Hart the Regulator 2

by John B. Harvey

  Fredericks looked as if he was going to say something in reply, but he thought better of it. Instead he turned back to Hart.

  ‘Where is Jefferson?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘You killed him?’ It was only just a question.

  Hart saw Fredericks slip his right hand into his coat pocket and figured he had a derringer stashed away there.

  Hart smiled, the tightest ghost of a smile and let Fredericks see that his hand was now covering the butt of his Colt. ‘No, I didn’t kill him. Comin’ out of Guthrie, someone tried to kill me. Jefferson happened to be around an’ got in the way.’

  ‘Convenient.’ Fredericks’ small mouth curled with sarcasm.

  ‘Not for Jefferson.’

  No one said anything for a while. Mrs. Fredericks continued to run the tips of her fingers along the shiny skin of her arm;

  Fredericks kept his hand on the derringer in his coat pocket, his eyes on Hart. A boot squeaked a loose board close outside.

  ‘You made enemies in Guthrie?’ Fredericks said eventually.

  Hart shook his head: ‘No.’

  ‘Then why...?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Bonney Fredericks ceased moving her fingers and pressed them into the soft flesh of her arm. ‘It makes you sound like a dangerous man to be around, Mister Hart.’

  ‘That depends, ma’am.’

  ‘What on?’

  ‘What you’re intendin’ on doin’?’

  The woman’s eyes widened, dark in the whiteness of her face, stones in snow.

  Fredericks turned and went to the low table and poured himself a drink from a glass decanter. He didn’t offer anyone else one. He said: ‘How do I know you’re not some no-good down on your luck and out to take me for whatever you can as soon as my back’s turned? How do I know you’re as good as you claim to be?’ He swallowed half of his drink.’ I don’t imagine you carry references.’ The thin mouth curled once more.

  Hart’s right hand blurred as his body dropped into a crouch: the Colt .45 was in his hand and the triple click of the hammer being levered back was the loudest sound Fredericks had ever heard. The end of the barrel was pointing directly at the centre of his chest.

  There was a slow, low moan of sound as Bonney Fredericks released her breath.

  ‘That’s the only reference I’ve got,’ said Hart easily. ‘You find someone who’s faster, hire him.’

  Fredericks and his wife continued to stare at the gun. Something had clotted at the back of Fredericks’ throat; his fingers had frozen on the metal of the derringer. Hart released the hammer, returned the gun to its holster.

  ‘I worked with the Rangers down in Texas. Before that rode as an Indian scout. Just handed Fagan back his deputy badge in Fort Smith.’

  ‘Jim Fagan?’

  That’s the one.’

  ‘How come you handed in your badge?’

  The image of the kid’s twisted face at the rope’s end rose up in Hart’s mind and he touched the burn marks on his own neck with his left hand. It was only the quickest of movements, but Bonney Fredericks followed it closely.

  ‘Let’s say we didn’t see eye to eye.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Fredericks downed his drink. ‘So now you want to work on your own?’

  Hart nodded. ‘You want a regulator, I’m your man.’

  Fredericks glanced at his wife; he moved to the shelves and pulled a volume half-way out, glanced at the title and pushed it back.

  ‘We’ll give it a trial. One month. Pay’ll be sixty...’

  ‘Hundred.’

  ‘That’s...’

  ‘Hundred a month. Take it or leave it. I’m the one who’s likely to get himself killed. All you have to do is pay to set me up.’

  Bonney Fredericks smiled; she uncrossed her legs and smoothed down her dress.

  ‘Okay,’ said Fredericks. ‘A hundred. But on a one month trial, mind.’

  Hart nodded.

  ‘Would that be with all found?’ asked the woman, the smile now held in her dark eyes.

  Hart looked down at her and the smile moved up and down his body. ‘Yes, ma’am, I guess it would.’

  Fredericks rammed the heel of his hand into the side of her chair, jolting it round. ‘Bonney, I asked you before and now I’m telling you. You leave business affairs to me! I’ll handle them my own way.’

  She moved her hands away from the sides of the chair, adjusted the lace shawl, stood up. In the glow of the oil lamp, the pallor of her face took on a sudden sheen.

  ‘Well, Jackson,’ she said softly, arching the upper part of her body towards him. ‘I guess you have to prove to yourself you can still handle something.’

  Fredericks flinched as if he’d been struck and then he swung his right hand, fingers extended, right into the side of her face. Into and across it, knocking her head back so that Hart could only see the tightly drawn hair and the jeweled slide.

  Fredericks moved as if he might hit her again, breath coming noisily through his nostrils, cheeks redder and more flushed than before. After a few moments he let his hand fall by his side; he was chewing away at the inside of his mouth, the right cheek moving in and out.

  The imprint of his fingers stood out clearly on Bonney Fredericks’ pale face; deep red lipstick had been smeared away from one corner of her mouth. Her hands were clenched tight together! her eyes burned darker, deeper than before.

  Hart had not moved. His glance went from one to the other of them, wondering if this were a usual eruption of anger or if it had been building up slowly for some time.

  Mrs. Fredericks shifted her gaze to Hart. He was unable to tell what she was thinking, feeling. She said: ‘Goodnight, Mr. Hart, Doubtless I shall see you again.’

  She said it calmly, evenly, as if nothing had happened. Without saying a word to her husband, she turned with a swirl of her dress and left the room.

  Fredericks went back to the decanter and poured a drink, larger than the first. This time he poured one for Hart as well.

  ‘Sit down.’

  Hart sat in the chair Mrs. Fredericks had left, hanging his hat from one corner. When he laid his arm along one side he could feel the warmth her body had left behind.

  ‘My wife ... she doesn’t always think what she’s saying. It’s being out here on the prairie. No one much to talk to.’ He shifted the glass between both hands. ‘She’s a ... she’s a good woman.’

  He looked at Hart earnestly. Hart didn’t say anything but he didn’t believe it, either. Whatever Bonney Fredericks might be – and she was likely a lot of things – a good woman wasn’t one of them.

  Fredericks drank some, fiddled with the glass a little more, got up and fetched a cigar box from between the rows of books. He held it out to Hart who declined with a shake of the head.

  ‘You ever been married?’

  The question caught Hart like a rattler under a stone. He didn’t know how long it was before he answered, ‘No,’ but it seemed a long time.

  Fredericks nodded and exhaled a ring of smoke which drifted towards the ceiling, changing shape and breaking into formless patterns as it went.

  ‘Jefferson told you the situation?’

  ‘Way I see it, you got a parcel of land doin’ nothin’ but growin’ good grass and you’re sellin’ grazin’ rights to any Texas trail boss who wants his stock to fatten up through the winter. Come spring you get ’em to the railroad and lop off a share of the profit.’

  ‘You say it as though you don’t like it.’

  ‘I don’t have to like it.’

  Fredericks drew on the cigar. ‘That’s right. You don’t. All you have to do is keep any trouble right away from my land.’

  ‘You make it sound easy.’

  ‘It’s not easy. Unless you’re as good as you say you are.’

  Hart leaned forward. ‘We’ll see ‘bout that. Where do I start?’

  ‘First herd’s due in a couple of weeks, depending on the weather. Soon as they arrive there’ll be rustlers comin
’ out of the hills like worms out of the woodwork. I want them shown the error of their ways.’

  Hart’s fingers clenched and unclenched. ‘No lynchin’.’

  ‘Why in the Lord’s name not?’

  ‘I ain’t partial to it.’

  ‘Partial! What the deuce has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘I’ll do things my way. There’s more than hangin’ to warn men off.’

  Fredericks stood up and set the empty glass on the table by the lamp. ‘Every steer that gets rustled, that costs me money. You remember that.’

  ‘I’ll remember it.’

  Hart stood up and faced Fredericks, staring at him until the other man looked away. The smell of cigar smoke was strengthening in the room.

  ‘Taylor and the other men sleep in the bunkhouse outside. There’s a spare bunk there.’

  Hart grinned and shook his head.

  ‘What...?’

  ‘You got a spare room upstairs, ain’t you? Place this size.’

  Fredericks squeezed the cigar, almost breaking it into pieces. ‘Damn it, man! You’ll sleep out with the rest of the hired men.’

  Hart hooked his thumbs into his gun belt. ‘I won’t. I won’t ’cause if I do they’ll think I’m the same as them an’ that might not be best. An’ I won’t ’cause I ain’t just another hired hand, I’m your regulator. An’ at a hundred dollars a month I deserve a good bed.’

  He turned towards the door, hesitated, swung back. ‘A few more things while we’re gettin’ straight. You see that Peters and whoever else you got out there know that if I need ’em to do somethin’ they do it. An’ however you think you can get away with treatin’ that wife of yours, don’t waste your time tryin’ the same on me – an’ that includes any ideas you might have concernin’ that fancy gun you’ve got stashed in your coat pocket.’

  He stepped past Fredericks and scooped up the decanter. ‘It’d help if you stopped bein’ so damned mean with your brandy.’

  Hart shut the door hard with his right hand and stepped outside the house. Peters was standing close by, rifle resting against his body. He tensed when Hart came out and slipped his hand down to the trigger guard.

  ‘My bags and saddle guns,’ Hart said. ‘Get ’em. I’ll be upstairs.’

  Peters stared back at him through the dusk, as if not quite able to take in what had been said. But as Hart didn’t move or speak again, he slowly moved away towards the barn.

  Hart leaned against the doorway, decanter trailing from the fingers of his left hand, right hand at his belt close by the butt of the Colt. Every vestige of light had disappeared from the sky.

  Chapter Six

  The eyes were hazel tinged with green, the hair brown, long, falling around her face, across her face. Tears bitten back, welling again inside. He reached out to touch her and she pulled away, turning her head from him as if his hand upon her would be like touching something rotted and old.

  ‘Kathy!’

  The face muscles tightened, the tears set away, there was nothing there but pain and strength.

  ‘Kathy!’

  Hart heard the word and woke, startled by the sound of his own voice. Through the open window he could see a pattern of stars, forking left to right across the blackness. Strand of her hair left to right across her face – freckled face. Cold sweat lay on him like a skin. He sat up in the bed and wiped at his arms with the flannel sheet, at his arms, chest, face and neck, the insides of his thighs.

  He knew what had brought the dream back to his mind. Fredericks’ question: have you ever been married? No, he could have said. No. I just stood in the place I built for her, for the pair of us to live in and watched her telling me that she wasn’t going to live there, that she wasn’t going to marry me. That was all. As close as he’d come to being married. A handful of years ago, not much in a life. Long enough for a dream to become a nightmare.

  Before Kathy there had been women enough, more than enough. Saloon girls and whores and chance encounters whose names he couldn’t remember even if he’d ever known them. Since then the only person who might have meant anything to him had been Carol Peterson, a woman he’d spoken to for half an hour.

  Hart thought about the strangely neat, ordered cabin deserted by people and wondered again where she and her husband might have gone, what might have happened to them. He recalled the look on her face when she’d talked of having children – later – one day. Remembered smoothing rough-hewn wood to satin in the room that would have been for his and Kathy’s firstborn.

  A son.

  Why a son?

  Was it only so that when he was gone there would still be someone else that was still part of him? Blood of his blood. Was that it? Flesh of his flesh. Like the boy he’d had to kill on the ferry, the one whose father had cut out his tongue. Like his own father, coming home from his prospecting trips with nothing to show for it but an aching body and a bloody temper.

  Is that what it meant – father and son?

  If so, wasn’t he better off as he was?

  Hart lay back down and pulled the covers over his shoulders. He closed his eyes and tried to empty his mind and drift back to sleep.

  Hart spent the first few days getting to know the extent of the Fredericks property and lay of the land. He [also talked with the men Fredericks kept on his regular payroll – he would take on extra hands when there were herds to drive up to the border.

  Peters didn’t prove any less surly and difficult to get on with after Hart got to know him a little. A stocky wrangler with a drooping brown moustache and a greasy Stetson that he never seemed to take off, Peters was only half-way civil to Hart because he knew his job depended on it. But every chance he got he made it clear as day that he reckoned Hart was only slightly preferable to a wild dog.

  He was five or six years the older man and he’d spent his life since fourteen handling broncs and steers and bustling his way to be top hand. When the trail herds came through he’d be worth double his pay but until that time, he just riled Hart all the time, as if driving him to swing a punch. Hart let it ride and kept out of Peters’ way as much as he could. The time might come when he’d need to have him on his side.

  Chavez was a Mexican who’d drifted up from Texas a year before and stuck around. He was tall for a Mex, a few inches above six foot and rangy with it. He wore one of those leather vests studded with pieces of polished metal that Mexicans seemed to like and a large-brimmed sombrero. He spoke in a broken accent that Hart suspected he put on more than he needed to and liberally sprinkled what he said with odd words of Mexican.

  Whenever he was sitting around doing nothing much, he’d take out his knife – a slim-bladed throwing knife with a double edge like a razor – and toss it over and over, always catching it with the haft in the palm of his hand. Every now and then he’d punctuate this routine by throwing it at anything that moved close. One time Hart saw him impale a long-legged spider from a dozen feet, the contents of the insect’s sac spilling out around the blade.

  The other two were called T.C. and Howie. They’d been signed on together when they came up the Chisholm Trail that spring. Howie had had a run-in with the trail boss and got himself fired. T.C. had quit on the spot and drawn his pay. They’d worked for Fredericks ever since. Howie was a barrel-chested man with legs that seemed too small for the rest of his body. He had a wide-open face and the look of someone who was constantly being taken by surprise. T.C. was taller and thinner and had a habit of coughing into an old red kerchief he always carried with him – long, racking coughs which bent him near double and took the blood from his face. He had only three fingers on his left hand; the middle two had got smashed up when he was tossed from a bronc that followed up by stomping him against a corral fence. The fingers had been so torn and crushed the foreman had given T.C. a quick slug of whisky and cut through them close to the knuckle with a big old bowie knife.

  Hart had ridden out with Howie and T.C. a few times – north towards the Salt Fork of the Arkansas
River, west towards the hills that led into the Outlet. To the east the tree line began and the prairie got swallowed up in oak. Southwards was the Canadian River.

  It was at the end of one of these journeys that Hart got back to find Fredericks with visitors. Three Cheyennes were astride their ponies outside the house, two wearing leggings and breechcloths, one a pair of wool pants several sizes too large. All three had hide shirts decorated with quillwork and beads. Their hair was greased and pulled back on their heads, parted at the centre.

  Peters was standing outside the bunkhouse, toying with his rifle. Chavez was sitting on the ground by the end of the barn, throwing his knife up into looping circles.

  Hart nodded for T.C. and Howie to ride to the left and went slowly forward. The Cheyenne who turned to face him had a nose that looked to have been broken more than once and spread across his face. He was nursing a Winchester in both hands, letting it rest on his thighs. The other two were also armed, though with pistols. All three weapons looked new and hadn’t lost their shine.

  Hart reined in Clay next to the two riderless horses, one another Indian pony, the other a saddled gelding with a white mark on its rear right leg.

  Hart got down from his mount carefully, watching the Cheyenne all the time. Their faces regarded him impassively. He went to the door and pushed it open, stepped inside.

  Bonney Fredericks was so close inside the door that he was next to her almost before realizing she was there. Something in his head jumped and his hand rested on his gun. She said nothing, looking up at him with her deep-set eyes, a strange half smile on the corners of her painted mouth.

  ‘You aren’t going to use that, are you?’ She was looking now at his hand on the Colt.

  Hart ignored her question and made to step past her. She slid her body into his way and for a moment her bare arm touched his chest.

  ‘Where’s Fredericks?’

  She turned her head sideways. ‘In there. Talking with his Indian friends.’

  ‘What about?’

  Her eyes widened in mock surprise. ‘You don’t really expect me to know. You heard my husband telling me business was none of my affair.’