Winchester 1886

by William W. Johnstone

  He turned to block the wind, watching a giant tumbleweed roll across what was supposed to be their front lawn. “Tumbleweeds.” He spat. “Time was when you never saw ’em things in the West. Now a body can hardly go nowhere and not run ’cross . . .” Another spit. “Russian thistle. Wished they’d strung up the rogue who planted ’em first bushes.”

  He remembered her question, and turned to face her again. “Might be a norther. Probably is one blowin’ in.” He gestured at the open doorway. “Might want to step inside. I’ll get a fire goin’.” He looked back at the skies, darkening in the west. “Could be a blue norther.”

  Tentatively, he put his arm over her shoulder, feeling her flinch, and eased her around, guiding her like a frightened child into the sod house.

  He left her in the chair he had fashioned, which he knew wasn’t sturdy, handsome or relatively comfortable, but served its purpose. He quickly had a fire going in the fireplace. She sat, staring at the flames, listening to the wind howling.

  “Be back in”—he shrugged, estimating—“maybe an hour.” He pointed at the trunk full of books. “Pass the time some. Read one of your favorites.” Crabbe knelt on the dirt floor, opened the lid, and pulled out the first book he found. He hoped it was one by that Austen gal Miss Peggy so admired, but he had no way of telling.

  She took the book, gave him another weak smile, and then set the book in her lap and rocked some more.

  A few moments later, Crabbe walked into the wind, gripping the Winchester ’86 in both hands. He didn’t like the look of that sky, darkening in the northwest. Tried to remember what month it was, but he had never been good at such things. Out in western Kansas, months didn’t really matter, anyway. He had sweated in November and had come close to freezing to death in June. The only thing constant, he knew, was the wind.

  He pulled his hat down tightly and checked on the mules he had stuck in the corral. Both had turned their backs to the biting wind. His fingers already ached, even though he had pulled on gloves the minute he’d stepped out of the soddy. He heard the door to the potato cellar slamming. Another chore he would have to get around to at some point. But first . . .

  He headed toward the creek, hoping he could find an antelope or something that would provide meat. But the way this norther was blowing in, he doubted if he would even find a frog to shoot at.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  She hated it here. Despised the cold. Loathed this home of dirt. Detested that uncouth man she had married. Abhorred this frontier called Kansas. Reviled herself, her weakness, and her stupidity that had brought her into this marriage, and into this filthy place. She could not bear that everlasting wind.

  Peggy Crabbe could get away from neither the wind nor the dirt. The wind blew always. Dirt came through the cracks in the door. Once, while she lay in bed, it sifted from the roof, and fell onto her. Not much, really, but it felt like an avalanche. She had awakened screaming, thinking the entire place was caving in on her, for she had read about the awful cave-ins at the mines in the West, and even in the East. Her husband, that fool Matt Crabbe, had come to her, tried to reason with her, and finally had slapped her—which had silenced her screams.

  “Nothin’ to worry ’bout,” the cad she had married told her.

  More dirt sifted from the roof, fell to the quilt her grandmother had made. She couldn’t see the designs anymore, could only see the dirt.

  “Might be a deer.” Crabbe spoke with excitement, and he left her sitting upright in her bed—her bed—for her husband had been sleeping on his bedroll across the room. He grabbed that giant rifle he kept leaning by the front door.

  Front door?

  Only door. And it wasn’t much of a door. No lock. Simply a latchstring he would pull in of nights.

  He stepped through the door, which slammed shut behind him, then opened, then shut, then opened . . . the wind stirring up the dirt that had piled on the floor. The floor . . . of dirt. When the door flew back open, and held for a moment by a wild gust of wind, she saw the grayness swallow him.

  The door slammed again, and she bolted out of the bed, grabbed the string, holding it, like she was a cowboy holding onto a rope. Pulling hard, she refused to let go, refused to let the wind blow open the door . . . again.

  She breathed in dust and cold and the wretched odor of whatever he had cooked for their supper. The grayness had swallowed him. He had disappeared in the dirt and the tumbleweeds that blew across their home. If the wind had blown him away, out of her life, she would be free. Free to leave this awful place.

  The door pulled open, and since she was pulling on the latchstring, she fell backward as her husband stepped inside.

  “What the Sam Hill is you doin’?” he called out, closing the door behind him and setting the bar in place. But the wind still rattled the door. It would rattle all night, and probably all the next day.

  It would rattle for all of eternity.

  “No deer.” He sighed. “Think it was a coyot’. Nah. Too big for a coyot’. Wolf, most like.” He leaned the rifle against the door, took a cautious step toward her, and then extended his hand. “You fall or somethin’, Miss Peggy?”

  She nodded.

  “Hurt?”

  Her head shook. She stared at his hand, rough, calloused, the first joint of his ring finger missing. She couldn’t remember how he had lost it—shot off, cut off, or seared off with a lariat. She imagined it as a snake, the fingers fangs ready to strike her, release its venom into her veins. She suddenly thought that would not be so bad at all. She would have to wake up in a better place than this.

  She took his hand, but sensed no sharp bite of fangs, only a rough grip that squeezed and pulled, and she felt herself lifted from the floor.

  “Sure you ain’t hurt?” her husband asked.

  “I’m . . . fine.” She began brushing the dirt off the skirt of her nightshirt. Dirt. Dirt. Dirt. Everywhere. She couldn’t escape it.

  Her husband moved to the uneven table, sat down, began pulling off his boots.

  She kept at the skirt, watching the dirt and dust fall, beating the fabric . . . beating it and beating it....

  “Best stop that,” her husband said.

  She obeyed, looked at him. Even his face looked like a serpent. His eyes sparkling hypnotically like that rattlesnake that had bitten ten-year-old Marilyn Summers last spring during recess. Her thoughts drifted off to that time, what felt like a thousand years ago, in a place so far, far away.

  It had snowed two days earlier. She remembered that. Could not believe that a snake would be out of hibernation, even though it had been warm for about a week before the cold front moved in. Had it been windy then? She couldn’t remember. In fact, it amazed her that she could even remember La Crosse, let alone Marilyn Summers, who died.

  Died.

  Died.

  Peggy was grading papers when the other children came in screaming that Marilyn had gotten snakebit. At first, she thought those little pests were playing some prank, but all the girls were crying, and even the Dille boys’ faces had turned pale as ghosts. She raced outside and found the girl crying and running around the swing, holding her arm that was already swelling.

  “Where is the snake?” Peggy asked.

  The kids pointed in different directions, but it did not matter. They never found the snake. It had struck, slithered away, maybe even under the schoolhouse, and never returned. Maybe it was the devil.

  She got Marilyn to sit on the steps and wrapped her scarf around the bite, two holes, two ugly holes, leaking blood.

  “His eyes . . .” Marilyn cried. “They just locked on me. I . . . I . . . I couldn’t . . . move.”

  Of course, she knew that the girl must have moved. She had tripped and fallen while playing a child’s game, and the snake had coiled less than a foot from where she had hit the ground. She had looked up, seen the snake, and the rattler had struck.

  Nobody thought Marilyn would die.

  “My dog got bit three times,” Mike Dill
e bragged, “and he ain’t dead.”

  “He didn’t even cry,” Mitch Dille sniggered.

  Even Marilyn’s father didn’t think his daughter would die. But she did.

  “That snake . . .” Peggy still heard that poor girl’s wail. “He was like the devil.”

  Suddenly, she was back from La Crosse, and again inside this perdition that her husband called a home. She watched him stoking the fire, bringing it back to life, busying himself to heat up yesterday’s leftover coffee and corn pone. Another great breakfast. Coffee thick as tar, and no honey for the crumbling bread that tasted as if he had used more salt than cornmeal.

  That snake . . . he was like the devil.

  Peggy stared straight ahead and knew that she had made a horrible mistake. This home was under the earth. Well, practically. No other person lived anywhere close. Her husband’s eyes were like diamonds, like the rattlesnake’s. They had mesmerized her, tricked her. His hands . . . not hands. Cloven hoofs. So were his feet. She could really see . . . now that he had removed his boots. His socks were so filthy and full of holes . . . yes, she could see that his feet were likewise cloven hoofs. Why, she could see the tail, the horns, and the pointed ears. She looked at the rifle, but it was no rifle. It was a pitchfork.

  Matt Crabbe was the devil. He was after her soul.

  “You hungry?” he asked. “Sun’ll be up in a half hour. Might as well start our day.”

  Start our day. Another day . . . that lasted an eternity. Another day of wind and dirt. Another day in hell. “I’m not hungry,” she managed to say.

  “Got to eat.” He slid the coffee pot onto the grate over the hot coals in the fireplace.

  A kitchen. Without an oven.

  A home. Without a window.

  A husband. Without a soul.

  She moved to the table, sat down.

  He did not put the bread into the Dutch oven, just pushed the awful stuff into a skillet and set it on the grate next to the pot. “I’ll fix you somethin’ then I gots to find us some game. That norther left a coat of ice an inch or two thick outside, but I warrant I should find some buck near ’bouts.” He gestured at the pitchfork, which had transformed again into that hideous rifle.

  Somehow, she managed to eat, and even wash down the horrible bread with black coffee. She wondered if Lucifer were trying to poison her.

  He reached over with his hoof-hands and patted her hand that lay flat on the table by her plate. “I know it’s tough. Takes some gettin’ used to. But this is gonna be a good place for us. Got water. Good farmland, I’m thinkin’. Don’t look like much right now, but it will. We won’t always be livin’ in this soddy. Don’t you fret none ’bout that. Just got to clear the field first, plant some crops, get us some money. And I’m thinkin’ that I might could set some traps along that creek. Sell us some skins in town. No, Miss Peggy, by the time our kids are maybe seven, eight years old, we’ll have us a fine, fine place. Neighbors’ll look on us with envy. Me especially.” The diamonds in his eyes winked. “On account that I got the prettiest wife in western Kansas.”

  She stared at him, could not think of anything to say, and slid her hand from underneath his scratchy hoof, and picked up the coffee. She drank, smiling pleasantly at him, trying to think, trying to form a plan.

  How do you kill the devil?

  How do you kill a snake?

  “Well.” Lucifer drained his coffee and pulled on his boots. He pulled on his Mackinaw, tossed a bandolier of ammunition over his shoulder, grabbed his hat, setting it atop his head, and picked up the pitchfork-rifle. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  He opened the door, letting the coming light brighten their home enough so she could see the dust mites. She could feel the wind, but managed to follow her husband, the devil, outside. She clutched the neck of her nightshirt. It was cold, so cold, and the country was no longer the color of dead grass—beige, brown, ugly. It was white.

  Her husband slipped a few times, then grabbed a stick from the woodpile to help him with his balance. He trotted off to the south, but stopped at the edge of the lean-to, and looked back. “You might want to chop up some wood. Stack it inside, in case we get another wet storm. Winter’s comin’. Right soon, feels like. I’ll be back, Miss Peggy. You just get settled in our home.”

  She nodded and he was gone. She looked at the woodpile, at the axe underneath the lean-to, its blade buried deep in the chunk of wood. Wood. There wasn’t much, just some dry wood her husband, that devil, had scrounged up around the creek. Even that chunk he had brought from La Crosse. You could hardly find a tree in this country, so mostly what they burned in what passed for a fireplace was dung. Dried dung.

  The devil was gone.

  The idea struck her, and she hurried back inside, leaving the door open, pulling off her nightshirt, dressing quickly in warmer clothes. She picked up her stockings that she had worn yesterday, pulled them on, thought it would take forever to button up her shoes. The scarf went around her neck, and she raced outside, again leaving the door open. Immediately, she slipped on the ice, falling, hitting the ground hard.

  She felt like a total idiot. Pain raced up her arm, where her elbow had struck, and she figured the bruises were already forming on her thigh. She pushed herself up, shook her head, and saw her steamy breath. The sun was up, slowly rising, a white globe that seemed to slow, but not stop, the wind.

  Tentatively, she rose and gingerly picked a path toward the lean-to. She did not care about the woodpile, about chopping up kindling. The bucket next to the fireplace in that awful home of dirt was full of dung. Antelope droppings. Mule waste. Even ancient discharges of buffalo, practically gone from Kansas for a decade. What fascinated her was the ax.

  It took her five minutes to free it from that old chunk. “Bury the blade deep in the trunk,” her husband, Lucifer, had told her earlier. “Keeps the blade free of rust, sharper, too.” She didn’t know if she believed that or not, but her husband, the devil, had certainly sunk that blade in deeply. As blisters formed on her fingers, she wondered if she would manage to free the ax.

  A trick. Her husband, Satan himself, had fooled her. Tried to exhaust her so she would not be able to put up a fight when he came home this evening to take her soul.

  At last, the blade pulled free, and she raised the ax. Heavy. She wanted to rub her finger over its edge, to test its sharpness, but she feared the ax. It looked like a snake’s fang. Impossible. But . . .

  It did not matter. She had the ax. She knew what she must do.

  How do you kill the devil? The same way, she had decided, as you kill a rattlesnake.

  You chop off its head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ogallala, Nebraska

  Danny Waco remembered those good old days—wild and raucous, with cheap booze, cheaper women, and stupid cowboys who expected to be cheated in the gambling dens and promptly were by shady card sharps and crooked roulette rigs. Ogallala sure hadn’t changed much with the times, and to him, Tonkawa Tom and Gil Millican, that was a good thing. Oh, the town had grown some, and progress had reached parts of it, but River Street remained a fine place for debauchery. Ogallala seemed just as lawless as it had been back when it was nothing more than a hell-on-wheels along the Union Pacific line. The Pony Express had come through first, then the railroad, but Ogallala’s claim to fame came as a cattle town, one that some say rivaled Dodge City. It had catered to cattlemen ever since the burg had been plotted, official-like, back in ’75. Plotted, yeah, but nobody had ever gotten around to incorporating it.

  The Great Western Trail came through there, bringing cattlemen, cowboys, and longhorn beef to stock the ranges in Wyoming, Montana, the Dakotas, and even a few in the rolling hills of western Nebraska’s boot heel. Stupid Texas waddies came in and got drunk, and often got killed. Boot Hill, for the longest while the only cemetery in town, had more than a hundred graves. When you realized that the town’s population seldom topped more than one-twenty-five, that was saying a lot.

 
It brought in the likes of Luke Short, a gunman mighty handy with cards, and Sam Bass, an outlaw who’d met his maker down in Texas in the late ’70s. And on a clear autumn day of blue skies, a modest wind, and temperatures in the fifties, it brought in Danny Waco.

  For three days, Waco had enjoyed all the comforts of Nebraska. He had settled into a high-stakes poker game for some more comfort. What he didn’t realize was how fate would soon make Ogallala uncomfortable.

  Though the Texas cattle trade wasn’t as prominent as it had been before that Texas fever outbreak back in ’84—which led to Nebraska banning Texas cattle and ending the trail-herd business—Ogallala hadn’t finished sowing her oats.

  The stores stood along Railroad Avenue, south of the UP rails. River Street, where the cowboys had raised Cain back in the ’70s and ’80s, ran south of the rails just above the South Platte River.

  The town jail, the lone stone structure along Railroad Avenue’s false-fronted frame buildings, sat empty, and the lawdog minded his own affairs. He didn’t care what happened in the saloons, gambling dens, and brothels, as long as no one disturbed the business section or made fools out of themselves by the railroad depot where people might see them and get the wrong idea about Ogallala, Nebraska. Nor could anyone cause a ruction and disturb anyone eating at the Ogallala House, because S.S. Gast, the owner, didn’t want anyone spoiling his supper or unnerving his chef.

  Danny Waco had no plans of disturbing any peace, unless the dealer at the poker table inside the Cowboys Rest riled him. Gil Millican stood with his boot on the brass foot rail at the bar, working on his sixth beer of the day. Some hurdy-gurdy gal stood beside him. A handful of other men lined the bar, and two more card games were being played.

  Waco studied his hand. Two jacks, two queens, and the ten of hearts. He checked.