“If she was Smoke’s sister, then she came from good stock. I can see how you might have felt so about her.”
Biff Johnson came over to join them at the table. “Did you hear what happened to the Cheyenne stage?”
“The Cheyenne stage? No, I ain’t heard nothin’. What about it?” Elmer asked.
“It was held up and everyone was killed; driver, shotgun guard, and all the passengers, including the woman and child.
“Biff!” Duff said anxiously. “Megan’s sister was on that coach. And Jason and the young lad!”
“No, no,” Biff said, holding out his hand reassuringly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get you all concerned. It wasn’t the coach they were on. It happened on the northbound coach. But it was the southbound coach that came upon them, all dead.”
“’Tis bad enough to rob a coach, to take the hard-earned money of decent people,” Duff said. “But what kind of brigand would do such a thing as kill everyone on the coach?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, Duff. All I know is that there are some incredibly evil people in this world. And for some reason a lot of them have decided to come west.”
Chapter Eleven
Territorial Prison of New Mexico
“One thousand dollars,” A. M. Jaco said to Lou Miller, who was standing in the corridor, separated by the bars of Jaco’s cell.
“Where are you going to get one thousand dollars?” Miller was a trusty due to be released in one more week. At the moment, he was supposed to be sweeping the corridor in front of the row of cells.
“I’ve got a thousand dollars put away in a secret stash. Actually, I’ve got more than that,” Jaco said. “All you have to do is get me a key. I know you can do that. I’ve seen you come in ’n out when you’re cleanin’ and such.”
“Why should I take a chance on doing anything like that? I’m gettin’ out in a week. I’d be crazy to risk such a thing.”
“What are you goin’ to do for money when you get out?” Jaco asked. “Wouldn’t you like to have a thousand dollars? Why, with that much money you could go somewhere new ’n start all over again. Nobody would ever have to know you was once in prison.”
“A thousand dollars would be good to have,” Miller said. “Where is it hidden?”
“You get me a key so’s I can get out of here, then meet me in Seven Rivers. I’ll give you the money then.”
“Is that where you got the money hid? In Seven Rivers?” Miller asked.
“No, it ain’t where I got it hid, ’n I ain’t goin’ to tell you where I got it hid. But I will have the money when you meet me there.”
Miller nodded. “All right. It’s a deal.”
The next day Miller was mopping the corridor out in front of the jail cells. When he got in front of Jaco’s cell, he knocked the pail over, causing the dirty water to splash into the cell.
“You clumsy pig! Watch what you’re doin’!” Jaco shouted loudly. Going up to the bars, he saw a key lying in the water that had been splashed into his cell, and he put his foot on it.
“What’s goin’ on in there?” the guard called.
“This oaf spilled his dirty water into my cell,” Jaco called.
“Did he?” The guard chuckled. “Miller, if it was up to me, I’d let you out a day earlier just for makin’ Jaco a little more uncomfortable.”
“I didn’t think you would mind all that much,” Miller replied to the guard. Very quietly he said to Jaco, “Seven Rivers, two weeks from today.”
“I’ll be there,” Jaco promised.
Jaco took the key back into his cell and slipped it into a cut he had made in his mattress. Then he resumed working on his dummy.
Three days later, Jaco lay on his bunk with his hands laced behind his head waiting for the guard to complete his ten o’clock rounds. He and Blue Putt were scheduled to be hanged at nine o’clock the next morning.
He heard the door open at the far end of the corridor.
“What do you think, Putt?” Jaco heard the guard say. “This is your last night. You won’t have to put up with me anymore after tonight.” The guard giggled. “Just think about it. This time tomorrow night, you’ll be dead.”
Jaco heard some sort of response from Putt, but it wasn’t loud enough or clear enough for him to understand.
Footfalls signaled that the guard was coming up the corridor to Jaco’s cell. He held his lantern up to the bars and, with the reflector, cast a beam of light into the shadowed cell. Playing the light through the dark cell, it fell upon Jaco’s bunk. Jaco’s eyes were open.
“Hell, Jaco, it’s ten o’clock. You’re most always asleep by now. What’s the matter? Can’t you sleep any tonight?”
“No,” Jaco replied.
“Well, I can’t say as I blame you,” the guard said. “I mean, thinkin’ about gettin’ hung tomorrow would just about keep anyone awake. Who would want to sleep on their last night alive? I mean, no more hours than you got left to live, I can understand how you’d want to be awake for ’em.” The guard chuckled, but Jaco didn’t answer.
“Well, one good thing. Fellas like you ’n Putt are bound to have lots of friends when you get to hell. And when you stop to think of it, you know that’s where all the bad women wind up, too. Why, I wouldn’t be none surprised a-tall if, by this time tomorrow night, you won’t be partyin’ with the likes o’ Sam Bass, Curly Bill Brocus, Jesse James, and purt nigh’ ever bad girl there ever was. Yes, sir, you just go look those fellas up. I’m sure they’ll be glad to show you around.”
“That’s right, Lucas. Me ’n Putt will be partyin’ with liquor ’n woman, ’n you’ll still be workin’ in this prison.”
“What do you think, Jaco? You want to trade places with me?” Lucas asked.
“What? And miss out on all that?”
Lucas laughed loudly, and was still laughing as he walked away.
Once the guard left, taking his lantern with him, the cell was again plunged into darkness. Jaco continued to lie on his bunk, perfectly still, listening to the receding clomp of the guard’s footsteps and the echoing rattle of the door being closed.
Not until there was one full minute of silence did Jaco hop out of bed. He stepped up to the bars, where he looked and listened until he was satisfied the guard was no longer present. Then he reached down into the chamber pot and extracted something wrapped in a towel. The towel was wet with urine, and soiled with offal. When he unwrapped the towel, it proved to be a gourd, but not just any gourd. This gourd had hair and eyebrows, so that it resembled a man’s face. Jaco put the gourd on the small, thin pillow, then draped the blanket in such a way as to make it look as if a man was sleeping peacefully in the bunk.
That done, he dug around in the padding of his mattress until he found the key.
Stepping up to the cell door, Jaco stuck his arm through the bars, inserted the key carefully, then turned it. He was rewarded with the satisfying click as the key tripped the tumblers in the lock. Pushing the door open quietly, he stuck his head out and looked up and down the center corridor. Lucas, the guard who had checked on him but a moment earlier, was truly gone, and the coast was clear.
Jaco closed the door and locked it behind him, then he looked through the door back into his cell. He was satisfied with what he saw. From the corridor and in the reduced light, to a no more than cursory inspection, it would appear as if he were still in bed.
Jaco moved quickly down to a cell on the other side and at the opposite end of the corridor, where he knew he would find Blue Putt. The prison officials had purposely separated them as far as they could, so that they wouldn’t be able to “come up with any mischief.”
Jaco stepped up to Blue Putt’s cell. “Putt,” he whispered. “Are you ready?”
“Damn! You done it! I didn’t believe you’d be able to actual do it.”
“I told you we was goin’ to get out of here, didn’t I?”
For purposes of economics, rather than have all the doors keyed differently, the te
rritorial prison of New Mexico was arranged so that one key would fit every cell door. That made it simpler for the guards to move the prisoners around. It also made it simpler for Jaco to open the door to Putt’s cell.
Just as Jaco had done, so too had Blue Putt prepared a dummy head, and though it wasn’t as good as the one Jaco had made, it did serve its purpose. If someone didn’t look too closely, they could easily believe that Putt was sleeping in his bed.
Moving quietly through the dark, they walked down to the far end of the corridor, the end with the door that opened into a hallway connecting two buildings. Jaco knew that the key he had would fit that door, as well.
It helped that, for the moment, Jaco and Putt were the only two prisoners on death row. There was little chance of their escape being compromised, at least at this stage of the operation.
Jaco opened that door that led into the hallway, then closed it behind him. The hallway was not part of the confinement area, so the windows had no bars and could be easily opened. He raised the nearest window, and he and Putt climbed through, then dropped down into the prison yard.
They were free of the cell, but not out of prison, for the prison yard was surrounded by a high wall with guard towers at every corner.
“Damn! Look at that.” Putt pointed toward a gallows. This was the first time either of them had seen it. “They was gettin’ ready for us, wasn’t they?”
“Yeah, well, it ain’t our worry now, is it?” Jaco replied. “Come on.”
Moving swiftly through the dark, they hurried across the open yard to the prison kitchen. This, too, was a part of their escape plan. Every Monday and Friday night, a garbage wagon would come into the prison grounds to carry away the kitchen slop. The prison paid to have the garbage hauled off, and the garbageman made more money by selling the edible slop to the pig farmers. Jaco got the key on Tuesday, which meant he missed the opportunity to try his plan on Monday. He had to wait until Friday. It was not only the next opportunity to take advantage of the garbage wagon, it was positively the last opportunity to incorporate the garbage wagon into his escape. And without the wagon, he knew there was no way they would be able to get outside the walls.
Jaco and Putt hid under the kitchen porch where they waited until the wagon was loaded and the driver had gone back inside to conduct his business.
“Now,” Jaco said.
The two men moved from the porch to the wagon, where they lifted up the canvas then crawled under it to hide in the slop that was being carried away from the prison. The canvas was used to help contain the smell so the wagon wouldn’t be so offensive when it passed through residential areas. It did an excellent job of containing the smell. Inside, the stench was so strong as to be almost unbearable. They could barely breathe.
As they waited for the driver to conclude his business and return to the wagon, Jaco lifted enough of the canvas to glance back toward the big, dimly lit blockhouse from which he and Putt had just come. The guard would have already made another round, but so far, there had been no escape alarm given. So far, the guard had been fooled into thinking they were both asleep in their bunks, and the dummies that he and Putt had made were doing their job
Five minutes later, the back door to the kitchen opened and a wedge of orange lantern light spilled out onto the same porch under which Jaco and Putt had been hiding earlier.
Two men came outside.
“What gets me is how they can call garbage edible, and nonedible,” the prison official was saying. “Ain’t none of it edible at all, far as I can tell.”
“If pigs will eat it, that means it’s edible . . . at least to pigs,” the wagon driver said.
“Yeah, well, if you charged us by the stink, we’d have to pay you more money just to have you haul it off tonight,” the prison official said, laughing.
“Fish heads ’n guts do have a way of stinkin’. But it seems like the more the slop stinks, the more them pigs seem to liken it,” the driver said with a chuckle.
“When you think about it, I suppose there ain’t nobody that’s ever said that pigs got ’ny sense.” The prison official waved as the garbageman drove the wagon away.
A moment later, the wagon started toward the front gate. As they passed the kennel, the dogs started barking.
One of the dogs managed to leap over the kennel fence and came rushing toward the wagon, growling viciously, his fangs bared. He darted toward the wagon and jumped at it, barking and growling.
“Get the hell out of here!” cried the driver of the garbage wagon. He banged against the side of the wagon with his whip.
“What’s going on?” one of the guards asked as the wagon stopped at the gate.
“What’s going on? I’ll tell you what’s going on. Your damn dog has gone crazy,” the driver answered. “Call him off.”
The guard yelled at the dog, who stood crouching, his head lowered, as he continued to growl. Finally one of the dog handlers arrived.
“What’s got into him?” the guard asked.
The handler smiled. “More ’n likely he’s wantin’ some of what you’re haulin’.”
“Yeah? Well he can have it, if you’re willin’ to pay for it. Pig farmers pay me for this.”
“Smells like fish,” the handler said.
“That’s most what it is.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want my dogs eatin’ fish. They’ll get bones in their throat.”
“Well, open the gate then,” the wagon driver said. “I’d like to get out of here before he takes it in his mind to attack me.”
The guard nodded at someone up on the wall and the gate, assisted by swinging weights, opened. The driver snapped his reins and the team moved forward through the open space.
“Let’s get out of this here wagon,” Putt said quietly. “I’m damn near to suffocatin’.”
“Not yet,” Jaco replied. “Not till I’m sure we’re far enough away from the prison that we ain’t likely to be seen.”
Jaco waited until he reached the point where he couldn’t wait any longer. Surely, he thought, they were far enough away to take a chance. “All right. Get out of the back and off the road quick as you can.”
Dropping down onto the road, they scrambled quickly into the drainage ditch that paralleled the road, then lay there for two minutes, breathing deeply, gulping in the fresh, clean air.
Finally, Jaco stood up. “Let’s get goin’.”
“Which way?”
Jaco looked up at the night sky, found the Big Dipper, then located the North Star. “That way is Texas,” he said, pointing east. “I want to get the hell out of New Mexico.”
Chapter Twelve
The two men walked through the rest of the night, finally stopping for a rest just as the sun was coming up.
“Jaco, I done walked my legs off near ’bout up to my knees. How much longer are we goin’ to be a-walkin’?”
“What are you complainin’ about, Putt? Would you rather be back there, gettin’ ready to be hung this mornin’?”
“No.”
“Then don’t be complainin’ so much about—” Jaco paused in mid-sentence, then smiled. “Smell that?” He held up his finger.
“Smell what? I still got nothin’ but the smell of fish in my nose.”
“That’s ’cause you ain’t tryin’. I can smell our horses right now.”
“What do you mean you can smell our horses?”
“Take a deep whiff, and tell me what you smell,” Jaco said.
Putt responded. Then smiled. “I don’t smell no horses, but seems like I can smell bacon a-cookin’.”
“You think bacon can cook itself?” Jaco asked.
“Cook itself? Jaco, what are you talkin’ about?”
“Just what I said. Bacon don’t cook itself. That means someone is cookin’ it and it’s more ’n likely that whoever is cookin’ the bacon has got hisself a horse. If there’s more ’n one of ’em, there will be more ’n one horse.”
“Yeah,” Putt said with an understan
ding smile.
“I’d say that the polite thing to do would be to pay ’em a visit.”
The two men moved toward the aroma of cooking bacon until they got close enough to see two people squatting by a camp fire. Two horses were ground hobbled nearby. An iron skillet was sitting on an iron grate stretched out over the fire.
“Hello, the camp!” Jaco called.
Not until the people turned did Jaco and Putt see that one of them was just a boy, probably no older than thirteen or fourteen.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Jaco assumed, though he had no way of knowing for certain, that the older man was the boy’s father.
“What kind of clothes is them that you’re a-wearin’?” the boy asked.
Jaco and Putt were still wearing the striped shirt and trousers of a prisoner’s garb.
“Well, son, it’s the kind of clothes you wear in a penitentiary,” Jaco said easily.
“A penitentiary? You mean you two is prisoners?” the man asked.
“We was prisoners, but not no more,” Jaco said. “My name is Jones, this here feller is Smith. Truth is, me ’n Smith done served our time, and we was being took to Santa Fe where we was goin to be set free, give a set of new clothes, ’n ten dollars apiece so’s we could start all over again, an’ go straight. But we got attacked by some renegade Injuns, and the driver that was takin’ us back got kilt. Not havin’ no guns to fight back, the onliest thing me ’n Smith could do was get away from the Injuns the best way we could. What we are a-doin’ now is lookin’ to go to the nearest town where we could turn ourselves in to the sheriff.”
“If you’re bein’ let out, why would you want to turn yourself in to the sheriff?”
“Why not turn ourselves in? We ain’t ’n no trouble now, and this way the sheriff can take us to Santa Fe where we’ll get our new clothes ’n the ten dollars that’s owed us. We ain’t got nothin’. no clothes, no money. Truth to tell, mister, we don’t even have anything to eat, ’n that bacon is smellin’ awful good to us. That’s what brung us over here in the first place.”
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