Outlaw Train (12 page)

“John?”

Dewitt, who had entered the office behind Luke, said quietly, “He ain’t going to answer you, Luke.”

“Where is he, Dewitt?”

Dewitt’s eyes cut toward the door leading from the office into the cell block area.

Luke knew almost intuitively what he would find when he opened that door, and the impulse to run away from it all was strong. But he was the marshal. He had to do it.

He went to the cell block door and pulled it fully open.

Now he knew what had become of John Bailey.

He was sure Bailey was dead even before a check for pulse confirmed it. Bailey’s neck was twisted at a strange, extreme angle, head tilted like that of a hanged man cut down from a noose, eyes and mouth half open. Bailey lay in front of the cell that had held the scar-faced prisoner. A cell now empty.

Luke knelt beside the corpse and shook his head helplessly. “You knew when you came to get me at the lecture hall that Bailey was dead,” he said to Dewitt, who stood nearby, sniffling and wiping tears.

“I knew. But I hoped I was wrong. I hoped we’d come back and he’d have got up and been all right.”

“You don’t just get all right from having your neck broken, Dewitt.”

“Lord, Lord. It’s my fault, Luke. I’m to blame for this.”

Luke came to his feet and rubbed his chin while looking over the situation.

“No, Dewitt. Seems to me that it was Scar Nolan who is to blame for this. You can see what happened…he managed to get Bailey to come back here with the keys, and he got him close enough to the cell door here that he could reach out twixt the bars and get hold of him around the neck.
Then he reached through the bars with the other hand and wrenched poor old Bailey’s neck so hard it snapped it. Bailey slumped down, dead, and all Nolan had to do was reach out, get the keys, and let himself out of here like he was walking out of the outhouse after a good squat.” Luke nudged Bailey’s body with his boot toe. “Damn! Damn it all to hell!” Then, “Sorry about the cussing, Dewitt.”

Dewitt shook his head and kept on leaking tears. “My fault,” he muttered again. “My fault.”

“How is it your fault, Dewitt?”

“’Cause I wasn’t in here to stop it.”

“Nothing wrong with that, Dewitt. Remember: it wasn’t your night to tend jail. You had no obligation to be here.”

“But if I had been…”

“If you had been, Bailey would have been pissing mad that you were hovering around him like a hen. And what happened might have happened anyway. Or it might be you lying dead, not Bailey. You can’t second-guess the Lord, Dewitt. Tonight was Bailey’s night to tend jail. And his night to die.”

“‘It is appointed to a man once to die, and after that the judgment,’” Dewitt said, quoting scripture.

“The point is, it wasn’t your fault,” Luke said. “If anybody in this office ends up taking blame for this, it will be me. I’m the marshal, and I was out of the office when it happened. Out attending a fraudulent spiritualist’s exercises.”

“Well, you went there because there’s a chance that that woman is breaking the law. And maybe that she’s even a wanted killer.”

“Even so, Dewitt, there’ll be some folks in this
town who say I was wrong to leave the jail tended by an inexperienced jailer like Bailey.”

“Or me.”

“What they’d say if it had been you was, ‘Luke should never have left a drunkard in charge.’”

“But I’m not a—”

“I know, I know. The point is, people still say it even though it isn’t true. So you and me, I guess we shouldn’t be worrying about what people say. Just what the truth really is. That’s all that matters. And the truth is that what happened here wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault. It was Scar Nolan’s fault, and Bailey’s own carelessness.”

“Yeah. And now he’s escaped.”

Luke nodded and paced. “Dewitt, I got something for you to do. We have a murder here, so we need to get District Attorney Crandall. And you need to fetch Wilton Brand, too, since he’s coroner. Can you do that for me?”

“I’ll go get them right now.”

Wilton Brand stood slowly and brushed his hands on his trousers. Turning to Crandall, he said, “Well, I think we can rest assured that there is no longer any doubt that the prisoner who murdered our sheriff and now Mr. Bailey was in fact Scar Nolan. Nolan has killed men in exactly this manner at least twice before tonight. A neck-snapping trick he claimed to have learned from a Chinaman, or so the story has it.”

“How do you learn such things, Jim?” Luke asked. “You’ve got more such lore about the outlaw breed than anybody else I’ve ever known.”

“Well, the first person who ever told me about
that was none other than old Ben Keely. Ben was always interested in those kinds of details about criminal folks, you know. Kind of collected them. He told me it was a habit he picked up from his father, who was a history-loving type, and even had an outlaw relic or two he’d collected.”

“Well, I wish Ben was here right now to take charge of this situation,” Luke admitted. “This peace officer business is turning out to be a lot more than I ever signed on for.”

“It has taken a few dark turns lately,” Crandall said. “This isn’t the Wiles that most of us have known for so many years. ‘Most peaceful town on the American prairie,’ they used to call us. And now we’ve got sheriff murders and jail escapes and dead jailers and such. And you know, Luke, you might think a man in my position would be pleased in the secrecy of his heart to have crimes of note being committed in his district. But I’ll own up right off: I don’t know if I have the capacity to rightly and successfully prosecute crimes of this stature. They may be beyond the reach of a man who has spent his life prosecuting the theft of small items from store shelves and the burglary of lonely little prairie houses and the occasional ‘borrowing’ of a horse. I’m overwhelmed, Luke. Plain old overwhelmed! You know what I mean?”

“I know exactly what you mean, Jim. Exactly. And just now we’ve got another overwhelming task to do, one I have never done before.”

“Forming a posse?”

Luke nodded sharply. “Forming a posse. One that can be ready to leave come first light.”

It went well, in Luke’s estimation. An eight-man group, all well-mounted and, thanks to the attention that Ben Keely had paid to building up a good little marshal’s office armory, well armed. He had good rifles, an assortment of Winchesters and Henrys, available from the gun cabinet in the corner of the office. Wilton Brand was the only posse recruit who declined one of the weapons, preferring to use his own well-maintained Winchester, a rifle whose weight, balance, and sighting he had customized carefully and which was his most proud possession.

It was Luke’s hope that no guns would be fired in the capture of Scar Nolan. With eight good men in pursuit and Nolan’s lead not particularly strong, he was optimistic of a good outcome.

The posse set out as the first rays of sunlight pierced the east. Investigation and questioning the previous night had indicated the direction Nolan had fled, and the fact that he’d stolen his own horse out of the livery.

The posse pursued, though a track was hard to find because Nolan had stuck to the main thoroughfare out of town, where horse traffic was heavy in both directions and tracks tended to obscure one another. At length they found one track that seemed, by its freshness, to have been more recently laid than most, and concluded that this was probably the mark of Nolan’s horse. They followed until, outside town, the track veered off the road and onto grassland.

“Looks like he’s trying to throw us off,” observed one posse member, Jesse Cauley.

“Always was like you to state the obvious, Jesse,” said a voice Luke hadn’t expected to hear. He twisted in the saddle and saw that Hank McAdams, former deputy of the Wiles, Kansas, marshal’s office, had ridden in to join the group. The sandy-haired young man rode up to Luke’s side and put out his hand.

“Care if I join this delegation, Marshal?” he asked as Luke pumped his hand.

“You’re more than welcome, Hank,” Luke replied, grinning. “I didn’t expect to see you, though. How’s your mother faring in her illness?”

“She rallied a good deal, just yesterday, and all at once. So when I heard what had happened at the jail—Joe Taylor told me as I was coming out real early this morning to collect eggs at the henhouse—I knowed I needed to come help you out. Not long ago, it might have been me instead of Bailey who got choked to death back among the lockups.”

“Could have been you, me, anybody,” Luke said. “I regret sore that it happened to Bailey. Him and me were never friends, as you know, but he seemed to truly want the chance to work for the town, and I needed him, so…”

“If I’d have knowed Mama would rally like she has, I’d not have left you to start with, Luke. But I swear, she was nigh on the edge of death, and the doctor said there was no hope for her. But then she just turned around, her color came back, and she got back on her food again. Miracle of God, I reckon.”

“Now you’re starting to sound like Dewitt Stamps,” Luke said. “He’s working as a jailer for me now, you know.”

“Yeah. I heard that. Surprised me. I reckon I think
of Dewitt like he was, before he got off the whiskey. But a man can change, I guess.”

“I believe that Dewitt really has. He’s doing a good job for me, though he’s nervous in his work. I’m proud of him for doing as good as he has. You want to come back to your old job, Hank?”

“I didn’t figure you’d want me back, since I quit on you.”

“I need your help, and you’re the best man I know of, terms of experience.”

“We’ll talk about it after we catch Nolan,” Hank said. “But yeah, I think I might like to come back, if you’d have me.”

“I’ll have you. Hank, Dewitt is a good man, getting better all the time, but he managed to lock himself in his own cell the other day.”

Hank mulled that, and laughed. Luke laughed, too, and was glad that Dewitt was not there to see him do it.

They rode on, following as best they could the path seemingly taken by Nolan.

But Nolan was not to be readily found. The posse rode and tracked and watched, but at length it became clear they had lost the trail. The search for Nolan turned into a search for tracks.

After two false starts and one dead end, Luke was nearly ready to declare the search at an end and admit defeat. Nolan had bested him. Let some other lawman in some other county or town capture the man.

“There he is!”

The speaker was Brand, and he was pointing toward a rise to the northeast. Luke looked, and sure
enough, a mounted figure was limned against the sky at the highest point of the rise, looking back at them.

“Wilton, let me take a look through those field glasses,” Luke said.

“That him?” Brand asked a few moments later, as Luke adjusted the binocular focus.

Luke studied the distant figure intently. Lowering the field glasses, he shook his head. “It ain’t Nolan, that I’m sure of,” he said. “But what surprises me is who I think it
is.
”

“From here, without field glasses, I would swear that was Ben Keely,” Brand said.

Luke handed the field glasses back to Brand. “If you’ll look at him through these, you’ll find it
still
looks like Ben Keely.”

Brand took a look, refocused, and looked again. “Too far away to be plumb sure, but it does appear to be him. He’s back, Luke. Ben is back.”

“So it appears, Wilton. So it appears.”

“Should we ride up and make sure?”

“We got other fish to fry. Let’s go see if we can get back on Nolan’s track again.” He took another look at the distant horseman on the hill. “From the look of it, though, I may owe Dewitt an apology. He might have sure-enough seen Ben Keely after all.”

“I don’t know, Nick,” said the man with the tattooed ears. “You know I’m always hesitant about being so open about what we’ve got. I think eventually it’s going to get us into hot water, this kind of advertising.”

David Akers, known now to the world by the more provocative and exotic moniker of “Gypsy Nick Anubis,” smiled benignly and shook his head. “No,” he said back to Professor Percival Raintree. “Never been a problem anywhere else and it won’t be here. Giving folks a free taste of what we’re serving only makes them more prone to part with a little admission money later on.”

Raintree shook his head and put his hand in his pocket, finding the small metal flask there. He unstoppered it and took a hot but refreshing swallow. Anubis watched, eyes locked on the flask, his tongue flicking thirstily between his lips.

“You go at that flask more and more these days, Percy. You’re nothing but a bundle of nerves anymore.”

“I’m not easy with being here, in this particular place,” Raintree returned. “We shouldn’t have come here. Too great a chance of somebody recognizing
him.” With that he nodded toward a figure seated on the shotgun side of the farm wagon upon which Anubis sat in the driver’s seat. “And now you’re getting ready to parade him through town God, Nick, we’re fools to be so careless!”

Nick Anubis shook his head. “Not a chance of it, Percy. He can’t be recognized. Even if somebody pulls off the mask, there’s no face there to be seen. You know that better than anyone. You’re the one who shot it off him! I don’t believe this fellow’s own mother would know him from looking at the smear of raw meat that’s under that mask.”

“What if we’ve overlooked something? What if we’re being overconfident?”

“Trust me, Percy. Taking Tennessee here into town isn’t our problem. Our problem is that not nearly enough people are coming out to the train here, any more than they did at Ellsworth. The flyers I hung ain’t doing the trick this time. People need to see more sometimes, need to get a clearer notion of what we’ve got to show them. That’s why me and Tennessee got to go to town. When I did the same thing at Ellsworth, business picked up.”

“Hell, maybe we should have just stayed there longer instead of coming here. Nick, are you sure that you aren’t just going into town to find a bottle?”

“As long as you are pulling from that pocket flask every five minutes, don’t you lecture me about bottles, Percival. Anyway, I’m not going into town for a bottle. I’m going to let folks get a glimpse of our dead friend here, and whet their appetites to see more of the same.” A gust of wind swept through, knocking askew a hand-painted sign that
was leaned up against the chest of the unmoving figure on the rider’s side of the wagon seat. Nicholas paused to correct it, and also checked the stability of the wooden post that ran up against the lifeless figure’s spine, keeping it upright. “I will tell you, though, that I do have another reason for going to town this evening,” he continued. “How would you like to have the best display yet on the train?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Nick?”

“I’m talking about Kate Bender, that’s what I’m talking about.”

Raintree froze, frowning, and stared at his partner. “Kate Bender the murderess?”

“The same. The same one who fled with her murdering kin and was never found. The same Kate Bender who used to present herself as one who could communicate with spirits, and who also sold herself to men as a common whore. The same Kate Bender who is back to her same old tricks again, using a different name, and this time without her murdering family with her. No inn this time with a curtain and a hammer and a trapdoor in the floor. This time there is nothing but her dead-folk-speak and her whoring. And she’s doing it in Wiles. She’s a good part of the reason folks haven’t much been coming to the train, I suspect. I think she’s got so much attention that nobody even pays heed to the flyers and such we’ve put up. That’s why I’ve got to make this run into town. And maybe, if we’re lucky, I can start getting some notion as to how we might get our hands on Miss Bender. Can you start to imagine the crowds we could draw if we had
Bloody Kate Bender’s corpse to show? We’d grow rich, Percy. Rich!”

“What name is she using?”

“Haus. Prophetess Katrina Haus.”

“Well, yes…we could get rich off this Katrina Haus if she proves out to really be who you say she is, not just some other soiled dove pulling the same kind of spirit-talking confidence game that Bender did. And, of course, she’ll do us no good, whoever she is, unless she conveniently drops dead and we get lucky enough to get her corpse for display.”

“Sometimes that can happen, Percival. People just conveniently dropping dead and all.”

“We don’t murder folks to stock our corpse displays, Nick. You know that.”

“Tennessee here might be inclined to disagree about that.” He tilted his head toward the corpse propped up on the seat beside him.

“Our man here didn’t meet his fate so we could display his body, Nick. I’ve told you that. He died because he refused to be reasonable. The use of his corpse as the Tennessee Kid was just a later inspiration. A way of adding value to an earlier difficult transaction.”

“I’m going on now, Percival. Too antsy to hang around here. But I’ll stretch it out, take my time. I don’t want to roll into town until after dark. This kind of thing always works best when folks see it when it’s dark.”

Dewitt was unsure what drew him back again and again to the place Bailey had died, because it was to him the most hated place he knew. He would never
forget the soul sickness he had felt when he saw Bailey’s corpse, and the empty cell where the murdering Nolan had been.

“Dear Lord, let me forget,” Dewitt prayed aloud, pacing in the narrow passage between cells. He was back to simple, basic duty again—minding the nowempty jail—but since the murder of Bailey and the escape of Nolan, the jail was no longer an easy place for Dewitt to be. “Let that picture of poor Bailey lying there go out of my mind,” he said to the empty human cages around him.

He couldn’t help but ponder the fact that it used to be easy to forget whatever needed forgetting. All that had been necessary was to pull a cork and press glass to lips. It was easy to forget in the days his mind was cloudy. Now, the farther he got from his last drink, the clearer his mind grew. And a clear mind was a remembering mind.

“I’m sorry, Bailey,” he said softly. “I’m sorry you got killed. I hope you went to heaven.”

Ten more minutes passed and Dewitt’s funk remained strong. At last he shook himself, went up to the front office and there dashed a little water on his face from the wash bucket in the corner, and decided that fresh air was called for. He left the office and told himself he was doing so in order to make rounds while Luke was out manhunting. Never mind that rounds were not part of his assigned duty just now. There was certainly nothing to do at the jail except dwell on the fact that a murder had occurred there.

He had to break this morbid sense of gloom hanging around him. Daylight was what he needed. Daylight and fresh air and a bit of exercise.

Closing the jail, he paused on the porch and wondered if he was doing the right thing. Luke and his posse would return at some point, most likely, probably with a recaptured Scar Nolan in tow. Luke might be angered to find the jail closed down.

Dewitt promised himself he wouldn’t stay away from the jail for long. A good walk, a brightening of the mood, and then he’d come back. Odds were he would be back in the front office before Luke even returned.

Gypsy Nick Anubis, who in the earlier days of his far-from-exotic life had been not a mysterious “Egyptian-born” showman but merely a young assistant to an Alabama embalmer who made his living giving cursory undertaking service to battlefield dead so their corpses could be shipped home for burial in family plots rather than interred in anonymous mass graves, settled himself more comfortably on the seat of the wagon and rode through the pleasant day with a dead man at his side. He was glad to leave behind for a while the Outlaw Train that provided a living for himself and his employer, Percival Raintree, a man he’d met four years earlier in an alley behind a billiard hall in Chicago, where both of them were emptying bladders filled earlier in the saloon next door. It was inside the saloon that Nick had first noticed Raintree…noticed his tattooed ears, actually.

The back-alley meeting had led to a surprise: Raintree already knew who he was. “I’m pleased to speak with you at last, Mr. Akers,” Raintree had
said while hitching shut his fly. “You’ll pardon me if I don’t offer to shake hands under the circumstances.”

“It wouldn’t much bother me to shake your hand, sir,” Nick had said. “In my line of work I’m accustomed to touching that which most would shun.”

“Embalming?”

“A good guess. You are correct.”

“No guesswork involved, Mr. Akers,” Raintree had replied. “I came to the saloon this evening because I saw you enter there. It was you I hoped to meet!”

“You followed me?”

“I’ve been following you for some days now.”

“I don’t like being followed.”

“I think you’ll be pleased, under these circumstances,” Raintree had replied. “I’m here to offer you a marvelous opportunity. Shall we go have another drink and talk a while?”

“I’m always thirsty.”

“Then let’s go.”

Jakey Wills had just fed Ben Keely’s cats once again when he saw the wagon come rolling over the rise against the backdrop of a darkening, cloud-filled sky. He paused in the yard of Keely’s empty house and squinted at the approaching vehicle. The driver was oddly dressed, in loose, flowing clothing that reminded Jakey of the garb of the man he’d seen outside the Outlaw Train the day he’d hidden on the hillside and watched the place with Luke and Dewitt. But he didn’t think this was the same man.

He couldn’t be so sure about the man riding shotgun. The fellow had a sign of some sort leaned up against his chest. A mask, like a flour sack, but with no eye holes, so that his entire head was hidden.

When the wagon was close enough, Jakey was able to read the sign. He drew in his breath in surprise and awe, and stared freely at the figures on the wagon, particularly the masked one, who did not move at all.

“Hello, young man,” Nick said. “What are you up to today?”

“Feeding cats.”

“Cats?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many you got?”

“Three. But they ain’t mine. They belong to Ben Keely.”

Nick squinted in thought. “Keely. Why does that name sound familiar?”

“You’ve probably heard of him, sir, if you’ve been around these parts. He’s the town marshal of Wiles, the town over that way.” Jakey thumbed eastward. “Except he ain’t in Wiles. He went off weeks and weeks ago to Kentucky to see kinfolk, and he ain’t come back.”

“That so?”

“Yeah. Hey, mister, is that honest-to-goodness the Tennessee Kid there in the seat beside you?”

“That’s what the sign says, ain’t it?”

“Yes, sir, but I just wondered if it’s real.”

“It’s real. And that’s him.”

Jakey’s face was the image of awe. He walked around the wagon and stood near the dead outlaw,
looking up. “He got shot down in Colorado, right? About two years ago?”

“That’s right.”

“Shot in the face with a shotgun, wasn’t he?”

“That’s why we keep that bag over his head. Folks couldn’t bear to see what’s under there.”

“Can I look?”

“It ain’t part of our show, son. And believe me, you’d not really want to see it.”

Jakey paced around, still studying the corpse. “You with the Outlaw Train, mister?”

“I am. You can call me Anubis. Nicholas Anubis.”

“What kind of name is that…Anubis? Never heard that before.”

“Neither had I, until Raintree gave it to me.”

“Who is Raintree?”

“He owns the Outlaw Train. He’s a smart man, Raintree.”

“Why did he name you Anubis?”

“It’s the name of some Egyptian god. God of mummification. And my first name, Nicholas, that’s not really mine, either. It’s another name Raintree gave me. It comes from Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of all kinds of workmen, including embalmers. Like me.”

“Are you the one who embalmed the Tennessee Kid here?”

“I am. And the others we’ve got inside the train.”

“The Outlaw Train is full of dead people?”

“There’s a few. And parts of others. Bones and preserved hands and feet and such. And relics of other kinds…guns, knives, clothes, hats, boots. Folks like to see such things, you know, if they have
something to do with a famous outlaw. We got the pitchfork that was used to stab the life out of Curly Drake, the gunfighter who killed that bounty hunter and his whole family. And we’ve got a flattened bullet that was dug out of the wall of the Blood Bucket Saloon over in Denver after it had passed through the skull and brain of Barrett Hampton, the famous hangman from Judge Shriver’s court down in Texas.”

“I’d like to see those things.”

“Then you come see the Outlaw Train. I’ll look for you there.” Anubis reached beneath into a pocket on the side of his flowing, baggy shirt and produced a small card he handed to the boy. It was a pass for free admittance. On its back was, in small type, a listing of several of the associated featured attractions.

Jakey read it closely for a moment. “It says here that you have the jar with the head of Big Harpe the murderer. But that can’t be right.”

Anubis immediately looked nervous. “Why not?”

“Because I know the man whose family has that jar. It’s the man who lives in this house here, the man who owns them cats. Our town marshal, Ben Keely.”

“He went to Kentucky, you said?”

“Yep. Some time after his father died. Went back to see his kinfolk.”

“Well, Percival—that’s Raintree, Percival Raintree—he went to Kentucky a while back for the very purpose of finding the family who owned that relic. And he did find them. And became the new owner of Harpe’s head. Or what little remains of it.”

“They sold it to him?”

“We’ve got it, so I reckon they did. Hey, son, is your family at home?”