by Curran, Tim
Cabe spent six months at Camp Douglas.
Originally erected as a training base for the Union Army, it had been converted into a POW camp after the Confederate surrender at Fort Donelson. There were over 7,000 prisoners and a single surgeon to see to their needs which were many. The camp was a cesspool of standing water, unburied corpses, rotting bones, rampant disease, and vermin. Rats roamed the grounds freely, feeding off the dead and sometimes the living who were simply too weak and sick to move. Men froze death. Men were beaten to death. Men were executed and tortured for the most minor offenses. Famine killed hundreds. Outbreaks of smallpox and dysentery killed hundreds more. The water was polluted with run-off from the latrines to the point that wounds cleansed with the foul stuff quickly became infected with gangrene. In the summer, the camp became a hive of buzzing flies and biting mosquitoes which filled the air in dense clouds. The unburied dead and heaped refuse became breeding grounds for maggots and rats.
The guards were called “The Hospital Rats” and were sadistic beyond reason, often preferring to toss food into the garbage rather than see the prisoners eat it. They beat men mercilessly, made them stand naked in the snow, and often held lotteries as to which prisoner could survive the longest without food or medical care. An average of eighteen prisoners died each day. Death wagons were pulled through the camp on an irregular basis, cadavers stacked upon them like cordwood in tangles of broomstick-thin limbs and hollowed faces. Often those near-death were thrown on as well. The wagons were often left to broil in the sun for days at a time until the heaped corpses literally shuddered and writhed from the action of feasting worms and rats, expanding gases.
Cabe had not been fed very well while in the CSA.
By the time of Pea Ridge, he was down from his trim 170 pounds to a gaunt 140…but by the time he left Camp Douglas as part of a prisoner exchange, he weighed barely over a hundred pounds. A stick figure scrawled hurriedly by a child’s hand, one dressed in rags and sewn-together bits of uniform and filth-caked blankets.
After a short stay in a Confederate hospital, Cabe was mustered back into the 2nd Arkansas which was merged with Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Cabe saw action at Murfreesboro, was under General Joe Johnston’s ill-fated attempt to relieve the Union siege of Vicksburg. And, afterwards…Chickamauga, Chattanooga, the Atlanta Campaign. He was badly wounded by shrapnel during the Carolinas Campaign, but survived to stand with his brothers when the Army of Tennessee surrendered in North Carolina in April, 1865.
After the war he drove steers from Texas up to Kansas, worked as a nightherder, a railroad detective, and rode shotgun on a bullion stage into California. He took up bounty hunting not long after.
But for all he had seen, all he had done, the horrors of war and the living nightmares of Camp Douglas, one event still overshadowed all else…his capture in Morgan’s Woods following the Battle of Pea Ridge.
And his first meeting with Jackson Dirker.
The man who would become his own personal bogeyman and haunt his dreams for years and, very often, his waking moments.
11
The job of county sheriff was not an easy one.
Jackson Dirker kept busy seven days a week, very often putting in fifteen-hour days. Besides enforcing law and order in the county—no easy feat with wild boomtowns like Whisper Lake and Frisco under his jurisdiction—Dirker was also charged with the upkeep of the county jail, serving court orders, and maintaining order in police court. He spent several days a week giving evidence at trials, arranging prisoner transfers, overseeing his deputies, and charging through the mountain of paperwork all this entailed. He was also something of a fire inspector, health inspector, and sanitation commissioner. He was called in to settle disputes between the mining companies and the local army of independent prospectors, townsfolk and immigrants populations, Indians and Mormon enclaves. He was part soldier and part diplomat, part clerk and part regulator.
He was everything and all to the folks of Beaver County.
When good things happened, he was the last one to know. But when the shit rained down, he was expected to be the first on the scene with the biggest shovel.
But for all its trouble, the position was also quite lucrative.
As a high-ranking county official appointed by the territorial governor himself, Dirker was also the county’s chief tax collector. And he kept 10% of everything he brought in, which was quite a bit. He also collected licensing fees from saloons, brothels, and gambling houses. This, along, with dispensing county contracts for new roads and bridges, brought Dirker upwards of $30,000 a year.
He also owned the St. James Hostelry, which in itself was a fairly profitable venture. But he had nothing to do with that. His wife, Janice, ran the entire enterprise. From the purchase of the hotel some four years before to its renovation and operation, Janice was completely in charge.
For Jackson Dirker was a busy man.
He spent more time these days pouring over arrest records and selling the property of tax delinquents than running down fugitives—these tasks he dispensed to his deputies more often than not—but there were still things he liked to keep his hand in. Things the people expected of him.
Things that were simply too dirty to pass down to his deputies.
And these were the things that haunted Dirker.
Because when he threw it all together in his mind, mixed it up like some foul stew, the stink of it all made him wince. So he slid it to the back burner where the smell wasn’t so bad and simply brooded over it.
Because, in his thinking, Whisper Lake was a cauldron that was getting ready to boil over. And when that happened, a lot of people were going to get burned.
There was the vigilante problem. Dirker didn’t know who they were—though he had certain suspicions—but he had no doubt they existed. Some vigilance committee that had formed to harass the local Mormons. The townsfolk blamed the Mormons anytime anything went wrong. And with all the disappearances out in the hills and the savage slaughter of no less than a dozen miners so far, people were scared. Dirker understood that. But to put the blame on the Mormons when those murders were clearly the work of a marauding dog or wolf pack was ridiculous. Dirker had put bounties on the animals and as far as the missing people went, shit, this was mining country. People came and went by the hundreds each month.
The real criminals here were the vigilantes.
And what they were doing was stirring up a mess of trouble. For already there was talk of Mormon militias out seeking revenge. The Mormons were building themselves a town up on the Beaver River and people seemed to see this as evidence that the Mormons were up to no good. Again, ridiculous. As county sheriff, Dirker found them by far to be the easiest group to manage. He had much more trouble with the gentiles. The mines had brought in squatters and immigrants and outlaws. Shootings and knifings were commonplace and not a one of those incidents had ever involved the Mormons.
They were insular, isolationist, but God-fearing and law-abiding from what Dirker had seen in these past five years as county sheriff.
But, for some reason, people just couldn’t swallow that.
Maybe it was because they hated anything they didn’t understand or maybe it was because of Deliverance, another Mormon town about four miles outside of Whisper Lake. Something had happened there, something had gone bad, it was said, and the town had gone bad with it. There were crazy rumors of devil-worship and witchcraft and even the Mormons themselves shunned the place. Dirker figured Deliverance had merely splintered from the teachings of Joseph Smith and become perhaps more puritanical and offbeat, but all those stories were nonsense.
He himself hadn’t been over to Deliverance in months and months.
Last time was when he’d provided an escort for a federal prisoner wagon passing through Beaver County. They’d stopped in Deliverance to water their horses. The place was very clannish, very odd, but the people were peaceable enough, if not exactly friendly.
No, the Mormons and Deliverance we
re just another symptom of the cancer that was eating away the heart of Whisper Lake. Vigilantes. Mormon militias. Outlaws. Immigrants. Crazy miners. Weird animal attacks. Yes, it was all building and it was going to blow.
And into this steaming stew had come Tyler Cabe hunting his deranged maniac.
That gave Dirker another headache.
He didn’t need another killer stirring up the population. And he sure as hell didn’t need Cabe constantly baiting him and rubbing the war in his face. If it kept on, there was going to be trouble. And although Dirker was a fair man and an honest one, he fully realized he could only be pushed so far.
And if Cabe kept pushing, there could only be one outcome.
God help him, if he made a nuisance of himself.
With all this bubbling away in his brain and making his temples throb, Dirker poured himself a cup of coffee. As he brought the tin cup to his lips, the door opened and the wind blew in, scattering papers from his desk.
Pete Slade stood there in the doorway, water dripping from the brim of his pinch-crowned hat.
“Shut that damn door,” Dirker told him, maybe a little more harshly than intended.
Slade did.
He was Dirker’s undersheriff. Whereas Henry Wilcox was big and fleshy, Slade was long and lank, a mustache just as thick as a grooming brush sprouting from beneath his nose. It completely covered his mouth. Slade was a dependable man and a tough one. He regularly hunted down horse thieves and gunmen single-handedly in the mountains.
And right then he looked scared, looked weary…looked something.
“Sheriff,” he managed and that voice was filled with dread. “Sheriff…we got us a murder.”
Dirker stared at him, wondering why a simple killing had him so spooked to the point of being physically ill. But, deep down, he knew it would be nothing simple.
“Bad?” he said.
Slade nodded. “Dear Christ…I…I never seen nothing like it…”
12
Once upon a time, Sunrise had been a booming gold town, but the ore had all but played out within a year or two and now it was nothing more than a little placer camp. A collection of hollow-eyed buildings and skeletal cabins, it sat on a little gravel butte between two towering rises of shale that sheltered it from the elements. The town was maybe two miles as the crow flies from Whisper Lake, but in reality more than a dozen along treacherous roads that climbed steep hills and plunged into rugged canyons.
It was isolated, hard to reach, and pretty much forgotten in its remote location. Except by the placer miners that worked the mountain streams and the prospectors who came there but two, three times a year to provision up at the remaining general store. A place that was a combination store, brothel, assayer’s office, and saloon.
It had whiskey. It had women. It had gambling.
And for the hard luck miners that refused to move on when the real deposits dried up, it was home. If you broke your ass panning for gold from sunup to sundown, you might get a few nuggets…enough, at least, to keep you in whiskey and gambling until it was time to crawl off to one of the dozens of abandoned homes and buildings to sleep it off. Most of these places were little better than shacks. Many had been torn down for firewood. But if you weren’t too choosy and didn’t mind the wind howling through the walls or the rain dripping through the roof, you had yourself a bunk.
That was life in a failed mining town.
***
It was night and Sunrise was dark.
The red-earth that showed through clumps of witchgrass and broomweed had turned to mud with the passing of the storm. Everywhere, it seemed, water dripped and pooled and ran.
Jack Turner, pissed to the high seventh on Taos Lightening, was leaning up against a shack across the road from the store. He was shaking the dew off his lilyand pissing most of it right down his legwhen he saw the riders coming in down the high trail. Though his vision wasn’t much after all the juice he’d swallowed and the night was just blacker than a mineshaft, he could see that there were maybe six or seven of them.
Quiet forms on quiet mounts.
No talking, no laughing, no griping. No nothing. Just the sound of hooves sinking into that muck and being pulled out again. The rustle of cloth and the muted jingle of spurs and equipment. They rode down into the remains of Sunrise single-file in that busy flurry of silence.
Turner stood there, swaying, his business in his hand, thinking for one crazy moment that the riders’ eyes…all of them…shined a luminous yellow-green in the darkness. Like the eyes of wolves reflected by firelight. But then it was gone and he blinked, figured it was just the hooch kicking up hell in his brain.
Sometimes, you got a belly full of that stuff, you saw all sorts of things that weren’t there.
The riders came on, just as silent as tombstone marble. Turner was going to call out to them, but he was just too damn drunk.
He slipped into the shack, threw the bolt on the door so someone else wouldn’t fall on top of him, found his bedroll on the floor and it was enough for him, enough for one night. As he drifted off, the riders passed by his shack, then paused outside the store, their horses snorting. For one moment, Turner smelled something, something sharp and musky like the stench from a snakepit…but he did not acquaint it with the riders.
Maybe it was just his britches.
He passed out.
***
Inside the store, Hiley was telling a tall tale of a gigantic gold nugget he’d pulled out of a streambed in California during the big rush of ’49. How the damn thing was so heavy he near threw out his back dragging it up the hillside. Said it took two mules and three stout men to get it up into the assayer’s office there. “But I made it, all right,” he told them. “Shit if I didn’t. It kept me in booze, cards, and hot women for near two months. Maybe if I’d been smart, I’d have banked it, but, damn, nobody ever said I was smart.”
“Amen to that,” a scraggly miner said, tearing off a strip of jerky with his remaining teeth.
There was laughter at that.
Hiley laughed, too. He could afford to laugh. Of all the men in the room, Hiley was the only one really making it. He owned the store. He owned the rooms above. He took a juicy cut from what his whores took in. The booze was his. The barrels and sacks of dry goods. The sides of ham and salted beef. Anything worth having in Sunrise belonged to Hiley. He’d long ago given up hardrock mining, deciding and deciding wisely that there was more money to be made selling than digging and panning.
While most of the men in the room were a slat-thin, desperate-looking bunch whose worldly possessions consisted of a pick, a sluice box, and the ratty, stained clothes on their backs, Hiley was ruddy-cheeked with a belly just as round and full as a medicine ball. That gut was a source of endless barbs, but Hiley took them all, smiled, and proudly said it was merely a trapping of success. As he was often wont to point out: “When you got a tool like mine, boys, you gotta build a shed over it.”
There was a plank bar down one side and maybe a dozen grubby men pushed up to it. There were a few tables where the whores were working their prospects, trying to part the ragged, leather-faced men from the gold dust they’d collected in their buckskin pokes. Under the glare of hurricane lamps a half dozen others were playing a hand of poker with greasy cards and well-thumbed chips.
The whores were laughing, the men were drinking, the gamblers were losing…and all and all it was an average night in Sunrise and by dawn the only one richer would be Hiley.
The double-doors opened and two men in gray dusters stepped in. They wore wide-brimmed hats that thrust their faces into pools of shadow. Their eyes seemed to glisten like wet copper.
Everyone stopped what they were doing, watched the strangers.
The two of them stood there a moment, looking around, drinking it all in. Behind them, out in the darkness, a horse snorted…or something did. The strangers closed the doors. They looked on all and everyone with flat, dead eyes, hungry eyes. The eyes of wolves takin
g in a tasty herd of steer, wondering which one they would take down first.
The men looked at each other, nodded, then came into that crowded room just as smooth and oily as serpents sliding up out of a crevice. Their spurs rang out on the plank flooring, their dusters swished. They took their time, admiring the racks of picks and shovels, the barrels of salt pork and beans, the soiled doves working the miners. They seemed to like what they saw, grinning with smiles of narrow yellow teeth. One was bearded, the other clean-shaven with pitted scars along his jawline.
Together, they leaned against the bar, set identical sawed-off Remington pumps on its surface.
They did not speak and all eyes were on them.
Maybe everyone was smelling something bad coming off these two, some inexplicable, savage odor that turned their insides to sauce. Because it was definitely there. A strange and heady odor of slaughterhouses and bone pits. The smell, say, wild dogs might carry with them from hunting and scavenging, chewing on dead things.
Hiley managed to clear his throat of whatever was lodged in it. “You gents thirsty?” he asked.
The bearded one laughed and it was a hollow, barking sound. “You hear that, Hood? Man wants to know if we’re thirsty.” He laughed again. “You thirsty, son?”
Hood stroked that scarred jaw. “Reckon I am. But I don’t see my favorite drink distilled anywheres. Figure I’ll have to tap my own keg in my own way. You understand my meaning, Cook?”
“Suspect I do.”
A miner at the bar with a Remington model 1858 .44 hanging at his hip, said, “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”