Saving Masterson

by Bill Brooks

  “Just so you know,” he said. “I gave Frenchy his money back, but I still got six lead pills for that headache you’re developing if you want them. Now untie the woman.”

  Teddy stepped aside while Bone struggled to untie the Rose, drops of his blood falling on her bare back and mixing with the bloody stripes. Once untied, she grabbed a robe and shucked it on and looked at Teddy as she huddled against the door.

  “Go on,” he said, and she went.

  “Now what?” Bone said.

  “You let her go and you leave Frenchy alone.”

  Bone shook his head defiantly.

  “I don’t let no woman go once she belongs to me.”

  Teddy shot him in the foot, watched him hop and fall.

  “Just so you understand my position on this,” he said to Bone.

  Bone cringed in his newly found pain.

  “You shot my toes off!”

  “There are worse things than toes you could get shot off. And I’m sure there are other women you can find to abuse. Just not that one, understood?”

  Bone lay there like a wounded dog, defeated by a bigger meaner dog. It was enough. Teddy lowered the pistol.

  “Remember,” he said. “Frenchy and the woman are off-limits.”

  Ed was coming through the doors of the Silk Garter just as Teddy was going out.

  “I heard a gunshot.”

  “Bone had an accident.”

  “He dead?”

  “No.”

  “Bat told me the situation about the deal Frenchy had with you…”

  “I didn’t come here because of that.”

  “He need a doctor?” Ed said, glancing toward the long hallway at the back of the bar.

  “I reckon he will.”

  “Self defense, you say?”

  “Accident.”

  Ed nodded. The two parted company, went their separate ways, Teddy not sure exactly how he was feeling about what happened, but not feeling overly bad about it either. He stopped down at the telegraph office to check for messages. There wasn’t any. He stopped at the post office and a letter from John marked GENERAL DELIVERY was waiting for him.

  Old pard. Life down here isn’t as good as when you were still hanging around. Hell, I’m about ready to die of boredom. When you finishing up and heading back? I was thinking maybe we could go into the cow business. It’s something we both know and these Mexican beeves run wild out in the chaparral—it wouldn’t take much to get us a small herd started and it’d beat robbing banks. I’m about ready to settle down to a steady life. Besides that, I got a situation brewing with you know who. She’s been coming around and I been doing my best to ignore her. I think she knows the padre is growing restless too since he seen you leave. Think she’s afraid he’ll leave her behind. I tried to tell her different, but she’s taken to me like a pup. It’d be nice to have an amigo to talk to and get some good advice. Don’t know how much longer I can stay here if you ain’t intending to return. Are you? Let me know.

  John S.

  Teddy couldn’t help but smile. John, he had a way of drawing trouble to him like flies to a dung heap.

  Chapter 22

  Wolves howled when they caught wind of him. Two Bits looked off into the moonstruck night made brighter still by the freshly fallen snow. Ahead a mile he could see the lights of Dodge twinkling like stars that had frozen and fallen to earth. It felt brutal cold, but work lay just ahead. A thousand dollars’ worth of work if Bone Butcher hadn’t gone and hired someone else, or if someone hadn’t already killed the Masterson Brothers.

  Someday, he told himself, he’d like to visit the ocean and stick his feet in the water just to say he’d done it once. His great-grandfather had been a sailor, or so he was told. There had been an old tintype of the man standing with a stern look and wearing a dark coat and a little dark cap perched on his head.

  “He sailed to Chiny,” Two Bits’ mother had told him. “He’d come back with tea and yeller slaves.”

  “I’d like to sail to Chiny myself,” Two Bits told his mother.

  “It’s a far ways,” she said. She said the old man had gotten eaten by a whale, but Two Bits didn’t believe her on that account because she was a lighthearted woman, even though she’d lived a hard live raising six kids alone, Two Bits one of the six.

  Such a moon-filled night reminded Two Bits of what it must be like on the ocean, for the prairies, he reckoned, were a lot like the ocean in some ways—vast and lonesome without much to distract a feller. In the warm season, there was nothing but grass that looked like ocean waves constantly moving back and forth in the wind. Grass and sky, the same way the ocean was just water and sky. Not a spit’s worth of difference he could imagine. Maybe after he killed the Mastersons, he’d take his money and Elvira and go find the real ocean and cross it and see what Chiny looked like, drink some of their tea maybe and look at yeller folks.

  He saw the sign there at the edge of town—the one about NO FIRE ARMS WITHIN CITY LIMITS—and rode past it without a second glance.

  He rode down Front Street looking this way and that—north of the tracks the businesses were closed. But he knew he wouldn’t find a man like Bone Butcher or Bad Hand Frank, his brother-in-law—who’d sent a wire saying there was a job needed done—north of the tracks.

  He crossed over the deadline, where there was noise and plenty of lights still on, and a gunshot rang out just as he did, but he didn’t think anything unusual about it. He swung in at the place Frank said he should meet them—The Silk Garter. Dismounted, felt stiff in the knees and hips, and went in where it was cheery and warm, where a crowd of drinkers and gamblers and whoremongers had gathered to waste away another night.

  He went to the bar and asked for Frank.

  “Frank’s in the jail,” the barkeep said.

  “Jail?”

  “He shot a pimp for his blue shirt.”

  “Don’t seem like a good enough reason to put a feller in jail.”

  “The law here is hard cases,” the barkeep said. “Them damn Mastersons make it so’s a feller can’t hardly enjoy life.”

  “So I heard. Where’s the jail?”

  “Back north of the tracks. You probably came past it if you come down Front Street.”

  “I’m sorty looking for another feller too what’s supposed to be around here—Bone Butcher.”

  “Mister, you’ll find him laid up in the infirmary. Feller shot him through the foot this morning.”

  “Lot of shooting going on, it sounds like.”

  “They’s a sort of madness ’round here lately, it seems. My guess is it’s the weather. Turns cold, people get cranky. You want a drink?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Cocktail?”

  “Beer. A whiskey too.”

  Two Bits could almost see his shooting money with wings on it, flying fast away, his potential employer foot shot and his brother-in-law jailed. Life was like milk: It had a way of going sour quick. Well, he’d not come all this way just to lose a job on account of people getting shot in the feet or kin tossed into jail.

  “Which way to the infirmary?”

  The barkeep told him how to get there, and when he arrived he saw it was just a small white structure on the east edge of town. It smelled strongly of some sort of medicine, chloroform and such, Two Bits noticed the minute he walked in the front door. He asked an orderly who was sitting in a chair eating a persimmon which of the wounded galoots was Bone Butcher.

  “That big ugly one down on the end bed,” the orderly said.

  Two Bits clomped over and stood there at the bed, staring into a face that didn’t possess a single pleasant quality. Bone’s bandaged foot lay atop the blankets. “I’m Two Bits,” he said. “Bad Hand Frank’s brother-in-law. You said you had a job for me.”

  “Well, you’re a talky son of a bitch, ain’t you?” Bone said.

  Two Bits looked around, saw that the orderly on the far side of the room was paying attention only to his persimmon.

&nbs
p; “I dint ride all the way here to be insulted. Looks like you took one bullet already; you want another in you?”

  “Ah, hell. Listen, I maybe have got more than just one job for you. You think you’re up to shooting more than just those Mastersons?”

  “How many others you want shot besides them?”

  “Just one.”

  “I’ll shoot as many as you want shot, for the right price.”

  “How much extry?”

  “Do all three for five hundred each.”

  “That comes to around twelve hundred don’t it?”

  Two Bits squinted, trying to tote it. Math had been his undoing as a schoolboy, and just one more reason to quit and run off and become an assassin. You didn’t need booklearning to kill folks.

  “I reckon somewhere around in there, yeah,” Two Bits said, thinking the figure sounded reasonable.

  “Done.”

  “I’ll need some good faith cash up front.”

  “How much?”

  “Half.”

  “Half’s a lot to trust to somebody I don’t even know.”

  “You know Frank don’t you?”

  “Frank’s in jail.”

  “So I heard. But you still know him. Ask him, he’ll vouch for me.”

  “I already did, that’s why you’re here.”

  “Them’s my rates, take ’em or leave ’em.”

  “I’ll have to wait till tomorrow when I get out of here to get you the money.”

  “Tomorrow no later than noon, else I’m leaving.” Two Bits turned to go; he didn’t like the smell of medicine and the sight of shot folks. It made him think of the time he was in the army as a stretcher bearer, hauling the wounded to the surgeon’s tents and seeing piles of limbs stacked up outside the tents: sawed-off legs and arms and feet. He still had dreams about piles of cut-off limbs and other bad things he’d seen.

  “Don’t you want to know who the extry feller is I want you to shoot?” Bone asked.

  “It don’t matter none to me. A feller is a feller, and a shot one is just as dead once he’s shot. They all just end up stiffs.”

  “That’s a real pleasant way of looking at it,” Bone said sarcastically. “You come around my place tomorrow and I’ll tell you who it is and give you the money.”

  Two Bits walked out and sucked in a lungful of prairie air that was cold as metal. Then he headed back down toward the deadline. Just the prospect of doing some more shooting had made him randy. He figured to take some of the forty dollars traveling money he had on him and while away the night in a most pleasant and carnal way.

  He thought maybe he’d like a skinny girl this time. One that would remind him of his sweet wife, Elvira. He missed her a lot more each time he went out on a hunt.

  I guess I’m just getting old and sentimental, he thought as he sought to find himself a nice skinny gal in a place called the Paris Club. And find one he did. He asked her her name and she said it was Mattie.

  “Mattie Silks,” she said.

  “That’s a very nice name,” Two Bits said.

  “You ain’t nobody’s feller, are you?” she said.

  “Why do you ask?” Two Bits said.

  “Well, I got in trouble once because I went with somebody’s feller and I’d not want the same sort of trouble again.”

  “No, I ain’t nobody’s feller,” Two Bits said, but feeling all the lust go out of him because of the lie he told.

  “Well then, I guess it’s all right,” Mattie said.

  Two Bits went up to her room with her and sat on the bed next to her and when Mattie began to undress Two Bits said, “It ain’t necessary.”

  And when she said, “You in that big a hurry?”

  Two Bits said, “No, it’s just enough if you’ll just lay down here with me.”

  And Mattie said, “You’d be the first feller that didn’t want me to…”

  But it was enough for him for her to be there lying next to him, Two Bits asking her to blow out the lamp’s flame so the room was dark. And lying there with Mattie, Two Bits could pretend it was Elvria lying next to him and it made him feel better thinking that it was.

  Chapter 23

  Teddy opened his door and there they stood—Bat and Ed Masterson, and one other: Hoodoo Brown.

  “’At’s him,” Hoodoo said, waving a long-barreled pistol.

  “We need to talk,” Bat said, pushing past Teddy into the room.

  The Colt Lightning was there in the holster rig hanging on the back of a chair—too far to reach.

  “Game’s up, jailbreaker,” Hoodoo said.

  Bat moved between Teddy and the gun, Ed stood there in the door, blocking it.

  “Man says he’s a sheriff from New Mexico,” Bat said. “Says you broke a prisoner out of his jail. Says the prisoner you broke out of his jail was a convicted murderer scheduled to hang. Any of this true?”

  “All of it,” Teddy said.

  The Mastersons exchanged looks.

  “Like I told you,” Hoodoo Brown said. “Least the son of a bitch ain’t a liar, I’ll give him credit for that. I want to put the irons on him and take him back.”

  “Hold on,” Bat said.

  “For what? You heard it out of his mouth. He’s a lawbreaker.”

  “He and I need to talk in private before anything else happens.”

  “Hell with that.”

  “You got no jurisdiction here, it’s my way or no way if you want justice done.”

  Hoodoo Brown threw Teddy a look.

  “I caught you, you lawbreaker. Nobody busts out of my jail and gets away with it. It’s gone be a long ride back to New Mexico, guaranteed.”

  “Wait outside,” Ed said, stepping forth.

  Once alone with the lawmen, Bat said, “I thought you were a Pinkerton.”

  “I am.”

  “Funny sort, I’d say,” Ed chimed in. “Never knew the Pinkertons to be lawbreakers.”

  “Least not outright lawbreakers,” Bat said.

  “It was a friend of mine I broke out. I don’t think he got a fair trial and I wasn’t just going to let them hang him.”

  “Very sentimental of you, but the law is still the law.”

  “Maybe so, but there is also something known as extenuating circumstances, and that’s what I felt got overlooked in John’s trial. I’ve got the home office working on it, trying to get him a new trial.”

  “Where’s he at, this friend of yours? Maybe if you’re willing to give him back to Sheriff Brown, I can talk him into dropping the charges against you.”

  “He’s down in Mexico.”

  Bat shook his head.

  “I don’t know what to tell you. There’s nothing I can do if I don’t have a bargaining chip.”

  “Keep me locked up for a few days, let me send some wires to my home office. Brown can take me back down to New Mexico in a few days as easily as he can now.”

  “What’s that going to achieve, me locking you up for a few days?”

  “I don’t know, maybe nothing.”

  Bat turned to Ed. Ed shrugged.

  “It’s up to you,” he said.

  “I guess we could wait for the circuit judge to rule on it. He’ll be through in what, two, three days?”

  “Friday he’s scheduled in,” Ed said.

  “Friday then.”

  “That’s good enough. You going to let me keep my gun?”

  Bat feigned like he didn’t see the humor in it, reached for the rig and handed it over to brother Ed.

  Hoodoo seethed and cursed the decision when Bat informed him.

  “What kind of shit thinking is that?”

  Bat stopped suddenly, turned on the man. “Keep plowing that field, my friend, and you’ll get locked up too.”

  “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch!”

  “Cool off, sheriff,” Ed ordered. “You’ll get your man, just not today.”

  “I should have brought me some deputies,” Hoodoo whined.

  “Maybe you should have brought a
court order or a federal judge,” Ed retorted.

  “Go over to the Lone Star and tell the barkeep to give you a bottle of whiskey, put it on my account. For your inconvenience,” Bat said. “Then go get you a room over to the Great Western, tell ’em to send me the bill.”

  Some of the starch went out of Hoodoo.

  “Kindly of you.”

  “We’re a friendly place when somebody gives us a chance to be.”

  Hoodoo looked out from under the wide brim of his dusty sombrero.

  “And a mighty unfriendly one, when folks come looking for trouble,” Bat added.

  Hoodoo said, “Which way is it?”

  “What, the saloon or the hotel?”

  “Saloon. Hell, it’s a drink I need, a feller can always sleep.”

  Bat told him how to get to the saloon, then watched him stalk off up the street like the mean, cussed son of a bitch he was.

  “That’s it then, walk on over to the jail with us,” Bat said.

  Teddy slipped on his hat and coat.

  “Where we going to put him, Bat?”

  “We’ll double up Bad Hand Frank with the Kennedy kid.”

  “Frank won’t like it.”

  “Who gives a damn what Frank likes?”

  Frank didn’t like it.

  “Got my damn finger shot off and now you’re putting me in with that snot nose,” he bemoaned.

  “Could put you in with them horse thieves.”

  Frank looked over at the three sodbusters who had stolen a string of horses from the livery. They were sallow-faced boys wearing high-water dungarees that had patches on the knees, and dirty shirts and dirty necks. Illiterate lot, one bucktoothed, one with a wandering left eye. All jug-eared. Frank looked at the Kennedy kid, saw that sullen look, hated it, wanted to smack the look off the boy’s face. Then he looked at the new man, the tall youthful man with the trimmed moustaches, the well-kept appearance, the one who looked like he had at least some breeding to him.

  “Why not double me and him?” Frank said, pointing with his chin toward Teddy.

  Ed started to say, “Frank, get your ass in one of them other cells.”