by Jake Logan
A quick look confirmed his suspicions. Four more of O’Malley’s gang rushed forward to help their friends. Slocum dropped more dynamite and killed them, too. From behind the bank he heard angry cries and the thunder of horses’ hooves. Slocum had done all he could for the moment. He edged back to the ladder and slid back down into the bank.
“What the bloody hell did you go and do, Slocum?” demanded Luther. “Lookee there. You blowed the side off the bank!”
Slocum had killed six outlaws. He had also blown a hole three feet across through the brick wall.
“Plug it up. Use the desk and a couple chairs,” Slocum said.
“They kin git in through that hole,” Luther whined. “It’s hard ’nuff keepin’ ’em from gettin’ in through the reg’lar doors.”
“I think you scared them off, Luther,” Slocum said. He coughed and said, “Excuse me. You chased them off, Marshal. ” This got Luther’s mind off the hole in the wall and the considerable chore of keeping thirteen people alive if the outlaws attacked in force. Slocum did not doubt O’Malley would send one of the artillery pieces from Fort Walker to blow open the bank, if the notion occurred to him. And it would, when he lost enough men.
Slocum flexed his stiff right arm until it felt better, then drew his six-shooter and went to the front door. Two of the men looked at him fearfully when he motioned for them to let him out.
“Do you have to go outside, John?” Etta pressed close to him, but did not grab him to stop the reconnaissance. “They might be waiting for you.”
“Got to see where they are and how many of them there are. It might be good to patch the brick wall I blew a hole in, too.” He pointed to the side of the bank. When she looked, he took the opportunity to slip through the door and into the street. The locking bar slid noisily back into place, accentuating how alone he was.
Keeping close to the wall, he sneaked around the side of the bank and saw the two craters he had blasted with his dynamite. He ignored the bloody patches that had once been outlaws. Around back, he saw where a dozen or more men had waited with their horses. Four of the horses remained, their riders dead by Slocum’s hand. He swung into the saddle of one horse and began exploring Sharpesville. The town was eerily silent. If there had been a few of the Schuylkill Butchers left to shoot it out, Slocum would have felt better. As it was, he had the feeling he always got before a huge thunderstorm hit.
The hair on the back of his neck raised, and the silence wore on him. The calm before the storm. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. It all hit him as exactly right.
He returned to the bank and left the horse with the others.
“It’s me, Slocum. I’m back. Don’t shoot!”
He walked out in front of the bank and stood, hands well away from his six-shooter so the men inside the temporary fortress wouldn’t get itchy trigger fingers.
The door opened, and Etta waved him inside. He hurried, ducked through the small opening, and saw two men work to slam the door and bar it behind him.
“The town’s deserted,” he told them. “But we can’t hold out here forever. If O’Malley brings back a cannon or even enough men to pin us here for a week, we’re goners.”
“What should we do?”
“There are four saddled horses around back. Anyone want to ride out and try to warn other towns? What’s the next nearest army post other than Fort Walker?”
“Fort Nealon,” Luther said, his face scrunched into a frown of concentration. “Might be thirty miles.”
“Forty,” corrected another man. “We’re better off trying to get to Raymond and warning them.”
“Raymond’s a town?” Slocum asked. “How big is it?”
“Twice the size of us,” Luther said. “’Course that was ’fore we all left town. ’Cept fer us in here, that is.”
“We know what you mean, Luther,” Mr. Rosty said. “We must ride. Four horses, Slocum?”
“There’re more around town, I reckon. Or might be the outlaws took the spare horses. The ones out back used to belong to dead men.” His eyes drifted toward the hole in the wall, giving them all a fair picture of who had owned the horses.
“I’ll ride to Fort Nealon,” one man said. “I got a cousin what lives there. He works for the post sutler.”
Three others volunteered, two for Raymond and another for a small mining town up in the hills. The more people alerted to the danger brewing, the better, Slocum thought.
The four took what supplies they needed, then left. Slocum watched as the four trotted out of town, three going east and one westward into the hills. He sank down, back to the wall, and closed his eyes. He tried to remember when he had last slept. The murmur of the others in the bank soothed him, and he had good dreams until he awoke with a start.
“It’s Jeremy’s horse. The one he rode out on,” called a man with his eye pressed to a peephole.
“Where was Jeremy headed?” Slocum asked, getting to his feet.
“Fort Nealon. He had a cousin there,” the man answered.
Slocum pulled back the bar on the door and went out. He heard nothing but the soft wind blowing down the street and the settling of buildings in town. He approached the horse slowly so as not to spook it, grabbed the reins, and pulled its head down.
Long smears of blood had dried on the horse’s mane. Slocum ran his fingers gently along the bloodied hair, looking for the wound. The horse tried to rear, but Slocum held it down. Nowhere did he find a cut on the horse. The blood had to belong to Jeremy. From the amount already dried on the horse, Slocum doubted the rider could have survived.
He led the horse around back and tethered it.
As he went into the street in front of the bank, he heard the pounding of hooves. He spun, went into a crouch, and had his Colt Navy out in a flash. Three more horses galloped past. It wasn’t hard to identify them. They had all carried riders out to raise the alarm. O’Malley had bottled up Sharpesville and wasn’t allowing anyone to escape.
Slocum rapped sharply on the door and bellowed, “Let me in. Now!”
The door opened a crack and Slocum pushed through, sending Mr. Rosty stumbling back.
“Sorry,” Slocum said. “We got big problems.” The rest of them gathered around looking fearful. He knew they had no choice but to fight for their lives now, and he did not want any of them simply giving up. That would be suicide.
“They didn’t make it, did they?” Etta asked.
“All four of them were killed or caught by O’Malley’s gang,” Slocum said. There was no reason to sugarcoat the truth. “If we don’t get help, they’ll wear us down or blow us up. Anybody have any suggestions before they decide to hit us with another frontal assault?”
A weedy man squinted at Slocum through thick glasses and tentatively raised his hand.
“This isn’t a schoolroom. Speak up if you have any ideas.”
“I’m the town telegrapher. We might get a ’gram out. Sending it along, every telegrapher on the route would hear it.”
“You mean send it to someplace far away like Billings and let the message be read as it goes?” Etta sounded outraged that anyone listened in on such communication.
“Ma’am,” the telegrapher said, “none of us can help but hear. It makes our jobs a little less boring, too. No safer.” He held up his arms. He wore heavy leather forearm protectors. From the burns on his hands, Slocum guessed the reason. The dangerous acid used in the batteries splattered everywhere. He had seen more than one telegrapher who had gone blind from the fumes.
“Where’s the telegraph office?” Slocum asked.
“Right down the street, not fifty yards off,” the man said.
“Let’s go. What’s the farthest you can send a telegram?”
“Why, all the way to New York City. With luck I can get a ’gram to Paris, France, but they wouldn’t be much help. Better to just send out a warning. Our only line’s between here ’n Miles City. From there the telegrapher would have to repeat the message.”
�
��That’s good enough,” Slocum said. He motioned for the gatekeepers to open once more. Slocum wondered how many more times they would let him back in before deciding he was a liability rather than an asset. Every time he spoke, he gave them more bad news.
Then he realized Luther wasn’t going to let them keep him locked out. Between him and Etta, they would have a pair of tornadoes blowing through the bank. That made him feel a little better, but did nothing to allay his fear about what O’Malley would do next.
Slocum and the telegrapher hurried down the dusty street to the telegraph office. The man fumbled in his vest pocket and took out a key. He had trouble with it in the lock. Slocum pushed him aside, kicked open the door, and then entered.
“That’s Western Union property!” the telegrapher protested.
“Bill me,” Slocum said. He was in no mood to waste time.
“Very well, I shall do that,” the man said primly. He put on his green eyeshade, went around the counter, and sat before the complicated box holding contacts and levers. Dextrous fingers connected copper wires to shiny terminals, and then he poured sulfuric acid into the lead-acid battery at his feet. “It’ll take a few seconds to get up to snuff. There.” He cracked his knuckles and looked up expectantly at Slocum. “What do I send?”
“Sharpesville attacked. Fort Walker overrun. All dead. Send help.”
“Should I make that ‘lots of help’?”
“Do it that way,” Slocum said. The message wording was less important than alerting the authorities all around to the danger. Let them think it was Indians. Whatever got the most soldiers out to investigate was the best message possible.
“Hmmm,” the telegrapher said, frowning. He worked a few seconds on the wires wrapped around brass posts, then worked on his key again. The clicking of the message being sent in Morse code sounded flat to Slocum. He had heard enough telegrams being keyed to know something was wrong.
“Why isn’t the message going out?”
“Well, my equipment’s in good condition. There’s a spark. See?” The telegrapher held a small brass rod across two contacts and caused a fat blue spark to jump and crackle. “That can mean only one thing.”
Slocum knew what it was.
“The Butchers have cut the line,” he said.
They were isolated and sitting ducks for O’Malley’s attack.
14
Slocum fumed as the telegrapher worked on his rig and finally shook his head.
“No question ’bout it,” he said. “The line’s been cut somewhere between here and Miles City. It happens, though not this time of year so much. Ice gets on the wire and—”
"O’Malley’s men cut it,” Slocum said flatly. He looked hard at the telegrapher. “If I splice the line, could you get the message through?”
“Of course, but I’d have to know when you fixed the line. And then there’s the problem of the outlaws. If they cut the line in one place, they might do it in two or a dozen. All it’d take to bring it down is a long piece of rope with heavy rocks tied on each end.” The telegrapher stood and acted out the process of throwing the rope upward, over the telegraph wire, and everything crashing to earth.
“Any way of knowing how far from town they cut the line?” Slocum asked. He rummaged through the telegrapher’s tools, taking out a spool of heavy, insulated wire.
“No way I ever heard. Thought on it myself, though. Having a cut wire’s like walking into a wall. I mean, you don’t go farther and neither does the signal. How far back you stumble from the wall tells you where the wall is. I reckon it’d be possible to time how long it took the signal to hit the cut and get back to me if you knew how fast the message went. Nobody’s fer certain sure on that, but it might be really fast. As fast as a hundred miles an hour maybe.”
“So? Where’s the cut?”
“I said it ought to be possible. I don’t know any way of actually doing it, other than to ride the line and hunt for where the wire’s down.”
“Keep sending the signal every ten minutes or so,” Slocum said. He glanced at the huge Regulator clock on the wall balefully ticking off every second. “No need to start for a half hour or so. It’ll take at least that long for me to find the cut and do the splicing.”
“Sounds like you done this before. You know how to prepare the wire?”
Slocum nodded. Other than knowing the code used to send the telegrams, he probably knew more about setting up and repairing a telegraphy shop than this man did. He had not spent all his time out West punching cattle, though that appealed to him more by the minute.
He hunted for his gelding, found it alongside the mare that had carried Etta so ably from Fort Walker, and wasted no time getting on the road. The telegraph poles were visible even if the wire sometimes vanished against the increasingly cloudy sky. The gray storm clouds gathering often blended with the insulating wire. He rode at a brisk trot, then slowed and looked behind him at the wire.
He was less than a mile out of town, but something did not set right with him. Slocum retraced his route, riding directly under the wire rather than simply looking at it from the road. By staring straight up at it, he found a white cloud to use as a contrasting background. A slow smile came to his lips.
“I’ll be damned, but I am lucky,” he said. The stretch of telegraph line above his head showed brown, while on either side it was a sticky black. Slocum had seen how Apaches sometimes cut telegraph lines, but held the ends together using rawhide strips. Finding the dangling wire and repairing it was easy. That sort of damage happened all the time, usually from natural causes. But if the line was still strung overhead, finding the cut and fixing it took added skill.
Or luck.
Slocum decided in this case it was better to have been lucky than skillful. Something about the way this section of the line dangled farther down had worried at him enough to look at it again.
“Sean O’Malley, you’re one sneaky bastard,” Slocum said as he dismounted and dropped the spool of wire to the ground.
A proper repair job would have required him to string the new wire up high to keep animals from gnawing on it. Slocum had no reason to be so painstaking. He cut a length of rope from his lariat, went to one telegraph pole and looped it around, then tied it to his waist. Using this as a support, he worked his way up the pole until he got to the glass insulator. Taking a deep breath, Slocum gripped the wire and leaned out as far as he could before tugging hard. The rawhide strip the outlaws had used to fasten the wire where they had cut it parted.
He lost his balance, and flailed about, glad he still had the rope around his middle to keep from falling. Slocum then shinnied down the pole and went to the two ends of the wire lying on the ground some ten feet apart.
Running his fingers over one end showed he was right. The Butchers had slashed through the wire with something sharp. He shivered, knowing that same cleaver had probably dismembered a human or two. Using his own knife, he scraped the insulation away and worked on the copper wire itself until it was bright. Taking one end of the wire from his spool, he spiraled it around a few times and bent it back, making a crude but serviceable connection.
He went to the other dangling wire and repeated the process, using the other end of the wire on his spool. Slocum had been gone for more than an hour. He hoped the telegrapher was following his orders to send a message every few minutes. The wire lay on the ground. Tentatively touching one of the bare connections, Slocum hoped to feel an electric jolt. Nothing. Either the telegrapher was not sending, or there wouldn’t be an electric spark. He didn’t know enough about these things to figure out what was—or wasn’t— happening.
Slocum stepped away and knew there might be another reason he felt nothing. This might not be the only spot the Butchers had cut the telegraph line. He had found it mostly by luck, but with the sun setting, he had no chance at all of seeing the color difference between rawhide and insulation in the dark.
Mounted, Slocum stared at the wire laid along the ground and hoped the
message had gotten through to Miles City. If the cavalry couldn’t come, he hoped a federal marshal and a posse big enough to matter did.
He swung around and headed back for Sharpesville. Barely a quarter mile toward the town, he saw movement along the road that caused him to stop and wait. He was partially hidden in the twilight, but still silhouetted by the evening sky glow. Urging his horse sideways, he got off the road to a spot where a grove of maples hid him fairly well. Doing nothing for several minutes allowed him to see how antsy the men along the road were. All they could do was lie doggo for a few seconds, then move around rustling the shrubs and disturbing the animals. The normal night sounds were absent. That alone would alert anyone on the road paying attention.
If the silence did not warn a rider, the constant movement would. Slocum counted five men in hiding.
Taking them out would be quite a chore since three of them were bunched together on the far side of the road. The ones on his side had separated by twenty yards. A quiet kill was possible on each of them.
“What do I do about the three sitting together behind that chokeberry bush?” he mused out loud. He had no easy answer. What worried him more than killing the five was where they had come from. The terrain on either side of the road was mostly thicket. While he had been occupied splicing the telegraph line, he would have heard something of them moving into ambush position alongside the road.
They hadn’t come from the direction Slocum had headed in his search for the break. That meant they had come from town.
His heart beat faster. He took a deep breath and caught the scent of burning wood. Mixed with it were odors he could not recognize. Even worse, as he watched above the trees, a faint flickering orange showed from the direction of Sharpesville.