IT TOOK TALBOT a good three hours to ride to Canaan. When the town’s main street closed in around him, as dark as a graveyard, he was chilled to the bone and more tired than he’d ever felt in his life.
He woke the hostler at the livery barn. “Stable my horse and give him a good rubdown, will you?”
“At this hour?”
“You want my business or don’t you?”
“It’s gonna cost you.”
“No, it’s gonna cost you. Give me a hundred dollars, and the horse is yours.”
The old man blinked. “What? You just bought him last week for two hundred.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” Talbot said. “I won’t be needing him any longer. I’m taking the train the hell out of here.”
“Thought you were from here.”
“I am.”
Muttering, the man retrieved a key from his desk and opened a small safe sitting under a pile of account books and catalogs. He counted a hundred dollars into Talbot’s outstretched hand.
“I reckon I can’t blame you,” he said. “After what happened
here today, just outside those doors, I’m about to pack up and try my luck in Glendive.”
“What happened?”
“Didn’t you hear? The sheriff was killed just down the street by King Magnusson. Verlyn Thornberg, too, and a handful of his riders. Main Street was like a damn battlefield. We were all day cleaning up and carting the bodies up to the undertaker’s.”
“So that’s where Magnusson got that bullet in his shoulder,” Talbot said thoughtfully.
“Say again?”
“You know the old trapper’s cabin on Little Wibaux Creek?”
“Sure. Charlie Gallernault used to hole up out there.”
“Well, King Magnusson and his daughter are out there now. Dead. Send the undertaker out for the bodies, will you?”
The stableman stood there looking flabergasted. “Holy shit in a handbasket!”
Talbot turned to strip his saddle from his horse. “You’ll find Mrs. Magnusson at Bernard Troutman’s in Big Draw.”
Saddle slung over his shoulder, Talbot walked over to the hotel and pounded on the door. After ten minutes the woman proprietor came to the door in an old duster and nightcap, looking haggard and worried and wielding a shotgun.
“I don’t take in customers this time of the night,” she said. “Not after what happened here yesterday.”
Talbot sighed, genuinely exhausted. “I don’t blame you, ma’am, but I’d sure appreciate an exception to the rule. Sleep is all I’m after.”
She studied him. She let the heavy gun sink toward the floor and drew the door wide. “A man out this late can be up to little good,” she admonished.
Talbot sighed. “Thank you. Much obliged.”
When he’d gotten situated in his room, he stripped down to his long johns and crawled under the covers with a groan and a sigh. As tired as he was, he thought he’d fall right to sleep. Instead he lay there, his mind whirling like a windmill in a steady gale.
Coming home to a little peace and quiet. That was a good one. Almost as good as finding his lovely Pilar stretched out in the barn with her throat cut.
Thinking of her made him think of Jacy, and his heart twisted counterclockwise and gave an additional thump. She was the only thing homey about this place, and if he stayed for anyone or anything it would be for her. But that was over now, before it had even gotten started.
It was just as well. He didn’t belong here anymore, and he knew Jacy could never belong anywhere else.
He rolled several cigarettes and smoked them down to nubs, lying there in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, his mind torturing him with all the death he’d seen over the past few hours, of Suzanne lying there on the bear rug beside the gunfighter—murdered by her own adoring father.
And it had all started with greed.
Jacy had said it best: “They all died like hell, like nothing means a goddamn thing.”
Talbot didn’t fall asleep until practically dawn. He woke four hours later to bright winter sunlight filling his room. The light was so merry golden, the sky so cold-scoured blue over the false wooden fronts across the street, he wondered for a moment if the bloody events of yesterday had been a nightmare and all was right with the world.
It was a fleeting notion, gone before he’d buckled his gun around his waist and headed out the door with his saddle on his shoulder.
“Help you, mister?” the depot agent said through the window.
“Yeah, I need a ticket for the next train, whenever that is.”
“Due in at twelve-fifteen, just like it says on the chalkboard over yonder. Where you headed?”
“What?”
“Where you headed.”
Talbot thought, looking around. “Ah … I don’t know …”
The agent planted his arms on the counter and scrutinized Talbot under his green eyeshade. “Mister, you mean to tell me you want a ticket, but you don’t where you’re goin’!”
Talbot turned sideways and looked around the station some more. “Well, I reckon that’s the long and short of it.”
“Who you runnin’ from?”
Talbot looked at the man. “What’s that?”
“Who you runnin’ from? The law?”
“No,” Talbot said thoughtfully, rubbing a hand over his chin. “No, I’m just runnin’.” Irritation creeping into his voice, he said, “Listen, mister, why don’t you just give me a ticket for as far as the train goes, and I’ll get off somewhere between here and there.”
The man raised his hands. “Don’t get mad at me. You’re the one doesn’t know where he’s goin’.” He sighed and glanced at the schedule chalked on the board. He shook his head. “Just anywhere that looks good, eh, cowboy? Doesn’t sound like much of a life to me. Well, let’s see … that’ll be twelve dollars and fifteen cents, payable in cash only.”
Talbot paid the man, took his ticket, and picked up his saddle. “Much obliged,” he said, and headed out the door.
He had an hour and a half to wait for the train, and he decided the best place to do it was at the saloon. As he stepped up on the boardwalk he saw that the big plate-glass window was gone, replaced by boards.
He shook his head and walked inside and ordered a beer
and a shot. He asked the apron to keep them coming until his train left at twelve-fifteen.
“Where you headed?” the man asked him conversationally.
“None of your goddamn business!” Talbot exploded, and knocked back his shot. “Can’t a man get drunk in peace around here?”
He brooded over several drinks, then moseyed over to the train station at noon.
The train was on time. Two drummers, an old lady, and a cowboy got off, and Talbot got on, threw his saddle on one seat and sat in another across the aisle. There were only a handful of people aboard, reading illustrated newspapers and conversing in hushed tones.
Talbot rolled a cigarette and sat waiting for the train to depart. He was halfway through the quirley when something blocked the sun beating through the window to his left.
Turning, he saw Jacy sitting atop a tall brown horse. She looked in at him, squinting her eyes against the reflected light, breath puffing around her face.
Talbot got up and walked outside. Jacy rode over to meet him.
“Figured I’d find you here,” she said.
Talbot shrugged. “Yeah, well, I guess it’s time to move on.”
“What happened?”
“They’re all dead.”
Jacy nodded. “I’m sorry about Suzanne.”
Talbot nodded.
“And I’m sorry about what I said back there at Magnusson’s. I was wrong.”
Talbot shrugged. “You’d been through a lot. I’d just been through a little more.”
“I guess.” Jacy looked around. “Well …”
“Good-bye, Jacy.”
She turned her green eyes to him and nodded. “Be seein’ you.”
“You bet.”
“Good-bye.” She tried a smile, reined her horse around, and rode away.
Talbot called after her, “Throw some flowers on Dave’s grave in the spring, will you?”
She turned, gave a nod, and turned away, heading down Main.
Talbot stood there for several minutes. When the conductor yelled, “All a-board!” he got back on the train as it chuffed away from the depot.
But when the train was gone, he was standing again on the siding, in the steam the locomotive had left behind. He had his saddle on his shoulder.
He stared across the platform. Jacy sat atop her horse just beyond the station house, looking at him and grinning.
“How in the hell did you know?” Talbot said with mock severity.
Jacy shrugged. “No man in his right mind would leave a woman like me.”
Talbot laughed. Shaking his head, he moved toward her.