The Sons of Grady Rourke (22 page)

In half a minute, the hail of bullets stopped.

With a shout, Billy Bonney jumped from behind the low wall. He limped badly and his left leg was stained with blood. He dropped to his good knee beside Brady's body. Five Regulators squatted beside him. Billy picked up Brady's rifle, waved it in the air, and retreated into Tunstall's store. He left a trail of muddy blood in the street.

Six Regulators huddled breathlessly in the deserted store: Billy, John Middleton, Jim French, Fred Waite, Henry Brown, and Frank McNab. Only Billy was wounded. Outside, George Hindemann bled to death.

The street cleared quickly when the gunfire started. Townspeople ran for cover and stayed hidden. Sean stood up behind the water trough. He wiped green manure from his bare hands to his trousers. Then he plunged his raw hands into the ice cold water until all of the muck dissolved. Wiping his hands on his muddy duster, he pulled his Peacemaker, opened the gate, and spun the cylinder. Putting the handiron back in its holster, he started across the street.

Sean stopped beside Sheriff Brady and Hindemann. He knelt in the impression made by Billy's bloody leg and felt Brady's throat for a pulse. He felt none. The other man lay face up, staring into the purple morning sky. There was no need to touch him.

Standing, Sean stepped onto Tunstall's front porch and pushed open the door. He took care to leave his duster flopping across his holstered weapon.

“This ain't your fight, Sean Rourke,” Billy said calmly. He sat in a plain wooden chair. His bloodied hands tied a knot in a piece of dress fabric which he wrapped around his left thigh. The boy's fair-skinned face was more pale than usual. His bluish lips seemed slightly shrunken from shock and made his front squirrel teeth protrude even more. He looked pained and frightened.

“That was cold-blooded murder, Billy.”

The wide-eyed Regulators behind the counter trembled visibly. When Sean looked hard at them but did not push his duster away from his holster, the men side-stepped like a muddy chorus line toward the hallway leading to the back room. When the last of them disappeared, only the sounds of their boots running across the hardwood floor filled the storefront where Billy nursed his leg.

“Not much of an army,” Sean said coldly.

“If you come here as a House man, then let me stand up and fill my hand fair and square.” Billy glared up at the tall man in the doorway.

Sean stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

“Fair and square like you done Brady?”

“Who's talking?” Billy frowned. “I seen you with Morton and the rest.”

Sean's brow pursed above his nose.

“What about Morton?”

“When Morton done Tunstall. I was in the trees above the road. I seen it all.” Billy paused to take a deep breath when he twisted a stick which he had passed under his tourniquet. “And Patrick, too.” He looked up with narrow eyes.

“Patrick?”

“Patrick was with me in the woods. We both seen you riding with Morton's gang when he did Mr. Tunstall. We seen it all.”

Sean's broad shoulders dropped as if from a physical blow. His jaw sagged and the good side of his face twitched.

“I ain't no House man.” Sean stepped closer to the sitting man. The teenager's trousers on the left side were soaked in dark blood. “You're going to bleed to death in that chair.”

“Maybe.”

“You need to get up to Doc Ealy's.”

“I can't walk.” For the first time, Billy's voice betrayed the slightest whimper. He did not flinch when Sean extended his hand. A trace of William Brady's blood was dry and brown on his fingertips. The large hand grabbed Billy's upper arm and pulled him out of the chair. When Billy stood, he left a puddle of blood on the coarse wood.

Sean came around to Billy's side and lifted the wounded man's left arm until it was around his shoulder. Billy had to stand almost on tiptoe to reach.

“Come on, Billy.”

The boyish gunman hesitated, grimacing with sudden pain radiating up his spine.

“But you're one of Brady's deputies.”

Sean looked down into Billy's tortured eyes. He looked more like a hungry urchin than ever.

“I am. And you're my brother's friend.”

Billy blinked and leaned on the big man who held him erect all the way to Taylor Ealy's house.

B
EFORE NOON
, A buckboard crossed a shallow ford in the swollen Rio Bonito. Alexander McSween and his wife rode back into Lincoln. Their wagon left deep ruts in the soft street. They looked neither to the left nor to the right when they passed William Brady's body, which still lay facedown in the mud. For nearly two hours, no one had come forward to drag the town lawman out of the soggy dirt. He lay where he fell. Neither his wife nor their eight children knew yet that, in an instant, they had become a widow and orphans.

When the spring sun stopped and hovered in the southern sky at noon, a blue line of sweating men road two abreast into Lincoln from the west. Twenty-five troopers from Fort Stanton had answered Sheriff Brady's Sunday call for the Army to keep order if the Regulators rode across the river.

Their white officer, Captain George Purington, dismounted ahead of his double column of black cavalrymen of Company H, 9th United States Cavalry. He stood beside Brady's riddled corpse, which was beginning to stiffen and rise out of the mud on rigid elbows. The soldier looked up at his weary men.

“Clean this up.”

A
RMED SOLDIERS PATROLLED
the single street when Patrick and Liam rode sleepily into Lincoln on Monday afternoon. A provost guard blocked entry to John Tunstall's store and Attorney Shield's office. When Liam briefly stated his military pedigree, the black cavalryman at the door cheerfully spilled a quick story of assassination and anarchy. But the street was quiet.

The brothers turned and led their horses by hand down the street and tied them at the Wortley Hotel. Inside, nervous men packing sidearms filled the boarding house. Sean looked up from Jesse Evans' table when his brothers entered. Patrick paused to look for Melissa and Bonita. He saw neither through the dense fog of tobacco smoke.

“What the hell is going on here?” Patrick still looked tired when he spoke. Sean looked closely at Liam who looked worse than tired.

Without rising, Sean studied his brothers and addressed them collectively.

“We won't being going to the lawyer today. Billy Bonney killed Sheriff Brady this morning. Deputy Peppin has taken his place as sheriff. You remember Captain Purington from when we rode in?”

Patrick nodded.

“Peppin ordered Purington to arrest McSween and that other one of your chums who fancies himself a shooter. What's his name? He plays with his handiron.”

“Rob Widenmann?”

“That's the one.”

“Are they in jail?” Patrick's narrow eyes scanned the table where Jesse Evans and his Boys sat in front of half a dozen empty shot glasses per man. “The House men will kill them for sure in there.”

“That's what McSween said,” Sean said quickly before Jesse could take a breath. “So Purington has the bunch of them under guard in a wagon to take them to the fort for safe keeping. Has Mr. Shield and Mrs. McSween, too. They'll all be gone within the hour, from what I hear.”

Liam seemed unsteady on his feet. Sean pulled a chair for him from another table. The oldest brother still had not stood up. Liam slumped heavily into the seat while Patrick remained standing, hat in hand.

“Is Billy dead?”

“Not yet,” Jesse interrupted. “They say he took a round and someone carried him to Doc Ealy's. Doc ain't saying. Billy's hiding out somewhere in town.” The gunman, called Captain by his friends, smiled. “We'll find him.” He glanced at his men who sat red-eyed and full of cheap whiskey. “There ain't no rush.”

“How's Melissa?” Patrick asked. There was no point in whispering in the noisy saloon.

Sean looked down at his own neat row of empty glasses.

“All right, I guess.”

“Well, then. There ain't no reason for Liam and me to stay, is there?”

“None that I can see. Pa's ranch is yours anyway—yours and Liam's. Signing them papers ain't but for finishing it up legal-like. Peppin says the judge'll be in town next week. You can come back then.” Without thinking, Sean lifted an empty glass to his lips and licked out the last drops. “I'll be right here.”

Patrick shrugged and lifted Liam bodily out of his chair. The two brothers pushed their way through the cantina.

Standing in the mud in the last of full afternoon daylight, they paused to watch a parade pass. Blue shirts and black faces on horseback led an open wagon toward the west. Three glum men and one plain-faced woman sat in the back. Looking up, Patrick remembered a woodcut illustration in a book about the French Revolution.

As a misty spring darkness fell softly around them, Patrick and Liam rode slowly out of town to the ranch. By the time Cyrus Buchanan's welcoming light in the window greeted them, Billy Bonney mounted a horse in the Tunstall store's paddock. Wincing from the pain beneath clean bandages on his leg, he spurred his mount out of Lincoln toward the southeast and the Regulator's hidden camp at San Patricio. There, Billy could take comfort from his own kind.

S
PIRIT
K
EEPER CAME
to Liam three nights in a row. But she left no spirit posts behind. Liam wondered if she were satisfied by merely making moccasin footprints in the thawed ground visible with daybreak.

In the churning cesspool of steer hooves from Chisum's cattle, Patrick never noticed human footprints in the black ooze.

Thursday morning, April 4th, Cyrus heard the floor boards creaking in the single greatroom of the ranch house. With only one eye open, he watched the shadow of a figure block out the red embers in the dying hearth. When the front door opened, a gust of wind carried enough moist, piney scents for Cyrus to know that dawn was an hour away. He climbed out of his bed roll and walked in stocking feet to the closed door. Opening it, he saw Liam's thin frame silhouetted against distant mountains beneath sparkling stars.

“Liam?”

The youngest brother neither startled nor turned around. He just stood in the cool breeze and watched the spruce trees against the sky. The wind could be heard in the mountain air. Midnight advection fog climbed the mountains and kept the air humid enough for sound to carry for a mile. So Liam and Cyrus could hear the wind rustling the treetops and growing from the gentlest whooshing sound into a chilly blast in their faces.

“Liam?” Cyrus in his red woollies laid his large hand on the young man's bony shoulder.

“She's come for me, Cyrus.”

“Who's come for you, boy?”

“A Cheyenne spirit-keeper.”

“Here? Impossible.”

“She left spirit-posts every morning down at South Spring. I seen them with my own eyes.” Liam's voice was a whisper full of pain and resignation.

“With hair on them?”

“Yes. Every one. Her child's, must be.”

Cyrus squinted into the darkness. They both looked west where the sky was purple-black. Behind them, beyond the house, the sky was dark gray with stars still shining. The retired sergeant could not doubt the sign. He had seen them over the years near bodies of frozen Indians whose hard bodies were flecked with red gouges where lead bullets had pecked at them like sculptors' chisels on dry stone.

“So that's what eating at you?”

Liam nodded without turning his face from the mountains.

“What does she want with you?”

Liam laughed out loud before he answered with his voice cracking from grief.

“Mackensie's raid, maybe? I don't know.”

“Impossible.” Cyrus tried not to sound impatient. “That's nine hundred miles from here, boy.”

“There ain't never been born no Indian woman who could walk nine hundred miles just to make you touched in the head.”

Liam faced his friend for the first time.

“I seen her sign for the last three days.”

Cyrus looked down at Liam and then up toward the last of the night.

“Maybe she's done with you. Maybe she ain't coming tonight. It's almost daybreak anyway.”

Liam shivered in his white longjohns and bare feet.

“She ain't done.”

W
HEN
T
AYLOR
E
ALY
shouted at Sean to never darken his doorway again, the tall man left the physician's home at ten o'clock, Thursday morning. The physician-preacher would not permit such words to be uttered under his roof where his beautiful wife cuddled in bed with their two small daughters. The six-month-old baby still suckled.

Sean shuffled back to his table at the Wortley. Melissa Bryant waited on tables but her eyes never stopped when her gaze passed over him. He sat with Jesse Evans. No one sat with them. Sean leaned forward so he could speak in subdued tones to the captain. He asked for and received the outlaw's word that Sean's question would be kept in confidence and that Jesse would ask no questions.

Sean was surprised when Jesse's cheerful face became serious. The look in Jesse's eyes made Sean believe that his secret was safe. Sean wondered if perhaps murder does create a peculiar brotherhood. Jesse never once glanced over toward Melissa as Sean spoke.

“Roswell, Sean. You need to go to Roswell.”

“Roswell? There ain't nothing there.”

“Nothing more than two, maybe three, cabins. I know.” Jesse spoke softly and earnestly. “There's a doctor who lives just off the main road. Lives in a bark hut. You'll see it from the stage road. White folks won't go near him. He ain't quite right. They say he's from New York. Done opium or something and rotted out his mind. But the Indian Agency lets him see to the reservation when the cholera's up. Maybe they figure it'll take him, too. But some of my boys has taken womenfolk down to him when they was in the family way. He's got an herb tea the Apache taught him. He ain't no butcher like up in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Just that there concoction.” Jesse smiled for the first time, only for an instant, until the expression on Sean's face made him serious again. “The tea will fix your problem.”