by Yes Jack
The ten members of the gang had strolled out to the edge of town; the better to talk privately. Although the sun had sunk below the horizon, it wasn’t yet truly dark. The evening star was twinkling low in the dark blue sky and in another half hour it would be nightfall. Hilton said, ‘What state was the stage in when you left, Mercador? Fit to travel?’
‘I shot two of the horses. They might limp along for a while with four.’
‘Where’s the next stop?’
‘Not for a way south,’ said one of the other men. ‘Little place called Greenhaven. Two-bit little berg, maybe six houses in the whole town.’
‘And after that?’ asked Tom Hilton thoughtfully.
‘Nothing ’til Fort Williams.’
Nobody said anything, waiting until they saw which way their leader’s thoughts were running. At length, Hilton said, ‘There’s no point haring after them in the dark. We leave at first light tomorrow. If we don’t take ’em on the road, then we’ll maybe find them in this little town. Either way’s fine by me.’
‘I don’t rightly understand. . . .’ began one of the men, only to move back a pace or two when Hilton turned on him savagely.
‘Don’t understand, hey, you son of a bitch? Then I’ll spell it out plain. My brother’s dead and I’ll have blood for it. I don’t know which o’ them on that stage fired the shot, so we’ll kill the whole boilin’ lot of ’em. That clear enough for you?’
It was certainly clear enough to all those present that they would be well-advised not to get crosswise to Tom Hilton in this matter and there were hasty nods and grunts of assent, all meant to indicate that what was all right for Tom Hilton was just fine and dandy for them as well. If Hilton wished to ride out the next day and murder everybody from a stagecoach, then none of them were about to gainsay him. The man who looked the least enthusiastic about the scheme was Ramon Mercador. He was racking his brains fearfully, praying that the lies he had fed to Hilton were not about to come back to haunt him.
By the time they reached the bluff and had climbed up a little way until they were out of sight of the road, everybody was tired and irritable. The only one who showed no signs of impatience or annoyance about the enterprise was Talbot. He had brought these people to safety and that was what he had intended to do. He neither expected, nor especially wanted, their gratitude. It was enough for him that he had done his duty.
‘This high enough?’ enquired Tim Hogan sarcastically. ‘Sure you wouldn’t have us scramble up those rock-faces and try to get to the top of that cliff there?’
Talbot eyed the youngster, saying mildly, ‘No, I don’t reckon that will be needful. We’re out of sight here and that’s all I desired.’
‘Thank Christ for that!’ muttered the boy.
‘No call for taking the Lord’s name in vain,’ said Talbot, ‘that ain’t what I want to be hearing at all.’
They settled themselves down as best they were able. There was nowhere to tether the horses and so Talbot hobbled them, so that they wouldn’t be able to wander too far in the night. He saw too that the ladies had the blankets and that water was doled out fairly. Then he announced, ‘I’m taking first watch, say ’til eleven or thereabouts. Who’ll take the next turn?’
There were no volunteers to relieve Talbot from his sentry duty at eleven and he shook his head in disgust, saying, ‘You men ought to die o’ shame. We got two ladies and a young girl to take care of here and none of you want to lend a hand. Well, so be it.’
As the others made themselves as comfortable as they could under the circumstances, Talbot clambered up to a rocky prominence overlooking the track along which they had come. He took out the long-barrelled pistol which he’d taken from his luggage and spun the cylinder to make sure that it was turning smoothly. He said to himself, ‘You’re a damned fool, Talbot, and no mistake. These folks ain’t a morsel grateful to you for setting a watch over ’em. You might as well go straight to sleep yourself and that’s a fact.’ Despite these words, he knew very well that he would not be sleeping that night and that he would set up here on the rock, keeping an eye out for danger, while the others rested. By Talbot Rogers’s lights, no real man ever allowed a lady to be in danger, not while he had breath in his body.
Chapter 4
Of the ten men who were standing around by the corral shortly after dawn the next day, only one was keen on riding out on the vengeance trail. The other nine knew that Tom Hilton led them well enough on their exploits and that they did better with him than they were likely to do alone. For this reason, they were prepared to go along with him on this personal crusade, with the unspoken understanding that they would be rewarded in some way at some time in the future for their loyalty. This at any rate was the general feeling among eight of the men; Ramon Mercador was wondering if he would have done better to dig up and vanish the night before.
From all that Mercador was able to gather, Hilton’s plan was for them to ride to where the ambush had taken place and then pick up the trail from there. He couldn’t rightly recollect how things had looked after he ran off with his tail between his legs, but he surely hoped that there would be enough confusion and disorder when they reached the spot, that nothing would be seen to arouse Tom Hilton’s suspicions. One thing was certain. If Hilton suspected for a moment that Mercador had been snoozing out of the way while his brother was fighting for his very life, then he would snuff out Mercador’s life with no more compunction than he would feel in extinguishing a candle.
The Hilton Gang had been killing time in Indian Creek before heading south through Texas towards the Mexican border. Every year, things became neater and more orderly in the United States and with the increasing order came better organized law enforcement. Even a couple of years ago, there were whole swathes of territory from Kansas down as far south as Louisiana, where you could be nigh-on sure to find a fair sized town without a sheriff or marshal to be found within two days’ ride. Sometimes there might be a vigilance committee to be wary of, but no regular law at all to speak of.
Times were changing though and more and more of even the smallest settlements were becoming civilized, with lawmen patrolling the streets and even telegraph wires linking them to nearby cities. Slowly but surely, bad men were being forced west and south if they wanted to be able to ride free and do as they pleased. The Hiltons and their boys had been heading south when they hit Indian Creek and it had seemed such a welcoming little town that they had lingered on until the ill-fated attack on the Butterfield mail.
‘How far’d you say it was to where my brother died?’ Hilton asked Mercador, as they saddled up.
‘Maybe twenty, thirty miles,’ answered the other vaguely.
‘Well, which is it,’ said Hilton irritably, ‘twenty or thirty? Shit, you spent long enough as a soldier, if all you say is true. Happen you should be able to gauge a distance within a mile or two.’
‘At least twenty, maybe a couple o’ miles more.’
‘That’s more like it. See now, you can ride alongside of me as we go.’
Seldom had Ramon Mercador received an invitation which he felt more like declining, but it would have been madness to refuse. Smiling in a sickly fashion, he said, ‘Sure thing, Tom.’
By the time Tom Hilton and his boys were in the saddle, the passengers from the mail coach had already been on the road for the best part of an hour. Sitting up all night, watching the occasional shooting star had been mighty lonely work for Talbot Rogers and as soon as he caught the first gleam of false dawn on the eastern horizon, he awakened the others and urged them to get ready to move out.
There was considerable reluctance on the part of those Talbot woke up, to start off so early.
‘Ah heck,’ moaned George Littlechild, the farmer, ‘surely we don’t have to leave this early?’
‘Well, but we do,’ replied Talbot politely, but with great firmness. ‘We have to leave this very minute.’
So it was that at the time that Tom Hilton and his boys were setting out fro
m Indian Creek, Talbot Rogers was saying to Littlechild, who was once again walking alongside him, ‘ ’less my eyes deceive me, I’d say that’s a town ahead of us.’
‘Your eyes are sharper than mine,’ said the farmer, ‘I’m blessed if I can see anything as might be a town.’
‘You see that peak up yonder,’ said Talbot, ‘right on the horizon?’
‘Just about. What of it?’
‘There’s a windpump sticking up just to the right of that rock. See it?’
The sun had barely risen and the light still uncertain. Littlechild shook his head and said, ‘You may be right.’
‘I’m right enough,’ said Talbot. ‘The wonder of it is that I didn’t see it yesterday when we stopped for the night.’
A half hour later and most of the others could see what Talbot had already marked, that there was a huddle of buildings about two miles away. It looked to be a little hamlet, but all the weary men and women were thinking that at the very least they might be able to obtain food, drink and shelter in such a place. Nobody, having heard of their misfortunes, would be likely to turn them away empty-handed.
Talbot Rogers was as pleased as any of them to think that they were approaching somewhere which would provide for the travellers with which he had burdened himself. After the previous night, when not one single man had offered to take a turn at look-out duty with him, it had convinced Talbot that these were the most ungrateful set of fools he had had to deal with in a good long while.
As they came closer to the little town, Talbot Rogers began to think that his stewardship of the band was drawing to an end. He had not forgotten the urgency of the quest which he had agreed to undertake for the man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was all well and good saving a dozen people from the wreck of that mail coach, but what if the delay spelled death for all those hundreds of people living in the homesteads and villages between here and El Paso? The sooner he had rid himself of his charges, the better for all concerned.
It took something over an hour for the ten riders to reach the scene of the previous day’s ambush and when they did, they stumbled upon a vision of hell. The seven bodies which had been laying out in the wild overnight had provided good sustenance for various predators; chief among them the coyotes which lived in these parts. Not one of the corpses had escaped unscathed. Some had lost fingers and noses; two had lost entire arms, when two rival gangs of the wild dogs had fought tug o’ war with the bodies of Carson and Bill Hilton. The members of the Hilton gang were by no means squeamish or sensitive types, but the sight of the chewed and mutilated bodies of their former comrades was a shocking one, even for such men as they.
Tom Hilton dismounted and wandered about the scene, staring at this and that, occasionally shooting an ill-favoured glance at Ramon Mercador. He examined one or two of the corpses closely and at last came back to where his men were sitting on their horses, waiting. Not one of them had felt the need to dismount and see at close quarters the evidence of mortality lying strewn around the dusty ground which lined the roadway.
‘I don’t see any horses,’ remarked Hilton, fixing Mercador with an accusatory eye, ‘not one.’
One of the men said, ‘Happen those from the stage took the horses with ’em when they left.’
‘Yes,’ said Tom Hilton, ‘so I thought. But what about the dead ones?’
‘Dead ones?’ asked Mercador. ‘What dead ones? Why should any of the horses have been killed?’
‘Why? I’ll tell you for why, you lying whoreson, because in a gun battle with five men on horseback attacking a coach, like you said you and the others did, everybody on that coach’d be aiming at the horses, not just the riders. Bigger targets. You know that, well as I do. You all know it. Yet there’s not a single horse to be seen.’
The sun had barely been up for an hour and it was still chilly, but Ramon Mercador was sweating. He could feel beads of cold liquid running down his chest and was uncomfortably aware that sweat was gathering too on his forehead. He tried to bluster his way out of it, saying, ‘How the hell do I know what happened to the horses? I didn’t stop to see what was happening.’ He realized that he had made a slip and tried to retreat. ‘Leastways, I didn’t stop ’til I saw that everybody had been shot.’
‘And not one horse, hey?’ asked Hilton. ‘How far were the boys when they was shot, answer me that?’
‘How far? Hell, I couldn’t say. Fifty yards, thirty yards, what does it matter?’
‘I’ll show you,’ said Hilton. ‘Get down from your horse now and come over here.’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yes, you. Come on, Mercador, you’ve some explaining to do.’
None of the others said anything and it looked to Mercador as though he was alone in this. Nobody was apt to cross Tom Hilton when he was in such a mood. He dismounted and went over to where Hilton was standing. ‘Well then, what is it?’
‘Come here.’ Hilton beckoned for Mercador to follow him and led him to where the body of Abe Wilson lay. Wilson had been a particular friend of Mercador’s and he had been grieved at the man’s death. When he reached the body, Tom Hilton crouched down by it and pointed at the face. ‘Notice anything here?’ he asked.
The dead man’s face presented an unappetizing spectacle. One ear had been chewed away by some animal and the open, staring eyes seemed to Mercador to be full of reproach. The ear had streams of dried blood leading from it, besmirching the corpse’s cheek.
‘Looks to me like he was shot,’ said Mercador. ‘Like I said, there was a shoot-out. What d’you expect to see?’
‘I don’t look to find powder burns around a wound received at thirty yards’ distance, for one thing,’ remarked Hilton in a soft and deadly voice. ‘Wilson was shot up close, whoever killed him must have had the weapon at point-blank range. How do you explain it?’
Despite the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach, Mercador swore under his breath and said angrily, ‘I can’t explain it. There was a heap o’ shooting and when I saw we was outnumbered, I rode like hell. What would you have done? Up and out with it, what do you say I’ve done?’
Tom Hilton smiled slightly, not at all sorry that the other man’s dander was up. ‘You want I should spell it out? Here it is then. I say you took out the lead horses on that stage, like you’ve done before. Then I’m guessing you let the others, my damned brother included, do the dangerous work. I think that somethin’ went wrong and they were all shot when they were off their horses. While you sat on your arse, halfway up a hill.’
It was hard to imagine a more succinct and accurate summation of the events of the previous day and for once in his life, Ramon Mercador was utterly lost for words. This did not pass unremarked by Tom Hilton, who was narrowly watching the other man and saw the fear and guilt in his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s just as I reckoned. Bill’s blood is on your hands and you’ll answer now for his death.’
It was no more than Mercador had expected. Very slowly, he turned to face Tom Hilton squarely and said, ‘If you’ll have it so.’
There was not the least delay in Hilton’s actions. The words had scarcely passed Mercador’s lips than Tom Hilton pulled his pistol and shot the other man down like a dog. Ramon Mercador hadn’t even enough time to reach for his gun. As he lay in the dust, his eyes glazing over, Hilton walked over to him and landed a vicious kick, right in his face. Then he spat on the prone man, saying, ‘That’s for my brother!’
In 1857, when New Yorker John Butterfield was awarded the contract to run a mail coach service linking St Louis in Missouri with San Francisco, his first action was to establish 141 stage posts. These were places where a staff of men made sure that fresh horses were ready when the coaches came in and had the means to make minor repairs to the Celerity and Concord coaches that Butterfield was using for his mail service to California. Some of these stage posts were in cities. Others were in one-horse towns like Greenhaven.
Precisely thirty-seven people lived in Greenhaven; twenty-five of who
m farmed the fields which surrounded the town and hemmed it in on all sides. Of the other dozen, two ran the smithy, which catered for passing trade, as well as fixing broken ploughshares and suchlike. Two more ran a tiny store and trading post, one was retired and lived on his savings and another two men worked for Butterfield’s, running the stage post.
When Talbot and his companions trudged into town, a little before eight in the morning, there was some consternation. Those living in the community, being in the main farmers, were early risers. The first man they encountered, a ruddy-faced man with a hoe over his shoulder, stopped dead in his tracks to stand and stare.
‘I’m guessing you all are from the mail coach as was expected yesterday?’
‘That’s the fact of the matter,’ replied Talbot Rogers. ‘These people are sorely in need of food and drink. Maybe you could help us to find vittles and shelter?’
The man thought about this for a moment, before suggesting that they carry on down the street to where the Butterfield’s people had their place.
Dave Starret and William Masters, the two men in charge of the stage post, were most surprised to see the gaggle of men, women and horses arrive at the barn that had been tricked out by Butterfield’s as a stopping place for their coaches.
‘Holy Moses!’ exclaimed Starret. ‘You surely ain’t the passengers off the stage bound for Fort Williams?’
‘That we are, son,’ said Talbot, ‘and I’m hoping as your company has some provision to make for folk such as them. If not, then the good Lord alone knows what’s to become of them.’
It took a while to explain what had happened and when Starret and Masters realized that there had been a raid on the stage, they looked very grim and exchanged meaningful glances. William Masters shook his head and said, ‘What did I tell you ’bout those bearer bonds? Isn’t it that I told you somebody was apt to catch wind of what was being carried?’ Suddenly he brightened up and asked the weary crowd, ‘Say, I don’t suppose any of you good people happened to think to bring the mail sack along of you?’