by John Shirley
“You got a letter, Wyatt,” Marshal Meagher said, coming out and passing over a linen envelope. “They sent it care of me because it come from a U.S. Marshal …”
Seeing Meagher was waiting for an explanation, Wyatt said, “I wrote for information about Dandi LeTrouveau.”
Hearing that, Meagher winced and went back into his office.
Wyatt opened the envelope and read:
Salutations, Officer Earp
I regret so much the delay in responding to yours of_____. We had a busted dike here, and much land flooded. I had to abandon my office for awhile. I was then distracted by the depredations of a local feud. On reclaiming my office I found your request for information high and dry on a cabinet. Accordingly, when the occasion took me to that county, I have visited the orphanage you named and was informed that the former resident Miss Dandi LeTrouveau was the daughter of a woman named Belle LeTrouveau and a Mr. A. Pierce, as indicated by Belle LeTrouveau. She did not indicate what the A stood for. He was only here a few weeks. She made the arrangements for her daughter on her death bed and this is all the information she gave. Belle came from a good family here, but they died out with the yellow jack in ’57. No other family is known. I am sorry I have no further information for you at this time. Most of our records were destroyed in the recent flood.
H. Liam Cay, U.S. Marshal, Louisiana
Wyatt shook his head. “I’ll be damned!”
“What is it?” Mattie asked, frowning at the envelope.
“It appears Dandi was the daughter of a woman named Belle LeTrouveau. Dandi didn’t take her daddy’s name because there was no legal marriage. He was a young fella who visited New Orleans some years ago …”
“Anyone familiar?” Bat asked.
“Her father’s name was Pierce. Marshal doesn’t know his first name, except the initial ‘A’.”
Bat stared at him. “’A’ as in Abel? As in Abel Pierce?”
Wyatt nodded thoughtfully. “Seems too big a coincidence to be anyone else.” He folded the letter and put it in his shirt pocket. “Pierce left yesterday on the train for Points South. He’s going west, taking the train far as Medicine Lodge. He’ll ride south, after that, I expect … I might be able to catch him in Medicine Lodge.”
“Oh, Wyatt!” Mattie shook her head. “The girl is gone—and whoever did it is long gone from around here. Now it’s a shame, what happened, and I’m sorry for her but it’s a fool’s errand to chase it any more. Stay here!”
“I’ve got to know—if I confront Pierce with this, he may feel he’s got to tell me the whole truth …”
“But that killing happened before you had this job—that was a different agency. And who will pay you for this?”
“If I can solve it, I will bill the city for solving a murder. If they don’t want to pay, I don’t much care.” He thought of Sarah. He thought of Urilla. “I’ve just got to know …”
An hour later, after a quick meal and quicker packing, Wyatt was at the ticket window in the train station, buying passage to Medicine Lodge for himself and paying a freighting fee for his horse. The noon train, which had been forty-five minutes delayed, was about to leave, but there was just time to get the horse aboard a stock car.
He didn’t notice the man watching him from the shadows at the back of the train station. The man was sitting on a bench in a corner, between a grandfather clock and the wall, smoking a pipe, and you’d have to peer into that corner to see him clearly.
* * *
Some hours later, the same Johann Burke was cantering his horse down a half-overgrown dirt road winding through the low hills of Southern Kansas, looking for the trail to what was left of the town of Ghost Corners. You wouldn’t see the trail if you weren’t looking sharp for it. Could he have ridden past it?
He reined in his horse, listening. Yes—he could hear a horse coming up the road behind him.
It was a region marked with stony outcroppings and this late in the day it was still warm here, with the September sun bouncing off the granite, sparkling the veins of quartz. Burke didn’t care for people riding up behind him, but he was grateful for an excuse to pull his horse into the shade of a copse of cottonwoods. He dismounted under cover of the brush and, drawing his pistol, moved to where he could watch the road. Could be that it was just another traveler coming, with no thought of Johann Burke.
But it could be one of the Earp brothers, or Bat Masterson. They might’ve guessed what was coming, and they were said to be ridiculously loyal to Wyatt Earp.
Instead, he saw, it was that gilded lump, Swinnington, inexpertly riding a mule; bobbing about in his saddle, wiping his forehead and gawping at the hills.
Burke slipped through the brush, and stepped into view. “Swin-nington!”
Startled, the portly swindler’s mount reared, nearly throwing him. “Whoa you cretinous, foul-smelling mule!” he shouted—which only made the animal more jumpy.
Burke stepped into the trail and caught the mule’s reins. “Take it easy, there, easy. That’s it … Swinnington, what are you doing here?”
Swinnington removed his derby, which had developed a flapped hole in the crown like the top of a half-opened tin can, and wiped his glistening forehead with his forearm. “Mr. Burke, I’ve been looking for you. You said to watch Wyatt Earp. I heard Smith say Earp’d be taking a train out of town, so I waited over there at the station, biding my time—”
“Get to the point. Where’s he gone?”
“Medicine Lodge! He’s trying to overtake Abel Pierce. He’s sent a telegram ahead asking the Sheriff to stop Pierce—I got the telegraph operator to tell me. Don’t know if they’ll hold him in Medicine Lodge, Mr. Pierce being a well-regarded gentleman, more well regarded the farther south you go, as I understand it, but—”
“So Earp took a train south, did he? When?”
“Earlier today. The only train. Have you anything to drink, Mr. Burke? I have only a canteen of water. Just … water. It has been a trying journey in the heat. My hat fell off and this idiot beast trampled it into the dust. I was just about to turn back, thinking I could not overtake you. When I came up here before it was with a large party, before the Indian trouble—”
“Yes, yes, here’s a pint of whiskey, help yourself.”
“You’re a saint, sir.”
Burke snorted. This Swinnington rattled away, saying things without a thought for their meaning.
So Earp was going to Medicine Lodge? A railroad car—that could make for difficulties.
There would be witnesses on a train. And Burke had a bad feeling about calling Earp out. He’d rather not take a chance like that. Then too, Earp was now Assistant Town Marshal—shoot a lawman in the back and there’d be a real investigation. Witnesses might be located. He couldn’t kill them all.
He knew of some other folks, though, who had little to lose by killing young mister Earp. And Ghost Corners, where they liked to meet, was just up west in these hills …
“Now as to the payment you promised me, Mr. Burke,” Swinnington was saying. “That would be, ah, four hundred dollars in gold.”
“I promised you a hundred, you lying sack of shit,” Burke said absently, his mind on the train to Medicine Lodge.
“Oh but this arduous journey I’ve made, sir—well, two hundred-fifty will fill the bill, I believe—”
Burke looked at Swinnington. Seeing that look, the swindler closed his mouth, and swallowed.
“Or … or, Mr. Burke … a hundred would be fine.”
“In town, I might be inclined to give you the money,” Burke said, his voice ominously soft. “But out here? I don’t think so. And I can’t just let you ride out because you might try to sell information to, say, Bat Masterson.”
Swinnington’s eyes widened. “I’d never do that, Mr. Burke!”
“You’d sell your mama for a bucket of beer, Swinnington. No. I don’t want to pay you and I don’t want to let you go. So let’s see. What does that leave me? Besides—there’s some creatures
… Back home we have a bug called the Jerusalem Cricket—big as your thumb and the ugliest crawling thing you ever saw. Whenever I see one, I have to step on it. Can’t bear it otherwise. You give me much the same feeling, Swinnington.”
Swinnington tried to back his mule up, but Burke still had a grip on the reins.
“Now see here, sir!” Swinnington wailed. “If I just disappear, why, then, ah, people will … they will …”
“They will? Who will search for you, Mr. J. Mundale Swinnington? A bloodsucker like you, why, nobody’ll miss you when you’re gone. If anyone does notice, they’ll say ‘Good riddance’.” He cocked his pistol, going on relentlessly, “I doubt if even one single person comes to look for you, Swinnington.”
“No—!”
“I’m ’fraid so.” He fired his pistol into Swinnington’s belly, blowing him off his mule. The confidence man fell heavily onto his back, groaning at the impact, shot through the belly. “Nope, no one’ll look for you at all, Swinnington. Kinda pitiful, that is.” Burke felt a little pity too, looking at Swinnington writhing on his back in the dirt—like a half-crushed bug. Anyway he felt something close enough to pity to use up another perfectly good bullet, finishing Swinnington off, when he could have saved one by leaving him there to die slowly.
Then he went through the dead man’s pockets, taking the watch and the eighteen dollars he found.
He took the mule too. He’d sell it, somewhere along the line. No reason to let a perfectly good mule just wander off.
* * *
Wyatt slept badly on the train, waking jumpily every time the locomotive stopped for water or screeched its brakes on a downslope. Come morning, with the train still chugging onward, whistling now and then, he woke from a dream of Urilla and Dandi walking hand in hand beside a river of jet-black water, the two dead women coming slowly, very slowly toward him with sad smiles of greeting on their faces …
Glad the dream was fading, Wyatt rubbed his eyes, grimacing. The train was not as uncomfortable as a stagecoach or a wagon, but it was no featherbed, either.
There were a few other people in the car: an elderly woman gazing forlornly out the window across the aisle from him; a swarthy, lank-haired plainsman snoring in the rear; a couple of young women leaning on one another, dozing, toward the front. Both women had worn their flowered hats all night and both hats were now tilted wildly askew.
He held his new watch up to the gray light coming through the window, and sleepily puzzled over why it said two-fifteen, when it was clearly dawn. He realized he’d forgotten to wind it.
Winding the watch, he looked at the sun rising over the rolling plain, its rays returning color to the stands of oaks and cotton-woods, patches of sere corn in farmland, and judged it to be about seven-thirty in the morning.
The locomotive’s whistle gave out a shriek, and this time it kept whistling, sounding almost frantic. Again and again it screeched—then the train braked, the cars slamming their couplings together with the suddenness of it, and Wyatt had to grab the seat in front of him to keep from being slammed himself. He almost lost his grip on his watch.
The locomotive stuttered jerkily to a halt, hissing steam that was caught up by a breeze sweeping from the south so it dewed the windows. Startled awake, the other people in the car were asking one another in frightened tones what was afoot.
There was no station here. This was a stop of some urgency, unscheduled. Wyatt put his watch away, got up and drew his pistol, keeping it low so as not to needlessly alarm anyone. He started for the front of the train.
“There’s a feller with a gun up there!” the plainsman shouted. At first Wyatt thought the man meant him, and he turned to tell him that he was a Deputy, then he saw the plainsman pointing through the window on the right side. “Now there’s two more … coming from a whole ’nother direction. Why, they’re sewing us up from all sides!”
“It could be Jesse James!” one of the young women said, excitedly, pressing a hand to her bosom, the other hand straightening her hat. “He robs trains whenever he feels like it! He just … takes ’em!”
It wasn’t likely to be the James Gang, Wyatt figured. They were too well informed to rob this train. As far as Wyatt knew, the train carried nothing valuable. Either he was misinformed or the robbers were. There were scarcely any passengers to rob, and none likely to carry much cash.
But then, he thought, stepping through the door to the iron walk over the coupling, a stupid mistake wasn’t unknown amongst outlaws. As he’d tried to tell Henry, it was not usually a profession chosen by smart men. Wyatt had only flirted with outlawry when drunk. And drunk was the same as stupid.
Wyatt stepped down onto the cinders of the railroad bed, looking right and left, seeing no one.
Leaning to look toward the front of the train, past the locomotive, he saw someone had dragged a slender felled tree across the tracks. Not a big tree trunk but it might’ve been enough to derail the locomotive. Wyatt stepped out of the train for a better view of the front, thinking whoever had put the blockade up was still there …
“Hey—horse killer!” The shout came from behind him and Wyatt knew it’d be too late as he spun and brought his gun up to find a target.
He had just time to see Dunc Blackburn, forty feet away, grinning past the rifle he’d nestled into his shoulder, aiming at Wyatt’s head—before Blackburn went spinning to one side, spraying blood from the left side of his chest, shot by someone hidden between the train cars.
Who was doing the shooting? The plainsman?
Blackburn fell, gurgling, without having fired a shot—and Blackburn’s man, Hound Farraday, jumped down behind the fallen outlaw, coming off a coach. He’d been on the train searching for Wyatt.
“Dunc!” Hound shouted, firing wildly at Wyatt with his dragoon.
Hound missed. Wyatt snapped off two shots. But rattled by nearly getting his head shot off, Wyatt missed his aim. One of his shots chunked into Hound’s right shoulder. Hound swayed, grimacing with pain, but didn’t fall, his gun leveling at Wyatt—another pair of shots came from the unseen gunman between the railroad cars, then, the first catching Hound in the side of the neck and the second punching through his left temple.
Hound staggered to the right for a few steps, as if for a square dance, and then fell in a heap, dead before he hit the ground.
Wyatt cocked his gun, stepping back from the train, looking for the other gunman. Whoever it was might think he was with the outlaws. “Who’s there?” he called.
“Hello, Wyatt,” said Ben Thompson, grinning as he came out from between the cars, smoking revolver in his hand. “How are you?” He glanced at Hound and holstered his pistol.
“Ben!” Wyatt blurted, momentarily confused. “You weren’t on the train, were you?”
Ben chuckled. “I was not. Wyatt, it’s like this …” He beckoned to Wyatt and the two of them went to examine the bodies of the dead men as Thompson spoke, keeping his voice down so the train’s passengers wouldn’t hear. “… I went to see my brother Billy, at a place where the owlhoots hole up. Ghost Corners …”
“That old trading post? I thought it was closed down.”
“Not much left of it—just a few shanties, and something like a saloon. Dunc Blackburn and this fella Hound had been there before me—somewhat more animated than they are now. Billy tells me this Blackburn tried to hire him into his gang. He said Blackburn had to take care of a fella named Earp on a train, first, and they’d rob the train while they were at it, and then they’d hit a stage somewhere. Billy declined their generous offer, and told me about it. Not liking Dunc Blackburn, and owing you a favor, why, I followed them to see exactly what they were about, and here I am … My horse is over yonder.”
Wyatt let out a long, unsteady breath. “I’m beholden to you. Either one would have shot me dead for sure, the way things were set. How’d they know where to find me, I wonder …”
“Story is, they were sent by a man named Joe Handle Burkett—or a name not far from
that. I do not know the gentleman. I don’t think I’d care to.” He looked at the bodies. “Wyatt, I’d rather not take credit for this shooting—just say it was some wandering citizen, if you will. Or say you did it yourself, if you want.”
Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t care to have any more of that kind of reputation than necessary.”
“I understand—sure as bloody hell, that I understand.”
“You know, Ben, you committed no crime, in killing these men,” Wyatt pointed out. “They were firing on a peace officer.”
“I’d have to make a court appearance to back it up—and that, my friend, would be bloody inconvenient. I’ve got reasons to avoid the police in Medicine Lodge.” He grinned, rubbing his chin. “Let’s say it was done by a mysterious, public-spirited gunman. First now, what do you say, shall we move these stiffs into a freight car, put my horse aboard, and move that little bit of a tree? Then we’ll be on our way and I’ll ride the train with you to the next town.”
Wyatt nodded, noticing the locomotive’s engineers leaning out of the engine cab, trying to see past the smoke and steam, not wanting to come down until they were sure the shooting was done.
It was time to get these bodies out of the way, and report the ‘mysterious gunman’ to the engineers. He bent over and grabbed Blackburn’s body by the collar, started dragging it toward a freight car he knew to be empty. Thompson dragged Hound by the ankles. They made a strange pair, walking backwards and dragging dead men, side by side.
“I’ll be getting off in Medicine Lodge too,” Wyatt remarked, as they dragged the bodies along. “I’ve got business there. Pressing business.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It was deep into a hot afternoon when Wyatt parted with Ben Thompson, and headed for the Sheriff’s office just off the main street of Medicine Lodge. To get to the office he had to weave carefully through a stream of cattle herded down the middle of the side street, the steers harried by whistling and chirruping mounted cowboys, on their way to the pen at the freight station. He was careful where he stepped.
