Shortly before eleven as Duncan Campbell and his daughter readied themselves for bed, Thomas Clouston excused himself with the pretense that he wanted to check on his horse.
“Please don’t stay awake for me,” he said. “I can find my own way to my room.”
When he stepped outside, the rain had ended but lightning still flashed within the clouds and the night air smelled of a further downpour to come.
By the light of a single lantern, Clouston led his horse from its stall and saddled the sleepy animal with little haste. There was no rush. The plan he had in mind would take time to mature.
He turned down the lantern, led the horse to the barn door, and looked around outside. Good. There was no one in sight. The hands had already sought their bunks, and the only sound was the steady tick of rain from the barn roof and a distant rumble of thunder. The night was black as ink as Clouston tied his horse to the cast iron post outside the house. When he stepped inside a single candle burned in the hallway to light his way upstairs. He smiled. How just too, too touchingly thoughtful.
After he entered his room, Clouston blew out the candle and pulled a straight-backed chair to the window, sat, and stared out into the dreary night.
He was still there an hour later.
When the old grandfather clock in the hallway downstairs first chimed midnight, Clouston rose to his feet like an automaton. He checked the loads in his Colt, then shoved the pistol back into the holster.
From his pants pocket he took a large, blue and white polka dot bandanna and spun it into a sausage shape. Now was the time to proceed with stealthy tread, like a man tiptoeing through a graveyard on All Hallows’ Eve.
Testing the tautness of the bandanna, Clouston slowly stepped to the door and let himself out into the hallway. After its chiming exertions, the grandfather clock now tick-tocked contentedly downstairs and patiently waited for the opportunity to strike one. Lightning shimmered inside the darkened house as he stood and listened, the bandanna stretched tight between his hands.
There were three bedrooms upstairs. Stentorian snores from behind the door at the end of the hallway marked Duncan Campbell’s, so the one opposite Clouston’s own must be Judy’s.
On cat feet the man stepped to the door. The house was well built and the floorboard did not creak.
Clouston tried the door handle. It turned easily and he pushed. Excellent! It wasn’t locked. Such sane, trusting souls. He smiled. Little did they know that they had a bogeyman in their midst.
Judy Campbell lay on her back, her hair spread across the white pillow like spilled red wine. Under the sheet her breasts rose and fell with every breath, and her long, shapely legs were outlined, slightly open in unconscious invitation.
Clouston licked his lips and advanced on the bed. Duncan Campbell still snored and that was good, very good. Clouston knew his merry men would have laughed to see how slyly he crept up on the sleeping girl, the bandanna a tight garrote in his fisted hands. This had to be done swiftly and without sound.
Like a crouching shadow in the darkness, Clouston bent over the bed for a moment. Then, like a predatory animal, he hurled himself on top of the sleeping girl.
Judy Campbell’s eyes few open and she tried to scream, but Clouston gagged her with the bandanna, then knotted it tightly at the back of her neck. He dragged her from the bed and threw her over his left shoulder, aware of the firm shape of her body under the sheer silk of her nightdress.
The girl struggled, fighting the gag, but Clouston rammed the muzzle of his colt into her temple and said, “Quit that or I’ll kill you and then your father.”
Suddenly the girl went limp. Because of his threat or the fact that she’d fainted Clouston did not know, nor did he care. She was quiet and had ceased to struggle, and that was all that mattered.
The girl was slender and Clouston did not feel particularly burdened as he carried her out of the bedroom and into the hallway. There was now no sound from Duncan Campbell’s room, and he made haste to take to the stairs. But he grabbed his cloak and hat from the rack without undue hurry and stepped out the front door.
Despite the lightning and pattering rain, Clouston’s horse stood placidly at the hitching post. Clouston threw Judy over his saddle and then mounted. He grabbed the girl and held her close to him and walked his horse away from the ranch house.
After a while, riding through murk, Thomas Clouston tilted back his head and laughed. It had all been so damned easy. He’d been a wolf among sheep and stolen a woman from them without their notice, just as nice as you please.
He figured his future plans would go even better. When he conquered Broken Bridle, the sheep would run, he’d drive the Chinese north, get rich, and take time to enjoy his new woman.
For Thomas Clouston life was good, and he reveled in it.
Judy Campbell had feared for her father’s life and had feigned unconsciousness. Now she struggled again and said, “Where are you taking me?”
Clouston grinned. “To my home, of course. But first to my camp near the Rattlesnake Hills.”
“My father will come after you,” Judy said. “He’ll find you and kill you.”
“Is that right, my child?” Clouston said.
“You betrayed his hospitality.”
“What a shame. But in doing so I’ve gained a bride.”
“I’ll never marry you,” Judy said. She struggled and strands of wet hair fell over her forehead.
“Depend on it, my dear, you will. All women are whores at heart, and when you discover that you will live like a queen you’ll gladly accept my ring and my bed.”
“I’d rather die first,” the girl said.
“That can also be arranged, and I assure you, you will find it a most unpleasant experience.” Clouston scowled. “Now shut your trap and leave me to my thoughts.”
The certainty came to Judy Campbell that this was the man who’d kidnapped Jane Collins. And if that was the case the poor girl was already dead . . . or wishing she was.
CHAPTER FORTY
Broken Bridle lay under a pall of mourning made more somber by the thunderstorms that came in flashing, roaring bands and threatened never to leave.
The blue-faced bodies arrived in a freight wagon that parked outside city hall, and when Oskar Janacek’s four-hundred-pound wife saw what had happened to her husband she collapsed in the street. It took three men to lift her onto the boardwalk where smelling salts were administered and then brandy. But Andrea Janacek rallied when she saw the emotional state of the young widows. She insisted on getting to her feet, and then she hugged them to her ample chest and comforted them as she would crying children.
But in the end it did little good. People were already leaving town.
By midafternoon the hardware store was closed and locked after Mark Logan the proprietor loaded his wife and three children onto a wagon and left for places unknown. Carson’s Rod & Gun followed. Big, laughing Andy Carson and his wife left in the company of the baker Lucas Mellon and his wife Agatha with their brood of seven.
More were preparing to leave the next day, filling wagons and even handcarts with supplies and a few sticks of furniture. They were determined to escape Broken Bridle as though it was doomed Sodom.
If nothing was done to stop the exodus, Shawn O’Brien estimated that Broken Bridle would be a ghost town within a week.
When Shawn said this to Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy, the young lawman stared at him, his eyes empty behind the owl glasses. The man was broken and seemed too dispirited to pick up the pieces.
“What do you want me to do, O’Brien?” he said. “You saw what happened when we tried.”
“Organize the defense of the town,” Shawn said, suddenly angry. “In other words, do your damned job.”
Purdy glanced out the office window. “Will this rain never end?” he said.
Hamp Sedley, horrified by what he’d seen in the hills, was on a short fuse. He pulled his Colt and thumbed back the hammer. “Purdy, git out of the chair or b
y God I’ll shoot you out of it.”
“Go ahead,” the sheriff said. “You’d be doing me a favor.”
“Hamp! Let it go,” Shawn said. “Broken Bridle can’t afford any more dead men.”
Sedley hesitated, his finger on the revolver’s hair trigger, and Shawn whispered, “I said let it go.”
The gambler thumbed down the hammer and shoved the Colt back into its holster. To Purdy he said, “You make me sick. Go on, get out of here and become a politician and kiss babies. It’s the only job you’re fit for.”
“I’m not fit for any job,” Purdy said. He pulled the star off his shirt and hurled it into a corner. “Especially this one.”
Shawn stared at the young man for a long time, saw nothing to reassure him, and said, “Hamp, let’s go see if Burt Becker is awake.”
“Why, Shawn?” Sedley said. “We came here to help Purdy. Well, he doesn’t want our help and we can’t go out there and stop the great skedaddle, so I say we cut our losses and light a shuck with the rest of them. I mean, while we still can.”
“Before we do anything, we’ll go see Becker,” Shawn said.
Sedley let out a wearisome sigh. “Well, I tried to warn you.”
For cowboys coming in off the trail, Broken Bridle was a glittering metropolis, a mecca for sin and debauchery where sex and booze came easily but never cheap. But in fact it was a Frontier cow town like any other, small, dusty, fly-specked, the buildings huddled close, its only contact with the outside world and its reason for existing at all the slender thread of a single railroad track.
Thus it was that the weeping and wailing of widows and bereaved mothers in a close-packed town produced a keening noise, a low, nerve-scraping whine like an out-of-tune violin.
“Like lilies in the rain, aren’t they?” Pete Caradas said when Shawn and Sedley stopped at his table. As was his habit, he sat in his robe at a table in the Streetcar drinking coffee with his morning bourbon. A sleepy girl with mussed hair sat next to him, her shift revealing too much leg and breast.
“We need Becker,” Shawn said. “You saw what happened.”
“I saw the aftermath of what happened. Funny, I was always told steady infantry would defeat cavalry. I guess that’s all wrong.”
“They were drunk,” Sedley said. “They were mighty unsteady infantry.”
“A massacre they call it,” Caradas said.
“It was,” Shawn said.
“You know the Chinese left in the night, don’t you?” Caradas said. Shawn was shocked and the draw fighter smiled and said, “I can see you don’t.”
“They were mighty quiet about it,” the girl said. “Usually they’re the noisiest people God put on earth.”
“The thunderstorm provided good cover,” Caradas said. “And of course the town was busy with other concerns and didn’t notice.”
“Why would they just pull out like that?” Sedley said. “They scared of the crazy doc like everybody else?”
“I don’t know,” Caradas said. “The women and children are gone, so I reckon that means they don’t intend to ever come back.”
Shawn said, “This has something to do with Clouston, I’m sure of it.”
“Seems like he’s the main troublemaker around here,” Caradas said. “So it’s likely. Clouston makes Burt Becker look like an altar boy.”
“Is the altar boy awake and taking nourishment?” Sedley said.
“I don’t know. Sunny Swanson is up there with him. Why don’t you ask her?”
“I’ll do that,” Shawn said. He turned for the stairs, but Caradas said, “Folks pulling out, O’Brien.”
“Seems like,” Shawn said.
“You should go with them, O’Brien,” Caradas said. “There’s nothing for you here now.”
“Some will stick,” Shawn said. “And what about the widows and the orphans? How will they get out with their menfolk dead?”
Caradas smiled. “O’Brien, unlike you, Burt hasn’t suddenly got religion. He couldn’t care less about widows and orphans. There’s no money in it.”
“Maybe I can convert him,” Shawn said.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Caradas said. “I wouldn’t count on that at all.”
Sunny Swanson looked tired, but when she saw Shawn O’Brien she merely looked angry. “Are you here to gloat again?” she said.
“You know what’s happened to this town, Sunny?” Hamp Sedley said.
“Should I care? I’m a whore and that’s how this burg treated me . . . like a whore. I don’t give a damn if the whole place burns to the ground.”
“There must be people in this town who never did you any harm,” Shawn said.
“Name them,” Sunny said. Then, “Burt is awake, but he’s still not right in the head. He says he’s being haunted by men with no skins and they scare him. It’s hard to understand him because Dr. Walsh still has his jaw bound up tight. But he says there’s gold in the Rattlesnake Hills and Thomas Clouston is trying to steal it from him.”
Sedley snapped his fingers. “Damn it, now I remember something that’s been bothering me. Shawn, you recall hearing the name Last Chance Pike, a prospector from over New Mexico way?”
“I think I heard my father or one of my brothers mention that name. Maybe it was Jake. He knows everybody.”
“Pike had two simple sons and a wayward daughter. None of them came to any good, and I recollect that the youngest boy was hung. Or was it the oldest? I can’t—”
“Hamp, where are you going with this?” Shawn asked, a tinge of urgency in his voice. “I have to talk to Becker.”
“I’m sneaking up on it, Shawn. A few years back when I was dealing faro in Abilene I heard Pike tell another tinpan that if you can find yourself a belt of greenstone, you can find mineable gold. Then he talked about how much gold you can take from a good-sized seam.”
Shawn opened his mouth to speak but Sedley silenced him with a raised hand. “There’s a massive belt of greenstone in the Rattlesnake Hills. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
“How come you noticed but nobody else did?” Shawn said. “I didn’t see any green-colored stone.”
“Pike gave me an eye for it. The seam is well hidden at the base of an overhung rock face, and that makes for mighty dangerous digging. If a man’s not careful, the whole damn hill could come down on top of him. Now maybe others did see the greenstone, but to mine a worthwhile amount of gold, you’d have to shift thousands and thousands of tons of rock.”
“How much gold would be in that seam you saw, according to what Pike told you?” Shawn said.
“From what I remember, I’d say at least a million ounces, maybe more.”
Shawn stood in thought for a while, then said, “That’s over thirty tons of gold, about twenty million dollars’ worth. There are men who would kill for that.”
“A man like Clouston would,” Sedley said. “He’s proved that already.” He smiled. “How did you calculate that tonnage so easy?”
“I’ve got a head for figures,” Shawn said. Then to Sunny, “Does Becker know there’s that much gold in the hills?”
“Sure he does,” the girl said. “But he never thought it through like Clouston did. Why do you think Clouston moved the Chinese?”
“Of course. To work the mine for him,” Shawn said.
“The Chinese work hard and they work cheap,” Sunny said. “Clouston stands to get rich, even if he moves the ore out by train and pays to get it crushed somewhere else.”
“And it has to be kept secret until the Chinese cut out all the greenstone. If the news of a strike got out there could be a gold rush,” Sedley said. “That’s why he wanted everyone gone from Broken Bridle.”
“Seems like he got his wish,” Sunny said. “The whole town is going to up and leave.”
“Not if I can help it,” Shawn said. “Now I want to talk to Becker.”
“Follow me,” Sunny said. “I moved his guns out of the way, O’Brien. He planned to shoot you on sight.”
C
HAPTER FORTY-ONE
Burt Becker, looking more than ever like a huge rabbit because of the bandage tied on top of his head, saw Shawn O’Brien and growled. He cast around frantically before Shawn removed a Colt from the big man’s shoulder holsters and said, “Is this what you’re looking for, Burt?”
Shawn spun the revolver, smiled, and shoved it back into the holster.
“Sunny moved the guns over here out of your way,” he said. “She thought you might do yourself an injury.”
“I’ll kill you, O’Brien,” Becker said, gritting out the words between clenched teeth.
“Don’t get overexcited, Burt,” Sedley said. “We’re here to talk peace.”
Becker’s red eyes glared at Sunny and he gestured wildly to his guns on the table beside the door, an angry question on his face.
“Burt, you can’t use guns,” Sunny said. “You’re not ready yet.”
Becker let out a frustrated wail and tried to swing his feet off the cot. But suddenly Shawn’s Colt was in his hand and his face was stern.
“Burt, make a move toward your guns and I’ll drop you right where you stand,” he said. “Don’t think about it, and don’t try me.”
Becker was mad clean through, but he read the writing on the wall and stayed right where he was.
“Did Sunny tell you what happened last night?” Shawn said.
“I haven’t told him yet,” Sunny said.
“The good citizens of Broken Bridle tried to drive Clouston out of the hills,” Shawn said. “They lost thirteen men and now the folks who are left are pulling out. This town is dying, Becker.”
Shawn saw in the big man’s eyes that there was no point on playing on his compassion. He had none.
“Clouston plans to attack this town and kill everyone in sight,” Shawn said. “And he will, unless you and your men are willing to stand up to him.”
As he knew he would, Becker shook his head, and when he looked at Shawn his eyes were filled with murder.
Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter Page 16
