by J. Lee Butts
I’d barely known Travis Teel, but could see the impact of the man’s death on the other two marshals. They lingered over the grave, mopped their faces with bandannas, and kicked at the ground as men often do when confronted with something beyond their understanding or control.
They’d been his friends. Traveled that trail with him before, sweated together in the summer and shivered in the winter. Figured it might be a comfort to them if some words—any words—got read. So I hurried back to camp and got the thick book Elizabeth sold me the day I arrived in Fort Smith.
And as the cold wind sliced its way across the empty land, I read aloud, “From Julius Caesar, act two, scene two. ‘When beggars die, there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes. Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, it seems to me most strange that men should fear; seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.’”
As we trudged back to camp, Billy Bird pulled at my sleeve and said, “Always admired Mr. Shakespeare. Them words you picked fit Travis right down to the ground. Mighty glad you were here to read over him.”
We talked late into the night about what we would do. Finally Harry said, “Think we should leave the wagon here, take what supplies we can carry, and run these jaybirds to ground. Don’t know who we’ll be chasing, but, by God, Travis Teel’s murder deserves chastisement of the first order.”
“I’m ready.” Billy jabbed at the embers of our fire with a stick like a man about to explode.
“Hayden, under normal circumstances I’d be the first to make every effort to bring these men in alive. Not because we’d lose money if we don’t, but because it’s the right thing to do. I’ve never had a problem letting Judge Parker parcel out any retribution before, but the men who murdered Travis need killing double-quick.”
“Amen.” Sparks shot into the air as Billy threw his stick into the flames. “The level of arrogance necessary for anyone to think they could get away with back-shooting a U.S. marshal makes me mad enough to bite the head off a hammer.”
Next morning, Harry picked up the trail where we found Travis. We ran our horses hard to the south and west. By the time Billy made camp that night, Harry estimated we’d covered almost fifty miles.
He pulled the woolly collar of his sheepskin coat up around his neck and snuggled down into his bed. “This bunch was so brazen, they haven’t even made any effort to hide their trail.”
“They probably thought Travis was out here alone, and that no one would ever know what happened to him. Well, I can’t wait to see the surprise on their faces when we bust their worthless asses.” Billy snapped his blanket like a whip, then dropped onto it and fell asleep in less than a minute.
It took three more days before the opportunity to bust their worthless asses finally presented itself. By then, we’d run out of the Territories and crossed the Red River into north Texas.
“Aren’t we out of our jurisdiction, Harry?” I asked.
“Son, you’re a deputy U.S. marshal in possession of a fistful of John Doe warrants. You can go anywhere in the United States, and hell itself if necessary, to serve them. Sadly, we’re not in the balmy realm of Hades today. We’re in Texas. Them Texian boys think they’ve made it home safe and sound. That feeling is about to go through a serious reformation.”
We tracked that bunch to a used-up carbuncle of a town named Black Oak. Only way that nasty burg managed to hang on to existence rested just inside the doors of two saloons. They dominated the tiny jumble of clapboard buildings along a single street.
“Those saloons have whores working in ’em. Even if those women are uglier than one-eyed, three-legged dogs, men will find them and indulge their pleasure for as long as their money lasts. I’d bet everything we can make in a year that we’ll find Dudley and his bunch doing exactly that.” Harry smiled and urged his horse toward the saloons.
He left Billy and me on the edge of town beside a broken piece of tree that’d been hit by lightning. The name of the town wandered in a childish scrawl across a board nailed to the blackened stump. We waited there for almost half an hour before he came back.
“They’re all in that palace of swill at the end of the street. If you can call this pig-run a street. I checked their horses, and they’re for sure the ones we’ve followed all the way from the Muddy Boggy.” He dismounted and squatted. “Our boys are the only people in town other than the whores and gamblers. Business seems to be pretty bad around here right now. We come back in six months this mud pie won’t be nothin’ but a bad memory.”
“You’re certain these are the right men, Harry?” I asked. “There’s no doubt in your mind they’re the ones who killed Travis?”
“No doubt, Hayden. Their ponies are all tied out front of a place called the Salt Fork Saloon. One of those men shot Travis Teel in the back, and at least two—maybe three—of the others were there and helped finish him off. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to have any problem shooting as many holes as I can in these bigheaded brush poppers.”
I watched Billy the whole time we talked. He hadn’t bothered to question whether we were in the right place or had the right men. He spent the time Harry and I chewed the situation over doing the things necessary for him to face gunfire and survive. Checked the big Colt strapped high on his waist. Then pulled another pistol from his saddlebags, loaded it, and pushed it under his cartridge belt against the small of his back. The shotgun he carried behind his saddle got loaded last. When finished, he leaned against the rump of the palomino with the scattergun propped against his hip.
Studied the face of each man for almost a minute before I finally said, “Well, guess we’d better get at it. Let’s go cage as many of these jaybirds as want to stay alive.”
Billy jerked his blaster up to the ready. “Now that’s exactly what I wanted to hear.”
We led our horses into town. Tied them to the hitch rails in front of the first dilapidated building, which declared itself the Red-Eye Saloon. I watched the other marshals as they began to strip off all their rain gear and heavy leather coats.
“Take off anything that might interfere with your gun handling, Hayden,” Billy advised. “These boys ain’t gonna go peaceably. Least I hope not.”
“They’re in that place next door.” Harry pointed toward the Salt Fork Saloon. He pulled the pistol from his shoulder rig, opened the loading gate, and carefully added a bullet to the empty safety chamber. Then swapped it for his belly gun and did the same.
I levered a round into the .45-70, left the hammer back, and waited for them to finish getting primed. Then we all moved into the street and walked carefully past the six cowponies. Their owners had tied them in front of the only whiskey vendor in town who could say he possessed something that actually resembled a real saloon.
All those stout little animals sported the livery most people would normally associate with Texas cowboys. Three of them had woven horsehair headstalls decorated with hammered silver. Braided rawhide lariats hung beside chaps, and each Denver saddle had a yellow rain slicker tied behind it. Mustangs had been rode hard and left out in the cold. Always figured that if there’d been a stable in town, the cowboys would’ve boarded their mounts. As it was, their horses had to wait while the urges of men gone bad got satisfied.
Harry stepped through the door first. Billy followed and went to his left. I moved along the wall on Harry’s right.
Three of the cowboys sat at a table across the single room from the door. Two more stood at the bar along the left wall between the three of us and their friends. A sixth man appeared to have passed out on the floor beside a badly abused upright piano in the far right corner.
Billy glided to the end of the bar closest to him and laid the shotgun on it. He moved one step away, reached behind his back with his left hand, and slipped his fingers around the grip of the pistol hidden there. Harry held his cocked gun behind his righ
t leg. I let the Winchester rove from one side of the room to the other.
The laughter and noise that greeted us quickly died away as everyone in the room realized that men wearing badges and loaded for bear were eyeballing them. Couple of rough-looking harlots draped over the cowboys at the table moved away and ran for a door behind the bar. Bartender slid along the wall and disappeared with the women.
In a matter of seconds that dying dram shop became frozen in time. The quiet interrupted only by snorts from the quivering slug sleeping on the floor beside that dilapidated music box.
In a voice that sounded like it came down from Mount Sinai with the tablets, Harry said, “Boys, I’m Deputy U.S. Marshal Harry Tate. The man on your left is Deputy U.S. Marshal Hayden Tilden, and the stringy feller over there is Deputy U.S. Marshal William Tecumseh Bird. We have warrants for your arrests.” He turned to his right and slightly sideways toward the cowboys. “You will give up the man who shot Marshal Travis Teel in the back out on the Muddy Boggy in the Nations last week. We want him right now. You present that man to us, and we’ll see that the rest of you get a fair trial in Judge Parker’s court on the charge of accessory to murder.”
No one moved or said anything for about ten seconds. Then a scar-faced man, who’d been leaning on the bar, stood and moved back toward his friends at the table. “You lawdogs gotta have a lotta hard bark coverin’ yore dumb Arkansas asses to come down here and try to arrest Texas boys. Yore badges and warrants ain’t worth spit hereabouts. We don’t answer to nuthin’ ’cept Texas law. So you can fold them warrants five ways and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine.” He stopped beside the table and pulled his coat away from his pistol.
“I do believe I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Jug Dudley,” said Harry. “I have one warrant especially for you, sir. The others are John Does, but they’ll work just fine on your friends.”
The man who remained at the bar said nothing, but pulled his coat back to reveal a big Remington tucked in his belt. Two of the three men at the table stood and made all the motions of those prepared to go down shooting. The cowboy left seated seemed reluctant to be a party to what was clearly about to transpire. He placed his hands on the table and clamped his fingers together as though to signify his wish to stay out of the fight.
Cold wind slipped under the door and tiptoed up my spine as sweat ran down my jaw and dripped onto the floor. Dudley hooked his thumbs into his gun belt. The fingers of his right hand tapped a spot a few inches away from the walnut grip of his Colt.
“By Godfrey, boys, did you hear that? I’m known. That means you’re known too. We’ll be even more famous when we get through squashing these Arkansas dung beetles. Tomorrow, people all over Texas and the Territories will know about the Dudley gang.”
The bullet from Billy Bird’s pistol ripped through Dudley’s skull and snuffed out his life before he even had a chance to blink. He fell backward like a drowning man trying to claw his way to the surface and landed upright in the chair behind him.
Man at the bar tried for his gun, but it barely cleared his cartridge belt when a shot from Billy’s hideout punched a hole in his chest as big as the bottom of a whiskey bottle.
Harry’s right hand snapped up. Bolts of flame a foot long jumped from the Colt’s silver barrel and burned twin caverns in one of the drunks at the table.
Fourth man kicked his chair back and jumped for the door behind the bar. A slug from my Winchester dropped him like a twelve point rack of antlers with the buck still attached.
Blasting inside that cramped cow country oasis nearly deafened me. For fifteen seconds or so, couldn’t hear much of anything. The muscles in my arms trembled. Acrid blue-black smoke hung in the air like fog along the banks of the Arkansas early on a warm spring morning. The three of us stood there coiled up and quivering. Spring steel with fangs, waiting for the next move.
The living man left at the table frantically waved his hands like a deranged M.K.&T. brakeman signaling his engineer. Three of our four weapons covered him. His stricken glance darted from one of us to the other.
“Don’t shoot me, Marshals. I ain’t heeled. I didn’t have nothin’ to do with the killing of your friend.” Tears rolled down his cheeks.
Handsome Harry’s words fell on the man colder than sleet on Travis Teel’s grave. “Sir, you will stand and go to Marshal Bird. Do be careful. You’ve seen how deadly he is. It would be to your benefit to heed what you’ve just witnessed.” He stepped aside and allowed the terrified cowboy to move out of the line of fire. Billy escorted the man outside and placed him in shackles.
Harry and I examined each of the fallen outlaws. The one at the bar had been shot squarely in the heart and died before he hit the floor. A smile lingered on his lips as though he felt certain he’d beat Billy Bird to the draw.
Harry dropped his warrant in Jug Dudley’s lap. He leaned over, his face only inches from the dead man’s, and sneered, “Consider yourself served, you murderin’ gob of spit. After today, nobody will ever know who Jug Dudley was. I’m gonna bury you deep and not put up a marker. By tomorrow afternoon no one but your mother will even know you were ever amongst the living.” He grabbed the man by the chin, jerked the head to one side, and slid his finger along the jagged scar. Then he spat on the corpse and stalked away.
Unfortunately the brush popper brought down by my shot wasn’t as lucky as his extremely dead friends. My aim had been off by the slightest margin. Bullet ripped a huge hole in his gut, but didn’t kill him outright. It took a bit for the numbness of his injury to give way to the pain. When it did, he died long, loud, and pitiful. Tried to make him comfortable, but nothing really helped. He screamed, wept, and cried out for his mother all night long. Death didn’t come for him till early the next morning.
The drunk who’d been passed out on the floor slept through the whole dance. Next day, all he could do was shake his head and marvel at what he’d missed.
Black Oak’s undertaker had abandoned the place over a year before we got there. Harry enticed two of the local elbow-benders to help with the burial of Dudley and his men. True to his word, he put them in the ground in a patch of woods just outside town. No markers were erected for them. We could have gone back a month later and not been able to find the site.
On the long, cold trip back to the Muddy Boggy and our wagon, I pulled Harry aside and asked, “Why haven’t you said anything about Billy’s quickness with his pistols?”
“What do you expect me to say?”
“Just that we might have been able to get more of them alive if he’d waited a minute or so longer.”
“Hayden, if Billy hadn’t done what he did, you and I might both be dead right now. Dudley and the others were only a heartbeat away from being shot by me when Billy jumped in. Best advice I can give you about this job happened back there in Black Oak. Never give a bad man an even chance. If he’ll let you do it, take him alive. If not, kill him before he kills you. Know it sounds harsh, but out here you have to do it that way or you’ll end up dead as Travis Teel. I’d sure hate to hear Elizabeth read Shakespeare over you.”
Well, that outing turned out the way far too many of our ventures into the Nations would in the future. Hell, we’d start out thinking we might find men like Killin’ Bill Barber and Saginaw Bob but end up running all over the country because the real truth about law enforcement out in the Nations was that anything could happen and usually did. When the only law west of Fort Smith hung on our chests people seemed to come from under every rock and bush wanting us to check on something for them. More often than not, we would get diverted by criminal activity more dreadful than anything we’d planned on solving.
Anyway, Harry’s party managed to pick up enough other miscreants, malefactors, and reprobates to make our trip an economic success. During the quieter moments of that second raid, I took some time to think on the events of the recent past and just how far things had come.
In the short span of six months, I’d gone from being a Kent
ucky farm boy, on the way to being a Texas farm boy, to a point where many recognized me as one of the most dangerous of Judge Isaac Parker’s pack of lawdogs.
Met and squired the lovely Elizabeth Reed around Fort Smith. My finances were such that I had little to worry about for the foreseeable future. And, to tell the truth, no one was more awed or fascinated with the persona of Deputy U.S. Marshal Hayden Tilden than the man himself.
Magruder still ran loose somewhere in the Nations, but sooner or later he’d stumble or someone would give him up. He didn’t know it, but death was waiting and its name was Hayden Tilden.
In spite of knowing all that, I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest fantasies what was in store for me when we arrived at Judge Parker’s courthouse on a cold, nasty day in February of 1879.
6
“HE MADE THE MOVE WITH HIS EYES”
WE DELIVERED OUR cargo of riffraff late in the afternoon of a Friday. Harry tried to schedule our arrival in the hope of taking the weekend off. I even entertained delusions of spending a good deal of my free time with Elizabeth. But all of us knew we’d have to sit around in the office till calluses began to form on our rumps, while we waited to testify if needed. And, true to form, nothing worked out the way I hoped or expected.
Barely settled myself into a cane-bottomed chair near the potbellied stove in the U.S. marshal’s outer office when Judge Parker’s private bailiff, George Wilton, visited me. Mr. Wilton was a tall, bald-headed, black gentleman who sported one of those big ole handlebar mustaches. Highly educated. Handsome dresser. Always wore a three-piece suit, tie, and polished boots.
He leaned close and spoke in a low, conspiratorial tone. “Marshal Tilden, the Judge wishes to speak with you in his private office.”
“Do you know why he wants to see me, Mr. Wilton?”
“Yes, sir, I do. But I am not at liberty to say at this time. His Honor heard of your return from the Nations and sent me to find you immediately. He awaits your appearance presently.”