EIGHT

As it happened, Bucephalus Wilson, the undertaker, had a rush job, to improve the complexion of an old man who’d died of jaundice, and do it in time to ship him to Denver in the same baggage car Blackthorne had reserved for me. Since I had nothing better to do while waiting I helped out by handing things to Wilson, chiefly a pot of aluminum paste he applied as a sort of primer and a tin of pink powder to lend his customer the glow of health. It was interesting work, and the undertaker was good company, as might be expected since the Judge’s deputies brought him so much business.

I won’t dwell on that cold lonely ride across the High Plains, because it’s as boring to tell as it was to experience. The old man’s coffin gave me a seat, and I had a railroad lantern to warm my hands over until a porter came to tell me to put it out. A clerk had arranged to have my valise carried aboard, so I had my extra suit coat to keep me from freezing. I’d bought it, with black trousers to match, from a back room of the Drew Emporium where reclaimed and mended clothing sold for poverty prices. The coat was big enough to hide my revolver and shabby enough for a minister who survived on Christian charity.

As far as the train personnel were concerned I’d requested the windowless coach to flee an angry wife; boarding early under cover of darkness supported the story. I doubt they believed a word of it, but enough money had changed hands to keep their curiosity in check. In any case they didn’t know where I was going after Denver, and they saw so much in the course of a working day to lower their opinion of the human race the odds were they forgot about me as soon as they finished unloading.

I didn’t like the odds. A secret parsed more than two ways is like three men on one horse: You know it will collapse, but you’re not sure when. But that was an inept comparison, because I was the only one in danger of falling. In Denver I went to the water closet three times to make sure I wasn’t being followed. The other people waiting in the station looked at me sympathetically. It was obvious to them I had a medical problem.

It’s a shuddery stretch from the Rockies to the desert Southwest, but the chair car felt like a private Pullman after the journey in baggage. I sank with a sigh of pleasure into horsehair stuffing that had shifted to accommodate backsides shaped very differently from mine and made myself intimate with the contents of Brother Bernard’s wallet, and with the fabled Mr. Sebastian himself.

I sensed the Judge’s devious hand behind the letter from Sebastian’s mother, with perhaps Mrs. Blackthorne’s gentler touch in the tender parts. I’d never seen a sample of her penmanship, but there was a womanly swoop in the tails and capitals, and I doubted anyone in the ruthlessly masculine organization of the Helena federal court could have managed the endearing phrases it helped form. In between, a more calculating mind had leavened in information that provided the bearer with both a history and an ironclad fence to prevent anyone from confirming or discounting it.

It was on the order of an expression of maternal gratitude and a helpful guide through the changeable landscape of a difficult world. Cleverly, Blackthorne had inserted pertinent details that explained how Sebastian had been thrust into it full-grown. Mother Sebastian, it seemed, had composed the letter to be discovered by her son among her personal effects, and read after her death. His father had been dead for many years. In his absence, young Sebastian had cared for his invalid mother in a house belonging to a Mrs. Brown in or near Denver. The father, a Church deacon, had tutored him in religion, so there was no reason to advise him about gentlemanly conduct once he was on his own, but the old lady took care to instruct her son on certain practical matters to ease his entry into the society of man. I learned from it how to save money, what to look for in a buggy horse, the importance of choosing friends cautiously, and the sort of woman to avoid. I’d have profited from knowing the first three twenty years ago, but I doubt I’d have paid much attention to the last even then. Perfidious women are an education all by themselves.

It was a remarkable document. I got lost in it, truth to tell, and found myself picturing an authentic Bernard Sebastian somewhere out there, born of an ailing mother rich in the wisdom of her years. It couldn’t have been all fabrication. There was a rumor (which the Judge would have slashed to bits if it were ever mentioned in his presence) that the Blackthornes had lost a child in infancy years before they came to Montana Territory. Now I saw foundation in it. These were lessons intended for a youth who hadn’t lived long enough to benefit from them. On the other hand, Mrs. Blackthorne was a great reader of novels, the chairwoman of a book club, and never missed the first night of a new production at the Ming Opera House, so I might have been wasting compassion on nothing more poignant than a lively sense of theater.

Purely as an instrument of my mission, it was expert craftsmanship. A place the size of Denver and its environs would be too thick in “Mrs. Browns” to encourage anyone to look up Sebastian’s former landlady, and the name of the church where his father had served as a lay preacher wasn’t mentioned; the city had dozens. A man of middle age seeking a pulpit in Texas could not have answered queries into his experience better than to claim he’d spent the last couple of decades nursing a bedridden patient and studying the Bible. Such exemplary sacrifice established him as a righteous man, and having a deacon for a sire entitled him to semiprofessional status at least. Mistakes made in front of the congregation would be assigned to his lack of an opportunity to practice what he’d learned in public.

So the old bastard was anticipating I’d fall on my face. As was I, but my pride was stung. All right, it’s a sin, and so is wrath. I wanted to wring his neck.

I put back the letter and examined the rest. Someone familiar with my expense vouchers had come disturbingly close to duplicating my hand in the little writing block where Sebastian kept track of his travel budget. It, and what looked like a complete collection of receipts for possibles that he might need on the road, led me to believe that Brother Bernard was close with a buck, which befit a pilgrim of small means, but it was overdone. Devotion is difficult enough to manufacture without having to try to be a prig as well. I threw the receipts out the window.

I learned from a telegram, composed in Owen, Texas, and sent through Wichita Falls by way of the Overland, that Sebastian’s request for a pastorship had been accepted “on approval” by a director with the First Unitarian Church who went by the intriguing name of “R. Freemason.” The lack of an outright commitment indicated there were concerns about my being an evangelist. Communication by telegraph meant that a court contact in Denver had wired the original petition, and sent the response to Helena.

Stuck in the fold of the wallet I found a stiff rectangle about the size of a penny stamp: an orange and wrinkled tintype of a sheep-faced woman in her fifties, a son’s only likeness of his sainted mother. I wondered who she was really.

Blackthorne had thought of everything. He’d gone to a deal of trouble to place me in the thick of a robbery investigation in someone else’s jurisdiction. I couldn’t believe his only motive was to run the gang to ground in Texas on the slim chance that if it were left unfettered it might shift its activities to Montana Territory.

Taking this assignment was like sitting in on a poker game where the dealer made up all the rules. I wouldn’t mind losing so much as not knowing why. But if I’d turned it down he’d have found something worse. That was the thing about the frontier: There was always something worse.

 

 

Texas doesn’t belong in the same sentence with the place I considered home, or for that matter on the same continent. As far as I was concerned it had broken off from southern Spain or northern Africa, blown about for a while to dry out some more like a dead cottonwood leaf, and come to rest a day’s ride from the border of Colorado, where at least winter had the good manners to pause for conversation before heading north. To get there from where I’d started you had to cross the Cimmaron Strip: two hundred square miles of rugged land that was supposed to belong to the Indian Nations, but which had been overlooked when the territorial lines were drawn, leaving a slot-shaped hole in America where road agents scuttled like roaches when dawn broke. That was where mine would head if I put my foot wrong in Owen, and if I were reckless enough to follow them there, Brother Bernard would be dead before his first birthday. I’d taken the oath expecting to die in its honor, but dying twice in one season wasn’t in it.

At Colorado Springs, our last stop in civilization, the greeters and loafers on the platform wore scarves and heavy pullovers and moved in close to warm themselves in the steam when the train braked. In Texas a couple of hours later, when we stopped to let off passengers and take on water, they wore loose cotton, sweat through under the arms, and stepped back to escape the moist heat. By then I’d shrugged out of my heavy preacher’s weeds and pushed up the window against the furnace blast of wind scraping sand from Arizona Territory, which was the only place I’d spent time where you closed up the house to keep the heat out, and the only place that had somewhere to dump the heat it couldn’t handle.

Somewhere being Texas.

Put that together with arid gusts that rocked the stationary cars like Confederate grapeshot, and you can begin to understand the conditions in panhandle country. No other spot on the map was better named, with the possible exception of the Dead Sea. You know that if you’ve ever tried to lift a heated skillet by its handle without first wrapping a rag around it. Sitting in that close coach, waiting for the train to pull out and fanning myself with Brother Bernard’s wallet, I watched a stove-in galvanized bucket bounding across the prairie like a spooked antelope and wondered where it would stop this side of Arkansas, or if barring a fence or a corn rick or a sedentary hog, it would clatter through North Carolina, cross the Atlantic and the Gobi Desert, and make its way around the world back to that same patch of dead earth. That was one sophisticated bucket. I’d have gone out to intercept it, if for no other reason than that a rude receptacle of water shouldn’t be more well-traveled than I, if I weren’t afraid the train would leave me behind with the gilas and roadrunners.

That was my objection to Texas and its featureless landscape. I liked mountains on one side, waving grass on the other, and here and there a saloon or a brothel or even a bank or post office to interrupt the monotony, but the whole state was flat enough to duck under a fence. I’d ridden far for the court and had seen both extremes, cities of brick and stone decked out in coats of soot and spreading acres empty to the horizon. I wanted something in between, with an open window handy in case I changed my mind.

Then there were the Texans themselves; but more about them later.

I wasn’t looking forward to crossing the same country again by horse. I’d overshot my destination for practical reasons and also for duty. There was as yet no rail line to Owen or anywhere within a full canteen of it, and I had a Ranger station to report to at end of track before I set out. Ever since he’d lost two deputies in a misunderstanding in old Mexico, Blackthorne had been a stickler about checking in with local authority. The federales had taken the bigger hit, but he’d just escaped congressional censure over the affair, and the Mexican major in charge had been stood up against a wall in Mexico City.

As we resumed rolling, a man and woman entered the car through the connecting door, balancing themselves against the sway with the support of the seats and the weight of their bags. They were both dressed for town, the woman in tightly woven tweeds as armor against cinders, and I thought they were together, but after the man hoisted her portmanteau into the overhead rack, she thanked him and they sat down on opposite sides of the aisle, she to gaze out at the scenery, such as it was, he to open a copy of The Fort Worth Gazette and lose himself in the gray columns.

That was the payload, not counting freight, and it didn’t say much in favor of where we were heading. I could only hope I could at least get drunk there.

I wished I’d bought a paper while we were stopped. I didn’t care what was going on in Fort Worth, and there was never anything for me in the telegraph columns from New York and Washington, but I’d forgotten to bring a deck of cards and that last leg promised even less in the way of diversion than all those that had preceded it. I opened my Bible to Ecclesiastes. The Preacher strummed the same three notes, time and oppression and no new thing under the sun; he must’ve taken the same trip. I dozed, and woke, and saw nothing had changed outside, not even a shadow to tell me how long I’d slept. The woman had given it up to knit and the man was snoring with his Gazette spread over his face.

In due course we passed a pile of broken crates and empty lard cans that meant a settlement coming up. An ancient conductor with railroad-issue bad feet and a pair of moustaches the size of saddle pouches hobbled down the aisle shouting, “Wichita Falls,” as if it were the first circle of hell.

Slowing, we slid through a neighborhood of chalk-gray houses and drew up alongside a station bright with fresh paint. I took my bones out of the seat and scooped my valise from the rack. “Where’s the nearest place to get a steak and a bottle?”

The conductor’s moustaches moved as he chewed. He parted them to squirt a muddy stream at the cuspidor at my feet. “Kansas City.”