A Quiet, Little Town

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “We had a run-in,” Buttons said.

  He didn’t elaborate, and the man didn’t push it. “Name’s Ora Pelton,” he said. “I own this here palace. I got a good team in the corral and fried beef and sourdough bread for breakfast.”

  Buttons’s eyes went to the corral. “Mostly grays. I ain’t keen on them.”

  “Like the fried beef, it’s all I got. Take the grays or leave them,” Pelton said.

  “When grays get hot, they smell,” Buttons said.

  “Still smell better than people,” Pelton said.

  Buttons stared at him without comment and then turned his head and said, “Archibald, you’ll help change the team, earn your keep for a change.” He leaned out of the box and yelled, “Passengers out.”

  Pelton held the tent flap open for Augusta and for the monks, a sight that raised his eyebrows. He looked up at Buttons and said, “On this job I’ve met all kinds of passengers coming and going, but the Patterson stage carries the strangest cargoes I ever did see.”

  “It’s our specialty,” Buttons said. “When it comes to freaks and crazies, we’ve cornered the market, present company excepted of course.”

  Pelton smiled. “Of course.”

  * * *

  After a breakfast of tough beef and greasy fried bread, the Patterson passengers, now showing signs of exhaustion, once again boarded the stage and headed south under a bloodred morning sky. Superstitious men like Red Ryan and Buttons Muldoon should have considered such a sky ill-omened, but, irritated that Frank Carson and his militia had refused to escort them at least part of the way to Fredericksburg, they didn’t give it a second thought. As events would soon reveal . . . they should have.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In later years, Buttons Muldoon would always say that his real troubles on the Fredericksburg trip began when he ran over the sombrero thirty miles out from the town. He claimed he didn’t see the Mexican headgear until it was too late, and that was true. Tired like his passengers and drowsy, he might have nodded off when the incident happened.

  It was Chris Mercer riding up top who saw the squashed sombrero flopping around in the stage’s following dust cloud, and he casually remarked to Red Ryan that they’d just run over somebody’s hat. He could not have imagined the reaction this statement would cause.

  “Buttons!” Red yelled. “We just ran over the hat.”

  Buttons immediately reined in the team. “Oh, my God! Where?” he said, his face shocked.

  “Just a little ways back,” Mercer said. Puzzled, he looked from Red to Buttons and back again. “What’s the trouble? It’s only a hat . . .”

  But he talked to Red’s back . . . he and Buttons were already scrambling down from the box.

  “It’s the hat all right,” Red said. As dust settled around him, he stared down at the mangled sombrero and shook his head. “Buttons, this is bad. I mean, real bad.”

  “Yeah, I know it’s bad,” Buttons said. “You don’t have to tell me it’s bad. Did I move it?”

  “Yeah, you moved it,” Red said. “Ran over it and moved it.”

  “Damn it, Red, it shouldn’t have been there,” Buttons said. “It should’ve blown away in a big wind.”

  “But it didn’t, did it?” Red said. “It was right there on the trail where it’s been for years.”

  “Bad luck, Red,” Buttons said. “For me and for you.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Red said. “You were driving, not me.”

  “I told you to watch the trail ahead,” Buttons said.

  “It was still mostly dark,” Red said. “How could I be expected to see a hat in the road?”

  “A sombrero,” Buttons said.

  “A sombrero is a hat,” Red said.

  Augusta Addington stepped beside Buttons. The monks were stretching their legs and seemed uninterested. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Everything is wrong,” Buttons said. “We ran over the hat. That’s like . . . like breaking a mirror, a hundred years bad luck.”

  “Seven years bad luck,” Augusta said.

  “A whole heap of bad luck then,” Buttons said.

  “What’s so special about an old hat?” Augusta said.

  “I’ll tell why it’s so special,” Red said. “As it was told to me by a puncher who worked for the Anderson Cattle Company, a ranch to the north of here. Well, it used to be north of here. It went out of business four years ago. A year before that, one of the Anderson vaqueros was right here, on this road, rounding up strays, when a sudden thunderstorm blew up.”

  Buttons said, “The vaquero, some say his name was Alonzo, others Alvarez, got struck by a bolt of lightning that killed him and his hoss stone dead. His sombrero flew off his head and landed in the middle of the road. And there it stayed for years. Cowboys are a superstitious bunch, and nobody would pick up the hat, because to touch it would bring bad luck. Some even rode a mile out of their way to avoid getting close to the dead man’s sombrero.”

  “And now Buttons ran over it with the Patterson stage,” Red said to Augusta.

  “Red, I’d be obliged if you’d stop saying that,” Buttons said.

  “Sorry, old fellow, but that’s what happened,” Red said.

  “And now all the bad luck is on me,” Buttons said. Suddenly he looked crestfallen, as down in the dumps as a normally cheerful man could be. “A hundred years of bad luck.”

  “A good story, but it’s all nonsense,” Augusta said, frowning. She picked up the battered sombrero and held it up to the horrified Buttons and Red. “Look,” she said. “It’s just a dirty old hat that someone lost.” The woman held the sombrero by the brim and then slung it away from her. The hat sailed away and landed in a patch of scrub, startling a covey of sleeping quail that exploded into the air like shrapnel.

  “Now,” Augusta said, “can we resume our journey that’s beginning to seem endless?”

  Buttons was stricken. “Miss Addington, you shouldn’t ought to have done that,” he said. “Now the hat’s been throwed, the bad luck will be a sight worse.”

  Augusta smiled. “No, it won’t, Mr. Muldoon. The story about the hat is just an old wives’ tale. Don’t let it trouble you in the least.”

  Buttons was unconvinced. “I hope to God you’re right,” he said.

  An hour later . . . twenty-five miles out from Fredericksburg. . . they heard the thin cry of a woman in grievous distress . . .

  * * *

  “Yeah, I heard it,” Red Ryan said.

  “I heard it, too,” Chris Mercer said.

  “It’s a woman’s voice,” Buttons said. He halted the team and pointed east. “Somewhere in that direction.”

  “Seems pretty close,” Mercer said. “And it’s definitely a woman.”

  “There’s one way to find out. I’ll go look,” Red said. “Buttons, cover me. It could be an Apache trick.”

  He climbed down from the box, and Buttons handed him the shotgun. The driver had his own Winchester ready. “Red, step careful,” Buttons said. Then, “You hear that?”

  “Yeah, it’s a woman calling for help,” Red said.

  “Out here?” Buttons said.

  “Seems like,” Red said.

  The whereabouts of the mad killer Donny Bryson was uppermost in Red’s mind. He’d kidnapped a woman, but why had he brought her here, a good thirty miles from his kinfolk on the Perdinales River? Maybe to shake the Rangers or a posse from Austin?

  Red had no answer to those questions, but they troubled him as he left the stage and walked toward the area from where they’d heard the woman’s cries. He was good with a gun, fast and smooth on the draw and shoot, but he dreaded coming up against Bryson, who might even now be lying in wait for him. The man was so fast, so accurate, so deadly with the iron that the rumor was he’d sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a lightning draw. Red figured the tale was a big windy, but a man never knew . . . Donny had killed a lot of people.

  Beams of wakening sunlight fanned into the m
orning sky as Red crossed a low rise where a few stunted juniper shared the ground with a post oak and thin patches of bluestem grass. Walking at a half crouch, his shotgun at the ready, he encountered a sandy flat and running parallel to it a dry wash that ran straight for fifty yards and then angled abruptly to the west. It was from this bend he heard the woman’s voice again, a frail cry for help, but filled with deep despair and pain.

  Red closed the remaining distance at a run and then came to a dead stop, staring dumbstruck at what lay before him. He would always remember his first sight of the woman, not really a woman, just a teenaged girl. What did she look like that morning? Years later Red would tell a horrified reporter, “Imagine a rag doll after two large dogs had fought for an hour over its possession, and you’ll then have a good idea what Mrs. Alice Russell, the widow of deputy Mark Russell, looked like. I tell you this, Donny Bryson didn’t only use her for his pleasure . . . he tore her apart.”

  Traveling booth fighter, sometimes hired gun, shotgun messenger, nothing in Red Ryan’s past had prepared him to succor the sick or tend the wounds of the injured, especially a pregnant woman. To his mortification, he realized he hadn’t even brought water. The canteen was still with the coach. But he scrambled into the dry wash, determined to do his best. As soon as the woman saw Red, she shrank away from him, her eyes wild with fear.

  Red stopped where he was and said, “Ma’am, no need to be afraid of me. My name is Red Ryan and I’m a representative of the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company. I mean you no harm, and you need help.”

  Some of the terror left the woman’s face, and she whispered, “My baby. Save my baby.”

  “Yes, of course I will soon. I mean I will . . . I mean . . .” Red’s tongue got so tangled, he lapsed into silence. He saw the woman’s swollen belly, but she was so covered in blood, all over her plain gray dress, that he feared the baby might already be dead.

  The woman grabbed the front of Red’s buckskin shirt in a death grip and said, “Mister, save my baby . . .”

  Feeling helpless, hopeless, Red murmured, “I’ll go get help, Ma’am.”

  “Red, she’s terrified. Move away from her.”

  Augusta Addington stood on the bank of the wash in her dusty riding outfit, her hair pulled back from her face. She looked tired, shadows under her eyes, a woman worn out from stage travel looking at another who’d gone through Hell. Augusta slid her way down the embankment and kneeled beside the woman. She’d brought the canteen.

  “I don’t know what happened to her . . .” Red said.

  “You don’t?” Augusta said, her eyebrows arching. Red said nothing.

  “Well, I do,” Augusta said. “I know exactly what happened to her.”

  Chris Mercer had followed Augusta from the stage, and he spared Red the need to say anything further. “No tracks on this side of the wash,” he said.

  Red pointed east with his shotgun. “We’ll scout in that direction.”

  As Augusta tended to the woman, Red and Mercer worked their way along the other side of the wash where there were more trees and brush. But the horse tracks were obvious. They came in from the north, and the rider had stopped long enough to throw the woman into the wash from his saddle. He’d then headed due east at a walk, taking his time, confident of not being seen in that empty, uninhabited wilderness.

  “If it’s Donny, he’s headed for the Perdinales,” Mercer said. “My God, I don’t believe the things he did to that poor woman.”

  Red didn’t care to follow up on that and said, “You ever come across him before? I mean back in your gunfighting days.”

  Mercer shook his head. “No, but one time when I hired out my gun to a rancher up where Catfish Bayou meets the Trinity River in Anderson County I saw Donny’s handiwork. At the time, he was walking out with a fallen woman who cheated on him and he dragged her out of bed one night, shot the man who was with her, and carried her away. In places, both banks of the Catfish are heavily wooded and he crucified her on a hardwood tree. Used ropes to tie her arms to a couple of limbs but also used nails to fix her hands and feet in place, and then he did some knife work. I saw the body when she’d been taken down. The law up there reckoned it had taken the young lady three days to die.”

  “Well, I sure enough asked you the question, and now I’m sorry I did,” Red said.

  “It’s hard to talk about Donny Bryson without mentioning death, blood, and torture,” Mercer said. “The Mexicans say he’s a demon spawned in Hades, and they may be right.”

  For a few moments Red’s eyes searched into the rolling distances of the hill country and then he said, “Looks like he’s long gone.”

  “And thank God for that,” Mercer said. “I hope I never get this close to Donny Bryson ever again.”

  “That makes two of us,” Red said. He turned. Augusta Addington, blood staining her hands, stood staring at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Red knew what it meant. Donny Bryson had claimed another victim . . . two victims.

  “She’s dead,” Augusta said when Red and Mercer joined her. “I think the baby died before she did.” And then after a long pause, “I’m not a doctor. There was nothing I could do.”

  “There’s nothing a doctor could have done, either,” Red said. “At least she didn’t die alone.”

  “That would have been a terrible thing,” Augusta said. She fought back a tear. “She held my hand until the end. Red, I helped her, didn’t I? For God’s sake tell me I helped her.”

  “Of course, you did,” Red said. “You helped her more than I could . . . more than anybody could.”

  “We’ll take her back to the stage,” Augusta said. “I don’t want to leave her . . . and the baby . . . out here.”

  “We’ll take her to Fredericksburg and get the local law to wire Austin,” Red said. “If she has kin there, they’ll want the body for a decent burial.”

  The monks stood apart as the woman’s body was gently lifted into the stage. One of them, the one with the Irish accent, had a rosary in his hands, praying in a low murmur.

  Augusta elected to ride with the dead woman, the monks taking up station behind the stage. Mercer took up his usual position up top.

  Buttons slapped the reins and urged the horses forward at a walk. No one talked, and the only human sound was the whisper of the praying Irish monk.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Red, we got a dead lady in the stage, four holy monks walking behind us slow as molasses in January, and one of my gray wheelers is coming up lame,” Buttons Muldoon said. “It’s the curse of the sombrero, I tell you. The bad luck is beginning.”

  Red said, “Buttons, the gray is young, and he’s tiring and the dead woman has nothing to do with your luck and everything to do with the mad dog killer Donny Bryson.”

  “But I feel it,” Buttons said. “Bad luck is in the air, like a black fog.”

  “When did you ever see a black fog?” Red said.

  “All right, then, a gray fog,” Buttons said. “But it’s in the air. Keep your eyes skinned for Apaches, Red. Them savages can sense when a man’s luck is running bad.”

  Red smiled. “Once we get to Fredericksburg, we’ll drop the passengers at the stage depot and then head to the Munich Keller for good German beer and sausages. That will fix you right up, make you feel a sight better.”

  Buttons shook his head. “Nothing will make me feel better.”

  “Damn, it all, Buttons, I’ve never seen you so down in the mouth before,” Red said. “You ain’t exactly good company.”

  “Yeah, well, I never ran over a cursed hat afore, either,” Buttons said. “Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

  “You’ll get over it,” Red said. Then, “Hey, there’s that blonde waitress who works at the Munich Keller . . . what’s her name?”

  “Lilly.”

  “Yeah, Lilly. You like her.”

  “She won’t even look at me,” Buttons said. “Not with my luck.”

  “Oh, damn,” Red said.
/>   “Oh, damn, what?” Buttons said.

  “That gray wheeler is limping,” Red said.

  * * *

  The oil lamps were lit in Fredericksburg when the Patterson stage drove along the main street that was lined on each side with a large variety of stores and warehouses. Buttons Muldoon pulled up outside the depot with five horses in the traces, the sixth tethered behind the coach. The town was settled by German farmers, some of whom later branched into manufacturing, and it had none of the boisterous saloons and whorehouses of the Texas cattle towns, though its several beer gardens did a lively business. It was a clean, well-ordered settlement of stone and plaster houses, churches, and schools. The county seat of Gillespie County, Fredericksburg had a young sheriff named Herman Ritter who spoke both German and English and attended Lutheran services every Sunday. He was as tough as he had to be but had no gun reputation.

  Fredericksburg was a straitlaced town, a civilized town, a peaceful town . . . but not a good town to bring a murdered lady with a dead baby inside her.

  The Alpenrose Inn was a two-story hotel that doubled as the stage depot with a corral and barn out back and beyond that a fenced pasture where a dozen horses grazed. The animals looked fit and sleek, and Red figured that boded well for the final leg of the trip to the Perdinales River. Buttons had a deep-seated prejudice against grays, and happily there were none to be seen. Red hoped that might cheer him up, but it didn’t.

  Looking grumpy, Buttons said, “The monks have decided to stay here in Fredericksburg for a few days of quiet prayer and meditation, whatever the heck that means. I told them the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company, doesn’t do refunds, even partial refunds, and that Abe doesn’t even know the meaning of the word.”

  “What did they say?” Red said.

  They stood on the hotel porch while the depot manager and his two helpers took care of the team and the lame gray.

  “It didn’t trouble them none,” Buttons said. “The Irish feller told me they’d book rooms here at the inn.” He shook his head. “I didn’t know monks had the money for fancy hotels. I figured they’d pay a few cents a night to sleep at the Lange livery stable over yonder.”