He’d also upgraded the Sharps yet again, acquired in Dodge what would turn out to be the last and most mythic incarnation in the design’s evolution—the rifle that Roy would eventually lug around the West like somebody else’s cross to bear. A Model 1874 two-and-a-half-inch .50, capable of propelling a titanic 600-grain slug. A rifle engineered for one thing and one thing alone: to drop a one-ton buffalo dead in its tracks, even at extreme range. OLD RELIABLE, read the legend on the barrel. Big Fifty, in the parlance of the trade. Lachlan dubbed her Juno.
By now he’d again lost count of his actual take, the numbers nothing short of astronomical and the hides sold not by the unit but by the ton. Wherever they rode they encountered the scatter of bones and middens of carcasses, even the scavengers unable to deal with them all. After a while he could no longer tell whether the perfume of rot hung everywhere or whether his airways and faltering lungs were simply permanently tainted unto themselves.
They crossed south into Texas and made their way to the Canadian River. They began to kill bison.
They hadn’t been in the country a week before a scout galloped in from the nearest trading post to announce that the place was under siege by several hundred Comanch’, and God knows what-all war parties were afoot otherwise, but anyways another waddie already hotfooted for Dodge to get the army on down, and you gents best get on in and duck and cover . . .
By the time Lachlan’s outfit made the post most of the action had abated, as the day before a young dead-eye named Dixon, armed with a twin to Lachlan’s own Juno, scored a direct hit on a mounted warrior at a range of what other witnesses swore to be “damn near a mile.”
It was largely luck, of course, and Dixon would say so himself until the day he died, but it had the desired effect. Several hundred festooned Comanches fell even farther into the distance, and through a spyglass appeared to be loading their dead onto ponies and pulling out even while other buffalo hunting parties trickled in.
By the time Roy became old enough to absorb the wild old stories a couple of decades hence, every red-blooded boy from El Paso to Glen Rose knew the name Billy Dixon, knew about that legendary rifle shot, same as they knew Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and the Alamo, or Captain Hays and the Texas Rangers. And by the time of his fifth birthday, living with his father in Somervell County, Roy knew that the colossal rifle in the corner was itself the stuff of legend.
Young Roy already had a fascination with mechanisms, with bicycles and train engines and of course firearms, this one in particular. Even before he’d achieved the stature or strength to hoist and balance the big rifle, his father would brace it across the porch rail and instruct him to lever the action and drop the block, just to marvel at the timed and regulated genius of the thing. The forged and lathed and puzzlelike pieces toggled and locked in a unison not unlike magic.
Ammunition was no longer manufactured for the Big Fifty. No need, because nothing remained to shoot with it. Roy would peer into the tunnel of the bore anyway, like looking back through the spirals of history itself. He could imagine what it must have been like to slide a brass cartridge the size of a cigar into that beautifully machined chamber, lever the block closed with the unassailable authority of a bank door. With his father still balancing the gun, he muscled the hammer back to its cocked position, heard the fine click of the sear.
Still too small to shoulder the buttstock, he instead tucked the comb under the pit of his arm and aligned the sights at some imaginary mark across a span as much of time as of distance. In addition to the standard buckhorn affixed to the rear of the barrel, this particular specimen—what his father called Juno—also had a folding-ladder sight attached to the tang of the grip, with demarcations out to nine hundred yards. Roy could imagine himself on that great lost frontier, dodging tomahawks and arrows, riding and hunting and shooting. Free as the wind.
He held the sights steady, the notch on the ladder set to its extreme range, noted the way this forced the gun muzzle to elevate in a manner that hardly made sense. He imagined the path of the bullet exiting the bore at such an angle, up and up and into the very sky itself, in a rainbowlike trajectory, until the pull of the earth forced it back down in a scribed steady arc, and a fateful intersection with the intended target. But at nine hundred yards or better, how high must that bullet climb at its apex to remain airborne long enough to cross such a straight-ahead span? Two hundred feet in the air? Three hundred? A mystery that probably cannae be solved.
He pulled the trigger-set and heard the pawl click minutely into place, the timing of those fitted internal parts still regulated like a Swiss watch, even after all these years.
“Ye sneeze on ’er no’, and aff she goose, lake Judgment Day.”
Young Gilroy barely touched the trigger. The big hammer dropped on the hollow chamber with a railcar clank. He imagined anyway the roar and blast, the cinder and smoke out front, imagined the speck of a painted and feathered warrior blown off his pony a full five seconds later. He levered the big action open, could practically smell the fire and brimstone.
“How I wish ye could’ve seen it, lad,” Lachlan mused. “Naught a greater sight on airth ’an ’at broad wild land and ’ose endless beasts a-roomin’ it. How I wish . . .”
Years later Roy would come to understand the spiraling circularity of the whole business. The great engine-driven line shafts of tool and machine works in Europe and the East remained nonetheless totally reliant on buffalo hides, for the long leather belts that powered lathes and drills and shapers and power hammers and cotton looms, and on and on. Those roaring industrial cauldrons would produce in turn such magnificent alchemical wonders as sewing machines and cash registers, typewriters and well pumps. Iron Horse locomotive engines. Mile upon mile of steel rail.
Those same belt-driven works enabled the meticulous forgings and spiraled barrels of the big buffalo rifles themselves, which would in turn slay with such supreme efficiency the very source of the heavy leather turning the wheels of all that ingenious industry in the first place. Progress and cargo could chug ever forward, even across the unsettled West, on a suturelike line of tracks and rails.
By the same token, in the first years of such enterprise a sizable buffalo herd migrating across the rail line might wreck a train’s schedule by a day or more. Or worse, wreck the integrity of the railbed itself.
But eventually, that very train would make its eastward trek packed engine to stern with green hides, to create in turn the leather for the belts that powered the factories and tools and machines. Round and round and round, two birds with one six-hundred grain, screaming lead stone.
Or three birds, if you counted the U.S. Army’s shrewd calculation that the demise of the buffalo herds directly correlated to the containment and eventual vanquishment of the free western tribes.
By the middle eighties the bison had been shot out. Millions of them, even tens of millions, steadily and systematically and finally precipitously annihilated, in large majority by a mere few thousand rifles specific to the task. Springfields, Remingtons, Ballards, and a few others, but most famously and effectively the old reliable Sharps. And clear to the Pacific, the trains ran on time.
Roy came to understand that for Lachlan, the math simply boggled. The rivers of bison seemed as vast and as endless as the empty land they inhabited, and the individual beasts themselves were such titans of irascible surliness. How on airth could a handful of hell-raisers in buckboards just blot ’em, in haif a young man’s lifetime? The aboriginals bin runnin’ ’em beasties off th’ cliffs by the score, f’r tame immemorial, withoat makin’ so much as a scraitch . . .
The bison were largely gone from the southern Plains by 1877, and Lachlan followed the trade north to the Yellowstone River country in ’78. He killed a fair number of buffs—nothing like the old days, but fair—before the frigid winter air nearly caved his lungs for keeps. Guys were hunting on heavy wooden skis across great blankets of snow,
packing fifty pounds of gear on their backs. He had no way to compensate. He got himself slightly recuperated at Milestown and took a paddle wheeler from Fort Keogh east and then south.
He’d taken to choking up blood on an alarming basis, was terrified to see a doctor about it. But he knew the Texas air had eased his lungs, and any fool could see his days as a professional hide hunter were no more. Probably time to settle down anyway—he’d saved a good bit from that mountain of skins he produced. He could buy a house, dream up some business. Maybe find a girl and marry.
Roy for his part had never not known the ratcheting cough, the ever-present handkerchief to capture the expulsion, so the incremental deterioration in his father’s health largely escaped him. Then in his ninth year the decline went from gradual to obvious, characterized as much by waking nightmares and fevered ramblings as any scurvied gauntness or killing cough.
Lachlan had long regaled the boy with stories. The times the gun smoke would get so thick in front of him on a windless day, he’d lose all sight of the herd and have to crawl for another shooting position altogether. The times he played cards in a saloon with Wild Bill, first in Hays City and then again later in Abilene.
The time he stumbled on an ambushed wagon train a day or so west of Laramie, most of the wagons half charred and smoldering yet, men and women both scalped and bristling like arrowed pincushions and otherwise mutilated and outraged in unspeakable ways, a single dead and stripped and scalped little girl as well, but most of the kids evidently carted off with the stock.
And in like contrast, the times he rode through routed and shelled and burned-out Indian encampments after attacks by the U.S. Army. Shot-up and sabered bodies there, too. All ages, all sizes.
“Aye, it’s true, the’ were savage and dangerous times. But lucky was I to have had ’em, me lad. Lucky was I indeed.”
The tales owned a persistent theme: Lachlan’s wish that Roy could have seen it all, too. The land the way it was, of course, undeeded and unplowed and unfenced, but also the sight of a migrating Indian band, or the smoke out of a hundred paint-bedizened lodges marked with arcane geometry and totemlike silhouettes on an otherwise pacific night. Above all, the seemingly endless black herds that accompanied those old and lost ways.
But as the air in his lungs truly began to seize, the stories and the memories became more like phantasms, daylight nightmares from which he could never fully revive. He could hardly shamble to the outhouse, had no frequent urgency anyway because for that matter he could hardly eat, even water a thing to choke down.
“Aye, lad,” he gargled, like talking with his head in a trough. “Y’aught to see ’em. Some. ’Ows. B’lieve Goodnight keeps a few. Or Montana . . . b’lieve the’ migh not. Be. Full gone. Saddle ’at . . . wee gray. Take ye ’at Juno . . .”
The nearer the approach of death, the further this fantasy took him, until in his final hours, spent not in the house but at a small hospital in town, he flat begged the boy through spasms and chills, mind-fog and hacked blood and tears, and as near to frenzy as might be possible in such a state of absolute debilitation. “Pack ye ’at Juno, laddie . . .”
Roy did indeed own a lithe gray mare to match his father’s stockinged black. The two had ridden since before Roy could scrabble into the saddle on his own, potting jackrabbits and cottontails with a .32-20 Winchester, a pipsqueak of a gun compared with the thunder-stick Sharps. In later years he would remember those pale-pink bodies with their muscles and tendons and fading warmth, and the almost loving manner in which his father would handle or prepare them. It would dawn on him how little went wasted.
Pack ye ’at, Juno, lad . . .
Two days after the funeral and now totally alone in the world, young Gilroy rode out in the dawn, mounted on the gray and leading the black. The women’s auxiliary at the Episcopal church in town was already taking an active interest and Roy had the distinct sense he was bound for an orphanage. He parceled his father’s stash of coin and cash in different hideaways in his gear and on himself and on the two horses—some in each boot, some in the toe of the rifle slip with the .32-20—and as much hardtack and jerked beef and dried fruit as the larder provided. He balanced Juno across the pommel and lit out.
Two weeks later he rode into the breaks of the Canadian in Hutchinson County and on out through the greened-up spring grass to the headquarters of the Turkey Track Ranch. A number of hands gathered at the sight of this pint-size kid setting in the yard with a Big Fifty Sharps across his lap. He told them he’d come to find old Fort Adobe, to see for himself the place where Billy Dixon made his famous shot twenty-two years earlier.
To his utter astonishment Dixon was living right at the ruins of the old trading post, on a good piece of watered ground with an orchard established and a new young bride and a log house doubling as the local post office. Roy rode in past the melting footings of the original ruins and straight up to a woman hanging laundry on a line, shielding her eyes the better to see him as he approached. From inside the house, an infant squalled.
He stayed most of a week, Dixon himself more than congenial, enamored with and probably somewhat bemused by this unusual visitor in such an otherwise empty and lonely locale. And Mrs. Dixon equally so—according to the two of them, she was the only woman yet residing in the entire county. They had just the one child, a girl baby not quite six months old. Mrs. Dixon for that matter was much younger than her legendary husband, only an infant herself back when the famed shot was fired.
“It was scratch, pure and simple,” to hear Dixon tell it. They stood inside the molten remains of the old Hanrahan saloon, at the point of the very window ledge he’d used as a rifle rest. “Pure luck. I just shot at the whole bunched-up mess of them out there at the base of the bluff.” Juno leaned against the wall at the moment, and Dixon took up the heavy rifle and sighted it the way he once had.
“I didn’t hit a thing with the first two shells. They were so far out, I’m not sure they had a notion I was lobbing at all. Or if they did, I reckon they figured I was just burning powder and ball, at that crazy range.
“Like they say, third one’s a charm. Had a bunch of spotters with spyglasses, and they watched that poor cuss sail off his horse like God Almighty hit him with a lightning bolt.” He grinned at the kid. “Should have heard the holler go up then, tell you what.”
He cranked the breech open, peered into that vast empty chamber. “Do hate to think of the hole in the guy who caught it. Like a whack with a dern cannonball. Prob’ly drive a six-team freighter right on through.”
He looked out at that faraway bluff, across the broad emerald shimmer of prairie grass. A cow bellowed somewhere over toward the house. “They were a proud people. Vicious as the day is long, no doubt. But proud. You ever shoot this brute?”
He made no presumption, or at least voiced none, about the kid’s sure inability to handle the recoil. Roy shook his head. “Pa had some empty brass for it, and bullet molds. I packed ’em along with me. But he never had no live cartridges around.” He thought a minute. “Told me this gun kicked like three mules, though. Even as stout as she is.”
“They kill on both ends, all right.”
“He was mighty sick, for a real long time. Now that I look back. I don’t think he had the lead for it anymore.” Roy clawed for some other identifier. “He was a Scotchman. Spake lake it, too, raight t’ th’ end.”
Dixon grinned again and shook his head. “Like I said, it was a madhouse of a week. Time it ended we was all pretty near out of our minds ourselves, and a whole passel of guys had come in off the country by then. I wish I remembered him, I truly do. But it’s a safe bet he and I never so much as helloed each other.”
Roy gandered at the crumbling mud walls, at the open sapphire sky where the roof used to be. He looked out across the plain. Grass as far as the eye could see. A big bunch of the Turkey Track’s Herefords out by the bluff.
“Think
ing you’ll ride on to Goodnight’s?”
Roy pondered. “Ain’t sure. From what you told me, I think I’d just be disappointed. They sound about like them cows out there.”
“Well, they ain’t wild like they were, that’s for sure. But Montana . . . that’s a sight down the trail, son, and outside what dregs is left around Yellowstone, I don’t think you’ll find what you want up thataway, either.”
“Well, failin’ means yer playin’.” One of Pa’s standards. “Anyways, Yellowstone’s something.”
Dixon nodded. “I myself was any less, uh, domesticated, I’d saddle up and ride right ahead with you.” He gave a wry look. “Truth be told, I envy you. Wouldn’t mind seeing them old shaggies myself one more time.”
Roy had his birthday a couple of weeks later, the day after passing out of Kansas and into Colorado. He’d been told to stay near the railbeds or the drovers’ roads, where they existed, that they’d keep him near to ranch houses and settlements and out of trouble with the stock thieves and outlaws who pretty much replaced the war parties of old as the most immediate threat to travelers.
He slept in bunkhouses and barns and sometimes in the homes of ranch families if they had the room, and one evening while taking his supper with such, the actual date and day of the week came up.
He looked down at his plate. “I just realized something. Reckon tomorrow’s my birthday.”
They insisted he stay another day so the lady of the house could bake him a cake. They sang to him in the evening, presented him with a pair of buckskin gauntlet gloves outgrown by the family’s boys. He very nearly cried.
Attention from ladies was new to him and on this trek he got a heap of it, much of it a combination of astonishment at the mere idea of what he’d undertaken and also what he eventually understood as basic maternal worry. Nigh on to everyone practically tried to adopt him. He certainly never had to worry about feed for the horses.
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