Winchester 1886

by William W. Johnstone

  Waco cursed and flattened against the grass.

  This lawman would be someone to play poker against. Made the predictable seem unpredictable. Might have seen Waco, so he crawled through the grass, over one or two graves, and came to one of someone with a bit of class or at least some money. That body’s kinfolk or friends had erected a little fence around his grave. Of course, weeds had overtaken it, and the whitewash had been blasted away by wind, snow, and rain.

  Waco glanced off to his left. Gil Millican had found a spot along the last row of dead men.

  Where in blazes had The Tonk gone? Gutless wonder. Waco cursed and spit. No better than those fool, loudmouth kids they’d gotten to go along on that Katy job. He should have remembered what his pa had told him all those long years ago. Don’t trust no Indian. And trust a half-breed even less.

  Gently, Waco eased himself up, resting the rifle between the pickets of the fence around the grave. He noticed for the first time the size of the grave. Too small to be a full-grown man. Must have been some kid. He aimed in the general direction of where he believed that law to be hiding. Then the heat of a bullet practically seared him as it roared past his face, blowing off the pointed end of the old one-by-two-inch picket.

  Cursing, screaming, Waco fell backward, the rifle spinning up and over, landing in the grass.

  He recovered quickly, rolled over, grabbed the rifle, and scurried along the graves through the tall grass, over one grave with the cross lying on its side—no name, and the date too weathered to make out anymore—to a marker that was nothing more than a slab of wood. No name, no date, nothing likely ever had been written on it, probably because the poor fool was unknown and unclaimed.

  Waco rose and yelled, “Go get him, Gil!” He pumped three quick shots across the boneyard and ducked, laughing to himself as he heard Millican cutting loose with something that might have been a Johnny Reb yell, firing his revolver as he ran.

  A rifle roared, and Waco came to his knees, firing, cocking, cocking, firing, then moving over three or four graves, aiming at the smoke from that law’s long gun.

  Millican had emptied his Smith & Wesson, and he found another tombstone to hide behind while he reloaded. Waco aimed, waiting for the lawdog to show his head, if he wasn’t already barking at the devil, dead from one of Waco’s bullets. Suddenly, a figure appeared on the far edge of the grave. Too far away to be the law—unless he was a ghost. Waco turned his barrel and almost pulled the trigger before he understood exactly who it was standing there.

  The Winchester’s barrel felt scalding hot as Jimmy quickly fed shells from his gun belt into the carbine’s loading gate. He felt around the belt. Ten more cartridges. Plus the six he had in his Colt, still holstered. Stop wasting lead, he told himself. You know better than that.

  The way he figured it, Waco was off on the town side of Boot Hill, and Millican about even with the gate, maybe twenty yards in front of him. He rolled onto his belly, took a deep breath, and moved up a few feet.

  “You loaded?” Waco’s voice calling out to Millican.

  “Yeah? You?”

  “To the brim. Charge that gent, Gil. We’ll get him this time. The town laws will be here shortly.”

  Jimmy came up, saw Millican running. Almost immediately, he caught something out of the corner of his eye and turned just as Tonkawa Tom pulled the trigger on a single-shot rifle.

  Waco laughed as the lawman went flying backward, his carbine’s stock going the other way, and the rest of the Winchester flying over Millican’s head.

  That half-breed had come through. But Waco figured any praise would have to wait. “Come on, boys!” he yelled. “Leave the law for the buzzards, and let’s get out of here.”

  They were all running. Couldn’t wait around to check to see if that lawman was dead or merely dazed. Ogallala’s finest would be coming to help that marshal. Waco hurdled the fence, then tripped, tumbling down the hill, but never letting go of his rifle. He came up and saw Tonkawa Tom already on the road.

  Now there is a good man, Waco figured. Good ol’ Tonk had even fetched the lawdog’s horse. Waco also saw something else. Men. Most of them on horses, not riding hard, but coming toward Boot Hill. The town law. And some were armed for bear.

  He looked up and found Millican running through the gate and down the steps.

  “Posse come.” The Tonk was already in his saddle.

  “I know.”

  “Didn’t know your horse dead.”

  Millican reached them, slid to a stop, turned, and aimed his Smith & Wesson at the gate . . . waiting for that marshal, who might or might not be dead.

  “Must ride double,” The Tonk said. “Till find another horse.”

  Waco knew that would just slow them down. With a posse on their tail.

  Millican had the reins to the lawman’s horse.

  “Let’s go,” Tonkawa Tom urged.

  Waco hated to do it, but, well, he didn’t want his neck stretched. Hated it. But not that much. He raised the rifle and blew Tonkawa Tom out of the saddle.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Wallace County, Kansas

  The days never changed. Dreary. Cold, Always growing more frigid. The nights stretched on for an eternity. Breakfast was always some gruel or nothing more than black coffee. Because fresh game proved scarce, salt pork usually wound up on the plate for supper.

  The wind always blew.

  Peggy Crabbe had grown to accept this as the wind blew out October and November roared into the treeless plains of western Kansas. Each morning she awoke to find the cot on the floor where her husband spent each night empty and Matt Crabbe gone. She made her breakfast, swept the dirt and dust out of the sod house, and went about her day—feeding the mules, breaking up the ice out of the trough so they could drink, preparing supper. She had forgotten all about ever eating a noon dinner or having tea . . . the thought of having tea made her laugh.

  She never expected her husband, Old Beelzebub, to return, but late each afternoon, she heard the mules snorting, and knew the Devil had made it back to Hades. He always returned with the pitchfork, which he made her believe was a rifle, and he hypnotized her into thinking that his hands and feet were those of humans, that his ears were not pointy, and that his eyes were not soulless.

  Peggy knew better, though.

  Sometimes her husband, the Devil, brought home scrawny jackrabbits for supper. Other times, he would leave the pitchfork-rifle in the soddy, and take a shotgun with him, returning with a pheasant or some other birds—Peggy did not want to know what they had been—and she would fry those up in a skillet and serve with a thick gravy she had learned how to make that was stout enough to fill their stomachs more than the thin, greasy meat of the fowls. She had even grown accustomed to spitting out the birdshot that wound up in her teeth.

  Other times, her husband, Lucifer in disguise, returned home with nothing.

  On those evenings, even he sat at the table, head hung down, and sang out in despair. “God as my witness, Miss Peggy, I didn’t know things would be this rough. I thought—still think, mind you—that this is a good place for a homestead, but . . . but . . . but . . . well, I jus’ don’t know where all the game’s got to. We got water. And it ain’t like this place coulda been hunted out afore we settled here. It’s jus’ . . . well . . . it’s peculiar. I even tried fishin’ in the crick, but”—he let out a long, weary sigh—“nary a bite. At least we got us salt pork.”

  Not tonight, she thought as she ladled a thick mess of gruel and gravy into his bowl.

  “I just can’t figure this out. Bad run of luck.” His head shook again. “It’s like—”

  “We are cursed,” she finished for him.

  He laid his spoon on the table and studied her, long, thoughtfully. “I—” He never could find the words. “Don’t reckon I’d say that.”

  Of course not, she knew. Because he was cursed. Cursed to rule in Hades. Tossed out of Heaven. Because he was Satan. Maybe she would find her courage, and God would
give her the strength, and she could chop off the head of this serpent.

  But, it wouldn’t be that night. She knew it when she pulled up the covers and heard the Devil snoring on his cot by the door. She was too tired. It proved hard to keep up one’s strength with the slop they had been eating for two weeks. If Matt Crabbe were not Lucifer, he would have given up, taken her back to La Crosse. By Jehovah, she would have settled to be back at Monument Rocks, looking at the bloated bodies of horses and soldiers.

  She tried to say a prayer, but could not remember any. Another trick of her husband, she knew. Corrupting her mind. Blinding her. Stealing her memories.

  The wind howled. She could see the dust already forming under the bottom of the door. She could hear something banging outside, while her husband, the Devil, snored, oblivious to everything going on outside.

  The quilts and blankets could not warm her, no more than the fire. Old Beelzebub had banked it before he had lain down on the floor and quickly fallen to sleep.

  Briefly, she looked at the books she had left on the bed. The Bible. Charles Dickens. But she did not feel like reading. Not that night. She was too tired and needed her strength. Tomorrow, she knew, would be the day she would kill the Devil.

  Ogallala, Nebraska

  Marshal Theodore Munroe and his posse of stalwart, brave, God-fearing citizens stopped to stare at the body of the dead half-breed.

  Shirley Sweet shook her head in disgust and tossed her Remington Rolling Block rifle to the haberdasher named Belton. Lifting her skirt, she hurried up the steps, went through the gate, and found the young, bearded deputy U.S. marshal on his knees behind a wooden grave marker he had knocked over. The tombstone was broken. The man who wore the six-pointed star wasn’t in much better condition.

  He kept shaking his hands, trying to make the feeling return, sending streams of blood onto the dead grass, weeds, and sunken grave.

  Turning, Shirley took a few steps back toward the gate, staring down the steps. Marshal Munroe and others were pointing down the road at the fading dust left by Danny Waco and his one surviving partner. None of the posse seemed interested in the cemetery, although a few had walked around the dead man to look at the dead horse.

  The day had been going pretty good, Shirley thought. She had bested that murdering outlaw in a poker game, had a good stake already, and Colonel Tom C. Curtis had not even arrived in Ogallala with the rest of his Wild West Show.

  Wild West Show? No, Curtis’s was not anything like Buffalo Bill Cody’s or Pawnee Bill’s. It was more like a dog-and-pony show, but Shirley Sweet was Curtis’s star attraction, a sharpshooting wonder. Munroe and a couple men had come into the saloon—conveniently a few minutes after Waco had left and gunfire had erupted on the streets of Ogallala. The marshal had asked for a posse, anyone in the saloon who could help them. The only volunteer in The Cowboys Rest had been Shirley Sweet.

  Munroe and the others did not like that one bit, but when Shirley had produced the handsome Remington Hepburn, no one had the guts to stop her.

  A single shot, the Rolling Block was a No. 3 Sporting Model, firing .38-55 Winchester from a 30-inch barrel. She rarely missed, even figured she could give Annie Oakley a run for her money. Of course, hitching her career to a confidence man like Colonel Tom C. Curtis, she knew there was a fat chance of that ever happening.

  Belton stared at it stupidly, like he had never held a gun before. Probably hadn’t, but gave him credit. Haberdasher or not, he had joined the posse. No one in the saloon had.

  “Hey!” she shouted, and everyone looked up. “That lawman’s up here. Hurt, but he’ll live. I could use a hand.”

  Men in the posse looked at each other, but no one moved. Shirley Sweet gave up and returned to the lawman.

  “Where’s my rifle?” he asked when she knelt beside him.

  She had spotted part of it—the stock—on the main path when she had entered Boot Hill.

  “I need my rifle,” he repeated.

  “Not anymore.” She ripped a piece off her skirt, and grabbed the man’s left hand. The cuts on that palm seemed deeper than the cuts on his right. He did not resist, and she wrapped the cloth over his hand, securing it tightly.

  “Huh?”

  She let his left hand drop, and reached for his right, noticing how he touched the center of his chest—right on the breastbone. She saw the hole in his shirt. “You’re lucky,” she told him as she began to wrap his right hand.

  He blinked. “How’s that?”

  “Way I figure it, one of those gunmen shot you. Only the bullet—had to be from a rifle, a powerful one.” She kept on talking as she worked on his right hand. “Bullet hit your rifle, which you must have been holding right next to your chest. Probably hit the stock, right above the lever. Blew your rifle apart.” Her head tilted. “I saw the stock laying over yonder. Reckon you’ll find the rest of your gun”—her head tilted the other way—“over there somewhere.”

  She tied off the ripped piece of skirt. “Bullet popped you in the chest. Dead center. Lucky. But it was spent by that time. Might have just been a fragment of the bullet. By all rights, you should be dead. I reckon that rifle you were shooting saved your life.”

  He blinked. Reasoning and sanity seemed to be returning. He looked at his hands. Blood already seeped through both of her bindings.

  “You’re like a cat, I reckon,” Shirley Sweet told him.

  Somehow, he managed to laugh. “Nine lives?”

  She smiled at him. “Something like that.”

  “Well.” He sighed. “Reckon I just used up Number Nine.”

  “Then don’t get caught under Danny Waco’s gun sights again.”

  His head lifted, and he stared at her hard. “What’s your name?”

  Shirley smiled. “I thought you Westerners frowned upon such things as asking a body his or her name.”

  “My name’s Jimmy Mann,” he told her. “Sorry for being forward. Deputy marshal out of Fort Smith.”

  “You’re a long way from home.”

  “I got my reasons.”

  Yeah. She knew his reason. Danny Waco. Probably personal, not legal.

  “I’m Shirley Sweet. Originally from Zanesville, Ohio.”

  “You’re a long way from home, too.”

  She shook her head, laughing without humor. “I haven’t had a home since I was fourteen years old. How’s that you put it out here, ‘I live where I hang my hat’?”

  He looked up at her. “You’re not wearing a hat.”

  “’Cause I hung it here. In the hotel. For now.”

  For the past eight years, since Colonel Tom C. Curtis had found her shooting squirrels for the Zanesville Café, she had lived in hotels, but only when Curtis was flush. Mostly, they slept in the wagon yards or under the wagons when they couldn’t afford what a wagon yard charged.

  The Colonel Tom C. Curtis Wild West Extravaganza Featuring Shirley Sweet, the Sharpshooting Wonder of the World included four wagons; one bear with only three teeth left; an Italian who passed himself off as a great Sioux warrior; a Texas roper who, Shirley had to admit, was pretty handy with a lariat, as long as he laid off the hooch; a twelve-year-old runaway who could blow a trumpet; Colonel Tom C. Curtis, whose only dealings with the military came when he slicked soldiers in his shell games; and Shirley Sweet, twenty-two-year-old dead shoot . . . and not a bad poker player.

  The Colonel had sent her ahead, instructing her to get the lay of the land at Ogallala and maybe win some money at the card tables, while the rest of the Extravaganza waited for him to finish his thirty days in jail in North Platte, Nebraska.

  Served Curtis right. Shirley had warned him against running his con games or trying to set up the show in North Platte. That was Buffalo Bill Cody’s stamping grounds, and Cody was friend to everyone—excepting, naturally, a money-grubbing fraud like Tom C. Curtis who cheated, swindled, disavowed every Code of the West, and competed with Buffalo Bill for a buck.

  “You know a lot about guns,” Deputy U.S. Ma
rshal Jimmy Mann was telling her, “for a . . .”

  She waited. He didn’t finish. A good thing, she figured, though she was really used to such comments.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  That surprised her. She smiled, and pointed at the Colt in his holster. “I take it you’re handy with guns, too.”

  He looked at the revolver. “Not so much with short guns.”

  She laughed. “Me, neither. Never even fired a six-shooter. Just rifles and shotguns.”

  He looked at his bandaged hands, back at the holstered Colt, then at her. “I got to go after him.” He started to rise, only to fall against her shoulder.

  She caught him as she heard the gate to the cemetery opening. At least one of the posse members had found his courage.

  She eased Jimmy back up, waited for him to regain his balance and the dizziness to pass, and then released her hold. “Honey, you ain’t going nowhere—especially not after a man like Danny Waco. You can’t even hold a gun. Not it them hands. And you won’t be holding one for a spell.”

  Frowning, Jimmy Mann looked at his hands.

  Marshal Munroe squatted beside them, his knees popping, and his lungs working hard from all the exertion of walking up those stairs to the cemetery. He had come into Boot Hill alone, leaving the six other men from town to gawk at the dead man, the dead horse, and watch Danny Waco and his pard get farther and farther away. Shirley figured they were already out of Munroe’s jurisdiction. The newspaper would probably write that Munroe had run Danny Waco out of Ogallala.

  “You got one of them, Mann,” Munroe said.

  The deputy marshal stared, not comprehending. “What are you talking about?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  You got one of them.

  The marshal’s words ran through Jimmy Mann’s head again. Got one? Jimmy had not killed The Tonk. The half-breed had been shot dead by his pard, his boss—the man whose life he had saved.