Ride With the Devil (2 page)

SMALL BROWN PUFFS HUNG IN THE AIR JUST BEHIND the rider as the horse’s hooves stirred up dust from the low, sun-baked grass. From the perspective of an eagle circling overhead, the solitary rider was moving slowly but inexorably across a long, unbroken plain.

The morning sun was to his back.

Mason Hawke was tired. It was a saddle-sore, sleeping-on-the-ground, bone-deep, butt-weary kind of tired, brought on by dusty trails, people he couldn’t remember, and towns he wanted to forget.

Like Puxico.

It had been five days since his hearing in Puxico. After listening to four witnesses attest to Hawke’s innocence, and with a dozen more ready to testify to the same thing, the judge released Mason Hawke without charges. Hawke had not been asked to leave town, but decided, on his own, that it would be better for him to move on.

Charley had asked him to come back to work for him, playing the piano, but Hawke turned him down. People who played the piano in saloons tended to fade into the background, like a potted plant or a painting on the wall. Hawke
liked that anonymity, but after the incident with Tucker and the two men who turned out to be his cousins, continued anonymity in the town of Puxico was impossible.

Hawke did not hunt for trouble, but trouble had a way of finding him. One incident seemed so often to lead to another, and another, becoming a chain of events that would inevitably draw him into yet one more confrontation. Whenever that happened, Hawke would leave that town and press on to see what was around the bend, over the next hill, or just beyond the horizon.

Now, ahead of him, like irregular clumps in the land, a handful of ripsawed, windblown, sun-dried buildings rose from the prairie. The little town offered Hawke the prospect of sleeping in a real bed for the night and eating food that wasn’t camp-cooked. He could have something to drink besides alkali water and trail coffee. Hawke thought that he might even find a woman he could enjoy having a conversation with.

He stood in the stirrups for a moment, just to stretch away his saddle ache, then urged his horse on. That was when he saw the vultures.

They were circling too warily, too cautiously, for it to be a small animal. Only one thing could cause this kind of display.

Hawke had seen them gather like this many times before, over the battlefields of Antietam, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. He’d seen them since the war as well, during his wanderings through the West. Slapping his legs against the side of his horse, he hurried it on for the next mile until he saw what was attracting the carrion’s attention. Hanging from the branch of a cottonwood tree was the body of a man, twisting slowly at the end of the rope. A sign was pinned to his chest.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO

OUTLAWS IN SALCEDO.

DRIFTER, MOVE ON.

WE DON’T WANT YOU IN

OUR TOWN.

LEAVE THIS BODY HANGING.

Hawke pulled the paper off the dead man’s chest. It was signed, “Salcedo Regulators Brigade.”

Looking back up at the body, Hawke stared at it for a long moment. He had seen many bodies in his time; stabbed, shot, ripped apart by cannon fire, even some who had burned to death. People sometimes talked about dying peacefully, but Hawke had seen little of that.

There were few deaths more gruesome than hanging, and the expression of terror and pain remaining in the face of the corpse was evidence of that. The victim’s eyes were open and bulging, his lips were pursed, his tongue protruding, his neck stretched, and his head twisted to one side. He was wearing a shirt without a collar, frayed cuffs, and missing a button.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, friend,” Hawke said aloud. “I don’t give a damn what the sign says, I don’t intend to let you hang here.”

Pulling his knife, Hawke stood in his stirrups, then reached up to cut through the rope just above the man’s neck. As he cut the man free, he maneuvered the body so it fell across the front saddle of his horse. Rigor mortis had already set in, making it difficult to get him draped over the saddle, but he managed to do it.

A small, hand-painted sign on the outer edge of the town read:

SALCEDO

OBEY OUR LAWS

No railroad served the town, and its single street was dotted liberally with horse apples. The first building Hawke saw was the Roman Catholic church. It was large and substantial, constructed of earth-colored stucco with a red clay-tile roof.
He had no way of knowing it, but this church had occupied the same spot for nearly a hundred years before the town itself came into existence. The church anchored the east side of a street that ran some one hundred yards to the west, where the street was anchored by St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a white frame building with a red door, a green shake roof, and a towering steeple.

At either end of the street, as well as in the middle, planks were laid from one side to the other to allow people to cross when the street was filled with mud.

The buildings of the little town were as washed out and flyblown up close as they had been from some distance. The first structure Hawke rode by was a blacksmith’s shop.

SARGE’S BLACKSMITH SHOP

IRONWORK DONE

TREE STUMPS BLASTED

It was at the east end of town, and a tall and muscular black man was bent over an anvil, the ringing of his hammer audible above all else.

From the blacksmith’s, one side of the street contained a butcher shop, a general store, a bakery, six small houses, then a leather goods shop next door to an apothecary. A set of outside stairs climbed the left side of the drugstore to a small stoop that stuck out from the second floor. A painted hand on a sign, with a finger pointing up, read:

CHARLES URBAN, M.D.

The city marshal’s office and jail was next to the apothecary, then came the bank, a hardware store, and several houses, before that side of the street ended with the Episcopal church at the other end of town.

On the north side of the street, proceeding from the blacksmith’s, there was a gunsmith, a newspaper office—the
Salcedo Advocate
—a café called Dumplings, then several houses, followed by a seamstress shop, the Ranchers’ Hotel, a stage depot, the Golden Calf saloon, several more houses, and a small one-room school.

Citizens of the town stopped when they saw the body draped across Hawke’s saddle, then started following him. Staying on either side of the street, they gave him plenty of room but, out of curiosity, kept pace with him as he rode into the town.

“Hey, he’s got Delaney,” someone said.

“That’s Ed Delaney,” another said.

“Delaney!”

The hollow clopping sound of his horse’s hooves echoed back from the buildings. More people came out of those same buildings, and the crowd began to grow large.

“Lookie there,” he heard someone say. “The rope is still around Delaney’s neck.”

One of the crowd ventured much closer than the others, coming off the wooden sidewalk to step out into the street for a closer look at Delaney. Hawke stopped then and looked right at him.

“Where’s the undertaker, mister?” he asked.

For a moment the man was as startled as if Delaney himself had spoken to him. He stared at Hawke.

“The undertaker?” Hawke asked again.

“Uh, that would be Gene Welch,” the man replied, pointing. “His place is behind the hardware store, which is just up there, on the left. You can’t miss him.”

“Thanks.”

Hawke continued to ride down the street until he reached the building the man had pointed out. The sign out front read:

SIKES’ HARDWARE:

NAILS, LUMBER, TOOLS

Underneath was a smaller sign:

GENE WELCH, UNDERTAKER

IN BACK

Hawke didn’t have to go around back, though. A man wearing a long black coat and a high silk hat was standing on the porch of the hardware store. Obviously, word had already reached him that someone was coming into town with a body.

“You’d be the undertaker? Hawke asked.

The man nodded, but said nothing.

“I have a job for you,” Hawke said. He gave Delaney a little push, and the body fell off the horse. When it hit the ground, the crowd, now close to one hundred people, gasped in unison. Many jumped back, as if they expected the body to explode.

“Whoa, Delaney’s getting’ a little ripe,” someone said, and a few others giggled nervously.

“Mister, did you cut that body down?” the undertaker asked.

“I did,” Hawke said.

“We, uh, weren’t supposed to cut it down.”

“You didn’t cut it down. I did,” Hawke said. “Now, are you going to give him a decent burial, or do I have to bury him myself?”

“What’s he to you, mister?” one of the men in the crowd asked. He had a shock of unruly hair, a red, pockmarked face, and buck teeth.

“He’s a man that needs burying,” Hawke said.

“You read the sign, didn’t you? If you don’t want to answer to the Salcedo Regulators Brigade, you’ll take him
back and put him where you found him,” the bucktoothed man said.

“No need for that, Vox,” another man in the crowd said. “I think the point has been made.”

“All right, Colonel. If you say so,” Vox replied.

“Mr. Welch,” the one Vox had called colonel said. “You may bury Mr. Delaney now. I’ll pay the expenses.”

“Very good, Colonel, I’ll take care of it,” Welch replied. “Thank you.”

Hawke was sure he had heard that voice before, and when the man appeared out of the crowd, he recognized him.

“Mason Hawke,” the man said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Titus Culpepper,” Hawke replied, nodding toward him. “Indeed it has been a long time.”

“All right, folks,” Culpepper called to the others. “The excitement is all over. You folks tend to your business now, and let Mr. Welch tend to his.”

“Yes, sir, Colonel Culpepper, thank you,” Welch said. He looked toward a couple of men in the front row of the crowd. “You men, help me get Delaney back to my embalming table.”

“Hawke, come on down to the Golden Calf with me. Let me buy you a drink,” Titus Culpepper offered.

“Don’t mind if I do,” Hawke replied.

The Golden Calf was unremarkable in every respect. Just inside the bat-wing doors, a dozen round tables occupied the wide-plank floor, each one surrounded by half a dozen chairs. They showed the scars, burn marks, and spill stains of an establishment that stayed busy, as evidenced by the fact that twenty or more customers were now occupying the tables or standing at the bar.

On one side of the room, a wood-burning stove, cold at the moment, was redolent with the smell of last winter’s fires. And on the other side, from front to back, was a bar
constructed of unpainted wood. It had a brass foot rail at the bottom and brass rings attached about every ten feet, from which hung hand towels for the customers. There was a mirror behind the bar, and in front of it, glass shelves containing bottles of liquor, their numbers doubled by the reflection. Above the mirror was a painting of a golden calf, the saloon’s namesake. At the rear of the saloon was an upright piano, the cover pulled down over the keys.

“The beer isn’t bad here,” Culpepper said. “The whiskey is good only if you really need something stronger. It’s green as grass and flavored with rusty nails,” he added with a laugh.

Hawke laughed with him. “Listen, after several weeks of trail dust, a beer would be like the finest wine right now.”

“As I recall, you did have a taste for fine wine. Your father had a pretty good wine cellar, I believe.”

“The best in Georgia,” Hawke said.

“Two beers, Paddy,” Culpepper ordered.

“Yes, sir, Colonel, two beers coming up,” the bartender said, and a moment later hurried over with two mugs, the amber liquid crowned by high-rising heads of foam.

“Mr. O’Neil, here, isn’t just a bartender,” Culpepper explained. “No sir, he’s one of Salcedo’s leading businessmen. He owns this place, don’t you, Paddy?”

“Or it owns me,” Paddy replied with a chuckle as he sat the glasses before the two men.

Culpepper blew off some of the foam. “Here’s to you,” he said, holding his mug out.

Hawke held his mug out as well, then took a swallow.

“So, Hawke, how long has it been?” Culpepper asked.

“I don’t know. Chickamauga, perhaps?” Hawke replied, wiping some of the foam from his lip. “You were wounded at Chickamauga as I recall.”

Culpepper nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess you could call it a wound.” His voice sounded bitter.

“I lost track of you after that. What happened to you? Where did you go?”

“Once I got out of that butcher shop they called a hospital, I took my discharge and went west. That’s when I joined up with Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. They were the real fighters. If Jeff Davis had put one of them in command instead of Lee, the South would have won the war. I should have joined them a lot earlier.”

“Yes, well, I’m glad you didn’t leave before Gettysburg. As I recall, you saved my life there.”

“I was just paying you back for what you did at Shiloh.”

“I had to. You owed me two dollars,” Hawke said.

Culpepper laughed. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I? By the way, did I ever pay you?”

“Yes, in Confederate money.”

Culpepper laughed again. “Well, I was just being patriotic. Hey, whatever happened to that girl you used to sniff around all the time? What was her name? Tamara Snell-grove? She was a pretty thing, as I recall.”

The smile left Hawke’s face and his features tightened. He took another swallow before he answered.

“She took a fever and died.”

“That’s a shame,” Culpepper said. “You were…wait, as I recall, you were going to marry her, weren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Hawke said without elaboration.