CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
For Donny Bryson it was an easy kill and a profitable score.
It was the girl with her young eyes who first saw the wagon in the distance as it headed west into the cattle country.
“Could be a supply wagon,” Donny said, telescope to his eye. “Worth taking a look-see.”
They’d earlier broken camp, and the girl rode Lucas Bell’s mule. The dead man’s Sharps rifle was too heavy for her to carry, but his gunbelt and holstered Colt hung from her left shoulder and across her chest. “Two people up on the driver’s seat. I think one of them is a woman.”
“You can see that from here?” Donny said.
“I can see far,” the girl said. “But up close, not so good.”
Donny was skeptical. “Even with the glass I can’t see two people. I don’t put that much confidence in your eyesight.”
“Suit yourself,” the girl said.
They were in hilly country, and she and Donny sat their mounts in the dip of a shallow saddleback. Stretching away from them lay a seemingly endless wilderness of prairie, here and there dotted with stands of Texas oak, mesquite, and juniper and bright patches of blue, pink, and yellow wildflowers. Under the bowl of a cloudless sapphire sky, the afternoon smelled clean of long grass and the earth, of distant dust and remembered rain . . . but would all too soon reek of gunsmoke, blood, and violent death.
* * *
Donny Bryson kneed his horse forward, and the girl followed, cursing at her balky mule. As they drew closer to the wagon, the driver and his companion came into focus, a gray-haired man and a plump, motherly-looking woman wearing a flowered dress, a red shawl draped over her shoulders. A mouse-colored, swaybacked mustang with its ribs showing labored in the traces of a small, four-wheeled farm wagon with a canvas cover carrying a wooden sign that read:
SAM A. HEIDELBACH
PEDDLER TO THE GENTRY
When the peddler was within hailing distance, he drew rein and yelled, “Welcome! Welcome to the Heidelbach mercantile on wheels.” Then when Donny and the girl drew closer, he smiled under his beard and said in his normal tone of voice, “Mister, I have a wide section of goods for your perusal. I got tobacco, cigars, nuts, beans, and nails. I got pails, lanterns, ropes, fabrics, and sewing notions including needles and bobbins of thread. I have combs, soap, medicines, candy, crockery and dishes, pans, cartridges, coffee, pickles, soda crackers, candles, boots and shoes, glasses, beads and ribbons. And, at cost, calico dresses for the young lady.”
In the West of that era, Jewish peddlers seldom traveled with their spouses, and that made the murders of Sam and Frieda Heidelbach all the more poignant. Early twentieth century historians, unwilling to accept that “gunfighter” Donny Bryson was an insane psychopath, claimed that Sam, suddenly afraid, reached for a revolver concealed under his coat and that Donny drew and fired in self-defense.
It didn’t happen that way.
Two events occurred that triggered the killings.
The first was that Donny looked over the contents of the Heidelbach wagon and coveted what he saw.
The second was the girl’s screech of, “Ooh, Donny, get me a pretty dress.”
The girl would later testify that Donny didn’t even speak. He just shucked his Colt and shot Sam and Frieda Heidelbach dead. What the girl omitted to say was that after the murders, she bounced up and down on her mule’s back and yelled, “Look for the dresses, Donny! Look for the dresses!”
* * *
Donny Bryson and the girl loaded up with stuff they could use or sell in Fredericksburg. In addition, Donny discovered eighty-seven dollars in a cash box and a gold ring he took from Frieda’s finger. The girl was all got up in shoes, underwear, and a yellow dress she found in the wagon. She’d added a straw hat with an artificial pink flower on the brim, a white parasol, and a heart-shaped metal pendant inscribed with the word, Love. Donny found himself a new blue shirt with a small collar and a pair of canvas pants.
And after they’d finished plundering the wagon, Donny found a couple of cans of kerosene and set it on fire with the Heidelbachs inside. For some reason that’s never been explained, he tore the sign off the canvas cover and tossed it aside. Later the sign would help Texas Rangers identify the murdered couple.