There were tumbleweeds banked against the side of the barn and caught under the water trough in the corral. This place had been a long time alone.
The dry steps of the house creaked under his weight. The closed door sagged on its hinges, and when he tugged on it they creaked protestingly, almost rusted into immobility. Yet when the door opened, his boot rested on the step and stayed there.
A man’s skeleton lay on the floor; his leather gunbelt, cracked and dried to a stiff, dead thing, still clung to his waist.
“So that was it. You built it but never got a chance to enjoy it.”
Bowdrie stepped into the room, glancing around with thoughtful attention. Here, too, was evidence of careful planning, the keen mind of a practical man who wanted to make life easier both for himself and for his woman.
The neat shelves, now cobwebbed and dusty, the carefully built fireplace, a washbasin built of rocks with a drilled hole from which a plug could be removed to drain off the water, all contrived to eliminate extra steps.
Bowdrie stepped over and looked down at the body. From the bones of the chest he picked up a bullet, partly flattened. “That was probably it. Right through the chest, or maybe even the stomach.”
He glanced again at the skull. “Whoever killed you must have really wanted you dead. He finished you off with an ax!”
The skull was split, and nearby lay the ax that had been used. The man had been shot first; then the killer made sure by using the ax.
A gun lay not far away, evidently the dead man’s gun, an old .44. The killer had used a .41.
In another room he found a closet, the warped door open. Inside were a few odds and ends of women’s clothing. He studied the closet, some items hanging askew, some fallen to the floor. “Whoever killed you probably took your woman,” he muttered, “an’ whatever clothes he took, he just grabbed off the hangers an’ the hooks. At least, that’s what it looks like.”
A man’s clothing hung in another corner of the closet, a black frock coat and pants, obviously his Sunday best. In the inside coat pocket was a letter addressed to “Gilbert S. Mason, Esq., El Paso, Texas.”
Dear Gil:
After many days I take my pen in hand to address you once more. It is pleased I am to learn that you and Mary have found a home at last, knowing as I do how long you have wished for one. It will be a lovely place for little Carlotta to grow up. I am completing my business in Galveston, but before returning to Richmond I shall come west to see you.
Your friend,
Samuel Gatesby
Folding the letter, Bowdrie placed it carefully in a leather case he carried inside his shirt. He then began a methodical search of the premises.
Other than the clothing, there was no evidence of the woman or the child. If dead, their bodies had been disposed of elsewhere, but after another glance at the closet he decided they had been hurriedly taken away.
In a drawer of an old writing desk that he had to break open he found a faded tintype. It was a picture of an attractive, stalwart young man and a very pretty young woman, taken, according to the note on the back, on their wedding day.
Gilbert S. and Mary Mason, and the date was twenty years earlier. In the drawer was an improvised calendar. Made from year to year, the dates were crossed off until a period in September, sixteen years ago.
In the kitchen he glanced at the skeleton again. “Well, Gil,” he said, “you had a right beautiful wife. You had a little girl. You had a pretty home and a nice future, and then somebody came along. Gil, I’m goin’ to make you a promise. I’ll find who it was and what became of your family, even if it has been sixteen years.”
The West was often a hard and lonely land where heat, cold, drought, and flood took a bitter toll in lives, but in this valley Gil Mason had made a home, he had found all a lonely man could dream of, only to lose it to a murderer.
“My guess, Gil, is that you didn’t have horses and cattle enough, and not very much money. You were killed for your woman.
“You were a good-lookin’ man who’d fixed up a nice home, so I’m bettin’ she didn’t go willingly.”
He buried the bones, wrapped in a blanket and placed in a crude coffin slapped together from some extra planks stored in the barn. He buried them behind the barn, and from another section of plank he placed the name and added “Murdered, September …” and the year.
A month later, with other business out of the way, Bowdrie was loafing around a stage station called, by some, Gabel’s Stop. There was nearby a general store, a saloon, and a few other activities. What Bowdrie had come to think of as Mason’s Valley was only a few miles back in the country.
The stage station was operated, dominated, and had been constructed by Gabel Hicks. Tipped back against the wall of the station, Gabel Hicks spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dust of what he called a street. It wasn’t often that he found a listener like this young sprout.
Chick Bowdrie, his own chair tilted back and his toes on the porch on either side of the chair, listened absently. Hicks was an old-timer and a talker, but he had a lot to say, and had lived through it all. Bowdrie,long since, had learned that one learns a lot more by listening than by talking.
The sun warmed the street into dozing contentment. “Yep! Been here nigh onto forty year! Come west in a covered wagon. Fit Injuns all over these here plains and mountains. You youngsters, you think things is rough now! You should’ve been here when I come! Why, even twenty years ago! Now? The country’s ruined! Crowded too much! Why, there’s a ranch ever’ fifty, sixty miles now! A body can hardly ride down a trail without runnin’ into somebody else!”
“She must’ve been quite a country fifteen, twenty years ago,” Bowdrie commented. “I’ll bet this was wide-open, empty country back then! Not many riding the trails then.”
“More’n you think.” Gabel Hicks spat again, drenching a surprised lizard. “Some of them still around, like Med Sowers, Bill Peissack, Dick Rubin. They were all here. Old Johnny Greier, the town loafer, he was here. He wasn’t no loafer then. He was a hardworkin’ young cowhand … before he took to drink.”
Chick Bowdrie let his chair legs down and picked up a stick. With a flick of his hand to the back of his neck he took out a razor-sharp throwing knife from under his collar and began to whittle. “Must’ve been a hell of a country then. Mighty little water, and no women around. Must’ve been right tough goin’.”
“Women?” Hicks spat. “There was women. Even Johnny Greier had a woman when he came into this country. Purty, too, although not as purty as some. That Mary Mason, now, she was a humdinger!”
Chick Bowdrie’s knife cut a long splinter from the stick. “Where’d they all get to?” he demanded. “I ain’t seen a pretty woman since I hit town! Come to think of it, I haven’t seen a woman!”
He inspected the stick. “Some of those pretty women must have had girl-kids, and they’d be about right for me now. What happened?”
“Sure they had kids. Some of them still around, but they surely don’t come down here, except to the store. That Med Sowers, now? He’s got him a right purty daughter. Accordin’ to what I hear, she’s due to be comin’ home soon. Been away to school most of her life. Boardin’ school for young ladies. Med asked me to kind of watch out for her.”
“Daughter? Well, maybe I’ll just hang around and look.”
“No chance for no driftin’ cowhand! That Med’s a wealthy man, although you’d never guess it to look at that place of his! Like a pigsty! Yessir, like a pigsty!”
He spat. “O’ course, she ain’t rightly his daughter, comes to that. She’s his ward. I guess that means he has the handlin’ of her.”
Hicks’s face turned grim. “He’s had the handlin’ of more than one woman. Can’t say I’d want any gal of mine in his hands. He’s a bad ’un.”
Chick yawned and got to his feet; the knife disappeared as he did so. Hicks’s wise old eyes measured him, the two guns, coupled with the hawklike face and the deep, dimplelike scar unde
r the right cheekbone.
“Stayin’ around long?” he asked.
“Maybe.” Chick hitched his gunbelts into an easier position. “Might stay longer if I get a ridin’ job.”
“Averill’s been takin’ on a few hands.”
Bowdrie grinned. “Not while I’ve got forty dollars!” he said.
Hicks chuckled. “Don’t blame you none. When I was a young feller, I was just the same. If I had me an extry dollar, I was a rich man.”
Chick Bowdrie walked across the street to the Lone Star. It had taken him nearly a month, but he was learning things. McNelly had been doubtful at first. After all, sixteen years was a long time. Finally he told him to go ahead.
Bowdrie had begun by using the Rangers’ services to get information from Richmond and Galveston. Samuel Gatesby had been a respected businessman, a Southerner who had good New York connections and came back strong following the Civil War.
Gilbert Mason had been a major in the Confederate Army who married a childhood sweetheart and who had come west full of ambition and energy as well as love for his lovely young wife. The West, according to reports, had swallowed them.
Bowdrie checked further on Gatesby. The man had acquired large cotton and shipping interests, but had been a lifelong friend as well as a brother officer of Mason. Bowdrie paused under the awning of the Lone Star to reread the letter he had received a few days past:
Samuel Gatesby disappeared after leaving El Paso sixteen years ago. His two brothers, both wealthy men, offered rewards of several thousand dollars for information. Gatesby was never heard from again. Tugwell Gatesby wishes to be informed of anything you may learn. If necessary, he will come west to make identification.
There was a crude grave marked by an unlettered stone near the house in the valley. Bowdrie had a theory about that grave but did not believe it contained Gatesby’s remains.
Johnny Greier looked hopeful when Bowdrie entered the saloon, as the rider in the black flat-crowned hat had been good for a drink several times in the past three weeks. Bowdrie took a seat at a table and gestured for Greier to join him.
Johnny hurried over, lurching a little, and the disgusted bartender heaved himself out of his seat at the far end of the bar and brought two glasses and the bottle. “Bring us a couple of plates of that free lunch,” Bowdrie suggested, and dropped a coin on the table.
Waiting until the bartender had returned to his seat, Bowdrie poured a drink for himself, and after Greier had taken one glass, Bowdrie refilled it for him, then moved the bottle away.
Johnny looked up, hurt showing in his eyes. “You eat something before you have any more,” Bowdrie ordered. “We’ve some talkin’ to do.”
“Thanks. Most folks don’t ’preciate an ol’ man, just because I take a drink now and again.”
“Johnny, there’s something I want to know, and you may be the only man in town with gumption enough to tell me.”
Johnny’s features seemed to sharpen, and the bloodshot eyes stared, then fell. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “Whatever I knew, the whiskey’s made me forget.”
“I think you do know, Johnny,” Bowdrie said quietly. “I think that’s what started you drinkin’.”
Chick filled Johnny’s glass again, but the old man did not touch it.
“Johnny, what became of Mary Mason?”
Johnny Greier’s face went white and sick. When he looked at Bowdrie again, the alcoholic haze seemed gone from his eyes. Chick Bowdrie’s black eyes were hard and without mercy.
“She’s dead. Now, don’t ask me no more.”
“Johnny …” Bowdrie spoke gently, persuasively. “A man named Gil Mason built himself a home, something he always wanted, and he brought his wife out to enjoy it, and their small daughter was with them.
“I want a home too, Johnny. So do you. Every man west of the Brazos would like one, but Gil Mason made it. He realized his dream, and then he was murdered, Johnny. I want to know what happened.”
“He’d kill me!”
“Johnny, most people around here take you for nothing but a drunk. I know better, Johnny, because I’ve looked into the past. You were a top hand, Johnny, one of the very best. You rode with all the good ones and you were one of them. It took a man to be what you were, Johnny, and it took a man to win the kind of respect you had. What happened, Johnny?”
Greier shook his head, staring at the full glass in front of him.
“Johnny, in a little while there’s a stage coming in. On that stage, a pretty young girl will come in. She is Mary Mason’s daughter and she is coming home to live on the ranch with Med Sowers. She’s never seen him. She doesn’t know what she’s gettin’ into. She’s been away at school all these years.”
Johnny stared at the glass, then pushed back a little from the table. “There wasn’t many of us here then, an’ Med Sowers had all those gunmen around him, men who would kill you at the drop of a hat.
“There was no law here then. The country hadn’t been organized. A man did whatever he wanted, and Med Sowers had the power.”
Johnny stared at Bowdrie out of red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. “I knew what happened. I seen it comin’, an’ I did nothing.”
“What could you have done?”
“I dunno. Maybe nothing. I was nowhere as good with a gun as any one of that outfit. I seen Sowers watchin’ her, and I could see what was in his mind. I started out to the ranch to warn Mason, but it was too late. That was the day they done it.
“Med will kill me for talkin’, but I guess my time’s about up, anyway. Med Sowers killed Mason for his woman.”
He stared into the glass. “He taken her to his place an’ kept her there. She lived a dog’s life. He sent her girl away to school and held that over her, that if she didn’t go along, he’d see the kid killed.
“Later he said he might as well raise him another woman. ‘Let her grow up,’ he said, ‘and then she’ll be mine.’
“First chance she got, Mary ran off. He followed her an’ killed her. Afraid she’d do it again and talk to somebody.”
There was a chorus of wild yells from the street, and the pounding hooves of racing horses.
“That’s him. That’s Med now, he an’ that murderin’ bunch of his. Dick Rubin, Hensman, Morel, and Lute Boyer. Rubin an’ Boyer were with Med Sowers when he killed her.”
Chick Bowdrie heard another sound above their yells. It was the incoming stage. Under the deep brown of his face, Bowdrie paled. His thoughts raced. What could he do? What could he legally do? There had been no law then, but there was now, and she was Sowers’ ward.
The chances were that the girl on the stage was Carlotta, mentioned in the letter. Now she would face what her mother had faced, and there was as yet no evidence beyond the word of Johnny Greier, even if he lived to speak.
Bowdrie walked outside and leaned against the awning post. It was the first time he found himself wishing he was not an officer of the law. He might walk out there, pick a fight with Sowers, and kill him.
He shook his head. That was no way to think. That was what the old Bowdrie might have done, the one before McNelly recruited him.
The stage rolled to a stop in a cloud of dust, the door was opened, and a girl got out.
Chick Bowdrie straightened with an indrawn breath. She was the image of the girl in the picture he had, a very pretty girl, every inch the lady.
Then his eyes shifted to Med Sowers. He saw the shock of recognition as the big man saw the girl’s mother in her face. Then the shock faded, giving place to triumph and a sort of animal eagerness. Sowers pushed forward. His checkered shirt, far from clean, was open halfway down, revealing a massive hairy chest.
“Howdy, Mary!” he said. “I’m Med Sowers, your guardian!”
Mary? Why Mary?
She smiled brightly, but Bowdrie was close enough to see the dismay in her eyes.
“I am glad to see you,” she said. “I do not remember you, of course. I was so very young.”
“
Think nothin’ of it.” He hitched his belt over the bulge of his stomach. “We’ll make y’ feel right t’ home. You just wait’ll we get to the ranch. You cost me a sight of money, but I reckon it’ll pay off now.”
“Thank you.” She turned to the tall, good-looking young man standing slightly behind her. “Mr. Sowers, I would like you to meet Stephen York, my fiancé.”
Med Sowers’ hand stopped even as it started for the handshake. His face went dark with angry blood. “Your what?” he bellowed.
York stepped forward. “I can understand your surprise, Mr. Sowers, but we thought it best to tell you at once. Miss Mason and I wish to be married.”
“Married?” Sowers was ugly with rage and frustration. “I’ll see you in hell first! I didn’t spend all that money gittin’ her eddication for you to take her away!”
Chick Bowdrie stepped into the center of the gathering crowd. “What did you raise her for, Sowers?” he asked.
Med Sowers turned impatiently, seeing Bowdrie for the first time, but realizing for the first time also that an interested crowd had gathered. “Who’re you?” he demanded.
“Just a very curious bystander, Sowers.” His eyes moved slowly over the faces of Rubin, Morel, Hensman, and Boyer. “I find it odd that you should be so mad because your ward has found her a young man.”
Bowdrie indicated York. “He looked to me like a right nice young man who would do right by the girl, and also,” he added, “one who would go a long way to protect her.”
Med Sowers was aware of the waiting, somewhat puzzled crowd. Perhaps only one or two aside from Sowers and Bowdrie knew what was implied.
Sowers made up his mind quickly. “Well, no wonder I was surprised! Here I’ve had no word … you kind of sprung it on me, Mary. I guess I kicked up the sod, some.” He grinned at York. “Better let her get out to the place an’ git settled, then we can get acquainted. If you’re the right man, I couldn’t be more pleased.” He turned, reaching for her suitcase. “Well, let’s get out to the ranch!”
Chick caught the girl’s eye and shook his head ever so slightly. Her brow puckered, but she turned to Sowers.
The Chick Bowdrie Short Stories Bundle Page 10
