The Death and Life of Strother Purcell by Ian Weir

Author:Ian Weir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Goose Lane Editions
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Young Weaver arrived at a lope some short while later.

I’d heard the news while taking lunch at a saloon, half a mile away—a shooting scrape, would you believe it, at a whore’s lodgings on Pacific Street. Some old man with one eye blasting the hell out of Rent Collectors. Oh, shit-fuck-pisspots, I thought to myself, and sprinted.

So I hadn’t—strictly speaking—been an eyewitness to the confrontation. The accounting I’ve given above is more what you’d call a dramatic re-creation, based on interviews and canny suppositions, honed by years of writing yarns for newspapers. But I think I come pretty close to the mark.

Rose’s rooms, when I got there, were strewn with debris and spattered with blood. The door and two chairs were reduced to kindling, and three walls were cratered as if by cannon-fire.

“Fucksake, Barry!” Rose said to me. We were on the landing together, the two of us. Outside the gaping doorway, trying to have a private conversation. “Three of ’em—one old tramp. Jesus on a rented mule, who is he?” She was halfway giddy with relief, but she had me by the shirt front just the same: both hands clenched and nose-to-nose. “The truth, you bastard!”

So I told her. Or at least, I told a version thereof. It could hardly help the old man to start blabbing the whole truth, unvarnished and entire. Besides, I still knew only parts of it myself, despite having been busy for the past couple of days, scouring through newspaper archives in search of information. I’d written letters to old newspaper acquaintances, too, here and there about the country, casually asking for any information that fellows might have concerning the late gunman Strother Purcell. There’d been no replies as yet—the letters had just gone out—but I had hopes. And in the meantime, my archival scouring had yielded up the broadest strokes of a biographical sketch.

Born in North Carolina. Left there as a young man, after a back-country blood-feud boiled over. Turned up a few years later as an itinerant lawman in tough, rail-head cattle-towns in Kansas and Wyoming. Turned up after that in New Mexico, where some manner of reunion with his outlaw brother led to a year-long pursuit all the way into Canada—the Retribution Ride—and a Reckoning sometime in the winter of 1876.

And there’d been corpses—by his own admission, that first night in the cell. Corpses left behind, at each stop along the way.

I didn’t mention this to Prairie Rose. Not the details, and certainly not the name. Instead, I told her: “I believe Old Lem killed a man.”

“He near to just killed three more!”

“No, hear me out. He shot a man dead, a few years back. In—in New Mexico, I think.”

This was true. Almost certainly. Based on the research I had done to this point, it seemed clear that he had killed men in various States and Territories, not to mention Canada. So why should New Mexico be an exception?

“An’ now you get around to telling me? Fucksake, Barry...!”

“Just keep your voice down.

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