The Man From Lordsburg

by Peter McCurtin

  Lassiter wasn’t all that keen on killing Cassie, double-crosser or not—what else could he do? Cassie was no amateur. She knew the rules about as well as he did. It was a high stakes game. When you lost, you lost big. There wasn’t anything bigger than losing your life.

  Lassiter slept for three hours and when he woke up he knew he was going into Abilene by daylight. There was one edge he had—they wouldn’t be looking for him in a town he’d recently robbed and wrecked. They might not hang him for robbing the cattle buyer. They sure as shooting would string him up for wrecking the town. Lassiter didn’t mean to give them the chance to decide.

  Lassiter rooted through old Cal’s war bag and came up with something like a change of duds. The old stock-thief had been living a town life in recent years, but he still toted around some go-to-meeting clothes in his war bag. Or maybe he’d never taken them out of there. They smelled that way to Lassiter, musty and too long without a breath of fresh air. There was a more or less clean white shirt, a badly folded black frock coat, and a shapeless black wool hat without band or lining. Digging deep, Lassiter found a crumpled, stand-up paper collar and a patent leather cravat.

  He tried fitting the paper collar to the smudgy linen shirt. Lassiter was lean but old Cal had been hunger-thin, and it wouldn’t work. The out-of-date frock coat was long enough and fit pretty good, except for strain across the shoulders and some bunching under the arms. Lassiter hated to put on that goddamned wool hat. It made him feel—and look, he guessed— like a fool. Well I’ll be damned, he thought when he stuffed his own hat into the dead stock-thief’s war bag and found a pair of badly bent spectacles.

  He tried on old Cal’s hideaway glasses and couldn’t see a thing. It looked as if Cal had been closer to the rocking chair age than he’d figured. He wondered why Cal Moseley had any kind of glasses, since the old buzzard hadn’t been able to read or write his own name. Lassiter slid the steel-rimmed glasses down on his nose and, feeling foolish, bent his shoulders in an old man’s hump. Without a mirror, he didn’t know if he looked like an unfrocked preacher, a snake oil peddler, or an unburied corpse.

  It would do fine, he decided, though he wasn’t happy about the possibility of being killed in an outfit like that. Lassiter’s reputation was the last thing he worried about, but to have his picture in the Abilene-Sentinel in such a get-up would be a bad end to any man’s life.

  The sun said it was all of two o’clock when he got near Abilene. More than ever he needed a drink of whisky. More than that, he wanted to feel his hands around Cassie McCord’s neck while she explained or failed to explain exactly why a near-perfect robbery had turned sour just when it was time to split the take and start smiling. Naturally, he was ready to learn that Cassie had left town in a hurry. He was ready for that, but he didn’t think so. He had a hunch that it had started in Abilene, and would end there.

  Lassiter was no actor and he didn’t try to be. He’d just as soon they hanged him as try to pretend to be something or somebody he wasn’t. He wondered if the horse would give him away, even if the Sunday duds got him through this thing unnoticed. It was a goddamned fine animal, much too good for the shabby old fraud he looked like now, that he hoped he looked like now.

  The road into town passed by the railroad yards. There was no doubt that the taking of Mathew Woodruff’s money was the biggest event Abilene had worried about since the drought of ’73.

  They hadn’t got all of Texas Jack’s six thousand cows back in the pens yet. Lassiter rode by at a canter, four-eyed under the droopy hat, bent in the saddle, coattails flapping in the breeze he stirred up. Fourteen hours had gone by since the taking of the cattle buyer’s money. As far as Abilene was concerned it was still new news.

  There was the parlor car just as they had left it, with the big hole Howey Winters had punched in the Bismarck-glassed window with the Sharps. The caboose was there too, looking no different. A man standing behind a camera on a tripod with a black cloth over his head was telling the sightseers to get out of the way. The sightseers were yelling back, telling the photographer to take their picture too, or to go to hell. As Lassiter rode by, the colonel with the Burnside whiskers came out of the wrecked parlor car shaking his head.

  It was still too recent for the company detectives to be there. Lassiter saw the thickset sheriff, flanked by three of his deputies. The sheriff looked at Lassiter as he rode into town past the yards. Lassiter wasn’t slighted by the sheriff’s lack of interest. He liked it. He didn’t think he could have acted the character that went with the clothes, if the sheriff had been interested enough to ask his name, and his business in Abilene.

  Lassiter started along Texas Street. Now he knew how a town looked after six thousand longhorns had run over it. It hadn’t been much of a town anyway. The stampede must have killed more than the gunmen guarding the train. That didn’t bother Lassiter. People were born to die, and a nice quick stampede was every bit as good as blackwater fever, or lung fever, or brain fever, or a knot in the guts, or a cancer of the heart.

  One whole side of Texas Street was knocked down, part by fire, part by running cows. The Thompson Hotel where Cassie lived, or had lived, was still standing. The porch had been partly swept away, but the hotel was built of brick, the only hotel in town so built, and it looked like a hotel that needed only a fine front porch to make it look right.

  Past that was The Pearl, a saloon Lassiter had never been in. He went there now, to have the drink of whisky he’d been thinking about since the sack of money had turned up missing. If Cassie was at the Thompson Hotel, she could wait a while longer. If not, she could wait a while longer.

  Lassiter knew he was a rotten actor. He tried anyway, trying to remember how he must have sounded when he spoke when he first came west. “Didn’t know they had cyclones this time of year,” he said to the bartender in The Pearl who drew his beer, then poured his whisky.

  “Cyclone,” said the drink-pourer. “You must be new in town, old-timer.” The bartender sounded proud. “How many towns you seen can take a stampede of six thousand cows and pour you a drink the morning after? Not to mention the biggest robbery in the history of the state. By cracky, wouldn’t I like to have some of that money. They got the whole bunch except the one with the money. That feller got clean away. Three hundred and eighty thousand is what that feller got. Think about it, old-timer—three hundred-eighty thousand dollars! Ain’t that something to think about?”

  “The Lord’s business is more important, but a heap of money it is,” Lassiter said to the barkeep. “Think of the tabernacle could be raised with such a sum? T’would make the Saints of Utah hang they heads in shame.”

  The barkeep set down the bottle in front of Lassiter. “Texas Jack’s boys got all of them but the one with the money.” The bottle custodian was as excited as if the money had been his own. “They packed them back to town this morning but nary a smell of the money did they have.”

  Cassie? Texas Jack? Lassiter lingered on his second drink of whisky. There was no harm in asking, not with the bartender sounding off the way he was. “Must be a right smart feller, God forgive his avarice, not only robbing such a sum but getting away with it.”

  “By George,” Lassiter said, shaking his head. “Have a drink or a cigar or something, barkeep. Usually I don’t hold with smoking, but, now, ain’t that something!”

  The bartender said he didn’t smoke. Didn’t smoke usually, like the man said, but, well, he’d have a drink, it being such a special occasion and all.

  Lassiter raised his glass as the bartender drank his own poison. The barkeep bought Lassiter a drink and they mulled over the robbery.

  “Who is this feller anyway?” Lassiter asked. “You sure it ain’t Jesse James?”

  “It’s Lassiter,” the barkeep said. “A feller goes by the name of Lassiter. You ever hear of him, ’cause I ain’t.”

  “No,” Lassiter said, thinking some. “But a name don’t mean much. I say it’s the James boys and you can say what you like. The
re was talk of the Quantrills some days back, and you know them James fellers and the Colonel’s son is thicker than thieves.” Lassiter corrected himself. “Least as thick. As thieves, I mean to say.”

  “You want another?” the barkeep asked.

  The barkeep poured. He winked at Lassiter. Lassiter winked back. Lassiter’s spectacles kept slipping and he adjusted them again. The barkeep poured himself a drink and put it away fast.

  “Forget about the James boys,” the bartender said solemnly. “This was done by a feller name of Lassiter. A real hardcase from down south. They got men all over looking for him right now.”

  Lassiter signaled for another drink. “They ain’t a-going to catch Jesse,” he said.

  “It’s Lassiter, for Christ’ sake,” the barkeep said. “And he ain’t about to get away with it. Ain’t a man alive can get away with four hundred eighty thousand dollars.”

  “How much?” Lassiter asked.

  “More than that,” the barkeep said.

  Lassiter had to pass the sheriff’s office and jail to get to the Thompson Hotel. He couldn’t say it wasn’t interesting. One deputy was nailing up a wanted poster for a robber named Lassiter while two others were setting his four friends out to take the air on an undertaker’s cooling boards. Of course, Kingsley, Murphy, Moseley, and Winters had cooled some time ago. Now they were stiff as the boards they were lying on.

  The same photographer was trying to take pictures, and was having the same problems. Stopping to look at his four departed associates, Lassiter wondered if some day he would end up on a cooling board like that. So many hardcases had, and did, and would.

  At the Thompson Hotel he asked the day clerk if Miss McCord was up yet. Cassie never did like to get up early, then, or, he guessed, now. Lassiter wondered how Texas Jack was taking all the excitement.

  The elderly room clerk frowned at Lassiter. “Miss McCord has been up for some time,” he said. “She’s having breakfast now.”

  Lassiter looked over the top of his spectacles, and smiled. It was the best he could do, feeling the way he did. “It’s all right,” he said, feeling as foolish as he ever would. “I’m her brother—the Reverend Jeremiah McCord from Apple Valley, Alabama. We don’t have the apples anymore, but the valley is beautiful as ever. Come and see us, you hear?”

  Lassiter went upstairs and knocked on Cassie’s door. He put his hand over his mouth when she asked who was there. He did it a second time. Cassie had a bad temper. When she opened the door, she had a piece of toasted bread in her hand and she looked ready to hit him with it.

  “Wrong room,” she started to say.

  “Got any coffee?” Lassiter asked. By then it was too late for Cassie to do anything but nod her head.

  Chapter Ten

  “Look Deacon, you’ll get into trouble for this,” Cassie said, still not recognizing him. She wasn’t scared and she wasn’t mad: Cassie’s door had been forced too often for that. She was trying reason. Soon she would use the knee.

  She gasped when he took his glasses off and threw the wool hat into a corner. It was a good act—if it was an act.

  Throwing herself into his arms, she clutched him tight and said, “Oh Jesus, Lassiter,” she called out, shaking as she said it. “I didn’t think I was ever going to see you alive again. Oh Jesus, Lassiter, you’re alive.”

  Lassiter held her at arms’ length and smiled at her. “Us bad pennies,” he said.

  She tried to grab him again, teary-eyed and frantic. Lassiter held her off. “A drink, old friend,” he said. He turned the key in the lock and put it in his pocket. “After that we can talk.”

  She came at him again. He didn’t fight the hug she gave him, but he cut it short.

  “I know! I know!” she said. “A drink.”

  There were three bottles on top of a walnut stand. Cassie picked up two, then all of them. She shook the bottles at him.

  “Whisky,” Lassiter said, in no hurry at all. If he had to kill Cassie, where was the hurry?

  Lassiter was pretty sure now. Cassie poured too much whisky into the glass and then she dropped it. Lassiter, comfortable in a fat chair by the door, watched her bend for the spilled glass.

  “I could cry,” Cassie said, fetching the drink right. Her hands were shaking. “Oh God, all those men dead and the money gone.”

  The roses were back in Cassie’s cheeks, and there was nothing Lassiter liked more than a pretty woman. Cassie poured herself a drink. After she downed it, she said, “I waited and waited at that farmhouse, Lassiter. All I could think of was you and me in San Francisco. Then I heard them coming. At first I thought it was you. When I saw it wasn’t, I just got out of there, fast as I could.”

  Lassiter liked the chair he was in. Cassie’s whiskey was good, definitely not from a bar bottle. For a girl cast-off by Texas Jack, she was doing all right for herself.

  “At first I was sure it was you,” Cassie said. “At the farmhouse, I mean. You don’t know what it’s like, to be thinking of San Francisco, Lassiter—Nob Hill and everything, you know—and then you have to ride off with nothing at all.”

  “I can imagine,” Lassiter said.

  Cassie said, “You got to get away. The whole country’s looking for you. You must be crazy to come back here. They don’t have a thing on me but they know you, Lassiter. I don’t know how they know but they do.” Cassie laughed. “I guess Texas Jack can’t be robbed after all.”

  There was no reason to do anything just yet. The whiskey was good and so was the company. He waved Cassie forward with the bottle. The label on the bottle read: de Mores Whiskey—A Quality Brand.

  Cassie was good as gold. This time her hand was steady when she poured the drink, and she said, “I got you into this, Lassiter, and I’ll get you out. I got a little something saved. It’s in the hotel safe downstairs. You’re welcome to any or all of it.”

  Cassie started for the door.

  “I wouldn’t hear of it,” Lassiter said, easy in his chair, drinking and relaxed. “You been square with me, old friend, old bedmate, and that means a lot to a man, no matter how bad things are. If I do say so, sis, they’re none too good right now.”

  Lassiter smacked his lips over Cassie’s good whisky. “That don’t include the whisky,” he said.

  Cassie got agitated again. She’d always been like that, bold and nervous at the same time. She found her nerve, then she lost it, then she got it back.

  “You got to leave Abilene, Lassiter,” she said. “That’s what I’m fixing to do. I’m sick of this town.”

  Lassiter sat up in his chair. “Why’d you do it?” he asked. The tone was quiet, but Cassie knew Lassiter. On the other hand, he thought, maybe she didn’t know him well enough.

  Cassie’s voice faltered. “What?” she said, going white. “What was that?”

  There was no reproach, no threat in Lassiter’s voice. “I think you did it, sis. I think you set me up.”

  She started to laugh and didn’t make it. “You’re crazy,” she said. “My God—this is Cassie you’re talking to.”

  Batting her eyes like the heroine in a tent show, she took a step toward him. Lassiter didn’t do anything to stop her. She stopped anyway. Not being able to persuade a man with her body left Cassie at a loss.

  “You pour,” Lassiter suggested, holding out his glass.

  Her hand shook. “Aw, you’re joshing me, Lassiter. You scared me for a minute.”

  Cassie was trying hard to find her nerve again. A drink seemed to help. “You know you’re crazy,” she said. The smile she threw at him was brimming with affection.

  Lassiter held up his hand. “Can it,” he said. “Where’s the money? I don’t know what your share comes to. I don’t care, long as it ain’t too small. No more talk, Cassie, and no more tricks. Be smart, sis—I don’t get that money, you die here and now.”

  “You’d kill a woman?” she said, hate in her eyes.

  “Sure thing, honey.”

  Cassie took the drink and walked up and d
own for a while. She sat down at her dressing table.

  “If there’s a gun in that drawer, you better leave it there,” Lassiter suggested.

  Cassie turned foxy. “Suppose—just suppose I have the money. Part of it anyway. Would you consider a split?”

  Lassiter shook his head. “The original deal’s no good now. You sort of canceled our contract when you set up that ambush. I want all of it, sis—every little dollar. And let that be a lesson to you. Now where is it?”

  “You son of a bitch,” she rasped, greedy enough to be brave a little longer. “Go ahead—kill me.”

  Lassiter set down his empty glass. It seemed like such a long time since the good times in El Paso. Cassie’s eyes went wide when he showed her the Bowie knife. “Maybe I won’t kill you,” Lassiter said, meaning it. “Maybe I’ll just mark that pretty face of yours. You figure the money is worth that?”

  Cassie opened her mouth to scream but no sound came out. Before she could try it again Lassiter’s hand was clamped hard across her mouth, shutting off the air. To remind her that he wasn’t fooling, he put the big blade across the back of her neck. Cassie shuddered.

  Lassiter said, “This is about the last chance you get. Nod your head if you’re ready to talk.”

  Cassie nodded her head and Lassiter took his hand away. “Let me start you off,” Lassiter said. He talked with the knife in his hand. “Texas Jack set the whole thing up and you helped him.”

  Cassie didn’t say anything. Lassiter didn’t bother to get an answer. “With the kind of rep Jack’s got, he had to make it look good. He had to make it look so good that nobody in his right mind would suspect he was behind it. Otherwise he’d be finished in the cattle business. He’d have company detectives on his neck for the rest of his life. He’d be finished in politics. That’s why all the guns and guards.”