The Road to Reckoning

by Robert Lautner

  ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘I would say that you have done the right thing, Mister Stands, by bringing this to the law. You are to be commended.’

  He put back his chair but stumbled as he went up and had to grab for the desk.

  ‘If you will excuse me for but a moment this letter you have brought has determined my immediate attention.’ He patted the air to keep us to our seats and took the letter with him.

  ‘I will be a short time, gentlemen.’ He shuffled out.

  When I had heard him creak down the stairs and that friendly front bell chime, I stood up and leaned on his desk.

  ‘Why should we not tell about that Mister Gore?’ I asked.

  Henry did not look up from his hands. ‘It would do no good. And probably worse.’

  ‘But he had bodies there! There could be good people looking for their relatives?’

  ‘As I said. Probably worse.’

  This was not a satisfactory answer but I did not press, for that never went well with him.

  I looked down at the packet that had carried Stodgell Stokes’s letter. It was marked from Berwick. With no thought or malevolence it was in my fingers. I turned it over. The effeminate hand on the back froze my fingers pale.

  It was from mister William Markham! Him with boys and asylums on his mind!

  Twice a day that stage came into Stroud and mister Markham for all his paunch had a fast pen over his slow feet, I knew that much.

  A letter as fast as us!

  Judge Stokes had looked at me as he read it and had caught the table as he stood. I was too worn to be taken in by coincidence. I held it up.

  ‘Mister Stands!’ I waved the paper. ‘His letter is from Mister Markham! That man at Mrs Carteret’s!’

  I could feel stone walls closing in on the orphan.

  Henry stood and took the packet. He looked it over, back and front as if there would be some hidden cipher.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said, crushing it and putting it to the floor. ‘Should have burst that fat man. God knows what he has written against.’

  He took my hand and I planted my hat.

  Stodgell Stokes would have slowed us some if he had locked his door. He must have been too trembling to do so.

  Outside was a bright spring afternoon, but the street, which had been bustling, was now still. Henry kept a hand to my chest and edged me behind him.

  The tall hats and parasols had gone. Instead there were five wide hat-brims and shotguns standing on the planks and mud across the street. Stodgell Stokes both apart and with them. He demonstrated himself too far to be a threat but his voice was veritable enough for an unarmed man.

  ‘You are Henry Stands?’ he called, and Henry said nothing and to Stodgell that was enough affirmation for the shotguns.

  ‘Stands, I have a letter from Mister William Markham! Respected member of our church and elected member of our county. He informs that you have kidnapped this boy for reward or to sell into servitude. He states that you are a member of the actual gang that deprived this boy’s father of his life and are a wanted roadman that drew a weapon on him and that there are a number of crimes on warrant that are fitted to your description.’ He lifted the letter aloft. ‘What say you on these charges?’

  Those five shotguns were brought up like morning plows as if Henry were the horse and drawing them.

  ‘What you have is incorrect,’ Henry said. ‘Ask the boy.’

  But they did not hear or would not ask. Stodgell Stokes went on.

  ‘The letter states that you have bewildered, seduced, and confused the boy. Do you deny that he is the property of the St John’s asylum? Against Mister Markham’s word? Kidnapping is a hanging, sir!’

  I could feel the air crisp. These lies, these paper lies, which are the worst and shape wars, were making the round world into a square.

  I would shape it back.

  I stepped in front of Henry Stands, my arms spread.

  ‘No! This man is taking me home! I have agreed to all!’

  Some flat-brimmed hat yelled over to me from behind his breech.

  ‘Stand aside, boy! You are safe now!’

  Another cocked his piece. ‘The Hoosier has the boy hostage!’

  That snapped them all into life.

  Henry Stands stood solid. Prey and predator, but I would remain his shield.

  My father had made me the same in front of him and I told you I have made peace with that. I should have volunteered then. I volunteered now because I knew death. It has nothing to do with fear. Fear only precipitates. And perhaps I might have saved my father still if I had not just sat on the ground that night and watched.

  I stood in front now, like I should have done before, against five guns at my body. To save all three of us. My father watching.

  ‘He is my friend!’ I yelled.

  ‘Away, boy!’ This came from a black coat and hat. His face hidden behind his gun, high collar, and pulled-down brim. I had seen that shadow. It was now a common shape to me. I think that is how the Devil walks the earth.

  Henry Stands edged me aside. I looked at his black fingernails on my chest.

  ‘Get,’ he said.

  I never heard his voice again.

  He stepped down to his horse as if the guns were not there and they stood transfixed on him. He pulled his huge knife and cut the rein and was up on him in the same move.

  He dug his knees to put that quarter horse into the middle of the street. Those gentlemen stepped back with their shotguns high, and Stodgell Stokes ducked behind a barrel with his liar’s letter.

  The black coat was the first to set his gun.

  This was not right! We had eaten oysters and beer, we had come to the law, we had destroyed enemies. I was to home! This was happening too fast, too unfair!

  Henry Stands threw down on the guns against him. That elitist cross-draw that was bespoke to the ranger. Two pistols in his fists. A crowd of guns stepped from the plank walk but they were not soldiers, they were not rangers. And they did not have Colt’s ‘Improved Revolving Gun.’

  That quarter horse was an outlaw’s so I guess he had some knowledge and resistance of gunfire or Henry Stands squeezed him tight enough. He wheeled once and gave one shot from each hand to the windows over the nearest shotguns’ heads.

  The shotguns ducked but felt confident now that he had spent his hands. Two of them fired, but to the sky. Counterfeits think that one barrel high is enough to stop, that no man is used to that sound opposing him.

  Only the black coat stepped from the planks and let both his barrels go, and straight on, but that meant nothing to Henry Stands. He stared into the fire as it came. It is hard to shoot a man, no matter how black your coat, and harder still when the man in front dares it.

  They all thought him done. An old man with two pistols spent. But Henry Stands would show them the future.

  He rolled those Colts in his fists and slammed lead into their painted houses. They cut back in their surprise. Still those shots came on.

  It was a wonder now. Unseen anywhere! Unending! There was not a man ever before who carried two pistols and sent shotguns running as he fired repeatedly, fired magically!

  Eight shots in the hand, from the saddle, again and again. They ran like the first animals from the first fire.

  The street emptied. Henry and his horse whirled in the white smoke, his quarter horse’s head set west. I had not ducked. I had no doubts.

  He put the pistols to his scabbards and took back the short rein. His head looked round for guns, to eat them if they still stood, but they had cowered to behind their doors. He had killed none. That was not his intention.

  I saw his coat sweep and that quarter horse fly, the mud barely leaping. Hands grabbed to stop me from running to the street.

  He was gone.

  I write those words like I had a patent.

  EPILOGUE

  Mister William Markham was true to his word. He had sent one letter of destruction sure enough, but his fervent pe
n had stretched to New York also, which was as well, for if not I had been set to spend some time in a house of stone and oak where boys are apt to be forgotten.

  The court had found my aunt and my aunt had sent for me while Stodgell Stokes waited to find some soul willing to take a boy to the asylum in Allegheny. There had naturally been a reluctance due to my recent history, despite a twenty-dollar bounty waiting on me for the purveyor.

  There might, after all, be a grizzled old man with fire in his fists on the road.

  I returned to New York and my aunt’s sorrow, with a bill for my return and keep. Her loss was great and we bore it together with me patting her shoulder as I imagined.

  I showed her the wooden gun and my father’s book and told her that I had to get to Paterson and to mister Colt for my father’s money that I owed to Henry Stands.

  It was strange to talk about him to someone who did not know him and when everything surrounding him seemed wrong. My words not eloquent enough to get across to Aunt Mary how very important it was that we find the man. I did not cry anymore, but maybe that would have helped my insistence.

  In truth, between the wooden thing, which I kept under my bed, and the settling of mister Colt, the finding of Henry Stands was the only thing.

  My aunt decided that to write to mister Colt would be enough.

  You may know that Sam Colt was notorious for not paying his bills. The revolving gun was not a resounding success at that time. We never got any coin and would have to have stood in a long line to do so.

  His business was wound up in ’42. He wrote us a poorly scripted letter citing that because my father could not return any of the samples, Henry Stands having made off with five and Heywood trading the rest, and the orders amounted to but one hundred and twenty-nine dollars, which he would follow up on, of course, our commission had been swallowed by the loss of the guns. He included a bill for the difference, which I burned.

  I married young, as was the expectation in those days. I took my wife, Mary, in the same year my aunt and Jude Brown died. Mary seemed an inevitable name for me to find. She was an orphan also but had her own seamstress shop and did not need to marry a spectacle salesman.

  I sold the house on Bank street (I told you I knew it) and moved to Lycoming when Mary’s belly swelled. New York is no place for a family if you can afford to avoid it.

  I wanted to settle somewhere near the Susquehanna, and I took her to see the Lehigh falls on the way. We bought our place outright with enough land to feed ourselves; no government would catch me. Pigs, one cow, chickens, and a plow. Neighbors for the rest. That is how it should be. Yet I owe, as do you, as I said. It happens. Banks gun for you eventually, especially once you have family. Sometimes you envy them drifters.

  We named our first son John Walker.

  I had some insurance from my father’s death and I did indeed sell spectacles by mail using my father’s suppliers. I decided not to sell guns.

  Married, and with my sales, I could map the prosperity of the states by their orders, almost to their streets, and I settled on Old Lycoming as a town where I would set up an optometrist store. I had become my own Chet Baker!

  All of that was in the first year of John’s life, and our second son came right along behind him.

  We named him Henry.

  I wrote to mister Chet Baker in Milton that I would like to hear word of Henry Stands if he came across it, and bless that man if he did not write back to say that he would forward my details to every salesman and traveler who came by him.

  Chet and I kept letters until ’70, when a stroke took him. He outlived my sons. His store is now split in two as a barber and confectionary. Nothing of Henry Stands ever came through.

  The revolving gun did spread, particularly down in Texas with the settlers and the rangers, and I knew why for that. It was an adept killing tool for one man against the many. I am sure Colt envisioned that when the Devil mothered his invention.

  From time to time word of its peculiar success made the papers. He had made enough of them and they found their way into the best and worst hands.

  In New York, as I grew to manhood, Colt’s patents were being made under license. Six shots now. We had fallen for the revolver. Fallen far. You know the names that made it famous but I balked when I read about the Colt Walker, which made such an impact in the Mexican war of ’48. Fortunately it was just coincidence but I sagely acknowledged the Comanche saying that came up from those lands:

  White man shoots one time with rifle. And six times with butcher knife.

  By then I was in Old Lycoming with two children at my knee. I had put my past behind me and was known as a man of still countenance and quiet strength. I never had a bill that was not settled.

  My wife Mary and myself were good Mennonites, her religion not mine; I was a Proverbs man. I thought no more on guns and Indiana rangers until my boys were old enough for me to tell them about the wooden gun and I went to my past to fetch it.

  I could not find it.

  I searched through our barn with all the goods that young marrieds always store and there were song sheets and shawls and pepper grinders and coffee jars and even puppets and dolls that Mary had carried with her all her days. There were paper brooches and letters from Chet Baker and wooden toys that held no memory but no flared pistol grip of two pieces and engraved wooden cylinder. Mary questioned if I had not imagined such a piece.

  I cursed and shouted and went to bed drunk and Mary cried for the first time. I apologized the next day.

  I told her about Strother Gore and that I had killed a man with an extraordinary blow, the story of which I had never told even to my aunt. I blamed that tale on the reason for my temper. She knew about Henry Stands, of course, for I had used that story to woo her, but I had kept back the darker parts.

  Still the wooden gun was lost. Spirited away when I had stopped holding it and thinking of it. When I did not have need for it.

  I am sure I had it with me when I left New York but my hands were full at the time. Things get lost when you make a family and a home. But I had it within me and I told the story to my sons, and drew the wooden Paterson for them, and told them about Henry Stands as I have now fully told you.

  My sons died in Columbus in ’65. The spring of the end. I told them the day they volunteered to find a ranger and stick by him and pay no mind to West Point boys. John was nineteen and Henry eighteen. That was eight years ago. I have a letter from Sherman commending them.

  We have the metal cartridge now, the complete round, and Colt’s rear-loading pistols. He has found favor again. The glorious terms Peacemaker and Frontier and the self-loading rifle are shaping the west and I can see no end to the shaping of the gun. It gets ever easier to use, the skill gone. The father does not need to show the son how, and intelligence and reasoning has gone from the art of loading a gun, which once took patience and practice. Now drunks believe themselves badmen and shootists.

  I get my hair cut and even the barber holds a Colt at his coin box. I tell him that nearly forty years ago I was selling those guns, that I was the first to hold them. He brushes the hair from my collar and raises his eyes. He is half my age. To them the revolver is theirs not mine.

  I think of Henry Adams’s letters that we see now and then in the New York Times and the contention that the war past was won only by the science of the repeating gun. As Meriwether Lewis had extolled the infinity of the wind-rifle, so Adams could see the future. As I could. As I had.

  The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

  I still dream of that circus tent from time to time. There is the man in the red coat, tall hat, and greasepaint, and sometimes his red coat is cut crudely at the back and there are giggles from the dark that I do not like.

  There is a malevolence that seeps toward me, figures cut out from the white lamp. I try to wish them go
ne and try to fight them gone but my hands are small and I cannot go against them or against the crowd that presses to drown me. There are men in black coats and high collars and I can smell iron and sulfur all around.

  But he appears then. Always.

  He is in a darker black than them, darker than them counterfeits could ever pretend to be. He has renounced age. The blade of his pistol’s sight has not dimmed in his eye.

  He is the dry lightning that stirred me to dreaming.

  And they retreat.

  They go back into the dark. Away from the actual.

  And I go back to sleep.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks to my agent, James Gill, ever stalwart. Katie Espiner at HarperCollins for taking it on. Thanks to Thomas McNulty, author, who kindly read my early drafts with no reason to do so and made me feel I was on the right track.

  And I owe a great debt to the historical chroniclers of 19th century America whose diaries, studies and dictionaries helped me travel the road.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Robert Lautner was born in Middlesex in 1970. Before becoming a writer he owned his own comic-book store, worked as a wine merchant, photographic consultant and recruitment consultant. He now lives on the Pembrokeshire coast in a wooden cabin with his wife and children.

  COPYRIGHT

  The Borough Press

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  Hammersmith

  London W6 8JB

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

  Copyright © Robert Lautner 2014

  Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

  Cover images © Getty Images (revolver); Shutterstock.com (bird)

  Map © David Rumsey Collection

  www.davidrumsey.co.uk

  Robert Lautner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library