Butch Cassidy the Lost Years

by William W. Johnstone

  “I sure can. Come on in and I’ll show you the bill of sale. Got coffee on the fire, too.”

  He grunted noncommittally. When he was climbing down from the buggy his coat had swung open enough for me to see the butt of a revolver in a cross-draw rig on his left side. I would have been willing to bet that I was faster than he was, but I didn’t see any need to prove it unless I was forced to.

  We went into the ranch house, and I hung my hat on one peg near the door and the Winchester on a couple of others close by. Since I was the only one living here I didn’t use the cook shack but did all my cooking in the fireplace instead. I had the coffeepot sitting on the hearth now, staying warm. I gestured toward it and said, “Arbuckle’s?”

  “Thanks.”

  I got a couple of cups from a shelf and poured. As I handed Lester’s cup to him, I said, “You know, Sheriff, you don’t really sound much like a Texan.”

  “I’m from Iowa,” he said. He didn’t say what had brought him to Texas or how long he’d been here.

  “I was born in Utah, myself.” I never minded admitting that. A lot of people were born in Utah.

  He hadn’t said thanks for the coffee, and when he took a sip of it, he didn’t say that it was good or anything else about it. Some folks are just brusque by nature, and a significant number of them seem to become lawmen. I think maybe that’s because they just don’t like to talk much, and they think they can get by with saying, “Hands up” or “You’re under arrest” now and then.

  He got right to the point, asking, “When did you buy this ranch from Abner Tillotson?”

  “Back in December it was.” When I had run into Abner and the Daughtry brothers that cold night, I hadn’t been sure of the date, but I knew the month. Just as a guess I had put December 12th on the bill of sale, because I thought it was about two weeks until Christmas.

  “You say you have proof of that?”

  “Yes, sir, I sure do.”

  I went over to a little box I’d found and started using for important papers. It wouldn’t do for anybody to know that I still had Abner’s trunk and the old Bible in it. That would raise too many questions, because anybody would figure he’d take personal possessions like that with him if he’d sold the place. They weren’t like the tools and the furniture and the livestock.

  I took out the bill of sale and the deed, which Abner would have given to me if we’d concluded our transaction the normal way. I handed them to Sheriff Lester to look at to his heart’s content.

  He didn’t seem too impressed. He said, “You should have gone to a lawyer and had a proper bill of sale drawn up and witnessed. This is worthless in a court of law.”

  “Well, sir, I suggested as much to Abner, but he was in a bit of a hurry. He said that would stand up just fine, because everybody around here knows his signature.”

  “Possibly,” Lester said. “The sale should have been recorded with the county clerk, too.”

  “I just haven’t had a chance yet to get down to the county seat and take care of that. I plan on doing it, though, as soon as I can.”

  “I wouldn’t tarry if I was you.” Lester handed the papers back to me. “Where can I find Mr. Tillotson, so I can check on all this with him?”

  I shook my head and said, “I don’t rightly know. He didn’t say where he was going when he pulled out.”

  “Clyde Farnum says Tillotson was in poor health.”

  Actually, I had told Farnum that, but evidently the storekeeper had taken it as gospel, which was a good break for me. I said, “You know, I got the same feeling, but I didn’t ask for details. I don’t like to pry too much in a man’s business.”

  Lester grunted. Prying was what he did for a living, I supposed.

  “I’d feel better about this whole affair if I could talk to Tillotson,” he said. “For all I know, you murdered him and just moved in on the place.”

  It wouldn’t be natural for a man not to be a little offended at an accusation like that. So I huffed up a mite and said, “By God, Sheriff, I don’t care for what you’re insinuatin’.”

  “I’m not insinuating anything. I’m flat out saying it.” He looked at me like he was daring me to prove otherwise, too.

  “If you think I murdered Abner Tillotson, what you are is flat-out wrong. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on that old man’s head.”

  “Good friends, were you?”

  “No, but I liked him, and I wish we’d gotten to spend more time together. Now, I don’t want to get too testy, Sheriff, but I’ve shown you the bill of sale and the deed. What more do you need to see?”

  “What about if I take a look around the place and see if there’s a grave a few months old?”

  “Go ahead,” I told him. “You won’t find any, because there ain’t none.”

  I was glad I’d changed my mind about putting up a marker for Abner, up yonder on the hill. I had decided it might be safer in the long run to let the grave go back to nature, and I didn’t figure Abner would mind. To that end, I’d tamped the dirt down good, scattered some rocks around, and even transplanted a couple of cactuses over there, making it look like they’d been growing there all along. I didn’t think the sheriff would spot anything different about the ground by now.

  Some people might wonder why I didn’t just tell the law everything that had happened to start with. I was in the right for once. Everything I’d done had been to bring the killers of an old man to justice and recover his stolen property.

  The problem was that the bodies of the Daughtry brothers had me leery. I worried that some hotshot lawman might make me out to be a murderer. I was the only man alive who knew the truth of what had happened that night, and that right there would be enough to make a lot of badge-toters suspicious. Better to keep everything as simple as possible, I thought.

  For a minute I thought the sheriff was going to take me up on my invitation to go ahead and search the place. Then he took another drink of coffee and set the cup on the table.

  “All right,” he said. “But I’m going to look into this, Strickland. If I come out here to talk to you again, you’d better be here.”

  “Sheriff, I’m not planning on going anywhere,” I said honestly. I was taking to the ranching life better than I thought I might, and I figured I’d stay on until I got tired of it.

  Lester gave me a curt nod and started to turn away. He stopped and said, “You know the Daughtry brothers?”

  He probably hoped to throw me for a loop by asking it out of the blue that way, but I didn’t let it faze me.

  “Can’t say as I do,” I told him. “Do they live around here?”

  “They did. Folks in Largo said they hadn’t seen them for several months, so I drove up to their place before I came here.”

  I shook my head and said, “I don’t even know where it is.”

  “About four miles northeast of here. Sorry little outfit on the edge of Fishhook range. I’ve had it in mind that the brothers—there were three of them—had been rustling some of Tillotson’s stock.”

  “I haven’t lost any cattle,” I said, telling the truth again.

  “I suppose not. The Daughtrys are gone. Looks like they abandoned the place. No horses, no cattle, and the shack was falling in. They’d left some personal things behind, but nothing to amount to anything.”

  It appeared that I owed a debt of gratitude to the buzzards, the coyotes, and the wolves. They had dragged off and disposed of the remains, probably scattering the bones across the prairie. A Daughtry skull might turn up sooner or later, but likely it would just remain an unsolved mystery.

  I said, “No offense, Sheriff, but from the way you described them, it’s good riddance to those fellas, wherever they went.”

  Lester nodded slowly and said, “I suspect most of the citizens in the county would agree with you, Strickland.” This time he turned and went to the door, pausing only to say, “Thanks for the coffee.”

  That surprised me, but I had the presence of mind to say, “You’re w
elcome. Come on back any time you’re of a mind to.”

  He gave me a hard look.

  “If I have a reason to be here, I will be.”

  With that he climbed up into the buggy and drove off. I wasn’t sorry to see him go.

  Even when I haven’t done anything wrong, me and star packers just don’t mix.

  CHAPTER 7

  Since Sheriff Lester had told me about the Daughtry place being abandoned, I didn’t think it would be too suspicious for me to ride over there and take a look around. As the new owner of the Fishhook, I had a right to scout out the boundaries of my range, didn’t I?

  So I saddled up and headed in that direction a day or two later. I wanted to make sure there was nothing there the sheriff could trace back to me.

  Of course, in the back of my mind was the thought that maybe he had baited a trap for me, and paying a visit to the place was exactly what he wanted me to do.

  I had discovered that in life there’s often a fine line between thinking too little and thinking too much, so I’d learned to trust my instincts. They said to head in that direction, so I did.

  Sheriff Lester was right: the house looked like it had been abandoned. A gusty spring wind was blowing when I rode up. The door swung open on its leather hinges, one of which had partially rotted because of exposure to the weather, making the door hang crooked. The wind blew it back and forth, but one corner dragged in the dirt, and the motion worked that bad place in the leather even more. In another month or so it would come apart.

  I thought about going inside to see if anything could be salvaged, but I didn’t want to step in there. I was sure it stunk, and I didn’t want anything that had belonged to the Daughtrys. I’d never worn the buffalo coat when I went to town, and as soon as I was able to buy another sheepskin jacket at Farnum’s store I burned the damned stinking thing.

  I rode all around the shack, but I didn’t see any bones anywhere. Satisfied, I turned and headed south toward the settlement. I needed a few things at the store.

  As soon as I got there, I could tell that Farnum was excited about something and couldn’t wait to tell me about it.

  “Howdy, Jim,” he said eagerly as he rested his hands on the counter at the rear of the store. We called each other by our first names by then. “You heard about what happened?”

  “Well, I’ve heard about a lot of things that happened, Clyde,” I told him. “Which thing in particular are you talkin’ about?”

  “The train holdup.”

  That got my attention right away. Robbing trains is a subject that holds a particular interest for me. And for once, a holdup was news to me. I said, “Tell me about it.”

  “It was over at Cougar Pass, early this mornin’. A gang of bandits stopped the westbound not long after dawn.”

  I’d heard of Cougar Pass, about seven miles east of the county seat. Since this part of the country was mostly flat, it wasn’t really much of a pass, just an open spot between two little hills.

  “How’d they do that?”

  “Pried up a rail, then piled brush in front of the place and set it on fire. The engineer couldn’t see that the rail was gone, so he tried to barrel on through the bonfire.”

  “Good Lord!” I said. “Did the whole train derail?” I hated to think about the devastation and likely loss of life if that was the case.

  “No, just the engine and the coal car. The other cars buckled up some but didn’t crash. That was a stroke of luck, they say. The whole thing could’ve gone over. Not so lucky for the engineer and the fireman, though. They were both killed.”

  I hated to hear that. Like I said before, even though I’d done some things in my earlier days I wasn’t particularly proud of, I’d tried my best to see to it that nobody was killed or even seriously hurt.

  “Once the train was stopped, the bandits came chargin’ in and tried to bust into the express car,” Farnum went on. “From what I hear, there was a big money shipment in there. Reckon the outlaws must’ve known about it somehow. The Wells Fargo guards were waitin’ for ’em, though. There was a hell of a gun battle.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked him. If the holdup happened that morning, then news of it had reached Largo mighty fast.

  “Charley Davenport and his wife were down in the county seat last night. They took their old maid daughter to town to put her on an eastbound train. She’s goin’ to visit relatives in Dallas and find herself a husband. Then they stayed the night and came back today. Stopped by here on the way to their place and told me all about it. It was the talk of the town.”

  I had met Charley Davenport once, here at Farnum’s. His spread was farther west. Seemed like a good sort, if a little closemouthed. I had a hunch it was Mrs. Davenport who’d done most of the talking about the robbery.

  “Anyway,” Farnum went on, seeming a little put out that I’d interrupted him, “one of the guards was wounded in all the shootin’, but two of the bandits were killed and the other four got away. The way I hear it, one of ’em was wounded.”

  “They didn’t get the money?”

  “Nary a penny. Those guards are heroes, if you ask me.”

  I hadn’t asked him, and given my background, I had a hard time seeing it the same way he did. Of course, I didn’t particularly admire the holdup men, either. To my way of thinking, what they’d done was crude and sloppy. They could have killed dozens of innocent people by derailing the locomotive. There are less destructive ways of stopping a train.

  But a derailment was effective, I had to give them that. A train can’t run if it’s not on the rails. And a crash likely would have busted the express car open and might have even killed the guards, so they could have waltzed in and made off with that loot pretty easy. That’s fine and dandy, if all you care about is the money.

  “What happened after the robbers lit out?” I asked.

  “The conductor shinnied up a telegraph pole and cut in on the wire,” Farnum said. “He got help from the county seat. Sheriff Lester went chargin’ out there with a posse, sent the wounded guard back to town, and took off after the bandits. That’s the last Charley and his missus heard about it, so I don’t know if they caught the varmints yet or not.”

  I didn’t really care one way or the other, but at least the sheriff would be busy for a while chasing after outlaws and wouldn’t have time to wonder about me and how I’d got hold of Abner Tillotson’s ranch.

  “The railroad’s shut down,” Farnum added. “They’ll have to send a work train out, maybe all the way from San Antone. Wouldn’t surprise me if they don’t get the mess cleaned up until sometime tomorrow. Maybe even the next day.”

  “Well, I’m not plannin’ on going anywhere, so that won’t cause me any problems.” I took the list I’d written out of my pocket. “I need a pound of coffee, some beans . . .”

  I told him the rest of the supplies I needed, and he started gathering them up with a surly expression on his face. He would have rather gossiped some more about the train robbery than do any actual work.

  I’d heard enough about it, though, and it had stirred up some uncomfortable memories for me. I don’t plan on apologizing for anything I’ve done in the past, and I learned a long time ago that regrets don’t change a damned thing. But I didn’t need any reminders, either. I especially didn’t cotton to the avid look on Farnum’s face when he talked about the engineer and the fireman dying in the crash, or the way he eagerly described the shootout between the robbers and the Wells Fargo men.

  The whole thing stuck with me stubbornly on the ride back to the Fishhook, and it didn’t go away as I tended to the chores the rest of the day. When I laid down in the bed that night, sleep didn’t come easy to me, like it usually does.

  Those railroad tracks stretched across the plains some thirty miles from where I’d laid my head, I thought, and trains carrying plenty of passengers and loot rolled over them in both directions several times a day.

  Not many people bothered to hold up trains anymore. Black
Jack Ketchum had still been at it over in New Mexico a few years earlier, but the law had caught him and he’d wound up on a gallows.

  Ol’ Black Jack had come to an even grislier end than usual, though, because the hangman hadn’t been very good at his job and when Black Jack dropped through the trap, the noose popped his head right off his shoulders. The body fell all the way to the ground, and Black Jack’s head bounced off to one side. Lord have mercy, what a way to go. The crowd that had gathered to watch the hanging got more than they bargained for. I didn’t feel sorry for ’em, the damned buzzards.

  But remembering what had happened to Black Jack Ketchum just sort of ricocheted through my head. Mostly I was wondering how much trouble it would be to put together a big enough bunch to stop one of those trains the right way.

  That brought me up against a stone wall in my thinking. The old bunch I’d used to run with was gone. Nearly all of them were dead. I was in Texas and one other fella was out in California, last I’d heard, livin’ a law-abiding life, and the two gals who had been part of the gang didn’t want anything to do with that life anymore. When I’d stopped in New York to visit with one of them, being the bearer of bad tidings that I was, she’d told me in no uncertain terms not to darken her doorstep ever again.

  But enough of that. One thing you can’t do in life is go back. You can turn and look at the past, you can even stick out your hand and try to touch it, but it’s always going to be just beyond your reach.

  I was finally about to doze off when I heard hoofbeats outside.

  They were slow but not too steady, as if the horse would walk a few steps and then stop for a second before moving on again, the way it would do if it didn’t have a rider. My first thought was that one of the horses had gotten out of the barn and was wandering around in the night.

  But I didn’t rightly see how that could have happened, because I knew those stalls were solid and secure. Abner had seen to that, and I had kept them in good repair.

  So if it wasn’t my horse, it had to belong to somebody else. Maybe it had wandered off from another ranch. Or maybe one of the Daughtrys’ mounts had found its way back to this area. I didn’t care for that thought. I’m not given to flights of fancy, but for a split second I wondered if maybe a Daughtry ghost had come looking for me, and I liked that idea even less.