One Bright Morning (51 page)

Since Maggie had been telling Mulrooney what
she thought of him for several minutes now, her words might have
been considered silly if anybody had been of a mind to pay
attention to the context of her assault.

But the hollow rattle of the train as it
crossed the bridge and the loud crackling of the iron railing as it
gave way combined to distract everybody who stood on the deck.

Pelch reached out a hand to grab Maggie’s
arm before she could follow Mulrooney through the gap that opened
up as the bolts fastening the metal railing to the carriage wall
gave way. Mulrooney’s roar of alarm and his sudden, wide-eyed look
of horrified surprise stopped Maggie’s tirade in mid-holler. Her
mouth was opened to spew more bile onto Prometheus Mulrooney, but
he suddenly wasn’t there anymore. She saw his fat hands reach
desperately at the broken railing and saw the jagged metal bend and
slice his palm open as his hands slithered off the bar. The metal
was too weak to hold the enormity of Mulrooney’s evil bulk.

After Pelch steadied her, Maggie found
herself alone all at once, as both Pelch and Ferrett dashed past
her to the new opening in the railing. They clutched each other
convulsively as they leaned carefully over to peer into the gorge.
She heard a terrified bellow that seemed to get weaker and weaker
as Mulrooney neared the rocky bottom of the valley.

“
Will you look at him flail
about, Mr. Pelch,” Ferrett murmured in an awed voice.

“
I’ve never seen the like,
Mr. Ferrett,” whispered Pelch.

There were several seconds where the only
sounds that Maggie heard were the rumble of the train and the
frantic wail that drifted up from the gigantic hole in the earth.
Then that far-away wail stopped abruptly, and she noticed both
Ferrett and Pelch flinch.

“
My goodness gracious,”
breathed Ferrett.

Pelch shook his head. “Burst like a melon,”
he murmured.

Maggie clutched Annie closely. “Oh, my God,”
she breathed.

“
Where dat bad fat man go,
mama?” came the puzzled voice of her little girl.

Maggie swallowed hard. “To the devil, I
guess, baby,” she whispered.

“
And did you notice where it
broke, Mr. Pelch? It wasn’t even where we sawed.”

Ferrett’s voice held vast astonishment as he
fingered the ragged iron and eyed it closely. The bolts had ripped
away from the wall of the carriage, apparently unable to bear the
gigantic weight pressed against the railing.

Pelch nodded in bemusement. “Perhaps we
could have just loosened the bolts, Mr. Ferrett.”

Ferrett looked at Pelch blankly. “I guess it
doesn’t matter now, Mr. Pelch.”

“
I guess not, Mr.
Ferrett.”

Maggie backed up and squeezed Annie when the
two men suddenly grinned wildly and grabbed each other. She was
sure they had lost their minds when they began dancing up and down
Mulrooney’s elaborate carriage to shrill cries of, “We’re free!
We’re free!”

Chapter Twenty-One

Jubal’s heart just about broke when he and
Dan found the spot where the abduction had taken place. The tracks
were plain to read, as was the sickening, black stain on the desert
made by Four Toes Smith’s dried blood. His hat, the greasy,
floppy-brimmed hat he always wore, lay brim up next to the patch of
gore.

“
Oh, God, Danny,” Jubal
breathed. He leapt off of Old Red’s back and tore over to the hat,
hoping against reason that he would find Four Toes somewhere,
anywhere, still alive.

“
Leave it be, Jubal,” Dan
told him when Jubal made as if to begin to search for Four
Toes.

Jubal turned haunted eyes toward his friend.
“We can’t just leave him out here, Danny. He’s our brother.”

Dan’s face was grim. “We’ll come back to
look for him, Jubal. I ain’t going to leave him here forever
without lookin’. But you know as well as me that if he lost that
much blood, it’s too late.”

Jubal couldn’t speak.

“
You know what probably
happened, Jubal.” Dan’s voice was thick.

“
Yeah. I know.” But he
couldn’t say it out loud. A cougar or a coyote dragged the body off
and ate it. That’s what happened out here. He knew it. Dan knew
it.

Jubal whispered as he walked back to Old
Red, “We’ll be back for you.” He hooked Four Toes’ hat over the
horn of his saddle.

Then he spotted Maggie’s eyeglasses. They
were unbroken and lay as they had fallen, two bright ovals of clear
glass, shimmering in the heat. He picked them up and stared at
them.

Dan didn’t say a word. His lips were pinched
tightly together, and his face was set into grim lines.

Jubal folded the glasses up carefully and
put them in his shirt pocket.

When he swung his leg over Old Red’s back,
he felt as though his soul had died. He couldn’t see anything for a
few seconds; the world had gone all blurry on him. He passed his
gloved hand over his face and didn’t realize the moisture the soft
leather picked up from his cheek was from his own tears. He nudged
at Old Red’s side and the horse began to trot again, following the
trail left by the ranch wagon.

Dan’s sad eyes scrutinized Jubal narrowly.
“Maggie’s probably still all right, Jubal.”

“
Yeah.”

The two men rode on in silence for another
few minutes.

“
He knew it was his time,
Jubal. He told me. He’d been feelin’ it.”

Jubal couldn’t look at his friend. His hurt
was almost too big for him to speak of. “Well he didn’t tell me.”
His voice cracked, and his throat was paining him from him trying
not to bawl like a baby.

Dan gave him a bitter grin. “You been busy
with your wife, Jubal. Besides, you ain’t Indian.”

“
Hell,” was all Jubal said
to that.

They were surprised when, an hour or so
later, they came upon the special train Prometheus Mulrooney had
hired, stopped dead on the railroad tracks, half-way to Amarillo.
They were even more surprised when no gunfire erupted as they
boldly stormed up to the engine.

When they climbed aboard and discovered the
engine abandoned by the engineer and heard the sounds of a party
coming from a back carriage, they were flabbergasted. They eyed
each other uneasily.

“
I don’t like this, Danny,”
said Jubal. “What the hell’s going on?”

Dan shook his head. “Beats me.”

They had their guns drawn as they crept
stealthily from the engine to the next car, which had also been
abandoned. That car was apparently the kitchen. Another empty
carriage was obviously where Mulrooney’s hired help slept. It was
from the fourth carriage that all the noise was coming. They heard
whoops of laughter and even jolly, out-of-tune, masculine singing.
They stared at each other in bemused wariness.

Jubal carefully opened the door of the
carriage. Dan was right behind him. Both men’s guns were cocked and
ready for use, and Dan made sure his knife was within easy reach.
They stood just inside the open door and stared in astonishment at
the scene in front of them.

Ferrett and Pelch were still dancing.
Mulrooney’s other hired help, among whom were the train’s engineer
and his mechanic, were toasting each other with opened bottles of
champagne. The bubbly wine had foamed over the bottles’ mouths and
was sloshing over the floor, walls, and furniture. Maggie and Annie
sat upon a cushioned bench in a corner. Maggie appeared to be a
little ragged around the edges. She wasn’t smiling, and her eyes
seemed empty. Annie was laughing and clapping her hands at the
antics of the men in front of her. She saw Jubal and Dan first.

“
Look, Mama, it Juba,” she
cried.

Maggie’s looked up numbly. She still felt
vaguely unsettled about her part in Mulrooney’s demise, although
she was glad he was dead. But her heart ached so painfully about
Four Toes that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.

When she realized it was her husband
standing at the door, she leapt to her feet with Annie in her arms.
She didn’t even notice people scatter out of her way when she ran
into his embrace.

“
Jubal! Jubal!” Maggie
wasn’t numb any longer. She felt as though someone had gashed a rip
in her heart and she was crying now, full-bore. “Jubal, they killed
Four Toes! They murdered him! Then Mulrooney fell out of the train
and into a gorge and he’s dead, and I did it,
and—and—oohhh!”

Jubal barely had time to holster his gun
before Maggie and Annie hit him in the stomach. He staggered back
with a grunt and wrapped his arms around them. He tried to say
something, but his throat was too tight.

“
Mulrooney’s dead?” Dan’s
incredulous words didn’t penetrate anybody for a second.

Ferrett and Pelch and the engineer and
mechanic had all stopped dancing and singing. They were standing
still now, and stupid grins looked as though they had been painted
on their faces. It was Ferrett who spoke first.

“
He’s dead,” Ferrett
confirmed in a high-pitched, silly, squeak of a voice.

Pelch nodded.

Then Ferrett picked up a pile of papers and
threw them into the air. “He’d dead! He’s dead! He’s dead!” he
shrieked, as though he were ringing in a new year or out the end of
a war.

Jubal had buried his face in Maggie’s hair,
but he lifted it when he realized what Ferrett had said.

Maggie took a huge sniff and drew her wet
face away from Jubal’s shirt.

Annie smiled up at Jubal and held out her
gourd dolly.

“
They killed Four Toes,
Jubal,” Maggie whispered, and she had to swallow hard.

“
I know, baby. We found the
place.” Jubal brushed his lips across her hair again.

“
How did Mulrooney die?” Dan
hadn’t been able to follow Maggie’s ragged explanation before she
collapsed into Jubal’s arms, and Mulrooney’s hired help didn’t seem
to be of much help right now.

“
Mama yell at dat bad fat
man and he fall down,” little Annie told them all.

“
Your mama made him fall
down?” Dan pinned Maggie with a bright black gaze.

Annie nodded seriously. “He bad fat man,”
she said firmly.

Jubal gave both of his women another
squeeze. “He was a real bad fat man, parsnip,” he said to Annie in
a ragged whisper.

“
But he gone to da devil
now,” Annie told him solemnly, as though she figured that
circumstance might make him feel better.

# # #

Jubal and Dan ultimately restored order to
the little train. The two friends supervised Ferrett and Pelch’s
clean-up of Mulrooney’s papers. Both men from Green Valley wanted
to read them to make sure Mulrooney hadn’t planned any further
treachery that might sneak up on them later.

Then Jubal made Maggie sit down and tell him
exactly what happened from the time Sloane and Potts kidnapped her
and killed Four Toes Smith, to Mulrooney’s demise through the
broken railing of the train platform. At the mention of Sloane and
Potts, Jubal shot a quick glance at Dan, Dan nodded, and Maggie
knew that Four Toes would be avenged. She wasn’t sure whether she
was glad or not. There had already been so much bloodshed.

She didn’t have too much time to think about
it, though, because just then Jubal remembered he had her
spectacles in his pocket.

“
Here, sweetheart, you
probably miss these.” He tried to wipe the lenses off on his
flannel shirt.

“
Oh, Jubal,” Maggie
whispered. “I thought they were broken.” And she burst into tears
once more.

Jubal looked at Dan with resignation while
he held and comforted his wife yet again. Dan just chuckled at them
and shook his head.

Ferrett and Pelch managed to find some food
for everybody, and then Jubal made Maggie lie down and rest. Annie
was already napping.

“
We’ll see that the train is
tidied up, sir,” said Pelch, who had already transferred his
subservience to Jubal.

“
Indeed we will, sir,” added
Ferrett. “And we’ll be absolutely certain that nobody makes a loud
noise and wakes the lady.” He spoke of Maggie with
reverence.

Jubal nodded at the two men. Then he took
Maggie’s glasses off of her nose, laid them carefully on the table
beside her sleeping head, and kissed her.

“
Come on, Danny.”

The two brothers, one white, one Mescalero,
mounted up and nudged their horses alongside the rails,
backtracking. They rode silently through the still desert; neither
one of them felt like talking. No wind stirred the air. The June
sunshine gleamed against mica-crusted rocks, and lizards scurried
out of the way of their horses’ hooves. They walked their mounts
slowly until they reached the bridge over the gully. Then they
dismounted, tied up their horses, and began to walk across the
trestle.

About halfway over the span, Jubal stopped
and gestured to his friend. They both leaned over and squinted down
into the deep gorge. The sides of the gorge were steep and slick
and glinted in the sun. Jagged rocks lined the bottom of the gully,
and a thin, silvery thread of water snaked between the huge
boulders. Although not a breath of air stirred above the huge hole
in the earth, they could hear the wind moaning like a malevolent
ghost through the deep valley beneath them.

“
Shoot, that’s a long way
down,” muttered Dan.

“
Can you see him,
Danny?”

“
I can see what’s left of
him. It ain’t much.”

“
Maggie said she could hear
him yelling for a long time. I wonder how long it took before he
hit those rocks.”