Leduc recognized both almost immediately, mentally placing their faces to names found in the leather-bound sheaf of warrants the rangers called their bible. He figured there wasn’t enough rope in the whole territory to carry out every sentence, and he sometimes wondered if it would be so wrong to just kill these men wherever found. Captain Stringer was of the same mind, but stronger was his conviction that there had to be a dividing line between the lawless and the lawful. He’d also said there was nothing wrong, if forced, with a verdict issued by Judge Colt and a jury of five.
Leduc got to his feet. His right thumb, in a casual movement, flicked the thong from his gun hammer. “I’ll be right back,” he said to Delaney, then moved off.
By now the pair had reached the bar, belly-up with both hands visible. The tall one, Roy Harmon, spotted Leduc first. The ranger was careful in his approach—you never could tell what men of their stripe were apt to do. He noted that Harmon, the jumpy one, had carelessly placed his carbine down below the bar, out of sight. The muzzle was no doubt pointing upward, with the trigger guard facing out and an empty round under the hammer. Also, the bar was so swamped with patrons that there wouldn’t have been enough room for Harmon to bring his piece to bear on Leduc without putting a hole in the roof first. That dealt him out as a possible combatant—that, and the fact that one of his hands already had a whiskey glass in it.
Jim Church’s pistol lay in a cross-draw holster across his lower stomach, much more accessible than Harmon’s carbine was, only he was bent so far over the bar that there was no way he could have beaten Leduc on the draw. When he finally took notice of the ranger, already standing within six feet, the outlaw could only stare.
Harmon made no effort to hide his contempt. “What in the hell d’you want?”
Leduc stood flat-footed, thumbs hooked behind his buckle, ignoring the outlaw’s question to ask one of his own. “You good Christian men stayin’ out of trouble?”
“You bet we are,” Church said with feigned bravado, but Leduc thought he heard apprehension somewhere in there.
Harmon persisted. “I said, what business you got with us? We just barely come into town a minute ago, and we’re thirsty. Ain’t no law against bein’ thirsty, is there?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit, Roy,” Church said, voice deep as a lowing bull’s.
Of the two, Leduc figured Church was the one to watch. The man might look like just another down-at-heel cowpoke, lazy in his walk and in his talk, but he was dangerous. Leduc had known him as a horse thief, but it was said he’d killed two men down in Bexar several years back. As little as he trusted Harmon, the ranger’s eyes never left Church.
Harmon was speaking again. “You got any papers on us? Legitimate or otherwise?”
“Got no papers on ya,” Leduc admitted. “Not on me, least-ways. Reason bein’, I’ve presently got bigger fish to fry than you two.”
Harmon seemed to take offense to that. “What’s that s’posed to mean?”
“Neither of ya would’ve happened to cross paths with Gabe Kings lately, wouldja?”
“Why?” Church asked. “You lookin’ to bring him in?”
“Governor wants to have a sit-down with him, and he wants a few of us to make it happen.”
Church snorted. “Don’t figure that. You got sand, Leduc, you and Stringer both, but I think mebbe you bit off more’n you can chew this time. Nobody braces Gabe Kings and walks away—I don’t care how many of ya Hubbard’s payin’. I bet there’s a hundred of your kind buried ’tween here and Juárez, and a couple dozen more just been left for the buzzards. For all the good you claim to be doin’ for the state, I’d say it’s fellas like Kings doin’ the bigger service.”
He paused to take up his glass but did not drink immediately. “But to answer your question, no, we ain’t seen him lately. Tell you the truth, Roy and me never had any truck with his lot. We’re in the horse business, not the bank and train business.” He clicked his tongue and said apologetically, “So sorry we can’t be of help.”
Delaney was suddenly beside Leduc. “Any trouble here, Sergeant?”
“No trouble, Detective. Not tonight.” He nodded in turn to the pair. “See you boys around.”
He didn’t wait for a parting word—wouldn’t have received one anyway—but turned to Delaney and motioned for him to walk ahead. “Let’s go,” he said and gave Harmon’s shoulder a good, hard squeeze as he edged by.
Outside in the lamplight, Delaney cupped his hands around a match and a second cigar. “Who were they?”
“Just a couple of two-bit stock thieves. Wasted my breath tryin’ to get somethin’ out of ’em.”
Delaney waved the flame out and flicked the match into the street, nearly landing it in a pile of horse apples. “Somethin’ on Kings.”
“Yep.”
“Another case of lockjaw.”
Leduc heaved a deep breath in an effort to purge the frustration from his body. “Well, we best not let it get us down, Delaney,” he said, trying for optimism. “We knew this was gonna be a high-stakes game goin’ in, but there’s one thing you can lay a safe bet on.”
“What’s that, now?”
“We got all the time in the world. Kings don’t.”
“He’s had a good run so far. When d’you figure his time’s gonna run out?”
His father used to say that prophesying, like play-acting and play-writing, never paid for breakfast, but something compelled Leduc to speak on the corner of that Austin street.
“He’s the last of a dyin’ breed,” he said. “If you recall, the Jameses and the Youngers got their hash cooked up in North-field not too long ago, and they ain’t been seen or heard from since. You think about it, James and Kings are cut from the same cloth. Same as them Missouri boys, Kings is fightin’ a war that ended more’n ten years back. He’s just another holdout, waitin’ to be brung in.”
The detective tapped ash off his cigar and squinted out onto the thoroughfare. Under the boardwalk across the way, he could just make out the slinking silhouette of a stray cat that paused once to turn its unblinking yellow eyes on Delaney. He liked to imagine it was stalking a rat. He thought that they—Stringer, Mincey, Leduc, and himself—were playing a similar game, only their role, whether cat or rat, was less clear.
“What’s takin’ them so long?” he wondered aloud, looking upstreet.
Leduc looked, too, as if that would bring Stringer and Mincey down the hill from the capitol all the quicker. And for once in the history of looking, it did.
“Well, here’s your chance to ask ’em,” he said.
The men gathered in the street.
CHAPTER 16
Wingate went in search of extra ammunition through what he figured must have been Kings’s quarters and found a Bible, of all things, instead.
The last time he’d picked one up was to say words over the grave he and his younger brother Charlie dug for their pap. He remembered he read from the Psalms.
Some days, if he sat still enough, Wingate could smell the stuffy dust and slogging rainfall of Clay County, Missouri; still feel the humidity and the pesky sting of mosquitoes along the back of his neck as he worked from five in the morning to well after sundown while his pap soaked up so much whiskey it eventually killed him. They discovered him facedown in six inches of ditchwater early one spring morning. Frank had just turned fifteen.
He’d been the oldest of three young ones, one of whom never survived infancy. Pap liked to attribute his drunkenness to that tragedy, but Frank had seen the time when his father couldn’t even remember his own name, let alone the face of an unnamed infant who died so long before. Early on, it became bitterly apparent what kind of life Frank and Charlie seemed destined for—one as hard as the pallet they shared in the loft of the gloomy, two-room Wingate farmhouse.
Not long after Pap drowned, consumption robbed Frank of his mother, the same mother who spoke of God’s unending love and tender mercies. It was around this time—specifically, about the
time it came for him to again perform the reading at grave-side—that Frank lost whatever shred of faith that lingered in him.
His mother’s will expressed her desire that he and Charlie be sent to their aunt and uncle in Springfield, and it had pained Frank to go against her plans for him, but the night before they were set to leave, he said good-bye to Charlie, crawled out the back window of the Widow Jones’s boarding house, and left Clay County without so much as a backward glance. The first night out, he camped on the near bank of the Missouri River and used the entire book of Genesis and most of Exodus to get a nice blaze going.
Over the next few years Wingate spent time in Kansas and the Utah Territory. He moved into the Pike’s Peak area to try his luck at prospecting in ’57. Tin-panning for gold dust brought naught but disillusionment, and he was back in Missouri by season’s end. He decided St. Lou was as good a place as any for him to kick his boots up, and, for a while, he made his living forking out stalls for the liveryman. He lived in a jerry-built shack out on the edge of town, and come sundown he would cover his head with a sugar sack and kidnap slaves at gunpoint, then return them to their owners the day after for a reward. On Independence Day of ’59 he shot a Union man in the throat, then made tracks for the Cherokee Nation.
When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, Wingate, who was at that time raising hell with a vicious former schoolteacher named Bill Quantrill, threw in with the troops led by General Ben McCulloch in time to serve at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. By the end of that day Frank discovered he had a knack for taking lives, so he decided to go along for the ride.
He rode with Quantrill through Independence, helped torch the Kansas town of Aubrey to the ground, and singlehandedly accounted for a half-dozen innocents at the Lawrence massacre. He survived Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson both, escaped the threat of the gallows, and shunned all amnesty pardons offered by the government. He spent the next five years riding the steamboats up and down the Mississippi, and it was during this period of heavy gambling and whoring that he became acquainted with Dan Carver, who was a bouncer in those days. Not long afterwards, Jack Lightfoot joined their company.
Henry Coleman had been the last to throw in with them, vouched for by Lightfoot, and his relationship with Wingate had always been a strained one. Wingate generally held farm animals in higher esteem than darkies, but he never met the ox who could outshoot this particular darkie. That alone had been a good enough reason for him to tolerate Coleman’s presence.
He sat down now on the edge of Kings’s bed and let the book fall open where it wanted in his lap. Ecclesiastes, chapter three. “To everything there is a season,” he read, “and a time to every purpose under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die . . . A time to kill . . . A time to laugh . . . A time to dance.”
A time to kill. Well, there was one thing he and God could see eye to eye on, at least. As if that mattered.
He fanned onward into the book with a clumsy hand, heard the delicate onionskin pages tearing, and didn’t care. A few chapters deeper into Ecclesiastes found Wingate pondering: “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness.”
Taking up the bottle of good Tennessee sipping whiskey, he wet his finger with alcohol and ran it over his eyelids, one after the other—it was an Injun trick he’d learned from Lightfoot that supposedly gave a man his second drinking wind. Wingate had been swilling Kings’s whiskey for the better half of the morning, and he didn’t intend to stop until he’d killed this bottle off.
After a while, he shuffled down the hall and found Carver where he’d left him, but where the hell else could he go? The big man lay on his bedroll by the fireplace, stocking feet facing the door and a pillow beneath his head. He had awakened and was breathing raggedly, now that he was conscious of the agony that twisted his bullet-mangled guts. He rolled his head to the side when he heard footsteps.
“I’ll say this fer ye, Carve,” Wingate said, squatting beside him, “you may not be no nominee for sainthood, but you’re one tough sonovabitch.”
His attempt at humor was lost on Carver, who growled, “This ain’t the first time I been shot.”
“Even so, that Yankee bastard popped you good. A lesser man woulda kicked it on the spot.”
“Yeah, well, I ain’t headin’ south till I see this job gets done.” Carver licked his lips, clearly parched, and wiggled his fingers. “Gimme that bottle.”
Wingate passed it over. “Where’s Coleman run off to?”
Carver’s laugh was cynical and ugly, but justified, Wingate supposed. “I been in and out all day, Frank. It look like I know or give a damn where he’s at?”
While the slow-dying man drank, Wingate walked out to the porch in time to catch another grisly sight. Lightfoot, on horseback, had looped one end of a rope around his saddle horn and the other around the neck of Yankee Dave Zeller and was dragging the corpse across the yard to God knows where. The man had been dead three days and was starting to smell, and Wingate saw that a scrap of paper had been pinned to his bloodied shirtfront. He couldn’t see it, but in clumsy scrawl it read, “Welcum home Kings.”
“Jack!” he called out, stopping the half-breed before he made it too far. “Get on over here.”
While he waited, Wingate leaned down close to make out a passage in the Epistle of James: “From whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust, and have not . . . Ye kill, and desire to have, and cannot obtain . . . Know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? Whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.”
Whoever James was, Wingate figured he’d had some experience on the other side of things. That was plumb insightful, what he just read—too insightful for a righteous man like this gent made himself out to be. But hell—who could call himself righteous with a gun to his head? If there was one thing Frank Wingate had learned, it was that sin found a man, no matter how deep a hole he dug or how many church house doors he closed behind him. Might as well accept it . . . and be a friend of the world.
“What is it?” Lightfoot asked, out of breath at the bottom of the steps.
“Where’s Coleman?”
“I think he went off down the canyon a little while back.”
“Good,” Wingate said, raising his eyes. “Never know when Kings is gonna be back. When Coleman comes in, you take the next watch.”
“When Kings does ride in, Frank, he’s gonna be as unsuspectin’ as a steer to the slaughterhouse.”
“And just what in the hell’re you fixin’ to do with Yankee Dave?” Wingate stared hard at Lightfoot, not unlike a schoolteacher who’d caught a pupil doing something he shouldn’t.
The breed smiled, showing crooked teeth. “Whaddaya think?” he said, turning to glance back at his horse holding the line taut. “I’m gonna hang it high somewheres on the way in.”
“What fer?”
Lightfoot looked perturbed that he should have to explain his genius. “Well, I reckon it’ll get Kings’s blood boilin’ right quick, maybe incite him to do somethin’ foolish. Play right into our hands.”
“Gabe Kings never played into nobody’s hands. He ain’t survived this long for no reason, and he sure as hell ain’t goin’ quietly when we show him out. Now, I aim to do just what Spivey hired us to do, and that’s irrigate Kings’s liver with this Schofield. But by the Lord Harry, I’m doin’ it humble.”
Lightfoot was unconvinced. “You know what I found in that wooden box under his bed? The one from the Santa Fe Railway? I figgered there’d’a been piles of money inside—Kings’s secret stash, judgin’ by the size of the lock he had on there.” He shook his head in disgust. “No such thing. Correspondences, buncha fargin’ love letters from some woman named Belle. Bastard’s gone soft.”
Wingate shrugged in resignation. He figured Lightfoot w
ould just have to wait and see for himself. “You want me to put that on your tombstone,” he said, looking back down, “or would you prefer a scripture? I’ve stumbled across’t a few interestin’ ones, here.”
Lightfoot showed his teeth again. “You’re joshin’ me, ain’t ya?”
“Well, ya know, Jack, a wise man once said”—Wingate scraped the bottom of his memory’s barrel—“ ‘Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.’ ”
“Where’s that wise man now?”
“Deader’n hell, I believe.”
On the fifth morning of his stay at the Jackson ranch, the man for whom this reception was being prepared slinked about the property, going to and fro like a furtive barn cat, tipping doors wider and walking on eggshells in his cavalry boots. The last he had checked, the boys were up in the loft, playing cards and enjoying themselves. The major had ridden off with his son and foreman to see about a few animals that had missed the pen on the drive in from the pastures, and their Mexican mustanger was busy re-shoeing horses.
His wife was at work in the kitchen, and their daughters sat on plush stools in the drawing room while Mrs. Jackson patiently tutored them from the pages of an English primer.
That left Kings alone, for a short time, with the major’s daughter.
Kings had been momentarily transfixed by her loveliness when she appeared at the head of the stairs. He knew she had done herself up for his benefit, almost as if she were trying to make an impression all over again. A flat-crowned Spanish hat sat upon her head, and her honey-blonde hair fell out from under it in a single, heavy braid. She wore a buckskin short jacket and full riding skirts, cinched at the middle by a woven rawhide belt, all of which accentuated her slim waist and curving hips.
The hour was early, and they rode stirrup-to-stirrup beneath a drab and murky sky. Whenever the trail narrowed, Belle would edge her mare closer to the flank of his stallion. Kings was acutely aware of the prod of her knee against his, and of the intention behind the supposedly accidental flick of her horsehair crop along the side of his neck.
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