Christmas in the Lone Star State

by Jason Manning

  Hanley knew something about real estate, though he had never aspired to own a farm, or “spread” as they called it in these parts, being quite content with his house in Cameron. This farm should have provided the family who lived on it with a comfortable life—if one could remove the vagaries of the weather from the equation. Which led him to speculate about Purdy’s future. He did not see her holding on to this land for the next thirteen years, until her husband got out of prison. Her father dead and her mother vanished, she had no other family as far as he knew. Had she and Jake owned the land outright, she could have sold it for a handsome sum. But Jake’s father had put the farm up for collateral to secure a loan from the Cameron bank, money he had spent to weather a stretch of hard times a decade ago. Paying on that loan was what had driven Jake to the commission of a crime, and now Purdy carried that financial burden alone. Hanley doubted that she could. But until her boy was buried he could not bring himself to broach the subject of the farm and the possibility of giving it up. After all, the farm was all she had left of what had been a happy life with bright prospects.

  Purdy rose from the chair with a suddenness that startled him. The buffalo coat slipped off her body and onto the porch as she lurched, swaying on unsteady legs toward the casket. She gripped the shotgun by the end of its two barrels, dragging the stock. She was shaking, and Hanley bent to retrieve the coat, but the yellow dog was on all four feet again and bared its fangs at him. Hanley left the coat where it lay and went after Purdy, gently taking the shotgun from her. She didn’t resist, didn’t even seem to notice. He quickly lay the shotgun on the porch, as he had a powerful aversion to guns.

  Hanley realized then that the top of the casket was propped up against the wall of the house, and he caught a glimpse of the dead boy’s face, as white as the snow that lay on the ground. A primal chill ran right through him, and it had nothing to do with the winter wind that occasionally whipped the woolen trousers he wore against his stocky legs. He tried to interpose himself between Purdy and the casket, thinking it would be better if she did not see her son’s corpse before he began to consider why the casket was open and who had opened it.

  “I need to see him,” Purdy explained, trying to go around him. “I need to see my son,” she said, louder, frowning at him as he continued to be an obstruction. “I have to make sure he’s still there!” she shrieked, when he gently took her by the arm. Now very agitated, she wrenched her arm free and pushed away from him.

  “Of course he is still there, Mrs. Eddings,” Hanley replied, employing his most soothing tone. “He is resting peacefully…”

  “Resting peacefully?” She began to back up, staring at him indignantly. “Resting? He’s DEAD! My beautiful boy is dead! He’s not resting!” And then she turned away from him, covering her face with her hands, her body racked with anguished sobs that managed to bring tears to Temple Hanley’s eyes.

  At a loss what to do, he stood there a moment, feeling quite helpless and demoralized as he watched her suffer so horribly. Hanley’s self-worth was vested in his belief that with all his gifts, he could set things right for others. That he could employ his agile mind, his gift with words, his kind and compassionate nature, and sometimes his talent in a courtroom to that end. He had tried to do this by representing Jake Eddings pro bono because he believed Jake was a good man and feared he might face a hangman’s noose. But confronted by Purdy’s inconsolable, soul-wrenching grief, he concluded he couldn’t do anything to help apart from trying to see to her physical well-being. He was not a brave man, but Purdy was in such need he risked antagonizing the yellow dog. His nape hairs rose as the beast snarled at him when he picked up the buffalo coat to wrap it around Purdy again, buttoning it at the collar.

  “I certainly did not mean to upset you, dear Mrs. Eddings,” he said, getting her back in the rocking chair and tucking the voluminous coat around her.

  She wiped the tears from her cheeks and then looked around in dismay. “The shotgun. Where is the shotgun!” She looked at him, her eyes pleading for help. “I must have it, or the coyotes will come steal my boy away. I stayed out here all night to keep them away.”

  “My God,” murmured Hanley, fetching the shotgun and laying it across her lap. Standing there, hugging himself against the numbing cold, he considered his options. He would have to subdue and tie her up to take her back to Cameron, of that he was certain. And then what about Joshua’s corpse? He could not transport it in the buggy. Was there someone he could cajole—or even pay—to look out for her? Perhaps his own housekeeper, Miss Bishop, would be a Good Samaritan, and if not he was willing at this point to pay her to do it.

  But right now, this instant. he had to do something for the unfortunate Purdy Eddings. He remembered the box of foodstuffs and picked it up. “You must be starving. When was the last time you had anything to eat?”

  She looked at him blankly. “Thank you, but I’m not hungry.” She seemed more composed now.

  “You must keep your strength up. I’ll make something and perhaps you will find your appetite. I’m quite a good cook, you know. I don’t have a housekeeper because I need someone to cook for me. I just hate cleaning up the dishes.” He chuckled, trying to convey that it was meant as humor. He had elicited laughter from others using that same line, but it was lost on Purdy. She didn’t seem to hear him or even know he was there, anymore. She was gazing off across the fields, now barren of life, not to mention hope and dreams, though Hanley didn’t get the sense she was even seeing them.

  With a sigh, he carried the box inside, put it on a table, and looked around. The house was a two-room affair and the main room, the one in which he stood, had a neglected look. It was dusty and unkempt. He built a fire in the stone hearth. On one knee, he warmed himself for a while, glancing several times at the table. He saw with the mind’s eye a tableau that had Purdy and her husband and son around that table. It was suppertime, in a cabin that was warm with color, filled with life and laughter and loving smiles. He couldn’t get it out of his head.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After a quick breakfast of coffee and a biscuit at the break of dawn, Sayles was on the move again. Eddings didn’t eat. He didn’t say a word. He hardly acknowledged Sayles at all. He seemed lost in his own private hell and Sayles let him be, relieved that there would be no more talk about lost loved ones, at least not for a while and hopefully never again. They rode accompanied by the creak of saddle leather, the soft plodding of iron-shod hooves on the blanket of snow covering the road, an occasional whicker from the bay or coyote dun, and the whisper of the wind that moved the upper branches of the thick forest closing in on both sides, without a word passing between them for hours.

  The day promised to be a replica of the one before, and the one before that, and so on—a heavily overcast sky, cold north winds, desultory patches of light snowfall. Sayles figured it had been a week at least since he had seen so much as a patch of blue sky. Although he had prided himself on being virtually impervious to the harsh Texas weather—or at least appearing so—Sayles caught himself thinking fondly of his room in Mrs. Doubrett’s boardinghouse in Waco. At first he had been skeptical about living under the same roof with a woman, but the widow was a quiet and unobtrusive sort and it was better than a room in one of Waco’s two hotels, since Mrs. Doubrett didn’t allow whores or whiskey in her house and was very effective at enforcing the embargo.

  It wasn’t that Sayles had anything against whores and whiskey, but he did enjoy peace and quiet and there was nothing about a soiled dove or bottle of who-hit-john that was conducive to that. He calculated he would make it back to Waco the day after Christmas, which suited him just fine, since Mrs. Doubrett liked to cook a special Christmas dinner and had finished decorating her house days before Sayles had embarked on his journey to Huntsville. She relished making it seem that she and her three boarders were one big happy family. Sayles preferred to forget about Christmas because it stirred painful memories. He could endure physical pain that would bring mo
st men to their knees, but no one could become inured to the effect of emotional wounds. So, while relieved that he would miss his landlady’s Christmas dinner, he looked forward to treating himself to a full bottle of Old Overholt and one of the soiled doves at the Paradise brothel to ring in the new year with as much relish as he could muster for anything these days. That was another good thing about whores and whiskey—they helped you forget.

  An hour down the road Sayles started to get a funny feeling at the base of his spine. He checked the road behind them a time or two, and squinted into the verdant gloom of the forest to left and right, but he didn’t see anything. This didn’t make him feel any easier, as he had spent most of his adult life fighting Indians, and you often didn’t see an Indian even when you were right on top of him. He had learned to trust his instincts, at least when it came to being watched, because time and again during his service patrolling the frontier the same feeling he was having now prefaced a hair-raising pursuit or a bloody fight.

  Sayles mulled over the possibilities. Odds were good that whoever was out there wasn’t an Indian, as all the tribes had been relocated—unless it was a renegade. There was no good reason for a farmer or a hunter or a woodcutter to be shadowing him. Most likely it was one of those outlaws who used the forest to elude justice, and if so then bushwhacking was a possibility. He considered veering off into the brush, which was quite thick in places, but discarded the notion almost as soon as he thought of it. His preference was fighting out in the open where he had a better chance of seeing what he was up against.

  He untied the bay’s lead rope from his saddlehorn and looked around at Eddings. The prisoner was bound as before, ankles lashed snugly under the bay’s barrel, hands shackled behind his back. He rode slump-shouldered, looking down at the ground.

  “Grab the cantle and hold on,” drawled Sayles. “We’re going to run our god-dogs and warm ’em up a bit.”

  Eddings looked up, puzzled. “God-dogs?”

  Sayles was already kicking the coyote dun into a canter, gripping the lead rope in his gloved left hand. “What the Comanch’ call that animal under you.”

  Eddings grabbed the cantle with his bound hands and clenched his legs against the bay’s barrel to keep his seat in the saddle. He had never been much of a horseman, and he was sore from the seven-mile ride out of Huntsville the day before, a soreness exacerbated by being cold clean through, that kind of cold that made one’s bones and joints hurt. He hoped this horse-warming bit would be short-lived. He tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He had never been this cold for this long before, and the faster the horse under him moved the colder it felt. It made him almost nostalgic for his prison cell. At least those thick stone walls kept the wind at bay.

  The coyote dun liked to run, and Sayles had to keep it in check. In his experience, a bushwhacker usually had a yellow streak and preferred a sure thing when it came to doing violence upon another. By putting the horses into a faster gait, Sayles had made himself a harder target for anyone who wasn’t a sharpshooter, and hoped that by doing so he had lessened the chance of someone putting a hole in him. Giving the coyote dun its head and taking off in an all-out gallop might have swung the odds even more in his favor, but it also would have increased the chance that Eddings would lose his seat, and if that happened there was no telling how the bay might react. Sayles doubted that whoever was out there would shoot the dun out from under him. Good horses were a commodity. They had value. A dead horse meant less return for a highwayman, unless he was starving.

  The first man he saw came out of the woods behind them. He rode up the road at the same gait, not trying to close the distance, and a moment later Sayles knew why. Two more men appeared, emerging from the forest on either side of the road a hundred feet up ahead.

  Sayles checked the coyote dun. The bay carrying Eddings stopped too, behind and to the right of the Ranger’s horse. The two men in front rode closer, checking their mounts about twenty feet away. One of them was an older man with an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard and a lazy eye. He sported a ragged butternut-gray overcoat and a bowler-style hat, and he carried a 10-gauge coach gun. It wasn’t pointed at Sayles, but rested on the man’s right leg. With him was a burly black man wearing a blanket serape belted at the waist and a battered sombrero that looked like someone had bitten off chunks of the brim. An old Walker Colt was secured under the belt. Sayles took a look over his shoulder to see that the third man had come to a stop about thirty feet back. He was a young, lanky, tow-headed kid wearing a lot of clothes under his yellow duster to keep warm, and was throwing back the tails of the duster to reveal a brace of pistols in cross-draw holsters. He flashed a cocky grin at Sayles, who wondered just how fast the kid was with those two smoke-wagons.

  Eddings was the next to get a glance from Sayles, who thought the prisoner looked nervous. That was understandable. With hands bound behind him he was helpless, unable to defend himself, and being roped to the bay he made a good target—and there wasn’t a thing he could do to change that.

  “Well well,” drawled the older man, flashing yellow, crooked teeth in an untrustworthy smile. “Howdy, boys. Where y’all headed?”

  Sayles wasn’t going to waste time on an answer that nobody really cared about. “Reckon you men better throw those guns away. I’m going to have to haul all three of you to the nearest jail.” There was no bravado evident in his reply, no emotion at all. He was just stating his opinion.

  The older man chuckled, a raspy sound. “So you’re a lawman, then.” His one good eye left Sayles and focused on the ropes around Eddings’s ankles.

  “Not a lawman,” said Sayles, flatly. “A Ranger.”

  The sombrero-wearing black man had been scowling belligerently at Sayles during this exchange, but now he grunted skeptically and mumbled. “Old man don’t look like no Texas Ranger to me.” His hand rested on the Colt Walker stuck in his belt. His dark sullen gaze swung toward Eddings. “What you do?”

  “I broke the law,” replied Eddings, nervously.

  “Maybe you ride with us.”

  Eddings looked at him, the lazy-eye man, the kid who was grinning like a coyote, and finally at Sayles.

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  The man with the bad eye and the ragged Confederate coat wasn’t smiling anymore as he looked into Sayles’s squinty, gunmetal-gray eyes. That one good eye flickered over Sayles’s buttoned-up coat, and to the Winchester rifle still in its scabbard, and finally to Sayles’s gloved hands, both of which were empty since he had dropped the bay’s lead rope, unnoticed by anyone. He had ridden with the ex-slave for a year now, and the towheaded kid about half that long, and he knew that the former was capable of killing and the latter had been bragging about being capable for so long now he was aching for an opportunity to prove it.

  As for the old codger on the coyote dun, he didn’t look like much. If he was sporting a holstered sidegun it would take him a moment to get it out from under his coat—probably a fatal moment. Everything about Sayles might have encouraged him to stand his ground—but for one thing. He kept coming back to those hooded eyes in Sayles’s gaunt, beard-stubbled face. The old man’s gaze was intense and unafraid. Those steel-cast eyes seemed to bore right through you. They were the eyes of a killer. Maybe he was too old and slow to kill now but he had in the past, and often. You could tell because he looked at you like you were a target, not a human being. It was the ambivalence in those eyes that worried him the most.

  The man with the bad eye took a deep breath and, realizing he had just lost his nerve, said, “Maybe we’ll just ride on by, boys.”

  The black man looked at him incredulously. “You scared of this codger, Ben?”

  Sayles figured the shotgunner had calculated the odds—balancing the likelihood of getting shot against the possibility of collecting horses, saddles, weapons and whatever else that could be used or sold—and decided they weren’t good enough. “Don’t matter if he is,” he drawled. “Not letting you ride away. Start sling
ing some lead or throw down those guns.”

  Eddings was staring at Sayles in much the same way the black man was staring at Ben. Somehow the Ranger had buffaloed the leader of this gang of cutthroats, but instead of letting them turn tail he was pushing them into a corner, thus pretty much guaranteeing that there would be some shooting. It didn’t make much sense to Eddings, but then again it didn’t come as a surprise based on his first impression of the Ranger.

  “Damn it,” muttered Ben, and now he looked scared. His voice had a hollow, despairing ring to it. “Damn it all.”

  Sayles saw the barrel of Ben’s coach gun begin to lift up off his leg. Without hesitation the Ranger raked the coyote dun with his spurs. The horse was already nervous and fiddle-footing, sensing the tension in the air. It leaped into a gallop that took Sayles between Ben and the black man in a heartbeat. His right hand dove into the deep pocket of his coat and closed around the Schofield revolver he had put there the night before. He passed to the left of Ben, and the latter had to bring the coach gun up and over the neck of his mount, so Sayles shot the black man first, firing two rounds through the coat pocket since pulling the pistol all the way out would have wasted valuable time. Both bullets struck the target where he had intended—in the chest—shattering ribs and tearing through lung tissue. The black man slid off the saddle to his left but couldn’t seem to let go of the reins, and when he went to the ground he turned his horse’s head so sharply to the right that it brought the animal down to roll on top of him.