by Jory Sherman
“Don’t you touch me,” his mother said, with a sharp bitterness in her tone.
“Ma. What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”
He tried to put his arm around her again, but she drew further away from him.
She looked at him with tear-filled eyes and shook her head, unable to speak.
“Please,” he said. “What did Gaston say to you? Did he hurt you? Threaten you?”
“No,” she said. “He gave me those.” She pointed to the array of news clippings and paper on the table.
Dan felt a sharp pang as he saw the headlines, his likeness on the wanted poster with the $500 reward under the drawing of his face, in boldface type.
“I told you, Ma. None of that is true.”
“You murdered your own brother,” she said.
Dan reared back in surprise.
His mother reached into the bodice of her dress and pulled out the bills he had given her earlier. She threw the money at him, a look of stark rage on her face.
“Ma, that’s not true.”
“Blood money,” she said. “You murdered poor Jason so’s you could get his share of the money. That’s what Marshal Gaston said. That’s what it says in those newspapers. Murdered your own brother.”
Dan stared at the money lying on the divan between them.
“Is that what they said?” he asked. “They’re lying.”
“You didn’t earn that money by yourself,” she said.
“No, Jason and I earned it.”
His mother put her face in her hands and began sobbing again. Dan felt the sting of her anger and struggled to find words of comfort for her.
“I was framed,” he said. “A man named Krebs killed Jason and the others. I was blamed for it.”
“That’s not what it says in those papers.”
“Ma, you can’t believe all that stuff.”
“They can’t all be lying. You’ve turned into a common criminal, Dan. I want you out of my house. Now.”
“Ma, listen to me. Someday, my name will be cleared. I wish I could tell you how and why, but I can’t.”
“You can’t explain these things to me?”
He hung his head.
“No, Ma, I can’t.”
“Then, get out, Dan. Get out and don’t come back. And take your blood money with you.”
“Ma, I came by that money honestly. It’s for you. Don’t turn me away, please.”
Oralee entered the room, so quietly Dan had not heard her. She came up to the divan and stood in front of Eileen. She knelt down and took Eileen’s hands in her own, looked at her with an expression of sympathy.
“You upset your mother, Dan. She wants you to go. Please. Do not hurt her any more than you have.”
“I can’t leave like this, with my mother thinking I’m guilty of crimes I didn’t commit.”
Oralee turned and walked toward the kitchen.
His mother looked at him and his eyes were flinty with rage. He recoiled at a look he had never seen before, a look of pure hatred. Bewildered, he struggled to breathe, a feeling of suffocation coming over him.
“Dan, I’m asking you,” she said. “Leave my home. There’s no place for you here anymore. You have broken my heart. You are no longer my son. Go, before you make things worse for both of us.”
“Ma, whatever you read, whatever Gaston told you. None of it’s true. I swear.”
“How dare you? You…you murderer.”
Dan stood up. He looked down at his mother, a feeling of pity washing over him.
“I’ll go,” he said. “But, someday…someday, you’ll know the truth.”
“They’re going to hang you, Dan,” his mother said. “You’re an outlaw. A criminal, and they’re going to catch you and hang you for your horrible crimes.”
He saw that he could not reason with his mother. She was blinded by what Gaston had told her, what she had read in the Abilene newspapers about him. And, there was that accusing flyer, saying he was wanted for murder.
Dead or alive.
“Goodbye, Ma,” he said. “I’ll come back someday. When all of this is over. Don’t think bad of me.”
His mother said nothing. She just shook her head and wept. She looked so frail and lost when Dan walked from the room. He felt empty inside.
“Oralee,” he said as he walked into the kitchen. “Keep that money for my mother’s use.”
“She probably won’t use it.”
“Keep it anyway.”
He could hear his mother sobbing as he opened the back door and stepped outside. Ben Alexander had not said he would face anything like this.
He hesitated, wondering if he should go back inside and tell his mother everything, make her believe him. He wanted to. With all his heart, he wanted to tell his mother everything.
And then he thought about Krebs, and all that was at stake.
He couldn’t tell his mother the truth. He couldn’t tell her, or anyone else. If he did, Krebs might get away with his crimes and go Scot free.
He had made a promise to Alexander. A promise he knew he had to keep.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” he muttered, as he stepped off the back porch, knowing she could not hear him.
But, either he was a man of his word, or he was nothing, he knew.
And, his hatred for Krebs swelled inside him until it exploded in his veins and made his jaw harden with determination. At that moment, Dan was gripped with an almost blinding rage, a fierce desire to track down Jake Krebs and kill him with his bare hands.
Chapter Nine
Dan’s argument with his mother brought back all the memories of that fateful day when Jake Krebs killed Jason, then framed him by switching his pistol with Dan’s. Jason was killed with a different caliber bullet than Dan’s pistol, but he couldn’t prove it at the time.
The scene that day replayed in Dan’s mind with crystal clarity.
They heard footsteps outside the front of the barn. Dan and Jason looked toward the open doors and saw two men striding toward them. They turned around to look at Krebs.
“What the hell….” Dan said.
“Let me handle this,” Krebs said.
“Those are U.S. Marshals,” Jason said. “I wonder what they want.”
The two men wore U.S. marshal badges on their vests. And they both carried rifles.
“You men are under arrest,” one of them said. “I’m United States Federal Marshal Charles Norwood and this is Dean Parker.”
“I’ll take that money,” Parker said, walking toward Krebs.
“What’s the problem?” Krebs asked.
“Those cattle are stolen,” Norwood said. “Someone took a running iron to the 2 Bar 7 brand that was on them. As you damned well know.”
Krebs held out the money. As the marshal was reaching for it, Krebs dropped the money in a heap at his feet and pulled his pistol. He was lightning fast. As the pistol cleared his holster, he thumbed back the hammer. Before the marshal could react, Jake fired. The Colt belched flame and smoke, spewed out a lead ball that slammed into the marshal’s heart. He dropped like a sack of meal, a hole in his back from the exit wound.
Parker went into a crouch and brought up his rifle, cocking it. Krebs’s pistol barked and Parker went into shock as the bullet smashed into his neck, square in the Adam’s apple. Blood spurted all over Jason who turned toward Krebs, clawing for his pistol.
Krebs’s pistol roared once again and Jason fell to his knees, a bullet through the middle of his forehead. He crumpled over as Krebs stepped up and brought his pistol down with great force atop Dan’s head, knocking him out cold. Dan folded up into a heap.
When Dan awoke, he was in the Abilene jail—accused of murdering three men.
And now, Frank Gaston was apparently embellishing the events of that day, adding details that poisoned Dan’s mother’s mind. Why in hell, he wondered, didn’t Marshal Alexander explain to the marshals in Abilene what really happened? He could have explained part of it, that Dan hadn’t stolen hi
s brother’s pay and murdered him for it. Even that much would not have jeopardized Alexander’s plan to use Dan to track down Krebs. Alexander had arranged Dan’s escape from jail, but only after Dan agreed to help the marshal find Jake Krebs. And because Dan was considered an outlaw after the escape, he had to stay out of sight and ride the owlhoot trail. And Ben Alexander had sworn Dan to secrecy about their mission.
His life had become so complicated, he felt as if he were in a maze, a bewildering maze from which there was no escape. Now his mother had disowned him and Gaston was on his trail. The trail was full of obstacles, dead ends, side-roads where even more danger lurked. And he was bound to secrecy and silence, while the entire world, his world, thought him a vile criminal, a man to be shot on sight or taken to the gallows in Abilene.
Dan caught up Dapper and mounted the gelding, a sense of urgency now upon him. He looked at the sky and saw that the moon was just rising in a far corner, a thin silver fingernail, which would not give out too much light. There was still time to ride the three or four miles over to the Reed farm and see Priscilla. Neither he nor Priscilla had gone to school, but Priscilla’s mother, like his own, had schooled her at home. Both could read and write and their mothers saw to it that they studied the classics in literature and learned arithmetic.
He wanted to see Priscilla before she went and talked to his mother. Perhaps, he thought, he could use her as an ally to help patch things up with his mother. He knew that those newspaper articles would continue to fester in her mind and produce unbearable images of him as a killer.
He crossed Dancing Creek, the stream behind his mother’s house. He and Jason had named it Dancing Creek when they were small. The name caught on and others in the area all called it that now. The Reed’s farm lay on that same stream, to the east of the Cord spread.
Malcolm Reed and his wife, Myrle, raised vegetables which they sold in Waco. He didn’t have much acreage, but he and his wife raised the best produce in that part of the country. And so they were somewhat prosperous and the war had not hurt them as much as it had the larger farms and plantations. Reed had not raised cotton or tobacco, but stuck to raising corn, beans, squash, melons, tomatoes, okra, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, sugar beets, cabbage, and such. He kept several Mexican families on the land, fed them, and paid them in hard cash.
Malcolm was a tough Irishman, and his wife, Myrle, was half-Italian, half-Irish. The mixture of their bloodlines had produced a most beautiful daughter, Priscilla, with dark brown hair that grew to her waist, brown eyes, and a dazzling smile.
Dan had loved her from afar for a very long time. But, he had never gotten the courage to show himself. Now, however, he felt an urgency to speak to Priscilla. When he was in jail in Abilene, he had received a letter from Priscilla and it was obvious from what she wrote that she had been aware he’d watched her from a distance, and she was smitten with him, as well. He hadn’t been confident enough to approach her before because he thought he had little to offer her. Besides, life had been too much of a struggle for him, with no father at home, and his mother always needing money. But, Eileen had kept her sons well-dressed, making clothes for them out of good material, and she saw to their manners.
Dan stopped and looked back at his mother’s house. The lights were still on. A wave of loneliness swept over him. He took deep breaths to fight back the tears that threatened to blot out his vision. He could barely make out the chicken house beyond the orchard, and the barn stood in gray-black silence, like some deserted outpost on a desolate plain. Home. Lost to him now, so near, yet so far away.
He rode well away from Dancing Creek so that he could listen for hoofbeats, just in case Gaston, Simms, and the other two lawmen returned. He stopped every so often to listen, but heard nothing but the soft sigh of the wind whispering across his hat brim and Dapper’s breathing, the switch of his tail.
The Reed home loomed ahead, its windows aglow with lamplight and Dan felt a tug at his heart. Malcolm’s first house had been made of adobe brick, but over the years, he rebuilt it with store-bought brick and lumber. He had added rooms and a second story at one end. It was a much nicer house than his own, but he didn’t envy the Reeds. They had worked hard for what they had and deserved a nice place to live.
The smell of growing things assailed his nostrils and he found the cart path through the fields that led to the yard. A dog barked as he rode up into the yard and he saw the flick of a tail in silhouette as Scooter, Malcolm’s Irish setter, rounded the corner of the house.
“Hello, Scooter boy,” Dan said, and the dog stopped barking, wagged its tail in recognition. He knew the dog’s name because he’d heard Priscilla call Scooter at times when he’d been watching her from a distance.
The front door opened. “Scooter, what is it?” a voice asked.
Dan recognized Priscilla’s voice. She shaded her eyes and peered out into the darkness.
“Hello, Priscilla,” Dan called, keeping his voice low. “It’s me, Dan.”
“Dan!” she said, and walked to the edge of the porch. “Is that really you?”
“It’s me, Priscilla. Can I step down?”
She descended the steps as quietly as she could and rushed up to him. Scooter wagged his whole body as she came past him.
“You’d best not come inside, Dan,” she whispered. “I’ll meet you out at the well.”
Dan turned his horse.
“Who’s out there, Priscilla?”
Dan stiffened as he heard Malcolm’s voice boom through the front door.
“It’s nothing, Daddy. Scooter thought he saw something.”
“Come on back inside,” Malcolm said.
“In a minute.”
Dan rode over to the well on the other side of the house. He could barely see it in the darkness, but he knew where it was. There was a trough next to it and when he slid from the saddle, Dapper stretched his neck and started to slobber water into his mouth, the bit clacking against his teeth.
Priscilla shooed Scooter away and walked up to Dan, standing close, but making no move to embrace him.
“What are you doing here, Dan?” she asked, and he tried to gauge the tone of her voice. She sounded more curious than angry, he decided.
“I got your letter when I was in Abilene. You said you wanted me to visit you.”
“I know, but that was before,” she said.
“I wanted to see you, Priscilla, in case you heard things about me. None of ’em is true. I mean about me bein’ a criminal.”
“You’re wanted by the law, Dan. Daddy brought a flyer from town the other day. There’s a reward out for you. Murder.” Her voice dropped off at the last word.
“It ain’t true.”
“Why don’t you turn yourself in, then, and clear your name?”
“It’s a long story, Priscilla.” He paused. “I’ve wanted to see you ever since I got your letter, up in Abilene.”
“Shh,” she said. “My daddy would whip me if he knew I was out here talking with you and had written you a letter.”
“My ma’s turned against me. A marshal came to the house this evenin’ and left her a bunch of newspaper clippings sayin’ I murdered Jason.”
“Jason?”
“It’s a lie, but that’s what this Gaston feller told her. She believes every word in those lying papers.”
“Well, so does Daddy.”
“What about your ma?”
“She can’t believe you’d murder anyone. But she’s not sure. And, neither am I.”
“You’ve got to believe me, Priscilla. I can’t tell you much, but one day I’ll clear my name. I just need time. I need to hunt down the man who murdered Jason and some lawmen.”
They both heard the front door slam shut. Startled, they stood there, staring at the corner of the house. Then they heard footsteps on the porch.
Malcolm called out. “Priscilla? Where are you?”
Priscilla opened her mouth to answer, but Dan clamped a hand over it. She struggled, and tore away
from him.
“How dare you,” she said. “How dare you touch me like that.”
“I—I…”
“Priscilla, that you?”
Malcolm came around the corner of the house, Scooter tagging along after him.
Dan saw that Priscilla’s father was holding a scattergun.
“Over here, Daddy. We have a visitor.”
“Hello, Mr. Reed,” Dan said, trying to put some amiability into his voice. Instead, his words scratched the high register, turning his tone into a squeak.
“Cord?”
“Yes, sir.”
Malcolm walked close, stared at Dan. Dan couldn’t see his face clearly and his eyes were just dark pits.
“I’ve got a wanted poster inside the house with your picture on it, Dan Cord. Now, get away from my daughter before I blow you to hell.”
Dan heard the snick of both hammers as Reed cocked the shotgun. He brought the gun to his shoulder and aimed it straight at Dan’s head, less than four feet away.
“Mr. Reed,” Dan started to say.
“That flyer says you’re wanted dead or alive, Son, and we could use that five hundred dollars.”
Time stopped for Dan, as Priscilla shrank away from him, her eyes wide with fear.
Dan drew in a breath, held it, waiting for the blast of the shotgun, the roar that would send him into eternity.
Chapter Ten
Running footsteps pounded up behind Reed.
“Malcolm, don’t,” Myrle said. “Put that scattergun down before you do something you’ll be sorry for.”
Reed turned slightly to look at his wife. “You stay out of this, Myrle,” he said.
Dan sensed the wildness of the moment. Malcolm had been about to shoot him, and the shotgun was still at full cock. Reed was distracted for the moment, but he could turn and touch off those triggers.
“Malcolm…”
Dan couldn’t wait for the argument to develop or pass. He stepped forward and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun, pushing it away from him at the same time. The twin barrels rose in the air as he tried to wrest the shotgun from Malcolm’s hands. Both barrels went off when Malcolm’s finger squeezed the triggers.