The Circuit Rider Read online

  “Damn yellow-skinned animals!” The man looked like the young woman, but with a glint in his eyes that reminded Bird of a rodent.

  “Peter, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Dawn said. “You’ll have to forgive my brother, ma’am. He lets the whiskey do most of his talkin’.”

  “You mind stepping outside with me so we can have a talk?” Bird said. “It smells like shit in here.”

  “Well, lardy-dardy to you, too!” Peter said. He waved a hand at them like he was shooing flies away. Bird wondered if the stink was even too bad for the flies.

  She led Dawn away from the house, and, since there was nowhere to go, they stood by Bird’s Appaloosa. Dawn patted the horse’s flank.

  “I love horses,” she said. “They’re so gentle.”

  “I heard tell that Sadie was a gentle young woman, too. That true?”

  Dawn smiled. “She sure was. Sweet as honey.” The girl’s smile faded a bit, and Bird knew she’d stopped herself from adding something.

  “Had she stayed sweet right up until the end?” Bird said. “I heard things might have changed for her a little bit. You know anything about that?”

  “Working for Mr. Whitcomb is not an easy job,” Dawn said. She ducked her head a little bit, as if she expected to be struck for saying such a thing.

  “Why is that?” Bird said.

  “Well, he owns everything,” Dawn said as if she were talking to a young child. “He does what he does, and if you don’t like it, you might as well leave town.”

  Bird caught something in her voice.

  “Did you work for him?”

  The girl nearly flinched.

  “I can’t—”

  “Dawn. Those Chinamen didn’t kill Sadie. I know that, and you know that. So let’s be honest with each other. What was going on between Sadie and Mr. Whitcomb?”

  A little tear slipped down Dawn’s face.

  “OK,” Bird tried. “What happened between you and Mr. Whitcomb?”

  “He did some things to me,” she said. “And when I refused to go back, he said it was fine but I couldn’t tell anyone. So he pays us a little bit every month to let some of his horses graze on our property. It used to be enough, but then my brother started drinking the money away.”

  “Which is why you’re working now for Big Kate.”

  Dawn nodded. “Hell, those men don’t do nothin’ to me that Mr. Whitcomb ain’t done.”

  “So he was doing the same thing to Sadie.”

  Dawn let out a long breath that rattled her thin, narrow shoulders. “I think so. Sadie was real private. But I could tell something was wrong.”

  There was a disconnect for Bird.

  “So was she planning on getting away from Whitcomb? Quitting her job? Where was she going to go?”

  “Sadie was real smart,” Dawn said. “A lot smarter than me. And a whole lot braver. She said she had something that would get justice for both of us. She was going to meet someone who could help us. She stopped here on her way, and that was the last time I saw her.”

  “Who was she going to meet?” Bird said.

  “A territorial marshal.”

  Dawn looked up toward the mountains.

  “Did this marshal have a name?” Bird said.

  Inside the house, they heard a chair tip over and more glass breaking.

  Dawn turned to her.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  “Please. Dawn. Do it for Sadie. Did she say if this marshal had a name?”

  Dawn nodded and then said the name softly.

  “Toby Raines.”

  Forty-Seven

  The scent of burning wood still lingered, but the smoke had cleared. Tower paused at the entrance to Hop Alley. It looked like things had returned to some sense of normalcy.

  The joss shops and gambling dens appeared to be occupied, while the laundry businesses were busy with people scurrying to and fro.

  Tower continued on, past Hop Alley, and went to the hotel he and Bird had checked into. As he walked, he thought about his conversation with Whitcomb.

  It had not gone well.

  There was something about the way Whitcomb had become so defensive when he talked about his wife that gave Tower the feeling that Whitcomb’s sudden and intense reaction outweighed the moment. It was an overreaction.

  Why?

  Tower entered the hotel, went to the front desk, and asked if there were any messages for him.

  There weren’t.

  He walked to the staircase and began to climb the steps, pausing to step aside as a Chinese person carrying a large basket of bedsheets passed him by. Tower climbed the rest of the stairs, went to his room, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  He was looking forward to a little bit of time for reflection. He would have loved to set up a service for Twin Buttes, but he was torn. The Chinese were the people in most need of help and guidance, but they weren’t Christian.

  Tower would have to see about organizing a prayer session with the non-Chinese population of Twin Buttes and preach a sermon of forgiveness and acceptance of others.

  He set his Bible on the table next to his bed and took off his boots, jacket, and shirt.

  There was a washbasin and a pitcher near the door, so he filled the basin with water, then washed his face. He used a small towel embroidered with red flowers to wipe his face.

  He looked in the mirror at his reflection, saw a man still young but with a face that showed a lot of years in the saddle, a lot of years fighting demons, both internal and external.

  Tower went back to the bed and was about to sit down when he noticed a small slip of paper peeking out from beneath one of the pillows.

  He lifted it out and opened it.

  It was thick paper, and the words were written with a fine hand.

  To Whom It May Concern,

  My name is Sadie Bell and I am writing this letter and entrusting it to my faithful friend, Lop Shee, should any harm come to me. I am leaving tonight for a meeting with the territorial marshal as I plan to file a rape charge against Mr. William Whitcomb. He sexually attacked me after my first week as his housekeeper and threatened to kill me if I told anyone. Mrs. Whitcomb did not know what was happening, but she is also in fear of her life. She arranged a meeting for me with the marshal. Hopefully, no one will ever have to read this letter.

  Yours,

  Sadie Bell

  Tower put the letter inside his Bible. He felt anger overtake him. Whitcomb had been hiding something after all. And Tower instinctively knew that the territorial marshal had been a setup. Someone had discovered Sadie Bell’s plan. And that she had entrusted Lop Shee. Tower guessed that Sadie Bell had unwittingly signed the Chinese man’s death warrant, too.

  Because if his hunch was correct, Lop Shee was one of the Chinamen who had been hung.

  Forty-Eight

  “You stupid bitches don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Bird looked up.

  Peter Ratcliffe stood, swaying, on the porch. The bottle of rotgut was in his hand.

  “Go away, Peter,” Dawn said. She looked at Bird with a hopeless expression on her face. And a tinge of embarrassment.

  “Fuck you, Dawn,” he said.

  Bird stepped away from Dawn and faced Peter.

  “Why don’t you come down here and enlighten us?” she said.

  Peter stumbled down the steps toward Bird and stood in front of her.

  “You think I’m afraid of you, Miss Tough Lady? You and your two guns?”

  A fine mist of spittle flew from Peter’s mouth.

  “No, I don’t think you’re afraid of me,” Bird said. “If you were sober, you might be. But you’re too drunk to be scared. So show us how smart you are, Peter. What do you know that we don’t?”

  Peter giggled, then belched. Bird could smell the cloud of rotgut in the air between them.

  “She wasn’t goin’ to see no marshal, the stupid bitch,” he said. “There weren�
�t no marshal.”

  “What?” Dawn said from behind Bird. Her voice was unnaturally high. Bird recognized near hysteria when she heard it.

  “What are you talking about, Peter? Sadie was my friend. Why didn’t you say something? What did you do to her?”

  Bird now felt like a peace officer standing between the two siblings.

  “I didn’t touch a hair on her precious damn head,” Peter said. “So don’t worry, my sister the whore.”

  Bird swung, a right cross, and she twisted her wrist inward at the last moment to put a little extra torque into the punch. It was how she compensated for having to protect her hands. A gunfighter with swollen and injured hands was a dead gunfighter. So she took a little off the punch. Still, it landed solidly on Peter’s jaw, and he listed forward, then fell face-first onto the ground.

  Bird rolled him over onto his back.

  She picked up the bottle of rotgut, poured a little on Peter’s face, then wiped off the mouth of the bottle and took a drink.

  The stuff was poison.

  But it was free.

  Peter Ratcliffe struggled to his feet and stood there, weaving in front of Bird. She drew her gun and put the muzzle against his sweaty forehead.

  “If I ever hear you refer to your sister that way again, I’ll cut off your dick and shove it so far up your ass you’ll be pissing into your own belly.”

  Peter Ratcliffe turned pale, and Bird thought he might be about to vomit.

  “Now, what do you know about Sadie?” she said.

  “Fuck you,” Peter mumbled, blood dripping out of the side of his mouth.

  Bird thumbed the hammer back on her pistol, and the sound of it cocking echoed in the quiet air.

  She heard Dawn gasp behind her.

  “You have two choices,” Bird said. “Tell me what you know. Or I will make your sister sole owner of this property, and probably the happiest woman in Twin Buttes, by putting a bullet through that pea brain of yours.”

  “I don’t know anything. I’m just guessing about what happened to Sadie,” Peter said. He licked his lips, and his tongue looked dry and swollen.

  “Well, tell us your best guess of what happened then,” Bird said.

  “Whitcomb’s got some gunfighters out in a mining camp near the Silvertip. Heard one of ’em supposedly liked to pretend to be a territorial marshal and sometimes rob people.” Peter glanced down at the whiskey bottle like a dog begging for a treat after it had done a trick.

  Bird drank from the bottle instead and gestured for Peter to continue.

  “They mostly were there to keep the workers in line, but occasionally they’d get bored and rough up some people or have fun with a young lady who wasn’t all that willing. I heard all about ’em. That’s the marshal Sadie probably thought she was going to see.”

  Bird drank the last of the rotgut in one long pull from the bottle. She threw it into the air and fired four times in rapid succession, shattering the bottle and each of the biggest pieces.

  “Thanks for the drink,” she said.

  She turned to Dawn.

  “Get rid of this piece of shit and have a go at this ranch. You don’t need to be selling your wares down at Big Kate’s. And if he gives you any trouble, let me know. I’d love to come back and finish the job.”

  She swung up onto her horse and headed for the camp near the Silvertip.

  Forty-Nine

  Tower rode back to the Whitcombs’ big house on the hill. Dark storm clouds were gathering north of town, a veil of blackness setting a backdrop behind the buttes.

  Bertram the butler opened the heavy front door and gave no greeting to Tower.

  “Might I have a word with Mrs. Whitcomb?” Tower said.

  The butler’s smile was thin and without warmth.

  “I’m afraid they’ve retired to the country for the day,” he said. “I believe a picnic lunch was packed, and they’ve gone. I am more than happy to let them know you were here upon their return.”

  Tower weighed his options.

  “Thank you,” he finally said.

  The butler shut the door with more than a little emphasis.

  Tower climbed onto his horse and rode back toward town, then circled around so he came up far behind the Whitcomb house. He began a series of semicircles, riding to cut sign, as the trackers called it. He expanded his search, casting wider and wider circles.

  A picnic for the Whitcombs would mean enough food and drink for four people, Tower assumed. They would definitely not go via horseback. A wagon to hold all of the food and refreshments would certainly have been required.

  Tower was nearly a quarter mile from the house when he at last picked up fresh tracks of a horse and buckboard.

  Tower followed the tracks as they headed north toward the buttes, then veered on a dim game trail toward the west.

  The buckboard clearly needed to skirt any terrain too challenging, and Tower saw that the trail mostly meandered over rolling valleys and meadows, the landscape becoming more lush the farther it went from the plateau upon which the town of Twin Buttes sat.

  As he rode, Tower thought about Sadie Bell. A girl caught between a powerful man, a lack of authority in the town—hell, they didn’t even have a sheriff—and probably a range of emotions and fears. Panic being chief among them.

  Though he’d never met her, Tower could only imagine the sense of powerlessness and fear she must have been experiencing. Going after the men upon whom most of the town depended on economically would have been a lonely and terrifying situation.

  Ahead on the horizon a gap appeared, and Tower sensed a body of water in the distance. He crested the hill and gazed down upon a mountain lake nestled between a saddle of hills with thick stands of cottonwoods and scrub brush surrounding the shoreline.

  The buckboard sat at the edge of the water, the horse still in its yoke, munching from a feed bag full of oats.

  A single person sat on a blanket facing the lake.

  Tower edged his horse closer.

  The person, a woman, turned to look at him. She had curly chestnut-brown hair piled high on her head. Her face was pale, with fine features and a startling pair of green eyes.

  She wore a white dress, her feet were bare, and a lace shawl was around her shoulders.

  “Mrs. Whitcomb?” Tower said.

  She raised the wineglass in her hand.

  “Guilty as charged,” she said and gave a little giggle. Tower wondered how much of the wine she had had to drink.

  “And who might you be? Ants are usually the first visitors to interrupt a picnic.”

  “My name is Mike Tower.”

  “Ah. You’re the circuit rider who questioned my husband recently, correct?” she said.

  Tower looped the reins of his horse over the back of the buckboard, dismounted, and approached the woman.

  “I am,” he said.

  “Please sit, Mr. Tower. I’ve got a nice bottle of wine.”

  Tower remained standing.

  “I must thank you for stopping by yesterday,” Mrs. Whitcomb said. “I was listening to your conversation, you know.”

  Tower shook his head. “No, I knew someone might be eavesdropping, but I didn’t know who.”

  “It was all lies,” she said. Tower heard the fragility in her voice. A slight tremolo effect.

  “William has a taste for young women,” she said. “The younger the better. Or, as I’m sure he thought of them, the younger, the fresher.”

  She drank the rest of her wine and refilled her glass.

  “There have been many, many of the young things. Sadie was merely last in a long line.”

  “Last?” Tower said.

  She gestured with her glass toward the lake.

  Tower turned, and it took him a minute to spot the dark mass floating facedown in the cobalt-blue water.

  When he turned back, Annette Whitcomb had a double-barreled derringer pointed at his chest.

  “You see,” she said, “Mr. Raines was simply supposed t
o pay off Sadie Bell, in the same manner in which we’ve paid off the rest of William’s playthings.”

  She drank her wine.

  “But it seems Mr. Raines had a little side hobby I knew nothing about. Something he failed to mention when I hired him.”

  Tower put the rest of it together.

  “And you hired him because the sheriff of Twin Buttes had a heart attack and died. And he would have been the one with whom you usually worked out the financial arrangements with the other young women?”

  Annette Whitcomb nodded.

  “Yes. When one breaks from an old pattern, there are always unforeseen consequences. Mr. Raines butchering Sadie was one of those unfortunate surprises. A very nasty one, in my opinion.”

  “How did you find him?” Tower said. “This Toby Raines.”

  Annette Whitcomb adjusted her shawl without taking her gun from Tower.

  “He was a new man, joined William’s crew of labor ‘enforcers’ a few weeks ago. He seemed very capable. Apparently, a bit too capable.”

  The woman set her wineglass down and looked directly at Tower.

  “Please make sure I am buried nowhere near my husband,” she said. “And pray that God forgives me.”

  She put the derringer at the base of her chin, pointed up, and fired both barrels.

  Fifty

  The camp sat less than a mile from the Silvertip mine. It was easy to find, as the miners working in the mine had no problem pointing out where the “enforcers” spent the majority of their time. A few of the miners warned Bird about going up there.

  She paid them no attention.

  The enforcers lived in a bunkhouse with an attached corral and stable.

  There was only one way to do this.

  Bird rode directly up to the bunkhouse, left the Appaloosa outside, and opened the bunkhouse door.

  It was dark and smelled like men who spent a lifetime around cattle.

  Three men sat at a single table playing poker.

  They looked at her like she was a ghost.

  Bird kept her hands loose, her palms hovering over each gun.

  None of the faces was the one she sought. If it had been, Bird would have been shooting, not talking.