Dead Man's Return Page 8

  Something brought him out of his reverie and he was disorientated for a moment.

  Down below he saw four men riding out of the gate – one of them, a big man on a white and brown pinto – was pointing up at him. As he watched, one of the men cut left, another went right, and the other two – including the big leader – started coming straight towards him.

  They were in Roberta’s small front room – well, it wasn’t small, but with Leon and Andrew Beaumont and the two women it felt that way – drinking sweet tea and eating biscuits that Roberta had bought from a baker in town. Leon was still holding the handkerchief that Doctor Koch had given him, but strangely he didn’t feel the urge to cough at the moment. It was almost as if just seeing Koch had somehow relieved the symptoms.

  ‘Roberta said she’d told you all about me,’ Leon said. He looked briefly across at Roberta, who was sitting on the two-seater alongside Rosalie. ‘Should I be worried?’

  Beaumont smiled. ‘No. You have nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t told you everything, then?’

  ‘Maybe I don’t know everything,’ Roberta said.

  ‘You don’t,’ Rosalie said. ‘Some of it. . . . It’s too terrible to talk about.’

  Roberta looked at her sister. She took one of Rosalie’s hands and held it in her lap.

  ‘I’m a lawyer,’ Beaumont said. ‘Not a marshal or a Texas Ranger, though I know a few of both. But from what Roberta’s told me you’ve served your time.’

  ‘For something I never did,’ Leon said. ‘Well, I didn’t do the worst of what they accused me of.’ Leon finally managed a smile. ‘I guess everyone says that, though.’

  ‘It’s the truth though,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘I gather you were in a leasing camp,’ Beaumont said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m told they are cruel places.’

  Leon nodded.

  ‘And I’m not sure they’re entirely legal,’ Beaumont said. ‘At least, in my opinion.’

  Leon looked at the lawyer. ‘Did you say you knew a Texas Ranger?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, I know several,’ Andrew Beaumont said.

  Jim Jackson jerked the reins hard round to turn the horse. He pressed his spurs into her flanks, and he yelled at her to move. Well rested and full of energy, she leapt forward. Jim hunkered down over her head, out of the wind. He risked a quick look over his shoulder but there was nothing to be seen. The men who had left Beecher and Smith’s yard were too far away, down at the bottom of the long slope, or circling far to his left and right.

  ‘Go! Go!’

  He’d been a fool. Just because Beecher and Smith didn’t know him was no reason to think they wouldn’t want to investigate someone who was clearly watching their workings. And, of course, they knew of him. That’s why they’d had John Allan killed.

  ‘Faster!’

  His breath came in short bursts as if it was he, rather than the horse, that was doing the hard work. She was already frothing a little at the mouth, but she was strong.

  That didn’t mean she was stronger than those who were pursuing him.

  And they no doubt had geographical knowledge that he lacked. He had ridden slowly, peacefully, towards the general area of Beecher and Smith’s, picking up the railroad, and then finding the works. There had been no hurry – Leon and Rosalie had headed into Austin to see a doctor and probably they would stay overnight. But that meant that if he was caught, maybe dragged back to Beecher and Smith’s yard, he’d be on his own.

  ‘Come on!’ he urged.

  He was riding in a straight line, desperately keeping the sun in the same place over his left shoulder. He figured if he rode straight, then they couldn’t outflank him. Not without riding faster than him.

  It didn’t matter where he went. Just so long as they didn’t catch him.

  The land was wide open. There was a tree line way over to the west, and rises to the east, somewhere beyond which was Austin. But ahead it was a mile or two of scrubland, where even the grass struggled to grow. Beyond the scrub were the growing shapes of grey hills. If he could get there then he might be able to lose them. He couldn’t cut left to the trees – he had to keep racing straight, and he had to keep pushing the horse hard.

  Spit was flying back from her mouth now. Her flanks starting to glisten with sweat. Yet already he sensed that her initial sprint was done. She was settling into a fast gallop. Was it enough? He’d never raced her hard and long, wasn’t sure of what she was capable.

  At one point she stumbled.

  If she put a foot in a jackrabbit hole and fell then it was all over.

  He noticed that across to his right, and running across his intended path, was a row of fence-posts. He couldn’t see if there was any wire strung between the posts, but it was something else to watch out for.

  He looked back over his shoulder.

  The open grassland was as far behind him now as it was in front. He was in the middle of a lot of nothing, with hardly a tree or a termite mound to hide behind.

  The dust from his horse’s feet hung in the still air behind him. Then, through the dust, there they were. The two of them who had also ridden straight. Maybe a mile or so back.

  Riding fast.

  He leaned further over her head. He whispered to her, his words snatched away in the wind that she was creating.

  ‘You can do it,’ he said. ‘We both can.’

  The distant grey hills weren’t getting any closer. He thought back to those hills on the ride down earlier. There were thick copses of trees there, a river, rocky outcrops with small gullies and passes. Nothing like the great ranges west of here, but enough to find a hiding place.

  If they could get there.

  He thought he heard a rifle shot.

  It was hard to tell with the wind whistling passed his ears.

  If they could get there.

  The question was: what then? Would simply hiding be enough?

  The last time he’d been chased like this, back when he’d broken Leon out of the prison camp, he’d ended up cornering himself in a rocky canyon. He’d come within seconds of being killed that day. He’d planned the ambush reasonably well and would have been fine save for one thing.

  He hadn’t been able to kill his pursuers in cold blood.

  He’d been hidden and he’d had them in his gunsights.

  But he’d hesitated, and it was only luck and circumstance that had saved him.

  Ahead of him the grey hills finally started to coalesce and thicken. He could see a track leading into them. He started to make out individual trees, the larger rocks. The cover.

  ‘Come on,’ he urged. They were going to make it.

  But the question remained, as it always did with him: ‘What then?’ It had been the same back in Leyton.

  He heard a rifle shot again. This time it was unmistakable.

  Did it mean they were closer? He risked another look. No, they were still way back out in the middle of the openness. But his horse was slowing, and the wind noise was lessening, and now he could actually see that one of them had a rifle in his hand.

  ‘Keep going!’ he pressed his heels harder into her flanks. The froth was flying back from her mouth and neck. She was breathing hard.

  The ground began to rise.

  What was it Leon had said back in Leyton when they’d had John Allan hooded and tied to a chair?

  Give me the word.

  Jim hadn’t been able to kill John Allan in cold blood, despite all that Allan had put them through. And that reluctance had, just like the events in that canyon by the prison camp, almost led to Jim Jackson’s own death.

  Leon had been prepared to shoot Allan, but only if Jim had given him the go ahead. And that was akin to pulling the trigger himself. He hadn’t even been able to do that.

  The upshot was that twice now his failure to be cold-blooded had almost been his downfall.

  Yet there had been one time, back in the hide-out after they’d broken Le
on out of prison, when he’d had to kill someone in what seemed like, at the time, cold blood. He’d done it, and in the process had saved himself, Leon, and Rosalie.

  So he could do it. He told himself that this wasn’t Boston. This wasn’t the east where a whole set of rules and laws applied. Where good and evil, right and wrong, were set down in law book and statutes and everyone knew where they were.

  Sure, Austin was just a few hours ride away, and that place was as civilised as anywhere back east.

  But here, out on this range, back in Leyton, in the canyon just south of the prison camp. All of these were wild places. To live and survive here one had to apply a different set of rules. An alternative law-set.

  Another bullet whistled by.

  He hunkered down as low as he was able.

  If they were shooting at him, didn’t that give him every right to shoot back?

  They were on a rising slope now, almost at the crest. Fifty yards more and they’d be out of sight.

  ‘Just a little further now,’ he told her.

  Thirty yards.

  Twenty.

  Another rifle shot and this time the horse stumbled.

  For a moment Jim thought it was the loose scree beneath her feet. She appeared to find balance and momentum again, but then he saw blood in the air, spraying back from somewhere. Her legs buckled and it was only reflexes that kept him from being trapped beneath her as she fell.

  He landed hard on the ground.

  The horse was looking at him. There was a plea for assistance in her wide scared eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  He grabbed a water skin from the back of the saddle and sprinted to the shelter of the nearest rise.

  ‘Can I read it?’ Andrew Beaumont said.

  Leon shrugged. ‘Why not? You can tell me what you think.’

  Beaumont unfolded the piece of paper that Leon had been writing on. He read the words and was quiet for a few moments.

  He looked at Leon.

  ‘Are you sure you want to do this?’

  ‘I can’t think of any other way.’

  ‘They could simply arrest you.’

  ‘For what? I did my time. Jim did his.’

  ‘Except you didn’t, did you? Jim broke you out of prison. They’d be well within their rights to arrest you both. They love Texas more than anything. You know that?’

  ‘Do they believe in the truth?’

  Andrew Beaumont smiled. ‘Like I said, they love Texas more than anything.’

  ‘Jim foiled a train robbery,’ Rosalie said. ‘I was there.’

  ‘I know. Roberta told me.’

  ‘He’s on the side of . . . good,’ Rosalie said.

  ‘Well. I’ll pass it on. How will I get word back to you?’

  ‘I’ve promised to stay,’ Rosalie said. ‘For a day or two. I’ll take the reply back to the boys.’

  Andrew Beaumont looked at Leon again.

  ‘Sure?’

  Leon felt that tickle in his throat again. It seemed like the respite from simply seeing Doctor Koch was over. He raised the handkerchief to his mouth and coughed, feeling and tasting the blood in his throat.

  ‘I’m sure,’ he said.

  It was time to learn the lesson. Not third time lucky, but third time unlucky. For someone.

  That occasion in the canyon south of the prison camp was number one. The situation with John Allan in Leyton, number two. This wasn’t Sunday school. If you kept avoiding the hard truth out here you would die. It was that simple.

  They’d shot his horse and they were, presumably, happy to shoot him, too.

  So lesson learned.

  This time he would come out shooting.

  Chapter Nine

  Jim Jackson had the sun behind him. It had been accidental, rather than planned. But it worked well and he would remember it in future.

  He lay just below the top of the rise, his head behind a rock, and he peered through the long grass at the two horsemen.

  Jim figured the one in the lead was the fellow in charge. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was that one who had been giving out the orders when the four riders had first left the yard gates.

  The man was big, with wide shoulders and a great belly – maybe that was what had saved Jim from being caught back there in the open. The man’s horse looked exhausted. Behind him rode a smaller, leaner man. This one with the rifle in his hand. He was scanning the area, and he looked tense and ready to drop the reins from his left hand, steady the rifle, and shoot down Jim the moment he saw movement.

  Back before any of this had started, before Jim had even suspected there was anything other than bad luck that had got him incarcerated for ten years, the Texas Ranger Sam McRae, had said to some folks in Parker’s Crossing, New Mexico, that there was no doubting Jim Jackson was the quickest gunman that McRae had ever seen in Texas. McRae had said this in the moments before Jim Jackson had a gunfight. Jim had never figured out how Sam McRae had known how fast he was. And, on reflection, he wondered if McRae had said it just to give Jim a little more confidence in those stomach-churning moments before the shoot-out. However, there was no denying that he was fast. He knew that. He’d never really worked at it. It just came naturally.

  The thing was that right now it didn’t matter. Indeed in most cases it never mattered. It was rarely about speed.

  It was always about the willingness to kill.

  And that had been Jim Jackson’s weakness.

  Had been, he said aloud.

  The two riders were barely twenty yards away.

  Jim stood up, gun already drawn.

  His first bullet took the thin man in the chest, lifted him off his saddle and out of his stirrups. Even before the man had hit the ground Jim adjusted his aim and shot the big man twice. The man was still turning, still trying to focus on Jim Jackson, his mouth opening to say something when the bullets ploughed into him, almost as one. There was an explosion of red mist as the bullets exited the man’s back. But he was too big to be blown off the horse. His eyes widened, his mouth, too. A bubble of blood rose and burst from his lips, and he slid off the horse, slowly, like a huge bag of feed that hadn’t been tied on tight. The horse accelerated in fear and dragged the big man several yards before the man’s right foot broke loose from the stirrup and he lay motionless on the ground, dust rising up around him.

  Jim Jackson’s breath came in rapid bursts, almost as quick as his shooting had been. First he breathed through his mouth. Then the breathing became sniffle and sobs and he breathed through his nose. Then he took deep breaths and blew the air out of his mouth, trying to calm himself, slow his racing heart, and control the rising sickness in his belly.

  ‘You shouldn’t have been shooting at me,’ he said. As if speaking it aloud might make everything all right. ‘You shouldn’t have been shooting at me.’

  But the words didn’t make it all right.

  Whichever way he looked at it, he was now a killer. A stone killer. Not a killer in self-defence, not a killer protecting someone else, just a killer.

  He dropped his gun and he fell to his knees.

  He bowed his head and then a moment later he looked Heavenwards.

  ‘What have I become?’

  But there was no answer.

  Ike Landreth heard the gunshots. Initially they were intermittent. Maybe a minute or two apart. Then there was nothing. He wondered if maybe Billy or the Greek had shot the fellow they said was spying on the yard. But then came three more shots. Three in such quick succession that there may actually have only been two.

  Shots so rapid they must have come from a revolver.

  Landreth felt a cold hand wrap itself around his spine and start to squeeze.

  Earlier, the Greek had told him to get his horse saddled up and to be over at the gate as quickly as he could. ‘We’ve got a fellow to bring in. Mr Smith wants to talk to him.’

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘Spying.’

  Then the Greek ha
d added, ‘Bring your rifle.’

  Landreth had been working at Beecher and Smith’s for a few months now. It was easy work. He was just a deputy to the Greek’s sheriff. They weren’t really deputy and sheriff. They had no authority, of course. Not outside the yard. But within it, well that was a different matter. There were so many people there now, working, living, playing. Women, too. They had a saloon and there was rotgut whiskey brewed on site. Gambling and a little whoring went on. And most nights there were fights, mostly fist-fights, but sometime with knives, and just occasionally someone would draw a gun. A lot of money came in, too. Wages for all of those workers. So there was always lots to do, keeping everyone safe and calm, and maybe knocking down a few men if they got too rowdy, and even locking them up in the makeshift jail. It would have been a hell of a job for one man. One man, whoever he was, probably wouldn’t have lasted a week, but for four of them, especially with the Greek in charge, it was pretty easy. They’d had to set a few examples earlier on, but now that folks knew where they stood, and what they could get away with it, it was easy work.

  Easy enough that this, chasing down someone from outside the yard, was an exciting break from the norm.

  The Greek had sent him left, saying that he was to ride as hard as he could and ride along the tree line where they’d killed those coyotes a month before. ‘You’ll see us trailing him,’ the Greek had said. ‘If he cuts towards you, don’t be afraid to shoot him. Maybe his horse. Whichever. The fellow’s up there spying. There’s no good reason for that.’