The Stranger from Abilene

Chapter 55

After the wagons left, Clayton stepped into the ranch house and into silence.

Only a grandfather clock in the hallway made a sound, remorselessly ticking away time.

Clayton shivered. Damn clock made him think of death and Judgment Day.

Moses Anderson had done a good job. There was not a trace of blood left in the dining room or the kitchen, and he’d opened windows to clear the smell of decay. Someone, probably Anderson, had placed a vase of wildflowers in the kitchen window, and a vagrant bee buzzed around the blossoms.

The flowers did little to cheer the place.

Clayton walked to the dining room and stood beside the table. The room was oppressive, hot, weighing on him as though he were wearing a damp greatcoat. He felt eyes, watching, waiting, wondering why he was there.

And that spooked Clayton badly. The whole damned place did.

Determined to see this tour to the end, he walked into the parlor, furnished in an overly ornate style in the fashion of the time.

Above the fireplace, draped in black crepe, hung a picture of the gallant Custer. The great man stared belligerently across the room at the opposite wall where an oil painting of Lee was flanked by one of Parker Southwell, dressed in the gray and gold splendor of a Confederate colonel.

Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .

The clock in the hall reminded Clayton that this was a house of the dead and he was not welcome here, not now, not ever.

Clayton had never lost the cowboy’s superstitious fear of ha’nts and the restless dead and now it plagued him.

There was the time when one of his hands had been struck by lightning and his hat lay on the range for three years. No one would touch it or go near it, the cowboys riding a mile out of their way to avoid the thing.

Finally a great wind rose and took the hat away and everybody, including Clayton, was relieved.

He felt the same way about this house as he had the hat.

He went from room to room, smelled Lee’s perfume in her bedroom, the gun oil, leather, and cigar tang of Parker’s study.

Shad Vestal’s clothes were still spread out, untouched, on the bed. Moses Anderson had been up the trail and he shared the cowboy’s superstitions. He’d left the duds where they lay.

And that’s what Clayton wanted to do with this house . . . leave it where it lay.

He returned to the parlor and poured himself a drink from a decanter that Moses hadn’t cleared away, then built a smoke.

It was there, in that room, he decided that he couldn’t bring Emma to this place.

Could they ever take a starlit walk along the creek and spoon under the cottonwood knowing that a man had hung head-down from one of its branches, suffering the agonies of the damned?

Could they spend a restful night in any of the bedrooms? Lee’s? Parker’s? Vestal’s?

Could they eat a meal in a dining room that had witnessed the slaughter of six human beings?

Could they live with the shadows of people who were once vibrantly alive and were now lying cold in pine boxes in the undertaker’s storeroom?

Clayton asked himself those questions, and the answer to all of them was an emphatic no.

He’d take Emma back to Abilene, start up his ranch again.

Angus McLean would need to find himself a new manager.