by Matt Braun
Belle plumped up both pillows and wedged them in behind him. McCluskie eased him back, so that he rested against the pillows in a half-sitting position. Feeling somewhat drained themselves, they just stood there watching him, uncertain what to do next.
Suddenly the boy’s lids fluttered and they found themselves staring into the blue eyes again. Only this time they were clear, if not fully alert. The youngster’s lips moved in a weak whisper. “Am I back in the hospital?”
McCluskie exchanged puzzled glances with Belle, then shook his head. “You’re in a hotel room, kid. We brought you here from the train depot.”
The boy closed his eyes and for a minute they thought he was asleep. Then he was looking at them again. Focusing at last on the Irishman. “You the one that clobbered me?”
McCluskie nodded sheepishly. “Thought you was somebody else.”
The kid’s mouth parted in a sallow grin. “You got a good punch.”
McCluskie smiled. The button had plenty of sand, even flat on his back. “What’s your name, bucko? Got any family we could get word to?”
“Just me. Nobody else.”
“Yeah, but what’s your name?”
“Kinch.” The boy’s eyelids went heavy, drooping, and slowly closed. “Kinch Riley.”
The words came in a soft whisper as the laudanum again took hold. Breathing somewhat easier, he drifted off into a deep sleep.
They watched him for a long while, saying nothing. Oddly enough, though they hadn’t touched since Belle entered the room, they felt a closeness unlike anything in the past. Almost as if the boy, in some curious way, had bridged a gap in time and space.
At last McCluskie grunted, and his voice was a shade huskier than usual. “Belle, something damned queer happened to me tonight. I’ve been in brawls, knife fights, shootouts—and afterward I always remembered every minute of it. Every little detail. But tonight—after I slugged the kid—it’s all fuzzy. Just comes back to me in bits and snatches. That’s one for the books, isn’t it?”
She put her arm around his waist and laid her head on his shoulder. “Mister, would you buy a girl a drink?”
The Irishman pulled her close, warmed by her nearness and the scent from her hair. But his eyes were still on the kid.
Then it struck him. The name.
Riley.
Sweet Jesus on the Cross! No wonder he was a gutsy little scrapper.
The kid was Irish.
CHAPTER 6
MCCLUSKIE RODE past the stockyards, letting the sorrel mare set her own pace. Now that they were headed back to the livery stable she was full of ginger, apparently cured of her tendency to balk and fight the reins. Several times throughout the day he’d seriously considered the possibility that he had rented a mule disguised as a horse. Along toward midday he started wishing for a pair of the roweled spurs favored by Texans, and would have gladly sunk them to the haft in the mare’s flanks. Even coming back from Wichita the hammerhead had acted just like a woman. Wanted her own way and pitched a regular fit when she didn’t get it.
The Irishman had ridden out of Newton early that morning on the pretext of inspecting the track crew west of town. While he could have hitched a ride on a switch-engine, he let it drop at the hotel and again at the stables that he felt like a hard day in the saddle. Just to work out the kinks and melt off a bit of the lard from city living. The truth was, he had an absolute loathing for horses. Having served under Sherman during the late war, his rump had stayed galled the better part of three years. Upon being mustered out he had sworn off horses as a mode of transportation for the remainder of his life.
Still, renting a horse was the only practical dodge he could think of for a flying trip to Wichita. It had to be done in one day so as not to arouse the suspicions of Spivey and his cronies. Heading west, he had crossed Sand Creek, passed the stockyard, and kept on a couple of miles farther before turning back southeast. Except for the iron-jawed mare, the twenty miles to Wichita had proved uneventful. There he had quickly hunted down Meade and Grieffenstein, and managed to gain entrance to their offices under an assumed name.
The promoters had been elated when he revealed his identity and the purpose of his call. Although deeply enmeshed in a financial conspiracy with the Santa Fe, they had been kept virtually in the dark by the brass. They knew only that someone would be sent to Newton, and that when the time seemed ripe, they would be contacted.
Some six months past the Santa Fe had entered into an agreement with the partnership of Meade and Grieffenstein. They were to organize a railroad between Wichita and Newton, and float a county bond issue for its construction. Once it was operating, the Santa Fe would buy them out at a tidy profit. The pact was struck and now the vote on the bond issue was less than a month away. The partners had the political muscle to control the southern townships, Wichita in particular, but the upper part of Sedgwick County still had them worried. Unless the referendum carried, the Wichita & Southwestern railroad would simply evaporate in a puff of dust, and McCluskie’s message brought with it a measure of reassurance.
His orders were to establish himself in Newton working undercover as long as practical, and to influence the vote of the northern townships to whatever degree possible. Wherever divisive tactics would work, he was to drive a wedge between the town leaders, splitting them on the bond issue. The sporting crowd, with whom he enjoyed a certain reputation, was to be cultivated on the sly. Hopefully, their ballots could be controlled in a block and provide the swing vote in Newton itself. Further than that, he was instructed to give the promoters any help they might request. But within certain limits. Money and muscle were not included in the bargain.
Retracing his steps across the buff Kansas prairie, McCluskie had hit the tracks a few miles west of the stockyards and turned the mare toward Newton. So far as anyone would know, he had spent the day in the Santa Fe camp, performing some errand for the head office brass. Which was stretching the truth only in terms of time and place. The errand had been real enough, if not precisely as reported.
Now, entering the outskirts of town, he was reminded again of the Wichita promoters. They were a shifty pair, well versed in the rules of the game, and the Irishman had come away with the impression that they still had a few dazzlers left to be played. After years of rubbing elbows with grifters and bunco artists, he had an instinct for such things. Meade and Grieffenstein were about to sound the death knell on lively little Newton.
Thinking about it as he passed the depot, McCluskie grunted with disgust. All of the skulduggery and underhanded shenanigans left him with a sour taste in his mouth. While he could play the game well enough, it went against the grain. Yet, when it got down to brass tacks, his assignment in Newton was hardly a new role. In a moment of sardonic reflection, it occurred to him that his life had been little more than a lie since the day he headed west.
After the war he had returned to New York, colder and leaner, a man brutalized by the bloodbath that had ended at Appomattox. But he quickly discovered that not all of the casualties had taken place on the battlefield. Only months before, while he rode in the vanguard of Sherman’s march to the sea, his wife and small son had been killed in a street riot. Somehow, in those last frenetic days of the war, the army had failed to notify him of their deaths. The homecoming he had dreamed of and longed for during the fighting became instead a ghoulish nightmare. In a single instant, standing dumbstruck before his landlady in Hell’s Kitchen, he became both a widower and a bereaved father. Kathleen and Brian, the boy he had never seen, simply ceased to exist.
The blow shook him to the very core of his being. On a hundred killing grounds, from Bull Run to Savannah, he had seen men slaughtered. Grown cold and callous to the sight of death. Accounted for a faceless legion of Johnny Rebs himself. Killing them grimly and efficiently, unmoved toward the end by the bloody handiwork of his saber. Thoroughly accustomed to watching men fall before his gun, screaming and splattered with gore like squealing pigs in a charnel house. But the de
ath of his wife and son left him something less than a man. Cold as a stone, and with scarcely more feeling.
Informed that the riot had occurred at a political rally, he investigated further and unearthed a chilling fact. Kathleen and the boy had been innocent bystanders, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Caught up in a brawl deliberately staged by the ward boss of an opposing faction. It was simply another Irish donnybrook, political rivals battling for control of the ward, except that this time it had claimed the lives of three men. And a woman who happened by with her small son.
That very night McCluskie sought out the ward boss and beat him to death with his fists. Afterward, certain to be charged with murder, he vanished from Hell’s Kitchen and boarded the first train headed west.
The years since had been rewarding after a fashion, for he was not a man to brood over things dead and gone. But the ache, though diminished with time, was still there. For Kathleen, and for the son he had never seen. It was a part of himself that he kept hidden, and seldom saw the light of day. Yet as he passed the depot and reined the mare across the tracks, he was struck by a curious thought.
He wondered if his boy would have been anything like Kinch.
Somehow he hoped so, and just exactly why didn’t seem to matter. It was enough that he might have had a son like the kid. A scrapper who never quit. Never backed off. A boy to make a man proud.
Dismounting in front of the livery stable, McCluskie led the mare inside as the sun settled to earth in a fiery splash of gold. Seth Mabry, the proprietor, looked up from shoeing a horse in the dingy smithy set back against the far wall. When he saw that it was the Irishman, he dropped his rasp and hurried forward, wiping his hands on the heavy leather apron covering his chest and belly.
“Well, Mr. McCluskie. You made a day of it. I was just startin’ to wonder if you was gonna get back in time for supper.”
“Make it a practice never to miss a meal,” McCluskie replied handing over the reins. “Little habit I picked up right after I got weaned.”
Mabry’s stomach jounced with a fat man’s hearty mirth. “Good way to be, Mr. McCluskie. Never was one to pass up a feed myself. Course, there’s them that stays partial to milk even when they’re full growed. If y’know what I mean.”
“Been there myself, Mr. Mabry. Nothin’ suits better than going back to the well when your throat gets dry.”
“Now ain’t that a fact!” The blacksmith squashed a horsefly buzzing about the hairy bristles of his arm. “Say, I didn’t even think to ask. Hope Sally gave you that workout you was lookin’ for. She’s got a lot of sass when she gets to feelin’ her oats.”
McCluskie snorted and shot the mare a dark look. “Sass don’t hardly fit the ticket. She’s got a jaw like a cast-iron stove. ’Stead of a quirt you ought to give people a bung starter when you rent her out.”
“Just like a woman, ain’t it, Mr. McCluskie? Never seen one yet that wasn’t bound and determined to make a monkey of a man. Part of bein’ female, I guess. Now, you take my wife—”
“Thanks all the same, but I’ll pass. Hell, I had enough trouble just handlin’ your horse.”
The blacksmith was still laughing when McCluskie went through the door and turned down Main Street. Striding along the boardwalk, he almost collided with Randolph Muse in front of the Cattlemen’s Exchange. The judge came tearing out of the bank as if his pants were on fire, and McCluskie had to haul up short to keep from bowling him over. It occurred to the Irishman that Muse never seemed to walk. His normal gait was sort of a hitching lope, like a centipede racing back to its hideout.
“Afternoon, Mr. McCluskie.” The judge squinted against the sun, grinning, and his store-bought teeth gave off a waxy sheen. “Looks like you had a hard day’s ride somewhere.”
McCluskie swatted his shirt, raising a small cloud of dust. “Yeah, rode out to have a looksee at the track gang west of town.”
“Everything proceeding smoothly, I trust.”
“Right on schedule, Judge. Laying ’em down regular as clockwork.”
“Good! Good!” They walked on a few paces together and Muse rolled his eyes around in a sidewise glance. “Don’t suppose you heard any word about our competition? That Wichita bunch, I mean.”
“Can’t say as I did, your honor. Most likely they’re keepin’ their secrets to themselves.”
“Well keep your ear to the ground, my boy. Ear to the ground! We need all the information we can get on those rascals.”
“I’ll do that very thing, Judge. Fellow never knows where he’ll turn up an interestin’ little tidbit.”
“Precisely. Couldn’t have said it better myself.” Muse took to the street and angled off toward the Lone Star. “I’d ask you to join me in a drink, but I’ve got a matter of business to discuss with Bob. Say, how is that lad of yours doing? Up and around, is he?”
“Gettin’ friskier every day. I figure he’ll be ready to try his legs just any time now.”
“Excellent. Bring him around to see me. Sounds like a boy with real grit.”
Muse turned away with a wave of his hand, kicking up little spurts of dust as he churned along. The Irishman chuckled softly to himself, struck again by the wonder of wee men obsessed with themselves and their wee plans. Passing Horner’s Store, he stepped off the boardwalk and headed toward the tracks.
Newt Hansberry waved from the depot platform, but McCluskie merely returned the wave and kept going. This was one time he simply couldn’t be bothered with the gossipy station master, or the Santa Fe for that matter. He’d earned his pay for the day and had a sore butt to prove it. The whole lot of them could swing by their thumbs for one night. It was high time he cut the wolf loose and had himself a little fling. Maybe even resurrect that card game with Dandy John and the boys.
The thought came and went with no real conviction. Tonight he’d be doing the same thing he had done every night for the last week. Sitting up with the kid. Just jawboning and swapping yarns till it was bedtime and he could sneak off for a quick one over at the Gold Room.
Not that he begrudged the kid those evenings. Truth was, he sort of enjoyed it. The button had more spunk than a three-legged bulldog, and oddly enough, he’d never felt so proud of anybody in his life. Judge Muse had called it grit, but that didn’t hardly fit the ticket. The kid had enough sand in his craw to put them all in the shade. With a little to spare.
Doc Boyd had declared it nothing short of remarkable. The way the kid had perked up and started regaining his strength. Almost as if he had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps. Somehow refused to knuckle under. The sawbones had put a fancy handle on it—the instinct to survive—but McCluskie knew better. It was just plain old Irish moxie, with a streak of stubbornness thrown in on the side. The Gaelic in a man didn’t let go without a fight, and Kinch Riley had been standing at the head of the line when they passed out spunk.
Already the color had returned to his face, and he’d lost that skin and bones look. Mostly due to Belle stuffing him full of soup and broth and great pitchers of fresh milk. Every day his spirits improved a notch or two, and he had even started talking about getting out of bed. Doc Boyd had put the quietus on that fast enough, leastways for the time being. But one thing was plain as hell. That kid wouldn’t let himself be bound to a bed much longer. Not unless they strapped him down and hid his boots.
Thinking about it, McCluskie had to give most of the credit to Belle. She spent the better part of each day with the kid, returning to her house only when it was time for the evening rush to start. Along with hot food and fresh milk she also dispensed a peck of good cheer. Her sense of humor was sort of on the raw side, but she had a way of joshing the kid that made him light up like a polished apple. Maybe it was just Belle’s maternal instinct showing through, but whatever it was, it worked. The kid lapped it up as fast as she could dish it out, and it was her gentle nudging that had finally started him talking.
At first, he had been reluctant to say much about himself. Just his name an
d the fact that he had no kin. But day by day Belle had wormed her way into his confidence, and when he finally let go it turned out to be a real tearjerker. Even Belle had got that misty look around the eyes, and a couple of times had to interrupt so she could blow her nose.
The kid made it short and sweet, just the bare bones. His folks were from Chicago and had been killed in a fire shortly after he turned seventeen. Afterward, working in the stockyards, he had heard about the Kansas cowtowns and decided to come west. His coughing spells got worse, though, riding the rods. He didn’t think much about it at first, because he’d had similar attacks off and on over the past couple of years. But train smoke evidently didn’t set well with his lungs and in Kansas City he ended up in a charity ward. The doctors there were a friendly bunch, but they hadn’t pulled any punches. They told him what he was up against, and just about what he could expect. Once he was back on his feet, he’d skipped out before anybody got ideas about putting him in a home somewhere. He figured he might as well see the elephant while he had time and he started west again. Things got a little hazy after that, except for being chased and the one haymaker he’d thrown in the Newton rail yard. The next thing he knew, he woke up in Mike’s bed.
Later, the Irishman talked it over with Belle and they decided that it was a little more than the luck of the draw. The kid’s cards were being dealt from a cold deck, and it was going to be a rough hand to play out alone. McCluskie had surprised himself by volunteering to look after the kid. Just till he got his pins back under him.
Belle wasn’t the least bit surprised, though. Not any more. She had laughed and said that it merely confirmed her suspicions. Beneath his stony composure he was all whipped cream and vanilla frosting. In other words, Irish to the core, and a born sucker when it came to siding with an underdog. Then she’d taken him up to her room and come very near to ruining him. When he finally crawled out of her place next morning, he’d felt limp as a dishrag. But good. Restored somehow. Better than he had felt in more than a year.