A Tale Out of Luck (25 page)

“Maybe she doesn’t want you bossin’ her around like you boss me around.”

“I don’t boss you around.”

Skeeter forced a laugh, even though none of this was funny any more. “‘Skeeter, get me some gloves.’ ‘Skeeter, saddle the horses.’ ‘Skeeter, gather the firewood.’ I’ve about had a bellyful of it.”

“Well, somebody’s got to make the decisions. I’ve learned from my daddy how to run an outfit.”

“You’ve learned how to run your mouth. You haven’t done a tenth of what your daddy’s done in life.”

“Yeah, well at least I’ve got a daddy!” Jay Blue blurted.

Coming from anybody that would have hurt, but from Jay Blue . . . Skeeter saw that Jay Blue regretted saying it immediately, but he didn’t wait for an apology. This was his chance. “I’m gonna ride the other side of that draw, and you’d damn sure better stay on this side of it if you don’t want me to get off this horse and whip your ass.”

“Hey, Skeeter, come on. I’m sorry.”

“Kiss my ass, Jay Blue.” He reined his horse away.

“Daddy told us to stick together!”

“You mind him! He’s your daddy, remember? Not mine!”

“Well, keep hollerin’ for Poli where I can hear you across the draw.”

Skeeter looked over his shoulder and saw Jay Blue slumped in the saddle, looking as foolish as he must have felt. He remembered what Jack Brennan had said to him the night before. What if he did take a job with the Double Horn Ranch? That would show the damned ol’ high-and-mighty Tomlinsons.

“Poli!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, his throat already ragged from shouting all morning. He almost wanted to cry. He was truly worried about Poli and he was tired of feeling like a nobody without a home. He hated being an orphan. No matter how folks tried to treat him like family, they couldn’t quite do it. Everyone knew what he was. A charity case. Another mouth to feed. A drain on the resources. There had to be another way, and maybe Jack Brennan had the answer.

He heard Jay Blue’s voice across the draw, farther away now as the canyon widened. “Poli . . .”

Spending every waking hour with Jay Blue the last few weeks had worn his patience thin. If he only knew how ridiculous he looked worrying over that barmaid. “I just wish some stupid girl was all I had to worry about,” he muttered to himself. He drew in a deep breath of cold air. “Poli!”

He rode on like that—shouting for Poli, listening for Jay Blue, working himself into a pitiable state of mind. Then he caught sight of the Double Horn Ranch buildings a couple of miles away at the foot of the hills below. The freezing rain started falling hard again. His tracks would be obliterated in no time, in case Jay Blue rode around the canyon to look for him. He didn’t care what Jay Blue thought anymore. Not even Captain Tomlinson. He just wanted to be somebody. Jack Brennan had said he knew who his daddy was.
Is
. He reined his horse down the slope and rode through the timber toward the Double Horn Ranch.

A feeling had come over Hank. He felt a strong pull toward an area up the Colorado River. He couldn’t say why, or how the urge came to him, but he knew his course before he had even put a foot in a stirrup. Having sent most of the boys out in pairs, he had given Tonk his orders: “Swing around to the Gridiron Branch. I’ll ride past Eagle Bluffs, then meet you at the Narrows.”

“The Narrows?” Tonk said.

“You know the place?”

Tonk nodded. His frown had darkened as he turned to mount. It was as if he had felt the same pull to that place.

Now Hank had Eagle Bluffs behind him, having found no trace of Poli. Not even a buzzard would be flying on a day like this, he thought. Perhaps that was just as well. He cursed his own thoughts, the cold, and that damned competitive streak all the Broken Arrow hands kept constantly alive.

“Poli!” he called.

His head ached, and his throat was raw from yelling. So much so that he had taken to alternating the yells with shrill whistles he sent through his teeth. His bones ached from this numbing cold, especially the old shoulder wound. He was approaching the Narrows when the rain turned to a hard, driving sleet.

He reined his horse to a stop, and could not even say why he had done it. Whatever it was that had drawn him here was behind him. He could feel it. He didn’t want to look. He had passed a clump of bushes on his left, but had not looked at the other side of the brush as he rode past, his eyes busy elsewhere. But he knew he had to look now. Maybe it was nothing. He had gotten false signals from these strange urges before. He set his jaw. His neck was stiff today, so instead of wrenching it around, he reined his horse to the left.

The sight dragged his heart down into the deepest of dark pits, and tears burst from his eyes. He roared in anger and sorrow. He leapt down from the saddle, his boots splashing frigid mud that oozed through the stitching and soaked his socks. He trudged toward the arrow-riddled body, feeling as if he would vomit up the little bit of breakfast he had managed to choke down this morning. He only glanced at the arrows to check for the markings of Black Cloud.

Hank had seen scalped corpses plenty of times before. It was something a man never got used to, but learned to stomach. You just trained your eye away from the grisly abomination intended to break your morale and got on with the sad business at hand. But this was Poli. His head of thick black hair was gone, cut and torn from his bloody skull. Hank knew this scalping was meant for him and that Poli had somehow gotten in the way.

He fell to his knees beside the body of his friend, sobs escaping from his lungs in spite of the heart this frontier had hardened. He could literally feel the pain of the arrow shafts protruding unnaturally from Poli’s chest. He tried to shut Poli’s dark eyes, but the body was frozen, the face encased in a glaze of ice that seemed to have preserved Poli’s last dying visage of fear and pain for all eternity.

“Poli!” he screamed, as he had been screaming all morning. “Goddamn it, no!” He choked on his own words and felt his anger and grief turn to guilt. “What did I bring here?” he asked himself. The remorse shifted to fear as he thought of his boys being out there now. There was only one way to torment him worse than this. And Black Cloud was hanging over them all.

He heard a hoof stamp in a puddle and turned, wild-eyed, to see the rider there, looking down at him. Tonk was pulling his Winchester from the saddle scabbard, his face looking even sadder than usual. The old scout cocked it, fired, pumped the lever, pulled the trigger again, flipped another smoking shell into the mud, and sent a third bullet speeding skyward behind the others.

35

M
ATT KENYON
arrived in Luck, chilled to the marrow, but relatively dry under his black oilcloth slicker. He rode first to the Dunnsworth livery barn to have his horse stabled on the state nickel. He had also allocated the funds to pay for boarding the evidence—that brindle heifer with the WJ brand. The payment seemed to shock the one-eyed man who owned the place, but Kenyon believed in doing things by the book, and standing by his word.

“Where might I find Captain Tomlinson today?” Kenyon asked the stable keeper.

“You
might
not find him at all,” was the only answer Dunnsworth would offer.

Undaunted, Kenyon stepped out of the livery and looked up and down the cold, muddy thoroughfare of Main Street. Folded in his breast pocket, protected from the weather under his slicker and a wool coat, he carried a warrant for the arrest of Captain Hank Tomlinson on suspicion of murder, signed by a judge appointed by the radical Republican Reconstruction government—the same administration that had disbanded the Texas Rangers and replaced them with the Texas State Police. The judge had read Max Cooper’s article in the
Daily Statesman.
Kenyon had been working toward this day his whole adult life—and even before.

Matt Kenyon had no memory of his father; no portrait or tintype picture. All he possessed were the descriptions his mother had shared with him. He had grown up listening to his mother’s stories of his father as a kind, brave man; honest, handsome, and honorable. His mother had also told him that one Hank Tomlinson—a Ranger she had never met—had killed her beloved Jim and deserved nothing less than a hangman’s noose.

For reasons he never quite understood or questioned, young Matt grew up fascinated with police work and, by the time he was eighteen, had decided upon a career in law enforcement. Not even the Civil War would stand in the way of his ambitions. Matt had grown up with strong Union sympathies, and instinctively opposed secession, so he left Texas and went to California during the war, finding work as a policeman in the city of San Francisco. It was there that he proved himself as a cop in one of the toughest and wildest towns in the West. In three separate gunfights, Matt Kenyon shot in self-defense, killing lawless men who would have happily added him as a notch to their pistol grips.

It was also in San Francisco that he began earning an extra buck or two as a crime reporter, writing under a pen name. City councilmen and judges read the newspapers, and Matt found that he could sway their attitudes and opinions with his pen. He realized that criminals read the newspapers, too, and that he could often flush suspects out of hiding by planting certain bits of information—or misinformation—in his articles.

He returned to Texas to bury his mother after the war. The way he saw it, she died of a broken heart, and the man responsible for her grief—Hank Tomlinson—still roamed free on the frontier as a respected rancher and town builder. It was at this time that the radical Republican government was forming the Texas State Police, and Matt’s credentials impressed them. He won a commission as a lieutenant, with responsibilities ranging statewide. The
Daily Statesman
also liked his style—writing as Max Cooper.

When news of the murder of Wes James found its way to Lieutenant Kenyon’s desk, he finally saw the opportunity he had sought since boyhood to avenge his father’s murder and lay his mother’s soul to rest once and for all. The fact that details of the crime came to him in the form of an anonymous letter served only to reveal that Tomlinson had other enemies out there who wanted him brought down for his outrages as the legendary Black Cloud.

Now, standing in the muddy street of Tomlinson’s own town, Kenyon’s excitement was slowly building, like steam pressure in a boiler. Today would be the day. He had the confidence of his experience and the weight of the state government behind him. This was one crime story he would not have to write himself. Every newspaper in Texas would carry the news of the Ranger gone wrong, finally brought to justice by the son of one of his victims.

The warrant gave Lieutenant Matt Kenyon the authority to bring Tomlinson in dead or alive, as he saw fit.

At Flora’s Saloon, Kenyon found the swinging doors latched back and the glazed glass doors shut because of the cold. But there was a horse shivering at the hitching rail, indicating that at least one patron might be drinking in the saloon.

What kind of man would leave a saddle horse to stand in this kind of weather?
Then he saw the Double Horn brand in the animal’s wet coat on the left hip, and knew it probably belonged to the owner of that ranch, Jack Brennan. He had questioned this man, a neighbor to Tomlinson, and found him less than helpful. He opened a glazed glass door and entered. Inside, he found only Brennan and the barkeep, Harry.

As the two men stared at him, Kenyon said, “I’m looking for Captain Hank Tomlinson. Police business.”

“Tomlinson ain’t here,” Brennan answered, then went on to explain that one of Tomlinson’s men was missing, having failed to return from a hunt.

The news took an edge off of the resolve Kenyon had honed preparing for the moment of confrontation. He decided to have a snort to warm his belly after the long, cold ride.

“Whiskey,” he said to the bartender, who snarled, but grabbed a glass.

“So, you’re it?” Brennan asked.

“I am
what
, sir?”

“You think you can take Hank Tomlinson alone?” He began laughing, whiskey sloshing out of his shot glass.

“I’m sure he’ll give up his guns in an orderly fashion.”

Brennan almost choked on the shot he had thrown back. He coughed a few times, then said, “Well, let’s figure the odds. I’d say you have a ninety percent chance of dyin’, and ten percent chance of surviving a bullet wound or two.”

Kenyon was unmoved at the rants of the big rancher. “I’m just here to do my duty. I don’t bet odds. I’m not a gambling man.”

“Oh, you’re gamblin’, alright. With your life.” He filled his empty glass from a bottle on the bar. “I guess you already know about the arrow,” he added.

“What arrow?” Kenyon said, picking up his glass of bourbon.

Brennan looked at the bartender, who had forced a cough. “Well, he’s gonna find out sooner or later, Harry,” the big man said, having sensed the disapproval of the barkeep. He turned back to Kenyon. “An old arrow matching those found in the carcass of Wes James was discovered in the possession of Captain Tomlinson. It fell out of a fiddle case he owned, last night, right here in the saloon, in front of three dozen witnesses.”

The news further brightened Kenyon’s spirits. “Where’s the arrow now?”

“They took it over to the general store to compare it to the others. Then news of Hank’s lost foreman got to town, and the whole Broken Arrow crew left to find him.”

Kenyon threw the whiskey past his teeth, his mind whirling to analyze how the new evidence might bolster his case. He charged out of the saloon, sloshed across the street, and swung open the sweaty glass door to find Sam Collins talking to two pretty women whom he remembered as barmaids. One, in fact, was the bar owner, and Tomlinson’s gal.

“Oh,” Sam Collins said, as if caught doing something wrong. “Officer Kenyon. What can I do for you?”

Kenyon’s eyes caught sight of the two arrow shafts that Collins was attempting to move from view.

“Stop right there,” he warned. “Obstruction of justice is a serious charge.”

The store owner slid the two arrows back onto the counter, becoming instantly defensive. “Sir, you’re addressing an elected officer of the court!”