The Lady and the Outlaw

by Joyce Brandon

  He shrugged. “I work in the Texas and Pacific’s main office—or I will—as soon as we get to Phoenix. I’m going to be Mr. Summers’s assistant. He’s right under Mr. Kincaid.”

  “Sounds like a very important position, monsieur.”

  The pink in his fat, muscular cheeks darkened again, and Leslie decided it was time to change the subject before John Loving, who looked very earnest, crawled under one of those hard wooden seats in embarrassment. “Tell me about this gang,” she said quickly. “Why are you so sure they left the guns?”

  “See those men using crowbars on the boxcar?”

  She leaned across Annette to peer out the window. “Yes.” She couldn’t actually see what they were doing, but assumed Loving was correct.

  “The bandits nailed the boxcar shut sometime before they stopped the train. There’s a posse inside. The gang always seems to know the important things ahead of time—as if they have inside information…”

  “Over here!” a masculine voice yelled from outside. By the stampede that followed, Leslie could tell they had found the guns.

  “What are they going to do now?” she asked, watching armed men on horseback jumping from the boxcar onto the ground.

  “Follow them, but they won’t catch them.”

  “How do you know that?” she asked, noting that John Loving had considerable admiration for the bandits.

  He shrugged. “The gang has too many friends. They don’t rob ordinary people, seldom hurt anyone, not even posses. They’re sort of looked up to—like modern-day Robin Hoods—especially by the Mexicans.”

  “Does the Texas and Pacific know you speak so highly of the bandits who rob their trains?” she asked, teasing him.

  Loving sneaked another look at Annette and nodded, his young face solemn. “Mr. Kincaid talks the same way, and he is the Texas and Pacific.”

  “Is he the one they were talking about? The one who offered that bandit a pardon and a job?”

  “Yes. The same.”

  “But why would he do that?”

  “Kincaid’s probably one of the richest men in the United States. I guess he considers it good business. He knows that some people resent the railroads for taking all the best land and that most ordinary folks admire men who can take some small part of it back.”

  “Do railroads really take land away from people?”

  “No, not really. Congress grants the railroad one square mile of land for every mile of track the company lays if they complete a stretch of track tying two towns together.

  “Kincaid built a line all the way from San Diego to El Paso. The company owns millions of acres of land now. And sometimes the land is occupied by a homesteader or a squatter who doesn’t want to move when the railroad takes possession. The railroad usually does what it can to help the people relocate, but sometimes nothing helps, and it ends badly. Some say the leader of the gang may have been one of the squatters who used to ranch around here.”

  “You sound like quite an admirer of Mr. Kincaid’s railroad.”

  “It’s hard not to admire such a visionary. I’m learning everything I can from him.”

  “I thought for a moment that you wanted to be just like that outlaw.” She laughed, completely recovered now from her earlier fright. “Who do you think is the gang’s leader?”

  “Some folks think it’s Clay Allison, a big, sandy-haired fellow with a loud, booming voice. This chap was more like Sam Bass, the Texas outlaw, soft-spoken with smooth manners. Allison is sort of a blowhard, and if it had been him, half the men on the train would probably have been shot or killed. Personally, I think it’s Ward Cantrell.”

  They were interrupted by the men climbing back into the coach, stamping their feet, cursing, and breathing hard from the exertion of running around searching for their guns. Smiling at Leslie, the one named Ben stopped beside Loving and put his arm around the young man’s shoulders.

  “Our boy giving you all the lowdown, miss?” he asked in a jocular manner.

  “Why, yes, he was telling me all about the Devil’s Canyon Gang…”

  “Don’t nobody know much about that gang. Leastways no one outside the gang. Myself—I reckon that yaller-haired fellow with the little chili pepper wench that we saw is the leader. I always usedta think it was Clay Allison till I got a look at him today. Reckon now that there was Ward Cantrell.”

  A third man stopped and joined the conversation. He was tall, lanky, with a face that looked like tanned leather.

  “Cantrell ain’t no train robber,” he said emphatically. “Cantrell is a gunfighter. I seen him once in Taos. Greased lightning. Killed three men ’cause they beat and robbed a friend of his—an old cripple man Cantrell took a likin’ to. The old man had a little money. Guess to them it was like smellin’ whiskey through the jailhouse window—couldn’t resist it! Killed ’em ’fore the last one cleared leather.”

  “Cantrell went up against Dodge Merril in Holbrook five years ago,” another man interjected. “Didn’t see it, but Cantrell walked away from that fight without a scratch. Cut the article out and saved it. You know how those damned reporters are always swarming around. They’s three of ’em in the lead Pullman coach right this minute, writing up a storm. Them slick eastern rags pay big money for stories about western bad men. I heard tell the New York Times has a half-dozen reporters don’t do nothing ’cept roam from town to town writing fast as they can.”

  Ben grunted in disgust. “I happen to know there’s a lot of men sidle up to them greenhorns that call themselves writers and fill them so full of bull…excuse me, ma’am, I mean hogwash.”

  “Well, yeah, they’s a lot of exaggeratin’ goes on, ain’t denying that, but when it comes to letting Judge Colt settle a dispute, I put my money on Cantrell any day. He don’t need to rob trains. Hell—’scuse me, ma’am—I heard they’s a man up in Wyoming paying a cool five hundred dollars a head for every blasted one of his enemies turns up dead, no questions asked. Cantrell could spend a couple weeks up there and ride away a right rich man.”

  “Like shootin’ fish in a tank for a man like him,” another man agreed, nodding his shaggy head.

  Breathing hard from exertion, a fourth man stopped beside Ben. “Hey, Ben,” he panted, “Allison died last year! A loaded wagon ran over his neck—broke it clean as a whistle. Died in Cimarron last summer.”

  Ben grimaced. “Coulda been Cantrell. ’Bout the same build. This feller was a towhead—so’s Cantrell.”

  “Naw! Didn’t you fellers get a look at ’em? Rigged like a puncher, he was, for comfort, not for looks. The top cover was a good Stetson; bandana was silk for ridin’ drag. I seen his saddle—it was low horn, rimfire, and there was a good rope hanging on it. I know a cowpuncher when I see his rig. Cain’t fool me! A good-looking, long-backed cowpuncher sittin’ on a high-forked, full-stamped Texas saddle with a live hoss between his legs is something I cain’t be wrong about. If he ain’t from Texas, he buys his rig there anyway,” he ended flatly.

  “Could be he just rigs himself real careful like so’s he don’t stand out in a crowd,” Ben said thoughtfully. “I seen a man once, California fancy man, he was. Custom-made boots with them extra long heels, silver spurs, packing a silver-plated forty-five Colt with a pearl handle. When the sun hit that feller he blazed up like a big piece of jewelry. Could see him for miles on a sunny day. Barrin’ Mexicans, he was the fanciest cow-dogger I ever did see. But he spent all his time admiring what a fine shadow he cast.”

  The train started to move, and the men headed toward their seats, still talking. “Yeah,” one of them said, “I seen Cantrell less than a month ago in Silver City, New Mexico, with one of the purtiest little chili pepper wenches I ever did see. Course, this little tamale he had with him today weren’t no slouch. If it was Cantrell, and I’d swear it was, I heard he got himself a hankering after the little chileñas, won’t even give the white girls a tumble.”

  A woman up front turned horrified eyes on the speaker, her thin face looking perman
ently shocked, then stared at Leslie as if she had somehow caused the offending conversation, before she gathered her young daughter into her arms, covering the girl’s ears with her hands. Leslie suppressed her own smile and spent the rest of the trip listening, most of the time to Annette, who was appalled by so many tales of murder and by how impressed they all sounded with an outlaw who was good at it.

  They weren’t yet off the train, and it was already apparent that this Wild West was all that the nickel novels and pulp magazines claimed it was—maybe more.

  For days Leslie had stared out the window, watching the West unroll before her disbelieving eyes. In the settlements they had passed through, she had seen tall, gaunt scarecrows of women wearing their dingy dark-colored frocks and their slat bonnets, and she could only imagine the deprivations that had brought them to look the way they did. On the farms laid out beside the railroad tracks she had seen women walking behind teams of horses, plowing long, slightly crooked furrows, staggering over clods of dirt. When the train passed, invariably the woman would straighten her back and lean on the plow, watching the train until it was out of sight, her face impassive. Each time, Leslie felt a lump in her throat, imagining herself in the woman’s place.

  She glanced out the window now and saw a small, square log cabin sitting like a blemish on the desert, surrounded by cactuses. There was a woman standing beside a large, round pot that hung over a small fire. Smoke curled up in a pale wisp around her, swirling her skirts. She was stirring her laundry with a long stick, and Leslie could see her look up at the train.

  Her own life in comparison had been almost leisurely. Thanks to her father’s generosity, she and her mother had been able to afford domestic help, leaving them free of daily drudgery so they could pursue their interests in art. Leslie had been born in 1869 while a wounded nation muddled through its reconstruction. She was nineteen now, and not much had changed. Black males were enfranchised in name only. Women were still holding conventions trying to secure the right to vote, and politicians were still plundering the nation’s resources while greedy investors made and lost fortunes.

  Leslie sat easily on the hard wooden seat, her slender back straight and proud. Annette stifled a groan and picked up her fan to wave it impatiently, wishing she had as easy a disposition as her mistress. Leslie Powers, lovely and talented, from a comfortable home, seemed to her to have lived a charmed existence, until recently. She had been the only child of affectionate, indulgent parents who were both dead now. Her father had gone west fifteen years before and had been killed four months ago in an accident on the ranch he owned with his brother. Leslie’s mother, an artist, well known for her vibrant landscapes, had died only three weeks before him when an abscess burst, flooding her system with poison. All this only two months before the end of the school year and her nineteenth birthday. Only Leslie’s boundless energy and fortitude had enabled her to struggle through those last weeks and to endure both losses with amazing strength for one so young. She had been quite close to her mother. They had shared an intimacy more common to sisters than to mother and daughter. While it had been obvious to Annette that Leslie was shattered inside, she had functioned with admirable competence.

  Just as she did now. Annette, who was an odd mixture of flat-footed common sense and hysteria, marveled at the younger woman’s even temperament and wondered what thoughts flitted through her mistress’s orderly mind as she gazed out the dust-coated window.

  Leslie swayed with the monotonous, undulating motion of the rail car. Her slender white hand left the smoothly polished mahogany armrest to pat impatiently with her limp handkerchief at her perspiring brow. For the hundredth time since she had left Wellesley, Massachusetts, for Phoenix, Arizona, she was questioning her sanity. When she had been safely at home, amid the customary refinement and ease of civilization as it was practiced in Wellesley, she had been bored by it. Now that she had experienced a taste of the Wild West, she was miserable from the oppressive heat and fully aware of the numerous opportunities for disaster.

  So far only the scenery had made this trip bearable and only then because she lived and breathed art. She saw the world not as a moving panorama but as a landscape. Riding a train through Kansas had been like floating across an ocean of tall, pale grass that stretched out endlessly.

  New Mexico, with its strange, vast, contorted rock formations, had thrilled and amazed her. Expanses of sterile, unblemished sand with enormous, fantastic crags jutting up into a cloudless blue sky—her mind groped for words to describe adequately the rock imagery of New Mexico, where massive monoliths dotted the arid tracts, rising up like decaying, abandoned castles.

  I must have been insane to come west, she thought. After all, she reminded herself, I didn’t come when my father was alive. Why did I come now? Because Uncle Mark had written that last letter, making it sound like he wanted and needed her? Was it his insistence or her mother’s memory that had started this journey?

  Leslie stared out the soot-coated window at the Arizona desert. If she had had a sketch pad, she would have been tempted to try to capture the fierceness and mystery of this wild, bandit-haunted landscape that spilled away from either side of the train…She would start with the clouds that hovered at the horizon, so white they looked like colossal cotton balls hanging over the sparse mountains. Then she would…

  As always happened when she was experiencing something that could be captured artistically, she wanted desperately to share the experience with her mother. But her mother, who had always seemed too fragile, was dead. In the last hour of her life, while Leslie had still denied that death could claim anyone she loved, her mother had insisted on talking instead of resting as Dr. Klein had advised.

  Now, over the monotonous clank-a-tee-clunk of the wheels against the tracks, Leslie could again see her mother’s dear, wan face, hear her mother’s voice edged with pain: “Leslie, I’ve never been a proper mother to you. My selfishness and fear kept you from knowing your own father. No, don’t stop me. I need to say these things. You need to hear them.” Her pale hand, so translucent that Leslie could see the blueness of the veins beneath the skin, waved her daughter’s protestations aside. “I was never good at self-sacrifice. I was an impatient mother. I wanted you to hurry and grow up so I would be free to paint.” She sighed as if words were an effort for her, but she stopped Leslie’s attempt to silence her. “I cheated you of your father’s presence; I cheated him of knowing you—all because of my painting…You paid a dear price for my selfishness…”

  “Mama, please, you’re perfect, Mama. No one could be a better mother than you,” she had whispered, meaning it. In her guilt, her mother had forgotten how much they had shared. Now Leslie rushed to remind her, only to be shushed into silence.

  “Hush, child. Listen,” she said urgently. “Don’t spend your life alone as I did. Don’t be so filled with fear that you cannot live life. You have wonderful, warm instincts. Use them. And forgive me if you can…”

  “Mama, please,” she said, the vacantness of her mother’s expression scaring her, filling her pounding heart with pain and helplessness. “I know you love me, Mama.”

  “It’s not enough. And now I’m dying before you even finish school,” she said, her eyes closing with the effort. “Now I am abandoning you.”

  “No, Mama, you’ll get well. I know you will.”

  “Leslie, go to him. Go to your father. You’re like him in so many ways. He was so bursting with life and energy, as you are. I should have sent you long ago. But I was selfish.” She patted her daughter’s head. “Promise me you will go.”

  “I promise, Mama. We’ll go together.”

  But her mother had died within the hour. Her father had answered immediately in response to her telegram, sending her money for necessary expenses and her transportation to Arizona. Part of her had wanted to go flying into his arms, but another part of her was too wrenched by her mother’s death. She had moved like a sleepwalker, unable to make any definite decision. Ten days lat
er word came to her that her father had been killed in an accident. Then he seemed little more than an image conjured from photographs, pieced together by words and phrases uttered by her mother. Now that the woman who had created him for her was gone, so was he. At times she wondered if he had ever existed at all.

  Wellesley College had graduated Leslie with honors, but she had barely noticed. It had taken four months for her to come to terms with her parents’ deaths. She and her mother had been unusually close, and in the end it was this closeness that had saved her. Margaret Powers’ love now rested inside her without that earlier sense of abandonment and rage. At last she had made peace with her mother’s legacy—she trusted life enough to risk again.

  Now, glancing out the window of the train with eyes dimmed by a mist of tears, she knew that Phoenix was only miles away. Annette, who had been crocheting, sighed beside her, and Leslie reached over and absently patted the woman’s hand. Annette had been her family’s cook, maid, and housekeeper for three years and a source of much comfort these past months. Her simple French-peasant mentality had been a godsend. While in the throes of depression, Leslie had agonized over every decision; Annette merely decided, typified by the look on her plump, cheerful face when Leslie had asked her if she would accompany her to Arizona. “Oui, mademoiselle, your maman would wish it.”

  Leslie sighed. Boston, New York, Wellesley were another world entirely, in no way similar to the barren sweeps of land that stretched away forever into dreamy ghostliness on either side of this wretched train.

  She picked up her reticule and used it to stir the tepid air. If the windows were open, soot and sparks flew in, filling her head with visions of burning passengers, but if the windows were closed, she could barely breathe. She cursed herself for packing her fan in one of her trunks, where it was completely useless to her. Then, irritated with herself for whimpering, she settled back and closed her eyes, determined that since she had initiated this “adventure,” she would endure it as stoically as possible.