Outlaw Train (18 page)

“You’ve told me some of this story before, Father,” said a man in his midtwenties to the older man beside him. “But I don’t recall how it was you got free of that tree you were tied to.”

“I owe that to a man who came along at just the right time,” said Luke Cable to his son. They were standing on a boardwalk along Emporium Avenue in the town of Wiles, in a year early in a new century, more than two decades past the day two major twisters had devastated that Kansas town and turned the Montague Emporium into a huge pile of rubble. “In a way, you might be able to say that Scar Nolan had saved my life by tying me to that tree after he clonked me on the skull. That twister passed right over, and made splinters out of the Outlaw Train just yards from where I was, but being tied to that tree kept me from maybe getting blown off into the sky like a leaf. Nearly tore my arms out of my shoulder sockets, but probably kept me alive, too.”

“But how did you get loose after the whirlwinds had blown over?”

“I’ve got a traveling journalist to thank for that. Man by the last name of Baum who had come to Wiles to find Percival Raintree and his Outlaw
Train. Like most everybody else in town that day, Baum got surprised by the weather. He picked just the wrong time to rent a horse and ride out to the Outlaw Train, but it’s lucky for me he did. He saw me there on the ground, still tied to that tree, not even back to consciousness yet. He came over and cut me free, and it was about that time I woke up.”

“Did Baum put you in his newspaper?”

“Ha! That man didn’t work for any newspaper, not like you’d think of a newspaper. He wrote stories about ghosts and spooks and the like for a journal magazine, the
Argus
of something or other. He wrote a story up that said the Outlaw Train had been destroyed by a demon conjured up by Scar Nolan, who was angry about Raintree having a display related to one of his brothers. He mentioned me in his story by my title, but not by name, which suited me. There was some truth in the account he published, but not much. Nolan, sure enough, was angry about what was in the Outlaw Train, I suspect, but there wasn’t any demon-conjuring involved in what he did about it. No demon other than Nolan himself, anyway.”

“He shot Raintree?”

“Blew his brains all over the inside of that display car. There was just enough of it left to figure out what had happened.”

The younger man looked across the street, where a large church reached skyward. “So that’s where the emporium stood, is it?”

“That’s the spot. It was a sight to see, that store. Bigger even than that Baptist church house there. When the twister took it down, it ruined poor old
Campbell Montague, though. Made him a sad and withdrawn kind of man. He built another store to replace it, just a small one, still standing over on that corner there. See? But he sold it off within a year of building it, and pretty much just hid himself away, almost like his brother Simon had done up in the attic of the original store. Funny twist in all that. Simon finally came out and joined the world again, and his brother turned hermit, doing nothing but hiding away and taking care of Macky as long as Macky lived. Campbell himself died the year after Macky was killed.”

“How’d Macky get killed?”

“Macky was a good boy, but he was simple and he was careless. He walked out one day and got hit by a wagon that somebody was driving too fast around a corner. He’s buried over in the town cemetery. Let’s walk over that way and I’ll show you his grave. And some others.”

Luke and his son strode down the street, Luke examining the town he served as marshal a quarter century earlier. It had changed dramatically, but much of what he had known so well remained, too.

The cemetery held the past. Luke took off his hat and walked solemnly between the stones, reading names, pointing out in particular the resting places of Macky and Campbell Montague. Moving on, he came to a small marker. His son joined him and they read the name together in silence.

“Was she really as beautiful as you say, Father?”

Luke glanced around, making sure his wife wasn’t near. The former Sally James of Ellsworth, who had married Luke in 1879, had gone earlier to visit the
local dress shop, leaving her husband and son to take a walk around the town Luke had not visited since the spring of 1880, the year he’d left Kansas and moved to Missouri to take up a new career as a house carpenter.

“To speak truthfully, Katrina Haus was probably the most beautiful woman I’ve seen in sixty-three years of life,” Luke said. “You needn’t mention to your mother that I said that.”

“Is that why you looked around before you answered?”

“No point in stirring up trouble you don’t have need for,” Luke replied with a quick grin. “A man should never say within hearing of his wife that there is, or even ever was, a woman more beautiful. Though in the case of Katrina Haus, I don’t know there was ever a greater beauty than she was, here or anywhere else.”

The younger man looked down at the grave. “It’s a shame such a beauty should be killed by a cyclone, of all things.”

Luke shook his head. “It wasn’t a cyclone that killed her, son. Far from it. It was…murder.”

“She was murdered?”

“She was.”

“Are you the one who figured it out?”

Luke chuckled mirthlessly. “No, son. No. The only thing I figured out in the whole situation was that I had neither the skill nor the real desire to be a peace officer anymore. It was Katrina Haus, in her death, who caused me to come to that conclusion. Her, and Ben Keely, considering what happened to him.”

“So who determined Katrina was murdered?”

“The half-wit nephew of Campbell Montague. Macky.”

“A half-wit figured that out?”

“He did. It was Macky and Simon Montague who found her body after they fled the emporium during the storm. She was lying on her back in a shed, mouth open just a little. Macky got close enough to notice something visible near the roof of her mouth.”

“What was it?”

“The head of a pin. A kind of French hat pin they sold in the emporium. Big, long hat pins.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Father.”

Luke looked at his son. “A hat pin had been thrust through the roof of her mouth. All the way up through her head into her brain. I know it for a fact because I saw it myself as me and Wilton Brand examined the corpse before she was buried. Wilton found evidence that the pin had been pushed in several times, pulled out and pushed in again and again, you see. To make sure her brain was punctured enough to ensure she was dead.”

“Why did the murderer leave it in the last time? Tiny little holes in the roof of her mouth probably wouldn’t have been noticed by themselves.”

“I think she was frightened away, maybe by the first hit of the twister at the emporium, which was close by, or maybe even by the approach of Simon and Macky after they fled the store building.”

“ ‘She,’ you said?”

“Come over here.”

Luke led the way to a different grave. “Here’s your murderess, in my opinion.”

The gravestone bore the name of Clara Ashworth.

“I did some asking around after the fact and found out from Jimmy Wills, who at the time was just a young fellow working as hotel clerk, that Katrina Haus had received a note at the hotel, on stock imprinted with Howard Ashworth’s name, Howard being Clara’s husband, asking Katrina to meet Howard in that same lot near the emporium that Simon and Macky ended up fleeing to. But Jimmy told me that handwriting on the note looked more like Clara had written it than Howard, though Howard’s name was signed at the bottom.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I think Clara had figured out that her husband had been unfaithful to her. With Katrina Haus. Maybe Howard had even confessed it to her, I don’t know. I think it was Clara’s revenge. The woman was so proud she couldn’t bear the idea of her husband making a fool of her by seeking out the affections of a common whore. So she contrived to lure Katrina to that empty lot and that dark shed, and kill her there. What she couldn’t know at the time she left that note was that a tornado was going to sweep through at the same time she planned to meet Katrina Haus. My theory is that Katrina was either knocked out by the storm and pulled into that shed by Clara, and those pins thrust into her brain while she was senseless, or Clara maybe clouted her in the head with something and knocked her cold, then killed her.”

“Yeah, she pretty much had to be unconscious to be killed that way. Nobody would lie there with
their senses about them and let someone shove hat pins up through the roof of their mouth.”

“Exactly. And by the way, Clara Ashworth was known to have bought a box of those hat pins at the emporium, just shortly before all these things happened.”

“So was Clara ever charged with the murder?”

“Son, we found Clara Ashworth dead the day after the storm, caught under the rubble of a building that fell in the wind. I think that after she killed Katrina and fled that shed, she was caught by the storm while she was trying to get home. Wrong place at the wrong time, and crushed to death.”

“Well, it saved having to have had a trial, I guess.”

“Yes. And it saved me from any notion of wanting to continue as town marshal. Within a week of the storm coming through, I gave my resignation. Especially after I found that Ben certainly wouldn’t be coming back. His sister had come into town, you see, in hope she’d find he was alive and well. And she found him, all right, but not alive and well. He’d been murdered in Kentucky by Percival Raintree, who wanted a criminal relic Ben possessed at that time, to put on his Outlaw Train. Raintree gunned Ben down out on a remote road in Kentucky. Shot him in the face with a shotgun. I reckon that was what gave Raintree the idea of hiding his crime by making poor old Ben into a relic himself. There was a criminal of that period of time, you see, who had been about Ben’s size, and got killed by a similar shotgun blast to the face. The Tennessee Kid, they called him. So Raintree sneaked Ben’s corpse onto
his train and left Kentucky to resume touring in Missouri and Kansas. Had his partner, fellow name of Nicholas Anubis, preserve Ben’s body and pass him off as the Tennessee Kid. Ben’s corpse couldn’t be recognized because there was nothing left of the face. And of course they kept the head covered up with a cloth, anyway. But apparently it took them some time to recollect that the real Tennessee Kid had also lost one leg, so they cut off one of Ben’s legs and dumped it off the train while they were about to roll through Wiles to the old railroad side track out west of town. That was the last stop the Outlaw Train would ever make. The tornado saw to that. The tornado, and Scar Nolan, when he killed Raintree.”

“What became of Anubis?”

“Killed in the same tornado. He’d come into town with the body of ‘the Tennessee Kid,’ and it was then that Bess Keely recognized the corpse of her brother. She identified him by way of some old dogbite scars around one of Ben’s ears. I remember those scars myself. They were the only identifying marks left on Ben’s body after Raintree killed him in Kentucky.”

“What became of Bess?”

“She went back to Kentucky. By train. Had Ben’s body shipped back at the same time to be buried in the family plot. Otherwise, I guess he’d be buried in this cemetery here.”

“Is Dewitt here?”

“Come over. I’ll show you.”

They walked to a grave in the far corner of the cemetery. The stone bore the words HERE LIES THE MORTAL REMAINS OF DEWITT ISAAC
STAMPS, b. 1840, d. 1896, CHILD OF GOD. WASHED CLEAN OF HIS SINS IN THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB.

“That’s nice,” Luke’s son said.

“It is. First time I’ve seen this stone, even though I’m the one who wired in the money to pay for it. They did a good job. The words on it, Dewitt wrote himself when he got sick enough to know he wasn’t going to survive.”

“He was a good man, you’ve told me.”

“One of the finest I’ve ever known. It’s why I named my own son after him.”

Dewitt Cable smiled. “I’m named after a town drunk. Kind of funny.”

“I’ll bet Dewitt himself found it funny, when I wrote to tell him about it. He was a humble man. But he was sure no town drunk when he died, no matter what he’d been years and years before. He had only one occasion of backsliding in his life, to my knowledge. The night the storm hit, Bess Keely had gone down to the saloon and bought Dewitt a bottle of whiskey. He’d managed to persuade himself that it was all right for him to have a little drink. But like so many who get trapped by the bottle, Dewitt learned he couldn’t stop with just a ‘little drink.’ He got drunk on that whiskey Bess bought him, and it was months before he was dry and clean again. But after that, Ben never faltered again. Became a preacher, preaching mostly to men who had been like he was, and giving them help. There’s a lot of men alive today who would have been dead by alcohol if not for Dewitt Stamps. You can bear his name with pride, son.”

“I will. And I do.” Dewitt Cable turned to his father. “I’m glad you decided to come back and visit this town. And I’m glad you let me come with you.”

Luke grinned. “Me, too, son. Hey, I see your mother coming across the street there, heading this way. Go on to her so she’ll know she’s found us.”

The younger man obeyed, leaving Luke alone at the gravestone. He looked down and read its words one more time.

“I’ll be seeing you later on, Dewitt,” he said. “Until then, you rest in peace. Hear? I love you, Dewitt. Admired you more than you ever knew.”

Luke Cable put his hat back on his head and walked off to rejoin his family. When he reached them, his son had one more question for him.

“Father, did Katrina Haus wind up to actually be…what was her name?”

“Kate Bender? I asked Simon Montague that question, straight out. He’d seen Katrina clearly after she died, you remember, in that shed. He said her face was not that of Kate Bender. And he would have known. Katrina Haus was just a young woman who defrauded gullible people and used herself in wrong ways. But she was no murderer. No Kate Bender. No Clara Ashworth.”

The Cable family walked together a few minutes without speaking. Then Luke said, “I noticed coming through town that the Taylor Café is still open, after all these years. Let’s go have a meal, shall we?”