I sensed the Judge’s devious hand behind the letter from Sebastian’s mother, with perhaps Mrs. Blackthorne’s gentler touch in the tender parts. I’d never seen a sample of her penmanship, but there was a womanly swoop in the tails and capitals, and I doubted anyone in the ruthlessly masculine organization of the Helena federal court could have managed the endearing phrases it helped form. In between, a more calculating mind had leavened in information that provided the bearer with both a history and an ironclad fence to prevent anyone from confirming or discounting it.
It was on the order of an expression of maternal gratitude and a helpful guide through the changeable landscape of a difficult world. Cleverly, Blackthorne had inserted pertinent details that explained how Sebastian had been thrust into it full-grown. Mother Sebastian, it seemed, had composed the letter to be discovered by her son among her personal effects, and read after her death. His father had been dead for many years. In his absence, young Sebastian had cared for his invalid mother in a house belonging to a Mrs. Brown in or near Denver. The father, a Church deacon, had tutored him in religion, so there was no reason to advise him about gentlemanly conduct once he was on his own, but the old lady took care to instruct her son on certain practical matters to ease his entry into the society of man. I learned from it how to save money, what to look for in a buggy horse, the importance of choosing friends cautiously, and the sort of woman to avoid. I’d have profited from knowing the first three twenty years ago, but I doubt I’d have paid much attention to the last even then. Perfidious women are an education all by themselves.
It was a remarkable document. I got lost in it, truth to tell, and found myself picturing an authentic Bernard Sebastian somewhere out there, born of an ailing mother rich in the wisdom of her years. It couldn’t have been all fabrication. There was a rumor (which the Judge would have slashed to bits if it were ever mentioned in his presence) that the Blackthornes had lost a child in infancy years before they came to Montana Territory. Now I saw foundation in it. These were lessons intended for a youth who hadn’t lived long enough to benefit from them. On the other hand, Mrs. Blackthorne was a great reader of novels, the chairwoman of a book club, and never missed the first night of a new production at the Ming Opera House, so I might have been wasting compassion on nothing more poignant than a lively sense of theater.
Purely as an instrument of my mission, it was expert craftsmanship. A place the size of Denver and its environs would be too thick in “Mrs. Browns” to encourage anyone to look up Sebastian’s former landlady, and the name of the church where his father had served as a lay preacher wasn’t mentioned; the city had dozens. A man of middle age seeking a pulpit in Texas could not have answered queries into his experience better than to claim he’d spent the last couple of decades nursing a bedridden patient and studying the Bible. Such exemplary sacrifice established him as a righteous man, and having a deacon for a sire entitled him to semiprofessional status at least. Mistakes made in front of the congregation would be assigned to his lack of an opportunity to practice what he’d learned in public.
So the old bastard was anticipating I’d fall on my face. As was I, but my pride was stung. All right, it’s a sin, and so is wrath. I wanted to wring his neck.
I put back the letter and examined the rest. Someone familiar with my expense vouchers had come disturbingly close to duplicating my hand in the little writing block where Sebastian kept track of his travel budget. It, and what looked like a complete collection of receipts for possibles that he might need on the road, led me to believe that Brother Bernard was close with a buck, which befit a pilgrim of small means, but it was overdone. Devotion is difficult enough to manufacture without having to try to be a prig as well. I threw the receipts out the window.
I learned from a telegram, composed in Owen, Texas, and sent through Wichita Falls by way of the Overland, that Sebastian’s request for a pastorship had been accepted “on approval” by a director with the First Unitarian Church who went by the intriguing name of “R. Freemason.” The lack of an outright commitment indicated there were concerns about my being an evangelist. Communication by telegraph meant that a court contact in Denver had wired the original petition, and sent the response to Helena.
Stuck in the fold of the wallet I found a stiff rectangle about the size of a penny stamp: an orange and wrinkled tintype of a sheep-faced woman in her fifties, a son’s only likeness of his sainted mother. I wondered who she was really.
Blackthorne had thought of everything. He’d gone to a deal of trouble to place me in the thick of a robbery investigation in someone else’s jurisdiction. I couldn’t believe his only motive was to run the gang to ground in Texas on the slim chance that if it were left unfettered it might shift its activities to Montana Territory.
Taking this assignment was like sitting in on a poker game where the dealer made up all the rules. I wouldn’t mind losing so much as not knowing why. But if I’d turned it down he’d have found something worse. That was the thing about the frontier: There was always something worse.
Texas doesn’t belong in the same sentence with the place I considered home, or for that matter on the same continent. As far as I was concerned it had broken off from southern Spain or northern Africa, blown about for a while to dry out some more like a dead cottonwood leaf, and come to rest a day’s ride from the border of Colorado, where at least winter had the good manners to pause for conversation before heading north. To get there from where I’d started you had to cross the Cimmaron Strip: two hundred square miles of rugged land that was supposed to belong to the Indian Nations, but which had been overlooked when the territorial lines were drawn, leaving a slot-shaped hole in America where road agents scuttled like roaches when dawn broke. That was where mine would head if I put my foot wrong in Owen, and if I were reckless enough to follow them there, Brother Bernard would be dead before his first birthday. I’d taken the oath expecting to die in its honor, but dying twice in one season wasn’t in it.
At Colorado Springs, our last stop in civilization, the greeters and loafers on the platform wore scarves and heavy pullovers and moved in close to warm themselves in the steam when the train braked. In Texas a couple of hours later, when we stopped to let off passengers and take on water, they wore loose cotton, sweat through under the arms, and stepped back to escape the moist heat. By then I’d shrugged out of my heavy preacher’s weeds and pushed up the window against the furnace blast of wind scraping sand from Arizona Territory, which was the only place I’d spent time where you closed up the house to keep the heat out, and the only place that had somewhere to dump the heat it couldn’t handle.
Somewhere being Texas.
Put that together with arid gusts that rocked the stationary cars like Confederate grapeshot, and you can begin to understand the conditions in panhandle country. No other spot on the map was better named, with the possible exception of the Dead Sea. You know that if you’ve ever tried to lift a heated skillet by its handle without first wrapping a rag around it. Sitting in that close coach, waiting for the train to pull out and fanning myself with Brother Bernard’s wallet, I watched a stove-in galvanized bucket bounding across the prairie like a spooked antelope and wondered where it would stop this side of Arkansas, or if barring a fence or a corn rick or a sedentary hog, it would clatter through North Carolina, cross the Atlantic and the Gobi Desert, and make its way around the world back to that same patch of dead earth. That was one sophisticated bucket. I’d have gone out to intercept it, if for no other reason than that a rude receptacle of water shouldn’t be more well-traveled than I, if I weren’t afraid the train would leave me behind with the gilas and roadrunners.
That was my objection to Texas and its featureless landscape. I liked mountains on one side, waving grass on the other, and here and there a saloon or a brothel or even a bank or post office to interrupt the monotony, but the whole state was flat enough to duck under a fence. I’d ridden far for the court and had seen both extremes, cities of brick and sto
ne decked out in coats of soot and spreading acres empty to the horizon. I wanted something in between, with an open window handy in case I changed my mind.
Then there were the Texans themselves; but more about them later.
I wasn’t looking forward to crossing the same country again by horse. I’d overshot my destination for practical reasons and also for duty. There was as yet no rail line to Owen or anywhere within a full canteen of it, and I had a Ranger station to report to at end of track before I set out. Ever since he’d lost two deputies in a misunderstanding in old Mexico, Blackthorne had been a stickler about checking in with local authority. The federales had taken the bigger hit, but he’d just escaped congressional censure over the affair, and the Mexican major in charge had been stood up against a wall in Mexico City.
As we resumed rolling, a man and woman entered the car through the connecting door, balancing themselves against the sway with the support of the seats and the weight of their bags. They were both dressed for town, the woman in tightly woven tweeds as armor against cinders, and I thought they were together, but after the man hoisted her portmanteau into the overhead rack, she thanked him and they sat down on opposite sides of the aisle, she to gaze out at the scenery, such as it was, he to open a copy of The Fort Worth Gazette and lose himself in the gray columns.
That was the payload, not counting freight, and it didn’t say much in favor of where we were heading. I could only hope I could at least get drunk there.
I wished I’d bought a paper while we were stopped. I didn’t care what was going on in Fort Worth, and there was never anything for me in the telegraph columns from New York and Washington, but I’d forgotten to bring a deck of cards and that last leg promised even less in the way of diversion than all those that had preceded it. I opened my Bible to Ecclesiastes. The Preacher strummed the same three notes, time and oppression and no new thing under the sun; he must’ve taken the same trip. I dozed, and woke, and saw nothing had changed outside, not even a shadow to tell me how long I’d slept. The woman had given it up to knit and the man was snoring with his Gazette spread over his face.
In due course we passed a pile of broken crates and empty lard cans that meant a settlement coming up. An ancient conductor with railroad-issue bad feet and a pair of moustaches the size of saddle pouches hobbled down the aisle shouting, “Wichita Falls,” as if it were the first circle of hell.
Slowing, we slid through a neighborhood of chalk-gray houses and drew up alongside a station bright with fresh paint. I took my bones out of the seat and scooped my valise from the rack. “Where’s the nearest place to get a steak and a bottle?”
The conductor’s moustaches moved as he chewed. He parted them to squirt a muddy stream at the cuspidor at my feet. “Kansas City.”
NINE
Lone Star lore, which is what the rest of the country calls a barefaced lie, says the first owner of the site on the Wichita River won it in a poker game. The other version is it was part of a legitimate purchase of land certificates, but he must not have thought much of them because he put them away and forgot they existed. When the trunk was opened almost forty years later, mice and squirrels had eaten all the better prospects and Wichita Falls was what was left.
The crook who platted the tract drafted a nonexistent lake, cotton warehouses, and steamboats in quantity. None of those things ever materialized, and by the time the town had a church and a post office and a public school even the falls had vanished, pounded flat by the relentless water. After that it might have followed a hundred other Western towns into oblivion but for a land-concession deal with the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company that amounted to property confiscation in return for a spur line. Behind the tracks came the station, a shingle and sorghum mill, a lumberyard, a general store, and promotion to county seat.
All this had happened in five years. When I first saw it, the place was built of loblolly pine shipped in from the East with no foundation between it and the natural limestone and smelled of sawdust and turpentine; when the wind shifted crossways the sting made your eyes water. All it took was a flake of hot ash from a pipe or a spark from a train wheel to wipe it out in four hours.
Except, of course, for the rails. The robber barons had stitched up the continent with steel thread that will still be there after the next great flood.
The station agent, a short twist of hickory with handlebars that extended past his shoulders, told me I could find Captain Jordan of the Texas Rangers in the back of the post office. I asked him if there was a hotel in town. He shook his head and gave me a ticket for my valise.
“How many bags have you got waiting to be reclaimed?” I asked.
“Just the one.”
The regional Texas Rangers headquarters hung its shingle above a separate entrance to the post office, which was the only building in town flying the Stars and Stripes. I knocked, got a bark from inside, and opened the door on an office the size of a cloakroom. There was a plank floor without a rug, a barrel stove, a cot, the obligatory spitoon—pewter, with the initials of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company embossed on the flange around the top—a green-painted table, two chairs, a Windsor and a ladderback, and a male creature seated on the ladderback who might have been the twin of the station agent, left out in the weather. His handlebars were fair whereas the other’s were brown and his hair had gone unbarbered long enough to curl back up toward the brim of his mottled pinch hat, but he had the same eyes like steel shot and hawk’s-beak nose that looked as if it had been broken at birth.
He had a copy spread on the table of what looked like the same edition of The Fort Worth Gazette I’d seen aboard the train and was using a wooden yardstick and a clasp knife to cut a neat rectangle out of the lead column. He didn’t glance up as I entered but told me to take a seat. He had a big voice for a small man; not as deep as Dr. Lawrence Lazarus Little’s, but what it lacked in timbre it made up for in volume, with that burred edge that comes from shouting orders against the west Texas wind. I sat, and noticed that his yardstick was stenciled with the name of the Fort Worth & Denver Railway Company and that the knife he was using was the kind issued to porters to cut the tags off luggage and probably had the same legend printed on the handle. A panoramic photograph of two rows of Texas Rangers, one standing, one sitting cross-legged on the ground, all armed with pistols and carbines, hung crooked in a walnut frame on the wall behind his head. As far as I could tell, the railroad hadn’t gotten around to slapping its brand on that.
He finished cutting, peeled up the rectangle, and spiked it on a spindle on a cast-iron base. Other cuttings, scraps of scribbled paper, and telegraph flimsies climbed halfway up the spindle.
I asked him if he’d been mentioned in the newspaper.
“Not me. The Rangers.” He crumpled the rest and tossed it into an open crate in the corner by the Republic of Texas flag on a stand. “Every time we’re in print I’m supposed to save it and send it on to San Antonio.” He’d lowered his voice, but it still carried. I couldn’t hear anything from the post office side, so the walls must have been stout. “That’s what we do up here since we whipped the Comanches. All the men I need to keep the peace are down shooting greasers on the Rio Grande. Who the hell are you?”
“Are you Captain Jordan?”
“Would I be sitting in this shithouse if I wasn’t?”
“Don’t get your back up, Captain. The more people know I’m alive, the less chance I’ve got of staying that way.” I showed him the star and the letter from Judge Blackthorne. His own star, which was nearly as plain as mine, hung on a pocket of his blue flannel shirt, with two inches of white union suit sticking out of the cuffs. He was one of those who believe in insulating themselves against the heat.
In his case it seemed to work. He wasn’t sweating, and the room couldn’t have been hotter if it had been built above a blacksmith’s forge. He looked well past fifty, but taking into account the oven conditions in that country he might have been ten years younger. He didn’t wea
r spectacles and held the letter at normal length while reading.
He laid it down, fingered through the stack of papers on the spindle starting at the base, and tore one loose a third of the way up from the bottom, then smoothed it out beside the letter. He wasn’t comparing the writing, because the second sheet was a telegram that had been taken down by a key operator in Wichita Falls. It was a carefully whittled message from Judge Blackthorne, who never spent a taxpayer’s penny on unnecessary verbiage, asking him to cooperate with a visitor bearing a letter from him. Learning to read upsidedown is useful in my work.
Jordan aimed a square-nailed thumb over his shoulder at the waste paper in the crate. “You’re dead in today’s Gazette.”
“In yesterday’s Independent, too, up in Helena.” I tried not to preen. Vanity’s a stubborn sin to lick when you find out you’re news so far outside your range.
“Anyone can write a letter. Got anything to prove you’re who you say?”
“I left my commission behind. Traveling with the badge and letter was risky enough. I’ll thank you to burn the letter and I’m putting the badge in your charge when I leave here.”
He ruminated. Then he rolled onto one hip; to let wind, I thought, and in that thick air I came closer to panicking than I had since the Judge’s sniper had shaved things so thin back home. Instead he hauled out a long-barreled converted Colt Paterson with a worn brown finish from a scabbard that went down into his back pocket, cocked it, and clunked it down on the table. “I’ll have that pistol under your arm.”
I was wearing the coat I’d had tailored to cover it, but he’d make it his business to know why I kept it on in the heat. I lifted the Deane-Adams clear, holding the butt between thumb and forefinger like a dead fish, and laid it inside his reach. He picked it up, checked the cylinder, and gave it back.
The Book of Murdock Page 7
