The Legend of Caleb York Read online

  Also by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

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  MICKEY SPILLANE AND MAX ALLAN COLLINS

  The LEGEND OF CALEB YORK

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  HOW THE LEGEND OF CALEB YORK BEGAN - An introductory note from the co-author

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Copyright Page

  For Bill Crider—

  best of the West

  “Heroes never die. John Wayne isn’t dead. You can’t kill a hero.”

  —Mickey Spillane

  HOW THE LEGEND OF CALEB YORK BEGAN

  An introductory note from the co-author

  It’s been my honor and pleasure, over the past several years, to complete a number of suspense novels begun by Mickey Spillane, the most famous and popular American mystery novelist of the twentieth century.

  I began, as so many did, as Mickey’s fan. Over the years, as I became a professional fiction writer myself, we became friends and at times collaborators. Shortly before his death in 2006, Mickey asked me to complete the Mike Hammer novel he was working on (The Goliath Bone, 2008), should he not be able to. Around the same time, he instructed his wife Jane to conduct “a treasure hunt” after his passing, and to gather any other unpublished material of his and turn it over to me—“Max will know what to do.” I can imagine no greater honor.

  After completing The Goliath Bone, my first order of business was five novels featuring Mickey’s signature character, tough detective Mike Hammer, that Mickey had set aside, as well as two other non-Hammer suspense novels. These were substantial manuscripts of one hundred pages or more, often with plot and character notes. Currently I am developing Hammer novels from shorter but still significant unfinished works in Mickey’s files.

  In addition to these stories-in-progress were several unproduced screenplays by Mickey, with the potential to become novels. One of these was of particular interest— The Saga of Caleb York, a Western that he developed for John Wayne.

  Mickey and the Duke (and Mickey knew him well enough to call him that) were great friends. Wayne cast Mickey as a detective version of his superstar mystery-writer self in the 1954 film Ring of Fear. Backing Mickey up in Ring of Fear were legendary character actor Pat O’Brien, John Ford stock-company player Sean McClory, lion tamer Clyde Beatty (whose circus provided the setting), and lovely Marian Carr, who would go on to co-star in director Robert Aldrich’s celebrated Mike Hammer adaptation, Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

  Wayne himself did not appear in Ring of Fear, producing it (with Robert Fellows) for his Batjac company, which was responsible for such Wayne-starring classics as Island in the Sky (1953) and The High and the Mighty (1954).

  Problems during the filming of Ring of Fear led Wayne to ask Mickey to do a rewrite on a screenplay by other hands (Paul Fix, Philip MacDonald, and director James Edward Grant). The Duke, fearful that the CinemaScope picture was turning into a circus documentary, wanted Mike Hammer’s daddy to tighten the story and provide new, more suspenseful scenes. Mickey did, but refused payment (and co-writer screen credit). By way of thanks, Wayne had a brand-new Jaguar dropped off in front of Spillane’s home in Newburgh, New York, the white convertible tied in a big ribbon with a card reading, Thanks—Duke.

  Now and then, Wayne would bring Mickey in to view rough cuts of films to provide notes. Mick recalled sitting with famed director William Wellman in one such Hollywood screening, specifically of Wayne’s money-pit pet project, The Alamo (1960). When the lights came up, Mickey’s suggestion to Duke was “change the ending.” Astonished, Wayne—who played Davy Crockett in the picture—said, “Mickey, we can’t change the ending ! It’s the Alamo.” Mickey’s response was: “Nobody wants to pay two dollars to watch a bunch of Mexicans kill John Wayne.”

  However un-PC Mickey’s critique might be, he had a point. The disappointing returns on the Wayne-directed Alamo were the downfall of the actor’s Batjac production company. Wayne embarked on a succession of highly successful pictures (starting with North to Alaska that same year), but for producers other than himself.

  Which is why the screenplay Mickey wrote for Wayne and Batjac was never produced (apparently, no money ever changed hands). Written around 1959, the screenplay finds the famous mystery writer drawing upon the “Print the legend” West of John Ford and Howard Hawks (set in fictional Trinidad, New Mexico, in the early 1880s). It’s easy to imagine rolling into a movie theater in the late fifties or early sixties and seeing Caleb York’s saga unfold.

  You are free to picture John Wayne as the stranger who rides into town, though that’s hardly a requirement—at Batjac, Wayne produced films starring Glenn Ford, Robert Mitchum, and, of course, Mickey Spillane. The great Batjac production Seven Men From Now (1956) represented a Burt Kennedy script Wayne sent to Randolph Scott, initiating the much-admired series of Scott Westerns directed by Budd Boetticher (several others of which were also written by Kennedy).

  Cast the hero here as you like, in the movie theater of your mind. Both Wayne and Scott would work fine. But who knows? Maybe Batjac would have hired Ford or Mitchum, or perhaps Joel McCrea or Audie Murphy. Remember, there are no budgetary concerns for the reader. Nor does the passage of time prevent you from casting this as you like—Maverick-era James Garner? No problem. Sam Elliott? Good choice. Gary Cooper? You can afford him, too. Both Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef are available in the Bijou of the brain. So is an idealized version of yourself, which was how Mickey always wanted readers to envision Mike Hammer.

  So I’ll leave you with Mickey’s words, which he often inscribed in books he signed to fans he described as his “customers”: Have fun!

  —Max Allan Collins

  CHAPTER ONE

  Everybody called it Boot Hill, but there was no hill about it—not even a rise on the flat, dusty ground just off the rutted road half a mile out of Trinidad, New Mexico.

  The spot had been chosen because of a resilient mesquite tree that provided some color and shade, but this scrubby patch of earth otherwise had nothing to recommend it. For serving a town of less than three hundred, this was a well-populated cemetery, wooden crosses clustered with the occasional flat tombstones popping up like road markers. On this April morning, a breeze flapped hat brims and bandanas into flags and stirred dust into foot-hugging ghosts. Like diffident mourners, distant buttes lurked, turned a light rust color by a sun still on the rise, faces of their steep cliffs sorrowful with the dark shadows of erosion.

  Willa Cullen, her father’s only daughter—only offspring—by rights should have worn a Sunday dress, its hem weighted down with sewn-in buckshot to fight the wind. But sh
e was in a red-plaid shirt and denim trousers and boots with stirrup-friendly heels, the kind of work clothes worn by the handful of her papa’s ranch hands that could be spared to attend the small, sad graveside service for Bud Meadow.

  Reverend Caldwell from Trinidad’s church, Missionary Baptist, presided over this congregation of half-a-dozen cowhands, their boss, his daughter, and a dead boy in a pine box in its fresh hole. No townsfolk were present.

  No surprise, really. Nobody knew Bud very well. He’d drifted in looking for work, Papa had given it to him, and come first pay, end of the month, Bud had gotten himself shot outside the Victory Saloon.

  Trinidad had a reputation for looking the other way when cowhands came in on those particular Friday nights. It became routine for any business—save the Victory, the two restaurants, and the barbershop—to board up their windows till the boys got it out of their systems. In front, the affected businesses just stacked the lumber up under the windows along the boardwalks.

  But Bud had mouthed off to the sheriff, and the sheriff had shot him down in the street. Funny how only the Cullen cowhands seemed to wind up that way—half a dozen were already buried here on Boot Hill. Now among them was a Meadow, planted but never to blossom.

  Who were his parents? Willa wondered. Did he have brothers or sisters? Friends forged on trail drives?

  They would never know. No date of birth, no full name. Just a white wooden cross, freshly painted but soon to be windblown and blistered.

  Willa was a pretty thing but not delicate, near tall as her father but with her late Swede mother’s hourglass figure and also the same straw-yellow hair worn up and braided back. She had been called a tomboy in her youth, but was too much of a woman for that now, though she often wore ranching-style riding apparel like today.

  She meant no disrespect to the late Bud Meadow. She just knew she needed to be dressed to ride, though her father—in his black Sunday suit and string tie and felt hat—had brought the big buggy, drawn by a pair of horses, with plenty of room for her to sit beside.

  Really, this was about Papa’s stubbornness. In buggy or wagon, he refused to let his daughter take the reins, leaving her to ride alongside on Daisy, her calico, and surreptitiously guide the hitched-up horses, should Papa need the help he refused. Leaving the hard-packed, rutted road to take the turn into Boot Hill was an example of that.

  But for a blind man, George Cullen got around well.

  Her papa’s blindness had come on gradual over these five years past, until now his unseeing stare had a disturbing milkiness. He would wince and narrow his eyes and widen them, as if that would somehow summon vision that was only a memory now. Still, their world was small enough—ranch, road, town—that Papa could manage. Mostly.

  When the service was over, and the grave diggers gone to shoveling, Papa sent Whit Murphy, his foreman, back with the boys, and—with Willa’s subtle help—steered the buggy back onto the road and headed into town. Whit had offered to come along and several others chimed in their willingness, too.

  It had been Willa who discouraged them.

  “If just Pa and me ride in,” she said firmly, “there’ll be no trouble. You boys chaperone us, we could be back out here at another service tomorrow. Maybe more than one.”

  Whit, lanky and weathered with a Texas-style Stetson and droopy, dark mustache, only nodded, touched his brim, and rode off, the rest following.

  It didn’t have to be said: a blind man and a girl could ride in and, no matter what transpired, ride back out again. Even Sheriff Harry Gauge had to respect some things.

  The buggy and its calico escort took it easy down Main Street’s row of facing frame buildings. At this end of Main, the white wooden church seemed to stare all the way down at its bookend, the bare-wood livery stable whose high-peaked hayloft mirrored Missionary Baptist’s steeple. The street itself wore a layer of sand, carted in from the nearby Purgatory River, to hold down the dust. Wooden awnings shaded the boardwalks, a few women in gingham out shopping, encouraged by the cool breeze, always welcome in this hot dry climate.

  All very civilized, Willa thought.

  Hardware store, apothecary shop, barber, hotel with restaurant, mercantile store, bank, telegraph office, saloon. From Main’s stem several streets shot off and modest houses hid back behind the tall false-fronted clapboard stores and the occasional brick building. Trinidad existed to serve the ranchers, large and small, who lived and worked in the surrounding area. The population here was merchants and their employees. Nicely dressed, genteel folk who depended on the rough men and frontier women who made making a living in this hard country possible for those softer than themselves.

  Down toward the livery stable, with its blacksmith forge out front, was a scarred adobe building that had once been a Mexican army outpost and still sat apart from the rest of the town, across from a scattering of adobes, the homes and businesses of the town’s modest Mexican contingent.

  Seated under an awning that had been added onto the tile roof, watching the world go by, were two big rough-looking men in their thirties, one leaning back in his wooden chair with his boot heels catching the railing.

  Willa and her father were only halfway down Main when her father asked her, “You see him?”

  Papa meant Sheriff Harry Gauge.

  “I see him, Papa.”

  “Where is he, child?”

  “Where he always is, when he’s not in that saloon.”

  “In front of his office.”

  “In front of his office.”

  “Anyone with him?”

  “Just that nasty deputy. Rhomer.”

  “Let’s go on down, then.”

  She frowned at the unseeing face as they kept up their leisurely pace. “Papa, you said the telegraph office. We’re almost there. Let’s do your errand and go about our business.”

  “Willa, make sure I stop right beside him.”

  “Papa, please . . . let it be.”

  “You heard me, girl.”

  When they got to the sheriff’s office, Willa cleared her throat just a little and her father brought the buggy to a stop.

  Sheriff Harry Gauge took his feet off the rail and let the chair and his boots hit the plank porch, purposely loud. Gunshot loud.

  Her papa flinched. “You there, Gauge?”

  Gauge was a big blond man with ice-blue eyes, six-two, broad-shouldered, rugged but clean-shaven, with a cleft chin and a propensity for smiling at jokes he never shared. He wore a wide-brimmed middle-creased Stetson, a spotted cowhide vest, and a dark blue shirt with a badge, his dark duck trousers tucked into his finely tooled boots. The Colt .44 hung loosely at his side, its tie-down strap dangling.

  Seated near him was Deputy Vint Rhomer, a redheaded, red-bearded man even bigger than Gauge. Eyes so dark blue they almost looked black, Rhomer was in a store-bought gray shirt with sleeve garters and badge and a buckskin vest, denims tucked in his boots. His .44 was tied down with a holster strap keeping the weapon in place.

  “Right here, Cullen,” the sheriff said, his voice low and mellow, and a little thick—he was chewing tobacco. “Mornin’, Miss Cullen.”

  Willa gave the sheriff the smallest nod she could muster.

  Her father’s face was stony with rage, but his voice didn’t show it. “Thought you might make it out to the burial, Sheriff. Seems the least you might do.”

  “I didn’t know Mr. Meadow that well.”

  “Knew him well enough to kill him.”

  Gauge said nothing.

  His tone still casual, her father nonetheless pressed: “There was no need to shoot that boy down in the street. Like a rabid dog. None at all.”

  “He was a rabid dog, Cullen. Wild kid, liquored up. Threatened me when I asked for his gun.”

  “Bud was no gunfighter. Just a kid I give a job.” An edge came into her father’s voice. “But that was enough for you to cut him down, wasn’t it? That he worked for me.”

  Gauge turned his head and spat a black tobacco stre
am. “Nothing to do with it, Cullen. He just had a big smart mouth. Big enough to get him killed.”

  Now the rage in her father’s voice was a storm rattling at windows. “You’re no sheriff! You don’t even sound like a sheriff.”

  Gauge spat again, put his shrug into his voice: “Well, the good folks of Trinidad elected me one, just the same.”

  “Because they’re scared as hell!” Her father’s anger unsettled the horses some. “Scared of you, scared to death of you and your badge and your whole damn bunch!”

  “Cullen . . . a lady’s present.”

  Willa said, “Don’t either of you hold back on my account.”

  Gauge grinned. “A sheriff needs deputies, Mr. Cullen. I rounded up some reliable men, hard men for a hard job. No ‘bunch.’ ” He shrugged again, and his eyes went to Willa. “I seem to do all right by this town.”

  Her father snorted a laugh. “Like hell.”

  The sheriff shifted in his wooden chair, scraping the wooden porch. “Cullen, you’re riled because that kid worked for you. I can understand that. But you didn’t see the shooting, did you? You wasn’t even in town. And if you was, well . . . you wouldn’ta seen it, anyway. You don’t see anything, do you, old man?”

  The insult—however true, it was an insult—hung in the air like a sour smell.

  Finally her father said, “I can see that you’re trying to take over all the good grazing land around here. And so do the ‘good folks of Trinidad.’ ”

  Gauge was grinning again. “And what if they do? What would any of them do about it? Storekeepers. Bankers. Cooks and barkeeps. Children all, who need a strong hand.”

  Her father was trembling with anger now. “One day it will happen.”

  “What will, Cullen?”

  Papa’s smile had something terrible in it. “You’ll run into a real one. A man. The kind who built this country.”

  “Like you, you mean?”

  “Like I was. Yes, I’m an old man. A blind old man. And you are damn lucky I am, because could I see, I would find no greater pleasure than cutting you down like you did that boy.”