Stolen Hours
While Irons St. John and company were steaming toward Colorado, their quarry was crossing a snow-covered basin five miles south of Pinto Creek, Wyoming. Chins huddled into their chests so that their hat brims met their standing collars, the four slouched along astride lathered mounts whose breath steamed in the crisp air, casting a smoky haze over the scene that reduced the riders to figures in a faded tintype.
The man in front bore little resemblance to the jaunty youth pictured on Rawlings' dated bulletin. Two days' rusty stubble and a bad sunburn aged him ten years instead of three, and the eyes that glared red-rimmed and watering out of the shadow of his bent-down brim had neither the arrogant directness of the eyes in the photograph nor the earnest, trustworthy look that haunted the nightmares of such as former Bank Manager Thorson and Engineer C. T. Goddard. He rode, as was his habit, with one gloved hand on the reins and the other resting on his left thigh, leaving most of the work to the horse. All he had to do to display his cowboy training was step into leather.
The old man watching them from the door of the exhausted soddy slid his binoculars along the single-file procession, taking in the older, tense man riding behind the young leader; the cripple with his reins wrapped around one stump; the Cherokee woman bringing up the rear in white man's clothes, her face pumpkin-shaped and oriental under the ruins of a felt hat dragged down over her long hair. Behind them the broken teeth of the Laramie Mountains gnawed at a dull steel sky.
When they were still outside rifle range the group halted. The man in front stood in his stirrups, his eyes moving past the building and the five horses in the corral and combing the terrain beyond. At length he drew his hip gun and fired a shot into the air. The old man saw the smoke before he heard the report, warped by wind and distance and echoing lispingly off the mountains that ringed the basin. In response he hoisted his Springfield rifle and sent a bullet through the overcast. The blast deafened him momentarily, as if his ears had been boxed.
Someone let out a whoop and the riders charged the cabin. The horses put up only a token protest, for they had caught the welcome scent of wood smoke. Tiny arcs of snow flew off their hoofs.
"You're late," observed the old man, as they dismounted before the door.
Merle Buckner snorted. His moustache was ragged and the ends were frosted white, making him look like a contemporary. "A hunnert and fifty miles ain't a walk around the house. You ought to try her sometime, get rid of that gut." He poked the other's hard belly, spilling out through the aperture left by his coat's being buttoned only at the neck.
"Done her a thousand times," the old man retorted. "And I had this gut when you was still on ma's milk."
"That'd be about last year, wouldn't it, Merle?" Race Buckner laughed and stamped snow off his boots before entering the hut.
While the Indian woman saw to the horses, the others gathered around a shaky wooden table inside. A fire burned fitfully in the stone fireplace, spitting inadequate yellow light now here, now there, making shadows crawl on the bug-infested walls. Merle opened his coat and unstrapped a canvas money belt from around his middle. He grunted in relief as he flung it down on the table. "Damn thing's been gnawing holes in my hide for a hunnert miles. I should get a bigger cut just for carrying it."
"You volunteered," Race said, opening the compartments and pulling out fistfuls of bills. "You wasn't family, I'd of thought you was fixing to head south."
"I like the feel of it. Or I did." He unbuttoned his shirt to examine the sores in his flesh.
"Any shooting?" The old man stared transfixed at the cash coming out, his pale tongue moving from side to side in his stubbly white beard.
Merle shook his head. "Like opening sardines. I thought you said that engineer was hard."
"He was back in '97, when Ted Northrup's bunch tried to take that Army payroll. Put Ted's little brother in the ground like he was a carrot seed. Ted never was the same after. They hung him in Texas after he robbed a general store and kilt the clerk. A general store, for chrissake! Frank and Jesse would of kicked his ass."
"Carroll, you do stretch a man's tolerance," said Merle, doing his shirt back up. "The James boys, the Daltons, Butch Cassidy—ain't there anyone famous you didn't ride with?"
"William Bonney. Me and Billy never did work the same place at the same time, though we did share a bottle once in Roswell." He chuckled, ending on a phlegmy cough. "He had the ugliest whore I ever—"
"Shut up while Race is counting."
Carroll swallowed his retort. Jim Shirley, the double amputee, was watching the younger Buckner' s hands separating the crumpled bills and notes into piles for enumerating. He seldom spoke. The gang had from time to time included transients who drifted in, rode with them for a while, then drifted out; carrying away the belief that he was mute as well as crippled. Silent, armed men had always unnerved Carroll, and on those rare occasions when this fellow whose revolver was attached to one stump gave voice to a command, the old bandit tended to obey.
"Eight thousand, seven hundred sixty cash," announced Race, smoothing out the last twenty and laying it atop the finished stack.
"What's those?" Carroll pointed a crooked arthritic finger at the heap of neglected notes.
"Bearer bonds," said Merle. "You hand them to the cashier and he gives you money back. You don't have to sign nothing nor show identification. There's eleven thousand dollars' worth there. Counted 'em myself when I put them in the belt."
"Burn them."
All eyes turned to Race. He wasn't smiling. Merle's jaw dropped. "They're good, I said! I unloaded a thousand bucks' worth in Montana before they picked me up."
"Could be that's why they picked you up." His cousin spoke quietly. "They draw too much fire. Folks look too close at your face. You want to do the honors, Carroll?" He shoved the pile toward the old man, who grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth with many gaps.
"I sure as hell would! Make me feel like Vanderbilt." He scooped up the notes.
"It's like burning money!" Merle moved to stop him.
Race laid a firm hand on his cousin's wrist. "There's no leaders here," Race said. "I vote we play safe and burn the paper. Who votes with me?"
"I vote we don't," spoke up Shirley, after a moment. "Folks stare at me anyway."
"Carroll?" Race looked at the old man.
He rubbed a fistful of notes over his beard. "I may be crazy, but I wouldn't last six months behind no bars," he said. "Let's set fire to it."
"Appears we're tied," observed Merle.
Race said, "The squaw ain't voted."
"Injuns and women don't vote!" Carroll was indignant.
"She gets an equal cut for holding the horses. That entitles her."
"She votes with me," said Shirley.
Race studied him. "She ain't even in the room."
"She votes with me anyway."
Merle was smug. "Well, I reckon that's that. Divvy her up, Carroll. Twenty-two hunnert apiece."
"Horses!" His cousin closed a hand on that butt of the gun in his holster.
The others started, looking around. The hut had no windows.
"I didn't hear nothing." But Merle drew his Remington. Every man in the group carried the same make, except Shirley; it was a Buckner family custom that in Race had become an obsession.
Carroll, who wasn't wearing his, dropped the bonds he was holding and snatched the Springfield out of its corner. He tore aside the buffalo robe he had dropped down over the door after everyone had entered. Merle and Shirley pressed in close beside him. Only Race hung back.
"There ain't—" began Merle, then fell silent. He swung around.
Race was standing empty-handed in front of the fireplace. The flames burned brightly, flicking long yellow fingers up the chimney. Merle's eyes flew to the table. The bearer bonds were gone. "You son of a bitch!" He vaulted toward the hearth. Race stepped in front of it. Halting, his cousin raised his weapon. He was quivering with rage.
"Move aside."
The other shook his head. "Reckon you'll have to shoot, Merle. I done it for us all."
"Put it away," Shirley said quietly.
Merle turned just far enough to include the cripple in his field of vision. Recognizing the crossed-stumps stance, he rammed the Remington into its holster hard enough to pop a stitch on the belt. His face was as white as a clenched knuckle. Suddenly he spun and pushed his way out past the buffalo robe.
"Let him be," advised Race, when Carroll turned to follow him. "He'll be back when he's ready. Just like when he was little."
"Thought you said they wasn't no leaders here." Heavy-shouldered and coated to the knees, Carroll looked like a large gray bear. The rifle dangled at the end of his arm.
"Didn't like the way the vote went." Race took up a crooked stick leaning next to the fireplace and broke up the ashes. A charred corner of paper bearing the inscription FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($500) floated out and drifted unnoticed to the earthen floor.
The air was growing warm. The old man put away his rifle and started wriggling out of his overcoat. "Want help with yours?" he asked Shirley.
"Woman'll do it."
A few minutes later, the squaw called Woman Watching came in carrying two blanket rolls under each arm and dumped them against the wall next to the doorway. Her black eyes glittered from slits in her round, smooth face like those of a fat little boy. She was just twenty. Her pudgy fingers unfastened the buttons on Shirley's coat with a mother's swift efficiency, and when she had freed his stumps from the turned-back sleeves she folded the threadbare garment and hung it over the back of a wooden chair reverently as if it were a gentleman's new ulster. Then she commenced to loosen the straps that anchored the modified Colt to his truncated limb.
"Where'd he get her, anyways?" Carroll whispered to Race. With a rag wrapped around one hand he had lifted a chipped enamel coffee pot from its station in front of the hearth and was filling the second of two tin cups on the table.
The younger Buckner was slouched in the only other chair, both legs stretched out toward the fire. His cup steamed on the table before him, daring him to pick it up. "Jim won't say. He had her when I met him. I heard he bought her off a tinhorn in Oklahoma, but you can't prove it by me. They appear to get on."
"You reckon them two ever—?" The old man looked genuinely curious.
"I don't know," the other said irritably. "Why don't you ask him?"
"Think he'd mind?"
Race looked at him, at his eager, ravaged face, and laughed quietly. The squaw, massaging Shirley's shooting arm through his shirtsleeve where he sat in the chair that supported his coat, shot them a curious glance. "Uncle Carroll," said Race, "you are a one."
"I don't know what you're gabbing about. And quit calling me Uncle."
"It was good enough when Merle and me was kids."
"Well, you ain't kids no more. Just 'cause I knowed your pa don't make us blood relations."
Race sipped carefully from his cup. The coffee burned his tongue and scalded the roof of his mouth. But it felt warm and good in his stomach. He worked the stiffness out of his fingers, realizing for the first time how cold he had been. His thighs ached from straddling a horse for two days and his seat was numb. It had been a long time since he left ranch work. "Any visitors while we was gone?" he asked Carroll.
Standing hunched with both hands around his cup, the old man shook his head fiercely, like a bull buffalo besieged by flies. "Gets lonesome as hell out here. I liked hanging around in Cheyenne waiting for the telephone to ring better. At least I got to jaw with folks passing by."
"We won't use that one again for a spell. We was lucky to get out of it what we did. Had it to do over, I wouldn't use it more than twice in a row." He paused. "We pull out in the morning."
"How come? Law on your heels?"
"I don't know, but it's good to think that way. I'm thinking we'll split up for a little, meet in Casper after the first of the year."
"Never figured you to be one to rabbit for no good reason," snarled Carroll.
Race didn't reply. Instead he drew a folded sheet of stiff paper from inside his coat and flipped it open under the other's nose. It was a reward poster containing the Union Pacific's five-thousand-dollar offer for the younger Buckner, dead or alive. The 1903 photograph smiled irrelevantly under the grim legend.
Where'd you get-that?"
"It was nailed to a telephone pole outside Cheyenne. I figure they got them posted all over the state." He dropped it atop the money on the table. "Was just me, I might risk it one more time, but I'm like a brand on the butt of everyone with me."
"How much we got now?"
"Counting this, about forty thousand. That's eight thousand apiece. Any man can sail through all that 'twixt now and the end of the year is a sinful spendthrift."
"It'd make one hell of a stake for something really big."
Something in Carroll's tone drew a thoughtful glance from Race. Then he tilted his hat brim forward over his eyes. "Don't try to tempt me, old man," he said. "Your job's to get a good price for those worn-out horses after we leave. Nobody elected you ramrod."
"Who was the one told you about the banks in Wyoming and Colorado? Or the express office in Provo? Or the train stop at Elephant Crossing?"
Race slid farther down in the chair so that he was all but reclining, his shoulders barely touching the back. "Forget it. You come up with all the ideas and we take all the risks."
"Let's hear what he's got."
Raising the hat, Race met Jim Shirley's gaze across the table. The cripple was sitting up straight now, his murky eyes level. Behind him stood the squaw with her hands down at her sides, watching them impassively, fully understanding. Then Race saw his cousin in the doorway and levered himself upright.
"Talk, Carroll," he sighed.
The sun lay nestled in a crook formed by two mountains like an orange coal in a blacksmith's iron tongs. Dying violet light stole across the basin and stained the snow east of the soddy with viscous shadow. The horses in the corral huddled together for warmth, their breath curling milky white around their muzzles before the rising wind caught and shredded it like wet tissue. James Blame Shirley sat on the hut's sunward side with his back to the damp wall and his knees drawn up under his coattails, the tip of a cheroot glowing violent red in the darkness between his hat and collar. Next to him sat Woman Watching, moving only to take the cheroot from between his lips at intervals and knock the ash off the end before replacing it. To the east an early coyote yipped twice and raised its voice in a tentative howl drawn thin as silver thread by the wind and cold. There was no answer and the call wasn't repeated.
"Get it out," said Shirley.
The squaw hesitated, then reached inside her coat and withdrew a hinged leather case from which she lifted a bronze star trailing a ribbon of red and blue silk. She held it up for his inspection. He was still looking at it through his smoke when Merle Buckner came out of the hut, saw what he was doing, and sat down on the other side of him.
"All right," Shirley told the woman.
"None of my business," said Merle, as the medal and case were tucked away, "but I'm wondering why you never hocked that thing. You had some lean times after the war."
"I tried. No one'd take it. It ain't real gold."
"You know what? I don't think you'd of went through with it if they made you an offer. I think you like carrying it."
Shirley smoked and said nothing.
"What you think of Carroll's big thing?" Merle asked. "It's big." He let the woman tap some more ash off the cheroot.
"I like it. Race don't. I think maybe he's going yellow on us."
"He ain't going yellow."
"You agree with him?"
"What I think won't buy coal."
"Your vote's as good as mine."
Shirley chuckled, without mirth. "It is that."
Merle watched the sunset. Only a molten silver remained in the notch, forced down by layer upon layer of purple, each one darker than the one below it until they blended.
"You miss them?" he asked suddenly.
The squaw shot him a murderous look.
"Miss what?" asked Shirley, knowing very well what. "Your hands."
"Would you miss yours?"
"Yeah, for a while. But you got so you get along pretty good without them. I was just wondering if you still cared one way or the other."
Shirley spat out his cheroot. The glowing tip described a phosphorescent arc and died with a hiss when it hit the snow. The Cherokee woman watched it like a bored dog.
"Call you next time I take a leak."
Merle said, "I never thought about that."