Sudden Country (5 page)
"Shot through the heart."
Mother's fingers dug into my flesh.
"They were after the gold," I said. "I heard them talking."
Both men stared at me. I related what I had heard. "Did you see any of them clearly?" the Judge demanded.
I shook my head. "The one with the pretty horse was called Beacher. He called the other one Pike, the one Mr. Knox shot."
Mr. Knox said, "You saw him hit?"
"I think so. He jerked in his saddle."
"Charlie Beacher and Nazarene Pike. I thought it was Pike when I saw the whip." It lay on the ground near the Judge. "The Yankee scalps that pair took would reach from here to Gettysburg."
"Really, Judge." But Mother's scolding lacked conviction in that place.
"What about the fourth man?" Mr. Knox asked me.
"He had a blaze-face horse. No one called him by name and I couldn't see or hear him well. I think he started to go through Mr. Flynn's pockets." In my excitement I had forgotten about the glass eye.
"Looking for what, I wonder." Standing over Flynn now, Mr. Knox stroked his moustache. "I wonder as well what Flynn was doing out here with a lamp."
"He wasn't looking for his flask," the Judge said. "He had that earlier."
"I know what it was." I freed myself from Mother's grasp and turned inside.
Mother was soothing Mayellen Fredrickson from next door on the front threshold when I came downstairs fully dressed minutes later. Mrs. Frederickson was wearing a lavender percale robe cut for a younger, less abundant Mrs. Frederickson and fanning herself with a lace handkerchief that was plainly inadequate for anything but fan-fling. Mother made sympathetic sounds and closed the door firmly in her visitor's face. The night's incidents would fuel conversation at Mrs. Frederickson's First Tuesday .At Home for years. Mr. Knox and Judge Blod were there as well. I held out the crumple of notes Flynn had given me that morning, less what I'd spent on the Navy Colt's and cartridges. The Judge grabbed it before Mr. Knox could move.
"There are but a few dollars here," he said, disappointed.
"He must have forgotten the errand he sent me on. I hadn't a chance to return what was left. Perhaps he thought he'd dropped them."
"What's that yellow note?" Mr. Knox asked.
"Mr. Sterner refused to accept it."
The Judge separated it and studied it at arm's length. "A Confederate five. It must have been a keepsake. It's worthless."
"It has writing on it." Mr. Knox took it from him.
Mother and I crowded in for a look; or at least that was my purpose. She rested long fingers on Mr. Knox's sleeve. On one end of the note, next to the portrait of Jefferson Davis, a number of marks had been made with a pencil. They were blurred but still discernible, and resembled nothing so much as a child's game of tic-tac-toe.
"It is a map of some kind," declared Mr. Knox.
"Quantrill's gold!" I cried.
"Balderdash. Mere doodles." Judge Blod snatched at the note, grasping only empty air as Mr. Knox turned toward me.
"Did Flynn give you this in the backyard?" he asked. I nodded. He stroked the parchment thoughtfully. "Obviously a mistake, as he could not hope to purchase anything with a Confederate note. When he discovered it was missing he went out to see if he'd dropped it in the yard and found his old friends waiting for him."
"Let us find the gold," I said.
"Let us wire the authorities in Amarillo about the dead men behind the house. There is nothing here to tell us this will direct us to gold. Even if it did, where would we begin looking? What is this 'Harney' scribbled in here? It could be in Africa or China for all we know."
"Or Argentina," said I, morosely.
"It is a mountain in South Dakota."
We all looked at Judge Blod, whose normally proud face and posture now presented a study in defeat.
"I suppose we must be confidants," he said. "Orrin Peckler had a daughter, now aged twenty-one. After her mother's death she moved from Amarillo to New Jersey, where I interviewed her. She informed me that her father was prospecting extensively in the Black Hills at the time he married her mother. When the treaty of Fort Laramie banned white men from the Black Hills in 1868, they came to Texas, where he established a freight company. It is my considered opinion that he went into that country to put gold in, not take it out."
"Why there?" asked Mr. Knox.
"Where better? The Black Hills were sacred to the Sioux, who were then at their apogee. Who better to guard his wealth until it was safe to spend, if not ten thousand savages? He had risked his life for the gold once; why not twice, in order to conceal it safely?"
"The Sioux have been on reservations for years," Mr. Knox pointed out. "What has prevented you from going in and removing the gold?"
"I had only a general location and my own suspicions.
I was convinced that Flynn had the finer details but lacked the general location. Evidently he liberated Peckler's body of the note, which made an ingenious map as no one is likely to question the presence of just another war souvenir among his effects and he was not likely to spend it by mistake. But I had to wait for Flynn's release in order to see his cards."
"The map was in his possession all that time?"
"In the property room in Huntsville, to be precise. With the exception of firearms, prisoners' personal belongings are held for them and returned at the end of their sentences. However, the information was useless without a place to start. I hinted to him in my wire that I had it; that and train fare were sufficient to bring him here. He was cautious, but I fancy I was battering down his defenses when this happened."
"Forgive me for practicing similar caution. Why are you telling us this now?"
Judge Blod spread his tiny, well-kept hands. By degrees he had come back around to his orator's stance. "I am but one man, and the Black Hills are vast. This Ghost Dance business in South Dakota cannot be overlooked. I require a partner who has proven himself dependable in dangerous circumstances."
"Are you suggesting an expedition?"
"I have come two thousand miles to organize it."
Mr. Knox scowled at Jefferson Davis. "This fellow Snake must have followed Flynn here from Huntsville. After this morning's debacle he sent for help. That means the others were not far away. There may be more."
"There are more. Fifteen men stopped that Union train. Joe Snake joined the band after the war. Of the original number, five were dead before tonight and three in prison. Flynn's death leaves six. They will undoubtedly find reinforcements. We will have to move fast, before they regroup."
"I cannot close the school before Wednesday, when the spring planting break begins."
"I shall require that much time to arrange for men and supplies in Amarillo. You can meet me at the Palo Duro Hotel."
"I haven't said I'm going. We are both too old to go galloping off after buried treasure."
"Rocking chairs cost money."
"Who will look after Mrs. Grayle and David in the event the night riders return?"
"I am going on the expedition," I said.
"My room is paid up through next week," the Judge said. "Unless EvangâMrs. Grayle has objections, you may stay there until the end of the session. After that, perhaps Mrs. Grayle has friends or family who will put them up. These dastards will quit this country soon enough when they sense their quarry has flown."
"I am going on the expedition," I repeated.
"I have a boarding house to run," said Mother.
Mr. Knox said, "Soon the Texas climate will be too hot and windy for visitors. You will not be losing much business and your safety would be a comfort to me."
Mother softened, as she always did before a masculine entreaty. "I have cousins in Amarillo. Will you escort us?"
"I shall be delighted."
I said, "If you don't take me to Dakota I shall tell everyone I know about the gold."
Judge Blod grew imperious. "Madam, your son wants discipline."
"My son's discipline is no concern of yours," Mother said coldly. "Mr. Knox, you must concur that the events of this day have entitled the Good Part Boarding House to an equal share in the reward for the gold's recovery."
"I do."
"Since we have an interest, I should like to propose my son's services as an extra to help out on the expedition." He appeared surprised. "There will be danger."
"He will be more of a danger to himself if left behind. David is headstrong and in need of tempering. If he becomes a burden you may send him home and we will consider our agreement terminated."
"We are no nannies," protested the Judge.
"We would not have this map but for David." Mr. Knox handed me the note. "I can be no less trustful than the late Mr. Flynn."
I folded it carefully with the map inside and buttoned my shirt flap over it. "It is safe with me." Inside I was soaring.
"At the very least your geography should improve," commented Mr. Knox.
THE MAN WITH LTHE JUDAS EYE
State of Texas
County of Carson
W
e the jury summoned to appear Julius Honyocker United States Marshal and Louis Calfine Coroner the seventh day of April 1890 to inquire into the circumstances attending the deaths of Jotham Flynn, transient, and unidentified Indian male do upon our oaths say that they came to their deaths at Panhandle Carson County Texas on the sixth day of April 1890 from the effects of a gunshot wound and a bad fall on the property of Evangeline Grayle, widow. That said deaths were the result of a prior grievance unknown to this court.
Witness our hands (etc.)
That was the way they recorded it in a thin sheath of yellow typewritten sheets that is now in my possession. I did not testify at the inquest and neither did Judge Blod, who was in Amarillo that day, having sworn to a deputy marshal named Noles or Knowles that he had slept through the incident. Mother and Mr. Knox presented the details they had witnessed, leaving out mention of the gold, which was not precisely committing perjury because they were never asked about it. The entire proceeding did not take twenty minutes.
Joe Snake could not be identified by name without further explanation and so was buried without ceremony or a marker in Stranger's Corner. Mother used the money the Judge had given her for Flynn's stay to bury the old raider in a graveside service conducted by the Reverend Thomharvester and attended by her, six elders who acted as volunteer pallbearers, and myself. She gave the greenbacks I had left after purchasing the Navy Colt's to Ovid Thanapopoulis to cut the headstone. It is there yet, reading:
JOTHAM FLYNN
D. April 6, 1890
"I'M A GOOD OLD REBEL"
Her loyalty to her boarders even in death remained a subject of much debate in Panhandle for years, including speculations I will not dignify by including here.
The last three days before the spring planting break stretched eternally for a boy who had had his first taste of adventure and the promise of more courses to come. The night riders did not return during that time, Mr. Knox remained deaf and blind to my mother's unsubtle advances and kept to the Judge's old room nights, and I longed to be away. What value the Palmer Method and the Pythagorean Theorem, when guerrilla gold beckoned? When, precisely at three o'clock Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Knox dismissed the session at last, I was so full of the expedition that I did not protest even to myself the assignment to read Mr. Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop before classes resumed in May.
Mother, Mr. Knox, and I rode the train to Amarillo, where he hired a trap to convey her and her bags to the home of Cousin Gertrude, a woman of substantial presence and girth whom I could not stand. I ached with impatience. I had been to the city many times before, and apart from the release offered by any excursion outside
Panhandle, I was no more taken with the place than I was with Gertrude's obfuscatory greetings and farewells. Its crooked streets and faceless buildings did not differ significantly from those of my home, albeit covering a larger area, and as is so often the case with cities isolated by great distances, its inhabitants tended to look upon visitors from smaller settlements as rubes and gawkers. Certainly we drew our share of condescending attention from passersby as Mother embraced me on the woodwalk in front of Gertrude's iron fence.
