The Backstabbers

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Seems like you and Buttons both have a story to tell.”

  “Same story. Long in the telling.”

  “All I got in this place is time,” Stanton said. “Buttons, I’ll help you put up your horses. I have oats, and they need ’em. Red, you come inside and set. You look like you got an axle dragging.” He smiled at Daphne. “And you, too, young lady. Just don’t shoot anybody.”

  * * *

  Red stepped into the cabin and sat at the table. Daphne set her parasol and bag on the floor at her feet and then settled beside him.

  The Ranger sat opposite, a bowl of stew in front of him, a spoon in his right hand, a chunk of fry bread in his left. “Howdy.” He laid down his spoon and touched his hat to Daphne. “Ma’am.”

  Back to eating, he finished quickly, pushed the bowl away, and took the makings from his shirt pocket. As he rolled a cigarette, he saw the tobacco hunger in Red. He tossed the papers and a full sack of Bull Durham across the table. “Help yourself, shotgun guard.”

  “Obliged.” Red’s eager fingers built a smoke, and the Ranger thumbed a match into flame and lit it for him.

  “Keep the makings,” Sam Flowers said. “I got more.”

  Red was happy to accept the man’s offer.

  “Saw you come in on the stage,” the Ranger said. He was a tall young man with frank, hazel eyes, and he sported the huge dragoon mustache that was a Texas Ranger rite of passage. “Where are you headed?”

  “El Paso.” Guessing that some sort of clarification was needed, Red said. “Came up from the Rio Bravo way.”

  Flowers nodded, accepting that without comment, and then said, “See any riders on your travels?”

  “A few. You looking for anybody in particular?”

  “Yeah, a feller by the name of Johnny Teague,” the Ranger said. “Him and his boys have been playing hob, robbing and killing. They’re the worst of the worst.”

  Suddenly a man thrust into conflicting loyalties, Red stalled. “Worse than the James boys?”

  “As bad, I’d say.” Flowers thought for a moment, drumming on the table with his fingers, and then added, “Yeah, I’d say just as bad.”

  “I’ll keep a lookout for him.” Red figured it was a statement of fact, or could be, not an outright lie.

  “Yeah, you do that and if you come across him, tell the local law enforcement. His name is Teague . . . T-e-a-g-u-e . . . Johnny Teague. Only don’t try to tackle him yourself. Leave it to the law.”

  “I won’t. He sounds like a desperate character.”

  “Oh, he is,” Flowers said. “That’s a guaranteed natural fact.”

  “Quick on the draw, huh?” Red said.

  “I don’t know about that, but I’d guess he is,” the Ranger said. “Outlaws who are slow shucking the Colt’s gun don’t live real long.” He looked at Daphne. “You got a situation waiting for you in El Paso, young lady? A teacher’s post, maybe?”

  The girl smiled. “No, sir, I want to be a whore.”

  It took a lot to surprise a Ranger, but Flowers was surprised. “Say again?”

  “I want to be a whore,” Daphne said. “It is the oldest profession, you know.”

  “After undertaker, maybe.” Flowers shrugged. “Well, good luck in your chosen calling.” He stared at the girl, obviously unimpressed by what he saw. “Well, if that don’t beat all.” Rising to his feet, he stretched. “Time for some shut-eye. The most comfortable place in this station is the hayloft, if you don’t mind the rats who share the same opinion.”

  Buttons passed the Ranger in the doorway. They exchanged greetings, and Buttons took the man’s vacated chair at the table.

  “The Ranger asked me if I’d seen Johnny Teague,” Red said after the driver sat.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I hadn’t.”

  Buttons considered that and said, “We rode with him, Red, ate his grub. Seems hardly right to sell him down the river.”

  “That was my thinking.”

  “Say no more about it to anybody,” Buttons said. “So long as he ain’t holding up the Patterson stage, it ain’t really any of our business.” His gaze took in Red, assessing him, the hollow eyes and gray pallor under the tan, the sag of his shoulders and the weakness in his voice. “I’ll get you a cup of coffee, then lie down and rest.”

  Red nodded. “I reckon I will. My tail is dragging.”

  Buttons poured coffee from the pot simmering on the fire and placed it in front of Red. “I told you to ride inside the stage.”

  “And I told you, I’m the shotgun guard. I take my place in the box.”

  Buttons shook his head and then said, “Where did you get the makings?”

  “Ranger gave them to me.”

  “He’s a smart man, that Ranger, knows you’re ill. He was being considerate.”

  “Maybe so. Anyway, I sure appreciated the gesture.”

  “Yes, he’s a nice man,” Daphne said. “I hope I meet him again in El Paso.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  When Buttons Muldoon drove the Patterson stage into El Paso, the city was booming thanks to the arrival of the railroads—the Southern Pacific, Texas and Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. Ten thousand people—merchants, entrepreneurs, ranchers, and young men on the make—rubbed shoulders in the crowded, roaring streets. Undesirables also sought to make their fortunes. Flashy gamblers, careful-eyed gunmen, wild young cowboys, thieves, murderers, and prostitutes crammed into the scores of jangling saloons, dance halls, gambling dens, and brothels that lined the streets. The proud boast of the lawless was that El Paso was the “Six-Shooter Capital of the World.”

  Amid this cacophony of sin, violence, and debauchery was the modest, two-story depot of the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company, managed by seventy-five-year-old Ira Cole, one of the saltiest stage drivers to ever crack a whip. A wreck up Lincoln County way in the New Mexico Territory had broken both his legs, and a road agent’s bullet still lodged somewhere in his vitals had slowed him some, but the greeting Cole gave Buttons and Red was exuberant and energetic enough to refute his age.

  After the whiskey was poured, drunk, and the glasses refilled, Cole said, “Well, Buttons, and be damned to ye fer a lost soul, you were supposed to be here in El Paso weeks ago. We thought for sure you were a goner.”

  “It’s a long story, Ira,” Buttons said. “I’ll write up a full report for Abe Patterson and explain the loss of two horses.”

  “No need to write it up. Abe is here in El Paso,” Cole said.

  “Here? Because of me?” Buttons said.

  “Partly. But mostly it’s to close a deal with the Texas and Pacific,” Cole said. “Abe says railroads are the future and he wants to get in on the business afore it’s too late.” The old man smiled. “Of course, he ain’t exactly as happy as a pig in a peach orchard with you two. He’s got his son with him, and that high-yeller gal of his, and they’re writing down new rules for stage drivers every day.”

  “Then he’ll have to wait,” Buttons said. “I need to get Red to a doctor.”

  Cole looked at Red. “Figured you’d took poorly with some misery or another, sonny. You look a mite green around the gills.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need to see a doctor,” Red said. Doctors will kill you quicker ’n scat. Everybody knows that.”

  Daphne spoke or the first time. She laid down her whiskey and said, “Mr. Muldoon is right, Mr. Ryan. You must get checked out and get a clean bill of health before you ride shotgun again.”

  “Wisely spoke,” Cole said. “And who are you, young lady? A passenger?”

  “Yes, I was a passenger,” Daphne said. “I’m here in El Paso to practice the whore’s profession.”

  With the truthfulness of the old, Ira Cole shook his head. “No offense, young lady, but it seems to me that you don’t have the trappings for that line of work.”

  “But I do have the equipment, Mr. Cole,” Daphne said. “That should see me through.”
r />   “Well, I hope that’s the case, young lady, and good luck to ye,” Cole said. “Some ladies get rich from lying on their backs, but it ain’t real usual.” He directed his attention back to Red. “There’s a doctor just down the street, a man named McKenna. He learned his trade during the War Between the States, and he’ll fix you right up. They say he can saw off a rotten leg in less than two minutes.”

  “Damn it, I don’t have a rotten leg.”

  “I know,” Cole said. “But he’ll fix you up just the same.”

  * * *

  “You’re a strong man, Mr. Ryan,” gray-haired Dr. John McKenna said. “I can’t find anything wrong with you that can’t be fixed by a week of bed rest. You can put your shirt on now.”

  Red pulled his buckskin shirt over his head and then glanced at the disapproving portrait of a bearded Confederate colonel on the wall. “Is he kin of yours, Doc? He’s been staring daggers at me since I came in here.”

  “No, not kin,” McKenna said. “That’s Lieutenant Colonel Booker C. Hadden. I amputated his left arm after the Battle of Gaines’s Mill. He was very grateful and later sent me his picture.”

  The doctor took a small brown bottle with a tan-colored label from a glass-fronted cupboard and passed it to Red. “This is a tonic. Take a spoonful twice a day and it will help build your strength. Meantime, don’t work too hard and try not to get overexcited.”

  Neither the doctor nor Red knew it then, but soon his strength would be put to the test . . . and he’d get very overexcited.

  * * *

  “Well?” Buttons Muldoon said, an eyebrow lifting.

  “Well, what?” Red Ryan said.

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “He gave me a tonic.” Red held up the bottle. “Told me to take a spoonful twice a day.”

  “And have you taken it yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then take a swig now.” Buttons made a face. “What does it taste like?”

  Red tilted the bottle to his mouth, swallowed, and then put the cork back in place.

  “Well?” Buttons said.

  “It tastes mostly like gin.”

  “Gin?” Buttons said, looking doubtful.

  “You asked me, and I told you. It tastes like gin.”

  “Let me try that.” Buttons took a swig and then said, “You’re right. It does taste like gin and maybe lemon juice.” He handed the bottle back. “It’s good.”

  “And don’t you be getting any ideas. This stuff is a tonic to build up my strength. It ain’t for the likes of you.”

  He and Buttons were in the depot’s back room, where there were cots and shelves above them for the drivers and shotgun guards to rest and put their belongings. Oil lamps were lit against the growing darkness and a small, four-paned window gave a view of the corral and barn outside. A potbellied stove stood in one corner with its always simmering coffeepot, the Arbuckle strong enough to float a Colt revolver. The room smelled of coffee, man sweat, tobacco, wood smoke, and gun oil. A print of Indians attacking a wagon train hung askew on one wall.

  Red sat on the creaking corner of his cot and said, “Where’s the girl?”

  “Daphne? As far as I know she’s gone whoring.”

  “We have to pay back her twenty dollars.”

  Buttons said, “Right as soon as we get paid.”

  “We ain’t gonna get paid. Abe is likely to dock us pay for losing the stiff’s fare and the two horses.”

  “If he don’t give us the boot,” Buttons said.

  “We’ll find the twenty somewhere. I have a feeling that little gal is sure gonna need the money.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The One Note Saloon where Daphne Dumont chose to start her chosen career was probably the worst dive in El Paso. Patronized mainly by cowboys, railroad workers, and a seasoning of gamblers, con artists, and sporting gents, more dead men had been carried through its batwing doors than any other drinking establishment in town.

  When the place burned down in 1889, the citizens of El Paso breathed a collective sigh of relief, but that was still a few years in the future.

  When Daphne stepped into the One Note for the first and last time, it was a Friday night. Everybody had folding money, and the guy at the piano was playing a rousing rendition of “I’m a Good Old Rebel” that drowned out the ten chimes of the railroad clock above the bar.

  The saloon was a dangerous, violent cesspit, the kind of place where the first thing a new bartender learned was when to duck and the whores wore bulletproof corsets. The last preacher who tried to reform the drunks was hung in the belfry of his own church. It was said he kicked so hard and for so long the bell clanked for fifteen minutes.

  Daphne, confused by the noise, peered shortsightedly through a haze of smoke that was so thick it seemed to have been knitted together by giant spiders. She stood at the edge of the dance floor, her folded parasol in her hands and an expression of dazed bewilderment on her face.

  A tap on her shoulder from behind made Daphne turn to a woman in a yellow dress, a brassy blonde with heavily made-up eyes and a scarlet ruby of a mouth. Her voice rose above the din. “You lost, honey?”

  “I want to be a whore,” Daphne said. “Am I in the right place?”

  The woman’s smile was thin. “Oh, you’re in the right place, no doubt about that.” She looked Daphne up and down from her scuffed ankle boots to the top of her head and was obviously not impressed. “You sure you want to be a whore, honey? It’s a demanding profession.”

  “Yes. I . . . I think so . . .” the girl said. Her chin took on a determined set. “Yes, I am sure.”

  “Then you’ll need to talk with Pete Pace. He runs the place.” She steered Daphne to an empty chair. “Sit there and I’ll bring him over. Maybe you can work the cribs. My name’s Pearl, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you, Pearl. My name is Daphne.”

  “Oh my God,” Pearl said before she swept away, her silk petticoats rustling under her dress.

  Pete Pace was a splendid creature with slicked-down black hair parted in the middle and a pencil-thin mustache. He wore a brocade vest, boiled white shirt and string tie, and on his feet patent-leather shoes with pointed toes. He extended a beringed hand to Daphne and said, “Up. Let’s take a look at you, little lady.”

  Like Pearl before him, he was less than impressed. “Daphne . . . that’s your name?”

  “Yes. Daphne Dumont.”

  “Well, Daphne Dumont, you ain’t much to look at,” Pace said. “And I mean no offense by that. It’s just that what you have to sell, men may not be willing to buy.”

  Pearl untangled herself from a sporting gent and stepped to the table. “Pete, I figured she could work the cribs,” she said, almost shouting above the bedlam of noise, the roars of men, and the high, false laughter of women.

  “Maybe.” He stared at Daphne. “Back there against the far wall are three small, curtained-off rooms. Nothing in them except a cot and a chamber pot. Those are cribs, understand?”

  The girl nodded. Pace wasn’t sure if she understood or not.

  “The house takes forty percent of all you earn,” he said. “Set your price at two dollars and on a good night you can still clear fifteen, sixteen dollars. Does that set all right with you?”

  Again Daphne nodded. She seemed a little dazed by the commotion going on around her.

  Pace sighed as though he’d made a decision that displeased him. “Pearl, can you fix her up with a dress and shoes? Maybe do something with her face and hair?”

  “I’m sure I can find a dress and shoes to fit her,” Pearl said. “The rest won’t be easy.”

  “I know, but do what you can, huh?” He shook his head and said to Daphne, “Girl, you know why I’m doing this? It’s not on account of you being pretty, because you ain’t. It’s because I have a heart of solid gold.”

  * * *

  An hour later Daphne Dupont was transformed from a plain Jane to a plain Jane trying to look like she wasn’t.
She wore a red dress two sizes too large for her that had once belonged to a well-endowed whore who’d quit the business, and red shoes adorned with a gold fleur-de-lis that were a size too small. Her hair was piled, more or less, on top of her head and held in place with pins. Her face was made up with cheek rouge and lipstick, hastily applied by Pearl since, for her, time was money. The end result was . . . disastrous.

  But Daphne, embracing her new role, thought she looked beautiful.

  * * *

  His name was Barney Koerner, a tall, muscular man who’d been in several shooting scrapes and had a minor reputation in and around El Paso as a gunman. When the deadly shootist Dallas Stoudenmire was city marshal, Koerner had kept his head down and stepped softly, but now that Stoudenmire was dead, Koerner claimed he was “the cock o’ the walk in El Paso.” A bully and an abuser of women, he was drinking in the One Note the night Daphne made her dreadful debut . . . and the stage was set for a display of Koerner’s latent sadism.

  The girl’s ordeal began innocently enough. She stood on the edge of the dance floor, knock-kneed in her short dress, her eyes wide as she beheld sights and sounds she’d never experienced before in her life. She smiled at the big, yellow-haired man who strode across the floor toward her, shoving aside dancers in his path.

  “Well, well, what do we have here?” the man said.

  “My name is Daphne Dumont,” she said.

  “I bet it is.” Koerner grabbed Daphne by her thin arm. “Let’s rub bellies, lil darlin’.”

  For a couple of minutes, to the tune of “Clementine,” the big man cut a rug, displayed some fancy footwork and knocked around the other dancers on the crowded floor like a bowling ball striking pins. But then he steered Daphne toward the bar and yelled, “Hell, that’s enough. Lady, you’re just too damn ugly to be dancin’ with!” He pushed her hard toward a man at the bar, a puncher with rodent eyes in a small, triangular face. “Here, Ellis, you take her.”

  The man ginned and said, “Hell, Barney, I don’t want her.” And he pushed her back.

  “Over here, Barney!” another man yelled.

  Koerner laughed and threw Daphne at him.

  “Hell!” the man yelled. “I ain’t dancin’ with her. She’s as homely as a mud fence. Here, take her back.”