Savage Texas: The Stampeders

by William W. Johnstone

  “Good news, it would seem, Miss . . . Miss Pepperday. Do I remember your name rightly?”

  “That is the name I gave, yes, or part of it. I go by Julia, my first name. Your memory is good, Reverend. I remember you, too . . . you are the fine preacher of the Hangtree Church.”

  “Not so fine the day you visited, Miss Pepperday. It was a day I felt a failure as a preacher of the divine word. It was a day of . . . struggle for me.” Without a conscious effort to do so, he flicked his eyes for half a second down to her ample bosom and back up again.

  “Will I hang, Reverend?” she asked, looking down at the pitchforked man.

  “No, miss. No. You saved my life and probably your own. It was a defensive act, and no court in Texas would condemn you for it. Do you know what his name was?”

  “He said it was Wilfred Brody. Probably a false name.” I know all about false names, she might have added.

  “Probably. Do you think he was telling the truth regarding your mother?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “So his goal was . . . something different, obviously.”

  “I think he had wicked intentions. Fleshly intentions. It isn’t the first time I have encountered such things.” Her mind flashed back to a time as a little girl when one of her father’s associates attempted to put his hands on her in a most vulgar way. Black Ear Skinner caught him and relieved those hands of all ten fingers, one butcher knife chop at a time.

  One thing Della had known all her life was that her father, though not a good man, was thoroughly devoted to her and her protection. She would admire that always about Black Ear Skinner, regardless of the wicked things said about him and attributed to him.

  “You are a lovely young lady, Julia. I am sure that the blessing of beauty also brings its own curses as well, especially that of unwanted and wrongful attentions.”

  “It is true, Reverend. It is true.” She frowned down at the corpse. “Should we tell someone?” Then she staggered, stabbed with pain that throbbed through her injured head.

  “I’m getting you to medical help, Julia. You took a hard blow to the skull. Did he strike you?”

  “I fell . . . against a table, I think. In the dress shop.”

  “You might have died from such an accident.”

  “I don’t think it was an accident. I think he pushed me down.”

  “Come on, Julia. My house is not far and my wife, Claireen, can give you good care. She worked in military hospitals during the war. I will fetch the doctor in to see you there, and you may stay with us until you are steadier on your feet. The last thing we would want would be for you to fall again.”

  “You are a good man, Reverend. I’ve known good men and wicked ones in my life, and you are a good one.”

  “I hope I am. Thank you.”

  He led her out the rear of the livery stable, thinking it might look strange for people to see the local minister propping up a bloodied young beauty coming out of an enclosed and mostly windowless building. Around a few corners and down two alleys, and they reached his house. She had only the thinnest memory of meeting Claireen Fulton and of being guided into a spare bedroom and tucked away. Reverend Fulton had left to find the local doctor while Claireen had gently washed the crusted injury and then helped change her unexpected houseguest from her clothing into one of Claireen’s own cotton shift nightgowns. After that Della Rose/Julia Pepperday’s recollections were mostly absent, until she had awakened to find herself looking up at that vaguely disturbing image of Jesus hanging on the wall beside the bed.

  “It might have been best had she been kept awake as much as possible after the concussion of her brain,” said the same physician who had lost one Hiram Tate on his surgical table while falling short of removing a blasted arm that had been barely hanging on anyway. Preacher Fulton had found the bachelor doctor in his little residence, pulling on a bottle of gin, and hustled him home to have a look at Julia Canton’s injuries. “Then again,” the doctor went on, “others say that sleep is actually more helpful than wakefulness. It is a debate in medicine that is likely to go on for some time yet. In any case, I can say our lovely young friend here seems on her way to recovery. It was a nasty blow and an ugly cut on the brow, but I see no reason to think this one will not be back on her feet and living normally within days.”

  “What about dancing?” asked the patient. “I’ve been invited to the town dance.”

  “No dancing, not that soon,” said the doctor, earning himself a piercing glare in return. “You won’t be steady enough for it, and there is simply no need to take that risk.”

  With skull and brain pounded, she was in a state of identity flux, alternately feeling more like Julia Canton and then more like Della Rose Skinner. At news she would not be able to step out to the music with the handsome Sam Heller, the Della Rose side won out.

  Lying back against her pillow, she glared at the ceiling and said, “Damn. Damn to hell! I’m sorry, Preacher, I know that’s not how you speak in this house, but . . . damn! I was invited and I was so looking forward to it.”

  Claireen and the doctor had stepped to the other side of the room for a moment to discuss aspects of the injured one’s care, so Preacher Fulton drew a little closer to the bed, reached down and took one of her hands in his, and said, softly, “Don’t fret, dear. Sometimes you encounter those situations in life where all you can do is just say”—he glanced quickly back at the others, then sharply whispered—“damn.” He squeezed her hand. He smiled at her and shifted his eyes heavenward. “I think the Maker understands his creatures and makes all proper allowances for their trivial failures, including those of saying what they, what we, shouldn’t. I really think he does. I hope so. I do hope so.”

  Della Rose Skinner closed her eyes again and let herself slip back off into sleep. She dreamed, vividly, and in the dream she was dancing with Sam Heller beneath the Texas stars. No dizziness, no pain on or in her skull, no halting or stumbling of her feet. She spun in his arms, and for once it didn’t matter whether she was Julia Pepperday Canton or Della Rose Skinner. She was simply herself and it was enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The dead man in the livery generated far less public interest than he might have in other towns. For one thing, he was a stranger, known to no one at all that anyone at all could seem to find. And generally speaking, unknown meant unimportant. Secondly, dead strangers were not all that uncommon in Hangtree. More than one local who heard that a corpse had been found pitchfork-pinned to the floor of the livery stable had shrugged and said, in effect, “Well, it’s been a few weeks. ’Bout time somebody was kilt.”

  The late Wilfred Brody, after being photographed by Otto Perkins with pitchfork still in place through his torso, was beneficiary of a tradition that had come to be called in Hangtree a “good riddance funeral,” the sort reserved for the most morally loathsome and despised dead. Such as strangers who came into town and made an apparent attempt to abduct and misuse the town’s prize beauty. A round hole about a yard across was dug to a depth of five or six feet in a lesser corner of the Boot Hill burying ground, Brody was crumpled up and dumped on his rear in in a seated posture, sans coffin and even clothing, and a wagonload of longhorn dung was hauled in to begin the filling of the grave. Brody was submerged in half-liquid bovine filth, with only the top two feet of his grave filled with dirt, and that mostly just to hide the smell of the dung. No cross was put on his Boot Hill grave, just a crude sign made by a county prisoner under the oversight of Sheriff Barton and Deputy Smalls. The sign read simply: HERE RESTS A BAD MAN. It’s what they would have inscribed even if they’d known his name. Three other graves with an identical inscription were nearby—other despised souls who met their ends, in all cases violently, in Hangtree.

  Faithful to his calling, Reverend Fulton came out and pronounced the only funeral oration the unfortunate Brody would receive. Preacher Fulton closed his eyes beside the filled hole, lowered his head, and intoned, “God be merciful to the departe
d sinner here buried.” It was his standard liturgy for “good riddance burials.” Otto Perkins posed and took a photograph of the preacher and the delegation of volunteer gravediggers (most of them drunk), standing by the filled hole with the emptied manure wagon sitting to the side, and that was that for Wilfred Brody, failed rapist.

  Of more interest to most Hangtree folk than the passing of one more piece of stray human trash was how badly the town’s most lovely lady had been treated and hurt by that particular scoundrel. It was known about Hangtree that she had been going to attend the town dance with Sam Heller, but that her injury was going to prevent her from taking part. Because she had become something of a living town mascot and heroine since her escapade at the church service, not to mention the adored embodiment of female beauty because of her many walks about town and her generally friendly manner with those who greeted her, Hangtree’s people took it seriously that she had been harmed. To have been very nearly carried away and misused by a depraved stranger lent an aura of romantic tragedy to Julia Canton that couldn’t have been heightened short of her actual death at the hands of the degenerate, or her rescue by her perceived suitor, Sam Heller, rather than the local parson.

  It wasn’t that the locals had given up their widespread deploring of Heller’s “carpetbagger” status. It was that romantic tragedy covered a multitude of sins. Even, to some degree, carpetbagging.

  Ironically, Julia’s head injury and the temporary immobility it inflicted upon her might have saved her life, most locals concluded as the facts came out. If she had not suffered the blow to her head and her captor had been able to force her at gunpoint to travel with him, he might have gotten her away quickly to some hidden place, where only all-seeing God would have envisioned the atrocious things that would have been done to her . . . God, that is, in company with the drunken degenerates at the Dog Star Saloon. The same lechers who came to watch knicker-shunning Petunia Scranton doing the high-kicking can-can to the sped-up tune of a camp meeting hymn could imagine in vivid detail the perverse things that might have been inflicted upon Julia Canton, and they talked them over without the slightest restraint among themselves, reveling in the sordid visions their minds contrived.

  There was some reaction to the crime against Julia Canton that was more than lust-driven imaginations on the part of local drunks. To maintain a smattering of law and order in a town with little of either, a coroner’s jury was convened and the passing of Wilfred Brody was put down to “death by misadventure.” That was, presumably, the misadventure of having a pitchfork rammed through his chest by a young woman he’d been about to rape.

  Beyond that not-quite-real coroner’s jury, the world of law and justice would have no more dealings with Wilfred Brody. It was ready to forget him. Eternally seated in his narrow hole on Boot Hill, encased in steaming, decaying dung, he was where he belonged.

  Claire Fulton had learned and accepted the fact that a preacher is eternally at the beck and call of the people he serves, and that the same is true for his wife. It was her job to set the proper example of compassion and caring for someone who was wronged and hurt, so she did it. It was clear to all that Julia Canton was better off under Claire Fulton’s care in the parsonage than she would be in her own rented room at the boardinghouse, so the contents of her wardrobe were cleaned out at the boardinghouse and shifted to one in the corner of the Fultons’ spare room, now Julia’s chamber.

  Claire fell back on her old wartime training-through-experience as a nurse and began to thoroughly enjoy having someone to care for. She kept a close eye on Julia’s wounded head, and comforted her with assurances that there would be little scarring (though in reality she worried that there would). She was pleased that Julia seemed to be feeling better first by the day, then by the hour. The doctor began to allow her more movement, assuming Claire was by her side to keep her from succumbing to the dizziness that appeared likely to be a lingering problem for a while.

  Visitors began to call, a mixed blessing for Julia because she cherished her privacy, and because several of her visitors were local young men who obviously were looking for a way to meet the prettiest girl in town. She was kind to them, but not talkative, and most got the message and left quickly.

  She was napping one afternoon when the bedroom door opened and closed and Claire was there, followed by the enticing scent of the stew she was cooking downstairs. She slipped to the bedside and made her usual inquiries about how Julia was feeling and gave the usual quick check to her bandage. Then she took up a hairbrush from the bedside table and gave Julia’s hair a quick fixing-up. “Much better, much better! Though I have to say, most of us would love to have hair that retained so much thickness and form after going unwashed for days. Me, my hair is a pancake against my noggin after a single night’s sleep. But look at you! All beauty and brightness no matter what.”

  “It’s because I have such a good caregiver looking out for me.”

  “It’s my delight, dear. It has brightened my week to have you with me, even under such dark-edged circumstances.”

  “You spoil me, Claire. You truly do.”

  “Oh! I almost forgot: The town dance was to be tomorrow night, but it has been put off for a week to make sure you have time to recover and take part. It was Mayor Holloman who came up with the idea, and the town fathers were quick to say yes. They want to give you special honor in the dance. The entire town sees you as a hero for the brave way you stood up to that thief in church, and how you fought so hard against that dreadful man who hurt you, and bested him.”

  “I couldn’t have done so without your husband.”

  “I want to ask you to tell him that. Not immediately, and not in any way that seems to be deliberate, if you know what I am trying to say. Just when you are having a conversation sometime.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  Claire sighed and looked across the bed and out the window. “It’s hard to know how to say it. His church was intruded by an armed robber while he was standing in the pulpit, and he did nothing to stop it. Then a little slip of a girl, armed with nothing but an offering plate and a steel nerve, brings the entire situation to an end. Then, when he finds that same slip of a girl being attacked and steps in to try to rescue her, as any good man would, it ends up being the girl herself who defeats the attacker. Very dramatically, I must say.”

  “That would not have happened if Preacher Fulton hadn’t first pulled the man off me. I can assure you of that.”

  “Let him hear you say it sometime.”

  “I will.”

  “Men have a certain kind of pride, you know. It is their greatest weakness, that pride. And with it goes some degree of cruelty. Men say things to one another to attack the pride of one another.”

  “And local men have been gigging him for letting a female win his battles for him. Not that I’m saying I see it that way . . . I’m just trying to guess what is prompting you to say these things. He’s being mocked, isn’t he?”

  “He is. And he tries to shake it off and say it doesn’t matter, that God despises pride in a man and he must shun it . . . but even so, even so . . .”

  Julia sat up a little straighter, leaning back against the headboard. It hurt her much less this time to do it, and roused much less dizziness. When she was settled, she said, “Claire, Preacher Fulton is perhaps the finest man I’ve known. I give him credit for my life. And if this town plans to honor me in some public way, they’d best be prepared to hear me give equally public credit to the man who pulled a debaucher off of me, a man who very nearly killed me by throwing me down against the sharp edge of a hardwood table. I’ll not have anyone diminishing such a fine and brave gentleman on my account.”

  Tears had actually formed in Claire’s eyes. “Thank you, dear. Thank you.”

  A knock sounded downstairs, someone at the outer door. Claire jumped up and quickly wiped her eyes. “Another caller for you, I suspect. Are you up to another visitor?”

  “Send them up. I can always influen
ce people to leave by pretending to go to sleep, if I must.”

  “Clever child, you are! Clever child!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The caller at the door was a man probably in his fifties, and he asked if he might have a chance to talk to his niece for a few moments. He gave his name as Cale Pepperday. Claire bid him wait a moment and dashed up the stairs.

  “She says she’ll see you, and asked me to give you some privacy so you can talk about family. I told her of course it was all right. May I bring you some coffee up, Mr. Martin?”

  “Fine as I am, ma’am. I’ll not be long with her.”

  “So, girly, tell me how you are doing.”

  “Well enough, I suppose. I tend toward headaches now.”

  “From the size of that bedsheet folded up on your topknot, I’d guess you took a sizeably hard blow.”

  “I lived through it.”

  “And he didn’t.”

  “I got him with pitchfork prongs.”

  “You always were an enterprising one, child. When you were nine or ten, you were just like your mother was at that age.”

  “Uncle Cale, did you know the man who hurt me?”

  “Tell me his name. I ain’t heard it.”

  “He called himself Wilfred Brody. He claimed to be a hired manhunter, sent to find me. Sent by Mother.”

  Martin’s expression had changed the moment he heard the name of Brody. His teeth clenched together behind his thin and bewhiskered lips, a habit he had when angry, and one Julia had known since her childhood as Della Rose.

  “Lying son of a bitch!” Martin growled. “Wicked devil, that man! Pure wicked!”

  “Could it be true? He said she’d come out of her—”