by Tim Bryant
Sunny read and re-read the newspaper story that came out on the day following my trial. On the first page, it fit under the headline “Texas Cattle Driver Unofficially Credited with Killing of High Sheriff and Store Owner. Hell’s Half Acre Has Been Saved.” The headline was as long as the story, but the truth had been revealed. Along the way, I had somehow survived my own hanging. I was famous.
There was an article on page two in which the editor complained of two botched hangings in as many months. He was calling for both the end of capital punishment in the city and an investigation of Jack Delaney himself. As a result, Gentleman Jack had disappeared. Madam Pearlie said he went high-tailing it back to New Orleans, but Sunny heard a different story altogether.
“You keep making progress, Wilkie John, you up for entertaining visitors, I’m gonna bring somebody up here to see you. I think he’ll really open up those green eyes of yours.”
By then, my eyes were awake most of the time, and the buttermilk had given way to chicken broth and ginger ale. I was already having visitors, truth be known, as a steady stream of people—most of whom I didn’t recognize—came by to get a peek at the man who cheated the hangman’s noose. Even more, I was the man who fired the fatal bullet into the High Sheriff’s upper story.
Celebrations continued without pause as each new word leaked out that somebody had refused the newly opened position. No one else was foolhardy enough to take on the Acre when it was running at full power. It was as if the entire place, from Throckmorton to Main, Calhoun to Jones, had survived the noose. And now, I was being visited upon by an authentic Texas Ranger.
David Hubbard Hubbards came from a place called Birdville. He dressed like a drab sketching of Gentleman Jack, and the peso star gleamed on the colorless collar of his long coat. He wore his hair like an Indian; that is to say, it was thick and long over his shoulders like a woman.
“I don’t care how many people you’ve shot,” he said. “Whatever the number is, I’ve shot one more.”
I liked him immediately. I’m not sure the feeling was mutual.
“That really your name, sir?” I said.
He looked at me with eyes that said he’d seen plenty of my kind, had heard everything I could say, and failed to see any humor in any of it.
“I’m a little surprised that someone with a name like Wilkie John Liquorish would find amusement in someone else’s name,” he said.
It was a fair point, and I said as much.
He was there with Deputy Parnell to impart news about our friend Jack Delaney, and also to seek an answer or two. According to Ranger Hubbards, Gentleman Jack was a first-rate con man, and had a twenty-five-year path of swindling and sweet talking behind him.
“I’ve been on this guy’s trail for the better part of two years,” he said. “We had him in Wichita Falls and let him get away. But he’s a bad penny.”
It might go a long ways toward betraying my state of mind that I first wanted to defend him. Surely he hadn’t been such a scoundrel. What it meant was surely I hadn’t been so hornswoggled.
“You certainly weren’t the only one,” Ranger Hubbards said. “He’s had sheriffs and deputies in his employ from Tennessee to Texas. He seems especially savvy at fooling law folks. He’s good at making big promises. He’s gonna come in and clean up the town, and they’re all gonna pay him to do it. Meanwhile, he’s taking pay from the saloons and bordellos, saying he’ll protect them when the storm comes.”
I could tell enough by the gloom setting in on Sunny’s face. The countless hours Jack had whiled away in the Black El’s bar, hobnobbing with the barkeep and slapping the girls on the backside. His quick trips in and out of the White El on Main Street. Where it once seemed peculiar, it now just criminated. How could I have not seen it?
“So he was taking pay from the High Sheriff with one hand and Madam Pearlie with the other,” I said.
Deputy Parnell, every bit as dour as he’d been on the gallows, chimed in.
“Store owner was in on it too,” he said. “They was in cahoots.”
The Texas Ranger was standing at the foot of my bed. I was sitting straight up and trying to remember the details of an old story Sister Mary Constance had told. There was a man in a bed and an angel standing at the foot. The angel was saying something.
“Mr. Liquorish, I need you to know one thing. You have my word of honor, I have no interest in prosecuting you for anything. Now, in return, I need to know one thing. When you shot the sheriff and Mr. Tubbs—and based on the three boxes of bullets in your possession, I have no reason to doubt your testimony—did you overhear or see something that you felt put your life in jeopardy?”
He had blue eyes that looked like Ira Lee’s blue eyes. When we had been young, people would stop him just to marvel at those blue eyes. My gray-green eyes, unspectacular, would hide my jealousy. And later, unobserved, I would look intently into those same eyes and wonder what I was missing.
There in the little room in the Black Elephant, I didn’t miss anything.
“Yes.”
I said a silent thank you to Ira Lee.
“We found your brother’s name on a ledger in William Tubbs’s office,” Ranger Hubbards said. “It didn’t take much at that point to start putting things together.”
They only had one loose string that needed tying off, they said. And it would lead us to Gentleman Jack.
David Hubbard Hubbards had good enough reason to think Gentleman Jack was in Wichita Falls. Seems Delaney Blacksmith Shop was located right smack in the heart of town and, according to the Texas Rangers, got enough business that Jack could’ve eked out a fine living making horseshoes, nails, hinges, and hammer heads.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
I don’t kill people who don’t ask for it. There was a Dallas businessman who made a habit of visiting Fort Worth to do a certain kind of business he couldn’t be seen doing at home. There were actually enough of that sort that, if you put them all on a train and sent them our way, they would fill a good number of cars. This one fellow, though, was named Hampton Balfour, and he had an eye for Sunny. An understandable thing, except for him being forty years past her in years and already having a house full of family thirty miles east.
It had gotten to the point where, whenever Mr. Balfour would present himself in the drawing room of the Black Elephant, Madam Pearlie would sometimes hold Sunny back from the line-up and tell him that she had taken ill. This had the effect of raising his concern, and he would bring flowers for her room. If she told him that Sunny was otherwise engaged, he would become irritated and even paranoid, suggesting that we were conspiring against him. This wasn’t far from the truth.
On an early morning, I was walking down the block to purchase a copy of the daily news, with a coin donated by Pearlie. She liked to have a copy of the Fort Worth Chief laying around in the front room, just to make us look more worldly. I was aware that I was being followed right away. I have a nose for that kind of thing. It was easier to sneak up on Long Gun, the Indian, than it was me. I figured, in this instance, that it was Gentleman Jack, as he customarily kept me in his sights. Soon enough, I knew better. The footfalls were all wrong, timid instead of quiet, unsure where Jack was steady. I stopped and admired a hat in John Barbon’s Men’s Clothing store. Hampton Balfour appeared in the glass.
“What you following me for, Hamp?” I said.
He moved right up next to me and talked to my reflection in the glass.
“I need to have a discussion with you, boy.”
I hadn’t retrieved my gun for this short ramble, and for that I was sorry. He had me in a tight spot, and he knew it.
“Right here?” I said.
If he would follow me back to the Black El, I would be a little happier to sit down and talk with him. I didn’t see why whatever he had to say couldn’t wait.
“Not right here, but right now,” he said.
He patted his gun for added emphasis. I couldn’t tell what he was carrying. It was holstered inside
his coat. I knew it beat what I had.
“Okay. Where?”
Hampton Balfour led me down a narrow alley between the corner store with its paper rack and the dressmaker that all the whores went to for clothing. People said she was the best paid dressmaker west of the Mississippi, and I have no doubt it was true. Most of the whores had money to spend, and they all tried to look better than the rest.
At the end of the alley was a bunch of tables and chairs. I recognized it as the backside of Frank’s Saloon, even if it was a side I’d never seen before.
“Marguerite,” Balfour said.
A good-looking Mexican girl came out as if this was something Balfour did on a daily basis. He ordered two beers, which I thought hospitable, and motioned for me to take a chair. I didn’t put up a fight. He lit up a cigarette and offered me one of those too, but I passed. Not that I won’t smoke a cigarette on occasion, but I didn’t want to be any more indebted than I had to be. Plus, far as I was concerned, this was no occasion.
“What do you want?”
He smoked the cigarette halfway down before he found his words.
“I’m a successful man,” he said. “I operate a land office in Dallas County. I make enough money to blow a good portion on frivolities here in your town.”
I didn’t consider Fort Worth to be my town, but I said nothing.
“Sometimes, what appears as a frivolity might not, in fact, be a frivolity,” he said. “Do you understand what I’m telling you, boy?”
I tried my best to say it back to him in my own words.
“You’re a rich son of a bitch who thinks he can buy his way to happiness.”
He didn’t agree with that assessment. By this time, Marguerite had returned with drinks in hand. Balfour pawed his glass, sucking off the foam and lapping at the brown liquid. I pushed mine away.
“You little lick-spittle, I could blow a hole through you right now and leave the mess for that little Mexican girl to clean up. You understand me?”
He could count himself lucky I was unarmed. He was old enough that I could probably have taken him in a fair fight, but the gun beneath his coat made that impossible.
“So you’ve got money,” I said.
It was my attempt to get the train back on the track, even if I didn’t like where it was going.
“I’m willing to pay you a generous amount if you’ll help me to achieve a goal,” Balfour said. “I have a proposal.”
I thought of Greer back in Mobeetie. I thought of the baby. Money was the reason I left town in the first place. After everything that decision wreaked, I was still chasing it.
“How much?” I said.
“How much would you have to do?”
“No,” I said. “How much money?”
The whole Tubbs’s General Store debacle hadn’t convinced me that there weren’t a couple of banks in town that needed robbing, but if the bank was coming to me instead, I would at least listen to what it was saying.
“What was Bill Tubbs supposed to pay you for those cattle you were driving?” Balfour said.
It took me a minute to process. There was a heck of a lot of information in that question, and I wasn’t expecting it.
“What makes you think I have anything to do with Bill Tubbs?” I said.
I knew I had made a series of mistakes. I was at the end of a narrow alley. Without a gun. With someone who seemed to know more information than was good for him.
“Bill was paying off cattle drives for whatever amount and then sending them on to Kansas and making big money. Everybody knew it.”
He paused.
“Probably what got him killed.”
I pulled my drink over and took a sip. I still didn’t care for beer, unless it was root beer.
“I was supposed to get paid thirty dollars when I got here,” I said.
Enough said and all true.
“I’ll pay you twice that amount if you’ll get Sunny to be my macushla. I’ll buy her a house right here in the Acre. I’ll buy her one on Main Street if that’s where she wants it. I’ll give her a monthly allowance. Enough to buy perfume and dresses from Chicago. I’ll buy her a piano. Piano lessons. Whatever she likes.”
What did macushla mean? I’d never heard it before.
“She likes reading about places like New Orleans and New York,” I said.
He looked delighted.
“I’ll buy her books.”
It was a start.
“And . . .” I said.
He looked confused. “Anything she likes,” he said.
“Trips to places outside of Texas,” I said.
Part of me felt like I was selling someone back into captivity. I didn’t have any right to speak for Sunny, much less on a matter of such importance. I told him as much. I think it must have come as a sock on the jaw, as he’d mistaken my banter as something more than it was.
“So we have an agreement?” he said.
No, we didn’t. Seemed to me, the only thing me and Hampton Balfour had in common was a sincere like of Sunny. Not that I was jealous or anything.
“If you’re paying me to deliver Sunny to you, that sounds like slavery,” I said, “and that’s illegal even here in Fort Worth.”
He began to get real restless. I could tell he was about to lose his composure. I didn’t expect it to end in tears.
“I don’t want to purchase her,” he said. “I want to take care of her. I love her very much.”
I heard a lot more than that, some of which doesn’t bear repeating. It’s enough to say Mrs. Balfour no longer gave her husband much cause to come home, and she never looked at him anymore in the way Sunny did. I didn’t think it was a good time to mention that Sunny looked at him that way because that’s the way Sunny looked. She looked at me and Black Price Hardwick and Kitch Howard the exact same way. She looked at her breakfast that way too, far as that goes.
On the other hand, as much as I hated to, I empathized. If I’d had that kind of money, I might have wanted to do the same thing. And who was I to say anything about Mrs. Balfour? At times like that, I thought about my Greer back at home and grew flat out melancholy. I thought about killing Balfour a few times. Even dreamed about it and woke up sure I’d done it, a kind of reversal of what had happened years before when I killed Gallo and then halfway-convinced myself I had dreamed it up. I might have killed Hampton Balfour for calling me boy, for calling me a lick-spittle. I didn’t really know what a lick-spittle was, but I was pretty sure he was calling me little or something equally disagreeable. I could have shot him for crying or just for claiming to love Sunny. But I didn’t. I just didn’t have the heart. Of course, I didn’t go running back to tell Sunny about our conversation either, although maybe I should have. I never collected a penny from Hampton Balfour either.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Bird and me left Fort Worth on a balmy morning, pointed in the one direction I was least interested in going. I might have lived a thousand more years without a hankering to visit Wichita Falls if I didn’t have business there. And if that business hadn’t been solicited by a Texas Ranger.
I tried to talk Hubbards into making the trip back with me. He didn’t see any upside in it. It would double the chances of us being spotted, he said. I tried to argue back that it would only double the number of people being spotted. That wasn’t the same thing at all.
We left with Sunny and Madam Pearlie standing in front of the Main Street side of the Black Elephant and waving handkerchiefs, Ranger Hubbards having left in the opposite direction an hour previous. Wichita Falls would be a stop along the way and nothing more. I was contemplating Indian Territory. I hadn’t ventured up that far before, and it seemed like a change of scenery was in order. I didn’t want to go South. I was sure of that much.
The trail to Wichita Falls was made up of untold layers of earth and history, generations buried away and built over one at a time until you could feel the ghosts under your feet. It had been Indian land—mostly Cherokee—maybe as lo
ng as there was land. I felt like an intruder. The only thing that broke up the landscape, besides the occasional bald eagle or wild animal, was Decatur. A little less than halfway, the town gave me a short relief from the heat and a chance to check Bird’s hooves. She was in need of new shoes. Maybe I should’ve seen a smith there in Decatur, but I had the smallest scrap of a plan, and I wasn’t ready to give it away. I knew I could make Wichita Falls in two days, so I pressed on.
According to the Texas Rangers, Jack Delaney was married to a woman named Rachel who still lived in the town. She and Jack had a girl named Tennie who stayed in the home. Jack had returned there on a regular basis up until the last ten or twelve months, during which his visits had become shorter and more erratic.
“He had a son,” Ranger Hubbards said. “If you go back to Wichita Falls, you need to know what happened. Just to understand what you’re getting into.”
I rode along for those two days, going over what Hubbards had said to me. I wanted to learn it so well that I didn’t have to remember it. I wanted it to become a part of me.
“We were there working with the sheriff, old fella named Ples Thatcher, and we were there to serve a warrant for cattle thieving. We knew Delaney was working with someone in Fort Worth. At that particular time, we weren’t sure who. We were planning to go easy on him, work to get him a short sentence if he would turn over a few names.”
I saw where Hubbards was going in time to head him off at the pass.
“Jack was rustling cattle and selling them? To who, William Tubbs?”
“Oh hell, they even had the ranchers on the other end involved,” the Texas Ranger said. “They were rustling small numbers, less than a thousand head, sometimes less than five hundred, mostly so Delaney and a couple of his boys could manage them, get them into Fort Worth and either sell them off to meat-packing plants or mix them in with bigger drives headed up north.”
