Stand Up and Die

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  That speech did absolutely nothing but waste his breath.

  So he added, “And you all shall be paid one thousand dollars in gold for seeing this job finished.”

  * * *

  Broken Buffalo Horn’s eyes slowly opened, and he stared into the eyes of his horse, which looked down on the Comanche medicine man and snorted. He realized he had held on to the hackamore after being pitched over the side of his horse as it galloped after the fleeing cowardly white-eyes. His hand felt blisters from where the hackamore had pulled tightly, but he still had a horse to ride.

  “Can you sit up, my friend?” Killed A Skunk asked.

  “Yes,” Broken Buffalo Horn said. “Of course, I can sit up. I am Comanche.” He waited. When Killed A Skunk just stared at him, he said, “Help me up, my friend.”

  Lost His Thumb rode up, then waved his bow to the south and west. “The white-eyes we chased have moved into a fort of wagons that have been attacked by a strange group of white-eyes.” He held up what appeared to be a scalp, but this black hair did not drip with blood. “They are dressed like Indian peoples.”

  “Comanche?” Broken Buffalo Horn asked.

  “No.” Lost His Thumb pointed north. “Those who like silver and black. The ones who many summers ago lived at the edge of Comanche land, at the fort of Long Knifes at Bosque Redondo.”

  “The Navajo.” Broken Buffalo Horn let his head move up and down. It did not fall off, and that was a good sign.

  “Yes. That is how they are called. The Navajo.”

  “And my son?” the medicine man asked.

  Lost His Thumb frowned. “He is in the fort with the white eyes. The fort made of the wagons.”

  For a long while, Broken Buffalo Horn stared at the sand, but had nothing to say. His breathing barely reached the ears of the two other Comanches, but at length, after some great thought, the medicine man looked up. “What of the Comanche ponies?”

  It was Killed A Skunk who frowned. Many are dead, my friend,” he whispered. They rode over a wheel gun that kills so many . Some died there. Then the wheel gun that kills so many was swallowed by a monster that breathes fire and rains silver and gray balls. That killed more ponies, but some of those would have died anyway.”

  Gunshots began a few hundred yards away.

  “They shoot again at the fort made of wagons,” Lost His Thumb said.

  “Which means they shoot at my son,” Broken Buffalo Horn said.

  “Yes, it is so.” The Comanche warrior shook his head. “And there are three of us. But at least ten times that of them.”

  “It is not like a Comanche to ask for help,” Killed a Skunk said.

  “A Comanche would never ask for help,” Broken Buffalo Horn said. “But it would not be right to count coup and take scalps in this country without receiving permission from the Navajos. This is their country.” He nodded.

  “Then perhaps,” Lost His Thumb said, “We should see if the Navajos would like to help us take coups and scalps.”

  * * *

  Hans Kruger shoved a .45 barrel against the back of Jed Breen’s head.

  “Vere!” he cried out. “Vere is mein Bruder?”

  “Easy, pard, easy.” A tall man in buckskins decorated with scalp locks walked toward him. “We’re in a pickle, ol’ boy, and this don’t really make me feel so good, but, well, hell, we might need that gent’s gun. That’s Jed Breen, Hun. A bounty hunter.”

  “The bounty hunter,” Breen said.

  “Nein.” Kruger shook his head. “Nein. I vill not do anything until I know vere mein Bruder is. Somebody vill tell me or else I vill kill dis bounty hunter. I must see mein Bruder—”

  Blood and brains exploded from the center of Hans Kruger’s forehead before anyone heard the shot. The man in buckskins ran one way, and Hank Benteen went the other way. Kruger lowered the Colt unfired, turned with a look of complete amazement on what was left of his face, and toppled to the ground. He shuddered, messed his britches, and lay still.

  Breen rolled over, palming his Colt, and found the homesteaders from the wagon train taking positions. Matt McCulloch crawled to an opening, and Breen took a spot beside him.

  Hell’s bells, Breen thought. He couldn’t find the widowmaker named Charlotte Platte, but the homesteaders began returning fire at those Indians that had them pinned down. “What are our chances?”

  McCulloch began feeding cartridges into his Winchester. When he ran out, he frowned, but Charlotte Platte came over holding the gun belt she had just pulled off Hans Kruger’s corpse.

  “Thanks,” McCulloch said as the woman began thumbing cartridges out of the leather loops and placing them into McCulloch’s hands.

  “What kind of Indians are those?” Breen asked, after not getting an answer to his first question.

  “The worst kind,” McCulloch answered. “White men.”

  “Damn.” Breen ducked after a bullet whined off the iron wheel of the wagon next to him. “Maybe I should get my Sharps.”

  “We’d appreciate that,” Charlotte said.

  McCulloch asked, “You seen Wooden Arm?”

  Breen looked north, then west, finally south. He smiled. “Some kids are staring at that splint you made. He’s entertaining them, keeping them out of harm’s way.” Breen pointed. “They’re behind a fort within our fort.”

  “What kind of fort?” McCulloch fired, levered another round into the Winchester, and stared at where he had shot.

  “The best kind,” Breen said. “Dead horses, dead oxen, dead mules.”

  “Won’t be long before there are dead people,” McCulloch said.

  “Matt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where’s Sean?”

  McCulloch lowered his rifle. He looked at the still smoldering ruins where that cannon had exploded, at the dead bodies of men and animals all around that spot, and the dead littering the . . . Dead River. Aptly named.

  “Hell,” he said in a dry whisper. “Do you reckon that stinker up and died on us?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Sean Keegan’s head hurt. His eyes opened, and he saw nothing but black. “By the saints, I’ve drunk meself blind.” He saw a light, which slowly came into focus as the moon. That came as a relief, but when he tried to move, to get up and stand on his own feet, his left leg refused to cooperate.

  He felt the coldness of the dark, realized it was night, and memories came creeping back.

  “Ah, hell.” That fine old Matt McCulloch horse had ridden himself to death. Keegan put his right boot just behind the back of that bone-jarring McClellan saddle and began shoving. He remembered riding, remembered shooting, remembered some wilder than sin explosion behind him. The reins? Right. He had dropped them after the explosion. By squeezing his legs like a vise, he held on to the galloping horse as it thundered across the desert.

  Keegan remembered the poor lad had run until his heart quit pumping. He remembered not having enough time to leap clear of the saddle before the horse fell against the rock that had given Keegan a headache worse than some of the forty-rod whiskey he had tried to lick in Purgatory City or some other blight of the Western community.

  Thrown from a horse, stuck under the backside of a runaway, and afoot in the middle of the night in some godforsaken desert in Arizona Territory. The shame of it all.

  He gave another shove against the horse’s buttocks and Keegan’s foot and calf came free, without even pulling off his boot. All he had to do was figure which way he ought to head to figure out if Matt McCulloch and Jed Breen—or anyone else—remained alive.

  * * *

  No campfire. McCulloch had convinced the leader of the wagon train, a nice man named Walter Homes, of that. Campfire would give those tramps targets to shoot at. The full moon already gave them enough. It bathed the interior of the makeshift fort, reflecting off the pale sand and stones that made up the bed of the Dead River. It was just like noon, except for the blackness all around the big white ball in the sky.

  Wooden Arm cr
ept up to where Breen, McCulloch, and the widowmaker sat in front of a dead ox. Bloated and already drawing flies, it smelled something awful. The kid pointed his good arm toward the man who smoked a cigarette—despite McCulloch’s insistence not to even strike a match—at the northern end of the camp.

  “I know,” McCulloch said.

  “Bad hombre,” Wooden Arm said.

  Breen cocked his head and looked at the man in buckskins. “Friend of yours?” he asked the former Ranger.

  “Scalp hunter,” McCulloch said.

  “That’s a breed of man I have no use for,” Breen said as he cleaned his Sharps.

  “That’s not even a man,” Charlotte Platte said.

  “Bad hombre,” Wooden Arm whispered.

  “You know the fellow your scalp-hunting pal is talking to?” Breen asked.

  McCulloch’s head shook.

  “Benteen. Hank Benteen.”

  McCulloch looked at the man on Linton’s left. “You sure?”

  “I don’t make those kinds of mistakes,” Breen said.

  “Well,” McCulloch said, “We might have use of his gun before tomorrow’s over.”

  Breen shrugged and opened the breech to his Sharps.

  The noise carried, and Benteen and the scalp hunter named Linton turned around, staring, both hands hovering over their sidearms.

  Breen chuckled and called out, “Just loading my Sharps for the morning festivities, boys.”

  Neither of those two men appeared amused.

  Wooden Arm suddenly noticed Charlotte for the first time. He pointed his good arm at her and said, “Hat!”

  She smiled grimly. “It flew off. My hat. When we were stampeding those mustangs.”

  “Bad sun,” the Comanche kid said.

  Breen grinned. “He thinks you’ll get sunburned.”

  The widowmaker shrugged and sighed. “I do wish I had my hat.”

  Breen tugged his off and held it toward her. “Ma’am, it would be my pleasure.”

  She laughed. “I’m not worried about sunburn, boys. The hat. The hatband, rather. That’s where I kept my poison.”

  The bounty hunter started to laugh, then looked at McCulloch, who was looking at Charlotte Platte with his eyes wide open.

  He turned to the Comanche boy before shaking his head then asked the woman, “Are you serious?”

  “Silver tube,” she said. “Hollow. I bend over a pot or filling a cup of whatever. Reach up, press a button hidden behind the feathers. Out comes a drop. Two drops. Four. No more than six. Depends on how much I want them to suffer. It runs down the brim, drops into whatever I’m serving. If anyone saw it, they’d just think it was water from the pot or something. All I had to do was make sure the wind wasn’t blowing toward me. Wouldn’t want it to blow into my mouth by mistake, but who wants to stand downwind of a cook fire that’s blowing smoke?”

  “Your hatband.” Matt McCulloch shook his head. “How ’bout that? Hatband. I never even thought about it.”

  Breen eventually looked away from Charlotte Platte and smiled at the old Ranger. “I’m glad neither one of us thought about it.” He returned his gaze to the woman and tossed her his hat. “You were a sight to behold, ma’am, and I mean that in my most honorable way. Please, accept my hat as sort of an apology.”

  “You might need it,” she said.

  He laughed again. “I don’t think so, ma’am. Not after tomorrow.”

  * * *

  Sean Keegan stopped walking. All around him he heard snores. A ways off to the north, he spotted campfires, and he could see the faint outline of canvas covers of wagons ahead, but just barely.

  A man not two feet in front of him snorted, coughed, said something about not wanting anymore to do with those skunks, and began snoring again.

  Keegan realized he had walked into the middle of a camp of some fellows he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. He let out a silent breath, put one foot in front of the other, and suddenly felt like he could sleep for ten weeks.

  He might just do that. Might even sleep that eternal sleep if he stepped on some horse’s ass.

  * * *

  Don Marion Wilkes rode out on a high-stepping white stallion, his manservant riding with him, and let the thirty-two men fan out, showing their strength, but keeping them out of rifle range. He grinned as his prancing horse stopped fifty yards from the eastern side of the besieged wagon train.

  “Good morning,” he called out. “I would like to speak to your leader.”

  “Speak,” yelled one of the spud diggers.

  Looking up, removing his hat, Don Marion Wilkes wiped his forehead. “My fine emigrants, it is going to be a hot day. As you can see, I have more than thirty men. And I have water. I have powder, and I have lead. You have rotting animals that will be bloated and just . . . well . . . stinking even worse than they already are. I have come to offer you generous terms.”

  “What are they?” the spud digger asked.

  Walter Homes listened as the gentleman in the expensive Mexican outfit and riding a fine horse gave his word as a nobleman and landowner that all of the emigrants would be escorted south to the first stagecoach station at Tulia Junction. They would have to walk, of course, and they would have to leave all firearms, even knives behind, but no harm would be done. When they were a mile from the Tulia station, their escorts would ride away.

  Homes turned to two of the newcomers, the big Texan with the Winchester and the white-haired but young-looking man who held a big rifle with a fancy telescopic sight. “What do you think?”

  “He thinks we’re a bunch of fools,” McCulloch said. “Ask him what happens if we refuse those generous terms?”

  Homes yelled that question across the Dead River sand.

  “I have thirty men who will strike you all down. We can starve you out or sweat you out, but if you don’t come out under my generous terms, there will be no quarter. It will be like the Alamo in Texas.”

  McCulloch shook his head. “Bigmouth shouldn’t have said that. Not to a Texan.”

  “Or to an Arkansan,” Homes said. “We had relatives down in San Antone.”

  “Would you like me to shoot him now?” Breen asked.

  “Not yet,” McCulloch said.

  Homes, on his own, offered to Wilkes, “You have seen that we are used to fighting, sir. You mentioned the Alamo. You might recall how many Mexicans died before those gallant defenders were put to the sword.”

  “But I do not have to charge like Santa Ana. I can wait you out.”

  “Can you?” McCulloch shouted. “See those buzzards. That’ll get a lot of attention on that stagecoach road. Maybe even the Navajos. And the army. It does send out patrols this way.”

  “Gentlemen, it is already hot,” the man said. His horse stopped prancing. “I have offered my men a thousand dollars to kill you all. They are eager to earn such a fine bounty.”

  “Is that gospel?” Breen yelled out.

  “On my word of honor as a gentleman,” the man said.

  Homes tried to figure out what to do. Could he really trust that man? He looked at McCulloch for help, but it was Breen who had the answer.

  “Mister,” he said cocking the hammer on that Sharps, “How can you pay them when you’re dead?”

  * * *

  Don Marion Wilkes saw his horse trotting away. He didn’t feel a damned thing, and couldn’t understand why he lay on his back in the middle of the Dead River or what in heaven’s name had hit him right in the middle.

  Luís, his manservant, knelt over him.

  Then the pain hit him, and Don Marion Wilkes gasped. “Luís? Have I been shot?”

  “Sí, Don Wilkes.” The noble servant pulled up Wilkes’s shirt, began loosening his—

  “What are you . . . doing?” Don Marion Wilkes had to turn his head, spit out phlegm . . . no that tasted more like . . . blood.

  “I take your money belt, Don Marion,” the noble servant said. “You have no use for it anymore.” He held the money belt high over
his head and laughed. Then Luís gasped and fell hard onto Wilkes’s stomach. An arrow quivered in Luís’s back.

  War hoops. Hooves. Gunfire. Those sounds came from far away.

  Don Marion Wilkes looked at the buzzards circling over his head in the clear, blue sky. He reached up and stroked Luís’s slick, dark hair.

  “Poor Luís. Poor, poor Luís.”

  An Indian suddenly leaped before him. It was one of his men dressed like a Navajo. Good, Don Marion Wilkes thought. Here was a loyal rider for the great Don Marion Wilkes. He frowned. Why is that man waving a tomahawk? And why is it coming straight down toward my head?

  * * *

  “My God!” the kind leader of the wagon train yelled. “That man came under the flag of truce!”

  “You cut off the head of a rattlesnake,” the bounty hunter said as he reloaded the Sharps, “And the snake dies.”

  “But that man—”

  “That man”—McCulloch stood up, enjoying the confusion among the riders that remained out of rifle range—“would have cut us down, man, woman, child. Now . . . let’s see how those boys react to a Rebel charge.”

  “What?”

  One second later, the riders were scattering, and Indians were swooping at them from all directions.

  “Hell,” McCulloch said. “Those look like—”

  “Navajos.” Breen laughed. “Riding to our rescue?”

  * * *

  “What the hell?” Linton looked up, saw hundreds of mounted warriors raising dust all over the dry riverbed.

  No one in the train seemed to know what to do, but Hank Benteen saw his chance. “Here’s where I avenge the deaths of my . . . my . . . gang!” He ran toward the Texan and that sharpshooting bounty man.

  Linton saw something better to do. He saw the pretty girl with the raven-dark hair. With all those Indians running around, and none of the spud diggers knowing what to do, he might be able to kill that girl, lift her hair, and make for that prancing horse. He pulled his knife, ran right for her, and felt the taste of wood that split his lips and broke his nose.