I hummed old hymns that I didn’t know the words to and thought of my tattered past and the new life I was going to have in Oregon. I suppose I romanticized both to fit my own specifications.
Shortly before noon I saw the three of them riding out toward the fence line.
Art Lennox was the one in front. Even at a distance I could see that he was set purposefully. Beside and a little behind him was his wife, not riding sidesaddle, but astride in a gray dress, her mouth tight, her hair escaping its pins. The third man I didn’t know. He wore twin Colts and a black hat tugged low over his eyes. The pinto pony between his legs looked weary. He had a swooping dark mustache and a pointed chin and dead eyes. I figured this had to be Henry Jarvis. Time proved this to be an accurate guess.
I stood with my seven-foot iron digging bar in my hand, awaiting their arrival. The raven left with a hasty croak. The black horse lifted its head and watched with curiosity as the incoming riders, moving fast and hard, approached.
They reined up sharply in front of me. Art Lennox spoke from his lathered horse’s back. He tried to steel his words, but they came out thin and reedy. His wife looked at me as if she had caught someone in her pantry. Jarvis had a hand resting familiarly on his right-hand gun. Veronica had a shotgun lying across the withers of her pale pony. I thought she looked the most dangerous of them all.
‘We need to talk,’ Art Lennox said.
‘Go ahead,’ I replied. Looking from Jarvis to Art and his wife in turn, I wondered if this had something to do with the night before. Old Billy had been right in his appraisal of the situation, it seemed, but unwilling to say anything blatantly. I understood that. He needed his job, such as it was. The West was not full of opportunities for 70-yearold ranch hands wishing to start over.
‘Just shoot him, Art,’ Jarvis offered, and I braced myself, shifting the digging bar to my other hand. ‘It’ll save us time.’
‘Be quiet, Henry,’ Lennox snapped. His face had that pasty drunkard’s pallor still. His hands were shaking. Veronica’s face, on the other hand, was flushed with the cold and with apparent excitement. Her eyes, so warm and lovely in the firelight the night before now seemed feverish and hostile.
‘Tell me what’s going on, Art,’ I said, and he leaned forward to talk to me. The wind shifted his pony’s mane and the animal shuddered. ‘Have I done something?’
‘Not to me,’ Lennox answered. ‘Jarvis here just brought me back from town.’
‘Yes. I understood that was one of his jobs,’ I said, and Veronica’s back stiffened.
‘Well, Marshal Coombs had a visitor before we left.’
‘Yes?’ I had a shadow of an idea of what was coming, and I didn’t like it.
‘A man rode in from Yellow Tongue,’ Jarvis said harshly. ‘I seems you’ve killed a couple of men out that way.’
‘In self-defense.’
‘That’s for a judge to decide.’
I felt everything sliding away from me: my plans for my future in Oregon, the idea of taking Ben Comfrey’s pay to his wife to help her through the winter. Alton McCallister would make sure that I was tried for the shootings – he would make sure that I was hanged for them. I saw no indication of charity in Jarvis’s hard eyes, none in those of Veronica Lennox. Her husband might have given me a minute to try to explain things, but he was a weak-willed man and I knew there wouldn’t be any conversation about guilt or innocence.
‘There’s a reward out on you. The railroad’s posted it,’ Jarvis said. His hand hadn’t drifted far from his holster. ‘It’s a dead or alive sheet – murderers are always posted that way.’
I looked to Jarvis for one last chance. ‘Art, I didn’t do those things.’ He looked away and said to no one, ‘The reward is five hundred dollars. A lot of money.’
‘More than a man’s life is worth?’ I asked.
‘You don’t know how much we need that money,’ Veronica said with a tongue like a razor. ‘Besides, we don’t even know who you are. What you are. You might kill us all in our sleep, given the chance.’
‘What is Coombs doing?’ I asked. I wondered that they had not brought the marshal with them. ‘Where is he?’
‘Out looking for you. I told him you and I had parted ways after we left New Madrid. I gave him the idea that you were riding south,’ Art said, without apparent shame. ‘The marshal isn’t allowed to collect a reward, you know … and we need it badly.’
‘That’s enough chatter,’ Jarvis said. ‘We don’t need to explain ourselves to a killer. Ryan, I’d advise you to unbuckle your gunbelt and raise your hands. You can’t win.’
Before he had finished speaking, he drew his own sidearm. Before he had finished drawing it, I had shot him through the shoulder. He yelled, threw his hands out crazily and cursed loudly. His horse danced away in panic. Jarvis bounced from the saddle and landed on his head. I guessed his neck was broken. He lay still against the cold earth.
Art drew his own pistol shakily. His face told me he didn’t really want any part in this, but he was a man with a gun and I treated him as such. I whipped the seven-foot digging iron against his elbow, hearing bone crack. He groaned and sagged in the saddle, dropping his revolver.
Veronica shrilled like a crazed Fury and raised her shotgun. The first load of buckshot missed me, boring a ragged hole into the earth near my foot. At the sudden confusion of sounds, her horse bucked solidly wishing to escape, and she was thrown from his back to land on her rump, the shotgun flying free of her grip.
She sat in the mud screaming and cursing as I strode toward her, picked up the shotgun and heaved it toward the creek beyond.
‘You’ll die!’ she yelled at my back.
‘So will we all one day,’ I said. Then I walked to where the puzzled black horse stood watching, tightened the twin cinches on my Texas-rigged saddle and swung aboard.
I rode south then, letting the black pick its way daintily across the railroad tracks and continued on for three or four miles before I lost myself in the pine woods there. Then I swung down and rested myself against the side of my pony. My legs were trembling and I had to remove my borrowed hat and wipe the sweat from my eyes.
After a while I started on, looping through the snowy woods until I was riding north again, back toward New Madrid, back toward whatever lay beyond. At times I hate this stubborn streak in me; it seems a little like madness.
Nevertheless, these people had challenged me, had tried to arrest me, kill me, have me hanged for a series of events not of my making. I was supposed to be frightened. I was supposed to be intimidated – and I was, some. No matter. A man does what he has to do, what is right. I would prove my point, or I would die trying – unfortunately that seemed the more likely outcome, and as the cold wind from the north grew stronger, I shivered in my coat and tugged my hat lower.
I longed for Oregon.
I had already decided what I was going to do. I couldn’t wait nine days for Alton McCallister to return on his train. The longer I remained in the area the more certain it would become that Marshal Coombs would find me. I had no desire to be hanged.
I was going after McCallister once again, returning to the Yellow Tongue Gorge. People might have thought me crazy, tracking down the man who had accused me of murder, but what else was there to do? Oregon sounded fine, but without food and supplies, I was not going to make it in the winter. No one crosses the Rockies that time of year unprepared.
There was that and the gnawing guilt about deserting Ben Comfrey’s wife to the rigors of winter. She would be lucky if she could make it to springtime without help. And – McCallister owed me more than that. He owed me an apology and needed to stand up and admit he was lying about what I had done to him personally.
The other charges had no bases in fact. Whether I could clear all of that up was doubtful, but I could straighten out the charges between the law and myself where McCallister was concerned. Or so I hoped. I wanted to extract a written promise from him that he would deny his allegations.
I guess to some rich man it might sound foolish to be willing to die for that kind of money, but I figure when a man works for you he has a contract. He has given his word as his bond and to refuse a worker his honest pay is to break that bond. It is dishonest; it is cheating and lying. And to withhold it from a widow after her husband has died trying to provide – that goes beyond despicable. Civilized countries for thousands of years have had special statutes in law protecting widows and orphans. Well, I was the law now, there being no other willing to act.
With the bright shining of a new day after one more frozen night, I continued westward. I could follow the railroad tracks without riding too near by the glint of the sun on the new steel of the rails. I came upon a herd of about forty elk that morning, majestically antlered old bucks, does and fawns. They hardly paid attention to me. I think I could have ridden through the herd without disturbing them. They had never seen a man, it seemed, and it could have been so. That would change when the railroad locomotives became a permanent fixture in their wild range, spewing smoke and clattering along the tracks.
Had I been traveling free and easy I would have considered taking down one of the bull elks for meat. I could have eaten for weeks off the steaks. However, now was hardly the time to unlimber my rifle or stop to butcher and smoke the meat.
Marshal Coombs was back there and he would still be trying to track me, and with snow still on the ground, he and his posse would eventually cut my sign. It was ironic, but Jarvis and Veronica had actually done me a favor by lying to the marshal about the direction I had taken.
Maybe now – with any sort of luck – I could finish what had to be done before lighting out for Oregon again.
The Yellow Tongue Gorge, when I found it, looked as deeply shadowed, raw and rugged as it had before. Snowmelt ran down the flanks of the great canyon, and the trestle I saw from a distance, had nearly been completed. Maybe the arrival of the railroad manager had speeded the building of the spiderwork of timbers.
I sat my black horse half a mile away, watching the scene. I noted a few men, ant-like at that distance, crawling up the framework of the trestle, saw a tree felled unexpectedly, the crack as its trunk shattered clear across the cold distances. The slopes had been nearly denuded now.
And there was the train. The black locomotive was inert on the tracks, the Pullmans like segments of a giant insect still and motionless. There was a dusting of snow on their roofs. There was no movement within or around them that I could make out. Where were all the pretty ladies, I wondered?
Where was Alton McCallister?
I could just make out the pay office, looking small and humble. The long barracks emitted a thin drift of smoke; the stable was squat and bereft of activity. I thought how small all human endeavors looked when seen from a distance.
I swung down from the back of my weary horse, loosened the cinches and squatted on my heels. I glanced to the skies and saw that day had not long to live before it flared with red and orange and died away to purple death. I also considered that this could be my last day on earth before I faded away into some unknown twilight passage. I didn’t like that idea and chased it from my mind and used the gloaming time to clean my guns and make my plans.
I was at least on familiar ground, having spent the end of summer and autumn in the lumber camp. The night was dark, sheathing me in invisibility, and my boots made only a soft crunching sound against the snow. The wind, while active, was still far from cold. I could pick out the lights of the individual buildings – stable, bunkhouse, office, supply shed – and oriented myself immediately. I was alert for roaming guards, but I didn’t think they could have predicted my unannounced arrival here where the danger was most immediate. Nevertheless, I moved carefully and swiftly, darting from shadow to shadow among the scattered pine and cedar trees. There is always danger when a man moves among the guns.
Pausing on the northern flank of a low knoll, I searched the camp and the perimeter before focusing on my objective. The huge black form of the 4-4-2 locomotive and its silent Pullman appendages was no more than fifty yards below. Now there were lights on in both passenger cars and I saw movement behind the screened windows. Yet the wind swept away all sound and I might have been on the moon for all of the signs of life.
I started down toward the head of the locomotive, eyes constantly searching. Once, across the distances, I heard a crash and a muffled curse – noises, I assumed, emanating from the bunkhouse where some of the boys would now be finishing off their day with raw whiskey.
Moving in a crouch, I slid up beside the locomotive over the blue snow. The moon was an eerie visitor above me, peering at intervals through the fragmented clouds. I rested a hand against the cold flank of the iron horse as I caught my breath and decided on my next move.
There were gold painted curlicues and whimsical striping decorating the big engine. Even the huge drive wheels were painted with filigree. The brass bell shone like a bit of bright pride in the starlight. It was a great iron animal waiting to have its heart stoked with fire and begin its powerful run across the plains.
I slipped toward the rear of the locomotive, passed the coal tender and swiftly climbed the iron ladder at the front of the first Pullman. I knew from my last visit that the car in the rear was where they held their parties and played at cards; that the front car was reserved for sleeping and dressing.
I mounted to the roof of the Pullman and quickly went to my belly. There was a moving shadow on the ground near me, a watchman with a Winchester repeater in his hand. I lay there against the cold roof of the Pullman, trying to still my breath as the man – wearing a long buffalo coat – walked past me slowly, in no hurry to get anywhere. He didn’t seem to be particularly alert, which suited me fine. If he had raised his eyes once he could have seen me on top of the train and easily drilled me where I lay.
He strode on. I thought I could hear a faint, tuneless whistle escaping his lips.
I stayed on my belly, inching ahead until I reached the rear of the car, then hastily I swung down, burst into the lighted Pullman and came face to face with the guard Tom. His eyes opened wide in total surprise and I clubbed him with the barrel of my Colt. He sagged to the floor of the corridor. I looked into a nearby compartment, found it empty and dragged Tom into it.
I was sweating now. Iron stoves heated the car and the difference between indoor and outdoor temperatures was extreme. I went on.
I opened the door to the next compartment carefully and by the dim light of a lantern saw a young good-looking woman lying in bed, her dark hair free of its pins. She saw me too. She drew the blankets up to just below her wide eyes. I smiled at her and put a finger to my lips. She didn’t scream or move an inch as I backed from the room.
Next door I found my man.
I slipped inside, halting Alton McCallister in the motion of lighting a cigar. He sat in a luxurious green velvet-covered chair, his polished boots propped up on the bed. He wore a pair of black trousers and a cream-colored shirt, the top button undone, tie loose around his neck. He scowled at me and lowered his cigar. Green eyes examined me from beneath his reddish eyebrows. He touched a finger to his mustache and spoke firmly.
‘What are you trying to do, Ryan? Commit suicide?’
‘I am trying,’ I told him, as I closed the door and leaned a shoulder against it, ‘to collect the pay due me and my friend.’
‘If you’d been out working – all the time you’ve put into this charade – you could have more than made up the money.’
‘That isn’t the point,’ I said. My throat was a little dry. I felt more nervous than McCallister looked. ‘The point is that you owe the money. Ben was killed by your men.’
‘This is all merely a point of honor?’
‘That’s all it is, McCallister. Pay me and I’ll leave you alone. I sure don’t want to see you ever again.’ My Colt, held loosely by my thigh now rose and he glanced at it.
‘All right,’ he
said after a slow minute. ‘I’ll agree with you on this – this has gone quite far enough.’
Slowly he lowered his cigar and placed it on the table. Then he got to his feet and removed a purse from a drawer. I warned him with a gesture and the cocking of my pistol that there had better not be a weapon hidden there and he smiled thinly, acknowledging the silent command. When he turned he opened the chamois purse and removed a handful of gold eagles, scattering them on the table in bright disarray.
‘I don’t want all of it,’ I said, shaking my head. I didn’t want anyone coming back to say I had robbed the railroad boss at gunpoint. ‘You owe me a hundred and forty-nine dollars.’ Having said that, I carefully counted out seven twenty-dollar double-eagles and one ten-dollar piece. ‘I’ll send you the change.
‘Sit down,’ I ordered.
‘I thought you said that this was all you wanted,’ McCallister said, but he sat down and raised his hands to shoulder level.
‘It is. I’m taking this gold and disappearing. I don’t want to ever see you again; I want no further trouble. Be big enough to swallow it and stay out of my tracks. I’m not looking back, McCallister. I hope you won’t either.
The Drifter's Revenge Page 6