Rides a Stranger Read online

  BILL BROOKS

  RIDES A STRANGER

  For Carmen and Laura,

  God’s Own Children

  Contents

  Prologue

  My name’s Kip Mulligan and I own a saloon in…

  Chapter One

  After I turned the badges into Captain Rogers in Eagle…

  Chapter Two

  I rested a foot on the rail and waited for…

  Chapter Three

  He’d been a worried man looking for an answer he…

  Chapter Four

  The barkeep chipped me off a chunk of ice from…

  Chapter Five

  She had been waiting forever it seemed.

  Chapter Six

  I told her to think about it, that I planned…

  Chapter Seven

  We walked over to the jail and went in and…

  Chapter Eight

  I needed rest bad and I went to my hotel,…

  Chapter Nine

  When the stranger offered her salvation, she took it. For…

  Chapter Ten

  I made steady time, and after what seemed forever dawn…

  Chapter Eleven

  We stayed ahead of them as though we were out-racing…

  Chapter Twelve

  Morning light had filled the room and I was…

  Chapter Thirteen

  The metaphor, he told himself, was a boat adrift, its…

  Chapter Fourteen

  That son of a bitch Joe Bike was right about…

  Chapter Fifteen

  A gun, a horse. What more did a man need…

  Chapter Sixteen

  The town was as I remembered it: just a town…

  Chapter Seventeen

  We followed the railroad tracks. It seemed simplest. The country…

  Chapter Eighteen

  From the diary of Maize Walker…

  Chapter Nineteen

  Day broke. The woman slept beside me. Our lust less…

  Chapter Twenty

  I was already up and saddling my horse when Maize…

  Chapter Twenty-One

  From the diary of Maize Walker…

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Dusk brought with it the anticipated rain. Tom sat at…

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  We started early, Tom and me, the light without the…

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  She held the bottle of mercury in her hands, the…

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  I was already awake and dressed when the knock on…

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  They rode swiftly through the night of moonlit landscape. Tom…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  I’d heard rumors that the last of Custer’s men shot…

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The horse was starting to break down under their weight…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  As luck would have it—or fate, which he knew was…

  Chapter Thirty

  He woke and wept alone—away from his wife, where she…

  Chapter Thirty-One

  I knew I’d never be able to locate Tom and…

  Epilogue

  As they waited for the end they spoke of many…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bill Brooks

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The Hondo Daily Reporter

  Eyewitness Account of Slaying

  My name’s Kip Mulligan and I own a saloon in Hondo County just outside Mordecai, New Mexico Territory. I have owned the place for three years and never seen such violence all at once. About noon, three men came into my establishment and took seats at a table and ordered drink and food. They were secretive in their manner and spoke in low voices. I took them at first to be cow-boys, for they were dressed like drovers and wore long dusters and spurs with small rowels.

  I brought them whiskey and stew and they took to it like they had not eaten in quite some time. I tried to make small talk but they were reticent to be engaged in conversation. One of them had his hair in a long braid that fell halfway down his back. That was the only outstanding feature among them.

  I noticed that their horses were all lathered when I stepped outside to empty a spittoon. They looked like they had been used pretty hard.

  My assistant, Miss Emily Rose Sherbrooke, entered the room shortly after the trio arrived and took up residence with me behind the bar. Some words were exchanged between she and the men not fit for print. I tried to intervene on her behalf after they insulted her, making reference to what they perceived her profession to be. Miss Sherbrooke has worked for me for several years and is an entertainer and nothing more, let the record show.

  It was at this point that I became concerned for our safety, for all three of the men acted gruff and in a threatening manner and I could see by then they were well-armed with revolvers. I asked Miss Sherbrooke to take her leave so as to calm the situation. She refused, calling one of them a son of a—! after he again insulted her looks. This is when he parted his duster back and showed us he was wearing a badge—the sort I’d seen whilst living in Texas and quite common down in that country, the sort the Rangers wear.

  I offered them a free bottle of spirits in order to improve the situation and they readily accepted, and I thought that pretty much the end of the matter even though Miss Sherbrooke was still distressed over the insults they’d cast her way.

  Things had settled down considerably by the time another stranger entered and approached the bar behind which I and Miss Sherbrooke were yet standing and ordered a glass of beer. He took notice of the painting I have hanging above the bar—a rendering of a nude entitled Eros in Recline, which I purchased a year earlier at an auction in Santa Fe in order to provide my customers some respite from the isolation of the territory, which only adds to a man’s great loneliness. The painting is quite revealing and free to view for any paying customer.

  Nonetheless, the stranger seemed like everyone else who comes in for a drink—nothing at all unusual about him. He was middle-aged, maybe, tall, dusty from the trail like the other three. When he first came in I thought maybe he was part of that bunch because he was wearing a duster of similar fashion.

  He kept glancing up at that painting before letting his gaze fall to the mirror behind the bar, and I did not understand what he was doing until he done it.

  Cool as a cucumber, he reached inside his coat, I thought to pay for the beer, but when he withdrew his hand, it was full of a nickel-plated Russian model Smith & Wesson 44.–40, I do believe. I feature myself as something of a gun fancier and have studied the various models of revolvers, and the Russian model is a mean piece of iron, that when you’ve emptied its firepower on your opponents you can use to bludgeon them with if needed. I’ve seen it done.

  Miss Sherbrooke and I were warned off sounding the alarm by the stranger’s hard gaze—not that I would have alerted them anyway considering their earlier behavior toward Miss Sherbrooke.

  And as smooth as silk the stranger swung ’round and pointed his piece at the trio and warned them to lay their own pistols on the table they were sitting at. I never saw a man hold a gun so steady, and you’d have to be a complete fool to not think he meant business.

  But I guess those three were fools. The one with the braid swore a curse and made his play but by the time he’d cleared leather, the stranger shot him dead center. Dust spanked up off his shirt and he flopped back out of his chair like a carp yanked out of the river.

  The sound of that Russian model going off in such close quarters left my ears ringing. Miss Sherbrooke screamed just as the remaining pair went for their guns, coming up quick out of their chairs as they
did. I don’t know what those boys were thinking—whether they had a death wish or whether maybe just because they were peace officers they knew all about looking into the face of danger and terrible odds and were not fazed by what they just witnessed happen to their friend. I know those Texas Rangers are tough hombres.

  The stranger killed them both so quick it sounded like he only fired a single shot. Bang bang.

  I never seen anything like it in my life, and I’ve resided in such places as Dodge City and Tombstone and Del Rio, Texas too.

  Then before I could even think to breathe he wheeled about and aimed his weapon at me—the muzzle of that big Russian model breathing smoke an inch from my face, and he said, “Whatever you’re thinking about doing, don’t.”

  And I said, “No, sir, I ain’t thinking about doing nothing and I ain’t going to either.” And then he looked at Miss Sherbrooke and said, “Miss, please stop that god—screaming.” It shut her mouth right up like a door that had been slammed shut.

  We watched as he walked over to the dead men and removed their badges and put them in his pocket. Then just turned and went out and got on his horse and rode off toward the north. That’s how it happened. I don’t know how I’m ever going to get those bloodstains out of the floorboards. If any of your readers want to come by and see where those three Texas Rangers got dusted, they can see the exact spot. That’s all I’ve got to say about what I seen.

  No, I never seen the man before in my life, nor did I see those three Rangers. It seemed odd to me that they had come to Hondo County from across the border in Texas, and I remember when I first saw their badges that I asked them how it worked, them enforcing the law in New Mexico, and what the one said—the one with the braid of hair—was, “We ain’t surveyors.” “Surveyors!” I said, taking it to mean they didn’t care nothing about where borders began and ended. I don’t know what else it could have meant. I reckon now they’re sorry they weren’t surveyors. My place is open for business all the time.

  Chapter One

  After I turned the badges into Captain Rogers in Eagle Pass, he thanked me for what I’d done and said, “Jim, I wish you could have brought those murdering bastards in alive so I could have hanged them myself.”

  I told him I wished I could have too but they didn’t give me much of a chance to negotiate.

  “It’s one thing to kill one of my men,” he said, “another to kill three and steal their badges and guns. To me, it’s robbing the dead, which only makes the crime worse, and even though I am sworn to uphold the law, had I been you I don’t think I would have negotiated with them either.”

  Captain Rogers was a short, blue-eyed man who’d spent most of his adult life fighting for the right things. He’d pulled me out a jail cell where I was doing thirty days for drunk and disorderly and bought me a decent meal and said he was sorry to have seen me go downhill like I had done. I said I was sorry too. Then he told me about the killings and said, “You want to be a Ranger again?” I’d most likely have turned him down but I knew all three of those boys—Frank May, Billy Higgens, and Josiah Barkley. Two had wives and children, and I knew them too. And when the Captain told me how they’d been ambushed and then executed by being shot in the back of the head, I could see myself finding the men who did it. And I could see myself doing what I did to their killers—which is exactly what happened that day in Hondo County where I found them.

  Then I told the Captain I was quitting for good, I didn’t want to wash my hands in any more blood. He asked what I’d do, and I said I thought I’d go work at something peaceful like on a ranch somewhere, and we shook hands and that was the end of my Rangering days and the start of all the rest of my days.

  And now I was on the drift again like I had been since I quit.

  I’d bet a dollar that the crow watching me from atop the wobbling sign wondered what such a raggedy looking fellow like me was doing riding a twenty dollar horse with a forty dollar saddle into a town that looked like little more than some old lumber somebody had spilled off the back of their wagon and had been hammered up into badly constructed buildings on a prairie so lonesome even the wind never stopped to take a rest.

  And I’ll bet another dollar I wouldn’t have an answer.

  The sign read:

  COFFIN FLATS POP. 756

  NO DISCHARGING OF FIREARMS

  BY ORDER OF CITY MARSHAL

  WELCOME

  Summer was dying and winter hadn’t woke up yet. Some called it “Indian summer.” All I know was it was a sweet time of year—not too hot, nor cold—and I’d come a long ways from the last place I’d been and was thirsty and tired. I was also down to my last few dollars from the last job I quit, when the ramrod told me to go dig Mr. Watts some postholes, which was the last straw for me, considering what all had preceded it.

  I told the ramrod I didn’t dig postholes, and he said that I’d better go collect my pay then because he was only paying for a posthole digger that day and not some fancy duded-up cowboy who thought himself too high and mighty to do work except from the back of a horse. I said that was about the size of it. But where he got the idea I was high and mighty escaped me even though I wasn’t about to disabuse him of his notions. Hell, I figured I’d already gone the extra mile by mending fence wire, something no man worth his salt should ever do.

  So I went on up to the big house where Mr. Watts lived and knocked on the door, and his wife answered and looked surprised to see me. I told her I was quitting. She asked why and I told her my hand didn’t fit a posthole digger was why and she rolled her eyes.

  “Lord, Jim, it seems like such a little thing to be quitting over.”

  “It may well be, Fannie, but that’s the way it is.”

  But we both knew it wasn’t just about me digging postholes or not digging them. It went a lot beyond all that.

  Now I guess a stranger listening in might wonder why a saddlesore drover like myself would be talking so familiarly with the rancher owner’s wife on such a pretty day as it was, standing there on that big wide wraparound porch so freshly painted you could still smell the mineral spirits. And I’d have a hard time explaining it except to say that Fannie Watts and me had gotten on familiar terms ever since about the second week I’d come to work on the place.

  Some things just happen you don’t have any control over—like the feeling that comes over you about certain women and horses and other potentially dangerous creatures. That’s the way it was with us—we didn’t have any control over it.

  The way it happened was, I was out riding fence, looking for busted wire I could fix so all Mr. Watts’s cattle didn’t run clear to Colorado or some such, when this black buggy topped a grassy rise and come on down the fence line.

  She pulled up and stopped where I was banding wire back together and set there watching me. I was at first pretending like I hadn’t noticed because I knew who she was and what the ramrod had warned me of the first day I hired on.

  He’d said, “Jim Glass, don’t make the mistake some other of these old waddies have made and gotten run off for.”

  “What mistake would that be?” I had told him as I threw my bedroll onto an empty bunk in a place you could tell was lived in by nothing but men because there were chaps hanging on pegs and run-down boots ’neath the cots, several decks of dog-eared playing cards, and lariats and everything smelling of sweat and tobacco smoke.

  “Flirting with the boss’s wife,” he’d said with a face like a preacher that just learned there wasn’t any Jesus.

  “That been a longstanding problem?” I asked, looking around at my new home—for how long, exactly, I didn’t know, but knew it wasn’t someplace I’d likely retire in.

  “No, no problem,” he’d said, “long as you keep your eyes to yourself and your manners proper. She’s younger than the old man and cute as a button and sometimes these old boys just fall all over themselves whenever she comes around. Some don’t rightly know where to draw the line ’cause they was raised without manners.”
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br />   “Maybe it’s her that’s the problem then,” I said. “Maybe she oughtn’t to come around men who don’t see a decent woman but maybe thrice a year whenever they hit a town where there might be some decent women to be seen.”

  “You hold your tongue or you can just saddle that broomtail and keep riding,” he’d told me. He was a stumpy little fellow hard as weathered blackjack tree who’d left any personality God had given him back home somewhere.

  So anyway, I tried to keep everything to myself whenever I saw her—Fannie—and not talk about it with any of the other hands, about what a pert young gal she was, with hair like spun gold, to be somewhat poetical about it, and eyes as crisp blue as a Kansas sky on a real good day. She looked more like the boss’s daughter than his wife whenever you saw them together.

  Jack Watts was tall and slightly bent forward like a nail that had been struck slightly wrong. And you’d never see him without his standing under a big white Stetson that looked like he’d just taken it off the merchant’s shelf. He had flowing white moustaches, and most of what hair he had on his head was all white as well and shagged over his collar. He wore black waistcoats and white shirts. Flint, the ramrod, said old Jack Watts started out as a drover back in ’68 and eventually gathered his own little herd made up of mostly mavericks and maybe more than a few brand-altered cattle and started buying up other surrounding ranches, owned by many who had abandoned life on the high lonesome for the goldfields of California.

  “Everything that old boy touches turns to gold,” Flint said. “Like that fella, Midas.”