THE DEATH OF PETER TALON
The Beginning of a Western Novel
CHAPTER 1
When I glanced back over our trail there was blood on the snow, blood from ice-cuts on our horses’ hoofs.
The snow was a foot to two feet deep and a few days back it had warmed enough to melt the surface, then frozen again into an icy crust. Often when our horses’ hoofs broke through that ice cut like a knife.
We had been nine hours in the saddle, riding in the bitter cold. The horses were struggling now and Charlie’s gelding had gone down once. We were hard put to get him back on his feet.
“We got to get under cover.” Charlie’s voice was muffled by the bandanna tied over his nose and mouth.
“This here’s a trail of some sort,” Burt said. “I seen a wagon track back yonder where the snow had blowed off.”
Luckier than the others, I had a wool muffler tied across my face, knitted for me by a girl whose name was Mary. I never expected to see her again but she’d left kindly thoughts in my mind. That muffler was a god-send and I’d have given plenty to be putting my feet under her table.
I squinted through the slowly falling snow at the bulk of the mountain ahead, and the way the trees climbed its side. I’d never been to this part of the country before, so why should it seem familiar?
Like that big old oak tree where we’d camped last night? And the spring where I’d dipped up water.
“Fence,” Charlie pointed.
Sure enough, there was the corner of a split-rail fence just off the road; the fence running alongside the road as if to hold back the trees.
“Thank God!” Burt said. “There’ll be a house and a fire!”
We needed it. We just weren’t going much further. The cold was intense, night was coming on and our horses were played out. Three days we’d been riding now with mighty little rest.
The trees ended at the edge of a small meadow covered with snow. Up the road a ways we could see a gate, and back against more trees was the house. There was a barn and a corral with a big stack of hay alongside. No smoke came from the chimney.
“It will be shelter,” Charlie said. “There’s got to be a fireplace or a stove.”
“Let’s hope there’s wood, too,” Burt said. “I ain’t in no mood.”
The gate was closed and Charlie leaned from the saddle to slide back the bar. Glancing up at the sign arching above the gate, it took me a moment to read it: The Burning Lamp.
Burt, he stared at it, too. “Now what the Hell does that mean? Anyway, I’d rather it was a burning fire in the stove.”
Me, I didn’t say anything. I took another look then pulled my chin back behind my coat collar. Something about that sign made me feel all funny inside, and that was foolishness. The Burning Lamp, what did it mean, anyway?
No hoof marks or those of sled-runners. No smoke from the chimney. We waited while Charlie closed the gate. No ranching man ever leaves a gate open that he finds closed, and habit was stronger than the cold.
We rode up to the house. Snow all over everything. Heavy on the roof, on the porch. Snow blown against the shutters leaving white lines like bars.
“Hello, the house!” I yelled.
Wind blew a whiff of snow off the eaves, and a dry branch scraped against a roof-corner. One of the horses stamped impatiently. Burt turned his mount and walked him toward the barn.
Stepping down from the saddle, so stiff I could only fumble at the front door. It was locked. The porch and the steps creaked when I left them to walk around to the side of the house.
“We’ll have to break in,” Charlie suggested.
“Let’s try the back door first,” I said. Cold or no it went against the grain for me to break into anybody’s house. Although Western folks usually expected people to stop by. All they wanted in return was to leave things as they were found.
There was a stack of wood, as much as two cords of it, stacked alongside the house, and in the shadows of the covered back porch I saw an axe, and a cross-cut saw.
Stepping into the cold stillness of that back porch, I tried the door.
Locked.
On a hunch I looked up along the door frame and saw a key hanging from a peg. Not a nail, but a peg. Well, a lot of folks used pegs. Nails were scarce.
Unlocking the door, I pushed it open. It was a small kitchen, oil-cloth on the floor, a big old kitchen range and some pots here and there. The wood-box was filled. There were a few dishes on the shelves.
Charlie went back for the horses and I stepped into the next room.
There was a pot-bellied stove, another full wood-box, and some pitch-pine slivers laid out ready to start a fire. Standing in the icy stillness of that empty room, I stared at those slivers of pine. I said, “I’ll bet the fire’s laid, too.”
Opening the stove, I peered in. There it was, some crumpled bark, some small twigs, slivers of pitch-pine and heavier wood. Squatting before the stove I struck a match. It flared up and I leaned in, touching the match to a thin, curled edge of bark. It caught, crept along the edge, showing a tiny blue flame, then it gathered strength and reached hungrily for the twigs. I closed the stove door and stood up.
No sound. Only icy stillness. An empty house can be the coldest place in the world. Slowly, I let my eyes take in the room.
Two doors opened into other rooms or closets. The floor was well-made, the planks tightly fitted. No rugs on the floor but there had been rugs, for I saw a dark stain, straight along one edge as though something had spilled partly on the rug, partly off its edge.
I shivered. What was it about this place?
The room was dim with only a little light filtering through the shutters. On a small table there was a coal-oil lamp, half-filled with oil. I crossed the room, struck a match and lifted the lamp chimney to touch the match to the wick. Then I replaced the lamp chimney and blew out the match. Adding fuel to the fire which was blazing up, I crossed to the nearest door.
A bed-room, bed built against the wall. A home-made bed with leather straps for springs. No mattress now. Pegs on the walls for hanging clothing, one picture I could not make out in the darkness. Leaving the door open to warm the room in case somebody decided to sleep there, I went to the other room.
The second room was smaller, but there were two beds, pegs on the walls here, too, and an old trunk between the beds. When I turned around I noticed there was a bar for the door, a bar on the inside.
“Odd,” I said aloud.
The stamping of feet on the porch brought me back to the living-room. “Took care of your horse,” Charlie said. “Took the gear off and rubbed him down a mite. There’s plenty of hay and whoever built that barn, built it tight and strong.” He glanced around. “Same as this house.”
They walked to the stove, peeling off their gloves to extend their opened fingers to the heat. “Man! That surely feels good! Didn’t take you long to get a fire goin’!”
“It was already laid.”
Burt glanced around at me. “Grave out yonder.” He gestured toward the woods near the barn. “Seen it when I was gettin’ hay.”
Burt was a big, quiet man, a top-hand on any outfit, and older than Charlie and me. Burt was out of Arkansas by way of Texas, and he’d been up the trail to Kansas a time or two. Easy-going man, but no nonsense about him, either.
“Good place,” he said, looking around. “Makes a body wonder why they left it.”
“Trouble in the family,” I said. Indicating the second door I said, “Whoever slept in there had a bar across the door. Ain’t likely a man would want to keep anybody out, so it must have been a woman.”
“Pretty bad if she had to use a bar,” Burt said. He was opening his pack. “Seen a skillet out there, and I’m goin’ to fry up some bacon.” He glanced around at me. “Any of that bread left?”
“Most of one loaf, all of another. And I’ve coffee. We’ll make out.”
Burt left the room and we heard him moving around outside. When he returned he had a bucket of snow which he placed beside the stove to melt. “Pump’s froze,” he explained.
Uneasily, I looked around. There was something about this place—“Be glad when we can get back on the trail,” I said.
Burt glanced at me. “Have you looked outside? We’ll be lucky if we can move out for days. She’s comin’ down pretty good out there. Anyway, it’s snug and tight in here and it ain’t likely we’ll find anywhere else.”
“Our horses are done in. A few miles further and we’d have been afoot. We were shot with luck when we come up to this place.”
From the wood-box I added sticks to the fire. The room was warming up.
“I’ll bring in some more wood,” I said, and went to the door. Burt was rinsing out the frying pan with melted snow-water.
Outside the snow was falling faster, and so thick I could no longer see the gate. Gathering an armful of wood from the pile I brought it inside, then followed it with two more.
Charlie was squatting near the stove when I came in. He was a thin, tall man with a drooping yellow mustache from which the ice was melting.
“I’d have lost my horse,” he commented.
“Burt’s right,” I admitted. “We should hole up here a couple of days.”
Charlie and me met up when we were punching cows on the Slash Seven. He’d been there just a few days when I hired on and we made a team of it. He was a good man with a rope and he tied fast. Me, I was a dally man, myself. Just take a turn around the old horn when I latch onto something.
For a few months there we rode some serious country together, gathering strays out of the canyons and working the rough string. When you said rough string on the Seven you meant it. Some of those horses were rounded up out on the mesa from wild stock and they’d been rode mighty little. I was a fair hand but Charlie was better. Burt was the best rider of us three but he wasn’t hunting any bad ones. “You kids can have them,” he said. “I cut my teeth on wild mustangs and they’ve jounced me around enough.”
We’d been riding together, Charlie and me, for eight or nine months when we met Burt.
Burt was down in a buffalo wallow with a dead horse, and he was smoking it out with a bunch of Arapahos. He’d been burned by a couple of rifle shots and he was down to his last four cartridges.
When we showed up we taken the fun out of it for the Indians and they taken off waving their hands and slapping their behinds at us.
Burt stood up and says, “You boys come along at the right time. I’d just a few beans left in the mill.” That was when he showed us the four cartridges he had left.
“You nailed one of them,” Charlie said.
“That was right off. I never did get a good shot at anything after.” He glanced down at his horse. “I surely do hate to lose my outfit. I’ve set astride of that old saddle across some rough country.”
“You can ride with me,” Charlie said. “My horse can carry double. Copper will take your gear.”
It was forty miles to town, a settlement gathered around a box-car that doubled for a railroad station, general store and saloon. There were some loading-pens and four or five dry farmers, bucking the odds and the dust storms.
At the bar where he taken us to buy a drink, this gent looked over at us and said, “I’m Burt Hoogan.”
Charlie, he just nods, so I say, “They call me Copper, because of my hair.”
My hair wasn’t red, just about the color of dusty copper. My folks said I taken after a woman who married into the family. She was my great-grandmother or something of the kind.
Charlie never said what his other name was and nobody asked him.
“Glad you boys come along,” Burt said. “I was fixing to get almighty lonesome, and them Injuns wasn’t much comp’ny.”
After that the three of us rode together and when the Seven let us go for the winter we hit the trail together.
Burt was slicing bacon into the pan when I came in with the last armful of wood. He glanced at me. “That grave I seen…” he said, “I went over and taken a look. Eleven years old. That was all. Name of Peter Talon.”
Well—
Burt, he looked at me again, mighty sharp. “What’s wrong? Copper? What’s the matter?”
“That kid…Peter Talon…I think he was my brother.”
CHAPTER 2
They stared at me, and then Burt said, “You mean you know this place? You lived here?”
“I never saw it before. I’ve never even been in this part of the country. If this is the place I heard about I think it is my pa built this cabin, with ma helping. The Talons were mostly builders, and he took after them.”
“What happened to your ma?”
“Last I heard she was in Kansas, and Petey was with her, but they were headed west.
“She an’ pa had been out west and they’d built a cabin, but when she was fixin’ to have me they went back east where she could have care. Pa, he left her there and guided a wagon train west and he did some more work on this place, fencing it, and the like. He put in a crop, bought some cows, and then he came back east to be with ma.
“After I was born pa was building a bridge and so he stayed by. Then he got another job working on a fort the Army was building, and then as a teamster with the Army. That took him right where this place was. So he stayed on awhile, fixing things up and building the barn. Then he came back.
“We moved from Tennessee to Missouri. Petey was born after a bit, and all they did was talk about their place out west. It was like a dream to them. Pa taken sick and died. He caught pneumonia. He was all strong and happy like, then he was down in bed and then he was gone. I don’t recall the years. Pa left ma with a little money and she taken care of us, but she was scared.
“You know how those days were. Missouri was wild. There was a lot of bad blood over the War, and occasional shootings. There was several men wanted to marry ma, but she shied away from them. Then this one man came around and he sort of warned the others off. He was a strapping big man, handsome, and better dressed than most. Ma thought he was like pa, but he surely wasn’t.
“Once they were married he began to ask questions about the place out west and about grandpa. I used to hear them talking, and I knew ma couldn’t make head or tail of it, and he would get mad. He thought she was hiding something from him when she just flat didn’t know what he was after.
“I knew, and one time when he was down to the saloon, I told her. It was that ol’ treasure story. Pa told it to me like he told me a lot of other stories, and he didn’t think there was anything to it, and it wasn’t grandpa at all, but much further back than that.
“Even before they were married my step-father had been curious about a medallion my mother wore. It was gold and it had funny markings on it. Pa said it was an heirloom from his family and wanted my mother to have it.
“Maybe Pa had never told her the story, thinking it fanciful, but I was a little boy and him hard put to come up with fresh stories for me, he told it to me.
“An ancestor of his, away back, had been a pirate. Not in Jamaica and those islands like you hear, but off in India somewhere. I don’t know much about that over there so all the names and places were strange to me, but I recall they had wonderful sounds.
“Pa talked of places like Madagascar, Coromandel, Zanzibar, Borneo and such-like. Anyway, this ancestor of his was the one who first took the name Talon, took it because he’d had one arm cut off and a claw to replace the hand. An old devil by all accounts.
“He’d raided and marauded and captured ships here and there and finally sailed back with four big ships, heading across the Pacific. By the time they came to the shores of America, and that was some time in the 1600s, they were in bad shape.
“They had to abandon one vessel, and as they were all heavy loaded, they buried that treasure. Millions, they said.
“They were attacked by Indians but got safely off after losing a few men. Further south they had a fight with a Spanish ship and it crippled another one of theirs, so they buried what they had from it and what they’d taken from the Spanish ship.
“They sailed around the horn with just two ships left. They were taken with scurvy and some died, and some were lost in storms so when they finally came into harbor on the coast of Canada, a place called the Gaspe, later, they were short-handed.
“That first Talon, he chose to stay right where he was, and some stayed with him. Some stayed, some went. Those who went were given shares of treasure but of course, they wanted more. At the end they sailed off, then came back to seize the rest, but the old man was waiting for them. There was a mad fight there on the shore and some men died and some lived. That time when they sailed off their ship exploded. Blew right up, and some do say the old Talon rigged it so.
“Anyway, some carried the story that a Talon knows where there’s treasure, hidden somewhere in the West. Where there was one story there’s now a dozen, all different, and treasures hid in places no Talon ever was, but folks will believe what they wish to believe.”
“What about the loot buried on the West Coast? From that first ship?” Charlie asked.
“She’s still there, wherever that is. So far as I know the Old Man told nobody. Maybe he went back and got it. He had ships there for awhile, and he did what he said and gave land to those who stayed with him.
“Anyway, that heirloom ma wore, that was supposed to be a gold piece from the treasure, handed down in the family. This man who married ma, he heard the name Talon, and he’d heard the story before. Talon had been set on going west, had a place out there, somebody said. Somehow he got it in his mind that where the cabin was, that was where the treasure was.
“She didn’t even know what he was talking about until I told her, then she told him it was all nonsense. He couldn’t accept that. To believe that he had to admit he was a damn fool.
“He’d talked mighty big about all he was going to have, and now he had nothing. Instead he was spending what he had taking care of us. Only he took what ma had, too, and when I went to work, he took what I earned, little as it was. He drank more and more and he beat us more and more. He couldn’t give up on the story but I don’t know if he believed it anymore, either.
“He got me to one side and tried to get out of me what I knew. I told him the only treasure I heard of was buried afar off, at sea. He whipped me for that. If I hadn’t run off, he’d of killed me. Now I’m wondering what happened to Petey.”
“And to her,” Burt said, “to your ma.”
The idea chilled me. “I’ve got to find out,” I said. “I’ve got to find out what happened.”
“There’s that trunk,” Charlie suggested.
“There’s another place, too,” I said. “There’s our secret place back in Missouri where Petey and me used to hide. Ma knew of it, and she left notes there for me, time to time, warning me when he was drinking and such, so’s I could stay clear. She used to leave grub for me.”
“Your pa ever look for that treasure?” Burt asked.
“I asked him that, and he says, ‘Look where? Two places in maybe three thousand miles of coast? I wouldn’t even know where to begin, nor would anybody else. The whole story may be a pack of lies. I don’t know. It’s just a good story, that’s all. If there’s any proof it’s true or not it’s right back there on the Gaspe, where the Old Man lived…and died.’ ”
Burt fried some bacon and made coffee. “Beats me why they’d leave such a snug, warm cabin,” he said. “Your pa was a sure enough builder. Look at how those corners are fitted. Ain’t a chink nowhere, and the window sashes fit. I tell you a body doesn’t often see work like this.”
“Ma loved this place,” I said. “I can’t figure why she’d leave.”
“Maybe after her other boy died there was no reason to stay.”
We sat up to the table and made do with what we had and when I was washing up after I turned to them and said, “Boys, I’ve got to quit you. I know we figured on going out to the Nevada country but I’ve just got to find out what happened to ma.”
Charlie lay back on the bunk where he’d spread his blankets. “You just do that. Burt an’ me, we ain’t in no hurry, and she’s mighty cold in the saddle.”
“Nevada will look a whole lot better in the spring,” Burt agreed. “If we lay in some grub there’s no better place to last out the winter. A snug cabin, good stove, and plenty of fuel.”
Charlie slept in the main room and Burt took over one bed-room and I slept in the room which had the bar on the door. That, I figured, might have been ma’s room. She must have slept here with Petey in the other bed.
First, I lit the coil-oil lamp and then I rustled around for some paper. All I could find there at first was a couple of old envelopes.
With a stub of pencil I sat down and looked at the back of those envelopes. Some folks think well in one way, some in another. I like to get something on paper where I can look at it, study it and add a thought here and there. Tracing in the dust with a twig or scratching on a piece of bark is nigh as good.
This was pa’s place out west. That was why that oak tree where we camped had seemed familiar. He had told me of camping there. Ma had come here with Petey and that man…my step-father. Petey had died here. Ma was gone.
That man…Frank. Somehow I even hated to say his name. Frank had expected to find something and he had found nothing. So what would he do?
He wouldn’t believe it. He couldn’t believe it. He had his dream, too, of easy money, somebody else’s money. People hunting treasure are mighty unreasonable people as a rule. You can prove to them there isn’t any gold and never was any, and they simply won’t accept it. I’d seen that before.
He would think there was something. He would think ma knew and just wasn’t going to tell him.
COMMENTS: Like the first fragment in this collection, The Bastard of Brignogan, this piece contains a good deal of information on the progenitor of the Talons. Not all of the material in these fragments is completely consistent; if you read carefully you can see Louis trying out slightly different versions of the Talon backstory to see which one he likes best. More about the family can be found in The Ferguson Rifle, Rivers West, and even a bit in the Sackett novel To the Far Blue Mountains.
While there are quite a few coincidences in Louis’s fiction, this character accidentally winding up in his own family home is a whopper! I’ve never been quite sure why coincidence plays such a big role, but, though I’m fairly critical of my father’s work, I’m left with the feeling that it wasn’t laziness. The concept of synchronicity or connectedness between people was such a powerful force in Dad’s imagination that he devoted his first novel, No Traveller Returns, to that very theme.
We should also remember that the world was a smaller and more compact place during his formative years. The population was less than half of what it is today, and with class and race barriers being what they were, connections between people who were very much alike may have been significantly more common. Dad transcended more of those barriers than many of his time, working as a laborer alongside people of all races from all parts of the world, and then living as a celebrity under conditions where people sought him out to remind him of their connection to his life. It all leads me to wonder if there may have been fewer degrees of separation between the people of his era than we tend to think.
This story was created late in Dad’s career (1986 or so), and in his journal he revealed that he got the idea from a picture on a postcard. Wanting it to develop differently from other stories, he had chosen to “start it earlier in the story to get the full effect of the men lost in the snow storm and finding the cabin.” This refers to him not starting at some high-stakes moment, which was his usual modus operandi. His notes included the following brief description of the story, which will give you some clues as to how a slightly different version of it evolved:
A cowboy, drifting with two buddies, and broke, comes to a ranch gate with a sign over it THE BURNING LAMP. It gives him a twinge…long ago his Ma had said she’d keep a lamp burning in the window for him. He rides into the gate and they come up to a deserted ranch-house, an empty barn. They go in and he finds things that tell him this is, indeed, the place where his mother and sister had once lived. With his little brother, too. And another girl, taken in by them when her folks were killed.
They warm themselves in the cabin and he putters about finding a fragment here and one there, he remembers the last letter he got, worn almost away in his pocket and the trouble facing them.
He had run away at his mother’s urging when his stepfather threatened to kill him. His sister had added a note to the last letter telling him of her “secret place,” a hollow in the old tree where she kept her diary. He starts to ride away in the morning, then on a chance, turns back to the tree and finds her diary and the last, sad days. Under the trees he finds his brother’s grave.
He begins a lonely trail and at the end when the conflict comes to a head his two old trail partners join him in the shoot out. They just couldn’t see him face it alone. Build into this all the charm of an old folk song, even the rhyming words, a line here and there until the song is ended.