“Yeah. The place was cold an’ empty. I knew nothing about no back room. I just broke up some kindling an’ got a fire goin’. Once she was burnin’ pretty good, I put some chunks on the fire an’ laid down. I was played out.”
“You were next, Stadelmann?”
“Uh-huh. Roper there, he was asleep or pretendin’ to be when I come in. I put more wood on the fire an’ set down at the table. About that time other folks started arrivin’.”
Bowdrie picked up his cup and Nelly filled it from the pot. He sat down in an empty chair with his back to the wall. Right from the start this had been a tough one. He had been searching for a man he had never seen and of whom he had no description. He had found himself among a group of people, any one of whom might be guilty. Now the least likely of them all seemed to be the man he must find. And that man was gone. Or was he?
“Roper? The way I understand it, you an’ Miss Craig were in here all the time?”
“Uh-huh, only Baker never did go clear out. Just his head an’ shoulders.”
DeVant’s yellow eyes followed Bowdrie with that same malicious gleam as his fingers riffled the pasteboards.
Nelly and Roper were near the fire. Judd, his face drawn and bitter with the loss of his life savings, stood nearby. Baker and Stadelmann were at the table with DeVant.
Finishing his coffee, Bowdrie took off his wet slicker and hung it on a nail. Then he dried his hands with infinite care, his dark Apache features inscrutable as he carefully thought out every move. What he would now attempt to do was fraught with danger.
He turned suddenly. “Stadelmann! Baker! Get up, will you, please?”
Puzzled, they got to their feet. Baker was on the verge of a sarcastic comment when Bowdrie said, “Now, if you will go into the back room and take the body of Ed Colson down from the rafters.”
“What?” Stadelmann exclaimed.
Judd was staring, jaw hanging.
“Don’t bring the body in here, just take it down.”
DeVant was watching him, alert and curious. Lew Judd passed a shaking hand over his chin. “You . . . you mean he’s dead?”
“Murdered and robbed after he had robbed you, Judd, by the only man who could have done it.”
“What? What do you mean?” Baker demanded.
“Why, DeVant did it,” Bowdrie said, and the two guns thundered at once.
Bowdrie stood still, his .44 Colt balanced easy in his hand, while DeVant sat perfectly still, a round hole over his right eye. Slowly he started to rise, then toppled across the table. Nelly Craig screamed.
White-faced, Baker stared from one to the other, unable to grasp what had happened. Bowdrie stepped over to the dead man, and unfastening his shirt, removed Lew Judd’s money belt and passed it to him.
Judd grasped it eagerly. “Thank God!” His voice trembled. “I slaved half my life for that!”
Peg Roper stared at Bowdrie, and exclaimed, “Did you see him throw that gun? DeVant had his in his lap with his hand on it, an’ Bowdrie beat him!”
“How could you know?” Baker asked. “How could you possibly know?”
Bowdrie fed a cartridge into his pistol and holstered it. “I should have known from the beginning. Ed Colson killed that prospector, and he probably killed the stage driver.
“Somehow, DeVant got wise. Maybe he actually heard or saw something back there on the grade. Maybe he was following Judd himself.
“Judd an’ Stadelmann went after wood and I followed them. Colson had been to the back of the dugout before, and he went there again. He slipped out, tried to kill me, and robbed Judd’s cache almost as soon as Judd his it. He thought he pulled it off, but DeVant had seen him go.
“Probably DeVant knew who to watch. Naturally, Roper and Nelly were looking toward the dugout door where Baker had gone. DeVant was a quiet-moving man, anyway, who knew from card-cheating the value of doing things by misdirection. He got back there, knifed Colson when he came back with the money, and shoved the body across the rafters. Then he just quietly came back into the room. I doubt if the whole operation took him more than two or three minutes.
“Remember, nobody knew there was another room then. All he would seem to have done was to get up and move around.”
“What about Colson’s horse?”
“Turned it loose with a slap on the rump. DeVant had no reason to be suspected. He planned to ride out on the stage with the rest of you. It was cold, unadulterated gall, but he might have gotten away with it. Only when I was in that back room a drop of blood hit my hand.
“Figure it out. Who was missing? Only Colson. Where could that drop have come from except overhead? It had to be those low rafters. Who had the opportunity? DeVant.
“Baker said DeVant was outside, but he wasn’t. That indicated to me that DeVant was moving around. Probably Baker thought he had gone out because he was not in sight, but he wasn’t paying that much attention.”
“I wasn’t,” Baker said. “I was expecting gunfire out there.”
Nobody said anything for several minutes; then Lew Judd sat down and looked at his niece, smiling. “We’re going to make it now, honey,” he said.
Stadelmann crossed to the bunk and stretched out on the hard boards. He was soon asleep. Roper hunkered down near the fire.
“It is almost morning,” Baker said. “Maybe the stage will get through.”
“I hope so,” Judd said sincerely.
Chick Bowdrie said nothing at all. He was sitting against the wall, almost asleep.
Historical Note:
ESPANTOSA LAKE
LONG AGO IT was believed that the lake and its shores were haunted, and over the years it became a place of legend, ghostly sightings, and mysterious disappearances. On the Upper Presidio Road, which lead from Coahuila in Mexico to the Spanish settlements of Texas, it was in the beginning a favored stopping place. Trains carrying supplies to the missions stopped here, and outlaws lived in the brush country around it. Indians camped here, but rarely were their camps on the lake shore itself. They preferred to camp away from the water.
It has been said that a wagon train loaded with silver and gold camped beside the lake one night and in the morning was gone. Supposedly the ground beneath it sank suddenly, swallowing up all the wagons, stock, and people of the train. In any event, none of them were ever seen again.
The shores of Lake Espantosa were said to be the place where the lost colonists of Dolores disappeared. An attempt was made by a party of English people to establish a colony. After much hardship and struggle they gave up the effort and were headed for the Gulf Coast and a ship home to England. They camped on the shores of Espantosa and vanished, wiped out, some say, by Comanches.
STRANGE PURSUIT
YEARS HAD BROUGHT no tolerance to Bryan Moseley. Sun, wind, and the dryness of a sandy sea had brought copper to his skin and drawn fine lines around his pale blue eyes. The far lands had touched him with their silence, and the ways of men as well as the ways he had chosen brought lines of cruelty to his mouth and had sunk thoughts of cruelty deep into the convolutions of his brain, so deeply they shone forth in the flat light of his eyes.
“No, I don’t know where he is. If I did know, I wouldn’t tell you. Don’t tell me I’m going to hang. I heard the judge when he said it. Don’t tell me it’ll relieve my soul because whatever burden my soul carries, it will carry to the end. I lived my life and I’m no welsher.”
Chick Bowdrie sat astride the chair, his arms resting on the back, his black hat on the back of his head. He found himself liking this mean old man who would cheerfully shoot him down if he had a chance to escape.
“Your soul is your problem, but Charlie Venk is mine. I’ve got to find him.”
“You won’t find him settin’ where you are.”
“Known him long?”
“You Rangers know everything, so you should know that, too.” The old outlaw’s eyes flared. “Not that I’ve any use for him. He never trusted me an’ I never trusted him. I will say t
his. He is good with a gun. He is as good as any of them. He was even better’n me. If he hadn’t been I’d have killed him.”
“Or was it because you needed him? You were gettin’ old, Mose.”
The old man chuckled without humor. “Sure, I could use him, all right. Trouble was, he used me.”
“How was that?” Bowdrie took out a sack of tobacco and papers and tossed them to the prisoner. “I figured you for the smartest of them all.”
“Just what I figured.” Mose took up the tobacco and began to build a smoke. “Don’t think you’re gettin’ around me, I just feel like talkin’. Maybe it is time they hung me. I am gettin’ old.”
He sifted tobacco into the paper. “We had that bank down in Kelsey lined up. I done the linin’. Never did trust nobody to do that. The others always overlooked something. On’y thing I overlooked was Charlie Venk.
“You seen him? He’s a big, fine-lookin’ young man. Strong-made, but quick. I seen plenty of ’em come an’ go in my time. Seen the James boys an’ the Youngers. Cole, he was the best of that lot. Jesse, he had a streak of meanness in him, like the time he shot that schoolboy with his arms full of books. No need for it.
“Charlie reminded me of Cole. Big man, like Cole, an’ good-lookin’. I never trust them kind. Always figure they’re better’n anybody else. ’Cept maybe Cole. He never did.
“We got that bank job lined up. There was four of us in it. Charlie, Rollie Burns, Jim Sloan, an’ me, of course. Burns an’ Sloan, they were bad. Mean men, if you know what I mean, and they couldn’t be trusted. Not that it mattered, because I never trusted anybody myself. An’ nobody ever trusted me.
“Ever see Charlie sling a gun? I’ve heard you’re fast, Bowdrie, but if you ever tangle with Charlie you’ll go down. Not only is he fast but he can lay ’em right where he wants ’em, no matter how rough it gets.
“He was slick on a trail, too, but if you’ve already trailed him across three states, you know that. He was a first-rate horse thief. Given time, I’ll tell you about that.
“Anyway, about noon we come down this street into town. No nice town like this’n. She was a dusty, miserable place with six saloons, two general stores, a bank, and a few odds and ends of places. We come in about noon, like I say. Sloan, he was holdin’ the horses, so the rest of us got down an’ went in.
“There was a woman an’ two men in that bank. Two customers an’ the teller. Rollie, he put his gun on the woman an’ the man customer an’ backed them into a corner, faced against the wall. At least, the man was. Rollie, he didn’t pay much mind to the woman.
“Charlie, he pushed the teller over alongside of them an’ vaulted the rail to start scoopin’ money into a sack.
“Out front Sloan leans over to look into the bank an’ he says, ‘Watch it! The town’s wakin’ up fast!’
“Charlie, he was a smooth worker with no lost motion and he had cleaned up more cash than I had. We started for the door an’ the teller, he takes a dive for his desk. Maybe he had a gun back there. Rollie backs his hammer to shoot an’ Charlie says, ‘Hold it, you fool!’ An’ he slaps the teller with his gun barrel an’ the teller hit the floor cold as a wedge.
“Then we hit the leather and shot our way out of town. We rode like the devil for those first six miles, knowin’ there would be a posse. Then we reached the grove where more horses were waitin’. It taken us on’y a moment to switch saddles. We rode out at a canter an’ held it, knowin’ the posse would almost kill their horses gettin’ to that grove.
“We got away. Ten miles further we switched horses for the third and last time. By then the posse was out of the runnin’ and we doubled back in the hills, headed for our hangout. Rollie was ridin’ a grouch an’ Charlie, he was singin’. Nice voice, he had.
“Suddenly Rollie says, his voice kind of funny, ‘Nobody calls me a fool!’ We all look around an’ he had the drop on Charlie. Had the gun right on him. Well, what d’you expect? Me an’ Sloan, we just backed off. Whoever won, it was more money for the rest of us, an’ Charlie had always figured he was pretty salty. He was, too. Right then we found out how salty.
“‘Aim to kill me, Rollie?’
“‘What d’you expect? I had that durned teller dead to rights.’
“‘Sure you did,’ Charlie said, easy-like. ‘Sure you did. But maybe that teller had a wife and kids. If you’ve got no thought for them, think of this. Nobody back there is dead. All that’s gone is the bank’s money. Nobody will run us very far for that, but if we killed a family man they’d never quit.’ ”
“He was right,” Bowdrie said.
“‘You ain’t talkin’ yourself out o’ this!’ Rollie says. ‘I aim to—’
“Charlie Venk shot him right between the eyes. That’s right! Got him to talkin’ an’ off guard, then drew an’ fired so fast we scarcely knowed what happened. Rollie, he slid from the saddle an’ Charlie never looked at him. He just looked at us. He had that gun in his hand an’ was smilin’ a little. ‘I wasn’t askin’ for trouble,’ he said. ‘You boys want to take it up?’
“‘Hell no! Rollie always had a grouch on,’ Sloan says. ‘Leave him lay.’
“We camped that night at a good place Charlie knew. Three ways out, good water, grass an’ cover. We ate good that night. Charlie, he was a good cook when he wanted to be, an’ he really laid it on. Like a dumb fool, I ate it up an’ so did Sloan. After all, none of us had et a good meal in a week. We et it up an’ then Charlie outs with a bottle an’ we had a few drinks. Charlie was a talker, an’ he was yarnin’ away that night in a low, kind of dronin’ voice. An’ we’d come a hard ride that day. Before we knew it, we were dozin’.
“Of a sudden I come awake an’ it was broad daylight! Yessir, I’d fallen asleep right where I lay, boots an’ all! What made me maddest of all was that I’d figured on gettin’ up whilst the others were asleep an’ skippin’ with the cash.
“There was Sloan, still fast asleep. An’ Charlie? You guessed it. Charlie was gone.
“He had hightailed. No, he didn’t take our money but he did take Rollie’s share, but that was half of it. Oh, yeah! He dipped into our share for a dollar each an’ left a note sayin’ it was for the extra grub an’ the whiskey. Why, that—!”
Bowdrie chuckled. “You never saw him again?”
“Not hide nor hair.” Mose got to his feet. “You catch up with him, you watch it. Charlie’s got him some tricks. Slips out of cuffs, ropes, anything tied to his wrists. Mighty supple, he is. I seen him do it.
“Good at imitatin’, too. He can listen to a man talk, then imitate him so’s his own wife wouldn’t know the difference.”
ONE HUNDRED AND four miles north, the cowtown of Chollo gathered memories in the sun. Along the board-walk a half-dozen idlers avoided work by sitting in the shade. Chick Bowdrie’s hammerhead roan sloped along the street like a hungry hound looking for a bone.
Outside the livery stable a man kept his stomach on his knees by using a rope for a belt. When Bowdrie swung to the ground the flesh around what seemed to be one of the man’s chins quivered and a voice issued, a high, thin voice.
“Hay inside, oats in the bin, water at the trough. He’p yourself an’ it’s two bits the night. You stayin’ long?”
“Just passin’ through.” Bowdrie shoved his hat back on his head, a characteristic gesture, and watched the roan. Bowdrie lived with the roan the way Pete Kitchen had lived with Apaches. Safe as long as he watched them.
“Any strangers around?”
“Rarely is. Rarely.”
“Ever hear of Charlie Venk?”
“Nope.”
“Big gent, nice-lookin’, an’ prob’ly ridin’ a black horse. Good with his gun.”
Both eyes were wide open now, and the fat man peered at him with genuine interest. “We never knowed his name. Never saw him use a gun, but we know him. He’s the gent that hung our sheriff.”
“Hung your what?”
“Sheriff. Ed Lightsen.” A fat middle finger po
inted. “Hung him to that big limb on the cottonwood yonder.”
“He hung the sheriff?”
A chuckle issued from the rolls of fat. “Uh-huh. He surely did! Best joke aroun’ here in a year. The sheriff, he was aimin’ to hang this gent, an’ he got hung hisself. Funny part of it was, it was the sheriff’s own rope.”
The fat man leaned forward. There were rolls of fat on the back of his neck and shoulders.
“This gent you speak of. Venk, his name was? He come in here about an hour before sunset ridin’ a wore-out bronc. He was carrying some mighty heavy saddlebags an’ he was a big man himself, an’ that bronc had been runnin’.
“Nobody has any extry horses in this town. All out on roundups. Stingy with ’em, anyway. This gent, he tried to buy one, had no luck a-tall, but he hung around. Split a quart with the boys over at the saloon. Sang ’em some songs an’ yarned with ’em. Come sundown, he walked out of there an’ stole the sheriff’s sorrel.
“That’s right, the sheriff’s sorrel. Now, the sheriff had been makin’ his brag that nobody but him could ride that horse. This here Venk, as you call him, he got astride an’ he stayed astride for just one mile. Then he came head-on into ten of those hard-case riders of Fairly’s. They recognized the horse and threw down on him before he even realized he was in trouble. They brought him back into town.
“Now, the sheriff was mighty sore. I don’t know whether it was for stealin’ the horse or because this here Venk actually rode him. ‘You can put him in jail,’ Webb Fairly says, but the sheriff was havin’ none of it. ‘Jail? For a horse thief? We’ll hang him!’
“There was argyment, but not much. It looked to be a quiet time in town, so the boys figured a hangin’ would liven things up a mite. Then this here Venk comes up with his own argyment.
“‘Well, boys, you got me. I guess I’ve come to the end of my trail, but I’ll be damned if I go out with money in my pocket. Nor should a man be hung with a dry throat. I don’t favor that, an’ I reckon you boys don’t.
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