The Stranger from Abilene Read online

  The marshal rode beside him, took the makings from Clayton’s shivering hands, and rolled the smoke. He licked the paper tube closed, put it in Clayton’s mouth, and thumbed a match into flame.

  “You did good, Cage,” Kelly said. “Shot that damned Apache off my back.”

  Clayton inhaled smoke deeply. “You saw that?”

  “It pays a man to see everything that’s happening in a gunfight.”

  “Are they all dead?”

  “Dead as they’re ever gonna be.”

  “I didn’t want to kill the old man.”

  Kelly smiled. “Well, don’t let it trouble you. An old man can kill you deader’n hell, as surely as a young one can.”

  “Nook, I still don’t think the Apaches killed Lee and the Southwell hands. It was Vestal.”

  “Well, it don’t matter a hill of beans now, does it?”

  “We might have killed innocent men.”

  “You think Shad hoisted himself up over a slow fire and boiled his own brains?”

  “No. The Apaches did that. It was payback time.”

  “Then they were guilty of murder.”

  Clayton’s eyes roved around the dead men. “And they sure paid for it.”

  Kelly nodded. “That’s the law. Commit murder and you pay for it.”

  He looked at Clayton with blue, untroubled eyes, as though a brush with danger and the deaths of six men meant nothing to him. “Finish your smoke, then help me load them Apaches onto their ponies.”

  He read the question on Clayton’s face and said, “Cage, the citizens of Bighorn Point pay me to administer the law, but the law has to be seen to be done. They don’t want my word for it. They expect to inspect the evidence.”

  He smiled. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  “Five dead Apaches is quite a haul, for Bighorn Point or anywhere else.”

  “Yeah, the taxpayers are gonna be real pleased.”

  And they were. Brass band pleased.

  The town had another hero to add to their list, right up there with the gallant Colonel Parker Southwell and his band of lionhearts.

  The Apaches, as wicked and treacherous as ever, had obviously been in league with the bandits the colonel had destroyed. They had taken out their murderous rage on the Southwell Ranch, killing, raping....

  Oh, and poor Mrs. Southwell.

  That very flower of American womanhood had been outraged, then horribly murdered, her ranch segundo , the brave Shad Vestal, tortured and killed within her sight.

  “The only fly in our ointment of valor,” said Mayor Quarrels, “is that the savages were not taken alive. It would have been my great pleasure to hang them all.”

  Quarrels said this at the commencement of a street meeting, when Marshal Kelly was presented with a handsome gold badge made from two double eagles.

  When the crowd heard the mayor talk about the hanging, they cheered wildly.

  As for Clayton, being an outsider and the one who’d thrown poor Mrs. Southwell in horse piss, Mayor Quarrels only shook his hand, and a few in the crowd managed a halfhearted “Huzzah.”

  However, Clayton did get an invitation from Ben St. John, the banker, to discuss his financial affairs and his forthcoming nuptials to Miss Emma Kelly.

  After singling Clayton out from the crowd, the fat man pontificated on marriage and money matters.

  “Marriage is a big step, Mr. Clayton, and the one way to ensure happiness is to be financially secure,” he said. “As the immortal Mr. Wilkins Micawber says, ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.’ ”

  St. John’s eyes met Clayton’s, but could not stay there, sliding away like black slugs. He looked at Clayton’s chin and beamed. “Do you catch my meaning, sir?”

  “Yes, I do,” Clayton said.

  “Then come see me at the bank. I assure you, we can put you on a path to prosperity that will enhance your marital bliss.”

  St. John put his hand on Clayton’s shoulder. “Shall we say ten o’clock tomorrow morning?”

  “I’ll be there,” Clayton said.

  He’d disliked the man on sight, and the suspicion lingered in him that St. John might be the one.

  He could be Lissome Terry.

  Chapter 54

  It fell to Moses Anderson to remove the bodies from the Southwell Ranch and clean up the house. He and his helpers were just finishing up when Cage Clayton rode into the yard on an inspection and swung out of the saddle.

  “Bodies are all gone, Mr. Clayton,” the black man said. “I took them into town earlier this morning.” Anderson wiped his hands with a rag, a talking man glad of an audience. “The undertaker says they’re all too far gone for him to make them pretty, so he’s just gonna box ’em and bury ’em. Buryin’ is tomorrow and the mayor will be there and a lot of other folks. Mayor’s laid on a barrel of beer for the wake an’ a hog on a spit and it’s shapin’ up to be a shindig. Yes, sir, a real hootenanny.”

  He shrugged. “ ’Course, black folks ain’t invited.”

  Clayton smiled. “Neither am I.”

  “Well, Mr. Clayton, that’s a real shame, an’ after the way you killed them Apaches an’ all.”

  There was an expectant look on Anderson’s face, but Clayton didn’t want to dwell on the subject.

  “You get all the blood out of the house, Moses?”

  “Sure did. She’s as clean as a whistle.”

  Clayton waited awhile, then eased into his questions.

  “Moses, you’ve lived in Bighorn Point for a long time, huh?”

  “Sure have. Man and boy, I bin there, ’cept I went up the trail a couple of times.”

  “How well do you know Ben St. John?”

  Clayton watched as shutters closed in Anderson’s eyes.

  “Not much. He don’t like colored folks.”

  Clayton continued to look into Anderson’s face without speaking.

  Uneasy now, the black man said, “Folks here’bouts say he’s a mean one. Foreclosing on people and takin’ their property, thowin’ them out on the street, an’ all. But he goes to church and sits in a pew with him and his wife’s name on a little brass plate and what he’s done don’t seem to trouble his conscience none.”

  A man standing by one of the wagons yelled, “Moses, we’re all through here.”

  “Be right with you,” Anderson said.

  “St. John ever kill a man?” Clayton said.

  The black man shook his head. “Not that I ever heard.” He looked over at the wagons that were ready to pull out. “I gotta go now, Mr. Clayton.”

  “Wait, Moses. Is he faithful to his wife?”

  The man stared into space. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve got something to tell me, Moses, and I want to hear it. The more I learn about St. John, the better.”

  “You think he’s the man you came to Bighorn Point to kill?”

  “He could be.”

  Anderson took a step closer. “He’s sparkin’ a little black gal.”

  “I thought he didn’t like coloreds.”

  “He don’t. But that little black gal’s got a thing between her legs he likes jus’ fine.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Minnie.”

  The name rang a bell. “She was Lee Southwell’s maid.”

  “Was. That’s right. Now she swamps the saloon and does some whorin’ on the side. Ben St. John is her best customer, steadylike.”

  Clayton nodded. “He’s not the man he seems to be. Like he leads a double life.”

  “He likes women, that’s for sure, and the more of a whore she is, the better he likes her.”

  “How come the town knows nothing about this?”

  “St. John is a secretive man. And a couple of women who bragged in the saloon about servicin’ him ain’t with us no more.”

  “He killed them?”

  “All I kn
ow is, they ain’t around, and that’s all I’m sayin’ on the subject, Mr. Clayton.”

  Anderson stepped away. “I got to go now. My woman expects me back to town.” He gave a white grin. “Collard greens, ham, and cawn bread for supper.”

  Moses Anderson waved as he led his two wagons from the front of the house.

  It was the last time Cage Clayton saw him alive.

  Chapter 55

  After the wagons left, Clayton stepped into the ranch house and into silence.

  Only a grandfather clock in the hallway made a sound, remorselessly ticking away time.

  Clayton shivered. Damn clock made him think of death and Judgment Day.

  Moses Anderson had done a good job. There was not a trace of blood left in the dining room or the kitchen, and he’d opened windows to clear the smell of decay. Someone, probably Anderson, had placed a vase of wildflowers in the kitchen window, and a vagrant bee buzzed around the blossoms.

  The flowers did little to cheer the place.

  Clayton walked to the dining room and stood beside the table. The room was oppressive, hot, weighing on him as though he were wearing a damp greatcoat. He felt eyes, watching, waiting, wondering why he was there.

  And that spooked Clayton badly. The whole damned place did.

  Determined to see this tour to the end, he walked into the parlor, furnished in an overly ornate style in the fashion of the time.

  Above the fireplace, draped in black crepe, hung a picture of the gallant Custer. The great man stared belligerently across the room at the opposite wall where an oil painting of Lee was flanked by one of Parker Southwell, dressed in the gray and gold splendor of a Confederate colonel.

  Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .

  The clock in the hall reminded Clayton that this was a house of the dead and he was not welcome here, not now, not ever.

  Clayton had never lost the cowboy’s superstitious fear of ha’nts and the restless dead and now it plagued him.

  There was the time when one of his hands had been struck by lightning and his hat lay on the range for three years. No one would touch it or go near it, the cowboys riding a mile out of their way to avoid the thing.

  Finally a great wind rose and took the hat away and everybody, including Clayton, was relieved.

  He felt the same way about this house as he had the hat.

  He went from room to room, smelled Lee’s perfume in her bedroom, the gun oil, leather, and cigar tang of Parker’s study.

  Shad Vestal’s clothes were still spread out, untouched, on the bed. Moses Anderson had been up the trail and he shared the cowboy’s superstitions. He’d left the duds where they lay.

  And that’s what Clayton wanted to do with this house . . . leave it where it lay.

  He returned to the parlor and poured himself a drink from a decanter that Moses hadn’t cleared away, then built a smoke.

  It was there, in that room, he decided that he couldn’t bring Emma to this place.

  Could they ever take a starlit walk along the creek and spoon under the cottonwood knowing that a man had hung head-down from one of its branches, suffering the agonies of the damned?

  Could they spend a restful night in any of the bedrooms? Lee’s? Parker’s? Vestal’s?

  Could they eat a meal in a dining room that had witnessed the slaughter of six human beings?

  Could they live with the shadows of people who were once vibrantly alive and were now lying cold in pine boxes in the undertaker’s storeroom?

  Clayton asked himself those questions, and the answer to all of them was an emphatic no.

  He’d take Emma back to Abilene, start up his ranch again.

  Angus McLean would need to find himself a new manager.

  Chapter 56

  Shack Mitchell was well pleased with himself.

  He’d only been in Bighorn Point an hour, but in that time the contract had been agreed on, his fee paid up front, and he’d left on the trail of the mark.

  That was how he liked to conduct his business. Get in, get out, and get lost.

  The fat man had understood all that, since he’d once been in the man-killing profession himself.

  “Call it professional courtesy,” the fat man had said. “You trust me, and I trust you to get the job done. So there’s no need to stand on ceremony. Just bring me Cage Clayton’s head and then ride out.”

  But Mitchell didn’t trust the fat man. He put his trust in nobody, and that’s why he was so good at what he did—killing men who, for one reason or another, had proved troublesome for his clients.

  His last project had been in El Paso, a crusading young lawyer who was getting too close to the monetary affairs of powerful and rich men. He’d settled that contract in three days, long for him, but his clients had understood. After all, a sandstorm had been blowing at the time.

  The lawyer had been his twenty-ninth victim. This man Clayton, whoever the hell he was, would make it a nice round thirty.

  Mitchell smiled. This would be easy peasy.

  He scanned the ranch house with his field glasses. He saw the mark move from room to room, exploring the place, and probably filling his pockets with what-ever he could find.

  Mitchell didn’t blame him for that. Honesty was for idiots.

  He slid forward his Spencer, parting the buffalo grass at the crest of the rise.

  The rifle was a single shot in .45 caliber. Having only one round didn’t trouble Mitchell; he seldom needed more. Sometimes he used his Colt on a mark because he was fast and accurate on the draw-and-shoot, though he did not boast of it.

  Mitchell boasted of nothing. At fifty, he was a coldly proficient assassin and when not on assignment he lay low, stayed away from whiskey, and kept his mouth shut.

  He did enjoy whores, but that was just scratching an itch. He didn’t like women, didn’t like men either, come to that. Didn’t like anybody.

  Perhaps his only virtue was patience.

  He’d wait in the sun for as long as it took for Clayton to come out of the house—hours, days, weeks if necessary.

  But the horse at the hitch rail told him that the man would leave sooner rather than later.

  Then he’d kill him. Efficiently and without fuss.

  Cage Clayton was startled. Had the gallant Custer just winked at him?

  He studied the picture, but the general was staring across the room just as before. It must have been a trick of the light, a reflection maybe.

  But a reflection of what? And from where?

  Clayton stepped to the side of the parlor window and moved the curtain just enough to look outside.

  Nothing moved out there, not even the wind.

  The open ground stretched away from his eyes for about a hundred yards, past a cattle pen, a cast-iron trough, and a small shed that probably held tools and branding irons.

  The open ground gradually rose to a shallow ridge, crowned with grass, scattered wildflowers, and clumps of broom weed.

  Clayton was suddenly tense. Custer hadn’t winked at him.

  Hell, I’m not that spooked.

  It had to have been a brief flash of light that reflected on the glass.

  A rifle barrel?

  Maybe he was being foolish, imagining things. But there had already been one attempt on his life—could this be another?

  If he ventured out to get his horse, he’d be an easy target for a hidden rifleman. He moved to the rear of the house, opened the back door, and stepped outside.

  He drew his Colt, his heart pounding.

  Where was the rifleman—if he even existed?

  Real or not, the rifleman wouldn’t make getting to his mount easy.

  Chapter 57

  Clayton moved to the corner of the house where he could see the cattle pens and the ridge. The stillness troubled him. As far as he could judge, the ridge was the most obvious place for a bushwhacker to hide. But he wasn’t even sure about that. The ground between him and the ridge looked level, but it might have unseen dips and hollows that
could conceal a rifleman.

  Clayton wiped his sweaty palm on his shirt, then picked up his gun again. The day was hot, but a faint breath of wind rustled the cottonwoods by the creek and fanned his burning cheeks.

  He studied the ridge again. Nothing stirred up there but the blooms of the wildflowers. The sky was denim blue and a few puffy clouds hovered over the Sans Bois. Somewhere a bird sang and he heard his horse toss its head, jangling the bit.

  The day was peaceful, drowsy with insect sounds, and unthreatening.

  Clayton holstered his gun. This was ridiculous. He was acting like an old maid who hears a rustle in every bush.

  He stepped away from the corner—and a bullet splintered timber from the house wall behind him.

  Without conscious thought, Clayton dove for the ground, rolled, and then sprinted for the cattle pens. He fetched up against a post, breathing hard, and pulled his gun.

  His wounded thigh was healing, but now it pained him, an insistent throb, reminding him of his clumsy surgery back at the railroad spur.

  Clayton looked quickly around the post, caught a glimpse of smoke on the ridge, then ducked back down as another bullet chipped wood near his head.

  Clayton swore. Whoever the man was up there on the ridge, he was a fair hand with a rifle. Both his shots had been real close. If the bushwhacker caught him in the open, if only for a second, he was a dead man.

  Shack Mitchell cursed. For some reason his damned shooting was off today. He’d fired twice at the cowboy—that’s what he looked like—and missed.

  This had never happened to him before and it wounded his professional pride.

  He’d anticipated an easy kill and hadn’t put his whole concentration into the job. Well, now he would. He wouldn’t miss a third time.

  The mark was pinned down at the cattle pens and he had nowhere to go. All he could do now was wait until dark and make his move.

  And Mitchell would be still waiting and ready.

  He was angry now, angry at himself, and as mean as a teased rattlesnake.

  All right, the man called Clayton would get it in the belly.