By that time, Dooley no longer smiled. The dog barked. The lawman’s horse bolted away from the river. The gunmen crossing the river cursed and whooped and kept right on shooting. The mule brayed, bucked, and began to follow the lawman’s blue roan. Dooley tried to tell the mule, “Whoa,” but he couldn’t manage a word, not even a grunt. He tried to squeeze the mule’s sides so hard that the dumb plow animal would stop, but that just made the mule run harder. Then Blue, sensing the danger, started yapping at the mule, trying to keep it from running. Which only made the mule bolt, and Dooley felt himself slipping off the rear end of the mule, and the rope tightened across his neck.
Then, he was kicking the hanging man’s death dance.
CHAPTER TWELVE
His eyes bulged out of his head. He felt blood trying to push through the veins and arteries in his throat. His lungs screamed for air. His brain told him to die. Dooley tried to stop kicking, fearing that would just hasten his demise, but his feet and the muscles in his legs would not listen. He bounced up and down. His heart wanted to explode. No longer could he hear anything but Satan’s laughter.
The last thing he thought he would see on this earth was Hubert Dobbs, standing in the stirrups on his big black horse, one hand pressing down on the saddle horn, the other aiming a long-barreled .44 caliber Remington at Dooley’s head. Dooley saw the muzzle blast, but heard not a pop. The world turned suddenly black.
* * *
“Ouch,” said Dooley.
His eyes opened. He must be in Hell. Doc Watson’s gaunt, white face stared down at him. Vaguely, Dooley understood that his head was off the ground. The gunman coughed as he jerked the noose off Dooley’s head. Dooley’s head slammed against the ground.
This time, he didn’t say ouch. What he said caused a bunch of men to laugh.
“’Pears he don’t care much fer yer bedside manner.” The voice sounded nasal and twangy, but oddly feminine.
More laughter.
Dooley slowly reached over and rubbed the back of his head that had made contact with hard dirt. He remembered his name, and remembered hanging by the neck, so he knew he had not lost his memory. He knew he must not be in Hell, but still on the banks of the Platte River in Nebraska. His hand moved from the back of his head to his throat, gingerly touching the raw flesh, already scabbing over from a hideous rope burn. He sucked in a deep breath, which burned his throat but satisfied his lungs. He blew out. Repeated the process. Beside him came a familiar noise, and Dooley smiled, but quickly regretted that. It made his throat hurt.
“I’m all right, Blue,” he told the shepherd. That hurt, too.
“Bear grease,” said the nasal, girlish voice. “Do the trick. Rub some on that scratch, Doc.”
“Scratch,” Doc Watson said. “Any deeper and his head would’ve been cut off. And that’s one thing I know about . . . cuttin’ off heads.”
“I’ve cut meself worser shavin’ me armpits,” the voice said.
“Forget the damned bear grease,” roared the voice of Hubert Dobbs. “Get that feller up on his own legs. Now.”
Doc Watson and another man each took one of Dooley’s arms and jerked him to his feet. The world began spinning, and if the second man had not kept a firm grip on Dooley’s left arm, he would have spilled onto the Nebraska sod again.
“Start talkin’,” Hubert Dobbs ordered.
Dooley waited until the dizziness passed. He shook his head, swallowed painfully, and looked at the men. His mouth opened, but no words escaped. Impatiently, Hubert Dobbs drew the big Remington and cocked it, pointing the barrel at Dooley’s midsection. The man let go of Dooley’s left arm and took a few steps off to the side. Doc Watson moved closer to the Platte River.
“I give you the benefit of a doubt, feller,” Hubert Dobbs said. “I can always string you up again.”
“He just cain’t talk right now, Pa,” said the female voice. “Hell’s fire, he just got hung.”
Dooley blinked. Yes, that slim rider in buckskins with a wild mane of brown hair spilling from underneath a wide-brimmed straw hat was a woman. Her breasts pushed hard against the greasy buckskin shirt she wore. She also carried a brace of Navy Colts, butt forward, in a green sash. A woman. Yes. Definitely a woman. Sort of.
He finally managed to say something.
“Your daughter.”
“Don’t get no manly desires, mister,” Hubert Dobbs said, waving the gun angrily.
“Shucks, Pa,” his daughter said. “You spoilt all the fun. He ain’t that bad-lookin’.”
“Quiet. Don’t shame your ma. Don’t shame me. I—”
The Remington lowered, and he swung down from the big black stallion, tossing the reins to his daughter. Hubert Dobbs stepped until he was practically standing on Dooley’s toes.
“I know you,” the outlaw leader whispered.
Doc Watson coughed, spit, and gestured vaguely to some point across the Platte River. “He’s the gent from Omaha. The one Zeke coldcocked and taken his horse.”
“Only, that’s the horse there,” said Frank Handley. He pointed to General Grant.
“Which means . . .” The daughter of Hubert Dobbs laughed. “. . . that he up and stole back that horse.”
Dobbs leaned even closer to Dooley.
“That right? You stole Zeke’s horse?”
Dooley swallowed. He tried to speak as loudly as he could, but all that came out was a hoarse, painful whisper. “It was my horse.”
That was an honest answer, but one that did not set well with Hubert Dobbs. A backhand sent Dooley crashing to the ground. It also sent Blue’s jaws clamping on the big outlaw’s arm. Dooley knew what would happen, and he jumped up, hearing the sounds of hammers clicking and Doc Watson giggling. He moved fast, ignoring the pain in his throat and cheek, and dived, pulling the shepherd off the big man with the thick beard, and taking Blue to the ground, shielding the dog with his own body.
“Easy,” he whispered. “Easy, Blue. It’s all right. It’s all right.”
It wasn’t. Dooley figured that both he and his dog would be dead soon.
“Kill ’em both!” Hubert Dobbs bellowed.
“No,” his daughter contradicted. “You always said a man that does right by his dog is a man to ride the river with, Pa. Don’t kill that cowboy. Not yet.”
Blue stopped growling. Dooley squeezed his eyes shut when he heard the outlaw leader say, “I never said that.”
“No,” his daughter agreed. “What you said was, ‘Think afore you kill a man.’”
“So?”
“We come here to find Zeke. And to find that money. Didn’t we?”
Dooley opened his eyes.
“So?” the skinny, filthy girl’s daddy said again.
“He got his horse back, Pa. Do I have to spell it out for you?”
Silence. Then Doc Watson was kneeling by Dooley. “Stand up, mister,” the deadly gunman said. “Just keep your dog calm. Stand up. You might get out of this day alive.”
“Easy, Blue,” Dooley whispered. “Everything’s going to be fine.” He sat up, rubbed the dog, scratched its ears, and tried to give the blue-eyed dog that this-is-all-funny-some-joke-ain’t-it-good-dog look before he wearily managed to stand on his own two legs once more. He sucked in a painful breath of air, exhaled, and looked at Hubert Dobbs, whose daughter had dismounted and was tying a filthy bandanna over her father’s bloody arm.
Dooley wasn’t so certain either he or Blue would live much longer.
“Zeke?” the big man asked.
“I killed him,” Dooley said.
A few of the men whistled. “That takes some doin’,” one of them said.
“How?” That question came from Doc Watson, Hubert Dobbs, Frank Handley, and Dobbs’s dirty daughter.
Dooley didn’t answer at first. He couldn’t. Then Hubert Dobbs nodded, looked at another of his men and said, “Fetch some bear grease.”
* * *
It did work. At least the bear grease took the pain out of Dooley’s throat.
And the dirty girl showed a kind hand at nursing as she wrapped the sleeve of one of the outlaws’ spare shirts—and it was a clean shirt—over the grease and the skin cut deep by a hangman’s rope.
Some of the men gathered the bloody corpse of the quiet and now dead lawman and propped him up against the big cottonwood. Naturally, they went through the dead man’s pockets, but every now and then—when Dooley’s story got really interesting—they would stop their thievery to listen closer to Dooley’s story.
It was, Dooley came to think a few hours later, a pretty good story—and Dooley didn’t even have to exaggerate. Dobbs and Handley and Doc Watson and the boys—and girl—believed everything Dooley said, and Dooley told the truth, where that dead lawman stiffening up underneath the cottonwood had scoffed at Dooley’s tale. Oh, that corpse might have actually believed Dooley’s story, but he planned on murdering Dooley for the money Dooley’d planned on returning to its proper owners.
Which led Dooley to a dilemma as he got deeper into his story. Would Dobbs and Handley and the others let greed trump their morals? Would they kill Dooley Monahan, and Blue, for that wealth?
Well, Dooley decided to gamble.
He pointed to the saddlebags on the lawman’s blue roan. The one two of the outlaws had ridden off after and fetched back.
“Money’s in the saddlebag,” Dooley said. “That saddlebag, by the way. But the money’s from the bank at Dutch Bluff.” Dooley ran his fingers over his bandaged neck. “Not that side,” he instructed. “The other. Yeah.”
The leather cover flapped open. Dooley saw the outlaw’s eyes widen.
“Whoopee!” he cried.
Hubert Dobbs shook his head, drew the big Remington, and walked over to the dead lawman. He emptied his revolver into the dead man’s head, turned around, shucked the empties from the cylinder, and filled the holes with fresh loads.
“One thing I despise,” Dobbs said, “is a dishonest man. A lawman at that. Sworn to uphold the law.”
Dooley wanted to vomit, but he managed to say, “I told him the same thing.”
The leader of the outlaw gang shoved the smoking. 44 into his holster. “Gnaws inside my gizzard, it does.” He came back to Dooley and stuck out his hand. “Put it here, mister. Why, you brung tears to my eyes when you told us what you done.” He turned around. “You heard him, boys. Heard what this gent done. He’s a bona fide hero, yes, sir.” The man’s big arm went around Dooley’s neck, and Dooley almost fainted from the pain from the rope burn that had almost severed his windpipe. “How many of you would’ve done what this boy did? Nary a one. That be my guess. Hell, I wouldn’t have thought to do it my ownself.” He squeezed, bringing Dooley closer to the man’s stinking clothes. “Kill a swine like Zeke. Shoot his arse into a well. But then have the decency to bury a good, honest, foreigner who come to this state to farm. Bury him with his own hands, mind you. And not only that, he nailed up a sign to save any wayfarers who might have drunk from that well, got sick to their stomach from the disease Zeke put in that water. Boys, this is a good man. This is a man we need. He’s what they say is ‘a man to ride the river with.’ And we’re in luck, boys. ’Cause Dooley Monahan is riding with us.”
The man’s death grip released Dooley, who turned, wet his lips, and said, “I am?”
“You are, Dooley, my amigo.”
“Well . . .” Dooley tried to think of a way to decline the invitation.
“Or we leave you swelling up beside that dead hombre.” Dobbs nodded his big head toward the gory body of the dead lawman.
That’s how Dooley Monahan, who had once ridden with Monty’s Raiders, became a member of the Dobbs-Handley Gang. It wasn’t so bad, not at first. They let him take his saddle off Ole’s mule, which they turned loose to graze underneath the shade of the cottonwoods—and the stink of the dead lawman—and let him put his Navajo blanket and saddle on General Grant. They loaned him a Colt .44-40 and a Winchester carbine. They tossed corn dodgers to Blue, who ate them with relish.
“I’m glad you’re with us,” Hubert Dobbs’s daughter, Zerelda, said, and winked.
“Uh. So am I,” Dooley lied.
They rode west.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It didn’t start off so lousy. For Dooley Monahan, riding with the Dobbs-Handley Gang rang similar to that time long ago—when he was practically still a kid—when he had been a member of Monty’s Raiders. After all, back then, before he sneaked away from the outlaws a few weeks before most of them were shot dead near Davenport in ambush, and a few days later the ringleaders were busted out of jail by several Iowa citizens for an old-fashioned lynching, all Dooley had to do was hold the horses and keep a lookout, or cook, do laundry, and wash dishes in camp.
There was no laundry for Dooley to wash with any of the Dobbs-Handley boys, or Zerelda Dobbs herself, and nobody ever asked him to cook or wash dishes. Mostly, their grub consisted of hardtack, soda crackers, stale biscuits, or beef jerky—washed down by whiskey. Certainly, neither Frank Handley nor Hubert Dobbs trusted Dooley enough to let him serve as a lookout. Besides, that’s how Dooley had managed to leave the employment with Monty’s Raiders.
So what he did was ride.
That was one thing the men—and Dobbs’s daughter—who rode with this band of outlaws excelled at. Riding. They rode hard. They rode long. They rode . . . and rode . . . and rode.
Through washes and dried creek beds. Down creeks or rivers to make it hard for any scout or lawman or posse to trail them. On the treeless expanse that was this part of Nebraska—where it appeared that a man on a good horse (and General Grant was as good a horse as Dooley Monahan ever owned) could see forever—Dooley learned that a savvy person could find places to hide or camp for a night. They spent one night in a buffalo wallow, which proved to be a great spot to stay out of view, but not so good to sleep. Buffalo left not only dung in the sandy pits, but they wallowed away their fleas and ticks. Dooley spent the next two days scratching, but then a thunderstorm blew in to wash off the fleas, and pea-sized hail knocked off the remaining ticks and left Dooley with a few bruises on his arms and back. Thunderheads—especially those that cut loose with hail like grapeshot—were another way to avoid lawmen and posses, according to the philosophy of Hubert Dobbs.
The gang members didn’t really accept Dooley Monahan as one of their own, but they certainly admired his horse. In fact, more than a couple of the outlaws asked Dooley for permission to take General Grant once Dooley was dead. Dooley just shook his head and whispered, “Do that, I’d likely be dead quicker than the good Lord has planned for me,” which got chuckles from the requesters and the listeners. Dobbs’s daughter usually laughed the hardest, and asked, “How ’bout you will the Gen’ral to me, sweetie pie?”
“Then I’d be dead even sooner,” Dooley would answer.
Every evening, that conversation happened. The gang seemed to enjoy the same joke.
But the outlaws especially enjoyed Blue. They wanted Dooley dead and wanted General Grant to ride, but they certainly swooned over the shepherd, feeding him bites of jerky or stale biscuits, letting him drink their coffee or maybe just a sip of whiskey. Blue never got drunk, though, and always—to the dismay of the men and Zerelda Dobbs—Blue would curl up beside Dooley when they finally called it a night and turned in.
Of course, you needed a really good scout—someone who knew the lay of the land and locations of creeks and rivers and buffalo wallows and trails that a flea could not have passed through—to navigate Nebraska, and Dobbs and Handley had one of the best scouts between Nebraska City and Denver City.
“What do ya see there, Dooley?” Zerelda Dobbs asked. She snorted, spit out some juice from the copious amount of snuff she had packed between the gums below her brown front lower teeth and bottom lip.
Zee—she kept telling Dooley to call her Zee and drop that Miss Zerelda stuff—nodded toward the northwest.
“I don’t know, Miss—um—I mean—er—Zee,” he said, and glanced nervously behind him. They h
ad to be a mile or more ahead of Hubert Dobbs, Frank Handley, Doc Watson, and the rest of the bad men, for Dooley could see no sign of the gang.
That was something Dooley had learned about the Great Plains. The country looked flat, but it wasn’t that flat. A man could disappear, or a herd of cattle, or a little less than a dozen murderers and rapists and robbers and cheaters at cards. The land rose and fell, so that men could actually hide in the country.
Dooley turned back toward Zerelda, who swung one leg over the horn and waited. She tilted her head toward the northwest. Dooley studied the land and blue skies.
He shrugged.
“Don’t you see nothin’?” she asked.
Dooley stood in his stirrups and concentrated. Tall grass rippled like waves in the wind. Low on the horizon he saw a few small dots of clouds.
“Grass,” he said. “Some clouds.” He repeated his shrug.
Zerelda laughed, and pointed a crooked finger to the southeast.
“How ’bout yonder?”
The land and sky looked the same. Rolling grass. Small clouds.
“Same,” he told her.
“Clouds?” she asked.
Dooley nodded his head.
She slid her leg back into position, found the stirrup, and gathered her reins.
“Them ain’t clouds, you dumb oaf. They’s smoke.”
Dooley looked to the southeast first, and realization struck him like a jenny’s kick in the gut. He could see now, one puff that certainly was no cloud, rising slowly toward the heavens, breaking up, dissipating, followed by another that did the same, and another. Jerking his head around, he found almost a reflection in the northwestern skies. White wood smoke, one . . . two . . . three . . . rising from the Nebraska plains, whipped into oblivion by the winds.
“Smoke . . .” His voice started out as nothing more than a whisper, but the next word he said with loud emotion—stomach-churning fear.
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