Prairie Fire, page 14
She nodded once.
“Good, get dressed.”
“She ain’t nothing but a squaw!” the wounded outlaw protested. “Why are you worried about her? I’m hurt bad here!”
Luke pointed the barrel of his cocked Remington at the man’s face. He wanted this no-good skunk alive for now, but the outlaw didn’t have to know that.
“Talking is not a good choice for you at this moment.”
The man blanched and nodded. He was bleeding heavily from the wounds in his arms. If they weren’t seen to, he’d bleed to death soon. Luke couldn’t let that happen. That the man wasn’t in shock already, he put down to the alcohol coursing through his veins.
“How’d you like to live? You’re worth five hundred dollars to me, so if you expect to get out of here, you’d better do what I say.”
“You’re going to let me live?” the outlaw asked.
Luke squinted at his face, trying to recall the man’s name from his brief sojourn with Colonel Goldsmith’s gang. “Turner,” he said. “You’re Cleo Turner.”
The man didn’t answer.
“I take it back,” Luke told him. “You’re only worth three hundred at the moment. Of course, when I turn you over to the authorities at Fort Laramie, they’ll add rape and murder and desecration of a corpse to your charges. That should get you up to five hundred dollars, which is respectable.”
“Dese—what?”
“Mutilated. You burned bodies. I found that settler family.”
“I never!” Turner protested. “That was the colonel. Colonel Goldsmith loves burning people like a normal man loves getting him some—”
The Indian girl—Luke thought maybe she was Shoshone—streaked past him, a cheap hatchet in her hand. The sudden attack caught Luke by surprise and he was a second late, only managing to jostle her arm slightly as she brought the hand axe down.
The blade struck Turner in the side of the head and stuck there. Luke flung an arm in front of the girl and threw her back against the table.
“Stop!” he yelled. “I need him alive, damn it.”
The girl leaned on the table and glared at him, eyes blazing as she spat what he was sure were vile curses in her own language, which confirmed her identity as Shoshone if he’d got the sound of it right.
Luke looked back at Turner, expecting the man to be dead. He blinked. Turner stared up at him with glassy eyes. Scalp wounds bled heavily and he looked as if he’d done a swan dive into a slaughter pen. But he was still alive.
The hatchet jutted from his head like the handle on a pot. The blade was stuck into his skull about a quarter of an inch from what Luke could tell from where he stood.
“Did she scalp me?” Turner’s words were slurred. From the loss of blood or because of the whiskey he’d guzzled down earlier, Luke didn’t know.
The pupil of one of Turner’s eyes was drawn down tight and the other one was dilated so far you couldn’t see the iris. Luke looked back at the hatchet, trying to comprehend what he was seeing.
“Lord have mercy,” the old man said.
“Did she scalp me?” Turner repeated.
“No, she didn’t scalp you,” Luke said. “She stuck an axe in your head.”
“There’s an axe in my head?” This seemed puzzling to Turner.
“Damn right, there’s an axe in your head,” the old man said. “You murdering son of a—”
“Well, pull it out!”
“I’m disarming you first,” Luke informed him.
“Pull it out!”
Turner was not in a mood to be reasonable.
Luke kept the Remington trained on Turner and used his other hand to pull the man’s pistol free. He slid it across the floor toward the trader, who picked it up. Luke continued searching Turner. Long ropes of drool had started collecting at the corner of his mouth and dripping into his beard. He worked his jaw back and forth, his throat making hard little clicks every time he swallowed.
There was a sheath for a knife on the gunbelt, but the knife was missing. It was probably the one stuck in the Indian woman, Luke figured. He found a straight razor in one boot and a two-shot derringer in the other. He kept both. Reaching around to the small of the outlaw’s back, he found a Colt Navy .3 6. He slid that over to the old man.
“Who are the women?” Luke asked. “Will they have family to come look after them?”
“I am the family,” Milligan said with a bitter voice. “That was my wife. The girl’s my daughter, Rosie.”
That simplified things, at least. He was going to be trailing Goldsmith north. He didn’t need a band of justifiably outraged braves tracking the man as well.
Milligan broke down crying. Though he held little sympathy for a man who might have dealt in goods stolen in situations all too similar to this one, Luke heard the genuineness of his grief.
“I am truly sorry for your loss,” Luke said.
“Pull the axe out of my head!” Turner wailed.
Snarling, Luke reached over and yanked the blade free. The wound looked like a ravine and immediately welled up with blood. If he wanted Turner to lead him to Goldsmith, he would have to dress the man’s wounds.
“You got any laudanum?” he asked the trader.
“Not for him!” Milligan cried.
“Look, I appreciate your feelings, I truly do. But there’s twenty bad men just like this lot that went north, led by the worst of the bunch. I guessed wrong and followed these varmints here. But I need him alive and fit enough to ride.”
“Rosie done put a hole in his head.”
“That is unfortunate,” Luke agreed. “But I need him to be able to ride.”
The interior of the trading post was close and crowded. Every kind of antler rack or horn known to the plains or mountains had been mounted on the wall. There were so many prongs and tines sticking out that a drunk man would need to be cautious that he didn’t stumble and impale himself.
The place was crammed with tables and they were mounded with bolts of cloth, trading post knives of an inferior quality, steel traps, piles of furs, liquor, small mirrors, and boxes of ammunition. The Indian girl, Rosie, had stepped off to one side and wrapped a blanket from one of the tables around her while Luke talked to her father.
He caught the flash of motion out of the corner of his eyes and whirled. He was in no position to stop the girl except to shoot her, and he wasn’t going to do that. He was rising to his feet and uncocking the Remington when she reached Turner.
She grabbed the outlaw by the long greasy hair dangling over his forehead, now streaked crimson with his blood. Rosie held one of the trading-post skinning knives in her hand. Luke shouted at her, but she was cat-quick.
Turner screamed in pain as she jerked his head back, then started shrieking as she used the blade to scalp him. The skin made a wet tearing sound as she peeled it back and then ripped it clean off. Throwing the knife to the other side of the room, she showed Luke the bloody scalp.
“Mine,” she said.
Luke had to clear his throat to speak. “Sure,” he said.
Turner was alive, though getting worse for wear by the second.
“She scalped me!” he managed to moan.
“Oh,” Luke agreed, “she surely did.”
CHAPTER 17
Luke dug a grave for the old man’s wife, the exertion making his still-healing arm ache again. He hadn’t had to bury anybody for quite a while before today, and now it seemed like he was digging a grave every time he turned around.
Eustace stood off to the side, a gloomy expression on his white-bearded face, and nipped from a jug as he watched Luke laboring. Between drinks, he talked aimlessly of his life. He had come west and followed Jim Bridger toward the end of his career in the late 1830s and early ’40s. St. Louis had still felt like the edge of the world, back in those mountain man days, he said.
After binding up the outlaw’s wounds to stop the bleeding, Luke had made Turner drink enough laudanum to be in a senseless stupor and then tied him, sitting up, to one of the hitching posts in front of the building. He’d learned his lesson by now and insisted that Rosie not be left alone with Turner. She had good reason to kill him, but when he made the request that she leave Turner alone, she’d just shrugged.
“Let him hang. I have his scalp.”
Luke couldn’t be sure how sincere she was, though, so he figured he’d best err on the side of caution.
When the grave was ready, Eustace roused himself from his drinking and grieving enough to help Luke lower the blanket-wrapped body into the ground. Luke decided digging the grave was enough. Somebody else could cover it up.
He left the father and daughter tending the grave and went over to Turner. Luke stood over the incapacitated Turner, knife in hand. He looked down at the man, feeling the weight of the blade in his grip. He knelt and took each boot in turn. Sleeping the morphine sleep, Turner didn’t stir. Luke made a mark on each of Turner’s heels, then came to his feet and headed for the corral.
Entering the enclosure, he stripped the saddles off the outlaw horses and brushed them down before doing the same with his mount. Any money, along with the saddles and guns, he left with them. He asked for the loan of a tack hammer and awl, which Eustace gladly gave him. When he was finished with the chore he’d set for himself, he gave them back.
Once the laudanum wore off a little and Turner began to come around, Luke slung each dead man over his mount and then cut Turner loose and tied him into the saddle. He slid the straight razor he’d appropriated into the man’s back pocket. The outlaw looked at him dully, not quite comprehending what was going on. Smiling, Luke tucked the pain medicine into Turner’s shirt where it wouldn’t fall out.
“A little ways up the trail, you can cut yourself loose,” he said. “Your arms ought to work well enough for that. You’re wanted, so I wouldn’t head for any of the nearby towns.” He looked the owlhoot in the eye and lied. “From Fort Bent all the way to the south Platte, they know to look for you. I rode through them tracking you.”
The wounded man just glared at Luke with sullen eyes. He was starting to understand more now. The bounty hunter had caused him so much pain he was afraid to speak out of turn. He cast his eyes nervously around after a moment, though, as if he were looking for something . . . or someone.
Luke grinned. The man was terrified Rosie would take another crack at him.
“You can tell Goldsmith that hell is coming. That’s the only reason you’re still alive and the only reason I’m not taking you back to a hang rope.”
The man looked on the verge of saying something, but Luke stepped back and slapped his horse on the rump. The startled animal jumped and began trotting away across the grassland. Luke stood for a while and watched the man riding north until he became a speck on the horizon.
The old man shook his hand and wished him well. Rosie was nowhere to be seen.
“I thank ye ag’in for your help,” Eustace said. “I guess those old boys would have done for me and Rosie both if you hadn’t showed up.”
Luke touched the brim of his hat in acknowledgment. Turning his horse, he took his grisly mule train of bounties and headed north.
This wasn’t a bad day’s work, he thought. But things were just getting started.
* * *
He turned in the bodies and collected the bounties at the nearest town and then rode his back trail looking for Turner. Less than forty-eight hours had gone by since Turner rode away from the trading post, and soon enough Luke found the trace. He’d tapped in two X’s on either side of Turner’s mount’s shoes, and the track was readily identifiable.
Coupled with him being fairly sure the wounded outlaw was headed to southeastern Wyoming, it was easy enough to guess his path. Luke swung out wide around settlements and when he stopped to ask questions at the little ranches or homesteads in that path, they frequently reported missing chickens or piglets. Turner was exhausted and hungry, but not desperate enough to risk venturing into a town.
Luke began to worry that the man might collapse and die on the trail before he was able to rejoin Goldsmith’s gang. Despite that, they made it out of Colorado in a reasonable time and crossed over into Wyoming. But then he began finding empty bottles of Mariani wine along the way.
More potent medicine than wine, it explained how the wounded outlaw was dealing with both the fatigue and the pain of his wounds. A bottle of Vin Mariani a day could keep a man in the saddle for a long time.
His hunch was that Goldsmith would have designated rendezvous points when the gang split up, and that Turner would make his way to one of these. A day into Wyoming, he cut Turner’s track on the other side of a feeder stream to the North Platte and realized that the way Turner was heading coincided with the direction a large group of riders had been headed. Those tracks were older, fainter, but still readily identifiable. Goldsmith was close. Luke felt it in his bones.
In a shallow valley he came across a sheep massacre. Forty or fifty animals had been killed and left to rot. He saw bold coyotes eating carcasses at the edge of the meadow and the place was alive with crows. His slow canter made them take flight and they rose in the air in a black cloud, harsh caws echoing wildly.
Luke inspected the sheep casually as he rode through, and it was obvious they’d been shot and left to rot. Big cattlemen had always coexisted uneasily with homesteaders and smaller spreads. Neither group held much patience for sheepherders. The friction frequently erupted in violence. Down New Mexico way, Luke knew, the Colfax County range war that had started back in ’73 was still going on.
Hell, Clay Allison had burnished his already considerable reputation as a gunhawk during those early battles in Colfax County.
Luke avoided such conflicts when he could, though with his skill with a gun, he could have earned top dollar. Inevitably, his upbringing and history caused him to side with settlers over cattlemen and landowners. That wasn’t the profitable side of the battle and frequently cattle associations had the law on their side. Or in their pocket.
A man could only do what he could do. Luke chose to take his money eradicating one evil man at a time.
The stench of the sheep carcasses brought him back to the present. His horse tried shying, as disturbed by the stink as Luke was. Rather than fight with the mount, he gave the animal its head and they galloped clear.
They followed clear wagon tracks up into the foothills of the Medicine Bow Mountains. First part of the Cherokee Trail, the area had seen several mining booms. He assumed he was heading toward an old mining town, but he hadn’t ridden this area much before, so he wasn’t sure what he would find.
It was beautiful, stark country. And he enjoyed the ride for a while. But as the elevation increased and the hills and canyons began pressing in on all sides, the atmosphere changed. Stands of trees gave him uneasy feelings like he was being watched, or that someone would ambush him.
He followed Turner’s track until he found the horse dead by the side of the trail. Wolves had been at the belly and he was mildly concerned a grizzly could be attracted by the horse flesh. He inspected the animal and saw a worn spot on one forelock and a bullet hole in the animal’s skull.
There was a now familiar empty bottle of Mariani wine on the ground.
He supposed the animal had come up lame and Turner had put him down and continued on foot. The other possibility was that he’d checked the forelock and seen to the shoes only to notice the marks Luke had branded them with, then killed the horse to try and throw the bounty hunter off the scent.
Luke didn’t favor the latter thought, though it was possible. Men didn’t like to be afoot in wild country. Goldsmith’s men were cavalry, not fur-trading mountain men. They’d sooner cut off their feet than travel cross country the way Kit Carson had. No, if Turner had discovered the marks, he would have risked riding into a town to sell the horse and purchase another.
The outlaw was on foot with only one hope of shelter—the settlement wherever those wagon tracks led. There was no place else to go. Luke gigged his horse and started off at a trot.
He found the preacher hanging a man just before dusk.
CHAPTER 18
The crowd outside of Golgotha Rock was hungry for blood.
Golgotha Rock was in the fading glory of its boom. What had started as a river of copper had, over several years, dwindled to streams. The town hadn’t given up the ghost and died yet, but it seemed the vultures were circling.
Luke slowed his horse to a walk as he saw the mob standing on the flats outside of the town proper. A big tamarack pine stood at the center of a small clearing. A rope was tied to a stout branch and the rope came down in a noose around the neck of a sullen-looking man with a bushy mustache and haystack hair.
The crowd was arrayed in a half-circle around the hanging tree and a preacher man stood in the back of a buckboard. Black, flat-brimmed hat, black trousers, black coat. White, collarless shirt buttoned all the way up to the throat. In one hand he held a Bible and in the other a whip. As Luke drew nearer, he could hear the fire-and-brimstone sermon erupting from the man’s throat. The crowd shouted choruses of Amens! and Hallelujahs! to punctuate his points.
He stopped to listen, pulling his horse up at the edge of the crowd. The preacher had a deep, clear voice. Luke had no trouble hearing the sermon. The man’s voice carried.
“A dark door has opened in Golgotha Rock, I tell you, friends! A door has opened and Satan has walked through!”
The preacher was so bombastic, it was hard to ignore the man’s voice, but Luke did his best. He studied the man about to hang. He assumed it wasn’t a lynching when he got a glimpse of several men with tin stars on their shirts in the congregation.
And that’s what it is, he thought. A congregation. Not a crowd or a mob, but a congregation.
He realized he recognized the criminal. It wasn’t one of Goldsmith’s outfit, but a hardcase from the New Mexico Territory, John Hamilton Little. Sometimes called Short Little because his brother stood six and a half feet tall. Horse rustler, bank robber, an owlhoot with eleven deaths on his gun. At least. Stringing him up was no injustice.
