Sundown, p.1
Sundown, page 1
SUNDOWN
MICHAEL MURPHY
Michael Murphy
Sundown
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Murphy
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Published by Spines
ISBN: 979-8-89691-028-2
Sundown is dedicated to Skye Murphy, a fellow dreamer
who makes my journey a joyous one every day.
CHAPTER 1
Everyone in Sacramento knew Wyatt McCrea was the luckiest man on the West Coast. With the beautiful Sadie Hampton at his side, radiant as a summer's day, and a promising future laid before him like a well-rolled carpet, courtesy of her father's law firm, he should be as happy as Sadie. Yet, for reasons unfathomable, a shadow loomed overhead as if luck seemed to have skipped right over him and his unsuspecting fiancée.
As they strolled along the cobblestone walkway, Wyatt's tan Stetson did little to shade his face. The midday Sacramento sun beat down on his back, turning his denim jacket into a sweat-stained second skin.
When a horse-drawn carriage passed by, the well-dressed driver tipped his hat with the flourish of a gentleman. Sadie, the picture of grace as always, nodded, then slipped her arm in Wyatt’s and began to hum a soothing tune. The young woman, who had turned twenty a month earlier, appeared untouched by the town’s dusty heat or his doubts about what tomorrow might bring.
Sadie was a vision of beauty and style in a crisp white organdy dress and parasol the color of a robin’s egg. Her blonde hair shimmered in the bright sunlight.
Before he met Sadie, Wyatt was a former cowboy trying to fit into the cultured city and college life. Since their courtship blossomed, some of her elegance and sophistication had begun to rub off on him; at least, his friends thought so. He enjoyed the new experiences but couldn't shake the feeling of loss for the past he'd left behind.
Sadie squeezed his arm. “Where should we go for our honeymoon?"
"What? What was that?"
"Our honeymoon. Where would you like to go?" After he shrugged, she prattled on about favorite places she’d been around the world, destinations he’d only read about as a kid, reading adventure books by the flickering light of a coal oil lamp.
She laughed as she dodged a tumbleweed bouncing down the cobblestone road that led to her house. They passed neighbors on foot and horseback.
Sadie greeted them all, even those prominent rivals of her headstrong father.
They arrived at the Hampton Estate, as locals called the residence. The mansion, a testament to new money from California’s Gold Rush, stood three stories tall with arched windows that gleamed in the afternoon sun.
Although he'd been a frequent guest since their courtship began, the grounds loomed before him with devilish intimidation. A perfectly landscaped lawn, maintained by a team of gardeners, stretched out on both sides of a red brick path.
As they walked up the pathway, they passed fragrant flowerbeds with yellow and purple blossoms. An elephant topiary added a touch of whimsy to the otherwise formal grounds.
As if the estate didn't intimidate him enough, near the entryway stood a long silver and white sign that read, The Hamptons.
Mature leafy sycamore trees promised welcome shade. They paused for a moment. He was about to take the most important step of his young life. Although he adored Sadie, he wasn’t sure if he was ready to accept the extravagant lifestyle of the Hamptons family.
Sadie let go of his arm and ran a painted fingernail along his cheek. “What are you thinking about?”
“Our future.”
“I’m so glad. I can’t think of anything else. I’m going to make you so happy.”
Wyatt was perfectly happy with how things were, but he wanted to please Sadie, and who wouldn’t? However, when she talked weddings and marriage, he began to doubt whether he would ever fit in among the polished society of the West Coast. Did he even want to?
She straightened his black western bow tie and reminded him her father liked a firm handshake and a confident man who looked him straight in the eye.
Wyatt took Sadie’s hand and led her to the shade of a tree at the edge of the path. He swept an arm around her waist, drew her close, and kissed her soft lips. Now, he felt happy.
With a look of surprise, Sadie glanced at her house. “What if Daddy saw?”
A part of him wanted “the old man” to see. “Reckon he'd either fire me or question my intentions toward his daughter.”
“Reckon.” Sadie snickered. “You can take the boy out of the frontier, but you can’t take the frontier out of the boy.”
Wyatt reckoned her rich society friends would agree. He had plenty of friends who’d married after graduating from college, but he wasn’t certain he was ready to make such a change in his life.
Only yesterday, he was a kid chasing rabbits on his older brother’s ranch outside of Sundown, Wyoming. Now, he was about to ask for Sadie’s hand in marriage from her menacing father, his boss and one of the most influential men in Sacramento.
It all made sense after their relationship had changed and they’d become close, more than close. He remembered the night on a blanket beneath a full moon that shimmered off her smooth naked skin.
Since that night, Sadie began to talk about their future, a lavish ceremony with her father walking her down an aisle decorated with white roses. She described the house Sam Hampton would surely buy them as a wedding present.
Her breath tickled his neck. She ran a finger down the side of his face. “You’re not having second thoughts, are you?”
Was it that obvious? “Course not, but your father can be intimidating.”
She brushed a wisp of Wyatt’s hair from his fore‐ head and tucked it under his hat. “Daddy absolutely adores you. He’s told me so a dozen times.”
He doubted Sam Hampton used the word adore. Her father liked him as a young lawyer. As to the prospect of becoming his son-in-law, Wyatt still had his doubts. No one was good enough for the rich attorney’s daughter.
He understood why his friends considered him lucky. A beautiful, sophisticated wealthy young woman, the darling of Sacramento society, wanted to marry him. And, at age twenty-three, he was working for her father. His life and career had been mapped out for him by Sadie and her “daddy.” However, Wyatt couldn’t shake the memories of the life he left in the small frontier town of Sundown.
Even if he married into her family, he’d never be a Hampton any more than Sadie would never be a McCrea after she took his last name.
A smile swept over her face. She kissed his cheek and brushed away a touch of lipstick from his face. His doubts began to fade when she nibbled his ear, sending chills down his neck.
Sadie slipped one arm in his. They continued down the red brick walkway toward the front steps. She led him up the steps. As they stepped onto the porch, she dropped his arm. “Daddy tells his friends you’re a brilliant young lawyer. One day, everyone will know it."
He was about to ask one of Sacramento’s most prominent public figures for something more valuable than any gold found at Sutter’s Creek: to be his son-in-law.
In addition to winning the heart of Sadie, Wyatt was on a path of success few law graduates could claim, but this was different. In the next hour, his life would change forever.
The weight of the task beat down on Wyatt more than the hot sun. He took a moment to breathe. Even before he attained his law license, he’d been educated and trained to appear confident in the face of adversity. Now, he couldn’t remember anything from the speech he’d rehearsed. He blew out a puff of air. He could do this.
He pulled a white handkerchief from his pants pocket, wiped the moisture from his forehead, and quoted something his brother Travis taught him: never let them see you sweat.
Wyatt managed a smile as they stopped at the front door. He raised his hand, his knuckles white against the dark walnut door and…
Didn’t knock.
The clatter of a horse’s hoofs on the cobblestone road drew their attention. A telegraph boy, no older than seventeen, slid off his horse. “Mr. McCrea?”
Clutching a yellow envelope, the eager young man hurried up the pathway and skidded to a stop. “Wyatt McCrea?”
With a quick glance at Sadie, Wyatt nodded and took the envelope. His brief law practice taught him telegrams never ever brought positive news.
“It’s urgent,” the young man added, holding out his palm.
Sadie pulled a coin from her dress pocket and gave a quarter to the boy, who tipped his cap and ran to his horse. He climbed on, spun the steed and rode off in a gallop.
Wyatt tapped the telegram against his forehead and gazed toward the front door. “It’s probably from your father telling me to stay away from his daughter.”
With an uncomfortable laugh, she bit her lower lip. “Open it!”
He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and opened the envelope. The message came from the sheriff in Sundown. Wyatt had been right all along. His life was about to change, just not in the way he imagined.
“My brother’s in jail.” He slumped down onto a wrought iron bench by the door.
Sadie sat beside him. “I didn’t even know you had a brother.”
Travis was the only family W yatt had left. “We haven’t kept in touch.”
He handed her the telegram. Her eyes widened when she read the charge against his brother. “Murder!”
“I have to go to Wyoming.” When he left Sundown five years ago, the law was applied with a six-gun, and justice was dispensed at the end of a rope. Had the code of the West changed in five fleeting years? To his great surprise, Wyatt found himself bound by brotherly love that compelled him to enter the storm and pull Travis from the brink. Despite their differences, Wyatt had to do whatever he could to save his brother.
“Oh, Darling, what about us?” A quivering lip hid the beauty of her face. “You sure you aren't using the news as an excuse to get away from me?”
Were his doubts so apparent? "Of course not." Wyatt held Sadie’s hand, trying to comfort her.
“With me being gone, you can plan our wedding.” Sadie tried to blink away tears but failed.
After he took care of his brother, if Travis even wanted his help, he'd return to Sacramento. They'd pick up right where they left off. Then, he’d ask her father for Sadie's hand in marriage.
Sadie’s emerald-green eyes glistened. “How long will you be gone?”
“As long as it takes.”
CHAPTER 2
Wyatt had never been able to sleep on a train. The low moan of the whistle that echoed inside the half-empty passenger car reminded him he’d left his well-planned future behind for now.
A single oil lamp hanging from the grimy ceiling cast flickering shadows that danced across the faded blue plush of the seats. The words in the lawbook he held in his lap blurred as lack of sleep threatened to overwhelm him. With his brother soon facing a murder trial, he studied like he did for an exam, but the stakes were far more ominous than any test he'd ever taken.
Wyatt snapped the book closed and set the volume and a notepad next to the travel bag beside him. Fueled by a brother’s love and desperation, he just had to make it to Sundown before sinister town folk took the law into their own hands.
He missed Sadie already, but their time apart would allow him to think things through, to know whether he really wanted the life she so desperately desired to share with him. If he fixed Travis's problems in Sundown and made sure he was all right, Wyatt would take the next train back to Sacramento. Then they’d decide on the future that seemed so clear a day earlier.
Sacramento was but a distant memory, a blur in the inky blackness outside the window. A sliver of moon peeked through a tear in the thick cloud cover, momentarily illuminating the desolate landscape, a stark silhouette of scrub brush and the occasional gnarled Joshua tree.
He pulled the telegram from his notebook and scanned again the words he’d already read a dozen times. Travis deserved a seasoned attorney, not a kid brother who was a lawyer, because a piece of paper said so.
Sheriff Sawyer Black, Sundown, Wyoming. Wyatt knew the no-nonsense lawman and had never known him to send a telegram. Murder? Travis had plenty of faults, and he’d killed during the war, but he was no murderer.
He couldn’t think about the past; he had to try to sleep. Sinking deeper into the worn leather, he tugged the Stetson over his forehead and closed his eyes as the rhythmic clatter of the train against the tracks gave a steady rumble beneath him.
He dreamed about the day Travis and his pa joined the Illinois Fighting Regiment. It rained the day they climbed onto a train and waved goodbye, or possibly the moisture was his mother’s tears and his own.
He awoke and rubbed his face. He was eleven the day they left, twelve when word came Pa was killed at Chancellorsville. He'd turned thirteen when news came that his brother was captured and sent to a prison camp at Camp Martinsville in Louisiana.
When nearly a year passed, Wyatt and his Ma accepted that Travis was dead. Then, toward the end of 1862, they received a letter from Travis. It was brief and lacking in detail. They weren’t sure where he was, but they knew he was alive.
Then, one day, Travis came up the dusty path to the farm. Travis was nothing but old rags hanging on a young man’s bones. His only possessions were the clothes on his back and a leather satchel slung over his shoulder.
As the days went by, the only time he talked about Camp Martinsville was to explain the scars on his back from a whipping he endured the first time he tried to escape. His wounds inside had never healed.
Now, on the train to Sundown, Wyatt knew there was a decent chance his brother wouldn’t want to see him. He hadn’t hidden his anger after learning Wyatt had chosen to study law. His letters stopped, and those Wyatt wrote came back unclaimed.
Wyatt gazed out the window. He may have left behind a city, a fiancée and his six-month stint as a junior attorney, but Sadie felt close. He tipped his hat away from his brow and pulled a photograph of his love from a shirt pocket. He never tired of staring at her smooth face, blonde curls and emerald-green eyes. Even in the smoky car, it felt as if he could smell the lavender scent of her hair.
Still, he couldn’t shake his doubts about why she was in such a goldarned hurry to get hitched. Perhaps she just loved the idea of hosting dinner parties in her own fancy house. Her two best friends had both married in the last year, and she barely hid her resentment that she was still single and living at home. Possibly, Wyatt was merely the right man at the right time.
A dark-skinned old porter came through the door, took off his cap, and wiped the back of his hand on his forehead. He looked around the car at the sleeping passengers, then reached toward the ceiling and dimmed the oil light.
The old man seemed like he was carrying the weight of a hundred travelers on his shoulders. He stopped beside Wyatt. “Can I fetch you something, sir, a pillow maybe?”
“Not a thing, thanks, but you could do me a favor and sit and chat awhile.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” He sat on the seat across the aisle from Wyatt and wiped the back of his neck with a wrinkled old handkerchief. He reached over and shook Wyatt’s hand. “The name’s Henry Wilks. I trust you’re Wyatt McCrea. You returning to Sundown from Sacramento or going there on business?”
“You might say it's business. My brother got himself in trouble, and I’m going there to help. I’m an attorney.”
“Then you’re a good brother, Mr. McCrea, but if you don’t mind me saying, you look a bit young to be a lawyer.”
“I’m almost twenty-four - and call me Wyatt.”
“Then you call me Henry.”
“How’d you become a porter, Henry?”
“Now that’s a long story.” He leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling as if he was thinking about the past. “Before the war, I was a house servant for a genteel family near Charleston. I was born on the land and never left until I turned fifty, just before the war broke out. I went with the family on a trip to Savannah and couldn’t believe there was a world beyond the plantation. I told myself then and there that if I ever had an opportunity to see the country, I’d grab it. After the war, the chance came when I took a job helping around the railroad, doing whatever they’d pay me for. Then one day, a porter took off with a lady passenger and the next day, I was a porter. Been doing that ever since.”
When the door opened, another uniformed railroad man came in and shot the porter a look.
Henry took one look at the man and rose. “I’ll fetch you a pillow, sir.” He left the car, returned with a soft pillow, and winked. Wyatt stuffed the pillow between the edge of his seat and the window and closed his eyes.
Wyatt awoke when the porter shook his shoulder. “We’ll be pulling into Sundown in a few minutes. I fetched your bags ‘cause you come across as a man in a hurry.”
He sat up, his back cracking with the sound of someone shooting dice. He thanked the old man and gave him a generous tip.
Henry tipped his cap. “Best of luck in Sundown.” He was going to need luck, help and then some. When the train slowed, he stuffed the lawbook and notebook in one of his two bags and braced himself for the task at hand. He vowed to set aside the doubts that felt so overwhelming. He wouldn’t show his fear, not to Travis, not to anyone.
Wyatt stood in the doorway as the iron belly of the train ground to a halt, spewing a plume of acrid steam that momentarily obscured Sundown’s depot. Wyatt placed his Stetson on his head and stepped off the train.
