Outlaw Train (9 page)

“Well, she was at church last Sunday,” Dewitt said. “I seen her going in the door of the Methodist church with my own eyes.”

“Well, as I’ve heard it told, Kate Bender was a churchgoer at the same time she and her kin were murdering the patrons at their inn. Presented herself as a good Christian woman. All to make folks trust her.” Jakey paused and chuckled. “Kind of funny, in one way. A murdering woman who also whored herself and claimed to talk to folks’ dead loved ones. Twisted as a wagon spring, that is! Can you think of anything more loco?”

“It’s wrong to try to talk to the dead,” Dewitt said. “Bible teaches that.”

“Be that as it may, after the war was done, there were a lot of folks who got interested in talking to the dead,” Luke said. “You can’t much hold folks at fault for wanting to talk with, say, a son who got shot down in battle.”

“That don’t make it right to do, though,” Dewitt countered. “Bible teaches it’s wrong to dally with familiar spirits.”

“The point is that the fact there were so many dead opened the door for frauds and fakes like Kate Bender, or Katrina Haus, or Prophetess Katrina Haus—all of which may be one and the same—to
get their hands into the pocketbooks of bereaved people.”

Jakey shook his head. “I don’t know that such things are always frauds. My old granny talked with her dead forebears all her life…and sometimes she knew things they’d told her, things she couldn’t have knowed otherwise. Things they’d seen folks doing, because they were ghosts and you didn’t know they were there watching. I got in trouble for stealing my uncle’s knife when I was just little. The ghosts seen me do it and told Granny, and Granny told Pap on me.”

“I don’t know that I believe in ghosts, Jakey,” said Luke.

“Maybe it was Ben Keely’s
ghost
I seen,” Dewitt said. “Because, I swear, I seen
somebody.
”

“I’m sure you did, Dewitt. I just doubt it was Ben, dead or living. He wouldn’t come back to Wiles and not come to his own house. And he wouldn’t hide himself from his old friends. I’m sure of it.”

“Hey, I can’t tell you where Ben Keely is,” said Jakey, “but I can tell you law gents where you can find a whole passel of bad outlaws.”

“Can you, now?”

“Sure can, Marshal. And they’ll be easy to catch.”

“How so?”

“They’re all dead. And some of them are just pieces.”

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

Jakey shrugged and grinned. “It ain’t far, just on down the railroad track a ways. Want me to show you?”

Luke, though suspecting that the boy was playing them for fools, said, “Why not?”

It took a few minutes for Jakey to run back home, saddle up his horse, and rejoin the group at Ben’s house, but soon the boy was leading the small group of riders westward along the tracks, Luke all the while wondering if this were all a waste of time.

“So tell me about this ‘passel of outlaws,’” he said to Jakey.

Again the youth shrugged. “It’s a train, or a couple of cars, anyway. They’re parked at the old side track, got awnings and tents and lanterns and such strewed around. Kind of a stage platform built up there, too.”

“Why?”

“‘Cause they’re show cars, I reckon. Pay your money, see the show.”

“Show…like dancing Gypsies or something?”

“Funny you should say that,” Jakey replied. “There is a Gypsy-looking man around them cars. And one of the signs says something about ‘Gypsy Nicholas Anubis, Preserver of the Dead.’”

“What the hell’s an ‘Anubis’?”

“I don’t know. Just somebody’s name, I reckon.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “And I thought things couldn’t get any more strange than they have been lately.”

Lying on his belly on a brush-covered ridge that overlooked a small creek, and beyond it, a railroad track, Luke squinted and tried to read the signage attached to the two railroad cars parked on the side track below. One in particular intrigued him for what he thought it said, but he was unsure of his reading at this distance. He wished he had the pair of field glasses that at this moment were in one of his desk drawers back at the office in Wiles.

“You’ve got young eyes, Jakey. Can you make out what that sign says down there?” Luke pointed.

Jakey replied, “It says, ‘Professor Raintree’s Outlaw Train and Chamber of Criminal Relics.’ And the other one over there, it says, ‘Traveling Cabinet of Infamous Preservations,’ and then ‘Gypsy Nicholas Anubis, Preserver of the Dead.’”

“I can read
those
signs, Jakey! It’s that smaller one, that white one over on the front car, that I can’t make out.”

Jakey looked hard, but shook his head. “Can’t read that one from here, either. I’ll get closer.”

Before Luke could respond to stop him, the boy vaulted forward and down the slope. There was no sign of life around the two sidetracked railroad
cars. Jakey scrambled athletically down the incline and dropped behind a bit of brush. Luke watched him lift his head and study the sign.

Just then something moved below. Luke caught sight of a man coming around from the far side of the end-to-end railroad cars. The man did not look up the slope, did not see those who hid there, watching him.

He was strangely dressed, in a bulky, flowing shirt cinched around his waist with a cloth sash, and with some sort of odd headgear. He was carrying a heavy hammer in his right hand, and walked to the outside corner of a tent that stood near the railroad cars. He knelt and began hammering a wobbly tent stake, tightening the rope support and making the tent a little straighter.

“Why’s he dressed that way?” Dewitt asked in a whisper.

“Don’t know,” replied Luke. “Maybe that’s Gypsy Nicholas. Or Professor Raintree.”

“What kind of thing is this?”

“It appears to be a traveling museum of some sort,” Luke said.

“What’s an ‘infamous preservation’?” Dewitt asked.

“Couldn’t tell you, Dewitt. No idea.”

“Should we go down there and bust this thing up?” asked Dewitt.

“No grounds to do so that I can see. Nothing criminal about operating a cabinet of curiosities that I know of. There’s things like this all over…this one is just different because it’s on rails and wheels.”

“Then why did we sneak and hide like this?”

“Because of Jakey talking about there being a ‘passel of criminals.’ I wasn’t sure what we’d find, so I decided we should do this on the sneak. Let’s get back to town now. There’s nothing illegal about a traveling show. My gut tells me to leave this be for now.”

The man below bolstered the rest of his tent stakes and went around to the back of the railroad cars again. As soon as he was out of sight, Jakey scrambled back up to his companions, and the three of them went back to where they had left their horses, mounted, and rode back toward the empty house of Ben Keely, missing town marshal.

Jakey and Dewitt were in a mood to talk, while Luke was content with silence. He kept apart from the other two as they rode, leaving them to chatter at each other while he softly whistled an old fiddle tune. When they reached the point where Jakey would take his leave of them, Luke and Dewitt said farewell and rode on together toward Wiles as young Jakey went back to his home. The sky was clouding over, the air beginning to feel thick and moist.

At the edge of town, Luke suddenly stopped his horse and exclaimed softly, “Blast it!”

“What’s wrong?”

“Dewitt, Jakey went down that hill so he could read what was on that sign, then he plumb forgot to tell me what it was, and I forgot to ask.”

“Luke, Jakey tried to tell you, but you didn’t hear him over your own whistling.”

“So what did it say?”

They were riding into town now, already in sight of the jail.

“Jakey said it said something about a ‘new dishun,’ or something.”

“‘Dishun.’ New edition. Or addition, maybe?”

“Yeah, that was it! ‘New addition: the crumbled skull of Big Harpe the murderer.’ That was what Jakey said, or something close. I don’t know who Big Harpe is, though.” Dewitt paused. “Why you frowning like that, Luke?”

“Because I
do
know who Big Harpe was, and I know whose family has owned his skull bone for years. Ben told me about it. And I have to wonder how that jar could now be in the possession of some traveling railroad show when it was something Ben Keely went back to Kentucky to fetch.”

They dismounted. The sky was terribly overcast by now, darkening the day and giving it an ominous feel.

Hardly had boot heels touched the street before an out-of-breath Oliver Wicks launched himself down from the low, flat-topped roof of the jailhouse and landed catlike on the dirt, startling Luke, Dewitt, and their horses.

“What the hell, boy!” Luke exclaimed. Then: “Sorry about the cussword, Dewitt.”

“Marshal, you got to come now!” Oliver said, gasping. “Sheriff Crowe just got himself shot dead over at the Redskin Princess!
Dead!
And some of the folks have got the fellow what done it tied up in a storeroom, and they’re talking about hanging him!”

As Kansas prairie towns went, Wiles had fewer than the average number of saloons, and those that did exist were of good quality and, owing to lack of
gambling and dancing girls, didn’t attract the rowdier element that had rendered infamous some of the rougher dens and dance halls of Dodge City and other cattle towns. Which was why the grim news delivered by Oliver was hard for Luke to believe. Oliver pummeled him with details of the story as they trotted along street and boardwalk on their way to the farther side of town.

“It happened fast, they said. No sign it was coming. The sheriff had come in the saloon after the first fellow was already there, the one with the scar on the side of his face. By this time Scar-face was drinking beer and eating a sandwich. Sheriff Crowe went over to him straightaway, they said, and sat down like maybe he’d come in specifically to see this man. The two of them talked a bit, just quiet talk, and everybody else went on playing billiards and so on, paying no attention to them. Then, all at once, the man with the scar leapt up and pulled out a pistol he’d been carrying hidden beneath his jacket, and Sheriff Crowe was shot through the chest before he was halfway out of his chair. Someone said that the bullet went right through his badge. Well, that shot didn’t kill him, so the sheriff still went for his own pistol and had it out in his hand before Scar-face shot him the second time. This one right through his brow. Needless to say, that one killed him.”

Leaving Dewitt behind on the pretext of tending to the jail, although it was at present empty, Luke went on toward the Redskin Princess, mind reeling at the thought that he had an actual shooting death
to deal with. And the victim the county sheriff, no less. He was more nervous and overwhelmed than he would want to admit. He’d always supposed that, in the case of a murder, the first thing he’d do would be to call the more experienced Sheriff Crowe in to assist and guide him. He’d never envisioned a situation in which Crowe himself would be the murder victim.

A milling, excited crowd remained outside the Redskin Princess; the electric tension of their emotion made the atmosphere crackle. As he reached the fringe of the clot of people, Luke began to be noticed, eliciting a mix of responses. He heard mutterings that said it was about time the law showed up; he heard others that bewailed the arrival of a man with a badge because what was needed here was a good quick hanging without interference from the law.

Luke pushed his way through the cluster of humanity and entered the saloon. As he did so he learned that the sense of electricity in the atmosphere was not generated merely by the tension of the situation and the crowd. A sudden flash of lightning filled the sky, followed by a bolt of thunder that made the ground vibrate and the saloon walls shudder.

Luke strode through the saloon, stepping around overturned chairs and accidentally kicking strewn glasses and bottles here and there on the floor. It had been an atypically rough night at the Redskin Princess, it appeared.

“Over here, Marshal,” said a man on the east side
of the room, near a table that had been scooted to one side. Luke walked over.

“That’s where he lay,” the man said, pointing to a circle of blood clotting on the dirty floor. At the edge of the circle were bits of fleshy matter that Luke guessed was brain. He felt queasy for a moment.

“So there’s no question that he’s dead, I guess,” Luke said to the man.

“None. The bullet went in his forehead and took the back part of his head with it when it came out.”

“Where is Sheriff Crowe’s corpse now?”

“Wilton Brand had him carried over to the undertaking parlor. He signed off on the death papers.”

Luke was just about to ask the man where the shooter was being detained when a shout from a back room gave him the likely answer. He headed in that direction, reaching protectively for the butt of the Colt revolver holstered at his right side.

Three burly men had the prisoner in an otherwise empty back room; a man Luke had never seen before, yet who roused a sense of possible familiarity. He had apparently just made a bolt for the door and was reaping the consequences from his self-appointed captors. Luke froze for a moment, aware that this was the most difficult and precarious situation he had faced in his young career as a peace officer.

“Town marshal!” he bellowed, drawing his pistol. “What’s going on here?”

One of the men had the prisoner in a headlock, and looked squarely at Luke. “We got you a murderer here, Marshal. Murdered Sheriff Crowe, he did. Shot him right through the head.”

“I’ve heard. I’ll take custody of that man now.”

“No, sir. If we let go of him, he’ll make a break for it, and he might just get past you, pistol or no pistol.”

The speaker was John Bailey, local blacksmith, one of the strongest men in Wiles County. Though Bailey was known as a good citizen, Luke never much liked him because Bailey so obviously did not respect him. Bailey believed that officers of the law should be men of fist and muscle, and was frequently vocal, after a few beers, in declaring that the slimly built Luke Cable was not cut out for the role he played in Wiles, any more than Ben Keely had been. Bailey’s opinion carried much less weight than his frame did, but Luke was annoyed by it nonetheless. He’d heard rumors that Bailey had once approached the town fathers to seek the marshal’s appointment for himself, but Luke didn’t know if that was true, nor did it matter, because Bailey’s bid, if it had ever happened at all, had not been taken seriously by the local powers.

“What’s your name, man?” Luke demanded of the scarred man.

The prisoner struggled and ignored the question. Luke drew closer and spoke louder, repeating his query.

The man stopped trying to fight his way free. He panted, relaxing, glanced down at Luke’s badge, then stared at Luke. “Howdy, Marshal.”

“I asked your name.”

“Wesson. Ed Wesson.” The man began to struggle with his holders again.

“Fairly believable alias, friend,” Luke said. “Most
just come up with something like Joe Jones or Bill Smith.”

John Bailey said, “You’re right about it being an alias, Luke. You know who this man really is?”

“Why don’t you just tell me, John?”

“Because you’re the lawman. You should be able to figure it out yourself. Take a look at him!”

Unsure what Bailey was trying to make him see, Luke eyed the struggling prisoner. The burly man was a stranger, yet that earlier sense of something recognizable about him lingered.

The man turned his head and the scar on the right side of his ruddy face throbbed lividly. And at that moment Luke knew, or at least strongly suspected. An image from a year-old wanted poster flickered in his memory.

“‘Scar’ Nolan?” he said.

Bailey nodded vigorously. “You should’ve figured that out right off, being law. If I was marshal, I’d not have to have been told who it was.”

“Yeah, you’re a treasure, John. A real treasure.”

“Well, here’s some advice you can treasure, lawman. You’d best deputize me and these boys right now, or else I doubt you’ll get this old boy to the jail without him getting away from you. Scar Nolan didn’t get famous for escaping the law by being easy to hold.”

“I ain’t no Scar Nolan!” the prisoner growled, struggling. “Honest to God, lawman! My name is Ed Wesson.”

“Shut up, you!” Bailey ordered.

“Bailey, it’s you who should shut up,” Luke said. “As much as you don’t like it, I’m the marshal here.”

“
Acting
marshal,” Bailey corrected. “Acting like a marshal without being one.”

“Bailey, I don’t know why you hold as deep a grudge against me as you do, but it’s nothing but a nuisance to you and me both. I’m officially appointed to fill in for Ben during his absence, and if the town had wanted you in that position, they’d have put you there. But they didn’t, and you being jealous over it don’t change that.”

“Oh, listen at him preaching from his speaking stump!” Bailey mocked. “Ain’t you proud to be took in by such a fine man of the law as this one, Scar? Not that he had nothing to do with it. It was me and these other boys who got you!”

“I’m telling you, this is a damned mistake!” the prisoner declared, struggling harder. “I’m no criminal!”

And suddenly he was free. A wrench and a twist, and by seeming luck he found a way to get out of the grip of the men holding him. He lunged away from them and toward the door, sending him directly past Luke.

He didn’t get far. Luke had his pistol out and swinging before the fellow had completed his first step. The heavy Colt caught the scarred man on the left temple and drove him down to the floor. He crumpled and quivered and passed out, groaning a curse as he did so.