by Ralph Cotton
Janie collected herself quickly. With Burkett down, dead for all she knew judging from the sound and impact of the blow, and the other three men stunned for the moment, she found herself and her new associate holding the upper hand.
“Keep ‘em covered,” she said to Shaw, taking on a commanding tone. She slipped hurriedly down from her saddle, grabbed her shotgun and raised it to her shoulder, cocking it.
Chapter 7
Jesse Burkett lay in a limp heap on the ground, his ruined mouth agape, blood running freely down his cheek. Broken front teeth, both upper and lower, lay strung across the ground like a discarded handful of cracked corn. Jane stepped away from the knocked-out Burkett in time to hear the next man, a California gunman named Max “the Ax” Cafferty, say to Shaw, “You best take note, there’s still three of us facing you.”
Jane stood braced and ready, waiting to hear a response. But upon a quick glance up at Shaw, seeing he wasn’t going to reply, she cut in. “Not for long there won’t be. You’re next Max the Ax.” She put a sarcastic twist on the man’s name. “Then you, Collie Mitchum . . . you too, Bennie Ford.” She cut a sharp glance to each man in turn, using her shotgun barrel to single them out.
“You don’t have us caught by surprise,” said the Ax to Shaw. When Shaw didn’t answer, he said to Janie, “Is something wrong with this one? Is he a mute or something?”
“I told him to keep quiet,” Janie said, grasping their upper hand more firmly, taking over as much as the situation would allow. “He does whatever I tell him to. I say a word, he’ll kill all three of yas.”
The gunman studied Shaw’s flat, menacing expression. Shaw had made his move on Burkett so fast that none of the gunmen had seen it coming. It had been a sudden blur. Max thought about it. A man that fast and accurate with the butt end of a rifle would be no less fast and accurate with the firing end, he decided. He tried to form a cordial smile, but it came off stiff and insincere.
“Hey, how did all this come about?” He shrugged, making sure he kept his hands away from the Colt on his hip.
“Well, let’s see,” said Jane, as if giving it all some thought. She was clearly in charge now, Shaw thought, observing in silence. “Oh, I know,” she said. “I bet it started when you four peckerwoods came riding in like hell boiling over and Mister No-Front-Teeth Burkett here started throwing his weight around.” She gestured a nod toward the knocked-out Burkett.
Max had to take whatever she threw at him for now. He and the other two had been caught cold. He wasn’t about to lift iron toward this stranger who seemed all too at home spilling a man’s teeth and swinging a rifle around in search of his next target. The silence was all the more unsettling. “Jesse is too hotheaded for his own good,” he said, his tone softening.
“Is that what you call a keen observation?” Jane asked with a bemused look. She still bore a splash of Burkett’s blood on her cheek, and his teeth scattered about near her scuffed boots.
“What do you want from us, Miss Jane?” Max asked, shedding his pride. He warily eyed Shaw’s face, seeing nothing but sudden death in his calm eyes.
“Toss your guns,” Janie said firmly, with no room for discussion on the matter.
The three men lifted their guns, both pistols and rifles, and pitched them to the ground. “There, all gone,” said Max, trying to put a lighter spin on the situation, but seeing no change in the eyes of the man holding the rifle aimed at his chest. “Can we take Jesse and go now?”
“Uh-uh. Say the magic words first,” said Jane.
“What?” Max looked at a loss.
“You know, the magic words,” Janie said. She tightened her grip on the shotgun stock with a bitter snarl to her lips. “Say them, you son of a bitch!” she growled.
“Go on, Max. Say it. Let’s get out of here,” Collie Mitchum said quietly behind him.
“All right.” Cafferty took a deep breath and said to Jane in a humble tone, “We don’t want any trouble, Miss Jane.”
“Aw, heck, Max the Ax,” the woman replied with a crooked but friendly make-believe grin, “we never really thought you did.” But her smile went away as sudden as it had appeared as she gestured her shotgun barrel down at Jesse Burkett. “Now, get this bloody no-good bastard out of my sight before I change my mind and blow his fool head off.”
Shaw watched in silence. He kept his rifle pointed at Max Cafferty as the other two men slipped down from their saddles, hurried over and dragged Jesse Burkett back to his mount. When they had loaded Burkett upward onto the horse like a sack of feed and let him slump forward onto the animal’s neck, one of them led him away.
“Can I move now?” Cafferty asked Shaw. But Shaw gave no reply.
“Can you move?” said Jane, grinning crookedly. “Well, hell yes you can move. Move on out of here. Don’t come for them guns until we’re far enough away that we can’t smell you.” She took a step forward, shouting, “Now let’s see the four of yas start getting smaller, mas pronto!” Only when the four riders were headed back along the valley trail at a quick pace, Burkett bobbing loosely in his saddle, did Jane turn to Shaw and say playfully, “You can talk now, Mr. Lawrence.”
“Obliged,” said Shaw. He lowered his rifle.
“That beats about all the hell I’ve ever seen,” Jane said, sounding put out with him now that the men were out of hearing range. “Why didn’t you do exactly like I told you to do?”
“You said keep quiet, and I did,” Shaw countered. “You said don’t let him see me make a move for my gun. He didn’t.” He uncocked his Winchester, wiped his hand across the butt and slid the rifle down into its boot.
“No. The lousy bastard never saw what hit him, that’s for damn sure.” Jane looked at him pointedly, forcing herself not to smile or appear overly friendly. “I had you pegged as some sort of drifter, and a low-down drunkard. Now I ain’t so sure about it. Who are you anyway, Mr. Lawrence?” She emphasized Mr. Lawrence, instead of calling him Nobody.
Shaw didn’t answer. When he’d heard the two men raising Burkett from the ground beside him, he’d kept his eyes on Cafferty, but he’d heard the slightest sound of coins jingling as they dropped to the ground. Now that the men were gone, he turned and slid down from his saddle and searched the dirt. There it is. . . . He picked up a gold coin along with a short bone-handled pocketknife.
He studied the coin and shoved it into his pocket before the woman had a chance to see it. Another of the stolen gold coins, he told himself. He opened and closed the pocketknife and put it away. Turning to his speckled barb, he busied himself as if checking the horse’s saddle cinch.
The woman stepped into her saddle, walked her horse around and looked at him. “What the hell are you doing, anyway?”
“Nothing,” Shaw said. He patted his horse’s side and stepped back into his saddle. Considering the two coins, he wondered whose pockets they had fallen from, Burkett’s or the two men moving him.
“Stop fooling around and let’s get on over to the Edelmans’ place. If Lori Edelman happened to look out and see any of that, she’ll think we’re all a bunch of damned savages.”
“I wouldn’t want her thinking that,” Shaw said in a flat tone, wrapping the mule’s lead rope loosely around his gloved hand. He put the gold coins from his mind for the time being. But his ride to Banton was starting to turn more and more interesting.
When they had lined their horses side by side, Shaw leading the mule, they stopped for a moment and stared off at the disappearing riders through a rising dust. “We made a pretty damned good pair, wouldn’t you say?” Jane asked proudly, crossing her gloved hands on her saddle horn for a moment.
“A pair?” Shaw said quietly.
She looked embarrassed. “Hell, you know what I mean. We put those birds in their place. That’s all I was getting at.” She straightened in her saddle and jerked the horse around toward the Edelman house in the distance. “I hope we haven’t gone and stirred up a hornet’s nest, you busting Jesse Burkett in the mouth the way you d
id.”
Shaw rode up beside her. “He struck me as a man long overdue for mouth busting,” he said. “What kind of work is this Bowden Hewes in, that he needs men like Burkett and Max the Ax?”
She looked at him as they rode along. “What do you care? You’re just passing through.”
“Just curious,” Shaw said, tugging his top hat down onto his forehead.
“Hewes is in cattle,” she said. “Leastwise, that’s what he likes for folks to think. Personally, I have my doubts. I think he’s one of them who likes taking money from one side of the border and moving it over to the other, if you know what I mean.”
“I understand,” said Shaw. He was thinking about the coins, wondering if there might be some connection between Hewes and the Goshen Gang.
“But I wouldn’t get too curious if I was you,” said Jane. “Like as not you’ll be running into Hewes’ men again before you leave these parts. They’re not exactly the kind to forgive and forget.”
“What about you?” Shaw asked. “Will they be out to get you over what happened out here?”
“They might be,” she said, taking on a cavalier attitude. “But I don’t give a damn. I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.”
Shaw didn’t pursue the matter. He rode on in silence, leading the mule and the blanket-wrapped corpse.
When they rode into a sandy front yard spotted with spindly wild grass and yellow blooming barrel cactus, a tall, handsome middle-aged woman stepped out onto the porch to meet them. Standing at the porch edge she eyed the blanketed corpse as she said down to Jane, “Is—is everything all right, Janie? I happened to look through the window. I saw the four men riding up to you. Were they Bowden’s men? I couldn’t tell from here.”
“Yes’m, they were Hewes’ men,” said Jane respectfully. “It was Burkett, Cafferty and a couple others.” She reached up and removed her hat the way a man might do in the presence of a lady.
“Burkett . . .” The unknowing widow gazed off in the direction the four men had taken. “I hope they weren’t abusive,” she said. “I know Burkett can be such a loudmouth and a bully.”
Jane offered her a crooked smile. “Well, he was a little mouthy upon arrival, but he was unusually quiet when they left.” She gave Shaw a glance, then, noting his top hat was still on his head, she frowned and gestured for him to remove it, which he did. “This is Mr. Lawrence,” she said.
“Mr. Lawrence,” the woman said with a curt nod. Her eyes gave him a quick once-over, and she managed to mask any unpleasantness behind a short, courteous smile. But Shaw knew she had tagged him as a drunkard and a vagrant at first glance. He knew the look, no matter how hard a person tried to hide it. At first glance the woman had no use for him, he told himself. Well, so be it. . . . He was here only to bring a dead man home. By nightfall he’d be in Banton.
“Well, then, what brings you two out this way, Jane?” the woman asked as she turned her eyes from Shaw back to the blanketed corpse. From the tremor in her voice it was clear that she already had a pretty good idea.
“I’m afraid we have some bad news, ma’am,” said Jane. She slid down from the saddle and took a step back toward the mule.
“Oh no,” the woman murmured under her breath, as if bracing herself as she stepped forward down off the wooden porch.
Jane accompanied her to the mule, where the woman stood back and watched as Jane reached out a gloved hand and threw back the edge of the dusty blanket. Shaw had slipped down from his saddle and stood behind Lori Edelman. After a long look at the dried sunken skin that had once been her husband, she turned rigid for a moment. Then she swooned a bit to one side. Shaw saw her going faint and he moved quickly, catching her by her shoulders and steadying her until Jane arrived and took the woman in her arms.
“Easy now, Miss Lori,” Jane said in a soothing tone. “You’ve held up well this past year or more. Don’t go soft now.”
“Yes—yes, you’re right, Jane,” the woman said, trying to strengthen her voice as she spoke. “It’s not something I haven’t been prepared for all this time.” She took a deep breath, then asked, “Where, who . . . ?” She didn’t finish her question, but she didn’t have to.
“Mr. Lawrence here found him,” Jane said. “He was kind enough to bring him with him to Banton.”
“Oh . . . ?” She turned toward Shaw. He saw her opinion of him reshape itself right before his eyes. “Mr. Lawrence, I—I don’t know what to say. I can never thank you enough for what you’ve done.”
Shaw nodded humbly and made no reply. She still saw him as a drifting drunkard, only now she seemed to have surprised herself seeing that he had done something only a decent person might have done. But he didn’t care. He’d done what he felt he needed to do, decent person or no, he told himself.
Chapter 8
After Shaw carried the mummified body around the back of the house and laid it out of the heat in a small root cellar, he watered the animals at a trough while inside the house Jane consoled the doctor’s widow. After a while, Shaw looked up when he heard footsteps cross the porch and saw Lori Edelman walk toward him, a cloth kerchief in her hand. He could see that she had been crying, but he also saw that she carried herself with a bearing that said she had her emotions under control.
“Mr. Lawrence,” she said, with a recomposed air about her. “I am grateful to you for bringing my husband home. May I offer you some sort of reward for your trouble and your thoughtfulness?” It was not a question, rather the first step in a polite offer. She could only assume that he expected something in return.
“No, ma’am,” he said, surprising her.
“But I insist,” she said. “I know it must have been an inconvenience—”
“Ma’am, please,” Shaw said, cutting her off. “I’m not as destitute as I look.” He tried to soften his words with a thin smile.
“I didn’t mean to imply that you are destitute. I am simply trying to show my appreciation.”
“Your thanks is more than enough,” Shaw said.
The widow took a deep breath, realizing his response was sincere and final. “You are a gentleman, Mr. Lawrence.”
“Obliged, ma’am,” he said. He stood gazing into her eyes, knowing she had more questions she needed to ask about her deceased husband. She did.
“Jane—that is, Mrs. Crowly,” she said, correcting her informality, “told me you found my husband Jonathan’s body in a cave west of the border?”
Jane Crowly. He would have to remember that, he thought. “Yes, ma’am, I did,” he replied. He’d remember the doctor’s first name, too. “I happened upon the cave in the midst of hard rain, otherwise I might never have crawled into it.”
“I see . . .” She shook her head slowly at the long odds of a stranger finding her husband in a cave and bringing his body home. “I had given up any hope of ever seeing him alive. His horse came home pulling his empty buggy. . . .”
“Yes, ma’am, Jane told me everything,” he said, offering her a reason to not repeat the painful memory.
But she wasn’t finished. She reflected on something, then said, “As long as I had not seen his body it made a difference of some sort. I suppose I used it as an excuse to hang on to thinking he might still be alive, somewhere, somehow.” She sighed. “Today, all that ends.”
“Yes, ma’am, I hope it’s for the best,” Shaw said quietly.
She seemed to draw a surge of determination. “It will be, I’m certain. Although now I find myself faced with the decisions a widow must make.”
“I’m sure you’re going to be fine.” Shaw wanted to ask questions about the doctor’s stepbrother, Bowden Hewes, but he knew that right now was not the best time or place.
Hearing Shaw as she walked around the corner of the house, Jane stepped over beside the widow and took her hand. “Yes, she will be just fine. She has been a strong woman ever since Doc disappeared. She’s not going to go weak on us now. I’m going to stick close enough to see to it.”
“Jane, you
have been a dear,” said Lori Edelman.
“And I’m going to keep right on being,” Jane replied in her husky voice. “You won’t have to worry about Bowden Hewes pushing you into anything you don’t want to do.”
The woman looked a little embarrassed, and said, “Please, Jane. I’m certain Mr. Lawrence doesn’t want to hear my predicament. I have imposed my life on him enough as it is.”
“Nonsense, Miss Lori,” Jane said. “I know he’ll want to hear what you just told me in the house.” She turned to Shaw. Seeing the curiosity in his eyes, she said, “Bowden Hewes has been pressuring her to marry him ever since Doc disappeared.”
“Now, Jane,” said Lori Edelman. “After all, Bo is Jonathan’s brother.”
“Stepbrother,” Jane corrected her.
“Still, he has expressed his intentions,” Lori Edelman said. “It is the accepted practice. He is within his right to ask.”
“But you said he’s been trying to force you to take up with him since a month after Doc’s buggy showed up empty.”
“Yes, it’s true,” said the widow. “At first I put him off because it was too soon after Jonathan’s disappearance. Lately I’ve said it’s because I have no proof that Jonathan wasn’t coming back. Now,” she added with dread in her voice, “I can no longer think of an excuse.”
“Tell the son of a bitch you don’t love him,” Jane cut in gruffly.
“I’m afraid love is not a matter to be considered, Miss Janie,” said Lori.
Jane continued. “Then tell him his feet stink too damned bad for any decent woman to ever be able—”
“You need no excuse, ma’am,” Shaw found himself saying, cutting Jane off. “You just tell him no.”
“If only life were that easy,” the widow said. “If only matters were so cut-and-dried.” She gazed out across the wavering desert as if the answer to her problems might lie somewhere in the fiery vastness of it. Then she seemed to resolve her problem for the moment. She turned to Jane and said, “Enough about me. I’m going to prepare us a nice dinner.”