by Bill Crider
EPILOGUE
It had been a hard few months for Ellie Taine. She had buried Jonathan Crossland under the cottonwood trees beside his son, but with more dignity than Gerald had received. And then she had gone to the bank for a loan.
The Blanco bank hadn’t been able to accommodate her because of the robbery. She’d had to go all the way to San Antonio, and the banker that she talked to there had at first been wary of letting a woman have any money. After she’d proved to him that she was indeed the owner of a considerable property that could stand as security, however, he’d seen things differently.
And the ranch was going to pay for itself. There wasn’t much question of that. Ellie had Juana to help her in the house, and she’d hired a couple of hands who could wrangle the cattle, do the roping and branding of the calves when the time came, and keep up the fences. Things were going to work out just fine.
Or they were if people would just leave her alone.
At first she didn’t understand why they kept coming to her, but then she realized that the story of what she and Jonathan had done had gotten around, and that it had grown in the telling. People thought she was some kind of female gunslinger, or even something more than that, someone who could set things right when they’d gone badly wrong.
Shag Tillman had been one of the first to come asking for her help. Not two weeks after he’d been made town marshal, someone had broken into Alf Rogers’ mercantile store.
“Now that our bank’s been robbed, they prob’ly think they can just walk in here and carry off the whole town,” Shag told Ellie.
“Who’s ‘they’?” Ellie wanted to know.
She was standing on the porch of what she still thought of as Jonathan’s house, looking up at Shag, who was sitting on his horse under a hard blue sky. The wind stirred up dust devils that danced across the yard.
“They’s whoever it is that broke into Alf’s store,” Shag said.
“What did they take?”
“Just some coffee and vittles, nothin’ much.”
“Maybe it was just somebody who was hungry. You can find them if you try.”
Ellie could say it, but she didn’t really believe it. She wasn’t sure Shag would be able to find his hat if someone were to take it off his head and hang it on a peg somewhere.
“I could sure use a little help,” Shag said, and Ellie could tell it was a hard thing for him to admit.
“I’d like to help you, Shag,” she said. “But I just don’t have the time. I’ve got a ranch to run now, and I can’t be doing your job for you.”
That had made Shag mad, and he rode back into town without saying another word to her. But he wasn’t the last of them.
There was a woman whose son had run away, mainly, Ellie surmised, because of his father’s casual brutality. She didn’t think it would do any good to look for him, and she figured he might very well be better off wherever he’d gone. So she told the woman that.
The woman had left crying, which had made Ellie feel terrible and had even caused her to be out of sorts with Juana later that day.
Why won’t people just leave me alone? she wondered.
But they didn’t. They kept coming, and she kept turning them away. They had troubles, but she had troubles, too. Running the ranch wasn’t easy. How could they expect her to leave it to help them out of their difficulties?
One day she went out to Jonathan’s grave, out under the cottonwoods away from the house and away from anyone who might ride up seeking her help.
She looked out over the green of the pasture and listened to the breeze rustling the thick leaves of the cottonwoods. It was a peaceful place to be, a place where she could think about things and try to get them straight in her mind.
“Do you think they’ll forget about what we did?” she said, looking down at the spot where Jonathan lay.
She wasn’t expecting an answer, and she didn’t get one.
“After all,” she went on, “it wasn’t much. We didn’t even bring the money back.”
The breeze stirred the hair on the back of her neck, and she smoothed it with her hand. It didn’t seem to make any difference about the money. People didn’t care about that, if they even thought about it. By now, they probably thought Ellie had brought the money back. A man last week told her he’d heard about how she’d faced down a gang of outlaws and shot three of them before they could even draw their guns. The story just kept on getting bigger, and people just kept on coming by.
Sooner or later there might even be someone that Ellie would want to help, maybe some woman who’d suffered the same thing that Ellie had, or even something worse.
“What am I going to do then?” Ellie said.
She didn’t get an answer that time, either.
I’m not the law, she thought, and revenge isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Nobody would believe that last part, even if she told them, which she never had. And while she wasn’t the law, she could probably do a sight better at the job than Shag Tillman, though she would never say that to anyone.
She believed it, however. She’d proved it to herself, and to Jonathan. Not to mention the men who’d raped her.
She sighed. She had a hollow feeling in her stomach, and the feeling told her that someday there would come an appeal she couldn’t deny, an appeal that would take her back into the kind of violence she didn’t want to face again.
But not today. She had other things to do today. She took one more look at Jonathan’s grave, then turned and went back to the house, to whatever was waiting for her there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native Texan, mystery writer Bill Crider has lived in the state all of his life and uses it as the setting for many of his crime novels. He’s published more than seventy-five books and an equal number of short stories, authoring five different fantastic suspense series.
In his hugely popular Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, he brings a classic western sensibility to contemporary murder mysteries. He launched the series with the suspense novel Too Late to Die, for which he won the 1987 Anthony Award for Best First Novel, and has added more than twenty titles over two and a half decades. Crider also has written several standalone Westerns and chilling horror novels, along with several other mystery series.
In Outrage at Blanco and the sequel Texas Vigilante, he offers a bold twist by crafting a crisp, contemporary crime story and setting it in the 1880s. An extraordinary Western with a strong female hero, this tale of vengeance and justice has earned rave reviews from critics and fans alike.
Crider is an avid reader and collector of mystery and western fiction and lives the quiet life in Alvin, Texas, with his wife Judy —who is always his first reader and biggest fan.