Hang Him Twice

by William W. Johnstone

  “No,” the old man barked. “For’. Short for Forlorn.” He moved down the six-mule team and gestured toward an open door. “Let’s get some coffee, Dooley. I’ll tell you about the route we take to Leadville.”

  Dooley decided he could drink some coffee, so he tethered General Grant to the hitching rail in front of the hotel’s side entrance, told Blue to stay, and he entered the kitchen of the hotel. He hoped he didn’t have to pay for the coffee. He didn’t.

  Motz pointed at a map and talked about this and that, but Dooley mostly looked through the open door at the mud wagon.

  It was square shaped, with canvas stretched across the top over struts of some wood that Dooley prayed would be strong enough to keep the trunk from falling through and smashing any passengers seated in the backseat. Dooley wasn’t sure where the old man had secured the rope, but he understood why the trunk had not been put in the rear boot. That was already packed with crates and barrels and grips and carpetbags. There must be a full load of passengers, and the three benches inside the coach had some blankets and even more luggage. Canvas side curtains—no doors, no wooden sides—had been rolled up, but Dooley expected the passengers to lower them once they rode off, to keep out the wind and cold.

  Dooley figured it wouldn’t be much colder riding in the box with the old man. From the look of the seat atop the mud wagon, it wouldn’t be any less comfortable than riding in the coach.

  Otherwise, the wagon looked like any other stagecoach on the frontier—with thoroughbraces that would have the passengers seasick before too long. Yeah, Dooley decided, he would be better off riding up top with Chester Motz.

  And the coffee wasn’t disgusting.

  “For’ ain’t bad,” Motz told Dooley. “Lighter than most coaches. And those mules know my touch. You just keep an eye out for bad men. We’ll hit Leadville in two days, plus a few hours. Or three days. Maybe four. What time does that watch of yourn say it is?”

  Dooley fished out the old key-wind. “About ten past six.”

  “Hell’s hottest fires, boy, we need to light out.” He pulled up his collar, tugged down his old hat, gulped down the rest of the coffee, and stepped outside, yelling in a voice that would raise the dead:

  “The stage to Leadville is leavin’ in five minutes. Stops at Idaho Springs, Georgetown, Silverthorne, and Frisco along the way. And anywhere else we happen to lose a wheel or break an axle. Get on now or get left behind.”

  Dooley drank the rest of his own coffee, wiped his mouth, hurriedly tied General Grant behind the mud wagon, and then picked up Blue and handed him to Chester Motz, already in the driver’s box and filling his mouth with fresh tobacco.

  “What’s that fer?” the old man asked, spraying dark, wet tobacco leaves into the wind.

  “The passengers won’t like a dog riding with them,” Dooley said.

  Motz frowned.

  Dooley smiled. “He’s still got his winter coat. It’ll keep your feet warm.”

  That did it. The old man smiled, reached down, and took Blue in his rawhide hands.

  “Had a pet coon oncet,” Motz said. “Was a good pal. But then come the hard winter and I got hungry.”

  Dooley tried to forget that statement, and he reached up for a hold, put one foot on the cap, and quickly made his way into the box after Chester slid into his place.

  “Horatio’s Parker’s down in the boot,” the old man said. Then he stood up and bellowed, “This wagon’s pullin’ out. If you ain’t on now, you ain’t gettin’ on till I comes back in about a week or three or four.”

  No one had gotten on the wagon. Dooley had just brought up the ten-gauge shotgun when Chester Motz released the brake, lashed out with a whip, and began bellowing a string of profanity as the mules bolted, the mud wagon rattled and lost a few parts, and they took off out of Denver and heading west.

  * * *

  “There’s nobody on board!”

  Dooley had pulled up his bandanna to fight the wind and the cold.

  “What?”

  Chester Motz leaned forward, whip in one hand, lines to the six mules in the other. He slashed out again with the whip, but Dooley couldn’t hear the pop because of the wind roaring past his ears and the creaking and banging of the coach.

  Dooley repeated his statement.

  “That’s right!”

  They reached the first hill, which meant the coach slowed, and the wind did not roar so loudly as the team climbed the incline.

  “There’s a lot of luggage for an empty stagecoach,” Dooley observed.

  “Cheaper than paying the freightin’ cost,” Motz said. He spit over the side of the coach.

  “Do you ever haul passengers?”

  “Oh, sure.” He leaned forward again and barked curses at the lead mules, worked the lines, and set the whip back in its holder. “But not this time of year, hardly a-tall.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The old man laughed and turned away from the mules and roads and stared at Dooley as if he were an idiot.

  “You know anything ’bout Leadville, boy?”

  “It’s a silver town. Boomtown.”

  “Yeah, and it happens to be about two miles above sea level. Denver’s right at a mile. You feel how cold it is right now?”

  Dooley nodded.

  “That’s summer in Leadville, boy.” The whip came out of its holder and the profanity came out of Motz’s mouth.

  Thirty grueling, bone-jarring, butt-aching miles later, the mud wagon slid this way and that into Clear Creek Canyon and wheeled into Idaho Falls, which, from what Dooley could see, looked like a fine little town, jammed into the canyon, with plenty of saloons and gambling halls. He had read about the town during the Pikes Peak gold rush all those years ago, but he did not get much time to appreciate the city because they were pulling out after dropping off the trunk atop the coach and a barrel inside.

  Georgetown looked interesting, too, from what Dooley could see of it, for it was pitch-dark by then, and the old jehu spit and nodded at some flickering lights in the distance. “That’s Silver Plume,” Motz shouted, “but we don’t go there.”

  Thus went Dooley’s tour of Colorado’s front range.

  He had fallen asleep after the change of mules and slept fitfully, bouncing this way and that, until he felt the wagon lurch to a stop and heard Chester Motz mutter something.

  “Come on, you lazy, good-fer-nothin’ replacement for ol’ Horatio who was just as worthless as you is!”

  That was not muttered. Dooley almost tumbled over the side of the coach and wondered if he would ever be able to hear out of his left ear again.

  “Get down!”

  Dooley blinked the sleep out of his eyes and slid off the mud wagon, careful not to step on the sleeping Blue.

  “What are we doing?” asked Dooley, who still had not awakened completely.

  It was dawn, cold, and here patches of ice covered the road and most of the country.

  “Grab that log,” Chester Motz instructed, and Dooley saw the stripped piece of pine or spruce or whatever. He had to kick it a few times for it had frozen to the ground, but he managed to shove it down the embankment. Motz had moved to the other side of the wagon.

  “We’re gonna lash this to the coach, brace it against the back wheels,” the driver explained. “That way the wheels don’t go too fast. Don’t go a-tall iffen we’s lucky.”

  “That’ll slow us down,” Dooley said.

  “That, boy, is the gen’ral idear.” He pointed. Dooley looked at the mountain they were about to descend.

  “C’mon, Dooley, daylight is a-burnin’.”

  His throat turned dry, and his chest ached from the bitter, frigid air, and his own anxiety. Somehow, they managed to fasten the log to the wheels, and Dooley saw General Grant eyeing him, more like pleading with him.

  “Hey, Mr. Motz,” Dooley said as he stepped to the off side of the mud wagon.

  “Call me Chester, boy, or don’t call me nothin’ a-tall.”

  �
��Well, Chester, maybe I should ride my horse down this slope.”

  “Maybe you should get your arse back in this seat. I’ve been down this hill more times than you can count, Dooley, and I ain’t wrecked a stagecoach on this route but four or five times. Two of ’em don’t count ’cause I was drunk.”

  Dooley made himself climb back into the box.

  “Are you drunk now?” Dooley asked.

  “No.” The old man released the brake. “But I wish to Sam Hill I was.”

  He did not use the whip, but merely flicked the lines. The mules began tentatively stepping down the hill. The old man deftly moved his left hand to the brake, and set it. One thin hand gripped the lines to the six mules. The other held the brake, giving it more pressure, then less. By now Dooley could see the ice-coated road clearly, and he could see the twists and turns and the edges that plummeted into a sea of white and rocks and snow-covered trees.

  Dooley took in a deep breath. Part of him wanted to jump off the side. But he managed to summon up enough courage, although his fingers practically tore through the rotten, dried, brittle wood on his side of the driver’s box.

  “What do we do now?” Dooley asked.

  Motz answered, “We pray.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You’re the best damned jehu I’ve ever seen,” Dooley said after they had removed the log brake at the bottom of the treacherous mountain. “Stephen Foster should write songs about you.”

  “I ain’t half-bad,” Chester Motz said. “You’re all right, Dooley. Old Horatio, God rest his worthless soul, he wet his britches five or six times we made the run. You done fine. Didn’t even puke.”

  Dooley wondered if his hat would still fit. That is, when he had enough money to buy a new hat. His old one, the one with two bullet holes in the crown, had blown off his head sometime between Georgetown and the Clear Creek crossing.

  “Maria should have us a hot meal and some good coffee waitin’ at Silverthorne.”

  Maria did, and Dooley ate with relish after that nightmarish, frigid run. The fat Mexican woman took a liking to Blue and fed him table scraps until he bloated up. There wasn’t much to Silverthorne, just a stagecoach station and some fresh mules. There wasn’t much to Frisco just down the road, either, though Chester Motz said both towns—if you could call them towns—had plenty of prospectors who were searching for pay dirt and had grown tired of Breckenridge and Leadville and that once one of those miners found gold, or silver, or maybe even some copper, the towns would pull hard-luck miners away from Leadville and maybe as far away as Denver.

  At Frisco, the damnedest thing happened.

  A man was waiting to get on the mud wagon and travel to Leadville.

  Dooley did not know quite what to make of the man.

  Oh, he definitely stood out, with the curly, dark hair pulled behind his ears and hanging well past his shoulders. He sported a well-groomed mustache and long goatee, had dark eyes, a bronzed face, and appeared to be a good two or maybe even four inches taller than Dooley. He wore a low-crowned hat with the brim turned in just about every which way possible, pushed up on one side, down in front, cocked almost at a right angle in the back, and just slightly askew on the other side. A multicolored, braided stampede string of horsehair hung tight against the man’s throat. His shirt appeared to be made of red velvet, and the double-breasted coat, unbuttoned and hanging loose, had a fur collar and fur trim down one side, fur cuffs, and fringe along the shoulders and down at the bottom. It was a long coat, too, of buckskin, just like the man’s britches, which were stuck inside black boots that gleamed. He wore a gun belt—though the long coat hit whatever holster he donned on a hip—that was held up by the biggest, dad-blasted buckle—silver with some red stones set inside—Dooley had ever seen. The man wore gauntlets, too, fancy and stitched with multiple colors that made the design of a pelican—or maybe an osprey . . . well, a bird of some kind, anyhow.

  The man also held a heavy Winchester rifle—not one of those carbines but the new Centennial model that chambered shells that could bring down a buffalo.

  “By jingo,” the man said in a musical voice that matched his dazzling eyes, “had I known you would be driving the wagon to Leadville, Chester, I would not have shot my horse, but merely put a splint on the poor creature’s left forefoot and made him take me into Leadville.”

  “Willie,” Chester Motz said with a nod after bringing the team to a stop and wrapping the lines around the brake. “I thought you’d be playing soldier boy or thespian or just drunk.”

  “I might be playing thespian, old hoss,” the man said, butting his Winchester on the cold ground, “and I have not soldiered in many a year, but I certainly could not play the drunk.” He winked. “One cannot play what he truly is. That’s real.”

  “You got money?” Motz asked.

  “Waiting for me in Leadville.” The man smiled. “Don’t you trust me, old hoss?”

  “No, but as soon as these jaspers unload some of the boxes in my coach, I’ll have need of you for ballast and the likes. You can pay the boss man when we ride into town. And the boss man is me.”

  “That might not be necessary, old friend.” Dooley frowned. Willie—and decked out like some dime-novel hero—was staring with quite the admiring eyes at General Grant.

  “If you’re thinking about making an offer on that horse,” Dooley informed him, “don’t. He’s not for sale. If you’re thinking about stealing him, don’t.”

  The man laughed. “I’m no common horse thief, my dear fellow. But perchance you might be interested in wagering this fine, handsome steed against.” He tapped the stock of the Winchester Centennial against the ice pack near the porch to the stagecoach station.

  “Even at Denver prices,” Dooley said, “that rifle couldn’t buy enough hairs from General Grant’s tail to braid you a new stampede string.”

  The man laughed again. “No matter. I have but one cartridge left for this cannon of a rifle.”

  The burly men at the station got the last luggage out of the wagon. The man with the long hair brought the Centennial up and tucked it underneath his left arm while his right reached toward the driver’s box.

  “My name’s Cody, sir. William F. Cody.”

  “Most folks call him Buffalo Bill,” Chester Motz said, “but I just call’m Willie.”

  Dooley almost dropped the Parker ten-gauge over the side of the mud wagon. He wiped his hands on his trousers and took the fancy gauntlet worn by William F. Cody into his hand. The man had a firm handshake, but not one that would crush Dooley’s bones. He kept the shake brief, too.

  “I’m . . . um . . . Dooley,” Dooley said. “Dooley Monahan.”

  Buffalo Bill Cody backed up toward the rough-looking log cabin that served as the stagecoach station in this small little burg.

  “Not the Dooley Monahan,” the famed scout and thespian and hero of many stories and novels and newspaper accounts said.

  “Well,” Dooley said, uncomfortable, “I am a Dooley Monahan. It ain’t that common of a name, but I reckon there’s probably at least another one with that handle.” He had read back in one of the Denver newspapers that the people who did all the counting expected the population of the United States and her territories to come close to fifty million or maybe even more once they got around to counting for the next census.

  “The Dooley Monahan I refer to,” Buffalo Bill Cody said, “dispatched the nefarious scoundrels Jason Baylor and his no-account brothers Alf and Dev. He shot dead their cousin in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He ended the reign of terror brought on by the notorious Dobbs-Handley Gang. I have long waited to make this bounty hunter’s hand and shake it.”

  Dooley shuffled his feet. “Well, I reckon you done shook his hand, sir. I’m that Dooley Monahan, but I’m not a bounty hunter. I just happen to . . . get . . . ummm . . . mixed up in things.”

  “By jingo,” Buffalo Bill said, and stepped back. “A man as deadly as Jesse James with the eye of Wild Bill Hickok and the nerves of Sitting B
ull. And he’s modest, to boot. Well, Chester, you have no need to fear of bandits plundering your worthy conveyance . . . not with the legendary Dooley Monahan riding shotgun on . . .” He stopped suddenly and turned quickly toward the bald-headed coot who crammed his mouth full of chewing tobacco.

  “By thunder, where is Horatio?”

  “Dead,” Chester said. “Kilt in Denver by the bullet fired by some unknown fiend who lacked the courage and scruples to step out of the shadows and face a body man to man.”

  Now the jehu was sounding just like Buffalo Bill.

  “Sad. Old Horatio.” Cody removed his hat, bowed his head, closed his eyes. “Struck down in the prime of life.”

  “He was older that Methuselah, Willie,” Motz informed the showman. “If you’re comin’ with us, say amen and climb aboard. I got a schedule to keep.”

  “Amen,” Buffalo Bill Cody said, and climbed into the coach.

  “Give him your dog,” Motz ordered Dooley.

  “I’ll do no such thing,” Dooley protested.

  “Not for keeps, you dern idiot,” Motz said, and shifted his massive bulge of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “For ballast. They’ve moved my loads around and if you think we’ve done some crazy turns and gone through some places not fit for a snake to crawl through, wait till you see the road to Leadville from here on up. And I mean up.”

  So Dooley climbed down and let the old coot hand him Blue. He let the workers pet Blue and allowed a rawboned man with a beard to his belly give the dog some jerky. Then Dooley stuck his head through the closed curtain door and introduced Buffalo Bill Cody to Blue, the merle-colored shepherd from somewhere.

  “A noble beast like this fine specimen,” Buffalo Bill said, and scratched Blue behind the ears, “will make this ride all the more bearable.”

  “He’ll keep your feet warm, too, Colonel Cody,” Dooley said. “Be a good dog, Blue.”

  “We shall get along splendidly,” Cody said. “I will see you in Leadville, Dooley.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If we live to see Leadville,” Chester Motz hollered from the box. “Now get back in this box, Dooley Monahan, or you’ll be walkin’ to Leadville. And that’s like walkin’ to heaven.”