Two fleet shadows slunk past me and I grabbed for my Colt. Even through the curtain of the blown snow I knew that they were skulking prairie wolves. I braced myself, but they went on. Apparently they, at least, knew of some secret den in which to shelter up as the storm passed.
I didn’t have their instinct. I plunged onward, falling once, then again over rocks and roots hidden beneath the inches of fresh snow. Once the clouds parted and an amazingly brilliant shaft of sunlight touched my eyes with blinding illumination. The clouds closed again and the snow continued. I fell again. My heart was pounding; my eyes burned. I knew I had the strength to rise, but it didn’t seem worth the effort.
Then I saw what I had tripped over. My fingers reached out and touched frozen steel. I had found the railroad tracks.
The knowledge energized me. I struggled to my feet and turned to my left. My head was still bowed, my legs heavy, but I moved with refreshed purpose. The town was ahead. McCallister was ahead.
I was going to live to see them both again.
With the weather as it was I couldn’t be sure of the passing hours, but I believed I had reached New Madrid just at dusk. I staggered from the railroad tracks and moved into the first alley I saw. The wind was cut by the buildings standing there. It no longer worked the snow like miniature sabers against my eyes. I felt warmer, safer. I could have sat down in that alley and slept. There was a much better place for that, if sleep could come to me.
I worked my way out on to the main street and started on wobbly legs along a boardwalk. There was no one else on the streets, although I could hear sound from behind the lighted windows of the saloons. Some of the men had apparently decided to ride out the storm inside these boisterous shelters.
I stepped from the boardwalk, staggered, and crossed the frozen street. No one had come that way for a long while – the snow was undisturbed against the dark earth except where my boots cut fresh tracks.
Smelling it before I saw it, I gave a silent cry of relief. The stable was just ahead of me. I walked toward it, exhaustion weighing heavily on me now. A lantern burned low as I entered. The horses stood looking at me curiously, my white-stockinged black among them, wondering no doubt where his mentally unhinged master had been wandering now. I made it all the way to my pile of straw before I collapsed and slept for years in the warmth of the horse-smelling building. I could hear the wind outside, but it had no meaning to me now. I was a man in shelter, a man alive.
‘Hey!’
I felt a boot toe nudge me, but I was too exhausted to rise. I tried opening an eye, but that seemed to demand too much of my precious energy. The boot toe nudged me again, not so gently this time.
‘Hey, you! Ryan!’
I opened one eye and rolled over, coming out of the depths of the dark cavern I had been sleeping in.
‘What are you doing back here?’ the voice asked. I recognized it and managed to sit halfway up, bracing myself on my elbows.
‘Hello, Mr Givens,’ I mumbled.
‘What are you doing back here?’ he asked. He stood there holding a kerosene lantern with the wick turned down low, the smoky light casting concerned shadows across his face. ‘I told you that you could stay here last night, but you never came back. Left your horse. What’d you do, get drunk?’
‘No, sir. I got myself beat up.’
‘Oh?’ Concern flickered briefly through his eyes, but vanished. ‘I told you that you could sleep here last night, didn’t I? For helping me out while my wife was birthing?’ I nodded and he went on, ‘That don’t mean you can live here with your horse eating free hay. Isaac saw you here and it troubled him. You’ve got to be moving on.’
‘All right,’ I muttered, sitting all the way up. My head hung for a minute before, looking around, I braced myself against the planks of the stall and rose. Givens grew apologetic.
‘I mean I know it’s hard weather out there and all, Ryan, but I can’t just let every saddle tramp and hard luck cowboy bed down here. This is a business, you know?’
‘I know. I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll be moving on. Can I wait for dawn?’
‘It is dawn, Ryan. Still dark outside, but the storm’s blown over and there’ll be a bright new sun in an hour or so. Just right for riding on your way.’
I didn’t say anything. I could not argue with Givens’s logic, and he had done me a favor. ‘Did you notice if the train is still in the station?’ I asked.
He took a moment to follow that leap in my thoughts, but answered, ‘Far as I know it is. Where else would it go?’
‘Just wondered. Thanks.’ I patted my pockets and was surprised to find I still had enough silver change for breakfast. As I came fully awake and the sky outside began to glow with a soft orange color, that idea seemed more compelling. Givens turned off the lantern and watched quietly as I saddled my black horse and gave him his bit.
‘You weren’t lying about getting beat up, were you?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘You ought to see the back of your head. Your jaw isn’t all that pretty either. Plus you got some bad splinters in your cheek.’ Then, grudgingly, he suggested, ‘Why don’t you draw yourself a bucket of water from one of the barrels and rinse up? I think I got an almost clean towel in the office.’
I ground-hitched my horse and drew a bucket of water from one of his six oaken barrels. Kept inside, of course – you can’t get a horse to eat ice when it’s thirsty. When he came back he brought me a newly stropped razor, a sliver of yellow lye soap and a comb with a few missing teeth. He showed me where he had propped up a plate-sized bit of broken mirror and left me to my task.
I appreciated what he had done. When you have nothing and a man helps out, you don’t forget. I’ve seen it before, many times. Take one of those dudes at the Palace Hotel out for champagne and oysters – or whatever they eat and drink – and he’ll cut you the next time he sees you if your fortunes have changed. Give a truly hungry man a sandwich and he’ll remember it a long time.
I eased the long gray splinters I could find from my cheek and chin, seeing, as Givens had told me, that when Tom had slugged me for ruining his pleasant evening of guard duty, his fist had swollen my face and it was starting to color nicely to purple and green.
Then I soaped my face and shaved gingerly. My natural face emerged slowly from behind the thicket. I soaked my head good and then began the most painful operation of all – trying to comb the huge scab from my scalp without tearing open the gash underneath again.
I finished the best I could, parting my hair and combing most of it to one side. Peering into the mirror, I saw my own features, only slightly puffed and discolored and decided I didn’t look any worse than half the men in town after a night out. I wished again that I had my hat. It was a pearl-gray Stetson that I’d given fifteen dollars for long ago in Great Falls. There’s nothing like a good Stetson to warm your head and top off a well-dressed man (which I wasn’t at the moment). And there’s nothing like wandering around bareheaded in Montana in the wintertime to make you stick out among the crowd.
‘Well, that’s a change,’ Givens said, as I handed back the gear he had loaned me.
‘I appreciate it,’ I said with feeling. I rubbed my smooth jawline and grinned. ‘Say hello to the wife and little Bartholomew for me.’
Then I took up the reins to my always wary black horse and walked him across the slushy road toward the restaurant I had eaten at before. The sun was rising like a huge molten sphere. The slush underfoot would be a foot of mud before high noon. People were emerging from their nesting places, rubbing their eyes, looking east as if they had never seen a winter sun before.
I hitched up the black and tramped into the restaurant, leaving muddy bootprints behind me like everyone else.
Breakfast was tinned peaches, four hotcakes and three eggs followed by a quart of coffee. I was beginning to feel almost alive. My momentary serenity was crushed as I paid my bill and realized that now I was as close to stone broke as a man could get and
the only way to get any funds was to brace down the railroad thugs and grab Alton McCallister and force him to choke it up. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect.
I stepped out on to the boardwalk with a toothpick between my lips and got myself arrested.
A snake-quick hand slipped to my holster from behind and removed my Colt. Another hand had taken my left wrist and pulled my arm far up my back. A voice asked me softly, ‘Can we do this gently, or do we need to make a spectacle of ourselves.’
I glanced at the people milling on the boardwalk in front of the store, their eyes fixed on me, and I said, ‘No need to make a fuss. I’d lose anyway, it seems.’
My arm was released and I turned to see the big man with the walrus mustache and the sad pouched eyes holding my pistol loosely. My first instincts about him being the law had been right. I could just see the tips of the starred badge he wore poking out from behind the edge of his coat. He smiled at me in a regretful way and started me off down the street while the populace watched.
We trudged through the mud toward the low featureless brick building I had seen earlier. Now I could see a small sign under the eaves that read ‘Town marshal’s office. City jail.’
We pushed on through the heavy door to the inside. The three small boys who had been following us along expectantly hoping for a ruckus walked away in disappointment.
‘Coombs is my name,’ the marshal said. He placed his hat carefully on his scarred desk, emptied my revolver of its .44 cartridges and placed it beside it, pocketing the bullets.
‘Hey, Coombs, I see you’ve captured another desperate criminal!’
The voice came from one of two iron-barred cells deeper in the building. I could see a man there with his hands gripping cold iron.
‘Shut up, Lennox,’ the marshal said, shrugging out of his heavy coat. Coombs looked at a handwritten piece of paper on his desk and then back to me.
‘I suppose you know why you’re here?’
‘No.’
‘No?’ Coombs scratched his head. ‘I’ve got charges brought against you for vagrancy and for making menacing threats.’
‘I don’t know what that means,’ I said honestly.
‘Alton McCallister of the Colorado Northern says that you burst into his private Pullman car and threatened him with violence if he didn’t give you money.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
The sad eyes lifted slowly from the paper. ‘He’s got six witnesses.’
‘I see.’
‘How are we going to deal with this?’ the marshal asked. ‘Have you any money at all?’
‘No.’
‘All right. You admit the vagrancy charge.’
‘I suppose, but I don’t understand that law. I mean every place I’ve ever traveled they have laws against vagrancy,’ I told him, feeling heat begin to flush my face. ‘They just never explain how a vagrant is supposed to be able to pay a fine for vagrancy!’
‘In my jurisdiction we work it off,’ the marshal told me calmly. ‘And then we send you on down the road to make trouble in the next town. That’s not so serious – this business about threatening McCallister is.’
‘Threatening? I asked him for my pay, that’s all.’
‘That’s not what he says.’
‘He’s lying.’
‘All the witnesses are lying?’ the marshal asked, lifting one bushy eyebrow.
‘Are they all employed by him?’ I asked, expecting no answer. ‘Look, I was invited into his railroad car. I told him what I wanted. He had two men beat me and dump me out on the prairie.’
‘They say you started the fight and then ran off.’
‘Do they?’ I said. ‘Doesn’t the law say something about me having the right to confront my accuser?’
‘I believe it does,’ the marshal said. His eyes were quiet and completely inexpressive. ‘However, Alton McCallister and his people have pulled out and returned to the end of the line – Yellow Tongue, that is to say – to check on the trestle construction. He won’t be back for at least ten days.’
‘Marshal?’ I asked. ‘How long does a man serve for simple vagrancy in this town?’
‘Ten days or pay ten dollars,’ he said without hesitation.
‘I see.’
‘It’s banditry!’ the voice from the cell hollered again. ‘Simple legal banditry.’
‘Shut up, Lennox!’ the marshal said, the first time I had heard him speak with emotion. ‘Now that you’re sober, you think you’re a lawyer?’
‘I’d be one of the few that was,’ the man named Lennox shouted back, and then he began to chuckle.
‘You’re going to have to do the ten days on vagrancy anyway,’ Coombs told me, ‘even if McCallister doesn’t press the other charges.’ He looked at my battered face a little doubtfully, dropped the paper back on his desk and seemed about ready to say something like ‘sorry’, but never did.
I was led back to the second cell, placed in it and watched as the marshal locked the door with a big iron key.
The other prisoner, Lennox, stood clinging to the bars of his cell, staring at me across the narrow aisle between us.
‘McCallister, huh?’ he asked, as I sank on to my bunk which was two planks hung from the brick walls from iron chains. ‘Did you really try to hurt him?’
‘No, but I almost wish I had,’ I said, stretching out on the rough bunk.
‘I wish you’d have broken his neck,’ Lennox said. I peered at him, seeing a man with a round face and small boy’s upturned nose sprinkled with freckles across a pasty hangover pallor. There was venom in his words.
‘You have something against him?’ I asked, sitting up.
‘Yes, I do! The railroad right-of-way cut across my grazing land. It wouldn’t have cost them nothing – nothing to them – to route their rails half a mile south. Now I have to fence off that end of the boundary. And in wintertime! That ground is froze solid. I fence it or risk losing cattle every time that iron horse rumbles through my land. Yes, I have something against him and the whole rotten railroad.’
‘Have you tried talking to them. Going at them legally?’
‘I’m not a wealthy man. You think I could go against a battery of lawyers like those the Colorado Northern has? No …’ He seemed briefly miserable. ‘Mostly I get drunk, spout off and end up in here for my troubles.’
He sagged on to his own bunk disconsolately. Well, I thought, at least I wasn’t alone in my dislike of the railroad. We spent a silent half-hour in the dark cool cells side by side before Lennox sat up suddenly, grabbing at his head as if that movement had been a mistake. When he had recovered he asked, ‘Look here, what name do you go by?’
‘Ryan.’
‘Tell me, Ryan, can you do ranch work? I mean, how are you with fencing?’ he asked me.
‘About average,’ I answered.
‘Average is all I need. Listen, I can use some help on the ranch. As I told you, I got to get some fencing done. That, and I like the way you stood up to McCallister. How about if I go your bail and get you out of here? Would you work for me?’
‘I’m only hanging around here waiting for McCallister to get back,’ I said in a lower voice.
‘Ten days?’
‘That’s what the marshal said.’
‘If you’ll agree to a dollar a day for your wages, you’ll have your fine settled with me by then. Besides, I guarantee you that working for me will be better than anything the town wants you to do to pay off that fine – and I won’t lock you up at night,’ he said with a smile.
I thought it over and couldn’t find any reason not to take up his proposal. I nodded to him. ‘OK, Lennox. After ten days, though, I’ll be leaving you. I still am going to look up Mr McCallister.’
‘Ryan,’ he said, ‘I might just go along with you when you pay him that visit. Whatever he owes you, he owes me more. Much more.’
FIVE
So it happened that after Marshal Coombs had decided that Art Lennox was sober enough to be no longer a
menace to society, Lennox paid his own fine and ten dollars for mine as well. The marshal didn’t seem to like it a bit, but he himself had set my fine and there wasn’t much he could do about it. As for the other charges, he had also admitted that McCallister had left town without filing any official complaint concerning them, assuming I would still be in custody for the next ten days at least.
Coombs handed me my unloaded gun and the cartridges he had taken from it and walked us both to the door of the jail, watching as we walked up the street to where my horse still stood in front of the restaurant. We recovered Art Lennox’s lanky little roan pony from the stable. A scarecrow of a man, that I took to be the unreliable Isaac, led the horse out, and we rode slowly out of town.
Lennox had been talkative back in the jailhouse, but now he was mute. I figured a hangover had smothered his high spirits. In less than an hour we were sitting on a low snow-dusted bluff looking down at Lennox’s ranch.
There wasn’t a lot to it, but it was nicely laid out and he was probably proud of it. His eyes glowed with satisfaction as we drew up and looked down at the low log house, an outbuilding which was probably a bunkhouse in roundup season, a small corral with two horses, tiny at this distance and, near a stand of leafless cottonwoods, twenty or thirty cattle. A creek wound its way across the land, its bottom clotted with dry willow trees. I could hear the hushed passing of the water as it flowed over boulders and among ice floes.
‘Nice place,’ I said for something to say.
‘It suits me. I put a lot of labor into this spread. If you look south you can just see the sun on the rails. That’s where we’re going to have to start fencing. The east border we don’t have to worry about – that’s where the creek runs. We’ll have to bring the fence line this way to abut the bluffs here.
The Drifter's Revenge Page 4