Sudden Country (4 page)

Judge Blod told him. Mother's nostrils pinched. "I was not aware of his past when I allowed you to invite him here. David, were you?"

I fidgeted; for the Judge had made me a conspirator in the secret. Mr. Knox rescued me.

"That is hardly of consequence now," he said. "However, I think that Mrs. Grayle deserves to hear the tale."

Judge Blod, plainly chagrined, set down his fork and touched his lips with the napkin he had tucked into the v of his waistcoat. He had made a decision.

"Very well. In February of 1863, President Lincoln, threatened with a general strike among federal troops campaigning in Missouri, authorized a special payroll shipment to Springfield. A band of Quantrill's raiders under the command of Bloody Bill Anderson stopped the train outside St. Louis, slaughtered the guards, and according to accounts rode off with one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold double eagles. The paymaster, Captain Orrin Peckler, was wounded but survived.

"An expedition to capture the raiders and recover the gold ended in failure when investigating troops were unable to find tracks left by the wagon that would have been required to carry away the booty. Some time passed before it was decided that the gold had not been carried away at all, and that it had not been put on the train to begin with. By then Captain Peckler had vanished, having recuperated at his home while on leave and taken flight. Although rewards were offered for his capture, nothing was heard from him until he was killed in Amarillo four years after the hostilities ended."

"Flynn!" I cried. My meal was growing cold.

"Just so. Flynn was one of the raiders who struck the train to cover Peckler' s embezzlement and share in the proceeds. Only instead of sharing, Peckler reclaimed the gold from wherever he had hidden it and fled alone. Perhaps getting wounded had turned him against his accomplices; perhaps he'd planned to cross them from the beginning. In any case Flynn caught up with him in a saloon. They quarreled, Flynn eviscerated Peckler, was arrested and tried for the crime of murder and sentenced to Huntsville. This is scarcely table conversation," he said in an apologetic tone to my mother. She appeared quite as enthralled as the rest of us.

"Do you think he knows where the gold is?" I asked.

"If so he would have been long gone before the authorities came looking for him. My theory is he drank too much, lost his head, and slew Peckler before he learned the gold's location. I suspected I was on the right track when he agreed to meet me here on the apron of Amarillo after his release. From what I have observed of his conduct since his arrival I am convinced of it."

Mr. Knox deftly sculpted the meat off the leg bone in front of him with his knife. "Then why meet with him at all?"

"His story is the only gold that interests me. I am a journalist, not an adventurer."

"Dumplings, Judge." Mother offered him the bowl. After studying her face he declined.

"Where does the Indian feature?" asked Mr. Knox.

"Joe Snake ran with Flynn and some of the rest after the war. Evidently a number of his old compatriots think he knows something."

I said, "Bloody Bill?"

"Anderson and Quantrill were both killed in the fighting. But the men they trained have been leading the law a merry chase for a quarter century."

"The man with the Judas eye."

"What's that?" The Judge stared at me.

"Something Mr. Flynn said," I replied. "He told me to watch for strangers. In particular I was to look out for a big man with a black mark on his face and a glass eye. He called it a Judas eye."

"It could be anyone. Precious few of those night riders emerged unscathed from the carnage."

Mr. Knox finished his chicken and pushed his plate away. "Come, Judge. As I understand it, war booty is in the public domain. Surely it's no sin to covet an honest fortune."

"The thought has crossed my mind. What of it? If Flynn knew where to look for the gold he would not be loitering here."

"You said yourself he has been drunk since he arrived."

"True. Peckler married a Mexican woman in Amarillo, but she died several years ago. If she knew his secret it died with her."

"Perhaps Flynn doesn't know that," Mr. Knox said. "Perhaps not." He seemed loath to agree.

Mr. Knox looked at my mother. "It is my opinion this fellow won't be back today. Rachel and the children are visiting her parents in Illinois. I think I should spend the night here in case he returns after dark."

Mother beamed.

The Judge glared: Upstairs, Flynn sang:

Oh, I'm off for the frontier

soon as I can go.

I'll prepare a weapon

and stomp on Mexico!

RIDERS OF THE NIGHT

I
had hopes that the morning's excitement would make Mr. Knox forget about my execrable record in arithmetic and geography, they were dashed quickly. After he had conferred with my mother I found myself alone in my bedroom with the problem of how many apples remained in Jeff's possession after Susan had plundered his store and ten pages in my composition book awaiting my reflections upon the annual mean rainfall in Argentina. By that time Mr. Knox had gone, to return at dusk carrying a valise. During supper I endured an oral quiz in long division while Judge Blod, uncharacteristically silent, busied himself with biscuits and gravy. Flynn did not show himself, but remained in his room, snoring rippingly and occasionally singing in his sleep about bloody banners, sacred ground, and Mr. Lincoln's antecedents.

I lay awake for some time after retiring, partly because of Joe Snake and thoughts of Quantrill's gold and partly because my schoolmaster occupied the room next to mine. A shaft of milky moonlight fell upon my half-completed geography assignment on the writing table, throwing a shadow that resembled Mr. Knox, rampant on a field of fleurs-de-lis.

If I slept at all, I had awakened by the time a harness ring jingled directly beneath my window. Notwithstanding Mother's lectures about the harmful properties of night air, I was in the habit of sleeping with the window partially open, and the noise carried. I might have put it down to my imagination, which was strongest when I lay alone in the dark on the edge of sleep, and drifted off, had not a horse then stamped and blown in the chill spring night. Hard on that I heard voices.

"I see you're still carrying Bloody Bill's flask, Flynn."

"Hell, Beacher, you know old Flynn'd suck the sap out of a old piss-elm iffen it was that or water."

"Where's the swag, Flynn?"

Two of the voices were unfamiliar to me. The first had a medium quality, not harsh like Flynn's, almost pleasant. The second was a nasal whine and employed some kind of backwoods dialect that made the words nearly incomprehensible. But it was the third speaker who brought me out of bed as suddenly as if something had scurried across me in the dark; for I recognized the rattling whisper of Joe Snake.

The window overlooked the backyard. Through it, I saw Jotham Flynn standing bowlegged under the cottonwood with his back toward me, holding aloft the lamp from his room. In its light he was surrounded by four men on horseback. Their hats hid their faces, but the Indian's huge frame was obvious astride a buckskin that was too small for him so that his boots nearly touched the ground. One of the others sat a pretty strawberry roan, which shied when a third man aboard a shaggy, ill-kept bay directed a glittering stream of tobacco juice at the roan's left forefoot.

"Bull's-eye!" he said, in the nasal whine, which I have already described.

The man on the roan cursed. "Spit on your own transportation, Pike." His was the pleasant voice.

The fourth man straddled a big blaze-face which stood in my mother's flowerbed, munching on the irises she had been laboring over for three years in a place where everyone said irises could not live. He was almost Joe Snake's size but did not look as freakish because of his choice of mounts. I saw pistols in belts and holsters and saddle rifles and, in the tobacco-spitter's hands, a bullwhip doubled over with a butt as big around as my wrist. He kept smacking his left palm with it when he wasn't despoiling the yard with his evil juice.

"Where's the swag, Flynn?" Joe Snake repeated.

Flynn laughed, coughed, and tipped up the flask he was never without. I recall wondering if the jug in his room had a bottom. "I had it, you think I'd still be here looking at your ugly face, you dumb redskin?"

The bullwhip cracked. The flask sprang from Flynn's hand and landed with a clank in darkness. He cursed and almost dropped the lamp. He shook his stinging hand.

The man on the blaze-face said something in a low voice. Pike spat, gathered in his whip, and said petulantly, "I was just practicin'."

"You wouldn't be back here you didn't know something, Flynn," said Beacher, the man on the roan. "You remember what the Cap'n said about greed busting up all the best outfits."

"I'm writing a book is what I'm doing here." Flynn worked his fingers.

Pike laughed nastily. "You couldn't write your own name in the snow."

Joe Snake said, "I say we take out an eye."

"The right one," said Pike, turning toward the man on the blaze-face. "Then him and you could side each other."

Flynn drew his big knife. "Which one of you sons of whores is man enough to try old Flynn?"

Pike raised his whip. Flynn lunged, slashing through the man's reins. The bay backed up and tried to rear. Dropping the whip, Pike grabbed for the harness. Joe Snake meanwhile drew a carbine from his saddle scabbard and worked the lever. Flynn dashed the lamp at the buckskin's feet. It shattered, spraying flame. The horse screamed and bucked and plunged. Joe Snake fired wild, tried to hold on with one hand, lost his grip and his seat, and fell to the ground, releasing the carbine. His left foot was twisted in its stirrup. The buckskin bolted, dragging the Indian shrieking through the blaze. More shooting broke out. Flynn fell.

The house came alive. I heard the door to Mr. Knox's room crash against the wall as it was torn open, heard the Judge demanding in stentorian tones what in thunder was coming to pass. Feet pounded the staircase going down. I held my post at the window. In the light of the flames I saw the man on the blaze-face dismount and approach Flynn on the ground with a pistol in his hand. His horse shied from the burning grass but appeared otherwise unaffected by it or by the other horses' panic. Beacher had one hand on his roan's traces and the other on the harness of Pike's shaggy bay, helping him bring the animal under control. Joe Snake's buckskin was gone, leaving behind a motionless flaming something lying on the ground several yards away from the original fire. The man who had stepped down from the blaze-face turned over Flynn's body with a foot, then put the pistol away in his clothes and bent over the body. The back door banged open. He straightened, glanced that way, and retreated toward his horse. In a flash he had gained the saddle, wheeled the animal, and galloped off, shouting something unintelligible over his shoulder. Beacher left off Pike's bay and whipped the roan after the blaze-face. Pike followed, hunched over the bay's neck as he hung on to the harness. Someone discharged a firearm in the yard and I thought I saw. Pike jerk as if hit, but then darkness swallowed up horse and rider.

These details remain as vivid in my memory forty years later as they appeared that night, and even though I am no more certain of the exact chronology than I was immediately afterward, I have only to close my eyes to see one in particular. When the man to whom the blaze-face horse belonged glanced toward the house, light from the fire in the yard glinted off something bright in the shadow of his face. Without doubt it was a glass eye.

"His neck is broken."

By the time I reached the back door, Mr. Knox had put out the fire smoldering in Joe Snake's clothes with one of my mother's blankets, which remained draped across the body he was examining. I could go no farther because of Mother's hands on my shoulders. I stood barefoot in my nightshirt on the threshold, smelling smoke and spent powder.

Judge Blod upended the well bucket over the last of the burning grass and joined Mr. Knox. He had pulled on a pair of his striped trousers under his own nightshirt and thrust his feet into purple velvet slippers with worn tassels. "It must have happened when his head struck the base of the bench." With his good foot he nudged that item, which had collapsed when a leg had broken.

"Very likely." Mr. Knox stood and deposited a small pistol in a pocket of his robe. "What about Flynn?"