God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  “My God, that was too close.” Hands shaking, he let down the hammer, oh so slow, with a slight rasp, and the click as it slid into place resounded in the silent, clear air. He helped Martha to her feet, “I’m sorry, missus, you’d best get into the house.”

  Canary was still snarling at the man, would not let him near Dotty. Martha took a hold of the rope around Canary’s neck, dragged him off aways, and the man who had come so near to shooting her lifted Dotty to her feet.

  Brushing at her clothes, he said, “You shouldn’t oughta get in the line of fire, missy.”

  McDowell yelled, “You bastards, you nearly killed my daughter.” He was still cussing at them as they led him away.

  Martha shepherded the child and the dog toward the cabin. McDowell’s yelling stopped. She had no time to think about that, just to get Dotty into dry clothes, warm them both. “Hurry, child, do! We’ll catch our death out here.” She knew she must think, but her mind reeled like she was dancing too fast, and why was –

  “Mam, look!” Dotty pointed uphill, where, at the end of Idaho, armed men stood across the road, each carrying a long gun, and Martha wheeled to look downhill toward the Creek, and men stood shoulder to shoulder there, too. Not even a cat would escape.

  Martha’s thoughts splashed around, the common stream running in her mind broke on rocks like her fingers playing on a smashed dulcimer, misshapen chords jumping up and falling back, their scales flashing until one clear thought leaped the rapids as she buttoned a clean skirt round herself, Dotty already in dry clothes (washday coming up too quick): Find Dan Stark.

  She had one arm in her coat, Dotty all wrapped up to go, when running steps froze them until Tim flung open the door. And she relaxed into tears because her son was here. “Mam, they got Pap.”

  “We got to find Dan Stark,” she said. “Your Pap is no murderer, and he’s no thief.” She squirmed out of his grasp, because a new idea had jumped the tumbling rapids of her thoughts, and she knelt in front of the lowest shelf in her makeshift cupboard, reached far back, and pulled out the cigar box of contracts.

  Tim held Dotty, stroked her hair, made soothing noises like someone might make to a fractious filly, gentling it.

  The contracts would all have different dates on them; she’d seen them signed and dated at her table at different times during the last months. They’d prove that McDowell had been out prospecting. Not killing, not stealing.

  “Here.” She thrust the box at Tim. “Run quick. Give it to Mr. Stark. Nobody else. Just him. He’ll know what to do. They’re the contracts between your Pap and Fitch.”

  “But – ” Tim frowned, like he didn’t know what a bunch of papers could do.

  “For the love of God, run! They’ll prove he was out looking for gold.”

  Tim’s face cleared. Tucking the box under his arm, he shook off Dotty’s clinging hands and ran.

  Martha watched him run. “Your Pap will be all right now.” Now she could hope. Now, she’d done everything she could to help McDowell live. It was up to the Lord now, what the Vigilantes did, but she’d done her best and the wish she’d had wouldn’t count no more. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “No!” shouted McDowell. “I tell you I never! I ain’t a thief, I ain’t a murderer.”

  Paris Pfouts banged down his gavel, banged it again, but McDowell, straining against the ropes and against the charges holding him, hollered: “All you got on me, it don’t amount to a pile of shit, and you sons of bitches know it!”

  From behind the partitions strategically placed to separate the prisoners from each other, came shouts: “You tell the bastards, Sam! Go, Sam!”

  They might have been cheering a horse race, Dan said to himself, except the prize was McDowell’s life. The feed store fronting on Main Street was new enough that the smell of green wood stayed in the walls, as if the logs remembered their lives as trees, their damp pungent aroma mingled with the dry smell of oats and corn. A window gave him a sight all the way up Wallace Street, and the weak morning sunshine cut the guards’ silhouettes against the panes.

  He did not see her on the street.

  “Gag him!” said one of the Vigilantes who stood behind Dan.

  Pfouts said, “McDowell, if you can’t be quiet, I will do just that.”

  In the comparative quiet, Dan said, “I haven’t changed my mind, either. I can’t believe Sam McDowell is a murderer. Or a thief. If he had money, his wife would not be taking in boarders and baking pies to sell.” He felt strange, curiously separated from himself, as if he watched through his own eyes and at the same time from someplace outside himself, as from a box and he were a player on a stage acting a life.

  “He’s gambled it away,” said Fitch. “You won his share of two of those contracts.”

  “Yes.” Dan still watched up Main Street, but he could not see her yet. “I’ve played some poker with this man, and believe me, he’s not very good. He’s a sore loser, besides. But, gentlemen,” and now he turned to look at the other Vigilantes, “he’s not a card cheat. He loses, or he wins, fair and square. Now I ask you, would a man who loses a claim at poker be a man who robs people at gunpoint or kills them to steal their gold?” Almost holding his breath, he waited, but no one could think of an example. Being a thief, a killer, and an honest poker player did not go together. “Nor has he once tried to take back the claims by force. Sam McDowell is a prospector. He’s not a killer, and he’s not a thief.” He’s the husband of the woman I love.

  “He tried to kill you,” Fitch said. “You know he did.”

  “I’d have killed him, too, if I could have.” Dan was lying, but once mounted on it, he could not get off; the lie had its own momentum. He would have killed McDowell if he’d had to, he still wished the man were out of the way, but he knew that to kill McDowell would be to lose Martha before he had – what? Won her? Impossible even to try. “It was a fight that got out of hand, that’s all.”

  “What is wrong with you?” Fitch jerked his head toward McDowell. “Why do you defend him? There’s not one shred of proof that he was really prospecting.”

  Why did Fitch keep on with this? Why did he keep prodding at it, as if demanding that he help Fitch murder McDowell for his own reasons? Damn it! He would not be complicit with Fitch. He held hard the reins on his temper, felt it fight against the curb. “I don’t have to. You prove him guilty.” Proof. Something clicked into place, and he cursed himself for a God damned idiot. He’d been too preoccupied with Martha to pay attention, was letting the secret planner work out McDowell’s doom while hiding from himself the simple fact that he would have Martha McDowell, hiding his own King David.

  The contracts. He had them in his pocket. They were proof, maybe not in court, but here they would be enough, perhaps, to throw doubt on Fitch. He took the two pieces of paper from his pocket and flapped them at Fitch. “Here is proof. I have signed and dated contracts between you and McDowell. They prove he was prospecting.” Duly witnessed by Con Orem, assigned to Dan by his signature and McDowell’s mark.

  “The hell! They don’t show a damn thing.” Fitch’s voice was rising. “He gulled me!”

  The two men might have been alone in the big room, the Vigilantes and the prisoners alike quiet and waiting to see how this would pan out. McDowell, looking from one to the other like a spectator at a tennis game, yelled, “I found them claims! You know I did!”

  Dan’s mind leaped and skidded into an understanding. The claims were valuable. Did Fitch want them all to himself, so badly he was willing to portray himself as gullible, discredit his own cleverness, to have them? He knew what Fitch would say next, and sure enough, Fitch said to McDowell, “I believed you then, but I’ve never seen a flake of dust.”

  “You’re too smart to be taken in,” Dan said.

  “Anyone can be bamboozled sometimes,” said Fitch. “There’s no proof he did anything but take my money. Those contracts are just paper.”

  There was movement in the street, where people we
re gathering, and figures separated themselves from the crowd, a man carrying something. Tim. Armed guards stopped him. The man pointed down the hill toward the feed store. Dan didn’t have much time to finish this. It had to be himself that freed McDowell. Not Tim. Otherwise, she would forever brand him as one who had tried to murder her husband. “‘Those contracts are just paper,’” Dan repeated.

  “That’s right. Just paper. Worthless paper.”

  “How many are there, altogether?” Dan made his question as neutral as he could, against the rising excitement that beat in his ears. Fitch couldn’t bear to be thought stupid; he was confessing to having been fooled in perfect grammar, unlike his usual ungrammatical speech.

  “Oh, I believe he brought in about eight so-called claims.”

  “Eight times he humbugged you? You? Major Fitch? ‘Fool me once, shame on you.’ Or have you never heard that saying?” Dan swung around, turned his back square to the window, to address the other Vigilantes. “Gentlemen, I propose we release Sam McDowell. By the testimony of his partner, Major Fitch, formerly of the Confederate States of America, eight contracts exist that the Major grubstaked and signed.” He held his breath. Would they understand? Would they realize the contradiction that a Major in either Army could not have achieved that rank on such stupidity and gullibility as Fitch now pretended to? This was not England, after all, where a well-born idiot could buy his way to high command. Would they have heard Fitch’s educated grammar? Education, rank: Had Fitch been graduated from West Point?

  He glanced over his shoulder, up the street. A woman and a young girl had joined the man, and argued with the guards, who restrained them. Clouds had covered the sun. Vote, dammit!

  Fitch did not quite shout, “You’re making a big mistake, if you let a road agent walk free!” He glared at Dan. “You’ll regret this, Stark. By God, you will.”

  Dan stared into Fitch’s eyes that were cold as pebbles under a winter stream: You don’t know how I already do.

  Pfouts said, “Gentlemen, Dan Stark has asked for a vote of acquittal. What say you?”

  The Vigilantes, judge and jury alike, muttered among themselves, until X Beidler spoke up: “All in favor of acquittal say, ‘Aye’.”

  “Aye!”

  “Opposed?”

  “No!” The no’s were not as strong as the Ayes, but the Vigilantes required unanimous votes to convict. McDowell was free.

  Dan let out his breath as Cap Williams led McDowell aside to wait until the others had been dealt with. He kept his back to the window, he did not want to know how McDowell’s family waited, did not want to see her frantic waiting for her husband. Christ, if they had voted to convict he would at least know he had done his best, but she would have been just as far out of reach. He had little to say about the others, their crimes; his job was to evaluate the evidence, to make them corroborate Yeager’s list. Guards came and went outside, changing places as their stomachs, or nature, called. The angle of the sun shifted, sunlight came and went, with intermittent gleams from the side, then casting long shadows of the afternoon down Main Street as the Vigilantes pressed the remaining men, played them off against each other, to trip them up. At last Dan could ignore his need no longer, but went out to stand against the back of the building, where Cap Williams joined him.

  “Gallagher’s next,” said Williams.

  Dan, buttoning his trousers, nodded. The cold air, smelling of wood burning and fresh dug earth, felt good. Behind him, Alder Creek flowed around miners at work.

  Williams said, “We ain’t going to get corroboration, are we?”

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Dan said. “But we have enough to hang them anyway. Eyewitness accounts of their participation in robberies, shootings, Boone Helm’s confession to those murders in Oregon, back East.”

  “Except Ed French. I think he had some of the wrong friends. Like McDowell.”

  “Same here. He’s careless, but he’s no criminal.”

  “Acquittal, then?”

  “Yeah.”

  Williams pushed open the back door. “I still would have liked to get them to admit the conspiracy exists.”

  Dan said, “Oh, it exists all right. Or how did Club-Foot George know that marking a stage would tell someone to rob it? I’d like corroboration, too, but we have enough.” His wounded leg bumped a box, and he gasped at the scorching pain. “Like with Plummer. We had enough to hang him.”

  They were questioning Gallagher. Across the street, George Temple paced back and forth by the Leviathan Hall, his arm in a sling, bandages around his neck. Even from here, with the guards blocking much of his view, the man’s anger vibrated in the air, in the angle of his back, his abrupt turns, the stiffness in his shoulders. Dan told of the shooting, how Gallagher shot Temple in the arm and then, as Temple, clutching his arm, his back to Gallagher, paused at the saloon door, the Chief Deputy had carefully lined up his sights and fired. Dan’s glimpses of Temple between the heads of the guards were like watching a moving card show that was missing a few cards here and there. It didn’t matter about connecting Gallagher to the gang. Shooting Temple, on top of other killings, was enough to hang him. Gallagher had meant murder, Temple’s luck that he lived.

  When Dan had given his testimony, Gallagher sobbed, “I thought you were my friend.” Dan stared at him. Why did Gallagher think that? Did he think friendship could be built on intimidation?

  Ready to go, the Vigilantes released Sam McDowell and Ed French first. Martha and her children stepped out into the street, but there was no reunion as McDowell backhanded his son, knocked him aside, and strode up Wallace, his family trotting after him.

  * * *

  Martha stumbled after McDowell, who stormed past her and the young’uns like he didn’t see them, like the clotted mud didn’t catch at his boots and fair trip him up like it did her, so that she had to slow down, her and the child both, blowing like a horse, to watch him turn up Jackson. He was making for home. Tim, holding the box under one arm, gave her the other and helped her along. She couldn’t seem to mind where she placed her feet.

  All she could think of, he’d been spared. Thank you, Lord, you delivered him. Thank you, Lord. She repeated that all the way home, it kept away the knowledge she didn’t want to face: she had wanted him dead so’s she’d be free. But if they’d hung him, she would never have been free. Never. On account of she’d wished it.

  He’d left the cabin door open, and was stuffing his spare shirts and other things into a gunnysack, all helter-skelter, and the skin of his face all dark like there was too much blood under it.

  “What are you doing?” Her voice wasn’t hardly more than a whisper. Off to the side of her knowing, Tim followed her into the cabin, shut the door, and stood in the back corner with his arms around his little sister.

  McDowell ransacked the kitchen corner for the smaller frying pan, a pot, a knife and fork and spoon. One of the blue tin cups. “What the hell does it look like? Getting out of here. They almost hung me. Don’t you understand? Them stranglers almost hung me. The bastards! Your pal Stark among ’em.”

  “Mr. Stark?” She hugged her arms around her, wrapped in her shawl.

  “Yes, Mr. Stark.” The name was a sneer. “Oh, he argued some and got them to let me go, but he’s a strangler right enough. Didn’t lift a finger for Gallagher, or the others.”

  “Gallagher? They’re hanging Gallagher?”

  “Yeah, Gallagher, and Club Foot George, and Boone Helm, and Frank Parish, and Hayes Lyons. They let me and Ed French go, but them others – if they ain’t dead now, they soon will be. They’d have hung Bill Hunter, too, only he got away somehow.”

  “Oh, dear God.” Martha collapsed onto a chair.

  McDowell picked up his bag. “I’ll send word where to find me, then you and the young’uns come.” He glared at Tim. “’Cept you. I can’t abide a man don’t dirty his hands.”

  Martha took in air. She had a sudden vision of how it would be, her life traipsing after him, setting up
and him drinking and getting into trouble, and them moving on, and him getting ever meaner, and what of the child then, because they’d have nothing, and where would Timmy be? “No.”

  “Whaddaya mean, no? You’re my woman, you go where I go.”

  “No, not this time. You go now, and you go alone, because I’m not following you hither and yon. I want to put down roots, and make a home, and so what that I didn’t want to come here, you were coming and I wanted to keep the family together, but you never wanted us, and you don’t want us now. Here’s where I am and I’m staying put.”

  “You can’t do that. You got to come. You can bake pies anywhere, but you’ll give me the money.”

  “You just want me slaving for you, that’s all!” Her temper was rising to meet his. That was all he thought of her, was it? A slavey, to make him money to drink up?