Christmas in the Lone Star State

by Jason Manning

  She nodded. “It’s true. I am, or was. Then Isaac came along, throwing a lot of money around. He was a hunter for a railroad, you see. They paid hunters real good ’cause they was obliged to feed all the men on the work crews, you know. I thought he would take care of me. Least he said he would. He liked the idea of having his own personal whore, I guess.” She smirked. “And me, I was fine with that. Having just one man on top of you every day is better than ten. Then the troubles began. The railroads started failing, or at least stopped laying new track. Ended up Isaac couldn’t do more than keep some food on the table.” She twirled hair around her finger as she paused and considered her next words. “Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t bad to me or anything. I mean, not real bad. But I’m kind of glad to be gone from that place.” She looked at Mal speculatively. “You and your brother are outlaws, I’m guessing.” She looked at him with her eyebrows rising.

  Mal had made her a cup of coffee and held it out to her. “A couple of regular Dick Turpins, we are,” he said drily.

  Alise took the cup gratefully, warming her hands around it. She glanced at Lute, who was beginning to stir but wasn’t quite awake. “Well, from what he told me last night, it sounds better than what I’ve had. More … exciting.” She glanced sidelong at Mal and smiled a slow, carnal smile. “And being the captive of two dashing bandits, well, there are worse fates. I mean I know I said one man was better but…” She shrugged. “So you two are wanted for something? Are you robbers?”

  “We’ve been a lot of things.” Mal didn’t want to ruin the morning by being specific. That he and Lute were wanted for the murder of the Badham woman in England—and no doubt before long there would be wanted posters out on them for the killing of the two lawmen on the Mustang, as well—might prompt Alise into believing she would be better served trying to escape. And if she tried that, Lute would kill her. Even though he considered her an inconvenience, Mal didn’t want her dead. It wasn’t that one more body left along the trail would make things worse for him and his brother. As far as Mal was concerned, the goal of misleading the law into thinking they had remained east of the Brazos was unreachable now, with the death of Alise’s man. Tracks in the snow would tell an experienced lawman or bounty hunter all he needed to know. For once, Mal hoped for fresh snow, since it might serve to cover or at least confuse the trail they had left. Ordinarily he hated snow. He had gotten his fill of it in London. Although he had never seen New York City or Paris or Rome he felt confident that London had the worst climate of any city in the world, and the long winters were a big part of the reason.

  Snow had played a big role in his enduring dream of sailing to tropical isles and living in a paradise that was balmy year-round while cavorting with beautiful half-clad native women. What English boy didn’t dream of such an adventure following the much-publicized events of HMS Bounty? The mutineers who had commandeered the ship, commanded by Captain William Bligh during an expedition to obtain breadfruit trees on the island of Tahiti, had committed the crime not because Blight was a cruel captain—by all accounts he wasn’t—but rather because they had been seduced by the opportunity to live the very same dream Mal Litchfield had harbored since childhood. Everyone knew the story, thanks to Bligh, who had written A Narrative of the Mutiny on Board His Majesty’s Ship “Bounty” following his acquittal at the court-martial that inquired into the loss of the ship to the mutineers.

  “So you’re on the run, heading west,” mused Alise aloud. “Maybe you’re going to San Francisco? That’s where I hoped to end up when I left home back in Alabama. I hear it’s quite a place. A place a person can get plenty rich. Even now, long after the big gold rush.”

  “You fell short of the mark by a good bit,” observed Mal.

  “Plenty of marks with pockets full of coin.”

  “You mean for you or for us?” he asked wryly.

  Alise shrugged, smiling coyly. “There’s nothing between here and there, from what I’ve heard. And sure, maybe I could work in one of those fancy houses I hear tell of.”

  Mal glanced at her, smirking. “So your dream was to be a soiled dove in some fancy bordello, plying your trade in a plush four-poster bed with a feather mattress and silk sheets. Until you found some bloke who seemed to have money and who became infatuated with you and wanted to have you around all the time, to poke for free whenever he had the need.”

  His words put her on the defensive. “Well, at least I give them something in return for their money. That’s more than you can say.”

  Mal chuckled. She had spirit. Nothing like the fire Sylvie had, though. He sighed as he thought about her—the pretty French prostitute who had been the Litchfield brothers’ partner in crime back in London—until Lute had killed her. Or maybe it was the mention of San Francisco. Compared with London, San Francisco was quite a bit closer to that paradise that had fueled his dreams all these years. “As for San Francisco…” He shrugged. “Who knows? Won’t do to make big plans when you’re on the run. It’s best just to be happy you get through the day without being shot, or crapped.” He noticed the perplexed look on her face. “Hanged,” he explained.

  Alise touched her neck while keeping her arms pressed against her sides, in this way keeping the blanket up over her breasts. “They … wouldn’t hang me if they caught us … would they?”

  “Who can say what men will do when the bloodlust is up?”

  Alise fell silent, and Mal gulped down the rest of his coffee, now cold. A moment later, with a cautious glance at Lute to determine that he was still asleep, she murmured, trying to look coy, “Would you want me to come warm you up a little?”

  “No. You’re Lute’s whore, not mine. My brother doesn’t like to share. In fact, if history teaches us anything, he will most likely kill you if he catches you with someone else.”

  “Oh.” She looked crestfallen. So much for working in a famous Frisco bordello. Mal felt a little sorry for her.

  Lute sat up abruptly and pulled the dead lawman’s pistol out from under the blanket, where he had kept it while he slept. He pressed the barrel against Alise’s temple. She tensed and cried out and was so startled she let the blanket fall down around her waist. Lute chuckled, took the cup from her shaking hand, and drank the quickly cooling coffee it contained. “Mal’s right. You’re my whore from now on,” he said with melodramatic menace. “So you can forget about your dreams. You had better convince me that you have. Show me why I shouldn’t kill you right here and now.” Then he laughed at the terrified expression on the young woman’s face and pushed her down, rolling on top of her and laying the pistol aside. “Aye, I’m a highwayman and I take what I want! And right now that’s you.”

  Mal got up and saddled his horse while Lute dabbed the whore. He wasn’t envious of his brother. Women had their uses, but he had never allowed himself to become attached to one, though that might have happened with Sylvie had she lived a little longer. He certainly didn’t obsess over the opposite sex the way his brother did, and he had no intention of laying a hand on Alise—she wasn’t worth the trouble it might provoke. He would have preferred she wasn’t even with them, but he just had to hope that having her along would keep Lute from wandering off and getting into trouble in the future.

  He soon learned how foolish it was to entertain such hopes.

  By the time Lute was done Mal had both horses saddled. “What about breakfast?” asked Lute as he started pulling his pants on. “I’m starving.”

  “We don’t have many provisions. One meal a day, for now. No telling when we’ll find some more.”

  “We have guns. We can hunt something.”

  “We have pistols, and precious little ammunition.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know how to set a snare for a rabbit,” remarked Lute. “You know everything except that, I guess. You set plenty of snares for marks. Maybe we’ll stay lucky and find another farm.”

  Mal glared at him. “No more farms. No more bodies.”

  A disgruntled Lute muttered a
bout going hungry while he finished dressing, literally yanking the blankets away from Alise and snapping at her to get dressed while he rolled the blankets and tied them behind the saddle on the chestnut. He didn’t like being talked to like that in front of Alise. It pricked his pride. But he knew by his brother’s tone of voice that he needed to take him seriously. Mounting, he pulled the woman up behind him and they were off, with Mal leading the way. Emerging from the thicket, Mal checked the sky. It wasn’t always easy to determine direction when the skies were overcast, but it was early morning and obvious that the cloud cover along the eastern horizon was a bit lighter than the rest.

  They negotiated some thinly timbered hills sloping to the south and late in the morning came to thicker timber. Eventually they approached a bluff that steered them south a spell, and then the country began to open up and they spotted a small valley ahead of them. The first thing that caught Mal’s attention was a haze of wood smoke; then he saw the sod house. The valley was shaped like a dog’s hind leg, with the biggest part, the upper thigh, nearest. It was here that the house had been constructed, along with an outhouse, a smoke-or springhouse, and a large pen made with a palisade of vertical posts. Next to this was a smaller pole corral holding a couple of horses. Mal didn’t know much about farming but common sense made him think that the larger pen had been made to hold livestock smaller than a horse or cow. The hills all around were wooded. A creek meandered past the homestead before making its serpentine way down the valley, exiting at the far end. The problem, in Mal’s view, was that there was very little cover in the valley, just a batch of brush here and there along the creek, which was sporadically lined with willows and sweet gum. “We’ll have to stay up here in the trees and circle around,” he told Lute. “Stay out of sight.”

  A man emerged from the sod house and walked to the stream, getting down on one knee at the water’s edge and smashing the coat of ice covering the water with a hatchet. Then he moved to the pen. He opened a gate and entered the enclosure and it was then that Mal saw the sheep the pen contained, which had been huddled together in a bunch up against the northern side of the palisade where they were best protected from the wintry blasts that occasionally swept across the little valley. The man’s entrance caused the animals to stir. With their grayish-white fleece they were hard to see against the snow-covered ground until they moved. Seeing the man made Mal eager to move along, so he put his horse into motion. Lute began to follow, then sawed on the reins so abruptly it made the chestnut balk. The horse could sense that Lute was an uncertain rider, and it didn’t have the best temperament to start with, so it objected to nearly everything Lute tried to make it do that didn’t entail standing still. “Mal! Look!” exclaimed Lute. “Mutton on the hoof!”

  “Forget it. Keep moving.”

  Lute went from excited to petulant in an instant. “The hell you say! Damn your eyes, Mal. I’m bloody hungry! And I haven’t enjoyed a good leg of mutton in months. And you said so yourself—no way of knowing when we’ll find more provisions. Well, there are provisions right down there! In the house and on the hoof!” He yanked on the reins to turn the chestnut and then kicked it mercilessly until it broke into a run down the slope. Alise’s arms tightened around Lute’s midsection as she held on for dear life.

  Mal opened his mouth to shout at his brother to to turn back. But Lute had acted quick as thought—or without thinking, mused Mal angrily—and was already so far away that he would have to shout at the top of his lungs for his brother to hear him. Surrounded by bleating sheep, the herder in the pen had not yet heard Lute’s horse at the gallop, but he might hear a shout from the top of a hill. Cursing vehemently, Mal flew into a rage. The horse beneath him sensed his strong emotion and danced nervously beneath him. For the second time in Mal’s life he had the urge to abandon his younger brother. The first time had been when Lute butchered Sylvie in that Whitechapel back alley. He wanted to now because he knew this wasn’t about mutton and an empty stomach, at least not entirely. This was about Lute’s hunger for killing. The gun to Alise’s head this morning should have been a warning that Lute Litchfield was in a sanguinary mood. If Lute killed a person or two every day they would have half of Texas on their heels and would meet their doom sooner rather than later. He had to stop, but Mal didn’t know how to stop Lute short of killing him. The words of Coleridge came to him … “God save thee, Ancient Mariner! / From the fiends that plague thee thus…” His own brother was the albatross around his neck, and since he couldn’t kill his own brother, if he simply rode away now he would be rid of Lute and have a far better chance of staying alive.

  The homesteader was herding the bleating sheep out of the pen to let them drink from the stream. Now Mal understood why he had taken a hatchet to the ice beforehand. The flock numbered about thirty animals, and they compliantly moved in a slowly spreading phalanx to the water’s edge. The door of the sod house opened and a black-and-white dog bolted out and began herding the sheep. A raven-haired woman stood in the doorway. It was she who first saw Lute riding in hell-for-leather and called out to the homesteader, a stocky man with a mop of russet hair, who took one look at Lute then turned and shouted something at the woman. Mal kicked his horse into motion, cursing long and fervently under his breath as he rode down the slope and out into the open, following in his brother’s wake. The redheaded man snapped a command that galvanized the dog into action. It began barking up a storm, nipping at heels and running back and forth so fast it was a blur, and the sheep began splashing across the shallow stream as the dog herded them away from the house, a few foundering as the thin coating of ice gave way under the herd’s combined weight. Meanwhile, the redheaded man loped toward the sod house and was getting close when the woman emerged and handed him a double-barreled shotgun.

  When Mal saw the sheepherder arming himself, he pulled the Gasser out of his coat and shouted a warning to Lute, who was thirty yards ahead of him—a warning lost in a sudden flurry of gunshots. Lute was shooting at the sheep and Mal had to wonder if he was even aware that the homesteader was now armed. Several of the animals went down, writhing in agony. Lute was not a good shot, especially from a distance, so he didn’t manage to kill a single one right off, even when shooting into the thick of them. He finally looked around at Mal, and then in the direction of the sod house—just as the homesteader brought the shotgun to shoulder. By this time the chestnut, unchecked, had carried him and Alise to within twenty feet of the man.

  Yanking instinctively on the reins hard enough to make the chestnut lock its back legs, hooves plowing up a spray of snow and nearly sitting down, Lute had a split second to react. He hurled himself off the horse with such violence that he broke free of Alise’s embrace—she had been holding on for dear life as he rode headlong down the hill. Before Lute’s body hit the ground the shotgun boomed and the buckshot from both barrels caught Alise squarely in the chest. She was beginning to fall backward over the cantle as the chestnut’s croup dropped, easily dislodged now that she no longer had Lute to hold on to. Several buckshot hit the chestnut in the neck up near the crest. Lute landed clumsily, on his right side, and felt a lancing, breathtaking pain shoot through his shoulder. The impact jarred his pistol loose and knocked the wind out of him. He lay there, stunned and hurting, an anguished wheezing issuing from his throat.

  As the chestnut kicked and then took off in a gallop, uttering a shrill whinny of pain and indignation, the homesteader saw that Lute wasn’t getting up right away. He was also aware of Mal bearing down on him. The woman was standing paralyzed in the doorway and he yelled at her to get inside, then stepped toward Lute, chiding himself for shooting both barrels in his panic-stricken haste. In the ten years he had been trying to make a living and raise a family in this valley he had only shot at someone one time. He had been searching for a ewe that had slipped away unseen by his dog. While scouring the timber up on the hills, he’d heard a single rifle shot, and a short while later came up on a man skinning the dead ewe. You didn’t leave
the house without a weapon in this country, and he’d had the shotgun with him and cut loose with one barrel, too far away to do much damage, just hoping to run the sheep killer off. He assumed the man was a hungry drifter and didn’t really want to kill him anyway.

  A little farther west, in cattle-ranching country, cowmen had a low opinion of sheep and the men who raised them, and it wasn’t unheard of for cowboys to come swooping down on a flock with guns blazing. But these two men today were no cowboys. He knew that much in a glance. The horses they rode, the rigs they sat on, the clothes they wore—none of it was genuine ranch hand. Even so, he had little doubt they would shoot more than sheep.

  He saw Lute’s pistol lying in the snow and bent to retrieve it, trying to remember how many shots this sheep killer had fired, deciding he didn’t have time to open the cylinder and check. He stared in horror at the body of the woman he had shot and hesitated a fateful second, trying to decide whether he should shoot the man on the ground before he managed to get up, or try to hit the horseman barreling down on him. He wasn’t much of a shot, so he opted for the closer, slower-moving target; additionally, for most men shooting accurately from atop a galloping horse was difficult, and he could only hope it would be so for the mounted man bearing down on him. With the empty scattergun gripped in his left hand, he thumbed back the hammer of the Colt revolver, trying to steady his shaking hand and make one shot count—an instant before Mal’s bullet struck him in the temple.

  Mal made the shot from sixty feet away astride a running horse. Seeing that the sheepherder was about to shoot his brother, he had gone for the head shot as the only sure way to prevent that from happening. As he began to check his horse, he saw the woman burst through the doorway of the sod house and thought for an instant she was going to fly to her man’s corpse. Instead, she went for Lute’s pistol, now dropped for the second time. Realizing he wasn’t going to be able to stop the horse in time, he rode right at her, sawing on the reins at the last instant to turn the horse. The sorrel’s barrel collided with the woman just as she straightened with the pistol in hand and sent her sprawling. She lost her grip on the sidegun and as soon as she went down she was crawling, reaching frantically for it. Mal managed to get down off the horse and plant his foot on the weapon at the same time her fingers touched it.