Hate Thy Neighbor

by William W. Johnstone

  “I need a room for the night.”

  Lawson nodded. “Upstairs, room to the left. It will cost you a dollar and another dollar for a pillow and blanket.” He looked Mosely up and down, not liking what he saw. “You got two dollars?”

  Mosely reached into his sodden pocket, found the coins and rang them onto the counter among the peach cans. “Key,” he said.

  “There ain’t no key on account of how there ain’t no lock,” Lawson said. “This is the New Mexico Territory, boy, not the Ritz.”

  “I guess it will do,” Mosely said, as thunder crashed.

  Lawson grinned. “You look a tad peaked, boy. Thunder scare you?”

  Mosely shook his head. “No. I bring the thunder,” he said.

  * * *

  Upstairs, roughly above the store part of the building, was one large room partitioned into two by a couple of ragged army blankets hanging from a string. The room to the left was furnished with an iron cot and a dresser that supported a jug and a basin, both empty. There was a corn husk mattress on the bed, much stained, and a chamber pot under it that Josiah Mosely did not care to investigate. He threw the muddy contents of the carpetbags on the rough timber floor and then set the seemingly empty bags on the bed. But both had a false bottom, one of Professor Purdon’s little secrets since each compartment held a British Bulldog revolver and a box of cartridges. The little guns were made by Webley & Sons of Birmingham, England, and both were engraved with the words ROYAL ULSTER CONSTABULARY. The lovely little five-shooters were in .455 caliber and sported walnut grips and a nickel finish. How the professor acquired them, Mosely did not know. The old man had never shot the revolvers but kept them meticulously cleaned and oiled. Josiah Mosely had never shot them, either; in fact he’d never fired a gun of any kind, and Purdon had never encouraged him to take an interest in revolvers—a gap in his education that Mosely now regretted.

  Well, now it was time to make up for it by getting in some practice.

  The Bulldogs were unloaded and the noise from the saloon area had grown in volume as the four killers and their women got drunker. A gun in each hand, Mosely triggered imaginary shot after shot at Jesse Tobin and his friends—click—click—click—click. The Bulldogs were snarling, spitting fire.

  It is one of God’s tender mercies that the novice shooter, having known no other, will blithely accept a heavy double-action trigger pull under the illusion that such is the norm. Only later when he understands the ways of the revolver will the joys of light, smooth triggers enter into his thinking. It should be noted here, as Mosely clicked, clicked, at his phantom targets, that women learn this faster than men. But now Mosely had to adapt to the Bulldog’s notoriously heavy trigger faster than anybody.

  After a while he stopped, realizing that shooting an empty gun at shadows was far removed from the harsh realities of a gunfight. All the youngster had going for him was the element of surprise and a consuming anger that made him determined to take his hits and keep on shooting.

  Professor Purdon was dead, buried out there in the thunderstorm under a pile of rock. No matter the cost, there had to be a reckoning.

  Josiah Mosely loaded the Bulldogs, shoved them into the pockets of his damp coat, and stepped downstairs. He had ten shots and could afford six misses. Even so, the odds were not in his favor.

  * * *

  The saloon was a close, rickety room with a few tables and chairs and a bar made from two beer barrels supporting a warped timber door from an old barn. Behind the bar a shelf held half-washed glasses, several jugs of rotgut, a few dusty bottles, and a small keg that may once have contained brandy. There was no beer. Above the shelf a framed, embroidered sign read HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER? and a couple of smoking oil lamps hung from the ceiling beams, glowing dimly against the advancing darkness.

  Josiah Mosely stepped to the bar and turned to face the room.

  Jesse Tobin took his hand out from under the unlaced corset of the woman named Annabelle and glared at Mosely with undisguised contempt. “What the hell are you doing in here, boy?” he said. “Gold Lawson don’t sell milk, so only men are allowed in here.”

  Annabelle laughed and said, “Maybe he’s got some sarsaparilla, huh, Jess?”

  Tobin grinned and said, “Get the hell out of here, boy, before I get angry and spank your butt.”

  Mosely said nothing, but his eyes were busy, fixing the positions of the four men, the sprawled half-naked bodies of the two women.

  Floris Lusk said, “You still here, boy? Jesse just told you. You ain’t drinking among the men.”

  “Or the women, Annabelle said.

  “Or the whores,” Tobin said.

  “Jess, I ain’t a whore,” Annabelle said, pouting. “And neither is Bonnie Sue.”

  “Then if you ain’t whores, then what the hell are you?” Tobin said.

  “We’re ladies.”

  This last occasioned a loud explosion of mirth among the men. Annabelle jumped from Tobin’s lap and flounced to the door, her open corset and undone Mexican blouse revealing her breasts.

  “Git back here!” Tobin said, suddenly angry.

  “She’ll be back, Jesse,” Lusk said. “You ain’t paid her yet.”

  More laughter followed.

  Josiah Mosely was pleased. The woman’s leaving gave him a clear shot at Tobin. But it wouldn’t be easy.

  The gunman drew his Colt, thumped it onto the table, and said to Mosely, “Go bring me my woman, boy. If she ain’t here on my knee in two minutes, all undone, I’ll shoot you right between the eyes.”

  The youngster straightened. “I’m a rainmaker,” he said. “I bring only the thunder.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Floris Lusk said.

  A moment later he found out.

  * * *

  Josiah Mosely reached into his pockets and suddenly in the cheap perfume-scented gloom his revolvers flashed fire. In its black powder loading the .455 is not a particularly powerful round but at close range it’s a big, soft lead bullet that can do a hell of a lot of damage to a man. Jesse Tobin didn’t even have time to reach for his revolver before he took a hit. Mosely had pointed the muzzle of the Bulldog at the middle of the man’s forehead but he jerked the heavy trigger and pulled his shot low to the right. The bullet entered Tobin’s right eye and blew his brains out the back of his head.

  One round. One kill. Nine rounds left.

  Floris Lusk, a skilled gunman with three kills to his credit, jumped to his feet, his Colt clearing leather. But at that moment the woman who’d been sitting beside him decided to make a run for it, and she and Lusk collided, tangled, and the half-drunk gunman staggered back and delayed his shot. At a range of just five feet, Mosely fired at Marty Hawley and again pulled low and left. Hawley took the bullet in the lower gut and staggered back a step, shocked by pain. His cousin Dene Brett, a back-shooter but not a fighting man, was slow getting his work in. He and Mosely swapped a couple of shots with no hits, but the youngster got lucky with his third and hit Brett at the base of his thumb where it joined the wrist. Disabled, the man screamed, dropped his Colt, and bent over, cradling his shattered wrist, out of the fight.

  But Floris Lusk was back in action. Assuming the duelist’s position, his right arm extended, he drew a bead on Mosely. In that split second the young man knew he was dead. But then a gun roared and kept on roaring. Lusk reeled, hit several times. Annabelle stood in the doorway, a smoking Henry rifle at her shoulder. Lusk turned his head and stared at the woman, stunned at the manner of his death. He tried to raise his revolver, but suddenly it seemed to weigh as much as an anvil. Lusk raised up on his toes and then fell flat on his face, dead when he hit the floor.

  Then things happened quickly, almost too fast for the gun-shocked Josiah Mosely to follow.

  Splashing a trail of blood, Dene Brett, still bent over, staggered toward Annabelle, and said, “Help me.”

  A country girl born and bred, long familiar with rifles, now a whore with a heart of stone, th
e woman pumped two shots into Brett and said, “Go to hell.”

  Those were her last words. A single shot rang out and through the thick tangle of gunsmoke Mosely saw Annabelle grab for the doorjamb then slide slowly to the floor.

  Gold Lawson appeared in the doorway, a huge Colt Dragoon revolver in his hand. He looked down at the dead woman with a face devoid of pity and gritted between clenched teeth, “Bitch.”

  That was enough for Mosely. He crossed eight feet of open floor quickly, raised the Bulldog in his right hand and said, “You look a tad peaked, mister. The thunder scare you?”

  Lawson looked beyond Mosely at the carnage the youngster had wrought and said, “Damn you, boy, I never took ye for a shootist.”

  “I’m not. I’m a rainmaker, like Professor Purdon was a rainmaker. I bring the thunder.”

  Unnerved by the events of the past couple of minutes, Lawson raised his Colt, but he was painfully slow. He cursed his own hesitation and thumbed back the hammer.

  At a range of five feet Josiah Mosely fired. The bullet hit low to the left, slammed into Lawson’s belly, and the man dropped to his knees, his face shocked. “You killed me, you son of a bitch,” he said.

  Mosely nodded. “Yes, I did. But then some men need killing.”

  He fired again.

  Hit a second time, Lawson gasped and fell on his face, dead as he was ever going to be.

  The woman named Bonnie Sue, still pretty but worn, a woman who’d been used and abused all her life, appeared in the doorway. She kneeled beside Annabelle’s body and sobbed quietly for a while and then her tear-stained face turned to Mosely. “She didn’t deserve this,” she said.

  “I reckon she didn’t,” Mosely said. “But it happened.”

  “You killed them all.”

  “Not the woman. I didn’t kill the woman.”

  “Now where do I go? Is there anyplace in the world lower than this hell, boy?”

  “Nowhere. You go nowhere. Seems like now you own a grocery store and saloon. You stay right here, make a life for yourself.”

  “I don’t own McLean or anything in it,” Bonnie Sue said.

  “Then who does? Gold Lawson is dead. Did he have any heirs?”

  “Not that I know of. And if he had any they’ve probably all been hung.”

  Mosely nodded. “Then you’re his only heir, woman. I know that out of the goodness of his heart Gold would have wanted you to have all that was his.”

  The woman thought that over then said, “You’re right, pilgrim. I was always Gold’s favorite.”

  “Seeing as how he shot Annabelle without too much regret I’d say that was the case.”

  “He was a dear man,” Bobbie Sue said. “I mean really deep inside.”

  “Yeah, wasn’t he though,” Mosely said with a straight face.

  “What about you? There’s only me and you. Do you plan on killing me?”

  “There’s been enough killing,” Mosely said. His smile was boyish. “I’ll go wherever the balloon takes me.” Then, “But first I’ll help you bury the dead.”

  Owning the establishment so recently vacated by the late, unlamented Gold Lawson had struck a chord with Bonnie Sue. “I want Annabelle close and the others far, far away from my place.”

  My place. Josiah Mosely smiled inwardly at that. Bonnie Sue was a quick study, and there was more to her than he’d realized. Watching her now, he saw a strength and determination found in many females of that era. He’d been told that examples of such women lived in Texas, one or two of them wealthy ranchers, but he considered that last just a big story.

  * * *

  Josiah Mosely and Bonnie Sue spent the next day burying the dead. Like Professor Purdon, Annabelle was laid to rest under a cairn of red stone, but the dead men were dragged away behind their horses and left in the wilderness where the coyotes would be attentive but not kind. Then Mosely did one last kindness for the professor. He laid the old man’s precious cane on his grave, and Bonnie Sue said it would stay there forever. As far as is known the cane lay on Purdon’s last resting place until the 1920s, when it mysteriously disappeared.

  The following day, in fair weather, Mosely reinflated the balloon from the hydrogen cylinder but did not light the burner. The prevailing wind was to the south and Bonnie Sue, dressed in a demure brown dress with white collar and cuffs, waved to him as he soared into the air and abandoned his fate to the elements.

  Mosely knew that southward lay West Texas, but he did not know that Kate Kerrigan owned most of it or that his destiny would intertwine with hers and that all too soon he would again remove the British Bulldog revolvers from the carpetbags to use them to fight for what he believed in.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “A fine sight, is it not, Kate?” Buffalo Bill Cody said. “A man’s entire reason for existence represented by a locomotive, boxcars, flatbeds, cage wagons, and a dozen passenger cars.”

  Kate Kerrigan nodded. “A fine sight indeed, Mr. Cody. Do you not think so, Frank?”

  Frank Cobb stood at Kate’s side by the rail terminal and his handsome face bore an expression of wonderment. He grinned and said, “I bet there hasn’t been this many Indians in one place at one time since the Custer Massacre.”

  That last was greeted by loud laughter that interrupted the oohs and ahs of amazement by the crowd that surrounded Kate. Every house servant and puncher who could make an excuse to leave his ranch chores had done so, and Kate feared that the KK must be empty. Her tall sons Trace and Quinn had quickly attached themselves to a pair of pretty young ladies Bill called “cowgirls,” and Annie Oakley had emerged from a passenger car to wave to Kate and the others and fire her rifle in the air.

  “Oh, look, Kate,” Frank said, as excited as a boy at his first circus. “You see that black feller there with the terrible scars on his face, that’s—”

  “Meldrew Washington,” Bill Cody said, beaming. “Kate, he’s the only man in the history of the world to survive four days of torture at the hands of Apache women, the worst of them. When he was rescued by Texas Rangers he hovered at death’s door for three months before he pulled through.”

  “A tough man, Mr. Cody,” Kate said.

  “Indeed, ma’am, and a damned fine wrangler to boot,” Bill said. “I mean horse wrangler, of course.”

  “Mr. Cody, I know what a wrangler is,” Kate said. “I employ several.”

  “Why, indeed you do, Kate,” Bill said. “My mistake. Now, do you see that huge buffalo being led down the ramp from the boxcar?”

  Frank Cobb shook his head, his eyes wide. “Well, cut off my legs and call me shorty. I never thought they grew to be that size. He’s bigger than any longhorn I ever saw.”

  “Mr. Cobb, we took five Sioux and Cheyenne arrowheads and a fifty-caliber ball out of that bull’s hide,” Bill said. “We call him Methuselah, and when Sitting Bull first saw him he said he must be at least a hundred years old because he remembers putting an arrow into him when he was just a boy. And see there, the Indian standing on top of the boxcar wrapped in a blanket? That’s Spotted Fawn, an Arapaho that was at the Custer fight. He said he put a bullet into the gallant Custer a moment before the one that killed him, but I don’t know if that’s true or not.” Cody smiled, revealing remarkably good teeth, “The crowd loves to boo him, I can tell you that, but they cheer when I stick a knife into him.” He looked quickly at Kate. “All in pretend, dear lady, all in pretend. No one really dies.”

  Kate smiled and shivered. “I should hope not, Mr. Cody.”

  Bill swept off his hat and made a gallant bow. “And now I must see to the unloading of the cooking stoves. Napoleon said an army marches on its stomach, and so does Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West.”

  After Bill swaggered away in his usual swashbuckling fashion, Kate looked at the people around her and said, “You may watch until the train is unloaded, and then I want you all back at work.” She turned to her personal maid. “Except you, Flossie. You’ll come with me. I’m not at all sure the gray hair was
the only one and I want you to search. And Frank, we need to talk about the nesters over to Fort Stockton way. I want them out before the spring roundup.”

  Frank Cobb nodded but said nothing. What he had to tell Kate could only be told in private.

  * * *

  After Flossie had been dismissed with nary another silver hair found, Frank was summoned to meet Kate in the parlor, and the doors were closed.

  “Are you ready to make a report, Frank?” Kate said. “I’d hoped that Trace and Quinn could be here, but apparently they’ve found better things to do.”

  Frank grinned. “Bill’s cowgirls sure are pretty though, ain’t they?”

  “Frank, that will be quite enough. I have no wish to discuss cowgirls, or whatever you wish to call them. We need more range now I’ve gotten the army contracts. Come spring I plan to ship ten thousand head, and that’s all I wish to discuss at this time.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Frank said. “From what I’ve been told, there are at least six thousand acres under the plow around Comanche Springs, all it platted land and of legal occupancy.”

  “How many farms are we talking about?” Kate said.

  “Around forty, maybe less.”

  Kate thought about that, then said, “We can bypass the farms and run our cattle on the open range. Later we’ll put up fences to keep the sodbusters in their place, but it’s the nesters that are my main concern. What about those people camped out on my range west of Fort Stockton?”

  “I meant to tell you earlier, Kate, but we no longer have worries on that score. The nesters have been cleaned out. Hiram Clay and the association brought in a young rifleman by the name of Tom Horn and made him a range detective. Within a few weeks the nesters pulled stakes and lit a shuck, left four of their number in the ground. Horn rode out too, said he was headed for the Arizona Territory.”

  “You took all this time to tell me?” Kate said.

  “I only heard it myself a couple of days ago from a Rocking-G puncher,” Frank said. “He said he rode past those nester cabins and they’ve all been burned to the ground.” Frank watched as roustabouts manhandled a huge tent canvas off a flatbed wagon, then said, “But we have nester trouble elsewhere.”