Talmage Powell
Dark Journey
He slid out of the waters of the creek like a lean, hungry cat. It was night, with Texas stars glittering in the black blanket overhead. More important, the night was silent. The dogs and men were no longer behind him, thirsty for his blood.
Exhausted and dirty as he was, Frank Donovan experienced a moment of exultation. The past hours lay like a gray fog in his mind. During those hours he had moved and breathed with a grim desire to live, but with little hope of making the escape a success. He had been like a hunted animal, motivated only by its primordial instinct to run, to put distance between itself and the cold, yawning cage. But now, like a flicker of feeble light, hope was beginning to stir in Donovan’s brain and feelings. The possibility of see Glory again, touching her hands, her lips, drove him to his feet, lurched him down-creek with a wild laugh.
The break itself had been a fluke, an incident arranged by a droll pixie of fate. Two guards had stood watch over the road gang of half a dozen convicts. With a long-handled shovel, Frank had been digging loose a six-pound stone when the guard nearest him had half turned to shout to the guard up the road. Without thought or conscious volition, Frank had straightened and hurled the stone in one lightning motion. The rock had slammed the guard hard on the shoulder, knocking him down. With cougar-like grace, Frank had dropped over the rim of the gully as the second guard’s shotgun had blasted.
There’d been swampy land ahead covered by a tangle of underbrush, where a man could lose himself, hide until the sinking sun dropped behind the bluffs in the west. He’d heard a second shot from the guard’s shotgun. A man had whooped, which meant the break had become a small riot. Frank realized he must have been counting on that, too.
Then the underbrush had swallowed him as he left confusion behind. He’d known this was but the beginning, that a general alarm would round up most, perhaps all, of the convicts. Dogs and men would hunt human prey, and he might spend the next month in solitary. The odds had favored the other side with men, guns, equipment; but against these Donovan had pitted the hardened body and trail wisdom accumulated in twenty-four years of life spent mostly outdoors, an iron-ridged belly capable of withstanding hunger, and a heart that refused to quit.
Now, after the sun had marched twice across the heavens, Donovan dared believe he might have won the first round. The cost had been heavy. His muscles were sucked dry of strength, his brain fatigued with fear and constant alertness. And the hunger, assuaged only by wild berries and some vegetables taken from a nester’s garden under cover of night, was a roaring demon inside him.
He reached a slope shadowed by a stand of oaks. He stumbled once as he staggered to the crest, and then he was looking down at a moon-toned scene that put a lump in his throat and brought a blur to his eyes. He saw a long, fallow meadow, the cabin standing at its head, a low, solid structure of logs hewn by his own hands.
Even the hunger faded before this new hollowness that took possession of him. Here was the past and all its dreams. A small spread, watered by his sweat, a house snug against the roaring northers. A house built for Glory, never quite complete because it had never known her warm presence. Three years ago the dream had died, after Cort McCullens’ gunslinging ramrod had bled out his life beneath the cottonwood at the east corner of the house. Three years ago — when the iron gate of the state pen had clanged shut behind Donovan, like a bell ringing a clear note of doom.
With Indian wariness, Donovan scouted the house, fighting the bitter memories aroused by every blade of grass here. He was reasonably sure they would never look for him here, never expect him to return like a homing pigeon. But he wasn’t taking chances. He was a full thirty minutes working his way close to the house, noting the condition of the fields and fences. His lips were tight. Cort McCullens must be using the grazing land. Everything looked to be in fair repair.
He opened the plank door on its leather hinges, pausing and listening, wondering if the house had been ransacked of the clothes he’d left hanging in the bedroom and of the few dollar tucked behind the loose stone in the fireplace.
Something was wrong. He didn’t know what, but the edges of his senses felt something amiss. Hackles crawled on the back of his neck, across his scalp. And then it struck him that the house did not have the musty smell of a place long unoccupied. Instead, there was the clean, bright smell of soap, of a place being lived in.
He heard the whisper of a footstep, and he whirled, a cornered animal ready to kill blindly for survival.
“Frank!”
The whisper was like a memory out of a lost, dead dream. He stood shaken, sweat breaking on his face, wondering if he were hearing things.
He smelled the sweet perfume she used sometimes before he saw her darker shadow in the darkness.
Their two shadows melted together, becoming one. Frank touched her arms, her shoulders, knowing he would die of the sweet pain tearing through him. He could feel the wild strength of her arms about his neck and the wetness of tears on her cheek as she pressed her face to his.
“I knew you would come, Frank. All the others said you’d never be fool enough to head this way. Sheriff Tennessee Crowder watched the place last night and today, and then gave the job up. He never knew I was watching, too, ready to warn you if I saw sign of your coming too soon.”
A shaft of moonlight filtered through the window, touching Donovan’s gaunt, stub-bled face. A sob caught in Glory’s throat as she touched the face with her palm. “You’re not thinking of facing Cort McCullens, Frank?”
“No,” he gentled the fear from her. “Cort deserves trouble for what he did to me, but I’ll not make it for him. I want just one thing, Glory. To take you to Mexico and start a new life.”
“The old life seemed pretty good once, Frank.”
Until Cort McCullens decided I wasn’t to have breathing room. Every word I said in court that day was true, Glory. Cort sent his man here deliberately to pick a fight and gun me down. He drew fast and shot. If his horse hadn’t skitted I’d be a dead man. He didn’t get a chance to shoot again, because I was fighting for my life.
“Everything Cort said at the trial was a lie. He didn’t see the fight. I wasn’t drinking, and I didn’t start it. Every man jack on the jury knew he was lying. But it was Cort McCullens talking and the little men were afraid of him. They couldn’t stomach hanging a guiltless man, but they had to make a gesture to Cort. So I drew five years for manslaughter. Five years ripped out of my life, shot to plain hell! I hope the little men have been able to sleep well.”
“They haven’t,” Glory said quietly. “Your sacrifice hasn’t been for nothing, Frank. Your shadow has lain over the little people, giving them no rest, until they’ve stiffened against Cort McCullens. He’s not the power he was three years ago when you were sent away. The land has changed. Another two or three years and Cort McCullens will be finished, pushed back to the land he legally owns, no longer able to hold the public-domain land against settlers.”
“Powerful enough still to use my lands, my house,” Frank said bitterly.
“No, Frank. Boys from our place have taken care of the land — and I’ve taken care of the house.” A sob caught in her throat. She moved to the window, framed in moonlight. “I’ve come here to this empty house to clean it and care for it as if it were mine, just the way we planned. The emptiness and loneliness has been terrible, Frank. When it got so I couldn’t stand it, I’d interrupt my cleaning to go to the front door and imagine you coming across the fields, shirt open halfway down your chest, sweating from your labors, giving me a wave and smile and wanting to know what was for dinner.” Glory laughed mirthlessly at herself. “Crazy of me, wasn’t it?”