Savage Texas: The Stampeders (12 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

The dead man in the livery generated far less public interest than he might have in other towns. For one thing, he was a stranger, known to no one at all that anyone at all could seem to find. And generally speaking, unknown meant unimportant. Secondly, dead strangers were not all that uncommon in Hangtree. More than one local who heard that a corpse had been found pitchfork-pinned to the floor of the livery stable had shrugged and said, in effect, “Well, it’s been a few weeks. ’Bout time somebody was kilt.”

The late Wilfred Brody, after being photographed by Otto Perkins with pitchfork still in place through his torso, was beneficiary of a tradition that had come to be called in Hangtree a “good riddance funeral,” the sort reserved for the most morally loathsome and despised dead. Such as strangers who came into town and made an apparent attempt to abduct and misuse the town’s prize beauty. A round hole about a yard across was dug to a depth of five or six feet in a lesser corner of the Boot Hill burying ground, Brody was crumpled up and dumped on his rear in in a seated posture, sans coffin and even clothing, and a wagonload of longhorn dung was hauled in to begin the filling of the grave. Brody was submerged in half-liquid bovine filth, with only the top two feet of his grave filled with dirt, and that mostly just to hide the smell of the dung. No cross was put on his Boot Hill grave, just a crude sign made by a county prisoner under the oversight of Sheriff Barton and Deputy Smalls. The sign read simply: H
ERE
R
ESTS A
B
AD
M
AN.
It’s what they would have inscribed even if they’d known his name. Three other graves with an identical inscription were nearby—other despised souls who met their ends, in all cases violently, in Hangtree.

Faithful to his calling, Reverend Fulton came out and pronounced the only funeral oration the unfortunate Brody would receive. Preacher Fulton closed his eyes beside the filled hole, lowered his head, and intoned, “God be merciful to the departed sinner here buried.” It was his standard liturgy for “good riddance burials.” Otto Perkins posed and took a photograph of the preacher and the delegation of volunteer gravediggers (most of them drunk), standing by the filled hole with the emptied manure wagon sitting to the side, and that was that for Wilfred Brody, failed rapist.

Of more interest to most Hangtree folk than the passing of one more piece of stray human trash was how badly the town’s most lovely lady had been treated and hurt by that particular scoundrel. It was known about Hangtree that she had been going to attend the town dance with Sam Heller, but that her injury was going to prevent her from taking part. Because she had become something of a living town mascot and heroine since her escapade at the church service, not to mention the adored embodiment of female beauty because of her many walks about town and her generally friendly manner with those who greeted her, Hangtree’s people took it seriously that she had been harmed. To have been very nearly carried away and misused by a depraved stranger lent an aura of romantic tragedy to Julia Canton that couldn’t have been heightened short of her actual death at the hands of the degenerate, or her rescue by her perceived suitor, Sam Heller, rather than the local parson.

It wasn’t that the locals had given up their widespread deploring of Heller’s “carpetbagger” status. It was that romantic tragedy covered a multitude of sins. Even, to some degree, carpetbagging.

Ironically, Julia’s head injury and the temporary immobility it inflicted upon her might have saved her life, most locals concluded as the facts came out. If she had not suffered the blow to her head and her captor had been able to force her at gunpoint to travel with him, he might have gotten her away quickly to some hidden place, where only all-seeing God would have envisioned the atrocious things that would have been done to her . . . God, that is, in company with the drunken degenerates at the Dog Star Saloon. The same lechers who came to watch knicker-shunning Petunia Scranton doing the high-kicking can-can to the sped-up tune of a camp meeting hymn could imagine in vivid detail the perverse things that might have been inflicted upon Julia Canton, and they talked them over without the slightest restraint among themselves, reveling in the sordid visions their minds contrived.

There was some reaction to the crime against Julia Canton that was more than lust-driven imaginations on the part of local drunks. To maintain a smattering of law and order in a town with little of either, a coroner’s jury was convened and the passing of Wilfred Brody was put down to “death by misadventure.” That was, presumably, the misadventure of having a pitchfork rammed through his chest by a young woman he’d been about to rape.

Beyond that not-quite-real coroner’s jury, the world of law and justice would have no more dealings with Wilfred Brody. It was ready to forget him. Eternally seated in his narrow hole on Boot Hill, encased in steaming, decaying dung, he was where he belonged.

 

 

Claire Fulton had learned and accepted the fact that a preacher is eternally at the beck and call of the people he serves, and that the same is true for his wife. It was her job to set the proper example of compassion and caring for someone who was wronged and hurt, so she did it. It was clear to all that Julia Canton was better off under Claire Fulton’s care in the parsonage than she would be in her own rented room at the boardinghouse, so the contents of her wardrobe were cleaned out at the boardinghouse and shifted to one in the corner of the Fultons’ spare room, now Julia’s chamber.

Claire fell back on her old wartime training-through-experience as a nurse and began to thoroughly enjoy having someone to care for. She kept a close eye on Julia’s wounded head, and comforted her with assurances that there would be little scarring (though in reality she worried that there would). She was pleased that Julia seemed to be feeling better first by the day, then by the hour. The doctor began to allow her more movement, assuming Claire was by her side to keep her from succumbing to the dizziness that appeared likely to be a lingering problem for a while.

 

 

Visitors began to call, a mixed blessing for Julia because she cherished her privacy, and because several of her visitors were local young men who obviously were looking for a way to meet the prettiest girl in town. She was kind to them, but not talkative, and most got the message and left quickly.

She was napping one afternoon when the bedroom door opened and closed and Claire was there, followed by the enticing scent of the stew she was cooking downstairs. She slipped to the bedside and made her usual inquiries about how Julia was feeling and gave the usual quick check to her bandage. Then she took up a hairbrush from the bedside table and gave Julia’s hair a quick fixing-up. “Much better, much better! Though I have to say, most of us would love to have hair that retained so much thickness and form after going unwashed for days. Me, my hair is a pancake against my noggin after a single night’s sleep. But look at you! All beauty and brightness no matter what.”

“It’s because I have such a good caregiver looking out for me.”

“It’s my delight, dear. It has brightened my week to have you with me, even under such dark-edged circumstances.”

“You spoil me, Claire. You truly do.”

“Oh! I almost forgot: The town dance was to be tomorrow night, but it has been put off for a week to make sure you have time to recover and take part. It was Mayor Holloman who came up with the idea, and the town fathers were quick to say yes. They want to give you special honor in the dance. The entire town sees you as a hero for the brave way you stood up to that thief in church, and how you fought so hard against that dreadful man who hurt you, and bested him.”

“I couldn’t have done so without your husband.”

“I want to ask you to tell him that. Not immediately, and not in any way that seems to be deliberate, if you know what I am trying to say. Just when you are having a conversation sometime.”

“Is something wrong?”

Claire sighed and looked across the bed and out the window. “It’s hard to know how to say it. His church was intruded by an armed robber while he was standing in the pulpit, and he did nothing to stop it. Then a little slip of a girl, armed with nothing but an offering plate and a steel nerve, brings the entire situation to an end. Then, when he finds that same slip of a girl being attacked and steps in to try to rescue her, as any good man would, it ends up being the girl herself who defeats the attacker. Very dramatically, I must say.”

“That would not have happened if Preacher Fulton hadn’t first pulled the man off me. I can assure you of that.”

“Let him hear you say it sometime.”

“I will.”

“Men have a certain kind of pride, you know. It is their greatest weakness, that pride. And with it goes some degree of cruelty. Men say things to one another to attack the pride of one another.”

“And local men have been gigging him for letting a female win his battles for him. Not that I’m saying I see it that way . . . I’m just trying to guess what is prompting you to say these things. He’s being mocked, isn’t he?”

“He is. And he tries to shake it off and say it doesn’t matter, that God despises pride in a man and he must shun it . . . but even so, even so . . .”

Julia sat up a little straighter, leaning back against the headboard. It hurt her much less this time to do it, and roused much less dizziness. When she was settled, she said, “Claire, Preacher Fulton is perhaps the finest man I’ve known. I give him credit for my life. And if this town plans to honor me in some public way, they’d best be prepared to hear me give equally public credit to the man who pulled a debaucher off of me, a man who very nearly killed me by throwing me down against the sharp edge of a hardwood table. I’ll not have anyone diminishing such a fine and brave gentleman on my account.”

Tears had actually formed in Claire’s eyes. “Thank you, dear. Thank you.”

A knock sounded downstairs, someone at the outer door. Claire jumped up and quickly wiped her eyes. “Another caller for you, I suspect. Are you up to another visitor?”

“Send them up. I can always influence people to leave by pretending to go to sleep, if I must.”

“Clever child, you are! Clever child!”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

The caller at the door was a man probably in his fifties, and he asked if he might have a chance to talk to his niece for a few moments. He gave his name as Cale Pepperday. Claire bid him wait a moment and dashed up the stairs.

“She says she’ll see you, and asked me to give you some privacy so you can talk about family. I told her of course it was all right. May I bring you some coffee up, Mr. Martin?”

“Fine as I am, ma’am. I’ll not be long with her.”

 

 

“So, girly, tell me how you are doing.”

“Well enough, I suppose. I tend toward headaches now.”

“From the size of that bedsheet folded up on your topknot, I’d guess you took a sizeably hard blow.”

“I lived through it.”

“And he didn’t.”

“I got him with pitchfork prongs.”

“You always were an enterprising one, child. When you were nine or ten, you were just like your mother was at that age.”

“Uncle Cale, did you know the man who hurt me?”

“Tell me his name. I ain’t heard it.”

“He called himself Wilfred Brody. He claimed to be a hired manhunter, sent to find me. Sent by Mother.”

Martin’s expression had changed the moment he heard the name of Brody. His teeth clenched together behind his thin and bewhiskered lips, a habit he had when angry, and one Julia had known since her childhood as Della Rose.

“Lying son of a bitch!” Martin growled. “Wicked devil, that man! Pure wicked!”

“Could it be true? He said she’d come out of her—”

“Listen to me, Della Rose . . . she’s gone. She passed on, peaceful they say, not long after you left.”

Tears rose and trailed down a beautiful face and across trembling lips.

“Sorry to tell you, girly. I reckon I should have told you before, but it’s been for so long as if she was dead anyway, there didn’t seem much call to distress you over it.”

“It’s all right, Uncle Cale. It is. If she’s gone, she’s gone, and like you said, she’s been gone a long time already.”

“I miss her. Fine woman, my sister was. But she married bad.”

“I know. Papa did wrong things. But you got to remember, Uncle Cale . . .”

“That I followed right along and joined in with him. Yep, I know that, girly. And now with Curry gone, here I am still doing it. Still planning to, anyway. That’s part of why I come to see you today. I got to learn where all this stands now.”

“I would think I could ask the same question of you.”

“You can. And I can tell you that on my end of things, we’re ready to go. We’ve just been waiting for you to come tell us when to get it started. And if this is going to be done, it can’t wait much longer. I know the cattle have been seen, by who I don’t know, but there’s been men spotted watching and looking. Raises a lot of questions for folks, I reckon. That ain’t your usual throwed-together herd of mavericks, most of them. Them’s branded cattle for the most part. All kinds of brands, but most bear the Heller brand. What’s going to happen is that somebody is going to decide what’s going on is some kind of big rustling operation. Or if they are savvy enough to know a bit of history, they may figure out the truth, that this is a stampeder plan.”

She nodded and said nothing.

“Let me just get right to the heart of it and ask you straight out, Della Rose: you still want to do this? We could turn them cattle back out loose on the plains as easy as you please, and go our way and be done with it. You’d have some mighty angry men on your hands, though. They see this one as something big, bigger, maybe, than most of what they did when your daddy was still leading them. They won’t turn away easy. Might not turn away at all, no matter what you say.”

Her manner changed when he said that. “Tell me what you mean by that.”

“All right. All right, I will. You ain’t going to like hearing it, I don’t think.”

“Talk!”

“Fine. Let’s just run through it from the start. What we’re doing here is getting ready to revive the Black Ears, and revive ’em big. This time with somebody different at the head of it all . . . you. Black Ear Skinner’s own born daughter, his pride and joy. Taking up what her daddy had to leave behind when a bullet caught him in Mason. And besides reviving the gang, we’re going to make us a piss-pot full of cash and gold, courtesy of Mr. Rich Man Carpetbagger Sam Heller of Hangtree, Texas. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“And we’re going to go about this from two . . . no, three . . . angles. We know that Heller ain’t a totally trusting man . . . he’s got lots of money but don’t trust banks to keep it all. So he puts only a part of it in the bank here. The rest he puts . . . well, nobody knows for sure. But the figuring is, if anybody could get Heller to let the cat out of the poke, it’d be a pretty lady who gets close enough to him. That being you.”

“Right.”

“Has that happened? Have you cuddled up enough with him to get him to talk?”

“We kind of got interrupted, you know.”

“By Brody, you mean.”

“That’s right. By Brody, and a smashed head.”

“Forget all that a moment. Let’s move ahead. The plan is, you find out where Heller hides his money that ain’t in the bank, and how to get to it. Second part of the plan, we stampede that big herd of cattle we’ve been collecting up out there right through this town and pound it to splinters. Meanwhile, with the town having its hands full with the cattle running everything and everybody into the dirt, we get into that bank and clean it out. Everything Sam Heller has becomes ours . . . property of the back-to-life Black Ears, and their leader, Della Rose Skinner. That’s the plan.”

“When you spell it out like that, it sounds . . . sounds . . .”

“Loco? Yeah, it does. Except that it’s been done before. Little settlement over in East Texas, stampede tore through it three years ago, just an accident . . . and while the town was getting run over, some smart old boys there got the notion of cleaning out the local bank vault, which was standing open when the cattle came through, and also the stock of a gunsmith shop and a silversmith, all in the same town. They did it, got away clean, and never got caught. Happened there, it can happen here, with the difference being that the stampede happens when and how we want it to.”

“If we can get all the advance work set up.”

“The cattle are in place. And skittish. It ain’t going to take much to stampede them. We got to get the rest of this in place, too, and move soon. And I mean real soon.”

“I can’t even stand up for long without holding to something for balance,” she said. “And lying up here in this bed I ain’t in much position to be galivanting around with Sam Heller to persuade him to tell me where he keeps his fortune.”

“Hate to say this to my own sister’s daughter, but if you can’t galivant around with Heller out there, maybe he can do some galivanting with you up here.”

She couldn’t believe what she was hearing, not out of moral offense, but because of the sheer impracticality of it. “Uncle Cale, you’d best remember what ‘up here’ is. This is the spare bedroom in the local preacher’s house. Neither Sam Heller nor anyone else is going to be allowed to come up here and ‘galivant’ with me in a parsonage bedroom.”

“Then you’d best be figuring up another way to go about it, and fast. The cattle ain’t the only thing getting restless out there. I got a bunch of men starting to ask why we really need a ‘play-pretty girl’ running this, anyway. They respect the memory of your father and the name of the Black Ears . . . but they don’t see that this couldn’t be done for the most part by them alone. Even if the money Heller keeps hidden somewhere is never found, there’s still enough money in the Hangtree Bank to make it worthwhile. And the stampeding you wouldn’t be part of, anyway. They can pick their time, run them cattle in, and get that bank robbed at gunpoint before the local law can even see through the stampede dust.”

“But that would be wrong. This isn’t just another bank robbery. This is for my father, for his memory and his legacy. It has to be led by a Skinner to mean what it should mean.”

Martin shook his head. “Girly, listen to your uncle. The men out there rode with your father and backed him up to the end. They were proud to be Black Ears with the original Black Ear himself. The point of all this being that they ain’t doing this for the same reasons you are. For you it’s family pride and a daughter picking up where her father was forced to leave off. For them, it’s a job. A strike. Money to be got. They ain’t going to wait much longer to reach out and take it.”

Her heart was racing in her chest and it was hard to breathe. For the first time she wondered if this was going to happen, at least with her involved. Everything felt like a train about to jump track, and she had no idea what to do about it. Not while she was still laid up.

“Brody’s fault, that’s what it is. If he hadn’t come along . . .”

“But he did come along, Della. Just a sorry devil your father made the mistake of hiring one time. And I reckon Brody must have took a shine to you, the wrong kind, and there you are.”

“Tell them it will be soon, Uncle Cale. Tell them to be patient just a little while longer, and keep a look out for trouble. And before you know it the ground will be shaking and cattle will be rumbling by, and what’s in that bank vault right now will be in their saddlebags.
Our
saddlebags.”

“I’ll tell them. I don’t know how much they’ll listen. There’s been talk lately of another way, maybe an easier way. There’s a banker, name of Caldwell. He’s in a position to be pressured. He could get us in, get us access to the vault . . .”

“Do what you have to, then. But remember who it is who is running this thing. And Uncle Cale . . . who is it who is stirring things up?”

“I ain’t going to say, girly. Nothing gained by it.” And without saying anything more, he was gone.

Julia felt very tired all at once. Closing her eyes, she fell asleep propped up against the headboard.

 

 

“What are you thinking, Cale?” asked Drew Toleen of Cale Pepperday after his return from visiting his niece.

“Drew, I hate to say it, but I don’t believe we’re going to be able to wait on her anymore. She says she wants to go on, but I don’t know. Something ain’t right. Maybe she’s got cold feet, or is getting religion, or just getting scared . . . but I think this thing is either going to be done by us, fast, or not done at all. Just my gut feeling, but I ain’t usually wrong.”

“When, then?”

“They got a big town dance coming up in two nights. I say let them dance theirselves ragged and crawl off late to bed, then hit the next morning when they’re still wore out. Get it done and get out of town.”

“What about the vault? How will we get it open?”

“It’ll be open. Don’t fret.”