The Book of Murdock (9 page)

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Authors: Loren D. Estleman

BOOK: The Book of Murdock
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“I'm not pretending to be a priest. And I'm not half sure you're wrong.”
“We'll just leave that in the room, along with this here.” He picked up the letter from Judge Blackthorne and set fire
to it with a match from a twist of oilcloth he took from his flap pocket. When it had burned almost down to his fingers he let it fall to the floor and stamped out the flame.
I felt like taking off my hat. I'd missed my funeral.
“
Two banks, the
Overland, two trains, all in six months,” I said. “Blackthorne said this gang leaves footprints, but he didn't say what they were.”
“He always cut you loose this well informed?”
“He encourages independent action, outside his presence. To him that means traveling light on such things as too much preparation, which he says slows the brain and the hand. He's a son of a bitch is what he is.”
“How's the pay?”
“I can't spend what I make, but that's only because I haven't had a week off since the last time I was shot.”
“Sounds familiar. Why do you stick?”
“For the glory, same as you.”
Jordan still had his matches out. He filled a short-barreled pipe from a pouch in his other flap pocket and started it, his cheeks caving in on the draw where the molars had rotted away. His front teeth—the lowers, anyway—were ground
down to yellow-oak stumps. If he had uppers the handlebars covered them.
He shook out the match, dropped it on the floor, and pushed the pouch toward me. I shook my head.
“You're overplaying your part,” he said. “I read the Bible cover to cover and back. San Antonio recommends it. It don't say a thing against smoking or chewing. The Reverend Wilcoxson up at the First Methodist orders cigars by the case from New Orleans.”
“I never got the habit.”
He puffed smoke out of the side opposite the pipe, which as long as it was burning he never took out of his mouth. “I got a man who won't cuss and some who say they never touched a drop of the Creature, but when it comes to covering ground fast they'll all dump their coffee before their tobacco. I don't trust a man without a vice I can see or smell or taste. The one he's hiding might get me killed.”
“I didn't say I didn't have any vices.”
“I forgot to mention women, which can be worse than all the rest put together. I'm near certain it was another woman caused Jimmy Poe to shoot his wife and then himself.”
“I approve of women in general, but I've been on friendly terms with the Creature most of my life.”
“How friendly?”
“We were living in each other's pockets for a while. The commitment got to be too much. These days we just shake hands.”
“Same here. It was Mrs. Jordan made me choose. She's dead, but it don't taste the same now that I don't have to hide
it in the potato bin.” He smoked. “I drink standing up. We got a nice little watering hole down the street with a cross draft from the river, though it's best to put it down fast before it boils.”
“After we talk. Bartenders spill too much.”
He scratched his congenitally broken nose. “How many know about this scheme apart from you, me, and the Judge?”
“Pretty much the entire territory of Montana, and I have my suspicions about the Santa Fe Railroad. As I see it I've got three weeks at the outside before everyone in the panhandle knows I'm still around and Brother Bernard never was.”
“Who's he?”
“He's me. Sebastian's my other name.”
“You had too many as it was. I wouldn't give it no three weeks. News travels faster by jackrabbit than Western Union.”
“When's the next stage leave for Owen?”
“Eight in the morning.”
“That's another day gone. We'd better get started. Has any of the gang been identified?”
“Not yet. They wear bandannas over their faces and only one does the talking.”
“That describes half the men in your book. What is it about the robberies that ties them all to one bunch?”
“It's not so much the way they go about their business as how they look. Everyone that's ever read about Jesse James knows what to say and where to point his pistol and to get in and out fast; if I had my way I'd bring in every one of them dime novelists in leg irons for teaching folks how to break the law. But even they don't say Jesse and his guerrillas dressed alike even in the war.”
“They wear uniforms?”
“Not so's you'd call 'em that, taken one at a time. When five men bust in all wearing white dusters, gray hats, and blue bandannas, that's the impression. That's how it's been all six times.”
“Six? I counted five raids.”
He plucked the piece he'd cut from the
Gazette
off his spindle and slapped it down in front of me. It was a sketchy description of a midnight run on a cattle ranch near a town called White Horse three days earlier. The thieves had shot the ranch hand on watch and turned five hundred head of Herefords north. Contact had been made with the Texas Rangers to investigate.
“What makes this our gang?” I asked.
“They gut-shot the man on watch, but he was still talking when the man that came to fetch us took us to the line shack where they carried him. He didn't talk long. There was a little-bitty moon that night, what we call a rustler's moon, but it was enough to see what they was wearing.”
“Dusters are common in dusty country. They could've had on brown hats and red bandannas. You can't see colors by moonlight.”
“Nor did he, but different colors look different whatever the light. They was all the same. I say they was gray and blue.”
“Too thin for court.”
“It's a far piece out here between courts. They don't always make it.”
“Five men?”
“Seven. I said it was five bust in on banks and such, but I didn't mention the one they left outside with a carbine and
the one they left to hold the horses. At White Horse, the other hands had put together a P.C. and took out after them; we met them on their way back. They'd followed to the Canadian, where the bunch turned the herd into the river, but by then the moon was down and they couldn't see where they come out. The hands voted against making camp on account of the bushwhack risk.”
“P.C.” was Texas talk for
posse comitatus
. Guerrillas had brought the term west from Missouri; in many cases half a jump ahead of a posse. “Did you find where they came out?”
He nodded, puffing smoke. “It was sunup and the trail was cold. In the Nations it crossed some others left by legitimate outfits headed to market. We wired Fort Smith to alert the marshals, but them beeves are gone. Chicago's hungry.”
“Where's White Horse?”
“Thirty miles southwest of where you're headed. Your Judge Blackthorne might be on the sunny side of right. Then again he might not.”
“He might not. Rustling's hard work for cash bandits. They don't usually cross over.”
“If it's the new breed, where'd they learn to ride if not a working ranch? I'm seeing a lot more buggies and buckboards than saddle horses these days.”
“I notice you're not ready for a buggy yet. If you rode out there and up into the Nations and back in three days, you ought to be lathered up as bad as your mount.”
“That ugly little mustang needs more'n a short trot like that to break a sweat. I wish I could say the same for me. I just got back from the bathhouse when you knocked.”
“When do you sleep?”
“When it hits. Some nights I don't make it as far as that cot.”
“How many men do you have under you?”
“Fourteen. I came here with a company, but that was before the Frontier Batallion busted up. We done too good a job thinning out rebel scum, you see.”
“You should've left a few more for seed.”
“Wouldn't of done. Austin discovered Mexico and took all my best men. There's a powerful lot of ranch money down on the border and the governor's fixing to keep it in this country where he can draw on it come election time. That's what this bunch is counting on. It's a wonderment they took this long to test me.”
“Why do they dress alike, you figure?”
“Keep from shooting each other.”
“How much shooting takes place?”
“Less than you'd expect. They winged the shotgun messenger on the Overland to make their point, but that was the worst of it till they killed that cowhand on watch. A bank manager got pistol-whipped when he forgot the combination to the safe, if you count that and if you count bankers. I won't say they go out of their way not to let blood, but they don't rattle. If that's the new way of robbing folks, I'm for it, and I'll shake their hands on the scaffold.”
“I'd admire to have a talk with that shotgun messenger.”
“Not the banker?”
“Him too, but shotgun men have good eyes and remember what they see.”
“Just as well. The banker took his busted head home to
Baltimore. The shotgun's staying with his sister in Owen till he heals, but I believe they're affiliated with the Church of Rome.”
“I'll visit as a neighbor.” I took out the sorry wallet and showed him the telegram from R. Freemason, director of the First Unitarian Church. “What can you tell me about him?”
“He ain't Catholic.”
“I gathered that from the name.”
“Dick Freemason runs sheep, not that you'd smell it on him. He's a gentleman rancher, lives in town with his wife in a big ugly house he had built, with a chandelier he had shipped from Italy and sent a special train down to fetch it. He sits on most of the town committees and had a big hand in banning whores from all the public areas before ten P.M. He pays exactly twice as many men as he needs to manage his spread. Ask me why.”
“Because he runs sheep in cattle country.”
He tried not to appear impressed. “You're quicker than you look.”
“That's why I get these assignments. I suppose you asked his hired guns what they were doing at the time of the robberies.”
“I did. I work this job. I'd of been suspicious if they all had stories, and I'm pretty sure at least two of them are in the Yellow Book under other names. But Freemason pays too much to make the risk worthwhile.”
“No one pays that much.”
“He comes close. Also he's a rough cob under the silk. Eleven jurors voted to send him to Huntsville after he had a bunkhouse thief horsewhipped to death. That was in Waco,
before he came here. I don't know where he was before that. He don't talk like a Texan.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth then to stifle a yawn. I was keeping him from his cot. I got up. “I'll pass on that drink. Brother Bernard shouldn't be seen in a saloon in broad daylight. Is there a place in town where I can put up my feet?”
“Corporal Thomson and his wife have a spare room and a baby on the way. They can use the money. White house with green shutters, two squares up and one over. Where's the rest of your gear?”
“I left it with the station agent. He looks enough like you to be kin.”
“First cousin. I won't apologize for his manners. He was easier to live with before he hurt his back and had to leave the Rangers.”
“Is he the reason you didn't volunteer for the border?”
“It meant promotion to major, but I turned it down when they offered. He can't ride and he can't sit up in a train. Since Elizabeth died the miserable bastard's all the family I got.”
I shook his hand. “I'm Sebastian if Corporal Thomson asks.”
“I recommend it. She's all right, but he likes to talk.”
“Did the jury in Waco ever find out if Freemason wanted that man whipped to death?”
“I never heard.”
“Maybe he's easier on the ministers who work for him.”
He yawned openly. “Stick your fingers in the collection plate and find out.”
I never had
the opportunity to board the gondola of a hot-air balloon, but I've ridden in Pullman parlor cars, and someone once said that apart from them no nineteenth-century invention accommodated itself to the comfort of passengers as well as the Concord coach: more than a ton of red-lacquered bentwood, suspended hammock fashion on a pair of leather thoroughbraces that rocked its human cargo gently over washes and rubble. But it was wasted on flat west Texas, so I didn't get one.
Wells, Fargo & Company, owner of the Overland, had sent all its Concords to more challenging country and stuck me in a square mud wagon on solid elmwood timbers that telegraphed every ridge and chuckhole directly to my spine. Dust caked the muslin side curtains, releasing gusts of ocher powder when the cords were undone but forming no barrier whatsoever to fresh injections from outside. When they were drawn and tied down, the hot wind battered at them and whenever we turned crosswise to the blast the coach wobbled
and groaned and tried to heel over like a ship. One of my fellow travelers, a barbed-wire salesman from Indiana who carried a sample case that opened in two halves to show his assortment of Buckthorns, Champions, Spur Rowels, and Sawteeth mounted on washboards, offered to bet me that at times we were rolling on two wheels only, the others lifted clear of the earth and spinning ineffectually.
I declined to take him up on the wager. Partly it was because I wasn't half convinced he was wrong, but mostly it was because I was in full preacher's kit, with the Deane-Adams well concealed beneath the rusty black sackcloth of my old coat and a badly used slouch hat that ought to have had a couple of holes cut in the brim for an ass to stick its ears through, and games of chance were inappropriate. I smiled as I shook my head, clinging to the valise on my lap and trying not to cut my throat with Eldred Griffin's stiff clerical collar.
The first time I'd tried it on, in Corporal and Mrs. Thomson's spare bedroom in Wichita Falls, I'd looked at myself in the mirror above the wash basin and saw a mean-faced, middle-aged gunman trying to pass as a man of the cloth, but of course I was hobbled by guilty knowledge. I'd known preachers who could match a Kansas redleg for ruthless aspect and the saintliest-looking one I'd ever seen, with white hands and a gentle countenance, had hanged himself in a cell in Billings after clubbing his wife to death with a boot scraper during a heated discussion over some little thing. I promised myself to shave more closely and look to my nails and accept the rest with serenity.
The collar was another matter. I wasn't sure I'd ever get used to it in the Texas heat and there were plenty of sects
that didn't require it, but having been seen with it on, I considered putting it away a risk to my mission. Griffin had outmaneuvered me at the last. The torturous gift was his vengeance for having been forced to compromise his principles. It was my hair shirt.
I kept the valise close because it contained his sermons. I'd given him my word I'd look after them, and I was rewarded for my vigilance when the driver turned abruptly to avoid striking some piece of wagon-road jetsam, overcorrected, and an iron-bound trunk toppled off the rack on the roof, broke its hasp when it struck the ground, and spilled out most of its contents. The driver drew rein and my only other companion, a careworn lawyer who dressed even more shabbily than I did, got out to scoop his linen and legal library back into the trunk. The mustard-colored volumes had been missent to Houston while following him from St. Louis; after they were rerouted by the railroad, he'd left his brandnew practice in Owen to go to Wichita Falls and bring them home personally.
I got that information from his anxious conversation with the driver while the trunk was being loaded, and he repeated it as he repacked. The heat and dust of the journey had not led to casual conversation except from the wire drummer, who seldom heard what was said in answer and failed to draw the obvious conclusion from silence.
The lawyer struck me as a worthier fellow. I respect a man who takes care of the tools of his trade; Blackthorne treated his soiled, mismatched texts as tenderly as a surgeon handles his saws and scalpels, and if I were on trial for my life I'd want no one else to sit in judgment.
Provided I was innocent.
The driver, who cursed the way other men breathed, bound the trunk with rope from the tackle in the boot to keep it from flying open again while his shotgun messenger stood by with the hammers eared back on his Stevens ten-gauge, dividing his attention equally between open country and the tattered attorney. He kept his counsel as to how the man might have rigged the mishap to lay the stage open to ambush. Guarding mail shipments is a suspicious profession.
There was no faulting his caution. There must have been something of value in the strongbox, because the passenger fares on that run wouldn't have fed the horses, much less paid for the wear and tear on the equipment.
The salesman and I stepped down to stretch our legs. It did nothing for my confidence in my disguise that the messenger watched me as closely as he did the others. His taut face and bunched chin beneath the black whiskers was the first evidence I'd seen that the recent bandit raids had the panhandle on the balls of its feet.
I asked the lawyer for his card.
He didn't hear me at first, concentrating as he was on the driver's skill with knots. Then he hoisted his bushy brows and smiled tragically at me from under muttonchops that had needed barbering a week ago. Gray tips and the general fall of his crest made him look ten years older than he probably was. He might have been on the green side of thirty-five.
“I thought you parsons pled your case with the Almighty Imponderable,” he said. “I'm afraid I'm not licensed to practice before that bench.”
I answered the smile with a humble one of my own, or rather of Brother Bernard's. “I've no use for fence, but I took that gentleman's name.” I tilted my head toward the third member of our party, who was relieving himself noisily into a clump of thorn scrub at the side of the road. I'd already forgotten what he called himself. “I see no reason not to make a running jump at getting to know my neighbors. Bernard Sebastian.” I offered my hand.
“Father or Reverend?” He took it, stealing a look at my raiment. The treasures of the Vatican were not apparent.
“Brother. I'm merely a pilgrim on the path to righteousness.”
“Well, Brother, you must have been walking it on your hands. I've shaken the paws of mule skinners with less muscle.” He kneaded bruised fingers.
I apologized, stopping short of inventing an excuse. I would have to watch more than just my visual impression. The strength in my gun hand ill befit the meek.
He seemed to disregard it. “I haven't just had time to have cards printed. I've spent my first weeks in Texas tracking that trunk, which has scaled mountains and forded rivers and crossed the burning prairie, passing all manner of savages and baggage clerks, only to become a casualty twenty-five miles from its destination.”
The driver hooked a heel on a corner of the item under discussion and heaved back on the rope to set the knot. “Better a busted trunk than a busted wheel. The Golden Rule don't hold up out here.”
“You're hardly the resident expert,” said the lawyer. To me: “I'm Luther Cherry. I expect delivery of my shingle any
time, if that dullard of a sign painter ever gets it right. Why a man who can't spell should choose that line of work is a question only your immortal Client can answer.”
“I'm sure He can, although I'd hesitate to approach Him with it. What kind of law do you practice?”
“Real property, chiefly land disputes; which makes me a colleague of sorts of Mr. Barbed Wire. I'd intended to open an office in Denver, but there's a glut there, as you might expect. Then I learned the legislature in Austin is debating a law to declare fence-cutting a felony. In Colorado Territory it's a misdemeanor punished by a fine, which Big Cattle pays routinely as part of the cost of running off their smaller competitors' stock.”
“They'll never pass it,” I said. “It would mean the end of the open range in this state.”
“Cattle don't pay taxes. Landowners do, and entirely too much of it is going to waste on community grazing rights. In any case I anticipate a healthy demand for my counsel.”
“I'm told ranchers here are accustomed to settling their disputes out in the open, with gunfire.”
“I was told the same thing, and most of the inquiries I made confirmed it, when they received a response at all. The guard is changing, however, as change it must, before the relentless advance of civilization. The governor is in favor of the law, and he has the support of Mr. Richard Freemason of Owen, who wired me travel expenses in St. Louis as part of the retainer for my services.”
The sheep baron seemed to cast a wide loop.
“We share a sponsor,” I said. “Mr. Freemason is a director of the church where I am preparing to preach the gospel.”
Some of the tragedy went out of Cherry's smile. “A splendid sign! The sheep wars have been strangling the livestock industry, and Mr. Freemason means to have a hand in restoring peace. Was not the man whose wife bore the Prince of Peace a shepherd?”
“This one, at least, has made friends of two strangers.”
“Will a Mrs. Sebastian be joining you later, or does your oath forbid the domestic custom?”
“It doesn't, but I have no wife.”
His face fell. “That's a disappointment. Mrs. Cherry is closing the house in St. Louis and will board with her parents until I'm settled. It's lonely out here for a woman, they say.”
“Mr. Freemason is married.”
“I've not met him yet, though I've spoken with his wife, who told me he was away visiting the ranch until this week. She's gracious, but worldly—a bit out of Anna's set. She paints her face. The only other women I've seen are years older, except the ones who can't show themselves until the respectable citizens are home in bed.” Abruptly he added, “Those who are not engaged until late setting their office in order, I mean.”
He'd colored a shade, surprising me. None of the lawyers I'd known could have managed it.
“Yes,” I said, acknowledging the problem of Original Sin. “Still, it's not exactly a mining camp.”
“Did I hear you say you're bound for the camps?” The fence man joined us, buttoning his fly. He picked up only half of everything said within his earshot and folded it into a pitch. “Once I make my stake in Texas I'm off to the goldfields.
There's nothing like six hundred yards of Glidden's Twist Oval to protect your claim from jumpers.”
Cherry shook his head—not to contradict the other's impression of what we were talking about, but to address the new development. He'd do well in court. “I studied the crime for my bar examination. Claims are jumped in town, not in the field. It's a combination of bookkeeping and bribery.”
The salesman considered what he'd taken from that, then lost interest. “They ain't come up with a barb for that yet.” He climbed back aboard the coach.
The driver manhandled the trunk to the roof and lashed it to the rack. His messenger waited until we were all seated, then eased down his hammers and mounted to his place on top. As we jolted forward, Cherry watched the flat land rolling past. “It's this way clear to Owen. Does it ever change, do you think?”
I said, “I understand after you cross the Canadian it starts to level out.”
He turned from his window, but I was careful not to intercept his look. The man sitting facing us was busy rearranging the samples in his case. I hoped—well, prayed—that if I learned to think before I spoke I might play my part as well as they played theirs.

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