Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  “Well, I’m mighty mad I was violated in such a manner,” the Kid declared. “I intend to find that man and get my ear back and teach him a lesson in the doing.”

  “You best hie on back to Cincinnati or wherever it was you said you were from,” Teddy Green said. “The frontier is no place for a tenderfoot to be, as you can plainly see if you were to look into a mirror. That ear will be a long time growing back, but if those fellows had shot you full of lead like your compadres, you’d be a lot sooner dead.”

  “No, sir,” the Kid said, standing up, then wobbling like a newborn colt. “I intend to track that bastard down and get my ear back.”

  “Well, good luck to you, boy,” Teddy Green said, and mounted his horse.

  “We can’t just leave him here,” Cole said.

  The Ranger gave him a flat stare. “We’re closing ground on them,” he said. “You want to slow us down by hauling this yahoo along?”

  “Well, then, at least have the decency to shoot him,” Cole said. “It’d be a more generous act than leaving him out here alone on foot, him leaking a blood trail the wolves can follow.”

  Teddy Green looked thoroughly disgusted at the suggestion. “OK,” he growled, kicking a foot free from his stirrup. “We’ll ride him double to the next town.”

  “Dodge is back yonder,” young Joe said as they started out on the south road again.

  “We ain’t going to Dodge,” Teddy Green said.

  “Why ain’t we? It’s the closest town.”

  “Because we’ve already been there. Now stop yapping.”

  In spite of Cole’s concern for the boy’s welfare, Teddy Green was right, even if he was as hard as nails about it. Having to ride the boy double would slow them down considerably. Each hour, each day that passed without them catching up to Ella Mims and Tom Feathers only decreased the chance of finding them alive. Colorado Charley Utter and his bunch, along with Gypsy Davy, were leaving a bloody wake across the landscape. It seemed all they were doing was following after them and cleaning up the mess.

  Chapter Nineteen

  There wasn’t spit for the next two days and riding an extra man, even one as light and slender as the Kid, made the going slower than it should have been. The landscape was more of the same, except the country became a little more hilly, the soil turned reddish, and the rivers and creeks more muddy. They were even seeing more trees, scrub oaks and blackjack trees.

  “I know this land,” Harve said. “Crossed it many times droving. What they call no man’s land, Oklahoma Territory. Bad place to be unless you’re an outlaw. Hide-out of killers, thieves, rapists, and every sort of bad actor you can imagine.” He turned and looked at Joe, who was riding behind Cole. “Why, you ought to be right at home here, Kid. You being the cold-eyed, one-eared, only surviving member of the Canadian River boys.” Harve took great delight in japing the Kid about aliases and falsified reputations.

  “Why would any thieves or killers want to come here?” the Kid said, looking about. “We ain’t seen nary a mercantile or even a drummer to rob or kill.”

  “They come here because the law is afraid to,” Harve explained. “Those federal marshals sent out of Judge Parker’s court over in Arkansas won’t come this far. No fool in his right mind who wears a badge would come to such a hellish place.”

  Teddy Green’s eyes snapped. “I’m wearing a badge and I came here,” he said sourly.

  “Well, I must admit,” Harve said, “you’re a rather odd duck to begin with.”

  “What do you mean by that statement, Mister Ledbettor?”

  “Just meant that there ain’t many men who’d go clear to hell to find an ex-wife. In fact, most men would head in the opposite direction when it comes to ex-wives.”

  “Well, I ain’t most men,” Green said.

  “That’s sure enough plain as paint.” Then Harve, who was riding slightly in the lead, drew up short.

  “What is it?” Cole asked.

  “Look,” he said. “Ain’t that the biggest rattlesnake you ever saw in your life?”

  A diamondback rattler was stretched out on a rock in the warm sun near the road; its body was the thickness of a man’s arm, its length well over six feet.

  Before Cole knew it, the Kid leaped off the back of the horse and quickly grabbed up the big snake by the tail and cracked it like a whip, snapping off the head.

  “Dinner!” the Kid said, holding it up proudly.

  “Dinner?” Teddy Green said. “What sort of fool would eat a snake?”

  “You ever et one, Mister Green?”

  “No, and I ain’t never going to eat one, either.”

  “Tastes like chicken, you fry ’em right.”

  “I’d just as soon eat a real chicken if I wanted something to taste like chicken.”

  “How about you, Mister Ledbettor? Mister Cole?”

  “No thanks, Kid,” they said in unison.

  He shrugged and said: “Suit yourself.”

  The horses needed a blow and there was a small, meandering, muddy stream nearby, so they made noon camp and smoked cigarettes, except for Teddy Green, who said he preferred cigars but had forgotten to purchase any in Hump Dance. Harve produced one of the bottles of $20 whiskey from his saddlebags and offered it around while they sat and watched the Kid skin and cook his snake over a mesquite fire.

  “You know it was the devil in the form of a serpent who tempted Adam and Eve in the garden,” Teddy Green said. “It’s why God didn’t give legs to a snake.”

  “Imagine if He had,” Harve said. “What terrible creatures they’d be. Why suppose a big old rattler like that ’un had legs and could run as fast as a horse? Wouldn’t this be a mighty dangerous world?”

  Green seemed to think about that for a while. Cole’s thoughts were on Ella Mims. Thinking about her and the things that had transpired since he’d last seen her, he could only wonder how different their fate would have been if he had asked her to marry him when he had the chance. Just those few words could have changed everything for them.

  It was easy for a man to imagine all sorts of things, given the time and inclination. Lately Cole had been doing a lot of thinking about life, what lay ahead for him, given the fact that he was a year older than Bill Hickok who, like most of Cole’s contemporaries, had already been sent to the grave. A man Cole’s age and with his past, surviving on the frontier, gave him cause to think. But if he did have many more years ahead of him, he would like them to be in the company of a woman like Ella Mims.

  Cole watched the Kid, squatting before the fire, content, he supposed, to be alive, the prospect of a full belly, and all the world yet ahead of him. Some of the pain had probably healed already. It seemed like only yesterday that Cole was as young and foolish as Joe McCarty, a jug-eared cowboy hardly green broke, chasing the rear-end of longhorns and eating their dust up trails like the Chisholm, the Bandera, the Goodnight-Loving, and a lot of others. In a way, it seemed like it had never happened, like a dusty dream. But it had happened and he’d grown long in the tooth and he knew that his gun hand was slower than it once had been, and that he couldn’t stay in the saddle forever. Sooner or later, he would have to find a place to light and take root or end up dead, maybe on some sawdust floor like Hickok. The taste of lost opportunity turned bitter in his mouth.

  The Kid pulled smoldering chunks of the rattler off his roasting stick and ate them, seeming delighted with his repast while the rest squatted on their heels and watched.

  “You fellers don’t know what you’re missing,” he said.

  Finally it got the best of Harve and he said he’d try it.

  “Damn, the Kid’s right,” Harve said, tentatively chewing on a piece of the snake. “Does taste like chicken … sorta. Let me have another piece of that serpent, Kid.”

  Cole thought: What the hell? His belly was starting to scrape his backbone and he was
hungry enough to eat cactus. It wasn’t so bad—fried snake—once you got over the thought of it.

  But Teddy Green would have none of it. “Some things are just too vile for a man to put in his mouth,” he said. “You’ll not catch me eating a creature that crawls on its belly … and that includes horny toads and Gila monsters.”

  “Horny toads and Gila monsters got legs,” Harve said.

  “Little bitty ones,” Teddy Green said. “Not enough to count. They are just serpents with little bitty legs.”

  They rode the rest of the day, and as dusk started to overtake them, they saw some lights off in the distance. “Could be a town,” Harve said.

  “Don’t care what it is as long as we can buy a meal, something other than serpent to eat,” Teddy Green said.

  Actually it wasn’t a town, but a collection of shacks built around a large garden.

  “We’d best be cautious in our approach,” Teddy Green said. “What Mister Ledbettor says is true about this territory … it’s a refuge for bad actors. Decent folks will be jumpy about the approach of strangers.”

  But they’d already been noticed. Several men stepped out of the shadows, each had a shotgun cradled in his hands. These were the dark faces of Negroes.

  “What you men want?” one of them said. He was an older man with a cotton-gray fringe of hair.

  “Meal, if we can get it,” Cole said. “That and a place to water our horses.”

  “Be hard pressed to get a meal ’round here,” the man said.

  “Why’s that?” Green asked.

  “Look at you,” the man said, then glanced at the others who stood spread out.

  “What about us?” Green said.

  “You white,” the man said.

  “I’m also a lawman,” Green said. “Texas Ranger.”

  “This here ain’t Texas, mister, and all the law that exists is these.” He waggled the barrels of his shotgun.

  “If I had a dollar for everyone who’s told me this wasn’t Texas, I’d be a rich man,” Teddy Green replied. “I know it ain’t Texas. Fact is, I’m dang’ glad it ain’t Texas, for, if it was, I’d be ashamed to be a Texan.”

  “Insults ain’t gonna buy you much except trouble, mister,” the man said.

  “Not trying to insult anybody, trying to buy a meal,” Green said.

  Harve spurred his horse a little ahead and said: “The color of gold matter to you gents, whether it’s a white man’s gold or not?”

  The men looked at each other.

  “Gold money?”

  “Double eagle. Give you one for a meal for my friends and me and some grain and water for our mounts, how will that be?”

  “That’d be just fine, but I’d like to see the money afore I feed you.”

  Harve flipped the man a coin, and he caught it and examined it before slipping it into his pocket and lowering the scatter-gun. The others were slow to lower theirs until the old man said: “Welcome to Nowhere.”

  “That what they call this place?” Cole said. “Nowhere?”

  “That’s what it is,” the man said. “So that’s what we call it.”

  He told them where they could wash up and water their horses and had one of the younger men pour out some grain in nose bags for their mounts. Inside the shack, the old man sat at the head of the table. Up and down both sides, sitting on benches, were children. Cole counted twelve.

  “These are my young ’uns,” the older man said, and named them, each and every one. “And that’s my wife, Hattie, doing the cooking.” A large black woman stood at the stove with her back them and only every now and then glanced over her shoulder. The room was filled with the smell of fatback and beans and cornbread. It was a good smell.

  “What happen’d ta your arm, mister?” a youngster about halfway down the right hand row of children said. He was maybe five or six years old, wide-eyed and curious.

  The older man spoke up, told the boy to mind his manners, but Harve grinned and said it was OK, he’d been asked the same question lots of times. It was plain, however, that the loss of an arm was not fit conversation around a supper table, so Harve didn’t go into the grisly tale.

  After supper, the older man, who said his name was Israel, asked them to join him out of doors, which they did. The sky was just turning a dark shade of plum against a dark-silver background and some of the other men were standing around a large fire of blackjack stumps, the flames trapped in their eyes.

  Israel introduced them all around and told them this was all one family, cousins and brothers of his, nephews, men who’d brought their wives and children to this far end of the settlements to be shed of the troubles that still existed for a colored man closer in. He told them that he and some of the older men had fought the Cheyennes, Sioux, and Apaches as buffalo soldiers in the 9th and 10th Calvary regiments; how after they’d all been blooded and after the fighting was over, they went home to the same hard conditions they had left.

  “Don’t seem to matter none what you did or didn’t do for this country,” he said, looking sharply into the flames, the stem of a corncob pipe clenched between his teeth. “You a black man, you still just a slave in most white men’s eyes. That’s why we came out this far, figgered no white men here to contend with. Ain’t, either, except the occasional dodger. You see now why we carry shotguns and take notice of strangers.”

  “Pays to be alert,” Cole said. “No matter whether you’re white or black or red in this country.”

  “Got that right, mister.”

  They talked at length about the war, about crops and rain and outlaws while Harve produced a fresh bottle from his saddlebags and passed it around. Then the conversation turned to what their business was this far from anything and Teddy Green told them. The mention of Ella Mims and Tom Feathers brought a pall over the talk.

  “You seen these folks?” Cole asked. “It’s important we find them before some others do.”

  “Ain’t seen nobody,” Israel said. “Nobody’s been through here in a month.”

  Logic said that was hard to believe, considering that they’d been traveling the same road since Dodge, which lay just a hundred yards to the north of the settlement.

  “You sure?” Teddy Green said. “I don’t see how you could have missed seeing them.”

  “Ain’t seen nobody like you described or like you ain’t described, either. I guess we best be turning in … getting late, lot of planting to do tomorrow.”

  It was a signal to the others to slip off into the shadows and head toward their homes. Israel said the newcomers could camp the night but would appreciate it if they were gone by daylight. “Nothing against you,” he said. “Jus’ that, well ….”

  “We’ll be gone,” Teddy Green said. After the men left, he said: “They saw them.”

  “I agree,” Harve said. “Clammed right up when you asked them.”

  “I’m sure they’ve got their reason,” Cole said. “Out here, middle of nowhere, man’s best to keep to himself.”

  “They seemed like honest enough men,” Harve said.

  “Honest to a point,” Teddy Green said.

  “The outrider,” Cole said. “Bittercreek Newcomb said he was a black man.”

  “Then that’s it,” Teddy Green said. “They wouldn’t say anything against him because he’s one of their own.”

  “Makes sense,” Harve said. “Feathers’s man could have told them they were being chased by a pack of white devils … don’t we look it, truth be told?”

  “Maybe the lack of an answer is our answer,” Cole said.

  The boy, Joe, strolled back into the fire’s light.

  “Where you been, Kid?” Harve said.

  “Relieving myself.”

  “Of what?”

  Joe grinned sheepishly.

  “Say you didn’t?”

  “Didn�
��t what?”

  “Wander off into the bushes with one of those young gals.”

  “I might have taken a stroll down by the creek out yonder,” he said. “And maybe one of them young gals happened to come down there for a pail of water. And maybe we even exchanged a few pleasantries.”

  “Jesus, Kid, you want to get us shotgunned by some outraged daddy?”

  “Didn’t do anything, me and her, just exchanged some pleasantries.”

  Teddy Green warmed his hands in front of the dying flames and stared into them. A knot worked along his jaw line.

  “From now on,” Cole said, “stay close to camp, understood?”

  The Kid looked at him, lowered his gaze to the flames. “Yes, sir.”

  “Was she sweet?” Harve asked. “’Cause if you are going to die over a gal, she ought to at least be pretty and sweet.”

  The Kid blushed, the fire sputtered and crackled, and a thousand stars were flung across the sky. Among them, only the Kid seemed to be enjoying the moment.

  Chapter Twenty

  John Henry Cole thought Bill Cody and others like him had wiped out all the great herds of buffalo on the plains. If you ever been to places like Fort Griffin and Dodge and seen the mammoth pile of buffalo skulls and bones, smelled the stink of hides waiting to be shipped east, you’d know what was meant about the eradication of the beasts. Once was a time you could see herds so vast that you could practically walk from Texas to the Canadian border atop their backs without ever setting foot on the ground, or top a rise and see before you a carpet of dusty brown hides, humps, and horns that went from horizon to horizon. So many, a crew of hide hunters could set up shop half a mile downwind and melt the barrels of their Sharps rifles, trying to kill them and still not make a dent. So many, the land became littered with their rotting carcasses after the slaughter, and if the wind was right, you could smell death twenty miles away. So many, the wolves got so fat and lazy trying to eat up all that meat, you could walk up and club them. As one old Cheyenne who’d remembered put it: “The white man has emptied the prairies of the buffalo.”