A Quiet, Little Town

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  Red Ryan left Augusta’s side and stepped forward to meet the baleful threat, but Abe Patterson, feisty and aggressive, pushed him aside and confronted Smiler Thurmond almost as soon as he stepped through the door.

  “Smiler Thurmond, you know me. We go back a ways,” Patterson said. “This is a wedding here, so do you come in peace or in war? State your intentions.”

  “I’m here to congratulate the bride and groom,” Thurmond said. He raised the burlap sack in his hand that looked as though it held something quite heavy. “And I brought them a present to bring joy to their wedded life.”

  Abe was suspicious. To mutters of approval, he said, “Why would someone like you, an outlaw and low down, bring a present to anybody?”

  “Not just to anybody,” Thurmond said. “It’s for the bride. Miss Augusta saved the life of one of my men. I may be low down, but that was a favor I won’t forget.”

  “She’s now Mrs. Ryan to you, Smiler,” Abe said.

  “She was Miss Augusta then,” Thurmond said.

  “Yes, I was, and you are most welcome to our wedding celebration,” Augusta said, beaming. “And my, don’t you look very elegant, Mr. Thurmond.”

  The outlaw wore a gray broadcloth suit and a collared shirt without a tie, and he sported a red wildflower in his buttonhole. He leaned on a gnarled walking stick, favoring his left leg that had stopped a bullet during the recent Wells Fargo robbery.

  Thurmond bowed. “Thank’ee Mrs. Ryan,” he said. “And I brought you this.” His eyebrows rose, as though he’d just remembered something and added quickly, “I didn’t steal it. I bought it.”

  “I’m sure you did,” Augusta said, smiling. She wore a pale blue gauze scarf around her scarred neck, but Thurmond would later say that she was the prettiest bride he’d ever seen in the state of Texas. He put his hand in the sack and said, almost shyly, “Well, here it is.”

  Thurmond produced a metal box about the size and shape of a Texas lawbook that seemed to be gold-plated. The box was also decorated with enameled panels of colorful woodland scenes, and Augusta smiled and exclaimed, “How pretty!”

  “Now watch,” Thurmond said.

  He pressed something at the back of the box and part of the lid popped open and a little silver bird appeared. The bird’s wings flapped up and down, its beak open and closed and its tail fluttered . . . and it trilled a birdsong for about twenty seconds before the lid closed and it vanished into the box.

  Augusta laughed and clapped her hands. “It’s beautiful,” she said. She kissed Thurmond on his lean cheek. “A wonderful wedding present.”

  “I’ll show you the key and how it works,” Thurmond said. He actually grinned.

  Buttons Muldoon was sufficiently moved by this scene to say, “Smiler, you’re a credit to your profession. Not only because you don’t rob the Patterson stage, but because you played the gentleman’s part today and brought the happy couple a musical box.”

  Red Ryan agreed and ordered whiskey and cigars all round.

  “Happy?” he said to Augusta.

  “Perfectly happy,” his bride said. “And you?”

  “The happiest day of my life,” Red said.

  * * *

  Now there are some revisionist historians who say the marriage between Red Ryan and Augusta Addington was one of convenience between an emotionally and physically scarred woman and a wild, womanizing shotgun messenger who knew the spread of the railroads would soon put the stage lines out of business. They say Red realized that it was time to settle down and find a new occupation and that Augusta, whom he’d only known for a short time, was merely a convenience, a steppingstone to the future he envisioned for himself. Of course, that means their love was a lie. But if this is true, then it should be said here that the lie grew less of a lie with every passing year of the long, happy, and productive life they were destined to spend together.

  EPILOGUE

  Red Ryan rode shotgun messenger for a year after he married Augusta Addington, who resigned from the Pinkerton Detective Agency on her wedding day. They later opened a bar and restaurant in San Angelo and prospered. Their descendants live in the area to this day.

  Patrick “Buttons” Muldoon continued working as a stage driver until Abe Patterson sold the business in 1899. Buttons later worked as a laborer on the Panama Canal and died there of yellow fever in 1908 on his fifty-third birthday.

  Della Stark married Don Miquel de Serra in 1884 and within a year he died from the accidental discharge of a shotgun he was cleaning. Della never remarried, sold her land in the early 1900s, and later became active in the Suffragette movement. She died in 1940 in New York.

  Herman Ritter was not reelected as sheriff and entered politics and no more of him is known.

  Smiler Thurmond was lynched for a horse thief in the Oklahoma Territory in 1896. He committed one crime too many.

  In 1928 a woman claiming to be Effie Bell tried to sell her memoir, I Wed an Apache War Chief, to Adolph Zukor, the head of Paramount Pictures. But nothing ever became of it, and the woman claiming to be Effie soon vanished from history.

  Nothing is known of gun vaquero Manuel Garcia.

  During World War 1, Ernest Walzer, the Englishman who hired the four assassins to kill Dr. Ben Bradford, became a multimillionaire selling arms to both sides. He lived to the ripe old age of 103, and his career proves that sometimes crime does pay.

  And now a word about Honeysuckle Cairns. In 1889 she joined a traveling circus as the Fat Lady and after five years on the road retired and married strongman Louis St. Cyr, the French Hercules. The pair later explored central Africa, then known as the Dark Continent, where St. Cyr allegedly overawed the natives with his amazing feats of strength. Honeysuckle and the French Hercules then tried to repeat their triumph in South America and were last seen in the city of Puerto Maldonado in Peru in 1910 as they prepared to enter the Amazon rain forest. They were never seen again.

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of the next

  Western adventure!

  NATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHORS

  WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE and J. A. JOHNSTONE

  BY THE NECK

  A Stoneface Finnegan Western

  Brand new series!

  Introducing a new Western hero in the grand

  Johnstone tradition:

  a mining town saloonkeeper who serves up justice

  like a shot of liquor—150 proof.

  JOHNSTONE COUNTRY.

  BOOMTOWN JUSTICE.

  Rollie Finnegan is a man of few words. As a Pinkerton agent with two decades of experience under his belt, he uses his stony silence to break down suspects and squeeze out confessions. Hence the nickname Stoneface. Over the years he’s locked up plenty of killers. Now he’s ready to make a killing—for himself . . .

  There’s gold in the mountains of Idaho Territory. And the town of Boar Gulch is a golden opportunity for a tough guy like Finnegan. But when he arrives, the local saloon owner is gunned down in cold blood—and Finnegan makes a cold calculation of his own. Instead of working in a mine, he’ll buy the saloon. Instead of gold, he’ll mine the miners. And instead of getting dirty, he’ll clean up this grimy little boomtown once and for all—with his own brand of Stoneface justice . . .

  Look for BY THE NECK on sale now!

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rollie Finnegan, two-decade veteran of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, almost chuckled as he descended the broad stone steps of the county courthouse. Not an hour before, he’d taken no small pleasure in seeing the arched eyebrows of the jury men when he’d been called to the stand.

  He suspected it would be a long time before the defendant’s city-bred whelp of a lawyer would drag him up on the stand again. Finnegan had seen even more surprise on the pocked face of the inbred mess that was Chance Filbert, defendant and self-proclaimed “Lord of the Rails.”

  Trouble was, “Lord” Filbert was gifted with bravado and little else. He also liked to swill tanglefoot, and at Corkins’ Bar he’d yammered a
bout his impending robbery of the short-run mail train from Mason’s Bluff to Randolph. It hadn’t worked out that way.

  Chance had managed to clamber aboard the train with the help of a fat cohort named Kahlil, who’d somehow mounted the rumbling car’s fore platform first. Not receiving any response to their rapping on the door of the mail car—the train was by then cranking along on a flat, the grinding steel pounding for all it was worth and the men inside didn’t hear the ruckus—Chance sent two shots at the door handle.

  One bullet managed to free up the lock. The second found its way into the right temple of little Sue-Sue Campbell, who had been obeying her harried father, Arvin, one of the two workers sorting mail. He’d had no choice but to take her along on the run that morning, because her mother was deep in the agonies of pushing out a little brother for sweet Sue-Sue, who until then had been an only child. And so would her brother, Arvin Jr., be thanks to Chance Filbert and his eagerness to avoid a legal occupation.

  Filbert’s greasy, snaky head had entered the car before the rest of him, and though he didn’t see the slumped girl to his left, he did see two men in the midst of sorting the mail. With hands full of letters, their jaws dropped, and they stared at the appearance of the homely man and the fat, long-haired one behind him, both with guns leveled.

  In court, Rollie wore his twenty-dollar pinstriped, storm-gray boiled-wool suit, and capped it with a matching gray topper, what he referred to as his city hat. He recalled when the salesman had set it on his head while standing before the tall looking glass how much like his long-dead father he looked. He also had to admit that the salesman had been correct—the hat made the suit, and the entire affair looked damn good on him.

  Though he’d rather tug on his old fawn Boss of the Plains, like he did most every day, Stoneface Finnegan did not ever miss a court date. He had vowed long ago to always see a case through, from top to bottom, front to back, and inside out. He knew, not unlike his old man once more, if he didn’t do everything in his ability to nail shut the door on each and every lawbreaker and miscreant he nabbed, he’d be setting himself up for a month’s worth of sleepless nights, all the while grinding down his molars and enduring his ticked-off-with-himself attitude. And at fifty-four, he didn’t need that crap in his life anymore.

  If wearing a fancy suit and shaving himself close and pink and oiling his hair and waxing his mustache (which he did each morning anyway) helped the prosecuting attorneys send the devils to the prison or the gallows, then he’d tug on the suit and do the job.

  There had been ample and irrefutable damning evidence and painful, tearful testimony from the dead girl’s parents. There had also been the precise recounting of events by Agent Rollie Finnegan. Despite this, in a last-minute courtroom effort, Moe Chesterton, attorney-at-law for Chance Filbert (and closet dice roller, much to the detriment of his anemic bank balance), had stood before the assemblage, red-faced and thumbing his lapels in an effort to draw attention to what he hoped were persuasive words.

  He’d told the crowd stinking of sweat and the weary jury that Stoneface Finnegan had once more put his charge, in this instance Chance Filbert, in a most dire situation. Most dire, indeed. Yes, it was true, Chesterton nodded. And he could prove it. The lawyer’s pink jowls quivered and drooped suitably. “Hold up your hands, Mr. Filbert . . . if you are able.”

  With much effort, the smirking killer had managed to raise his palsied hands aloft. Soon, they dropped to the mahogany tabletop before him and his head bowed, exhausted from the strain.

  Rollie had rolled his eyes then, from his seat in the first aisle behind the prosecution. Not for the first time in the proceedings did he wish he had let his Schofield have its way with Chance when he’d finally caught up with him in that creekside cave in Dibney Flats. All that nonsense could have been avoided. Waste of time, waste of money.

  But the law was the law, and Rollie told himself if he had wanted to break it, he should have taken the owlhoot trail instead of tracking scofflaws after the war. Or gone into politicking, making laws to suit his base whims like those oily rascals in capitol towns everywhere.

  Instead, on that thundering, wet morning in the cave two months before, after tracking the outlaws for a day and a night, the snout of Rollie’s Schofield parted the desiccated viny roots draping the entrance. It was then he’d seen Chance Filbert seated inside on a low boulder. He’d watched the oily man a moment, uncertain of Kahlil’s whereabouts in the dim hole. The close air, scented of warm muck, had forced thoughts of thick, slow snakes and crawling things.

  Rollie had seen Chance and fat Kahlil ride there with intent, then dismount, tie their horses, and enter the cave. They’d lugged in what they made off with from the train, a small arch-top wooden trunk and a squat strongbox wrapped in riveted strap steel. They’d left their horses lashed to a low, jutting branch, saddled and without reach of water. The poor beasts swished and nipped and stamped at a plague of biting flies.

  For minutes, Rollie had wondered if Chance was the only man alive in the cave. Of the two, Rollie had seen only Chance venture out with increasing frequency as the hours dragged by. He’d poked his malformed face between the mossy vines, then satisfied he was not surrounded, would saunter out more loosely each time, limbered, no doubt, by drink. Of Kahlil, there had been no sight or sound.

  Unless the man had a steel bladder or there was a back entrance to the cave, which from Rollie’s reconnoiter of the region didn’t seem likely, he bet himself a bottle of Kentucky’s finest that Chance had knifed his slop-gutted partner.

  Rollie had won the bet when he’d looked inside and saw a massive, unmoving dark form off to the left. Not even snoring. To his right and babbling in a whiskey stupor, Chance sat atop that boulder before the flop-topped trunk, torn papers all about the muck-rock floor—intimate letters unlikely to make it to their destinations, orders for goods long saved for by some lonely bachelor dirt farmer or farmwife helpmate, or perhaps awaited countersigned deeds to land and goods—all pillaged for cash by the stunted, drunken Chance Filbert.

  The strongbox had fared better and appeared to be intact. Rollie hadn’t heard shots, Chance’s favored means of opening locked things. Maybe he had been afraid of a bullet whanging back at him, though Rollie had not credited the man with such forethought. Likely he was saving the strongbox for dessert and pilfering the easiest pickings first.

  Subduing the killer had been a simple matter of pushing his way through the clingy green vines and thumbing back the Schofield’s hammer. The hard, solid clicks would make a dead man rise. Except for Kahlil. Rollie had quickly inspected the dark shape enough to note it had indeed been slit open. He’d smelled the rank tang of blood mixed with the dank earth stink of the cave. He was glad he’d decided to keep his hat on his head, tugged low though it was, mashing his ears in an undignified manner. Beat having something with too many legs, or too few, squirming on his head and down the back of his shirt.

  “Who you?” said Chance when his vision and his head had together in a wobble.

  For a moment Rollie had considered replying, but he was not fond of excessive chatter. Why speak when you could act? The unspoken motto had served him well for years. He reckoned it was proven enough to keep on with. He stepped forward quick—one, two strides—while Chance made a sloppy grab for his own gun. His fingertips barely touched the nicked walnut grips as the butt of a Schofield mashed his hat into his head above the left ear.

  Chance knew no more until he found himself lashed over the saddle of Kahlil’s horse. The saddle and the horse under it smelled bad. Why was he on his dead pard’s horse? He could see his own, perfectly good horse, walking along, tied, behind this one. But hold on there. Fat Kahlil was tied to it, dripping all manner of black-looking goo and cultivating a cloud of bluebottles that rose and dipped together as if they were training for a stage presentation.

  But even that was the least of Chance Filbert’s concerns.

  He’d known for certain his head had somehow been cle
aved in half and was leaking out what he was certain were the last of his precious brains onto the heat-puckered earth. Nothing less could account for the volleys of cannon fire thundering inside his skull.

  The pain doubled as the day had ground on, one pounding hoof step after another. He’d tried several times to speak to the vicious brute who’d ambushed him, but his strangled pleas, which came out as little more than gasps and coughs, brought new washes of agony that ended in his throbbing hands lashed behind his back.

  The man on the horse ahead showed him only his back, tree-trunk stiff and wide-shouldered. Who was he, and why did he think it was acceptable to bust in on a man when he’d been tucked away in a cave, tending his own business?

  The farther they walked, the angrier Chance became. He’d regained more control of his throat, but the lack of water, a desperate need at that point, rendered his usually loud voice to little more than a hoary whisper.

  Several yards ahead of Chance, Rollie had struck a match and set fire to the bowl of his briar pipe, packed full of his least favorite tobacco, a rank, black blend of what tasted like the leavings of an angry baby and a gut-sick drunkard. The thick clouds of smoke would drift back into Chance Filbert’s face and gag him. With hours to go yet, Rollie had two pouches of this special blend. He had smiled then, for a brief moment.

  In the courtroom two months later, Moe Chesterton had asked Rollie what he thought about the fact that Chance Filbert’s hands had been rendered all but useless by the too-tight restraints Rollie favored—smooth fence wire.

  “It’s a shame,” said Rollie.

  “A shame,” repeated the lawyer. “And, Mr. Finnegan, would you care to enlighten us as to why you feel this . . . this avoidable affront . . . is a shame?”