Jackson rode in the general direction of the Winged T, but he didn’t follow the main trail between the settlement and the ranch, the trail that Luther Berryhill’s horse had taken instinctively when its rider was too drunk to navigate. Jackson stayed half a mile or so east of that route, which put him about halfway between the trail that led to the Winged T and the one to Fowler Vance’s spread. Since the trails tended naturally to follow easier paths, the terrain was more rugged where Jackson rode, with quite a few hills and ridges. He let his horse pick its way along in the darkness, trusting to the animal’s senses and instincts.
Jackson couldn’t have said for sure what he was looking for out here. He was just looking. Twice in the past three nights, mysterious lights had appeared in this vicinity and people had died horrible deaths.
If those lights showed up again, he hoped that he would be on hand to see them. He wasn’t particularly scared. In his experience, he had never run into anything that couldn’t be dealt with by a fast gun hand and a Colt full of bullets.
As he rode, he recalled hearing stories about some mysterious lights near the settlement of Marfa, farther west. Cowboys had been seeing elusive, dancing balls of illumination over there for several years now, and no matter how much people searched, they’d never been able to discover the truth behind the phenomenon. Jackson hadn’t seen the Marfa lights himself, but he had heard about them. As far as he knew, they had never caused any trouble and certainly had never hurt anyone. Folks couldn’t even seem to get near them. When anybody went looking, the lights were always somewhere else.
That wasn’t the case here. The lights Matt Harcourt had seen had heralded his death. Jackson wondered if the so-called Hand of God had gotten the idea for his lights from the ones over by Marfa. That made as much sense as anything else about this business.
He remembered too Ned Dawson’s comments about the Winged T having trouble with rustlers. Wideloopers often operated at night, so Jackson kept his eyes and ears open for any signs of that sort of activity too.
From time to time, he stopped to listen intently, and it was during one such pause that he heard horses moving in the distance. Somebody besides himself was out and about tonight, and Jackson was willing to bet that whoever it was, they were up to no good.
He estimated that there were several riders off to his left, maybe a hundred yards away. He turned his horse in that direction and started riding toward the hoofbeats, moving slowly so that the sounds of his own horse wouldn’t alert the men he was trailing.
After several minutes of following those unknown riders, Jackson heard something new—more hoofbeats, and the lowing of cattle. His mouth tightened. Those horsebackers were moving some stock. They were on Winged T range, he figured, but he would have been willing to bet that those men didn’t work for Benjamin Tillman.
He hadn’t found the mysterious lights, but he was pretty sure he had stumbled across some cow thieves hard at work.
What would he do about it if that was the case? he asked himself. He wasn’t a lawman, and he didn’t ride for the Winged T. He owed no allegiance to Benjamin Tillman. He figured there were probably five or six men pushing a jag of cattle through the hills. If he interfered with them, there would be gunplay, and plenty of it. Jackson had never been one to run from superior odds, but in a corpse-and-cartridge session like that, he’d probably wind up the corpse. And for what? To save some cattle for a man who didn’t much like being a rancher and probably shouldn’t have come out here to Texas to start with?
On the other hand, Jackson reflected, if he could follow the rustlers and find out where they were holding their stolen stock, maybe discover who they were, the knowledge might come in handy somewhere on down the trail. He smiled faintly to himself as he continued to follow the sounds of men and horses and cattle through the night.
The rustlers were moving north. Jackson didn’t know how far in that direction the boundaries of the Winged T extended, but he knew that a range of mountains lay that way. Chances were the rustlers held the cattle in some box canyon in those mountains while they changed the brands. Then they would drive the cows east to Fort Stockton or even San Angelo to dispose of them. Jackson had worked as a range detective on occasion, when the pay was right, and he knew how rustlers operated.
The landscape flattened out a little between the last of the ridges and the mountains in the distance. Jackson reined to a halt on top of the ridge and studied the landscape in front of him. His keen eyes spotted movement on the open, semiarid plains. He took the field glasses from his saddlebags and lifted them to his eyes. Focusing on the dark, moving mass, the glasses enabled him to see that his hunch had been correct. He picked out five riders pushing along a group of forty to fifty cattle, a good night’s work for the rustlers. They had probably gathered the cows the night before and left them in some isolated coulee, blocking it off with brush so the animals couldn’t get out, then returning tonight to drive them off Winged T range and up to the hideout.
Jackson stowed the field glasses away and lifted the reins, ready to ride down off the ridge and resume following the rustlers. But before he could do so, he heard the sudden crackle of brush off to his right. Somebody was there, and his hand moved instinctively toward his Colt as he twisted in that direction.
Flame stabbed from the muzzle of a gun and lit up the night for an instant. Jackson heard the crack of a rifle, and sensed as much as felt or heard the passage of a bullet close by his ear. He palmed out his revolver and brought it up, triggering twice in the direction of the muzzle flash as he jammed his boot heels into his horse’s flanks and sent the animal lunging to the side.
Another shot blasted, and from the way Jackson’s mount screamed and leaped, he knew the horse was hit. The horse didn’t go down, though. Hauling on the reins, Jackson pulled it around in a tight turn and galloped toward the rifleman, firing again as he leaned forward over the horse’s neck to make himself a smaller target.
His hat went flying in the air. He knew that a slug had plucked it from his head, which meant he had come within inches of dying. Instead of frightening him, that just made him more angry. He fired again and then, as the bushwhacker’s rifle gouted flame once more, Jackson kicked his feet free of the stirrups and rolled out of the saddle as if he’d been hit by that last shot.
He landed hard on the ground and rolled over a couple of times. That took him behind a scrubby mesquite tree, where the ambusher couldn’t see him. If the rifleman wanted to make sure Jackson was dead, he’d have to come out of hiding and approach the spot where the gunslinger had fallen.
Lying on his belly, Jackson gripped the Colt tightly and waited for that to happen.
Chapter 17
Malcolm and Rosalie Graham lived in a small house on one of Death Head Crossing’s side streets, not far from the office of the Weekly Journal. Everett met them at the office and then walked with them to the house, through streets growing shadowy with twilight.
Normally at this time on a summer evening, children would still be out playing, but instead Everett heard their mothers calling them to come in. The women’s voices had a nervous quality. The recent deaths had everyone in town on edge, and even though the mysterious Hand of God, whoever or whatever it was, had targeted adults so far, no mother wanted her children to be out after dark tonight.
It was a shame things had come to that, Everett thought as he watched several fireflies dancing merrily through the dusk. There ought to be children chasing happily after those bouncing, darting balls of light, laughing happily as they stretched out their hands to grasp them.
Everett broke stride as a realization hit him. From the way the doomed Matt Harcourt had described what happened at the Vance place, it must have seemed like giant fireflies he had seen in those final moments before his sight was blasted away forever.
Rosalie Graham put a hand on his arm. “Are you all right, Mr. Howard?” she asked.
“Yes, I just, ah, tripped a little,” Everett said. “These Western boots,
you know. I guess I’m still not completely used to them. You have to wear them, though, if you’re going to ride horses.”
With a smile, Graham said, “Or even if you don’t, if you want to fit in out here.”
“You’re not from here? Texas, I mean.”
“Oh, we’re from Texas,” Graham said. “We were both born and raised in Dallas. But I promise you, that’s about as different from Death Head Crossing as you can imagine. Dallas is an actual city, like St. Louis or Chicago. Of course, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to New York, but it’s nothing like the rest of Texas either.”
“How did you come to be all the way out here running a newspaper?” Everett had heard that it wasn’t considered polite to ask a Westerner where he came from or what he had done in the past, but he didn’t think there would be any harm in posing that question to a man like Malcolm Graham.
“I was always interested in writing,” Graham replied. “I got a job on the Dallas Herald and worked there for several years before I decided I wanted to have my own paper. I saw a notice that the man who founded the Weekly Journal here in Death Head Crossing wanted to sell it and retire, so I wrote to him, made an offer, and here I am. I knew it would be a lot different from being in Dallas, but so far everything has been fine.”
Everett turned to Rosalie and asked, “What about you, Miss Graham?” He hoped he wasn’t being too inquisitive.
She didn’t seem to mind answering the question. “Our parents had both passed away, so I decided to come with Malcolm and keep house for him.”
“I’m sorry about your parents,” Everett said.
“Of course, as it turned out, Rosalie does just as much work on the newspaper as I do,” Graham went on. “I never dreamed she had such mechanical aptitude until the first time I saw her working on that old printing press.”
Rosalie laughed. “I assure you, Malcolm, it took me by surprise too. But really, so much of it is just common sense. You can usually figure out how something works if you look at it long enough.”
“You can, my dear, not me.”
She laughed again, and since she was walking between Everett and her brother, she linked arms with both of them as they went down the street. The gesture was intimate enough to take Everett’s breath away. Even though there were two layers of clothing between them, his and hers, he could feel the warmth of her arm against his side, and it sent tremors of pleasure through him.
When they reached the little house where the Grahams lived, Rosalie went into the kitchen to prepare supper while her brother asked Everett, “Would you care for some brandy? I keep a bottle on hand, even though it’s not that easy to get out here.”
“Why, yes, thank you.”
Everett looked at the numerous books on shelves lining the front room while Graham poured the drinks. Graham handed a crystal snifter to him and said, “To your health, Mr. Howard.”
“And to yours,” Everett replied. After he had sipped the smooth liquor, he went on. “But you should really call me Everett.”
“Certainly. I’m Malcolm, and my sister is Rosalie, as you know.”
Everett drank some more of the brandy. “The two of you seem to be an outpost of culture and civilization here in Death Head Crossing. Otherwise, it’s just a dusty little cow town. No offense.”
“None taken, I assure you,” Graham replied with a smile. “We do our best.”
“Do you know Mr. Benjamin Tillman? He’s from Philadelphia. But of course, you’d know that.”
Graham nodded. “Yes, we’ve met Mr. Tillman. I’m afraid he’s not very happy out here. Adjusting and making the best of the situation seems to be beyond him. He’d be better off going back East where he belongs.”
The bluntness of the appraisal surprised Everett a little. “I suppose he feels a responsibility to his family to do the best he can with the Winged T.”
“Then he should hire a competent manager and leave the running of the place to him.” Graham took a drink of the brandy and then shook his head. “Of course, it’s none of my business, and anyway, Tillman’s too proud and stubborn to do anything that reasonable. He’s not going anywhere.”
Rosalie appeared in the doorway between the parlor and the tiny dining room. “Supper is ready,” she announced. “Pour me some of that brandy, will you, Mal?”
“Of course.”
The meal was quite pleasant. Malcolm Graham told several stories about what it was like running a newspaper in a frontier town like Death Head Crossing, but for the most part he and his sister wanted to know everything about New York that Everett could tell them. He hadn’t talked so much in a long time, especially not to such an appreciative audience. He had a grand time.
“What about this man Jackson?” Graham asked after he had refilled their brandies. “I’ve heard about him. He’s supposed to be quite notorious.”
A little shiver went through Rosalie. “I think I’d be afraid just to be around him.”
“Oh, no, he’s a fine fellow,” Everett insisted. “Rough around the edges, of course, but you’d expect that of someone who’s lived the life he has. He’s been very friendly and helpful to me.”
“Is he helping Sheriff Brennan investigate those mysterious deaths? He seems to always be around when something’s going on.”
“Well . . .” Everett was a little uneasy now, because he didn’t really know what Jackson was doing, or why. Clearly, Jackson wanted to get to the bottom of the killings, but he hadn’t explained his motivation for doing so. Everett supposed he was just curious. “He’s not actually assisting the sheriff, but he is investigating. Unofficially, I suppose you could say.”
“Has he found out anything?” Graham smiled. “I hope you’ll pardon my inquisitiveness. Journalistic curiosity. You understand.”
“Of course,” Everett said without hesitation. “No, as far as I know, neither Sheriff Brennan nor Mr. Jackson have been able to figure out who’s to blame for those terrible deaths or even how they were accomplished. Mr. Jackson did find the tracks that Matt Harcourt left when he crawled away from the Vance place, where he was, uh . . .” He glanced at Rosalie.
She smiled. “Don’t worry about offending my delicate sensibilities, Everett. I know that Mr. Harcourt was having an illicit romance with Mrs. Vance. The gossip around town is that that’s why they were killed.”
“Yes, by that so-called Hand of God,” Graham said. “He must be a madman. You can’t just go around killing people because they don’t conform to your own notion of what’s right and wrong.”
“Some people do,” Everett said. “Evidently, the man calling himself the Hand of God does. He killed Luther Berryhill for drunkenness and Harcourt and Mrs. Vance for their adultery.”
Rosalie shook her head. “Terrible,” she murmured. “Just terrible.”
Everett couldn’t argue, or even disagree, with that sentiment.
Rosalie changed the subject somewhat by leaning forward and saying, “Tell me . . . is Mr. Jackson’s given name really Hell?”
Everett hesitated, not wanting to betray any sort of confidence, but when he thought about it, he wasn’t sure he would be doing so. Jackson’s name was well known. Everett nodded and said, “Yes, it really is.”
“I thought maybe it was just a nickname,” Graham said. “Good Lord, what sort of parent would name a child Hell?”
“From what I understand, Mr. Jackson’s mother died giving birth to him,” Everett explained. “His father was overcome by grief and turned that into resentment toward his son. He felt that by denying him his wife, the baby had damned him to hell. So that’s the name he gave the boy.”
“I never heard of such a thing,” Rosalie said. “He should have been ashamed.”
Everett shrugged. “I suppose Mr. Jackson could have gotten it changed later if he wanted to. It must not bother him too much, or he would have.”
“He sounds like a fascinating individual,” Graham said. “Do you think he would agree to an interview?”
“For yo
ur paper, you mean?”
Graham nodded. “Of course. People always like to read about famous gunmen like Wild Bill Hickok and John Wesley Hardin and Hell Jackson. Their fascination with such flamboyant characters seems to be endless.”
Everett didn’t think Jackson was all that flamboyant. To look at him, you’d take him for a drifting cowpoke. It was only when you noticed how well cared for his gun and holster were, and how his pale blue eyes were always alert and roving as they searched for trouble, that you realized how much danger truly lay within his compact, well-muscled form.
“I don’t know whether he’d be interested in doing an interview or not,” Everett said in reply to Graham’s question. “You’d have to ask him.”
“Perhaps you could intercede on our behalf, since you’re his friend.”
Was he? Everett wondered. Was he really Hell Jackson’s friend? Just because the gunslinger was allowing him to hang around didn’t mean that they were friends, as much as Everett might wish that was the case. But he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks,” Graham said with a smile. “I’m sure the Journal’s readers would be interested in learning more about such a notorious man.”
“But don’t think that we only invited you to supper tonight so we could ask for your help, Everett,” Rosalie put in. She reached over and rested a hand on the back of his hand. “You’re very good company, and we certainly enjoyed hearing all about New York, didn’t we, Mal?”
“We certainly did,” Graham agreed.
Everett felt himself blushing as he sat there, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. The touch of Rosalie’s hand was so warm and nice, and the way she smiled at him made him feel . . . he couldn’t even begin to describe it.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said again, and Rosalie Graham squeezed his hand.
Chapter 18
Jackson’s horse kept running after he deliberately toppled out of the saddle. But even though it was night, the stars overhead were bright and Jackson had been out in the open enough so that he felt sure the bushwhacker had seen him fall. As he lay there in utter silence, he heard the metallic sound of a Winchester’s lever being cocked, followed by the tinny clatter of the empty cartridge that was ejected falling among some rocks.
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