Ralph Compton Tucker's Reckoning (9781101607770)

by Compton, Ralph; Mayo, Matthew P.

  The marshal turned away. “I am done listening to your sad conjurings. Save the rest for the judge.”

  Tucker watched the man’s broad back retreat up the short hall. He reached the door and paused, his back facing Tucker.

  “What is it you are afraid of hearing from me, Marshal?” Tucker’s voice, full and sonorous, the only thing not thin about him, echoed in the otherwise empty cells.

  The lawman cranked the skeleton key in the mechanism and just before he pulled the ring handle, he said, “You keep this up and there will be very little of you left to hang . . . provided the judge can make it here in time.” His voice was cold.

  From the other side, he settled the door, locked it, and soon Tucker heard the front door of the law office open and close. There was nothing working in his favor, everything working in the marshal’s. And that’s all it would take to convince anyone who might need convincing that his neck should snap like a carrot.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Grissom looked at the two men in his employ and shook his head. “My word, I didn’t think that after last night you two sorry cases could look any worse. But I was wrong.”

  Rummler held one side of his forehead as if it were cracked porcelain and he was waiting for the glue to dry. “It wasn’t our fault. Chasing down a . . . horse thief. Right, Vollo?”

  “More likely a filly. And if it’s the one I suspect it is, you watch your step there. That filly bites and I haven’t given you any orders in that direction—you hear me?”

  The men nodded and Grissom watched as Vollo worked the brim of his grimy hat. The fat man knew what was coming, but he liked to see the lead-up to it, just the same.

  “We are finding this town expensive, as you know. There is food, and horses need shoes . . . These things are . . .” He shook his head, looking for the word.

  “Expensive?”

  “Yes, Mr. Grissom. That is the word. So I am glad you see what I mean, eh?”

  “I don’t quite understand what you are trying to tell me, Raoul. Would you like to start a business? As a farrier, perhaps?”

  Vollo looked as if he’d been slapped. “Oh no. I don’t even know what that is, but I don’t think I would like that. What I need is—”

  “Oh, shut up, Vollo.” Rummler winced as he raised his own voice. “What we need is our money, Mr. Grissom. You know, for what we done yesterday. That paper and all.”

  “Aaah, now I see. I thought for a moment there that all my businesses in this town would soon be challenged by two savvy new merchants. But I see now that I was mistaken. I breathe a sigh of relief, sirs, at this satisfying turn of events.”

  “I swear, Mr. Grissom, you ought to go into politics. You got all the fancy patter down flat. I have heard a few of them statesmen palaver here and there in meetinghouses and saloons and on the street and such. I always make a point to listen, though I have no idea what it is they go on and on about. You got the gift, sir, and no mistake.”

  Grissom smiled broadly, tilted his head, and nodded. It was true he could wax eloquent at times, he knew as much, but even from someone such as Rummler, it was a pleasure to hear.

  As he counted cash into two stacks before them on his desktop, it occurred to him that perhaps Rummler was a deeper pool than he had earlier surmised. The man, he felt sure, had been stroking his feathers to get their money out of him as painlessly as possible.

  He pushed the money toward them. If I don’t have them killed before they spend it, he thought, I will surely recoup the investment in my saloon.

  As they pocketed their payments, grinning and wincing with each movement, Vollo indulged in a moan. “I am so sore today. I need a drink.”

  Rummler nodded slowly.

  “Your sore head or elbow or backside is of no concern to me. What I am concerned with is that drunk in the marshal’s cage. I want him dead.” He watched the two men smile through their wounded faces and lopsided gauze wrappings. “Just not yet.”

  “Not yet? Why forever not, Mr. Grissom?” Rummler squinted at him as though he were having a hard time making out just where Grissom stood.

  “Because Marshal Hart is no fool. If he senses a reason why he needs to keep that boy alive, though it is a reason he won’t share with me, then I want to go along with it—for a little while. But my patience only wears so thin.”

  “Well,” said Rummler, “just tell us when your patience reaches its end, and we’ll snap it for you.”

  “Bold talk for a quivering, wounded wreck. But we’ll see. For now, I’d like you two to do what you are good at.”

  “That would be drinking, boss,” said Vollo, offering Rummler a wink that looked as though it cost him physically just to execute it.

  “The thing to which I refer is leaning against the porch post and making sure that nothing happens at the marshal’s office without me knowing about it. Understand?”

  The two men nodded, and Grissom could see on their faces that this simple task sat well with them.

  Then Vollo asked the inevitable question. “What sort of things?”

  Grissom sighed. “Anything, you fool. Anything at all. If the marshal leaves, I want to know. If he stays, I want to know. If a blowfly lands on the roof, I want to know. Am I clear?”

  Again, the two stared at him as if he’d just asked them to run naked through the street. He shook his head, then motioned them to leave as if he were waving away a bad smell—partly true in their case. The door had nearly closed when he shouted after them, “And no drinking on the job.”

  He smiled as he heard their low moans.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  It was dark early the next morning when Emma woke. She was cold, her muscles were sore, and as the previous day’s events came to her, she rolled onto her side in the little bedroom she’d slept in her entire life. She usually hated to stay in bed, preferred to get the day moving, but today there seemed little point. She was alone in the house now. Arliss kept to himself in his quarters in the lean-to built onto the side of the barn. She knew she should get up, but the effort seemed too much for her.

  Then the faint, strong tang of coffee on the boil reached her. Arliss had come in, tended the stove, and put on coffee to boil. That old man was too good to her. Especially considering she had fallen asleep the night before to the far-off rhythmic sound of his hammer blows and rasping saw as he worked to build her uncle a proper coffin. He was a skilled carpenter, and she knew it gave him grim pleasure to be able to do this last thing for his friend, but she hoped Arliss hadn’t overdone it. He was no spring chicken, as he liked to remind anyone in earshot.

  She stretched, flexed her back and arms, and lightly touched the kerchief around her throat. It held in place the bandage Arliss had insisted she keep on the back of her neck where the bullet had grazed her. The nick was tender, but not enough to slow her down.

  She dressed in her dirty clothes from the evening before and topped them with a wool sweater and fresh wool socks for her feet. She laid out on her bed a buckskin riding skirt and cotton blouse, suitable attire for a funeral. But first, she would have to dig her uncle’s grave up beside her mother and father. It would be a long chore but one that needed doing. And one that she felt she needed to do—her own last effort for her uncle. Arliss would argue with her, but she would not let him down in that hole. He had done more than enough.

  As she entered the small cabin’s main room, Emma avoided looking at the blanket-draped form of her uncle laid out on the table. She had told Louisa that they intended to bury her uncle today, after the noon hour, so Emma was sure men would come later to help place him in the coffin, then carry him up back to the plot where her mother and father were buried.

  The morning was a chill one, with a cold rain just beginning to fall. Emma tugged on an old slicker hanging on a peg by the back door and headed to the two-holer behind the house. S
he caught sight of Arliss limping his way back to the house from the barn and waved a hand, but he had his mackinaw canopied over his head and didn’t see her.

  By the time she got back to the kitchen, he had two cups of hot coffee poured and was warming what was left of last night’s biscuits. He looked rough, dark eyed, and older than he usually did. Tired or heartsick? More likely both.

  Finally he spoke, his voice a croaking sound he hoped was more early-morning frog in the throat than a sign of coming sickness. “I’ve built a right pretty box for him to rest in. I expect he’d like something a bit grander, but it’s what we got.”

  Emma tried to smile, said nothing. Arliss knew full well that her uncle Payton didn’t have a fancy bone in his body. A plain box, especially one built by Arliss, suited him perfectly. Right down to the ground, he would say. And in it too, she thought, wincing at the apt thought.

  She finished her coffee, set the cup in the dry sink, and tugged on her coat. “I expect I’ll get started on the grave. This rain will soften the soil, but it could hinder if I wait too long.”

  As she suspected, Arliss bolted down his coffee and biscuit. “I should do that, Emma. It ain’t no work for a—”

  Her look stopped him from saying “girl,” as it always did.

  “I’d like to help,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “Of course.”

  The rain made the initial digging easier, having loosened the hard-packed earth, but then it continued, cold drops pelting down, running off their hat brims. By that time they were nearly five feet down, and the bottom of the hole was a muddy soup. Arliss had long before crawled out and worked the edges to keep the rain from slumping the dug soil back into the hole. They finished just before the first wagon from town arrived.

  Over the next hour, buggies and single horses and buckboards filled with townsfolk all arrived, their raised arms tenting tarpaulins over their heads, the oiled cloth shedding most of the wet. They angled their rigs off to the sides of the long, narrow lane to the homestead. The men stood in groups in the barn, dressed in their best bib and tucker. Women and children brought baskets of food to the house, kept a near silence on their chatter, out of respect. Mostly, though, people could not understand what had happened—over and over the words “stranger” and “makes no sense” and eventually “Grissom” came out.

  Soon Emma could no longer bear being in the house. Cleaned up and dressed in her clean clothes, her long hair loosened, mostly to hide the bandage at the nape of her neck—she definitely did not feel like talking about her adventure of the night before—she went to the barn, nodding politely at the looks of sad concern directed her way from all the men. Arliss was busy in the back corner, talking to some of the men in a harsh tone, and didn’t see her as she approached. He sounded angry, as if he were scolding the men.

  “Arliss, I think it’s time.”

  He looked at her, nodded rabbit-quick, and silently walked to the coffin he’d made, other men assembling around it. Then they all trailed Emma to the house.

  The men brought the box, the fitted cover, and a hammer and nails to the house. Arliss had laid out Payton on his own quilt, one made for him long years before by an ancient relative. It was a beautiful piece of handwork and some of the ladies clucked quietly, about such stitchery going to bury a man, never to be seen or appreciated again, but they caught reproachful glares and quieted themselves.

  They all filed past, said their piece, and then Arliss and Emma did so. She managed to keep from breaking down before all those people, people she’d known her entire life. Some of them she liked, some not as much. But all of them had genuinely liked her uncle, dozens of them, so many that Emma was convinced, looking around the place, that most of the town’s residents were there.

  The one whose absence surprised her was Marshal Hart. She asked Arliss about it, but before he could answer, Louisa overheard. She’d been told he would miss the funeral because he was afraid that in his absence, given the anger of the townsfolk the night before, some stragglers might take it into their heads to lynch the man.

  Cold rain chilled them all to the bone as they stood clustered about the grave four and five people deep. The man who ran the town newspaper, Wilfred Tinker, a friend and poker pal of Payton’s, read a passage from Shakespeare that Emma was surprised to learn had been a favorite author of her uncle’s. Emma vowed to read more, as her uncle and father had forever nagged her about. Then six men overhanded the ropes until the casket settled with a gentle splash in the last six inches to the bottom of the hole, water rising on it. They would make a marker later, as her father had done for her mother, and they had done for her father. They’d had the advantage then of Payton’s immense strength to help sledge out the large, flat rock that Arliss chiseled her father’s name into.

  After the service, as they all trailed back down off the little hill toward the house and barn, someone said, “Month from now, this rain’ll come down as snow.” There were a few murmurs of agreement, and then they all went back to talking quietly in the barn until the women called them all in for a stand-up meal. Seeing them all there made Emma both grateful and tired. She appreciated their support, but wished they would all go home.

  There was little said that night. She and Arliss sat by the fireplace, too bone tired and too numbed from all that had happened to do much more than shake their heads and watch the flames dissipate into glowing coals. Then they too dwindled.

  In the dark room, Arliss’s voice surprised her. “You had your uncle here last night. I expect I’ll stay tonight. Lord knows what them two craven devils will do.”

  Emma knew he meant Vollo and Rummler. She was too tired to argue, but she was curious about something. “When I went out to the barn earlier, it sounded to me as if you were chewing out those men from town. Was I just hearing things?”

  He sat for a long moment, and she’d begun to think he’d dozed off when he said, “I was givin’ them all what for, yessir. Trying to get them to do something for me—for your uncle. And to a man they said they would do anything for me, for your uncle. But not what I was askin’.”

  She almost hated to ask, but she had to know. “What did you ask them, Arliss?”

  “I count a good many of them folks who come here today as my friends. Or at least I did. But not a one of them will raise a finger against Grissom.” He looked at her for the first time in long minutes. “I asked them boys to help me take care of Grissom’s boys, Vollo and Rummler. And do you know, they hemmed and hawed and whined about their bank loans and children’s safety and their houses and businesses? My word, you’d think Grissom owns everything under the sun.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “No, girl!” He smacked a gnarled old hand against the worn armrest of the rocker, the runners working as if part of a machine. “That’s where you’re wrong. Man like Grissom can grab everything he can see and it will never be enough for him. But it won’t be everything. No, no, ’cause what a person’s got that can’t be bought is in here.”

  He tapped his temple again, as Emma had seen him do a thousand times before when he was trying to prove a point. “And here,” he said, thumping a fist against his own chest so hard she thought he might pop something. “I’m talking spirit and fight and that thing deep inside that tells us if what we’re doing is right or wrong. You see what I mean?”

  She nodded.

  He looked back at the dying glow of the fire. “But them folks who live in town, they got nothing but fear in their hearts and heads. And that ain’t no way to live. I was hoping to stir them up. But the fear’s got ’em too hard, too deep. Even when they know something’s wrong, they’re too afraid to do anything about it.” His voice grew quiet and she barely heard him when he said, “Have to do it myself.”

  She wanted to tell him not to do anything foolish, but with Arliss, she knew telling him not to do something was just l
ike begging him to do it. And besides, there was a part of her—and she didn’t mind admitting it to herself—that wanted to see Vollo and Rummler squirm, then die.

  She shook her head. “Daddy’s bed is all made up, you know.”

  “I know, I know.” His rocking chair worked faster. “I might settle down there later. Right now I’ll set a spell. But you look about ready to slide off that chair and hit your head. Best you get to bed, girl.”

  She rose and hugged him before he could get up. Then covered him with a wool blanket, and kissed his bald forehead. “Good night, Arliss. Thank you for . . . everything.”

  “You’re near as kin as I got.” His voice was low and watery. “I’m thankful for you, girl.”

  Emma squeezed his shoulder, then went to bed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Hundreds of miles to the south, along a rail line in Nevada, thick chains rattled as a ramp lowered from the middle of a stock car. The angle was steep, but two great black horses picked their way down with ease, each led by a man wearing a black hat and black duster. The horses carried identical flat black saddles, saddlebags, and sheaths for long guns.

  A third horse, an Appaloosa, followed, led by a man of thirty-five years, dark blond hair worn fashionably long, as was his matching waxed-and-curled-at-the-end mustache, daggered chin hair, and bushed sideburns; a thick cigar jutted from beneath the mustache. His horse carried a richly carved dark brown leather rig, a single rifle boot, and a war bag lashed securely behind the cantle. This third man was spotlessly dapper, his knee-height boots shone with a high polish, and he wore a cream-colored jacket trimmed in leather, starched white shirt, string tie, and all topped with a fawn hat. He bore the look of a man who makes his money by pointing and nodding.

  When all three men were assembled trackside, the third man wagged a brown-leather-gloved hand at the ramp, and the stock car’s attendant, who cranked hard from inside the car on a ratcheting handle, raised the ramp. The three men did not wait for the train to gather steam and resume its journey.