The Outlaws of Salty's Notch Read online

  The Outlaws of Salty’s Notch

  The elderly derelicts in the sleepy Louisiana settlement of La Belle Commune are leading the good life, lazing in the hot sun. Until Bushwhack Jack Breaker rides in from Texas with his outlaw band, and everything changes. Ex-bounty-hunter Paladin awakes to find eccentric marshal, Brad Corrigan, has been forcibly taken, along with saloonist Rik Paulson and storekeeper Alec Mackie – but where, and why? The elegant widow Emma Bowman-Laing knows where, but Paladin and crippled wrangler Shorty Long fail in their rescue bid and Bowman-Laing’s crumbling antebellum mansion goes up in flames.

  With rumours of a horde of gold coming across the sea by ketch, and flashy Mexican killer Guillermo Rodriguez brandishing his six-gun, Paladin slips reluctantly into his old bounty-hunting ways. His search for truth and justice takes him deep into Texas, but it is in La Belle Commune that everything is resolved in a bloody fight in the saloon, and brought to a fatal close in the waters of Petit Creek.

  By the same author

  High Plains Showdown

  Stand-off at Blue Stack

  The Diamond K Showdown

  The Last Chance Kid

  Kilgannon

  The Gold Mine at Pueblo Pequeño

  Long Ride to Yuma

  Trouble at Mesquite Flats

  The Outlaws of Salty’s Notch

  Will Keen

  ROBERT HALE

  © Will Keen 2014

  First published in Great Britain 2014

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2282-7

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.bhwesterns.com

  This e-book first published in 2017

  Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press

  The right of Will Keen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Part One

  Chapter One

  The rider on the blue roan was halfway through the town of La Belle Commune when Paladin, beer-glass in hand, picked his way unsteadily across the rotting timber gallery outside Paulson’s Place. The stranger, a raw-boned moustachioed man armed with six-gun and rifle and wearing a flat-crowned black hat grey with trail dust, was drawing level with the shack that served as the town’s jail. Walking his horse without haste, he was alert, watchful, his head constantly turning. A glance took in the store. Another the saloon. An ironic grimace twisted his lips as sharp eyes took careful note of the drab surroundings.

  La Belle Commune’s single street was little more than a wide expanse of bone-dry earth, stony and rutted. Single-storey buildings were sagging beneath the unrelenting Louisiana heat, their woodwork eaten by termites and bleached white by the merciless sun. A general store, the saloon with wide shaded gallery where Paladin stood watching, the jail that looked a tarted-up chicken coop, a scattering of dwellings trailing away into the shimmering distance – La Belle Commune was as impressive as a dried out waterhole, a Louisiana settlement close to the Texas border sinking into senility.

  Then the rider’s eagle gaze alighted on the side trail that ran alongside Mackie’s store, cut through a low sandy ridge and sloped lazily south for a hundred yards to the ocean where palm trees lining the beach drooped listless green fronds against the endless blue skies over the gulf.

  Something about that side track seemed to please him, Paladin noted. The man smiled, nodded to himself and sat straighter in the saddle as he heeled his horse to a faster pace and headed east out of town. That trail would take him, Paladin mused, half-a-mile or so to the timber bridge affording a crossing of Petit Creek – and then where?

  The stranger had been watched all the way by Brad Corrigan. Brad was sitting outside the jail in his rocking chair. Smoke from the cigarette in his lean hand rose straight and thin in the hot, still air. The slow creaking of his chair was no match for the fading beat of the departing horse’s hoofs, and the mid-afternoon sun struggled to pick highlights from his tarnished badge. In that dazzling sunlight La Belle Commune’s marshal seemed half asleep. His battered Derby hat was perched on hair like dry hay. Sweat-stained and mildewed green with age, it was tipped forward, shading his eyes. Beneath its curled brim those pale blue eyes appeared remote, uninterested.

  And that was deceptive, Paladin thought. Brad sees him all right, files him away mentally just as I do – and with good reason. As he leaned on the gallery’s shiny wooden rail and swallowed the last of his warm beer, Paladin recalled the other riders who had passed through La Belle Commune. Four in as many days – some kind of a record. One a young half-breed or full Mex’, but Texas gunmen every one of them: dusty, hard-eyed, watchful, armed with six-guns and rifles, blued metalwork tarnished, stocks and butts glossy from constant handling. To believe there was nothing connecting them with the moustachioed rider whose dust was a drifting haze in the sunlight would be foolish; to fathom that connection was too much for a man whose mind was rusty with disuse, halfway to addled by heat and strong drink.

  Which, Paladin thought wryly, led to the obvious question: why the hell was he getting his pants in a twist? La Belle Commune was a lazy settlement on the Gulf of Mexico’s palm-fringed Louisiana coast, with a population counted on the fingers of two hands. Any money that jingled on the hardwood counters of the store, or on the rough planks that served the same purpose in the saloon, was earned by a handful of old fishermen, and no-hopers who worked on odd jobs further inland. Saw enough wood, hammer in enough nails to earn a pocketful of silver dollars. Laze away the next few days or weeks in town, where salt-laden onshore evening breezes cooled the air and rattled fronds of skeletal palm trees. Jingle coins on the bar in Paulson’s Place. Awake one day to poke a hand deep into a pocket, encounter nothing but dust, reluctantly ride north to find work.

  Paladin was spared even that minor irritation. He had earned his money in a way he never specified but from which he bore mental and physical scars that were testimony to its ugliness and its dangers. He’d been a hard man, in an occupation that had no place reserved for morals or conscience. And as he gingerly negotiated the rickety steps and set off across the settlement’s baking thoroughfare, he reflected yet again on a fact that was strangely comforting: shrewd Brad Corrigan had watched his arrival in town some two years back, and from that first day could read him like an open book.

  Paladin, as he would himself admit in the lonely hours of the long nights, was a spent force. A shadow of the man he had once been, all the decisiveness and lightning-fast reactions in explosive, dangerous situations long since gone. He drank too much, lived in a world of brooding melancholy.

  The marshal watched Paladin’s approach, shifted his weight in the chair so that it creaked in protest. He dropped a hand, let go his cigarette and crushed it beneath one of the rockers. By the time Paladin had come around the hitch rail he was up on his feet, a man of extraordinary height and as thin as a beanpole.

  ‘That makes five,’ the marshal said.

  Paladin nodded. ‘You want my opinion? I’d say that’s an end to it. The others were as nothing compared to that hombre. He was one mean sonofabitch, a man not to be crossed.’

  ‘A leader,’ Corrigan agreed, and he swung away and ducked through the door into the cooler shadowy interior of the office. ‘A honcho,’ he elaborated as Paladin followed and dropped into a battered chair, ‘but a honcho’s a boss man – so what is it that feller’s bossing? If we had a bank I’d say he was here to beat that raggedy bunch that preceded him into some kind of shape to stage a robbery. But the nearest bank is fifty miles to the east. What in the name of God are thos
e hellions doing, here, in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Always supposing,’ Paladin said, ‘all five of them haven’t ridden straight on through, put La Belle Commune well behind them and are halfway to Baton Rouge.’

  ‘But you don’t think that any more than I do,’ Corrigan said, folding his length into his swivel chair and slapping his hat on the desk. ‘Like me, you saw him eyeing Salty’s Notch. So what the hell was all that about?’

  An inner door was open. Beyond it, out of sight, an open window by the empty cell was providing a through draft. Paladin whisked off his hat, relished the feel of cool air on his damp forehead, musing on the marshal’s words.

  Some fifty years back an old fisherman had used a skinny mule to drag his flat bottomed skiff from his hut to the shore and into the sea. Day after day. There and back. Over time, that use had worn a deep, wide groove in the soft sandy earth of the low ridge that lay between town and sea. Salty Logan was long gone, as was the stubborn mule. But others had made use of the opening he had created, and his legacy was the broad track leading down to the shore that was known as Salty’s Notch. Which, Paladin agreed, had been of inordinate interest to the hard-eyed horseman.

  ‘Only thing a man finds down the notch,’ he said, ‘is sand and the big wide ocean.’

  ‘So we’ve got five Texas gunmen taking a vacation from holding up stage coaches or trains, drinking warm beer under palm trees too tall and dried out to offer shade. Why would they do that?’

  ‘Waiting,’ Paladin suggested.

  ‘For their boat to come in?’

  ‘To La Belle Commune? Hah. There’s a couple of flat bottomed skiffs owned by old fisherman trawling with rotting nets. Any other boats out there, hell, they’re making for New Orleans, giving this place a wide berth if they see it at all.’

  Corrigan was nodding. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘this place’s anonymity makes it attractive to somebody out there in a way we don’t understand.’

  ‘And never will.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Corrigan said. ‘But setting aside my weak jokes about palm trees and warm beer, we’re left with five gunmen who came riding out of Texas for a reason. It might be interesting to find out where they are now, and what the hell it is they’ve got planned.’

  At that moment Alec Mackie came in through the street door. He owned the store across the street next to Paulson’s Place where Paladin roomed. He was a middle-aged burly character with a florid face and bright blue eyes. His wife had left him in Laramie, and he’d spent a year drifting south with cash in the bank and his eyes full of emptiness. If La Belle Commune had a town council, Mackie was one-third of it. He liked to call himself the town mayor, but did it with sadness in those blue eyes put there by the conviction that everyone in La Belle Commune was living proof that life was cruel.

  ‘Whatever it is,’ the storekeeper said, letting Paladin and the marshal know he’d caught Corrigan’s drift, ‘it’s surely beyond my comprehension. Five gunmen descending on La Belle Commune with, what, an eye to making a heap of money? Don’t make me laugh.’

  ‘My past experiences in north Texas cow towns makes me unfailingly suspicious, Mac,’ Corrigan said.

  ‘Suspicion’s all right, in its place,’ Mackie said, leaning back against the windowsill, ‘but that place ain’t La Belle Commune. You want my opinion, you’re creating a gang out of five total strangers who’re long gone. And you’re doing it because you’re two intelligent men who’ve had too little to do for far too long.’

  But Brad Corrigan was having none of it.

  ‘I stayed alive by seeing evil in any disreputable characters I met until they proved me wrong. My guess is around this same time tomorrow morning the widow Bowman-Laing’ll come walking daintily down the street under her broken-ribbed yellow parasol. If we saw those fellers passing through town, you can bet your boots that old gal’s sharp eyes tracked ’em a good part of the rest of the way, and in that perky, bright-as-a-button way she has she’ll give us something to chew on.’

  ‘Always supposing,’ Paladin said with a grin, ‘that like Mac says we’re not just just a couple of over-excited old-timers talking through our hats.’

  ‘You’re not,’ said a firm voice from the doorway.

  The widow Emma Bowman-Laing had appeared sooner than expected. Tall, slim, elegant, her blonde-grey hair was coiled in a neat chignon. A faded, washed-out cotton dress hung from bony shoulders and brushed her sandals. The parasol she used to protect her ageing skin from the sun was folded, one rib poking through the fabric like a broken fish bone.

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ Corrigan said, ‘and I’m sure you’re going to tell us why you think that, Emma.’

  ‘Not think, know. I was up by my old house in almost pure darkness a couple of weeks ago. You know I ride there most nights?’

  ‘That’s where your memories lie,’ Corrigan said. ‘It would surprise me if you could stay away.’

  ‘Yes, well, for some years now you’ve known what I think about that,’ Bowman-Laing said.

  ‘And you know,’ Corrigan said, ‘that one day, soon as it’s possible, we’re going to do something decisive, set the record straight, roll back the years.’

  For a moment there was silence. Then Emma Bowman-Laing sighed.

  ‘I rode across the slope, close to the lawns, keeping my eyes averted because I know how a glimmer of light catches them. But I saw him, on the top balcony, and he wasn’t too clever. Stepped back, but the glow of a cigarette betrayed him.’

  Corrigan pursed his lips. ‘The place is old and empty, Emma. Weary drifters would see it as a good place to spend a couple of nights.’

  ‘The horse tethered at the side of the house belonged to no drifter. It was a fine blue roan. Meant nothing to me then, but a good horse once seen is never forgotten. That same blue roan went through town today.’

  ‘Ridden by a mean man with a moustache,’ Paladin said, ‘who showed unusual interest in Salty’s Notch.’

  The widow Bowman-Laing turned to him, looked him up and down with her sharp blue eyes.

  ‘You know,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘we’re going to need a man like you, if you can stay off the drink and find yourself a gun. Because, you mark my words, Paladin: pretty soon now our sleepy world’s going to be turned upside down and shaken, and the men responsible won’t be taking prisoners.’

  Chapter Two

  Bushwhack Jack Breaker had chosen a rotting old antebellum mansion as their temporary base. On high ground a mile to the north-east of La Belle Commune, the creaking tumbledown house was shrouded by tall pines planted as windbreaks by the millionaire owner who had died a gallant officer’s death in the War Between the States. Squinted at from the coastal strip on which La Belle Commune sprawled, it was lost in those dense trees that were themselves usually a vague shimmer in the constant heat haze, but from the balustraded front balconies supported by fluted Greek columns it was possible to see the distant town.

  A town Breaker had steered well clear of on his first visit a couple of weeks ago.

  On that occasion the lean, moustachioed outlaw had ridden down from northern Louisiana. Fifteen miles short of La Belle Commune he had made a calculated stop at a small cotton settlement tucked into a lush river valley. He knew nothing about La Belle Commune other than the role it would play in the scheme that would make him rich. What he needed was information. The place to get it was up against the bar in the settlement’s only saloon.

  It was mid-morning. The grizzled old timer had his foot hooked on a rail. He was willing to talk for as long as his glass was refilled with lukewarm beer. Breaker mentioned La Belle Commune. The old-timer rolled his rheumy eyes and told him that three men long past their best would tell Breaker all he needed to know about La Belle Commune. The town marshal was one; the old-timer couldn’t remember his name. Alec Mackie owned the general store, Rik Paulson the saloon.

  Without those three men, the old-timer had said, La Belle Commune was a boat without a rudder, a ship without a
goddamn sail. And at the old feller’s drunken, closing remark, Jack Breaker could barely suppress a grin so close had it come to the image in his mind that was the spur driving him on.

  He had slapped the old man on the back, slid a silver dollar along the bar, and once again headed south.

  The next evening he had stumbled upon the big house quite by accident as he left the vague trail and cut across country. He had followed a fast flowing creek, watching the foaming water as if hypnotized. His eyes had been drawn to a rickety bridge, little more than a couple of planks without rails; had torn his gaze away and seen the antebellum mansion.

  It must once have been pure white. In the gathering gloom it was a drab, peeling grey, its roof and tall chimneys silhouetted against the darkening southern skies. He had ridden away from the bridge and entered the grounds of the old antebellum from the rear, riding across a wide back yard overgrown with weeds, fronting stables with no doors. From the yard he could see past the side of the house and down the slope towards an unseen ocean. He left his horse there, tied to a post, and entered the house through a back door sagging on rusted hinges. He had picked his way past a rear stairway and along a gloomy passageway, climbed a wide staircase that doubled back between floors, on treads that creaked and groaned. He had at once judged that the place was ideal: close to the town, deserted, long forgotten.

  On the topmost of the two once elegant front balconies he had stood leaning on the balustrade and smoked a cigar in the cool of evening. As if to prove him wrong, as if to tell him not to count his chickens, some half a mile away down the slope a rider had emerged from a stand of trees. Breaker had stepped back into the shadows, cupping the glow of his cigar. The rider was a woman, wearing a split riding skirt and using a side saddle. She had come close, walking her fine chestnut mare across the rougher ground beyond the edge of the sloping lawns fronting the house. For an instant there was a flash of pale skin and light hair beneath the broad-brimmed hat, and Breaker sensed that she was looking up towards the house. Then she had nudged the big horse to a canter. She had moved quickly down the long slope. Beyond his gaze she seemed to clatter across the shaky bridge without slackening speed and head in a direction that would, Breaker judged, take her back to town.