Butch Cassidy the Lost Years Read online

  Vince said, “Those gals heard that he was in a fight with Jed Flannery outside. That’s all it took.”

  “Ah,” I said. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Girls love a bad boy, Bert. You’d do well to remember that.”

  “I suppose so, sir,” he said. “Nobody ever thought of me as a bad boy before!”

  And they didn’t have any reason to now, I thought, but I kept that to myself. Bert hadn’t really done anything except get backed up against a tree and have his mouth walloped, but the girls at the dance didn’t know that. All they knew was that he’d been mixed up in a fracas with a dangerous gunman. That was enough to make Bert intriguing to them. More power to him, as far as I was concerned.

  I took the punch back to Daisy. She suggested that we go outside to drink it.

  “I don’t know if you’d want to do that,” I said. “There are fellas out there passin’ around flasks and chewin’ tobacco. It’s not really any place for a lady.”

  “I’ve seen plenty of unladylike behavior in my time,” she said. “You forget, Jim, that a minister is sort of like a doctor. People usually don’t show up on his doorstep unless they’re in some sort of trouble and need help. Before my mother passed away she always tried to shield me from that part of my father’s calling, and so does he to a certain extent, but I’ve still witnessed plenty of human misery.”

  “I’m not sure sippin’ whiskey and chewin’ Red Man qualifies as human misery,” I said, “but it is a mite warm in here. Some fresh air would be nice.”

  We carried our cups out of the schoolhouse and ambled over to the trees where the confrontation with Jed Flannery had happened earlier. Daisy sort of eased into the shadows, and I followed her. We stood there sipping punch while a night breeze stirred the branches over our heads. At that time of year those branches had started to put on leaves, and they seemed to whisper as they brushed against each other.

  After a while it seemed like I ought to say something. Maybe I really am in love with the sound of my own voice. I began, “Other than that little scrape, it’s been a fine evening—”

  “Jim,” Daisy said, “shut up.”

  She was in my arms before I could stop her . . . not that I would have tried very hard if I’d had advance warning. She must have been able to see pretty well in the dark, because her mouth came to mine like a shot. She tasted sweet from the punch, but that wasn’t the only reason. Her kiss would have been sweet all by itself.

  I was glad my cup was almost empty, because it slipped out of my fingers and fell to the ground. I put my arms around her waist and held her against me tight enough I could feel her heart beating fast. She slid her arms around my neck and held on to me like she planned on never letting me go.

  Finally her lips moved away from mine, and the part of my brain that was still working forced me to say in a quiet, serious voice, “Daisy, this just isn’t right—”

  “Oh, hush up,” she said. “I may be a preacher’s daughter, but when it comes to things like this, women know a lot more about what’s right and wrong than men do.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that. A gal can get caught up in her emotions just like a fella can. Maybe they’re more sensible overall, but they make plenty of mistakes, especially about who they fall in love with.

  Still, Daisy obviously wasn’t in the mood for a debate, and it wasn’t like we were doing anything that improper, just a little sparkin’ under a tree. So I kissed her again, and what with one thing and another we didn’t go back inside the schoolhouse until we heard the fiddle player scraping his bow across the strings as another number started up.

  The dance lasted pretty late, especially in a place where folks generally went to bed with the chickens. When it finally broke up, there were a lot of farewells shouted between the departing families. Boys and girls who had fallen in love that night held hands until the last possible second. Men who’d passed around the flask a little too much stumbled on their way. Automobiles started up with pops and rumbles as men worked the hand cranks on the front of them.

  I walked out of the building with Daisy, and as we stepped out under the stars I said, “I hope to see you again the next time I come to town, Miss Hatfield.”

  “I hope so as well, Mr. Strickland,” she said. “Do you know when that will be?”

  “No, I don’t,” I admitted. “I’ve got a ranch to run, and I expect it’ll take up most of my time. But my cook has to come to town for supplies now and then, and I might just come with him when he does.”

  “That would be nice. My father and I are staying at the boardinghouse, if you’d care to call on us.”

  I wasn’t sure how the Reverend Franklin Hatfield would feel about his daughter having a suitor who was twice her age. I wasn’t even sure how I felt about it. The idea still made guilty feelings stir around inside me. Daisy had a mind of her own, though, and she was determined. She had decided she wasn’t going to dance with anybody but me tonight, and by Godfrey, that’s the way it had turned out.

  “We’ll see,” I said. “Your father’s liable to need help gettin’ that church built. I might make a donation.”

  “We all do the Lord’s work in our own way, Mr. Strickland,” she said, prim and proper as she could be.

  But all I could think about as I looked at her was how sweet her mouth had tasted.

  Later, as we were on our way to the ranch, Enoch eased his horse up alongside mine and said, “You spent a lot of time tonight with that preacher’s gal, Jim.”

  “I did,” I admitted.

  Behind us, Gabe dozed in the saddle, clearly having mastered the old cowhand’s art of sleeping and riding at the same time. Straggling behind him came the three youngsters. From time to time one of them let out a moan. They seemed to be taking turns. They had snuck outside too many times for a nip, and they would pay for that in the morning. A man can never welsh on the debt he owes to a bellyful of hooch.

  “You sure it’s a good idea gettin’ mixed up with a girl as young as that one?” Enoch asked after a moment.

  “I’m not mixed up with her. I just danced with her.”

  “And went outside with her. I ain’t askin’ what you did out there.”

  “And I ain’t tellin’,” I said. “But don’t worry about it, Enoch. I didn’t sully the young lady’s honor, and I don’t intend to.”

  “Good. I’d have a hard time ridin’ for a man who’d take advantage of a girl.”

  That was an old-time Westerner for you. I had a hunch Enoch had burned plenty of powder in his time. Might have killed more men than some gunfighters who were a lot more notorious, and I was pretty sure he’d heard the owl hoot plenty of times. Don’t ask me how I know, I just did. Like recognizes like, I guess you could say. But when it came to females, he was as stiff-necked and moral as Reverend Hatfield, maybe even more so.

  “I won’t let things get out of hand, Enoch,” I promised. Hell, I didn’t think it was a good idea for me to get mixed up with Daisy any more than he did. I’d figure out a way to divert her onto some other, more suitable path, I told myself.

  But as things turned out, I didn’t have much time to worry about that, because a few days later Sheriff Emil Lester came back to the Fishhook, and nothing was the same after that.

  CHAPTER 23

  The first time Sheriff Lester visited the ranch after I took it over, he drove up in a buggy. This time he came in an automobile, and we heard it coming before he even drove into sight. The thing rattled and belched and growled like some sort of monster crawling over the plains. I had seen and heard enough of the things to have a pretty good idea what it was, but anybody who hadn’t might’ve been a little worried.

  I saved my worrying until the car got close enough for me to recognize the man I saw through the glass window that stuck up in the front of it. The sheriff sat there sawing wildly back and forth with the wheel, making the automobile jerk from side to side. I had a hunch he hadn’t driven much.

  Gabe and I were the only ones at the house ju
st then. Enoch and the boys were out helping the cattle drift back to the high pastures where they would graze for the summer. Randy, Vince, and Bert had been hungover and miserable the day after the dance, just as I expected them to be, but a day’s hard work had driven most of the miseries out of them. They were almost back to normal now.

  I thought about the dance when I saw the sheriff coming, and I wondered if the trouble with Jed Flannery and the other men was what had brought Lester out here. It didn’t seem to me that I had done anything wrong by coming to Bert’s aid, but come to think of it, I had threatened to kill four men. Sheriffs don’t take kindly to such things, especially twentieth-century sheriffs like Lester. Maybe Flannery or one of the others had sworn out a complaint against me, embellishing the facts so that the story sounded like I was in the wrong.

  There was only one way to find out, so I waited patiently on the gallery, where I’d been working on my saddle. Gabe came around the corner of the house from the cook shack and asked, “What’s that god-awful racket? Sounds like a dragon from a storybook a-snortin’ and a-bellerin’.”

  I pointed and said, “It’s an automobile.” Then I grinned. “You read storybooks, Gabe?”

  He let out a snort of his own and ignored the question.

  “I think I’d rather it was a dragon. I don’t cotton to those contraptions. There’s such a thing as too much progress, if you ask me. Why, I remember hearin’ about how they drove that Golden Spike and finished up the transcontinental railroad. I said it right then, I said to myself, this here is the beginnin’ of the end of the frontier the way God intended it to be.”

  Seeing as how Gabe would have been all of ten or twelve years old when they drove the Golden Spike, I didn’t think it was likely he’d had such profound, philosophical thoughts at the time. But if he wanted to remember it that way, it was no business of mine.

  As the automobile carrying Sheriff Lester approached, I stood up, walked out in front of the house, and waited for him with my hands tucked in my hip pockets and my hat resting on the back of my head.

  The car shook and rumbled to a stop, then belched a couple more times. Despite the dust that coated it, the black paint still had a new-looking sheen. Sheriff Lester climbed out, took his hat off, and used it to swat at his clothes.

  “By God, that thing kicks up more dust than a whole herd of horses!” he said in a mixture of exasperation and disgust.

  “Why’d you buy it then?” I asked.

  “I didn’t. The county bought it for me. The commissioners said it was time to bring law enforcement in the county up to date. If you ask me, they just wanted to be able to brag that the sheriff’s department has an automobile.” The sheriff brushed off his hat, too, and clapped it back on his head. “I’ve got business with one of your riders, Strickland.”

  That surprised me. As far as I knew, none of the hands had gotten into any trouble. Unless Flannery was claiming that Bert started the fight at the dance, which seemed pretty far-fetched to me. But if that was the case, I figured we could round up enough witnesses who would tell the sheriff the truth about what really happened. It would be an annoyance but nothing more.

  Or maybe Randy’s past had caught up to him after all, I thought. That was actually a pretty worrisome possibility. I was going to play my cards pretty close to the vest until I found out more about what Lester wanted.

  “They’re all out on the range,” I told him. “Who is it you want to see?”

  “Vince Porter. He does ride for you, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.” That was another surprise. Vince was a little scrappier than Bert, but only because Bert was so gentle he’d never hurt anybody unless he was backed into it, like a cornered animal. “What do you want with Vince?”

  “That’s between him and me,” Lester said. “Where can I find him?”

  “Well, I don’t know exactly. I reckon we can locate him, though. The boys are out movin’ some stock to their summer graze.”

  “Point me in the right direction.”

  “Now hold on,” I said. “You’re not thinkin’ about drivin’ out there in that thing, are you?”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, the range may be too rugged for it, and for another, even if you can get there in it, the blamed noisy thing is liable to scare some beef right off my cows. How about I saddle up a couple of horses for us, and we both ride out to find Vince?”

  “Thank God,” Lester said, and he sounded like he meant it. “I was hoping you’d offer something like that, Strickland. I’ve got to drive that car all the way back to the county seat, and I’m not sure my butt can stand up to any extra miles in it!”

  That declaration made me like Lester a little more. I was still pretty leery about his reasons for wanting to talk to Vince, though. If the boy was in trouble, I wanted to be there when Lester spilled the story, so I could lend Vince a hand if I needed to. I’d tackle the sheriff if I had to in order to give Vince a head start.

  It didn’t take long to slap saddles on a couple of horses. We rode along the creek and then turned south toward the hills. I gave some thought to leading Lester on a wild goose chase, but I decided to play it straight and take him to Vince. Finding out what was going on struck me as being more important than delaying the sheriff.

  The thin haze of dust I saw rising between us and the hills gave me something to aim for. Within half an hour we came in sight of a good-size bunch of cows drifting along with Enoch and the three young punchers behind them.

  Lester hadn’t said much during the trip out here. I had tried a time or two to find out what he wanted with Vince, going about it subtle-like, you know, but the sheriff hadn’t bit on any of the bait I threw out. Now he asked, “Which one is Porter?”

  “That one there, with the red hair,” I said, pointing at Vince. Since subtlety hadn’t done any good, I asked Lester point blank, “Have you come out here to arrest him, Sheriff?”

  “Arrest him?” Lester said, sounding genuinely surprised. “Why would I do that?”

  “You tell me. As far as I know, the young fella hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Well, as far as I know, he hasn’t, either. If you must know, I came out here to deliver some news to him. Bad news. I could have sent a deputy, you know, but I thought it was important enough to take care of it myself.”

  “I sure don’t like the sound of that.”

  “You’re about to like it even less,” Lester said as he heeled his horse into a faster gait. As I pulled my horse alongside his, he added, “But you’re not the one it’s meant for, so just back off and let me do my job, Strickland.”

  I didn’t back off—I stayed right beside him as we rode up to the crew—but I didn’t say anything else, either.

  Not surprisingly, Enoch was the first one to know we were coming. It was hard to put anything past that old gun-wolf. He wheeled his horse around to face us, and his right hand moved closer to the butt of his holstered revolver. I held up my hand, hoping Enoch would understand I was telling him this was a peaceful visit.

  If the sheriff noticed Enoch’s reaction, he didn’t give any sign of it. He kept riding as the three younger punchers reined in and turned their mounts as well. Lester and I came to a stop about ten feet from the little group of riders.

  “Howdy, boss,” Enoch drawled. “Looks like you brought us some company.”

  “The sheriff’s got something to say to Vince,” I said.

  Vince looked shocked. He said, “To me? I haven’t done anything wrong, Sheriff, I swear. At least, not that I know of.”

  “I know that, son,” Lester said. His usually gruff tone suddenly had some sympathy in it, and even if he hadn’t told me that he had bad news for Vince, that would have warned me something unpleasant was coming. Lester went on, “You’d better brace yourself. There was an accident in the railyard this morning. Your father was killed.”

  Lester hadn’t tried to soften the blow. With terrible news like that, there was really no point in it.
No matter how he put it, what he had to say was going to hit Vince like a pile-driver punch in the gut.

  Vince sucked in his breath, but for a second that was his only reaction. He just stared at the sheriff like Lester had grown horns and started spouting a foreign language or something. He’d heard the words, but they didn’t mean anything to him. He couldn’t wrap his brain around them.

  But then his understanding of what the sheriff had said started to sink in. I could see it happening in the widening of Vince’s eyes and the slackening of his jaw. He started breathing harder as he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “No, it ain’t possible. My dad’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lester said. “He isn’t.”

  Randy and Bert actually looked more shocked than Vince did. Enoch was the great stone face, as usual, but I saw the sympathy in his eyes.

  Vince leaned forward in his saddle and asked, “What happened?”

  “You can get all the details later in town—,” Lester began.

  “No!” Vince breathed harder. “I want to know now! Tell me, Sheriff. Tell me or I won’t ever believe it.”

  Lester’s gaze narrowed as he regarded Vince for a couple of seconds. Then he nodded curtly and said, “All right. I reckon you’ve got a right to know. They were moving some freight cars around in the yard this morning when your father got pinned between a couple of them. He never had a chance. It was quick, though. That’s what they told me, and I believe it.”

  Vince shook his head.

  “He worked for the railroad for years. He wouldn’t have been careless enough to get caught between two moving cars like that. He knew his way around the yard too well for that to happen.”

  “Like I told you, it was an accident,” Lester said. “The cars weren’t supposed to be moving. An engine bumped one of them and knocked it into the other one.”

  “Then it was the engineer’s fault!”

  “No,” Lester said. “He tried to stop short of the freight car. The brakes went out and he couldn’t. Nobody’s to blame for it. It was just a tragic accident, and I’m sorry for your loss, Vince.”