The Edge of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  Colter shook his head. “I’m halfway down already,” he said.

  The railroader understood, and walked down the rest of the distance with him. They crossed rocks, went through a few boulders, and made their way down to the streambed. Colter looked up at where a trestle should have held the U.P. rails across the gulley.

  His first thought was that rains had washed away the tracks, but no. He shook his aching head. No, there had been little rain this summer. And the creek bed was dry. Then he noticed the charred pilings that still stood. Most had collapsed in a heap.

  “Lightning?” Colter asked.

  “Injuns,” the railroader answered. “What in bloody hell was this about?”

  Colter stopped. He saw the two handcars on the rocks, now reduced to kindling and bent iron.

  “Some cowhands robbed the U.P. train when it came to the depot,” he said.

  “Bloody hell. What?”

  “Yeah.” Colter kept walking.

  From somewhere overhead, another Irish-accented voice called down. “Is everyone all right?”

  “No,” Colter answered in a whisper as he neared the wreckage. “Not everyone.”

  * * *

  The strongbox had busted open, and the workers had loaded the scrip and coin into canvas bags, which they had then toted up the hill to the side of the tracks. The two bodies of the broken remains of the two cowboys had been hauled up in blankets, and were laid beside the bodies of the two men Jed Reno had shot.

  Another big man who swung a sledgehammer for a living had found Colter’s LeMat, returned it, along with his hat, and now Colter was checking the weapon—the hat back on his head—and blowing dust out of the cylinder and hammer. The barrel somehow remained free of debris. Tim Colter wasn’t sure how much of that money would actually get back to the U.P. brass in Violence, but he had done his job. Most of his job.

  Mix Range had busted his nose. Jed Reno had a few fresh scratches and a big bruise forming on his right hand. But his Hawken and Colt were ready, loaded, and clean.

  “I don’t think,” Colter explained to the chief of the crew, “that these four boys planned to push their way to join the Central Pacific.”

  The Irish leader laughed. “Not this year. Maybe not the next.”

  “So where were they going?” he asked.

  “Laramie City?” one of the workers asked as an answer.

  Colter’s head shook. “Would you?”

  “Horses,” Reno prodded them.

  One of the men—a lean, thin, redheaded man with a face filled with freckles—stepped forward. “I saw a couple of boys riding that way this morn.” He gestured to the southwest. “Figured they was just headin’ west. Maybe to Laramie City.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’, Timothy,” a burly man said with a snort.

  “But they was leadin’ four saddle mounts. Struck me as odd. And a pack mule.”

  Colter grinned. The burly man did not, but shuffled back into the army of workers.

  “If you were going to stop a cart, probably out of sight, and mount horses . . .” Colter did not have to finish because the redheaded kid answered quickly.

  “The hollow,” he said. “Three miles west of here.”

  Colter wet his lips. He pointed at a freight wagon.

  “You boys mind renting that wagon to us?”

  “Marshal,” said the Irish leader, “ye jus’ saved us a month’s pay. Ye take that with the Union Pacific’s blessing. We’ll pick it up when we come back to Violence for some drinkin’ and gamblin’.”

  * * *

  They rode—Mix Range driving, Tim Colter beside him, Jed Reno kneeling in the back, staring ahead with his one eye, which seldom missed anything—moving across the rolling hills northwest of the U.P.’s rails. The Irish foreman had described the hollow, and Jed Reno knew where it was. He agreed that it would make a likely place to change from handcar to horses. They would probably ride south, toward Virginia Dale, and then maybe into Denver City—if they weren’t killed by the owlhoots that populated Virginia Dale. Colter figured the cowboys would least expect a posse to come in from the north. If anyone had trailed them, they’d be riding in from the south.

  “You don’t reckon they noticed the trestle had been burned up?” Mix Range asked.

  “The kid said they’d swung wide south by then,” Colter answered. “No. I don’t think they’d noticed the bridge was out. If they had, they would have ridden back to warn their boys. Not because they wanted to save their hides, but they would want to save that money from the strongbox.”

  “Injuns.” Range looked across the hills. “I don’t want to run into no Sioux warriors.”

  “Cheyennes,” Reno said. “Railroad boys haven’t made life easier on that tribe of late. Army sure hasn’t helped. And what I hear tell they done at Sand Creek back in ’64 . . . well . . .”

  “They have a right to be mad,” Colter agreed, and he told Jed Reno about Red Prairie, what the railroaders had been about to do to that fine Cheyenne warrior before Colter had intervened.

  “I taught you pretty good, boy,” Reno said with a grin. “Didn’t I?”

  Colter grinned back. “You sure did.”

  They fell silent now as the mules pulled the wagon. Reno pointed north, and Range tugged on the lines, turning the mules in that direction. The grass grew high, even green despite a lack of moisture, and they moved on a mile or two, then moved back along a dry creek bed south. Toward the hollow.

  “Way I figure things,” Reno said, “is that we stop about a half mile from that meeting place. Leave Mix here with the wagon and mules. You go off west a bit, I come in from the east. Get the drop on the boys. You want them alive, I reckon.”

  “I would at that,” Colter answered. “Just curious why six cowboys would try to rob a train.”

  “Think they was put up to it?” Reno asked.

  “I’d like them to tell me.”

  A mile south, Mix Range pulled the mules to a halt. Tim Colter was standing now, shielding his eyes from the sun, as he stared off down the creek bed. He wasn’t looking at the ground, though, but the sky.

  “You might not get an answer, boy,” Jed Reno said.

  “Yeah.” Colter spit the disgust out of his mouth and onto sagebrush. “Got a feeling you’re right.”

  “Let’s go back,” Mix Range suggested. “Get them railroad boys to come with us.” His voice cracked with fear. He sweated more than he had while pushing that handcar after the robbers.

  “No.” Colter sat down. “Keep the wagon going. We might need these mules.”

  Reno spit. “A buckboard pulled by mules sure won’t outrun no Cheyenne dog soldiers on good, grass-fed war ponies.”

  Buzzards kept circling in the clear sky.

  Thirty minutes later, their nerves taut, their guns ready—for Reno had loaned his Colt to Mix Range—they reached the hollow. The horses and pack mule were gone. The two cowboys remained, but Tim Colter would be getting no answers from those two boys. The two robbers who had broken their bodies among the boulders and smashed handcars, back along the U.P. line, had been much more fortunate than these two poor souls.

  Not that Tim Colter felt any sympathy for them. They had been part of the holdup, as much as the other four dead men.

  “Well.” Jed Reno spit.

  Mix Range stood over some sagebrush that he was watering with his vomit.

  “Yeah.” Tim Colter sighed. “I think there’s a shovel in the back of the wagon. We might as well bury them.”

  Reno snorted. “You mean . . . what the buzzards left behind.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Suppertime had come and gone before Tim Colter had time to breathe again—and continue his questioning of this correspondence with a nonexistent school board in the town of Violet. Train robberies were federal offenses—and Colter had that commission as a deputy United States marshal. Even though all six outlaws were dead, and the money recovered, he had to send telegrams back to Washington City and a lot of paper
work to Boise City. The money was recovered from the payroll strongbox, and from most of the wallets of the train executives. Their watches, however, had been smashed to oblivion, along with the bodies of the two men who had plummeted over the canyon.

  So Colter had sent Jed Reno to look after Betsy McDonnell while he caught up on his duties. He figured she would be at the only hotel in town, and he had other work to do, too. He checked on the prisoners in the corral, released two from their five-pound Oregon Boots, talked to at least five Union Pacific officials, and felt relieved when the foreman of the group repairing the bridge and trestle arrived in town with another wagon, the strongbox, and all of the stolen loot.

  The prisoners wanted to eat. Mayor Jasper Monroe wanted ten minutes for a report, and, well, that made Colter tend to regret getting that job as the town marshal. Now he had obligations to Monroe. What he needed was a deputy, but he had already sent Jed Reno on an incredibly important assignment.

  “You need anything, Marshal?”

  At first, Tim Colter didn’t recognize the voice. It was one nasal drawl.

  Colter looked up. He sat at the desk in his office on Union Street, chewing on a piece of jerky—the only food he had eaten since breakfast—and sipping on cold coffee that had thickened like molasses. He sighed, and studied the crooked nose on Mix Range.

  That gave Colter pause.

  Everything had been moving like a locomotive churning across the Northern Plains since Betsy had arrived. Colter had had little time to think about anything. . . until now.

  “What the hell got into you, Mix?” he asked.

  The killer and two-bit criminal stared. “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “When they said the train had been robbed, why on earth did you follow Jed and me to the depot?”

  The gunman stared, blinked, and, after a moment, shrugged.

  “And getting on the handcar? What was that about?”

  “I don’t know. Those boys had taken one. I seen the other one. Wasn’t no horses handy. Just come to me . . . of a sudden. Didn’t really think nothin’ ’bout it.”

  Colter considered that for a moment, but did not look down at the paperwork piled on his desk. Instead, he put his elbows on the desktop, locked his fingers together, and placed his chin on the bridge his hands made. He studied Mix Range a little harder.

  “You killed a couple of peace officers in Texas,” Colter said. “According to the warrants.”

  The prisoner shrugged.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened down there?”

  Range’s tongue ran underneath the inside of his lip, back and forth, like the pendulum on a clock. A finger on his right hand gently tested his nose. His head weaved a little, and then the right hand rose to scratch his head, then his beard stubble, and then smoothed his mustache.

  “Well . . . ,” he said, which was as far as he got.

  “Go on,” Colter said, and he listened.

  * * *

  If Mix Range was telling the truth—and the gunman didn’t seem intelligent enough to make anything up—he had drifted west from Horseshoe Bend, Alabama, after the War to Preserve the Union. Made his way to Natchez on the Mississippi River, then worked awhile in Shreveport, Louisiana, finally dealt faro and Spanish monte in the old cotton town and riverboat town of Jefferson in the Piney Woods of eastern Texas, and eventually made it to Dallas.

  He had done some carpentry work there, putting together quickly and crudely constructed houses, and had met a girl.

  “What was her name?” Colter asked.

  “Jennie Wyndham.”

  Not a name someone would likely make up, Colter deduced.

  Jennie worked for a dressmaker in town near the Trinity River. Mix Range was paying her a visit—the Presbyterians were having a dance, which was something Mix Range, as a Baptist, and Jennie Wyndham, who grew up in Pennsylvania among the Society of Friends, had never gotten the opportunity to attend. They were going on that Saturday night.

  Then a couple of overzealous peace officers stopped Jennie as she was leaving the dressmaker’s shop.

  Mix Range had come to her rescue.

  “One of ’em said he was placin’ me under arrest,” Range said. “I told’m that was fine and dandy with me, that I’d let the town’s chief of police and maybe even the mayor know what was goin’ on. That’s when the other feller drawed his Remington. An’ Jennie screamed, and the first one, the big one, knocked her down to shut her up.”

  Range studied his boots as he kept talking.

  “Well, Dallas wasn’t no friendly town. So it paid to keep a pistol handy. I had one. And I was a much better shot than either of ’em two dandies. Long and short of things, Marshal, is they was lyin’ on the streets, one dead, the other dyin’, and some other copper was blowin’ on his whistle, and I just figured it was time to hightail it out of there. I grabbed Jennie, hurried her to her house about six blocks away. And I thought about goin’ to turn myself in, let the chief know what had happened. But damn if whilst I was walkin’ to the courthouse to do just that very thing, a couple other policemen started shootin’ at me. Stole me the first horse I could grab a rein on, and rode out toward Denton. And kept ridin’.”

  * * *

  Colter nodded. “What about Jennie Wilson?”

  “Wyndham,” Mix Range corrected. Colter said, “Right.” But he had been testing the prisoner. “Jennie Wyndham.”

  “She was a good girl, Marshal. Didn’t see no need in bringin’ her into my troubles.”

  “But . . .”

  “One of the policemen died right away, but the other lived . . . just long enough to tell some other copper that I’d done the shootin’. He didn’t mention Jennie, or if he did, the one who heard what someone read to me in a newspaper was his ‘dyin’ testimony,’ didn’t bring her name up. I figured . . . why should I? So I just lit out for parts unknown. Likely, they’d ’ave strung me up in Dallas, had I stuck around for a trial.”

  “Likely,” Colter agreed.

  “Well, I reckon I should get back to the corral,” Mix Range said. “I mean . . . the jail.”

  Colter waved him to an empty chair, and the Alabaman sat down, sighing, probably figuring he was about to be forced to put on the thirty-pound shackle.

  “How’d you get up here?” Colter asked.

  The gunman shrugged. “Heard they was hirin’ workers for the U.P. Figured no Texas lawdog would come lookin’ for me this far north.”

  “But you weren’t working for the Union Pacific,” Colter said.

  Range’s head shook. “No. I never seemed to fall in with the right folks—except when I met Jennie Wyndham—and that just got her in trouble. When I couldn’t get no job, I went into Slade’s place, and . . . well . . . I got a bit drunk. Think I got into a fight with one of his bouncers, and I whupped him. And I reckon, drunk as I was, I told Slade a few things ’bout my past.”

  Colter understood. “So he hired you.”

  “Yep.”

  “As an . . . enforcer.”

  “The way Slade put it, he wanted to take over this town. But so did someone else.”

  “Paddy O’Rourke,” Colter said.

  “Slade never said no names. He told me there could be only one king of Violence, and Micah Slade said it was gonna be him. You know the rest of the story, I guess. Is it all right now, Marshal, if I go to the corral? I’ve had a right awful day.” He touched his nose.

  Mix Range’s sigh filled the room as Colter shook his head. He opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a badge. It was a deputy’s badge, actually, an old U.S. marshal’s badge, but there was no designation stamped in the tin. He tossed it to Mix Range, who caught it, and stared. He blinked as he tried to comprehend what Tim Colter meant.

  “I got a better job for you, Mix,” Colter said. “How’d you like to be on the right side of the law for a change?”

  “But I’m a wanted man.”

  Colter smiled warmly. “This isn’t Texas, Mix. It’s Idaho Territory.
Pays ten dollars a month. And you sleep in here from now on. Not the corral. Hell, you put a roof over this place, and got the walls up, and the window in. You should enjoy what you built.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about bein’ no lawman.”

  “Join the crowd,” Colter said. “Half of what I’ve done in this town wouldn’t hold up in an actual court. But we happen to be the law. And we’re the good guys in a town that’s rotten to the core. That’s what makes the difference.” Colter pointed at the badge. “You want it?”

  Range grinned widely, and pinned the badge on the front of his shirt. “Do I? You bet I do. Always wanted to be a good guy.”

  Colter told him to raise his right hand. Range lifted his left, corrected himself, and brought the right hand up. He said, “I do.” Colter nodded. Everything was official, or as official as anything came in Violence.

  “You might regret your first job, though,” Colter said.

  “What is it?”

  He hooked his thumb toward the wall. “See what our neighbor, Mayor Monroe, wants. I need to find my bride-to-be.”

  * * *

  Betsy McDonnell wasn’t in the hotel. Mr. Yost said she had checked in earlier that day, her luggage had been delivered, but he had not seen her in hours. She wasn’t in the café. There was no church in Violence, and Colter didn’t think she would be in O’Rourke’s or Slade’s places of business. He scratched his head as he walked down Union Street, along the south side, and he kept walking, past Second Street, Fourth, to the corral at Sixth. Then he looked beyond, past the edge of Violence, at what once had been Jed Reno’s trading post.

  The sun was setting, a brilliant orange that turned red and purple and pink and white, shining over the charred ruins. People surrounded the place. A tent had gone up. Wagons—farm wagons—were parked alongside mules, without saddles, and big draft horses. By Jupiter, Tim Colter could even hear music. A fiddle was playing. Voices sang in perfect harmony. Children pitched horseshoes or played some other games.

  Colter turned around. He looked down Union Street, and heard the laughter, the curses, and the bad banjo music. Prostitutes sang their calls. Railroaders swore and staggered. This looked like Hell. He turned back toward the ruins of Reno’s place. Yet, that sounded like Heaven.