by Lauran Paine
The old man sat there stroking his beard, smiling with his eyes, and seemingly completely at peace with himself.
“You’re going to tell them different though, in the morning,” Duncan said.
The stroking stopped. “Why should I? Like I already told you, my boy’s got his hurt shoulder. He’ll need at least two days’ head start to get plumb out of the country.”
“You damned old scoundrel,” swore Duncan. “They’re going to hold a trial tomorrow.”
“Trial?” said the old man. “What trial? I didn’t shoot that expressman.”
“Neither did I.”
“Then what’s to worry about, cowboy?”
“I’m worrying. The way those men acted who brought me in, they’d play a fiddle for me to do a rope dance with.”
“You,” intoned the old man softly. “You, boy, not me. That there’s the difference. They figure you shot that Dudley fellow, not me.”
“You made them think that, damn you!”
“Well now, of course I did. I had to. Jerry Swindin’s dead. I been right here in jail, and at the time of the shootin’ I was holdin’ a camp meetin’ at the riverbank, which left only you to be used to get me clear. With my son safely away, cowboy, my only thought is to also get clear. So you see, I had to sort of help ’em to believe what they wanted to believe.”
“Parton,” Duncan muttered softly. “If I get out of this alive, I’m going to hunt down you and that boy of yours and shoot the pair of you.”
The old man turned so that some of that smoky light struck his hawk-like, bony old gaunt face. For the first time Duncan saw his eyes as they really were—sly and ice-cold and completely merciless.
“I already figured you’d feel that way,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to swear you into that hang rope noose, cowboy. I’ll give ’em the evidence they plain want to hear at that blamed trial tomorrow, just so’s you won’t be able to come after me and my boy. You see, in my business, a fellow’s got to be constantly thinkin’ ahead for all the angles.”
Under Duncan’s stricken gaze the old man turned upon his side, slid down, and pillowed his shaggy old head upon one arm with his back to Duncan. He murmured: “Good night, cowboy, sweet dreams.”
Duncan didn’t move until his cigarette stung his fingers. He flung the thing down, stepped upon it, and half turned to gaze out the tiny, narrow barred window in the back wall of his cell.
He just could not believe it. His one chance for life had turned out to be without doubt the most thoroughly evil person Duncan had ever met in thirty years of life.
He went to his own pallet, sank down upon it, punched at the straw filling until he’d made places for hips and shoulders, then lay there, more awake in the middle of the night than he’d ever been.
Chapter Four
Morning brought with it several developments. The first one was a female visitor, Marianne Dudley, the dead expressman’s daughter. Berryhill brought her in to view Duncan and the pair of them stood outside his cage looking stonily unrelenting.
The girl was very handsome. She was tall and sturdy with taffy-blonde hair and clear blue eyes. There was a fullness to her that sang across the barred intervening distance to Duncan even before Berryhill dryly explained to Duncan who she was. He would have guessed anyway, though, for her stare was cruel and her stance hostile.
“I hope,” she told Duncan crisply, after they had exchanged a long look at one another, “I hope you hang. I hope they make your father watch you die.”
Duncan had no chance to say a word. Marianne Dudley turned and hastened out of the cellblock into the front jailhouse office.
Sheriff Berryhill lingered to mutter: “Breakfast will be along directly. Thorne’s gone for it.” He looked at old Parton in the next cell, who was sitting relaxed, watching all this from interested, sardonic eyes. “Maybe you’ll get to watch it at that,” he said. “That’s not a bad idea.”
When Berryhill left, Duncan turned, found those fiercely sly old eyes upon him, and ran an unsteady hand over the beard stubble on his face. The old man fell to combing that wild gray beard of his with bent fingers.
“A fine-lookin’ specimen of a female,” he stated. “A right sturdy heifer if I ever saw one. What do you say, boy?”
Duncan kept his back to old Parton. “I say I’m getting a sort of constricting feeling around my throat, you damned old devil,” he muttered. Then he turned to regard the old man through their steel bar partition. “Listen, if they’ll hold off their trial until tomorrow, will you tell the truth?”
Old Parton continued to stroke his beard while he ran this through his mind. “They won’t hold off,” he said finally. “Listen to the noise out in the roadway, boy. These here good citizens are all fired up. Why, this is like a big celebration to ’em. You’re wishin’ for the moon. If the law was to try and postpone your trial, son, there’d be a lynch mob around this here jailhouse quicker’n you could say scat.”
Duncan crossed over to stand beneath that narrow overhead barred window where morning sunlight came downward as a golden shaft to add the only mote of cheerfulness to this otherwise dingy, demoralizing gray world. He could hear roadway traffic and the brisk beat of many booted feet upon the plank walks around front. He could hear men calling back and forth, their voices ringing with vigor and anticipation. He couldn’t make out many of their sung-out words, but he didn’t have to, the feeling was there unmistakably. Old Parton was correct; Leesville was up early today. It was rushing about its normal affairs in order to have free time when court convened. There was an air of jubilant expectation in the air, an unmistakable attitude of righteous vengeance.
He twisted to look around as someone passed into the cellblock from Berryhill’s office. This was Jack Thorne, Berryhill’s burly big companion. Thorne was now wearing a deputy’s badge pinned to his shirt-front. He brought two bowls of mush and two tin cups of black coffee. He scarcely looked at Duncan but he pushed old Parton’s breakfast under the steel door with almost a solicitous examination of the older man.
Parton made a wan, resigned face, and Duncan, watching the old man, very gradually came to the sickening realization that old Parton was an accomplished actor. Without speaking a word or even moving, he was projecting for Thorne’s benefit an image of grieving fatherhood. He sat in there all crouched low upon his pallet making no move to take either his bowl of mush or his cup of coffee.
Thorne dropped his glance from the old man’s face, shuffled over, and pushed Duncan’s food in at him. Here Jack Thorne’s glance hardened against this cell’s inmate. When he straightened up again, he said through lips that scarcely moved: “I’ll fetch you some soap and water. No sense in you walkin’ into the courtroom lookin’ like that.”
“And a razor,” said Duncan, wildly thinking on the spur of the moment he might be able to accomplish something with a razor in his hands.
But Thorne’s lips pulled down in a mirthless smile. “Sure,” he said. “Maybe you’d rather I just brought you a couple of guns.” And he left.
Old Parton cocked his head, listened to someone lock the oaken door from beyond it, then swooped down upon his breakfast and ravenously consumed the mush. Duncan, who had no appetite, not even for the coffee, watched as the old man straightened up, coffee cup in one bony hand, sniffed the bouquet of that oily black beverage, and rolled his eyes over at Duncan.
“Eat, boy,” Parton said. “You’re goin’ to need all the strength you got.” Parton sipped, sucked droplets from the corner of his beard with a bubbly sound and gently bobbed his shaggy head up and down. “Man can’t put up much show on an empty belly, son. You’d better eat up.”
Duncan slumped. It was not warm in the cellblock but he had sweat running under his shirt. He kept watching old Parton, half wondering if there was some way to reach him, half wishing he could get into the old man’s cell for five minutes.
&n
bsp; “Well, then,” Parton spoke up again. “If you don’t want the mush how about passin’ it through the bars. Sittin’ around in here makes me hungry as a bitch wolf.”
Duncan’s frustration increased. He stepped off the width of his cell, stepped off the length of it, spun at the completion of his last circuit and found the old man standing there, peering at him through the bars, his bushy beard and shadowed face giving him the appearance of some ancient patriarch of Biblical times.
“What would it take to make you tell the truth?” Duncan asked. “Tell me that much, Parton.”
“Well now, boy ... if they’d hold off sentencin’ you until tomorrow, and if they’d give me amnesty and free passage out of their stinkin’ little town, why then I’d gladly tell ’em how it really was.”
Old Parton began negatively to wag his head. He kept this up all the time he resumed speaking, as though powerfully to emphasize his next words.
“But you know they wouldn’t do that, boy. They’ll convene their court by noon. They’ll hear you and me and a half dozen of their own stupid people by two o’clock. They’ll sentence you by three and hang you by four. By the way, when you come into town, did they fetch you in the back way? No? Well, you missed seein’ the gibbet. It’s a little weathered, but it’s solid built. It stands just west of town.”
“Would you really go through with it, Parton ... seeing me hang knowing what you know in your heart?”
The old man didn’t answer this. He didn’t have to. As soon as Duncan asked it, he saw his answer in those fierce, merciless old sunk-set pale eyes. Parton would go through with it. Better than that, he would act out the part of the anguished father right up to the last, exactly as Duncan had briefly glimpsed him acting it out for Jack Thorne a short while earlier.
The second event of this fateful morning occurred when Matthew Berryhill came in with a tired-looking elderly priest beside him. The holy man glanced only very briefly at Parton, but in that fleeting second Duncan saw such a degree of distaste on the priest’s wrinkled face it jarred him away from his own immediate predicament for a moment.
Then Berryhill spoke. “This is the young one, Father,” he said to the priest. “The one who killed Charley.”
That old priest nodded, glanced steadily in at Duncan, saying nothing for a while, then nodded again and turned. “Leave me with him, Matt,” he said. “I’ll knock when I want back out.”
Berryhill walked away without so much as a glance at Duncan. He closed and barred the oaken door from without.
For a little while the old priest simply gazed in at Duncan. He had a way of putting his aged eyes upon a man as though commiserating with him, and yet Duncan thought he detected a shrewd and assessing appraisal going on all the time this deceptively mild old gaze was fixed upon him. He wanted to feel hope, to view this rickety old priest as some kind of an omen, but Duncan was a practical, forthright man, not only with others but with himself, also. That old man looking in at him in his dusty, unpressed black suit, his cracked old shoes, his frayed cuffs and skeletal hands clasped over a caved-in, emaciated middle, was far from hope inspiring. He seemed more like some toothless old bird of prey hovering beyond Duncan’s bars, waiting as buzzards habitually wait.
Parton broke the silence with a cackle. “A fellow brother of the cloth,” he said. “Aye, but a papist ... and from the looks of him a lifelong one at that.”
The priest ignored Parton with a disdain too deep for description. He said to Duncan: “The daughter of the man you shot asked me to see you.” At Duncan’s quick look of surprise the priest inclined his head. “I know ... I know what she said to you. That’s what made her come to me. Still, whether you can forgive her or not, I’m sure, after seeing you, that you can understand why she said that about wishing you would hang and that your father be forced to watch.”
Duncan stepped over to the bars, raised both hands, and hooked them there. “You’re not going to believe this any more than anyone else does, Father, but I’m not that old devil’s son, and I didn’t shoot anyone named Charley Dudley, and I’ve never before been in this town in my life.”
The priest’s soft milky stare lingered upon Duncan’s haggard face for a long time. For a moment Duncan thought he spied a little break of interest in that gaze, but it was gone too soon for him to be sure.
“All right, my boy,” retorted the elderly holy man, using the mild, indulgent tone one used with children. “All right. I’m willing to accept that. But let me point out to you, lad, that you’re unknown here, the facts seem to warrant a strong belief in a different view of things, and unless you have some excellent proof of innocence, man’s law is going to prevail here today. Now tell me, lad, have you such proof?”
Duncan felt old Parton’s glittering eyes upon him from the gloom of the adjoining cell. Old Parton was listening to this exchange carefully. It required no great divination for Duncan to understand why this was. Parton, ready to swear Duncan’s life away in a courtroom, wanted to know everything he could that Duncan might say in order to have his own solid rebuttals ready.
Duncan shook his head. “No proof, Father,” he mumbled. “I rode over the northward hills into this country a perfect stranger. I saw two cottonwood trees, knew there’d be a spring, rode over, and found that dead man ... that Jerry Swindin. The rest of it you’ve probably already heard from Sheriff Berryhill.”
“Yes, I’ve heard it. Not only from Matthew Berryhill but also from the posse men who were with him when they found you. Tell me something ... is there anyone I can telegraph to on your behalf?”
“I have no folks, Father.”
“I see. How about friends?”
“Sure, dozens of ’em from Canada to Mexico. But without a postponement of this trial that’s getting under way, you’d only get the telegrams sent ... you’d never get the answers back in time.”
“Amen,” intoned old Parton, wickedly smiling through the bars. “Amen, Dominie. The lad’s got a good head on him, hasn’t he?” Parton broadly smiled, cocked his head making a raffish wink, and said: “Gets it from my side of the family, he does. All the Partons was clever folks ... all of ’em.”
The priest waited out this interruption without looking at Parton, without letting on by facial expression that Parton even existed. “Do you know anything about this other man ... this one you say you have been mistaken for?”
“No, only what that old whiskered devil’s told me. He was shot in the shoulder trying to rob a stage up north somewhere. That’s why Parton’s willing to swear under oath I’m his son ... to give his real son time enough to get plumb away. He can’t travel hard with a bad shoulder. He’ll need rest from time to time. He said if the trial could be held off for one more day though, he’d tell the truth and get me off, in exchange for amnesty.”
For the first time the old priest turned toward Parton. From a face as blank as hewn stone he said: “Will you do that if there is a postponement for one day?”
Parton rolled his eyes. He looked sadly over at Duncan and spoke in a low, roughened tone: “Dominie, the boy’s inclined to imagine things. It’s the strain. He’s been denyin’ his own pappy ever since they brought him in. Of course I never said no such a thing. How could I? I’m his pappy and he shot that expressman. It grieves me to the marrow to see my own flesh and blood tryin’ to use his old pappy to worm out of this mess.”
Parton turned with dragging steps, crossed over to his pallet, and sank down there. He began combing his beard again, began to sadly wag his leonine old head and softly sniffle.
“I know how it is with you, Dominie,” he said. “You despise us itinerant preachers of salvation. And I’ll confess it’s a hard, unrewardin’ life for a fact. But when a man gets the call ... ” Parton lifted and dropped his bony shoulders. “The Lord’s will be done.”
Duncan’s anger rose up, nearly choking him. “You damned old hypocrite,” he swore. “Yo
u lousy faker, Parton. You use that preaching of yours to cover up a heart as black as sin. I’d trade five years off my life to get into that cell with you for five minutes. You’d tell the truth ... Damned if you wouldn’t!”
Chapter Five
Sheriff Berryhill brought two tin basins and some water. He watched Duncan wash from a leaning position across the narrow corridor outside the cells. As Duncan was finishing, he said: “In case it’s worrying you, Parton, we got a sort of lawyer to represent you.”
Duncan looked up. “What is a ‘sort of’ lawyer, Sheriff, someone you appointed?”
Berryhill nodded. “Yup. Leesville’s got no regular lawyers and we won’t have time to import any.”
“And the judge,” asked Duncan. “Is he a ‘ sort of’ judge, too?”
Berryhill’s voice turned a little sharp at this sarcasm. “You can say that if you like, Parton, but one thing I’ll tell you, he’s hung his share of renegades. He’s the local liveryman. His name is Walter Sheay. Two years back the folks hereabouts petitioned the territorial legislature to appoint him justice court judge for this district.”
Duncan finished with the towel, tossed it aside, and ran both hands through his heavy mane of chestnut hair. “It’s cut and dried, though,” he said, looking straight out at Berryhill. “Isn’t it, Sheriff?”
There was no reply to this question. Berryhill nodded at the tin basin. “Push it back under the door,” he ordered. As Duncan stooped to obey, the sheriff said dispassionately: “The punishment for murder usually is cut and dried in folks’ minds, Parton. You’ve been around enough to know that. You should’ve thought about it a little before you pulled that trigger.”
Duncan finished with the basin, straightened up, and leaned on the cell door. “You know, Sheriff,” he said quietly, “if anyone had told me there were people in this country as hypocritical as you are, and as just plain stupid, I wouldn’t have believed them.”
