The Book of Murdock

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I heard you carried an English weapon. Those are harder to come by than this other gear.”

  I returned it to its scabbard and watched him take the Paterson off cock and put it away. “I heard the Rangers went to Peacemakers.”

  “Peacemaker didn’t save my hide fourteen times in fifty-eight. What’s your story?”

  That put his age back into the fifties. “I’ve got a billet at the First Unitarian Church in Owen, where they think I’m a preacher named Sebastian, out of Denver. Governor Ireland asked us to lend a hand with a run of robberies in the panhandle.”

  “Why Owen?”

  “So far it’s the only place this bunch hasn’t hit.”

  “Think it’s next?”

  “Only if they’re foolish enough to tip their hand in their own parlor.”

  “Just because we carry our guns out in the open don’t mean we’re simple. We poked our heads into every attic, root cellar, and pigsty in town on the same suggestion. It didn’t take long; you’ll find out why when you see the place. We didn’t turn up a cartwheel dollar unaccounted for nor a man who fit any of the descriptions close enough to sweat a confession out of him.”

  “Bet you sweated someone, though.”

  “San Antonio sends out a new Yellow Book every two or three years, to keep us current on who’s got paper out on him. Some, when we know where they are, we leave for seed. The seed crop in Owen all had witnesses that put them home at the wrong times. Wrong for us, anyway. I’m satisfied.”

  “Some of the new breed have never been posted anywhere. They’re in it for profit, not to settle old scores. They don’t write letters to newspapers or do anything else to bring suspicion to them. You won’t find them in your book.”

  “You want to know the first time I ever heard the words ‘new breed’? December sixty-eight, when John Wesley Hardin bushwhacked and killed three Yankee troopers in Sumpter. I been here long enough to see a parcel of new breeds turn old, when they lived that long, and a bushel of new breeds pour in on their heels. You fixing to pray this bunch into turning themselves in?”

  “I’m not fixing to do anything but keep my ears open. If the God-fearing folk there tell me something they didn’t tell you, I’ll report it and you can do what you want with it. We’re not after glory.”

  “Glory, you think that’s what this conversation is about?”

  I’d pinked him where it hurt. I didn’t know why Blackthorne saddled me with these jobs that required diplomacy. The last time I’d had to establish friendly relations with an elite law enforcement unit outside the U.S. marshals, I’d nearly started a war with Canada. “I wasn’t born pinned to that star, Captain. I drove cattle between here and Mexico, and someone was always telling thumpers in the bunkhouse. A coroner’s jury in San Antonio ruled ‘death by suicide’ in the case of five bandits mowed down by Texas Rangers because everyone knows what’s in store for a desperado who sticks up a bank that close to Rangers headquarters. A reputation like that is worth a thousand extra men. It’s in everyone’s best interest not to claim outside credit, or glory, if you like that sort of language.”

  His steel-shot eyes regarded me from under brows that stuck out like spines. The resemblance to the man behind the counter in the train station was marked. He tilted back his chair, scooped the wide framed photograph off its hook with one hand, banged the front legs back down, and laid the picture on my side of the table facing my way. A stone barracks stretched behind the two rows of armed men, with empty sky above and barren earth below. On the bottom, in brown ink in a neat copperplate hand, someone had written:

  Ft. Sill, 10 June 1875

  “That’s me, Sergeant Andrew Jackson Jordan, aged none-of-your-goddamn business.” His index finger banged the glass above a face that was all bone and a pair of eyes that photographed like blank whites, belonging to one of the Rangers seated on the ground. He’d worn chin whiskers then and the handlebars were smaller. Apart from that I didn’t know how a man could have changed so much in nine years. I put him back down into his forties, and the veteran of 1858 around age eighteen.

  “These here are Corporal T. J. McReady and Ranger James Poe. Mac and Jimmy. I never knew Mac’s Christian name.”

  I looked at a young Irish roughneck and an Adam’s apple with a head attached, seated on either side of the sergeant. He’d had several years on both.

  He read my mind. “They called me Dad. They wasn’t walking yet when I joined up.”

  “I guess there’s a Dad in every outfit. Mine had one.”

  “A splay-footed mulatto name of Tilson took the picture about a week after the Comanches surrendered. It was white of the Yankees to let us sit for it, seeing as how they got the glory after we fought the bastards forty years, including the five we spent doing it alone while they was busy putting down rebels. Mac never had his likeness made before and kept asking when would it be ready. He never seen it. He was assassinated June twelfth. It was done from cover with a shotgun, from behind. We never did find who done it or why. Half his head was gone. His mother had to say good-bye to him through the coffin lid. Twenty-two he was.”

  “What about Poe?”

  “Jimmy got tired of manhunting finally and shot himself behind the counter of a dry-goods store in Dallas. Later that day the city marshal found his wife shot dead in their house. Same caliber gun. They fell out over something and he got all the way to work before what he done caught up with him.

  “Burial’s free when you served with the Rangers. There’s your glory.”

  “We’ve all got stories like that,” I said. “I meant no disrespect.”

  He leaned back and rehung the picture, more crookedly than before. “We’ll all of us be reunited in dust. I gave up on the other. Maybe I shouldn’t talk like that in front of a padre.”

  “I’m not pretending to be a priest. And I’m not half sure you’re wrong.”

  “We’ll just leave that in the room, along with this here.” He picked up the letter from Judge Blackthorne and set fire to it with a match from a twist of oilcloth he took from his flap pocket. When it had burned almost down to his fingers he let it fall to the floor and stamped out the flame.

  I felt like taking off my hat. I’d missed my funeral.

  TEN

  “Two banks, the Overland, two trains, all in six months,” I said. “Blackthorne said this gang leaves footprints, but he didn’t say what they were.”

  “He always cut you loose this well informed?”

  “He encourages independent action, outside his presence. To him that means traveling light on such things as too much preparation, which he says slows the brain and the hand. He’s a son of a bitch is what he is.”

  “How’s the pay?”

  “I can’t spend what I make, but that’s only because I haven’t had a week off since the last time I was shot.”

  “Sounds familiar. Why do you stick?”

  “For the glory, same as you.”

  Jordan still had his matches out. He filled a short-barreled pipe from a pouch in his other flap pocket and started it, his cheeks caving in on the draw where the molars had rotted away. His front teeth—the lowers, anyway—were ground down to yellow-oak stumps. If he had uppers the handlebars covered them.

  He shook out the match, dropped it on the floor, and pushed the pouch toward me. I shook my head.

  “You’re overplaying your part,” he said. “I read the Bible cover to cover and back. San Antonio recommends it. It don’t say a thing against smoking or chewing. The Reverend Wilcoxson up at the First Methodist orders cigars by the case from New Orleans.”

  “I never got the habit.”

  He puffed smoke out of the side opposite the pipe, which as long as it was burning he never took out of his mouth. “I got a man who won’t cuss and some who say they never touched a drop of the Creature, but when it comes to covering ground fast they’ll all dump their coffee before their tobacco. I don’t trust a man without a vice I can see or smell or taste. The one he’s
hiding might get me killed.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t have any vices.”

  “I forgot to mention women, which can be worse than all the rest put together. I’m near certain it was another woman caused Jimmy Poe to shoot his wife and then himself.”

  “I approve of women in general, but I’ve been on friendly terms with the Creature most of my life.”

  “How friendly?”

  “We were living in each other’s pockets for a while. The commitment got to be too much. These days we just shake hands.”

  “Same here. It was Mrs. Jordan made me choose. She’s dead, but it don’t taste the same now that I don’t have to hide it in the potato bin.” He smoked. “I drink standing up. We got a nice little watering hole down the street with a cross draft from the river, though it’s best to put it down fast before it boils.”

  “After we talk. Bartenders spill too much.”

  He scratched his congenitally broken nose. “How many know about this scheme apart from you, me, and the Judge?”

  “Pretty much the entire territory of Montana, and I have my suspicions about the Santa Fe Railroad. As I see it I’ve got three weeks at the outside before everyone in the panhandle knows I’m still around and Brother Bernard never was.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s me. Sebastian’s my other name.”

  “You had too many as it was. I wouldn’t give it no three weeks. News travels faster by jackrabbit than Western Union.”

  “When’s the next stage leave for Owen?”

  “Eight in the morning.”

  “That’s another day gone. We’d better get started. Has any of the gang been identified?”

  “Not yet. They wear bandannas over their faces and only one does the talking.”

  “That describes half the men in your book. What is it about the robberies that ties them all to one bunch?”

  “It’s not so much the way they go about their business as how they look. Everyone that’s ever read about Jesse James knows what to say and where to point his pistol and to get in and out fast; if I had my way I’d bring in every one of them dime novelists in leg irons for teaching folks how to break the law. But even they don’t say Jesse and his guerrillas dressed alike even in the war.”

  “They wear uniforms?”

  “Not so’s you’d call ’em that, taken one at a time. When five men bust in all wearing white dusters, gray hats, and blue bandannas, that’s the impression. That’s how it’s been all six times.”

  “Six? I counted five raids.”

  He plucked the piece he’d cut from the Gazette off his spindle and slapped it down in front of me. It was a sketchy description of a midnight run on a cattle ranch near a town called White Horse three days earlier. The thieves had shot the ranch hand on watch and turned five hundred head of Herefords north. Contact had been made with the Texas Rangers to investigate.

  “What makes this our gang?” I asked.

  “They gut-shot the man on watch, but he was still talking when the man that came to fetch us took us to the line shack where they carried him. He didn’t talk long. There was a little-bitty moon that night, what we call a rustler’s moon, but it was enough to see what they was wearing.”

  “Dusters are common in dusty country. They could’ve had on brown hats and red bandannas. You can’t see colors by moonlight.”

  “Nor did he, but different colors look different whatever the light. They was all the same. I say they was gray and blue.”

  “Too thin for court.”

  “It’s a far piece out here between courts. They don’t always make it.”

  “Five men?”

  “Seven. I said it was five bust in on banks and such, but I didn’t mention the one they left outside with a carbine and the one they left to hold the horses. At White Horse, the other hands had put together a P.C. and took out after them; we met them on their way back. They’d followed to the Canadian, where the bunch turned the herd into the river, but by then the moon was down and they couldn’t see where they come out. The hands voted against making camp on account of the bushwhack risk.”

  “P.C.” was Texas talk for posse comitatus. Guerrillas had brought the term west from Missouri; in many cases half a jump ahead of a posse. “Did you find where they came out?”

  He nodded, puffing smoke. “It was sunup and the trail was cold. In the Nations it crossed some others left by legitimate outfits headed to market. We wired Fort Smith to alert the marshals, but them beeves are gone. Chicago’s hungry.”

  “Where’s White Horse?”

  “Thirty miles southwest of where you’re headed. Your Judge Blackthorne might be on the sunny side of right. Then again he might not.”

  “He might not. Rustling’s hard work for cash bandits. They don’t usually cross over.”

  “If it’s the new breed, where’d they learn to ride if not a working ranch? I’m seeing a lot more buggies and buckboards than saddle horses these days.”

  “I notice you’re not ready for a buggy yet. If you rode out there and up into the Nations and back in three days, you ought to be lathered up as bad as your mount.”

  “That ugly little mustang needs more’n a short trot like that to break a sweat. I wish I could say the same for me. I just got back from the bathhouse when you knocked.”

  “When do you sleep?”

  “When it hits. Some nights I don’t make it as far as that cot.”

  “How many men do you have under you?”

  “Fourteen. I came here with a company, but that was before the Frontier Batallion busted up. We done too good a job thinning out rebel scum, you see.”

  “You should’ve left a few more for seed.”

  “Wouldn’t of done. Austin discovered Mexico and took all my best men. There’s a powerful lot of ranch money down on the border and the governor’s fixing to keep it in this country where he can draw on it come election time. That’s what this bunch is counting on. It’s a wonderment they took this long to test me.”

  “Why do they dress alike, you figure?”

  “Keep from shooting each other.”

  “How much shooting takes place?”

  “Less than you’d expect. They winged the shotgun messenger on the Overland to make their point, but that was the worst of it till they killed that cowhand on watch. A bank manager got pistol-whipped when he forgot the combination to the safe, if you count that and if you count bankers. I won’t say they go out of their way not to let blood, but they don’t rattle. If that’s the new way of robbing folks, I’m for it, and I’ll shake their hands on the scaffold.”

  “I’d admire to have a talk with that shotgun messenger.”

  “Not the banker?”

  “Him too, but shotgun men have good eyes and remember what they see.”

  “Just as well. The banker took his busted head home to Baltimore. The shotgun’s staying with his sister in Owen till he heals, but I believe they’re affiliated with the Church of Rome.”

  “I’ll visit as a neighbor.” I took out the sorry wallet and showed him the telegram from R. Freemason, director of the First Unitarian Church. “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He ain’t Catholic.”

  “I gathered that from the name.”

  “Dick Freemason runs sheep, not that you’d smell it on him. He’s a gentleman rancher, lives in town with his wife in a big ugly house he had built, with a chandelier he had shipped from Italy and sent a special train down to fetch it. He sits on most of the town committees and had a big hand in banning whores from all the public areas before ten P.M. He pays exactly twice as many men as he needs to manage his spread. Ask me why.”

  “Because he runs sheep in cattle country.”

  He tried not to appear impressed. “You’re quicker than you look.”

  “That’s why I get these assignments. I suppose you asked his hired guns what they were doing at the time of the robberies.”

  “I did. I work this job. I’d of been s
uspicious if they all had stories, and I’m pretty sure at least two of them are in the Yellow Book under other names. But Freemason pays too much to make the risk worthwhile.”

  “No one pays that much.”

  “He comes close. Also he’s a rough cob under the silk. Eleven jurors voted to send him to Huntsville after he had a bunkhouse thief horsewhipped to death. That was in Waco, before he came here. I don’t know where he was before that. He don’t talk like a Texan.”

  He took the pipe out of his mouth then to stifle a yawn. I was keeping him from his cot. I got up. “I’ll pass on that drink. Brother Bernard shouldn’t be seen in a saloon in broad daylight. Is there a place in town where I can put up my feet?”

  “Corporal Thomson and his wife have a spare room and a baby on the way. They can use the money. White house with green shutters, two squares up and one over. Where’s the rest of your gear?”

  “I left it with the station agent. He looks enough like you to be kin.”

  “First cousin. I won’t apologize for his manners. He was easier to live with before he hurt his back and had to leave the Rangers.”

  “Is he the reason you didn’t volunteer for the border?”

  “It meant promotion to major, but I turned it down when they offered. He can’t ride and he can’t sit up in a train. Since Elizabeth died the miserable bastard’s all the family I got.”

  I shook his hand. “I’m Sebastian if Corporal Thomson asks.”

  “I recommend it. She’s all right, but he likes to talk.”

  “Did the jury in Waco ever find out if Freemason wanted that man whipped to death?”

  “I never heard.”

  “Maybe he’s easier on the ministers who work for him.”

  He yawned openly. “Stick your fingers in the collection plate and find out.”

  ELEVEN

  I never had the opportunity to board the gondola of a hot-air balloon, but I’ve ridden in Pullman parlor cars, and someone once said that apart from them no nineteenth-century invention accommodated itself to the comfort of passengers as well as the Concord coach: more than a ton of red-lacquered bentwood, suspended hammock fashion on a pair of leather thoroughbraces that rocked its human cargo gently over washes and rubble. But it was wasted on flat west Texas, so I didn’t get one.