The Taylor County War

by Ford Fargo

  The rider was diving into Sen Yung’s stew. In fact, it looked like he’d taken it all.

  Tobias looked up. “This here’s Eddie Benton. Says he’s riding grub line.”

  Benton scraped his chair back and stood. “Pleased,” he said. No one offered him a hand. “I was hoping there might be some kind of a riding job at the T-Bar-B. Really would be good to get three squares. That there stew was almighty tasty.”

  Billy threw a glance at Quaid, who made a tiny nod. “Boss,” Billy said. “Taggart and Henry being gone and all, we sure could use another rider.” He turned his attention to Benton. “You know anything about cows?”

  “I come up the trail from Laredo,” Benton said. “I’ve trailed my share.”

  “Trailing and tending stock are not one and the same, but at least you’ve herded cows a bit. If you can, Boss, maybe you could hire Benton here, just to give him a try. Start with a month, then keep him on if he pans out.”

  Tobias looked hard at Billy, then at Quaid. Both looked relaxed and easy, like they really anticipated the extra hand Benton would make.

  “All right,” Tobias said. “Get Eddie set up in the bunk house, and get ready to ride out in the morning. We’re gonna head for the north line shack. Find out what’s going on with the teacher and his kids.”

  Billy gulped his coffee. “Come on, Eddie Benton. Let’s go get you settled in. Bring your nag around back.” He left by the back door with Quaid at his heels. Benton went out the front door to get his horse.

  Billy showed him where to put his horse and then offered him the only empty bunk. “Get your stuff together,” he said. “We ride north at sunup.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Clay More

  The man’s final death throes had been pitiful to watch. Yet after a week of ever-deepening delirium, fever and excruciating pain, his death had been a merciful release.

  “He’s gone,” Dr. Logan Munro announced with a sigh. “And I didn’t even know his name.”

  The town doctor wound the tubes of his stethoscope into a neat bundle and stowed it away in his medical bag. The man’s death would be a release for Logan as well, since he had been visiting him three times a day to administer laudanum and check on the wound dressings. It had been a highly unsatisfactory case, since he had felt well nigh powerless to help.

  The man had been found lying on his side in an alley in Dogleg City a week before. He was unconscious, having been struck on the back of his head, and he was losing blood from an ugly knife wound to the abdomen.

  “I must say, Doc, it’ll be good to get him out of here,” said Declan O’Donnell, the stocky middle aged Irishman who owned the building that he fancifully called O’Donnell’s Lodging House. It was not the most salubrious flophouse in Dogleg City, but Logan had always liked the Irishman, for he seemed to have a heart and was not solely motivated by what he could get out of life. There were many others in Wolf Creek who would not have been so ready to let a dying man stink his place out with the stench of rampant abdominal gangrene.

  “You did a good thing in letting him stay here, Declan,” Logan said. “Especially with him being barely conscious all week.”

  “Sure, the man had paid me for a week’s board. It was the Christian thing to take the poor fellow in. Anyway, apart from the smell he was no real bother.”

  Yet it bothered Logan that he knew next to nothing about his patient. Although he had been drifting in and out of consciousness, he had volunteered no information whatsoever, not even a few days ago when he had been well enough to let Logan feed him some beef tea without vomiting it straight back.

  The man seemed to be in his early thirties and looked to be the sort of tough, sinewy gunman that was attracted to the kind of establishments that thrived south of Grant Street and made Dog Leg City what it was. That he had paid for a week’s board implied that he had some business to do, or perhaps he had even been aiming to gain employment as an enforcer for one or other of the local ‘businessmen.’ At any rate he had clearly upset someone enough to become a victim himself. And it was more than that, for whoever had struck him down had then cold-bloodedly stabbed him in the abdomen and twisted the blade enough to do him real internal damage.

  That had puzzled Logan when he had first examined the man. He had seen enough of violent attacks to realize that an abdominal wound that resulted in a perforated intestinal loop spilling out was indeed a murderous act, which had been inflicted in such a way as to ensure a lingering, painful death. Far easier to slit the throat and cause instant death. This, however, was both vicious and cruel beyond belief. It was done so that the victim would know that he was going to die and that no one could help. Not even the town doctor.

  Certainly all that Logan had been able to do was patch up the wound and treat the pain as best he could. As for the law, after cursory investigation no one seemed worried about the man’s fate. Only Logan seemed to feel any remorse for the man.

  Declan pulled the window up and then turned and waved his hand back and forth in front of his face. “Damn! The poor sod was starting to stink worse than some of the dead things that we used to dig out of the peat bogs back home in good old Connemara.”

  Logan had to agree. The smell of putrefaction had been overpowering toward the end. “At least the poor devil is out of his agony now.”

  “An amazing thing, isn’t it, Doc,” Declan went on as he pulled out a battered corncob pipe and fingered the bowl thoughtfully. “One second he’s lying there writhing and blabbering away, then the next moment he’s gone. It was like his spirit suddenly left him.”

  Logan looked at the dead man’s face. The lines of pain were gone and the pupils of his eyes were already fixed and dilated in death.

  With his finger and thumb he eased the eyelids over the unseeing eyeballs, then with a sigh he stood up and gave the little Irishman a rueful smile as he looked round the spartanly furnished room. It was one of the ‘superior’ rooms that Declan occasionally rented out instead of the rows of bunks that were crammed into two dormitories, yet it was still pretty basic. Apart from the bed, the only furniture consisted of a cheap table, a chair and washstand with a chipped jug and bowl. The man’s bloodstained clothes had been roughly folded up by Declan and deposited on the table alongside a Remington, an old pepperbox and a knife that he had kept in his right boot.

  “Not much to show for a life,” Logan mused as he pointed to the table.

  “Maybe it wasn’t much of a life, Dr. Munro,” Declan returned phlegmatically. “I reckon I had better drop by Elijah Graveley’s funeral parlor and tell the old buzzard that he has another customer.”

  Logan poured water into the bowl and washed his hands. “I’ll do that, Declan. I have to drop in later to see another patient.”

  Declan gave a short laugh. “Well good luck, Doc. If you can bring some of his customers back to life, you are one hell of a doctor!”

  ***

  Elijah Graveley was not renowned for either his sense of humor or his generosity. He was aware of this reputation and indeed, he went to some length to foster it. In his view both life and death were serious matters. Since he made his living from the serious business of disposing of the dead, he had long since made a business-like decision to maximize the profit he made from each dead client. To do that he had to supplement what he considered to be the meager fees he charged either the family or the town for the burial. Over the years he had found various ways of doing so.

  First of all, he enjoyed an informal partnership with Wil Marsh, the local photographer; a kindred spirit who was also able to see death and the anguish it caused to grieving relatives as a sure way to earn extra dollars. Graveley would beautify up the corpses and Marsh would photograph them in all their glory, as if they had just gone to sleep. Few widows could resist the little works of art, and saw it as part of the twosome’s compassionate natures.

  On the other hand, if the deceased had died violently as a result of some disagreement about what side of the law they were on
- well, Graveley could set them out in what he called their ‘finest gory’ by opening up a wound or two, scorching the flesh around the wounds and fixing their eyeballs so that they were turned upward to show only the whites, making them look like boiled fish eyes. Then Wil Marsh would take the picture to turn them into the very embodiment of evil; men who deserved to be slain like the vermin they were. And it worked. The pair found that many of the fancy magazines back East were willing to pay top dollar for them.

  A second source of income was derived from another, more clandestine partnership that Gravely had with Dr. Jefferson Cantrell, the Wolf Creek dentist. Cantrell was a man to avoid at certain times, especially if you developed toothache any time after noon. That was about the time that the effects of the strong liquor he started imbibing in from nine in the morning would have begun to exert an effect. That was not to say that his tooth-pulling skills were much affected, it was just that he was not guaranteed to pull the right one.

  Despite all that, the dentist was much sought after by the toothless hags, crones and the middle aged and elderly men who wanted either to be able to chew a steak again or maybe attract a partner. Either way, Cantrell could whip up a set of false teeth in a few days, for a fairly substantial fee, of course. It was a lucrative skill that he had developed during the War when there were so many dead young men who had no need to be buried with their teeth.

  Elijah Graveley had become skilled at pulling the teeth out of the dead jaws and stuffing the mouth with rags to make it seem that they still had a mouthful of their very own ivory. A couple of hidden stitches through gums and lips prevented any unwanted exposure of his handiwork.

  No questions were asked and no one to that date had ever recognized any of the teeth in the new sets of dentures that Dr. Jefferson Cantrell made.

  The third source of the undertaker’s extra income he had only discovered by accident. It was the fact that a few people used their rectums as a kind of internal purse. In a few miners, outlaws, and a couple of cowboys he had found little stashes of gold and silver. An old maid had kept her jewelry there, and in the body of one old man he had even found a wad of notes wrapped up tight in an oilskin. It was not a regular occurrence, but he had found it a sufficiently profitable discovery to make a search of every corpse’s inner regions a part of his normal examination after death.

  “No sense in burying good fortune in Boot Hill,” he would muse to himself whenever he removed teeth or made such a find as he prepared the body in his locked embalming room. It was only when he had finally completed his work and dressed the deceased in their burial clothes or one of his shrouds that he would summon his assistant and gravedigger, Caleb Brodie, and together they would load the body into the coffin ready for the funeral.

  Often, when standing at one or other of the bars in Dogleg City, Caleb Brodie would complain about how little Graveley paid. Yet what he never told anyone was the fact that Elijah Graveley always paid his medical bills for him. Caleb knew it was because he was the best-damned gravedigger there was and it was worth keeping him well.

  Elijah Graveley was waiting for Dr. Logan Munro at the door of his funeral parlor. As usual, he was dressed in a black frock coat and a top hat. He was almost skeletally thin and had an iron-grey moustache that he allowed to droop over his upper lip in order to hide the fact that he had no teeth in his head at all. For personal reasons, he had never contemplated asking the Wolf Creek dentist to make him a set of dentures.

  “Thank you for coming back, Doctor Munro. The sooner you use that fancy knockout stuff on Caleb the better for me. He won’t stop talking. I reckon he is more nervous than I have ever seen him before.”

  “He has every reason to be a touch scared,” Logan replied as he entered the parlor ahead of the undertaker. “Having a perianal abscess the size of a hen’s egg is no fun. The chloroform will help, but he’s going to need pain relief for a good few days after the work I’m going to be doing on him. You realize that he’s not going to be able to do any digging for at least a week.”

  Elijah Graveley had removed his hat upon entering, and automatically ran a hand through his thinning hair. He smiled and came perilously close to revealing his edentulous mouth.

  “In that case, it is a good thing that I have no funerals arranged, Doctor Munro. It appears you are doing your job too well. The Wolf Creek folk simply ain’t dying these days!”

  Logan shook his head regretfully. “I am afraid that I haven’t been so successful, Elijah. A patient of mine just passed away. It is not a case that will wait. He needs a quick burial.”

  The undertaker sighed. “He is decaying fast, I take it? Then it looks as though I will have to either find a substitute gravedigger or get my own hands dirty. What’s the client’s name, doctor?”

  Logan winced. “I am afraid I have no idea, Elijah. In my country we’d call just him John Smith.”

  Elijah Graveley opened the door leading to the living quarters where Caleb Brodie could be heard gabbling and chuckling away to himself.

  Logan grinned. Soon, under the influence of chloroform, Brodie would be as quiet as the grave that would soon receive Logan’s other un-named patient.

  ***

  After operating on Caleb and leaving him with a bottle of a specially prepared painkiller of his own invention, Logan headed along South Street. It was busier than usual. He tipped his hat to a group of ladies as they made their way toward the church, their arms laden with flowers and various cleaning paraphernalia. They belonged to the coterie of devout, god-fearing women who kept the Reverend Obadiah Stone’s church in pristine order, garlanded with blooms and smelling like the Garden of Eden itself. Not only that, but they took turns in keeping the parsonage as clean and wholesome as a parsonage should be. Some of the less charitable members of the said reverend’s congregation did a lot of elbow nudging and chin pointing at some of the prettier members of his entourage and opined as to which of them kept the reverend’s bed in order, too.

  Up ahead, at the junction with Second Street, he recognized the familiar plump figure of one of the prominent ladies of Wolf Creek. Edith Pettigrew was the widow of Seth Pettigrew, one of the town’s founders, a pedigree that she wholeheartedly believed gave her and the sewing circle which she led the right to act as the moral compass for the town. She was huddled in conversation with a tall, slim Chinese man dressed dapperly in a suit with a starched collar and tie. By their furtive manner he knew that a transaction was taking place.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pettigrew,” he said, tipping his hat as he approached. “And to you, Mr. Tsu.”

  Tsu Dong stuffed something in his pocket, turned and smiled at Logan as he gave a small stiff bow. “Good morning, Doctor Munro.”

  The widow Pettigrew blushed as she pulled the cords of her purse-string bag closed. “Ah, Dr. Munro, I am coming to see you later. I have need of your professional services.”

  “I’ll be consulting from ten o’clock, Mrs. Pettigrew. I will look forward to our meeting.”

  Logan smiled as he walked on, well aware that the widow had just obtained a supply of opium from one of Tsu Chiao’s “nephews.” And he was ready to bet money that the reason for her planned consultation with him would be to obtain a good laxative. The extent of her addiction to the drug was manifest by her chronic constipation and the pinpoint pupils of her eyes, which gave her such an unattractive mien.

  He made for a plain fronted building with steamed up windows. A large sign above the door proclaimed it to be LI’S LAUNDRY. Beneath it in red calligraphic painting the same thing was more mysteriously and more impressively written in Chinese:

  中国洗衣店

  Beside the door hung a gong, a very public sign of the Li family’s grief. For weeks it had been rung every day in memory of Li Chang, the youngest son of the family, who had been trampled to death by an outlaw’s horse when the Danby gang had attacked the town.

  Underneath the gong there was a bowl on a tripod. It was full of ash from the paper clothes and paper t
oys that the family had burned for young Li Chang to enjoy in the spirit world.

  A bell jangled as Logan pushed open the door and found himself in the steamy atmosphere. Through the steam he could see Jing Jing, the Li couple’s pretty daughter, standing behind a counter and going through a wad of laundry orders. She was dressed in a blue tunic with a bereavement ribbon around her arm. At one end of the counter a statue of a family god was covered in a red cloth. At the other end sat a small basket cage full of straw, which contained the two white mice that had belonged to young Chang, and which were adoringly looked after by his three older brothers. Logan knew only too well how important such links were to bereaved children. He had made a point of keeping a regular check on the family ever since the tragedy.

  “Good morning, Doctor Munro,” Jing Jing began, her mouth curling into a delightful smile. Then she hesitated and looked past him as the door opened and Tsu Dong stepped in. Her expression registered first pleasure, then embarrassment. She dropped her eyes demurely.

  Young love, Logan mused to himself. He understood both her attraction to the young man, whom he reckoned to be about twenty-one or twenty-two, just five or six years older than her. He was a good looking fellow, had impeccable manners and dressed well, as did all of Tsu Chiao’s “nephews.” Yet, whether he was actually related to the owner of the Red Chamber or not, Logan was not sure. What he did know was that Tsu Chiao expected absolute loyalty and total obedience from his family. The fact that all of his nephews had the same family name did not necessarily mean that there was a blood tie, but possibly indicated that a binding contract or pledge had been made, of fealty to a master.

  Logan had, on several occasions, had to treat people who had been on the wrong side of the Wolf Creek opium den’s owner and one or other of his nephews. Recollecting that brought a suspicion to his mind. Could Tsu Dong or one of the other nephews have been responsible for the mortal wound and the protracted death of his unnamed patient?