by Jory Sherman
“You the law?”
“No,” Jed replied.
“Stand up.”
“How do I know if I stand up, you won’t shoot me?”
The voice cackled. “You don’t. But if you don’t stand up, I’ll shoot you dead where you are. And set that rifle down. Let me see your hands when you come up out of that grass.”
Jed debated whether or not to put down his rifle. If he did, when he stood up, he would be defenseless except for his six-gun, and he would not be able to draw it fast enough to stop a bullet if the man wanted to kill him. But if he didn’t show himself, he was liable to be shot dead right where he was squatting so ignominiously.
“All right,” Jed said, “but don’t shoot. I mean you no harm. I’m just looking for a place to lie low for a while.
A man in Junction City sent me here.”
“You come up real slow, sonny. Hands high.”
Jed squeezed the trigger of the rifle slowly while he held his thumb on the hammer. He eased the hammer down to half-cock and set the rifle down. If he needed it, he was hoping he could dive down and snatch it up quickly. So he set it down very carefully, in the path, so that nothing would obstruct his grasp if he had to grab for it.
“All right,” Jed said. “I’m going to stand up.”
He stood up, slowly, holding his hands over his head, palms out to show that they were empty. He felt foolish. He also felt as if the next sound he would hear would be a gunshot. The last sound he would ever hear.
“Now, step away from that rifle. Toward the soddy.”
Jed did as he was ordered. He was in the open, just a few yards from the sod shanty.
“Now, you just hold up there, feller, and with one hand, unbuckle that gun belt. Real slow now.”
Jed dropped one hand to the buckle of his gun belt and worked the tongue loose from the hole. The buckle opened and the belt slid free. He let the rig slide down his legs to the ground, then lifted his hand back up.
“Now, you step thisaway, feller. Toward me.”
“I can’t see you.”
“Same way you was a-goin’ and no sass, now, hear?”
Jed took a few more steps before the man ordered him to stop once again. He was only about four or five paces from the shanty. A meadowlark trilled a melodic line from over by the creek as Jed waited for the man to speak again. The scents of grass, water, and mud wafted to his nostrils and he felt the sun warm his shoulders. He might have been back home on an ordinary day, waiting for Dan out in a field, except that he was sweating like a running horse and his stomach was fluttering with fear.
“Now, then, let’s take a look at ye,” the man said.
Jed turned his head slowly until he was staring at the back corner of the soddy where a short, stout man stood as if he had appeared magically out of the ground. The man held a double-barreled shotgun at gut level, the snouts aimed straight at Jed’s chest.
“Who are ye?”
“Jed Brand.”
“Oh, ho, yep, you sure as hell are, feller. Only, you don’t look none like your picture drawing. I seen the flyer on you, Jed Brand, and it looks like I got me a triple bloodthirsty murderer with a two hunnert dollar price on his head. Why, you’re just a pup, young’un, barely dry behind the ears.”
“You aim to collect the reward on me?” Jed asked, sweat streaming down his face and body.
The man’s expression changed with a suddenness that surprised Brand.
Even through his scraggly beard, Jed could see the scowl on his face. His eyebrows, as bristly as a pair of soot-covered pipe cleaners, seemed to bristle as they arched over his glittering, porcine eyes. His pudgy nose twitched as if his nostrils were filling with a disagreeable odor. His tongue flicked out over cracked lips, a garish pink against the blackness of his tobacco-stained teeth and mouth.
“Me? Turn you in to the law for two hunnert dollars? Temptin’ as that might be, the sheriff’d likely put me in the hoosegow right along with you, and we’d both be shit out of luck.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“What fer? Do you think I have no respect for human life, sonny?”
“Well, no. But, you’re holding a shotgun on me.”
“Friendship don’t often spring up all of a sudden. I’m gettin’ to know you, Jed Brand. Maybe you want to shoot me and steal my goods. Not that I have all that much, but I got a roof over my head and some peace and quiet down here on the creek. That’s worth something. A hell of a lot, really.”
“I’m not a killer, Mister.”
“So you say.”
“I say it because it’s the truth. One of the men I’m accused of murdering was my own dear brother. A man named Silas Colter murdered them and made everyone think I killed those men.”
“Silas Colter.”
“You know him?”
“I knowed him once. He’s a snake.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean the man was born to treachery. I mean he’s a low-down liar and a deceitful man, not worth the powder to blow him to hell. He kilt a friend of mine in Lawrence, oh, it’s been five years now, but I remember it. Shot him in the back and then finished him off with a bullet to the head when my friend was down.”
“Why?”
“That was Colter’s way of dissolving a partnership.
Maybe the same as with you. What did you do for him?”
Jed told him.
“Yeah, that sounds like Colter. Well, you passed the test, Jed. You can bring your horse up, get your rifle and strap your gun belt back on. You got any grub with you?”
“Not much. Some hardtack and jerky.”
“Well, I got plenty. If you like goat.”
“Goat?”
“Antelope. But I got taters and onions and turnips and dried apples.”
The man cackled and his beady eyes sparkled with a look of madness, as if he had suddenly become addled.
“You know my name, what’s yours?” Jed lowered his hands very slowly. The old man aimed the shotgun toward the ground, took his fingers out of the trigger guard.
“Well, they call me Galoot.”
“Galoot?”
He cackled insanely again, before answering.
“I keep tellin’ folks that it’s really Curmudgeon, but they call me Galoot. Like ‘Old Galoot,’ you know?”
“Funny name.”
“Names don’t mean much where I hang my hat.”
“Where do you hang your hat?” Jed felt foolish. He wondered if Galoot was mad. Sometimes he seemed quite intelligent and well-spoken. At others, he seemed to go off the deep end into a state of craziness as if he drifted in and out of sanity like a man who has spent too much time alone.
“Why, all along the owlhoot trail. I’m a fugitive just like you, Jed. Now, get your goods and come on in out of the sun. This soddy ain’t The Palace, but it’s better’n nothin’ at all.”
And that was how Jed became friends with a man who went by the name of Galoot. He put up Jubal in a lean-to Galoot showed him, a place where he kept a moth-eaten burro that was the color of a gray mouse. There was water under the shed in an old barrel that had been cut in half and tarred on the outside seams so it wouldn’t leak. He had cracked corn and wheat in an old wooden trough. The burro was hobbled, and Jed put hobbles on Jubal, carried his saddlebags, rifle, and bedroll into the shanty.
It was dark and musty inside the sod house with its earthen floor. He could smell the onions and the apples, too. It reminded him of their storm cellar in Waco. The place had that same kind of aroma and made him a little homesick. A couple of boxes served as chairs and one as a table. Galoot had food on shelves and in boxes. Jed noticed that there were holes in the walls that served as gun ports. He thought Galoot might have dug them through the walls himself.
“Make yourself to home, Jed.”
Galoot kicked a sturdy empty box toward Jed. Jed set down his gear and turned the box over and sat down. Galoot laid his shotgun down on an old rug, next to a r
ifle. When he sat down, Jed noticed that he had a pistol riding high on his belt, hidden by the vest he wore. He hadn’t noticed it when Galoot was standing up. The man was well-armed. The rifle was a Sharps carbine and looked well-cared for, the bluing very shiny and gleaming with oil.
“So, you’re on the run, Jed.”
“I reckon.”
“But you came here. How’d you find this place?”
Jed told him about Simpson.
“Sometimes we find good fortune in the hands of strangers.”
“I’m finding that out, Galoot.”
“How come you didn’t put a lot of distance between you and the Abilene marshals? Why did you come to this place?”
“Colter. He’s coming to Junction City. Meeting a couple of hardcases named Norton and Burns.”
“And what if you see Colter? That’s three against one.”
“I want to bring him to justice.”
“Boy, you are a caution. Justice? There is no justice in the world.”
“He has to pay for what he did to my brother and those two marshals. I don’t want to be running all my life.”
“Well, you got big ideas, but I know Norton and Burns, too. Know of ’em. They’re as hard as they come.
They’d swat you like a fly. You got greenhorn written all over you, Jed. And they wouldn’t blink an eye. Just like Colter.”
“I can’t just let Colter get away with murder.”
“Besides him, you got the law after you.”
“Now more than ever,” Jed said.
“What do you mean?”
“One of the deputies from Abilene was shot and killed today.”
“You kill him?”
“He was trying to kill me.”
“Haw. That don’t make no nevermind. So you got another killing to answer to, Mr. Brand. What else are you keeping from this old boy, eh?”
“Well, there’s Hoyt, a deputy marshal and a hired gun. They’re both looking for me.”
“Who’s the hired gun?”
“His name is Jellico.”
Galoot sucked in a breath and he shook his head.
Then he looked at Jed with burning eyes, eyes that bored into him and made him squirm inside as if he were under the harsh glare of a blinding light reflected from a mirror.
“Jellico,” Galoot said, his voice hushed. “You might as well go and find yourself a rattlesnake for a pet, young Jed. If that man is after you, you don’t need no other enemies. He’s as bad as they come, and he’s got more blood on his hands than a butcher in a slaughterhouse. I pray for your soul, young man. I pray for your soul.”
Jed felt the room go cold and he felt that coldness in his heart.
What had he done to deserve this? Was there a way out of his predicament? Jed didn’t know. But everywhere he looked in his mind, all he saw was death.
And death was that cold in his heart. Death was that fear in his belly.
Death was Hoyt and Colter, Burns and Norton.
But more than any of those, death was a man named Jellico.
CHAPTER
19
GALOOT HELPED JED ERASE HIS TRACKS INTO Robber’s Roost so that there was no trace of him anywhere near the hideout. During that first week, Jed learned a lot from his newfound friend, and gradually his nervousness at being on the run subsided. He wondered, though, if he was turning into someone he didn’t want to be.
“Galoot?” Jed asked. “How do you get used to this?”
“Used to what?”
“Hiding out. Being on the run.”
The two men sat in the shade under a cottonwood that grew along the creek. Galoot held a pair of binoculars in his hand. They, like his Sharps, were army issue. Jed wondered if he might be a deserter, but he couldn’t force himself to ask. For the past two days, they had seen riders off the road, searching for tracks, they supposed, but none had come close to Robber’s Roost.
“After a while, it becomes second nature. But not so’s you drop your guard. You kind of develop what I call another sense.”
“Another sense?”
“I think of it as that, yes. It’s like there’s a sense underneath all the others. You sleep, but don’t sleep. You don’t hear anything, but hear everything. You don’t look at anything in particular and you see what is important.”
“A sixth sense? I’ve heard of it. Never knew what it meant.”
“Well, I don’t know if it’s got a number, but it’s like it was when you was in school, remember? You’d feel like somebody was behind you, somebody you couldn’t see was a-watchin’ you and when you turned real quick, you saw somebody starin’ at you.”
“Yes. I’ve had that happen.”
“Well, on the owlhoot trail, it happens all the time. You feel a shadow on you and you turn around. There’s nobody there. But maybe way across the street, someone’s comin’ at you, and you know you got to run or fight.”
“I don’t think I could ever get used to living like that.”
Galoot let out that brittle cackle of his, a cackle that always ended in a soft squawk.
“You get used to it, or you get locked up. Or you die.”
“I don’t want to live that way.” Jed looked at the blue sky, the small white puffs of clouds skimming slowly across the skies like balls of cotton on a smooth blue ocean. “What put you out here, Galoot? What are you running from?”
“Ah, I almost forgot.” Galoot laughed to show that he was joking. “No, you never forget. You live with what you done. You sleep with it. You go back to it in your mind and wish you had done something else at the time. But you realize you done it and you can’t go back and you can’t change nothing.”
“If you don’t want to tell me, you don’t have to,” Jed said.
“I know. I been keepin’ it inside me a long time. Sometimes it helps to talk about it. I don’t mind. Not no longer.”
Jed waited. He drew in a breath and held it. He let it back out through his nostrils, out into the silence.
“I was in the army. Seventh Cavalry. I was married. I got sick on patrol and my platoon leader sent me back to the fort. I went home and my wife was in bed with the sutler. He drew on me and I shot him. He shot at me, but his bullet struck my wife. She died in my arms. They arrested me for murder, but I escaped before my court martial.”
“But you shot in self-defense,” Jed said.
“Not according to the army. And I killed a soldier when I broke out of the stockade. That’s how I got away.”
“And you’ve never been caught.”
“No, but the army doesn’t give up. They’re hunting me.”
“Why do you stay close to the fort here? Seems to me that you’re making it easy for the army to find you.”
Galoot laughed. “Sometimes you hide in plain sight.
The army thinks I’d be as far away from an army post as I could get. They’re not lookin’ for me around here. Besides, here I can pick up all the gossip. I have a friend at Fort Riley. Once a month, we meet up.”
“And you trust this man?” Jed asked.
“Yes. He’s my uncle, on my father’s side.”
Jed wanted to ask Galoot his real name, but he had the feeling that he would be overstepping some boundary that Galoot had established. If Galoot wanted him to know his true name, he would tell him. And maybe someday, he would.
“You got a girl back in Waco, Jed?” Galoot asked him a few days later.
Jed blushed.
“Not really.”
“Most men your age have a sweetie.”
“Well, I don’t.” Jed felt uncomfortable, but he didn’t blame Galoot for asking. His mother had asked him that, and Dan had teased him about it.
“I don’t believe you,” Galoot said.
Jed looked up and saw that Galoot was staring at him with those drilling eyes of his, eyes that bored right through him and burrowed deep into his innards.
“Well, there’s a girl,” Jed said. “A real pretty girl. But I’ve never asked her
parents to court her.”
“But now you wished you had.”
“I just never could get up the nerve.”
“Tell me about this gal, Jed.”
Galoot’s eyes softened and Jed began to relax. He had not thought of her since Abilene, but on the drive up to Kansas, he had thought of her a great deal. Constantly.
“Well, her name is Felicia. Felicia Stevens, and she lives on a little farm west of Waco. I used to ride over there just to look at her. From a distance. I liked to watch her wash clothes and hang them on the line when that west Texas wind was blowing, making all the clothes flap and whipping at her calico dress. Or I would ride by in the evenings and hear her playing the piano. I would look in the window. Her fingers were so graceful. They flew over the piano keys like fluttering birds, and sometimes, when she had the window open I could smell her perfume, the lilac water she used. And if she was sitting on the porch, knitting, I could watch her for hours and never tire of seeing her work the needles through the yarn. I think she’s the prettiest gal I ever did see.”
“Um, sounds like you’re pretty sweet on this gal.”
“I like her. I—I guess I pine for her sometimes.”
“Did you ever talk to her?”
“Oh, when I’d see her at church, I’d say hello, mumble something to her, and once I saw her at a pie social and wanted to buy her pie, but someone else did, some old man. I don’t think she even knows who I am.”
“I reckon she does. ’Member what I said about someone starin’ at you and you feel it? Well, she probably knows you’re watchin’ her and wishes you’d come up and sit on the porch with her, or help her hang her clothes on the line. You’ve got to make the first move, Jed. That woman isn’t puttin’ on lilac water to attract bees.”
Jed thought about Felicia a lot after that talk with Galoot, and kicked himself mentally for being such a clodhopper, a tongue-tied, awkward, shy, clodhopper who didn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain.
Every so often, Galoot would leave Robber’s Roost and be gone for a few days. He told Jed to stay there and sit tight. He said he’d find out what he could about Colter and Hoyt and Jellico. Meanwhile, Jed’s beard had grown out so that his face was fully covered in silky, curly hair. He no longer remotely resembled the drawing of him on the wanted flyer. Whenever Galoot was gone, Jed grew very nervous and lonesome.
