Outlaw Train (8 page)

That night, Luke Cable’s sleep was restless, filled with distressing dreams.

In the worst of the nightmares, he was riding through a rainy dusk across Kansas flatlands, weary and eager for food and rest. He saw and approached a small, lonely house with a sign advertising meals. He rode toward it, though some voice in his dream consciousness warned him to ride on. He did not heed the voice.

He then saw himself seated at a table, his luggage beneath the table and between his feet. He was the only diner in the restaurant, if such the simple room with a bit of rough furniture could be properly called. He was seated with his face toward the front of the house, his back nearly against a filthy and oddly stained curtain that hung from ceiling to floor.

A plate of food was set before him and he began to eat. From behind the curtain came shuffling, whispering sounds, and the clump of a footstep. In the dream, Luke began to turn and look behind him. The curtain bulged toward him and something heavy and tremendously hard struck him brutally atop the head, sending him pitching to the
floor, blood and brains spilling. In the dream, Luke saw himself dead on the floor. He watched wretchedly as his corpse drained, quivered, and settled, then looked up to see Katrina Haus standing in the corner of the room, smiling as she watched his death.

“Might you have a dead loved one you wish to speak with, Marshal?” she asked in her bell-like Germanic voice.

With that, the dream vanished and Luke Cable of the real world awakened and stared breathlessly at the ceiling above his bed, welcoming the realization that what had just happened was nothing but nocturnal imagination. Even so, he reflexively reached up to gingerly touch the top of his skull, half expecting to find it cracked open like a dropped egg. It was whole, uninjured. His respiratory paralysis passed and he sucked in air as if he’d just run a mile.

The rest of the night passed with little sleep. Each time Luke dozed off he found himself back in that Kansas prairie inn, hearing the noises behind the stained curtain and knowing what was going to come next. So he mostly lay awake, shunning dreams. He mentally listed the oddities of recent days to keep his mind occupied and awake.

He’d never encountered such a flurry of strangeness: a mysterious severed leg beside a railroad track—not only severed, but impossibly mummified; an unusually beautiful young woman coming to town and promising to communicate with the dead relatives of locals, while meanwhile practicing the old and dishonorable profession of prostitution;
an injured old man living in the attic of the emporium, hiding from the world the shame of his impairments; a traveling town marshal who had gone off to Kentucky and then seemingly vanished from the earth…

“Well,” Luke said aloud to the night, “with things this strange, at least it’s not likely to get any stranger any time soon.”

He stared across his bedroom and hoped it was true.

Around dawn, he was very nearly asleep again, but his rest was broken prematurely by the persistent hammering of a fist against his front door. Luke rolled over, swearing softly, then got out of bed and pulled on his trousers.

Dewitt Stamps was at the door, apologetic for having disturbed his boss at such an early hour.

“Luke, there’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “It’s Ben Keely. I think he might be back in Wiles.”

“Come on in, Dewitt,” Luke said, suddenly alert. “I’ll make us some coffee.”

Dewitt concentrated on his coffee with the same intensity he once reserved for alcohol. After two cups and meaningless chatter about everything from the death of a local dairy cow to the need for a good window washing at the jail, Luke put Dewitt onto track.

“Why do you believe Ben is back?”

“I seen him.”

“What? Where?”

“Just outside of town. Near the jail, yesterday
about half past four in the afternoon. I went to go to the privy and seen him through that gap in the trees. Riding, he was.”

“What did he have to say for himself?”

“Never got to talk to him, Luke. He was riding t’other direction and I don’t know he ever seen that I’d seen him.”

“You didn’t holler at him?”

“I was going to after I got done in the outhouse, but he was gone by then. I know I should have hollered at him quick as I seen him, but the outhouse couldn’t wait, you know what I mean. Besides, I was surprised to see him, and I figured I’d best wait until I could see him better to be sure.”

“You saw his face?”

“Uh…no. But it was Ben’s horse, I’m right sure.”

“Right sure. But not full sure.”

“Well…no.”

“Ben’s horse has nothing about it that would make it easy to recognize from any distance. From fifty feet away it looks like a hundred other horses you see in this town.”

“I know.” Dewitt stood and paced. “But the way this fellow sat his saddle, the way he wore his hat, everything about him, it just made me think it was Ben.”

“Let me think through this, Dewitt. Ben left for Kentucky by train. He took his horse with him on the stable car so he’d have it to ride when he was in Kentucky. So assuming that really was Ben you saw, that means he came back, got his horse off the train’s stable car, and saddled it up. He wouldn’t do that just to ride to the jail from the train station,
Dewitt. Too close. He’d just put his horse in the livery and walk over here.”

“Well, I figured he was going home and would come around into town later.”

“Tell you what, Dewitt, let’s check. You and me, we’ll ride out to Ben’s place and see if he’s there.”

Luke enjoyed the ride, largely owing to amusement at getting to watch Dewitt’s locally famous means of transportation: a large, aged mule that, for reasons known only to Dewitt, was named Eric the Mighty. The beast was slightly arthritic, limped, and was prone to make loud, threatening brays at all who came too near—all but Dewitt, anyway. The animal seemed to hold Dewitt in great affection. Everyone in Wiles County knew Dewitt and his mule.

Eric was doing well today, stepping gamely along with Dewitt firmly rooted on his back. “I don’t believe Eric is limping as much as he used to,” Luke said.

“Yeah, he’s better,” Dewitt replied.

“You’ve been praying for him, right?”

“I have. But I didn’t want to say that because I didn’t want you laughing. Ought not laugh at praying.”

“I wouldn’t laugh,” Luke said. “I think your prayers might have helped that old mule. Something surely has.”

“Lord loves mules, too,” Dewitt said.

“I’ll take your word for it, Dewitt.”

They rode westward, to where the Kansas flatlands gave way to a more broken and hilly region. It was in this terrain, in a small, lonely farmhouse,
that Ben Keely lived his bachelor existence while serving as Wiles town marshal.

“We just going to ride down to the house?” Dewitt asked.

“Let’s get up on that little woody ridge south of Ben’s place and have a look from there. We can probably tell from there if somebody’s been about the place.”

“You don’t believe me when I say I seen him, do you!”

“I figure you saw somebody, but I still can’t believe Ben would have come back and not looked me up right away.”

“All I can tell you, Luke, is that it sure looked like Ben. Mostly the way he carried himself, sat the saddle, and wore his hat kind of turned down toward the front. You know what I mean.”

“That does sound like Ben.”

“It
was
him, I tell you!”

With horse and mule tied off to trees, the two men slipped through the grove at the top of the sloping ridge until Ben Keely’s small farmhouse came into view. They watched it silently for several minutes, but there was no evidence of movement or life. At length, though, something moved in the breezeway of the barn that sat near the house. A small-framed figure emerged, and Luke squinted and looked closely.

It wasn’t Ben. It was Jakey Wills, a boy who lived with his family on a ranch that adjoined Ben’s small piece of property and who also happened to be the little brother of Jimmy Wills, desk clerk at the Gable House Hotel. Jakey had been recruited by Ben to
feed, while Ben was away, the three stray cats that Ben allowed to live under his porch. That Jakey was still doing so lent support to the notion that Ben was not in fact back in Kansas. Luke said as much to Dewitt.

“I seen what I seen,” Dewitt replied stubbornly.

“Let’s go down and ask Jakey if he knows anything.”

Jakey, distracted by his efforts to lure a recalcitrant feline from beneath the porch for a pan of milk-soaked bread, did not see the two lawmen riding down toward the house. When he realized they were there, he bumped his head soundly while trying to get out from beneath the porch. The cat he’d been trying to lure followed him but ignored its food and raced around the house to the barn.

“Ow! I felt that clean over here, Jakey!” Luke said as the boy rubbed his injured head. “You didn’t break skin, did you?”

“No…don’t think so.” Jakey examined his hand for blood and found none. “Howdy, Luke. Dewitt.”

“Didn’t mean to startle you, son,” said Luke. “Dewitt and me were just riding out this way and I wanted to check and see if you’d heard anything about Ben getting back.”

“He’s
back
?”

“Well, Dewitt believes he caught a glimpse of him the other day. But he was looking through some trees and never really saw his face. The horse looked to be Ben’s, or it least one just like his.”

“If he’s back, he ain’t come around here,” Jakey said. “I been coming every day and bringing scraps to these danged cats just like he wanted me to. But
I’m tired of it, and what he paid me before he left wasn’t enough to cover me still taking care of these cats for all this time.”

“You’re a good boy to do it, Jakey,” Dewitt said.

“Thank you, Dewitt. How’s Eric the Mighty doing?”

“Still pokey, but he’s making it. Ain’t limping so much as before.”

Luke said, “I kind of know how you’re feeling about Ben, Jakey. I’ve been left doing a job for longer than I expected, too. I was looking for Ben to come back weeks ago.”

“Yeah. Hey, Luke, is it true what my brother told me?”

“If it’s something Jimmy said, there’s no telling. What was it?”

“He says that Kate Bender is in Wiles, living in the hotel and pretending to be somebody else.”

Luke raised his brows. It was the first time that anyone had spoken aloud the name he and others had been talking around and thinking about for the last little while: Kate Bender. Hearing the name said out loud knocked him back to his nightmare of sitting in that prairie inn before a stained fabric curtain. He shuddered and hoped the other two did not notice it.

“Who’s Kate Bender?” Dewitt asked.

“You haven’t heard about the Bender family, Dewitt?” Luke asked.

“I think maybe I’ve heard the name. But I don’t remember nothing about them.”

“They was bad, bad people, Dewitt,” said Jakey. “Lived over in east Kansas, in Labette County. Old
man and his wife, plus a son and a daughter. Daughter’s name was Kate. Real pretty woman, by all accounts. They say she was the heart of the family and the one who led in the crimes they did.”

“Robbers?” Dewitt asked.

“Yep, and worse. Killers.”

“They get hung for it?”

“Nope. They got away, that’s what they done,” Jakey continued. He was growing into his story, speaking with increasing energy. “They was killing folks who came to a little inn they was running in a house out on the flatlands. Bashed folks in the head with a big hammer after they’d set them down to eat with a curtain behind them. The son of the family, he acted kind of half-witted, they say, but he’d be behind that curtain, and when Kate or one of the others would give him a signal, he’d bring that hammer around, right through the curtain, and smash in the brain of whoever was at the table. Kill them dead. They’d drop them down through a place in the floor into a pit, and finally they’d clean out their pockets and such, and bury them outside somewhere.”

“Jakey is telling it correctly, based on what I’ve heard,” Luke said. “A lot of the details of how they did it didn’t come out until after the neighbors of the Benders got suspicious. But the Benders saw what was coming and managed to get away. A search of their place, and some digging, uncovered corpses and such.”

Jakey cut in and took over the story again. “All kinds of folks started looking for the Benders then. The law, hired detectives, and just regular folks.
Whole posses of men. But nobody’s caught them yet, not that anybody’s proved, anyway.”

“That’s right,” Luke said. “It’s surprising. They must have divided up to avoid drawing attention. But you’d still think that, with so many folks hunting them, they’d have been found by now. Or at least some of them.”

Jakey chortled. “Well, I’ve seen the woman who my brother says is Kate Bender. Saw her on the street in town. It looks to me like she can get a lot of attention all by herself.”

“She’s a beauty,” Luke said.

“What did she say when you asked her if she was Kate Bender?” Jakey asked.

The question embarrassed Luke because he’d been struggling with a feeling of neglected responsibility regarding that matter. “I haven’t asked her yet,” he admitted. “You got to be careful about how you go about such things. There’s such a hate for the Benders in this state that you don’t want to make people start thinking that some particular person is one of them, not if you don’t know for sure. As a peace officer I have to be careful what I say. There’s been false accusations regarding the Benders made in other places, innocent folks accused because they look like them, have the same kind of German accent, that kind of thing.”

Jakey said, “People are believing this woman is a Bender all on their own, Luke, whether you say it or not. Hell, I believe she’s one of them!”

Luke sighed, closed his eyes, and shook his head. “I’m going to have to talk to her about it, whether I want to or not. I guess I’d hoped she’d just disappear,
go somewhere else. Or that Ben would come back all at once and she’d be his problem, not mine.”

“Luke, whether she’s Kate Bender or not, she’s still breaking the law,” Jakey said. “My brother says men are coming into the hotel and visiting her room in the middle of the night. I’m guessing she ain’t up there telling them stories about Baby Jesus.”