Dead Man Walking

by Derek Rutherford

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Better than I have been for years.’

  ‘Can you climb on the horse?’

  Again, it wasn’t really a question, more an invitation, and already she was helping him, supporting him – hell, almost leveraging him – up on to the saddle. He moaned aloud. His legs hurt like they’d been whipped – which had happened many times – and his belly, spine, and shoulders all sent shards of pain from one body part to another. It was as if there was a whirlwind of agony inside him.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked again.

  ‘My ears and toes don’t hurt,’ he said. ‘On second thoughts, my toes do.’

  She smiled as she climbed on to her own horse and the smile helped with the pain.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s a place. It’s a few miles away, apparently.’

  ‘Apparently? You’ve not been there?’

  ‘I have directions. Jim said it’s derelict and hidden – overgrown. He’s got food and water there.’

  ‘First place the posse will look.’

  ‘No, Jim said it’s well off any trail and it’s hidden.’

  ‘Let’s hope we can find it, then’ he said, and smiled. Being on a horse again felt good whatever happened. Especially with Rosalie. ‘Lead the way,’ he said.

  ‘Let ’em ride,’ Webster Ellington whispered. ‘We can take them anytime.’

  ‘You mean wait for Jim Jackson to join them?’

  ‘Yep, that’s what I mean.’

  They let the girl and Winters ride on ahead. When they figured the couple was far enough away that they wouldn’t be spotted, they followed. It was a good day, Webster Ellington figured. The sun felt nice on his shoulders and it was good to be out riding through the trees with a nice cooling breeze on one’s face. It was a good day that was going to get better.

  Beardy said, ‘Thirty seconds.’

  Jim was on the verge of throwing his gun out and stepping from cover. The man opposite had moved far enough along the ridge that Jim could see him – which meant the man could see Jim. Blood was still running from Jim’s leg, and the pain was filling all of his body. He was breathing too fast, panting almost. The memories of his own experiences in the Texas prison camps started appearing in his mind: the beatings, the dreaded leather strapped bat, the hunger and the cold. He’d always known that he would do anything to avoid going back to such a place. It would kill him. He knew that with a certainty that sent a chill through the fire that was filling his body. Yet there was still some sense of self-preservation that made him consider throwing his gun out and limping, maybe crawling, out there.

  At least he’d be alive for a little while longer.

  He thought of Rosalie and of Leon. It had been too ambitious. It had been crazy.

  ‘Ten seconds!’ Beardy shouted.

  Jim Jackson sighed and lowered the Colt. It was all over. Life was all over. Rosalie. Leon. Even Jennifer back east. It was over.

  A gunshot exploded from across the ravine. Jim heard the man over there cry out. Jim snatched a quick look. The man was standing up, no longer interested in Jim, but instead looking mystified, and searching blindly for balance on the slope.

  ‘That one’s for Ned,’ someone yelled – a new voice. Then there was another shot and Jim Jackson saw blood explode from the back of the man’s head and he tumbled face-forward down the rocks. At the bottom of the slope he lay still.

  Jim pressed himself tight up against the rock again.

  ‘And this one’s because you broke my fingers,’ a second new voice said. There were two more shots in quick succession. He heard someone swear: Beardy.

  You broke my fingers.

  Jim racked his brains trying to figure out who these new people might be. But there was nothing. Besides, it wasn’t time to think. It was time to act. He turned and started to scrabble up the narrow cleft in the rock face behind him. It wasn’t steep and should have been as easy as climbing a staircase, but his right leg wasn’t obeying orders and he couldn’t put any weight on it.

  He glanced backwards.

  He was in the open now and they could see him as clearly as he could see them. But they weren’t looking. Beardy was on his back. There was blood on the ground around him and he was breathing heavily. The horses either side of him that he had been sheltering between had moved away, presumably frightened by the gunshots. Beardy’s gun lay on the dirt a few feet from his outstretched arm. Jim saw now that Beardy had been shot in the shoulder. Walking towards Beardy was a man Jim hadn’t seen before; a thin man with red stubble on his face. The man had a gun in his hand.

  ‘Boss, Jackson’s getting away.’

  The second man had a rifle in his hand. He was standing at the bottom of the far rock wall, over by one of the horses, and he was looking right at Jim.

  He knows my name, too, Jim thought.

  The man with the red stubble looked away from Beardy and glanced up at Jim.

  Jim saw it happening.

  Beardy reached inside his jacket with his left hand, his good hand. Maybe he had a shoulder holster in there, Jim thought.

  Red said ‘It’s OK; he’s bleeding. He ain’t going nowhere. We’ll catch him in a moment and, anyway, I want to spend some time with him on account of Little Joe.’

  He looked back down at Beardy and his eyes widened in realization of his mistake. Beardy now had a gun in his hand. Without hesitation Beardy shot Red in the face.

  Red was blown backwards, his hat flying off to reveal a head of red hair, and he lay still.

  Beardy moved fast. He rolled over – on to his wounded shoulder – aimed and fired at the other man in one slick movement.

  The other man was equally fast. He’d moved the rifle’s aim from Jim to Beardy and fired in the same movement.

  The gunshots were simultaneous.

  Both men cried out in pain.

  The man with the rifle staggered backwards, his mouth open in an ‘O’ shape. There was a bloom of blood on his chest. He tried to raise the rifle for a second shot, but his hands appeared to lose all of their power and the rifle slipped to the ground. He fell and was motionless.

  The rifle bullet had taken Beardy in the stomach. He lay on his wounded arm facing the man he had just shot. Jim could see that his lower back was a mass of blood and torn clothes where the rifle bullet had exited the body. As he watched, the man rolled slowly on to his back. He lay in a growing pool of his own blood, his chest heaving and eyes looking up at the endless blue sky.

  Jim’s own pain was forgotten for a moment. His heart raced and his hands shook. It felt as if he had been involved in that brief gunfight himself. But no, it wasn’t that. He had been ten seconds away from giving it all up. Cornered and helpless, ten seconds of real living had been all that had remained and then . . . what had just happened? Four men dead or dying and he was still standing.

  He took in the whole scene. Beardy was still breathing but the other men weren’t moving. It may have been imagination but it seemed that he could still hear the echoes of the gunshots bouncing back and forth between the rock walls of the ravine.

  He carefully climbed back down to the boulder he had been hiding behind. He stepped out on to the trail, all the time watching Beardy. He’d seen him surprise the hell out of the red-haired man and wasn’t about to make the same mistake.

  Beardy was moaning in agony and now Jim’s own pain returned. He sat on the ground and looked at his wound. The bullet had entered his leg just above the top of his boot. He didn’t think it had hit the bone, but there was a lot of blood and the flesh was torn.

  He pulled his neckerchief from around his neck and folded it into a long rectangle and he pressed it against the wound. It felt like a series of hot knives had been plunged into his leg from ankle to groin. The world wavered in front of him. He took off his jacket and his shirt and he ripped the sleeves off the latter and then he tied the folded neckerchief tight against the wound with the torn sleeves. He put his ruine
d shirt and his jacket back on and tried to stand.

  More agony. But he could put up with it.

  He held his gun out in front of him, his finger tight on the trigger, and he limped towards Beardy, the man who had shot his horse and tortured his woman.

  The cabin had been reclaimed by the forest. Whoever had farmed the area had constructed the cabin out of pine logs that had been cut from the forest behind. The land in front of the house had been cleared of stones and carved into small fields. The stones had been mixed with wet clay and had been used to build the low walls of a stable that had then been topped with more pine logs. The farmhouse roof had also been made from logs, criss-crossed with thick interlaced pine branches and on top of that a layer of soil.

  But now the fields were barely recognizable: grass had grown back long and thick, bushes and weeds had sprouted and multiplied and, closer to the woods, young trees were growing as if breaking out from the shelter of their parents. Many of these young trees obscured the farm cabin. Closer to the forest were several older trees that looked like they had marched out of the woods and had stationed themselves around the cabin. Grass had grown in the soil on the roof and log tendrils of weeds and wild flowers hung down. The stable walls had collapsed and the roof, no longer straight, appeared to grow out of the ground.

  From the westbound trail, skirting the edge of another wood half a mile away, the cabin was invisible.

  ‘Don’t cut across the fields towards the cabin,’ Jim had told her. ‘You won’t see it anyway, so you’d have no reason to cut across. You’ll come to a creek. There’s a doll – an Indian doll, you know, coloured beads and bright face? It’s impaled on a tree with an arrow.’

  ‘A doll?’

  ‘I didn’t put it there. I don’t know why it’s there. Maybe it’s an Indian sign that there’s a farm nearby. Or maybe the farmer did it to warn them off. Anyway, it was what made me stop and look around. I figured there must be something close. Follow the creek through the woods to the left – just ride in the water. It runs behind the old farm. Might be wise to take the doll down. Without it there’s no reason to pause. Anyone else will ride straight by.’

  Rosalie had struggled to remove the doll – the arrow was too deeply embedded into the tree. In the end she had torn the doll off the shaft. Without the doll drawing attention to the tree it would take an eagle-eyed posse member to spot the arrow. And even if they did, so what? And that was always assuming they’d come this way anyway. There had been so many trails and forks, so many possibilities, that the chances of them being found seemed incredibly remote.

  She and Leon rode through the creek and at the farmhouse they found water and food left there by Jim.

  She felt an enormous pang of fear. He’d planned it all so well, set everything up so carefully. But what if he had been caught? What if all of this was for nothing? What if she never saw him again?

  Leon must have sensed her mood or seen the worry on her face because he said, ‘Some people have luck riding on their shoulders, Rosalie. Jim’s one of them. I’ve always thought it was because he’s a good man. God looks after the good ones.’

  She looked at him and managed to smile.

  They hid the horses in the stables – there was even a sack of oats left there – and then she and Leon ate jerky, onions and thick crusts of bread in the farmhouse.

  ‘Best meal I’ve had in a dozen years,’ Leon said, slicing another wedge of bread with a long knife that, despite looking like it had been in the cabin since the day the place had been built, was still strong and sharp.

  Rosalie ate well, too. She hadn’t thought she’d be hungry, but it turned out she was ravenous.

  Later, she stood looking out of the window – real glass, no less. Trees and hanging branches obscured her view. She turned back to Leon. ‘Tell me about Jim,’ she said. ‘Tell me about yourself. Tell me everything.’

  Jim Jackson pushed Beardy’s gun away from the dying man with the toe of his good leg. He figured the man wouldn’t have a second hidden weapon but it was a chance not worth taking, so all the while he pointed his own gun right at the man’s face. There was blood frothing from Beardy’s mouth now.

  ‘Who were they?’ Beardy asked, looking up at him.

  ‘No idea. Figured you knew.’

  ‘We’d have had you if they hadn’t come along.’

  Beardy coughed up a fountain of blood.

  ‘You had to break a woman’s fingers to get this far.’

  Beardy tried to say something but he coughed up more blood. He grimaced in pain. Then said, ‘You’ve the luck of the Devil riding with you.’

  ‘You shot my horse,’ Jim said. ‘I’m going to take yours.’

  ‘Shoot me,’ Beardy said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ve never shot a man I didn’t have to,’ Jim said, and walked away.

  Leon told her a little of the train-robbing days, and of how Jim came to be known as the gentleman train robber. He recounted how Jim had told him he was giving it all up and that the next time he heard from Jim was when the little boy handed him the secret note in the outhouse. Rosalie asked him about life in the camp but Leon just shook his head. ‘It’s not something to talk about,’ he said.

  She heard one of the horses in the hidden stable neigh.

  ‘How long do you think he’ll be?’ she said

  A man appeared in the doorway. He had a shotgun in his hand that he was aiming right at Rosalie.

  He said, ‘I was just wondering the very same thing.’

  Chapter Eighteen

  His name, he told them, was Webster Ellington.

  ‘Captain Webster T. Ellington,’ he said. ‘I was a captain and I’m pretty darn sure that I will be again once we bring all three of you in.’

  A younger man, lean, medium height, and quiet, was with Ellington. He’d brought a coil of thin rope into the room with him and wore a six-gun. Ellington had the man check Rosalie and Leon for weapons and then he made the two of them sit on the bench facing him, their backs to the table.

  ‘Whit,’ he said to the younger man. ‘I want you to go outside. Move our horses so they’re way out of sight. Then hide up yourself. When Jackson arrives you be behind him. Follow him in and be ready. Be silent.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Hit him upside the head. He’ll be looking at me. Hit him just above the ear as hard as you can. When he wakes up. . . .’

  Ellington grinned as he gave the orders. The situation appeared to be making him very happy. It was making Rosalie feel sick. Fear and terrible desperate disappointment added to her nausea.

  She was searching for something – anything – that she could use as a weapon, but there was nothing. Leon was looking pale, tired, and ghostlike alongside her. She could feel him shivering.

  ‘Yes, you shake, boy,’ Ellington said. ‘You shake like a whipped dog because you know what’s coming, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ Leon whispered.

  ‘That’s why I’m savouring the moment,’ Ellington said. ‘This is . . . wonderful. Don’t you think?’

  Outside they heard a horse neigh again. ‘He’s from the railroad,’ Ellington explained. ‘The one you robbed.’

  ‘I’ve not robbed anyone for twelve years. You know that.’

  ‘I never said when.’ Ellington licked his lips and smiled again.

  He looked at Rosalie. ‘I don’t know what you have to do with all of this but I’m afraid it ain’t going to hurt me or Whit one bit to have caught you, too, ma’am. See, this is going to put me right back where I belong.’

  He turned to Leon. ‘Sad thing for you is, once they’ve finished with you, I’m going to insist that sooner or later you and Jackson both come back to me – wherever I am by then. We have some unfinished business, don’t we? Well, especially Jackson. But I’d hate for you to miss out. You do look a bit . . . weak though. I wonder how much you can take?’

  ‘You’re evil,’ Leon said.

  ‘What unfinished business?’ Ros
alie asked. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but the man was loud and getting louder. She thought if she kept him talking Jim might – just might – hear him as he approached. It wasn’t much. But it was all she had.

  ‘Well, it’s interesting you ask. See, they wanted him dead. But I never killed him. And for that. . . . Well, I got demoted and sent to one dead-end rat-infested camp after another. It wasn’t my fault he didn’t die. I mean, I wasn’t going to kill him, was I? Despite what Leon here thinks, I’m not evil. I’m not bad. I’m just doing my job the way they ask. Jackson was meant to die, and he didn’t and they blamed me. It spoiled my life. Wife left me on account of the places they sent me were no places for wives. Now’s my chance to make amends.’

  ‘Who wanted him dead?’

  ‘I don’t know, lady. They. The authorities. Him, too.’ He pointed at Leon. ‘He was meant to die, too. Look at him. He’s close. But they seem to have charmed lives, these train robbers.’

  ‘And what are you going to do with us?’

  ‘Well, as soon as Jackson turns up I’ll be taking you all back down the hill with me. After that I might just take me a ride into town to celebrate.’

  ‘He won’t be taken alive,’ Leon said.

  ‘He won’t know he’s still alive until he wakes up.’

  ‘You don’t know him as well as you think.’

  ‘Oh I do. When you’ve seen a man scream and cry and soil himself as many times as I’ve seen Jackson, then you get to know him very well. He’ll look at me and freeze. He always did.’

  ‘He’s changed.’

  ‘Then it’s a good job Whit is out there,’ Ellington said. ‘Now let me get comfortable. I guess he could be an hour or two, the way things were back at the camp.’

  She had taken the doll off the tree just as he’d told her. That was good. It meant that she’d found the place. More than that, it meant they she and Leon were here, that the plan had worked. After a fashion, anyway. There were four men dead back in the ravine south of the camp. He didn’t know who they all were and – though he figured they probably deserved to die and had brought it on themselves – it was almost certainly a higher body count than would have happened if he had just ridden into the camp, grabbed Leon, and shot his way out. But then that way the dead may well have been innocent. His horse was dead, too. He’d limped over to her and had stroked her cooling head.