Sulphur Springs, Texas
Brad Houser was quite vain about his appearance. He bathed frequently, he kept his blond hair neatly trimmed, and he was clean-shaven. Most women found him a handsome man when first seeing him, but upon closer observation there was something about him that was off-putting. Though few could put it in words, they believed it was something about his eyes.
His eyes were a very pale blue, but, as a woman once said when describing him, “His eyes don’t let you see into his soul. They are like the eyes of a perfect portrait . . . without life.”
At the moment, a man named Robert Dempster was in Brad Houser’s office. An attorney-at-law, Houser was one of only two lawyers in town, and he represented the Bank of Sulphur Springs, which was owned by Dempster.
“One hundred thousand dollars,” Robert Dempster said, a broad smile spreading across his face. “That’s the most money we have ever had, at any one time.”
“Bob, have you told anyone else how much money you have on hand?”
“Of course I have. Why, it’ll be in the newspaper this afternoon. Something like that is good advertising.”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Houser agreed.
* * *
Not long after Dempster left, Houser had another visitor to his office. Like Houser, the visitor had blond hair, but unlike Houser, his hair was long and unkempt. He had a purple and disfiguring scar that started just above his left eyebrow, darted down through the eyelid, sparing the eyeball but reappearing in the lower aspect of the socket, and ending just above the cheekbone.
“I was almost unable to locate you,” Houser said to the man who was now sitting in the same chair that Robert Dempster had occupied a short time earlier. “I didn’t know what name you had taken.”
“I wrote you a letter ’n told you I’d changed my name to Shamrock.”
“I didn’t open the letter and didn’t even think about it until the letter I sent you came back undeliverable. Shamrock, like the clover? How did you come by such a name?”
“I seen a saloon that was called the Shamrock Saloon, ’n I just likened the sound of it so I taken it for my own name. Anyhow, I don’t know why you’re so surprised. After you got me off that last charge, you told me I should change my name.”
“Indeed I did tell you that,” Houser said. “Your real name had accumulated too much opprobrium.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that people connected your name to the evil things you had done.”
“Like the name you used for a while? What do you think people thought when they heard that name?”
“That was no more my real name than this one is,” Houser said. “I not only shed myself of that name, I have also abandoned the persona of my former self. I take it that you have done the same thing. Is Shamrock your first or last name?”
“It’s my last name. Sid is my first name. Sid Shamrock.”
Houser nodded.
“What’d you send for me for? I thought you said you didn’t want me comin’ round no more. You told me to keep away.”
“Yes, but I also told you to keep in touch with me, so I could get ahold of you if it became necessary.”
“Yeah, well, you done that, ’n here I am. What is it you’re a-wantin’?”
“Have you any money?”
“What? No, I ain’t got no money. That is, I don’t have none to speak of. You’re a big rich lawyer, what are you askin’ me that for? You wantin’ to make the borry of some money? ’Cause if you do, you done come to the wrong person.”
“I don’t wish to borrow any money. I asked you about the state of your finances to see if you would be interested in a job I have for you.”
“A job? You mean a job like goin’ to work ever’ day?”
“No. I mean a job that will pay you ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand dollars?” Shamrock said, fairly shouting the words. “You’ve got a job for me that pays ten thousand dollars?”
“Why don’t you go outside and shout it in the street?” Houser invited.
“Why do you want me to do that?” Shamrock asked, clearly confused by the suggestion.
“Never mind. Actually, I will pay you fifteen thousand,” Houser said. “I expect you to find someone to work with, and you can pay him five thousand.”
“Who do you want me to kill?”
“I don’t want you to kill anyone. As a matter of fact, if you do kill someone in the course of this job, you won’t get one . . . red . . . cent.”
“All right, all right, I won’t kill nobody. What is the job?”
“I want you to rob the Bank of Sulphur Springs.”
“Are you kidding? You want me to rob a bank in your own hometown? I thought you was always a-sayin’ you didn’t want me to be doin’ nothin’ anywhere close to where it was that you was a-livin’.”
“Yes, because neither your skills nor your demeanor are sufficient to the task of keeping my name out of it. But this is a job I have conceived myself, and if you follow my instructions explicitly, you will make yourself a tidy sum of money, and you won’t be in danger. But of course you must leave town immediately and never return.”
“Yeah, all right, I can do that. Leave town, I mean. But what does expilla . . . explea . . . uh, whatever it is that word you say that I’m supposed to follow?”
“It merely means that you are to do everything I say.”
“All right.”
* * *
Two days later, Brad Houser spent the afternoon with Arnold Stone, a nearby rancher who was a client of his. Houser had helped him draw up a will.
“You’ve done quite well for yourself, Mr. Stone,” Houser said as he examined the figures.
“Yes, well, I came here right after the war, was able to get the land for a song, and then make a gather of cattle that, during the war, had run free ’n started multiplying.”
“So ranching can be quite a lucrative profession.”
“Well, if you got into it early enough, yes.” Stone shook his head. “Not that many opportunities left here in Texas now. If a man really wanted to get a start now, why, he’d have to go someplace like Wyoming, or Utah, or the Dakotas, I would think.”
“Interesting observation,” Houser replied. He put the papers he had been working on in a small satchel. “You come into town sometime next week, Mr. Stone, and I’ll have these papers ready.”
“Thanks. And thanks for coming out here to work on this for me. You didn’t have to, you know. I would have been glad to come into town.”
“I didn’t mind at all,” Houser said.
* * *
In Sulphur Springs, Sid Shamrock and Abe Sobel waited outside the bank.
“It’s near to four o’clock now,” Shamrock said. “Brad told me that the teller leaves at four ’n locks up, but Dempster, the banker, stays there until ’bout four-thirty. So when we see the teller leave, we’ll go in.”
“How are we going to get in, if the bank is locked?”
Shamrock smiled and held up a key. “This’ll get us in,” he said.
Abe didn’t ask how Shamrock came by the key.
“Look there, he’s about to come out,” Shamrock said, pointing across the street.
They watched as shades were pulled down in each of the two front windows and in the door. A sign, reading CLOSED, was turned around, then a man stepped through the door, locked it, and walked away.
“Wait till he gets around the corner,” Shamrock said.
A moment later, when the street was clear, Shamrock and Abe hurried across, unlocked the door, then stepped into the bank.
“What did you forget, Lee?” Dempster called without looking around. He was standing in front of the open vault.
“Put your hands up,” Shamrock called out.
Dempster put his hand on the vault door, as if to close it, and Shamrock pulled the hammer back on his pistol.
“You close that door and you are a dead man,” Shamrock said menacingly.
Dempster jerked his hand away.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to put all the money into this gunnysack,” Shamrock said, pulling the sack from inside his shirt and tossing it toward him.
It took less than a couple of minutes for the sack to be filled. Shamrock took the bag from him, then hit Dempster over the head with the butt of his pistol. Dempster went down.
“Damn! You didn’t kill him, did you?”
“Nah, I didn’t hit ’im that hard. Just put ’im to sleep is all.”
The two men went out the back door of the bank. One block behind the bank they mounted their horses that had been inconspicuously tied at a hitching rail in front of a saloon.
* * *
Houser was returning to town to prepare the document. One mile from town, as had been arranged, he reached the intersection of two roads, one running east and west between Sulphur Springs and Phantom Hill, the other north to Albany and south to Belle Plain. He examined his watch, and if everything had gone as planned, he would be meeting Shamrock here. He saw two riders approaching. They were coming fast, and they reined up when they came even with him. This was as expected, and Houser pulled up on the reins to the horse that was drawing the surrey.
One of the riders was Sid Shamrock, but Houser didn’t know the other rider.
“Did you have any trouble?” Houser asked.
Shamrock smiled. “Nah, it was like you said, there warn’t no one but the banker, all by hisself when we was there, ’n he didn’t give us no trouble at all. Abe Sobel, this here is my brother, Brad Houser. He’s the one that set this up for us.”
“No!” Houser said, holding up his hand. “Say no more. The less everyone knows, the better it is.”
“All right, I won’t say nothin’ more.”
“Where’s the money?”
“Here it is,” Shamrock said, handing the gunnysack to Houser.
Houser opened the sack and looked into it. Some of the money was in loose bills, but much of it was in bound stacks of twenty-dollar bills, fifty to a stack. He took out fifteen stacks and gave them to Shamrock.
“Looks to me like there’s more ’n fifteen thousand dollars left in that sack,” Shamrock said. “How much did we get?”
“You got fifteen thousand dollars, the agreed-upon amount,” Houser said. “Whatever remains is none of your concern. Now, I suggest you two divide up your share, then separate here, at this intersection. Oh, and Thomas, uh, I mean Sid, we don’t need to meet, ever again.”
“Here’s the thousand dollars I promised you,” Shamrock said, giving one of the bound stacks to Abe.
“Seeing as you got fifteen thousand, one thousand doesn’t seem right.”
“It’s like the feller said,” Shamrock said. “One thousand dollars was what I said I’d give you. Hell, what are you bitchin’ for? How much money did you have when you woke up this mornin’?”
Abe nodded and reached for the money. “I reckon you have a point,” he said.
Houser had intended for the man Shamrock found to get five thousand, not one thousand dollars. But if Abe was satisfied with a thousand, who was he to comment? That would just mean more money for his brother and a greater likelihood that he would never have to see, nor hear, from his brother again. A prospect that he found most agreeable.
“I expect you two had better get going,” Houser said. “I’m quite sure there will be a posse along, soon. Oh, and I would suggest that you separate here.”
“Yeah,” Shamrock said to the other rider. “Come on, let’s go.”
The two men left, Shamrock going north and the other rider continuing to the west.
No more than five minutes later Houser saw Sheriff Peach and a body of men coming toward him. He stopped the team.
“Mr. Houser, what are you doing out here?” Sheriff Peach asked.
“I had a meeting with Mr. Stone, who is a client of mine. What is it, what is going on? If I didn’t know better, I’d say this looks like a posse.”
“It is a posse,” Sheriff Peach said. “The bank was just robbed.”
“The bank? Oh my goodness, that’s awful!” Houser said. “Wait, you wouldn’t be after two men, would you? I thought they were riding awfully fast.”
“Yes! One of them had a scar, here, ’n the other was wearin’ a white hat and a red shirt. Is that who you saw?”
Houser shook his head. “That’s exactly who I saw.” Houser pointed behind him. “I was just approaching the Phantom Hill and Belle Plains intersection. As I said, they were riding very fast, and they took the road south, to Belle Plains.”
“Thanks, Mr. Houser, we appreciate it,” Sheriff Peach said. “Come on, men!”
Peach and the ten men in the posse swerved around the surrey and continued west, toward the intersection. With a smile, Houser snapped the reins, and the horse pulling the surrey started out again at a comfortable trot.
In his room that night, Houser counted the money. If there was $100,000 as there was supposed to be, he should have $85,000 in the bag. To his pleasant and unexpected surprise, he had $88,297.
He closed the bag and contemplated his next move. He couldn’t stay in Sulphur Springs—there would be no way he could justify his sudden influx of cash. He was going to have to leave town . . . but he couldn’t just pull up stakes and leave, either, for to do so might arouse suspicion. He needed a reason to leave, and as he sat there, he knew what he was going to do.
Even though the boardinghouse where he stayed furnished a cleaning lady, he was not concerned that anyone would discover the money. He had pulled three boards away from the wall, put the money inside the wall, then replaced the boards. Even a most careful observation couldn’t detect any anomaly with the boards.