by Mari Sandoz
Sheriff Angus watched them go, the wind lifting the thin wisp of reddish hair left at the top of his head. Then he put his hat on for one more errand before he dared let himself sleep. Wearily he rode the three miles to Fort McKinney.
"The posse going out is in a dangerous mood, Colonel. There will be bloodshed, bloody slaughter," he said.
But Colonel Van Horn reminded him that he could make no move without orders from his superiors.
The TA was set on the pleasant bottoms among rolling hogbacks. The ranch buildings, large, sprawling, and weathered beside a pile of new lumber, were enclosed in a seven-foot fence of logs set too close for much more than a limber-boned weasel to crawl through, with a stout barbedwire fence around the outside. The ranch house had been a place of gay entertainment once, of hunt dinners and balls, but it stood empty now, the blank windows staring upon the Invaders as they settled themselves. They dug out a little fort on a knoll, the dirt thrown up in breastworks for the sharpshooters under Senator Tisdale, with water, food, and some of the few blankets inside. The new lumber—planking and square-sawn logs ten inches thick hauled in for new buildings—Wolcott used for barricading the house, the rambling stables, even the icehouse and the hen coop. Realizing that the supply wagons were surely captured by now, a couple of steers were driven in from the range and one of them butchered—thin but meat. Because they must get word out to Cheyenne and Washington, as well as reach supplies and ammunition, if possible, Wolcott had sent Allen, manager of the Standard Cattle Company in east Wyoming and in Nebraska, and tied in with Baxter, to Buffalo. Unknown up there, he might get Billy Irvine's order to friends. It didn't work. Almost before the Invaders were unsaddled at the TA, Allen was in the Buffalo jail.
Fortunately the Invaders had all day to prepare but the scouts knew that the Johnson County Defenders, now to become besiegers, were gathering, coming all night, too, with a camp set up prepared for a long stay. At dawn of the eleventh, while the first smoke rose from the chimney of the TA ranch house, the besiegers appeared on the rises to the north and the .45-70's began to throw an experimental thunder over the valley, answered in a scattering fire from the TA. Then the horses were sent back and Flagg's men began creeping up closer, slowly, worming along like Sioux Indians, the firing increasing as more men came in. Now those who had Champion surrounded in his little KC alone a couple of days ago had trapped themselves.
It was impossible to keep rumors from reaching the railroad and the telegraph service—wild stories of a wild undertaking, with great numbers of men killed on this side or on that. Eastern newspapers tried to send men in, but everybody was afraid of being caught by the Invaders or the socalled rustlers. Wolcott's men had kept the little telegraph office on the Powder in their hands yet somehow Angus got a message through to Sheriff Campbell at Douglas about the KC fight and requested him to hold all suspects, even though he was one of the Britishers, Angus, the Scotsman, admitted dourly. Two of Campbell's county commissioners were Wolcott with the Invaders, and E. T. David, Carey's ranch manager, who was to keep the telegraph cut. What a mare's nest of connected interests were after the men of Johnson County.
But the fact that one message got through that far scared the ranchers and the line repairmen got threats and bullets whistling over their heads. There were also big bills or gold coins in bottles beside new gaps cut in the wire.
Now suddenly it was the Invaders locked up, at the TA, and the besiegers cutting the line. Already the governor had been asked for the National Guard to avoid bloodshed, meaning Invader blood, but his orders to Parmalee of the Guards at Buffalo apparently never got through.
Gradually the outside was getting a little more understanding of what was happening in Johnson County. Down in Denver the Rocky Mountain News protested the action of Wyoming state officials as without comparison in the history of a civilized country. "If the ringleader's object is to kill off all his personal enemies on this trip, about half of the population must be on the list."
Then the findings of the coroner at KC got out: eight bullets in Champion's body, Nick Ray charred, the legs below the knees and the arms practically burned off. When the bodies reached Buffalo, the excitement and fury ran like a lighted fuse toward dynamite, and once more Angus hurried to the fort. The men surrounded out at the TA would be blown up, massacred when the coroner's findings got out to the besiegers there. The Invaders must be rescued, held for murder, yes, but rescued while there was time.
The spring wagon with the gunshot Dudley came in right after the bodies arrived from the KC. It was stopped by outraged citizens who thought the man's story a bald-faced lie, a ruse to get a message from the Invaders to the fort. Coroner Watkins was called from his sorrowful task of writing up his report on the dead before he slept. He came, pulled the blanket back. Seeing the swollen and bullet-shattered leg, he ordered Dudley to the post hospital immediately and then, overcome by all the violence and horror, fell in a stroke right there on the street and died.
Now even the churchmen were aroused. Six months ago the Reverend Rader had thrashed a cattleman on the street for calling his militant Methodist congregation a nest of damned cattle rustlers, it was said. Now the preacher gathered up forty churchmen of the town and started out to slay a few cattle kings, not with the jawbone of an ass but with the latest model Winchesters they could scare up at this late hour.
All over Wyoming and adjoining cattle country settlers were sleeping out in the sagebrush or the willows or bunch grass, away from their usual beds because ranchers were riding the country in posses. One from Billings and Big Timber was in a gun fight with rustlers at the Wyoming line. There were rumors of large cattlemen movements against settlers in Dakota, too, but less because there were more Texans up there, with little sympathy for the Yankee carpetbaggers and for the Britishers who controlled most of the big outfits in Wyoming. But it was rumored that ranchers even in Wyoming were loading up their families and streaming in to Douglas and Gillette, even Newcastle and Cheyenne, too, for safety. "Clay knew why he was getting out," one of the men leaving said ruefully. It was true that the president of the Stock Growers Association was safe off in Europe while his associates, connections, and debtors were dodging bullets at the TA and Sheriff Angus was working so hard to keep the Crazy Woman Fork from running red with their blood.
At the besieged ranch Canton was still arguing that they must break out, but Wolcott knew they were safer right there. If Angus and the other officials had been killed as arranged, there would be only unorganized mobs like the one around them here, and as soon as word got to the governor and Senators Carey and Warren, troops would come at a full gallop. Van Horn at McKinney knew something was up; he had been told to take in three new Studebaker wagons if they had to hit for the post.
In addition Wolcott worked out his plan to sneak a few good men in among the rustler line when the troops were about due. They would drop a couple of bluecoats from the saddles and make it look like the rustlers' doings. That ought to bring on a good fight, particularly if the troops came in the dark. Meanwhile he and his force would be making a run for Cheyenne, where reinforcements would be ready for a return. Next time they would count tally on every man who dared pack a gun against them.
"Bull! That's just plain Yankee brag and bull," old Mynett drawled. "I plan to make a run for it if the clouds hold out, but for Texas, and tonight."
"You won't be going out of here alive, not before the rest," Tom Smith warned him, with Canton and Elliott to back him up now, and the boy-faced Texas Kid moving in close beside them, feeling an important killer now that he had bloodied his gun with Nick Ray.
"There's no call for talk like that," Wolcott interrupted. Troops would be coming and anyway he was sending another messenger out to get double word to Buffalo and Cheyenne, if Allen didn't make it. Somebody suggested Phil DuFran. He knew the country for years, and probably nobody outside would suspect he had been anywhere near the TA. He could just let on he'd been off on private business.
But DuFran shook his dark, shaggy head with his usual good humor. "The fellers out there, they catch almost anybody they shoot him. Me"—pointing his thumb at himself,—"me they burn."
Some of the Texans looked on this as bad Frenchy humor but others didn't need it explained. Anyway, there was work to do, laid out for everybody except Calhoun. He was in such pain from Champion's bullet at KC that he was bedded down on blankets although with 200 men plainly not troopers sweeping in over the ridge at a gallop his gun could come in handy. Through Wolcott's field glasses he saw that Angus was the leader, with the powerful Arapaho Brown on one side and the fighting Methodist parson Rader on the other. He could have guessed that. The rest were the lot of new deputies and a general posse of small ranchers, settlers, clerks, gamblers, a few genuine rustlers who hadn't hit for Idaho or Montana, half-a-dozen plain adventurers, and some of the churchmen. But they didn't charge. Instead, they dug in, taking advantage of cut banks and gullies, making a wide, broken circle around the Invaders and apparently settling down to a wait, firing now and then, but without much urgency. For an hour at a time the only smoke might be from some pungent old cob pipe or a little hand-warming fire.
More besiegers came in through the stormy night, reporting to Angus headquarters set up at the little Covington ranch a mile and a half away. They watched but Wolcott got Dowling out past them all in a thick flurry of snow while Shonsey made a diversion on the far side. Afterward they saw where the horse had slipped on a snowy bank and knew they would have to work fast, particularly those who intended vengeance.
By morning the watchers were chilled as wet dogs, so they left a few guards and went to breakfast. The headquarters were so crowded there was barely standing room, with provisions and bedrolls and ammunition boxes in piles all over the yard—enough for a month of siege.
Inside the TA, Calhoun's wound was so inflamed and festering that it was plain he must get to a doctor. They helped him into the saddle and, swaying to the run of the horse, he got through, with only a few desultory shots to hurry him. Because this had been so easy, the Invaders all started to saddle up in the corrals, and got a hot fire that drove them back into the barricades as Dead Center Dave steadied his heavy old Sharps 50 buffalo gun on a forked stick and picked off the horses, firing out his six, seven cartridges, reloading them from the caps, powder, and bullets in his pockets and firing again, the horses plunging each time, perhaps one to fall, or stand, head hanging, and then go down to kick awhile in the corral dirt. Dave and the others got twenty-six before the Invaders made a run out to drive what was left into the barn.
The temperature dropped, the snow thickened a little until the valley was pure white over roofs and breastworks. It hurried the besiegers. They scattered bales of hay brought down from Buffalo and began to slide them along the snowy grass, pushing in as they shot from behind them, the ring of smoke closing in on one side, then another. But with the TA and the little fort sprawled out and the angle of return fire so wide, it became dangerous.
Midmorning the three Studebaker wagons were brought in to the Angus headquarters. The drivers talked freely enough, and for the first time the sheriff and the others discovered just who the invaders were. When Colonel Parker's cowboys realized that they had been shooting at their boss they slipped away, the rest letting them go, for Parker was a reasonably decent man. There was no accounting for some of those caught over there in the TA.
The three drivers claimed they knew nothing of the loads they hauled, particularly nothing of the two cases of dynamite, the bottles marked POISON with the red skull and crossbones, and in Canton's valise the copy of the Dead List with the seventy names marked for extermination.
As this was read off there was a heated run for the ammunition piles.
"Kill every son of a bitch like you would stomp out a nest of rattlers!" one of the homesteaders shouted, his words dark as the angry, the infuriated faces around him.
Half-a-dozen men stepped forward, each naming one or more as his private target. "Canton's mine," a quiet, stooped little clerk said, to start.
"Not yours alone! We'll take Canton, Hesse, and the others who tried to lynch Champion together," several others interrupted. "But we'll let you in." Others demanded this and that name: Wolcott, Shonsey, Irvine, even Phil DuFran, and so on, and Smith, Elliott, and a dozen others taken early.
But Arapaho Brown stood in their path, a hand up. "Stomping them is too costly," he said. "Somebody'll get hurt. I have been planning a go-devil for the dynamite, an Ark of Vengeance, the Reverend calls it."
Rader nodded, and some of the men hesitated, then all turned back to listen. There was no denying Arapaho was a handy man with a saw and a hammer, with machinery, and the Reverend was a scrapper; had a mighty true eye on him for men and for a target.
While Arapaho scratched thoughtfully under the tangle of his long, curly beard, one of the Covington ranch shacks was torn down and, under Snider's direction, built into a fort on the running gears of two of the new wagons set side by side. If the horses failed under fire, twenty, thirty men could push the Ark up close by the tongues while others fired through the loopholes, trying to get close enough to throw the dynamite with short fuses into the little earth fort and over to the house. It was dangerous but even the tenderest among them was ready to destroy the last man in the TA, many others as determined as Allison Tisdale, brother of the ambushed Johnny.
Uneasily Sheriff Angus watched this fury grow and rode for Fort McKinney once more, spurring hard. Colonel Van Horn was in a bad mood. Perhaps Foote really had come offering $5,000 for a cannon, as rumored. But Angus argued that his men were beyond taking captives now, planning to wipe out the entire force of the Invaders. They got their hands on the Dead List with the seventy names on it, he told the stern-faced officer. Names of their mayor, part of their county commissioners, their sheriff, even ministers. Found enough dynamite in the wagons to blow up the courthouse, half the town, and some of the churches, too, it seemed. Vials of poison for water holes and wells, so one of the wagon drivers thought. If the Invaders—madmen—had succeeded it would have meant civil war, turned Wyoming into a slaughterhouse. Not a cattle king or a company official would have been left alive. The besiegers were bound to pay the Invaders for this but the men at the TA, with state officials among them, had to be saved, no matter how guilty of murder and man burning. If they died, the consequences for the people would be almost as bad as civil war.
It was a long, long speech for the close-mouthed Red Angus, but Van Horn still couldn't move without orders. Wouldn't.
At the hills and ridges around the TA hundreds of men were waiting, coming, going, but mostly waiting. Inside the ranch below there was waiting, too, waiting that turned into anger and then despair as the men saw the great awkward go-devil, much heavier than theirs at KC, for this one had to withstand fifty rifles instead of one, and from a very wide angle. The ponderous little fort tipped and staggered forward as the drivers whipped their teams that pushed the fort from behind. The Texans squinted at it through the barricades and swore grimly, the cattlemen, gaunt and paling under their windburn, searched the rim of the valley, now dark as in standing pines, so thick were the besiegers. Plainly Wolcott's messengers were being captured or their cause here had been deserted everywhere from Buffalo to the White House. Senator Tisdale talked earnestly for a break made in force. "If we skulk in our hole here they'll get us all," he argued. In a break at least some would get away.
But Billy Irvine protested that not half could make it. "Tonight, yes—"
"Tonight will be too late."
"—tonight if the moon is hidden, but not in broad daylight," Irvine finished. Even with the provisions about gone and the ammunition low, they had to hope for rescue before that go-devil out there reached them. Someone must come. If not troops through Carey and Warren, then cattlemen perhaps from Montana and other Wyoming regions.
It was grim waiting as the much too unwieldy Ark of Vengeance moved each painful inch with forty men pu
shing from behind after the horses reared and faunched when bullets struck around their hoofs. There was fire from the dirt fort and the ranch, grazing the legs of the men pushing, too, and clipping boot toes while far off. A dozen times the go-devil stuck against a bank or soft ground, sinking deep into gopher holes. But its fire grew more dangerous as, by dark, it was only around 400 yards off and still moving doggedly, very slowly, but moving in the clear April night.
As the moon brightened, the bullets began to penetrate the thinner barricading so the icehouse and the hen coop were abandoned with much uneasiness about the sharpshooters out in the earth fort, with the dirty rustlers certain to fling their dynamite into it. At the house Tisdale still wanted to make the break for freedom. Tomorrow the food would be gone. At least they would go down fighting, not be blown up in their holes, or burned like rats.
All around him men nodded soberly, too worn and discouraged, too scared, perhaps, to speak or to remember the KC.
Up at Buffalo the town was swarming so that Dowling had to hide out for hours and when he finally got to Parmalee of the National Guard, the telegraph was out again. Finally that night of the twelfth they got through to the desperately anxious Senators Carey and Warren. The two men rooted President Harrison out of bed. He stirred up the War Department and at last orders were dispatched out to Douglas and along the one thin wire to Fort McKinney.
Although the moon had gone under clouds early, with little running showers and sleet, at daybreak the go-devil was plainly closer, and as the light grew the lurching fort began to move again, with a black neckerchief of "No Quarter" flying at one corner, Arapaho Brown's red bandana at the other. Out in the dirt fort the sharpshooters fired in desperation, if only to slow the heavy movement a little, help the impeding rain-softened earth and the rise toward the ranch. But the Ark kept coming on, foot by foot, in spite of the futile and suddenly scarcening bullets. There was a growing stir at the TA, loud shouts and cursings. At the earthen fort a man climbed out on the wall, standing there in one challenging, perhaps surrendering, moment, and was knocked back by a bullet.