“You’re a good man, Elmer Gleason,” Duff said.
“There’s Rebel,” Elmer said.
Rebel came down the ramp first, followed by Sky. Neither horse was saddled, though the saddles were on the train, having been sent as baggage.
Half an hour later, the two men had their horses boarded and their saddles stowed.
“I’m staying at a hotel just up the street here,” Duff said. “I’m sure there is another room on the same floor.”
“A bed would feel good,” Elmer said. “The trip was long.”
The two men walked quietly up the street for another moment before Elmer spoke again.
“Well, are you goin’ to tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Duff asked.
“What this bit of trouble is that you got yourself into.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that.”
“I was robbed,” Duff said.
“Robbed?”
“Aye.”
“Well, how much did they get?”
“Fifteen thousand, eight hundred and twelve dollars and fifty cents,” Duff said.
“Whew,” Elmer said. “Yeah, I would say you are right in saying that you had a bit of trouble. Who did it? Or do you know?”
“It was a man named Crack Kingsley.”
“Crack Kingsley? Are you sure it was Crack Kingsley?”
“Yes. Why, have you heard of him?”
“Oh, yes, I know the son of a bitch. He rode with Doc Jennison during the war.”
“Yes, I read that in the report at the marshal’s office that he rode with Doc Jennison. I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
“Crack Kingsley and I both grew up in Clay County, Missouri.”
“So, you were friends?”
“We know’d each other, but I’d hardly call the son of a bitch a friend. When the war started, we had boys from the county who joined the South and some who joined the North, in some cases brother against brother. Those men we could understand. But what Kingsley done was even worse. He went over into Kansas and started ridin’ with the Jayhawkers. They would raid into Missouri taking everything, robbing the houses of bed and clothing, taking all the horses, cattle, sheep, oxen, and wagons they could find. They killed every man between the ages of fifteen and seventy-five, then they tore the clothing off the women and raped them.” Elmer was quiet for a moment. “One day, Kingsley led a group of men into Clay County. They hit a farmhouse ... the Dumey place. They killed Mr. and Mrs. Dumey, then they raped and killed a young woman named Alma. We were to have been married.
“I went after the bastards, and I’m happy to say that I caught up with most of them and I killed them. But not Kingsley. Kingsley got away.”
“Then I would be accurate in saying that you have your own reasons for pursuing him,” Duff said.
“Yeah, my own reasons,” Elmer said.
“In that case, Elmer, I shall welcome your company.”
Duff and Elmer were having their breakfast in the hotel dining room the next morning when Deputy Archer came in. Archer stood in the doorway for a moment, looking around the room until he spotted Duff. Seeing him, Archer strode purposefully toward his table.
“Good morning, Deputy,” Duff said. “This is my friend, Elmer Gleason. Won’t you join me for breakfast? Perhaps a cup of coffee?”
“No, thank you, I don’t have time, and I don’t reckon you will either, after you hear what I have to say.”
“What is it?”
“We’ve got a report on Kingsley, the fella you are looking for. There is someone over at the marshal’s office I think you might want to talk to.”
Duff had just about finished his breakfast, so the tossed down the last of his coffee, then stopped at the counter to pay for it before he and Elmer followed Archer out of the hotel and down the street to the marshal’s office. There were four people in the marshal’s office: Marshal Bivens, a man wearing the liturgical garb of a minister, another man, and a boy. The man looked to be about forty, the boy about ten. Though the boy was not crying out loud, a steady stream of tears was running down his cheeks. The man had as sad a face as Duff had ever seen.
“Hello, Mr. MacCallister,” Marshal Bivens said when Duff and the deputy stepped into the office. “This is Todd Raymond and his boy Harley. When Mr. Raymond got back home yesterday afternoon, he found his wife and his young daughter, both of them shot to death. The boy saw it all, and had sense enough to stay hidden until the killer left.”
“I am so sorry, Mr. Raymond,” Duff said.
Raymond nodded, but said nothing.
“Now, here is why I sent for you,” Bivens said. “The boy gave us an excellent description of the killer. The description is a perfect match for the man we knew as Carl Butler, but who we now know is Crack Kingsley.”
“Lad, if it not be a trouble to you, would you be for describing him to me?” Duff asked.
The boy looked at his father.
“It’s all right, Harley. Tell him what you saw.”
“He looks like a haint,” Harley said. “He is tall, but he is very skinny. His face, it is narrow here,” he put his hands on either side of his mouth, “but it is wide here. He has a cut, a big, ugly cut, that starts on this eye.” He put his finger just outside his right eye, then paused for a moment. “No, that is because I was looking at him. He has a cut that starts at this eye,” he put his hand to his left eye, “and it runs down to here where it turns back up. It looks like a fishhook.”
“A cut? You mean a scar?”
“Yes, a scar.”
“That is the man who stayed here in town for a few days,” Bivens said. “As I say, we knew him as Butler, but according to Crocker, his real name is Crack Kingsley.”
“Go on, son, you are doing very well,” Duff said.
“I was in the kitchen when mama told the man to go away. The man went back to his horse and I thought he was going to go away, like Mama told him to, but when he got to his horse, he pulled out his gun and he shot both Mama and Ellie Mae. I ...” the boy stopped, and before he could speak again, he started crying, so that he was sobbing the last few words.
“I wanted to go out and help Mama and Ellie Mae, but I was too afraid. I am a coward!”
“No, son, you are far from being a coward,” Duff said. “There is nothing you could have done then, and if you had tried, you would have gotten yourself killed. You did the right thing. You looked very closely so you could describe him, and now we know who did it.”
“Mr. MacCallister is right,” Marshal Bivens said. “You did exactly what you were supposed to have done. Todd, you should be very proud of your boy.”
Todd put his arm around his son and drew him closer to him. “I am proud of him, Marshal. I am prouder than I can say.”
“I hope they catch him,” Harley said. “I hope they catch him and I hope they hang him. And when they do hang him, I want to be there to watch.”
“Oh, I will catch him,” Duff said.’
“You will catch him?” Harley asked.
“Yes, sir, I will catch him. You can count on that.”
“Good,” Harley said.
“Mr. Raymond, if you don’t mind, when you go back to your ranch, I would like to go back with you and have a look around,” Duff said.
“I don’t mind at all,” Todd Raymond replied.
Chapter Twenty-one
“He rode off this way,” Elmer said, pointing south as he and Duff examined the signs at the Raymond farm.
Leaving the Raymond place, Duff and Elmer started south. After about fifteen minutes, Duff spotted something on the trail ahead of them and hurrying toward it, he dismounted to examine it more closely. It was a half-smoked cigar.
Elmer dismounted as well, and holding the cigar to his nose, he sniffed a couple of times.
“Half a day old,” he said.
Remounting, they continued to track Kingsley. He wasn’t moving very fast, evidently confident that he had gotten away cleanly. At nightfall they camped out on the trail, thinking that would be better than to continue on and lose his trail in the darkness.
They followed the trail for another day and night; then the next morning, they came across a railroad track that was running south. It quickly became obvious that Kingsley was following the track.
“If he gets into Lincoln, he could catch a train to just about any place in the country,” Elmer said.
“Then we need to step up the pace a bit so we can catch up to him before he gets on the train,” Duff suggested.
“Since we know where he’s a-goin’, there ain’t no real need to be trailin’ him no more,” Elmer said. “So I don’t see no reason why we can’t just go on ’bout as fast as the horses will let us go,” Elmer said.
When Kingsley was about a mile away from Lincoln, he dismounted, took down the briefcase, then slapped the horse on its rump and sent it running. If anyone was following him, that might throw them off the track. It had been his experience that men on the run were often identified by the horses they were riding. Besides, this was a stolen horse, and though he thought time and distance probably made it improbable that he would be picked up for riding a stolen horse, it was foolish to take the chance, especially since he was carrying as much money as he was.
Just before Kingsley got to Lincoln, he saw an old abandoned house, and he stepped inside. The house, which was constructed of unfinished, rip-sawed lumber, was fading badly. It consisted of one room, the floor covered with about an inch of dirt. At one time the walls had been papered, but what paper there was now hung in long, ragged, colorless strips. There was no furniture. Upon examining the place, Kingsley found a loose board in the wall and, pulling it out, was able to slip the briefcase behind it, after first removing one thousand dollars.
After hiding the briefcase, Kingsley walked the rest of the way into town. Because he was hungry, he stopped at the first restaurant he saw, a place called Kirby’s Café. Inside, he took a small table next to the wall, then lit a cigar as he waited.
“Yes, sir, what can I get for you?” a waitress asked.
Kingsley enjoyed a meal of roast beef, mashed potatoes and gravy. Then, grounding out his cigar butt, left the café and walked across the street to the Cow Lot Saloon.
Loomis Byrd was in the back of the Cow Lot Saloon when he saw a familiar figure come in through the front door. It took him only a moment to recall who it was and, getting up from the table, he walked up to the bar just as Kingsley got there.
“It’s been a long time, Kingsley,” Byrd said.
Startled at hearing his name called, Kingsley turned to man who had spoken to him. The expression on his face indicated a lack of recognition.
“Damn, don’t you ’member me? After all the ridin’ we did together?”
“What ridin’ would that be?”
“Ridin’ with the best cavalry in the whole Union army. I’m talking about the Jayhawkers.”
Kingsley smiled. “That what you’re callin’ it now? Cavalry?”
“What you doin’ in this part of the world, Kingsley? I thought you would be back in Missouri. That is where you’re from, ain’t it?”
“Yeah. That’s where I’m from, but the folks there don’t take too highly to me yet. You’re Byrd, ain’t you? Loomis Byrd?”
Byrd smiled upon being recognized. “Yeah, that’s me all right. What you been doin’ with yourself?”
Kingsley bought a bottle of whiskey and the two men retired to the back of the saloon where they found a table and began catching each other up on old times.
“You know what I miss?” Byrd said. “I mean, what I miss the most? It’s the ridin’ with a bunch of men like the ones we was ridin’ with then. You know, we went where we wanted to go, took what we wanted to take, and there wasn’t nobody with gumption enough to stand up agin’ us.”
“Yeah, them was good days, all right,” Kingsley agreed.
“There’s two more of ’em that rode with us that live here, you know, them bein’ Curtiss and Rawlins. And not more’n twenty miles from here is Jones and Wales. That would be six of us, countin’ you and me,” Byrd said.
“Six of us for what?”
“I don’t know. I reckon we’d let you figure it out. But if you had an outfit of six good and experienced men, I’m sure we could come up with somethin’ we could do.”
“Like what?”
Byrd looked around the room before he spoke again. “Look, I heard tell you was on the dodge. To me, that means you’re ridin’ the outlaw trail. All I’m suggestin’ is, as long as you’re goin’ to be ridin’ that trail, you may as well do it with company. All these men has rid the trail before, and what’s more, they have rode the trail with you.”
“You still ain’t said what we could do.”
“Well, hell, with an outfit like that, there ain’t nothin’ we couldn’t do. We could rob banks, trains, stagecoaches, just like in the old days. Only this time it would all be for us.”
Kingsley drummed his fingers on the table as he considered it. He had fifteen thousand dollars now, more money than he had ever had in his life. It had been incredibly easy to get. On the other hand there was something to what Byrd was saying. An outfit of experienced men could do just about anything it wanted to do. And it would take more than a sheriff and a temporary posse to stop them.
“What do you think?” Byrd asked.
“I think I want to get me a whore and think about it for a while.”
“Elmer, look over there,” Duff said.
Looking in the direction where Duff was pointing, Elmer saw a horse without a rider coming toward them. They urged their own horses into a trot until the caught up with it. The horse was saddled, but there was no sign of a rider anywhere.
Elmer got down and examined all four of the horse’s hooves before nodding and making his pronouncement.
“This is the horse we’ve been following, all right,” he said. “The question is what is he doing out here without a rider?”
“And where is the rider?” Duff added.
“Could be that he was throwed,” Elmer suggested.
“Or, it could be that he let the horse go, just to throw us off.”
“Yeah, that, too.”
“We’re no more’n five or six miles from town. This horse came from that same direction. I’m sure that when he decided to abandon the horse and walk the rest of the way into Lincoln, he was probably no more than a mile away,” Duff suggested.
“Which means he is probably there now,” Elmer said.
“Let’s hurry it up. I’d like to catch up with him before he gets a train,” Duff said.
“What about this horse?” Elmer asked.
“I have a feeling it is a stolen horse, and I also have a feeling that he knows where he is going. I’d say let him go.”
“Good idea.”
Clouds had been building up all day, and by late afternoon the rain had started. There was nothing Duff and Elmer could do but break out their slickers and hunker down in the saddle. They were soaked thoroughly when they reached the outskirts of Lincoln, and the thought of getting out of the rain was quite an incentive. There was a banner spread across the street as they entered town.
C
OUNTY
F
AIR
, A
UG 4, 5, 6.
R
ACES, WRESTLING, PATRIOTIC SPEECHES
.
One corner of the banner had come loose, and the banner was furled like a flume, so that a solid gush of water poured from the end.
The first thing they did was go to the livery to get their horses out of the weather. After that, they walked over to the railroad station.
“No, sir, there ain’t been nobody like that bought a ticket today, or in the last two or three days,” the ticket agent said.
“Thank you, ’tis appreciative I am for the information,” Duff said. He turned to Elmer.
“I’m bettin’ he’s still here,” Elmer said.
“Aye, ’tis a good bet I’m reckoning. He’s got money and it does a man no good to have money if he can’t spend it, and the only place he can spend it is in town.”
Elmer chuckled. “You got that right,” he said. “Speaking of which, what do you say me ’n you spend a little money now and get us somethin’ to eat?”
“Sounds good to me,” Duff replied.
Duff and Elmer picked their way across the muddy, horse-apple-strewn street, and headed toward the café.
Kingsley crawled out of the whore’s bed and walked over to relieve himself in the chamber pot by the window. As he stood there, he glanced out the window and got a start from the two men he saw picking their way through the rain and across a muddy street.
“Son of a bitch!” he said.
“What is it, honey?” the whore asked. “You ain’t got the burns, have you? ’Cause I’m clean, and if you got the burns you didn’t get it from me. And if you got it, and you give it to me, that’s goin’ to cost me some money, ’cause don’t nobody want to bed with a woman if she’s got the disease.”
“Oh, shut up,” Kingsley said. “I ain’t talkin’ about nothin’ like that.”
The two men went into Kirby’s Café, just across the street from the Cow Lot Saloon. Kingsley was a little surprised to see MacCallister; he thought he had hit him hard enough to have killed him. But what really surprised him was the other rider he saw with him. Was that Elmer Gleason? No, it couldn’t have been. Gleason was dead. Kingsley was sure he had heard that. Still, it looked an awful lot like him.
Dressing quickly, Kingsley went back downstairs. He saw Byrd sitting at a table with a couple of other men and started to call Byrd over to him, then he thought he recognized them. They were much older, but he was sure they were men he had ridden with during the war. Byrd had said their names were Curtis and Rawlins, though he had no idea which was which.
When Kingsley walked over to the table, the three men stood up and Curtis and Rawlins stuck out their hands.
“Do you remember us?” one of them asked.
“I remember you,” Kingsley said. “You’re Curtis and Rawlins. Don’t remember which of you is which, though.”
“I’m Curtis,” one of them said. He was bald, which would make it easy to remember.
“Byrd was tellin’ us you’d like to start a gang,” Rawlins said. “If you do, me ’n Curtis want to be in it.”
“I haven’t actually said that I was goin’ to,” Kingsley said. He thought about MacCallister and Gleason being in town. He had no idea how it was that they were together, but he was pretty sure why they were here. They had come after him. Maybe putting a gang together, if for no other reason than protection, might not be a bad idea.
“You said you was goin’ to think about it, though,” Byrd said.
“Yeah, I did say that, didn’t I? All right, I’ve thought about it. Are you willin’ to do what I ask you to do?”
“Yeah, hell, a gang has got to have a leader,” Rawlins said.
Kingsley nodded. “I’m glad you see it my way.” Kingsley reached inside his shirt and took out a packet of money, the one thousand dollars he had taken from the satchel.
“I don’t want anyone who works for me to think I’m cheap,” he said. He counted out one hundred dollars apiece for the three men, then he put the rest of the money back inside his shirt.
“What’s this for?” Rawlins asked.
“There are a couple of men in town who are lookin’ for me,” Kingsley said.
“What do they want with you?” Curtis asked.
“They want to kill me. And they will, unless we kill them first.”
“We?” Rawlins asked.
“Yes, we,” Byrd said. “We just took his money, which in my book means we just signed on with him. So if someone is after him, that means they are after us as well.”
“Rawlins, when you think about it, Byrd is right,” Curtis said. “If we took the money, that means we are all together.”
Rawlins thought for a moment, then he smiled. “Yeah, well, the way I see it, we’re four against their two. And they prob’ly don’t know that Kingsley has took on any partners.”
“You got that right,” Kingsley said. “There don’t nobody know about you three at all.”