Message on the Wind

by J. R. Roberts

“Go take care of them,” Clint said. “Thanks for listening, Carl.”

  “Sure thing,” Crews said, standing up. “Lemme know what happens, will ya?”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Clint went past the young couple, who were new in town and looking for a good breakfast.

  “You’re in for a treat,” Clint said. “Good breakfast here.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the young woman said, with a smile.

  Her husband scowled at Clint and put his arm around his young bride protectively.

  Clint left and headed for the newspaper office.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Clint Adams?” Paul Harris asked as Clint entered the newspaper office.

  “How’d you guess?”

  “I was told you’d be comin’ to see me.”

  “Told, or warned?”

  “Both, I guess,” Harris said. “What’s the difference? Paul Harris.” He wiped his hand on a rag and then extended it to be shaken. “Don’t worry. It’s just a little ink.”

  Clint shook the man’s hand. A negligible amount of ink was transferred.

  “Why don’t we go into my office and have a drink?” Harris said.

  “Fine.”

  He led the way down a hallway and into a small room.

  “This was one of the buildings left standing here,” he said, getting a bottle out of the bottom drawer of a roll-top desk. “I decided to renovate it, rather than build a new one.”

  He pulled out two coffee mugs, poured two fingers of whiskey into each, and handed Clint one. There were two chairs in the room. He sat at the one in front of his desk.

  “Have a seat.”

  Clint took the remaining chair.

  “I heard you’d have some questions for me.”

  Clint took the clipping from his pocket and passed it over.

  “This what brought you here?”

  “That’s right.”

  Harris studied it.

  “Before my time, from the old Organ Pipe,” he said. “According to the date, anyway. Who wrote this on it?”

  “I don’t know,” Clint said. “Don’t think I’ll ever find out.”

  “But you came anyway?”

  Clint took the clipping back. “Somebody needed help.”

  “That was probably written while Joe Hickey and his gang were in control of Organ Pipe.”

  “Sounds likely. Who else was in Hickey’s gang?”

  “Why do you want to know that?”

  “So I can talk to them.”

  “The sheriff told me you came here from Yuma,” Harris said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And that Joe Hickey’s in prison there?”

  “Right again.”

  “Well, if Joe Hickey was in Yuma, I’ll bet some of his gang is still there. I’ll bet you’ve already talked to them.”

  “I won’t know that until somebody gives me some names,” Clint said. “Nobody’s being very forthcoming about Organ Pipe’s history.”

  “Well,” Harris said, “a lot of us are not proud of the town’s history.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because we stood by and let Joe Hickey bully us,” Harris said.

  “What was your job in the old Organ Pipe?”

  “I was a clerk at a store,” Harris said. “But I wanted to be a newspaperman.”

  “Why didn’t you work at the newspaper?”

  “The editor wouldn’t hire me.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was a friend of Joe Hickey’s.”

  “Joe Hickey had friends?” Clint asked. “I thought he just had gang members.”

  “Some of the citizens became his friends. I guess they thought they’d get preferential treatment.”

  “They were sleeping with the enemy?”

  “You could say that,” Harris answered. “Eating and drinking with him, anyway.”

  “And you know the names of these citizens?”

  “I know some,” Harris said, “the sheriff knows some others. Why?”

  “Well, folks have been lying to me, Mr. Harris,” Clint said. “I’d kind of like to know why.”

  “You mean about the plague?”

  “And I mean about not knowing a thing about a town called Organ Pipe.”

  “Well, maybe some of the gang is actually ashamed of what they did,” Harris said.

  “Mr. Harris,” Clint said, “can you just give me some names?”

  Harris poured himself more whiskey, offered Clint some. He shook his head.

  “Just the names.”

  “Well, I don’t know if you’ve met any of these gents or not,” Harris said. “You might try talking to Fred Fellows, and Steve Wynn.”

  “What positions did they hold in Organ Pipe?”

  “Fellows was a deputy, and Steve Wynn ran the paper.”

  “And they were friendly with Joe Hickey?”

  “They made sure Hickey knew they weren’t against him,” Harris said.

  “I’ve already run into Fellows and Wynn,” Clint said. “In fact, it was Wynn who took me to see Hickey in prison.”

  “Are they in Yuma?”

  “They most certainly are in Yuma,” Clint said, “and doing much the same thing they did in Organ Pipe.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Harris said. “I had no idea they were so close.”

  “Took a lot of nerve, I guess,” Clint said.

  “Have you run into Mike Callum yet?”

  “Callum? No. Who is he?”

  “He was one of Hickey’s men. I heard he stays close to Hickey. If you haven’t run into him, you will, and I’d watch my back.”

  “I’ll do that. Thanks for talking to me, Mr. Harris.”

  “Where are you off to now?”

  “To see the sheriff,” Clint said. “Reckon I can get the last of what I need from him.”

  “Good luck.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Mike Callum?” Sheriff Patterson repeated. “Sure, I know him. He was part of the Hickey gang.”

  “So he helped Hickey burn the town down?”

  “Sure.”

  “And those other two you told me about?”

  “Yep.”

  “So now that you know that Callum is in Yuma, will you go and get him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t prove he and Hickey burned the town down,” Patterson said.

  “No witnesses?”

  “Not witnesses that will come forward.”

  “What about Fellows and Wynn?”

  “I don’t like them,” Patterson said, “but they didn’t break the law. All they did was look out for themselves.”

  “Why do you think they went to Yuma, and didn’t stay here and help you rebuild?”

  “Nobody would’ve worked with them, or spoken to them,” Patterson said. “They were traitors.”

  “So they wouldn’t have gotten their jobs back?”

  “Jobs. Lives.” Patterson shrugged. “They wouldn’t have been welcome here.”

  “Well, Yuma welcomed them.”

  “Nobody in Yuma knew what they did,” Patterson said. “Course, if you went back to Yuma and told people . . .”

  “But there’s no proof, right?”

  “You’re not the law,” Patterson said. “You’re the Gunsmith. Why do you need proof?”

  “I’m not just going to shoot someone,” Clint said. “Not on your say-so, anyway.”

  Patterson shrugged again.

  “As long as they don’t come back here, I got no problem with them,” Patterson said.

  Clint nodded and stood up.

  “Well, thanks for the information, anyway,” Clint said. “At least I know why some people were lying to me.”

  “They got something to hide.”

  Clint started out, then stopped.

  “You know a black man named Antoine? Got a young girl with him, named Jada?”

  “Antoine ran the livery in Organ Pipe,” Pat
terson said. “He ran out before the fire even started.”

  “Was he part of Hickey’s gang?”

  “Don’t know,” Patterson said. “He just lit out.”

  “Well,” Clint said, “he’s on the run from something.”

  “You headin’ back to Yuma?” Patterson asked.

  “Right now,” Clint said. “I want to wrap this up and get back to my life.”

  “What about whoever wrote that note?”

  “Don’t think I ever expected to find that out,” Clint said. “See ya, Sheriff.”

  “Probably not,” Patterson said, as the door closed behind Clint.

  Moments after Clint walked out, Patterson heard two shots. He sighed, got up, and headed for the door.

  As Clint stepped outside, he saw a man in the street, facing him, maybe waiting for him.

  “Saw you go in,” the man said. “Figured I’d wait out here.”

  “Let me guess,” Clint said. “Mike Callum.”

  “Gonna make a name for myself, Adams, by killin’ you,” Callum said, “no matter what Joe Hickey says.”

  “Going to make a name for yourself, all right,” Clint said, “but it won’t be for killing me. It’ll be for getting killed by me.”

  “No more talk.”

  Clint shrugged. Callum went for his gun, but never made it.

  FORTY

  When Clint rode Eclipse back into the livery in Yuma, he made the liveryman very happy.

  “You brought him back,” he said, happily jumping from one foot to the other and back.

  “Take good care of him,” Clint said.

  “Of course.”

  Clint had made one stop before coming back to the town. He’d stopped at the Yuma Territorial Prison . . .

  “Back for another visit?” Warden Kelsey asked.

  “If that’s all right with you, Warden.”

  “Hey, it’s all right with me if it’s all right with Hickey,” Kelsey said. “I’ll just check.”

  Clint waited in the warden’s office with a guard while Kelsey went to talk to Joe Hickey. When the warden came back, he said, “Come this way.”

  Kelsey walked Clint to the same room where he’d met with Hickey before. Once again, the guard waited outside and Hickey was seated at the table, in chains.

  “Glad to see you’re okay,” Hickey said. “Justifies my faith in you.”

  “You knew Callum was coming after me?”

  “The idiot came to see me, told me he was gonna try you,” Hickey said. “I tried to talk him out of it. I knew you’d kill him. You did kill him, didn’t you?”

  “I killed him,” Clint said. “He gave me no choice.”

  “Course not.”

  “What about the others?” Clint asked. “Your other partners in burning down Organ Pipe?”

  “Partners?” Hickey asked. “As far as I know, Callum was the last one, and now he’s dead.”

  “But you’re still in here, and your friends are out there.”

  “Friends?”

  “You know,” Clint said. “Deputy Fellows and the newspaper editor, Steve Wynn? Your friends from the old Organ Pipe?”

  “How does it look?” Hickey asked.

  “How does what look?”

  “The new town,” Hickey said. “How does the new Organ Pipe look?”

  “It looks fine,” Clint said. “Not that you’re ever going to see it.”

  “So you went there, and you have the whole story, right?”

  “Right,” Clint said. “No disease, no plague, just a man who wanted to see a town burn.”

  “I was good to them,” Hickey said. “Me and my boys, we kept those people safe, and what did they do? They turned on me.”

  “They wanted you out of their town.”

  “My town!” Hickey shouted. He tried to bring his fist down on the table, but the chains inhibited him, so he just kind of knocked on the tabletop. “It was my town.”

  “You owned it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And since you owned it, you figured you had the right to burn it.”

  “Right again.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of what might happen now that you’re admitting it?”

  “Admitting what?” Hickey asked. “There’s only you and me here, Gunsmith. I’ll just deny I ever said anything. Besides, what would they do, hang me twice?”

  “I understand you’re in here for something you didn’t do.”

  “That’s right,” Hickey said. “Railroaded by that sheriff, his senior deputy, and the newspaperman.”

  “I understood Wynn was your benefactor.”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “That he stood up for you? Argued for you in his newspaper.”

  “Oh yeah, he made it look real good, but they all lied to get me in here.”

  “The sheriff, too? What’s his name? Bockwinkle?”

  “Now, there’s a man who may be hard to kill,” Hickey said, “but I have faith that you’ll get it done.”

  “I’m not killing a lawman, Hickey,” Clint said.

  “No, you ain’t,” Hickey said. “You’re gonna kill two lawmen. And a newspaper editor.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because they ain’t gonna give you a choice,” Hickey said. “Now that you’re back from Organ Pipe, you know the truth. You know they was all . . . what did they call ‘em in the war . . . collaborators?”

  “That’s right.” Clint said. “All of them? I heard about Fellows and Wynn. What did Bockwinkle do in Organ Pipe?”

  “Nothin’,” Hickey said. “He ain’t from there, but he helped the other two put me in here.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Why does anybody do anythin’?”

  “Money?”

  “You got it.”

  “Fellows and Wynn? Where’d they get enough money to buy a sheriff?”

  “Nobody told you about the Organ Pipe bank?”

  “No,” Clint said, “nobody told me about the bank. You robbed it?”

  “I took the blame for robbin’ it,” Hickey said, “but I never did. All I did was burn it down, with the rest of the town.”

  “You’re saying Fellows and Wynn robbed the bank?”

  “Why do you think they didn’t go to the new Organ Pipe?” Hickey asked. “They came here instead, to start over.”

  “Why come here? Why so close to Organ Pipe?”

  “Two reasons. One, nobody would look for them this close. And two, if they did find them here, it wouldn’t look like they ran, just relocated.”

  “Kind of does look like that,” Clint admitted.

  “Yeah, well, they relocated all right, with a bunch of money.”

  “Funny, nobody in Organ Pipe mentioned that to me.”

  “They don’t trust nobody in Organ Pipe.”

  “You saw to that, didn’t you?”

  “Oh yeah . . .”

  “I’m curious, Hickey.”

  “About what?”

  “Why’d you send me to Organ Pipe? Why’d you tell me an idiotic story about a plague?”

  “I figured you wouldn’t be able to resist then,” Hickey said. “And I wanted you to hear the whole story.”

  “So now you want me to take care of your three, uh, backers?”

  “Why not? They deserve it. They deserve to be in here, not me.”

  “You deserve to be here just for burning down a town,” Clint said.

  “But that ain’t what I’m in here for.”

  “Too bad,” Clint said, standing up. “As far as I’m concerned, you deserve to be in here for what you did to that town.”

  “I call that not fair,” Hickey said.

  “I call it justice,” Clint said.

  FORTY-ONE

  Clint didn’t have any intention of killing Fred Fellows, Steve Wynn, and Nick Bockwinkle for Joe Hickey, but neither could he let them get away with robbing a bank, assisting in burning down a town, and, oh, yeah, trying t
o use him.

  The first thing he had to do was let them know he was back. Then he’d let nature take its course.

  He entered the sheriff’s office, saw Deputy Fellows standing in front of the desk while a big-bellied man with a sheriff’s badge sat behind it.

  “Well, speak of the devil,” Fellows said. “I was just talkin’ about you, Adams.”

  “And here I am.”

  “Here you are,” Fellows said, “back already. Did you find out what you needed to find out?”

  “I found out everything, Deputy,” Clint said. “Why don’t you introduce me to your sheriff?”

  “Sheriff Bockwinkle, this is Clint Adams, the Gunsmith.”

  Bockwinkle gave Clint a wary look, and did not rise or extend his hand.

  “Is there gonna be trouble?” he asked.

  Clint wasn’t sure who the man was asking.

  “If you’re asking me, I’d say yes,” Clint said. “If you’re asking your deputy . . . well, I don’t know. What do you think, Deputy? Is there going to be trouble?”

  Fellows started to reply, but Clint cut him off.

  “Before you answer that, you should know that I paid another visit to Joe Hickey.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “To get the last pieces of the puzzle in place,” Clint said.

  “And did you?”

  “I did, Deputy,” Clint said. “I surely did. I’m going to go to my hotel now and get some rest, but I’ll be seeing you later.”

  Clint walked to the door, then turned.

  “Oh, and would you tell Steve Wynn I’m back?” he asked. “I’ll want to talk to him.”

  As Clint went out the door, Fellows turned to Bockwinkle and gave him a look.

  “To answer your question,” Fellows said, “yeah, I think there’s gonna be a lot of trouble.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Bockwinkle and Fellows went to the offices of the Yuma Daily Sun. They told Steve Wynn that Clint was back and there was going to be trouble.

  “Why did we ever think different?” Wynn asked. “Once he talked to Hickey—”

  “You took him to talk to Hickey,” Bockwinkle pointed out.

  “He thought I should take him to Hickey,” Wynn said, pointing to Fellows.

  “Why did you think that, Fred?” Bockwinkle asked.

  “I thought it would be better for him to get to Hickey through one of us than on his own.”