Christmas in the Lone Star State

by Jason Manning

  The coach gun boomed. Sayles could tell by the sound that only one barrel had been fired. Sensing he didn’t have time to slow and turn the dun, he twisted in the saddle and just let his horse run for the time it took him to bring his right arm across his body, lifting the Schofield to shoulder level. He was surprised to see Ben’s horse going down.

  Ben was focused on surviving the fall and wasn’t even looking behind him at the Ranger, who put two bullets in his back. Ben’s arms flew up and the coach gun cartwheeled through the air.

  Sayles didn’t watch the road agent go down, turning his attention to the third man, the lanky yellow-haired one who had come up the road behind him and Eddings. This one wasn’t in the fight, though. He had spun his pony around and was kicking it into a headlong gallop back down the road.

  Shoving the Schofield back in the coat pocket, Sayles yanked hard on the reins. The dun locked its front legs and nearly sat down in the road as its rider swung a left leg over the pommel and came down on both feet, whipping the Winchester out of its saddle boot before the horse could even stand up. “Ho-shuh,” he said. “Ho-shuh.” He turned the dun to stand crossways in the road. It was Indian horse-talk meant to calm the animal, and Sayles knew for a fact it worked on the dun. There was already a round in the Winchester’s chamber so he laid the long gun across the saddle and draped his left hand over the barrel, reins threaded through the fingers. He curled the forefinger of his right hand against the trigger. It took him two heartbeats to gauge distance, elevation, wind, and trajectory, and he fired with the fleeing highwayman about three hundred feet away. Then he stepped back into the saddle, levering another round into the chamber, prepared to give chase and, if necessary, get a shot off from horseback. But the yellow-haired kid slid sideways off his saddle and lay still while his horse galloped right on out of sight around a curve in the road.

  Shoving the Winchester back into its scabbard, Sayles looked around for his prisoner. Trying to make himself the smallest target possible, Eddings sat hunched over on the bay, which had wandered off to the edge of the woods to get away from the gunfire. But that was as far as it would get away from the dun. Sayles stuck thumb and forefinger into the corners of his mouth and whistled. The bay looked around, then turned and plodded back up to the road. It was then that Sayles realized his hands were shaking. He had always had the ability to focus exclusively on how to deal with a threat to life and limb, and only after the threat was dealt with did he entertain thoughts of what might have been. That was when the shakes took hold of him. The best way to deal with them was to keep busy.

  Dismounting, he ground-hitched the dun and turned his attention to Ben. The right side of the cutthroat’s horse was a bloody mess. It was an easy mystery to solve. Ben had been nervous and in too big a hurry and instead of bringing the coach gun up and over had banged the weapon against the animal’s neck and triggered one barrel; the buckshot had taken off the side of the animal’s face. The old scofflaw was dead, as Sayles had known he would be even before he had put two bullets in his back.

  The black man’s horse had rolled on him, and was back up, standing with haunches aquiver and a little wild-eyed. Sayles Indian-talked the animal long enough to grab the reins. The blanket serape the black man wore was soaked with blood in front, and he was coughing up more blood, his eyes wide and wild with the abject fear of a person desperately clinging to life for just a few seconds more. Sayles reached into his coat pocket and had the Schofield halfway out, intent on putting the man out of his misery, when the man gave up the ghost, drowned in his own blood.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” shouted Eddings, angrily. His voice was high and his tone edgy with fear “They backed down! They were going to ride away! But you kept pushing!” He pointed back down the road, at the corpse of the towheaded robber. “He was running away, for God’s sake!”

  Sayles nodded as he sat on his heels next to Ben and began going through the dead man’s pockets. “That he was. But I warn’t going to let ’em go so they could rob and most likely kill some other folk riding down this here road.” All he found were three buckshot shells for the coach gun and half a plug of chewing tobacco. He tossed the plug, pocketed the shells, picked up the coach gun to inspect it, and nodded. “Might keep this,” he murmured, thinking aloud. “Be good for killin’ snakes and other varmints.” He spotted a possibles bag tied to the dead horse’s saddle and took it, opened it, made a face, and dumped some yellowish-green sowbelly and worm-infested hardtack into the snow. He shook the burlap bag once more for good measure then folded it up and stuck it under his belt.

  Eddings watched, incredulous, as Sayles stood up and went over to the black man and began searching him. He couldn’t believe a Texas Ranger was looting dead bodies. That just didn’t seem right.

  Sayles found a wadded-up handful of greenbacks, which he threw away. “Ain’t worth the paper they’re printed on,” he said, again talking to himself. Then he found the Sheffield bowie knife in a buckskin sheath shoved under the belt at the dead man’s back. He pulled knife from sheath and admired the twelve-inch blade with soft brass along its spine and a brass quillon. He knew something about such knives, though he had never carried one himself. A man by the name of James Black, who had made the first such knife to the specifications of James Bowie in 1830, continued to produce the weapon for more than thirty years after Bowie—and his knife—went down in history at the Alamo. The knives were so popular that factories in Sheffield, England, produced them by the hundreds for export to America even before the War Between the States. The knives were so devastatingly effective in a fight that some eastern states had outlawed carrying them concealed. Sayles didn’t figure that would ever happen in Texas.

  Shoving the sheathed knife into his right boot, Sayles grimaced as he straightened up. He didn’t know anything about adrenaline but he knew that after a dustup he felt stiff and even older than usual. He secured the reins of the sorrel mare the black man had been riding to the pommel of the saddle Eddings was sitting on, then hauled himself back up into his own rig, where he checked his Elgin keywinder and frowned. This delay had cost him about fifteen minutes.

  “Christ,” muttered Eddings. He was still shaking. “You just killed three men with five shots in about half a minute. Don’t you feel anything?”

  Sayles looked up at the prisoner, then at the two nearby corpses, and nodded. “Yep. I’m relieved they’re dead and we ain’t.”

  Eddings sat there atop the bay, shivering uncontrollably from the cold and overwrought nerves, bitterly contemplating the irony that this Texas Ranger had just gunned down three men in cold blood, one of whom had been trying to flee, while he was going to spend the best part of his life in prison because of the death of a man he hadn’t even fired a shot at. “You’re not even going to bury them?”

  “Nope. Critters are hungry this time of year.”

  “You don’t mind killing them but you’re dead set on getting me back to Huntsville alive.”

  Sayles nodded. “True words. You heard the superintendent. It’s what’s expected of me.”

  “And you always do what’s expected of you, don’t you?”

  Sayles leaned over to retrieve the bay’s lead rope. “One time I didn’t,” he said bleakly.

  He urged the coyote dun into motion and headed back down the road toward the body of the towheaded youngster, whose brace of pistols and cross-draw rig he intended to sell or barter in the next town, along with the sorrel mare. By the time they were headed west again they would be half an hour behind schedule, and Sayles had no intention of wasting more time and wearing himself out trying to dig three holes in the frozen ground.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Listening to the winches worked by crewmen directly overhead on the main deck of the riverboat Mustang, Malvern Litchfield watched the gangplank being lowered by two stout ropes. The gangplank was quite long, and needed to be, since the Brazos River was very shallow in places, filled with snags and shifting sandbars, so that eve
n a stern-wheeler like this one, which drew no more than fifteen inches at around a hundred tons, usually could not venture very near the bank. In this instance, though, a large and ramshackle dock jutted out from the bank.

  Boats had always fascinated Mal. Growing up in Whitechapel, he had frequented the docks along the Thames to watch boats great and small ply the mighty river, his boyish imagination embarking him on fits of reverie that usually involved being a daring sea captain during the Age of Exploration. Many was the poor boy in the East End who wanted to escape a future of dreary poverty by sailing the high seas. Being a seaman was a life of risk and hardship, but at least there was the allure of the unknown, the adventure that might await just over the horizon. That was more than could be said for wasting away in some workhouse your entire life, knowing that every day would bring the same misery as the day before.

  Mal could be a friendly, charming sort when he wanted to be, and he had cajoled this stern-wheeler’s skipper—with a bottle of gin as an accomplice—into telling him a great deal about the history and hazards of navigating the Brazos. This river ran through some of the most fertile land in Texas, and prior to the war numerous steamboats had carried mercantile goods up the river from the port of Galveston and cotton, hides, corn, and pecans back down. The postwar railroad boom threatened to diminish the river trade, but the financial crisis had led to the abandonment of some unfinished iron roads and the failure of some newly completed ones. So there was still a commercial need for a few riverboats.

  There were two men standing on the dock. The bigger of the pair was still holding the lantern he had used to signal the stern-wheeler. The signal light was used day or night, to distinguish the people who loitered on docks or riverbanks to watch the big boats pass by from those who sought passage. The two men’s horses were tied near a small, run-down shack behind them. Time had taken its toll on the structure. The roof had caved in and the brush had grown up around and within it. The dock was sizable, with plenty of room for stacking barrels, crates, or cotton bales. Mal had an agile mind and a vivid imagination, and he could visualize this dock twenty years ago, bustling with slaves carrying cotton up the gangplank and crates and barrels of goods back down. There had probably been a plantation or two in the vicinity, but now the shack was the only sign of civilization in the thick woods that lined the Brazos on both sides. There had to have been a road at one time, wide enough for a wagon, but all Mal could see was a narrow trail wending out of the thicket to the dock.

  A quarter of an hour earlier Mal had been in the cabin he shared with his brother Lute, reading a dog-eared version of the Edinburgh Edition of the Reliques of Robert Burns. He was chuckling as he read aloud a verse from his favorite poem, the irreverent “Holy Willie’s Prayer” … O Lord! yestreen, Thou knows, with Meg / Thy pardon I sincerely beg; / O may it ne’er be a living plague / to my dishonour, / And I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg / again upon her … when he felt the vessel lurch and begin to slow. By his estimation they had been making about fifteen kilometers an hour, a fair clip up a river that ran as strong as the Brazos. He had swung off his narrow bunk when he felt the slowing boat veer to starboard. It was then that he suspected something might be wrong. By his calculation it was too early to have reached their destination, a place called Port Sullivan, which was the end of the line when it came to navigating this particular river. It struck him as a little odd that an inland town would be called a port, but then this was America.

  He donned his heavy wool peacoat. A Gasser Model 1870 army service revolver was secured under his belt in back and brass knuckles were stowed in one coat pocket with the book of verse in the other. Only then did he venture out to investigate. This took him through the boiler deck saloon aft of the cabins, and here he found his brother playing poker with two other men. Lute was gloating, and called him over to see the size of his winnings, but Mal ignored him and went out on deck. In his single-minded pursuit of entertainment, be it with the ladies or a deck of cards, Lute sometimes seemed to forget that they were fugitives on the run from the law.

  A glance confirmed they weren’t anywhere near Port Sullivan, since the Mustang’s captain had mentioned the town was located on a bluff just downstream from giant limestone boulders. There was no town, no bluff, and no boulders—just two men on a weather-warped dock flagging down the stern-wheeler. Mal felt the deck beneath his feet shudder as the paddle wheel began to revolve counterclockwise, churning up the brown water. The crew threw bow-, stern, and spring lines as far as the dock so that the two men there could secure them. A moment later the gangplank touched the dock and one of the men proceeded to board, while the other remained where he was.

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Mal. He had a nose for coppers, and he would have bet his last farthing that these two were lawmen. No longer talking to his associate, the man left standing on the dock was scanning the ship from stem to stern, and he gave Mal a long look. Mal flashed his teeth in a grin, gave a jaunty salute, hoping to pass himself off as a man without a worry in the world, who didn’t care if he attracted the attention of a lawman, then turned to hasten back inside the saloon. He went straight to the table where his brother was playing five-card stud and clamped a hand on Lute’s shoulder while flashing another one of those disarming grins at the other two players.

  “Begging your pardon, gents, but I need to speak to my brother for a moment.”

  “You two don’t look like brothers,” said a stout, florid man whose surly expression, Mal surmised, had something to do with the fact that Lute was a skilled broadsman—or cardsharp as they called such players over here. Most of the greenbacks on the table were piled up next to Lute’s arm.

  “You have a keen eye, sir,” said Mal, pleasantly. “Our mother, God rest her soul, was a ladybird and quite popular with the gentlemen, two of whom, apparently, were our fathers.” Indeed, he and his brother bore precious little resemblance to each other physically. Lute was slight, slender, devilishly handsome, and clean-shaven, with straight black hair and very striking light-blue eyes. Mal was a tall, brawny man with curly auburn hair, thick and unruly. He sported Newgate knockers—bushy side whiskers—swept back over his ears. His hair resembled a lion’s mane.

  “You know,” said Lute, mildly, “I really would rather you didn’t tell everyone that we are sons of a whore.” He was studying the three upcards in his hand, the upcards of his opponents, and the size of the pot.

  Mal leaned down and whispered, “And I really need to talk to you … now!” emphatically enunciating the last word.

  Lute sighed, turning up the corner of his hole card. “Would you walk away from that?”

  Mal looked at his brother’s hand—and saw that Lute had nothing. With one card still coming, the best he could do was a pair, and a low one at that. He glanced at Lute, whose face was serenely inscrutable, then at the other players, who were staring at him, trying to read his face for even a hint that Lute had a hand to be worried about. Mal’s nape hairs were rising because there was a copper aboard the Mustang and there was a chance that he and Lute were the reason. Yet the fact that Lute was bluffing seduced him, because in his experience there was hardly anything better than separating a mark from his money under false pretenses.

  “No,” he said, straightening. “No, I can’t say I would. Just hurry.”

  The florid man produced a sigh of resignation and turned his cards over, folding. “I’m done for anyway.” The other man folded as well. Lute exultantly added insult to injury by showing his hand and then provided a free lesson. “Never fold if you don’t see at least one pair on the table, gents.” He swept the winnings into the crown of the flop-brimmed hat he had stolen in Galveston, bade the glowering men farewell, and followed his older brother out of the saloon. Once they were on deck, on the port side of the Mustang and out of the sight of the man on the dock, Mal turned angrily on his brother.

  “What did you do, eh? Back in Galveston? Besides steal that hat? Did you kill the poor sod who was under it, you bludge
r? I swear to Almighty God I ought to give you a good anointing!”

  Lute was startled at first, but by the time Mal’s tirade ended his pale-blue eyes were like chips of ice under lowering brows. He resented Mal for undermining his short-lived glee at having outplayed and then bluffed those two dupes. “What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t do nothing.”

  “There is a copper who just came aboard, and another ashore. Figure they are looking for someone and makes sense they either come up from Galveston or word was sent ahead.”

  Lute waxed indignant. “You just know these crushers are here because of something I’ve done!”

  Mal thought it over and nodded. “Yes! Exactly.” He looked anxiously up and down the deck. He was counting on the man who had come aboard to observe the age-old custom of informing the skipper as to the purpose of his visit. If indeed he was looking for them then by now he was aware that there were a couple of Englishmen aboard the Mustang. He had to assume that their nationality, made evident by their accents, would be one of the primary identifiers used by lawmen to track them down. The riverboat captain knew Mal was British from their conversations. Mal thought that he and Lute had, at best, a few minutes to get off the Mustang before they were discovered. As riverboats go this one wasn’t very large, 120 feet in length. Searching it stem-to-stern would not take long. The weight of the German-made barker in the pocket of his peacoat was a comfort, as he fully expected to be confronted at any moment. “You can tell me later. We would do well to get off this bloody boat.”

  Lute dubiously studied the murky brown water about fifteen feet below where he stood, and shivered. The north wind coming right down the river channel numbed and reddened his cheeks, ruffling his thick black hair since he still clutched his winnings-filled hat to his body. “It’s damned cold here, Mal,” he whined. “I thought it would be warmer over here than it was back home.”