Chapter 9, Part One

Chip Raleigh had just sat and listened to one of his top men give a report of the law presence in Clear Creek, Missouri. It was sparse… a sheriff and his lone deputy. But it was a quiet town, with mostly quiet men, who were armed and ready. But only a few of them were fighters, and so the target should be easy. They would fight, but they would lose. The law, though it had proved its skill in how it handled the brawl on the man’s final night in town, was too few in number to stop the forces it would be facing. So went the man’s report.

Raleigh knew otherwise. In all his years he had never met the man who could match Jack Miles. Jack was proud, sure, but Jack was the best. He had, without hesitation, in order to escape a posse, once killed an old man who was on a horse. He did consider stopping to ask the man, even kindly with a gun under the nose, if he could borrow the horse. He just shot the man. Raleigh had nearly gagged when he heard the tale, but this was before he and Miles were thrust together by circumstance. His way of thinking and acting was gradually shaped to Miles’ as they pillaged and plundered their way across the west. They had become close during that time, both repeatedly saving the other’s life, and had built a following of men, men who were fiercely loyal to them, partially for the money they paid them, but for other reasons. The gang had survived intact, with one exception, for a dozen years. That one man had died, not of a gunshot, but with a fever. They had buried him, and then the next day raided the town where he had contracted the disease. The name of the Miles-Raleigh gang was feared throughout the west. Yet, for all their work, no one knew what Miles or Raleigh actually looked like. They ran their gang efficiently, but invisibly. Raleigh, a veteran of the War between the States, and Miles, a bushwhacker from Missouri, were regarded as the invisible legends. When they traveled in public, they never conducted the “business” of terrorism. They never appeared in a town or city except as drifting cowboys, always headed for the next town, never finding the work they wanted. In all, they had taken over seven hundred thousand dollars during a long and illustrious career.

Then Miles saw the girl named Tessie from Missouri. He had weakened, and told Raleigh to ride on. He was tired of living outside of the natural world. He wanted to be human again. For eight months he lived in Clear Creek, and though Raleigh tried to get him alone and talk to him, he would not be dissuaded. It was shame, Chip reflected, how he had refused to let the old riding partner even get a chance to tell of the journal he had found. He would have dropped what he had right then and there. But he never did, and so he married the girl. Raleigh watched from afar and fell into despondency as he saw the man find happiness in the arms of a girl. He rode away from the county of Clear Creek just two days before Jack got spooked and decided to get out. Chip never forgave himself for leaving, because he was not there to help Jack. It seemed that the family of the girl did not approve of Jack, and things came to a head not long after the two were married. He left, but not before killing Tessie, her grandfather, and parents.

When the story was told Raleigh, he could not believe what he heard next. The man said that the likes of the mad pursuit had never been seen before. Miles was chased for six weeks before the brothers finally found him. They gave him one chance to surrender, and then… then the unthinkable happened. Jack Miles drew his gun.

Chapter 8

It was going well into my second year as Sheriff of Clear Creek when I saw the stranger on the street. I had seen him somewhere before. Perhaps on a wanted poster, but I was not sure. And since I was not sure, all I could do was make a mental note to keep an eye on him, and a verbal note to my lone deputy Alan. While Clear Creek was a good-sized town, and the surrounding county somewhat dense with farmers, it was certainly not violent, so I needed little outside help. I had to swear in a couple of temporaries once a few years before to chase after a man who had burned a barn, but nothing more than that. However, the town was growing, and so I was considering hiring another permanent deputy. I was especially concerned by the addition of the second saloon into the town, which, from what I’d seen and heard and knew from experience, was the chief breeding ground of violence in the town. My opinions were confirmed when a fight broke out between two homeless drunkards one night in the new bar, which carried out onto the street, and got a few more people involved than should have been. I was at the office, but Alan was out on the street, and was highly effective and plucking the brawlers off of one another, seeing as how he outweighed and outmuscled most of them by a good fifty to a hundred pounds, and was raucously sober at that. By the time I got there, he had mostly finished them off, and all that was left to do was the sorting out and the determining who would spend the night in prison. I decided the next morning that we had to have another deputy, because I was intolerably sore from sleeping at the jailhouse on guard duty.

Oddly, I did not see the stranger on the street anymore after that. And as soon as the drunkard that I did not recognize was let go after his hangover stopped, he disappeared. My detective mind kept that stored away in a file-box somewhere as I posted the opening for a sheriff’s deputy all around town.

Chapter 7

Two years would pass. The bank robbery would be only the more forgotten by all but a few, removed by years from any tracking. Yet, in the minds of a few, the robbery was fresh, and the burial of the fruits fresher still. More specifically, where the fruits were buried was foremost in the minds of several, and for the select couple who knew that the fruits were only part of one tree in the midst of an orchard, the anticipation was made all the more bitter-sweet. For eight years plans had been made, for two years, in one mind, more plans were being made. Leland was ruthless. He would find a way to win, with care and control, as always. This thing precisely bugged him the most, this that he did not have control over. He did not know where the orchard, nor where the tree, were planted, nor did he have any way of knowing unless he ceded control to another. He assured himself that it would be only a temporary necessity. He couldn’t shake the feeling that it wouldn’t be.

The tenseness rose with the months. Bill Carnegie was on edge more and more. The heist had been his life’s dream and goal. He was counting on the money to make him a happy man, and then he had to wait ten years for it. Those ten years of waiting had not made him happier. Unlike his jailed son the lightning bolt with a gun, he was a thundercloud. Hateful, brooding, slow. Destructive. Nine years and eleven months into his son’s prison sentence, the thundercloud descended on Clear Creek, along with a drunkard, a gambler who never gambled, a weeping, bitter, used cowboy. They were ready to unleash hell on earth on a small town in Missouri. Only one had a clue how close to hell the experience could take all the others. The gambler would never lose.