by Jo Goodman
When she had backed him into the washroom, she slammed the door shut and leaned against it just long enough to catch her breath. On the other side of the door, Marcie stopped howling and began to whimper. She imagined that he was checking the condition of his parts. Jane doubted that she had cut off his penis but wondered if perhaps what she had done was not worse. There was so much blood, so much bright red blood, that she thought she might have cut into his femoral artery.
“There are towels in there. Use them to press hard on your injuries.”
“Go to hell, lady. I’m gonna bleed all over your goddamn floor.”
It occurred to Jane that he was angry enough that he might live after all. She dropped the paring knife in her apron pocket and walked to the other side of the wardrobe. She put her shoulder against it and heaved. Her feet slid on the floor and the wardrobe did not budge. She dug in again and pushed harder. This time it slid inches. Again, and it moved far enough to block half the washroom door. She stopped using her shoulder and put her back into it instead. The wardrobe moved the rest of the way.
Jane stood on tiptoes to reach Marcie’s gun and holster. She caught the edge of the belt with her fingertips and pulled it toward the edge. She carefully took it down and removed the gun from the holster. After tossing the belt aside, she opened the cylinder, saw that all chambers were loaded, and closed it again.
Satisfied, she went to the adjoining bedroom and freed Max. She gave him Marcie’s gun. She picked up Morgan’s Colt on her way to the kitchen. It was lying on the floor just where Gideon had kicked it. She set it on the table while she untied Rabbit.
“Are you hurt, Mrs. Longstreet?” It was Rabbit’s first question when she removed his gag. It was the same one Max had asked.
Jane looked down at herself. Her apron front was stained with blood. Marcie’s blood. “I’m fine.”
Rabbit’s cheeks ballooned as he blew out a long breath, and then he dared to ask the question that Max had not. “Did you really cut off his piss whistle?”
• • •
Ted Rush was the first person Morgan recognized when he waded into the crowd. He put Finn in Ted’s arms and told him to take him to Dr. Kent. “Finn will tell you everything. Send Bridger after me.” He grabbed Ted by the collar when the man stared dumbly at him. “Send the marshal after me!”
Morgan let him go, spun on his heels, and ran off toward the alley. Someone in the crowd must have thought it would be a good idea to shoot him first and sort it out later because he heard Finn scream with bloodcurdling ferocity to drop the gun. So much for the ordinance against carrying.
He ducked into the alley and ran to the back of the bank. He untied Condor, but it was Sophie that he mounted. If the gelding could keep up, he was welcome to come.
Morgan took the straight route out of town that none of them had discussed going in. He wanted to be noticed now. He and Sophie emerged from the alley as if they had been catapulted from a slingshot. The crowd scattered, and no one tried to shoot him this time. Their trail down the middle of the street was as true as a compass needle and as quick as a bead of mercury.
• • •
Avery surrendered without drawing his weapon except to toss it on the bunkhouse floor. It pained him some that he was outmaneuvered by a man who could only see out of one eye and a woman who had to hold her gun in two hands to keep it steady. They had him crosswise before he knew what was happening. His chest made for a very large target.
The boy entered when they called for him and cut through the ropes that secured all three Davis brothers to the bunkhouse’s center post and to each other. They stood, shook out their cramped limbs, massaged their wrists, and then took turns raining blows on Avery’s head, his stomach, and occasionally his groin. Jem, in particular, seemed to enjoy every punch he landed.
They stopped when Mrs. Longstreet called a halt, but by then, Avery was already on his knees.
The brothers made the same short work of tying him up as they had of beating him up.
• • •
Once Morgan set Sophie on her course, he never looked back. He carried no timepiece except the one in his head. He counted out the seconds, the minutes, and he, the godless man, prayed that he would arrive in time.
• • •
Rabbit brought the buckboard to the front of the house. He was flanked by Jem and Jake on one side and Jessop and Max on the other. They were mounted, ready to ride. There had been no debate, no disagreement when Jane had said they must go. They were waiting for her now because she had gone back into the house at the last moment. There was something she had to do, she told them, before she went out to meet Morgan.
They let her go. Not one of them would stand in the way of her unwavering faith that Morgan was coming back.
When she left them, she was wearing her black velvet hat with the spray of scarlet poppies. When she returned, the hat was gone, replaced by a red woolen scarf. It covered her hair and wrapped around her throat. The long fringed tails were knotted once.
Rabbit held out his hand to help her up. She thanked him, thanked all of them, and then the wagon began to roll.
• • •
Morgan saw them as silhouettes. Four men on horseback, two people in a wagon. He thought Sophie must have seen them, too, because she dug deep and flew. The last hundred yards were a blur, but Sophie’s speed did not wholly account for it.
• • •
Jane jumped out of the wagon before Rabbit brought it to a full stop. She spread her arms high and wide as Morgan pulled Sophie up hard and threw himself out of the saddle. His momentum carried him into Jane’s embrace. He lifted her off her feet. She held on as he spun them round and round. She thought his shout of joy, of relief, rode the wind all the way back to Bitter Springs.
He set her down and cupped her face. He kissed hard. He kissed long. He unwound her scarf to thread his fingers in her hair . . . and stopped.
“Jane?” He felt for pins, for combs. There were none. He gently ran his hand over the crown of her dark hair until he reached the blunt, cropped ends at the level of her jaw. The ragged cut went all the way around. Sifting through it with his fingertips, Morgan bent his head and placed his mouth against her ear. “You are my life, Jane. Whatever’s been done, this will grow back.”
It was then that his strong, fearless warrior wife burst into tears.
Epilogue
May 1892
Morning Star Ranch
Jane and Morgan stood on the front porch of their home to see the last of their guests off. Jane waved. Morgan alternated between nodding and tapping his hat brim with a fingertip. They both smiled, though, and that was the lasting impression they made on every person who rode away that night.
People had begun arriving at Morning Star in the early afternoon. They brought hot, covered dishes, and cold ones packed in dry ice. Walt Mangold and Mrs. Sterling arrived with cases of liquor and a keg from the Pennyroyal. Morgan and his men roasted a cow and two pigs. Cobb Bridger brought his wife and new baby and a crate of fireworks he had ordered special from St. Louis for the occasion. The mayor came with his fiddle and two banjos and had no trouble finding folks to pick and strum.
Jem Davis proposed to his sweetheart, again, but he was feeling the drink by then and no one was certain if he would remember that this time she said yes. Ted Rush stayed close to the liquor and told stories to folks who did not mind hearing them, again. Finn stationed himself behind the smokehouse and showed off his badge of courage to anyone who paid Rabbit a penny to see it. When his granny caught him with his pants down wiggling his hip at Priscilla Taylor, she took a broom to both boys, again.
It was the best kind of day, perfect, peaceful, and in a good way, predictable.
The picnic was Jane’s idea, and Morgan fell in with her plans because opposing them would have put him in the bunkhouse. There still had been snow on the ground when she conceived of the idea, and on one of her trips to Bitter Springs, she put it to Ida Mae Sterling. At that j
uncture, only a calamity of biblical proportions could have stopped it from happening.
There had been no calamities in Bitter Springs since the night of the robbery at the Cattlemen’s Trust Bank. Ted Rush was still trying to name the event because he thought it deserved that kind of notoriety in the town’s collective memory, and because he played such a critical role in saving Finn’s life. After all, Morgan Longstreet singled him out to take young Finn to the doctor, and Ted had sacrificed his good wool coat to the boy’s bloody wound. Most everyone learned that very night that while the ricochet from Gideon Welling’s gun had cut a furrow in Finn’s thigh, the injury never veered toward fatal. They let Ted go on because he was a force of nature on the order of a howling wind and sometimes you just had to hunker down and let him blow.
Folks knew now that when the first shots were fired, Marshal Cobb Bridger was at the station house talking to Jeff and Heather Collins regarding the whereabouts of their rascal grandsons. As Cobb would recollect later, the gun reports were so distorted by distance and obstructions that he did not recognize them for what they were. Jefferson Collins had heard them as well, but he had checked his watch thinking it was an approaching train and that he had mistaken the time. Heather had tilted her head to one side and cupped the ear she generally kept close to the ground, but in the end, had only shrugged.
Cobb was curious, but he wanted to finish his conversation about the boys. By any measure that he applied, Finn and Rabbit were late returning to town, and he was of a mind to go after them. First, though, he needed to know if Mr. or Mrs. Collins had an explanation for the boys’ tardiness that he was not privy to.
The station agent and his wife were discussing that be- tween themselves when the next incongruous report echoed their way. Frowning, Cobb put up a finger to halt their conversation and walked to the station entrance and opened the door. He stepped out, waited, and . . .
Drop the gun! It came to him clearly, a youthful, earnest voice as familiar to him as his own. He ran to the edge of the platform then and peered down the street. He could see that people were congregating in front of the bank, and moments later, he recognized Morgan Longstreet, hat in hand, red hair as bright as a signal flare, charging out of the alley and riding hell for leather toward Morning Star.
Cobb had wasted no time mounting his horse and riding straight for the crowd. Finn was waving a gun, screaming and squirming to get out of Ted Rush’s arms, but when he saw Cobb, he flung the gun to the ground and began to sob. The bystanders provided some help interpreting Finn’s disjointed story, although Cobb had a sense of the whole of it long before they did. He quickly deputized Jim Phillips and George and Buster Johnson to handle the growing crowd, the bank, and the bodies, and then he set off out of town.
He had come upon Jane and Morgan sheltering in each other’s arms about a mile short of the ranch. He slowed his horse when he saw them and gave them a wide berth, joining the group he saw up ahead instead.
Their version of events at the ranch was about as disjointed as Finn’s had been, but Cobb understood enough to recognize he had at least one arrest to make, and maybe two, if Marcie was still alive. If he wasn’t, then there was a body to remove and a washroom to scrub before he was allowing Jane to go near her home.
He deputized Max and the Davis brothers, just so they knew they were answering to him for the time being, not Morgan Longstreet. He turned them around, and they headed back to the house. He was not even sure that Morgan and Jane knew they were leaving.
Marcie was not dead, or even castrated, but he had bled like a stuck pig—which they all agreed was an apt description—so there was plenty of work for them to do in the washroom to make it right. Rabbit was sent to sit on the front porch to direct Jane to stay outside when she and Morgan returned. No one wanted to tend to Marcie’s wounds once they got a good look at them, so Cobb gave him a wadded towel to stuff down his trousers, and Jessop and Jake carried him out to the bunkhouse to keep Avery company.
Cobb made a final inspection of the house before pronouncing it fit for Jane’s return. Jake cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, and dealt with the firebox and ash pan in the dragon. Max removed the remnants of the torn sheets that had been used to tie him to the bed and straightened the covers. Jessop put away the folded linens that were sitting on the rocking chair in Jane’s room, and placed her hairpins and combs in a shallow dish on the dresser with others like them. Jem and Cobb walked the wardrobe side to side until they put it back where the markings on the floor indicated it belonged. Jem admitted he was confounded that a slip of woman like Mrs. Longstreet could move it on her own, but Cobb had some experience with women who could move heaven and earth if they had a mind to. For any one of them, a full wardrobe was hardly challenging.
Cobb gave Marcie’s gun belt to Jem along with an armload of bloody towels for burning. As Jem left by the back door, Cobb opened the front one and invited Morgan and Jane into their own home. He thought he had accounted for everything until Morgan helped Jane off with her coat, and he saw the bloody condition of her apron. She had followed the direction of his glance and quickly tore it off, but not so quickly that Morgan had not gotten an eyeful. While he and Morgan were still staring at each other, Jane ducked between them and went straight to the front room’s hearth where Cobb had built a welcoming fire. She took something from the apron’s pocket that Morgan and Cobb only recognized as a paring knife when she held it up to the light. She regarded it for a long moment and then tossed it and the apron into the fire.
Cobb stayed long enough to hear what happened from all sides and not a moment longer. He told them later it was like conducting an orchestra where none of the musicians could read sheet music.
He had his own part to tell, the most important being that armed with several well-reasoned arguments—and his gun—he had convinced Mr. Webb at the Cattlemen’s Trust that the only way to save his bank was to let Morgan Longstreet rob it. That was the plan they had come to the afternoon Morgan and Jane sat in his office and discussed protection. Morgan believed his brother would ask him to crack the Barkley and Benjamin, and Cobb was inclined to agree. They talked about whether he could really do it, but in the end decided it could not be left to chance. Morgan alone was given the combination to the safe, Cobb put a gun inside it, the iron bar was deliberately not placed across the bank’s rear entrance, and Mr. Webb lived in such a state of anxiety from one day to the next that even his medicinal sarsaparilla in blends that exceeded twelve percent alcohol failed to calm his nerves or ease his rheumatism.
Dixon Evers was the only casualty of the robbery, although it looked for a while as though Marcellus Cooley might succumb to infection. Doc Kent eventually pronounced him fit enough to hang. It was not the part he played in the thwarted robbery, or even the attempted rape, that drew the death sentence from Judge Darlington. It was the cattle rustling. Cobb Bridger tracked down a branding inspector at the Rawlins station who remembered Marcie bringing in some cattle with an unregistered brand. The closest markings the inspector could find belonged to the Morning Star ranch, but the bars at the top and bottom meant the iron was not a match. He did not have time to investigate his suspicions, but he did not allow Marcie to sell the cattle at his station. The inspector proved to be a good witness at trial.
Marcie would not turn on Avery or Gideon, so there was nothing to connect them to the cattle thieving except common sense. Judge Darlington liked the idea of hanging Avery Butterfield for the company he kept, but ruled with the law instead. Avery was fined five hundred dollars for being offensive in the eyes of the court and thrown in jail until he figured out a way to pay it.
Gideon had another charge that separated him from his men. He had confessed to killing Zetta Lee Welling, and he had made this admission in front of Morgan and Jane Longstreet as well as the two young deputies who had been sworn in earlier that day. The sheriff in Fremont County cleared the way for Gideon to be tried in Bitter Springs. No one thought that jurisdiction should
stand in the way of jurisprudence.
Judge Darlington gave considerable weight to the statements made by Marshal Cobb Bridger’s deputies. He heard testimony from the Longstreets first and certainly found them credible, but he made no secret of the fact that he, like everyone else crowded into the room that day, was looking forward to what the young lawmen had to say.
Rabbit presented the facts gravely and gave a good accounting of the events and Gideon Welling’s declaration of guilt. When Finn took the witness chair, he eased into it slowly and carefully, reminding the court that he had been shot, although his wound was considerably healed by then. He related Gideon’s confession and how it had come about, and no one, not even his grandmother, doubted his veracity. He also managed to insert the story of how he had pissed on Marcie’s leg and told him it was raining.
Gideon Welling hanged the following day.
• • •
Jane slipped her hand into Morgan’s and pulled him toward the porch swing. “Come. They’re gone. I cannot hear them any longer.” She turned her head a little and listened. “No, not even Rabbit or Finn.”
Morgan sat and gave Jane’s hand a tug. She followed him onto the swing and drew her legs up. “Are you pleased with yourself?” he asked.
“Can’t you tell?”
“You look pleased, but then you glow all the time now.”
Chuckling, she drew his hand to her belly. It had a curve that he could palm with his hand. “I am very pleased with myself.” She gave him a little poke in his side. “And with you. You were a good host, and I think you might have actually enjoyed yourself.”
“I am not admitting to that.”
“Mrs. Sterling noticed it.”
“She’s not always right.”
“True. She was right about my pregnancy, though, and she will always be able to claim it. When I looked around at our guests today, I don’t think there was anyone here who did not know before I did, including you, and they still take some perverse delight in telling me that. The women, that is. The men don’t dare.”