While he was considering his options and vaguely wondering Why didn’t I just kill this Indian while I had the chance? the boy cleared his throat. McCulloch set down his coffee cup and stared over the fire as Wooden Arm moved his hands. Why are you in these hills?
How he managed to sign with a busted arm splinted in two places amazed the former Texas Ranger.
McCulloch answered honestly. I seek mustangs.
Why?
Comanches like horses, McCulloch thought. He signed, I like horses. They make me rich. Like Comanches.
The boy laughed.
McCulloch drank more and ate the last of the bear meat on his plate.
The boy signed, I can help you.
McCulloch blinked. Help me do what?
I know horses, too. I am Comanche. No one knows horses better than Comanches.
McCulloch nodded with honesty. That is true. Comanches are the best horsemen on the plains.
I will help you.
Now, McCulloch shook his head. No. Your arm is—
Quickly signing, the boy did not let him finish. A Comanche with one arm is better than ten Texans when it comes to capturing wild mustangs.
Actually, McCulloch didn’t think Wooden Arm used the word Texans. It seemed more like skunks, but he figured Texans had to be the general idea.
As McCulloch tried to think of a way to respond, Wooden Arm signed, You save my life. I must repay my debt.
McCulloch pointed at what passed for the grave of the two dead scalp hunters. You have repaid your debt.
The boy shook his head. Then he smiled and said in Comanche while signing. Then we will be like brothers. You and I will find mustangs. We will become rich. Together.
And in English, Wooden Arm said, “Is right.”
Staring harder, McCulloch wondered how much English this little Indian knew, but Wooden Arm spoke to end McCulloch’s suspicion. “Is right. No mas.” Then he signed, I can speak ten words in the Kiowa tongue, but with these hands, I speak all languages. As do you.
McCulloch brought the coffee cup up, lowered it, and looked over at the two horses. Like that was a sign. Two horses. A Comanche. A Comanche on horseback didn’t need two arms to help work a herd of mustangs. A Comanche could likely find a horse herd faster than McCulloch could alone. And two men, even if one of those men was a boy, would have an easier time driving wild mustangs back to his ranch outside of Purgatory City. Yeah, it was a gamble, but something about it struck McCulloch as right.
Never being one to count those chickens—he knew that plans and dreams often broke like eggs—McCulloch couldn’t help but believe that he might be able to pull off this crazy idea after all.
He nodded. “Is right,” he said, and lifted his hand toward his new partner. They shook the Comanche way first, and then they shook like way of the white Texans.
Wooden Arm grinned, raised his head to the blackening sky, and howled like a coyote.
CHAPTER NINE
Linton had been a scalp hunter since he had first heard about how the Mexican government in towns close to the American border would pay a handsome amount of money for an Apache or Comanche scalp. In all those years, what had it gotten him—other than a lot of money that he usually spent in two or three nights? A dapple horse. A suit of buckskins. Some disease he never brought up, especially to the prostitutes he paid. Fading eyesight. A bad scar across his back. A bullet that the sawbones in Nogales hadn’t been able to dig out of his left knee. And two pards, Bert and Fisher, neither one worth a lick of salt.
“What about Amigo?” Bert asked as they rode into Two Forks, a settlement where horses could be traded, whiskey could be drunk, and a man might be able to rest a spell without answering any questions.
“He’s dead,” Linton answered.
“You sure?” Fisher asked.
“Maybe you boys want to ride back to the Davis Mountains and see for yourselves.” Linton’s knee hurt for he had been riding a long damned time. His horse was as played out as his two pards.
“How about Greasy?” Fisher asked.
“Oh, he’s definitely dead,” Linton said. “Saw the Ranger’s bullet hit him.”
“Hell,” Bert said. “Now that Texas star packer’s gonna collect the bounty on that Comanche kid.” He leaned out of the saddle and pointed, shaking his finger at Linton the way that schoolteacher did him back in Corpus Christi. “It’s yer fault, Linton. You said taking that little kid’s scalp would be easy pickin’s.”
Partners come easy, and Linton considered killing Bert but then he’d have to kill Fisher, too. He was the kind of person who would turn state’s evidence to avoid getting his necked stretched.
“Did I ever tell you about the schoolmaster I had back home down south years and years ago?” Linton didn’t wait for one of his two surviving pards, each of them a damned fool, to answer his question. He never waited. “I had my pa’s razor, and I cut that man’s finger off.” He laughed at the good memory. “That sent Juliette Jameson and all the other ten kids in that school outside screaming their heads off. And then I used that razor to cut that rotten apple’s throat. Boy, I’d never done that before—cut a man’s throat like that, is what I mean. Could hardly believe how much blood poured out of that little slit I’d made. And before the light died in that schoolmaster’s throat, I tried to use the razor to take the lowdown skunk’s scalp. Didn’t get much. Didn’t even keep it. Just dropped it on his paddle.” He nodded with pleasure. “That was the first time I tried to take a scalp. Can’t call it my first scalp because, well, hell, boys, I wasn’t no more than thirteen.” He laughed and climbed out of the saddle beside the stone fortress that made up all there was to Two Forks, except for a few lean-tos, a lot of corrals, and two buildings that passed for barns out in that part of the frontier.
Bert and Fisher remained on their horses.
Linton tilted his head to the door that led to Two Forks’ sole place of business. “You boys ain’t thirsty?”
Bert shook his head, pouting like Linton’s brother used to do after Linton has whipped the kid’s arse.
Fisher said, “Bert and me don’t believe in not avenging the death of a pard.”
“Two pards,” Bert said.
Linton frowned. “You want to go back after that Ranger and that Indian. For a kid’s scalp that’ll bring us twenty-five pesos? That’s not a hundred. That ain’t my idea of good business, boys, but if you want to go, turn around and look. Look up at that ridge over yonder way. Not that way, you damned fools, back where we was comin’ from.”
They looked.
“What do you see?” Linton asked.
“You mean that little bit of smoke?” Fisher answered with another question.
“Exactly.”
“That might be that Ranger’s campfire. Might be he’s takin’ care of Amigo, if that greaser’s still alive,” Bert said.
“That’s Comanche smoke, boys.”
“Well,” Bert said, “Maybe the boy kilt the Ranger. And is roastin’ him for supper. Then we can ride back to that little valley and kill the buck and get his scalp.”
Linton stepped back. “Is that what you want to do, boys?”
He waited.
Fisher and Bert glanced at one another, and Bert was the first to bob his head. Fisher nodded, too.
Linton sighed and said, “Look, boys. That Ranger knows what we look like, so scalp huntin’ ain’t gonna be such a good way to make a livin’ in this part of Texas. My plan is to ride north. They’ll be lookin’ for us south. Ride up to the Panhandle. Might run across some Comanche camps. Then cut across New Mexico.”
He grinned. “They pay for bounties in Sonora, down south of Arizona Territory. I met me a fine girl down in Nogales years back, meanin’ Nogales south of the border. In Mexico. We can collect a passel of scalps and sell them to whatever they call the mayor in those Mexican towns. And here’s the real genius of my plan.”
He paused, liked his idea, and said, “Do you know what you’ll find in Mexico a
nd Arizona?” Again, before they could think of an answer, which undoubtedly would be wrong, Linton told them. “Mexicans. Nothin’ but Mexicans.”
He laughed again. “And do you know somethin’ ’bout Mexicans? I never paid that much notice before. Here we know a lot of those greasers, like Amigo, and he would have frowned upon it had he knowed it was somethin’ I been thinkin’ about. But now that Amigo’s burnin’ in Hell, I got no reservations.” Linton thought they might have figured out his scheme, but their faces told him that had not happened, and would not happen.
So he told them. “Mexican hair can’t be told apart from Apache or Comanche hair. We kill us some greasers, scalp ’em, and make their topknots look like it come off some Apache or Comanche buck. Boys, it’s a lot easier to kill a Mexican peon than it is to kill a Comanche Dog Soldier.”
“Dog Soldiers,” Fisher pointed out, “Is Cheyennes. Not Comanches.”
Linton shook his head and asked, “Well. You boys comin’ in? I’ll buy the first two rounds.”
Again, he had to wait for the two imbeciles to look at each other. They shook their heads, frowned, and told him, “Sorry,” at the same time.
Bert continued. “I don’t think I could kill no Mexican who ain’t done me no wrong.”
“And,” Fisher said, “To be honest with you, I’m sort of sick to my stomach about what all we been doin’. I guess seeing Amigo and Greasy cut down in the prime of life, just make me see the light.”
Linton nodded. “Well, boys, if that’s your play, that’s your play.” He gestured, though, again at the smoke rising from the hills. “But you better take a good long look at that before you ride back to check on two dead men.”
They turned in their saddles and stared at the smoke.
Linton shot them both out of the saddles. Their horses bolted, but only for about twenty yards, so worn out they were. Three men came out the door, but Linton grinned at them and said, “They pulled on me, boys. Thought they could take my scalp and pass it off down below the Rio Grande as a Comanche buck’s. Never could stomach a scalp hunter. You boys help me bury them varmints, and I’ll let you keep their horses. Worn out, but a little rest, a lot of water, and some hay and they’ll be good as new.”
He wasn’t sure if Fisher or Bert really planned to go back after their now-dead-as-they-were pards, or if they might have planned to go to the law and try to collect the reward on Linton. But the main reason he shot and killed them both was that he figured it would be easier to find men who wouldn’t mind being scalp hunters in New Mexico and Arizona. And well, if those two men got arrested by that hard-rock Texas Ranger who had killed Amigo, or any sheriff, marshal, or bounty hunter . . . they would likely give a complete description of Linton. Pards weren’t like they used to be.
Hell, he thought, they never was a pard a man could trust.
But in Two Forks, a man minded his business. He could have a whiskey and be on his way. He’d head up north, just like he told those two corpses stiffening on the dirt. Maybe stop in Five Scalps. Then ride west.
CHAPTER TEN
“You gutless puke.” Sean Keegan cursed the undertaker. “How much does the county pay you to bury a convicted murderer and owlhoot?”
Undertaker A. Percival Helton wiped his bald head and said in his irritatingly squeamish voice, “That’s not the point, sir.” He was a short man, pale like most undertakers were, but pudgy unlike most of the men who did business with the dead. Maybe that’s because undertaking still proved to be a booming business in the remote frontier of West Texas, and a man could get fat if he ate nothing but chicken fried steaks and greasy enchiladas.
“It damned well is the point,” Keegan said, and he pointed up at the dead man still swinging from the gallows. “He’s dead, and he needs burying, and from the records I found in the county sheriff’s office, you signed a contract to bury Tom Benteen, also known as Tom Lovely, alias Lovely Tom. Well, that’s him up yonder, you weasel, and I don’t like folks walking by and looking up at him like he was the Lord Jesus on the cross. He ain’t. He’s a rotten, murdering devil whose soul be burning in hell, and I want him cut down and buried. Now. With the rope still around his neck and his face planted down, so he can see exactly where he’s going.”
“That contract,” A. Percival Helton whined, “Has been invalidated. It wasn’t a legal hanging.”
Keegan spit on the grass. “He was to be hanged today. Sentenced legally, upheld by the governor of the Great State of Texas, and he was hanged. Just because the hangman got killed—”
“And there you have it.” The high-voiced, rotten snake had found something he could sink his teeth into. “The Benteens shot the bloody hell out of Purgatory City, and I am far, far too busy preparing the dearly departed for their funerals. Citizens of our county and our glorious town. They deserve burying, and, as the only undertaker in Purgatory City since Willard Carradine coughed himself to death from consumption and Alfred Davidson decided that El Paso was more to his liking, I think my duty rests with tending to the needs of those fine people.” And just to cut Sean Keegan to the quick, the whining miserable excuse for a man added, “Surely, Titus Bedwell, gallant soldier and God-fearing servant to our state and our county and our country, deserves my attention much more than a pathetic killer, whoremonger, bank robber, arsonist, and horse thief like Lovely Tom Benteen. Or, sir, do you disagree?”
Keegan stared hard into the little pipsqueak’s eyes, but damn it all to Dublin if the runt hadn’t made a solid point. It was a dirty trick, a hit below the belt, and Keegan had the urge to pick up a rock and smash in A. Percival Helton’s skull, and let the ants eat up the brains that would leak out of his head. But . . . well hell, he could not deny giving the late Titus Bedwell the attention a soldier and servant to the army and Texas deserved. Even if Titus Bedwell, had anyone bothered to have asked him, would likely have said he would have wanted to be buried by his fellow soldiers where he had fallen, wrapped in his saddle blanket and with “Taps” played over his grave. No marker. No tears. Just a few rounds at the nearest sutler’s store or saloon when the boys got back from the sergeant major’s last patrol.
Keegan, though, would not let Helton think he had fooled him. “You just don’t want Uncle Zach Lovely or Hank or Bob Benteen to come gunning for you because they’ll say you didn’t bury poor Tom right. You’re a gutless wonder, Helton. You still live with your ma. What kind of man are you? The Benteens and Zach Lovely aren’t gonna be gunning for you, you yellow-livered coward. They’ll be after my head.” He pointed at the corpse. “I did that. Me. Sean Keegan. And I’d do it again.”
The last couple of dozen words had been spoken to the fat coward’s back. A. Percival Helton was leaving the enclosed compound behind the county courthouse.
This was the way Keegan’s day had been going. The sheriff, Juan Garcia—a pretty good man, Keegan though—had organized a posse and taken off after the men who had raided Purgatory City and left Titus Bedwell and several others, including town marshal Rafe McMillian, and the hangman, poor Mr. Kligerman, dead in the streets. All of the Texas Rangers, commanded by Captain J.J.K. Hollister, had taken off after learning that the Kruger gang had tried to rob a bank down the pike in Deep Flood.
Even the army at Fort Spalding would be of no help. Colonel John Caxton had led out practically his entire command in search of renegade Comanches who had been hitting a few homesteads, ranches, and way stations across West Texas.
Purgatory City had suddenly become a town without any law.
That though—and the fact that the posse Sheriff Garcia had quickly and thoughtlessly organized contained most of the hardest men in the county seat—suddenly stretched a wicked little grin across Keegan’s rough, Irish face. It was the grin his mother, God rest her glorious soul, always said made her realize that “Ye have that devil’s loose and cutting look about you, Sean, me son. Oh, I hope I’ll have enough money to go your bail in the morn.”
He looked again at the corpse stiffening under the ro
pe and said as he walked out of the enclosed executioner’s grounds, “Aye, Mother me dear, but there’s no need to worry this fine Texas day. For there be no one in town who can arrest Sean Keegan.”
Inside the jail, he went to the desk and found the tin stars in the third drawer he opened. He pinned on a deputy’s badge and nodded with satisfaction. Seeing a Bible, he put his hand on the cover and raised the other, though for the life of him, he couldn’t remember which it was supposed to be. Right hand raised, left hand on the Bible? No, the Bible be the most important thing, so your right hand should be on it, then your left hand raised. Unless you’re left-handed. Which Sean Keegan wasn’t.
“I do,” he said and walked out without closing the door. It was his town now, and he could do as he wished.
His first stop was at the best general store where he went directly to the back of the store and found the kerosene. Two should do the job. He walked to the counter, set the two gallon cans on the top, and nodded at the pimply-faced teenaged clerk. “These ye’ll need to be charging to the county, me boy,” Keegan told him, and then pulled up his blue shirt to reveal the badge. “Official business from the sheriff’s office, ye see.”
“Uhhh,” the kid said.
“That’s a good boy. Just send the bill to Sheriff Garcia.” He reached for the cans, but stopped, and pointed. “And ye might as well hand me that bag of candy. Charge it to the county, too. Oh, and I’ll need a box of matches, and, yes, yes, of course, two of those cigars. Nah, nay, sonny. Those big, fat ones, with the gold band around their middles. Official business, too. And, sonny, I can’t see the label, but does that hair tonic above the licorice say it has alcohol in it? Good. Bloody well good, yes, a bottle of that, and take a bit of licorice for yourself and your service to our county. I’d recommend the red one. Tastes like cherry.”
He signed the receipt, so that no one could be able to tell if it had been approved by Juan Garcia or Wild Bill Hickok, gathered his plunder, stuffing the candy and matches in his trousers pocket, biting off the end of one cigar and sticking the other in his shirt pocket, and shoving the bottle of hair tonic into his rear pants pocket. He used the lamp on the counter to light his smoke, thanked the clerk one last time, and picked up his two cans of kerosene before marching to the front door.
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