The Stranger from Abilene

As the lawman leaned back and shoved the cup into his saddlebag, Clayton said, “Why does Hinton dislike me so much?”

Kelly considered that. “Maybe it’s the way you look at a man,” he said finally. “It’s like, well, it’s like you look right inside him to see what makes him what he is.”

“I wasn’t aware of that.”

“Well, you do it. I knew a man like that once, feller by the name of John Wesley Hardin. Heard of him?”

Clayton nodded. “Yeah, gunfighter from down Gonzalez County way in Texas. Last I was told he was in prison someplace.”

“He’s doing twenty-five years in Huntsville, which he don’t deserve. Anyway, Wes was like you. He’d stare right into a man’s soul.”

“So, what does Hinton have to hide that I make him so uncomfortable?”

“Nothing that I know of, unless it’s his cooking. You spook a man, is all, looking at him like that. And what a man doesn’t understand, he fears.”

Clayton smiled. “And do I spook you, Nook?”

“No, you don’t. Ol’ Wes used to stare at me like that all the time over the rim of a whiskey glass, so maybe I got used to it.”

“Well, I’m going to stop looking at folks that way,” Clayton said.

“Ain’t gonna happen, Cage. It’s a thing you’re born with and it won’t ever go away.”

“Hello the house!”

Kelly sat his horse and scanned the building. Windows stared back at him with empty eyes, the bloodstreaked sky caught in their panes.

“Nobody to home,” Clayton said.

“You check the bunkhouse?”

“The hands aren’t there. It’s like they picked up and left in a hurry.”

Kelly stepped from the saddle. “We’ll go inside. I’m feeling something I don’t like.”

Guns drawn, Clayton and Kelly entered the ranch house. There was no sound, only the tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway and a persistent, droning buzz.

They checked a couple of bedrooms, then the parlor. Everything was as it should be.

The buzz stayed with them, growing in intensity.

“Bees in the walls?” Kelly said.

Clayton lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. Could be, I guess.”

A second hallway met the first, forming a T. They turned right and stepped into the room at the end of the corridor.

Shad Vestal’s fancy duds were still spread out on the bed.

“All ready for his trip, huh?” Clayton said.

“Seems like,” Kelly said. “But where the hell is he? And where’s Lee?”

Clayton checked another room, then stepped through the dining room door after Kelly.

They walked into a charnel house.

Chapter 49

Five men were sprawled across the dining room table and another lay on the floor. Their faces were covered in a buzzing mass of fat flies, black masks that concealed the contorted features of the dead.

The room smelled sweet, of decay, and the tick of the hall clock was loud, already measuring the minutes and hours of eternity.

His stomach an uncertain thing, Clayton left the room and stepped into the kitchen, expecting to find . . . he didn’t know what.

“White men don’t kill like that.”

Clayton turned. Kelly was framed in the doorway.

“This is Apache work,” the lawman said.

“Caught the hands while they were sleeping off a drunk, you think?”

“Looks that way.”

“Then where is Vestal?”

Kelly shook his head, said nothing.

Clayton made a quick search of the kitchen and discovered a heap of bloodstained clothes that had been kicked into a corner.

He picked them up and laid them out on the kitchen table.

“Expensive duds for an Apache,” he said.

Kelly picked up Vestal’s shirt, studied it, frowning as his mind worked.

The kitchen sink still bore pink streaks of blood, as did a carving knife that lay on the floor where it had been carelessly tossed away.

“Whoever killed those men took time to strip off his bloody clothes and wash his hands,” Clayton said. “I never knew Apaches to be that dainty.”

“Then how did it come up?” Kelly hesitated only a heartbeat. “In your expert opinion.”

Clayton let the barb pass. “Could be that Vestal invited the hands here to celebrate his departure for Boston, got them drunk, then cut their throats.”

“Why?”

“Because they knew too much about the business of killing Apaches and the sale of their bodies.”

Kelly seemed to consider that, but his eyes were steel-hard, a man who intended to go his own way, no matter what. “Vestal was a gunfighter, maybe the best there was around after me. Why didn’t he shoot them?”

Clayton smiled. “Think about it, Nook. A gunshot in an enclosed room is loud. Even men dead drunk can wake and go for their revolvers.”

As Kelly had done earlier, he picked up the bloody shirt.

“Vestal wanted the men dead in the quickest, easiest way possible. That’s why he used a knife and not a gun.”

The marshal’s speech slowed, as though he was talking to a child or an obvious dimwit.

“Cage, I told you, white men don’t kill like that.”

Clayton opened his mouth to object, but Kelly raised a hand.

“Listen to me. You’re right. The hands were drunk, and so was Vestal. The Apaches found them that way, cut their throats, but took Vestal away for special treatment. He was the one they hated most and his death would be a lot slower.”