Savage Texas: The Stampeders (3 page)

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

The vehicle moving along the Hangtree Trail was nondescript, a mere plain-sided box enclosing the tail end of a wagon. Equally unremarkable was the man driving it.

He would have looked at home behind a bookkeeper’s desk, ringing a schoolmaster’s bell in the doorway of a small-town school, or shelving books in a library. Thin, short-statured, he carried on bony shoulders a balding head a little too large for his thin stalk of a neck. He held the leads with hands made to accommodate stubby fingers, but bearing instead long and supple ones. No odder human creature, Mexican, Comanche, or Anglo, had ever traveled through this flat and barren-looking landscape than had Otto Perkins, traveling photographer.

He’d learned his craft in the hardest school of all: the battlefields of the American South. Blessed with the patronage of a wealthy uncle who was fascinated by the science of photography and freely spent his fortune supporting the development of increasingly better photographic equipment, the Atlanta native Otto had joined his uncle and a local embalmer in a morbid but educational wartime enterprise. They toured bloodied, smoking battlefields and photographically recorded the carnage with unflinching candor, like Confederate Mathew Bradys. They also created much more sanitized and dignified images of the dead whose bodies remained sufficiently intact to allow cleaning and embalming. These they dressed and photographed on portable, collapsible draped biers they carried with them on a wagon. Images of their dead in poses that made them appear merely to be peacefully sleeping, cleansed of blood and grit and with wounds hidden, were welcomed by bereaved families, most of whom were willing to scrape together whatever they could to purchase those final mementos of the lost ones.

Thus, throughout the war, bespectacled Otto Perkins learned to be perhaps the finest unheralded photographer to come out of the southland. He discovered as well a gift for business, a tolerance for blood and mayhem, and a mounting fascination with death, especially that inflicted by violence. And so, when the war had ended, Otto had created his mobile, wagon-mounted darkroom, and headed west in hopes of building a fortune at best, making a living at least.

In his many long hours of traveling alone, bouncing along on his darkroom wagon and wincing at the potential of every jolt to loosen some seam or joint and create a light leak in his mobile darkroom, Otto had been forced to admit to himself that it all was easier than he’d imagined it would be. With no plan worthy of the name, he’d traveled from town to town, state to territory and back again, and along the way found plenty of people eager to have images of their lives in a growing country turned into something they could hold in their hands and treasure for their entire lives. Otto photographed newborn babies, barn-raisings, cattle brandings, weddings, funerals (complete with corpses laid out or propped up in their finest clothing with family circled around), and even a few hangings, legal and otherwise. What he’d found himself most interested in, however, were photographs related to criminal violence and the criminals who made that happen. It had become something of a secret specialty of his, taking photographs of the infamous and dangerous. He’d photographed the James brothers and their cohorts, and others who had made their names known in the violence of Bleeding Kansas and the border wars, including Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. He’d taken a photograph of the latter with some of his best pistol fighters, including one young and fine-looking dark-haired fellow whose name Otto could not for the life of him remember, but whose image had for Otto become the single best visual embodiment of the pistol fighters of Missouri-Kansas.

Otto Perkins had plans. He would be the creator of the finest library of photographs of the late war and the rebuilding and growth of the nation in the years following. Particularly the expansion into the West. And he would chronicle as his specialty the world of outlawry that was inevitably part of any expanding frontier. As he traveled the West seeking any way he could find for his camera to make him a dollar, he would in particular capture the images of the bad men and their victims, and someday it all would make him famous and envied, respected, rich, and remembered. Otto could feel it in his rather frail bones.

And so, over time his life quest had attained an increasingly narrow focus, his routes and travels guided by rumors and hints and chatter he picked up along the way. He went where he believed he could find those who did not wish to be found, the ones who kept themselves in the places where civilization and law had yet to fully take root.

He had to find them, after all, before he could have any hope of photographing them.

It was his quest that drove him now toward the grubby Texas backwater of Hangtree. Following a trail of rumors and talk, in search of a particular human being.

 

 

Otto’s awareness that he was not alone on this road came to him gradually, and when a look back around the side of his wagon confirmed the presence of a rider coming along behind, it merely verified something Otto had already sensed in some manner unknown even to himself. So there was no surprise involved.

Except in regard to the appearance of the lone rider. The man gave the immediate impression of some ancient Norse warrior thrust forward in time. He was tall and broad-shouldered, muscled torso narrowing to a lean waist. His hair was flowing and mane-like, golden yellow, framing a weathered blue-eyed face both rugged and handsome. The kind of man who had intimidated Otto Perkins all his days.

But also a man who visually embodied the rugged masculinity of the westerner to a degree seldom encountered. Otto had pointed his camera at enough lawmen and outlaws and brawlers and toughs to know that most did not even vaguely match the vision of America’s public of the quintessential man of the frontier. Yellow, broken teeth, skin weathered and sunned to the texture of over-abused leather, warts and scars and cauliflowered noses and squinted eyes, fingers resembling ill-bent twigs from long-past untended breaks . . . Otto had photographed hundreds of such, many of them outlaws and desperadoes.

This man, though, this silent and unexpected fellow man of the road brought by fate to this point of meeting . . . such visually classic subjects as this one almost never came along.

It was time to seize the moment. Otto pulled his wagon over to the side of the Hangtree Road and reined it to a halt. As expected, the gold-maned rider—who wore a sawed-down Winchester rifle holstered on his right thigh, rode over and halted beside the wagon.

“Howdy,” said Otto, peering at the man through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

“Howdy yourself,” said the other. “Having trouble with your wagon?”

“No, sir, not at all. I’ve just stopped to get some grub out for a bite of lunch. Name’s Otto Perkins. Have you had aught to eat, stranger?”

The horseman moved closer and thrust a leathery hand toward the wagoneer. They shook, Otto noticing the strength of the rider’s grip. “I’m Heller, Sam Heller, Mr. Perkins. Herd a few cattle and such as that around these parts.”

“Call me Otto, sir.”

“Call me Sam. What’s your game, friend? I believe you’re a newcomer.”

“I am. If you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare I’ll put some meat on some bread and pour us some cider, and we can eat a bit and I’ll show you what I do.”

“I hate to deprive a man of victuals he might need for himself at a later time,” said Heller. “But my growling belly would make me out a liar if I claimed lack of hunger. I thank you for the invite and will be glad to join you.”

“Excellent, Sam. Excellent.”

The sandwiches were dry and the meat tough, but the Arkansas cider mostly remedied both. They ate and drank and perused some of the photographs Otto Perkins carried with him as a sort of professional calling card. Heller was impressed and said so, and with the skill of a Union man accustomed to surviving in old rebel country, managed to avoid a discussion of their relative positions during the late war, images of which were mixed in among the photos Perkins showed. Heller could tell from the prevalence of Union corpses in the photographs, and from Otto’s drawl, that he was dealing with a Confederate-leaning man here. But also a man of great talent in his field. Heller was not one to gush out compliments to any man, but the praise he gave to Otto’s work was sincere.

“So what brings you out to the devil’s armpit, Otto Perkins?” Heller asked.

“Devil’s armpit . . . by which you mean . . .”

“Hangtown. Hangtree. The town up the road.”

Otto chuckled politely. “Well, sir, what brings me here is the same thing that takes me anywhere I go: my work. I come to this empty wilderness in search of images that can intrigue and reveal and teach. Images of the people who have gravel and grit in their souls so they not only survive in this difficult land, but even thrive.”

“You sound like a professor, friend Perkins. Not that I’ve known many such in my day.”

“Which? Professors, or people fit to survive out here?”

“Either.”

“Well, Sam, if I sound to you like a professor, then you, sir, sound like, and look like . . . this.” Otto waved his hand to indicate the land around them.

“Like that, huh?” Heller looked around at the endless brush-studded flatness around them. “I fail to see the resemblance, myself.”

“I mean you look like the spirit of it all. A human incarnation of what makes this country so tough and stern and strong. That’s why, Sam Heller, I hope you’ll let me create a portrait of you once we reach Hangtown. Perhaps you standing before the famous hangtree itself.”

“I . . . I ain’t much one for having my picture took.”

“It requires nothing of you. Simplicity personified. You take your position, remain for the brief time it takes to capture the image, and that’s it.”

“I’ll consider it, Otto. Because you seem a decent enough hombre. Better than many I’ve run across on this same road.”

Otto’s heart skipped a beat. “Outlaws, you mean? Bad men?”

Heller nodded, one fast bob of the head. “Hangtree draws its share, and I’ve dealt with many.”

Otto all but rubbed his hands together in glee.

“Excellent!”

“How so?”

“I have my own reasons, artistic and commercial, for expressing that feeling. You see, it is my goal to gather the finest and most complete photographic gallery of those individuals and groups who have brought romance and mythos and a sense of legend to the world of the western outlaw . . . those whose names will be recalled through the years. I hope to allow their faces to be remembered as well. Too many will come and go and all that will remain will be legends and lies and faulty memories. As a photographer I can remedy that.”

“So you’re going to Hangtree in the hope of lining up robbers and killers and rapers and may-hemers and saying ‘smile!’”

“Not precisely how I’d phrase it, but essentially, yes.”

“We all live in our own worlds, don’t we, Otto.”

“We do. But in my view, we should learn to remember as much as we can of all of them. We need help for that. Giving some of that help is what I do.”

Heller finished his sandwich, dusted off his hands, and said, “Well sir, I wish you luck in whatever thing it is you’re working at. I don’t profess to understand arty things real well. But I got to tell you that I hope you’re disappointed. I hope there’s not an outlaw to be found in Hangtree when we get there. They’re just too much dang trouble for honest folks.”

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

Though the general flatness of the countryside disguised it, there was a gentle swell to the land between the place they were and the nearest side of Hangtree. Thus they had no idea, until they had moved forward a few hundred yards, that a dead man was lying beside the road. He’d not been there long enough to be much decayed, but the buzzards had already relieved him of his eyes and lines of ants were moving into his ears and out again while others entered via his nose and slightly open, sun-blistered lips. Buzzards had also helped themselves to what brains they could reach through the bullethole in his forehead, and insects were also swarming freely around that splintery access point as well. It was an ugly sight that Sam Heller did not like looking at, though he’d seen enough gore in his day to handle it. Otto Perkins, delicate-looking as he was, seemed to possess no qualms at all about getting near the stinking body. This photographer of the dead leaned over the ruined face, whose skin crawled with bugs and swarmed with flies, and studied it seriously.

“I’ve seen this man,” he said.

“Who is he?” asked Heller.

“I’m not sure. His features are very damaged, as you can see. And besides that, I’m not sure I could place him. I see so many faces in my line of work.”

“Well, Otto, we can bury him, throw him up on top of your wagon there and haul him on into Hangtree, or . . .”

“Not on top of the wagon. He’d leak right through the wood into my darkroom box, and it’s close and hot in there. I’d never be able to use it again. I say we leave him where he is. Or drape him over the saddle of your horse and ride him in that way. Or we could drag him with a rope.”

“Leave him and report that he’s out here,” Heller said. “If the critters don’t have him scattered off in all directions before you know it, somebody can come out here and say a few words over him and put him in a hole.”

Otto Perkins rubbed his chin between thumb and forefinger. “It doesn’t seem right to leave him out here when I know I’ve seen him before.”

Heller said, “You don’t want him leaking into your wagon box, and I don’t want him staining up my saddle. So it looks like it’s drag him or leave him. Your choice.”

Perkins paced about in a tense circle. “Drag, then. I can’t think of leaving him here.”

“Drag it is.”

“But not until I take a picture.”

“I don’t think this gent is up to smiling for the camera, Otto.”

“I have to have an image. I have to be able to figure out why he seems familiar.”

“Suit yourself. But I don’t think you’ll find many people wanting to put that face in a frame and hang it over the mantelpiece.”

“It’s for my own purposes, which I’ve already explained. It won’t take long. If you prefer, go on ahead toward town.”

“I’ll wait. I want to see how you do what you do.”

 

 

It made for an ugly parade. Heller brought up the front on horseback, Otto Perkins and his darkroom wagon behind him, and the stiffened dead man, tied at the ankles and freshly photographed, dragging along behind like a sculpture made of pulpwood, shedding pieces of decaying flesh along the way and tainting the air all around with the smell of death.

Squint McCray and Luke Pettigrew, the former the proprietor of the scruffy Dog Star Saloon and the latter a frequent friend and companion of Johnny Cross, were among the first to notice their approach. Sam Heller, looking like he always did and being a commonly seen personage in Hangtown, did not particularly attract their eye, but Otto Perkins and his boxy wagon did. Once proximity and angle allowed them to see that a human form was being dragged behind the wagon, their full attention was seized and held, and both men headed out to meet Heller, Squint with his good eye almost as pinched as his permanently squinted one because of dust blowing against his face, and Pettigrew with his pegleg slowing him down this particular day more than it usually did. Some days for the war-crippled ex-Confederate were just that way. At times he could actually feel pain in the ankle of a foot no longer there.

The pair muttered greetings at Heller and nodded cautiously at the pencil-necked man driving the boxed-in wagon, then moved around to the battered corpse. They stood beside it, wincing at the stench and ugliness, and looked for any clue as to why a dead man was being dragged into town by Sam Heller and some puny stranger.

Heller, on foot now with his horse loosely tied off to a front wheel of Otto Perkins’s wagon, walked around and stood beside Pettigrew.

“Who is he, Sam?” Squint McCray asked.

“Don’t know,” Heller replied. “We found him out on the road like this, dead and stinking like the rump of Satan, blowflies buzzing and ants crawling and the buzzards sitting around and belching from having eat a good meal. Mr. Perkins, who I met coming in toward town, he says the man looks familiar to him, but he can’t place him.”

Pettigrew cast a quick glance at Heller. “Did this Perkins maybe shoot this man?”

“Don’t seem likely. This gent had been laying out there long enough to start ripening pretty good, as you can see and smell for yourself. And I had already come upon Mr. Perkins when we found him. I can tell you, just from watching him, that he was as surprised to find this corpse as I was.”

“Who is this Perkins?” asked Pettigrew.

“Traveling picture-taking man. Got himself set up so he can work right out of his wagon there . . . that box is made so no light gets in and he can work in there with the pictures he takes. He took one of our dead friend here. That’s what he does, mostly. Makes pictures of killed folks and outlaws. Other things, too, but it’s the outlaws and killers and such he likes best.”

Pettigrew frowned. “Sounds like an odd bird.”

“Yep,” Heller said.

As if cued by the conversation, Perkins came around from the front of the wagon. With lips pressed nervously together, he nodded briefly at each man and got nods and grunts of greeting in return. Perkins looked down at the corpse.

“He looks even worse since we dragged him,” he said. “Does he look familiar to any of you?”

“Sure does,” said a voice from behind them. Sheriff Mack Barton walked up beside Heller and took a look at the dead man. “Yep, I know that face . . . or what’s left of it.”

“Who is he?” Pettigrew asked.

“Ever heard of the Toleen brothers?”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Perkins. “They rode with the Bracken Gang for years, but made their name riding for Black Ear Skinner and his men. Some of the worst. I made portraits of both of them, along with Black Ear himself and some of his other gunnies. That’s where I saw this man before.”

“Black Ear Skinner . . . God!” said Barton. “Worst of the worst, that one was. I’m glad he’s gone.”

“Over in Mason, wasn’t it?” Pettigrew said. “During a stage robbery?”

“That’s right. Shot right through the side of the head. The side that had the blackened ear, matter of fact.”

“How’d that happen to him, anyway, sheriff? The ear, I mean.”

“As I hear it, it was somebody who had a grudge against Skinner’s old man, his pa. To pay him back for whatever he’d done, they captured his boy, Curry—that being Black Ear before he was Black Ear—and hauled him off in the woods somewheres, and made him suffer bad. Cut him, beat him, whipped him. Burned him. Burned off three toes, burned his elbows through to the bone, and burned his left ear to ash. The elbows healed over, but the joints were stiffer than they should have been. The ear never grew back in, not most of it, anyway . . . just left him with a black little stub of gristle sticking off the side of his head. Earned him the nickname Black Ear. He hated being called that when he was young, but by the time he’d growed up and turned to crime, he accepted it. Liked the sound of calling his gang the ‘Black Ears.’ From all the stories, though, his heart was blacker than that ear ever was. Man had no mercy at all in him. One of his own gang crossed him, just a young gent who wore his hair long, and Black Ear hung him up by his toes and built a fire under his head. Kept it low enough just to cook him, not burn him fast. Burned off that long hair down to the scalp, then burned the scalp through to the skull. He let the poor hombre suffer for half an hour or more, then built the fire up higher and tossed the boy a pistol with one bullet in it. Told him he could use it to shoot him, Black Ear, or put the bullet through his own brain. The boy did what anybody would in that circumstance and used it on himself.”

“The hell,” said Pettigrew. “Reckon that’s true, or just one of them stories that get started and grow?”

“It’s true,” Perkins said. “I heard it spoken of by Black Ear himself. He laughed about how after the poor devil shot himself, the blood that dropped down sizzled when it hit the fire.”

“Meaner than a Comanche with an Apache mama and a bad affliction of piles,” Heller muttered.

“Yes indeed.”

“And this poor fellow here was one of Black Ear’s guns, huh?”

“He was. He and his brother together, twins. Drew and Cal Toleen.”

“Which one is this?”

Perkins rubbed his chin in the same way Heller had seen him do out on the Hangtree Trail. “Don’t know. They look just alike to everybody except them who knows them well. This one could be either one, as best I could tell. I’ve only had one good look at the Toleens myself.”

“But there’s no question it’s one of the two?”

“No, sir,” said Perkins.

“You weren’t talking so sure before. You said he was familiar but you couldn’t place him.”

“That’s right . . . then the sheriff here called his name and then I remembered, and knew he was right.”

“So where’s his brother?” Luke Pettigrew asked. “Every story I’ve heard of them, they always stuck together. You see one, you’re going to see t’other before you know it.”

“Maybe the other one’s dead, too,” said the sheriff. “If he is, we ought to go have a drink to celebrate. Any of the Black Ears gone is good news to good folk.”

“Tell you what, men, this old boy here needs to be in the ground.”

“Needed to be in it maybe two days ago,” said Heller, waving his hand in front of his nose to clear some of the death stench. “I’d say it’s time to get this gent here a new low-ceiling house made of pine boards, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ll fetch him myself,” said Barton.