“Could be they take after you,” Majors continued. “Yeller like the man they run with.”
Tap threw down the cloth and whirled round; there was anger enough in his own face and his fists were bunched tight. His weapon, though, was lying on top of the alpaca coat, more feet away from his reach than it should have been at that moment. Majors looked big and powerful and his head jutted forward towards Loughlin as he spoke.
“Hear what I’m callin’ you, Loughlin? Yeller!”
The words half-choked on Tap’s lips. “I hear you.”
“And?”
“And there’s men enough here who’ll say it ain’t so.” Tap’s eyes flicked round the edges of the fire, wondering not so much how many men would support him with words, but how many he could count on if it came to a fight. Baptiste and Little Kinney were the only ones he could have relied upon whatever the argument, whatever the situation – and they were shot up pretty bad and face down on blankets with their wounds half-dressed. Levy he was less and less sure of. There was something he only registered now, the way Scott had avoided his eyes the last day or so, saying nothing more than he had to. Tap wondered now, too late, how much talk Scott Levy had been having with Majors on the quiet.
As for the blacks, Tap had no idea. They’d showed support for him against Majors once before, but that had been the other side of Ozark and how much longer were they going to carry on backing a losing hand?
Majors grinned. “I’m listening hard, Loughlin, but I can’t hear anyone sayin’ overmuch.”
Tap shrugged, shifted his feet; if only that pistol of his weren’t so far off. Majors’ own gun was only inches from his hand and he was only looking for the chance to use it. They both knew that: all the men round the fire knew it. It was for Loughlin to decide - either he was yeller the way Majors had said and he’d accept it and lose face, lose control of the gang- or he could make a dive for his gun and get shot for certain.
Tap’s throat was dry but his hands were damp with sweat. The sweet smell of wood smoke choked his nostrils.
“What’s it to be, Loughlin?” sneered Majors.
Tap kicked at the loose earth before the fire. “You think what you damn well like!”
He said it with as much force as he could but could tell straight off that it didn’t carry a lot of weight with those who were still making up their minds, with Gideon and Joseph, maybe Levy. He heard one of the blacks snort with disgust and saw Scott Levy turn away as if he were embarrassed.
Loughlin turned away himself, going back to his knees and taking up the piece of cloth with which he’d been wiping Little Kinney’s back. He shook it free of dirt and then plunged it into the boiling water before reapplying it to the wound.
Majors stood at the centre of things for a while longer but he didn’t need to say anything else and neither did anyone else. It was over: decided. At sun-up, they rode out, taking the bulk of the supplies with them – Majors, Gideon and Joseph, a somewhat shamefaced Scott Levy. Loughlin would have shaken him by the hand, wished him well, but Levy was too ashamed even to look him in the eye.
Not a word was spoken: nothing. Just the sound of horses moving off through the thicket and after that an occasional sound and the sight of four riders moving through the tree line as they trailed the side of the hill up to the Mulberry.
~*~
The remaining three said little enough; there didn’t seem to be a whole lot to talk about. Not that that was going to make their row seem any easier to hoe. They had around sixty dollars between them, which would keep them in food and supplies and buy some fresh ammunition. But it wasn’t going to last them very long if they ran into difficulties. Loughlin and Little Kinney had pistols and Baptiste still had one of the shotguns they had taken from the State Penitentiary. Baptiste was as strong as a mule. He ground his teeth hard together and pulled himself slowly up into the saddle. The gunshot wound in his back pained him worst, but since that had happened the pair of wounds he’d taken in his leg at the train had started playing up a lot more than the previous few days. Still, he had the physical strength to cope. His dark eyes were as bright as ever; his expression as determined. The thick beard and moustache hid from view the slight grimacing of the mouth whenever one or other pain jolted through his body.
Little Kinney took his troubles less quietly. Alternately cursing the sheriff for shooting him in the back and cursing Majors for leaving them like he had, Kinney’s face was permanently screwed up with this or another anger. Neither was he as naturally strong as Baptiste; when his wound troubled him he wasn’t powerful enough to shake it off, pretend that it wasn’t happening. Instead, he doubled forward with the pain, moaning and lashing out into the air with his hands.
“You know where they’re goin’ to be headin’, don’t you?” said Baptiste when they were a half mile along the trail.
Tap Loughlin nodded. “Right enough.”
“You know that bastard Levy’s goin’ to lead ’em right to it.”
Tap shook his head. “Not right to it, he ain’t. He don’t know exactly where that railroad money is no more’n we do. Hell, it could be halfway across the entire damn country from here for all we know.”
Baptiste looked round. A small brown-winged bird moved between the upper branches of an ash. “But he’s goin’ to lead Majors up across the border. He’s settin’ him on the trail sure enough.”
Little Kinney cursed and whistled. Cursed some more. “Six thousand dollars!”
“Yeah!” hissed Baptiste and spat down to the ground.
Tap shook the reins and moved the horse into a trot. “They ain’t got it yet,” he said. “Not yet they ain’t.”
A few hundred yards on, he slowed again, realizing that neither of the men with him was going to push his mount above a walk unless it was unavoidable. The journey was going to take days longer than necessary under normal circumstances – unless he could get them patched up real good and able to ride properly. Or unless he left them to their own devices and went on alone.
Tap turned in the saddle and gazed back down the trail and all he could see was Little Kinney galloping along that main street in Ozark and hollering his name.
No: he wouldn’t be riding on ahead. Not yet awhile.
~*~
They were climbing a steep slope towards the summit and a short cut to the river when Little Kinney lost his balance and tumbled sideways from the saddle. This time his foot jerked free of the stirrup right enough and all he suffered was a hefty thump on his arm and ribs and part of his back. But it was sufficient to open up the wound again and they had to wait while the bandages were removed and replaced. Loughlin could see them falling further and further behind, he could see Majors getting on the track of the money, he could see...
He stood upright and what he saw chilled him. It was Sara-Lee opening the door to the cabin where she lived in Springfield and there in the doorway bulked Lloyd Majors, blocking out the light.
Tap closed his eyes and his fingers went for a moment to the side of his head.
“You okay?”
Tap blinked at Baptiste and nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said in a flat tone. “I’m fine.”
But all the time now he was conscious of how much they were holding him back, of how much more urgent catching up with Majors was likely to be.
~*~
“What’s that up the road?”
Tap Loughlin reined in and followed the direction of Baptiste’s out flung arm.
It was a high-sided, canvas-sailed wagon travelling slower than they were, but in the same direction. There was some colored smudging on the sides, lettering maybe, but from that distance it wasn’t possible to make it out clearly.
“Some kind of trader?” Tap offered.
“We could use some more shells,” said Little Kinney.
“Some jerky,” suggested Baptiste.
But the wagon turned out to have more for them than shells and beef jerky. Seymore Hardcastle was taking a rest from driving the pair of
mules; his afternoon siesta, as he liked to call it. A couple of shots of his own cure-all and he laid down on the mattress in the back of the wagon and it never took him more than five or ten minutes to be fast asleep. Truth was, it never took Seymore more than that long to fall asleep anytime, anywhere. Myra was handling the reins, mouthing off at the mules for their stubbornness under her breath and now and again throwing small stones at their rumps. Neither the curses nor the stones made the least bit of difference and Myra would have lost her temper and hollered loud if she hadn’t have known it would have waked the baby. Not Seymore, no fear of that, just the baby. So she tolerated the mules grudgingly, thankful of the peace she was enjoying while the child slept.
As it was, she was soon disturbed by the sound of horses and, looking around the side of the wagon, she saw it was three men coming up behind. The fact that they were in no apparent hurry made their appearance less threatening, though not such that she didn’t check the load in her .38 Remington and stash it under the folds of her dress, real close to where she’d lay her right hand.
“Ma’am.”
Myra turned and nodded, taking in the speaker quickly, the one who’d drawn off from his companions. Stubble-faced, an alpaca coat and no gun belt but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a pistol stashed somewhere.
She looked into Tap Loughlin’s face and made one of her instant judgments: she thought he might be all right. The pair riding with him, though – something strange about the way they held themselves in the saddle and that big bearded feller looked mean as she guessed a grizzly would be if ever she came across one face to face.
“Saw your sign there,” Tap pointed at the wagon’s lettering, the words CURE-ALL suggesting that they might have come across exactly what they wanted.
“You a doctor?” Tap asked, turning his horse sideways on to the wagon.
“Me?” Myra laughed and her breasts shook loosely inside the top of her dress. She saw Loughlin following their movement and she wasn’t displeased. “No, I ain’t no doctor. Why you askin’? You sick?”
“Not me.” Tap nodded towards Baptiste and Little Kinney.
“Them?”
“Uh-huh. Run into a scrape a ways back. Took a little gunshot.”
Myra nodded, looking at Loughlin afresh, resting her fingers on the butt of the .38 beneath her dress, hard and reassuring under the softness of the material.
“Cure-all ain’t goin’ to do nothing for gunshot wounds,” she said, after a while.
“Might be some bandages in that wagon. Might be you could help if you was willin’. I tried dressing ’em myself but my hands just don’t sit right, doin’ a job like that.”
Myra looked at him still, half in her mind to ask: what kind of a job do them hands of yours sit right doing?
But she held her tongue and nodded towards the rear of the wagon. “Mr. Hardcastle back there, if he was awake, he might do something for your friends.”
Tap Loughlin looked at the wagon a shade anxiously. Then he patted his coat pocket and Myra heard coins rattle together. “You suppose that sound might wake him up?”
Myra almost smiled. “It might.”
The baby stirred and she turned her head towards the child, hushing and shushing softly. As she did this the shaggy head of Seymore Hardcastle appeared through the canvas at the back of the seat. The man blinked several times, adjusting to the light; looked seriously and long at Loughlin and the men with him; reached back into the wagon and brought out his broken-down top hat, which he jammed fast on to his balding head.
“I believe certain of you gentlemen are in need of medical assistance,” he said.
~*~
The wagon was pulled off the trail and into the shade. There was an argument, not very prolonged, about the precise fee to be paid for Hardcastle’s services. Then Baptiste and Little Kinney were helped up into the wagon and laid down side by side on the mattress, while Myra boiled water on the fire she and Tap had built close by. Seymore Hardcastle found a giant-size bottle of cure-all which he used to disinfect his own hands in the proper surgical manner; that done, Hardcastle rinsed a small, sharp knife in the same liquid and promptly splashed more over the patients’ backs. Both Baptiste and Kinney hollered, Little Kinney in particular, but Hardcastle assured them that all they’d experienced was a good sign that the cure-all was doing its job. “After all,” he said, “you don’t want nothin’ gangrenous settin’ in there, do we?” He rubbed his hands together, laughed, and began to probe around.
Tap Loughlin persuaded Myra that some of the boiling water wouldn’t come amiss being put to some coffee grounds, and they sat, trying not to listen to what was happening under canvas, passing the time of day as pleasant as they could.
Tap was thinking how Myra, with her mess of brown hair and her ample figure - not to mention the child she was cuddling to her breast - wasn’t exactly the kind of woman he’d like to have dreams about. She wasn’t no Sara-Lee Danziger and that was certain. But there was a warmth and a frankness about her that made him feel, well, more attracted than he felt comfortable being.
For her part, Myra was pretty positive that Tap was one of the better looking strangers she’d come across in the past month or so. Nice enough, in fact, for her to wish that she could give her baby over to someone else for a time and wander off into the nearest clump of trees with him.
She even considered handing the child into Seymore, but then he sounded to have his hands full enough as it was. And, besides, how could she be sure he was interested- the stranger? Huh! Myra smiled to herself. What man wasn’t, when it came down to it? None that she’d ever met. No, the way he was cradling that coffee mug in his hands and looking at her body, she was certain enough.
Myra eased herself a little closer and Tap did nothing to shift away.
“Myra!” Hardcastle’s voice called out from the interior of the wagon. “Myra! Get in here and help me bind these two up good and fast.”
She sighed and gave Tap the baby to hold instead.
Fifteen minutes later, all four were standing talking, drinking a final mug of coffee before the three riders set off on their way again. Little Kinney and Baptiste felt like trussed chickens, but now their wounds had been properly cleaned and bound and weren’t likely to come open again at the first jolt in the journey.
“Travelin’ far?” asked Hardcastle.
“Up Missouri way,” said Tap quickly, owing them a civil answer, but not wanting to say too much.
Baptiste threw the remnants of his coffee down and moved off towards his horse. Loughlin shook hands with Hardcastle, smiled warmly at Myra, and turned away. He helped Little Kinney up into the saddle and soon the three of them were lost from sight.
“Where’s the next place we hit?” asked Myra, as they brought the wagon back on to the trail.
“Cass, I reckon. Why d’you ask?” He glanced across at her. “You in need of somethin’?”
Myra shook her head. “Not so’s you’d notice.”
~*~
It was not far south of Cass that they ran into Wes Hart and told him how to find the Grant place, Myra suckling her child and fingering her .38 at the same time.
Chapter Nine
The morning following their first meeting with Hart, they saw him again. Wes had been up before the first light, before the first song of the birds really caught fire. He had seen to his horse and checked out his guns, dismantling the Colt and cleaning it, piece by piece, putting it back together with unhurried speed and precision.
Malcolm Grant had been waiting for him on the front porch of the house. There was ham and eggs, corn bread, good coffee. Hart watched as Grant took a couple of eggs uncooked and straight from their shells before settling down to the fried kind.
“Good for a man,” Grant had said.
Hart nodded and kept his own counsel.
During the meal, the banker gave Hart all the information he’d obtained from Marshal Fagan about the escape. How many men Majors had broken out with, some
details about them – a couple of no-good niggers and three desperadoes who were behind bars for train robbery. There was only one clue to the direction the escaped prisoners might take: the train robbers were known to operate up by the Missouri border. The remnants of the Loughlin gang had been hit hard by a posse from a town called Garfield, close by Beaver Lake. Two of them had got away and as far as was known they were still on the run.
“Do you think Majors would have stayed with these men?” Grant asked.
Hart chewed on some ham and thought about it. “I reckon. For a while at least. He’ll likely reckon his chances are better than on his own.”
“So you think they’ll ride north again? Up to the border country?”
“It’s a chance.”
Grant sat forward. “What sort of chance?”
Hart shrugged. “Chance I got to take.”
~*~
The Hardcastle wagon wasn’t the first thing Hart saw when he rode early into Cass, but it was one of them. He noted it, saw that neither the man nor the woman were around, and carried on down the street towards the marshal’s office. He found it caught between a saloon and a saddler’s, thick door reinforced with hefty planks of wood that had been nailed across it, one window that was almost too small for a man to stick his head out of without wriggling. There wasn’t anything about it that looked welcoming.
Hart dismounted, tied up his horse, and hammered on the door. He was greeted by the sudden barking of what sounded to be a pretty big dog. More knocking only seemed to make the animal all the more furious, so Hart waited while a man’s grumbling voice grew slowly more distinct. Eventually, it shouted through the thickness of the wood: “Who the hell is it, this hour?”
“Name’s Hart, marshal. Want to talk to you is all.”
“This ain’t the marshal,” the voice grumbled. “An’ if you want to talk why don’t you wait till a proper hour.”
“There’s folk enough stirrin’ round town,” said Hart, controlling his temper.
Hart the Regulator 7 Page 9