Hell in the Nations: The Further Adventures of Hayden Tilden (Hayden Tilden Westerns Book 2)

by J. Lee Butts

  Hell in the Nations

  The Further

  Adventures of Hayden

  Tilden

  J. Lee Butts

  Beyond the Page

  Publishing

  Hell in the Nations

  J. Lee Butts

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2002, 2014 by J. Lee Butts

  ISBN: 978-1-937349-86-8

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now know or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Carol,

  whose patience and support are boundless,

  and

  Linda McKinley,

  whose talent and skill make me a better writer

  HELL HATH NO FURY . . .

  “You gonna cry, pretty girl? Gonna do that female boo-hoo thang right here in front of all us big bad men?”

  Don’t guess she was as bad off as he thought. Her eyes narrowed up on him like the sights on one of those old rolling-block rifles. Her lips curled back like a mother wolf protecting newborn cubs when she said, “Damn you to an eternal burning hell, you sorry piece of human trash. You murdered my entire family.”

  Her eyes blinked real fast a couple times, and tears coursed down her cheeks right before she screamed, “You even killed my mother, you low-life scum-sucking dog!”

  Then, as God is my witness, a short-barreled Remington .44 appeared in that angry gal’s hand like a sideshow magician’s rabbit. . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, special thanks to Michael and Barbara Rosenberg for their invaluable efforts on my behalf. To Kimberly Waltemyer for turning me into a published author. And finally, all those buckaroos and buckarettes at the DFW Writer’s Workshop whose invaluable knowledge, experience, and weekly contributions are apparent in every word of my work.

  Why . . . consign these men to death and exterminate them from the earth? Because they are preying wolves . . . unfit to live and unfit to remain at large.

  —Western Independent, 1871

  Hell. That’s what it were like. Hell in the Nations.

  —Carlton J. Cecil, 1948

  Near as I can figure, living has always caused dying. . . .

  —Hayden Tilden, 1884

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  ON AN ICY morning, when frozen tree limbs clicked against the windowpanes of my sun porch kingdom here at the Rolling Hills Home for the Aged, Franklin J. Lightfoot, Jr., slid silently into the chair beside me and flipped his notepad open again. The boy looked to have just shaved, his face glowed, and instead of witch hazel, he’d switched to something new, Old Spice, I think, or maybe Bay Rum. My nose might be big as a South American parrot’s bill, but it doesn’t work as well as it used to.

  “Well, I’ll just be damned. Been wondering when you were gonna get around to coming back by, Junior. Looka here, Carlton, the prodigal pencil-pusher hath returned.”

  Cecil’s heavy-lidded eyes opened slowly, and then sparkled when he recognized our young friend. “Junior, my God, son, it’s good to see you again. Actually, it’s good to see anybody when you get our age. Want a lemon drop?” He fumbled around in his blanket and came up with a fuzz-covered ball of stickiness.

  Franklin J. examined the candy like it was a bug on a pin, scrunched up his nose, and said, “No, thanks, Carlton. I’m just here to talk with Mr. Tilden a bit.” He smiled and winked as Cecil popped the sugar-covered fur ball into his mouth, then went into a spitting fit trying to get rid of all the blanket lint.

  “Well, Junior, what’s on your mind?” I took General Black Jack Pershing, leaned over, and dropped him into the reporter’s lap.

  “You read the Lawdog series?” Franklin J. scratched the old cat behind the ears with his left hand and held a pencil at the ready with his right.

  “Couldn’t hardly avoid it, since you made a point of seeing everyone here at Rolling Hills got a free copy of the paper. Some of these old farts that hadn’t read much of anything in ten years got hooked on the stuff you wrote. I’ve got women so ancient they can barely push their walkers up and down the hall chasing me around my bedroom at night. ’Bout to wear me down to a nub.”

  He smiled so large, every tooth in his mouth got some sunshine. “Glad to hear that, Hayden. Lawdog has generated more interest than any article of its type I’ve ever written. We’ve had inquiries from publishers all over the country who want to serialize a version of your life story, and most importantly, they want more.”

  “More?” Tried to sound innocent and uninformed at the same time. Wanted to give him the impression the possibility of such a prospect had taken me completely by surprise. “You’re just pulling an old man’s arthritic leg, aren’t you, Junior?”

  “Hayden, right now the level of interest from our readers is such that I think we could go on for about as long as you can stand it.”

  Carlton almost ruined my trick, though, when he kicked in with: “We knew you’d be back, boy. Didn’t we, Hayden? Hell, they’s just too much more to pass on. You’d barely scratched the surface with Magruder and that bunch in your first installment. We’ve got a lot yet to tell you, don’t we, my friend?”

  Junior looked pleased. “A lot more? How much more?”

  Before I could stop him, Carlton blurted out, “Oh, you’ve got your Charlie Two Knives and your Albino Bob Thornton, Lonesome Edgar Steele, L. B. Ledoux, Chief Buffalo Head Long Feather, Three-Toed Willie McCord, and uh-uh-uh . . .”

  Either his memory completely failed, or he couldn’t get his mouth to work around one of those lumps of candy at that exact moment. No idea what caused his rambling old mind to burp, but he just kind of mumbled off into nowhere—thank goodness. I didn’t want to let everything out at one time anyway. Figured we had our red-faced reporter hooked, and wanted to string him along for all he was worth. Whatever that turned out to be.

  “Well, if it’s agreeable with the two of you fellows, why don’t we start this session sometime around the point where you’d just put Magruder in the ground and go from there.”

&n
bsp; Thought it nice of young Franklin J. to include Carlton in the mix, even if the crazy old coot couldn’t keep his mind on much of any one thing for more than a few minutes. But of course, that was only if you didn’t include candy or pretty young nurses and whatever else his fractured mind might want to latch onto as important. Right kind of bribe and his prehistoric thinker mechanism worked just fine, thank you very much.

  “Why don’t we pick it up around 1880–81, or something in the neighborhood. Just tell me anything. You know—like who the worst criminal you encountered about then might have been. I don’t see how you could have happened on too many as bad as Magruder, but just try to think of one.” He glanced up from his pad and threw me a mischievous grin. “You can remember 1881, can’t you, Hayden?”

  Scratched my head, then my chin, squirmed around in the chair, picked at my fingernails, and stared up at our dormant ceiling fan for about ten seconds before I kinda mumbled, “Well . . . let me see here. Do I remember 1881?” Then I perked up and snapped, “Hell, yes, I can remember ’81, Junior. The Fort Smith Elevator used up a lot of good ink on a bunch of famous dead people that year. We’re not talking run-of-the-mill bandits, thieves, and killers. We’re talking folks everyone still remembers. Pat Garrett shot the hell out of Billy Bonney over in New Mexico Territory. Newspapers said The Kid was slain by Sheriff Garrett. Never have believed you could slay murdering weasels like him. Seems like The Kid checked out kind of early in the year, if I remember correctly. Anyhow, my friend Wyatt Earp, his brothers, and Doc Holliday rubbed out two of the Clantons and a couple of their cronies over in Tombstone. And ’81 was the year President Garfield got blasted by some disappointed churnhead that didn’t get the job he wanted. So, yes, by God, I do recall most of 1881 for those and some particularly tough-to-take personal reasons.”

  A roguish Carlton J. Cecil squirmed in his chair and grinned. He had the look of a kid behind an outhouse who’d just seen his sister’s best girlfriend in the altogether.

  “Smilin’ Jack Paine,” he wheezed, “he ’uz a bad ’un.”

  The fact my own private loony bird remembered the name astonished me. Of the hundreds of people he could’ve brought up, it was easy to figure out why he’d picked that one, but it still irritated the hell out of me.

  “God Almighty, Carlton. You could’ve talked till dark and not mentioned that low-life son of a bitch.”

  Of course our exchange just lit a fire under Franklin J. Junior. “Who was he, Hayden? Come on, tell me about him.”

  “Don’t care to talk about Smilin’ Jack, if it’s all the same to you, Junior.”

  “Why on earth not?”

  “Smilin’ Jack Paine did, and personally caused, some things so awful I’ve never forgot ’em. Having Carlton bring him and his nefarious deeds back to mind again is really irritating. Besides, while Jack was a bad one, there were others just as bad and some even worse.”

  Jerked around on the comforter over my legs for emphasis. Tried to put just the right amount of righteous in-dig-nation into my voice. Wanted to make sure he jumped on board the Hayden Tilden Special as it ripped off into the wilds of Judge Parker’s Indian Nations full tilt, belching steam, its whistle screaming for notice from everyone.

  “Come on now, Hayden. Gimme the whole animal—fur and all. Tell me everything you can remember about Smilin’ Jack Paine. You know I can go to the Fort Smith Elevator’s archives and find out everything I need to know about him anyway—now that you’ve dropped the name.”

  “I didn’t drop Smilin’ Jack’s name. That bonbon-sucking piece of ancient wheeze over there beside you is the one who remembered Jack and his bunch.”

  Carlton grinned, his head snapped back, and he twirled the lemon drop around in his almost toothless mouth with a tongue the size of a Pony Express rider’s saddlebag.

  Junior’s eyes lit up. “Bunch? This just keeps getting better. Did he lead a gang like Magruder’s?”

  The cat jumped out of the boy’s lap when the scribbling got more furious than he wanted to deal with. Having someone scratch his ears pleased Black Jack more than just about anything, but he tended to be a somewhat persnickety two-hand feline, and if one of yours wasn’t busy with him, he would just abandon you altogether for someone who’d shower him with their total attention. As a consequence, Carlton accused the big tomcat of being somewhat “female” in his attitudes, and often blamed Chief Nurse Leona Wildbank with having had Black Jack fixed. A fate worse than death as far as Carlton was concerned.

  Knew we had Franklin J. on the line again, and kept jiggling the hook just to make sure. “Well, Junior, sometimes Smilin’ Jack ran with others, sometimes he ran alone. But he spent most of his life running one way or another. That is—till Hayden Tilden caught up with him.”

  “Just how much do you remember?”

  “How often have I told you before, Junior? I’ve been cursed with a memory longer than an Arkansas well rope and clear as that water those folks from Hot Springs sell for five dollars a bottle to Yankee tourists who aren’t paying attention. Some old people can’t remember how to tie their shoes; others can’t forget the slightest details of their lives from sixty years past. At times its does seem a curse, because I fall into that second bunch.”

  “Are you going somewhere with this, or was Smilin’ Jack Paine hiding in that gob of bull feathers and I just didn’t hear about him?”

  “Smilin’ Jack’s sorry assault on the world is an open book just waiting for me to read it out for you. As had been the case with others, Judge Parker’s private bailiff, Mr. Wilton, presented me with the package that contained everything anyone could ever have wanted to know about the worthless piece of vermin.”

  “Well, let’s get on with it.”

  “Where do you want to start?”

  “How far back can you go?”

  “I can go all the way to Mount Joy, Ohio, where Jack taught school in a one-room shack just a few miles from the river. Guess he’d been there for several years when a new family moved into the tiny community and placed their sixteen-year-old daughter in his classes. Her conduct with local boys—and men from all over south Ohio—drove her into the open arms of her trusted instructor. Before Mr. Paine knew what hit him, he was running down the Ohio headed for the Mississippi and all the freedoms available in that world-class capital of sin, New Orleans.”

  Junior glanced up from his notepad. “Let’s back up for a minute. Go to the very beginning. Tell me how you and Mr. Wilton met, and give me all the particulars in as much detail as you can recall. Want to get everything down just right for all your new fans out there in Tildenland, now don’t we?”

  “You’re right, Junior. Be especially hard on the inmates here at Rolling Hills. So, I’ll give you the whole bird. Feathers, beak, feet, and all.”

  1

  “HAYDEN TILDEN, AT YOUR SERVICE”

  I MOTIONED JUDGE Parker’s personal bailiff toward a brocaded armchair in Elizabeth’s spanking-new month-old parlor. She’d purchased the house just before Easter of ’81. I’d been out in the briars and thickets at the time, chasing a two-tailed skunk named F. Evan Polk. Polk killed Buckskin Elroy Tatum near White Bead Hill in the Chickasaw Nation. Story I heard had it that the men fought over the results of a horse race. According to witnesses, Polk lost the fistfight, but caught Tatum on the trail home and emptied both barrels of a twelve-gauge into the back of the surprised winner, who was then robbed of approximately a thousand dollars. Most of the money was still drenched in the dead man’s blood when I took it off Polk. Spent almost two months of living on the ground before I caught that murdering scoundrel. Man was slicker than a hand full of watermelon seeds.

  My approval of Elizabeth’s purchase had its basis in the quiet we’d achieved by moving away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Fort Smith. Never minded living in the apartment over the store we’d inherited from her father, but noise from the street tended to go on late into the night. After being so close to nature while in the wilds for weeks on
end, sleep often came hard for me during my visits to civilization.

  Our new home, north of town, sat on a hill overlooking a bend in the Arkansas. From the veranda that encircled the entire house, I could see Van Buren to the north and all of Fort Smith to the south. A good road led back to the Marshal’s office and Judge Parker’s chambers. In emergency situations, I found it easy to make myself available for duty in less than thirty minutes.

  Loud ticking from the grandfather clock just inside the foyer rippled through the silence as Wilton made his way across Elizabeth’s highly polished hardwood floors to the chair I’d offered. She was in town at the store, and we had the house to ourselves. He seated himself like an overdressed fussy old woman and kept picking at his clothing.

  “Judge Parker has another special assignment for you, Marshal Tilden.” The carefully barbered and immaculately dressed black gentleman leaned forward in his seat and gently placed a thick envelope on the table between us.

  Since the day of my secret agreement with the Judge to take on the mission of being his personal bounty hunter, Mr. Wilton always performed the task of acting as our go-between. His responsibilities included the provision of all necessary information available and instructions about disposition of those scalawags so beyond the pale of justice they required the Judge’s own private lawdog to dole out a “special brand” of handling.

  “Rather than read all of that pile of paper, Mr. Wilton, I’m certain you can tell me exactly what I need to know about the man portrayed in your carefully prepared file.”

  “Of course, I can acquaint you with most of the facts. The biography contained in those pages is of one Alonzo Jackson Paine, known as Smilin’ Jack to those bold enough to count him among their circle of friends. He is an evil one, Mr. Tilden, and needs immediate attention.”

  “Smilin’ Jack Paine. I’ve heard the name, but can’t say I have any substantial knowledge of his criminal activities.”