The Man from Stone Creek

by Linda Lael Miller

  Vierra sighed. “Must have skipped a couple of stops—no freight or passengers to pick up, maybe. Engineers like to make up time wherever they can.”

  All of a sudden, O’Ballivan mounted up. “I’ve got to go down there,” he said.

  There would be no stopping him, Vierra knew. He put a foot in the stirrup and swung up onto his horse. “We’ll be easy targets,” he pointed out. “They’ll see us for sure.”

  “We’ll be out of range,” the Ranger said, and started down the trail.

  It was a path for mountain goats, not men on horseback, and a couple of times O’Ballivan almost pitched over the side, gelding and all. Vierra followed, more slowly, and much more carefully. All the while, he watched the other side of the ravine, his rifle resting across the pommel of his saddle, but nothing stirred over there, nothing at all.

  And that made the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

  ORALEE MARCHED RIGHT PAST Elias James’s scrawny little clerk, and didn’t so much as knock before she shoved open the door of his office and barreled over the threshold like a hay wagon pulled by a fast team.

  “I’ve come to pay you cash money for that mercantile,” she announced.

  The skin under James’s chin quivered like a turkey’s wattle and his eyes went narrow. “What?” he demanded, standing and gesturing for her to shut the door in one motion.

  Oralee smiled and opened her handbag, kicking the door closed with her right foot. She might have been hefty, but she was nimble, too. “How’s your wife?” she asked, putting a trill to the words.

  Banker James sat right down again and she heard the breath rush out of him. “I offered to sell the property to Maddie Chancelor,” he said, careful, like a man feeling his way over uncertain ground. “Not to you.”

  “Maddie’ll be the owner, all right,” Oralee said, making a show of catching hold of the wad of hundred dollar notes she’d taken from her private safe, not ten minutes before, and hauling it out for him to see. “I’m just financin’ the deal.”

  “You can’t be serious,” James said, but when he got a look at all that money, he started to salivate. Fixed it with his eyes and didn’t turn loose.

  “Oh, I’m serious, all right,” Oralee replied. She all but waved the bankroll under his nose before dropping it casually back into her handbag. “Are you plannin’ to handle the sale, or do I have to ride all the way out to the Donagher place and make my pitch to Undine?”

  James gulped. Reddened around his mutton-chop whiskers. “That won’t be necessary. Anyway, it’s Mungo who has to agree, not Undine.”

  “I reckon you’d better talk to him, then,” Oralee said.

  “You shouldn’t be carrying around that kind of money, Oralee,” James prattled, after clearing his throat a couple of times. “It’s dangerous.”

  “There’s nobody in this town that’s as dangerous as I am,” she countered. “My saloon ain’t called the Rattlesnake for nothin’. When I coil and hiss, I mean to sink my fangs in, and that’s that.”

  He looked longingly at her bulging handbag. It was her favorite, silk, with real pearls stitched on in the shape of a forget-me-not, but she didn’t reckon it was the purse that held his interest. No, sir, it was money Elias loved, ill-gained or otherwise. “I’d be glad to put your funds into escrow,” he offered, waxing friendly. “Just until I’ve spoken with Mungo.”

  “I’d just bet you would,” Oralee retorted. She took in her surroundings with naked contempt. “And I’d sooner give it to old Charlie Wilcox for safekeepin’ as let you get your fat paws on it.” She smiled. “And you didn’t answer my question. How’s the missus these days? Still sufferin’ from the vapors and those sick headaches of hers?”

  James swallowed again. “Lenore,” he said, “is very delicate.”

  “I reckon it would half kill her to find out that her fine, upstandin’ husband pays double for Lulu’s specialty every other Saturday.”

  A dull flush climbed the banker’s neck. “I will not stoop to reply to that,” he said indignantly.

  Oralee smiled again, more broadly this time, and showing her teeth. “You stoop to plenty else,” she replied.

  “What do you want, Oralee?”

  “Damn fool question,” she said. “I just told you. I want the mercantile.”

  “You keep inquiring after my wife. I don’t see what Lenore’s health has to do with that. Unless, of course, you think you can blackmail me.”

  Oralee batted her eyelashes and put one hand to her bosom. Her derringer was tucked between her breasts, just in case she should have need of it. “Blackmail?” she repeated, suitably horrified. “I would never do such a thing.” She paused, enjoying the banker’s discomfort. To her, he wasn’t just one banker, he was a whole string of carpetbaggers, going back as far as she could remember, each one a bigger thief than the last. It was folks like him that’d stole her papa’s land and left her mama to die of the heartbreak. “On the other hand, I really can’t say what my girls might let slip, maybe in the mercantile or some other public place.”

  Banker James rallied, but it was all bluster and Oralee knew it. She could read any man, though she had to admit, at least to herself, that that O’Ballivan fella stumped her a little. He was about as male as a feller could get, but he hadn’t come near the Rattlesnake Saloon, save to pat Charlie Wilcox’s old horse and give it a handful of grain now and then. Something odd there, even if he was taken with Maddie, and darned if Oralee could work out what it was.

  “It is highly improper for a lady like Miss Chancelor to do business with the likes of you,” the banker said. “Her reputation will be in tatters by the time this is over. She’ll be lucky if folks don’t travel all the way to Tucson to do their marketing, just to avoid dealing with her.”

  “I guess that’s more her concern than mine,” Oralee said confidently. Up until now, she’d bought most of her own supplies in Tucson, mainly because the selection of goods was better and the prices lower. A few other townspeople had done the same. Most folks, though, preferred to buy at home, and the mercantile was thriving proof of that. “I’m just looking to earn a little interest on my money.”

  James spread his tallow-colored hands. “This whole thing was Undine’s idea in the first place,” he said. “For all I know, Mungo won’t agree to any such transaction.”

  Oralee leaned in a little. “You’d better hope he does,” she said.

  The banker swore, but he pushed back his desk chair, stood and took his bowler hat off the rack on the wall behind him. He pushed past Oralee, making for the door.

  “I won’t keep you,” she called after him, with plenty of sugar in her voice. “But give Lenore my best regards, won’t you?”

  MUNGO DONAGHER GRIPPED the rusty bars of his cell in both hands and stared, disbelieving, at the woman standing on the other side, a sheaf of what looked like legal papers in her hand. He’d had a bath and a shave and a change of clothes since the day he’d done the murder, but just looking at her made him feel dirty all over again.

  Near as he could tell, it was late afternoon, but he was only guessing. He’d stopped marking the passage of time the moment he took Garrett’s worthless life.

  “Whore,” he said just as the banker hurried in. Elias must have brought Undine here, then. Gone out to the ranch to fetch her into town for some business they’d cooked up between them. Drawn up those papers, too.

  Mungo ignored him.

  Tears sprang to Undine’s eyes. Pretty as a picture, she was, in a flowered hat and a rose-colored dress. A matching beaded bag dangled from her wrist, and she had a parasol tucked under one elbow, like she was out for a stroll. All that frippery, bought with his money. She’d been down on her luck when he’d met her. Stranded, without a nickel to her name. Now, she looked like a Roosevelt.

  It galled him severely.

  “I know you don’t mean that,” she said brokenly. “You’re just overwrought because you had to kill Garrett to save me.”

  Mungo blinke
d. For a moment he was in that accursed bedroom at the ranch again, putting a gun to his own son’s head. He wrenched himself back to the grim present just before the trigger tripped.

  “What?” he bawled, confounded.

  She spoke up a little, maybe for the benefit of the cowpoke who’d been standing guard ever since the killing, but her eyes were clear and direct, as though she was trying to get a point across. “If you hadn’t done what you did,” she said, “well, who knows what would have happened to me?” She paused, sniffled again, but the tears had already dried, if they’d ever been there in the first place. Could be he’d imagined them. “I’m your wife. You protected me. I can’t think what else you could have done.”

  Mungo opened his mouth, closed it again.

  Undine smiled. “Soon as the judge hears my side of the story, you’ll be out of this place. Back home, where you belong.”

  The thought of stepping over the threshold of that house gave Mungo pause. Hard as he’d worked all those years, he’d as soon burn the place to the ground as look at it, after what happened there. As he came back to himself, though, he felt a powerful yen for his old freedom.

  “Maybe you’d like to go to California, after all,” Undine suggested sweetly. Her eyes were still shrewd; she was looking straight into his head, unraveling his thoughts like so much tangled thread. Weaving the strands to suit her. “We could make a fresh start there. Put all this behind us for good.”

  Mungo felt himself being drawn like smoke to an open window. He gripped the bars harder, rested his forehead between them and shut his eyes tight. “What are them papers, Undine?” he asked in a thin whisper. After a few moments he glanced at the banker, saw the man tug at his celluloid collar with a nervous finger.

  “Maddie Chancelor wants to buy the mercantile,” Undine answered. “She’ll pay fifteen hundred dollars cash.”

  “Buy the—?”

  “Mercantile,” Undine finished for him. She bit her lower lip, but her gaze held steady. Whole cloth, that was what her story was, and she was trimming it to fit. “We can use the money to hire us a Tucson lawyer, Mungo.”

  “There’s plenty of money,” he said, and looked past her to James for confirmation. He’d scrimped and saved for years, and he owned the ranch free and clear.

  The banker nodded, and that was reassuring, but he kept his distance just the same. Meantime, the cowpoke looked on from over by the stove, sipping coffee from a blue enamel cup and not even pretending not to eavesdrop. The yellow dog lay snoring at his feet.

  “We’ll need all we can get together to make a go of it in California,” Undine reasoned. “It might take a while to sell the ranch, too.”

  Sell the ranch.

  Damn the house, but that land—that land—had soaked up his blood and sweat for thirty years. How could he leave it? Who would he be, anyhow, without that patch of ground, stretching as far as the eye could see, in every direction?

  “I can’t bear to go on living here, after what’s happened,” Undine said, and her voice took on a fretful note, though her eyes still didn’t change. Mungo was reminded of a rattler he’d run afoul of one time, out on the range. It had sprung at him from some rocks next to the creek, when he squatted to drink, sunk its fangs into his thigh and, even as the venom surged through his system like so much molten lead, he’d drawn his pistol and shot that snake into little chunks of quivering flesh. “Folks will talk.”

  Mungo didn’t figure he’d ever see the outside of that jail, except maybe to stand trial in Tucson or Tombstone, and then, like as not, he’d hang. Still, there was that fierce longing, wandering inside him like a wraith, feeling its way from window to door, pounding and wailing to be let go.

  Mungo wasn’t stupid. He knew Undine might take the money from the sale of that store and light out for California or elsewhere without him, leave him to face his come-uppance on his own. But the truth was, he didn’t give a damn about the mercantile. If Undine took to the road, well, he’d know the truth of her feelings, at least. If she stayed, that might be reason enough to fight for his life.

  “Get me a pen and ink,” he said.

  Undine’s cheekbones went pink with pleasure, and maybe triumph. Rhodes produced the requested items from a desk drawer and Mungo signed the papers. Before the ink was dry, Undine had snatched them back.

  “You won’t be sorry,” she said.

  Mungo wasn’t sorry about much of anything, including the fact that he’d shot his firstborn in the back of the head, at point-blank range. Undine claimed he’d saved her, and he knew that wasn’t precisely true, but a man had a choice about what he believed. Might as well be the easier thing as the hard one.

  “You run off,” he warned as she turned away from him, “and you’d better pray to every saint in heaven that I hang.”

  Undine stopped cold, looked back at him. “Why, Mungo,” she scolded prettily, “if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were threatening me. And here I am, ready to tell the truth about what happened and save your stubborn neck from the noose!”

  Mungo scowled. “California ain’t such a big place that I couldn’t find you,” he said. “You just remember that.”

  “I never forget anything,” Undine said coolly. “Not anything at all.”

  A moment later she was gone, with the banker trotting at her heels like a blind sheep.

  “I reckon a lot of folks would believe you were just protecting your wife,” the cowboy jailer observed thoughtfully when the door closed behind Undine and Banker James. He set the ink bottle down on the desk and laid the pen next to it. “Yes, sir, I reckon they’d believe it.”

  Mungo sat on the edge of his cot, buried his face in his hands and waited—not for the circuit judge, or some fancy lawyer come from Tucson to take his part, not even to be set free.

  No, sir. Mungo Donagher was waiting to see what his lovely bride would do once she got her mitts on that money.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTEEN

  THEY WERE ALL DEAD, piled up in those upended railroad cars like the last few matches in a box.

  Eight passengers. Two conductors. Six federales, apparently guarding a strongbox Sam assumed was filled with government gold. While Vierra stood watch on the riverbank, Sam brought the bodies out, one by one, starting with a woman and two little girls in flowered bonnets. He laid the three of them in a row on the rocky shore; surely somebody was waiting up ahead somewhere, to gather them in and celebrate some long-awaited arrival. Now, there would be tears instead of joyful greetings.

  Something ground deep and hard inside Sam.

  Vierra scarcely glanced at the corpses, but he was sweating as if he’d carried them himself. “Did you find the gold?” he asked after visibly struggling to contain the question for a few moments.

  It was a reasonable thing to ask, and offered quietly, but it made Sam’s jaw tighten just the same. He looked at the trestle, part of it standing, a spindly, wooden thing, part dangling like splintered bone from a severed arm. “It’s in there,” he said, filled with bleak determination, steeling himself to go back.

  “Where the hell are they?” Vierra fretted, presumably referring to the outlaws, turning in a full circle to take in the surrounding terrain. “I know they’re here.”

  Sam headed back toward the single passenger car, trying to be thankful that there weren’t a hundred corpses, instead of sixteen. Except for the locomotive, which had plunged nose-first into the river, the rest of the train lay in a pile in about eighteen inches of water. “Like I said before,” he called in reply, fixing to climb through a hole in the side of the car, “they’re waiting for dark.”

  “They have to know there are only two of us,” Vierra said as Sam looked back at him through the opening. The Mexican moved to look down at the bloody bodies of the woman and her daughters, made the sign of the cross.

  “For all they can tell,” Sam replied, buying a few moments before he had to wade through all those dead folks again, “we’re scouting for a posse. H
alf the U.S. Cavalry could show up any minute, or a hundred federales.”

  Vierra didn’t answer, just shook his head.

  The grim work went on, and all the while, Sam knew he wouldn’t be able to bury the bodies. There were no shovels, the ground was stony, and it was getting late in the day. When night came, he and Vierra would probably have all they could do to stay alive themselves.

  He had brought the last federale out—a boy no older than seventeen—slung over his right shoulder like a sack of grain, by the time the sun started to dip behind the rocks to the west. The outlaws hadn’t shown themselves in all that time, but Sam knew they were watching by the prickle under his hide.

  He wished he had blankets, or even coats, to cover the remains of those unfortunate wayfarers, but except for a few lap robes, which he’d spread over the first woman and her daughters, there was nothing. He did find a crate of dead chickens in a freight car, along with bags of mail and some staples, like sugar and flour and rendered lard.

  On the shore, well away from the line of corpses, he busied himself plucking and cleaning two of the birds, as best he could, using his pocketknife and the muddy river water, a little ways upstream from the wreck. Vierra gathered a pile of driftwood and plucked some sagebrush from the hillside for a fire, but Sam noticed the other man’s gaze kept straying back to the train, and he didn’t have to wonder what he was thinking.

  Vierra’s mind was fastened tight on the gold.

  Meanwhile, the horses grazed on patches of grass sprouting between river rocks. Though they weren’t tied or hobbled, they didn’t stray within twenty yards of the bodies.

  The sun slipped lower in the sky.

  The chicken carcasses roasted, succulent and snapping, on a spit over the low fire. Sam wasn’t hungry, but he knew he had to eat to keep his brain alert and his gun hand steady. He had a powerful hankering for coffee, made strong on his little stove in the room back of the schoolhouse, and waited resolutely for the desire to pass.