Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  “Your man,” Cole said. “He run off, get killed, something like that?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “He went out hunting one day and never came back. I went looking for him for a month. I had an old mule. I rode out as far as I dared, looking for Albert. Never found him, never found a trace of him. Like as not, he got carried off by a bear, or he just grew tired of all the responsibility of a wife and young ’uns and trying to scratch out a living from this hardscrabble.”

  She brushed her forehead free from more sprigs of hair with the back of her wrist.

  “Seems like a poor place to bring a family,” Cole observed.

  “Not if you’re wanted by the law, it ain’t.”

  “On the dodge, your man?”

  “Albert used to rob banks in Missouri,” she said. “Till it got to be unprofitable.”

  “How does robbing banks become unprofitable?”

  “The Jameses, Jesse and Frank and their cousins, the Youngers,” she said. “They were a lot better at robbing banks than Albert ever was and that got the Pinkertons and most of the law in Missouri down on bank robbers. Pretty soon, it got so you couldn’t walk in a bank that didn’t have at least one or two armed guards. Albert was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a gun artist. The other thing was the new safes the banks installed. Albert said you couldn’t blow one ’cause of the amount of dynamite a man would have to use … that the explosion would blow up the whole bank and all the people and money in it. Albert wasn’t no murderer like those James boys. He had a good heart in him. Couldn’t kill a sand flea. Those new banks and armed guards just put him right out of business.”

  She folded her arms against the chill wind and stared off toward the horizon.

  “It’s just as well,” she said. “Sooner or later Albert was bound to be murdered.” She turned her head just enough to look at Cole over her shoulder. Her eyes were the same color as the sky—smoky gray. “You ever know an outlaw who came to any good end?”

  “Most die young,” Cole said. “Least the ones I’ve known.”

  “Albert just never liked the thought of regular work. He had a good heart but was shy when it came to hard work. Still, I miss him something terrible, and so do the kids.”

  “Maybe if a bear didn’t get him,” Cole said, “he will change his mind once he’s been gone long enough, and come back.”

  She sighed and stared at the horizon as though, if she watched it long enough, Albert might appear. “I wonder how long is long enough,” she said. “He’s been gone a year already.”

  “Why stay on if that’s the case? Don’t you have some family back in Missouri?”

  “Sister,” she said. “That’s about it.”

  “That’s something, anyway. A place to start.”

  “No,” she said. “I best wait and see if Albert does come back. I light out, he might not know where to look for us.”

  “How long you reckon you can hold out?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe another six months, leastways up till winter.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then … well, I imagine I’ll have to take the kids to an orphanage and find myself some work in the nearest town.”

  The wind blew steadily out of the northeast. “You down to just biscuits and fatback?” Cole asked.

  She nodded and said: “And not much of that.”

  “There any sort of town near here that’d have a mercantile?”

  “Jack Ass Flats,” she said. “About twenty miles that way,” pointing with her chin.

  * * * * *

  The woman proved accurate about the wind. In an hour Cole’s clothes had dried, cold and stiff. He was still in pain, but at least he had clean clothes and a full belly. He thanked the woman for her kindness as he stepped into leather.

  “My manners are poor,” he said. “I never caught your name. Mine’s John Henry Cole.”

  “Charity,” she said. “And those wild ’uns are Minerva, Jessie, Laura, and Albert, Junior.”

  They grinned up at Cole like ’possums, and he tipped his hat to them.

  “Hope your man comes back soon,” he said. “If he’s out there and got any good sense, he will.”

  She offered Cole a weak smile as though she knew there wasn’t a chance she would ever see Albert again but still held to the slimmest of hopes.

  Cole rode away, thinking that the reason the frontier was so vast was because of all the misery and heartbreak it had to hold.

  Jack Ass Flats was west and would take him out of his way, but it was a trip that needed taking, so that was where he headed.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The first thing Cole noticed about Jack Ass Flats was the man hanging from the telegraph pole. The corpse twisted in the wind to the creak of the rope that held him. The streets were empty and he felt as if he had ridden straight into a bad dream. He saw a string of ponies tied up out front of a saloon. It seemed like the place to stop.

  The bar was lined with men of all sizes and shapes. They were in a celebrant mood. A few threw looks Cole’s way when he stepped up to the oak and ordered a whiskey. The bartender said: “Two bits.”

  Cole placed the coin on the oak next to the glass, then stood for a moment before knocking the drink back, and let its burn fan out in his blood.

  “You Cecil?” the man next to him said.

  “Cecil?”

  “Why, yes,” he said. “Cecil Trotter, the executioner from Tahlequah.”

  “Sorry,” Cole said. “I’m neither from Tahlequah nor an executioner.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “We was hoping you were.”

  “Why’s that?”

  He grinned wide enough to show that his incisors were gold-capped. “Just so’s we’d have the pleasure of telling you old McTavish’s already been hanged. Imagine you saw him when you rode in … feller what’s hanging from the telegraph pole.”

  “Hard to miss,” Cole said. “What was his crime?”

  “Pony thief, adulterer, and murderer. Killed his lover’s husband. The husband caught them in bed together.”

  “Sounds like a bad situation.”

  He nodded knowingly. “Was … for him.” The man gave Cole the once-over, probably wondering if he looked like a pony thief or a murderous adulterer.

  “So this Cecil from Tahlequah is going to be a bit disappointed,” Cole said. “Riding all this way for nothing.”

  “It got boring waiting,” the man said. “Town like this, you take your fun when you can get it.”

  Cole thought of Teddy Green and how he would think it was unseemly to leave a dead man hanging from a telegraph pole where the corpse could be seen by women and children. “There a reason you just left that fellow hanging?” he asked.

  “Well, hell, we was to cut him down right away,” the man said, turning to make sure he had the attention of his compadres, who by this time were all ears, “it’d just get boring again.”

  “Yeah,” said the man next to him, a short fellow wearing a Navy Colt with ivory grips. “The Flats ain’t exactly Saint Louis, in case you ain’t noticed. Ain’t much to do here but watch paint dry and listen to the wind blow.”

  “So hanging a man is a real big deal,” Cole said, “like the Fourth of July. Which way to the mercantile?”

  “Down the street to your right, stranger.”

  Cole was tempted to order another whiskey, but he wasn’t up to the company of men who would leave another man hanging from a telegraph pole for the sport of it. He found the mercantile and told the man what he wanted: beans, flour, sugar, coffee, cured beef in tins, some hoarhound candy. Then he asked that the store deliver the supplies to Charity and gave him directions to the woman’s holdings.

  “I know you’ve got a telegraph in this town,” he said. “I saw a man hanging from one of the poles. Which direction is it?”


  “Cross the street, down two doors.”

  The telegraph office was closed, a sign on the door said:

  Out to Lunch.

  Back in Thirty Minutes.

  Cole figured the telegrapher was among the men celebrating in the saloon. He started to cross the street to seek him out when he had to step back on the walk to keep from getting run over by a spring wagon pulled wildly by a pair of high-stepping Percherons. Holding the reins and trying to keep her seat was a female dressed in a buckskin shirt and leather breeches. Cole wasn’t sure whether she had control of the team or not until she brought them to a hard stop just beneath the pole where the dead man hung.

  He watched her for a moment, saw her stare up at the body, then lower her head until her shoulders shook once. Then she climbed into the back of the wagon and took a knife from her belt and began sawing away at the rope.

  “Better let me help you,” Cole said.

  She looked down, saw him, said: “Who are you?”

  “Just a stranger passing through,” Cole said. “Better let me help you.”

  The dead man’s size made her agreeable. Cole climbed in the back of the wagon and hefted the corpse while she cut the rope, then he laid him out in the back of the wagon.

  “This your man?” he asked.

  She had short-cropped red hair that was as glossy as a rooster’s feathers and sea-green eyes and a splatter of freckles across her nose.

  “He’s my father,” she said. “His name’s Flea McTavish.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Why should you be, unless you are the one who hanged him up there and left him like that?”

  “No, I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Then don’t apologize for what you had no hand in. You want to feel sorry for someone, feel sorry for them who did this.”

  She jumped from the wagon, reached back in under the seat, and took out a shotgun with sawed-off barrels and a whittled-down stock—to fit her own diminutive size, Cole supposed—and headed across the street to the saloon.

  Cole took hold of her elbow. “You planning on getting some justice?”

  She looked at him hard.

  “It’s just that there’s probably twenty or thirty yahoos inside and everyone of them is drinking and armed.”

  “I don’t see where that’s your concern,” she said.

  “You don’t think they’d shoot a woman, liquored up and growing bored again?”

  She pulled free from Cole’s grip and started across the street.

  Cole didn’t know why he felt it was any of his affair what the people in this town did—it appeared like they were all hell-bent on killing one another—but he fell in step alongside her, and followed her through the double doors of the saloon.

  All the celebrating that had been going on stopped at the sight of the two of them, most of the attention going to the woman and the shotgun she was carrying.

  “Who did it?” she said. “Step away from the bar.”

  For a whole minute the men stood frozen, beer mugs and shot glasses held in their hands, disbelieving looks on their faces.

  “Who’re the ones who hanged him?” she demanded.

  The man who had been so talkative to Cole earlier said: “Diana, that thing loaded?”

  “You do it, Woodrow?”

  He shook his head. Cole saw some of the others ease away from the man, snake out along the bar out of harm’s way.

  “How about you, Frank? You hang him?”

  Frank, the one with the Navy Colt, lost his grin. “Every man in this room knows what your daddy did,” he said. “Hanging was too good for him.”

  “Step away from the bar, unless you want your friends to die with you,” she commanded.

  “Ain’t nobody dying today, Diana,” a voice from behind said. “Put that greener down before you shoot somebody.”

  Cole turned enough to see a familiar face, only this time he was wearing a nickel badge and holding a pistol.

  “Stay out of it, Bill,” the woman said without taking her attention from Frank.

  “Can’t,” the lawman said. “It’s my town.”

  “If it’s your town, where were you when they hanged my father?”

  “Collecting taxes,” he said. “A man can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “You should have been here,” she said.

  “I’ll see that things get righted,” he said. “But you cut loose with that scatter-gun, you’ll just end up making it worse.” Then the lawman said to Cole: “You there, mister, step away.” He had failed to recognize Cole. It had been a long time since they’d last run into each other. Bill Tilghman said to the men at the bar: “Put your irons on the oak and step away.”

  They did, quickly enough.

  “Now,” Tilghman said. “You shoot any of those men, Diana, unarmed like they are, it’ll be the same thing as what they did to your daddy. Let me handle this, woman.”

  She took a deep breath, let it out, then turned to face him. “God damn you, Bill Tilghman, for letting them do it!”

  “It was my responsibility,” he said, “and my mistake of thinking it would be done legally. Cecil was on his way over from Tahlequah. I thought he’d be here by now.”

  Her eyes filled with a bitter pain. “I’m holding you and this whole town responsible for what happened here.”

  “You might hold your daddy a bit responsible, too,” Tilghman said. “Trouble with one wrongful act is, it often leads to others. Wasn’t for his crimes, none of us would be standing here now.”

  She looked at him for a long hard second, then strode out of the saloon, brushing past him and through the double doors.

  Some of the men snorted until Tilghman told them to “shut their cake-holes.” He eyed Cole for a moment. “Have we met?”

  “Once,” Cole said. “Long time back on the Chisholm Trail. You were ramrodding beeves and I was looking for work.”

  He stepped closer where the light was a bit better, then with what for him probably came as close to a smile as you would see on Bill Tilghman said: “John Henry Cole. You sure found your way to hell and gone.”

  “Looks like you did, too,” Cole said.

  “I’ve some work to do here,” he said. “Maybe after I’m finished, we can meet up at the café and have some coffee and catch up on old times.”

  “I’d like that, Bill, but to tell the truth, I’ve got to keep moving.”

  “You on the dodge?”

  “Not to worry. You’ll find no papers on me.”

  “I heard sometime back you was wearing a badge down in Del Río. What happened with that?”

  “Long story,” Cole said. “I killed a bandit and had to quit.”

  “Why’s that? They don’t like lawmen killing bandits down along that border?”

  “Not when the bandit is a cousin to most of the population,” Cole said.

  “I see.”

  Cole started to leave, then took a moment to say: “Glad you didn’t shoot that woman, Bill.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t shoot her, either,” he said. “She’s my fiancée.”

  “Well, then that would have made a rough start of it for the marriage.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Cole could hear him telling some of the men at the bar they were being placed under arrest as he walked out to the street again. The woman snapped the reins over the rumps of the Percherons, turning them around in the street, then, when she arrived at where Cole was standing, brought them to a halt.

  “If you are seeking a long and prosperous life, this ain’t the place,” she said.

  She snapped the reins again and drove away.

  Cole made for the telegraph office and this time he found the telegrapher in.

  “How much to send a wire to Go
nzales?” he asked.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  In Amarillo, John Henry Cole sold the bay, the saddle, and a few of the pistols he’d taken from the dead after the fight with Rufus Buck’s gang. He needed money and he needed a quick way to Gonzales, so he bought a ticket for the stage to take him from Amarillo to San Antonio. From there he could easily make his way to Gonzales with hopes of hooking up with Teddy Green and Harve Ledbettor. He’d sent a wire from Jack Ass Flats to be delivered to whatever local law enforcement was to be had in Gonzales that explained the situation and asking him if those two riders were in the vicinity, and if they were to let them know Cole was coming. There was a man named Beaver Smith who ran a private stage line out of Amarillo, what he called a mud wagon, and there were two other passengers besides Cole—a gaunt-looking drummer with a large mole on the tip of his nose, and a woman.

  The woman wore a green, tie-back dress with black trim and a Western hat with a large ostrich feather pinned to the crown. She had a long face with dark curious eyes, an unattractive woman whose silence was disturbing. The other thing that was disturbing about her was the single scabbard with the mother-of-pearl-handled pistol on her hip. It was highly unusual for a woman to wear a side arm. Most kept a Derringer or knuckle duster in their reticules, but few openly wore pistols. This one did and she fancied a small riding crop laced around her left wrist. She had a certain way of running her gaze over you that made you feel like prize livestock she was considering buying.

  The drummer seated next to her seemed quite interested in this homely woman and for the first several hours of the ride out of Amarillo, he could not seem to take his eyes from her. She appeared not to notice, but when the mud wagon pulled into the first way station and they got out to stretch their legs, Cole heard her say to the drummer: “Something about me that’s got you so all fired dumbstruck?”

  The drummer flushed red and he adjusted his trousers by hiking them up over his narrow hips. They were baggy on him as were the rest of his clothes—baggy and dusty.

  “No, ma’am, just that I couldn’t help but notice that fancy piece you’re wearing. Unusual for a lady to go about fixed with a pistol. You ever shoot anybody with that iron?”