Butch Cassidy the Lost Years (6 page)

CHAPTER 7

S
ince Sheriff Lester had told me about the Daughtry place being abandoned, I didn't think it would be too suspicious for me to ride over there and take a look around. As the new owner of the Fishhook, I had a right to scout out the boundaries of my range, didn't I?

So I saddled up and headed in that direction a day or two later. I wanted to make sure there was nothing there the sheriff could trace back to me.

Of course, in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe he had baited a trap for me, and paying a visit to the place was exactly what he wanted me to do.

I had discovered that in life there's often a fine line between thinking too little and thinking too much, so I'd learned to trust my instincts. They said to head in that direction, so I did.

Sheriff Lester was right: the house looked like it had been abandoned. A gusty spring wind was blowing when I rode up. The door swung open on its leather hinges, one of which had partially rotted because of exposure to the weather, making the door hang crooked. The wind blew it back and forth, but one corner dragged in the dirt, and the motion worked that bad place in the leather even more. In another month or so it would come apart.

I thought about going inside to see if anything could be salvaged, but I didn't want to step in there. I was sure it stunk, and I didn't want anything that had belonged to the Daughtrys. I'd never worn the buffalo coat when I went to town, and as soon as I was able to buy another sheepskin jacket at Farnum's store I burned the damned stinking thing.

I rode all around the shack, but I didn't see any bones anywhere. Satisfied, I turned and headed south toward the settlement. I needed a few things at the store.

As soon as I got there, I could tell that Farnum was excited about something and couldn't wait to tell me about it.

“Howdy, Jim,” he said eagerly as he rested his hands on the counter at the rear of the store. We called each other by our first names by then. “You heard about what happened?”

“Well, I've heard about a lot of things that happened, Clyde,” I told him. “Which thing in particular are you talkin' about?”

“The train holdup.”

That got my attention right away. Robbing trains is a subject that holds a particular interest for me. And for once, a holdup was news to me. I said, “Tell me about it.”

“It was over at Cougar Pass, early this mornin'. A gang of bandits stopped the westbound not long after dawn.”

I'd heard of Cougar Pass, about seven miles east of the county seat. Since this part of the country was mostly flat, it wasn't really much of a pass, just an open spot between two little hills.

“How'd they do that?”

“Pried up a rail, then piled brush in front of the place and set it on fire. The engineer couldn't see that the rail was gone, so he tried to barrel on through the bonfire.”

“Good Lord!” I said. “Did the whole train derail?” I hated to think about the devastation and likely loss of life if that was the case.

“No, just the engine and the coal car. The other cars buckled up some but didn't crash. That was a stroke of luck, they say. The whole thing could've gone over. Not so lucky for the engineer and the fireman, though. They were both killed.”

I hated to hear that. Like I said before, even though I'd done some things in my earlier days I wasn't particularly proud of, I'd tried my best to see to it that nobody was killed or even seriously hurt.

“Once the train was stopped, the bandits came chargin' in and tried to bust into the express car,” Farnum went on. “From what I hear, there was a big money shipment in there. Reckon the outlaws must've known about it somehow. The Wells Fargo guards were waitin' for 'em, though. There was a hell of a gun battle.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked him. If the holdup happened that morning, then news of it had reached Largo mighty fast.

“Charley Davenport and his wife were down in the county seat last night. They took their old maid daughter to town to put her on an eastbound train. She's goin' to visit relatives in Dallas and find herself a husband. Then they stayed the night and came back today. Stopped by here on the way to their place and told me all about it. It was the talk of the town.”

I had met Charley Davenport once, here at Farnum's. His spread was farther west. Seemed like a good sort, if a little closemouthed. I had a hunch it was Mrs. Davenport who'd done most of the talking about the robbery.

“Anyway,” Farnum went on, seeming a little put out that I'd interrupted him, “one of the guards was wounded in all the shootin', but two of the bandits were killed and the other four got away. The way I hear it, one of 'em was wounded.”

“They didn't get the money?”

“Nary a penny. Those guards are heroes, if you ask me.”

I hadn't asked him, and given my background, I had a hard time seeing it the same way he did. Of course, I didn't particularly admire the holdup men, either. To my way of thinking, what they'd done was crude and sloppy. They could have killed dozens of innocent people by derailing the locomotive. There are less destructive ways of stopping a train.

But a derailment was effective, I had to give them that. A train can't run if it's not on the rails. And a crash likely would have busted the express car open and might have even killed the guards, so they could have waltzed in and made off with that loot pretty easy. That's fine and dandy, if all you care about is the money.

“What happened after the robbers lit out?” I asked.

“The conductor shinnied up a telegraph pole and cut in on the wire,” Farnum said. “He got help from the county seat. Sheriff Lester went chargin' out there with a posse, sent the wounded guard back to town, and took off after the bandits. That's the last Charley and his missus heard about it, so I don't know if they caught the varmints yet or not.”

I didn't really care one way or the other, but at least the sheriff would be busy for a while chasing after outlaws and wouldn't have time to wonder about me and how I'd got hold of Abner Tillotson's ranch.

“The railroad's shut down,” Farnum added. “They'll have to send a work train out, maybe all the way from San Antone. Wouldn't surprise me if they don't get the mess cleaned up until sometime tomorrow. Maybe even the next day.”

“Well, I'm not plannin' on going anywhere, so that won't cause me any problems.” I took the list I'd written out of my pocket. “I need a pound of coffee, some beans . . .”

I told him the rest of the supplies I needed, and he started gathering them up with a surly expression on his face. He would have rather gossiped some more about the train robbery than do any actual work.

I'd heard enough about it, though, and it had stirred up some uncomfortable memories for me. I don't plan on apologizing for anything I've done in the past, and I learned a long time ago that regrets don't change a damned thing. But I didn't need any reminders, either. I especially didn't cotton to the avid look on Farnum's face when he talked about the engineer and the fireman dying in the crash, or the way he eagerly described the shootout between the robbers and the Wells Fargo men.

The whole thing stuck with me stubbornly on the ride back to the Fishhook, and it didn't go away as I tended to the chores the rest of the day. When I laid down in the bed that night, sleep didn't come easy to me, like it usually does.

Those railroad tracks stretched across the plains some thirty miles from where I'd laid my head, I thought, and trains carrying plenty of passengers and loot rolled over them in both directions several times a day.

Not many people bothered to hold up trains anymore. Black Jack Ketchum had still been at it over in New Mexico a few years earlier, but the law had caught him and he'd wound up on a gallows.

Ol' Black Jack had come to an even grislier end than usual, though, because the hangman hadn't been very good at his job and when Black Jack dropped through the trap, the noose popped his head right off his shoulders. The body fell all the way to the ground, and Black Jack's head bounced off to one side. Lord have mercy, what a way to go. The crowd that had gathered to watch the hanging got more than they bargained for. I didn't feel sorry for 'em, the damned buzzards.

But remembering what had happened to Black Jack Ketchum just sort of ricocheted through my head. Mostly I was wondering how much trouble it would be to put together a big enough bunch to stop one of those trains the right way.

That brought me up against a stone wall in my thinking. The old bunch I'd used to run with was gone. Nearly all of them were dead. I was in Texas and one other fella was out in California, last I'd heard, livin' a law-abiding life, and the two gals who had been part of the gang didn't want anything to do with that life anymore. When I'd stopped in New York to visit with one of them, being the bearer of bad tidings that I was, she'd told me in no uncertain terms not to darken her doorstep ever again.

But enough of that. One thing you can't do in life is go back. You can turn and look at the past, you can even stick out your hand and try to touch it, but it's always going to be just beyond your reach.

I was finally about to doze off when I heard hoofbeats outside.

They were slow but not too steady, as if the horse would walk a few steps and then stop for a second before moving on again, the way it would do if it didn't have a rider. My first thought was that one of the horses had gotten out of the barn and was wandering around in the night.

But I didn't rightly see how that could have happened, because I knew those stalls were solid and secure. Abner had seen to that, and I had kept them in good repair.

So if it wasn't my horse, it had to belong to somebody else. Maybe it had wandered off from another ranch. Or maybe one of the Daughtrys' mounts had found its way back to this area. I didn't care for that thought. I'm not given to flights of fancy, but for a split second I wondered if maybe a Daughtry ghost had come looking for me, and I liked that idea even less.

“Hell's bells, you've gone loco, old son,” I muttered to myself as I swung my legs out of bed and stuck my feet in my boots. Wearing the boots and a pair of long underwear, I picked up my rifle and went to the window to look out.

The horse had come to a stop between the house and the barn and looked lost. It wasn't riderless, though. A dark shape hunched forward in the saddle, leaning over the horse's neck. I knew a hurt man when I saw one, even in bad light.

The hope that the horse would move on and take its burden with it never crossed my mind. In those days, unless you were the sorriest no-account that there was—like the Daughtrys—when you saw somebody in trouble you tried to lend a hand if you could. So I grabbed my hat off the peg, stuck it on my head, and went outside in my long johns to find out what was wrong.

I wasn't careless about it, though. I took the Winchester with me.

Pausing on the little gallery in front of the house, I called, “Hola, amigo! Are you hurt?” In that part of the country there was a good chance the fella was a Mexican, so that's the way I greeted him.

He didn't say anything, but the horse turned its head toward the sound of my voice. I walked toward it, watching for any sign of a trap or an ambush.

The horse shied away from me. The man in the saddle swayed back and forth like he was about to fall off, and I realized that he might be unconscious. I knew a man could pass out and still manage to remain mounted. I'd done it myself a time or two.

I spoke softly to the horse, but it danced farther away and the rider swayed even more. I could tell he was about to lose his balance. Without thinking about what I was doing, I jumped forward to catch him as he pitched out of the saddle.

He was lucky I was there and lucky as well that his foot didn't catch in the stirrup, because the horse ran off toward the barn. I caught my mysterious visitor, staggering a little under his weight even though he was slender. Because I was still holding the rifle at the same time, hanging on to him was awkward. As carefully as I could, because I felt a sticky place on his shirt that had to be blood, I lowered him to the ground.

His hat fell off as I did so, and in the light from a half-moon that hung over the hills, I saw that his face was familiar. The last time I'd seen it was right here in front of the ranch house as I gave him those wrapped-up biscuits to keep him from starving.

The young fella I'd been convinced was on the dodge had come back to the Fishhook, and now he had at least one bullet hole in him.

CHAPTER 8

O
ne good thing about living an active life is that not many things take you completely by surprise. No matter what happens, there's at least a chance that you've run into it before. For example, this wasn't the first time I'd had a wounded man land on my doorstep.

So this didn't exactly throw me for a loop. The first thing I did was straighten up and listen. Any time you've got a wounded man, there's a good chance somebody's chasing after him. I listened as hard as I could for the sound of rapid hoofbeats.

The night was quiet, though. Could be he'd given the slip to whoever shot him. But just in case somebody who wasn't friendly might show up in the near future, I decided I'd better get him into the house.

I leaned the Winchester against one of the posts holding up the thatched awning over the gallery. Then I bent and got my hands under the wounded man's arms. I lifted him, my back protesting some as I did so, and slung him over my left shoulder. I took him inside, balanced him precariously while I took the blanket from the bed and threw it on the sofa, and then lowered him onto it. He was out cold and never stirred or made a sound.

I fetched in the rifle, hung it on the wall, and lit the lamp. The glow from it told me that the young fella was still alive. His chest rose and fell in a shallow motion.

His horse was still out there and needed to be dealt with. I left him there on the sofa and went outside again. The horse was still skittish, but I'd had practice catching animals that didn't want to be caught. When I had hold of the reins I led the critter into the barn, put him in an empty stall, and took the saddle off him. It was just a well-worn old saddle, nothing really to distinguish it, so I stuck it in the tack room.

With that taken care of, I went back to the house, pausing on the gallery to listen again. The night was still quiet.

When I stepped inside, I found myself looking down the barrel of a gun.

My visitor had come to and rolled onto his side. He lacked the strength to get off the sofa, but he had been able to pull a small revolver from his pocket. I knew that must be where he'd gotten it, because it sure as hell wasn't one of my guns. As he pointed it at me his hand shook so much the barrel must have traveled a good six inches back and forth. That made me sort of nervous, because the hammer was cocked and all it would take to fire the blasted thing was a little pressure on the trigger.

“You don't want to shoot me, son,” I told him. “I'm tryin' to help you. Why don't you put the gun down?”

“Wh . . . where . . . ?”

“This is the Fishhook Ranch. You stopped by here a while back, remember? You watered your horse and I gave you a cup of coffee and some biscuits. My name's Jim Strickland.”

He was in too much pain to remember much of anything, I realized. He kept wobbling that gun at me and said, “Stay . . . stay back . . . I'll shoot . . .”

I was getting a little disgusted. You try to help somebody and they point a gun at you. That's just not civilized behavior.

I held out both hands and approached him slowly, saying, “Now just take it easy, take it easy, I'm a friend, I won't hurt you, son—”

I saw his eyes roll up in his head and knew he was about to pass out again. The gun sagged toward the floor. But as it did his finger tightened on the trigger and I had to make a wild jump to keep from getting a toe shot off as the revolver barked. I must have been a pretty funny sight, hopping around in boots, hat, and long underwear like that.

The slug smacked into the floorboards. A second later the gun slipped from his fingers and thudded to the floor. I kicked it and sent it sliding well out of reach.

Then I took hold of his arm and rolled him onto his back again. I wanted to get a look at that wound.

He had lost quite a bit of blood, but as soon as I peeled his shirt back I saw that the injury wasn't serious, even though it probably hurt like blazes. A bullet had plowed an inch-deep furrow along his rib cage. I worried that he might have a cracked or broken rib in there, but if that was the case it hadn't punctured a lung. He didn't have any bloody froth on his lips, and when I put my ear next to his mouth I could tell that his breathing was normal. I didn't hear any wheezing or whistling as I would have if he'd had a hole in one of his lungs.

I cut the blood-soaked shirt off him, then used a whiskey-soaked rag to swab the blood away from the wound. The kid groaned when the liquor bit into raw flesh but didn't wake up. The gash was still oozing crimson when I bandaged it, but I could tell it was going to stop soon.

With that done, I straightened up and thumbed my hat to the back of my head as I looked down at him. His cheeks were gaunt, and his dark hair was matted with sweat. I could tell that he'd been on the run for a while. I knew the look well. I had seen it gazing back at me from the mirror often enough.

“Kid,” I said, “what in the hell am I gonna do with you?”

I couldn't stop thinking about what Clyde Farnum had told me about that attempted train robbery. It was thought that one of the outlaws had been wounded in the shootout with the Wells Fargo men, and now here was this youngster showing up with a bullet crease in his side. The two things didn't have to be connected, of course, but it made sense that they might be.

If that was true, the law was after him, and that was trouble I didn't need. Sheriff Emil Lester was already suspicious of me. If he found me harboring a wanted fugitive, he might decide I'd been part of the gang that tried to hold up the train. He might dig around enough in my background to discover that Jim Strickland wasn't my real name. He might even figure out the name I was best known by, and I sure didn't want that. I was doing my damnedest to put those days behind me.

So if I wanted to look out for my own best interests, helping this kid was a damned fool thing to do. I knew that . . . but I also knew that I wasn't going to turn my back on him. The Good Lord just hadn't made me that way.

Those thoughts were going through my head when I heard swift hoofbeats outside.

When you hear that sound at night, you know there's a good chance trouble has come to call. I whipped over to the table and blew out that light, knowing that I was too late. Whoever was out there would have seen the yellow glow in the windows already. But even so, there was no need for me to make things easier for 'em. Moving by feel in the darkness, because I already knew every inch of that house like I had lived there for ten years, I plucked the Winchester from its hooks on the wall near the door and waited.

The hoofbeats came to a stop. I couldn't hear much through the door, but I knew the horses had been run hard enough that they would be moving around restlessly out there, snorting and blowing.

A man called, “Hello, the house!”

The windows opened from the middle like shutters. I eased one of them back a little and asked, “What do you want?”

I halfway expected the riders to be a posse from the county seat, but the man who had spoken wasn't Sheriff Lester. He might be one of the deputies, though, I thought.

“We're lookin' for a friend of ours. He might've ridden in here a little while ago. Young fella, about twenty years old.”

“If he's a friend of yours, you ought to know for sure how old he is,” I said.

The man sounded impatient as he said, “Never mind about that. Have you seen any strangers tonight?”

“Not a one,” I said, and I told myself that was an honest answer. I might not know the wounded man's name, but he wasn't a complete stranger. I had offered my hospitality to him before and he had accepted, so as far as I was concerned that meant we were acquainted.

“You haven't heard a horse go by?”

“Nope.” That was true, too. None of the horses that had come up tonight had gone by. They were all still here.

“You wouldn't mind if we take a look around?”

“As a matter of fact, I would. I don't cotton to folks nosin' around my place at night.”

My eyes had adjusted to the dark. From where I was, I could see two men on horseback. Judging by the sound of the hoofbeats I'd heard a few minutes earlier, at least one more man had ridden up with them. That meant he was unaccounted for, and I had a hunch he'd gone around to cover the back of the house. There was a window back there, but no door.

My last statement had drawn a few seconds of silence. Then the man who'd been doing the talking said, “Mister, I don't really care what you cotton to. If our pard's here, we're gonna find him, and you'd be wise not to try to stop us.”

“Bein' wise is something that nobody's ever accused me of,” I said. “I've got a Winchester pointed at you. Rattle your hocks out of here while you still can.”

They weren't quite sure what to do. I was pretty good at sensing such things. If I was alone, they had me outnumbered. But they had no way of being sure I didn't have half a dozen well-armed men in here with me.

The fella decided to try to repair the damage. He said, “Look here, amigo, we got off on the wrong foot. We're not huntin' trouble. Our friend's hurt. We just want to help him, that's all. If he's here, we'll take him and go, and you won't have to see any of us ever again.”

It was a tempting offer in a way, but I can count. Four men had gotten away from that holdup, and one of them was wounded. Now I had a wounded, unconscious man on my sofa and three men, more than likely, outside my house. Three men on the run from the law, I reminded myself. They might be desperate enough they wouldn't want to leave any witnesses behind to tell the sheriff that they'd been here or which way they went when they rode off. I knew there was a better than even chance if I opened that door, they'd shoot me down.

Besides which, some other thoughts were percolating around inside my brain. When the kid stopped by here before, he sure hadn't acted like he was part of a gang. Instead he had given the impression that he was on his own, without any friends or family within a hundred miles, at least.

So if my suspicions were right and he had fallen in with this bunch during the time since he'd been here, they likely weren't the good friends to him the spokesman was making them out to be. I didn't have any real reason not to trust them, other than what my gut was telling me, but that was enough.

“I told you, the fella you're looking for ain't here, and I'm not in the mood for company. So turn around and ride off.”

They were just shadows in the dark to me. I couldn't see their faces. But I could tell from their attitudes they were torn about what to do. The air held a sense of menace that told me they wanted to yank out their guns and start blasting.

Then something tipped the scale. The third man hadn't gone around to the back after all. He was over at the barn. I heard his voice come from there as he yelled, “Hey, Steve, Randy's horse is in one of those stalls! The yellow bastard's here, all right.”

The one called Steve ripped out a curse and told the man with him, “Scatter!” At the same time, both of them jerked guns from their holsters.

There was no point in waiting any longer. I stuck the barrel of that Winchester through the window and cut loose my wolf.