The scarlet mail-coach came bowling down the hill at a fair lick, coming at last within sight of its latest destination. The messenger sitting beside the driver turned round and banged on the roof with a chunk of wood, hollering, “Parson’s End. Parson’s End, a comin’ up.”
Truth to tell, the messenger might as well have saved his breath, for the coach contained only a single passenger and he knew better than any employee of the stagecoach company that they were about to pull into the little town of Parson’s End. After all, he had been bred and raised not five miles from there and was tolerably familiar with every crack in the boardwalk on Main Street. Anthony Armstrong craned his head out the window and watched as they entered the environs of what, he felt, had to be one of the most dreary and least interesting towns in the whole of the United States.
The first structure of note to meet his eyes was the imposing bulk of a three story, faded, clapboard building with, “MERCHANTS HOTEL” painted on the front in letters six feet high. The absence of a possessive apostrophe, which he had never before noticed, irritated the young man. Next was a row of run-down stores, which were little better than adobe shacks with false fronts. These were emblazoned with the names of the proprietors and type of goods on offer within; THOS KIRBY, BANKER, G.M. HOOVER, LIQUOR & CIGARS, COVENEY - SUPPLIERS OF DRY GOODS, TIN-WARE AND GUNS. Nothing at all had apparently changed in the year and a half that he had been away and this fact too caused Armstrong to click his tongue in an expression of dissatisfaction and annoyance. The damned place hadn’t changed since he was a boy. For somebody who had spent the last eighteen months at Harvard Law School, the parochialism of his home town stood out in sharp contrast to the urbanity and sophistication of Massachusetts. Had it not been for his mother’s entreaties in the letters which she had been sending him every week since he went off to take up his place at college, Anthony Armstrong seriously doubted if he ever would have wished to return. Still, he thought, as the stage shuddered to a halt with a screeching of iron brakes, there it was. He was back now for the Hilary vacation and might just as well make the best of it.
It did not strike Armstrong, until he had left the stage and was walking along the wooden sidewalk towards the track which would lead him to his parents’ home, that he was dressed any differently from other folk in the town. But then, since he had begun at Harvard, he had grown so used to wearing sober, semi-clerical black suits that he had donned one for the journey home without thinking anything of it. The boot boy at the hotel where he had stayed a couple of nights back had polished his black shoes until they shone like looking-glasses. His attention was drawn to the matter as he passed the Lucky Lady and one of a pair of loafers, standing near the entrance to the bar, remarked, “Hooee, looks like a damn woman, with them shiny shoes. Howdy, lil’ lady!”
Being slightly built and shorter than average, Anthony Armstrong was quite used to fellows like this; men who thought to make him the butt of their pleasantries. He walked over to the scruffy, mean-looking men and asked amiably, “Would you care to repeat that?”
The two loafers, both aged about thirty or thereabouts, exchanged glances and one winked at his partner, before saying, “I was just admiring’ your shoe-leather is all. That and ‘markin’ as them shoes’d look more fittin’ on a woman’s feet than a man’s.”
The words were scarcely out of the fellow’s mouth, before Armstrong delivered a ferocious punch to his chin, sending him sprawling across the sidewalk. It was not the first time in his life that foolish people had thought that Anthony Armstrong’s modest size and quiet demeanour indicated that he was a soft mark. He was however a leading light in the Harvard Boxing Club and had never in all his life allowed anybody to make game of him. While he was waiting for the man whom he had knocked down to rise and set to with him, the batwing doors of the saloon swung open and an elderly man with a bristling, iron-grey mustache strode out. Catching sight of the fellow laying on the sidewalk, clutching his jaw tenderly, the newcomer said sharply, “I don’t pay you boys good money to start brawling in the street like guttersnipes as soon as I turn my back on you! Get up this minute, what d’you mean by it?” Then he caught sight of Anthony Armstrong, standing at his ease and waiting to see how the fight which he had initiated might develop. The older man looked at him a little uncertainly, before saying, “Anthony. Back in town, hey?”
“Yes, sir.” It was an embarrassing circumstance, because he and his family had been, and for aught he knew to the contrary still were, at outs with Michael Doolan and his boys. Not but that they hadn’t got on well enough with them until a couple of years back, but things had got mighty sour before he’d left for Harvard and he didn’t rightly know which way the wind was currently blowing.
“Well,” said Mr Doolan, “Happen I’ll see you about in town.”
“How’s your daughter sir?”
“Which one of ‘em?”
“Katy.”
“She’s well enough. Why d’you ask?”
“Oh, no particular reason.”
Michael Doolan stared at Anthony for a few seconds, as though he might have something more to say. Then he turned to the fellow that Anthony had punched and said gruffly, “Get up, Hogan. Less’n you’re wanting to see your wages docked. We got work to do.”
Before he got to his feet and followed his boss, the man called Hogan favoured Armstrong with an evil glare, which suggested that if they met again, then there were apt to be fireworks.
The town of Parson’s End contained something in the region of six hundred souls when young Anthony Armstrong came in on the mail coach that day in the spring of 1867. The settlement had grown up at a ford across a tributary of the Legrande River which wended its way through the Tonto Basin. The river-crossing had already been known as Parson’s End some years before the first buildings had been erected on the spot which would later form the nucleus of the new town. Almost fifty years earlier, in the late summer of 1819, a Presbyterian missioner had been making his way through the valley on the way to the Lord only knew where. For some reason or another, the local Navajo Indians were feeling a mite ticked off with white men just then and they had seized the minister and lashed his ankles and wrists to four stout wooden stakes which they had driven into the ground by the ford. Then they had carefully removed his eyelids with a razor-sharp hunting knife and left him facing the sun. It was supposed by those who came upon his remains three days later that the sun would have blinded him before he had died of thirst. There were those who said that the minister’s sightless ghost haunted the road thereabouts on the anniversary of his death. Some wag had soon after christened the location Parson’s End and the name had stuck.
Before the town had sprung up, men had come to this part of the Arizona territory, hoping to make their fortunes. Those who had succeeded in doing so were few and far between, but Seth Armstrong, Anthony’s father, had been one of them. He now owned, or lay claim to, half of the land between the Legrande and the boundary of the Arizona Territory to the north of it. On the other side of the river, Michael Doolan and his clan held sway.
Although the Armstrongs and Doolans were by far and away the biggest landowners in this part of Arizona, their spreads were surrounded on all sides by other, smaller concerns. Since the feud had arisen between the two families, the men farming the land near to them tended to take sides, looking for protection from one or the other of the two powerful families in the valley. That, at any rate, had been the state of affairs for some while before Anthony Armstrong had left Arizona and headed east. It remained to be seen how things were currently situated. He wondered if Katy had forgotten him now. The summer before last, they had enjoyed a flirtation; all the more exciting for being undertaken secretly, in flat opposition to the wishes of both their families. For Anthony, it had been a little more than a game though. He still believed himself to be in love with Katy Doolan.
It was a fine enough day and since he was burdened only with an old carpet bag, young Armstrong made good time, coming in sight of his home in under two hours. The farmhouse that his father had built before going in search of a bride had been added to and embellished over the thirty two years since Martha Armstrong had somehow been persuaded to leave the civilised country in the east and come out to settle in the wilderness. Much had changed in the district since then and there were hopes that before too much longer Arizona would be admitted as a new state of the Union. True, the territory had technically been on the side of the Confederacy during the late War between the States, but there was no sign that Washington held that against them. Besides, it was a debateable point where the true allegiance of most of those living in Arizona had actually lain. After all, many of them, Anthony Armstrong included, had fought for the Union, rather than for the Confederacy.
His mother was the first to see him. She was harvesting some herbs from the vegetable garden at back of the house which was her pride and chanced to look up and see her youngest son bearing down upon her. It was not in Martha Armstrong’s nature to show too much of her real feelings and emotions and so she contended herself with saying in a gruff tone of voice, “You surely took your time. I been expecting you since these three days gone. What kept you?” Then, because Anthony was her youngest son and also her favourite child, she was unable to maintain the pretence any longer and hurried up to embrace him. “You stayed away too long,” she told him, “You hear what I tell you?”
“Sure, ma. I’m sorry. I won’t leave it so long next time.”
Martha Armstrong stood back from her beloved youngest son and looked him over carefully. Although she was hugely proud of the boy and secretly impressed with his smart appearance, she didn’t wish to let him know so and therefore said, “I hope them fine clothes don’t mean you think you’re too good to help out round the place over the Eastertide? There’s a heap o’ work to be done.”
“I’m no prouder now than when I set off to Harvard,” replied her son, stung a little by the suggestion that he might have changed, “I can still feed hogs or plough a furrow if need be and do it as good as those brothers of mine, as well you know.”
“Well well, we’ll see. It’s good to have you home again. Come and set in the kitchen now and have a bite to eat.”
Although they had not seen their little brother for over a year, his brothers Tom, Jack and Andrew greeted Anthony with the same casual and good-natured contempt that they always had done. They none of them enquired about his life at college, but instead said things like, “Looky here, the scholar’s come to see us!” and “Lord, who set that tailor’s dummy at table?”
“What are you rascals up to these days?” asked Anthony, “I saw Mr Doolan in town, but he didn’t seem overly keen to stop and talk with me.”
“That whoreson…” muttered Jack and then jerked back in pain as his mother turned from the stove and rapped his head smartly with the ladle with which she had been stirring the pot of soup.
“You mind your mouth when you’re in my kitchen,” she said, “I’ll not have a heap of cursing and dirty talk at table.”
Martha Armstrong ruled her house with a rod of iron and this had not changed as her sons grew to manhood. Jack was twenty eight, but he still deferred to his mother as he had done since he was knee-high to a grasshopper. The three sons who still lived with her might be regular terrors when they were out on the range or raising Cain in a saloon, but indoors, under the strict eye of their indomitable mother, they behaved like Sunday School pupils.
Seth Armstrong came in a little after his sons and he greeted his youngest boy with the same casual air, like he might have seen him at breakfast that day. Like the rest of the family, he wasn’t a whale at showing his feelings. “Ah, you’re back then? Reckon you’ll be any help around the place? Those brothers of yours aren’t worth sh… a cuss when it comes to good, honest work.”
“Sure I can help out, pa. What’s doing these days?”
“No talkin’ business at table,” said his mother firmly, “Let’s converse of more pleasant topics, like how you’re doing in your studies.”
After Anthony had sketched out his progress in qualifying as a lawyer, explaining about the difference between criminal law and the civil law or torts, he said, “Had a run-in with one of Mr Doolan’s fellows earlier.”
“The hell you did!” said Tom and then, as his mother glared at him, added hastily, “Sorry, ma. It just slipped out.”
“What chanced, son?” asked Seth.
After Anthony had given a brief account of the incident outside the Lucky Lady, there was a sombre silence. Tom said, “You say his name was Hogan? I know him. He’s one o’ them…” He stopped dead at a sharp and imperious gesture from his father.
“You mind your mother now,” said Seth Armstrong, “You heard what she told you. No talking business at table. Tell us some more about these here ‘torts’, Anthony. It sounds right interesting’!”
“Torts!” muttered Tom quietly, “Sounds like Mexican vittles or somethin’.”
Throughout the meal, Anthony could not help but notice that his father seemed a little vague. It was nothing to put one’s finger on, but just that he had to say some things twice before the old man appeared fully to apprehend his meaning. It was a mite troubling and he made sure to ask his brothers later about it. After they had finished the soup and bread, Seth asked his youngest son to come for a walk around the place. To his three elder sons, he said, “You boys know what’s needful. Just be carryin’ on with it.”
If anybody knew that Anthony Armstrong was no soft body or weakling, it was his father. However much his brothers chaffed him, Seth knew that his youngest boy had more about him than any of them guessed. When all was said and done, Anthony had been to war and that was something he had in common with his father, who had himself fought in the Mexican wars. For all that they were tough and able to handle themselves in a roughhouse or even shoot a man if need arose, neither Tom, Jack nor Andrew had endured the terrors of battle.
“It’s good to have you back again,” said Seth Armstrong, clapping his arm around his young son’s shoulders, “It’s been too long. Your ma’s been grieving for you.”
“I know,” said Anthony, “It’s a right smart distance from here to Massachusetts though. I can’t be haring back every five minutes.” Then, to change the subject, he said, “What it is with you and Michael Doolan these days? You still at daggers drawn with each other?”
“You might well say so,” replied his father, rubbing his jaw meditatively, “Things are no better than when last we saw you and they’re like to get a good deal worse.”
“Worse? How so?”
“I don’t want to see you mixed up in a lot of dirty business while you’re here. Just lend a hand to look after the animals and that’ll be all I want of you.”
“Are you in any trouble, pa?”
“Nothing I can’t take of by my own self, son. I looked after my family these thirty years or more, I reckon I don’t need any help.”
Despite this assurance, Anthony was made profoundly uneasy, not especially by his father’s words, but more by the old man’s attitude. It was plain that something was amiss, but it was equally certain that his father was not about to discuss it.
Since he had been a young boy, Anthony had been aware that not all that took place on the crossed “A” spread was open and above board. Being the youngest, with a gap of six years between him and his next brother Andrew, Anthony had not been as deep in his father’s counsels as the other three boys. Then, when he had shown a brilliant streak for book-learning, his father had engaged the minister from Parson’s End to give him private lessons in Latin, Greek and other subjects such as were not covered by the syllabus of the town school. The consequence was that it had been studying that his father expected of him as a youth, rather than riding out and dealing with the practical matter of running the place.
“Well, I suppose you know your own business best…” began Anthony, but his father cut in with the greatest irascibility, before he could complete the sentence.
“You talk like a lawyer already and ain’t been studying yet at college above a twelvemonth or so. Lord knows how you’ll sound by the time you finish there.”
Feeling that his father might think he was putting on airs and graces, Anthony took breath to deny that he had changed in the least degree since last they had spoken together, before he went off in the fall of 1865. Before he had even formed the words though, there came the crack of a rifle shot. Seth Armstrong gave a grunt and dropped to the turf.
Unlike his father and brothers, Anthony Armstrong was not in the habit of carrying firearms. It would have looked pretty well out of place on the Harvard campus, had he started strolling around with a six-gun tucked in his belt. His father was not moving; just laying still, with his eyes open and staring up at the sky. It wasn’t possible to aid him under fire and so the first thing to do was drive off any attacker. He reached down and pulled out the Navy Colt which hung at his father’s hip; cocking it with his thumb as he did so. Then he began scanning the surrounding area, in order to locate the sniper who had taken down his pa.
Jolly good start Simon. These westerns of yours are a great escape.