The stagecoach driver interposed himself between the two of them. His back was to Luke. Shooting him in the back made no sense. Luke wanted to fight with the big man. Busby he’d been called. By George. The stagecoach driver. Why hadn’t he known their names before? He rubbed his eyes to clear them and staggered just enough to fall against the bar. He used it to support himself.
George turned and gripped Luke by the shoulders. A hard shake rattled Luke’s senses enough to get him to focus.
“Show him. Show Busby your badge.”
“Badge?”
“Your Pinkerton badge. The one you showed me.”
“This one?” Luke reached into his coat pocket and found the strip of leather with the tin star on it. He pulled it out and slapped it down hard on the bar.
Busby stood on tiptoe and looked over George’s shoulder at it. Then he stepped back and held out his hands, palms forward.
“I didn’t mean nothing, mister. You just keep on drinking.” Busby waved off the barkeep and left in a powerful hurry.
Luke tried to figure out why. Nothing fit together right anymore.
“Here. Put this back in your pocket. Busby’s a good old boy, but he gets touchy now and again. Don’t go after him. He’ll let you be.”
“Because of this?” Luke picked up the tin star and stared at it. He laughed harshly and tucked it into his pocket. “But I wanted to fight him.”
“Busby’s a tough customer. He’d have flattened you. Maybe even put a slug in your hide, but he’s no killer.”
“And I am?”
“Maybe not you, but other Pinks. You got the reputation. If anything had happened to you, there’d be an army of agents descend on Preston. We don’t need trouble like that, not with Rhoades and his family already causing trouble for us all.”
The mention of the outlaw’s name sobered Luke. His hand twitched as it moved toward his six-gun.
“I’m gonna kill him. Him and his partner, Mal Benedict.”
“That’s what I mean,” George said. “You Pinks got a reputation for trouble. You string up that gang or turn them over to the law. You do what you have to, but don’t go stirrin’ up trouble with the fine folks in these parts. All we want to do is live peaceably and raise our families.”
“Raise families,” Luke said dully. The flash of sobriety passed. Once more he had trouble staying upright. Using both hands, he supported himself against the mahogany bar.
O’Malley edged down and pointed at Luke. George shook his head.
“You tell him,” the barkeep said.
“Tell me what?” Anger flared once more. Luke felt his face flush and his ears turn hot.
“It’s time for you to go home. Or to a hotel or stable. Sleep it off. You’re gonna have one lightning-struck headache come the morning after purty near finishing an entire keg of beer.”
“Why’d you stop me? That fellow was . . . was . . . one of them.” Luke tried to remember what he was saying. Thoughts jumbled and caused the world to spin around him.
“One of ‘them’? You mean one of Rhoades’s gang?” George exchanged a quick look with the barkeep, took Luke by the elbow and moved him toward the door. His voice hardened with the snap of command. “Get out ’fore there’s nothin’ I can do for you. It’s gettin’ closer to that sorry state of affairs every time you open that yap of yours.”
“You were a soldier, weren’t you?”
“I was a sergeant, Fifth Kansas Volunteers out of Fort Scott.”
“Fort Scott,” Luke muttered. He smiled. “Lane’s Brigade. I remember hearing of you.”
“Mister Pinkerton, you have to go. Now.”
Luke about flew through the air. For a short man, George packed quite a wallop. Maybe it had to do with driving the stage and handling a team of six horses. Luke fluttered about and spun twice in an effort to keep his feet. He almost succeeded. Rather than tumble over, he sat hard enough to click his teeth together. The saloon door slammed and lights inside began to dim. The Drunken Cow closed after throwing him out.
He wasn’t going to put up with that indignity. More than that, thirst turned his throat into a raging desert. He got to his feet, but the straight line to the front door took him into the alley alongside the saloon. Luke fell again. With some relief, he pulled his legs up and drifted into a boozy sleep.
CHAPTER THREE
THE DREAM TURNED into a nightmare. Luke and Audrey under the springtime bower, the preacher and fine words and then the invasion! A powerful hand grabbed his shoulder and shook hard. Luke fought back. He flailed about, kicked out and connected with something hard. He groaned as the shock went all the way up his leg to his hip. He had smashed into a wall.
“No, you can’t take her. She’s mine!”
The shaking stopped, but an instant later he felt a slap that rattled his senses. This brought him awake in time to see a callused hand swinging in the other direction. The second slap left burning fingerprints on his cheek.
“Get up, you wastrel. Get up, I say!”
Before he could understand he had gone from a nightmare to reality, he was jerked to his feet. His legs buckled, but he wasn’t allowed to fall. The hand that had left its imprint on his face shoved him back hard against the wall. Wood creaked and a nail popped out beside him. He stupidly looked at it. Every single detail of the nail etched itself into his brain, but he still failed to focus beyond it. Inches. In focus. Feet. Like everything shimmered in a desert mirage.
“I ought to hang you out to dry, but no, the mayor says I have to run all the drunks in. He wants the citizens to feel safe and not have sots like you littering the streets. You’re due for a week in the hoosegow.”
This time the hands that had punished him grabbed a double handful of lapel and pulled him out into the street.
“Walk or I’ll drag you. It’s too early to be dealin’ with the likes of you.”
Luke peered out through bloodshot eyes and squinted. The new sun’s rays glinted off a marshal’s badge pinned to the man’s fancy brocade vest. He started to protest and pull out his own badge, then thought better of it. The lawman wouldn’t be impressed with a Pinkerton badge. Or it might make him even more determined to toss his prisoner into jail and throw away the key. Luke knew he hardly represented the best qualities of an agent right now. He still fingered the strip of latigo and the badge as he stumbled along, arguing with himself about whether to show it or take his punishment. Every step grew stronger and more sure until he walked steadily to the jailhouse.
Since beginning his search for Audrey and the Rhoades gang, he had seen jails in dozens of towns. The pride of Preston was no different from any other. If anything, it showed better repair than many. The plank walls had been whitewashed recently, and the front door had been squared properly. The door opened on well-oiled hinges, and the dim interior showed a desk with neat piles of wanted posters to one side and the cell keys resting in the middle.
The marshal scooped up the key ring. As the lawman pushed Luke toward the rear, he managed to snare his Model 3 and do a quick pat-down to be sure he didn’t have a hideout gun or knife sheathed at the small of his back.
“Last cell. In.” The lawman sent Luke reeling with a hard push that carried him inside. Before Luke recovered his balance, the iron bars clanged shut and the key turned with a depressingly loud click!
“I can pay a fine. Go on and let me out, Marshal.”
“I’m tempted, but I got orders. Drunk and disorderly means you go before a judge. I got a complaint about you from a citizen.” He tossed his keys onto the desk. They landed in exactly the spot where he had picked them up. The marshal showed how exacting he was in every detail of his life.
Luke eyed the man. Some lawmen were hardly better than the drunks they jailed every Saturday night. This one wore clean, neatly pressed clothing. Not a speck of dust or lint showed on the jet-black broadcloth
coat or britches. His black string tie had been precisely tied so the dangling ends perfectly aligned, and the gold chain hanging across his taut belly to a pocket watch gleamed and flashed as he moved. Real gold. Even the lawman’s boots were polished to a mirror finish. What sent a cold chill down Luke’s spine was the hard leather holster and the .44 Colt in it at the man’s right hip. The six-shooter had seen hard use and had been well taken care of. The marshal might not have been a gunman before taking the job, but he was no stranger to using that formidable weapon.
“Who made the complaint?” Luke hung on the bars and strained to look out at the marshal to better take his measure. “It was a man named Busby, wasn’t it?”
“It was. From what O’Malley said, I’m surprised you have any recollection of your night of debauchery.”
“If I apologize to Mister Busby, can I get out?”
“Important business, eh? Busby’s gone on back to his ranch. He’s foreman out at the Triple B.”
“An upstanding member of the community, then,” Luke said. “All the more reason to let me apologize.”
“Do it in court. The circuit judge’ll be here in a week.”
Luke fought against the rising panic.
“I can’t be locked up that long!” Rhoades and his self-styled family would be a hundred miles away by then. It had taken him months to get even this small hint about Rhoades. Starting over on his hunt only wore at his strength and determination. Those stolen horses meant they intended to travel far and fast. Again he put his hand in his coat pocket and fingered the badge. Again he decided against using it. The marshal wouldn’t give two hoots and a holler about any Pinkerton agent.
Worse, he might ask questions Luke wasn’t inclined to answer. The threat of standing in front of a judge and swearing to tell the truth rattled him even more.
“We’re not the worst jail in Kansas,” the lawman said. “Settle down and enjoy your stay.” He left the jailhouse whistling “Camptown Races.”
Luke sagged and then stepped back to perch on the edge of the hard bed. It wasn’t anything more than a plank with a blanket thrown over it, but he had slept on worse. But a week!
“You got the look of a man who has to be somewhere soon.”
Luke looked up. He hadn’t noticed that the next cell over was occupied. The other prisoner had the look of a cowboy about him. Bowed legs, face weathered into dark leather, squinty eyes from too much prairie sun, all he lacked was a horse under him and a herd on the horizon.
“I’m looking for some men.”
“That makes you sound like some kind of law. You don’t look like a sheriff.” The man spat on the cell floor, wiped his lips and fixed his squint on Luke again. “If you was, Marshal Hargrove would never have locked you up.”
Luke refrained from flashing his badge. The cowboy’s words carried an edge to them telling of dislike for the law. That made sense. He was locked up, too.
“What did the marshal arrest you for?”
The cowboy shook his head sadly.
“Mostly not being liked. Folks here don’t take kindly to my kind.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I’m a half-breed. When I get out of Preston, I’m headin’ back to Indian Territory.”
“What tribe?”
The man dismissed it with a wave of his gnarled hand. He spat again.
“Who’s it you’re lookin’ for? I run across all kinds of pilgrims out on the trail.”
He had nothing to lose by asking after Rollie Rhoades. “And his henchman’s named Mal Benedict. You know either of them?”
He caught his breath when the cowboy nodded that he knew the outlaw and kept adding details that proved it.
Luke watched closely. The man’s eyes tightened up even more.
“Fact is, I do know the ones you’re talkin’ about. Crazy Water’s what they call that Benedict fellow. Puts weeds into his whiskey to get even ornerier than he usually is. I never seen him drunk and all toked up on locoweed, but I can imagine.” The cowboy laughed harshly. “I seen how he is in what passes for sober with him. He’d wrestle the devil and win by cheating. That’s the sort of man he is, that Crazy Water Benedict.”
“Where? In Preston? Somewhere nearby?” Luke shot to his feet and went to the bars. “You’ve got to tell me.”
The cowboy stepped away. He rightly saw that Luke would reach through the bars and grab him by the throat to squeeze information from him.
Luke had no intention of doing that, but he couldn’t hold back his eagerness. This was as close to finding out where the gang was as anything he’d come across in a month. Longer. He forced himself to settle down. When he spoke, he was hardly calm and collected, but the wildness had died down. A little.
“What do you know about the gang?”
“Well,” the cowboy said, sitting on the bunk after making sure Luke couldn’t reach him, “it’s like this. I was in the saloon and these two hard cases came in. The place went quiet while they looked us all over. I didn’t feel anything, no fear because I’ve faced down a stampede of longhorns. There’s nothing that’ll make a man feel real jimjams like facing tons of charging beeves.”
“Rhoades. Benedict! What about them?” Luke tried to bend the bars to get to the cowboy. There had to be something in what the talkative cowboy said. There had to be. If only he’d get to it!
“As I was sayin’, it didn’t take no genius to see these were killers. They stood there lookin’ round, wantin’ to find somebody to gun down. Nobody was loco enough to draw their attention. That would have meant lead flyin’ and the whole lot of us ventilated.”
The cowboy looked smug. Luke forced himself to silence. The man would get to real information soon enough. The price Luke had to pay was listening. It was the hardest thing he had ever done, short of watching Crazy Water Benedict dragging Audrey away. He touched the spot where the shrapnel had saved his life from what should have been a killing shot. The buried metal felt hot to the touch.
“Not seein’ any impediment to their drinkin’, they went to the bar and ordered. Don’t rightly remember what they ordered.”
“Whiskey. Crazy Water drinks whiskey.”
“You surely do know your quarry. You’re right about that. The ugly one ordered whiskey. The other was a pretty boy. Almost cute with that baby face of his, but I read cruelty in the eyes. You can always tell. But the one you call Crazy Water ordered whiskey and put in a few drops of something from a bottle he took from his vest.”
Until now Luke had worried the cowboy was just joshing him to pass the time. This meant he had seen Benedict in the saloon. That wasn’t something any range-riding wrangler would think up on his own.
“I was next to the baby-faced yahoo and heard him as easy as I’m hearin’ you suckin’ air right now. They were drawin’ maps in spilt beer on the barm, and it sounded like they intended to rob a bank.”
“A bank?”
“I wondered about that. The bank here in Preston is nothing more ’n a sitting duck for outlaws like them.”
“You heard their names? You told the marshal about what you heard?”
“Do I look like I just fell off the turnip wagon last night? Of course I didn’t say a word to Marshal Hargrove. He’d get it all confused in his head and think I had throwed in with them. I’m not an outlaw. All I want to do is wrangle beeves, even if I get stuck ridin’ night herd now and again. I hate that. There’s always a fool calf that wanders off and—”
“A bank? If not in Preston, where?”
“I might have been wrong about that since they was talkin’ so low. I wasn’t about to ask them to repeat what they’d done said.” He sat straighter. “Truth was, even if I’d been that stupid, it wouldn’t do any good since two more outlaws came swaggering in.”
“How do you know they were outlaws?”
“They was all puffed
up and pushin’ everyone out of the way until they spotted Crazy Water and his partner at the bar. Never seen anything like it. It was like they deflated. Whoosh! One minute all cock of the walk, the next they was bowin’ ’n scrapin’ like menials.”
Luke wished he had his saddlebags. More than one wanted poster followed the owlhoots in Rhoades’s gang. Over the months he had accumulated a big stack with their criminal likenesses. He hardly needed to know the identities of the two men talking with Rhoades but it would be nice to be sure they rode with him.
“What did they talk about?”
“Well, now, they got back to how the baby-faced one needed to steal dynamite. That seemed real important for them. The only place around here they could get even a stick is—”
The cowboy shut up abruptly and got to his feet. He pressed against the iron bars as Marshal Hargrove came up, the cell key dangling from his finger. The lawman spun it around and then gripped it hard.
“You’re out of here, Little Raven. Your boss vouched for you.”
“So he figgered out he needed someone to ride night herd? It’s ’bout time.”
“Wait, tell me more!” Luke rattled the bars but the cowboy never looked back as he rushed from the jail. Luke heard two men talking just out of his sight. The foreman had sprung his wrangler. Luke dropped back to the bunk and tried to remember every detail of what the other prisoner had said about his brief meeting with Rhoades and Benedict.
A bank. Rhoades wanted dynamite. That was too slim a lead to go on.
Luke got to his feet and shouted to the marshal, “Let me out, too. I’ll ride with . . . with Little Raven.” He had hardly believed the man was part Indian but that must be the case with a name like that. From what the cowboy had said, he wouldn’t be herding cattle long. He’d head south into Indian Territory and vanish for good.
“A week, I said. You’re in jail until the judge shows up.”
“I’ll pay a fine. How much?”
“Don’t go trying to bribe an officer of the law. If I hinted that you’d tried, Judge Benbow’d send you to prison for a year.”
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