A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  A buggy took me to the train depot, where I sat for an hour on a hard little bench and let the locals gawk at me. It probably wasn’t real hard to see that I’d just gotten out of prison.

  BY THE TIME it was a year and a half old, the wolf was no longer a pup. Nor was it exactly a wolf. Its weight of 160 pounds marked its maturity, but the tasks it performed belonged not to the wolf family—which was essentially peaceful except for hunting—but to a predatory state that could only be man-made.

  Schroeder, using methods a wolfer named Briney had shown him, built an enormous cage for the animal and let him out only when there was a task to be performed—or only when the wolf was being trained.

  Schroeder believed that violence begat violence, and so he was remarkably cruel with the wolf. When the animal failed to perform properly, Schroeder beat the animal until it crawled and whimpered. Thus broken, it once again became malleable.

  Schroeder trained the animal for eight months before testing it.

  One chill March day, Schroeder took a husky about the same size as the wolf and put it in the cage, locked the door, and spoke aloud the Indian command for “kill,” which was supposed to turn the wolf into a frenzied beast.

  The wolf did not turn on the husky.

  Schroeder spent an hour alternately calling out the command and threatening the animal.

  When it was finally clear that the wolf would not attack the husky, Schroeder opened the cage, withdrew the dog, and then began beating the wolf until the animal seemed ready to turn on its master.

  But Schroeder had been ready for that. He clubbed the animal across the skull with a ball bat. The animal collapsed into unconsciousness.

  This training continued until the year that Schroeder met the Chase brothers and arranged for them to rob the bank of which he was part owner.

  By then the wolf was obedient, as he proved when he murdered the one Chase brother and cruelly attacked the other.

  The wolf no longer remembered the smell of smoky autumn winds and the taste of cool clear creek water and the beauty of sunflowers in the lazy yellow sunlight. He no longer even remembered his mother and father.

  There was just the cage. There was just his master. There was just the whip. There was just the prey he was sometimes ordered to kill and rend.

  He was still called a wolf, of course, by everyone who saw him.

  But he was no longer a true wolf at all. He was something more. And something less.

  ON A FINE sunny dawn, the roosters stirring, the wolf awoke to find that he had company in the large cage.

  A raccoon had burrowed under the wire and was just now moving without any fear or inhibition toward the wolf.

  Instinctively the wolf knew something was wrong with the raccoon. For one thing, such an animal was not very often brave, not around a wolf anyway.

  And for another, there was the matter of the raccoon’s mouth, and the curious foamy substance that bearded it. Something was very wrong with this raccoon.

  It struck before the wolf had time to get to its feet.

  It ripped into the wolf’s forepaw and brought its jaws tight against the bone.

  The wolf cried out in rage and pain, utterly surprised by the speed and savagery with which the raccoon had moved.

  In moments the raccoon was dead, trapped in the teeth and jaws of the wolf as it slammed the chunky body of the raccoon again and again against the bars of the cage.

  And then the wolf, still enraged, eviscerated it, much as the wolf had been taught to eviscerate humans.

  Then it was done.

  The wolf went back to his favorite end of the cage and lay down. His forepaw still hurt and he still cried some, but oddly, he was tired, exhausted, and knew he needed sleep.

  When he woke, he stared down at the forepaw. A terrible burning had infected it.

  He still wondered about the raccoon and where it had gotten all that nerve to come into his cage and attack him.

  Soon enough the wolf went back to sleep, the inexplicable drowsiness claiming him once again.

  Part 3

  In the summer of ’98 the folks in Rock Ridge were just starting to sink the poles and string the wire for telephones. I knew this because all three of the town’s newspapers told me about it right on the front page, in the kind of civic-pride tone most mining-town papers use to prove that they really are, after all, a bunch of law-abiding Christian people.

  On a sunny June morning filled with bird song and silver dew, I sat in a crowded restaurant located between a lumberyard and a saddlery. The place smelled of hot grease, tobacco smoke, and the sweaty clothes of the laborers.

  Near midnight I’d pitched from my dry and dusty mount and taken a room down the street at the Excelsior Hotel. I didn’t know exactly what to expect from Gillian yet.

  According to the Gazeteer, Rock Ridge was a town of four thousand souls, five banks, twelve churches (I found it curious that the Gazeteer folks would list banks before houses of the Lord), two schools, ten manufacturing plants, and a police department of “eighteen able and trustworthy men, among the finest in all the West.” (On a following page was a small story about how a prisoner had died of a “mysterious fall” in his jail cell, and how his widowed mother was planning to sue the town, which of course told me a hell of a lot more about the police force than all of the newspaper’s glowing adjectives.)

  I was just about to ask for another cup of coffee when the front door opened up and a man in a dark blue serge uniform with shiny gold buttons on the coat came in, the coat resembling a Union Army jacket that had been stripped of all insignia. He wore a Navy Colt strapped around his considerable belly and carried in his right hand a long club that had an impressive number of knicks and knocks on it, not to mention a few dark stains that were likely blood that soap hadn’t been able to cleanse. The contrast of his natty white gloves only made the club look all the more brutal. He had a square and massive blond head and intelligent blue eyes that were curiously sorrowful. He was probably my age, on the lee side of thirty.

  He made a circuit, the policeman, like a mayor up for re-election, ultimately offering a nod, a handshake, a smile, or a soft greeting word to virtually everybody in the place. And they grinned instantly and maybe a little too heartily, like kids trying hard not to displease a mean parent. They were afraid of him, and some of them even despised him, and the more they grinned and the more they laughed at his little jokes, the more I sensed their fear.

  When he was done, he walked over to a plump serving woman who had long been holding a lone cup of coffee for him. He thanked her, looked around, and then settled his eyes on me.

  He came over, pulled out a chair, sat down, and put forth a hand that looked big and strong enough to choke a full-grown bear.

  “You’d be Mr. Chase?”

  I nodded.

  “Got your name at the hotel desk. Always like to know who’s staying over in our little town.”

  I said nothing, just watched him. Hick law, I figured, trying to intimidate me into pushing on. He wouldn’t know anything about my time in prison, but he wouldn’t want me around town, either, not unless I had some reason for being here.

  “Name’s Ev Hollister. I’m the chief of police.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “This is a friendly place.”

  “Seems to be.”

  “And we’re always happy to welcome strangers here.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Long as we know their business.” When he finished with this line, he shot me one of his empty white smiles.

  “Maybe looking for a place to settle.”

  “You have any special trade?”

  Yeah, I wanted to say, bank robbing. Which bank would you suggest I hit first? “Nothing special. Little of this, little of that.”

  “Little of this, little of that, huh?”

  “Uh-huh.” I gave him one of my own empty white smiles. “All strictly legal of course.”

  “Glad you said th
at.”

  “Oh?”

  He took some of his coffee and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He was proud of those hands the way a man is proud of a certain gun. They were outsize, powerful hands. “Cholera came through here three months ago.”

  “Bad stuff.”

  “Struck the Flannery family especially hard.”

  “They kin of yours?”

  “No, but they gave this town two of the best officers I ever had. Brothers. About your age and build. Damned good men.” He looked at me straight and hard. “You ever thought of being a police officer?”

  I could imagine the men back in territorial prison listening in on this conversation. They’d be howling.

  “Guess not, Chief.”

  “Well, if you stay around her, you should consider it. The work is steady and the pay ain’t bad, forty-eight dollars a month. And folks have a lot of respect for a police officer.”

  My mind drifted back to the mother of the youngster who’d died in a “mysterious fall” in his jail cell. I wondered how much respect she had for police officers.

  “Well, I sure do appreciate the interest, Chief. How about I think it over for a couple days?”

  “Lot of men would jump at the chance to be on my police force.” There was just a hint of anger in his tone. He wasn’t use to getting turned down.

  I put forth my hand.

  He stood up and made a big pretense of not seeing my hand sticking out there.

  “You think it over,” he said, and left.

  The smile was back on him as soon as he reached the front of the place, where he flirted with a couple of ladies at a table and told a bawdy joke to an old man with a hearing horn. I knew it was bawdy by the way the old guy laughed, that burst of harsh pleasure.

  Through the window, I watched Chief Hollister make his way down the street. The water wagon was out already, soaking down the dust as much as possible. A telephone pole was being planted on a corner half a block away. Ragged summertime kids stood watching, fascinated. Later they’d spin tales of how different a place Rock Ridge would be with telephones.

  Up in the hills you could see the mines, watch the smoke rise and hear the hard rattling noise of the hoists and pumps and mills. In prison an exminer had told me what it was like to be twenty three hundred feet down when the temperature hit one hundred twenty and they had to lower ice down the shaft because that low your tools got so hot you sometimes couldn’t hold them. And sometimes you got so dehydrated and sick down there that you started puking up blood—all so two or three already rich men in New York could get even richer.

  And who would keep all those miners in line if they ever once started any kind of real protest?

  None other than the dead-eyed man I’d just met, Rock Ridge’s esteemed police chief, Ev Hollister. Over in Leadville they’d recently given a police chief and two of his officers $500 each for killing three miners who were trying to lead a strike. Law was the same in all mining towns.

  I paid my money, went down to the livery and got my horse, and rode out to see Gillian.

  Part 4

  It was a hardscrabble ranch house with a few hardscrabble outbuildings on the edge of some jack pines in the foothills of the blue, aloof mountains. It was not quite half a mile out of town.

  In the front yard a very pretty little girl of eight or so spoke with great intimacy to a dun pony no taller than she was. The little girl wore a blue gingham dress that set off her shining blond pigtails just fine. When she looked me full in the face, I saw the puzzlement in her eyes, the same puzzlement as in mine. She favored her mother, and that tumbled me into sorrow. I guess I hadn’t any right to expect that Gillian would go without a man all these years. As for the little girl staring at me—I was long conditioned to people studying my scars, repelled and snake-charmed at the same time, but then I remembered my new blond beard that covered the scars. They couldn’t be seen now except in the strongest sunlight. Yet the little girl still stared at me.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes that blue,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “Are you enjoying the summer?”

  She nodded. “I’m Annie. I bet I know who you are. You’re Chase. My mom talks about you all the time.”

  It was a day of orange butterflies and white fluffy dandelions and quick silken birds the color of blooded sunsets. And now fancy little conversations.

  “I was going to write you a letter once,” Annie said.

  “You were?”

  “Uh-huh, but Mom said I better not because of your major.”

  She smiled, sweet and shy and pure little girl there in the bright prairie morning.

  “She said you were in the cavalry and that you had a real mean major named Thomkins who didn’t want you to get letters.”

  I handled it best I could. “He was pretty mean all right.”

  “My mom’s inside.”

  “You think it’d be all right if I went and saw her?”

  “She’s baking bread. She’ll give you some if you ask.”

  I grinned. “Then I’ll make sure to ask.”

  She put her tiny hand up in mine and led me up the earthen path to the slab front door of the ranch house. As we walked, I saw to the west a hillock where a well had been dug, probably an artesian that had failed because the water would not rise. Easier to walk to the distant creek and lug it back in buckets. Or make one of those homemade windmills you could now buy kits for.

  I could smell bread baking. It reminded me of my own ma and our own kitchen, back before all the troubles came to us Chase boys, and for a moment I was Annie’s age again, all big eyes and empty rumbling belly.

  Annie pushed open the door and took me into the cool shadows of the house. The layout seemed to be a big front room with a hallway leading to a big kitchen in back. Between were two bedrooms set one on each side of the hallway. There wasn’t much furniture, a tumbledown couch and chairs, a painting of an aggrieved Jesus, and a splendid vase lamp with an ornately painted globe. The flooring was hardwood shined slick and bright and covered occasionally with shaggy blue throw rugs.

  In the kitchen, I found Gillian just taking a loaf of bread from the oven and setting it on the windowsill to cool. To clear room, she had to shush a cardinal away, and looked guilty doing it.

  When she saw me there, led in by her little daughter, her face went blank and she paused, as if considering what to feel. I’d once promised Gillian I’d marry her, and never had; and when I was sent off to prison, she in turn promised she’d wait. But the birth of Annie had put the lie to that. I guess neither one of us knew what to feel, standing here and facing each other across a canyon of eight hard and lonely years.

  She was still pretty—not beautiful, not cute, pretty—with a long fragile neck and fine shining golden hair, Annie’s hair, and a frank blue gaze that was never quite without a hint of grief. She’d had one of those childhoods that not even a long life could outlive. She wore gingham, which she always had, and a white frilly apron, and even from here I could see how years of work had made her quick, slender hands raw. She was neither old nor young now, but that graceful in-between when a girl becomes full woman. She looked good as hell to me, and I felt tongue-lost as a boy, having no idea what to say.

  “This is my mom,” Annie said.

  I laughed. “I’m glad you told me that, honey.”

  “He wants some bread.”

  “Oh, he does, does he?” Gillian said.

  “And jam,” Annie said definitively.

  “Doesn’t he know how to speak for himself?” Gillian said.

  “He’s so hungry, he can’t talk.”

  I wondered, what had happened to that shy little girl who’d greeted me on the walk?

  Gillian gaped at me a moment longer and said, “That sure is some beard you got there, Chase.”

  A FEW MINUTES later Gillian shooed Annie outside and set about fixing me up with that warm fresh bread and strawberry jam her daughter wanted me to have
.

  As she sliced the bread and poured us both coffee, she asked me how my first night here had gone, and I told her, with a laugh, all about how the chief of police had tried to recruit me.

  “Maybe you should do it,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  She sat down my bread and coffee, slid the jam pot over to my side of the table, and then sat down across from me. “Maybe you should do it.”

  “Be a policeman?”

  “There are worse ways to make a living.”

  “Seems you’re forgetting where I’ve been the last few years.”

  “Hollister doesn’t know where you’ve been. And he wouldn’t have any reason to check unless you did something wrong.”

  We didn’t speak for a time. She sat there and watched me eat. I tried not to smack my lips. I’d shared a cell with a man who snorted when he ate. I knew how aggravating noisy eaters could be.

  When only my coffee was left, I looked up at her. “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me about Schroeder.”

  “I was hoping you’d forget about Schroeder. Anyway, he calls himself Reeves now.”

  “What does he do?”

  “Runs a bank. Has a partner who’s very old, and lives in a big mansion by himself.”

  “The bank been robbed since ‘Reeves’ bought in?”

  “No, but I imagine it’s just a matter of time.” She watched me the way Annie had when I’d first come into the yard. “Why don’t you forget about him, Chase? That part of your life is gone now.”

  “He killed my brothers.”

  “They’d want you to go on with your life, Chase.” She’d known both my brothers. While to the town they’d been bank robbers, to her they were never more than rambunctious boys who’d eventually settle down. “I knew them, Chase, and what they wanted for you. They didn’t want you to be the way they were.”

  And then she was crying.