The Stranger from Abilene

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.