by Tim Bryant
“Should I trust you or search you?” Jack said.
I couldn’t figure out how he was standing there, cool and composed, while I lay on the ground, closer to Manley Clark than Jack Delaney.
“Little Cuss hurt his leg,” I said. “We need to go back and see if we can save him.”
Jack laughed. Not so much like he was laughing at me. Just laughing at the ridiculous situation.
“Little Cuss didn’t cut his leg, Wilkie John. Snake got hold of him.”
It depended on how you looked at it. He may or may not have run up on a snake, but the bite threw him off balance enough that I came off the tail end and Little Cuss went down. That was when he’d cut his leg. I was sure of it. Somehow, in my fall, I had totally missed the snake.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I made a tourniquet and cut the bite out. Gave him some water. He’ll probably make it.”
He bent over and grinned down on me.
“You, I’m not so sure about.”
I was just about as happy to see the man as I could have been, generally speaking. He’d spent considerable energy trying to kill me the year previous, and I’d sworn revenge on him for it. Now, back down in the lonesome part of the state, I ran into him when he was running down Manley Pardon Clark, or Phantom Bill, and I was sitting around, trying to decide what to do next. To be specific, Jack had sent word to Fort Concho: he was looking for a soldier or two to help in the capture of the outlaw. Then he sent word again and made mention that the reward would be split in an equitable manner.
When still no soldier was provided, he showed up at the fort, looking exactly like himself. At six and a half foot tall, his legs were long for his horse, and he still insisted on wearing a top hat that made him look odd and even taller. He wore a suit that fit perfectly, even if it didn’t befit the situation. Sure, it was important to dress well, to guard against all the things the desert might spring on you, but he was still dressing for a night out on the town, and that didn’t appear to be in the cards.
“He was here three days before he held up the train,” I said.
Neither of us had any thought that he would be coming back that way, but the stop at the fort had proved helpful. Two different soldiers, neither of whom had a clue who he was at the time, said he’d mentioned going to Chihuahua when he left. That information narrowed the trail enough that I was now just a few yards from what remained of Phantom Bill. Seemed he hadn’t been a phantom at all.
Neither soldier reported any mention of train robberies or other plans for misbehavior along the way. In fact, being told who they had been talking to, neither believed he was the man. Not him. He didn’t have it in him to do such a thing.
Now I was laying in the desert, half blind and wondering where the money was.
“How hard would ten thousand dollars be to hide?” I said.
I was looking at Jack’s suit and counting pockets. I didn’t trust him as far as I could see him, and he was moving in and out of eyesight.
“A hundred one hundred dollar bills. Two hundred fifties,” Jack said. “Ain’t gonna slow you down a whole lot, Wilkie John.”
I scanned the sand between me and Manley, like I was expecting a bill to come fluttering by on the wind.
“Hell, bears could’ve eat up the money too,” I said.
I had no idea how much time had passed, but I knew I was quickly running out of it. We had four more days to find the stolen loot and return it to the railway people in Alpine, Texas. After that, they were leaving for California and half of the reward money was going with them.
Gentleman Jack Delaney had asked me to come along for one reason. He was considerably more likely to find both Manley and the loot with me helping. He knew it, and he knew I knew it too. I also knew something else, and I wasn’t completely sure if he was aware I knew that part of the deal. He wasn’t planning to split any reward money with me. Not a chance. In fact, he had no intention of taking the loot to Alpine at all. Why would he take ten thousand dollars into Alpine and get five thousand back when he could take ten thousand to Chihuahua?
How did I know what he was doing? For all his faults, and they were numberless, he was too damn much like me. I wasn’t interested in some reward money doled out by the railroad or the government. I also had no interest in vacationing in Chihuahua with Gentleman Jack. I would leave his bones with Phantom Bill for the devil to find.
Then again, he had saved my life and maybe even the life of my horse on that day we found the bones in the sand. And there was that thing about me being a Texas Ranger. Damn. Things, as usual, were bound to get complicated.
CHAPTER TWO
Becoming a Texas Ranger had an interesting effect on my life. Womenfolk took more notice of me. Maybe I walked a little taller. At least I didn’t think of myself as so small anymore. I wasn’t perfect, but it reminded me of something a Fort Worth preacher had once told me.
“Being saved doesn’t make me perfect, but it makes my imperfection into something God can work with.”
I didn’t know about all that, but if you counted that the Rangers had saved me from a life of crime, it certainly did go on to make my weaknesses something easier to overlook. So even if Reverend Caliber had got the letter of the law wrong, he’d at least got the spirit of the thing. There was no question I was a better Ranger than I had ever been a non-Ranger.
I’d had it in mind to visit Indian Territory. In fact, I was in Comanche, Texas, and headed north, stopping only to pay respects at the gravesite of my older brother Ira Lee when word came that the Colorado and Concho Rivers were flooding and there were German immigrant families stranded and possibly in danger of drowning. I went down there and, with the help of another Ranger from Leon Springs and a soldier from San Antonio, we brought out eight Germans of varying shapes and sizes and two Cherokee women with their children.
The soldier had already set up a camp on high ground by the time I arrived, and we carried our survivors there behind two mules. I call them survivors because we saw more than a few who weren’t. A dead boy in a tree that spooked me good, the look on his face so real, I tried to talk him down before I realized he wasn’t alive. There were several people washed up in bushes and against fence posts. Most looked like farmers, farmers’ wives. We didn’t move any of them. Where would we bring them? We didn’t have the tools to dig graves, and, if we had, we’d have just dug into more water. The soldier said a solemn prayer over each of the bodies, and I was completely respectful.
“Which way you going from here?” the soldier said.
The rain was gone, but the Colorado had flooded its banks, and the water was still rising. You couldn’t make out where the river began and ended. Standing on high ground and surveying the scene, it looked like the whole world had become the raging Colorado.
Half of the Germans wanted to stick it out. I couldn’t get over that. With everything underwater or washed downstream, they wanted to stay put. Start over. The other half had had enough. There was nothing left to pack, nothing to save. They were ready to go back east right then.
“All I know, I’m moving upstream,” I said.
I was like that half of the Germans. I’d seen enough water. I’d seen enough of what it could do. I was going elsewhere.
“You mind carrying these people over to Fort Concho?” the soldier said. “They’ll be okay there until they can get a coach or maybe a train back to where they come from.”
“No coach take us back to Bremerhaven,” one of the ladies said.
She didn’t appear to be talking to us, so I didn’t answer.
By then, the Indians had slipped off, never to be seen again. There was no need to look for them, no need to worry. They could look after themselves.
It turned out Fort Concho was less than forty miles away and, if it wasn’t in my preferred northerly direction, at least it was out of the flood’s path. And it was a direction I’d never taken before. I said yes, and we decided to go ahead and move out that afternoon, so we stood a go
od chance of arriving in camp the next day.
“Wait until tomorrow,” said the Ranger, who turned out to be Roy Lee Deevers from San Antonio. “You don’t want to travel by night.”
But I did.
“There will be a full moon tonight. Plenty of light, and much cooler for the horses,” I said. “Plus, maybe he will sleep.”
I nodded to one of the German men who had a badly broken leg. He wouldn’t be easy to deal with. He was a mean son of a gun who didn’t seem the least bit happy to have been saved from a more horrible fate than traveling back east.
The San Antonio Ranger cleaned up the break as best he could and made a real decent splint with one of the many sticks scattered around us. When the German argued against it and tried to get up and walk to prove his case, Roy Lee knocked him over the head with the butt end of his rifle.
“I’ve done just as much good with that end of the gun as the other,” he said.
I drug the German and his family off in peace, making good time through the night. Watching the moon come up right in front of me, climbing up into the night even as we climbed into the hills. At one point I stopped and made them all look at the beautiful sight before us, split equally between the valley below us, the sand seeming to glow under the moonlight, and then the sky, so full of stars they seemed to be crowding each other out, trying to get in position to look down upon us. I saw a hundred rabbits and even some hyenas, one of which I drove away with a single shot from my gun. Overall, it was a perfect example of why I like to move at night and sleep during the day. To make it even better, we arrived at Fort Concho in time for a late breakfast of ham hocks and eggs.
Fort Concho was built on a grand scale. So grand, I thought I found it and left it, only to find it a second time. Turns out I had never left and wouldn’t exit the grounds for two more days. It was bigger than Mobeetie. Enough men to whip Attila and all of his Huns. I never did figure out who the supreme commander was, but there was one Lieutenant with the name Zephaniah Swoop who seemed to have a pretty firm grasp on the situation. Most of them seemed to bow to him, in spite of his name.
Swoop had a heap to say. Mostly about this outlaw the Indians called Phantom Bill. The Phantom had robbed the Pacific Railway train three times, each time getting more brazen and getting away with more cash. It was embarrassing the railway people, who had put three Pinkertons on the last train. His ability to get away seemed supernatural. That’s how he got the name Phantom Bill.
Orders had come down to help some bounty hunter track him down and kill him. Swoop was hesitant.
“I don’t mind taking my orders from President Arthur,” he said. “These orders are coming from Pacific Railway. I don’t work for the railroad.”
I could sympathize. I wasn’t much of a railroad guy either. And I damn sure didn’t take orders from California. He called a few meetings, none of which I was party to. I had delivered my Germans safe into the care of the U.S. Army and was planning to pull out for Indian Territory the following day.
Swoop awoke me while it was still dark. I thought I was dreaming.
“Say again?”
I blinked hard and shook my head, trying to force myself to attention.
“This bounty hunter is named Jack Delaney. He seems to think he knows you.”
It was quite possibly the last name I would have ever expected to hear from the man’s lips.
“And what exactly does he want me for?”
With a few hard blinks, my vision had come back to me and was focused on this man, tugging on his beard like maybe he would pull the answer out of it. I recall wondering, ever so briefly, if pulling at your beard would make it grow longer like Swoop’s. Mine grew to a certain length and then seemed to just stop. I had never pulled on it much.
“Phantom Bill’s robbed the Pacific Railroad three times now in two months. This guy’s looking for someone to ride with him. I’m not sending any of my guys out there with him. If they get that money, they won’t come back. If they don’t, they’ll be dead. This fella seems rather fond of you.”
One of the privates was standing right at Swoop’s elbow. He looked like maybe one of the men who wanted to go and didn’t get the call.
“Said he’s going back to California with a hat made of Phantom Bill’s skull,” the private said.
Swoop elbowed him right behind the ear.
“It’s Gentleman Jack’s skull I’d be more comfortable wearing,” I said.
The idea of a hat made from a human skull was worthy of contemplation. Hunting down an outlaw with the man who’d tried to kill me only a year before wasn’t.
“Why don’t you send one of the Germans?” I said.
It was an admittedly weak argument. The only one who might have been up to the job at all had bone sticking through his leg and was delirious from either fever or the medication he’d been given. The only other boy, obviously the man’s son, was watching over his father and feeding him water from a canteen. Or maybe it was beer.
“You are a Ranger, aren’t you?” Swoop said.
Even if the ladies did look at me differently, and even if I did walk more like five foot and six inches than five foot even, there were times I’d just as soon not wear the badge.
“I’m not afraid of no Indians,” I said, “and I’m sure as heck not afraid of this Phantom Bill. But you can count me out of this one. I’m not signing up.”
Swoop and his boys watched me for a good while.
“He didn’t say he wasn’t afraid of this Jack Delaney,” one of them said.
I was saddling up Little Cuss just as the Army medic arrived to patch up the new arrivals and prepare to ship them to Savannah, Georgia. My instructions, if I wanted to meet up with Gentleman Jack, were to ride due south. Pass Lonetree Mountain and then proceed thirty miles. There I would join my old foe and proceed to track down and smoke out the outlaw Phantom Bill. Manley Clark. Whoever he was.
I wasn’t going to do it. That much I knew.
“You have an alias, Wilkie John?” Zephaniah Swoop said while I checked my supplies.
I thought about it. I’d been falsely identified as John Liquorman, but it hardly qualified as an alias. I’d toyed with calling myself Long Gone Liquorman, but I’d never put enough effort into it for it to catch on.
“People named Wilkie John Liquorish and Zephaniah Swoop don’t have much need for an alias,” I said.
Swoop laughed and nodded.
“I never trusted anybody with an alias,” he said. “Don’t much matter if they’re good guys or bad guys.”
Swoop had a handle on things all right. He’d had one look at Gentleman Jack Delaney and had taken the measure. All in all, I’d have rather chased the Phantom down with Swoop and told him as much.
“I don’t reckon I believe much in phantoms,” he said.
I mounted Little Cuss and tipped my hat. “Real phantoms probably don’t have to call themselves phantoms,” I said. “Same goes for gentlemen.”
I left riding south, and I cussed myself for it. It was the one direction I wasn’t interested in. I was potentially riding into a trap. Even if I wasn’t, I was surely riding into trouble. I wasn’t teaming up with Gentleman Jack. He could count on that much. I looked down at the peso badge on my coat. In ways, it had surely changed me, its pin poking through layers to jab at me, prod me. Sure, part of me was a little intrigued. Had Jack really asked for me? If so, why? We hadn’t separated on good terms. In fact, I had promised his daddy I was going to shoot him dead. I was more interested in following through on that promise than wasting bullets on some damn ghost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIM BRYANT was born in Smackover, Arkansas. He graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University in 2007 with a BFA in creative writing. Before that, he was a singer-songwriter and recording artist, performing in his native Texas as well as his second home, New Orleans, and recording with musicians from Ireland, England, Norway, and all over the United States. He continues to write, record, and perform music
, and is the proud parent of two children. Readers can visit him at www.thetimbryant.com.