The Trail to Trinity (A Piccadilly Publishing Western

by Owen G. Irons

  ‘No, I can go off on my own ... I have so many talents.’

  ‘You raise a fine apple,’ Sage said, trying to lighten the girl’s concern. She was worried, no doubt about it, as they approached the end of their trail. It seems that’s the way most of us are. Distant dreams are somehow more strongly clung to than those approaching faster than we are prepared for.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Sage repeated. He had the door to the cabin open now, peering out into the silence of the forest. ‘Now, let’s get moving. The end of our long trail is at hand.’

  Sage referred to himself as well. The end of his long trail to Trinity had been reached. He, like Gwen, had to now face up to what that meant. His hate, focused on a man who was far distant, had been much stronger somehow. Now that he was in Trinity, still intent on putting lead into the familiar form of Brian Paxton, his brother, playmate and confidante of his youth, it seemed more than a challenging idea. It had descended to the distasteful. It was now not a heated thirst for vengeance, but a painful, dark plot that must be carried through.

  The patch of woods fell away as they entered the red, open country that surrounded the town of Trinity, Colorado. The town had grown some since his last visit, before he had ridden away to find fame and fortune and blundered into one dead end after another ... He had to keep talking. Brian was on his mind.

  ‘Where did you say your aunts’ house was?’ he asked Gwen. She glanced at him quizzically.

  ‘I’ve already told you—I don’t know. I’ve never been to Trinity before.’

  ‘All right. We’ll find it—before dark, I hope. They’ll be more apt to welcome company.’

  ‘You can hardly wait, can you?’ Gwen asked, her eyes turned away.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To get rid of me, to stash me away somewhere so you can go about your important work: killing your own brother and recapturing the maiden.’

  ‘You have a funny way of looking at things, Gwen. I said I’d take you here, and I did. I don’t know what else you expect of me.’

  ‘I don’t either. Somehow all the way here, a small part of me believed that you’d come to see the utter futility of what you were planning on doing: killing a town marshal, your own brother, for which they’ll surely execute you if you do come out ahead in the fight. I thought I saw your determination wavering just a little, but that was before you saw her again. A woman whom you cannot win at all. Either you’ll be dead or you’ll be asking her to take up the outlaw trail with you—knowing her, that’s totally impossible, and you know it. What are you going to win. Sage?’

  That’s not what this is about,’ Sage said, as they approached the town limits of Trinity. ‘It’s a debt that must be collected in blood.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be happy as soon as you’ve done that—no matter that Brian might not have even been responsible. You haven’t even given him a fair trial, a chance to explain— Here are some people; let’s ask them if they know my aunts.’

  Since Gwen did not even know the main streets of the town to take reference from, Sage did the talking to the farmer and his son they stopped. Nodding, Sage started his horse again. To Gwen he said, ‘I think I can find it.’

  They rode on, turning away from the heart of town. Gwen was silent in her saddle, her eyes distant. Sage, too, rode silently. The burnish of his righteous mission of retribution seemed to be fading as the glow of the sunset sky briefly brightened and then fell away toward darkness.

  The cross street was Elm, which Sage knew. Once outside of town, it petered out into two roughly sketched dirt trails, unnamed, which forked in different directions. ‘This way,’ Sage said, nodding to his right, toward a trail which seemed to be the lesser used.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No, but the farmer said keep to the right, and that’s this way.’

  Gwen seemed uncertain, but it was not doubt about their direction that caused it. The girl seemed unwilling to reach her goal, to finally find the end of the long trail to Trinity. He urged her forward. ‘Come on, they can’t be as bad as all that.’

  Her eyes shifted toward him, damp and questioning in the faltering light of the day. ‘No,’ she muttered, heeling her horse forward, ‘they can’t be.’

  What was troubling her? Sage had a dim inkling but he roughly shoved the notion aside. There was no point in even giving it any consideration. None of it would matter by tomorrow anyway, once his mission was done.

  They continued along the dry road past bare hills until they crested out overlooking a small valley where a stream trickled past. The house standing there was quite small—Sage guessed the place could have only one bedroom. It was a white, peeling little structure with two white oak trees standing in front of it. The house looked impoverished, but not entirely untended. The picket fence around it was either new or freshly painted. There were flowers growing along the front of the house. Right now these were being tended by a woman in a faded dress. She was quite small, frail-appearing. She turned a worried, birdlike head toward the arriving riders. Sage didn’t imagine the two sisters had much company out this way.

  ‘Is that one of your aunts?’ Sage asked Gwen. The girl shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, how would I know? I haven’t seen them since I was a small girl. All I remember about them was that they were large.’

  ‘Like that?’ Sage asked, as a second woman emerged from within, drying her hands on her apron as she stood squinting in their direction. She was quite stout. Her face showed the lines of care, deeply carved. The two seemed of an age, though the one in the garden patch had been selected to waste away in her older years, the other to add layers of fat to her round body.

  ‘I think ... ’ Gwen said hesitantly, ‘I think I recognize her. That might be Aunt Alice. I’m almost sure it is. The other one would be Penelope.’

  ‘You’ll find out for sure in a few minutes.’

  ‘Oh, Sage, what am I to do now?’

  ‘It’s simple. What you do is swing down and ask them if they have a niece named Gwen. After that whatever you feel like sharing about your situation is up to you.’

  Gwen looked close to panic. Then, resolutely, she got down as Sage sat his horse, watching. He heard a few low, explanatory words from Gwen, a couple of murmuring responses from the aunts. Then they turned to hustle her into the house. Gwen halted at the doorway, lifting a hand toward Sage. She seemed to want to say something, but she turned and silently entered the house with her aunts.

  Sage waited for another minute before he turned the big gray’s head back to the south, toward Trinity which would be waiting in the solemn sunset, settling down for its evening rest.

  Sage rode that way with cool deliberateness. He meant to rouse the town, or at least a good part of it, out of its sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  Trinity was still awake at this hour. When Sage reached the town limits there was still enough light to see by, though a purple shadow seemed to have been drawn over the town.

  Lanterns burned behind a few windows where a shopkeeper was working late and other honest men went about their work. The bank he passed was closed; such establishments do not favor being open after dark.

  The rifleman they had encountered along the road had delayed them just enough to cause Sage to miss talking to the banker concerning the will of his mother and father; however, riding his gray along the main street at a walk, he saw a shingle hanging from the eaves of an office, a light burning within the building. The sign and the painted legend on the front window both proclaimed it to be the office of Wilbur J. Winston, the very man Sage had hoped to see.

  Tying his gray at the hitch rail, Sage rapped on the door and entered. Behind a desk a startled-looking man with a bald head and a Van Dyke beard looked up, pen poised over some papers in a stack in front of him.

  ‘I’m closed for business,’ the man said, in a somewhat surprising deep, husky voice.

  ‘Aren’t you Mr. Winston?’

  ‘I am, but I told you ...
Who are you? You look almost familiar.’

  ‘The name is Sage Paxton, Mr. Winston. I’m here to ask you about my mother and father’s will.’

  ‘I see.’ He scribbled something on the paper before him, probably his signature, and placed the stack of the other papers aside. Winston leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together. ‘What exactly is it you wish to know, Mr. Paxton?’

  ‘Just the general terms,’ Sage said, seating himself in a wooden chair across from the lawyer. ‘I’ve never seen the will. There’s that, and I wondered if there were any papers that needed my signature.’

  ‘There’s nothing you need to sign,’ Winston said, peering closely at Sage. The will was legally signed and witnessed. I know that since it was done here in my office. Unless you are meaning to contest some of the will’s terms, it is considered to be fully executed.’

  ‘I have no reason to challenge the will or its terms.’ Not with pen and ink, anyway. ‘I just wanted to know if my understanding of it is correct—as I said, I never saw the actual will.’

  ‘Surely someone would have written you.’ Winston looked a little baffled. Sage was quick to respond.

  ‘I was notified, but it was long afterward. I have been a traveling man and my letters take a while to catch up with me.’

  ‘I see,’ Winston answered, picking at one tooth as if it was bothering him. ‘It was quite a straightforward document with no special exemptions or exclusions of any sort. I can find my copy in a matter of minutes if you would like to study the full document.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s necessary if you can recall the general terms. As I said, I was notified, but the information was second-hand, and my informant may have been mistaken on certain points.’ Though Sage doubted it, Beryl was nothing if not a careful woman.

  ‘Well, if you will agree to trust my memory, which is very good, I assure you, the cash—of which there was little, really—the house and the land with all of its assets—which I suppose must mean cattle—were to be divided equally between you and your brother, Brian. That’s about all there was to it.’

  ‘Was there anything about one of us predeceasing the other?’ Sage asked. Winston blinked with surprise, then answered.

  ‘That is a standard conditional clause in all wills. If one or the other of you predeceased the other, the property ownership would fall to the other brother.’

  ‘Yes. What would happen to it if neither of us were to survive?’ which was directly to the point of the matter as far as Sage was concerned, but seemed to puzzle the lawyer again.

  ‘The ranch and all of its appurtenances would then fall to the alternate heir, Miss Beryl Courtney—is that a disputable point with you, Mr. Paxton?’

  ‘No, not at all. That is the way my parents would have wanted it. It’s the way both my brother and I would have preferred it.’

  ‘You have discussed this with your brother, then?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Sage said, rising from his chair, ‘but don’t give it another thought, Mr. Winston. Brian would agree with me on that point. I just wanted to make sure I understood how things had been arranged.’

  ‘Well, that’s it, so far as I recall,’ Winston said. ‘If you have any further questions you are welcome to examine the entire document when you have the time.’

  ‘That won’t come up,’ Sage said, putting on his hat. ‘I know all I need to know about matters. And I won’t be having much time in the immediate future.’

  Winston’s mouth twitched with a strange little bunched movement of his lips, either because of his tooth, or because he knew that whatever Sage had been trying to find out, it had been answered only incompletely. With a sigh he returned to his legal briefs as Sage crossed the small office and departed into the night.

  All right, Sage was telling himself, that was taken care of. Beryl would be cared for no matter what happened on this night. Sage could not forecast the events; he only knew that it would end with blood being spilled in the town of Trinity.

  Leading his gray horse then he began walking along the street toward the marshal’s office. He had gone no more than twenty paces when the first bullet rang out from a crossing alley, whipping his hat from his head. Sage dropped and rolled beneath his steady gray horse, unloosed his Colt and returned fire into the alleyway, the only possible place the ambush could have had its origin. His shots drew a pair of answering bullets. One of these struck his saddle pommel, and the gray, calm and stoic before this, started away, leaving Sage exposed in the middle of Main Street.

  He was peripherally aware of people rushing toward him, of lights going on, and shouts being raised all along the street, but had no time to pay this much attention. There were still bullets flying around—only luck, the poor light, and possibly the ambushers’ over eagerness had kept him from being tagged by spinning lead. With his horse gone, there was no escape. Defensively Sage threw himself to the ground, hoping to provide a narrower target silhouette for his attackers. From his belly he looked more closely into the dark alley. One man, he saw as a gun flashed in the darkness, had taken a position behind an outside stairway which Sage remembered as leading to the second storey of the dry goods store where women could try on dresses in privacy. He aimed his Colt as carefully as possible from his prone position and triggered off in that attacker’s direction. His shot drew an eerie answer from that quarter. A shriek like a woman’s scream raised itself into the night and, as it lowered in tone, continued as the low-voiced grumbling of a man cursing in pain.

  On the heels of that a second gun opened up in Sage’s direction, this one spattering him with roughly driven sand from the alley floor. Sage was able to shift his eyes that way to locate the second shooter squatted down behind a barrel. He fired one bullet at that ambusher.

  At the same time the first gunman rose from behind the staircase and ran toward the far cross-alley. Sage shot at this one again, and the man fell immediately to the ground, clutching his thigh.

  The men behind Sage were drawing much closer in an angry knot. These could be associates of the men in the alley—there was no way of telling. He didn’t know the motivation of any of the men, who they were. Perhaps the whole town had been riled by the return of Sage Paxton. He knew that he could not face that large a body of men—knew also that he could not go forward. One of his attackers was down; did that leave one man, or two, or... ?

  Sage knew he had to leave or be gunned down like a dog from ahead or from behind. That would mean scraping himself off the ground and charging in the only direction he could take: straight ahead toward his ambushers. He would be offering a much better silhouette to shoot at, and this one would be approaching them. Behind him he could still hear the angry, arguing, cursing mob nearing.

  Sage loosed another bullet from his revolver at the man behind the barrel to keep his head down, and rushed toward him, keeping to the far side of the alley. He could clearly see the man he had shot in the leg, sitting on the ground. Sage’s assailant still had his pistol in his hand. He saw the murky shape of the second man behind the barrel.

  And a third man who had appeared at the head of the alley, braced and ready for a fight. Sage was fired at again by the man behind the barrel. This shot tore into the planking beside Sage’s head, spraying splinters. He fired that way carelessly. He realized only now that an earlier decision not to try to reload his Colt in the middle of things might prove to be fatal.

  The third man fired as Sage tried to swerve past him, but the bullet was not aimed at Sage but at the attacker behind the barrel. Strange, Sage had time to think, before the jolt of impact stopped him nearly in his tracks, sudden darkness closed over him and he could feel himself tumbling to the cold hard floor of the alley, his night’s quest brought to an abrupt and futile end.

  ‘I think he’s waking up,’ Sage heard through the confusion of his tangled thoughts.

  ‘I told you he’d be back among us soon,’ a nearly familiar voice answered.

  ‘With that goose egg on his head, I w
ondered,’ the first man replied.

  ‘Sage Paxton has too thick a skull to be bothered by something like that for long.’

  ‘It must run in the family.’

  ‘I suppose it does,’ the other one answered with a short laugh.

  Slowly Sage pried his eyes open. There was a terrific throbbing in his head. Peering through the pain toward the men conversing he saw the source of the nearly familiar voice. His face was instantly recognizable.

  Brian Paxton had always had curly blond hair. Now he wore it nearly to his shoulders. A marshal’s shield gleamed dully on his shirt front as he leaned back in a chair behind the jailhouse desk. He had also sprouted a blond mustache, neatly trimmed, which sprawled the length of his smiling upper lip.

  Sage’s brother was a handsome man, and he briefly resented him for it.

  Realizing now where he was, Sage struggled to sit up. He was on a cot supported by chains in the narrow jail cell. The door to the cell stood open! That did not matter to Sage just then. He doubted he could make it to the cell door, let alone attempt to flee the marshal’s office. Anyway he did not wish to flee from his brother—they still had not had their long talk. Sage had not even been disarmed, though reflecting he was not certain that there was even a single load left in it after the hasty hell of the alley shoot-out. He was just then a useless man with a useless Colt in a jail run by his brother.

  Nothing seems to go according to plan.

  ‘Are you awake, Sage?’ Brian called out as if nothing were wrong between them. Sage didn’t so much as grumble a response. The second man, a lean man in black Sage took for a deputy marshal, chipped in, ‘He’s sitting up, isn’t he? He must be. It might be he left some of his brains out in the alley.’

  ‘Where’d they get me?’ Sage asked, speaking for the first time.

  ‘You mean where’d you get yourself?’ the deputy cracked. Sage frowned at the man. He had never liked being the butt of a joke, especially when he did not understand the gist of it.

  ‘Knock it off, Harvey,’ Brian Paxton said, rising to his feet behind his desk. The deputy, Harvey, nodded, muttered an apology, and shrugged, though he was still smiling.