A Time For Hanging (11 page)

"I must tell it to both you and your husband," Consuela said.

Mrs. Randall absently opened the door and stepped aside.
 
Consuela went past her and into the house.

"My husband is praying," Mrs. Randall said.
 
"I don't think he wants to be anybody to bother him."
 
She preceded Consuela into the living room, her bulk obstructing the other woman's view.

When they got into the other room, Martha Randall stood aside and Consuela could see that the Reverend was indeed deep in prayer.
 
He was kneeling in front of the couch, his elbows resting on one of the cushions, his hands clasped and his head bowed.
 
His eyes were tightly closed.
 
His Bible was resting beside his right elbow.
 
He seemed to be entirely motionless, like a statue clothed in black, but now and then there was a tic in his cheek that revealed that he was a living person.

Mrs. Randall said nothing.
 
She simply stood there and stared at her husband's back.

Consuela wondered what to do.
 
She did not want to intrude on the man's grief and his prayer, but she had to say what she had come to say.
 
She had to let these people know that their daughter was pregnant with someone's child and that while Paco would have had no reason to want her dead, there might have been someone else who did.

She waited for several minutes before speaking.
 
There was no sound in the room except for the buzzing of a fly that seemed to be trapped behind one of the curtains.

The air in the room was close and stifling.
 
There were no open windows, and Consuela found it hard to breathe.

When she had waited as long as she could, she spoke.
 
"Senor Randall.
 
I have come to speak to you about my son, Paco Morales."

She might have been a mute for all the impression she made on Randall.
 
He appeared to have heard nothing.
 
Even his cheek stopped twitching.

"Senor Randall," she said again.

"He can't hear you," Mrs. Randall said.
 
"When he's with the Lord like that, he can't hear a thing."
 
Her voice was bitter.
 
"If he'd could've heard some of the things I tried to tell him years ago, we might still have our daughter."

"It is your daughter I have come about," Consuela said.

Mrs. Randall looked at her then, as if realizing for the first time that there was really someone there.

"What about my daughter?" she said.

"They say my son -- my Paco -- that he killed her."

Mrs. Randall's face turned red, and Consuela felt a jolt of fear.
 
Mrs. Randall was a formidable woman.

"Then what are you doing in my house?" Mrs. Randall demanded, clenching her hands into fists.
 
"How dare you to come into my house and speak to me?"
 
Her voice rose.

"Because Paco did not kill your daughter, Senora.
 
My son would never do such a thing.
 
It was done by someone with an evil reason, and my son had no such reason."

Some of the color drained from Mrs. Randall's face.
 
"What reason?" she said.
 
"What do you mean?"

Consuela had wanted both Mrs. Randall and her husband to hear what she had to say, but the preacher had not looked up even at the loud tones the woman had used.
 
Consuela decided that she would tell the woman.

By the time she had finished talking, Mrs. Randall was looking as much like a statue as her husband.
 
She seemed to be hardly breathing, and she swayed on her feet like some gigantic boulder that might be about to tip over and start an avalanche.

"Senora Randall?" Consuela said.
 
She was afraid that the woman might faint.

"Get out of here," Mrs. Randall said in a harsh whisper.
 
"Get out of here and never come back."
 
She looked anxiously at her husband.

"But Senora," Consuela said.
 
"I must tell your husband what I know.
 
He must understand . . . . "

"He won't understand.
 
He'll never understand.
 
Just you get out of here.
 
Get out before it's too late."
 
Mrs. Randall asserted her body between her husband and Consuela and began to force Consuela backward, out of the room.

"But my son.
 
Paco.
 
They will kill him," Consuela said.

"That's better than havin' my husband kill you," Mrs. Randall said, pushing at Consuela with her doughy hands.
 
"Go on now.
 
Get out of here."

Consuela got out.

#

When the back door slammed, the Reverend Randall opened his eyes, looked up and took his Bible into his hand.
 
Then he got slowly to his feet.
 
His knees popped as he straightened to his full height.

He was watching the doorway as his wife came back into the room.
 
As she entered, he opened his Bible and began to read in a resonant voice:

"'And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and

Roger Benteen rode into town with ten men, stirring the dust on the dry street.
 
It wasn't that he thought he needed them for anything.
 
He could handle his daughter by himself.
 
But he was used to having his men with him wherever he went.
 
He didn't like to ride out alone, and he hadn't done it in years.
 
It was as if having the riders along gave him a kind of authority that he might have lacked without them.
 
The riders impressed people in a way that Benteen himself might not have been able to.

If they knew him, as everyone in Dry Springs assuredly did, they were impressed anyway, but he took always the riders.
 
He may have felt he needed them because of his stature, which was decidedly unimpressive.
 
He was no more than five feet tall, and that was with his high-heeled boots on.
 
Too, his face never frightened anyone or gave them cause to look on him with favor.
 
Though he was nearly seventy years old, he still looked in some ways like a boy, with wide, curious eyes and a sensual, full-lipped mouth.
 
Those features, passed on to his daughter, merely added to her beauty and allure.
 
On her father, they presented an oddly feminine aspect that belied his true nature.

For Roger Benteen was as ruthless as a starving timber wolf and as cold as a sidewinder.
 
He could look at a man with those wide eyes and a smile on those full lips while at the same time plotting that man's downfall and ruin.
 
He had not accumulated his fortune and his holdings by being as soft as he looked.

He had no plans to be soft with his daughter, either.
 
She had never defied him before, and maybe she thought she could get away with it for that very reason.
 
Maybe she thought that everyone deserved one defiant act.

Well, she was wrong.
 
Roger Benteen was not going to tolerate even that much.

It was not that he was so fond of Charley Davis.
 
True, Davis had shown he was a hard worker, and he appeared to be honest and at least moderately intelligent, but Benteen had once hoped for more for his only daughter.
 
He did not like settling for second best, but when you lived on the edge of West Texas you had to take what you could get.
 
It was a hard fact, and Benteen had grudgingly come to accept it.

So what he was left with was Charley.
 
There were other cowhands, but Charley was the one who had showed the most drive and initiative when given the chance.
 
Most of the breed moved around a lot, traveling from job to job, from ranch to ranch, never settling down on one for more than a few years at most.

Charley, however, had stuck it out with Benteen for four years now and showed no desire to move on.
 
He had taken each new responsibility that Benteen offered him and made the most of it, and he had shown a quick grasp of every new task.

When Lucille began to notice the cowboy, Benteen could have stepped in.
 
He chose not to because by then he knew that she wasn't going to do any better.
 
Charley would never be the man that Benteen was, but maybe that didn't matter.
 
He would be able to managed the ranch, with Lucille's guidance, of course, after Benteen was gone, and maybe that was good enough.
 
He would never increase the holdings, but the odds were he would be able to hang on to what he had.

And now Lucille was threatening even that plan.

He couldn't figure what had come over the girl.
 
One day she was making plans for her wedding, looking through magazines from back East at pictures of dresses, talking about what it would be like to have a house of her own.
 
The next day she was running off and leaving her father a note saying that she was not going to marry Charley Davis, that she was moving into the Dry Springs Hotel, and that she was thinking about traveling to the East to see the world.

Benteen did not understand women; he understood men and cattle, or at least he liked to think that he did.
 
His wife had died giving birth to Lucille, and he had never courted another.
 
He had plenty of things to keep him busy, and he always discounted the stories of those men who said they could not go for more than a week without a woman.
 
He figured they were either liars, or stupid.
 
He had gone for years, and it had never bothered him in the least, or never for more than a few minutes at a time.

Some of the boys had told him long before now that Charley had been seeing the preacher's daughter, that red-haired girl that Benteen had seen in town from time to time.
 
He supposed she was pretty enough, though certainly not as pretty as Lucille.
 
He could understand why Charley might like her.

That was all supposed to be over now, however.
 
Charley had assured him that it was, and Benteen had never mentioned it to Lucille.

Maybe she had found out.
 
If that was it, her behavior was probably normal for a woman, at least as far as Benteen knew.
 
Anyway, it was something they could easily straighten out.
 
Lucille would be home by that afternoon.

He and his men pulled up in a dust cloud in front of the hotel.
 
He slid off his horse with an ease that belied his years and flipped a gold piece to one of the men.

"You fellas go on over to the saloon, have a drink on me," he said.
 
"I'll give you a holler when it's time to go back to the ranch."