Hell's Half Acre

by William W. Johnstone

  Ahead, he saw the river, and now all of the horses slowed down. Oh, no one stopped. The leader jumped off what passed for a bank, and Dooley and the men riding on either side followed.

  The water felt good as it splashed over Dooley’s wind-burned, mud-blasted, sweaty face. General Grant’s hooves found solid bottom, and the gelding pushed through the water toward the shore.

  This, if Dooley had his bearings straight, would be the Platte River. Wide, but not that deep, even after all those thunderstorms and being fairly close to where the river flowed into the Missouri. It was wet, though, and Dooley took a moment to scoop up some with his right hand. He splashed it across his face, repeated that process, then found another handful and brought it to his mouth. There wasn’t that much to swallow, but what did go down his throat felt good, replenishing, but most of the wetness just soothed his dried, chapped lips.

  The two riders on his left and right pulled ahead of him, but Dooley knew better than to try to escape now. He tried to think up various options, but no matter what idea came to him, the end result most likely would lead to Dooley Monahan’s quick and merciful death. Unless Handley or Dobbs decided to stake him out on an ant bed, cut off his eyelids so the sun would burn his eyeballs out before the ants started eating him alive. Then that death wouldn’t be anything close to quick or merciful, but it would most certainly be eternal death.

  Those three riders had reached the banks about twenty yards ahead of Dooley now. He heard horses snorting, and men grunting behind him.

  Water cascaded off the horses as they climbed up the bank. The riders—that bearded man on the buckskin mare, the man in the deerskin shirt, with a cheekful of chewing tobacco, on the powerful black stallion, and the puny gent in the striped britches, who rode a brown and white pinto mustang—turned around, drew their revolvers, cocked them, and waited.

  The Platte began to get even shallower, and soon General Grant was carrying Dooley out of the wide patch of wetness. Behind him came the other riders, who grunted or cursed or farted. Dooley let his bay horse pick its own path up the bank until he reined in in front of the three men. He stared down the barrels of a Smith & Wesson, a Colt, and a Remington. Behind him he heard another noise.

  You never forget what a rattlesnake sounds like. Maybe you think you know how it sounds—or how it makes you feel—but once you hear that rattle, you know exactly what it sounds like and you know it will practically make you wet your britches.

  Quite similar to the whirl of a rattler is the cocking of a single-action revolver . . . the thumbing back of two hammers on a double-barreled shotgun, and the levering of a fresh cartridge into a Winchester or Henry rifle or carbine. Those were the sounds coming from behind Dooley Monahan.

  Not the rattlesnake, of course. Not that sound. Though right then, Dooley would have preferred it to those metallic clicks.

  Dooley eased the reins down, letting them drop in front of the horn. The horn he gripped with both hands, and leaning forward, he nodded his head at the men in front of him.

  “Who the hell be you?”

  That came from the man in the deerskin shirt. He wore a wide-brimmed dirty hat that might once have been white but had been dirtied up and sweated through over some years. Or it could have been gray, but had been faded from so much alkali dust and the blistering sun of the Great Plains. Dooley didn’t think the hat had ever been black.

  Brown juice came out of the man’s mouth like he had opened a spigot, and he wiped the tobacco juice off his lips with a gloved left hand. The right held that cannon of a pistol, a Smith & Wesson that looked just a tad smaller than a cannon. He was the biggest of the men, which explained why he rode that giant black stallion. Dooley couldn’t quite guess, but he had to figure the man stood six-foot-four in his boot heels, and had to weigh around two hundred and forty pounds. Maybe more.

  “Name’s Dooley,” Dooley said. “Dooley Monahan.”

  The bearded man on the buckskin mare pursed his lips as if in deep thought. Thinking did not mean the man took the .45 caliber Colt away from Dooley’s chest. He just thought.

  He appeared to be more medium size, maybe not even as tall as Dooley, but tougher than a railroad tie and maybe twice as solid. Muscles strained through his muslin shirt, and Dooley couldn’t quite remember when he had ever seen a beard that long on any man. There had been that woman back at that circus in Davenport that time, but you expected that when you paid two bits to see the bearded lady at a circus in Davenport. Her beard didn’t seem real, though. This gent’s certainly wasn’t glued on.

  “We ain’t got no one goin’ by Dooley in this gang, does we?” the man on the massive black mount finally asked.

  “Ain’t got nobody usin’ the handle Monahans, neither.”

  That sentence came from the third cuss, the one with the striped britches. He was puny. A spring wind might have carried him off like the furs on whatever those weeds with the furlike tops were called. Puny, and pale, with the coldest blue eyes Dooley had ever seen, sunk way back in his head. His blond hair, soaked by sweat and some Platte River water, hung like greasy rawhide strings. He was even uglier than that bearded lady back at that circus eighteen months back in Davenport, Iowa.

  The man seemed so sickly, the big Smith & Wesson never steadied in his pasty white hand, but neither did it ever exactly not aim at one of Dooley’s vital organs.

  “Monahan,” Dooley corrected. “No s. Just Monahan. Dooley Monahan.”

  He thought if he kept talking, they might not kill him.

  “Shut up,” barked the man on the black horse.

  “Kill him, and let’s ride,” said the one on the buckskin mare. “Posse’ll be chasin’ us directly.”

  “How did you come to be ridin’ with us?” asked the sickly one on the pinto. “Dooley Monahans.” He stressed the last name and especially the s on the end of it, even though it wasn’t Dooley’s name.

  Dooley shrugged, but kept gripping that saddle horn. If he let go, those men would think he was going for his Colt, and he’d be plugged before he could explain by a .45, .38, and .44 bullet—and no telling what calibers or gauges from the men behind him.

  “Came to Omaha to stock up,” Dooley said honestly. “Was riding out down that main street when you boys started whooping and hollering and riding.”

  “And shooting,” said someone behind him.

  “And shooting,” Dooley added.

  The men behind Dooley chuckled. The ones in front of him did not even blink or crack a smile.

  “Y’all kind of swept me up,” Dooley went on. “Wasn’t anything I could do but keep riding. If I stopped, you would have run over me. That would’ve caused quite the spill. Probably got one of you boys caught, if not killed.”

  “We’re obliged to you for that,” said another voice behind him.

  “Do you know who we are?” asked the tobacco-chewing man on the big black.

  Dooley’s mouth went dry. He could only shake is head.

  “Hubert,” came the first voice behind him. “My horse’s gone lame.”

  “Now do you know who we are?” The man spit out more tobacco juice and shifted the quid to the opposite cheek.

  Dooley just swallowed, but what he swallowed was mostly air. His mouth felt dried out like his skin did when he was farming. And his muscles did not respond when he tried to shake his head.

  “C’mon, boy,” said the man with the long beard. “How many bank robbers you ever heard called Hubert?”

  “Shut the hell up, Frank,” barked the tobacco chewer. “Hubert ain’t no name to be ashamed of. Belonged to my grandpappy on my ma’s side, and his grandpappy’s long before that.”

  The bearded man grinned. “And now you know my name, Dooley Monahan.” At least he pronounced Dooley’s name correctly. “Frank Handley.”

  “Which,” said the big man on the big black, “makes me Hubert Dobbs.”

  “Which makes us,” said the thin man on the pinto mustang, “the Dobbs-Handley Gang.”

 
“A pleasure,” Dooley managed to say.

  “Step down off that horse,” said the man who had not introduced himself.

  “But first,” added Frank Handley, “pull that hogleg from your holster . . .”

  “Real careful,” warned Hubert Dobbs.

  “Real careful,” coached the second voice behind Dooley.

  “And,” said Handley, “drop it to the ground.”

  Dooley Monahan obeyed.

  “Let go of the reins and step away from the horse. Kinda in my direction.” The tobacco chewer spit again. “That way. That’s good. Two more steps. Now one more. Now don’t move. Good. You take directions real good.”

  “Thank you,” Dooley said.

  The puny man leaned over in his saddle, and now managed to steady the .38 caliber Smith & Wesson. “Do I kill him now, Hubert?”

  “No, Doc,” Hubert Dobbs said. “Gunshot would draw a posse.”

  Which meant the sickly-looking man on the rangy pinto would be Doc Watson, the coldest and most vicious killer to ride with the Dobbs-Handley Gang.

  “I can slit his throat,” came a new voice behind Dooley Monahan.

  “You could,” Frank Handley said, “but Dooley Monahan rode with us. Maybe by accident. And maybe for just a few miles. But he rode with us. And we don’t murder men who rode with us. It ain’t in the code of the outlaw.”

  Dooley’s heart skipped a beat. His mouth started to open to thank, to praise, Frank Handley.

  Then everything went black.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Somewhere in the depths of dreams, delirium, or death, everything struck Dooley Monahan with perfect clarity. But that was the way things had been the past couple of years. When he was sleeping—and being clubbed over the head with a shotgun stock and left unconscious, not to mention for dead, on the far side of the Platte River, which was a form of sleeping—Dooley Monahan could think clearly and remember clearly. Awake, even after four cups of coffee, Dooley’s mind tended to fog over.

  “Thinkin’,” the circuit-riding Methodist minister who rode and preached on the Des Moines–Corydon–Accord–Lamoni–New Virginia–Old Albany City loop had often told Dooley, “ain’t your strong suit, son.”

  But he was asleep now—technically, unconscious—and he could remember. Everything.

  “I should have told Hubert Dobbs that I once rode with Monty’s Raiders,” he muttered in words that would have been unintelligible had anyone other than a jackrabbit been around to hear him.

  Riding with Monty’s Raiders, of course, had been by accident, too.

  Way back in 1850, when Dooley was but twenty years old, his pa, the now dearly departed David Monahan, had sent Dooley south to fetch a cow. The cow he had procured, but afterward he met some boys who seemed friendly enough but turned out to be part of Monty’s Raiders. Of course, by then, Monty McHugh, who had formed the raiders, had given up robbing pig farmers and corn farmers in Iowa and had made a fortune selling soap to miners in Hangtown, California. But the new members of the gang, liking how Monty’s Raiders sounded so gaily on one’s tongue, had kept that handle.

  The new Monty’s Raiders put up with Dooley for a while, then knocked him senseless and left him for dead—much as the Dobbs-Handley boys had just done—and Dooley became a drifter, turned cowboy, and wound up playing poker in a bunkhouse in the Dakotas when he had gotten into an argument with Bob Smith.

  Well, whiskey, and not blows to his noggin, fogged much of what happened, but the long and short of things said that Dooley Monahan put one bullet through the heart of Bob Smith, who, the law soon learned, was not Bob Smith but one Jason Baylor, who had posters on him planted inside every lawman’s office between Missouri and Montana.

  Then, in 1872, three years after Dooley had plugged Bob Smith né Jason Baylor, Dooley had drifted into the Arizona Territory, where he had found a newspaper article that told him he ought to be heading north. California? Or was it Alaska? Someplace like that. Dooley still had trouble remembering everything. Although he did remember why he was drifting. Jason Baylor had some family, and that family did not like having one of its own killed by a cowboy who nine times out of ten could not hit a barn door six feet away with no wind, no noise, and a fence post to rest his gun on. Between 1869 and 1872, Dooley had been carrying around the voucher the lawman had given him after Dooley had plugged Jason Baylor. All Dooley had to do was turn in the voucher at an accredited bank and he would be presented $500 in cash money. Enough for Dooley Monahan to make it to a booming gold town and strike a fortune. Dooley had been heading to that gold strike, as soon as he found a bank to cash in on his reward, and that’s where he was going to when he camped one night in the Mogollon Rim—he could still smell those pines in that mountainous country—when he had first found that blue-eyed dog.

  “Where are you, Blue?” Dooley muttered as he rolled over on the Nebraska plains. The rabbit did not hear him this time as the rabbit was desperately trying to avoid becoming a hawk’s supper. The hawk did not hear Dooley, either.

  The dog was one of those merle shepherds. No. No, merle was the color. That’s right. Somewhere between blue and gray, with patches of black tossed about. White feet. White chest. And some copper spots on his legs, muzzle, and a couple of dots, also copper, over his eyes. An Arizona shepherd. Because Dooley had found the dog somewhere between Payson and Show Low. Had Dooley been in San Francisco, it would have been a California shepherd. Had he picked up Blue in Australia, it would have been an Australian shepherd. Had he been in Iowa, it wouldn’t have been anything but a mutt, and, most likely, a mutt with the mange.

  Blue had belonged to a family of settlers. Dooley remembered that. It caused a tear to run down his cheek as he rolled back over. Apaches had massacred the family. The blue dog was an orphan, so Dooley, after burying those awful bodies, had let the dog tag along with him. He was a good dog. Made Dooley feel like he really wasn’t traveling alone.

  So Dooley had been heading to Phoenix. Maybe Tucson. He didn’t think it was Flagstaff, although it might have been Prescott. He ran into a sheriff named Carmichael who was traveling with a redheaded cowboy Dooley had worked with in Utah before he had even shot Smith/Baylor deader than dirt. Butch Sweeney was a kid, but a cowboy to ride the river with, and before Dooley really understood why, Butch Sweeney had been with him. So had a girl.

  What the Sam Hill was her name?

  It wasn’t Sam Hill. Judith? No. Judas? Don’t be silly. Jennifer. No. You were closer with Judith. Judy? Julie. That was it. Julie. No. No, it wasn’t. Julia. Yes. Definitely. Julia. Julia Arizona, because he had met her in Arizona.

  He laughed and rolled over, slid down the embankment closer to the Platte. Julia Arizona. That was a joke. She wasn’t like some shepherd dog. In fact, now that things began clearing up a mite, he saw her face. She was a pretty girl. Maybe even beautiful or would be in a few years. Back then, Julia Cooperman—that was her name. Not Arizona. Julia Cooperman, thirteen years old. Sweet. Spunky. But tortured. Pained. But a good kid.

  And they had taken care of those other Baylor boys, too. So Dooley’s $500 reward had turned out to be worth $1,625. In gold.

  Which would have staked Dooley and Julia and Sweeney to a trip to Alaska, where they would make even more money.

  So they had ridden from Phoenix all the way to San Francisco, California, with plans to board a packet and sail north to Alaska.

  Yet something happened. He remembered rubbing General Grant’s neck, then felt as if someone had just taken an axe and split his head clean in half. Dooley fell into that dark, dark void, and when he finally woke, to a splitting headache but at least his head remained intact, he couldn’t remember much of anything. Including his name. That much he learned from his wallet, and he also realized he had more than $1,000 in cash. Whoever had clubbed him good had not been intent on robbing him. He knew his bay gelding was General, but General what? And he had no idea what the Sam Hill he was doing in San Francisco. In fact, the only reason he knew he was in San Fr
ancisco was because of so many signs in that big city saying it was San Francisco.

  SAN FRANCISCO MORNING CALL

  CAFÉ SAN FRANCISCO

  SAN FRANCISCO’S BEST LIVERY

  SAN FRANCISCO’S LARGEST WAGON YARD

  SAN FRANCISCO’S GAUDIEST WHOREHOUSE

  The dog, which at that moment he figured to be a California shepherd, seemed to be his. So Dooley Monahan mounted his horse and took his wealth and his merle dog and rode out of the big city by the bay and decided to head to Virginia City.

  Obviously, the memories came back to him, by and by.

  In Virginia City, for instance, he started saddling the horse in Virginia City’s Best Livery Stable when he just said as he reached under the gelding’s belly for the cinch . . . “Grant.”

  He blinked, brought the strap up, and blinked some more.

  “Grant. General Grant. That’s your name.”

  The bay gelding snorted and even seemed to nod its head in agreement.

  Which told Dooley Monahan something else.

  “I must be a Yankee.”

  Southerners, he knew, would not likely name their horse after Ulysses S. Grant.

  If, indeed, he had named the horse General Grant after the Union Civil War hero and president—that’s right, Grant was now president of these United States. He remembered that even before he saw an article in the Virginia City Enterprise that had a few choice comments about President Grant’s policies and choices for political offices.

  He lost $233.76 of his more than $1,000 at roulette and blackjack in Virginia City, so decided to take his shrinking fortune and his blue-eyed shepherd dog and bay gelding named after a Union war hero (and disaster of a president) toward Montana.

  Somehow, he wound up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, instead.

  By then he had begun to call the dog Blue, and the dog wagged his tail and the bay gelding nodded its head in agreement.