by Cameron Judd
Luke raised his brows. It was the first time that anyone had spoken aloud the name he and others had been talking around and thinking about for the last little while: Kate Bender. Hearing the name said out loud knocked him back to his nightmare of sitting in that prairie inn before a stained fabric curtain. He shuddered and hoped the other two did not notice it.
“Who’s Kate Bender?” Dewitt asked.
“You haven’t heard about the Bender family, Dewitt?” Luke asked.
“I think maybe I’ve heard the name. But I don’t remember nothing about them.”
“They was bad, bad people, Dewitt,” said Jakey. “Lived over in east Kansas, in Labette County. Old man and his wife, plus a son and a daughter. Daughter’s name was Kate. Real pretty woman, by all accounts. They say she was the heart of the family and the one who led in the crimes they did.”
“Robbers?” Dewitt asked.
“Yep, and worse. Killers.”
“They get hung for it?”
“Nope. They got away, that’s what they done,” Jakey continued. He was growing into his story, speaking with increasing energy. “They was killing folks who came to a little inn they was running in a house out on the flatlands. Bashed folks in the head with a big hammer after they’d set them down to eat with a curtain behind them. The son of the family, he acted kind of half-witted, they say, but he’d be behind that curtain, and when Kate or one of the others would give him a signal, he’d bring that hammer around, right through the curtain, and smash in the brain of whoever was at the table. Kill them dead. They’d drop them down through a place in the floor into a pit, and finally they’d clean out their pockets and such, and bury them outside somewhere.”
“Jakey is telling it correctly, based on what I’ve heard,” Luke said. “A lot of the details of how they did it didn’t come out until after the neighbors of the Benders got suspicious. But the Benders saw what was coming and managed to get away. A search of their place, and some digging, uncovered corpses and such.”
Jakey cut in and took over the story again. “All kinds of folks started looking for the Benders then. The law, hired detectives, and just regular folks. Whole posses of men. But nobody’s caught them yet, not that anybody’s proved, anyway.”
“That’s right,” Luke said. “It’s surprising. They must have divided up to avoid drawing attention. But you’d still think that, with so many folks hunting them, they’d have been found by now. Or at least some of them.”
Jakey chortled. “Well, I’ve seen the woman who my brother says is Kate Bender. Saw her on the street in town. It looks to me like she can get a lot of attention all by herself.”
“She’s a beauty,” Luke said.
“What did she say when you asked her if she was Kate Bender?” Jakey asked.
The question embarrassed Luke because he’d been struggling with a feeling of neglected responsibility regarding that matter. “I haven’t asked her yet,” he admitted. “You got to be careful about how you go about such things. There’s such a hate for the Benders in this state that you don’t want to make people start thinking that some particular person is one of them, not if you don’t know for sure. As a peace officer I have to be careful what I say. There’s been false accusations regarding the Benders made in other places, innocent folks accused because they look like them, have the same kind of German accent, that kind of thing.”
Jakey said, “People are believing this woman is a Bender all on their own, Luke, whether you say it or not. Hell, I believe she’s one of them!”
Luke sighed, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “I’m going to have to talk to her about it, whether I want to or not. I guess I’d hoped she’d just disappear, go somewhere else. Or that Ben would come back all at once and she’d be his problem, not mine.”
“Luke, whether she’s Kate Bender or not, she’s still breaking the law,” Jakey said. “My brother says men are coming into the hotel and visiting her room in the middle of the night. I’m guessing she ain’t up there telling them stories about Baby Jesus.”
“Well, she was at church last Sunday,” Dewitt said. “I seen her going in the door of the Methodist church with my own eyes.”
“Well, as I’ve heard it told, Kate Bender was a churchgoer at the same time she and her kin were murdering the patrons at their inn. Presented herself as a good Christian woman. All to make folks trust her.” Jakey paused and chuckled. “Kind of funny, in one way. A murdering woman who also whored herself and claimed to talk to folks’ dead loved ones. Twisted as a wagon spring, that is! Can you think of anything more loco?”
“It’s wrong to try to talk to the dead,” Dewitt said. “Bible teaches that.”
“Be that as it may, after the war was done, there were a lot of folks who got interested in talking to the dead,” Luke said. “You can’t much hold folks at fault for wanting to talk with, say, a son who got shot down in battle.”
“That don’t make it right to do, though,” Dewitt countered. “Bible teaches it’s wrong to dally with familiar spirits.”
“The point is that the fact there were so many dead opened the door for frauds and fakes like Kate Bender, or Katrina Haus, or Prophetess Katrina Haus—all of which may be one and the same—to get their hands into the pocketbooks of bereaved people.”
Jakey shook his head. “I don’t know that such things are always frauds. My old granny talked with her dead forebears all her life…and sometimes she knew things they’d told her, things she couldn’t have knowed otherwise. Things they’d seen folks doing, because they were ghosts and you didn’t know they were there watching. I got in trouble for stealing my uncle’s knife when I was just little. The ghosts seen me do it and told Granny, and Granny told Pap on me.”
“I don’t know that I believe in ghosts, Jakey,” said Luke.
“Maybe it was Ben Keely’s ghost I seen,” Dewitt said. “Because, I swear, I seen somebody.”
“I’m sure you did, Dewitt. I just doubt it was Ben, dead or living. He wouldn’t come back to Wiles and not come to his own house. And he wouldn’t hide himself from his old friends. I’m sure of it.”
“Hey, I can’t tell you where Ben Keely is,” said Jakey, “but I can tell you law gents where you can find a whole passel of bad outlaws.”
“Can you, now?”
“Sure can, Marshal. And they’ll be easy to catch.”
“How so?”
“They’re all dead. And some of them are just pieces.”
“What the hell are you talking about, boy?”
Jakey shrugged and grinned. “It ain’t far, just on down the railroad track a ways. Want me to show you?”
Luke, though suspecting that the boy was playing them for fools, said, “Why not?”
It took a few minutes for Jakey to run back home, saddle up his horse, and rejoin the group at Ben’s house, but soon the boy was leading the small group of riders westward along the tracks, Luke all the while wondering if this were all a waste of time.
“So tell me about this ‘passel of outlaws,’” he said to Jakey.
Again the youth shrugged. “It’s a train, or a couple of cars, anyway. They’re parked at the old side track, got awnings and tents and lanterns and such strewed around. Kind of a stage platform built up there, too.”
“Why?”
“‘Cause they’re show cars, I reckon. Pay your money, see the show.”
“Show…like dancing Gypsies or something?”
“Funny you should say that,” Jakey replied. “There is a Gypsy-looking man around them cars. And one of the signs says something about ‘Gypsy Nicholas Anubis, Preserver of the Dead.’”
“What the hell’s an ‘Anubis’?”
“I don’t know. Just somebody’s name, I reckon.”
Luke rolled his eyes. “And I thought things couldn’t get any more strange than they have been lately.”
CHAPTER TEN
Lying on his belly on a brush-covered ridge that overlooked a small creek, and beyond it, a railro
ad track, Luke squinted and tried to read the signage attached to the two railroad cars parked on the side track below. One in particular intrigued him for what he thought it said, but he was unsure of his reading at this distance. He wished he had the pair of field glasses that at this moment were in one of his desk drawers back at the office in Wiles.
“You’ve got young eyes, Jakey. Can you make out what that sign says down there?” Luke pointed.
Jakey replied, “It says, ‘Professor Raintree’s Outlaw Train and Chamber of Criminal Relics.’ And the other one over there, it says, ‘Traveling Cabinet of Infamous Preservations,’ and then ‘Gypsy Nicholas Anubis, Preserver of the Dead.’”
“I can read those signs, Jakey! It’s that smaller one, that white one over on the front car, that I can’t make out.”
Jakey looked hard, but shook his head. “Can’t read that one from here, either. I’ll get closer.”
Before Luke could respond to stop him, the boy vaulted forward and down the slope. There was no sign of life around the two sidetracked railroad cars. Jakey scrambled athletically down the incline and dropped behind a bit of brush. Luke watched him lift his head and study the sign.
Just then something moved below. Luke caught sight of a man coming around from the far side of the end-to-end railroad cars. The man did not look up the slope, did not see those who hid there, watching him.
He was strangely dressed, in a bulky, flowing shirt cinched around his waist with a cloth sash, and with some sort of odd headgear. He was carrying a heavy hammer in his right hand, and walked to the outside corner of a tent that stood near the railroad cars. He knelt and began hammering a wobbly tent stake, tightening the rope support and making the tent a little straighter.
“Why’s he dressed that way?” Dewitt asked in a whisper.
“Don’t know,” replied Luke. “Maybe that’s Gypsy Nicholas. Or Professor Raintree.”
“What kind of thing is this?”
“It appears to be a traveling museum of some sort,” Luke said.
“What’s an ‘infamous preservation’?” Dewitt asked.
“Couldn’t tell you, Dewitt. No idea.”
“Should we go down there and bust this thing up?” asked Dewitt.
“No grounds to do so that I can see. Nothing criminal about operating a cabinet of curiosities that I know of. There’s things like this all over…this one is just different because it’s on rails and wheels.”
“Then why did we sneak and hide like this?”
“Because of Jakey talking about there being a ‘passel of criminals.’ I wasn’t sure what we’d find, so I decided we should do this on the sneak. Let’s get back to town now. There’s nothing illegal about a traveling show. My gut tells me to leave this be for now.”
The man below bolstered the rest of his tent stakes and went around to the back of the railroad cars again. As soon as he was out of sight, Jakey scrambled back up to his companions, and the three of them went back to where they had left their horses, mounted, and rode back toward the empty house of Ben Keely, missing town marshal.
Jakey and Dewitt were in a mood to talk, while Luke was content with silence. He kept apart from the other two as they rode, leaving them to chatter at each other while he softly whistled an old fiddle tune. When they reached the point where Jakey would take his leave of them, Luke and Dewitt said farewell and rode on together toward Wiles as young Jakey went back to his home. The sky was clouding over, the air beginning to feel thick and moist.
At the edge of town, Luke suddenly stopped his horse and exclaimed softly, “Blast it!”
“What’s wrong?”
“Dewitt, Jakey went down that hill so he could read what was on that sign, then he plumb forgot to tell me what it was, and I forgot to ask.”
“Luke, Jakey tried to tell you, but you didn’t hear him over your own whistling.”
“So what did it say?”
They were riding into town now, already in sight of the jail.
“Jakey said it said something about a ‘new dishun,’ or something.”
“‘Dishun.’ New edition. Or addition, maybe?”
“Yeah, that was it! ‘New addition: the crumbled skull of Big Harpe the murderer.’ That was what Jakey said, or something close. I don’t know who Big Harpe is, though.” Dewitt paused. “Why you frowning like that, Luke?”
“Because I do know who Big Harpe was, and I know whose family has owned his skull bone for years. Ben told me about it. And I have to wonder how that jar could now be in the possession of some traveling railroad show when it was something Ben Keely went back to Kentucky to fetch.”
They dismounted. The sky was terribly overcast by now, darkening the day and giving it an ominous feel.
Hardly had boot heels touched the street before an out-of-breath Oliver Wicks launched himself down from the low, flat-topped roof of the jailhouse and landed catlike on the dirt, startling Luke, Dewitt, and their horses.
“What the hell, boy!” Luke exclaimed. Then: “Sorry about the cussword, Dewitt.”
“Marshal, you got to come now!” Oliver said, gasping. “Sheriff Crowe just got himself shot dead over at the Redskin Princess! Dead! And some of the folks have got the fellow what done it tied up in a storeroom, and they’re talking about hanging him!”
As Kansas prairie towns went, Wiles had fewer than the average number of saloons, and those that did exist were of good quality and, owing to lack of gambling and dancing girls, didn’t attract the rowdier element that had rendered infamous some of the rougher dens and dance halls of Dodge City and other cattle towns. Which was why the grim news delivered by Oliver was hard for Luke to believe. Oliver pummeled him with details of the story as they trotted along street and boardwalk on their way to the farther side of town.
“It happened fast, they said. No sign it was coming. The sheriff had come in the saloon after the first fellow was already there, the one with the scar on the side of his face. By this time Scar-face was drinking beer and eating a sandwich. Sheriff Crowe went over to him straightaway, they said, and sat down like maybe he’d come in specifically to see this man. The two of them talked a bit, just quiet talk, and everybody else went on playing billiards and so on, paying no attention to them. Then, all at once, the man with the scar leapt up and pulled out a pistol he’d been carrying hidden beneath his jacket, and Sheriff Crowe was shot through the chest before he was halfway out of his chair. Someone said that the bullet went right through his badge. Well, that shot didn’t kill him, so the sheriff still went for his own pistol and had it out in his hand before Scar-face shot him the second time. This one right through his brow. Needless to say, that one killed him.”
Leaving Dewitt behind on the pretext of tending to the jail, although it was at present empty, Luke went on toward the Redskin Princess, mind reeling at the thought that he had an actual shooting death to deal with. And the victim the county sheriff, no less. He was more nervous and overwhelmed than he would want to admit. He’d always supposed that, in the case of a murder, the first thing he’d do would be to call the more experienced Sheriff Crowe in to assist and guide him. He’d never envisioned a situation in which Crowe himself would be the murder victim.
A milling, excited crowd remained outside the Redskin Princess; the electric tension of their emotion made the atmosphere crackle. As he reached the fringe of the clot of people, Luke began to be noticed, eliciting a mix of responses. He heard mutterings that said it was about time the law showed up; he heard others that bewailed the arrival of a man with a badge because what was needed here was a good quick hanging without interference from the law.
Luke pushed his way through the cluster of humanity and entered the saloon. As he did so he learned that the sense of electricity in the atmosphere was not generated merely by the tension of the situation and the crowd. A sudden flash of lightning filled the sky, followed by a bolt of thunder that made the ground vibrate and the saloon walls shudder.
Luke strode through the saloon, s
tepping around overturned chairs and accidentally kicking strewn glasses and bottles here and there on the floor. It had been an atypically rough night at the Redskin Princess, it appeared.
“Over here, Marshal,” said a man on the east side of the room, near a table that had been scooted to one side. Luke walked over.
“That’s where he lay,” the man said, pointing to a circle of blood clotting on the dirty floor. At the edge of the circle were bits of fleshy matter that Luke guessed was brain. He felt queasy for a moment.
“So there’s no question that he’s dead, I guess,” Luke said to the man.
“None. The bullet went in his forehead and took the back part of his head with it when it came out.”
“Where is Sheriff Crowe’s corpse now?”
“Wilton Brand had him carried over to the undertaking parlor. He signed off on the death papers.”
Luke was just about to ask the man where the shooter was being detained when a shout from a back room gave him the likely answer. He headed in that direction, reaching protectively for the butt of the Colt revolver holstered at his right side.
Three burly men had the prisoner in an otherwise empty back room; a man Luke had never seen before, yet who roused a sense of possible familiarity. He had apparently just made a bolt for the door and was reaping the consequences from his self-appointed captors. Luke froze for a moment, aware that this was the most difficult and precarious situation he had faced in his young career as a peace officer.
“Town marshal!” he bellowed, drawing his pistol. “What’s going on here?”
One of the men had the prisoner in a headlock, and looked squarely at Luke. “We got you a murderer here, Marshal. Murdered Sheriff Crowe, he did. Shot him right through the head.”
“I’ve heard. I’ll take custody of that man now.”
“No, sir. If we let go of him, he’ll make a break for it, and he might just get past you, pistol or no pistol.”
The speaker was John Bailey, local blacksmith, one of the strongest men in Wiles County. Though Bailey was known as a good citizen, Luke never much liked him because Bailey so obviously did not respect him. Bailey believed that officers of the law should be men of fist and muscle, and was frequently vocal, after a few beers, in declaring that the slimly built Luke Cable was not cut out for the role he played in Wiles, any more than Ben Keely had been. Bailey’s opinion carried much less weight than his frame did, but Luke was annoyed by it nonetheless. He’d heard rumors that Bailey had once approached the town fathers to seek the marshal’s appointment for himself, but Luke didn’t know if that was true, nor did it matter, because Bailey’s bid, if it had ever happened at all, had not been taken seriously by the local powers.