Cherokee

by Giles Tippette

  He said, looking a little hurt, “Well, I didn’t know what you wuz likely to think, not after them instructions you give me ’fore I left. I jest figured I was through if he got the notion was something other than yore roll. Hell, I could have made that up outten my salary in about a year.”

  “Ray, now listen to me. Are you listening to me? Look here at me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It was my fault.”

  He looked a little puzzled. “What?”

  “I knew this was a rough town and I shouldn’t have been flashing that roll down there in the lobby, either when we were getting the room or when I paid for my supper. There were plenty of hardcases sitting around and I should have had better sense. Maybe I was thinking about the gold. Maybe I was thinking who’d be interested in the five or six hundred dollars I had in my pocket when I was worrying about a hell of a lot more than that.”

  “Now let me git this straight. You be sayin’ that this was yore fault?”

  I sighed and looked away. I knew what was coming. I had just given Hays enough ammunition to use on me for the balance of the year. I figured to never hear the end of it. But I said, “Yes, Hays, it was my fault.”

  He looked at me blankly for a moment and then said, “Well, I’ll be damned. I never thought I’d hear them words come out of yore mouth.”

  I gestured at his hands. “You better soak them fists of yours or you won’t be able to hold a knife and fork by breakfast.”

  “You ain’t blamin’ me fer that fella bustin’ in the room like he done, comin’ in here with the you-know-what, even if he didn’t know about it?”

  “Now, listen, Hays, I have already said I’m to blame. Do not keep on with this or I’ll bring up a few things in the past that were your fault. Now look here, go on down to the desk and make that clerk get you some salt out of the kitchen. He won’t want to, but you tell him if he don’t that I’m coming out to talk to him. Go on now.”

  He got up. He glanced toward the window. He said, “Wonder if that old boy comin’ out the window will fetch the law?”

  I got up and raised the window and leaned out as far as I could. As near as I could tell it was business as usual. Hadn’t been five minutes since the man had tumbled into the street, and so far, he hadn’t drawn so much as a crowd of one. I said, “I reckon they got so many drunks laying around one more don’t draw no notice.” I turned away, shutting the window. I looked at Hays curiously. He was up and putting on his hat. “Ray, you were well on your way to beating that old boy to death. I never knowed you to have such a temper.”

  “Wasn’t my temper was poundin’ that man. Was yours. I could just picture the hell I was fixing to catch from you and I reckon I took it out on him.”

  “You moved pretty quick jamming that door against his gun arm. Especially considering you couldn’t see around the end of the door.”

  “Uh, uh,” he said. “I could see his revolver an’ his wrist. I knowed what I was doin’.”

  “Yeah, considerin’ that gun wasn’t pointing at you.”

  He sighed in that way he had. “I might have knowed it. Might have knowed it. Should have knowed I wadn’t gonna get off scot-free. Now I’m bein’ blamed ’cause I didn’t let him run off with your money.” He sighed again. “I should have knowed.”

  I had to laugh a little. “Hays, go get the salt. You done a good job. I’m serious. I’m going to prove it to you by not cutting your wages like I’d been planning on.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, but then thought better of it and closed it and went out the door.

  I smiled. Hays always made me smile. There was something about him that struck my funny bone. I glanced over and saw the blood on the floor. But there was nothing funny about the way he’d hit the robber. I’d seen Ray in gun fights and knew he could hold his own, but I’d never seen him use his fists. He could hit a hell of a lot harder than I’d thought.

  I locked the door and then got my revolver and waited. I didn’t want a repetition of what had just happened. Next time we threw somebody into the street it might not go unnoticed. Pretty soon there came a knock at the door. It was a kind of a dull thump. I went over to the door. I said, “Ray?”

  He said, “Yeah. Open the door, will ya?”

  I turned the key and then twisted the knob. Ray came in carrying a big saltshaker. I said, “Just the one of you this time?”

  He ignored it. “Boy, my hands are already sore. I had to knock on the damn door with my head.”

  I said drily, “You should have used that on that feller. Then your hands wouldn’t have got hurt.”

  He give me a sour look. I took the saltshaker out of his hands, unscrewed the top, and then dumped the biggest part of the salt into the big washbasin that was sitting on a stand with a pitcher and some fresh towels and other things. I poured the basin about half full of water out of the pitcher, and then kind of stirred it around and took it over and set it on Ray’s bed. I said, “Sit down there and stick your hands in that water. It works better when it’s hot, but there ain’t much we can do about that this time of night.”

  He put his hands in the brine and said, “Awwh!” and immediately took them out. “That stings like all get out.”

  “Ray, put your hands in there. We’ve got to get to sleep sometime tonight. Just soak your hands for half an hour.”

  “How am I gonna have a drink if I got both hands in here?”

  “Well, the answer to that is that you’re not going to have a drink. Now sit there and soak your hands and don’t say anything. I need to think.”

  “I ain’t goin’ out again without a weapon. I was a damn fool to do it tonight.”

  “That ain’t not saying anything. That’s talking.”

  “Course I don’t know what I could have done even if I had had a gun. Ol’ boy jest come up behind me, and next thing I know he’s proddin’ me in the small of the back.”

  “You’re soaking, but you’re still talking.”

  “Wasn’t as if he come at me from the front where a pistol would have done me some good. Never gave me no chancet.”

  I ignored him and poured myself a drink.

  “You gonna drink in front of me when I got both hands in this brine an’ can’t have one? It’s still burnin’ like sin in case you be interested.”

  I continued to ignore him.

  “Well, you see any way I could have avoided lettin’ happen what happened?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Stayed in the room.”

  Next morning we got away in pretty good style other than the usual trouble I had with railroad people. It seemed as if when you asked them for something that wasn’t right down on their list in block letters, it just threw them completely off track. I had to explain to the crew that was handling the freight cars that, yes, a stock car got hay and water even if there was just three horses going in it, and yes, since I’d paid for the whole damn car it was my car and they couldn’t put any other stock in it even if I didn’t have but three animals. And yes, we were going to ride in there with the horses and it was legal because we had tickets that said so, and if they wouldn’t bust up all the bales of hay we could sit on a couple of them until it came time to feed them to the horses.

  But we’d finally gotten rolling, pulling out of Bastrop no more than fifteen minutes late. Some day I vowed to find out why railroads went to all the trouble to print up timetables since they didn’t seem to pay the slightest bit of attention to them.

  But finally the town was behind us, and Ray said something about he could now relax from worrying about the sheriff coming looking for him for throwing the man out the window. He said, “That ain’t generally like me, you know. I’ve had to use a gun, but I don’t generally just cold-bloodedly fling a body out a second-story window.”

  “You didn’t seem so cold-blooded to me. In fact you appeared a touch hot under the collar.”

  I didn’t know about Ray, but I hadn’t slep
t so well. Seemed like, after the little scuffle, I was more conscious than ever of the gold in the saddlebags under the bed. So I’d just more or less dozed, listening for every sound and coming full awake if anything sounded the least suspicious. Hays yawned about the same time I did. He said, “Boy, I didn’t sleep so good last night.”

  “Hands hurt you?”

  He looked down at his knuckles. They were skinned up and red-looking, but they hadn’t swollen much. He said, “Naw. Reckon it was that damned gold.”

  “Yeah.” We were rolling through open countryside now. The land was starting to get more woody and broken. “Well, we can’t nod off now. Ain’t more than an hour till Austin and I don’t like the idea of us both being asleep while we’re going through there. There’s about a thirty-minute layover, according to the clerk at the depot, and I imagine this train will get shunted off to a siding or do a lot of backing and starting and stopping before we get lined out for Fort Worth.”

  We were both wearing leather jackets. Mine was my sheepskin-lined one that reached halfway down my thighs. Ray had on a big one that was lined with what looked like an Indian blanket. We were both huddled up pretty good. It was getting colder and colder and, as the train picked up speed, that wind just came whistling through the car. Ray said, “Hell, I’m about halfway too cold to sleep.”

  “You get a couple of drinks in you and drag out your sleeping blankets, you’ll sleep. I’ll bet on it. We ought to have a good three or four hours on the run from Austin to Fort Worth.”

  “I can stay awake. Besides, I ain’t seen Austin in a long time. I used to work for a cattle outfit had a ranch not all that far out of town. Of course that was a long time ago. Used to have me a right pretty girl I was courtin’ then.”

  “What happened to her?”

  He shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I was mighty young and on the move. I reckon she figured she could do better.”

  “You ever think about that, Ray? Finding the right woman? Settling down and getting married?”

  He shrugged again. “I dunno. Man don’t get much chance to meet the right kind of girl in a cowhand’s life.”

  “You ain’t a cowhand.”

  He made a motion with his hand. “Well, you know what I mean. Far as I can remember, that girl in Austin was the last nice girl I was ever around much. I mean in a courtin’ fashion.”

  “I never cared for Austin. Still don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know. Capital of the state and all that and I just never cared for it. Something kind of made up about it. Don’t seem real.”

  CHAPTER 7

  By the time we started getting into Austin Ray Hays was doing a pretty good job of nodding off and then jerking back up awake. But I had the sliding door open and had a bale of hay pulled up, and was sitting and looking out at Austin as it rolled by. I hadn’t been there in a while, but it still had that kind of temporary look about it as if everybody in the place was all fixed up to move on at the drop of a hat or the sound of a cannon. Which was just about right. Houston had been the first capital of Texas, back in 1836 when it had won its independence from Mexico and become a republic. But Houston was on the very east coast, and it was a hell of a trip for most folks to go to the coast to transact business that involved the government. So the powers that be decided they needed a more central location for the seat of government, and they sent out a bunch of surveyors and whatnot and decided, based on the then-settled parts of the country, on a spot that was just about in the middle of everywhere. So right then and there, right on the bald-ass prairie, right there without so much as a house in sight, they drove a stake and said that this was the site of the new capital.

  Which seemed to me like a kind of haphazard way to set about establishing a city, let alone a capital. As far as I knew, most towns had a reason for being. Either they were a port or on a river, or at a railhead or on the border or in the middle of a big bunch of cattle country or some other such thing. I had never heard of somebody just driving a stake in the ground and saying, “Well, let’s unpack. Here she be.”

  Of course the whole plan of the capital being in the center of the settled areas as they were then was a good idea. It meant nobody had to go any further to see the government about some business than anybody else. The only problem with the plan was that the forefathers hadn’t figured on Texas continuing to go west and north and southwest the way it did in the next fifty years. Now the capital was one hundred fifty miles from the coast, but it was near four hundred miles from the New Mexico border in far west Texas.

  And watching it as we slowly rolled into the depot and switching yards, it still appeared to me to not quite know what it was except the place where the capital was located. Of course it was a big city of about twenty thousand souls, but a good many of them were transients, and I wasn’t just talking about the legislators and the governor and his wife. Of course Austin grew up around the capital. It just being there created a town overnight, drawing mercantiles and hotels and saloons and grocery stores and churches and blacksmiths and every other kind of business you could name. But they always seemed to be changing. Seemed like nothing ever stayed the same, nothing was ever in the same place as it was when you last were there.

  The train shuddered and jerked as we come slowly to a stop. I looked back over at Ray. The jerk had jolted him off his bale of hay and he was sitting on the car floor looking around, still about half asleep, trying to figure out where he was.

  I said, “We’re in Austin, Ray. Short of the depot. I figure they’ll be switching around and adding some more freight cars before we pull in to pick up the passengers.”

  “Yeah,” he said. He got up, kind of groggily, and sat back down on the bale of hay and leaned back against the slats of the car.

  I leaned out the door and looked up the tracks. The depot appeared to be no more than a few hundred yards away. I figured to have plenty of time to walk up there while the train was switching around and getting itself made up. I said to Ray, “Hays, I’m gonna walk up to the depot and ask about what train we can get out of Fort Worth on into Oklahoma. You hear me?”

  “Yeah,” he said. But his eyes were closed and he had his hands in his lap.

  “Ray, goddammit! I’m going to get out of the car! Now wake up and stay awake!”

  That roused him. He sat up, blinking his eyes. He said, “What? What?”

  I told him again what I was going to do. “Now, damnit, you stay awake. You hear me? I’ll be gone maybe fifteen minutes. See to the horses.”

  We’d left the horses saddled with the stirrups tied over the seats of the saddles so they wouldn’t swing around and bother them when the train motion got rough. And of course, we’d slipped the bits out of their mouths so they could eat hay. They didn’t seem to be minding the ride too much, though they hadn’t had but an hour of it.

  Ray was rubbing his eyes. He said, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Go right ahead.”

  When the train made a stop at a junction switch I jumped down. Just to be on the safe side I slid the door to. There was something wrong with the lock so that it wouldn’t shut tight, but I didn’t figure that mattered. I set off up the tracks.

  The depot was just running awash with folks, most of them carrying little bundles of their clothes or carpetbags, with here and there some gentry with leather luggage and a hired hand to carry it for them. I finally got up to the window, and the ticket agent was good enough to look up the change for me even though it didn’t have nothing to do with his line. It turned out there was a train that very night at eight P.M. that left Fort Worth on its way to Oklahoma City. En route it passed through Chickasha, and I knew that Anadarko wasn’t but a good horseback ride from Chickasha. The agent said the line out of Fort Worth was the TP&O, and that we ought to be in there in plenty of time to get our car hooked on to the eight o’clock train. He told me he’d tell the conductor of our train to spot our car, when they unhooked us, so as to make an easy connection with t
he TP&O line. He said sometimes the brakemen and the conductors could get kind of ornery if they was carrying a grudge for some reason or another against another line, and would sometimes try and hide a whole string of freight cars.

  I left the depot and started back up the tracks toward our train. It was good luck and a good break and no mistake. The way things had been going, I’d fully expected to get to Fort Worth and then get to sit for a couple of days before we found any kind of train going anywhere near where we wanted to go. Or at least where we thought we wanted to go. For all I knew we’d get to Anadarko and I’d find out I’d wanted to go to Ohio or Georgia or some other such place the whole time.

  There were several other trains in the yard being made up, but I’d marked ours carefully and now I stepped along, trying not to trip, over the rails and between the ties and switches and all the other clutter that you find in a railroad yard. It appeared our train hadn’t moved, and I headed about catercorner toward where our car ought to be. I had counted it to be the seventeenth car from the caboose, but walking along, when I counted again, the seventeenth car had its door open. Either the train had indeed moved and the door had slid back, not being latched good, or else Hays had gotten out. Only I didn’t see him anywhere. I quickened my pace. Maybe he’d opened the door just to see out. I couldn’t for the life of me figure he’d get out of the car and wander off with all that gold in there for any reason under the sun. If he’d had to head for the bushes I knew he’d of waited for me or bust first.

  When I got near our car I got up next to the train and went slipping along. I had no reason to expect trouble, but when there’s $25,000 involved, you don’t take nothing for granted. I got to the end of my car and peeked in between the slats. It was a little darker inside, but I could clearly see a man I didn’t know up by the horses at the end of the car. I couldn’t see Hays because of the angle and the horses in between.

  I watched the man while he untied the bridle of a horse and then slipped the bits in. It was, I noticed, Hays’s horse. But I figured the man had just picked the horse that was the easiest to get to. When he had the horse properly bridled he took the reins and turned the horse around and started for the open door. I hunkered down and crept along just under the car so the man couldn’t see me. When I got to the bottom of the door I drew my revolver. Looking up over the edge of the floor of the car, I could see the man get to the door and jump down. What he was going to do was to jump the horse out of the car, which, for the horse, was a pretty risky matter, especially in a railroad yard with tracks and ties and switches running all over the place. Normally you used a wooden ramp to load and unload a horse out of a stock car. But what the hell, if the horse made it the man had him a fine animal. If it didn’t he’d just steal one somewhere else. Only this one happened to be carrying $12,500 in gold in its saddlebags.