Catfish Charlie

Marshal Abel Wilkes snapped his eyes open, instantly awake.

Almost as quickly, though not as quickly as it used to be, the Colt hanging from the bedpost to his right was in his hand. Aiming the barrel up at the ceiling, Abel clicked the hammer back and lay his head back against his pillow, listening.

What he’d heard before, he heard again. A man outside breathing hard. Running in a shambling fashion. The sounds were growing louder as Wilkes—fifty-six years old, bald but with a strap of steel-gray hair running in a band around his large head, above his ears, and with a poorly trimmed, soup-strainer gray mustache—lay there listening.

What in blazes . . . ?

Abel tossed his covers back and dropped his pajama-clad legs over the side of the bed. He’d grabbed his ratty, old plaid robe off a wall peg and shrugged into it and was sliding his feet into his wool-lined slippers, as ratty as the robe, when his daughter’s voice rose from the lower story. “Dad? Dad? You’d better come down he—”

She stopped abruptly when Abel heard muffled thuds on the floor of the porch beneath his room, here in the second story of the house he owned and in which he lived with his daughter, Bethany. The muffled thuds were followed by a loud hammering on the house’s front door.

“Marshal Wilkes!” a man yelled.

More thundering knocks, then Bushwhack Aimes’s plaintive wail: “Marshal Wilkes!”

What in tarnation is going on now? Wilkes wondered.

Probably had to do with the railroad. That damned railroad . . . bringin’ vermin of every stripe into—

“Dad, do you hear that?” Beth’s voice came again from the first story.

“Coming, honey!” Abel said as he opened his bedroom door and strode quickly into the hall, a little breathless and dizzy from rising so fast. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, and he had to admit his gut wasn’t as flat as it used to be, either. Too many roast beef platters at Grace Hasting’s café for noon lunch, followed up by steak and potatoes cooked by Beth for supper.

Holding the Colt down low against his right leg, Abel hurried as quickly as he could, without stumbling down the stairs, just as Beth opened the front door at the bottom of the stairs and slightly right, in the parlor part of the house. The willowy brunette was as pretty as her mother had been, but she was on the borderline of being considered an old maid, since she was not yet married at twenty-four. The young woman gasped and stepped back quickly as a big man tumbled inside the Wilkes parlor, striking the floor with a loud bang.

Not normally a screaming girl, Beth stepped back quickly, shrieked, and closed her hands over her mouth as she stared down in horror at her father’s deputy, who lay just inside the front door, gasping like a landed fish.

Abel knew it was Bushwhack Aimes because he’d recognized his deputy’s voice. The face of the man, however, only vaguely resembled Bushwhack. He’d been beaten bad, mouth smashed, both eyes swelling, various sundry scrapes and bruises further disfiguring the big man’s face. He wore only long-handles, and the top hung from his nearly bare shoulders in tattered rags.

“Oh, my God!” Beth exclaimed, turning to her father as Abel brushed past her.

Like Abel, she was clad in a robe and slippers. Lamps burned in the parlor, as well as in the kitchen, indicating she’d been up late grading papers again or preparing lessons for tomorrow.

“Good God,” Abel said, dropping to a knee beside his bloody deputy, who lay clutching his left leg with both hands and groaning loudly against the pain that must be hammering all through him. “What the hell happened, Bushwhack? Who did this to you?”

He couldn’t imagine the tenacity it had taken for Bushwhack in his condition to have made it here from the jailhouse—a good four-block trek, blood pouring out of him. The man already had a bum hip, to boot!

“Marshal!” Aimes grated out, spitting blood from his lips.

Abel turned to his daughter, who stood crouched forward over Aimes, looking horrified. “Beth, heat some water and fetch some cloths, will you?”

As Beth wheeled and hurried across the parlor and into the kitchen, Abel placed a placating hand on his deputy’s right shoulder. “Easy, Bushwhack. Easy. I’ll fetch the sawbones in a minute. What happened? Who did this to you?”

Aimes shifted his gaze from his bloody leg to the marshal. “Thor . . . Thorson. Frank Thorson . . . an’ his men! Shot me. Beat me. Stripped me. Left me in the street . . . laughin’ at me!” The deputy sucked a sharp breath through gritted teeth and added, “They busted Skinny out of jail!”

“Are they still in town?”

“They broke into one of the saloons—the Wolfwater Inn! Still . . . still there, far as I know . . . Oh . . . oh, Lordy!” Bushwhack reached up and wrapped both of his own bloody hands around one of Abel’s. “They’re killers, Marshal! Don’t go after ’em alone.” He wagged his head and showed his teeth between stretched-back lips. “Or . . . you’ll . . .” He was weakening fast, eyelids growing heavy, barely able to get the words out. “. . . you’ll end up like me—dead!”

With that, Bushwhack’s hands fell away from Abel’s. His head fell back against the floor with a loud thump. He rolled onto his back and his head sort of wobbled back and forth, until it and the rest of the man’s big body fell still. The eyes slightly crossed and halfway closed as they stared up at Abel Wilkes, glassy with death.

Footsteps sounded behind Abel, and he turned to see Beth striding through the parlor behind him. “I have water heating, Pa! Want I should fetch the doc . . . ?” She stopped suddenly as she gazed down at Bushwhack. Again, she raised her hands to her mouth, her brown eyes widening in shock.

“No need for the doc, honey,” Abel said, slowly straightening, gazing down at his deputy. Anger burned in him. “I reckon he’s done for, Bushwhack is.”

Beth moved slowly forward, dropped to her knees, and gently set her hand on the deputy’s head, smoothing his thick, curly, salt-and-pepper hair back from his forehead. “I’m so sorry, Bushwhack,” she said in a voice hushed with sorrow.

“Stay with him, take care of him as best you can, honey,” Abel said, reaching down to squeeze his daughter’s shoulder comfortingly. “On my way into town, I’ll send for the undertaker.”

Beth looked up at her father, tears of sorrow and anger in her eyes. “Who did this to Bushwhack, Pa?”

“Frank Thorson.”

Beth sort of winced and grimaced at the same time. Most people did that when they heard the name. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Don’t you worry, honey,” Abel said, squeezing her shoulder once more. “Thorson will pay for what he did here tonight.”

Abel gave a reassuring dip of his chin, then turned to start back up the stairs to get dressed.

“Pa!” Beth cried.

Abel stopped and turned back to his daughter, on her knees now and leaning back against the slipper-clad heels of her feet. Beth gazed up at him with deep concern. “You’re not thinking about confronting Frank Thorson alone—are you?”

Abel didn’t like the lack of confidence he saw in his daughter’s eyes. “I don’t have any choice, honey.”

Aimes was his only deputy, and there was little time to deputize more men. He needed to throw a loop around Frank Thorson and the men riding with him before they could leave town. This was his town, Abel Wilkes’s town, and he’d be dogged if anyone, including Frank Thorson, would just ride in, shoot and beat his deputy to death, spring a prisoner, then belly up to a bar for drinks in celebration.

Oh, no. Wilkes might not be the lawman he once was, but Wolfwater was still his town, gallblastit. He would not, could not, let the notorious firebrand Frank Thorson, whom he’d had run-ins with before, turn him into a laughingstock.

Trying to ignore his deputy’s final warning, which echoed inside his head, Wilkes returned to his room and quickly dressed in his usual work garb—blue wool shirt under a brown vest, black twill pants, and his Colt’s six-gun strapped around his bulging waist. He grabbed his flat-brimmed black hat off a wall peg and, holding the hat in one hand, crouched to peer into the mirror over his dresser.

He winced at what he saw there.

An old man . . .

His dear wife’s death two years ago had aged him considerably. Abel Wilkes, former soldier in the War Against Northern Aggression, former stockman, former stage driver, former stagecoach messenger, and, more recently, former Pinkerton agent, was not the man he’d been before Ethel Wilkes had contracted bone cancer, which they’d had diagnosed by special doctors up in Abilene. Abel’s face was paler than it used to be; heavy blue pouches sagged beneath his eyes, and deep lines spoked out from their corners.

There was something else about that face staring back from the mirror that gave Wilkes an unsettled feeling. He tried not to think about it, but now as he set the low-crowned hat on his head, shucked his Colt from its holster, opened the loading gate, and drew the hammer back to half cock, he realized the cause of his unsettlement. The eyes that had stared back at him a moment ago were no longer as bold and as certain as they once had been.

They’d turned a paler blue in recent months, and there was no longer in them the glint of bravado, the easy confidence that had once curled one corner of his mustached upper lip as he’d made his rounds up and down Wolfwater’s dusty main drag. Now, as he stared down at the wheel of his six-gun as he poked a live cartridge into the chamber he usually left empty beneath the hammer, his eyes looked downright uncertain. Maybe even a little afraid.

Maybe more than a little afraid.

“Don’t do it, Pa. Don’t confront those men alone,” Beth urged from where she continued to kneel beside Bushwhack as Abel descended the stairs, feeling heavy and fearful and generally out of sorts.

Beth wasn’t helping any. Anger rose in him and he shifted his gaze to her now, deep lines corrugating his broad, sun-leathered forehead beneath the brim of his hat. “You sit tight and don’t worry,” he said, stepping around her and Bushwhack, his Winchester in his right hand now. “I’ll send the undertak—”

She grabbed his left hand with both of her own and squeezed. “Pa, don’t! Not alone!”

Not turning to her, but keeping his eyes on the night ahead of him, the suddenly awful night, Abel pulled his hand out from between Beth’s and headed through the door and onto the porch. “I’ll be back soon.”

Feeling his daughter’s terrified gaze on his back, Abel crossed the porch, descended the three steps to the cinder-paved path that led out through the gate in the white picket fence. He strode through the gate and did not bother closing it behind him. His nerves were too jangled to trifle with such matters as closing gates in picket fences.

* * *

As he strode down the willow-lined lane toward the heart of town, which lay ominously dark and silent straight ahead, Abel shook his head as though to rid it of the fear he’d seen in his daughter’s eyes . . . in his own eyes. Beth’s fear had somehow validated his own.

“Darn that girl, anyway,” he muttered as he walked, holding the Winchester down low in his right hand. She knows me better than I do. She knows my nerves have gone to hell.

Fear.

Call it what it is, Abel, he remonstrated himself.

You’ve grown fearful in your later years.

There’d been something unnerving about watching Ethel die so slowly, gradually. That had been the start of his deterioration. And then, after Ethel had passed and they’d buried her in the cemetery at the east end of town, that darn whore had had to go and save his hide in the Do Drop Inn. The gambler had had Wilkes dead to rights. The marshal had called the man out on his cheating after hearing a string of complaints from other men the gambler had been playing cards with between mattress dances upstairs in the inn.

So Abel had gone over to the inn, intending to throw the man out of town. The gambler had dropped his cards, kicked his chair back, rose, and raised his hands above the butts of his twin six-shooters.

Open challenge.

Let the faster man live.

Abel remembered the fear he’d felt. He had a reputation as a fast gun—one of the fastest in West Texas at one time. “Capable Abel” Wilkes, they’d called him. His dirty little secret, however, was that when he’d started creeping into his later forties, he’d lost some of that speed. His reputation for being fast had preceded him, though. So he hadn’t had to entertain many challengers. Just drunks who hadn’t known any better or, because of the who-hit-John coursing through their veins, had thrown caution to the wind.

And had paid the price.

The gambler had been different. He’d been one cool customer, as most good gamblers were. As Abel himself once had been. Cool and confident in his speed. That night, however, the gambler had sized Wilkes up, sensed that the aging lawman was no longer as fast as he once had been. Abel hadn’t been sure how the man had known that.

Maybe he’d seen the doubt in Abel’s own eyes.

The fear. That fear.

Abel had let the gambler make the first move, of course. Over the years, the lawman had been so fast that he’d been able to make up for his opponents’ lightning-fast starts. That night, however, Abel would have been wolf bait if the drunk doxie hadn’t stumbled against him in her haste to leave the table and not risk taking a ricochet.

She had nudged his shooting arm just as the man had swept his pearl-handled Colt from its black leather holster thonged low on his right thigh. Abel’s own Colt Lightning had cleared leather after the gambler’s gun had drilled a round into the table before him, between him and his opponent. Abel’s bullet had plunked through the man’s brisket and instantly trimmed his wick.

Abel had left the saloon after the undertaker had hauled the gambler out feet first. He’d tried to maintain an air of grim confidence, of a job well done, but the other gamblers and the saloon’s other customers all knew it to be as phony as he did. If that drunk, little doxie hadn’t nudged the gambler’s arm at just the right time, the undertaker would have planted Abel in the Wolfwater bone orchard, beside his dearly departed Ethel.

Leaving their old-maid daughter alone in the cold, cruel, West Texas world.

* * *

Now he swung onto Wolfwater’s broad main drag, dark except for up at the Wolfwater Inn, half a block ahead and on the street’s right side.

Abel felt his boots turn to lead. He wanted to do anything this night, except confront Frank Thorson and Thorson’s men. Abel didn’t know whom Frank was running with now, but for them to do what they had done to Bushwhack, they all had to be every bit as bad as Frank.

No, Wilkes wanted nothing to do with them. But he couldn’t very well ignore them. He wanted to turn tail and run home and hide. Wait for the Thorson storm to pass. That’s why he did what he did now. He quickened his pace.

There was only one thing worse than being dead.

That thing was being a laughingstock in front of your whole dang town.