“Perfectly. I’ll keep the guns in the bags from now on,” Mosely said.
Frank worried the bone of contention a little longer. “Wrap them in an oily cloth and pass them down to your grandchildren,” he said. “Don’t be tempted to shoot them, that’s a good way for a pilgrim to invite disaster, maybe shoot off one of his toes.”
“Oily cloth, don’t shoot, disaster, and give them to my grandchildren. Got it,” Mosely said, blinking behind his glasses.
Frank shook his head. “I’ll never understand how rubes like you who don’t have the sense to spit downwind manage to survive on the frontier.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Kate Kerrigan was not impressed by Annie Oakley. She thought the girl’s square chin made her look mannish, as did her mannerisms and strident Yankee voice. The buckskin dresses Bill Cody made her wear did nothing for her and only accentuated her boy’s figure. Nor, it seemed, was Annie particularly enamored of Kate, eyeing her blue silk dress with its plunging neckline and huge bustle and the tiny hat balanced on top of her piled-up hair with vague disapproval. After exchanging a few pleasantries, none of them sincere, Kate was glad when the girl said she had pressing business elsewhere and left Kate to her leisurely promenade around Bill Cody’s vast tent city.
It seemed that everyone was busy. Cowboys mended tack or exercised horses, and maintenance men touched up the paint of the show’s battle-scarred stagecoach and wagons and made repairs as necessary. Men with steaming buckets and stained shovels patrolled the restless buffalo enclosure and others lifted, carried, or pushed and pulled boxes, grain sacks, and other burdens like ants in a stepped-on nest. The noise was constant and loud, a blacksmith’s anvil clanged, human voices, hoarse from shouting, mingled with animal sounds, and somewhere one of the brass band’s musicians practiced on a trombone. The entire fifteen-acre area smelled of manure, aged canvas, trampled grass, cigar smoke, and the occasional drift of perfume from the women’s tents.
Kate was enthralled and her shining emerald eyes missed nothing.
“Mr. Cody, what in the world is that delicious smell?” Kate said. She’d raised her parasol against the sun and the fringe around the rim cast a lacy pattern of light and shadow across her beautiful cheekbones. “I declare, it’s making me quite hungry.”
“Pea soup, dear lady, the specialty of Mr. Random Clark, formerly of Her Majesty’s Royal Navy and now my chief cook,” Bill said. “When Random was a navy cook aboard the ironclad HMS Invincible he had the great honor of serving a bowl of pea soup to the German Kaiser Wilhelm the First. The grateful monarch declared it to be the best soup he’d ever tasted and awarded Random the Prussian Service to the Monarch Medal, third class. Needless to say Random is very proud of both his soup and his medal.” Bill took Kate’s elbow. “Would you care to sample a bowl?”
Kate shook her head. “No. I fear I’d be imposing.”
Bill, never one to pass up the chance of a sweeping bow, did so and then said, “Dear lady, your imposition would be a sweet distraction. Let us proceed to the dining tent.”
Random Clark was a small, wiry man with a few strands of hair combed across a bald pate, and he walked with a mariner’s rolling gait. His pea soup— he handed Kate the bowl like an angel presenting the Holy Grail to Sir Galahad—tasted even better than it smelled, and Kate decided that if she ever had a Kerrigan Medal third class, she’d award it to the ham bone and dried pea maestro.
* * *
“Yes, it was excellent. I do admire people who can cook, Mr. Cody,” Kate Kerrigan said as they continued their tour. “I don’t cook and never have. Throughout my life others have gladly taken that onerous chore from me. Most willingly, I should say, which I always found somewhat surprising. I do bake a fine sponge cake, though. But I’ve told you that already, have I not?”
“Yes you have, dear lady, and I look forward to partaking of that rare delicacy at the first available opportunity.”
“And so you will, as you say, very soon for tea and cake,” Kate said. “Come spring there will be no time for baking, I fear. The Kerrigan Ranch will ship more than ten thousand head of cattle to the Union Stock Yards next year and that means much hard work for everybody.”
“Then we must make my participation in your tea a matter of the utmost priority,” Bill said. He stopped and cupped a hand to his ear. “Hark! Do you hear that?”
Kate listened and her ears picked up a steady thud—thud—thud—
“Do tell, Mr. Cody,” she said. “That is a most singular sound.”
“This way and you’ll see for yourself,” Bill said.
He led Kate past a large storage tent and then they turned into an area of open ground. A young woman wearing a short red skirt, laced corset, black fishnet stockings, and red knee-high boots stood facing a man who had his back to a large wooden wheel painted a bright orange color. A small black boy stood beside the wheel and grinned at Kate. Next to the woman was a folding camp table that bore a large assortment of knives, including some wicked-looking bowies.
Bill Cody bowed and said, “Mrs. Kate Kerrigan, may I introduce you to Miss Ingrid Hult, and yonder pinned against the wheel is her partner Ducking Jim Benson. Ingrid, a Swedish lass from the great state of Kansas, is our knife thrower and Jim is her target.”
“Target? I hope not,” Kate said.
“I throw to miss, Mrs. Kerrigan,” Ingrid said, smiling.
Liking the pretty, blue-eyed girl immediately, Kate said, “Please, call me Kate.”
“Then you must call me Ingrid.”
“May I see a demonstration of your skill?” Kate said.
Bill said, “Ingrid, do you mind?”
“Not at all, Mr. Cody,” the girl said. And then, “Jim, are you ready to duck?”
Benson, a personable young man with a shock of black, unruly hair and an easy grin, looked at Kate and said, “How can I refuse the request from such a beautiful guest?”
Ingrid liked Bill Cody and it showed, probably because he was ahead of his time, paying the women in his show the same wages as the men.
The small black boy fastened straps to Benson’s wrists and legs and then spun the wheel so that the man rotated at a fairly brisk pace.
Ingrid picked up a handful of throwing knives and quickly outlined Benson’s shape, concluding with a blade between his legs an inch under his crotch, calculated to make every man in an audience wince.
After Ingrid turned and dropped a little curtsey, Kate, thrilled, applauded and exclaimed, “Huzzah!”
But a more daring encore followed. The boy removed the knives from the wheel and then set Benson turning again. This time Ingrid used large bowie knives, designed for slashing and sticking, not throwing. But again she effortlessly silhouetted Benson’s slim figure and the one between his thighs made Bill glance at his buckskinned crotch to make sure all his parts were still intact.
Again Kate clapped and her huzzahs were even more enthusiastic. The girl had revealed amazing skill with the knife.
“Kate, would you care to try the wheel?” Ingrid said. “I promise I’ll do my best to miss you.”
Kate smiled and shook her head. “I’d rather not. I think my spinning around on a wheel would be most unseemly. To say nothing of being outright dangerous.”
“Ah, correct on both counts,” Ingrid said. Her eyes were very blue. The black boy brought back the knives, and Ingrid selected one with a beautiful staghorn handle. “This is for you, Kate, a little souvenir of your visit to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.”
Kate was touched, thanked Ingrid profusely, and invited her to the ranch for tea and sponge cake just as soon as she had some spare time. The girl said she would come and was already looking forward to it and then went back to practicing.
* * *
“There’s still more to see, Kate,” Bill Cody said. “If you’d care to continue our little promenade.”
“I declare, I think I’ve had quite enough excitement for one day, Mr. Cody,” Kate said.
“Then I’
ll escort you to your carriage,” Bill said. He smiled, “Perhaps you’ll find some time to practice knife throwing, if one of your servants can be induced to volunteer to be the target.”
Kate laughed. “Trust me, none of my servants will volunteer, but I might be able to talk Frank Cobb into it or one of my sons, though somehow I doubt it.”
CHAPTER NINE
A hundred and twenty miles south of Bill Cody’s encampment lay the ruined Spanish mission of Cristo el Salvador, destroyed by Comanches two decades before Kate Kerrigan and her family entered Texas.
Two men emerged from the sand and brush country riding at a walk on tired horses. Both men looked weary, dusty, and trail-worn, and they stared straight ahead at the mission like pilgrims seeing the Grail. But there was nothing of religion in the minds of Bat Boswell and his brother Sky. They wanted whiskey, food, and a woman if there was one to be had.
Killing the man they hunted would come later.
A Winchester across his chest, Slide McKenzie stood and watched the riders come. A lanky, loose-geared man with eyes the color of swamp mud, McKenzie formed no judgments. The riders could be Texas Rangers or outlaws on the scout. They could be anybody.
When the men were within talking distance McKenzie said, “Howdy boys.” Then as a joke, “Welcome to church.”
The riders drew rein and looked beyond McKenzie to the mission. Three of its walls still stood and almost all of its tile roof, though much damaged in places. The forecourt swarmed with Mexicans, mostly men and children, but a few young women walked back and forth barefooted, their ample hips swaying under long, colorful skirts. The smell of spices and frying meat hung in the air, and the odor of ancient sandstone warming in the noon sun. Bat Boswell’s gaze searched the mission forecourt but he saw no other white men, only the skinny drink of water in front of him with the rifle and long Yankee face.
“We need grub, whiskey if you got it, and maybe a woman,” Boswell said.
McKenzie grinned. “The first two we got aplenty if you’ll substitute mescal for whiskey,” he said. “As for the third, all the women here are married or betrothed.” Bat and his brother exchanged glances and then Sky said, his words flat, “Like that ever troubled us before.”
The riders swung out of the saddle, tall men in canvas slickers. Both had sweeping dragoon mustaches, short-cropped yellow hair, and carried holstered Colts. The Boswell boys were Texans, born to the feud and the reckoning. After an early stint in the bank-robbing profession they became lawmen in several cow towns but now worked as guns for hire. The brothers were drinking buddies with John Wesley Hardin and had killed men in the vicious Sutton-Taylor scrap. For a spell they ran with Wild Bill Longley and that hard crowd, but Bill and Sky never could get along and their association had ended less than amicably.
Between them Bat and Sky had gunned nineteen white men. A pair of fine-looking fellows as they were, the Boswell brothers had time after time proved themselves to be brutal thugs and pitiless killers.
“Name’s Slide McKenzie,” the lanky man said.
“Means nothing to me,” Bat said. “I’m Bat Boswell and this is my brother Sky.”
“Right pleased to make your acquaintance,” McKenzie said.
“No, you’re not,” Bat said. “And I don’t blame you none.”
McKenzie stepped to the side to let the men and their horses pass, but then he said to Bat’s broad back, “I don’t want no trouble.”
Boswell turned his head, grinning, and said, “Then stay the hell out of our way.”
“Just sayin’ that I want . . . no trouble . . .” McKenzie said, but he was talking into dead air.
* * *
The Boswell brothers stopped and surveyed the crowded plaza in front of the mission. “Plenty of señoritas, seems like,” Sky said. “Some of them are pretty enough, I guess.”
Bat nodded. “And señoras.” He smiled. “A woman can come later. We’ll eat and have a drink first.”
Near Bat, and his reason for stopping, a Mexican couple and their three children sat at a makeshift table and had begun to share a meal of fried beef and peppers and tortillas. The woman looked to be fifty but was probably in her early twenties, made old before her time by poverty and grindingly hard work. She held a tortilla in her hand, filled it with meat and peppers, and made ready to hand it to her husband, a skinny little peon who couldn’t have weighed more than eighty pounds.
Bat intercepted the tortilla and snatched it from the woman’s hand. He nodded in Sky’s direction. “Make another for him.”
The señora didn’t know a word of English, but Boswell’s meaning was clear. Without a sound, her face impassive, she piled meat and peppers onto another tortilla and handed it to Sky. There was very little left in the bowl when she finished. Her husband stared, shocked, at his family’s food that was now vanishing down the throats of the two gringo gunmen and he jumped to his feet, yelling his anger. The Mexican’s name was Sebastiono. He was tiny but he was game . . . . and he was a dead man.
Bat Boswell stopped chewing, his mouth full of beef, and he stared at the enraged little peon for several long moments before he drew his Colt and shot him in the chest. The .45 bullet punched two huge holes in Sebastian’s frail body, entrance and exit, and he fell dead without a sound.
Sky Boswell glanced at the dead man and said, “Bat, what the hell was that about?”
“Beats me,” Bat said, holstering his revolver. “I guess he was trying to impress his woman.”
Sky shook his head. “What a damned fool.” He looked briefly at the Mexican’s wife and children, who’d thrown themselves on his body, then spat out the food in his mouth. “This grub tastes like sawdust. Let’s go find mescal.”
Slide McKenzie stepped beside the Boswell brothers. He had his Winchester in his hands and a worried expression on his face. He looked around at the growing crowd of hostile of Mexicans and said, “You boys better come with me.”
Bat drew his gun. “The greasers want to step over their own dead?”
“They just might,” McKenzie said. “Come with me into the mission.” Then, “There’s been enough killing here for one day. I need these people and a heap more like them.”
Sky Boswell grinned. “Bat, you want to drop a few? Calm them down some.”
Bat rubbed his stubbled chin, his eyes on the crowd that was slowly shuffling closer like a stalking animal. Most of the men had knives and those that didn’t carried clubs of one kind or another. The smell of gunsmoke and rising dust hung in the air.
“Get into the mission,” McKenzie said. “Bullets won’t calm them but I can.”
“Sky, we’ll do as he says,” Bat said. “Damn it, we can’t kill them all.”
McKenzie smiled, “Wise move, gentlemen,” he said.
“Go to hell,” Bat Boswell said.
CHAPTER TEN
“These are my own personal quarters,” Slide McKenzie said, a note of pride in his voice. “This was the study of the first abbot, Ademar de la Cerda. He was murdered by Comanches when the mission was burned in 1767 and he’s now a saint.”
“He lived in a pigsty,” Bat Boswell said, looking around him.
He grabbed the bottle of mescal and poured for himself and his brother. McKenzie had an earthenware cup on the table in front of him but Bat ignored it.
“Is that locked?” he said, nodding in the direction of the ancient door set into the crude brick wall to his right.
“Yes it’s locked. Probably hasn’t been opened in a hundred years,” McKenzie said.
“So the only way the Mexicans can come at us is through the main door in front of me, huh?”
“Yes. That’s the only way, and as you can see, the roof above us is solid.”
“Good. Then if we need to we can pile the greasers up in the doorway.”
“They won’t attack,” McKenzie said. “I told them that if you were harmed I would not lead them north.” He smiled, revealing bad teeth. “They think I’m some kind of Moses who’ll take t
hem to the Promised Land.”
“You?” Sky Boswell said, contempt souring his face. “You ain’t Moses. You ain’t nothing.”
“Maybe so, but the Mexicans don’t think I’m nothing,” McKenzie said. “They’ll make me thousands, a fortune. Study on that for a spell.”
“You’re full of crap,” Sky said.
“Hold on,” his brother said. “I want to hear him out. How can a bunch of raggedy-assed greasers make you a fortune?”
“Real easily, and you can share if’n you throw in with me,” McKenzie said. “I may need a couple of guns to back my play.”
“Bat, we’re here to kill a man, remember?” Sky said. “We got priorities.”
“Who’s the man?” McKenzie said. “Anybody I might know?”
“His name is Josiah Mosely,” Bat said. “You ever hear of a gun by that name?”
McKenzie shook his head. “Can’t say as I have. He do wrong by you?”
“He killed a cousin of ours up in the Brokeoff Mountains county of the New Mexico Territory,” Bat said. “Gal that owns a saloon that way says Mosely took off in a hot-air balloon.”
“What the hell is that?” McKenzie said.
“It’s a balloon full of hot air, just like you,” Sky said, grinning.
Bat said, “It flies in the air and can carry a man far. The gal we spoke to says Boswell headed south for Texas.” The gunman’s right hand white-knuckled around his cup. “Our cousin went by the name Jesse Tobin. He wasn’t much, but he was kin, and there must be a reckoning.”
“Hell, man, he could be anywhere,” McKenzie said. “A flying man like that.”
“The woman told us the balloon was damaged and wouldn’t fly far,” Bat said. “She said it would come down in West Texas.”
McKenzie grinned, or tried to. He had a way of stretching his mouth and then allowing it snap back into place like a contracting rubber band.
“If the flying machine came down to earth in West Texas, it landed on the Kerrigan ranch,” he said.
Hate Thy Neighbor Page 5