by Tim Bryant
Delaney would get a cut, the High Sheriff would get a cut, and they would start all over again. When Delaney needed a suitable day job to keep him around town, Gentleman Jack the bounty hunter was born.
So Jack never gave a damn about Wichita Falls. Probably didn’t shed any tears over the High Sheriff and William Henry Tubbs either. What he did care about was the end of his con game. His final con had come up just short.
Not short enough to make any difference to Greer. That’s why I was traveling northwest toward Wichita Falls instead of north into Indian Territory. I had a pain in my neck that wouldn’t quit and a chest that still felt like raw beef, but it wasn’t about me. Or maybe it was. Greer was dead and buried in a shallow grave behind Reverend Caliber’s Baptist Church, but I would have to either go home to a house in Mobeetie that wasn’t home anymore or decide to never go back. Either way, Jack Delaney was the cause of it, and he would have to deal with me.
One man at a saloon in Decatur said he’d seen Gentleman Jack just two days before.
“He wear one of them Lincoln hats,” he said, “only it was red?”
I don’t know why he wore that thing. Well, I knew why he wore it. Because it made him stand out in a crowd. His vanity would be his undoing.
“With a feather,” I said.
We were sitting in the Number Nine on First Street in Wichita Falls, and I was drinking whiskey. They were permanently out of ginger ale, and it seemed like time for me to grow a little hair on my chest.
“Fella bought me a drink,” the man said. “Seemed like a pretty decent man.”
By appearances. In actuality, he was a Bunce’s Ten Cent Novel inside an original William Blake cover. Only a Bunce’s Ten Cent Novel would have more entertainment value.
“For a cattle rustler,” I said. “And a cheat. And he killed my wife.”
He was eyeing me with some suspicion by that point. I could understand why. I pulled my coat out of the way, just enough to show the peso badge pinned to my shirt collar. He sat up straight in his chair, suddenly sober as a Quaker.
“Oh, you a Texas Ranger,” he said.
I had it pinned on upside down. Partly so I could look down at it and see it right. Mostly because I’d heard a Ranger say you weren’t supposed to turn it over until you got your first kill.
I put down two bits and started to go. Then I stopped and dug two more bits from my pocket.
“See him around these parts again, you tell him he’s gonna regret not ending me.”
If I’d really been able to deliver a message, I’d have told him to kiss Rachel goodbye. There were times I wanted to kill her, just to put him through the same thing he put me through. I wasn’t sure she deserved it though. I wasn’t sure I should leave the girl without a mother. I wasn’t sure about a lot of things, but telling Jack to say his goodbyes wasn’t one of them. He wouldn’t know whether it was him or Rachel I was coming after, but he would damn sure know I was coming.
If I had been able to deliver a message.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“One of our men got into a shootout in Wichita Falls and thought they had Gentleman Jack himself. Turned out to be his son, Jack the second.”
I had the details committed to memory, but it was the first time I had spoken it aloud. The part about Jack Delaney getting shot up at the Delaney Blacksmith Shop in Wichita Falls the year before. The loss of his legs, his livelihood. Then the loss of his dad.
I wasn’t talking to a man in a bar. I wasn’t talking to a woman in a bedroom. I was talking to Bird, and we were trying to get to know each other. I was missing Roman something awful. I had come to the realization, somewhere between Fort Worth and Decatur, that the dream where I’d been searching through all those lit up tents back on that field where the Lusk family had been killed, had been about Roman. He’s who I had been searching for. Don’t ask me how I figured that out. Once I did, it didn’t matter how.
Bird was limping pretty bad by the time we made the outskirts of Wichita Falls, and, in a fanciful way, so was I. What had been designed as my undoing—my ending—had turned out to be my beginning. I wasn’t following Ira Lee. I wasn’t chasing Greer Lusk. I wasn’t running from the U.S. Army. I was making my own way.
I was a deputy Texas Ranger.
Delaney Blacksmith Shop was on Fifth and Burnett in Wichita Falls. From Ranger Hubbards’s report, Jack wasn’t likely to be there. It had been run by Jack number two, and when he was shot, they brought in outside help. As a business, it paid the bills and put food on the table for Rachel and the girl. Jack Junior lived in a hospital bed. No legs to run off on. No hope of getting anything but closer to death. A constant reminder of how one man’s fate was visited upon the son.
Gentleman Jack wasn’t in. The Blacksmith was working on hinges for a barn door but said he’d be happy to fix Bird up if I could leave her for an hour or two. As a kid, I’d spent hours with Ginny Hay watching clouds form shapes then break up and reform again over Central Texas. As an adult, I could recognize an opportunity when I saw one.
“Got a horse I can borrow for collateral?” I said.
He nodded at a mule out in a field behind the shop.
“A mule for a mule,” he said.
There was a nice little mustang running down the fence line.
“How about that one?” I said.
He laughed and shook his head.
“That one’s mine. She don’t let nobody ride her but me.”
I stood there and watched him pound a hinge into shape on a piece of railroad track, the fire blowing so hot I could feel the hairs on my arm curling up in response. I looked at Bird and then at the mustang in the field. He was coming toward us at a brisk pace. It seemed like he knew what was about to go down.
“You know where I might find Jack Delaney?” I said.
The man continued his work, bending the glowing hinge to his will.
“Old man or the son?” he said.
I had Ira Lee’s .44 Colt in hand and was sliding its nose up and forward.
“The father,” I said.
As the mustang got closer, the mule seemed to turn and watch him approach. The dust was kicking up a trail behind him.
“They’re out at the Clara house, far as I know,” he said.
I raised the gun up and pulled the trigger twice. The fire in the forge seemed to leap with each blow, and his body fell against its side and slumped to the ground. I pulled him up by his collar, dragged him onto the forge and stoked the flames as they ate away at the evidence.
Clara was a small community just outside town. I’d ridden through it once before on a dark night with a pale moon that barely beamed through the cloud cover. It was one of those nights when shadowy hoofbeats seemed to give chase and the trail hissed and moved around me like a snake.
I knew if I made good time and everything fell just right, I could be out of Clara and on my way into Indian Territory by sundown. If I took the mustang. And if anyone saw me along the way, they would think I was the blacksmith on his way to pay the boss a visit. I took his hat and duster to further the effect, being careful to pin the deputy Texas Ranger onto the inside breast of the coat. I still pinned it upside down.
I left Bird with the other mule there at the shop. I felt real bad about that, especially because I hadn’t let the blacksmith fix her up before I shot him. Still, it was all in service of the greater good, as I had heard Reverend Caliber once say. That was a concept I understood well. I had seen how things, often terrible things, worked for good many times in my life. Enough times that I’d begun to consider it a pattern. And once I looked for the pattern, I was surprised how often I found it.
On the way to Clara, I asked the mustang about himself. I didn’t have a clue about his name or the blacksmith’s either. I still remembered naming Roman after the Roman literature I was hearing during Sister Mary Constance’s lessons.
“I could name you Vulcan after the Roman god of fire,” I said.
The mustang didn’t see
m impressed.
Clara looked almost as ghostly by day as it did by night. There was only one trail running through it, and aside from a small church and a handful of houses, it appeared most of the residents lived on the other side of the ground. I found a man sitting outside the church with a shovel in his hand, and I wondered if he’d buried the whole town and was just waiting around the join them. He reminded me of my old friend Grover Morrow.
“Howdy, Stranger,” I said.
He face looked like too little skin stretched over too much face. His mouth pulled open into a frozen silence. Maybe he thought I was the ghost.
“You know where a Jack Delaney lives around here?” I said.
The man moved the shovel into a vaguely defensive position. He cleared his throat, which seemed to rattle all the way down into his lungs.
“You kill that Texas Ranger?”
I didn’t like the way he looked at me, didn’t like the way he talked.
“Beg your pardon?” I said.
He used the shovel to pull himself to his feet then leaned unsteadily on it.
“You killed that Texas Ranger in Decatur, like Jack said.”
He was staring off into the distance, or, at least, I thought he was. Turns out, it wasn’t that great a distance. Maybe twenty, thirty yards at the most. For it was there that Gentleman Jack himself stood, tall and silent as a steeple. He didn’t have his fancy duds on. He wasn’t wearing the Abe Lincoln hat with the feather in it. I wouldn’t have recognized him in any other situation. I knew there was nobody else it could be.
“Hi Jack,” I said.
He had a rifle pointed right at my head, something I’d never seen a church steeple do. If I moved for the .44, crows would be picking at my brains for supper.
“Why in the hell are you riding Lee Otis’s horse?” he said.
I looked at the horse and tried to think. For a few moments, the only thought my brain seemed to have in it was the one about not wanting to die in Clara, Texas. Then it slowly yawned back to life.
“You know this horse’s name?” I said.
When it came right down to it, and it looked like I was going to cash in, I didn’t want to get that close and then die not knowing that damn horse’s name. It seemed that important.
CHAPTER FIFTY
David Hubbard Hubbards had been going south when he rode out of Fort Worth. Why he was laying dead on a slab in Decatur, Texas, forty miles north of town, I couldn’t tell you. Gentleman Jack seemed to have a few things to say on the subject.
“He’s dead in Decatur, and you show up here two days later wearing his badge,” he said. “You don’t seem to learn, do you?”
Jack, the old man, and me were standing inside the church building in Clara, Texas. The old man, who turned out to have the keys to the place in his pocket, had used the shovel to wedge the front door shut. It wouldn’t have kept me inside for more than a few seconds, if I had a few seconds with it, but it seemed to be there more to keep folks out. A thought that disturbed me just a little. Gentleman Jack was pacing back and forth in much the way I’d seen him do on the gallows in Fort Worth, only now, he was walking the aisle of the church, up to the altar and then retreating back into the pews. The rifle was still pointed at my head, and now he had Ira Lee’s .44 Colt for backup. I had a few bits in my pocket and the peso badge. After accusing me of killing Ranger Hubbards and taking the Colt, he hadn’t searched me further. Not inclined to give it up, I was trying to decide whether I could use the pin side of it as a deadly weapon.
“If he’s dead, I’m pretty sure I know who killed him,” I said.
The truth was plain as the nose on Gentleman Jack’s face. He knew Hubbards deputized me. That must have put some kind of fright into him. The Texas Rangers were onto him, and now I was one of them. His final, desperate play: Kill Hubbards and, like the peso badge, pin it on me.
“I’m pretty sure I know who killed Lee Otis, too,” Gentleman Jack said. “What you say, let’s take our stories to Sheriff Thatcher and see which one he believes.”
I knew that, according to David Hubbard Hubbards, Thatcher had been cooperating with the Texas Rangers in their pursuit of Jack. Jack didn’t seem to have a clue about that. I also knew I couldn’t be any less safe in the sheriff’s office than I was in a secluded church house in Clara, Texas.
“I’ll take you up on that,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
I could tell that didn’t make Jack happy at all. He shoved the rifle into my face, close enough that I could smell gunpowder. He pulled it down, cocked it and fired. The blast rattled the whole building, from the vestibule to the choir loft. A board proclaiming twenty-two in attendance on the previous Sunday fell to the floor in panic. A hole in the floor opened up, not nearly wide enough to swallow me up.
“The sheriff sees you today, you’re gonna be dead weight on the back of a mule,” he said. “You wanna know a secret? You didn’t get away with anything in Fort Worth that I didn’t let you get away with. You think you cheated the hangman. That’s malarkey. If I’d wanted you dead, believe me, you’d be asleep in Jesus right now.”
I wondered if that could be true. Of course, it could. I tried to recall the moments of the hanging. It had all happened so fast. I remembered my heart racing. I got tunnel vision. The sounds became a roar in my ear. I remembered the floor opening up and having the sensation that I was being pulled upward instead of down. Then I must have passed out, because I woke up gasping for breath. I remembered being acutely aware that I’d soiled my trousers.
“Greer died to teach me a lesson?” I said.
The old man with the key to the church was watching the proceedings intently. The shovel out of his hands, he was clutching something in his left hand, but I couldn’t be sure what it was. He looked nervous. It was understandable.
“It doesn’t make her a saint or anything, Wilkie John,” Jack said. “Everybody’s death teaches somebody a lesson.”
That wasn’t a lie. I had been taught enough, I was slowly putting things together in my mind. I had been taught that Gentleman Jack didn’t want to kill me. He’d said that much himself, hadn’t he? If he’d wanted me dead, I would have died in Fort Worth while he had the rope around my neck. That crowd had been hungry for blood. Standing shoulder to shoulder in the streets to watch the rope break the neck and kill a young Scottish girl with no blood on her hands.
There weren’t many things Jack could’ve wanted from me. I didn’t own any land yet. I had no business. I was a failed cattle driver.
“I think enough lessons have been learned, Jack,” I said.
I looked into the hole at my feet. I guess I was looking for an answer there. I would have expected that hole to open up and start talking before Gentleman Jack did.
“Fear the Lord your God,” the old man with the church key said.
The floor itself might as well have said it.
“What in tarnation is that supposed to mean?” Gentleman Jack said. “God is love, preacher. I’ve heard you say it.”
The old preacher pulled a Smith & Wesson out of nowhere and pointed it right at Jack.
“God is love to the lovable.”
Shots rang out all over that Baptist church. The first one came from the preacher’s Smith & Wesson, and it hit its target. Jack turned, his rifle ready to roar, but the bullet through his right shoulder into his neck had done damage. The first two shots from Gentleman Jack’s rifle ripped through the pews and chewed through the pine walls, but didn’t come close to the old man.
“Fear,” I said.
The answer had come to me. Jack hadn’t killed me because he needed me to fear him. If he killed me, his power would be gone. But what had I done to cause the whole thing? Why me?
I didn’t get the chance to ask him. The third shot from his rifle hit the old preacher in the upper thigh and knocked his legs out from under him. He hit the floor and started leaking blood that matched the red carpet under him. I thought he was as good as dead. And I would be next. May
be Gentleman Jack didn’t want to keep me alive after all.
“This is the look of fear,” Jack said.
He stepped out from behind the pulpit and stepped down three steps to the preacher, who was struggling to get up on all fours.
“Jessie, dammit, you made me do it,” Jack said.
The preacher knelt there all pasty, sweating like he knew that, just maybe, all his fancy words and beliefs had been for naught. He could die alone on the floor of his own church, and there might not be any angels coming to carry him off, no Jesus beckoning him to come unto him and find rest. He might just die.
“No,” the preacher said. “You caused all of this.”
The preacher let out a whoop so loud, it curled the clapboards. It sounded like an old Confederate charge, and maybe that’s what it was. It seemed like a whole battalion came through the back side of that church, busting the hinges clean off a door I hadn’t taken note of. I don’t rightly know how many Texas Rangers bombarded that little church. It’s possible there was even more than the twenty-two on the church attendance chart. There were also more gunshots than a man with only two hands and two feet could keep up with. I lay down on one of the pews with my hands over my head and tried my best to throw a prayer out. I could hear bullets biting into the wood all around me as I did. I could also hear the soft thud as they hit flesh. For half a minute, I just lay there. Oh God, how I hated church.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“I seen your dang badge. I was trying to tell you I was with the Rangers,” Jessie said. “You gonna keep wearing that thing, you’d best learn to listen. Learn to see. You weren’t nothing but a damn hinderance in there. Hiding in the pews like a sinner on Sunday morning.”
To be precise, he was Reverend Jessie of First Baptist Church of Clara, Texas. As if there would ever be a second one. He was also, believe it or not, an active member of the Texas Rangers. And he was sitting just outside the front door of the church in his longjohns, showing his new clean-through wound to anyone who asked. I didn’t ask. I still didn’t like him one bit.
