Rides a Stranger

by Bill Brooks

  “Young,” I said.

  “She was pregnant, that was the very worst of it. I lost them both, Annalee and our child.”

  “I’d think you’d want to kill the men who did this,” I said.

  “I do,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  “How so?”

  “It goes against everything I ever believed in, everything I ever spoke out against.”

  “I was right then, you are in the God business.”

  “Was,” he said. “I haven’t been for a long time now. And I doubt even if I wanted to be, that I’ve fallen too far from the vine to be redeemed.”

  “Redeemed,” I said. “I like that word.”

  He went on to tell me how he had been a preacher and had come to live among the Quakers and met his wife and fell in love with her on first sight.

  “I’d been all my young life a hell-raiser till I found the Lord,” he confided. “I was saved, born again, and found my own true love all within a couple of years. I was given a taste of the promised land—in her I found everything, including my true self. Then these men came along and destroyed it all and I went back to being what I was before. And now I don’t know what I am…”

  He sighed and drained what was in his cup and set it aside.

  “I am lost,” he said.

  I felt niggardly for having been so complaining about my own circumstances now that I’d heard his.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I knew to say.

  “So am I, Jim. So am I.”

  That night I had dreams of Antonia, only she had the face of the preacher’s wife, those innocent eyes staring at me, and I heard the thunder of hooves and saw a rider bearing down on me. Death riding a horse. I heard a woman’s scream and awoke sitting up, my pistol in my hand ready to shoot the ghosts that plagued me. But no one was there and my heart hammered inside my chest, the broken rib a painful reminder of the recent past and why I was out here now.

  I lay down again and stared up at the stain of stars. All man’s bloody history had been witnessed by those same stars, and all that was yet to be done would be witnessed by them as well.

  The next day we rose and rode on to Refugio without talking because it didn’t feel like there was anything worth saying that hadn’t already been said. Nothing we needed to share about what haunted us.

  We were just two men riding to an uncertain fate, pursued by bad memories, chasing uncertain things.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The town was as I remembered it: just a town like any other, without any sign of the violent men that it harbored.

  “Well,” I said to Tom, “I guess this is where I bid you farewell—in keeping with the drama of it all, of course.”

  His smile was slight. “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “You, those men you intend to kill or use real bad.”

  “Yeah, I know, pretty poor odds, and I shouldn’t do to them what they did to me because it will only make me just like them, and all that.”

  “That’s true enough. But I can’t let you face them alone.”

  “Meaning?”

  He reached back into his saddlebags and came out with a double rig and strapped it around his waist. Two-gun men were rare in the West, mostly a creation of dime novels.

  “Those for real?” I said.

  They had ivory handles with carvings of eagles and were nickel-plated—like something you’d see in a Wild West show.

  “’Thirty-six Navies,” he said. “I bought them from a man named Utter in Colorado who said they belonged to Wild Bill, that he was trying to raise money for a headstone for Bill. They’re real enough.”

  When he saw the uncertain look on my face he took one out—the left one—and handed it to me. I inspected it and it was the fanciest damn gun I’d ever seen anywhere. J.B. Hickok was engraved on the back strap.

  “I bought them thinking I’d find the men who did what they did to her and kill them. But later I realized that she wouldn’t have wanted that. She would rather have sacrificed her own life than that of another human being.”

  “But you didn’t get rid of them. Why?”

  He shrugged. “I guess you’re lucky I didn’t,” is all he said.

  “And you aim to do what, exactly?”

  “Help you.”

  “You wouldn’t take revenge on your wife’s killers but you’d help me?”

  “I wasn’t able to find them, for one thing,” he said. “I tried. I guess it wasn’t part of my destiny to do so. I realized that if I kept trying, it would have gone against Annalee’s wishes, and against whatever my fate is meant to be. It would have been futile, so I quit trying. But you’re right here and you could use some help and I’m right here and I’m able to help and maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do. Least, that’s what it feels like I’m supposed to do.”

  The town looked peaceful. It was just past noon.

  “We never do good just for good’s sake,” I said. “Isn’t that what you told me the other night?”

  “No, we never do,” he said.

  “You ever fire those things, ever shoot at a man or had one shoot at you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, I’ve been in a couple of gunfights,” I said. “It’s something that will take your breath away if you live to tell about it.”

  He sat looking toward the town, down the wide main drag. Then he turned his head and looked at me.

  “I think that our entire lives are laid out for us from the moment we take our first breath until the moment we take our last,” he said. “If it’s meant you do this thing and it’s meant that I try and help you, then nothing we say or do is going to change what the outcome of this day will be. Now if you just want to sit here and keep talking about it, that’s fine with me.”

  “I never did meet nobody like you,” I said.

  He simply turned his gaze toward the town again.

  We rode down the center of the street and I spotted the jail to my left and I said, “That’s it there” and we reined in and got down and I pulled the pistol out and held it in my right hand down alongside my leg and Tom pulled both his and followed me in. We went in fast.

  The kid who’d cuffed me was reading a Bible—a small black one—and he looked up and I said, “You so much as even think about going for your gun I’m going to send you quick to heaven and you’ll learn firsthand what it is like and you won’t have to read about it no more. You understand?”

  He nodded and looked at Tom, who had both those shiny pistols aimed at him, and even I was surprised at how steady Tom held them.

  “Where’s your boss and the other deputy?” I said.

  “Eating their lunch,” he said.

  “I want to know what you did with the woman.”

  “Sheriff Bike put her on the flyer back to Coffin Flats with a guard.”

  “Now that was a mistake,” I said and stepped forward and cracked the butt of my Thunderer down across his hat, caving it in and knocking him half out of his chair. He let out a painful whoop and looked like he was about to cry.

  “Get on back to that cell,” I said.

  He did as I ordered and marched back and I found a ring of keys hanging on a peg and locked him inside, and Tom came back there and handed him his Bible through the bars.

  “You might want to study on it careful, what it says in there about doing unto others, son,” he said.

  “I ought to give you as much chance as you gave me and shoot you where you stand for leaving me to die out there,” I said.

  He rubbed the knot I’d put on his head and looked at his caved-in hat.

  “I just do what I’m ordered,” he said.

  “You ought to learn better,” Tom said. “Suppose you’d been ordered to fry children, or something?”

  The kid deputy blinked. “Huh?”

  “What do you want to do now?” Tom said to me.

  “Why don’t we just wait for them to come back from
lunch?”

  He shrugged. “It’s your show,” he said.

  We went out into the other room where the kid had been at the desk and stood by the window looking out onto the street.

  “Fry children,” I said. “That’s quite an image.”

  “Maybe it will be one that will stick with him for a while next time he’s given an indecent order.”

  “I reckon maybe it will.”

  We stood around maybe thirty minutes or so.

  “That’s him, Joe Bike,” I said, seeing the lawman and his deputy coming down the walk on the other side of the street. Bike was picking at his teeth with a thumbnail, his deputy was walking with his head down, his hands stuffed in his pockets. They stopped briefly to talk to another man, then came angling across the street to the jail. We were waiting for them, just inside the door, our pistols out.

  “Come on in and close the door,” I said.

  Joe Bike didn’t seem all that surprised to see me but his deputy did.

  “How—” the deputy started to say.

  “Ease your hardware out and lay it on the desk,” I said.

  “Or what?” Joe Bike said. “You forget I’m a goddamn sheriff?”

  “Soon to be ex, or the late, take your pick if you don’t do what I told you,” I said. He looked at Tom Twist, at those pretty guns Tom was aiming at him and his deputy.

  “Horace!” he called.

  The one in the back said, “Yessir, I’m back here.”

  “I did you a favor is what I did,” Joe Bike said. “I could have just as easily killed you and dropped you in a shallow grave and nobody would have known the difference.”

  “Yeah, you could have, but you didn’t. Your mistake. Now take those guns and put them on that desk.”

  They eased them out and set them there.

  “Where’s my horse, saddle, and rifle?” I said. “And where’s the money you stole off me?”

  “Sold your horse and saddle and guns at auction to cover expenses,” the lawman said. “And you’re a liar about the money. I ain’t no thief.”

  “Yes you are,” I said and hit him square in the face—one short hard punch I’d imagined throwing for days—that knocked him back against the wall and cut his cheekbone open like I’d sliced it with a razor.

  Tom stood steady with his pistols.

  Joe Bike swiped at the blood running down his face, saw it on his knuckles when he looked.

  “You leave a man afoot like you did me is the same thing as murdering him,” I said. “I’m a man who believes in squaring things.” Some of his blood dripped down onto the toe of his boot and the floorboards.

  “Put that expense money and my stole money on the desk.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, like I’ve got it,” he said.

  “You better have it.”

  I thumbed back the hammer on the Colt.

  He began to fumble at his pockets until he found his wallet and brought that out and took what was in there out and dropped it next to the guns. I gave a quick count. Forty dollars. I put it in my pocket.

  “Now you,” I said to the deputy. He took out his money and looked at it then set it down on the desk. Thirty dollars.

  “My month’s pay,” he said.

  I had no sympathy for him and took his money too.

  “Now what you stole off me.”

  Joe Bike hesitated again and I raked him across the face with the barrel of the gun and opened another cut wider than the first one and this time he dropped to his knees, stunned.

  “I can keep this up if that’s what you’re wondering,” I said.

  “You’ll never make it out of this town alive,” he said, wiping at his lacerated face.

  “Then neither will you.”

  “Why don’t we just kill them all right now and get it over with,” Tom said. I wasn’t believing what I was hearing coming from his mouth.

  The two lawmen swallowed down whatever brave they still had in them.

  “Okay!” Bike said. “I’ll give you your money…”

  He stood up shakily and opened the bottom left hand drawer of his desk and took out the familiar paper envelope. “It’s mostly all there,” he said.

  “Put it on the desk and step away,” I ordered.

  “I still think we should just finish it here and now,” Tom said. I glanced at him and saw he was looking at the lawmen like they weren’t even there.

  “Hold up goddamn it!” Bike protested. “You got what you came for.”

  I put the money into my pocket along with the rest.

  “Walk on back to the cell,” I said. I unlocked the door and they went in like trained puppies and I locked it on them again.

  “You all know who this man is?” I said.

  They looked at Tom and you could see they were trying to put his face with a name.

  “John Wesley Hardin,” I said. “You all are just goddamn lucky I don’t let him go ahead and unload on you because there’s hardly anything he likes better than killing traitorous bastards such as yourself, is there, John?”

  “I’ve killed forty-one men,” he said. “Might as well make it forty-four.”

  It was starting to wear on their nerves, being faced down by such a notorious bad man as John Wesley Hardin. First I was him, now Tom was him. The son of a bitch seemed to get around, even though the last I’d heard he was still in the state prison down in Texas.

  “Let them live, this time, John,” I said.

  “I sure don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay. But tell you what, they make any move to come after us, we’ll kill them in ways they haven’t even thought of yet.”

  We went outside and Tom said, “Who’s John Wesley Hardin?”

  “A very bad man,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “What would you have done if things had gone wrong in there? I mean you were talking tough as hell.”

  “Just trying to get them to cooperate with you,” he said. “I don’t know what I would have done if things had gone wrong. I guess we’re both lucky they didn’t.”

  “I guess.”

  “What now?”

  “You want to see this through all the way to the end?”

  “You mean getting the woman back?”

  “It probably won’t go near this easy,” I said. “I saw what Johnny Waco and his bunch did to a city marshal and it was pretty ugly.”

  “You mean uglier than what you did to that sheriff?”

  “By a whole lot.”

  “Why don’t I just tag along for a time and see how it goes.”

  “It’s your choice.”

  He shook his head.

  “Like I said, I don’t believe we have any choices, Jim.” Then he seemed to consider something for a moment and said, “John Wesley Hardin. You think he’d take it as an insult that folks would mistake me for him?”

  “Probably shoot you in the eyes.”

  He smiled then, that same thoughtful smile like someone had told him a clean joke.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He was already starting up the street toward the train depot and I was already thinking I wouldn’t have to ride bareback anymore like some damn bummer. But a train ride back to Coffin Flats wasn’t the smart move and I stopped Tom and told him we’d have to make the trip on horseback.

  He wondered why.

  “Telegraph,” I said. “You’ve heard about it, right?”

  It was the first time I saw a look of impatience from him.

  “Those birds we got caged will get out before we get halfway to Coffin Flats and that sheriff will wire ahead and Johnny Waco will have his boys waiting for us and probably kill us before we get both feet on the platform.”

  “Well then you better buy yourself a saddle and we’ll resupply our food stocks.”

  “Let’s make it quick before they all start hollering.”

  We found a dry goods store and I bought what we needed including a saddle and a good rifle and were out of town i
n under half an hour. And like it understood the situation and sided with the jailed lawmen, the weather turned meager and it began to rain.

  I looked at Tom and he said, “There’s a reason for everything, Jim.”

  Hell, what’d I know?

  Chapter Seventeen

  We followed the railroad tracks. It seemed simplest. The country wasn’t familiar to me and it wasn’t to Tom either. We shot a jackrabbit the first night and cooked it over a fire down inside a small canyon to avoid any watchful eyes that might be roaming about. I figured by now Joe Bike and his deputies had broke jail and Johnny Waco already had gotten word I was coming.

  “How’s that rabbit?” I said.

  Tom was chewing on it tenderly because of the heat.

  “Just like a Philadelphia steak,” he said.

  “You’ve been everywhere?”

  “Been around to lots of places, that is a fact.”

  “Asia and Philadelphia,” I said. “Don’t know that I ever met a man who’s even been to either one of them.”

  “Travel seasons a man,” he said.

  “Your late wife, did she use to travel with you?”

  “No. I did most of it way before I met her.”

  “You in the war?”

  He nodded almost sadly.

  “I was,” he said. “A chaplain’s assistant, in case you hadn’t guessed.”

  “What side?”

  “Union. What about you?”

  “The other—the one that lost.”

  “It was a terrible war no matter,” he said.

  “It was.”

  “I think of the dead—especially the ones who died on the losing side of a battle—how they just got dumped into mass graves, their names unknown, their causes lost, their families never knowing what became of those lost men. Was always better if you died on the winning side…”

  His voice trailed off, a sound fading into the distance. The rain had stopped long before and now the air was as cool as it was black and the stars were out and you could see the crescent of a moon riding a ridge of jagged mountains.

  “The best friends I ever had were lost in that war,” I said.

  He nodded understandingly.

  “We lost so much, all of us.”

  “At least you didn’t have to kill anybody,” I said. “Be grateful for that.”