by Bill Crider
He believed that he could trust the two men; he just hoped that they could carry through their part of the action. They were certainly brave enough, if brave was the word; unimaginative was probably more like it. What worried O’Grady was the matter of their capability. In his estimate, they were likely to be unpredictable in a pinch.
He would have tried the bank alone but for the fact that he was not a man given to taking unnecessary chances with his own life and well-being. He did not believe that robbing the bank in Blanco posed any great threat to him, but on the other hand it was always best to have someone standing behind you just in case someone else decided to try redeeming a misspent life by attempting to perform a heroic action, no matter how ill-advised it might be under the circumstances.
So O’Grady wanted someone to guard his back, and Ben and Jink were as likely as anyone he could think of. Truth to tell, a man like O’Grady, having spent so many years on the run, was not apt to know a great many dependable people.
That was a situation that O’Grady sometimes regretted. He liked to think that he was an honest man at heart, having resorted to crime only when all legitimate means of obtaining a living had been exhausted. He had never intended to spend his life in the company of men like Ben Atticks and Jink Howard. He was hoping that the bank robbery would allow him to occupy the rest of his days in better surroundings than those of the White Dog Saloon, and with a better class of men.
“God save all here,” he said as he sat at the table.
“Howdy, Daniel,” Ben said. “You think God would mind us havin’ a drink or two?” He indicated the bottle.
“Not the God of the Irish,” O’Grady said, looking to see if there was a glass for him. There was, and he filled it gratefully.
“Cuts the dust,” he said after a deep swallow.
He looked at the two men and noticed that Jink had a piece of dirty cloth tied around one finger. The cloth was stained a rusty red with blood.
“And what might that be?” he said, gesturing at the finger before draining his glass.
“Just a little cut,” Jink said. He had tied it up when it had started bleeding again in the saloon. “It’s nothin’.”
“Sure and I hope you’re right about that,” O’Grady said.
Ben wasn’t one for small talk about the general health of the partners. “Is it on?” he said.
“As certain as the night that follows day,” O’Grady said. He reached into a pocket of his stained vest, pulled out a worn nickel-plated watch, and opened the cover. “One hour from now, to be exact.” He snapped the cover shut and replaced the watch in the vest.
“One hour?” Ben said. “That doesn’t give us much time to get ready.”
“Time is something that we don’t need,” O’Grady said. “There’s no reason for us to linger about here in town and let people get too good a look at our faces, and for what we’re going to do, there’s no getting ready.”
“That fella you told us about,” Ben said. “Is he gonna pull his weight?”
“Why of course he is,” O’Grady said. “It’s all a part of the plan.”
But he wished that he was as confident of Gerald Crossland as he sounded.
Jonathan Crossland had been merely feigning sleep to avoid having to talk to his son, not that Gerald would have spoken to him in any case. Jonathan hadn’t slept for quite a while, not well, and not for more than four or five minutes at a time, anyhow. The pain was too bad, though he would never give Gerald the satisfaction of knowing that.
The laudanum that the doctor had given Jonathan was practically useless at this point. It had helped a great deal at first, easing the pain and making Jonathan almost forget that he was a sick man, but as the days went on it had done less and less for him, other than give him quite colorful dreams during those short spans that it affected him at all. At this point in his illness, it had hardly any more effect on him than drinking water.
When Gerald left the room, the old man’s eyes opened, and his nose twitched with pleasure at the smell of the cigar smoke. He had told Gerald that he didn’t like it, but that was a lie. He had taken great satisfaction in smoking when he had been able, and now that he was not, the only way he could enjoy it was to smell the smoke exhaled by others. Gerald would never have dreamed of smoking in the room had he know that Jonathan enjoyed it, however, so Jonathan had told him the opposite.
As he lay there on the hard bed, Jonathan could feel the fever that raged in him like an unabated fire, but he refused to let it cloud his mind. He fought it every minute, with all the strength he had left.
It was not an easy battle. His body felt light under the covers, so light that he wondered why he did not float up from the bed so high that he could reach out a hand and touch the rough wooden rafters of the room.
It was as if the thin blanket that covered him was the only thing holding him there, though he supposed it was actually the pain that dragged him down, the pain that was so much a part of him that he had to grit his teeth against it to keep it from erupting from his mouth in a great bellow of anguish.
It was just as well that he had to keep his mouth shut, he told himself. Otherwise, he might have told Gerald something that the worthless little son of a bitch didn’t have any business knowing.
Jonathan’s mouth twisted in a grimace that might have been an attempt at a smile as he thought about the words Gerald had spoken just before leaving.
You’re wrong, Gerald, he thought. It’s not what I think that matters. It’s what I know.
Saddling the horse in the barn was as hard a physical labor as Gerald ever intended to perform again as long as he lived, and for him it was labor.
He was not used to being out of the ranch house, where the thick adobe walls kept out a great deal of the day’s heat, and he was not used to getting the animal to stand still and accept the bridle, heaving the heavy saddle up onto the horse’s back, and tightening the girth.
It might have been easier if the horse had been inclined to cooperate, but it was not. It had not been saddled often during the weeks of Jonathan’s illness, and it had not been saddled by Gerald in much longer than that.
There had been a time when the ranch had employed men to perform such menial tasks, but now there was no one left except for one old Mexican woman who cooked and took care of Jonathan. The old man had decided that if he was going to die, there was no need to pay people to hang around the place and do meaningless jobs or, worse than that, do nothing at all.
The hardest part of the job Gerald had to do was to mount the horse. His bulk made the job harder than it should have been, but he finally located a small empty nail keg and stood it beside the horse. Stepping up onto the keg, he managed to get a foot in the stirrup and then swing his other leg across the horse’s back.
Once mounted, Gerald was a good rider, though he looked somewhat ridiculous because of his bulk. The horse did not seem to mind the rider’s size, however. Having been saddled, it resigned itself to the rider and moved docilely off in the direction of town.
Gerald told himself that everything would go well. He was not worried so much about what he was to do, or about what the others were to do.
His own job was easy, and if the man he had met in Mexico showed up, things should go well enough. The man had seemed a competent sort. And if he did not show up, then Gerald had really lost nothing, having had nothing in the first place since everything was going to that damned orphanage.
If the man got caught, that would be another problem, but only if he revealed Gerald’s name, in which case Gerald planned to deny everything. There was really nothing that could be proved against him, after all, and once again he would lose nothing.
So he was not worried about the big things; he was worried instead about the things that should have been the simplest, such as getting away. That in itself was not going to be the problem, he knew, but since he had not been able to bring along the nail keg, mounting the horse again was going to be the difficult part. If h
e could do that, he would have no trouble escaping before any pursuit could be organized, if indeed anyone thought of pursuit at all. More than likely, they would not.
Gerald smiled.
They wouldn’t think of coming after him because they would have plenty of other things to occupy their minds.
“So that’s all there is to it?” Ben said, pouring another drink from the bottle that was now almost empty.
“That’s all there is,” O’Grady said. “For you two at least. You just hold your guns, make sure that no one walks in on us or gets away. I’ll be the one to do the talking. It’s more in the way of my sort of thing.”
“I just thought of somethin’,” Jink said. “That guy whose old man has all that money. What if he gets caught and tells them your name?”
“Ah, but for that to happen he would have to be knowing my name, now wouldn’t he?” O’Grady said.
“You didn’t tell him?” Jink said, as if such an expedient would never have occurred to him.
“Of course I told him,” O’Grady said. “I told him that I was a wandering Scotsman by the name of Jack MacLane, kicked out of the clan for behavior unbecoming one who wore the tartan, and down on my luck in Mexico. There was more to the story, I believe, but I’m afraid I don’t recall it now.”
Ben shook his head with admiration, only some of which was inspired by the drink he was holding. “I gotta hand it to you, Daniel. You’re a natural-born liar.”
O’Grady smiled. “Sure and I thank you for the compliment,” he said.
FOUR
Burt Taine’s tanned face was mottled with white and his fists were clenched at his sides.
“What did they look like, Ellie?” he said. “Tell me, goddammit.”
Ellie sat in a straight-backed wooden chair at the table where they ate their meals. Her hands were resting on the table in front of her, and she was looking at the backs of them as if there might be a message written there that only she could see and understand. She might not have heard her husband for all the indication she gave.
Ben stepped over to the side of the table opposite her and slammed his fist down on it.
Ellie herself did not move, but her hands bounced with the force of the blow. She raised her head, but her eyes did not meet Burt’s. She stared at a spot somewhere just over his left shoulder.
“What did they look like?” he said again.
When she spoke, her voice was flat and toneless. “One of them was big and had a beard,” she said. “One of them was skinny and had beady eyes.”
“What else?” Burt said.
She lowered her head and stared at the backs of her hands again. “I can’t remember,” she said.
Burt wanted to scream out his rage. He wanted to kick a hole in the wall or pound his fist through the table. It was as if a fire were burning in his belly, and he felt as though his head had swollen to twice its normal size. It was a wonder that his eyes didn’t pop out and roll on the floor.
He shuddered and took a deep breath. Then he said, “I’m going after them.”
Ellie didn’t respond. She didn’t even look up. She looked at the backs of her hands, turned them over and looked at the palms. They were hard and calloused, the hands of a woman who knew what hard work was.
“I said I’m going after them,” Burt told her. He went over to where his gunbelt hung from a peg on the wall and took it down. He did not look at his wife while he strapped it on.
He didn’t remember the last time he had used the pistol, which was an old Navy Colt. He was a farmer and a rancher, and in the normal course of things he had little use for guns. He had never used the pistol either for defense or intimidation, though he had once killed a rattler with it, and once he had used it to kill a coyote that was stealing their chickens.
In the case of the coyote, he had gotten lucky and hit it with his third shot. The snake, being a considerably smaller target, had required that he empty the whole cylinder.
He tried to put such thoughts out of his mind. When a man’s wife had been raped, there was nothing a man could do but strap on his gun and go after the men who had violated her.
If he could find them, he would face them. If he couldn’t find them, he could at least tell Sheriff Dawson what had happened and put the sheriff on their trail.
Burt buckled the gunbelt and jammed his battered hat on his head. “I’ll be back by dark,” he said.
Ellie still stared at her hands. A fly landed on one and crawled across the upturned palm. She made no move to shake it off.
“Did you hear me?” Burt said.
“I heard you,” she said.
She felt strangely detached from the proceedings. Once, when she was a girl before she had ever met Burt Taine, her parents had taken her to see a real play in a real theater, and she felt now as she had felt then, as if she were sitting in a strange room watching the actions of strangers on a stage, actions which were interesting to her in a vague way but which had no real bearing on her own life.
Burt took the double-barreled shotgun from its place by the wall and checked to see that it was loaded. It was, and he laid it on the table in front of Ellie.
“Don’t let anyone in the house,” he said, worried that her attackers might for some reason find their way there. “If anyone tries to get in, you let him have both barrels.”
Ellie reached out a hand, and the fly rose in the air and buzzed away. Ellie ran her hand over the cool dark barrels of the shotgun.
“You understand me?” Burt said.
“I understand.”
He wasn’t sure that she did, but he went out the door without looking back, passing through the shade of the porch and out into the hard sunlight of the yard.
Ellie thought that he looked like an actor in the play making his exit and that like the actor he was merely performing a role, doing what was expected of him because people would have thought it strange had he done anything else.
It was as if what had happened to her was not his real motivation; he was moved instead by some sense of obligation to behave the way everyone would think he should.
Ellie heard the hoofbeats as he rode away toward town, but she did not rise from the table to watch him leave.
By the time Gerald Crossland arrived at Whistler’s Livery, he was sweating freely. Streams of sweat ran from under his hat and down his fat red cheeks. His shirt was soaked—front, back, and under the arms. Where his body met the leather saddle, there was a slick coating of sweat. He was looking forward to getting out of the saddle, no matter how much trouble he might have getting back in.
Though the sun was still bright in the sky, Gerald could see black clouds massing heavily in the north, and there was the slight stirring of a fresh breeze. Ordinarily, Gerald would have welcomed the relief, but because of what he was about to do, he did not look forward to the possibility of rain.
Whistler’s was on the south edge of town, a little apart from the small business district, and Gerald had come to it by a roundabout way, arriving behind the stable and out of sight of anyone passing by the front. He was also out of sight of Earl Whistler, the owner, who generally sat tipped back in a wooden chair in the shade just inside the big double door in front when he wasn’t busy with the animals in his care.
It was important that Gerald not be seen, since he intended to burn the stable to the ground, or at least create an inferno of a size sufficient to draw most of the population of Blanco to the scene.
This part of the plan had been Gerald’s idea. He would create a diversion that would allow the robbery of the bank to proceed smoothly and without any aggravating interruptions by the sheriff. The bank was in the center of town, at least a quarter of a mile from the livery stable, and with luck and with everyone’s attention concentrated on the fire, the robbery would go practically unnoticed until it was all over.
Gerald dismounted behind the stable. He wiped his face with his bandanna and stood quietly for a few seconds to get his breath. Even minor exertions
were hard for him, but he soon recovered.
He was standing beside the pile of dirty hay and straw that Whistler, who was notoriously tidy for a livery stable owner, added to every morning when he cleaned the place. Every week or so, Whistler would load the pile on a wagon and haul it somewhere out of town and dump it in a gully, but he had not done so recently.
It had not rained in Blanco for quite some time, and the sun had sucked all the moisture from all the hay, except for a small portion of the topmost layer.
Gerald looked to the north sky at the thick black clouds gathering there. Lightning flickered through them, changing their color momentarily from black to purple, and there was a dim crack of thunder. The clouds were still quite a way off, however, and Gerald thought there would be plenty of time for the fire to have its intended effect before it started raining hard enough to have any result.
He got a damp cigar from his shirt, lit it, and threw the match into the straw. Then he threw in two more matches for good measure.
The straw smoldered for a moment and then burst into bright orange flames.
Gerald watched until the fire had spread to the back wall of the stable. Then he tried to mount the horse, but the difficult job was made even harder by the fact that the horse was spooked by the fire. It danced to the left and to the right, slamming into Gerald, who was clinging to the reins, and nearly knocking him to the dirt.
Gerald resisted the urge to draw his pistol and kill the horse. That would be stupid. He took the cigar that he had clamped between his teeth and threw it on the ground.
“Easy, boy,” Gerald said to the horse in what he hoped was a soothing tone. “Easy.”
The horse didn’t pay any attention to his words or his tone. It kept dancing from side to side and pulling backward on the reins.
The back wall of the stable was burning now, crackling and popping. There was still no alarm from the front, and Gerald had an idea.
“Come along, boy,” he said, leading the horse away from the fire. “Come along. We’ll get out of here.”