CHAPTER SEVEN

June 12, 1912 — Wednesday. New Mexico.

A dust cloud blew across the barren land and on the road, where the farmyard was marked by a broken gate, a lizard crawled slowly from one gate post to the other in search of insects that might lie in the next shadow. It was the third day after the murders and John Morgan had just found out about them. He was sitting on the front porch of his New Mexico two-room house listening to his Mend, Al Crans, who had been trying for seven days to convince Morgan to move to Denver, Colorado. They had worked together for Burns Detective Agency in the past, but Al Crans had turned his resignation in and now encouraged Morgan to join him in a private detective agency of their own in Denver.

“You’ll have to get out of Burns Agency before long, Morgan,” Crans said again for the thirtieth time. “You can’t get ahead working the cases they’ll throw at you. Come on — come with me to Denver.”

Morgan had been to Denver. It was his kind of country, he admitted. He looked around him at the low wood and adobe shack with a mud-brick fireplace. It was as stark and plain as the country that surrounded it, fitting the terrain as naturally as the lizard on the road.

“Bess would not want to go,” he said of his wife.

“Is that a problem?” Crans asked honestly.

“No.” Morgan admitted.

They were sitting on a wooden bench together saying much without speaking, as old friends do, but their appearances were in sharp contrast. Crans was a young man, short and stocky and his facial expressions seemed to reveal the higher education he had obtained. Morgan was long and gangly, his face was weathered and the tips of his thick moustache were bleached by the sun. He wore a bowler hat which matched his dusty black suit and vest and all of this rolled into one gave him the look of twenty years beyond his age, although he was just forty-three last spring.

On the clay step beside him laid a telegram from Burns Detective Agency with a folded newspaper. A thick banner headline across the top of the paper read, “Tragedy at Twin Forks — Heads of Eight Crushed.” He picked up the telegram in his left hand and held the newspaper in the other.

“This Twin Forks case — it could get me somewhere — at Burns Agency’s expense.”

Crans shook his head, ‘They’re all the same, Morgan. You work your ass off and the agency comes along to take all the publicity.”

Morgan let his eyes roll across the flat land around him until he came to a strip of plowed ground to the west where his wife struggled in her garden. She’ll never give it up, he thought to himself. For the rest of her life, she’ll fly to grow those things out of this dead ground. He tried to feel sorry for her, but she was so oblivious to her hardship that all he could find for her was pity — resentment for his years she had wasted on this broken land.

He turned to Crans, “I am not in the same position as you. You have had three successes in the past twenty months — a good record to take with you. In that same time, I have had three failures.”

“None of those were your fault,” Crans protested.

Morgan held a hand in the air, as if to surrender the argument, “I know. But the result is the same — three failures. I will not go into a business with you as a failure — someone to leach off you because you are a friend.”

“Then you’ll go to Twin Forks to work on this mass murder case?” Crans asked.

“Yes. I will leave on the train tonight and get there in time for the funeral on Friday. This Porter family believes that this wealthy man is behind the killings. If that’s true, then it’ll be national news.”

Crans stood and kicked the dust, “How long do you think it will take you to settle that case?” he asked.

Morgan picked up the newspaper again and read it, as if it would give him the answer to his question. “I would estimate that six months should do it.”

“Six months. Yes, that should do it,” Crans agreed. “But what if you get into another problem — will it be another six months or a year before I hear from you?’

“Six months should do it,” Morgan repeated.

But Crams would not give up. He grabbed Morgan by the shoulders and brought his face close, “Look Morgan — you and I are the perfect team. I have all the research ability — and you, why you have a nose for this kind of thing that a bloodhound would be proud of. I want you as my partner.” Crams concluded, “I need you — and if we are friends, then I don’t think you should turn me down to go chase around in Iowa just to solve a butchery case.”

Morgan wished Crans hadn’t brought their friendship into the matter. Crans was the only close friend he had and to turn that friendship into a weapon now was unjust.

“All right. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll go to Twin Forks for six months. If we don’t have anything on Gardner by then, I’ll quit the case and Bums Agency and I’ll be on the next train to Denver.”

‘That’s a deal!” Crams said happily. He climbed onto the wagon he had come in a week ago, I’ll see you in six months,” he shouted as the horses jerked him forward.

Twenty minutes later John Morgan watched the horse and buggy carrying Al Crans disappear over the western horizon. He slowly climbed to his feet and walked to where his wife knelt in her gar den. He said nothing and she did not know he was there, so he watched her dig. Her hands were as dry as the dirt clogs she was breaking between her fingers and her face was a dark red from many years of exposure to the wind and sun.

He sensed that she knew he was behind her. After a long silence, he said to her quietly,

“I have another case.”

She stopped her work in the dirt momentarily, then continued clawing at the ground without comment.

A hot wind came again and with it the suffocating smell of dust. He pulled his bowler hat lower on his forehead and looked into the wind at the land where tomatoes of dust swirled through the brush. Saying more to the land than to his wife, he said,

“You’ll not see me again. But we never did have much between us, did we Bess? If we did, it is all gone.”

As John Morgan left the farm in New Mexico, he stopped at the gate for a last look at his wife; she was already back to work in her garden lurching forward and dragging the clogs toward her. If she was sorry to see him go, he could not tell it.

The wind blew harder and the lizard snapped up a bug, then lumbered beneath a stone in search of another morsel. No matter what Twin Forks is like, Morgan thought, it could not be any worse than this.