Puzzlement showed in every hard line of Crane’s face. “You’re talking in circles. I’m trying, but I can’t dab a loop on your drift.”
“Then I’ll lay it out real simple. I’ll trade my twenty-five thousand dollars for Sarah’s life. If I didn’t, it would be the ultimate betrayal of certain principles that at one time, if I recollect clearly, I held dear.”
A light had come into Masterson’s eyes, like a man lost in the woods who has suddenly found his way. “Stark wants the whole fifty thousand, but I reckon he’ll settle for my half of the money. Gus, now we have a bargaining chip for the girl.”
“Paul, it’s not your money. Did you forget about that?”
“If it saves Sarah’s life, do you really care?”
Crane felt that question like a blow to the gut.
He wore a star on his chest and had sworn a solemn oath to uphold the law.
But there could be only one answer to Masterson’s question. Reluctantly, the words dragging out of him, he said, “No, I don’t care.”
“Let’s get the horses and ride.” Masterson said. He grinned. “I can’t leave you to crash around in the dark by yourself. The Piute would figure you’re one of Stark’s sodbusters and lift your hair for sure.”
“No, we wait. How much bargaining are we going to do in the middle of a shooting scrape? We bide our time and see what tomorrow brings. Who knows, maybe Hollister will bring back Reuben Stark with a rope around his neck.”
“It could happen, I guess. Well, we’ll play it your way and wait.”
Crane’s face took on a crafty expression. “When we try to make our bargain with Stark, do we take the money with us?”
“No, Gus. We make the bargain, then meet somewhere to trade for Sarah.”
“Where is the money hid, Paul?”
The sheriff shook his head and smiled. “Don’t ask me that again, Gus. I said I have a tender conscience, but I don’t think adding a marshal’s scalp is going to trouble it one bit.”
“I declare,” Crane said, “you’re a mighty irritating man.”
Crane stood, sleepless, looking out his hotel window.
He had visited Sarah’s room, saw the carefully hung clothes he’d bought her and remembered the girl’s innocent joy over her fixings, the hotel and about her life and the living of it.
The visit had been a mistake and it had done him no good. All he’d done was open festering wounds that now bled despair.
Beyond the hotel, Rawhide Flat lay dark and unseen, as though the town was glad to disappear into the deeper darkness of the night. Their patrons gone, the saloons were closed. The street was quiet and unmoving as a tomb.
A gusting wind played with a sheet of newspaper, tossing it into the air, then letting it swoop to earth again. The paper rose a last time, curved around a red and white pole outside the barbershop and fluttered like a stricken dove. Bored, the wind left it alone and moved on.
The sky was black, but in constant motion. Almost invisible, clouds with misty edges of gray toiled in from the north, and white light tremored in their swollen bellies.
A sudden spatter of rain hit Crane’s window and for a moment beaded on the dusty panes before trickling downward.
The marshal’s attention was caught by a shadowy movement in the street.
Cloaked and hooded, a slight figure hurried toward the sheriff’s office, the delighted wind tugging at her.
A gust pushed back the hood and for a fleeting moment before she replaced it, Crane saw the veil and white coif of a nun.
Moving his position for a better view, the marshal watched as the sister tapped on the door of the office. Masterson answered, smiled, and the little nun quickly stepped inside.
Prepared for a wait, Crane built a smoke, his eyes on Masterson’s door.
But he didn’t have to wait long.
After a few minutes the door opened and the nun stepped back outside. She looked around and hurried back the way she had come, soon disappearing from sight as he was fenced in by the gloom.
The marshal lit another cigarette, his face thoughtful. Why would a nun make a midnight visit to Paul Masterson? Was she trying to convert the former outlaw and hired gun from his wicked ways?
Hardly likely.
Was it something to do with Reuben Stark? Or the avenging Archangel Michael, about to destroy the Comstock with his sword of fire?
Both were possible, even if they didn’t make any sense.
Crane smiled to himself.
But then, what did make sense in Rawhide Flat?
Chapter 26
The Piute, Ben Hollister and seven of his men rode into Rawhide Flat at the brightest part of the day.
The rain of the night a memory, the sun burned like a gold coin in the buffed lemon sky and a stifling heat lay heavy on the town, forcing stray mutts into the thin shade of alleys and sending panting lizards scampering under rocks.
Along the street the timber buildings creaked and groaned and purged pungent pine resin like sweat. Local merchants opened store doors wide, tried vainly to catch a breeze and invited inside swarms of fat, black flies nurtured in the rich manure of the cattle pens by the railroad tracks.
Irritable and querulous, businessmen in broadcloth and clerks in plug hats cursed the sweltering heat and the gritty dust that worked its way inside their celluloid collars and under their woolen long johns.
Women layered in bloomers, petticoats, corsets, camisoles and cotton dresses felt flushed and sticky, dark stains in the middle of their backs and under-arms. They told one another that the summer dog days had just begun and that temperatures would only go higher. They wondered aloud if cool weather would ever come again or if it had been killed aborning, burned to a crisp by the jealous sun.
But that day none of these, men, women or animals, was more miserable than Ben Hollister.
Crane and Masterson had just eaten in Ma’s Kitchen restaurant and were standing on the boardwalk when the rancher’s horse, by long acquaintance, stopped at the Texas Belle.
Like his seven men, Hollister was wrapped from his hips to the crown of his head in barbed wire. Wound and rewound, the spikes had cut cruelly into his face, masking his features in blood. He tried to open his mouth to speak to the townspeople crowding around him, but his lips were imprisoned by the wire and could not move.
The Piute, not being a white man and thus a natural enemy, had been treated differently.
He’d been scourged, then crucified.
The Indian, naked, was nailed to the crosspiece of a T formed by two fence posts and later had been roped to his saddle.
Mercifully, he was dead. But hatred and defiance had not yet faded from his open, fixed eyes.
Crane and Masterson joined the willing hands helping Hollister and his men from their horses. A merchant dashed into his dry goods store and returned with an armful of wire cutters.
Three of Hollister’s riders were wounded, and they cried out pitifully as the wire was cut from their bodies and the wicked spikes ripped out of their flesh.
“Massacree,” Hollister gasped once his bleeding mouth was freed from the wire. He was lying on his back, a woman Crane didn’t know supporting his head. “Everybody dead . . .”
“What happened?” This from Masterson.
“They laid for us in Sullivan Canyon. We were bushwhacked real good, pretty as you please. The Piute tried to hold the boys back, said it was a trap, but their blood was up, and since when do punchers listen to anybody, especially an Injun?”
Hollister’s eyes were haunted, his face a grotesque, scarlet carnival mask.
“Stark and his sons led us into the canyon and into an ambush. I don’t know how many men were hidden on the slopes, hundreds maybe. We were cut to ribbons in the first volley.” He waved a hand. “All but these.”
“Why did Stark spare you?” Crane asked.
Hollister lifted his gaze to the marshal.
Crane saw fear, resignation . . . no, far worse than that, the shattere
d, distant stare of a broken man.
“He hates you, Crane, for killing his son. Hates you . . . hates you like poison.”
The woman holding Hollister’s head made cooing sounds, told him to lie quiet until the doctor got there.
The rancher wasn’t listening.
“He—he says you and Masterson have to bring him the town’s money by noon tomorrow. He says if you don’t, he’ll cut the hide of the girl—Sarah—like he did Maxie Starr.”
Hollister looked wildly around him. “Where’s the mayor?” he yelled. “Where’s the damned mayor?”
“I’m here, Ben.”
A small, balding man wearing a merchant’s white apron took a knee beside the rancher.
Hollister grabbed him by the front of his shirt.
“Ed, he wants it doubled.”
The mayor shook his head. “Ben, I don’t understand.”
“He wants a hundred thousand. He says for the folks in Rawhide Flat to take their money out from under their mattresses and add it to bank loot.”
A horrified murmur ran through the crowd, and a man in broadcloth yelled, “The hell we will.”
“Then he’ll burn the town and kill every male, man and boy, like Quantrill did in Lawrence, Kansas.”
“The town doesn’t have that much money, Ben,” the mayor said. “The loss of the fifty thousand from the bank has crippled us all financially.”
“Then you’d better start trying to scrape it up, Ed. If you don’t, Reuben Stark will come to kill. Depend on it.”
The doctor, a man named Preston, had a lame left leg and the experienced physician’s worried look. He immediately started to work on the most badly wounded of the cowboys.
“Hollister, I thought all Stark wanted was range,” Crane said.
“Changed his mind, or maybe he always planned it this way. I reckon, after all this killing, he knows the law will catch up with him sooner or later and he wants out. A man can go far and fast with a hundred thousand dollars.”
“Found a dynasty someplace else where he’s not known,” Crane said, almost to himself.
At first glance Mayor Ed Reddy looked what he was, a middle-aged man with huge muttonchop side-burns who was quietly prospering in the drapery business.
But his looks were deceptive.
Reddy had risen to the rank of brigadier general during the War Between the States and had fought with great bravery on the Confederate side at Shiloh, Lafourche Crossing, Chattanooga and Five Forks.
After the war he’d worn a lawman’s star in Texas before taking up the tradesman’s calling.
Now he looked at Crane with critical eyes. “Marshal, you represent the federal law in the Comstock. Why don’t you arrest or shoot Stark and his cohorts?”
“Seems to me that Hollister lost sixty men trying to do just that,” Crane said.
The mayor would not be turned aside. “Then what do you suggest, Marshal?”
“I plan on trying to bargain with Stark, see if I can make him see reason.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then I’ll be dead and you and the other citizens of Rawhide Flat better start searching under those mattresses.”
The doctor elbowed Crane aside, made a cursory examination of Hollister, then snapped at the crowd, “All of these men are badly hurt and we need to get them out of the sun. We’ll use the saloon as a temporary hospital.”
He looked over his shoulder at the marshal. “The Indian is dead.”
As hands reached out to lift him, Hollister freed himself from the woman’s comforting hands and raised himself on one elbow, looking at Crane. “Remember what I told you. By fair means or foul, Reuben Stark aims to see you dead and he won’t rest until he does.”
The rancher’s eyes took on a distant, lost look again. “He hates you—worse than me, worse than anything.”
Chapter 27
“Gus, I know I keep asking you where we go from here,” Masterson said. “But where do we go from here?”
“Like I told the mayor, we speak to Stark.”
“Hollister never asked me about the money.”
“Hollister is done. He’s beat. I can see it in his eyes.” Crane looked at the sheriff. “But I’m asking about the money.”
“I can get it, the whole fifty thousand.”
“Stark wants a hundred.”
“I’d say that’s up to the people of Rawhide Flat and ranchers like Ben Hollister.”
“Paul, there are no ranchers left, only their widows.”
“Then we dicker with the money we have.”
“Leave it be. If we ride into Stark’s territory with the fifty thousand, he’ll just kill us both and take it. We’ll tell him we stashed the money along our back trail, then set a time and place to meet.”
“So we say, ‘Come with only a couple of men,’ and when he does, we draw down and gun him?”
“That’s the general idea.”
“Think it will work?”
“No.”
Masterson looked shocked. “Then why the hell did you suggest it?”
“Because it’s the only hand we have. All we can do is play our cards and hope they come up aces.”
“It’s thin, Gus, mighty thin.”
“You asked where we go from here. Well, that’s where we go.”
Crane made an odd gesture, tilting his head to look at the flexing fingers of his right hand. “Know this, when the moon comes out tomorrow night and looks for Reuben Stark, it won’t find him. No matter what happens, no matter how many bullets I take, I’ll stay on my feet long enough to kill him.”
“You’re one hard gent, Gus.”
The marshal smiled. “Ain’t I, though?”
Crane bought a large burlap sack and filled it with every kind of debris he could find in the alleys, from peach cans to scraps of paper.
When the sack bulged enough, he hefted it and said to Masterson, “If Stark has scouts out, they’ll expect to see a money bag.”
“Suppose the scouts just bushwhack us, shoot us dead and take it?”
“I don’t think that will happen. I reckon Stark won’t forego the pleasure of killing me himself.”
The lawmen were walking past the Texas Belle toward the livery stable but stopped when the doctor hailed them from the boardwalk.
“Sheriff Masterson, Mr. Hollister wants to talk with you. And you too, Marshal.”
There was an odd light in Preston’s eyes and for a moment it looked like words were hovering on his lips. But he thought better of it, closed his mouth and trapped them inside.
The big rancher was on his back across two tables that had been pushed together. He’d been stripped to the waist and his body and face glistened with some kind of salve. Now that the blood had been washed away, he looked better, but his skin was pocked with angry red welts, like a man who had just done battle with a nest of hornets.
Hollister raised his head as Crane and Masterson entered. Now he reached out and grabbed a handful of the sheriff’s shirt, wounded eyes searching the lawman’s face as though trying to find responses to words he had not yet said.
“Get the money and give it to Stark,” he pleaded. “Every last penny of it. Save my ranch, Sheriff, and save this town.”
Masterson nodded but made no answer.
His eyes moving to Crane, Hollister spoke with a keening whimper. “Save me, Marshal, save me.”
“You’re safe, Hollister, safe now,” Crane said.
“Safe.” The rancher savored the word like fine bourbon, then smiled. “Hey, Marshal, tell the boys to bring those yearlings in from the west forty, will ya? And tell ’em to ride the damn fences out there now and again. Get Powder River Tom Dowling to do it. He’s a steady hand.”
Hollister sat up and screamed wildly, “No! No! No!”
“Easy, now, easy,” Crane whispered, pushing the man back onto the table.
Hollister’s eyes looked like they were staring through a sheet of frosted ice.
“Tom’s
dead,” the rancher yelled. “I saw it happen. The whole top of his head was blown away.” He shook his head and stared at Crane. “He couldn’t live after that. And Jed Battles . . . dead. Luke Donnelly . . . dead. His brother Mark . . .” Hollister was telling himself something he could not believe. Wonderingly, he muttered, “All of them . . . are dead.”
Dr. Preston pushed beside Crane, a small defeat in his eyes. “Better leave him now.”
The man was a cow town doctor who could treat broken limbs, gunshot wounds, scurvy, running sores, the croup, the more common social diseases and all the other ailments punchers fall prey to.
But sickness of the mind was beyond Preston’s medical skills, an uncharted sea where he dared not venture. He could only stand helpless on the shore and watch Ben Hollister founder.
Crane stepped away, then walked outside, a sickness in him.
Hollister was not his friend but a likely enemy. Yet he felt no joy, no triumph.
Every man has his breaking point and the rancher had reached his.
His will, his spirit, had not been broken, as is the way with slaves. But his mind had been shattered and the horrors he’d seen in Sullivan Canyon would remain with him forever. The gray ghosts of the dead men would be there when he woke, sit with him at table and crowd around his bed at night.
His only way to escape those accusing shades was to retreat into madness as Hollister had now done. He would forever ride a twisted trail that led nowhere until death, in its cold mercy, freed him.
“We’d best get going, Gus.” Masterson stepped beside Crane, his eyes questing over the big marshal’s face.
“Yeah, I guess we’d better.”
Both men left unsaid what was on their minds. Guns, horses, badmen they could handle. But, as it was with Dr. Preston, mental illness was a dreaded unknown and they were content to let it lie.
Crane and Masterson rode north under a searing sun. Despite the encouragement of the rain, the grass around them was already losing its green, turning to gold to match the sunlight. In the distance languid buzzards quartered the sky and once a small herd of antelope crossed their path before vanishing into the shimmering heat haze.
Rawhide Flat Page 15