Rough Justice

by Lyle Brandt

  Perfect.

  As he sat and watched the arid countryside roll past beyond his smudged window, waiting for sleep to overtake him, Ryder went back over what he’d learned about the Knights. Their “grand commander” was a former Rebel captain, Royson Coker, known to friends and enemies alike as Roy. He’d been attached to the First Texas Partisan Rangers, a cavalry unit organized by another Jefferson resident, Colonel Walter Lane, in June of 1862. The unit had seen its first action in Arkansas, then retreated into the Louisiana bayou country for a series of guerrilla engagements lasting until the Trans-Mississippi Department’s formal surrender in May 1865. Colonel Lane had been pardoned and worked as a shopkeeper now, but Coker had apparently decided to continue fighting on his own terms, loyal to the Lost Cause.

  No one could say how many “Knights” Coker commanded statewide, but the bulk of them were thought to live in Jefferson and surrounding Marion County, flush against the Louisiana borderline. They had already tarred and feathered the publisher of Jefferson’s only Republican newspaper, running him out of the county with threats to do worse if he ever returned, and Ryder had reports of half a dozen freedmen murdered since war’s end. Their “crimes” consisted of refusing to continue working for their former masters and, in two cases, of having the temerity to register as voters. Coker’s men, it seemed, intended to preserve the antebellum status quo as best they could, and so far, no one from the county sheriff’s office had restrained them.

  Ryder wasn’t looking forward to another one-man war against long odds, but he had taken on the job with both eyes open, and he’d see it through as best he could.

  Or die trying, a voice inside his head retorted.

  Maybe. But one thing that he wouldn’t do was quit.

  Two hours out of Corpus Christi, reasonably sure that he was safe for now, the train outrunning any horsemen who might try to follow, Ryder closed his eyes and willed himself to sleep. He kept the Henry rifle wedged between his left leg and the window, right hand resting on the curved butt of his Colt Army revolver.

  Just in case.

  *

  Ryder’s train arrived in Houston with two hours to spare before his scheduled departure for Jefferson on the Eastern Texas Railroad line. No one was waiting for him on the platform, a relief, and Ryder found a restaurant nearby, on Commerce Avenue, where no one raised an eyebrow at his guns or luggage. Hungry from his long ride north, he ordered steak with all the fixings. The waitress brought a slab of beef that could have fed two men, plus fried potatoes under gravy, mushrooms, and a heap of collard greens.

  Ryder surprised himself, putting it all away within an hour, then examined downtown Houston for another thirty minutes, before hiking back to catch his train. It still amazed him, coming from the North, that no one in a city of this size thought anything about a man walking amongst them with a rifle, six-gun, and a Bowie knife on full display. Most of the other men he passed were armed with pistols, either on their hips or peeking out of shoulder holsters, and he would have bet some of the women had shooting irons stashed in their oversized handbags.

  He wondered what would happen if a fight broke out, or someone tried to pull a daylight robbery. A scene of bloody chaos came to mind, and Ryder hoped that his imagination was exaggerating.

  From what Ryder could see, it seemed that Houston was recovering from the war in fair style. He knew the city’s economy had been hurt by a Union blockade of Galveston, in 1862, but Rebels had recaptured that port city early the following year, restoring the flow of commerce to some degree. Houston’s Chamber of Commerce held the city together until General Lee’s surrender, and there’d been no local skirmishing to damage any of the shops or homes, but postwar government seemed problematic. A newspaper he bought from a cigar store, near the railroad station, carried articles about the anarchy enveloping some rural parts of Texas since Appomattox, with local officers and U.S. cavalry incapable of keeping order.

  There were bad days coming, Ryder realized. He wondered if his mission to East Texas would improve matters, or only serve to make them worse. He understood his duty, didn’t want to second-guess it, but there was a human element to be considered, also.

  Had he made things worse in Corpus Christi? Thomas Hubbard had been killed despite Ryder’s best effort to protect him. Now his Josey was a widow and would wind up God knew where, assuming she escaped from Texas with her life. If Ryder had abstained from intervening that first night, if he had let the lynchers have their way, would it have spared Miss Emma and the others from a second lethal raid? Were two lives worth the dozen-plus eventually sacrificed, when he had wound up losing one of them regardless?

  Ryder didn’t know, and knew that pondering the question overlong would make his head ache, likely rob him of the sleep he craved. He couldn’t turn back time, undo what had been done, and self-flagellation wasn’t Ryder’s style. He made mistakes, like any other man, and tried to learn from them.

  Unfortunately, when he dropped a stitch in his trade, people sometimes suffered.

  Sometimes died.

  He thought of Hubbard: young, idealistic, off on a crusade to help the freedmen rise above their miserable lot. That quest had killed him, but would it have been successful if he’d lived? Ryder believed the odds were poor. A chasm yawned between the races, both in Texas and across the country, had divided them for some two hundred and fifty years, and showed no sign of closing. Race, religion, the economy, and rage over the war were all tied up together in a strangling knot which, Ryder thought, might choke the South to death if nothing changed.

  But could it change? Would it?

  From what he’d seen of how free blacks were treated in the North, before the war and during, Ryder saw no reason to be optimistic.

  Still nobody at the depot appeared to be a KRS lookout, and Ryder took his seat in the second of four passenger cars. Three other travelers were already seated when he arrived—one he pegged for a salesman, the other two clearly a mother and child. A final rider boarded as the warning whistle blew, a rangy man whose coat was a couple of sizes too large, slouched hat riding low on a minimal forehead, his thick mustache drooping almost to his chin on both sides of a straight, thin-lipped mouth. He barely glanced at anybody else inside the car and took a seat three rows in front of Ryder, on the left side of the aisle.

  Someone to watch? Or just another Texan riding on the cheap from one point to another, one job to the next? Ryder decided not to borrow trouble on a guess, but kept his weapons handy when the train began to move at last, leaving the depot with a blast of steam and smoke that drove onlookers from the platform, hands and handkerchiefs raised to their faces.

  Ryder waited till they cleared the city limits, then slouched back and closed his eyes to rest. Eleven hours, minimum, before he reached his destination, and he couldn’t say when he would have a chance to sleep again, in Jefferson. Other towns along the Eastern Texas line included Lufkin, Nacogdoches, Henderson, and Marshall, where the train would gain or unload passengers, say half an hour for each stop, to extend his time inside the railroad car. No time to grab a meal, but he’d make do.

  A smooth ride was the best that he could hope for, and the odds of that were slim.

  *

  Roy Coker lit a slim cheroot, eyes narrowing against its acrid smoke as he reread the telegram from Corpus Christi. It was from the Nueces County sheriff, filling Coker in on grim events that had occurred during the night.

  REGRET TO INFORM YOU OF SERIOUS LOSS STOP CHAS TRUSCOTT AND OTHERS DECEASED STOP SEARCH FOR THOSE RESPONSIBLE CONTINUING STOP BE ON GUARD STOP

  Coker scowled, crumpling the flimsy paper in his fist, and was about to drop it on the street when he thought better of discarding it, and tucked the telegram into his pocket. Careless errors could prove fatal, as he’d learned during the war.

  He understood the friendly sheriff’s need to be discreet. It wouldn’t pay for an elected law enforcement officer to be caught fraternizing with a group of Rebel vigilantes, after all, no m
atter how the voters in his county felt about the Yankee occupation of their territory. Carpetbaggers and the bluecoats who supported them could build a case against him, probably remove him from office, perhaps lock him up on some kind of conspiracy charge.

  The warning he’d received would have to do, for now. Coker would send a couple of his men to Corpus Christi on the next train out—quicker than riding, some four hundred miles overland, that could take them a week to arrive—if they weren’t picked off in transit by redskins or border trash looking for drifters to rob.

  In the meantime, he would have to wait and see what happened next.

  “Search continuing” told Coker that the sheriff hadn’t caught the man or men responsible for killing Truscott and his boys, however many might have fallen. Had the killers even been identified? Were warrants in the works for their arrest? It was the damned uncertainty that set his teeth on edge, like scouting in the wartime wilderness for Yankees, never knowing when the woods in front of you might blaze with musket fire and cut you down.

  He had survived those years by guile, audacity—and, yes, a fair amount of luck. Shot twice, still carrying fragments of shrapnel from an artillery round in his scarred left thigh, Coker was a survivor. He’d overcome the limp—well, mostly—and it could have been a damn sight worse, if he’d been hit a few short inches to the right. That would have disappointed several women he could name, if he were not a gentleman.

  Well, more or less.

  There was a chance, though he regarded it as slim, that Truscott and his other men in Corpus Christi had embroiled themselves in something stupid and had died as a result. He couldn’t put it past them, necessarily, but Coker had been cautious in selection of his field commanders, passing over slack-jawed yokels to select the kind of men who looked before they leaped, thought through a situation before taking any action that would be their own undoing. Granted, there were situations when you couldn’t see too far ahead, but in those situations you took stock, decided whether to proceed or not based on potential for success.

  “Not much to go on,” said Lloyd Graves, his second in command, who’d read the telegram as Coker did.

  “Not near enough,” Coker agreed. “We need a couple pairs of eyes in Corpus Christi. Put them on the first train headed south.”

  “Will do.”

  “The sheriff is a friend of ours. Have them find out if he’s got anyone in custody, or any suspects. Wire the details back to us, and make sure they’re in code.”

  Graves nodded. “Satterfield and Kimes can handle it.”

  “I trust your choices. If this was something federal, we need to stay ahead of it. We’ve barely gotten started, and I don’t want anything derailing us.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Worry doesn’t enter into it. I’m talking preparation. Strategy.”

  “I hear you.”

  “If the bluebellies are after us, we need to know it.”

  “If they aren’t,” said Graves, “they soon will be.”

  “Agreed. But we could use some warning, all the same.”

  “I’ll have the boys look sharp for strangers asking questions. See if Travis can get anything from Corpus Christi, in the meantime.”

  Harlan Travis was the sheriff of Marion County and, incidentally, a loyal Knight of the Rising Sun. He took his duties seriously and would spare no effort when it came to sniffing out the order’s enemies.

  Between the sheriff’s office and his own men, Coker thought that he could deal with most threats from outside the county—but he wasn’t ready, yet, to fight another all-out war against the Yankees with the troops he had available. Before that day came, if it did, the people of Texas and the other Rebel states at large would have to bind the wounds they’d suffered during four long years of war, forget their losses, and rededicate themselves to the crusade that had been stalled but never truly failed.

  But first, he had to take care of the problem that confronted him.

  Beginning now.

  *

  The run from Houston, northward, had more interesting scenery than Ryder’s route from Corpus Christi had delivered. Lots of trees, to start with, on a landscape that rose and fell, so the train passed through tunnels of shadow, then burst into blinding sunshine without warning. There were no mountains here to match the Appalachians or the Smokies, but it made a welcome change from flat land bordering the Gulf of Mexico.

  And there was more to watch for here, he realized. Not only wildlife on the tracks, which would be crushed and mutilated if it didn’t move aside in time, but people watching from the forest shadows. Ryder knew that outlaws prowled the district. White, black, Mexican, it made no difference if they shot first or came upon you in the night and laid the sharp edge of a blade against your throat. And there were native tribes, of course: some Cherokees who hadn’t made the trip to Indian Territory, Anadarkos who’d jumped the reservation, maybe even some Comanches driven from their normal range in West and Central Texas.

  Sharp eyes watching as the train rolled past, leaving its trail of smoke.

  Or was it only his imagination?

  Ryder didn’t like to borrow trouble, but his job had taught him that the quickest way to die was to ignore the range of possibilities in any given situation. He had stayed alive this long by thinking first and acting second—well, most of the time—and he intended to survive this mission, too.

  The railroad car he occupied was roughly half full, ample room for Ryder to avoid his fellow passengers. None of them appeared to pay him any mind, which suited him down to the ground. He kept his weapons handy without putting them on show, conforming to the rule for other travelers he’d seen so far. If there’d been any firearms confiscation in the Lone Star State, Ryder had yet to see the proof of it.

  As far as he could tell, there were no guards aboard the train, unless the company had stashed them in the mail car. He had looked for soldiers, too, as they were boarding, without turning up a single Yankee uniform. Bandits could readily procure that kind of information, if they put their minds to it, which made the whole line vulnerable to attack.

  Relax, he thought, before you start to jump out of your skin.

  As if on cue, two horsemen materialized at the tree line outside Ryder’s window, watching the train pass. They made no move to intercept it, simply sat astride their animals and stared until the locomotive and its trailing cars left them behind.

  Nothing surprising there, he thought. This country must be full of cowboys, hunters, ranch hands—though, in truth, he hadn’t spotted anything resembling a cultivated spread since leaving Houston. There had been no livestock grazing near the right-of-way, and nothing that suggested railroad crews performing maintenance. Until the riders showed themselves, he might have thought the territory was deserted, going back to nature in the wake of having track laid on its face.

  Where had they come from? To the east, Louisiana sweltered, with its swamps and Spanish moss. Or maybe they had ridden down from Arkansas, its landscape mixing bayou country with the sort of forest Ryder saw flanking the tracks. They could be outlaws, what the locals called long riders, meaning that they constantly kept moving to avoid the law. They’d had a certain look about them, he supposed, though it could have been simple weariness or boredom. Maybe they were envious of people riding on a train, not getting saddle sores.

  He tried sleeping again but couldn’t get the hang of it, supposed it was impossible to store up sleep against a time when it could be in short supply. The rock and rattle of the train lulled Ryder, but it didn’t put him out, only dulled his mind to a near-dozing level that felt like being drunk, without the benefits. He checked his fellow passengers from time to time, not staring, thankful that they all were seated farther forward in the car, with none behind him. That could change at any given stop, but Ryder thought he might shift toward the rear next time they pulled into a town, thus making sure that any other riders sat in front of him.

  He didn’t think the KRS could track h
im, much less put a shooter on the train who’d recognize him from the other men on board—but why take chances?

  He had hours yet to think about what he should do in Jefferson, how he’d approach the main part of his task. It shouldn’t be that hard to find Roy Coker, prominent as he was said to be, but Ryder didn’t want to make it obvious, putting his quarry on alert after the bloody mess in Corpus Christi. Let him think it had been something local, coming back to snap at Truscott, with no reason to be up in arms.

  From what he’d seen, though, it appeared the KRS was always up in arms. Any excuse to fight would do.

  And maybe he could turn that to his own advantage, after all.

  7

  Ryder was dozing when the train shuddered and started slowing down. He cracked an eye, peered through the window to his left, and spotted nothing to explain it. As he shifted in his seat, shrugging the stiffness from his shoulder where he’d slumped against the window frame, he heard the whistle blow.

  Three seats in front of him, one of the passengers who’d boarded back in Livingston turned to the lady he was riding with and said, “It’s just a water stop, Marie.”

  From where he sat, the locomotive was invisible, but Ryder knew the drill. Railroads had stops for fuel and water placed along their lines at intervals of thirty miles or so, in case a train encountered problems and was running low. There’d be no settlement around the stop, out here, only a water tower with a chute the engineer or fireman could release and lower to refill the boiler, while the engine huffed and grumbled like a dragon caught up in a restless dream. A roving crew would check the tower’s water level every week or so, and drop more wood to feed the firebox.

  How long would it take? He didn’t know, but there was nothing to be done about it. Ryder cracked his achy shoulder, was about to settle back and close his eyes again, when one of the four women riding in his car gave out a little squeal.

  Up front, the man who’d boarded last in Houston was on his feet now, turning to face his fellow passengers. He was smiling through his thick mustache and had a pistol in his hand, aimed vaguely down the center aisle.