Dead Man Walking

by Derek Rutherford

  ‘Doesn’t look much,’ Whit said.

  ‘He ain’t been eating. Got a sickness or something. It’s been going round. He was thin to start with.’

  The captain had brought Whit down yesterday and introduced him to Billy. Said a team of railroad men from Austin were watching out for someone and wanted to place a man in the camp for a day or two. Billy was to look after Whit, find him a bunk, some food, and so on.

  ‘He been here a long time?’

  ‘Longer than me.’

  ‘How long you been here?’

  ‘Couple of months. But most of the men been here years.’

  Leon Winter shuffled very slowly towards the outhouse. As he walked he held up his trousers with one hand to stop them slipping down his bony frame.

  ‘Billy! Billy!’

  Billy turned. Behind them little Alfie skidded to a halt, his dog at his feet.

  ‘I ain’t done the paper. I forgot. Blue caught a rabbit.’

  Billy wasn’t sure whether the rabbit was the reason Alfie had forgot to load up the paper stack or an unrelated piece of news.

  ‘Well, best you get on over there quickly before Winters stinks up the place. You run fast enough you’ll catch him before he gets there.’

  Billy opened the gate and Alfie ran through, a thick sheaf of paper squares in his hand.

  As Leon Winters reached for the outhouse door handle he heard a young voice breathlessly call his name from behind.

  He turned.

  It was the kid. He’d seen the boy many a time, running around outside the fence with his dog at his heels. Always smiling. Too young yet to know how the world can turn on you.

  But the kid had never said anything to him before, let alone called him by his name. Hell, how would the kid even know his name?

  ‘Leon,’ the kid said again, as if he was enjoying the moment, enjoying being allowed to say a prisoner’s name.

  ‘Hello,’ Leon said, and even smiled. It wasn’t the kid’s fault that, out of anyplace in the world he could have grown up, God had dumped him in this one.

  ‘Paper,’ the boy said, holding out a thick wad of outhouse paper squares.

  ‘Thank you,’ Leon said, still puzzling on how the boy had known his name.

  The boy grinned and turned to go. Then he said, ‘Jim sent it.’

  Billy and Whit watched Alfie hand Leon Winters the toilet paper, then turn and run back towards them.

  The kid was smiling. Hell, the kid was always smiling.

  Billy opened the gate and let Alfie out.

  ‘Got there before the stink,’ Billy said.

  Alfie smiled. He went through the gate, turned and said, ‘I’m getting a telescope.’

  Then he was gone, running up to the big house, dog racing round his heels.

  ‘Kid seems a bit simple to me,’ Whit said.

  ‘He’s just young,’ Billy said.

  Leon closed the door. The wood had warped and cracked over the years. The door squeaked and moaned and thin shafts of dusty sunlight came through the gaps.

  His hands were trembling.

  Had the boy really said what Leon thought he’d said?

  Jim sent it.

  All those years. The endless years. The tortures, both physical and mental, the hopelessness and the despair. The knowing that you were alone and that this was it, forever. That one way or another you were never going to be free again. Sometimes wanting to end it all. Other times fighting back. But always hanging on to something, some knowledge or hope that one day something would happen.

  Jim sent it.

  Leon looked at the paper in his hand. It was just paper. But it was paper Jim had sent.

  There’d only been one Jim. Jim Jackson: his best friend in the old gang. Leon recalled nights spent talking, looking at the stars, discussing books. Jim Jackson had no more been a train robber than he’d been a whale hunter. He did it for love. For money, sure. But love was behind the money. Yet he turned out to be good at it in his own unique gentlemanly way. Leon tried to recall the last time they’d spoke. There been all that fighting – not he and Jim, the two of them had trusted each other – but all of them arguing and cussing and trying to work out who had shot that Texas Ranger on the train. They all had masks on and in the confusion no one could be sure who did it. Or why. That had been the end of it. The end of the good times. The beginning of the hell. But it hadn’t been the last time. There had been other times, sad times. A goodbye. He recalled Jim riding off, saying he was done. Heading for home to get his few things together and then aiming back east to see if that love that he’d gone through everything for was still there. That had been the last time.

  Leon didn’t want to put the paper down, so he dropped his trousers one-handed – they just slid down over his hips without help anyway – and he sat over the hole in the wooden plank and he looked at the paper in his hand.

  The first sheet was blank.

  The second had writing on it but it was too dark to make out the words.

  His stomach gurgled and below him he heard the gentle flow of the creek.

  He held the paper up so the shaft of light coming through the gap between door and wall lit it up.

  He read.

  At first he wondered if it was a trap. An elaborate trap. They did that sometimes – tried to entice a man into running. Just so they could have fun hunting him down, watching his sudden hope slowly ebb away and turn to despair. Then they’d shoot him.

  They’d tried numerous times to drive Leon to escape. Maybe more times than the other men. It was as if, for some reason, they wanted him dead more than they wanted anyone else dead.

  But would they go to these lengths? Would they have gone so far as to employ the kid in such a ruse?

  Yes, he figured. Yes they would.

  Then, at the bottom of the note, the writing said: ‘My luck – like yours – didn’t last for ever. But we have a chance to put it all right. Carpe diem.’

  His heart raced. His stomach tightened and the gurgling stopped.

  It was from Jim.

  It had to be.

  He read the words again. And he was convinced.

  Jim sent it.

  Jim Jackson eased back into the trees. The kid had done well. And when Leon had emerged from the outhouse he had, quite surreptitiously, looked up and around the hills surrounding the camp.

  Now Jim circled the camp on the horse, taking his time, listening, and being more careful than ever.

  He left the horse high in the trees above the timber yard and he worked his way down to the piles of lumber on foot. He chose two piles where the great logs looked dry and ready to burn, and where there were gaps and holes he could put his small bags of shotgun powder, shells and home-made fuses.

  He memorised where he had put the incendiary devices and then he worked his way back to his horse.

  Tomorrow was the day.

  Red was mad. Drunk and mad.

  First Little Joe. Then Ringo. Now Ned. Add in Wes and Lech – because they were as good as dead – and that meant almost all of the gang. Someone – several people – were going to pay. Jackson for killing his little brother. And that railroad fellow, Adams, for breaking his fingers – God, that had hurt. Not just when the man had done it, but when the doctor had snapped them back into place as well. His fingers were bound up now, splinted with little sticks and tight bandages and the whiskey helped ease the pain. In a way that pain was good. It made him mad and even more determined. But it didn’t end there. The one that was called George had to die too. He’d shot poor Ned in cold blood. Right there in the street. How in the hell that yellow-bellied sheriff had come to release George and Adams, Red couldn’t figure. It was cold-blooded murder, plain as day. But that was the thing, wasn’t it? That was always the thing. The men turned out to be some railroad employees, investigators or something. They were all in it together. Sheriffs and detectives, the whole lot of them. Well, they’d get what was coming to them.

  It was almost dusk b
efore Sheriff August had finally uncaged them.

  ‘This is the deal,’ August had said. ‘I’m letting you go. But there’s a condition. The condition is you get your belongings, you take your horses, and you leave town.’

  ‘We didn’t do nothing,’ Red argued. ‘It was my man that got shot dead. Murdered.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to all the witnesses. You leave. That’s the deal. I’ll walk with you over to the hotel. You collect your stuff and then we’ll go to the stables and I watch you leave. It’s too hot for me to sit here writing up paperwork, but if you don’t like the deal then that’s what I’ll do. You can stay in the cage for a week, a month, however long it takes before I figure out what to do with you. Is it a deal?’

  At least the sheriff had let Red spend the last of his money on a bottle of rotgut whiskey before leaving town. ‘My fingers hurt like hell,’ Red had said. ‘If you ain’t charging the man that broke them, at least let me get something to dull the pain.’

  Now he and Callum were holed up in the woods about three miles north of Prairie City, not far off the trail that led up to the lumber camp. They had whiskey in their bellies against the pain and blankets around their shoulders against the cold, blankets that Red had stolen right from under the nose of that sheriff whilst they had been collecting their few things from the hotel. The worse thing was that when Red had been coming out of the hotel, August right by his side, there had been Jackson sitting in the eating room with a big plate of bread and beans.

  ‘It ain’t over,’ Red slurred now. ‘I’ll bet money, if I had any, that tomorrow Jackson will be riding up this very trail, and not far behind will be those railroad men.’

  ‘And we’ll be behind them,’ Callum said.

  ‘We’ll be behind them,’ Red agreed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  There was a knot in Jim Jackson’s belly. It felt like that hot rock of fear that he had been carrying for several days ever since seeing Captain Ellington up at the camp. Although this knot was made up of excitement and anticipation as well as fear. It was the same feeling he’d had all those years back when embarking on a train robbery. There was knowledge that it could be a good day, when everything might go according to plan, and the rewards would be wonderful. But the other side of the nickel was always the very real possibility that if things didn’t go as planned then the results could be terrible.

  Today the stakes were higher than ever.

  By the time it was over he and Leon might be riding together again, free after all of this time. There’d be a period of catching up, recovering, building strength, and explanations. But they’d be riding side-by-side just like the old days. And this time it would be revenge rather than riches they were riding towards.

  Or. . . .

  By nightfall he might be dead. Maybe worse. By nightfall he might be in the clutches of the Texas system again; the Texas system as personified by Captain Ellington. The thought was paralysing. That knot, that hot rock, suddenly tightening, making him dizzy with fear.

  He wiped perspiration from his forehead. The taste of bile was strong in his mouth. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply, letting the oxygen clear his throat, his lungs, his blood. He exhaled slowly, calming himself.

  Then he adjusted and tightened his gun belt and put a box of Lucifers in his pocket.

  He stepped outside.

  Adams and Dubois were already saddled up and waiting in a copse of pine trees just north of the Prairie City boundary line. There were no chances to be had this morning. They’d failed to follow Jim Jackson for two days. Sooner or later he was going to do what he came for and they couldn’t afford to miss him again, even with Whit stationed up at the lumber camp.

  ‘August tell you anything more about those other fellows?’ Dubois said. He was rolling a cigarette as he sat waiting on his horse.

  ‘I don’t want you lighting that,’ Adams said. ‘I’d like a cigarette myself but if the wind is right you can smell a man smoking even if you can’t see him.’

  ‘OK, boss.’

  ‘To answer your question, no. August seemed to think they had something to hide. I tend to agree. But they never said anything all the time he had them locked up. I mean, they talked: August said they moaned and wanted to know if we were going to be charged – me for breaking his fingers and you for killing that fellow. August said they ate like they hadn’t eaten for days, too.’

  ‘You think they’ve gone?’

  ‘Yeah. I hurt the red-haired one bad. You hear how he screamed? Like a stuck piglet. And the fact you shot one of them—’

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone before.’

  Adams looked over at the young man. Tree branches and the man’s hat shadowed his face. It was impossible to see Dubois’ eyes.

  ‘You did well. Are you all right?’

  They’d spoken about it yesterday, locked up in a storeroom at the sheriff’s office. August hadn’t put them in the second cage on account of it sharing a set of bars with the cage in which he’d locked Red and the other fellow, whose name turned out to be Callum. But the sheriff had locked them up nonetheless. ‘Just for a few hours,’ he’d said. ‘Whilst I wire your railroad.’ In that storeroom, dark, oppressive and hot, George Dubois had said, initially, that he was OK about killing a man, especially as the fellow was pointing a gun at him. But as the hours had passed he had grown quieter, only occasionally saying things such as, ‘You think he had a brother? A sister?’ and later, ‘You think his parents are still alive? You think they know where he is?’ Adams had reassured Dubois that what he’d done was the right thing, not just for that moment that they had found themselves in, but beyond that too. A man intent upon killing another man in cold blood was not a good man. Sooner or later he would go through with a killing. Maybe more than one. In the eyes of the law, and even in the eyes of God, Adams said, what George had done has been the only thing to do.

  ‘Yeah, I think I’m all right,’ George said now.

  Adams breathed in. There was freshness to the air, the smell of leaves and grass on the slight wind.

  ‘We all get to kill a man for the first time one day,’ he said. ‘After that it gets easier.’

  The boy looked so similar to little Alfie up at the lumber camp that when he handed Jim the note Jim had to do a double take. The same age, the same height, even the same tousled hair. If this boy had had a dog circling his feet then Jim would have really wondered if he wasn’t imagining things.

  ‘The lady told me to give you this,’ the boy said, smiling. ‘She was real pretty.’ Then he ran off.

  The lady?

  Jim looked up and down Main Street. It was as it had always been since he had arrived here a few days ago – quiet compared to Austin, but lively in its own way: folks walking up and down on their way somewhere, but that somewhere not immediately apparent. Horses, carts, horses and carts, fellows unloading boxes, fellows carrying boxes, dogs scratching in the shadows, the smell of fire and smoke as the coffee-boy boiled water and unseen folks cooked breakfast, a few trail hands leaning against posts and a few pretty women on the plank-walks . . . but none of them looking his way or paying him any attention.

  He glanced down at the paper in his hand. It was folded in two. He opened it and a shiver ran all the way up his spine and out through his shoulders. Then came warmth, flooding through him even before he’d read any words. He could hear – or feel – his own heartbeat, the blood rushing through his ears. He’d seen that writing before, that neat script, the straight clean lines.

  It was Rosalie’s writing.

  He read the note.

  I’m in the church. Come immediately. But don’t be followed. They know you’re here.

  What?

  He read it again, trying to understand it.

  Rosalie was here? In Prairie City? Why? How?

  Who were ‘they’?

  And how did they know he was here?

  Too many questions, too much confusion. Thoughts crashed and ricocheted inside his head.
>
  He looked up and down Main Street again. The coffee-boy saw him and waved. He waved back, the gesture automatic.

  There was no question but to go to the church. Unless . . . he wondered could it be a trap? But why? And who? No, he had to go – this was most definitely Rosalie’s beautiful writing and now he realized how much he longed to see her, how much he had missed her, and how hard he’d had to struggle to keep such emotions locked away because he’d genuinely believed he would never see her again.

  But time was tight. He had to get up to the camp and hide away in the copse with the extra horse he’d already arranged over at the livery. Be there for Leon. However it turned out.

  He folded the letter, and thrust it into a pocket. Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction to the church, stopping at random intervals, turning, trying to see if anyone in this quiet town a hundred miles from Austin was following him.

  The church interior was dark, save for dusty lines of light shining through the small windows high on either side. The aromas of old incense and newly sawn wood floated in the still air. At the head of the church a simple wooden cross stood on a plain altar. Unlit candles were positioned either side of it.

  He stood in the open doorway and the low morning sun cast a long shadow of his body on the floor before him.

  ‘Close the door,’ she said, from the darkness somewhere to the left.

  Her voice made him smile and tremble. He felt hot and scared simultaneously.

  He turned towards her voice but couldn’t see her.

  ‘Rosalie?’

  ‘The door.’

  He turned and pushed the door closed, and when he turned back she was there, coming out of the shadows, grabbing him, holding him, hugging him. She was crying and she was laughing and she knocked his hat off and he kissed her hair.

  ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ she said, looking up at him now, her eyes wet with tears and even prettier than he remembered. She laughed and it turned into a sob. He kissed her hair again and tasted sand and dirt. The trail grit was on her face, too. He held her at arm’s length, looking at her, still smiling, but seeing how tired she was.