Vengeance Trail (2 page)

Henry nodded his appreciation and gave the fat man and his two friends a final hard look before making his departure. Once
outside, the heat and light caused him to squint—seemed like if you lived in Texas, you spent a lot of time squinting.

He walked Ike down the street until he came to the Little Star. The bardog had been right; it wouldn’t hardly pass for a hotel
in anyplace except the Texas Panhandle.

Henry grasped the porcelain door knob and turned it; the whole door seemed to rattle in his hand as he opened it and stepped
inside.

A hunched-backed man was sitting on a three-legged stool near a smudgy window and holding a newspaper up to it in order to
see the print. He looked up and stared at the intruder through thick, wire-rimmed spectacles.

“Sompin I can help you with?”

“I’ll need a room for the night.”

The clerk’s mouth turned rubbery in its effort to smile. “Well now, you come to the right place, mister.”

“I hear it’s the only place.”

“That’s a born fact. You want a mattress with your room? A mattress will be two bits extry. You want to just toss down your
warbag, sleep on the floor, it’ll cost you less. Mattress’s is clean, though. I air ’em out ever week or so—no graybacks crawlin’
around in ’em, and they’s made of good shuck so’s to give a man comfort.”

“I’ll take a room and a mattress,” said Henry.

“Yes sir!” said the hunchback, putting down the paper and moving over to a small desk. “That’ll be one dollar and twenty-five
cent for room and mattress for the night.”

Henry dug the money out of his pocket, this time being less careful about pulling his duster back. The clerk noticed the big
Remington and the bulge of another pistol.

“You’re well heeled,” he said.

“It’s a hard country.”

The hunchback grinned. “It is indeed.”

“I’ll need care for my horse, is there a livery hereabouts?”

“Just up the street. Jesus Ortega knows horses like most men know their wives.”

“I’ll be back. Make sure all the ticks and bedbugs are shook out of that mattress. I don’t like sharing quarters.” The hunchback’s
eyes rolled behind the thick glasses.

Henry found the livery. An old Mexican dozed on a cane-bottom chair that had most of the cane frayed out.

“Hola,” said Henry, loud enough to stir the man from what ever place he had drifted off to.

The old man’s lids fluttered open and he rubbed one eye. He looked older than the land itself. The old man’s eyes went right
to Henry’s buckskin.

“Hees a fine animal, señor.”

“Sí. I want him watered, fed, and brushed down.”

“Right thees way, señor.” He lifted himself from the stool and led the way inside the stables. The old Mexican walked like
a man who hadn’t spent much time off of the back of a horse. His short, wiry frame included legs so bowled sheep could run
through them.

The interior of the stable was cool, the smell of horse and hay pleasant. The old man led them to an empty stall. Henry removed
Ike’s saddle and bridle and then spanked him inside.

“I’ll be here first thing in the morning,” Henry said as he slipped the old man a silver dollar. The old man looked at it
laying in his brown palm.

“I’ll take good care of him, señor.” Henry turned to leave when one of the horses caught his eye: A tall, long-legged sorrel.
He walked over and inspected the right flank of the animal. A welt of initials branded into the sorrel’s hide confirmed his
suspicions: JM.

“Who brought this animal in here?” he asked the old man.

“That is meester Ned Butcher’s horse, senor.”

“Where would I find this fellow, Ned Butcher?”

“Oh, he’s easy to find, senor. He’s big and round and he has oogly friends.” The old man spat brown juice and grinned.

“He jus’ went over to get himself a drink. He and hees oogly friends they like to drink and have a good time.”

“This fellow wear a big sombrero?”

“Sí, tha’s heem.”

The old Mexican wrangler saw the tall gringo shift the right side of his duster back, exposing the pistol on his hip as he
crossed the street toward the whiskey tent. He heard the clear ringing of the big spurs with each step the stranger took.

Henry Dollar checked the load in both pistols as he crossed the street toward the whiskey tent. Satisfied, he replaced them
in their holsters.

Ned Butcher and his two companions were hossing one another when Henry re-entered.

“I just found my friend’s sorrel over in the stables. The Mexican said it was yours!”

The three of them turned, their hands reaching for their pistols. Henry shot the fat man through the chest, the slug spanking
up dust and slamming him against the plank bar, his weight snapping the board and spilling glasses.

The quiet one had cleared his piece and snapped the trigger, but the move had been too quick and his shot went wide of its
mark punching a hole through the side of the tent instead of the ranger.

In a swift but deliberate move that took less time than a breath, Henry Dollar brought the Remington to bear on the tall man
whose own finger was pressing the trigger of his pistol for the second shot. The ranger’s slug tore through jawbone on its
way toward its final destruction. The tall man’s body fell atop that of his fat friend.

The ugly one had dropped his own pistol in fear and was scrambling for the scattergun that the bardog kept propped up against
the back wall of the tent. He swung it up, the twin black eyes coming to bear on the ranger, but it was way too late. The
ranger’s shot took him dead center, spinning him around. He crashed into the side of the tent, his hands clawing at the canvas
as he slid to his knees and then toppled over face down.

A smoking pistol in each hand, the ranger brought his gaze to rest on the only man left in the whiskey tent—the pock-faced
bardog. The man shoved both hands into the air.

“I just serve them liquor,” he stammered. “I ain’t married to them!”

The tent was filled with the acrid smoke of gunfire. The wind pounded against the canvas walls as though trying to get in.
Henry knelt next to each of the dead men and searched their pockets.

He found Jim McKinnon’s Texas Ranger badge in the vest pocket of the fat man. It had a smear of dried blood on it. Henry wiped
it clean and put it inside his own pocket.

He stood and eyed the sweating bartender.

“You take what ever money you find on them and use it to get them buried,” ordered Henry. “Send your burying man out west
of town to where a pile of rocks stand and have him dig a proper grave for that fellow there. Make sure he puts up a marker.”

“What you want it to say?”

“J.T. McKinnon. Texas Ranger.”

“That all?”

“That’s enough.”

Johnny Montana dreamt of rivers—rivers that raged and roared and overflowed their banks. He dreamt of being astride a horse,
trying to cross such a river. In the dream, the water tugs at his legs and keeps rising, churning, and swirling until it reaches
his waist. The water is cold, like ice, and hurts like needles piercing his skin.

He is in the middle of the river—the shore far away. He can feel the horse floundering beneath him, feel the panic set into
the animal’s flesh and then his own. And then, the water is separating him from the horse, unseating him and he desperately
tries to hold on.

The horse rolls over in the current, surfaces again, its eyes white with terror, and then is swept away downstream.

The turgid brown waters pull at him, his feet dancing below him trying to touch bottom, but there is no bottom. He regrets
that he never learned to swim, feels a great sadness along with the terrible, terrible fear, and the waters suck him under,
choking away his breath, choking away his hope.

He struggled awake, sat bolt upright in a start. The light inside the jacal was dim. Through an open
window on the east wall, he could see a thin blade of pearl light knifing across the horizon and realized that it was near
dawn.

His heart pounded wildly inside his chest; the dream had not left his mind.

A woman stirred on the bed beside him; the corn husk mattress crackled with every movement. He reached for her. She came awake
to his touch.

“What…?”

He shook his head and reached for the bottle of tequila on the chair next to the bed, uncorked it, put it to his lips, and
swallowed long and hard.

“It’s the dreams,” he told her. The tequila burned his lips. “I was dreaming about a river. I was drowning it, same as always.”

“It’s just a dream, Johnny,” she told him.

“Dreams have a way of coming true,” he said, his gaze focused on the dawn coming
through the small square window.

“My daddy told me dreams never do come true,” said the woman. She was pretty, her hair long and auburn, but dark in dim light.
She had milk white skin, small breasts, and slender legs. The sound of her voice carried with it the mellow sweetness of the
South. She raised her hand and stroked his hair, which was damp with sweat.

“Your daddy don’t know anything!” he told her, his voice edgy and tense. Dreams have a way of coming true, at least in my
family they do.”

He swallowed more of the tequila and sat up on the side of the bed, letting his feet dangle just above the earthen floor.
In spite of the hour, the air was warm and still.

He continued the litany on dreams: “All men who
live by their wits and their guns have it in them to read dreams. Jesse James had it. John Wesley Hardin had it, too. My family’s
got it, and I got it. Only a fool would ignore his dreams!”

She could smell his fear and it made her fearful, too.

“I tell you, Kate, I’m going to drown in a river someday, and there ain’t nothing going to save me when that day comes.”

She did what she could to calm him.

“You won’t die, Johnny, if we don’t cross any more rivers,” she told him.

“Don’t cross any more rivers!” His anger came out in hot, sour gasps. “Hell, woman, how are we going to travel if we don’t
cross any more rivers! This whole dern country is full of rivers!”

She was fully awake now. He could be mean to live with when he was upset. She touched the bare skin on his back with her finger
tips.

“We could just go around any rivers we come across,” she said, believing in the logic of it.

He swallowed more tequila and leaned back against the cool adobe wall of the jacal.

“Katie, I know you mean well, but there are some things you don’t know a thing about.”

“Like what?”

“Like crossing rivers. You just can’t go around every river you come up on—some of them dang things is hundreds of miles long.”

She knew he wouldn’t let the subject rest until a solution could be found.

“Well, maybe we ought to just find a place and settle down, someplace where we don’t ever have to worry about crossing rivers.”

“Well, maybe we ought to!” he told her, drinking the last of the tequila, feeling its fire in his throat.

“But, right now we can’t do that—we’re wanted all over the territory. Outlaws don’t just quit running and settle down when
they want to and not ever cross rivers again. Heck, we tried something like that, the law would be on us like ticks on a festered
hound.”

“What are we going to do then, Johnny?” she asked, feeling uncomfortable with what he was telling her. She was struck with
how much things had changed in the last three months, from the time she first met him until now.

“If you are afraid to cross rivers, and we can’t settle down, what are we going to do?”

“I didn’t say I was afraid to cross rivers,” he said bitterly. “I said, I hated crossing them. That’s a big difference.”

Johnny Montana was the handsomest man that Katie Swensen had ever met. He was tall and dark and sported a thin, neatly trimmed
moustache, and he had midnight black eyes. He was particular about his person; he shaved regularly, put rosewater in his hair,
and preferred clean shirts when he could get them, which wasn’t often because they were on the trail so much of the time.

It had all happened so suddenly, their meeting. She considered it destiny.

He had come into her daddy’s dry goods store where she clerked—Tallapoosa County, Alabama—to try on hats. He was leaning
toward a short-brimmed Stetson when he first caught her eye, and she his.

“How do I look?” he asked. He had a smile that would melt ice.

Later that same day, they found themselves eating ice cream in a small confectionery store named WENZE’S, and that was when
he had told her how pretty she was.

“Ain’t never seen anything like you,” he said. “A woman like you could steal a man’s heart without even trying.”

They talked until it had grown dark and then he walked her home. When he came again the next day to the store she wasn’t at
all that surprised. She was already in love with him.

“I guess I can be a pest,” he had said. And then he asked her a question that changed everything about her life.

“You planning on sticking around these parts the rest of your life?” She knew instantly that if he asked her to go, she would:
Men like Johnny Montana did not come through Tallapoosa County every day.

They left in the late hours of a warm evening, her daddy snoring in the other room. It all seemed like such a grand adventure.

It wasn’t until days later, after a few stickups along the way, that he told her about having killed a man back in Alabama.
The news cut her like a knife.

“He was just some ol’ pig farmer I got into a row with,” was the way Johnny Montana put it to her. “He may have been good
at raising hogs, but he wasn’t worth a tinker’s damn at gambling.” She wanted hard to believe him and to take his side in
it, but still it blunted something about the way she felt about him.

“Anyway, it don’t matter—it was a fair fight, everyone saw it, said so. I just wanted you to know that’s all.”

She wondered at the time why he told her. She came to understand more fully after she witnessed him pulling a robbery along
the road of man travelling alone and on horse back.