by Jon E. Lewis
Captain Hollander’s face twisted in remorse as he listened. The hunters had been right; if he had followed them his troops would have reached water sooner than they did. Perhaps Esau Nettles and Private Nash would not be dead; perhaps others would not still be missing.
Lieutenant Judson tried to reassure him. “You used your best judgment based on the facts at hand, Frank.You knew this water was here. You couldn’t know there was water where the hunters wanted to go. They were just guessing. What if they had been wrong?You had the responsibility for all these men. Those hunters could gamble. You could not.”
Gideon knew Judson was right, as Hollander had been. But he could see the doubt settling into the captain’s eyes. As long as Hollander lived, it would be there, the questions coming upon him suddenly in the darkness of a sleepless night, in the midst of his pondering upon other decisions he would be called upon to make in the future. To the end of his life, Hollander would be haunted by Esau Nettles and the others, and the unanswered question: did it have to be? Gideon looked at him. It was one of the few times in his life he had ever genuinely pitied a white man.
Gideon wrestled awhile with his doubts, then approached the captain hesitantly. “Sir . . .” He took off his hat and abused it fearfully in his nervous hands. “Sir, you done right. Old Sergeant, he’d of said so hisself, if he could. He’d of said you always done right.”
Hollander stared at the ground a long time before he looked up at Gideon. “Thank you, Ledbetter. There’s not a man I’d rather hear that from than you . . . and him.”
Early on the fifth day, having sent out search parties and having given up hope that any stragglers still out would ever turn up alive, Hollander ordered the company to march southward to the supply camp. Water there was better, and timber along the creek would provide shade. The trip was slow and hot and dry, and Gideon found himself skirting along the edge of fear as terrible memories forced themselves upon him.
Late on the afternoon of the sixth day, a column of mounted men and two army ambulances broke through a veil of dust out of the south. A rider loped ahead of the column, pulling up in the edge of camp. He was the civilian scout Pat Maloney, from the village of Ben Ficklin. He whooped in delight as he saw Captain Hollander and Lieutenant Judson standing beside a wagon.
“Frank Hollander! Dammit, man, we thought you were dead!”
He pumped Hollander’s hand excitedly, but that was not enough. The ex-Confederate gripped the Union officer’s arms and shook him in a violence of joy. “Tell you the God’s truth, Frank, we come to hunt for your body. We thought every man jack of you had died.”
His gaze swept the camp. Gideon felt the scout’s eyes stop momentarily on him and Jimbo, lighting with pleasure at the sight of them.
Hollander replied gravely, “A few of us are dead. The best of us, perhaps.”
Maloney looked around a second time, his face going grim as he missed Nettles. “The old sergeant?”
Hollander looked at the ground. “We buried him.”
Maloney was silent a moment. “We thought from what we heard that we would have to bury you all!” He explained that Sergeant Waters had somehow made it back to Fort Concho, with two others. They had brought a report that Captain Hollander and all his men had been led astray by Indians on that great hostile plain, that they and all those buffalo hunters were dying from heat and thirst. They were certain, Waters reported, that no one except themselves had survived.
Maloney pointed to the approaching column. “You can imagine how that news tore up the post at Concho.”
Apprehension struck Hollander. “My wife . . . Adeline. She heard that?”
“Everybody heard it.”
“She must be half out of her mind. This, and the baby coming . . . We’ll have to send word back right away.”
Maloney smiled. “You know I got me a new baby boy, Frank?”
Hollander seemed not quite to hear him. “That’s good, Pat. Glad to hear it.” But his mind was clearly elsewhere.
Maloney said, “Who knows? He may grow up to marry that little girl your wife had. Join the North and South together again, so to speak.”
Hollander’s eyes widened. He had heard that. “A girl, you say? You’ve seen it?”
“Went by there last thing before I left the post. She looks like her mother. Damn lucky thing, too, because her papa looks like hell.”
The trip back to Fort Concho was made slowly and carefully, for more men were afoot than on horseback, and none had completely regained strength. At times even the civilian Maloney would step down from his horse and walk awhile, letting some tired black trooper ride.
Messengers had carried the news of their approach ahead of them, so that most of the people of Saint Angela were lined up to watch the arrival of men who had come back from the dead. An escort and fresh horses were sent out from the post. Hollander and Judson and Maloney rode at the head of the column. Gideon was behind them, urging the men to sit straight and look like soldiers that Esau Nettles would have wanted to claim.
Ordinarily they would not have ridden down the street, but this was an occasion, and the escort wanted to show them off. Lined along Concho Avenue were civilians of all ages, sizes and colors, white to brown to black. Most cheered the soldiers as they passed, though Gideon looked into some eyes and found there the same hostility he had always seen. Nothing, not even the ordeal the soldiers had been through, had changed that. Nothing ever would.
Two-thirds of the way down to Oakes Street, a seedy, bearded man leaned against a post that held up the narrow porch of a new but already-dingy little saloon. As Hollander came abreast of him the man shouted, “Say, Captain, why didn’t you do us all a favor and leave the rest of them damned niggers out there?”
Hollander stiffened. He turned in the saddle, rage bursting into his face. He freed his right foot from the stirrup and started to dismount. Maloney caught his arm. “Frank, you ain’t got your strength back.”
Maloney swung slowly and casually to the ground, handed his reins to Gideon and walked up to the man with a dry and dangerous smile set like concrete. He crouched, and when his fist came up it was like a sledge. The man’s head snapped back, then his whole body followed. He slid across the little porch, winding up half in and half out of the open front door.
Maloney looked first to one side, then the other, challenging one and all. Nobody took up his challenge. He reached down for the struggling man.
“Here, friend, let me help you up.”
When the man was on his feet, Maloney hit him again, knocking him through the door and into the saloon. With a wink, he took his reins from Gideon’s hand, swung back into the saddle and gave the silent Hollander a nod.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
The Bandit
LOREN D. ESTLEMAN (1952–) was born at Ann Arbor, Michigan. He matriculated at Eastern Michigan University at Ypsilanti, and then worked as a reporter and journalist. Since 1980 he has been a fulltime writer of fiction. If he is better known for his thrillers, particularly his series of prize-winning P.I. novels featuring Detroit-based Amos Walker, Estleman has also written much stylish Western fiction. Estleman’s first Western novel, The Hider, was published in 1973, and another eleven have followed, including Aces and Eights (1981), for which he received a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Estleman’s novel, Bloody Season (1988), based on the events following the gunfight at the OK Corral, is lauded as one of the best historical Westerns of recent decades. Estleman has also written a non-fiction work on the Western, The Wister Trace: Classic Novels of the American frontier (1987).
The short story “ The Bandit” is from 1986 and was awarded a Spur Award by the Western Writers of America.
THEY CUT HIM loose a day early.
It worried him a little, and when the night captain on his block brought him a suit of clothes and a cardboard suitcase containing a toothbrush and a change of shirts, he considered bringing it up, but in tha
t moment he suddenly couldn’t stand it there another hour. So he put on the suit and accompanied the guard to the administration building, where the assistant warden made a speech, grasped his hand, and presented him with a check for $1,508. At the gate he shook hands with the guard, although the man was new to his section and he didn’t know him, then stepped out into the gray autumn late afternoon. Not counting incarceration time before and during his trial, he had been behind bars twenty-eight years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days.
While he was standing there, blinking rapidly in diffused sunlight that was surely brighter than that on the other side of the wall, a leather-bonneted assembly of steel and inflated rubber came ticking past on the street with a goggled and dustered operator at the controls. He watched it go by towing a plume of dust and blue smoke and said, “Oldsmobile.”
He had always been first in line when magazines donated by the DAR came into the library, and while his fellow inmates were busy snatching up the new catalogs and finding the pages containing pictures of women in corsets and camisoles torn out, he was paging through the proliferating motoring journals, admiring the photographs and studying the technical illustrations of motors and transmissions. Gadgets had enchanted him since he saw his first steam engine abroad a Missouri River launch at age ten, and he had a fair idea of how automobiles worked. However, aside from one heart-thudding glimpse of the warden’s new Locomobile parked inside the gates before the prison board decided its presence stirred unhealthy ambitions among the general population, this was his first exposure to the belching, clattering reality. He felt like a wolf whelp looking on the harsh glitter of the big world outside its parents’ den for the first time.
After the machine had gone, he put down the suitcase to collect his bearings. In the gone days he had enjoyed an instinct for directions, but it had been replaced by other, more immediate survival mechanisms inside. Also, an overgrown village that had stood only two stories high on dirt streets as wide as pastures when he first came to it had broken out in brick towers and macadam and climbed the hills across the river, where an electrified trolley raced through a former cornfield clanging its bell like a mad mother cow. He wasn’t sure if the train station would be where he left it in 1878.
He considered banging on the gate and asking the guard, but the thought of turning around now made him pick up his suitcase and start across the street at double-quick step, the mess-hall march. “The wrong way beats no way,” Micah used to put it.
It was only a fifteen-minute walk, but for an old man who had stopped pacing his cell in 1881 and stretched his legs for only five of the twenty minutes allotted daily in the exercise yard, it was a hike. He had never liked walking anyway, had reached his majority breaking mixed-blood stallions that had run wild from December to March on the old Box W, and had done some of his best thinking and fighting with a horse under him. So when at last he reached the station, dodging more motorcars – the novelty of that wore off the first time – and trying not to look to passersby like a convict in his tight suit swinging a dollar suitcase, he was sweating and blowing like a wind-broke mare.
The station had a water closet – a closet indeed, with a gravity toilet and a mirror in need of resilvering over a white enamel basin, but a distinct improvement over the stinking bucket he had had to carry down three tiers of cells and dump into the cistern every morning for twenty-nine years. He placed the suitcase on the toilet seat, hung up his hat and soaked coat, unhooked his spectacles, turned back his cuffs, ran cold water into the basin, and splashed his face. Mopping himself dry on a comparatively clean section of roller towel, he looked at an old man’s unfamiliar reflection, then put on his glasses to study it closer. But for the mirror in the warden’s office it was the first one he’d seen since his trial; mirrors were made of glass, and glass was good for cutting wrists and throats. What hair remained on his scalp had gone dirty-gray. The flesh of his face was sagging, pulling away from the bone, and so pale he took a moment locating the bullet-crease on his forehead from Liberty. His beard was yellowed white, like stove grime. (All the men inside wore beards. It was easier than trying to shave without mirrors.) It was his grandfather’s face.
Emerging from the water closet, he read the train schedule on the blackboard next to the ticket booth and checked it against his coin-battered old turnip watch, wound and set for the first time in half his lifetime. A train to Huntsford was pulling out in forty minutes.
He was alone at his end of the station with the ticket agent and a lanky young man in a baggy checked suit slouched on one of the varnished benches with his long legs canted out in front of him and his hands in his pockets. Conscious that the young man was watching him, but accustomed to being watched, he walked up to the booth and set down the suitcase. “Train to Huntsford on schedule?”
“Was last wire.” Perched on a stool behind the window, the agent looked at him over the top of his Overland Monthly without seeing him. He had bright predatory eyes in a narrow face that had foiled an attempt to square it off with thick burnsides.
“How much to Huntsford?”
“Four dollars.”
He unfolded the check for $1,508 and smoothed it out on the ledge under the glass.
“I can’t cash that,” said the agent. “ You’ll have to go to the bank.”
“Where’s the bank?”
“Well, there’s one on Treelawn and another on Cross. But they’re closed till Monday.”
“I ain’t got cash on me.”
“Well, the railroad don’t offer credit.”
While the agent resumed reading, he unclipped the big watch from its steel chain and placed it on top of the check. “How much you allow me on that?”
The agent glanced at it, then returned to his magazine. “This is a railroad station, not a jeweler’s. I got a watch.”
He popped open the lid and pointed out the engraving. “ See that J.B.H.? That stands for James Butler Hickok. Wild Bill himself gave it to me when he was sheriff in Hays.”
“Mister, I got a scar on my behind I can say I got from Calamity Jane, but I’d still need four dollars to ride to Huntsford. Not that I’d want to.”
“Problem, Ike?”
The drawled question startled old eardrums thickened to approaching footsteps. The young man in the checked suit was at his side, a head taller and smelling faintly of lilac water.
“Just another convict looking to wrestle himself a free ride off the C. H. & H.,” the agent said. “Nothing I don’t handle twice a month.”
“What’s the fare?”
The agent told him. The man in the checked suit produced a bent brown wallet off his right hip and counted four bills onto the window ledge.
“Hold up there. I never took a thing free off nobody that wasn’t my idea to start.”
“Well, give me the watch.”
“This watch is worth sixty dollars.”
“You were willing to trade it for a railroad ticket.”
“I was not. I asked him what he’d give me on it.”
“Sixty dollars for a gunmetal watch that looks like it’s been through a thresher?”
“It keeps good time. You see that J.B.H.?”
“Wild Bill. I heard.” The man in the checked suit counted the bills remaining in his wallet. “I’ve got just ten on me.”
He closed the watch and held it out. “ I’ll give you my sister’s address in Huntsford. You send me the rest there.”
“You’re trusting me? How long did you serve?”
“He’s got a check drawn on the state bank for fifteen hundred,” said the agent, separating a ticket from the perforated sheet.
The man in the checked suit pursed his lips. “Mister, you must’ve gone in there with some valuables. Last I knew, prison wages still came to a dollar a week.”
“They ain’t changed since I went in.”
Both the ticket agent and the man in the checked suit were staring at him now. “Mister, you keep your watch.You’ve earned that break.�
�
“It ain’t broke, just dented some. Anyway, I said before I don’t take charity.”
“Let’s let the four dollars ride for now. Your train’s not due for a half hour. If I’m not satisfied with our talk at the end of that time, you give me it to hold and I’ll send it on later, as a deposit against the four dollars.”
“Folks paying for talking now?”
“They do when they’ve met someone who’s been in prison since Hayes was President and all they’ve had to talk to today is a retiring conductor and a miner’s daughter on her way to a finishing school in Chicago.” The man in the checked suit offered his hand. “Arthur Brundage. I write for the New Democrat. It’s a newspaper, since your time.”
“I saw it inside.” He grasped the hand tentatively, plainly surprising its owner with his grip. “ I got to tell you, son, I ain’t much for talking to the papers. Less people know your name, the less hold they got on you, Micah always said.”
“Micah?”
He hesitated. “Hell, he’s been dead better than twenty-five years, I don’t reckon I can hurt him. Micah Hale. Maybe the name don’t mean nothing now.”
“These old cons, they’ll tell you they knew John Wilkes Booth and Henry the Eighth if you don’t shut them up.” The ticket agent skidded the ticket across the ledge.
But Brundage was peering into his face now, a man trying to make out the details in a portrait fogged and darkened with years.
“You’re Jubal Steadman.”
“I was when I went in. I been called Dad so long I don’t rightly answer to nothing else.”
“Jubal Steadman.” It was an incantation. “ If I didn’t fall in sheep dip and come up dripping double eagles. Let’s go find a bench.” Brundage seized the suitcase before its owner could get his hands on it and put a palm on his back, steering him toward the seat he himself had just vacated.
“The Hale-Steadman Gang,” he said, when they were seated. “Floyd and Micah Hale and the Steadman brothers and Kid Stone. When I was ten, my mother found a copy of the New York Detective Monthly under my bed. It had Floyd Hale on the cover, blazing away from horseback with a six-shooter in each hand at a posse chasing him. I had to stay indoors for a week and memorize a different Bible verse every day.”