Latigo 3, page 23
In a moment Helen appeared. She wore a brown dress. There were dark smudges under her eyes, because she’d had little sleep. She said, “I didn’t think you’d remember my maiden name. Can I help you, Mr. Lockwood?”
“At the ranch I got you to callin’ me Jed.”
“What can I do for you ... Jed?”
“Would you walk with me? There’s something I’d like to say.”
She got her coat, and they walked up a path through spring weeds; it hadn’t rained in a week. He told her about Ralph enlisting. “I s’spose I could get him out if I tried. But maybe I should let him be. What do you think?”
“Ralph’s big for his age. But it’s your decision.”
His voice held so much strain that sometimes she could barely make out what he said. She had to lean close to him as they walked. Then he told her about sending the girls down to his sister. “Only temporarily until ... until ...”
She glanced at his face; he had the look of a man being torn apart.
He said, “I’ve been wrong, so wrong ... about a lot of things. My son has left me. And you ... you’ve done so much good. Everyone has a kind word to say about you. It seems I’m the outcast, in a way, because of things I’ve said. But the way you’ve pitched in ... When you lived with us at the ranch, Emma was alive. But I ... I guess I loved you even then. My girls need a mother now that Emma’s gone ... Would you marry me?”
“Take me away from a life of sin?” Helen’s smile was tight.
“I suddenly find I don’t know very much about life. It isn’t all what I expected. I’m beginning to realize there’s more good in the world than can be found in a prayer book. People look up to you, and so do I. I ... I’d sell the ranch and we could go away. Someplace so far away nobody would ever know.”
She shook her head. “There’s always someone who would know.”
“Think of my girls.”
“I am. Mr. Lockwood, I went through this once with the children of my late husband. I refuse to go through it again.” That was the end of it. He shuffled away, and she went back and sat in her office at the desk and started to laugh. Then the tears began to fall. Across her mind strode Cole Cantrell and then poor, uncertain Jeremy Van Horn ... Cole she wanted and knew she could never have. Jeremy she had had, but the strain of living with her past had torn him to pieces. And now Jed Lockwood! What an incredible life, she thought.
Down in Basin City Claudius Max was thinking the same thing. Incredible. A man of his age enjoying more bliss than at any time since he married Theodora, when she was seventeen. He even envisioned the four of them, Theodora, Carrie, Annetta and himself together on Dupree’s bearskin rugs. But he knew that there was a limit to Theodora’s spirit of adventure. Not that he gave much of a damn, really; lately she was so petulant. But it would be interesting to see the blaze of jealousy in those green eyes that a sight of young bodies might produce.
From the first he had wondered if she was incapable of jealousy. Such a condition might be a blessing to most husbands. It only annoyed Max. He was certain that word of his affairs had reached her through the years, but she never mentioned the subject. And in their bedroom she was as wildly efficient as ever, except when in one of her moods, as now.
Which had led him to the conclusion early in their marriage that she had turned into a fine actress.
That in itself was irritating. In time he would think of some way to make her pay for pretending to enjoy him.
Theodora was aware of what went on at the Dupree studio. In fact, half of Basin City knew of it, but no one, owing to Max’s power, dared voice an objection. Last Sunday an itinerant minister who hoped to build a new church in Basin City had preached against Claudius Max, mentioning him by name in his denunciation. Funds for the new church suddenly dried up, and it was suggested he leave town. He did.
One morning, through her bedroom window, Theodora saw Rego Gattling ride into the yard. He had been away on business for Claudius. He and his horse were mud-splattered. Gattling put his horse in the barn, then climbed the outside stairs, to his living quarters above the carriage house.
Gattling cleaned himself up, then went to the house and knocked on the front door. He knew it was too early for Max to have left for the Python office, downtown.
It was Mrs. Max who opened the door, instead of the maid. Her cool green eyes appraised him.
“Yes, Mr. Gattling?”
“I just got back and wondered if I could have a word with your husband, ma’am.” He stood, hat in hand, feeling like an adolescent in the presence of such arrogant beauty. Her attitude pricked his temper, but he had the good sense to hold himself in.
“My husband is asleep in the library,” she said crisply. Her wrapper was green with small white flowers. It was open at the throat and far enough down so that he saw a film of blue lace strung across her breasts. He had never seen this much of her before. He felt his blood begin to warm.
“When can I see Mr. Max? I’ve got some pretty important news.” When she continued to look at him, the green eyes questioning, he said, “It’s about Cole Cantrell.”
“I’ll see if my husband is awake.” She walked away, her knees weak. Did it mean that Cole Cantrell was dead? How many times had she heard that, only to have him turn up later, very much alive. In New Sodom she had felt faint with excitement the day he had soundly beaten that hulking bare-knuckle champion who was now part of her husband’s entourage.
But the news Gattling brought to the library, Max rubbing sleep from his eyes, was that Cole Cantrell was alive.
“You told me the Crows found his body and buried him, or whatever they do with the dead!” Max stormed. “God damn it ...” Max broke off, glaring. “How do you know he’s alive?”
“Billy Bend saw him. Cantrell killed Broken Lance and those two renegade Kiowas I hired. Bend got away. Don’t worry, I’ll finish Cantrell. But I thought you should know he’s not dead.”
Claudius Max hunched his head on the thick neck. “He better be dead ... and soon.”
“Don’t worry.”
“And that other business I want finished. At Scalplock.”
Gattling’s smile was as cold as the eyes of Claudius Max.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
COLE CAME THROUGH Scalplock the following week. Sight of the ruin saddened but failed to shock him. He’d seen it all and worse in four years of war. That day he was dressed not as Indian but white, and mounted again on Trooper.
At the Shamrock he found his friend Duke Sateen, who spoke of the fire and Helen’s role afterward. Cole was pleased but he knew human nature. Memories were short. His purpose in the visit was to speak to Sateen about Rego Gattling and Billy Bend. It wouldn’t be the first time the professional gambler had acted as Cole’s eyes and ears.
Sateen was at a corner table, smoking a cheroot. He ran a stack of chips idly through his talented fingers. He spoke of Gattling. “Ah know of that bastard bounty hunter. As ah have said so often, Cap’n. Ah owe you my neck, literally. So anything ah can do ...”
Cole thanked him and pushed back his chair. “When I find those bastards, then I’ll likely go back to work for Intermountain.”
“Ah hear Gale’s sick with worry about his niece. Was on her way west, but nobody’s seen hide nor hair of the girl.”
“I figure to keep one eye open for her.” Cole got to his feet. “I’ll say hello to Helen, then be on my way.”
She was in her cubbyhole of an office when he knocked on her private door. She was delighted to see him. He kissed her cheek. He was glad she had not lost her young girl’s smile. They talked about the fire, and then she told him what Lockwood had proposed.
“Why not take him up on it?” Cole suggested. “You’d have protection ...”
She shook her head. “After I’ve paid Annie off I’ll sell out. That’ll be the end of me. I’ll simply disappear.” She gestured with both hands at the ceiling.
Then he told her about Gattling and described him. “Don’t let him in here. If he should try, get word to Duke Sateen. Will you?”
“Anything I can do for you, Cole, just ask.” She looked into his dark face for a moment, sighed and lowered her eyes.
“I ask this. Don’t disappear.”
That caused her to smile, and the brown eyes brightened. “I’ll always let you know where I am, Cole.”
He took her hands, kissed her cheek and left by the side door.
On a Monday a few days later she sat alone in the office. She practically closed down on Mondays. Sundays she didn’t open at all, and the following day was always slow. All the girls except two had the night off to do as they pleased, which wasn’t much, now that the town was in shambles. At ten o’clock Helen closed the place, and the two girls were free to join the others. They wouldn’t come straggling in till dawn. With the residential area gutted, their off nights with men friends were now spent under canvas.
She was going over the books to see if a few more dollars each month couldn’t be squeezed out to send an ailing Annie for doctor bills. Someone knocked on the side door. Duke had said he’d come over for a few hands of poker, so she unlocked the door and said to the shadowed figure, “Duke?”
A stranger thrust his way inside, closed the door and locked it. She spun around, lunged for her pistol in a desk drawer. The stranger slammed the drawer on her fingers. When she cried out he slapped her across the face. The blow knocked her to her knees.
Slowly she got to her feet, brown eyes tight with rage. A worm of blood crawled from a cut lip. “Get out of this town while you can still walk,” she said up into a pair of pale, cool eyes in a rather handsome face.
He laughed at the threat and shoved her into a chair. He sat on the corner of the desk, swinging a foot. His boots were of finely tooled leather, highly polished. His cold eyes drilled her.
“I want to hear about Cole Cantrell,” he said thinly, and drew a pistol from a shoulder holster concealed under a well-cut gray coat. He cocked the weapon, the metallic sound loud in the small office. As she stared at the gun she prayed that someone, forgetting her early closing on Monday, would bang on the front door and frighten him away. But one look at the glacial eyes, the cruel mouth, and she knew nothing would frighten him. He was so like the men who had murdered Cole’s parents and later found her in the mountains. Men utterly devoid of conscience.
He said, “Cantrell’s alive. Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
He slapped her again, almost knocking her from the chair. She thought of screaming but then looked at the cocked gun pointed at her breast.
“My name’s Rego Gattling.”
Something clicked in her mind. “Claudius Max sent you.” His smile confirmed it. Suddenly her voice was without hope.
“If you intend to kill me, get it over with.” She listened to her voice, which seemed surprisingly calm. She was slightly dizzy from the blows, and her head hurt. Blood from a cut his ring had torn in her cheek had bled into the collar of her blue dress. Her fingers were skinned from the slammed drawer. A French clock on a shelf whirred away the seconds that were left of her life.
“Max always worried that one day somebody important might listen to your story about Cantrell’s folks. And start wondering.”
“I hope Max hangs.”
“Nobody out here hangs but two-bit rustlers or drunks who murder their wives and wish they hadn’t and then pee in their pants when the rope goes around their neck.” Gattling’s gaze roved to her breasts, the fitted waist. “You’re pretty good-lookin’ for a madam. You oughta be workin’ a bed yourself instead of down here getting ink on your fingers with the book work.”
A wagon rattled by in the street. She sat tensely, hoping. But it went on by.
Then Gattling moved so swiftly she was caught by surprise. Holstering the gun, he sprang at her with a white silk handkerchief. It was whipped across her mouth, knotted in back. She tried to fight him, but he trapped her slim wrists in one hand, then ripped off her clothing with the other.
When she tried to press her knees together, he laughed. “Modesty in a whore? Jeezus, I can’t believe it.”
He threw her to the floor. Although she tried to fight and kick, all she succeeded in doing was make muted sounds behind the gag. Her body stiffened when he thrust into her savagely.
He said, “Hell, you might as well enjoy the last one of those things you’ll ever feel.” He laughed.
Helpless, she endured. As she had endured, as the child, the advances of a stepfather. Endured the murderers of Cole’s parents. There was only one difference. Before, she had survived. This time there would be no survival.
When he stood up, making adjustments to his clothing, he peered down at her spread limbs. “First free one I ever got in a parlor house.”
Then he drew an ivory-handled clasp knife from his pants pocket. Leaning down, he struck savagely at her throat and stepped back quickly so as not to soil his boots in the sudden gush of fluid. Her head rolled loosely to one side.
When she was finally found, posses hammered the roads on the four points of the compass, seeking the maniac who had committed the foulest crime in the history of the frontier settlement. They returned empty-handed. Scalplock went into mourning...
Chapter Thirty
A MAN COULD put his nose in the air and sniff spring, was the way Cole’s father, Badger Cantrell, used to put it when the first trace of greenery appeared along the creeks and the wind no longer drilled coldly into the flesh.
It was on such a day that Cole, on the trail of Billy Bend, neared the Crow camp. He thought of spending the night there but couldn’t take the time. He had to get to Basin City.
At a trading post Cole received staggering news. Quickly he swung west, toward Scalplock. Coming in from the northeast he had to pass the graveyard. A hunched man in a big hat, gray beard blowing in the spring breeze, worked on a column of granite with hammer and chisel. It was the tallest slab in the cemetery. Cole rode close and read a name: HELEN LYDIA HORNEY.
The stonecutter was working on the date of her death. Apparently no one knew when she was born.
The man removed his hat and said, “She was a fine lady. Reckon you must’ve knowed her, from the look on your face.”
“I did.” Cole rode on. A black wreath hung on the front door of Cindy Lou’s.
At the Shamrock he found Duke Sateen. “You’ve heard about Helen,” was Sateen’s greeting. He stood at the bar, bottle and glass at his elbow. He called for an extra glass and poured for Cole. “You look like you need one. Ah have needed many, these last days.”
Cole drank, refilled his glass, finally able to speak. “When did it happen?”
“Monday. She wasn’t found till the next day.”
“I heard that some maniac murdered her.”
“Had to be. She was gagged and her clothes torn off. She’d been raped. Ah declare ah would like five minutes alone with the one who did it. Ah must have ridden fifty miles that Tuesday, tryin’ to pick up a trail. There was not one damn thing.”
“My hunch tells me the bastards finally made it. God knows they tried often enough.”
“You mean Python?” Sateen shook his head. “Ah think you’re wrong, Cap’n. They’d shoot her an’ be done with it ...”
“Who’s marshal here now? What’s he think?”
Sateen explained that no replacement had been found for the one who had quit. “Of all times to need some law. The fire, and now ... poor Helen.” Sateen’s voice broke. Seldom had Cole seen the cynical gambler display emotion. Cole finally got it out of him. Sateen said he had told Helen he would be over that Monday night to play a few hands of poker.
“But ah had two fellas on the hook with full money belts. An’ by the time ah had their money ... Well, ah didn’t see a light next door, an’ it bein’ the night she closed up early, ah thought she’d gone to bed. If ah’d gone there like ah should, mebby she’d be alive.”
Cole poured himself a second drink.
“Don’t blame yourself, Duke. Blame me. I’ve left Claudius Max alive. It’s a little late, but one way or another I’m going to see him on the gallows.”
“You can’t do it alone. Ah’ll help ...”
“Stay out of it, Duke. I take all the risks. And when I nail that son of a bitch, which I will, I want all the credit.”
Each time Cole visited Basin City its growth surprised him. Buildings lined blocks where there had been only vacant lots a few months previously. Many fine residences had been built for the affluent. Streets were choked with wagons and buggies and saddle horses. The Python office had expanded, the adjoining building been taken over.
With hat brim pulled low, Cole scouted the building. He saw no sign of Gattling or Claudius Max. But he did spot Billy Bend, attired in brown hat and matching suit, march from the alley door to the privy out back.
When Bend stepped from the privy Cole was waiting. Bend froze. In those few seconds Cole grabbed Bend’s gun, tossed it through the open door of the privy and into one of the three holes. The muzzle of his .44 dug at Bend’s navel. Seizing him by an arm, he marched him up the alley and away from the Python building.
“You look downright elegant, Bend,” Cole said through his teeth. “New suit and all.”
Bend recovered quickly. “I can yell, an’ there’ll be help here ...”
Cole’s smile was icy. “What the hell makes you think you’re gonna yell? Or even breathe?”
Bend lost more color. “What you want, Cantrell?”
He asked about Claudius Max. Bend said he and Gattling and Grubb had left that morning for New Sodom.
“Left you in charge, huh?”
“Yeah, I got a good job.”
Cole pointed at some trees beyond vacant lots. “You walk ahead of me. If you even turn your head I’ll put a bullet in your spine. For the rest of your days you’ll have to hire somebody to set you on the chamber pot.”
Bend licked his lips but did as he was told. The back of his dark neck glistened with sweat as he walked toward the trees. Sweat darkened the collar of his new brown suit.
