Widowmaker Jones (15 page)

I
t was only thirty miles or so to Zaragoza, and the road was level and easy where it was carved out of the low brush or wound through various farm fields or open stretches of poor grassland. Newt had little hope that they would catch up to Miguelito before he reached Cortina.

They alternated the pace of their horses between a long lope and a trot, and Newt wondered if the judge, at his age, could hold up to the rigor. Yet, come nightfall, the judge was still riding beside him, slouched in the saddle as if his spine were a sagging spring, but uncomplaining as if he could go like that all day long.

Having come about twenty miles, somewhere near midnight they gave up overtaking Cortina's henchman and staked the horses on a bit of lush grass on the edge of a large, spring-fed marsh and lake—what the Mexicans called a
ciénega
. They built no fire nor did they eat anything, being too tired to give the effort.

“Didn't think we could catch him.” The judge lay down on the ground on the flat of his back, as usual, without so much as a blanket to lie on or cover himself with.

“Maybe he took another road,” Newt said while he spread his bedroll.

“My guess is he's already with Cortina,” the judge said.

“What next?”

“Nothing changes.”

“They'll be ready for us.”

“If I had known you were soft I wouldn't have brought you along.”

“Do you mean because I didn't kill that man back in Piedras Negras?”

“You said you wanted justice, but maybe you don't have the stomach for it,” the judge said, grunting and trying to find a more comfortable spot on the ground.

“He said he wasn't with them when they robbed me.”

“You trust the word of an outlaw with a pistol held to his head? That man would have cut your guts out for a half-dollar if you gave him the chance. I know his kind.”

“I never got a look at any of them, except Cortina. He was the one that followed me out of White Oaks and put a bullet in me, and he's who I want.”

“Be careful what you wish for. You keep wearing that gun and somebody will come along and make you use it.”

That the old judge was a killer, Newt had no doubt. Crafty to the point of comedy at times, he hadn't hesitated to execute the bandit back in Piedras Negras. He'd murdered that man with no more compunction than stomping a spider or twisting the neck on that rooster. Newt knew himself to be a man of black moods, but the judge was the kind that had lost any guilt over laying low those who opposed him. Most men like that tended to look after their own hide first and foremost, and justified whatever they felt they needed to do, no matter what it was. He'd bear watching, and Newt knew he should have cut loose from him the second he was turned loose back in Langtry. He couldn't say why he was still riding with him.

“What are you going to do if you actually get your gold back?” the judge asked.

The question threw Newt off guard. Some things were best kept to oneself, at least in his opinion. Things that seemed special often seemed not so special anymore when you had to talk about them. Vague ideas that excited him when still only thoughts sounded silly when he tried to put them to words. He was put out that the judge had asked such, but knew that if he didn't answer the judge would keep on talking.

“I was going to Houston or maybe farther east. Thought maybe I would set myself up in a shop.”

“What kind of shop?”

The judge's tone made Newt even more reluctant to discuss the matter. He didn't have the whole thing worked out. When he gave an answer it was a quiet one.

“A wagon shop. Maybe some cabinet and furniture work, too.” Not only did his words sound silly to his own ears, but they came out as if he were hearing his own ideas for the first time.

“Never would have taken you for a craftsman,” the judge replied. “I've guessed some things about you, but never that. Where did you learn the trade?”

“Never did.”

“You what?”

“I said I never did.”

The judge propped himself up on one elbow. “And what makes you think you would be good at it?”

“I like wood and I've always been good with things I can do with my hands.”

“Well, I've always liked whores, but I never thought I would make a good pimp. Whores are like liquor, and a man who can't keep from sampling too much of his wares won't last long in business.”

Newt made a fuss over making his bed, hoping the judge would let it go. But he didn't.

“There's no telling the ideas some men have rattling around in their heads,” the judge said as if Newt weren't even there, and as if he were talking to himself.

“Pa worked wood a little. Not fancy woodwork—only some carving and scrapping together a few pieces of furniture or mending someone's wagon,” Newt said. “And then I was apprenticed to a wheelwright down in the low country, but that fell through before I was with him a month or two.”

“That's not enough time to learn anything.”

Newt only half heard him, with his mind wandering back to the way fresh wood shavings smelled piled up beneath his father's feet while he turned a table leg on an old foot-powered lathe he had built himself. And he could still remember the first fancy coach he had seen passing along the road, and he and his father had stood hand in hand on the side of the road and watched it pass, with its high red wheels, varnished wood, and brass lanterns as shiny as gold. He had thought then what a fine thing it would be to ride in something like that or to build such a wonderful coach—something shiny and something that could take you places.

The judge pointed at Newt's battered and knocked-down knuckles and then at his face. “A man should stick to what he's good at.”

“I've had my fill of getting my skull busted or getting paid to bust someone else's skull,” Newt said. “Never has gotten me anything but headaches.”

“How'd you get in the skull-busting business?”

Newt shrugged. He hadn't said so much all at once in a long, long time, but there he was telling things to an old, worn-out killer like the judge. “I don't know. I was trying my hand on a little placer claim and having no luck. The whole camp was having trouble with claim jumpers, and a couple of men approached me and said they would pay me fifty dollars in gold if I would guard their claim for a week while they went up to Denver to purchase what they needed to sink a shaft they had planned. I cut myself a big stick and sat on that claim for them for a month.”

“Anybody give you any trouble?”

“Some, but I got that fifty dollars.”

“Did you get those scars then?”

Newt shrugged. “There and other places. Next boom camp I was in there was a disagreement that got out of hand between some miners and the company they worked for. The miners were a bunch of hard-rock Welshmen and Irishmen. You know the kind—stout workers and every bit as hardheaded. They picketed the gate to the mine one night and weren't letting anyone in or out. One of those company men had heard about me and came and asked if I could gather some tough men and go up the hill and convince his employees to get back to work. I was broke, so I took the job.”

“That cauliflower ear of yours—most men I've seen with such are regular brawlers like yourself, or have spent time in a boxing ring.”

“I fought for prizes, time to time. Seemed like a lark at first. I never was any great shakes at it.”

“You said your pappy was a woodworker. How come you didn't go into the trade back there instead of coming west?”

“Pa's heart quit him when I was fourteen. Found him behind his plow mule and drug to one end of a furrow. We didn't have much of a place and never could afford any bottom ground. You know, rocky, thin mountain ground.”

The judge nodded, as if he really did know.

“There were three of us boys and a baby sister for Ma to feed. My oldest brother went to work with a timber crew, sending money back home from time to time until we heard he drowned walking a log raft on the Mississippi River up in Minnesota. Things got worse after that. My younger brother was the best farmer, but no two-bit, hardscrabble farm like we had was going to grow enough to feed the family, much less turn any profit. So, I thought about it some, and one morning I left out to lighten the demands on our table.”

Newt regretted having said the little he said. There was no way the judge could understand, and he was probably laughing at him the whole time he rambled on. Newt lay down and stared at the stars overhead, the sky a canopy that seemed to go on and on forever. A man could change. Because he was one thing didn't mean he couldn't be something else if he put his mind to it. He was tired of scrapping and tired of waking up every morning no farther along than he had been the day before. Always doing someone's dirty work or being done dirty.

He'd left home for the opportunity to do things, and to show them all he could find his fortune. The people going west said there were fortunes to be made out there, and all it took was a man with gumption. He had plenty of gumption, but it turned out things out West weren't much easier than back in the mountains he left. Oh yes, there were gobs of money being made in ore, timber, railroads, and cattle, but none of it fell his way. Seemed like the only thing he had to offer the world was the muscle on his stubborn bones. Every time he was down on his luck, somebody came along and offered him a fighting job. It seemed like the only thing he was good at, but he was tired of fighting and tired of living like some attack dog kept chained to a post until its owner needed to sic it on someone. And he was tired of being ashamed of what he had become. The gold he had found should have fixed all of that and given him the chance he wanted.

“Judge?”

The judge didn't answer him.

“Judge?”

The judge's breathing was already deep with sleep. Newt continued to stare at the night sky, lost in his thoughts until he finally fell asleep. He woke with someone kicking him in the sole of the foot.

“Wake up,” the judge whispered. “Somebody's coming down the road.”

Newt got to his feet and struggled to get his mind awake and working. “Who is it?”

“Don't know. Might be anybody or it might be somebody we're interested in.”

The marsh reached almost to the edge of the road. The horseman, or horsemen, was going to be visible quite a ways off, and so was their camp to whoever was coming. A lone clump of mesquite brush and low oaks barely big enough to hide a couple of men lay on the other side of the road a few yards away.

“You take a stand in that little thicket, and I'll lead our horses out in the cattails,” the judge said.

Newt finished saddling the Circle Dot horse and slapped it on the hip as the judge led it off. The judge and the horses waded into the tall water grass and cattails at the edge of the marsh.

“I'll be right back,” the judge called over his shoulder.

Newt could see the rushes bending and hear them splashing through the mud and the judge's low cursing even after they disappeared totally from sight. He ran to the clump of mesquite and found the best cover he could. He could barely make out a rider in the distance, but that didn't last long. It was three men, and one of them was riding a white horse.

Newt cast another glance in the direction the judge had gone, but there was no sign of him. The riders were only a hundred yards away and closing at a long trot. They were close enough by then that Newt could tell the one in the middle on the white horse was Miguelito.

Newt gave up on the judge getting back in time to help and stepped out in the middle of the road with his pistol drawn and hanging down at the end of his arm beside his leg, turned slightly with his left foot forward so that the pistol was hidden from them. The riders saw him in an instant and slowed their horses to a walk.

“Good morning,” Newt said because he couldn't think of anything else to say.

All three men looked around for signs of anyone else with Newt or evidence of how he had appeared in the road before them.

“
Buenos días
,” the one to Newt's left said. He was wearing a straw farmer's sombrero with a tattered brim, and wasn't a man Newt had seen before.

All three of the Mexicans stopped their horses less than five yards in front of him. He didn't recognize the man on the other side of Miguelito, either, but it didn't set well with him that the man had a Remington rolling-block carbine laid across his saddle swells and his thumb on the hammer.

Miguelito said something in Spanish, and when Newt couldn't answer, the man in the straw hat translated.

“Did you lose your horse?” he asked.

Newt kept a close watch on Miguelito. “He broke loose last night and left me afoot,” Newt said.

Miguelito edged his horse forward two steps and said something again.

“He don't believe you,” the one in the straw hat said. “He thinks maybe you were with the judge back in Piedras Negras.”

“Judge?”

“
El juez viejo malo
. Bean.”

The men were still looking for someone else with Newt, as if they didn't trust the setup.

“We think you lie,” the man in the straw hat added. “Where is the judge? We would like to talk to him.”

“Kill him,” Miguelito said. Apparently, he did speak a little English.

The man with the carbine was the first to get his gun up, but his horse lunged forward and shied, frightened at his quick action. He was slow getting a bead on Newt because of it. Newt cocked the Smith pistol and brought it around and leveled it on the man with the rifle. It felt like he was handling the pistol entirely too slowly and that he was going to die long before he got it into play.