Parson told him little he did not already know. He and Blue Star had already made plans of their own. A schoolteacher and his wife, they’d heard, an old man, probably his father, two outriders with a cart, not a riding carriage but something to haul a weighty object—what were they carrying, and why would they be making the journey? There was no settlement this side of the river, and no way across for a cart. He went to the ridge and looked down into the blue night, thinking. It was logical to assume they were headed for one of the new Wyoming settlements, but the schoolteacher was supposed to be travelling with two escorts, and that smelled bad. No-one could afford to waste men on accompanying a civilian couple unless they were carrying something special with them.
Giddens kicked over the fire and lay awake for the next hour, feeling the earth cool beneath him. The mystery of the schoolteacher had dug into him now, and would not easily be released.
The weather turned foul in the last week of the month. Sun and moon both vanished, and rains turned the old settler’s route into a mudslide. The gang resolved to set camp at Twelvetrees until Giddens brought in the party. None of them was deterred by thoughts of jail or hanging. They worked from necessity, knowing that each party they robbed might be their last, because each was smarter than the one before, and would not be gulled by a pleasant stranger with a helpful smile. Giddens knew it would come to an end some day, but not quite yet—there was talk of uprisings and a coming war with the red men, so minds were preoccupied and treasure parties grew reckless, risking plunder. Until the train arrived there would be no easy way through this route, and at least the gang killed quickly when they could, which was more than could be said for the half-starved bastards to their north.
Blue Star returned from Fort Gray to tell them he had seen the party setting off for a settlement downriver. The teacher was ‘birdsmall’, the wife was ‘driedleaves’, the old man a ‘gravewalker’. Their carriage was little more than a wood platform on cartwheels and there was only one outrider. To anyone else this would have come as bad news, but Giddens still felt confident that they were delivering something important. To be given a scout at all was a luxury. The group would pass close to Twelvetrees Ridge in two days’ time. Their outrider would arrive three or four hours ahead of them. The ridge formed a bottleneck through the tail of the forest, where the land opened out into flat brown earth. It was exposed but tightly contained. Even so, there was danger in an ambush. Better to befriend the teacher and win him over. Giddens was a man of some learning, and could exert considerable charm. It was his chief advantage over Parson, who was roughly born and branded through with it like a birthmark. He was bandy from riding and lack of greens, and had once received a knife in the eye, which had left it glazed. He did not look naturally trustworthy.
The others, who this year numbered about fifteen in total, were no better. None could read or write, and few spoke above a cuss. They were hungry and dirty and stank, and got sick from wiping their shit-stained hands on their breeches before eating with their fingers, and when they fucked their women they often left them dead. Mostly they were like mean children, even Shug, who was the oldest and reckoned he was probably about fifty, although he could not rightly be sure—he’d seen too much to stay in kindly disposed spirits.
So Giddens rode out to greet them. He had an advantage; the path had washed out some half-mile south and he knew better than any guide how they could circumnavigate it. He sighted the party moving from the sea green shadows of the pines, and drew in alongside. Within seconds the outrider, a soft-chinned, bug-eyed young man who looked like he’d never seen sunlight, had drawn close and was resting his hand on the rifle in his saddle.
‘I hope your boy here knows the safest passage through these woods, sir,’ he said, doffing his hat. ‘Hector Giddens, at your service.’
The schoolteacher was indeed small, a bundle of female bones reshaped into a bookish man. He observed Giddens with a still eye. ‘He knows the way well enough.’
He’s been warned, thought Giddens. I’ve seen that look before.
‘You know him well, then.’ He indicated the outrider without glancing at him.
‘We were introduced by Captain Mallory at the fort,’ called the old man at the back of the party.
His father is the weakness. He’s already given too much away. ‘I should perhaps warn you, sir, that the path ahead will unseat your horses. We’ve had bad rains, and the road has been washed out in a number of places.’
‘Thank you. I shall be wary of that.’ There was a movement under the tarp on the cart. The teacher called back sharply, ‘Stay down, Sam.’ So there was another riding with them.
‘Then I wish you well enough,’ said Giddens. ‘You need have no fear in these parts, although it never pays to drop your guard. “Covert enmity under the smile of safety wounds the world.” ’
‘You know your Shakespeare, sir.’ The schoolteacher tried not to look impressed. He held out a cautious hand. The outrider flinched. ‘Lemuel Franks, and this is my wife, Mayla.’ He indicated a stony-faced woman with centre-parted dark hair. She was dressed in a stiff high-collar blouse and grey silk skirt unsuited for the terrain. ‘Back there is my father, Abel, and my boy. Come out, son.’
Samuel Franks emerged from beneath the tarp, maybe eight years old, small for his age. He looked feverish.
‘He has not been well,’ said the teacher’s wife. ‘His stomach.’
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. See the big green leaves at the base of the pine brush? Tear them up and boil them to broth, they’ll improve his bowels. Pleased to meet your family, Mrs Franks. I feel I am in good Christian company.’ Giddens knew she would appreciate the formality. He ignored the outrider, but kept a carefully respectful distance. He deliberately avoided looking at the cart behind them.
The first and most important thing was to give Franks a reason for trusting him, and to do that he needed to produce a reason for riding with them. To offer an immediate explanation would sound wrong, so he let Franks fish for answers. Giddens explained that he’d been living out here alone since his dear wife died of pneumonia. That he was lonely, a former marshal turned trapper waiting to be relieved of his post by Captain Mallory’s men. These days he made a living scouting out forests for the logging companies. Sometimes he was glad of educated company—not too many of the fellows he ran into had any learning to speak of. It made a man hungry for good conversation. He allowed droplets of information to fall from him like thawing branches.
Blue Star’s knowledge of the group’s departure stood him in good stead. He was able to display his knowledge of the fort, its men and even its jail. They joked lightly together about mutual acquaintances.
Franks, in his turn, explained that he and his wife were to set up a school for the militia to teach them map-reading, for he was a geography teacher. As Giddens suspected, his wife was a Bible-wringer and had been placed in charge of the new chapel. The outrider’s name was Billy; he was Captain Mallory’s grandson. That night, Giddens took his leave and promised to return early the next morning. Only Billy was displeased, because his authority had been usurped.
This charade carried on for five days and nights. Giddens was beginning to despair, because the party was moving further and further away from camp. He promised to ride with them one more day, but knew he was running out of time. If Franks was really the guardian of a treasure, it had to be in the trunk they kept under the tarpaulin, but there was no way to it.
The boy’s health and spirits improved. He asked to ride with Giddens, but Mayla Franks would not let him out of her sight. Lemuel knew about the land’s geography, but had little experience of it. He rode badly, and more than once risked overturning the carriage when the path proved too steep. The outrider remained wary—hell, that was his job—and Giddens plotted a way to get rid of him.
He prearranged a meet-point with Parson and three others. If he failed to show, they would ride on ahead and stake the outrider’s figure-eight, hoping to waylay
him. Billy rode out early each morning, returning before noon to report. On the sixth morning, he did not return. Giddens went to see what had happened, and returned with bad news.
‘I’m afraid your rider is dead,’ he told them. ‘He’s in a glade about three miles west of here. Looks like his horse lamed itself and threw him. His neck broke when he landed. I don’t suppose he felt any pain.’ That much was true, although Parson had tortured him awhile, trying to find out what the schoolteacher was delivering. When he went too far and Billy left them for another sphere, Parson realised the outrider had died without giving them a clue.
Giddens offered his services, and they were readily accepted. A fine blue mist was settling into the valley ahead; the pines were laced together by a sheen of dew-filled spiderwebs, and even the birds had fallen silent. They rode without talking, but Giddens felt a tension building in his gut. Parson and his men arrived without sound. They fell in around the convoy and calmly, quietly strangled Abel Franks with a rope. Giddens cut Lemuel’s throat from behind with a straight razor. Mrs Franks was too ugly even for them, so they twisted her neck and pulled her from her horse without so much as a pudgy hand raised in protest. These acts were not undertaken out of malice but from a sense of practicality; no-one could be left to report back. Lately the militia had been behaving in an excessively violent manner, and none of the gang would have reached trial after capture, so it was better this way. One of the horses grew frightened at the sight of blood and bolted. The others accepted their new owners.
Parson and Shug would have killed the boy but Giddens stayed their hand. It was agreed that Sam was young enough to be trained for a different future, and two of the men took him back to camp. Giddens and Parson uncovered the tarp and broke open the chest on the cart. Inside were damp-riddled schoolbooks and clothes, nothing more. It made no sense until Giddens set to wondering if the treasure Lemuel Franks had been carrying was not gold but information. And what if it was the boy who held such knowledge? It would explain why they had kept him hidden under the tarp.
Giddens buried the boy’s parents below the cottonwoods in the river bed and brought the old trunk along. When they reached camp he emptied the schoolbooks and Bibles into Sam Franks’s space, a hide they had stretched across the bushes for him. Giddens burned the clothes because they were evidence. Inside Mayla Franks’s Sunday dress he found around thirty dollars, two small gold coins and a small stash of jewellery, obviously paste and easily identifiable. The necklaces went into the river. More and more, he became convinced that the boy must know something of greater importance. So he waited.
In the same way that Giddens showed a stoical, infuriating patience with his victims, he now resolved to do the same with the child. He could see from studying the boy’s still brown eyes that threats would provoke little response. He was his father’s son, except for his jet hair and the tougher fibre within him. The only way was to win his trust. He was careful right from the outset, making sure that Samuel did not actually witness his father’s bloody death, or his mother’s strangulation. Sure, the boy would realise they had gone and that he had been adopted by a very different family, but in time Giddens hoped that he would become reconciled to his fate. The young were pliable. Giddens had seen it before; angry twin brothers had joined the gang on their eleventh birthday. He had never asked why they had run away from what seemed like a pleasant settlement, but had accepted them, fed them, taught them how to kill. They were gone now, in tragic circumstances, and he missed them.
Sam rode with them and did not look back. He never asked questions and he never complained. He took to riding with his arms around Giddens’s waist, and rarely spoke about the past. One older man in the gang began to show a lively interest in the boy when he was washing himself in the creek, so Giddens stayed by his side at night, sleeping at the edge of the hide.
It was only a matter of time before Captain Mallory sent some men after them. Word had reached him that the Franks family had never arrived, but this news upset him less than discovering that his grandson Billy had gone missing. Giddens heard troops from the fort combing the forest on four separate occasions, but by now the trail had grown over, and besides, they never thought of searching the river bed. Eventually the loss was written off, in that curious way the old West had of dealing with unforeseen tragedies.
One night the gang camped out in a wide southern plain of rock and stubble where no fire could be kindled without being seen for miles, but it was warm enough for them to stay without. The stars had come down to brush the earth. Giddens hunched himself into his jacket and looked over at the boy, who was watching for comets.
‘Did your father ever say why he was moving the family?’ he asked.
The boy remained motionless, his large head tilted up at the spilled-out sky. ‘We had relatives in Wyoming,’ he said finally. ‘We were going to meet them halfway and set up a mission. It was my ma’s idea.’
‘But your old man was gone teach geography.’
‘Only ’cause they was nothing else he could do.’
Giddens knew that a man like that was useless out here.
‘And your grandpappy came.’
‘Couldn’t leave him behind.’
‘Captain Mallory sent a rider along with you.’
‘We heard about the scalping party.’ There had been reprisals for an attack on a reservation, but that had been some three years ago.
‘That the only reason?’
‘My pappy didn’t know the way.’ He pointed at a silver streak in the heavens. ‘There’s one.’
Jesus, thought Giddens, what the hell is wrong with the folk in this country? They deserve to be taken advantage of. ‘You want to ride with us the next time we go out?’ he asked.
‘Sure. My hands are cold.’ He put his right fist into Giddens’s jacket and they stayed in place, side by side, watching the stars drop from their orbits.
The next day they went looking for a party that was headed west, taking mail and supplies to a settlement known as Cricktown. The boy proved useful in gaining the trust of the waggoner. Giddens introduced him as his son, and found that smiles soon appeared. The boy was damned cute, and knew how to sell it. He won the women over first. Suspicions quickly lessened, so that they were able to surprise the party and take it in half the usual time. He remembered the look of shocked betrayal on a ranch-hand’s face as he cut his throat and thought, Hell, we haven’t had a reaction like that in years.
Sam got better. Soon he was clinging to Giddens and hitting their victims with so much bull about travelling with his daddy that there was hardly any more work to be done. He learned the trade real fast. It was difficult not to feel proud of a boy who figured things out like that. The rest of the gang adopted Sam as a mascot, sending him to check the trail ahead of them because he could get through low brush without making a sound. Only Blue Star kept away from him, because he had lost his standing in the gang.
But life was still hard. The winter of ’74 was meaner than the last, and two of their men died of the cold. One was rock-solid and dead on his horse, which meant that Parson had been talking to a corpse for a morning without realising it.
The pickings were mixed at best. One party headed for Yankton was carrying banknotes intended as a kickback for the mayor, which meant that the loss couldn’t be reported, but too many settlers travelled with just their bedrolls and the clothes on their backs. Old Shug was heard to complain that they’d have made more money as pirates. Then Parson got sick to his stomach and died of something wrongly cooked. They shoveled aside pine needles and dug him a pit, covering it with brush. ‘Ain’t nobody going to say a few words for him?’ Giddens asked, and Sam stepped forward with a short speech he had written, which cheered everyone.
But losing the gang’s first partner lowered their spirits. Nothing was quite the same for the next two years. New settlements were springing up in the sheltered valleys, where the worst of the weather passed overhead and there was plenty of game to be caught,
and they regarded all strangers as enemies. Giddens knew that the days when he could charm the women out of their britches were coming to a close.
One day, watching the half-breed slowly dismounting from his horse, he realised that even Blue Star was getting old. The gang got by on stragglers and fools who had taken routes they had no right to be on, but it was a poor way to make a living. The only advantage they had was the boy; there was an innocence about Sam that could pull the wool so far over folks’ eyes that they didn’t feel the blade going in. Giddens would not let him take part in the kills. He needed to keep the boy fresh. In turn, Sam kept the gang on its toes, so that they learned from one another.
Giddens always knew when Sam was about to come up with some new idea. His brown pupils dilated and he would gaze into the distance, his lips pressed tight together. Then he would say, ‘How about if…’ or ‘What would you think…’ and suddenly he would run off at the mouth with some scheme that got less crazy the more you worked it out.
On one of their increasingly rare trips into town he persuaded Giddens to purchase a great iron pot, which they dragged back to their new camp at the ravine and filled with water, keeping it boiling through the dark winter months, adding meat and bitter root vegetables that could cook for weeks and still taste good. They built several small bases deep in the hills and kept a cow for milk, so that they could stay healthy. As the boy grew, there was just one bone of contention between them. He didn’t like what they did with the women. He didn’t understand it exactly, he just knew it was wrong, and wanted them to stop it. Giddens said he would see what he could do, but could not promise that the men would easily change their ways.
The composition of the gang altered from time to time. Men went back to their wives or decided to chance their luck in another state, but around twelve of them stayed, a sufficient number to attack a band of travellers without mishap. During one miserable summer the gang was forced to steal clothes and kitchen utensils from a settlement as it moved upstream. When it seemed they could no longer scrape a living from their trade, more members drifted away, under oath never to mention what they had seen or participated in, upon pain of death. They had no romantic notion of being outlaws. They were of a criminal class far below the admired rebels of the time, and no townsfolk would ever welcome their arrival. Sometimes Giddens looked at the boy and was shamed by the way he made his living. He had grown up in the East, and been educated to appreciate the value of the classics. Now he hankered for the erudition to express himself, to somehow pass on what he had learned about the world to Sam. A hole had opened up inside him like the gnawing of a rat, but it was too late to find a way of changing for the better.
Red Gloves, Volumes I & II Page 32
