Post-Civil War, many morticians were.
But Perkins said, “I am not, sir.”
Byers thought for a moment. “Do you have ice the young man can rest upon for the time being? We will want to arrange a service and the boy’s brothers will likely be coming from out of town.”
“Certainly. Perhaps you would like to have someone come around to select a casket?”
“Not necessary. Just make it the best you have.”
Perkins tipped his stovepipe and said, “The very best indeed, sir,” and then he and the boy in the undertaker’s cast-off clothes lugged the grisly remains in the picnic basket of a coffin down the street. Perkins was having difficulty curtailing a smile. William Hammond’s bad night had been a very good one for C. B. Perkins.
Soon William Hammond would have mahogany and brass fittings, York knew, not that it would matter to the boy.
Byers put his derby back on and, polite, even cordial, asked, “Might I know the circumstances of young Hammond’s passing?”
“He ravaged and beat a young woman senseless. When I requested he give himself up, he made a hostage of another girl and I shot him dead.”
The bookkeeper nodded, as if that were just so many more figures to record in his mental ledger. “The young man had his problems. No doubt he’d been imbibing.”
“No doubt. But I’d imagine you had a few tonight, playing faro, and managed not to ravage and batter any young women—at least none that have come to my attention.”
“True. True.”
York met the man’s eyes earnestly. “Is it too late for me to ride out to the Circle G to speak to the boy’s mother? It’s my responsibility to deliver the sad tidings.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Hammond will wish to speak to you about the matter.”
York thought, I bet she will.
Byers continued: “But the news will be better coming from me. I’ll convey the gist of tonight’s tragedy, and report the arrangements I’ve made with . . . what is the mortician’s name?”
“Perkins. The only one in town.”
“Not surprising. It’s a small town.”
“But lively,” York commented. “I’ll be out to the G midmorning, if that seems suitable.”
“That will be fine.”
“Do tell Mrs. Hammond that I regret this affair worked out in such a fashion. Assure her I did my best to bring her boy in alive.”
He sighed, nodded. “It’s not the first incident involving young William, I’m afraid,” the bookkeeper said.
And he tipped the derby and went off into the night.
But it will be the last, York thought. For William Hammond, anyway.
What steps his mother and brothers might take remained to be seen.
* * *
Under a sun still making its climb, Caleb York rode his black-maned, dappled gray gelding up the narrow rutted road that cut through the flat expanse beyond Trinidad. Here and there on either side shimmered occasional pools of fetid water, and even on the somewhat soft roadway itself a few puddles remained.
The aftermath of the brutally hard blizzards that had shown up like one unwanted guest after another further displayed itself in the leaning telegraph poles and battered-looking cacti, as well as squashed yucca and stripped pinyon pines. The occasional juniper tree, bereft of green, was left with its thick, gnarled branches reaching for the sky like the limbs of dying animals. On the nearby range, still-rotting corpses of cattle would have a similar look of terror and tragedy.
Five minutes or so from town, off to the right, came the inaccurately named Boot Hill—it was just as flat as any of the surrounding landscape—where wooden crosses and tombstones struck odd angles or had even fallen over, the mesquites that normally shaded the cemetery wearing many a partial, snapped-off branch. About the only unaffected aspect of the view was the shelf of distant burnt-red buttes with their weather-scarred cliff sides.
York faced a first-time duty this morning in this lawman’s job he’d held for going on a year. Oh, he had informed a parent here and a spouse there of the accidental death of a loved one—this one thrown from a horse, that one bit by a rattler. In the Southwest, the only thing cheaper than life was death. But never before had he had to face the mother of a man—a boy, in this case—whom he had killed.
He had killed too many men, and too many had been boys or nearly so, wanting to shoot him and stake a claim on his reputation. But this was a region and a time when men (and women, too) disappeared into the geography, changing names, inventing new personas, abandoning lives lived elsewhere, including crimes committed in those jettisoned years, even inventing lives never lived at all. The clerk in New Mexico might have been a murderer in New York. The housewife in Texas might have been a prostitute in Kansas. The deputy in Arizona may have robbed a stage in California.
Who was Billy the Kid, really? William Bonney? Or Henry McCarty? Maybe Kid Antrim? And that was just a single twenty-one-year life. Yet even with an infamous character like the Kid, no one really cared who he’d really once been.
The dead were as anonymous as the living.
That Byers character had done the sheriff a favor by taking the news to the Hammond woman. Breaking it to her himself was not something he’d have relished. Few things in life did Caleb York shy away from—no challenge, no responsibility, no danger . . . he could face just about anything. He took pride in that.
But the mother of a boy he’d killed, however much that terrible child deserved it? York shivered, even as he tried to write it off to a chill morning. But it wasn’t that chill today, as he damn well knew.
For that reason—and this was another first—York was going out on official business unheeled, his Colt Single Action .44 and gun belt left behind at his
