THE WIFE OF the Rosarita banker asked Adam Steele: ‘Are you at all interested in what I think of you, young man?’
‘You’ve got a small audience but it’s a captive one, ma’am,’ he told her. ‘And although I’d rather be somewhere else doing something else …’ He shrugged. ‘I’ll be happier listening to you in here than I was when you were holding that double-barrel shotgun on me, Mrs. Webb.’
She showed the ghost of a smile as she shook her head ruefully and then sighed: ‘It was quite a reception you got here in town, wasn’t it?’
‘Last time I had so many guns aimed at me on one day was probably at Shiloh.’
It was a few minutes after the woman had entered the lockup and the preacher had reluctantly assumed his responsibilities as a deputy in the sheriff’s office. Although Steele had said he was not hungry, Ellie Webb had unloaded her basket and pushed food into the cell through a horizontal slit in the bars of the door. There was a half loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese and two still warm boiled eggs. She had called through the open doorway to the Rev. Masterson that he should light Kyle’s stove and make coffee. The preacher had done some muttering of complaint, but then there were sounds that indicated he was doing as he had been asked.
‘I think you’re a victim of circumstances,’ Mrs. Webb announced. And stepped into the second cell, where she sat on the cot—on the pillow so that she was able to rest her back against the front wall of the lockup and swing her feet off the floor. Thus was she able to look through the dividing wall of bars into the Virginian’s cell without having to crane her neck.
‘Reckon we’re all that,’ he replied as he sat on his cot and rested his back to the wall between the lockup and the sheriff’s office.
‘Can’t argue with that. But I guess you know what I mean in particular? Some folk’s circumstances are a whole lot worse than other folks.’
Masterson stepped into the connecting doorway and was morose rather than aggrieved as he qualified: ‘There are some, it seems to me, who can be said to go out of their way to invite trouble.’
‘Hey, the poor guy’s locked in the hoosegow through no real fault of his own!’ the woman accused and her eyes directed a scowl toward the man in the doorway. ‘Be a whole lot more punishment than he deserves if he has to be forced to listen to one of your moralizing sermons, Michael Masterson.’
‘And some that just can’t seem to help stirring up the dust when other people are around, feller,’ Steele allowed, his tone and expression detached from the here and now as he gently massaged the bruised area on the left side of his face.
‘Nothing worthwhile comes easy to us in life, sir. All of us who seek to achieve our laudable aims must strive to take into account that we are not islands in a vast sea of—’
‘Orville Kyle—or anybody else for that matter—tell you about the trouble between Avery Begley and Lucas Hart?’ the woman cut in. And there was scorn on the turn toward anger in her dark eyes as she glared briefly at the preacher. Then, after he had responded to the look with an expression that seemed totally devoid of Christian thought, she peered through the open door of the cell at the rear wall of the lockup: and saw, on the stonework, images that threatened to touch off the fuse of her rage.
‘Just that it killed Begley,’ Steele answered. And shot a glance at the preacher that was impassively commanding.
‘I’ll attend to making the coffee,’ Masterson said with resignation. And added as he turned to re-enter the sheriff’s office: ‘But I’ll be able to hear what you say to him, Ellie.’
‘Nothing that won’t be the truth,’ she answered the one man, but looked at the other with an expression of sincerity replacing the earlier anger on her plain face.
‘Why, ma’am?’ Steele asked as a first trace of the aroma of brewing coffee found its way into the lockup on a cool draft of evening air. ‘The food was more than enough.’
‘Because it would be pointless not to tell …’ She faltered and then vented a small sound of annoyance with herself. ‘Oh, I think you mean why should I be here fixing to jaw your ear off?’ She paused, but to frame an answer to her own question rather than to wait for his confirmation. Then: ‘Pride, I suppose. In myself and my husband. In the town and most of the folks that live hereabouts. You seen us at our worst and I figure it’s important to set the record straight as to why Rosarita people been acting up the way they have. So, same as the food, I guess. Hoping you’ll know we’re as sorry as I say we are—but just saying sorry to a man don’t make his lumps hurt any less, does it?’
‘No, Mrs. Webb.’
‘Nor does it’ she gave him an up-from-under look. ‘—persuade a certain kind of man that there ought to be room for him to forget and forgive?’
In the sheriff’s office, the Rev. Michael Masterson had been moving about and rattling tin cups together. Abruptly he was silently still. And it almost seemed as if the whole town was waiting just as anxiously to hear the Virginian’s reply to Ellie Webb’s question—for not a sound filtered in off the street through the barred windows of the lockup.
‘I’ve always been willing to forgive my enemies, ma’am,’ Steele said.
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘Soon as they’re dead.’
The preacher dropped a cup and the banker’s wife caught her breath.
‘I don’t always feel the need to kill them.’ He ran the fingertips of a gloved hand along the aching length of his jawline again. Then invited: ‘Not prepared to tell you right now whether or not I’m open to being talked into allowing you to keep your local lawman in one piece.’
Masterson vented a low, strangled cry and Ellie Webb swallowed hard before she was able to entreat:
‘But you’ll listen, young man?’
‘Whatever you have to say will have to rest easier in my mind than what’s already in there, Mrs. Webb.’
‘Good.’ She nodded with an emphatic motion, then had to pause to organize her own thought process. Eventually launched into the explanation with far less confidence than she had shown when she first came to the lockup. ‘Avery Begley was well liked and highly respected in this town. Guess you must have figured that out for yourself: from how the entire town, almost, went to the burial. You came in off the west trail and you probably saw the old Begley place out by the Black River cottonwood grove. Still some sign of it left, I’m sure?’
‘Enough to show there was a farmstead there once.’
‘That was where Avery first settled hereabouts. At a time Rosarita was no more than a couple of stores, a church that’s since fallen down, a shack that was Duncan Nelson’s first saloon and our bank. Off to the east there was a whole lot of other dirt farms and Avery should’ve staked a claim over there with them. But he always said he’d come out from New York City to find some space. He wasn’t a man that disliked other folks—just the kind who only liked to see them when he wanted to. Had a pretty young wife who never said she didn’t agree with his line of thinking. And there were twin little ones not old enough to have any opinions.’
The preacher had brought two tin cups of coffee into the lockup, and by his manner showed that it was not his intention to intervene: this as he set down one of the cups on a spot where Steele could reach through the bars for it and then went into the other cell to hand the second to Ellie Webb. He went back into the sheriff’s office and then re-emerged to stand in the doorway with his own cup of coffee as the woman continued:
‘The Begley family had three good years out at Cottonwood Farm. Same as other settlers on the better land to the east of town. And Rosarita started to grow. Then both the Begley little ones took sick with the typhus. Died within hours of each other. Their mother grieved for a week before she drowned herself in the river that went past the place. Avery was working in the fields when she killed herself. He buried her alongside the grave where they’d both buried the babies. Then he hitched his horse to the buckboard and headed out across the badlands to the west.’
‘I was there and watched him,’ the preacher said sorrowfully, holding his cup in both hands and peering down into its steaming contents. ‘He’d asked me out there to perform the burial service. There were just the two of us and after he thanked me and told me I was to sell everything of value on the place and put the proceeds toward the building of the new church, he left. I tried to talk him out of leaving. At least he should not go out into the wilderness, I told him. If he did not die of hunger or thirst, at that time there were many bands of hostile Apaches roaming the Natanes Plateau. But it was as if I were making entreaties to a deaf mute. And when I attempted to restrain him by physical force he knocked me to the ground as if I were a mere boy.’
‘That was almost twenty years ago, young man,’ Ellie Webb said, eager now to take up her version of the account again. ‘And for the next two years we all thought he must have perished. But then he came back to Rosarita. A rich man by our standards. And I should know, since he deposited his cash in Earl’s bank. But he didn’t keep it sitting there for very long. Started to buy up the places east of town. Offered good prices to the folks ready and willing to sell. Later on better still to those who needed persuading. Took him fifteen years before he got all the land he wanted. Fifty thousand acres it says on all the title papers he held. All of it the single spread, of course. All the old places and their fences knocked down. Except for the one he first bought. He just moved in there and started to live in it the way it always had been before he bought it. And he farmed a few fields, ran some hogs and a few head of beef cattle. Kind of let the rest of his property go back to the way nature intended it.’
‘A lot of people thought he must be crazy,’ Masterson went on while Ellie Webb took time to sip her coffee. ‘But many more of us realized he was simply leading the style of life that had always attracted him. Without a wife and family any longer, of course. But he had his little farm isolated from neighbors he did not have to see unless by his own choice. Encircled by land that could not be settled because he owned it. Perhaps he was indeed a little unhinged. The degree of tragedy he had endured must leave a mark of some kind upon a man.’
‘But he never did a solitary thing to harm anyone, Steele,’ the woman put in, her tone insistent. And she set down her empty cup on the floor and rose from the cot. To peer out through the barred window as the gathering murk of approaching evening suppressed the final harsh glare of the afternoon sunlight: overlaying the yellow brightness with the dull red of a dying fire. ‘Just lived his life the way he wanted—and had the money to afford. Kept himself to himself almost all the time, but was always the perfect gentleman in all his dealings when he had occasion to come to Rosarita. Were a few people here about who held he was selfish to keep all that land to himself and do hardly anything with it. Held that if it was sectioned off like it once was all the different families that worked it would have made Rosarita more prosperous. But most of us figure we haven’t done so badly for a one-street town at the end of the stage route and a telegraph line. Still a few scattered places worked by folks that didn’t sell to Avery or that he never planned to buy. Them folks need what we can supply here in town. Same as the men who work for Lucas Hart.’
She paused, but not for effect. Instead to do a double take at something that had caught her attention on the street. She pushed her unattractive face closer to the bars of the window and vented an unladylike grunt just before her husband called lightly:
‘So this is where you’ve got to, Ellie. That’ll teach you to interfere with law business.’
‘I’m here of my own free will!’ she countered irately. ‘Trying to undo some of the harm Orville Kyle and some others I could mention did—’
‘Pardon me, dear,’ he interrupted. ‘But you obviously have some other poor man who has to listen to you right now. So I guess I can be excused to take a quiet drink at the Pioneer while—’
‘Go to hell, Earl Webb!’ she snapped and spun away from the window.
Her husband chuckled as he went on by the lockup toward the saloon at the far end of the street.
The preacher made a sound of rebuke that might have been drawn by the woman’s mild curse or Earl Webb’s dismissive attitude toward his wife. Then took up the account of Rosarita’s recent trouble. ‘Mr. Lucas Hart was ranching in this area back when the town was first established, Mr. Steele. A few miles to the east on the Mogollon Rim, let it be said. At the start we townspeople saw little of him: and his men came to Rosarita only very occasionally. There was never any trouble. And when he became more successful and needed to expand the Double-H Ranch, he spread to the east and the north and the south. Until there was no more suitable cattle country in those directions. But he still wanted to enlarge his land holdings, and so the only way to come was westward. And then it was the turn of Avery Begley to be offered a fair price for his place. But he told Hart he had no intention of selling; and after this, I’m afraid the … the trouble began.’ His voice dropped and he shook his head sadly. ‘The trouble that led to that poor, tragic, helpless …’
‘That killed the crazy son of a bitch!’ Ellie Webb said into the morose silence that the preacher had left as he ran out of soft-spoken words. And in the fast-gathering gloom of evening her voice probably sounded more harsh than it was because of its stark contrast with that of Masterson. ‘First some fence lines got knocked down. Then grass fires flared up for no good reason. A coyote got trapped in Avery’s chicken run one night, would you believe? And that rumor you heard got started when a whole mess of For Sale signs was nailed to trees on his property. A fishing pond on his place suddenly got poisoned. For more than a year that kind of lousy thing happened to Avery, young man. And Orville Kyle wasn’t ever able to find out a damn thing that showed that Lucas Hart was behind what was happening.’
‘Now, Ellie, the sheriff did try to investi—’
‘Did I say he didn’t?’ the woman snapped at the preacher. ‘And why don’t you throw some light on the situation we have here, Michael Masterson?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Light a lamp. Sun’s near set and as a deputy sheriff you can’t keep a proper eye on the prisoner if you can’t see him.’
‘Deputy sheriff indeed,’ the preacher murmured as he swung out of the doorway to do as she suggested. ‘I think you are more fitting to hold such a position than I.’
The woman resumed her frowning survey of the street as the fragrance of woodsmoke permeated with the aroma of cooking food began to waft in through the barred windows. And said as light from the newly-lit lamp spilled into the lockup from the sheriff’s office: ‘You’re not a man to ask many questions, Mr. Steele?’
The Virginian had taken off his gloves, and as he broke open one of the hardboiled eggs he told her: ‘Ma’am, you were there at the bank when I asked what I wanted to know.’
‘Does that answer mean you’ve got no interest in what Michael Masterson and me are telling you?’
‘Could be you’re leaving nothing unsaid,’ he answered. And then rekindled her eagerness to go on when he probed: ‘You were getting around to saying that the Rosarita lawman did his best, Mrs. Webb?’
She nodded as the preacher returned—content to leave the lamp in the sheriff’s office to shed meager light through the doorway, for he carried his refilled coffee cup in one hand and the pot in the other. He quietly set the pot down on the floor where Steele could reach through the bars and replenish his cup. And this was done, the men nodding in acknowledgement to each other, as the woman responded to the Virginian’s prompting.
‘He’s good at his job, which is sheriff of a hick town. Lucas Hart is smart and has money to hire on smart help when the need arises. Fact is, everyone knew what was happening—who was doing what to who—but if you want a town run on a tight law and order rein, all the rules got to be abided by. Without proof of guilt, wasn’t nothing Orville Kyle could do.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Then poor Avery died and wasn’t no other way to look at it but as an accident from how it happened. There was a stampede of Double-H cattle that had the whole herd going hell for leather onto the Begley place. Hart’s men claimed they couldn’t stop the critters because they were so spooked up. Did manage to swing them away from Avery’s house at the last minute. Avery allowed that himself. While he lay dying after some of Hart’s men brought him to town. Seems he took a hand in heading the stampede away and the strain was too much for his ticker. He died in Doc Bascomb’s house no more than an hour or so after he was carried in there.’
‘And how the town felt about the way he died may be judged from the size of the congregation at the funeral service,’ the preacher added in a tone of sadness that was a match for that in Ellie Webb’s voice when she spoke of the recent death. ‘But I’d be telling less than the truth if I told you I thought the size of the attendance was due entirely because of the high regard in which the deceased had been held.’
‘Damn right!’ the woman cut in, and her near venomous tone was directed out through the window along with a reproachful scowl. ‘Almost all them that were there went there out of a feeling of guilt. Because all they ever did while that poor son of a bitch was being driven to his grave by that land-grabbing Lucas Hart was to throw up their hands and make sounds of pity.’
‘But what else could—’
‘I know, I know!’ she cut in on the man attempting to excuse the townspeople. ‘And I know, as well—same as you do—that Orville Kyle feels more shame than anyone about not being able to lift a finger to help Avery.’
She had turned from the window to stare at Masterson. Now swung out of the cell and halted at the barred door to glare through at Steele. But she was able to moderate the expression in her dark, weak-sighted eyes to a brand of entreaty before she concluded: ‘And I know that’s why he acted the way he did toward you, young man. He figured you for the kind of trouble he could handle. But under normal … if we hadn’t buried poor Avery just a short time before, the sheriff would never have been so brutal.’
She gazed at him for stretched seconds after her plea was ended. And he could see that she needed to struggle hard to keep a grimace of mounting anger off her plain face while he chewed on some bread and cheese. But he swallowed the food and was able to respond to the woman before her rage exploded.
‘I’m grateful for the trouble you went to to bring me supper, Mrs. Webb.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘And your company.’
‘But you still mean to cause trouble because of what has—’
‘If I’ve ever caused trouble it was never because I meant to. Sometimes I set out to end it.’
She seemed about to press the point. But then she snorted and snapped: ‘You really are the most infuriating man!’
‘Stubborn and self-opinionated, too,’ Masterson augmented as Ellie Webb gestured for him to step aside so she could leave the lockup.
‘Can’t deny it, I reckon,’ the Virginian allowed. ‘Amazing how much Avery Begley and I had in common.’
‘And remember what happened to him, young man!’ the woman said ominously as she pushed between the preacher and the door jamb. Concluded from the sheriff’s office as she strode angrily across it: ‘He’s dead!’
Steele waited for the door to slam behind her before he washed down a final piece of egg and bread with a swallow of coffee and drawled: ‘Reckon I’ll worry some about that until I’m turned loose from here.’
‘I assure you, sir, you have no need to be concerned on that score,’ the preacher assured. ‘The sheriff truly does take his duty seriously and holds the law in high regard. When I intervened in this afternoon’s violence it was as much to save him from himself as to prevent you from taking further punishment. As that woman told you, Mr. Kyle was not—’
‘Yeah, I’m convinced, feller. The Rosarita peace officer is one of the finest in the land. And I bet he’s got a good supply of the elephant powder, too.’
Steele was starting to feel painfully stiff from sitting in one position for so long. And he eased tentatively to his feet with a grimace as Masterson asked, confused: ‘Elephant powder?’
‘You spread it over the streets of a town and elephants never come near,’ Steele growled as he began to pace the short length of the cell again.
‘But there are no ele … Oh, I see. It’s some kind of joke.’ But he was ready to be angry rather than amused.
And the Virginian’s features were impassive rather than grinning in the wake of the grimace as he replied: ‘More an allegory than a joke, I reckon. Maybe there are no elephants because of the powder? The same way that maybe Kyle’s such a hotshot peace officer because nobody ever disturbs the—’
‘No, that is not strictly true, Mr. Steele,’ Masterson cut in earnestly on the slowly pacing man in the cell. ‘The sheriff once tracked down and had to shoot three men who robbed the Webb’s bank. And he has on several occasions been required to deal with trouble among drunken customers at Mr. Nelson’s Pioneer Saloon. Mostly that was caused by hands off the Double-H Ranch on pay nights.’
Steele decided there was little point in taking so much trouble to keep his muscles from getting set at this early stage of his incarceration: and so he abandoned the exercise and lowered himself onto the cot again, at a point that allowed him to swing his legs up and to rest back with his head on the pillow.
‘Yeah, I met four of Hart’s cowpunchers in the Pioneer. Liquored up, I reckon they could raise some hell.’ He lifted his head off the pillow to peer along the length of his body and between the bars at the uncertain preacher to add: ‘And I’m not trying to make a joke this time.’
‘Yes, I saw Ashton and the others ride into town and then leave after the funeral,’ Masterson countered in a manner that suggested he was eager to put his relationship with Steele on a man-to-man, equal basis that ignored the bars between them. ‘And I agree with the consensus as to why they were in town.’
He paused and there was a near-palpable query hovering in the silence of the meagerly-lit lockup. The Virginian, his head back on the pillow and his brooding gaze now directed up at the ceiling, confirmed his interest with the assumption:
‘Charlotte Begley and the two men with her were expected to reach Rosarita in time for the funeral?’
‘Nothing was certain, Mr. Steele. So much time had elapsed. You see, in the final few minutes of his tragic life, Avery Begley knew the end was near. And he requested that after he was gone a letter should be written to Charlotte and Dale Begley at an address in San Francisco. To tell them what had befallen him and that he bequeathed to them the land for which he had died. And he also asked that his funeral be delayed for two weeks to give his family an opportunity to attend.’
‘No strings attached to the legacy, feller?’
‘None. He said they should be told in the letter that they might do as they wished with their inheritance. His requests were adhered to, and it was even decided to use the telegraph rather than the mail to give the surviving members of his family a slender chance of reaching Rosarita in time for the funeral. But we held out little hope of the message drawing a response, Mr. Steele. For this was the first that anybody had ever heard of him having relatives. And as far as we were aware he had not had any contact with anyone outside of this community since he returned here after the two-year absence that followed the tragedy at Cottonwood Farm.’
He stooped to retrieve the coffee pot and the cup that Steele had used, before he concluded: ‘Those four men from the Double-H have been in and out of town for the past several days. For no other reason than the obvious one, it appears. And I can but assume that the distraction of the funeral, perhaps allied with your arrival, caused them to overlook the fact that the stage was due to reach town today.’
‘But maybe Kyle will save the Double-H boys another trip to Rosarita to find out they left too early, uh?’
Masterson sighed deeply. ‘He did say he might go out to see Lucas Hart, didn’t he? We can but hope and pray that whatever he has in mind to do will result in a peaceful end to this tragic business.’
‘If praying can do any good, you’re better qualified to swing something than I am, feller,’ the Virginian drawled. ‘Best you count me out of that “we” stuff.’
The preacher sighed again, less intensely, and answered: ‘I can assure you in all sincerity of one thing, Mr. Steele. If I honestly considered that your way of dealing with this matter was superior to the method my calling forces me to employ, I would unlock this cell door and you could go about your business with my blessing.’
‘I’m grateful for the thought, Reverend,’ the Virginian murmured. ‘Especially since blessings are something I’m a little short on right now. But, right now, I don’t count anyway.’