by Bill Crider
“Most of what you heard probably wasn’t true, and the rest was likely overstated a little bit. Maybe more than a little bit. But I can tell you from experience that you might be surprised at what you can do when you have to.”
“I don’t think so. I’m too worried about Lane. And about Laurie. About what Angel might do to her.”
“He’s not going to do a thing to her,” Ellie, surprised by the savage tone of her voice. “We’re not going to let him.”
Sue gave her a startled look.
“I love that little girl,” Ellie said. “And nobody’s going to hurt her.”
“I believe you,” Sue said, and smiled for the first time that day.
It wasn’t much of a smile, but it encouraged Ellie.
“I’m glad you believe me. Now, I think we’d better stop and rest for a while. I don’t know about you, but I can’t sit in this saddle much longer.”
“You’re just saying that because you know how I feel.”
“And how’s that?”
“Like someone was trying to break me in two like a wishbone. It’s been too long since I spent any time on a horse.”
“I feel the same way. That’s why we need to stop.”
“I won’t argue. It’s just that I hate to think of Angel getting farther and farther away from us.”
“You don’t have to worry about that. He’s going to have to stop to rest, too, even if he is riding a mule.”
“A mule?”
“I heard one bray when he was making his getaway. So someone’s riding one. Maybe him. Maybe all of them. Mules are good animals, but we can keep up with them. And there’s another thing. He won’t be expecting us, so he won’t be ready when we do catch up with him. So you just put your mind at rest.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“Well, you can try. Now let’s get off these horses for a while.”
The sun was already getting bright, so they rode into the shade of the trees. A squirrel skittered across some dry leaves and ran up a tree trunk.
Ellie drank from her canteen, put the top back on, then stared up into the treetops. She looked back down and said, “You really don’t think your brother would do anything to Laurie, do you? She’s his blood kin.”
“Her being kin wouldn’t matter to Angel,” Sue said. “I don’t think he cares about anyone except maybe himself, and sometimes I’m not even sure of that.”
“I can’t understand a man like that.”
“I don’t think anybody can.” Sue paused. “You really care about Laurie, don’t you.”
“As much as if she were my own.”
“I thought so. If anything should happen to me—”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you,” Ellie said. “Or to me, either. Let’s get back on the trail.”
They mounted up and rode out of the trees, heading in the direction of the river.
TWENTY-TWO
There wasn’t much left of the old church. The boards were weathered to a light gray, and a lot of the roof was gone. There were birds’ nests way up in the rafters, and the windows were just empty holes. The church was surrounded and shaded by tall sycamore trees, their leaves hanging motionless in the stillness of the day. The whole building sagged a little to one side, as if it had begun settling into a hole, though there was no hole there.
On the north side there was a little cemetery, overgrown with grass and weeds. Once there had been a fence around it, but the fence was long gone. There were a few weathered headstones sticking up here and there, but the others had tumbled over and were half-buried in the soil.
The only good thing about the place, as far as Jephson could see, was the fact that it wasn’t far from the banks of the river. He couldn’t see the river from where they were because of all the trees, but he knew it was there. He could hear it running over the limestone rocks.
“Goddamn,” Hoot said, giving the old building the once-over. “That sure ain’t much of a church.”
Angel looked at him with eyes as flat as glass. “I don’t want you talkin’ that way in front of my niece.”
“Talkin’ what way?”
“You know what I mean,” Angel said.
“Oh, hell. I didn’t say nothin’ she hadn’t heard before. Did I, little lady?”
Angel rode his mule over beside Hoot. One second Angel’s knife was in his boot, the next it was in his hand, its point touching the soft flesh under Hoot’s chin.
“This is my niece here with me on this mule,” Angel said. “And that over there is a church. I don’t want to have to tell you again about usin’ the wrong kind of language.”
Hoot laughed shakily. “Sure, Angel. It’s just that I’ve been in pri—”
Before he could get the word out, Angel jerked his hand upward, forcing the point of the knife through a layer or two of Hoot’s skin. Laurie saw the bright blood pop out, and she said, “Stop, Uncle Angel, stop!”
Angel relaxed slightly and moved the knife slightly downward.
“Sorry to scare you, honey. I was just tryin’ to teach Mr. Hoot some manners.”
To Hoot he said, “It’s not always smart to talk about where you’ve been spendin’ your time.”
The point of the knife was still less than an inch from Hoot’s chin. A trickle of blood ran down his neck and into his shirt.
He said, “I see what you mean, Angel. I surely do. I’ll watch myself from now on.”
“You do that,” Angel said, and the knife disappeared into his boot. It was there one instant, gone the next.
Jephson watched the whole thing, not saying a word but feeling more and more as if he’d made a mistake that was far too late to undo. He even wished, briefly, that he’d done things differently, that he’d done something, anything, to help Hob Bowman. But there was nothing he could have done. He’d been chained to Angel then, and he was chained to him now. The chains were different, and you couldn’t even see them, but they were there just the same.
“What kind of a place is this?” he asked Angel.
“Like I said, it’s a church. There used to be a little settlement not far from here, and the folks there built them a church here in this grove of trees. Then there was a fire that took the whole settlement, burned ever’ house in it, and people were so discouraged they didn’t try to build it back. The church house, bein’ out of the way like it was, didn’t get burned. So they just left it.”
“The settlement lasted long enough for a few folks to die,” Hoot said, looking at the tumbled gravestones.
“Some of ’em died in the fire,” Angel said. “There was nowhere else to take ’em to be buried.”
Jephson looked over his shoulder. The sky in the west was turning dark blue, almost purple.
“Rain comin’,” he said. “Looks like a bad one.”
As far as he was concerned, the rain was welcome. He knew there were people on their trail by now, and a good hard rain would wash out any tracks the mules had left.
On the other hand, something about the decaying church spooked him, and he didn’t much like the idea of being around it for too long. He knew he was just being superstitious, but that didn’t change the way he felt.
“We’ll just ride around back,” Angel said. “We can leave the mules there while we have us a little picnic inside.”
“You right sure we oughta stop here?” Hoot asked. “There’s bound to be a po—”
He clapped his mouth shut before he got the word out. Angel was already riding toward him, knife in hand.
“I talk too much,” Hoot said hastily. “I don’t mean nothin’ by it.”
It was becoming clear to Jephson that Angel didn’t want his niece to know anything about her uncle’s prison time or the fact that there was undoubtedly a posse after them. But that didn’t change the fact that Hoot was right. Their best bet was to keep on the move. If they stopped now, they’d be giving the posse a good chance to catch up with them. The more miles they traveled with the rain washing out thei
r tracks, the better, or so it seemed to Jephson.
He started to say something along those lines to Angel, but Angel got in the first word.
“We’re gonna stop here and have a little picnic. I don’t want Laurie gettin’ wet if she doesn’t have to. Her mama and daddy’d never forgive me if she got wet and caught a cold.”
Jephson didn’t think Angel gave a cuss one way or the other whether Laurie caught a cold, and he knew damn well that Angel didn’t care what Laurie’s parents thought. But he didn’t want Angel pulling that knife on him, so he kept his thoughts to himself.
Angel rode his mule around the graveyard, and Hoot followed him. Jephson rode along behind, leading the spare mule. It was cool under the trees, and a little breeze sprang up, riffling the leaves.
“Looks like that rain’ll be here before you know it,” Angel said. “We’d better get inside.”
The inside of the church didn’t look to Jephson as if it promised much protection from the rain. There were holes in the roof big enough to throw a saddle through, and the floor was covered with dead leaves from the trees outside.
The pews and the altar were gone, and there was no sign of a piano. There was trash scattered around, some cans and paper that made it obvious to Jephson that the church had been used as a camping place more than once by people who happened on it while on the trail.
Hoot threw his saddle on the floor, looked around, and started singing “Jesus Loves Me.”
“I know that song,” Laurie said, and she sang along with Hoot on the chorus.
When they had finished, she said to Hoot, “Do you know about Jesus?”
Hoot laughed. “Honey,” he said, “Jesus wouldn’t have a thing to do with a fella like me. The closest to Him I’ll ever come is bein’ around an Angel.” He laughed at his joke, then sat down with his back to the wall and leaned against it. “Why don’t you come over here and sit by me for a little while, honey. We could sing some more songs.”
“I don’t want to sit by you. You smell like a pig.”
Angel laughed, and Hoot’s face turned so red that Jephson couldn’t see his freckles.
“She’s right, Hoot,” Angel said. “You might oughta clean yourself up now and then.”
Hoot didn’t say a thing, but he gave Laurie a look from under his hat brim that frightened Jephson. It had both hate and desire mixed in it, and Jephson thought of that coyote again.
“Now, then,” Angel said. “Let’s see what we have for that picnic.”
He set a pair of saddle bags on the floor and began to empty them as if he didn’t have a thing in the world to worry about. Maybe he had some secret that the others didn’t know. Jephson wished to hell he could figure out what it was.
But he forgot about it when the wind started to blow. It came whistling through the cracks in the walls and rushing in through the window openings. Leaves scratched and scattered all over the floor.
Angel looked around and said, “We can stay out of the wind in the corner over there, and I think the roof’s solid up above it. Might as well make ourselves comfortable.”
Jephson moved toward the corner, pretty sure that he was never going to be comfortable again.
TWENTY-THREE
Brady Tolbert was thinking about his brother and how their lives had been completely different. Lane was two years older, and he’d always been the more serious of the two. He was quiet and studious, liked to read and even liked to do arithmetic problems. He’d gotten married and settled down almost as soon as he was able, while Brady had banged around and tried a couple of different jobs before deciding that he wanted to ride with the Texas Rangers.
Their parents had always worried that Brady would come to a bad end, and they’d been very happy when he’d become a Ranger. That was a job they could respect and understand, even if there was a certain amount of danger in it.
They hadn’t worried about Lane, but then they hadn’t known about Angel Ware.
Brady thought it was funny, though not the laughing kind of funny, that Lane was the one whose life was in jeopardy, through no real fault of his own. If he and Sue hadn’t turned Angel in, they wouldn’t have had any trouble with him when he escaped from prison. But they’d done the right thing, and now they were paying for it.
It was also funny that while Lane had been the one to take care of Brady for most of their growing up, he was the one who needed taking care of now. It sure hadn’t been that way when they were kids. Whenever anyone had picked on his little brother, Lane was right there to take up for him.
Brady recalled the time that Lew Wickliff jumped him because of something that Brady had said. He had taken Brady by surprise and had him face down on the ground, sitting on his back and rubbing his face in the dirt.
It was Lane who’d pulled Lew off Brady’s back and held him until Brady could get to his feet and paw the dirt out of his eyes and nose.
“I’m gonna let you go now,” Lane said to Lew. “And then you two can have at it for as long as you want to. But this time it’s gonna be a fair fight.”
Lew hadn’t been looking for a fair fight, but he hadn’t run away from it. Brady bloodied his nose for him and blacked one of his eyes before he called calf-rope.
That had been more than twenty years ago, but Brady remembered it as if it had happened yesterday. Lane hadn’t been worried about Brady getting whipped. Whether he did or not didn’t matter to Lane. He just wanted it to be a fair fight. That was all he ever asked for.
Now it was Brady’s turn to take care of Lane, but Brady hadn’t been there to help him when the time came. There was nothing he could do about it. It was just bad luck. But because Brady had been delayed, Lane had been shot in what Brady was damn sure wasn’t a fair fight. Not that there was anything Brady could do about it.
Well, there was one thing. He could make sure that Angel Ware paid the price for what he’d done.
It wasn’t going to be all that easy, however. Not only had Angel got clean away, Lane’s wife and another woman were out there looking for him. Brady didn’t like the idea of having someone in his way when the shooting started. He hoped that he and his posse got to Angel before they did.
He was a little doubtful about his posse. Willis and Moon seemed like good men, but they were cowhands, not gunfighters. If they’d fired their pistols at all, it was probably to shoot at a rabbit, just to scare him.
Shag Tillman was a lawman, but that didn’t mean much. He didn’t seem to be exactly chomping at the bit to find Angel. In fact, it seemed to Brady that Tillman was reluctant even to get on the trail.
And now that it looked like rain, Tillman was asking if they shouldn’t turn back.
“Hard enough to track anybody on this rocky ground even when it’s dry,” he said. “If it comes up a good hard rain, we won’t be able to find a sign of them. The truth of the matter is, we might as well turn back, maybe come out lookin’ again tomorrow if it clears off.”
There was a thick black cloud out to the west, and it was moving in on them fast. It was going to rain, all right, but Brady wasn’t going to let a little rain, or even a lot of it, stop him. He was about to say so, but Moon beat him to it.
“You ain’t gonna melt if you get wet,” he told Shag. “We got a boss man lyin’ back there with a bullet wound, and we got a little girl out here somewhere with a pack of killers. What kinda men would we be if we turned back?”
Brady had tried not to think too much about Laurie. There was no telling what Angel had in mind for her. It didn’t bear much thinking about.
Tillman shrugged. “I was just sayin’ that it ain’t gonna be easy to find a trail. We could ride around out here for a week and not see a sign of anybody.”
“We’ll find ’em,” Willis said. “I don’t figure there could be too many places out here for them to hide.”
“What about Miss Ellie and Miz Tolbert?” Shag said. “What’re we gonna do about them?”
Brady was worried about Sue. She wasn’t exactly used to b
eing outdoors. She knew her way around a hot stove or a wash pot as well as anybody, but as far as he knew, she’d never spent a lot of time on top of a horse. But there wasn’t anything he could do about that.
“What happens to them is their look-out,” he said. “I’m sorry they didn’t wait for the marshal and me to do something, but now that they’re out here, they’ll have to take care of themselves.”
“What if they run across them outlaws?” Harry said. “I don’t doubt Miss Ellie can take care of herself, but I don’t know if Miz Tolbert knows one end of a gun from the other.”
Brady was pretty sure she didn’t. Sue was probably a whole lot less expert at shooting than she was at riding unless Lane had spent some time teaching her, and there was no reason to think that he would have. Why would she need to know about shooting? And even if Lane had taken her out a time or two and let her shoot at some target like a prickly pear, something like that most likely wouldn’t help her if she met up with Angel. There was a lot of difference between shooting at a cactus and shooting at your own brother, especially if he was shooting back at you.
And Brady was pretty sure that Angel would probably just as soon shoot his sister as to bust up a horse turd. Which was another reason there wasn’t going to be any turning back.
They were crossing a wide clear area, of which there were plenty around Blanco, when they saw the rain coming toward them like a gray curtain.
“Better get out your slickers, boys,” Moon said. He scratched his bristly beard. “We’re about to get a soakin’. This’ll get that old river on the rise.”
Brady unrolled his slicker and slipped it over his head. “What about that river? How far is it from here?”
“Few miles,” Willis said. Always able to see the bad side of things, he added, “We’d best not have to cross it, considerin’ the direction that rain’s comin’ from. It’ll be runnin’ fast and deep. Drown ever’ damn one of us.”
“Angel’s prob’ly already crossed,” Shag said. “Prob’ly be long gone before we can ever get to the other side.”