by Bill Crider
It wasn’t anything he was looking forward to, nor was he looking forward to seeing Ben and Jink again. They likely wouldn’t take kindly to the fact that he’d run off with all the money.
He rode as fast as he could through the trees, putting up a hand to keep the branches from whipping his face. He’d be coming to the Blanco River soon, and maybe he could travel in the shallow water for a way and throw off his pursuers.
He’d decided to go back to Mexico. There were disadvantages to living there, it was true, but the money he had would last him a lifetime down south of the border. He would never have to resort to robbery again once he was in Mexico.
All he had to do was get there.
“Goddammit, how far ahead of us could he be?” Jink said. He and Ben were riding slowly, looking for some sign of O’Grady. “I don’t see how we let him get out of our sight. You shoulda saddled the damn horses quicker.”
Ben didn’t answer. He was leaning down from the saddle, trying to follow that son of a bitch O’Grady’s trail. Ben wasn’t all that good a tracker, even when the ground was muddy and making things easy for him, and he wished Jink would just shut up.
But Jink wasn’t about to be quiet. “I don’t see why he ran out on us like that,” he said. “We was just tryin’ to take care of things the best way we could. That fat bastard would’ve got us all killed back there, killed or stuck back in prison, and I’ve had all of that prison I ever want.”
Ben couldn’t figure it out. Jink had never been much of a talker before, but now it was like he couldn’t stop.
“How’s your finger?” Ben said. Maybe that would keep him quiet.
Jink held up his hand and looked at it. It didn’t look quite as bad as it had, and the swelling in the finger was going down. Just the same, he didn’t feel any too pert.
“It’s better now,” he said. “I guess I oughta thank O’Grady when we catch up to him. Right before I shoot him.”
“He turned down this draw,” Ben said, reining his horse to a stop.
“You reckon he’s waitin’ for us at the other end?”
“Naw. He’s too busy runnin’.”
“I hope you’re right,” Jink said. “I don’t want to go and get bushwhacked.”
“O’Grady wouldn’t do nothin’ like that.”
“The hell he wouldn’t. He took our money and ran off with it, didn’t he?”
Ben didn’t say anything. He kneed his horse and started into the draw.
Jink hung back. A man who’d steal from you would just as soon bushwhack you too. If Ben wanted to ride into it, that was fine. But Jink wasn’t that stupid.
When Ben rode out of the draw, Jink was a good way behind him. While he waited on Jink to catch up, he built himself a smoke and took a few puffs. He didn’t enjoy it. He’d been looking forward to smoking store-bought ready rolls for the rest of his life, what with all the money he’d expected to get out of that damn bank.
When Jink caught up with him, Ben snapped away the cigarette and said, “Looks like he went into them trees over yonder.”
“Damn,” Jink said.
“Don’t worry so much,” Ben told him. “He’s not gonna ambush you in there. He’s gonna keep runnin’. We ain’t the only ones after him.”
Jink looked back over his shoulder.
“I didn’t mean they was closin’ in,” Ben said. “But they’ll be along.”
“Then we better get to him before any damn posse does,” Jink said. “I want my share of that money.”
“We’ll get him,” Ben said. “He’s gotta stop sooner or later.”
“What about us?” Jink said.
“We’re gonna keep goin’. We won’t stop till we catch up to him.”
Jink didn’t know about that. There’d been a time when he could stay in the saddle for a day or so without rest and not be too broken down when the ride was over, but that had been a few years back.
And it had been when he was healthy. He didn’t feel healthy now.
“What if we can’t keep goin’?” he said.
“I can,” Ben said.
Jink looked at his old buddy. “I guess you’d bring my share of the money back to me if I had to stop and rest, then.”
“Sure I would. You know me, Jink.”
“Yeah, I know you, all right,” Jink said. “That’s what’s got me worried.”
Jonathan took his flat-crowned black hat off the peg by the back door, settled it on his head, and went out into the yard. He still wasn’t as certain on his feet as he would have liked, but he was managing all right.
The worst thing was the sunlight. He’d been cooped up in the house for so long, the light was a real bother to his old eyes.
As he went around the corner of the house, he heard a wagon coming into the yard, and he stopped. He didn’t want to run into any friends of that bunch of killers.
He waited until the wagon came to a halt, and then he peeked around the house. There was a woman sitting in the wagon, looking down at the body of Rawls Dawson.
He thought he recognized the woman, but he didn’t have any idea why Ellie Taine would be at his ranch. Well, there was one way to find out.
He stepped into the yard.
“Oh,” Ellie said, when she saw him.
She turned and fumbled under the wagon seat, coming out with the shotgun in her hands. She pointed the gun at Jonathan and cocked both hammers.
“Stay where you are, Mr. Crossland,” she said. She hardly recognized him. His face was gaunt and gray, covered with stubbly whiskers.
“Don’t you worry, ma’am,” Jonathan said. He touched the brim of his hat to her. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
“That’s Marshal Dawson on the ground,” Ellie said. “Is he dead?”
“ ’Pears that way to me,” Jonathan said. “I ain’t had a chance to get a good look at him.”
“Who’s that over there?” she said, nodding toward Gerald’s body.
Jonathan looked in that direction, too. “That’s my boy,” he said. “That’s Gerald.”
“Did they shoot each other?”
Jonathan shook his head. “No, ma’am, that ain’t exactly what happened.”
“Did you...?”
“No, ma’am, I didn’t have a thing to do with it. I would’ve saved ’em both if I could.”
Ellie kept the shotgun pointed at him. It was quite heavy, but she didn’t let the barrels waver.
“What happened then?” she said.
“There was three other men here,” Jonathan told her. “Bank robbers, most likely.”
“Those are the men I’m looking for,” she said. “They killed my husband.”
“I’m right sorry to hear that,” Jonathan said. “Burt Taine was a good man.”
“Your son—Gerald—did he have anything to do with the robbery?”
“Seems like he must have. I don’t know the whole story. I ain’t been up to snuff lately, so I don’t know exactly what all’s been goin’ on around here. But I think Gerald was mixed up with those three. I surely do.”
Jonathan felt a sudden wave of weakness surge through him. “I need to sit down for a minute,” he said. “You wouldn’t mind if I did that, would you?”
“No,” Ellie said. She put the shotgun on the wagon seat. “What are we going to do about the marshal and your son?”
Jonathan was already on his way back inside the house. “Why don’t you come in, and we can talk about it,” he said.
They sat at the kitchen table and drank well water from tin cups.
“That tastes mighty fine,” Jonathan said, draining his cup and setting it on the wooden table top. “Sometimes you forget how good things can taste.” He looked at Ellie. “Now, then, why don’t you tell me what you meant when you said you were lookin’ for those three men that robbed the bank.”
“I told you,” Ellie said. Her cup was still nearly full. “They killed my husband.”
“That’s the truth. You told me that. But that don’t exp
lain why you’re looking for them.”
Ellie didn’t say anything.
Jonathan’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean to tell me that you’re thinkin’ to capture ’em,” he said. “A woman, by herself, lookin’ to find three desperadoes and put ’em behind bars?”
“I’m not looking to put them behind bars,” Ellie said.
“Godamighty,” Jonathan said, putting a skeletal hand to his forehead. “You can’t mean you’re gunnin’ for ’em.”
Ellie said, “Killing my husband wasn’t all they did.”
Jonathan looked at her across the table. Her mouth was tight, her eyes determined.
“What else did they do?”
Ellie had thought she would never tell anyone what had happened, not anyone except Burt, but she did. “They raped me,” she said. “Two of them did.”
“Godamighty.”
“I’m going to find them,” Ellie said. “And when I do, I’m going to kill them.”
Jonathan didn’t know what to say, but he felt that he had to say something.
“I don’t want to discourage you, ma’am, but those are three real bad men. I expect Marshal Dawson thought he was man enough to stand up to ’em, but he’s dead out there in my yard. Gerald, well, he wasn’t much good for anything, and he took his bullets in the back, but that just shows you the kind of men they are. They’re the kind that’d shoot a fella in the back while he was runnin’ away from ’em.”
“I don’t care about that,” Ellie said. “I’m going to find them. And when I do—”
“Yeah. I know,” Jonathan said. “You’re gonna kill ’em, I know. You said that already. But I still think it’s gonna be a lot harder than you think it is.”
“I guess I’ll find that out, then,” Ellie said. “When I find them.”
“Yeah.” Jonathan fiddled with his cup for a few seconds. Then he said, “I was wonderin’ if, before you go off after ’em, you’d mind helpin’ me with somethin’.”
“What?”
“Well, I thought I was gonna be able to do it myself, but now I can see I ain’t quite up to it. I was gonna bury my son.”
“I’ll help you,” Ellie said.
She had never dug a grave before, and it was hard work, but Ellie was up to it. It took her a couple of hours, but she got down deep enough.
It was even harder to get Gerald’s body into the wagon than it was to dig his grave. He must have weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds, and his body gave new meaning to the phrase “dead weight.”
Jonathan wasn’t much help. He wanted to be, but he was simply too frail and too weak to be of much use.
Ellie finally got the body loaded into the back of the wagon. Gerald’s legs dangled off the end, but that didn’t bother Ellie any. She wasn’t going to drag him any farther into the wagon.
She drove to where she’d dug the grave, a spot under a cottonwood tree on a little rise about a quarter of a mile from the house, and Jonathan helped her pull Gerald off the wagon bed. Gerald was lying on his back, and he left long streaks of blood on the wood when they slid him out. He was too heavy for them to catch when he came out of the wagon. They tried, but he hit the ground hard, splattering mud.
“Don’t matter none,” Jonathan said. “He don’t need dignity now.”
They rolled the body into the grave, and Ellie realized she was about to attend her second funeral of the day.
It was even shorter than Burt’s.
“There ain’t no words,” Jonathan said, removing his hat. “He wasn’t much, but he was my boy. I’m sorry he had to die the way he did.” He put his hat back on. “Here, now. Let me help you shovel him over.”
“I’ll do it,” Ellie said, digging the shovel into the mounded dirt and pitching a load down on Gerald. He had landed on his back, and he was looking up at her with staring, sightless eyes. She covered his face first.
“What are you going to do about the marshal?” she said as she worked.
“I been studyin’ on that,” Jonathan said. “I thought maybe you could take him back to town, let folks know what happened here. They could get up a posse and go after them fellas.”
“I’m not going back to town,” Ellie said. She paused for a minute to wipe her face. She had already worked up a sweat, even though the tree provided a bit of shade. “I told you what I was going to do.”
“I thought maybe you’d give up that idea,” Jonathan said. “Don’t seem to me like you’ve got much chance of findin’ ’em. Ain’t no tellin’ where they’ve got to by this time.”
“I’ll find them,” Ellie said, tossing in another shovelful of dirt on Gerald.
“Damn if I don’t believe you,” Jonathan said after a while. “Well, that don’t help me none with the marshal.”
“If you’ve got a wagon, I’ll hook up your team for you,” Ellie said. “You could take him back to town.”
She didn’t really think he’d make it, not the way he looked.
“I guess I could take him in, at that,” he said. “I expect folks sure would be surprised to see me. But I got a better idea.”
“What?” Ellie said.
“I think I’ll just go along with you.”
Ellie stopped shoveling. She stuck the blade of the shovel in the dirt and said, “I must not have heard you right.”
“You heard me right. I said was thinkin’ about goin’ along with you.”
“You can’t do that,” Ellie said.
“Why not? They killed my boy, same as they killed your husband.”
“I told you. They did more to me than just kill Burt.”
“I know it.”
“And besides that, you don’t look too good. I heard in town that you were just about dead.”
“Well, I guess I am,” Jonathan said. “That’s why I want to go.”
Ellie looked at him questioningly.
“It’s kinda hard to explain,” he said.
Ellie started shoveling again. “You might as well try,” she said.”
There was a slight breeze blowing, and it rustled the leaves of the cottonwood tree. Jonathan looked around him. All the land he could see in any direction belonged to him. Once it had been populated with some of the best beef in Texas, but those days were gone now. There wouldn’t be any more herds of cattle there, not that Jonathan would live to see, and there was no one to leave the land to, not even Gerald, who would just have let it go to tarnation anyhow.
Jonathan felt like a man who had outlived his usefulness and outlived his time. He would’ve been better off to have died like Zach Chaney, out there on the trail someplace, riding along with a herd, but that wasn’t going to happen. He’d missed his chance at that.
But that didn’t mean he’d have to die meekly in bed like some dude back East who’d never seen a cow and never slept outside under the full moon.
He could do one last thing. He could go looking for the men who killed his son, and if he didn’t live long enough to find them, at least he’d die outdoors and not closed up under a roof and behind four walls. He’d die while he was doing something, not while he was lying down as if he were just waiting for his life to end, and the sooner the better.
He tried to explain all of that to Ellie Taine, and when she finished covering the grave, she looked at him thoughtfully.
“You’re sure that’s really why you’re wanting to go? You’re sure it’s not because I’m a woman, and you think somebody ought to take care of me?”
Jonathan smiled. It seemed to him that it was the first time he’d done that in a month of Sundays.
“I’m afraid it’d be the other way around,” he said. “My days of takin’ care of folks are over.”
“I can’t take care of you, either. And if you did go with me, I wouldn’t want you to go dying on me while we’re on the trail. I wouldn’t have time to bury you.”
“You wouldn’t have to. Just leave me where I fall. I don’t figure it’ll matter much to me, one way or the other.”
&nb
sp; “If you got sick on me, I couldn’t nurse you,” Ellie said. “You’d just have to lie in the wagon and keep quiet.”
“I’m pretty good at that,” Jonathan said. “Keepin’ quiet, I mean.”
“What would we do with the marshal?” Ellie said.
“I guess we’d have to bury him,” Jonathan said. “But not too deep.”
TWELVE
O’Grady was tiring, but he knew he couldn’t afford to stop. His horse was tired, too, but they’d both had a drink at the river. They could go for a while longer.
He’d come out of the woods near the river, and he’d walked the gelding along in the shallows for about a mile before he located a low-water crossing and went across.
When he reached the opposite bank, he turned right and rode for another mile, until he found a particularly rocky patch of ground. He rode into the rocks, then turned back and rode down into the shallow water by a slightly different route. He headed back the way he’d come from, riding until he’d passed well beyond the place where he’d crossed the river. Only then did he turn south again.
While he didn’t hold out any real hope that his maneuvering would throw Ben and Jink completely off his trail, he thought maybe it would buy him some time.
He hadn’t seen anything of them yet, but he knew they were back there. They wouldn’t let the money slip away from them without a fight.
Unless that marshal had stopped them. Somehow, O’Grady didn’t think that was very likely.
The country before him was hilly and rocky, covered with scrub brush and cedars. There wasn’t much in the way of cover, except for the occasional taller cedar tree or good-sized rock, but at least he could try to keep the hills between himself and Ben and Jink.
He smiled and urged his horse to go just a bit faster. He was beginning to think he was going to make it.
Ben and Jink were indeed falling farther behind.
Jink was no better at tracking than Ben was, and O’Grady’s gambit at the river did throw them off the track for a while. It took them more than half an hour to figure out where they’d gone wrong, and then it took them another half-hour to pick up the right trail.