One Man's Fire

by Ralph Compton

  “Go ahead and hand that food through,” the man said.

  “I don’t think he wants it, Sheriff,” she replied.

  “Leave it anyway. He’s just posturing.”

  A knot formed in Eli’s stomach that felt more like a fist gripping him from within. It formed partly from hunger and partly from the fact that the lawman had seen through his snarling facade with such ease. Lyssa eased the tray of food she’d been holding through a narrow gap at the bottom of the bars. The leading edge of the tray scraped against the crude opening, but there was no danger of the hard pile of oatmeal and stale biscuit getting scraped off. If left there long enough, the food could very well have hardened into something more durable than the walls of Eli’s cell. She looked up at him, shrugged apologetically, and walked away.

  The lawman watched her leave before turning to watch Eli even harder. “She’s a good girl.”

  “So?” Eli grunted.

  “So you should treat her as such. She’s not the one who broke the law or put you behind these bars.”

  Eli looked at the food, wanting it even though the meal looked only slightly more appetizing than the filthy mattress beneath him. Rather than give the lawman the satisfaction of seeing him crawl for the scraps he’d been given, Eli pulled himself to his feet and paced to the other side of his cell. It took just under two steps to get there.

  “I’m Sheriff Vernon Saunders.”

  “That supposed to mean anything to me?”

  “It does if you have any intention of getting out of that cage.” When Eli closed his mouth and glared viciously at him, Saunders nodded and said, “I thought that might get your attention.”

  “Where’s the other men who were at that ranch?”

  “You mean your gang or the ones that were killed? The whereabouts of the latter group is six feet beneath the soil just outside town. They were good men, far as I know. Better than the ones that put them under, that’s for certain.”

  “Far as you know,” Eli scoffed.

  “But you probably weren’t asking about them, were you? You want to know where to find Jacob Welles, or them other two. What were their names?”

  Fixing his eyes on Saunders, Eli said, “Never caught their names.”

  “Course you didn’t. Not that I expected to get much out of you. What little I’ve heard says you’re a real hard case, Mr. Barlow.” As if he were digging the sharp end of a stick into an open wound, he added, “Eli Barlow formerly of Gracen, Georgia. Georgia is a real fine place. The air smells sweet and the ladies have a real nice way of talking. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard of Gracen, though.”

  Eli kept his mouth shut while making his way slowly to the front of the cell.

  “Must be nice,” Saunders said. “Can’t see many places in Georgia being too bad.”

  Once he was close enough, Eli stooped down and picked up the tray. “Why don’t you go there, then? Or would you rather I tell you somewhere else you can go as well as what you can do once you get there?”

  “Something tells me I know what suggestion you’re about to make. If it’s what I think it is, you’ll be going there long before I do. See,” Saunders said while reaching out to place his left hand flat against one of the bars, “you’re set to hang in a few days.”

  “Suppose I slept through my trial?”

  “No need for a trial. You’re a member of the Welles Gang. Jake, you, and those others have killed folks in three other counties apart from this one. Maybe more. Everyone knows what happened over at the Lazy V, and there’s no reason why one of the men responsible for all that bloodshed shouldn’t swing for it at the nearest opportunity. The only guff I’ve been catching since you’ve been here is why I didn’t roust you out of bed and string you up already.”

  “Why is that, Sheriff?”

  Saunders didn’t hesitate before saying, “Because I’m a man who believes in doing things properly no matter what anyone wants.”

  “So you want to string me up, but properly.”

  “Of course I do. It’s my job. I knew a few of those men that were killed at the Lazy V. Like I told you already, they were good men.”

  “You said as far as you knew, they were good.”

  In a tone that was colder than the stone walls surrounding him on three sides, Saunders snapped, “Better than you or anyone else who’d ride with the likes of Jacob Welles. And that’s a fact.”

  Eli thought of a few comments he could make, if only to get the sheriff’s goat. He choked them back and carried his tray to the cot, where he sat down upon the threadbare mattress. “Suppose you got me there.”

  The sheriff allowed his prisoner to take a few bites of biscuit, which sounded like sandstone being ground by a mortar and pestle. When Eli began using the chunk of hardened biscuit to scoop up some oatmeal, Saunders asked, “You still want to know where Jake and the others are?”

  “Unless you knocked them in the head harder than you did me, I’d say they’re not in this jailhouse.”

  “You got that right.”

  Eli looked up with a clump of oatmeal clinging to his chin as if it had been glued there. “They dead?”

  “Not as far as I know.”

  “Then they got away. Good for them.”

  “They did get away. In fact,” Saunders added while dragging a chair from where it had been placed down the hall so he could sit directly in front of Eli’s cell, “they were all too happy to ride away after I cleaned your clock. I expected more of a fight once one of their own fell. Gangs tend to get nasty when it becomes clear they’re on the losing end of a fight. Sometimes they turn into savage beasts to make sure they pull their partners out of the fire. Sometimes they become crazed rats who chew on anything they can find just to get out of a losing situation. You want to know which it was in Jacob’s case?”

  Eli looked up, more out of confusion from hearing someone refer to Jake in such a formal manner. That didn’t last long and he quickly got back to his meal. “It’s your story, Sheriff.”

  “It was neither.”

  “That’s real interesting,”

  At first glance, it might have seemed that the lawman was nothing more than a dramatic storyteller trying to draw out a loaded moment. When Eli looked up from his food, however, he saw only a man wincing uncomfortably as he tried to get situated on his chair. The oatmeal was warm and had a sprinkling of cinnamon in it, so Eli shifted his attention back to that.

  “That gang of yours rode away as soon as they had the chance,” Saunders said after a few more grunts. “Didn’t try to rescue you or anything.”

  “Still time for that.”

  “Haven’t heard a peep from them in days. If there was gonna be something along the lines of busting you out of here, I wager we would’ve gotten a shot fired at us or even spotted one of them scouting out the town. Near as I can figure, nobody even tried to see where we took you once you were sprawled out and sleeping off your headache.”

  “You’re the one who gave it to me,” Eli pointed out. “Or are you about to blame Jake for that too?”

  “No. That was me.” He shifted in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. It wasn’t an easy affair and required him to grab his shin, drag it into place, and hold it there. “Come to think of it, I just heard tell that one of your outlaw friends was spotted in Cheyenne. That’s only a day or two ride from here.”

  “Is that so?” Eli asked with mock interest.

  “It is indeed. The one-eyed fella. Hank something or other, I believe.”

  That struck Eli as slightly more interesting than his oatmeal, and the sheriff picked right up on it. “Got word about it over the wire just this morning,” Saunders continued. “Near as I can figure, after all the running and hiding Jake must have been doing after leaving you behind, they probably rode straight on to Cheyenne.”

  “You do a lot of figuring.”

  “Most of the time, that’s all I need to do around here. Apart from the occasional drunk or dispute between neighbors, this
is a pretty sleepy town. That changed last week, though, and things seem to be getting more interesting by the hour. Probably even more so in Cheyenne, though. Your friends have anything planned out there?”

  Jake had always talked about going to Cheyenne. Hank liked the idea as well and they both would go on endlessly some nights about how the whole town was like one big bank vault that didn’t have a lock. What with the gamblers, cowboys, and thieves in that town, there would always be money ripe for the plucking for any man who had the sand to take it. At least, that’s what Jake and Hank always said.

  As all of this went through his mind, Eli kept quiet. Even so, Saunders grinned as he watched his prisoner. Perhaps he picked up on the way Eli held on to his tin tray as if he were about to crumple it into a ball like so much paper.

  “You enjoying that meal?” the sheriff asked.

  “Well enough.”

  “Good, because it’ll be tougher to swallow once your neck is stretched at the end of a noose.” Saunders grunted while getting up from his chair and hiking up his pants.

  Chapter 6

  That night, when Eli tried to sleep, something apart from the overcooked oatmeal ate at his innards. While that meal sat in his belly like a lump of coal, his chest constricted around his heart as if purposely trying to grind it to a halt. Taking deep breaths didn’t help. Neither did rolling over and trying to get some sleep, which only gave him more time to quietly ponder what the sheriff had said.

  Eli wasn’t stupid. He knew well enough that Saunders could be feeding him a line of manure just to turn him against Jake and the others. Obviously the outlaws had gotten away despite the reinforcements that had been hiding in that barn on the Lazy V. That must have eaten away at the lawman something awful. His best hope for finding the remaining gang members would be in forcing or tricking the one who was in custody to point him in the right direction. To do that, Saunders would need to convince Eli that turning traitor was a good idea. If this was indeed the sheriff’s strategy, he was going to be in for a rude awakening. Eli was a lot of things, but a traitor wasn’t one of them. He forced a smirk onto his face, rolled over, and sent a chorus of creaks through the air hanging within the cell.

  Eli sifted through his recent memories involving Jake and Hank. It didn’t do any good to think about Cody, since that one had never said anything worth remembering. The other two were a different story. Jake did plenty of talking about everything ranging from jobs he’d always wanted to do to the lawmen he’d put into the ground. A common thread was that the gang was at the top of his list no matter what. Hank talked less, but that gave his words a bit more weight. On the other hand, many of those words were spiteful and angry, which meant they oftentimes faded into the background like the constant clatter of train wheels against a track.

  No matter how much talk Eli might have either written off as boasting or simply didn’t believe, he’d always been confident that the rest of the gang would back him up if it was necessary. The fact that they’d ridden off when he needed them stuck in his craw. So on that end, the sheriff had done his job by sowing his disruptive seeds very nicely. That grated on him even more.

  A scant amount of moonlight drifted in through the narrow window near the top of Eli’s cell as well as through the windows of the other cells in the jailhouse. All that did was allow Eli to make out a few blocky shapes in the darkness, while his ears greedily hunted for any sound they could find. When the door to the jailhouse rattled slightly, his hand went reflexively to his side but found only the bottom edge of his rumpled shirt, which had been pulled loose from the waistband of his jeans. Wherever his guns were, they wouldn’t help him now.

  The door was unlocked, opened, and shut again. Light footsteps shuffled across the floor to echo throughout the small building. Even if Saunders was lying to him for some reason in regards to the whereabouts of the rest of the gang, Jake, Hank, or Cody sure weren’t in that jailhouse with him. Eli felt like a single pebble rattling inside a dry bathtub, and now that he heard someone coming in and making their way toward his cell in the dark, he felt even more isolated. Since he didn’t have a firearm or blade, he balled up his fist and tensed his muscles in preparation for a leap that would take him off the cot and to the floor near the bars in the space of a few seconds.

  The steps drew closer. Soon they were accompanied by a subtle sigh that told Eli it wasn’t the sheriff sneaking in to get a look at him. A ghostly figure moved down the hall on the other side of the bars, drifting to a stop before shrinking down to something half its original size. Now Eli considered the possibility that he could be dreaming. When the ghost reached milky white hands into his cell, he decided to make his move. Dream or not, Eli Barlow wasn’t about to be picked apart like a rat trapped in a hat box.

  As soon as he landed from his jump, his feet scraped against the loose dirt and bits of gravel on the floor. If he hadn’t been in such a rush, Eli might have been able to steady himself with a minimum of effort. As it was, he flailed for a second and then toppled onto his side. Twisting partly before he hit, Eli caught himself using one arm against the cot and then pushed away to drop onto the floor. The ghost near the bars pulled in a quick breath and started to retract its hands, but Eli scrambled forward to grab one of its wrists. He pulled it toward him until he heard something very solid pound against the cell door. It wasn’t a ghost after all. In fact, he was now close enough to smell the visitor’s skin, which told him exactly whom he was dealing with.

  “It’s me, Eli. Lyssa!” she said to give him one last bit of confirmation that he didn’t need. “I brought you some more food.”

  “Yeah,” he grunted while struggling to align his body in a more natural pose without letting go of her arm. “And now you brought me the keys. Very kind of you.”

  She struggled against him, but wasn’t strong enough to pull herself loose. The keys that had been rattling in the dark still jangled noisily in the air well away from the bars. When he squinted and concentrated, Eli could tell she was holding them in her other hand and extending them as far away from him as possible. “What are you doing?” she asked through the strained muscles of her neck, chest, and stomach, which all fought to stretch away from him.

  “Trying to get out! What…were you…doing?” Eli asked while sticking his arm between the bars and reaching for the keys. He could feel her taut body struggling for freedom, and now that he was close enough, he could also hear the sobs that were being pressed down by a quickening series of panting breaths.

  A rush of thoughts flew through Eli’s mind. Most of them let him know just how proud Hank and Jake would have been to watch him overpower this woman, take her keys, and force his way out of the jailhouse. And then, like a bunch of quail that had been discovered by an overzealous dog, his fighting instinct flew from him. Eli was left feeling empty and tired when he let go of Lyssa’s wrist and slumped back from the bars.

  His eyes had adjusted to the shadows long ago, but he still could barely see the outline of her head and shoulders when she scooted back to noisily bump against the opposite wall. She sat curled up in the narrow hallway, which was the only corridor running the length of the building past all four of its cells. Both of them were breathing heavily and neither seemed anxious to move.

  “Why…why did you attack me?” she asked.

  “Why were you sneaking in here like that?”

  “I wasn’t sneaking!”

  “Then where’s your lantern? Maybe even a candle.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “I’ve been checking in on you every night since you were brought here. You needed your rest, so I didn’t want to wake you with the light of a lantern.” Her voice became weary as she added, “I don’t need a lantern anyhow. I imagine I could walk up and down this hall, sweeping out each cell with my eyes closed.”

  “Yeah,” Eli chuckled. “Me too. You already knew I was up and around, so what brought you here tonight?”

  “Thought you might be hungry.”
r />   As if to purposely make Eli feel even worse, the smell of warm bread drifted to his nose. “Not oatmeal?”

  “I figured you’d want something better.”

  “I would,” he told her. The words drifted through the air like bits of dust swirling near the top of a loft.

  She moved again, collecting herself at first and then gathering some items that were scattered on the floor. “It was just some bread and cheese. It’s dirty now. Take it or leave it.”

  “Take it.”

  Once she had the tray in hand, she stood up and looked down at him. Her voice was shaky but stern when she said, “Move back to your cot.”

  He did and even went so far as to pull his legs up and lean against a wall. As Lyssa approached the bars again, she kept her eyes on him. Her face and suspicious frown became visible as if she were appearing to him in a dream. What he saw was pieced together from the few details he could make out in the dim moonlight along with what he’d committed to memory. She eased a tray through the opening near the floor, stepped back, and stood in front of his cell.

  “May I have a taste?” he asked.

  “I suppose.”

  Eli eased off the cot and walked slowly toward the bars. When he got there, he felt like a dog that was humbly approaching its master after being caught with its nose in the cupboard. Not liking that one bit, he lifted his chin and looked directly at her while picking up the tray like a man. The food smelled good and he could feel warmth coming off the bread when he grabbed it and brought it to his mouth. While still chewing on that, he found a little hunk of cheese and stuffed it in so both snacks could blend into one.

  “It’s good,” he told her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So, you just thought I’d be hungry?”

  “Well…weren’t you?”

  Because of the thick shadows in the jail, he couldn’t see much by way of detail on her face and was fairly certain she couldn’t see much of his. Even so, they stared as if studying each other under the glaring rays of a noonday sun. “Yes,” he replied. “I was. Just seems strange that you’d take such an interest. Especially seeing as what I done.”