Outlaws & Lawman

By Robert Kammen

When word was carried into Laramie, by a trustee named Blackie, that the renowned gunfighter Moses Quinta was coming out, a crowd began gathering in front of Dumont's General Store, the first business place giving those who waited for a glimpse of the gravel road that came down from the territorial prison. Usually the release of a prisoner was an unheralded event, with the freed man slinking along back streets to the train depot where he'd catch the first piece of rolling stock away from a place he'd learned to hate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Longhorn Publishing
• Release date: May 27, 2024
• ISBN: 9798227720269

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

When word was carried into Laramie, by a trustee named Blackie, that the renowned gunfighter Moses Quinta was coming out, a crowd began gathering in front of Dumont’s General Store, the first business place giving those who waited for a glimpse of the gravel road that came down from the territorial prison. Usually the release of a prisoner was an unheralded event, with the freed man slinking along back streets to the train depot where he’d catch the first piece of rolling stock away from a place he’d learned to hate.

Inside the sanctuary of his store, Ira Dumont leaned on a counter while scanning the contents of an article about the gunfighter in an old edition of the Cheyenne Star, the gist of it stating that Moses Quinta had been apprehended in Cheyenne and sent to the territorial prison without benefit of a trial. It was in the saloons that the storekeeper had come across this last piece of information, learned further that when the gunfighter appeared, men were either killed or sent to prison, because Quinta worked on both sides of the law. That must be gospel, pondered Dumont, since it was the governor who’d signed the writ of habeas corpus giving Quinta his freedom. Further down on the front page was a picture showing Quinta handcuffed between two U.S. Marshals.

There he was, three months ago:

Moses Quinta, manacled hands hooked into his gun belt, standing some four inches taller than the other men; the black sombrero shading slate-gray eyes; the tanned flesh lying taut against the bony contours of the angular face and shaggy mustache concealing his upper lip; dark coat over a light cotton shirt and a silly kerchief at his neck; the leather holsters empty but thonged down at their lower ends; the gray trousers coming down over roweled boots and hand-crafted by a Texas bootmaker. A smile seemed to sparkle out of the gunfighter’s eyes, as if he knew that wrong had been done to him.

A killer, was the storekeeper’s terse comment, as he folded the newspaper and set it aside. Ira Dumont was no bigger than a circus dwarf, with gnome-like features on a head too large for his body and a deformed foot encased in a special made shoe. He’d used a quick wit and a sharp business acumen to turn what had once been a deserted building partially razed by fire into a money making venture. Being somewhat of a historian, Dumont knew that down through the ages kings and warlords used to confide in the dwarfs because of the mystical qualities supposedly attached to these people, and after twelve years here he knew most of Laramie’s secrets. When asked why he left Utah, Ira Dumont would solemnly reply that he’d been blacklisted by the Mormon sect. That had been in his wild, womanizing days, he liked to say, before striking eastward as dictated by the flip of a silver dollar. Somehow, he’d wound up here.

Someone’s coming!

Dumont strolled to a front window as the eyes of those gathered along the boardwalks swung to the road leading up to the grey stone walls of the prison, a good quarter of a mile to the southeast.

Before, there’d been idle talk and some jokes being bantered about, with the crowd more concerned about the heat or the price of beef—now only the gusty wind could be heard shrilling under the covered boardwalks or causing loose roof shingles or window shutters to bang against the buildings. A tumbleweed rolled onto Main Street to tumble against the legs of a rancher who jumped aside as though it were snake-laden, the man’s eyes never leaving the road. The faces of others showed awe or fear or uncertainty, along with anger and just plain hatred. To the storekeeper’s way of thinking, it was if the angel of light was a-coming to claim his own, that before this day ended there’d be killing.

It’s him—whose picture I seen in the paper. Quinta!

But he ain’t armed?

He’s probably carrying his guns in that satchel!

Mostly there were townspeople, a sprinkling of ranchers and assorted riffraff, and with four hardcases clustered across the street in front of the Elkhart Saloon. The sight of Moses Quinta striding purposely along that dusty road held the crowd immobile, the fear of the man rippling upstreet like the stench of carrion being carried into town by the quartering wind. Little rivulets of dust popped out from under the gunfighter’s boots, and when Quinta’s long stride carried him into the shadow, cast by Dumont’s store, some of the more timid souls slunk back into buildings. And if humiliation was the name of the game, or the hatred of those wanting him dead, it didn’t seem to be making any inroads as to what was going on behind Moses Quinta’s passive expression, for he could be going to church, or courting, for all the attention he paid to those watching him. Opposite, one of the hardcases stepped to the edge of the boardwalk and let his hand hover near his holstered Navy Colt, but the spell cast by Quinta, that of a man taking a casual stroll through a ghost town, unnerved the hardcase, and he eased back into the shadow. Then Moses Quinta was at the first intersection and veering onto a side street that would take him to the train depot, and leaving in his wake men still gripped with hatred and fear of him, and grudging admiration, too.

Mainly because of its isolation, the Laramie Hotel, an elegant, two-storied structure facing the railroad center, rarely had an empty room, but when Moses Quinta came strolling into its lobby the clerk on duty paled some before muttering timorously, You can have the President Grant Suite, Mr. Quinta.

A room’ll do. He reached for the quilled pen.

All—all of the rooms are occupied.

Casting the clerk a hard scowl, he said, The suite, then. He scrawled a fancy Q and dropped the pen on the register book. I'm wanting to take a hot bath right away. After that, I expect to see a couple of bottles of Red Dog whiskey and a steak with all the trimmings waiting in my suite. And I'm a’wanting to see Ira Dumont.

Dumont?

The storekeeper boy and send somebody reliable over to fetch him. Just make damned certain you or whoever you send—fishing out a silver dollar, he slapped it down on the counter top—keeps quiet about this. I’ve been a little edgy of late.

The clerk eased backwards as Quinta reached around and lifted out a box of imported Havana cigars. Put them on my bill. Now, where’s that suite?

It’s upstairs, exclaimed the clerk as he started out from behind the counter.

I'll find it, Quinta said flatly, and headed for the staircase.

Dust filmed what furniture there was in the suite, and Moses Quinta knew that it hadn’t been occupied for some time. As was his habit, he checked out all the rooms, locking those doors opening onto the hallway and keeping from being framed in the windows when he secured the latches. He hadn’t reached the aging side of his thirties by being careless, and from the reception he’d just received from the citizens of Laramie, could be that somebody might try to take him out here at the hotel. Others had tried, in the past, and Moses Quinta had left a trail of graves from down Old Mexico way to places further north of his present location. It wasn’t something to brag about, nor did he ever kill a man who wasn’t asking for a killing. He always hired out to the highest bidder. Holding up banks or stagecoaches, he’d found out early on, wasn’t too profitable, but doing the work of money men was, and a helluva lot safer.

There he’d been, loafing about Dodge City, easing out of bed around noon, and after a nice hot bath and shave, he’d generally head over to the gambling houses. Then a letter had caught up with him, and even before he opened it, Moses Quinta had a premonition of impending doom. First of all, the envelope had borne a Wyoming postmark, which should have been reason enough to discard it. The contents of the letter told of how a widow woman up in Big Horn basin country was fighting to hold onto her ranch, and of how she would pay a tolerable sum to Quinta if he’d hire out to her. That letter had been headed for the trash barrel until a final paragraph caught the gunfighter’s eye, in which the widow woman told how a cattle baron, by the fancy handle of Charlton Talbot, was trying to force her out.

Charlton Talbot, he said bitterly. Talbot was the reason he’d spent five years in a Texas prison. They’d only gotten around seven thousand in that bank robbery, but more than enough to turn Talbot into a rancher. At the time they’d been a couple of wild yonkers out of Oklahoma. There was good old Charlton with those big, luminous blue eyes that women adored and kind of pale complexioned so that they wanted to take him home to cuddle, with those bank tellers always figuring Charlton to be collecting for the Salvation Army until he pulled out that old Dragoon and demanded their money. There’d been two bank robberies, one successful, the other seeing Moses Quinta shot and abandoned by his partner.

In the southwest bedroom, Quinta dropped the satchel on the metal-framed bed and peeled out the suit coat and thin flannel shirt presented to him by the territory of Wyoming upon his being released from prison. He gazed at the mirror reflecting the puckered scar on his right side, the wound given him by his old partner, Charlton Talbot. He was much leaner, harder than he’d been three months ago; sledge hammering rocks would do that to a man. Those prison guards were a vicious lot, the hot, dry summers and long winters having sucked any human decency out of them, and hankering to use those bullwhips to goad a man into working harder. One of them, a squat hunk of nothing, bragged that he’d been using weights to build up his muscles. The man’s arrogant manner got to Moses Quinta, who found out in a bare-knuckle match that the guard couldn’t fight his way out of a bagful of goat crap.

It had been a short walk there to solitary for Quinta, with only the release notice brought by his lawyer saving him from getting worked over by the guards.

Hell, he remarked sagely, Sunday school teachers couldn’t cut the mustard in that hellhole. And somebody with a lot of political clout had arranged for him to be arrested, the threads of Quinta’s suspicions pointing to his old sidekick, Talbot. That three month exposure to territorial hospitality was another reason for helping the widow woman, and it had left Quinta a lot meaner.

Opening the satchel, he pulled out a pair of holstered .45 Colt Peacemakers with their black gutta-percha grips and a two-shot derringer, before proceeding to dump the rest of the satchel’s contents on the bed. There was a rap at the door in the living room, a woman announcing that his bath was ready in a room just across the corridor.

Obliged, he yelled back, while turning to the business of checking out the loads in the Colts. Three months was a long time not to handle them, and they felt awkward to hold. Shucking out of his boots, he lit a cigar and thrust the Colts into his waistband as he left the bedroom and opened the door onto the corridor where he found the clerk, who’d rented him the suite, standing there holding two bottles of Red Dog whiskey. He took one of the bottles, told the clerk to leave the other in the suite.

The bathroom was about twelve feet square with walls painted a yellowy white and oblong windows letting in midday sunlight, the window to the east, having its bottom half pushed up and a balcony running under it. Vapor steam rose from scalding hot water filling the wooden-stave washtub and burning wood crackled in the potbellied stove, the combination of the heat and the small room caused sweat to pop out on Quinta’s face as he pulled a chair close to the washtub and set his Colts on it so their grips faced the tub. Undressing, he settled gingerly into the tub, the open door leading into the hallway and both windows within eyesight.

Almost immediately the soothing water began to chase tension from muscles hardened by pounding rocks and to cleanse skin that hadn’t seen the insides of a place like this for three months. He began to feel drowsy, but his senses were alert to sounds within the hotel, the rumble of a passing train, and other outside noises.

Though Quinta heard two men chatting as they moved up the staircase just down the hall, the window to the east held his gaze. Again came the chink-chink of spurs, and the gunfighter knew that somebody was out on the balcony.

Damned shame a man can’t even take a bath, he muttered, reaching with his right hand for one of the Colts, his attention momentarily distracted by the sight of a limping man somewhat short of stature hammering on the door of Quinta’s suite.

Are you the storekeeper?

Ah, there you are, Mr. Quinta. A nervous Ira Dumont swept the hat from his head and gestured with it at the other man who’d just moved into view. This is—

"Haskins of the Denver Gazette, the other man said pompously. You’re news, Mr. Quinta—yessiree, front page stuff."

Later on the storekeeper, Dumont, would say that what transpired next happened so quickly that it defied describing, though he would say later, too, that he’d stood there rock-steady when Moses Quinta shot and killed a man who suddenly stood framed in the window to the east, the ambusher’s weapon barking to scour a groove in the varnished hallway floor next to Dumont. The truth of what happened was that as Quinta spun in the washtub to place a slug in the stranger’s throat, reporter Haskins from the Denver Gazette was flopping downward to shatter the lens in his horn-rimmed glasses, the storekeeper sprawling alongside, but still catching a glimpse of Moses Quinta lunging naked out of the tub and darting over to lean out the open window. There was a split second when Quinta hesitated as another ambusher tried to slip back through another window in his efforts to get away. But the meanness Quinta had been storing up in prison caused his trigger finger to move before he could react to its pressure, with a slug from his Colt slapping into the man’s back to leave him wedged dead over the window sill.

Picked a bad time to rile me up, stranger, he said angrily as he swung his upper body back into the washroom. He eased back into the tub as Dumont and the reported groped upright. Get in here, Dumont, and lock that door.

The storekeeper hurried into the room and closed the door. He said shakily, Mr. Quinta, I'll swear it was self defense.

That’s mighty noble of you, storekeeper; just tell that to the marshal. Quinta laid his gun down on the chair. By your sign you sell guns.

Yes, the finest money can buy.

We’ll talk about that later. Right now I want you to trot back to your store and fetch me some new clothes. Lost a little weight in the last few months, so make them about a half-size smaller than what I've been wearing.

Just what manner of clothes did you have in mind?

Traveling clothes, storekeeper. The best you’ve got. Upon your return we’ll discuss some other items I'll be needing. Reaching to the chair for his trousers draped over its back, he handed them to Dumont and settled deeper into the tub. You’ll find the other half of that monkey suit in my suite.

A skeptical town marshal had finally taken the word of the storekeeper and Haskins, the reporter from the Denver Gazette, just to why there were two dead men waiting to be carted off to the F.L. Prickett Funeral Home, one body still draped over the windowsill, the other ambusher having fallen off the balcony to land on the front steps of the Laramie Hotel, much to the discomfort of the immigrant family