The Stranger from Abilene

This time he didn’t faint, but he vented his lungs.

“Aaaarrrgh . . . ya son of a bitch!”

It took him time to recover, but after a few minutes Clayton used the shirt to bind his wound. He stood, gingerly tested the leg. It took his weight, but the pain was considerable.

He sat again, smoked a cigarette, and drank more coffee.

Then he heard the train whistle.

Chapter 18

There was a real possibility that more hard cases were on the train, and Clayton knew he was in no condition to fight anybody. Pain had sapped his strength, and the Old Crow had turned on him and was no longer his best friend.

He rose, looked around the room, then picked up his rifle and staggered outside. Lightning still flashed across the sky, lighting up the clouds, and the rain was still coming down hard, hissing like a dragon in the dark.

Limping badly, he stopped and looked along the tracks. The approaching locomotive was a point of light in the distance, but under his feet the rails were thrumming to the rhythm of its wheels.

Clayton walked around the refrigerator car and dragged the dead guard’s body into the underbrush. The effort fatigued him and for a minute he stood with his back against the side of the car, breathing heavily. Then he pushed himself to round the car again and go back to the tracks.

The train seemed no nearer, but the whistle was louder, its five notes echoing through the rain-lashed hollow of the night. Clayton hesitated, then made up his mind.

It was now or never. He was going to see what was inside those damned boxes. The guard had been ready to kill to keep their secret, so the contents were precious to somebody.

His hearing reaching out to the train, Clayton opened the car. It smelled of meat and blood and ice. And death.

His wounded leg would not allow him to climb inside, but a box, smaller than the others, was near him. He dragged it closer and used the toe of his rifle butt to hammer it open.

The cheap thin pine splintered and Clayton pulled a piece free. He thumbed a match into flame and looked into the box.

A child stared back at him with wide black eyes.

Startled, Clayton took a step back. He heard the clack of the locomotive’s wheels, and its whistle again pierced the night. He leaned over the box again and lit another match. In the shifting yellow light, he saw the dead face of a little girl, black hair falling over her shoulders. She wore a buckskin dress that somebody, her mother probably, had decorated with blue Apache beads.

The girl showed no sign of physical violence, but when Clayton looked closer, he saw that she’d vomited down the front of her dress.

The child had been poisoned.

She’d been given something to eat or drink and it had killed her.

A sickness in him, he did not have the time or desire to check the remaining boxes. He had a good idea what they contained.

He laid the splintered pine plank back on top of the box, then slammed shut the car door. As quickly as he could on his bad leg, he stepped away from the tracks and quartered back to where his horse was tethered. There, among the trees, he would not be seen by anyone from the train.

The locomotive huffed on the tracks as it took on water and wood. From his hiding place, Clayton watched a man step inside the boxcar office. He’d left the bourbon bottle, and hopefully all the blood he’d spilled was hidden by the table.

The man was inside only for a minute or so, then reappeared. He laughed and said something to the engineer, then helped hitch the locomotive to the refrigerator car. As Clayton had hoped, the man had seen the bottle and figured the guard had wandered off drunk somewhere.

Clayton sighed his relief. Another gun battle was the last thing on earth he needed. After the locomotive left with the refrigerator car, Clayton returned to the office. The stove still burned with a good heat and wearily he stretched out beside it. Despite the nagging pain in his leg, he slept.

Clayton was unaware that just a mile away, the man who was hunting him was wide awake, listening, watching, a dangerous predator who was one with the unquiet night.

Chapter 19

Shad Vestal sat his horse, head raised, testing the darkness for sound. A pair of hunting coyotes yipped back and forth, and in an oak grove off to his left an owl asked its question of the night. The wind whispered, thunder grumbled in the distance, and raindrops ticked from the tree branches. But there was nothing of human origin. No cough or snore or cry torn from troubled sleep.

Vestal grimaced. Damn it, where was Clayton?

He eased his horse forward, rode through a saddleback between a pair of shallow hills, then up a low ridge, drawing rein near the rain-slicked surface of a volcanic boulder, fallen there a long time past.