by Lyle Brandt
It was a night to celebrate, regardless. Sure, they’d lost some men taking the carpetbagger down, but it was worth the cost and had his men fired up, pretending that they’d fought a battle on the scale of Gettysburg. The ones who’d been in combat knew better but wouldn’t spoil it for the stay-at-homes. Tonight, they felt like winners, and he meant to keep them feeling that way, since they had a long fight still ahead of them.
Since Lincoln’s death in April, the Republicans in Congress had been clamoring for stiff reprisals. Booth was dead, and his accomplices had stretched rope in July, but killing off five southern patriots had failed to satisfy the Yankee craving for revenge. President Johnson seemed to think that he could hold the radicals in check, but Truscott didn’t think so. There were hard times coming for the late Confederacy, and she would need hard men to preserve the treasured southern way of life, even in part.
One of his men nudged Truscott’s elbow, nearly spilled his lukewarm beer, but Truscott bit his tongue in lieu of cursing. “Cap’n, we done good tonight,” his soldier slurred, already three sheets to the wind.
“You did, indeed,” Truscott replied—although, in truth, he wasn’t happy to have lost the men who’d fallen, and to have the coppers picking over their remains. It was unlikely that there’d be any investigation worthy of the name, but clumsy tactics made for sloppy outcomes.
They would have to do much better in the future.
Someone at the far end of the bar was calling for another song. “Dixie” this time, and the piano player started hammering his keyboard without hesitation, singing in a loud, slightly discordant voice, as others joined in with him.
“Ooohhh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten—”
“Look away!” the rowdy chorus echoed. “Look away!”
“Look away, Dixie Land!”
Somebody tugged on Truscott’s sleeve, the left. He turned in that direction, lowering his eyes to meet those of a shorter man whose whiskey breath was nearly overpowering. Truscott wondered if he had grabbed the nearest solid object to support himself, but then the short man gave another tug and asked, “Cap’n, who’s that?”
“Who’s who?” Truscott replied, raising his voice to make it audible over the singing.
“There,” the shorty answered, pointing toward a doorway that gave access to the Southern Cross’s storeroom, owner’s office, and a back door exit from the place. Squinting against tobacco smoke, Truscott picked out a figure that he recognized and came up with the name of Gary Rodgers.
Pushing past the man who had alerted him to Gary’s presence, Truscott moved in that direction, smiling. “You came back,” he said. “I’m glad to see you. Let me—” Glancing down, he froze, then asked the man who’d saved him earlier that evening, “What’s the rifle for?”
Unsmiling, Rodgers kept the Henry’s muzzle pointed at the floor, as he replied, “Truscott, it’s time for you to come with me.”
*
Ryder hadn’t considered what charge he could file against Truscott. Nothing came instantly to mind, except a vague count of conspiracy he knew was likely to be tossed from any court in Texas. Right now, he wasn’t thinking past the moment. All he wanted was a chance to question Truscott privately, away from all his men, their raucous singing, and cloying fog of smoke inside the Southern Cross.
“What do you think you’re doing, Gary?”
“Putting you under arrest,” Ryder replied.
“On what authority?”
“The U.S. Secret Service.”
“Never heard of it,” said Truscott, with a mocking smile, his fingers gliding toward the outer right-hand pocket of his suit coat.
Ryder jabbed his belly with the Henry’s muzzle. “Move that hand another inch, you’ll hear this plain enough.”
“You’d shoot me here, in front of all my men?” Truscott was trying to be cocky, but he wasn’t managing too well.
“You’re coming with me, one way or another,” Ryder said. “It’s your call, either way.”
“How are you planning to survive this?”
“Not your problem. Somebody starts shooting, you’re the first to drop.”
Truscott stared hard at him, apparently deciding that he meant it. “All right, then. Be quick about it, will you, for the sake of all concerned.”
Ryder was backing toward the hallway he’d just passed through, calculated he was halfway there or better, when a drunken voice behind Truscott called out, “Cap’n? Wha’s goin’ on?”
That drew a few more from their off-key singing, to observe Ryder and Truscott. Even soused, they couldn’t miss the rifle Ryder held pressed into Truscott’s belly. Voices growled profanity. Hands flew to holstered pistols, and to knives.
“Stand easy!” Ryder cautioned, as the jangly piano music died. “You pull on me, I’m letting daylight through your boss.”
“Bullshit!” one of them snarled, and whipped his pistol clear.
Ryder started to move, keeping Truscott before him to use as a shield, but the drunk fired a shot anyway, missing both of them by several feet. It was the break that Truscott needed, slapping at the Henry’s muzzle, reaching back to snatch a bottle from the bar and lob it overhand toward Ryder. When Truscott struck the rifle, Ryder fired a shot by accident and heard a yelp of pain from someone in the crowd behind Truscott, then he was reeling as the whiskey bottle struck his shoulder, staggered him, and bounced away.
Truscott was off and running like a man who’s seen his house on fire, the other members of the KRS ducking for cover from the unexpected gunfire. Ryder had their boss man in his sights, when someone fired another pistol shot and cut a jagged piece out of the bar immediately to his left, stinging his cheek with splinters as he dropped into a crouch and focused on the job of trying to survive.
How many men against him in the Southern Cross? He guessed it must be thirty-five or forty, anyway, and likely more. Most of them now had weapons drawn but didn’t seem exactly clear on what they should be doing with them. Some reached out to Truscott as he passed them, sprinting for the nearest exit, but he struck their hands away and shouldered through their ranks, not taking time to rally a defense.
The man Ryder had wounded lay beside a table that was overturned, a couple of his friends hunkered behind it in the vain belief that it would stop a bullet. Ryder couldn’t tell how badly the man was hit, and frankly didn’t care. He was in danger from the men still on their feet, not one rolling around the floor, clutching his gut and bellowing in pain.
He ducked behind the near end of the bar, the only decent shelter in the room, as half a dozen pistols started firing, bullets gouging strips out of the floorboards, peppering the wall behind him, wild shots breaking bottles shelved behind the bar. He figured Truscott must be out and gone by now, but if he cleared the barroom fast enough, Ryder still had a chance to overtake him on his way back home.
One rule he’d learned about gunfighting: those who fired in haste—particularly in their cups—normally missed if they were any farther out than point-blank range. Of course, a stray shot was as deadly as an aimed one, if it clipped an artery or drilled a vital organ, so he couldn’t calculate the odds of getting out alive.
What Ryder needed was chaos, and plenty of it.
Glancing toward the barroom’s ceiling, he saw two suspended wagon wheels, fixed on pulleys to be raised and lowered, each with half a dozen oil lamps mounted equidistant from each other on its rim. If he could clip the ropes they dangled from and bring them crashing down, the lamps would likely shatter, spill their fuel across the wooden floor, and set the place on fire.
If he could make that shot, with pistols barking at him, enemies he’d never met before shouting their threats and curses, all intent on killing him.
Sweating, he raised the Henry, tried to hold it steady, index finger curled around its trigger, praying that the rifle wouldn’t be shot from his hands.
*
Chance Truscott covered one full block before i
t hit him: if he ran away, how would his men, his Knights, ever have faith in him again? He was afraid, no doubt about it, but if he let them see that, he would be finished as their leader.
Was it already too late, the way he’d bolted from the Southern Cross, shoving his men aside to save himself? Maybe. But if he went back now and rallied them, led them to kill the traitor who’d deceived him earlier that evening, he could likely win their trust back. Spin some story about going off to look for help, and then deciding he was needed more among his men than fetching reinforcements.
That could work. But it meant going back right now.
Reluctantly, he turned and ran back toward the Southern Cross, breath wheezing in his lungs. His mind was racing, searching for a handle on the situation. Rodgers, or whatever he was called in fact, had said he worked for something called the U.S. Secret Service. True or false, Truscott thought he could use that to distract his men from any doubts or disappointment they might feel toward him, directly.
Paint it as another federal incursion on the sovereign State of Texas, once its own republic, now crushed under Yankee boots and likely to remain so, if a force of loyal native sons did not arise to sweep the blue plague from their soil. If Rodgers had credentials or a badge, it would confirm a charge of spies among them, undermining every aspect of the old traditions his supporters had been raised to view as part of God’s eternal plan.
His courage was returning as he reached the Southern Cross—at least, until he heard the storm of gunfire echoing inside there. As he neared the bat-wing doors, the light appeared to shift in the saloon, immediately followed by a crash that shook the place. Men cursed and howled, more guns went off, and when he peered in through the nearest window, Truscott saw the place was burning now, its wooden floor a sea of spreading flames.
Stupid to go in now, he thought. The place is burning. Anyone with any sense will make a break for it.
But leadership and common sense were not always compatible. Sometimes a leader had to take a chance, risk everything, if he was going to inspire his men and hold their confidence. He couldn’t urge them into battle, when a situation called for him to lead them by example. If he didn’t joint the fight, those who escaped the Southern Cross tonight would carry two grim memories: their own fear, and his failure as their captain. They would shun him as a coward, maybe even seek revenge against him for deserting them.
Truscott drew his pistol—nothing big, a Colt Pocket Police revolver in .31-caliber, weighing just over a pound and a half—and moved forward against his better judgment, shoving through the bat-wing doors into the anteroom of Hell.
*
Ryder had missed the wagon wheel’s suspension line with his first shot but cut it with the second, while the raving drunks around him ducked and wondered what he had in mind. They found out seconds later, when the ring of lamps came plunging down and trapped one man beneath it, six lamps shattering on impact with the floor and spewing liquid fire. The man beneath it screamed and tried to wriggle free, his legs acrawl with biting flames.
Ryder couldn’t get a clear shot at the second wagon wheel, but didn’t think he’d need to. Panic swept the room, men’s voices shouting, “Fire!” as if nobody else could see the spreading smoke and flames. A woman screamed, one of the upstairs girls, and Ryder hoped she’d make it out all right, but couldn’t turn the fight into a rescue mission. He was focused on escape now, tracking Truscott and—
“Captain!” one of the shooters cried, over the din of general confusion.
And another, right behind him, hollered, “Cap’n! You come back!”
“Discretion,” Truscott’s deep voice answered, “dictates we evacuate this place.”
“We got ’im cornered, though,” a third man said. “If we can root ’im out real quick—”
“Indeed,” Truscott replied, cutting his soldier off. “We cannot leave an enemy to possibly escape, then harm us further on another day.”
That earned a rousing cheer, over the crackling of the fire, and Ryder braced himself for what he knew was coming. They would charge en masse and overrun him, kill him where he stood—or crouched, more like—and that would be the end of it. If he tried bolting out the back, they’d shoot him as he ran.
Unless …
He still had thirteen rounds left in the Henry, six more in his Colt without reloading. If he fought back hard enough, there was a chance that he could rout them. Not a good chance, but it beat his odds if he did nothing. And if he could turn the charge, there was a chance that he might reach the back door with a slim head start.
And Truscott?
Drop him if you can, he told himself.
It took another smoky moment, even with the place in flames, for Ryder’s enemies to rally, summon up their nerve, and rush the point where they had seen him last. By then, he’d edged further behind the bar, gaining more cover for himself, and when he rose, his Henry shouldered, several of his would-be killers gaped at him in stark surprise.
Log them as drunk and stupid.
Ryder rapid-fired into the charging crowd, dropping two men in the front rank before he spotted Truscott, swung around, and nailed him with his third shot. Ryder saw his .44 slug drill through Truscott’s cheek, then had no time to watch him fall or see if he was trampled by the others rushing up behind him. Blazing at his human targets like a madman, Ryder barely had to aim. The wall of angry flesh before him made a wasted shot impossible.
His fusillade tore through the ranks, causing a ripple that became a rout, the men he hadn’t killed or wounded yet changing their minds about the wisdom of hurling themselves at a repeating rifle, while the building that contained them filled with smoke and threatened to collapse.
Their mass retreat began when someone cried, “The cap’n’s hit!” More voices joined the lamentation, and the charge broke ten feet short of a collision with the bar. To keep them moving, Ryder started lobbing whiskey bottles after them, each one exploding into bright flames as it shattered, setting fire to trousers, bodies, furniture—whatever was nearby.
Ryder took advantage of his adversaries fleeing toward the street, a couple of them smashing windows to leap through them when the flapping doors seemed too congested. No one noticed as he scuttled down the hallway to the back door, bursting through it, bleary-eyed and coughing from the dense smoke roiling through the Southern Cross.
The place was done, cooking away with Truscott and a number of his people still inside it. Ryder didn’t plan to stay and watch it all fall down, particularly since that meant police, the fire brigade, and far too many other witnesses to suit him. Starting on the trek back to his boardinghouse, slapping his clothes to shed some of the smoky odor, he began to think about his next report to Washington.
What would he write? Got tired of waiting, so shot up the place and burned it down.
He wasn’t sure that anything he’d done so far, in Corpus Christi, fell within the law. He could have said the same for Galveston, of course, and that turned out all right, as far as his director was concerned. He’d lost Tom Hubbard to the KRS, along with several freedmen, but that would have happened anyway, he guessed, whether he’d been in town or not.
The thing to work on now was moving forward. Ryder wasn’t finished with the Knights, by any means. He’d only started, and his next move would be taking him into the hard heart of their territory, to disturb a hornets’ nest.
He needed to be ready, or his bones—like those of Yankee soldiers in the Rebel song—would soon lie still in southern dust.
6
The train left Corpus Christi for Houston at nine o’clock on Friday morning. Ryder had passed a restless night, sitting up in his room at the boardinghouse, half expecting the police or sheriff’s deputies to turn up anytime. He was relieved when they did not appear, managed to eat a double helping of the landlady’s biscuits and gravy, then packed his gear and headed for the station two hours ahead of schedule, taking back streets all the way.
The railroad station had a f
resh coat of paint, but the tracks were rusty and the train that pulled into the depot at half-past eight consisted of three passenger cars trailing a boxy prewar locomotive, its giant funnel smokestack out of all proportion to the boiler and the engineer’s cab. In motion, he knew from experience, it would spew gray smoke and cinders, proven by the staining on the cars it towed.
They killed time while the locomotive took on fuel and water, but Ryder had his ticket ready and sat out that time in the last of the three aging passenger cars. His half dozen fellow passengers sat in the first car, treating themselves to the worst of the smoke and jolts from the journey, and he left them to it. Assuming they stayed on the rails, all three cars should arrive in Jefferson at the same time.
He had plotted the trip beforehand. The stretch from Corpus Christi to Houston covered 184 miles, at an optimistic top speed of twenty miles per hour. With at least one other fueling stop along the way, call it ten hours on the rails. At Houston, he’d be switching trains for the 218-mile journey to Jefferson, eleven hours minimum, not counting any stops along the way. A full day of rattletrap travel, but once he got used to the noise and vibration, Ryder supposed he could catch up on sleep from last night.
And what would his adversaries be doing, in the meantime?
He was leaving Corpus Christi’s Knights of the Rising Sun in disarray, momentarily leaderless, but Ryder guessed they wouldn’t stay that way for long. They didn’t have his name, and Truscott—dead now—was the only one to whom he had identified himself as a federal agent. Beyond that, he assumed that general alarms would go out to other KRS chapters statewide, and the organization’s headquarters in Jefferson should logically be first to get the news.
That meant he’d be walking on eggshells tomorrow, when his train arrived. The KRS might have a welcoming committee at the depot, watching out for strangers, maybe even with a general description of their target from survivors of the shootout at the Southern Cross. If so, he would be ready for them—or, at least, as ready as he could be in the circumstances. One man in a hostile city, where his badge was nothing but a bull’s-eye, and he couldn’t count on any help from local lawmen.