The Book of Murdock

by Loren D. Estleman

  Wells, Fargo & Company, owner of the Overland, had sent all its Concords to more challenging country and stuck me in a square mud wagon on solid elmwood timbers that telegraphed every ridge and chuckhole directly to my spine. Dust caked the muslin side curtains, releasing gusts of ocher powder when the cords were undone but forming no barrier whatsoever to fresh injections from outside. When they were drawn and tied down, the hot wind battered at them and whenever we turned crosswise to the blast the coach wobbled and groaned and tried to heel over like a ship. One of my fellow travelers, a barbed-wire salesman from Indiana who carried a sample case that opened in two halves to show his assortment of Buckthorns, Champions, Spur Rowels, and Sawteeth mounted on washboards, offered to bet me that at times we were rolling on two wheels only, the others lifted clear of the earth and spinning ineffectually.

  I declined to take him up on the wager. Partly it was because I wasn’t half convinced he was wrong, but mostly it was because I was in full preacher’s kit, with the Deane-Adams well concealed beneath the rusty black sackcloth of my old coat and a badly used slouch hat that ought to have had a couple of holes cut in the brim for an ass to stick its ears through, and games of chance were inappropriate. I smiled as I shook my head, clinging to the valise on my lap and trying not to cut my throat with Eldred Griffin’s stiff clerical collar.

  The first time I’d tried it on, in Corporal and Mrs. Thomson’s spare bedroom in Wichita Falls, I’d looked at myself in the mirror above the wash basin and saw a mean-faced, middle-aged gunman trying to pass as a man of the cloth, but of course I was hobbled by guilty knowledge. I’d known preachers who could match a Kansas redleg for ruthless aspect and the saintliest-looking one I’d ever seen, with white hands and a gentle countenance, had hanged himself in a cell in Billings after clubbing his wife to death with a boot scraper during a heated discussion over some little thing. I promised myself to shave more closely and look to my nails and accept the rest with serenity.

  The collar was another matter. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to it in the Texas heat and there were plenty of sects that didn’t require it, but having been seen with it on, I considered putting it away a risk to my mission. Griffin had outmaneuvered me at the last. The torturous gift was his vengeance for having been forced to compromise his principles. It was my hair shirt.

  I kept the valise close because it contained his sermons. I’d given him my word I’d look after them, and I was rewarded for my vigilance when the driver turned abruptly to avoid striking some piece of wagon-road jetsam, overcorrected, and an iron-bound trunk toppled off the rack on the roof, broke its hasp when it struck the ground, and spilled out most of its contents. The driver drew rein and my only other companion, a careworn lawyer who dressed even more shabbily than I did, got out to scoop his linen and legal library back into the trunk. The mustard-colored volumes had been missent to Houston while following him from St. Louis; after they were rerouted by the railroad, he’d left his brandnew practice in Owen to go to Wichita Falls and bring them home personally.

  I got that information from his anxious conversation with the driver while the trunk was being loaded, and he repeated it as he repacked. The heat and dust of the journey had not led to casual conversation except from the wire drummer, who seldom heard what was said in answer and failed to draw the obvious conclusion from silence.

  The lawyer struck me as a worthier fellow. I respect a man who takes care of the tools of his trade; Blackthorne treated his soiled, mismatched texts as tenderly as a surgeon handles his saws and scalpels, and if I were on trial for my life I’d want no one else to sit in judgment.

  Provided I was innocent.

  The driver, who cursed the way other men breathed, bound the trunk with rope from the tackle in the boot to keep it from flying open again while his shotgun messenger stood by with the hammers eared back on his Stevens ten-gauge, dividing his attention equally between open country and the tattered attorney. He kept his counsel as to how the man might have rigged the mishap to lay the stage open to ambush. Guarding mail shipments is a suspicious profession.

  There was no faulting his caution. There must have been something of value in the strongbox, because the passenger fares on that run wouldn’t have fed the horses, much less paid for the wear and tear on the equipment.

  The salesman and I stepped down to stretch our legs. It did nothing for my confidence in my disguise that the messenger watched me as closely as he did the others. His taut face and bunched chin beneath the black whiskers was the first evidence I’d seen that the recent bandit raids had the panhandle on the balls of its feet.

  I asked the lawyer for his card.

  He didn’t hear me at first, concentrating as he was on the driver’s skill with knots. Then he hoisted his bushy brows and smiled tragically at me from under muttonchops that had needed barbering a week ago. Gray tips and the general fall of his crest made him look ten years older than he probably was. He might have been on the green side of thirty-five.

  “I thought you parsons pled your case with the Almighty Imponderable,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m not licensed to practice before that bench.”

  I answered the smile with a humble one of my own, or rather of Brother Bernard’s. “I’ve no use for fence, but I took that gentleman’s name.” I tilted my head toward the third member of our party, who was relieving himself noisily into a clump of thorn scrub at the side of the road. I’d already forgotten what he called himself. “I see no reason not to make a running jump at getting to know my neighbors. Bernard Sebastian.” I offered my hand.

  “Father or Reverend?” He took it, stealing a look at my raiment. The treasures of the Vatican were not apparent.

  “Brother. I’m merely a pilgrim on the path to righteousness.”

  “Well, Brother, you must have been walking it on your hands. I’ve shaken the paws of mule skinners with less muscle.” He kneaded bruised fingers.

  I apologized, stopping short of inventing an excuse. I would have to watch more than just my visual impression. The strength in my gun hand ill befit the meek.

  He seemed to disregard it. “I haven’t just had time to have cards printed. I’ve spent my first weeks in Texas tracking that trunk, which has scaled mountains and forded rivers and crossed the burning prairie, passing all manner of savages and baggage clerks, only to become a casualty twenty-five miles from its destination.”

  The driver hooked a heel on a corner of the item under discussion and heaved back on the rope to set the knot. “Better a busted trunk than a busted wheel. The Golden Rule don’t hold up out here.”

  “You’re hardly the resident expert,” said the lawyer. To me: “I’m Luther Cherry. I expect delivery of my shingle any time, if that dullard of a sign painter ever gets it right. Why a man who can’t spell should choose that line of work is a question only your immortal Client can answer.”

  “I’m sure He can, although I’d hesitate to approach Him with it. What kind of law do you practice?”

  “Real property, chiefly land disputes; which makes me a colleague of sorts of Mr. Barbed Wire. I’d intended to open an office in Denver, but there’s a glut there, as you might expect. Then I learned the legislature in Austin is debating a law to declare fence-cutting a felony. In Colorado Territory it’s a misdemeanor punished by a fine, which Big Cattle pays routinely as part of the cost of running off their smaller competitors’ stock.”

  “They’ll never pass it,” I said. “It would mean the end of the open range in this state.”

  “Cattle don’t pay taxes. Landowners do, and entirely too much of it is going to waste on community grazing rights. In any case I anticipate a healthy demand for my counsel.”

  “I’m told ranchers here are accustomed to settling their disputes out in the open, with gunfire.”

  “I was told the same thing, and most of the inquiries I made confirmed it, when they received a response at all. The guard is changing, however, as change it must, before the relentless advance of civ
ilization. The governor is in favor of the law, and he has the support of Mr. Richard Freemason of Owen, who wired me travel expenses in St. Louis as part of the retainer for my services.”

  The sheep baron seemed to cast a wide loop.

  “We share a sponsor,” I said. “Mr. Freemason is a director of the church where I am preparing to preach the gospel.”

  Some of the tragedy went out of Cherry’s smile. “A splendid sign! The sheep wars have been strangling the livestock industry, and Mr. Freemason means to have a hand in restoring peace. Was not the man whose wife bore the Prince of Peace a shepherd?”

  “This one, at least, has made friends of two strangers.”

  “Will a Mrs. Sebastian be joining you later, or does your oath forbid the domestic custom?”

  “It doesn’t, but I have no wife.”

  His face fell. “That’s a disappointment. Mrs. Cherry is closing the house in St. Louis and will board with her parents until I’m settled. It’s lonely out here for a woman, they say.”

  “Mr. Freemason is married.”

  “I’ve not met him yet, though I’ve spoken with his wife, who told me he was away visiting the ranch until this week. She’s gracious, but worldly—a bit out of Anna’s set. She paints her face. The only other women I’ve seen are years older, except the ones who can’t show themselves until the respectable citizens are home in bed.” Abruptly he added, “Those who are not engaged until late setting their office in order, I mean.”

  He’d colored a shade, surprising me. None of the lawyers I’d known could have managed it.

  “Yes,” I said, acknowledging the problem of Original Sin. “Still, it’s not exactly a mining camp.”

  “Did I hear you say you’re bound for the camps?” The fence man joined us, buttoning his fly. He picked up only half of everything said within his earshot and folded it into a pitch. “Once I make my stake in Texas I’m off to the goldfields. There’s nothing like six hundred yards of Glidden’s Twist Oval to protect your claim from jumpers.”

  Cherry shook his head—not to contradict the other’s impression of what we were talking about, but to address the new development. He’d do well in court. “I studied the crime for my bar examination. Claims are jumped in town, not in the field. It’s a combination of bookkeeping and bribery.”

  The salesman considered what he’d taken from that, then lost interest. “They ain’t come up with a barb for that yet.” He climbed back aboard the coach.

  The driver manhandled the trunk to the roof and lashed it to the rack. His messenger waited until we were all seated, then eased down his hammers and mounted to his place on top. As we jolted forward, Cherry watched the flat land rolling past. “It’s this way clear to Owen. Does it ever change, do you think?”

  I said, “I understand after you cross the Canadian it starts to level out.”

  He turned from his window, but I was careful not to intercept his look. The man sitting facing us was busy rearranging the samples in his case. I hoped—well, prayed—that if I learned to think before I spoke I might play my part as well as they played theirs.

  TWELVE

  Owen, Texas, was ten years old, older than Wichita Falls by five years and ancient by frontier standards, which had seen pick holes sprout into metropolises in six months, then blow away six weeks after the veins played out, and roaring end-of-track towns dismantle themselves and reassemble under different names farther down the everexpanding line. Such places were as transient as Indian villages and left only piles of offal behind to mark their passage. Owen had kept the offal but refused to budge.

  Increase Owen, scion of an old New England family and a putative former army major who had either resigned or been cashiered by Ranald MacKenzie at the end of the Red River Indian War in 1874, had built an adobe store on a tributary of the Canadian River called Wild Horse Creek, selling whiskey and provisions and ammunition to parties of buffalo hunters. On occasion he’d bartered for hides, and at the end of the first winter—and they were as cold in the panhandle as the summers were unbearably hot—when the stack of stiff green hides behind the building began to reek, he sold them to a tanner, who paid the market rate. This amounted to ten times what he’d taken in on all his other merchandise since opening his doors, wiping out cost of construction and stock. At that point he entered into a partnership with the tanner. With the Eastern demand for lap robes and doctors’ coats and leather belts to drive the gears in Industrial Age manufactories at its peak, he might have retired in five years to a life of leisure and fine things if the buffalo had just held out.

  They didn’t. By then a little community had sprung up around the store, made up of gunsmiths, knife sharpeners, wheelwrights, crib girls, faro dealers, plank-bar saloons where busthead whiskey was sold and consumed by the jug, and all the other bluebottles that feed on a going concern. Owen had had the foresight to obtain a deed to a hundred acres on the creek and the knowledge to have it platted for town lots, but also the poor judgment to do it all on credit. When the great herds vanished and his debtors caught up with him, he shot himself with the Army Colt he’d carried in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon; or had stolen from a sutler’s after he’d been stripped of his weapons and rank, depending upon which story you preferred. Generally there’s truth in everything that’s said about a person, and if you took all the rogues out of the rotation the country would still belong to the Indians, who had rogues in plenty but not enough to check the press from the Atlantic coast.

  Its founder’s misfortune and death would have been the end of the city of Owen in the normal course of things, but the West was no normal place. The creek, which slowed to a trickle during droughts, never quite dried up, and the grazing was ideal for fattening herds of longhorns and Herefords being driven from the ranches down south to the Kansas railheads in Dodge City and Abilene. Tent saloons popped up like mushrooms, to be replaced quickly by frame buildings where brand whiskey was served in bottles on proper bars and brothels with parlors replaced the cribs. There were shootings, brawls, and the odd mysterious disappearance of a lucky poker player after he left the scene of his success, but nothing to compare with what was going on up north, where the cowhands were paid their full trail wages and had more to spend. Owen boasted the first hotel in the panhandle, and soon a Catholic church, attended mainly by Mexican masons and carpenters and their families. In 1878, a sheep rancher named Vallejo wedded the eldest daughter of one of them before its altar and was buried from there three months later after he was shot by an unknown assassin and his flock scattered. No one was ever brought to trial for his murder; just as well, as it was commonly accepted that no Texas jury would find against the cattle interests, which benefited most from discouraging the sheep trade in that state.

  That was the beginning of Owen’s ranching phase. By the time I arrived, relations between cattleman and shepherd had settled into a low simmer. Residents credited the uneasy truce to the appearance of Richard Freemason, whose eight-hundred-acre ranch on the other side of Wild Horse Creek was the largest in the region, and whose determination to raise sheep placed him on the side of one of the most oppressed groups on the prairie. He was the first rancher to encircle his spread with barbed wire. Three of his fence riders (who when questioned on the stand revealed a deeper knowledge of gun handling than posthole digging) were tried for the murder of a cowhand surprised in the act of cutting the wire to drive some strays across the spread instead of riding a mile out of his way to use the public gate, and convicted after forty minutes of jury deliberation. Freemason appealed the decision. It was upheld and the three were condemned to hang until Governor Ireland issued a full pardon, citing the right of a property owner and his trusties to defend it from trespassers and vandals. He made special note of the relative proximity of the gate and the minor nature of the inconvenience to the cowhand of obeying the law.

  The precedent sent shockwaves from the Canadian to the Rio Grande. Prominent supporters of the cattle trade pronounced it a license to commit m
urder, but since that had been the effect of earlier decisions on the side of Big Cattle, few paid them any attention. Anyone who didn’t believe the tide was changing took a ruder hit a few months later when a bill was introduced in the capital to make fence cutting a crime punishable by jail and a stiff fine. Freemason’s single-minded crusade on his men’s behalf was considered instrumental in this development, and as one public servant after another came forward in favor of the bill, it seemed likely to pass.

  I got part of this history from the attendant who took my money and handed me a towel at the bathhouse and the rest from the clerk in the freight office, who took my valise for safekeeping and gave me a ticket to reclaim it. There is something about a clerical collar that brings out the tour guide in everyone. I was clean and close-shaven, but unbrushed. I’d played the impoverished preacher over whether to order the extra service at the launderer’s where the bathhouse man had offered to take my clothes while I was soaking, then decided I’d make a better impression in a clean shirt and a white collar and a dusty suit than I would in a brushed one and yellow linen; for I’d chosen to pay a call upon my benefactor as soon as I was presentable. When the collar came back, the helpful launderer had put in enough starch to slice cheese with it.

  Finding the house required no directions, although the clerk and the attendant, both proud citizens, had been eager to point it out. It stood on the only high ground in town, a conical hill erected with spades and dredges from level plain that brought the gables in line with the steeple of the Catholic church at the opposite end of the main street. The construction was a delirious arrangement of spires, grilles, turrets, and fretwork, with fishscale shingles and more shades of paint than a tart caught outside in daylight. A quartet of mature cottonwoods provided shade on all four sides at what must have been considerable expense; trees don’t grow in such accommodating symmetry and so had to have been brought in after the house was built.