A Quiet, Little Town Read online

  Abe Patterson’s farewells were said, another dire warning given about cussing within earshot of the holy monks, and then he slapped Buttons on the back and wished him, “Bon voyage.”

  The Patterson stage left Fredericksburg with a sound of rolling thunder. Buttons stood in the box like an old Norse god in his sailor’s coat and sweeping mustache and cracked his whip to supply the lightning. Half-drunk voices raised in wild cheers as the stage’s spinning yellow wheels kicked up clouds of dust as it hurtled across the city limits and then rocked headlong into the wilderness.

  Up on the seat, Red sat with his shotgun across his knees and grinned, “You gave them a show, Buttons.”

  “Damn right, I gave them a show,” Buttons said. “One ol’ Abe and them drunks will never forget.”

  Behind him, a terrified Archibald Weathers clung on for dear life.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Patterson stage headed southeast across rolling grassland interwoven with red, white, and yellow wildflowers and stands of timber. Buttons Muldoon kept the Concho River well to his west, taking a trail first blazed by the army in 1869. The team performed well, including the green wheelers, and the horses seemed glad that they’d escaped the confines of the barn.

  The stage was ten miles north of Kickapoo Springs on a good wagon road when Red Ryan saw riders ahead, coming on at a trot.

  “Yeah, I see them,” Buttons Muldoon said.

  “Army?” Red said.

  “Could be. They ain’t Apaches. Too much shiny stuff on them.”

  “Road agents?”

  “I don’t know but keep the scattergun handy.”

  Buttons leaned over and yelled into the stage window, “Riders coming, but keep calm. Let me and Red do the talking.” He straightened up, then said, “Archibald, you set still and behave yourself, an’ you won’t get shot.”

  Then Weathers surprised the heck out of him. “The man on the paint is Smiler Thurmond,” the little man said. “And that’s Jonah Halton with him.”

  “How the heck can you see that far?” Buttons said.

  “I got eyes like a hawk,” Weathers said.

  “An’ that’s why you’re a chicken thief, huh?” Buttons said, grinning.

  “One of the reasons,” Weathers said.

  Buttons shook his head. “Feller, there’s nothing about you makes any sense,” he said.

  “Smiler never crosses the Brazos. Everybody knows that.”

  “It’s him,” Weathers said. “And he’s got the Barnes brothers flanking him, Ollie and Harvey.”

  Now Red shifted uncomfortably in his seat and white-knuckled the Greener. “Would that be Crazy Ollie Barnes, the ranny that shot up the Fidgety Ferret brothel in Abilene that time?”

  “None other,” Weathers said. “He’s as loco as a bedbug, but when it comes to gunfighting he’s no pushover.”

  “Who the heck is he?” Buttons said.

  Red said, “He’s a drawfighter who should never drink whiskey, drives him crazy, and when he’s crazy he’s pure pizen. He cut loose and shot five men in the Fidgety Ferret that night. Shot a real likable whore by the name of Nanette de Vere too.”

  Buttons didn’t take his eyes off the oncoming riders. “Why did he shoot the whore?”

  “By mistake,” Red said.

  “How come you know all this?” Buttons said.

  “I was there, drinking at the bar. I’d just won a booth fight and was celebrating.”

  “Heck, Red, lucky he didn’t shoot you,” Buttons said.

  “Lucky I didn’t shoot him, you mean. I’d given my gun to the bartender, and by the time I got it back, Ollie was gone. He killed Brent Walker that night, a friend of mine.”

  “Brent Walker, the Amarillo outlaw?”

  “Yeah, Brent had been a lawman for a while, but then he took up the bank- and train-robbing profession and he was doing pretty well at it,” Red said. “But like mine, his gun was behind the bar that night.”

  Buttons tore his eyes away from the riders and said, looking worried, “Red, don’t try to get even today, not when we’re carrying passengers, especially four holy monks and a woman.”

  “While I’m a representative of the Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company I won’t waste my employer’s time settling old scores,” Red said. “One day my path and Ollie’s will cross again.”

  Buttons seemed relieved. “That’s true blue of you, Red,” he said. “You’re a credit to the company.”

  “Damn right,” Red said.

  “Now, here they come,” Buttons said. “Let’s keep a weather eye on them rannies.”

  The four riders drew rein at pistol distance. A morose-looking man, his long, narrow face clean shaven, an oddity at that time in the West, sat his horse and addressed himself to Buttons. “Name’s Smiler Thurmond,” he said. “My old man give me that handle as a joke, on account of how I never smile. That is, until the day I bashed his brains out with a mattock. I smiled that day and I’ve never felt the need to repeat it since. Now you know all about me, so what about you? Are you carrying a strongbox? And shotgun guard, if I was you, I’d keep that Greener acrost my knees and the only movement I’d make is to blink.”

  Red opened his mouth to speak, but Buttons, afraid of what might come out of it, jumped in quick. “Right pleased to meet you, Mr. Thurmond,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you, how it’s a natural fact that you’re the fastest hired gun around and that you ain’t never been bested in the outlaw’s calling.”

  “I asked you a question, mister,” Thurmond said. “I won’t ask it a second time.”

  “Well, Mr. Thurmond, I’m as disappointed as a bride left at the altar to tell you this, but, as you can see, I ain’t carrying a strongbox. All I got is four holy monks an’ a schoolmarm an’ I don’t reckon they could put together fifty cents between them. As for me an’ Red, well, look at us . . . we own what we stand up in.”

  Thurmond turned his head. “Jonah, go take a look in the stage,” he said.

  The man called Jonah, small and mean and scowling, wearing a buckskin jacket and canvas pants tucked into fancy boots no cowhand could afford, swung out of the saddle, walked to the stage and looked inside. After a moment he said, “Yeah, four monks in robes and a woman.” He broke into a grin. “And the woman can drink champagne in my bed anytime.”

  “Jonah, git back here,” Thurmond said. “Leave that woman alone.” He looked hard at Buttons and then said, “You got nothing worth robbing. You’re a sore disappointment to me, driver.”

  “Told you so, and I’m right sorry.”

  “How come you don’t have a strongbox?”

  “The Abe Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company cornered the mail and passenger trade,” Buttons said. “You want strongboxes, Mr. Thurmond, your best bet would be Wells Fargo or the Barlow and Sanderson Company. They carry silver mining payrolls up Leadville, Colorado, way.”

  Thurmond shrugged. “I know. Robbed them both at one time or another, but never scored a big haul.”

  “Right sorry to hear that,” Buttons said. “You must’ve hit them on bad days.”

  “Seems like,” Thurmond said. Then, “The Apaches are out.”

  Buttons nodded. “Heard that at Fort Concho.”

  “We seen the talking smoke,” a hard-faced man with ice-blue eyes that Red recognized as Ollie Barnes said.

  “Where?” Red said, testing the man. Did he remember him from the Fidgety Ferret?

  His question was answered when Barnes looked at him without recognition and waved a hand. “Thataway, to the northeast.”

  “How long ago?” Red said, feeling Barnes out again.

  “An hour, maybe less,” the man said. Barnes still did not appear to recall Red, but he seemed uneasy, edging close to being afraid. But afraid of what? Then Thurmond made it clear.

  “Where are you headed, driver?” he said.

  “Name’s Muldoon,” Buttons said. “We’re headed for the Patterson stage station at Kickapoo Springs to
feed the passengers and change horses.”

  “Then we’ll tag along with you,” Thurmond said. “I can’t rest easy with Apaches this close.” His eyes swung away from Buttons to Augusta, who had stepped down from the stage. “You best get back inside, lady,” he said. “There are Apaches about and not a two-hour ride away from here. We seen what they can do to a woman . . . and a man.”

  “Sodbusters?” Buttons said.

  “Rancher and his wife,” Thurmond said. He recalled what he’d seen, and his face showed strain. “Mom-and-pop outfit.” He shook his head. “Tough people . . . took them way too long to die.”

  Augusta Addington played the nervous New Orleans belle again. “Oh dear, those dreadful Apaches.” Then, more genuinely, “Did they suffer very much, the man and woman?”

  “Do you really want me to answer that question, lady?” Thurmond said.

  “No, I guess not,” Augusta said. “Are you a road agent?”

  “Not today,” Thurmond said. “Today, I’m just a fellow traveler.”

  “On account of how you ain’t got anything worth stealing,” Jonah Halton said. “Unless it’s a kiss or two.”

  Augusta shook her head. “I think that would be quite as unpleasant as a robbery,” she said.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Halton grinned. “Not for me.”

  “Jonah, git back here, quit the chitchat, and mount up,” Thurmond said. “The sooner we get to the stage station and have walls around us, the better I’ll feel.”

  Halton swung into the saddle. “Never knowed you to be this boogered afore, Smiler,” he said.

  “Yeah, but then I never seen what Apaches do to a white person afore,” Thurmond said.

  “Hellfire,” Ollie Barnes said suddenly. “I know you.”

  Red’s head snapped up, but the man wasn’t looking at him. His eyes were fixed on Archibald Weathers. Barnes pointed. “Smiler, lookee. Ain’t that Chris Mercer?”

  Recognition dawned on Thurmond’s face. “Yeah, that’s him. What the heck happened to you, Chris? Where are your gambler’s duds and them fancy Russian pistols?”

  “I gave all that up, Smiler,” Weathers said. “A long time ago.”

  “Heck, you ain’t exactly prospered since, have you?” Thurmond said. He addressed himself to Buttons. “Where are you taking this man?”

  “Taking him?” Buttons said. “Well, I’m taking him a hundred miles from here and dumping him. The law in San Angelo wanted to hang him for a damned nuisance but decided to give him the option of being banished from the city limits forever. He took the option.”

  “Buttons,” Red Ryan said. “Chris Mercer . . . don’t that ring a bell?”

  Buttons seemed puzzled, then his face slowly cleared. “Yeah, now I recollect . . . the Salt Creek War up Colorado way a few years back. Heck, big Jim Milk, nowadays he drives for Wells Fargo, was a hired gun in that scrap . . .”

  “And Chris Mercer was top gun,” Thurmond said. “You’d killed eight white men by then, hadn’t you, Mercer?”

  “About that,” the man now called Mercer said. “Somewhere along the way I lost count.”

  “That’s enough talk, now get this stage rolling,” Thurmond said. “The Apaches could be getting close. I think I can smell them in the wind.”

  “Hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute,” Buttons said. He turned and looked at the man hunched over on the top of the stage. “Here you,” he said. “Was you Chris Mercer at one time?”

  The little man nodded. “Yeah, I was. At one time.”

  “How come you quit the gunfighting profession?”

  “Because of a Gypsy woman.”

  “She left you?”

  “No, I was in Denver when she told me my fortune.”

  “Heck, man, did she read your palm, the way they do?”

  “No, she saw me in a crystal ball.”

  “And what did she say when she saw you in the crystal ball?”

  “I’d killed twelve men in fair fight by then and she told me thirteen was my unlucky number. If I tried to kill a thirteenth man, he’d be the death of me.”

  “And that’s it?” Buttons said. “You hung up your guns?”

  “No, I didn’t hang them up. I sold the Smith and Wessons and my duds and bought whiskey,” the man called Chris Mercer said. “I’ve been buying whiskey ever since.”

  “Buttons shook his head. “Damned tragic,” he said. “All that shooting skill gone to waste.”

  Red said, “Maybe the Gypsy woman was wrong. Ever think of that?”

  Mercer shook his head. “She was old, and old Gypsy women are always right. Anyhow, I can’t take a chance.”

  “Hey, Chris, want me to shoot you and put you out of your misery?” Jonah Halton said.

  “Maybe later,” Mercer said. “I’ll let you know.”

  Halton grinned. “Jonah Halton, the man who killed Chris Mercer. I like the sound of that.”

  Mercer’s only reaction was a disinterested shrug of his skinny shoulders, and Red wondered at the man. There was a time not so long before when Western men talking around the potbellied stove of a wintertime mentioned Chris Mercer in the same breath as John Wesley Hardin and Wild Bill Longley. Had a Gypsy woman’s crystal ball really spooked him that badly, or was there something else? Time and future events might answer that question.

  Buttons Muldoon hoorawed the team into motion, and an hour later drove the stage into the Patterson station at Kickapoo Springs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As soon as she stepped from the stage, Augusta Addington took Buttons Muldoon aside and told him she thought she’d caught a glimpse of an Indian on a black horse watching them at a distance. But Buttons and Jim Moore, the station manager, were skeptical. Gertrude Moore, Jim’s tall, bony and angular wife who seemed to live on nothing but prune juice and scripture, questioned Augusta closely and then reported that she put the Apache sighting down to female hysteria accompanied by a heaviness in the womb and a tendency to cause trouble.

  Buttons and Moore accepted that explanation, but Red Ryan was not so sure. He recalled Augusta calmly standing under the disemboweled bodies of Stover Timms and Lem Harlan, a British Bulldog revolver in her pocket, and whatever else she might be, the woman was not a hysteric. If she said she saw an Apache, then she saw one . . . it was as simple as that.

  Western outlaws took good care of their horses, and Smiler Thurmond and his men put theirs in the stable with hay and a scoop of oats before they returned to the cabin.

  While Buttons and limping Jim Moore, a man with heavy features, black eyes, and graying hair showing under a frayed Confederate kepi, left to change the team, Red gave Augusta his arm and followed Thurmond and the others inside the station, a spacious log cabin with two small windows to the front that could be shuttered from the inside. Apart from the usual outbuildings, barn, and corral, Abe Patterson had built what he called a redoubt, a crude, sod wall enclosure about eight feet high with timber firing platforms and a single narrow gate. The structure covered about twenty-five hundred square feet of ground and when Apaches were in the area it was manned day and night by Moore’s witless sons Danny and Donnie and a surly hired hand named McKenzie who’d killed a man in El Paso a couple of years before. According to Jim Moore, all three were crack shots with a Winchester, and fear didn’t enter into their thinking, such as it was. Abe Patterson’s plan was that in the event of an Indian attack, the occupants would leave the main cabin, man the redoubt, and run up the Patterson and Son Stage and Express Company flag, a green and gold quartered banner, the colors of his coat of arms.

  So far, the plan had not been put to the test, and Jim Moore hoped it would remain that way.

  When Red and Augusta stepped inside, the two long dining tables were occupied, the one to the left by the four monks, the other by Smiler Thurmond and his men. The monks sat in silence, hoods pulled over their faces, and Chris Mercer, small and insignificant, sat alone.

  Beyond the tables, at the far wall, was a stone fireplace burn
ing logs, fronted by wrought iron stands that held a variety of pots, fry pans, a kettle, and a large, sooty coffeepot. Gertrude Moore busied herself frying bacon and stirring beans, and the biscuits cooking in a cast iron skillet smelled a little scorched.

  “Hey, Ryan, bring the lady over here and sit with us,” Thurmond said. He nodded in the direction of the four silent monks. “You won’t get much conversation over there.”

  “Or there,” Ollie Barnes said, his eyes moving to Mercer. Then he called out, “Hey, mister, don’t I know you?”

  Hayden McKenzie sat at the end of a table, forking beans into his mouth. “You don’t know me,” he said.

  “I swear, I seen you afore somewhere,” Barnes said.

  “You ain’t seen me anywhere,” McKenzie said.

  “Y’all sure about that?” Barnes said. “Didn’t I have trouble with you one time?”

  McKenzie’s sullen expression didn’t change, but he remained silent.

  “Ollie, leave the man be,” Thurmond said. “He doesn’t know you.” He stood for Augusta Addington and, with a certain amount of Southern charm, said, “Please be seated, ma’am and allow us to delight in your company. I’m sure you’ll prove to be a sweet distraction.”

  “You are very gallant, sir,” Augusta said. “Y’all hush now, you’re making me blush. Mercy me, I almost feel that I’m back in New Orleans.” She sat, her petticoats rustling, and watching her, Red Ryan marveled that she’d already spent three hours in a hot, dusty stage but still looked fresh and pretty and smelled of French perfume.

  Mrs. Moore served up food, bacon, beans and slightly scorched on the bottom biscuits. A devout Catholic, she attended to the monks first and asked for their blessing, which, after some hesitation on the brothers’ part, she duly received, four strong hands making signs of the cross in the air.

  As a top-class hired gun, Smiler Thurmond had spent time around the rich and powerful, men and women with airs and manners above his station. He was a quick learner and so with some sophistication talked to Augusta about trivial things and told her stories that made her laugh, leaving Red to sit in silence, feeling like a tongue-tied rube.