by Bill Brooks
By the time I reached the spot where they had been I saw what they’d been looking at: a collection of shacks, a ghost town, it seemed.
Waco’s men were spreading out through it then they gathered around one building in particular that had a weary looking horse tied up in front.
I could hear them shouting something.
Then suddenly there were two shots spaced out about a second apart followed by utter and stunned silence. I had dismounted and lay flat on the sandstone with my rifle ready. I had it aimed at the fellow wearing the sheepskin coat.
Several of the men dismounted down below and cautiously approached the building, their pistols drawn. Johnny Waco sat his horse, content, I suppose, to let his boys do the dirty work.
Like rats, the men slipped in through the doors and windows.
I held my breath, keeping the front blade of the Winchester aimed at the center of Johnny Waco’s back.
And when the men came out dragging the bodies of Tom and Antonia and laid them at the feet of Johnny’s horse, I pulled the trigger and watched him topple from the saddle and fall beside them.
It set up panic among them of course, and I shot the Indian next just because he was the son of a bitch that led them to my friends. And then I shot another and another until I had shot at least half a dozen before they figured where the firing was coming from and had scattered like quail into the buildings.
But I was already riding back down the ridge, circling in a wide loop, maybe one or two shells left in my rifle, my mind full of anger. I figured if they were fool enough to come after me, I’d take them away from the ghost town and circle back and get more weapons and make my stand. And if it came to dying with my friends, then I figured it was a hell of a lot better than dying without them.
I reached a point far enough away to wait to see if they were coming. I waited listening for the sounds of pounding hooves.
Nobody came.
I waited some more.
Still, nobody came.
I completed my loop and came within sight of the ghost town from the northwest. The bodies were all still there, lying like rag dolls, but the drovers were gone. I saw a dust cloud the other side of the valley. I figured it was Waco’s boys, fled, all the fight taken out of them now that the man paying their wages wouldn’t be anymore. Besides, if they were any sort of drovers, it would have been damn demeaning taking orders from a dead son of a bitch. Drovers, if nothing else, are pretty goddamn independent even if someone’s paying them regular wages.
I waited a bit longer to make sure some of those old boys didn’t come back out of a sense of misguided loyalty, then rode on down.
Tom and Antonia lay side by side as if they’d simply fallen asleep. She was yet beautiful even in death, and Tom looked as peaceful as he had ever been. I noticed how their hands touched. Each had a small bloody wound to the side of the head but were otherwise unmarked.
Johnny lay facedown next to them, his face in the dirt turned away from the woman he’d wanted to possess more than he’d wanted to love.
My curiosity caused me to go inside the building I’d seen Waco’s men drag them from. I found a small silver derringer with both shells spent and it confirmed my suspicions. Tom had done for her what she could not have done for herself. And knowing him, he probably told her he wouldn’t let her go alone into that dark void, that he’d go with her just to keep her company.
I walked out again feeling sad and bitter because it shouldn’t have turned out this way.
I scoured the ruined little town until I found the busted blade of a shovel with half a handle someone had left behind, as if whoever had left it knew it still had a purpose.
I dug a single grave and put Tom and Antonia in it, side by side. I suspected they would have wanted it that way—that she would have wanted him to hold her and that he would have wanted to hold her on their final journey.
My hands shook as I tossed the last shovel of dirt onto the mound and patted it down. I told myself that my tears were from anger and not from sorrow, but they were from both and I didn’t really care.
Then I rode away again, as I had once come, a stranger to this place, these dead.
Epilogue
As they waited for the end they spoke of many things and told each other things about themselves they’d not told anyone until that time.
They slept and woke again and talked more and she told him of all the things she’d hoped she would have become if life had turned out differently, and all the places she would have liked to have traveled. And he told her of similar dreams he had, saying he had lost his way but understood there was reason to be found even in the confusion of being lost.
“One life is not enough,” he said. “We should have three or four. One in which we learn, and another in which we live what we’ve learned, and one we spend in pleasure and one in which we spend in reflection.”
“How do you know that we don’t?” she said. “How do you know that when we die we don’t go on to another life and do exactly that, and that maybe this is the life of reflection we are living now and all the other lives await us still?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Do you believe there are other lives after this one?”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“So do I.”
“Then it won’t be so bad, will it?”
“No. I don’t think it will be very bad at all.”
“It might be so beautiful we can’t even begin to imagine it,” he said.
“I’d like to believe that.”
“Then we should.”
“Yes.”
And then they fell into silence, each feeling their separate thoughts as they held hands until she leaned against him and said, “Hold me, Tom.”
And so he held her in his embrace knowing what was to come.
For they’d decided somewhere between that long night and when they heard the riders come that they would suffer no more at the hands of others.
She handed him the derringer.
“I want to go first,” she said.
He nodded.
They heard the horses stop outside.
“It’s time,” she said. “Before they come in.”
“Yes,” he said. “Let me kiss you one last time.”
She inclined her head to him and he kissed her.
Then they heard footsteps on the porch outside. She closed her eyes. He pulled the trigger once. Then he said, “Good-bye my sweet, sweet child,” and pulled the trigger again.
Twenty men arrived from the adjoining county and Chalk was waiting for them.
“You boys go over to the Bison and get you something to eat and something to drink and I’ll go and get Mr. Stone and he’ll tell you what he needs and what the pay is,” he said, and they went quietly knowing that work was work and sometimes hard to come by unless you were willing to do whatever it was needed doing and were not afraid.
And just as he came out of the hotel with Mr. Stone walking at his side he saw the stranger riding down the street on a lathered horse.
The stranger stopped, and Chalk said to Mr. Stone, “This is Jim Glass. Jim, this is Mr. Dalton Stone, Antonia’s father.”
And the two men shook hands and then Jim told him about the daughter he had come to find and where he could find her.
“Would you be kind enough to show me?” Mr. Stone said.
“I would.”
And together they rode back out to the ghost town and Jim showed the father where the daughter was buried and explained to him the story and circumstance of her death and about his friend Tom Twist and what sort of man he was.
“I know he did right by her,” Jim said. “I don’t doubt that by the end he had come to love her.” And after Dalton Stone had knelt there by her grave for a time, he stood and looked around and said, “You killed these men?”
“I did.”
“Which one is Johnny Waco?”
Jim showed him.
“And woul
d you, sir, do such a thing again if the need called for it?”
“I would,” said Jim.
“Then we need to talk, you and I.”
And together they rode back to Coffin Flats, two men who were once strangers but now had found a common cause.
About the Author
BILL BROOKS is an author of eighteen novels of historical and frontier fiction. He lives in North Carolina.
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Books by Bill Brooks
The Journey of Jim Glass
RIDES A STRANGER
Dakota Lawman
THE BIG GUNDOWN
KILLING MR. SUNDAY
LAST STAND AT SWEET SORROW
Law for Hire
SAVING MASTERSON
DEFENDING CODY
PROTECTING HICKOK
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
RIDES A STRANGER. Copyright © 2007 by Bill Brooks. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition December 2006 ISBN 9780061753220
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