Monahan's Massacre

by William W. Johnstone

  “Grant. General Grant. That’s your name.”

  The bay gelding snorted and even seemed to nod its head in agreement.

  Which told Dooley Monahan something else.

  “I must be a Yankee.”

  Southerners, he knew, would not likely name their horse after Ulysses S. Grant.

  If, indeed, he had named the horse General Grant after the Union Civil War hero and president—that’s right, Grant was now president of these United States. He remembered that even before he saw an article in the Virginia City Enterprise that had a few choice comments about President Grant’s policies and choices for political offices.

  He lost $233.76 of his more than $1,000 at roulette and blackjack in Virginia City, so decided to take his shrinking fortune and his blue-eyed shepherd dog and bay gelding named after a Union war hero (and disaster of a president) toward Montana.

  Somehow, he wound up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead.

  By then he had begun to call the dog Blue, and the dog wagged his tail and the bay gelding nodded its head in agreement.

  In Cheyenne, he heard a couple of cowboys brag in a saloon that they had lynched a damned old sodbuster. Dooley dropped his beer—half-full or half-empty, depending on your point of view—and said out loud, “Iowa.”

  At Fort Bridger, Wyoming, he had paid four dollars and thirty-five cents to a doctor, who had treated Dooley, given him a tincture of some medicine that tasted most foul but caused Dooley to sleep like a baby and gave him some of the wildest dreams. The doctor said that this amnesia—which was the word he used to describe Dooley’s loss of memory—could end, could be permanent, and even could cause Dooley to die an early death of a stroke or aneurysm or suicide.

  “But it doesn’t appear to be that bad of a case,” Dr. Smoker had said, and he smoked like the 2-4-0 locomotive on the railroad tracks nearby. “You remembered the dog’s name. You remembered your horse’s name. You assumed you are Dooley Monahan and that is likely correct.”

  “Assumed?” Dooley had asked.

  “You could have stolen the wallet from the real Dooley Monahan.”

  “Nah.” Dooley shook his head. “I think I’m Dooley Monahan.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Who the hell would call himself Dooley Monahan if that wasn’t his name?”

  Dr. Smoker, between coughs, went on to say that various things would cause Dooley to regain most of his memory. And that’s what happened.

  In Cheyenne, he understood that he hailed from Iowa. The word sodbuster jogged that memory back into place, and Dooley remembered he was a farmer. So he rode back.

  Other memories would come back to him—but some of those he didn’t care to remember. Besides, he was sleeping right now—unconscious—and wondered if he would remember anything when he woke up. Right now, though, he didn’t care if he ever woke up because he was having a mighty fine dream. And he had used up the last of that opium or whatever the sawbones had called it years ago.

  It was the plump girl from Omaha. And Dooley had saved her life. And now she was showing proper respect by kissing him all over, and Dooley’s hands were going to some places on her body that were plump where they should be plump and felt mighty fine. But then the plump blonde started licking his face. And she kept right on licking. Wet, sloppy licks from a tongue that felt like coarse leather. And Dooley had no choice but to open his eyes and say . . .

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Damn you, Blue, stop licking me!”

  He rolled away from the merle-colored dog, who was sopping wet, and shook his head. That was a mistake, he learned, as he lifted his body off the ground and vomited. Then his arms gave out, and he planted his face in the weeds and sand and everything his stomach had just purged.

  Beside him, Blue whimpered.

  Eventually, Dooley rolled over. He waited for the dizziness to pass, then wiped his face with his hand. Blue came over to help, and licked his face again. This time, Dooley did not complain.

  “How’d you get here, Blue?” he asked the dog, who did not answer, but backed away a bit, shook more Platte River water off his body, and lay down, head up, staring at his master.

  “Good boy.” Dooley managed to smile, even though stretching his lips caused his head to ache.

  After about an hour, or maybe a day, he managed to push himself to a seated position and looked across at the cranes and the coyotes along the far bank of the Platte. It was morning. He must have slept through the rest of yesterday and all of last night. Eventually, he lifted his left arm and tested the knot, about the size of a goose egg, on his head. Dried blood matted his hair, but at least the blood was dried. He wouldn’t bleed to death.

  He didn’t know where his hat was, but figured he would find it when he climbed back up the bank. He moved his right hand toward his gun belt, surprised to find his shell belt but remembering that either Dobbs or Handley or maybe the pale Doc had ordered him to drop his Colt. Most likely, one of the outlaws had taken possession of that .45.

  And General Grant?

  Slowly, carefully, Dooley turned and looked up at the cloudless sky and the tall grass. He wet his lips, then tested his voice:

  “General?”

  No answer.

  “General Grant?”

  A crane flapped its wings.

  “Horse?”

  Well, he figured as much. The outlaw whose horse had gone lame had taken General Grant. And probably they had taken the lame horse with them a ways.

  He checked his vest pocket where he found his pocketknife, his pocket watch, and even his billfold with thirty-two dollars and seventy-two cents in change. The robbers hadn’t robbed him. Even better, they hadn’t killed him.

  In the last pocket on his vest, he fished out a piece of taffy and a hard bite of beef jerky. So he would not starve to death, at least for a little while, and he even had water from the river to wash down both the candy and the dried meat.

  He returned the food to the bottom-left pocket. No sense, he told himself, in testing that stomach yet.

  All in all, this morning was not as bad as he thought it could have been.

  Well, he was horseless, but he did have his dog. He looked at the shepherd.

  “How’d you find me, Blue?”

  Silly question. Obviously, Blue had followed the outlaws from a distance. He had swum across the wide river. Dooley was horseless, but at least he had his dog back.

  And his memory.

  He smiled. He knew his name without having to check his wallet. He knew the dog’s name. He remembered his horse’s name. He could recall everything that had happened, except some parts of those wild dreams he had been having—but that was usually natural. Never had he been very good at remembering his dreams, especially when he had just awakened.

  After about an hour, Dooley decided to stand. He weaved and staggered and even collapsed to his knees once, but eventually he reached the edge of the Platte. Lying on his belly, he reached out into the river and washed the vomit off his face and the blood out of his hair. He drank, and the stomach accepted the offering. His tongue reduced in size. Rolling over and sitting up, he soaked his boots in the cool water.

  When he decided he could stand again, he did. He moved downstream a few yards and looked at the tracks in the sand. A posse must have crossed the river here, but turned back and recrossed the Platte. Maybe the men decided to return home. He saw one stick that had been used for a torch. So they had come across the river at night. Dooley nodded, and surprised himself when he did not irritate his head or stomach.

  “If they came at night, maybe that’s why they didn’t see me,” he told Blue.

  Blue wagged his tail.

  He drank more water, a lot more water, and climbed up the bank to the general area where he had talked a bit to Hubert Dobbs and Frank Handley and had been buffaloed by a mean hombre from behind and left horseless on the far side of the Platte River.

  Dooley looked across the river again.

  “That posse,”
he told Blue, “crossed the Platte and almost immediately recrossed the river.”

  He rubbed his chin.

  “Maybe that river’s the boundary of their jurisdiction,” he told Blue, who had lost interest in anything Dooley Monahan had to say. Dooley looked west. The grass had been pushed down by the horses of the bank robbers. Even Dooley Monahan could follow that trail, so certainly a posse from Omaha could have done it. But the lawmen had not. Another thought entered his head and came out of his mouth.

  “Cowards.”

  Not that Dooley Monahan could blame them. He remembered reading that story in the National Police Gazette back on his farm that said Hubert Dobbs had personally murdered fifteen men; Frank Handley had gunned down at least twelve, plus two mules, a goat, and a Canadian; while Doc Watson had plugged five men with pistols, two with shotguns, one with a rifle, ten with knives, three with his bare hands, and one with a pitchfork. The article had not counted up the murders done by the other men who rode with the gang.

  “Or,” Dooley said, trying to say something nice about Nebraska and Nebraskans, which came hard for a man from Iowa, “it could be that they mistook the Platte for the Missouri.” He nodded. “And if they thought this was the Missouri, that would mean that the outlaws were in Iowa, so they’d have to turn back.”

  He smiled. His head shook. He looked at Blue and said, “Even Nebraskans ain’t that stupid.”

  After another minute, he said again, “Cowards.”

  Dooley found his hat, carefully knocked off the horse apple on the brim, and even more carefully placed it on top of his head. The sun had warmed up considerably since Blue had licked him back into the real world. So now Dooley Monahan had to make a decision.

  He could walk back to Omaha. It would be a considerable hike in wet Wellington boots that would be even wetter because he would have to cross the Platte River to get there. Or . . .

  Dooley gazed down the trail of bent grass.

  Some no-account coward who rode with a bunch of murdering thieves had put a knot on his head and had taken, most likely, his Colt .45 and the best horse he had ever owned. And the men had left a trail a blind man could follow, at least for the time being. Dooley Monahan wasn’t a lawman, or a gunman—even though he had had a bit of success with the latter—but nor would anyone ever call him a coward.

  He reached into a vest pocket and brought out the taffy, which he stuck in his mouth. The jerky he tossed to Blue, who gobbled it up without even tasting it. As he chewed and sucked, Dewey put his right foot in front of his left, and followed with the left in front of the right.

  It made sense. After all, Dobbs, Handley, Doc Watson, and the boys were riding west. Dooley needed to go west at least for a spell, too. Eventually, he would have to turn north and find that gold strike in the Black Hills of Dakota Territory. He stopped, found the back pocket on his canvas trousers, and felt the newspaper clipping he still carried with him. The outlaws had not stolen that, either.

  He walked. And Blue followed.

  * * *

  At first, the trail proved easy enough to follow—even if he didn’t have bent and crumpled grass, and plenty of horse apples, to guide his way. Handley, Dobbs, Doc, and the others just rode along the Platte River. When it dipped south, they dipped south. When it bent to the north, they bent to the north.

  For two or three days, Dooley Monahan and his shepherd dog walked along the banks of the Platte. Blue managed to catch a rabbit and devoured it, but Dooley had little to eat except the taffy that he had finished before he had traveled a hundred yards on the first day. On the second day, he found some quail eggs in a nest near the river and had eaten those raw. He had not gotten sick, either.

  On the third day, however, the Platte River turned west, but the outlaws rode north. That meant Dooley would have to ford the wide river on foot. Or turn back like the cowardly posse had done and make his way back to Omaha. Or find another city.

  He thought about that because by now his feet really ached. Wellington boots were not meant for walking across Nebraska. Probably, he later decided, he would have done just that, and then another thought came to him.

  He could have gone back to Omaha three days earlier, bought a horse and saddle with the money the outlaws had not stolen, maybe even managed to buy a used pistol that would fire the .45 bullets in his shell belt. Then he could have gone chasing after Hubert Dobbs and his fellow horse thieves and scoundrels.

  “Why,” he asked Blue, “do I come up with better ideas after I’ve already implemented the stupid one?”

  Blue walked to the bank.

  “Yeah,” Dooley said. He crossed the river. Everyone said the Platte could be a mile wide but rarely an inch deep. That wasn’t quite the case, but never did the water reach above his knees.

  It wasn’t so much the anticipation, or the vague notion, of catching up to a bunch of riders on horseback that led Dooley and his dog to ford the wide river. It was the smoke.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The smoke led Dooley and Blue to the sod house about two or three miles northwest of the Platte. The smoke wafted white and gray from a stovepipe that rose above the weeds that grew from the roof.

  Dooley swallowed. He had always thought his farmhouse, which had been his parents’ home before they had been called to Glory, was as hardscrabble as any place on the good earth until he saw this dirt home cut into a hill. A mule stood in a small corral near the small sod hut. An outhouse stood a few yards behind the corral. On the other side of the corral, Dooley spotted the well. Behind the sod house, some ground had been turned over, but most of the land around the farm—if you’d stretch your imagination and actually call this a farm—remained prairie. But Dooley kept walking, no longer drawn by the woodsmoke but the smell coming out of the open door in the little hill.

  Salt pork frying in an iron skillet, mixed with the aroma of coffee boiling.

  When he came about twenty yards from the doorway, Dooley stopped, swallowed, and whispered to his dog, “Sit.”

  Blue actually obeyed.

  Dooley sucked in a deep breath, exhaled, and cupped his hands round his mouth.

  “Halloooo the . . . uh . . . house,” he called out. His throat ached. He tugged the holster on his hip toward his crotch, just so the farmer could see that Dooley was unarmed, and he spread both hands far away from his side, just so the farmer could see that Dooley meant no harm. Besides, after so many days walking across Nebraska, Dooley figured he must look pathetic. Even a Nebraska farmer would take pity on any critter that looked half as wretched as Dooley Monahan did right then.

  A big man in dirty denim britches and a homespun shirt filled the doorway, studied Dooley, then Blue, and after a moment stepped into the light. His hands, like Dooley’s, remained empty.

  “Howdy,” said the man. The greeting was country, American, Nebraskan, farmland, but the accent came from Europe. Norwegian, Dooley guessed. Or some such place.

  Dooley lowered his hands and smiled. “Howdy,” he returned. “My horse got stole a few days back.”

  The big farmer took another step and looked at his mule before he turned his big head back and locked his gray eyes again on Dooley.

  “I’m not after your plow mule,” Dooley said. “Just was hoping for some water for my dog and myself. Maybe some coffee. And . . . well . . . I have had one piece of taffy in three days.”

  The farmer waved his big hand.

  “Come,” he said. “I have plenty. Feed you. And dog. Good dog. Come.”

  Rancid bacon burned to a crisp so it wouldn’t make a fellow sick, and coffee so strong it went down about like the bacon filled Dooley’s stomach as he sat in a chair, a real chair, and stretched his boots out underneath the rickety table. The farmer, whose name was Ole Something-another-dorf, turned over a keg to use for his chair. Obviously, Mr. Something-another-dorf was a bachelor.

  The big farmer listened as Dooley told him what had happened in Omaha, and why he was walking across eastern Nebraska. The man blinked but said
nothing, and Dooley figured Ole Something-another-dorf had never heard of Hubert Dobbs, Frank Handley, Doc Watson, and maybe even Omaha. It was obvious the man did not read newspapers.

  In fact, the man took pride in pointing out two things in his home, and neither was the blanket in the corner near the fireplace that served as his bed. One was a Bible, a lavish, leather-bound beauty that appeared to be twice the size of the Bible Dooley’s mother had read. The other was what appeared to be a copy of the claim Ole the Farmer had gotten when he had filed for his 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862.

  “Is there a town nearby?” Dooley asked.

  The man made a vague gesture northwest, which was the opposite direction of Omaha.

  “Dutch Bluff,” he said.

  “How far?” Dooley asked.

  “Fifteen miles,” Ole answered. “Maybe thirty.”

  “Oh.” He wondered how far away he was from Omaha. Maybe Ole the Farmer would offer to take him to Dutch Bluff in his . . . buckboard? Dooley had seen no sign of any wagon, any means of transportation, other than the mule.

  Ole the Farmer, however, did not offer the loan of the mule, but he did pull from the water bucket near his smelly bedroll a jug, tore the cork out with his teeth, and handed the earthen container to Dooley.

  * * *

  Hospitality. If every Nebraskan showed this much cordiality, Dooley Monahan, as a native of Iowa just across the Missouri River, might have a higher opinion of the state. Of course, Ole wasn’t really from Nebraska—was anybody, other than maybe some Pawnees and Poncas?—but he hung his hat here, and made some potent but quite tasty liquor made from potatoes. Or so Ole had told Dooley.

  Over potato liquor, and potato bread, and peeled potatoes fried in bacon grease, and coffee, Ole and Dooley talked about this and that, farming and outlaws, Nebraska and Iowa, homesteading and the book of Genesis, which, turns out, was as far as Ole had gotten through that ornate Bible.

  Dooley liked talking about his farm. A hundred acres in corn, forty in oats, forty in hay, thirty acres of cow pastures, and the rest for horses, the barn, the pigs, a garden, a well, a cistern, and a fishing pond. When he had been a young buck of right about twenty, he had owned half of that. Now that his mother, Janine, and father, David, were walking the Streets of Glory, it was all his. His parents, and a baby sister that never lived to see her first birthday, and an older brother taken by the croup or something when he was three years old, about two years before Dooley entered this world, were also sleeping their eternal sleep on his farm, on a hill that overlooked the cow pastures.