Death in Red (#6 in the Claw Western series)

By Matthew Kirk

Blacksmith Tyler Wyatt was a man of peace. But a murderous moment of violence took away his wife, his future ... and his left hand. On his own anvil Wyatt made his metal Claw and turned himself into a one-man killing machine. Tyler joins a stagecoach crew to flush out a traitor in their midst, and once more finds himself on the bloody road to retribution ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215838662

Matthew Kirk

Matthew Kirk holds a B.S. in Economics and a B.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematical Sciences with a concentration in Quantitative Economics from the University of Washington. He started Modulus 7, a data science and Ruby development consulting firm, in early 2012. Matthew has spoken around the world about using machine learning and data science with Ruby.

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Blacksmith Tyler Wyatt was a man of peace. But a murderous moment of violence took away his wife, his future ... and his left hand. On his own anvil Wyatt made his metal Claw and turned himself into a one-man killing machine. Tyler joins a stagecoach crew to flush out a traitor in their midst, and once more finds himself on the bloody road to retribution ...

CLAW 6: DEATH IN RED

Copyright © Matthew Kirk 1983

This electronic edition published September 2023

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing

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Anonymous?

Perhaps, but nonetheless appreciated –

for Harry

Dean Stanton.

Chapter One

HARRY CATLIN TUGGED on the soft leather gloves he wore to handle the six-horse team and clambered onto the Concord’s box. A steel-cold wind was blowing down the canyon of the San Carlos, the horses bunching tight together as they sought to put the barrier of the stage coach between their rumps and the probing chill. Harry lifted the reins, settling them with casual deftness between his gloved fingers: leaders between fore and middle, swing between middle and third, wheelers between third and smallest. It was an automatic arrangement, made without thought, the reins connecting driver and team as intimately as an umbilical cord. Harry held them loose, crooning gently to the animals that stamped their restless desire to get out of the wind and run. He was phlegmatic; sixteen years spent driving teams of one kind or another had taught him patience. So now he sat stolid on the box, battered Stetson secured to his head by a thick wool scarf of indeterminate color and age. Rather like its wearer: long in years and frayed around the edges, but still durable, oiled and weatherproofed by age; not worn out.

Harry Catlin was fifty-two years old, his life divided in three nearly-exact portions. He had been born in Pennsylvania, of Dutch stock, his parents second generation Americans who owned a small farm near a town called Cooper, which was a bastardization of the Dutch Kopje. Harry had always shown more interest in the plough horses than the harvest, and when the Civil War erupted he immediately volunteered for the cavalry on the Union side. He was posted to the artillery, which proved quite acceptable because he was given charge of a four-horse team hauling a twelve-pounder. He was twenty then, and it was the first time he had spent more than seven days away from home. He enjoyed the life and when the War ended he enlisted as a regular. He spent the next sixteen years teaming horses for the Army, securing the rank of Top Sergeant. Then he threw it all away when a shave-tail lieutenant fresh out of LaSalle got thrown by a tetchy horse and his own stupidity and started to take out his embarrassment on the dumb animal. Harry Catlin wasn’t dumb, so he told the lieutenant to stop and when the officer didn’t, made him. The intervention left the officer with a broken jaw and Harry with a choice: accept mustering out or spend a year with a punishment detail, emerging from the stockade busted down to private. Harry opted for the mustering out, spent three days blind drunk, then got himself a job as a stage driver with the Bracken & Whistler Western Line. His parents were long dead and his younger brother was running the farm better than Harry ever could, so sticking with horses seemed the logical thing to do. He had driven coaches ever since.

Now he sat wrapped in his scarf and his big bearskin coat as the Concord’s thoroughbraces groaned under the weight of gold bullion Dansker’s coolies were loading on board. It was a special run, the mine to Dead Fall, where a company of Arizona Rangers would accept responsibility for the cargo, and Dansker had paid healthily for the Wells, Fargo coach and the territory’s best driver.

Also for the shotgun rider.

Jack Starret was twelve years younger than Harry Catlin and looked the same age. Both men were weather-beaten, faces tanned and lined by wind and sun and snow and rain. Both had grey showing in their hair. Both were tall and slim, with the angular, deceptively lazy bodies of men accustomed to physical hardship. But their eyes were very different. Where Harry’s were big and Dutch porcelain blue, Jack Starret’s were narrow and fierce, glistening black pinpoints that were never still, never at rest. Harry carried a storekeeper’s Colt in the righthand pocket of his coat; Starret wore two Peacemakers belted over his heavy broadcloth stormcoat. The collar was turned up high enough it touched the brim of his grey Stetson, the hatbrim bending and flattening under the buffeting of the wind. Like Harry, he wore soft gloves that protected his hands whilst still allowing him sensitivity of touch. The gloves were the same shade of grey as his hat and they held the .44-40 caliber Winchester rifle with a delicacy that matched the driver’s grip on the reins.

Jack Starret had ridden shotgun for six years, ever since a punk kid with a loud mouth and a slow gun got embarrassed enough about Starret facing him down that he waited for the then-marshal of a godforsaken silver town called Emmettsville and put two bullets in Starret’s back. Starret hadn’t even known he had shot the kid until the closest thing Emmettsville had to a doctor told him, while digging the first slug out of his left hip, that he had placed a shot through the kid’s right lung, a second through his throat, and a third through his skull. The doctor had then dug the second bullet from between Starret’s ribs and told him to rest. The worthy leaders of Emmettsville had decided that a marshal who couldn’t walk for the next couple of months couldn’t do his job either, so they had let Starret go.

The experience might have embittered another man. Starret took it with an equanimity born of long acquaintanceship with hypocrisy. Catlin had asked him about it once; asked how he felt about putting his life on the line and getting thrown away when his employers decided he had outlived his usefulness. Catlin had shrugged and said, ‘Hell, Harry! Wherever you got people, you got dirt. Only decent folk don’t want to get their own hands soiled, so they hire someone to shift it for them. You get paid for it, but the smell sticks. People don’t like that. I guess you remind them of the dirt. But I knew how it could go when I took their money, so I don’t have any right to complain.’ It was a bleak philosophy and Harry guessed it came out of Starret’s experiences, which he didn’t quite understand, being himself a peaceable man. Starret had lived by the gun pretty well as long as Harry had lived with horses. At fifteen, he had quit his home in Brownsville, Texas, to sign on as deckhand on a coaster plying the Gulf of Mexico route. At sixteen, he had killed a sailor in defense of his virtue, then been forced to kill the man’s lover. Starret had walked away from the coaster in Galveston and spent all his pay on a ridgebacked horse and a rimfire Marlin, vowing that he would never eat crow—or anything else—for any man. He had joined the Texas Rangers, where he earned himself a reputation as a fast gun and a relentless manhunter. He had spent three years working for the Pinkerton Detective Agency and seven hiring out as Peace Officer to any settlement ready to meet his price. He had been shot eleven times; knifed, five. He had killed nineteen men that he knew of, eight in face-to-face shootings. One time, on the Lordsburg run, he had been confronted by three owlhooters carrying between them a Meteor shotgun, a Henry lever-action rifle, and Colt’s Dragoon pistol. All three weapons had been pointed at him when he asked casually which of the would-be stage robbers wanted to die first. The trio couldn’t decide and Starret had spat in the dust as he nudged Harry Catlin and told him to get moving again, riding out with a smile and a warning that if he saw any of the hold-up artists again, he would shoot them down on the spot. He was the best: Harry was pleased they were together for this run.

He was less sure of the others.

They were young for one thing, hiding nerves beneath an easily-penetrated veneer of blustering toughness. For another, at least one of them was married. Neither Harry nor Starret had ever been married and now Harry was too old to bother and Jack seemed like he was too old to care. So neither man had anyone but himself to worry about. Billy Tilghman had a wife back in Picacho—the reason he had elected to take Dansker’s bonus! Like his two companions, Billy was still in his twenties, a big, raw-boned young man with straw-yellow hair and a smile he couldn’t make look tough. Like Starret, he wore his gunbelt outside his mackinaw. Catlin doubted he could draw and fire as fast, or as accurately, as Starret had done that time Whistling Bob Chandler had tried jumping the stage on the ice-covered Leadsville road. No, Billy could be trusted with the firepower of the two-barrel Winchester scattergun he carried, but not for any fancy trigger work.

No more than Walt Pickering or J. W. Bascombe, whose only advantage over Billy was that they weren’t married. That would at least mean they were anxious to complete the run and spend their bonus on the girls in The Lucky Lady; looking ahead, rather than worrying about what might happen to their wife if they got killed. Harry glanced at them, smiling thinly behind the fur of his coat as they fingered their shotguns and glared about as though ready to open fire on Dansker’s Chinamen. Walt was a short, narrow-faced man wearing a long, Cavalry-blue coat and a wide Stetson that seemed to lodge on his jug-handle ears. Like most small people he seemed to compensate for his lack of stature with a tender temper and an excess of nervous energy. He boasted of killing three men, but Harry knew that at least one had been the better part of drunk and didn’t give much for Pickering as a shootist. J.W.—he was reticent about the names behind the initials—was a decent enough youngster, but lacked—in Harry’s opinion—the dependability of an experienced guard. He was a. tall, thick-set man, amiable enough, with a soft Missouri drawl and a brace of Smith & Wesson Schofields belted cross-draw fashion over his brown and white plaid topcoat. He wore a fur cap with ear flaps knotted down either side of his freckled face and an expression of such obviously assumed ferocity that Harry came close to chuckling.

Instead, the driver glanced up at the sky and tried to guess how long he had before the snow hit.

The sky was the color the wind felt. Steely, more grey than blue, with a scoured look like