Six Days to Sundown

by Paul Lederer

  ‘Nothing. Don’t blame yourself.’

  ‘Marly!’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ she answered, She had already bundled up in order to slip out and summon the leaders of the wagon train.

  ‘You’ll stay with me, won’t you, Casey?’ the colonel asked.

  ‘I think it’s probably better if you talk to them by yourself.’ He added, ‘I haven’t really made a lot of friends among them. Just point out that I’m here and Joe Duggan is gone. That might give them enough to think about.’

  With that, Casey himself clambered down from the wagon. He had it in mind to first try to do something for Checkers – at least unsaddle him and rub him down even if he could find no feed. Let the colonel have his talk with the leaders of the wagon train. It might be enough to let them see the mistake they had made in stopping here at Joe Duggan’s urging.

  Returning to where he had left Checkers, Casey began leading the roughly used Appaloosa across the camp. Here and there he saw lanterns flicker on behind the canvas walls of the wagons, heard men grumbling, an occasional curse as they were summoned from their beds for the meeting.

  She came from out of nowhere.

  Holly Bates had not been there one moment and the next she was, her blonde hair streaming down across her shoulders. She held a heavy robe of some sort clutched at her throat. Starlight caught her blue eyes and she smiled deeply.

  ‘I didn’t expect to see you again, Casey.’

  ‘That’s what everyone keeps saying.’

  She turned and walked along beside him as Casey led the horse. ‘Do you know Jeff Dannover?’ Holly asked. ‘No matter. He’s got some hay bales in his freight wagon. He won’t miss what it will take to feed your horse.

  ‘Then,’ Holly said, with a sigh, ‘we have to have a talk, Casey.’ She paused, stepped in front of him and took both of his arms in her small hands.

  ‘Do we?’ he asked, looking down into her eyes.

  She nodded. ‘Yes, there are still some things you don’t understand, though I suppose you’ve guessed plenty by now.’

  Jeff Dannover was apparently at the meeting at the colonel’s wagon. Most of an already broken bale of hay rested against the plank bed of Dannover’s wagon. Using only his hands, Casey scooped out a pile of feed for Checkers who started nibbling at it immediately. Casey tethered Checkers to the wagon and turned to face Holly who had been watching patiently, silently in the chill of the night.

  Tilting back his hat. Casey asked, ‘Now then – what was it that you had to tell me?’

  ‘It’s a little complicated,’ the blonde answered hesitantly, her eyes turning down briefly. ‘And it’s not something I care to talk about where anyone might overhear me.’ She turned her head and lifted her chin toward a nearby snow-patched stand of pines. ‘Let’s walk away from prying eyes and curious ears.’

  ‘All right,’ Casey agreed. With his rifle in hand, he escorted Holly into the darkness of the pine shadows: Overhead, stars winked through the upper reaches of the tall trees. Holly was frowning as if she were still undecided. Finally she nodded with decisiveness and shrugged and sighed at once. Casey had leaned his rifle up against a tree after assuring himself that no ambushers lurked in the shadows. He let the girl gather her thoughts as the cold, chilling wind worked its way through the pines.

  ‘I’ve made up my mind now,’ Holly said finally. ‘At first I wasn’t sure I really wanted to tell you this, but it makes no difference, does it? Since I’m going to kill you as soon as I’ve finished talking.’

  EIGHT

  Casey could only stare at the beautiful, blonde-haired woman. In Holly’s hand was a small nickel-plated pistol she had been carrying concealed in the folds of her robe. Starlight glinted off the deadly little weapon which was clenched firmly in her right hand.

  ‘I suppose I should have known,’ Casey said. He inched forward, but Holly’s foot swept out, knocking his propped rifle to the ground where Casey could not reach it without diving toward it. His own revolver was in its holster, hidden behind the skirt of his coat. The girl’s teeth had begun to chatter; there was a strange excitement in her eyes.

  ‘You’re out here in wild country you don’t belong in. I should have guessed that you were working with McCoy,’ Casey said. Astonishingly Holly began to laugh. To laugh wildly until there were tears in her eyes. Puzzled, Casey could only stare al her.

  ‘Fool!’ she spat. ‘Don’t you understand? I am McCoy! There’s a reason I’m out here, all right. To keep an eye on the gang of incompetents I’ve surrounded myself with. Half of them can’t wipe their noses without instructions.

  ‘My real name is Genevieve McCoy. Once I got into the business world I started to use “Gervase”. All important papers I simply sign with “G. McCoy” to avoid any legal sticking points that might arise.’

  ‘I still don’t understand why you’re doing this,’ Casey said. The pistol in the young woman’s hand was unwavering. She smiled humorlessly, perhaps reflecting, and then her sharp tone of voice returned.

  ‘Money! Can that be so hard to understand? Do you have any idea how hard it is for a woman to make her way out on the plains? That’s why I always send someone like Duggan to take care of the tasks of commerce. No one takes a female cattle buyer, a land speculator seriously. And I mean to be taken very seriously, Casey, I mean to have their respect even if it is surrogate respect.

  ‘When my parents brought me out on to the long plains, Dad built a soddy like the thousands of others you see scattered around and about. That was what we had: the soddy, a garden and two horses. The Indians had more than we did, by far. When the first winter set in, the roof of the soddy began to sag, the cold winds to blow drift-snow up against the northern wall so that we couldn’t even see outside on a bright day. One of my jobs was scraping away snow from the ground to look for frozen buffalo chips which I’d carry back to the house in my apron to use for cooking fuel.

  ‘Mother, I believe, started to go mad early on. The smoky close confines of the house, the snow piled six to ten feet high in the yard, nothing to eat but the rawest sort of meals made chiefly from roots. A year to the day after we had arrived in Montana, Mother died. Just lay down and never rose again. We had to wait for the spring thaw to bury her.’ Holly – Genevieve – fell into a dark reverie again. Overhead the tips of the pines swayed in the light breeze. The stars still shone. The moon was low on the horizon, painting the snow fields with a soft yellow sheen.

  ‘The month after Mother was buried, Dad finally got what he had been expecting all that time – a small inheritance from a distant uncle. He rode off toward town, waving his hat merrily. It seemed as if we were going to have some kind of luck after all.

  ‘Of course, Dad never did have a stroke of luck, poor or otherwise. Well, you’ve seen him now.’

  ‘I have seen your father?’ Casey asked in bewilderment. Genevieve smiled thinly.

  ‘Oh, I thought you knew everything by now, Casey,’ she said with a hint of mockery. ‘I brought Dad with me. He’s driving my wagon.

  ‘The mute! The thin, pale man?’

  ‘Yes, that’s my Dad. Lester McCoy, by name. You see,’ she said, tossing her head so that the fall of golden hair rearranged itself charmingly, ‘He had gone to town to purchase a few supplies for us, but he was lured into a frontier saloon. The word must have gotten around that he had a little money. There are always people willing to take advantage.’

  Casey nodded his understanding.

  ‘They caught him in a back alley and beat him savagely. I watched him hover near death for weeks. Finally he recovered enough to dress himself and do simple chores – but he was never able to talk again. Those men had crushed a vital portion of his skull.’

  Genevieve continued. Her story might have brought an upwelling of sympathy if Casey wasn’t well aware of what the girl had become.

  ‘Some of the inheritance money had been set aside at home for future use. I went to the little hoard. I rode to Bismarck by myself. When I got there
, I found a hotel room and bought the local newspaper.…’

  ‘And then?’ Casey prompted.

  ‘Then I started to buy land! Busted landholdings, slivers of land here and there. I swore I would never be poor again. You can lose almost anything – you can be robbed, a bank can go under – but you cannot lose your land. I thought of buying cattle, but that would have to wait until later. As long as I had land, I had leverage. I cheated men; I lied to them; I hired thugs for a quart of whiskey each to run farmers off their property. I purchased a set of lawbooks when I was living in that hotel room. I still have them in the library in my big house. I pored over those at night, looking for new ways to get what I wanted.’

  ‘More land?’

  ‘Yes, and the power that goes with it! I’ve never sold a single square foot of property and I never will.’

  ‘What got you interested in Sundown?’ Casey asked. He continued to try to edge closer to the woman, but she was having none of it. The muzzle of her pistol remained steadily trained on him.

  ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? I knew about the contract the army had with Reese-Fargo. It is a part of my business to know everything that is going on where development is concerned. Think of the opportunity this presented me – the riverboat company needs to have facilities built. The boatmen need to have sleeping accommodation and prepared food when they arrive upriver. Freighters and wagons will have to be provided to transport materiel overland to Fort Benton.’

  She went on, ‘When the good weather arrives, soldiers on leave from the post will flood the town eager to spend their back pay. What is there for them to buy at Fort Benton? Where else can they spend their money within two hundred miles? Those men, too, will be fully accommodated, in every way possible. Sundown – whatever I choose to finally name it – will be a fully functioning town … and I will own every inch of land it sits on, every stick of wood it’s built from.’

  Casey shook his head heavily. Quietly he told Genevieve, ‘You are a sad and pathetic little woman.’

  ‘Me!’ Genevieve said in astonishment. ‘What about you, Casey? Pathetic, am I? You don’t even own a horse. And those friends of yours have not offered you so much as the tiniest, roughest parcel of land along the river. I never could understand why you chose to throw your lot in with them, to fight for that ungrateful crowd.’

  ‘No,’ Casey said after a moment’s sorrowful reflection, ‘I don’t suppose you could understand it. Tell me, Genevieve, why is it that you want to kill me.’

  ‘Why?’ She tossed her golden curls again. ‘At times I think you’re a clever man, Casey, at others I think you’re no smarter than the fools I have working for me – all of those rough-riding men without enough sense or gumption to shoot you down. You are in my way, Casey, that’s all. Word fairly flies through this camp. I know you want to try to make a midnight drive toward Sundown.’

  ‘I doubt they’ll agree to it,’ he said honestly. ‘I also seriously doubt that it can even be done.’

  ‘I can’t take that chance, Casey. I tried to convince you back down the trail that you were making a mistake. Funny,’ she said, with a shadow of wistfulness, ‘men almost always do what I tell them to do.’

  ‘They’ll catch on to you, Genevieve. When they find me out here, dead, you standing over me with a gun.’

  ‘It won’t be that way, Casey. I’ve thought about it. Nobody in this camp likes you; I’m everybody’s darling. You lured me out here and then you got rough. I’ll be in pitiful condition when the shots summon the camp. Weeping, trembling, my robe half-torn away from me. They’ll say it wasn’t my fault, that it was lucky I had my pistol with me.

  ‘Don’t you see, Casey? I knew you were trouble from the first time I saw you. When the colonel appointed you wagon master I nearly panicked. Now you’ve shown up again.’ She shrugged her shoulders, ‘There’s nothing else to do. Sorry.’ She aimed the nickel-plated pistol and two shots, one on the heels of the other, rang out in the forest copse.

  Casey flinched reflexively; put his hand to his chest. But he had not been hit. How could she miss at that range?

  Because Genevieve had never fired her gun. No smoke curled from its muzzle.

  Marly stepped out of the shadows with her father’s pistol held loosely at her side. ‘I didn’t want to do that, Casey. I thought that maybe after she had talked herself out … I did not want to do that!’

  She stepped to Casey then and wrapped her slender arms around his waist. He stroked her abundant dark hair as shouts rose down in the camp and the sounds of excited men rushing in their direction came clearly through the cold night.

  ‘How much did you hear?’ Casey asked, tilting his head back to look down at Marly.

  ‘Almost all of it.’

  ‘Good. Then if we can get the others to listen to what we have to say, perhaps we can get this wagon train moving west by midnight.’

  ‘They must listen!’ Marly said emphatically. She was clinging to the lapels of his coat. The pistol had fallen to the snowy ground.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘What you said to Holly – Genevieve – whatever her name is, was it true? That we probably have no chance of reaching Sundown overnight no matter what we do?’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Casey said again, more doubtfully. He put his arm around Marly and they started from the pines as a band of armed men, fearing that the Shadow Riders had attacked once more, rushed toward them.

  They were confronted angrily by settlers with drawn guns before they could make it far. One man rushed past them, discovered Holly’s body and called back, ‘Storm has killed the Bates girl!’

  The mob surged forward in a fury. At the forefront was the red-bearded Mike Barrow, a shotgun leveled at Casey Storm’s mid-section. Casey could pick out Doc and Art Bailey among the crowd, the others were faceless in the shadows of the pines. They had one thing in common: they were in a murderous rage. All around Casey were the sounds of vengeful anger. Mike Barrow egged them on.

  ‘Get a rope! A man who would shoot down a woman—’

  ‘He didn’t do it!’ Marly said, her voice a near-shriek. She placed herself protectively in front of Casey. ‘I did it! I did it because she was trying to kill Casey. If you’ll took under her body, you’ll find the pistol she intended to use.’

  The stout, confused Art Bailey stuttered a question. ‘You, Marly? Why would you kill her? Why would Holly want to kill Casey Storm?’

  The man who had slipped past them called from beside Holly’s body. ‘There’s a pistol here, all right. On full cock, too.’

  ‘What’s that prove?’ Mike Barrow demanded. ‘She was probably trying to defend herself.’

  ‘She was trying to murder me,’ Casey said in a calm voice. ‘After she told me the truth of things.’

  ‘What are you talking about!’ Barrow shouted wildly.

  ‘You already know, Barrow, You were working for her. You and Joe Duggan.’

  ‘You’re crazy as hell. I hardly knew the woman.’

  ‘You knew her well enough to follow every instruction she gave you,’ Casey said. ‘Even to murder.’

  ‘Holly Bates?’ Doc said in disbelief, ‘Why that little girl—’

  ‘Her name wasn’t Holly Bates,’ Marly said, spreading her arms pleading ‘I know it; Casey knows it; Joe Duggan knows it; Mike Barrow knows it.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot of imagination, Marly,’ Mike Barrow said with a crooked sneer, ‘What was this all about up here? A lover’s triangle—’

  ‘There’s one other person who knows that wasn’t her name. She was his daughter.’ Casey’s eyes shifted toward the pale, gaunt man who stood helplessly on the fringe of the group, his bony fingers clenching and unclenching. ‘Isn’t that so, Mr McCoy?’ Casey asked the mute.

  Lester McCoy’s dismal eyes met Casey’s and as the others watched him, he slowly nodded, pushed his way through the mob and went to where the beautiful woman lay spread against the cold earth.

  ‘You called him McCoy?’ Art
Bailey asked.

  ‘That’s right. That’s his name. Her name was Genevieve McCoy – Gervase for business purposes. Isn’t that so, Barrow?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Mike Barrow said unconvincingly. The astonishment on his face at being suddenly found out was deep. He was obviously shaken.

  ‘I think we’d better talk about this,’ Doc said quietly.

  ‘I think we had,’ Casey agreed. Staggering, stumbling, Lester McCoy passed through them again, carrying the limp body of his daughter. His haunted eyes were unfocused, his speechless mouth agape. Tears streaked down his ghastly cheeks.

  Guns were holstered. Even Mike Barrow let the muzzle of his shotgun lower.

  The men started back toward the camp, but Casey halted them with a commanding voice. ‘One minute. You’ve already met with the colonel. He’s told you why I mean to make a midnight run toward Sundown. You didn’t all agree; I didn’t think you would. Now I – and Marly – are going to relate the rest of what we know – what McCoy admitted to me. It won’t take long, because I’ll keep it as short as I can so that we don’t waste time that could better he spent making preparations. But if any of you, after listening to what we have to say, still wants to wait here for an army patrol that is never coming … God have mercy on your stubborn souls.’

  Marly had retrieved Casey’s rifle for him; now he levered in a round and pointed the weapon at Mike Barrow.

  ‘You, Barrow, I’ll give you one chance. Ride out of the camp now, before these people know you for what you are. After they’ve heard us out, it will be you they want to string up!’

  Barrow did not even pause to answer. Growling a single curse, he spun away and started marching back toward the camp where his tethered pony awaited. The men in the mob frowned or shrugged their shoulders. It was obvious that there had to be something to what Casey was saying. Otherwise, why would the always obstinate Mike Barrow be so quick to take to his heels, to simply ride out alone on the long Montana plains?

  ‘Do you think that was a mistake?’ Marly asked in near whisper.