A Texas Hill Country Christmas (14 page)

The stagecoach carrying Smoke and Sally on their journey rolled on steadily from Stephenville to Brownwood to Brady, through a couple of days of off-and-on rain. Some of the storms were torrential and forced the new driver, Jonas McClaren, to pull to the side and wait because water was running across the road too swift and deep for the stagecoach to risk it.

Smoke had been watching the streams they crossed. Luckily they were all spanned by bridges, because the creeks and rivers were swollen. The ground was saturated from the weeks of intermittent rain, and any downpour lasting more than a few minutes was enough to make the streams rise.

Sally saw her husband frowning out the window and asked quietly, “Do you think we're going to get there all right, Smoke?”

“I'm sure we will,” he said. “McClaren seems like a careful man. He won't take the stage into anything that seems too risky.”

Herman Langston had left the coach in Brownwood to make sales calls on the accounts he had there, but the Purcells, Mrs. Carter, and Arley Hicks were still aboard. Arley's wounded shoulder was bandaged properly now, and a black silk sling supported his arm. He hadn't lost any of his youthful enthusiasm.

“I hope this whole part of the country ain't been washed away by the time I get to Bandera,” he said. “Won't be any use havin' a ridin' job if there ain't nowhere to ride.”

Donald Purcell said, “I could teach you how to speak properly, you know, young man.”

“You sayin' there's somethin' wrong with the way I talk?” Arley asked with a frown.

“I mean no offense, but . . .”

“You understand what I'm sayin', don't you?”

“Of course I do,” Purcell said.

“Then I don't see what could be wrong with it. That's the whole point of talkin', ain't it? To make folks understand what you're sayin'?”

Sally said, “I think Mr. Purcell means that there are rules to language that people are supposed to follow.”

“Well, there you go. I ain't never been much o' one for followin' the rules.”

“Believe me, I understand about that,” Sally said, her eyes twinkling with amusement as she looked over at Smoke. “I married a man who's never minded breaking a rule if he needed to.”

“Just doing what needs to be done,” Smoke said with a chuckle.

“But I was a teacher, too, like Mr. Purcell,” Sally went on, “so I understand why he said he could help you to speak in a more proper manner.”

“You taught school, Mrs. Jensen?” Purcell said. “You never mentioned that before.”

“Yes, I was working at a school in Idaho when Smoke and I met,” Sally said.

The settlement of Bury, Idaho, held a lot of memories for both of them, mostly bad. That town had been under the thumb of the three men responsible for the death of Smoke's father Emmett. A lot of blood had been spilled when Smoke caught up to them and settled that score.

But there were good memories, too, because that was where the two of them had met and fallen in love. Neither of them would ever forget
that
, either.

Arley said, “Well, I reckon if you was to think I oughta learn how to talk gooder, Mrs. Jensen, I might give it a shot. I ain't promisin' nothin', though.”

Purcell said, “You could start by not using the word
ain't
anymore. That sentence you just spoke should be phrased like this: I am not promising anything, however.”

“Dadgum! If I was to talk like that, I'd sound just like I had a stick up my—Beg your pardon, ladies. Almost said too much there.”

“Yeah, you did,” Smoke said.

Arley took his hat off, scratched his head, and said, “I ain't—I mean, I'm not sure a feller like me could ever be edjimicated, but I'll give 'er a try.”

“See?” Sally said with a smile. “That's the first step.”

A short time later, the stagecoach crossed another bridge. It was raining hard by now, and the shutters over the windows were closed to keep out as much of the dampness as possible. Smoke opened one slightly to look out as the coach rattled across the bridge. The creek was high, with muddy brown water roiling along less than a foot below the planks.

Half a mile later, McClaren slowed his team and brought the stagecoach to a stop. He dropped down on one side of the vehicle while the guard, Ike Plumlee, got off on the other side. McClaren opened the door on his side and said, “Cougar Creek Station, folks. Usually we just change teams here, but I reckon we'd best spend the night and give the rain a chance to stop so maybe the streams'll go down. Bridge back yonder was almost flooded, and the south fork of this creek crosses the road another mile farther on. That bridge is lower than the one we just went over, so there's a chance it's washed out already. Even if it ain't, I wouldn't dare take the coach over it with the creek up like it is. Too big a chance we'd get swept off.”

Mildred Purcell sighed and said, “I'm beginning to despair of ever reaching our destination.”

“Oh, we'll get there, ma'am,” McClaren told her. “May take us longer'n what we figured, that's all. Better to get there safe than on time, though.”

Mildred sniffed and looked like she wasn't sure if she agreed with that idea or not.

McClaren went on, “Ladies, let me go in the station and get some canvas you can hold over your heads to keep from gettin' too wet whilst you run in. It's a real toad-strangler out here.”

Smoke could tell that was true without even seeing the rain, just from its constant drumming on the coach roof.

A few minutes later, the passengers made the dash to the station, which was a sprawling structure with walls made from large chunks of red sandstone and a slate roof. A barn and a corral sat to one side.

Sally held a square of canvas over her head while Smoke grasped her arm and helped her along so she wouldn't slip and fall in the mud. Donald Purcell did the same with his wife. Smoke had told Mrs. Carter to stay in the coach and he would come back for her, but Arley gave the woman a hand.

“My right arm's still all right, so I don't mind pitchin' in,” the young cowboy declared.

Once all the passengers had disembarked, Jonas McClaren pulled the coach over to the barn and drove inside.

The station was run by a spade-bearded man named Olmsted and his wife. Their three sons worked as hostlers, and their daughter helped her mother with the cooking. The station's large main room was a little drafty, but the air was much warmer inside than out, and the roof was nice and tight, allowing no leaks.

“You folks gather around the fire and dry out,” Mrs. Olmsted said, pointing to a huge stone fireplace on one side of the room. “I've got coffee brewing and a pot of stew simmering, along with fresh bread in the oven. You'll be warm inside and out in no time.”

“That sounds wonderful to me,” Sally said. “It seems like we've been damp and chilled forever.”

The heat from the fireplace made the passengers' clothes steam as they stood around it, basking in the warmth. McClaren and Plumlee came in from the barn, shed their slickers on the enclosed porch, and joined the group.

By the time everyone was relatively dry, Mrs. Olmsted had supper on the long table in the center of the room.

As they began to eat, Olmsted pulled on his beard and said, “It's a good thing you decided to stop for the night, Jonas. I sent one of the boys down to the south fork bridge a while ago, and he came back and said the water was already washin' over it a little. Probably a foot deep on the bridge by now.”

“Think it's likely to wash out?” McClaren asked.

“Don't know about that. Bridge is pretty sturdy. It's been through some floods before without washin' out. But it sure wouldn't be safe to drive over it right now. I wouldn't risk either of those bridges, to tell you the truth.”

“But if there are bridges on both sides of the station,” Mildred Purcell said, “doesn't that mean we're stuck here?”

“Only until Cougar Creek goes down,” McClaren said. “Maybe tomorrow, if the rain will stop.”

“And if it doesn't,” Mrs. Olmsted said, “we have plenty of supplies here, and we'll be glad for the company so you can stay as long as you need to, ma'am.”

Neither of the Purcells looked happy about that prospect, but there was no use arguing with the weather. There was nothing they could do to change it.

The Olmsted boys came in a few minutes later, having finished unhitching and caring for the team. They were big, strapping, blond-headed youngsters who appeared to take after their mother instead of their sparsely, dark-haired father.

The food was good, and as Smoke washed down the meal with a cup of excellent coffee, he started to grow a little drowsy. Despite the relatively early hour, it was already dark outside. Folks would be turning in early tonight, he thought. This was good sleeping weather.

Christmas was only a few days away now. Smoke and Sally had intended to spend the holiday at Chester Fielding's ranch, but the delays had them running a couple of days behind schedule. They would reach Mason tomorrow, Smoke reminded himself, and it was only a day's ride from there to Fielding's spread on the Llano River, so they ought to be at their destination by Christmas Day.

Assuming nothing else happened....

After supper, Olmsted packed his pipe and lit it, then said, “If you gentlemen want to gather around the fire again, I've got a bottle of good brandy, and it seems like a fine night to open it up.”

“Good brandy?” Purcell repeated. “Out here in the middle of nowhere?”

Olmsted's teeth clamped down a little harder on his pipe stem, Smoke noted. The stationman said, “Why don't we just try it, mister?”

“That's fine with me. I'd like to be persuaded.”

Smoke wasn't much of a drinker, but a small glass of brandy might not be bad on a night like this, as Olmsted had said.

“I'll join you fellas in a few minutes,” McClaren said as he stood up. “I want to check on the horses.”

“My boys do a good job,” Olmsted said.

“I'm sure they do. It's just a habit of mine to look in on my animals before I settle down for the evenin'.”

“Well, in that case, go right ahead.”

McClaren put his hat on and went onto the porch to shrug back into his slicker. He closed the door and went out into the night.

 

 

A dark figure stood in the rain, apparently not even feeling it as the big drops pounded at him. He was practically invisible in the darkness. In fact, the man who came out of the station and trudged toward the barn passed within ten feet of him and never saw him.

The young men who had come out of the barn earlier had left a lantern burning inside. The watcher saw light spill out as the man from the station pulled one side of the door open. The glow silhouetted his burly frame. He went inside, leaving the door ajar.

The watcher glided toward the light, and as he did, he reached down to the bone handle of the knife stuck behind the sash around his waist.

Death smiled in the darkness.

Smoke was no expert on such things, but he thought the brandy was pretty good, just as Olmsted claimed. Even Donald Purcell admitted that, although grudgingly. The men didn't talk much, but an air of camaraderie began to steal over the group gathered by the fireplace. Ike Plumlee got a pipe going, too, and Purcell took a cigar out of his vest pocket and lit it with a burning twig he retrieved from the fire. He didn't offer a cigar to anyone else, though, Smoke noted.

After a few minutes, a frown creased Plumlee's forehead. The shotgun guard said, “Jonas should've been back by now. That barn's close by. It wouldn't take him long to walk over there, check on the horses, and get back here.”

“Maybe there was a problem with the animals,” Purcell suggested.

“Shouldn't be,” Olmsted said. “Like I told you, my boys do a good job takin' care of the teams. They been doin' it since they was just little sprouts.” The station manager's three sons were sitting at the table, enjoying second helpings of their mother's stew. “Boys, did all those horses look all right when you left 'em out there?”

“They were all fine, Pa,” one of the young men answered. “Shouldn't be no problems with 'em.”

“Maybe Mr. McClaren slipped in the mud, fell down, and hurt hisself,” Arley said.

Plumlee set his pipe aside, stood up from the chair where he'd been sitting, and said, “I'm gonna go make sure he's all right.”

“He's bound to be back in a minute—” Olmsted began.

“I don't care. Jonas and me been partnered up on the stagecoaches for a while now. He's a good friend.”

Smoke got to his feet as well and said, “I'll come with you.” Some instinct had begun stirring at the back of his mind. He couldn't have said why, exactly, but he felt like something might be wrong.

As he headed for the door, Sally called from the other end of the room where she'd been talking to the other women, “Smoke, where are you going?”

“Just out to the barn for a few minutes,” he told her.

“Is something wrong?”

He smiled and shook his head.

“Hope not.”

“You're finally dried off. Try not to get too wet again,” she said.

On the porch, Smoke put on his slicker and hat. Most of the water had dripped off both of them by now. Plumlee followed suit. He picked up his double-barreled coach gun, too, and put it under the slicker to keep it dry.

“Don't like to go too many places without it,” he explained to Smoke. “Reckon I'm in the habit of packing it.”

“I feel the same way about my Colt,” Smoke told him.

The rain wasn't falling as hard now, they discovered as they stepped out into it, but there was still a steady drizzle. Even if it kept that up all night, the creeks might go down a little. Maybe not enough to make it safe to cross the bridge over the south fork of Cougar Creek, though. It might take a day without any rain at all for that to happen.

One of the barn doors was standing open a couple of feet. Lantern light came from inside the big building and washed across the open space between the barn and the station. There was no sign of Jonas McClaren.

“He must be inside,” Smoke said.

Plumlee grunted and said, “Yeah, I reckon.”

As they neared the barn, Smoke heard the horses inside whinnying, as if something had spooked them. He slowed and said, “Wait a minute, Ike.”

“Yeah, I hear 'em, too,” Plumlee said worriedly. “Somethin's sure got 'em bothered. There are wolves in this part of the country. I wonder if one of 'em's prowlin' around.” He paused, then went on, “But even if that was true, Jonas'd be in there tryin' to calm the horses down again.”

Unmindful of the rain, Smoke unbuttoned his slicker and moved it back enough that he could get to his gun. He said, “Let me have a look first. Probably be a good idea to have that scattergun of yours ready, too.”

“I was just thinkin' the same thing, Mr. Jensen,” Plumlee said, his voice grim now.

Smoke drew the revolver as he stepped up to the open door. He stopped for a moment just outside and listened intently, but he didn't hear anything except the restless horses. Something definitely had disturbed them. They were bumping against the walls of their stalls as they moved around.

Smoke went into the barn in a low, fast crouch. Once he was inside he twisted away from the door and swung the Colt from side to side as he searched for any intruders who might be lurking in the barn. The lantern hung from a nail driven into one of the posts that supported the hayloft and lit up the aisle in the center of the barn.

He didn't see anyone, but he smelled something besides the usual barn odors of straw, manure, and horseflesh. This was a strong coppery scent that made the skin on the back of Smoke's neck prickle.

What he smelled was freshly spilled blood and a lot of it.

As Smoke stood there, he heard a steady
drip-drip-drip
. His gut told him the sound didn't have anything to do with the rain. Warily, he followed it until he reached an empty stall where the light from the lantern didn't reach. A shape loomed in the darkness, but Smoke couldn't tell what it was until he fished a lucifer out of his shirt pocket with his left hand and snapped it to life with a flick of his thumbnail.

The harsh light from the match's glare revealed a hideous sight. Jonas McClaren hung from one of the ceiling joists, a rope around his neck supporting his limp body. Smoke could tell that the jehu had already been dead when he was strung up there, however, because of the amount of blood that had pooled underneath his dangling feet. A corpse wouldn't lose that much blood; it required a still-beating heart.

So Smoke knew that McClaren had suffered the torments of the damned as someone worked him over with a knife, inflicting several wounds that would have been fatal even if nothing else had been done to him. Then the killer had put the rope around his neck and hauled him up there to finish draining. That was the dripping Smoke had heard, as blood ebbed from the wounds and trickled down McClaren's legs to finally plop into the gory pool on the ground.

Some men would have been sickened by this gruesome sight and lost the supper they had eaten a short time earlier. Smoke had witnessed too much death in his relatively young life, so he didn't react that way.

Instead, his discovery of the murdered stagecoach driver angered him. His first thought was to avenge McClaren's death.

And the killer might still be here in the barn.

Smoke dropped the match into the pool of blood, which snuffed out the flame. He turned quickly and lined the Colt in front of him. His eyes swept the barn, searching every corner he could see. He didn't spot anything out of place. The horses were upset, but the smell of blood would have done that.

“Mr. Jensen?” Ike Plumlee called from the entrance.

“Come on in, Ike, but be careful,” Smoke told him.

Plumlee stepped into the barn, holding the shotgun ready for instant use. He saw Smoke standing in front of the stall toward the back of the barn and asked, “What's wrong?”

“Jonas is in here. He's dead.”

Plumlee's eyes widened and he started to take a step forward as he exclaimed, “Dead!”

Smoke stopped him with an upraised left hand. He didn't want Plumlee rushing into an ambush if the killer was still in here.

“We need to search the barn to make sure nobody else is here,” he said.

“You mean somebody murdered Jonas,” Plumlee said. “It wasn't an accident.”

“No,” Smoke said. “It was no accident. You take that side of the barn and I'll take this side. If you see anything suspicious, blast it.”

Plumlee nodded. Like Smoke, he knew that all the other travelers were inside the station, as were the members of the Olmsted family. That meant the killer had come from somewhere outside.

The search took only a few minutes. Satisfied that he and Plumlee were the only human beings alive in the barn, Smoke holstered his gun and said, “He's back here, but I don't know if you want to see him, Ike.”

“I gotta know what happened,” Plumlee said. A bleak expression settled over his rugged face as he joined Smoke in front of the stall and looked up at McClaren's hanging body as Smoke lit another lucifer.

Plumlee started breathing hard. In the light from the match, his face turned dark with rage. A little shudder went through him as his hands tightened on the shotgun he held.

“Whoever did this,” he said, “I'm gonna kill 'em. I'm gonna make 'em die hard and painful.”

“Let's cut him down,” Smoke said. “We'll cover him up and then get back to the station.”

“You mean to just leave him out here by himself all night?” Plumlee snapped.

“Nothing can hurt him anymore, Ike,” Smoke said gently. “And since whoever did this isn't in here anymore, that means they're out there somewhere.”

He inclined his head toward the doors as he spoke. For a couple of seconds, Plumlee still looked stubborn and angry, but then he sighed and nodded.

“You're right. The rest of those folks may be in danger. We need to warn 'em.” He hesitated. “Unless the varmint who killed Jonas was a robber and is long gone.”

“That doesn't seem likely to me,” Smoke said. “A thief might have killed him . . . but he wouldn't have taken the time and trouble to do . . . what he did.”

“You're right. Whoever did this was like a hydrophobia skunk, killin' for the pure savagery of it.”

That was the way it looked to Smoke, too.

And he had a strong hunch that Jonas McClaren's death wouldn't be enough to satisfy the killer's blood lust.