Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  Clay ran for the nearest tree, scrabbling for fresh shells from his belt, shoving them home, snapping the barrels into place and cocking the hammers again, expecting momentarily to hear or feel bullets from the gun of the dead man’s partner. He dropped behind a fallen trunk and opened his mouth to breathe, his pinched nostrils making too much noise. There was nothing to hear, nothing to see but the dark outline of willow trees against a lesser darkness. He wanted to call upon the remaining man to surrender, but didn’t dare risk revealing his own hiding place. It was to be another waiting game, and against all his instincts, Clay prepared himself for it.

  “You out there!”

  The voice came from above, on the northern bank, probably the fire feeder. Clay said nothing.

  “Don’t you be shy,” called the voice. “I know where you’re at, can see you pretty good.”

  Clay doubted it; if he was visible, he would already have been shot at.

  “No sense in waiting till daylight. Why don’t we settle this with a deal right now?” suggested the voice.

  Clay took a chance. The other man’s voice gave no clear indication of his location, and any sound Clay might make would be made useless for targeting by the slight echo down there on the stream bed.

  “What deal?” he said.

  “You stay where you are and I go lose myself. My partner, he’s got most of what you’re after tied around him under his shirt. He ain’t going nowhere, so you stay here with him and you’ll get back most of it. You come after me and I’ll have to shoot you down.”

  “Don’t believe a word,” Clay said.

  “That you, Dugan?”

  “It is.”

  “Knew it was, soon as I heard that boomer. You ain’t got any kind of range with that cane cutter, Dugan. I got a long-barrel repeater here, better you know right now.”

  Clay was surprised that his identity was known to the other. “Who are you?”

  “Lonnie Baines Marshal.”

  Clay knew him; Baines worked at the livery stable in Keyhoe, a colorless young man with an obsequious manner, the last person Clay could have imagined robbing a bank.

  “You must’ve known I’d come after you, Lonnie.”

  “Well, no, we never did. A little ways out of your yard, ain’t you?”

  “Only as far as you made me go. Why don’t you come out where I can see you and lay that weapon down? I’m duty-bound to take you back. You can ride your horse or get slung over the saddle; I don’t care. You make your choice, Lonnie.”

  “Well, I already did, I have to say.”

  A fusillade of shots whined past Clay, one striking the trunk a yard or so from his face. Lonnie Baines wasn’t bluffing. Clay realized he should have given a cry to simulate a hit. Lonnie would have come down sooner or later to make sure of it, and he could have blasted him then. He wasn’t thinking fast enough.

  There was no point now in denying he was still alive. “How is it no one in town recognized you, Lonnie?” he called.

  “New coat, Marshal, new hat too. Had on a handkerchief as well. They never told you that?”

  “Who was your friend? I know him?”

  “Don’t believe so. Henry Pulvermiller?”

  “Never heard the name.”

  “He’s from out to Colorado way. Well, he won’t get home again now, I reckon.”

  “You want to get home, Lonnie? Throw that repeater out where I can see it, and come out after it.”

  “No, no, I sure can’t do that. Let you have the money Henry’s got wrapped around him, though. You take that and let me go, how about it?”

  “Not tonight. Get yourself out here and be sensible about this, Lonnie.”

  “I won’t do it, no, I sure can’t. See me going back there without the money I took, and a prisoner and all? They’d laugh at me. Nossir, can’t do it.”

  “It’s better than dying, Lonnie.”

  “I ain’t dead yet. Might happen to you, not me.”

  “No, Lonnie.”

  A long silence followed, then Clay heard the scuffling of boots. He swung the shotgun up, fingers tightening around the stock, expecting to see Lonnie making a suicidal rush for him. But the sound was already receding along the rim. Lonnie had decided to make a dash for the horses. Clay knew he would go a little way along the creek, then cross it to the south side, then double back to where the horses were waiting. He’d be keeping a check behind him as he ran, in case Clay was following, but Clay wasn’t about to.

  Lonnie spent almost fifteen minutes doing what Clay surmised he would, and found the horses at last only because one of them whinnied softly when he came near enough for it to recognize his scent. Lonnie looked over to the creek bed, a vague line of darkness fifty yards away. He hoped Clay was still there, or better yet a long ways upstream looking for him still. Now he saw the horses, the white shoulder of his own and the less distinct outline of Henry’s. It was a shame about Henry, and a bigger shame about the money that would get left behind with him, unless Lonnie found the nerve to go strip it from the body. It was a good idea, if Clay Dugan was indeed still on a cold trail further along the creek, searching in the dark, but a bad idea if Clay hadn’t fallen for it and was lying right there just a few yards from Henry and the cash. Lonnie hesitated.

  “Don’t you move, Lon.”

  It was Dugan’s voice, close by. He’d come looking for the horses, and found them. Lonnie hadn’t thought of that possibility, and felt angry with himself for slipping up so bad. Henry had slipped up, and now Lonnie had too, and it seemed like all he could do now was try and hit the marshal with a lucky shot. He fired it, and received both barrels in reply. Blown backward, already dying, Lonnie was thankful he wouldn’t have to hear any laughter after all.

  Both horses had tried to escape the noise and flashes, lunging away into the darkness, prevented by their tight hobbles from fleeing. Clay approached and gentled them with soft words for several minutes before attempting to lead them to the creek. He tethered them near the fire, now not much more than embers. Clay tossed wood from a pile prepared by Lonnie, then waited for the wood to catch before going out to retrieve the bodies. After hauling them both to the blaze, he went in search of his horse, and returned with it.

  The money had been divided, half of it wrapped in a sash inside Henry’s shirt as Lonnie had said, the rest in Lonnie’s saddlebags. Some of it had been made unusable by buckshot and blood. Clay tied the dead men securely across their saddles, kicked dirt over the fire and mounted up for a return to Kansas by night, riding slowly, leading the other horses. He was not tired, could ride until Keyhoe came in sight sometime tomorrow morning. He wanted to amble, and think about what he had done, while the miles quietly passed him by.

  The two stiffening men trailing behind were low caliber specimens, and Clay took no great pride in having killed them. He doubted that Henry had any reward money posted against his capture or demise; only a first-time bungler would have taken Lonnie Baines for a partner in robbery. There would be a general shaking of heads in town when the story came out, the usual pious consternation over why someone like that had chosen the left-hand path to perdition. Clay never asked himself any such thing. He assumed individuals made the choice consciously, having weighed the potential rewards against the likelihood of a short life. They knew the risks in advance, these acolytes of crime, and Clay was not about to ponder their stupidity. He wondered how many of them truly repented as the rope snapped tight against their ear, or the bullets came smashing into them.

  Toward dawn, back across the Kansas line, Clay fell asleep in the saddle. He awoke as the sun rose, and stopped to watch it push above the horizon. When it had separated completely from the plains, he turned to assure himself that his dead men were still tied aboard their mounts. They were, and as Clay stared at the horse under Henry Pulvermiller he recalled the advice of witnesses to the robbers’ escape: Look for the colored horse.

  Last night in the firelight it had seemed a common enough beast, its hide randomly s
plotched with different hues, none standing forth from the rest. Clay admired pintos and paints for the clear separation of their patches, and had thought the horse before him, with its unaesthetic smearings, a disappointing animal.

  The sun, however, changed his mind. Sunlight did for Pulvermiller’s horse what firelight somehow obscured. The light of a new day burnished its hide to a coppery brightness, but that tint was only one of many present; there was a subtle shade of what Clay wanted to call purple, but was in fact closer to lavender, and there was indigo, and a gray so vibrant it defied grayness, even a startling undertone of rose pink. All of these were splattered and streaked and swirled together, their edges melding, forming colors Clay could not identify. The mane and tail were a curious mixture of deep brown and gray and blue—Clay swore there were actual blue hairs among the rest—and the legs below the knee were dark, in four differing shades.

  It was a remarkable sight. Clay made up his mind then and there to have the horse for his own. He felt he had earned it. No one would argue with him if he impounded it as evidence and later released it for his personal use. He simply had to have it, because it was a horse unlike any other.

  He noticed, as the morning wore on, that its hide became somewhat dulled as the sun rose higher. There had been something special about the first unspoiled light of morning. That was the time Clay’s new horse had revealed itself fully, unreservedly. He would call it Sunrise.

  17

  Drew was asleep when Marion de Quille entered his cell. The clang of the steel door closing woke him. Marion looked around at the cell’s bare walls, and at the young man sitting up on his narrow bunk.

  “Drew boy, you don’t look good.”

  “I don’t feel good.”

  “How they treating you here?”

  “They feed me and take away the shit bucket once a day.”

  “Can’t ask for more’n that, now can you.”

  “You going to get me out, or just stand there admiring the furniture?”

  “Believe I’ll stand, just for now,” said Marion. “We have us a little problem this time. Feller you shot wasn’t just any feller. He’s the cousin of the state representative in Congress, no less, so there’s folks that want a piece of your hide for what you did.”

  “He started it.”

  “I believe you, but the point is, he’s had to have the arm you hit taken off above the elbow, and it’s his right arm. What’d you use, a forty-four? Smashed the bone all to pieces, so they had to take it off. You can see how that’d tend to make the man a little bit peeved.”

  “You’ve got me out before, Marion.”

  “I have, when it’s no one special you got mixed up with, and there wasn’t too much blood spilled. This time it’s different. This time there’s lawyers involved, and I can’t even get you bail. What all were you fighting over anyway?”

  “A girl. She didn’t want him, but he kept on grabbing.”

  “So you had to be Sir Galahad and rescue her.”

  “As a matter of fact, she started screaming at me after I shot him. His gun came out first, I want you to know. He was drunk, so he missed.”

  “So you’re in the pokey because you tried to get a congressman’s cousin off of his favorite whore. I wonder sometimes if you aren’t a fool, boy. How old are you now—eighteen? You should know better than to argue over loose women. There’s not one that’s worth it.”

  “Next time I’ll mind my business. What do they want from me, this congressman’s cousin’s lawyers?”

  “I’d say about a year behind bars for doing him grievous injury. A real good lawyer might get you off with six months.”

  “Then get me one, why don’t you.”

  “Can’t,” said Marion. “There’s not a lawyer in Houston wants to touch you, not even your money, if you had any, which I guess you haven’t.”

  “Nope. You don’t give me enough work to earn any.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault, I guess.” Marion snorted. He was genuinely upset to see Drew in jail. Drew had outgrown boyhood while working for Marion as a general factotum, assisting in all manner of illegal activities. Marion smuggled imported materials of all descriptions up from the gulf, and arranged for their dispersal across Texas. Drew had begun, as Yancy had, at the seafaring end of the operation, but discovered, like Yancy before him, he had no sea legs at all. Marion moved him back to Houston to help oversee the distribution of the untaxed booty, and Drew had used his sharp brain to fulfill whatever directive Marion gave him, then abandoned his mentor in crime to wallow in the usual troughs young men were drawn to. He was in danger of becoming a wastrel, like Yancy, and that would have been a shame, since Drew possessed greater potential for success than Yancy ever had.

  “There was one thing I did,” said Marion, “but you won’t like it if I tell you.”

  “Tell me and be sure.”

  “I sent a telegram to your mama down in Galveston. She’s got influence down there, and a parcel of it stretches up this far.”

  “Did you get an answer?”

  “I got one, all right. No, is what the lady said. I guess you don’t visit home like you should. He’s made his bed, is the message she sent, so now he can lie in it. Not a whole lot of sympathy there. Would you have taken help if she offered any?”

  “I’d take help from the devil if it got me out of here.”

  “Haven’t seen old Nick in the area, but I’m not one to let down a friend, Drew boy, so I came prepared. You can bet they’re not about to let you out of here till your trial’s due, and then it’ll be straight into the wagon and down to the courthouse, and directly from there to prison. Seeing as your mama won’t help, you’ll have to bust out of here on your own, and get clean away from Texas for good. That is, unless you figure you need to serve the time they give you for the good of your soul, and to make restitution for the bodily harm you did to that leading citizen. That how you feel?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Thought as much, so like I said, I came prepared. Get over to the door and keep a watch out for that dumb guard brung me in here.”

  Drew got up and stood watch while Marion slipped his suspenders and lowered his pants.

  “Are you in love with me by any chance, Marion?”

  “Keep your tongue in your mouth and your eyes where they’ll do the most good.”

  “Mind telling how you intend helping me by showing your butt?”

  “This big old butt is what’ll save your hide, son. They searched me pretty good when I came in, patted me down every which way to make sure I’m not carrying a weapon in concealment, but there’s one place they never cared to venture.”

  Marion bent over and extracted a tiny derringer from between his buttocks. “Been in a nervous sweat about that thing ever since I jammed it in there. Man could do himself serious harm with a misfire in his pants. There you go, and I don’t make any apology for the way it smells.”

  He handed the derringer to Drew. Its breech contained just one bullet. “I tried to carry loose ammunition alongside of it,” said Marion, “but it all kept falling out. You’ll have to get by with what you’ve got.”

  “Marion”—Drew grinned—“you’re like a father.”

  “Don’t accuse me of being a father to someone dumb enough to get in trouble over some other fool’s female. Now listen, you wait at least a full twenty-four hours before you use that thing. I’m leaving town tonight for a long spell, and I don’t want you busting out five minutes after I walk out of here. The longer you wait, the less sure they’ll be it was me that gave you that peashooter, so you hide it good, and wait, you hear me?”

  “I will, I promise.”

  “You better.”

  They talked some more, then Marion called for the guard. While he was escorted out, another guard entered Drew’s cell and began searching in every corner.

  “Looking for something, Herb?”

  “That old crowbait de Quille, he’s sly enough to get something in here as wou
ld help you get out, so I’m lookin’ for it.”

  “He wouldn’t do that, Herb. He’s getting me the best lawyer in the state, but keep on looking if it makes you happier.”

  Drew had wedged the bullet into a crack between the bricks, up near the ceiling, and dropped the derringer into the bucket containing his own shit and piss, thrusting it down out of sight. Herb took the time to examine the bucket, but didn’t touch it, and appeared satisfied that no weapon had been smuggled into the cell.

  “Herb, can I ask you a favor? Send a preacher in to see me, would you?”

  “Preacher? You?”

  “Marion gave me a lecture about mending my ways, but he didn’t have any practical advice to offer, so would you get the preacher from the church just down the street? I believe his name’s Appleton.”

  “I’ll ask, but I don’t say it’ll happen.”

  “Thank you, Herb.”

  Reverend Appleton was allowed into Drew’s cell the following afternoon. His humor had been sorely tested by the search he was subjected to before being allowed access to the prisoner, and he was curt to the point of rudeness.

  “You wanted my advice?” he snapped, refusing Drew’s offer of a seat on the bunk.

  “All the advice I can get, Reverend.”

  Appleton provided what he could, as quickly as he could, the smell from Drew’s latrine bucket upsetting him even more than the indignity of the search. The derringer had been retrieved, dried and placed under the straw-tick mattress before the bucket was emptied first thing in the morning, then hidden again in its original place as soon as there was enough fecal matter in the bucket to conceal it. Drew knew the cell would be searched after the preacher left, and so it was.

  “See the light?” asked Herb, as his partner escorted Appleton from the building.

  “What light’s that, Herb?”

  “Holy light—what the hell else?”