by Paul Bagdon
She stepped down from the surrey, the biscuit and thick chunk of bacon she’d brought for her lunch in her hand. The small, cold meal that she washed down with now-tepid water tasted as good to her as prime beefsteak and a mound of mashed potatoes would have, and she gave silent thanks for the food. Then she scanned the lifeless horizon. The deep blue of the sky was unbroken by even the least trace of a cloud. There was water a few miles ahead, Lee knew—a sinkhole that had warm and muddy-tasting water, but water, nevertheless. She’d let Meg drink sparingly there.
Lee looked back at where she’d come from. Beyond Burnt Rock, the ruts she’d been following had died out. For the last couple of hours, she’d been traveling due east, using the sun at her shoulder as a guide. Occasionally, she’d come across the desiccated remains of wagons and, more frequently, discarded furniture that’d become too burdensome for the animals pulling the loads. The skulls of cattle—and those of horses too—scrubbed white by the wind and the sun protested mutely against what they and their owners had endured. At one point, Lee had reined in, then straightened and packed some stones and dirt around a wooden headstone that read in deeply gouged letters:
Our Baby Timothy Homer
8-27-75–8-29-75
Rest in Peece Foraver.
Homer and Marian Stoddard
When Lee and Meg arrived at the sinkhole, Meg had no problem with the temperature or the taste of the water. Lee let the mare suck for a few long moments and then pulled her head up and away. Meg snorted once and danced sideways a bit, but didn’t fight Lee about leaving the water behind.
Lee looked around her and noticed a light tan haze that could have been three miles ahead—or ten. She knew distances were difficult to gauge with only the sun and a few hills to use as reference points. The dust seemed to hang still in the air until she focused and concentrated on it. Then she saw that it was moving slowly but inexorably in her direction. She grinned. Maybe the prairie isn’t quite as uninhabited as I thought it was.
It wasn’t until she saw an outrider far ahead—more of a moving speck, really—swing back and head in the direction from which he’d come, that Lee felt any sense of disquiet. Why did that rider change directions so abruptly? Why would he need to report back about a single surrey with only one person in it?
When, after a dozen or so minutes, the tan cloud moved more quickly toward her, Lee swallowed hard and felt moisture between her palms and the reins. She chided herself for anticipating trouble where there probably was none, but she couldn’t dislodge the quick spike of fear. As the cloud moved closer and became more distinct, Lee brought the rifle to her lap. A moment later, she tied the ends of the reins together and dropped the loop to the floor, placing her boot on it. She levered a round into the rifle’s chamber, set the safety, and again rested the weapon across her lap. Then she leaned forward and tugged her travel bag closer to her feet, putting the Colt within reach.
As the riders topped a hill, Lee could see that there were five of them. Apparently, they saw her at the same time she saw them, because they adjusted their direction more tightly toward her. She checked Meg to a walk. There was nowhere to run—and no reason to even think about running. The men could be some cowhands headed to a ranch, or some travelers, just like her, going to visit a friend or a loved one. She told herself that there was nothing to be worried about. Looking for trouble made no sense at all.
She took deep breaths to calm herself. Just some travelers—that’s all. She shifted the 30.06 a bit so that her right hand could fall directly to the trigger guard and her left to the forepiece if she dropped the looped reins again.
Just then, the men, as if in a practiced maneuver, put more space between one another. Now they rode ten or so feet apart, and as Lee watched, the distances between them slowly continued to widen. She could see that they wore slickers and carried rifles in saddle scabbards. They didn’t look grubby enough to be cowhands, and they didn’t have coiled lassos attached to their saddles to the right of the horn, which is the cowboy signature. Their hats—nicely creased Stetsons that were in decent condition—looked too good to belong to range workers as well. And each of the men was clean shaven. The horses they rode, she noticed, were good ones with wide chests and proud head carriage.
The riders stopped in a wide arc fifteen feet from the surrey. One of them, the man in the middle, walked his horse another few steps toward Lee. He was tall, with an angular face and high cheekbones that spoke of Indian ancestry. He smiled, and she saw that his teeth were white and even. But the smile seemed as false as a thief’s promise, and his dark eyes had no life in them.
“Lonely out here, ain’t it, ma’am?” he asked. The other men chuckled.
Lee held his eyes but didn’t speak. The farthest two men were out of her peripheral vision, and she didn’t like that at all.
“I asked you a question. I expect an answer when I ask a woman a question.” His smile broadened into a leer. “’Specially when she’s as pretty as you.”
“You’ve got no call to stop me,” Lee said. “This is the end of the conversation. I’ll be on my way.” She leaned forward as if to pick up the reins, but when she straightened, the barrel of her 30.06 pointed at the man’s chest. She thumbed off the safety, and the oiled snick sounded as loud as a gunshot.
“You’re liable to hurt yourself with that, ma’am. I want you to toss it on the ground right now. Hear?”
“Take your men off to one side and let me pass, and we’ll have no more trouble,” Lee said. She was proud that her voice sounded strong and confident. “I can use this, and I will if I have to.”
The man smirked. “You don’t count good, little lady. There’re five of us, an’ there ain’t but one of you. Seems like I’d be givin’ the orders.” He waited a moment and then added, “’Specially since the two boys you can’t see have their long guns aimed right at your pretty head.”
Lee swallowed. She’d heard no sound of rifles being drawn from scabbards nor safeties being released. Still, a cold sweat broke out at her hairline. Her mouth was dry as she spoke. “A snake can’t do much damage when its head is shot off,” she said to the man in front of her. “If I fire, it’ll be at you—and you’ll go down. Then I’ll tend to the others.”
A bead of sweat hung for a moment in Lee’s eyebrow and then slid into her eye, but she fought against the urge to wink it away. She refused to break her glare at the man closest to her.
His laugh was as contrived as his smile. “Feisty, ain’t she, boys? The thing is, I’m thinkin’ that Winchester is gettin’ awful heavy. Pretty soon, the little lady ain’t gonna be able to hold it up quite so straight.”
“I’ll fire it before that happens,” Lee said. “You can just bet on that.”
“Me an’ my boys don’t bet on nothin’ but sure things, ma’am.” He moved his head to scan his followers. “Ain’t that right, fellas?”
A voice to Lee’s left—out of her line of sight—answered with a coarse laugh. “We sure ain’t ridin’ to Burnt Rock to buy us a quilt!”
Lee noticed that the voice was loose and the slightest bit slurred. Good, she thought. He could be drunk. He’ll be slow ...
The leader’s shoulders slumped, and he exhaled loudly. “Well, it’s clear you ain’t got the time to chat with us, ma’am. I’m right sorry you was inconvenienced. Why don’t you just go on your way, an’ we’ll go on ours. Fair enough?”
Lee nodded but didn’t lower the rifle. The man had been right: The 30.06 seemed to have the weight of an anvil, and her left wrist and arm were threatening to cramp from the continued stress.
“One thing I’ll warn you about, though, back that way . ..” He motioned with his right arm toward where he and his men had come from. “There’s some—”
Lee shot him in the left shoulder. The derringer that had suddenly appeared in his hand flew in an arc onto the prairie floor. Thrown from his saddle by the impact of the heavy bullet, the man landed on his back, a patch of crimson spreading around the jagged
hole in his duster. Lee jacked the lever of the rifle and spun to her right, firing almost without aiming at the man who was bringing up his handgun from his holster. The slug took him in the left arm with enough power to twist him from his saddle.
Lee jacked another round and turned to her left without lowering the rifle. She’d been correct: The man who had been out of her sight was fumbling for his long gun with clumsy, drunken fingers. He immediately raised his hands. The other two, those in front of her, raised theirs as well. The head man sat in the dirt, cursing, his left arm hanging limply at his side with blood seeping from the wound. Lee motioned with her rifle barrel for the drunk to move closer to the others in front of her. The rider to her right, like his leader, was sitting in the dirt, attempting to stop the flow of blood from his arm.
Lee lowered the 30.06 to her waist but kept the barrel moving, slowly sweeping it back and forth over the riders. She was sure they were gamblers, not only because of the derringer the leader had concealed in his sleeve, but also because of what the intoxicated one had said about riding to Burnt Rock.
“I didn’t instigate this, and I’m sorry it happened,” Lee said. “Thank God no one had to die here today. You said you were heading for Burnt Rock, and there’s a good doctor there. He’ll fix your wounds—all you need to do is stop the bleeding until you get to him. I’m going to go on now. If you take another try at me, I won’t shoot for arms and shoulders.” She lowered the rifle to rest across her lap and picked up the reins. A thought flitted into her mind. “By the way, the marshall in Burnt Rock, Ben Flood, is my husband. Maybe you’ve heard of him—about how he tracked down and killed the man who murdered his father. That took him a long time, but he did it—and he did it in a fair fight.”
When Lee mentioned Ben’s name, she saw a quick flash of recognition in a couple of the gamblers’ eyes. The cold hand that had been grasping her heart suddenly let go.
Meg was more than ready to leave the guns and tension behind. Lee had barely raised the reins when the mare hustled forward, starting the surrey with a jump that almost dumped Lee from the driver’s seat.
After a half hour, Lee’s hands finally stopped trembling, and by then a sense of guilt had taken over. She’d shot two men—and only her first round had been aimed. The slug could well have taken the man in the head or heart. And, of course, she’d lied—lied out of fear and a sense of self-preservation, but lied nevertheless.
Had she fired too quickly? Would the head man have shot her? Or did he merely want her to drop the rifle? But, if so—then what? She had nothing worth stealing besides her weapons. She had some clothes that weren’t new and a few dollars in cash. Meg, as good of a horse as she was, wouldn’t bring fifty dollars at an auction. The surrey was a decent rig—a Studebaker—but nothing fancy. What did they want?
The answer was clear to Lee, and she shuddered at the thought.
She eased the surrey to a stop, rubbing the back of her neck. She’d been looking over her shoulder so often that she’d developed a stiff muscle that burned like fire. She’d seen nothing but her own dust for an hour, and then she’d seen the cloud of grit the gamblers put into the air as they rode away from her, heading to Burnt Rock and Doc’s office.
She set the brake and climbed down, then walked a few yards to where a cactus stood, its thick arms reaching upward. There she closed her eyes, lowered her head, and clasped her hands at her waist.
Jesus came to Lee as he always did when she called out to him—more as a dove than a lightning bolt. She let the Lord’s words flow through her mind and heart and offered to him her fears and guilt. Then a soft warmth that didn’t come from the sun enveloped Lee, and her heart was suffused with a sensation of God’s great love for her, like the love of a father for his child. Her fear and self-accusation dropped away as the gentlest of rains falls from the sky, leaving her feeling refreshed and renewed—and safe. She felt as safe as she’d ever felt, as safe as she did when on the hill by the Busted Thumb where she went to pray and to think.
Now she had the strength to continue on.
She hit the Dwyer Horse and Cattle Company pasture when the sun was finishing its work for the day, still offering good light but letting the world know it would soon be dark. Scattered groups of eight or ten longhorns tugged at the buffalo grass, barely looking up as the surrey passed. The cattle in these pastures, Lee knew, were used to people on horseback and wagons and carts. Those on the far-flung pastures of the ranch, however, were as wild and cantankerous as wildcats. Jonas’s cowhands always had their work cut out for them when they gathered in these cattle for branding every fall. Lee had helped out one year, doing what the cowboys called “brush popping”—chasing half-wild longhorns out of gullies and canyons where they’d scattered in search of good grazing.
The cattle she passed looked good; they had weight on them, and Lee saw no running eyes or the listlessness that signaled a sick animal. A massive bull that seemed the size of a steam locomotive, with horns extending a foot on each side of his head, trotted toward the surrey, snorting a challenge. He lost interest quickly when he realized that neither the horse nor the driver had any interest in him or his harem.
She rode in sight of Jonas and Margaret’s home, a sprawling two story that had been added to over the years as more space was needed. Built over twenty years ago when Jonas and Margaret first came to Texas from Virginia, their home had a texture of peace and permanence to it. Mary, the Dwyer’s oldest daughter, had moved away from home almost fifteen years ago when she married a doctor with a brand-new diploma. They and their children now lived in Massachusetts. Mary’s sister, Janice, lived in Chicago, where her husband was a merchant. The oldest of the Dwyer children, Stephen, had been killed in the War Between the States, near an obscure little town in Virginia called Vicksburg.
Margaret Dwyer had never recovered from Stephen’s death. She’d slipped deeper and deeper into a depression that seemed to plague her heart every waking moment. She then discovered patent medicines—elixirs and potions that promised good health and mental clarity. The “medicines” were, in fact, alcohol-, laudanum-, and opium-laden swill that tricked an unsuspecting person’s mind. Margaret, Lee knew, was hopelessly addicted to the nostrums and had been for several years.
As Lee drove Meg toward the main barn, Vergil Penn, Jonas’s ranch manager, rode out to meet her. Lee reined in and stepped down as Vergil swung out of his saddle. The two hugged. Lee had known the man since she was a child. He had to be well over seventy now, but she had never seen him look so old. Dark hollows hung under his eyes, and his wrists were gaunt, like those of a child.
“I’m so sorry,” she said into Vergil’s shoulder. “So awful sorry ...”
“We all are, honey. How such a thing could happen to a man as good and kind as Jonas is beyond me.”
Lee stepped back. “What happened, Verge? Marshall Flood said it was a murder. I still can’t believe that. Who would ever even think of murdering Jonas?”
The man’s eyes filled, and tears spilled down his cheeks. He tried to turn away, but her hand on his shoulder stopped him.
“He was back-shot, Lee. You know how he always had to be out there in the horse pasture. He rode out alone last Thursday mornin’, sayin’ he wanted to check on a couple of mares he was thinkin’ about bringin’ in to breed. I didn’t think nothin’ of it—it’s the type of thing he done nearly every day. Maybe an hour later, I heard a shot. It was one of them Sharp’s Buffalo pieces—I know the sound of them good enough. I couldn’t think of nothin’ but gettin’ on my horse and hightailin’ it to the pasture Jonas went to. I knowed there was somethin’ wrong, honey, just as sure as I would if the Lord hisself told me there was. I rode hard till I seen Jonas’s horse grazin’ with his reins danglin’ on the ground. Then I seen Jonas.” He wiped the tears from his face with the sleeve of his right arm. The gesture seemed almost boyish to Lee.
“Jonas was dead when you got to him?” she asked quietly.
Vergil nodded, swallow
ed hard, and then spoke. “Yeah. What a Sharp’s does ain’t pretty, but at least it killed him quick. He prolly didn’t even hear the shot.”
“Why, Vergil? And who did it?”
“Nobody knows. Nobody. Jonas, he didn’t have an enemy in the world. His wallet an’ pocket watch was still with him, so it weren’t no robbery.” The tears started again. “Jonas was a soft touch with anybody with a sad story. He woulda gave money to anybody who asked him. He was always takin’ in one stray or another, givin’ ’em work. An’ then the most of them, they’d steal him blind an’ ride off at night—on one of our good horses too. I used to rag on Jonas, tellin’ how we needed to put the law after every one of them thievin’ skunks.” Vergil’s voice cracked. “Now I wish I’d kept my mouth shut, ’cause Jonas, he was doin’ the right thing, just like the Bible says.”
“C’mon, Verge,” Lee said gently. “Let’s walk on into the barn and let me get my mare in a stall. We’ll talk as we walk, all right?”
She stepped to Meg’s head and slid her hand inside the halter, tugging Meg forward. After a few steps, she took her hand out, and Meg followed along behind her, as a boy’s dog follows his master. Vergil led his saddle horse by a single rein.
“Me an’ the boys, we buried Jonas up on the hill, jus’ like he wanted. The minister came an’ talked, an’ lots of folks was there. Even a couple of them drifters he helped out paid their respects.”
“Was Margaret there?”
“Nah, she wasn’t. Margaret’s a for-sure mess, Lee. She’s skin an’ bones an’ don’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive. She’s kinda in an’ out of what’s happenin’ around her. Sometimes she’ll sit there in the kitchen and talk as normal as anyone else, then she’ll drift away.”
“Does she understand that Jonas is dead? Has she talked about him with you or the minister or anyone?”