The Avenging Angels

by Michael Dukes

  North of the Deadline, Refuge boasted multiple clothing and mercantile stores, a stable, two hotels, the marshal’s office, a church that doubled as a schoolhouse, two restaurants, and an approximate population of seven hundred. The South Side consisted of six saloons, four gambling dives, three cathouses, a Chinese opium den, and a theater of sorts known simply as the Texas Dance Hall. Just a stone’s throw from the outskirts of town was the cemetery with its lone sentry of a lightning-split tree.

  For years Kings and his men had been paying semi-regular visits to this oasis, often not all at once. In the establishments north of the Deadline there was no place for them. South of it, there was just one where Kings and his boys could feel at ease. That was Delilah Young’s Pearl Palace, the finest of the three brothels. It was a comfortable spot where a man could recline on pillows and couches, have a drink at the bar, listen to a piano that was actually in tune, and enjoy the company of some of the better-looking doves money could buy.

  With its wide veranda, enameled red doors, and plate-glass windows, the Palace was a welcome sight to many a lonesome wanderer. Kings was one of the few who came there not to fornicate, though any one of Delilah’s girls would have taken him into her bed without a moment’s pause. His reason for letting his shadow fall across that particular threshold was to share a drink, laugh a little, and confer with the madam herself.

  Hitching his horse now in the warm glow of its porch lights, Kings tried to bring to mind the last time he had seen Del and finally reckoned that it must have been two years. He draped his coat over a forearm, edged both vest halves over his guns, then stepped through the twin doors. The others had already bulled in ahead of him, eager to wake some snakes.

  Just inside, a polished mahogany bar ran the length of the wall. Behind it was a garish collection of bottles below a gorgeous diamond-dust mirror. Kings lingered in the entryway, surveying his surroundings and unintentionally tracking caked mud on Delilah’s expensive St. Louis rug. He saw nothing suspicious, no authority figures of any kind that could possibly recognize him or the boys. All he saw were men of his own ilk, lost souls walking the road to damnation, and hopelessly oblivious to the fact. A fellow in a black eastern hat was on the piano, while hide-hunters, muleskinners, cowpunchers, and gamblers milled, clustered, or staggered across his plane of vision, some of them with a girl or two hanging on.

  A voice called from the stairwell, “Gabriel Kings, are you gonna stand there all night, or are you gonna come over here and tell me how much you missed me?”

  Kings’s eyes fell upon a woman who would not have looked out of place walking the streets of Richmond with a parasol over her shoulder. She was in her late thirties, not quite beautiful, with a straight, freckled nose and a firm chin, but her figure was ample, and she was a seductress of the first order. Beaming a girlish smile, she came down the stairs in a black and silver kimono, her auburn hair falling in sausage curls to her shoulders. When she was close enough, she lifted a hand to affectionately rasp the underside of Kings’s unshaven chin.

  “Where do you get the nerve, makin’ a lady come to you after such a long time?”

  He couldn’t help but smile down at Delilah Young. “What d’you expect from an ill-mannered ruffian from the backwoods?”

  “Like hell, you are!” she said with a high laugh. “If nothin’ else, Gabe Kings, you’re a gentleman. One of the few I’ve known.”

  Delilah circled the bar and grabbed two glasses and a bottle from the shelf. Kings hooked a boot heel over the brass foot-rail and watched as she poured. They clinked rims together in a toast—what, exactly, they were toasting, he did not know, but the feeling was there all the same. Kings waited until Delilah drained hers before taking a sip. Of the many things Del could handle, one of them was liquor, and she was easily able to drink Kings, Zeller, and even Brownwell under the table. On two occasions, she’d done it to all three.

  “So!” She leaned across the bar, crossing her arms below her breasts to make them bulge over the top of her bodice. “How you been keepin’?”

  “Peachy,” he replied, refilling her glass, then turned away so he could keep one eye on the comings and goings. “Just got in from fleecin’ the Union Pacific, with plans to strike it again on the return.”

  “Big payoff?”

  “Big enough. What about you? You seem to be doin’ well.”

  “Oh, I am. I’m rakin’ in more cash than half the other joints in this town combined. What’s more, I’m doin’ it without havin’ to lay down with any of these yahoos.”

  Amused, Kings shook his head at her frank tongue. “However do you account for this run of luck?”

  “I don’t know, honey. I guess there must be somethin’ about piano music and colored wallpaper that keeps bringin’ these flies to my web.”

  “Longings for home, I imagine. Memories of places left behind . . . mebbe a mother played Beethoven.”

  “If I can give a drop of comfort to some lost and lonely soul, Gabriel, I’ll have done my job.”

  “You’re a good woman, Delilah.”

  “Who told you?”

  They shared another chuckle. After a moment’s examination of his hairy face, Delilah said, “You look tired, Kings.”

  He thought the same could be said of her, but kept his mouth shut.

  “Seems to me like you could use a shave, a meal, a good night’s sleep”—she smiled then—“maybe some lovin’?”

  Kings peered down into the amber mirror of his whiskey. By design or by conviction, he’d never been one to lie with women who’d love him back at the wave of a banknote. There had been a time, however, when he might have accepted Delilah’s offer. She wasn’t just any woman, after all, and there was no mistaking the hope in her question, but he was a different man. Not in many areas, but there was one at least.

  Another, younger lady had caught his eye in the fall of 1869, two years after he first made the acquaintance of Delilah Young. He was twenty-eight then and not yet suffering from his lean years on the Hoot-Owl. Belle Jackson was seventeen, and nature was taking its course with her body, which was pure as driven Virginia snow, but that had little to do with how and why he fell for her.

  It was with her name imprinted on his heart that he looked across the hardwood now and shook his head. “We had our time once, Delilah,” Kings replied, almost apologetically, “but now . . . you know I can’t.”

  There was a pause, then Delilah put a hand to her chest and scoffed. “Honey, don’t embarrass yourself! I wouldn’t go back to barebackin’ for all the tea in China! Mercy, no! I was referrin’ to one of my new gals—fresh off the stage from New Orleans.”

  Her emotions reined back to their usual spot behind all the frills and warpaint, the spunk and sarcasm, Delilah came around the bar and took him by the elbow. “But even if you ain’t interested, you can come upstairs with me anyways. Let an old girlfriend fix you a bath.”

  Fifteen minutes later, he was soaking in a tub the size of a dinghy in the last room at the top of the stairs. His high-topped cavalry boots stood by the door, and his clothes and gunbelts lay on the mattress of the brass four-poster. One of his Colts rested on a stool that Del had placed near his right hand, the ivory butt towards him. At the foot of the tub, the madam herself sat a chair sidesaddle, sipping more of the whiskey and hating the suds for what they obscured.

  By and by, the outlaw stirred from his dreams when he heard the chair creak as Delilah got up to splash her hand across the water. “You soak in there much longer, hon, you’re gonna sprout gills.”

  Her tone masked the almost unbearable itch she knew would never be scratched again. How she longed to hike up her skirts, join him down there in the water and listen to him say her name as he had all those years ago. When she really considered the subject, though, it was unclear, even in her own mind, whether she still harbored those feelings. Maybe she just yearned to feel like a girl again, to immerse herself in the memory of this tall rake from the hills of the Shenandoah. As if he co
uld restore her youth . . .

  Kings stood, spilling sudsy water over the edges, and Delilah handed him a towel. His sinewy form glistened fish-belly white but his many scars were as pink as the insides of a grapefruit. There was a ridged reminder that ran across the triceps of his left arm, a starburst of mangled flesh in the lower right side of his back, and an improperly healed wound in his upper right pectoral that still pained him now and again. A runaway horse had jerked him with one foot in the stirrup during the Wilderness Campaign, and as a result, if he turned it just right, his left ankle popped like a twig. His knees cracked when he rose from a crouch if he’d been down for too long. Still, he was alive.

  As Kings dried himself, Del stood at the window, staring out onto the dark and lonely street below. Minutes passed, though it could have been hours. She had no clue as to how long she had been standing there, and then he was suddenly behind her in the pane, wet haired in his shirtsleeves and trousers. Gently guiding her into position, Kings took her by the waist, folded the digits of her right hand over the chevron of his thumb and forefinger, and became the illusion of her Virginia gentleman.

  They glided about the room, Kings leading Delilah to the imaginary music of an invisible orchestra and regaling her with the sorts of stories he imagined he might have to tell, were he the owner of a sprawling plantation.

  When her weight began to sag in his arms, he picked her up and laid her on the bed as he would a baby in its cradle. He felt sorrow lance his heart for this woman, this friend, who was adrift in a sea of troubles with no one but God and Gabriel Kings to keep her in mind. He left her dreaming with one hand curled childlike against her cheek and her hair all about her stilled and peaceful face.

  Kings spread his bedroll outside her door and spent what remained of the night with his Winchester under his palm.

  Daylight broke with a lazy haze that warmed the streets and filled open windows. The sinless inhabitants of Refuge rose to brew coffee or down the odd shot of whiskey to hasten the waking-up process. It was a new day, a perfect day to further the prosperity of the respectable half of their town, and the Good Lord has no time for loafers. The sinners that made up the other half of town, by and large, still lay wherever last night’s nocturnal adventure left them—in someone’s bed, on the steps of some den of vice, or in the dust beneath the boardwalk. The Lord would take them in his time.

  Kings checked in on Delilah and found that she had moved beneath the covers. Keeping quiet, he slipped inside to wash his face and teeth and to deposit his rifle and bedding in a Queen Anne chair. He strapped on one of his gunbelts—the one with the Bowie knife—and eased out of the room. Some patron’s forgotten Prince Albert coat was hanging off the newel post, so he decided to borrow it for the morning. It was a little short in the arms, but it would do. Thus clad, and as inconspicuous as he could afford to make himself, he left the building and headed north into town proper.

  He found Andy Yeager under the veranda of a café called the Blue Goose, forking eggs from a tin plate and sipping inky coffee. It was the first they’d seen of each other since splitting up at the Mission, but theirs was a wordless reunion. They stood together, watching the street and the people in it.

  Side by side, Yeager and Kings might have been taken for kinfolk. Though Kings was an inch taller and slightly thicker of body, they shared the same black hair and bronzed complexion, though that was due to years under the Texas sun. Both wore facial hair, which strengthened the slight resemblance. If either had bothered to trace their family trees back further than three generations, they might have found that they shared a greatgreat-grandfather or two.

  Yeager grew up on the slopes of Clinch Mountain on the Virginia-Tennessee border, the fourth of nine children born to a mother from Rockbridge County and a father from the Rhineland. It was upon those cobalt slopes that an old Cherokee instructed him in the ways of reconnaissance and sign-reading, talents he would go on to perfect as a wanted man. As one of Kings’s oldest surviving friends, Yeager was highly esteemed and his input valued whenever a holdup was in the planning stages.

  “Seen any of the boys around?” Kings asked him now, thinking that if they were to strike the Union Pacific again, Yeager, Zeller, and the others who sat out the first raid would need to ride out before nightfall. No telling how fast those railroad men had gotten running, restocked, and running again.

  Yeager flung the dregs of his coffee away. “Spied Zeller and a few others sometime around one o’clock this mornin’. They was walkin’ into some fancy barroom, lookin’ to tie one off, all smiles.”

  “Fresh from the cribs,” Kings diagnosed. “Looked like they’d been chasin’ the dragon?”

  “Didn’t look like it, but who knows.”

  Kings squinted up into the empty, blue span of sky. “No rest for the wicked,” he said, then stepped back into the sunlit street. “Think I’ll go a-huntin’ ’em. You watch yourself, Andreas.”

  Yeager watched him go. A dog barked somewhere up the lane, a cowhand trotted past on a big piebald horse, and a group of boys in overalls and straw hats were throwing rocks at one another.

  He suddenly tensed with the sobering feeling that he was no longer alone on the porch of the Blue Goose. Yeager turned his head to lock eyes with a man who had come up beside him—a tall, slender man with blunt, gray eyes, and clean-shaven save for a small, neatly trimmed mustache that gave him an aristocratic look.

  This was Marshal Asa Liddell. He wore black broadcloth in spite of the day’s warmth, and beneath the drape of his suit jacket were the non-aristocratic ornaments of his trade—a crescent-and-star badge and holstered gun.

  Yeager didn’t so much as blink an eye at the abrupt appearance of the marshal but met the man’s expressionless gaze with a smile. “Mornin’.”

  “Good morning.”

  This was far from Yeager’s first time in Refuge, but he had never before come within arm’s length of Asa Liddell. He knew enough of the man’s reputation to recognize that the marshal wouldn’t be easily fooled. Yeager knew a good piece of lying would have to be done here.

  “I’m Marshal Liddell.” He paused, not presuming to ask for a response outright.

  “J. B. Walker,” came the reply. “Pleased to meetcha.”

  Liddell’s eyes narrowed slightly as he openly took Yeager’s measure. “First time in Refuge, Mr. Walker?”

  Here came the gamble. Should Yeager answer in the affirmative—and providing that Liddell had indeed seen him around before—there would be a handful of hell to pay. Life had made a gambler of Yeager, but he chose not to twist the truth too much this time around.

  “Fourth or fifth, actually,” he replied. “Last visit was about two years ago.”

  “Strange that we shouldn’t have come across one another.”

  “Afraid I never stick around long enough for most folks to come across me, Marshal.”

  “Why’s that, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

  “Well, it ain’t that I object to fellowshippin’. Simple truth is, I’m a travelin’ man. Never been one to let the grass grow under my feet.”

  “I’ve seen the time when I could have shared that sentiment.”

  “That a fact?”

  “It is. I lawed in Dodge for a time, and before that, Casper. Didn’t care for the cold too much, so I rode off in search of sunshine.”

  “Plenty down here.”

  “That there is. Don’t believe I’ll be leaving it anytime soon, so long as the folks around here’ll have me.” Apparently satisfied, the peace officer touched his hat and said, “Enjoy your stay in Refuge, Mr. Walker. Should you choose to venture below the Deadline, steer clear of the bad apples.” At that, Liddell turned and walked away.

  As he went, Yeager wondered exactly how he could go about steering clear when he was rotten to the core himself.

  CHAPTER 6

  As Yeager chatted with the marshal, Kings was steadily making his way south. All around him were the sounds of townspeople at work—the s
trangely comforting noise of a broom rasping over dusty floorboards, a carpenter’s hammer pounding a nail, the banter passed between a friendly store clerk and a customer.

  A thin young woman caught Kings’s eye as she crossed from one boardwalk to the other. Taking in her flowered bonnet, her quick and graceful step, and the straight back that gently curved inward just above the bustle, he couldn’t help but compare her to Delilah. The madam of the Pearl Palace hadn’t carried that much clothing on her body in years, or had a home to call her own—if you didn’t count a half-dozen high-dollar cathouses with girls living three to a room. While he loved her for her grit and spirit, it was refreshing to see a woman like this, glimmering with feminine finery—a rose among the grimy undergrowth. There were too few of that sort in the venues and valleys he frequented, and he was about to come in contact, yet again, with the other kind.

  Back where he began his morning, Kings ascended the three steps leading up to the batwing doors of the Bull’s Eye Saloon. The entrance itself was located at the left-hand corner of the building, and a paint-peeling sign along the exterior proclaimed that decently priced drinks, square games of chance, and talented courtesans could be found here.

  The interior stank of tobacco, stale beer, coal-oil, sweat, and the loud perfume worn by the ladies advertised outside, and a thin coat of sawdust and wood shavings covered the floor to soak up any spills. There were two men at the bar on the left-hand wall, and about four of the tables scattered around the main room were occupied, even at this early hour, though it was coffee being poured, not alcohol. Several half-naked women lounged against the banister of the central staircase, playing with each other’s hair and blinking away last night’s funk.

  Dave Zeller was at a table near the back, face hidden by the tipped-down brim of his hat, and there was no way to judge his sobriety. Charley Davis slouched in the chair to his right, distractedly sifting through a dog-eared deck of house cards. Tom Seward and Sam Woods were at an adjoining table. Seward sat rigidly with his hands curled around a cup of coffee—Kings surmised he was about half-sober—but Woods was slumped forward with his head resting on the elbow of an outstretched arm. Of the two, he was the more likely to have partaken of the Oriental pipe, but in that position Kings had no way of knowing.