Brothers in Blood

by Lee Lejeune

  ‘Who in the name of heaven is the Great Lama of Oz?’ Bethany asked, putting a flame to her stubby pipe.

  ‘Oh, he’s just a guy who lives up there in those storm clouds you mentioned just now,’ Sunshine told her with a smile.

  As they jogged on down the trail towards the homestead Bethany had her pipe clenched firmly between her teeth, but she wasn’t smiling. Sunshine noticed she kept her buffalo gun close beside her. His Winchester was now in its saddle holster but he had the gunbelt strapped to his side, with the Colt Peacemaker handy.

  ‘You ever used a handgun before?’ Bethany asked him from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘No, I never have. I practised with the Winchester a few times but I guess it isn’t too difficult.’

  ‘The technicalities are different,’ she said. ‘When we get back to the spread you’d better put up a few bean cans and take some pot shots, but don’t aim for the windows or we might need to go back to the store.’ She chuckled in her own semi-masculine way. ‘By the way, I thought you did remarkable well with that bully Slam Smith. He always picks on someone smaller than himself, or someone he can outshoot. But he made a big mistake in your case. Lucky for you he didn’t manage to pull that gun of his.’

  ‘That wasn’t luck. That was good judgement on your part. Would you have used this Peacemaker?’

  ‘I would have done if I had to but I might have winged one of the horses if I had.’

  ‘Unless I’m mistaken that Slam Smith was one of the hombres gunning down on you yesterday.’

  ‘I guess you’re right on that,’ she said.

  ‘Did he ever shoot a man?’ Sunshine asked. Bethany nodded grimly.

  ‘Shot a man dead around a year past. Claimed it was self-defence but we all knew it was nothing but downright murder. They’d just had a disagreement about a horse.’

  ‘What about Sheriff McGiven. Didn’t he take a hand?’

  Bethany took her pipe out of her mouth and laughed out loud.

  ‘Sheriff McGiven is about as good at keeping the law as Lucifer himself is about keeping law among the demons in hell. He just looks at a crime with both eyes closed and his ears shut down like a wounded mule deer.’

  Sunshine couldn’t quite visualize the wounded mule deer but he appreciated the symbolism.

  ‘So what you’re saying is there’s no law in this town.’

  ‘Well, if there is a law it’s the law of the jungle and the king of the apes is the Cutaway brothers.’

  ‘That makes two kings,’ Sunshine said.

  ‘I was speaking in tongues, so to say,’ she replied. ‘And they ain’t boys, neither. They’re two big ugly hombres, just like Slam Smith only a whole lot more ornery.’

  ‘Maybe we should talk to them, make them see reason?’ Sunshine suggested.

  For the second time she took out her pipe and roared with laughter.

  ‘You’ve got a hell of a lot to learn, Sunshine boy, and you better learn quick, ’cause, if you stay around here there’s gonna be a deal of trouble for you.’

  Sunshine considered the matter. Yes, he could just ride away and leave Bethany Bartok to her fate, whatever that might be, or he could stay at the homestead and face up to the ugly truth.

  They were now within shouting distance of the homestead. Bethany clenched her pipe more tightly between her teeth.

  ‘Aha,’ she muttered. ‘We’ve got company. Get ready for trouble, Sunshine Boy.’

  Sunshine had already made up his mind to face up to the ugly truth. He held up his hand.

  ‘Rein in the horses,’ he said. ‘Wait here while I go down and investigate.’

  Bethany did as he said. ‘You know what you’re doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘I just know what I have to do.’

  He spurred Chingalong forward and rode down into the valley towards the homestead, where he saw two men on horseback waiting. He put his hand on the Peacemaker and eased it in its holster. Can I use this thing? he wondered to himself, or am I being a damned fool? That is the big question.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The two riders sat comfortably in the saddle just like they had been born there. Both had long tapering dandyish moustaches and eyes like small boot-buttons; they weren’t smiling. They could have been twins except that one was a good deal heavier than the other.

  Sunshine reined in a little short of them. He saw that they both had handguns on their hips.

  ‘Did you two gentlemen want something or is this a social call?’ he asked. The heavier of the two gave Sunshine a sardonic grin.

  ‘What’s that to you, yellow-hair boy?’

  ‘I’m just enquiring on behalf of the lady of the house,’ Sunshine said politely.

  The other man was looking beyond Sunshine towards the buckboard where Bethany was sitting with her buffalo gun across her knees and her pipe clamped firmly between her teeth.

  ‘Is that the lady in question?’ he asked.

  ‘No question about it,’ Sunshine replied. ‘That’s Mrs Bethany Bartok, if you care to know.’

  The larger man screwed up his eyes.

  ‘My eyes are getting a little dim,’ he said, ‘but what I see is a fresh-faced maverick with a long tongue in his head.’

  Sunshine smiled. ‘I can’t comment on that, sir, since I can’t get inside your head.’

  ‘Well,’ the smaller of the two men said, ‘from where I’m setting, I see a small shrimp of a boy pretending to be a man.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d be kind enough to tell this small shrimp of a man what brings you to the Bartok homestead and what you want with Mrs Bethany Bartok?’

  At that moment Bethany got a little tired of waiting; she jigged her horses forward towards the homestead. She wasn’t a patient woman, as Sunshine had discovered, and she wasn’t used to others taking on her chores unasked. So he turned and waited as she the drove her buckboard forward.

  The heavier of the two men switched his attention to her immediately as though Sunshine was nothing but a badly brought-up kid.

  ‘You Mrs Bethany Bartok?’ he shouted.

  ‘That’s my name. Who wants to know?’ she asked from the corner of her mouth.

  ‘Me and my buddy bring news,’ the big hombre said.

  ‘Who from?’ she asked suspiciously. The lighter hombre spoke up:

  ‘From your son Bart. He sends you his best wishes and hopes you’re doing real well in the homestead.’

  Bethany looked them over with deeply suspicious eyes.

  ‘So Bart sent you here?’

  ‘Let’s just say we come on his behalf,’ the lighter man said.

  Sunshine thought that was a somewhat strange response. He glanced at Bethany and saw she was nodding judiciously.

  ‘So where is Bart Junior right now?’ she asked. The heavier man stirred himself.

  ‘Like we said, he sends his regards.’

  ‘But he’s a little reluctant to say where he is right now,’ the lighter man added. ‘Just like that guy in the Good Book, he’s a little nervous about coming home. But he asked us to say he’s fit and well and hopes to see you soon.’

  Sunshine glanced at Bethany again and saw that her jaw had tightened on that stubby pipe of hers. It was, indeed, like a weather gauge. Sunshine could guess what she was thinking from the way she gripped it with her teeth.

  ‘So, he’s not too far away from here but he’s reluctant to come himself?’ she speculated.

  ‘You’ve summed up the position very well, Mrs Bartok,’ the lighter man said with a smile. Sunshine had seen a multitude of smiles in his life and had learned to put them into three categories. There was the open-hearted, genuine smile; there was the false grin, and there was the downright sinister sneer on the face of a deceiver. He put the lighter man’s smile somewhere between the second and third categories.

  ‘Well,’ Bethany said after a moment, ‘if you two gents have a message from my boy, Bart Junior, you’d better get down off your horses and come right inside.
’

  ‘That’s real kind of you, ma’am,’ the heavier man said. Was he relieved or triumphant? Sunshine couldn’t be sure.

  The two hombre dismounted and ambled into the cabin like they owned the place. There was nothing modest about them. They just looked around with their shoe-button eyes and nodded to one another.

  ‘Real nice place you got here,’ the bigger man said.

  ‘I got no complaint on that score,’ Bethany said. ‘You boys set yourselves down and I’ll give you a pint of my home brew.’

  ‘That sounds real welcome,’ the lighter man said with that rather sinister grin.

  The two men sat down at the table; Bethany drew off the home brew and passed it across to them.

  ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ the heavier man said, blowing the froth off his beer and holding it up to the light. ‘So you brew this up yourself?’

  ‘Just one of my country skills,’ she acknowledged. The lighter man gave Sunshine a close scrutiny.

  ‘Are you the hired man?’ he asked.

  Sunshine cocked his eye and smiled; he hoped the smile looked genuine.

  ‘I guess I’ve just fallen out of the sky, mister.’

  ‘Like the good angel. . . .’ the man said, ‘or would it be the one they cast down into hell at the beginning of time?’

  Sunshine was still smiling.

  ‘I think you have Lucifer in mind. Depends on your point of view.’ He glanced at Bethany.

  ‘He’s just about as good as he looks,’ she said, with one eye half-closed.

  ‘Sure knows how to smile, don’t he?’ The heavier man laughed and it sounded like he had a stone lodged in his gullet, which, Sunshine thought, was another bad sign.

  Bethany had removed her pipe and balanced it on a small pot, which was obviously where it belonged when it wasn’t in her mouth.

  ‘So,’ she said, looking at the lighter man, ‘what do you two gents want?’

  The lighter man didn’t bat an eyelid.

  ‘My, this home brew is real good,’ he said. ‘Could knock a man right off his feet at twenty paces.’

  ‘Is that the answer to my question?’ Bethany asked.

  ‘Not exactly,’ the lighter man said, squeezing a drop of beer from his long droopy moustache. ‘That ain’t the answer, ma’am. The answer is: your son Bart asked us to tell you he’s a little short of ready cash at the moment.’

  ‘You mean he hasn’t got a bean?’ she asked directly. The man looked momentarily puzzled.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say it’s quite as bad as that, ma’am. He’s just a little financially embarrassed. . . .’

  ‘Since he can’t pay his way,’ the heavier man added.

  ‘So you see, he asked us to come and ask you for a certain sum to tide him over.’

  ‘What sort of sum?’ she asked. The lighter man drew in a breath.

  ‘Shall we say a thousand dollars?’

  A menacing silence fell on the room. Then the heavier man drained his mug and put it on the table.

  ‘That’s real good liquor, ma’am,’ he said. Bethany fixed her eyes on the lighter man.

  ‘So my son, Bart Junior, has sent you here to the homestead to ask for a thousand dollars. Is that what you’re saying?’

  The lighter man opened his hands in a fatalistic gesture.

  ‘Sorry to bring bad tidings but that’s the way it is, ma’am.’

  Bethany nodded several times.

  ‘Two questions,’ she said. ‘If Bart needs money so bad why didn’t he come himself? And, since he was too embarrassed, like you said, how can I be sure he sent you?’

  ‘Oh, I can put your mind at rest on that score, ma’am.’ He reached into his pocket and pulled out a gold watch and chain. Then he dangled the watch in front of her and placed it on the table. ‘I think you’ll find that belongs to your son Bart, ma’am, or am I wrong?’ Now he was grinning again in his familiar sinister fashion.

  Sunshine wasn’t smiling. He just felt the urge to give the man a chop to the throat.

  Bethany reached out for the gold watch and weighed it in her hand. Then she turned it over and read the inscription on the back.

  ‘Where did you get this?’ she asked.

  ‘Let’s just say, your son Bart lent it to us since he needs the greenbacks.’

  ‘So the best thing you can do is peel out the money,’ the heavier man added.

  Bethany was staring hard at the gold watch as though it might give her a clue to her son’s whereabouts. Sunshine could see that it meant a lot to her. She turned over the watch and weighed it in her hand.

  ‘That’s a fine watch, ma’am,’ the heavier man said. ‘Must be worth a mint of money.’

  Bethany didn’t reply, but Sunshine saw her jaw muscles tighten.

  ‘Oh, by the way, ma’am, your son Bart sent a short note so you’d know what we said came from the top of the pack.’ The lighter man fished in the pocket of his vest and handed over a sliver of paper.

  Bethany took the paper and read the few short sentences scrawled on it:

  Hi Ma, I hope you’re doing well. I’m a little tied up at the moment. So I hope you’ll shell out the dollars to these two men. Your loving son, Bartholomew.

  Bethany put the paper on the table next to the watch.

  ‘Well, it’s good of you to come, gentlemen,’ she said calmly, ‘but I have a problem here – two, in fact. First, I don’t have the dollars you say my son Bart needs. The other thing is: I think I have to see him before I can hand over the money.’

  ‘Well, that sounds reasonable, ma’am,’ the lighter man said, taking up the gold watch and stowing it away in his pocket. ‘So, we’ll leave you to think on matters. . . .’

  ‘But don’t be too long thinking,’ the heavier man said, ‘because your son Bartholomew isn’t feeling too well at the moment and we might not be looking after him for too long. It comes out rather expensive, you know, and we don’t have too many dollars at the moment.’

  The two men got up from the table just like they were mind-reading twins.

  ‘We’ll be rolling along now,’ the heavier man said with false good humour.

  ‘We’ll leave you to think on things, ma’am,’ the lighter man said with that hideous grin. They ambled over to the door and turned.

  ‘Thanks again for that fine home brew,’ the heavier man said.

  ‘Think things over,’ the lighter man added. ‘Think things over for Bartholomew’s sake, Mrs Bartok.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ the heavier man said.

  Sunshine watched as the two men rode away. Were they going towards Logan or to some place else? It was impossible to say. When he turned back he saw that Bethany Bartok was sitting at the table with her head in her hands, but she wasn’t smoking her pipe and she wasn’t shedding tears. She just sat there, grim-faced and thoughtful.

  ‘What do you figure on this?’ she asked Sunshine, straight out.

  ‘What I figure is your son has been kidnapped,’ Sunshine said; he wasn’t smiling. Bethany looked at him out of her eagle-bright eyes.

  ‘Listen, Mr Shining, before the day before yesterday I didn’t know you. You just rolled in like the good angel and shot up those gunmen. I need to know something.’

  Sunshine sat down at the table across from her and rested his elbows on the pine surface.

  ‘Anything you want to know just ask away,’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘What I need to know is: are you a friend, a genuine copper-bottomed friend?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about the bottom part, copper or lead, but yes I’m a friend. I know I just blew in like a leaf from Missouri, but now I’m here I mean to stay. Does that answer the question?’

  She nodded. ‘Like I said, I can’t offer you hardly anything at all, but I think I can do with your help in this.’

  ‘In that case, I think I must put a few old cans on the corral fence and practise with that Colt revolver you lent me, because I have a strong suspicion I shall need to sharpen up my shooting
skills.’

  ‘What did you make of those two scumbags?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, you just about summed it up in one word,’ he said. ‘Those two smooth-tongued bags of scum wouldn’t think twice about gouging out a man’s eyes or shooting him in the back if the money was good enough.’

  She nodded grimly. ‘We agree on that. So I’m real worried about Bart.’ She picked up the note. ‘But one thing I am sure of. . . .’

  ‘What’s that, Mrs Bartok?’

  She tapped the paper with her index finger.

  ‘My son Bart didn’t write this and he didn’t sign it.’ She held up the paper. ‘And lookee here, what he’s written.’ She squinted at the paper through her small pebble spectacles. ‘ “I’m somewhat tied up at the moment”,’ she read out. ‘Doesn’t that tell us something?’

  ‘Could mean he’s too busy being a prisoner,’ Sunshine speculated.

  ‘That’s what I think,’ Bethany agreed. ‘But what is more important is that he’s not Bartholomew and never has been. He’s Bart and that’s all he ever was.’

  Sunshine took the paper and studied it carefully. It smelled like it had been in close contact with strong tobacco, but that didn’t mean anything since it had been in the lighter man’s pocket.

  ‘So you say this isn’t your son’s handwriting?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘That’s no more Bart’s writing than my cat’s or the writing on Belshazzar’s wall.’

  ‘But you haven’t got a cat,’ he said. She looked at him keenly.

  ‘And I ain’t seen no writing the on the wall neither. That’s exactly what I mean.’

  Sunshine thought for a moment.

  ‘Do you have a likeness of some kind, a photograph maybe?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ She got up from the table and went over to a ramshackle sideboard from which she picked up a photo in a somewhat elaborate frame. She brought it back to the table and stood it in front of Sunshine. ‘This was taken some five years back, just before my man Bart Senior took bad and died. I don’t see it helps us much.’