Bloody Trail

by Ford Fargo

  Western Fictioneers Presents:

  WOLF CREEK: Bloody Trail

  By Ford Fargo

  WOLF CREEK: Bloody Trail

  Smashwords Edition

  A Western Fictioneers Book published by arrangement with the authors

  Copyright © 2012 by Western Fictioneers

  Cover design by L. J. Washburn

  Western Fictioneers logo design by

  Jennifer Smith-Mayo

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictional manner. Any resemblance to actual incidents or locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Visit our website at www.westernfictioneers.com

  Beneath the mask, Ford Fargo is not one but a posse of America's leading western authors who have pooled their talents to create a series of rip-snortin', old fashioned sagebrush sagas. Saddle up. Read ‘em Cowboy! These are the legends of Wolf Creek.

  THE WRITERS OF WOLF CREEK, AND THEIR CHARACTERS

  Bill Crider - Cora Sloane, schoolmarm

  Phil Dunlap - Rattlesnake Jake, bounty hunter

  James J. Griffin - Bill Torrance, owner of the livery stable

  Jerry Guin - Deputy Marshal Quint Croy

  Douglas Hirt - Marcus Sublette, schoolteacher and headmaster

  L. J. Martin - Angus “Spike” Sweeney, blacksmith

  Matthew Mayo - Rupert "Rupe" Tingley, town drunk

  Kerry Newcomb - James Reginald de Courcey, artist with a secret

  Cheryl Pierson - Derrick McCain, farmer

  Robert J. Randisi - Dave Benteen, gunsmith

  James Reasoner - G.W. Satterlee, county sheriff

  Frank Roderus - John Nix, barber

  Troy D. Smith - Charley Blackfeather, scout; Sam Gardner, town marshal

  Clay More - Logan Munro, town doctor

  Chuck Tyrell - Billy Below, young cowboy; Sam Jones, gambler

  Jackson Lowry - Wilson “Wil” Marsh, photographer

  L. J. Washburn - Ira Breedlove, owner of the Wolf’s Den Saloon

  Matthew Pizzolato - Wesley Quaid, drifter

  Appearing as Ford Fargo in this episode:

  Clay More (Dr. Logan Munro)- Chapter 1 & 2

  James J. Griffin (Bill Torrance)- Chapter 3 & 4

  Troy D. Smith (Charley Blackfeather)- Chapter 5 & 6

  James Reasoner (G.W. Satterlee)- Chapter 7 & 8

  L. J. Martin (Angus “Spike” Sweeney) –Chapter 9 & 10

  Cheryl Pierson (Derrick McCain)- Chapter 11 & 12

  INTRODUCTION

  In Wolf Creek, everyone has a secret.

  That includes our author, Ford Fargo—but we have decided to make his identity an open secret. Ford Fargo is the “house name” of Western Fictioneers—the only professional writers’ organization devoted exclusively to the traditional western, and which includes many of the top names working in the genre today.

  Wolf Creek is our playground.

  It is a fictional town in 1871 Kansas. Each WF member participating in our project has created his or her own “main character,” and each chapter in every volume of our series will be primarily written by a different writer, with their own townsperson serving as the principal point-of-view character for that chapter (or two, sometimes.) It will be sort of like a television series with a large ensemble cast; it will be like one of those Massive Multi-player Role-playing Games you can immerse yourself in online. And it is like nothing that has ever been done in the western genre before.

  You can explore our town and its citizens at our website if you wish:

  http://wolfcreekkansas.yolasite.com/

  Or you can simply turn this page, and step into the dusty streets of Wolf Creek.

  Just be careful. It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.

  Troy D. Smith

  President, Western Fictioneers

  Wolf Creek series editor

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dr. Logan Munro was conscious of the blood splattered across the front of his shirt. The woman had bled profusely, and although he had moved quickly, he had been unable to protect himself from the gush of the severed vessels.

  He looked a mess, but despite himself, he smiled as he walked down the boardwalk on Fourth Street. He was a tall, slim man of almost forty years, with black hair going grey at the temples, and with a pepper and salt mustache. His face was weather-beaten from years spent under the tropical sun of far-off India, and he walked with the upright posture of one who had served in the army, which indeed he had. Dr. Logan Munro had served as a surgeon in three conflicts around the world. First, during the Crimean War, where he had worked at the British Army Hospital in Scutari in Constantinople. There, he’d had the honor of working with the nursing pioneer Florence Nightingale, who had been dubbed the Lady of the Lamp after her habit of making a nightly round of her patients. After a few months, he had been sent to the front with the 21st Regiment of Foot where he had ample opportunity to hone his surgical skills at the Siege of Sevastopol. Then, when the war was over, he had gone to India with the British East India Company Army, and was unfortunate enough to get embroiled in the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Finally, after settling in America, he had worked his way west and served with the Union in the Civil War.

  He had lost his best friend in the first conflict, and he had lost his young wife after the second. Understandably, he had not been in the best of emotional health when he arrived in America. By the time the Civil War ended, he had seen so much killing, had amputated so many mangled limbs and pronounced far too many young folk dead, that he felt more than a part of him had died. He had meant to fly as far as possible from civilization, and got as far as the fledgling Kansas town of Wolf Creek—situated in a dogleg-shaped bend of the creek by the same name, a tributary of the Arkansas River. He bought an office there, put up his sign and started doing the only thing he knew how—doctoring. He had intended to bury himself in work, looking after folks from cradle to grave. To his surprise, the town had grown quickly, being the sort of melting pot that people of all creeds and persuasions had gravitated to after the war. Former pro-slavery ‘border ruffians’ mingled with ardent abolitionist ‘Jayhawkers,’ but no-one was any the wiser. There was an acceptance that no-one was clean and blameless in war, and if a man wanted to keep his past to himself, that was his business. Then, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad arrived and caused the town to boom. Cattle drives made for the railhead, and with the influx of cowboys parched from weeks on the trail and with a thirst for copious quantities of drink, an appetite for female company and a desire to gamble their hard-earned money, the fleshpots swelled.

  When Logan first put up his shingle and started seeing patients, the southernmost part of town was South Street. As the town expanded southward, though, another street came into being. It was called Grant Street in honor of the President, but amongst the less deferential cowboys, most of whom hailed from Texas, it was known by the sobriquet of “Useless S. Grant Street.” Inevitably, this street marked the boundary between the respectable northern part of the town and the southern, less salubrious part, with its gambling and drinking establishments, its houses of ill repute, and its infamous opium den, owned by an enigmatic Chinese businessman called Tsu Chiao. This newer part of Wolf Creek was known as Dogleg City, being as it nestled into the dogleg of Wolf Creek. And the part that abutted the Creek itself was made up of cribs, hog pe
ns and crude tents where the most haggard of soiled doves plied whatever trade they could. As the town doctor, Logan Munro was often called to minister to them or their clients. At times, he found the downward spiral in some people’s lives profoundly depressing.

  Yet today was no day to feel sad. A bright sun had risen against a cobalt sky, a fitting harbinger of hope and new life. He straightened his hat, a reflex gesture from his British Army days, and began whistling a refrain from his old regimental song as he swung his bag in jaunty fashion. In his mind, he was whistling along to the pipes of the Scots Fusiliers.

  Already, the respectable part of Wolf Creek was starting to come alive, and most of the small business folk had begun their daily toil. He waved to several passers-by and acknowledged the odd rider.

  “Ach! You sound annoyingly cheerful for this time of the day, Doctor Munro,” barked Frank Kloepfer, the bulky, barrel-chested butcher, as he came out of his doorway. He carried a bucket of sawdust that he was spreading across the floor of his shop. He stroked his luxurious mustache, revealing, in the process, the gap where his two front teeth once resided until they had been knocked out by an irate customer complaining that he had been sold rancid meat. That had been before the big German had dislocated the man’s jaw, which it had been Logan’s tricky job to reset.

  Frank nodded his head at the blood on Logan’s shirt. “You had trouble today?”

  Logan shook his head with a grin and pointed to the butcher’s blood-stained apron. “No trouble, Frank. Just a sign of honest work, the same as yours.” He looked down at his shirt and pulled his jacket collar over to try and make the stain less conspicuous.

  “But why wouldn’t I be cheerful on a day like this?” he asked rhetorically, gazing up at the sky and smiling. “There is nothing like bringing a baby into the world to put a smile on one’s face. And that being the case, when you bring two in one go there is twice the reason to be happy.”

  “Ach, you don’t say! That has to be Mrs. Blunkett. She was looking as round as a kürbis.” He hesitated as he searched for the word in American, then his eyes widened in delight as it came to him. “As round as a pumpkin, when I last saw her.” He guffawed and winked lewdly. “Who would think Willie Blunkett was man enough to sire twins!” He rubbed his hands together. “I am guessing they will want steak? Or maybe you want them to ruin some of my good meat and make that heathen British beef tea you go on about.”

  “Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, sent vast amounts of concentrated beef tea to Florence Nightingale so that she could treat the wounded during the Crimean War. It is a great tonic after illness, and a grand thing for a woman after childbirth,” Logan explained enthusiastically. “That, and bosh water from the blacksmith’s quenching trough. It’s full of iron—just what a woman needs to build new blood. I’ll be going over to Spike Sweeney’s forge later for a bucket of the stuff so I can make up a bottle or two for her.”

  He walked on, his mind replaying the birth of the Blunkett twins and the extended episiotomy that he had to cut in order to use the forceps to deliver the head of the second twin, a little boy who had been in a breech, or bottom first, position. The fountain of blood from the spurting vessels severed in his incision had covered him before he had a chance to deflect the spray.

  But it was all over now, and Betsy Blunkett and her two babies, one of each sex, were in Martha Pomeroy’s capable hands. Martha was an attractive war widow who lived opposite the photographer’s studio at the junction of Lincoln and Fifth Street. She happened to be the best midwife he had ever worked with, despite the fact that she had no professional training, and only did it because she found she had a talent at helping woman deliver their babies. It was her personal sadness that her husband had been killed at Baxter Springs, and she had a stillbirth shortly after.

  A fine woman, Logan mused for a moment before quickly putting further thought of her from his mind. She and he were both widowed, both vulnerable, but he was not sure whether he could ever allow himself to get involved with another woman. Not after his failure to save Helen, his wife, back in Lucknow.

  He crossed Washington Street and tapped on the window of Ma’s Café. The aroma of freshly baked bread, bacon and coffee assailed his nostrils and set his gastric juices flowing.

  The said “Ma,” matronly Stephanie Adams—another of the many war widows of Wolf Creek—was bustling about serving breakfast to a couple of Joe Nash’s boys on one table, and to various Dogleg City revelers who were making their way home or to employment of some sort after a night of debauchery of one form or another. She smiled at him and raised the coffee pot in her hand with a quizzical expression.

  “I’ll be back,” he mouthed through the glass, pointing to the blood stained shirt, then cryptically jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  Ma opened her mouth in mock horror at the sight of the blood. Then, with a laugh, she waved and returned to dispensing coffee to her customers.

  Logan laughed and quickened his stride. Although Ma’s food was perhaps not as refined as the fare on offer at Isabella’s Restaurant on Washington Street, where Antonio Isabella, his wife, and family served out Italian cuisine to the more discerning palates in Wolf Creek, the merry widow knew how to satisfy a man’s hunger. Logan tended to spread his patronage among the various eateries, but more often than not, he breakfasted at her establishment. She had an uplifting nature and she never tired of imitating his strange accent that three countries, three wars and a whole lot of living had jumbled into a sort of Scottish patois.

  He turned right onto South Street and found his way barred by Marshal Sam Gardner and Fred Garvey, one of his deputies. The marshal was a tall, wiry man in his mid-thirties. His hair hung down to his shoulders, and the goatee he sported was coal black and well-groomed, just like the rest of him. He wore a wide-brimmed hat and frock coat, with a fancy vest, ribbon tie and expensive polished boots. The ivory-handled twin revolvers strapped to his sides implied his usefulness with guns. He had been a U.S. Cavalry officer during the war and had fought with distinction. He was typical of the cavalry types that Logan had seen in the Crimea and in India; brave without doubt, yet with an arrogance and self-belief that could stray into recklessness.

  Fred Garvey was a complete contrast. He was a short, stocky man in his middle years with a totally different idea about dress. His clothes were starched clean, and strictly functional, almost like a uniform. But, whereas Gardner was obviously one used to leading and being obeyed, Fred was clearly one who knew his place, and who would happily carry out his superior’s orders. His unhurried Georgian drawl was sometimes misconstrued by folk who didn’t know him. More than one errant cowpoke had incorrectly assumed that he was slow in the uptake, only to find himself on the end of a tongue-lashing, for he was both intelligent and witty. A stickler for the letter of the law, his short stature belied his ability to deal with anyone who infringed any of the town’s statutes.

  “Have you been in the wars, Doc?” Fred asked, looking at Logan’s bloody clothing with a smile.

  “In a manner of speaking. Betsy Blunkett had twins this morning. I’m on my way to Li Wong’s Laundry.”

  Sam Gardner smiled sarcastically. “I thought you didn’t cotton to our Chinese friends, Doctor Munro?”

  “Then you thought wrong, Marshal,” replied Logan, deliberately using the lawman’s title, just as he had. “I have no problem with any man, as long as he’s honest and doesn’t make his living by preying on the weaknesses of others. I believe that the Li family is an absolute asset to Wolf Creek. They are honest and industrious, a good example to many of the residents of the town. I take it you are referring to my views on Tsu Chiao’s activities?”

  The marshal gave a curt nod.

  “Well, there again, I have no personal feelings one way or the other about him as a human being. Who, of any of us, have the right to judge a man’s worth? What I dislike is the fact that he purveys opium and vice down in The Red Chamber. I often spend my time treating the effects they have on his c
ustomers. Opium fuddles the mind and brain, and venereal disease rots the nether regions.”

  He straightened his hat and added: “And that goes for both sexes.”

  Fred Garvey chuckled. “Sounds funny when you say it like that, Doc.” He shrugged. “But you know what Dogleg City is like. Every town has a part of it that caters to the baser instincts. I don’t know if our Wolf Creek is better or worse than any other cattle or railroad town.” He sucked air between his teeth. “All I know is that the law has to keep a close eye on things. We saw Sheriff Satterlee and Deputy Pennycuff head down there half an hour ago. The marshal and me are just heading down there as well. He’s going to call in on Soo Chow hisself.”

  He beamed, then quickly added, “Professionally, you understand. We have to nip any trouble in the bud.” He sighed. “And while he does, I have the pleasure of doing the rounds of Tent City.”

  Sam Gardner smoothed his goatee with the edge of an elegantly manicured forefinger. “Law-keeping is a serious business, Doctor. Just the same as your own occupation.”

  Logan had previously wondered about Sam Gardner’s ethics as a law officer, and his eyes narrowed a little. He suspected that his purpose in visiting Tsu Chiao may have more to do with collecting a percentage of the profits for ensuring that the opium den was left alone by the law, than to check for any misdemeanors. However, if the marshal detected any such suspicion in Logan’s eyes he did not show it. He returned his gaze unblinkingly.

  “Of course,” Logan said. “I understand how important the law is, and how seriously you law enforcers take your jobs. Good morning, gentlemen.”

  He tipped his hat to them, then set off across the street. He made for a plain fronted building with steamed-up windows. A large sign above the door proclaimed it to be LI’S LAUNDRY.