Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  “I do. Then we follow it West toward Wyoming territory, oh, fifty some miles. We’ll come to a station, if the Sioux haven’t burned it out …”

  “Good long distance into Wyoming after that, before town, I expect?”

  “Helluva long way, sure enough. But I don’t spend no time there, not more’n a night—my pa’s sheriff too, but we don’t get along. They’ve got strange notions in Wyoming.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well sir, women can run for office ‘n’ vote local elections in Wyoming territory. Governor’s wife must’ve barred him from the bed till he give in. It ain’t natural, allowing a woman to vote. You with me on that?”

  “I know what you mean,” Wyatt said diplomatically. “But don’t you think that’s the direction of history, in a kind of way? First the Negroes freed, then the women get the vote.”

  “Why next you’ll be saying the Chinese and the red savages will have the vote!”

  Wyatt suspected it would happen some day, but he didn’t want to try to explain the idea of historical inevitability over the racket of the coach. He didn’t much like long discussions anyway. So he changed the subject, patting the boot under the driver’s box where the gold shipment rode: “Are there many in Deadwood who know about the gold we got on board?”

  “We tried to keep it quiet. But I reckon it got out. You’d better watch sharp at the fork up ahead. That’s where old Hank Degg got himself shot last time …”

  Wyatt nodded and stowed the shotgun and pulled the Winchester rifle from its scabbard. He wasn’t sure why he made the switch. Some instinct for the best play. He had a sense that they were being watched; that the coach was being followed.

  He wondered if he’d made a mistake, bringing Henry on this trip. Should have sent him by one of the wagon trains heading to Kansas for supplies. This trip was too dangerous to bring a boy on.

  He reflected that they hadn’t heard from Henry in awhile. The boy had finally gone to sleep. Maybe when they got to the station, a few miles ahead, he’d be ready to eat. As he looked at the silvery glint of the lowering sun on the slow-running Cheyenne River to their left, Wyatt decided he was ready for food and rest, himself. He was hungry, tired, and he suspected that the driver’s box, though thinly padded, had permanently changed the shape of his pelvic bones. Anyhow it felt that way.

  It was Slaughter who saw the riders first. “On your right!” he shouted, jerking his head that way.

  Wyatt cocked the Winchester and turned to see the riders a few hundred yards off, angling toward the coach from the northwest; riding to cut it off. The studied way that the four riders were pacing the coach suggested outlaws, and not some harmless group of horsemen. Threading their mounts through a stand of spruce, then out into the open, they leaned into a single-file gallop, stalking the stagecoach. Sun glinted off steel as the riders drew their pistols …

  “That lead man,” Slaughter shouted, snapping the reins to urge the tired horses on, “that’s Dunc Blackburn, the son of a whore who killed Hank! He ain’t bothered with a mask and that’s a sign they mean to kill us!”

  They were just within pistol shot and then Wyatt heard the .45 rounds crack through the air close behind, the bullets out-flying the report of the pistols; holes appeared in the right side of the coach.

  “Henry! You okay?” Wyatt called, aiming the Winchester as best he could with the rocking of the coach.

  “I’m in one piece, Wyatt!” the boy shouted. “Give me a gun!”

  “Just lay low, flatten down—!”

  Another fusillade of bullets sang by; two more, scoring splinters from the coach. One of the riders—gun smoke from his pistol streaming behind him—shouted for them to “Brake ’er, brake ’er and stop, damn you, or die!” As if to underscore the warning, a bullet sang by Wyatt’s head. Another chipped the scrollwork above the passenger window.

  Wyatt had never before been under such heavy fire and he felt terribly exposed atop the stagecoach. He had an impulse to jump off and find cover. But he remembered Newton’s advice: Sometimes you say to yourself it’s up to the Lord if you live. Got to accept you might not live—or you’ll be afraid and your gun-hand won’t work for the fear. And that’ll kill you right there …

  The coach’s sidelight shattered from another shot as Wyatt fired back. He fired one, two, three times—his shots showing no effect. The riders drew closer, and closer, angling to cut them off. Bracing in place with his feet, Wyatt aimed and fired again, but it was hard to hit anything, frustrating to try to shoot with the coach making the rifle jump and waver out of true. He had one shot left in the Winchester and it’d be hard to re-load with all this bumping around …

  “They’re going to shoot the leaders!” Slaughter shouted, and it took Wyatt a moment to realize Slaughter meant the lead horses. Blackburn, now almost to the road ahead of the stagecoach, was turning in his saddle, pointing his pistol at the lead horse on the right side.

  “They will, will they,” Wyatt muttered, aiming the Winchester. No time to reload: He’d noticed that the men, riding single file, were close to one another, their horses almost nose to tail …

  Wincing, Wyatt sighted on Dunc Blackburn’s horse. He fired the last round in his Winchester, the bullet smacking home behind the animal’s left shoulder, just missing the outlaw’s knee.

  Wyatt hated to do it; he’d been raised to cherish horses, but a horse was easier to hit from a stagecoach going full bore—and he had another reason too.

  It paid off. Blackburn’s horse went down just as he fired his pistol at the stagecoach’s leaders—the pistol shot going wild as his horse seemed to dive into the ground. Blackburn leapt free at the last moment but the following horses crashed into the fallen animal, then slammed hard into one another: Wyatt could almost hear the bones breaking.

  The stagecoach left the tangle of men and horseflesh in its dust. Slaughter whooped in triumph and the coach rocketed on down the trail.

  * * *

  Swelling left arm dangling like a dead thing, Dunc Blackburn walked unsteadily over to inspect his horse. It was already dead. One of the other horses was dying, its neck broken. Its rider, an Irishman named Mulrooney, his right leg shattered, sat near the shuddering horse, weeping openly. “Oh my Savior Jesus,” he sobbed, “My horse … I stole ’er with me own hands three years ago, and a fine cinealta horse she was since … O the lach horse …”

  Weeping the whole time, Mulrooney picked up the pistol lying beside him. Hand shaking, he shot the animal through the head.

  The remaining two horses and their riders were bruised but intact. Hound Farraday, the tall man Swinnington had seen at the Black Hills spring, was picking up his own pistol, returning to his spooked horse—it reared, afraid it was going to be shot too, and he had to grab the reins till he could gentle it down. “Easy, you bucket-head, easy … Dunc, we could still go after ’em, two of us anyway, might catch ’em up …”

  “No, you damn fool, the station ain’t far off, and there’s men and ammunition there. We get any closer we’ll have a pack of ’em on us. No … We’re going to bide our time … Maybe have us a talk with Mr. Yo-Hann Burke …”

  “Oh Lordy Lord, my leg …” Mulrooney burbled as he tried to straighten the leg out. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Patrick too. Sure, I’m gonna need a splint … I don’t think I can sit a horse, Dunc, you’ll have to make a … now what do you call those things the Indians drag behind their horses, when they’ve got a man hurt?”

  “I don’t think we need to know what to call them, Mulrooney,” Blackburn said, checking to see that he still had a bullet into his six-shooter. One, but that was enough. “For I don’t think it’s going to be needed at all … We haven’t got time for your broken leg or your whining.”

  Seeing what Blackburn was about, Mulrooney stared a moment, gathering his courage. Then he spat at him and said, “May the cat eat you, Dunc Blackburn, and may the devil eat the cat.”

  Blackburn grinned, and shot Mulrooney through the head,
just as Mulrooney had shot his horse.

  He holstered the pistol, and said, “I need a horse. One of you is going to have to walk. Hound, you and me, we’re going to do something about this shotgun messenger who kills a man’s perfectly good horse just to save his skinny little neck …”

  * * *

  Henry had a bullet hole in the back of his right shoulder. One of the outlaw’s bullets had cut through the leather flap over the window, ricocheting off a brass fitting to wound the boy crouching between the seats.

  Shirtless and facedown on the cot in the log-cabin coach-station, Henry tried to show he was game, biting his lip to keep from crying out. But with Slaughter digging in the point of a knife to pop the bullet out, and pouring raw spirits on the wound, Henry went pale, sobbed aloud once—and lost consciousness.

  “Now if only he’d had the good sense to do that before I started digging out the durn bullet,” Slaughter muttered, reaching for the bandages.

  Wyatt sighed and shook his head as he went to find a place to bunk.

  It was late the next morning before Henry was awake and strong enough to take in some broth and climb aboard the coach. They were set to take passengers out again, including an elderly missionary woman in a bonnet who’d learned some nursing during the Civil War, and she volunteered to look after Henry on the trip to Cheyenne.

  Helping Henry up into the coach, Wyatt said, “Henry, we have to think about your future, and think serious.”

  Wyatt was worried that Henry would catch another bullet in his company. The next one would likely be fatal. Burke might well return to Kansas—and even without Burke, Wyatt seemed to be a magnet for gunfire, lately.

  Henry took his seat and, grimacing with pain, leaned to look out the open stagecoach door at Wyatt. “I figure to heal up and practice my gunning and become a deputy … And watch your back for you.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. You need to grow up first.”

  Looking out from the shadows of the coach, Henry looked like a trapped animal.

  “I know: I’m ‘between hay and grass’.”

  Something about Henry, right then, gave Wyatt a shiver. Anger seemed to pull shutters in Henry’s eyes, as the boy went on, “If the one side won’t have me, maybe the other will. Until you shot the horse out from under that Blackburn, I thought those ol’ boys were doing it up pretty slick out there …”

  And he reached out and shut the coach’s door in Wyatt’s face.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “My horse and saddlebags get here, okay?” Wyatt asked, as he and Bat strolled through the long shadows of early evening. Wyatt was less than twenty minutes back in town, still carrying his handbags; Bat had met the stagecoach, pretending to chide them for being late—as if he hadn’t noticed the bullet holes.

  “The freighters dropped the horse and the bags off at the livery this morning, in good shape. Your pockets full of nuggets now?”

  “I made some pretty good money, and didn’t throw much of it away on cards,” Wyatt allowed. “Another one-hundred-seventy-five for riding shotgun.”

  “Good pay for one trip.”

  “A riskier trip than most. But I will need work in town. I was thinking of going out to California, after I save up. Mattie might like that. My father gave up on California too easy. Lost his temper with the whole territory.”

  “Wyatt, there’s work for you right here in Wichita …”

  “What sort of work?” Wyatt asked, wondering if Mattie would still be in the hotel at this hour. He took out his watch—and stared at it in raw surprise. There was a crimped bullet lodged in the shattered face, right where the hands came together.

  Bat gaped at the watch, and whistled. “Will you look at that!”

  “I never even felt it!” Wyatt shook his head, adding ruefully, “I’ll need a new watch.” He looked at his vest, found the hole—right over his liver. The watch had been in a vest pocket. “And a new waistcoat. There’s the hole … Never noticed it neither. Did feel some kind of bruise …”

  “Is that all you can say, ‘I’ll need a new watch and weskit’? Do you know how close you came, Wyatt, to taking that bullet in your gizzard?”

  “What sort of work were you talking about?” Wyatt asked again, closing his fingers over the broken watch. He didn’t want to think about how close he’d come to dying.

  “Special Deputy work. The U.S. Marshal, Meagher, him and some of the merchants hire men—‘on assignment’, they call it. For things the town deputies don’t want to do.”

  “You mean fixing the sidewalks? Shooting stray dogs? I’ve done my share of that.”

  “No, I mean repossession—and tracking men out in the prairie. Tracking’s long, hot, dirty work and I myself take no joy in it. But they’ll pay for it. Marshal Smith likes to claim it’s the U.S. Marshal’s job, and Meagher, he claims it’s the Town Marshal’s … Say, how’s young Henry McCarty?”

  “Well enough. Bessie’s looking after him. I’ve got a mind to get him out of harm’s way.” Which brought a question to mind. “You seen Johann Burke in town? Or Pierce? Or that Hoy?”

  “None of them for a good long time.” After a moment Bat added, “If Burke comes looking for you, you send for me. I’ll back your play.” He said it simply, without drama, as he watched a frilly lady with a lacy parasol cross the street nearby, but Wyatt knew he meant it; meant it all the way.

  “Thank you, Bat. I’m not too proud to do just that. But …” He handed Bat the bullet-shattered watch. “There’s a present for you. You might want to look at that before you come running.”

  They both watched the lady crossing the street: a woman with delicate features and big brown curling-iron tresses spilling down the back of her neck. She had no need of the parasol, now, with the sun so low, but she kept it propped on her shoulder and spun it in her white-gloved hands as she whisked along in her bustled skirt, careful never to look their way but quite aware they were watching.

  “Word is, Pierce and Burke are down in Texas,” Bat said, in a low voice, his eyes following the sway of the lady’s bustle. “Pierce got his friends to drop the lynching charges and now he’s chasing squatters off his land—people that came in when they thought he wasn’t coming back.”

  Wyatt shrugged. Pierce would be back in Kansas, at some point. “You got my note?”

  “Way you tell what happened in those hills, though … I’m not sure how it’d come out in court. I asked Meagher about it, since it happened in territory supposed to be controlled by the federals—he didn’t feel inclined to arrest Burke. Said it wasn’t clear who was hunting who. Your word against Burke’s.”

  Wyatt grunted. “That’s what I figured.”

  “And it doesn’t hurt, even with Meagher—who isn’t a bad sort—that Burke is Pierce’s hound.”

  “Figured that too.”

  “Seems to me it’s gotten to be as much a feud as anything else … Or it’ll look that way to people.”

  “It is a kind of feud.” It was funny, Wyatt thought, how you could lose sight of what had started a feud in the first place. First that night in Ellsworth, running afoul of Pierce. Then Wyatt asking a few too many questions about a girl he didn’t even know.

  Dandi LeTrouveau had died—and that death had led to other deaths. Montaigne and Plug Johnson, and Sanchez. It was like a bullet ricocheting through a tightly packed room. And maybe the bullet wasn’t spent yet.

  It might be wiser to leave Wichita, he thought; to head west, avoid the conflict. But it’d haunt him, if he did that. He’d have to watch his back forever. And he hated leaving things unfinished. “Meagher won’t care that Smith fired me?” Wyatt asked.

  “Nope. He won’t give a shied penny.”

  “I’ve got to see Mattie,” Wyatt said. “But tomorrow morning I’ll have a word with Meagher about that work—I expect John Slaughter reported the attack on the stage already.”

  “You truly want me to keep this pocket watch, as a souvenir of your sorcerous luck?”

>   “I truly do. I’d rather not see it again.”

  “I’ll show it to my brother Ed—he’ll want to know where you buy watches that take a bullet for you …”

  Wyatt said goodbye to Bat on the porch of the hotel, and got only a few steps into the lobby before almost running headlong into Mattie on her way out. She was dressed in a red-trimmed white gown, cut low at the bosom and sewn so its skirts hitched up on the sides to show her legs.

  “Could get chilly tonight, for that outfit,” Wyatt remarked.

  “Wyatt!” And she ran into his arms.

  * * *

  Later, as they lay cooling off in their bed, Mattie in Wyatt’s arms, her cheek against his shoulder, he asked, as gently as he could, “That get-up you were heading out in—you weren’t thinking of going to … to ‘work’ in that thing?”

  “I … Well … no. Only …”

  He could tell that she wasn’t sure she should tell him the truth. He drew back, fixed her with his gaze. “Go on ahead, Mattie.

  Tell me.”

  She made a little moan. “I didn’t think you were coming back.”

  “I sent you money, and letters.”

  “Two little scribbles! I didn’t know how long the money’d last—or if there’d be more. I thought you’d found someone else. I hadn’t heard from you in a while. And I was so bored.’”

  “Saying you wouldn’t come to Deadwood because of the ‘ladies of low virtue’!”

  Her mouth quivered. “I was more afraid I’d …” She shook her head.

  He was surprised at how angry he felt, thinking about her going back to her old profession. His own past only seemed to stoke the anger.

  She began to sob, her face in her hands.

  He relented, leaning back and putting his arms around her. “You’ve got no cause to fall into that life again. I’m here now. You’ll learn to make fashionable dresses, you’ll go to ladies circles, go to the theater. Keep busy. You understand me?”

  “I understand, Wyatt,” Mattie said softly, nestling closer to him with a sigh.

  He noticed there were no tears on her cheeks.