Texas Gundown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Matt and Sam stood back until the joyous greetings were over. Then Mayor Lowell strode over to them with one arm around his wife and said, “I didn’t expect to find that you two had caught up to those outlaws and rescued the prisoners already.”

  “We didn’t catch up to the gang,” Sam said.

  “They left the prisoners here and rode on,” Matt explained. “They’re still ahead of us. Except for a couple of them who got hurt and were left behind, too.”

  “Where are they?” Lowell asked with a look of grim savagery. “We’ll deal with them.”

  “One of them is already dealt with,” Matt said, waving a hand toward the bodies that still lay where they had fallen earlier. “The other one’s inside. And in that smokehouse over yonder is the fella who ran this place, a Dutchman called Van Goort, along with some of his hired guns.”

  “They didn’t have anything to do with the raid on Buckskin?”

  “No,” Sam said. “This trading post is a refuge for outlaws. The gang that attacked your town was led by a man named Deuce Mallory. As Matt told you, they’ve moved on.”

  Lowell still glared. “But this man Van Goort, he was still holding the women prisoner?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said. “I reckon he planned on ransoming them back to you sooner or later.”

  The mayor’s face was dark with fury. “I think we have enough ropes to deal with this problem. There are no trees out here tall enough to hang a man, but that parapet will serve the purpose nicely.”

  His wife clutched his arm. “No, Timothy,” she said. “You can’t just lynch those men.”

  “Why in blazes not? They’ve got it coming to them! For God’s sake, Lucinda, I’d think that you’d be ready to pull on one of the ropes yourself!”

  She shuddered. “There’s a part of me that would like to do just that,” she admitted. “But . . . I know you, Timothy. I know all these other men. You’re all law-abiding men.”

  “The lady’s got a point, Mayor,” Sam said. “If you string up those varmints without giving them a trial first, you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your lives, even if you don’t get into any trouble with the authorities over it. It would be better if you took them back to Buckskin and handled things in a legal, proper manner.”

  “And then string ’em up,” Matt added. When Sam frowned at him, he shrugged and said, “The mayor’s right about one thing. They’ve got it comin’.”

  Lowell thought about it for a moment and then sighed. “You’re right, of course, Lucinda. You always are. And you as well, Mr. Two Wolves. We’ll take them back and let the law run its course. You’ll help us, won’t you?”

  Matt shook his head. “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Mayor.”

  “Why not?”

  Sam said, “Mallory and the rest of his gang are still on the loose. The fellow we captured told us where they were headed from here. They plan to raid another town. We’re going to stop them if we can.”

  “And if we can’t,” Matt said, “we’ll still try to see to it that Mallory and the rest of his bunch get what’s comin’ to them.”

  “Just the two of you alone?” Lowell shook his head. “We’d come with you and help you, but—”

  “No need,” Sam said. “You have to take the ladies back to Buckskin, not to mention Van Goort and the other prisoners.”

  “Anyway,” Matt added with a smile, “the two of us have been enough to handle things so far.”

  Lowell looked around at the scattered corpses and the burned-out barn. “Yes, that appears to be true.” He paused. “Where were this man Mallory and the rest of the outlaws going?”

  “A settlement down on the Rio Grande,” Matt said. “It’s called Sweet Apple.”

  * * *

  Magdalena Elena Louisa O’Ryan took a deep breath, gathered her courage, and pushed the batwings aside. She strode into the Black Bull like it was a nice civilized parlor in somebody’s house, rather than the bawdiest, hell-roarin’est saloon in all of Sweet Apple, Texas.

  Better known, for good reason, as The Lord’s Waiting Room by those wags who found something amusing about murder and sudden death.

  Maggie O’Ryan didn’t think it was funny at all.

  Even in the middle of the afternoon like this, the Black Bull was crowded. Hard faced, roughly dressed men lined the bar and threw back shots of whiskey so vile that to call it panther piss or rattlesnake juice was being generous. Other men slapped cards on green felt and eyed their opponents with squinty malevolence, as if they were about to accuse each other of cheating and get their guns to blazing at any second.

  Booze and games of chance weren’t the only attractions at the Black Bull. Some of the patrons were more interested in the women in low-cut, gaudy dresses who delivered drinks and made their way among the tables, allowing the men to paw them almost at will. Sometimes, one of those hombres would grab a woman’s hand and lead her up the stairs to the little rooms on the second floor where the saloon’s other main business transactions were conducted. The faces of the soiled doves were just about as hard and flinty as those of the men, although the paint daubed on them concealed that to a certain extent.

  Maggie felt her face glowing warmly as she took in all the indecent carousing going on in front of her. The curses, the lewd, raucous laughter, the tinny banging of a piano being pounded on by a drunken man in a soiled, dented derby, the smells of cheap tobacco smoke, spilled liquor, unwashed flesh, and the waste products of untold individuals . . . all of it combined to make Maggie’s head spin so furiously she was afraid she was going be sick, pass out, or both.

  Her presence hadn’t gone unnoticed. Eyes started to turn toward her as she stood just inside the saloon’s entrance. People went silent at the unexpected sight of her. That silence gradually spread across the barroom until it reached the piano player. The professor stopped butchering whatever song he was attempting to play and swung around on his stool to join everyone else in staring at her. Maggie felt a wave of irritation go through her. They were all looking at her like she had two heads or something. She was a perfectly normal twenty-two-year-old woman. A little short maybe, and not as pretty as some of the saloon women. But her long, thick, dark hair was clean and shone from brushing, her skin had a faint olive hue she had inherited from her Mexican mother, and her eyes were a startling shade of green, a legacy from her Irish father. What really set her apart from the other women in the room was her demure gray dress, which had long sleeves and was buttoned up modestly to the throat rather than letting half of her bosoms hang out.

  Not that she wouldn’t look good in the kind of shameless getup those hussies sported, she thought suddenly, without warning. She would look just fine—if that was the sort of woman she wanted to be. Which she didn’t. She was respectable. Which made her something of an oddity in Sweet Apple, Texas.

  Maggie cleared her throat. It sounded louder than she expected. She looked at the man in the dark suit and fancy vest standing at the end of the bar and said,

  “Mr. Delacroix, you said you were going to send Oliver to school today.”

  Pierre Delacroix, the owner of the Black Bull Saloon, was from New Orleans, and the soft mixture of accents that characterized those from the Crescent City was in his voice as he spread his hands and said, “A thousand pardons, Señorita O’Ryan.

  The promise slipped my mind.” He smiled at her as he came closer. “And no man should ever be allowed to forget a promise made to a lady, especially one as lovely as you, mam’selle.”

  Delacroix was tall and slender and handsome. No doubt the sporting women who worked for him thought he was just about the best-looking fella to ever come down the pike. Maggie had no doubt that Delacroix could have any of those girls any time he wanted them. That would have been true even if they didn’t work for him.

  But she was immune to his charms. All she cared about were the children of Sweet Apple. She had taken upon herself the task of educating those youngsters, and she didn’t intend to allow anything to s
way her from that goal. Not even the trepidation she felt at entering a place like the Black Bull—and certainly not the easy smile and charm of the saloon’s owner.

  “Oliver is already behind the other children in his schooling,” she told Delacroix.

  “It’s important that he not miss any more time in class.”

  Delacroix’s shoulders rose and fell in a graceful shrug. “We have moved around a lot, Oliver and I.”

  That’s because you probably got run out of town everywhere you went, you tinhorn gambler. Maggie couldn’t stop the thought from going through her mind. Until you landed here in Sweet Apple and couldn’t get any lower.

  “But I know that a boy needs to learn,” Delacroix continued, “more than the things he can learn in a place such as this, eh, shall we say?” He chuckled. “I will see to it that Oliver comes to school tomorrow, Señorita O’Ryan. You have my word on that.”

  Maggie didn’t point out that he had given her his word before. More than once, in fact. And Oliver still missed more days of school than he attended. But she forced herself to nod and say, “Thank you.” All she wanted now was to get out of here. She had a feeling that Delacroix was laughing at her behind that smooth, handsome façade. She had a feeling that most of the people in the Black Bull were laughing at her. The frumpy little schoolteacher, trying to be more than she was. Trying to forget that she was a border breed, her father a drunken Irish soldier of fortune, her mother a . . . Well, the less said about that, the better. At least her parents, a pair of lapsed Catholics if there ever was one, had had the decency to get married before she was born. Maggie was grateful for that even though she couldn’t summon up any other good memories of either of them. She turned away and started toward the batwings. The piano player resumed his ham-handed thumping on the keys.

  Behind Maggie, Delacroix called, “Señorita O’Ryan.”

  She looked back. “Yes?”

  “Come back any time, ma Cherie.”

  She flushed again. He was making fun of her. She hurried out, slapping the batwings aside. They swung back the other way a little faster than she expected them to and slapped at her. She stalked away along the boardwalk in front of the saloon. Down the street at the depot, a locomotive rumbled and then sounded its shrill whistle as the train stopped there got ready to pull out, but Maggie was so upset that she barely heard the sounds.

  She knew she shouldn’t let things like the encounter with Pierre Delacroix bother her. By now she should have been used to the mocking smiles and the barely suppressed laughter. She had always been the misfit, the ugly child who had bettered herself by sheer stubbornness, fierce determination, and a surprisingly keen intellect. She had worked hard at whatever honest, respectable job she could find—and they weren’t easy to come by in a hellhole like Sweet Apple. She had saved her money and gotten out, had paid for her own education at a school for teachers in Waco. But something had drawn her back to the squalid border settlement where she had grown up. The railroad had arrived in Sweet Apple a few years earlier, and the town was growing. As its population increased, there would be more and more children there, too.

  Children who needed an education. Maggie had realized after a while that providing that education was her calling.

  She hadn’t realized, though, that she would have to spend more time trying to get parents to send their children to class than she would spend actually teaching those children. As she looked around the settlement’s wide, dusty main street, she spotted a freight wagon rolling along it being driven by Fred Blevins. He had five children of school age who seldom showed up at the one-room adobe school on the edge of town.

  “Mr. Blevins!” Maggie called as she started after him, waving a hand over her head. “Mr. Blevins, if I could talk to you for a minute?”

  Blevins turned his head and looked back over his shoulder at her, then faced forward again and whipped up his team of mules in an attempt to get them to go faster. Maggie stopped and heaved a sigh. She wasn’t going to do anything as undignified as chase him down the street. At least he had seen her, and knew she hadn’t forgotten about his children and their need for an education. She would never forget about the children. No matter what the people of Sweet Apple thought about her.

  She turned around, and had started looking for some other parents of wayward students, when she jumped and let out a little scream as a gun blasted somewhere nearby and a bullet whistled past her ear.

  Chapter 12

  “Sweet Apple!” the conductor called as he made his way down the aisle of the swaying coach. The rhythmic clicking of the joints in the steel rails under the railroad car’s wheels provided a counterpoint to his words. “Comin’ into Sweet Apple, Texas!”

  Seymour Standish suppressed the groan of relief that tried to well up his throat. At last, after long days and longer nights, he was reaching the end of his hellish journey.

  Uncle Cornelius had bought the train tickets for Seymour, and naturally it hadn’t occurred to him to waste the company’s money on extravagances like a sleeping compartment. Seymour had been forced to sleep sitting up on the same hard bench seat where he rode during the day. From New Jersey to Chicago, down to St. Louis, through Little Rock and Texarkana and Fort Worth and San Antonio, and then on west to Del Rio and still farther west, following the valley of the Rio Grande toward El Paso . . . Seymour had lost track of the days he had spent in one rocking, swaying railroad car after another, breathing air choked by cinders and smoke that swirled in through windows that were open in an attempt to relieve the stifling heat. All he knew for certain was that he was exhausted and miserable and that every muscle in his body was stiff and sore.

  But now his destination was at hand, and no matter how bad Sweet Apple was, it had to be better than all the damned trains!

  He pushed his spectacles up on his nose, reached under his seat for his carpetbag, and pushed his spectacles up again since bending over made them slip down. He picked up his hat from where it sat on the bench seat next to him. For part of the trip a large, gaudily dressed salesman had sat there, and when the fellow dozed off, his head had wound up resting against Seymour’s shoulder. Seymour had been sickened by the smell of bay rum and stale sweat that wafted from the man, but there was nothing he could do about it. He wasn’t going to risk a confrontation by asking the man to move.

  Thankfully, Seymour hadn’t had a seatmate since the train left San Antonio. He had been able to doze a little himself during that respite.

  The train jolted and slowed. Its whistle blew. With a hiss of steam and squeal of brakes, the Baldwin locomotive with its diamond-shaped smokestack rolled into the station at Sweet Apple, pulling the long string of cars behind it. The locomotive came to a stop beyond the station, so that its boiler lined up with the water tank raised on stout wooden legs. This was a water stop, so the train would be here for a while.

  That positioning brought the passenger cars even with the long platform attached to the depot. Seymour looked out the window at the low adobe building with its red tile roof. Architecture was certainly different down here in Texas than what he was accustomed to back east. Brick buildings were rare, and there were no buildings taller than two stories. In fact, as he looked along Sweet Apple’s main street, which stretched out behind the depot, he saw that some of the buildings were constructed to appear to have two stories when there really wasn’t anything behind the upper part of the façade. He supposed that was what was meant by a building having a “false front.” He had heard that term before, but he couldn’t remember where.

  Well, pondering frontier architecture was interesting, he supposed, but it didn’t get him any closer to accomplishing his goal, which was to establish as many new accounts for Standish Dry Goods, Inc., as he could in Sweet Apple and the surrounding area. He settled his hat on his head, grasped the handle of his carpetbag, and stood up to leave the train. He would have to have a porter recover his sample case from the baggage car.

  The porter had already placed steps by t
he platform at the rear of the car, so Seymour went down them to the station platform, clutching his carpetbag to him as he did so, as if afraid that someone might try to take it from him. He had no idea what to expect from these Westerners. If they were all like the rowdies and hell raisers who populated the yellow-backed dime novels, he would have to be cautious indeed.

  Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to him, though. In fact, nobody was paying any attention to him. The other passengers who were disembarking had their own places to go and things to do. Those boarding the train were no doubt thinking of the destinations where they were bound, or the people they were leaving behind here in Sweet Apple. None of them even spared Seymour a glance. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or somewhat irritated that he was such a nonentity in their eyes.

  The smell in the air was even more disturbing. Mixed with the smoke and oil from the train was a haze of dust that made Seymour’s shoes crunch grittily on the platform as he walked, and underlying that was the potent stench of manure. He looked behind him, through a gap between cars, and saw the source of that less-than-fragrant aroma. On the other side of the tracks stretched a long line of cattle pens occupied by hundreds, if not thousands, of the mooing, jostling beasts. Several large ranches were located in the area, and they shipped their stock from Sweet Apple.

  The cattle weren’t the only producers of manure. The street was dotted with piles of droppings from the dozens of horses moving here and there. Some of the animals were saddle mounts; others were hitched to buggies and wagons of various sorts. But all of them shared in common the trait of relieving themselves wherever they happened to be. The same was true back east, of course. Horses weren’t any different there. And New Jersey had its share of trains and factories that produced plenty of thick, choking smoke. Trenton was no bed of roses, Seymour told himself. He just thought that it smelled worse here because everything else was so different. The buildings, the people, the way they dressed and spoke, the fact that men openly carried guns in public . . .