The Lawless Read online

  The Lawless

  The Kent Family Chronicles (Book Seven)

  John Jakes

  Contents

  Introduction: Answering the #1 Question

  The Kent Family

  Prologue The Dream and the Gun

  Book One: Matthew’s Mistress

  Chapter I “A Dog’s Profession”

  Chapter II The Prussian

  Chapter III Reunion

  Chapter IV Dolly’s Secret

  Chapter V Strelnik’s Flight

  Chapter VI In the Studio of the Onion

  Chapter VII Someone Watching

  Chapter VIII The Callers

  Chapter IX Colonel Lepp Insists

  Chapter X Shadow of Death

  Chapter XI The Hidden Room

  Chapter XII Sanctuary

  Chapter XIII On the Chelsea Embankment

  Chapter XIV Dolly’s Gift

  Interlude “And Thou Shalt Smite the Midianites as One Man”

  Book Two: Gideon’s Cause

  Chapter I Night Attack

  Chapter II Breakage

  Chapter III Tinderbox

  Chapter IV Julia at Home

  Chapter V “The Lucy Stone Brothel, West”

  Chapter VI Invasion at Ericsson’s

  Chapter VII Lucifer’s Match

  Chapter VIII Into the Inferno

  Chapter IX Guilt

  Chapter X Uninvited Guest

  Chapter XI Decision in the Rain

  Interlude A Shooting on Texas Street

  Book Three: Margaret’s Wrath

  Chapter I Molly

  Chapter II On Newspaper Row

  Chapter III A Hard Taskmaster

  Chapter IV The Hearts of Three Women

  Chapter V Tompkins Square

  Chapter VI In Boston

  Chapter VII Among the Goldhunters

  Chapter VIII Death in Deadwood

  Chapter IX House of Anger

  Chapter X Free Spirits

  Chapter XI The Man in Machinery Hall

  Chapter XII Vision of America

  Chapter XIII House of Hurt

  Chapter XIV At the Booth Association

  Chapter XV The Birthday

  Chapter XVI House of Madness

  Chapter XVII Voyager

  Interlude Summer Lightning

  Book Four: Eleanor’s Way

  Chapter I 100 Years

  Chapter II Imprisoned

  Chapter III The Tommer

  Chapter IV “Hell with the Lid Off”

  Chapter V The Punishers

  Chapter VI Hatred

  Chapter VII Call to Forgiveness

  Chapter VIII Call to Courage

  Chapter IX From out of the Fire

  Chapter X Two Farewells

  Chapter XI Sky Full of Stars

  Chapter XII Julia’s Fate

  Chapter XIII The Law and the Lawless

  A Biography of John Jakes

  Introduction:

  Answering the #1 Question

  IN Q & A SESSIONS, WRITERS are repeatedly asked one question above all others: “Where do you get your ideas?” In the case of The Lawless, the seventh novel about the Kent family, I can confidently point to several sources.

  I’ve said many times before that I’ve always relished the history of the American West. It has a place in the novel, in the sequences dealing with Jeremiah’s unhappy descent into a life of outlawry.

  My admiration for the French Impressionists is long-standing and that, too, is reflected in the book’s opening section, which finds Matthew Kent in Paris, hanging around with some of the young, and as yet unappreciated, painters who would profoundly influence modern art. Among them is Matt’s unruly friend Cézanne.

  Eleanor’s early career as an actress in a touring version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes from my lifelong love of the stage. These road company adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s blockbuster were called “Tom Shows,” and their performers “Tommers,” which I used for a chapter title. Tom Shows remained a staple of American theater well into the twentieth century.

  It’s possible that Gideon Kent became a labor organizer because, early in my life, my parents and I lived for a few years in Terre Haute, Indiana, under the long shadow of the legendary union organizer and socialist Eugene Debs. At the time I had no interest in Debs; besides, my parents, along with most of Terre Haute, dismissed him as a radical who didn’t fit in as a proper citizen of Indiana. Ironically, Debs’s home has become a tourist attraction, much as sites in Montgomery, Alabama, connected with the once-reviled Martin Luther King are now embraced by the local chamber of commerce and promoted as important places to visit.

  But the most specific answer to the question about ideas can be found in a dark room in a building at the south end of Chicago’s Lincoln Park. I visited the room many times as a youngster, gazing with awe and fascination at the scenes re-created in miniature behind glass windows: eight of them, as I remember.

  The place is the Chicago Historical Society, one of the nation’s finest museums and research facilities. The dark room at the CHS contained a series of dioramas, or models, depicting Chicago at various times in its past. The diorama that drew my interest most often showed the city, under a flickering red sky, being devoured by the Great Fire of 1871. Somehow that scene buried itself in my imagination, to be recalled and used at some unknown moment in the future. This turned out to be the sequence in The Lawless that finds Gideon trapped in, and trying to escape from, the Great Fire.

  When I started this new introduction, I asked the Chicago Historical Society whether the dioramas still exist. Lesley Martin of the CHS Research Center assured me that they do and in fact were recently featured in a photo piece in the Chicago Tribune. I was delighted to hear that not everything I knew and loved as a kid has been washed away by contemporary culture.

  Thus, for this second-to-last volume of The Kent Family Chronicles, I can, for a change, answer the question about the springboard for ideas. I wish it were that easy for every book I’ve written.

  The Lawless remains one of my favorite novels in the series, because it encompasses so many aspects of history that have always fascinated me, not the least of them that harrowing image of Chicago burning. I thank my friends at New American Library for returning this and all the other volumes in the Kent saga to new life in these excellent new editions.

  —John Jakes

  Hilton Head Island,

  South Carolina

  “Pistols are almost as numerous as men. It is no longer thought to be an affair of any importance to take the life of a fellow being.”

  October 13, 1868:

  Nathan A. Baker,

  editorializing in the Cheyenne Leader.

  “What is the chief end of man?—to get rich. In what way?—dishonestly if we can; honestly, if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock—father, son, and the ghost of same—three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme …”

  September 27, 1781:

  “The Revised Catechism”

  by Samuel Clemens,

  published in the New York Tribune.

  Prologue

  The Dream and the Gun

  i

  THEY HUNTED BUFFALO and lived in the open, away from the settled places. That sort of life tended to keep a man fit. But sometimes even the most robust constitution couldn’t withstand foul weather. So it proved with Jeremiah Kent in April of 1869.

  Three days of exposure to fierce wind and pelting rain left him sneezing. Two days after that, he and his companion made camp in a hickory grove. Jeremiah rolled up in his blankets and surrendered to fever. Kola, the Oglala Sioux with whom he’d traveled since early ’66, kept watch.

  After sleep
ing almost continuously for forty-eight hours, Jeremiah woke late at night. He saw Kola squatting on the other side of the buffalo chip fire, a dour look on his handsome face. Between Jeremiah and the Indian lay the cards of an uncompleted patience game Kola had started to pass the time. Over the past couple of years, whenever they’d had nothing else to do, Jeremiah had tried to teach his friend all the card games he knew. The Indian liked cards and had learned to shuffle and deal almost as fast and expertly as his mentor.

  Jeremiah struggled to rise on one elbow. The fever still gripped him, distorting sounds: the rustle of new leaves in the spring breeze; the purl of water out of a limestone formation behind the grove; the occasional stamp or snort of one of their long-legged calico ponies. From his friend’s expression, Jeremiah knew something bad had happened. He licked the inside of his mouth. The fever made his teeth feel huge, his head gigantic. “You ought to sleep once in a while,” he said.

  “The sickness has not passed. I will keep watch.”

  “That all you’re fretting about, the sickness?”

  The Sioux glanced into the wind-shimmered flame.

  “Something’s sticking in your craw. What is it?”

  The Sioux was three years older than Jeremiah, and his true kola, his sworn friend for a lifetime. Jeremiah had found the Indian on the prairie, nearly beaten to death by one of his own tribe; the beating was punishment for adultery. He’d cared for the Indian until he recovered, as Kola was caring for him now.

  The young man’s bleary stare fixed on the Indian, prodding. “Come on. What?”

  Kola sighed. “I did sleep a little tonight. While I slept, a vision came.”

  The various branches of the Sioux tribe put great stock in visions. Clearly Kola’s had upset him. Jeremiah tried to put him at ease with a laugh and a wave. “Listen, I’m the one with the fever and the dreams.”

  “Dreams of what?” Kola asked instantly. Jeremiah’s grin widened. “Women. Plump women.”

  Kola grunted. “Better dreams than mine. I dreamed a dark thing.”

  “Tell me.”

  Looking at him with eyes that brimmed with misery, Kola said, “I dreamed I saw you with your guns again. I saw the guns in your hands.”

  Anger and fear started Jeremiah shivering. Almost without thought, he glanced into the dark where the ponies were tethered. His revolvers were wrapped in oilskin in one of his saddlebags. The same bag carried the last of the money stolen in the ill-conceived payroll train robbery up near North Platte over a year ago. He’d been going by the name Joseph Kingston then.

  “Well, it must be a false vision this time. I packed the guns away last winter.”

  I killed eight men and one woman before I came to see that always settling things with the guns was a sickness. A sickness that would whip me one day if I couldn’t whip it first.

  The faces of the dead whirled through his mind, each vivid and never to be forgotten. Some were faces from the Georgia plantation owned by the man who had been his commanding officer. Before Lieutenant Colonel Rose had died outside Atlanta, he’d begged the young Confederate soldier to leave the beaten army—desert—in order to be of some real use in the last days of the war. He’d implored Jeremiah to head straight for the plantation named Rosewood and help protect it and the colonel’s family from Sherman’s horde.

  Jeremiah had done so. Or tried. At Rosewood, one by one, he’d killed Skimmerhorn, a Yankee forager. Price, a troublemaking ex-slave. And Serena, his commanding officer’s daughter. Killing her had given him the greatest pleasure. Hurt him the most, too. Serena had lied to him. Said she loved him when all she really cared about was the Kent money he’d told her about. The money he stood to inherit one day if he went back home, which was impossible after the killings at Rosewood. He fled west.

  Some of the faces of the dead were from Fort Worth. A monte dealer who’d tried to cheat him. A law officer who’d tried to arrest him after he used his guns to give the dealer his comeuppance.

  There were faces from his prairie wanderings. The busted-luck cattleman, Major Cutright. The major’s hired hand, Darlington. A third belonged to a member of Cutright’s party whom Jeremiah had foolishly spared and released after the major tried to steal a load of freshly shot buffalo. Jeremiah could still see the terrified, furious face of the boy named Timothy who’d promised to remember him. Remember the deaths. Find him one day and repay him.

  Finally there were faces from the Union Pacific railhead where he and Kola had sold the buffalo meat. A sharp named Butt Brown and his dim-witted helper. Those two and all the rest were dishonorable people, deserving death.

  But in the end, giving them what they deserved created too many problems. So last year he’d set about overcoming his desire to mete out punishment. He’d taught himself not to need the kind of joy that accompanied killing.

  With effort he went on. “Why, hell, I haven’t so much as threatened anybody with a gun since we held up the U.P. special in Nebraska and then agreed that kind of thing was too damn dangerous.”

  Slowly, Kola nodded. “I hear all you say. Nevertheless, I dreamed I saw you with the guns.”

  “That’s over!” A bitter smile. “Sometimes I think I’m the only one who believes it. My mother used to talk about a crazy streak in the family. Inherited from someone way back, a grandmother, maybe. Fletcher blood was what she called it. The woman’s name was Fletcher. My mother never came right out and said she saw the streak in me. But I know she did. Else why would she have brought it up? I guess what I did at the end of the war and right afterward proves she was right. But I’ve licked it, Kola. I may have it, but it isn’t going to push me where I don’t want to go.”

  He sounded more confident than he felt. Sometimes his mother’s words stole into his thoughts and brought a sad conviction that he was a prisoner of something inescapable. He grew vehement again.

  “I’m changed for good. The other way makes a man scared all the time. Scared of arrest, scared of every stranger he meets, scared of answering when somebody says an ordinary hello—”

  Kola averted his eyes. That angered Jeremiah all the more. “What the hell’s wrong now? You don’t believe me either?”

  “I want to believe you with the fullness of my heart, so you will be free of the hurt those kil—the past has brought you. But—”

  “Come on. Say it!”

  Kola swallowed, then whispered, “In the dream I also heard a voice.”

  Jeremiah’s spine twitched. “One of the holy voices?”

  “Yes, wakan, holy. When I woke, I was very careful to recall everything it said.” Kola’s eyes focused on the dark beyond the fire and his voice took on a singsong quality. “It said to me, once you take up the guns again, you will never put them down. There will be no end to the killing. The guns will bring great luster to your name for a while, but then it will vanish as swiftly as the light of a winter afternoon. Finally the power of the guns will fade and you will be killed by”—bleak eyes found Jeremiah’s—“one of your own.”

  “One of—” He gaped, torn between fright and an urge to guffaw. “You mean, my family?”

  Kola’s tone was normal again. “I suppose. I only heard the voice say exactly what I told you. There is no more.”

  Jeremiah wiped his perspiring forehead. “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. ’Specially the last part. It couldn’t happen! My mother’s gone and the rest of my family think I’m dead. The only person who knows Jeremiah Kent is still alive is my father’s friend Boyle, the Irishman we ran into at the railhead in sixty-six. But he swore never to say a word about meeting me. I couldn’t stand to have my father or brothers know the things I’ve—well, I don’t plan to look any of them up. Ever! So it couldn’t happen.”

  Kola ran a finger through the dirt beside the fire. “I hope that is true. I cannot say whether it is. Nothing was explained to me in the vision.”

  “Then it’s a stupid vision! You hear? Stupid!”

  The strident, fever-dry voic
e hurt the Sioux, who stared down at the cracked toes of his boots.

  Jeremiah’s exertions had cost him too much energy. He fell back, dizzy and breathing hard. His voice took on a rambling, sleepy quality.

  “I’m through with the guns. People hunt you, put your name up on posters. You’ve seen those, Kola. I’m all through with that kind of life. It”—he coughed—“it costs too much.”

  And yet, a taunting inner voice persisted, there is that indescribable moment when the hand is fused to the gun and the gun becomes part of you, when the bowel-loosening fright spreads in the eyes of the one facing the gun and you feel so powerful—

  “No,” he said, “I’m through.”

  Motionless, Kola contemplated the fire.

  Jeremiah’s eyes closed. He welcomed the fluffy black of fever-induced drowsiness. It saved him from thinking about his friend’s words. He was set on a different course, for good. No matter how poor the season or how meager the profits at the end of it, hunting buffalo was preferable to running and wondering who was pursuing.

  “Dream,” he mumbled, slipping into unconsciousness. “Dream—was wrong.”

  He didn’t slip away fast enough. He heard Kola whisper with unmistakable doubt, “Perhaps. Perhaps.”

  ii

  In another twenty-four hours, the fever still lay on him. Kola woke him gently. A red sunset light was spearing down, fragmenting in the shade of the grove.

  Touching his shoulder, Kola said, “This has lasted too long. You cannot eat, everything comes up. I cannot help you. I must find someone who can.”

  So dizzy he could barely fight his eyes open, Jeremiah said, “No, that’s not safe.”

  Kola acted as if he hadn’t heard. “There is a town nearby. I will find a man who practices white medicine and bring him.”

  At that moment Jeremiah felt a surge of emotion—love or something very close to it. He was startled to find he was still capable of feeling affection of the kind he’d once felt for his older brothers. Kola was risking much on his behalf. The other man well knew the dangers of riding into a white settlement, one scruffy Indian in white man’s clothing. It was especially dangerous in this part of Kansas, which had been plagued by raiding Cheyenne and Arapahoe and Kiowa the preceding year.