Lonnie Gentry

by Peter Brandvold

  His Grayback guardian angel had stopped his own cream stallion in front of the place, and was stepping down from his saddle. He turned toward Lonnie and Casey sitting a cautious several yards away, and he said, “Well, come on, then. You Yankee children don’t like roofs over your heads?”

  Lonnie studied the man and the surroundings. He didn’t know who this gent was other than he was an ex-Confederate and good with his old Confederate pistols. Lonnie had watched him kill three men as easily as swatting flies, and he’d also watched him stare down Shannon Dupree. He was a killer, all right. Lonnie knew that for sure. What else he was, Lonnie didn’t know. Maybe whatever it was, was good. But maybe it was bad, too, and that’s what had given the boy pause.

  That’s what had given Casey pause, too.

  “All right, then,” the stranger said, removing his stallion’s bridle and slipping its saddle, rifle scabbard, and bedroll off its back. He took the gear over to what appeared to be a dilapidated lean-to stable with connecting corral, and set it on the corral’s rail fence. Then he went on into the cabin, and soon Lonnie saw a wan amber light burning in one of the windows.

  “Gonna get cold out here, I reckon.” Lonnie continued to look around, cautious. “And it looks like the money’s still here on the General’s back.”

  “Did you count it?”

  Casey knew he hadn’t had time to count the money. It was her way of saying they shouldn’t assume they could trust this old Confederate, uncommonly good with a cap-and-ball pistol, because he’d saved their lives. But the more they both thought it through, the more they both saw it from a different angle. The man had saved them and he hadn’t taken the loot, which he very easily could have done, so they were probably being foolish, mooning around out here like a pair of stray pups.

  At least, that’s the angle Lonnie saw it from, and he could tell by Casey’s shrug that she’d come to that conclusion, too. They both dismounted, and stripped the gear from their horses and set it near the Confederate’s. Since the stranger hadn’t stabled his mount or hobbled or tied it, Lonnie figured the General and the chestnut could safely forage freely, as well. Both the General as well as the chestnut got down and began rolling, which the stranger’s stallion had done, as well, rubbing the lather off their backs.

  Hoping that the two stallions wouldn’t fight over Casey’s filly, Lonnie draped the stolen money over his right shoulder and carried his rifle in his right hand as he helped Casey over to the cabin. He knocked on the door that was so rickety it bounced and groaned in its frame. Lantern light seeped through the cracks between the planks.

  “It’s open an’ nothin’ in here’s gonna bite, so come on in, and light.”

  Lonnie opened the door and peered inside. He’d been a little worried there might be more like the Confederate in here, but he was alone, all right, sitting at a wooden table that had seen far better days. The strange old man was lighting a porcelain-bowled pipe. He sat with one mule-eared boot hiked atop the other knee. The little monkey stove behind him rattled with a freshly laid fire, and a coffeepot was chugging on top of it.

  He’d set his battered gray hat on the table. His head was long and narrow, with a bulbous forehead. His hair was gray-streaked chestnut along the sides, curling over the collar of his calico shirt, but there were only a handful of strands angling back over the top of his age-spotted dome. A worm-shaped white scar knotted his cheek only a few inches from his left ear. A bayonet wound, Lonnie silently opined as he stepped inside the earthen-floored place, which was little larger than the kitchen of his own cabin.

  “This your place?” he asked the man, who was drawing on his pipe, causing the flame in his hand to leap and flutter, sparking in his dark-blue eyes.

  “It is now, I reckon. Go on and set your loot down on the floor there, and pull up a chair. I won’t promise you they won’t cave in under you, cause they’re both older’n Jehosophat’s cat, but if they do, we’ll burn ’em in the stove. I’m almost out of wood, anyways.”

  He lifted his mouth corners with amusement as he continued to blow smoke into the air around his craggy head.

  Lonnie set the saddlebags down and pulled two of the three extra chairs up from the wall. He helped Casey into one directly across from the old Confederate. Then Lonnie eased down into the chair to Casey’s left.

  He didn’t like the way it creaked and groaned beneath his weight. When he leaned forward to place his arms on the scarred table, the chair sank precariously down in front and to the right, and for a minute Lonnie thought it would break and take him to the floor with it.

  But once it was down on its shorter right front leg, it held firm.

  Lonnie leaned forward on his arms. He realized he was still wearing his hat, so he took it off and set it on the table before him. He looked around quickly to see that the cabin was furnished by little more than the table and chairs and the stove and a few old fruit crates so old that the labels had faded and were nearly illegible. There was a cot on the wall to Lonnie’s right, with a moth-eaten wool blanket on it. A tied bedroll lay nearby. A coffee sack served as a pillow.

  The place smelled of pipe tobacco, of course, but also of old, rotting wood and mouse droppings. A rusty bull’s-eye railroad lantern hung from a wire over the table, casting a watery umber light amongst the shack’s heavy shadows.

  Except for the gurgling coffeepot, deep silence hung over the place. The old Confederate sat sideways to the table, his right profile to Lonnie and Casey, his elbow on the table, puffing his cigar and staring toward the door. Lonnie thought of him as old, because he had an old way about him, and he was still wearing the old gray hat and uniform trousers. But here where the boy could get a good look at him, he didn’t otherwise seem all that old. At least, he probably wasn’t far into his forties. Not young, to be sure, but he wouldn’t necessarily be considered an “old man.”

  Lonnie felt fidgety with all the silence. Casey was fidgeting around beside him, also uncomfortable. The old Confederate seemed to not even realize that he had company, for all the conversation he was trying to make.

  Wasn’t he curious about the money? He must have opened the saddlebag flaps and seen it. Or … maybe he hadn’t. Lonnie knew that it was probably not to his own credit that he likely would have snooped through the gear, had the tables been turned.

  Lonnie glanced at Casey. She returned the glance, giving her brows an incredulous arch. She was as uncomfortable as Lonnie was.

  Finally, the boy cleared his throat, and to fill the silence as much as anything else, he slid his hand across the table and said, “I’m Lonnie Gentry.”

  The old Confederate removed the pipe from his mouth and regarded Lonnie cryptically. He looked down at the boy’s open hand, then slipped his pipe into his left hand, and closed his large, gnarled, brown right hand around the boy’s, giving it a squeeze. He had the grip of a strong man. He scrutinized Lonnie and Casey from beneath furled brows, hesitating, and then he said in his gravelly, heavily accented voice, “Wilbur Calhoun.”

  Casey slid her own hand across the table. “Casey Stoveville. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mister Calhoun.”

  Calhoun nodded, regarding the girl curiously, as though trying to puzzle her out, as if maybe he didn’t believe she was really whom she’d said she was.

  Casey gave Lonnie a nervous, self-conscious glance, then looked around and said, by way of making conversation, “So … this your place?”

  “Nope,” Calhoun said, not bothering to explain whose it was. His mind seemed to be somewhere else as he studied Casey through a haze of wafting pipe smoke. Then he said in his slow, gravelly fashion, “Stoveville. That’s the name of the marshal down to Arapaho Creek, ain’t it?”

  “It was,” Casey said. “Marshal Stoveville was my father.” She sucked her bottom lip and stared down at the table. “He was killed last week.”

  “You don’t say,” Calhoun said with interest.

  His eyes flicked toward the saddlebags resting on the floor behind Casey.
Lonnie knew then that the man had opened the flaps and seen the money. He was curious, but it wasn’t his way to seem so. It was the Western way to not ask questions. Lonnie’s father had explained that the custom had probably come about because so many people in the West were on the run from something back east. Not all, of course, but enough to make asking too many questions dangerous. An overly inquisitive sort might just get drilled with a .44 slug—if he asked the wrong question of the wrong person, that was.

  Lonnie wanted to clear the issue of the money up fast, so the old Confederate didn’t get the wrong idea.

  “The money’s stolen, Mister Calhoun. It was stolen out of the bank over in Golden. It was stolen by the men you met tonight. That big, tall one—the blond-headed one with the devil’s eyes—he’s Shannon Dupree. He’s courtin’ my ma.” The boy lowered his voice in shame, staring down at the hands he was entwining on the table. “Leastways, he was. He …” He cleared his throat, having trouble explaining the horrible facts of the situation. “He … or one of the other two—the half-breed Fuego or Childress—killed Casey’s pa after they got over on the west side of the Never Summers, and Marshal Stoveville formed a posse out of Arapaho Creek to go after ’em.”

  Calhoun suddenly looked interested. He’d turned toward the table now, laid a rigidly veined hand down on the rough aspen boards while he held the pipe in his mouth with the other one. “How’d the two of you come to be packin’ all that money?”

  “Let’s just say my ma didn’t want it around the cabin,” Lonnie said.

  “Ah.” Calhoun nodded, smiled shrewdly. “She was tryin’ to save that curly wolf from himself, that it?”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “That’ll happen. Sometimes women see what they wanna see in a man, whether it’s there or not. Men do the same with women.” Calhoun added that last sentence with a wry snort, as if he knew plenty enough about the topic. He puffed his pipe and pondered what he’d been told. “Where you two headed?”

  Casey said, “To Camp Collins. We’re gonna turn the loot over to the deputy United States marshal there. Figure he’ll return it to the bank over in Golden.”

  “You figure to ride all that way,” Calhoun said, scowling his dismay, “with Shannon Dupree on your trail?”

  Lonnie said, “You sound like you heard of him before, Mister Calhoun.”

  “Prob’ly ain’t too many around the Front Range who haven’t heard of that low-down dirty dog. It’s a shame your ma put such stock in that cottonmouth.”

  “I reckon word of him hasn’t traveled all the way to the back side of the Never Summers,” Lonnie said, crestfallen. “But even if it had, well … Ma’s been lonely since my pa died.”

  “The Yankee?” Calhoun said with another shrewd glint in his eye.

  Lonnie gave his shoulder a sheepish shrug and cut his eyes at Casey, who returned the look with a skeptical one of her own. Then she shuttled a cautious look at the old Confederate sitting across from her.

  “Helkatoot!” Calhoun said, knocking the dottle out of his pipe and sweeping it off the table and onto the floor. “The war’s long since over, young’uns. The past is gone. Confederates and Yankees—we’re all one an’ the same—Americans!”

  He set his pipe down, pushed up out of his chair, and walked around the table to drop to one knee beside Casey. “Let me see that foot, little miss. What you packin’ there—a break or a knot?”

  “I think it’s just twisted,” Casey said, casting Lonnie another wary glance. “It’ll be all right, Mister Calhoun. Thank you, anyway.”

  “Oh, come on—show the ole Reb your ankle, Miss Casey. I learned some doctorin’ skills back durin’ the War of Northern Aggression, there bein’ few enough medicos providin’ for the wounded on our side.” Calhoun slapped his thigh. “Put it right up there, and let me take a gander and see what kind a hurt you’re packin’.”

  Casey fidgeted around, embarrassed, and then finally turned in her creaky chair, facing Calhoun. She hesitated some more, and then placed her boot on Calhoun’s thigh. Gently, the old soldier slid the boot off her foot, looking up at her concernedly as the girl sucked a sharp breath through her teeth, her cheeks turning crimson from the pain.

  “Hurt, does it?” Calhoun asked, moving even more gently.

  “A little,” Casey raked out.

  When Calhoun had Casey’s boot off, he rolled her sock down to inspect her swollen, purple ankle. He manipulated her foot a little and then released it, sank back on his heel, and said, “Helkatoot—I’ve hurt myself worse gettin’ out of bed! What you need to do is soak that limb in the creek out yonder. It’s good and cold—spring-fed. Bring the swellin’ down. Boy, help her out there. I’ll start some vittles cookin’, what little I got, then I’ll come out and wrap some rawhide around that limb of yours. The rawhide’ll shrink while it dries and give that wing the support it needs to mend.”

  Casey shrugged. Since it appeared good advice to her, Lonnie helped her up out of her chair. She wrapped around his neck and sort of skip-hopped over to the front door, which Lonnie opened.

  Two red eyes glowed at him and Casey from the darkness outside the door.

  An animal gave a deep growl.

  Casey screamed.

  CHAPTER 46

  Lonnie slammed the door and he and Casey stumbled back.

  “What is it?” Calhoun said, sliding one of his pistols out of its holster fast as lightning and smooth as silk. He clicked the hammer back and walked boldly up to the closed door.

  “There’s something out there—a wolf, maybe,” Lonnie said.

  “Wolf?”

  Calhoun chuckled as he depressed his pistol’s hammer, and opened the door. “Cherokee, that you?”

  The two red eyes moved closer until the lamp flickering over the table showed a large, shaggy, brown-and-white collie dog holding a large, limp rabbit by the neck between its jaws. The dog was eyeing Lonnie and Casey and growling deep in its throat in more of an apprehensive, curious way than an angry one.

  “Hidy, Cherokee!” Calhoun intoned. Then, to Lonnie and Casey: “Don’t mind him—that’s my ole collie. I call him Cherokee cause I couldn’t think of nothin’ else to call him when he wandered into my camp, a few years back, skinnier’n a boiled chicken. He looked like a collie dog we called Cherokee back to home in Tennessee, and I always been partial to collie dogs. Smarter’n most humans I ever known.” He added with another wry snort, “Heckuva lot more loyal, too.”

  Calhoun turned to the dog. “Drop, Cherokee.”

  Cherokee opened his jaws and the rabbit rolled out from between the dog’s jaws to land with a thud on the earthen floor. “Just in time, my good friend. I was fixin’ to prepare supper, late as it is. Meet our guests, Mister Lonnie Gentry and Miss Casey Stoveville from out Arapaho Creek way.”

  The dog wagged his tail and stepped forward to sniff the newcomers, but when Lonnie leaned down to pet the animal, Cherokee gave a groan and stepped back, head and tail low.

  Calhoun said, “He takes some warmin’ up to, Cherokee does.”

  Casey looked skeptically at Calhoun. “So … he hunts … game … for you, Mister Calhoun?”

  “Sure enough. I don’t like to fire no shots, so … I mean, I’m kinda colicky about expendin’ ammunition when it’s so gall-blamed hard to find way up here in the high-and-rocky, and Cherokee fell to it naturally—huntin’, I mean. He eats his share and brings what he don’t eat back to my camp, and, well, I reckon we got us a partnership.”

  Calhoun held the rabbit up by its rear legs. It was long and plump, with a charcoal coat and long, broad, mule-like ears. “That’s some jack there, Cherokee. You done good, old son. I’ll fry him up with some wild onions and canned tomatoes, and we’ll have us a nice meal to turn in on.” The Confederate rubbed his concave belly, both hipbones protruding beneath it. “Myself, I can’t sleep when I go to bed with no paddin’ between my ribs. You two go on out and soak that foot, and I’ll get the vittles started.”

&nb
sp; “Thanks, Mister Calhoun,” Casey said.

  “Yeah, we appreciate the grub, Mister Calhoun,” Lonnie chimed in.

  “Helkatoot,” Calhoun said, tossing the big jack onto the table and pulling a big skinning knife from his belt sheath. “Besides, it wasn’t me that fetched it. It was Cherokee!”

  “Thanks Cherokee,” Lonnie said, as he and Lonnie continued on out the door.

  The dog followed Lonnie and the hobbling Casey across the grassy yard toward the creek that flashed in the light of the moon kiting high over the canyon, casting shadows every which way. The dog followed closely, sniffing, mewling deep in his throat, wary of strangers. He reminded Lonnie of his master in that way.

  When Lonnie was sitting on the creek’s grassy bank, and soaking her foot in the cold spring water that gurgled pleasantly over rocks and down a beaver dam a little ways upstream, she turned to Lonnie, who’d sat down against a tree close by. She opened her mouth to speak, stopped, and glanced at the cabin.

  Calhoun was moving around behind the windows, cooking supper.

  She turned to Lonnie again and kept her voice low and confidential as she said, “Remember what I said about us maybe falling out of the frying pan and into the fire again?”

  Lonnie glanced toward the cabin. “You think Mister Calhoun’s dangerous? I think he’s been livin’ alone a little too long.” He looked at the dog that sat a ways upstream from Lonnie and Casey, staring at the newcomers in much the way that Calhoun had while he’d smoked his pipe—wary in the way that people get when they’re alone a lot, and maybe got a little mushy in the head from it. “Livin’ alone with just his dog for company.”

  Lonnie held his hand out toward the dog, trying to lure it up to be petted. Cherokee stretched out belly-down on the ground and gave a soft cry of frustration, not sure if he should trust the boy or not. The crooked white streak angling down the top of his otherwise brown head glowed in the moonlight.