Savage Texas: The Stampeders (8 page)

“Sounds like you might be a very dangerous man,” Julia said.

Heller shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. I’m no danger at all to those who give me no cause to be such to them. In fact, in the case of good, honest people, I’m a protector, not a danger.”

“Even if the people are good, honest rebs? I’ve been told you were a Yankee during the war, and that a lot of folks here call you a carpetbagger.”

“People ‘call’ a lot of things. Most ain’t worth listening to. Here’s the way I look at it: War’s over. Time to get on with the peace, and the coming back together. The dividing up just got a lot of folks killed.”

She grew thoughtful and looked past him, up toward the front of the saloon. She stared at the ugly, gray image of the dead Toleen brother with his empty eye sockets.

“It’s hard to put the past behind, though,” she said. “Hard to forget what you’ve been through. Where you came from, and who you came from.”

“You’re a philosopher, good lady.”

She smiled. “And you, sir, are a fine specimen of a man.”

“Better specimen than Johnny Cross?”

“Better than anybody I can think of. Can you walk me back to my boardinghouse?”

“I can.”

She drained off the last of her blackberry wine and slipped her arm into the crook of his. As they walked out of the Dog Star, she paused and glanced at the Toleen image.

“Cal,” she said.

“Beg pardon?”

“Cal. That’s Cal Toleen there.”

“Is that right? As I was hearing things, nobody was sure which one of the twins this one was.”

“It’s Cal.”

“Begging pardon again, but how would you know?”

She was discomfited by the question, but shrugged past it and said merely, “You know what you know.”

Sam looked at the face of the man he had tied to the back of Otto Perkins’s wagon to drag into town. “Evening, Cal,” he said, and led the prettiest woman in Texas out the door of the Dog Star into the Hangtree dark.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

Julia slept restlessly that night, not as the result of blackberry wine or feet sore from a long meandering walk around the dark town with Sam Heller. What kept stirring her back to wakefulness was a sense of not being truly alone, a feeling that someone was out there, in the dark beyond the boardinghouse walls. Maybe watching, maybe just pacing about. But out there because of her.

She dreamed during her sporadic periods of sleeping, the dreams being a combination of memories from childhood and imaginations about the person she was convinced was out there. She dreamed it was Sam Heller, and Johnny Cross. That it was that strange picture-taking fellow whose shop Johnny had led her into that day he was trying to find a man who had a knife for sale. She dreamed it was Timothy Holt out there, angry and heartbroken and suddenly no longer the gentle, boyish fellow who reminded her so much of her late brother. Then in the dream he changed all at once to Cal Toleen, the dead outlaw in the picture back at the saloon, and he was walking around out there with his skin gray and crumbling, and his eyes missing.

That mental vision woke her up and she sat up slowly in her bed, looking at the open second-floor window on the north wall of her room and listening to the night outside. “Papa?” she said, nonsensically, because she knew that if anyone was really out there at all, it was not and could not be her father. But the feeling was strong. “Papa? Is that you?”

There was a reply. No dream, it seemed. A real voice, one she did not know, rising up from below the window in a whisper just loud enough for her to hear. It chilled her as it said, “Della Rose? Della Rose, dear girl, it’s time to come home.”

She collapsed back into the bed and covered her face with her arms, hardly allowing herself even to breathe. She heard footsteps outside, or thought she did, though at some level of her mind she knew it was just a dream. No one would be out there, not really.

“Come on soon, Della Rose. Everyone is waiting for you at home. Come on.”

She did not know the voice. So why did she dream it? If her fancies were going to tell her that was her father out there, why did the man not have her father’s voice? And why did he call her Della Rose? That was not her. Not anymore. Della Rose belonged to a past best forgotten by all. Especially by Julia Canton.

She remembered then the man she’d seen in town, seemingly watching her from the other side of the street outside the dress shop. And she’d seen him other places as well. Maybe it was his voice she’d heard, if she’d actually heard one at all.

But he was a stranger. How did he know about Della Rose? And what did he know?

Closing her eyes tightly, she closed out the room and the night and with a pillow tried also to close out any voice that rose from inside herself, or from outside her window.

 

 

She looked for footprints outside the boardinghouse the next morning, and found them, but they meant nothing and she knew it. People walked in the dirt alley behind the boardinghouse all the time. It was a favorite shortcut toward a busy farrier’s shop. Footprints were to be expected.

In the rising daylight, some of her fear of the prior night seemed rather silly. Clearly she’d slept badly and been disturbed by dreams, and in dreams people saw and heard all kinds of things that weren’t really happening. She knew it now and she’d known it in the night while she lay trembling under her covers, afraid to peep out at her window because she feared that framed in it she’d see the face of the stranger who had been watching her lately, or that of the disturbing photographer who had taken the photograph of Cal Toleen and who seemed familiar to her for reasons she could not explicate, or maybe the face of her father, looking for her to tell her to come home, using a voice not his own.

She swore softly and stamped her foot in the dirt. If it would have helped, she might have slapped her own face, trying to knock some sense and reality back into her head. She looked up at the sky, not to pray, but to see clouds and blue and birds flying overhead . . . real things, things that were material and solid and part of the world that had nothing to do with phantom voices and the footfalls of people outside who were not really there.

Drawing in a deep breath, she reminded herself that she was not in this ugly little town for no reason. There was a purpose, and at the moment she’d taken an important step in the direction of fulfilling it. She’d met Sam Heller and drawn him to her, using her charm and her beauty and the simple fact that she was cunning and smart and not one to let herself be thrown off her task by nervousness or boredom or ridiculous dreams.

“Once you set yourself a task, stay on it until it is done,” she said to herself, softly but aloud. Her father had told her that. “Stay on it even if the Lord above and devil below put theirselves in common bond against you to stop you. Keep on doing and going and doing. Till it’s done.”

She drew in long, deep breaths, and caught the whiff of frying bacon from her landlady’s kitchen. Fiddling Claude Farley and his wife, Hilda, and all the other dullards who shared the boardinghouse with Julia would be gathering around the big table to gnaw on thick slices of bacon, fried hard, and mounds of scrambled eggs. Runny. And biscuits baked into bricks.

The food was poor, the company worse, but hunger was hunger and Julia needed to eat. She shook off the last of her tension from the difficult night before and went through the mudroom door into the boardinghouse, prepared to smile and be cordial and shallow and get through the meal so she could start her day.

“I heard some man talking out behind the house last night,” said Hilda Farley around a mouthful of biscuit. “Couldn’t make out what he was saying, for it was just like a loud whisper, but there was somebody.”

“You dreamed it, Hildy, I told you that,” said Claude.

“I heard it, not dreamed it. Know it for a fact.”

“Which calls upon us to do what in response?” Claude said. “Hmm? Hmm?”

“Nothing, husband. Nothing.”

“No point in bringing it up at all, then, was there?” Claude said. “Somebody pass me the bacon plate.”

Sweeping was sweeping, Timothy Holt supposed, but even so, sweeping in Otto Perkins’s photography shop and studio felt entirely different and new in comparison to sweeping at the Emporium. Timothy had no problems on the boardwalk outside, which was merely a smaller version of the same kind that was at the Lockhart Emporium, but inside Timothy was forever bumping into things: a metal bracket that was designed to help hold motionless the heads of people seated in a chair to be photographed, a big, umbrella-like reflector used to direct and intensify light, and various cases of things Timothy could not attach any explanation to at all. He felt clumsy and stupid, bumping into everything he got near to, and hoped his new employer would not fire him on his very first day.

He learned quickly that Perkins was not a natural-born shopkeeper. He’d turned his rolling photographic business into a fixed one mostly by merely moving items from his wagon into this rented space, but he’d left it all in such haphazard state that it appeared he was trying to keep things ready to move back onto the wagon as fast as he’d moved them off.

When Timothy had gotten the floors as clean as he could make them, he became distracted by the big volumes of old photographs made over the years and miles by Otto Perkins. Without really being able to express it to himself in words, he was fascinated with the concept that pieces of people’s lives were frozen and trapped in those volumes, images of them as they were at a moment they were thinking a particular thought, experiencing a specific feeling, looking at something outside the range of the photograph that now held them. Had fate and development been kinder to him, Timothy Holt might have been a skilled abstract thinker.

Otto Perkins busied around the place, but for the most part left Timothy to his sweeping. He was glad to have another person about the place, even one who offered only limited options for conversation. As a traveling man most of the time, Perkins was accustomed to being often alone and usually didn’t mind it. But humans were made for company, not loneliness.

Then, watching Timothy pause in his sweeping and stare again at the bound volumes of old photographs, Perkins remembered what he told Timothy before. There was something he wanted to show him, to see if Timothy saw it the same way he did. He called the young man over.

“Timothy, I’m going to show you a particular old photograph I took twelve years ago in eastern Texas. It’s a picture of a particular old outlaw and his people, his family. I have taken many pictures of outlaws, you know, and plan to put them out as a collection someday. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

“Yes, sir,” Timothy muttered.

“Come on.” He led Timothy to a big desk that came with his rented office space. Trudging to the storage shelf where he kept the bound volumes, he got the one he wanted and brought it to the desk. Full of tintypes, it was heavy and went down onto the desktop with a loud thud. He opened it and began turning over image after image, most of them unremarkable, significant only because of the infamy of some of those pictured.

“And here we are,” Perkins said at last, laying the volume wide at a particular photograph showing a line of people ranging from children through elderly individuals. They were lined up side by side, some seated in the foreground, others standing behind or beside them, all looking somber and rigid. In the center of the photograph, standing taller than any of the others, was the figure of a middle-aged man with harshly glaring eyes, the scars of old burns marring the skin on one side of his face, and on that same side, partially hidden by his hair, a black nub where an ear should be. As he looked over the faces in the picture, Timothy’s eye was drawn always back to the grim, scary face of the tall man.

“You took this picture, Mr. Otto?”

“I did. Under the hire of that man right there.” Perkins pointed at the image of the tall man. “He wanted a picture of himself with his family, because he seldom got to be with them. You know who that is, Timothy?”

“No, sir, no. But I don’t think I much like him. He has a mean look to him.”

“And a mean spirit inside of him. A regular demon of a spirit. He was as hard and cruel as he looks, Timothy. That man is the worst outlaw and criminal I’ve ever photographed. Have you heard of Black Ear Skinner?”

Timothy mouthed the name, then shoved his face down to look more closely at the tall man’s face. “Is that him? Is that Black Ear Skinner?”

“That’s him, Timothy. The man himself. That woman beside him, with the pretty face and that sweet look, that’s his wife, Belle. Every bit as kindly looking as her husband was vicious. How such a gentle woman wound up married to such a wicked man is a mystery to me. But that pair isn’t the most interesting thing in this picture, Timothy. Look at the ones standing beside them. Their children.”

Timothy looked closely. There was a boy, standing closely beside his mother, his hand up and clinging to hers. Something in the boy’s look seemed unusual, absent. Beside the boy was a tall girl, light-haired and with a face like her father’s, without the wickedness. And beside her, a second girl, dark-haired and younger, and not nearly as tall as her gangly sister. Timothy barely glanced at the second girl at first, then suddenly locked in on her face. She appeared to be perhaps ten years old, maybe eleven . . . and though Timothy knew no children of that age just now, he knew he’d conversed with this girl very recently.

It hit him: It was Julia Canton. A younger version of her, yes, but obviously Julia Canton.

“Is that . . . is she . . .”

“Yes,” said Perkins. “I knew when I saw our lovely Miss Canton that I recognized her from somewhere. It just took me a little time to remember, then to study that picture long enough to be sure. It has been years, after all.”

“But why is Miss Julia with an outlaw’s family?”

“Because she’s part of it, Timothy. She isn’t who she told us she was. Julia Canton isn’t Julia Canton. Her name is Skinner. According to my old notes I made to go with this group of photographs, her name is Della. Della Rose Skinner. Daughter of the infamous Black Ear Skinner himself.”