Dead Man's Return

by Derek Rutherford

  That was the thing about the Greek. He took no messing. Hell, he was as vicious as the worst of them. Landreth had seen him break a man’s arm, and he’d heard stories that the Greek had killed men, too. That’s why the job was so easy in the yard, even on the wildest of Saturday nights. Landreth had rarely had to do anything other than be there and be ready to back up the Greek.

  The Greek had sent young Kansas Joe to ride the fence line on the right-hand edge of the plain. Whichever way the spy rode, they’d get him sooner or later.

  But those three shots.

  They sounded awfully quick.

  Jim Jackson was tying his own bag to the back of the horse on which the thin guy had been riding when he saw the man bearing down on him from the east. The man, on horseback, was holding a revolver, and his face was pulled into an anguished grimace. He was no more than fifty yards away and even as Jim noticed him the man started to blaze away with his gun. Once, twice. Three times. The horse was at full gallop and Jim had no idea where the man’s bullets went. He dived onto the floor, and then scrambled to the other side of the horse, putting all that heavy horseflesh between himself and the rider.

  The man was screaming now.

  Jim risked a look around the back of the horse’s rump. He held onto the stirrup on his side of the horse with his left hand and said, ‘Easy boy.’ The horse was obviously used to gun fire, but he didn’t want it suddenly panicking, bolting off, and leaving him in plain sight.

  ‘Easy.’

  The man was thirty yards away.

  Now twenty.

  The man fired twice more, and this time Jim heard the whistle of a bullet in the air.

  Now the man was upon him, his horse bursting past the one that Jim hid behind. The rider heaving on the reins, the horse skidding, going down on his knees, finding its feet again in a cloud of dust, rising, turning, shrieking, and the rider twisting towards Jim, a young face full of wild anger, cursing Jim, his gun steadier now, and Jim standing with one hand holding his horse’s stirrup and the other resting on its flank, his own gun, picked up earlier from where he’d dropped it, back in its holster, where Jim had just moments before sworn never to use it again.

  The boy, for he looked no older than seventeen or eighteen, looked at Jim, called him a word that Jim wouldn’t even use himself, and pulled the trigger.

  Jim saw the flames and smoke explode from the gun.

  He felt the bullet punch him in the left-hand shoulder, spinning him back against the horse, and in the process freeing his right hand and his gun, which had both been pressed up against the horse.

  The boy squeezed the trigger again. This time there was nothing but a dry click.

  A look of panic flashed across the boy’s eyes. But then he blinked, dropped the handgun, and was already heaving a rifle from a saddle scabbard.

  Jim drew his revolver.

  He shot the boy in the chest.

  There was a look of surprise and disbelief on the boy’s face and then he fell backwards off the horse and was still.

  Ike heard more shooting. Lots of shooting. One, two, three. Four, Five. A pause, then six.

  And seven.

  He’d lost sight of the men on the plain earlier, but that was OK as he knew where he was headed. Now he paused on the edge of the tree line looking out over the grasslands, his stomach churning.

  There was nothing to see. Not from here.

  He was going to have to ride into the open.

  Jim Jackson wept silently and without realising it, as he finished tying his belongings to the thin man’s saddle. He wept as he reloaded his gun. He was still weeping as he mounted the horse and called for her to run.

  He was aware that there was a fourth man out there, just as he’d been aware that there had been a third man. But the way he was feeling he might just let the man shoot him and have done with it all, the agony, the guilt, everything.

  Killing the first two had left him numb and unable to think.

  Killing the third had filled that emptiness inside him with a terrible searing guilt.

  His shoulder burned and pain radiated out like flames from a fire. It was good pain. It was pain he deserved. He could feel the blood soaking his shirt. Let me bleed, he thought. Maybe he even said it aloud. He wasn’t sure.

  Then he told himself that it was them – they had been shooting at him. They had shot his horse. And in this new world that he found himself, had he not done what he did, then it would have been third time unlucky. He’d be dead.

  Yet the argument, and the resolutions he’d made about third time unlucky before the killings, didn’t stop the anguish in his heart or the churning in his belly. If one could drown in guilt, he thought, then I’d be at the bottom of the Missouri, and then some.

  The internal argument raged as he rode north, bleeding and crying, weakening from blood loss and not caring about a fourth man – if that man appeared then so be it. And he watched himself from afar, as if somehow his soul had become separated from his body.

  Maybe it has, he told himself.

  Maybe it has.

  Ike Landreth found the Greek’s body, and not far away was Kansas Joe lying with his eyes open, a look of surprise on his young face as if he couldn’t believe that the world didn’t do just as he asked, which was the way back in the yard because everyone knew the Greek had Joe’s back. But out here nobody had told that to the rest of the world.

  There was a dead horse, too. Not a horse that Landreth recognized.

  And over there, was Slim.

  Slim’s horse was gone, the other two horses were standing a few yards away, not grazing, just standing there looking as if they couldn’t believe it either.

  Landreth realised there were tears on his cheek.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.

  He looked to the north. There was still dust in the air. The day had become still. Still enough that a man could follow that dust trail if he was quick. And if he cared to.

  But he looked back at the bodies of his friends and he knew that he didn’t care to track the man that had done it.

  He would tie the bodies to the horses and he would take them back to the yard.

  And after that, who knew?

  Chapter Ten

  ‘My God,’ Leon said.

  He was back in their camp, hidden in the woods, up against the protection of the rock face. There was a fire burning, with a pot of coffee standing on the flat rock overhanging the flames, and a rabbit carcass skewered on a stick roasting above the flames. Leon’s bedroll was unrolled, ready for the coming darkness.

  Jim Jackson eased his horse – a different horse, Leon noticed – to the edge of the camp where Leon’s horse was eating grass.

  Leon leapt to his feet and just made it across to Jim before the latter slid sideways off his saddle. Leon caught Jim and lowered him to the ground.

  Jim grunted in pain, looked up at Leon, and smiled.

  ‘How’s the cough, partner? You cured?’

  ‘Seems to me you’re the one needs the doctor. My God, what happened?’

  Leon helped Jim to his feet and then supported him across to the fire.

  ‘You’ve been shot.’

  ‘Bullet went straight through,’ Jim said. ‘I was lucky. Not what I deserved.’

  ‘Let me look.’

  Leon undid Jim’s jacket and shirt. Jim shivered in the cooling shaded air. Leon washed the wound. It was still seeping a little blood, but already the worst of the wound, both front and back was congealing. If Jim could lie still for long enough he might be OK. With nothing to clean or bandage the wound with, all Leon could do was redress Jim and have him lie down as close to the fire as he could. He gave Jim coffee and rabbit meat.

  ‘I didn’t catch it. I bought it from a feller on the way out of Austin.’

  ‘You didn’t get recognized then.’

  ‘We need to take you there.’

  ‘No. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘What happened, Jim?’

  ‘W
here’s Rosalie?’

  ‘Rosalie will be here tomorrow. Maybe the day after. She’s spending the time with her sister.’

  Jim looked up at Leon with questions in his eyes.

  ‘She’s fine. I’m fine.’ Although even as he spoke Leon was trying desperately not to cough. The way the consumption was now, once he started he was finding it harder to stop. Vegetables and milk, warm dry weather, and rest. So much for any of that.

  Jim’s eyes closed.

  ‘I shot them,’ Jim said. ‘Three of them.’

  Leon covered him with a blanket.

  ‘Who.’

  ‘Don’t know. They were shooting at me first.’

  ‘Then it’s nothing to feel guilty about.’

  ‘You weren’t there.’

  ‘I know you, Jim.’

  Jim’s eyes flickered open. ‘I’m not sure I know myself anymore.’

  That night Jim flickered in and out of consciousness. Leon sat awake feeding the fire and, during his partner’s lucid moments, feeding Jim warm roasted rabbit and hot water, coffee and biscuits. In the morning he checked the bullet wound in Jim’s shoulder. A night of lying reasonably still meant the bleeding had stopped. But there was no doubting Jim had lost a lot of blood. His shirt was as hard as leather where the blood had soaked in and dried.

  ‘You want to talk about it?’ Leon asked at one point.

  ‘No,’ Jim said, but half an hour later, his eyes closed, he started mumbling about how they shouldn’t have shot his horse. They shouldn’t have been shooting at him. What was a man to do? Sooner or later a man’s luck would run out, Jim said, and so that man had to come out shooting.

  Leon knew that Jim had lost a horse before, one of which he had been extremely fond. The horse that had carried Jim in endless scouting missions as he had tried to figure out a way of getting Leon out of prison. Maybe that had been the trigger. Hell, most men would come out shooting if you killed their horse.

  And if the guys were shooting at Jim himself, what did they expect? Leon recalled their days more than ten years before when they had brought trains to a halt by putting great logs or rocks on the tracks and how Jim had walked through the carriages, never ever needing to use his gun in anger, but once or twice drawing and firing at lightning speed, maybe shooting a hole in the centre of a clock or a face on a poster. Just enough to make everyone aware of how good he was. Then they’d collect their hard-earned stealings.

  Those horsemen, whoever they had been, would have had no idea of who they were dealing with.

  Leon stood up to get another log from the pile he had built up. He coughed into his hand, then he spat blood out into the undergrowth. The pain in his chest was worsening. When he coughed now it felt like there was a rusty blade in his throat. It was one thing the doc telling him to eat well, rest, and find a warm dry climate. It was another thing to actually be in a position to do those things.

  ‘Maybe they only wanted to talk,’ Jim said.

  Leon turned. The low flames gave the stones around the fire an orange sheen, but by the time the light got to Jim it had turned grey.

  ‘They don’t shoot your horse if they just want to talk.’

  But Jim’s eyes were closed. He was dreaming or hallucinating.

  ‘Same as the boy in the woods,’ Jim said, and his face contorted, not in pain, but with a bad memory.

  ‘You had no choice,’ Leon said. But wasn’t he just like that doctor? Giving advice that the recipient was in no position to take?

  He put a log on the fire and pulled the blanket tight around his own throat. The morning felt damp and even breathing was starting to hurt now.

  ‘Someone’s approaching,’ Jim said.

  Leon took up station behind some trees on the far side of the camp, and Jim, sitting up now, had his Colt already drawn beneath the blanket that was wrapped around him.

  Then they heard Rosalie singing quietly, her voice sweet and tuneful.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said, stopping her horse where the other horses were tethered and grazing, letting them nuzzle each other in greetings.

  Jim heard her say to one of the horses. ‘You’re new. Where did you come from?’

  She stepped into the camp.

  ‘What on earth. . . .’

  She ran to Jim and went to hug him, but his expression stopped her. She pulled back the blanket and saw the blood, the gun. She looked at his face and saw the pain and the paleness beneath his beard, and the blue and purple bruises that John Allan had given him.

  She looked across at Leon.

  He looked equally as tired as Jim. There was blood on his chin of which he was unaware.

  ‘I . . . I. . . .’ She fumbled for words.

  ‘Morning,’ Jim said, and smiled.

  ‘I leave you boys for two days,’ she said. ‘And look what happens.’

  Rosalie had bought two new shirts in Austin, a pair of new pants, too. She told the men how Roberta has wanted her to buy blouses and skirts, fancy shoes.

  ‘She was horrified when all I bought – well, she bought them as a present – were trousers that, in her words, a man would wear. And the shirts are actually men’s shirts. I think she was trying to seduce me into staying in the city.’

  Rosalie tore her old shirt into several strips. She soaked one torn sleeve in warm water and washed Jim’s wound best she could, then she made two compresses out of the rear of the torn shirt and bound these in place. One of her new shirts fitted Jim, so they threw his blood-soaked shirt on the fire, where it flared and smoked and smelled like something evil had inhabited it.

  She’d brought food again, including meat, vegetables and a bottle of milk (‘for Leon’), and she rustled up a dinner that Jim said wouldn’t have been amiss in a restaurant.

  ‘When did you last go to a restaurant?’ Rosalie asked.

  ‘The day after I met you,’ he said, smiling.

  Jim told them what had happened, unaware that he’d already told Leon much of it, of how he’d been sitting staring at Beecher and Smith’s operation, simply letting his mind wander, when the men had come after him.

  ‘Who are they?’ Leon said. ‘I mean, Beecher and Smith? I know who they are. But. . . you know, who are they?’

  ‘I don’t know. But it’s all connected.’

  ‘Could they have recognized you?’

  ‘I don’t see how. I was a long way away. And as far as I know I’ve never met them in my life.’

  ‘I’ve got some news,’ Rosalie said. ‘From Andrew.’

  ‘Who’s Andrew?’ Jim asked.

  ‘Andrew,’ Leon said, ‘is Rosalie’s sister’s boyfriend. He knows some Texas Rangers.’

  Jim thought back to a conversation that Leon and he had had a few days previously. He looked at Leon and then back at Rosalie.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘They want to meet you,’ Rosalie said. ‘The Texas Rangers. One of them, anyway.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Jim said. ‘I’m a wanted man. We’re all wanted.’

  ‘Hear me out.’

  ‘OK. I’m listening.’

  ‘Andrew – Roberta’s boyfriend – said that the Texas Ranger concerned is a man by the name of Will Baker.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Andrew said he would vouch for Baker’s honesty and integrity. He assured me that if Baker made a promise to meet you under a flag of truce, as it were, then he would honour that.’

  A pulse of pain came from Jim’s shoulder. He grimaced.

  ‘I’m to trust a lawman because a fellow I’ve never met, and am unlikely ever to meet, says the lawman is trustworthy. Hell, he doesn’t even know anything about me. About us.’

  ‘Yes he does,’ Leon said.

  ‘What have you two been plotting?’ Jim said. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and laughed thinly. ‘I’m sorry. My shoulder hurts. I feel like hell. Go on. I shall listen with open ears and an open mind.’

  Leon said, ‘I told him that Sam McRae knew something. And I told him that the Ranger that wa
s killed on that train ten years ago—’

  ‘More.’

  ‘Well, I told him ten years.’

  ‘You’ve met him, this Texas Ranger?’

  ‘I wrote a letter.’

  ‘How did I miss all this?’

  ‘You were out getting shot,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘And shooting,’ Jim said. He pursed his lips as if the thought needed further consideration.

  ‘I told him there was something about that Ranger on the train. That it wasn’t random.’

  ‘And he wants to meet you,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘Just me?’

  ‘He said, one to one would probably seem fairest to you.’

  ‘Where and when is this meeting?’

  ‘Tomorrow at noon. There’s a flatland not far from here – it’s coincidence, he doesn’t know where we’re camped. Are you going to be strong enough?’

  Jim closed his eyes. He nodded to himself. They were good people, Leon and Rosalie. He’d gone riding down there, looking at Beecher and Smith directly and had ended up close to being killed and having to kill men just to escape. And they, his friends, carefully and subtly came at it from a different and far better direction.

  ‘I’ve never felt better,’ Jim said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Washington Smith said, ‘Wire Abraham. Tell him to come.’

  Charles Beecher looked at Evelyn and nodded. She wasn’t waiting for any go ahead from Beecher – she was Smith’s secretary and would do what she was told – but Beecher could see hesitancy in her eyes. Neither of them had ever seen Smith so mad, so incensed.

  Evelyn went out and closed the door.

  Smith turned to Beecher.

  ‘What’s going on? What the hell is going on?’

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ Beecher said. ‘Landreth reckoned the Greek was shooting at that fellow first, whoever he was. Hell, Washington. There’s probably not a man working for us who wouldn’t shoot to kill you if you were shooting at him first. Doesn’t mean anything’s going on.’