Lost Trail

by Paul Lederer

  ‘Is that my money, Tanner?’ Wes Dalton asked, nodding at the saddle-bags.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Tanner said. ‘How’d you find me, Dalton?’

  ‘You’ve got no imagination – there wasn’t anyplace else you could be. I checked the ponies in the stable this morning – I always do; I never know who might still be on my trail. And there it was, a big buckskin wearing the C-bar-C brand. The stable-hand described you. I knew you’d be in the hotel – like I said, you’ve got no imagination.

  ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll have my money back, Tanner.’

  ‘Who says this is it? Besides it was never your money. That was Ben Canasta’s coin.’

  ‘Oh, knock it off. Money changes hands every day. It gets traded back and forth. What’s yours today is the bartender’s or the boot maker’s tomorrow. Wherever it came from, makes no difference – it’s my money!’

  ‘I don’t see it that way,’ John Tanner said.

  ‘You’d better start seeing it that way,’ Dalton said as he raised his Colt and eared back the hammer on the gun.

  ‘You’re taking a big chance, holding me up in broad daylight,’ Tanner told him.

  ‘In this town!’ Dalton scoffed. ‘You forget these are the folks that convicted you of murder two years ago then stewed because you didn’t get strung up. Hell, they’d probably give me a medal for shooting you.’

  It might have been true, John reflected. His reputation in Knox was lower than a snake’s belly. Suddenly he didn’t care any longer. About the C-bar-C, Becky’s kidnapping, about Ben Canasta’s money.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ he said in frustration, ‘Take it!’

  Tanner slipped the bags from his shoulder and stood holding them loosely in one hand. ‘Take the money and get!’

  ‘You’ll be going along with me,’ Wes Dalton said, taking a menacing step nearer.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got an idea of what you are, Tanner. You’re a man who just won’t quit. You tracked me down once; you’d do it again. If I broke for Mexico, say, I’d look up one day to find you standing over me. You just don’t give up.’

  John considered trying to talk Dalton out of his notion, of explaining that his urge to do whatever was required to bring him and men like him, to justice had evaporated in the desert heat. But Dalton would have none of it – he had formed his plan and meant to stick to it. John also knew that if he rode out on to the desert with Wes Dalton nothing would ever be found of him but his bleached bones.

  ‘Look, Dalton,’ Tanner said reasonably. Then he hurled the saddle-bags into the man’s face and broke toward the head of the alley. No shots followed, to John’s surprise, but when he glanced back he saw that Dalton had not yet snapped out of his daze. No matter – he also saw that Dalton was now lining up his revolver for a killing shot.

  Two shots rang out nearly simultaneously. As a bullet impacted the side wall of the hotel, sending a quiver of wood splinters into the side of John’s face, he heard Wes Dalton whoop out in pain, turned to see Dalton up against the alley wall sag to a seated position, smoke still curling from the muzzle of his .44.

  From the foot of the alley the big man appeared. Marshal Jack McGraw walked to where Dalton sat inertly, checked him briefly for signs of life, scooped up the saddle-bags and walked to where Tanner stood, hand to his face.

  ‘Are these yours?’ McGraw asked, holding out the saddle-bags to Tanner.

  ‘Yes,’ John panted, taking them.

  ‘Let me see your face,’ McGraw said gruffly, forcing Tanner’s hand away from his cheek where dozens of splinters were embedded. ‘That’s not much,’ McGraw said, holstering his pistol. ‘We’ve got a pretty good young doctor in town now.’

  ‘I know you do,’ Tanner answered. ‘Help me over to the hat shop.’

  Jack McGraw who had been puzzling over Tanner’s earlier remarks had come to understand what the younger man was getting at. He looped John’s arm over his wide shoulders and the two men stumbled out into the sunlit main street of Knox and made their way past curious eyes to the hat shop of Candice Moore.

  ‘We can’t have any more of this,’ Candice said. She was sitting in a chair beside John Tanner who was reclined once again on her pink, canopied bed in the rear of her shop. She pulled one of the last splinters from his face with a pair of tweezers and dropped it into the basin she was balancing on her lap. ‘Did you ever try to pluck a porcupine, John? I could give you some lessons now. There’s a few smaller splinters that I’ll have to go after with a needle, but those can wait.

  ‘What happened this time?’ Candice asked him, dropping the tweezers into the basin and placing it aside.

  John tried to tell her the story, but there was so much he still did not understand that it was difficult. All the while Candice sat patiently listening, except for once when the tinkling of the front door bell called her out of the room. The dry breeze off the desert fluttered the ruffled pink curtains on the window, but the room was still comfortably cool. When Candice returned, Tanner finished his tale. She sat looking at him, a slight smile playing on her lips. Her dark hair reaching to her shoulders shifted slightly in the breeze.

  ‘To tell you the truth,’ he said with some frustration. ‘I still don’t really understand it all.’

  ‘Of course you don’t; you are a man,’ Candice said.

  ‘You mean you understand it?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘I think so – what was the root of the trouble between the two sisters?’

  ‘Why, jealousy, I suppose ‘

  Candice’s smile deepened. ‘I doubt it – it was money, John.’

  ‘Money? They had plenty of money.’

  ‘No. Ben Canasta had plenty of money. They were two young, adventurous women living out a life on the sterile solitude of the C-bar-C, far from entertainment of any kind, from shops and dances. I think they came up with the plan together – to take Ben Canasta’s money, preferably after he had just finished a profitable cattle sale, which you say he had done, this time.’

  ‘This time? You mean they had planned it earlier?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I think Monique had taken up with Matt Doyle and convinced him to be a part of the plan. Unfortunately for Doyle, he was intrigued with Becky Canasta as well. He must have let something slip about Monique’s plan – which did not now include Becky.

  ‘Becky taught Matt Doyle a lesson as well as Monique.’

  ‘They were back where they had begun,’ Tanner commented. Somehow his hand had stretched out and taken Candice’s. She did not remove it.

  ‘Yes, and if either woman had struck then it all would have seemed too coincidental, so they let the plan rest. Then they found out that you were to be released from prison in a few days. Maybe you had had the time in prison to think it over and realize what was up, or at least had a hint of what was going on at the C-bar-C. They had to act before you returned, or thought they did.

  ‘Becky was further ahead on her planning this time. She had charmed Morgan Pride into helping her with the robbery and supposed kidnapping. Later, when Monique discovered that Becky had actually gone through with the plan, she became furious and convinced Ted Everly to go after them. If she promised him money or just more tainted kisses, I couldn’t say.

  ‘Anyway, that is the mess you were dropped into the middle of,’ Candice said, leaning back in her chair, still holding John’s hand. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it makes as much sense as any other way I can put it together, but nothing can be proved, and it doesn’t matter anymore at this point. Both of them were such liars that anything is possible. Anyway,’ he said with a shrug. ‘It’s all over now; that’s all I care about.’

  The bell over the front door jangled again, and before Candice could get up to go out, Marshal Jack McGraw strode in. He looked at Candice who dropped John’s hand and then studied Tanner for a minute before saying:

  ‘Your money’s in the bank. Here’s the deposit slip.’

  John took it and look
ed at the verified amount of the deposit. ‘Old Ben – I wish he hadn’t done that.’

  ‘I guess he figured you had earned it. No one forced him.’

  ‘I know it – still I doubt that all of it has brought him any more happiness.’

  ‘I guess not,’ the marshal agreed. ‘John, I’ve been talking to the men around town, trying to tell them what you explained to me – like it or not, you’ve done your time and the boys ought to leave you alone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tanner answered.

  McGraw fumbled for a reply, did not find one, and simply started for the door. He paused in the doorway and looked around again, his eyes passing over Candice. ‘I guess you’ll be all right here for awhile.’

  ‘Seems so.’

  ‘Did you ever buy that hat you were looking for?’ Jack McGraw asked.

  ‘It looks like I won’t be needing it after all,’ John said and the marshal nodded. He might have smiled, but it was hard to tell. He was a man unused to such expressions.

  ‘By the way, Tanner,’ the marshal asked him. ‘Wasn’t there a man named Charlie Cox mixed up in all of this?’

  ‘Yes, he was one of the robbers,’ John told him.

  ‘I thought so. It might interest you to know that he got himself arrested down in Las Palmas.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Either Charlie was drunk or plain desperate. He tried to rob a Chinese laundry. Made off with seven dollars. But when he made his run out the rear of the building, he got himself tangled up in the clothes lines in the yard. Pulled nearly all of the clean laundry down. The Chinese went crazy and half beat him to death with sticks before the law could get there. He’ll be spending a lot of time in jail.’

  ‘That’s the last of them, isn’t it?’ Candice asked.

  ‘The last of them,’ John answered quietly.

  Still McGraw did not leave. He studied Tanner thoroughly and then asked:

  ‘You didn’t kill Matt Doyle, did you, Tanner?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ Marshal McGraw said, and he started toward the door of the hat shop.

  ‘What was all that about a hat?’ Candice asked, taking his hand again, this time holding it with both of hers. The sun was still bright in the window. It cast curving highlights in her dark hair. She was smiling with some secret knowledge. She was a knowing woman.

  ‘Nothing,’ John muttered lazily. ‘I just thought….’

  ‘That you needed an excuse to come see me again?’

  ‘Yes,’ he had to admit.

  ‘You didn’t,’ she replied softly. ‘Are you going to stay around long, John?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, trying for indifference. ‘I’d really like to settle down after the times I’ve had, but I can’t reasonably expect someone to stay with me – a rambling man such as I have been.’

  ‘Marriage? It’s a large thought,’ Candice said.

  ‘Who said anything about marriage?’ John Tanner asked.

  ‘John,’ Candice said, shaking her head in a too-knowing way, ‘why did you come here?’

  She bent her head and kissed him softly. ‘And you don’t really need to buy a hat.’

  The bell out front rang again and John felt like shouting at whoever it was to go away, but as Candice went out to greet the customer he rested his head back on the pink pillow and smiled at the empty day. Everything was done that could be done, except for planning for tomorrow. There are no pointless, lost trails in life. Each of them has a beginning and an end, some purpose.

  John Tanner had found the end of his trail.

  And its purpose.

  About the Author

  Paul Lederer spent much of his childhood and young adult life in Texas. He worked for years in Asia and the Middle East for a military intelligence arm. Under his own name, he is best known for Tecumseh and the Indian Heritage Series, which focuses on American Indian life. He believes that the finest Westerns reflect ordinary people caught in unusual and dangerous circumstances, trying their best to act with honor.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Logan Winters

  Cover design by Michel Vrana

  ISBN: 978-1-4804-8820-5

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

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