The Stranger from Abilene

by Ralph Compton

  “Get out of here, Minnie,” Kelly said.

  The girl hurriedly stepped toward the door, then stood as still as a statue, her eyes wide as silver dollars, as Kelly said, “Wait!”

  He looked at St. John. “Pay her.”

  “What?”

  “I said, pay her.”

  The fat man protested. “Damn you, I never even started.”

  Suddenly a Bulldog was in Kelly’s hand. “Pay her or I’ll put one right in your fat gut.”

  St. John tried to retreat into bluster. “Kelly, I’ll have your job for this. I’ll see you jailed.”

  Kelly thumbed back the hammer of the Bulldog, shortening the trigger pull so much a breath of wind could set it off.

  “I won’t say it again, Terry. Pay her.”

  The fat man blanched and his jowls trembled. “That’s not my name.”

  Kelly pushed the Bulldog forward and St. John immediately reached into his pocket and found a coin.

  “Double, Terry. Pay her double.”

  “Marshal Kelly, you don’t need to—”

  “Shut up, Minnie.”

  St. John, badly frightened, dropped money into the girl’s hand.

  “Now get out of here, Minnie,” Kelly said.

  The girl fled and Kelly motioned with the gun. “Sit at the desk, Terry.”

  The fat man did as he was told, his slack mouth twitching.

  A moment later the clerk stuck his head in the doorway.

  “Are you all right, Mr. St. John?”

  Kelly turned on him, his gun up and ready. “Get the hell away from here.”

  The clerk squealed and scampered back from the door. Kelly pushed it shut behind him.

  He stepped to the desk and threw the paper in front of the fat man.

  “Read it,” he said.

  St. John glanced at the note. Immediately his eyes popped and his hands trembled. He looked up at Kelly. “What are you showing me? The mayor is dead?”

  “Read it,” Kelly said.

  The fat man’s eyes dropped to the paper. When he finished reading he looked like a man about to have a heart attack.

  “Lies,” he said, his voice a whisper. “It’s all lies. I have lawyers. I can beat this.”

  “I’ll let the United States Marshal decide that, Terry. And I’ll wire the Texas Rangers. I’m sure they’ll be interested.”

  St. John raised bloodshot eyes to Kelly’s face, the threat of the Rangers scaring him badly. “What will happen to me?”

  “I’ll hang you. Or the Rangers will.”

  St. John sat in silence for a while, then said, “Do I have an out?”

  “Not that I can see,” Kelly said.

  “Money?”

  Kelly shook his head.

  “I should have gunned Quarrels years ago,” the fat man said. “When he first began to squeeze me.”

  “Seems like.”

  St. John’s hand strayed to the bottom drawer of his desk.

  “Open it, Terry,” Kelly said, his eyes glittering. “Please.”

  The fat man pulled his hand away as though it had been burned.

  “On your feet,” Kelly said.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “To jail. Where you belong.”

  Chapter 71

  There was no letup in the rain as Emma Kelly rode into the Southwell Ranch.

  Lightning hissed across a sullen sky, and thunder rolled with the racketing din of a thousand strident drums.

  She saw the bodies of three men sprawled on the muddy ground. Clayton she recognized at once, lying on his back, his face turned to the rain.

  Emma stepped from the saddle and ran to Clayton. Heedless of the mud, she kneeled, then lifted his head and laid it on her lap.

  “Cage, can you hear me?”

  The man’s face, pale under his tanned skin, showed no sign of life.

  Emma’s hand moved to his bloody chest. His heart was still beating, but hesitantly.

  Desperately the girl looked around her, her eyes searching for help that wasn’t there. She saw only the shifting curtain of the rain, heard it chatter on the ranch house roof, smelled the caustic tang of lightning.

  There was no one else. She had it to do.

  Clayton was a big man, heavy with bone and muscle, and lifting him was out of the question.

  Emma stood, grabbed him by the armpits, and dragged his limp body.

  It was slow going, a few inches at a time, the man a heavy burden for a slender woman.

  Starting and stopping, Emma took almost ten minutes to drag Clayton the twenty yards to the house. She glanced at Quarrels’s body, curled up in death, and felt only anger.

  She opened the door, and with the last of her strength, pulled Clayton inside into the hallway.

  This was not the time for false modesty. Now, out of the rain, Emma stripped off Clayton’s wet clothes and left him lying naked for a few moments while she ran into a bedroom and returned with a pillow and blanket.

  The man was shot through and through, but he was still breathing, and that gave the girl hope.

  Cage was strong. He would survive this—he had to.

  She walked to the door and looked out into the raging morning.

  She badly needed Nook Kelly’s help, his man’s strength.

  When would he get here?

  To the north of the Southwell Ranch, across the rain-lashed hill country, Marshal Nook Kelly stood in the bank and listened to Lissome Terry’s proposition.

  “Let me go to your office by myself, Nook,” the fat man pleaded. “I don’t want to walk through town with my hands raised and a gun at my back. I have friends here, neighbors.”

  Kelly glanced into the street. It was deserted, the rain forcing everyone indoors.

  “There’s nobody on the street, Terry,” he said. “Now move your fat ass off the chair.”

  “For old times’ sake, Nook?”

  “Terry, you and me don’t have old times, only bad times. Now move it. I won’t tell you again.”

  Years ago, when Bighorn Point was wilder and Kelly more on edge, he’d trained himself to expect the unexpected, to be ready for something he’d never seen before.

  That morning in Terry’s office he wasn’t unready—but his edge had been dulled by too many years of easy living.

  And the fat man showed him something.

  As he raised himself from his chair, he groaned, then slumped to his right, as though suddenly taken ill.

  Kelly holstered his gun and started to step around the desk to help Terry to his feet. But the man suddenly straightened and stood up. It was very fast for a grossly overweight man, and Kelly was taken by surprise.

  He drew as Terry’s Colt came up, but the fat man surprised him again.

  Instead of turning his gun on Kelly, Terry shoved the muzzle against his temple and pulled the trigger.

  The Colt roared and blood and brains splattered the marshal’s face.

  “You killed him!”

  The bank clerk ran inside and cast a horrified look at Terry’s body. The fat man lay facedown on his desk, a pool of blood spreading around his head.

  “He killed himself,” Kelly said. “Damned coward couldn’t stand proud and take his medicine like a man.”

  “Hell, what did he do?” the clerk said.

  “Everything,” Kelly said. “Everything that’s bad.”

  Chapter 72

  Cage Clayton watched the hazy play of light and shadow on the wall as he regained consciousness one hazy memory at a time.

  The gunfight with John Quarrels and his bushwhacking buddy . . . the bullets thudding into his body . . . Lee Southwell and Shad Vestal mocking him from the shadows . . .

  Ghosts of his imagination they’d been, those two, with as little substance as the filmy memories that now came and went in his head.

  He raised himself up off the pillow, a movement that hurt him badly and one he did not care to repeat.

  Where the hell was he?

  From o
utside he heard a hammer clang on an anvil. Closer, a woman’s voice, singing a song he didn’t know.

  Emma’s voice.

  Then a sound he recognized, the slow tock . . . tock . . . tock of the grandfather clock in the hallway of the Southwell ranch house.

  Steeling himself for the pain he knew would result, Clayton propped himself up on an elbow.

  “Emma!”

  The girl responded immediately. She walked into the room, her smile as bright as a spring morning.

  “My patient is finally awake,” she said. “It’s about time.”

  “And he’s hungry,” Clayton said.

  Emma sat on the bed. “And that doesn’t surprise me.”

  “How long . . .”

  “Three weeks. You’ve been out of your head most of the time.”

  The girl made a face. “And who, may I ask, is Dallas Laurent?”

  “Huh?”

  “Dallas Laurent. You talked about her quite a bit, made me blush at times.”

  Clayton looked like a shy schoolboy. “Oh yeah, she was a woman I knew in Abilene.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Last I heard she was in Denver, opened her own house.”

  “Now a lot of what you were saying makes sense.” Emma sniffed.

  Clayton was spared a further female interrogation when Nook Kelly stepped into the room. It was the first time he’d seen him without his guns.

  “How are you doing, old fellow?” Kelly said.

  “Peachy. Apart from carrying a ton of lead inside me.”

  Kelly laid a reassuring hand on Clayton’s shoulder. “No, the doc got it all out, saved your life. Well, him and Emma. She hasn’t left your side in weeks, and you raving like a madman, jumping in and out of death’s door.”

  “Raving about Dallas Laurent?”

  “Yeah, her, and less important stuff like cows and grass and winter snows.”

  Emma rose to her feet. “I’ll fix you something to eat, Cage. Any preference?”

  “How about burning me a huge steak with six fried eggs, a loaf of sourdough bread, and a gallon of coffee?”

  The girl smiled. “Two soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast, it is.” She looked at Clayton. “I’ll see what I can do about the coffee.”

  “Emma knows best, Cage,” Kelly said, grinning. “That’s something you’ll learn.”

  After the girl was gone, Clayton said, “And Lissome Terry? Did I rave about him?”

  “He’s dead, Cage.”

  Kelly answered the question he saw on Clayton’s face.

  “He shot himself.”

  “But when? I mean, how—”

  Using as few words as possible in the face of Clayton’s growing impatience, Kelly told him about Quarrels’s letter and the confrontation in the fat man’s office.

  “Terry couldn’t take his medicine,” he said. “I don’t know what scared him worse, me or the Rangers. I guess he realized them boys would’ve taken him back to Texas and hung him for sure.”

  Clayton lay back on his pillow, his face a tangle of conflicting emotions. “Then it’s over.”

  “Yes, it’s over, and Bighorn Point will never be the same again.”

  Smiling, Kelly shook his head. “You played hob, Cage.”

  The marshal stepped to the door, then turned. “I’m shoeing the black for you. Feels good to work with my hands.”

  Clayton said nothing.

  “Cage, it’s over and now your life is just beginning,” Kelly said. “Marry Emma and be happy and forget you ever heard the name Lissome Terry.”

  Chapter 73

  After Clayton ate what Emma described as “an invalid’s meal,” she helped him sit up on the pillows.

  “I’ve never been one to lie in bed,” he said. “Hell, Nook is even shoeing my horse.”

  “You’ll be very weak for a while yet,” the girl said. “Dr. McCann said you can get up and start walking around in another couple of weeks.”

  Clayton shook his head. “Not here. Not in this house. Help me on my horse and I’ll head back to the hotel.”

  Emma managed a lopsided smile. “Cage, you’re not exactly welcome in Bighorn Point. You robbed them of their mayor and the proprietor of the town’s only bank. St. John’s—I mean, Terry’s—wife already packed up and left. She didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  “Robbed is not the word I’d have used,” Clayton said.

  “I know, but that’s how the good citizens see it.”

  Emma, as though a thought had just occurred to her, held up a hand to stop Clayton from saying anything. She stepped into the silence. “You don’t like this house?”

  “No, it’s a death house, a bad luck house. You bring sunshine to the place, but its darkness remains.”

  “But what about your job? Where will we live?”

  “I don’t want the job. We’ll go back to Abilene. The cabin on my ranch is nothing like this place, but we can make it work.”

  Emma said, “Cage, when I’m your wife I’ll go with you anywhere—you know that—and I’m willing to marry you today if you want.”

  “I can see a ‘but’ in your eyes.”

  “We have a problem.”

  “It’s nothing we can’t solve together, Emma, you and me.”

  “You’re right. We can solve it, but it will take a sacrifice on both our parts.”

  “I’m willing to sacrifice. Just tell me what I have to do.”

  “I talked to Doc McCann when he was here, and he . . . Well, he confirmed my worst fears.”

  Clayton was genuinely puzzled. “What fears?”

  “Cage, we can never have children.”

  “You don’t want children?”

  “Oh, I do, but that will be impossible.”

  Clayton shook his head. “Now you have me really confused.”

  Emma sat in silence for long moments, marshaling her thoughts; then, word by word, she began to break Cage Clayton’s heart.

  “Cage, you’re part black. I know it’s a very small part, but it’s there.”

  Wary now, Clayton tried to make light of it. He said, “Maybe it’s one of my toes—the black part, I mean.”

  “It’s not. It’s inside you somewhere, in your blood.”

  Before Clayton could say anything, the words wrenched out of Emma, as though every syllable caused her pain.

  “Cage, we could have . . . a throwback.”

  Too stunned to say anything, Clayton could only stare at her.

  The girl covered her face with her hands and said between sobs, “Listen to me, Cage. Try to understand. How would it look to other people to see me, a white woman, nursing a . . . a . . .”

  “I understand,” Clayton said after a long while. “I understand perfectly how you feel. You were raised with a certain attitude and it’s hard for anyone to drop the prejudices of a lifetime.”

  Emma let her hands fall to her sides. “We can still marry, Cage. I’ll make you happy. I’ll be a good wife to you, I swear I will.”

  Clayton shook his head. “I want children someday, Emma. White, black, half-and-half, I don’t care. I’ll still love them.”

  Her pain giving way to defiance, Emma said, “I can’t do that.”

  “I know you can’t, Emma,” Clayton said. “And I pity you.”

  Three hours later, wearing clothes he didn’t originally own, Cage Clayton climbed onto the black.

  He was very weak, his heart so shattered he thought it would never mend.

  Kelly hung a sack of supplies on the saddle horn and passed Clayton Miss Lee.

  “Cage, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “We’re all sorry, Nook.”

  “Ride easy, pardner, and get better, huh?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Write. Let us know that you and your cat got back to Abilene safely.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  Cage Clayton turned his horse north, heading for home, a place where he could heal his body, and his soul
.

  He did not look back.

  Epilogue

  Cage Clayton returned to Kansas, where he reconciled with his father and prospered in the cattle business. He is credited with introducing Brahman cattle to the Kansas range.

  He married in 1896 and had a large brood of towheaded kids.

  Clayton died of influenza in 1930 at the age of eighty.

  Nook Kelly died in 1906 while working as a laborer on the construction of the Panama Canal.

  Emma Kelly married a preacher, then moved to Oklahoma City. Thereafter she disappeared from the pages of history.

  The railroad never reached Bighorn Point and during the automobile age the main highways bypassed the town. By 1928 Bighorn Point was a ghost town and today only the limestone foundations of the church remain, almost invisible in the prairie grass.

  The Southwell Ranch never prospered, and in 1918 the land was sold to the Standard Oil Company.

  Angus McLean returned only once to Bighorn Point, to erect a headstone over Moses Anderson’s grave that has since disappeared.

  At least, that’s how the story goes....

  Don’t miss another exciting Western adventure in the USA Today bestselling series!

  THE GHOST OF APACHE CREEK

  A Ralph Compton Novel by Joseph A. West Coming from Signet in November 2011!

  Dry lightning shimmered silver on the warped timbers of the town, imparting a fleeting beauty. A hard wind broke in waves over the Mogollon Rim to the south, crested, and then rampaged north toward the peaks and mesas of the White Mountains, picking up ragged veils of sand as it went.

  The wind venomously hurled the sand against the ghost town of Requiem, as though trying to wake the place from its deep slumber. Stinging grit cartwheeled along Main Street and rattled against the cracked glass of store windows, threatening to break them further. Rusty-hinged doors squealed and slammed in the tempest, and the wind shrieked like a virgin saint forced to take partners for the devil’s barn dance.

  A tall man walked through this maelstrom of wind, sand and darkness, his head bent, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings. His boots thudded on the boardwalk, the chime of his spurs faint in the storm’s roar. He stepped along slowly, shoulders hunched, long hair tumbling down his ragged back.