It might be a good idea for me and the rest of the crew to keep an eye on Vince for a while, I told myself.
We got back to the ranch late that night, and everybody was up early the next morning, going about their work. In fact, I drove the whole bunch of us pretty hard for the next few days, myself included. Staying busy was the best thing in the world for Vince right then, I figured, and not only that, it was getting a lot of work done around the place.
Four or five days had gone by when John Hamilton showed up. Scar’s barking warned me that something was wrong. I stepped out of the barn where Enoch and I had been doing some horseshoeing and I shaded my eyes with a hand as I peered toward a buggy rolling toward the buildings from the direction of Largo.
At first I thought Sheriff Lester must’ve traded in that automobile the county bought for him and had gone back to a more familiar mode of transportation, and then I wondered for a second if it might be Reverend Hatfield and his daughter. The idea of seeing Daisy again made my pulse jump a little.
Then I realized the buggy wasn’t either of those. When it came closer I recognized Hamilton’s big white mustache.
“That’s the fella you talked to for so long at Vince’s mama’s house, ain’t it?” Enoch asked.
“Yeah. Wonder what he wants.”
Hamilton brought the buggy to a halt in front of the barn and climbed down. His face was gray, and it wasn’t just from the dust his two horses had kicked up.
“Howdy, Mr. Hamilton,” I greeted him. “What brings you out here?”
“I need to talk to the boy,” he said.
“You mean Vince?”
“That’s right.”
I said, “Last time somebody showed up and wanted to talk to Vince, they weren’t deliverin’ good news.”
“Neither am I,” Hamilton said. He winced and caught hold of the buggy to steady himself.
“Are you all right?” I asked him.
“Aw, this damned gut rot of mine is acting up. That six months the doc gave me might’ve been optimistic.” He shook his head. “But that’s not why I’m here. Something’s happened that Vince needs to know about.”
“Something happened to his ma?” I sure hoped that wasn’t the case. The boy didn’t need to lose both of his folks so close together.
“No, she’s all right . . . physically.”
I slipped my hands in my hip pockets and said, “You’d better go ahead and tell me what this is about, Mr. Hamilton.”
“I’m not sure it’s really any of your business,” he said with a stubborn frown.
Enoch said, “That redheaded sprout’s our friend, mister. I reckon that makes it our business.”
Hamilton thought about it for a second and then shrugged. He said, “I don’t suppose it really makes any difference. Vince would tell Bert, and Bert Chadwick never kept a secret in his life. That boy’s face reads just like a book.”
“You were about to tell us what happened,” I reminded him.
“Yeah. Chet Rutledge came to see Helen Porter yesterday morning. He’d had word from the regional office in San Antonio about Bob’s pension.”
“They’re fixin’ to pay it?” I asked, but I already had a feeling that wasn’t going to be Hamilton’s answer.
“Hell, no,” Hamilton said. He looked like he’d just bitten into the sourest persimmon ever grown. “According to Kennedy and Milton, Bob borrowed on what he had coming and never paid it back. There’s nothing left. They’re not going to pay her one thin dime.” His voice shook with anger. “It’s a damned lie. Bob Porter wasn’t a borrowing man. They faked up some paper and made it look like he signed it, but it’s a lie.”
A heavy silence lay there between us for a few seconds before I said, “The railroad’s not givin’ her anything?”
“Not a thing.”
“Not even something for them bein’ at fault for his death?”
“But they weren’t at fault, according to the official report. It was an accident.”
That sour taste was in my mouth now. I didn’t like it, not one bit.
“As soon as I found out about it,” Hamilton went on, “I hitched up my buggy and came to tell Vince. Made it to Largo yesterday afternoon and spent the night there last night. Figured the boy had a right to know.”
“Yeah, he does,” I agreed. I turned to Enoch. “Can you ride out on the range, find Vince and the other boys, and tell ’em to come on back in?”
“Sure. You want me to let Vince know what’s happened?”
“No, I’ll tell him.” I looked at Hamilton. “Unless you’d rather.”
He shook his head and said, “I don’t suppose it really matters who tells him, as long as he knows. I’d just as soon get back home. I’ve never had any fanciful notions about dying with my boots on. I’d rather be in my own bed.”
“You’re welcome to spend the night here if you want,” I offered.
“No, thanks. I’ll be going.”
“Mr. Hamilton,” I said. He paused as he started to turn away. “I need to ask you one more question.”
“All right.”
“Are you absolutely sure there’s no truth to what Kennedy and Milton are claiming about the money coming to Mrs. Porter? They’d really do that? Cheat a widow woman out of what’s got to be a piddlin’ amount to the likes of them?”
He looked me in the eye and said, “I swear on what’s left of my life, Strickland, that’s what they’re doing.”
I smiled and said, “All right, then.” I put out my hand and shook his. “Thank you for makin’ the trip out here. It couldn’t have been easy for you.”
“Not much in life is easy. But as long as we’re here, there are things that have to be done.”
“Yes, sir, there sure are,” I agreed.
I had thought time was the only thing that would help Vince get over what had happened to his pa, but I knew now that I’d been wrong about that.
Vengeance might help, too.
CHAPTER 26
If anything, Vince took the news of the dirty trick Kennedy and Milton were pulling even worse than he had when Sheriff Lester told him his father had been killed. He ranted and cussed and raged around the room, nothing at all like the soft-spoken kid he usually was.
I had called everybody into the house before I told Vince what it was about. Like Hamilton had said, Vince didn’t have any secrets from Bert, and Bert didn’t have any secrets from anybody. Besides, with what I had in mind, they all had to know about it sooner or later.
After a while, Vince stopped carrying on. He just looked at me and said, “Why?”
“You mean, why would Kennedy and Milton do such a rotten thing?”
“Yeah. It’s not even their money. It’s the railroad’s money! And the railroad would never miss it.”
“Some fellas are like that,” I said with a shrug. “They’re just naturally greedy, and it slops over into their jobs. You can bet that Kennedy and Milton are rakin’ off plenty for themselves. They want to make as much money as they can for the railroad so they’ll stay in position to do that.”
“Well, it’s not right.”
“No, son, it sure ain’t. That’s why—”
Scar started barking again, interrupting me. I was a mite annoyed, but I figured I’d better see what had him so worked up. When I went to the door and looked out, I saw three riders coming toward the ranch house. The easy way they sat their saddles and the wide-brimmed, high-crowned sombreros they wore told me who they were.
“Santiago and his cousins are here,” I said. I wasn’t sure why they had shown up today. We hadn’t seen them since the roundup and the drive into town.
They were all as solemn as usual when they came in. Santiago nodded a greeting to us, then said, “Vince, we have heard what happened. We are very sorry, amigo.”
“You mean you know about my dad getting killed?” Vince asked.
Santiago nodded.
“Sí, and about the evil thing being done by the men he worked for.”
“How’d you know about that?” I asked. “John Hamilton just came up from the county seat and told us about it today.”
“Yes, but Señor Hamilton spent last night in Largo, and he was so angry by what the railroad is doing that he spoke to people about it. We rode to Largo this morning, and while we were there we heard the talk. Many people are angry at the railroad.”
“It’s not really the railroad,” Bert said. “It’s Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Milton.”
“Same thing as far as most folks are concerned,” Enoch said. The debate about that could go ’round and ’round, and it didn’t interest me. Making things right for Vince and his ma was all I cared about just then. I said, “I’m glad you and your cousins are here, Santiago. Saves me the trouble of havin’ to ride over to your rancho and talk to you. I planned to ask you to be part of this, too.”
“Part of what, Señor Strickland?” he asked, but I could tell from the way his eyes narrowed that he might have a suspicion already about what I was thinking.
“We’ve got to do something about this,” I said. “Too many times, folks see something wrong, and they just shake their heads and cluck their tongues and say ain’t that a shame, but there’s nothin’ they can do. Well, I’m not put together that way. When the Good Lord made me, he didn’t put in the part that stands aside and does nothin’.”
“Are we gettin’ to an answer to Santiago’s question pretty soon?” Enoch drawled.
That made me laugh, despite the seriousness of the situation. I said, “Yeah, we are. Vince and his ma have money comin’ from the railroad, and if the railroad won’t give it to ’em, that just leaves us with one thing to do.” I looked around at all eight of them. “We take it.”
As they looked at me the seconds ticked by and stretched out into a minute. Finally, as if the others had been waiting for him to speak up, Vince said, “What do you mean, ‘take it,’ Mr. Strickland?”
Enoch said, “When a fella talks about takin’ something away from the railroad, it usually means a holdup.”
“That’s right,” I said. “If Kennedy and Milton don’t want to do the right thing, we’ll just do it for ’em.”
“But we’re not outlaws!” Bert said. “We wouldn’t have any idea how to go about robbing a train.”
Enoch looked at me, and I saw the amusement twinkling in his eyes. Maybe he knew who I really was right then and maybe he didn’t, but he had an idea this wasn’t the first time I’d been involved in something on the wrong side of the law.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said. “But nobody has to be mixed up in this if they don’t want to. If any of you want to steer clear of it, nobody will think any less of you.”
“I’m glad you said that, Mr. Strickland,” Randy spoke up, “because I don’t want any part of it.”
That didn’t surprise me. Randy had actually held up a train before, and he’d gotten shot for his trouble, by his own partner, to boot. So I’d halfway expected him to feel that way.
“That’s fine,” I told him. “Anybody else?”
“Gabe and me are in,” Enoch said. “No offense, Jim, but ranch work ain’t near as excitin’ as robbin’ trains.”
Gabe said, “Speak for yourself, you ol’ stringbean. Maybe I don’t want to do somethin’ that’ll get the law after me.”
“Didn’t mean to speak out of turn,” Enoch said. “Are you in, Gabe?”
“Durned tootin’,” Gabe said. “Just wanted to make up my own mind, that’s all.”
Santiago said, “My cousins and I, we wish to be part of this effort as well, Señor Strickland.”
“Is that right?” I asked Javier and Fernando.
They both nodded solemnly.
I looked at Santiago and said, “They can talk, can’t they?”
“Get a bottle of mescal in them and you cannot shut them up,” he replied with a little twitch at one corner of his mouth. I knew that was what passed for a grin with him.
I turned to Vince and Bert.
“That leaves you two fellas.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Vince said. “Nobody’s going out and holding up a train on my account. You’ll all just get yourselves killed, and I won’t have it. I went to my dad’s funeral. That’s enough for a while.”
“Nobody’s gonna get killed,” I said. “As long as we’re careful and figure out everything beforehand, we’ll be fine. And you and your ma will get what’s comin’ to you, Vince.”
He gave a stubborn shake of his head and insisted, “It’s too dangerous.”
“Why don’t you let us work out a plan first, and then you can see if you still feel that way?” I suggested. “It won’t hurt anything for some of us to take a ride down to Cougar Pass and have a look around.”
“That’s where you plan on hittin’ the train?” Enoch asked.
“I don’t know yet. It’s a startin’ point, though. We’ll have to look around and see if we can find a better place.”
Vince said, “Aren’t any of you listening? I said no. I won’t let you do this.”
I smiled at him and said, “No offense, son, but I don’t reckon it’s up to you. If we want to hold up a train, we will, and if we want to hand over the loot to you and your ma, we’ll do that, too.”
“I won’t take it! And when I tell her where you got it, neither will she!” Vince threw his hands in the air in frustration. “You’re all crazy!”
He turned and paced over to the window. As he stood there with his back to us, staring through the glass, I saw his shoulders trembling just a little. I knew the emotions that had to be raging inside him. Sure, he wanted vengeance on the men who’d cheated him and his mother, and this was one way to get it. A successful robbery would reflect badly on Kennedy and Milton, over and above the money. But at the same time, Vince didn’t want to see any of his friends get hurt or killed. He had a point when he said that he’d already grieved enough.
Bert spoke up for the first time since I’d revealed what I wanted to do. He said, “I think we should do what Mr. Strickland says.”
Vince turned to frown at him.
“You want to be a train robber?” he said. “An outlaw? You?”
“Well, why not? The railroad’s done wrong by you and your mother, Vince. You should’ve gotten that pension money and more besides.” Bert paused, then went on, “Besides, there’s something you don’t know.”
That brought Vince away from the window. He said, “What? What is there I don’t know about this whole thing, Bert?”
“You don’t know what Mr. Rutledge has been saying about your pa.”
Vince looked like he’d been slapped. He couldn’t get any words out for a few seconds. Then his face hardened and he asked in an equally hard voice, “What’s Rutledge been saying?”
Now Bert looked like he wished he hadn’t even brought it up, but he swallowed and said, “It was when he talked to me in town. He said I could come back to work as a baggage handler, too. He thought maybe if I took the job, so would you, and he wanted to do something to help you out, even though . . . even though it was really your dad’s own fault, what happened to him.”
Vince’s eyes widened in anger and surprise.
“How in the hell does he figure that? Pete Abercrombie hit the throttle when he shouldn’t have.”
I kept my mouth shut. Vince had heard the story the railroad was spreading about Abercrombie and evidently accepted the idea that the initial talk about the brakes failing was just a mistake made in the confusion of the moment. John Hamilton was right: if the deception fooled somebody as close to the situation as Vince, it would fool everybody else.
The truth was my hole card, if I needed it.
Bert looked mighty uncomfortable as he said, “Mr. Rutledge told me that wasn’t really what happened. He claims your dad had time to get out of the way of that freight car, but he’d been drinking and didn’t see it because of that.”
Vince’s freckled face turned almost as red as his hair.
“Ru
tledge said my dad was drunk?” he demanded.
Bert swallowed again and nodded.
Kennedy and Milton must have ordered Rutledge to start spreading that rumor, I thought. It wasn’t enough they had covered up the railroad’s responsibility for those brakes failing. Now they were going to blacken Bob Porter’s name by having Rutledge whisper about him being drunk when he was killed. It was as dirty a business as I’d ever heard of, and for a moment it made me want to forget all about robbing one of the railroad’s trains.
What I wanted to do instead was to walk into the offices of Kennedy and Milton in San Antonio and gun down those black-hearted sons of bitches.
The problem with that idea was that while I’d killed in the past when I had to, I wasn’t a murderer. Never had been, and I knew I wasn’t going to turn into one now.
No, if I was going to help Vince strike back against Kennedy and Milton, it would have to be in a different way, a way I knew as well as my own name.
Vince was so mad he wasn’t able to talk for a minute or so. When he could, he choked out, “It’s a damned lie. I saw my dad drink a beer every now and then, but he wasn’t a drunk. He never would have gone to work drunk. He was too dedicated to his job.” His voice took on a bitter edge. “Too dedicated to the railroad. And now the men who run it are turning their backs on him.”
“I didn’t want to tell you, Vince,” Bert said. “But that’s why I’ve got to go along with Mr. Strickland on this. If there’s some way we can make them pay, we’ve got to do it.”
Vince nodded slowly. He said, “I think you’re right.” He looked at me. “If you’ve got a plan, sir, I won’t try to stop you. And I’m in, all the way.”
I clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Glad to hear it, son. I don’t have a plan yet, but I will. I can promise you that.”
Randy said, “I’m sorry, Vince. I still can’t go along with it.”
“That’s all right, Randy,” Vince said. The rage had faded from his face, but a cold determination had replaced it. “I don’t blame you a bit. Anyway, Mr. Strickland’s going to need somebody to stay here and keep an eye on the ranch. Isn’t that right, sir?”
Butch Cassidy the Lost Years Page 16