The Book of Murdock (8 page)
Read The Book of Murdock Online
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
The conductor's moustaches moved as he chewed. He parted them to squirt a muddy stream at the cuspidor at my feet. “Kansas City.”
Lone Star lore,
which is what the rest of the country calls a barefaced lie, says the first owner of the site on the Wichita River won it in a poker game. The other version is it was part of a legitimate purchase of land certificates, but he must not have thought much of them because he put them away and forgot they existed. When the trunk was opened almost forty years later, mice and squirrels had eaten all the better prospects and Wichita Falls was what was left.
which is what the rest of the country calls a barefaced lie, says the first owner of the site on the Wichita River won it in a poker game. The other version is it was part of a legitimate purchase of land certificates, but he must not have thought much of them because he put them away and forgot they existed. When the trunk was opened almost forty years later, mice and squirrels had eaten all the better prospects and Wichita Falls was what was left.
The crook who platted the tract drafted a nonexistent lake, cotton warehouses, and steamboats in quantity. None of those things ever materialized, and by the time the town had a church and a post office and a public school even the falls had vanished, pounded flat by the relentless water. After that it might have followed a hundred other Western towns into oblivion but for a land-concession deal with the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company that amounted to property confiscation in return for a spur line. Behind the tracks
came the station, a shingle and sorghum mill, a lumberyard, a general store, and promotion to county seat.
came the station, a shingle and sorghum mill, a lumberyard, a general store, and promotion to county seat.
All this had happened in five years. When I first saw it, the place was built of loblolly pine shipped in from the East with no foundation between it and the natural limestone and smelled of sawdust and turpentine; when the wind shifted crossways the sting made your eyes water. All it took was a flake of hot ash from a pipe or a spark from a train wheel to wipe it out in four hours.
Except, of course, for the rails. The robber barons had stitched up the continent with steel thread that will still be there after the next great flood.
The station agent, a short twist of hickory with handlebars that extended past his shoulders, told me I could find Captain Jordan of the Texas Rangers in the back of the post office. I asked him if there was a hotel in town. He shook his head and gave me a ticket for my valise.
“How many bags have you got waiting to be reclaimed?” I asked.
“Just the one.”
The regional Texas Rangers headquarters hung its shingle above a separate entrance to the post office, which was the only building in town flying the Stars and Stripes. I knocked, got a bark from inside, and opened the door on an office the size of a cloakroom. There was a plank floor without a rug, a barrel stove, a cot, the obligatory spitoonâpewter, with the initials of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company embossed on the flange around the topâa green-painted table, two chairs, a Windsor and a ladderback, and a male creature
seated on the ladderback who might have been the twin of the station agent, left out in the weather. His handlebars were fair whereas the other's were brown and his hair had gone unbarbered long enough to curl back up toward the brim of his mottled pinch hat, but he had the same eyes like steel shot and hawk's-beak nose that looked as if it had been broken at birth.
seated on the ladderback who might have been the twin of the station agent, left out in the weather. His handlebars were fair whereas the other's were brown and his hair had gone unbarbered long enough to curl back up toward the brim of his mottled pinch hat, but he had the same eyes like steel shot and hawk's-beak nose that looked as if it had been broken at birth.
He had a copy spread on the table of what looked like the same edition of
The Fort Worth Gazette
I'd seen aboard the train and was using a wooden yardstick and a clasp knife to cut a neat rectangle out of the lead column. He didn't glance up as I entered but told me to take a seat. He had a big voice for a small man; not as deep as Dr. Lawrence Lazarus Little's, but what it lacked in timbre it made up for in volume, with that burred edge that comes from shouting orders against the west Texas wind. I sat, and noticed that his yardstick was stenciled with the name of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company and that the knife he was using was the kind issued to porters to cut the tags off luggage and probably had the same legend printed on the handle. A panoramic photograph of two rows of Texas Rangers, one standing, one sitting cross-legged on the ground, all armed with pistols and carbines, hung crooked in a walnut frame on the wall behind his head. As far as I could tell, the railroad hadn't gotten around to slapping its brand on that.
The Fort Worth Gazette
I'd seen aboard the train and was using a wooden yardstick and a clasp knife to cut a neat rectangle out of the lead column. He didn't glance up as I entered but told me to take a seat. He had a big voice for a small man; not as deep as Dr. Lawrence Lazarus Little's, but what it lacked in timbre it made up for in volume, with that burred edge that comes from shouting orders against the west Texas wind. I sat, and noticed that his yardstick was stenciled with the name of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company and that the knife he was using was the kind issued to porters to cut the tags off luggage and probably had the same legend printed on the handle. A panoramic photograph of two rows of Texas Rangers, one standing, one sitting cross-legged on the ground, all armed with pistols and carbines, hung crooked in a walnut frame on the wall behind his head. As far as I could tell, the railroad hadn't gotten around to slapping its brand on that.
He finished cutting, peeled up the rectangle, and spiked it on a spindle on a cast-iron base. Other cuttings, scraps of scribbled paper, and telegraph flimsies climbed halfway up the spindle.
I asked him if he'd been mentioned in the newspaper.
“Not me. The Rangers.” He crumpled the rest and tossed it into an open crate in the corner by the Republic of Texas flag on a stand. “Every time we're in print I'm supposed to save it and send it on to San Antonio.” He'd lowered his voice, but it still carried. I couldn't hear anything from the post office side, so the walls must have been stout. “That's what we do up here since we whipped the Comanches. All the men I need to keep the peace are down shooting greasers on the Rio Grande. Who the hell are you?”
“Are you Captain Jordan?”
“Would I be sitting in this shithouse if I wasn't?”
“Don't get your back up, Captain. The more people know I'm alive, the less chance I've got of staying that way.” I showed him the star and the letter from Judge Blackthorne. His own star, which was nearly as plain as mine, hung on a pocket of his blue flannel shirt, with two inches of white union suit sticking out of the cuffs. He was one of those who believe in insulating themselves against the heat.
In his case it seemed to work. He wasn't sweating, and the room couldn't have been hotter if it had been built above a blacksmith's forge. He looked well past fifty, but taking into account the oven conditions in that country he might have been ten years younger. He didn't wear spectacles and held the letter at normal length while reading.
He laid it down, fingered through the stack of papers on the spindle starting at the base, and tore one loose a third of the way up from the bottom, then smoothed it out beside the letter. He wasn't comparing the writing, because the second sheet was a telegram that had been taken down by a key operator in Wichita Falls. It was a carefully whittled message
from Judge Blackthorne, who never spent a taxpayer's penny on unnecessary verbiage, asking him to cooperate with a visitor bearing a letter from him. Learning to read upsidedown is useful in my work.
from Judge Blackthorne, who never spent a taxpayer's penny on unnecessary verbiage, asking him to cooperate with a visitor bearing a letter from him. Learning to read upsidedown is useful in my work.
Jordan aimed a square-nailed thumb over his shoulder at the waste paper in the crate. “You're dead in today's
Gazette.
”
Gazette.
”
“In yesterday's
Independent,
too, up in Helena.” I tried not to preen. Vanity's a stubborn sin to lick when you find out you're news so far outside your range.
Independent,
too, up in Helena.” I tried not to preen. Vanity's a stubborn sin to lick when you find out you're news so far outside your range.
“Anyone can write a letter. Got anything to prove you're who you say?”
“I left my commission behind. Traveling with the badge and letter was risky enough. I'll thank you to burn the letter and I'm putting the badge in your charge when I leave here.”
He ruminated. Then he rolled onto one hip; to let wind, I thought, and in that thick air I came closer to panicking than I had since the Judge's sniper had shaved things so thin back home. Instead he hauled out a long-barreled converted Colt Paterson with a worn brown finish from a scabbard that went down into his back pocket, cocked it, and clunked it down on the table. “I'll have that pistol under your arm.”
I was wearing the coat I'd had tailored to cover it, but he'd make it his business to know why I kept it on in the heat. I lifted the Deane-Adams clear, holding the butt between thumb and forefinger like a dead fish, and laid it inside his reach. He picked it up, checked the cylinder, and gave it back.
“I heard you carried an English weapon. Those are harder to come by than this other gear.”
I returned it to its scabbard and watched him take the Paterson off cock and put it away. “I heard the Rangers went to Peacemakers.”
“Peacemaker didn't save my hide fourteen times in fifty-eight. What's your story?”
That put his age back into the fifties. “I've got a billet at the First Unitarian Church in Owen, where they think I'm a preacher named Sebastian, out of Denver. Governor Ireland asked us to lend a hand with a run of robberies in the panhandle.”
“Why Owen?”
“So far it's the only place this bunch hasn't hit.”
“Think it's next?”
“Only if they're foolish enough to tip their hand in their own parlor.”
“Just because we carry our guns out in the open don't mean we're simple. We poked our heads into every attic, root cellar, and pigsty in town on the same suggestion. It didn't take long; you'll find out why when you see the place. We didn't turn up a cartwheel dollar unaccounted for nor a man who fit any of the descriptions close enough to sweat a confession out of him.”
“Bet you sweated someone, though.”
“San Antonio sends out a new Yellow Book every two or three years, to keep us current on who's got paper out on him. Some, when we know where they are, we leave for seed. The seed crop in Owen all had witnesses that put them home at the wrong times. Wrong for us, anyway. I'm satisfied.”
“Some of the new breed have never been posted anywhere. They're in it for profit, not to settle old scores. They don't
write letters to newspapers or do anything else to bring suspicion to them. You won't find them in your book.”
write letters to newspapers or do anything else to bring suspicion to them. You won't find them in your book.”
“You want to know the first time I ever heard the words ânew breed'? December sixty-eight, when John Wesley Hardin bushwhacked and killed three Yankee troopers in Sumpter. I been here long enough to see a parcel of new breeds turn old, when they lived that long, and a bushel of new breeds pour in on their heels. You fixing to pray this bunch into turning themselves in?”
“I'm not fixing to do anything but keep my ears open. If the God-fearing folk there tell me something they didn't tell you, I'll report it and you can do what you want with it. We're not after glory.”
“Glory, you think that's what this conversation is about?”
I'd pinked him where it hurt. I didn't know why Blackthorne saddled me with these jobs that required diplomacy. The last time I'd had to establish friendly relations with an elite law enforcement unit outside the U.S. marshals, I'd nearly started a war with Canada. “I wasn't born pinned to that star, Captain. I drove cattle between here and Mexico, and someone was always telling thumpers in the bunkhouse. A coroner's jury in San Antonio ruled âdeath by suicide' in the case of five bandits mowed down by Texas Rangers because everyone knows what's in store for a desperado who sticks up a bank that close to Rangers headquarters. A reputation like that is worth a thousand extra men. It's in everyone's best interest not to claim outside credit, or glory, if you like that sort of language.”
His steel-shot eyes regarded me from under brows that stuck out like spines. The resemblance to the man behind the counter in the train station was marked. He tilted back his chair, scooped the wide framed photograph off its hook with one hand, banged the front legs back down, and laid the picture on my side of the table facing my way. A stone barracks stretched behind the two rows of armed men, with empty sky above and barren earth below. On the bottom, in brown ink in a neat copperplate hand, someone had written:
Ft. Sill, 10 June 1875
“That's me, Sergeant Andrew Jackson Jordan, aged none-of-your-goddamn business.” His index finger banged the glass above a face that was all bone and a pair of eyes that photographed like blank whites, belonging to one of the Rangers seated on the ground. He'd worn chin whiskers then and the handlebars were smaller. Apart from that I didn't know how a man could have changed so much in nine years. I put him back down into his forties, and the veteran of 1858 around age eighteen.
“These here are Corporal T. J. McReady and Ranger James Poe. Mac and Jimmy. I never knew Mac's Christian name.”
I looked at a young Irish roughneck and an Adam's apple with a head attached, seated on either side of the sergeant. He'd had several years on both.
He read my mind. “They called me Dad. They wasn't walking yet when I joined up.”
“I guess there's a Dad in every outfit. Mine had one.”
“A splay-footed mulatto name of Tilson took the picture about a week after the Comanches surrendered. It was white of the Yankees to let us sit for it, seeing as how they got the glory after we fought the bastards forty years, including the five we spent doing it alone while they was busy putting down rebels. Mac never had his likeness made before and kept asking when would it be ready. He never seen it. He was assassinated June twelfth. It was done from cover with a shotgun, from behind. We never did find who done it or why. Half his head was gone. His mother had to say good-bye to him through the coffin lid. Twenty-two he was.”
“What about Poe?”
“Jimmy got tired of manhunting finally and shot himself behind the counter of a dry-goods store in Dallas. Later that day the city marshal found his wife shot dead in their house. Same caliber gun. They fell out over something and he got all the way to work before what he done caught up with him.
“Burial's free when you served with the Rangers. There's your glory.”
“We've all got stories like that,” I said. “I meant no disrespect.”
He leaned back and rehung the picture, more crookedly than before. “We'll all of us be reunited in dust. I gave up on the other. Maybe I shouldn't talk like that in front of a padre.”
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