The Edge of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  That letter had arrived during the War to Save the Union. It, too, had been delivered to Bridger’s Fort, which had been forwarded on to Reno’s own post. Took probably six months for the letter to reach Jed Reno.

  It wasn’t much of a letter, either. Tim Colter had been marshaling in Oregon—a federal job—before he had joined the army. He said he doubted if he would stay in the army, and as soon as the war ended—by then, from everything Reno was hearing, that would not take too long—he would return to being a lawman. He did say one of the scouts reminded him of Reno, which was why he had taken pencil to hand to check up on his old mentor.

  “Mentor”: Reno had asked a dragoon what that word meant. It had made him smile.

  Something else in that letter had made Reno blow his nose, although he blamed it on the dust and cold. Colter and his wife had three children. The oldest was a boy, twelve years old when Tim had written the letter. The kid’s name was Jed. Named after “my dear old friend, loyal comrade, teacher, mentor, hero.”

  Reno looked at the Harper’s Weekly.

  The story said that Colter, who had single-handedly wiped out an outlaw gang led by some cutthroat named Rose, was a widower. A disease—that word Reno could not make out—had taken Colter’s wife and three kids back in ’65. Every time Jed Reno read over that passage, his chest tightened. The boy Tim had named after Jed Reno . . . he was dead.

  Reno inhaled deeply, and made himself stand. He went back into the trading post, to the counter, found his ledger, and ripped out a blank page in the back. He figured he was just drunk enough to write a letter. Probably be the first letter he had ever written, and his last.

  When he had suggested Tim Colter as the lawman of Violence, all he had known about his old traveling pard was that Colter had been a federal marshal in Oregon. But the way that magazine story put things, Colter was a good lawman. Well, Reno made himself smile, the boy had one good teacher twenty-odd years ago.

  Reno cursed himself. Two letters Tim Colter had written, but Jed Reno had never written the boy back. Colter probably figured Reno was six feet under by now. Reno looked at what he had written: Dear Tim. He looked back at the canvas opening to the dugout part of the post. He thought about wadding up the ledger paper and tossing it into the stove. Jed Reno was not one to beg. And he was not the kind of man to bring a friend into a situation that could get that boy killed.

  “They asked me to be that lawman,” Reno said to himself.

  He looked at the pencil in his hand, at the misshapen knuckles. Hell, it hurt him just to stand here, and he was leaning against the counter. He knew he had been right to turn down that job offer. “I’m an old man. Seventy years. More than seventy.”

  Again, he looked at the paper, the pencil.

  “Hell’s fire,” he said. And he began to scratch out a few more words.

  CHAPTER 12

  This wasn’t Tim Colter’s favorite place in Salem, Oregon.

  Guards armed with Spencer repeating rifles marched along fourteen-foot-high concrete walls, with cupolas on the corners housing more guards, and more guns. The main brick building, two stories, looked foreboding itself, and a tall iron fence surrounded it. The Oregon State Penitentiary had been completed back in 1866, replacing the original pen in Portland. It was a state prison, of course, but Oregon had no federal penitentiary, so federal prisoners were also confined here.

  Colter stood in the warden’s office, watching two guards lock a Gardner Shackle on Jake Long’s right leg. One iron band locked just above Long’s ankle, with braces coming down from the sides and underneath the heel of the shoe. This one, Warden J.C. Gardner bragged, weighed only eighteen pounds.

  “Get used to it, boy.” Standing behind his desk, Gardner smiled. “Some of my inventions weigh close to thirty pounds. But that’s for the real bad boys.”

  Long glanced at Colter, who kept his eyes locked on the warden. One of the guards placed a heavy key, used to lock the boot into place, into his jacket pocket. Then both guards escorted the prisoner out. Jake Long walked like a man who had suffered a stroke. Hardly any balance. And Colter knew that iron band and braces would be wearing through the denim trousers and woolen socks, rubbing Long’s skin raw.

  “Is that necessary, Warden?” Colter asked once the last guard had closed the door.

  “You know how many prisoners escaped, Marshal, before I came up with my shackle?” The warden did not wait for Colter’s response. “They don’t run anymore.”

  Colter shook his head, picked the receipt for the delivery of Jake Long to the Oregon pen off the warden’s desk, and headed for the door.

  “Just a moment, Colter,” the warden called out.

  Keeping his hand on the doorknob, Colter turned back.

  “I’m glad it was you who brought in our latest guest.” J.C. Gardner stood over his desk, sorting through a pile of mail. “This came yesterday.” He pulled up a crumpled, wet and then dried, well-worn tan envelope. “I was going to give it to the deputy who brought in Mr. Long to hand to you. But since it’s for you.” With a grin, he held out the envelope.

  Colter could just make out his name in the faded ink.

  Tim Colter

  Dep. Marshal, USA

  Staat OF Or-E-gun, USA

  And beneath that, the sender had penciled in:

  Maal Bos: Need heLp getTin thiS to Colter, pleez, Sir

  Colter gave the warden a questioning look. “It came here?”

  Laughing heartily, J.C. Gardner sank into his plush chair. “Marshal, it’s a miracle that thing even got to Salem, don’t you think?”

  Colter had to nod at that assessment.

  “If I were you, sir, I’d buy every postmaster a Daniel Webster cigar between Salem and . . . and . . . and wherever in blazes that thing came from.”

  He looked at the fragile envelope in his hand. There was no return address, and the several cancellation stamps on the envelope were too faded for him to even make out where the letter did come from.

  “Thanks,” Colter said, and walked out the door.

  He nodded at the guard as he passed through the iron gate out front, still studying the envelope, and quickly, though carefully, slipped it inside his coat pocket when the wind picked up and the misting rain began to fall. Colter swung into the saddle, then rode away from the prison.

  It was past dinnertime, almost two o’clock, so he road to Ferry Street and found an open rail in front of the Bullfrog Café. After tethering his horse, he ducked underneath the awning and looked through the glass in the door. Not crowded. The rush was over by this time of day, so Colter went inside, removing jacket and hat. After withdrawing the envelope, he sat at the table closest to the overhead lighting.

  “Hey there.”

  Colter looked up and smiled. Betsy McDonnell had already filled a cup with coffee and slid it in front of him.

  “Hungry?”

  “Stew,” he requested, and she left.

  He was still holding the envelope when Betsy returned with a bowl that smelled great. She had brought an extra cup of coffee, too.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  He grinned. “Well, it would be imprudent for a man to tell his fiancée no. Right?”

  With a laugh, she sat across from him.

  Oh, they had played everything with the strict formalities. Waited a full year after Betsy’s husband had died before they began what one might call a courtship. In March, they had agreed to marry—Colter wouldn’t actually call it a proposal—and had set a wedding date in June. Two months.

  “What’s that?” Betsy asked.

  “I don’t know, exactly,” Colter answered.

  “You going to open it?”

  “It might disintegrate in my hands.”

  Her head shook. “It’s not that far gone.”

  He found a knife by the place setting and slid it through the corner. Two pieces of paper were folded inside. One looked like it had been ripped from a newspaper or magazine. Slowly he pulled the papers out, and l
aid them in the center of the table. Immediately he recognized the clipping.

  “Harper’s Weekly made you famous,” Betsy said.

  “I never should have agreed to let that artist do those drawings, or write that story.”

  “You can’t stop the press.”

  “Wasn’t thinking clearly.” Hell, who would have been thinking with clarity after all he had been through? That gunfight should have left Tim Colter dead. One man against a gang of thugs led by Stewart Rose? He still didn’t know how he had lived through that, and sometimes he thought maybe he had gone after Rose and his blackhearts because he had wanted to die. He had known Betsy McDonnell then, but he had not found love till after that set-to.

  “Well?” Betsy asked.

  Colter slid the page from Harper’s Weekly aside, and stared at the letter, still folded, brittle, stained from water. A corner fell off as he unfolded the paper—from a ledger, it appeared—and he brought it up to read.

  At first, he beamed, and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  Quickly, however, that smile died on his face.

  Tim

  Yes Plenti Medesen IS stil Aliv & hop U is 2

  Harper’s Weekly tels me that I taut U good

  Run a post ON the UP lin

  we need help killins thieves bad tims

  if U cud come Help, wood B a bles-in

  yer pard

  Jed Reno

  Violet, Idaho Ty.

  “His spelling is atrocious,” Betsy said after Colter had passed the letter across the table. “I would know that. I taught school before I married Elliott.”

  Colter liked that. Betsy could mention her dead husband now without grieving. And Tim Colter thought, for the most part, he had put his wife and children in a good place. A good memory. He and Betsy could get on with living, and not mourning. “What is this Plenti . . . ?”

  “Plenty Medicine,” Colter answered. “His Indian name. And I think his writing’s pretty good. Clear, at least. Concise. Considering he probably hasn’t written a letter since he was . . . since . . . well . . . forever.”

  She studied the letter again, but finally placed it gently on the checkered tablecloth. “Violet?” she asked. “Idaho Territory?”

  “Imagine Jed copied that off some building, or a signpost on the Union Pacific rails.”

  Again, Colter looked at the letter, but this time he read it without those memories from two decades ago coming to him. He analyzed the letter, and he sighed.

  “Jed must’ve told the city leaders about me.” Leaning back in his chair, he recalled the letter that had come to U.S. Marshal Zeiber. They had read that letter in this very restaurant, just a few tables over, several months ago. He remembered what Zeiber had called the letter.

  “A request, sir. A plea for help.”

  Colter had easily dismissed such a plea, such a request. He wasn’t leaving Oregon for Idaho Territory. He wasn’t leaving Betsy McDonnell.

  “Tim,” Betsy said. “This Reno . . . he would not have known about the gunfight with the Stewart Rose bunch back then. I remember when that letter came. It was our first meeting with Marshal Zeiber. There is—”

  “I’d written Jed before,” Colter told her. “Gosh.” His head shook. “That had to be an eternity ago. During the war. Before Patricia and the kids were called to Glory.” He had done it, too. He had managed to say that without feeling his heart break, or the tears well. “Told him I had had a job as a federal deputy, that I’d likely go back to marshaling when the war finally ended.”

  He was smiling. Hearing from Jed Reno did that. By Jupiter, Reno was still alive. That Cyclops in buckskins would have to be seventy years old by now. No, probably a year or two beyond seventy. And running a trading post, following in Jim Bridger’s moccasin tracks. Colter tried to picture what that vagabond would look like after all these years.

  Across the table, Betsy McDonnell was not grinning at all.

  Tim pressed his lips together.

  “If I remember correctly,” Betsy said stiffly, “you told Zeiber that Idaho Territory had its own lawmen. Your commission is with the district of Oregon. Isn’t it?”

  He leaned toward her, put out an open hand, hoping she would meet it.

  She didn’t. Her eyes blazed, and her face reddened.

  “A man writes you for the first time in twenty years and you . . .”

  “Betsy,” he said, trying to stay calm.

  “It is hard enough for me to watch you ride out after some evil man and go traipsing across this state. Not knowing if you’d come back again to me. Now you want to go to some—what do they call them, Hell on Wheels?—all the way in Idaho Territory. To some savage wilderness?” She pointed at the letter. “Where killings, thieves, and bad times are rampant?”

  Tears began running down her cheeks.

  “Betsy,” he said again.

  “Tim . . . we’re to be married in two months.”

  “I imagine I’ll be back in two months.”

  “Alive? Or in a pine box?”

  That punched him in the gut. He pulled his hand back, taking the letter with him, but leaving the Harper’s Weekly page.

  “You’re going.” It was a statement.

  “I have to.”

  She wiped away her tears.

  “Why?”

  “I owe Jed. I wouldn’t be alive if not for him.”

  Betsy had some will. Tim Colter was amazed when she shut off those tears as if closing a spigot, and she shook her head. “Well . . . I suppose the wedding might have to wait.” Her voice was calm. He could tell she was forcing this, of course, but then her expression changed again, and she blurted out in excitement, “I could come with you!”

  CHAPTER 13

  He remembered the roads as he followed the ruts, sometimes so deep he found it hard to believe. The closer they got to Oregon, the worse the roads had become. Sagebrush and dust, dust and sagebrush. Most of the people Tim Colter had traveled with hated the stink of sagebrush, but Colter had always found the aroma pleasing. Sagebrush and dust, dust and sagebrush. No, the country had not changed, just the ruts seemed so much deeper than they had been back in 1845. When you finally reached water, the mosquitoes seemed as big and as hungry as crows.

  That had not changed twenty years later, either.

  Oregon was behind him now. The last supplies he had bought had been back in Baker City. He rode easy, a pack mule trailing the black stallion he had finally gotten around to naming Plenty Medicine. And that had been long before Jed Reno’s letter had reached him at the Oregon State Penitentiary.

  Marshal Zeiber had regretfully accepted Colter’s resignation as a deputy marshal, but promised him the job would be his when he returned. Zeiber had stressed “when.”

  “You could get an appointment in Idaho Territory,” Zeiber had said. “I’ll be glad to write an endorsement.”

  Colter had considered it before declining. “Then I might get pulled away from Violence.”

  “Which wouldn’t be a bad thing,” Zeiber had said with a frown. “At fifteen bucks a month.”

  “Keep that letter handy, Marshal,” Colter had told him. “If I need it, I’ll send word to you.” Yet, Betsy McDonnell had changed Colter’s mind about that. A federal commission might come in handy, she had argued, or at least give some ruffian second thoughts before pulling a trigger. Killing a town law was one thing. Having every federal lawman on your trail for killing one of their own was another. She had changed Colter’s mind about the commission, but he had not backed down on refusing her offer to come to Violet, Idaho Territory.

  “They don’t call this place Violence for nothing,” he had said.

  A barren land Colter had crossed. He remembered those rough parts of volcanic rock, the smell of salt along the desert ranges, and some of the most rugged mountains he had ever seen—jutting up like teeth from some storybook monster.

  Even today, all those years since the last of the Conestoga trains had brought settlers to Oregon, Colter
remembered how tough it was crossing the Snake Country, where broken rocks could lame oxen and horses, or how long it had taken him to clean hooves with his knife of packed-in volcanic ash.

  Oh, rain fell here. But the land soaked it up like a sponge, and that precious water disappeared into sinks in the desert. Even when they followed along the Snake River, water was hard to find. The river cut through the black basalt and ran wild far below the trail, maybe a hundred, maybe two, perhaps even more, impossible to reach. Colter remembered Jed Reno telling him what French-Canadian trappers had called the Snake: la maudite riviere enragee, “the accursed mad river.”

  That part of the Oregon Trail might have been the worst, especially for those settlers who had endured so much on those endless miles from Independence to Fort Hall. You would hit, if you were lucky, that desert wasteland in July or August, and it could break your heart. Of course, when Tim Colter had first seen it, his heart had been broken by the massacre of his parents. And he had grown up a lot since that day at South Pass.

  Now, the country, still brutal, seemed tame.

  As Colter traveled east, beyond Fort Hall, came a stunning paradise of wonderful mountains, cool breezes, timber, water, grass for livestock, fish and ducks and geese to eat. This was Bear River. Sheep Rock and Soda Springs. Katydids, which the settlers had called “Mormon crickets.” Annoying to many of the emigrants on the trail, but Jed Reno had taught Tim Colter that they made fine eating, and a key ingredient to the pemmican that kept them alive. Colter caught a few as he made his way across the country and put them into a kind of soup he cooked up. The protein was needed, even if they tasted like dung.