“You don’t really think John would stoop that low, do you?” his wife asked.
“Oh, Mother!” Lia said.
“Lia’s right, Nance. John Lee would do anything to gain total control of this area.” He stopped, looking at Matt, who was sitting with a smile on his face. “What are you grinnin’ about, boy?”
“So you heard that everybody in the town of Crossing is invited to the wedding, right, Jeff?” Matt asked.
“That’s right.”
“And they’ll go?”
“Everybody but Al. He’s the bartender at the saloon and he hates John Lee. Always has. I think John keeps him on for his amusement.”
“The townspeople . . . they’ll go because they’re afraid of John, or because they like him?”
“Mostly because they’re all just like him. Petty, mean little-minded people. Used to be a lot of good folks made up that town. No more. They all left, scattered around from the settlement to Fort Worth. What are you gettin’ at?”
“So the town will be deserted, right?”
“Just about. Might be a travelin’ drummer at the hotel. But I ’spect the town will just shut down.”
“That’s interesting. Very interesting.”
Sam looked at his brother. The very devil seemed to be popping out of Matt’s eyes. “Oh, Lord, Matt! Am I reading you right?”
Matt just grinned.
Ed Carson sat down on his front steps and howled with laughter. It was the first time he’d laughed since he’d banished his daughter from his house and life. Noah sat beside him and laughed until tears ran from his eyes. Mrs. Carson could not contain her laughter and soon they all were laughing.
“It might work,” Ed said, wiping his eyes. “By God, we might be able to pull it off.”
“It’ll be worth the effort just to see the expression on John’s face,” Noah said.
“I got the boys scouring the area for wagons,” Jeff said. “Folks left behind a lot of wagons when they pulled out . . . or were killed,” he added. “The boys are patchin’ them up. Weddin’s next week. We got lots of time to plan this out.”
“I love it!” the owner of the Flying V said.
“We’ll use those big Missouri mules the farmers sold me,” Jeff said, getting more and more into the spirit of the thing. “I never seen nothin’ that could pull like those mules.”
“To make it even better,” Dodge said, “John Lee has declared the whole week before the weddin’ peaceful. No trouble as long as we stay out of Crossin’.” The foreman started chuckling and the chuckling soon changed into full-blown laughter. Between his snorting and bellering, he gasped, “And we’ll damn sure stay out of Crossin’ ’tween now and the weddin’ day!”
That started everybody off again. The usually poker-faced Sam was caught up in it and he was soon chortling and howling. One of Ed’s hands rode in and sat his saddle in amazement, looking at the men and women practically screaming with laughter.
“What the hell’s goin’ on here?” Lee hollered during a break in the merriment.
“We’re gonna go steal something, Lee!” Noah yelled.
“Steal something? Steal what?”
Noah told him. Lee’s mouth dropped open. He sat his saddle, speechless. When he finaIly found his voice, he said, “You can’t do that! Nobody ever stole a whole damn town!”
While John Lee was all caught up in planning for the wedding and the party afterward, the men and women of the Circle S and the Flying V were making plans of their own, and doing so with all the cunning of generals planning a major offensive.
“Wagons?” Jeff asked.
“Twelve,” he was told.
“Mules?”
“Eight. And enough horses to take up the slack.”
They had sent Parnell into town, since no one knew he worked for the Circle S—that plus the fact he lost the draw when they drew cards.
“They’re shuttin’ ’er down for the day and the night,” he reported back. The only person who ain’t goin’ to the shindig is Al, the bartender.”
“We’ll have a place for Al when the new town is built,” Jeff said with a smile. “And won’t John be happy about that?”
“I hate to poke holes in all this happy planning,” Sam said. “But tell me this: what is to prevent John Lee from building another town?”
“Nothing,” the rancher told him. “But he’ll have to have the lumber brought in by wagon. From the time he sends in the order, to the time the material actually arrives will be weeks. Maybe months. This range war will be over, one way or the other, long before then.”
“But this victory will be ours,” Lia said. “And pulled off without firing a shot. That’s what makes it so nice.”
“They’ll be plenty of shots fired after those penny-pinchin’ weasels in town come back from the weddin’ and find the whole damn town gone!” Jeff said.
“I just hope that when this is reported—if it is reported—that the Rangers don’t send in Josiah Finch to investigate it,” Sam said.
“There ain’t no law out here, Sam,” Jeff told him. “The nearest law is a hundred miles away. Report it? I don’t think so. John doesn’t want Rangers in here. But he’ll be plenty mad about it. Killin’ mad. Oh, it’s a fine plan, and in the long run—if we win—it’ll benefit us. But once it’s done, the lead is gonna start flyin’.”
“So let’s have some fun before the real shooting starts,” Matt said with a grin, and it was an infectious grin.
The closer the date drew, the more frenzied the work around the Circle S and the Flying V became. The cowboys were all caught up in it, for once not griping about work they had to do out of a saddle. The wagons and harnesses were checked out; spokes and rims and reins and buckles and collars and hobbles were repaired or replaced. And always somebody was chuckling at just the thought of what they were going to attempt to pull off, and it was no certainty they could do it. They were going to have about twelve hours to take down a town and transport it and all the goods within the buildings.
Cindy’s name was not mentioned in the Carson house. As far as Ed was concerned, his daughter no longer existed. Her being with child out of wedlock had nothing to do with it. That she would consort with the enemy was the straw that overloaded the camel. Whatever she had left behind at the house was removed and burned at Ed’s orders. Her name was removed from the family Bible. In Ed’s mind, Cindy Carson was dead.
Chapter 7
On the night before the wedding, the lamps went out early in the ranches of Sparks and Carson. And everyone went to sleep with a smile on their lips. Cowboys occasionally chuckled in their sleep.
Long before dawn tinted the horizon with day’s rebirth, the wagons were rolling slowly toward Crossing. The drivers wanted to be in as close as they dared when the exodus of the townspeople began.
At nine o’clock, the air hot and still, the first buggies and men on horseback began leaving the town. Matt lay on the crest of a low hill, on his belly in the short grass, watching the town through field glasses.
“Get them ready,” he told Tate. “It won’t be long now.”
At nine-thirty, Matt watched as Al the bartender walked through the silent town. He made his loop, returned to the end of the street, and waved a white handkerchief.
“Let’s go!” Sam yelled.
Whooping and hollering, the cowboys slapped the reins on the horses’ butts and the wagons rolled into Crossing.
“We’ll take no one’s personal possessions,” Jeff ordered. “But I helped build this damn town—put up some of the money to buy the lumber—so I figure at least a part of it belongs to me. Take it down.”
It wasn’t as difficult as it might have seemed. With a few braces knocked out, several ropes in the right places, and cowboys on horseback with the rope around the saddlehorn, a wall came down. As soon as that was done, teams began dismantling the wall and stacking the lumber in wagons.
“How ’bout the boardwalk?” Gilly asked.
“Take it
,” Ed ordered.
The sounds of protesting rusty nails being pried up with crowbars filled the air. The first wagons left the town within fifteen minutes, the wagons filled with merchandise from stores. The town was being moved eight miles south, onto Circle S property. With people working frantically, the job did not take nearly as long as some had imagined.
They left behind them a very strange sight: beds and feather ticks and chamber pots, cookstoves and washtubs and dressing tables, dressing screens and parlor lamps and corset chairs, spittoons and foot warmers and mop buckets, all sitting forlornly on the rolling prairie.
The men left the outhouses intact, and that only added to the bizarreness of the sight.
Sometimes when the sides of structures were jerked out, the roof fell in and landed intact. If the building had been small enough, mules were used to simply pull the roof away from the town’s rapidly vanishing site to be dismantled later.
By midafternoon, the town of Crossing no longer existed. Eight miles south of the site, hammering and banging and sawing had been going on for hours. All hoped that no stiff wind would suddenly spring up, for the new town, for awhile at least, was going to be flimsily built.
Stocker’s General Store and Emporium was changed to Lia’s Family Store. Crossing Stable and Livery was changed to Dodge’s Barn. Harris’s Saddle Shop was now Gene’s Leather Goods. Crossing Hotel and Saloon was changed to the Pecos Rooms and Bar. The café was now the Eats. The barber shop was now the Hair Palace (that was Lisa’s idea). Matt Bodine was now the new town marshal, elected to the office in the same election that made Jeff Sparks the new mayor.
“What are we going to call it?” Sam asked.
“Name it,” Ed said.
“OK. That’s good enough,” Matt said.
Nameit was about to be born.
“What’s good enough?” Sam asked.
“The new name.”
“What new name?” Sam yelled.
“Nameit.”
“You want the town to be called Nameit?”
“Why not?”
“Sounds good to me,” Jeff said.
“I’d like to call it Prairie Flower, or something like that,” Lisa suggested.
“I ain’t bein’ the mayor of no damn town called Prairie Flower,” her father said.
“Why don’t we just stay with Nameit?” Sam said wearily. He walked off muttering, “Prairie Flower?”
Nick and Cindy were united in holy matrimony—more or less, since there was no preacher and John Lee married them after reading a few words from the Good Book. The party got underway. About seven o’clock, he sent riders into town to bring back more whiskey. They returned in a cloud of dust and confusion.
“There ain’t no town!” Pen told John.
“I beg your pardon?” John looked up at the man, still sitting his saddle.
“There ain’t no town!” Pen repeated.
“Are you drunk?” John yelled, as a crowd began gathering around.
“Hell, no, I ain’t drunk! I’m tellin’ you what I seen with my own eyes.” He paused. “Or what I didn’t see, I reckon would be the way to put it. There ain’t no damn town left.”
“Towns don’t disappear!” the man who used to be the owner of the general store said. “You must have got lost.”
“I ain’t lost, you igit!” Pen hollered. “Even the dogs is gone.”
In the new town of Nameit, hammering and sawing and banging and cussing were still going on. Shelves were being restocked and signs painted. The men and women all knew they were working against time.
“. . . The privies is still standin’,” Pen said. “Tables and chairs and chamberpots is there. Clothes all over the place, blowin’ here and yonder. But there ain’t a buildin’ left standin’ nowheres and dammit I know what I seen.”
Sam drew up papers proclaiming the town of Nameit legal and binding—sort of. He dated the paper a year back. “Does anybody here know what the governor’s signature looks like?”
“I don’t even know if he can write,” Ed said.
Sam scrawled the governor’s name on the bottom of the page and held it up for all to see. “This town has been in existence for one year, folks.”
As tired as they were, they all cheered and applauded.
John Lee looked over what was left of his town. He had a pretty good idea what had happened and where it was. For this to have been done this quickly also told John that Sparks had indeed hired himself a bunch of new hands, and they wouldn’t be fresh-faced greenhorns either. They might not be gunslicks, but they would be men who knew what a fight was all about and who would fight and die for the brand.
He also saw the fine hands of Matt Bodine and that damned half-breed brother of his in this work.
John sat his saddle and sighed as he watched the bewildered-acting people who once owned businesses in the now-gone town wander around trying to salvage something—anything. There was damn little to pick up. And no goods at all. Jeff and Ed and the others had not only taken the buildings, they’d also taken all the damn merchandise that had been in them.
“This is flat-out stealin’!” the man who had run the general store hollered.
“Prove it,” Bam Ford said quietly. “That is, if you want the law in here.”
John glanced at him. “There is that to consider, for a fact.”
“Well,” Bam said, trying awfully hard not to smile. “It ain’t all bad. They did leave the folks a pot to pee in.”
John jerked the reins and rode off. He was in no mood for any jokes.
“Man just don’t have no sense of humor at all,” Bam said to Kingman.
“I don’t like you, Bam,” Kingman said shortly. “And I don’t trust you. You was always a little wishy-washy to my way of thinkin’. I just don’t know what side you’re on in this fight.”
“I’m takin’ John Lee’s money, Kingman. I made it clear to him from the start that I fight growed-up men. Not women and kids and children’s pet animals. I’ll leave that up to people like you.”
“I oughta kill you right here and now!” Kingman snarled at him.
Bam met him look for look. “Anytime you feel like dyin’, Kingman, just make your play.”
“The day will come, Bam,” Kingman said. “Bet on it.” He turned his horse and rode off.
Pen Masters had been listening. He walked his horse over to Bam. “What’s the matter, Bam?”
“The same thing that’s been gnawin’ on you, Pen. I ain’t fightin’ no women and kids.”
“We ain’t fought no one yet, Bam.”
“John Lee’s a ruthless man, Pen. A man used to gettin’ his own way, anyway he sees fit. You and me, Pen, we rode out of that mess up in Utah, remember?”
“Yeah. I remember. I need the money, Bam. It’s just that simple.”
“I need money, too. But I also need sleep at night. I ain’t never killed no women or kids and I ain’t gonna kill no more cattle or sheep. That made me sick up in Utah. I just ain’t a-gonna do it no more.”
“Let’s stick this out for a few more days, Bam. If it gets to where innocents is gonna get hurt, we’ll pull out.”
“Deal.”
The next morning, John Lee, accompanied by his small army, headed south, following the wagon tracks from what used to be Crossing. Over forty strong, they kicked up a powerful lot of dust as they rode. They reined up at a freshly painted sign nailed to a fence post.
Nameit, Texas—one mile.
“Nameit?” Lopez said, taking off his hat and scratching his head.
Bam and Pen both ducked their heads to hide their smiles.
“Very amusing, I’m sure,” John said. He lifted his reins and paused, watching a large group of riders heading their way. They were all carrying Winchesters.
“We got ’em outnumbered two to one,” Lightfoot pointed out.
“And he didn’t even have to take off his boots to use his toes,” Bam said.
Pen laughed and Lightfoot gave them both dirt
y looks.
“Nobody wins in a fight with this many people, this close up,” John said, knowing full well that if a fight started, he’d be the first one dead. “Just stay calm and let’s see what they want. But spread out just in case.”
As John’s men spread out, the riders coming from the south broke out of their bunch and spread out. It was a sight that caused even the most hardened gunhand to wonder why he didn’t pursue some other line of work.
The line of riders stopped about twenty feet from John’s army. Jeff and Ed, flanked by Matt and Sam and Gene and Noah, sat their saddles and stared at John Lee. Various hands formed a line behind them.
Nick had been so hungover and sick he’d been unable to ride that morning. Cindy hadn’t helped matters by vomiting while Nick lay abed moaning about his head hurting.
“This is a public road, Jeff,” John pointed out. “You have no right to try to stop us from using it.”
“That wasn’t my intention at all. With all the dust, we thought it might have been the Army coming to visit our town, or a band of outlaws,” he added.
“We just thought we’d pay your new town a visit, Jeff.”
“New town?” Jeff looked puzzled. “What new town is that, John?”
John was not a patient man. He had very little in the way of a sense of humor. He struggled to keep his temper in check as he pointed to the sign by the road. “That new town.”
“Nameit? Why, John, Nameit’s been here for near ’bouts a year. We just had an election. Matt Bodine is the marshal and I’m the mayor. You boys are welcome in Nameit. Just don’t start any trouble.”
“A . . . year?” John said.
“That’s right, John,” Ed said. “You need to get out more, see all the changes that are takin’ place around you.”
“Broaden your horizons,” Sam said with a straight face.
“You won’t get away with this, Jeff. None of you. What you done was stealing.”
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