The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Read online

  They left the body there, and went back to the building which had once been a bar. “What about the horses?” Laura asked.

  “I imagine they’re over the hill, with his sheep. We’ll go look.”

  “First we split the money,” Harry said, kneeling in his black pants by the Indian’s saddlebags. “This’ll be easy money for you, Snow, damned easy!”

  “I’m not taking any money,” Ben said.

  “Hell, I didn’t mean you haven’t earned it. You killed that sheepman if nothing else. Killed him before he killed all of us. What was he—crazy or something?”

  “Crazy with an odd form of insanity, I think,” Ben answered slowly. He picked up the lamp and carefully blew out its flickering blue flame, plunging them into darkness. Across the pile of stacked-up currency, another fiery spot glowed brightly. This time it was not a reflection.

  “What in hell’d you do that for?” Harry gasped out.

  “I had to see if you had one too,” Ben sighed into the unseen.

  A revolver exploded next to his ear and the burning spot went out, like a star blotted by clouds. Harry the Preacher screeched once and fell against Ben, knocking his already-drawn gun out of line.

  Then Laura was lighting the lamp again, covering Ben with the steady gun of a girl who has just killed her brother. “You’re smart,” she said. “Too smart.”

  “I’ve got a gun too, Laura,” he said, keeping it pointed at her, remembering even as he did that he hadn’t reloaded it since killing the sheepman.

  “How’d you know?” she said, keeping her weapon where it was as they faced each other kneeling, a few feet apart, with the lamp and the money and her brother on the floor between them.

  “The sheepman had to have a motive. He wanted me away, but that was before you people arrived. If he was expecting you, someone must have told him. Someone must have told him about the money. He killed Jason in the dark with that harpoon—where’d he get that, in one of the buildings here?—and it was a good weapon for scaring people away. But he did kill him in the dark, and he killed the Indian in the dark, but not before I’d seen a glowing spot on the Indian’s shirt, making the target like a light—and there was one on your brother. It’s a little dab of phosphorous, a chemical that glows in the dark. If I wasn’t developing a spreading stomach, I’d have noticed it at once on my belt buckle. Since the sheepman could hardly have put it on us all, he must have had an accomplice who did—the same person that told him about the planned train robbery and the money. You, Laura.”

  “Why me?” Her face was hard in the glow.

  “None of the others had the opportunity. You tied me up—but I imagine it was when you kissed me that you dabbed my buckle.”

  “Put away your gun and we can talk,” she said. “They’re all dead now. There’s just you and me.”

  He shook his head. “The gun stays out. Maybe you think you can shoot me before I get off a shot myself. Maybe you’d like to try.”

  “The money’s there for both of us.”

  “And now that your boyfriend’s dead I’ll do for a companion—is that it? No thanks. I’m sure you wouldn’t value me any higher than your own brother, and look what happened to him.”

  “I never owed him anything.”

  “No, but you gave him something. A bullet.”

  She was staring into his eyes now. “Put down that gun. You wouldn’t shoot a woman, would you?”

  “That depends on whether or not I’m really Billy the Kid. Under the circumstances, I think Billy would shoot a woman.”

  She thought about this a moment longer, then said, “All right, we’ll throw down our guns together. Then we can talk about the money.”

  “Agreed,” Ben nodded. The two guns hit the floor with a clatter together. “Now what?”

  “If you won’t come with me, we can split the money here and go our own ways.”

  But now Ben shook his head. “I’m taking the money into town, to turn it over to the sheriff. I think you’d better come too.”

  She cursed softly and made a dive for the gun, but Ben had it first. She grabbed up his, squeezed the trigger twice, then hurled it at his head when nothing happened. “Damn you, cowboy! Shoot me if you want!” Then her hand clutched the lamp, and she hurled this too. It shattered against the far wall, and in a moment the bone-dry timbers were ablaze.

  “You little fool!” Ben holstered her gun and tried to catch her, but she was too quick, rolling away from him, jumping lightly to her feet and running toward the stairs. The entire wall was now ablaze, lighting the place with a sort of dangerous, flickering daylight. Hot, like the desert sun.

  She must have been trying to reach an upstairs window, where she might have dropped to the ground and escaped in the night. But she couldn’t know that the fast-rushing flames had already weakened the ancient timbers. The whole stairway started to go at once, and the flames received it like wood on a campfire. She screamed, and then vanished into the spreading inferno . . .

  Ben just had time to pull the saddlebags full of money into the street. Then, by the light of the leaping flames, he made his way back over the hill to the place where he found the missing horses, tied among the restless sheep. He took his and turned the others free, and rode back for a time the way he had come, until the first rays of morning could guide him on a route around the ghost town.

  Somewhere, far ahead, he’d find a town and a sheriff, and leave the money without explanation. And keep riding. Let others find the burnt-out ruins of the town, and the five bodies scattered there.

  It was really a ghost town now.

  He wondered where it had ever gotten the name of Raindeer . . .

  THE FLYING MAN

  The summer of ’96 had not been good to the people of Twisted River. Too hot, too dry, too lonely, surrounded by nothing but a desert which no one ever crossed and a line of high hills which few wanted to cross.

  It was a perfect place for a man like Ben Snow, who wanted to be forgotten, but the motives which kept the other three hundred-odd citizens in a dried-up hole like Twisted River were more difficult to pin down. Perhaps, in one way or another, it was the mine up in the hills that held them, with its promise of gold and enough occasional fulfillment to keep them content.

  But outsiders, especially in that September of ’96, tended to avoid the town.

  It was a place where time was standing still, where a few hundred people were rotting in the sun. Not a place to visit, or make a living, unless you enjoyed working down in the mine where the temperatures were sometimes thought to reach a hundred and twenty degrees.

  One day was much like another in Twisted River, though, and that was something Ben Snow liked. He could stroll the dusty streets, earn money at occasional odd jobs, even fish in the narrow stream that gave the place its name. There was even a girl named Sue, who worked at the small hotel where Ben had a room. Ben liked her. He liked the town in a crazy sort of way. And only the sheriff wore a gun.

  This day—it was a Tuesday—there was an undercurrent of expectation in the streets when he came down from his room. “What’s up, Sue?” he asked her, taking in the bright dotted shirt and tight pants that were her working clothes.

  “Stranger headin’ this way across the desert,” she told him, as excited as the rest seemed to be. “He’s got a wagon and everythin’!”

  Strangers didn’t come to Twisted River very often. In fact, this was the first one Ben could remember in the six months since he himself had ridden into town. He went out to the street in time to see a big wagon drawn by two horses just turning into town. The people had already surrounded it on all sides, crowding quietly close, and even from where he stood Ben could read the large garish sign which must have been the focus of interest at that moment:

  Doc Robin, The Flying Man!

  Ben had seen quacks and medicine men all over the West, but at first sight this seemed something quite different. The man himself was tall and white-haired, though with a youngish face that made one suspect the hair. He spoke in a booming voice that carried from one end of the street to the other.

  “Gather round, gather round! Doc Robin, the Flying Man, has come to town to thrill and amaze you.” And they gathered.

  Ben stayed on the porch of the hotel, where he had a perfect view of the white-haired man as he went into his well-rehearsed speech. “Folks, I come to your fair town bearing the greatest invention the world has ever seen, an invention that at this moment is sweeping the East and Midwest. No longer need man be grounded to the earth like the snakes and lizards—now he can fly, like the eagles and the hawks, fly like he was meant to! Here,” and he tugged at a cord that released a whole side of the wagon’s canvas covering, “here you can feast your eyes upon it! ”

  Ben feasted, and the thing he saw was a contraption like a giant set of wings, or rather a double set—one above the other. They had a span of perhaps fifteen feet, with a metal bar in the center of the lower pair, where a man apparently could hang on. “You mean those things fly?” someone shouted from the crowd. Ben recognized Frank McCoen from the livery stable. “Maybe you can put some on my horses!”

  But Doc Robin was apparently used to the heckling. Already he was passing out handbills among the crowd. Ben took one and saw at once that it was indeed an impressive thing. There were pictures—actual photographs—of a man flying through the air supported only by the double pair of wings. And there were articles from a number of big Eastern papers, including the New York Times. The man in the pictures was a German named Otto Lilienthal, who’d made more than a thousand successful glides with a series of “hanging gliders” which he’d built.

  “Yes, my friends,” Doc Robin was saying again. “You see it, but you still doubt. I recognize the doubt in your faces. Well, tom
orrow morning on that hill yonder I’m going to show it to you in the flesh. I’m going to fly off the hill with this set of wings! And when I land, when you’re all convinced that man at last can fly with the birds, I’m going to give each and every one of you an opportunity to place your orders for these wings. Laugh, laugh now if you want—you won’t be laughing tomorrow. Why, right now these things are so popular back in New York that the police are considering special traffic regulations. The people are gliding right off the buildings—I’ve seen it myself!”

  He went on like that for the better part of an hour, and Ben could see he was beginning to convince even the more doubting members of the crowd. If nothing else, he would have a big turnout in the morning. Through it all, Ben noticed Sheriff Hanson leaning against the bank building across the street, taking it all in, the badge and the gun at his side occasionally catching the sunlight’s glint when he moved. Apparently he was as interested as anyone else, and not at all about to run Doc Robin and his wagon out of town.

  After a time Ben grew bored and drifted away, down toward the stream now almost dried to death at the end of the scorching summer. There’d be no fish to catch for quite some time . . .

  He ate supper at the hotel with Sue, as he’d been doing most every night for weeks. Some nights they’d saddle up their horses and ride out across the desert for a few miles, where there was nothing but the stars. Tonight, though, he felt unaccountably restless, as if somehow the coming of Doc Robin had disturbed the peaceful equilibrium he’d been so long building.

  “No ride tonight, Ben?” she asked.

  “No. Little sleepy. Guess I’m getting old.”

  “At thirty-seven? I never heard you say that before.”

  “Sometimes I think I should go East, Sue. Maybe to New York.”

  “Where the men fly off the buildings?”

  He laughed and started to roll a cigarette. “I doubt that, somehow. But . . .”

  “There he is!” she whispered suddenly. “He’s coming toward our table!”

  And indeed it was Doc Robin, tall and snow-haired, moving between the tables toward them. “Ah,” he said when he’d reached their side, “do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Ben Snow?”

  “Don’t know as it’s much honor, but I’m Ben Snow all right. What can I do for you, Doc?”

  “A slight business matter. Could the charming young lady excuse us?”

  “Sure,” Sue said, slipping out of her chair. “I’ll be over at Frank’s stable with the horses, Ben, if you change your mind about that ride.” She smiled a bit uncertainly at Doc Robin and was gone.

  “What’s this all about?” Ben asked.

  “Could we talk somewheres private—maybe up in your room?”

  “I guess so.” Ben led the way upstairs, wondering what had prompted Robin to find out his name and where he was staying. “Here we are.”

  His room was hardly a place for entertaining, with a brass bed, wash bowl, lamp, chair, and a dull gray wallpaper broken only by a faded portrait of General Custer. But Doc Robin seemed not to mind. He motioned Ben to the only chair and sat down on the edge of the bed himself. “Ah! Fine. Now to business.”

  “What kind of business?” Ben asked suspiciously.

  “Let me start by saying I know who you really are.”

  Ben felt the old terror rising inside him. Not again, God. Not again. “I’m Ben Snow. Nobody else.”

  Doc Robin smiled. “Don’t try to fool me. I was an old friend of General Lew Wallace. Used to have dinner with him. Fought with him in the Civil War. Don’t look fifty, do I? Except for the hair, but that’s good for business.”

  Ben cut in on the rambling with, “Only Lew Wallace I know of is the man who wrote that book, Ben Hur. And I never met him.”

  “Maybe you didn’t meet him in person, but that’s the man I’m talking about just the same. Governor of the New Mexico territory he was, back in ’79 and ’80 when Billy the Kid was shootin’ up the place. He was working on his book then, I guess. I was out there to visit him, and I heard all about Billy the Kid.”

  “Then you heard he was killed by a sheriff in ’81.”

  “Maybe Lew Wallace and the rest of the lawmen thought he was killed, but there’s those of us who know better,” Robin said slyly. “There’s those of us who know he’s been alive all these years, traveling around the west—using the name of Ben Snow.”

  “Get out, Robin. I don’t like your sort of business.”

  “But it is business, Billy—Ben—and there’s money in it for you. I want to hire your gun for tomorrow, for a hundred dollars.”

  “Oh?” Ben settled back in his chair. This was beginning to sound interesting. “Who do I have to kill?”

  “Probably no one. That’s why it’s so damned easy. After I make my flight in the morning I take orders for these things. A hundred dollars apiece—ten bucks now and the rest when I deliver ’em. In a town this size, full of gold-mine money and all, I’ll probably sell close to a hundred sets of wings.

  That’s a thousand dollars all told cash in the hand. You get a hundred of it for makin’ sure nothing happens to me.”

  “Like what? Like Sheriff Hanson arresting you?”

  Doc Robin smiled. “We understand each other. That, among other things. Someone might try to take the money away from me, in one way or another.”

  Ben sighed, feeling tired. “You’re nothing but a confidence man. You have no intention of delivering wings to these people. You’ll take their ten dollars each, all right, but they’ll never see you again. You want me to cover you while you slip out of town tomorrow night.”

  “And you’ll do it, Billy.”

  “Like hell I will! And the name is still Ben. Do your own shooting!”

  “I’m too old to gunplay. Bad eyes. Flying that thing is dangerous enough.”

  “If you can really fly with it, why not really sell them? Some people are crazy enough to buy them. Why turn it into a confidence game?”

  Doc Robin looked a bit sad at this. “There are complications. For one thing, the German Lilienthal was killed last month, flying one of the things. But I didn’t bring those clippings along.”

  “He was killed and you’re still going out there and glide off a cliff in the morning!” The man amazed Ben more with every statement.

  “A thousand dollars is mighty good pay for two days’ work. It’s well worth the risk. I’ve hit three towns in the last two weeks, and I got the next one all picked out. Going to work my way to California and retire on a fortune. Beautiful country out there.”

  “Why did you pick this place?”

  “Because of the gold mine. The folks must have money. I cleaned up in Texas, in the cattle country. Hundred twenty-two orders in one place.”

  “There’s not much money here. Take my word for it and clear out tonight. I’m not handling a gun for you. I don’t even have a gun anymore.”

  Doc Robin shrugged. “Guess I’ll have to get someone else then. The peace of mind’s worth the hundred it costs me. Never did like gunplay.”

  “What if I tell the folks you’re a swindler?”

  The white-haired man smiled. “Then I tell ’em you’re Billy the Kid. Wouldn’t like that, would you?” He slid off the bed and picked up his hat.

  “See you in the morning?”

  “If I don’t sleep late.”

  Doc Robin smiled and went out. After a moment Ben latched the door and unhitched one of his saddlebags. He came up with a dull bronzed Derringer he hadn’t loaded in months. It only took two .45 slugs, but that would be enough. He wasn’t about to start guarding swindlers from the law, but he might need the weapon for other purposes now . . .

  The morning was sunny, with a bit of a breeze from the direction of the western hills. By the time Ben reached the street he could see that most of the town was already up there, waiting to see the Flying Man. Sue had waited for him and they walked up together, along with Jethro Aarons from the bank. Sheriff Hanson was already on the scene, standing with his foot on a convenient rock, seeing everything and everybody. And Frank McCoen, come

  perhaps to see the twilight of his beloved horses in the glory of this new flying device. And Sue’s brother Tommy, an unfriendly youth no doubt hoping to see some sort of tragedy. They all came, and gathered close around Doc Robin and his remarkable wings.