Desperado Run (An Indian Territory Western Book 2)

by Patrick E. Andrews

  “You might as well go on about—” There was a hesitation. “Are you a friend of Ned’s?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said. “We’re both working as carpenters. The two of us came to Hobart together.”

  “In that case it’d be a good idea if you came with me. What’s your name?”

  “John Smith,” Ben answered. “I’ve been in the bank several times on business.”

  “Oh? Oh, yes, indeed, I remember you,” Abernathy said as he vainly tried to recall such a person. “I’ll be out directly, Mr. Smith.”

  “Are you sure you remember me?” Ben put a touch of indignity in his voice.

  “Certainly, Mr. Smith,” Abernathy said. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m afraid I’m still quite sleepy.”

  ‘“I’ll wait for you,” Ben said.

  “Yes, thank you. I won’t be long.” The door shut and Abernathy’s heavy footsteps could be heard going back across the creaking floor of the recently constructed house.

  In ten minutes the banker emerged and both men hurried down to the business district with Ben leading his horse. The fugitive, sensing an uneasiness in his companion, began speaking in a calm, reassuring voice. “I just got back from Mountain View. I wanted to be here first thing in the morning to see Mr. Harrison.”

  “The jeweler?” Abernathy asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Ben said as his mind fabricated a story. “I’m getting married to a widow lady over there. I plan to buy a nice ring for her.”

  Abernathy smiled in the darkness as they turned onto Fourth Street off Jefferson. “Well! Congratulations!”

  “Thanks,” Ben said. “I had my dream of opening up my own carpentry business out here, but I never figgered on getting hitched so quick.”

  “That’s mighty fine,” Abernathy said as they walked up to the back door.

  “I’ll be doing a lot of business with you, Mr. Abernathy,” Ben said easing his pistol out of its holster.

  Abernathy unlocked the door. “I wonder where Ned is.”

  As they stepped inside the bank Ben shoved his Colt .45 into the other’s back. “Get your damn hands up and do it quick, mister, or I’ll put a hole in you they can drive a two-mule team through—wagon and all.”

  “Oh, my God!” Abernathy exclaimed.

  “Just keep your voice down,” Ben cautioned him. “I want that safe opened quick.”

  “I—I left the combination at home,” Abernathy said.

  “You got ten seconds to have that door swung open or I’m gonna kill you,” Ben said in a cold voice. “There ain’t gonna be none of this shit of walking back to your house or standing here jawing. I’ll make it simple so’s you can come up with a quick decision, Abernathy. Open that safe or die!”

  “I’ll open it! I’ll open it!” Abernathy said in fright.

  “I told you to keep quiet,” Ben again cautioned him. “We’ll let ol’ Ned snooze through this.” He chuckled. “Then you can fire him in the morning when he wakes up and finds you laying here all trussed up.”

  Abernathy had already turned toward the safe when the simultaneous flash and gunshot exploded aloud.

  Ben whirled toward the source of the attack in time to see the gun’s brilliant explosion again. This time the bullet whirled so close to his ear he could feel its brief slipstream.

  “Get down, Mr. Abernathy!” Ned Brownley yelled. “I’ll get him.”

  Abernathy dove to the floor, but this time it was Ben who fired. Three quick shots barked in the bank, and a groan from Brownley and his stumbling steps showed he’d been hit. Ben turned to look for the banker but couldn’t see him in the darkness.

  “You sonofabitches!” he yelled in rage.

  There was no sense in hanging around hoping to get Abernathy to open the safe now. It wouldn’t be long before alarmed citizens would be arriving.

  A lot of frustrated bank robbers would have blasted away in the dark hoping to kill the banker in revenge, but cold-blooded murder wasn’t Ben Cullen’s style. He left the man hiding in the dark and fled outside.

  A few lanterns flared up and loud voices could already be heard as Ben leaped into his saddle. He kicked the horse’s flanks and galloped madly through the dark streets toward the edge of town as he headed for the open prairie where the moon’s light, unhindered by buildings and other man-made structures, would guide him through the night.

  ~*~

  During his stay in the Kansas State Penitentiary, Ben Cullen spent a total of three years with Harmon Gilray and his gang.

  The organization eventually had its own shack constructed in one corner of the prison yard where they gathered daily for discussions on future plans, bank and train robbery techniques, and the latest news from their outside sources, as well as for general amusement with the ever popular knife-throwing games. Ben firmly established himself as the champion of champions in that event.

  During the cold months, with the small wood-burning stove furnished by the bribed captain of guards radiating comforting heat, the group would sit and listen to their gang leader spin his philosophies as he discussed life and sought to slant their views toward his own in an effort to mold them into better outlaws and enemies of society.

  “Nobody owns nothing in this world,” Harmon Gilray would tell his followers. “They might have something in their possession at any given time, but they’re only holding it until a stronger or meaner feller comes along and takes it away. That’s why you got to be strong and mean, so’s you can have what you want outta life.”

  “What about nice folks?” Ben once asked him. “Like bankers and such? They got Aplenty, but they ain’t strong or mean.”

  “Maybe not in a saloon fight,” Gilray allowed, “but they’re the strongest and meanest, boy. They don’t pack guns or knives, but they write laws and papers that make things go their way. Them rules and statutes give ’em the strength they need, and believe me, they’re mean enough to see that only the right stuff for them gets passed by the government. It’s us poor folks that got to use our guns and fists, boy, that’s our law—the Law of the Sixshooter—just like they say in them dime novels. That’s one thing them silly magazines have got right.”

  Sometimes Gilray’s preaching confused Ben. But as time went by, his understanding grew.

  The outlaw leader even touched on women in his discourses. “The ladies is another problem altogether. They’re trouble as sure as hell, and always have been. Remember Eve in the Bible?”

  “I sure do,” Ben answered. “She give ol’ Adam that apple and got him in dutch with God. He was lucky he didn’t end up in solitary.”

  “Solitary is something thought up by men,” Gilray said. “Even God never done that to anybody.” He paused. “But if the Creator ever did curse men, He done it with women. He give ’em that ’twixt their legs, boy, and if the Lord made anything better’n that He kept it for Himself.”

  Ben, who had never once in his life gazed between a woman’s legs, only nodded.

  “You stay away from ’em as much as you can,” Gilray advised him. “If you feel the urge, then pay some dance hall gal for a little of her time, then get on back downstairs with your pards. Don’t never go back to the same one again either. And if you ever catch yourself liking one, then get as far away from her as you can.”

  “I liked a gal once,” Ben admitted. “But I reckon I told you about her already.”

  Gilray laughed. “Yeah. You told us what happened too. Her goddamned brother beat the shit outta you, didn’t he? And just on account of what she told him.”

  “Yeah,” Ben said.

  “If it weren’t for that little gal, you wouldn’t be here right now, Ben Cullen,” Gilray said, emphasizing his point.

  “I reckon not,” Ben agreed. “But sometimes I’d like have a gal like me.” He smiled. “You know, be my sweetheart or something.”

  Gilray shook his head at this display of softness. “Are you crazy, young Ben Cullen? In the first place the fickle little bitch is gonna break your damn hear
t someday and take up with some other jasper. That is, if you’re lucky. If you ain’t, she’ll marry you and make your life a living hell on earth, believe me! Stay away from ’em, Ben. You already got more trouble than you can handle from a gal now, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Ben said. But somehow the thought of having a girl like him seemed like one of the most wonderful things that could ever happen to him. Sometimes, at night in his cell, his active imagination would create scenes between himself and this phantom young woman. These were chaste affairs with affection and tenderness between them. But these pleasant reveries would always drift into jarring, hurting memories of Maybelle Beardsley.

  Finally, Ben accepted Gilray’s dictum. The man was as right about women as he was everything else.

  Chapter Six

  Ben’s ride out of Hobart had been wild and unplanned. He’d simply headed for the safety of his hidden camp. Now, clutching his Winchester carbine, he knelt in the copse of cottonwood where he’d established a sanctuary.

  He had little trouble evading the poorly organized pursuit mounted against him from the town. The posse, who had left late, knew little of the country they searched and they rode in random futility from one end of Kiowa County to the other as Ben lay low in his hiding place.

  But suddenly a group of riders, obviously part of the people pursuing him, wandered dangerously close.

  One of the riders dismounted and entered the trees a scant few yards from where Ben, all his senses strained and alerted, watched in nervous readiness. The man lowered his trousers and squatted.

  “Hey, Hank!” a voice sounded. “Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m taking a shit,” the man named Hank called back.

  “Want something to read?” his companion asked. He followed the question with a cackle.

  “Don’t take all day,” a third man urged him. “Supper’s waiting.”

  “Hell, I figgered we’d catch the jasper that killed Ned Brownley,” the man relieving himself said.

  Now Ben knew the man he’d shot was dead.

  “Yeah,” the second pursuer said. “But we don’t know this country good enough. Hell, if we was back home in Missouri, I wouldn’t have no trouble catching the sonofabitch.”

  “Yeah,” the other agreed.

  Hank stood up and readjusted his trousers. “Okay. Let’s get on home. We done the best we could.”

  Ben licked his dry lips and listened as they rode away leaving him sitting alone in the early evening silence. No doubt there would be no more pursuit that day, but he would take no chances. After a couple of hours had passed, Ben carefully checked his camp in the waning light.

  He’d learned an important lesson when he first rode the owlhoot trail with Harmon Gilray and his gang: always clean up old camps so no one can tell anybody had even stopped there.

  Ben’s cookfire had been in a depression he scraped out in the ground. He had piled dirt over the ashes and used dead leaves and grass to cover that in order not to leave even a faint trace of his having been there. Lastly, he took a dead branch and meticulously brushed the area to get rid of tracks he might have left. When he was satisfied the job was done, he swung up in the saddle and, short of cash and supplies, but long on plans for the future, rode north toward the Kansas line.

  He traveled slowly and leisurely through the night, letting the horse pick his own way as long as the animal traveled in the right direction. Toward dawn Ben took a two-hour break and caught enough of a nap to take the edge off his weariness and restore some of the energy spent in the last day. Then he continued the journey.

  During the late afternoon, over the horizon to the east, a build-up of clouds began. These were black, restless mountains of heavy mist pregnant with moisture and bristling with flashes of angry lightning.

  They rolled up higher as they approached in a silent, billowy expansion of celestial majesty while the first discharges of thunder began to roll ominously across the darkening prairie.

  Ben could smell the rain and feel the growing coolness as the temperature plunged from the mid-nineties into the high seventies. Within a half hour the entire sky was a rolling canopy of flashing and deep rumbling as the restless, angry cumulus formations edged on in their ponderous but restless trek.

  Then the rain hit.

  The clouds released their wet cargo in thick sheets of water that measured hundreds of yards across. These descended rapidly from almost two thousand feet and slammed onto the helpless earth like the swat of a giant’s hand. Leaves were knocked from trees, birds in flight were crushed to the ground, and the high buffalo grass was beaten to carpet flatness by each successive wave of heavy rain.

  Ben reeled in his saddle and even the horse staggered under the initial watery assault, but finally the weight of the rain decreased markedly until it came in heavy drops. But even these, in the growing wind, obscured all vision as they swept across the prairies in whirling, dancing gusts with enough force to sting unprotected skin.

  Ben was virtually blind. He could only hold onto the saddle horn with one hand and his hat with the other as his mount lurched forward through the storm.

  Gullies and dry washes now filled with raging torrents. Many had been river- and creekbeds in ancient days, and were now reverted to their prehistoric state.

  Ben’s horse, not able to see any better than its rider, stumbled to the edge of a deep cut in the terrain. The slippery, loose mud gave way under the weight of the animal, causing it and the rider to plunge into a brand-new raging river flowing through the ravine where once wild flowers grew.

  Ben was swept from the saddle and he swam wildly, almost instinctively, against the current that now rolled and pitched him against the rocky banks. Confused and dazed, he vaguely noticed his boots being swept from his feet as his mouth and nose were filled with the muddy deluge that played with him, bobbing him around like a helpless cork.

  He continued to fight the water and grab air as he flailed and kicked. He quickly grew exhausted and his arms and legs seemed to be made of lead. Finally, gagging and hacking, his mind grew dizzy and disoriented to the point he no longer cared.

  He sank beneath the flood, all fight gone out of him.

  ~*~

  Ben had spent his full ten-year sentence in prison.

  Harmon Gilray and his men, through the efforts of their lawyers, finally were released three years before Ben. The outlaw leader left his address—actually his family’s farm near Newton, Kansas—and told Ben to look him up after his release.

  Ben, now permanently armed with his ever-present knife, found life not so easy without Gilray’s presence. He was once again assigned to pushing the coal cars in and out of the mine, but there was only one more sexual attack attempted on him.

  This was done by a lone bully who lunged for the youngster one moment and found his belly split open the next. The attacker survived—in maintaining the silence required by prison etiquette and tradition—and Ben was considered a “tough con” by then and not to be trifled with. In the culture of the prison yard he had proved himself a man and was treated with respect from that moment on.

  He continued at his job and went through the routine of being a loner. His ever-active imagination made life bearable for him as it conjured up images of dashing bank and train robberies as a member of Gilray’s gang. Ben saw visions of money, beautiful women—though he’d yet to have one—and whole dime novels devoted to his life’s story just like Jesse James had. This dream world, and the fantasies of hope and grand adventures it created, kept Ben on an even keel. He had the one thing that most convicts didn’t have: a dream of a better life than the one he’d had before going into the penitentiary.

  A month before his scheduled release, and just a few weeks after his twenty-sixth birthday, Ben was summoned to the prison chaplain’s office for an interview.

  The clergyman, a tall, thin, severe man named Hamilton, did little to hide the disapproval he felt for his flock. They were sinners of the worst sort as far as he was
concerned, and he firmly believed that lawbreakers should humble themselves before him and God—in that order—then spend the rest of their lives crawling before society, begging forgiveness for the crimes that had sent them to prison in the first place.

  Ben stood before his desk with the silent passivity he’d learned to display to authority since becoming Convict 2139.

  Hamilton had a piece of paper on his desk. “Your name is Benjamin Cullen, is it not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ben answered.

  “And your prison number is 2139?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The chaplain held up the piece of paper. “See this? There isn’t a mark on it, is there?”

  Ben looked at the document. He noted his name at the top and a series of squares covering the remainder. “I see printing, sir,” Ben said. “But no marks.”

  “That’s right,” the Reverend Mr. Hamilton said as he pursed his lips in indignant disapproval. “This is your chapel attendance record.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And there’s not one indication here that in the ten years you’ve spent in the Kansas State Penitentiary, that you even once came to services.”

  “I reckon not, sir,” Ben said unemotionally.

  “Why not?”

  “The folks back in my hometown didn’t like me going to their services ’cause I didn’t have good clothes or any money to put in the collection plate,” Ben said. “So I reckon I never developed much of a habit of attending church.”

  “Then, no wonder you ended up in here, Benjamin Cullen,” Chaplain Hamilton said sharply. “Regular church attendance would have taken you along the right paths in life and steered you away from bad company and evil deeds.”

  “I always figgered church was for folks from the right part of town, sir,” Ben said. “I lived on the other side of the tracks.”

  Hamilton scowled. “It’s true that churches on the outside have no place for riffraff like yourself, Cullen. But that’s no excuse not to have gone to chapel here and taken advantage of my counsel and religious teachings.”