CHAPTER FOUR
Sheriff Chance Hurd was a worried man. He should’ve heard from Clay Kyle by now. What the hell was keeping the man? The Apaches? The savages had never stopped him before.
It was evident that something had gone badly wrong at the Calthrop place, an eventuality that Hurd had not anticipated.
Damn it, Kyle had killed them all, the whole family, except for young Jenny. He had taken her with him, and the why of that was pretty obvious. Hurd reckoned that Clay planned to make the girl his whore for a spell, and then sell what was left of her in Old Mexico. Hell, that was only good business.
Hurd sipped raw-edged bourbon and stared out his office window at the white-painted houses across the street. A ragged coyote trotted between Pete Doan’s house and Ma Lester’s stick-style boardinghouse, every external vertical or slanted surface and archway decorated with fanciful, hand-carved latticework. It was an overly ornate dwelling, done on the cheap, and Hurd hated it. Every mining boomtown in the West had its row of stick homes, an ostentatious display of nouveau riches that had no place in Thunder Creek.
The coyote vanished and the sheriff sighed and once more pondered the mystery of Clay Kyle. The killing of Tom Calthrop and his family had been unfortunate. Holding one of the children’s toes to a fire would’ve produced the same result . . . the hiding place of the money. Tom didn’t trust banks and the rumor was that he’d stashed away more than ten thousand dollars in gold coin. Had Clay found it? And if he had, where was the galloper bringing Hurd’s thousand dollar share for the information?
Hurd had questions without answers, and that troubled him.
To make matters worse now Dan Caine had gone off half-cocked with the sorriest collection of vigilantes this side of the Mississippi. If they ran into Clay, he’d shoot them to doll rags and then he and his boys would hightail it back across the Brazos, ten thousand in gold clinking in their saddlebags and Chance Hurd left as penniless as ever.
Damn, life was unfair.
Hurd’s wounded stare lifted from his desktop to the window to the street outside.
No! Hell, no! That won’t do!
The sheriff jumped to his feet and ran outside. “You get back here, girl!” he yelled, stepping in front of her horse. “And you, Cornelius Massey, where the hell are you going? Get back to your printing press.”
Estella Sweet, astride her paint pony, ignored him, as did the skinny, top-hatted little man beside her, mounted on a rangy Missouri mule. Massey was the proprietor and sole employee of the one-sheet Thunder Creek Gazette, a man who’d known better times as a big city editor in Boston. But drink had done for him and though he no longer imbibed, the smell of bourbon made saliva jet from the sides of his tongue. Sobriety was a bitch.
Estella Sweet had a bedroll across the back of her saddle and a .44-40 Henry rifle under her left knee. She was dressed in spurred boots, woolen pants, and shotgun chaps, and, worn over a man’s pale blue shirt, a tan colored corset was pulled together by laces and leather straps with brass buckles. At the front of its crown, Estella’s wide-brimmed hat had a pair of dust-fighting goggles and she wore her usual dark glasses. Around her slim waist, a gunbelt decorated with conchos supported a long-barreled Colt in a cross-draw holster. The revolver was the same caliber as the Henry. Like Massey, she wore a duster.
To set matters straight, in 1903 it was alleged by the sensationalist rag The San Angelo Clarion that Estella Sweet was not a blacksmith’s daughter at all, but a corset-wearing whore who, at various times, shacked up with men in Thunder Creek and in later years was involved with the Wild Bunch.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Estella was the daughter and only child of widowed Mike Sweet, and the blacksmith doted on her. So it should come as no surprise then that he didn’t stand in her way when she decided to go after Dan Caine’s vigilante posse. Mike Sweet would later say that Thunder Creek was too small and backward to hold a beautiful and adventurous young woman like Estella, and future events would bear this out. Her only contact with the Wild Bunch was the correspondence she kept up with Laura “The Thorny Rose” Bullion, the sometime mistress of the Tall Texan, gang member Ben Kilpatrick. Like Estella, Laura was active in women’s prison reform, and the two exchanged letters until Laura’s death in 1961.
Sheriff Hurd had spoken to Estella as though she was a child, and she’d ignored the man, but now she drew rein and said, “I won’t be coming back until I find Jenny Calthrop, so don’t try to stop me, Sheriff.”
“Hell, Estella, you’re only a kid,” Hurd said.
“I’m a woman grown,” the girl said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Now step aside and give me the road.”
“Massey, talk some sense into her,” Hurd said.
“I’m a newspaperman,” Massey said. “Since when does anyone ask a newspaperman to talk sense? Never fear, dear boy, I’ll look out for Miss Estella.”
“Hell, Massey, you ain’t even heeled,” Hurd said.
“The pen is mightier than the sword, Sheriff,” the little man said, flourishing the small notebook and stub of pencil he’d taken from an inside pocket. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Mister, this is the West and plenty of pen pushers have been shot by men with guns and maybe ran through with swords, some of them,” Hurd said.
“Then I stand corrected,” Massey said. “Now, will you give us the road?”
“What the hell am I doing, standing here in a hot sun trying to talk sense into you two?” Hurd said. “Go on, leave, but God help you if you run into Clay Kyle or his like.”
“And what will happen to us, Sheriff?” Estella said, her tone scathing, her dislike of Hurd obvious.
“You’ll be dead. That’s what will happen.” Then, a mean little spike in his belly. “Or, Miss Sweet, you’ll wish to hell you were.”
“Maybe that’s what poor Jenny Calthrop is wishing right now,” Estella said. She kneed her paint into motion. “I’ll take my chances, Sheriff Hurd.”
“And that goes for me too,” Massey said.
“Then you’re a damned fool,” Hurd said.
Massey nodded. “I’ve been told that before.”