Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  Cole nodded and told him the story about how he’d come to Cheyenne to work for his old friend, Ike Kelly, who had operated a detective agency; how Ike had been murdered, his office set on fire with him in it, and how the fire had burned down Ella Mims’s hat shop in the process. “That’s how we met,” Cole said. “Ella and me, the first time. I questioned her about the fire, what she saw that night. We went from there. It didn’t have anything to do with Denver.”

  “I’m relieved to know that,” Green said.

  “What connected you to me?” Cole wondered.

  “I didn’t know her long,” Green replied. “So I didn’t know that much about her, about her past. But I learned recently she had an aunt in Ogallala and I sent a wire inquiring about Ella, stated that there had been some serious trouble, and that I was looking for her. The aunt wired back and said Ella had been there but had left. She also mentioned that Ella had a visitor while there and gave me your name. It’s the only lead I have. I came here to find you, hoping you could tell me where she was.” Green must have seen Cole’s look of surprise, for he said: “You don’t know where she is, do you?”

  “I figured she was still in Nebraska,” Cole said.

  Green shook his head. “Not according to the aunt. The trail runs out right here in Cheyenne with you. The aunt figured maybe she’d come back here, looking for you.”

  Cole ran the possibilities through his mind and came up with nothing. “I guess I can cash in my ticket to Ogallala,” he conceded. “If she’s not there, I don’t know where she is. It’s a big country, Mister Green.”

  “Unless the aunt is lying,” Green said.

  “She didn’t strike me as a dishonest woman,” Cole told him.

  Green shrugged his shoulders, stood up, and buttoned his coat. “What would you do to protect someone you loved?” he said. “Ogallala is all we’ve got, Mister Cole. You want to take the chance the aunt’s telling us everything she knows? And if she does know something more than she’s telling, better we find her before Colorado Charley Utter and his boys, or Gypsy Davy.”

  It wasn’t what Cole had had in mind, throwing in with Teddy Green.

  “Train leaves eight-fifteen,” he said. “I could use the help.”

  “Tell me something,” Cole said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you still love her?”

  Green twisted his mouth and removed the cigar stub, examined the ash, and finally said: “You don’t love a woman like Ella, then just stop because she left you. You ever been hard in love, you know that much, Mister Cole.”

  Cole thought that he knew exactly what Teddy Green meant.

  Chapter Eight

  A cold rain driven by a hard wind had the three of them huddled around the potbelly stove at the train depot the next morning. Cole had tried to talk Harve Ledbettor out of coming with them, but he’d simply waved that Ned Buntline Special of his in the air and declared he was up for excitement.

  “You don’t have an investment in this,” Cole had argued as he had packed his saddlebags.

  “Seems to me you are trying to look a gift horse in the mouth,” Ledbettor had said. “I only got this one arm left, but I can shoot like a son-of-a-bitch.”

  “You can get shot, too.”

  “Looky here,” Ledbettor had said, pushing the beaver hat down squarely on his head. “I’ve lived all the life one man can stand. I’ve been down to hardtack and river water coffee and I’ve et fish eggs on crackers. Had me ugly women, tall women, fat women, skinny women. I’ve ridden behind the ass of cows and slept in the saddle and I’ve slept in beds with satin sheets, too. Drank horse piss from a boot and champagne from a slipper. I guess I ain’t missed a thing if I was to get shot before breakfast. I’m willing and you need guns, if you run up against Colorado Charley Utter and his bunch, or that ear-wearing Gypsy Davy. ’Sides, I’m a freeborn man and can go where I damn’ well please. So finish up packing, John Henry, and let’s stop jawing.”

  “OK,” Cole had said, “but you ought to know I’ve not had much luck with friends lately … most of them are up there on boothill taking a long siesta.”

  He had winked and said: “But not me.”

  Teddy Green was already at the depot waiting for Cole when they came in. He looked at Harve, looked at the flap of his coat sleeve, then at Cole. Cole introduced Harve, and Harve said: “Teddy Green. Hell, I’ve heard of you.”

  “I’m from Texas as of late,” Teddy Green said. “But I was a lot of places before Texas.”

  “Seems to me I recall you killed the Harris brothers in a barn in Missouri,” Harve said. “All three of them on the same day.”

  Teddy Green warmed his palms over the potbelly stove. “Killed the ones that was there, yes, sir.”

  “Never did hear why you killed ’em,” Harve said, trying not to act overly inquisitive but primed for some juicy conversation. “But I’d read plenty about their exploits as bank robbers. Those boys claimed they robbed more banks than Frank and Jesse James.”

  “They robbed a few.”

  “I see,” Harve said, and warmed his own hands over the stove.

  Teddy Green pulled a big silver pocket watch from his waistcoat, snapped open the face, read the time until he was satisfied, then closed it and slipped it back in his pocket.

  “You were with the Pinkertons as I recall,” Harve said, not content to let a potentially good story go by the boards, now that his curiosity was up. “On the scout for Jesse and Frank when you come up on them Harris boys. Leastways, that’s the way I read it in the Police Gazette.”

  “Yes, sir, I was with the Pinkertons at the time.”

  “You just catch them boys in that barn, or was you waiting for them?”

  Teddy Green leaned forward a bit, arched his back, and said: “The beds at the hotel are pretty soft. I prefer a hard bed, keeps my back from aching.”

  Harve took the hint that Teddy Green wasn’t much interested in talking about the Harris brothers of Missouri and tugged his flask from inside his coat and held it forth.

  “Anybody care to have a nip of old Tose?”

  They heard the train’s whistle and gathered up their gear in preparation of boarding. The cold rain pecked at their necks as they stood on the platform, and Harve finally turned to Cole and said: “Don’t the weather ever grow pleasant in these parts? I ain’t seen the sun but once, and that was in my dreams.”

  It was a six-hour ride from Cheyenne to Ogallala, and when they finally unlimbered themselves, the rain had stopped but the sky was flushed gray and a strong wind was blowing up from the Platte. A few waddies with nothing better to do than hang about watching the comings and goings of strangers gave the three of them a careful once-over.

  “We’ll need to rent saddle horses for the trip out to the aunt’s place,” Cole said.

  One of the waddies leaned and spat from a plug in his cheek and called out to Harve: “Hey there, old-timer, you lose your arm in the war?”

  They were just slothful youths, rag-tag boys without enough to keep their minds occupied. Harve was content to let the comment pass, conceding that they were ignorant and disrespectful street trash.

  They went up to the livery stables but found the old man there had only one horse to rent at the time.

  “Have more in the morning,” he said. “All the others I got is let out at the present.” Then he started to tell them the names of those that had rented his other horses and why they’d rented them, but the trio turned and headed back up the street to find a place to eat dinner.

  “That feller must be dang’ lonely to tell us his business,” Harve said. “But from what I’ve seen of Nebraska so far, I can understand why. This looks like one of the loneliest places I’ve ever been.”

  The last time Cole had been to this territory, it wasn’t Colorado Charley Utter or Gypsy Davy that had troubled his mi
nd, it was a man by the name of Tom Feathers, the son of a rich man who wanted Ella’s attention, and more than just that. Cole had figured that once he was out of the scene, Tom Feathers would move in and stake his claim. He might be a good man to look up, if they couldn’t find Ella, a piece of information he decided to keep under his hat.

  They found the rooms at the Big Muddy Hotel. There was a bar downstairs and a dining room that served oysters and freshwater mussels and Harve insisted on treating them all to some oysters and steaks the size of elephant butts.

  They ate until they could barely push themselves away from the table, then went to the bar where Harve further insisted that he treat them to a few after-dinner drinks, which turned out to be gin rickeys. Cole didn’t care much for anything but good Tennessee sipping whiskey and so, after the first gin rickey, he ordered some mash and stayed with that.

  Teddy Green said that he wasn’t a drinking man by nature and turned in his drink for some black coffee. Cole saw his gaze take in everything and everyone. It was the gaze of a born lawman. In a far corner sat a group of men, playing poker with a circle of other men standing around them so that you could barely see who the card players were.

  “Must be a high-stakes game going on,” Teddy Green said. Then Cole caught a glimpse of one of the card players and knew why there was such a crowd.

  Bill Cody was wearing a beaded buckskin jacket and under the yellow light above the table his finely trimmed mustache and Vandyke gave him the appearance of an actor, which he had been—him and Texas Jack and Wild Bill before Wild Bill had jumped a train back to Kansas. Once there, Hickok promptly got married and headed for the gold fields in the Black Hills, where he was murdered and had left a widow that hardly knew him.

  Cody had told Cole on his last trip to Nebraska how damned scared Wild Bill had been in front of Eastern audiences. His fear of making a fool of himself, Cody had said, was what got him killed. If Hickok had been more like Cody and Texas Jack, he’d probably still be alive and living well from his fame. As it was, the only ones living well from Wild Bill’s fame were the dime novelists who wrote about him. Men like Ned Buntline, who was also sitting at the table to Cody’s left.

  “You met Bill Cody?” Cole said to Teddy Green.

  “That him?” he said, pointing with his chin toward the table.

  “That’s him.”

  Harve said: “God damn, he ain’t aged a lick.”

  “He’s a lot smaller than I imagined him,” Teddy Green said.

  “Bigger than life,” Cole said.

  “I heard he met the queen of England, Victoria,” Teddy Green said.

  “He gave her a pair of silver spurs,” Cole replied.

  “Heard he killed a Cheyenne war chief name of Yellow Hand.” Teddy Green’s interest bordered on disdain, as though Cody’s fame didn’t scratch much dirt with him.

  “What would the queen of England want with a pair of silver spurs?” Harve asked, two steps behind the conversation because of the number of gin rickeys he’d put away.

  Bill Cody was holding court more than he was playing a simple game of stud poker. He enjoyed the attention and was in his element when surrounded by admirers. Cole imagined that the long winter had made him as restless as everyone else to leave the confines of his big house up near North Platte and come to town and do a little celebrating and give folks a chance to have a look at him. From what Cole knew from the last time he’d visited him at his ranch, Cody felt like the prophet who was honored everywhere but in his own home. He loved his wife and daughters, but they saw him only as a husband and father and provider, not quite the way he saw himself or the way he preferred to be seen.

  “We could have used him down in Texas fighting Comanches,” Teddy Green said, turning his back and leaning his elbows atop the bar. Cole wasn’t sure how Teddy Green meant this comment. With Teddy Green, it wasn’t easy to tell what he was thinking.

  “Comanches are a fearsome bunch,” Harve said, hoisting his gin rickey. “Here’s to them poor sons-of-bitches!”

  Teddy Green nodded and said: “Don’t toast them too hardily, Mister Ledbettor, they killed plenty of Texas Rangers and a lot of other folks as well, before accepting their medicine.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harve said. “They were a fearsome bunch.”

  Harve left them standing at the bar and went over and plowed through the knot of spectators around Cody’s table and began slapping him on the back and calling him Cuz. It took Cody by surprise, then he recognized the old drover, and whooped and cleared a place for him at the table, ordering a fresh round of drinks.

  “You want to join your friends,” Teddy Green said, “go ahead. I’m thinking of taking a walk, getting some fresh air.”

  “No,” Cole said, “I think I’ll grab some shut-eye. I’d like to get an early start in the morning.”

  Teddy Green nodded, shifted his weight within his greatcoat, and walked out the front door. Cole headed for his room, knowing that Harve and Bill Cody would be up most of the night, drinking and telling grandiose stories, each of them slightly envious of the other’s position—Harve wanting to be widely known, and Cody wanting to be wealthy.

  As for John Henry Cole, he just wanted to find one woman. It didn’t seem like a lot to want in a world full of wanting.

  He was asleep when Harve pounded on his door and shouted: “Teddy Green’s just killed a preacher!”

  Rain hit the window and Cole thought: Good god damn, what else can go wrong?

  Chapter Nine

  Cole followed Harve to the bad part of town—the red-light district of cribs and bagnios. Every town had a bad side and Ogallala was no exception. Whores and pimps and dope fiends lurked in the shadows, men who would crack your skull with a lead sap while their women would pluck you like a chicken.

  “What the hell was Teddy Green doing in this end of town?” Cole asked Harve, who only shrugged and said: “Same as any man I expect, looking for some comfort.”

  The odd thing for Cole was that Teddy Green hadn’t struck him as the sort of man who would find his comfort in a red-light district.

  A sizable crowd had gathered outside a false-fronted building; torches flared and sputtered under a soft rain. There on the porch, looking as dead as a Nebraska winter, was sure enough a man dressed like a preacher, half his jaw shot away, blood staining his white collar. He was staring at the rain, but he wasn’t feeling any of it.

  Teddy Green was there and so were three deputies with shotguns aimed at him.

  “Man, ’Creek ain’t gonna like it you shot a preacher in his town,” one of the deputies said to Teddy Green just as Cole and Harve walked up. “’Specially this preacher.”

  Teddy Green’s shoulder rig hung empty. Cole saw his pistol in the belt of one of the deputies. Green shot him a glance when they parted the crowd and stopped just shy of the porch where the dead preacher lay.

  “He’s a preacher, then I’m Abe Lincoln,” Teddy Green said to the deputy.

  “You don’t understand, mister,” the deputy said. “That feller ain’t only a preacher, he’s the city marshal’s son-in-law.”

  “What happened here, Green?” Cole said.

  “That man,” Teddy Green said, pointing at the dead man, “is no preacher, or if he is, he wasn’t when I knew him. He’s wanted in San Antonio for murder and robbery.”

  “What in hell are you talking about?” the deputy said. He seemed to be the only one of the three that could, or would, talk. They were, all three, jug-eared and slack-jawed with their hats tugged down low. “That there is the Reverend Elihue Morral, Bittercreek Newcomb’s daughter’s husband.”

  Harve Ledbettor started to ask a question when a stir swept through the crowd and a man well over three hundred pounds pushed his way to the forefront. He stopped just short of the body, looked at it, and spat.

  “This the son-of-a-bitch that did it?” he s
aid to the talking deputy while nodding at Teddy Green.

  “Yes, sir. That’s him. Me and Hedge and Roy were just next door when we heard the shooting. Saw this man standing over Elihue with a smoking pistol in his hand, Elihue’s jaw blowed off. That’s some of it over there in the mud puddle.”

  The big man turned and saw the chunk of bloody flesh and bone floating greasily in the rainwater, then turned back to Teddy Green. “That there’s my baby’s husband, mister. And he’s a god-damn’ preacher to boot! You double-sinned tonight.”

  “He’s a wanted man in Texas for murder and rape,” Teddy Green said flatly.

  “Well, you know something, you dandified son-of-a-bitch? This here ain’t Texas and you ain’t the law. I am. And what we do with murdering sons-of-bitches is hang ’em from the hanging tree.” He pointed off toward a large cottonwood a hundred paces distant that stood like a lone sentinel, like a tree that was waiting to hang its next man. “Get a rope!”

  Cole knew Bittercreek Newcomb from down in Oklahoma Territory where Cole had spent a year working out of Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith. How a man like him had ever gone from illegal whiskey peddling and petty thievery in the Territories to city marshal of Ogallala was a mean trick—a big, tall bastard with a dark face and curly black hair who looked like he wouldn’t know what it was like to crack a smile. Maybe all that whiskey peddling and crime he pulled off in the Territories had made him a sour and bitter man, like his name.

  “No rope,” Cole said, and that spun Newcomb halfway around on his heels. Cole already had the self-cocker drawn and aimed at the center button on Bittercreek’s shirt. “This man’s a Texas Ranger,” he said, nodding toward Teddy Green. “And if he says that dead preacher was wanted down in San Antone for crimes, then I believe him. You best, too.”