Head West (The Collected Western Stories of B.J. Holmes)

by BJ Holmes

  the small rooms. It was obvious he could only manage the once––and that had been an effort on her part to arrange––so Kate was anxious to get him out. She sensed he hadn’t been near a woman for a long time.

  ‘Well, that’ll be five dollars, honey,’ she said, pulling on her fur-collared silken dressing gown. The usual rate was two dollars but he was seven seas over and a stranger in town.

  He beamed drunkenly and pushed twenty dollars into her hand. ‘Take it all, sweetheart.’

  ‘What do you mean––all of it? Is that all you got?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he slurred. ‘But you take it.’

  Normally she would have left it at that––she didn’t look gift horses in the mouth––but she was interested in this man. ‘You mean you ain’t got no more money at all?’

  ‘Not a cent in the whole world. But I don’t care.’

  ‘Don’t care about being broke? That’s just the booze talking.’

  ‘No it ain’t, ma’am. I’m genuine.’

  Lest he had second thoughts and asked for some change, she kept quiet from that point. Better to let him ramble.

  He giggled to himself. Eventually he came out with: ‘But in a few days I’ll be one of the richest men in the Territory.’ His voice trailed off under the soporific influence of the alcohol. Even his eye twitch had abated.

  She bent close to his ear and shook him gently but firmly. ‘What do you mean?’

  His eyes resumed their nervous flickering as he tried to concentrate and he turned his head. ‘Four years ago I did a job. A payroll job. The biggest haul I ever made. And I been in the knock-over business a long time. Nigh on $15,000, I’m talking about.’

  She looked him up and down. He didn’t seem capable of the physical effort for that kind of venture. But maybe there was something in it, so she encouraged him to continue. ‘Yes?’

  ‘But the law got me. Put me in the pen. Four years they gave me.’ Then his mind went off at a tangent. ‘The law’s got funny priorities, ain’t it? Four years for robbery, only five for murder––and hanging for hoss-stealing. I ask you––’

  Kate interrupted him. ‘Never mind that! You were telling me about $15,000.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ His face broke into a grin and he patted the side of his nose with a finger. ‘But I fooled ‘em. Buried it afore they caught me.’

  ‘Where?’ she asked in a tone suddenly as silken as her gown. ‘Where did you bury it?’

  His state of drunkenness had swamped all thoughts of caution. ‘Ah, ah.’ He patted his shirt pocket. ‘It’s all on my little map.’

  ‘Haven’t any lawmen followed you from the pen?’ she asked. ‘They won’t have forgotten a sum of money like that.’

  ‘Might have done,’ he whispered almost inaudibly. ‘But I been zigzagging all over the place for a week. There’s nobody on my trail now.’

  ‘Does anybody else know about the cache?’

  ‘No––’ With that he slumped over onto his chest, breathing heavily.

  She tried to turn him over but he was too heavy. She rose quietly––although it would have taken an earthquake to rouse him now––blew out the oil lamp and left the room.

  Seth Handley was the man of the house with the job of protecting the girls and ejecting rowdies. According to an unwritten agreement with the town council he was supposed to eject minors––but he only did so when they hadn’t got the money. In his fancy-armbanded shirt he was sitting in a back room smoking when Kate entered.

  She related her discovery. ‘Get the map,’ she concluded, ‘so we can see what it’s all about. You’ll have no trouble. He’s out to the world, but a mite too weighty for me. And be quiet about it.’

  Minutes later they had the map flattened out on the table. Although the location was sixty-seventy miles to the west the names of the crayoned landmarks were familiar to them. Flat Top Mountain, Bottle Creek––and close to The Devil’s Eyeball, a big X.

  ‘Couldn’t be any plainer,’ she whispered.

  Seth licked his dry lips. ‘What next, boss?’

  She looked into his eyes, drilling deep to assess his commitment to her. Eventually she said: ‘Get rid of him.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There are enough pillows in there. Suffocate him.’

  Seth hadn’t realized it would take so long to kill a man by suffocation. The ex-jail-bird writhed and twisted five minutes with the pillow held in vice-like fashion over his face. After the movement had stopped, Seth held the pillow in place for another five minutes just to make sure.

  They stripped the body of any clues to identification and dropped it miles out of town before first light.

  With one of the girls left in charge of the business, the two headed west the following day. Trekking sixty odd miles and digging up desert was man’s work but Kate had given no thought to letting Seth go by himself. Although the breasts which now bounced around under her cotton shirt proclaimed she was a woman, there was little softness to her character. She was calculating, ruthless, untrusting.

  They reached Bottle Creek in the cool of the evening and made camp under the weird shape of a Joshua tree. In the morning Kate condescended to the womanly chore of cooking breakfast. After washing in the trickle of the creek Seth mounted the bank and looked out across the desert.

  The night mist, which had brought droplets of life-giving moisture to the desert’s inhabitants, was quickly dissipating in the rising sun. As if by magic Flat Top Mountain appeared on the horizon, pinpointing the direction they had to travel.

  They pushed into the inhospitability of the desert and reached their destination by late afternoon––the Devil’s Eyeball, a colossal round boulder poised on the outcroppings that marked the foot of the mountain. Too excited to rest they dismounted and Kate pulled out the vital map. The location of the hidden cache was indicated by a three-pointed star, precisely measured in footsteps from three clearly set out points.

  It took Seth twenty minutes to pace the three lines out. The old payroll robber had done his work well. The intersection was unambiguous. Kate sat in the shade of a Saguaro cactus while he set to with his spade under the gaze of the Devil’s Eyeball which silently countenanced their villainy. Seth’s fancy shirt, incongruous away from the frills of civilization, absorbed the sweat of the man unused to physical labor. The job was made especially difficult because he had to dig wide to compensate for the sand which had a tendency to trickle back down after he’d shifted it; but after an hour he hit something firm.

  Kate heard the faint thud and an avalanche of sand accompanied her as she leapt excitedly into the cavity. Seth cleared away some sand from the object. It was a saddlebag. He heaved it out. It was satisfyingly heavy. He gave a whoop and they scrambled up the slope carrying the burden between them.

  At the top Seth wrenched at the straps and flung the lid open. It was jam-packed with bills. He upended the bag to confirm their good fortune and whooped again.

  They knelt opposite each other and laughed uncontrollably like a couple of kids who’d broken into a candy store. So jubilant were they, scooping up the bills and letting them flutter to the ground––that neither of them saw the shapes flitting from rock to rock in progression down the mountain.

  There was a strange hissing sound and a thud. Kate’s form went rigid and her eyes opened wider than Seth would have thought physically possible, giving her face the appearance of some grotesque night owl. With an ugly-sounding exhalation of breath she slumped lifeless over the fortune.

  He saw the arrow in her back. For a split second afterwards he also saw Indians behind her with raised bows. Then two arrows smacked into his chest knocking him backwards. Slowly, on his back, he slithered head first down the sandy slope into the grave of his own digging.

  Six feathered figures cautiously approached and stood over their victims. One, clearly a chief by his age and attire, stepped forward and in a language that would have been incomprehensible to Kate or Seth, had they been alive, he said,’ It is their
own fault. The whites have been notified of our intention.’

  ‘What do we do with the bodies, chief?’

  ‘Take them and deposit them on the other side of the creek. On the white man’s side where they belong.’

  A young brave dropped to one knee and ran his fingers over the pile of paper currency. ‘And what do we do with the white man’s money?’

  The chief smiled wryly. ‘We spend it, of course, like the white man. It will buy much food and clothes.’

  ‘The red bastards.’ The man who spoke was the younger of two on horseback beside Bottle Creek. Before them lay a pair of three days’ old corpses––a man and a woman. Flies buzzed around the broken arrow shafts that protruded from the bodies. Bottle Creek marked the agreed boundary of the Indian reservation and, from the markings in the sand, the bodies had clearly been brought across and dumped on the white man’s side.

  ‘Goddamn it, Pa. Why don’t government troops ride in and wipe ‘em out?’

  The older man shook his head. ‘It’s a pity all right. But you gotta learn to see things from others’ point of view, son. The Indians have lost the fight for their lands. They’ve been decimated and herded into a small, infertile tract. The ones that are left are realistic––they’ve accepted the inevitable.’

  The two men got down and prepared to hoist the bodies onto the backs of their horses.

  ‘But to retain some element of dignity for his tribe,’ the old man went on, ‘the Chief has stated that they’ll kill any white folks that trespass. That’s harsh but understandable. It’s been two years since the place was made into an exclusive reservation and the Chief had given us plenty of warning. Their territory, granted to them by whites, starts at Bottle Creek and the authorities tacitly accept the situation. Means the other side of the Creek onward Indian law prevails. If it prescribes execution for trespass––trespass over a line that we’ve agreed to––there’s little our government can do. So it’s entirely up to us locals to keep people out.’

  ‘But we can’t warn everybody, pa.’

  ‘No. There’s gonna be some unfortunate casualties. Like these poor schmucks; that’s inevitable, too.’

  He looked closer at the corpses. ‘The two must have been strangers to the area.’

  ‘Not only that, they must have kept themselves to themselves; otherwise any local would have warned them of the situation. And why should they have kept themselves to themselves?’

  The old man nodded. ‘And, for the life of me, can’t think what they could want out there anyway. There ain’t nothing but rock and sand.’

  A Bullet for One-Eye

  From the Annals of a Peace Officer

  I never could help making judgments on first appearances; one of my failings, I reckon. Take that instance back in the hot gasser of ‘86. This feller came riding into town. Had all the looks that worried a sheriff. Despite what you might read in dime novels not many men carried hand guns in those days. But this man had himself two––two .44 Army models––dangling on his hips; and a Winchester in a saddle boot.

  Bullhide was my town––so, although I had other things on my mind, I had to know why did the man need to go around looking like a mobile armory? He was young, too. Early twenties. In my book the hotheadedness of youth didn’t integrate too good with a brace of side-arms.

  That was one reason. Second off, he was unsmiling. You might say that’s no cause to peg a man as suspicious. In one way, you’d be right. In those days, when the tide of settlement was still moving west and each communal habitation was a mixing bowl of folks from every which way, the unwritten code was you kept yourself to yourself––unless invited to make contact; or when somebody plainly needed help. So many folks were mighty cautious of putting on a friendly show.

  Lastly, he was a stranger––a time when I didn’t want no strangers on the scene, especially unsmiling, armed strangers. My platter was already full: I’d had a killing on my hands.

  It had been two weeks ago. Bill Hendy was a teller at the Bullhide Depository. Been there for years. Quiet, dependable sort. Around thirty odd years of age, we figured at the inquest. The night when it all happened it appears he’d been working over. Business had been good, money had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there were some mistakes in the figuring to be ironed out. Anyways, the sun had gone down when the bank got broke into. Bill must have still been working on his bookwork and put out the light. We reckon that last bit as a fact, otherwise the robber might have been put off if he’d known there was someone still in the bank. Bill must have lain low when he heard the break-in. However it happened, no one knew of the robbery and murder until the next morning. You’d have thought somebody would have heard the shot, but nobody did. Being inside, the report must have been muffled. It was the Depository owner who found the safe cleaned out and Bill, slumped over his ledger, gut-shot.

  What the robber didn’t know was that poor Bill hadn’t died immediately. Before his last breath he’d managed to make a final entry in his book. Amongst mixed ink and blood stains we found the message ‘ONE’ in large capital letters. It was plainly unfinished and Bill had tried to complete the word but his death throe effort had resulted in the pen line coming away from the last letter as he collapsed.

  No fancy detective work was needed to attach meaning to the dying man’s message. He’d aimed to identify his killer. And he had: the town-no-good, One-eye Dixon. Jed––nicknamed One-Eye––Dixon had lived a full twenty years. And, from the moment he had learned to walk, he’d been in trouble. First, stealing fruit from the Provisions Store. Then, money. He slowed down a-piece after he lost an eye in a saloon brawl but his activities picked up and it hadn’t been long since he’d done a six-month stretch in County Jail for an out-of-town stick-up. He wasn’t too bright and his being a known criminal wouldn’t deter him from trying to heist his neighborhood bank if the opportunity rose and he thought he could get away with it,

  There was only one small shadow of doubt at the beginning: someone else could have tried to finger One-Eye by leaving the penned clue. But, for me, his guilt was clinched when I went out with Tod, my deputy, to the Dixon homestead. The son-of-a- bitch denied it, of course, giving us the ‘dog with a bad name’ routine. ‘Allus pickin’ on me’ and that kind of crap. But we searched his room. We couldn’t find the bulk of the haul but we did find some silver certificates stuffed in a pitcher. Later the bank man tallied the numbers with his records easily showing they were from his bank.

  So, we arrested One-eye on the spot, Under questioning back at the office, he confessed very quickly––I told you he wasn’t too clever––but he wouldn’t say where he’d stashed the rest of the money. I suppose in his simple way he thought he’d do time in the slammer and then come out to spend it. No amount of questioning could elicit that last bit of information. I know some lawmen who would have beaten it out of him but we didn’t work that way in Bullhide.

  We had enough material for a trial and I was hoping that the location of the loot might be forthcoming from cross-examination in court. I knew the public prosecutor and he was a wily smooth-talking man. Plus, the judge, if he’d a mind to, could use his discretion in making some deal with the accused––like commuting a death sentence to life––to draw out the truth. The legal boys know more about those tricks than me. Anyways, I’d done my part.

  That was the situation, the trial being a couple of days away, when the stranger rode in. Even by ‘86, Bullhide was off the beaten track; we’d long since been bypassed by the railroad, trails and stage lines. We got very little through traffic. That’s why I was mighty concerned about the stranger.

  It was in the morning that Tod and I had watched the mystery man come in. We stood at the sand-pitted window and noted he hitched his grulla outside the Cimarron Hotel. With the trial so close I still had paperwork to progress so it wasn’t until afternoon that I could make time to do some investigating. I left Tod in charge of the Law Office and moseyed over to the hotel.

 
; I asked Phil, the clerk, for the book. The stranger had signed as Jethro Lee. Had no meaning for me. I asked Phil for the man’s room number. He gave it but said there was no use in going up as Lee was out. Looking back, I suppose I could have taken the key and gone up for a look-see but we didn’t run the town that way.

  ‘You seed him up close,’ I said. ‘How’d you peg him?

  ‘Can’t say, sheriff. He’s a quiet one, Courteous. He don’t give me the notion he’s on the prod.’

  I thought of the saying, ‘Still waters run deep.’ And asked, ‘Any ideas where he went?’

  ‘Saloon.’

  I took my butt over to the Raw Nugget and enquired of the bartender. The stranger had been there, stayed about half an hour. The place was near full but as far as I could ascertain he hadn’t entered into any conversation. The room was a-buzz with talk about the trial and the bartender said the stranger had been quite content to sit and listen to it without participating. This news set me to worrying a mite more about our Mr. Lee. Seemed there could be some connection between the armed man and the impending legal proceedings. But what? Then, I was told, he’d asked the where-at of the cemetery. The bartender had given directions, then Lee had left.

  We had been laying our folks for their final rest up on Cottonwood Hill, just out of town, since 1820. I let Tod know where I was going and took a stroll. Before I got there I could see the slight frame of the stranger quite clearly, standing, hat in hand, skylined on the hill near the trees that gave the place its name.

  I approached casually, cautiously eying the butts of his Colts from the back when I neared. I made no effort to cover my presence, not wanting to give him cause to start when I got close. Just like you work yourself near a horse, sidling slowly.

  The marker on the new grave at which he looked was lettered ‘William Hendy’,

  ‘Afternoon, mister,’ I said, partly to herald my approach. He turned and grunted.