Rough Justice Read online

  Rough Justice

  A WESTERN STORY

  LAURAN PAINE

  Copyright © 2014 by Lauran Paine Jr.

  Published in 2016 by Blackstone Publishing

  Cover design by Djamika Smith

  Published by arrangement with

  Golden West Literary Agency

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition: 2016

  ISBN 978-1-5047-2572-9

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.BlackstonePublishing.com

  Chapter One

  They came in the night with a desert wind at their backs, four swift riders with sheepskin windbreakers turned up at the throat and four black guns lashed low to their legs. They left their animals at the livery barn and braced the wintertime blow as far as the sheriff’s office. They pushed inside with their solid tread and stood silently, stood stalwartly, filling that small office, gazing at Sheriff Doyle Bannion with wind whistling in from the storm-lashed roadway.

  Remaining seated, Bannion returned the stare of these large men, waiting for them to speak, to close the door, to pass over to his chairs along the wall and sit. They did none of these things. They stood looking down while the lamp guttered, while shadows sprang to life upon the far adobe wall, their strong, bony faces, somehow alike, fixed downward in an unpleasant way.

  In this groaning night beyond, the Santa Ana wind, up out of Mexico, beat with powerful force upon the town making shakes slap, and siding creak, and windows rattle. There was cutting dust in that wind, the kind that, when breathed deeply, brought blood in a man’s cough. It was the Santa Ana time of year, neither spring nor winter. The desert churned, it rose up and flung away, it covered tracks and sand-blasted buildings, and drove livestock headlong ahead of it in a blind seeking for shelter.

  Bannion got up and closed the door. He closed it hard and went back to his desk. He said: “All right...you’ve made your point. Now what the hell do you want in Perdition Wells?”

  The eldest of those four men spoke without moving. “I guess you could say we want justice. But I reckon a place called Perdition would be a poor place to get it.”

  Doyle Bannion eased back. He had broken the spell these big men cast, and when that oldest one had answered, the break was permanent. “The name,” said Bannion, “was put on this town because there’s a hot water spring east of here.” He looked steadily up at that big man, guessed him to be in his late twenties or early thirties, and said: “I’ve heard all the jokes there are about Perdition Wells and don’t any of them seem very funny to me any more. The Mexicans named this place, but they don’t own Texas any more so maybe someday someone’ll get around to changing the name. I hope so. Now...what can I do for you?”

  “You can give us the name of a murderer,” said the spokesman of those four night riders.

  “First you’ll have to tell me who got murdered. Then if I can, I’ll oblige you.”

  The youngest of those big men, in his late teens with a smooth face and a clear eye, said: “The name was King. Alpheus King.”

  Doyle Bannion let out his breath in a long, quiet way and for an interval of full silence said nothing. He gauged those four big men, assessed the depths of their temper, the degrees of their leashed violence, and felt lead settle in his belly, for there was no way not to see that these men were also named King.

  “Listen to me,” he told them. “First I’ll explain how that happened.” They did not interrupt, or even move for that matter, but the solid weight of their combined judgments was filling Bannion’s office with a blind and uncompromising stubbornness. “Old Al was swamper at the Union Eagle Saloon. There was an argument. When the smoke cleared, Al was down dead with a bullet through the heart.”

  “No warning?” asked Hank King, next oldest after Ray.

  Bannion said: “Let me ask you boys something. How were you related to the old man?”

  “His sons,” answered Hank.

  Bannion’s gaze clouded. “I see. Well, maybe you hadn’t seen him for a long time.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “He was warned, boys. There were some calls, they tell me, but Al was pretty deaf. He went right on sweeping. If it’s any satisfaction, and I reckon it wouldn’t be if he’d been my paw, old Al never knew what hit him.”

  “We’re obliged,” murmured Ray King, the eldest. “You’ve been right helpful, Sheriff. Now the name.”

  Bannion saw no change in those four expressions and felt no change in the atmosphere. “Another question,” he said. “Why was he here in Perdition Wells, if he had sons and a home?”

  “He had no home, Sheriff,” said Austin King, the youngest. “How good’s your memory?”

  “It’s good enough. Why?”

  “You recollect King’s Raiders?”

  Doyle Bannion’s gaze brightened slightly. “King’s Confederate Raiders?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who doesn’t remember,” Bannion said quietly. “The only authorized Confederate guerilla band that was not given amnesty after the war.” Bannion looked from one of them to the others. “Was he that King?”

  The big men nodded and Bannion eased back in his chair, remembering how it had been many years before when the Federal Union and the embattled South were fighting it out toe-to-toe in the bloody Shenandoah, on the peninsula, and along the turgid Río Grande. King’s Confederate Raiders had been a knout and a scourge to the Yankees. They rarely struck twice in the same place, they came swirling out of the dawn without warning, they were pursued, and they were dreaded. But they had never been apprehended, and after Appomattox they had simply dissolved, still undefeated.

  For ten years, long after others had been given total amnesty by a victorious Federal Union, secret service operatives, manhunters, and federal lawyers had pushed an intense search for the officers of King’s Raiders. None had ever been captured, and now, so many decades later, the aura of mystery and romance, of gallantry, had cloaked this dim memory with a sympathetic mantle, particularly among Texans, for it had been known that Colonel King’s officers had all come from the Lone Star state.

  “That King,” said Doyle Bannion again, beginning to understand the scope of this dilemma. “He was a saloon swamper.”

  “He never quit running, Sheriff. He never quit hiding. He was an old man. They wouldn’t let him go his last years in peace. There are a dozen orders for arrest out for him right now. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you?”

  Bannion nodded. “I’ve got some posters about him, yes. But I don’t believe there are ten lawmen in all Texas who would have arrested him, boys.”

  “It’s those ten he’s been running from.”

  Bannion looked at his hands. “It’s hard to believe. Colonel Al King...swamper in the Union Eagle Saloon here in Perdition Wells.” Nostalgic bitterness touched down through Bannion. “A real hero in his time, a great Confederate and a legendary guerrilla raider.”

  The eldest King loosened a little in his stance. He regarded Doyle Bannion without hardness. “That’s how it goes when a man lives beyond his usefulness. Every now and then someone would recognize him and send one of us word. We’d go at once where he was. We’d take him money and news of his kinfolk. Some years back our mother...his wife...got down bedfast...she’d t
ell us things to say to him. We’d carry the message back and forth. Once, he wanted to go back, but there were Secret Service men watching and he couldn’t. She died that winter. After that he kept getting harder and harder to find.”

  Bannion got up, crossed to a little stove, poked up a fire, and jiggled the coffee pot there, hefted it, then said: “There’s enough.” He pointed to a row of tin cups dangling from nails beneath a wooden shelf. “Help yourselves.”

  Ray King, the eldest, said: “No thanks Sheriff. All we want here is a name.”

  Bannion poured himself a cupful very slowly and watched that black liquid fill his cup in its oily way. He then returned to his chair and sat down without looking up at those four big men.

  How do you say it? the sheriff wondered. Let the old devil go. Let him get plumb away from this earth. Don’t hold him here with more killings. Sure he was your paw, but he’s sick to death. He just wants to be left alone in peaceful solitude, to lie in hushed darkness and forget. If you kill the man who shot him, you’ll be bringing the old man back to torment, to suffering. You’ll be chaining him to this damned life he was thoroughly weary of. He won’t be able to get away because the killing won’t stop when you get the fool who accidentally killed him. There will be a whole row of killings, and, because he’ll be the cause, he’ll have to stay here and suffer his anguish and his damnation. How do you say that to the Texas sons of a murdered man? You don’t. Bannion knew you didn’t because he was a Texan, too.

  “The name, Sheriff.”

  The coffee was like acid. Bannion pushed it away, telling himself that he had to try. Even though he could see in their unwavering eyes, in the hard-set jut of their jaws that he could not win, still he had to try. He owed this to his badge, his oath, more than anything else he owed it to himself, because, if the King boys did not know what lay ahead, Bannion knew, and he therefore had to warn them against it.

  “I know how it is with you fellers. I’ve seen this before, except that there’s a difference here. A unique difference. Boys, your paw wants it all to end right here. The bullet that killed him was fired into his heart by accident. But I am plumb certain it was a relief to him.

  “I knew him right well. Even though I thought he was just another old-timer without a dime or kin, we were friends. I felt the sadness in him, but, hell, all lonely old men got sadness in them after life has passed them by. I know now what that sadness was. I know as well as I’m sitting here, he wants it all to end right now. No more killings, no more running and hiding.” Bannion sat forward, clasped his hands, and looked at them.

  “You know that war is like throwing a stone into a still pool. The ripples spread and spread and keep on spreading. Each ripple is the wake of something unfinished, something left over after the last bugle’s been blown, and men can either turn away and let those ripples die out, or they can keep those ripples widening, running on and touching lives forty years later.” Bannion looked up at them—at Ray the eldest, at Hank next eldest, at Al—named for his paw—third eldest, and finally at Austin, the youngest. “That’s what you boys are doing now. You’re keeping one of those ripples spreading. Don’t do it. The colonel wouldn’t want you to, believe me about that.”

  Bannion stopped speaking. Silence settled filling the room. It came gently, layers and layers of it, until there was no place for any more.

  Then young Austin spoke into it. “The name, Sheriff.”

  “No, not from me.”

  “A friend, Sheriff?”

  “Not a friend, an acquaintance is all.” Bannion looked up. There was no change in any of those faces. No change at all. Austin was young and proud and fiery. Next to him was Al. There was something here—something felt but indefinably elusive. Something a little frightening.

  Then there was Hank. He and Ray seemed settled in their maturity. Hard men and deadly men, but not unfair men. Their trouble with Ray and Hank was, like their brothers, they had come of age believing in the gun and what it insured them. A man killed to defend himself and the things he loved or believed in. He killed to make his Texas plains and hills and towns safe places for other Texans who shared his convictions. And he killed for vengeance, to set right some particular wrong done him or his.

  It was a very old law and it was held to be the best justice on earth, not only by Texans, but especially by them. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

  “We’ll find the name, Sheriff.”

  “Yes,” conceded Doyle Bannion, rising. “You’ll find it. I can’t prevent that. But you’ll find a lot more, too, boys. A hell of a lot more, because that name will only be the beginning.”

  Bannion passed around them to the door and opened it. That screaming wind got inside to make the lamp gutter and smoke darkly.

  “Good night, boys.”

  “Good night, Sheriff.”

  They went out into the raw night and stood close to the building, considering Perdition Wells—its broad roadway, its orange-lighted saloons and variety houses, and its few cursing pedestrians who went along bracing either into the wind or against it.

  Looking steadily up where a full hitch rack and the noise and gaiety of a crowded saloon emanated, Al said: “I need a drink.”

  The others followed out Al’s line of vision, saw the quivering sign that said in bold black letters Union Eagle Saloon, and started forward with their brother, four abreast across the scourged roadway, up onto another plank walk and down it all the way to that lighted, noisy place. Then they headed inside where tobacco smoke lay thick as fog and people made a noise as vibrant as the lashing outside wind.

  Chapter Two

  Doyle Bannion shrugged into his windbreaker, pulled his hat on hard, and went along to the livery barn. He got his horse and rode north, then east, with sharp particles of razor-like dust grating in the folds of his neck and around his flattened lips.

  He rode with a kind of helplessness weighing down his spirit, and two hours later when he swung out and down before a big wood house, white-painted and ghostly in the gusty night, Doyle Bannion could definitely feel the solid futility of what he was about to do. He tied his horse fast to a stud post and stepped up onto the porch planking. It felt as though he were a chip being blown first one way and then another way by a wind of circumstance and ritual stronger than he, or any other man, could ever hope to be.

  There were lights showing from a long adobe house across this big yard. Farther out stood an immense log barn and its connecting spidery network of pole corrals. An air of prosperity, of power, of durability and lasting substance lay over this big ranch that no Santa Ana wind could even touch. It was the power that lingered in Doyle’s thoughts. The power brought by wealth. The power that eroded men’s spirits and made them swell with arrogance.

  He knocked on the door.

  Borne fitfully by that soughing wind was music from the adobe bunkhouse—the lift and ebb of a man’s pleasant voice. There was also a soft scent of white oak burning in a stove somewhere, mingled with the more permanent scent of cattle.

  The door opened. A big man stood there near to filling the opening. He was a handsome, broad man with gray over his temples and a confident, near smile down around his lips. He had a high-bridge nose and bold glance. “Sheriff,” he said, sounding surprised, sounding confident, and not in the least apprehensive. “Come in out of the cold.”

  Bannion crossed the threshold and halted there. Beyond, past a mahogany partition, burned a warming fire. A woman sat with her back to Bannion, and near her a girl with hair the color of new gold and flesh as good to look upon as fresh-churned butter. Bannion knew them both.

  “Come into the parlor,” the handsome man said, closing the door and smiling his solid smile.

  “No. What I got to say I’d best say right here,” responded Doyle Bannion, looking solemn and wind-whipped. “Mister Rockland, that old man who was accidentally killed when Dale McAfee and that cowboy
from Clell Durham’s outfit shot it out at the Union Eagle couple months ago was Colonel Alpheus King.”

  Bannion kept a steady look at Rockland’s face, waiting for understanding to come.

  Rockland stood a moment returning this regard, then he rolled his brows together in a puzzled way, saying: “No...you don’t mean...? Hell, man, you couldn’t possibly mean the Colonel King from back during the war...the Colonel King of King’s Confederate Raiders.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s exactly who I mean.”

  John Rockland stared at Bannion. His lips faintly lifted at their outer corners. His eyes showed a gradual shading of quiet and amused irony. “I’ll be damned,” he breathed. “I thought that old devil had passed on years ago. You used to hear all sorts of stories.... He was seen down in Mexico. He was living in the wilds of upper Canada with Indians. He was actually the governor out in California in disguise.” Rockland made his easy, assured smile at Bannion. “Are you sure?”

  Before Bannion could answer, Rockland raised a hand, roughly tapped Bannion’s chest, and chuckled. “No,” he scoffed. “Those old tramps just say things like that. No, Bannion. It’s just another Colonel King legend.”

  “Mister Rockland, this is no made-up story.”

  Bannion’s dead earnestness was grave enough to brush past Rockland’s faint amusement. Quietly the larger man began to lose his appearance of scorn, of sardonic amusement. He said: “Go on, Doyle. What else is on your mind?”

  “Colonel King’s four sons rode into Perdition Wells tonight, Mister Rockland. They want the name of the man who killed their father.”

  “Oh?” Rockland said, his tone changing, becoming soft and dangerous. “And what do these four men propose to do?”

  “Kill Dale McAfee.”

  Rockland’s bold gaze got steady, brittle, and unwaveringly iron-like. It remained upon Sheriff Bannion.

  “You’d better run them out of town, Bannion. Better yet...you’d better tell them Dale McAfee works for me, and that I take care of my own.” Rockland paused, then said in a condescending way: “Tell them it was an accident...that the old fool got behind Clell Durham’s rider and that the same bullet that killed Durham’s cowboy also killed their father. It’s too bad, but that’s the way it happened. A pure accident and no one is to blame.”