Savage Sunday, page 25
“If Hill couldn’t get the job done, he may as well be dead. Besides, ’im getting’ kilt has saved us twenty-five hunnert dollars.”
“Yeah, but MacCallister is still alive, and we ain’t been able to snatch up his woman.”
“Maybe we’re goin’ after the wrong man,” Lou suggested. “Maybe we should be goin’ after Cunningham. He ain’t no gunman like MacCallister, ’n he don’t have any people around him like that old guy and the Celestial that’s allus around MacCallister.”
“Before we come to such a decision, let me see what our friend wants us to do,” Bart suggested.
“How come you ain’t never told me who our friend is?” Lou asked.
“There’s no need for you to know. Besides, I had to swear that I’d never tell.”
“What if somethin’ happened to you? Then all this would be for nothin’.”
“You don’t need to worry none ’bout that. If somethin’ happened to me before all this was done, our friend would get in touch with you.”
So far, in all the failed attempts against MacCallister and Meagan, resulting in the assailants being killed, only one, Black Liberty, was of Bart’s original gang. As a result, Bart was able to go to town and spend some time looking around without danger of being recognized.
* * *
“Bart, what are you doing in town? It’s dangerous for you to be here, isn’t it?” asked Norman Sweeney, the middleman in all of this craziness.
“Nah, it ain’t dangerous at all. I ain’t hardly even been in town before, so they don’t nobody even know me.” Bart went on to explain how he and Lou Martell had come to the conclusion that they were after the wrong man.
“Well, you’re right. We have been going after the wrong person. I suppose you have been reading the newspaper stories in the Leader?”
“Oh yeah, I’ve been readin’ ’em. That’s how come I come into town in the first place to see iffen you want ’nything done about Cunningham.”
“Absolutely. Those articles he has been writing are as dangerous, or perhaps even more dangerous than the investigation MacCallister has been conducting.”
“Ha! So we are going after him. That shouldn’t be no problem. Cunningham will be a lot easier to kill than MacCallister.”
“No, don’t kill him.”
“What do you mean, don’t kill him? How are we goin’ to stop all them articles he’s a-writin’ if we don’t kill ’im?”
“That’s just it. We don’t want him to stop writing articles. We just want him to change them, to make them more favorable to us.”
“How are we goin’ to do that?”
“We are going after the woman.”
“You may not have noticed it,” Bart said, “but we’ve done had five men kilt tryin’ to snatch her up.”
“No, I’m not talking about her. I’m talking about Cunningham’s woman.”
“Who is his woman?” Bart asked.
“Joel Prescott’s widow.”
“Wait a minute. Her husband was just kilt, ’n you’re sayin’ that she’s Cunningham’s woman? That’s kinda fast, ain’t it? Are you sure she’s his woman?”
“I’m quite sure. Her name is Nettie, and as you may have read, she’s the new president of the bank.
“Yeah, I read that. But what can she do to hurt us? The money has already been redeposited.”
“It’s as I told you. She is Cunningham’s woman, and if we take her, it will give us leverage with him.”
“You mean set up an ambush for him, like the one we was goin’ to do for MacCallister.”
“You’re thinking small. Remember, I said it would give us leverage. If we have Mrs. Prescott, we can use that to force Cunningham to write any anything we want. For example, he has been looking into the situation, and has come to the conclusion that Prescott committed suicide after all.”
“Yeah, well how are we goin’ to snatch her up? We sure ain’t had a lot of success goin’ after MacCallister’s woman.”
“MacCallister, that old man whose name is Elmer, and the Chinaman, Wang, are always around the Parker woman. They are used to living in danger so they are always alert for it, as you can well attest, since you have lost several men in previous attempts.”
“Only one of them was my man,” Bart said.
“Nine men have died either trying to capture Miss Parker or kill MacCallister. And one of those was James Hill.”
“Onliest thing is, it warn’t MacCallister who kilt Evil,” Bart pointed out.
“Nevertheless, Hill, who I considered our best opportunity to kill MacCallister, failed, and is dead. It is time to change our tactics, and that means we will take Nettie Prescott.”
Cabin hideout
“What did you find out?” Lou Martell asked after Bart returned from his sojourn into town.
“I found out we been goin’ after the wrong woman,” Bart said.
“Well, who the hell are we supposed to go after?”
“Nettie Prescott.
“Nettie Prescott? Hell, I don’t even know who that is.”
“She’s the president of the bank.”
“Yeah, well, what good will it do to get her? The bank ain’t got no money.”
“Trust me. She will be helpful,” Bart insisted.
* * *
John and Nettie were having their dinner in the Cannady House dining room.
“That was a beautiful article you wrote about me,” Nettie said.
John smiled. “Well, when you have a good subject, it’s rather easy to write well about that subject.”
“But what good will it do?” Nettie asked.
“What good will what do? What do you mean?”
“I am president of a bank that has no money,” Nettie said. “You have to admit that, under those circumstances, it is a useless position.”
“I will admit nothing of the kind,” John said. “Duff is the one who came up with the idea, and he must have a reason for it. He is one of the most intelligent men I have ever known.”
Nettie chuckled. “Well, seeing as you were once a college professor, and spent a lot of time around a lot of other college professors, saying that Duff MacCallister is one of the most intelligent men you have ever known is quite a comment.”
“Nettie, don’t confuse education with intelligence. Many people have made that mistake, to their own detriment.”
After dinner they walked up the stairs together, she to go to her room, which was number 7, and he to number 3, which was his room.
Nettie couldn’t explain what she was feeling. Whatever it was, it came with a sense of guilt. There was a lightness in her head, and an emptiness to her stomach, even though she had just eaten. She took the door key from her reticule, but her hands were trembling so that she was having difficulty putting the key in the lock.
“Let me help you,” John offered, and taking the key from her, he opened the door.
“John, would you like to . . . uh . . . come in for a few minutes?” Nettie invited.
“I would like nothing better,” he said as he followed her into her room and closed the door behind him.
Turning to Nettie, John put his hands on her shoulders, holding her in such a way that she was looking at him. Though she knew she felt a strong attraction toward him, she had been able to suppress those feelings. But in the confines of her room with his hands on her shoulders, she felt a charge of excitement.
“John, I think that we . . . should . . .” The words of her unfinished sentence were much huskier than her normal voice.
“I think we should, too.” With a seductive smile, he leaned down to touch his lips against hers as gently as a drifting floret from a puffy dandelion head.
“John, no, I . . . it’s too soon,” Nettie said, but even as she mouthed the words, he took her head in his hands and she kissed him passionately.
The kiss deepened, then she felt John pull back, and she looked at him with an injured gaze. “John?”
“Not yet, Nettie. It is, as you said, too early. Let’s let it build of its own volition.”
“Yes. Yes, that’s as it should be.”
Chapter Thirty-four
They arrived in a wagon in the middle of the night, and as they passed the courthouse, Lou Martell glanced up at the clock tower.
“It’s lacking twelve minutes of three, if that clock is right.”
Billy Ogden was driving the wagon and he chuckled. “This is the first time I’ve ever been out this late unless I was passed out drunk on the saloon floor or upstairs in a saloon girl’s bed.”
“You was most likely passed out in the bed, too,” Gus Hagen said, and the others laughed.
“Quit your laughin’,” Semmes said. “You want to wake up the whole dang town?”
It didn’t seem likely that the town would be waking up anytime soon, so with shushes and silence they continued through town until they turned down the alley behind the Cannady Boarding House.
Semmes, Ogden, and Hagen stayed with the wagon. Bart, Lou, and Stump Waters went in through the back door, then upstairs.
“She’s in room seven,” Bart said in a low but authoritative voice.
When they reached the door to room number 7, Bart produced a skeleton key, which he used in the keyhole. Pushing the door open, they went inside quietly.
Nettie awakened just as the three men reached the side of her bed. Looking up, she saw them and drew a breath to scream, but one of then held a cloth over her mouth and nose. There was a sweet, cloying smell, then nothing.
* * *
“Coffee, Mr. Cunningham?” the Cannady House server asked John the next morning.”
“Yes, thank you, but hold the breakfast until Mrs. Prescott joins me.”
“Very good sir,” the server answered.
John drank his coffee and watched the others eat their breakfast as he waited on Nettie. It was strange that she would be late. He knew she wanted to go to the bank the first thing and to assume her role as president. She didn’t think she would have any trouble with Eli, but at dinner last night she had asked John to go with her.
The other breakfast diners began to leave until, finally, John decided to go up to her room to see what was keeping her. When he reached her room, he saw her door was slightly ajar, and that concerned him a little.
“Nettie?” he called quietly. When he received no response, he pushed the door open. “Nettie?” he called again.
John stepped inside and saw that her bed was still mussed. That was very unlike her and, concerned, he stepped deeper into the room for closer examination. That was when he saw the note on the bed.
Cunningham—
We have took yer woman. Rite a story and say that you changed yer mind and now you know that Prescott kilt his ownself. If you do that we’ll let her go. If you don’t do it we’ll kill her.
“Of course we will look for her,” Chief Peach told a distraught John when he went to the police with the note. “But if they have taken her out of the city, we won’t have any jurisdiction.”
“MacCallister,” Sergeant Creech said. “He’s the one you should see. He’s got that warrant from the governor that will let him go anywhere.”
“Yes! Yes, I’ll go see Duff.”
John found Duff and the others just finishing their breakfast in the dining room of the Interocean Hotel, and he showed them the note. “They’ve taken Nettie somewhere,” John said, distraught.
“Have you seen Chief Peach?” Duff asked.
“Yes, and he says if they are somewhere in the city he will find them, but if they aren’t in the city, he has no authorization to look for them.”
“Gardner,” Elmer said.
“Gardner?”
“Don’t you ’member that he talked about this feller named Bart, ’n so did the black man who tried to take Meagan.”
“Aye, I do remember,” Duff said. “Come on, I think we should be for paying a visit to the jail.”
* * *
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout nobody named Bart,” Gardner said a short time later when Duff and the others visited with him through the jail cell.
“That ain’t what you said when we took you,” Elmer said.
“Mr. Gardner, would you be for calling yourself a smart man?” Duff asked.
“Yeah, I’m smart enough.”
“And yet you have been here in the jail for several days, but your friend, Bart has made nae attempt to get you out.”
“What . . . what does that have to do with me bein’ smart?” Gardner asked.
“If you were a smart man, you’d be for making yourself a deal now.”
“A deal? What kind of deal?”
“A trade, you might say. If you would tell us what you know about this man called Bart, and where to find him, I’ll see that you are let out of jail,” Duff said.
“What do you mean you’ll see that I’m let out of jail? You ain’t a policeman.”
“He’s more than that, Gardner,” John said, speaking for the first time. “He is a territorial marshal with authority over the police. If he says he can get you out of jail, he can do it.”
Gardner was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know nothin’ about tryin’ to kill MacCallister or tryin’ to grab up the women. So there ain’t nothin’ I can say to help you there.”
“You mentioned a man by the name of Bart, and so did the black man who tried to take Miss Parker.”
“Black Lib got hisself kilt, didn’t he?” Gardner asked.
“Black Lib?” John asked.
“Yeah, he called hisself Black Liberty, but most just called him Black Lib. There didn’t nobody knows his real name.” Gardner said
“When you say ‘most,’ would you be talking about men who are part of Bart’s gang?”
Gardner was quiet for a moment before he answered. “Yeah.”
“And you were also part of this man Bart’s gang?” John asked.
“Yeah.”
“Tell me what you can about him.” Duff asked now.
“This will be part of the deal?” Gardner asked.
“If you give us enough information to help us find Mrs. Prescott,” Duff replied.
“What do you want to know?”
“Who is this man, Bart, and why has he been after me, and now after Mr. Cunningham?”
“His name is Bart Jenkins, ’n he’s got some deal goin’ with the money that was took from the bank. Onliest thang is, he ain’t actual got the money yet. There don’t nobody but him know who it was that took the money or where the money is at now.”
“Where can we find him?”
“When I was runnin’ with him ’n the others, they was holed up ’n a cabin ’bout five miles west of here.”
“I appreciate the information,” Duff said as he and the others turned away.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Gardner called. “Ain’t you goin’ to let me go, now?”
“Not until we ken the information you gave us is correct.”
“What if you go out there ’n you get killed?”
“You’ll still be in jail,” Duff said.
Outlaw cabin
When Nettie awakened, she had a headache and a total sense of confusion. The last thing she remembered was going to bed in her own apartment at the Cannady Boarding House. She didn’t know where she was, but she knew she wasn’t at the boardinghouse.
Was she dreaming? If this was a dream, it was certainly the most realistic dream she had ever had.
Her nose itched and she tried to scratch it, only to learn that she was tied to the bed. “What?” she said aloud and knew it was no dream. “Hello? Where am I?”
“Well, well, look who is awake,” someone said.
Nettie felt a sense of panic. “Who are you?”
“The name is Jenkins. Bart Jenkins, but we’re all friends here, so you can just call me Bart. Hey, fellers, she’s awake in here. She didn’t die.”
Several other men came into the little room and looked down at her on the bed.
“We was worried maybe we done too much chloroform. I hear tell that too much of that can kill a person. But, here you are, alive ’n breathin’,” said one of the other men.
“This here feller is Lou Martell,” Bart said, the introduction all the more bizarre, under the circumstances.
“What am I doing here, and how did I get here?”
“We brought you here, girly, my men and me. ’N the reason you’re here is so’s we can make your boyfriend put in the paper whatever it is that we want him to write.”
“My boyfriend?” Nettie asked.
“Ain’t that feller that’s been writin’ all them stories in the newspaper your boyfriend?” Bart asked.
“No,” she said. “I mean, I don’t know. Yes, yes I suppose you could say that he is my boyfriend. But how did you know?”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry your purty head none about that. We got ways of knowin’. ’N if he really is your boyfriend, he’ll do what we asked him to do to get you free.”
“I hope he doesn’t,” Nettie said.
“What do you mean you hope he don’t? Don’t you want to get turned loose of here?” Bart asked.
“I figure that I’ll be kept alive only as long as I can be used as a bargaining chip. Once you get what you want, there will be no need for you to keep me alive any longer.”
Bart chuckled. “Damn, Martell, what do you think about that? Turns out Miz Prescott is smarter ’n we thought.”
“Yeah, I reckon she is. You want some breakfast?” Lou asked.
Breakfast, Nettie thought. She had planned to have breakfast with John, yet here she was, God only knows where, and she was being offered breakfast. It was the last thing she wanted, and she started to say no, but she stopped.
“How do you propose I eat breakfast when I am tied up, hand, and foot?”
“Untie her, Semmes,” Bart said him. “It ain’t like she’s goin’ to run away. She don’t know where she is, ’n she ain’t hardly wearin’ no clothes.”
Nettie gasped. It wasn’t until that moment that she realized she was still in her nightgown. That meant she was taken from her bed. But how were they able to do that?
