Lost Trails Page 10

  For quite a while he traded shots, and when there came a lull, he wrote a few more words.

  “It is now about two hours since the first shot. Nick is still alive.”

  Then he had to put the notebook down for a minute to steady himself as another barrage of shots came.

  “They are still shooting and are all around the house. Boys, there is bullets coming in like hail.

  “Them fellows is in such shape I can’t get at them. They are shooting from the stable and river and back of the house.”

  A stillness in the room caused him to crawl over to where Nick lay, and then he wrote a few more words.

  “Nick is dead. He died about 9 o’clock. I see a smoke down at the stable. I think they have fired it. I don’t think they intend to let me get away this time.”

  Nate took a deep breath and looked over what he had written. Maybe Jack Flagg and the Hat boys would get to read this. Maybe not. Even if someone took it off his dead body, though, and burned it, these words would have been written. He could do that much.

  He went back to trading shots, now at the window and now at the door, taking snap shots with the rifle and thinking he might have made a hit or two.

  Things cooled down then, and a funny noise came at the door. He looked out the window to see someone had taken to throwing a rope. He didn’t go for it. While he still had breath, he would put down a few more words.

  “It is now about noon. There is someone at the stable yet. They are throwing a rope at the door and dragging it back. I guess it is to draw me out. I wish that duck would go further so I can get a shot at him.

  “Boys, I don’t know what they have done with them two fellows that stayed here last night.

  “Boys, I feel pretty lonesome just now. I wish there was someone here with me so we could watch all sides at once. They may fool around till I get a good shot before they leave.”

  The ranch yard had gone quiet now—too quiet. As he craned his neck to look out the window from each side, he could see no movement. No telling how many men were out there. At least twenty, and not a flicker.

  He sat on the floor by the table and took the skillet into his lap. The bacon, crisp on one side and fatty on the other, was cold on the tongue. The fire in the stove had long since gone out, and he couldn’t imagine cooking anything anyway. He ate a couple of slices of raw potato, discolored now, and ran out of appetite. He poured warm water from the coffeepot and drank a cupful.

  Time dragged on, and then he heard a commotion of yelling and shooting, but no bullets came his way. He went to the window and peeped out to see that a buckboard and rider had come by, and some of the gunmen had opened up on them. It looked as if at least one of the men had gotten away, but he couldn’t be sure in all of the chaos.

  A man came into view by the stable, the only man within range. Nate took a shot, and the man disappeared. Silence settled in again, and Nate took the opportunity to scribble a few more words about the buckboard and the man at the stable. Then he choked at the next words but made himself write them.

  “It don’t look as if there is much show of my getting away.”

  Before long, the men outside put the abandoned wagon to use. As it came into view, he saw they had heaped it with hay and chopped-up fence posts, and using the pile of hay for a cover, they were backing it toward the cabin. A rattle of bullets through the window kept him from getting any shots at them.

  It didn’t look good. They had him pinned down, and now they were pushing a go-devil at him. His heart was pounding and his mouth was dry as he took up the pencil and notebook. As he wrote, a volley of shots would come, then a pause, and then another barrage.

  “Well, they have just got through shelling the house again like hail. I heard them splitting wood. I guess they are going to fire the house tonight. I think I will make a break when night comes, if alive.”

  The gunfire kept him from looking out, but the smell of smoke coming in through the window made his heart sink. He wrote fast.

  “Shooting again. I think they will fire the house this time.”

  He was right. He could see the flames from the wagon as they licked up onto the eaves, caught the roof on fire, and then worked down the wall. In a matter of minutes, smoke was filling the room, getting thicker and lower. He had time to write one last bit, and then he was going to have to try to run for it.

  “It’s not night yet. The house is all fired. Good-bye, boys, if I never see you again.

  “Nathan D. Champion”

  He tucked the notebook inside his shirt and tried to gather his wits. It was a good fifty yards to the ravine south of the house, and his best chance was without his boots. He pulled them off, straightened out his wool socks, pulled on another pair, and crawled to the back door. This was it. He either got away or he didn’t, but they weren’t going to burn him like a rat. He was all on his own. He hated to leave Nick’s body in the fire, but it was the only way.

  For one more time that day, he thought of people he might never see again—his brother Dudley, Lou Ellen. They would know he went down fighting. So would Jack Flagg and the boys. But none of them was here now.

  He needed to get out of this smoke, or he wouldn’t be able to breathe enough to run. With the six-gun tucked in his belt and the rifle in his hand, he pulled the door open and made a run for it.

  The black smoke poured out around him, and he felt enormous energy as he took the first few strides. He heard shouts of “There he goes! There he goes!” and his mouth went dry as a tingling went through his shoulders and neck. He was running fine, though, his legs lifting and his lungs clearing.

  As he pushed around the bend, a man appeared with a rifle, then another standing nearby, also aiming. Not enough time to stop and draw a bead, everything out of order as he raised the rifle. A bullet tore into his arm and he dropped the gun. As he grabbed for his pistol, he felt three more slams in the chest, and he floated like nothing.

  Lou Ellen held the baby in her arms as she looked in the store window at a pair of gloves—men’s work gloves, with flared leather cuffs, the kind she had seen more than once on Blue Horse Mesa.

  There was nothing left now, nothing but servitude, bitterness, and hatred. She could make peace with her husband and put in her time. She could bite her tongue when she heard him and others talk about the rustler war. She could hate the cattlemen and their hired guns for not having to answer for what they did, for having the governor and the senators on their side, for doing as a group what none of them would dare on his own. When four couldn’t do it, it took fifty.

  She could nurture all the contempt she wanted, but she knew it could not change what had happened. Nate Champion was worth any number of these shameless cowards, yet they went on living, many of them in prosperity. That was all she had, knowing that he was a better man—that, and a little baby named Chance, and the determination that some day when her life was her own, she would go one more time to Blue Horse Mesa.

  The Ones He Never Mentioned

  Jeff Mariotte

  Of all the wretched, low-down, no-account holes in which Wes Hardin had taken refuge over the years, this one counted among the lowest. He couldn’t even be positive that he remained within the borders of his beloved Texas, since out in these dry desert wastelands no signs or markers existed to tell him so. The cabin in which he passed his days and nights was nothing more than a line shack for a cattle company, but years of drought had sapped all life from the brush-choked fields, leaving them yellow and brittle, of no use to cows or any other beast on God’s earth with a brain larger than a walnut.

  Except John Wesley Hardin, who—not for the first time, and likely not the last—found the need to locate himself someplace where no other human would have reason to be. The law claimed that a man could kill in self-defense, but just try it, he had learned, and see what happens. Since his teens he had been chased around the country by lawmen and others rabid to dispense their idea of justice. A week ago it had happened again—a man in Brackettv
ille had drawn down on him in a saloon and Wes had been left with no choice but to put a window in the fellow’s skull.

  Fortunately, he had not been in Brackettville long enough to put down roots—nor, having seen the place, did he intend to. But at least the town had a hotel with private rooms, clean beds, and soft grub. No similar claims could be made of the line shack, which he shared with what seemed to be half of the insects in West Texas and a goodly portion of the rodents, reptiles, and smaller mammals. The shack smelled like their leavings, and like some of them had maybe teamed up to drag a dead buffalo in and bury him under the floor. The stove was busted, requiring him to do any cooking outside, where the other half of the insects waited for him. He had to climb a precarious cliff down to the nearest impersonation of a creek, and then when he had bathed or filled a pot or both, he had to climb back up again, clinging to the roots of trees that had long since given up and pitched themselves over the side.

  He would give it another week, and then he would move on. The sidewinder in Brackettville had not, he thought, been such an important fellow that a posse would waste more time than that looking for his killer. If need be, Wes would ride into the New Mexico Territory for a spell (unless he already had) and return to Texas when things had calmed down again.

  Thinking about that creek water, such as it was, caused Wes to shove himself out of his bedroll. The shack’s floor was hard-packed earth and although Wes had not yet reached his twentieth year, sleeping on it night after night caused his back to ache like an old man’s. Add to that the pressure on his bladder from waking up thinking about the long climb down to the creek, and he was a miserable wreck from the moment he gained his feet.

  Standing outside the shack urinating onto the dried-out husk of a weed, he saw three riders coming toward him from out of the west. The one in front, atop a piebald mare, looked like a grown man, with two smaller men or maybe boys riding behind, one on a chestnut horse and the other on a gray mule. They might have been with the outfit that owned the shack, for all he could tell. If so, they might not appreciate his borrowing it. On the other hand, they might not care at all. They didn’t look like a posse, that was the main thing, and they weren’t coming from Brackettville way.

  With his mind settled on that, he finished what he was doing, but decided to postpone his climb down to the creek until he had established for sure if the three were headed toward him or not. Instead, he went back into the cabin, tugged on a pair of trousers and a shirt, settled his hat on his head, and grabbed his .44-caliber lever-action Henry rifle. Well, one that had been his since he’d found it in a ranch house, the second day out of Brackettville. The weapon’s owner had objected to its loss, but Wes needed a long gun and he’d had to leave Brackettville without one. Carrying it outside, he lowered himself to the dry, scratchy ground, rested the barrel on a flat chunk of rock, and sighted down its length toward the riders.

  Wes set down his pen and picked up a glass of whiskey from a bottle that Hattie Morose had brought him. Its smoky, slightly woody aroma reminded him of a lifetime of saloons. He took a sip, felt the liquid burn the back of his throat, followed that with a longer swallow. A gas lamp glowed on the table beside his stack of papers. While Hattie plied her trade on the mattresses of El Paso, Wes had been working on his autobiography. His life’s path had taken him from outlaw to convict to gentleman, a lawyer and a scholar, and he believed the world should know his version of the events that had shaped that path. He was, in many circles, somewhat of a celebrity. He had been accused of killing forty men over the last forty-two years. The book he wrote now would set the record straight on that—as straight as he wanted it set, at any rate. He had already decided he would own up to the forty, even though some of the killings that had attached themselves to his legend were ones he had not done. In some cases, the victims themselves had never existed.

  For the sake of the book, though, he would invent details about those non-people. Still, that left about a half-dozen deaths he did not want to write about, at least unless he could change the circumstances he set down enough to make them unrecognizable. Some people bore long grudges, and Wes feared his gun hands weren’t as fast as they had been when they got more regular use.

  Although he had hung out his law shingle in El Paso, he spent most of his days wallowing in a stew of mescal and memory. Reliving his past had been a strange journey full of unexpected detours and surprising discoveries; patterns cropped up in places he would never have looked for them, like the delicate filigree of a leaf’s veins after it has browned and fallen from the tree. The mental exercise kept him from working on the law (although, he allowed, the liquor might have had something to do with that), but in the long run he figured his fame would allow his book to sell well enough to earn him some money.

  To finish the book, though, he would have to decide which incidents could be included and which left beneath history’s faded rug. He took another sip, wiped whiskey from his mustache with two slender fingers, and determined to think this one over some more.

  As the riders drew closer, Wes became more and more convinced that he had seen the man before. The fellow had a black beard that seemed to grow up out of his shirt like a murderous hand clutching his throat and chin. Dark eyes burned from beneath the brim of his dome-crowned hat with a righteous fire that Wes could make out even from a distance. His mouth was set into a scowl so practiced that Wes doubted a smile had ever crossed his face unchallenged. I’ve seen that ugly face before, Wes thought as he watched the man approach. He couldn’t cipher out where it had been, but he knew the man.

  Not so the two boys, though, for boys he saw they were. Judging by their faces—soft, rounded miniatures of the older man’s—they had to be his sons. Even their clothes and hats were the same, as if their Maker had only the one mold but could cast people in different sizes.

  The man held up his right hand and the two boys reined in their mounts. Alone, the man continued, inside Wes’s range but not by far. He wore a hogleg on his hip and had a rifle shoved into a scabbard, but he held on to the reins with both hands. “You’ve had that rifle pointed our way a good long while,” he called. “You plannin’ to use it or should we keep comin’?”

  “What’s your business?” Wes asked.

  “No business here,” the man replied. “Passin’ through is all. Been travelin’ by moonlight so as to dodge the heat of the day, saw the shack and reckoned we’d bunk in there till sunset. If you ain’t got the room or the inclination, why then, we’d as soon keep ridin’.”

  “Ain’t my place,” Wes said. The man’s accent sounded local. “Y’all are Texans?”

  “And proud of it,” the man said. “John Junior and Anna there are born and bred, and I come here from Arkansas as a sprout.”

  That was all it took to remind Wes of where he had known the man. One phrase, and the way he said it. I come here from Arkansas as a sprout. It’d been years since he’d heard that, years and bodies gone past like river water in spring when the winter’s snows melt and tear away at the banks.

  “I come here from Arkansas as a sprout.” The man held both his hands in the air, the left one trembling a little. His dark eyes betrayed no fear, though, and Wes felt as if he would wither before their glare like his mama’s lilies in high summer. “I’m Texan through and through now. Listen to my voice, boy, then tell me you think I’m a Yankee.”

  Wes gripped the old cap-and-ball Colt with two hands, willing them not to shake although his heart hammered faster than a hummingbird’s wings, and kept it pointed at the man’s chest. The man had come up out of nowhere at the worst possible moment, and Wes’s mind raced as he tried to lay out all the angles, the possibilities of what could happen.

  Wes’s father was a Methodist preacher who had named his son after John Wesley, the founder of his faith. Wes’s family roots ran deep in Texas—one of his relatives even had a county named after him. Young Wes had always thought that his background and family placed a burden on his shoulders that they
were ill prepared to bear. People thought he should be somebody someday, and didn’t hesitate to tell him so. He tried to smile and nod when they did as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Inside, he seethed. Lately, it seemed the seething went on all the time, day and night, like he had swallowed a pot of boiling water and a cookstove and would boil over any moment.

  He didn’t know if he would be somebody or not. He knew only three things about himself for sure. He wanted people to tell him the truth, no matter what the truth might be (but his father instead recounted patently impossible stories from the Bible as if they were things that had happened to his kin just last week, which Wes found enraging). He wanted people to let him become whoever he would (but instead they tried to groom him to be who they wanted to see him become, whether it was a man of the cloth or a judge or a businessman). And while that pot of water in his gut simmered, the only way to keep it from exploding was to let little bits of rage out now and again, however he could. He knew it would blow one day anyway, and he would leave Bonham behind, never to return.

  The only question remaining was whether he would leave a trail of blood and fire in his wake when he did, or not.

  This particular day, things had come to a head early. His father had been on a tear, lecturing him virtually from the moment his feet hit the floor about what he called Wes’s “slovenly and unchristian behavior” for remaining in bed past the rising of the sun. He punctuated his diatribe with blows; his fist struck Wes’s temple, and with a spray of white lights like sparks from a farrier’s anvil, Wes sprawled to the dirt outside their house. Like a dark angel, his father turned away and stalked back inside, muttering words that might have been prayers, curses, or both.