Redemption

15

Before he walked home, Jason checked into the office just to make certain that Ward was on the job. He was, but so was an angry Wash Keogh, waving the newspaper.

“Blast you, Jason!” he shouted. “What’s wrong with you, takin’ out one’a your guns afore I had me a chance at him?”

Jason held up his hands. “I didn’t take him, Wash! Abe Todd did, and it was kind’a a surprise for everybody.”

“And while we’re not on the subject, how’s come you talk different accordin’ to who you’re doin’ the talkin’ to? Droppin’ g’s and sayin’ ‘ain’t’ and stuff you don’t do otherwise? Huh?”

Wash had a point, and it took Jason back a step or two. He did do that, he realized. He shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t know, Wash.” He really didn’t. “Sorry if it bothers you.”

Wash pulled himself up. “Well, it don’t, really. But this Gunderson deal does. And just when I was gonna strike it rich!” He dug into his pocket.

“Yeah, sure,” Ward muttered from behind the desk.

Wash made a growly face at Ward, then produced his nugget.

Jason let out a long breath and said, “Jesus, Wash! You been carryin’ that thing around in your pocket this whole time?” He’d never in his life seen such a rich nugget, or such a gigantic one, and he was certain that he’d told Wash to put it in the bank for safekeeping!

Ward was still intent on the papers before him, and Jason said, “Ward. I thought you were gonna take him up to the bank.”

Ward lifted his head and his focus fell on the gargantuan nugget in Wash’s hand. He dropped his pen and his mouth hung open. Then, “Mother of God! Wash, you said you were goin’!”

“What’d I tell you?” said the old prospector. “You brung me into town without no sleep and then you turn around and shoot the feller I was here to take care of! You beat everything, you know that?” And then he stomped past Jason, pocketing the gold again, his pants listing with its weight, and walked out onto the street and toward the saloon.

“You think that thing’s real?” Ward asked.

“Looked like it was.” It hadn’t even qualified as a nugget. If it’d been much bigger, Jenny could have used it in her rock garden, out back of the house.

“I need a smoke.” Ward fumbled in his pocket.

“I’ll join you.”

The two men sat in the office smoking for a while before Ward said, “You ever seen anything like that in your whole cotton-pickin’ life?”

Jason just shook his head. As yesterday, he told himself that it could have been pyrite, but he figured himself a good enough judge to tell the difference. If he knew where Wash had been digging, he would have been out of town like a shot.

No, he wouldn’t. It was Wash’s gold. And he kept on repeating that to himself. “It’s Wash’s, it’s Wash’s.”

“Key-rist,” said Ward. “Now I know what they mean by having larceny in your heart. How much you suppose a thing like that’s worth?”

Jason shook his head. “Have to have it assayed. But I’d say somewhere in the thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.”

“Key-rist,” Ward repeated.

“First thing in the morning, you make him go over to the bank and have Megan put it in the vault. I mean it this time, all right? I don’t like him walkin’ around town with it on him. Liable to fall through a hole in his britches.”

Ward stared out the front window. “Check, boss.”

Jason stubbed out his smoke and stood up. “I’m goin’ home.”

Later that same evening, while Jason was at home having one of those good “Jenny dinners” and Wash was still at the saloon, Ward Wanamaker was making his evening rounds, checking that everything that was supposed to be locked up was locked up, and that everything was pretty much in its place. He paused, halfway through, when he got up to the gate. It was being left open at night these days, in case something should happen—Heaven forfend—and the wagon train members needed to get inside in a hurry.

He leaned against one of the posts and rolled, then lit a smoke, breathing out a hazy plume into the crisp night air. The sun had barely set, but nights on the desert were cold, and this looked like it was going to be a real toe-and-finger freezer.

He was almost finished with his smoke and about to stamp it out and get on with his rounds, when he spied movement out there, in the expanse to the south. He waited a moment, which was just enough time for the movement to turn into a horse and rider, a rider who was moving like a bat out of hell.

He was yelling something, too, but Ward couldn’t make it out. All he could hear was somebody shouting something, and all he could see was that same somebody flapping his arms and fanning his horse and riding like sixty.

“Who the heck’s that?” a voice, much closer, asked. Ward looked toward it and saw Riley, the wagon master, strolling over toward him.

“Dunno,” Ward replied with a shrug. “Mighty odd. Guess we’ll have to wait till he gets close enough that we can hear what he’s—”

“Indians! Apache! Help!” came the cry, finally clear.

“Sayin’,” Ward finished. “And don’t go getting’ yourself in an uproar. I reckon it’s just one of MacDonald’s men. Apache don’t attack at night, but MacDonald sees Indians like other men see tumbleweeds.”

Riley folded his arms and stared out toward the rider galloping toward them. “He’s gonna ruin that horse.”

“Probably.” Ward ground out his smoke. “Reckon I’d best go round up the marshal. The U.S. Marshal, that is. Me and Jason, we ain’t got no jurisdiction out at MacDonald’s ranch.”

Riley said, “Well, good luck, then,” and wandered back toward his wagon while Ward started down the street, to the saloon.

That dang Matt MacDonald sure had a way of messing up his evenings.

Abe Todd was minding his own business, getting smashed at the saloon and keeping an eye on Sampson Davis, when the batwing doors burst in and two men shouldered through. Ward was one of them, and he raised a hand to acknowledge him. He didn’t expect Ward to come over to his table, though, but that’s what he did next, followed by the shorter man who’d come through the door with him.

The shorter man stared at the badge on Abe’s chest just long enough for Ward to say, “Sorry, Abe,” and shrug before the other man—a boy, really—started in.

He elbowed Ward aside and said, “I’m Steven McCord, sir, and I work for Mr. Matt MacDonald down south at the Double M, and we got Indians, a passel of Indians, the Apache kind, and he sent me to come get help right away and the town law ain’t never any help, so I come straight to you.” His long sentence finished at last, he leaned forward, catching himself on the tabletop as if he were exhausted.

Abe didn’t move, except to tilt his elbow and take another slug of bourbon. “At night?” he finally said. “You got Apache attacking you at night?”

McCord nodded his head frantically.

“Anybody actually shoot an arrow at you?”

McCord’s features bunched up. “What? No, but they’re comin’! Mr. MacDonald, he seen their dust cloud on the horizon.”

Abe studied his glass. “He did, did he?”

“Yessir! C’mon! Time’s wastin’!”

Abe leaned back in his chair and Ward sat down, probably to watch the show. Abe let the edification begin.

“Son, the Apache aren’t attackin’ your boss’s ranch. They don’t attack at night, for one thing. And for another, if they wanted to attack you, you wouldn’t see ’em comin’. They’d just be there, and you’d be dead—or wishin’ you were.”

“But—”

“No ‘buts’ about it,” Abe cut in, and lifted his glass again. He polished off the last of his bourbon. “Now, go on back home. Or sit down and have a drink. Your choice. But I ain’t runnin’ out there like some dumb cluck with my head cut off.”

“But—”

“Sorry, Steve, but that’s all she wrote,” Ward said, standing up, putting a hand on both of the young man’s shoulders, and turning him back toward the door. “Your boss’s imagination is runnin’ off with him again. That’s all there is to it, and this time, we ain’t gonna play, all right?”

Steve McCord, a nice kid who had come in with the wagon train before last, walked out the door, dejected. Ward called, “And you walk that horse for at least a mile, McCord.”

A muffled, “I know, I know,” came from the direction into which he’d disappeared, and then he was gone. Ward pulled out a chair again, wondering if Jason’d shoot him if he had a beer.

But then, he figured Jason’d be so tickled that he’d got rid of MacDonald’s rider that he wouldn’t mind, and so he signaled the serving gal and indicated a beer.

“That was right masterful,” he said to Abe.

“Nothin’ but the truth.” Abe leaned farther back in his chair, and for a second, Ward thought he was going to go to sleep. But when the barmaid brought Ward’s beer, Abe sat up and said, “One more round, honey.”

“That kid’s gonna be in a peck’a trouble when he gets back to the ranch alone,” Ward said, sipping his beer gratefully. It tasted good. “Matt MacDonald ain’t somebody you want to cross.”

Abe picked up his shot glass. “Not my problem,” he said, and drank half of it down. “The U.S. Marshal’s office ain’t for babysittin’.”

Ward nodded. The marshal’s office must be for getting drunk instead, he thought, then wiped the idea from his mind. He wasn’t there to judge Abe Todd. He was there to have a beer. He took another sip.

He wondered what Jason would have done, though.

Jason, relieved to be off-duty, finished a good dinner, then went out to the porch to smoke. He was halfway through his cigarette when Jenny came out.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, sitting down in the chair beside him like a bag of bricks.

“Nothing.” He turned toward her. “Why?”

“Because you didn’t say two words during dinner, or when you came into the house. Something’s eating at you, Jason. Anybody could see that.”

“It’s just . . . sometimes I wish I wasn’t marshal. Sometimes I wish we hadn’t come west at all.”

“Why? I like it here!”

“I know you do, Jenny. And to tell you the truth, that’s the only reason I’m still here.” And it was the truth, he just realized. Epiphanies could be curious things, and this one fell on him like a keg filled with nails. He wanted to weep.

“For me? Jason, you don’t need to stay for me. I’m fine!”

He took a drag on his smoke, then stubbed it out. “You wouldn’t be so fine if the Apache attacked again. Or if you married that jerk, MacDonald. Or if you—”

“Stop it!” She slouched back in her chair, hard. “You can stop listing things.”

Jason pulled out his fixings bag again and muttered, “That’s what you think.”

She stared at him through the darkness. He wasn’t going to find any comfort here tonight. He stood up.

“Where you going?”

Fixings bag dangling from his fingers, he said, “To the saloon. I feel like a drink.”

Jason didn’t know how he felt, truth be told.

He guessed it all had to do with the people and the situation concerned. But he was shaken up, no doubt about it. He wished he could just wave his hand and permanently get rid of Davis and Lynch and Todd and the town fathers and the whole world, and go happily back East. He’d force Jenny to go with him, that’s what he’d do. He’d bind and gag her until they got east of the Missouri or maybe even the Mississippi! Maybe by then she wouldn’t want to yell at him so much. Maybe she’d feel home calling to her, too.

He realized he’d stopped walking, and was leaning against the rail out front of Solomon’s Mercantile, and suddenly, he wondered about the baby. The lights were on in an upstairs window, and he heard, just faintly, the sound of Solomon laughing. Jason allowed himself a small smile. The baby must be some better, then.

But even that implied good news couldn’t cheer him up. He just felt . . . itchy. Like something bad was going to happen, something he didn’t have any control over, and he didn’t like it. He was used to having control over most things that mattered, but not the thing that was coming. Whatever it was.

He rolled himself a smoke and started on down the street, lighting his cigarette as he walked. The smoke tasted more brittle than usual, oddly dirty, and he almost put it out, but by then he was on the walk outside the saloon. “Aw, screw it,” he muttered, and pushed his way inside.

The first thing he did was check the place that Davis had staked out earlier, and sure enough, he was still there, still tossing back his rotgut like there wasn’t enough in the world to get him drunk, wasn’t enough to even make him stagger a little. And then from his right, he heard, “Jason!” and looked over to see Ward and Abe slouched at a table quite near him. He walked on over.

Abe was there, looking a little drunk, and Ward was with him, nursing a beer and not impaired in the slightest, his hand still raised in a wave. He guessed he couldn’t ride Ward about the beer. He’d had one himself today, and intended to have a few more tonight. “Wash go on home?”

Ward said, “To my house, yeah. And I guess you heard, though I can’t figure how. Did you come on down to celebrate with us?”

Jason wended his way over to the table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. “Heard what?”

“About MacDonald, of course!” said Ward.

“What about him?”

Ward went on to explain the evening’s excitement in great detail, and finished up by including Abe’s response to the situation. Abe, on the other hand, spent the entire time staring over toward Davis’s table.

For a moment, Jason aped him. Davis was still sitting there, drinking, and not much else. Jason glanced up toward the second floor, saw that Rafe’s door was still closed, and quickly looked away in case Davis had seen him.

His attention returned to the table before him, where Ward was nearly collapsed in laughter. Jason said, “Well, I guess whatever works, works.”

“Amen,” said Abe, and ordered another bourbon. Then he turned toward Jason. “This Miss Electa your sister works for: What’s her story?”

“She’s one of the Morton girls,” Jason answered, a bit surprised by the question. “The unmarried one. She teaches our school. Why?”

“Just wonderin’, that’s all. No warrants or anything?”

Jason was shocked. He said, “On Miss Electa? Certainly not!”

Abe had turned to stare at Davis. “Sorry,” he said. “Had to ask.”

But why? Was he asking because Jenny worked for her, or did he have some kind of personal designs on Electa? Jason didn’t ask. He was too embarrassed to pursue it.

“Don’t ya think that’s a riot, Jason?” Ward, to his left, elbowed him in the ribs.

“What?”

“Key-rist! About what Abe said to young Steve McCord! MacDonald’s man?”

“Oh, yeah. Pretty slick.”

“Well, you don’t need to sound so all-fired excited ’bout it.” Ward drummed the table with his fingertips.

“Sorry, Ward. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

Barely audibly, Abe muttered, “Don’t we all.”