Read Online The Old Wolves by Peter Brandvold - Free Book Online

mountains to Denver for trial.
    And then that was it.
    His job was over. And since his job had been his life, what could possibly be left?
    The girl turned to him. Her eyes met his. A pink flush rose in her cheeks.
    Well, he’d be damned . . .
    And then she turned to the older woman and rolled her eyes at Spurr. Spurr, deep in thought, had forgotten he’d been staring at the girl from beneath his hat brim. He’d apparently offended the girl.
    The woman turned to him, beetling her blond brows over her deep-set eyes, and said, “Sir, please—a gentleman would not stare!”
    â€œOne,” Spurr said, straightening in his seat, “I ain’t no gentleman. And two, neither one of you is anything like no lady should be.” He heaved his creaky bones to his feet and adjusted his cartridge belt and holstered .44 on his lean hips. “So there. Stick that in your pipe an’ smoke it. Me . . .” He reached into the overhead rack for his saddlebags and his Winchester. “I’m gonna go out to the vestibule and smoke my friggin’ cigar. I hope you
ladies
don’t get too lonely without me.”
    â€œWell, I never!” said the older, fat woman.
    â€œDon’t doubt it a bit,” Spurr said as, his saddlebags draped over his left shoulder, the Winchester in his right hand, he pinched his hat brim to the pair and headed on out the coach’s rear door.
    In the vestibule between the cars, he sat down with his back to the wall of the car he’d left, his saddlebags on one side of him, his rifle resting across his thighs, and relit the cheroot.
    The air whooshed past him on both sides of the gap between the cars, dragging smoke from the locomotive along with it. Spurr stared out across the prairie to the purple mountains, smoking and thinking over the long years behind him—long years that had rushed past faster than the prairie sliding past him toward Denver now—and he was glad when the train came to a jerking halt at the water stop and the little station hut on the open prairie east of Camp Collins.
    While the locomotive took on water and the conductor and one of the brakemen smoked and talked with the old black man who ran the depot hut in the shade of the hut’s little brush arbor, Spurr led Cochise down the wooden ramp from the stable car and tightened the roan’s saddle cinch.
    â€œWhere you off to this time, Spurr?”
    The old lawman turned to see the old black man, Sebastian Polly, walk toward him from the station hut, puffing the quirley he held between his lips with a gnarled, arthritic right hand. The sideburns running down from the blue uniform cap were steel-colored, as was Polly’s thick mustache, with only a few threads of black showing through the gray.
    â€œYou mean, for the
last
time, Sebastian,” Spurr said. For as long as Spurr had been a federal badge toter, Sebastian Polly had been living out here on this backside of nowhere east of Camp Collins, sixty miles south of Cheyenne.
    Polly lived in the station hut, and Spurr couldn’t remember ever stopping at this point and not seeing the black man here, tending the hut that saw business only when the train stopped to take on water or to let a passenger off. There had been a stage line through here, years ago, and Polly had run the relay station, but of course the stage line had closed when the Union Pacific connected Denver with the Northern Pacific line at Cheyenne. That’s when Polly went to work for the railroad and moved into the depot hut.
    Over the years, the black man’s hair had gradually turned grayer, and he’d grown a little thinner, his molasses eyes a little rheumier, his shoulders clad in the age-coppered blue uniform coat a little more stooped.
    â€œWhat you talkin’ about, Spurr?” Polly said, blowing out a plume of cigarette smoke and knitting his grizzled brows together.
    â€œThis is it for me.” Spurr