Christmas in the Lone Star State

by Jason Manning

  “Don’t blame yourself. Sometimes there are no good options.”

  Purdy shook her head. “That’s what Jake thought, you know. Here, Mr. Hanley, take your coat. You really should go, before Norris gets here. You’ve done so much for me. You’ve been so good to me, and asked for nothing in return. I just can’t bear the thought of you being hurt.” She walked past him to the door and opened it, held it for him to pass through, a grateful smile on her lips. At least, he thought, her anger had passed. He couldn’t bear to think of her upset with him.

  “But I … I can’t leave you to face him alone!” said Hanley, distraught. He took the coat and shrugged it on, sighed despondently, and looked out the door at his buggy, then at Purdy. He was afraid for Purdy but also for himself—afraid of what Norris might think to find him here. He abhorred violence. It was so … uncivilized. It seemed rather remarkable considering that he had spent the last fifteen years on the frontier, on the raw and bleeding edge of civilization, that he had been spared any form of physical violence directed at him. The thought of confronting a man like Norris made him tremble. He wanted nothing more than to leave at once. But something held him back. Something wouldn’t let him go.

  He walked to the door, stopped just shy of crossing the threshold, and glanced at Purdy. “I’m not leaving you to face him alone. I can’t. I’ll put the horse and rig inside the barn if it’s all right with you.”

  She opened her mouth to protest his decision but he didn’t wait to hear it and stepped out onto the porch. He saw movement out of the corner of an eye, followed instantly by a searing pain in his head. The world began to spin crazily. The worn planking of the porch came rushing up to strike him. Stunned, he shouted in pure anguish as more breathtaking, blinding agony exploded in his midsection. He didn’t realize that Norris had struck him at the base of the skull with a muscle-sheathed forearm hard as hickory, and then launched a vicious kick at his rib cage once he was down. He felt himself being grabbed and rolled over and he was dimly aware of a looming figure as Norris straddled him, but his vision was so blurred that it made him nauseous and he squeezed his eyes shut. Some primal instinct made him throw up his arms to shield his face as Norris, clutching the front of the buffalo coat with his left hand, made a fist of his right and pulled his arm back in preparation for driving that fist as hard as he could into Hanley’s face.

  “Can’t leave her alone, eh?” sneered Norris, furiously. “I’ll teach you to move in on my woman, you bastard!”

  “Don’t hurt him!” shrieked Purdy from the doorway.

  Poised bending over the lawyer, ready to strike, Norris looked over his shoulder at her, his face twisted in an ugly rictus of pure rage. “You whore!” he snarled. “Letting this fat pig poke you, aren’t you? Spreading your legs for any man who can give you something you need! Well, I know what you need. I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t ever forget, you…”

  Purdy saw his expression instantly transformed from ranging, mindless fury to shock and terror. Then Norris uttered a strangled cry as a hundred pounds of snarling muscle and sinew and fangs exploded through the doorway.

  Knocking Purdy off balance, Buck leaped at Norris. The man threw an arm up as he turned, stumbling backward over the prone Temple Hanley. He was off balance when the dog hit him. The collision lifted Norris completely off his feet and hurtled him back off the porch. Before they landed, Buck’s powerful jaws clamped down on the farmer’s forearm, and Norris snarled in pain as he clawed frantically at the bone-handled knife he wore in a belt sheath. He used the knife for many things—cleaning fish, dressing out game, killing snakes, and whittling as he sat brooding on his own porch in the evening, a habit he had picked up since the death of his wife, which had left him without much to do after supper. Right now he wanted to use it to kill the beast that was chewing on his arm. The searing, breathtaking pain triggered a primal instinct for survival in Norris. It transformed him into a beast, as well.

  Locked in a life-or-death struggle, man and dog landed in a spray of snow. Buck was thrown to one side, but his jaws remained locked, his fangs buried in the farmer’s flesh—until Norris’s blade plunged into his withers. Norris had been aiming for the neck, but the jarring impact with the ground spoiled his aim. Buck yelped and let go of the man’s arm. Both scrambled to their feet. The dog began circling, head down, hackles up, his ears back and fangs bared, growling from down deep. Norris kept turning in place, to keep the dog from getting behind him, his wounded arm dangling, ropes of blood dripping from his hand. He held the knife down low, expecting Buck to leap at him, intending to rip the dog open from underneath. “Come on!” he roared hoarsely. “Come on, you devil! I come here to kill you anyway!” Buck barked furiously in response, leaving a ring of blood drops on the snow as he circled. Then he gathered himself and made his leap.

  Standing in the doorway of the farmhouse, Purdy shouted “NO!” and in the same instant fired both barrels of the 10-gauge shotgun.

  The buckshot ripped apart the flesh of Norris’s right arm. It shattered ribs and punctured a lung. The impact knocked him sideways, the knife slipping from useless fingers. He lay there stunned, unable to breathe, consumed with agony. The last thing he saw were Buck’s fangs as the dog tore his throat out before he could even scream in terror.

  The shotgun blast wrenched a startled shout from Hanley, who still lay on the porch, having rolled over on his side to watch the confrontation. He had seen a few shootings in his time in Cameron, but always from a safe distance. He had never seen the damage a shotgun could cause at close range, but as shocking as that was it was nothing compared with watching Norris’s throat being ripped open. He stared in horror at an arterial fountain of bright-red blood spurting from the dying man’s neck, watched him twitch and flop in the snow as a growling Buck savaged his throat until he lay still. Only then did the dog release his hold, to limp up onto the porch and past Hanley like he didn’t even exist and sprawl at Purdy’s bare feet. Hanley looked up at her in that moment. She stood in her worn and faded dress with her auburn hair in disarray, a wisp of smoke escaping the barrels of the shotgun she held, looking as adamant and unmovable as a mountain. Then she dropped slowly to her knees and laid the shotgun down so she could cradle Buck’s massive head in her arms.

  Hanley rolled over on his back and remembered about breathing. The acrid burn of powder smoke lingered in his nostrils. He lay there a moment, his head and shoulders aching brutally, stunned by what he had just witnessed. It had all happened so quickly, much too quickly to allow a man to think. Norris had been on the porch, had struck him from behind when he emerged. That was obvious, and all he could sort through at the moment, because what had transpired after that had shaken him to the core. A man who abhorred violence, who had never lashed out or been struck in anger, he had always held to his conviction that the antidote to violence was reason; that it was better to talk things out than to resort to bloodshed. Now he wondered if he had been fooling himself all along. There had been no time to reason with Norris, no way of stopping Buck from attacking or Norris from trying to defend himself. No logic or rationale could have prevented this, and only violence—that shotgun blast still rang in his ears—could have stopped it from getting even worse.

  He got to his feet and saw that Purdy’s fingers were smeared with blood. She had been tenderly examining Buck’s wound. She wiped those fingers on her dress as though blood on her hands and clothes was an everyday affair not worth thinking about, then looked at him and said, in a calm and matter-of-fact way, “He was going to kill my dog and I wasn’t going to let him.”

  “Perhaps I-I should go fetch Dr. Crighton.”

  Purdy smiled, the tolerant smile of an adult who hears a child say something silly. “Buck won’t let anyone touch him but me. You know that, Mr. Hanley. Don’t worry. It’s not a mortal wound. Black powder and witch hazel and a lot of rest will do.” Hanley was looking at the body in the bloody snow while he listened to her and she added, wryly, “Maybe I’ll
end up in Huntsville Prison with my husband.”

  Hanley sighed. As someone who had devoted his entire adult life to the law, he knew he was obligated to go to Tom Rath and tell him about the killing of George Norris. But he had no idea what would happen if he did that. Rath was unpredictable. He might arrest Purdy or he might not. He might see what she had done as murder or as a completely justified act. Or he might just be too put out by the necessity of actually performing his duties as the town sheriff to do anything but complain. It was hard to say, since Rath didn’t care about the law except to the extent that it could further his own ends. Hanley wondered if a convincing argument could be made that Purdy had shot Norris in self-defense? There was no question in his mind that Norris had intended to kill Buck, but would he have threatened Purdy’s life? I’m going to teach you a lesson you won’t ever forget. Wasn’t that what Norris had told her? Hanley did not doubt that Norris would have been capable of striking Purdy as viciously as he himself had been struck by the man. Even so, he decided it was highly unlikely he could convince a judge and jury that Purdy had been within her rights to take the life of George Norris. Killing a man to save a dog wasn’t justified. To save a horse, maybe, in this country. But not a dog.

  Getting to her feet, Purdy murmured soothingly to Buck and the big yellow dog rose with another huffing sound, clearly in pain, moving stiffly as he followed her inside. Hanley stepped to the doorway and leaned against it, still feeling dizzy, his neck and shoulders throbbing painfully. He watched Purdy cajole Buck into stretching out by the fire, after which she walked to the door and gently touched the back of Hanley’s neck with the hand that had not been covered in blood. “Hot and swollen,” she said, solicitously. “You’re the one who should see that old sawbones in town.” She touched his arm then and smiled warmly. “I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for you, Mr. Hanley. You know that, don’t you?”

  Hanley nodded, then glanced over his shoulder at the body of George Norris. “I should help you bury him. Or take him off somewhere and bury him.”

  Purdy shook her head. “No. I’ll take care of that. You get back to Cameron and take care of yourself for a change.” She touched his arm. Hanley suddenly felt a great deal better. He gazed at her a moment, in wonder, for it was hard to believe that the woman who stood before him now was the one who had tried to drown herself in the Little River the day before. He drew a deep breath, smiled back at her, then turned to leave—only to turn back. “I was about to say I would be back tomorrow to check on you. But my dear Purdy, I don’t think you need me to.” He sounded a little sad as well as relieved.

  She watched him walk to his buggy, climb aboard, and urge the horse into motion; she closed the door. She didn’t look at the corpse of George Norris again, and Temple Hanley didn’t either.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  When Mal Litchfield woke, the first thing he did was to check to see if his brother was still in camp. He was relieved to find Lute still sound asleep in the blankets he now shared with the woman named Alise, who was also sleeping. Since childhood Lute had demonstrated a knack for wandering off and getting into trouble. Mal had always managed to bail him out, through either reasoning, bribery, threat of violence, or, occasionally, violence itself. As time went on and the trouble Lute caused became more serious, Mal began to wonder if he was doing his little brother any favor by making things right rather than letting him face the consequences. Now, no matter what he did—even murder—Lute assumed his brother would find a way to protect him from repercussions. The crux of the matter was Mal’s promise to their mother that he would look out for her “little darling” no matter what. It was a promise he felt compelled to honor even though she was long dead and gone—and one he suspected would be the end of him someday.

  Mal lay there a moment, reluctant to throw aside the blanket that provided his only cover from the bitter morning cold. Brushing the frost off his whiskers, he thought about Dick Turpin. Last night, while they ate a meager supper of beans and shared a single airtight of peaches, Lute had regaled Alise with tales of Turpin while suggesting he was cut of the same cloth as the great British highwayman of lore. Alise had never heard of Turpin, and whether this was because she was unlettered or because Americans were not acquainted with the legend Mal didn’t know. But even after Lute was done, she still didn’t know the truth. The life of an outlaw was not nearly as glamorous as all the fiction written about Dick Turpin made it out to be. And the subject himself was not nearly as gentlemanly and heroic.

  Mal finally summoned the will to get up. By the time he brought the campfire back to life he was shivering violently, the cold a dull ache down deep in his bones. The wood smoke rose up into the low, thick canopy of the thicket in which they had made camp. With the uncertain light of a long daybreak on yet another overcast day, he doubted the smoke would be seen.

  Yesterday, after leaving the cabin Alise had called home, they had not crossed a road or seen any other sign of civilization, which Mal found encouraging. He hoped that with just another day or two of travel they would reach the truly wild country he had heard and read about, where those wanted posters—and the lawmen and bounty hunters who might carry them—would be few and far between. Maybe then he could stop looking over his shoulder so much. The life of an outlaw was not nearly as glamorous as all the fiction written about Turpin made it out to be.

  A small iron pot was half filled with ice and this Mal moved to the edge of the fire. The night before he had melted snow for drinking water, and what was left froze overnight. Digging around in the sack of foodstuffs, Mal found a bag half full of roasted coffee beans, and he put a couple of handfuls into the pot once the ice melted. He soaked the beans to soften them, so he could use the butt of his pistol to grind them down, as he lacked a mortar and pestle. While he waited he reflected on Lute’s preoccupation with Turpin. He blamed himself. He had been the only one to attend school for any length of time. Like their mother, Lute couldn’t read a lick, so Mal had read to him at night, and early on it was evident that his younger brother much preferred being regaled with the outlandish adventures of the Great Highwayman found in the hugely popular Black Bess; or, The Knight of the Road, a 254-part penny dreadful, over any other book or pamphlet his brother had produced. Mal had been able to get his hands on a dozen or so issues of the Black Bess serial and that was more than enough to keep Lute entertained, even after listening to them many times over.

  Dick Turpin was also the subject of William Ainsworth’s novel Rookwood, a number of well-known ballads, and a play. He had even earned a place in Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. He was usually portrayed as a dashing gentleman bandit, protector of the weak, a modern-day Robin Hood. The truth about Turpin was quite different from the legend. A butcher like his father, he had become involved with a gang of deer poachers who later turned to robbing the homes of gentlemen. Based in London—Turpin had even lived for a while in Whitechapel—the gang was notorious for beating their victims and raping the women, and before long most of Turpin’s colleagues in crime were caught, tried, and hanged, their corpses left to rot in gibbets as a warning to the populace. The elusive Turpin managed to remain free for a couple of years more and turned to horse stealing. In that period of time he committed at least one murder. He escaped the authorities after a fight at the Red Lion Inn in Whitechapel in which his friend and accomplice Matthew King was shot—some said by Turpin himself. Shortly after that he was caught, found guilty of stealing three horses, and hanged.

  Despite the fact that Turpin had been glamorized in the fiction written about him, there was plenty of evidence to show that he was a violent and unprincipled rogue. But Mal saw no point in bringing this up with Lute. His kid brother wouldn’t believe it. His mind was made up. And he really did believe that there was something glamorous about the life of a brigand, despite the hardships that visited a man on the run, and the never-ending anxiety that came from knowing a prison cell, the gallows, or the grave was almost certainly one’s destination.
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br />   When Mal began smashing the softened coffee beans in the frying pan they had appropriated from the cabin, along with the pot and foodstuffs, he made enough noise to rouse the woman. He noticed her sitting upright, the blanket pulled up over her breasts, watching him with those piercing, emerald-green eyes. When he looked at her she self-consciously pushed her mussed brown hair away from her face and managed a timid smile. Mal glanced at Lute, still sound asleep, and shook his head. “My brother is a real shirkster.”

  “Brother? I had no idea you two were brothers. You don’t look at all alike.”

  Mal went back to smashing the coffee beans in the rasher wagon. When, a moment later, he glanced at her again, she was looking at the horses, and he said, sternly, “Don’t try to run. I’ve had enough trouble of late.”

  “I won’t,” she murmured earnestly. “I don’t have anyplace to run to.”

  Pouring steaming-hot water from the pot into a cup, Mal added some of the coffee grounds. While he waited for these to sink, he glanced again at Alise. “I’m thinking you were a dollymop at one point.”

  “A what?”

  “Prostitute. Baroness or dollymop, I really don’t care. It’s how easily you have adapted to this situation that made me wonder.”

  Alise cautiously tried to read his expression before responding. Clearly he wasn’t at all concerned about insulting her, and she fleetingly entertained the notion of pretending that she was offended, then decided not to risk it because she didn’t know him very well. While he seemed to be in a fairly decent humor, there was a ferocity about him simmering right below the surface. She wasn’t ashamed of what she was, but she knew that people responded to women like her in drastically different ways and she had reached the point where she didn’t really care what people thought of her.