The Sons of Grady Rourke (21 page)

“You shouldn't have talked to your horse like that, Patrick.” Liam spoke to the raw, red wounds on his mount's back and flanks.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. We can go in now.”

The brothers found Cyrus and Bonita sitting at the table. She had prepared one of her plain but inviting meals. Cyrus sat with his suspenders dangling at his sides. He wore his Army trousers but his faded red woollies covered his shoulders.

“Late breakfast?” Patrick said cheerfully as he led Liam through the door. His weary, thirsty voice was a raspy whisper. Cyrus had not heard the men approach until the door opened.

“An early dinner,” the ex-sergeant smiled.

“Good to see you, Cyrus.” Liam's voice was little more than a weak breath.

Cyrus stood when he saw Liam. His kind face looked suddenly troubled.

“You all right, boy? You look like wolves drug you home.”

“I ain't slept well.” Liam almost fell into a chair near the blazing hearth. Patrick slumped into his father's rocker.

“I guess not,” Cyrus said as he laid his large hand on Liam's sweat-soaked shoulder. “You sick?”

“No. Tired. Tired like after Bighorn.”

Cyrus nodded. A picture flashed instantly into his mind. Their troop had gotten to General Custer. But too late by a day.

Patrick collected the last of his strength. He had been in the saddle for three days.

“Bonita? You going to town today?”

“Yes. After I clean this up.”

“Will you see Sean? I think he's living with Melissa.”

“I could.”

“You need to get a message to him. McSween's men are riding to Lincoln today or tomorrow. They're gunning for Brady.”

“The sheriff? Are they crazy?”

“Crazy with greed maybe. McSween offered five hundred dollars to the man who kills Sheriff Brady. I just can't ride another minute.”

The woman looked at Patrick's exhausted face and at what was left of Liam's emaciated cheeks.

“I'll find him and warn the sheriff.”

Patrick looked up so slowly that Bonita thought she could hear the bones in his neck grinding against themselves before he whispered toward her.

“Don't let our brother get hurt.”

“I won't.”

“A
IN'T YOU GOING
to church?”

Sean Rourke wore his one clean shirt. Morning sun poking through holes in an overcast sky made the starch sparkle. Melissa smiled and shook her head, No. She pulled Sean by the hand into her tiny home.

“Where's Abbey?”

Melissa pointed across the street as she closed the door. When Sean sniffed the freshly ground coffee in the cozy air, she poured him a cup.

“Thanks.”

Sean looked at her. The woman's hair was pulled back and tied behind her neck. Sunday morning daylight coming through the windows glowed on her rosy cheeks. She looked remarkably beautiful. Sean's eyes kept focusing on her cotton blouse as she hovered near the pot-bellied stove where the coffee pot perched. Her breasts looked somehow rounder. Still standing in his open duster, he reached out and put his hands around her waist to pull her closer.

He looked down into her dark blue eyes that were a color he could never describe. Once, he had traveled from the gold fields to San Francisco. He had stayed until the heavy yellow dust in his pockets ran out at the gaming tables and the whore houses. Looking at Melissa's face, he remembered the Pacific Ocean in the bay at sunrise. Her eyes were that shade of blue.

Pushing her to arm's length, he studied her radiant face and searched her eyes for the source of the strange warmth that he felt radiating from her face.

Melissa Bryant smiled and placed his open palm on her long skirt, flat against her belly. She carefully watched him as he stood there thinking hard.

Sean pulled his hand away as hard as if she had laid his bare fingers on the red-hot stove lids.

“My God, woman!”

He pushed her away by the shoulders and she nearly toppled over a chair. He had to instantly reach out to grab her before she fell backwards into the wood pile.

The pain in the silent mother's eyes wrenched the tall man's heart.

“I'm sorry, Melissa.” He stepped toward her and she stepped backwards, avoiding the chair. With her back against the wall, he put a hand as gently as he could upon each side of her frightened face. Then he pulled her to his chest. “I'm sorry, Melissa. Forgive me.”

The woman sniffed once and stepped out of his embrace. She stood two steps in front of him. The good side of his bearded face was full of anguish.

“I love you. I would give my soul to hear your voice, even once.” He turned his back to her and faced the hot stove. “But I can't be no father.” He sighed and turned back to her. Sunshine fell on his destroyed cheek and her eyes narrowed for an instant. Her eyes locked onto his sad, gray eyes. “I ain't never had nobody to teach me.”

Melissa raised her left hand that would have touched the wounded side of his face for the first time. But before she touched him, Sean stepped aside and marched quickly toward the door. He opened it to the gray morning and spoke over his shoulder as he walked outside.

“I ain't had nobody to teach me.”

B
Y
S
UNDAY AFTERNOON
, early spring rain whipped across the high plains of Lincoln County. It blew across the Sacramento Mountains and drove sideways across the last of the snow.

A dozen cowhands and Regulators rode slowly with their faces down inside their collars. Rain stung the eyeballs of their horses. Alexander McSween rode beside Billy Bonney at the head of the miserable troop. When they reached the hamlet of San Patricio ten miles from Lincoln, the vote was unanimous to camp there for the night until the weather broke. After hot biscuits and coffee, Billy agreed to ride ahead into town to alert other Tunstall loyalists that the Regulators would ride in on Monday, April 1st.

*         *         *

B
ONITA
R
AMOS WRAPPED
a shawl over her head against the rain. She knocked on Melissa's door at five o'clock in the evening. Abigail opened the door and invited Bonita inside. She found Melissa sitting in the shadows.

“Where's Sean?”

The mute woman shrugged. When a single tear rolled out of her eye, the other woman removed the shawl from her shoulders soaked to the skin.

“You told him?”

Melissa nodded.

“I see.”

Melissa covered her wet cheeks and red eyes with her hands. Bonita shook her head. She had seen the same expression on Melissa's face the last time she learned that she was with child.

Bonita sat beside Melissa for an hour. Neither woman spoke a word. Abigail puttered quietly in the loft where she lived with cheerful stuffed animals of calico. Before she went outside into the twilight drizzle, Bonita wrote a careful note on a scrap of paper.

“Give this to Sean, please, if you see him before I do.”

S
HERIFF
B
RADY WAS
surprised to see Sean Rourke filling the courthouse doorway. Sean was equally disquieted by his strange and sudden need to smoke with William Brady.

“It'll be nine when the next one comes in the fall,” the sheriff smiled through blue pipe smoke. “Each time, I expect my wife to make me sleep in the barn 'till death do us part.' But it must be the Mex in her or something. I don't think she'd mind a dozen little ones.” He blew a smoke ring which hung in the thin, humid air of a rainy Sunday. “My constitution might not be able to handle it, though.”

Sean smoked peacefully. The soles of his muddy boots were close to the soles of Brady's boots in the center of his battered desk.

“You got a girl in mind?” The sheriff squinted through the smoke toward Sean's thoughtful face. Like everyone in Lincoln, Brady knew very well where Sean had been sleeping since his second week in town.

“No. Must be my age. But I been thinking of children, for some reason.”

“Well, your folks raised three boys. Two soldiers and one rancher. That ain't bad.” Sean was still uncomfortable in spite of Brady's genuine courtesy. The only real bond he had with the man was the two dollars a week he paid for part-time deputies—hired at Jimmy Dolan's whim—and the blood of John Tunstall soiling both of their souls, even though neither of them had pulled the trigger. Dolan ran Brady and Brady sent Dolan out to challenge the Englishman; Dolan then sent William Morton up the trail with Jesse Evans; and Sean was there when Evans did Dolan's dirty work. There was something sickening about propping his feet up on Sheriff Brady's desk. Sean was startled when Brady laughed out loud.

“Sean, I think it's just the springtime in the air. Yes, sir! You got the itch just like all the barnyard this time of year.”

Brady's voice and face were too full of good cheer for Sean to take offense. He just pulled his feet from the desk, tapped his pipe on the side of the stove, and stood. The sheriff stayed seated and chuckled softly. In the evening twilight illuminated only by the open door of the stove and a single oil lamp, Brady's hard face softened with the tranquility of a man who would leave nine children behind to carry on his name—such as it was. Sean put his warm pipe into his duster's pocket.

“Maybe it is just the weather, Sheriff. I don't know what got into me. But I'm grateful for your time and the smoke.”

Brady nodded and pulled the pipe out of his black mustache. The waxed ends curled up when he smiled warmly.

“You know, Sean, nobody taught me neither. About fathering, that is. My wife and I learned together. And we done all right.” He nodded thoughtfully. “We done all right.”

Sean paused at the open doorway.

“Thanks, Sheriff.”

Brady waved with his pipe and blew another smoke ring.

When Sean returned to the Wortley Hotel after dark, the clerk was surprised to see him.

“We are still holding your room,
señor,”
the Mexican grinned. “But you never use it.”

“I will tonight, Raul.”

"sí
. Bonita left you this.”

Sean took the scrap of paper. He looked at the upside-down letters and pushed the note into his pocket with the warm briar.

"Buenos noches, Señor
Rourke.”

T
HE RAIN STOPPED
during the night. The ground was a river of mud by sunrise Monday.

The Regulators broke camp before first light and reached the Rio Bonito by daybreak. Rain made the thawed river run high and they made camp on the north side across from town, just opposite the back of John Tunstall's store. Between the swollen river and the store, the mound of earth above Tunstall's grave had been washed flat with the muddy paddock.

Billy Bonney reached Tunstall's store by seven o'clock. He opened the door and expected to see Alex McSween. Brady's deputies had not yet taken up their posts at the front door.

“They're camped across the river,” Susan McSween said sleepily to Billy as she fired the stove. “Don't know when they'll cross with the creek so high.”

“Where's Brady's men?”

“They won't trifle with me,” the woman said acidly. “Brady won't send them back here.”

Billy suppressed a smile. The plain-faced, plain-talking woman could stare down Brady's whole posse as far as Billy was concerned.

B
Y NINE-THIRTY IN
the morning, Sean stood in the hotel's paddock and curried his well-rested horse who was getting fat on rolled oats and clean water. The animal closed his eyes, lowered his head, and dozed on his feet while his master brushed him. Sean kept an eye on the muddy street for his brothers due in town to meet with David Shield. The river fog lying across the Rio Bonito concealed Shield's brother-in-law, Alex McSween, and his little army camped on the far side just behind the hill above the north bank.

On the east end of town, twenty men summoned for jury duty milled around the adobe courthouse. They did not know that the first day of the new session of court had been delayed for a week. Sending them home was the sheriff's job.

At ten o'clock, William Brady and three deputies walked out of the House on the west end of Lincoln. The sheriff carried a written order proclaiming the new date for convening court. When a fourth House man joined them, Brady walked up the center of the main street beside Deputy George Peppin, George Hindemann, Jacob “Billy” Mathews, and Jack Long.

The four men passed Tunstall's store. Sue McSween glared coldly at them from the window. Directly across the street, former Justice of the Peace John Wilson was working in his garden. Too anxious for spring to wait until the last danger of frost, Wilson scowled at Brady and turned his back on the four House men.

Brady stopped at his courthouse, informed his veniremen to come back next Monday, and nailed his order to the adobe wall. Then he turned to walk back to the House where he belonged, along with Dolan's stock of flour barrels. salted pork, and bolts of calico.

Sean looked east from the hotel corral where he whispered sweet nothings into his horse's ear.

Sheriff Brady and his men walked west in front of Tunstall's store. Sue McSween was gone from the window when Brady looked her way. Without blinking, he lowered his face to keep from tripping face down in fresh manure. He never heard the explosions beyond his left shoulder.

Sean's horse spun around and bolted with the other animals to the far corner of the paddock. Sean dropped to his knees and crawled through wrist-high muck to a water trough where he crouched.

A fusillade of small arms fire erupted from an adobe wall adjacent to the Tunstall compound. The Regulators across the river heard the gunfire carried on the wet morning air.

William Brady went down instantly. He was dead before he could close his mouth around a clod of horse droppings. George Hindemann dropped bleeding badly beside him. The two other House men hobbled into the shadows between the few buildings on the south side of the street. They fired blindly toward Tunstall's paddock as they ran. Across from Tunstall's, a stray bullet caught John Wilson in the back pocket of his trousers. He fell face down and cursing into his new garden.