Texas Bloodshed

CHAPTER 19

The night passed peacefully. The overcast remained in place, and as Brubaker studied the gray, leaden skies the next morning, he commented, “Looks like there might be some snow in those clouds.”

Charley Graywolf shook his head.

“I don’t think so, Forty-two,” he said. “It’s been mighty dry down in these parts for months now. We haven’t had any rain or snow to speak of in a long time. I hear it’s even worse down in Texas, where you’re headed.”

Brubaker snorted. “It’s always dry in Texas,” he said.

“This is worse than usual. There’s a real drought down there, and it’s spreading north.”

“Well, it can hold off rainin’ until we get where we’re goin’, as far as I’m concerned. This wagon’s pretty heavy. I don’t want it boggin’ down on muddy roads.”

Bo agreed with that sentiment. If the wagon were to get stuck, that would make them sitting ducks for Gentry’s gang or for the vengeance-seeking Staleys, if either of those bunches should happen to catch up to them then.

As they got ready to move out, Graywolf said, “I’d still like to go with you to the border, Forty-two, especially since you gave us a hand like that, but our orders were to deal with Kinlock and then get back to Tahlequah as soon as we can. The Lighthorse has a lot of ground to cover, and we’re stretched pretty thin.”

“I know that,” Brubaker said. “Don’t worry about it, Charley.” He held out a hand. “Good luck to you.”

“And to you fellas, as well,” Graywolf said as everyone shook hands all around.

Earlier, after breakfast, Brubaker had chained the prisoners’ hands behind their backs again. Lowe and Elam had complained bitterly about that, but Cara had taken it in stony silence. She seemed to have gotten tired of raising a ruckus about everything. There was a look of dull acceptance on her face ... not only about the chains, but about her ultimate fate as well.

Before the Cherokee Lighthorsemen headed back east, Brubaker warned them, “Keep your eyes open for Hank Gentry and his gang. I know they’ve got to be lookin’ for these three. Gentry’s liable to gun down anybody who gets in his way.”

“Don’t worry, Forty-two,” Graywolf said from the back of his horse. “If we run into them, they won’t find out from us that we’ve seen you.”

“Never crossed my mind that they would,” Brubaker said.

He got the wagon rolling westward along the narrow trail again. Bo took the lead, and Scratch rode behind the vehicle to keep an eye on their back trail. Bo was none the worse for being dunked in the frigid creek the day before, other than the fact that his bones maybe ached a little more than they usually did.

At his age, a multitude of aches and pains was normal, though, so he didn’t think anything about it.

Charley Graywolf proved to be better at predicting the weather than Brubaker. The gray clouds hung stubbornly in the sky, but they didn’t produce any snow or rain. The day passed uneventfully. Late that afternoon the travelers came to a crossroads, although giving it that name was probably an overstatement. A dim, narrow trail running north and south intersected the westerly one they were on.

Brubaker swung the wagon onto the southern trail and announced, “We’ll head south to the Red River. There’s a good crossing there above Gainesville. Once we’re in Texas we’ll cut back east to Dallas and then Tyler. Be there in about a week ... if folks stop shootin’ at us and slowin’ us down.”

Bo wasn’t going to count on having that much luck, and neither was Scratch.

The trail angled to the southwest. Brubaker followed it for a couple of miles and then called a halt for the day.

After they had made camp and eaten supper, Brubaker opened the door of the wagon to feed the prisoners. Lowe asked, “Are you gonna move our chains back to the front again?”

“Not hardly,” Brubaker answered. “We had those Cherokee Lighthorsemen with us last night to help out if any of you got rambunctious. Now things are back to the way they were before.”

“It was sure a lot more comfortable the other way,” Cara said.

Brubaker let out a snort of disdain.

“It ain’t my job to keep you comfortable,” he said, “just to get you to Tyler so Judge Southwick can deal with you as he sees fit.”

“Listen, Forty-two,” Scratch said. “We’ve got us a pretty good routine down by now. I don’t see that it’d hurt anything if we made things a mite easier on these folks.”

“Blast it, don’t get taken in by ’em, Morton!” Brubaker exclaimed angrily. “They never made it any easier on the innocent people they killed in their robberies, now did they?”

Scratch shrugged.

“I reckon not. But it seems like it’d be less trouble for us, too. For one thing, we wouldn’t have to feed ’em. They could do that themselves. And if we kept on coverin’ em all the time the wagon is open, I don’t see how they could get away.”

Brubaker frowned in thought for a moment, then asked Bo, “What do you say, Creel?”

“Scratch is right,” Bo said. “I don’t see how chaining their hands in front of them is going to make any difference. It sure won’t while they’re riding and chained to the floor, too.”

What Bo said was true. He couldn’t argue with Scratch’s claims.

But he did wonder just why Scratch was taking the side of the outlaws. That was very unusual for him. It had to be because of the soft spot Scratch had for womenfolks. If all three prisoners had been hardbitten male owlhoots, he wouldn’t have worried about whether they were comfortable or not.

Scratch was just too much of a Southern gentleman. It was bred in him to be chivalrous to a woman ... even when that woman was a killer.

Bo resolved to keep an eye on his old friend. He wouldn’t let Scratch do anything foolish.

After both Texans had weighed in with their opinions, Brubaker gave a reluctant nod and said, “All right. We’ll try it for a day or two. But if anything happens, I’m holdin’ you two responsible.”

“That’s fine,” Bo said. He didn’t really expect any trouble. And if it arose, they would deal with it.

One by one, while the Texans covered them, Brubaker switched the chains on the prisoners. When he was finished with that and Lowe and Elam were padlocked to the rings in the floor again, the deputy said, “All right, Creel, take the woman into the trees. Morton and I will watch these two.”

Cara pouted. “Mr. Morton’s been takin’ me,” she said.

“It don’t matter who takes you,” Brubaker snapped, “just go get your business done.”

“Come on, miss,” Bo said. He, too, had been raised to be a gentleman, although it wasn’t ingrained as deeply in him as it was in Scratch.

Cara seemed to have gotten used to the lack of privacy and didn’t let it bother her anymore. She went into the brush and hoisted her skirts without argument. While she was doing that, she asked, “Has Mr. Morton ever been married?”

“Why in the world would you want to know that?” Bo said.

“I’m just curious, that’s all. He seems like such a nice man. I figure some woman must’ve hooked him at one time or another.”

“Well, you’d be wrong there,” Bo said. “He’s never been married. Never even come close, as far as I know, although he’s talked about it a few times when he met some widow woman he particularly liked.”

Bo didn’t say anything about his own tragedy-shortened marriage. Cara hadn’t asked about that, and he wasn’t just about to volunteer the information. It wasn’t that he tried not to think about what he had lost, all those years ago. It was so far in the past that the pain had almost receded to nothing. Almost. But it didn’t have any bearing on what went on now.

Instead he asked, “Why do you want to know about Scratch? Seems like I remember you trying to cut him open with a razor not that long ago.”

Cara came out of the bushes, straightening her clothes as best she could since the shackles still kept her from being able to move her arms very well.

“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “I didn’t know him then, and I was just loco to get away. I can’t stand to be cooped up anywhere.”

“You seem to be standing that wagon pretty well these days,” Bo pointed out.

“What choice do I have?”

She had a point there, he thought. Unless Hank Gentry and the rest of the gang showed up to rescue the prisoners, the odds of Cara LaChance ever again experiencing freedom were pretty slim.

She didn’t say anything else about Scratch. Bo took her back to the camp and escorted Lowe and Elam into the woods in turn. The prisoners ate supper and turned in for the night, stretching out on the floor of the wagon and wrapping themselves in blankets against the chilly night air.

Bo and Brubaker headed for their bedrolls as well. Scratch stood the first watch. He sat on a log near the fire, his Winchester across his knees, and let his senses reach out into the night, alert for anything that was out of the ordinary. He never looked into the flames for more than a second at a time, knowing that to do so would weaken his night vision. He knew he needed to stay as vigilant as possible.

Time passed slowly, as it usually did when he was standing guard. Scratch was a naturally gregarious sort. He loved talking to people and just having folks around him. He had company tonight, of course, but they were all asleep. He was glad it was cold. The chill probably helped keep him awake.

The sound that drifted to his ears was so soft that he almost didn’t hear it at first. Then it came again, and he realized someone was saying, “Psst!”

The little hiss came from the wagon. One of the prisoners was trying to get his attention. Maybe supper hadn’t agreed with whichever one it was, and he or she needed to visit the bushes again. In that case, Scratch thought, he would have to wake up Bo and Brubaker, and the deputy would likely be pretty annoyed.

He stood up and went over to the wagon. Putting his mouth close to the tiny crack around the door, he asked in a whisper, “What do you want?”

“Mr. Morton?” It was Cara’s voice on the other side of the door. Scratch could barely hear it because of the snoring that came from Lowe and Elam. “Scratch? Is that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Scratch replied. He wondered if she had overheard the conversation between him and Bo and Brubaker earlier and had known that he was taking the first shift on guard. “You need somethin’?”

“Just ... some company, I guess. I’m havin’ trouble sleepin’.”

He didn’t doubt it. The wagon had to be as uncomfortable as all get-out, plus there was the fact that she was on the way to be tried and hanged. Knowledge like that had to weigh heavily on a person.

“I can’t let you out of there,” he told her.

“I know you can’t. But maybe ... maybe you can talk to me for a little while, until I get to feelin’ like I could doze off?”

Scratch glanced at the two bedrolls near the fire. Bo and Brubaker appeared to be sleeping soundly. As long as he whispered, he didn’t suppose it would hurt anything for him to talk to Cara for a few minutes. He couldn’t let it distract him from being watchful, though.

“All right,” he said. “What do you want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. I just needed to hear the sound of another human voice. You ever get like that, Scratch? Just so blasted lonely that you think you’re gonna shrivel up inside and die?”

“Not hardly,” he said. “Bo’s always around to talk to.”

“You’re lucky,” Cara said. “Growin’ up I never had any real friends.”

“You must’ve had family.”

She laughed, but the sound was bitter and humorless.

“Yeah, some family, tryin’ to make a livin’ out of a hardscrabble farm in the piney woods, down in East Texas. All my ma and pa cared about was how much work they could get out of me, and after I wasn’t a kid anymore, all my brothers cared about was what else they could get out of me, if you know what I mean.”

Scratch frowned.

“Sorry,” he said. “Must’ve been a pretty hard life. But that’s no excuse to go to robbin’ and killin’.”

“I never killed nobody!” Cara said, and now she sounded vehement. “I know they say I have, but that’s all lies. There’s nobody who can say they ever saw me kill anybody, because I haven’t. It was Hank and the other fellas in the gang who did all the killin’.”

“You were there for some of it.”

“Well, what else could I do? What happened is, Hank came along a few years ago and I met up with him, and all I could think about was how if I went away with him, I’d get away from that damn farm once and for all. And so when he asked me to, I did. It didn’t seem like I had any choice.”

“We’ve always got choices,” Scratch said.

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what Hank was really like, either. I didn’t know he was an outlaw until I was part of the gang. And then it was too late. I had to go along with whatever he said. He can be ... well, he can be really nice when he wants to, but he can be really mean when he wants to be that way, too. I had to keep him happy with me, or else he would’ve turned me over to the rest of the men. Or worse, just left me somewhere to shift for myself.”

Scratch didn’t see how that could be any worse than what she was talking about, but obviously she felt differently about it. He said, “If all this is true, I’m sorry for you, miss. But you’ll have a chance to tell your side of it at the trial.”

“Do you think anybody will ever believe me?”

“Well, considerin’ how you came after me with that razor and how you’ve acted since we left Fort Smith ...”

“I haven’t done anything except yell some, and you’d yell, too, if you thought you were gonna be dancin’ at the end of a hang rope for things you didn’t do. And as for the razor, like I told your friend Mr. Creel, I was just about out of my head. I can’t stand bein’ locked up. I was loco to get away.” Cara paused, then continued in her soft whisper, “I’m sorry for what I done, Scratch, really and truly sorry. And I’m glad now that I didn’t hurt you.”

“Huh. You and me both,” Scratch said.

A big part of him didn’t believe anything Cara was saying to him. She was just playing up to him, he told himself, trying to make him feel sorry for her.

But what if it was true, even partially? Somebody living as hellish an existence at home as she had described might do anything to get away from it, even throwing in with a gang of bandits and cutthroats. And once she was a part of that gang, what else could she have done except go along with whatever its leader wanted? She must have been terrified of Hank Gentry.

So there was a part of him that actually did feel sorry for her ... if she was telling the truth, which she probably wasn’t.

“You’d better try to get some sleep now,” he told her. This conversation had gone on long enough.

“All right,” she whispered. “Thanks for talking to me, Scratch. It eased my troubled mind a little.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

She laughed again, and this time it was a more genuine sound.

“You probably thought I was gonna ask you to let me go, didn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t have done you any good,” he told her.

“I know that. That’s why I didn’t waste my time.

You’re not the sort of man who’d turn on his friends for a woman.”

“No, I sure ain’t.”

He started to turn away, when he heard her whisper, “But what about a woman who knows where there’s a fortune in greenbacks and gold?”