Chapter Two
The bullet hit the holstered derringer under the crown, and rammed the sneaky gun with venomous force into Creeds’ hand. The man yelped, let the top hat drop, and shook his stinging fingers.
“I seen that tinhorn trick for the first time twenty years ago. It didn’t fool me then and didn’t fool me now.” Grim old Luther Ironside, the Dromore segundo, walked from the corner of the schoolhouse behind a smoking Colt. “You heard Mr. O’Brien, Creeds. Now git off his damned property.”
Creeds was livid, raging beyond anger. The gunman’s face twisted into a demonic mask of hate as he stepped along the ragged edge of insanity. He was enraged enough to draw.
“Try it, Creeds.” Ironside’s voice was low and dangerous. “See what happens.” Snow flurried around him and his gray hair tossed in the wind. He looked like an Old Testament prophet come to justice.
Creeds was game, but he backed off like a snail into its shell when he saw Ironside adopt the classic gunfighter pose, right arm extended, the revolver steady in his fist, left foot forming a T behind the heel of the right, deciding he didn’t want any part of the tall old man. Not that day. “Mister, I’ll be back and I’ll kill you.”
Ironside nodded. “Yeah, you do that, sonny. But wait until them fingers o’ your’n have straightened out some. A blowed-up sneaky gun stings like the dickens.”
Creeds swung back to Trixie. “Last chance.”
The girl shook her head, turned on her heel, and rushed back into the schoolhouse.
“I’m going, O’Brien,” Creeds said. “But I’ll be back and I’ll bring down the fires of hell on this place.”
Shawn picked up the man’s hat and handed it to him. “You’ll need that. Keep your head warm.”
The gunman cursed, then swung his horse away and was soon swallowed by cartwheeling snow, winter darkness, and distance. His threat hung in the air and made the morning foul.
“We should’ve killed that feller, Shawn,” Ironside said. “I figger I taught you better than that.”
“I thought about it. But it didn’t seem to call for a shooting.”
“Damn it, he had a sneaky gun,”
“Yes, he did at that. Why didn’t you kill him, Luther?”
Ironside was silent for a moment, but couldn’t find an answer. Finally, he said, “Well, your brother Jacob would’ve gunned him right off.”
“Probably.”
“No probably. Jake would’ve gunned him fer sure.”
“Yes . . . he . . . would . . .”
Ironside snorted like an angry bull. “Hell, Shawn, you’re not listening to me.”
“I’m thinking, Luther.”
“Thinking, huh? Well study on this—if you’ve got the drop on a man never let him take his hat off. I teached you that a long time ago.”
Shawn smiled. “I guess I must’ve slept through that lesson.”
“I guess you did, an’ it near got your fool head blowed off.”
“But you were around to save me, Luther, as always.”
“Damn right I was, as always.”
Shawn quickly stepped close to the old man, taking him by surprise, then laid a smacking kiss on Ironside’s unshaven cheek. “You’re my hero, Luther.” He grinned.
Ironside rubbed his cheek as though he’d just been stung by a hornet. “Damn it, boy, don’t ever do that again.”
Shawn laughed and walked toward the schoolhouse.
Ironside watched him until he opened the door and stepped inside. Only then did Ironside smile. God knows, he’d tanned their hides often enough doing it, but he’d taught his O’Brien boys right. No doubt about that.
When Shawn stepped into the school, the black eyes of a dozen kids turned to him. All were the children of the Dromore vaqueros, and their education was one of his father’s pet projects.
His spurs chiming in the sudden hush, Shawn walked to the front of the class. He smiled at the teacher he knew only as Julia. “We have to talk.”
The woman nodded, realizing that the morning’s events had changed everything. She turned to her class. “Children, the snow is getting heavier. I’m letting school out early today.”
The kids had learned enough English to understand the gist of that. They cheered before stampeding out the door in a wild tangle, perhaps fearful that Miss Julia might change her mind.
After the children left, Julia said, “I guess I’ve got some explaining to do.”
Shawn nodded. “Trixie Lee to Miss Julia Davenport is quite a leap. It confuses a man.”
“Julia Davenport is my real name. I was Trixie Lee when I worked in Zebulon Moss’s saloon in Santa Fe. He gave me that name and I’ve always hated it.”
“All right. Tell me about it,” Shawn said, his chin set.
But Julia saw no accusation or judgment in his eyes. Rather she saw a reined patience, a man waiting for what was to come. She wiped off the chalked blackboard with a yellow duster, giving herself time to collect her thoughts and leaving circular white smears that matched the color of her face.
Shawn came from a direction she didn’t expect. “Did Moss give you the scar on your face?”
Julia turned then shook her head. “No, no, he didn’t.”
Shawn waited. The only sound in the room was the whisper of the north wind around the eaves and, far off, the voices of the children.
“My mother did that with a carving knife,” Julia explained. “It was part of a carving set that had been a wedding present to her and Pa.”
“What happened?”
“She went crazy. Mad, I guess you’d say. Pa failed at everything he’d tried in life, including the poems he wrote that nobody ever published. Farming on the Kansas plains was his last chance to make good. Have you ever been in Kansas?”
Shawn shook his head.
“It’s a flat, lonely place, grass as far as the eye can see and not a tree in sight. Well, Ma stuck it out for five years—five years of drought, prairie fire, torrential rains, blizzards, whirlwinds, locusts, rattlesnakes, and gray wolves, to say nothing of horse thieves and begging, destitute Indians.” Julia smiled. “What is it they say? ‘In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.’ That’s how it was with us, and with our poverty came not only hunger but the death of hope.”
“When you talk about Kansas, you shut your eyes,” Shawn said.
“I’m seeing it again, just like it was, so lonely and bleak.”
“And it finally drove your ma mad?”
“Yes. I guess it was the loneliness that drove her mad, that and the constant prairie wind. The wind blows day and night and it never stops, not for a moment. Then one day, she went outside the cabin and screamed and screamed and we thought her screams would never end. Finally Pa took her inside and she was quiet for a few days. I mean she didn’t speak or eat; she just stared and stared at nothing. Then, on the Sabbath, after Pa had read from the Bible, Ma got the carving knife and stabbed my little sister Bethany through the heart. She slashed at me and gave me the scar on my face, then she cut her own throat.”
Julia blinked, seeing pictures she didn’t want to see. “There was blood everywhere. The cabin was full of blood, red, scarlet blood on the floor, on the walls, all over Pa, all over me. Then Pa roared as though he was in pain and he held Ma and my sister to him for a day and a night and then another day. We buried the bodies away from the house, but shallow because the ground was hard with frost. The coyotes came and took them and we never found anything of Ma or Bethany again.”
“I’m sorry,” Shawn said, knowing how inadequate that sounded.
Julia took a breath and continued. “After that we moved to Dodge, where Pa thought he might prosper in the dry goods business, but he died of nothing more serious than a summer cold within a year.”
Shawn stepped to a side window and looked outside. Sky and earth were the same shade of dark purple and snow cartwheeled through the sullen day, driven by a wind cold as a stepmother’s breath. Julia had lit the oil lamp on her desk, but its dull orange glow did little to banish the gloom shadowing the schoolhouse.
“So you were left alone in the world,” Shawn said. “You were just a child, I guess.”
“I lived as best I could for a while, then I jumped a deadheading freight to Wichita. I couldn’t find a job so I worked the line for the next three years for a four-hundred-pound gal I knew only as Big Bertha. That’s where Zeb Moss found me. I’d just reached my seventeenth birthday.”
“And he gave you a new name,” Shawn said.
“And a job. He paid Bertha two hundred dollars for me and made me a hostess in his saloon in Santa Fe. He said with my scarred face I’d have freak value to customers who valued such things.”
“So after a while you ran away and came here?”
“Not for a couple years. I became Zeb’s kept woman and he never let me out of his sight. Then I read an advertisement in the newspaper about a teaching job and answered it. I made my break from Zeb when Colonel O’Brien wrote, telling me the job was mine.”
“You sent references to the colonel,” Shawn said. “Pa said you were obviously a genteel young lady of good breeding and that you’d worked as a tutor back East.”
Julia smiled slightly. “Say what’s on your mind, Shawn. Tell me I’m not a genteel young lady at all. I’m just a cheap whore and now my pimp wants me back.”