God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  No reply.

  Again, Copley shouted, “Come out, Pizanthia.”

  “Maybe he really isn’t here,” said Smith Ball.

  “Maybe not.” Copley pushed open the door, and a shotgun blast knocked him back in a spray of blood. Dan leaped aside, tasted Copley’s blood in his mouth and unslung the Spencer, levered a shell into the breech even as another shot boomed and Smith Ball sank into the snow, yelling with pain, and Dan felt a hard blow in his right thigh. He fired through the doorway, pumped the lever, and fired again. He had no target, only the rose-colored vision of Copley being blown back, his blood in Dan’s eyes, and even as he sank to his knees in the snow, he levered another shell into the breech, the rifle so heavy, but he put it to his shoulder and squeezed the trigger, and the recoil knocked him back, which had never happened before, and he toppled over onto his left side. Pain sliced his left hand, and a door slammed.

  Hands reached for him, grabbed the rifle, and he was being carried up the slope, laid on the ground, and someone wrapped his leg. “He’s lost blood, but it didn’t hit an artery.”

  “Get him to the doctor.”

  Someone washed his face in snow, and they would have carried him away, but the snow cleared his vision. “I’m all right,” Dan said. “It doesn’t even hurt that much.” He sat up, dizzy, reached for the Spencer. “Where’s my rifle?” Someone gave it to him, and he laid it across his lap.

  Copley lay beside him, his eyes wide open, disbelieving, while men worked to fashion a stretcher for him. His chest was awash with blood, and sharp white ends of his ribs stuck up amid shreds of flesh and cloth. He coughed, and blood bubbled up between his lips and ran down the side of his face.

  Smith Ball limped over to them, another man supporting him and carrying his shotgun, still not cocked. It had all happened so fast.

  “That murderin’ bastard!” someone yelled. “Let’s get him!”

  “Wait!” Sanders shouted. “If you charge the cabin, more men will be shot.” When they waited for him, he said, “Go to the Chief Justice’s house and bring up the howitzer. If Pizanthia wants war, we’ll give it to him.”

  With a cheer, men ran to get the small mountain howitzer standing in front of Judge Edgerton’s cabin, ready for an attack from the roughs or the Confederates who nightly rode through Yankee Flats whooping and firing their guns at the American flag on the ridgepole.

  Dan waited in the snow. Some men carried Copley away. “Glick is good with wounds,” Dan heard, but he thought no human healer could help Copley now.

  Fitch crouched beside him, offered him a flask. “Thanks.” Dan took a sip; it was a decent brandy. Surprised, he took another, then gave the flask back. “I’ll drink it all if you don’t take it.” Fitch put the flask in his pocket.

  The snowfall thinned to only a few flakes. The crowd paced about, muttered. Men came by Dan, knelt, shook his hand, mumbled at him.

  Sanders hunkered down next to Fitch. “I’ll never forget how you stood there in the doorway, shooting into that cabin. It gave us time to grab Copley and get everyone away.” He gave Dan his hand. “Thank you.” He looked up the hill. “They’re back.”

  “That goes double for me,” Smith Ball said. “You’ll forgive me if I keep standing.” He leaned on a stick.

  With Fitch’s help, Dan stood up. Where he had sat, the packed snow was red. “Shouldn’t you see the doctor?” Dan asked.

  Ball smiled. “When you do. You’re hit worse than me.” His dark eyes were full of pain.

  “Never thought I’d see anyone could handle a rifle like that,” Fitch said.

  A few former artillerymen, wearing blue and grey parts of old uniforms, set the gun, blocked its wheels, and cranked its barrel into position. A man in grey sighted it, and flapped his hand to the right. Men dragged it rightward a few degrees. The man in grey sighted down the barrel and gestured palm up, squinted through the sight, as two men in blue turned the crank until he flattened his hand, palm down. They stepped back and the man in grey took another look, nodded, and stepped back. Now the blue men loaded it, and a man in blue stepped up with a burning rag on the end of a stick. “Clear away,” he yelled at those standing behind the piece. He touched the torch to the fuse, and a second later the gun boomed and leaped backward, then settled.

  The fuse tore out, and the ball bored through the wall, but did not explode.

  “Shit!” one of the gunners said.

  A second ball ripped through both walls of the cabin and exploded on the other side.

  Sanders sent some men with rifles to fire on the cabin through the shot holes. “He won’t be able to use them to shoot any more of our men.” He ordered the artillerymen, “Aim for the chimney. He might be hiding in it.”

  They hauled the little cannon about, sighted it, and lit the fuse. The gun boomed and recoiled over one of the gunner’s feet. The man screamed, and others leaped to roll the howitzer forward for another shot, but the chimney blew apart, and logs splintered. The door fell inward, and the one window shattered.

  “Follow me!” Sanders ran down the slope. Yelling and whooping, dozens of men charged with him, including Smith Ball, who limped in their van, his pistol ready.

  “Guess he ain’t hurt so bad.” Fitch turned his head and spat a yellow-brown stream.

  Two men lifted the door, and two others dragged the Mexican out. Dan saw one of his arms move. He had apparently been behind the door when it blew in on him.

  Smith Ball emptied his pistol into Pizanthia. “You son of a bitch, you killed a good man.”

  Someone produced a rope, tied it around Pizanthia’s neck, and hauled the corpse up a pole. Men began firing at it, and soon more blazed away at the corpse dangling like an obscene flag.

  Dan turned his head away. Men were dismantling Pizanthia’s cabin, laying the logs on a great pile, bringing out everything Pizanthia had owned and tossing it among them. Someone lighted them, and a bonfire blazed up.

  “Burn the Greaser!” came a shout.

  The crowd responded, “Burn him! Burn him!”

  “No!” yelled Dan. “No!”

  “Shut up!” Fitch shouted in his ear. “You can’t stop it. Can’t you see they’ve gone mad? Look at Sanders. He knows better. You want them to burn you, too?”

  Men cut the rope, and took the corpse’s arms and legs, swung it back and forth, and tossed the body into the flames.

  Dan was watching the fire. “God in heaven, what have we come to?”

  Sanders, walking up the slope, heard him. His face was pale. He had lost control. Pizanthia’s murder was a blight on his leadership, and he knew it. “Nothing like this must ever happen again,” he told Dan. “We must set up a court system, or this entire enterprise could degenerate into mob action, worse than the roughs and road agents.”

  “What about Dutch John?” asked Fitch.

  Sanders’s eyes glowed, live coals in the caves of their sockets. “Now it’s his turn.”

  * * *

  X said, “If I’d’ve knowed you was a road agent, I wouldn’t have fixed your hands, John, I’d have shot you instead.” X Beidler stood in front of Dutch John Wagner and pointed his finger at the German.

  Even sitting, Dutch John could look X Beidler in the eye, but big as Dutch John was, Dan didn’t doubt but that the little man would have done exactly as he said. The German held up his hands, mittened in dirty bloodstained cloths. He had surrendered two days before. He squirmed from one buttock to the other, and his feet kept up a constant dance, tapped softly from side to side, toes in, toes out. He lowered his hands to rest on his heavy thighs, winced as the blood flowed into them, and raised them again.

  He said, “Aber, vielen dank, anyway.”

  “No need to thank me. I just postponed your hanging awhile, is all,” said X.

  “Let’s get on with this.” Dan sat in Chrisman’s own easy chair with his right leg resting on another chair. His wound burned, and periodic nausea swept through him, but he clamped his jaws shut and tried to fo
cus. He wanted to go home, to Virginia City, where Martha could tend to him. Not Dr. Glick. He wanted Martha’s healing touch. He wanted Martha.

  You’re lucky, Dr. Glick had said. He had not had to dig for the bullet, thank God, but he had used pincers to pull out tiny threads and bits of cloth, and poured whiskey into the wound to cleanse it while Dan clenched his jaws to keep from yelling. Now and then a moan escaped. You’ll live, said Glick, because you’re young and healthy, but keep this clean or it’ll fester and you don’t want to lose the leg. You’re lucky I’m here. I may be the most practiced doctor with gunshot wounds in the Territory.

  I had to be, the doctor had said. They’d’ve killed me if I’d lost a patient. They loved it, you know. They bragged about the crimes they committed, and they laughed because they had everyone scared witless and nobody could prove a goddamn thing. They flaunted their crimes, because I was too scared to talk. Besides, who would I have told? I knew the Sheriff was in it.

  So Dan, bandaged and with his ordeal over, wanted to be done here. If they’d had a legal system, they could not have used Dr. Glick’s knowledge because it would have been judged hearsay, but it was enough for the Vigilantes. Enough for justice.

  “Right,” Sanders said. “We don’t have all night.”

  Wagner licked his lips and hitched his right shoulder. “I ain’t done nothing. I never killed nobody, so you can’t hang me. I ain’t a murderer.”

  “But you’re friends with them as is,” said Fitch.

  “You see, John, we have to check up.” Sanders, a reasonable man, made a good point, Wagner nodding agreement. “Make sure you’re in the clear, if nothing else.”

  Good God, Dan said to himself. Was Wagner really as stupid as that? “Have him show us his right shoulder.”

  Wagner crossed his arms over his chest. “No, I ain’t taking my shirt off.”

  X pressed closer to the big man’s right side. “John, open your shirt. One of them as robbed Lank Forbes’s train a few weeks ago got shot in the right breast. It’s real simple. If you ain’t wounded, you ain’t the man.”

  “I can’t.” The prisoner waggled his hands. “Can’t work the buttons.”

  X said, “I’ll help you.”

  Wagner shook his head vigorously. “No, you can’t.”

  “Like hell I can’t. There’s another way, though.” X balled one fist and punched toward Wagner’s right shoulder. Wagner gasped and shrank back.

  Dan flinched, but the fist stopped an inch short of the wound.

  A man asked, “Wouldn’t there be a hole and bloodstains on the shirt?”

  Dan said, “You never heard of changing your shirt?”

  Wagner lifted his tied hands away from the plaid flannel shirt. X unbuttoned it, eased it down from Wagner’s shoulder, and stepped aside. Underneath, dried bloodstains surrounded a ragged hole in his dirty undershirt, unbuttoned to the waist because of the thick pad of bandage. Dan caught the stink of spoiled meat and nearly choked.

  Dan said, “I think we’ve seen enough.”

  X pulled up the shirt and buttoned it as Wagner said, “I was not there, I tell you! I was not there.” The th’s sounded like soft z’s.

  “Give it up, John,” Sanders said. “We know you’re a road agent. You’re on Yeager’s list, you were caught stealing a horse, enough to hang you right there, and you have a wound that identifies you as one of the robbers. You’d best make your peace with God.”

  X hitched one buttock onto Plummer’s old desk, and swung a foot like a pendulum. Wagner’s eyes followed the foot, back and forth, back and forth. The Vigilantes waited. They had no other evidence, and the lack of a confession would not save Dutch John, but if the man confessed some would be easier about it.

  For himself, Dan did not care. The rancher who owned the horse had been kind in letting Dutch John walk away when he caught him, even if he had kept John’s saddle. We can’t afford kindness to thieves and murderers, Dan told himself. They earn their fate.

  Wagner took a deep breath and slumped. “Okay. Ja. Is so.”

  “What is so?” asked Dan.

  “What you say. Is true, ja? But don’t kill me, please. Do anything, but don’t kill me.”

  “We have to vote, John,” Sanders said. “We’ll be quick about this, and you can rest in the cabin you’ve been held in.”

  Two men led Dutch John out of Chrisman’s store.

  When the door closed, one of the men who had caught him said, “He’s got his good points, you know. He could have killed one of us a couple of times, but he didn’t.”

  “We could banish him,” said one of the new Vigilantes from Bannack.

  “Oh, Christ,” Dan said. “Banished crim – ” He clamped his jaws together as a spasm of agony swept through him, tightened the muscles of his leg in a pain like burning. When it was over, leaving him sweating, he took a breath down to his toes, ignored a couple of odd looks. “Banished criminals come back,” he said. “Like Stinson did. Or they prey on people elsewhere. We have the evidence. Let’s get the job done.”

  “Are you sure?” Sanders asked.

  “Well, well,” Fitch arched one bushy eyebrow at Dan. “Getting shot usually makes a man more cautious. Not less.”

  “Maybe, but this is more evidence than we have against some others on the list.” Dan had wanted certainty, he’d tried to keep his conscience clear, to give history nothing to condemn them for, but after the last two days in Bannack, he wanted it over with, the killing, he was sick of it all. Sick of the excuses they gave as long as they were on top and had men afraid of them, sick of their terror when they had had no pity for their victims, and sick of the reek of shit and the piss on the front of their trousers. The jerking bodies and purple swollen tongues would live in his mind and foul his dreams until he died.

  And it was not done yet. After Dutch John, eighteen men were left on Yeager’s list. Gallagher. His gut clenched. He had liked Gallagher. Gallagher, the charming, handsome, deadly man whom he’d wanted for a friend.

  As if they sat in a courtroom and he was polling a jury, Sanders said, “We’ve had a call for the vote. Is there a second?”

  “Second.” Fitch brought out a much traveled handkerchief. He blew into it, all the time watching Dan, who felt the stare at the edge of his vision. What was Fitch thinking?

  One by one, the guilty votes came down, tolling Dutch John’s death knell. Even the new volunteers understood that the Vigilantes passed only one sentence: Death.

  * * *

  They brought Dutch John to an unfinished house, where beams across log walls lay ready to support the roof. The bodies of Plummer and Stinson lay waiting for burial, Stinson’s corpse on the floor, and Plummer’s on a work bench. Ray’s woman had taken his body for burial.

  Dutch John stared at them. X uncoiled a new, stiff rope and threw one end over a beam.

  Fitch, standing close to Dan, muttered, “That rope will be all stretched out after this.”

  In spite of himself, Dan saw the humor. “A new way to break in a rope?”

  “Why not? Good as any.”

  X made the noose, and the big man bent to let him slip it over his head.

  “Maybe I can pray now?”

  “Of course.” Sanders steadied him as he knelt.

  Dutch John crossed himself and prayed in a low-voiced mumble, his eyes closed. Two or three others knelt and prayed with him, the rest removed their hats. “Hail Mary, mother of God, blessed art thou ….” Snow swirled around them, and the wind thrust down the back of Dan’s neck. “Hail Mary mother of God be with us now and at the hour of our death.”

  When Dutch John said, “Amen,” Sanders took Dutch John’s good arm and helped him to his feet. X felt for his left ear, and slid the noose into position, worked the hangman’s knot along the rope until he had taken slack out. “That comfortable?” X asked.

  Dutch John nodded. “I think maybe I don’t worry about that soon.” His eyes were full of humor, and the corners of his lips turned up.
>
  Fitch and Sanders boosted him onto a flour barrel. X took up the slack in the rope, and anchored it with several turns around the beam.

  “How long does it take to die?” Wagner asked. “I have not seen a man hanged before.”

  “It won’t be long, just a matter of seconds and it’ll be over,” Sanders reassured him.

  Dutch John nodded. “All right. I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

  They jerked the barrel out from under him. His neck broke with a crack, but he refused to die. His feet flailed in the air, and he turned and twisted, struggled to free his hands, fought even as his head bent to one side, his eyes bulged from their sockets, and his face swelled to a purplish tinge.

  “My God,” said Fitch. “Why don’t he give it up?”