“A man never knows when his time is near.”
Cap raised one bushy eyebrow at me. “I’ve felt Old Death circling around me a time or two.”
“You’d best get down. It’s just about time for supper.”
“No, I’ll be riding on. It’s a long ride back to Mobeetie.”
“Why are you so bound and determined to catch Billy?”
Cap seemed to give that some thought for a spell. “I guess you could say he bothers me.”
When Cap rode away that evening, I watched until he was out of sight, and then saddled a horse and took down my Winchester from its pegs above our door. Owen was playing in the middle of the room, with little Samuel studying his every move. I roughhoused around with them for a bit, and told them to mind their mama while I was gone. And maybe I risked a little lie when I hugged Barby and asked her to keep my supper warm.
No silly premonition or casting of the bones led me down to wait for Billy at the creek crossing below the house. I knew he was coming for me just as plain as I could tell when a rain was brewing by watching black clouds building overhead. I felt no sense of doom, but I dreaded what I was sure would come.
I was sitting on a cottonwood log when he rode into view just at dusk. As he wound his way down the slope to the crossing I saw he wasn’t alone. I couldn’t make out the other rider in the failing light, and my hand slipped back the hammer of my gun. Two against one didn’t seem to me the way Billy would want it, but no matter, I was determined to beat the odds.
My plan was to stop him on the far side of the crossing, and with the creek between us we could say what needed said and settle what was between us. I was no match for him with a pistol, and a rifle fight in the growing dark was as good as I was likely to get. While I waited I tried to determine just how things ended up like they were, and I had come to no satisfactory conclusion when Billy rode down to the edge of the water and stopped.
“Is that you, Nate?” he asked of the night.
Out of the dark shade of the cottonwoods I stepped to the edge of the creek bank, where the moonlight lit the water, and I cast a long shadow on its sheen. I stared across that universe of stars floating there at the vague shadow of Billy that could have been my twin for all appearances of the night. The other rider with him stopped back in the brush, and I studied hard to see him there. The dull stomp of his horse’s hooves, and a hint of shadowed movement in the dark told me where he was.
Maybe whoever it was would sit this one out, and leave it as should be, between just us two friends.
“Hello, Billy.”
“I’ve come a long way to see you,” he said, and I didn’t doubt that he had.
His horse bobbed its head down for a drink and my tight-strung nerves had me too much on edge. My rifle sprang to my shoulder at the quick movement, and I tensed myself for the bullet I was sure he had already sent on its way. I stared down the long glint of my worn rifle barrel willing myself to hold steady, and knowing that I had already hesitated perhaps longer than I should have. Billy seemed as still as death, and I held on to the faint hope he would just ride away and leave things as they were.
“Hold up there,” a voice shouted from the night, and I knew it was Cap Arrington calling out from ambush.
Billy’s pistol flamed and cracked twice followed by the dull boom of a shotgun from somewhere down the creek. I watched as he reeled in the saddle, and then another round of buckshot knocked him to the ground. His horse charged over the crossing and passed so close by me that his shoulder brushed against me in the dark. I could feel the wild, hot sweat of him on my arm while I stared across the water at Billy lying there.
I waded the shallows to where he lay in the sand, already certain I would find him dead. He was on his back with both eyes open to the sky above and one hand upon his riddled chest. There was no sign of what force had left him lying peaceful there, for blood is not even so much as a shadow in the dark. I studied him there in his silent repose, and I knew he had nothing left to say to me forever and ever anymore.
Cap came walking cautiously out of the dark with his shotgun leveled in his hands. I thought for a moment to shoot him down, but the urge was as short-lived as it was strong. I turned away from him and studied the place where I thought Billy’s ally waited, and I was not quite sure that the night had seen all of its malicious intentions born out. What possessed me to do what I did I’ll never know, but I walked toward what my eyes told me could be an enemy waiting in the brush with my gun hanging useless at my side.
When I neared to within no more than a few feet from the horse I could now make out standing there, I recognized an old friend. I wrapped my arms around Dunny’s head, and pressed his face against my chest.
“I can’t figure why he let go that extra horse, unless he was going to swap to a fresh one to run out of the country,” Cap said behind me.
I laughed short and bitter, and led Dunny back down to him. If Billy had killed me he wouldn’t have gone anywhere once it was done. Cap couldn’t know that, but he was wrong just the same. He might be able to track an outlaw across the hardest rock, but he had no feel for the signs left by human nature, and the awful tricks it played upon us all.
“I’ll go get my horse across the creek, and we’ll take him up to the house,” I said.
We placed Billy across my saddle, and I didn’t wait for Cap to retrieve his own mount before I headed for the house. I had no sooner started back when Long rose from the trail before me with his old double barrel resting across his shoulder.
“I’m sorry I got here too late to help,” he said.
The truth was, I was glad that he was too late. I wondered how to explain to him that the best of intentions and loyalty weren’t enough sometimes to overcome our rugged, bloody hearts, and that killing Billy was indeed no way to save a friend.
Barby was standing in the light of the open door waiting for me and she prepared our table for Billy’s body while Long and I carried him into the house. She cried and looked to me to cry also, but I couldn’t find a single tear to shed for Billy, or for her either. While she wept I passed the night staring into the fireplace with Billy lying on my table, cold despite the flames that flickered over his face.
Come morning, Cap made it known that he wanted an official inquest to record the shooting and to justify his actions, but he wasn’t hypocrite enough to argue very long with our intentions of burying Billy that very day. He had laid low too many men without aid of judge or jury, far out on the wastes. He scrawled out his account of Billy’s demise on a scrap of butcher paper, and asked for all our signatures to support his claims. History is as simple a thing as that, and I signed the page.
There was no next of kin that we knew of so Cap left all Billy’s possessions with me to do with as I pleased. I intended to bury most of Billy’s things with him, or at least what I could. I would give his horse and saddle to Owen when he was old enough to ride, and his fancy spurs to Samuel when he too was of age. Billy’s good Sharp’s rifle I kept for myself, to keep well-oiled and hanging on my wall.
Long and I dug Billy’s grave on the side of the hill above the house at a place I thought he would like overlooking the wide sweep of the plains. The women dressed him in a good suit we found among his travel roll, and they trimmed his hair up neat. I found myself staring at his freshly polished boots, his Stetson laid upon his breast, and I was sure he would be pleased with the way they spruced him up just like he had always liked to look. If he were still alive I would have told him there was no such thing as a handsome corpse.
We wrapped his body with a good quilt, and in silent procession carried him up the hill on the tailgate taken from my wagon. The wind whipped Barby’s black dress about her as she stood at the edge of the grave, and I wondered if all pioneer women kept such things packed away in secret trunks, thus prepared and equipped to see good men placed beneath the ground. Our boys clung to her hands with big, solemn eyes, looking so much alike in every detail that they could easily pa
ss for twins. They both seemed the spitting image of Billy; or maybe it was just the way the sunlight was hitting my eyes. I’d sworn off judging anything life offered, but I couldn’t help but consider if the child swelling her belly then would look like Billy also.
Long after we laid Billy low, and all his mourners had gone away, I sat in the grass and studied the fresh mound of earth that now separated him from all but memory. All that I held against him was buried beneath that dirt, and I knew he had drawn a tougher lot than I in the end. Maybe given time, after I had come enough to sit and talk with him about the old days, we would be better friends than ever.
Under the dying light of the setting sun I pulled a sheet of paper from my pocket, and studied it like I had many times since the morning. In my hands I held the bill of sale for Dunny, made out in my name and signed just the day before with Bee Hopkins’s hand. I had found it in Billy’s breast pocket, with two buckshot holes through its middle, and his own blood staining the yellow paper brown. When I got back to the house I would place it in the little fancy box Barby kept on the mantle, so every now and then I might take it down and remember what very little I’d known of Billy Champion up until the bitter end.
EPILOGUE
Somewhere west of Plum Creek, Texas Panhandle—1890
The old Ranger kept his eyes upon the skyline and stopped to check his back trail more than once. He did it more out of habit than out of any necessity, for the Indians were all but tamed, and most outlaws of any account had all been hanged or elected to office. But there had been a time when a cautious man lived much longer, and he preferred to exist in the bygone, way out beyond sundown, in that faded land where the broncy ones still roamed.
He stopped upon the brow of a hill, and his pale blue eyes, made paler and watery by long exposure to the sun, took in the land before him. Both memory and vision tracked across that vast sweep of country, and the pioneer heart in him searched for what should be contained within that expanse. It wasn’t the grass in the wind that waved before his eyes, but instead a parade of long-ago images seared into his memory so deep they branded him.
The good horse beneath him was restless, and he could remember when he too was chomping at the bit to bring law and order to that last bit of wild Texas. He knew that there was bound to be territory still left wild enough to need his kind of lawman, but he was too old to search it out, and he returned his mind to the task at hand.
Buzzards were circling in the air a couple of miles to the west, and he set out with them as a beacon. He wound his way across the rolling prairie, nose to the wind and cautious hand near his gun. The lines in his leathery face showed his age, but the thought of the pursuit ahead lightened him and he felt twenty years fall away.
He had a report of a murdered man found shot upon plains and left there by the discoverer due to a lack of transportation, or a shortage of concern. It might just be your common, run-of-the-mill murder, if there was such a thing. The old Ranger didn’t count on it, because life had taught him that murder has a complexity all its own.
The sign left at the scene of the crime would be faded, and faint, but no matter. He had been on cold trails before, as vague and impossible as the reasons why people committed the crimes they did. And long ago he’d given up all such speculations of personality and motivation where those he hunted were concerned. Experience had taught him that you never know what kind of man or woman you are chasing, because even the tracks left by the guilty are secondhand hearsay to the truth.
He approached the body warily, cutting a wide circle casting for sign before his horse’s hooves marred the ground. The buzzards had just recently arrived, and they flushed upward only at the last minute, reluctant to give up what they too had found. He knelt beside the body and studied the twisted lay of it there in the grass, and put a finger to the bloody hole and busted bone centered in the chest.
Cap Arrington needed no witness to tell what his tracker’s eyes told him just as plain. The dead man’s rifle was just beyond his death-drawn, outstretched hand, and the bullet that killed him had taken him in the front. Cap worked the action of the rifle and found one empty case in the chamber. It was readily apparent that the killer had given his victim at least a fighting chance.
While his mind absorbed the evidence, Cap rode back and forth studying the ground between the body and where the killer had fired from. It was a long hundred yards or better to where he found the hoofprints and the spent shell that had taken Dale Martin’s life. That was a damned good offhand shot for a man sitting horseback to make.
Lots of folks had reason to want the stock detective dead, but the man who had done the deed wanted to make sure that whoever found Dale Martin’s body recognized what he died for. Across his chest lay a hammerless Sharps rifle with the initials “B.C.” carved into the stock. It was a hell of thing to believe that a man three years dead could shoot so true from the grave.
Cap chuckled grimly and wished all such crimes were so easily solved. He’d never known Nate was such a marksman, but it seemed like half of Texas had been settled by Tennesseans and they were all shooters by the time they were big enough to hold a gun.
He was getting too old to chase outlaws much longer, and he’d been offered a good-paying job as manager of a ranch. The new job required he run off most of a tough, rustler crew, and toss a certain Englishman out on his ass. That seemed to offer enough excitement and light work for an old wolf like him in his declining years.
He could see no sense in cluttering the books for the next man in office by leaving such a difficult case, so he dragged the body and the evidence over to the nearest wash. Then he caved in the bank of earth over it all to keep it from the buzzards. Damned the buzzards, and damned the prying eyes of men with lesser senses of what constitutes fair play.
And he rode away to disappear into the horizon as all such men do. As he passed down his last long years he recalled the men of the country gone before him to vanish along hoof-rutted trails, like Blue Knife, Billy Champion, and others too wild for a more settled land. Nobody would ever know their long years, dry years, cold years, freedom clouded in dust. The time would come when such men were as rare as dinosaur bones—the last of the old breed, come long before to orphan themselves upon the plains.
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Copyright © 2012 Brett Cogburn
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