“I’m just fine,” Kerney said firmly.
“Okay. Never mind.” Clayton pointed at the fresh tracks that showed Larson had picked up the pace, and spurred his roan into a trot.
Larson’s decision not to cross the next river right away, but to follow it to the highway that ran from Cimarron to Raton, proved to be the right move. By the time he reached the highway, the torrent in the Vermejo River had subsided and he was able to cross it and the pavement as well on a railroad spur that ran deep into the canyon to several coal mines.
When the sky began to clear, he left the spur for the cover of the old cottonwoods that hugged the bank of the river, and within minutes he heard the drone of an airplane engine. He brought his horse to a stop and through the thick foliage watched a small plane fly low along the railroad spur and disappear in the direction of the Dawson cemetery.
At one time, there had been the town of Dawson, a village of 1,500 people living and working in one of the most productive coal mining districts in the Southwest. In the early 1950s it had been shut down and dismantled by the mining company that owned it. But the cemetery remained, with hundreds of grave markers of miners killed in two of the largest mining disasters in the nation’s history.
As a teenager, Larson had come to several of the annual reunions of the descendants of the old-timers who had lived, worked, or grown up in the town of Dawson, and its colorful and tragic history was part of the folklore of the area.
He waited until the sound of the engine faded before continuing on, and then stopped again when the airplane returned and banked low over the river, heading east. He wondered if the cops were tracking him yet, or still searching for him on the mesas near Miami.
When it was all clear he kept riding, past the adobe shell of an old, roofless two-story ranch house, a collapsed barn, an irrigated wheat field, and a large pasture where fat cattle grazed on lush grasses. Where the spur spanned the Vermejo River again, he walked the horse through a muddy field, found a fast-running but shallow place to cross, and followed the tracks all the way to where the adjacent road ended at a locked gate posted with “No Trespassing” signs. A fork in the road allowed visitors to tour the cemetery, but access to the old town site was denied.
Larson returned to the railroad spur until it bridged the river once more. He remounted his horse, dropped down into the grassy valley, and splashed through the water and up a muddy bank. Since his last visit many years ago, the old smokestacks to the coke ovens had been torn down, but through the trees near the base of a small mesa he could see the outline of the two or three structures still standing. In the past, one had been used as a line camp by cowboys during summer months when cattle were in the high country. If the line camp was still in use, maybe he’d be able to resupply his provisions before moving on.
At the sound of an approaching helicopter, Larson spurred his horse to a gallop. He reached cover under a stand of trees in front of one of the old buildings just as the whirlybird swooped low on the other side of the river and hovered for a moment over an old weather-beaten cabin close to the bank, before continuing up the canyon. When it flew out of sight, Larson circled around the line camp looking for any sign of recent occupation. There were fresh tire tracks in the road at the front of the house, but no vehicle. All the window shades were drawn, so he couldn’t see inside. The front door was padlocked.
Larson figured the padlock meant no one was home. He led the horse up on the porch, used the Glock autoloader to destroy the padlock, and got himself and the animal inside with a minute to spare before the chopper returned and hovered overhead.
When the chopper left, Larson let out a big sigh of relief and looked around. The front room had a small propane cook stove on the counter, next to a sink with an old-fashioned hand pump. There was an ice chest on the floor, but it was empty. However, the pantry held a variety of canned meats, beans, soups, crackers, dried food, and bottled water. A twin bed in the back room was made up with sheets, a pillow, and a lightweight blanket, and the closet held a couple of changes of jeans and long-sleeved cowboy shirts on hangers.
Larson walked his horse into the back room, unloaded the ammunition bags, grabbed the Weatherby from the scabbard, and closed the door on the animal. Hungry, he set about fixing a meal, figuring he’d stay put at least until he ate, maybe longer if the chopper or the airplane kept coming back. He opened a can of meat, put it in a skillet, turned on the camp stove, and let it simmer while he poured a can of beans into a pot and put it on the second burner.
While the food warmed, he positioned the small dining table directly in front of the open door, arranged all the weapons he had on the table, made sure every gun was fully loaded, and put additional ammunition close at hand. Should people come calling, he was ready.
When the meat and beans were warm, he sat behind the table looking out toward the river valley, gobbled the food down, and mopped up the bean juice with some crackers. The chopper came back twice more while he ate.
Larson knew he couldn’t stay long; the cops had to be on his trail by now. Hopefully the chopper would move on to other canyons that wound up the mountains, especially the one with a Forest Service road that could take you all the way to the Colorado border.
He waited thirty minutes, and when the chopper didn’t return, he went and retrieved the horse from the back room, where it had dumped a load of fresh horse apples on the floor.
Larson thought that was a hoot. As he packed food he’d raided from the pantry into his saddlebags, he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching on the dirt road. He picked up the Weatherby, stood back from the open door, and waited. Soon a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer came into view. Larson used the rifle’s scope to look into the cab. Only a driver was inside the vehicle, an older man with a droopy mustache, wearing a sweat-stained straw cowboy hat.
Larson sighted in on the driver and followed him with the Weatherby as he drew closer. Just when the man noticed the open door to the line camp and started to turn the truck around, Larson shot him through the windshield.
The truck careened into a tree and the horse trailer skidded over on its side and slammed into the bed of the pickup. Larson first checked the driver, who was dead with a big hole in his chest that spurted blood. He dug the man’s wallet from his hip pocket and read the name on his driver’s license. One day, Truman Goodson’s name would be added to the plaque at the St. James Hotel that listed the people killed by Craig Lee Larson, “Last of the Western Desperadoes.”
Larson pried open the rear doors to the horse trailer. Two fine-looking cow ponies were inside, both busted up pretty bad. It was a damn shame, as either one of them would have been a far sight better than the horses he’d taken from the stables at the ranch. He put them both down, walked his gelding out of the line camp, gathered his weapons, mounted up, and rode off.
He started counting up how many kills he had made, and decided he should have finished off the prison guard and that scumbag Lenny Hampson who’d squealed on him to the cops. Also, he should have iced that young couple with the baby. Maybe the sheriff he’d shot and crippled had died. Add up all his kills, throw in the ones he let get away, and it would have been a damn impressive list. Too bad he hadn’t thought it through before he got in the groove.
Looking back, he should have written down their names for posterity so when the commemorative plaque went up at the St. James Hotel, nobody was left off. But since the cops would ID all the victims anyway, that wasn’t a problem. His big mistake was not thinking to leave instructions about the plaque with his brother, Kerry.
Thinking he needed to kill more cops to add to his luster as a badass bandito, Larson headed for the base of the mesa behind the line camp, where he could easily find cover if the chopper came back.
Following Larson’s trail under a blue sky in full sunlight proved easy enough to do. By noon, Clayton and Kerney had reached Dawson Canyon, and when they got to the melting shell of an old two-story adobe ranch house, they stopped to water and feed their horses.
Standing over the hoofprints of Larson’s animal, Clayton scanned the low mesas that squeezed the narrow valley. “If Larson was going to skip over to the next canyon, he would have had to do it right about here.”
