by Tony Roberts
Soon after they set off and were told to keep their weapons ready. They were expected to go into action. Casey took a deep breath; so soon after joining, he was going to be in a battle.
CHAPTER FOUR
He soon saw it was going to be different than he thought; topping the rise he saw the cavalry were already spread out ahead of them in a wide arc, galloping for the settlement of tents and tepees in the valley. Figures were seen running in terror and the shooting started. Casey grimaced. No sign of the warriors, this was a straightforward massacre of their woman and children. He looked away.
“No stomach for killing, Long?” Pickton sneered. “You ain’t fit for the uniform.”
“It’s you who isn’t fit,” Casey shot back before he could stop himself.
“What? What you say?” Pickton’s ugly face jutted forward belligerently. “That’s an offense, speaking against your superior.” He waved to a couple of other troopers waiting close by. “Go get the Sarge, got a dissenter here,” he said.
Casey sat there cursing to himself. Him and his big mouth. Cuff soon arrived with an escort. He soon got the gist of the exchange. All the while the shooting went on and people were seen running in all directions, chased down by fast riding soldiers.
“Long, you are not to answer the corporal back, do you understand? As its your first offense I’ll just put a report on your file. Now keep your mouth shut and follow his orders.” He wheeled his mount round and trotted off, leaving Pickton to laugh at Casey.
“I’ll have you busted good and proper by the time I’m finished with you, Long. I’ll make sure you get all the shitty jobs from now on. You’ll be sorry you opened your big stupid mouth.”
Casey held the corporal’s look. Pickton’s chuckle died in his throat and he looked away. Something in those blue-grey eyes unsettled him. He didn’t know what, but he guessed it was something he wouldn’t like. No matter, the idiot was his and he’d make sure the trooper would never have any chance of getting promotion. His file would be full of black marks and nobody ever would even consider him worthy of going up a rank.
The massacre went on. Casey saw a couple of shapes moving off to the left, people who had escaped the killing. They were in a gully and moving further away, and from their position they could only see the heads of the figures, moving furtively. The trouble was Pickton also spotted it and pulled out his pistol. “Hey,” he said, “there’s a couple of escapees.”
Nobody else was close, save the four of them, so Pickton led them to the left to intercept the fugitives. Where the gully ended, down a slope from the plateau, there was a collection of boulders that had fallen off the edge in some long past incident, and the troopers waited here.
The fugitives emerged from the undergrowth, expecting to be away from the shooting, and stopped in shock as they saw the muzzle of Pickton’s pistol pointing at them. “Well, too bad you didn’t die back there,” the corporal said. “I’ll have to do that myself now.”
Casey caught his breath. It was Tucker, Mary and now, he could see, the two kids. “Hey, Corp, there’s two kids with them.”
“And? Best they die, too. They’ll only grow up to be Injuns we could do without. Shot running away, okay you three?”
Hucknall and Schiffner looked at one another and didn’t look happy, but they kept quiet.
“You can’t murder defenceless people, Pickton,” Casey said with a hard edge to his voice.
“Wanna bet?” Pickton said in a tone Casey didn’t care for. His gun blasted Tucker back into the undergrowth. Mary screamed and fell to her knees, her arms round the terrified children.
Casey swore and hauled out his colt. Pickton was lining up on Mary’s forehead when Casey’s slug took the corporal through the back, pitching him off his horse onto the ground in a bloody heap.
“Jeez,” Hucknall exclaimed. “You shot him!”
“He was going to murder these people,” Casey replied, staring at his fellow soldier. “Is this what you joined the army for?”
“You’ll be shot for this, you maniac,” Schiffner predicted. “We’ll have to testify!”
“Do what you must,” Casey said in a tired voice. “Come on, let’s escort these three to the commander. Pickton was a piece of work anyway.”
Mary stared at the three troopers. “Please don’t kill us! We’re unarmed and defenceless!”
“Don’t worry,” Casey said, “we won’t shoot. Just come with us. I expect they’ll put you in a reservation.”
She nodded, tears flowing down her face, but holding tight onto the two youngsters. The girl was also crying but the boy was scowling at the corpse of Pickton. Not one to piss off there, Casey mused. The boy, who was almost into puberty, then locked eyes with him and nodded gratefully to him. Mary and he had recognized Casey now.
They moved back to the plateau were the soldiers were returning, some with prisoners. Hucknall sought out Sergeant Cuff and gave him brief details, and before long the body of Pickton was being brought up and was laid out before Cuff’s superior, a Captain Talbot. Talbot, his slim dark mustache twitching with anger, eyed Long, now unarmed and stood in between two carbine-wielding soldiers. “You’ll hang for this, Long, you know this.”
Casey shrugged. “Pickton was a murderer. Gunned down Tucker and was going to kill the woman and children right there.”
“The court martial hearing won’t care about that. The fact is you murdered a superior by gunning him down through the back, a coward’s act if anything else.” He waved to the soldiers. “Get him out of my sight!”
They returned to the fort and Casey was put in the cells. Helen came to see him, distraught, pleading with the jailers to let him out, but they couldn’t, of course. She wept and held onto the bars, begging to God to let her man free.
She had to be prised off the bars and wailed, keeping her eyes on Casey as long as she could until she was taken out of the jail. Casey sat down and shut his eyes. Hang. He’d been hanged before. Not a pleasant way to go but that was inescapable. He’d be put in a coffin and buried somewhere close by. He would emerge, rising from the dead before long, but the question was when and how.
What would happen to Helen? He had to know. He asked the defense council, a lieutenant called Dennehy. Dennehy assured Casey that she’d be cared for, and she wouldn’t be thrown out of the fort. From what he’d heard, Dennehy told Casey that Pickton had been in the wrong but the army being the army wouldn’t go easy on a trooper who had shot a corporal in the back. No matter the corporal was about to murder a native woman and children. Dennehy was helpless. “You will be found guilty, no doubt of that. I’ll try to commute the death sentence but we’re battling the sense of discipline, Long. It would have been better if you’d knocked the man out.”
“There was no time, Lieutenant. Pickton was about to blow the woman’s head off; I had to do something.”
“Then I’m sorry. You’d best make whatever peace you can.”
The court martial was carried out in the administration block, headed by the colonel and had two majors and a captain alongside him. Dennehy stood alongside Casey for the entire time, which didn’t take very long. The verdict was already clear-cut, the sentence was to hang until he was dead.
Casey sat on the hard wooden bench in his cell thinking hard. Fate being what it was had kicked him in the balls. What he would do now was anyone’s guess. He hoped to hell he wasn’t buried too efficiently. How long would he be in the ground? He’d been buried before, and it could last for anything from a day to decades. What would he find once he was free? What would the world be like? What would war be like? Who would be fighting and why?
Helen was permitted one last visit to him. Her eyes were red. She tearfully spoke to him through the bars. “This is no justice!” she complained loudly. “Saving a woman and children, and what do you get? Hanged! What sort of society is this?”
“I’m sorry, Helen, I – just couldn’t sit there and let that bastard do it.”
She nodded, holding a handkerchief to
her nose, blowing. “I’m going back to Da over the mountains. I don’t want to stay here! I’ll never forget you, Casey!” she dissolved into tears and had to be helped away.
He was allowed no other visitors, until just before dawn when the group came to take him to the room where he would be executed. A few soldiers, an officer and a chaplain. The chaplain got immediately on Casey’s nerves. All that inane mumbling about God saving his soul. Well fuck that – he was damned if he was going to listen to Christian shit when the prophet that Christianity was built on had cursed him to this unending life.
“I’m no believer in God,” he said harshly, “so I’d prefer not to hear this.”
The chaplain looked at him with incredulity, then at the officer for help.
“Prisoner will be silent,” the officer, a captain, ordered.
“Or what?” Casey answered belligerently. “What will you do? I’m about to be put to death, for Christ’s sake, so what can you do to me? Shut this god-botherer up or I may well go out doing something you’ll all remember for the rest of your lives.”
The captain stared, stuck for a suitable response. He shook his head to the chaplain who lapsed into a hurt silence. They then resumed their journey, Casey’s hands bound behind his back.
The execution chamber was a small room, ten by ten, with a beam a few inches below the ceiling. Hanging from this was the rope and the hangman’s noose. There was a raised central platform in the middle and inset in the center of this a square trapdoor of about two feet square. Casey was forced to stand upon this while the hangman slipped the noose over the bound man’s head and tightened it.
The soldiers then stood back by the door and the officer nodded again. A black hood was placed over Casey’s head and the world went black. Now the Eternal Mercenary would hear his breathing and feel his heart pounding. A muffled sound came to him. It was the officer saying something trite and pointless, then the chaplain’s reedy voice came again, something to do with forgiving sin and so on.
The handle operating the trapdoor was pulled and he fell about three feet. A jolt shot through his body, and he felt something give in his neck, then there was nothing.
CHAPTER FIVE
The blackness was absolute. The pain in his neck was excruciating and he had to grit his teeth to stop a groan passing his lips. To make a noise might not be the best thing to do, especially if he was still not yet buried. He had no idea how long he’d been out or where he was at that moment, but from the pain he was suffering from, he guessed it wasn’t that long. A day, maybe. There was air to breathe.
He couldn’t see properly and he guessed he was in a coffin. Hard surfaces pressed against his shoulders and when he slowly flexed his legs and arms, he soon found there was no space to move. He was lying flat out on a semi-hard surface, with a small cloth pillow behind his head. He listened. Nothing. Slowly, deliberately, he pushed up. The lid was firm. It had been nailed.
He listened again. There was nothing, no sound. He took in a deep breath. He used all his strength to push up, using hands, legs and his shoulder muscles, ignoring the pain. The lid screeched and suddenly tore free of its mountings. The sound could have brought the dead running. Earth and dirt cascaded down on him. He levered himself up and looked around.
His coffin was in a hole. He was half-buried. Damn them. Sloppy work, a job half done. Maybe there was a second coffin to go on top, judging by the height of the hole. Throw his coffin in, cover it in a loose amount of dirt, then another on top. He wondered whose coffin it would be. Getting up and replacing the lid was a hard task, but he finally did it, standing on the lid all the way round to either crush the nails or to drive them back into the main body.
His neck was giving him serious pain. It would have been broken at the hanging so it would be repairing itself. He needed to hole up somewhere, sleep it off, then decide what to do with his life here. It had been a short career in the cavalry.
The hole was in the cemetery and he scrambled up and loped away from the place, located outside the fort, close to one of the walls. The town chapel was alongside it. He stepped over the sagging plank perimeter and slunk off into the night, grimacing as each wave of pain overcame him.
He found a dry gulley and slept there until well into the day. He sat up and examined himself. His civilian clothes had been put on him. He had no food, water or weapons. Not good. He would definitely need all three. His thoughts turned to Helen, and he wondered what would happen to her once she got back to her family. He was missing her already. He felt bad about being taken away from her, and wondered if he should let her know he was alright. No, it wouldn’t be right; she would want to know how it was he had survived, and that would lead to some awkward questions and he couldn’t answer them without compromising his secret.
He felt his neck. It was better. He stood up and looked around. The town was off to his right. He looked the other way, along the gulley. No different than any other direction, he reasoned. He set off, the sun beating down on him. Rocks, grass, creatures. All were passed by as he put distance between him and the fort. Best he was forgotten by them.
After a mile or so the gulley levelled out and widened, and then it wasn’t a gulley anymore. He dusted off his shirt and looked around slowly. He was getting thirsty. He saw a fire in the distance off ahead and to the left, so he made his way there. It turned out to be a family of travellers and he asked for some water. It turned out their wagon had shipped a wheel and the old man didn’t have the strength to repair it, so Casey made himself useful and before long they had the wagon back up in working order.
The family, a six-member unit, were grateful. Old man Clint Ransom, a dour old man from Devon in England, wanted to give Casey a lift to some place. Casey said he didn’t know where he wanted to go, so Ransom suggested staying with them until he found a place he liked the look of. Casey agreed and took up a place on the driving board to spell the old man at guiding the single elderly horse.
The rest of the family were his daughter Emily and four children. The father had died in England, falling down drunk from another night out in the pub and cracking his head on the cobbles of Plymouth. With no future, the family had banded together and left for the New World.
Emily was around thirty, plain-looking with dark hair and a pale complexion. She worked hard for the four children, three boys and a girl, aged between ten and six. They stayed in the back and watched the world go by through the open tail.
After four days they came to a small town at the junction of two branches of the Oregon Trail. Casey thanked the Ransoms and decided here was the place to settle down in if he could. A life on the trails was not for him. His neck was as good as new by then and he had a full belly. He’d find a job here without a doubt.
He waved the family goodbye and found the nearest bar, which was the best place to his mind for a job or for gossip. Besides, winter would be coming soon and it was best to have some kind of place to stay.
At the tavern he leaned on the bar and spoke to the barkeep, a sad-eyed individual called Pete. Pete had a beard and a sizeable paunch. “Want a job, hey? What do you do?”
“Trouble shoot,” Casey said with a shrug.
“Is that so? Want to trouble shoot now? Got a guy upstairs who ain’t leaving one of my girls alone. Wants to marry her and she ain’t the marrying type. She’s my best girl and I want her to get other patrons in, except they ain’t paying because this guy is scaring them off.”
“Where?”
Pete jerked a thumb up the stairs. “Third room along. Girl’s called Betty. Blonde haired, lovely smile. Nice laugh. Worth a lot to me. Get him out of my place and you’ll be hired.”
Casey needed no second hint. He took the steps two at a time and went along the wooden-planked passageway. The doors were uniform, raw un-painted pine with wooden circular handles. He barged in to find the girl, Betty, pinned to the bed, a man atop her, kissing her and holding down her arms so she couldn’t wriggle free. “Hey, you paid for her?” Casey ann
ounced his entry.
The man whirled, furious. “What’s it to you, asshole?” His face matched his mood, dark, unpleasant and in need of fixing.
Betty looked relieved and massaged her wrists. “He won’t let me be!”
Casey shook his head. “You ain’t paying, you getting out of her now, got it?”
“And what you going to do about it, bud?” the man snarled, bunching his fists. He was dressed in a set of leather pants, low boots, a grey shirt and a brown leather jacket. He didn’t have a pistol but he had a knife in his belt.
“Make you leave,” Casey said equably. “Pick a window.”
“Oh you’re so humorous you know. You oughta be on the stage.” The man pulled out his knife and came at Casey, seeking to slice him from head to navel. Casey grabbed his wrist and held the down-swipe above his head, then sent his right fist into the man’s nose, breaking it.
As the man’s head snapped back, Casey wrenched the knife out of his hand and sent it spinning across the room to clatter loudly to the floor in the corner. Betty sat up, the bedclothes held up to her throat, hiding her charms, her eyes wide.
With blood dribbling down his lower face, the enraged man came again, fists windmilling. Casey merely stepped aside and sank his next blow into the man’s guts. The man staggered out into the passageway, clutching his stomach. He’d never been hit so hard before. He turned, his back touching the top of the rail along the edge of the landing. Casey wound up a big one and let it go, impacting on his opponent’s jaw. The man was lifted off his feet and went over the rail.
He plunged to the floor below, impacting with a heavy crash and lay there, stunned. Casey came slowly down the stairs, wiping his hands, the patrons all goggle-eyed. Grabbing the prone man by the ankles, Casey dragged him across the floor to the door and out into the street. He threw him into the middle of the dirt roadway and stood over him, hands on hips. “I catch you in here again I won’t be this friendly, got it?”
He returned to the saloon, not waiting for an answer. The barkeep, Pete, was impressed. “Hell, you sure dealt with that no-good waster. I can hire out Betty now,” he added with a smile.