by Bill Brooks
“In spades,” Ed said.
“And no sign of Dirty Dave or his crew?”
“You think we should have just kept going after ’em, after finding the Dutchman?” Bat said.
“No, I guess you boys did the right thing.”
“You damn right we did.”
“Let me buy you boys a round.”
Ed said, “You’d be buying Bat his own liquor.”
“Oh, I guess you’re right, since him and Jimmy own the place.”
“We sent some men out to bury ’em,” Ed said. J. R. Reed and some other boys.”
“That’s good,” Dog Kelly said. “I’ll arrange for proper services for ’em with the reverend.”
Dog knocked some of the ice from his hat, watched it fall to the floor.
“I need to go make my night rounds,” Ed said. “I hope I don’t dream about ’em tonight.”
Dog drank a beer while Bat worked on a bottle of whiskey he’d been keeping close at hand ever since he and Ed had ridden back into town and put the word out about the Dutchman and his family.
Bat was quiet by nature, but even more so given the circumstances.
“Bad things happen out here on these prairies,” Dog said. “The damn wind makes ’em go nuts half the time. Wind and loneliness and hard weather and too little money and too many mouths to feed. They come out here thinking of the free land they’re getting. They forget that they ain’t nothing free when it comes down to it. I think Schirtz was from Ohio. What was his wife’s name…?”
“Molly,” Bat said. It wasn’t a name he would easily forget, for a simple reason: Molly had been the name of a girl back in Sweetwater, Texas, shot dead two years earlier when Bat got educated about weather prognostication by the same gun.
“Molly seems like a nice name,” Dog said. “I didn’t know any of them kids’ names, did you?”
“One of ’em was a boy named Lester I think,” Bat said. “That’s about all I remember of ’em.”
With the ice storm and news of the deaths, the Lone Star, like all the other drinking dens, was quiet at that particular hour. It was just Bat and Dog Kelly standing at the bar. Jim Masterson was mopping the floor on the other side of the room in anticipation that more customers would arrive eventually.
“I got some other bad news,” Dog said.
Bat looked at him with sorrowful dark eyes.
“I ain’t got no hard proof,” Dog said, “but word is around that they’s some in this town don’t want honest law to rule things no more.”
“Earp didn’t have any trouble cleaning up the bad element,” Bat said, pouring himself another tumbler of whiskey. “What makes you think Ed and me will?”
“I’ve ever confidence in you boys,” Dog said. “Thing is, I don’t know who-all’s behind this thing, and that can be a mighty dangerous situation for you boys.”
“Well, I guess we can put our own word out that we’re ready for ’em, whoever they are,” Bat said, feeling more surly now because he didn’t care for such talk on top of what he’d seen earlier at the Dutchman’s.
“I’m damn sick and tired of the talk of killing,” Bat said somberly. “If there’s any more of it to be done, it will be me and Ed doing it. You put that word out, Dog. Put it out loud and clear, you hear me?”
“Yes sir. But I just want you to know, I ain’t putting all my eggs in the same basket. I’ve sent a wire to the Pinkertons.”
“What the hell for?”
“As mayor of Dodge, I have a responsibility,” Dog said. “You and Ed will continue doing the law round here, but if I can get a man on the inside and find out who they are, we can bust ’em out before they go to assassinating anybody.”
“Fuck ’em,” Bat said. “Let ’em assassinate if they think they’re up to it.”
Dog saw the way Bat Masterson’s eyes grew darker still—like a storm.
“You boys is good boys,” Dog said. “Go along with me on this, Bat. How’s it going to hurt for me to find out who our enemies are and rid the town of ’em?”
Bat stared into the whiskey, a mirror of his own chagrin.
“You do what you want to,” he said. “And me and Ed will do what we have to.”
“It’s for the best,” Dog Kelly said. “For everyone concerned. We come too far to let this town slip back into the clutches of the bad element.”
Bat listened to the ice storm, the way it sounded against the windows, and thought of the dead back at the Dutchman’s and knew he’d go ahead and get drunk because that’s all you could do sometimes.
“I’ll let you boys know when the Pinkerton arrives. I owe you that much and I want your cooperation on this thing, Bat.”
Bat shifted his gaze from the whiskey to Dog Kelly.
“I’d just as soon do no more talking this day,” Bat said.
And Dog knew that a silent man was much more dangerous than one who talked, and thus allowed Bat his solitude by once more braving the ice storm and feeling its sting on his skin like needles, wondering half to himself why he’d come to such a killing place as Kansas.
Chapter 1
They had been almost a year down in that country.
John Sears had wanted to cross the Rio Grande into old Mexico as soon as Teddy Blue busted him out of the jail in Las Vegas.
“Even Hoodoo Brown wouldn’t have the ca-jones to come looking for us down there,” John had said. But Teddy had made a commitment to his boss, George Bangs, the director of Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, in agreeing to go meet with Colonel Cody, and so that’s what they did. And once that matter had been taken care of, Teddy rode with John down across the border and found the little village of Refugio, where they were presently.
The first of the letters that arrived was written in pencil on butcher’s paper.
Ma’s dead. She wanted you to know. She died right after you were here. Married Antrim, then died. I guess he didn’t do her no good like she thought. She said your name in her last hour. I guess that’s about all I have to say. She wanted you to know so I promised her I’d write and tell you. Hope you get this. Antrim cries big tears. So what?
Wm. H. Bonney.
The letter had a dollar’s worth of postage and was mailed originally to Teddy’s address in Chicago. His mother had forwarded it with the others and included a note of her own praying that he was well.
John was tossing a stick so the little dog would chase it and bring it to him. They’d been sitting in the shade of an adobe when the letters arrived. Old man named Ortega rode a mule to deliver the mail every day like clockwork if there was any. Most days there wasn’t any. They’d been down in Juarez since before Christmas, had taken their pay from Cody’s hunting trip to sustain them an easy life. Had crossed the Rio Grande without getting their feet wet and kept riding. Refugio seemed the right sort of place for men like them who didn’t want to be found.
“What is it, old son?” John said when he caught the look on his young partner’s face after having read the letter.
Teddy held the letter a second, then let the wind take it. He and John watched it fly like a drunken butterfly until it snagged on the upper branches of a mimosa tree.
“You want some of this tequila?” John said, nodding toward an olla by his feet.
Teddy reached out for the jar and John handed it to him then took a sip himself when Teddy handed it back.
They’d raised beards and let their hair grow long and wore serapes and couldn’t hardly be told from the natives, with their sun-browned faces and how they spoke the local lingo.
“Bad news?” John said.
“About as bad as it gets.”
John passed him back the olla then rolled himself a shuck and smoked it.
“You want to talk about it?”
“It’s the woman I went to see in Silver City,” Teddy said. “Kathleen Bonney.”
“Lung fever as I recall. She die?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry as hell to hear of it.”
&nbs
p; The little dog worried John with the retrieved stick until John worked it loose from the hound’s jaws and flung it again. He liked watching smart dogs just like he enjoyed watching a good horse or a beautiful woman or clean white clouds in a glass blue sky.
John looked at the other letters Teddy hadn’t yet opened, weighted by a rock. He didn’t say anything. The sky was hot-metal white that time of day—the siesta hour. The air buzzed with flies. A community well stood just up the street from where the two men sat. They’d spent the last hour sitting in the shade and watching the comings and goings of the locals to that well: women mostly, drawing up buckets of water and filling clay jugs.
“I’ve been thinking of going north again,” Teddy said.
“Because of her?”
“It’s too late for me to do anything for her. I was thinking about going north before today.”
“Where north?”
A boy came down the dusty street leading a burro loaded down with ocotillo sticks. The boy looked at them, at the olla they passed between them, his face dark as saddle leather, hair black as crow feathers. His name was Chico something and he worked for the priest doing odd jobs. Some said he was really the priest’s own child, that the mother had died during birth—God’s retribution for the padre’s sins. Who was to say what was true, what wasn’t?
John said, “That kid reminds me of me when I was his age—dirt poor and aimless.”
“You made any plans yet?” Teddy asked.
“Me? Just to stay alive and out of jail, I reckon is all.”
“You think you’ll ever get over it, what happened in Las Vegas?”
John thought about the shooting, the way he’d come home to find his woman with the other man. John told himself a thousand times if he hadn’t been drinking he wouldn’t have pulled his pistol and let blind anger wash away all his reason and the woman would not be dead. He never meant for it to come out bad. The worst part was the man had lived. The man became a witness against him in the trial. He still remembered how that fellow smirked a little when he told his side of the story.
“No,” John said. “I never will get over something like that, I don’t reckon.”
The days had been as lazy as the Rio Grande itself. They’d subsisted on frijoles and fry bread, a little pork now and then, sometimes wild turkeys they’d shoot out in the chaparral. They drank tiswin and tequila at a local cantina run by an ex-Confederate soldier who kept a shot-through flag of the Stars and Bars tacked up on the wall behind the back bar. The man claimed he could never find any peace back in the States, the way things had turned out with the war.
“I’d rather die down here than be buried in ground the Yankees stole from my folks,” the Confederate said. His name was St. John and there was some rumor he was the actor Wilkes Booth, who’d shot President Lincoln, but neither Teddy nor John believed such a story and none of the locals much cared who he was.
Once in a while the Federales came through and stopped long enough to drink and fornicate with some of the local girls. John and Teddy kept a low profile when they were in the area.
The priest was also a gringo, who brought as much God as he could to the village, and was considered pretty much the jefe when it came to disputes that required judgment decreed. He sometimes came down and drank with them. His name was Seamus McGrady and he kept a local girl for companionship, which further fueled rumors that the orphan kid was his. The villagers simply called him “Padre.” The priest was older than either of them and had lived for a time in Texas, which made John feel a kinship with him, for John was a Texan by birth.
One afternoon just after Christmas John had gone to the church and told the priest: “I ain’t Catholic…hell, I ain’t nothing when it comes down to it, but I’d like to confess something anyway.” The priest blessed him and said he didn’t think it would matter much to God that John wasn’t Catholic and to go ahead and make his confession. So John did and the priest said that God forgave the sinner who was truly repentant for his sins and John felt some better about it afterward.
The priest came down now to where they sat in the shade and drank and watched the locals going to the well and doing their trading there in the plaza.
John passed the priest the olla of tequila and he took a drink and handed it back.
“Teddy’s thinking of leaving,” John said to the priest. “Going north again.”
“That’s something I’ve thought about several times myself,” the priest said.
“Why haven’t you, then?” Teddy asked.
“I don’t know, except I guess I’ve fallen in love with Selena,” the priest said, meaning the girl he kept companionship with. “If I left and went north again, I couldn’t take her with me and remain a priest.”
“It’s an easy life down here,” Teddy said. “Too easy to suit me.”
They drank a little more, then the priest said he had to go and prepare afternoon mass and they watched him go.
John said, “You going to open them other letters?”
Teddy looked at them, then picked one he could see was from Anne Morgan, postmarked New York City and already a month old. He opened it.
Dearest Teddy,
I’ve thought about you nearly every day and wondered how you are. I hope this letter finds you in good health, that your shoulder has healed and that your life is more pleasant now than when we last saw each other. I’m still not completely over the shock of Edgar’s death, or the guilt I’ve carried because I did not love him, and because of what transpired between you and I. New York is gray and dreary, and to be honest, I wish you were here with me now so that we could talk. I wonder where you are at the very moment you’ll read this. I trust that your mother was good enough to forward my letter on to you. I do wish you’d write me and let me know how you are. I’ve made no decisions yet on what I should do next, but I pray that the answers will come, and I hope that whatever my future is, that you are somehow a part of it. With the greatest affection,
Anne.
He’d thought of her often since their encounters on the hunting expedition with Cody. He never meant to fall in love with a married woman. Hell, he never meant to fall in love at all, but he had, twice already, and neither time had it come out good.
He folded the letter carefully and put it into his shirt pocket, then opened the last letter—this from George Bangs.
“What’s it say?” John asked after Teddy finished reading.
“George wants me to go to Dodge City. There’s a mayor there that wants some help breaking a conspiracy ring bent on killing the local law.”
“Shit,” John said. “What’s this frontier coming to, the law can’t handle their own problems?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy said. “You up to coming along?”
“Not me. I’m still wanted for a hanging, remember.”
“Maybe I can fix that somehow.”
“Well, you figure out how, let me know. I’d like us to stay saddle pards, but under the circumstance, I hope you understand why I can’t hardly go north again with you.”
They sat and drank some more and smoked cigarettes, and that night they went and watched the dance in the plaza and felt the music vibrating in their blood. They saw the pretty faces of the senoritas, their teeth so white in their sweet brown faces as they danced with their suitors they could make a man’s heart break just watching them. The music seemed to sprout wings and take flight against the canopy of nightfall.
The priest came with his young companion and joined them and said, “The music makes everything better. Everyone forgets their burdens on such nights as this—even if for only a little while.”
The priest looked at his young woman, who was among the prettiest there. She was a mute and her silence somehow made her seem more beautiful, and she was somehow beautiful to them all.
She tugged at the priest’s arm to dance with her and he did, and John and Teddy watched with a certain envy as the two of them swirled around the plaza under the sky with its st
ars and music.
They knew it might be a long time before they shared such a moment and they wanted it to stay with them long after this night.
It struck Teddy what a long way he and John had come from the days they first met each other on the cattle trails and John had taught him about everything of value there was to know for a young greenhorn Easterner who thought he wanted to be a cowboy. Teddy would never and could never forget the debt he felt he owed John and hoped that, with busting him out of that Las Vegas jail and a certain hanging, he’d paid some of the debt in kind, though he knew John never saw it as Teddy owing him anything. It seemed too, that Teddy had lived an entire lifetime in the past three years since his brother Horace had been shot and killed and he first headed west.
Horace’s murder and law school and Chicago where he’d grown up seemed like another world away, another lifetime. And even the fact that he was officially a Pinkerton detective still, and had worked on cases to protect two of the West’s most legendary characters, seemed like the life lived by someone other than himself.
John said, “Look.”
And they saw how happy the priest’s young woman was.
And they heard the music enter their blood.
Chapter 2
Teddy and John shook hands and John said, “You be careful across that border—them Texas Rangers might mistake you for some sort of bandito and shoot you clean out of the saddle.”
“I look that rough, eh?”
“Rough enough.”
“Maybe I should shave and buy a silk suit and a bowler.”
“Shit,” John said. “You went up in that country dressed such, them Rangers might shoot you for being too damn dandified. They’re touchy fellers, them Rangers.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for ’em.”
“You do that, old son. You get into a bad fix, you know where to send word. I ain’t going nowhere out of here anytime soon.”
“One thing,” Teddy said, climbing into the saddle.
“I can feel a lecture coming on.”
“I know she’s pretty, John. But she’s his woman.”