Ralph Compton - Blood and Gold

With a surprised jolt of recognition, I discovered I knew the man whose brains had been slowly roasted over the fire. Even though his mouth was horribly twisted by his last, agonized scream, there was no mistaking the freckles and what was left of the bright red hair of Shorty Cummings.

Shorty had once been a puncher for Simon Prather and I recalled that he’d pulled his weight and did his job without complaint. But the lure of easy money had attracted the little man to the outlaw life and he’d soon hooked up with a couple of hard cases out of El Paso. The last I’d heard, the trio had robbed a bank down on the Peg Leg Crossing country and shot their way out of town, a stray bullet killing a ten-year-old girl as they made their escape.

Riding slow and careful, I circled around Shorty’s body and headed toward the dugout, the rain-lashed hills around me waiting in patient silence for what was to come. A dead man lay on his back a few feet away from the door and another hung, head down, over the top rail of the corral.

The Apaches had caught all three out in the open and quickly killed the two El Paso hard cases. I reckon Shorty must have been born under a dark star because he had been the one unlucky enough to be captured alive.

I rode back to where the little man’s body hung. The fire was now dead, extinguished by the rain and by Shorty’s brains, which had run out after the heat cracked his skull wide open.

It had been a terrible way to die, and I vowed right there and then that no matter what happened, I wouldn’t let the Apaches take me alive. Or Lila either.

I found my knife and cut Shorty loose and he fell to the ground with an ungainly thump, legs and arms splayed, ugly and undignified in death. I swung out of the saddle and dragged the man into a clump of long, bluestem grass beside the creek where he’d be hidden from sight. That done, one by one I looped my rope around the feet of the other two outlaws and dragged them behind my horse and laid them beside Shorty.

There was no time for a burying, and I figured this way Lila would not see the bodies and be disturbed by them.

After stretching out the last outlaw, I straightened up and worked a crick out of the small of my back. I swung into the saddle and rode to the ridge of the hogback. Lila was down there, looking for me, her open hand shielding her eyes from the teeming rain. I waved to her, indicating that she should bring up the wagon. The girl cracked her whip and soon the ox team was plodding toward me, heads low as they leaned into the yoke and labored up the slope.

Scouting around, I found a clearing among the rocks and waved Lila toward it. The oxen reached the ridge and headed into the clearing where Lila halted them.

“What did you find?” she asked, looking up at me with eyes that were wide and just a tad frightened.

“There’s a dugout cabin on the hill opposite this one and a barn where we can put up my horse and the oxen.”

“People?”

I shook my head at her. “No people,” I lied. “Who ever lived here probably moved out when the Apache scare began.” I smiled, trying to reassure her. “Lila, we can spend the night in the cabin if the place is halfway decent. At least we’ll be out of the rain.”

Doubt clouded Lila’s eyes and for a moment I thought she knew I was lying to her. But to my relief she said: “I was just thinking about Pa. This journey has been hard on him and he’s not as young as he used to be.”

Well, I let that go. If, as I suspected, Ned Tryon was always as drunk as a hoedown fiddler, no wonder he was aging so fast.

Lila took my silence as agreement because she glanced up at the darkening sky and said: “He’ll be all right when we get to the new place. There’s still time to put in a crop.”

“Maybe so,” I muttered, not wanting to pursue the matter further. Then, more brusquely than I intended:

“I’m going to check out the cabin. Bring the wagon down, but be careful. The slope is slippery from the rain.”

Without waiting for a reply I swung the black around and headed back down the hill.

My brief conversation with Lila had disturbed me deeply. Pinning all her hope for the future on her drunken father was bucking a cold deck. Ned was too far gone in drink and dreams to make it as a farmer. Changing locations would not change the man, and soon the two of them would be running again, leaving one defeat only to chase another.

I hadn’t been lying to her when I told her the thin soil of the Brazos country wasn’t good for farming. But that was something she’d have to find out for herself, and the thought saddened me.

I was just eighteen that spring, yet as I swung out of the saddle and stepped wearily toward the dugout, I felt years older than both Lila and her pa and, in a way I couldn’t fully understand, responsible for both of them.

But I vowed that responsibility would end come morning. They would have to make their own way as I would have to make mine, or else I’d have no chance of catching up with Lafe Wingo and saving the SP Connected from ruin.

Though, as I opened the door of the dugout and stepped inside, the unbidden thought came to me that my chances of getting back the thirty thousand dollars were mighty thin—and all the time getting thinner.

To my surprise, the inside of the dugout was clean and well kept. The dirt floor had been recently swept and the blankets on the three bunks had been pulled up and squared away.

A rusty potbellied stove, long gone cold, stood at one end of the dugout and there was a table with a couple of roughly made benches drawn up to it.

The Apaches must have taken what supplies Shorty and the others had, because the place had been picked clean. Only a scattering of tin cups and a small wooden box remained on the table. When I opened the box I found a couple of dollars in nickels and dimes, a timetable for the Katy Flier and a page torn from a tally book with a sketch of a steep grade where Shorty and the others had hoped to stop the train.

It seemed the outlaws had planned to graduate from robbing banks to robbing trains—that is, until the Apaches had put the final period on the last sentence of the last chapter of their lives.

Looking around me at the cramped, spare cabin, I figured the hunted, wretched existence of the three men lay about me like an open book. The only thing was, there wasn’t much to read. Like so many others who rode the owlhoot trail, the three had died too young and too violently and the greater part of the story of their lives must forever remain unwritten.

Oddly depressed, rainwater dripping from my slicker onto the dirt floor, I stood for a few moments in a joyless silence that whispered of other men’s lives, then opened the door and stepped outside.

Lila stood beside the wagon and I motioned her into the cabin. But she hesitated at the doorway and asked: “Dusty, what about Pa? We can’t leave him in the wagon.”

Oh yes, we can, I thought, but said: “I’ll help him inside.” I felt the soaking wet shoulders of her cloak. “You better get out of those wet clothes and later I’ll build a fire to dry them.”

Lila took a step back from me, her eyes shocked. “You want me to sit there stark naked?”

“Wrap yourself in a blanket,” I said. Then, lying through my teeth, trying to make myself sound a lot more worldly than I was, I added: “Hell, I’ve seen a naked woman before.”

“Have you now, Mr. Hannah?” Lila asked, her left eyebrow arching. “Well, you haven’t seen this one.” She thought things over for a spell, then said: “I suppose you’re talking about that Sally Coleman person.”

“Maybe,” I said, defiant as all get out, but beginning to wish fervently I’d never mentioned naked women in the first place.