Outrage at Blanco

by Bill Crider

  Ellie, of course, was more of a help than anyone would think. She was almost as strong as a man, and she didn’t mind putting her hand to a plow. She could work right beside Burt in the hottest sun or the coldest rain and do almost as much as he could.

  She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the country, not by a long shot, but she was the best woman there was as far as Burt was concerned. He knew as well as anyone the truth of the saying about beauty being only skin deep.

  She was a woman who could take care of herself, too, and that was another reason why Burt wasn’t worried. They lived only a few miles out of town, and there wasn’t anything much that could happen between Blanco and the farm. He kept the wagon in good repair, and even if something had gone wrong with it, unlikely as that was, Ellie was perfectly capable of walking the distance to the farm. She was a good walker, and as far as Burt knew she never tired.

  So he wasn’t worried, not even though an hour or more passed beyond her usual arrival time. Burt had plenty to do to keep his mind and hands occupied. There was a leak in the roof that he’d been meaning to fix, and his saddle horse needed a new shoe on his right forefoot. There was a cracked board in the front porch that he wanted to replace before it gave way and tripped somebody up, and the pulley on the well needed greasing. It had screamed like a lovesick cat when he drew up the bucket of water for the parched tomatoes.

  He was standing on the edge of the well when Ellie drove the wagon into the yard. He could tell right off that there was something wrong by the stiff way she was sitting, staring straight ahead as if there was something that she was looking at but that no one else could see.

  Burt wiped the grease off his hand onto a rag that he jammed into his back pocket. He jumped down and went over to meet Ellie, but she drove the mules straight past him, nearly running him down with the wagon.

  When the wagon was in front of the house, she jerked back on the rein so hard that she pulled the mules’ heads up and back. They planted their feet, and the wagon came to a halt in a cloud of white dust.

  Ellie climbed slowly and stiffly down from the wagon seat. Burt came running up, wondering what the trouble was, and put out a hand to help her.

  Ellie looked at him with unseeing eyes and slapped at his hand, knocking it aside.

  “Ellie,” he said. He could see an angry red mark on her face, and there was still a little blood on her lip. “What’s the matter?”

  She brushed past him and stepped up on the porch, not even noticing that he’d mended the cracked board. She reached out and braced herself against one of the posts that held up the porch covering.

  Burt saw the dark stain of the blood on the back of her dress.

  “Ellie,” he said again, reaching out his hand once more.

  She looked at him with hard black eyes. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  Ben and Jink sat at a table in the rear of the White Dog Saloon, the only drinking establishment in the town of Blanco. They’d each had a shot of whiskey in the bar and then retired with the bottle to the table to await the expected arrival of Daniel O’Grady.

  Their connection with O’Grady went back nearly ten years, to the time they’d all served together in the state’s prison at Huntsville.

  O’Grady was an Irishman who had left the old country for reasons unspecified and wound up in Texas. He had bright blue eyes that sparkled with humor even in the decidedly unpleasant confines of the prison walls, and hair of a faded red that he swore had burned in the sun like the flames of a summer brush fire when he was a younger man.

  “Ah, and didn’t the women love me for it, too,” he said. “Many’s the one of them I led down the garden path in my salad days.”

  In Texas, however, O’Grady, now in his late thirties and well past his salad days, had fallen on hard times. Money was hard to come by, and he had several times found himself forced to resort to illegal means to obtain it. Oddly enough, or at least it seemed odd to Ben and Jink, he seemed to regret his transgressions. His illegal money-making activities, however, whatever they might have been, were not the reason he found himself in prison.

  He was there because he had shot and killed a man in a bar fight, which ordinarily wouldn’t have been the kind of thing to land a man in the pen, except that unfortunately the man had been shot three times in the back after he’d whipped O’Grady around the saloon, knocked him into a heap in a corner, and turned to get his pistol off the floor where it had fallen and finish the job.

  O’Grady never considered claiming self-defense. He did, however, think he could avoid serving any time in prison if he could only get out of the saloon and onto his horse under his own power.

  He had his pistol out, after all, and he had demonstrated a certain willingness to use it that had not gone unnoticed by the witnesses to his actions. The witnesses weren’t likely the kind of men who would’ve tried to prevent an armed and dangerous gunman from making a precipitous exit, but unluckily for O’Grady, his now-deceased opponent had somehow in the heat of the fighting managed to dislocate O’Grady’s right kneecap. When O’Grady tried to stand, he had fallen back to the floor, landing flat on his face and dropping his pistol in the process.

  When the local lawmen arrived on the scene, most of the witnesses who were still sober at that time of the night had fled the scene, leaving O’Grady where he lay. O’Grady thought of pleading self-defense then, but it had not saved him from sentencing.

  Ben and Jink, despite their penchant for casual criminal acts, were residing in Huntsville for a much lesser offense than that for which O’Grady had been convicted, having been caught after a badly bungled attempt to rob a small-town bank. They had made the absurd amateur mistake of doing their robbery on the Fourth of July.

  “Sweet Jesus,” O’Grady said when they had told him about it. “Sure and you’d be knowing that there wouldn’t be a solitary soul around to let you into the vault on a day like that, what with the celebrating and the drinking that must have been going on.”

  Ben and Jink hadn’t thought of that, to tell the truth, but that was only the first of their mistakes. Thoughtless action was their trademark, not planning.

  They had thought only of the fact that most of the town’s able-bodied population would be so busy celebrating and picnicking that two would-be bank robbers would have the whole place to themselves and that they could clean out the vault at their leisure.

  “It should’ve worked, too,” Jink said. “We had dynamite, and we blew that bank wide open.”

  “Ah, but they must’ve heard you,” O’Grady said. “Dynamite, now, it’s not a quiet device.”

  “We thought about that,” Ben said. “We were gonna set it off during the fireworks.”

  O’Grady shook his head. “Having the banker on hand is a touch easier, I’d think. And much less of a strain on the nervous system, too, I might add.”

  “Yeah, well, we know that now,” Ben said. “But the dynamite seemed like a good idea when we thought of it.”

  “And what went wrong?” O’Grady said. “If you don’t mind the asking.”

  “It wasn’t our fault,” Jink said.

  That was one way of looking at it. He and Ben had timed things to coincide with the fireworks, but had either of them taken the trouble to inquire, they might have learned that the town’s fireworks had not arrived in time for the scheduled patriotic celebration, and therefore the announced display did not take place as advertised, throwing into disarray all Ben and Jink’s careful planning.

  Instead, the peaceful darkness of the early holiday evening was shattered by the noise of the exploding dynamite, which blew out all the windows of the bank, shifted the roof, and weakened the support walls, without, however, doing much damage to the vault itself.

  The explosion, of course, called undue attention to the bank, and while Ben and Jink had not lingered after seeing the unsuccessful result of their attempt, they had not gotten far before being overtaken by the sheriff and a hastily organized posse.

 
O’Grady shook his head sympathetically. “It takes a certain knowledge of explosives for getting dynamite to work properly. An uncertain device, as I said, as well as a loud one.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “Next time, we’ll know better.”

  “If there is a next time,” Jink said, convinced that there never would be.

  And there had not been until now. Ben and Jink had finished their sentences and left the prison to resume their errant ways, though they stuck to the kind of random murder, rape, and robbery that, if not as profitable as robbing a bank might have been was at least the sort of criminal activity for which they had so far gone unpunished. They were content to leave the more ambitious crimes to those who demonstrated more aptitude for them.

  O’Grady, along with two other men, had escaped from prison not long after the release of Ben and Jink. His two companions had been caught almost immediately, but O’Grady had eluded his pursuers and set off for parts unknown.

  Occasionally his path happened to cross that of Ben and Jink, and O’Grady had once expressed to them his desire to succeed where they had failed—to rob a bank and make off with a large sum of money.

  “If you need any help, let us know,” Ben told him. “Just as long as there ain’t no damn dynamite involved.”

  “There won’t be any of that,” O’Grady said. “You can rest assured on that point.”

  They had lost track of him after that, but recently they had run across him again, in Texas, of all places.

  “Never thought we’d be seein’ you in this state again,” Jink told him over a drink one night in a border town saloon.

  O’Grady had eyed one of the prostitutes that frequented the saloon they were in and tipped his nearly empty glass in her direction.

  “Ah well. Mexico was restful, but restfulness is often overrated,” he said. “And where would I find such lovely women as that one but in the grand state of Texas?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, though the woman must have been well past fifty and had wrinkles that her heavy powder could not completely cover. “But what about the law?”

  “And what about the law?” O’Grady said. “Surely by now they harbor no memory of Daniel O’Grady and his sins, however vicious they may have been.”

  Ben and Jink weren’t so sure of that. They didn’t trust the law to forget anything.

  “Besides,” O’Grady went on, “the time has come for me to satisfy my ambition to become a rich man.”

  Jink perked up at that. He leaned his thin frame across the table. “How’re you gonna do that?” he said.

  And that was when O’Grady told them about the bank in the little town of Blanco.

  “It’s one of those small-town banks that has more than its share of money,” he said. “All because of one rich man who lives there, hoarding more money than he could ever spend, even if he lived his evil old life for another hundred years.”

  “Rich men don’t take it too good when you rob them,” Ben said. “They don’t like to lose what they’ve held onto for so long.”

  “Ah, but that’s the good part,” O’Grady said. “This particular rich man is not going to live another hundred years. He’s not going to live much more than a month if the doctors can be trusted. And he is, so I’ve been told, in no condition to do a thing about the loss of his money except to regret it.”

  “Huh,” Jink said. He didn’t trust doctors any more than he trusted the law.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, as if Jink had made some profound comment on the human condition. “And what about his family? They ain’t gonna like us takin’ his money out of that bank any more than he would, I reckon.”

  “Sure and that’s another good part of the story,” O’Grady said. “His only family is worthless son who desperately wants the old man’s money.”

  “That’s what I meant,” Ben said.

  “To continue,” O’Grady said as if Ben had not interrupted, “the son wants the money, but he has no way of getting it at the old man’s death, since the old man has disinherited him in favor of some charity home for orphans in New York City.”

  “I don’t get it,” Ben said.

  “I do,” Jink said, his thin lips smiling. “You met the son, I guess, O’Grady.”

  “Oh, yes, that I did. In Mexico, it was. He was there to partake of the pleasures of the flesh while he still had some limited access to his father’s money, and it was there he told me the whole sad tale.”

  “But you figured out a way to help him,” Jink said.

  “True. I did that little thing.”

  “I still don’t get it,” Ben said.

  “We rob the bank,” Jink said. “Before the old man dies and the money gets shipped off to the orphans. And we split the money with the son.” He looked at O’Grady. “Am I right?”

  O’Grady smiled, his eyes twinkling. “Of course you are, old son.” He put his glass to his mouth and swallowed the last of his drink. “Do you get it now, Ben?”

  “Not all of it,” Ben said.

  O’Grady looked concerned. “Which part of it is it that you’re still not grasping?”

  “That part about splittin’ the money,” Ben said. “I’m not graspin’ that part at all.”

  THREE

  Gerald Crossland sat in the front room of the ranch house where he lived with his father, and smoked his cigar. His father hated the cigars and claimed that the smoke interfered with his breathing. It might even have been true, but Gerald didn’t care if it was. The old man was good for at least two more weeks, cigars or no cigars, if the doctor was to be believed.

  Two weeks was more than enough from Gerald’s point of view, a damn sight more than the old man deserved. In fact, after today the old man could die anytime he damn well pleased. After today, Gerald wouldn’t care any more.

  He got up from his chair and walked across the room, moving with a strange gracefulness for a short man whose frame was sheathed in soft, quivering fat. He was obviously not accustomed to hard work, and his pale skin indicated his preference for remaining indoors.

  When he reached the open door of his father’s bedroom, he paused and blew smoke through the doorway. There was no sound from the room, so Gerald stepped inside.

  There were heavy drapes over the one window, and the light in the room was dim. Gerald’s father, Jonathan, his eyes closed, lay quietly on the single bed, covered by a thin sheet that rose and fell slowly with his breathing.

  Gerald stood and looked at him. The old man had really been something in his own day, Gerald had to admit that much. Jonathan Crossland had been the kind of man who was able to coax a fortune out of the cattle market through years of hard work and sheer force of will.

  But that day was past, and what had the hard work and determination gotten him? A wasting disease that sapped his strength, robbed him of his once considerable energy, and was now about to kill him.

  Well, Gerald reflected, that wasn’t quite fair. The hard work had also gotten Jonathan the fortune that Gerald so coveted, most of which was currently on deposit in the Blanco bank, old Jonathan preferring to have his money near to home. And the force of his determination was the only thing keeping Jonathan alive now, though it wouldn’t for much longer.

  Gerald had inherited none of his father’s characteristics, except possibly the determination. He did not know where his size and laziness had come from. He could not remember his mother, who had died when he was less than two years old, but he supposed those traits might have come from her. Jonathan sometimes spoke of her with remembered affection, but never with admiration.

  Jonathan did not admire his son, either, and two years earlier he had taken care to see that his lack of admiration was made clear.

  He had called Gerald into his room one day had handed his son a piece of paper.

  “I want you to read this,” he said. “It’s a copy of my will.”

  Gerald had read it, all right. Before he was through, his hand had begun to shake and his face had turned bright red. Gerald was no
t only to get no money, he was to receive the ranch only with the stipulation that it not be sold.

  “I can see that you understand it,” Jonathan said, noting the trembling of Gerald’s hand.

  Gerald returned the paper to his father without speaking. He was afraid of what he might say.

  “Well?” Jonathan said.

  Finally Gerald managed a nod. “I understand it,” he said. His voice sounded like a frog croaking.

  “Fine. You know, then, that I’m not cuttin’ you off with nothing. You’ll get enough so that you won’t starve. But if you want to live the way you’ve gotten used to, you’re goin’ to have to earn it yourself. Maybe even go to work.”

  Remembering his humiliation and outrage at that moment, Gerald looked at the dim form of the dying man on the bed. He took another puff of his cigar and blew a cloud of white smoke into the room.

  “That’s what you think, old man,” he said.

  When Daniel O’Grady walked into the White Dog Saloon, his dusty hat was pulled low over his face. He did not stop at the bar but walked straight to the back of the room to the table where Ben and Jink were sitting.

  O’Grady had made one big mistake in judgment in his life, and that one had cost him dearly. He had thought a judge and jury would understand that the man he had shot in the back was not just walking away. He was going for his pistol and putting some distance between himself and O’Grady so that when he turned and fired, it would look as if he had done so in response to some word or action of O’Grady’s. O’Grady had been more conscious than the man had realized and had taken advantage of that fact to be the first one to shoot.

  The judge hadn’t seen things the way O’Grady had, however, and not even the dead man’s vile reputation did anything to change the judge’s mind.

  So O’Grady’s mistake in judgment had put him behind the prison walls. He had sworn to himself then that he would never make another one. He hoped that he was not doing that now by joining forces with Ben and Jink.