The Man from Stone Creek

by Linda Lael Miller

  The two men rode without speaking, through the cottonwoods and scrub brush, and pulled rein behind the jailhouse.

  “Stay here with the horses,” Sam ordered in an undertone as he dismounted.

  Keeping to the shadows, Sam made his way around to the front, looked up and down the deserted sidewalk, and stepped into the dim light from the jailhouse window. When he went inside, there was no sign of Rhodes, or the yellow dog, but Mungo stood watching him, his big, gnarled hands gripping the bars.

  Sam riffled the desk drawers until he found a pair of handcuffs and the keys to the cell. “Facedown on the floor,” he told Mungo, “and put your hands behind your back.”

  Mungo frowned. “What—?”

  “Just do what I tell you,” Sam said. “Unless, of course, you’d rather be lynched.”

  The old man hesitated, obviously weighing his options. “What—?”

  “Do it,” Sam snapped.

  Mungo eased himself to his knees, then sprawled on the floor.

  Sam unlocked the cell door and cuffed Mungo with the dispatch of long practice. “Where’s Rhodes?”

  “Gone down to the Rattlesnake for supper,” Mungo said as Sam helped him to his feet. “What the hell’s going on here?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Sam replied, giving the other man a shove to get him moving. “Right now, I’m trying to save your worthless hide.”

  “Suppose I let out a holler, once we’re outside?” Mungo asked, stumbling a little as Sam gave him another push, this one harder than the first.

  “You’ll get the butt of my .45 in the back of the head,” Sam answered. “That’ll shut you up right enough. Or I could just leave you here, and let Rex and his bunch put a noose around your neck.”

  “Rex is my son,” Mungo said, gaining the sidewalk.

  “So was Garrett,” Sam answered. He took Donagher by one arm and hustled him around the side of the jailhouse.

  “You plannin’ to turn me loose?” Mungo asked hopefully.

  “Not a chance in hell,” Sam told him.

  Vierra leaned on the pommel of his saddle, watching the proceedings with interest. “We seem to be short a horse,” he said.

  “We’re not going far,” Sam replied. He helped Mungo get a foot in the stirrup and hoisted him onto the gelding. With the old man’s hands cuffed behind his back, it was an awkward enterprise, and Vierra maneuvered his horse to block Donagher from falling off the other side.

  Sam took the horse by the reins and started back the way they’d come, through the brush, careful to keep to one side of the path. Donagher might have been old and bound at the wrists, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to get away, and run Sam down in the process. The rancher was an able horseman, after all, and if Sam had been in his place, he’d have given the gelding his heels and worried about getting out of the handcuffs later.

  Vierra must have had the same thought, because he drew his pistol and kept it trained on Mungo the whole way back to the schoolhouse.

  Once they arrived, Sam wrenched Donagher down off the horse.

  Mungo lost his balance and landed hard on the ground, cursing under his breath. Sam pulled him up by the back of his shirt and flung him toward the ramshackle storage shed. Mungo crashed through the doorway and there was a clang as he struck the copper bathtub.

  “Goddamn it,” Donagher grumbled, hitting the dirt floor, “I’d rather be lynched than treated like this!”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Sam said, taking his rope down from a peg on the wall. He crouched and bound Mungo from his shoulders to his ankles, like a haunch of pork netted in string.

  “Suppose I need to piss?” Donagher demanded.

  “Reckon you’ll get wet,” Sam answered. He tugged at the rope to make sure it was secure.

  “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t done this,” Mungo warned.

  “Maybe,” Sam agreed. “In the interest of letting you breathe, I’m not going to gag you. One sound out you, though, and I’ll stuff one of my socks halfway down your throat.”

  Mungo cursed Sam, all his ancestors and all his descendents, but he did it quietly.

  “Now what?” Vierra asked reasonably when Sam stepped out of the shed and latched the flimsy door.

  Sam didn’t answer until they were too far away for Mungo to hear. “You go back to the jailhouse and make sure Rhodes doesn’t raise the alarm, if he hasn’t done it already. I’m headed for the telegraph office.” He got back on his horse, and Vierra did the same, but not without putting in his two cents.

  “The telegraph office is closed.”

  “I plan to open it again,” Sam said.

  They parted ways at the edge of town.

  Tucson was an hour away, on a very fast horse, and Tombstone was half again as far. The marshals of both towns would need time to get up a posse, if they were inclined to help at all—Sam wasn’t sure they would be, but he had to try.

  There was a light burning in the quarters above the telegraph office, but Sam had to do a lot of pounding before the operator came downstairs and, after peering at him around the door shade for a few precious moments, finally let him in.

  “Is this an emergency?” the clerk asked, peevish, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down the length of his scrawny throat.

  “As far as you’re concerned, it is,” Sam answered. “Get on the wire.”

  The clerk winced and moved behind the desk, dropping into his wooden swivel chair.

  “No tricks, either,” Sam warned. Last time he’d sent a telegram, it had been to Bird’s sister, up in Denver. He’d paid a dollar extra to keep it secret, and the sneaky little bastard had gone straight to Oralee as soon as Sam turned his back.

  “It’ll cost two dollars,” the clerk said with tremulous audacity.

  Sam leaned across the desk, got the man by his shirt-front and yanked him partway to his feet. “I reckon it won’t,” he countered.

  BEN DONAGHER LAY STILL upon the cot Maddie had moved into Terran’s room just for him, staring up at the ceiling and listening as the structure of the mercantile settled around him, nail by nail, board by board. He didn’t want to close his eyes just yet, because every time he did that, Miss Abigail Blackstone’s still-white face loomed up in his mind, filling the whole of it.

  Her lips were blue and her eyes stared like they were made of glass. He’d seen eyes like that before, once, when he’d ridden to Tucson with his pa, in a brand-new wagon, to visit a taxidermy shop, only they’d been looking out of a bobcat’s head. Pa had hunted down and shot that critter himself, after it killed two calves, right in the corral. He’d ordered its big head stuffed and its tawny hide tanned, and nailed it up over the barn door as fair warning any cat, wolf, coyote or stray dog that might be inclined to raid his livestock.

  Ben swallowed, remembering how he’d hated walking underneath that dead bobcat, watching him with its empty eyes, when he went to do his chores. All the time he was mucking out stalls, milking the cows or pitching hay down from the mow where it was stored, the hairs had stood up on the back of his neck, prickly as hog’s bristles.

  When Undine came to live at the ranch, Ben had marked her for a troublemaker right away, but she’d raised such a fuss about that bobcat that his pa finally took it down and burned it with the parts of an old shed that had collapsed after a hard rain. When the ashes were cool, Garrett sifted through them until he uncovered those glass eyeballs, and after that, Ben never knew where they’d turn up.

  He’d found one in his stew one night at supper, when Undine was upstairs, with a cold cloth on her head, feeling peakish. They’d all laughed, his pa and brothers, when he bolted from the table and threw up as soon as he got outside.

  Another time, in the dead of night, he’d gotten up after a bad dream to go downstairs for a drink of water. When he came back, one of those eyeballs was resting square in the middle of his pillow, gleaming in a stray beam of moonlight.

  He’d shuddered and broken out in a sweat, too, but he hadn’t
made a sound, because he knew Garrett was listening, and he was damned if he’d give his brother the satisfaction of getting a rise out of him again. He’d taken that eyeball, carried it outside and dropped it down the well.

  Garrett had boxed his ears for it, and ever after, Garrett had carried its partner in his pants’ pocket, like it was a good-luck piece, and brought it out whenever he wanted to get Ben’s goat.

  Ben wondered if Garrett had had that eyeball on him when Pa put a pistol to the back of his head and pulled the trigger. Maybe they’d buried it with his worthless carcass, the way they sometimes buried folks with pocket watches or wedding bands.

  He hoped so. The only thing worse than seeing that eyeball again would be seeing Garrett again.

  Garrett was dead, he reminded himself. Gone forever.

  Hallelujah.

  Ben shifted, and the pup, curled at his feet, whimpered in protest. He’d seen Garrett go into his pa and Undine’s room that awful morning, Ben had, and headed straight out to the barn, where Pa was saddling up, to tell on them. He’d never forget the look on his pa’s face, or what had happened after that.

  Ben hated Garrett and wished him dead more than once.

  Same with Rex and Landry, and Pa, too.

  He shivered. He hadn’t wished Miss Blackstone dead, exactly. Just far away from Haven. He’d hated her because he knew she meant to marry up with Mr. O’Ballivan and spirit him back to the north country, but she’d been kind to him, and all the other kids, over the two days of school she’d taught. And then he’d gone and fallen in the river and she’d died saving him.

  Ben’s eyes burned. He bit his lower lip and blinked hard. Maddie said it was an accident, Miss Blackstone’s dying like that, and Mr. O’Ballivan agreed, according to Terran. Ben would have liked to believe that, but he knew different.

  It was his hatred that had killed her, same as it had brought Garrett to a bloody end.

  He heard footsteps outside in the corridor and his breath froze in his lungs even though he knew it was only Maddie, on her way to her room. She paused, like always, and then went on. It was a comfort to Ben, the way she stopped to listen like that, same as if she’d touched him.

  “Terran?” Ben whispered a few moments later when he heard Maddie’s bedroom door close.

  His friend stirred and made a hmm sound, but he didn’t wake up. Terran was a sound sleeper, one of the many things about him Ben sorely envied. He’d have given anything, save his dog, for a sister like Maddie—though he’d heard Undine say, more than once, that Maddie probably wasn’t Terran’s sister at all, but his mother.

  As far as Ben was concerned, all that meant was that Terran was even luckier than he’d thought.

  Maddie was gentle. Ben liked the way she smelled and the sound of her voice, and the way she hummed when she was marking prices on things with a grease pencil. He liked the warm feeling he got when she looked at him, and he knew she really saw him, standing there.

  Most of the time, he felt invisible.

  He slipped out of bed, and the pup stood, stretching and curious.

  “You stay,” Ben whispered, pulling on his clothes.

  Neptune lay right down again, with a dog sigh, his muzzle resting on his paws, watching Ben’s movements with a rolling motion of his eyes. When Ben raised the windowsill, Neptune stood and, for a moment Ben was afraid he’d commence barking, wake up Terran and Maddie.

  “Shush,” Ben warned, putting a finger to his lips.

  Neptune cocked his head to one side and perked his ears, as if he was trying to work out whether he ought to make noise or be still.

  “You shush,” Ben repeated firmly as he put one foot out the window, onto the steep pitch of the mercantile roof.

  Neptune made a whiny sound, but then he settled back down in the blankets. Ben was relieved, but it left him with a hollow feeling, too. He had things to do, but it would have been nice if Neptune had raised a ruckus, rousing Terran and bringing Maddie on the run. She’d have made Ben stay, taken him downstairs for a cup of cocoa and given him what-for.

  He wouldn’t have minded considerable what-for, if it came from Maddie.

  Carefully he made his way down the slant of the roof, over to the sturdy water spout, where hard summer rains drained into a barrel in July and August. Maddie liked to save that water for hair-washing, she said.

  Ben shimmied down the spout, balanced on the rim of the barrel and jumped to the ground.

  WHEN THE JAILER finally wandered back in, followed by his dog, he found his prisoner gone and Vierra sitting behind the desk, his feet up and crossed at the ankles. Sam was still down at the telegraph office.

  The cowpuncher went for his gun, but Vierra was faster and had him in his sights before he could clear leather.

  “I wouldn’t,” Vierra advised after the fact.

  “Who the hell are you?” Rhodes demanded. Privately, Vierra agreed with Sam’s assessment. Rowdy Rhodes wasn’t the kind of name a mother gave a son; he’d fashioned it himself. A lot of men did that, some for good reasons, others because they had something to hide.

  Vierra didn’t give a damn which it was, with Rhodes or anybody else. He smiled benevolently and introduced himself, but he didn’t lower the pistol.

  Rhodes’s gaze swiped to the empty cell again, as though he might have missed something the first time he looked, then back to Vierra. “Where’s Donagher?”

  “The devil came and got him,” Vierra answered easily. “Said they were one voice short in the hell chorus.”

  Rhodes narrowed his eyes. “I was charged to see that he stayed put,” he said. The yellow dog sat at his feet, panting, and Rhodes gave him a distracted pat on the head.

  “Nobody argues with the devil,” Vierra said, checking his pocket watch. It was getting on toward ten o’clock. He sighed and snapped the case shut with a motion of his thumb.

  “You may have gotten the drop on me,” Rhodes said, loosening up a little, now that he wasn’t in immediate danger of getting shot, “but I still have a badge. Your name don’t mean shit to me. What’s your business here?”

  Vierra felt a surge of respect. He didn’t let it show, of course. Didn’t like to tip his hand. “That depends,” he said.

  Rhodes scowled, picked up the coffeepot, gave it a shake and set it down again with a disgusted thump. The little tableau put Vierra in mind of the Ranger; he had a way of doing the same thing. Liked his coffee, and when there was none in the pot, he took it as a personal affront.

  “This was the easiest damn job I’ve ever had,” Rhodes complained, going to the threshold with the pot and flinging the dregs into the street. “Sit around and watch an old man sleep. That’s all I had to do to collect my pay.” He ladled water into the pot, along with fresh coffee, and banged the thing down on the stovetop again. The hinges on the metal door squealed as he wrenched it open to jam in newspaper and kindling. “Thanks to you, I’ll be shown the road for sure now.”

  Vierra smiled. “Maybe not,” he said.

  Rhodes struck a match, lit the crumpled newspaper in the stove, and crouched to blow on the flames. Took his time answering, which was another thing Vierra was inclined to like about him. “What do you mean, ‘maybe not’?” he asked, shutting the stove door again and rising from his haunches. “I’m plain running out of patience with you.”

  Vierra did a parody of stricken alarm.

  Rhodes simmered as he went on about his coffee-brewing. It was a complicated task, Vierra reflected, with as many steps as shoeing a horse or hitching up a wagon.

  Whiskey was a lot less trouble.

  “What’s your real name?” he inquired.

  The other man left the stove, rubbing his palms down his thighs in clear vexation, then hauled a crate from against the wall, upended it and sat. “What’s yours?” he countered.

  “I told you. Vierra.”

  Rhodes looked skeptical. The dog leaned against his right leg and he stroked its back with long, slow motions of his gun hand. Vierra alway
s kept an eye on another man’s gun hand, especially when he’d put it to some ordinary, innocent task.

  “So you say,” said the lawman. “All I know for sure is, my prisoner is gone and you surely had a part in it.”

  “Where you from?” Vierra asked, and thought to himself, with some amusement, that he was getting the knack of sounding like a gringo. If it weren’t for his dark hair and eyes and his Mexican hide, he probably could have passed. Not that he wanted to. He’d have to spend too much time brewing coffee.

  “Montana,” Rhodes answered after a long, stubborn silence.

  “You’re a long way from home,” Vierra observed. Where the hell was O’Ballivan? If the Ranger didn’t turn up soon, he’d have to assume he’d found some trouble and go looking for him.

  Rhodes shrugged, but there was a challenge in his blue eyes when he looked squarely at Vierra. “So are you,” he said.

  Vierra indicated a southerly direction with his pistol. “Just across the river,” he answered. He thought of Pilar, living outside Refugio with her papa. Wherever Pilar was, was home.

  “Handy,” Rhodes observed. “You break somebody out of jail, and all you have to do is cross that wide stream they call a river. Up home, that would be a creek.”

  Vierra raised an eyebrow.

  “You ever seen the Missouri?” Rhodes pressed. “That’s a river.”

  Just then Sam came through the door, which was standing open to the tense and quiet night, looking irritated. Rhodes made a sudden move and Vierra almost shot him before he realized Rhodes was reaching for the damn coffeepot.

  “You got another cup?” the Ranger asked.

  Inwardly, Vierra sighed. Then he cocked the pistol and spoke to Rhodes. “Don’t get any ideas about throwing that boiling coffee on anybody.”

  Rhodes looked horrified, even as the pot boiled over and sizzled on the hot stove. “And take a chance on hitting the dog?” he asked.

  “Ah, yes,” Vierra said, lowering the .45 again. “The dog.” That was another thing about gringos. They were sentimental about critters Indians and Mexicans boiled up with beans when game was scarce. He turned his gaze on O’Ballivan. “Did you send the wires?”