The Stranger from Abilene

Epilogue

Teaser chapter

A FINE LINE

Clayton walked a few yards away from the barn and looked down the shadowed street. Somewhere out there was a man who would try to kill him. Not tonight, but maybe the day after or the day after that.

He lit a cigarette. He knew that if he stepped out of line, Nook Kelly would gun him. But where was that line?

Only the marshal knew, and he wasn’t telling, at least not yet.

Kelly told Hinton he was bored, wanted to see what would happen. But when it did happen . . . what then?

Clayton might have to kill a man Kelly didn’t want dead. The little gun exhibition he’d given tonight wasn’t really directed at Hinton. It was a warning to Clayton: Cross me and I’ll kill you.

The rancher’s cigarette had gone out. He lit it again, the match flame reflecting orange on the lean planes of his face. Clayton had no crystal ball. He couldn’t predict the future. But one thing he did know—he could never match Nook Kelly’s skill with a gun. Not in this lifetime or in any other.

He ground out the cigarette butt under the sole of his boot and shook his head. All he could do now was take things as they came. There was no use building barriers on a bridge he hadn’t even crossed yet.

Yet, as Clayton lay again on his uncomfortable bed of straw and sacking, a man was already plotting his death.

He didn’t know it then. But he would know it soon.

THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

—Ralph Compton

Chapter 1

It was midnight when the man from Abilene came to the ferry.

He could have been there earlier, but had taken his time along the trail, in no hurry to kill the man he hunted.

A steel triangle hung from a rope, suspended from the low branch of a cottonwood that stood by the riverbank. Tied to the triangle was a length of scrap iron.

The man—tall, lanky, the weight of forty hard years hanging heavy on him—groaned as he swung stiffly out of the saddle. He led his pony to the river and let it drink.

A bloodstained moon had impaled itself on a pine on the opposite bank, and the night was still, the silence as fragile as glass.

Only the misted river talked, an ebb and flow of whispers as it washed back and forth over a sand and shingle bank.

The night was cool, the stars frosted.

Once the buckskin had drunk its fill, the man led it back to the triangle.

He grabbed the chunk of iron and clattered and clanged the triangle awake, its racketing clamor ringing through the splintering night.

The man smiled and twenty years fled from his weathered face. He dropped the iron, mightily pleased by his act of acoustic vandalism.

A couple of echoing minutes passed, and a couple more.

He heard a splash from the far bank; then a man’s voice, cranky, rusted with age, reached out through the darkness to him.

“Hell, did you have to wake the whole damned county?”

The man from Abilene grinned and made no answer.

But the ferryman, invisible in the darkness, wouldn’t let it go.

“Alarming good Christian folks like that. ’Tain’t right and ’tain’t proper.”

The man, still grinning, took hold of the iron again and banged it lightly against the triangle, once, twice, three times.

“And that ain’t funny,” the ferryman yelled.

The ferry, a large raft with a pole rail on two sides, emerged from the mist like a creature rising from a primordial swamp. Its algae-covered logs ground over shingle and shuddered to a stop.

“Howdy,” the man from Abilene said, raising a hand in greeting.

The ferryman dropped the rope he’d been hauling. Even in the darkness he looked sour.