Jim Saddler 2

by Gene Curry

  I raised my rifle and waited for the end. I was still waiting when suddenly, from the direction of John Wingate’s ranch, came the thunder of bunched-up horses moving fast.

  Now the attackers were running for their horses, and we helped them on their way with a rain of bullets. I got two men in the back, the girl got another. One man turned to shoot back, and I nailed him too. The girl kept on shooting after I stopped. That was how she was, a genuine hard case, as I was to learn before long. I didn’t want to do any more killing till I knew what it was all about.

  I threw down my guns and had my hands raised before Wingate’s riders came to the edge of the gully.

  “Do the same,” I ordered the girl.

  She didn’t like it, but she did it.

  Dust boiled up as they rode in, more than twenty of them; the same number of rifles pointed at us from the north side of the gully. A tall tough rider with a long jaw and a red face divided by a thick mustache skidded his horse down the side of the gully, holding a rifle in one hand. He threw a quick look at the girl, but most of his interest was in me.

  “You’d be who?” he said in a Texas drawl. He was the ramrod.

  “Jim Saddler. John Wingate sent for me.”

  The rifle didn’t move from my chest. “So you say.”

  “Why don’t you ask John?”

  He was making up his mind about me when the line of horsemen opened up—and there was John Wingate in the flesh, what there was of it, tall and skinny as ever. John was born skinny and got skinnier every year he lived. His horse was as lean as he was, though I’m sure that wasn’t intentional. Men and horses have a way of getting to look alike, even more so than old married couples.

  John started laughing his high-pitched laugh when he saw me in the bottom of the gully with my hands up. “What are you doing down there, Saddler? Don’t tell me—you came and you brought a friend.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” the girl said.

  John said, “Trouble always rides out and meets you, doesn’t it Saddler. Here you are, not even a day in the county and you’re killing men. Couldn’t you have waited until I told you what it was all about?”

  Old John had a curious sense of humor; a few dead men meant nothing to him. He let the girl ride on ahead with the others and, you might say, all the hands were taking a real interest in her. Only a liar would deny that she was great looking, though I still had the uneasy feeling that she meant trouble.

  “Who’s the young lady?” John asked. “Are you acquainted, or did you just happen along at the same time?”

  I said I had no idea who she was. “I was riding along toward your place when I ran across her trading shots with two men. I came close to getting killed. One thing for sure—she’s got a mean temper.”

  “I guess she’ll tell us who she is later,” John said. “I wonder what she’s doing out here alone?”

  “You want to tell me about the trouble now, or wait?” I said.

  “Just as soon wait,” John said. “It’s not a long story, but it pains me to tell it. Come on now, and we’ll get some grub on the table. All that excitement made me hungry.”

  I said, “If you don’t mind me saying so, John, the place looks sort of rundown.”

  We were close to the main house. The last time I’d been there a well-watered flower garden—hardy plants to stand the fierce Arizona sun—bloomed in front of the porch. Now the flowers were withered, most of them gone. The place was clean and tidy, but still had a neglected air, as if the people who lived there had their minds on other things.

  “I know it’s rundown,” John said, “but as soon as I get this business out of the way I’ll get the place as shipshape as it ever was. It’s a hell of a thing when a ranch has to suffer because of the sheer, brazen cussedness of one man. One thick, bone-headed fool.”

  John spat to stress how bone-headed this unnamed bonehead was.

  I knew he wasn’t talking about himself. But you couldn’t rush John, not even if you put blinkers on him.

  John went on. “There are some people who just don’t know how to be reasonable. You give them your side of the argument, the reasonable side, and they suddenly go stone deaf, not to mention blind—and they call mules dumb. A mule couldn’t hold a candle to a certain Johnny Reb I’ll be talking about later. As soon as we get some food on the table. I’m mad, Jim, but I’m not going to let that spoil my appetite. We’re going to dig into the biggest meal you ever saw, then we’ll talk. I take it you’re hungry?”

  That was the most sensible thing he had said so far.

  Chapter Three

  The last time I’d been in John Wingate’s house there were two flags over the big stone fireplace in the main room: Union and Confederate. Now the Rebel banner was gone, and so was the steel engraving of Robert E. Lee; but Abe Lincoln still reigned supreme.

  We were sitting at the big carved table, and John watched with disgust while I drank three glasses of cold spring water before we started on the thick dark rum. A diehard New Englander after forty years in the West, John drank nothing but Caldwell’s Old Newburyport Rum, from the town of the same name in Massachusetts. Of course it hadn’t always been like that; when he was scrambling to make a living in the years gone by, he drank anything he could get, and was glad to get it. Now he was rich enough to have the beloved rum of his youth shipped all the way from the East.

  “Now for the good stuff,” John said, uncorking the dark-brown quart bottle. “My father drank it and his father before him. And I plan to be buried with a full bottle in my coffin.”

  He filled our glasses to the brim, and asked the girl—she still hadn’t volunteered her name—if she wanted a drink.

  “Sure I do,” she said.

  “Say when,” John said.

  “Right to the top,” she said.

  One of John’s two fat Navaho women was washing the girl’s wound with hot water. It was just a crease. John always kept two Navaho women, fat and pleasant looking, on the premises at all times, now that his wife was dead. They kept changing every five years, but there were always two, never more than that, and they were always fat.

  John recruited his ladies around the age of thirty-five—women younger than that were too flighty, in John’s opinion—and he pensioned them off at forty. At that point he gave them a hearty thank you, a hundred dollars in gold, and sent them back to the reservation. He favored Navahos because they were the most peaceful of all Indians; of course they hadn’t always been like that, but they were now.

  I hadn’t seen John for five years, and this one, Laughing Woman, was new to me. She poured alcohol into the wound and bandaged it.

  The girl came over to the table to get her rum. Hard drinker though he was, old John raised his bushy eyebrows when she drank half of it in two swallows.

  “That’s the spirit, girl,” he said admiringly.

  That offended her, something that wasn’t hard to do.

  “Don’t call me ‘girl.’ My name is Jessie Howard, and I can drink as well as any man and shoot as straight and fast as any man.”

  John filled his glass and said amiably, “That’s all right, Miss Howard. Nobody’s asking you to prove yourself.”

  “Call me Jessie, Mr. Wingate.”

  “Jessie it is then. You want a sling for that arm.”

  The girl scorned the idea. “Don’t need it. Even if I did it wouldn’t make any difference. I can shoot as good with one hand as the other.”

  John’s mouth was pulled down at the corners, trying hard to keep his smile from spreading. “Do tell,” he said.

  “I do tell,” she said.

  I wondered where the hell she had come from, where she was going. It was just a thought, and I didn’t dwell on it.

  After the two Indian women got through steaming up the kitchen, they brought in a piled-up platter of the biggest onion-smothered beefsteaks you ever saw. It took them a while to load the long table with mashed potatoes and turnips running with butter, three kinds of beans, hot appl
e pie and canned peaches, and gallons of good fresh coffee.

  I grinned at John. “Why so stingy with the grub?”

  “There’s more where that came from, Saddler. I call this a light lunch.”

  John began to pile his plate with food. That was the funny thing about John: he ate like a glutton but never gained an ounce. A small potbelly was all he showed for his efforts at the table.

  For a New England Yankee John was pretty talky, but not while he was eating. He took it as seriously as he did making money, and that was fine with me. After most of a week in the saddle I was ready to leave talking for later.

  John ate twice what I did, three times as much as the girl, and still managed to finish first.

  “Well now, that wasn’t too bad,” he declared, unbuttoning the top button of his pants, the only concession to the amount of food he had put away. Watching him, the two Navaho women giggled.

  All that eating didn’t make John sleepy; food fired him up like corkwood under a boiler. I knew old John Wingate—originally from Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts—wasn’t the drawling, good-natured man some people thought him to be, but I’ve met a lot worse.

  Building a big Arizona spread took more than a slow smile and a fondness for Indian women. You could have formed a platoon of ghosts from the men who had died under his gun. Still, he wasn’t any harder than he had to be. I’d known the bare-boned Yank going on ten years—we had traded a few favors—and nobody could say he didn’t set a good table.

  A snap of his fingers fetched good black Mexican cheroots. “Don’t suppose you smoke, Jessie.”

  “You suppose wrong, Mr. Wingate.”

  John lit the cheroot for her before he set fire to his own. He watched her while she blew smoke at the ceiling; she did it defiantly as if somebody intended to object.

  Clouding his head in smoke, John stretched his long frame in his high-backed chair. He seemed at peace with the world, but I knew different. I hadn’t asked him about his old partner, Vince Pardee, and I wasn’t about to. That had to be why he had sent for me; I’d hear about it when he was ready.

  John poured rum to top off the meal. Laughing Woman was still hanging around, and he waved her away, giving her a wink at the same time. She giggled, and no wonder they called her Laughing Woman.

  “I suppose you want to know what I’m doing in these parts,” the girl said. “That’s only natural.’

  “Not here, Jessie. Here we don’t ask questions.”

  “I still think you should know, Mr. Wingate.”

  “Call me John. Everybody else does.”

  “I can’t do that, Mr. Wingate. You’re a real old man.”

  That was the wrong thing to say to any old man, especially John. For years his age had been a sore spot, and he swore he’d die with a bellyful of rum, a fat Indian woman under him, and a smile on his face. If the girl had been a boy he would have knocked her across the room with the back of his hand. Now all he said was, “You could use some manners, missy.”

  Jessie Howard, if such her name really was, got up so fast the chair fell over. “I can’t pay you for the food, Mr. Wingate. I’ll send it when I get the money. So long, Mr. Wingate. You too, Saddler.”

  “Write every chance you get,” I said. I liked her in a left-handed way, and the way she looked had everything to do with it. Underneath the pants and the hard eyes there lurked a woman. I could easily see us together, in bed with our clothes off, the door locked, and a long sweet night ahead. Even so, I knew she was trouble. I wanted her to go and I wanted her to stay. You know how it is.

  I was wondering how far she’d get in dangerous country without a friend and no money. John, I guess, was thinking along the same lines, or maybe he was mooning about the favorite daughter he’d lost some years back. He hadn’t lost her to a sickness but to a smooth-talking salesman who had happened on the place with his stock of wares.

  It was a short, sad story; it hadn’t come to me from John. Somebody else told it to me. The girl, Hannah, had stolen all the money and valuables in the house to set this fly-by-night up in business in San Francisco. He ditched her when they got there and, ashamed to come home, she died in a whorehouse on the Barbary Coast. John went to bring home the body and while he was at it he found the man and killed him.

  He never talked about Hannah except at the sour end of an all night drunk.

  Jessie Howard was buckling on her small-sized gunbelt, taking her time about it. It was plain she didn’t want to leave. Against good judgment I didn’t want her to leave either. I should have helped her on her way by any means I knew how, but I didn’t, and I have to take the blame for that.

  “You, girl,” John roared. “Take off that damned gun and sit down. You got a hotter head than I do. Sit down, do what I tell you, girl.”

  This time she didn’t object to being called ‘girl.’ She sat down and picked up her half-smoked cheroot.

  “That’s better,” John said. “Now be quiet for a spell. I’ve got some talking to do.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Wingate.”

  After that she stayed quiet.

  John started to tell me about Vince Pardee, something I had come a long way to hear.

  “The hell of it is me and Vince been partners for close to twenty-five years. We both came to these parts about the same time. I wasn’t doing so well, neither was Vince, so we threw in together. There were still plenty of hard times after that, but together, the two of us, we did fine. Did better than that as the years went along. Funny thing is we didn’t have any fallings out till the money really started to roll in. I’m no saint, but I’d have to say most of the fault was on his side. You know Vince, Saddler. Let me ask you a question: Did you ever know a more cantankerous man?”

  I did, but I wasn’t ready to say who he was.

  “My name isn’t really Jessie Howard,” the girl said, cutting in on John’s flow of words.

  John’s thin Yankee mouth dropped open. “What?” he said, not knowing what he was supposed to think.

  I could understand his surprise. Here we were talking about important business and here was this girl from nowhere, good looking or not, telling us about something that didn’t matter a damn to anybody but herself. I wasn’t too surprised because I was starting to recognize the kind of outrageous gall she had.

  Getting over his surprise, John said, “You don’t have to tell us, girl. Out here a lot of men—and women—don’t go by the names they were first saddled with.”

  Ignoring that, she said, “My real name is James. My father changed it to Howard when he started using that name himself. He even did it legal in the courts.”

  “Fine,” John said agreeably, still not getting it. But I did.

  “Jesse James,” I said.

  “What?” John said, a little befuddled by rum.

  Then she let the rat out of the cage. “Jesse James was my father. They shot him down like a dog, but they won’t do me the same way.”

  John looked at me. “You hear what she’s saying, Saddler? The daughter of Jesse James!”

  “I heard her,” I said.

  Suddenly John began to laugh, a high-pitched yelp. “You’re joshing me, girl!”

  Clumsily, old John searched his rum-soaked brain for clues to the past, old newspaper stories, faded rewarded posters tacked up in railroad depots, mournful ballads about the passing of the great Missouri outlaw. Returning to the present, he said, “But Jesse didn’t have a daughter.”

  The girl bolstered her argument with more rum. “Nobody but his family and a few friends knew he did. Why do you think he took the name Howard? That was my mother’s name. Jane Howard was her name. She was a beautiful woman, descended from the kings of Scotland, she once told me, and she came from Joplin, Missouri.”

  The girl’s blue eyes bored into John’s doubtful look. “It’s true, Mr. Wingate. You don’t have to believe me sir, but it’s true. My father and mother knew great happiness, but she died all too soon. My father took her name when he was forced t
o go into hiding. He knew the bankers and the railroad men would murder him sooner or later, so he wanted me to have her name. He wanted none of his so-called shame to attach itself to me.”

  For John’s sake I asked, “Why did you tell us just now?”

  “Because I’m not ashamed of my father’s name. I’ve been living a lie for too long. I loved my father and I’m not ashamed of him. I only wish he could still be alive. I would ride by his side, fight by his side. What good is a daughter if she doesn’t stand by her father. I only wish O’Kelly hadn’t found Bob Ford and killed him before I did.”

  Well, she had the names right, and that didn’t mean a thing. Bob Ford and O’Kelley were both members of the James Gang. Ford had shot Jesse in the back and, some years later, O’Kelley, one of Jesse’s cousins, had caught up with Ford in Creed, Colorado, and blew him to bits with a shotgun in front of his saloon.

  And she could have read all that in the newspapers.

  John had enough rum in him to like what she said about a daughter standing fast by her father. I guess he was thinking of his dead daughter, Hannah, who hadn’t stayed with him. Even so, John was a hardhead and he wanted to know more about it.

  “What are you doing here, girl?” he asked. “These men Saddler and you killed worked for Pardee. I know what Saddler was doing crossing Pardee’s land, but what about you? Did they jump you or what? I thought Pardee had his men on a short rein.”

  Jessie James said, “I told them where I went was my business. They said I was on Pardee range and warned me to go back. I told them what they could do. You said two. That’s not right. There were four when they came at me. They didn’t jump me, I jumped them. I killed two and took off from there. They chased me and I would have got away if they hadn’t shot my pony.”

  “That’s when Saddler came along,” John said.

  “Nobody asked him to.”

  “Keep a civil tongue, girl. The way it’s been told to me Saddler saved your life. You don’t feel a debt for that?”