Colleen reminded Freemason he had work waiting and insisted on seeing me to the door. He shook my hand and withdrew to his study as she looped her arm inside mine. It felt pleasant, even if the last time she’d done that was just before someone had tried yet again to kill me.
“You came all this way to break up a gang of common bandits?” She spoke low. People who keep servants do as a rule.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. Richard is the second person in town you’ve spoken to about the robberies. You have no outside interests, Page. You’re quite dull when you come down to it.”
“We can’t all be as inspirational as Brother Bernard.”
“I’m not your spy. I’ve more to gain by being loyal to my husband than by robbing him.”
“You said yourself he’s gone bust.”
“I’ve seen busted from both sides. His kind has a different definition. When he hasn’t ten cents for a shave he can
raise a million dollars on his reputation. There ought to be another word for that kind of busted.”
“There is. It’s called running a bluff. All the more reason to hit him for the hard cold cash he gets up that way.”
“I’m not like that anymore.”
I laughed. “I don’t believe it. No one ever accused you of being dull.”
“I’m serious. You get awfully tired dealing from the bottom of the deck. You start to wonder if the suckers are right and the game’s more fun if you play it according to Hoyle.”
“You wouldn’t know Hoyle if he bet his watch and chain against the pot.”
We’d reached the door. She looked up at me. Her eyes were as clear as flakes of sky. How they stayed that way when they were attached to Colleen Bower’s brain stumped me worse than the Infinite. “I’d suspect you of personal motives if I thought you ever had human qualities,” she said. “Did I break your heart?”
“You as much as said I don’t have one.”
“Someone broke mine long before we met, and you know something? You can still feel the pain in a leg after it’s been cut off and buried.”
“What about the houseboy? He’s old enough to start thinking about a pension.”
“Fielo belongs to an old aristocratic family wiped out by Juaristas in the revolution. He fought for his country in the Mexican War, only to lose everything, including a son, after Maximilian fell twenty years later. He came here with nothing but the rags on his back and a ferocious hatred for all bandidos. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help out the Yankee variety. Anyway,
he’s frail, his duties aren’t physically demanding, and Richard pays him nearly as much as his top hand on the ranch. I asked him to. I doubt the old fellow would take the risk.”
“I’d like to visit the ranch. Can you arrange it?”
“So it’s the gang you’re after.”
“Yes. Are you happy now that you got me to say it?”
“The word is relieved. I wanted to make sure you weren’t acting as Blackthorne’s avenging angel.”
“What happened between Freemason and the Judge?”
“Ask the Judge.” She opened the door and held it.
“What about the ranch?”
“Shall I say you’re eager to bring the godless hands into the fold?”
“Tell him Brother Bernard wishes to know more of the world.”
“And if he responds that he wishes to know more of Brother Bernard?”
“He won’t. I accepted this invitation to give his people time to search the parsonage. I hid my traveling bottle in the outhouse and left a letter from Bernard’s sweet dead mother where they wouldn’t have to look too hard to find it.”
Her face drew taut over its very good bones. “Only a deeply corrupt man would suspect such corruption of a man he’d met only twice.”
“Avenging angels don’t get haloes. The man who taught me my gospel made that clear.”
He hadn’t trusted the job to someone clumsy from the bunkhouse. If I hadn’t purposely left the drawer in the
nightstand slightly ajar and done some other things to provide tells that someone had been through the place, I’d have thought no one had entered it from the time I left until the time I returned. Mrs. McIlvaine had Sunday afternoon off, to do whatever it was she did when she stood her broom in its shallow closet in the church, so I was fairly certain she hadn’t been in to clean. The counterfeit letter containing Sebastian’s brief biography was where I’d placed it, folded under the brass lamp on the nightstand with his mother’s tintype leaning against its base, but the lamp was turned slightly. That pointed to a literate intruder who’d taken down the information to report to his employer.
It being Sunday, I was sure a communication would be going out to Denver by tomorrow’s Overland, seeking to confirm the letter’s sparse details. Blackthorne never confided the nature of his intelligence organization to subordinates; I had to assume that whoever had handled Sebastian’s telegraph exchange with Freemason was in charge of such followups, but I didn’t trust him, or for that matter anyone else who held my fate in his hands. I had only the hope that the vague wording of the letter on the nightstand would slow down the inevitable long enough for me to get what I needed and make away. Since that involved pumping the Judge for the details of his past relationship with Freemason, I propped myself up in the iron bed with a writing block on my knees and drafted the following message:
Dear Mr. Smith,
I’ve been in Owen days only and everyone I’ve met has gone to great lengths to make me feel important.
Although I confess to homesickness, it is, I’m convinced, God’s will that I am in a place where I know my work is useful and wanted. Already I flatter myself that I have brought comfort to the afflicted. Mr. Freemason’s confidence in my humble gifts is reassuring and gives me strength to believe that nothing I did in the past is a tenth part of the good that my service to the Lord will accomplish here. All that came before is prelude to the hard work and sleepless nights put to the purpose of bringing light to Texas.
Please accept my sincere thanks for your kindness to a stranger.
Yours in faith,
Bernard Sebastian
I smudged up several sheets, counting words, striking some out, and adding others, before I had a draft I could transcribe in proper penmanship and put aside to mail by way of the Overland to Mr. J. Smith in care of General Delivery in Wichita Falls. Captain Jordan, who’d assured me there were upwards of two dozen “J. Smiths” in town and among the ranches and settlements within plausible riding distance, had a standing agreement with the postmaster to hold all missives thus addressed for his scrutiny. Together we’d worked out a code that would enable me to write what appeared to be a harmless communication to some random brief friendly acquaintance while putting the Texas Rangers to service to the federal court. It was a simple enough cypher, but with sufficient room provided for to drench it in homely verbiage: After the greeting, every twentieth word conveyed the actual message. If it was urgent and assistance was required immediately and in force, I would
begin with “My dear Mr. Smith”; otherwise, I was asking Jordan to forward the actual text by Western Union to Blackthorne. I had written:
important know Freemason’s past before Texas
After placing the letter in the nightstand drawer where I didn’t care who found it if I happened to become separated from it, I got up and fed the scribbled sheets to the fire in the laundry stove. I’d taken all the precautions I could, without feeling one bit more secure than I had before I’d written it. I don’t place much trust in encryptions, on the theory that what one or two men could create, one or two others could dismantle. Carrier pigeons had at least the advantage of passing through no human hands between dispatch and delivery, but the thought that my life depended on a creature that spent most of its time from one mission to the next picking lice from its feathers was worse than knowing that the number of people who were in on my masquerade would fill out the regimental band at Fort Custer, with the last person I’d trust with either my wallet or my hide sharing a bed and who knew how many secrets with the man whose measure I was trying to take.
It was enough to drive a God-fearing man to drink. I was weighing the relative risk of retrieving the whiskey bottle from the outhouse when someone knocked on the door of the parsonage. I reached for my collar, then decided to leave it off and went through the sitting room with my sleeves rolled up and a towel from the dishpan–wash basin over my arm, the Deane-Adams concealed inside its folds.
At first glance I thought the man on my front step was Freemason, but then I saw the frock coat was too large for the visitor’s slight frame and the silk hat rested too low on his forehead, bending down his ears, and knew him for Fielo, the aged houseboy, wearing his master’s castoff. He removed the hat, cradling it with a forearm, and held out an envelope with the Masonic compass-and-square embossed on the flap.
I laid the towel with the revolver rolled inside it on the rocking chair and took the envelope. The note was an invitation from Richard Freemason to accompany him to his ranch Tuesday at dawn. I asked the old man to take my acceptance to him with thanks. He bowed, turned, replaced the hat, and applied himself to the long walk back down the street and the steep climb up the limestone steps to the castle on the hill. He wasn’t as frail as Colleen made out.