The Man from Stone Creek

by Linda Lael Miller

  Maddie felt a sting at the mention of Abigail Blackstone, however indirect, but she didn’t take the time to follow it back to one of two possible sore spots—Sam being gone, or a pretty woman with a claim on him, taking up residence under his roof. She laid her hands on Violet’s shoulders and leaned down to look into her face. “You aren’t bothering me, Violet,” she said patiently. “What’s the matter?”

  Violet sniffled again and Maddie suppressed an urge to wipe the child’s nose with the hem of her apron. “My ma,” she said miserably. “I think she’s bad sick. She said fetch the teacher, so I tried—”

  Maddie smoothed back a lock of Violet’s thin, fine hair. “Just let me get the lantern and tell the boys I’m going out.”

  Violet’s eyes, full of sorrow, widened with a forlorn hope that tore at Maddie’s heart. Was the child so accustomed to being refused that she couldn’t trust simple kindness? “You’ll come, then? Back to our place?”

  Maddie took a moment to kiss the small, furrowed forehead. “Oh, Violet,” she said. “Of course I will.” She turned then, meaning to call out to Terran, but he was already standing midway down the stairs, with Ben hovering behind him. Poor, broken little Ben, always visibly braced for bad news, now that his father was in jail for the murder of his older brother, and who could blame him?

  “You’re going to the Perkinses’ place?” Terran asked. His face, mostly in shadow, seemed curiously still, and his voice was flat.

  “Yes,” Maddie said, and started back to the counter to get the lantern. “I don’t know how long I’ll be gone. Lock the door behind me, and don’t let anyone come inside before I get home.”

  “What do you want to go there for?” Terran persisted.

  Maddie stopped, one hand resting on the wire handle of the lantern. “Hittie Perkins is ill,” she said, unsettled by her brother’s odd tone and chilly manner. “She needs help.”

  “You could get sick, too,” Terran said. “Catch whatever it is she’s got.”

  So that was it, Maddie thought with hasty relief. Terran was afraid for her, and little wonder. His world had been an uncertain place—first the loss of their parents, then the orphanage, then all his hopes of having a real family again dashed when Warren died so violently. She was all he had.

  “I’ll be careful,” she said, hurrying to join Violet, who waited, poor little wisp of a thing, as if poised to flee, with one hand on the doorknob.

  “They’re not worth it,” Terran called after her.

  Maddie turned on her brother, her free hand resting on Violet’s trembling shoulder. If she closed her fingers, she feared they might go right through the child’s flesh and meet in the middle. “That,” she said, “is enough, Terran. Lock the door when I’ve gone. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  With that, she opened the door and stepped out, after Violet, who seemed to have taken a chill.

  Terran’s parting words echoed in Maddie’s mind. They’re not worth it.

  “Terran didn’t mean what he said, Violet,” she told her.

  “Yes,” Violet replied with heartrending resignation, “he did.”

  Maddie bit her lower lip. “Let’s go,” she said, after taking and releasing a very deep, steadying breath.

  The Perkinses’ place—a shack, really—stood on the northern end of town, off by itself, putting Maddie in mind of a poor relation at a wedding party, yearning to join in, but not dressed for the occasion. A lamp glowed weakly in the only window, and Maddie walked a little faster, mainly because of a sudden and entirely shameful impulse to turn and run the other way.

  The limbs of a lone oak clawed at the roof of the cabin, like fingers groping for a way in. John Perkins had hanged from a branch of that tree, and Maddie was afraid to look too closely for fear she’d see his shade still dangling there.

  She shook off the fanciful feeling and straightened her shoulders. What had gotten into her?

  Violet, clinging to Maddie’s hand since they left the mercantile, fit to crush her bones, let go then and rushed ahead to push open the door. “Ma?” she called. “I couldn’t find Mr. SOB, so I brung Miss Maddie in his stead!”

  Maddie hesitated and then walked purposely forward. The threshold was high and she had to lift her skirts to step over it.

  The stench of fouled bed linen, or a chamber pot in need of emptying, struck her first. There was a crude stove, fashioned from a metal barrel, two sawhorses with an old door laid across them for a table, and a single narrow bed shoved up against one wall. Hittie lay in a tangle of faded quilts, a wraith in the thin light from the lantern on the windowsill. Violet fluttered, like a little hummingbird, uncertain where to light.

  Maddie brought her own lantern along as she approached the bed, eased Violet aside and touched the woman’s pale forehead with a steady hand. She’d expected a raging fever, but Hittie felt clammy instead, and cold as a corpse.

  “Violet shouldn’t have troubled you, Miss Maddie,” she said in a raspy, strangled voice. “I’m so sorry—”

  “Hush,” Maddie said. She’d never attended a sick person before, except for Terran when he’d come down with the grippe last winter. What was she supposed to do? “I’m here now, and it was no trouble.” Not entirely true, but for the moment the assurance itself was all she had to offer the woman. “Do you hurt anywhere? How long have you been sick?”

  “I hurt everyplace,” Hittie said with a grim attempt at humor, and lapsed into a fit of coughing, covering her mouth with the bedclothes. “I been feelin’ poorly for a couple of days now, but it didn’t get real bad until tonight, long about suppertime.”

  Maddie set her lantern on the windowsill, beside the other, which flickered, about to gutter. “Violet,” she said, without looking at the child, “do you know how to make tea?”

  “No,” Violet answered. “And we ain’t got any, anyhow.”

  Maddie was getting used to the smell, but the poverty of the place seemed to loom in the shadows, another kind of miasma. Overhead, she heard the tree branches scratching, scratching, feeling for a crack in the crumbling roof. “Have you eaten?” she asked, and hoped the pity she felt wasn’t audible in her voice.

  “We had eggs,” Violet answered with some pride. “Ma didn’t finish much of hers, though.”

  “I’m going to send somebody across the river for a doctor,” Maddie decided out loud.

  Hittie grabbed for Maddie’s hand and caught it in a surprisingly strong grip, considering her emaciated state. “No Mexicans,” she rasped, clinging. “I’m sore afeared of Mexicans!”

  Inwardly, Maddie stiffened. “I don’t think we’re in a position to be choosey,” she said. “You need help.”

  “I can’t pay no doctor!” Hittie cried, and then lapsed into another coughing spell. The sound was racking, and Maddie felt the raw echo of it in her own lungs.

  She turned to Violet. “Where is the water bucket?”

  The child crossed the room, came back with a ladle, and, at Maddie’s nod, held it to her mother’s lips. Hittie sipped, and her coughing abated somewhat. She sagged back onto her bare pillow with a sigh.

  The cabin felt as frigid as a springhouse, despite the relatively warm weather. Maddie used kindling and most of the firewood on hand to get the fire going. Fretful, she wondered where in blazes Sam was, and what he’d do if he were here.

  It galled her that she was thinking such thoughts, and she tried to chase them away, but it was no good. If only Sam would appear. He’d know how to proceed, she was sure of that.

  Violet appeared at Maddie’s side, hovering like a feather caught in a downdraft. “Is my ma gonna die?” she asked in a breathless whisper.

  Maddie stopped her fretful busywork and embraced the child fiercely. Violet had already lost her father, and in a brutal way. She and her mother scraped by on egg money and the too rare charity of others. “No,” she said, and prayed that fate would back her up.

  Violet began to cry. “She’s worth it,” she said. “I don’t care what Te
rran says. My ma’s as good as anybody else.”

  “Of course she is,” Maddie said with gentle conviction, still holding Violet close. “And so are you.” She released the girl, bent again to look directly into that small, smudged, furiously despairing face. “Listen to me, Violet. I’ve got to find somebody to go across for Dr. Sanchez, and then stop by the mercantile for a few things. You stay here and try to get your mother to drink more water. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Violet clung to Maddie’s skirt with one grubby hand. “You got to come back, Miss Maddie.”

  “I promise I will,” Maddie said.

  Violet looked up at her, blinking, and slowly released her hold on Maddie’s dress. “Even if Terran says you oughtn’t to?” she asked, her voice so small, Maddie could barely hear it.

  “Even then,” Maddie replied. She glanced at Hittie, now lying very still, with her eyes closed, and the two lanterns standing on the windowsill. As she watched, the first one flared and went out.

  It was a dark night, with only a partial moon. She would have to leave her lantern behind, for Violet and Hittie, and make her way back to the center of town as best she could.

  She knocked on three different doors before Henry Maddox, the town blacksmith agreed, over his wife’s scathing objections, to ride across to Refugio and fetch the Mexican doctor. From there, Maddie hurried to the mercantile, climbing onto the wood box beside the back door to feel along the lintel for the key. Then light bloomed at the window over the kitchen sink and Terran opened the door. His face was stony as he watched Maddie get down, leaving the key where it was.

  “Guess you came to your senses after all,” he said.

  Maddie stared at him. “I wonder when you’ll come to yours,” she replied, and swept past him into the kitchen. She took the lantern from the middle of the table and headed for the main part of the store.

  After setting the light on the counter, next to the cash register, she went to work, pulling a tin of tea from a shelf, along with powdered aspirin and a brown bottle of laudanum. A woolen blanket came next and then a kettle, an enamel basin and a bar of soap.

  “What are you doing?” Terran demanded.

  Maddie didn’t pause to look at him. She didn’t want to think about her brother just then. “Go and hitch up the buckboard,” she said, stacking things on the counter. “And when you’ve finished, load some firewood in the back of it.”

  “We need our firewood,” Terran argued. “It’ll be winter soon.”

  “Do as I tell you,” Maddie snapped impatiently, straining to take cans of corned beef, fruit and vegetables down from a high shelf.

  “You’re takin’ all these things to the Perkinses’!” Terran accused. “Just givin’ them away! And you won’t even let me have a stick of penny candy ’less I pay for it in cash money!”

  Maddie walked over to Terran, met his defiant gaze and barely stopped herself from slapping him across the face. “Not another word,” she warned, sick with shame at what she’d nearly done, while her brother glared up at her in full knowledge that she’d been about to strike him. “Not another word.”

  Grudgingly, Terran turned and walked away, presumably to do as he was told. Maddie watched him go, full of regret. In the morning, in the bright light of day, they’d talk, she promised herself. They’d come to an understanding and she would apologize for her outburst. He’d be the Terran she knew again, cheerful and mischievous, not this cold, uncaring stranger she didn’t even recognize.

  Plain as could be, she heard what Sam O’Ballivan had said about Terran, that first day, when they’d butted heads right here in the store.

  Guess he’s got a devious side, to go along with that mean streak of his.

  Maddie put a hand to her stomach.

  It wasn’t true. It wasn’t.

  “I don’t believe it,” she whispered, just as if the clock had turned backward and Sam was standing in front of her again.

  You don’t choose to believe it. He’d said those words then, and he’d say them now, too, if he hadn’t lit out for parts unknown.

  Well, to hell with Sam O’Ballivan.

  He was no help anyhow.

  THEY’D RIDDEN HARD for two days, traveling mostly at night, he and the Ranger, stopping only to rest their horses and let them drink when there was water to be found. Fortunately, Vierra knew every rancho where a man could approach a trough or a well without catching a bullet for it, every stream and hidden spring. It was a relief when dawn came, though he usually favored the dark.

  “How far to the trestle?” O’Ballivan asked, standing in his stirrups to stretch his legs.

  “Maybe two miles,” Vierra answered, doing the same. He nodded toward the peaks of the foothills they’d been climbing for the last few hours. “Most of it straight up.”

  “Obviously,” the Ranger replied grimly.

  That was when they heard the thin, distant shrill of a steam whistle.

  “¡Madre de Dios!” Vierra gasped, giving his tired horse his heels. “The train!”

  The Ranger kept up ably and shouted from alongside, “I thought you said it wouldn’t get this far before noon at the earliest!”

  Vierra didn’t spare the effort to answer. He needed all his stamina to concentrate and to keep the horse moving. The trail was narrow now, and rocky, steeper with every lunging stride. He drove the animal on, and the Ranger stayed with him, though his gelding was puffing, lathered from the long ride, and close to winded.

  Still, they’d covered the better part of that scant two miles before they heard the train whistle again, shrieking now. Just as they crested the last rise, the locomotive rounded a bend and came into sight, wheels screeching and throwing sparks as they grabbed at the track.

  “What the hell?” the Ranger rasped as both he and Vierra reined in. A lone rider waited at the foot of the trestle, where it spanned a rocky chasm at least a hundred feet deep, facing down that speeding train as though it were a toy in a shop window.

  “The engineer must have tried to outrun them, farther back along the line,” Vierra said, every muscle in his body rigid, bracing for what was about to happen. For what he and the Ranger were too late to prevent. He drew his rifle from its scabbard, out of instinct rather than reason, but it was useless. The rider was out of range by at least three hundred yards, and as they watched, as the engineer at the controls of that locomotive laid on the brakes, he lit a fuse to what looked like enough dynamite to bring down the whole mountain, let alone a spindly trestle like that one. He tossed it onto the rails, waved his hat in triumph, and spurred his horse up a skinny trail alongside, as if the devil himself was after him.

  Vierra wanted to close his eyes, but he didn’t. Instead, he took off his sweat-soaked hat and pressed it to his chest, murmuring a prayer under his breath. Beside him, the Ranger struggled to control his horse, keep the terrified creature from whirling around and flat-bellying it in the other direction.

  Smart horse, Vierra thought.

  The blast came then, shaking the ground. Vierra felt the impact of the explosion, assaulting his eardrums, shuddering in the very air around him, saw the bright orange flash of flame and then the smoke. The trestle folded just as the locomotive cleared the edge of the slope, and he and O’Ballivan watched, helpless, as the engine plunged into space, pulling the other cars right along behind it.

  Both horses went loco then, in the deafening aftermath, screaming with fright, tossing their heads, spinning on their hind legs. For all that it was a battle to stay in the saddle, Vierra never looked away from that wreck, and he didn’t think O’Ballivan did, either. It wouldn’t have been right to do that, even though it required a lot of grit to hold on to the sight.

  “Sweet Jesus God,” O’Ballivan gasped, when it was over. When the crashing stopped and the awful silence boiled up out of that ravine.

  “Amen,” Vierra said into the dreadful, trembling calm. They’d seen one man toss that bundle of dynamite onto the trestle, but he wasn’t working alone.
Any second now, the banditos would swarm out of the rocks on the other side, like tarantulas, and make their way down to collect the spoils.

  “There might be somebody alive down there,” O’Ballivan said, and started for the descending trail, snaking along that side of the ravine toward the river far below. Vierra reached out and caught hold of the gelding’s bridle strap.

  “Not a chance,” Vierra told him. “Wait.”

  The two men glared at each other.

  “No one could have survived that fall,” Vierra insisted, easing his horse backward, behind an outcropping of rock.

  Reluctantly, O’Ballivan joined him. “Where the hell are they?” he mused, and Vierra knew he meant the outlaws who’d caused the cataclysm they’d just witnessed.

  “Could be they spotted us,” Vierra said, and spat. Bile kept rising in his throat. Too late, he thought, and fathomless despair yawned inside him like an abyss. He had to stay way back from the edge. We were too late.

  “That won’t keep the murdering sons of bitches from going after the gold shipment,” O’Ballivan replied. “Maybe they’re planning to bide their time until nightfall. Or ride around behind and get the jump on us.”

  Vierra swung down off his still-fitful horse, reached for his canteen and poured the contents into his hat so the gelding could drink. After a moment of deliberation, the Ranger did the same.

  Vierra settled his sodden hat back on his head, once the horse had emptied it. The dampness was cool and soothing, though it didn’t ease the dry ache that had opened up where his belly had been.

  “Where are they?” he murmured, not really expecting an answer, watching the cliff on the other side of the river. There was no sign of movement, as far as he could make out, not even a jackrabbit darting out of the sagebrush.

  O’Ballivan stared down at the wreckage. The top part of his face was shaded by his hat brim, but Vierra saw the tight, pale line of the Ranger’s jaw. Saw the tension in his wide shoulders and in the way he gripped his horse’s reins in one gloved fist. “Noon,” he said. “The train wasn’t supposed to reach this trestle before noon.”