Ralph Compton The Convict Trail (6 page)

Kane was not alarmed, but he was concerned enough to ask, “This Jack Henry feller, is he as good with the iron as they say?”

“Well, again that's a thing I don't know, but given the line of work he's in, I'd reckon he's as good as he needs to be.”

“Well, thanks for the warning,” Kane said.

“It's something to keep in mind,” Hayes replied.

“Yup, sure is,” Kane said.

“We're pulling out now, Marshal,” Hayes said. “I regard riding in the rain with considerable displeasure, but we're due back in Tyler in a couple of days and I don't have much option.” He stuck out his hand. “Well, good luck an' a safe trip.”

Kane took the little ranger's hand and nodded his thanks. “Maybe one day our trails will cross again.”

“Could be. Lawmen are a close-knit clan as well.”

 

Sam Shaver was guarding the prisoners as Kane watched the rangers leave, an odd sense of loss in him. Now he and Sam were on their own and they had it to do.

He stepped into the station and said, “Let's load 'em up, Sam. We've a fur piece to go and we might as well get started.”

Sam nodded and made a motion with his rifle. “You heard the marshal. On your feet.”

“Hell, it's raining,” Stringfellow said. “You can't drag a man out in that.”

“Don't give me sass, Stringfellow,” Kane said, drawing his Colt. “You won't melt. You ain't that sweet.”

The six men shuffled out of the door, their iron chains chiming. Bent over, Hick Dietz held his wounded hand close to his belly and looked at Kane. “A helluva thing to do to a man, shoot off his thumb.”

“Think yourself lucky,” Kane said. “I could've just as easily shot off something else.”

The mule team stood heads down in the lashing rain as Sam stepped out quickly and opened the cage door. He beckoned the prisoners forward.

Stringfellow, awkward in his shackles, scrambled into the wagon first, followed by the others. Sam clanked the door shut and turned the key in the lock. The convicts had no protection from the downpour and they were quickly soaked. They sat in the bed of the wagon, hunched and miserable, though Stringfellow's cold, calculating eyes never left Kane.

The marshal shrugged into his slicker and Sam did the same. Kane swung into the saddle, waited until Sam climbed up on the box, then waved him forward.

“Only a couple of hundred miles to go, Sam.” He grinned.

“Logan, that's all I been thinking about fer days, an' now I've come to it, having them boys back there is making me real nervous.”

“Me too, Sam. Me too.”

The afternoon was raked with rain, gloomy and dark, as though the night was impatient for the day to end. Kane rode point for the wagon, dropping back now and then to check on the prisoners. The going was easy, across flat, grassy country broken up by swampy playa lakes and stands of timber where shadows gathered. Heavy clouds had dropped so low, they settled on the high plains like an iron gray mist and the land seemed empty, shrouded in silence.

After Kane estimated they'd covered six miles, he cantered ahead to hunt up a place to stop for the night. The flat country offered little and he briefly considered returning to the spot where he and Sam had made camp the night before. But there had been no shelter from the rain in the clearing and his searching eyes reached into the darkening distance, hoping for something better, out of the rain.

Kane swung his sorrel into the pines and rode parallel to the trail, the big horse picking its way through the trees. He found what he was looking for a few minutes later and stared at it in disbelief, surprised as the widow woman who prayed for a man, then discovered one sitting at the foot of her bed come morning.

It was a roofless sod cabin but, incredibly, the door was intact, banging open and shut on its rawhide hinges at the whim of the wind. Around the cabin the tops of the pines were strung with mist, and rain filtered through their branches, falling to the ground with the sound of a ticking clock. Kane rode closer, then swung out of the saddle.

The cabin had never been roofed, he could see that. He scouted around and saw no source of water. Kane decided that someone had started to build the cabin and had then abandoned it, perhaps intimidated by the need to dig a deep well.

But Kane did a rethink when he found a rusted, strap-iron arrowhead embedded in the door. He also saw that the rough timbers were perforated by a dozen bullet holes. A settler had made a last stand here, most likely against marauding Apaches or Kiowas riding north from Texas.

A few minutes later, he found the settler's body, or what was left of it, lying at the bottom of a shallow depression at the rear of the cabin. Some of the yellowed bones had been scattered by animals, but the skull, rib cage and arms still remained. There was enough to tell the man's story. He had been dragged out of the cabin, spread-eagled on the ground and then tortured to death. The ivory jaws of his skull were wide-open and the memory of his last, agonized shriek remained, echoing in dreadful silence among the pines.

The settler, whoever he was, had died a death Kane would wish on no man, and he felt sadly depressed as he rode out of the trees and waited for Sam on the trail.

 

Kane stretched his slicker over a corner of the cabin and held it down with small rocks he found lying around. “See if you can build a fire under that, Sam,” he said. “The wood I picked up is damp, but it will burn. Eventually.”

“Smoke some too, Logan.” The old man stood inside the cabin doorway and nodded to the prison wagon. “You bringing them in?”

“Long enough to feed them. Then they go back.”

“Mighty wet.”

“That's their problem. It's going to be wet in here.”

“We cross the Red tomorrow. Going to feel good to get out of Texas, seem like we're finally headed somewhere.”

“Seem like.”

“Will we make it, Marshal?”

“We'll make it. Maybe we'll arrive with no prisoners because I've had to gun them all, but we'll ride into Fort Smith with our hides intact, nineteen, twenty days from now.”

“The judge doesn't want them rannies dead. He wants them to hang.”

“He doesn't always get what he wants, Sam.”

“Hope our grub holds out.”

“It'll hold out. If it don't, I'll kill some meat along the trail.”

The old man shook his head. “Ain't like me to hear footsteps in the fog, but Fort Smith . . . well, it's a long ways from har to there.”

Kane smiled. “It's a long ways from har to anywhere.”

“I'll get the fire started. Coffee, salt pork an' pan bread for supper, same for breakfast, until the flour an' coffee run out.”

Kane's smile stretched into a rare grin. “Sam, what would I do without you?”

“Starve to death, most likely.”

The marshal left the cabin and walked to the wagon. The rain was still heavy and lightning shimmered in the dark clouds without sound.

Kicking aside a tangle of legs and feet, Stringfellow moved closer to the side of the cage. “How long you gonna keep us out here?” he demanded.

“Not too long, Stringfellow. Once Mr. Shaver has the grub ready, I'll take you into the cabin and feed you.”

“The old coot is mister, an' I'm Stringfellow.”

“Uh-huh, that's about the size of it.”

“The cabin don't have a roof, damn you. We'll be as wet in there as we are out here.”

“Stringfellow,” Kane said, “I'm not concerned with your comfort. I was ordered to escort you to Fort Smith. How you get there was left up to me.”

“Hey, Kane!” Joe Foster yelled from the rear of the wagon, his young face made old by hate and anger. “If I ever get an even break with you, I'll—”

“You wouldn't even come close,” Kane interrupted, smiling. “All over the West, Boot Hills are full of tinhorns like you.”

Foster opened his mouth to speak again, but Stringfellow cursed him into silence. “Your time will come, Joe,” he said finally. “Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but it will come. Now shut your trap.”

Amos Albright looked at Kane, then ran a slimy tongue over his top lip. “Hey, Marshal, you gonna find us a woman soon, maybe a little Indian gal, huh? All you got to do is th'ow her into the back o' the wagon an' let's have at her.”

Albright had the face of a cadaver, a tallow skin that never took the sun and red-rimmed yellow eyes. His wet, loose-lipped mouth always hung slack, as though his jaw were broken.

Kane said, “You enjoy abusing women, don't you, Albright? You ever bite them on the shoulders?”

“Sure I do, an' I bite hard. Hot little gal expects that from a man. What do you do, Marshal, huh? What do you do to a woman?”

Albright started to cough, gagging on his own lust. Kane ignored him and stepped into the cabin. “I seen your smoke—smelled it too,” he said to Sam.

“She's smokin', all right, but there'll be enough fire to bile the coffee an' cook the grub.” The old man handed Kane the coffeepot. “Fill that from the water barrel, Logan. I'd do it my ownself, but this danged rain is a misery. My old knees is stiff as a frozen rope with the rheumatisms.”

Kane took the pot and said, “You set close to the fire an' warm up them bones, Sam.”

“Know what I really need, Logan? Brown paper, vinegar and an Irish potato. You soak the paper in vinegar and then make a poultice of shredded potato. Spread the poultice on the knees and cover with vinegar paper. It's a sovereign remedy for the rheumatisms.”

“We don't have any o' that, Sam.”

“I know we don't, so getting me the coffee water will have to do.” His eyes lifted to Kane's face. “You be careful out there, Marshal. I heard them boys talkin' to you an' none of them has a good story to tell.”

Kane walked to the wagon, lifted the tin lid of the water barrel and filled the pot. The convicts sat soaked and miserable in the wagon, saying nothing, but all eyes were hard on the marshal, their hostility hanging like black bile in the air, crowding Kane so close he could almost smell its vile stink.

He made to step back to the cabin but stopped in his tracks when he heard the soft fall of hooves on the wet ground behind him. Kane carefully laid the coffeepot at his feet and turned, his hand close to his holstered gun.

“Trusting man, ain't you?” a voice said from the darkness.

Kane spoke in that direction. “You ought to know better than ride into a man's camp without announcing yourself.”

“Never occurred to me.”

Leather creaked and hooves thudded as the man rode closer. But now, as the darkness opened up, Kane saw three riders, not one as he'd first supposed.

“Stop right where you're at,” he said. “I can drill ya clean through from here.”

The rain hissed around him as the riders drew rein. He made a quick study of the three men. They were wearing yellow oilskin slickers and looked alike as peas in a pod. All wore black plug hats, broadcloth pants tucked into English riding boots, and in the V formed by the lapels of their slickers, Kane saw rounded, celluloid collars and tightly knotted ties.

All sported sweeping mustaches and thick burn-sides, but they didn't seem to be Western men, although the Winchesters across their saddle horns looked frontier enough. They sat their saddles, patient men, watching Kane with shadowed eyes, as if the steel-bladed rain that hammered on their hats and shoulders did not exist.

“Behind you, Marshal. On your left.”

Sam's voice carried across the distance. Kane did not turn, knowing the old man would be standing outside the cabin with his rifle.

“What can I do for you fellers?” the marshal asked. “I can offer you coffee, not much else.”

“We're traveling,” the only rider who had spoken so far said. “We'll pass on the coffee.”

His accent was hard to place and Kane wrestled with it.

The man tilted his head, his chin jutting in the direction of the wagon. “Who are they?”

“Convicts.” Kane pulled back his sopping vest and showed the star. “I'm Deputy Marshal Logan Kane. These men are on their way to a hanging at Fort Smith.”

“The American people hate to see that,” the rider said. “White men caged like animals.”

“They'd hate it a sight worse if them white men ever got loose.”

Stringfellow and the others were crowded close to the wagon's iron bars, intent on the three riders as though they thought their saviors had arrived.

Never a man to stand in one place for too long, especially in a downpour, Kane was all through with it. “Mister, state your business or ride on.”

“State my business?”

“Did I just hear an echo?”

The rider eased himself in the saddle. His gaze slid off Kane, moved to Sam and lingered for a moment. Then he sighed and said, “My name is Carmine Provanzano. These are my brothers, Vito and Teodoro. We're from New Orleans.”

“Fur piece off your home range, ain't you?” Kane said.

“Like I told you, we're traveling.”

“Well, it's been right nice talking with you,” Kane said. “But I've got prisoners to feed.”

He moved to lift the coffeepot, but Provanzano's voice stopped him. “Marshal, my brothers and I are part of a large and successful business family. Mostly our commercial interests are centered on the New Orleans docks, but in recent years we've branched into the banking and hospitality industries, among others.”

Kane badly wanted his coffee and the scant warmth of Sam's smoky fire, and now he was irritated. “Mister, what's all that to me, huh?”