Duggins laughed, head thrown back as if he’d heard the mother of all windies. “No, no, I mean that I saw in his eyes that he was a blowhard. So I got up off my knee, walked right up to him, pulled my gun-hand backward over my right shoulder, and slammed him upside the temple. Gave him a scar above his left eye, on the high side of his cheek. You know the spot, I know you do.”
Sue Ellen knew the scar well. Alton had told her he received it in childhood, something about playing rough with other boys, swinging sticks like swords at each other.
“That was my contribution to his pretty-boy looks. Well, sir, when ol’ Delbert Hawkins came around to consciousness again—what? Wait. You mean you didn’t know that Alton Winstead’s real name was—is—Delbert Hawkins? Well, sakes alive, yes, indeed, my dear. At least, now that I come to think on it, that was the name he went by back then.” Duggins fixed her with a steady gaze, looking as if he were mustering an attempt to look serious. “Perhaps no one but Delbert, also known as Alton, knows how many names he’s had and just which is his true and given name. Heck, maybe he doesn’t even know anymore.” Again Duggins laughed.
Sue Ellen tried to swallow, sniff back the fresh wave of hot tears that ran down her face, annoying her. Delbert Hawkins? She’d never heard that name before. He’d shown her his Union Army discharge papers with the name Alton Winstead on them, for all to read.
“When he came to, I asked him just what it was he thought he was doing drawing down on me when I was a stranger. ‘You were coming up behind me’ was his answer. Well, you can imagine my surprise. ‘Coming up behind you? Why, I wasn’t aware of any other way to get into the cantina to purchase a beer to soothe my parched throat, you itinerant dandy,’ says I. Well, once again we stared hard at each other, trying to figure out the other man. For my part, I still wanted to hit him, now for a number of reasons and not just for nibbling on my girl. But I tell you what . . .” Duggins shook his head and sucked deep on his cigar.
When he resumed speaking, the blue-gray smoke chased the words from his mouth. “There was something about him, something that made you want to help him. He looked both bold and hollow, brash and weak, all at once. But he had some sort of sand, I will give him that much. He told me I was a worthless cur and that he would fight me in a duel, since I had bested him and besmirched his honor in front of a lady. Can you imagine? Those were his words; I’ve never forgotten them, I swear. I suspect Delbert was feeling emboldened by his foofaraw chatter, but I was ready to let him have another clout, just for insolence. And then he smiled and broke down in a full-body laugh. I swear I have only seen a few people laugh like that in my entire life. And never in the face of such potential danger. I reckoned he was either crazy or fearless. And I didn’t think he was fearless. So he had to be the other one.
“At first I was offended, as he’d been looking at me when he set off to laughing in such a manner. But then I realized it was genuine. That got me mad all over again. So I clouted him again and it made me feel good to see him crumple at my feet in his soiled finery. My happiness was short-lived, though, as I looked up at Inga. She was hurrying around the end of the bar, if you can believe it, fluttering to help her fallen little gambler. Curse his gentrified hide! So I snatched up his pepperbox, searched him for any other weapons, and came up with a long wallet filled with nothing, a watch fob with a handless watch attached, and a pocketknife with half a blade. And that half was dull. The man was next to useless. But this woman still wanted him. I ask you, as a woman yourself, does that make any sort of sense at all?”
He looked at Sue Ellen and it seemed to her that he was genuinely still miffed and puzzled by the barmaid’s swooning reaction. But Sue Ellen could understand. After all, she had fallen for him in much the same way. Duggins was right—there was something about Alton that made people want to help him.
“A long story short, that’s how I came to meet Delbert Hawkins. Or Alton Winstead. Whatever name you care to call him by, why that’s it.” He smiled and shook his head. “Those were good times. Me and the boys and a town full of women and liquor. And”—Duggins turned from the fire and stared right at Sue Ellen—“a new compadre with a plan to make us all very, very rich.”
She swore his eyes were afire. That it wasn’t just the reflected flames from the fireplace. Once again all pretense of a smile had disappeared and he said, “I wish with all my heart that I had shot him dead that day instead of befriending him.”
Chapter 7
“Oh, you probably want to know why I said I wished I had killed old Alton back then when I first met him—I’ll call him Alton so you don’t get all confused, my dear. Well, I will tell you, but as with all good things in life, it comes with a price. And that price is waiting to hear the rest of the story. And it’s a doozy, I can assure you, Miss Sue Ellen. But first, I suspect you are getting dry in the throat, so I will indulge that and offer you a sip or three of wine, okay?”
Sue Ellen dearly wanted to tell him to keep his wine, difficult since her mouth was gagged. But she was dry, and the gag hurt her mouth terribly. Maybe he’d leave it off after she drank. And he did—though not without pretending in feint a couple of times to cover her mouth again. She’d jerked her head to the side each time, and he finally nodded as if relenting to her superior power. “Okay, okay, you win. Now, back to my story. Your interruptions are slowing my momentum.”
“The very next day, a contingent of federales was spied heading to town—returning to town, I should say, for that is where they were based. Did I mention that when we got to town the week before, we had— How do you say politely, dispatched? Yes, that’s the word Delbert—excuse me, Alton—would have used. We dispatched the men left behind to guard the town and their barracks. This was no easy job, as they had superior weapons and a whole lot of walls to hide behind. But me and my boys, back then it was easier for us to sneak in and out of places. We were leaner then.” He smacked a hand against his solid, though not paunchy, belly, and smiled. “But we are no less hungry now than we were then.
“Eventually we wore them down and the townspeople were mostly happy about this because they were no longer under the thumb of the corrupt jefe. Little did they know that they were now under the thumb of me! When word came to us that we were about to be greeted by a whole lot of returning soldiers, soldiers who would not be pleased to know that their fellows they had left behind to guard the barracks outside of town had been . . . dispatched, well, you can imagine how that put the wheels in motion.” Duggins made a twirling motion beside his head, with a finger.
“And the most curious part of it all? It was your Alton who tipped us off. After that strange meeting with him in the cantina, you can be sure I was not willing to listen to much the man had to say, much less look at him. But he had been ranging in the hills near the town, doing who knows what, when he spied them. I thanked him for the information and since it looked as though we were going to need every hand on deck, as the sailors say, I gave him back his silly little pepperbox. I told him that if he tried to pull it on me again, he had better use it or be prepared to bleed to death, because my gun was bigger than his. I made sure to say this in front of the pretty barmaid, Inga.
“We positioned ourselves around the town, not having the ability or the time or the inclination to flee, intent on picking them off one at a time. They rode in grouped and gabbling together like stupid chickens in a penned yard. We wanted to at least even the odds, you see, so that we might reduce the number of people chasing us when we left.”
Sue Ellen could restrain herself no longer. “Alton would never be part of anything like that. Never!”
“Oh, you mean the man who lied to you, his own wife, about his very name? You mean the man who wanted to shoot me, a stranger, on our very first meeting? You are correct, of course, he didn’t do much shooting that bloody day. No, no, dear Alton was much better with the up-close work. He borrowed a Bowie knife off one of my men and . . . well, let us just
say that never since then have I seen a man behave in so savage a fashion.”
Sue Ellen gasped, sputtered for breath.
Duggins spun from the fire. “Yes, you might well be surprised. I know I was. But as hardened as we were, he was a brute. We only found out later, of course, just what his motives really were.” Duggins turned back to the fireplace, prodded it with the iron poker, then laid two more lengths of wood atop the coals. In moments, their smoky fragrance and the sounds of crackling dry bark filled the room. He strode, stiff-legged, to the sideboard and rattled the cut crystal top off the decanter.
He splashed a liberal amount of Alton’s expensive bourbon into a glass and looked over to Sue Ellen with raised eyebrows.
“No, thank you.”
“I get a thank-you, at least. That’s nice. But come now, I have so much to tell you, and believe me, you’ll want a drink to take the burred edges off some of it. Trust me, dearie.”
She shook her head no, so he topped the decanter and returned to his place by the fire, sipped. “Ahh, nice. So, where was I?”
“Lying to me about my husband.”
“Telling you all about your vicious husband, that’s right.”
Sue Ellen snorted and looked away, but she couldn’t prevent herself from hearing him. And he kept right on talking, curse him. And curse her, she thought, for listening. For wanting to listen to every word. Somehow she believed what he was telling her. At some level, in some deep place, she knew her husband had been something . . . different in a former life, in those times before they were married that he’d not wanted to talk about.
And when he did speak of it, he’d only begrudgingly offered weak, vague information to her. Nothing satisfying. Very little about family. Just that he’d been orphaned by a random act of violence and set adrift, his words, at a young age, left to fend for himself in the world. That alone had endeared him to her. And he’d built their courtship and subsequent marriage on such sad truths. She saw that now.
“We watched him as he advanced on the line of unsuspecting soldiers, creeping out of the shadows, looking for all the world as if he’d done this sort of thing for years—maybe he had, at that—and I determined that Alton must have an ulterior motive, as the smart people call it. And by golly, he did. And a doozy it was. I’d noticed that the soldiers had taken a long time to get to town from the time they were first seen, and determined that they were not the regulars. In fact, the men we’d . . . dealt with earlier . . . had been the only regulars. These men were a special transport troop escorting . . .” He turned to Sue Ellen and smiled, waggled his eyebrows. “Can you guess? No? Okay, I’ll tell you, but only because you are one pretty lady.”
Sue Ellen’s fears increased. As Duggins drank, he became more open with his rank remarks to the point where she was quite uncomfortable, but there wasn’t a thing she could do about it—she was completely in his control.
“Turns out they were transporting looted religious artifacts, worth, and I kid you not, millions of dollars. The gold alone would be enough to cripple ten donkeys. That’s why they had a massive ore wagon loaded and covered with canvas tarpaulins. And the jewels? Oh, I could choke on them for a month of Sundays and still not meet my end!” He turned, smiling, his eyes shining at the notion. “They were . . . stunning, delicious. A sight to behold, so . . . so much! Don’t you see!” He waved his arms, sloshing the whiskey. For a moment, Sue Ellen thought he might actually break into tears, so excited had he become. Then his sly reptilian smile crept back onto his leering scarred face.
“So what did you do about it?”
“What did we do about it, the lady wants to know.”
Faster than she thought possible, given his state of increasing inebriation and his leg’s obvious affliction, he lurched to her side and once again pressed his face close to her ear.
In a deep, husky voice that purred like silk sliding over rusted steel, and with breath that stank of food and whiskey, he said, “What do you think we did? How else would I know what it is they were carrying?” He stood and brayed a drunken laugh, obviously reliving his past glories. “We relieved them of their burden, of course. But it was not so easy. No, no, no. It took many days and many hours of planning and much help, I will say, from the man who knew this load of happy goods was coming our way. You see, he had no choice but to cut us in on the action. I speak of course of your fine, upstanding husband, Alton Winstead or whatever he called himself lately.” He waved his arms and the bourbon splashed, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.
“It seems that he came to Chihuahua knowing they would be there. And he had convinced himself that he would be alone and would do what he had to to liberate—that was a word he used—as much of this bountiful treasure as he was able to, as a lone operative, and make his getaway. Imagine the confidence on this man? Here he was, alone, poorly dressed, armed with a broken pocketknife and a paltry little pepperbox pistol that I’m not sure ever fired properly. Truth be told, I don’t even know if it was fully loaded, and no money, and yet there he was, an American in Mexico, dead set on liberating much of, if not all of, a vast treasure of looted holy gold relics from an entire Mexican army regiment. Now that takes guts. Me and my men? We just lucked into the right place at the right time.”
He paused, slung his head back, and took a long drink, realized his glass was empty, and wobbled over to the sideboard. “Sure I can’t offer you a tipple, m’lady?”
“I don’t believe a word you’re telling me.”
“Oh, it’s all true, I swear it.”
“I don’t doubt that it happened, but my Alton was never involved. If you knew him as you say you do, you’d know there’s no way he could ever have been involved in something so awful as that.”
Duggins closed his eyes, leaned his head back. Sue Ellen saw that the wine, heavy meal, and whiskey were finally having an effect on the man. He weaved slightly in place, his stiff leg held to one side, as a leaning post of sorts. He sniffed. “Perhaps you are correct, Mrs. Winstead.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “Perhaps I am a fool. Perhaps I imagined that story I just told you. It is, after all, rather a fanciful tale, don’t you think?” His canted head told her he was once again toying with her.
“But then again, something tells me”—Duggins once again bent low over her, his whiskey-tinged, tobacco breath clouding her face—“that you know I am telling the truth.” He smiled a wide, long smile, then stood. “Otherwise, how would I account for this?” With that he rapped his knuckle hard against his leg.
The sound was the same Sue Ellen heard every time someone knocked on a table for luck, or a door, begging entry. “Yes, my dear. It’s a wooden thing. All the way up to here.” He rapped the dead-sounding thing higher, halfway up his thigh, to within a hand-length of his waist.
“Perhaps later I will invite you to see just how much of this limb I have lost, eh?”
Sue Ellen felt ill. None of this made any sense. Where was Alton? Why wasn’t he here? What had they done to him? She’d asked them so many times, receiving nothing but leers and laughs and confusing stories. And as much as it pained her to admit it, she had almost lost her curiosity. Almost.
Chapter 8
Ty thumbed the cabin’s front door latch and hustled in low, then shut it swiftly behind him. Uncle Hob, his head down, growled from the far side of the bulky, work-scarred kitchen table. “You mind telling me just why we’re being shot at, and who in the world is doing the shooting?”
But Ty was too busy low-walking over to the pair of waist-high single windows—a rare extravagance for which he’d ordered the glass at no small expense back in the days when he’d thought Sue Ellen would be coming to the ranch as his wife. Now they were a spot by which he and Hob could sit on a snowy evening and watch the sun set.
Though in truth, Ty would prefer to keep them shuttered in the cold weather. But he knew the old man liked to sit there in his rams
hackle rocker, clucking at the empty house, stroking his flea-bitten rangy tomcat, No Ears, so named because, like most toms, he couldn’t keep from getting into scrapes with anything that looked as if it might need a limbing. As a result, the cat sported ragged nubs for ears.
Through the windows, from his low vantage point in one corner, Ty scanned the yard through squinted eyes. He had no intention of answering the whispered sputters of Uncle Hob just yet. Someone, perhaps a couple of someones, had shot at them and though Ty suspected he knew who’d done so, he wanted to know for sure the who, the why, and from where. If he couldn’t catch them alive, he’d gladly drill them where the cowardly bums hid.
“Boy, you’d best come clean with me.” Uncle Hob had somehow crawled over behind Ty. That unnerved the big rancher. He didn’t like the idea of drifting so far into his own thoughts that he wasn’t aware of what was going on around him. Seeing Sue Ellen again, and in such dire straits, had affected him mightily, and in ways he didn’t much like, and which weren’t proving especially useful.
“Uncle Hob,” whispered Ty. “You want to make yourself useful, I’d appreciate a hand—or rather a couple more eyeballs—scouting from the far end of the house toward the north. I have a feeling we have two visitors, one closer up, one hanging back up there. Maybe we can catch him skylined up there before the light leaves us wanting.”
The old man grunted and presently Ty heard him low-crawl back to the bedroom at the far end of the small house. The bedroom would be the safest place for him. Hob could play heck with a man on a daily basis, wearing his nerves down like rain on a rock, but he was the best man Ty could ask for in a pinch. Unquestioning, decisive, and with a long history as a lawdog, Uncle Hob was one of the best, especially in a situation where they were pretty much cornered in their own shack.
“Was me,” came Hob’s raspy whisper from the back room, “I’d chuck a torch in this direction. I only hope whoever it is out there ain’t half as smart as me.” His soft cackle brought a momentary smile to Ty’s face. This was a long, strange day, and he had a feeling they were in for a long, stranger night to come.
Ralph Compton Double-Cross Ranch Page 6