The Stranger from Abilene Page 5

  But he realized that was impossible.

  There was one thing about him that Nook Kelly didn’t know—the force that drove the man called Cage Clayton. . . .

  He was filled with hate.

  That’s why he wouldn’t back off, from Shad Vestal or anybody else. Hate is like water in a dry gulch: The longer it runs, the deeper it digs. And Clayton’s hate was deep . . . the product of twenty-five years, a hate so intense, so painful it afflicted him like a disease.

  He rose to his feet, tightened the buckskin’s cinch, and swung into the saddle. To the south, purple clouds were forming over the peaks of the Sans Bois, and the wind had picked up, carrying with it a distant rumble of thunder.

  It would storm before too much longer. Clayton took a yellow slicker from behind his saddle and laid it over the horn. He allowed himself a smile. Maybe he wasn’t ready for much, including Shad Vestal, but he could still beat the rain.

  Clayton topped a rise and saw the railroad spur ahead of him. Beside the single track were a water tower, a woodpile, and an old boxcar that had been converted into a makeshift station house. A handful of men moved around down there and he backed off. He rode down the rise, dismounted, and slid his Winchester from the boot. Slowly he inched back to the crest and dropped on his belly in the long grass.

  Two mounted cowboys watched three Mexicans load sides of beef, wrapped in thin burlap, into one of the new Swift refrigerator cars.

  The loading, from two heaped wagons, took the best part of an hour, since the beef had to be carefully packed into the bottom of the car where the air was coolest. The cowboys didn’t help. If they couldn’t work from the back of a horse, they didn’t work. But they were happy to supervise, encouraging the sweating Mexicans to greater effort with regular kicks up the ass.

  After the car was packed, another wagon drove up to the spur. An elderly Mexican handled the four-mule team, and a couple more men sat in the back.

  The wagon was loaded with boxes made of rough, unfinished pine, and these were manhandled into the car.

  Clayton touched his tongue to his dry top lip. Kelly had sent him here only to kill time and stay the hell out of the way. But he wanted to look inside those boxes.

  Was there beef inside—or dead meat of a very different kind?

  Chapter 15

  The rain came as the day shaded into evening, and with it thunder and sizzling streaks of lightning.

  Clayton shrugged into his slicker, then topped the rise again. Down below at the spur, the work was over. The cowboys were riding away, followed by the wagons. He waited for another ten minutes to make sure no one was coming back, then got to his feet and walked down the opposite side of the rise.

  Rain pounding him, Clayton reached the refrigerator car, then stopped, his breath catching in his chest. Above the roar of the storm, footsteps crunched on gravel.

  A few moments passed; then Clayton heard a foot skid on the wet grass beside the track and a man cursed. Clayton leveled the Winchester and stepped into the shadow of the car.

  The footsteps stopped, as though a sixth sense had warned the man that there was someone close, in the darkness.

  “Tom, is that you?” the man said. A listening moment, then, “Lon?”

  Thunder filled the silence and lightning gave it authority.

  Clayton heard a triple click as the man cocked a Colt.

  “You come out now,” he said. “I don’t let bums ride this train.”

  Clayton took a couple of steps out of the shadows. “Deputy Marshal Cage Clayton out of Bighorn Point,” he said, talking into a dark wall, needled with rain.

  “Fur piece off your home range, ain’t you, lawman?” the man said.

  “Some.”

  “Step toward me, real slow,” the man said. “I got faith in this here hog leg, day or night.”

  “I’m not hunting trouble,” Clayton said. Then, “I got me a rifle.”

  “Lay her down, show your honorable intentions, and then walk toward me.”

  Clayton hesitated, and the man said, “Hurry it up, Deputy. I’m a railroad employee, but they don’t pay me to get wet.”

  Clayton laid the rifle at his feet and walked into the darkness. A split second later he saw the orange flash of a Colt. The boom of the gun and the impact of the bullet came together.

  Hit hard, Clayton took a step back, his hand clawing for the gun under his slicker. The man fired again. A miss.

  “You dirty bastard!” Clayton roared, and shot at where he’d pegged the gun flash to be. He fired again.

  He heard a groan, then the heavy thud of a body falling on the ground.

  Stumbling forward, lashed by rain, he almost stumbled over the man’s sprawled form. He kneeled by the body, pushed the muzzle of his Colt into the man’s left eye and said, “Damn you, mister. You’d no call to do that. No need to cut loose at a man who was doing you no harm.”

  But he was talking to a corpse.

  Both Clayton’s bullets had hit the man square in the chest, the wounds so close he could have covered them with his hand.

  The dead man was wearing a railroad guard’s uniform. He was not young, somewhere in his early fifties, but, even in death, hard and cruel in the face.

  Clayton rose to his feet and looked down at the man.

  “I’d say you’ve shot your share of bums and Chinese coolies off’n your trains,” he said. “Only I’m not one o’ them. Your mistake, feller.”

  Suddenly Clayton felt the pain of his wound. His left thigh was covered with blood. Mixed with rain, it ran over his boots and pooled rust red on the ground under him.

  Limping, his eyes squeezing against the pain, he picked up his Winchester, then stepped around the refrigerator car and crossed the tracks.

  The door of the old boxcar by the water tower was partly open, and a rectangle of lamplight splashed on the wet ground outside.

  Moving slowly, carefully, Clayton walked to the boxcar and stepped inside.

  There was a partition wall to Clayton’s right, probably to separate a storage area from the guard’s sleeping quarters. A stove glowed cherry red in one corner, and there was a table and two benches and an iron cot, pushed against the far wall.

  Coffee simmered on the stove top; beside the pot, a small frying pan.

  Clayton looked at the pan. It held strips of bacon, not yet too badly burned, and a slice of fried bread.

  Limping, he looked around and found a tin cup. He poured coffee and walked both cup and pan to the table.

  There was a hole in his leg that looked bloody and raw, but no bones seemed to be broken.

  After he’d eaten and smoked a cigarette, he’d go back and get his horse. When he dug the bullet out of his thigh, he’d need that bottle of Old Crow.

  Clayton let out a long, deep sigh.

  He didn’t need anyone to tell him that he was in a helluva fix.

  Chapter 16

  Parker Southwell rolled his wheelchair to his wife’s bedside.

  “How are you feeling, my darling?” he said.

  “Look,” Lee Southwell said. She held up her right arm. “Look at the bruise the brute left on my wrist.”

  “He’ll pay for it, my dear,” Southwell said. “Soon he won’t be around to trouble you anymore.”

  Lee smiled. “Park, you’re so kind and loving. What did I ever do to deserve a husband like you?”

  “You were in Denver at the same time I was,” Southwell said. “What would you call that? Fate? Serendipity?”

  Thunder crashed overhead and Lee shivered, pretending a fear she did not feel.

  “The thunder won’t harm you, my love,” Southwell said. “I’ll let nothing or no one harm you, ever again.”

  Lee picked up a corner of the silk bedsheet and dabbed at the corner of her eye. She sniffed and said, “Does it ever trouble you, Park?”

  “Does what trouble me?”

  “That you found me in a . . . a house of ill repute?”

  “Why, of course it doesn’t,
my love. That was then—this is now. All I think about is our future together.”

  “I was no good, Park.” Lee buried her face in her hands. “I’m so ashamed. . . .”

  Southwell gently pulled his wife’s hands away. “There’s no shame. As far as I’m concerned, you were a virgin on our wedding night.”

  Lee pretended to bravely hold back tears. “I wish I could go back, to before we met,” she said. “I would have saved myself for you, Park. Just for you to treasure.”

  “I have enough. I have you.”

  Southwell’s hand moved up until it touched Lee’s left arm. He squeezed. Much too hard. Painfully.

  Lee winced, but did not pull away.

  He could be like this, her husband, cruel, wanting to hurt.

  Southwell moved his wheelchair closer.

  Lee smiled and pulled back the sheet in invitation. “I’m ready for you,” she said.

  No, I’m not. I don’t want your cold, skinny hand crawling all over me like a spider, the stink of your breath, your dead legs between my thighs....

  Someone rapped on the door.

  Relieved, and before her husband could respond, she called out, “Come in.”

  Lon Clyde, one of the hands, stepped inside and removed his hat. He spoke to Southwell.

  “Boss, Shad Vestal is back.”

  “Well, man, don’t just stand there gawking at my wife. Did he get him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re an idiot. Send Shad to me.”

  Vestal stepped inside a couple of minutes later. He looked dusty and trail worn, his face gray with fatigue.

  “Well?” Southwell said.

  “He’s not in Bighorn Point.”

  “Damn it, I know that. Kelly made him a deputy and sent him away somewhere to hide him from me.”

  “I searched as far west as Robbers Cave, thinking he might be there,” Vestal said. “He wasn’t. Then I swung south to Limestone Ridge, then Blue Mountain.”

  Vestal shook his head. “No luck. It’s like he’s vanished off the face of the earth.”

  “I want that man dead, Shad. Saddle yourself a fresh horse and get back on the hunt.”

  “It’s dark. I can’t find a man in the dark.”

  “Yes, you can. He’s a rube and he’ll light a fire. Head north this time. Find him.”

  “Shad,” Lee said, “track Clayton down just for me. And when you get him, take your time killing him. I want him to know he’s dying.”

  “Well, don’t just stand there,” Southwell said. “You heard my wife: Kill the son of a bitch.”

  Vestal nodded. “Just as you say, Park.”

  He and Lee exchanged a single glance, but it was one that held memories of shared pleasures past and the promise of many more to come.

  “That man is as big an idiot as the rest of the hands,” Southwell said after Vestal left.

  Lee said nothing. As her husband’s hand went to her body again, squeezing, twisting, Lee consoled herself with one exquisite thought . . . .

  Soon she’d kill the old man who was so greedily pawing her, spittle gathering at the corners of his mouth.

  And then she and Shad would be free.

  And rich.

  Chapter 17

  By the time he had retrieved his horse and staked him out on a patch of grass among some wild oak, Cage’s leg had started to bleed again and the pain was a living thing.

  After he returned to the old boxcar, he tried to numb the searing pain with the Old Crow, but he couldn’t drink too much, not if he was to dig out the .45 ball buried in his thigh.

  Clayton opened his Barlow knife and poured whiskey over the carbon steel blade. He dropped his pants; then, as careful as a naked man climbing over barbed wire, he shoved the point of the blade into the open wound.

  Clayton bit back a scream.

  Oh God, I can’t do this.

  His courage wasn’t up to the task, and that was the long and short of the thing. He gritted his teeth.

  Cage, you damn coward, get it done. There ain’t nobody but you.

  He plunged the knife deeper, and this time he screamed. He reached out, grabbed the Old Crow with a trembling hand, and gulped down nearly half a pint. The bourbon danced around in his head for a while, then hit him hard.

  “Bastard!” Clayton yelled, but whether at the man who’d shot him, the whiskey, or the bullet, even he couldn’t tell. He rammed the blade into his leg again.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!” He drank another slug of booze. Deeper. Blood spurted. The pain was white hot. His body shrieked at him to stop. Deeper still. The steel scraped on . . . something. The bullet? Bone? He didn’t know. He levered the tip of the blade upward.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

  More whiskey. Damn, the bottle was almost empty.

  Dig down, tip the blade upward.

  “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

  He saw it! The bullet, a gray iris in a scarlet eyeball. He shoved the blade under the ball. Gritted his teeth. Now! Tip it up and out!

  The bullet jerked from of the wound, described an arc in the air, and landed with a thud on the floor. Clayton didn’t hear it.

  He’d already fainted.

  When Cage Clayton woke, he was lying on the floor, the top of his head wedged tight against a wall.

  How long had he been out?

  He looked at his watch. It had just gone on three o’clock and the night was still full dark. An hour, then, maybe less.

  He rose slowly to his feet, the wound in his leg paining him like blazes. A quick search of the room uncovered a clean white shirt left by its recently deceased owner.

  Hungover, his head pounding, Clayton poured himself a cup of coffee, then sat at the table again. The wound looked red and inflamed, but it had stopped bleeding. He drank coffee, then built and lit a cigarette, steeling himself for what he had to do.

  He picked up the Old Crow. Good, there was enough left. Now wasn’t the time to hesitate. Clayton poured the contents of the bottle into his open wound.

  He roared as shrieking pain slammed at him, coming in waves, each one more agonizing than the one before.

  This time he didn’t faint, but he vented his lungs.

  “Aaaarrrgh . . . ya son of a bitch!”

  It took him time to recover, but after a few minutes Clayton used the shirt to bind his wound. He stood, gingerly tested the leg. It took his weight, but the pain was considerable.

  He sat again, smoked a cigarette, and drank more coffee.

  Then he heard the train whistle.

  Chapter 18

  There was a real possibility that more hard cases were on the train, and Clayton knew he was in no condition to fight anybody. Pain had sapped his strength, and the Old Crow had turned on him and was no longer his best friend.

  He rose, looked around the room, then picked up his rifle and staggered outside. Lightning still flashed across the sky, lighting up the clouds, and the rain was still coming down hard, hissing like a dragon in the dark.

  Limping badly, he stopped and looked along the tracks. The approaching locomotive was a point of light in the distance, but under his feet the rails were thrumming to the rhythm of its wheels.

  Clayton walked around the refrigerator car and dragged the dead guard’s body into the underbrush. The effort fatigued him and for a minute he stood with his back against the side of the car, breathing heavily. Then he pushed himself to round the car again and go back to the tracks.

  The train seemed no nearer, but the whistle was louder, its five notes echoing through the rain-lashed hollow of the night. Clayton hesitated, then made up his mind.

  It was now or never. He was going to see what was inside those damned boxes. The guard had been ready to kill to keep their secret, so the contents were precious to somebody.

  His hearing reaching out to the train, Clayton opened the car. It smelled of meat and blood and ice. And death.

  His wounded leg would not allow him to climb inside, but a box, smaller than the others, was near
him. He dragged it closer and used the toe of his rifle butt to hammer it open.

  The cheap thin pine splintered and Clayton pulled a piece free. He thumbed a match into flame and looked into the box.

  A child stared back at him with wide black eyes.

  Startled, Clayton took a step back. He heard the clack of the locomotive’s wheels, and its whistle again pierced the night. He leaned over the box again and lit another match. In the shifting yellow light, he saw the dead face of a little girl, black hair falling over her shoulders. She wore a buckskin dress that somebody, her mother probably, had decorated with blue Apache beads.

  The girl showed no sign of physical violence, but when Clayton looked closer, he saw that she’d vomited down the front of her dress.

  The child had been poisoned.

  She’d been given something to eat or drink and it had killed her.

  A sickness in him, he did not have the time or desire to check the remaining boxes. He had a good idea what they contained.

  He laid the splintered pine plank back on top of the box, then slammed shut the car door. As quickly as he could on his bad leg, he stepped away from the tracks and quartered back to where his horse was tethered. There, among the trees, he would not be seen by anyone from the train.

  The locomotive huffed on the tracks as it took on water and wood. From his hiding place, Clayton watched a man step inside the boxcar office. He’d left the bourbon bottle, and hopefully all the blood he’d spilled was hidden by the table.

  The man was inside only for a minute or so, then reappeared. He laughed and said something to the engineer, then helped hitch the locomotive to the refrigerator car. As Clayton had hoped, the man had seen the bottle and figured the guard had wandered off drunk somewhere.

  Clayton sighed his relief. Another gun battle was the last thing on earth he needed. After the locomotive left with the refrigerator car, Clayton returned to the office. The stove still burned with a good heat and wearily he stretched out beside it. Despite the nagging pain in his leg, he slept.

  Clayton was unaware that just a mile away, the man who was hunting him was wide awake, listening, watching, a dangerous predator who was one with the unquiet night.