Crucifixion River Page 7

  “Yes, and she’s not foolish enough to go traipsing off on foot.”

  “Missus Devane thinks she may be with the peddler, Shock.”

  “What!”

  “Missus Devane may be right,” I said. “Shock was in a hurry to pull out this morning. Stolen money in his pocket and maybe the girl hidden in his wagon could be the real reason.”

  “What’re you saying, Nesbitt? That he kidnapped my daughter?”

  “More likely she went of her own free will, with or without his knowledge.”

  Murdock said grimly: “Well, I’ll find out. It’s been less than two hours since Shock drove out and he can’t make fast time in that wagon of his. With luck I can catch him on horseback before he reaches River Bend.”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said. “Shock’s fast with that revolver of his, and a crack shot. Two makes better odds.”

  “Three makes better still,” Pete Dell said.

  “Murdock and I can do the job. Best if you stay here with the women.”

  “You hand out orders real easy, mister. Who put you in charge?”

  “Don’t argue with him, Pete,” Murdock said. “We don’t have any time to waste.”

  He sent his wife into the house for his sidearm and shell belt; I was already wearing mine. I saddled the rented piebald. Murdock didn’t own a decent saddle horse, but Luke Kraft’s roan gelding was broke enough to let a stranger throw Kraft’s old McClellan saddle on his back and climb aboard. We were out of the barn and on the levee road inside of five minutes.

  The road was in reasonably good shape after the storm. Rain-puddled and muddy, so we couldn’t run the animals even though it chafed Murdock not to. I set the pace at a steady lope that was still some faster than Shock could drive that peddler’s wagon of his, and we had no trouble maintaining it.

  Mostly we rode in silence, except for one brief exchange. Murdock twisted his head my way and said: “Just who are you, Nesbitt?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You talk and act like a lawman. Are you one?”

  “In a way. I work for the Pinkertons.”

  “So that’s it. That’s how you knew about me.”

  “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “Does Bellright know yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “All for yourself, eh? How much are you getting for me, dead or alive? Five thousand? Ten? More?”

  “Later, Murdock. Keep your mind on Shock and your daughter for now.”

  The morning was cold and gray, the debris-choked slough waters on both sides receding and mist rising here and there from the half-drowned cattails along the banks. Birds screeched and chattered, frogs croaked long and loud-the only sounds that reached my ears. We had the road to ourselves, but there were fresh wheel and hoof tracks to mark the passage of Shock’s wagon.

  I slowed as we passed a side road that cut away through a swampy peninsula to the north. There were no tracks at the entrance to the road, but the grass and pig weed farther on seemed to be mashed down in places. I kept us riding ahead because I couldn’t think of a reason for Shock to have detoured onto a side road-not until we rounded a bend and came on the fallen sycamore.

  “That tree’s been down a while,” Murdock said. “There’s no way Shock could have gotten his wagon around it.”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “He doubled back to that side road we passed. Where does it lead?”

  “Crucifixion River. What’s left of it.”

  “Any other way out of there?”

  “An overgrown track the sect members used. But Shock wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Your daughter does, though, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said, tight-lipped. “Annabelle knows.”

  We rode back to the intersection. As we turned onto the Crucifixion River road, I leaned down for a better look at the ground. Up close you could see where Shock had tried to rub out and hide the wagon tracks at the turning. A short ways beyond I spied a pile of horse manure that still steamed in the cold air. We couldn’t be far behind them now, I judged.

  I said as much to Murdock, and, riding as fast as we dared, we followed the wagon tracks through the wet grass and swampy earth.

  Annabelle Murdock

  I sat forward as Crucifixion River came into view ahead. It was an awful, bleak place in the best of weather, and on a dark gray day like this one the look of it made me shiver and hunch up even more inside my black dog coat. Except for marsh birds, the quiet was eerie. You could almost hear the people singing “We Shall Gather at the River,” the way they had been the day they arrived and Dad and Mother ferried them across the slough. I was just a little girl then, but I still remembered the singing and it still gave me chills.

  There was a big weedy meadow where the road ended, stretching out along the banks of the mud brown river. At one end were the remnants of the potato and corn and vegetable patches the sect people had started, and at the other was a church or meeting house and about a dozen cabins built back among willows and swamp oaks. There wasn’t much left of the buildings now. After the people moved away, shanty boaters had come in and carted off everything that was left behind. Even doors, window coverings, floorboards. They were all just hollow shells now, some of them with collapsed walls and roofs. Dead things waiting for the swampland and the river to swallow them up.

  “Now isn’t this a pretty spot,” James Shock said.

  Pretty? It was like visiting a cemetery.

  But I didn’t say anything. I hadn’t looked at him since we left the levee road and I didn’t look at him now. I sat away over on the wagon seat, as far away from him as I could get, and hunched and hugged myself and tried not to think what was going to happen.

  He wasn’t James Never Jim Shock to me any more. He wasn’t a handsome, romantic, banjo-playing traveling man; he was just a peddler and a cold-souled, foul-mouthed killer, and I didn’t know how I ever could have believed he was a man to run away with and give my favors to. Shame made my face and neck flush hot. I wasn’t ready to leave the delta yet, on my own or with anybody. I knew that now. What an addle-pated fool I’d been!

  I kept remembering the way he’d talked and the look on his face when he found me in the wagon, as if I were a bratty child instead of a woman-as if he’d like nothing better than to paddle my backside, or do something even worse to me. His eyes-Lord, that cold, ugly stare! It wasn’t anything at all like the way his eyes had been in the common room last night. That James Shock had been a sham, a sweet-talking wolf in sheep’s clothing. This was the real James Shock, sitting next to me right now. And I was as purely scared of him as I’d been of anything in my whole life.

  “This road just ended,” he said. “And I don’t see any other.”

  I gestured without looking at him. “It runs through that motte of swamp oak down along the river, on the far side of the meeting house.”

  “It better had. And it better lead where you say, back to the levee road.”

  “Why would I lie to you?”

  “Well, that’s right, now, isn’t it? You wouldn’t have any reason to lie.”

  “None at all. What…what are you going to do with me?”

  He didn’t answer, just snapped the reins and clattered us across the meadow toward the meeting house. We were almost there, angling past the big empty shell, when he shifted around in a way that made me cast a quick glance in his direction. He was holding the reins in his left hand and he’d moved his right down and was pulling the tail of his coat back, reaching inside to his belt.

  I don’t know how I knew he was about to draw his revolver, and what he intended to do with it, but I did know, all at once, and never mind that I couldn’t see any rhyme or reason for him to want to harm me. I just knew, with a certainty that made the hair on my scalp stand straight up, that he was planning to kill me as soon as he was sure of where that other road was.

  I’d been scared before. Now I was terrified.

  “Annabelle? You sure,
now, the road starts in that motte of trees?”

  I couldn’t have spoken if I’d tried. And I didn’t dare sit there next to him a second longer. My only hope was to jump off the wagon and try to get away from him, and that was what I did, quick as a cat.

  I landed all right on both feet, but then I lost my balance and sprawled headlong in the wet grass. Shock yelled something, but I didn’t listen to it. I rolled over and pulled my legs under me and lifted my skirts and ran as fast as I’d ever run, away from the wagon toward the meeting house.

  The open doorway yawned ahead. I was almost there, almost safe…

  And then-oh, God!-he started shooting at me.

  T.J. Murdock

  The first two shots sounded, faint and echoing in the morning stillness, when we were a few hundred rods from the camp. I pulled back hard on the reins; so did Nesbitt. The ghost buildings weren’t within sight yet, hidden behind a screen of trees ahead.

  “Small caliber,” he said. “Handgun, not a rifle.”

  “Christ!”

  “Can’t be Shock. What would he be firing at?”

  “Nobody else out here.”

  “Hunters, shanty boaters?”

  “Not this soon after a big storm.”

  Another shot cracked.

  My heart slammed and my mouth turned dry as dust. I kicked Kraft’s roan into a run, no longer mindful of the boggy ground. Nesbitt was right behind me. I had stopped caring what happened to me, but Annabelle…if anything happened to Annabelle…

  James Shock

  The little bitch had caught me by surprise, jumping off the wagon that way. I yanked Nell to a halt, dragged on the brake with my left hand, and drew the revolver with my right. I had it out quickly enough, while she was still running, but haste threw off my aim. The round missed wide, tearing splinters from the building wall. I steadied my arm and fired again just as she ducked through the doorway inside. I couldn’t tell if I’d hit her or not.

  Cursing, I hauled the Greener out from under the seat and jumped down and ran over to the tumbledown building. By grab, I’d blow her damned head off when I caught her.

  Annabelle Murdock

  Hide!

  But there was nowhere to hide in the meeting house. It was just one big room, with no partitions or cubbyholes and a section of the roof gone and a hole in the back wall where the fireplace had collapsed.

  I couldn’t stay here. I had to get out quick and find some place else. The woods, one of the other cabins, any place where Shock wouldn’t find me. I wasn’t hurt, but I’d felt the heat of the second bullet on my cheek as it whizzed by. I was so scared I thought I might wet myself.

  Enough daylight came in through the holes so that I could see well enough. There wasn’t anything on the uneven floor but weeds and animal droppings and pools of rain water. I stumbled across it to the jumble of fireplace stones, clambered and clawed my way over and through them to the opening in the wall. My foot slipped before I reached it and my knee knocked hard on one of the rocks.

  And just as that happened, I heard a thwack above my head and then the bark of Shock’s revolver behind me.

  Gasping, sobbing, I crawled over the rest of the stones and flung myself through the hole, tearing a long rip in the sleeve of my coat. My knee burned like fire, but I didn’t care as I scrambled to my feet. All I could think was-run!

  Run, run, run!

  Boone Nesbitt

  Kraft’s roan was a better horse than the piebald and Murdock was ten rods ahead when we cleared the trees and Crucifixion River came into view. But I had only a peripheral look at the crumbling ghost camp and Shock’s wagon stopped in the open meadow. What caught and held my attention was the girl staggering across open ground between the shell of a large building and a cluster of decaying shacks squatting among the trees.

  “Annabelle!”

  It was Murdock who yelled her name. We both veered sharply in her direction, guns already filling our hands. She heard us coming, twisted her head in our direction, but she had the sense not to slow up any. Shock was chasing her; in the next second, he came busting through a hole in the sagging back wall of the large building, brandishing a shotgun.

  He spied us before he’d taken half a dozen steps. He swung around, crouching, as Murdock bore down on him. I pulled up hard just as Murdock fired-a wild shot, like most from the back of a running horse. Shock didn’t even flinch. He let go with one barrel of the Greener, and the spray of buckshot knocked Murdock off the roan’s back and sent him rolling through the grass.

  I swung out of leather. If the ground hadn’t been wet and slick, I would’ve been able to set myself for a quick, clear shot at Shock. As it was, my boots slid out from under me and I went down hard enough on my backside to jar the Colt loose from my grip. It landed a few feet away, and by the time I located it and started to scrabble toward it, Shock was up and moving my way with that Greener leveled.

  I heard him say-“All right, you son of a bitch.”-as I got my hand on the Colt, and I was cold sure it was too late, I was a dead man.

  Only it didn’t happen that way.

  It was Shock who died in that next second.

  Murdock was hurt, but the buckshot hadn’t done him enough damage to keep him out of the play. He’d struggled up onto one knee and he put a slug clean through Shock’s head at thirty paces. The Greener’s second barrel emptied with a roar, but the buckshot went straight down as he was falling. Dead and on his way to hell before he hit the ground.

  I got up slowly, went over to him for a quick look to make sure, then holstered my weapon, and went to Murdock’s side. He squinted up at me, his jaw clenched tightly. There was blood and buckshot holes on his left arm and shoulder and the side of his neck, but he wasn’t torn up as badly as he might’ve been.

  “Dad! Dad!”

  Annabelle. She’d seen it happen, and, now that it was finished, she’d come running. She dropped down beside him, weeping, and he hugged her and crooned a little the way a relieved father does when he sees his child is unharmed.

  There were some things I wanted to say to Murdock, but this wasn’t the time or place. I turned away from them and went to where the peddler’s wagon stood in the meadow, to see what I could find to treat Murdock’s wounds.

  Annabelle Murdock

  I huddled in my bed, the quilt drawn tightly around me. My scrapes and bruises hurt, but not nearly as much as my conscience. For a while after we got back from Crucifixion River in the peddler’s wagon, I’d cried and felt sorry for myself, but I wasn’t feeling sorry for me any more…

  A tap on the door and Mother came in. I asked her how Dad was, and she said she and Mrs. Devane had gotten all the buckshot out of his arm and shoulder and she’d given him some laudanum for the pain.

  “He’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”

  “Of course he is. He and Mister Hoover both.”

  I said: “It’s all my fault.” And then-fool that I am-I started crying again. “If I hadn’t fallen for James Shock and hidden in his wagon, Dad wouldn’t’ve been shot. I did an awful thing, and he could have died and so could I.”

  Mother sat beside me and patted my back, just as she’d done when I was a little girl and had hurt myself. It only made me sob harder. I felt like a child right now. A bad one.

  She said: “That’s true enough. But we’ve made you live such a sheltered, isolated life, you couldn’t possibly know what a wicked man that peddler was. And you’ve never made a secret of how much you want to leave the delta.”

  “Maybe it’s not so bad here, after all.” But I didn’t really believe that. Did Mother? I didn’t think so, but she’d made the best of the past eight years in this place. So had Dad. The least I could do was the same while I was still living here.

  I wasn’t crying any more. I wiped my eyes with a corner of the sheet and said: “Someday I may still want to go to San Francisco, have a different kind of life. You’d understand, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course we would. But you
’ll tell us when the time comes, let us help you? You won’t try to run away again?”

  “No, Mother, I’ve learned my lesson,” I said, and I meant it. “I’ll never run away again, not ever.”

  Rachel Kraft

  I walked out of the roadhouse as the driver was bringing the stage around from the livery barn. Caroline Devane, wearing a gray serge traveling dress, stood still as a statue looking out over Twelve-Mile Slough, her crocheting bag and reticule beside her; the wind blew wisps of her hair, and her gaze was remote, as if she’d already traveled many miles from here.

  I said her name, and she turned and gave me a wan smile. “Have you made a decision about your future?”

  “Yes. I’m going on to my sister and her family, because they’re expecting me, but I won’t stay long. There’s a shortage of trained nurses in this state. I ought to be able to find employment in Los Angeles or San Diego.”

  “Do you have enough money to live until you do?”

  “Enough, if I’m fortunate. Before I left Sacramento, I sold my jewelry.”

  Mr. Nesbitt had returned the $3,000 to me when he and Annabelle and poor Mr. Murdock came back with word of the peddler’s death, and, after talking to Joe, I’d put the money into his belt pouch. Now I pressed the pouch into Caroline’s hands.

  “Perhaps this will help.”

  She stared down at it, then opened it. Her eyes widened with astonishment when she saw the bills and specie inside.

  “It’s half the money I took from my husband’s safe,” I said. “Fifteen hundred dollars.”

  “I can’t accept it.” She closed the pouch and thrust it back at me. “Why would you want to give me so much money?”

  “You saved Joe’s life.”

  “I only did what I was trained to do.”

  “Please take it. Joe and I want you to have it.”