The Man from Stone Creek (23 page)

“I guess that's more her concern than mine,” Oralee said confidently. Up until now, she'd bought most of her own supplies in Tucson, mainly because the selection of goods was better and the prices lower. A few other townspeople had done the same. Most folks, though, preferred to buy at home, and the mercantile was thriving proof of that. “I'm just looking to earn a little interest on my money.”

James spread his tallow-colored hands. “This whole thing was Undine's idea in the first place,” he said. “For all I know, Mungo won't agree to any such transaction.”

Oralee leaned in a little. “You'd better hope he does,” she said.

The banker swore, but he pushed back his desk chair, stood and took his bowler hat off the rack on the wall behind him. He pushed past Oralee, making for the door.

“I won't keep you,” she called after him, with plenty of sugar in her voice. “But give Lenore my best regards, won't you?”

 

M
UNGO
D
ONAGHER GRIPPED
the rusty bars of his cell in both hands and stared, disbelieving, at the woman standing on the other side, a sheaf of what looked like legal papers in her hand. He'd had a bath and a shave and a change of clothes since the day he'd done the murder, but just looking at her made him feel dirty all over again.

Near as he could tell, it was late afternoon, but he was only guessing. He'd stopped marking the passage of time the moment he took Garrett's worthless life.

“Whore,” he said just as the banker hurried in. Elias must have brought Undine here, then. Gone out to the ranch to fetch her into town for some business they'd cooked up between them. Drawn up those papers, too.

Mungo ignored him.

Tears sprang to Undine's eyes. Pretty as a picture, she was, in a flowered hat and a rose-colored dress. A matching beaded bag dangled from her wrist, and she had a parasol tucked under one elbow, like she was out for a stroll. All that frippery, bought with his money. She'd been down on her luck when he'd met her. Stranded, without a nickel to her name. Now, she looked like a Roosevelt.

It galled him severely.

“I know you don't mean that,” she said brokenly. “You're just overwrought because you had to kill Garrett to save me.”

Mungo blinked. For a moment he was in that accursed bedroom at the ranch again, putting a gun to his own son's head. He wrenched himself back to the grim present just before the trigger tripped.

“What?” he bawled, confounded.

She spoke up a little, maybe for the benefit of the cowpoke who'd been standing guard ever since the killing, but her eyes were clear and direct, as though she was trying to get a point across. “If you hadn't done what you did,” she said, “well, who knows what would have happened to me?” She paused, sniffled again, but the tears had already dried, if they'd ever been there in the first place. Could be he'd imagined them. “I'm your wife. You protected me. I can't think what
else
you could have done.”

Mungo opened his mouth, closed it again.

Undine smiled. “Soon as the judge hears my side of the story, you'll be out of this place. Back home, where you belong.”

The thought of stepping over the threshold of that house gave Mungo pause. Hard as he'd worked all those years, he'd as soon burn the place to the ground as look at it, after what happened there. As he came back to himself, though, he felt a powerful yen for his old freedom.

“Maybe you'd like to go to California, after all,” Undine suggested sweetly. Her eyes were still shrewd; she was looking straight into his head, unraveling his thoughts like so much tangled thread. Weaving the strands to suit her. “We could make a fresh start there. Put all this behind us for good.”

Mungo felt himself being drawn like smoke to an open window. He gripped the bars harder, rested his forehead between them and shut his eyes tight. “What are them papers, Undine?” he asked in a thin whisper. After a few moments he glanced at the banker, saw the man tug at his celluloid collar with a nervous finger.

“Maddie Chancelor wants to buy the mercantile,” Undine answered. “She'll pay fifteen hundred dollars cash.”

“Buy the—?”

“Mercantile,” Undine finished for him. She bit her lower lip, but her gaze held steady. Whole cloth, that was what her story was, and she was trimming it to fit. “We can use the money to hire us a Tucson lawyer, Mungo.”

“There's
plenty
of money,” he said, and looked past her to James for confirmation. He'd scrimped and saved for years, and he owned the ranch free and clear.

The banker nodded, and that was reassuring, but he kept his distance just the same. Meantime, the cowpoke looked on from over by the stove, sipping coffee from a blue enamel cup and not even pretending not to eavesdrop. The yellow dog lay snoring at his feet.

“We'll need all we can get together to make a go of it in California,” Undine reasoned. “It might take a while to sell the ranch, too.”

Sell the ranch.

Damn the house, but that land—that
land
—had soaked up his blood and sweat for thirty years. How could he leave it? Who would he be, anyhow, without that patch of ground, stretching as far as the eye could see, in every direction?

“I can't bear to go on living here, after what's happened,” Undine said, and her voice took on a fretful note, though her eyes still didn't change. Mungo was reminded of a rattler he'd run afoul of one time, out on the range. It had sprung at him from some rocks next to the creek, when he squatted to drink, sunk its fangs into his thigh and, even as the venom surged through his system like so much molten lead, he'd drawn his pistol and shot that snake into little chunks of quivering flesh. “Folks will talk.”

Mungo didn't figure he'd ever see the outside of that jail, except maybe to stand trial in Tucson or Tombstone, and then, like as not, he'd hang. Still, there was that fierce longing, wandering inside him like a wraith, feeling its way from window to door, pounding and wailing to be let go.

Mungo wasn't stupid. He knew Undine might take the money from the sale of that store and light out for California or elsewhere without him, leave him to face his come-uppance on his own. But the truth was, he didn't give a damn about the mercantile. If Undine took to the road, well, he'd know the truth of her feelings, at least. If she stayed, that might be reason enough to fight for his life.

“Get me a pen and ink,” he said.

Undine's cheekbones went pink with pleasure, and maybe triumph. Rhodes produced the requested items from a desk drawer and Mungo signed the papers. Before the ink was dry, Undine had snatched them back.

“You won't be sorry,” she said.

Mungo wasn't sorry about much of anything, including the fact that he'd shot his firstborn in the back of the head, at point-blank range. Undine claimed he'd saved her, and he knew that wasn't precisely true, but a man had a choice about what he believed. Might as well be the easier thing as the hard one.

“You run off,” he warned as she turned away from him, “and you'd better pray to every saint in heaven that I hang.”

Undine stopped cold, looked back at him. “Why, Mungo,” she scolded prettily, “if I didn't know better, I'd think you were
threatening
me. And here I am, ready to tell the truth about what happened and save your stubborn neck from the noose!”

Mungo scowled. “California ain't such a big place that I couldn't find you,” he said. “You just remember that.”

“I never forget anything,” Undine said coolly. “Not anything at all.”

A moment later she was gone, with the banker trotting at her heels like a blind sheep.

“I reckon a lot of folks would believe you were just protecting your wife,” the cowboy jailer observed thoughtfully when the door closed behind Undine and Banker James. He set the ink bottle down on the desk and laid the pen next to it. “Yes, sir, I reckon they'd believe it.”

Mungo sat on the edge of his cot, buried his face in his hands and waited—not for the circuit judge, or some fancy lawyer come from Tucson to take his part, not even to be set free.

No, sir. Mungo Donagher was waiting to see what his lovely bride would do once she got her mitts on that money.

T
HEY WERE ALL DEAD
, piled up in those upended railroad cars like the last few matches in a box.

Eight passengers. Two conductors. Six
federales,
apparently guarding a strongbox Sam assumed was filled with government gold. While Vierra stood watch on the riverbank, Sam brought the bodies out, one by one, starting with a woman and two little girls in flowered bonnets. He laid the three of them in a row on the rocky shore; surely somebody was waiting up ahead somewhere, to gather them in and celebrate some long-awaited arrival. Now, there would be tears instead of joyful greetings.

Something ground deep and hard inside Sam.

Vierra scarcely glanced at the corpses, but he was sweating as if he'd carried them himself. “Did you find the gold?” he asked after visibly struggling to contain the question for a few moments.

It was a reasonable thing to ask, and offered quietly, but it made Sam's jaw tighten just the same. He looked at the trestle, part of it standing, a spindly, wooden thing, part dangling like splintered bone from a severed arm. “It's in there,” he said, filled with bleak determination, steeling himself to go back.

“Where the hell are they?” Vierra fretted, presumably referring to the outlaws, turning in a full circle to take in the surrounding terrain. “I know they're here.”

Sam headed back toward the single passenger car, trying to be thankful that there weren't a hundred corpses, instead of sixteen. Except for the locomotive, which had plunged nose-first into the river, the rest of the train lay in a pile in about eighteen inches of water. “Like I said before,” he called in reply, fixing to climb through a hole in the side of the car, “they're waiting for dark.”

“They have to know there are only two of us,” Vierra said as Sam looked back at him through the opening. The Mexican moved to look down at the bloody bodies of the woman and her daughters, made the sign of the cross.

“For all they can tell,” Sam replied, buying a few moments before he had to wade through all those dead folks again, “we're scouting for a posse. Half the U.S. Cavalry could show up any minute, or a hundred
federales.
”

Vierra didn't answer, just shook his head.

The grim work went on, and all the while, Sam knew he wouldn't be able to bury the bodies. There were no shovels, the ground was stony, and it was getting late in the day. When night came, he and Vierra would probably have all they could do to stay alive themselves.

He had brought the last
federale
out—a boy no older than seventeen—slung over his right shoulder like a sack of grain, by the time the sun started to dip behind the rocks to the west. The outlaws hadn't shown themselves in all that time, but Sam knew they were watching by the prickle under his hide.

He wished he had blankets, or even coats, to cover the remains of those unfortunate wayfarers, but except for a few lap robes, which he'd spread over the first woman and her daughters, there was nothing. He did find a crate of dead chickens in a freight car, along with bags of mail and some staples, like sugar and flour and rendered lard.

On the shore, well away from the line of corpses, he busied himself plucking and cleaning two of the birds, as best he could, using his pocketknife and the muddy river water, a little ways upstream from the wreck. Vierra gathered a pile of driftwood and plucked some sagebrush from the hillside for a fire, but Sam noticed the other man's gaze kept straying back to the train, and he didn't have to wonder what he was thinking.

Vierra's mind was fastened tight on the gold.

Meanwhile, the horses grazed on patches of grass sprouting between river rocks. Though they weren't tied or hobbled, they didn't stray within twenty yards of the bodies.

The sun slipped lower in the sky.

The chicken carcasses roasted, succulent and snapping, on a spit over the low fire. Sam wasn't hungry, but he knew he had to eat to keep his brain alert and his gun hand steady. He had a powerful hankering for coffee, made strong on his little stove in the room back of the schoolhouse, and waited resolutely for the desire to pass.

“How much gold do you think there is?” Vierra asked. He was lounging next to the fire, watching the chicken cook, but he had his pistol drawn, resting on the ground beside him. Every once in a while, he felt for it with one hand, as though he thought it might have grown legs and sneaked off.

“No idea,” Sam said evenly, stirring the fire with a stick. “I saw a strongbox. I didn't open it.”

Vierra assessed him. “Why not?”

“I was a little busy. Anyway, it's got a lock on it. One of those dead
federales
probably has the key in his pocket.”

“You sure were in a hurry to get the corpses all laid out neat and tidy on the riverbank,” Vierra observed. “It's not like it was going to make any difference to them.”

Sam had been keeping his body busy, so his mind could work unimpeded, but he felt no compunction to explain that, or anything else, to Vierra. They'd been thrown into this assignment together, for reasons Major Blackstone hadn't bothered to clarify when he'd issued Sam's orders, but they were still strangers. Sam didn't trust Vierra much more than the outlaws who had done this horrendous thing, and now, with nightfall less than an hour away, by his estimate, he was prepared for just about anything—including the possibility that Vierra might have been in on the robbery all along. That could be why the others had yet to come after the gold. And it could be why he and Vierra hadn't gotten here on time to stop the disaster in the first place; Sam only had Vierra's word for it that the train wasn't due to reach the trestle before noon.

The theory that Vierra might be a member of the gang had one hole in it, though. Why involve an Arizona Ranger? Vierra knew who he was. Granted, he, Sam, was just one man, but it still didn't make sense. He was a complication, and it would have been far simpler to leave him out of the equation in the first place.

Just then a rock rolled downhill behind them and Vierra was on his feet in an instant, crouched, his pistol in one hand. Sam had drawn his .45 without rising from his seat by the fire, and thrust it back into his holster when he spotted a jackrabbit skittering across the wall of the ravine.

Maybe Vierra was what he claimed to be, Sam reflected.

And maybe he was putting on a show.

“We ought to haul that gold out here,” Vierra said when he'd calmed down a little. “Where we can keep an eye on it.”

“The gold's fine where it is,” Sam said evenly. “The water's shallow, and that car's sunk as far as it's going to.” He tested the chicken with the point of his knife, figured it for done, and took the spit off the fire. Kicked river dirt over the flames to douse them. A fire in the daylight was one thing, and it was another in the dark. No sense providing a beacon.

The two men ate in silence, both watchful, both listening.

The shadows thickened as the sun finally dipped behind the top of the ravine.

Sam fetched his ammunition belt from the pile he'd made when he unsaddled the gelding. He was going to have to name that animal one of these days; couldn't just keep addressing it as “Horse.”

Vierra watched curiously, his hand resting on the butt of his pistol, now holstered. Sam smiled to himself, figuring his companion might be having some of the same thoughts he'd had earlier, only in reverse. Maybe he reckoned Sam for one of the robbers.

“What are you doing?” Vierra asked, his eyes narrow as he watched Sam check his bullet supply.

“We're likely to live longer if we do our shooting from inside that railroad car,” he said, eyeing the chamber of his pistol even though he knew it was fully loaded.

“What about the horses?” Vierra asked, but his face relaxed a little, it seemed to Sam. He surely saw the sense in taking cover behind all that iron, crumpled as it was, but it was probably the chance to get close to the strongbox full of federal gold that smoothed his feathers. Neither man mentioned the obvious: that the car would provide shelter from the outlaws's bullets, but it might also turn out to be a trap. Taking cover was the lesser of two evils.

“We'll stake them on the other side of that pile of boulders,” Sam said, pointing downriver, “and hope to hell they don't get caught in the crossfire if there's a shoot-out.”

Vierra looked around again, straightened his shoulders and set about taking care of his horse. Sam did the same for his own, grateful for the solace of ordinary tasks.

After that, they made their way into the passenger car, standing on seats torn loose from the floor in the crash so they could look out through broken windows.

“There's something wrong,” Vierra advised when they'd been keeping watch for the better part of an hour. It was full night now, though twilight still played at the top of the ravine, and the inside of the car was dark, smelling of fear and death and something foul in the water. It came to Sam, with a chill, that there might be more bodies pinned underneath the car, a lookout, maybe, crouched on the catwalk on the roof, or someone with the misfortune to be moving between cars when the trestle gave way.

“You sound,” Sam observed, thrusting those images forcibly out of his head, “like a man with reason to expect things to go a certain way.”

He felt Vierra's sudden stillness. “You think I'm one of
them?
”

“I've seen stranger things happen,” Sam said.

“If you weren't a lawman, I believe I'd shoot you right here and now, just for defaming my character like that.”

“You could try.”

Vierra chuckled in the gloom. “You think you're faster than I am,
gringo?
”

“Might be that I am,” Sam allowed. He'd been in plenty of skirmishes in his time, and he was still alive, which said all that was needed about his prowess with a gun. On the other hand, the same could be said of Vierra.

“That would make things too easy for the
banditos,
if we shot each other,” Vierra surmised. A brief wisp of moon glow illuminated his profile. “I am not one of them.” He paused and spat, as if the idea had caught on his tongue and soured there. “But some of that gold is mine, if I bring
los diablos
back to a certain
rancho
alive.”

“You told me it belonged to the Mexican government,” Sam pointed out. “And given that I carried six dead
federales
out of this passenger car, I believed that much of your story.”

Vierra stiffened, gazing out the window, and cocked his pistol, a cold, decisive click in the dark. “Here they come,” he whispered, and, sure enough, four riders were making their way down the cliff trail, shadow creatures, part man and part horse.

Sam's palm sweated where he gripped his .45.
Dead or alive. Just bring the bastards in. But put a stop to the thieving and killing.
Those were the major's orders, but even after what the gang had done, the worst of it lying still on the shore in mute witness, Sam couldn't bring himself to shoot those men out of the saddle.

As he and Vierra watched, the riders gained flat ground. Three of them held back, cloaked in darkness, their hat brims down over their faces. The fourth man rode to the forefront.

“We been watching you,” he said. “You might just as well come out of there and let us have what we've come for.”

Sam didn't recognize the voice, but he thought he should have. All he knew for sure was that whoever the ringleader was, he
wasn't
Rex or Landry Donagher. He was too slightly built for that, though he sat a horse as though he'd been born to it.

Vierra spewed a stream of Spanish invective and fired a shot over the bandits' heads, striking the ravine wall and bringing down a shower of small stones.

The trio at the rear scrambled down off their horses and took cover in the rocks, and Sam waited for a volley of retaliatory gunfire, but it didn't come. The man up front had raised a hand to forestall it.

“Save your bullets, you damn fool!” Sam rasped at Vierra.

Vierra cursed again, but he didn't fire. “Women!” he shouted to the men on the bank. “Little children! Look at them, lying there, you bloodthirsty cowards!”

The man still on horseback turned his head in the direction of the bodies. He reined his mount toward them, and Sam thought he might have ridden right over the lot if the animal hadn't balked. Except in a blind panic, no horse would deliberately step on anything, lest it lose its footing.

“We tried to stop the train in a canyon,” the rider answered, “a mile or so south of here. That engineer kept right on coming, pouring on the coal. His bad luck that we'd posted a man up ahead, in case of that very eventuality. At a signal from us, he blew up the trestle.”

In case of that very eventuality,
Sam repeated in his head. He'd never known a cowpoke or a drifter who talked like that. Who the hell
was
this, and why did he figure he ought to know the answer to that question already?