Savage Texas: The Stampeders

by William W. Johnstone

  The metallic flash passed what seemed mere inches in front of Sam Heller’s eyes, close enough to make him start and reflexively reach for his mule-leg sidearm. The hard thunking sound beside him verified what he’d thought: the thing that had flashed by in front of him was a thrown knife, and it was lodged firmly into the wall of the feed store wall beside him.

  Heller’s weapon was up and ready to fire before he even noticed that the man who’d thrown the knife was Johnny Cross, and Cross was grinning like a cat. “Morning, Sam.”

  “Johnny, I nigh kilt you.”

  Cross shook his head. “Seems to me it was me who nigh kilt you. Another five inches to the right and I’d at least have sliced off your nose. A little farther right and that blade would be buried in your temple.”

  Heller put the mule-leg back into its custom holster and looked at the blade lodged in the plank siding. “Nice knife. Is that the one Jimbo Hale has been trying to sell?”

  “That’s it. And I’m the one who got it. Good throwing knives, them Arkansas toothpicks are. Got the right balance for it, that one there even better than most.”

  “Sorry you decided to try to kill me this morning, Johnny.”

  “If I’d been trying to kill you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.”

  Heller reached up and pulled the knife from the wall. He handed it to Cross. “Your blade, sir.”

  “Truth is, Sam, I come looking for you. Not just to show off my new toothpick, either. Couple of things you need to know about.”

  “Hell, Johnny, you’re sounding almost serious just now.”

  “Maybe it is serious. Or maybe it ain’t. I don’t know, but I figure the best is just to tell you.”

  “Speak on, then.”

  “I was out near Resurrection Gulch yesterday, and there’s some odd things going on thereabouts.”

  Sam looked more startled than he would have intended.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You got men hired to round up cattle out there?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  “Well, somebody’s doing just that. Rope corrals strung up everywhere, and all kinds of cattle. Quite a big herd being put together, and even though I wasn’t close enough to see brands, some of them got to be yours.”

  “Yeah. Could you tell who it was? Recognize anybody?”

  “Sure couldn’t. But something smelled mighty bad in the whole situation, and I ain’t just talking cow pies.”

  “That kind of worries me, and I won’t deny it.”

  “There’s something else, too. Something I learned down at that picture-taking shop. Four-eyes Perkins’s place.”

  “Huh?”

  “Something about the lady you’re taking to the dance, as I hear it.”

  Heller paused, frowned, then broke into a knowing smile. “All right, Cross. Now I see it! You were prancing around town with Julia Canton, and all at once you hear she’s going to the dance-party with me . . . and you get all green over it. So you decide to tell me my cattle are all getting rustled and all such as that, trying to get me worried and fretful. You’re jealous and wishing you’d got around to asking her instead of letting the better man beat you to it.”

  “‘Better man’? Who the hell might that be?”

  “The one who’s stepping out with Julia Canton to that dance, that’s who!”

  Cross’s temper got away from him. He was not one to be made fun of, especially by Sam Heller. Anger overcame judgment. “Her name ain’t Julia Canton, Sam. That’s something you don’t know about, and one of the main reasons I hunted you down this morning. I need to tell you about it. This is what I’m talking about when I said I learned something at the photograph place.”

  “She’s not Julia Canton. Right. Right. I understand, amigo. I’ve been misunderstanding her name all this time.”

  “You know who her daddy was, Sammy?”

  “Preacher out of Georgia.”

  “Uh-uh. Think again.”

  “Don’t need to. She told me about him herself.”

  “She lied.”

  Heller stretched to his full height in his chair, fists clenching. “You watch that mouth of yours, Johnny. You might find yourself in the same shape as that hombre Julia hit with the offering plate in church: blowing your own teeth out your hind end!”

  Johnny felt like yelling out what he had to say, but he realized that the words did not need to be broadcast on a public street, where unnoticed ears could overhear. So he drew in a few breaths, calmed himself, and spoke quietly. “Her daddy was Black Ear Skinner. Her name ain’t Julia, but Della Rose. Della Rose Skinner, daughter of the old ash-eared devil hisself. And there’s a picture of Black Ear’s family down at Perkins’s place that proves it. And now I’ve told you. My duty’s done and I’m heading on my way.”

  Heller took it all in and rolled it around his mind, then chuckled. The chuckle grew into a full-out laugh.

  “Black Ear’s daughter! Baw-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Johnny Cross, I’ve heard bilge and bull come out of your mouth before, but never nothing to top that! Ha!”

  Johnny Cross stared at him, silent and unshaken. “Believe what you want. I’ve seen the picture. But don’t go asking Four-eye Perkins about it. It was Timothy Holt who showed it to me, and Perkins don’t know he done it. Don’t want to get the boy in trouble.”

  Heller’s laughter subsided, but his mood of mockery did not. He cleared his throat and improvised a song to a familiar old fiddle tune. “Della Rose, Della Rose, she’s the gal nobody knows! Flounces ’round and says she’s Julia, but Johnny says she’s trying to fool ya!”

  Johnny Cross rolled his eyes sarcastically. “Good song, Sam. You ought to sing it to her while you swing her around at that dance.”

  “I may do that! Yep!”

  “See you later, Sam. You take care, you hear?”

  “I’ll do that, Johnny. You do the same. Come up with something more believable next time. Black Ear Skinner. Ha!”

  Thinking through it all later in the day, Sam began to worry despite himself. Much of the worry had to do with what Johnny Cross had said about unusual activity out where Heller ranged most of his longhorns. But there was another thing, too, something involving Julia that made Heller wonder if Johnny was onto something after all, wild as it sounded.

  The picture in the Dog Star of the dead Black Ear gang member named Toleen. She’d known him. Identified him as Cal Toleen. And she’d seemed quite confident when she said it.

  How could she have known such a man, and been so sure of it? How, indeed, as a mere preacher’s daughter from Georgia?

  It was early for it, but Heller needed a drink, bad. He headed for the Dog Star.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Heller drank enough at the Dog Star to take the edge off his worries, but no more. He valued discipline too highly to let himself become one of those men who loses himself in a bottle. Sometimes folks who did that never found their way out again.

  Leaving the Dog Star, he paused beside the picture of the dead man. “Cal Toleen, is that really you?” he muttered beneath his breath. “Or was she just talking through that blackberry wine she’d drunk, just blabbing her mouth?”

  Cal Toleen had nothing to say in reply, so Heller moved on. Out on the street he pondered marching over to Otto Perkins’s place and demanding to see that photograph Johnny Cross had talked about, but then he remembered what Cross had said about keeping Timothy out of trouble and decided he wouldn’t chance it. The whole business was probably a hoax Cross had cooked up, but just in case it wasn’t, he’d look out for Timothy. The poor dullard had enough troubles without having his newest boss down on him.

  Should he simply go to the dress shop, pull Julia aside, and tell her what Johnny Cross was saying about her? That thought brightened his mood. If Johnny was indeed making up such a scandalous story, Julia would surely not take at all kindly to learning what a man she used to walk about town with, in public, was telling others about her. That would turn the
tables on Johnny Cross, no doubt about it!

  Heller had already begun trudging toward the dress shop when he made himself stop and think. Might the tables not turn right back on him if he went to her in a way that implied he gave credence to Cross’s wild tale? Even if she despised Cross for making up a story about her heritage, and impugning her honesty, she might be just as disillusioned with Heller for being willing to consider it as possibly true.

  Best to forget the whole Della Rose Skinner nonsense and think about the other part of what Cross had said: the thing about strange activity at Resurrection Gulch. Activity seemingly involving Heller’s own cattle.

  Heller readjusted his hat, checked to make sure he was carrying a decent supply of ammunition in his saddlebag, and began the ride out to the remains of the failed settlement.

  Being unsure of what reaction he would provoke, the man waited until he knew the proprietress of the dress shop was absent on an errand before he went in. He entered with stealth, managing to reach a hand up and muffle the entrance bell above the door before it jangled. He eased the door closed and knew his quarry had no idea he was there.

  He heard her before he saw her. She was coming from the back room, bearing a box of scissors ready to go on display for sale. He hid himself behind a tall shelf and let her get the scissors in their place. She stepped back to examine the display, and only then did he speak.

  Using the same whispery voice he’d employed outside the boardinghouse window in the darkness so recently, he said, “Della Rose? Della Rose? It’s time to come home now.”

  Her reaction was faster and more violent than he would have anticipated. She grabbed one of the scissors she’d just put on display and confronted him with the closed blades pointing like a knife. Startled, he back-stepped and looked pleadingly at her beautiful but intense face.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” she demanded. “And why did you call me by that name?”

  “Della, please, please . . . I mean you no harm. There’s no need to—”

  “Why do you call me that? My name is Julia Canton! Who are you?”

  “My name is Brody, Wilfred Brody. I am a detective, a man-hunter. In this case, a woman-hunter.”

  “Have you been looking for me? Watching me?”

  “I have. And I apologize for my recent actions outside your boardinghouse, whispering and no doubt seeming threatening. That was my intent at that time. To unsettle you. I thought that might make it easier to persuade you to come home.”

  “What do you mean, come home?”

  “Please put down the scissors, Della. Please.”

  “No. If I put them anywhere it will be through your throat! Why do you call me Della, and who sent you? You’d best speak up. If my employer returns and finds you here in this situation, she will have the law on you!”

  “I call you Della because we both know who you really are. You are Della Rose Skinner. And I’ve come to bring you home because your mother needs you and has sent for you.”

  “‘Sent for me.’ What kind of fool do you think I am? My mother is unable to speak or even move. She has no power to ‘send for me.’ You are a fraud and a lecher, that’s what I think! A man who watches young women where they work and where they live, and whispers at them from the dark!”

  “Listen to me, Della. I understand your fear and confusion. But hear this: Your mother has awakened at last. She has come out of the stupor she has been in. It was unexpected, no sign of it happening until it did. She is weak, her speech is very slurred, and her vision and much of her movement is impaired, but she is back in the real world again, able to make her wishes known and understand what is happening around her. When she learned you had come to Texas, she hired me to come find you and bring you home.”

  “I don’t believe you. It has been years—years!—since my mother was stricken. Why should I believe something has suddenly changed?”

  “May I reach into my pocket and bring out something that may give what I say more credence?”

  “Move slowly.”

  Brody reached beneath his vest and drew out a sealed envelope marked with a familiar design. Rose Skinner’s personal emblem, used on all her personal correspondence in the years before her stroke. The man held it out and nodded.

  She took it in trembling fingers and managed with one hand and her teeth to tear it open, never lowering the scissors with which she held the self-described detective at bay. She pulled the paper inside out with her teeth, dropped the envelope, and took the paper in hand. Holding it up where she could see the face of it and keep the man visible at the same time, she read it.

  It was a quick read, just two words, scrawled so messily in pencil that they were nearly indecipherable. DELLA HOME

  “You can see in how the letters look that it was a great strain for her to write,” Brody said. “She has not used those muscles in many years. I, frankly, am surprised she was able to write at all.”

  Tears came, unwanted. She lowered the paper. “Why should I believe this? You or anyone else could have scrawled this out, making it look like the hand of someone who has been long afflicted, and using my mother’s personal stationery.”

  “That is true, Della. It could have been faked. But that isn’t what happened. I don’t know what I can do to persuade you. All I can do is ask you to come home and see for yourself. I am prepared to accompany you.”

  “Ha! Me, traveling with you? That won’t happen, Mr. Brody, though I wonder if that is your real name. I don’t believe what you’re telling me, and there are things holding me here that would make it impossible for me to leave even if I wished to. I have work here and much more lucrative and important work soon to come.”

  “I don’t know what to say, Della. I thought that surely you would wish to rush home to a mother so long unavailable to you!”

  “First, you can stop calling me Della. That is a name that used to be, but now I am Julia Pepperday Canton. I am from Georgia, just as Della was, and I had a brother with a similar limitation of mind as Della’s late brother. But my father, my father, Julia’s father, was a preacher. A good man. Not like Della’s father, an outlaw.”

  Brody was relaxing a little, seeking to strengthen his hand in a situation that had gone not according to plan. He gave her a feigned look of sympathy and understanding. “From all I have heard, though, Della’s father, though not what most would call a good man to all, was at least a good man to his younger daughter. He gave her education, opportunity. Freedom. Love.”

  “This discussion ends. I’m taking you to the law, and we’ll see if you can persuade them with your words!” She shook the scissors and made a little lunge with them.

  He was fast, faster than she would ever have anticipated. In half a moment her wrist was trapped in one of his hands while the scissors were being wrenched out of her fingers by the other. She cried out, but he anticipated it and pushed her face against his chest in a way that muffled her voice. She was fast disarmed, and then he had her firmly in his grasp.

  “What are . . . what are you going . . .”

  She did not finish her question. He tripped her and shoved her downward at the same moment. She went down hard, her head striking the edge of a heavy table. Without another sound she went limp and collapsed. He let her drop to the floor, knelt to make sure she was indeed unconscious, then picked her up as if she weighed nothing and carried her out of the store over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes.

  It was the first time he’d ever carried this particular young woman, but there’d been plenty of others, in other places. Women rendered senseless by violence, liquor, or opiates. Unlike many men who committed his particular favored crime, he was selective in his victims. If a man was going to risk hanging for the sake of taking his own pleasures, he might as well choose the best and most beautiful.

  He’d had his eye on Della Rose Skinner since the time he’d seen her in the house of Black Ear Skinner, bringing in a fresh-picked flower to give to her mother, who, of course, k
new nothing of it because she was a barely living, unconscious being, lying propped up on a pillow, eyes three-quarters closed and seeing nothing. Brody had been in that house at that time because Black Ear had come to suspect one of his former gang members had stolen from him, then fled, and Skinner needed a good man-hunter to locate him so that Skinner could see to the embezzler’s proper punishment.

  Brody had done the job, found the man, and conveyed to his employer word of how and where to capture him. Last Brody had heard of the fellow, he’d turned up dismembered in a dry gully somewhere up in the Nations. Evidence indicated some young Indian bucks had done the nasty work . . . but if so, Brody had known who paid them to do it.

  The morally unrestrained man-finder had never forgotten Black Ear Skinner’s lovely little girl. She had precisely the type of beauty that roused Brody’s passions, and when Black Ear had shorted him on the pay promised for finding that thieving-and-fleeing gang member, Brody had made himself a promise. He’d not take the risk of trying to gouge the missing pay out of Skinner. He’d be patient, bide his time, and take his recompense in a far more gratifying way, with Black Ear’s own beloved daughter, the one he valued, not the plain-faced one whom Skinner reportedly refused even to acknowledge as his own, despite her obvious dead-ringer similarity to him.

  When word came at length that Black Ear Skinner had been shot through the head during a robbery in Mason, Texas, Brody had been infuriated. By dying, Black Ear had robbed Brody of the pleasure of seeing the outlaw realize that his own daughter had been ravaged by a man he’d cheated. Brody had been on the verge of giving up on the notion entirely, but when he thought back on the beauty of Della Rose Skinner, her flawless face and spilling chestnut hair, he envisioned pleasure and satisfaction that had nothing to do with Black Ear Skinner. Most likely, the dead Skinner had other things on his mind, considering where he surely had gone.