The Vigilance Man Read online

  Seaton grasped the other man’s hand and said, his voice husky with genuine emotion, ‘I knew I could count on you. There’s a bunch of high-faluting types up in Pharaoh, think they know better than us how a town should be kept clean for decent folks. They’re sending some fellow down this way to take over the running of Greenhaven and give it over to some shyster lawyers up at the county seat and suchlike. All of us who know what’s right must stick fast together and show them the error of their ways.’

  ‘Just set me on the right path, Mr Seaton,’ said the blacksmith, ‘and you’ll see I won’t turn back ’til the job’s done.’

  ‘By my reckoning, this fellow’s like to be coming to Fort James tomorrow evening by the Flyer.…’

  CHAPTER 3

  When the riders were some fifteen feet away, they halted and one of them, a burly man, as large and hairy as a bear, said in a gruff voice, ‘Tell us your name, stranger.’

  ‘My name’s my own,’ said Cutler stoutly. ‘What’s it to you?’

  ‘It’s this,’ replied the man, ‘there’s four of us and one of you. You best do as you’re bid. Happen your name’s Cutler. If so, then you best hand over any papers you have.’

  So unexpected was this request, that Brent Cutler was momentarily taken aback. He had thought that his wallet or watch might be demanded of him, but why the Deuce would anybody be after the documents he was carrying in his saddle-bag? ‘That’s a blazing strange request,’ said Cutler, wonderingly. ‘What game is this?’

  ‘It’s no game,’ said another of the masked men, drawing a pistol and pointing it in Cutler’s direction. ‘Wouldn’t call it ’xactly a request, neither. Taking it now that you are Cutler, just you do as you’re told.’

  Mark Seaton’s instructions had been very clear. The man called Brent Cutler was not to be harmed, but he was to have all his belongings taken; most especially any documents or papers. Then he was to be stripped buck naked and deprived of any means of transport. In such a way, thought Seaton, any attempt to impose a sheriff on Greenhaven might be frustrated – at least temporarily.

  In fairness to Seaton, it must be said that self-interest and the desire to maintain his hold over the town were not the chief considerations motivating his actions in this matter. He was genuinely worried that if once there was an official system for keeping the peace, then it would not be long before all the corruption and graft that he had known in New York would creep into the town. As things were, justice was executed swiftly, with no shilly-shallying or opportunities for crooked lawyers or judges to set free a guilty man. There was often only a matter of hours between the commission of a crime and catching a rustler or mankiller and stretching his neck. If a sheriff were to be involved then there would be endless delays, appeals, bribery, escapes and the Lord knew what-all else. For Seaton and his band, the present arrangement was the neatest possible and needed no improvement. Add to all that the fact that there was scriptural authority for such a system and it was plain to some members of the safety committee that God wanted them to carry on after the present fashion and to have no truck with sheriffs or courts of law.

  Meanwhile, Brent Cutler was weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of pulling out his little muff pistol and letting fly at the men who were menacing him. He decided that he had not yet reached that final extremity and so, being reluctant to start a bloodletting over a sheath of papers from the District Attorney’s office, he thought he’d let them go without a fuss. He said, ‘You really want my documents, then you can have them. I’ll be needing to turn round to fish them out the saddle-bag, mind. Don’t go getting itchy trigger fingers, hey?’

  ‘Just don’t move too fast is all,’ said one of the men facing him, his voice muffled from the cloth covering it.

  Very slowly and carefully, Cutler twisted round in the saddle and undid the straps on the saddle-bag. He was keenly aware all the while that there was at least one gun pointing at his back. He had led a peaceful and uneventful life up at the county seat and being held up and robbed in this way was the most exciting thing that had happened to him since he was a child. He didn’t think that he was in any real danger from these riders, who somehow had the air of ordinary men rather than ruthless outlaws. Not that Cutler had any sort of experience of bandits and killers. It was just that these fellows seemed so unexceptional and down to earth. He found it impossible seriously to entertain the possibility that they might be about to gun him down.

  Once he had handed over all the documents from his saddle-bag, one of the riders having walked his horse forward to receive them, matters took a more sinister turn. When the man who had taken the bundle of papers from Cutler had backed his horse away and rejoined his three companions, the big man who had first spoken said, ‘Now you can get down from your horse.’

  ‘You want me to dismount? Why? I gave you what you wanted.’

  ‘Not so much talk. Just get down.’

  It was at this point that Cutler began to be alarmed about the direction that events were moving. As he swung himself from the saddle, he reached into his vest pocket and slipped the derringer into his palm. He might be the mildest and most law-abiding of individuals, but he had not the least intention of allowing himself to be shot down on the highway without putting up any resistance.

  There were only two shots in the little pistol and the ridiculously tiny barrel meant that it would not be accurate beyond ten or twenty feet, but Cutler was thinking now that things were more perilous than he had at first apprehended. This suspicion was amply confirmed when the big man who appeared to be in charge of the riders announced, ‘Now take off your clothes!’

  ‘You say what?’ asked Cutler in amazement.

  ‘I said take off your clothes.’

  ‘I’ll be damned if I will!’ declared Cutler. ‘I tell you now, I won’t do it.’

  ‘Enough o’ the cursing,’ said the man who had directed him to strip, and it was at that point that things suddenly went very rapidly wrong.

  Honestly believing that these men intended to take all his belongings and then kill him, Cutler cocked the muff pistol with his thumb. At the same moment, sensing his reluctance to comply with their demands, the four riders began to move forward, crowding him. Fearing for his life, the young man pulled the trigger of his little pistol, not really aiming at anybody in particular and half thinking that the sound of a shot alone might cause the men pressing in on him to back off. The results exceeded all his expectations, because as soon as he fired, the burly man who had first spoken fell back at once, sliding from his horse. So effective had his manoeuvre been, that Cutler loosed off the other barrel, with similarly satisfying consequences. The man who had earlier been pointing a pistol at him gave a hoarse cry and dropped his gun.

  Although he had never yet been involved in such lively events, having only ever worked in law offices, Brent Cutler was no sissy and had a deep detestation of crime in all its manifestations. Before the echoes of his shots had died away or the smoke had had a chance to dissipate, Cutler darted forward and snatched up the pistol that one of the men in front of him had let fall. He drew down on the men and said, ‘I reckon the boot’s on the other foot now. You fellows get down from your horses.’

  ‘I can’t get off my horse,’ said the man who had dropped his pistol. ‘You done shot me. I’m hurt real bad.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry for it,’ said Cutler sincerely, ‘but you waylay and rob a man, you got to expect trouble.’

  The other two men slowly and reluctantly dismounted, keeping a wary eye all the while on the young man pointing a gun at them. One of them said, ‘You killed our friend. You’re like to hang for this night’s work.’

  ‘I hang?’ exclaimed Cutler in amazement. ‘You men shouldn’t have held me up. It’s as clear a case of self-defence as ever I heard tell of.’ Seeing that one of the men was about to speak, he continued, ‘I won’t debate with you on this. You two who can walk, just you go on down the road. Leave your horses here.’

  It
was perfectly plain to the riders who had accosted him, that here was a young man who was quite prepared to stand up for himself against all comers. They none of them had expected any serious trouble. Although Ezra Stannard hadn’t told them precisely what was going on, they had understood that their action tonight was to be in the nature of a warning, rather than a punishment. However, their friend Ezra, the blacksmith, now lay dead and another man looked to be severely wounded. For all that they had been cautioned against harming this fellow, their thoughts now were bent on vengeance. For the time being, though, there seemed little enough to be done other than to obey their instructions and to leave the scene on foot.

  After he was sure that the two men had moved far enough away that they would not be able to impede his actions, Cutler said to the man still seated on his horse, ‘Have you another weapon, apart from this one that you dropped?’

  ‘No,’ replied the man and followed this up with a prodigious groan. ‘You hurt me bad. I think I’m like to die.’

  ‘I’ll help you down from your mount, but I tell you now, don’t play me false. I’ll have the muzzle of this pistol pressing against your body and I won’t hesitate to shoot.’

  It was no easy task to ease down the heavy man from his horse and he gave several sharp cries of pain before he was laid safely on the ground; but eventually, the thing was accomplished. The two men who Cutler had instructed to walk away on foot had halted on a nearby ridge, where they were silhouetted against the sky. Paying no more attention to the man he had assisted, Cutler set to work untacking the horses of the those who had attempted to rob him. He had, as a boy, worked for a time in a livery stable and so found this a simple enough operation. When his exertions in that field were completed, he foraged about in the saddlebags until he found a sharp knife. With this, he cut through various straps and reins, ensuring that even if any of the men recovered their horses, then their tack would be in no fit state to be used. Having done this, he turned to the injured man, who was now moaning more or less constantly from the bullet wound in his stomach. Cutler said, ‘I told you I was sorry I shot you and I am. I’m leaving now. Your partners are waiting up yonder and I dare say as they’ll come to your aid, once I’m gone.’

  There was no reply to this and so Cutler slapped the rumps of the horses, sending them running off into the night. Although they could surely see what he was doing, the two men watching him from about a quarter of a mile away, did nothing. They could hardly start firing down at Cutler without running the risk of finishing off their friend or shooting their own horses. When he was confident that he had made it impossible for the others to pursue him, Cutler mounted his own horse and set off across country. He didn’t think that it would be prudent to remain on the road that night, just on the off chance that the men he had encountered had associates prowling around nearby.

  Brent Cutler was no fool and the more he mulled over the events of the last hour or so, the stranger they appeared to him. Because of the excitement of the thing, he had scarcely had a chance to think about what had taken place until now. As he did so, his horse plodding along patiently through the darkness, he gradually came to see that this had been no bungled robbery by a bunch of road agents. He had known instinctively, by the way that they had spoken, that these were not rough outlaws, but rather ordinary, respectable men. The man he had killed had even reproved him for cursing; was that likely behaviour from a bandit?

  In addition, there was the indisputable fact that they had known his name. That was exceedingly peculiar in itself. Taken in conjunction with the fact that their first and foremost interest had been in the papers that he was carrying, all went to suggest that these were men who had been alerted to his arrival in the neighbourhood and were intent on frustrating his purposes. It was not for nothing that Cutler was known as one of the sharpest of the up and coming men in the office of the District Attorney in Pharaoh and it was not long into this train of thought that he came up with the only logical and well-nigh inescapable inference that the attack tonight could only have been the work of men wishing to prevent a sheriff being appointed in Greenhaven.

  When this thought struck him, he reined in and thought things over for a few minutes. Only the man heading the Greenhaven safety committee had been told of his imminent arrival. There could be no other way that those who had stopped him could possibly have known who he was or that he would be carrying any documents with him. The implications of this were disturbing in the extreme. Not least because he had gunned down two of the vigilance men from the town he was heading for. This would take some serious thinking about.

  It was at this point that he was hailed from a nearby stand of trees and a sharp, authoritative voice cried out, ‘Don’t you move a muscle, or you’re as good as dead!’ It seemed that the night’s adventures were not over yet.

  Mark Seaton’s religion was brimstone and fire Protestantism to the core, but he had always had a slight admiration for the pragmatism of the Catholic Jesuits. One maxim of that body of zealots he had particularly taken to over the years was the slogan: If the end is lawful, then the means are likewise lawful. Seaton interpreted this to mean that if you were on the right path with the Lord and doing his work, then you were pretty well justified in taking any actions in pursuit of that end. When the party of men he had despatched to intercept the District Attorney’s man had returned, not only empty-handed but with one of their number stone dead, the leader of Greenhaven’s vigilance committee had been reminded of this sensible saying of the Jesuits.

  For over fifteen years now, Ezra Stannard had been as good a friend to Seaton as he had ever known. Seaton had looked after Ezra’s children at odd times and always helped the man as best he could in any way that he was able. If ever there was a God-fearing and pious citizen of Greenhaven, that man was Ezra Stannard. Now he was dead, gunned down like a dog on the highway and left in the dirt. Since the blacksmith had been acting on his instructions, Seaton felt that the guilt for his death weighed heavily upon his own shoulders. Although none of the three men who had returned alive from the expedition had voiced the thought out loud, Seaton was sure that in their hearts, they must be blaming him for the blacksmith’s untimely death and wondering what steps he would take to make things right.

  As was so often the case, Seaton found that the Lord’s aims and purposes happened in this case to coincide in every particular way with his own. It had taken the three surviving members of the group most of the night to get back to town. They had managed to fix up one saddle and retrieve one horse. Ezra Stannard’s body had been conveyed in this way to Greenhaven, with the others trudging along wearily on foot. Tom Hanning, who had been shot, proved not to be as badly injured as at first thought and faced with the choice of being left alone out in the wild or somehow forcing himself to keep pace with his friends, chose the latter course of action.

  ‘Any of you men read these papers?’ asked Seaton when the bundle of documents was handed to him.

  ‘Ain’t hardly had the time,’ remarked one of the men sourly.

  Since he had confided only in Ezra Stannard the true nature of the night’s business and the others had been acting as members of the safety committee without knowing the facts, Seaton felt that this disaster could be easily set right; at least for the time being. After all, he was, and had been these past few decades, undertaking the Lord’s work. All else was just straw in the wind set against this. It was from this perspective that Seaton, in his heart, condemned an unknown man to death. Not casually and not without considerable misgivings, but aware that in doing so he was serving the greater good of the community which he had sworn to protect from evil. ‘Listen up now,’ he told the men standing before him, ‘There’s work to be done!’

  When you are certain-sure that you are doing the right thing, then there really is no limit to what steps you are liable to take in pursuit of your aims. Seaton felt both a terrible grief over the death of Ezra Stannard and a gnawing sense of his own guilt in the business. The only way to
rid himself of these twin burdens was to make amends for what had happened. He couldn’t bring the dead man back to life, but he could bring the killer to justice. That this would also put a stop to the plans to take from him the administration of law in those parts was, or so Seaton persuaded himself, a minor point. The main thing was to ensure that word of his role in causing the blacksmith’s death did not become voiced abroad. Nothing was more calculated to damage his standing in Greenhaven and that was a thing not to be thought of. It was no longer just a question of preventing a sheriff being appointed in the town; he would never be able to hold his head up in these parts if it became known that he had needlessly caused the death of one of the best men in Greenhaven.

  The sun had barely peeped over the horizon when the three men had come to see him with their tale of disaster. He would need to make his plans swiftly, working, as he was, on the reasonable assumption that this troublesome fellow might appear in town at any moment. He would have to make sure that Mr Brent Cutler didn’t have the opportunity to go round stirring up discord in this peaceful town. So it was that an essentially good man turned bad, without either he himself or anybody else marking the moment. The lay preacher from the local chapel was plotting murder and truly believed in his heart that the Lord was still directing his steps.

  ‘What would you have of me?’ asked Brent Cutler, ‘I’m not carrying much in the way of cash money, if that’s what you’re about.’

  ‘Money?’ cried the man indignantly, ‘I ain’t after stealing from you. It’s you looks to me like you’re on the scout. What d’you mean by idling your time away here in the middle o’ the night? You huntin’ for me or what?’

  ‘Hunting for you?’ said Cutler, amazed. ‘I can’t fathom what you’re talking of. I’m not looking for anybody, just tending to my own affairs.’