One Bright Morning

by Duncan, Alice

  “He don’t pay as good as Mulrooney, though, ma’am,” the black-haired man said with a yellow, rather apologetic, grin.

  “You traitors.” Maggie’s furious whisper cut through the warm June air. “You damned traitors.”

  “I guess you got a right to call us anything you want to, ma’am. But we still got to take you to Mulrooney’s train.”

  “Train? I thought he was in El Paso.”

  “Not no more he ain’t. When he heard your man and that Injun was headin’ to El Paso today, he got on his train. We’re goin’ to take you and meet him along the way.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Maggie said firmly. She was holding Annie so tightly, that the little girl began to whimper. Annie was scared, too.

  “I’m afraid you got no choice, Mrs. Green,” the man said.

  Maggie glared at the man and hate radiated from every pore of her body. “I’ve never seen a real, live traitor before. You’re a hateful man, mister, you and your friend.”

  “Oh, we ain’t friends, ma’am, just employees.”

  Maggie shook her head. She couldn’t think of anything foul enough to say to the two men.

  “You’d better just go along with them, Maggie.”

  Maggie stared at Four Toes in horror.

  “Four Toes Smith, we can’t just go with them,” she cried. “They’ll use us as hostages to lure Jubal to that horrid man. I’d sooner die than lure my husband to his death.”

  The look Four Toes gave Maggie then stopped her words and dried her mouth and made her heart begin to thud with a funereal dread.

  “It isn’t ‘us’ they want, Maggie. It’s you. I’m afraid this is it for me.” Four Toes looked at her kindly, as if he knew his words would make her cry.

  He was right. Maggie’s mouth dropped open and she couldn’t talk. Tears pooled in her blue eyes until the irises looked like sapphires glinting in a brook.

  “Four Toes,” she gasped in horror. “You can’t mean—”

  The Indian put a brown hand on her cheek. Then he stroked little Annie’s soft curls.

  “I don’t want to scare Annie, Maggie. Please don’t screech or anything. This is all right. You know, I grew up with Jubal and Dan. They raised me. But Dan taught me enough about being an Apache that I know one or two things. These men are nothing. I know Jubal and Dan will rescue you. They’ll get Mulrooney. I feel it in my gut. I knew I wasn’t going to live very long. It’s just something that I grew up knowing. It’s all right, Maggie.”

  Four Toes seemed to be more concerned about the tears that were now flowing freely down Maggie’s cheeks than he was about his own destiny. “It’s all right, Maggie. Really. I’ve had a good life, thanks to Jubal and Dan. As my people say, it’s a good day to die. The main thing is not to frighten Annie.”

  Maggie nodded numbly. She couldn’t stop her tears. Little Annie was beginning to cry, too, because her mama was crying and Four Toes seemed so somber, and those bad men were pointing guns at them.

  “Better come with me, Injun.” Those were the first words the light-haired man had spoken since guns were drawn. They weren’t spoken unkindly.

  Four Toes leaned over and kissed Annie. “I love you, Annie,” he said. Then he kissed Maggie on her tear-drenched cheek. “Take care of Jubal and Dan for me, Maggie. They’re my brothers.”

  Maggie was shaking her head now. “You can’t just go off with that man, Four Toes. You can’t.” Her voice was an incredulous, miserable whisper.

  Four Toes shrugged and grinned ruefully. “Got no choice, Maggie. Only gun I got is that rifle,” he pointed at the floor of the wagon. “I can’t risk getting you and Annie hurt.” He shook his head sadly. “We lost this one, Maggie.”

  “Oh, my God,” Maggie whispered. “Oh, my God.”

  She watched as the black-haired man dismounted and tied his horse to the wagon. Then he got into the driver’s seat and whipped up the mules.

  Maggie lurched off her seat, but the black-haired man shoved her, hard, back onto it. Her glasses flew off of her face and landed on the desert floor. Maggie could just barely see them: two bright circles of glass reflecting the sun. Her stomach lurched.

  She looked over her shoulder as they drove off. Four Toes smiled at her, and she knew her heart was breaking. He waved at Annie.

  “Bye-bye, Annie,” he called.

  “Bye, Fo Toe,” Annie said back. She sounded puzzled. Then she turned to her mother. “Why Fo Toe stay der, Mama?”

  But Maggie couldn’t answer her daughter’s question. Her throat was tight and aching, and her tears would have drowned any words she might have spoken. She just shook her head and sobbed.

  The two men at least spared Annie and Maggie the sight of Four Toes’ murder. The light-haired man and Four Toes were out of sight by the time Maggie heard the sound of one far-away gunshot. It sounded muffled, as though it had to travel over many lifetimes to reach her ears. She couldn’t stop the ragged cry of grief that tore from her throat.

  “How could you? How could you? How could you?” she asked the black-haired man, over and over. She sobbed into her baby’s pretty bonnet.

  “It’s not personal, ma’am,” the black-haired man told her. He sounded just a little bit sorry about it all.

  “Not personal?” The words stumbled out of Maggie’s throat thick and sad.

  Maggie remembered from what seemed like a century ago Dan Blue Gully’s words as he knelt beside her in the kitchen of her farm and tried to calm her down. He told her then it wasn’t personal. Maggie knew that she’d never understand as long as she lived why this had to happen. It was the most personal thing she’d ever experienced.

  She didn’t even try to stop crying, even though she knew it would upset Annie. She couldn’t help it.

  Four Toes Smith was the kindest man she’d ever known in her entire life, and the best friend her little girl would ever have. She couldn’t even stand the thought of him lying there, dead, under the merciless desert sun. And she was here in this wagon, being driven as a hostage to a crazy man she’d never even met, and she couldn’t do a thing for Four Toes. She couldn’t even bury him, for God’s sake.

  Not personal. Maggie couldn’t stand it.

  # # #

  When Jubal and Dan got to El Paso and found out Mulrooney had left, they knew something had gone incredibly wrong.

  “There’s no way he would have left unless he knew we were coming for him,” Jubal told Dan as they tore away from the town and back toward Green Valley. “Mulrooney never moves unless he has to. There’s something wrong.”

  “Jesus, Jubal, do you think Maggie and Four Toes are in any danger? They were going out to the desert today.”

  “Sammy sends guards with them whenever they leave the ranch.”

  Dan eyed Jubal through the dust that the pounding hooves of their horses spewed up. “He’s had to hire new guards, Jubal, since everybody’s been getting sick. If Mulrooney knew about our coming to El Paso, that means somebody on your spread is being paid. That means he might have infiltrated your forces, no matter how careful Sammy’s been.”

  Jubal’s face was pale as death under his hat in the lovely spring sunshine. His lips were pinched together and his expression was drawn with worry.

  “I know that, Dan.” His words were clipped. “I already know that.”

  They rode back to Green Valley as fast as they could without killing their mounts.

  # # #

  “So this is Mrs. Green.”

  The black-haired man, whose name, Maggie learned, was Sloane, had led Maggie by the arm through the five-car special to the very last carriage and deposited her in front of an enormously fat man. The light-haired man, Potts, had rejoined them before the wagon reached the train.

  Maggie couldn’t even look at Potts, the villain who had murdered Four Toes. She held Annie tightly in her arms.

  It made her feel sick to her stomach when a mousy little man gave Sloane and Potts each a wad of money and the two thugs left th
e train and rode away across the desert. She wondered where they were headed now, and if kidnap and murder were their usual line of work.

  Prometheus Mulrooney stood near the little open observation deck in his luxurious, private railroad carriage and beamed at his prisoners. His voice was slick with pleasure. His turkey wattles quivered with delight, and his big stomach rippled when he laughed. He was so pleased with himself that his fat face fairly glowed.

  Maggie was petrified, but she swore to herself that she’d be skewered on a spit and roasted alive before she’d allow Prometheus Mulrooney to witness her terror. She noticed that two men, one of them the mousy man who had paid Four Toes’ murderer and her kidnapper, were cowering at Mulrooney’s side. They kept eyeing Mulrooney as though to assess his mood.

  The two were obviously underlings of Mulrooney’s and they both seemed like truly miserable human beings to her. Maggie didn’t understand how people could allow themselves to be so downtrodden as to let their better natures be so completely subverted. Yet that’s apparently just what these creatures had done.

  She found the two men contemptible, and their cowardice repelled her. Unwittingly, they gave spur to her own courage. She sucked in a deep breath.

  “Yes, I’m Mrs. Green. And you must be Prometheus Mulrooney.”

  Maggie spoke to the huge man as though he were a freak in a circus side show. To the contempt in her tone of voice, she added a comprehensive glare that took in the fullness of Mulrooney’s person, from the fat little toes that wiggled inside of his broad shoes, to his enormous, sparsely covered head. Maggie’s supercilious stare did not miss his huge belly or his watermelon thighs. She tried very hard to make her expression as full of loathing and disgust as she could. It was not a difficult task.

  Ferrett and Pelch, the two men whose defeated demeanor unknowingly fired Maggie’s spirit, looked at each other with horrified astonishment.

  Mulrooney’s smile soured some at Maggie’s tone of voice and frosty glare of contempt.

  “The same, madam,” he said. “And I suggest you treat me with the respect I deserve.” He spoke smugly and rocked back on his feet. His demeanor was that of a man supremely pleased with himself.

  “Respect?” The word hurtled out of Maggie’s mouth and slapped Mulrooney on the cheek as surely as if she’d used her open palm. “Respect? You don’t know the meaning of the word. You’re a filthy murderer. You—you—you horrible man. You’re a beast! A criminal! A filthy, disgusting murderer! Respect? I’d respect a rattlesnake before I’d respect you.” Maggie’s eyes raked Mulrooney’s blubbery body once more. “You, Mr. Mulrooney, are a truly contemptible creature.”

  Mulrooney had already turned a deep red. Nobody had talked to him like this in at least forty years. He had made it a point to see that no one he dealt with had any spirit. But this honey-haired woman who was, at most, a quarter his size, was actually daring to vilify him—and in front of his underlings, what’s more.

  His huge body quaked with outrage.

  “I suggest you shut your mouth, Mrs. Green. Perhaps you don’t realize just exactly how tenuous your position is.” His voice was quivering with wrath.

  “My position? Tenuous?” Maggie spat at him. Her courage had been overtaken by anger and she wasn’t even thinking any longer. Her one goal at this moment was to let Prometheus Mulrooney know how much she hated him.

  “Tenuous? I don’t even know what that word means, mister. If you’re trying to tell me you’re going to kill me and my baby, why don’t you just say so. That shouldn’t be too hard for you. God knows, you’ve murdered better people than me in your disgusting, filthy life.”

  Mulrooney’s pig eyes bulged ominously in his florid face. “Ferrett!” he roared at his secretary, who jumped a foot.

  “Yessir,” Ferrett whispered.

  “Take this miserable creature away from me.”

  “Yessir.”

  Maggie whirled on Ferrett now. He still stood next to Pelch, not quite yet daring to move, and both men were eyeing Maggie with awe. They had never heard anybody stand up to Prometheus Mulrooney before.

  “And you!” Maggie shrieked at Ferrett. “What do you do all day long? Just quake in your boots while this horrid man makes you pay the people who do murder for him? How on earth can you live with yourself? I’ve never seen anything like it!”

  Ferrett reached a tentative hand out to pat Maggie’s arm, as though he were trying to get her to calm down. His own timid nature would never allow him to buck Mulrooney. He was sure Maggie was destined for a cruel, perhaps immediate fate, if she didn’t stop yelling soon.

  “Take your cowardly hands off me, you miserable thing,” Maggie cried at Ferrett, wrenching her arm away from his touch. Poor Ferrett shrank back against Pelch, who put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  “Ferrett! Pelch!” Mulrooney’s face had by now turned a deeper purple than either man had ever seen it. His putty nose looked like a huge, doughy dumpling floating in a bowl of beet soup.

  Maggie spun to face Mulrooney again.

  “Ferrett! Pelch!” Her voice was a mockery of Mulrooney’s furious rumble. “You filthy pig! You murdering devil! You surround yourself with weaklings and toadies and make them do your horrid butchery. You slime! You burned my house! You murdered my friend!” Her voice caught at the mention of Four Toes’ death, but she took a deep breath and went on. “You tried to murder my husband! You awful, awful, awful, fat, disgusting—greasy lard pudding!”

  Maggie couldn’t think of words terrible enough to express to Mulrooney exactly what she thought about him, but she was doing a fair job of getting her point across. The expressions on the faces of the room’s occupants testified eloquently to that truth.

  At the word “fat,” both Ferrett and Pelch looked at each other with alarm. When she called him a “greasy lard pudding,” both men gasped. Nobody ever mentioned Mulrooney’s obesity in his presence. It was a law in his land.

  “Enough!” Mulrooney roared.

  His piggy eyes were lost in his purple face, and his hands were balled into enormous lumps of suet at his sides. He reached one of them out now to push at Maggie, who was leaning toward him. He’d never had to lay a hand on an enemy before, but Maggie showed no signs of going away, and neither Ferrett nor Pelch showed any sign of recovering from their respective stupors of surprise.

  Annie chose that moment to frown, point at the quivering man, and say, “Mama, dat’s a bad fat man.”

  “He’s a terrible, bad, fat man, Annie,” Maggie confirmed furiously.

  Mulrooney’s roar could have deafened a person less incensed than Maggie. It only fired her own fury to a pitch unknown to her before.

  When Mulrooney’s hand reached out to her, Maggie rebalanced Annie on her hip in an instant and slapped the enormous, porky fist as hard as she could. The fat man drew his hand back with a gasp of pained surprise. Nobody had ever dared strike Prometheus Mulrooney. He actually took a step back.

  Maggie, who knew nothing of battles or the element of surprise, instinctively pressed her advantage and followed him. She stalked Mulrooney like an infuriated cat attacking its prey.

  “You vicious, foul, disgusting thing. You don’t even deserve the word ‘human.’ You’re too foul. How many people have you murdered in your miserable life, anyway? How much did it cost you to burn my house? It wasn’t worth it, believe me. That poor place barely kept us alive, yet you must have spent hundreds of dollars to burn it down. And how much did it cost you to have Four Toes Smith murdered? As good a man as ever walked the earth, and you killed him!” Maggie’s voice cracked again, but she pushed herself on, rage giving her strength. “And you did it all out of pure meanness. You’re a freak Mr. Mulrooney. You’re a fat, disgusting freak of nature. Why are you doing this? Why? Why? Why?”

  Maggie’s shriek might have shattered glass if the door to the deck had been shut, but it wasn’t. She had backed Mulrooney out the open door of his carriage by this time.

  “Why?” Mulrooney wa
s roaring in harmony to Maggie’s screaming. “Because that damned Marianna Potter wouldn’t marry me, that’s why! I’ll teach her! I’m going to wipe the Green’s off the face of the earth! The fool married Benjamin Green instead. That’s why!”

  He was trying to sound ferocious, but he was, in truth, frightened. Nobody had ever yelled at him or come at him the way Maggie was doing. She’d even slapped him! And nobody was bounding to his rescue, either.

  “She wouldn’t marry you?” Maggie’s voice dripped with sarcasm that was acid enough to eat through metal.

  “She wouldn’t marry me.” Mulrooney was whining now.

  “That’s the reason for all this butchery?” Maggie’s hand swept out in a gesture that encompassed years and years and lives and lives.

  “I prefer to call it justice,” said Mulrooney. He was still whining.

  “Justice? You prefer? You prefer? You disgusting idiot!”

  “Well, she wouldn’t marry me!”

  “Well, why should she marry you? You’re a disgusting, filthy, grotesque pile of lard! You’re a horrible person! Who on earth would want to marry you?”

  Mulrooney uttered an incoherent bellow of outrage.

  Maggie had by this time shrieked Mulrooney across his observation deck to the wrought-iron railing of the platform. When he leaned his bulk against the rails to get away from the violent, screaming termagant who wouldn’t stop following him, Ferrett and Pelch looked at each other with big eyes. They were probably the only two people on the whole train who heard the ominous groan of overtaxed metal.

  “Oh, my Lord, Mr. Pelch,” whispered Ferrett.

  He looked out the window of the carriage to discover that the train was, at this very moment, crossing a bridge that spanned a deep—a very deep—rocky gorge. Ferrett tapped Pelch on the shoulder and pointed out the window. Pelch gasped.

  “Good heavens, Mr. Ferrett,” he breathed.

  He crept to the deck and stood in the doorway. He stared as Maggie pressed closer and closer to Mulrooney and Mulrooney leaned harder and harder against the delicate railing. Ferrett joined Pelch, and they watched, wide-eyed, as Maggie continued to confront her husband’s family’s tormentor.