The Saga of Henry Starr Read online

  Also by Robert J. Conley

  THE ACTOR

  BACK TO MALACHI

  KILLING TIME

  THE WITCH OF GOINGSNAKE AND OTHER STORIES

  WILDER & WILDER

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A Double D Western Book

  Published by Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

  Double D, Doubleday,

  and the portrayal of the two D’s

  are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82231-4

  Copyright © 1989 by Robert J. Conley

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  For Dave West and Frank Breneisen

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Author

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The Saga of Henry Starr is a novel. It is, however, based on the actual life of Henry Starr. In fact, Henry Starr’s own book, Thrilling Events, was a primary source for this narrative. In The Saga of Henry Starr, where controversy exists (as in the disappearance of Kid Wilson), I have simply taken a position—one that suits my purposes as a novelist. I have taken other liberties, leaving out certain historical personages, renaming others. These kinds of choices are, after all, part of the selection process that is a major prerogative of writers of fiction.

  1

  The young cowboy rode hard, lashing at the big sorrel mare to urge her on. They splashed through freshets and churned up the soggy prairie ground, but in spite of his efforts, he arrived at the swollen stream too late to help. The others there before him had already managed to urge the last frightened cow back across through the swift, cold water to the proper side. He saw the cold, wet cows, smelled their wet hair, and heard them bawling against the background noise of the roaring water and the cursing of the cowboys. He pulled his panting, sweating mount to a halt in the midst of the other cowboys and had no more than dismounted when he felt himself jerked forward and off-balance by the big, burly hands of Clint Chambers.

  “Damn you, Starr,” said the big man, “that’s my horse you’re riding.”

  Henry Starr wrenched Chambers’ hands loose from his shirtfront and backed off a couple of steps, slipping in the wet ground and regaining his balance. He tried to think of an appropriate response, but Chambers didn’t give him time to formulate it.

  “You damn near rode him to death,” Chambers continued. “Look at him.”

  “Mr. Roberts told me to get down here quick,” said Henry. “When the boss says to move fast, I move, and I don’t care whose horse I kill.”

  “Yeah, well, I notice that you didn’t get down here quick enough to do any work,” said Chambers, giving Henry a rough shove, “you damned lazy redskin.”

  Henry felt the anger suddenly boil up inside him even as he staggered backward from the shove, again sliding in the mud beneath his feet. He was embarrassed. The others were watching. As Henry caught his balance and doubled up his fists to retaliate, a third cowboy stepped in front of him, grabbing him by the shoulders.

  “Hold on, Henry,” he said.

  “I didn’t start this,” said Henry. “He did.”

  Two others took hold of Chambers’ arms and held him back.

  “Turn me loose,” shouted the big man. “By God, I’ll teach him a lesson.”

  “Just calm down,” said the cowboy who was holding Henry. “We still got work to do. If you two got a grudge, settle it later. Come on. Mount up.” Henry shrugged and turned toward the horse he had ridden up on.

  “No you don’t,” said Chambers. “Not on my horse.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Henry, and he turned away from Chambers’ horse. Chambers climbed quickly into the saddle and started riding toward the ranch house. Henry thought that for a man who had just wanted to fight him for having ridden his horse too hard, Chambers was sure moving out fast. The hypocrite, he thought.

  “Here,” said the calm cowboy, handing Henry the reins to another mount. “This is the one he rode out on.”

  “Thanks.”

  All during the ride back to the ranch house, Henry seethed. He was burning inside. He was seventeen years old and full of the pride of youth, and he was an Indian working in the midst of a crew of white men. He had been pushed and yelled at in front of other men. He had been made to look foolish, slipping and sliding in the mud. He had been chastised for having done something he felt he had every right to do—more than that, something that he was, in fact, obligated by his employer to do. The back of his neck burned from the humiliation. He had left home because his white stepfather treated him, he felt—no, he was certain—unfairly—treated him like a snot-nosed kid with no sense and no rights. He could recall the many times C.N. had told him over and again to wash his neck even though he had just done so. C.N. thought that his brown skin was dirty. Well, he had gone out on his own, and he would not be treated that way again. He did miss his mother, but then, well, she just shouldn’t have married that white trash, C. N. Walker.

  Back at the ranch house, Henry went inside to talk to the boss. He found Roberts in his office, sitting behind the big desk.

  “You get those cows turned back, Henry?”

  “Yeah,” said Henry, shuffling his feet and looking down at the floor and suddenly wishing that he had done a better job of cleaning the mud off his boots before coming in to see the boss. “Well, really, the other boys had it done by the time I got there, but that’s not what I came to talk about.”

  Roberts looked up from his paperwork.

  “What is it, Henry?” he said.

  “I’m quitting.”

  “You’re quitting? What for? Haven’t I been fair to you?”

  “You’ve been more than fair, Mr. Roberts. I’ve got nothing against you.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Henry told Roberts about the incident with Chambers and his horse. Roberts took a deep breath and leaned back in his big office chair with a creak. He nodded knowingly.

  “I already heard about that,” he said. “Chambers beat you in here and told me all about it. His side of the story, of course. I’ll tell you what I told him. He was wrong. You were in the right. When a man hires on with me, he hires on his horse, too. I sent you to do a job, and that horse was availabl
e. You don’t have to quit on account of that.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Roberts,” said Henry, “but I guess I’ll be moving on anyhow.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  Henry just looked at the floor, so Roberts reached into a drawer of the desk and pulled out a cashbox. He counted out some money onto the desk.

  “You’ve been a good hand,” he said, “but if you’ve made up your mind, I won’t try to change it for you. Here’s what I owe you.”

  Henry took the money and shoved it into his pocket.

  “Thanks, Mr. Roberts,” he said.

  “If you ever want a job back here again,” said Roberts, “it’s yours. And if you need a reference from me for a job somewhere else, I’ll give you a damn good one. You tell them that.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Henry. “Be seeing you.”

  He turned and walked out of the house and soon found himself riding aimlessly across the prairie. He was fantasizing a finish to the argument with Chambers—one in which he thrashed the bully with his fists. Gradually the anger subsided, and Henry began to marvel at the extent of the open prairie. He was still in the Cherokee Nation (though people were beginning to refer to it collectively with its neighboring Nations as “Indian Territory”), but he was as far north as he had ever been in his short life. He had spent nearly all of his seventeen years in the thickly wooded hill country around Fort Gibson. Henry’s memories of Fort Gibson were emotionally mixed. The earliest remembrances, from the days when his father, George, known as “Hop,” was still alive, were pleasant, but they had been far too few. Henry’s mother had remarried after the death of Hop Starr, and Henry’s new stepfather was C. N. Walker, a white man. Henry hadn’t liked C.N. from the beginning, and when C.N. had sold Henry’s horse and saddle, bought and paid for with Henry’s own money, money he had earned for himself, the young man had left home for good. He had wandered north, an incredible eighty-some-odd miles away from home, and found a job on the Roberts Ranch.

  Roberts, too, was a white man, Henry mused. Things were quickly changing in the Cherokee Nation. He could remember a time when whites had been few and far between, but the Nation’s government had allowed more and more renters to move in, and white men married Cherokee women for land rights in the Cherokee Nation. In addition, droves of whites had simply wandered into the Nation and squatted. Roberts was decent enough, but it seemed to Henry that C. N. Walker and Clint Chambers were more representative of the race. He longed for the good old days, which, of course, were not much more than ten years behind him, and then an ironic realization surfaced in his brain.

  He had thought that he was riding aimlessly across the prairie, but, in fact, his path was leading directly to the home of the Morrisons—Mr. and Mrs. Morrison and their daughter, Mae. The Morrisons were renters. Mae was Henry’s sweetheart. He was feeling bad, and he wanted to see her, and they were white.

  2

  Pretty, young Mae Morrison was in the yard outside her parents’ rented cabin, turning the crank at the well to draw up a bucket of water. She was barefoot, and the flour-sack dress she wore clung to her sweating flesh. Her brown hair was blowing in the wind. Some errant strands stuck to her face. She turned the crank almost with ease. She was not a frail girl. Her skin was tanned—almost, Henry Starr thought as he rode up into the yard, as dark as his own. As the horse and rider approached, kicking up puffs of dust from the flat prairie, dry already under the hot sun in spite of the recent heavy rains, Mae looked up and recognized Henry. She hauled the bucket on up out of the well and unhooked it from the rope.

  “Henry,” she said, her voice betraying a certain amount of surprise, “what are you doing here?”

  Henry dismounted and let the reins trail in the dust. He noticed a few puddles of water standing around here and there, witnesses to the heavy rains in an otherwise dry setting. He took a step or two toward Mae, his thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trousers, his head ducked, eyes on the toes of his well-worn boots. He didn’t know what he was doing there, but he didn’t really want to tell her that. He was there because he was drawn to her. He had never had a sweetheart before. And she was a lovely one, he thought. He was there because he really had no other place to go. He was there because he had found himself traveling in that direction without having given it any particular thought.

  “Oh,” he said, “I just thought I’d stop by and see if there’s anything I could give you a hand with.”

  Mae brushed some of the wild strands of hair away from her face with one hand, her other hand holding the bucket of water at arm’s length. Water dripped from the bucket, forming a small but spreading patch of mud at her feet. Her toes dug into the mud. The picture was not, Henry realized, what most folks would think of as especially ladylike and dainty, but to Henry it was beautiful. It was real. Mae belonged to the land, he thought. She fit her setting the way—well, the way Henry fit his saddle.

  “No,” she said, “I mean, why aren’t you at work?”

  Henry walked boldly to Mae and put his arms around her, pulling her toward him. As he started to kiss her, she turned her face away from his, and he kissed her cheek, tasting the salty perspiration. He savored the taste. It was the taste of Mae.

  “Henry,” she said, “shouldn’t you be at work?”

  Henry let go of Mae and reached for the water bucket, pulling it out of her grip.

  “Here,” he said, “let me tote this bucket for you.”

  “Will you answer my question?”

  Henry turned his back on Mae and started walking toward the house.

  “I quit that job,” he said.

  After Henry had taken the water into the house, a small log cabin, and had said hello to Mrs. Morrison, he and Mae walked out back and strolled between the rows of corn in the garden. The rains had not yet had a noticeable effect on the scrawny corn that Mr. Morrison was trying to raise. The stalks were only as high as Henry’s shoulders, and the husks had a sad, dry look. Henry held Mae’s hand in his. Their palms were both sweaty. He told her the story of Clint Chambers’ horse, and he told her how Mr. Roberts had not wanted him to quit. He told the whole story, being careful not to leave out any details, including how it all had made him feel.

  “But I quit anyway,” he said. “I just didn’t want to be around those people anymore.”

  They walked on some more in silence. As they came to the end of a corn row and rounded it to stroll down another, Mae broke the silence.

  “What will you do now?” she asked. “Go home?”

  Henry stopped walking. He turned loose of Mae’s hand and began to fumble with some drying corn tassels that were blowing in the wind with a rattling sound on a stalk there beside him.

  “I don’t have a home,” he said.

  “I mean your mother’s house,” said Mae.

  It was a few seconds before Henry answered.

  “When she married C.N.,” he said, “that place stopped being my home. She chose him. I didn’t. And I don’t have to live with him. I guess there might be a good stepfather somewhere, but I haven’t seen him. And if there is one, C. N. Walker is sure not it. He just married my mother for what he could get out of us.”

  Henry thought bitterly about his horse and saddle.

  “No,” he said. “I’m not going back there.”

  “What will you do then?” said Mae.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Henry. “I guess something will turn up. Don’t worry about it. Okay?”

  It was Mae’s turn to pause and think. She ambled along a few steps ahead of Henry, brushing the rough cornstalks with her hand. When she stopped and turned around to face him, she dug her bare feet into the dusty earth as if they were seeking moisture below the dry top layer of dirt. She looked at Henry, then reaching down the front of her homemade dress, she pulled out a string that was hanging around her neck. There was something on the end of the string, which she held tightly in her fist. She gave a sharp tug, breaking the string, then held the fist out toward Henry.r />
  “I have something for you,” she said.

  Henry walked toward her as she opened the fist to reveal a gold ring.

  “Will you wear it for me?”

  Henry took the ring from her sweaty palm and tried it on. It fit the little finger on his right hand.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ll wear it. Always.”

  Once again he reached out to take her in his arms, and this time, when he leaned forward to kiss her lips, she did not turn her face away. He was no longer thinking about Clint Chambers and his horse, about the humiliation of the confrontation in front of the other cowboys, about the loss of his job or about C. N. Walker. Mae felt good in his arms. Her lips felt good pressing onto his. He thought of nothing else. He felt just fine.

  Henry had been right not to worry about the job. It was only a few days later that he found himself sitting idly on a street in Nowata, a small town not far from the Roberts Ranch. He had found a chair on the wooden sidewalk of the main street of town, and he sat down in it to rest up from his footloose wandering and began whittling on a stick with his pocketknife. He had just gotten a fine, sharp point on the stick when a wagon drew up in the street there before him. The driver hauled back on the reins and set the brake as the dust rose around him. His clothes indicated to Henry that he was a prosperous man, and he appeared to be in his early thirties.

  “Morning,” he said.

  Henry looked up and saw that the man was talking to him.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “You’re Henry Starr, ain’t you?” asked the driver.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, my name’s Charles Todd. I’ve got a little ranch out here. I heard you quit Roberts. That right?”

  “That’s right,” said Henry. He quit whittling and looked at the man.

  “You looking for a job?” asked Todd.

  “Well, sir,” said Henry, pitching the stick aside and folding up his pocketknife, “I just might be.”

  And it had been as easy as that. Roberts had been better than his word. He had made the recommendation before Henry had asked for it, and after only a few short days of unemployment, Henry Starr found himself back at work cowboying again, still not too far from the rented cabin of the Morrisons. The world seemed all right to Henry. He had a job doing the kind of work that he enjoyed, being around the kind of people he could understand, and he had a sweetheart—the prettiest gal he could ever remember seeing anywhere. Life was just fine.