Death Rattle

by Sean Lynch

  Eliminating Thomas Pritchard was potentially going to benefit Shipley in ways other than financial. Shipley always had his eye on Dovie Pritchard, one of the comeliest women in Jackson County. Making her a widow at the same time he commandeered her dead husband’s lumber business was killing two birds with one stone.

  Shipley’s wife had died under what some called “unusual” circumstances a couple of winters back. According to her husband, she sustained a fatal injury when she fell, drunk, down the icy back steps of the Atherton Hotel and fractured her skull. Except Miranda Shipley was known to be a teetotaler, only hotel employees used the back stairs, and there were no witnesses besides her husband. Regardless of what actually befell the hapless woman, the sheriff and town marshal summarily declared her death an accident. Dr. Mauldin had no choice but to sign the death certificate, listing “accidental” as the cause of her demise. That’s where the matter ended.

  With Pritchard’s unexpected entrance, Shipley’s plan had gone awry. Currently the town’s police force, the sheriff and his deputies, and half the townspeople were boiling over and pointing guns at one another in the town square. If he didn’t get a lid on this powder keg, there was going to be mass bloodshed. And with an enraged teenager pointing a .44 at Shipley’s own sizable midsection, it was likely some of that spilled blood would be his.

  Even if he survived assassination by Pritchard, Shipley knew an incident like the one about to transpire would inevitably result in the dispatch of troops from Kansas City, something he’d lied about sending for earlier. The last thing Burnell Shipley wanted was additional scrutiny from the U.S. Army at a time when he was finally about to gain complete control of the town of Atherton.

  “Everybody calm down,” Shipley said, in his silkiest and most paternal tone. “There’s no need for gunplay. Sheriff Foster, have your men holster their guns. Marshal Stacy, do the same.”

  “But he murdered Glenn,” Sheriff Foster protested. “He should be hanging from a—”

  “Young Pritchard deserves a fair trial,” Shipley cut off the sheriff, “like any man who’s been accused. He has a right to be heard. Holster those weapons.”

  The sheriff cursed under his breath, but gestured for his men to stand down. Along with the town marshals they sheathed their guns.

  “That’s mighty generous of you,” Pritchard said to Shipley, making no effort to lower his own pistols, “considering you’re the man who ordered Pa’s killing.”

  “Son,” Shipley said, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. I did no such thing. We understand you’re distraught at the death of your father, as anyone would be, but you’re not thinking straight. I am not your enemy, and guns aren’t the answer.”

  “Wrong on both counts,” Pritchard said.

  “Put your guns down,” Shipley said, “and you’ll get a fair trial. If what you say is true, you’ll be vindicated. I give you my word as mayor of Atherton, and as district provost marshal.”

  “If I don’t?”

  “You’ll die in the street, tonight. You may get a few of us, but your own death is a certainty. You might even get your mother and sister killed, and some of these good folks shot along with them. Is that what you want? To have innocent people hurt or killed on account of your actions? Do you really want to be gunned down in front of your family?”

  Pritchard looked over at Dovie and Idelle. They held each other, in fear and anguish, but stood their ground between him and the lawmen. As badly as he wanted to pull the triggers, and damn the consequences, he couldn’t allow them to be harmed.

  Pritchard lowered the hammers and dropped the pistols at his feet. Several deputies moved in and roughly grabbed him by both of his thick arms.

  “Just as well you gave up,” Eli Gaines’s whiny voice spoke in Pritchard’s ear. “We both know you didn’t have the balls.”

  “Oh yeah?” Pritchard replied. “Whyn’t you ask Bob Toole and Glenn Bedgley about that?”

  “Talk tough while you can,” Gaines said. “Come tomorrow morning, you’ll be swinging from a rope like your old man.”

  Pritchard stared hard into Eli Gaines’s eyes, his own blazing. “I don’t remember tellin’ anybody Pa was hanged.”

  In reply, Gaines showed Pritchard his infected grin.

  “Get him over to the jail,” Shipley told Marshal Stacy, “and do it quietly.” Stacy passed the order to his men.

  “The rest of you folks,” Shipley again addressed the crowd, still in his conciliatory tone, “simmer down and put away your guns. We’ll need cool heads and every bit of ball and powder we’ve got before this night is through. I want all the menfolk to line up and report to Sheriff Foster. He’ll assign you posts around town. The womenfolk and kids are welcome to take refuge inside the hotel.”

  “We’ll do as you say, Shipley,” one of the men from the crowd of townspeople spoke up again, “but come first light I’m leaving town and heading home. Any man who gets in my way is gonna catch a ball.” A chorus of voices signaled their agreement.

  “That’s only fair,” Shipley said magnanimously. In truth, his charade about needing to keep the townspeople in Atherton to stave off Confederate raiders had merely been a ploy to allow the six riders he’d dispatched earlier that day room to operate unhindered out in county territory with as few witnesses as possible. Samuel Pritchard’s arrival nearly spoiled that.

  The riders had been given strict orders. Kill Thomas Pritchard, burn his house, but damage no other of his assets, and do the same to a couple of other nearby farms and ranches so it wouldn’t look like Pritchard alone was targeted. They were to hang any men they killed, to make it look like border ruffians or Confederate raiders. They were to wear reb coats in case they were seen, and above all, they were not to remove their masks.

  Four of the riders, Eli Gaines and three other county deputies, had sneaked back into town unnoticed before sunset, as ordered. Two of the men he’d sent, Toole and Bedgley, never returned. When Pritchard showed up with the wayward men strapped over a saddle, Shipley learned why.

  Toole and Bedgley had jeopardized everything by allowing themselves to be caught and killed by a teenage boy. As far as Shipley was concerned, they got what they deserved, just like Samuel Pritchard said.

  As quickly as the people of Atherton fired up, they calmed down. Pritchard’s peaceful surrender deflated their ire, and the logic of staying in town until daylight, with reb raiders potentially on the loose, was irrefutable. Reluctantly, and in an orderly fashion, they shuffled off to do as Shipley commanded.

  “This ain’t over between you and me,” Pritchard said to Shipley, as he was escorted past the hotel toward the jail. Dovie and Idelle followed.

  “It most certainly isn’t,” Shipley said as Pritchard was led away.

  Chapter 6

  Dovie and Idelle trailed behind the marshals as they escorted Pritchard to the jail, but the lawmen refused to allow them to enter. When she pounded on the door, Marshal Stacy told Dovie to take it up with Mayor Shipley. She marched back across the town square to the Atherton Arms with Idelle holding her hand and struggling to keep up.

  Dovie stormed through the hotel lobby, ignoring the bustle of townspeople and marshals stationed inside, until she found a friendly face. It was Mrs. Nettles, one of Atherton’s only two schoolteachers. Dovie left Idelle seated in the lobby, in Mrs. Nettleses’s care, and went directly to Shipley’s office.

  She opened the door without knocking and found Shipley seated at his desk with Sheriff Foster standing over him. A bottle of whiskey and two glasses were on the desk.

  “I want to see my son,” Dovie Pritchard said.

  “I thought you were too high and mighty to enter my hotel,” Shipley said, sipping whiskey and ignoring her question.

  “Don’t play games with me,” she said.

  Shipley made a dismissive gesture to the sheriff. Sheriff Foster scowled, downed his drink, but tipped his hat and walked out. He closed the door behind him.

  “Marshal St
acy wouldn’t let me see Samuel at the jail. He said you had to authorize it.”

  “That’s true,” Shipley said.

  “Then authorize it. I want to see my son.”

  Shipley set down his drink and leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his sizable belly. “I’d like to help you, Mrs. Pritchard, but I can’t. Your son’s a dangerous criminal. A murderer, in fact. He’s going to be hanged in the morning for his crimes.”

  “Hanged?” Dovie gasped. “You can’t mean that?”

  “I do indeed,” Shipley said smugly. “That’s what we do with murderers here in Atherton.”

  “But you said Samuel would get a fair trial! There’re witnesses who heard you say it!”

  “No need for a trial,” Shipley said. “Your son admitted to killing two men, one of them a deputy sheriff, in front of those very same witnesses you speak of. Besides, as district provost marshal, operating under duly declared martial law, I have the authority to convene a tribunal and dispense justice as I see fit. For your information, I just convened the tribunal with Sheriff Foster, before you arrived. I’ll be dispensing the justice tomorrow at dawn.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Dovie said. “You had Thomas killed, just as my son said. Now you’re going to kill him, too.”

  Shipley shrugged. “I most certainly did not have your husband killed,” he lied. “He died, it appears, at the hand of Confederate brigands.”

  “Samuel says differently.”

  “It makes no difference what he says. I have a duty to enforce the law, which means hanging your son. He killed two men. He must be punished. Order must be maintained. We’re at war, you know.”

  Dovie put her face in her hands and began to sob. Shipley retrieved a clean glass from his desk and poured three fingers of whiskey into it. Then he topped off his own. She continued to weep.

  “Your son doesn’t have to hang, you know,” Shipley said.

  Dovie parted her hands and looked up. Her crystal blue eyes, a feature she passed on to both her son and daughter, were red from crying.

  “What did you say?” she asked hesitantly.

  “You heard me. Your son doesn’t have to perish at the end of a rope.”

  “I’m listening,” Dovie said.

  “If Samuel were to escape,” he said, “and go off and enlist in the Federal army, perhaps under an assumed name, who’d be the wiser? He’d have to serve in the war, naturally, and it would mean he could never, ever, return to Atherton. But at least he wouldn’t get his neck stretched.”

  “You’d allow that?”

  “I could be persuaded.”

  Dovie was no fool. “What do I have to do?”

  “You’re a very beautiful woman,” Shipley said, his eyes moving up and down her. “But as of tonight, you’re a widow. This is hard country for a woman alone, Mrs. Pritchard. If what your son says is true—”

  “You know it is,” she cut in.

  “—you’re also without a home. And you, with a young daughter to support. Unfortunately, it would seem you’re now without means as well. Since the sawmill is a critical military resource, and in light of the recent Confederate partisan activity in the area, I’ve had to commandeer it. For the war effort, of course.”

  “Of course,” Dovie said bitterly. “Just say it plain, Burnell. Quit dancing around and tell me what you want?”

  “Direct,” he said, sitting up and leaning forward in his chair. “That’s another thing I’ve always admired about you. Very well, I want you to marry me. Not right away, of course. It might look bad if you got re-hitched so soon after your husband’s demise. Say, in a month or two?”

  “In exchange for becoming your wife, my son doesn’t die? Is that what I get in return?”

  “You’ll get more than that. If you haven’t noticed, I’m a very rich man. You and your daughter would be well cared for. You’d live here at the hotel, in luxury, and have anything you’d ever want.”

  “What I want,” Dovie said bitterly, “is my husband and home back, and my son safe.”

  Shipley pushed the fresh glass of whiskey across the desk. “We can’t always have everything we want, Mrs. Pritchard,” he said. “Sometimes, we have to settle for what we can get.”

  “All that Samuel said about you was true,” Dovie said, more to herself. She looked at the glass of whiskey on the desk in contempt. “You’re a murdering bastard.”

  “Still high and mighty, eh?” Shipley said. “Well, it’s a free country. You certainly don’t have to accept my offer. I’m sure you and your daughter can find lodging somewhere around Atherton. But you’ll need money to pay for rent and food, which means you’d have to find work. I’ve got a feeling nobody around here is going to hire you.”

  “You’d see to that, wouldn’t you?”

  “I could always use another gal down at the Sidewinder,” Shipley said.

  The Sidewinder, Atherton’s main watering hole, like almost every other building and business in town, was owned by Shipley. The establishment featured drinking and gambling downstairs and two floors of “hospitality hostesses,” as he called them, in the bedrooms upstairs.

  “Idelle is nine or ten years old now, isn’t she?” Shipley mused. “Kids grow up fast in these parts. Who knows? In a few years, she could start working at the Sidewinder along with you.”

  Dovie knew Shipley had her cornered. She could consent to marry the man who orchestrated her husband’s death and had stolen their family’s assets, and her son could live, or she could refuse, which would condemn her and her daughter to a life of poverty, prostitution, and shame, and her son would die.

  “I need to think it over,” she said, her voice barely audible.

  “Don’t think too long,” Shipley said, extracting his gold watch from his vest pocket. “Dawn’s only a few hours away.”

  Shipley repocketed his watch. He picked up the whiskey he’d poured for Dovie and extended the glass.

  Dovie’s shoulders slumped. She accepted the whiskey and began to drink. When the glass was empty, she looked at Shipley with beaten eyes and nodded.

  “Is that a yes?”

  “It is,” she said, casting her gaze to the floor.

  “I do believe,” Shipley said, his grin widening, “we’ve just had a jailbreak.”

  “I want to say good-bye to Samuel,” Dovie said without looking up.

  “I’ll allow it,” Shipley said. “Think of it as your engagement present.”

  Chapter 7

  Ditch Clemson rubbed his eyes and forced himself awake. He heard voices below and thought he recognized Pritchard’s. He gingerly crawled through the mounds of hay, careful not to make any sound, and peered over the edge of the loft.

  Ditch was in the upper tier of the livery stable at the edge of Atherton. He’d arrived in town on foot, unnoticed and exhausted, well after midnight. He found deputies and armed townsmen patrolling the streets, but the resourceful youth was easily able to evade them and enter the stable without being seen.

  After Ditch parted ways with Pritchard earlier that night at what was left of the Pritchard home, he ran through the woods to his own family’s modest ranch. There was plenty of moonlight to guide him, and he was intimately familiar with the woods, having roamed them since he was able to walk. There, to his relief, he found his father unharmed.

  Rand Clemson had been outside tending to his small string of horses that afternoon when he heard riders approaching. Since his son had taken his only gun, the Hawken, without his permission, no doubt to go hunting instead of attending school, the rancher had no choice but to hide. He fled to the woods and hid under a pile of brush as the riders stormed in. With pistols in their hands, they dismounted and invaded his home.

  He watched in anger as the riders, six of them, wearing masks and reb coats, roped his five horses together and rode off.

  Ditch hugged his father and told him what transpired at the Pritchards’.

  “Damn it, boy,” Rand cursed. “Why did you involve yoursel
f?”

  “What was I supposed to do, Pa? Let them murder Samuel right before my eyes?”

  Rand looked at his son, taller than him for two seasons. He put his hand on Ditch’s shoulder. “Of course not,” he said. “You done the right thing. But none of that matters now.”

  He led his son into the house and began packing what little food they had, and his son’s few clothes, into a bedroll.

  “What are you doing?” Ditch asked.

  “You’ve got to flee, son. Iffen you don’t, you’ll be as dead as Samuel in a day or two.”

  “Who says Samuel’s gonna be dead?”

  “You just told me he rode into town alone to face down Burnell Shipley,” his father answered. “Between the marshal and sheriff, Shipley has two dozen guns. Your friend doesn’t have a prayer. Neither do you, I’m afraid.”

  “Pa, nobody knows about my part in what happened over at the Pritchard place. Samuel surely won’t tell.”

  “You’re cooked if he does,” Rand Clemson said, not harshly. “If Samuel went into town, and he ain’t already dead, he’s been captured. There’re ways of making the tightest-lipped men talk. I know of what I speak, son. I was about your age during the Blackhawk War.”

  “Samuel would never give me up.”

  “I ain’t sayin’ he would. Even if he don’t, folks around here know you and him are tighter than two ticks on a hound’s butt.”

  This was true. Neighbors David Clemson and Samuel Pritchard had been inseparable since they were knee-high. It was Pritchard who gave Davey his nickname, “Ditch,” after a particularly spirited stud named Backbreaker threw the ten-year-old into a hog wallow when the stubborn youth tried to do what most men in the county would not: mount and ride the cursed horse.

  “The men who killed Samuel’s pa, and burned his home, are Union men,” Rand Clemson explained to his son. “I ain’t, and everybody knows it, especially with a boy fighting for the Confederacy. Neither Burnell Shipley, nor his sheriff, are going to take what Samuel and you did sittin’ down. Those riders will be back. I’m sorry, David, but we have no choice. If you want to stay alive, you have to skedaddle.”