by Jake Logan
“No peaceable land, no railroad?”
“That sums it up. Sharpesville will dry up and blow away without the railroad. With it, the town might become important.”
“Right now, they’re getting along without a marshal.”
“What are you saying?”
Slocum scowled and shook his head slowly. He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. An idea fluttered at the edges of being put into words, but escaped whenever he worked too hard at it.
“You want them caught.”
“I want them killed. And it’s more than revenge for my nephews. If Sharpesville disappears, so will Fort Walker. There aren’t many commands left out West. I’d be mustered out if they close this post.”
Everything Zinsser said rang true. Then Slocum broached the subject he had been avoiding.
“What do you want from me? The last I saw of the Butchers, they were camped in this valley.” He went to the map, located Sharpesville, and was surprised to see how close it was to Fort Walker. The Schuylkill Butchers were holed up not ten miles from town, but in the direction opposite from the fort.
“You’ll lead us,” said Zinsser. “Little Foot is good, but having someone who’s seen the camp is even better. You can tell us what you remember of the valley and where the Butchers patrolled while we’re riding up.”
Slocum glanced over his shoulder and saw Little Foot in the doorway, his rifle riding in the crook of his left arm.
“Better get to it then,” Slocum said. “I reckon you’re going to ride straight through and attack.”
“That’s the only way to catch them. If they caught so much as a hint that I was on the way with enough troopers to kill or capture the lot of them, they’d disappear into those mountains.”
Slocum looked at the map and wondered. Something held the Schuylkill Butchers to that area. He wasn’t going to argue with Zinsser, though. It might be for the best if they scared the outlaws away without a fight.
But Slocum doubted that was going to happen. The memory of silvery cleavers and butcher knives flashing in the sun as they hacked at human bodies was too vivid.
5
“Not too far now,” Slocum said. He wobbled in the saddle from the all-night ride from Fort Walker, but Major Zinsser looked as fresh as the instant he had settled onto his horse. His eyes were so bright they might have betrayed fever, but Slocum knew better. The army officer had finally found a way to avenge the deaths of his nephews—and probably win himself not only a medal, but the everlasting admiration of the citizens of Sharpesville.
Behind them rode two entire companies of men. The rattle of weapons and the thudding of so many horses’ hooves had worried Slocum. Sneaking up on the Schuylkill Butchers did not seem likely, yet they had ridden through the maze of valleys and across broad meadows without being seen. As he had noticed before, the outlaws had nothing but contempt for anyone coming after them. They saw themselves as invincible.
Until now that was true.
Eighty veteran horse soldiers were prepared to change the Pennsylvania killers’ lives forever.
“That valley ahead,” Slocum said. “They keep the cattle they’ve rustled at the far end.”
“Probably butcher and eat them,” Zinsser said. “There haven’t been any rustled beeves offered for sale.”
Slocum said nothing. He was sure the officer kept a close watch on such trade, but the statement carried more hope than certainty. In these hills, who was to say that a down-on-his-luck rancher wasn’t going to buy a few head of stolen cattle to improve his herd?
“Where do we begin the attack, sir?”
Slocum looked at the eager shavetail. The lieutenant was still wet behind the ears. Having a battle-hardened sergeant ask would have suited Slocum more. Looking up, he saw the pale light of a new day cracking open the eastern sky.
“Let me go scout the valley ahead, just to be sure you can get them all on the first attack,” Slocum said.
“Take Little Foot with you,” Zinsser said. “I’ll see that the men are ready for immediate combat.”
Slocum knew the men were keyed up and ready. He had seen the rigid way they sat in the saddle, the way they looked around nervously, eyes moving and heads immobile. Veterans they might be, but even going against the Blackfoot or the Sioux had not carried such fear of impending attack. The Indians were hit-and-run fighters. If their initial attack failed, they might try a second or even a third, but eventually they would ride off, whooping and hollering. Even their prisoners were not as badly mistreated as the prisoners of other tribes—like the Apaches. Slocum had seen firsthand too much torture and outright mutilation.
The Schuylkill Butchers were worse.
“They should have stayed in Pennsylvania,” Little Foot said. “Not that I wish anything evil on the good people of Pennsylvania.”
Slocum wondered how much more about the Butchers Little Foot knew. Going to school in the same state where the Molly Maguires rioted and killed had to bring a bit of chin-wagging his way.
“You want to split up, reconnoiter, then make our way back?” Slocum asked.
“Together,” Little Foot decided.
“Why don’t you trust me?” asked Slocum.
The Indian turned in the saddle and smiled.
“I don’t trust any white man.” He looked ahead into the dawn. “I trust them even less. I have seen them.”
“You think I’m one of them?”
“They would eat you alive,” Little Foot said. With that, he gestured for Slocum to ride ahead.
Slocum did as he was bidden, fuming as he went. Little Foot did not believe he was part of the murderous gang. It was worse. He thought Slocum was a dupe. Slocum might be many things, but that was not one of them. Reaching over, he slipped the leather thong off the hammer of his Colt Navy. He wanted to be ready for anything, even if six shots wouldn’t go very far in killing a couple dozen Butchers.
The closer he got to the rise looking down into the valley, the warier he became. Even the Schuylkill Butchers ought to have sentries out. He had seen no one, even asleep, at what should have been a decent lookout point. Little Foot had turned more nervous, too, jumping at small sounds. Killing one or two men on guard would have been normal.
Nothing about this gang of cutthroats from Pennsylvania was normal.
“Down there,” Slocum said as they rode along the ridge, hunting for an opening in the trees to get a better view. He heard cattle lowing. Try as he might, he did not hear any horses, though.
“Where are the camps?”
“I see a few campfires,” Slocum said. “They’ve died down.”
“All?”
Slocum’s heart leaped into his throat. He understood what Little Foot meant. Some of the fires should have been blazing higher than others. A guard would toss a few more logs onto a fire to stay warm. Not everyone in the vast camp would be asleep at the same time. It was as if all the fires had been built and then guttered out over the long night.
“They’re not down there,” Slocum said.
“We must warn the major,” Little Foot said, wheeling his paint about and setting off at a quick trot through the woods on the far side of the ridge. Slocum followed, but his gelding was exhausted after almost a full twenty-four hours of travel. The brightening dawn allowed Slocum to make better time than he normally might, but his horse simply could not be pushed much further without keeling over dead.
He broke out of the woods at the foot of the hill in time to hear a roar go up. It started low and built like the whine of a tornado sweeping across the prairie. Then came the blinding flash of half a hundred rifles firing. Barely had the dazzling glare faded when another volley came. And another and another.
Sporadic fire answered. Slocum recognized the muted pop of army carbines. But there were so few. Too few.
The Schuylkill Butchers had ambushed both companies of cavalry.
“Little Foot!” Slocum shouted. “Little Foot!”
The Sioux scout did not answe
r. Slocum forced his gelding ahead at the best speed it could muster. But within a hundred yards, he came to the fringes of the massacre. The ground was littered with bright cartridges—spent brass from the outlaws’ rifles. They had dug trenches and hidden in them with hunks of canvas pulled across to conceal their position. In the darkness, not expecting such a ploy, Major Zinsser had ridden into a deadly position. From the angle of the trenches, Slocum guessed the entire cavalry detachment had been caught between them.
Once the major stopped to get his men ready for battle, the outlaws had simply thrown back the canvas camouflage and opened fire with their rifles. They didn’t even have to be good marksmen to take a deadly toll.
The trenches were empty, but Slocum heard fighting farther on. The Butchers had left the safety of their battle pits and pursued the fleeing soldiers. Or what remained of them.
As Slocum rode, he saw increasing signs of the massacre. Frightened horses. Dead riders. So much blood that the ground had turned into a bloody, muddy paste. Here and there, he saw the signs of the Butchers’ special handiwork. An arm or a leg had been severed. But nothing like the slaughter he had witnessed when they attacked the Sharpesville marshal and his posse. There wasn’t enough time for that. Yet.
Reacting instinctively at a small noise, Slocum swung about in the saddle and fired twice. A man in a bloodstained leather apron was using a butcher knife on a fallen soldier. Both slugs ripped through the Schuylkill Butcher’s head, killing him instantly. Slocum wished he could make the man suffer for his cruelty, but then he saw two more of the outlaws ahead, the morning light glinting off their weapons. He fired at them until his six-shooter came up empty. He might have hit one. There was no way of telling.
What he had done was draw their attention to him.
"O’er here, boyos,” called one giant of a man. He waved his bloody cleaver overhead to get the attention of his partners. Then he lumbered toward Slocum.
Reaching back, Slocum slid his Winchester from its sheath and got off a round that caught the outlaw squarely in the chest. The man stumbled and went to his knees, but he was not dead. Slocum remedied that with a second round. By now, however, a dozen Schuylkill Butchers were converging on him. All were armed with knives or meat cleavers. If they had been carrying rifles, he would have been dead in a flash.
Using his knees, he turned his horse and galloped off, shooting as he went. Mostly he missed, but one round did find its way into a Butcher’s leg, felling him amid long, loud curses. As Slocum retreated, he saw the full horror of the battlefield.
He had hoped many of the soldiers could have escaped. If any had, it was only a handful. The stacks of blue-uniformed bodies piled up all around told him how effective and deadly the Butchers’ ambush had been. It was as if they had expected the attack. Slocum wondered if someone at the fort had alerted them, or if they were simply more cunning than he had given them credit for. Not seeing sentries did not mean they weren’t getting scouting reports from outliers.
When his rifle magazine was expended, Slocum slid it back into its sheath and kept riding. There was nothing he could do for the survivors—the few survivors. With any kind of luck, he could circle the battlefield and get back to Fort Walker to tell of Major Zinsser’s fate.
As he rode, though, he came across Butchers armed with rifles and pistols. A hot crease along his back warned him he had to be more careful in getting the hell away.
“Thass one. Must be a scout. He ain’t in uniform,” cried a lookout from high in an oak tree. The lookout bent way out and using a six-shooter opened fire on Slocum. The range was too great, and the man was a terrible shot. Still, Slocum veered away, heading up a narrow valley with a peaceful stream running down the middle of it. Farther down, this stream would be filled with blood. Here, the water looked crystal clear and pure.
From nowhere came two Butchers, one on each side and both grabbing for him. In an instant, Slocum saw they had come from hidden trenches. The Butchers must have cut their defenses deep along every approach leading to their hideout. Slocum wasted no time wondering how long it had taken to dig such extensive pits. He kicked out and caught one outlaw smack in the middle of the face. As the man stumbled away and fell facedown in the stream, causing the very bloody flow that Slocum had thought wasn’t likely to exist here, the other owlhoot grabbed and pulled hard. Slocum went flying from the saddle and landed hard on the ground.
He shook off the fall and got to his feet. His six-gun was empty. Reaching down, he curled his fingers over the hilt of the knife he had stashed in his right boot.
The man he faced wasn’t the behemoth so many of the Schuylkill Butchers were. He was still well muscled and moved with an easy grace as he waved his long butcher knife in front of him.
“I see I got me a real man fer a change. Ya fight like one with a knife. Now die like one with me knife shoved in yer guts!”
The man rushed Slocum, his butcher knife thrusting straight for the gut. Slocum twisted away at the last possible instant, grabbed the brawny wrist more to get his own balance than to prevent a second slash, and then used his own blade where it would do the most good. His cut was aimed at the man’s throat. He got him across the eyes.
“Ya blinded me!” The man lashed out with his knife, flailing wildly. Blood gushed from the wound into the man’s eyes. Slocum might have stepped away and left his foe thrashing about.
Instead, he judged his distance, and when opportunity came, he took it. His knife sank up to the hilt in the man’s chest, puncturing his heart. The Butcher died way too easily.
Slocum stepped away, panting harshly. He wiped his blade off on the man’s leather apron, then went to get his horse.
“Lookin’ fer this?” Another of the Butchers held the reins of Slocum’s gelding in one hand. In the other he held a six-shooter. “Saw what you done to me friend. Now it’s time fer ya to suffer a mite ’fore I slice you up.”
The outlaw raised his pistol. The report rang loud and angry in Slocum’s ears, but no bullet cut through his flesh. The Butcher took a half step forward, and then twisted to the ground in a boneless spiral.
Slocum looked up to see Little Foot twenty feet away, lowering his rifle. Smoke still billowed from the muzzle.
“Thanks,” Slocum called. “Should we get back to tell them at the fort what happened?”
“You can. I’m leaving.”
With that, the Sioux scout vaulted onto his paint horse and galloped away. Loyalty was good only so long in the face of such utter destruction of life.
Slocum took the time to reload before climbing back onto his skittish horse. The smell of blood spooked the gelding and did little for Slocum’s peace of mind. He rode directly for the edge of a wooded area, thinking the pine scent would go a long way toward scrubbing the coppery blood stench from his nostrils. When he reached the sheltering woods, he dismounted to give his horse a chance to rest. Whatever happened next, he needed a strong, rested animal beneath him.
Slocum poked through his saddlebags, hunting for what he could count on as supplies. Most of his food was gone. He was down to a single box of cartridges for his rifle. He reloaded the Winchester and took out his field glasses to study the carnage out in the valley. A mist had formed, limiting visibility. There might be rain soon, cleansing rain to wash away all trace of the blood.
Slocum propped his field glasses on a low-hanging tree limb to steady them, and began a slow survey of the battlefield. From what he could tell, the Butchers had criss-crossed the entire area with trenches. Enough of them hiding under canvas in those trenches could ambush a force of any size—and had. Slocum gave up counting the dead soldiers when he reached twenty. Spotting bloodstained gold braid convinced him the major was among the dead.
Little Foot might have lit out for more peaceable regions of Montana, but Slocum knew he had to report this to the officer in command at Fort Walker. From what he could remember, it might be a lieutenant.
That mattered less to Slocum than letting the army know
of the danger camped on its doorstep. To hell with railroads and commerce. The Schuylkill Butchers had to be stopped. They were like a plague on the land, moving through and destroying everything as surely as grasshoppers or locusts. The unmoving bodies of so many soldiers convinced Slocum of what he had to do.
Waiting until darkness fell, he carefully formulated what he would report. He had run afoul of the law in Sharpesville because the marshal apparently assumed any stranger riding through had to be one of the Schuylkill Butchers. Slocum had spent the day getting his bearings and deciding on the best route to Fort Walker. Moving through the forest, he eventually came out on the far side close to midnight. The storm he had wondered about earlier finally spattered a few cold raindrops on him. Slocum turned up his collar, pulled down his battered hat, and kept riding.
A little past two, he drew rein and listened hard. The steady drizzle muffled sound, but something was not right. Turning slowly in the saddle, he located the source of the noise. His hand flashed to his ebony-handled Colt Navy, but he did not draw. To fire at the men huddled by the campfire would be suicidal. At least a dozen men held out their hands for warmth. Only the cold rain kept them from spotting Slocum.
He edged his gelding away from the encampment. So many men at one fire meant others were likely near. For whatever reason, the Butchers traveled in huge gangs. He rode at an angle to their camp, only to find the way blocked by seven dim figures, all mounted. As he cut to his left to avoid them, they came galloping in his direction.
As he rode, the rain increased until it beat down at him in sheets of blowing water. Using this to his advantage, Slocum doubled back and tried to get around the seven riders. Rather than continuing after him, hunting in vain, only three continued along what ought to have been his trail. The other four remained as guards.
The way they strung themselves out prevented Slocum from getting around them. His way to Fort Walker was efficiently cut off.