Mrs. Bewley reached behind a bolt of cloth that had been put aside because insects had damaged it, and pulled out a beautiful lavender dress. She held it up proudly.
“It’s beautiful, Mrs. Bewley. Absolutely beautiful!”
“It’s yours, Julia, if you’ll have it. I’ve had this cloth laid back in store for some special use for a long time now, waiting for a special time I could use it. Having you join me here has given me reason to bring it out and sew you this dress. I hope so much that it fits you well . . . I think it will, because I’ve had so much experience in measuring for dresses that I’ve gotten to where I can do it just from looking, and almost always be right down to the inch. My hope is you’ll like it well enough to wear it to the dance this week. I’m assuming you’ll have many men ask you to go.”
“Oh, Mrs. Bewley . . . may I try it on now? I love it! Adore it! You are so very kind, so kind, to do this for me!”
“Certainly. Would you like me to help you into it?”
“I can do it alone. I’ll come out and let you see it, though. And yes, I am going to the dance. Sam Heller invited me.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Bewley’s brows went up in a knowing and pleased expression. “Richest man in Hangtree, that one! Well done, dear!”
The dress fit perfectly, and its color brought out all that was best in the flawless young woman. She paraded it proudly before Mrs. Bewley, authentically grateful to the older woman for her gift, and caught herself wondering what Sam Heller would have to say when he saw her so beautifully garbed.
She’d knock his eyes out, and knew it. And the eyes of every other man at that dance. Every man would wish she was with him, and every other female there, young and old, would envy her for the ease with which she would steal the show.
She wouldn’t even have to try. Julia Pepperday Canton had always stolen the show, wherever she was and whomever she was with. As had Della Rose Skinner before her, the identity she had left behind and to which she would soon return, if all went according to plan.
Della Rose Skinner had been fortunate enough to inherit the beauty of her mother, and somehow to build on it and render it perfect. How a man as physically unappealing as Curry “Black Ear” Skinner had managed to snare such a lovely woman as Belle Pepperday was a mystery to all, including Curry himself. That Rose had aligned herself with a man of such amoral criminality and cruelty was even more astonishing. Rose had been the daughter of a Georgia preacher of stern and uncompromising moral standards, determined his daughter would marry no man who did not share his principles. That it was the old preacher himself who had first introduced youthful Curry Skinner to Della was one of life’s ironies. Of course, at that time Curry Skinner had been presenting himself to the world as a reverend himself, preaching some excellent sermons at camp meetings and church gatherings across the South. The outlaw persona of the man had yet to become known.
The kin of Black Ear Skinner always said that goodness showed itself only in three areas of the man’s life. One was the gentle care he provided for his wife when a stroke she suffered during the birth of their son, Jimmy, left her in a coma destined to become her perpetual state of existence. Black Ear made sure his wife had the best doctors, nurses, and housekeepers to see that her world was as safe and pleasant as it could be, though the comatose Rose knew nothing of any of it. The second was in the way Black Ear protected and supported his only son, despite the fact that it was in that son’s birth that his wife suffered her life-changing affliction. Jimmy suffered in the difficult birth, and was left with a weak heart and slowed mental growth. Never to view the world with anything beyond a three-year-old’s level of maturity, Jimmy was destined to life as a “half-wit,” as many people of the time called such as he. No one dared label him so in Black Ear’s presence, however: Black Ear, on one of the rare occasions he dared to be in his own home despite imminent danger of arrest, once shot a dinner guest through the forehead after the man complained of “that stupid half-wit” knocking over his drink at the table. The bullet went through the unwise man’s forehead and blew blood and matter all over the wall behind the dinner table. Black Ear forbade anyone thereafter from replacing the splattered wallpaper, saying he found the ragged stain of blackened crimson “pretty.”
The third and final aspect of life in which Black Ear exhibited anything approaching goodness was in the way he treated his only daughter, Della Rose (who in later years would borrow liberally from her mother’s life story and maiden name in forging her persona of Julia Pepperday Canton, including her mentally slow brother). Having been impoverished in childhood, Black Ear was determined his girl would have what she needed in life and never go hungry or raggedly clothed. An astonishing story was often repeated among Black Ear’s kin, quoting him as saying he sometimes prayed to God in thanks that his daughter had been blessed with extraordinary beauty, because it would make her life’s journey easier. The amazing thing about it was the idea of Black Ear Skinner saying any kind of prayer beyond the contrived and false ones he’d performed back in his days as a fraudulent preacher.
Black Ear’s love for Della Rose was most clearly shown, it was said in the family, by the way he arranged for an expensive and high-quality education for her. He sent her off to a prestigious academy in the East, where she thrived and learned to present herself before the world to her own greatest advantage. She completed her education with the highest grades and honors, though under a fictional name and biography. Black Ear was aware of his daughter’s vulnerability to unscrupulous manhunters who might threaten her safety to gain leverage over one of the nation’s most wanted and hated outlaws. Della’s teachers and fellow students never knew their exemplary and amazingly beautiful fellow scholar, Julia Canton, was the daughter of an infamous and despised outlaw.
Della had found it easy to live under a false identity. It solved many problems simply by not bringing them up in the first place. There was never need to apologize for being the daughter of a minister. She fit in with normal society, and once people “knew” her good-girl background, expectations for her were that she would be a young woman of good repute and high moral code. So it was easy to brush off the many men who were lured by her beauty for lustful reasons.
Her professions of being a righteous girl were as false as her name. Julia Pepperday Canton might have been the well-behaved daughter of a southern preaher, but Della Rose Skinner had been born to a man of sin and carried his blood in her veins. It fueled an interest in the same things that had driven her father: greed, the desire for fast and unfettered fulfillment of impulses and wishes, and the prospect that perhaps one really could reap something other than what was sown.
It hadn’t turned out that way for Black Ear, of course. He’d lived by the gun and died the same way. Died in commission of a robbery, and the jolt of losing her father and seeing his gang of gunhawks scatter for their own safety, like disturbed quail, had changed something inside of Della Rose. Any battle between the Julia side of her and the Della side had instantly tilted, and Della Rose had found herself beginning to dream of claiming her family legacy in a way no one would anticipate . . . she would drape her father’s fallen mantle over her own shoulders and find a way to bring the Black Ear gang back together in a way that would do true honor to the memory of his name and legacy.
At the beginning she’d tried to make herself believe that the best way to honor her father would be to devote herself wholeheartedly to the care of her incapacited mother. He’d cared about her so deeply, and surely it would have pleased him to know that someone was stepping in who would care as well.
So Della had tried. She’d sat beside her mother, reading aloud to her though there was no indication the woman could hear. She sang songs her mother had loved before her apoplexy and washed her brow with damp, cool cloths when the weather was hot. As much as she loved Rose Skinner, though, she could not escape the fact she was really doing her no good. Della was quite sure her mother had no notion even of her own existence, much less who she was and
who it was who cared for her.
Della couldn’t go on with it. Her mother’s needs were being met by paid nurses and domestics (most of them not knowing their pay came from the proceeds of crime), and Della was restless and unhappy, and feeling that her father was being forgotten. For Della that was intolerable. To her, if to no one else, Black Ear Skinner had been a great and memorable man.
So she decided to find a way to take his place. Using fact-finding research skills that had made her a leading student at her prestigious academy for young ladies, she began contriving a criminal plan her father would have been proud to pursue, and to look for a place it could be done. She had some advantages her late father would not have possessed had he been the one putting the plan into motion. She was female and beautiful, cultured and educated, and very cunning. And she would be leading a gang that no one believed existed any longer, not since the death of Black Ear effectively cut off their head.
The research was done, the plan formalized. Della got in contact with the members of the Black Ear gang whom her father had deemed the most trustworthy, and recruited them to begin the process of reconstructing the old gang, though not in full. Della Rose’s version of the Black Ears would be made up only of the best of their number, men who could be counted on and who would have been the ones her father would have chosen. That, at least, was her goal. Della would later come to realize that some from the older and lesser ranks of the gang had caught wind that something was in the works, and managed to find their way into the fringes of it as uninvited and unwanted hangers-on. One of them, a true old-timer as Black Ears went, had been relieved of his teeth by Della herself in the Hangtree Church when the fool tried to rob the congregants and also threatened to blunderingly expose her identity. Another had gotten himself killed by Sam Heller’s mule-leg rifle in front of the Lockhart Emporium.
Before all that happened, though, the plan was put in place. Some of the process seemed downright providential, or at least serendipitous. She explored the possibility of hiring the famed Pinkerton detective organization to help her gather a list of names of wealthy Texas men who might be good prospects for her scheme (she told the Pinkertons nothing of what her real motives were, nor what her real identity was). In the process of talking to her Pinkerton contact, she used her well-practiced charm and managed to learn of a former wartime Pinkerton named Sam Heller who was reportedly making quite a pile of wealth for himself down below the Staked Plains in an unknown little smattering of buildings known as the town of Hangtree. As remote and incognito a place as one could find, it seemed an ideal locale at which to stage an audacious scheme such as Della Rose wished to put into motion. And a possible shape for that scheme fell into place when Della learned that Sam Heller, who had worked for the Pinkertons during the war, was a man who reportedly had nearly $100,000 banked in the little town, more hidden at some unidentified location in the area, and uncounted numbers of longhorn cattle on the plains near Hangtree and Fort Pardee, the nearest military outpost in the region. “So many cattle you could likely trample the town into the earth if you ran enough of them through it at one time,” the Pinkerton man said to the lady who had introduced herself as Julia Pepperday Canton and then proceeded to turn him into a babbling fount of information and rumors despite all prior training to give only minimal and verified facts in any situation other than the briefing of Pinkerton superiors.
Della Rose Skinner never hired the Pinkertons, but she did hire a drifter with some police experience to make the journey to Hangtree and find out more about Sam Heller. He’d done his job, and Della Rose knew from his information just who it was who would be first to feel the touch of the revived Black Ear gang. It would be the very man who was to accompany her to the town dance on the coming Friday evening.
And Heller’s own longhorns would help clean Heller out.
She hoped her father would have been proud.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Early the next morning, as Sam Heller headed toward a steak-and-egg breakfast at the Cattleman, he passed a smokehouse that served the household of an administrator at the Hangtree Bank, one Arvil Caldwell, a man well-known to Heller. It was Caldwell who had helped Heller establish his multiple accounts at the bank, and who served as the unofficial designated guardian of Heller’s extensive holdings in gold, silver, and cash in the bank’s big vault.
Heller had often chanced to meet Caldwell coming out of his house as Heller headed for breakfast, so he prepared to say his hello should today prove to be one of those days. And it did. The door opened and Caldwell, face ruddy from a fresh morning shave and scrub, came out and grinned at Heller.
“Good morning, Sam! Looks to be a lovely day coming on!”
“Going to be hot, I’d say. You had breakfast?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Come on then. I’m buying.”
“Well! My lucky day, then!” The smiling man tripped lightly down his porch steps to join Heller. As he did so, his seven-year-old daughter, Angeline, came to the door, bearing a new doll he’d given her for her birthday a week earlier, and gave him a chirpy “Have a good day, Daddy!” He waved back at the girl and told her he hoped the same for her.
“You’re a fortunate man, you know it?” Heller said as they walked in the direction of the big hotel that hosted the finest eatery in town. “Pretty wife, good family, nice home, solid work.”
“Oh, I know it, Sam. I take not a bit of it for granted. I’ve been blessed beyond all measure, and don’t deserve half of it.”
“You take good care of your own, and that counts for a lot. You deserve your blessings more than you realize, Arvil.”
“Thank you, Sam.” Caldwell paused, then said, “From what I hear, you have some blessings of your own just now. Going to take that lovely new lady down at Myrtle’s dress shop to the dance, I’m told.”
“Who’s been talking about me?”
“The lady herself, Miss Canton. She’s been in the bank a good deal lately, making small deposits and every now and then a withdrawal. Half the time she doesn’t seem to have all that good a reason to be there. She had one of the tellers give her a tour of the building a couple of days ago. Said she just likes banks and thought our vault door looked ‘artistic.’ Got a pretty emblem painted on it, you know.”
“Yep. I’ve seen it aplenty. ‘Likes banks,’ huh? Odd thing to say.”
“I thought the same, but I’m not trying to mock her when I tell you that. I hear she is a woman of good reputation.”
“We know she goes to church, anyway,” Heller said. “Knocked the teeth out of an outlaw’s mouth not long ago, right there in the service.”
“I know. I was there and I saw it. And heard what the man said to her before she did it, too. Looked right at her and said, ‘It’s you.’”
“Like he knowed her?”
“Sounded that way to me.”
Heller strode along for a bit without saying anything, but he seemed to be thinking hard, and Caldwell noticed.
“Everything all right, Sam?”
“Fine, fine. Will be, anyhow, when I have some grub in my belly.” They walked in and sat down at Sam’s usual table. “Like she knowed him, huh?”
Caldwell realized the conversation had just turned back to the bit of offering plate violence that had happened that Sunday morning in the Hangtree Church. “Well, I guess really it was more like he knew her than the other way around.”
“Troubles me, somehow. That fellow, I’m told, proved out to be an outlaw. No big fish, I don’t think, but still an outlaw. Tied in sometime in the past with Black Ear Skinner himself.”
Caldwell, a diplomat and appeaser by nature, said, “Think about it, Sam. A woman that beautiful is going to tend to be remembered a good while by any man who sees her. A face and a pair of . . . let me just say, a face and form like that tends to lodge itself in a man’s mind. Most likely the old fellow had just seen her somewhere before. Maybe just out on the street. Or maybe he rode in on the same stagecoach she did.
That might have been the only ‘knowing’ of each other that was involved.”
“Probably so. Hope so.”
The waiter appeared in his black vest and matching armbands over a crisp white shirt. “Steak and eggs, Sam?”
“Yep. Same for you, Arvil?”
“Sounds just right.”
Coffee was served and they settled in to talk and await their food. “Likes banks,” Sam muttered in a distracted manner. “Never heard of somebody who just ‘likes banks.’”
“Don’t worry so much, Sam. She ain’t loco, she’s fine. And if she ain’t, she’s pretty enough to make up for it.”
“That’s the truth. Just something, though . . . can’t quite figure it out. Just something that don’t feel right.”
“Well, the main thing is, you’ve got yourself a mighty fine partner to kick up your heels with Friday night.”
“No denying.”
“Sam, when am I ever going to persuade you to trust the bank for all your money? Everybody in town says Sam Heller has at least a third of his money hid out somewhere, stashed away, because he figures banks can be robbed.”
“That’s what they say, is it?”
“You know it is. What I want to know is, is that true?”
“Could be.”
“Wherever you’ve got it—and you should know that folks are guessing about that all the time—I can assure you it would be safer in our vault with the rest of your cash.”
“So you tell me. Put all my eggs in one basket and I’ll have no worries. Not sure I go along with that.”
The arrival of the food ended most of the conversation. Heller paid for the meals when they were done and said his farewell to Caldwell, who headed toward the bank.
. . . And there she was. Julia Canton was on the far side of the street from the bank and looking closely at it. Caldwell stopped where he was and watched her, thinking about the worries Heller had expressed and wondering if there was indeed anything worthy of concern over her odd interest in this particular bank. A bank where, coincidentally or not, a big part of the cash on deposit had been put there by Sam Heller.
Savage Texas: The Stampeders Page 11
