The Trail West Page 11

  Sweeney was of a similar opinion. At least, he was no more polite than he had to be, and spent most of the interview slumped in the spare chair, staring at the floor or out at the street.

  When the sheriff finally sent them on their way, Monahan was sure of two things. First, Alf would be free of Carmichael’s custody within twenty-four hours. He could tell by Alf’s confident manner and the state of the jail itself. Even if Dev Baylor turned out to be a seventy-year-old fat widower with rheumy joints and cataracts covering his eyes like peony petals, he could break Alf out of jail between drags on his smoke and never lose a flake of ash.

  Unless he was a jackass as dumb as Alf.

  Monahan didn’t think that was possible. God could play nasty, which was true enough, but He wasn’t outright cruel.

  Second, Carmichael didn’t seem to give a whit about securing his prisoner. The deputy who had been on guard at the door when they arrived had long since gone off duty, and it didn’t look much like the sheriff was expecting anybody to take his place. In fact, when Carmichael followed them out, he made a show of locking the jailhouse door behind him, as if that was that.

  Monahan was pretty certain a kid could have picked that door lock open with a half-sharp stick. He and Sweeney wandered up the street a bit to let the Arizona air blow the jail stench from their clothes, and then they turned around and walked back down the street to the café.

  “Here or the saloon?” Sweeney asked.

  “Here, I reckon. Promised the girl I’d bring her some café supper.”

  Sweeney nodded, and Monahan opened the door and stepped inside.

  “Whoa! Ain’t seen you fellas for a few minutes!” Sheriff Milton J. Carmichael laughed and stepped back, narrowly avoiding a collision with Monahan. “Crowd got thin in here all of a sudden. Hope it wasn’t me what caused it.” He gave a wave to the waiter at the front counter.

  “Wasn’t you, Milt,” said the waiter, looking up from his newspaper. “Crowd thins out right about six on weekdays.” He jabbed his thumb toward the clock on the back wall. The black, curlicued hands read six-twenty.

  Sweeney gave a tip to the brim of his hat. “Be seein’ you, Sheriff.”

  “Yeah, later,” Monahan echoed, and they moved toward the rear of the establishment. He slid into the first empty chair they came to.

  Sweeney seated himself across the table and picked up a menu. “I hear right? You takin’ supper back for that girl?”

  Monahan nodded. “‘Less you’d rather let her starve.”

  “I’d ruther she took her meals at her own place.”

  Monahan raised a brow. “Ain’t like you’re payin’ for ’em.”

  Sweeney let out a heavy sigh and put down his menu. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with money. It’s got to do with—”

  “Can I take your order, gents?” The waiter stood next to their table, pencil poised over his pad of paper.

  Sweeney ordered first, and Monahan ordered the fried chicken dinner, plus one to go. When they had the table to themselves again, Monahan said, “Eat up. You can tell me what you know about Julia and I’ll explain what I know when we get back to the hotel.”

  While they were leaving the café, Dev Baylor was quietly letting himself into the jail. The front door proved no problem, and, as he had guessed, there was no official presence on the other side. Nobody but his stupid, addlepated, lousy shot of a brother, who stood up in the cell and smiled at the sight of him.

  Alf started to say something, but Dev shushed him before he had his mouth all the way open. Alf had a tendency to shout when he was excited, the last thing Dev needed at the moment. He growled, “Don’t say nothin’ ’less you know where the key is.” Alf cocked his head to one side, looked at Dev like he was a loon, and pointed to the wall next to the desk, from which depended a large iron key ring. Dev snatched it off the wall and began to sort through the keys, saying softly, “Any minute. Any minute and we’ll have you outta here, Alf.”

  Monahan and Sweeney exited the café, well satisfied, and bearing a paper-wrapped dinner for Julia. Sweeney stopped for a moment outside on the boardwalk.

  Curious, Monahan stopped too, following Sweeney’s line of vision. He found himself staring straight up the street at the jailhouse. He couldn’t see too clearly, but it looked to him like there was movement around the front door. “What’d you see?”

  Sweeney shook his head. “Dunno. Coulda sworn the front door closed. I mean, it was wide open.”

  “Maybe it was the sheriff. Was he goin’ back to the office? Did he say anythin’ to you?”

  “Fat chance. Of him goin’ back to work or tellin’ me about it, I mean.”

  “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

  “Thinkin’ you’re probably wantin’ to get Julia’s supper to her ’fore she perishes or it goes cold or both, aren’t you?” Sweeney offered, his voice wavering slightly.

  “Yeah,” muttered Monahan. “Yeah, that’s the ticket.” Turning, he hurried back down the boardwalk. Sweeney ran after him.

  They dropped Julia’s supper, complete with rhubarb pie and a tall glass of buttermilk, off at her door and went on upstairs. Sweeney went straight to the chair by the window, sat down, and stuck out his legs. “All right. What the hell’s goin’ on?”

  Monahan scratched at his head. Where to start?

  “C’mon, Dooley!” Sweeney insisted. “What’s the deal with the gal, and with that deal up to the sheriff’s office, and—”

  “One damn thing at a time.” Monahan sat down on the side of his bed and began to pull off his spurs. “First, Miss Julia.” He stopped and stared down at the floor, unsure of how to tell the kid about such an awful thing.

  Finally, in response to the third prodding, he cleared his throat and started talking. “About . . . about Miss Julia. She don’t wanna go home. Fact is, she ain’t got no home to go to, no people, either. Her uncle ain’t really her uncle at all. He’s a no-account that took her in after her folks died of the smallpox—she was eight, then—and moved her out here. He waited till he thought she got old enough—you know, started with her monthlies—and then he set in to rapin’ her every chance he got.”

  Monahan’s head shook with saying it out, and with the weight of knowing it. Once again, he was internally urged to go beat the hell out of Julia’s ‘uncle,’ just because.

  “Jesus,” muttered Sweeney. By the look of him, the information had hit him hard. “That’s why she said . . . I mean, that’s why she talked so tough when we found her. You know, all that stuff about making a livin’ on her back just to get away and well, you know. I didn’t think she knew what she was talkin’ about. But, Jesus.”

  “Since she was just turned eleven,” added Monahan. “And she’s thirteen now. Two years is a big chunk of a little kid’s life.” He dropped the final spur on the floor.

  “Of anybody’s. So we’re takin’ her along, then.”

  “Can’t rightly leave her here.”

  “Nope. We’ll have to get her a horse.”

  Monahan nodded. “I know. Reckon we can get one from Tommy, over at the livery.”

  “Who?”

  The old cowboy smiled, despite everything. “Tommy Hawk. The Indian kid they got workin’ over at the stables.”

  “Tommy Hawk?” asked Sweeney incredulously. “Tommy Hawk? You gotta be kiddin’ me!

  Chuckling, Dooley shook his head.

  “Well, hell!” Sweeney thumbed back his hat. “Maybe he should just up and go with us, too!”

  “Mayhap he should,” Monahan agreed. “He’ll have to get a move on if he wants to leave with us, though.”

  Butch’s brow furrowed.

  “That thing up to the sheriff’s office. I’m willin’ to bet we was witness to a jailbreak.”

  Sweeney’s head dropped forward to hang limply from his shoulders. “Aw, damn.”

  “Anybody ever say you got a way with words, boy?”

  Sweeney snorted.

  Just before dawn the two
men and the young girl finally set out for the livery. Sweeney saddled the horses while Monahan looked over the rest of the stock and made a mental list of those he found unacceptable and those with promise. Tommy showed up about the time the first fingers of morning light appeared in the east, and Monahan quickly made a good deal on a bay gelding and some used tack.

  Julia had been hoping for a wilder-colored, flashier horse, but accepted the bay gratefully. When Tommy admitted he didn’t know the horse’s name, she christened it Parnell, for reasons known only to her.

  To Monahan’s mind, it didn’t much matter what name you gave a horse, so long as the horse knew it and it wasn’t silly. Of course, he had ridden a washed out palomino gelding called Blondie for a while. It wasn’t the best name, but then, it wasn’t his horse. It was only a loaner after his old horse, Chesapeake, got gored by a Mexican fighting bull and died over in Alamogordo. He’d been against bull fighting before that—he thought it was pointless and not a sport at all—but afterward, he retracted his former opinion. Those bulls were mean through and through and deserved whatever life—or death—handed them.

  At any rate, they rode out of town just past five-thirty, before hardly anyone else was up. Keeping to his word, Monahan asked the stable boy if he’d care to accompany them, but Tommy, who apparently didn’t care about his joke of a name, declined.

  “All right, then.” Monahan threw a leg over General Grant. “You change your mind, you can track us.”

  “Understand.” Tommy nodded as he stepped away from the horse. “Good luck to you. To all of you.”

  “Thank you, Tommy.” Monahan reined out into the street to join Sweeney and Julia. “Let’s go,” he said softly.

  They headed on down the street.

  Shortly after eight, they stopped for breakfast, and Monahan announced over his coffee mug where they were going. Sweeney and Julia were rapt, for he’d given them no clue earlier. They’d been drifting generally southward with no destination either one of them could think of.

  “Got a friend down here, lives on the Old Mormon Trail.” Monahan said, out of the blue. “Got a ranch right smack-dab in the middle o’ nowhere.”

  Sweeney frowned. “Mormons in Arizona?”

  “Yeah. A battalion of Mormon volunteers marched through here to fight the Mexicans about twenty-five years ago. I figure we can bide there for a spell. At least, until the heat overtakin’ Julia dies down.”

  “Takin’ me?” Julia sat up ramrod straight, her spine stiff with umbrage. “You didn’t ‘take’ me. Nobody takes me!”

  Sweeney mumbled something just under Monahan’s hearing range, and then all hell broke loose. Monahan ducked under Julia’s plate, which came sailing through the air without warning and then dove behind a prickly pear. The shouts got louder as Julia screeched something wretched about Sweeney’s mother.

  Sweeney yelled, “Why you so damned touchy? Ouch! That hurt!”

  “I wouldn’t be so touchy if you could keep your dirty mind outta the gutter!”

  “The gutter? What the hell you talkin’ about? All I did was make a remark, one you weren’t supposed to be hearin’!”

  “You badger’s butt!”

  “Oh, try to make it my fault now! And you set yourself up for it! Ain’t my fault if you—”

  The fight continued while Monahan—along with the dog—carefully climbed to his feet and stuck his head around the cactus. At least they were out of things to throw. “Hold it!” he yelled, waving his arms. “Just hold it!”

  They stopped stock still, and stared at him. Well, glared, more like.

  “Damn it, Butch. You made some sorta crack, didn’t you?”

  Sweeney had the grace to look a little embarrassed, and so Monahan was a little softer on him than he would have been otherwise. He shook his head sadly. “There ain’t none so unintentionally cruel as the very young. Now Butch, you keep your smart remarks to yourself. And the same goes for you, Miss Julia.” He kept an eye on them while he stepped out from behind the cactus and into the clearing and when he saw Julia start to open her mouth—with the probable intention of using it like a Gatling gun—he said, “I mean it. Both of you, Julia.”

  She closed her mouth with a click, but her eyes still beamed daggers—at both men. She was a pretty little thing but she had one ugly temper.

  If she gave him much more trouble, Monahan was likely to dump her on the side of the trail. He was a loner by nature, and already had one extra too many—that being Sweeney—without adding Little Miss Loudmouth to the mix. He was trying to simplify, but God and all His angels—or maybe it was the devil and all his demons—kept doing everything in their power to complicate things.

  “All right, then,” he said after silence took over the camp and the birds in the surrounding scrub began to softly call and twitter again. “Gather up your stuff. We’re pullin’ out.”

  15

  Come mid-afternoon, they had turned toward the east when they hit the first signs of the Old Mormon Trail. It was marked on both sides by broken glass that sparkled for miles before and behind them; by abandoned Conestoga wagons with the weathered remains of broken axles plunging upward through wagon beds; by big, heavy objects like pianos or chifforobes discarded after being hauled for miles; and by graves marked with everything from granite slabs to wooden crosses tied together with rotting cloth to simple cairns of rocks. And except for the low hills that marked the distant horizons, there was nothing around but desert.

  Sweeney and Julia gawked at first, then became jaded to the sights as the afternoon wore on and the temperature rose. Neither was accustomed to the heat on the flats, and several times Monahan seriously considered calling a halt until the evening. But that all changed when he saw the first signs of Hoskins’ farm. He spied cattle here and there, scattered in the distance ahead. They roamed aimlessly or rooted through the low scrub, looking for anything they might have missed earlier.

  As they drew nearer, more and more stray memories floated through his mind like so many wandering balloons. Some floated within his reach, like the face of Buckshot Bob Hoskins’ daughter, Meggie, and her little pup, Daisy-June; the inside of the Hoskins’ home, the warm kitchen in particular, and the roast beef Buckshot Bob’s wife Mae had served on his last visit; and the stock pond Buckshot Bob was just beginning to dig out back behind the barns.

  It wasn’t much longer before he saw the house and the barns dimly outlined in the distance. He felt his heart flood with joy that he remembered them. Without realizing it, he nudged General Grant into a trot.

  The trio gained the Hoskins spread within a half hour. They rode into the yard and dismounted as the house door opened and people poured out.

  Monahan recognized Mae and Buckshot Bob right away. He didn’t recognize Meggie—who, at fifteen, was almost grown—or her younger brother Robbie, although he was the spitting image of his father. Their dog, Daisy-June, having long left puppyhood behind, followed in their wake, wagging her little stub of a tail behind her.

  “Oh, Dooley! Is it you?” Mae cried as she threw her arms around him. “It’s been over eight years, hasn’t it, Bob?”

  “Nine, mayhap ten!” Bob’s wide grin was framed by a close-cropped goatee and graying mustaches. He kept slapping Monahan on the back, barking out a big belly laugh, and then slapping him again.

  As for Monahan, he just laughed and laughed.

  Buckshot Bob Hoskins had met up with Monahan long ago, back when he was trying to retrieve his memories of Iowa and his folks, Missouri and Monty’s Raiders, and Kathleen.

  After two long nights on the front porch, too many cigarettes, and countless pots of coffee, Buckshot Bob and Monahan had relived their experiences together through the years up to just prior to the Civil War. Sweeney had sat with them and listened.

  The two old friends sat on the porch steps, the yard filled with crushed out and discarded smokes before them and a half-gone pitcher of lemonade between them. Sweeney sat behind so as not to intrude, the slow rhythmic me
ter of his rocking reminding Monahan of home and Iowa, of his ma rocking softly while she sewed and mended in the main room when he was just a little tyke and had been put down for a nap. The sound soothed him as he listened to the tale of his wandering during the years before the war.

  He remembered most of it with Buckshot Bob there to provoke his mind, but part of it sounded like something out of a storybook—outlandish tales some writer had made up, featuring a hero—or maybe a villain—who happened to carry the name of Dooley Monahan. He was torn about that part.

  He leaned back, resting his spine against the center step, and lit a fresh smoke. “My goodness,” he said as he exhaled. “That’s quite a story, there, Bob. I greatly appreciate you takin’ the time to remember it, and to say it all out for me.”

  Bob poured them each a fresh glass of lemonade, then turned and offered the pitcher to Sweeney, who shook his head. “Had enough, thanks.”

  Bob put the pitcher back down and pulled his fixings pouch from his pocket.

  He yanked it open, then looked up. “Dooley, I swan, that’s three times you’ve rode in here and three times I’ve said it out for you. You ought to write it down or somethin’. I mean . . . I might get killed before you ride through again!”

  Monahan smiled. “Ain’t dead yet, are you?”

  Buckshot Bob Hoskins threw his hands in the air, snapping, “That’s what you said last time!”

  Monahan caught the fixings bag in midair before it had the chance to pick up any dust from the ground and handed it back. “Mayhap that’s why you’re still kickin’, Bob. Ever think o’ that?”

  Behind him, Sweeney laughed softly.

  Beside, Bob furrowed his brow.

  Sweeney had listened to everything Buckshot Bob had told Monahan for three nights, and he had to admit that the old cowboy had surely had one hell of a tangled life. He’d sure been banged up a lot, too. Been thumped upside the head more often than Hector had pups! Any other fellow would’ve been dead, but Monahan? No way! It had made him a little scrambled in his brain, but he was still around.