Dead Man's Return

by Derek Rutherford

  He stared at Allan. ‘Please,’ he said.

  John Allan smiled.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll just let you wonder.’

  From through the open door Leon said, ‘You’re an evil man, Allan.’

  ‘Allan?’ the one called Emmett said.

  ‘It’s just a name,’ Allan said. ‘I used to use it way back.’

  ‘You did well, didn’t you?’ Leon said. ‘Whatever you did, you did well out of it.’

  Allan smiled. ‘I guess I did OK. Unlike you boys. Can’t imagine how you ever managed to be train robbers. Look at you now.’

  ‘What happened?’ Jim said. ‘How did you do it?’

  Allan walked over to his desk and opened a small box. He took out a cigar and closed the lid. Then he opened the box again and took out three more cigars. He gave one to Emmett and one to the other deputies. Each of them bit the end off their cigars. Allan scraped a Lucifer into life and then lit the cigars. He leaned against the wall and looked at Jim Jackson. Then he walked back to his desk and took out a bottle of whiskey from the bottom drawer. He pulled the cork out and took a long swig, then passed the bottle to his youngest deputy. The bottle went round the room and ended up back with Allan. He took another long drink, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and said, ‘OK. I’ll tell you what happened.’

  The man called Abraham stood against the outside wall of the sheriff’s office. His coat was open. Both his guns were visible. Anyone who knew to look for such things may have noticed that the guns rode slightly high in their holsters where Abraham had loosened them. One leg was cocked, his boot flat against the wall he leant against. He smoked a cigarette and watched the people walking by. He smiled at those that looked at him.

  And he listened.

  The sheriff’s voice was clear through the wooden wall. He sounded excited, although there was the slightest slurring to his words as if maybe he’d partaken of a drink or two. Probably to celebrate still being alive, Abraham thought. He had gathered, from the street gossip – most of it started by a young boy – that someone had tied the sheriff to a chair over at the telegraph office and had been seconds away from shooting him dead, when the sheriff’s deputies had rescued him.

  Interestingly, the woman that Abraham had spoken to yesterday, appeared to have been involved in the situation. He’d liked her. But it meant nothing. Who they were didn’t really matter. The situation was what it was and if their predicament could help him, so be it.

  What that predicament had done was bring everyone into the same room at one time.

  ‘They were on to us, you know. That’s what happened,’ the sheriff said from inside the office. ‘I got a knock on the door one night and there was a couple of fellows there from the Department of Public Protection, or so they said. I wasn’t sure. I’d never heard of such a department. But there they were. There were a couple more of them outside. I saw them. The one who had knocked on my door told me that they’d come to arrest me and he painted a pretty grim picture of what lay ahead.’

  Abraham heard someone else interject at that point but he couldn’t make out the words.

  ‘They took me away and I thought that was it. Locked me in a room overnight. But in the morning they offered me a deal.’

  ‘You double-crossed us,’ someone else said.

  ‘No. They said if I were to do something real simple for them, just one thing, they would make all of the trouble – that future in hell-holes like you ended up in – go away. I thought he meant for all of us.’

  ‘Like hell you did.’

  There was a pause then. Maybe, Abraham thought, the sheriff was shrugging. Yes, from what he’d seen of the sheriff that’s what he’d be doing.

  ‘All I had to do was kill a man on a particular train,’ the sheriff went on. ‘They basically set up that robbery. It wasn’t easy. I honestly didn’t want to give you guys up – ‘

  ‘So you did betray us.’

  ‘It was falling apart anyway. We were on borrowed time and they had us anyway. They knew who we were and where we lived, and if I’d have said no you’d have all been arrested by morning anyway.’

  ‘And to think I hesitated from pulling the trigger just a few minutes ago.’

  ‘Like I said, you always were soft. Anyway that’s it. It couldn’t have worked out better, the way one of you dropped a sack over his head. I knew I had to kill the fellow, but I didn’t know how until that moment. That’s it. That’s all I know. After that you went your way and I went mine.’

  ‘We went to Hell and you came here and lived like a king.’

  ‘The wind blows different ways for different folks. It’s the way it is. Emmett, untie him. Let’s put him back in the cell.’

  Abraham heard the jangle of keys. He counted to ten.

  Then he pushed himself away from the wall, drew his guns, and kicked open the door.

  Jim Jackson was standing in the doorway between the room in which the cages were situated and the sheriff’s office. John Allan was in the cage room with the keys to one of the cages in his right hand and a Colt 45 in the other. He was unlocking the cage in which Leon stood, blood specks on Leon’s lips from his coughing, his hands gripping the bars.

  Emmett – Jim didn’t know his surname – was standing in the sheriff’s office loosely holding a shotgun, which pointed in the vague direction of Jim Jackson’s spine. The other two deputies still lounged against the wall in the office, enjoying their cigars, filling the room with a warm rich smell, which at least temporarily masked the stink of sweat and body heat.

  All of the lawmen looked relaxed and carefree, almost jolly. The sheriff even seemed a little drunk. Drunk on life, Jim thought. When you come as close to death as Allan had, then it doesn’t take much liquor to make you happy. Just being alive is enough.

  And if, in the process, you capture the man who was going to kill you. Well, that’s just like drinking another bottle of good whiskey, isn’t it?

  Jim swallowed, tasted blood, and wondered if he’d ever be drunk on life again. He looked into the first cage and saw Leon standing there, still gaunt. He worried about Leon’s cough. Leon always tried to hide it but Jim had noticed. Rosalie, too. A cough like that, when you’re spitting blood, is a killer. And Rosalie, in the next cell along, her arm around the boy who was to hang the next day. How had he allowed this to happen to sweet beautiful Rosalie?

  Allan was just slipping the key into the door lock, saying something to Leon about moving to the back of the cage if he knew what was good for him, when Jim heard something crash against the door, and then he heard the secondary smash as the door itself hit the inside wall.

  He turned.

  The man with the long beard was quick. As quick as Jim had ever seen.

  The gun in his right hand blazed twice, two flashes of fire, two blasts so close together that they may have been one.

  Both deputies against the far wall fell, not even enough time for recognition or awareness to register in their eyes.

  Emmett was turning now, the shotgun swinging towards the bearded man.

  But the gun in the man’s left hand blazed, too, and Emmett was lifted off his feet and thrown against a chair. Emmett’s finger squeezed the shotgun trigger as he fell and the blast ripped into the office ceiling.

  The realisation struck Jim that the bearded man couldn’t see John Allan. And that even if the angles of the wall had allowed that visibility then he, Jim, was in the doorway between the two men.

  John Allan was still holding the keys, but now he was turning, straightening up.

  ‘Catch.’

  The bearded man didn’t wait for a response. He gently lobbed one of his guns towards Jim Jackson. Jim would never know if was luck or judgement – the latter he suspected afterwards, on account of how efficient the bearded man had been with everything else – but the gun landed perfectly in Jim’s hand.

  He’d been beaten. He’d been tied up. The knot’s overly tight. The blood was only just coming back i
nto his hands. The nerve endings were tingling. His fingers felt as big as sausages.

  But instinct took over.

  John Allan was raising his own gun, when Jim Jackson shot him. Once. Twice. Three times. The bullets smashing Allan into the far wall, leaving a smear of blood where he’d slid down the grey paint.

  He was dead without ever seeing, or knowing of, the bearded man who had come to kill him.

  Chapter Six

  Years later it would become known as the Leyton Massacre. It wasn’t a story that was ever documented as the townsfolk didn’t want anyone hunted down or prosecuted. Those townsfolk were free of the tyrant that had ruled their lives for years. The fear lifted from Leyton like morning mist burned off the creek by a late summer sun. The story became a whispered and joyous hand-me-down, shared by the generations, but always a town secret. And part of the tale was of the celebrations that day and night. Celebrations that became a great fiesta. Pianos and fiddles were played with a freedom and a spirit that few in the town could recall. The tall bearded man – Abraham – was a hero, albeit a reluctant one. He drank just a little that day, and was happy to hold hands and dance in the street once or twice. Jim Jackson, Leon Winters, and Rosalie Robertson were feted, too. They danced and drank, too, and even Howard from the telegraph office, albeit begrudgingly, forgave them the way they had forced him into their plot. Young Billy’s stories grew wilder every time he retold them, but there was no denying he had been there, right in the midst of it. Martin and his mother couldn’t find the words to thank Rosalie, although they tried over and over, and in the end they simply offered their home as a place to stay whenever Rosalie or her men, as Martin put it, needed one.

  It was on the floor in that house that Jim Jackson woke the morning after the celebrations, with a head that hurt more from the beating that John Allan had given him and the scores of tiny pellet wounds from the shotgun blast than from the whiskey he had enjoyed.

  He rose, pulled on his boots, and stepped outside.

  The morning was fresh, crisp and still. On the plank-walk across the street a couple of young men were still sleeping off the celebrations. A dog wandered along the centre of the street, sniffing the ground, its tail wagging as if it, too, had found some new freedom. A vee of geese flew south-east, and a gentle breeze lifted a whisper of dust from the boards on which Jim Jackson stood.

  He’d killed a man again. But this time it didn’t bother him as other killings had done. In fact he had enjoyed it in a way. He – they – had been facing death, and to shoot a man whose intent was your own killing felt right. Even, in some ways, honourable. He had done the right thing by Rosalie and Leon. For a man to save his friends that way felt good. To go from feeling like you were responsible for their forthcoming execution to the point where you had rescued them, there was no better feeling.

  Yet that good feeling worried him.

  Was he starting to enjoy it? Was he, with every man he killed, becoming immune to it?

  But it wasn’t even those questions that were bothering him most this morning. It was something more. He had done what he had set out to do. The last few months had been leading to this. This killing of the man who had betrayed them and consigned them to so many years of misery.

  Yet. . . .

  What was it Allan had said?

  They said if I were to do something real simple for them they would make all of the trouble go away. All I had to do was kill a man on a particular train. They basically set up that robbery.

  They.

  Who were they?

  There had been someone behind what Allan had done. Sure, it had been down to Allan, but on another level – a bigger level – it was down to someone else.

  He had tried to talk to the one called Abraham about it yesterday. But Abraham had been elusive. Oh he had talked. He had commended Jim Jackson on his gun-work – and his catching ability – and he had admired the Colt that Jim Jackson had strapped back on after Allan had been killed and they had retrieved their own weapons from the sheriff’s drawer. Abraham had been charming to them all – especially Rosalie – and he had enjoyed a few drinks at the celebrations, but any direct question about who he was, and why he had come to Leyton, had been deflected with a smile and a shrug.

  Well, that had been yesterday. Emotions, especially relief, had been flooding through everyone, the whole town, but especially Jim. Today, with a bit more sense and time in the air, Jim Jackson would try again. Someone else had forced John Allan to kill a man on a train, and that someone else had been responsible for Jim and Leon’s hell, and the death of their other friends – Hans Freidlich, Patrick Reagan and Bill Moore. Hans, who had been their leader, had been hanged after the murder on the train that John Allan had committed. Pat had died in Huntsville of pneumonia, and Bill had been shot when, unable to bear the hell no longer, he had ran from a chain gang. All of them gone. It could all be laid at John Allan’s door, but who had put it there?

  The fact that Abraham had arrived to kill John Allan had to be connected. No question. Jim didn’t know where Abraham had spent the night. But this morning he would find him, and he wouldn’t let Abraham leave until he knew what Abraham knew.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Jim said.

  They were sitting in Rose’s Café, just down from the Watering Hole, and diagonally across the road from the sheriff’s – currently empty – office. Leon and he were eating boiled ham, beans, and eggs and drinking coffee, and Rosalie had toasted bread with cheese and sausage on the side. They had mugs of very good coffee, and it was all free. Rose had insisted on feeding them free of charge for as long as they were in town. As they ate many people came up and thanked them, shook their hands, and offered such gratitude that it started to become embarrassing.

  ‘He’s gone?’ Leon said.

  ‘Who?’ Rosalie asked.

  ‘Abraham. I checked at the Livery this morning. He left in the early hours.’

  ‘I liked him,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘He saved our lives,’ Leon said. ‘Does it matter he’s gone?’

  ‘It’s not over,’ Jim said. ‘You heard what Allan said.’

  ‘Someone made him do it.’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  Jim shrugged. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Maybe it’s time to let it go,’ Rosalie said, lifting her coffee mug. ‘John Allan got what was coming to him. You avenged your friends. Maybe it’s time to go home?’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Home,’ she repeated.

  ‘Where is home?’ Jim said. He looked at Leon. ‘Where’s your home, Leon?’

  Leon shrugged. ‘No idea. You?’

  ‘The same.’

  They both looked at Rosalie.

  She smiled. ‘I don’t know either. Not these days.’

  ‘So we can’t go home on account of we have no home. What do we do then?’

  ‘More bacon?’ Leon said.

  ‘More bacon,’ Jim agreed. But the unfinished business still bothered him.

  Howard sat at his desk with a book open in front of him.

  When he heard the squeal from his damaged door he turned, and Rosalie saw that he had a monocle gripped in one eye and was holding a small screwdriver in his right hand.

  Rosalie held up her hands as if offering a peace gesture.

  ‘I’m not going to force you to do anything,’ she said. ‘Not today.’

  Howard managed a small, almost straight, closed-lipped smile.

  ‘I’ve come to say thank you. And to apologise,’ Rosalie said.

  Howard put the screwdriver down, then reached up and took the monocle from his eye.

  ‘I pulled the wires from the key,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I don’t know when, it must have been yesterday during all that . . . excitement.’

  ‘I’m sorry we had to do what we did.’

  ‘I’m sorry I acted the way I did. I was scared. I’m no hero. I. . . . If you’d have lived here then. . . . Well you won’t u
nderstand. You can’t understand.’

  ‘I think I do. The celebrations last night. It was quite revealing.’

  ‘It’s still scary,’ Howard said. ‘I mean it’s a vacuum now. Do you know what I mean? No one’s in charge.’

  ‘Just enjoy it, Howard. I’m sure there are men in town who can step into that vacuum.’

  ‘Maybe your friend? Friends, I mean. Both of them.’

  ‘It’s time for us to move on.’

  ‘You came to kill him? Nothing more? Now you’re going?’

  ‘It’s a long story. A very long one. Anyway, I just wanted to apologise before we left. I don’t normally behave that way. It was all an act.’

  She stepped closer and held out her hand. ‘No hard feelings?’

  ‘No hard feelings.’

  He shook her hand, and this time his smile was a tiny bit wider. She saw that the book on his desk was open to a wiring diagram.

  ‘Jim would love to talk to you about that,’ she said. ‘He loves the mechanical.’

  ‘It’s electrical.’

  ‘I’m sure he’d be interested in that, too. Anyway, I hope you get it fixed before someone wants to send a message.’

  ‘Oh I already have a spare. I set it up this morning when Abraham came in.’

  ‘Abraham?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought he left in the early hours?’

  ‘I was still awake. People were still partying. The noise. . . .’

  ‘And he sent a message?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘What did he send? Who did he send it to?’

  Howard shook his head. ‘I couldn’t possibly say. It’s private. It always is. It’s all we have – that absolute privacy. If people thought we were sharing their messages. . . .’

  ‘Howard. It’s important.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t.’