by Bill Crider
She clucked to the mules and drove the wagon out of the barn.
It was a pretty day, with a clear blue sky, and the rain had cooled things down some. Marshal Rawls Dawson almost enjoyed his ride out to the Crossland ranch, and he felt a twinge of guilt about not having ridden out sooner. He had known Jonathan Crossland for a good number of years, and he should have paid a call on the old man before now.
That would be his excuse for showing up at the ranch, he decided. He felt a little strange about making a special trip to question Gerald Crossland about the burning of Whistler’s stable. It didn’t seem to Dawson like the kind of thing that Gerald would be involved in. Why would Gerald want to help rob a bank? When Jonathan died, Gerald would probably own the bank.
Nevertheless, he felt he had to check things out, just in case there was some connection that he couldn’t see. He could say that he was just dropping by to see how his old friend Jonathan was doing, not that it was any secret in Blanco that Jonathan was just about as good as in his grave.
The more he thought about it, the more Dawson realized that he actually did want to see Jonathan. He missed the old man, who had always stopped by the jail for a chat when he was in town. He had been a friend to everyone in town, unlike his son, who appeared to think he was better than everyone else, for some reason that Dawson couldn’t make out.
The truth was that Gerald was about as sorry as owl shit, as far as anyone could tell. Besides being unfriendly, he was lazy, never having done a day’s work in his life that anyone knew about.
There were times Dawson wished that he had married and had kids, and there were other times that he was glad that he hadn’t. What if one of them had grown up to be like Gerald Crossland? Dawson didn’t think he would have liked that at all.
The gate to the fenced ranch yard was open, so Dawson rode on through. He stopped his horse and looked around the yard. It wasn’t as well kept as it had once been, but Dawson wasn’t surprised. He’d heard that Jonathan Crossland had let all his hands go, and Gerald damn sure wouldn’t be the kind to do any work around the place, no matter what it looked like.
Dawson climbed down from his horse and flipped the reins over the hitch rail. “Hello, the house,” he called.
“It’s the marshal,” Gerald said, with a feeling of considerable relief. He might not get a share of the loot from the robbery, and he might even go to jail, but Jink probably wouldn’t kill him right there in front of the marshal.
However, it was hard to tell about someone like Jink, who was looking crazier by the minute.
Gerald decided that it would be for the best if he got out of the barn.
“I’m over here, Marshal,” he said in response to Dawson’s call, and as soon as he said it, he started outside.
“You son of a bitch,” Jink said. He shot Gerald in the back.
The echo of the shot bounced around the barn, and before it had died, Ben had drawn his own pistol and was firing it at Gerald, who continued out of the barn, running now as fast as he could.
O’Grady stared at them in amazement. Maybe Jink had some excuse; he was sick. Or maybe just crazy. But Ben? Why was Ben shooting? Didn’t he have any sense at all?
Gerald was fat, but surprisingly graceful as he ran. Not only did his fat not prevent him from running, it also kept him alive longer than anyone would have thought.
He could feel the bullets strike him, but they didn’t hurt the way he thought they would. They threw him off stride, but that was all.
He was going to make it to the marshal, and Dawson would take care of him.
Then everything would be all right.
TEN
Dawson didn’t know what the hell was going on.
He saw Gerald Crossland running out of the barn, and he heard the shots, but at first he didn’t know whether they were being fired at him or at Gerald.
Then he saw Gerald stagger and knew that Crossland had been hit. He drew his own pistol and started toward him.
“Marshal!” Gerald called. “Help!”
Two slugs slammed into Gerald at one time, both of them striking him just below his left shoulder blade, and it was as if he had been kicked by a mule. He pitched forward in the mud and slid on his stomach for four or five feet.
For a second, he didn’t even realize that he had fallen. His feet kept moving as if he were still trying to run.
He looked up and saw Marshal Dawson heading toward him. The marshal was firing into the barn.
“It’s the men from the bank,” Gerald said. His voice was not much more than a whisper. “They tried to rob me, too.”
He was glad to see the marshal. He knew that he had been in real danger for a while there, but now that the marshal was here, Gerald thought, everything would be fine.
That was the last thought Gerald ever had.
His breath went out of him in a rush, and the world turned black as night. His feet twitched one last time; then his neck went limp. As Dawson ran past him, his face splatted into the mud.
O’Grady didn’t waste any more time on Ben and Jink. As far as he was concerned, their partnership was over. He couldn’t be partners with crazy men.
He swept the money off the hay and into the bag he had carried it from the bank in. He tied the top of the bag and threw a saddle on his horse. By the time Ben and Jink caught on to what he was doing, he was riding hell-bent past them and out the barn door.
O’Grady put his heels to the horse’s flanks and whipped the reins from one side of its neck to the other, riding straight at the marshal.
Dawson got off one shot before he threw himself to the side. O’Grady’s horse cleared Gerald’s body and was already out the gate before Dawson got himself turned around to fire a futile shot after him.
“That son of a bitch O’Grady has our money!” Jink screamed. “We gotta get after him!”
Ben reloaded and started to saddle his horse while Jink fired out at the marshal, who was now firing back at them.
“Saddle mine, too,” Jink said as he reloaded. “I can’t do it with this damn hand.”
Ben saddled Jink’s horse and said, “Let’s go.”
Jink couldn’t get hold of the saddle horn with his bad hand, but he managed to hook his elbow around it and get mounted.
“We gotta take care of that marshal,” he said.
“Yeah,” Ben said.
They rode out of the barn, guns blasting.
Dawson never had a chance.
Ben and Jink didn’t manage to hit him with every shot, but they did more than sufficient damage, hitting him in the right shoulder, the left side, the belly, and the neck.
The stomach wound would have killed him eventually, but the bullet through his neck did it decisively and quickly. It sliced through a carotid artery, which sent jets of blood pumping out ten feet in front of Dawson before he fell.
As his knees buckled, Dawson put his hand to his throat to stop the bleeding, but Jink’s horse crashed into him, knocking him backward and sending blood fountaining straight up into the air. Some of it spattered on Jink and the horse, and then they were past him and out of the yard.
They didn’t look back. They were no longer interested in Dawson. They were looking for O’Grady.
Jonathan saw most of it through his window.
He pushed himself up when he heard the shots, and he saw Gerald running from the barn. He saw his son fall. He knew that Gerald must surely be dead, but the only sorrow he felt was for himself.
He was sorry that he couldn’t find any grief anywhere inside him for his son.
Gerald was dead, but there was no sense of loss in Jonathan, none at all. There was just a sense of emptiness. It was as if Gerald had died a long time ago as far as Jonathan was concerned.
He saw the man hightail it out of the barn and try to ride down Rawls Dawson. He wondered for a second how the marshal had found out the men were there, and then he watched helplessly when the other two men came charging out of the barn and gunned Dawson down.
When they were gone, he lay back on the pillow breathing a little faster, but otherwise not too much affected by what had happened. When a man is so close to his own death that he can reach out and touch it, seeing other men die doesn’t worry him overmuch.
After a while, Jonathan sat up in the bed. There were two men lying out there in his yard, and one of them was his son. He supposed he should do something about them.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed and stood up. He hadn’t been out of the bed in weeks, and he nearly fell. He had to sit down on the side of the bed until his head stopped swimming.
It cleared up in a minute or so, and he stood again. This time he was all right.
The funny thing was that he felt almost good. Not like he ought to, but not nearly as bad as he had been feeling. The pain had continued to recede, and now it was more like a dull ache that lingered in every part of his body. It was nothing he couldn’t put up with. He didn’t even need to yell anymore.
His clothes were hanging on a chair, where they’d been since he took to the bed. He had refused to put them away. He wanted them right there where he could put them on in case he got up. He had never really expected to wear them again, but he put them on now, liking the way the worn jeans felt as they slid over his legs, the way the shirt touched him when he buttoned it.
The jeans were loose, but he took the belt up a couple of notches and decided they’d stay on. He put on a pair of socks and slid his feet into his boots. They still fit just fine.
He walked into the kitchen. He wasn’t what you could call steady on his feet, but he got where he was going.
What he needed was some food, he thought. Something to eat, and he’d be just fine again, ready to go out and do a day’s work around the ranch. He didn’t feel like fixing anything, however. He looked around until he found a can of beans and a can of sardines.
He opened the can of beans and ate a bite or two to see if he could keep them down. He could. They tasted better than anything he could ever remember eating, and he gobbled the rest of them right out of the can, following them with the oily sardines.
He was feeling even better by the time he finished, but he wasn’t fooled by that.
He knew what was happening to him. He’d seen it happen to others.
Once, on a trail drive Jonathan had been on as a young man, a cowboy named Zach Chaney got in the way of a herd of stampeding cattle and had the bad luck to fall off his horse.
They’d run all over him, stepped on his legs, his hands, his arms, his stomach, even his head. Chaney was as busted up as any man Jonathan had ever seen, and the things you could see, like the arms and hands, weren’t half as bad as the stuff you couldn’t see. Chaney was busted up inside, too.
Everybody on the drive knew that Chaney was a goner, though nobody actually came out and said that to his face. They put him in the chuck wagon after they got the herd rounded back up, and they told him that they’d get him to a doc as soon as they came to a town.
They were three days from a town, though, and they knew Chaney would never make it that long.
He didn’t, but he nearly fooled them.
For two days, he got steadily worse. By the end of the second day, he was feverish and out of his head, mumbling about things that meant nothing to anyone but himself. For a while, he seemed to think he was in some swimming hole with his brother, Jimmy, back when they were kids. Then he was apologizing to a school teacher for fighting in the classroom. He blabbered about some girl he’d known when he was fourteen.
The ones who heard him just shook their heads. They figured he wouldn’t last the night.
But sometime toward morning his fever broke, and he woke up bright-eyed and eager, impatient to get back on his horse and ride with the herd.
They tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted that he was feeling fine, just fine, and there hadn’t been much they could do to stop him, short of tying him up, and they didn’t want to do that.
So he got out of the wagon and climbed up on his horse, with a little help. He rode drag most of the day. About three o’clock, somebody looked back and saw the horse coming along without a rider.
Jonathan had been the one who rode back to look for Chaney. He found him lying on the ground, right where he’d fallen from the saddle. He was covered with trail dust, but there seemed to be a smile on his face.
It wasn’t such a bad way to go, Jonathan thought now, riding along and feeling like everything was going to be all right. One minute you were there, and the next you were gone. That was the way it ought to be, all right. A man ought not to have to die a little bit every day, lying flat on his back so that all he knew about the world was what he could see out some damn bedroom window.
Jonathan figured that he was in just about the same fix Chaney had been in. He wasn’t really getting better; more likely, he was just about to die.
Well, that didn’t much matter. He’d been expecting that for a good while.
What mattered was that it didn’t look like he was going to have to die in the bed. He was going to be up on his feet, the way it should be.
Maybe. Or maybe he’d just get sick again and have to go lie down.
No, by God. He wasn’t going to do that, whatever happened. No matter how bad the pain got, he wasn’t going back to the bed. He was sorry he’d ever done it in the first place. He should’ve taken his pistol out behind the barn and shot himself in the head before he’d taken to his room, and that was what he’d do this time, for damn sure.
Jonathan walked out of the room. It was time to take care of Marshal Dawson.
And Gerald.
The wagon rattled along the muddy, rutted road, the mules twitching their ears or switching their tails at the occasional fly.
Ellie Taine had never been to Crossland’s ranch, but she knew where it was. Everyone around Blanco knew that.
She also knew Jonathan and Gerald Crossland, or at least she knew who they were. It wasn’t as if they were friends of hers. Jonathan had attended the Methodist church once or twice, and she had been introduced to him. One of the women at the church had told her that he was very sick, just about to die, and she was sorry to hear it. He seemed like a fine man.
She had seen Gerald in town at the mercantile store, but he clearly wasn’t the same kind of man his father was. He didn’t bother to speak to anyone, or even acknowledge that anyone was there. He seemed all wrapped up in himself, and Ellie didn’t much like him.
She found it hard to believe that either one of the Crosslands would have anything to do with a bank robbery. They were rich men, the kind of men who had more money than Ellie could ever dream of, but she had learned that you never could tell about people and what they might do. Maybe there wasn’t any such thing as having as much money as you needed. Maybe you’d always want a little more and do what you had to in order to get it, even if it meant robbing a bank and killing a man.
So she would start at the Crossland ranch. Anyway, she didn’t have any choice other than to go to there. At least it would be a starting place. Where would she have gone, after all, if she hadn’t overheard what Earl Whistler had told the marshal? She had been determined to set off after Burt’s killers, but how would she have known where to go? She would have been crazy just to go off looking wildly about the country, but she would have done it anyway.
She was a little amazed at her own resolve, considering what had happened to her only the day before—funny, she thought, it seemed much longer ago than that—but she was confident that nothing like that would happen again.
This time, she was prepared. This time, she had the shotgun. And the pistol.
She would not be a victim again.
She saw the ranch house ahead. It was low and long, and it was surrounded by a wood fence made of cedar posts and cedar boards. The gate was open, and there was a horse at the hitching rail.
Ellie was sure it must be the marshal’s horse. She had hoped to get there ahead of him, but she had not b
een able to get away from the cemetery. She wondered if the marshal had been able to get anything out of Gerald Crossland or if he had actually been involved in the robbery at all.
Then she saw the bodies in the yard.
ELEVEN
O’Grady rode hard and fast, pushing his big gelding to the limit. He knew that Ben and Jink wouldn’t be far behind him, but he hoped they’d be slowed down by Jink’s fever.
He also found himself hoping that the infection in Jink’s finger was just as bad as it looked and that it would spread fast. If it did, O’Grady might not have to deal with the both of them, because Jink would be dead.
He turned the horse into a narrow draw, came out near a little wood of oaks and pecans, and entered the trees. He thought he might have as much as a full day before anyone got on his trail, anyone except for Ben and Jink.
Gerald Crossland and the marshal were both assuredly dead, and the old man didn’t look as if he’d be riding into town for help. The marshal would be missed eventually, but by the time that happened, and by the time his deputy could get a posse organized, O’Grady would be a long time gone.
He wished that Ben and Jink weren’t so trigger-happy. Even killing a citizen in the course of a robbery, even killing Gerald Crossland, wasn’t as bad as killing a marshal, which was a sure way to get every lawman in the state on your trail. You’d think they’d know that, but it was as if they didn’t care. Or as if they didn’t even give it a thought.
The marshal showed up at the wrong time, he was a threat, they shot him. That’s all there was to it.
Of course O’Grady didn’t have a thing to do with killing the marshal, or with killing Gerald Crossland or the teller or the man who’d been outside the bank.
But that didn’t matter. He was in just as much trouble as Ben and Jink. He was sure that if the law ever caught up with him, they wouldn’t be asking him how much shooting he’d done. If they did, they’d be asking him after he was shot full of lead himself.