Monahan's Massacre

by William W. Johnstone

  He had to rinse out the coffeepot and find more coffee. The salt pork he just wiped off with his gloves, which he then ran around the inside of the cast-iron skillet, mostly to clean off the remnant tracings of the bullet. The dent in the lower edge of the pan went deeper than Dooley had originally thought, and when the salt pork was sizzling in its own juices, grease leaked through the bottom of the pan and caused the fire to flame up every now and then.

  But Dooley could understand that. Dobbs had packed his loads with a lot of gunpowder, and they had been at, not quite but close enough, point-blank range. Dooley felt even luckier than he had earlier that evening.

  He ate with his fingers, straight out of the pan after it had cooled, and drank coffee until the pot was empty. He let Blue have the last two pieces of pork and lap up all the grease, which cleaned the pan good enough for breakfast—if Dooley wanted any breakfast.

  After dousing the fire, he took the reins to General Grant, told Blue to follow, and led his dog, his horse, and his bedroll about two hundred yards from the camp. Just to be safe. There, in a buffalo wallow that the fleas had deserted ages ago, Dooley made his camp.

  It wasn’t the best night’s sleep he ever had, but at least he wasn’t as dead as Hubert Dobbs.

  * * *

  Before first light, Dooley returned to the camp.

  No coyotes, no buzzards or other raptors, had bothered the corpse, and no Indians or night raiders had stolen Hubert Dobbs’s horse. Dooley thought about breakfast, but decided that hardtack and jerky would be even better than scrambled eggs, fried pickles and ham hocks and corn bread at Charlie’s Eatin Place in Newton, Kansas.

  The morning was cool, so Dooley did build a fire, making sure there was not much smoke, and warmed his hands over the flames before resuming his work.

  Dooley packed the cooking grate, the skillet, coffeepot, and other items, and started to police the camp. He found the wanted poster stuck on some sage, read it again, frowned—his stomach roiling—and moved to the fire, where he held the parchment until it ignited, and then let it burn with the dung and sage.

  When Dobbs’s horse snorted, Dooley walked over to feed the big horse.

  “I’ll turn you loose,” he whispered. “And . . .”

  That’s when Dooley remembered another piece of paper in Dobbs’s saddlebags. He walked back to the saddle, and blanket, and leather bags, opened one side, and withdrew the paper.

  Hubert Dobbs always carried the wanted posters that described the likenesses and crimes—but mostly the offered rewards—of his men, but Hubert Dobbs was also a vain, vain man.

  Dooley held out the piece of paper and read, not all of it, just the description and the pertinent details.

  WANTED

  Dead or Alive

  HUBERT DOBBS

  $4,500.25 Reward.

  Blue wagged his tail. General Grant snorted contentedly. The blanket-covered corpse of Hubert Dobbs did not move.

  I was going to leave Dobbs here, Dooley thought. Turn the horse loose. Mount up and ride hard and fast. Get as far away from this place as possible. Forget the Black Hills. Forget Iowa. Hell, maybe even forget the United States. Try Canada. Or Mexico. Or Argentina if I could find it.

  His eyes fell back on the wanted poster.

  “But why?” he said aloud.

  With a stake of $4,500—and twenty-five cents, for some reason—Dooley could try anywhere. Black Hills? He wouldn’t have to mine, but open a saloon—or buy one—and watch his money grow. Or even head west to San Francisco. Or Canada, Mexico, or Argentina if he wanted to see what life was like up or down that way. Besides, he had earned this reward. He had displayed the presence of mind to lift a cast-iron frying pan to his midsection to deflect a bullet and send Hubert Dobbs to a place where he could torment decent folk no more.

  Dobbs had told Zee and the boys that he and Dooley would be gone for four days. They had traveled one. Another day’s ride to Julesburg. Turn in the body. Claim the reward. Tell the lawmen that the rest of the Dobbs-Handley Gang was hiding out in a wagon yard in Ogallala, Nebraska, and that Dooley didn’t want any of that reward, that it was all for the lawman and whoever he got to shoot and kill with him. Dooley wouldn’t have to worry about the gang members seeking revenge. They’d all be dead, or in prison. Zee would be arrested, too. Maybe not killed. He didn’t hate her that much. Just put in prison . . . for the rest of her life. That would mean Dooley was free. Free to ride west to Denver or Cheyenne or Santa Fe. Or disappear in the Black Hills.

  “I’ve already got the reputation of a bounty hunter,” Dooley told General Grant. “I’d have a two-day start on Handley and Watson and Zee even if the Julesburg lawman didn’t kill them all. General, you could put a lot of miles between us and those vermin if . . .”

  He jerked the wanted poster out of the bay gelding’s mouth.

  “Don’t eat this!”

  Dooley folded the paper—missing just the upper left-hand corner and the W in Wanted and the Dea in Dead, which didn’t seem too important—and shoved it into the back pocket of his trousers. He went back to work, saddling Dobbs’s horse, shoving the blanket-covered corpse over the saddle, and securing that dead outlaw with Dobbs’s own lariat.

  It was still early in the morning, before most people—especially notorious bank robbers like Doc Watson and Frank Handley—were even finished with their breakfasts, when Dooley Monahan rode off toward Julesburg, Colorado. He pulled the dead Hubert Dobbs on Hubert Dobbs’s horse behind him.

  The trail that ran to Julesburg was wide and with deep ruts. He certainly shouldn’t get lost.

  For most of the way, he kept the horses at a trot if not a gentle lope.

  * * *

  He spotted the dust, and, cursing softly, he reined General Grant to a stop. Behind him, the big horse carrying the body of Hubert Dobbs began to urinate, and Blue, panting, walked off the side of the trail and found a patch of grass between some clumps of sage.

  After exhaling slowly, Dooley let out a little sigh. Well, the road from Julesburg to Ogallala and points east was typically well traveled, so the chances of not meeting anyone seemed to be a bit out of reach. And the riders were coming from the west, not Ogallala, and that made Dooley feel better, if just slightly better.

  The horse finished its bodily function, snorted, and shook its head, tugging on the lead rope. Dooley turned and looked back.

  On the other hand, explaining the corpse he was carrying might be troublesome.

  He looked again at the dust. The riders were making a good clip.

  “Maybe it’s a stagecoach,” Dooley told Blue. His head nodded as if that would make Dooley’s wish come true. “Stages have to keep their schedule.” Another nod. “So the driver ain’t likely to stop. Just keep going.”

  He frowned. Keep going to Ogallala, where the driver would tell his boss who would tell one of his workers who would hurry into the saloon to tell every drunk and drinker there that so-and-so had seen a rider on a bay horse carrying a big dead man on the back of another horse bound for Julesburg, which would be overheard by Doc Watson or Frank Handley which . . .

  “Hell,” Dooley said.

  He glanced to his left, then right, and saw the hopelessness of his situation. In this country, he would need to find a really deep buffalo wallow to hide in, and that didn’t seem likely. Especially when he considered just how close that dust kept coming.

  So he drew the Colt from its holster and filled the sixth chamber with a bullet. Sometimes, you listened to your gut. Sometimes, it paid to be careful.

  He wet his lips and swung down from the saddle, keeping the reins to the General in his left hand. He tested the new Colt, making sure he could draw it quickly, without snagging. He looked at the barrel and wondered why in hell any fool would file down the front sight. Oh, sure, that might prevent it from catching in a cut of the leather, or something else. But it would make it damned hard for a man to take a good aim at a stomach he wanted to put a bullet into.

  The Colt
fell back into the holster, and Dooley inhaled deeply, and exhaled rapidly.

  “It’s not a stagecoach!” he told Blue.

  But then he thought: That’s not necessarily a good thing.

  And it wasn’t. Four riders stopped their horses about fifty yards from where Dooley waited. One rose in the stirrups to give Dooley, the General, Blue, and the trailing horse and its package scrutiny. The men talked among themselves, although Dooley couldn’t make out any of the words. Finally, the four men tested the revolvers in their holsters, too, before putting their horses into slow, deliberate walks.

  They spread out, two on the main road, the others flanking out a good ten yards off the trail.

  They rode straight toward Dooley.

  He shifted his reins to his right hand, which he kept close to his Colt, and lifted his left in a friendly wave that could not be mistaken for friendly, just cautious. Actually, nervous.

  The riders did not return the wave, and Dooley lowered his hand, took the reins, and let his right hand hover just above the Colt’s handle.

  “Halllooooo!” he called out. “I come in peace.”

  The words made him feel like a greenhorn idiot, like he had learned how to talk by reading dime novels.

  The men did not halllooooo him back.

  Ten feet in front of him, they stopped, still spread out, still keeping their hands on the handles of their six-shooters.

  The leader of the men, or so Dooley assumed, nodded. He wore a dusty white hat and trail duds, and sported a thick mustache and underlip beard.

  “You’ve had trouble, I see.” The accent sounded Scottish.

  Dooley just glanced at the other men, two young, one old, all leathery and sharp nosed. Mostly he took in the horses, which were well lathered and already laboring for breath. They had been ridden hard, too hard, and as an old cowboy, Dooley knew that men who abused horses like that were in a hurry. Running for something. And in need of fresh mounts.

  Like General Grant and Hubert Dobbs’s horse.

  “No,” Dooley said. He decided he could sound like a dime novel some more, only the tougher hero in the dime novel, and not someone who was coming in peace.

  He gestured with his shoulder toward the late Hubert Dobbs.

  “He’s the one who had trouble.”

  The man in the white hat laughed.

  Off the trail to Dooley’s left, the one on the buckskin, the one with the black hat and stringy black hair, who had hooked a leg over the horn of his pinto pony, whipped his big Schofield from the holster.

  It should have occurred to Dooley that a gun that belonged to a killer like Hubert Dobbs would have a fast action and hair trigger. The Colt leaped into Dooley’s hands, and he had cocked it and touched the trigger in a blaze of speed. But too fast. The bullet hit the pinto, killing the horse, and sending the man with the Schofield somersaulting off his saddle, the big revolver falling on the other side.

  Dropping the reins, Dooley let General Grant run west—right toward the man in the brown hat on the brown horse, which caused the brown horse to buck. Stepping away from the trailing horse carrying the late Hubert Dobbs, Dooley fanned back the hammer of the Colt. He ignored the man on the bucking brown horse for the time being and shot the man in the white hat square in the forehead.

  He had been trying for the man’s chest, but didn’t have a front sight to guide his aim.

  That one got off one shot before he was blown out of the saddle, but the bullet just punched a hole in a cloud above. Dooley stepped away from the dun horse as it bolted toward Ogallala, dropped to a knee, and shot the man off the brown horse. He hit him just above the missing button on his calico shirt, which was more or less where he had intended to shoot him.

  This Colt’s all right, Dooley told himself, and tripped over sagebrush as he stepped off the trail.

  The brown horse leaped over him, and Dooley shouted, swallowed the panic, and raised his head, and the Colt in his right hand.

  By then, Dooley figured that the man in the black hat on the dead pinto had recovered his Schofield, and he knew he was right, because as he had been falling, he heard the report of a pistol and felt the hot air as the bullet whizzed over his back.

  “Take this, you dirty cur!” the man in the black hat shouted, and punched two more shots from the Schofield. One clipped the sage to Dooley’s left. The other spit sand into Dooley’s nose and mouth. Dooley brought the Colt up and squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet caught the man in the side, spun him around, and dropped him to his knees. Yet he still gripped the big .45, and grimacing, brought the pistol up with both hands, desperately trying to push back the heavy hammer.

  Dooley shot him again, and that bullet finished the man, and dropped him dead into the dirt.

  The last man, the one on the palomino with the Mexican sugar-loaf sombrero, Dooley had ignored—mainly because he saw a flash of dark fur and knew Blue had gone for him. Sure enough, the shepherd had leaped up, knocking the man from the saddle, sending his revolver flying into the sage, and sending the horse running farther into the sage.

  Standing, Dooley cocked the gun in his hand as he ran across the road, leaped over one dead road agent, and stopped. The man had lost his sombrero, and Blue had torn great gashes in his left arm, which now hung useless by his side. Blue was charging at the man, who was turning his old Navy .36 at the dog.

  “Hey!” Dooley yelled.

  The man spun around, tried to bring the old Colt up at Dooley’s midsection.

  If Dooley had counted right, he had one bullet left in his Colt.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  It wasn’t much of a settlement, and Dooley would not have known he was in Colorado Territory instead of Nebraska, had the sign not informed him:

  You’re in JULESBURG

  (Colorado Terri)

  Good Luck!

  The sign on the other side of the Union Pacific railroad tracks hung crooked on a post that had been splintered with bullet holes. For that matter, so had the sign. The dot over the i in Terri appeared to have come from a .38, while what Dooley guessed once spelled the rest of Territory had been blown off with a shotgun or heavy buffalo rifle.

  The depot, nothing more than an old boxcar with the wheels removed and sitting on a log foundation, was also pretty much ventilated with bullet holes. So was the sign nailed above the door. It read:

  JULESBURG DEPOT

  Union Pacific

  Those i’s had also been dotted with bullet holes.

  Nobody was at the depot.

  Cottonwoods and other trees grew along the South Platte, south of town, but that’s about all that grew in this country, other than sagebrush and grave markers. Dooley rode slowly past the cemetery. He counted a dozen or so buildings, not including outhouses and lean-tos, most of those structures on the northern side of the main, and only, street that ran on southwest toward Camp Wardwell, long abandoned by the army, and on toward Denver City.

  A dog crawled from underneath a porch, growled, then disappeared back under the partly rotted, mostly warped planks of an abandoned building on the southeastern edge of town.

  Julesburg seemed to lean a little to the southeast, probably because all the buildings had been blown that way from cold winds. There didn’t appear to be anything to blunt the force of the winds from here to the Rocky Mountains to the northwest.

  Dooley saw the Julesburg Store, the Julesburg Hotel, the Julesburg Bank, the Julesburg Saloon No. 1, the Julesburg Tonsorial Parlor, the Julesburg Express Station, the Julesburg Marshal and Jail, the Julesburg Livery, the Julesburg Saloon No. 3 (apparently, the Julesburg Saloon No. 2 was the abandoned building with the dog under the porch), and the Julesburg cabin that was for sale. The other buildings, on the opposite side of the street, were cabins and sod huts for the residents.

  People began stepping out of the buildings—and the cabins and soddies—to watch Dooley Monahan as he rode into town. He couldn’t blame them. They did not say anything, did not nod their heads o
r wave their hands, or even whisper among themselves. They just watched.

  He rode into Julesburg with a nickel-plated, ivory-handled, short-barreled Colt on his hip, a panting dog walking alongside his bay gelding, leading a string of four horses behind him.

  The big black carried the blanket-wrapped body of Hubert Dobbs. The brown packed the body of the man with the brown hat and the man with the Schofield whose horse Dooley had accidentally killed. The dun carried the corpse that had worn a white hat. The palomino carried its rider, the one with the left arm ripped to shreds and Dooley’s last bullet (for that gunfight) in his heart.

  Had he his druthers, he would have reined in front of the Julesburg Saloon No. 1 or the Julesburg Saloon No. 3 to slake his thirst and put something in his stomach so he wouldn’t feel so damned empty. But he knew whiskey would just worsen that sickness he felt.

  Instead, he rode up to the Julesburg Marshal and Jail. One arm pressed against one of the posts that would have held up an awning (had there been an awning or a second post), the town badge-wearer eyed Dooley. He smoked a cigarette. His suspenders fell loosely beside his legs, and a tin star remained pinned, heavily pulling at the one pocket on his solid gray shirt. He wore a black hat, but no belted six-shooter. He didn’t need a revolver, because Dooley could see the double barrels of a shotgun poking through the window to the left of the doorway. No panes of glass were left, making it easy for Dooley to see the bald man who tried, but failed, to keep the shotgun steady.

  “Marshal,” Dooley said as he reined in, keeping his right hand far from the holstered Colt.

  “Deputy,” the man replied as he removed his cigarette and blew smoke that the wind carried away.

  Dooley nodded, and tried to think of how to begin. With a sigh, he gestured toward the load he pulled behind his horse.

  “That’s Hubert Dobbs on the first horse,” Dooley said. The mere sentence made him feel as if he needed to sleep through two nights and three days.