The Stranger from Abilene

“Yes, more drunken talk. Just today I told Marshal Kelly to run him out of town.”

“Can we save him?”

“No, my dear, he’s beyond redemption.”

“What a pity. But perhaps we could try by example to—”

“You know, I think I will have that seltzer,” St. John said.

Damn, Edith was an irritating woman.

“Right away, dear.”

He watched Edith’s tall, bony body as she walked into the kitchen and felt no desire.

Sometime soon she’d have to go and he’d move in a woman more to his tastes. But not until this Clayton mess was settled.

Edith was in bed asleep. St. John shook his head at the scrawny wonder of her. Affection-wise, Ben St. John cared more for the Morgan mare he kept at the livery stable than he did his wife.

He reached into the bottom of the closet he reserved for himself and lifted out a dusty carpetbag, then returned to the parlor and sat at the table.

The blue Colt, its barrel expertly cut back to the length of the ejector rod, had lain in the bag for years, wrapped in an oil-soaked cloth. To St. John’s relief, the revolver showed no signs of rust, and the mahogany handles glowed dull red in the firelight.

He cleaned and oiled the revolver, then loaded five chambers. The ammunition was a more recent acquisition, each .44-40 round made by a master craftsman in Fort Smith.

St. John balanced the Colt in his hand. He had killed three men with the gun, and Cage Clayton would be the fourth.

He nodded, his mind made up.

When you want a job done well, do it yourself.

Chapter 62

Cage Clayton answered the knock at his hotel room door with a gun in his hand and a scowl on his face.

Nook Kelly stood looking at him, his features just as grim as Clayton’s.

“Come to collect my ten-dollar fine, Marshal?”

Kelly made no answer. He reached behind him, grabbed Minnie by the shoulder, and pushed her into the room.

“Tell Mr. Clayton what you told me, girl,” he said.

Minnie looked terrified, her black eyes huge.

“Tell him, Minnie,” Kelly said again. “He won’t hurt you.”

The girl’s voice was a timid whisper. “Mr. Anderson is dead, and so is Miz Lucy.”

“What happened?” Clayton said, a stirring of alarm in his belly.

“I don’t know,” Minnie said. “Miz Lucy, she tole me to visit for supper, but she didn’t come to the door when I knocked. So I went inside and . . . and they was both lying dead.”

Clayton looked over Minnie’s head to Kelly. “St. John?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you been to Moses’s house?”

“Not yet. I thought you’d like to be there.”

“Then let’s go,” Clayton said. He grabbed his hat, then looked at Minnie. “You go on home, girl. Nobody’s going to harm you.”

The girl sniffed. “I’m so scared, Mr. Clayton. Bad things is happenin’ in this town. There’s blood on the moon tonight, I seen it.”

Clayton patted Minnie’s shoulder. “You run straight home now. You’ll be all right.”

“Nobody in this town will be all right, not tonight, not any night,” the girl said. “I’m frettin’, Mr. Clayton, frettin’ something awful.”

Moses Anderson lived in a limestone cabin he’d built by himself, about a half mile north of town.

Clayton and Kelly walked in silence through a night lit by the blood moon. Around them dark arrowheads of pine stirred their branches in a gusting wind. The night was cool and smelled of rain and of the lightning that flashed soundlessly above the summits of the Sans Bois.

“Cabin’s just ahead,” Kelly said, breaking the quiet that had stretched between him and Clayton. “Yonder among the wild oaks.”

Oil lamps still burned in the house, its windows rectangles of yellow light that splashed on the ground and tinted the leaves of the oaks.

From the outside, in the darkness, the cabin looked cheerful, welcoming, like an enchanted cottage in a fairy tale.

But inside, there was only blood and death.

“Both shot in the head from close range,” Kelly said. “The woman has powder burns on her forehead around the bullet hole.”

“St. John shut them up,” Clayton said. “He was worried about what else Moses could tell me.”

“You don’t know that,” Kelly said, careful to not make it sound like an accusation.

“I know it. And so do you, but you won’t admit it.”

“I don’t know who killed Moses Anderson and his woman,” Kelly said. “You don’t know either. And there it stands.”

“Moses had hired hands out there at the Southwell Ranch,” Clayton said. “One of them told St. John I was talking with him.”

Kelly shook his head. “Cage, we don’t know that’s what happened. I can’t arrest a man on unfounded suspicion.”

“Then look around you, damn it, and try to solve this thing.”

“Cage, I’m a cow town marshal, hired for my guns. I’m not one of them big city detectives who hunt for clues and solve crimes.”

Clayton’s eyes, blue as ice and just as cold, met Kelly’s. “Then what happens, Marshal?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t talk to St. John just yet. Ask his clerks if their boss left the bank for any reason yesterday. If they say he did, then you can talk to him and ask him where the hell he was.”