by Paul Bagdon
He turned and went into his home. We could just barely hear a woman sobbing. As we were turning the wagon about, Don rode down the hill. His face was grim. He knew that funeral wagon wasn’t there to spread good tidings.
“Lucas?”
“Yeah.”
“He was one hell of a good man,” Don said.
“That he was,” I said.
“I’d better get to the house, boys. Take them sonsabitches down for us, will you?”
Hairy Dog nodded.
“You can bet on it,” I said.
We drove out a couple of miles or so from the Murfin enclave with little talk.
Eventually, the Indian said, “It is strange.”
“What’s strange?”
“The women. In my tribe, if a warrior is killed, the women cut themselves and tear their hair out.”
“Does that bring the warrior back?”
“Shows respect.”
“So whites don’t show love or respect, huh? We…ahh, screw it. Want a drink?”
“To Lucas.”
“To Lucas,” I repeated.
I fetched a jug from the rear of the wagon, and we each had a suck at it.
“Our army grows smaller,” Dog said.
“I’ll tell you what, Hairy Dog,” I said, “the men we have now—you, Jake, Big Nose, and me—will kick those drunken clowns outta Gila Bend—or kill them.”
Dog grunted his agreement, and we rode along for a bit.
“That’s a fine rifle,” Dog said. “I hear they’re sighted in at the factory. I trust a factory as much as I trust a faro player in a bar.”
“Yeah, but the Henry company…”
“I think you should test the rifle just to make sure, Pound.”
I laughed. “You just want a crack at this baby after I run a few rounds through it. Right?”
“It’s a gun I hear a whole lot about. I don’t want one, but I want to see what it can do.”
“We can tie up over there, by the desert pines. A Henry makes a hell of a racket, and I don’t know what this horse is used to.”
That’s what we did. As I loaded the Henry’s tube I could feel the patina of Hoppe’s gun oil on it. The tube clicked into place.
“You see a good target, Dog?”
He nodded. “You see that rock with the mica glint by the two cactuses?”
“Sure,” I lied. I couldn’t see the cacti, much less the rock. “But let’s start close and work our way to distance. We’ve got a case of ammunition.”
“There,” Hairy Dog said, “that prairie dog is standing up watching us. He’s maybe forty or fifty yards.”
A lot more prairie dogs would stay alive if they didn’t stand up on their hind legs and haunches, as still as cigar-store Injuns. Nosey little bastards—that’s their problem.
I took aim from a standing position and severed the prairie dog’s head.
“You aim for headshot?”
“I sure did.”
I fired a dozen or more rounds at miscellaneous things: rocks, cacti, whatever. I didn’t miss a shot. I felt the barrel. It was warm but not hot. I reloaded the tube and clicked it back in place. I handed the rifle to Hairy Dog. He held it to his shoulder and worked the lever action repeatedly, spewing unfired cartridges like rain around him.
“Is good,” he said. “At one time a Winchester .30-06 lever action jammed up on me when I was in a bad spot.”
“What’d you do?”
“Used sumbitch as a club. Worked good.”
We rode for another hour or so with little or no talking. Then, out of nowhere, Hairy Dog said, “We make a deal, Pound?”
“I don’t…”
“Money makes no importance to me. It’s paper. This Henry rifle has meaning. I want it. We trade one thousand dollars for the rifle, right?”
“It isn’t worth anywhere near a thousand dollars. You could take your money and buy…”
“This is the one I want,” he said. “It speaks to me, is a partner.”
I had no particular use for a Henry, but it was a gift from a dead friend’s relative. The thousand dollars didn’t mean any more to me than it did to Hairy Dog. But still…
“I dunno, Dog,” I said.
Dog smiled. “It is because the old man gave it to you, no?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Will you ever lay eyes on him again?”
“Probably not.” I thought for a moment. “No.”
“So we make a trade like your leaders make with my people. I give up the thousand dollars and you give up something that’s not worth near that value.”
Dog’s logic was good.
“OK,” I said.
Hairy Dog pulled a knife from his boot. I flinched, but he used it to slice a cut into his right index finer. He let his blood in a tiny stream flow onto the cherry wood stock of the rifle.
“The rifle is mine now,” he said. “We are parts of one another.”
Dog moved a few steps from me and began firing. He hit a piece of rock about the size of an egg, and skipped and chased it around the prairie. It was an impressive piece of shooting. He fired at something in the distance I couldn’t even see but apparently he scored well, judging from the smile on his face.
When the hammer clicked on the empty firing chamber, Dog felt the barrel. “Not hot,” he said quietly, probably to himself rather than to me.
“The mercantile should have a Hoppe’s cleaning set,” I said. “Even with good ammunition, crud builds up in the barrel. You need to keep the rifle clean and oiled.”
Hairy Dog laughed. “You sound like my mother warning me to clean inside my ears, Pound,” he said. “But you’re right. I will buy.”
It seemed that Dog couldn’t put that rifle aside. He reloaded and fired every so often, blowing a hole in a prairie dog, shooting the head off a short rattlesnake, and puncturing any number of cacti as we drove along.
“Now the rifle is a virgin, ya know? All I shoot with her is nonsense: snakes and cactuses and prairie dogs. What this Henry needs to make it complete is human blood, a human life.”
“I don’t suppose it’ll be real long before you get to do that. The way things are heating up with Powers, we’ll need you cranking that rifle.”
“Is true,” Dog said. “Want a drink?”
“Sure.”
Hairy Dog eased himself into the rear of the wagon—still holding his rifle—and returned to his shotgun seat next to me with a jug. We each had a few swallows. Dog replaced the cork and set the jug down on the floor in front of us.
“I been kind of wondering,” I said. “What tribe are you and Big Nose from. None of your ornaments are the same, and you speak mostly in English to each other.”
“We are brother/friends, but we arose from different tribes. I was born of a woman of the tribe of Tatanka Iyotaka—Sitting Bull, who was the great chief of the Sioux and led the attack that put Yellow Hair in the ground.”
“Yellow…? Oh. Custer, right?”
“Yes.”
Hairy Dog avoided my eyes as he spoke. “The thing is, I am not a full member of the Sioux. My father…well, he was unknown. He was, of course, an Indian—look at my skin and face. Some say he raped my mother. Others say she was willing.” He sighed. “Who knows? But all my hair and being a bastard made a difficult childhood for me.” He smiled. “I learned to fight—and fight good—very early.”
“Big Nose is a full Sioux?”
Dog nodded.
We were silent for a time, Dog caressing his rifle, me driving without paying any attention to what I was doing. We were following a dirt road to Gila Bend, and the horse had no reason to veer off into the scrub. We were forced over to the side by a large freighter pulled by four huge horses, probably with a good deal of Clydesdale blood in them. That set me to thinking.
“Most of our action with Powers has been in the saloons,” I said. “If we can get rid of the gin mills, or at least some of them, we’ll have an advantage. Some of those losers will drift on, and the ones who s
tay won’t be happy. After all, getting rid of a couple saloons will cut into their profits.”
“Is true. You talk of fire?”
“No, there are always men in those joints and even if we tossed torches on the roof and inside, they’d put it out soon enough.”
“What, then?”
“I dunno. I’m thinking on it, though.”
It’d begun to snow lightly, and the wind picked up slightly as we came in sight of Gila Bend.
I drove the wagon to the rear of the mortician’s place, unhitched the horse, and rubbed him down. I was about finished doing that when the owner came out red-faced and angry.
“That’s stealin’, Pound. You’re a lawman right? Lawmen ain’t supposed to steal. I’m going to write a letter…”
“Shut your yap, or I’ll kick your ass around the block,” I explained.
He sputtered a bit, but went back inside. Dog started to walk to the alley between the buildings, but I stopped him. “Let’s take the back way, behind the buildings,” I said.
We did so. As we walked along, I noticed that about ninety percent of the structures had false fronts—areas built up from the roof to give the appearance of another story to the building. Apparently, before Powers and his men moved in, Gila Bend was a silver town on the grow—or at least the semblance of one.
There was a privy behind several of the buildings, and each saloon had one. The ones behind the bars smelled like the pits were limed perhaps once a century, if that.
I was more interested in the foundations of the gin mills than the privies or anything else. Maybe “foundation” isn’t the right word, though. Each building—saloons included—was built from a plate on the dirt ground. Those that had wooden floors nailed them directly to the plate and then built upward from there. The owners who opted for a dirt floor simply built upward.
Hairy Dog had been walking behind me, the Henry held across his chest. Finally, he could no longer contain his curiosity. “What’re you looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not completely sure at this point. But c’mon, let’s take an alley. It stinks back here.”
We went to the office, snow and ice squeaking under our boots. Jake was behind my desk, reading yet another dime novel, this one entitled, Danger on the Frontier—or—Daniel Boone Saves the West. “Any problems?” I asked.
“Been quiet,” Jake said. “Calvin, the bar-rag, came by scroungin’ for change. I give him a nickel. That’s about it.”
“Gee, a whole nickel,” I said. “You’re a real sport, Jake.”
“Well, hell” he grumbled. “Since you’ve got us payin’ for our own drinks, I’m goin’ broke. I want to collect my thousand dollars an’ haul ass outta this town.”
Big Nose nodded and grunted.
Dog showed off his Henry to a highly appreciative pair of his colleagues.
“Jake,” I said, “how about letting me use the desk for a bit? I have some figuring to do.” Jake moved closer to the stove, sitting on the floor.
I pulled down some Wanted posters and turned them over to their blank sides. I settled in behind my desk. I drew some rectangles and lines and so forth, but knew little more than when I’d started. I tried again, said, “The hell with this,” and crumpled the posters into a ball and tossed them into our trash can.
“Problem?” Big Nose asked.
“I’m not real sure,” I said. “I’ve got an idea, but I’m not at all sure how it’d work out. It could be important or we could make ourselves look like four bumbling idiots.”
Jake looked up from his reading. “I’d jus’ as soon look like a bumblin’ idiot as set here doin’ nothin’ about the job of work we’re s’posed to be doin’.”
“Good point,” I said. “Just give me a little time to get my information together.”
“Information?” Hairy Dog asked incredulously. “My Henry wants to talk an’ you want information. It jus’ don’t figure.”
“How about this?” I said. “You three boys lay into the jugs we brought from the Murfins’ place while I go down to the mercantile and kinda poke around.”
“Jugs?” Big Nose asked.
“Yeah. Damn,” Dog said. “We left ‘em in that goddamn funeral wagon. Won’t take but a minute for me to fetch ‘em.”
I left the three of them and walked down to the mercantile. I strolled around the store, picking up and inspecting this and that, buying nothing thus far. Their saddlery was decent—not great, by any means, but no too bad either. I went through the farming supplies where the spools of heavy chain were stored for stump pulling and so forth. For whatever reason, that’s where the Stetsons were. I picked out a nice one—kind of tan-brown—and it fit just fine. Of course, Stetson never made a hat that didn’t fit just fine. I took it back to the counter and paid for it, then left the store.
Chapter Eight
Temperatures dropped, and not only did they drop, but they stayed down. Fellows who chewed tobacco and were forced to be outside for extended periods of time developed beards of frozen tobacco juice, not a particularly pleasing sight. Old Calvin found as much work as he wanted and was able to stay drunk most of the time on pay from the saloons for breaking the ice in the watering troughs out in front of them. Horses developed long, glittering icicles suspended from their lower jaws when they drank.
Two phrases passed for social conversation in Gila Bend: “Cold nuff for ya?” and “Cold nuff to freeze the balls offa brass monkey.”
There was next to nothing for me or my men to do; Powers and his crew stayed in the gin mills and stayed too drunk to cause much trouble.
I spent a good deal of time walking around the outer structures, and the more I did so, the more convinced I became that my plan would work.
I’ve mentioned before the small nugget of heat that slowly turns into a real conflagration, depending upon the situation I was in. That fire was already glowing.
Very little snow accompanied the cold, but the snow on the ground squeaked under a man’s boot or a horse’s hoof like a stepped-on mouse.
Hairy Dog had bought a rifle cleaning kit and he disassembled, cleaned, and oiled his Henry at least twice a day—sometimes three of four. Jake and Big Nose played cards for pennies. Cheating, they decided early on, was allowed. If one of them got caught, though, he had to give up the pot.
Late one thickly overcast afternoon of the unrelenting cold, I stood at the office window watching nothing in particular when a four-horse freighter creaked and banged down the street, overloaded with barrels of beer. It pulled down an alley to the rear of the saloon with the piano player.
“You boys ready to do some breaking and entering tonight?” I asked.
“Hell,” Dog said, “I’m ready to do anything.” The others agreed with nods and grunts. It was real clear that keeping these boys caged up was very hard on them—they were used to being on the move at all times, and that’s the way they liked it.
“OK,” I said, “gather ‘round the desk here and I’ll show you what I have in mind.”
I took out some drawings I’d made after the first attempt and spread them in front of me. I explained everything I’d determined in my many walk-arounds, and I told them how I though it would work—if it worked at all.
There was a stunned, disbelieving silence that lasted for a few seconds, and then the three of them talked at once, slapping me on the back, almost cheering, grins as wide as the Mississippi.
The afternoon that slowly turned to night took damned near forever. As we waited, we sipped whiskey and discussed every possible aspect of what we were about to do. We talked, I think, simply to be talking, trying to goose the time ahead a bit.
The fire in my gut was burning nicely now—strong and hot and churning and demanding action.
About midnight I said, “Ready to have at it?”
My men were already dressed for the cold and had been for some time. My question was purely rhetorical.
The cloud cover had stuck around for the night, which was fine.
The darker it was, the more difficult we’d be to see. We went out the back door by the horse enclosure and moved down the backs of buildings until we got to the mercantile. Hairy Dog opened the back door with a solid kick that tore the lock and hasp free and ripped the upper hinge away, too.
It was dark in the store—we could see shapes, but the shapes had no definition. That was fine. I knew exactly where I wanted us to go—the farming supplies. Big Nose filled a pocket with licorice whips as we passed the candy display.
Dog, Big Nose, and Jake gathered around me.
“This stuff is goin’ to be right heavy,” Jake said.
“We don’t have to take it far,” I said.
It was indeed heavy—and the four of us almost busted a gut getting it down the block to where we needed it to go. The freighter stood, its horses still in rig, feed bags over their snouts, behind a saloon at the end of the block. Jake had more experience driving a four-horse team of draft horses than any of us, so he took that duty. Nose, Dog, and I went back to the gin mill, from which the piano music tinkled merrily and went to work. It didn’t take too long. Then, Hairy Dog positioned himself at the front of the bar with his Henry, ready to cut down any outlaws who tried to get out after things got under way.
Jake drove up and stopped. We made the connections we needed to make. Everything was set. No one had gone in or out of the bar since we began our work in the street. I waved to Jake, and he kicked off the brake and got the huge freighter moving.
The heavy chain that encircled the entire base of the saloon became taut, as did the one attached to the long side of the structure.
Jake got after the horses, slapping the reins over their rumps. To them, this was merely another day of business—Jake got no argument from them.
A horribly high-pitched screech was the first indication that anything was happening. The horses, snorting, leaned into their traces. The entire building began to move toward the street, the tearing wood sounding strangely like a massive fire.
Men raced to the batwings; Dog moved them back with a few more rounds than he needed to. The saloon continued to move, slowly, like a wounded behemouth. Curses, screams, and shouts inside barely reached us over the ripping and destruction of wood joined to wood.