by Ralph Cotton
No sooner were the two out of sight than Rojo went back to watching the trail from his rock perch. But the encounter with Heebs and Smith had unsettled him. He couldn’t sit here forever, waiting for Texas Bob. For all he knew, Trigger Leonard and Mitchell Smith might change their minds any minute and come riding back to kill him. He couldn’t take that kind of chance.
‘‘Damn it,’’ he said, standing, brushing his knees.
He had to slip in on Texas Bob under the shelter of night, maybe kill him in his sleep. That was riskier than catching him in an ambush, but sometimes circumstances forced you to throw caution aside and make a bold move, he thought.
Mary Alice had been alone long enough, she told herself, gazing out across the rocky hillsides looming above the cabin. The stillness had started to get to her, making her edgy, uneasy. Once a city girl . . . , she reminded herself as she searched the dark afternoon shadows and called out the dog’s name again. But it was more than the loneliness bothering her.
She had grown more and more concerned about Texas Bob. He’d been gone long enough to have found Sheriff Thorn and straightened everything out, hadn’t he? ‘‘Stop it,’’ she murmured aloud to herself, realizing that she’d been letting loneliness, and her nerves, get the better of her. She’d said she would wait here until Bob returned, so she would. For how long, though?
‘‘Mercy,’’ she sighed, tired of arguing with herself, tired of the silent days, tired mostly of the nights alone. Now that she and Texas Bob were together, she wanted them to be together. She smiled coyly to herself, knowing what she missed most of all. She called out the dog’s name, holding a tin plate of food for him in her hand. What she missed was feeling Texas Bob’s arms around her, she admitted, pushing a strand of hair back from her forehead.
‘‘Plug, come and get it,’’ she called out, trying not to think too much about her and Texas Bob right now.
This was the third time she’d walked out onto the porch and summoned the big dog to supper. Bob had told her Plug preferred to forage for himself. But once she’d started feeding the dog meat scraps, gravy and biscuits on the front porch of an evening, he had begun showing up like clockwork. By this time she would find him sitting at the open doorway, his tail brushing back and forth across the planks.
‘‘Well, not tonight,’’ she said, setting the tin plate down. When she straightened up and started through the doorway, she stopped for a moment and gave one last scanning glance around the rugged, darkening land. Had she heard a dog whine? No, she told herself, even as she listened closely for any other sound from within the dead silence, the encroaching darkness.
Raising her apron, she wiped her hands idly and stared down at the plate on the plank porch. There was something foreboding about the dog not being there as he had been the past nights. ‘‘Don’t you worry,’’ Bob had told her before he’d left. ‘‘Plug’ll watch about you while I’m gone.’’
Yes, but where is Plug? she asked herself, looking back again across the hillsides, feeling the darkness creep closer in around her. She didn’t like this at all. Something was wrong—something out there, she thought, smoothing her apron down and walking calmly but purposefully into the cabin. Suddenly she felt the sensation of eyes on her as she closed the door and shoved the heavy iron bolt into place.
From within the dark shadows of a large upthrusted boulder, Tommy Rojo had sat watching the door close, his rifle in one hand, a long boot knife in the other. He’d worked his way into the tight valley on foot over an hour earlier and sat patiently in the darkening shadows. He hadn’t seen Texas Bob, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t around here somewhere, maybe hunting game, maybe on his way back to the cabin at this very minute, he told himself.
This had to be the hideout. This was where the two sets of hoofprints had led him. The woman had to be the whore from the saloon, he convinced himself. The thing he did not want to do was sit out in the dark and the cold, and then when Texas Bob came in for the night find it too dark to get a clear back shot at him.
No, that wasn’t the way this was going to go, he decided, rising to a crouch and moving hurriedly from shadow to shadow down to the cabin porch. Ducking down below porch level, he waited for only a moment, then crawled like a serpent up onto the rough wooden planks and over beneath a window. He wasn’t going to use the rifle on the woman. No sir, he thought, raising his face to a window and looking inside, seeing the woman stoke the hearth in the glow of an oil lantern.
He wanted this to happen quickly and silently, he told himself, laying his rifle on the porch beneath the window. He crawled slowly and carefully to the door, not risking his footsteps’ creaking on the planks. He had to kill her quietly, not tip off Texas Bob with a rifle shot.
Gripping the knife handle tightly, he began to rise into a crouch, his free hand reaching for the door handle. With the woman dead, Texas Bob would walk through that front door not expecting a thing. Almost too easy. He grinned, ready to make his move. But just as his hand closed around the handle, he heard a low menacing growl behind him and turned his head slowly to see the big dog standing half on the step and half on the porch, its hackles raised, its fangs bared, glistening white. ‘‘Easy, boy,’’ Rojo ventured in a whisper, seeing the dog poised, ready to spring forward into his face at any second.
But his words only seemed to enrage the dog. The growl grew deeper, louder. The dog stepped stiffly up onto the porch and closer to Rojo’s face. The knife in Rojo’s hand meant nothing to the animal. The rifle lay over ten feet away. Cold sweat beaded on Rojo’s forehead.
‘‘Who’s there?’’ the woman’s voice called out from inside. ‘‘Is someone there?’’
‘‘Yes, ma’am,’’ Rojo said in a slim shaky tone, not wanting to trigger the big dog into action. ‘‘Pl—please, I’m—I’m . . .’’ He had no idea what to say next.
‘‘You’re what?’’ the voice said. Even in Rojo’s state of terror he realized the voice seemed calm, almost as if the woman was toying with him. He managed to squeeze the door handle enough to feel the bolt in place.
He tried to think of something else to say, but before he could come up with anything the dog sprang into him. Rojo screamed long and loud, taking a stab at the dog but missing, and feeling the knife fly from his hand as he tried to clutch the big animal by its neck to keep its teeth out of his face.
Inside, Mary Alice heard the screams, the growl and the ensuing scuffle against the closed door. She took her time slipping the bolt open, a double-barreled shotgun in her left hand, a thick iron fire poker in her raised right hand.
When the bolt allowed, the door swung open wide and Rojo spilled onto the floor at her feet, the dog atop him, the screaming man’s face buried in the dog’s snarling mouth. ‘‘Oh, a big knife!’’ Mary Alice called out above the melee, seeing the knife lying discarded on the porch.
‘‘Get him off!’’ Rojo screamed, his words muffled by the dog’s wet enveloping flews.
‘‘I’ve seen bigger,’’ Mary Alice said, still focused on the knife.
Suddenly Rojo realized the dog had turned his face loose and stepped off of him, Mary Alice having reached a hand down and grabbed it by the loose nape of its neck. ‘‘Get away from me, whore!’’ Rojo shouted, batting his blood-filled eyes, gasping for breath. But his reprieve was short-lived.
‘‘Whore?’’ Mary Alice hissed, her face turning white with rage. ‘‘I’ll show you what this whore can do!’’
Rojo heard the swishing sound of the iron poker swinging back and forth through the air and felt the bite of it at the end of each swing.
‘‘You came here to stab somebody!’’ Mary Alice shouted as she beat him without mercy. ‘‘To kill some dumb helpless whore! Shame on you! This is not my first knife fight!’’ She screamed and beat him while the big dog bounced back and forth, excited, growling and barking wildly.
PART 3
Chapter 14
The first time Rojo regained consciousness, memory of the dog, the enraged w
oman and her iron poker came to mind, causing his swollen eyes to spring open as much as their sore and battered condition would allow. But to his waking horror both dog and woman still loomed over him, the dog growling, the woman having exchanged her iron poker for a double-barreled shotgun. ‘‘Oh God!’’ he managed to say just as the shotgun butt took a long swing sideways and crashed into the side of his already swollen, bloody head.
Upon his second awakening he used more caution. Opening one eye only a crack, he looked back and forth. The dog lay near a crackling hearth, sound asleep. Breathing a little easier, Rojo opened his other eye and looked back and forth at floor level, realizing he’d been tied tightly with a rope and enveloped inside a tight-fitting brownish bedsheet.
‘‘So, you’re awake,’’ said Mary Alice, sitting at the wooden table, holding a long needle and a ball of thick thread.
Rojo moaned and tugged at his tied wrists. She’d folded his arms across his chest, looped each wrist with a length of rope, drawn the ropes together tightly behind his back and tied them into a thick knot. His feet were tied securely together and the rope circled upward like the stripe on a barber’s pole and ended in a floppy bow at his throat.
‘‘What have you . . . done to me?’’ he gasped through swollen lips.
‘‘Well, for one thing,’’ Mary Alice replied, ‘‘I washed your face and sewed it up.’’
‘‘Sewed it up?’’ As soon as she said it he recognized the tight painful sensation of stitches across his forehead, across his scalp, down the side of his black, swollen nose and beneath his chin. ‘‘The dog . . . ?’’ he asked in a trailing voice.
‘‘Mm-hmm,’’ Mary Alice replied in an offhanded manner, wrapping the remaining thread into a ball and sticking the needle in it. ‘‘Since I was sewing anyway, I went ahead and sewed you inside an old sheet I found under the wood box. So you can relax. You’re not going anywhere. Even if you could, Plug would eat you alive.’’
Raising his head enough to look down himself, Rojo groaned and pleaded, ‘‘Shoot me, ma’am, please.’’
Mary Alice stood with one hand on her hip, the shotgun leaning against the table beside her. ‘‘Oh, now it’s ma’am, is it?’’ she said. ‘‘Last night it was whore.’’
‘‘I want to . . . apologize for that, ma’am,’’ Rojo said haltingly. ‘‘A man says things . . . he doesn’t mean, when his head’s in a dog’s mouth.’’
Mary Alice gave him a flat, unyielding stare. ‘‘You came to kill Texas Bob, didn’t you?’’
Realizing the pointlessness of denying it, Rojo sighed and said, ‘‘Yes, ma’am, that is . . . the gospel truth. I did. But I swear I never came to bring you any harm.’’
‘‘You mindless fool,’’ said Mary Alice. ‘‘I love Texas Bob. Coming to kill Tex does bring me harm. It’s no different than if you came to kill me. Tex and I just happen to love one another. But what would a man like you know about something like that?’’
Taking a breath, trying to clear his head and see what it would take to get out of his predicament, Rojo said quietly from within his tight-fitting cocoon, ‘‘Ma’am, there’s nobody appreciates love more than I do. But your man Texas Bob is wanted for murder.’’ He hoped he sounded official. ‘‘I wanted to take him to Sibley so he could face an honest trial by jury.’’
‘‘I see,’’ said Mary Alice skeptically. ‘‘Then you’re a lawman?’’
‘‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’’ said Rojo, his stitched-up face throbbing, aching painfully. ‘‘I’m under the authority of his honor, territorial judge Henry Edgar Bass.’’
‘‘You’re a bounty hunter,’’ Mary Alice said flatly. ‘‘Judge Bass is the brother to the man Texas Bob killed in self-defense.’’ She considered the situation, realizing the danger Bob was in if he hadn’t yet found Sheriff Thorn and straightened things out.
‘‘Yes, I am a professional manhunter, it’s true,’’ said Rojo. ‘‘But self-defense? That’s for a jury to decide,’’ he said, imitating the way he’d heard lawmen talk to people in the past, hoping it would work. He nodded toward a small wicker sewing basket on the table. ‘‘Now, if you’ll take those scissors and cut me out of this concoction, I’ll just be on my way, no harm done.’’
‘‘No harm done?’’ Mary Alice looked at his purple ravaged face, then at white strips of scalp where she’d cropped his hair to skin level in order to sew his ripped flesh back down on his head. ‘‘You come sneaking around in the dark, peeping in windows, with a rifle.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘There’s been plenty of harm done. If Tex had been here, you would have killed him. Don’t think you’re getting out of here and taking off after him again.’’
As she spoke, she picked up the scissors and stood over him with them. Reaching down with the points she gathered a handful of the sheet at his crotch. ‘‘Ma’am, please, no!’’ Rojo begged, feeling the sharp scissors puncture the sheet.
‘‘Calm down,’’ said Mary Alice. ‘‘I’m cutting an opening front and rear so you can relieve yourself when the need arises.’’ His voice had risen enough to awaken the sleeping dog. It stood and stretched and walked over to him curiously.
‘‘You can’t leave me trussed up like this! It’s not human!’’ said Rojo, lowering his tone as he saw the dog step into sight. Grateful she wasn’t going to use the scissors in some unspeakable manner, but now realizing she planned on him being tied and wrapped for a while, he said, ‘‘What are you going to do with me?’’
‘‘I’m taking you to town,’’ said Mary Alice.
‘‘Oh no you’re not,’’ said Rojo, struggling in vain for a moment before relenting with a moan. He pictured the town staring as she dragged him down the middle of the street sewn up in the bedsheet. ‘‘Ma’am, please don’t take me into Sibley like this. I’m begging you.’’
‘‘I have to,’’ said Mary Alice. ‘‘It’s either take you to Sibley or else kill you and hide your body out in the wilds,’’ she said sincerely, snipping a second opening in the sheet. ‘‘I’m not turning you loose and I can’t sit here any longer, doing nothing while the world falls down around me.’’
‘‘I can’t ride like this,’’ Rojo offered, still hoping to get himself cut loose.
‘‘There’s a wagon wheel in the barn,’’ Mary Alice said, more to herself than to Rojo. ‘‘I’ll put you on it and pull it with a rope.’’
‘‘Pull me on a wagon wheel? You can’t do that,’’ said Rojo. ‘‘All that dust will choke me to death! I’d never make it to Sibley.’’
‘‘I’m not asking you to,’’ Mary Alice said coldly. ‘‘Keep in mind that if you die that’s one less problem for me to have to deal with.’’ As she spoke Rojo watched her snip the scissors open and closed in her hand, as if in grim contemplation.
Judge Bass looked out of place seated at the battered wooden desk in the dusty sheriff’s office, wearing his crisp white shirt and black linen suit. On the corner of the desk lay his black flat-crowned hat. With his head bowed over a stack of paperwork, he did not see the faces of Claude Price and Frisco Phil appear first at the window before they opened the creaking door and slipped inside.
Upon snapping his attention up from his paperwork, Bass said in surprise, ‘‘Well, it’s about damn time! What took you two so long?’’
Price and Frisco looked at one another. Then Price said, ‘‘Your Honor, you just can’t believe the trouble we ran into out there.’’
‘‘Trouble? What sort of trouble?’’ Bass jerked his wire-framed glasses from his eyes. Before they could answer, the judge said, ‘‘I suppose some trouble could be expected from a man like Texas Bob. The main thing is, you did drag him out of his lair. Am I correct?’’ He gave them a fierce stare.
‘‘Judge Bass, this Texas Bob is a bigger deal than you or us either one realized,’’ said Frisco Phil, stepping forward. ‘‘He’s done a lot of other things you need to know about. He’s killed Sheriff Thorn.’’
‘‘Thorn is dead?’’ The judge
stared, stunned. ‘‘You—you know this for a fact?’’
‘‘Yes, we do, Your Honor,’’ said Price. ‘‘We heard shooting while we were on Texas Bob’s trail. When we caught up to the gunfire we saw Thorn laying dead in the dirt beside the Cottonwood stage. Texas Bob robbed the stage and killed Thorn, and the two stage men too.’’
The judge realized the story he’d been told left a lot to be questioned, but he ignored that for now. Hearing the terrible things Texas Bob had done caused him to have to hold back a slight smile. ‘‘Do tell me you killed this monster, that his body is lying across a horse out there?’’ He sidestepped and craned his neck for a glance out the window.
‘‘Uh, no, Your Honor,’’ said Price sheepishly.
Seeing no body on any of the horses lined along the hitch rail in the waning evening light, Bass turned his chilly stare back to the two men. ‘‘Well, where is his body then?’’
‘‘I’m afraid he got away from us, Your Honor,’’ said Price.
‘‘So he’s not dead,’’ Bass replied coldly to Price. ‘‘I am very disappointed in you.’’ His eyes swung to Frisco. ‘‘In both of you!’’
‘‘But we thought you’d be glad to hear about him robbing the stage and killing the stage crew, Judge,’’ said Frisco. ‘‘That’s just one more crime he’s committed. We thought it would be useful information for you.’’
‘‘The Cottonwood stage—Texas Bob robbing it,’’ the judge said, letting things sink in a little more clearly now that he’d vented his anger. ‘‘I would never have pegged him as a stage robber.’’
‘‘But then you never would have pegged him as a murderer if you didn’t know he’d killed your poor dear brother,’’ Frisco put in.
‘‘Very true,’’ said Bass, ignoring Frisco’s mocking attitude. As the judge thought about what the two had told him, his eyes lit with possibilities. ‘‘This man killed my brother, went on the run to keep from answering for his crimes and now apparently has sunk to the level of a common criminal rather than face justice.’’ He paused, then added as his mind worked over the situation. ‘‘Perhaps he had planned on the stage robbery to finance his flight from the country—to Mexico no doubt.’’
