TIME DOES NOT ALWAYS move in the same direction, but sometimes curves back upon itself and strikes with the fury of a cottonmouth. So time played a perverse prank on Plainsville.
The '70's had come to their violent end. Many of the rowdy trail towns were dying. Texas was being fenced in. The new decade was hailed as an era of peace and prosperity; and the end of outlawry and bloodshed was in sight. Then time, on a frivolous whim, reversed itself; peaceful citizens found themselves on a new frontier as violent as any of the '70's had known.
The railroad came to Plainsville.
Jefferson Blaine, now eighteen, watched in amazement as the settlement reverted to the loud and brassy times that he had so longed for as a boy. First came the surveyors, and there was great excitement in the town. The railroad was an unmistakable sign of progress, the storekeepers happily proclaimed.
The railroad meant new markets for the grangers—and there was a flurry of business at the new Farmers Bank as the homesteaders hurried to replace worn-out tools and equipment. New business houses were established. There arose a new eating house—competition to the Paradise— a new barn at the public corral, and another saloon. Sam Baxter and Frank Ludlow talked of putting up a hotel.
Then came the graders, building a raw mound of earth across the prairie; a track bed, they called it. Then came the track layers themselves, the broad-shouldered spike maulers, the Irish gandy dancers. The new depot was not even finished when the twin glistening rails were hammered to the earth directly in front of Mike Bender's feed store.
Before the town had finished celebrating, carpenters had already gone to work building chutes and cattle pens to the south of town.
Now, once again, there was loud laughter in Plainsville, and the cowhands raced their horses in the streets. Gunfire was no longer a rare sound, and tinny piano music clamored in the saloons. Strange women appeared from nowhere and mixed with the cowhands wherever they drank or gambled. Swift and Blackwelder, a pair of undertakers from Dodge, rented space from Doc Shipley and waited for business.
The transformation was shocking to some, pleasing to others. Plainsville had become a shipping center for cattle, and the ranchers soon forgot their oath to stay away.
For Jeff Blaine, the eternal noise of the place was a delight. It was like stepping from the grave into the middle of a Mexican fiesta. From the workbench in his uncle's tin shop he could see the boiling seas of cattle that descended upon Plainsville like flash floods in April. Their bawling and horn clacking and stamping added to the general din and atmosphere of excitement. Cowhands from the big outfits, heavy with guns, fresh from the new bath house and barber shop, prowled the streets, like happy tigers.
This was an August day; the air was furnace-dry and heavy with dust. Jeff lay aside his heavy cutting shears and stood looking out with vague discontent. Since finishing his schooling at the academy he had worked here in Wirt's tin shop. Five years, almost. You'd think a man would get used to his work in that length of time.
Sometimes he thought of his father with sadness. Nathan's name was never mentioned in the Sewell household, but stories had a way of traveling in this country, and Jeff had heard some of the them.
They said his pa was someplace in Mexico, a personal bodyguard for a high man in the Mexican army. They said that Nate Blaine was a big man in Mexico, which was why Texas authorities couldn't try him for killing Jed Harper.
They said a lot of things about Nate Blaine—but not to Jeff's face. Eighteen was a man's age in this country. The name of Blaine kept most of them at a distance.
Jeff watched Elec Blasingame, a bit fatter, a bit thicker, cross the dusty street and head toward the tin shop. It seemed to Jeff that the marshal had grown old fast, since the railroad came to town. That bulldog jaw had gone flabby. It look longer to kindle the fierce fire in those pale eyes.
Now the marshal stood in the tinshop doorway. “Is your Uncle here, Jeff?”
“I think he went over to Baxter's. Anything I can help you with, Marshal?”
“No.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. Both of them remembered too much, and neither was comfortable. “If I don't run on him in the street, tell Wirt to come down to my office, will you?”
“All right.” Jeff put a note of curiosity in the words, but Elec chose to ignore it. He glanced at Jeff for one brief moment—a strange, almost bewildered look.
Elec said abruptly, “You like it here in the tinshop, Jeff?”
“Sure. It's all right, I guess.”
The marshal's fat jowls shook as he nodded. “Good business Wirt's got here. It'll be yours some day, I figure.”
Jeff wondered what he was getting at. In five years he couldn't remember passing more than a dozen words with Blasingame. Why the sudden interest? “I hadn't thought much about it,” he said. “But I guess I'm the only one Uncle Wirt's got to leave anything to—except Aunt Beulah, of course.”
“Of course,” Elec said, cocking his head slightly, as though he were listening for something. Then he looked directly at Jeff, with some of the old fire in his eyes. “They've been good to you,” he said bluntly. “Wirt and Beulah. I hope you don't forget it.”
Now that was a funny thing for him to say, Jeff thought, as Elec shoved away from the door and tramped heavily up the street.
A few minutes later Wirt came in and Jeff told him about the marshal's visit. “I wonder what Elec wants to see me about?” Wirt pondered. “Well, I guess I'll have to go to his office.”
If Wirt Sewell could have seen the look of stark savage-ness in the marshal's eyes at that moment, he would not have been so pleased with himself as he marched primly toward the Masonic Temple building.
But the marshal was a block away, in his office, alone, when he read the letter through for the fourth time. In a fit of helpless rage, he balled the letter in one big fist and hurled it at the wall.
He stood spread-legged, mean as a bear, in the center of his bleak office. He looked as though he would happily kill the first man who dared come down the steps.
