“Once you set yourself a task, stay on it until it is done,” she said to herself, softly but aloud. Her father had told her that. “Stay on it even if the Lord above and devil below put theirselves in common bond against you to stop you. Keep on doing and going and doing. Till it’s done.”
She drew in long, deep breaths, and caught the whiff of frying bacon from her landlady’s kitchen. Fiddling Claude Farley and his wife, Hilda, and all the other dullards who shared the boardinghouse with Julia would be gathering around the big table to gnaw on thick slices of bacon, fried hard, and mounds of scrambled eggs. Runny. And biscuits baked into bricks.
The food was poor, the company worse, but hunger was hunger and Julia needed to eat. She shook off the last of her tension from the difficult night before and went through the mudroom door into the boardinghouse, prepared to smile and be cordial and shallow and get through the meal so she could start her day.
“I heard some man talking out behind the house last night,” said Hilda Farley around a mouthful of biscuit. “Couldn’t make out what he was saying, for it was just like a loud whisper, but there was somebody.”
“You dreamed it, Hildy, I told you that,” said Claude.
“I heard it, not dreamed it. Know it for a fact.”
“Which calls upon us to do what in response?” Claude said. “Hmm? Hmm?”
“Nothing, husband. Nothing.”
“No point in bringing it up at all, then, was there?” Claude said. “Somebody pass me the bacon plate.”
Sweeping was sweeping, Timothy Holt supposed, but even so, sweeping in Otto Perkins’s photography shop and studio felt entirely different and new in comparison to sweeping at the Emporium. Timothy had no problems on the boardwalk outside, which was merely a smaller version of the same kind that was at the Lockhart Emporium, but inside Timothy was forever bumping into things: a metal bracket that was designed to help hold motionless the heads of people seated in a chair to be photographed, a big, umbrella-like reflector used to direct and intensify light, and various cases of things Timothy could not attach any explanation to at all. He felt clumsy and stupid, bumping into everything he got near to, and hoped his new employer would not fire him on his very first day.
He learned quickly that Perkins was not a natural-born shopkeeper. He’d turned his rolling photographic business into a fixed one mostly by merely moving items from his wagon into this rented space, but he’d left it all in such haphazard state that it appeared he was trying to keep things ready to move back onto the wagon as fast as he’d moved them off.
When Timothy had gotten the floors as clean as he could make them, he became distracted by the big volumes of old photographs made over the years and miles by Otto Perkins. Without really being able to express it to himself in words, he was fascinated with the concept that pieces of people’s lives were frozen and trapped in those volumes, images of them as they were at a moment they were thinking a particular thought, experiencing a specific feeling, looking at something outside the range of the photograph that now held them. Had fate and development been kinder to him, Timothy Holt might have been a skilled abstract thinker.
Otto Perkins busied around the place, but for the most part left Timothy to his sweeping. He was glad to have another person about the place, even one who offered only limited options for conversation. As a traveling man most of the time, Perkins was accustomed to being often alone and usually didn’t mind it. But humans were made for company, not loneliness.
Then, watching Timothy pause in his sweeping and stare again at the bound volumes of old photographs, Perkins remembered what he told Timothy before. There was something he wanted to show him, to see if Timothy saw it the same way he did. He called the young man over.
“Timothy, I’m going to show you a particular old photograph I took twelve years ago in eastern Texas. It’s a picture of a particular old outlaw and his people, his family. I have taken many pictures of outlaws, you know, and plan to put them out as a collection someday. Do you understand what I mean by that?”
“Yes, sir,” Timothy muttered.
“Come on.” He led Timothy to a big desk that came with his rented office space. Trudging to the storage shelf where he kept the bound volumes, he got the one he wanted and brought it to the desk. Full of tintypes, it was heavy and went down onto the desktop with a loud thud. He opened it and began turning over image after image, most of them unremarkable, significant only because of the infamy of some of those pictured.
“And here we are,” Perkins said at last, laying the volume wide at a particular photograph showing a line of people ranging from children through elderly individuals. They were lined up side by side, some seated in the foreground, others standing behind or beside them, all looking somber and rigid. In the center of the photograph, standing taller than any of the others, was the figure of a middle-aged man with harshly glaring eyes, the scars of old burns marring the skin on one side of his face, and on that same side, partially hidden by his hair, a black nub where an ear should be. As he looked over the faces in the picture, Timothy’s eye was drawn always back to the grim, scary face of the tall man.
“You took this picture, Mr. Otto?”
“I did. Under the hire of that man right there.” Perkins pointed at the image of the tall man. “He wanted a picture of himself with his family, because he seldom got to be with them. You know who that is, Timothy?”
“No, sir, no. But I don’t think I much like him. He has a mean look to him.”
“And a mean spirit inside of him. A regular demon of a spirit. He was as hard and cruel as he looks, Timothy. That man is the worst outlaw and criminal I’ve ever photographed. Have you heard of Black Ear Skinner?”
Timothy mouthed the name, then shoved his face down to look more closely at the tall man’s face. “Is that him? Is that Black Ear Skinner?”
“That’s him, Timothy. The man himself. That woman beside him, with the pretty face and that sweet look, that’s his wife, Belle. Every bit as kindly looking as her husband was vicious. How such a gentle woman wound up married to such a wicked man is a mystery to me. But that pair isn’t the most interesting thing in this picture, Timothy. Look at the ones standing beside them. Their children.”
Timothy looked closely. There was a boy, standing closely beside his mother, his hand up and clinging to hers. Something in the boy’s look seemed unusual, absent. Beside the boy was a tall girl, light-haired and with a face like her father’s, without the wickedness. And beside her, a second girl, dark-haired and younger, and not nearly as tall as her gangly sister. Timothy barely glanced at the second girl at first, then suddenly locked in on her face. She appeared to be perhaps ten years old, maybe eleven . . . and though Timothy knew no children of that age just now, he knew he’d conversed with this girl very recently.
It hit him: It was Julia Canton. A younger version of her, yes, but obviously Julia Canton.
“Is that . . . is she . . .”
“Yes,” said Perkins. “I knew when I saw our lovely Miss Canton that I recognized her from somewhere. It just took me a little time to remember, then to study that picture long enough to be sure. It has been years, after all.”
“But why is Miss Julia with an outlaw’s family?”
“Because she’s part of it, Timothy. She isn’t who she told us she was. Julia Canton isn’t Julia Canton. Her name is Skinner. According to my old notes I made to go with this group of photographs, her name is Della. Della Rose Skinner. Daughter of the infamous Black Ear Skinner himself.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A few miles southwest of the town of Hangtree, the remnants of what might have become a town, but for an act of God, broke the monotony of the flatlands. Resurrection Gulch had a history as strange as it was short. Created at the close of the war, the little settlement had been formed and populated by an idealistic band of Confederates and Confederate sympathizers from Arkansas who had centered their life around a politicized church led by a radical minister. That minis
ter claimed divinely granted knowledge that the Confederacy would be resurrected in Texas and be centered in their tiny, barren little flatland farrago. This time, the preacher wildly declared, the Confederacy would thrive rather than fail, and be blessed by the hand of God himself, becoming grander and greater than the United States. Thus it had been revealed and thus it would be.
The starry-eyed pioneers of Resurrection had plenty of faith but little in the way of finances and the kinds of life experience and skills that might have helped them put down sustaining roots in the Texas soil. None knew how to manage livestock or pursue the limited kind of agriculture appropriate to a dry, sun-baked region. Most lacked skill in working with tools and the kinds of building materials available in the Pecos country. There appeared to be little hope the utopian community would survive, and indeed it did not. The collapse of the little society presaged a far more literal collapse brought on by a tornado that swept past Hangtree but slammed Resurrection hard, leaving little standing but a few isolated walls that stood out rather starkly on the largely empty landscape.
No truly complete building remained at Resurrection Gulch, though the church building was mostly intact. No congregations gathered there now, however, the building being a haven for birds and wildlife, and the occasional traveler who took a night’s shelter beneath what remained of the roof.
Companion to the abandoned community was an equally abandoned ranch, similarly damaged by the same tornado and now just an available shelter for man and beast fortunate enough to find it at just the right moment.
Johnny Cross sat astride his horse on a low, broad rise of land and looked down on Resurrection Gulch, knowing he was facing a conversation, soon, with Sam Heller. He knew enough of Heller’s business to see that there were things happening in and around this little ghost community that Heller needed to know about. Otherwise, Cross suspected, Heller stood to lose much he had worked hard to gain and preserve.
Cross was seeing clear signs of occupancy where there should be vacancy, activity where there should be stillness. It was far from clear, however, exactly what was going on. The presence of huge rope corrals out across formerly abandoned ranch lands, and clear evidence that someone was quietly rounding up cattle and herding them together regardless of brand and ownership, raised disturbing questions Johnny Cross could not answer.
He watched awhile longer, then turned his horse and began the ride back to Hangtree.
Otto Perkins was pleased with his new employee. Timothy Holt, though “feeble-minded,” was more capable than Perkins had anticipated he would be. His duties expanded beyond mere sweeping to general maintenance of the weakly constructed building. Upon learning that Timothy had some skills in carpentry, basic and unrefined but skills nonetheless, Perkins sent him poking all around his building, inside and out, with hammer and nails to repair damaged areas and strengthen weak ones, of which there were plenty. The building had been damaged in high winds that had spun off the tornado that had destroyed the settlement of Resurrection Gulch.
Perkins had taken his growing trust of Timothy a step further on this particular day. Thinking increasingly of lengthening his stay in Hangtree and putting the nomadic photographer life behind him for a year or two, Perkins had developed a vision of how his rented building might be improved internally to increase its appeal to potential customers. He’d set up a lunch meeting with the owner of the building to put forth his ideas and propose that Timothy Holt be used to do much of the work, which would all be simple: new shelving, a space divider or two, nothing costly or hard to accomplish.
Thus it was that Perkins left Timothy to man the shop alone for the first time while he kept his lunch meeting. Timothy was merely to keep up his usual maintenance work and politely instruct any customers who might come in to return in the afternoon, when Perkins would be back.
Timothy was sweeping the floor beneath the front window when he looked up to see Johnny Cross riding in, fresh from his observation of the odd activity going on at the Resurrection Gulch ghost town. On Timothy’s mind was the information he’d learned from Perkins about Julia Canton—Timothy still thought of her by that name even though he now knew better—and he decided that Johnny Cross needed to know it as well. Though he was sure Perkins would not favor him sharing what had been told to him, Timothy went to the door and called to Johnny Cross, waving for him to ride over.
“What’s going on, Timothy?”
“There’s something I need to show you, Mr. Johnny.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just know something you’ll want to know, too.”
Wondering if he were a fool to be snapping at bait thrown out by a simpleton, Johnny Cross even so dismounted and tied his horse off to the porch rail. Timothy led him inside.
“What is it, then?”
“Come back here for a minute . . . I got a picture you need to look at. There’s somebody in it who you know.”
Puzzled and sure he was wasting his time on something trivial, Cross went along anyway, and followed Timothy back into the room where Perkins stored the big volumes that held his life’s work.
“You’re going to be surprised,” Timothy said in a gleeful tone.
“I don’t always like surprises, Tim.”
“This may be one of them you don’t like, Mr. Johnny. But you’ll sure be interested in it!”
And he was. Timothy had to go three times through his version of the narrative that Perkins had given him to manage to convey it accurately to Johnny Cross. At first Cross was inclined to put it all down as an error of some sort, but each time his eye went back to the image of the young girl’s face in the lineup of Black Ear Skinner’s family, he knew it was Julia Pepperday Canton he was seeing. There was simply no mistaking it: this was Julia as a younger girl, just as stunning then as she was these years later.
Except she wasn’t really Julia Canton. Clearly Julia Canton, daughter of a Georgia preacher and good churchgoing young lady, was a fiction. A covering falsehood used by the daughter of an infamous late outlaw to hide herself as if under a cloak.
But why here? Black Ear Skinner had no specific ties to Hangtree or its environs that Johnny Cross knew of. So why would his daughter hide her identity and come here, of all places?
And why, at the same time, would old criminal associates of Black Ear himself begin appearing in the vicinity, robbing Sunday morning church folk, getting themselves shot dead on the roadside, or gunned down in front of the Lockhart Emporium for the sake of so trivial a bit of fun as mocking a half-wit?
Having just been disturbed by unexpected activity out at what was essentially a ghost town, and now by this unexpected revelation about a beautiful young lady he had thought he knew, Johnny Cross had the strongest notion that something odd indeed was going on in Hangtree County. He just had no idea what it was.
“Timothy, do me a favor,” he said.
“Anything, Mr. Johnny.”
“Let’s just keep this private for now, can we? Don’t tell anybody else what you’ve just told me, or show anybody else this picture here.”
“I . . . well, all right. Truth is, Mr. Otto probably wouldn’t have wanted me even to show it to you.”
“Maybe not. But I’m glad you did. There’s something coming into shape around this town that seems to tie back to Black Ear Skinner. And that, my friend, is not likely to prove out to be good news. Nothing involving Skinner can be anything but bad news.”
“That makes me feel sad, Mr. Johnny. I don’t like bad news.”
“Neither do I. Now, Timothy, you put all this back like it was so that Perkins don’t have any notion it’s been disturbed. I’m going to get out of here before he gets back and finds me here.”
“You don’t want me to tell him I showed you this, then?”
“No. No. Like I said, let’s just keep this private for now. I need to try to figure out just what’s going on. By the way, I know you are fond of her, and I’m regretful you had to see her exposed as a falsi
ty.”
“It don’t matter now, Mr. Johnny. I don’t like her no more. I . . . I . . . you’ll think me a fool for this, but I tried to get her to go to the dance with me. Got her a flower and everything. She told me she didn’t want to go with me.”
“Well, she ain’t going with me, either, Tim. I guess we both lost out, huh?”
“I reckon.” Timothy’s eyes were gazing out through the open door into the room where they were, and out the front window of the store. “Hey, I think that’s Jimbo Hale out there across the street. You still wanting to buy that knife off him?”
“I sure am, Timothy. Thanks for spotting him. I’ll go out and collar him right now while I got the chance. You get this all put back like it was before we came in here, you hear?”
“I sure do, Mr. Johnny. I hope Jimbo ain’t sold that knife yet.”
“I heard tell he was still trying to sell it as recent as yesterday,” Cross replied. “He’s asking too much for it, though. I’ll see if I can’t talk him down on it a little.”
Timothy nodded and began putting back in place the items they had disturbed. By the time Otto Perkins got back to his shop and studio, grinning privately from a successful meeting with his landlord, Timothy was repairing loose trim on a side window, the shop was in good order, and Johnny Cross had, ten minutes before, rode off on his horse, the proud possessor of a new knife.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Julia? Can you come back here a moment?”
Startled by the call from Mrs. Bewley, Julia Canton moved too quickly and overturned a display of stacked thimbles she had just finished on the flat display area of the front window—no easily achieved task. She swore softly beneath her breath, hoped Mrs. Bewley hadn’t heard it, and breezed back to the storeroom.
“Yes, Mrs. Bewley?”
“Julia, dear, I’ve got something for you. You’ve done so well here at the store, and increased our business so much, that you’ve earned a little something extra. And here it is.”
Savage Texas: The Stampeders Page 10