Long Shadows

Chapter 11

There was more delay before the much reduced party of men was ready to leave for Garden City. Horses had to be collected from the Double Star, provisions acquired for the journey and various other arrangements made. Colonel Farrance was unable to shake off the feelings of impending disaster which gripped him when his thoughts turned to Crawley. Wilson tried to cheer him along, but he just knew that some mischief was afoot in that direction.

Before they started out for Garden City, the twelve men of the posse, four prisoners and two corpses of the men who had been killed in the lawful execution of their duty, Sheriff Giles addressed the prisoners thus:

“You cowsons have killed two good men. Old Mr Beauregarde and my deputy, Jim Sellars. I tell you now, that when we get back to my town, I shall be charging all four of you with the murder of a peace officer. That breakout was a joint enterprise and every man-Jack of you will hang for it.”

One of the men tried to interrupt, intending perhaps to offer some justification or excuse, but Giles would have none of it. “Shut your mouth, you bastard,” he said, “You are lucky that I do not hang all of you right now. I am strongly minded to, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

The possibility of a lynching had occurred to the others and when the man who had tried to speak looked about to say something, they jogged him in the ribs and told him to keep quiet. They knew that it would not take much for the sheriff to string them up right here and now.

The bodies of the four outlaws were left in Endeavour and the sheriff promised to send on money to pay for their burial. As they rode out of town, Sheriff Giles got alongside Farrance and said, “You and your partner will be wanting to know about the reward money. I will vouch for the capture and so on. It will take a little time but if you like, I can arrange for it to be paid out where you are resident. Pennsylvania wasn’t it?”

“Yes, that is so. If I gave you a telegraphic address, I guess that might expedite matters?”

In short, once they had got back safely to Garden City, there was no need for Colonel Farrance and Ikey Wilson to hang around. They would be paid a sum for having rode with the posse and their duties would be ended.

After the sheriff had moved off, the colonel said to Wilson, “I suppose you had best come back to Whyteleafe with me, Ikey. It will take a time for that reward money to come through and I would not have you sleeping rough until then.” The truth was that he had grown kind of fond of Wilson in a funny sort of way over the last few weeks and the idea of having the man in his house for a time was not as irksome as all that. So it was that two days after arriving in Garden City, Farrance and Wilson began the long railroad journey from Kansas to Pennsylvania.

It was a great relief to Farrance to reach Whyteleafe after all his recent adventures and purely a delight to see his beloved daughter again. Being only sixteen, she had not yet acquired that veneer of a well bred lady, which manifests itself in a complete lack of interest in masculine affairs. Indeed, she was openly and avidly curious about what her father and Mr Wilson had been up to. She artfully tried every blandishment upon her father and various species of coquetry upon Wilson in order to extract information about their recent whereabouts ; all to no avail. The two men asserted boldly that they had just been on a little vacation, the details of which could be of no possible interest to a young thing like her.

Farrance and Wilson sat talking late that first night, after Charlotte had retired for the night.

“It’s right good of you to let me stay here until this reward money is arranged,” said Wilson, “I wouldn’t have looked for it and it is appreciated.”

“Hell Ikey, we have had a good time. I don’t suppose consulting all my ledgers and so on, which is what I would have been doing had you now showed up here, would have been as entertaining as what we have been up to. Stay as long as you want. Anyways, Charlotte seems to like having you around.”

Just after dawn the next day, Colonel Farrance was awakened from sleep by a piercing shriek. He awoke in an instant and the scream was repeated a few seconds later. The colonel leaped from his bed and ran to the door. He wrenched it open and rushed out into the corridor. Then he stopped dead. His daughter was standing a dozen feet to his left, along the passage. She was in her nightgown and as pale as could be. Little wonder, because an arm was clamped around her throat, which had the effect of hugging her close to the man who was standing behind her. It was Andrew Crawley.

“Don’t you hurt her now,” said Farrance, “You just let her go now and we will deal with this man to man. You hear what I tell you?”

Crawley’s face was a mask of demonic triumph and it struck Colonel Farrance that the man looked as though he had lost his senses. He said to his daughter, “Just keep calm, Charlotte. This man will not hurt you.”

“Well now, Bob,” said Crawley in a jovial voice, quite at odds with the desperate nature of the situation, “You could not be more wrong about that.” He showed Farrance the pistol which he held in his right hand and placed the muzzle of it behind Charlotte’s ear. “I aim to blow out this child’s brains and I got her to scream a little so that you would wake up and watch.”

Charlotte was almost fainting with fear and her knees were sagging. It was only Crawley’s arm around her throat that was keeping her from slumping to the floor. Although his bowels were almost turning to water in terror at the thought of any harm befalling his child, Farrance thought that there was one last gamble worth trying. He said, “Andrew, you do know that this is likely as not your daughter and not mine? She was born nine months after you stayed with me and Annie. Think on that.” Thankfully, Charlotte looked as though she had fainted altogether by this time and so was unlikely to have heard.

“The hell are you talking about?” asked Crawley in apparently genuine bewilderment, “I never screwed your wife.”

“I saw you.” Farrance reminded him.

Crawley smiled wickedly. “Oh, that. Yes, I saw you through the window, coming along the street like you hadn’t a care in the world. I was going that day anyway and so thought I’d kind of leave you something to remember me by. I pulled down my pants and jumped on that wife of yours. She was struggling and crying out and then you walked through the door. Boy, your face was a picture!”

It was not the time to think this through, it was enough for the colonel to see that this line of appeal to Crawley’s better nature was pointless. He aimed to hurt Farrance as bad as he could and the murder of his only child would surely be the best way to accomplish that end. It was at this moment that Colonel Farrance became aware of a figure moving stealthily along the passage and approaching Crawley and his daughter from behind. It was Ikey Wilson and he had had the foresight to pick up his Remington before leaving his bedroom; which was, by the by, more than Farrance had done.

The fear in Colonel Farrance’s heart was that Crawley was a man with nothing left to lose. He was a fugitive who would hang for the murder of the deputy and so had chosen to exact this last terrible revenge upon the man he held to be ultimately responsible for his predicament. Did Wilson know this? If challenged or likely to be apprehended, then Crawley had nothing to lose by killing Charlotte; he could only hang once. Please God that Ikey had figured all this out and did not try to treat with the man like a reasonable being.

He need not have worried, because Ikey Wilson had worked out the odds of this drama as soon as he had heard Charlotte scream out in panic. His aim was simply to kill Andrew Crawley; not to parlay with him; offering him a safe passage or aught of that sort. He moved silently towards the little tableau of the vicious man holding the helpless and innocent young girl. Then he struck.

As soon as he was in reach of Crawley, Ikey Wilson’s left hand snaked out and grabbed the wrist holding the gun to Charlotte’s head. He gripped this with all his strength and jumped backwards, causing Crawley to loosen his grip on the child. At the same instant, Colonel Farrance jumped forward and caught the swooning girl before she fell to the floor. He picked her up and raced to his bedroom to put her out of danger. Pausing only to snatch up his own pistol, which was hanging from the gun belt which he had cast carelessly over the back of the chair, he went back into the corridor. Just as he reached the threshold, there came two shots; deafening in the narrow confines of the passageway outside his bedroom.

As he emerged into the corridor, lit only by the pale light of early dawn, Farrance saw that Ikey Wilson and Andrew Crawley were grappling with each other and that each appeared to be preventing the other from bringing up their guns to fire. He had a clear line of sight to Crawley and so did not hesitate to fire; the bullet taking Crawley in the throat and dropping him at once. “You alright there, Ikey?” he asked his old comrade.

“Not really, Bob,” came the reply, “I think he has done for me.”

“Don’t say so. Here, let me have a look there. You say you are shot?”

“Don’t you trouble about me. How’s Charlotte? Is she safe?”

“Yes she’s fine,” said Farrance, “Hey, hold up man!” he said, as Wilson leaned unsteadily against the wall and then slid slowly to the floor. He went over and examined Ikey carefully, finding the wound in his chest at once.

“You’re going to be alright, Ikey,” said the colonel, “It is nothing. You and me both have had worse than that. It is a scratch. I am surprised to hear you make such a fuss over a little flesh wound, you must be getting old.”

“I am cold,” said Wilson, “You best use that reward money yourself, Bob. Or give it to Charlotte perhaps. I will have no use for it where I am going today.”

Feeling awkward, Farrance put his arm around Wilson’s shoulders and said, “Don’t talk so, Ikey. You will be fine.”

It was in this attitude that Charlotte Farrance came out of the bedroom a quarter hour later, after she had come to, and found the two men sitting together on the blood-soaked carpet. Right next to them was the dead body of the man who had threatened to kill her. She said to her father, “Is Mr Wilson alright?”

“Not hardly,” came the reply, “He is stone dead.”

The girl started to sob softly at these tidings and her father put his arm around her; relinquishing his hold upon the dead man, who then slumped sideways to the floor. This circumstance provoked a fresh paroxysm of grief from Charlotte, who clung sobbing to her father as though she were six and not sixteen. At length, her tears subsided and she said, “Did he give up his life to save mine?”

“Well, I reckon that that is just what happened.”

“I liked him. He was funny and kind.”

“Which,” said Colonel Farrance, “Is by no means a bad epitaph.”

The repercussions of the deaths at the home of Whyteleafe’s leading citizen were surprisingly muted and insignificant. The sheriff knew Colonel Farrance very well, both professionally and socially. He was inclined to treat the case as being a burglar disturbed in the night who had seized a hostage to effect his escape. In the resulting struggle, the colonel’s house guest had gallantly given up his life to save a young girl. It would have amused Ikey Wilson mightily to know that in death he became a law abiding and heroic figure.

The reward for the breaking up and capture of the best organised gang of counterfeiters since the end of the war, was a considerable one and, as Wilson had desired with his last dying breath, went to Charlotte. Colonel Farrance set up a trust fund, so that at the age of twenty one, the money would be his daughter’s; to do with as she wished.

The episode at Endeavour and its aftermath were by way of being a coda in the adventurous life of Robert Farrance; the last little bit of excitement before he settled down to spend the rest of his days in peace and quiet. With the deaths of Ikey Wilson and Andrew Crawley, the last connections with his life as an outlaw were severed and he was able to devote the remainder of his life to caring for his daughter and maintaining the character of a war hero and respected member of the community.