by Jon E. Lewis
I saw Johnny tense. “I’ll handle this,” he snapped.
“You talk too much, Preacher,” Ted said. “We come here to run these sheepers out. I do my talking with this!”
Ted’s hand slapped down awkwardly and his fingers closed around the butt of his gun. Telling it now, I can see every move. I couldn’t then. I threw myself out of the brush, my rifle hip level, and I yelled out for them to throw up their hands. I saw the thin man drop into a half crouch and I saw his gun half clear leather, and then Johnny was sailing out of his saddle and he landed on Ted Beaumont’s shoulders. The kid went down hard, the gun spinning out of its holster.
I rammed my rifle barrel against the thin man’s back and I heard his grunt of pain. The thin man let his half-drawn gun slip from his fingers, and Johnny had snapped to his feet, his cocked gun in his hand, and he was covering that tent beyond the fire, his eyes sweeping the other two gunmen, warning them.
Johnny didn’t even look at Ted. “You’re so anxious to get the feel of that gun,” Johnny said across his shoulder, “pick it up and see if you can keep them covered.” The kid did as he was told.
I knew what had happened to Ted and I felt like taking a club to him. It was as Johnny said. Ted was too blasted anxious to get the feel of his gun, and if he had gotten away with his crazy plan he would have figured himself quite a gunman. I was glad he had failed. I saw him standing there, the wind half knocked out of him, and for a minute I was afraid he was going to be sick. The gunmen had raised their hands and I moved around behind them and took their guns.
The thin man laughed, a high, wild sound. “Where I come from, punk,” he said to Ted, “ you wouldn’t live to be as tall as you think you are.”
Ted swallowed hard but he kept his gun trained on the thin man.
Johnny moved over toward the tent. He kept his gun in his hand and he walked toward the door of the tent, walking slowly on the balls of his feet, making no sound. When he was near the tent he moved to one side and he stood there, his hand gripping the butt of the gun. “Come out, Corby,” he said softly. “It’s Johnny Calaveras.”
The flap of the tent moved aside and a man came out. He was round and fat. His eyes were a striking pale blue and his skin looked as if it had never seen the sun. He reminded me of a well-fed snake that had lived too long in the dark. He stood there on his thick legs and stared, his tongue darting in and out. “Is it you, Johnny?” he asked.
“You want to touch me, Corby?” Johnny said. “You want to feel the flesh and bone?”
“Johnny, I figured—”
“You figured I was dead,” Johnny said. “Otherwise I would have come after you before this.”
Corby Lane looked at his gunmen, lined up there under Ted’s and my guns. I saw that Corby Lane was a man who was weak without guns to back him up. “ Johnny,” he said, “it was all a mistake. It was a mix-up.”
“It was that,” Johnny Calaveras said. “And you did the mixing. You set a gun trap, and me and Steve walked into it.”
This talk didn’t make sense, except to tell me that Corby Lane’s voice was steadier now. “ All right,” he said. “ So it was planned. But I didn’t plan it. It was Steve’s idea. He was tired of the way you kept riding him. He was tired of your preaching.”
There was a wicked ruthlessness on Johnny’s face now, and I thought I was going to see a man killed. For that second Johnny Calaveras was a man without a heart or a soul. His lips were thin, tight against his teeth, and I saw his trigger finger tightening. I saw the sweat on his forehead. I watched him trying to keep from squeezing the trigger. His voice came out on his expelled breath.
“ You’re a liar,” he said. “ Steve didn’t know anything about it. You told him to raid my camp. He did it because that was what you were paying him for and because he liked to fight. You counted on that. You told him me and my boys were part of the XB outfit. He couldn’t tell in the dark that it was my camp he was raiding any more than I could tell it was Steve who was raiding me. You doublecrossed us both, Corby, because you wanted to get rid of me and Steve and you knew there was no other way.”
Sometimes a certain dignity comes to a man standing on the edge of eternity. It came to Corby Lane now. His shoulders squared and he faced Johnny Calaveras. “All right,” he said flatly. “That’s the way it was, and it worked. Steve’s dead. He caught a bullet right between the eyes that night.” There was perspiration on Corby Lane’s moon face, but there was a growing confidence in his voice. “Maybe you fired the bullet that killed him, Johnny,” Corby Lane said quietly. “Did you ever think of that?”
Whatever it was, I knew that Corby Lane had hit Johnny Calaveras with everything he had. I saw the old tiredness come into Johnny’s eyes, and an old hurt was there in the sag of his shoulders. “Yes,” Johnny said. “I’ve thought of that. And I figured if I hunted you down and killed you it would give me something else to think about.”
“I would have been easy to find,” Corby Lane said. In some way he had gained the upper hand, and as I watched I realized these two men had known each other not only well but completely. Corby Lane knew of some twist in Johnny’s nature that would be a weakness in a gun fighter. I figured I knew what it was. Corby Lane knew that Johnny was a man who would ask himself questions, and that, for a gun fighter, was a dangerous thing. Some day he might ask himself if it was worth while killing again. Corby Lane was gambling that Johnny had already asked himself that question. And Johnny had, I knew. Otherwise he wouldn’t have become the man we called The Preacher.
“Why didn’t you come after me, Johnny?” Corby Lane said.
“Because I decided there was only one way to really hurt you, Corby,” Johnny said, “and that’s the way I’m going to hurt you now. I want that money belt you always carry. Without money to hire guns you’re nothing. You’re not even worth hunting down.”
“If this is a plain holdup why didn’t you say so?” Corby Lane said. He tried to put disgust into his voice. “You’ve sunk pretty low, Johnny.”
“That’s funny, coming from you,” Johnny said. “ I want that money belt, and I want more.”
“You’re forgetting the law, aren’t you, Johnny?” Corby Lane said. “They’ll excuse a gun fight quicker than they will a robbery.”
“Go to the law, Corby,” Johnny said. “ When you do I’ll start talking. The law is still trying to find out what happened to those six soldiers that got killed. The law still wants to know what happened to that payroll the soldiers were packing.”
I saw the surprise in Corby Lane’s face and then the terror, and I knew Johnny had pulled something out of Corby Lane’s past, something that had been long dead. “You can’t tie that to me,” Corby Lane shouted. “ It happened before I even knew you.You don’t know anything about it.”
“Don’t I?” Johnny said. “It didn’t happen before you knew Steve. Maybe Steve told me all about it. Maybe it was on Steve’s mind so strong he had to talk about it.”
I watched Corby Lane. I knew he was trying to decide if Johnny was bluffing or not, and I saw he was afraid to take the chance. He made one last gesture. “If you know so much,” he said, “you know Steve was in it. You’re admitting that.”
“I am,” Johnny said. “But Steve is dead. They can’t hang a dead man, Corby, but they can sure hang you.”
“What do you want, Johnny?” Corby Lane said thickly. He was whipped and scared.
“What money you’ve got,” Johnny said. “We’ll call it wages you owed me and Steve. After that, turn those sheep out through the canyon and keep ’em on open graze. I reckon you’ll go broke. That’s good enough for me, and it would be for Steve. Some day you’re going to slip and say the wrong thing, and the Government will know what happened to that payroll pack train. I’ll count on it happening. If I ever hear of you making a slip, I’ll see that it happens sooner. Give me the money belt, Corby.”
The gunmen watched their boss back down. I watched Corby Lane, too, and I watched Johnny Calaveras. I
wondered if Johnny really did know enough to hang this man, and Corby Lane was wondering the same thing. I decided I would never know for sure; I knew Corby Lane would never take the chance of finding out. Johnny had him whipped. Lane took off the heavy money belt and handed it to Johnny Calaveras.
The tall, thin gunman spit between his wide-spaced teeth. “So you’re Johnny Calaveras,” he said. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Move those sheep down into the valley and you’ll hear a lot more,” Johnny said.
“I reckon I would,” the tall gunman said. “ But I won’t be around.” He glanced toward the fire where I had thrown the guns. “If you’re finished with me and my boys here,” the tall gunman said, “I reckon we’ll mosey along.” He looked at the money belt Johnny was strapping around his middle. “I don’t work for a man that ain’t got no money,” the gunman said . . .
As we rode back to town I looked at Ted and his face was serious and ashamed, and I knew he was thinking of the fool he had made of himself. Ted Beaumont had lived a long time in those few minutes back there.
Maybe The Preacher figured he owed us an explanation, but I never thought that was it. Rather, I think he wanted Ted to see everything in the right light. The Preacher stared straight ahead. “I worked for Corby Lane down in New Mexico,” he said. “There was a cattle war on and any man who took a job took a gun job.” It didn’t sound like the rest was really meant for us. “Steve was already working for Corby,” he said. “I figured it would be best if I was with Steve.”
He was trying to say a lot more, but suddenly it was hard for him to talk. “This Steve,” I said. “He was your buddy?”
The tiredness in The Preacher’s eyes was something you could feel. “Steve was my brother,” he said. “ He was a kid who couldn’t leave guns alone.”
It hit me like a sledge hammer, and I looked at Ted and saw the impact of it numbing him. I thought of Johnny Calaveras, this quiet man we called The Preacher, living with the thought that he might have killed his own brother in a gun trap set by Corby Lane. And suddenly I knew what the fight inside Johnny was as he stood there with a gun held on Corby Lane, and I knew why he had let Corby Lane live. It was his way of proving to himself that he had whipped the past, his way of paying a debt he felt he owed. And I knew now why Johnny Calaveras and Grace Beaumont had never married.
“I used to be pretty proud of my gun speed,” The Preacher said quietly. “ But spending the rest of your life wondering whether you killed your own brother is quite a price to pay for pride.” I glanced at Ted Beaumont; he looked sick . . .
Everybody was out on the street when we got back to Doc Isham’s store. They were standing there looking up toward the south end of the valley. There wasn’t any worry in their eyes any more, and I knew that band of sheep had turned east, toward the mouth of the canyon.
Grace was there, and when she looked at Johnny and Ted she knew, without being told, that the two men she loved had reached an understanding. She knew that Johnny had won his right to live his new life. I knew now what it was that had made Grace and Johnny’s love for each other so compelling. It was the understanding between them. There wasn’t anything about Johnny’s past that Grace didn’t know, and that knowledge had drawn them together, and at the same time it had held them apart. Johnny would never ask a girl like Grace to marry him until he was sure his past was gone, until he was sure he could settle a fight without killing.
Johnny dismounted, and for a second his shoulder touched Ted Beaumont’s shoulder. I saw Ted glance toward the money belt, his eyes questioning. I saw Johnny’s quick understanding and I saw his grin, amused, pleased. He unbuckled the belt and tossed it to one of the farmers from Rincon Valley. “Here,” he said. “Corby Lane sent this down. Said he hoped it would pay for the damage his sheep did to your crops.” He turned then to Ted. I saw Ted stiffen, waiting for the lacing he knew he had coming.
The Preacher said, “If you’ve a mind to grub out that oak on your place, Ted, I could give you a hand with it tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Johnny,” Ted said, and he tried to grin.
Johnny took Grace’s arm and the two of them walked off together . . .
I left the valley about ten years back. Johnny and Grace are married now, still in love, still amazed at the goodness of the world. Ted Beaumont married my oldest girl, Lucy. Ted’s a good, steady boy now. Outside of that, things haven’t changed much. Folks around here still call Johnny Calaveras The Preacher. It’s surprising how much respect men can cram into a nickname like that.
WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER
Beecher Island
WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER (1906–1996) was born in Pomeroy, Washington. He worked as teacher for many years, writing Western fiction when time would allow. He sold his first story to Popular Western in 1936, but his career (which lasted fifty years) really took off when he secured the services of the literary agent August Lenniger. Overholser’s stories subsequently appeared in over seventy pulp magazines. Unlike many of the top pulp writers of the 1940s and 1950s, Overholser successfully negotiated the decline in the pulp magazine market, and eventually published over a hundred Western novels. Two of these novels, The Lawman (published under the name of Lee Leighton) and The Violent Land received Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America as the best novels of 1953 and 1954 respectively.
“Beecher Island” is from 1970, and is a fictional reconstruction of the battle of Beecher Island, September 1868, when a group of Cheyenne led by Woqini (known to the whites as Roman Nose) surrounded a command led by Major George Forsyth.
SAM BURDICK HAD no notion of passing time. All he knew was that the sun was well above the eastern rim of the prairie and the morning was beginning to lose its chill. Only an hour ago, or maybe it had been two, he was camped with the rest of Forsyth’s civilian scouts on the bank of the Dry Fork of the Republican when the Indians had tried to stampede the horses and failed. Minutes later the Indians had appeared by the hundreds as suddenly as if they had sprouted out of the ground.
Someone had yelled, “Get to the island,” and the scouts had plunged pell-mell across the sandy, nearly dry bed of the stream to an island that was covered by brush and weeds. Sam had heard the command above the frantic commotion, “Dig in! Dig in!” That was exactly what they had done, dug in with butcher knives and tin plates and anything they could use while Indian bullets and arrows swept over their heads.
The scouts’ horses were shot down; now and then a man was hit. The Indians had attacked and had been beaten off, but they would come again. No one had told Sam that they would, but he was as sure of it as he was sure of death and taxes.
The old mountain man, Bill Smith, lay behind his dead horse in the pit next to Sam. A bullet had slashed a bloody furrow across Smith’s skull, but he had wrapped a bandanna around his head and kept on fighting.
The only firing now was from the Indian sharpshooters who were hiding in the tall grass along the banks, and the answering shots from a few scouts who were equally well hidden in the brush on the low end of the island.
Now that there was this lull in the fighting, Sam had time to draw a deep breath and look at the sky and wonder why he was here. Sure, he was like the others in one way. He felt he was doing something that had to be done.
The Cheyennes had swept across the western end of Kansas, burning and torturing and killing, and they had to be punished. There weren’t enough soldiers to do the job in the skeleton army that survived the Civil War, so General Sheridan had told Colonel Forsyth to enlist fifty civilian scouts and see what he could do with the Cheyennes.
They had set out to find Indians and punish them. Well, they had succeeded in finding them, succeeded too well. They’d found hundreds, maybe a thousand, so now it was a question of who was going to punish whom. It was even a question of whether any of the scouts would live to leave the island with odds like this.
“They ain’t pushing us right now,” Sam said, and then, although he knew better, he asked, “Figure we whipp
ed ’em?”
“Hell, no,” the mountain man answered. “They’ll hit us again purty soon. We ain’t seen hide nor hair o’ Roman Nose, and when we do, we’ll know it.”
Sam closed his eyes, his pulse pounding in his temples. He pressed hard against the body of Sam’s dead horse, which lay between him and the edge of the island. You do something like joining the scouts because it’s your duty, but there were other reasons, too.
Maybe you’re bored by the monotony of farm life or you want to be a hero, or maybe you’re in trouble with the law and this is one way you can keep ahead of the sheriff. Or maybe, and Sam guessed this was the most important reason, you see a chance to pick up a few dollars at a time when dollars in central Kansas were about as hard to find as feathers on a fish.
With Sam it had been a proposition of needing the dollars. At the time the farm work wasn’t pressing. Still, he hadn’t figured on this kind of fight. One scout, William Wilson, had been killed, and several others including Colonel Forsyth were wounded.
Someone holed up in the middle of the island called, “If you men on the outside don’t do a little shooting, them red devils will be on top of us again.”
“That feller’s a fool,” Smith said in disgust. “He better git over here and do some o’ the shooting he’s talkin’ about.”
Two of the scouts, McCall and Culver, were needled into action by the man who had yelled. They raised up to locate an Indian to shoot at. Smith bellowed, “Git down,” but he was too late. One of the sharpshooters shot Culver through the head and caught McCall in the shoulder.
Smith swore bitterly. “ Every time we lose a man, we cut down our chances of knocking ’em back on their heels the next time they charge us.” He motioned toward the bluffs. “ There’s the old boy hisself. I knowed Roman Nose would be in it sooner or later. He’s got more fight savvy than any other Injun I know.”