Eagles Legacy: The Killing

Chapter Twenty-one

“He rode off this way,” Elmer said, pointing south as he and Duff examined the signs at the Raymond farm.

Leaving the Raymond place, Duff and Elmer started south. After about fifteen minutes, Duff spotted something on the trail ahead of them and hurrying toward it, he dismounted to examine it more closely. It was a half-smoked cigar.

Elmer dismounted as well, and holding the cigar to his nose, he sniffed a couple of times.

“Half a day old,” he said.

Remounting, they continued to track Kingsley. He wasn’t moving very fast, evidently confident that he had gotten away cleanly. At nightfall they camped out on the trail, thinking that would be better than to continue on and lose his trail in the darkness.

They followed the trail for another day and night; then the next morning, they came across a railroad track that was running south. It quickly became obvious that Kingsley was following the track.

“If he gets into Lincoln, he could catch a train to just about any place in the country,” Elmer said.

“Then we need to step up the pace a bit so we can catch up to him before he gets on the train,” Duff suggested.

“Since we know where he’s a-goin’, there ain’t no real need to be trailin’ him no more,” Elmer said. “So I don’t see no reason why we can’t just go on ’bout as fast as the horses will let us go,” Elmer said.

When Kingsley was about a mile away from Lincoln, he dismounted, took down the briefcase, then slapped the horse on its rump and sent it running. If anyone was following him, that might throw them off the track. It had been his experience that men on the run were often identified by the horses they were riding. Besides, this was a stolen horse, and though he thought time and distance probably made it improbable that he would be picked up for riding a stolen horse, it was foolish to take the chance, especially since he was carrying as much money as he was.

Just before Kingsley got to Lincoln, he saw an old abandoned house, and he stepped inside. The house, which was constructed of unfinished, rip-sawed lumber, was fading badly. It consisted of one room, the floor covered with about an inch of dirt. At one time the walls had been papered, but what paper there was now hung in long, ragged, colorless strips. There was no furniture. Upon examining the place, Kingsley found a loose board in the wall and, pulling it out, was able to slip the briefcase behind it, after first removing one thousand dollars.

After hiding the briefcase, Kingsley walked the rest of the way into town. Because he was hungry, he stopped at the first restaurant he saw, a place called Kirby’s Café. Inside, he took a small table next to the wall, then lit a cigar as he waited.

“Yes, sir, what can I get for you?” a waitress asked.

Kingsley enjoyed a meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy. Then, grounding out his cigar butt, left the café and walked across the street to the Cow Lot Saloon.

Loomis Byrd was in the back of the Cow Lot Saloon when he saw a familiar figure come in through the front door. It took him only a moment to recall who it was and, getting up from the table, he walked up to the bar just as Kingsley got there.

“It’s been a long time, Kingsley,” Byrd said.

Startled at hearing his name called, Kingsley turned to man who had spoken to him. The expression on his face indicated a lack of recognition.

“Damn, don’t you ’member me? After all the ridin’ we did together?”

“What ridin’ would that be?”

“Ridin’ with the best cavalry in the whole Union army. I’m talking about the Jayhawkers.”

Kingsley smiled. “That what you’re callin’ it now? Cavalry?”

“What you doin’ in this part of the world, Kingsley? I thought you would be back in Missouri. That is where you’re from, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. That’s where I’m from, but the folks there don’t take too highly to me yet. You’re Byrd, ain’t you? Loomis Byrd?”

Byrd smiled upon being recognized. “Yeah, that’s me all right. What you been doin’ with yourself?”

Kingsley bought a bottle of whiskey and the two men retired to the back of the saloon where they found a table and began catching each other up on old times.

“You know what I miss?” Byrd said. “I mean, what I miss the most? It’s the ridin’ with a bunch of men like the ones we was ridin’ with then. You know, we went where we wanted to go, took what we wanted to take, and there wasn’t nobody with gumption enough to stand up agin’ us.”

“Yeah, them was good days, all right,” Kingsley agreed.

“There’s two more of ’em that rode with us that live here, you know, them bein’ Curtiss and Rawlins. And not more’n twenty miles from here is Jones and Wales. That would be six of us, countin’ you and me,” Byrd said.

“Six of us for what?”

“I don’t know. I reckon we’d let you figure it out. But if you had an outfit of six good and experienced men, I’m sure we could come up with somethin’ we could do.”

“Like what?”

Byrd looked around the room before he spoke again. “Look, I heard tell you was on the dodge. To me, that means you’re ridin’ the outlaw trail. All I’m suggestin’ is, as long as you’re goin’ to be ridin’ that trail, you may as well do it with company. All these men has rid the trail before, and what’s more, they have rode the trail with you.”

“You still ain’t said what we could do.”

“Well, hell, with an outfit like that, there ain’t nothin’ we couldn’t do. We could rob banks, trains, stagecoaches, just like in the old days. Only this time it would all be for us.”

Kingsley drummed his fingers on the table as he considered it. He had fifteen thousand dollars now, more money than he had ever had in his life. It had been incredibly easy to get. On the other hand there was something to what Byrd was saying. An outfit of experienced men could do just about anything it wanted to do. And it would take more than a sheriff and a temporary posse to stop them.

“What do you think?” Byrd asked.

“I think I want to get me a whore and think about it for a while.”

“Elmer, look over there,” Duff said.

Looking in the direction where Duff was pointing, Elmer saw a horse without a rider coming toward them. They urged their own horses into a trot until the caught up with it. The horse was saddled, but there was no sign of a rider anywhere.

Elmer got down and examined all four of the horse’s hooves before nodding and making his pronouncement.

“This is the horse we’ve been following, all right,” he said. “The question is what is he doing out here without a rider?”

“And where is the rider?” Duff added.

“Could be that he was throwed,” Elmer suggested.

“Or, it could be that he let the horse go, just to throw us off.”

“Yeah, that, too.”

“We’re no more’n five or six miles from town. This horse came from that same direction. I’m sure that when he decided to abandon the horse and walk the rest of the way into Lincoln, he was probably no more than a mile away,” Duff suggested.

“Which means he is probably there now,” Elmer said.

“Let’s hurry it up. I’d like to catch up with him before he gets a train,” Duff said.

“What about this horse?” Elmer asked.

“I have a feeling it is a stolen horse, and I also have a feeling that he knows where he is going. I’d say let him go.”

“Good idea.”

Clouds had been building up all day, and by late afternoon the rain had started. There was nothing Duff and Elmer could do but break out their slickers and hunker down in the saddle. They were soaked thoroughly when they reached the outskirts of Lincoln, and the thought of getting out of the rain was quite an incentive. There was a banner spread across the street as they entered town.

COUNTY FAIR, AUG 4, 5, 6.

RACES, WRESTLING, PATRIOTIC SPEECHES.

One corner of the banner had come loose, and the banner was furled like a flume, so that a solid gush of water poured from the end.

The first thing they did was go to the livery to get their horses out of the weather. After that, they walked over to the railroad station.

“No, sir, there ain’t been nobody like that bought a ticket today, or in the last two or three days,” the ticket agent said.

“Thank you, ’tis appreciative I am for the information,” Duff said. He turned to Elmer.

“I’m bettin’ he’s still here,” Elmer said.

“Aye, ’tis a good bet I’m reckoning. He’s got money and it does a man no good to have money if he can’t spend it, and the only place he can spend it is in town.”

Elmer chuckled. “You got that right,” he said. “Speaking of which, what do you say me ’n you spend a little money now and get us somethin’ to eat?”

“Sounds good to me,” Duff replied.

Duff and Elmer picked their way across the muddy, horse-apple-strewn street, and headed toward the café.

Kingsley crawled out of the whore’s bed and walked over to relieve himself in the chamber pot by the window. As he stood there, he glanced out the window and got a start from the two men he saw picking their way through the rain and across a muddy street.

“Son of a bitch!” he said.

“What is it, honey?” the whore asked. “You ain’t got the burns, have you? ’Cause I’m clean, and if you got the burns you didn’t get it from me. And if you got it, and you give it to me, that’s goin’ to cost me some money, ’cause don’t nobody want to bed with a woman if she’s got the disease.”

“Oh, shut up,” Kingsley said. “I ain’t talkin’ about nothin’ like that.”

The two men went into Kirby’s Café, just across the street from the Cow Lot Saloon. Kingsley was a little surprised to see MacCallister; he thought he had hit him hard enough to have killed him. But what really surprised him was the other rider he saw with him. Was that Elmer Gleason? No, it couldn’t have been. Gleason was dead. Kingsley was sure he had heard that. Still, it looked an awful lot like him.

Dressing quickly, Kingsley went back downstairs. He saw Byrd sitting at a table with a couple of other men and started to call Byrd over to him, then he thought he recognized them. They were much older, but he was sure they were men he had ridden with during the war. Byrd had said their names were Curtis and Rawlins, though he had no idea which was which.

When Kingsley walked over to the table, the three men stood up and Curtis and Rawlins stuck out their hands.

“Do you remember us?” one of them asked.

“I remember you,” Kingsley said. “You’re Curtis and Rawlins. Don’t remember which of you is which, though.”

“I’m Curtis,” one of them said. He was bald, which would make it easy to remember.

“Byrd was tellin’ us you’d like to start a gang,” Rawlins said. “If you do, me ’n Curtis want to be in it.”

“I haven’t actually said that I was goin’ to,” Kingsley said. He thought about MacCallister and Gleason being in town. He had no idea how it was that they were together, but he was pretty sure why they were here. They had come after him. Maybe putting a gang together, if for no other reason than protection, might not be a bad idea.

“You said you was goin’ to think about it, though,” Byrd said.

“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? All right, I’ve thought about it. Are you willin’ to do what I ask you to do?”

“Yeah, hell, a gang has got to have a leader,” Rawlins said.

Kingsley nodded. “I’m glad you see it my way.” Kingsley reached inside his shirt and took out a packet of money, the one thousand dollars he had taken from the satchel.

“I don’t want anyone who works for me to think I’m cheap,” he said. He counted out one hundred dollars apiece for the three men, then he put the rest of the money back inside his shirt.

“What’s this for?” Rawlins asked.

“There are a couple of men in town who are lookin’ for me,” Kingsley said.

“What do they want with you?” Curtis asked.

“They want to kill me. And they will, unless we kill them first.”

“We?” Rawlins asked.

“Yes, we,” Byrd said. “We just took his money, which in my book means we just signed on with him. So if someone is after him, that means they are after us as well.”

“Rawlins, when you think about it, Byrd is right,” Curtis said. “If we took the money, that means we are all together.”

Rawlins thought for a moment, then he smiled. “Yeah, well, the way I see it, we’re four against their two. And they prob’ly don’t know that Kingsley has took on any partners.”

“You got that right,” Kingsley said. “There don’t nobody know about you three at all.”

“All right, who are they?”

“Like I say, there’s two of ’em. The young one is as big as a tree. His name is MacCallister. The old one with him is Gleason. Elmer Gleason.”

“And you say they are in town now?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Right now, they’re in the café across the street. I reckon they’ll be comin’ in here pretty soon.”

“How do you know they’ll come in here?”

“Because they are lookin’ for me,” Kingsley said. “And when you are lookin’ for someone, the best place to start is a saloon.”

“I got me an idea,” Byrd said.

“What’s that?”

“We’ll split up, one of us sittin’ in each corner of the saloon. Soon as they come in, why, you can give us the signal. We’ll have ’em surrounded, an’ they won’t have no idea that they are in danger.”

“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Rawlins said. “What about you, Kingsley? What do you think?”

“Yeah. I say we can give it a try,” Kingsley said.

Across the street in Kirby’s Café, Duff and Elmer were just having their dinner. Outside, the rain had stopped, but it was still dark because of the heavy cloud cover.

“Elmer, look at that table over there, in the ash tray,” Duff said.

The table Duff pointed out was one of the smaller tables that were set up against the wall with only two chairs. In the ashtray was half of a cigar. A waitress was walking by then, and Duff got her attention.

“Yes, sir, something else for you?” she asked with a practiced smile.

“Could you be for tellin’ me, lass, about the man who left the cigar in the ash tray there?”

“Oh,” she said. “How awful. Who would want to eat there with a smelly cigar butt in front of them? Thank you for calling it to my attention.”

“Yes, ma’am, but ’tis more interested I am in the man who left it there. Was he tall and gaunt? And did he have a scar, here?” Duff traced his face where young Harley had said there was a scar.

“Yes, oh, quite a frightening thing he was, what with the scar. And his eyes. I’ve never seen eyes like his. They were like the eyes of a snake.” She shivered as she explained them.

“Thank you, lass, you have been most helpful.”

“Did you see where he went when he left the café?” Elmer asked.

The waitress shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice.”

“He went over to the Cow Lot,” one of the others in the café said.

“The Cow Lot?”

“That’s the saloon just across the street.”