Winter Kill

by Bill Brooks

  “No, suh,” he said. “I’m a temperate man.”

  “Don’t be a god-damn’ fool,” Harve said. “Drink some of that red devil, it’ll bring you to your senses.”

  Reluctantly Isom Dart did as ordered and didn’t stop until he’d drunk a third of the contents.

  “Where’d this ambush take place?” Cole asked once he’d revived.

  “In a small cañon,” he said. “Somewhere back up that way.”

  “Come daylight, you’ll show us where,” Teddy Green said.

  “Yes, suh.”

  Teddy Green looked at Cole and said: “We’re close.”

  * * * * *

  They rode out at dawn, Isom Dart doubling with Harve, the black man indicating the direction.

  “How can you be sure, you walking in the dark like you done?” Harve questioned.

  “I can see good in the dark,” he said.

  “Oh, yeah, I remember Bittercreek Newcomb telling how you could see well enough in the dark to shoot a man.”

  “He’s a fool,” Dart said. “Damn’ ugly one, too.”

  They burned three quarters of the day before Isom Dart said: “Turn off here. Up in there is where the cañon is.”

  Teddy Green eyed the sky, saw a wheel of buzzards, some of them dropping below a ridge of rock.

  No cañon could be seen from the road, but as they cut through a stand of mesquite, they came upon an arroyo that snaked back into a small box-like cañon. There they found the abandoned hack, the horse dead in its traces, bloated and half-eaten—the big ugly birds flapped their wings and took flight at their approach.

  “Looks like he killed everything,” Harve said.

  “Tell us what happened here?” Cole said.

  “We was camped, pulled in here figgering to be safe. Mistuh Feathers say we soon be to his daddy’s ranch, best we not tarry along the road.” Dart slid off the back of Harve’s mount and walked to the buggy, then cast his gaze upon the dead horse and shook his head. “He come outta nowhere …”

  “Who?”

  “The Gypsy man, the one Miss Ella say be after her.”

  “What happened then?” Teddy Green asked.

  “He killed Mistuh Tom. Slipped up on him and put a knife to him and cut his throat with it before I could get my sights on him. Then he shot me in the head, probably thought he killed me. That’s all I know. I come to, bleeding, thinking maybe my brains be spilling out, but they ain’t … that bullet just run a track over my skull. It don’t hurt so bad as this here,” he said. “When I feel my ear ain’t there any more.” The story seemed to sap all the strength from him.

  “The woman?” Cole said.

  Dart shook his head. He didn’t know.

  Teddy Green said: “Where’s Feathers’s body?”

  It wasn’t there.

  They followed a blood trail that climbed a rocky slope of the cañon’s west wall and found Tom Feathers’s body, lying among the cacti at the top.

  “He didn’t die right away,” Teddy Green said.

  “Look at the way he was cut,” Cole said, more closely examining the corpse. “Just enough to let him bleed out.”

  “Davy wanted him to know he was dying,” said Green.

  “Pay back for taking Ella,” Cole said.

  “Pay back,” Teddy Green said. “This is one mean son-of-a-bitch.”

  “What now?” Harve said.

  “We read the signs, see which way they went,” said Cole.

  “What about him?” Harve indicated the black man, still kneeling by the dead horse.

  “You take him back to Gonzales, wait for us there,” Cole said.

  “I came to fight.”

  “We can’t just leave him, Harve.”

  “I hate splitting off from you boys.”

  “You might not have to,” Teddy Green said. “Look.”

  A cloud of dust in the distance indicated riders headed their way.

  “Colorado Charley?” Harve asked.

  “That’s my guess,” said Green.

  “Then let’s make a stand here and now,” Cole said.

  “God damn right,” Harve said. “I’m tired of playing behind the eight ball.”

  “So am I,” Teddy Green said.

  Chapter Thirty

  “You up to shooting?” Cole asked Isom Dart when they reached him in the bottom of the cañon.

  He looked at Cole with eyes that spoke of regret. “I’ll do what needs doing. Who you want me to shoot, anyway?”

  “There’s riders coming,” Harve said. “Gypsy Davy wasn’t the only one after Miss Ella.”

  They set up their positions behind rocks—Teddy Green and Harve to the right, the black man and Cole to the left—partway up the cañon’s neck.

  “We just gonna ambush ’em?” Isom Dart said. “Just gonna shoot ’em out from under their hats?”

  “We’ll give them a chance to ride away,” Cole said. “But only if they prove to be agreeable.”

  He didn’t ask anything more, simply wetted his thumb, wiped it over the front blade sight of the Winchester, then settled in.

  “Let me ask you something that’s troubling me,” Cole said.

  He didn’t take his eye from the sights.

  “How come you and Feathers are just now getting this far south? You should have been here at least a week or two ago.”

  “Miss Ella turned sick, had to find her a doctor. She was laid up for a time, thought she might die. Delayed us coming.”

  “What kind of sick?” Cole asked. “What was wrong with her?”

  “Don’t know. Just sick is all.”

  “How was she when Gypsy Davy waylaid you?”

  “Still weak as a kitten,” he said. “All the color washed out o’ her, but well enough.”

  For that, Cole was relieved. If Gypsy Davy had meant to kill Ella, they would have found her body. It was a two-edged sword, that thought. Cole was glad she was alive, but the knot in his belly that she was in the company of a madman was little comfort.

  They could hear the clatter of shod hoofs coming down the cañon. Cole signaled for the others to get ready, but to wait for his play.

  They could hear the echoes of voices from Charley’s bunch, glancing off the cañon’s walls.

  “Something’s dead up in here, see those buzzards circling?”

  “Might be we lucked out and they all perished on their own,” Cole heard Charley say. They were close, just around the bend.

  “Be our bad luck, I was counting on having a little time with the woman before we finished her.” This sounded like Batwings, Charley’s sidekick.

  “Hell, we all were!” another cawed.

  “You boys, shut them cake-holes. Why, if there is dead up in here, you’ll wake them up.”

  They came into view, two abreast, Charley and Batwings in the lead. The ambushers waited until they’d all cleared the bend before Cole said: “End of the trail, Utter. Don’t even think about it. We’ve got you nailed. You do anything, this is where you’ll stay, where they’ll find your bodies.”

  Surprise crawled all over Utter’s face as he jerked hard on the reins.

  “John Henry Cole?”

  “You still want to shoot us like prairie chickens?” Teddy Green called down from his position. “Go ahead.”

  Batwings turned his attention to the rocks on that side of the cañon.

  “Yes, sir!” Harve shouted. “Hell, it’d be my pleasure blasting you yahoos!”

  “I wanna know what’s your stake in all this?” Charley said.

  “We’re not here to talk, Charley,” Cole snapped. “Drop your irons on the ground and dismount.”

  Some of the horses snuffled and pawed the ground—they smelled the death.

  “Then what, we do that?” Charley said. “
You planning on leaving us afoot, something like that?”

  “Something like that, but only on the condition that you hoof it back to Denver and tell the judge you failed in your mission.”

  “No can do. Why, I ain’t never failed in my mission, ain’t about to now. We got ten guns to however many you got in them rocks and my suspicion is you ain’t got much but them two others was with you last time we met … that feisty Ranger and the one missing an arm.” Charley was full of himself, considering the position he was in.

  Cole said: “We got you in our sights, that’s all you need to be concerned with. You can go tell the judge yourself or he can read about it in the papers. Makes no never mind to me, Utter.”

  “The hell you say!” he shouted, jerking his pistol.

  Cole shot him out of the saddle. It was too late to do any more talking. Guns jerked from their holsters, rifles and pistols cracking, bullets ricocheting off the rocks, scattering dust and riders, men pitching from their saddles. The ambushers shot into Utter’s posse with a fury, and some of them scattered back up the cañon, while the rest lay dead or dying. Batwings was one who scattered at the first shot and Teddy Green shouted that he was going after him. Cole called out to let him go, but Green was already stepping into leather.

  “Jesus,” Cole muttered, and went for his own horse. There was nothing like a bull-headed, right-minded, never-forget-an-insult Texas lawman not to let a fight come to a quick end. Teddy Green was spurring his horse up the cañon by the time Cole hit leather.

  “You want me to stay here or what?” Harve shouted.

  “Stay here!”

  Cole was eating Teddy Green’s dust when the pop! pop! of pistol shots opened up ahead of him. Teddy Green had caught up with someone, or someone had caught up with him.

  By the time Cole rounded the next bend in the cañon, where it began to open up, Teddy Green was down on his knees, his horse shot from under him, struggling to rise. Blood stained his shirt—he’d been caught in a crossfire. The bastards had made a stand instead of running, instead of going back to Denver.

  Teddy Green was firing his pistol toward a rock outcropping. Then Cole saw Batwings rise from a rock above him, take aim with a Winchester, and blow the top of the Ranger’s head off.

  Cole jerked his own rifle, took steady aim, and killed Batwings. He watched him pitch from the rock and tumble to the cañon’s floor. Bullets chewed up the ground around Cole, but he had gone into the cold-blooded state of mind of a killer—everything moved in slow motion. The remaining gunfighters were mere targets for him calmly and efficiently to knock down. Old instinct took over, his aim steady and true, he began to kill them in the rocks until the last one threw down his rifle and ran.

  Cole dismounted and kneeled beside Teddy Green’s body.

  “Teddy,” Cole said, “you damned fool.”

  Then he searched Green’s pockets. He has lost most of his things in the storm, but his Ranger badge was pinned to his undershirt, and around his neck tied to a leather thon, Cole found a small waterproofed packet. He opened this and found a tintype of Ella when she was young, her hair done up in reddish curls, a slight smile on her lips. Pretty and innocent. Cole stared at the picture for a long time, remembering the woman he’d kissed in the summer kitchen in autumn with the sweet scent of apples in the air. He realized, too, how much Teddy Green had loved her, enough to give his life for her when he didn’t have to. Also in the packet was a letter. He opened and read it.

  Dear Teddy,

  I still think of you and miss you. I wonder every day if the Comanches that you so dearly love to chase, or some outlaws, will bring you harm. I worry about you constantly. I was so in love with you when first we met, and you with me. I was just a girl but knew my own heart. How did such a heart become broken? How did our love become separated? Why wasn’t I enough for you? Questions I still ask myself in my loneliest hours. But I know the answers. I know that you were born needing to do the right thing, that you were born with a sense of honor that few men have. That for you to see injustices done was simply intolerable. And your duty and your honor proved a greater power over you than did my love, though I’ve no doubt that you loved me. Denver is a city full of passion and life, though my own life has not been easy, my sins many—these, the price I’ve learned to pay for this freedom. Would that you leave your beloved Texas and join me, I would give up this life and become your wife again. But I know how utterly unhappy you would be here, just as unhappy as I’d become there on the frontier. These are matters of the heart and my heart wanted to tell your heart that I shall always love you, even though I could not love you enough, or you could not love me enough, for us to be together forever. Think of me, and never let me out of your heart for very long.

  Your Ella

  Cole placed the tintype back in the packet with the letter and slipped them into his pocket along with the badge. They didn’t deserve to be lost and scattered in some lonely cañon, as lost as bones and dust.

  “Dammit, Teddy Green, why didn’t you love her enough?” were the only words to express Cole’s grief at the loss of a good man, and maybe a good woman, too.

  Harve saw Cole return without Teddy Green in tow.

  “He still up the cañon?”

  Cole nodded.

  Harve shook his head. “Son-of-a-bitch. You get the others?”

  “All but one.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “We lost a good one,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “What now?”

  “Let’s saddle a horse to that hack and take Teddy to Gonzales for a proper burial.”

  “What about Ella?”

  “I think I know where she is,” Cole said.

  “Huh?”

  “Call it a feeling.”

  Together the three righted the hack, cut loose the dead horse, and hitched the hack to Teddy Green’s mount, then took it up the canon, and loaded his body into it.

  The fat Mexican sheriff, Carlos Delgado, was just coming out of a café when he spotted the three of them.

  “Hey, you went off to find Señor Feathers,” he said, “and what you found was a Negro and a buggy. That’s pretty good.”

  “Shut up,” Cole said.

  The sheriff blinked.

  “Stay clear of me, you understand?”

  The sheriff glanced at Teddy Green’s corpse in the hack. “You kill heem?”

  They continued down the street until they found a store front advertising an undertaker.

  “We’ll make the arrangements,” Cole said, “then this is where we part company, Harve.”

  He looked stricken. “Why, John Henry? We ain’t found Ella yet.”

  “Because that’s the way I want it, partner.”

  Harve reached in his pocket and took out his wallet, removed several bills, and handed them to Cole.

  “You’ll need it … traveling expenses.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll see to it that Teddy Green gets a proper and fine funeral. You go on and do what needs doing. Just one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d appreciate a wire sent to me in Denver to let me know how it turned out.”

  They shook hands. Then Cole shook Isom Dart’s hand. Dart thought he would go back and bury Tom Feathers. He felt he owed him that much.

  Harve told Dart that either he would have to take him along or take a little money to help with the expenses. If it was no offense, Dart said, he’d prefer the money. Harve said he wasn’t offended.

  Cole turned his horse back toward San Antonio, prodded by nothing more than a feeling that was aching in his bones like a fever.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “Vaudeville Variety Theater and Gambling Saloon is where you’ll usually find him, if he ain’t here,” the bartender at the Golden Spur said. “Doc ain’t h
ere, he’s usually there … loves the comics.”

  Cole figured that if anybody knew the underside of San Antonio, it would be Doc Holliday and so Cole needed to search him out.

  He crossed the street, cut across Market Square, and angled his way opposite the Alamo Plaza, where some sort of festival was taking place. Dancers wearing red-trimmed skirts and peasant blouses clicked their heels to a mariachi band; the men were dressed in black with silver conchos adorning the legs of their trousers, and big sombreros. The music was lively and quickened the blood and the evening sky was streaked with crimson clouds.

  Cole found the Vaudeville and asked the man at the ticket window if Doc Holliday was in attendance. He was a short, balding man with heavy jowls shaved to a clean pink.

  “Have not seen him yet,” the man said. “However, I do expect him. The Rose of Cimarron is playing tonight … she’s a wonderful singer, you know.”

  “What time do you expect him?”

  The man pulled a watch from his pocket, snapped open the lid.

  “He’s usually here around eight … unless, of course, him and Kate are getting into it.”

  Big Nose Kate was Doc’s common-law wife. Cole asked the man where they resided and he said over a butcher shop on South San Saban Street.

  “Which way is that?”

  Cole followed the directions. The street was, like almost every street in San Antonio, cluttered with ox-drawn wagons. The buildings were mostly of stone or stucco, pockmarked by the weather. Cole found the address and climbed the outside stairs and knocked on the door.

  He waited a few moments and knocked again, then the door opened and Kate stood there in a chintz robe clutched with one hand. Her hair was uncombed and it looked like she’d been crying.

  “Oh,” she said. “I was expecting someone else.”

  “Doc here?”

  “He’s not here,” she said, her voice hoarse, the way a voice ravaged by liquor and cigars will get. “Fact is, I thought you were him.”

  “Doc usually knock on his own door?” Cole asked.

  “Who are you?”

  “Guess you don’t remember me, Kate. I’m John Henry Cole. We met in Deadwood some time back.”