Men of violence, p.10
Men of Violence, page 10
“Yes,” Emile Fritz had conceded, “but do you remember the time when old Mister Harper murdered his wife and holed up in his house and wouldn’t surrender and threatened to shoot anyone who tried to arrest him? You remember that, Lazlo?”
Lazlo had recalled the incident.
“And we had to send for Sheriff Birdy Peach and his deputy, Slade Yellowbone, and they come down here and how much of a gunfight it turned into before they burned the house down around him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s why you should carry a gun, in case something terrible like that were to happen again.”
Lazlo wondered if he could actually shoot someone if the circumstances were dire enough. He could still see the charred remains of old Mr. Harper when they dragged him from the ruins of his house, how awful and nonhuman he looked. Lazlo promised to get himself a gun, but he never did.
Then a few days back those outlaws had ridden in and robbed the bank and shot up the town, killing three people. If only I would have listened and bought a gun, Lazlo was thinking for the thousandth time, I might have been able to stop those devils and saved Emile’s and Juno’s life as well as that of the Tolvard boy. Now look at what’s happened.
He paced and fretted while awaiting the arrival of Sheriff Birdy Peach, and then suddenly there the sheriff stood, along with that evil-looking deputy, Slade Yellowbone.
“Well, Constable,” Birdy said, “we’ve come to find your killers and get back the bank money. What can you tell us, and which way did they go?”
Lazlo told them everything he knew about the robbery, and then about how he had been over at the infirmary helping Lila Patterson care for the sick and feeding soup to those who could not do it for themselves. He did not admit that one of his reasons for offering his assistance was because he was sweet on Lila, even though she was a married woman. It would not do to admit such a thing, but his heart burned brightly if unrequitedly for her.
“Feeding soup?” Slade said caustically.
“We do what we can for one another in Buffalo Jump,” Lazlo replied.
“Seems to me you’d have done a lot more for one another by shooting down those dogs who robbed your bank and killed your townsfolk,” Birdy said.
“You didn’t get so much as a shot off?” Slade asked.
“No, sir.”
“Why not?” Slade wondered.
Lazlo struggled to utter the truth. “I had no gun.”
“No gun! What the hell sort of lawman are you?” Slade growled.
“A peaceful one.”
Birdy snorted. So did Slade.
“Peaceful peace officer, well, now ain’t that an interesting idea,” Birdy said.
“Sort of like a three-legged racehorse,” Slade said.
“Or a real tall midget.”
“Or a short beer.”
They were having fun at his expense and Lazlo knew it, but he did not feel up to challenging them.
“You’re lucky those miscreants didn’t send you to perdition,” Birdy said.
“I would have shot you for just being plain dumb,” Slade said. “Laughed, and then shot you and gone about the whole country saying how I’d come up against an unarmed lawman.”
This only made Lazlo feel even more terrible, made him want to run and hide and never show his face again.
“Well, we’ll go over to the bank and see how much they absconded with,” Birdy said.
Lazlo remained still, like a scolded schoolboy. He no longer wanted anything to do with being the town constable. He wasn’t even sure he wanted anything to do with remaining in Buffalo Jump, though the thought of moving away from Lila pained him. He watched the sheriff and his man cross the street and head for the bank.
Birdy and Slade soon learned that the amount of stolen money was over fifteen thousand dollars, nearly the entire sum of the bank’s holdings except for the sacks of coins—silver dollars and liberty head dimes—and that the outlaws had fled west, and that a posse had gone after them but had returned empty-handed before dusk the same day.
“We best get in the wind,” Birdy said, “if we have any hopes of finding those rascals and retrieving that money.”
Once they had gotten fresh mounts and some supplies to sustain them for a few days—cured bacon, sugar, coffee, tobacco, and, of course, whiskey—they rode off in the direction they were told the outlaws had gone.
“We’ll press them hard,” Birdy said. “If they’ve got some wounded like Lazlo thought, they won’t be able to move all that fast. And since it’s been three days, they’ll likely not fear anybody coming after them. They’ll hole up somewheres, I do believe, and lay low while they lick their wounds. But we’ll find them.”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll still have all that stole money on them and won’t get a chance to spend much of it.”
“We’ll make sure they never get to, either,” Birdy said. “Fifteen thousand split two ways is a right smart day’s wages.”
“Plus whatever we can get for their horses and guns, and then the reward money on top of that,” Slade said.
“And we’ll come out looking like heroes. Guaranteed to get me elected to a second term. Why by the time I finish cleaning up this county, we’ll be richer than a railroad baron, me and you, Slade. Hell, I might even run for governor.”
“I don’t know why everybody isn’t a lawman,” Slade said. “The pay’s right smart if you know how to collect it.”
“Me, either. But be glad they’re not, or there wouldn’t be no criminals and we’d be out of a job.”
“Hell, one of us might have to take up the Owlhoot Trail and the other be the lawman just so we’d have some work.”
“We’d have to flip a dollar for it.”
Slade allowed himself a rare laugh.
“I do believe every man in this whole United States who has made himself a fortune, big or small, has done it illegal,” Birdy said. “Big ranchers started out as rustlers, bankers and lawyers are nothing more than legal thieves, and so it goes. We’re no different, you and me, Slade. And like them others, folks will look up to us and sing our praises, for the common man loves the successful one.”
“They’ll write dime novels about us,” Slade predicted.
They soon enough found old blood sign, and later that day a camp with cold ashes. They followed horse tracks that turned north into some rough, beat-up country, scarred by arroyos and hidden little cañons. The next day, down through a sandy wash, they found more tracks and more blood sign.
“They might as well be leaving us notes,” Birdy said.
“I can’t wait to kill them peckerwoods,” Slade said.
“We’ll ask them to surrender, then kill ’em.”
“I say we should do it the other way around,” Slade said.
“Whatever works out best,” Birdy said.
The second night they encamped under a railroad trestle. A bright full moon, like a newly minted silver dollar, rose above the trees, then teetered for a time upon a ridge. The land was empty, it seemed, except for the pair of them. Come first dawn they were back in the saddle, pressing on, Slade reading sign like it was a book. They only stopped for the horses to have a blow as they drank canteen water and ate beef jerky while in the saddle. The third night they made camp by a small pond of spring-fed water. The water was cold and sweet, and in the night Birdy said, in a semidrunken state after sharing yet another bottle of Old Tub, what he was going to do with some of the bank and reward money. He wanted to buy a cathouse. “Hell, I’ll hire me all the best-looking wimmen and charge double the going rate.”
“Wimmen,” Slade said sourly.
“Sure, why not? What’s the two things men will pay good money for even if it’s their last dollar? Liquor and wimmen.”
Slade snorted. He had become increasingly quiet, even more so when he was deep into his cups. For his thoughts kept wandering back to the mercantile clerk. In his silent reverie, Slade recalled a great uncle of his about whom it was said he had become a camp follower—a fancy cognomen for prostitute—during the Civil War. Uncle France had dressed as a woman and played the part of a woman to the men who came to visit him in his tent under the pretense of having their laundry done. It seemed at the time when Slade had first heard this strange and disturbing story that it simply could not be so. But nowadays, Slade had begun to wonder if maybe there wasn’t something that ran in the family blood, maybe skipped a generation or two, and struck him. Maybe he was like his Uncle France, a fancy boy. It gave him the shudders to think so. Wimmen, he thought.
The night stars seemed so near they could just reach out and pick them like frozen fruit from a tree. Slade wondered what Jody was doing this night. In bed, alone? Something cold shuddered through him—like he’d swallowed a frozen star.
“Hell, maybe you’d need you an enforcer in that cathouse,” he said to Birdy. “I’d admire some of that action myself.”
It was a big fat lie of course, but Birdy didn’t know that, and it was best to keep Birdy in the dark about what Slade had in mind once they caught and rubbed out the Sam Starr gang. How Birdy had talked about all that money split two ways. Well, why not just split one way? Wouldn’t that last a man a lot longer than two ways?
“Pass that Old Tub,” Birdy said, “and I’ll think about making you my right-hand man.”
Somewhere out in the far dark and lonely night a coyote yipped, and then another, and another, until there was a whole chorus of them. Slade wondered whatever had happened to Uncle France. Nobody in the family seemed to know. He never did come back from the war. Some figured him to have been killed, either by the enemy or his own kind—found out, perhaps, and murdered for his depravity. Uncle France wasn’t very often spoken about, and never in the company of any of the Yellowbone womenfolk. It was always just whenever some of the Yellowbone men had gathered and shared a jug of mash liquor and got to talking about one thing or another. Mostly when Uncle France’s name passed their lips, it was contained in such phrases as, “Can you believe it?” or “Thet boy was surely tetched in the head.”
I am surely cursed, Slade told himself as he listened to Birdy’s snores, to the coyotes’ yips, to the silence of stars. He felt like killing somebody. Killing always seemed to help for some reason or other. Always made him feel like a true man and allayed his fears about the other thing.
Chapter Sixteen
They reached Lusk by sunset, Tom and John Henry Cole. It was still hard for Cole to believe that Tom had showed up. Even though he seemed more like a complete stranger, Tom was still his flesh and blood. He decided that no matter what, he was going to try and get to know this boy and do for him what he could, and not let him go again. Tom had an innocence about him, but he also had an edge to him as hard and sharp as a barlow blade.
They talked little, however, each searching for words they could speak that might mean something to the other one. For Tom, finding his father again, a man his mother had talked much about in her last days, seemed surreal, like a dream he’d had so often about meeting up with this man once more, the man who once virtually saved his life before abandoning him. But now that he had found him again, it wasn’t anything like a dream. John Henry Cole seemed too hardened and grizzled a man ever to have wooed and won his mother’s love, Anna Rain, who had been pretty and petite and of delicate sensibilities. And yet, she had allowed this man to get her pregnant, had been apparently abandoned by him, and so she had married Jimmy Wild Bird, a man approved by her father. She had told Tom how he had been taken from her at birth by his grandfather, and how great the shame had been over the pregnancy.
“The man who would have been your stepdad had he lived, Jimmy Wild Bird, I was with him, you know, when he died,” Cole said.
“My mother told me that. She said he knew about the two of you, but he never knew about me, never saw me. He didn’t know I was called Red Snake … or what the men I was with did.”
“No,” said Cole, “he never did. And he was killed trying to capture Caddo Pierce, the man you were riding with in those days.”
“My mother said Jimmy Wild Bird died of blood poisoning.”
“That’s right. It was either getting his arm cut off, or dying. He chose to die. He was a proud man. I liked him. Like they say, he was one to ride the river with. It was an honor for me, riding with him. He was a good man.”
Tom held the reins threaded between his fingers as the little town of Lusk came into view, the first lights of evening shining from inside some of the establishments and homes. A collection of buildings scattered like seeds within a cup of land not unlike a buffalo wallow, the whole place seemed more accidental than planned. What caused such places to be birthed was anyone’s guess. They simply were, and some survived the passage of time and fortune, and some did not. In the blue-black dusk a bawling rose and fell in a soulful sound that seemed to speak of great loneliness, as if the very land itself was crying out.
Cole had noticed a scar on Tom’s face like a knife cut that had healed but had left a trough through the flesh above the left eye and curved slightly downward like the letter C.
“How’d you come by that?” he asked.
Without bothering to look at him, Tom said, “A Canucker. Me and him got into it more’n once. I guess he expected me to quit every time, but I wouldn’t quit. I just would come back at him every time, and one day I came at him and finally beat him up, so that was the end of it.”
Cole’s smile was a bitter one—proud that his son had stood his ground, sad that he’d had to stand it at all.
“I guess you have a right to be bitter.”
“It don’t matter to me one way or the other. Where’d you say that smithy was?”
“Up ahead, there at the end of the street.”
Tom passed through the center of the town and reined the mules over where a silent forge stood, and set the foot brake, then wrapped the reins around the handle. He and Cole climbed down.
A thick-set man lay snoring under a buffalo robe, his heavy boots poking out one end, his thicket of head hair out the other. He sounded like a busted steam pipe.
Cole tapped him on the soles of his boots until he stirred awake.
“Waugh!”
“Got a horse needs being shod,” Cole said.
The man sat up, knuckled sleep from his eyes, and stared at the two of them in the soft buttery light of a bull’s-eye lantern hanging from a nail driven into a thick support post. “Bring her around. I’ll have to stoke up the forge. Need pay in advance.”
“How much?” Cole asked.
“Four dollars all four shoes. Unless you need just one.”
“All four will do.”
“Come back in an hour and she’ll be done.”
“I’ll wait,” Cole said.
“I’d as soon walk around and see what’s here,” Tom remarked.
“Go ahead.”
Cole watched him go off, swallowed up by the dark places. He sat while the smithy stoked the forge to life with bellows, coal oil, and matches. He built himself a shuck and smoked as he tried to piece together the events of the day, wondering what sort of luck or fate it was that Tom had come back into his life after all this time, and found himself nearly overwhelmed with happiness that Tom had. Maybe I’m getting a second chance for a reason, Cole thought as the smithy pried off the old shoes from the Appaloosa and filed the hoofs, preparing them for the new shoes. He took measurements and began to heat the new shoes in the forge. He was a stout man, as you’d have to be, his forearms knotted into hard muscles, his wrists and hands thick, strong as he plunged one shoe into the coals and heated it, then removed it when it got hot enough. He hammered it into shape before cooling it in bucket of cold water. Over and over again, working steadily, assuredly, his eye keen, his labor intent and sure as that of any craftsman. The hammer rang against the steel of shoe and anvil, rang sharply enough that Cole had to step away. The smithy’s face was a sheen of sweat over soot, the sparks flying and the coals breathing like some fiery creature against the outer darkness.
Cole imagined a future with Tom, the two of them mending fences with each other, getting past the unfamiliarity of lapsed time. He allowed himself to imagine getting old and Tom marrying and settling into the house and babies coming who’d sit on his lap, and call him grandpa. He was letting his thoughts gallop away with him when shots rang out. Without knowing for certain, something told Cole that trouble had returned.
Chapter Seventeen
One-Eye moaned and cursed his poor luck and said, “Can’t one of you-all dig this damn bullet outta my leg, or am I to suffer and bleed to death?”
Sam Starr looked askance at his wounded soldier. “Stop your goddamn whining.”
“Go to bloody hell!” One-Eye said through clenched teeth.
Black Bill was the handiest among them to patch up shot people. He’d been on burial detail during the war, but had watched a lot of those field surgeons cut and slice the wounded, had seen them saw off arms and legs and toss them into a pile. And sometimes they’d require him to hold a man down while they did their cutting and he’d watch them carefully, how they did it, dig out slugs and sew up wounds, how they’d wash the wounds with cleansing water and all the rest. “I’ll give it a try,” Black Bill said.
One-Eye looked at him skeptically. “You know what you’re doing?”
“I don’t have to do nothing you don’t want me to do. Lay there and suffer and bleed to death, or wait for lead poisoning to set in and kill you.”
A small fire flickered, the flames licking at the night. They had ridden their mounts hard and now they had to rest them. So far no posse had followed. They figured they were mostly in the clear.
