The Old Wolves by Peter Brandvold Page A

often hung in post offices, barbershops, and Wells Fargo offices for years—Henry didn’t know. All he did know was that he had an old man to pick up in the Medicine Bow Mountains, a hundred miles as the crow flies from Denver, and he didn’t want to waste his younger, busier deputy marshals on such a tedious, routine assignment.
    Henry hadn’t put it just that way to Spurr, of course. He’d much less crassly told his senior-most deputy that he might have one more job for him though it included more horsebacking in the mountains west of Camp Collins, in northern Colorado, than actual lawdogging. Which made it appropriate for Spurr’s last assignment, given the old deputy’s bad health. So if Spurr wanted it, Henry supposed he could take it.
    Spurr had taken it, pleased to have one last job beyond the one in which he’d gotten a pretty girl killed.
    One last slow, easy job with which to ride off into eternity . . .
    Spurr chuckled now as he looked out the train window at the Front Range of the Rockies sliding past, beyond the rolling blond prairie under the vast, cerulean, high-altitude sky. For some reason it had just dawned on him that Henry had ridden out to his cabin with every intention of giving Spurr the easy job of hauling old George Blackleg back to the federal courthouse in Denver. Henry hadn’t let on, and he’d done a good job of fooling Spurr into believing he’d handed the job over reluctantly.
    The truth of it was, Spurr now realized, Henry had packed that file in his valise with every intention of allowing his old friend to go out on a better note than he otherwise would have, so that the dead girl wouldn’t be Spurr’s last memory after twenty years of more or less exemplary service.
    â€œI’ll be damned,” Spurr said as he blew a long plume of aromatic tobacco smoke at the soot-streaked window.
    â€œSir, I’m going to have to ask you to watch your tongue—there is a young lady present!”
    Spurr jerked with a start, and turned to see a stout woman in a gaudy traveling frock and feathered picture hat scowling down at him. She was a tall, blond woman with double jowls and angry little eyes, clutching a pink leather grip in one hand, a parasol in the other. She waved the parasol and made a face. “And would you mind opening a window and blowing that wretched smoke
out it
instead of merely
against it
and right back
into
our
faces
!”
    Spurr frowned up at the big woman, who appeared in her late thirties, early forties. As far as he could tell, she was alone. Was
she herself
the “young lady” she’d been referring to? Spurr found himself grinning devilishly and asking wryly, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I only see . . .”
    A young girl’s face rose up from behind the woman’s right shoulder. Spurr’s tired ticker lurched in his chest. The girl was pretty and brown-eyed, her thick, wavy, wheat-blond hair pulled back behind her head in a loose French braid—and for a moment Spurr saw Kansas City Jane staring at him from over the big woman’s shoulder. For another moment, he thought that Jane was about to say something to him from the misty otherworld beyond this one.
    But then the girl slid her curious, vaguely impatient eyes from Spurr to the big woman in front of her, and said in a needling voice totally unlike Jane’s, “Can I have the window seat, Aunt Alice? You know how awful sick I get if I can’t see out!”
    â€œOnly if you think you can stomach the smoke, dear?” The old woman glowered at Spurr. “We left the last car because of the cacophony kicked up by three drunkards. Here, we have to tolerate the smoke from your cigar!”
    â€œHere, here—I’m opening the damn window, so get your frillies out of a twist!” Spurr said.
    The woman gasped.
    Spurr glanced over his shoulder, sheepish. The girl was scowling over her