Savage Texas: The Stampeders (9 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone,J.A. Johnstone

BOOK: Savage Texas: The Stampeders
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C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
A few miles southwest of the town of Hangtree, the remnants of what might have become a town, but for an act of God, broke the monotony of the flatlands. Resurrection Gulch had a history as strange as it was short. Created at the close of the war, the little settlement had been formed and populated by an idealistic band of Confederates and Confederate sympathizers from Arkansas who had centered their life around a politicized church led by a radical minister. That minister claimed divinely granted knowledge that the Confederacy would be resurrected in Texas and be centered in their tiny, barren little flatland farrago. This time, the preacher wildly declared, the Confederacy would thrive rather than fail, and be blessed by the hand of God himself, becoming grander and greater than the United States. Thus it had been revealed and thus it would be.
The starry-eyed pioneers of Resurrection had plenty of faith but little in the way of finances and the kinds of life experience and skills that might have helped them put down sustaining roots in the Texas soil. None knew how to manage livestock or pursue the limited kind of agriculture appropriate to a dry, sun-baked region. Most lacked skill in working with tools and the kinds of building materials available in the Pecos country. There appeared to be little hope the utopian community would survive, and indeed it did not. The collapse of the little society presaged a far more literal collapse brought on by a tornado that swept past Hangtree but slammed Resurrection hard, leaving little standing but a few isolated walls that stood out rather starkly on the largely empty landscape.
No truly complete building remained at Resurrection Gulch, though the church building was mostly intact. No congregations gathered there now, however, the building being a haven for birds and wildlife, and the occasional traveler who took a night’s shelter beneath what remained of the roof.
Companion to the abandoned community was an equally abandoned ranch, similarly damaged by the same tornado and now just an available shelter for man and beast fortunate enough to find it at just the right moment.
Johnny Cross sat astride his horse on a low, broad rise of land and looked down on Resurrection Gulch, knowing he was facing a conversation, soon, with Sam Heller. He knew enough of Heller’s business to see that there were things happening in and around this little ghost community that Heller needed to know about. Otherwise, Cross suspected, Heller stood to lose much he had worked hard to gain and preserve.
Cross was seeing clear signs of occupancy where there should be vacancy, activity where there should be stillness. It was far from clear, however, exactly what was going on. The presence of huge rope corrals out across formerly abandoned ranch lands, and clear evidence that someone was quietly rounding up cattle and herding them together regardless of brand and ownership, raised disturbing questions Johnny Cross could not answer.
He watched awhile longer, then turned his horse and began the ride back to Hangtree.
 
 
Otto Perkins was pleased with his new employee. Timothy Holt, though “feeble-minded,” was more capable than Perkins had anticipated he would be. His duties expanded beyond mere sweeping to general maintenance of the weakly constructed building. Upon learning that Timothy had some skills in carpentry, basic and unrefined but skills nonetheless, Perkins sent him poking all around his building, inside and out, with hammer and nails to repair damaged areas and strengthen weak ones, of which there were plenty. The building had been damaged in high winds that had spun off the tornado that had destroyed the settlement of Resurrection Gulch.
Perkins had taken his growing trust of Timothy a step further on this particular day. Thinking increasingly of lengthening his stay in Hangtree and putting the nomadic photographer life behind him for a year or two, Perkins had developed a vision of how his rented building might be improved internally to increase its appeal to potential customers. He’d set up a lunch meeting with the owner of the building to put forth his ideas and propose that Timothy Holt be used to do much of the work, which would all be simple: new shelving, a space divider or two, nothing costly or hard to accomplish.
Thus it was that Perkins left Timothy to man the shop alone for the first time while he kept his lunch meeting. Timothy was merely to keep up his usual maintenance work and politely instruct any customers who might come in to return in the afternoon, when Perkins would be back.
Timothy was sweeping the floor beneath the front window when he looked up to see Johnny Cross riding in, fresh from his observation of the odd activity going on at the Resurrection Gulch ghost town. On Timothy’s mind was the information he’d learned from Perkins about Julia Canton—Timothy still thought of her by that name even though he now knew better—and he decided that Johnny Cross needed to know it as well. Though he was sure Perkins would not favor him sharing what had been told to him, Timothy went to the door and called to Johnny Cross, waving for him to ride over.
“What’s going on, Timothy?”
“There’s something I need to show you, Mr. Johnny.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I just know something you’ll want to know, too.”
Wondering if he were a fool to be snapping at bait thrown out by a simpleton, Johnny Cross even so dismounted and tied his horse off to the porch rail. Timothy led him inside.
“What is it, then?”
“Come back here for a minute . . . I got a picture you need to look at. There’s somebody in it who you know.”
Puzzled and sure he was wasting his time on something trivial, Cross went along anyway, and followed Timothy back into the room where Perkins stored the big volumes that held his life’s work.
“You’re going to be surprised,” Timothy said in a gleeful tone.
“I don’t always like surprises, Tim.”
“This may be one of them you don’t like, Mr. Johnny. But you’ll sure be interested in it!”
And he was. Timothy had to go three times through his version of the narrative that Perkins had given him to manage to convey it accurately to Johnny Cross. At first Cross was inclined to put it all down as an error of some sort, but each time his eye went back to the image of the young girl’s face in the lineup of Black Ear Skinner’s family, he knew it was Julia Pepperday Canton he was seeing. There was simply no mistaking it: this was Julia as a younger girl, just as stunning then as she was these years later.
Except she wasn’t really Julia Canton. Clearly Julia Canton, daughter of a Georgia preacher and good churchgoing young lady, was a fiction. A covering falsehood used by the daughter of an infamous late outlaw to hide herself as if under a cloak.
But why here? Black Ear Skinner had no specific ties to Hangtree or its environs that Johnny Cross knew of. So why would his daughter hide her identity and come here, of all places?
And why, at the same time, would old criminal associates of Black Ear himself begin appearing in the vicinity, robbing Sunday morning church folk, getting themselves shot dead on the roadside, or gunned down in front of the Lockhart Emporium for the sake of so trivial a bit of fun as mocking a half-wit?
Having just been disturbed by unexpected activity out at what was essentially a ghost town, and now by this unexpected revelation about a beautiful young lady he had thought he knew, Johnny Cross had the strongest notion that something odd indeed was going on in Hangtree County. He just had no idea what it was.
“Timothy, do me a favor,” he said.
“Anything, Mr. Johnny.”
“Let’s just keep this private for now, can we? Don’t tell anybody else what you’ve just told me, or show anybody else this picture here.”
“I . . . well, all right. Truth is, Mr. Otto probably wouldn’t have wanted me even to show it to you.”
“Maybe not. But I’m glad you did. There’s something coming into shape around this town that seems to tie back to Black Ear Skinner. And that, my friend, is not likely to prove out to be good news. Nothing involving Skinner can be anything but bad news.”
“That makes me feel sad, Mr. Johnny. I don’t like bad news.”
“Neither do I. Now, Timothy, you put all this back like it was so that Perkins don’t have any notion it’s been disturbed. I’m going to get out of here before he gets back and finds me here.”
“You don’t want me to tell him I showed you this, then?”
“No. No. Like I said, let’s just keep this private for now. I need to try to figure out just what’s going on. By the way, I know you are fond of her, and I’m regretful you had to see her exposed as a falsity.”
“It don’t matter now, Mr. Johnny. I don’t like her no more. I . . . I . . . you’ll think me a fool for this, but I tried to get her to go to the dance with me. Got her a flower and everything. She told me she didn’t want to go with me.”
“Well, she ain’t going with me, either, Tim. I guess we both lost out, huh?”
“I reckon.” Timothy’s eyes were gazing out through the open door into the room where they were, and out the front window of the store. “Hey, I think that’s Jimbo Hale out there across the street. You still wanting to buy that knife off him?”
“I sure am, Timothy. Thanks for spotting him. I’ll go out and collar him right now while I got the chance. You get this all put back like it was before we came in here, you hear?”
“I sure do, Mr. Johnny. I hope Jimbo ain’t sold that knife yet.”
“I heard tell he was still trying to sell it as recent as yesterday,” Cross replied. “He’s asking too much for it, though. I’ll see if I can’t talk him down on it a little.”
Timothy nodded and began putting back in place the items they had disturbed. By the time Otto Perkins got back to his shop and studio, grinning privately from a successful meeting with his landlord, Timothy was repairing loose trim on a side window, the shop was in good order, and Johnny Cross had, ten minutes before, rode off on his horse, the proud possessor of a new knife.
C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN
“Julia? Can you come back here a moment?”
Startled by the call from Mrs. Bewley, Julia Canton moved too quickly and overturned a display of stacked thimbles she had just finished on the flat display area of the front window—no easily achieved task. She swore softly beneath her breath, hoped Mrs. Bewley hadn’t heard it, and breezed back to the storeroom.
“Yes, Mrs. Bewley?”
“Julia, dear, I’ve got something for you. You’ve done so well here at the store, and increased our business so much, that you’ve earned a little something extra. And here it is.”
Mrs. Bewley reached behind a bolt of cloth that had been put aside because insects had damaged it, and pulled out a beautiful lavender dress. She held it up proudly.
“It’s beautiful, Mrs. Bewley. Absolutely beautiful!”
“It’s yours, Julia, if you’ll have it. I’ve had this cloth laid back in store for some special use for a long time now, waiting for a special time I could use it. Having you join me here has given me reason to bring it out and sew you this dress. I hope so much that it fits you well . . . I think it will, because I’ve had so much experience in measuring for dresses that I’ve gotten to where I can do it just from looking, and almost always be right down to the inch. My hope is you’ll like it well enough to wear it to the dance this week. I’m assuming you’ll have many men ask you to go.”
“Oh, Mrs. Bewley . . . may I try it on now? I love it! Adore it! You are so very kind, so kind, to do this for me!”
“Certainly. Would you like me to help you into it?”
“I can do it alone. I’ll come out and let you see it, though. And yes, I am going to the dance. Sam Heller invited me.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Bewley’s brows went up in a knowing and pleased expression. “Richest man in Hangtree, that one! Well done, dear!”
 
 
The dress fit perfectly, and its color brought out all that was best in the flawless young woman. She paraded it proudly before Mrs. Bewley, authentically grateful to the older woman for her gift, and caught herself wondering what Sam Heller would have to say when he saw her so beautifully garbed.
She’d knock his eyes out, and knew it. And the eyes of every other man at that dance. Every man would wish she was with him, and every other female there, young and old, would envy her for the ease with which she would steal the show.
She wouldn’t even have to try. Julia Pepperday Canton had always stolen the show, wherever she was and whomever she was with. As had Della Rose Skinner before her, the identity she had left behind and to which she would soon return, if all went according to plan.
Della Rose Skinner had been fortunate enough to inherit the beauty of her mother, and somehow to build on it and render it perfect. How a man as physically unappealing as Curry “Black Ear” Skinner had managed to snare such a lovely woman as Belle Pepperday was a mystery to all, including Curry himself. That Rose had aligned herself with a man of such amoral criminality and cruelty was even more astonishing. Rose had been the daughter of a Georgia preacher of stern and uncompromising moral standards, determined his daughter would marry no man who did not share his principles. That it was the old preacher himself who had first introduced youthful Curry Skinner to Della was one of life’s ironies. Of course, at that time Curry Skinner had been presenting himself to the world as a reverend himself, preaching some excellent sermons at camp meetings and church gatherings across the South. The outlaw persona of the man had yet to become known.
The kin of Black Ear Skinner always said that goodness showed itself only in three areas of the man’s life. One was the gentle care he provided for his wife when a stroke she suffered during the birth of their son, Jimmy, left her in a coma destined to become her perpetual state of existence. Black Ear made sure his wife had the best doctors, nurses, and housekeepers to see that her world was as safe and pleasant as it could be, though the comatose Rose knew nothing of any of it. The second was in the way Black Ear protected and supported his only son, despite the fact that it was in that son’s birth that his wife suffered her life-changing affliction. Jimmy suffered in the difficult birth, and was left with a weak heart and slowed mental growth. Never to view the world with anything beyond a three-year-old’s level of maturity, Jimmy was destined to life as a “half-wit,” as many people of the time called such as he. No one dared label him so in Black Ear’s presence, however: Black Ear, on one of the rare occasions he dared to be in his own home despite imminent danger of arrest, once shot a dinner guest through the forehead after the man complained of “that stupid half-wit” knocking over his drink at the table. The bullet went through the unwise man’s forehead and blew blood and matter all over the wall behind the dinner table. Black Ear forbade anyone thereafter from replacing the splattered wallpaper, saying he found the ragged stain of blackened crimson “pretty.”
The third and final aspect of life in which Black Ear exhibited anything approaching goodness was in the way he treated his only daughter, Della Rose (who in later years would borrow liberally from her mother’s life story and maiden name in forging her persona of Julia Pepperday Canton, including her mentally slow brother). Having been impoverished in childhood, Black Ear was determined his girl would have what she needed in life and never go hungry or raggedly clothed. An astonishing story was often repeated among Black Ear’s kin, quoting him as saying he sometimes prayed to God in thanks that his daughter had been blessed with extraordinary beauty, because it would make her life’s journey easier. The amazing thing about it was the idea of Black Ear Skinner saying any kind of prayer beyond the contrived and false ones he’d performed back in his days as a fraudulent preacher.
Black Ear’s love for Della Rose was most clearly shown, it was said in the family, by the way he arranged for an expensive and high-quality education for her. He sent her off to a prestigious academy in the East, where she thrived and learned to present herself before the world to her own greatest advantage. She completed her education with the highest grades and honors, though under a fictional name and biography. Black Ear was aware of his daughter’s vulnerability to unscrupulous manhunters who might threaten her safety to gain leverage over one of the nation’s most wanted and hated outlaws. Della’s teachers and fellow students never knew their exemplary and amazingly beautiful fellow scholar, Julia Canton, was the daughter of an infamous and despised outlaw.
Della had found it easy to live under a false identity. It solved many problems simply by not bringing them up in the first place. There was never need to apologize for being the daughter of a minister. She fit in with normal society, and once people “knew” her good-girl background, expectations for her were that she would be a young woman of good repute and high moral code. So it was easy to brush off the many men who were lured by her beauty for lustful reasons.
Her professions of being a righteous girl were as false as her name. Julia Pepperday Canton might have been the well-behaved daughter of a southern preaher, but Della Rose Skinner had been born to a man of sin and carried his blood in her veins. It fueled an interest in the same things that had driven her father: greed, the desire for fast and unfettered fulfillment of impulses and wishes, and the prospect that perhaps one really could reap something other than what was sown.
It hadn’t turned out that way for Black Ear, of course. He’d lived by the gun and died the same way. Died in commission of a robbery, and the jolt of losing her father and seeing his gang of gunhawks scatter for their own safety, like disturbed quail, had changed something inside of Della Rose. Any battle between the Julia side of her and the Della side had instantly tilted, and Della Rose had found herself beginning to dream of claiming her family legacy in a way no one would anticipate . . . she would drape her father’s fallen mantle over her own shoulders and find a way to bring the Black Ear gang back together in a way that would do true honor to the memory of his name and legacy.
At the beginning she’d tried to make herself believe that the best way to honor her father would be to devote herself wholeheartedly to the care of her incapacited mother. He’d cared about her so deeply, and surely it would have pleased him to know that someone was stepping in who would care as well.
So Della had tried. She’d sat beside her mother, reading aloud to her though there was no indication the woman could hear. She sang songs her mother had loved before her apoplexy and washed her brow with damp, cool cloths when the weather was hot. As much as she loved Rose Skinner, though, she could not escape the fact she was really doing her no good. Della was quite sure her mother had no notion even of her own existence, much less who she was and who it was who cared for her.
Della couldn’t go on with it. Her mother’s needs were being met by paid nurses and domestics (most of them not knowing their pay came from the proceeds of crime), and Della was restless and unhappy, and feeling that her father was being forgotten. For Della that was intolerable. To her, if to no one else, Black Ear Skinner had been a great and memorable man.
So she decided to find a way to take his place. Using fact-finding research skills that had made her a leading student at her prestigious academy for young ladies, she began contriving a criminal plan her father would have been proud to pursue, and to look for a place it could be done. She had some advantages her late father would not have possessed had he been the one putting the plan into motion. She was female and beautiful, cultured and educated, and very cunning. And she would be leading a gang that no one believed existed any longer, not since the death of Black Ear effectively cut off their head.
The research was done, the plan formalized. Della got in contact with the members of the Black Ear gang whom her father had deemed the most trustworthy, and recruited them to begin the process of reconstructing the old gang, though not in full. Della Rose’s version of the Black Ears would be made up only of the best of their number, men who could be counted on and who would have been the ones her father would have chosen. That, at least, was her goal. Della would later come to realize that some from the older and lesser ranks of the gang had caught wind that something was in the works, and managed to find their way into the fringes of it as uninvited and unwanted hangers-on. One of them, a true old-timer as Black Ears went, had been relieved of his teeth by Della herself in the Hangtree Church when the fool tried to rob the congregants and also threatened to blunderingly expose her identity. Another had gotten himself killed by Sam Heller’s mule-leg rifle in front of the Lockhart Emporium.
Before all that happened, though, the plan was put in place. Some of the process seemed downright providential, or at least serendipitous. She explored the possibility of hiring the famed Pinkerton detective organization to help her gather a list of names of wealthy Texas men who might be good prospects for her scheme (she told the Pinkertons nothing of what her real motives were, nor what her real identity was). In the process of talking to her Pinkerton contact, she used her well-practiced charm and managed to learn of a former wartime Pinkerton named Sam Heller who was reportedly making quite a pile of wealth for himself down below the Staked Plains in an unknown little smattering of buildings known as the town of Hangtree. As remote and incognito a place as one could find, it seemed an ideal locale at which to stage an audacious scheme such as Della Rose wished to put into motion. And a possible shape for that scheme fell into place when Della learned that Sam Heller, who had worked for the Pinkertons during the war, was a man who reportedly had nearly $100,000 banked in the little town, more hidden at some unidentified location in the area, and uncounted numbers of longhorn cattle on the plains near Hangtree and Fort Pardee, the nearest military outpost in the region. “So many cattle you could likely trample the town into the earth if you ran enough of them through it at one time,” the Pinkerton man said to the lady who had introduced herself as Julia Pepperday Canton and then proceeded to turn him into a babbling fount of information and rumors despite all prior training to give only minimal and verified facts in any situation other than the briefing of Pinkerton superiors.
Della Rose Skinner never hired the Pinkertons, but she did hire a drifter with some police experience to make the journey to Hangtree and find out more about Sam Heller. He’d done his job, and Della Rose knew from his information just who it was who would be first to feel the touch of the revived Black Ear gang. It would be the very man who was to accompany her to the town dance on the coming Friday evening.
And Heller’s own longhorns would help clean Heller out.
She hoped her father would have been proud.

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