Savage Texas: The Stampeders (15 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX

As town dances in Hangtree went, this one would go down in history. The music was better-practiced than usual, Fiddling Claude Farley had a particularly good night, and his original composition for the occasion, “The Brave Maiden Waltz,” received applause and hoots and five demands for encore. Claude good-naturedly obliged them all.

Torchlight lit the area outside the horse barn, giving a beautiful golden glow across the dancing people and lighting the rising smoke from the pits where pigs roasted. The delicious smell wafted across the entire area, reaching even to the unseen horsemen who sat in a line in the darkness, pondering whether to send one or two of their number in to gather up a couple of bucketfuls of barbecue, then deciding it was too much of a risk.

Drew Toleen spat tobacco amber onto the ground and said to the rider beside him, “After tomorrow morning, we’ll be able to buy all the meat in Texas.”

The sound of applause reached the mounted watchers.

“Hey, look at that . . . they’ve got Della Rose up on the platform, giving her some kind of award. What the hell!”

“She’s big and famous and brave now, don’t you know? And she ain’t Della Rose to those people there. Calls herself Julia Canton now. Uses the middle name of Pepperday.”

“Like Cale?”

“Cale’s sister was Della’s mother. So Pepperday was her maiden name.”

“I be damned! Learn something new all the time. Speaking of Cale, he still got that gal locked down good?”

“Locked up, actually . . . she’s locked inside an old woodshed left from when there was a settlement there.”

“I been thinking . . . why bother with stampeding the cattle? We got the daughter of one of the bankers . . . why not just have him open the vault up for us, get the money, and run our asses out of there?”

“Because you’d not be out of town before some lawman was on us and a posse was after us. Run a big herd of cattle through that town, knocking down a few buildings, trampling a few folks to death, and by the time they know the bank was robbed, we’ll be miles away, rich men.”

“Hope it all goes right.”

“It will. It will. Look there . . . Della Rose is dancing with that big hombre!”

And she was. She and Sam Heller waltzed masterfully to the tune of Claude’s new composition while the admiring population of Hangtree looked on. As in her dream, those minutes removed from her all other concerns, worries, even awarenesses. She looked into his face and he looked back at hers, unheeding of the bandage on her brow and the occasional unsteadiness of her feet.

Then the music stopped and the applause renewed. Julia looked around at her admirers and accepted their veneration, but back into her consciousness crept the realization that out in the darkness was a big herd of cattle that in the morning would violently rampage through this town. And in the bank, a young girl would be held at gunpoint until her father helped a criminal gang empty the vault of a bank he was pledged to protect.

The dancing, eating, and drinking went on long after the ceremonial honoring of the “Brave Maiden of Hangtree” was concluded. Though she left the dance ground and retired to one of the chairs circling it, there to enjoy a plate of roasted pig and, she hoped, some quiet conversation with her escort. But she and Heller received almost no opportunity to converse. A stream of well-wishers and congratulators moved past her, each person eager to have his or her moment with the celebrated woman of the hour. Despite a mind filled with worries and distractions, Julia maintained her cordiality throughout. It was not easy.

Nor was it easy to overhear bits of conversation around her: People asking one another where the Caldwell family was. Had they not attended? Bridgette Caldwell was known to be an excellent dancer, and the delightful young Angeline Caldwell showed promise of possessing equivalent skill. It was impossible to imagine what might have kept them from this event.

If only they knew
, Julia thought.
Dear God, if only they knew.

 

 

Not a moment of sleep had touched the mind and body of Arvil Caldwell by the time the sky began to lighten the next morning. He was up and shakily making a pot of coffee more than an hour before his early “appointment” at the Hangtree Bank. He’d had time over the sleepless hours to make peace with what he was being forced to do. He was past any sense of guilt over turning over the bank’s assets. He felt badly about it, to be sure, but a man with no choice was a man with no choice. He would meet the robbers at seven, open the bank’s doors and just as readily open the vault, and even help them load up their takings for removal. Whatever it took to get his daughter back again.

When he thought of how much Sam Heller would be hurt by this, he cringed. Sam was a friend as well as the bank’s key depositor. It pained him to think he would see his friend’s fortune carried out by scoundrels, and this after Caldwell had spent so much time trying to persuade Heller of the security of his bank.

Amazingly, Bridgette had managed to fall asleep, something her husband put down to the exhaustion brought on by extreme worry. For a time, her husband had lain there beside her, sitting up against the headboard and staring into the darkness, praying and wondering where his child was at that moment, and in what circumstances this night was passing for her. There were no words for the level of distress it caused him.

Caldwell managed to get down one cup of coffee and then could wait no longer. He went to his wife, ready to kiss her and gently awaken her for a good-bye. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. What good would it do her to be awake and worrying, when she was powerless to change the situation?

It was Arvil who held that power, and he vowed to himself and the heavens that he would exercise it. He would return with their daughter safe at his side, and never let her face such terror again, whatever it required.

He trudged through the dimmest part of morning toward the bank, making sure he had the required keys, and his written-down listing of the vault combination. He could not risk a failure of memory with so much at stake.

Praying silently, he took the longest walk of his life.

 

 

Unknown to him, he was not alone on the streets. Others were awake, two of them a pair of bachelor brothers, generally referred to jointly as “Them Drunken Earhardt Brothers.” They had lived up to their collective sobriquet at the previous night’s town dance, drinking excessive amounts of cheap beer provided by the Dog Star. One of them, Aaron, had followed his usual habit of out-guzzling his brother, and naturally had been the first to pass out, hugging the back of an outhouse near the farrier shop. His brother, Austin, drank more slowly and managed to avoid passing out at all, but he did stretch out on the ground a few yards away from his brother to sleep out the night. He awakened first as well, and stirred his brother back to life. They stumbled along together now, up through town, blocked by their location from any view of the shadowy moving figure of Arvil Caldwell.

The Earhardts were seen, though, but not by Caldwell. Their halting progress was tracked by the eyes of Pedro Sanchez, who worked in the kitchen of the Cattleman and was dumping a batch of old grease into a pit behind the building, much to the interest of a pack of semi-feral dogs whose home was the streets. The Mexican, who had fought and won his own battle with alcohol, watched them and said a quick prayer for them, genuflecting as he did so.

Also seeing them was Julia Canton, up early after failing to sleep for much the same reason as Arvil Caldwell. She had no intention of being at the bank when the Black Ear gunnies showed up, but she did hope to see Angeline safely returned to her father and to find a good vantage point from which to watch the anticipated stampede.

Clad in a ragged old dress rather than the fine lavender-colored one she had worn the night before, she was also wearing her plainest and most serviceable old shoes, tie-ups worthy of an old maid schoolmarm. There was a reason for her rugged garb. She had an idea of where she wanted to be when the cattle surged into the street: a balcony attached the to same building housing the local farrier. The rooms behind it were unused and empty. To get to the balcony from the outside, she would have to climb.

She reached the spot and realized that she also would have a good view of the bank from the balcony—another plus. Taking a quick look around to make sure she was not being watched, she darted to a trestle running up one side of the balcony-topped porch, and clambered up it fast, especially so for a lady who had recently suffered a major concussive injury. On the balcony, she noticed a filthy old rug that had been hung over the railing. Good cover to remain behind so as to see without being seen in turn.

She got in place and began to watch the bank. No lights burned there yet, but it seemed to her a shadow moved behind one of the windows. Someone was already inside. Caldwell, probably.

She settled and from a large and specially made pocket on the side of her dress removed a pistol. She examined it, making sure it was loaded. She had no special plan to use it, but this was a dangerous enterprise and she felt better with some means of protecting herself.

 

 

Tired and hurting from a night spent tied up on a woodshed floor, Angeline Caldwell was sure she was on the way to her death. Though the man who called himself Uncle Cale made token efforts to be kindly, he had an underlying manner that gave the lie to it. At her young age and coming from a close and loving family, Angeline knew far more of good than of bad, so it was hard for her to realize that what she was feeling in the person of Cale Pepperday was simply a great depth of evil.

She was behind him on the saddle, riding double with her arms around him as if he really were her uncle and someone she was happy to be with. It was only threats, though, that kept her clinging to the man. He had told her that if he felt her let go of him, he would cut her arms off at the elbows and see how she liked
that
. She clung on hard.

They shunned the main street and approached the bank from the side and rear. Cale and his prisoner girl, three others of the gang, and that was all. The others were all delegated to start, and as much as possible, direct the coming huge stampede. Once the first wave of cattle tore onto the streets, the others would follow the same path. It was going to be something to see, and dangerous to be part of. The biggest crowd of living creatures Hangtree had ever seen. But the payoff, oh, that would be worth every risk.

The rear door of the bank was open, as planned, and they entered to find Caldwell waiting for them in the most open part of the lobby. His arms were raised on each side of him to shoulder level. His eyes darted quickly over every man entering, looking for his daughter.

And there she was, coming in ahead of a man he somehow knew at once had to be the “Uncle Cale” who had brought such terror to his wife, and stolen his daughter. Cale Pepperday had a pistol raised and pressed between the child’s shoulder blades, and she was shaking hard, and clearly fighting not to cry.

That battle was lost the moment she saw her father. “Daddy!” she exclaimed, and started to bolt to him, but Cale Pepperday’s hand shot out and caught her by her clothing. “Not yet, pretty one, not yet,” he said. “Daddy’s got some work to do for us before you go back to him. He’s helping us out, like a good little bank monkey. Ain’t that right, bank monkey? Lending a hand to good old Uncle Cale and his friends? Have you got the vault open for us, monkey boy?”

“It’s open,” Caldwell said as firmly as he could. It was hard to speak at all just now.

“Get in there and show your new friends here where the big money is. And any diamonds tucked away in there by your local biddies, or any gold and silver and such. We want to carry as much out of this place as we can, and we intend for what we carry to be worth the burden. No dollar notes or half-dimes or pennies or any such as that. Now move.”

Caldwell had been counting on being brought into the vault, because it provided him an opportunity these thieves had no way of knowing about, an opportunity that, once remembered, had filled him with fantasies of violent rescue of his daughter, thwarting of the robbery, and simultaneous lethal punishment of the robbers.

Now that they were actually present, and Angeline was in the midst of it all and potentially in the line of any fire that might break out, the fantasy seemed much less plausible. Especially when Pepperday ordered one of his associates to keep guard over Angeline so that she would not attempt to flee prematurely.

“You done good so far, banker man,” said Pepperday as he and Caldwell entered the vault, which was the size of a small room and lined with stout shelves. On some of those shelves were small double-lock strongboxes containing cash, jewels, precious metals, and other items of value. Each strongbox belonged to a customer of the bank, and Caldwell possessed only one of the keys needed to open the boxes, the others being in possession of the individual customers. If these thieves wanted to get at the contents of the small boxes, they would have to carry the strongboxes out complete and break into them elsewhere, and later.

“Listen!” Pepperday said sharply and suddenly, raising his hand.

Caldwell did, then said, “I don’t hear—” and cut off fast, because he did hear it, felt it, actually, more than heard. A distant, advancing rumble, not much different from muffled thunder from a long way off.

It had started. And as the thieves in the still-darkened bank began to detect it, a cheer rose from them, kept low, but still a cheer. Hands slapped together in celebration . . .

. . . and attention was diverted for a few moments. Moments that Angeline Caldwell took advantage of to dart out the same door through which they had entered, the man assigned to watch her having become distracted by the approach of the stampeding cattle.