Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

“Button my dress, unless that filthy animal ripped them all off. I’m too shaken to do it myself.”

“They’re all there,” Fletcher said, his face troubled. He could handle a gun or a rope and in a pinch a blacksmith’s hammer, but women’s fixings were usually beyond him.

The buttons were small and round, covered in the same fabric of the shirt, and there seemed to be a hundred of them. It took Fletcher’s big, fumbling fingers a long time to get them all fastened.

When he finished, Estelle turned to face him. “I knew you’d come for me, Buck,” she whispered. “With all my heart and soul, I knew it.”

“Did he . . .” Fletcher stopped, trying to find the right words.

There was no need. “No, he didn’t. Buck, I am protected by the shield of the Lord, and had that animal tried to force himself on me, I would have called down the terrible thunder of His wrath.”

Fletcher nodded. “Well, I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” He glanced at Jones’s body without sympathy. “Or in his case a skunk.”

Estelle looked at Fletcher as if seeing him for the first time. “Buck,” she said, “you’re soaking wet!”

“Some,” Fletcher admitted.

“Let’s get you out of those wet clothes before you catch your death of cold.”

Fletcher nodded toward the dead man. “I’ll get rid of that first.”

He grabbed Jones by the feet and dragged the body outside. There was no sign of the Cheyenne woman, the wood for the stove lying where she’d dropped it.

Fletcher dragged Jones’s body into some deep brush on the riverbank, then returned to the shack.

Tired, wet, and irritable, he insisted Estelle turn her back while he stripped off his wet clothes. These he spread in front of the stove, then wrapped himself in a blanket from the cot.

“Can I look now?” Estelle asked, a barely suppressed laugh in her voice.

“Yeah,” Fletcher answered gruffly, annoyed at the girl and the way all women seemed to have of making a naked man feel foolish about his modesty.

Estelle looked around the shack and found the coffeepot and a sack of Arbuckle. There was water in a jug, no doubt brought in by the Cheyenne woman, and she filled the pot and placed it on top of the stove.

Sitting back on the bed, Estelle leaned over and moved Fletcher’s shirt and mackinaw closer to the fire. “Where is the Indian woman?” she asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know, back to her people maybe. I guess living with Red Jones was no picnic and she was glad to get rid of him.”

The girl reached down and pulled a sodden wad of sack, paper, and tobacco from the pocket of Fletcher’s shirt and threw it into the fire.

Fletcher followed her movements with unhappy eyes. “I wasn’t killing mad at Jones until I discovered that,” he said. “Then it became real personal between him and me.”

Estelle smiled. She rose and picked up her coat that Jones had thrown on the floor in his haste to strip her. She held up the mackinaw and reached into a pocket, coming up with a tobacco sack and papers.

“How the hell—” Fletcher began.

“You know, Buck,” the girl said, interrupting him, “sometimes the way you talk to me, explaining every little thing, I get the impression you don’t think I’m very intelligent.”

Stung and embarrassed, Fletcher fumbled for words. “I don’t think that. I mean—”

Estelle shook her head. “It doesn’t matter; really it doesn’t. But early on I was clever enough to figure out that a smoking man without tobacco would be like a grizzly bear with a toothache.” She smiled and handed sack and papers to Fletcher. “That’s why I bought these back at the sutler’s store at Fort Apache. I thought it might be real prudent to have some spare.”

“Estelle,” Fletcher said, grinning, meaning every word, “you are an angel.”

The girl rose and found matches and scratched one alight, holding it up to Fletcher’s cigarette. He drew deep and long, then, smoke trickling slowly from his nose, sighed. “Ahh . . . that was good.”

“Nasty habit,” Estelle said, her nose tilting. “I don’t approve of it.”

* * *

Fletcher and Estelle both decided to forgo the dubious cleanliness and comfort of Red Jones’s cot, preferring to sleep on their own bedrolls. Fletcher, shivering in his blanket, found them stashed with their horses and saddles in the dead man’s small barn behind the shack.

Fletcher hotfooted it back to the shack, threw the bedrolls on the floor, and was glad to return to his coffee and the welcoming warmth of the stove.

In the early hours of the morning, he rose and brought in the wood the Cheyenne woman had dropped, and fed the fire.

Outside the night was bitter cold and a frosty moon rode high. There were a few stars scattered across the sky, but the horizon toward the north was black with building clouds. The coyotes had begun calling, and down by the riverbank a large animal crashed through the brush.

Fletcher lay on his blankets again, listening to Estelle’s soft breathing, wondering at the girl’s dry-eyed grief for her dead husband and baby and her determination to even the score with her father.

Restless, thoughts crowding on thoughts, Fletcher built himself a smoke and lit the cigarette with a brand from the stove.

Despite the still-visible wagon tracks, trying to find Falcon Stark in the vast, featureless wilderness would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And if it snowed heavily or a cavalry patrol escorted the senator and his hunting party to Fort Hays they would have to turn back and start the search all over again. That is, if they survived. Getting caught in a blizzard on the Kansas plains was no bargain.

And Dan Cain was in Hays. The city marshal would have returned by this time and Cain had made it clear that any debt he owed Fletcher for past favors had been paid in full. Next time he would do what the law demanded of him.

Fletcher had nothing against the lawman. Cain must do his duty as he saw it, and he could not be blamed for that.

Then there was no going back to Hays. Maybe he and Estelle would head for Ellsworth and ride the boxcars of the Union Pacific east. But to where? Lexington? Or would they have to follow Stark all the way back to Washington?

It seemed the chances of clearing his name were slender and growing more so all the time. Falcon Stark was a powerful, respected man in the nation’s capital, and exposing him for the liar and murderer he was would not be easy and, indeed, might be impossible. Fletcher felt a pang of despair deep in his belly as he took a last drag on his cigarette and threw the butt into the fire.

All he could do now was play the cards where they fell and hope he could put together a winning hand.

But that was mighty cold comfort, as cold as the night outside, and just as dark and as fraught with danger.

* * *

Fletcher woke as dawn changed the light inside the shack from scarlet-streaked black to a watery gray. He rose, shivering, and piled more wood into the glowing stove. The water jug was empty, so he dressed and filled the coffeepot at the river.

When he returned Estelle was also awake, and the girl seemed refreshed by her sleep and greeted him with a smile.

Fletcher threw a handful of coffee into the pot and placed it on the stove to boil.

“We’ll head south and see where the wagon tracks take us,” he said. “Just hope the snow holds off or we’ll lose the tracks and our way.”

“What will we do if that happens?” Estelle asked, her face troubled.

Shrugging, Fletcher made an adjustment to the position of the coffeepot.

“If that happens we head to Ellsworth and try again some other day in another place.”