Showdown at Dead End Canyon (5 page)

“Excuse me,” she said.

The ticket clerk turned around. For a moment he was confused as to where the voice had come from.

“I’m down here,” Bailey said.

Looking down, the clerk saw her. “Yes, may I help you?” he asked.

“What is your latest information on the westbound train? Will it be on time?”

“We received a telegram from Bushnell a short time ago,” the clerk replied. “It left the depot on time.”

“Thank you.”

As Bailey returned to the depot dining room, she thought of what the sheriff had told her. Although Dancer had said nothing about killing the two men, they had been in Bitter Creek two days earlier and the train had spent an hour in the depot there while some repair work was being done. Bailey stayed on the train, but Dancer left to go to the saloon. He returned in time for the train to leave, then sat in the overstuffed chair of the parlor car and went to sleep.

He had said nothing at all about an encounter at the saloon.

Bailey wasn’t really surprised, either that it happened or that he had said nothing about it. Employing a man like Ethan Dancer was a little like staring into the abyss. She found it frightening, but at the same time strangely erotic.

“I just spoke with the ticket agent. The train is on time,” she said to Dancer when she returned to the table they were sharing.

Dancer nodded but said nothing.

“I spoke to the sheriff too.”

“Did you?” It was Dancer’s only response.

“Mr. Dancer, when the train stopped in Bitter Creek the other day, did anything happen?”

“Why do you ask?” Dancer replied.

“The sheriff says you killed two men.”

“I did.”

“God in heaven, man!” Bailey burst out. “You killed two men just in the period of time that we were in Bitter Creek, and you didn’t even think it was important enough to mention?”

“I figured you had read about it,” Dancer said.

“Read about it?”

Dancer picked up the paper and pointed to a story that was on the front page in the lower right-hand corner.

“It’s no secret,” he said.

Bailey looked at the article he pointed out.

TWO MEN KILLED

Bailey read the article, then looked up. “Mr. Dancer, what is it like?” she asked.

“What is what like?” Dancer replied.

“What is it like to kill a man? What does it feel like?”

Dancer was surprised by the expression on Bailey’s face and the intense look of excitement in her eyes. He realized then that, instead of being distressed by the fact that he had killed two men, she was actually intrigued by it. She was more than intrigued, she was fascinated, even excited.

“It’s a good feeling,” Dancer said.

“A good feeling, how?”

“A good feeling like when I have a woman and—”

“No!” Bailey said. “That’s enough. I had no business asking such a question.”

Bailey shivered in what could only be sexual excitation, and yet she knew it was not because of any attraction to Dancer, whose badly scarred face repulsed her. The sexual excitation came from the act of killing itself.

She cleared her throat, then closed the newspaper.

“They’ll be here soon,” she said.

Addison Ford, Administrative Assistant to the Honorable Columbus Delano, Secretary of the Interior, was traveling at government expense, on government business. The trip from Washington had been long and tiring. But because their accommodations were first class all the way, it had not been what he would have called an exhausting trip.

It was almost as if Ford, his wife Mary, his son-in-law Jason White, and his daughter Lucy were traveling by private accommodations, because they were the only passengers in the parlor car, and had been since leaving Omaha.

Ford was carrying a letter from Secretary Delano granting him full power of attorney to act on behalf of the Secretary of Interior. Ostensibly, he was making the trip as one of exploration to determine whether the application to build the Sweetwater Railroad should be favorably considered.

“There have been too many railroads built for no other purpose than to provide the railroad builder with free land,” Delano told his assistant before he left Washington. “I place full trust and confidence in you to make the correct decision, then to act upon that decision.”

“I will not betray your trust and confidence,” Ford had replied. Even as Ford made that statement, he was holding a bank draft for $10,000, an inducement he had personally received from the Sweetwater Railroad. It had been loosely described as an offset against any expenses incurred while investigating the application, but it was a bribe, pure and simple.

The money was good, but Addison Ford wanted much more than $10,000, and he was certain that in head-to-head negotiations with the person who had paid him this bribe, he would be able to secure a larger piece of the pie.

WHEN THE
WESTERN FLYER
ARRIVED, BAILEY AND
Dancer boarded the train, then were shown to their first-class accommodations in the parlor car. Before the train got underway, though, Bailey stepped into the next parlor car, in which there were only two men and two women. They looked up when she entered and looked at her for a moment longer than was courteous, but Bailey said nothing.

Seeing that she wasn’t going to leave the car, the older of the two men stood up.

“Is there something I can help you with, madam?” he inquired.

“Are you Addison Ford?” Bailey asked.

“I am.”

“I’m McPherson,” Bailey said.

When the expression of Ford’s face didn’t change, she said, “Bailey McPherson? I believe we have been doing some business together.”

“Bailey McPherson? You’re a woman?”

Bailey laughed. “Yes, I am.”

“I thought…”

“I know what you thought,” Bailey said. “And I apologize if I let you think that, but it was by design. It was my belief that we would be able to negotiate our arrangement better if you thought I was a man.”

“Yes, well…Miss…McPherson, it is a pleasure to meet you at last. And I assure you, your gender will have no bearing on our arrangement.” He stuck his hand out.

“The pleasure is all mine,” Bailey said, shaking.

“Let me introduce my traveling companions,” Ford said. “This is my wife, Mary; my daughter, Lucy White; and her husband, Jason. Jason is the civil engineer who will be doing the surveying for us.”

Bailey shook hands with all of them, then said to Ford, “Secretary of Interior Delano is with us on this?”

Ford smiled. “I have with me full power of attorney to act for the Secretary. He isn’t the one you need to please. I am.”

“Oh?” Bailey said. “Tell me, Mr. Ford, are you suggesting that you were not pleased by the, uh…inducement I sent you to ensure your cooperation?”

“Oh, I was very pleased with it,” Ford replied. “As a goodwill gesture,” he added pointedly.

“A goodwill gesture?” Bailey asked.

“Yes, to—as they say—ensure tranquility between us.”

“I see.”

Ford cleared his throat. “Miss McPherson, surely you understand all of the intricacies and details I must arrange. There are other agencies to bring on board, congressmen to convince, and expenses to incur. All of that will have to be funded. And of course, we both know that you stand to make a great deal of money from this operation. A great deal of money. As the only person who can bring all this to fruition for you, I don’t think it is at all unreasonable to expect to be generously compensated.”

“Very well, Mr. Ford,” Bailey agreed. “We’ll have an organizational meeting first thing after we reach Green River.”

“I look forward to it,” Ford said.

The engineer blew two short blasts on the whistle, and, with a series of jerks, the train started forward.

“I’ll be getting back to my car,” Bailey said. “We’ll postpone any further business discussion until later. In the meantime, please enjoy your trip.”

It was now two days since Poke and Gilley brought Pamela to the little cabin, and she had been tied up the whole time. Her back and legs were cramped and the ropes were beginning to rub blisters on her wrists. She had no idea where she was, nor did she know how she got here, though she was vaguely aware of being awakened in her berth to the smell of the chloroform-soaked handkerchief.

“You want some jerky?” Poke asked.

“No, thank you,” she replied.

“Here, take a piece,” Poke said, offering her a piece of the dried meat.

Pamela shook her head. “I don’t want it.”

“You got to eat something. You ain’t et a bite since we brung you here.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“How can you not be hungry?”

“It stinks in here,” Pamela said. “You stink. How can I have an appetite under such conditions?”

Gilley laughed. “Poke, I done tol’ you that you smelled somethin’ awful. By God, man, your stink would gag a maggot on the gut wagon.”

“You ain’t no bed of roses yourself,” Poke replied angrily. He looked back at Pamela, who was still in her nightgown. “Look, if you don’t want to eat, I ain’t goin’ to beg you. It ain’t no skin off my ass, that’s for sure,” he said. He put the proffered piece in his own mouth and tore a chunk off with his crooked yellow teeth.

“She’s got to eat sometime,” Gilley said. “We ain’t goin’ to get nothin’ from her pa if she starves herself to death.”

“You aren’t going to get anything from him anyway,” Pamela said.

“That’s what you think, girlie. This has all done been thunk out for us,” Poke said.

Despite her condition and situation, Pamela chuckled. “It would have to have been thought out for you by someone else,” she said.

“Hey, Poke. Someone’s comin’!” Gilley said.

“Who is it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s somebody come lookin’ for the woman.”

“Better get a gag on her so’s she can’t yell out none,” Poke said.

Less than an hour earlier the sky had been clear and blue, but now dark rolling clouds darkened the day and sent jagged bolts of lightning streaking to the ground. The change in the weather had occurred quickly, the way it often did on the plains. But fortunately the rain had not yet started when Hawke saw the little cabin. Smiling at his good luck, he headed toward it.

He saw a flash of light at the window and heard the report of a rifle shot. The bullet struck his horse in the head, making a thocking sound, like a hammer hitting a block of wood. The horse went down and Hawke went down with it. His impact with the ground caused the Colt .44 to pop out of his holster and slide away from him. Worse, the horse fell on his leg, pinning him beneath the animal and leaving the .44 about three feet beyond his grasp.

Hawke was still reaching for his pistol when he saw two men leave the cabin then disappear behind a large boulder. A moment later they reappeared, mounted now, and rode up
slowly, confidently, arrogantly. The boulder had hidden their horses, contributing to Hawke’s belief that the cabin was unoccupied.

“Well now, Poke, what do we have here?” the smaller of the two men asked when they reached Hawke. He was narrow-faced, hook-nosed, and with one eye that didn’t quite track with the other one.

Poke’s laugh was high-pitched, a cackle. The larger of the two, his most prominent feature was a mouth full of crooked yellow teeth.

“I’ll tell you what we got us here, Gilley. We got us a rabbit, all staked out on the ground, waitin’ to get his ass killed.”

The two men, still mounted, looked down at Hawke. Their drawn pistols were pointed at him.

“You got ’ny last words before we kill you, mister?” Poke asked.

“Yeah. Why did you shoot at me?”

“You come ridin’ in here like the cavalry gallopin’ in to save the settlers,” Poke said. He looked over at Gilley. “I’ll bet he was already countin’ his reward money.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hawke said. “All I was doing was looking for a place to get out of the rain.”

“Yeah, well, in a minute you ain’t goin’ to be worryin’ about the rain,” Gilley said.

“I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then I’ll make it easy for you,” Poke said. “We shot you ’cause you was here.”

“Well hell, mister, everyone has to be somewhere,” Hawke said.

Poke laughed again. “Everyone has to be somewhere,” he repeated. “You know what, Gilley? This here is a funny man. Too bad we have to kill him.”

“Then don’t do it. What do you say that the three of us go into town and have a few drinks? You’ll find out that I’m just a barrel of laughs,” Hawke said.

He was playing for time by keeping the conversation going for as long as he could. All the time he was talking, he was also working his rifle out of its saddle sheath. But like his leg, the saddle sheath was held down by the weight of the horse, making it difficult for him to extract the weapon. On the other hand, the fact that the horse was lying on the rifle managed to cover his efforts, so neither of the two men realized what he was doing.

“Yeah, well we ain’t likely to be havin’ no drinks together,” Poke said. “’Cause you see, we’ll be busy and you’ll be dead.”

Laughing at his own joke, Poke and Gilley raised their pistols to fire.

At that moment Hawke managed to yank his rifle free. He knew he had no time to aim. All he could do was jack a round into the chamber and fire. His bullet hit Poke’s horse just before Poke pulled the trigger. As the horse went down, it caused Poke to twist around as he fired, and because he was out of position, his bullet shattered the knee on the right foreleg of Gilley’s horse. That left Gilley on a collapsing horse, and like Poke, his shot was also wild.

Using the rifle barrel as a lever, Hawke managed to get enough space to pull his leg out. He rolled away just as Poke and Gilley, both unseated now, fired a second time. Their bullets kicked up dirt where a split second earlier he had been lying.

As Hawke rolled away he passed over his pistol. Grabbing it, he came out of the roll on his stomach and thrust his gun hand forward.

“What the hell! Poke, he’s got—”

That was as far as Gilley got with his warning, because
Hawke pulled the trigger and his shot caught Gilley in the Adam’s apple. Poke fired a third time, but again Hawke managed to roll away. Hawke’s second shot was as deadly as his first, and Poke went down as well.

Still wary of his two would-be assailants, Hawke got to his feet, gun in hand. His leg, which had been pinned under his horse, bothered him a bit as he limped over to have a closer look at the two men. It didn’t take much of an examination to see that both men were dead. There was a hole in Poke’s forehead, and Gilley’s eyes were open but opaque, staring off in two directions, even in death.

He was still puzzled as to who his attackers were and why they had opened fire on him. What did they mean when they said he had ridden in like the cavalry rescuing settlers? And what reward were they talking about? Hawke looked at the three horses. His and Poke’s were dead. The third horse, Gilley’s, had managed to stand up again, but was wobbling around on a shattered and bloody knee. Hawke sighed, then limped over and embraced the horse’s head. He looked into the creature’s big, liquid brown eyes and saw intense pain and confusion.

“I’m sorry, fella,” he said to the horse. “It wasn’t your fault that your rider was such a sorry-assed bastard. It breaks my heart to do this, but believe me, it’s better for you.”

Hawke shot the horse between the eyes, then shook his head as he realized that he was in the middle of nowhere without a mount.

“Damnit!” he shouted in anger. “Who the hell were you two? And why did you shoot at me?”

The dark sky and ominous clouds chose that moment to deliver on their threat. The rain came down in large, heavy drops. The lightning, sporadic until then, increased in frequency until it was almost one sustained lightning flash, a new bolt striking before the previous one left. The thunder
boomed in a continuous roar, not unlike the artillery bombardments Hawke could remember from the war.

Pulling his saddle and saddlebags from his horse, he hurried through the rain toward the shelter of the small cabin. He was about to step inside when he thought of the two men lying in the dirt a hundred yards behind him and realized there might be another one waiting for him. Pulling his pistol, he kicked open the door then fell to the floor inside, rolling away from the door with his gun at the ready.

No one came toward him.

Hawke lay on the floor for a moment, making a slow, thorough sweep of the cabin. Convinced that the cabin was empty, he stood and returned his pistol to the holster.

That was when he heard the bump.

Drawing quickly, he spun toward the sound, gun in hand again, eyes narrowed and ready.

He heard another bump, accompanied this time by a squeaking sound.

Curious, and cautious, Hawke moved carefully toward the sound. It was coming from the back of an overturned table. Looking around the table, he was startled by what he saw.

A pair of wide-open, blue, frightened eyes stared back at him. The eyes belonged to a woman, obviously the source of the squeaking he’d heard. She was making the only sound she could, because there was a gag around her mouth. In addition to the gag, she was bound, head and foot, by ropes, and Hawke was surprised to see that she was wearing a nightgown.

After one more quick perusal to make certain nobody was using the girl as bait, he knelt beside her and removed her gag.

“There were two outside,” he said. “Are there any more?”

“Not that I have seen,” the woman answered. “Please, don’t let them come back.”

“They won’t be coming back.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I killed them,” Hawke said.

The woman nodded. “Good. I’m glad you killed them.”

“Who were those men, do you know?” Hawke asked.

“Other than the fact that they called each other Poke and Gilley, I have no idea.”

The woman spoke with a cultured accent that Hawke recognized as British.

“Are you all right? Did they do anything to you?”

“What sort of question is that? Of course they did something to me. They kidnapped me, then they tied me up and gagged me. You don’t think I came here of my own accord, do you?”

“No, I mean did they do anything…else?”

“I wasn’t raped, if that is what you mean.”

By now Hawke had pulled a knife from his belt and was cutting through the ropes that bound her ankles. After that, he cut the ropes from her wrists.

“Did my father send you?” the girl asked as she gingerly rubbed her wrists. “I was sure that he wouldn’t pay the ransom. It’s not the money, it’s the principle of the thing. And my father is nothing if he is not a man of principle.”

Finished with her wrists, she leaned forward and began massaging her rope-burned ankles.

“Your father didn’t send me,” Hawke said.

The girl looked up in surprise. “He didn’t?” Her resultant laughter was genuine, and totally unexpected. “No doubt he will be amused to learn that one solitary knight dressed, not in shining armor, but blue jeans and a red and green plaid shirt, succeeded where his army failed.”