Episode 72

Eagle Flat

Toward the end of his second day out on the llano, Cal Spade saw the town come into sight.

Though Eagle Flat wasn’t much of a town.

More like, it was an untidy collection of buildings, tents and shacks strung out along the El Paso stretch of the Texas & Pacific line. There was the long station house and platform with a water tower off on a siding. A telegraph office sat tucked in by the station. Set back from that was a dirt street lined with a dry goods, a saloon, dollar store, livery and other businesses including an assay office and a leatherworker. Blooming like weeds all around the commercial street were cabins, shacks and tents.

It was an end of track town that sprung up when the rails were being laid and left to dry up and blow away once the navvies moved on laying rails west. The discovery of silver down in the Chisos gave the town a second lease on life. As it appeared now, it was hard to tell whether Eagle Flat was laying down to die or fixing to get up and howl.

Symbolic of this was the town’s largest structure, a vast stack of timbers cut for ties that lay south of the track grading. Set by it was a whole forest of poles for stringing wire and a whole acre of iron rails piled atop one another to the height of a man.

The stores for a proposed new siding, that was meant for a spur to drive deeper into the Big Bend country, had been there as long as Cal had been riding for the railroad and probably longer. The massive pyramid of ties was beginning to sag on one end as the wood at the bottom of the pile had turned black with rot. The iron rails were deep orange with a powdery coat of rust. Only the telegraph poles remained unchanged as they’d been painted with creosote now furred with the carcasses of the flies incautious enough to land on the sticky coating.

Cal hitched his gelding to an iron bollard set outside the telegraph office and tied up Jake’s mare alongside. He hoped that Mr. Withers would be absent from the office. He’d prepared a story to explain Jake’s absence but was not anxious to share it with the officious little man who was his boss. As he suspected, his hopes were in vain as Withers was at his station inside the telegraph office.

The man raised his head from the week-old newspaper he had spread on his desk to blink through thick lenses at Cal. Behind a half wall at his back there was a cot and washstand. Withers lived here and was seldom out of hearing of the telegraph sounder. He even had his meals brought in and, when a tooth went rotten, he called in a dentist to pull a molar that had gone black right here in this room. Trips out to the station’s privy were the only times anyone in Eagle Flat had seen him in the sunlight.

“You have something to tell me?” Withers said. His tone was impatient and condescending. For a small man who was near-blind and fat around the middle, Withers spoke with an unquestioned authority. As the sole representative of the railroad in the county, he drew a lot of water.

“Jake took a bad fall. Stove his head in on a rock. I buried him up near the Horsehead,” Cal said, his hat gripped in his hands.

“Well, too bad for Jake,” Withers sniffed. “I meant did you have any luck running off those Polacks?”

“Sure. Sure. They’re pulling up stakes and moving on,” Cal said, relieved at the other man’s total disinterest in the fate of his former partner. “They were Bohunks, I think.”

“I don’t care if they were Musselmen on a pilgrimage. How certain are you that they’ll be departing?”

“I’ll be up that way again on my rounds in a few weeks. If they’re still squatting, I’ll take care of it.”

“Kill a few. Unless you already have. In that case kill a few more. Hire on a few men to help if you need to.”

“I can handle it. Though I’d appreciate if you’d take on a new partner for me. This ain’t no country for a man to be riding alone.”

“Feel free to recruit another gun. You have to associate with them not me. I trust you’d choose a man suited for the task.”

“About that,” Cal began. “Jake has pay coming and I know he has kin ’round Odessa parts. Only seems right they get what he had coming.”

“I’ll look into it,” Withers said, returning his gaze to his paper.

Cal knew for damn sure that the money set aside for Jake would go into the pocket of the bespectacled little son of a bitch but said nothing more on the subject.

“There anything else you need from me, Mr. Withers?” Cal said standing in the open doorway.

“Only to get back on your rounds once you’ve hired someone.” Withers kept reading his paper, fingers pressed against the page to mark his place.

“I will do that, sir,” Cal said. To himself he thought, not till I’ve had a meal, a drink and a night on a real bed.

He led the horses to the livery where they’d get the rest they earned while he kicked back a while.

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