With the promise offered and—he hoped—accepted, he turned and walked to the house where he and his sons would spend the night for perhaps the last time.
The next morning the four Shaye men split the supplies evenly among them and mounted their horses in front of the livery stable.
“Where we headed, Pa?” James asked.
“North,” Shaye said. “They headed north.”
“Why not south, to Mexico?” Matthew asked.
“Because Ethan Langer doesn’t run and hide after he hits a bank,” Shaye said. “He joins up with his brother Aaron, after he and his men also hit a bank.”
“You mean they hit banks in different towns at the same time?” Thomas asked.
“Roughly the same time,” Shaye said. “I got a telegram yesterday from the sheriff up in Prairie Bend, South Dakota, that the Langer gang hit their bank yesterday. It’s a competition between them, I think, to see who gets more money.”
“Is that sheriff tracking them?” James asked.
“Won’t go out of his jurisdiction.”
“So where will they go?” Matthew asked.
“Aaron and his part of the gang will go south, while Ethan and his part will go north. They’ll probably meet up somewhere in Kansas.”
“So we’re goin’ to Kansas?” James asked.
“We’re going north,” Shaye said. “Wherever they end up, that’s where we’ll end up.”
5
Ethan Langer poured himself a cup of coffee and replaced the pot without offering any of his men some. Terry Petry picked up the pot and filled his own cup. The other men were too busy eating to notice or care what was going on with the coffee.
“Whataya think, Ethan?” Petry asked. “We do better than Aaron and the boys?”
“We won’t know till we meet up,” Langer said.
“Yeah, I know, but whataya guess?”
“I don’t guess, Terry,” Langer said. “I never guess. I pick my banks because it’s where I know we’ll do the best. Aaron picks his the same way. We’ll see who got the most when we meet up, like always.”
“Okay, sure,” Petry said, “sure, Ethan.”
Langer drank his coffee and avoided looking into the fire. He’d had one plate of bacon and beans and that had been enough. Despite what he told Petry, he was wondering how his brother Aaron had done in South Dakota. He hated going north himself, because he hated the cold. That’s why most of the jobs he’d pulled over the past year had been in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
“Too bad about the woman,” Petry said.
“Huh?”
“That woman that we rode down,” the other man said. “Too bad she was in the street.”
“Stupid bitch got what she deserved,” Langer said.
“Wonder who she was?”
“Who cares?” Langer demanded. “Look, Petry, go and sit at the other fire, okay? Yer startin’ to piss me off.”
There were two campfires for the eight men, and they were sitting four and four, but now Langer took out his gun and waved it around.
“All of ya, go sit by the other fire, damn it! Now!”
Petry and the other men moved quickly, so that there were now seven men seated around the other fire. Ethan Langer was known to have a short fuse. A big man, he dealt out punishment with his fists or his gun, and none of the men wanted to risk either.
Langer holstered his gun and poured himself more coffee. What did he care what happened to some stupid woman who was standing in the street? Goddamn dumb bitch was too slow-witted to move, she deserved to get ridden down.
His horse had been the first to strike her, and the shocked look on her face was still vivid in his mind. So vivid that he had been seeing it in his sleep every night since then.
Goddamn bitch, she’d haunted him all the way here to the Oklahoma Territory. How much longer did she intend to haunt him?
6
When Dan Shaye and his sons rode into Vernon, Texas, a week after leaving Epitaph they were all bearded except for James, whose cheeks had only been able to sprout some fuzz during that time.
The young men had learned a lot from their father during that week: much about tracking, like reading sign. They now knew that when you were tracking someone, the evidence of their passing was not just on the ground, but in broken branches, as well, or places where branches and brush had been gathered for a fire. They had also learned about the proper care of a horse while on the trail—how important it was to walk a horse at times, resting it but not necessarily stopping your progress—and of making and breaking camp. James had been taught to cook by his mother, but on this trip he’d learned a thing or two about trail coffee from his father.
They’d learned about shooting too. Every day after they ate, Dan Shaye had schooled his boys on the proper use of a handgun and a rifle. Thomas, though a fair hand with a pistol, had never drawn or fired the weapon at another man. Shaye taught them where to shoot a man to be sure to bring him down, and what to do when facing a man who was better than they were with a gun. He explained that it was not the fastest man with a gun who survived, but the most accurate.
After one particular lesson, James had said, “But, Pa, that wouldn’t be fair.”
“You want to be fair, boy?” Shaye had asked him. “Or alive?”
The answer was easy for all three boys.
Along the trail the three young men had time alone with their own thoughts, both on horseback and at night, when they were camped. Shaye made them all stand watch, made sure they all knew not to stare into the fire and destroy their night vision, but there was plenty of time for introspection.
Thomas was normally a quiet person, so introspection was nothing new to him. Growing up, he often went off alone to shoot targets and think. He wanted very much to be like his father, even though his physical resemblance was to his mother. At six feet tall, he was a slender 170, and he had a good eye and fast hands. He’d asked his father on more than one occasion to make him a deputy, but his mother had always stepped in and vetoed the idea.
“I worry day and night about your father,” she’d say, “I’m not going to do the same with you or any of my boys.”
Those first seven nights on the trail, Thomas thought about those words, and now it wasn’t any of them who was dead, but her. He felt guilty that it had taken the death of his mother to get him the job he wanted—deputy to his father, whom he considered not only a great lawman, but a great man as well.
The middle brother, Matthew, was not much for thinking. At six-five, he was three inches taller than his father, but he resembled him more than either of the other two boys. He had his father’s breadth of chest and shoulders, and was narrow in the waist, the way Dan Shaye had been before he moved into his forties. Now forty- eight, Shaye had thickened somewhat, but still had his power, though less than his middle son’s, and for that he was proud rather than envious.
While on the trail, Matthew had done some thinking, and had posed many questions to himself. He would follow his father to hell and back, but he wondered what was going to happen when it was all over.
