Ralph Compton Death Along the Cimarron

by Compton, Ralph

  “I see,” said Stick. He looked Annabelle up and down, then said to Danielle, his voice still lowered, “I believe the bastards have killed everybody in town.”

  Danielle felt Annabelle shudder and begin to sob quietly beside her. “We’re going to need your help to get these folks gathered and buried proper. Are you up to it, Annabelle?” she asked.

  The heartbroken woman summoned up her courage and stepped from beneath Danielle’s consoling arm. “I will be as strong as I need to be.” She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh, looking down at her dead husband’s face. In the east, the first thin wreath of sunlight crept upward from the horizon, casting a ghostly silver glow over Haley Springs and its dead. “But let’s get started, Miss Danielle,” Annabelle added. “I can’t bear to see Robert laying here this way.”

  “I understand, Annabelle.” Danielle led the shivering woman into the small shack. Stick hitched the horses to a single hitchpole and followed. Inside the cluttered shack, Danielle took a small kerosene lantern from a wall peg, dusted it off, and lit it. Stick began to search through a line of long-handled tools leaning against the wall, quickly choosing two shovels and a pick. Danielle prepared a place for Annabelle to sit down on a nail keg near a small woodstove. With some kindling and newspaper, Danielle soon had a small fire dancing in the round belly of the stove. “I’ll get some coffee from my saddlebags,” she said, patting Annabelle on her shoulder. “You sit here and rest.”

  After a hot cup of coffee, Danielle and Stick went to work, digging graves while the sun rose higher from the eastern rim of the sky. Annabelle stayed close by them as they worked, telling them what had happened, her eyes darting around at the least little sound among the smoldering ashes of what had been the town. Yet when it came time to bury the dead, Annabelle pulled herself together. Corpse after corpse, she washed their faces and their hands, made certain their eyes were closed and that their hair was properly parted and combed. Danielle and Stick watched in silence as the woman prepared the bodies of her husband, her neighbors, and her fellow townsfolk. Then, with their hats in hand, they joined Annabelle in a short prayer over each of the dead. Once done, Danielle and Stick put their hats back on and resumed their work.

  Shortly after sunup, the northbound stage arrived in a cloud of dust. Hap Smith, the driver, and his young shotgun rider, Paul Sutterhill, immediately lent a hand with the burying, using two spades they took from the small shack. It was almost noon before the tired burial group patted their shovels on the last mound of freshly turned earth. Eleven new graves now lay inside the short wall of loose stones surrounding the town cemetery. Annabelle sat quietly beside her husband’s grave as the others looked on, her hands folded in her lap.

  As they worked together, Danielle and Stick had filled in Smith and Sutterhill on what had happened. With each rise and fall of the pick into the hard ground, Stick had told them about Cherokee Earl and his band of rustlers, and about the shooting in town. But it was only as they finished up the last grave that Hap Smith scratched his scruffy white beard and commented on the matter. “Who in the world would have ever dreamed a band of cattle rustlers would come back and do something like this?”

  “It’s simple. They came back to town looking for someone to point them toward my house,” Danielle said in a bitter tone. “Annabelle told me no one in this town would tell them where I live ... so Earl and his men took turns shooting everybody.”

  “Lord God,” Hap Smith murmured. “I reckon that only leaves you one way to go, young lady. You’ll have to go find a marshal and put him onto these murders.”

  “That’s one way,” said Danielle. “But I have another idea.” She turned, rolling down her shirt sleeves, and walked away.

  Hap and Sutterhill both looked at Stick. “Did I say the wrong thing?” Hap asked.

  “Nope,” Stick replied. “But I believe she’s already decided to go after them herself.”

  Hap Smith almost scoffed, but then he caught himself, seeing the serious look on Stick’s face. “Herself? What chance would a woman have against a bunch that would do something like this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stick, “but I sure plan on being there to find out.”

  Ellen Waddell had noticed how tense and worried her husband had been the night before. He’d barely touched his food. After supper he’d spent the remainder of the evening pacing back and forth on the front porch. She noticed that he had laced his coffee with whiskey, slipping the thin flask from inside his vest and pouring it when he thought she wasn’t looking. Something was wrong, but she had no idea what it could be. Late in the evening, when gunfire resounded on the distant horizon, she had craned her neck slightly and looked off in that direction.

  “Pistol shots,” Ellen said attentively.

  “Yes, so what?” Dave Waddell snapped, only increasing the intensity of his monotonous pacing.

  “Well, nothing, I suppose,” Ellen replied. But then, when the shots came again, this time in greater number, she said, “Doesn’t that sound like it’s coming from town?”

  “Yes, damn it, it does!” Dave Waddell barked at her.

  Ellen was taken aback that her simple comment had prompted such a harsh response. “Watch your language, if you please.... And you needn’t raise your voice.” She nodded toward his coffee cup sitting on the sun-bleached porch railing. “Perhaps if the coffee is too strong, I’ll need to—”

  “No!” Dave cut her off. “There’s nothing wrong with the coffee. Can’t you see I’m trying to think here? There’s time when a man has more on his mind than figuring out whether or not gunfire is coming from town.” He took a quick swallow of the laced coffee and muttered, “Good Lord, woman!” Then he fluttered a nervous hand in the direction of Haley Springs. “Probably just some hunter shooting at jack-rabbits,” he said. “Why does everything have to be such a big event to you?”

  “A big event?” Ellen sat stunned for a second. “I was only making conversation.”

  “Then make it to yourself,” Dave snapped. Then he had turned, snatched up his cup of coffee, and stomped off the porch and toward the barn.

  “My goodness,” Ellen had whispered to herself.

  That wasn’t the first time she’d seen her husband upset about something. But the next morning, when she awakened just before dawn, she noticed that his side of the bed hadn’t been slept in. She arose and lit the lamp beside the bed and carried it with her through the predawn gloom. Padding barefoot out onto the front porch, wearing only her loose-fitting cotton gown, she saw Dave Waddell sitting slumped in a wooden porch rocker. She also saw the almost-empty whiskey bottle between his legs, the cork lying discarded at his feet. He stared blankly off toward Haley Springs.

  Ellen shook her head and walked closer. “Dear?” she said gently, stepping up behind her husband and laying a hand on his shoulder.

  Waddell stiffened, making a slight gasp of surprise. Then he turned in the rocker and looked up at her through hollow, red-rimmed eyes. “For God sakes, don’t sneak up on me like that! You give a man heart failure!”

  “I’m not sneaking up,” said Ellen. “I was concerned about you. You didn’t come to bed.”

  “I have other things on my mind,” he snapped at her. “There are other things besides going to bed, you know. Some of us have to figure out what to do next in the world!”

  “Well, pardon me,” Ellen said, seeing his dark mood and not wanting to aggravate matters further. She backed up a step.

  But Dave Waddell half rose from the rocker, the whiskey bottle falling to the porch and rolling back and forth. He snatched the bottle up before the last drops could spill from it. He threw back the last drink and let out a whiskey hiss, holding onto the empty bottle as he looked Ellen up and down. In her revealing cotton gown, Dave saw dearly the outline of her breasts. He gave her a look of disgust. “Don’t run around here naked like some harlot!” He shot a frantic glance at the trail, as if someone might be watching.

  “A harlot, did you call me?
” Ellen’s voice struggled to keep her anger in check.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” said Dave, relenting, but only for a second. “But have you no shame? What if somebody happened along here and saw you this way?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, David.” She managed to swallow her anger and keep her voice settled. “Has anybody ever come along at this time of morning? We live far from town, far from any other ranch.”

  Dave Waddell slung the wooden rocker aside drunkenly and raged at her. “Don’t you dare make light of what I say, woman! I’m the man of this house, and when I tell you something, I don’t expect it to be turned into some lighthearted joke!”

  Ellen Waddell turned rigid; her words turned cold. “Oh, don’t you worry, man of the house, there won’t be anything lighthearted going on in this household for a long time to come.” She turned in a huff and disappeared inside the house, slamming the front door behind her.

  It was an hour later when Dave Waddell walked inside and looked around. The coffeepot sat cold atop the stove, which was itself cold and unfired. The table sat empty. The door to the bedroom was closed. Dave rapped on the door gently, still feeling the effects of swigging whiskey all night. “I’m—I’m sorry, Ellen,” he offered. “I reckon I just lost control of myself. Will you forgive me?”

  His words were met by a chilled silence. He turned and left the house and spent the next two hours in the corral beside the barn, attending horses and preparing two of them for the trail. When he returned to the house, the kitchen looked the same. The bedroom door remained closed. “Honey, I’ve been thinking,” said Waddell, rapping again gently. “Things have been getting the best of me lately around here.” He paused, then added, “Remember how you said you’d like to go up to Denver? How you said you’d like to stay a few days in one of them fine hotels, where you pull a sash and get food brought up to you?”

  After a slight pause, Dave heard the latch fall on the other side of the door. He breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, I remember,” said Ellen, not giving in all at once.

  “Well, I’ve been thinking,” Dave continued. “We’ve got the money, and we’ve got the time.... Hell, there ain’t nothing keeping us here right now. What cattle is out there is in good grazing for now. What say we just up and take off?”

  “You mean, soon?” Ellen asked, opening the door a crack, enough for Dave to see that she was still wearing her cotton gown. This time he was not at all disgusted at the sight of her breasts. In fact, this time the partial sight of her through the narrowly opened door stirred desire within him.

  “Soon?” Dave chuckled, putting aside any ideas he might have just had and reminding himself that there was a good reason for what he was proposing. “Honey, I’m not talking about soon! I’m talking about right now ... this minute. I’ve already saddled up two riding horses. I’ll open the corral and turn the rest out to graze when we leave. Denver, here we come!”

  “Oh, Dave, do you really mean it?” The door squeaked open another foot. “I mean, this isn’t just the whiskey talking, is it?”

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure the whiskey has a hand in it.” Dave smiled, putting his arms around her and pulling her against him. “But, little darling, I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.”

  “Oh my goodness, Denver!” Ellen squealed with delight, then pushed herself away from her husband. “Don’t you dare change your mind! I’ll throw some things in our grip bag and be ready before you know it!”

  “You do that, darling, and hurry yourself up,” Dave said, cutting a quick glance across the room, out the window toward the main trail. He watched Ellen throw back a blanket that covered the dressing trunk where she kept her clothes. As she began pulling out a hat box and a pair of lady’s high-topped dress shoes, Dave said, “I’ll grab a couple of clean shirts and some trousers when you’re done. Meanwhile, hurry up!” He clapped his hands to speed her along. “I’ll make sure all the dry food is topped and stored.” Another glance out along the empty trail brought a sense of relief to him. “Who knows?” he said, feeling better by the minute. “We might be gone for the next month or two.”

  Chapter 5

  “Well, now, look here,” Cherokee Earl Muir said, crossing his wrists on his saddle horn and looking down at the Waddell spread from the shelter of a pine thicket lining a cliff behind the house. Four of his six men drew their horses up quietly around him. Earl had begun to split his men up, sending Frisco Bonham and Billy Boy Harper on head, riding a different trail in case anybody followed their tracks from Haley Springs.

  “Don’t forget, Boss,” said Sherman Fentress. “We’re down to six men now.”

  “I ain’t worried about it, Sherman,” said Earl. “Dave is the only gun on the place.” He dismissed the matter and sat watching Dave Waddell lead two horses hurriedly from the barn to the front of the house until the tin roof blocked him from sight. Earl spit a stream of tobacco and said, “Looks like my new partner’s in a big hurry to get someplace.”

  “Yep, it does,” said Dirty Joe. “Why don’t I punch a couple holes in him for you?” He reached down, slipped his rifle from its saddle boot, and started to raise it to his shoulder.

  “Put that damned rifle down, Joe,” said Earl. “I don’t care where Davey goes.” He chuckled under his breath, turning his gaze back to the house, studying it like a hungry wolf. “I just don’t want him taking that pretty little redheaded woman with him. I would call that unobliging of him.”

  “Sí, Boss,” said Jorge Sentores, grinning. “I thinks maybe you gots the plan for that pretty woman, eh?”

  “Watch your dirty mind, Jorge,” said Earl, his voice turning tight with indignation. “I’m not some pig ... some animal who would dishonor a man’s woman, him standing by whilst I done it.”

  “No, Boss, of course not,” said Jorge, shrugging, unable to tell if Earl was serious or not. He looked at the others for some sort of clue. The men only stared down at the house in silence.

  “All right, here’s the deal,” said Earl without taking his eyes off the house below. “We’re going down there. Any of yas says anything out of the way to that little redheaded woman, it’ll take you the rest of the day to pull my boot out of your ass.”

  “Can’t we even say howdy?” asked Sherman Fentress, tweaking his thin, well-trimmed mustache.

  “No,” Earl said bluntly. “You especially can’t say howdy to her.”

  “Not even if she says howdy first?” asked Fentress.

  “Keep in mind the size of my boot,” Earl Muir warned. He heeled his horse forward at a walk, down onto a thin path.

  “Damn,” Sherman Fentress objected quietly. “I never seen a person you can’t even say howdy to.”

  Beside him, Dirty Joe said in a whisper, “I wouldn’t cross him now if I was you, Sherman. You see what he did to that town back there.”

  “Yeah, I saw. I also saw that nobody back there ever told him a damn thing,” said Fentress. “We’ve got no more notion where that woman and the old man is than when we started out.”

  “I know Earl,” said Turley. “He’s got a plan. I figure instead of riding into those hills, maybe facing an ambush, Earl figures after killing all them folks, that woman and the old man has got to come looking for us.” He nudged his horse forward. “Then we’ve got them.”

  “Yeah, or they’ve got us,” Sherman retorted, looking around at Jorge and the others. “I ain’t sure which.”

  “I think this is a bad thing we have done, killing those peoples. I always steal the cattle. I am never been a murderer,” Jorge said to Avery McRoy as they stepped their horses onto the trail behind Sherman and Dirty Joe.

  “Well, you are now, Jorge,” McRoy said, “so tell it to yourself a few times and get used to it. You’ve killed once, and I expect you’ll have to kill some more before this traipse is over.” The five horses moved down the path silently in single file.

  Out front of the house, Ellen Waddell sat atop one of the horses, a small black gelding.
“Dave, I thought you were in such a hurry to leave?” she called out playfully to the open door.

  “Just one second,” Dave replied. He jerked open the bottom drawer of the battered oak desk sitting against the back wall and pulled out the extra pistol he kept there. He hefted the small .36 caliber Navy Whitney in his hand, made sure it was loaded, and shoved it down into his belt. Then closed and buttoned his suit coat over it. “I want to make sure we don’t leave here forgetting something we might need down the road.” Before shutting the desk drawer he caught sight of a dusty bottle of whiskey. “One to grow on,” he said to himself. He pulled the cork, raised the bottle to his lips, and drained it. Letting out a breath, he corked the empty bottle, put it back in the drawer, and locked the desk with a small key.

  “Dave ... ?” Ellen’s voice trailed off with an edge of apprehension that Dave didn’t notice in his rush to get under way.

  “Shhh,” said Cherokee Earl, sitting on his horse beside Ellen, lifting the reins from her hands. He leaned in close to Ellen’s ear and said softly in his raspy voice, “Let’s surprise ole Davey, what do you say?”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Dave replied, hurrying through the house and out onto the porch. He closed the door behind him without even looking out at the five horsemen surrounding his wife. “You know, darling,” he said, looking down at the door key in his hand for a second as he spoke, “if we like Denver, we might just arrange to have this place sold and never even have to come back—”

  Dave’s voice stopped as he looked up, stunned at the sight of Cherokee Earl sitting on his horse, too dose to Ellen, holding her horse’s reins in his gloved hand.

  “Never come Back.” Earl chuckled flatly. “My, my, this must be some outing you’ve got planned. Partner.”

  Ellen looked back and forth between her husband and this stranger with a puzzled, frightened expression. “David, what does he mean calling you partner? I think you better explain.”