The Best American Mystery Stories 2006

That was not allowed, as Chief Hazelwood surprised the brother with a Spencer rifle at the level, as he rounded a strawstack. As Haze marched him around to the front, Dari, who has much of the scarecrow about him, made to jackrabbit, and for his efforts received a blow from the gunstock behind his knees.

Sam Watts of our party then rushed into the house, where the distaff kin huddled, and purported he would kill every man, woman, and child if they issued a sound. He was snarling like a coon dog and they wolving back when I entered the fray and found a quartet of females, all with hacked hair and wearing frocks sewn from the same bolt. All were sparrow-eyed and snaggley, the least a mere imp and the eldest a crone of rawky voice, dugs scarce covered by her cloth, and her steady sneer evidenced she bore no respect for my badge or rabbit-eared two-barrel. Everything in the single-room cabin was ashed and scutty with a stink of fish and rancid lard, and I would have been much pleased to be in any other of the world’s sculleries but that one. Soon our party were both in the reeking house and beyond it, a picket line of our deputies to let the fugitive pass through, and with lanterns lit inside, we impressed the women to make supper motions and stir the fire.

Before long, the object of our search emerged from a stand of scrub pine, his expression that of a preacher on a spree, an old Colt Navy dangling from his hand but his gait a carefree lope. Although he was much altered since his soldier days, I knew him at once. He is the blackest of the Painters, likely issued from different loins than Dari, and in that twilight one could indeed describe him as damson. At his approach Pink shouted his name, as in turn did we all to announce the full surround. The women, knowing Painter’s indisposition to surrender and seeing so many firearms brandished, commenced to plead and keen for their beloved relative’s life, and he raised his hands as if to come in peaceably, bringing me to a sigh of relief. Catching his face holding back all feeling, I had to think for one moment he was but little different from myself — worn out and edgy — and hoped he would yield easy.

But that was not to be. Haze strode forth with the irons in his hand, and just at that pass, Painter abandoned his ruse, roostered his hammer, and dropped to his knee to fire a ball at the Chief. We can only assume that the chamber was null or wet, as the sole sound was a dry snap, and by then Suttock feathered into the man with his Winchester, swatting as if he had an axe handle. Even stunned and bleeding from the temple, Painter, who is both stout and tall, was loath to be manacled or handled roughly, and he thrashed about. I finally had to put on the quietus with a blow to his nape from my belt stick. Peeling back the sleeve of his dustcoat and shirt, I saw the viper drawn into his skin, though hardly visible against his own dark surface. He had affected a handlebar moustache and bore scars unknown to me, but this was surely our culprit.

Even after the man was cuffed and revived and I had served the papers, he was no more cooperative than a mad fox, snarling curses at us and kicking till I decided to hobble him as I would a headstrong colt. When he spat my name and called me a pussle-gutted son of Nick, I had heard enough and swatted him out again. All along Sam Watts held his weapon trained on the rest of the family, taunting them as they reined still enough to satisfy any portrait photographer. Dari was so flinchy-eyed I felt certain he was scouting for some edged tool to make an unwise demonstration, so I judged it best to cuff him as well.

Coming to all bound up, Painter heard Hazelwood to say we should best shoot him on the spot and sling him down the shaft of an old tin mine to save the county money and the poor victim much discomfort and trauma. This was laughed off by some of us, though Pink alleged as this was far the best suggestion of the campaign. For my part, I am sorry to say, the proposal seemed not without merit, but I registered at once we were too many eyes and tongues to keep such a course concealed. The banter seemed to have a sobering effect on the accused, however, who was thereafter compliant except on the matter of his army hat, which he insisted in vain we fetch from his camp among the hemlocks. Watching in lantern light his coiled hair as he sat the jack on our descent, I could not but think this was all a tainted business, neither clean nor worthy of our charge.

After the prisoner was delivered to Lexington the next day in sheveled and humbled state, the posse was dismissed, and the cost of this chapter of the manhunt to the county has been in excess of thirty dollars, including rations, grain for the horses, and three dollars bounty for each volunteer. The distance covered in the hunt, much of it through rough mountain, could scarce be less than a hundred miles, though the map reckoning from Lexington to the headwaters of the Pedlar and back is but forty-two miles. I must continue to implore the county to ordain a constable to take jurisdiction in the Irish Creek region, as upheavals there are frequent and the labor and cost of enforcement from town prohibitive. Though yet a somewhat hale specimen, I do not possess the resources for many more such misadventures, and I relish them not at all.