Benedict and Brazos had the stage all to themselves. The other passengers had heard that Sundown Valley was wild country, and last night’s experience had proved it and more. The trio was waiting back at Shafter’s way-station for the next stage back north. It wasn’t due for three days, but they were prepared to wait—Darcy Rudge’s poor cuisine notwithstanding.
Sprawled in one corner of the jolting coach with his sorry hat canted forward over his eyes, Brazos was playing the “Ballad of a Sad Cowboy” on his harmonica, and in the opposite corner Duke Benedict was reading a small, leather-bound book, “The Collected Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Or he was trying to read, the big man noted. Frequently Benedict would mark his place with a finger, close the book and stare out the window. And each time he did that, a small frown would crease his brows and it was plain that his thoughts were a long way off. Brazos knew the other was thinking about Ben Hollister, but he was damned if he was going to ask about the gunfighter again. If Benedict wanted to talk about Hollister, then that was all right by him. He was curious, of course, but right now he was more interested in their chances of getting a lead on the man they hunted.
Their hunt for Bo Rangle, wartime marauder, outlaw, killer, fugitive from justice, dated back to the dying days of the Civil War when Confederate and Union troops had fought a bloody battle over a shipment of Confederate gold, only to have the gold snatched away by the infamous Rangle’s Raiders. Rebel sergeant Hank Brazos and Union captain Duke Benedict were the sole survivors of that savage encounter at Rye Patch, Georgia. Chance had brought them together at war’s end, and now, together, they hunted Bo Rangle and the gold so many brave men had died for.
The lead that had prompted them to take the long journey to Glory, Sundown Valley, had been a slender one, but in the absence of anything better to go on, they’d elected to follow it. Coaxing tuneful notes from his mouth organ and absently rubbing the back of his ugly dog, Bullpup, snoring contentedly on the floor, the giant Texan was wondering how they would make out in Glory even if they got a scent of Rangle’s trail. Funds were low. It could well be that they might have to work at their respective trades of horse-breaking and gambling before they could push on, and that was a depressing thought on a hot summer day in an unsprung stagecoach.
Finally Benedict gave up trying to read altogether. He slipped the book away in his expensive leather traveling bag that lay on the seat opposite, lit a cigar and cocked a disapproving eye at Bullpup who was snoring like a buzz saw.
“I suppose he has to do that?” he murmured.
Brazos blew a sour note. “Yeah, that’s right, he does.”
“Cretin of a beast.”
“Watch your mouth or he’ll take a piece of meat out of your leg.”
This was Benedict’s cue to come back with a sharp response, but he passed it by. Instead he leaned back against the leather and murmured, “Poor Ben.”
“Oh, sure! Poor old Ben. My heart bleeds for hard cases.”
Benedict glanced at the big man pensively for a long moment, then he said, “Ben Hollister is no hard case, Reb.”
Brazos snorted. “No, he just rides around through the tall and uncut holdin’ up God-fearin’ folks for the exercise. No real harm in him, or in that wild-eyed kid who was fixin’ to plug Whitman. Just fun-lovin’ boys, that’s all they are.”
“I’ll concede I don’t condone what happened last night, but it is not Ben’s fault. But you’d have to know the man to understand why.”
Brazos just grunted. He was feigning disinterest, but he sensed Benedict was about to open up. And he was right.
“Ben Hollister taught me how to use a gun, Reb. I believe you already know that. It was back in Kansas before the war, when I was just a boy. There was a game of poker and I cleaned out a local hard case named Abe Polk who accused me of cheating. He was wrong, of course, but hard words led to gunplay and the ugly Mr. Polk ran second. But only just. I stopped a bullet in the shoulder and my pride suffered some discomfiture as a result. It was then that Ben Hollister, who even then was regarded as one of the best, took me in hand. He told me that if I was determined to go on living dangerously, I should at least know how to handle a gun properly. So he tutored me.”
“Well, I reckon he done a fair enough job of teachin’,” Brazos conceded, not feigning disinterest any longer. Then, soberly, “You hold that gunfighter high, don’t you, Benedict?”
“Ben Hollister is the best. The best man with a gun I ever saw ... the best friend.”
“But damn it all, if he’s such an all-fired noble varmint, what’s he doin’ ridin’ the owlhoot?”
Benedict sighed. “There is the tragedy. Ben, over the years, has become a prisoner of his own reputation. The Living Legend ... you’ve heard that often enough. Well, living legends do not become bankers or clerks, cowhands or insurance salesmen. They are wedded to the gun, and sooner or later the gun will put them on the wrong side of the law.”
Hank Brazos scratched his navel, frowned hard, and said, “But surely to hell, Yank, if a feller like Hollister didn’t want to ride the owlhoot, couldn’t he saddle himself with a new name and start out fresh?”
“If he were on his own, yes, he could.”
“You mean his brother?”
Distaste moved across Benedict’s handsome countenance. “That is precisely who I mean.” He gazed out the window, watching a line of dusty cottonwoods sweep by. “I never met Billy Hollister, but Ben told me a great deal about him. Ben was completely devoted to the boy. Their parents died when both were young, so Ben reared Billy. And Billy is the reason why Ben has never been able to shake himself free of his name.”
“But why? Couldn’t he have taken the kid with him?”
“You don’t understand, Reb. Billy murdered two men in cold blood in Texas a year ago. He’s wanted all over, and I’m afraid he’s the breed born to die young. I’ve had to kill them myself; they end up making it impossible for you to do anything else. Little boys trying to be men, and they wouldn’t make it if they lived to be a hundred. That is Billy Hollister, Reb, and he is a millstone around Ben Hollister’s neck.”
“Yeah, I reckon I read his brand clean and clear right off last night. But I guess Ben don’t see the kid that way, eh?”
“Ben Hollister is a lonely man, Reb. Billy is all the kin he has and he feels responsible for him. Strange ... a man like that seems bigger than life, yet Ben lives on a broken-down old ranch on the east rim of this valley with his kid brother and two hard cases ... lives on what he can steal and waits for the day when somebody will get lucky with a bullet or a rope ...”
Strangely moved by Benedict’s story of fast Ben Hollister, the soft-hearted Brazos was about to take up the threads of the conversation when they passed the trailside marker that read:
GLORY — FOUR MILES
Immediately he saw the sign, Benedict got up, opened his traveling bag, took out a whisk broom and started brushing down his expensive broadcloth coat and humming a strain of opera. Brazos, though only too familiar with his partner’s mercurial changes of mood, was nonetheless taken aback by this abrupt change from thoughtful solemnity to what was obviously high spirits.
Brazos tugged out his sack of Bull Durham and scowled out the window, wondering when he was going to get smart enough to stop trying to understand Duke Creighton Benedict III.
Sheriff Dave Grady sat in the heavy shade of the law office porch watching the two strangers walk past. One, a giant of a man with a faded purple shirt unbuttoned to the waist, had a hulking monster of a hound trotting at his heels. His companion was tall and slender and just about the flashiest looking dude that Glory’s guardian of law and order had seen in years. They strolled past the jailhouse on the far side of the street, both subjecting him to a casual glance before they disappeared beyond the batwings of the Prairie Flower Saloon.
A familiar voice sounded at the sheriff’s elbow. “Strangers, eh, Sheriff?”
Grady turned his head to look at Deputy Henry Bower.
“Uh huh, strangers,” he grunted, and extracted a toothpick from his vest pocket. A blocky, nondescript looking fellow, Grady had a flat, spotty face with eyes set too close together over a flattened beak of a nose. His ears stuck out from the side of his head like the handles of a pitcher and a straggly moustache adorned his long upper lip.
“Come in on the stage, I reckon,” said the short, ugly deputy.
“Could have.” Grady picked at his tobacco-stained teeth.
“Kinda troublesome lookin’ fellers, Sheriff,” the deputy said. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Forget it,” Grady cut him off. “Trouble with you, Bower, is you got too much time on your hands. Go fetch your hat and get along to the Widow Briggs and see if that missin’ hog of hers has turned up yet.”
With an injured air, the luckless deputy slouched off, leaving the sheriff grunting in satisfaction. Finally satisfied with the state of his teeth, he put the toothpick away, took out a match and started drilling in his ear for wax. An unimpressive specimen, Dave Grady, but then the job of sheriffing Glory was hardly calculated to attract a Wyatt Earp. In sunny Glory, a sheriff either tried to uphold law and order and got killed for his trouble, or he concentrated on minor offenders and turned a blind eye on the shooting, brawling and violence so prevalent in the town.
Sheriff Dave Grady fitted neatly into the latter category.
Glory stood on a flat alkali plain that was roughly on the border between the parched plains of the north and the cattle country that stretched away to the south. To the east lay the Jimcrack Hills, a semi-circular row of stone teeth biting at the washed-out blue of the Territorial sky.
The heat haze always began to build up around midday, a haze that would deepen as the day wore on, until by mid afternoon it would distort every object and make those far off dance in the devil heat. Now Rigg Smith’s water wagon rolled slowly across Republic Street and down Wagoner Street on its way to Lincoln Creek.
Watching the water cart’s sluggish progress, Grady knew it was right on twelve. In a town not famous for its punctuality, the water carrier was always on time. At six, nine, twelve, three and six, lugubrious Rigg Smith could be counted on to cross Republic and go down to the creek. Grady found himself wondering vaguely if Smith used a watch or relied on instinct.
When Smith returned from the creek, he would come driving along the west side of Republic with his sprays going, then slowly, methodically, back along the east. The watering would lay the dust for a time, but not for long. The dust of Glory was not to be denied. Soon it would be churned up again by the iron-bound wheels, hoofs and boot heels. It would rise sluggish and yellow, and fall as a fine powder over all. Down it would drift onto the roof of Bill Tobin’s feed and grain barn, onto Breslin’s general store, the Prairie Flower Saloon, the Blue Dog, the Jubilee and the Grand View Hotel. It would powder the Summerville stage depot, the Big Dipper Saloon, Miss Hetty’s rooming house, the Frontier Fast Freight depot and the jailhouse. It would fall on the billiard parlor, the Hash House Eatery, the bone-yard, the houses, the liveries and the blacksmith, and treat them all impartially.
As far as Grady was concerned, the attempt to lay Glory’s eternal dust was just a waste of council’s time and money. As the water cart clanked from sight, he chanced to catch a glimpse of the man responsible for the innovation walking the planks on the opposite side of the street.
The sheriff’s thin lips curled as he watched Homer Parnell’s erect, gray-headed figure pause out front of Molly’s Hat Shop for a word with Gus Benner. There was no love lost between Glory’s badge-packer and the schoolteacher from the East who’d first come to Glory with his daughter over a year back. For one thing, Parnell was an idealist, which put him off-side with Grady from the jump. But worse than that, Parnell had seen fit to dedicate his considerable energies to making Glory a respectable town—the way it had been once before the wild men and the gamblers and the grafters and phony lawmen had taken over. It was no secret around town that one of Parnell’s keenest ambitions was to have Grady booted out of town and replaced by what the schoolteacher and president of Glory City Council described as a “true peace officer.”
Grady’s sneer deepened. Parnell didn’t appreciate him. Grady always made certain that obnoxious drunks were arrested, providing they didn’t come from Yellow House River or the Hollister place out in the Jimcracks. He enforced city ordinances with the same reservations. He had even been known to track down the odd cow thief, and he was downright rigid when it came to moving on strangers who looked like they might bring trouble.
He wondered about the two strangers who’d entered the Prairie Flower.