Butch Cassidy the Lost Years

Also by William W. Johnstone with J.A. Johnstone

 

A Rocky Mountain Christmas
Luke Jensen, Bounty Hunter
A Lone Star Christmas
The Family Jensen
MacCallister
:
The Eagles Legacy
Support Your Local Deputy
Phoenix Rising

WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE
With
J.A. JOHNSTONE

BUTCH CASSIDY

Kensington Publishing Corp.
http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Zephyr, Texas, 1950

 

A
fter the hot, bright sunlight outside, the grocery store was dim and pleasantly cool. Electric fans sitting here and there in open spaces on the shelves stirred the air around and blended the smells of pepper, vinegar, cinnamon, coffee, and a thousand other items into an aroma that intrigued the senses of Nathan Tuttle. The irregular slap of ivory against wood drew him toward the rear of the store. A bluish-gray haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air above the scarred wooden table back there, past the meat case and the counter where the cash register squatted.

Four men sat at the table playing dominoes. One of them, a stout man wearing a white apron, was probably the store's owner. Another wore jeans and a grease-stained mechanic's shirt with the name “Howard” stitched onto an oval patch sewn to it. The overalls and dirt-encrusted work shoes of the third man indicated that he was a farmer.

The fourth man, who had a brown, hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips, was lean almost to the point of gauntness, his leathery face a study in planes and angles. He wore a straw cowboy hat tipped back on his head, revealing crisp white hair. His faded blue shirt had snaps on it instead of buttons. He sat with his back to the wall, facing the door, Nathan noted, so he would be able to see anyone who came in.

The man glanced up at the newcomer, and even though he had to be at least eighty years old, his eyes were those of a younger man, blue and piercing and intelligent. He had a small scar under the left one.

The old man looked down at the dominoes in front of him again, obviously dismissing Nathan from his thoughts. That came as no surprise. Tall, slender, and bespectacled, with a natural awkwardness about him, Nathan knew he wasn't a very impressive physical specimen. He liked to think he made up for that with his mind, but the jury was still out on that.

The storekeeper looked up at Nathan, too, and asked, “Something I can do for you, son?” In the middle of a hot afternoon like this, the store wasn't busy. In fact, Nathan was the only potential customer at the moment.

“I'm looking for Mr. Henry Parker,” he said.

The glances the other three players shot toward the man in the cowboy hat told Nathan he had come to the right place.

“This here's Hank,” the storekeeper said with a nod toward the old cowboy.

The man added a domino to the arrangement on the table and said, “Makes fifteen.” A rectangular piece of board with holes drilled in it lay on the table near his left hand. The holes were arranged in five columns, with ten holes in each column. The cowboy took a small wooden peg and moved it up three holes. He didn't look at Nathan.

“Hello, Mr. Parker,” Nathan said. “I was wondering if I could have a word with you.”

Parker drew on the cigarette and let the smoke trickle out his nostrils.

“Go ahead.”

“In private, if we could,” Nathan said.

The farmer chuckled and said, “Sounds like you might be in trouble with the gov'ment, Hank. This boy looks like he might be a gov'ment man.”

Parker finally looked up at Nathan again and asked, “You come from Washington, son?”

“No, sir. Dallas.”

That brought more chuckles from the other three men, as if being from Dallas was almost as bad as being from Washington.

“We're right in the middle of a game here,” Parker said. With a graceful motion, he gestured toward the dominoes on the table. “I'm ahead, and I only need thirty more points to go out.”

The mechanic said, “The lousy dominoes I'm gettin' today, it might take me three hands to score that much count.”

“Jim Strickland told me to look you up, Mr. Parker,” Nathan said.

Parker's face looked like it might have been carved from old wood. Without changing expression, he said, “Jim Strickland, eh? How is ol' Jim?”

“Very interesting,” Nathan said.

The storekeeper asked, “Don't think I know a Jim Strickland. He any relation to the Stricklands up at Blanket? I recollect one named Mose, and another boy, called Alvy, somethin' like that.”

Parker shook his head and said, “Jim's no relation, as far as I know.” He turned his dominoes face down. “You fellas go on without me.”

“You're quittin' in the middle of a game?” the farmer asked. “That ain't like you, Hank.”

“Well, hell,” Parker said as he got to his feet, “there'll always be another game, won't there?” He pointed to the store's entrance and went on to Nathan, “We'll go sit on one of the benches on the front porch and talk. You got to buy me a cold soda pop, though. It's hot out there today.”

Nathan reached into his pocket for a coin and said, “Sure. How much?”

“Soda pop's a nickel,” the storekeeper said.

Nathan handed him a dime.

“I'll get one for myself, too,” he said as he went to the red metal drink box. He paused with his hand on the lid and looked back at Parker. “What would you like, sir?”

“Co'-Cola will be fine, son,” Parker said as he stepped around the table and the other players.

Nathan took two bottles of Coca-Cola from the bed of half-melted ice on the bottom of the box, let them drip for a few seconds, and then popped the caps on the opener attached to the side of the box. He handed one to Parker, and the two of them strolled outside together.

It was warmer out here, but at least the awning over the sidewalk put the wooden benches in the shade. The single block of businesses that constituted the community's downtown was all but deserted. No cars hummed past on the highway.

The two men sat down. Parker stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them at the ankles. His plain brown boots showed signs of long wear.

“My name is Nathan Tuttle, sir.”

“Am I going to be pleased to meet you, Nathan?” Parker asked with a faint smile on his face. “Or am I going to regret it?”

“I suppose that depends on our conversation.”

“Ain't that always the way?” Parker lifted the bottle to his lips and let a long drink slide between them. When he lowered it, he went on, “What brings you to Zephyr besides a hankerin' to act all mysterious-like, Nathan?”

“I work for the Pinkerton Detective Agency.” Nathan had intended to be very forthright and open, putting his cards on the table right away, so to speak. But something about Henry Parker was intimidating, despite his mild appearance and soft-spoken manner. After admitting that he was a Pinkerton, Nathan fell silent.

Parker took another drink of the soda and said, “Go on.”

“My father was a Pinkerton agent,” Nathan said. “So was his father before him.”

“It's not a job that's usually handed down from father to son, from what I hear,” Parker said.

“That's the way it worked in my family. My father and grandfather were both devoted to the idea of upholding the law.”

“Most fellas who feel like that become cops, not strikebreakers and railroad goons.”

Nathan bristled with anger, unable to suppress the reaction.

“That's not all the Pinkertons do. They pursue criminals all over the country.”

“Is that what you're doin', Nathan?” Parker drawled. “Pursuin' a criminal?”

Nathan felt like the man was making fun of him. He knew that he ought to be used to that by now, but it still rankled him.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” he said. Warming to his subject now, he continued, “A couple of years ago, not long after I went to work for the agency, I came into the possession of my grandfather's trunk. Inside it were a lot of his notebooks and papers concerning the cases he worked on. I found them to be fascinating reading, especially the ones about his search for one outlaw in particular: Butch Cassidy.”

“When was this, when your grandpa was lookin' for Butch Cassidy?”

“Around the time of the First World War.”

Parker shook his head slowly and said, “I hate to break it to you, Nathan, but he was wasting his time. Butch Cassidy was killed before that down in South America, in one of those countries that's even hotter than Texas. I remember hearin' all about it. Seems like it was . . . 1906, maybe. Somewhere around in there.”

“1908,” Nathan said. “In Bolivia, at a little town called San Vicente.”

“See, there you go, you know a lot more about it than I do.”

“That's where Robert Leroy Parker and Harry Longabaugh, better known under their aliases Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, supposedly were killed in a battle with the Bolivian army.”

“Well, two men against an army . . . It don't sound very likely they would have come through that alive.”

“The Pinkertons have never officially declared them dead.”

“I don't reckon you have to be declared dead to
be
dead.”

Nathan ignored that comment and went on, “My grandfather, Newton Tuttle, believed that while Longabaugh was indeed killed in Bolivia, Robert Parker survived the shooting, although he was wounded, and escaped from the Bolivians. A week after the battle at San Vicente, an American who appeared to be ill—or suffering from a gunshot wound—appeared in a coastal village in Chile and bought passage on a trading ship that took him to Lima, Peru. From there he was able to secure a berth on a liner bound for Liverpool. He traveled under the name Leroy Michaels.”

“Now, I can see why you might think I'm related to Butch Cassidy, since my name's Parker and you say that was his real name, too . . . even though there are a whole heap of people with that last name. I don't recall that I've ever known anybody with the last name of Michaels, though.

“Robert Leroy Parker started calling himself Butch Cassidy after he met a rustler named Mike Cassidy,” Nathan said. “The connection seems obvious to me.”

“It's your story, Nathan,” Parker said softly.

“Actually, it's my grandfather's story. He's the one who traced Leroy Michaels to England, where he recuperated from his wound and eventually traveled to France and Spain, only by then he was using the name Jameson Lowe. Jim Lowe was another name Butch used as an alias for a while.”

Parker sipped from the soda bottle and said, “Go on.”

“Eventually Jameson Lowe sailed to New York and disappeared. There's speculation that Etta Place, Harry Longabaugh's lover, was in New York about the same time, so it stands to reason that Cassidy wanted to see her and break the news of the Sundance Kid's death himself.”

Nathan's eyes were keener than they looked behind his glasses. He didn't miss the way Henry Parker's hand tightened on the bottle when he mentioned Etta Place. Parker didn't say anything, though.

“Jameson Lowe dropped out of sight after his visit to New York. My grandfather actually hadn't been assigned to track down Butch Cassidy and determine once and for all if the outlaw was dead or alive. That was just a tangent off another investigation, but he became so interested in it that he continued to follow up on his own time after his superiors insisted that he drop the matter. He came to believe that Butch Cassidy was living in Texas under the name Jim Strickland and had become a successful rancher.”

“What made him think that?” Parker asked.

Nathan hesitated, then said, “I don't really know. There are . . . gaps . . . in my grandfather's documentation of his investigation. I know at one point he planned to travel to Texas to meet this fellow Strickland and see if he was right. But I haven't been able to find any indication that he ever made the trip.”

“And why do you think I'd know anything about Strickland?”

“Well . . . you agreed to talk to me after I mentioned the name, didn't you?”

That brought a slow chuckle from Parker. He said, “I just wanted to see what sort of burr you had under your saddle, son. I could tell as soon as you came in the store you were fit to bust about somethin'. You've spun an interestin' yarn, but what does it have to do with me?”

“I suppose I've talked around it for long enough, haven't I?” Nathan took a deep breath. “I've taken up the challenge where my grandfather left off, sir. I've been trying to find out what happened to Jim Strickland, and I've traced the man I believe was using that name through several more identities until I arrived at a conclusion. I believe that you are the man who was once known as Jim Strickland, Mr. Parker. Or should I say . . . Mr. Cassidy?”

For a long moment, Parker didn't say anything. Then he tipped his head back and let out an easy laugh.

“Son, you've been out in the sun too long,” he said. “It's done somethin' to your brain. Do I really look like a famous owlhoot and train robber to you? I'm just a stove-up old cowboy.”

“You seem rather spry for your age, sir . . . which, if I'm not mistaken, is just about the same age as Butch Cassidy would be if he survived that shootout in Bolivia. Mid-eighties, am I right?”

“Be eighty-five my next birthday,” Parker said. “Just what the hell would you do, kid, if I said, yeah, I'm Butch Cassidy?”

Nathan was prepared for that question. He said, “In all likelihood, I wouldn't do anything. There are no charges still on the books against Butch Cassidy. I just want to know the truth. I want to know if my grandfather was right.”

Parker still seemed amused. He took another drink and said, “Well . . . I'm not admitting anything of the sort, mind you, but folks around here seem to think I'm a pretty good storyteller. Tell you what I'll do. You've spun me a yarn, so I'll spin you a yarn of what it might have been like if I really was Butch Cassidy. How about that?”