‘Got you, boy.’ A hand on his shoulder and a pistol-barrel in his back. ‘Next move you make gonna be your last.’
TWENTY-THREE
‘You’re that feller Sefton’s boy.’ Gideon Pollack rose from the chair in the Perdition hacienda’s dining-room. He held out his hand to January as the ginger-haired Shaughnessy and Mudsill brought him in through the back door. ‘One who helped Doc Meredith save my life.’ In the light of the lamp on the table Pollack looked awful, his eyebrows standing out black against waxen features, his face drawn with pain. From two feet away January could smell the wound, a smell he knew from years working the clinic at the Hôtel Dieu.
‘You need to get that wound looked at right away, sir.’
When the man’s hand clasped his, January could feel it dangerously hot. All his fear, all his disgusted rage at the man, could not, for the moment, eradicate the healer’s instincts that had ruled his life for as long as he could remember.
Pollack coughed, the wet, heavy sound of pleura filling with fluid. ‘When I’m done here,’ he said. ‘Rance, get me some whiskey.’
His brother lumbered out to obey.
Pollack sat, flipped open the saddlebag that Mudsill had dropped on the table in front of him. ‘What’d you run away for?’
‘If you was a black man in this country you wouldn’t be asking that question, sir.’
The man grinned, and pulled out the little bundle of gold pieces, wrapped in one of Alicia’s handkerchiefs. The grin faded as he weighed the coin in his hand. ‘Where’d you get this?’
‘It was hid under a board in the backstairs, sir. The handkerchief was with it.’ (It hadn’t been, but January wasn’t going to go into how thoroughly he’d searched the house or who else had been there, unless he had to.) ‘I think it was Miss Marryat’s, sir. One of the other men here said as how she pinched money, from her nephew and whoever else was in the house – I think from my master as well.’
His anger at Pollack surged back under the man’s hard gaze. And with it, disgust at himself for the pity he’d felt. This man had raped Selina Bellinger – and Heaven only knew how many others among his bondswomen. He had used, and betrayed, Alicia Marryat as coldly and deliberately as Seth Javel had used Selina. At least Javel hadn’t pushed Selina into killing a man.
And Javel hadn’t ordered anyone – probably Eli Creed – to kill Selina when he was done with her.
Yet January couldn’t keep himself from saying, when Rance returned with a bottle half-full of whiskey and a glass, ‘You’re feverish, sir. And if you’ll permit me to say so—’
Pollack poured himself a glass and gave January a crooked grin. ‘I’ll not permit you to say so, son. This is just enough to loosen me up a little. Rance?’ He glanced up at his brother, inquiring.
‘Not a thing yet.’
‘Keep looking. He’s got to have done something with it.’ The rancher shook his head, as if to clear a buzzing from his ears, and returned his gaze to January. ‘So you thought you’d run away in all the confusion?’
‘No, sir,’ January returned. ‘When I came back from the corrals, and saw Sheriff Quigley leading off my master and everyone else in the house, I–I was afraid of what was like to happen to me, if I got taken, too. In Vicksburg and Natchez, and places like Baltimore, you get slave-stealers comin’ through the jails, pickin’ every likely man an’ boy, an’ payin’ the jailers to look the other way when they says, “Oh, that man’s a runaway”.’
He saw Pollack’s eyes shift. He’d heard that story, too.
Maybe from men he’d bought.
‘Beggin’ your pardon if he’s a friend of yours, sir,’ continued January, with the assumed diffidence he had all his life been forced to practice. ‘But I didn’t know a thing about Sheriff Quigley. Nor about his deputies nor his jailer. My master’s ill, and he knows no one in Texas. I stayed back in the darkness til everyone was gone, then snuck in and searched the house for this money they said Miss Alicia had hid. I knew I’d need it, if I was to get back to Austin and see what I could do for Michie Sefton.’
Pollack sniffed. ‘You didn’t need to worry, boy. Atticus Quigley’s a bone-headed jackass and a traitor to his country, but he’s got his honor where the law’s concerned. I’ll give him that.’ As he spoke he stacked the gold pieces: five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and assorted smaller stacks of silver, and fingered the stout linen of the handkerchief, with its over-elaborate embroidery: AM. ‘She piled up more than I thought,’ he added softly, in that deep, velvety voice. ‘Poor silly bitch.’
January said nothing to that. The memory of your limbs entwined with mine makes my heart pound …
It went without saying that he’d made no such sweet-talk to Selina. When Pollack coughed again – the wet, heavy hacking of a man struggling to breathe – January thought, You’re dying, Mister, and was glad.
Beyond Pollack’s shoulder, January could see lamps and lanterns moving around in the hallway. Heard the voices of men, the crunch and rip of upholstery being torn or stair-risers taken up. As he and his captors had crossed from the corrals to the house, he’d seen men going through the barns and sheds, to see if there was anything they’d missed. They were even digging up Hookwire’s grave, to make sure that all that was down there was, in fact, a man’s body.
Good luck with that …
‘And what’s this?’ Pollack coughed again, and pulled out the bundle of papers from the saddlebag.
‘I don’t rightly know, sir. My master took those from Mr Francis’s study. He told me to hold onto them; said they’d help prove that Mr Francis forged Mr Taggart’s will. Mr Francis claimed he’d found the will in a book or someplace in Mr Taggart’s rooms, that gives everything to Mr Francis.’
‘Huh.’ Pollack poured himself another half-glass. ‘Vin Taggart knocked his brother down, the one time that crippled little git asked him about a will – and in company, too. By what Alicia told me that hag-witch mother of theirs, and the older brother, Jack, nagged and pestered old George Taggart about his Virginia property til he swore he wouldn’t have anything to do with any of ’em. In the end Jack got the old man drunk and had him sign a will that none of ’em ever told him about. Got two of his gambling pals to witness it, knowin’ neither of ’em would get a dime of what Jack owed unless they did.’
He shrugged, and grimaced as he drank. Beside the door behind him, January was aware of Mudsill making a movement, as if he would have spoken. Evidently he thought better of it – or perhaps knew that there was no point. At length Pollack said, ‘Everybody in the county knew it. The kid doesn’t have a leg to stand on.’
Calculation flickered in the velvet-brown eyes. Tender, Malojo had called them. They were like chips of onyx now, wondering, perhaps, how best to seduce Valentina, or Madrecita Taggart, if she ended up in possession.
‘That’s what my master told M’am Valentina, sir,’ agreed January respectfully – so that it wouldn’t sound like he had any opinion of his own on the subject. ‘I think that’s why Mr Francis accused my master of the deed, when he found poor Miss Marryat’s body.’
Pollack looked aside, his mouth tightening for a moment. Then he waved a dismissive hand. ‘You got nuthin’ to worry about, boy.’ He tried to clear his throat, fighting for breath.
‘No, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘So where was you and your master yesterday mornin’?’ The dark eyes, though narrowed shrewdly, squinted, struggling to focus. ‘He say anythin’ about huntin’ for somethin’?’
‘Yes, sir, he did. We were down the arroyo where Miss Valentina was shot at, hunting for anything – any sign at all – that could prove that it happened as she said. Michie Sefton searched the old jacal down there, and it must have been four miles upstream, where he said there was another ruin of some kind. He didn’t say why, sir.’
‘Didn’t he?’ Pollack’s frown deepened, and he turned his head as his brother entered again. ‘You know anything about other ruins on Sauceito Creek? ’Bout four
miles up from the jacal?’
Rance looked puzzled, but Shaughnessy said, ‘There’s supposed to be what’s left of a Spanish garrison fort someplace up that way, sir. I never heard exactly where it is …’
‘Think you could find the place again, boy?’
January shook his head. It was one thing to divert their search from Witch Cave Canyon, quite another to accompany them as a prisoner. ‘The way the creek rose with the rain, sir, I couldn’t be sure of anything.’
Pollack grunted. ‘Rance, take a couple of men and have a look.’
‘Wasn’t Sefton the feller, tried so hard to get that yeller wench away from you?’ The younger brother stared hard at January. Pollack’s velvety eyes were, in Rance’s face, like hard little dark beads, sunk in pouches of fat.
‘He’s the man who saved my life.’
‘You searched him?’
Pollack moved his hand to indicate the empty saddlebags, but Rance strode over to January and shoved hands into his pockets.
‘Got a damn fancy watch for a nigger.’ He tossed the silver watch on the table. ‘And a damn fancy spyglass and compass.’
‘They’re my master’s,’ January explained. ‘They were left in his room.’
Rance unfolded a half-sheet of crumpled paper that for a moment January didn’t recognize.
Then he realized it was the list he’d found in Taggart’s strongbox. And had pocketed, as he’d distributed coin throughout the house.
Shit. Damn. Shit.
Rance asked, ‘You know what these names are, boy?’
January shook his head and felt as if both men could hear the pounding of his heart.
‘Where’d you get this?’
‘It was in Miss Marryat’s little music-box, where she had the money.’
Pollack’s face had changed. He regarded January for a long time in the lamplight, then said, ‘Shoot him.’
Rance’s small eyes widened. ‘Shit, Gideon, Neumann’ll give us a thousand dollars for a big buck like him.’
‘Rance,’ sighed Pollack, ‘I love you an’ you are the dearest brother a man could ask for, but if brains was gunpowder, you couldn’t blow your nose. The last thing we need is a nigger wanderin’ around knowin’ more than he’s sayin’. Shoot him. Shaughnessy, Mudsill, bury him in the same hole with that poor bastard Creed told us about, that got sliced up by the savages.’
As Rance took January by the arm and thrust him at gunpoint toward the door, Pollack rose, and said quietly to January, as if continuing a conversation that had already gone on for an hour, ‘I didn’t tell her to kill him, you know.’
January turned and looked back at him. Just as softly, he replied, ‘It doesn’t matter to me, sir. And it won’t to you, in about two days.’
Rance looked absolutely baffled by this, but January felt Mudsill’s hand flinch, where it closed around his arm. Pollack’s mouth hardened again as he turned his face aside, like a man trying to duck a blow.
He said, ‘Believe me when I say I was as knocked down as anybody, when I heard. Yeah, I told her Vin was a traitor – which he was. An’ when she said he’d meddled with her back home, an’ had brought her here to Texas so’s he could have his way with her again – I agreed with her, yeah, I’d heard him say so. Although I knew for a fact, Vin was horrified at havin’ her under his roof, whatever he’d done in the past … Well, I needed someone in the household. Someone close to him, who’d be able to find out what he was up to. Someone who wouldn’t feel one shred of loyalty to him.’
He coughed again, this time almost doubled up by the violence of it. January glanced sideways and saw in Rance’s face both pity and absolute terror. Terror at the thought of being left alone. Leaving January in the grip of the two cowhands, he stepped back to the table and poured another glass of whiskey, which Pollack drank.
‘That’s better,’ Pollack whispered. ‘I hope you believe me, boy. I had to do it. Had to turn her. Just payin’ that hound-dog Creed wasn’t enough. An’ by damn,’ he added, ‘I was glad I did, when Rance told me …’ His eyes narrowed a little, as if trying to recall how much January knew or might have guessed.
‘Well, I never meant her to kill him. She said he deserved to die an’ I said yes, he sure did, but she was always goin’ on like that. She’d say that about her sister, too, an’ two days later I’d see the two of ’em gigglin’ like schoolgirls over some gossip or other. It didn’t mean nuthin’. When I told her to clear him an’ that Mex wife out of the house for a couple days, I meant set the kitchen on fire, or run cattle through the place – she was a smart rider, an’ knew how to shoot. She coulda done it an’ not been caught. She was clever, if you got to her in the mornin’ ’fore she started in on the dope. Damn if I thought she’d do what she did.’
‘But when she did it,’ replied January, ‘you had to be rid of her, didn’t you?’
Rance’s face convulsed with fury at this lèse majesté and he raised his gun-hand to strike, but his brother gestured him still.
‘She was crazy,’ said Pollack quietly. ‘She wasn’t stupid, not in the least. But crazy. An’ she got crazier, after she did it.’
‘He had raped her,’ returned January. ‘Whether he’d been pushed into it by his brother, whether he regretted it afterwards, did you think she wouldn’t feel anything?’
Pollack gestured again, impatient at the argument. ‘Ah, he hadn’t hurt her. Women don’t really care that much about bein’ raped.’
January was silent for a moment. Then, quietly, he asked, ‘Or were you just afraid she’d start asking about your divorce?’
Rance hit him, that time, a blow that made his head ring. He staggered, and as Mudsill and Shaughnessy pulled him upright again and he flinched away from a second blow, he heard Pollack say, ‘Rance …’
His skull pounding, January met Pollack’s eyes again.
In them he saw that the man knew he was dying.
Only to see what he’d say, January asked, ‘What are you looking for, sir?’
Pollack whispered, ‘The future of Texas.’ And sank back, as if he, not January, had been struck, into his chair, and buried his head in his hands.
‘Fucking goddam nigger –’ Rance’s voice was shaking as he thrust January out the back door into the darkness – ‘I’m gonna fucking kill you for that. I’m gonna shoot you to pieces, one piece at a time … It’s your goddam doin’ he’s failin’! Your goddam meddlin’ with Doc Meredith’s takin’ the bullet out.’ His grip was like an iron shackle but January could hear that he wept. ‘He’d been fine, if you hadn’t throwed Doc Parralee out, if you hadn’t messed with him. Creed!’ he yelled. ‘Creed!’
The sandy-haired man came running from one of the barns.
‘Get the ox-whip. An’ a chain.’
In the torchlight, Creed saw the fear in January’s face, the murder in Rance’s, and smiled. Like a child, at the prospect of sweets.
Three more men came running up from the direction of the orchard and Rance yelled to them, ‘Get a rope, an’ let’s get this damn nigger –’ before he realized – and indeed, before January realized – that the three men were Jalisco, and the vaqueros Borrachio, and Yanez.
January wrenched and twisted aside from the pistol that Rance had pressed to his back, dropping to his knees as the pistol fired, the ball skinning across his back like the stroke of a red-hot poker. The next instant one of the vaqueros fired, and Shaughnessy buckled and fell. Rance and Mudsill fled for the shelter of the water-trough beside the corral. In the darkness beyond the torchlight January saw riders, gunshots cracking …
‘Get your men out of here!’ he yelled, as Jalisco caught hold of him, dragged him back toward the darkness. ‘Pollack’s dying – and I know what he wants. I know what’s going on.’
‘Shit,’ gasped the vaquero, ‘I’m glad somebody does.’ He raised his voice. ‘Vamanos, bravos! Let’s get out of here!’
TWENTY-FOUR
The raid on Hacienda Perdidio had actually been organized by Ja
lisco to obtain horses, salt, beans, and flour from the rancho’s stores. It was only chance, Jalisco said – later, around a campfire in the hills beyond Witch Cave Canyon – that Twenty-One had spotted January being brought in to the hacienda. ‘I doubt Pollack told his own men what they were looking for,’ January said, sipping coffee from a borrowed tin cup and gnawing from the bone the final fragments of beef. ‘Other than that there were three wagons involved – and three wagonloads of boxes. All ten of the men Pollack hired – or instructed Silver Joe Fleam to hire – were from out of the area, Missourians, deserters from ships in port, or Comancheros. Men who had no opinion about and no stake in what Texas was or might be. I think it’s what took him so long to put the theft together.’
‘So long?’ Jalisco raised his shaggy brows.
‘I think Pollack has been working on this,’ said January, ‘since October. And it’s a good thing,’ he added, looking around him at the little camp, men and horses in the flickering light of the camp-fire against the rock and woodland of one of the innumerable gullies in the hills, ‘that you got as many horses as you did.’
‘Half of them we found,’ explained the vaquero. ‘Horses and mules – branded with the Pollack brand, loose on the hills.’
January nodded. He was just beginning to stop shaking from the exertions and shocks at the hacienda. ‘I thought you would.’
Seventeen of Vin Taggart’s cowhands – plus Noah, and Enoch’s wife Juana – had retreated to the hills when Sheriff Quigley had turned up with his warrant yesterday afternoon. There they had been joined by the bodyguard Ortega, stringy and silent as ever. January worried that their numbers might not be sufficient, should Pollack attempt to stop the next day’s cavalcade back to Austin. But Ajo and Missouri, who were watching the hacienda from a distance, reported in the morning that Pollack’s men were staying close to the house, with the exception of Eli Creed, who had slipped away before daybreak with three horses and what looked like provision for a journey, headed south.
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