Dead Man’s Hand

by John Joseph Adams

  The Indians didn’t like it. After getting pushed around for years, Sioux holy men like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were on the warpath, trying to drive off the miners, much as they’d tried to hold off the homesteaders and buffalo hunters.

  Only this time, the way Morgan figured it, there was going to be a bloodbath. You can only steal so much from a man before he has to push back. Morgan didn’t fancy blundering into such a mess. Some Sioux had big magic.

  At dawn he rode east toward Frenchman’s Ferry, climbing over the hills. A day later, he found a single skinwalker’s track between two boulders, in a land covered by worn sandstone rocks and sparse grasses. The creature had been leaping from boulder to boulder, hiding its trail. But it had come to a place where the rocks were too far apart.

  Like many skinwalkers, Coyote Shadow had turned himself into a beast once too often, and now he’d lost himself. His print was something halfway between a human foot and a bear’s paw. Coyote Shadow had become only half a man.

  Much like me, Morgan thought. He’d carried a torch for Sherman, had forced womenfolk from their houses and set entire cities aflame. Sometimes folks had refused to leave their homes, and he’d heard the women screaming in the fires.

  He forced down the memories.

  Morgan slid from his saddle and studied the print. The dusty ground here had given easily, yielding a deep track with crisp ridges. The track looked fresh—hours old.

  Morgan searched the bleak landscape: sandstone thrusting up from broken ground, dry grass and sage, and little else.

  During the heat of the day, any sane Indian would have stopped in the shade, though there wasn’t much of it here to take solace in.

  Morgan’s mare nickered and shied back a step, as if she’d caught a dangerous scent.

  Morgan sniffed. Between the iron odor of rocks and dry grass, he smelled an undertone—like garlic rubbed in fur.

  A skinwalker.

  He’d been hunting the creature for months, and now he resented finding it. He was on his way to kill the clockwork gambler.

  But justice demanded that he finish this monster.

  He searched uphill. A pile of sandstone boulders stood at its crown, with a single rock jutting up from it in a small pinnacle. Yucca plants and a few junipers grew tall in the pinnacle’s shadow.

  The skinwalker is up there, Morgan realized. He could be watching me.

  Morgan studied the shadows. Nothing stirred. Perhaps the skinwalker was sleeping.

  Morgan tied his pony to a mesquite bush, pulled his Winchester from the saddle holster, and began picking his way uphill, weaving behind rocks and bushes in case the skinwalker tried to take a long shot.

  Fifteen minutes later, Morgan reached the rocks, and in the shade of a juniper found some crushed grass where the skinwalker had bedded. He’d left only moments ago.

  Biting his lip, Morgan leapt to the far side of the rock and scanned the landscape. He saw the skinwalker, rushing uphill toward the next ridge, a lumbering mound of shaggy fur. His long arms swung with every stride, and he ran low to the ground, like an ape, but Coyote Shadow still wore the scrap of a loincloth. He moved fast, faster than a horse could run.

  The creature was more than two hundred yards out, and as he neared the ridge, he turned and glanced back.

  Morgan had time for one shot before the sorcerer escaped. He crouched behind a rock and steadied his aim. The skinwalker saw him, whirled, and doubled his speed.

  Morgan’s hands shook. Mouth went dry. Heart pounded. He gasped.

  Buck fever.

  He didn’t want it to end this way—shooting the skinwalker in the back. Morgan had imagined catching Coyote Shadow, taking him to some town where a judge would see that he was hanged proper.

  Morgan forced himself to stop breathing, lined the skinwalker up in his sights, and squeezed gently.

  The rifle cracked and jumped in his hands. The skinwalker didn’t jerk or stumble. Instead, his stride seemed clean, uninterrupted, as he disappeared over the hill.

  Still, that didn’t mean that Morgan hadn’t wounded the beast. Morgan once had seen a rebel lieutenant die in combat—he charged into battle, swinging a sword in one hand and shooting a revolver from the other while bullet holes blossomed on his chest like roses. “Charging Dead,” Morgan called it.

  So he took note of the place where the skinwalker had stood as Morgan fired, near a large rock with a yucca plant, then hurried to the spot.

  He found the monster’s tracks and studied the ground for blood, a clump of hair, hoping for or any other sign that the skinwalker was wounded.

  Morgan tracked the monster over one ridge, then another.

  As the sun began to wallow on the horizon in a leaden sky, and bats wove through the air, he admitted defeat. Not a drop of blood could be found. He’d missed.

  * * *

  That night, the moon hid beneath bands of clouds, and a south wind from the Gulf of Mexico smelled of rain. Morgan camped without a fire, not wanting to risk setting the prairie alight.

  He couldn’t sleep. He’d ruined Coyote Shadow’s rest, and he worried that the skinwalker might come creeping into his camp, hoping for vengeance. So for long hours, Morgan lay quietly listening for the crunch of a foot in the prairie soil with his pistol in hand, just beneath his blanket.

  As the hours stretched, he dozed sporadically, but would wake again with a start. A screech owl hunted nearby, flying low, shrieking every few minutes as it tried to startle mice from their hiding places.

  Long after midnight, Morgan decided to relax and put his hat over his eyes. Suddenly it was knocked away, and he rose up and fired blindly, just as the owl winged off.

  His hat lay on the ground next to him. The bird had swooped low and struck it. Apparently the bit of rabbit fur on the brim looked too much like a varmint to the owl.

  Morgan turned over, indignant, and after many minutes he slid into an uneasy slumber.

  He dreamt that he was in a shop, where a tinkerman with a big, white handlebar moustache and penetrating blue eyes worked at piecing together clockwork soldiers.

  One soldier lay like a patient on a surgeon’s table. The tinkerman had its chest cavity open and was grasping something inside: it was a huge golden coil spring, nearly lost amid gears and pistons. Part pocket watch, part steam engine, the insides of the clockwork soldier were somehow more greasy and filthy than Morgan had imagined they could be.

  The tinkerman nodded toward a crate and said in a deep Georgia drawl, “Son, would you be so kind as to fish a heart outta that box?”

  The shop had bits and pieces of clockwork everywhere: a shelf of expressionless faces, waiting to come to life; arms and legs hanging from the rafters like dry sausages in a Mexican cantina; tubes and gizmos lying in heaps on counters and on the floor.

  Morgan looked into the box. He found dozens of hearts in it, barely beating, covered in grease and oil, black and ugly.

  Morgan picked up the largest, strongest-looking one. It throbbed in his grip, almost slipping away. He handed it to the tinkerman.

  “Much obliged,” the tinkerman said.

  He thrust the heart into the contraption, piercing it through with the gold coil, and the clockwork soldier jolted to life—hands flexing, a strangled cry rising from its throat. Its mouth opened, and it whined stupidly, like an animal in pain.

  The tinkerman smiled in satisfaction. “Perfect.”

  Somehow, that pronouncement scared him. Would the clockwork gambler that he was hunting be “perfect?” It sounded presumptuous.

  Morgan wondered at that. He said, “When God made man, he only allowed that his creation was ‘good.’”

  The tinkerman glanced up, lips tight in anger, eyes twinkling. “God, sir, was not a perfectionist. He failed as an organism. We superseded him.”

  “Superseded?”

  The tinkerman smiled cruelly. “He drove Adam from the Garden of Idunn. In some tales, afterward, Adam made a spear and sneaked up on God while he was sleeping�
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  Morgan woke, wondering. He’d heard in the war that God was dead. He never heard any legends, though, about how it happened.

  * * *

  Morgan woke with a start, afraid that someone was sneaking up on him. He lay still for several minutes, listening for the crackle of a footfall. Thin clouds filled the sky, which was beginning to lighten on the horizon. Morning would not be far off.

  Small birds flitted about in a nearby sage. Here in the desert, most birds were silent, unwilling to call attention to themselves.

  Morgan felt that something was wrong.

  Suddenly, he realized that he hadn’t heard anything amiss. It was what he didn’t hear that bothered him—his horse. He lurched to his feet, swung his pistol around, and peered into the shadows.

  His horse was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  Coyote Shadow had circled Morgan, stolen his food, his hat, his rifle, and his horse.

  Morgan must have worn himself out, trying to keep watch. The skinwalker could have killed him in his sleep, but this Indian was more interested in counting coup, humiliating Morgan, than taking his scalp.

  “Hope you’re getting a good chuckle out of this!” Morgan shouted to the horizon.

  He turned away from the skinwalker’s path and set off for Frenchman’s Ferry.

  Morgan wasn’t the kind of man to chew on regret. In life, he believed that you have to do the best you can. Sometimes you succeeded, sometimes you failed.

  He’d lost Coyote Shadow, and by now the renegade was probably heading to join up with Crazy Horse’s men; either that or he’d gone up into the aspen forests in the high country. Morgan figured he’d never see Coyote Shadow again.

  Yet he began to regret missing his shot at the skinwalker. He wondered about his buck fever—the shaking hands, the dry mouth.

  Too many men, when they get in a gunfight, will draw and fire wild, hitting only empty air. That’s what gets them killed. A more experienced man will take a moment to aim—half a second, if need be—and thus shoot his opponent.

  Morgan was fast on the draw and had a steady aim, but he’d gotten buck fever.

  His failure seemed a portent.

  The clockwork gambler wouldn’t suffer from human debilities. He wouldn’t get excited and drop his gun. He wouldn’t get a case of tremors. He wouldn’t pause because he was having an attack of conscience.

  He would just kill.

  In some ways, Morgan realized, he’s better than me.

  Morgan survived the next two days off strips of sliced prickly pear cactus, which tasted like green beans, and yucca fruit, which were more like potatoes. The odd jack rabbit added protein to the fare.

  Four days after meeting the stranger, Morgan was hobbling along on sore feet, thirty miles from Fort Laramie. If the stranger was right, someone would get killed today. Morgan wouldn’t be there to stop it.

  When he reached Frenchman’s Ferry, down on the North Platte, he spotted a miserable little log shack. Bear traps, snowshoes, and other durable goods hung outside. A pair of dogs—half mastiff and half wolf—guarded the door. Its smokestack was roiling, even in the heat of the day, producing black clouds of smoke.

  A bevy of greenhorns had just left the post, heading north into the wilderness.

  Morgan hurried inside.

  At the counter, an aging squaw sat with a basket of big turkey eggs. She hunched over a lightbox—a box with a mirror on one wall, and an oil lamp in the middle. By holding an egg up to the contraption, a person could check it for cracks or the blobs of half-formed fetuses.

  The squaw’s blouse was white with red polka dots—a Cheyenne design. But she wore buckskin pants like a trapper, and her perfume smelled imported. She didn’t spare him a glance.

  “Look around,” she offered in that Indian way that was more “careful” than “slow.” The shop was filled with merchandise—tins of crackers, barrels of pickles, beans, rice and wheat. On the wall behind the counter were hunting knives, a pair of shotguns—and above them hung Morgan’s Winchester.

  So the skinwalker had been here.

  The gun didn’t interest him right now. The skinwalker had stolen it fair and square. He’d counted coup and sold the gun. No sense arguing with the squaw about who owned it. Morgan would just embarrass himself by admitting that it had once been his.

  Of everything in the shop, the things that most interested him were those eggs. Hunger gnawed at him. When Morgan was a child, his ma had often sold eggs to folks in town. She’d taught him young how to handle one, to check it for damage.

  “Is Black Pierre around?” Morgan ventured.

  “Gone for supplies,” the squaw said. “Back in three, four days.”

  The squaw was turning an egg experimentally, studying it. She didn’t look up. Morgan could see how judging such an egg might be difficult. Most chicken eggs were a uniform tan in color. Finding blood spots inside was easy. But these eggs were white, with big specks on them—some sand-colored, others more like liverworts. The shells were thicker than a chicken egg.

  “I’d be right happy to buy some turkey eggs off of you,” Morgan offered.

  “Not turkey eggs,” the squaw said, “thunderbird! Traders brought them in this morning. Found them in an old geyser vent over in Sulfur Springs.”

  Morgan had never seen a thunderbird egg before. Back east, they were called “snakebirds” but had been extinct for at least a hundred years. Down in Mexico, the Spaniards had called them quetzals, and some of the tribes still prayed to the critters.

  “Want to see?” the squaw asked.

  She held an egg to the hole in the lightbox, and Morgan peered in. Sure enough, the light shining through the egg was bright enough to reveal the embryo inside—a birdlike head with a snake’s body. Many of its bones were still gelatinous, but he could see its guts forming, a tiny heart beating. Its scales were still almost translucent, just beginning to turn purple.

  “Well, I’ll be!” Morgan whispered. “Didn’t know as there were any snakebirds left. They’re fading faster than the buffalo.”

  “Mmm…” the squaw mused. “The world must get rid of the old wonders, so that it can make way for the new.”

  Morgan thought on that. He’d seen some of the last real buffalo herds as a child, darkening the plains of Kansas. Now the railroads were coming, and the railroad men were killing the buffalo off. The big herds were a danger to trains.

  He imagined the clockwork gambler. Would such things someday replace men?

  “Those eggs for sale?” Morgan asked.

  “Not to you. They’re for the Sioux—big medicine.”

  “How much you reckon to get?”

  “My scalp,” she said. “The Sioux slaughtered General Custer last week at the Little Bighorn. I’m going to need some gifts, to make peace.”

  Morgan didn’t have a lot of money. He was able to buy back his pony and his hat at the trading post, but couldn’t afford his rifle.

  He set off down the Platte toward Fort Laramie, riding overland, well south of the river, far away from the pioneer trails where the Sioux would concentrate their patrols.

  When he reached Fort Laramie, the post was full.

  People of every kind had taken refuge just outside the fortress walls in tents and teepees—gold miners, fur trappers, homesteaders on the Oregon and California trails, Mormon converts from England and Denmark on their way to Utah, railroad workers of the Chinese, Irish, Dutch, and Negro persuasions, Omaha Indians and a few Comanches, Bible thumpers. Morgan had rarely seen such liveliness on the frontier.

  He heard a rumor that there was a plague merchant in town—with bottles of black death and boxes of locust larvae.

  Hell, there was even a freak show in town with a three-headed woman, an elephant, and a genuine Egyptian mummy.

  The town hadn’t seen rain in weeks, and so as Morgan entered the fortress, he found a rainmaker at the front gates—pounding a huge drum that sounded for the world like the crashing of thunder.
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  “Come, wind!” the rainmaker shouted. “Arise ye tempest, I say! Let your water soak the gnarly ground. Let cactus flowers bloom, while toads claw up from the mud!”

  Morgan sat on his horse and studied the slim man—a tall beardless fellow in a fine top hat and tails, who roared as he drummed and stared off toward a few clouds on the horizon like a lunatic, with manic eyes and a grim smile.

  The clouds were drawing near, blackening from moment to moment.

  Morgan tossed a penny into the man’s cup. “Keep your eyes on them clouds, Preach,” Morgan said. “Don’t let ’em sneak off.”

  “Thank you, good sir,” the rainmaker said, pausing to wipe sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. “There will be rain soon. Mark my word.”

  Morgan didn’t want the clockwork gambler to know that he was hunting for him. But the rainmaker seemed like a trustworthy fellow. He hazarded, “I’m looking for a clockwork gambler. Seen him?”

  “You a friend of his?” the preacher asked. His tone became a bit formal, suspicious, and he backed away an inch.

  In answer, Morgan pulled the badge from his pocket, a star made of nickel.

  “You’re too late,” the preacher said. “He went on a rampage yesterday. He was sitting quiet at a card table, and suddenly pulled out his gun and shot a showgirl. There was a big row. Some cavalrymen drew steel, and seven men died in the firefight. The gambler escaped.”

  “See which way he went?”

  The rainmaker nodded toward the clouds. In just the few moments since they’d begun speaking, Morgan realized that they’d shrunk and had begun to drift away. “He headed off into the High Frontier, where no one can give chase. There won’t be no posse. Major Wiggins has got more trouble than he can handle, with them Sioux.”

  Morgan had heard tales of the High Frontier, but he’d never been there. Few men had. There had always been stories of castles in the clouds, but truth is far stranger than fiction.

  “How’d he fly?” Morgan asked.

  “Private yacht. He won it in a poker game.”