Remington 1894

by William W. Johnstone

  “Hold your fire!” he yelled, and waited till his men stopped shooting. Then, after creeping a bit toward the front of the trading post, he laid down flat on the roof, and waited.

  The first slug exploded and whined off a rock or something. Butcher heard a curse, followed by the shattering of a plate, a glass, a bowl . . . something.

  “What the—” someone began, but then the fireplace turned into a Gatling gun.

  Butcher laughed, hearing the roar from the fireplace and muffled echoes escaping from the chimney behind him. Someone inside screamed. He glanced to the east, saw the white top of the moon clearing the trees. Wetting his lips, he waited.

  “Bastards!” A man stepped out, levering a Winchester rifle, shooting into the darkness.

  Dirk Mannagan’s Colt Thunderer barked, and the man spun around, giving Moses Butcher a clear aim at the Indian as he fell onto his knees in the dirt beside the outlaw’s dead horse.

  Butcher squeezed the trigger.

  The cannon fire inside the building slowly stopped. Another bullet popped a few seconds later. Then one more. Silence followed, but soon a new noise came from the inside. The moaning of someone maimed, likely riddled with lead. Butcher had not counted just how many rounds he had dropped into the chimney, but his plan had worked.

  “Mannagan,” he called out.

  The gunman rose from behind the dead horse, his left hand hanging limp at its side, blood dripping from his fingers.

  “Check it out.”

  Dirk Mannagan looked up as Butcher stood on the roof. He wet his lips, and started toward the doorway when an ear-splitting shriek cut through the night again.

  Mannagan brought the .41-caliber pistol up, but tripped over one of the dead horse’s legs and fell to the ground as the figure raced from the building, wielding a hatchet.

  Butcher shot the woman in her back. She crumpled, rolled over, and glared at him as he leaped off the roof.

  By then, Greaser Gomez and Milt Hanks had rounded the building, along with Miami and Bitter Page. Gomez, Miami, and Page went through the doorway. Gomez’s pistol barked. The moaning ceased.

  The woman coughed, turned her head, and saw the hatchet she had dropped. She reached for it, but Butcher’s boot stepped on her hand, and she grimaced, but did not scream.

  “Feisty, ain’t you?” Butcher pressed down harder and holstered his Colt. “But I like that in a woman, especially an injun squaw.” The moon climbed higher, bathing the compound in white light. He could see his brother coming toward him and Zuni standing up behind the water trough. He could see the dead horses, the lame ones, the played out ones, and those wonderful horses, fresh and full of life in the corrals. He saw Cherry running out of the barn and sprinting across the yard.

  Sliding to a stop in front of Butcher, Cherry said,

  “I found some Indian ponies in the barn, boss.” The gunman gasped to catch his breath.

  “And now you tell us,” Butcher said.

  Cherry took several steps back, horror and fear registering on his face.

  Butcher laughed.

  “Just don’t let nothin’ like that happen again, Cherry.” He stared at the squaw and unbuckled his gun belt.

  CHAPTER 16

  Just past full, the moon had risen . . . but the light found only a few paths through the thick forest. For the fifth time, Emory Logan fell over the mule’s side, landing hard on the trail that ran west of the Phoenix road. He rolled out of the way as Dan Kilpatrick and John McMasters reined in their horses.

  “Hold up!” McMasters called. He could see the woman, Mary Lovelace, leading the way.

  She stopped her mule and turned it around, waiting. The other killers also stopped theirs. Swearing underneath his breath, Alamo Carter even swung down off the animal he rode, and grabbed the hackamore on Logan’s, stopping it from running up the trail a bit.

  Logan sat up, rubbing his shoulder, his long legs and worn boots sticking out on the road.

  “I hate mules. They ain’t good for nothin’!” He spit in the general direction of McMasters and Kilpatrick.

  “Get up,” McMasters said. “And back on.”

  “Hell, man . . . how you expect us to catch up to ’em bad men . . . with us on mules?”

  “Stay on and we won’t have to stop so much to pick up your worthless hide,” McMasters said.

  The big slave dropped the end of the hackamore to Logan’s left. “Thought you hailed from Missouri.”

  “What’s it to you?” the one-time Confederate bushwhacker snapped.

  “Ain’t Missouri knowed for mules?” Carter walked back to his own mule. He was so big, it would have looked downright comical how his legs practically dragged across the dirt, but nothing struck John McMasters as even halfway funny anymore.

  “Get up,” McMasters said again.

  “We need—”

  McMasters brought up the Remington. “We need you to stay on the back of your mule for longer than fifteen minutes.”

  “Then get me a damned saddle.”

  “You’ll get a saddle—maybe even some hot grub—when we get to Aztec’s post.” He lowered the shotgun as the Reb got to his knees, rose gently, and took the hackamore in his left hand.

  “How about weapons?” the Mexican asked.

  “In time.” McMasters watched Logan move to the high ground, and use that to help him leap onto the mule. He almost slid off immediately, but grabbed the mane tightly. The mule let out an angry hee-haw, kicked with its back legs, and snorted. Somehow, Emory Logan managed to stay on its back, and the mule stopped its bucking almost as fast as it had started.

  “You see,” McMasters said. “It’s not that hard.”

  “Easy fer ya to say. Ya’s sittin’ in a slick-fork saddle.”

  “Move.”

  Grumbling and cursing, Emory Logan kicked the mule. The redhead turned her animal around and began climbing the hills. The others followed in single file, moving slowly, letting the mules pick their own way up the rocky slope.

  McMasters had ordered them off the trail when they’d come to a stream. Any posse following, he had figured, would think they would have turned downstream, which would take them to Tonto Creek. Easier country than moving into the hell that was the Mazatzals.

  The name came from some Indians down in Mexico, and meant “Land of the Deer.” But so far, all McMasters had seen had been two tarantulas, one greater short-horned lizard, and a Gila monster that had almost spooked his own horse. Farther to the west, the mountains turned into short hills, covered by brush and rocks that became the Sonoran Desert and left the Verde River as a sandy wash. Where they were, the mountains could see snow in the winter. Pines rustled in the wind, and McMasters knew they would be entering a high-walled canyon soon. His posse would have no choice but to ride single file through it.

  That was one reason he had made them take it.

  He thought back to what Bloody Zeke The Younger had said before they had ridden away from the tumbleweed wagon and the covered body of poor Royal Andersen. He, too, had quoted from Revelation, as if he had read McMasters’s mind or had been hiding in the brush when McMasters had ridden away from the embers and smoke and that smell of death at his ranch off the Rim Road—an impossibility, McMasters knew. Bloody Zeke had been in Andersen’s wagon by then, shackled to the floor with chains.

  “ ‘And I looked,’ ” Bloody Zeke had said, “ ‘and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’” Laughing, he had swept off his hat, and called out to McMasters. “Lead the way, Death, and we shall follow you.”

  McMasters had shaken his head slowly.

  “I’m no fool. You don’t ever get behind me.”

  As further precaution, he didn’t even let Daniel Kilpatrick get behind him. The young deputy marshal rode at McMasters’s right.

  An hour later, with the moon rising high over their heads, they came to the canyon. The woman had stopped, waiting, and the gambler had dismounted, handing his mule’
s rope to Emilio Vasquez. Patton walked to a bush, unbuttoned his trousers, and began urinating. McMasters and Kilpatrick stopped their horses, McMasters keeping the shotgun leveled just ahead of him, Kilpatrick stretching, kicking his boots from the stirrups, and twisting his feet this way and that.

  “Are we going through that?” Bloody Zeke nodded at the entrance to the canyon.

  “Yeah.”

  “At night?”

  “We’re not waiting till daybreak.”

  “That moon won’t be shining on us for long,” Bloody Zeke said. “Be blacker than the ace of spades.”

  “Then be glad you’re riding a mule. Better footing. Better eyesight.”

  The gambler returned, stuffing his shirtfront into his britches, and took the rope from the Mexican killer. “Be a right handy place for an ambush,” he said before he leaped onto his mule’s back.

  Four of his companions laughed. The redheaded woman said nothing.

  “Ever seen what buckshot can do to a man when it ricochets off granite?” McMasters said. “Tears through a man like grapeshot. Get moving.”

  The laughter died, and Mary Lovelace guided her mule into the dark, narrow opening.

  The walls stood high and rocky, but thin. In some ways, it was like a slot canyon, prone to flash floods during thunderstorms, but the animals found just enough water to soak fetlocks, nothing higher. And the canyon was too narrow for Emory Logan to slide off the mule. If he slipped, he would just bounce against a rock wall.

  “What happens—” The gambler stopped. Spooked by his echo in the darkness, he lowered his voice. “If we come to a rockslide?”

  McMasters did not reply for he had no answer. There wouldn’t be enough room to turn the horses around, and backing up horses and mules out of that hell would slam the door on his chances. He simply rode through the doorway, seeing nothing, just hearing the hooves, the echoes, and labored breathing.

  He didn’t know if the canyon had a name, but he had always called it The Doorway . . . which is what it was. For years, he had used it as a shortcut. Not for chasing mustangs. Horses would not go through a canyon like it unless forced to by a man like John McMasters. Men did not like traveling through it, either.

  A gray light appeared almost as suddenly as the blackness had covered them, and a star twinkled overhead. McMasters breathed easier, seeing the outlines of the riders ahead of him as the trail widened.

  “Ride ahead when you’re through The Doorway,” he called out, his words bouncing off the rocks, but without much of an echo. “If I don’t see six of you spread out on the hilltop when I come out, I shoot to kill.”

  Ahead of him, he saw Daniel Kilpatrick slip his revolver out of its holster. McMasters wet his lips. The gray light was merely the sky, shining brighter because of the moon. Kilpatrick eased his horse through the wide slot, moving to the left.

  McMasters rode through on the right, keeping the twelve-gauge aimed across his body and the saddle.

  “Whoa.” He tugged on the reins, and the buckskin stopped.

  Five men. One woman. All on their mules, awash in the rays of the moon.

  The Doorway opened, if you were entering it from the north, in the Mogollon Rim country. When you came out on the other side, the coolness of the Rim, the scent of pine and rosin and sometimes turpentine, vanished, and you smelled dust and desert and, every now and then, a sweet scent of desert blooms. But it was too late in the year to smell spring. Behind Mary Lovelace he saw the first saguaro desert.

  This, he always told himself, was the beginning of the Sonoran Desert.

  It was where hell really began.

  “Well?” Bloody Zeke asked.

  “Slide off.” Using the buckskin to cover his dismount, McMasters slipped to the ground and braced the shotgun across the saddle, watching his hired men climb off the backs of the mules. Off to his left, Daniel Kilpatrick holstered the revolver and dropped to his feet.

  “Give the mules a breather,” McMasters said.

  “Water?” Patton asked.

  “No water for the animals. We’ll water them when we reach Bear’s place.”

  “I’m not talking about the damned mules,” the gambler said. “I meant for us.”

  “Carter,” McMasters said.

  “Yeah.”

  McMasters unhooked one of the canteens with his left hand, and moved around the buckskin, staying close, practically touching the animal so he wouldn’t frighten it, cause it to kick, maybe crush his skull. Once he cleared any potential danger, he held up the canteen. The slave understood and took a few steps.

  “Close enough,” McMasters told him and tossed the canteen, which the big man caught easily.

  McMasters watched, curious. The giant Negro turned and went to the woman, uncorking the canteen and handing it to her.

  He started to bark an order, but to McMasters’s surprise, Alamo Carter beat him to it. “One sip, ma’am. But make it a good swallow. No more than one swallow.”

  She tilted her head up, staring at him.

  “We’re in the desert now, ma’am. Water’s precious.”

  “Hell!” Marcus Patton said. “You said we’d be at that trading post before long. They’ll have water.”

  “Maybe,” McMasters said. “Maybe not. Carter’s right. One swallow. We save our water from here on out.”

  The woman drank. Then Bloody Zeke. The ex-slave turned Army scout turned man-killer let the gambler drink, and then Emilio Vasquez. At length, Alamo Carter walked to Emory Logan.

  John McMasters grinned without mirth. He knew what was coming. It wasn’t funny, but it was justice. As the fiend who rode with Quantrill reached for the canteen, Alamo Carter lifted the canteen and drank. He swallowed only once, but he held that canteen up and on his lips for the longest while. With an exaggerated sigh of pleasure, he wiped his lips with one massive arm and used the other to extend the canteen toward Emory Logan.

  “I ain’t drinkin’ after him,” Logan said. The lean, one-eyed killer whirled toward McMasters. “You fetch me another canteen!”

  “No,” McMasters said.

  The killer folded his bony arms across his chest.

  “Then I ain’t thirsty.” His voice, however, revealed just how much of a lie he had spoken.

  “Suit yourself.” McMasters drank from his own canteen, saw Kilpatrick doing the same, then he moved back to the front of the horse. “Keep the canteen, Carter,” McMasters called out, “in case Logan changes his mind.” He could trust the old scout . . . at least when it came to one canteen. He glanced at the moon, frowning. How much time had he given Moses Butcher? He should get his “hired hands” moving, covering as much ground as possible, but he knew better. The animals had not been pushed hard, but that canyon tested the nerves of men and beast. Five minutes, he told himself. Ten.

  “Rest,” he said. “But you”—he waved the Remington at Mary Lovelace—“come over here.”

  The Reb laughed. “Want some horizontal refreshments, mister? Then do we all gets a turn? I don’t mind seconds.”

  “One more word, Logan, and you’ll get both barrels.”

  The man cursed. The woman led her mule through cactus and killers, and stopped a few feet in front of McMasters.

  He lowered the shotgun, butt to the ground, and leaned it against a boulder. It had grown so heavy he found it impossible to hold for another minute. He flexed his fingers, trying to get the blood flowing again. He did not realize how tightly he had been gripping the Remington. “Back at the wagon, you said something about Butcher making a beeline for the Superstitions.”

  “I did.” She wasn’t going to offer anything. Closelipped. Like all of the others . . . except the bushwhacking killer from Missouri.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why?” he demanded.

  “Why would anyone ride into that country?”

  “The Lost Dutchman’s Mine?” McMasters shook his head. “He’s not that loco.”

  “Isn’t he?”


  “With a posse on his trail?”

  She grinned. “Posse wouldn’t look for him there. And it’s country that only fools enter.”

  “Or hopeless causes trying to find a mine that never existed,” McMasters pointed out.

  “That’s Moses Butcher,” Bloody Zeke said from where he sat on a rock several yards away.

  McMasters thought about that, shook his head, and stared directly into Mary Lovelace’s eyes. He could not see their greenness at that time of night and with the moon behind her back.

  “The Superstitions,” McMasters said to himself.

  “That all you want from me?” the woman said.

  McMasters shot a glance at Dan Kilpatrick.

  “Where did you pick up Bloody Zeke?”

  “Miami,” Kilpatrick answered.

  South of here. Closer to Globe than the Superstition Mountains, but close enough, McMasters figured. It had been a big mining town in the 1870s, silver and gold, and once those played out, the miners had started to find some interest in digging for copper. It wasn’t as big as Globe, and a man could cut up across the desert from there and get to the Superstitions without being seen by many folks.

  Ten minutes had not passed, but McMasters changed his mind about how much rest the animals needed. “Get your mules. We’re moving out. You’ll walk the animals till I tell you to mount. Now, move. South. Single file. Watch for cactus. The spines hurt like a bastard. Watch for rattlesnakes. Fangs hurt even worse.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The Dutchman, if John McMasters remembered right, had been called Waltz. Jacob Waltz. He had arrived in Arizona Territory when McMasters had been shooting Sharps rifles at unsuspecting Confederates at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Some folks said he had been a farmer, others a merchant, and most called him a rake. But he definitely had money. At least, that’s what folks said around Payson and across much of the territory. Gold. Typically, he dealt in gold, and those riches, those nuggets and dust, had not come from his homestead on the Salt River.

  From the stories McMasters had heard—he had never met or even seen Jacob Waltz—the Dutchman would leave his farm every winter from a few years after the Civil War to maybe a decade or so ago. He’d come back with gold. Some folks tried to follow him, but he was like a mountain goat and an Apache. Nobody could track him. Nobody could find him or his mine.