Christmas in the Lone Star State

by Jason Manning

  “Why are we bringing her along, Mal?” he whispered.

  “Because I’m not a cold-blooded killer.” The tone of his voice made clear he thought that only one of them wasn’t.

  Lute could tell his brother was very angry. Mal didn’t like it at all when his plans went awry. “I didn’t want to kill him,” he muttered, nodding at the dead man. “But it might have been me lying on that floor all shot to hell instead of him.”

  Mal leaned forward and rasped, “Would you like to put a bullet in her bloomin’ brainpan, then? Is that what you want, now that you’ve had your fun?”

  Lute frowned but didn’t say anything. His brother rarely lost his temper, but when he did it was a frightening thing to behold. He had once seen Mal beat a man to a bloody pulp in a quarrel over a prizefight wager at a pub on Little Paternoster Row, one of Whitechapel’s seedier streets. This had led one of the local slum landlords to recruit Mal for some organized fights, a career that proved short-lived. It seemed Mal Litchfield was not a pugilist so much as a brawler, and wasn’t devastating with his fists unless he was madder than hornets. Like he was right now.

  “She comes with us,” said Mal, taking his temper in hand. “It’s possible they might think she killed him and then ran away. Depends on how much time passes before that body is discovered, and whether the winter will be obliging and cover our tracks before that happens.”

  Lute shrugged. “Well, I suppose there is something to be said for having her along. You go on about how there aren’t many people out there on the frontier, so I suspect women will be hard to come by. Might as well bring our own.” A slow smile curled his lips. “And while she may not be a raving beauty, she’ll look better and better as time goes on, right?”

  Mal noticed that Alise was emerging from the sleeping area and knew she had overheard. She stood there forlornly, barefoot in her worn dress, and he didn’t even ask if she had shoes or boots. He instructed Lute to get the boots off the dead man and onto her, and to collect as many supplies as he could carry in one sack. He noticed that the pistol still clenched in the corpse’s beefy hand was an old black-powder pistol, what he knew as a dragoon revolver. He decided it wasn’t worth taking. But he pried it out of the dead man’s grasp anyway, and took it outside and threw it as far as he could. It was impossible to say what Alise Graham would do if she suddenly decided she didn’t want to be abducted, with the prospect of being raped repeatedly in the bargain.

  He sighed. They had killed three men in three days, and the third day was far from over. “Hurry up!” he called out, and climbed into the sorrel’s saddle, casting an anxious look around. He was in a hurry to go, because the farther west they got the longer they would live, and Mal Litchfield wanted to live a very long time, since he knew where he was going when he died. Lines from “Holy Willie’s Prayer” came to mind—Lord in Thy day o’ vengeance try them … And pass not in Thy Mercy by them … But for Thy people’s sake destroy them.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also you have received, and wherein you stand; By which also ye are saved, if you keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless you have believed in vain. For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures…”

  Bill Sayles wasn’t listening to the Cameron preacher who stood at the head of Joshua Eddings’s grave while reading solemnly from the Bible, and it didn’t seem to him that many of the other people present were paying much attention either. About twenty were congregated in the town cemetery under the skeletons of old oaks stripped bare of their leaves. Some of them were staring at Purdy Eddings, who stood arm in arm with Temple Hanley, and Sayles was glad the lawyer had persisted in hooking the woman’s arm under his because she looked none too steady on her feet.

  Sayles had seen plenty of grieving women in his time on the Texas frontier, women who had lost loved ones to sickness or violent death at the hands of Indians or bandits. Some were made of stern stuff, had been forged in the crucible of frontier life—a life of privation and danger. It bred a stubborn resolve seasoned with fatalism that left them as prepared as a person could possibly be for the loss of someone dear to them. But others were destroyed by such tragedy.

  He knew one such woman quite well. Ellen Carnaby had been the pretty young wife of an acquaintance and fellow Ranger who, along with Sayles and about eighty more Rangers, had followed Captain Rip Ford on an expedition into the heart of Comancheria to pay the Indians back for incessant raids that had left the frontier a bloody shamble. Accompanied by nearly a hundred Tonkawa Indians, mortal foes of the Comanche for generations, they struck the village of the legendary Comanche leader Iron Jacket, who wore a Spanish coat of mail and was thought to be invincible. Iron Jacket had certainly thought so; he rode out to meet the oncoming attackers alone, taunting them. A Tonkawa marksman took the chief down with an old black-powder buffalo gun. Sayles figured that maybe in the past the chain mail might have deflected a bullet or two fired from an ordinary rifle, which could have lulled Iron Jacket and his warriors into believing he was invincible. But no suit of armor was going to save the Comanche chief from a buffalo gun.

  Fierce fighting raged in and around the village in what came to be known as the Battle of Little Robe Creek. As was the case in the Comanche wars, no mercy was asked for or received by either side. The Comanches routinely slaughtered men, women, and children along the frontier, occasionally taking women and children as slaves. Ford’s orders, written by Governor Hardin Runnells, instructed him to inflict the most severe and summary punishment on the Comanches, and this the Rangers and their Indian allies were more than happy to do. Such was the way of war on the frontier. It wasn’t enough to kill the men who did the fighting. One had to kill the woman who could produce another fighter, and kill the children who would grow up to be a fighter or a producer of fighters. There weren’t many in the ranks who had not lost a loved one to the Comanche scourge. Most of Iron Jacket’s people were killed that day, with a mere handful managing to escape. The Tonkawas, who were cannibals, ate some of the dead and enslaved a number of Comanche women.

  Reinforcements from a village farther along the Canadian River arrived, led by a chief named Peta Nocona, whose wife was a captured white girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. The Comanche kept their distance, hurling challenges at the Rangers and their Tonkawa allies to fight in one-on-one duels. Some of the Tonkawas accepted and usually paid the ultimate price for doing so. Ford finally put a stop to that and charged the Comanches in force, but the elusive Nocona kept falling back and a running fight commenced that took up most of the day, continuing for several miles. Eventually Nocona’s braves slipped away, but not before several Rangers lost their lives. One of them was Jubal Carnaby, and the unpleasant task of carrying word back to his young widow fell to Sayles. Carnaby’s body had been carried away from the site of the battle and buried in a shallow grave without marker of any kind, so that it would not be discovered and the body defiled by the Comanche scouts who were sure to shadow Ford’s expedition.

  The news of her beloved husband’s death sucked the life right out of Ellen Carnaby. For a short while she lingered at her place on the outskirts of San Saba. Sayles and a few other Rangers dropped by to check on her whenever they were able. Then she disappeared, leaving all her belongings behind. No one knew for certain if she was the victim of foul play or had just wandered off to die. For years there were rumors that a crazy woman—some were convinced it was a ghost—roamed the woods near San Saba. Some people swore they heard her wailing in the distance, calling to someone, but no one was ever close enough to tell who or what she was saying. Sayles had decided if it wasn’t a ghost he could track the woman down. In the end he decided against trying, knowing that if the woman turned out to be Jubal Carnaby’s widow there was really nothing he could do for h
er.

  Looking at Purdy Eddings as they laid her only son to rest that morning, Sayles didn’t think there was much anyone could do for her either.

  “Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead? But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not…”

  Others were staring at Jake Eddings, who stood next to Sayles with his hands shackled behind him, on the other side of the grave from Purdy and Hanley. The lawyer had argued that binding Jake Eddings’s hands behind his back wasn’t necessary, but Sayles disagreed. “I’ve seen grief make men do crazy things,” he said. It was something he knew from personal experience, but he hadn’t elaborated and Hanley hadn’t pressed the issue. He already knew Sayles well enough to know that the Ranger wasn’t going to enter into a debate once his mind was made up.

  The prisoner wore a suit of plain brown wool, courtesy of the lawyer. He had washed and brushed his hair and shaved the stubble from his cheeks, courtesy of Bill Sayles. Tom Rath hadn’t approved of what he described as mollycoddling a prisoner, and assumed that the hair washing and the shaving had been Hanley’s doing and the Ranger was just seeing it done. In fact, it was a decision made by Sayles before Hanley even had an opportunity to bring it up.

  Eddings didn’t seem aware of the attention he was getting. He had stared at Purdy when he arrived at the cemetery on the outskirts of town. Sayles made sure they stood on the opposite side of the grave, something Hanley had suggested and which the Ranger had agreed to. When the preacher began to speak, Eddings seemed to forget about his wife and from that point on stood there with a blank expression on his face, his eyes riveted to the pine box that had already been lowered into the grave by the laborers the local undertaker had paid, with Hanley paying the undertaker’s bill. Sayles tried not to think about the body in the coffin, or listen to the preacher recite the Gospel, or look at Purdy’s grief-stricken face. He tried to distract himself by consulting his timepiece and looking at the sky, wondering if it was going to snow again, and calculating how many miles he could carve off the long road back to the prison at Huntsville before sundown.

  He was anxious to get this job done. It was turning out to be a good deal more unpleasant than he had anticipated. Not on account of anything that had happened. It was the constant threat of old wounds being opened. Seven days to Christmas, and he had to hurry if he wanted to get home to Mrs. Doubrett’s boarding house in time, sipping brandy while sitting in one of her comfortable, upholstered chairs, warmed by a crackling fire in the parlor’s hearth and by the landlady’s relentless good cheer. He would sop a brandy, since Mrs. Doubrett lifted her ban on strong liquors for Thanksgiving and Christmas. He tried not to think about Jake Eddings spending that same day in a prison cell, or Purdy Eddings sitting alone in a dark and empty house.

  He had traveled with Temple Hanley to fetch Purdy and the body of her son the day before. They had talked on the way there, though were silent on the way back to Cameron, since Purdy accompanied them. He had watched the lawyer with the distraught young woman. Hanley was gentle, compassionate, and at the end of the day Sayles found that he had a large measure of respect for the man. Hanley had handled everything, had paid the coffin maker, the gravediggers, and the undertaker. He had paid for the simple headstone, already in place. He had provided for the suit Eddings wore, as well as a new black-and-gray woolen scarf and a pair of gloves for Purdy. He had carried food for Purdy to the Eddings place. At first Sayles had wondered if the lawyer did all this because he had failed to do the impossible, to successfully defend Eddings at his trial. And while guilt might have been a factor, to think it was the lawyer’s only motivation did an injustice to the man. Temple Hanley was just a genuinely good and decent fellow.

  “Jake should have been convicted of robbery but not murder,” Hanley had told him during the ride to the Eddings farm. “He and his accomplice were starting to leave the scene of the crime when the stage driver made his play. If anything, he was shot in self-defense. It certainly wasn’t a cold-blooded killing. If he’d had better aim he would have shot Jake in the back.” All that Sayles had offered in response was that it seemed to him that the driver had just been doing his job, which was to prevent anyone from making off with something that belonged to another. Realizing that he wasn’t going to lure Bill Sayles into a discussion on the logic and temperance of the law, Hanley had sighed and simply added, “Perhaps one day this land will be more civilized, and the law will be, as well.”

  Sayles had pondered Hanley’s last comment for a spell, arriving at the conclusion that he had no interest in living in a world so civilized. As far as he was concerned, if a man rode with an outlaw he was himself an outlaw, and if one committed a crime the other was equally guilty. Once a man took that path he surrendered any right to fair play at the hands of others. The law was not about fairness, but rather about justice, justice for the victim of the crime or for society as a whole, but not for the one who committed the crime. In Hanley’s perfect world the motivation of a criminal would also be taken into account. True, a person might make a mistake or be a victim of circumstance. From what Sayles could discern, that had been the basis of Hanley’s defense of Jake Eddings. In the Ranger’s view, only one person could know with complete conviction why a crime had been committed, and that was the person who committed it. The law had to focus solely on the facts because the facts didn’t lie. That made for justice swift and sure. But Sayles knew better than to argue with a lawyer because it was as much a waste of time as would be arguing with a woman or a mule.

  “Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame. But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? And with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die…”

  Sayles scanned the faces of the men and women who had come not as friends and neighbors in support of the couple who had lost a son, but rather as spectators to gawk at the homegrown outlaw and the Texas Ranger who had him in custody, or to whisper behind their hands about the young mother who, according to rumors, had sought comfort in the arms of a man other than her husband. Hanley had warned him on both counts—about the rumors regarding Purdy and the widower named Norris, and about the newspaperman named Placer and the article he had written that had gotten the whole community in a buzz about the return of Jake Eddings. While his creased and leathery face was a stoic mask, as usual, Sayles met every set of eyes that came his way, and he stared at each and every one of them until they looked away. He felt sorry for Jake Eddings. At least Eddings was so consumed with grief that he didn’t seem aware that people were looking at him.

  Though he wasn’t paying attention to the preacher, Sayles caught a line here and a word there and knew the end of First Corinthians 15 was drawing near. He checked his keywinder again. He had learned to read with the Bible, which was just about the only book one was likely to find on the frontier. It wasn’t that he wanted to learn what the Bible had to say, but on occasion he had been embarrassed by his lack of schooling, his inability to read or even write his name. He had plenty of time to school himself, sitting under the stars in countless lonely night camps, miles from anywhere that had a name. He had taught himself by reading out loud, phonetically, but the first time through he wasn’t able to comprehend much, since so many of the words remained stubbornly incomprehensible to him. With subsequent readings, though, he began to match what he heard people say to the words he read out loud, and eventually he not only could read and write but knew the Bible backward and forward.

  Standing there watching a boy being buried, Sayles couldn’t help but think about his own mortality, and how imminent his own death had to be. He was old and didn’t ha
ve many years left. Most people, especially those who lived on the frontier, didn’t survive as long as he had. Long ago he had made up his mind that he didn’t want to be buried like this. No pine box planted six feet into the cold and quiet earth of some crowded bone orchard. No preacher reading scripture. It wasn’t like he had anyone who would weep over his passing. Mrs. Doubrett might show up for his burying, but he doubted she would shed a tear. Behind all her compassion and concern she was made of stern stuff. She would be sorry to see him gone, and not just because he had been a boarder who paid her regularly, but she wouldn’t be reduced to weeping and the gnashing of teeth.

  His Captain would make an appearance, and maybe say a few words about how fine a Ranger he had been, and how he had served the state of Texas with distinction, but only if there were other people there to hear him speechify. Sayles respected the man’s rank but The Captain was a new and different breed of Ranger, one dedicated as much to politics as he was to duty. He was certainly no John Coffee Hays or Bigfoot Wallace or Rip Ford, all men who didn’t hesitate to do what was called for, come hell or high water, and damn the consequences. Sayles got the impression that his superior considered him a man whose usefulness had waned now that the frontier was safe from rampaging Indians.

  Sayles had never been a very sociable man. He tended to keep to himself, so he could count true friends on the fingers of one hand. There was Newt Pellum, but Newt had gone north to become the marshal of some trail town when he realized the halcyon days of warring against the Comanches were coming to a close. After having survived countless scrapes with Indians, Pellum ended up being shot in the back by a drunken cowboy after just a few weeks wearing the tin star.

  Then there was Mateo Morado, a half-breed, whose father had been a Tennessean come to Texas to fight for its independence from Mexico and whose mother had been one of the camp followers accompanying Santa Anna’s army, a girl who had been captured after the Mexican army was routed at San Jacinto. According to Matty, as his fellow Rangers called him, his father had forced himself on his mother, and then, out of remorse, had made her his bride. Despite such an inauspicious beginning, the couple had gotten along pretty well for the short time they were together, just long enough for Matty to be born. Then Matty’s uncle rode up from Mexico, having heard of the fate that had befallen his sister. He had shot Matty’s father six times and carried mother and infant off.