For the Love of a Woman

by Orrin Russell

  Nelson raised his gun barrel at the shocked faces. ‘Put your hands up, each one of you. Raise them up high or take a bullet.’

  Ladies in long dresses sat closest. Behind them were businessmen in broadcloth suits and a family with three young boys. At the far end sat two buffalo hunters with long beards and hollow eyes and two Sharps Model 1853’s laid up against the window.

  ‘You two boys just leave those rifles where they lay,’ said Nelson. He turned to Aston behind him. ‘Ast… I mean...you. Let’s go.’

  Aston moved up from behind, and as he came abreast of Balum he addressed the passengers.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this, most clearly, is a robbery. I’ll ask you to kindly hand over your valuables to the gentlemen in the rear,’ he motioned to Saul, ‘including banknotes, purses, watches and jewelry. I’ll take this opportunity to ensure you that if you produce a weapon or interfere with our actions in any way, we will shoot you. Do not doubt it.’

  He looked around at the eyes peering back at his masked face, then continued.

  ‘And when you’ve reached Cheyenne and they ask you who robbed the train, you can tell them it was the great train thief Balum!’

  At this he swung a hand up to Balum's uncovered face. The passengers gawked and stared. Balum stood motionless, the unloaded Dragoon hanging from his hand. Aston pushed him forward to the next car and repeated the same message to the collection of frightened passengers huddled together. Nelson went on ahead to the engine, and when Saul came through the door Aston departed to the front.

  Balum watched as Saul made the rounds collecting valuables. He stood over a thin man with a crooked lip that quivered when Saul held out the burlap sack for his wallet. The thin man carried no gun. He drew his wallet from his breast pocket and dropped it gingerly into the sack, then placed his hand back at his side and shied away from the bandit as if he feared being struck.

  In the engine room Nelson laid the barrel of his revolver alongside the conductor’s head and let him know in clear terms what his fate should be if the train did not stop immediately. The conductor threw the break. A grinding sound shrieked from the rails and the train shuddered to a stop. Within seconds Douglas Crenshaw’s sweating mass of fat boarded the train and waddled into the passenger car where Balum and Saul stood.

  ‘Help me fill this sack,’ barked Saul.

  Crenshaw drew his gun and wiggled it at the paralyzed passengers. His other hand he held extended to receive gifts like a deacon circulating an offering bowl. When the riders had been fleeced of their valuables, Saul and Crenshaw urged Balum forward through the door and out onto the metal deck platforms. They crossed the space in the open air and threw wide the door on the end of the next car.

  Saul entered first. Not but one foot had crossed into the car when a bullet smashed into the wood a few inches to the left of his head. Saul’s gun was already out. The passenger who had fired the shot held his smoking revolver before him, his face a contortion of frightened horror which was soon erased by a lead projectile that blew through his forehead and sprayed the contents within that cranium over the seatbacks and passengers throughout the traincar.

  Saul swung his gun over the rest.

  ‘Anyone else feel like shooting?’ he shouted. ‘The next idiot who tries that will get his head blown off just the same. I’ll do it, or maybe Balum will do it.’

  The door on the far end of the car swung open and Aston leaned through.

  ‘What happened?’ he bellowed, but the destruction was clear to see. Blood and bits of brain and skull streaked the walls and windows and had speckled the faces and clothing of the men and women seated about.

  ‘You,’ Aston pointed at Saul. ‘We can’t get the strongbox open. Get some rope from outside and we’ll pull it out. Take Balum with you. And you,’ he looked at Crenshaw. ‘Get the rest of the valuables until the train starts moving again.’

  Outside, Shane Carly had rounded up the horses. He sat with them, his small eyes squinting in the sunlight and his mouth open and quivering slightly.

  When Saul reached the horses he mounted his own and lifted a coil of rope from the pommel of another. Balum put a foot in the stirrup and swung up on top of the roan. Shane Carly glanced at him but said nothing. Saul had already begun to ride forward to the car holding the strongbox.

  ‘It’s on the other side,’ shouted Aston with his head stuck out the traincar window. ‘Ride around.’

  In the growing confusion of the separation, Balum saw his chance. He reached for the remaining coil of rope and laid it across his lap. Shane Carly sat stupidly next to him.

  ‘Stay here,’ Balum ordered.

  Shane should have refused. He should have drawn a gun on Balum, shouted out for help, anything. But Shane Carly was a fool. Used to taking orders from the strongmen he aspired to be one day, he took the order silently from Balum; a man who in his subconscious he knew to be the most strong-willed of them all.

  Saul had already circled around the front of the steam engine and crossed the tracks to the other side. Balum followed. He crossed over the railroad ties and on the other side he paused at the steam engine window. The conductor stood watching, his hands hanging helpless at his sides.

  ‘Start this train moving again,’ said Balum.

  ‘That big feller said I ain’t to do that till ya’ll have up and left.’

  ‘I’m telling you now. Lock the engine door and get this thing moving.’

  The conductor disappeared into the engine room. Balum led the roan out from the tracks and down to the second car where Saul had thrown one end of the rope through a window. Inside, Nelson and Aston were busy tying it about the strongbox.

  A lethargic chug bellowed from the engine chimney and the crankshafts jerked the driving wheels into motion.

  ‘The train’s moving!’ Saul yelled out the obvious.

  ‘Let her move,’ Aston piped back. ‘Take out the slack in that rope and start pulling.’

  Saul backed his horse up and the rope snapped taut.

  ‘Pull it, Goddamn you!’ Aston yelled from the traincar window.

  Saul pulled, and as he did so the train picked up speed, the cylinders and pistons grinding louder and steam huffing from the boiler and shooting out from fissures in the water tanks.

  Balum grabbed one end of the rope over his pommel and tied a loose overhand knot through which he rethreaded the tail end. He tightened it, passed through the slack, and tied on a stopper knot. With the lasso tied, he gripped the loop in his right hand and turned the roan.

  The strongbox had shimmied up the wall to the window and Saul’s horse began to lose ground as the tension on the rope increased. Balum edged the roan up to Saul’s rear. The man’s attention was focused only on the rope and the shouting coming from inside the traincar. The strongbox strained against the window frame, buckling the wooden bracings. Aston and Nelson had begun to kick and pound at the frame, weakening it for the box to break through.

  Balum whipped the lasso overhead. Many a month he had labored as a cowhand. He had thrown rope over countless cattle. Rope during branding, rope thrown over calves stuck in mud wallows. He let it fly from his hand and the rope looped over Saul’s torso. Balum pulled it tight with a jerk. The motion snapped the slack from the noose and winched the man’s arms against his ribs and he turned with his eyes wild and surprised. The horse underneath skipped forward under the pull of the rope still attached to the strongbox in the train.

  Balum tugged in the opposite direction, toward the caboose end, and Saul’s own rope pulling at the strongbox sprang loose from the saddle horn. The strongbox crashed back down to the floor of the car and the rope attached to it skipped freely over the railroad ties as the train chugged down the tracks.

  Nelson, Aston and Crenshaw ran for the exits as the train gathered speed. They spilled out into the dust where Shane Carly sat in complete ignorance of what had happened on the opposite side of the train.

  Saul bent his forearm for the gun in his holster but h
is arms were smashed tight against his ribs. Balum had reached the caboose. He trotted the roan alongside of it and threw the rope over the iron railing, caught the loose end, and tied a double knot linking the rope fast to the train.

  The engine spit steam from its chimney far ahead. The caboose had caught up with Saul and as it slid past, the two sides of the tracks came into view of each other again. On the opposite side, Aston, Nelson and Crenshaw ran on foot to their horses.

  Saul kicked his horse with his heels. His eyes stared at the lasso noose connecting his body with the end of the train as though it were some unreckonable power to which he had been subjected. Balum rode with him, and the two horses broke into a run as the train puffed and wheezed and cranked its wheels along the rail irons. Behind them the rest of the party had regained their mounts and took off after the train.

  The horses were put to a canter, and as the crankshafts found their motion and the train barreled forward, Saul beat his heels into the horse’s flanks until he was galloping at top speed, the slack in the rope slowly tightening out. He shouted something at Balum that was lost in the noise of the train, and as the slack disappeared from the rope he kicked furiously at his flagging horse until the beast could maintain its speed no longer, and suddenly, like a fish being plucked from water, Saul Farro was lifted out of the saddle. There was a moment where he coasted through the air, then hit the ground in a smack. A plume of dust exploded and a heavy cloud was kicked up into the air by Saul’s massive body being drug through the hardpack clay behind the train. His screams were lost to the roar of the train. The friction of the ground beneath him tore quickly through his jeans, his jacket. Pieces of clothing were ripped and strewn behind him, leaving his skin to scrape along the jagged ground below, bouncing over the protruding iron rails and drug over railroad ties and stone. The skin peeled away from his body, blood and muscle and bone to follow. Along the railroad ties for half a mile, Saul Farro’s body was wiped like a soiled rag, leaving nothing but a dark red streak staining a line of gore behind the receding traincars. When his body had been thoroughly obliterated there was nothing left but the rope skipping whimsically behind the caboose and the long whistle of steam piping through the engine chimney.

  21

  Balum bent low over the roan’s neck. His pursuers lagged at a distance of no more than a hundred yards. Gunshots rang out behind him. Balls of lead whistled through the air and into nowhere.

  Douglas Crenshaw was the first to give up. He was no horseman, and the steed he rode, though determined, was not built to carry such a load on its back in an all-out charge. Shane Carly was next. His panting had become as ragged as his horse’s, and he veered off away from the building cloud of dust and sat staring ahead with his mouth hanging open and his beady eyes squinting into the sun.

  Frederick Nelson and Aston Sanderson rode side by side, horse legs drumming the earth underneath. They rode solid horses, but both men were by nature large and heavy. Too much time had passed since they had been given cause to expel such effort. They fired more shots at Balum’s shrinking figure and slowed to a canter. Nelson swung his head around and shouted at the two laggards behind him with an accompanying wave of his revolver. They could not catch him, but neither would he escape their sight. If he did it was no matter; they all knew where he was headed.

  Balum’s roan knew when it was time to run. It had carried the same man on its back nearly all its life and could feel the urgency in the way Balum leaned forward, the clamp of his legs along its ribs. Its hooves clawed forward in massive strides, forelegs pounding the earth and the thighs and rump launching it forward anew. They rode out of the harsh clay sand and into the darker ground where grass sprouted and grew and waved in sheets before them.

  He looked behind him several times to gauge the distance between himself and his pursuers. The line he took toward Shane Carly’s pitiful dugout was more direct than the route they had ridden that same morning. His mind scrambled for a plan. Sara would be waiting, her gun as well. He had no doubt she would use it. Nothing came to him. He was a man who needed time to wrestle a problem down, time to ponder it with a wad of tobacco in his cheek in the shade of a tree. Time he did not have.

  Nearing the hill that encased Shane Carly’s hovel he looked back again. A mile, no more, separated him from the men. A few minute’s time was what he had to retrieve Angelique without one or both of them being shot. It occurred to him to swing wide of the dugout, climb the hill and descend on foot to the doorway, but it was too much. They would reach him by then.

  As the roan charged forward he realized blankly that he had no plan at all. His mind reeled. Riding head-on would bring Sara out. On a gut feeling he cut south and rode hard to the base of the hillside. When he reached it he swung north again and rode along the edge of the hill at a trot. He could see the trash strewn about the doorway in the distance. The two remaining horses stood in the shade of the trees.

  No sign of movement. Fifty yards from the doorway he prodded the roan to a gallop.

  The pounding of hooves brought Sara to the doorway. She stepped outside and turned toward the sound of the rider. It took a moment for her mind to register what was happening. A moment too long. When she made the connection that it was Balum charging down upon her she raised the gun in her hand, but he was already there. He drove the horse’s shoulder into her, sending her sprawling. Without waiting for the horse to come to a stop he jumped off and tumbled head over heels in the dirt. Sara’s gun had gone flying and when he regained his feet he ran for it. Sara had risen. The gun lay closer to her and she reached it first. She bent for it, came up with it and pulled the hammer back but Balum was there. He ripped it from her hands and let the hammer down, then shoved it into his waistband and pushed Sara through the dugout doorway.

  Angelique’s hands were tied but her feet were not. Unattended, she had already run to the kitchen and found the knife. Balum threw Sara aside and took the knife from Angelique’s hands. He sawed the rusted blade furiously against the ropes, but they only frayed and caught in the teeth.

  In his mind Balum imagined the thunder of horses closing the distance.

  ‘Get to the horse,’ he said, and threw the knife aside.

  She ran with her hands still tied in front of her and asked no questions. Balum stepped toward Sara and the girl backed to the corner.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing with me?’ she hissed.

  ‘You’re coming with.’

  ‘Like hell I am.’

  He wasted no movement. She swung at him. Her fist struck him in the face but he was against her already. He threw her to a shoulder and carried her outside, then threw her body over his saddle. He climbed on after her, and shoved her forward, then threw her across his lap without any mind paid to her flailing legs and arms.

  ‘Where to?’ said Angelique from the saddle.

  ‘The CW.’

  She left without a backward look. Balum nudged the roan up to Sara’s paint horse and took it up by the reins, then reconsidered. He drew Sara’s revolver from his waistband and fired it into the air and struck the horse on its flank. It bolted in the direction it faced; southward and away from where Angelique was already galloping.

  Balum followed in her wake.

  Sara fought where she lay, but with his free hand Balum pushed her head down along the roan’s shoulder and leaned forward, pinning her body against its neck, the saddle horn digging into her ribs. She continued to kick and squirm, which Balum ended by smacking her upturned rump with his open hand. She yelped at the sting of it, but ceased her fighting.

  The roan had enjoyed no more than a couple minute’s rest at the dugout. The added weight of the girl over its back slowed its steps. Its head lolled and its ribs heaved in search of breath. Balum slowed it to a walk. He hoped Sara’s horse would confuse the riders, even if only for a short advantage, though the hope he held was small.

  They gained on him, slowly. It was not only their dust he saw. At a half mile out he could see each
individual rider. The CW ranch remained a few miles to the north. He continued to walk the roan, giving it all the time he could to gather its breath again. The time would come to sprint. He could always dump Sara from the saddle, though it was a last resort. With her across his lap they would hold their fire.

  Beyond that, he needed her for something else. In exactly what capacity, he did not yet know, but she was the link to the men behind him, and though they rode in pursuit they had yet to realize who was the predator and who was the prey. For Balum had reached the end of patience. The end of the law, the courts, the end of reason. He had on his mind two things only: to ensure Angelique’s safety, and the bloody lust of revenge.

  A shallow ravine opened up and he took it. Behind him the riders had reached the dugout and turned after him. The riderless horse had not fooled them.

  The roan scrambled along the moist floor of the ravine and when a cut appeared through the rolling hillside to his left he took it, picking the horse up to a trot again. He rode in clear view of them. They turned one by one into the ravine after him, their horses’ hooves trampling through the tracks of the roan.

  At the high point of the hill Balum turned and drew Sara’s gun from his waistband. He leveled it down at the riders and let off a shot, then another. The distance was too great for accuracy, and the change in elevation complicated the shot. The riders scrambled chaotically, unprepared for gunfire. Balum wasted no more time. He shoved the gun into his belt and let the roan stretch its legs. The ground opened up in a flat plain before him. The house and corrals of the CW ranch sat like small dark smudges on the horizon. The roan ran as though it knew the odds were against it. Its neck stretched forward and it ran in a solid gait, the strides even and firm on the ground.