Savage Texas: The Stampeders Page 3

  “Oh. Sorry then. But you are pretty. And I think you’re nice.”

  Julia beamed him a smile. “You know what, Timothy? I think you are nice, too. I’ll bet you are one of the nicest young men in Hangtree! Would you say he was, Johnny?”

  “He’s a fine gent all around, sure ’nough, Julia. Timothy speaks the truth as he sees it, but he generally speaks only that part of it that helps folks and makes them grin.”

  “A good policy,” Julia said.

  Timothy seemed more serious all at once and looked down at his feet. “Ma’am, I don’t know if you can tell it or not, but I’m . . . I’m not . . . not smart.”

  “There’s different kinds of smart,” Julia said. “Or so has been my experience in knowing men. Most aren’t as smart as they think they are.”

  “I bet you know a lot of men,” Timothy said. “I mean . . . you being pretty and all, I bet a lot of men want to know you.”

  “In the full-out biblical sense,” Cross muttered beneath his breath, a thought spoken out loud that should have been kept silent, because Julia heard it, and understood it though Timothy didn’t. Johnny grimaced and played out a mental vision of himself kicking his own backside.

  “Are you going to live in Hangtree, Miss Julia?” Timothy asked.

  “For a time, at least,” she said. “Maybe for a long time . . . it depends on whether I find reason to stay. And if I like the people, and the town, and so on. What about you, Timothy? Do you like the people, and the town?”

  “Most the time,” he said, shrugging. “A lot of them are nice folks. Sometimes some of them are kind of mean. They pick on me and make fun.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Julia said. “It’s so wrong when people do that. So wrong!”

  “One time I was sweeping and this man got behind me and started acting like he was sweeping, too, and making a face that made him look stupid. My mama always tells me to just act like people like that ain’t there and they’ll go away. But this man didn’t. Not until Johnny came along and knocked him off the walk into the street. Then he got his arm around the man’s neck and hauled him back up in front of me and made him tell me he was sorry.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yes. Then he left Hangtree because he was scared of Johnny after that.”

  Julia smiled beautifully.

  “Timothy, I do like you,” she said. “You remind me of someone I knew for a long time, and loved very much. However long I’m in Hangtree, I’d like to be your friend.”

  Timothy smiled and nodded. When Julia moved in and gave him a gentle hug around the shoulders, his face reddened and he backed away without another word, and went back to sweeping. He did not take his eyes off Julia until she and Johnny had walked around a corner and out of sight.

  “Did you really know somebody like Timothy?” Cross asked her. “Or were you just talking?”

  “I knew somebody. His name was Jimmy. He was simple in his mind. Like a little boy. Like Timothy seems to be. He was my brother.”

  “Was?”

  “He died. His heart was weak from the time he was a baby.”

  “I’m sorry. Younger brother?”

  “Yes. The last of us.”

  “How many brothers and sisters in your family?”

  “My older brother, Lloyd. One older sister, Betty. Then me. Then poor Jimmy.” Julia sniffed and dabbed at an eye.

  “The others still living?”

  “Lloyd died in a skirmish in Georgia, coming home when the war was over. Betty married a Yankee and lives in Maine now. We haven’t spoken in years. Marrying a Yankee! A shame to the family.”

  “I got little stomach for that breed myself,” Cross said. “Took shots at enough of them, and them back at me.”

  “I’m hopeful I’ll not run into many Yankees here in Texas,” she said.

  “There are a few. Carpetbaggers come down to tell us how to live our lives and take whatever they can from us, mostly. And a few folks who lived here when it all started and just didn’t see things the right way and favored the bluebellies. Hard to account for, but there were some like that.”

  “I deplore that kind. There were even some in Georgia.”

  Johnny said, “There’s a carpetbagger in Hangtown that puts a twist in my guts like nobody else. Name of Sam Heller.”

  She’d been looking across the street, but snapped her head around at the mention of the name.

  “You know him?” Cross asked her.

  “How would I know anybody in this godforsaken town?”

  “You just reacted when I said his name, that’s all.”

  “Well, maybe I heard somebody mention him on the stagecoach while they were looking at the cattle herds out on the plains. Who is he?”

  “He’s a crack shot and a stout fellow. And brave. I’ll give him that. The kind of man you want on your side in a fight.”

  “But he’s not your friend, being a Yankee?”

  “We’ve got our own way of getting on with each other. We get by. Every now and then get to hating each other for a few days. It don’t last.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “Cattleman. Richest man to be found hereabouts for miles around.”

  “How rich?”

  “A lot of them cattle you folks in the stage were looking at, they were Heller’s. He’s got maybe a thousand head of longhorns with his brand on them. And story has it he’s got a hundred thousand dollars or more in cash and gold in the Hangtree Bank. But you know how stories like that go. He may have that much, may have less. Hell, he may have a lot more. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “I’ll have to meet him.”

  “Nah. You’ve met me, and that should be good enough for you. But once Heller sees you he’ll make sure you meet him. And you’ll know him. Generally wears that yaller hair of his long and tucked back behind his ears.”

  “Sort of like you do, minus the yellow part.”

  “Well . . . I guess so. He dresses to catch the eye. Bandoliers crossing his chest and a sawed-off Winchester Model 1866 rifle in place of a pistol. And he can hit what he wants with that mule’s-leg, let me tell you.”

  “‘Mule’s-leg?’”

  “That’s what folks out here call a sawed-off rifle.”

  “I’ve got a lot to learn about Texas.”

  “Well, let me tell you something you’re going to learn soon enough: You earned yourself an admirer already.”

  “Why . . . Johnny! I’m flattered! Are you always so forthright about your feelings?”

  “Well . . . yeah, I am, but this time it ain’t me I’m talking about. I’m talking about poor old Timothy back there at the Emporium. I know that boy well. Good boy, going to be a child all his days. Innocent as a lamb. But he’s got a man’s feeling for the ladies, and a heart that attaches fast to any pretty thing who wanders by and gives him the time of day. Right now that pretty thing is you.”

  “Oh, I suppose he might get an infatuation, Johnny, but I’m accustomed to that.”

  “I bet you are. And Timothy won’t be the only one who’ll get his heart set on you. You’ll have the eye of every gent in town, not just the dummies, before you’re here another week.”

  “Are you going to be among them, Johnny?”

  “Already am, Julia. Already am.”

  “Let’s walk some more, Johnny. You need to show me that boardinghouse. Oh, and please don’t call Timothy a ‘dummy.’ Some used to call my brother that. I always hated it.”

  “I’m sorry, then. Let’s go.”

  “Walk me past the bank. I want to see the bank.”

  “The bank ain’t much to look at.”

  “I need to know where it is. I didn’t come to Hangtree without some degree of means. I’ll be needing to open myself a bank account here.”

  “Beauty, a good brain, common sense. And grit. And apparently a bit of money, too.”

  “A bit. I’d like to make it a lot more.”

  Johnny Cross chuckled. “You’re the full combination, lady.
It really ain’t going to be only poor old Timothy trailing around after you.”

  “I’m counting on that, Johnny Cross. I came here to move my life ahead, not backward.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Wait and see. Just wait and see.”

  “Miss Julia Canton, I’m beginning to think you came to Hangtree in hopes of finding yourself a good Texas man to marry. Which makes this a fine time indeed to be a Texas man. And I reckon I’m the luckiest of them all, being the first to trot you around town like this, right in front of God and everybody.”

  “I guess you are, Johnny Cross. Now step it up! I like to walk fast.”

  “Me, I kind of want to stretch this one out.”

  She grasped his arm and tugged at him. “Come on, pokey. Lively now!”

  “Pretty. But bossy.”

  “Don’t you forget it, Mr. Cross.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The vehicle moving along the Hangtree Trail was nondescript, a mere plain-sided box enclosing the tail end of a wagon. Equally unremarkable was the man driving it.

  He would have looked at home behind a bookkeeper’s desk, ringing a schoolmaster’s bell in the doorway of a small-town school, or shelving books in a library. Thin, short-statured, he carried on bony shoulders a balding head a little too large for his thin stalk of a neck. He held the leads with hands made to accommodate stubby fingers, but bearing instead long and supple ones. No odder human creature, Mexican, Comanche, or Anglo, had ever traveled through this flat and barren-looking landscape than had Otto Perkins, traveling photographer.

  He’d learned his craft in the hardest school of all: the battlefields of the American South. Blessed with the patronage of a wealthy uncle who was fascinated by the science of photography and freely spent his fortune supporting the development of increasingly better photographic equipment, the Atlanta native Otto had joined his uncle and a local embalmer in a morbid but educational wartime enterprise. They toured bloodied, smoking battlefields and photographically recorded the carnage with unflinching candor, like Confederate Mathew Bradys. They also created much more sanitized and dignified images of the dead whose bodies remained sufficiently intact to allow cleaning and embalming. These they dressed and photographed on portable, collapsible draped biers they carried with them on a wagon. Images of their dead in poses that made them appear merely to be peacefully sleeping, cleansed of blood and grit and with wounds hidden, were welcomed by bereaved families, most of whom were willing to scrape together whatever they could to purchase those final mementos of the lost ones.

  Thus, throughout the war, bespectacled Otto Perkins learned to be perhaps the finest unheralded photographer to come out of the southland. He discovered as well a gift for business, a tolerance for blood and mayhem, and a mounting fascination with death, especially that inflicted by violence. And so, when the war had ended, Otto had created his mobile, wagon-mounted darkroom, and headed west in hopes of building a fortune at best, making a living at least.

  In his many long hours of traveling alone, bouncing along on his darkroom wagon and wincing at the potential of every jolt to loosen some seam or joint and create a light leak in his mobile darkroom, Otto had been forced to admit to himself that it all was easier than he’d imagined it would be. With no plan worthy of the name, he’d traveled from town to town, state to territory and back again, and along the way found plenty of people eager to have images of their lives in a growing country turned into something they could hold in their hands and treasure for their entire lives. Otto photographed newborn babies, barn-raisings, cattle brandings, weddings, funerals (complete with corpses laid out or propped up in their finest clothing with family circled around), and even a few hangings, legal and otherwise. What he’d found himself most interested in, however, were photographs related to criminal violence and the criminals who made that happen. It had become something of a secret specialty of his, taking photographs of the infamous and dangerous. He’d photographed the James brothers and their cohorts, and others who had made their names known in the violence of Bleeding Kansas and the border wars, including Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. He’d taken a photograph of the latter with some of his best pistol fighters, including one young and fine-looking dark-haired fellow whose name Otto could not for the life of him remember, but whose image had for Otto become the single best visual embodiment of the pistol fighters of Missouri-Kansas.

  Otto Perkins had plans. He would be the creator of the finest library of photographs of the late war and the rebuilding and growth of the nation in the years following. Particularly the expansion into the West. And he would chronicle as his specialty the world of outlawry that was inevitably part of any expanding frontier. As he traveled the West seeking any way he could find for his camera to make him a dollar, he would in particular capture the images of the bad men and their victims, and someday it all would make him famous and envied, respected, rich, and remembered. Otto could feel it in his rather frail bones.

  And so, over time his life quest had attained an increasingly narrow focus, his routes and travels guided by rumors and hints and chatter he picked up along the way. He went where he believed he could find those who did not wish to be found, the ones who kept themselves in the places where civilization and law had yet to fully take root.

  He had to find them, after all, before he could have any hope of photographing them.

  It was his quest that drove him now toward the grubby Texas backwater of Hangtree. Following a trail of rumors and talk, in search of a particular human being.

  Otto’s awareness that he was not alone on this road came to him gradually, and when a look back around the side of his wagon confirmed the presence of a rider coming along behind, it merely verified something Otto had already sensed in some manner unknown even to himself. So there was no surprise involved.

  Except in regard to the appearance of the lone rider. The man gave the immediate impression of some ancient Norse warrior thrust forward in time. He was tall and broad-shouldered, muscled torso narrowing to a lean waist. His hair was flowing and mane-like, golden yellow, framing a weathered blue-eyed face both rugged and handsome. The kind of man who had intimidated Otto Perkins all his days.

  But also a man who visually embodied the rugged masculinity of the westerner to a degree seldom encountered. Otto had pointed his camera at enough lawmen and outlaws and brawlers and toughs to know that most did not even vaguely match the vision of America’s public of the quintessential man of the frontier. Yellow, broken teeth, skin weathered and sunned to the texture of over-abused leather, warts and scars and cauliflowered noses and squinted eyes, fingers resembling ill-bent twigs from long-past untended breaks . . . Otto had photographed hundreds of such, many of them outlaws and desperadoes.

  This man, though, this silent and unexpected fellow man of the road brought by fate to this point of meeting . . . such visually classic subjects as this one almost never came along.

  It was time to seize the moment. Otto pulled his wagon over to the side of the Hangtree Road and reined it to a halt. As expected, the gold-maned rider—who wore a sawed-down Winchester rifle holstered on his right thigh, rode over and halted beside the wagon.

  “Howdy,” said Otto, peering at the man through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

  “Howdy yourself,” said the other. “Having trouble with your wagon?”

  “No, sir, not at all. I’ve just stopped to get some grub out for a bite of lunch. Name’s Otto Perkins. Have you had aught to eat, stranger?”

  The horseman moved closer and thrust a leathery hand toward the wagoneer. They shook, Otto noticing the strength of the rider’s grip. “I’m Heller, Sam Heller, Mr. Perkins. Herd a few cattle and such as that around these parts.”

  “Call me Otto, sir.”

  “Call me Sam. What’s your game, friend? I believe you’re a newcomer.”

  “I am. If you’ve got a couple of minutes to spare I’ll put some meat on some bread and pour us some cider, and we can eat a bit
and I’ll show you what I do.”

  “I hate to deprive a man of victuals he might need for himself at a later time,” said Heller. “But my growling belly would make me out a liar if I claimed lack of hunger. I thank you for the invite and will be glad to join you.”

  “Excellent, Sam. Excellent.”

  The sandwiches were dry and the meat tough, but the Arkansas cider mostly remedied both. They ate and drank and perused some of the photographs Otto Perkins carried with him as a sort of professional calling card. Heller was impressed and said so, and with the skill of a Union man accustomed to surviving in old rebel country, managed to avoid a discussion of their relative positions during the late war, images of which were mixed in among the photos Perkins showed. Heller could tell from the prevalence of Union corpses in the photographs, and from Otto’s drawl, that he was dealing with a Confederate-leaning man here. But also a man of great talent in his field. Heller was not one to gush out compliments to any man, but the praise he gave to Otto’s work was sincere.

  “So what brings you out to the devil’s armpit, Otto Perkins?” Heller asked.

  “Devil’s armpit . . . by which you mean . . .”

  “Hangtown. Hangtree. The town up the road.”

  Otto chuckled politely. “Well, sir, what brings me here is the same thing that takes me anywhere I go: my work. I come to this empty wilderness in search of images that can intrigue and reveal and teach. Images of the people who have gravel and grit in their souls so they not only survive in this difficult land, but even thrive.”

  “You sound like a professor, friend Perkins. Not that I’ve known many such in my day.”

  “Which? Professors, or people fit to survive out here?”

  “Either.”

  “Well, Sam, if I sound to you like a professor, then you, sir, sound like, and look like . . . this.” Otto waved his hand to indicate the land around them.

  “Like that, huh?” Heller looked around at the endless brush-studded flatness around them. “I fail to see the resemblance, myself.”