by Cameron Judd
“What’s going on, Dewitt?”
“You got to come, Luke. You got to.”
“What’s wrong?”
Dewitt seemed as though he might break into tears. “You just got to come, Luke. I don’t know how it happened, except for what I could cipher out on my own.”
“For God’s sake, Dewitt, you’re starting to make me nervous.”
Dewitt didn’t respond. He was already leading the way out of the lecture hall and into the street, where he walked at a fast clip toward the jail.
Near the jail, Dewitt finally spoke again. “I think it might be my fault. If I’d been in there, I could have stopped it.”
Had they been farther from the jail, Luke might have physically seized Dewitt and forced him to explain what he was talking about, but it seemed more feasible at that point simply to go see for himself. But Luke hesitated to thrust himself into a situation about which he had no information.
“Dewitt, stop.”
The jailer stopped and looked at Luke as if bewildered. “Luke, we got to get in there.”
“Before we do, tell me one thing: is there an ongoing danger in there that we’ll be walking into?”
Dewitt’s lip trembled and a tear slid down his face. He shook his head. “No danger, no. It’s past that now, Luke. And I think it’s my fault.”
Luke said nothing, but pushed past Dewitt and onto the porch. The front office window was lighted, but the jail gave forth a sense of emptiness. But that could not be, Luke knew as he put his hand to the knob, because the prisoner had to be in there, back in his cell, and Bailey had been left on duty to tend to the place.
Luke entered the office. Bailey was not there. The chair was pushed back from the desk and the ring of cell keys was not at its usual place, hanging from a hook inside the rolltop desk. The door between the front office and the cell blocks was ajar, but only a few inches.
“John! John Bailey? It’s Luke! Where are you?”
No reply came. Nor was there any sound of movement back in the cell area. Luke walked to the center of the office and looked around, then noticed that the cabinet that was used to hold the personal effects of prisoners was open. And empty.
“John?”
Dewitt, who had entered the office behind Luke, said quietly, “He ain’t going to answer you, Luke.”
“Where is he, Dewitt?”
Dewitt’s eyes cut toward the door leading from the office into the cell block area.
Luke knew almost intuitively what he would find when he opened that door, and the impulse to run away from it all was strong. But he was the marshal. He had to do it.
He went to the cell block door and pulled it fully open.
Now he knew what had become of John Bailey.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He was sure Bailey was dead even before a check for pulse confirmed it. Bailey’s neck was twisted at a strange, extreme angle, head tilted like that of a hanged man cut down from a noose, eyes and mouth half open. Bailey lay in front of the cell that had held the scar-faced prisoner. A cell now empty.
Luke knelt beside the corpse and shook his head helplessly. “You knew when you came to get me at the lecture hall that Bailey was dead,” he said to Dewitt, who stood nearby, sniffling and wiping tears.
“I knew. But I hoped I was wrong. I hoped we’d come back and he’d have got up and been all right.”
“You don’t just get all right from having your neck broken, Dewitt.”
“Lord, Lord. It’s my fault, Luke. I’m to blame for this.”
Luke came to his feet and rubbed his chin while looking over the situation.
“No, Dewitt. Seems to me that it was Scar Nolan who is to blame for this. You can see what happened…he managed to get Bailey to come back here with the keys, and he got him close enough to the cell door here that he could reach out twixt the bars and get hold of him around the neck. Then he reached through the bars with the other hand and wrenched poor old Bailey’s neck so hard it snapped it. Bailey slumped down, dead, and all Nolan had to do was reach out, get the keys, and let himself out of here like he was walking out of the outhouse after a good squat.” Luke nudged Bailey’s body with his boot toe. “Damn! Damn it all to hell!” Then, “Sorry about the cussing, Dewitt.”
Dewitt shook his head and kept on leaking tears. “My fault,” he muttered again. “My fault.”
“How is it your fault, Dewitt?”
“’Cause I wasn’t in here to stop it.”
“Nothing wrong with that, Dewitt. Remember: it wasn’t your night to tend jail. You had no obligation to be here.”
“But if I had been…”
“If you had been, Bailey would have been pissing mad that you were hovering around him like a hen. And what happened might have happened anyway. Or it might be you lying dead, not Bailey. You can’t second-guess the Lord, Dewitt. Tonight was Bailey’s night to tend jail. And his night to die.”
“‘It is appointed to a man once to die, and after that the judgment,’” Dewitt said, quoting scripture.
“The point is, it wasn’t your fault,” Luke said. “If anybody in this office ends up taking blame for this, it will be me. I’m the marshal, and I was out of the office when it happened. Out attending a fraudulent spiritualist’s exercises.”
“Well, you went there because there’s a chance that that woman is breaking the law. And maybe that she’s even a wanted killer.”
“Even so, Dewitt, there’ll be some folks in this town who say I was wrong to leave the jail tended by an inexperienced jailer like Bailey.”
“Or me.”
“What they’d say if it had been you was, ‘Luke should never have left a drunkard in charge.’”
“But I’m not a—”
“I know, I know. The point is, people still say it even though it isn’t true. So you and me, I guess we shouldn’t be worrying about what people say. Just what the truth really is. That’s all that matters. And the truth is that what happened here wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault. It was Scar Nolan’s fault, and Bailey’s own carelessness.”
“Yeah. And now he’s escaped.”
Luke nodded and paced. “Dewitt, I got something for you to do. We have a murder here, so we need to get District Attorney Crandall. And you need to fetch Wilton Brand, too, since he’s coroner. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll go get them right now.”
Wilton Brand stood slowly and brushed his hands on his trousers. Turning to Crandall, he said, “Well, I think we can rest assured that there is no longer any doubt that the prisoner who murdered our sheriff and now Mr. Bailey was in fact Scar Nolan. Nolan has killed men in exactly this manner at least twice before tonight. A neck-snapping trick he claimed to have learned from a Chinaman, or so the story has it.”
“How do you learn such things, Jim?” Luke asked. “You’ve got more such lore about the outlaw breed than anybody else I’ve ever known.”
“Well, the first person who ever told me about that was none other than old Ben Keely. Ben was always interested in those kinds of details about criminal folks, you know. Kind of collected them. He told me it was a habit he picked up from his father, who was a history-loving type, and even had an outlaw relic or two he’d collected.”
“Well, I wish Ben was here right now to take charge of this situation,” Luke admitted. “This peace officer business is turning out to be a lot more than I ever signed on for.”
“It has taken a few dark turns lately,” Crandall said. “This isn’t the Wiles that most of us have known for so many years. ‘Most peaceful town on the American prairie,’ they used to call us. And now we’ve got sheriff murders and jail escapes and dead jailers and such. And you know, Luke, you might think a man in my position would be pleased in the secrecy of his heart to have crimes of note being committed in his district. But I’ll own up right off: I don’t know if I have the capacity to rightly and successfully prosecute crimes of this stature. They may be beyond the reach of a man who has
spent his life prosecuting the theft of small items from store shelves and the burglary of lonely little prairie houses and the occasional ‘borrowing’ of a horse. I’m overwhelmed, Luke. Plain old overwhelmed! You know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean, Jim. Exactly. And just now we’ve got another overwhelming task to do, one I have never done before.”
“Forming a posse?”
Luke nodded sharply. “Forming a posse. One that can be ready to leave come first light.”
It went well, in Luke’s estimation. An eight-man group, all well-mounted and, thanks to the attention that Ben Keely had paid to building up a good little marshal’s office armory, well armed. He had good rifles, an assortment of Winchesters and Henrys, available from the gun cabinet in the corner of the office. Wilton Brand was the only posse recruit who declined one of the weapons, preferring to use his own well-maintained Winchester, a rifle whose weight, balance, and sighting he had customized carefully and which was his most proud possession.
It was Luke’s hope that no guns would be fired in the capture of Scar Nolan. With eight good men in pursuit and Nolan’s lead not particularly strong, he was optimistic of a good outcome.
The posse set out as the first rays of sunlight pierced the east. Investigation and questioning the previous night had indicated the direction Nolan had fled, and the fact that he’d stolen his own horse out of the livery.
The posse pursued, though a track was hard to find because Nolan had stuck to the main thoroughfare out of town, where horse traffic was heavy in both directions and tracks tended to obscure one another. At length they found one track that seemed, by its freshness, to have been more recently laid than most, and concluded that this was probably the mark of Nolan’s horse. They followed until, outside town, the track veered off the road and onto grassland.
“Looks like he’s trying to throw us off,” observed one posse member, Jesse Cauley.
“Always was like you to state the obvious, Jesse,” said a voice Luke hadn’t expected to hear. He twisted in the saddle and saw that Hank McAdams, former deputy of the Wiles, Kansas, marshal’s office, had ridden in to join the group. The sandy-haired young man rode up to Luke’s side and put out his hand.
“Care if I join this delegation, Marshal?” he asked as Luke pumped his hand.
“You’re more than welcome, Hank,” Luke replied, grinning. “I didn’t expect to see you, though. How’s your mother faring in her illness?”
“She rallied a good deal, just yesterday, and all at once. So when I heard what had happened at the jail—Joe Taylor told me as I was coming out real early this morning to collect eggs at the henhouse—I knowed I needed to come help you out. Not long ago, it might have been me instead of Bailey who got choked to death back among the lockups.”
“Could have been you, me, anybody,” Luke said. “I regret sore that it happened to Bailey. Him and me were never friends, as you know, but he seemed to truly want the chance to work for the town, and I needed him, so…”
“If I’d have knowed Mama would rally like she has, I’d not have left you to start with, Luke. But I swear, she was nigh on the edge of death, and the doctor said there was no hope for her. But then she just turned around, her color came back, and she got back on her food again. Miracle of God, I reckon.”
“Now you’re starting to sound like Dewitt Stamps,” Luke said. “He’s working as a jailer for me now, you know.”
“Yeah. I heard that. Surprised me. I reckon I think of Dewitt like he was, before he got off the whiskey. But a man can change, I guess.”
“I believe that Dewitt really has. He’s doing a good job for me, though he’s nervous in his work. I’m proud of him for doing as good as he has. You want to come back to your old job, Hank?”
“I didn’t figure you’d want me back, since I quit on you.”
“I need your help, and you’re the best man I know of, terms of experience.”
“We’ll talk about it after we catch Nolan,” Hank said. “But yeah, I think I might like to come back, if you’d have me.”
“I’ll have you. Hank, Dewitt is a good man, getting better all the time, but he managed to lock himself in his own cell the other day.”
Hank mulled that, and laughed. Luke laughed, too, and was glad that Dewitt was not there to see him do it.
They rode on, following as best they could the path seemingly taken by Nolan.
But Nolan was not to be readily found. The posse rode and tracked and watched, but at length it became clear they had lost the trail. The search for Nolan turned into a search for tracks.
After two false starts and one dead end, Luke was nearly ready to declare the search at an end and admit defeat. Nolan had bested him. Let some other lawman in some other county or town capture the man.
“There he is!”
The speaker was Brand, and he was pointing toward a rise to the northeast. Luke looked, and sure enough, a mounted figure was limned against the sky at the highest point of the rise, looking back at them.
“Wilton, let me take a look through those field glasses,” Luke said.
“That him?” Brand asked a few moments later, as Luke adjusted the binocular focus.
Luke studied the distant figure intently. Lowering the field glasses, he shook his head. “It ain’t Nolan, that I’m sure of,” he said. “But what surprises me is who I think it is.”
“From here, without field glasses, I would swear that was Ben Keely,” Brand said.
Luke handed the field glasses back to Brand. “If you’ll look at him through these, you’ll find it still looks like Ben Keely.”
Brand took a look, refocused, and looked again. “Too far away to be plumb sure, but it does appear to be him. He’s back, Luke. Ben is back.”
“So it appears, Wilton. So it appears.”
“Should we ride up and make sure?”
“We got other fish to fry. Let’s go see if we can get back on Nolan’s track again.” He took another look at the distant horseman on the hill. “From the look of it, though, I may owe Dewitt an apology. He might have sure-enough seen Ben Keely after all.”
PART THREE
RAINTREE AND ANUBIS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I don’t know, Nick,” said the man with the tattooed ears. “You know I’m always hesitant about being so open about what we’ve got. I think eventually it’s going to get us into hot water, this kind of advertising.”
David Akers, known now to the world by the more provocative and exotic moniker of “Gypsy Nick Anubis,” smiled benignly and shook his head. “No,” he said back to Professor Percival Raintree. “Never been a problem anywhere else and it won’t be here. Giving folks a free taste of what we’re serving only makes them more prone to part with a little admission money later on.”
Raintree shook his head and put his hand in his pocket, finding the small metal flask there. He unstoppered it and took a hot but refreshing swallow. Anubis watched, eyes locked on the flask, his tongue flicking thirstily between his lips.
“You go at that flask more and more these days, Percy. You’re nothing but a bundle of nerves anymore.”
“I’m not easy with being here, in this particular place,” Raintree returned. “We shouldn’t have come here. Too great a chance of somebody recognizing him.” With that he nodded toward a figure seated on the shotgun side of the farm wagon upon which Anubis sat in the driver’s seat. “And now you’re getting ready to parade him through town God, Nick, we’re fools to be so careless!”
Nick Anubis shook his head. “Not a chance of it, Percy. He can’t be recognized. Even if somebody pulls off the mask, there’s no face there to be seen. You know that better than anyone. You’re the one who shot it off him! I don’t believe this fellow’s own mother would know him from looking at the smear of raw meat that’s under that mask.”
“What if we’ve overlooked something? What if we’re being overconfident?”
“Trust me, Percy. Taking Tennessee he
re into town isn’t our problem. Our problem is that not nearly enough people are coming out to the train here, any more than they did at Ellsworth. The flyers I hung ain’t doing the trick this time. People need to see more sometimes, need to get a clearer notion of what we’ve got to show them. That’s why me and Tennessee got to go to town. When I did the same thing at Ellsworth, business picked up.”
“Hell, maybe we should have just stayed there longer instead of coming here. Nick, are you sure that you aren’t just going into town to find a bottle?”
“As long as you are pulling from that pocket flask every five minutes, don’t you lecture me about bottles, Percival. Anyway, I’m not going into town for a bottle. I’m going to let folks get a glimpse of our dead friend here, and whet their appetites to see more of the same.” A gust of wind swept through, knocking askew a hand-painted sign that was leaned up against the chest of the unmoving figure on the rider’s side of the wagon seat. Nicholas paused to correct it, and also checked the stability of the wooden post that ran up against the lifeless figure’s spine, keeping it upright. “I will tell you, though, that I do have another reason for going to town this evening,” he continued. “How would you like to have the best display yet on the train?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Nick?”
“I’m talking about Kate Bender, that’s what I’m talking about.”
Raintree froze, frowning, and stared at his partner. “Kate Bender the murderess?”
“The same. The same one who fled with her murdering kin and was never found. The same Kate Bender who used to present herself as one who could communicate with spirits, and who also sold herself to men as a common whore. The same Kate Bender who is back to her same old tricks again, using a different name, and this time without her murdering family with her. No inn this time with a curtain and a hammer and a trapdoor in the floor. This time there is nothing but her dead-folk-speak and her whoring. And she’s doing it in Wiles. She’s a good part of the reason folks haven’t much been coming to the train, I suspect. I think she’s got so much attention that nobody even pays heed to the flyers and such we’ve put up. That’s why I’ve got to make this run into town. And maybe, if we’re lucky, I can start getting some notion as to how we might get our hands on Miss Bender. Can you start to imagine the crowds we could draw if we had Bloody Kate Bender’s corpse to show? We’d grow rich, Percy. Rich!”