The Circuit Rider Read online

  Sixty-Nine

  If the town of Platteville, Nevada, had been much to look at before the battle with the Paiute, Bird would have been surprised. Because the way it looked now, as she and Tower rode into town from Fort Stewart, there wasn’t much left.

  A small cluster of buildings ran along a single sodden street. Half of the structures showed signs of fire damage; the other half looked like they were about to collapse.

  Bird followed Tower to what was left of Platteville’s general store. It was clearly one of the buildings that had been set on fire, with black scorch marks over most of the facade, a cracked front window, and a missing front door.

  They tied their horses to the hitching post and went inside.

  The debris wasn’t limited to the outside. The store was a mess. Shelves were knocked down, merchandise was strewn about, and empty bullet casings still littered the floor.

  “Just haven’t had time to get her cleaned up proper,” a voice said behind them.

  Bird turned and saw an older man wearing a striped vest and an enormous pocket watch, its chain hooked to one of the buttons of the vest.

  “Looks like you were right in the middle of it,” Tower said to the man.

  “I was!” He walked over to the store’s counter and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the wooden rail. “It happened right here, you know. Name’s Thompson, by the way. I own this place. And I’m the mayor, though not much of that matters now, I suppose.”

  “What happened right here?” Tower said.

  “Those worthless jackasses saw those Indian girls buying candy and just slung ’em over their shoulders and rode out of town. ’Cept the one who circled back behind the hotel and took the one girl up to his room. Found her later.”

  The man shook his head.

  “Them Indians butchered an entire family. The Robsons, live just up the street. The husband, wife, and all four children. Cut ’em down like dogs. They killed pretty near everyone they come across. Didn’t matter to them.”

  Bird wanted to point out the Indians hadn’t started the debacle, but there was no point in arguing about it.

  “Do you think you could introduce me to the folks that are still left in town?” Tower said. He held up his Bible. “I’d like to offer what help I can, even though I know there isn’t much comfort to be found in a terrible tragedy like this.”

  Thompson looked around the skeleton of what his store had been.

  “I’d be happy to get you out and about the town, Preacher. Maybe you can help the healing begin. Maybe we can put Platteville back together. Better than it was.” The man sighed.

  “Besides, I just can’t bring myself to tackle the job of cleaning this place up. Don’t know if there’s a point to doin’ it.”

  Bird stepped aside as the two men left the store.

  She went out, climbed onto the Appaloosa, and headed for the hotel.

  Seventy

  Bird climbed up onto what was left of the hotel’s porch and had to watch her step. The hotel had been burned as well, although it looked like most of the fire had been limited to the front of the building and wasn’t able to make its way inside.

  Bullet holes and broken arrow shafts littered the floor. Inside, every piece of furniture was smashed, burned, or turned upside down.

  A man sat alone on the floor of the hotel’s main room, a bottle of whiskey by his side. He was middle-aged, with dark pants, a white shirt full of stains, and suspenders that were hanging by his side.

  “Hate to see a man drinking alone,” Bird said.

  “Then go ahead and join me,” the man said, his voice thick with alcohol. “Good luck finding a glass, though,” he said and waved a hand around the room.

  Bird glanced beneath a table that was sheltering a stack of china from the dining room, she assumed, and spotted a lone coffee cup. She looked inside, then wiped it clean with her shirt.

  She went back to the man, and he held the bottle up for her. She filled the cup, tossed it back, then refilled it.

  “Thank you kindly for the drink,” she said. “This hotel your place?”

  “It was,” the man said. “This is my farewell drink to a dream that just died. I’m heading back to Chicago. I gave the West a try, but it didn’t work out.”

  Bird sipped from the whiskey in her coffee cup. If it had been a regular glass, she would have downed the whole thing already.

  “So rumor is one of the Paiute girls was killed here.”

  The man’s shoulders began to shake, and at first Bird thought the man was laughing. But then he wiped his eyes and she understood that he was crying.

  “Damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said. “I have half a mind to go up there and set that hellish nightmare on fire, burn the rest of it down. But I can’t set foot in there. Did once — won’t ever go again.”

  “Set foot where?” Bird said.

  The man sighed, a wet noisy sound that came out mostly through his nose.

  “The room where that sick bastard — ”

  The man couldn’t finish the thought. He threw his glass against the far wall, got to his feet, and drank straight from the bottle. He emptied it, then threw it against the wall, too. It shattered, and some of the glass pieces rained down on the broken china that littered the floor. It sounded to Bird like strange, discordant music.

  “I’ve got to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Out of this damn hotel and out of this goddamn town.”

  He stormed past Bird, thunked off the porch, and staggered down the street.

  Bird finished her whiskey and went to the stairs.

  How many rooms can there be? she thought.

  At the top of the stairs there was a landing, with torn and shredded mattresses, some night tables smashed to pieces, and a washbasin stomped into hundreds of tiny shards.

  One by one, Bird opened the door to each room, or at least the rooms that had doors, and looked inside. It wasn’t until she got to the last room at the end of the hall that she knew what she would find inside.

  The door had been ripped from its hinges and hung askew, as if it were trying to block the person entering from seeing the entire interior at once.

  Bird pushed the door to the side, and its edge tore a gouge in the wallpaper as she stepped through the doorway.

  For a moment, she lost her breath.

  The walls were smeared with blood, splattered in places, fashioned into crude pentagrams on several sections of wall.

  A great pool of dried blood sat in the middle of the room. The bed that had most likely been the central piece of furniture was half in the window, half out, the mattress wedged in place by thick shards of glass.

  Bird took in the sight of the room, transported back in time to other places, other scenes like this one. There had been too many. One was too many, but there had certainly been more than one. Many, many more than one.

  She carefully stepped toward the corner of the room, a sense of unease creeping over her as she stood in the middle of such wanton destruction.

  Bird turned and looked back toward the room’s entrance. There was a message, written in blood, on the inside of the door that still hung askew.

  The words were tilted, so Bird had to angle her head to read them.

  At the top of the door, a finger most likely dipped in the blood of the young Paiute girl had scrawled one name.

  Bird.

  She felt her insides go cold and a current of electricity vibrate up her arms, and she instinctively put her hand on her gun.

  Bird stood frozen, the chaos of the room falling away from her as she let her eyes travel down to the words below her name, their crude shapes punctuated with long tendrils of dried blood.

  See you in San Francisco.

  — T.R.

  Episode Five

  Seventy-One

  The barren rock of Nevada slowly gave way to the rugged beauty of eastern California. Tower had never been in this part of the country and was staggered by its vastness, by the soarin
g hills, the wide valleys, and the sweeping power of its rivers.

  He was saddle weary from being on the trail for the last three days, but he felt good, satisfied with the work he had done in Platteville. The innocent victims of the conflict there had needed a calming presence, one that could restore their faith in what the future could bring, and he had filled that role.

  Now he was looking forward to the next stop on his circuit ride, which was a small town just beyond the edge of the Sierra Nevadas, called Bing City. Tower liked the sound of the name.

  Ahead of him, Bird rode like she always did — casual but alert, looking like she was on a brief jaunt into town. But Tower wasn’t fooled. He knew she was always watching, always on guard. It was one of the traits that had helped her survive, but that also made her difficult to understand. At times, he took comfort in her vigilance, but he also wondered if the price for that wariness was too high. Especially for her.

  The amount of whiskey she consumed never seemed to affect her, a fact that both surprised Tower and caused him chagrin.

  He had not lived a sheltered life; he had seen more than his fair share of hard-drinking men who had grown overly fond of the bottle. But he had never seen a person, man or woman, who drank as often and in such large quantities as Bird Hitchcock. Which made her skill with a gun all the more impressive. A part of him wondered, though, if she kept drinking at this pace, would it one day slow down her reflexes? And would that happen at an inopportune time, say, in the middle of a gunfight on some dusty main street?

  Tower shuddered at the thought.

  He wondered how he could get through to her. Lead her to some sort of resolution within herself that would put her on a path to forgiveness not just for the people who had done injurious things to her, but forgiveness for the most important person she needed to feel compassion for: herself.

  The trail dipped down into an arroyo, then rose again quickly, leading them to the edge of a meadow anchored by one of the largest fallen trees Tower had ever seen. It had been uprooted, creating a wall of root and dirt against a bank of earth and rock.

  It was the perfect place to settle into for the night; the large upheaval of dirt would create a natural wall against which they could bank their fire and rest in the reflected heat.

  Tower put a loose hobble on his horse, letting him graze on some thick grass at the edge of the meadow. He found a small stream just down from the rock ledge and washed his face.

  He noticed that Bird didn’t seem herself, looking off to the far horizon. She built a small fire, then drank quietly from a bottle as the flames slowly took hold and the nearly smokeless heat took a slight chill from the air.

  Tower unfurled his bedroll and stretched out between the fire and the root wall. He read from his Bible, set the book on his chest, and was almost instantly asleep. He dreamed of a time just before he joined the army, when he told his mother that he was leaving home to take a stand against the rebels of the South. She hadn’t said much, her face gray and tired. Tower remembered the chill of that evening. His father’s whereabouts were unknown, and that lack of knowledge weighed down the family like a slab of rock unceasingly exerting its constant, blind pressure.

  In the dream, he was back in his bed, trying not to let the fear of the unknown get to him. Often as a boy he would grind his teeth in his sleep, and the action would create an exquisite headache centered in the middle of his forehead.

  The pain would only stop when he woke up, as he did now. The pain was very real because the muzzle of Bird’s gun was pressing hard into the middle of his forehead.

  She was straddling him, and he could smell the whiskey coming off her in waves.

  Bird pulled back the hammer of her gun and Tower felt the vibration of it clicking into place. On either side of the gun barrel, Tower could see the heavy lead bullets, each resting in its own chamber.

  “Even though I know you’re a man of few words” — Bird took a long drink from the whiskey bottle, keeping the pistol pressed firmly against his forehead — “I do believe now is a very good time for you to do some talking, Mr. Tower,” she said.

  Seventy-Two

  “This is no way to have a conversation,” Tower said.

  Bird was surprised. She’d thought the sneak attack, the ambush, might rattle him into some kind of admission, but he was clearly calm and under control.

  She had no intention of backing off, however.

  “Let’s start with how Toby Raines knew that I was going to San Francisco,” she said.

  “What are you talking about?” Tower said. Bird studied Tower’s face; his eyes were clear and unblinking. It didn’t look like he was lying.

  “He left me a message in the room where he killed the Indian girl,” Bird said. She pictured the room again and wished that her gun were pressed against the head of Toby Raines instead of Mike Tower.

  Bird felt Tower shift slightly beneath her, and he tilted his head.

  “Stop looking at me like that and answer the damn question,” Bird said.

  “I have no idea how he knew about San Francisco,” Tower finally said.

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It’s the only one I’ve got.”

  Bird studied Tower’s face. She saw no shadows, no twitches, no signs of a liar trying to sell her a wagon full of cow chips.

  “Well,” Bird said, “the problem is that I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. Not a damn soul. So he couldn’t have found out from me or from anyone I’ve come into contact with. So that leaves you and your people.”

  “Can you please put your gun away?” Tower said.

  “No.”

  Tower sighed. “Look at this objectively,” he said. “We’ve made no secret of where our final destination is. Maybe someone from one of the towns rode ahead of us and shared our travel plans.”

  “Or maybe someone from your church tipped Toby Raines off,” Bird pointed out.

  Tower raised an eyebrow at her. “Does Toby Raines spend a lot of time with churchgoing folks?” he asked.

  Bird thought about that, then eased the hammer of her gun back. She took another drink from the whiskey bottle and contemplated Tower beneath her.

  “You’re kind of warm and comfortable,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  Bird holstered her pistol, went back to her bedroll, pulled out a new, full whiskey bottle, and took a drink. She picked up a couple small twigs and placed them onto the ghost of a fire they’d started earlier. She watched the twigs catch, then pop into flame. Thin tendrils of smoke wafted upward.

  “Look,” Tower said. He was now sitting up, rubbing the spot on his forehead where Bird’s gun had dug a round burrow. “Are you ever going to tell me what happened? How this horrible thing that was done to you came about?”

  He grabbed his coffee cup, leaned forward to the fire, and poured the small amount left in the pot into his cup.

  Bird drank again, straight from the bottle.

  “Maybe one day,” Bird said. “But today isn’t the day.”

  “Is there ever going to be a good day to talk about it?” Tower said. “Now seems like the perfect time. We’re both wide awake.”

  Bird stretched out on her bedroll and rested her head against her saddle.

  “I’m listening,” Tower said.

  Bird answered by softly snoring.

  Seventy-Three

  Bird had always felt more at home away from towns and cities. She’d learned to take comfort in the hills, mountain ranges, and vast stretches of land where there were little to no signs of human habitation.

  As a young girl, with often a temporary home that proved to be even more temporary than first imagined, she had spent vast amounts of time in the woods, hunting game with her old rifle that she had learned how to take apart and put back together time and time again.

  So when a nagging feeling of tension began to make itself apparent between her shoulder blades, and when she felt that little tingle of nervousness running along the
back of her neck, Bird took notice.

  They had climbed steadily into the mountains, and the landscape seemed to open up bigger and wider with each turn in the trail. The blue sky seemed to grow larger, the air thinner and crisper, the mountain streams wider and running with more force each time the trail rose.

  When the trail rose and they emerged onto a narrow shelf of land, both she and Tower stopped abruptly.

  The view took her breath away.

  Before her, the trail simply ended at one of the most spectacular waterfalls she had ever seen. To her right, Bird saw the trail reemerge higher up, skirting the rock formation that had been carved by thousands of years of river water.

  The waterfall itself shot out from between two towering stone cliffs, a cloud of mist and light hanging over the area like its own permanent cloud.

  Next to her, Tower let out a long, low whistle as he watched the water pour from the mouth of the raised cliff opening.

  “Beautiful,” Tower said. “Absolutely stunning.”

  “Thank you, I’m often told that,” Bird said.

  She glanced at Tower, and the corner of his mouth tugged as he tried to hide a smile.

  She lifted her eyes and scanned the top of the ridge beyond the waterfall, letting her eyes analyze the land in sections, searching for any signs of what was causing that tingle of uncertainty.

  Bird shrugged off the feeling. Maybe it was simply the vastness of this country that was leaving her with an unsettled feeling.

  She savored the beauty of the water, the power of the water, as it crashed down and cut through rock. She decided a drink was in order; such an unforgettable image was the perfect setting to savor some whiskey.

  Bird turned to open the flap of her saddlebag, and as she did, she felt a rush of air zip past her face and heard the crack of rifles.

  Next to her, Tower tumbled from his horse and fell to the ground.

  Bird ignored the instinct to straighten up and instead continued her move down toward her saddlebag. She stayed low in the saddle and immediately recognized that the shooters had to be over on the other side of the river.