Dead Man's Return Read online

  But what now?

  Each day he stayed in the city it felt like it would be harder to leave. Not because he didn’t want to. But because of Rosalie.

  The day he’d met her she had been on a train travelling into Austin. How could he take her away from the soft clothes and the comfortable beds, the tram cars and the running water and the electric lights? How could he have her sleep beneath the stars again? Especially with winter coming on.

  And why would they do that? What would they do out there?

  He’d been an engineering student once, a very long time ago.

  ‘You could do that,’ she’d said to him, in a café on Brazos Street. ‘There must be a thousand opportunities for an engineer in Austin.’

  She was right. He’d enjoyed being an engineer, too. Although he’d never really got beyond the books. But it no longer appealed the way it once had. Something had changed. Out there, beneath the open sky, on horse-back. There was freedom. It was being your own man. It was making a difference, not through designing a way of making a steam engine more efficient or a building stronger, but by standing up for what was right. By facing down evil.

  There’d been excitement in Rosalie’s eyes when she had been talking of him being an engineer. She’d been wearing a nice coat, a blue knitted coat. A woman’s coat.

  How could he take all that away from her?

  He recalled her telling him, so long ago now – or at least it felt like that because so much had happened since – how she had travelled west, had her share of adventures and, having got them out of her system returned to the city. That’s when he had first met her. On her return to the city. He had yanked her out of that. Taken her back to the wilderness. Taken her through things that no woman should ever have to face.

  Now she was in the city once again and he saw the excitement in her eyes when she imagined a role for him there.

  Sometimes he thought of the town of Parker’s Crossing where he had first emerged from the darkness of his prison years. For a while Parker’s Crossing had been home. He wondered if it could be again. Maybe that was the answer. He’d promised his friends there that one day he would go back – and it was a promise he would keep. But was it possible, if not likely, that Parker’s Crossing would be as civilized as Austin soon? Who knows, maybe it already was? And that was the other thing. In his bones he knew that there was a time coming when no one would sleep beneath the stars any more. Things were changing too fast. The world was changing.

  He thought upon all of this, but most of all he thought about being a killer.

  He no longer wore his gun, although it was still with his small pile of belongings back in his hotel room. The nightmares and the guilt were receding – partly because of time, but mostly because he was able to talk such things through with Rosalie. She had killed Washington Smith and she seemed to take it a lot better than he did. They talked for hours about how and why he felt so guilty and slowly the anguish eased.

  But it didn’t change the fact.

  He was a killer, not an engineer, and no amount of flicking electric lights on and off made him feel at home.

  Will Baker said, ‘Walk with me, my friend.’

  They were down by the railroad tracks. As far as the eye could see were pens of cattle. The noise settled over them as they walked – the lowing of cows and bulls, horses neighing and bickering, cowboys yelling and laughing, the occasional crack of a whip, dogs barking, the hiss of steam and a whistle from a locomotive. The smells too, steam and coal smoke, cattle and wet straw, tobacco smoke, body heat from men and animals.

  ‘It’s like a different world down here, isn’t it?’ Baker said. He turned and looked back up the hill into town, at the great Capitol building construction, the houses and shops, vast hotels and offices, squares and avenues, stretching out in all directions.

  ‘It’s like . . .’ Jim Jackson tried to find the words for what he was feeling. ‘It’s like it used to be,’ he said.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Baker said. ‘Nothing stays the same. But. . . .’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘It’s still like it right here, isn’t it? I mean, here’s the proof. Right in front of our eyes.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘And if it can still be like it here, in the capital. Well, I guess it can be like it anywhere. For a long while yet, anyway.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You don’t know what to do, do you?’

  ‘It’s that obvious?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Rosalie said something, too.’

  ‘Did she now?’

  ‘She’s worried.’

  ‘She likes it here.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t? Don’t you?’

  ‘I . . . I guess so. I just feel that I don’t fit.’

  ‘All these students and business types,’ Will Baker said.

  ‘And engineers.’

  ‘Engineers?’

  ‘Rosalie thinks I’d make a good engineer.’

  ‘There’s still a lot of cowboys around,’ Will Baker said. ‘Look at them.’

  ‘I’m no good with cattle.’

  ‘But you’re good with a gun. You’re brave. More than brave. You’re courageous and you’re determined to do the right thing, no matter how hard that thing is.’

  Jim Jackson stopped walking.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘You don’t want to be an engineer and you don’t want to be a cowboy. How do you fancy being a Texas Ranger?’

  Will Baker was best man and Roberta Robertson was bridesmaid. They were married in the same church where Leon Winters was buried. They lived in a small house just along from Roberta’s house and a year later Leon Jackson was born.

  Jim Jackson, Texas Ranger, wore Sam McRae’s gun for many more years. Once or twice he even had to draw it in anger, which he did with a lightning speed that came naturally to him. But he never had to kill another man.

  His reputation and the legend of Gentleman Jim Jackson went before him.