Sudden Country

by Loren D. Estleman

  Wedlock was interviewing the next man in line. He was shorter and stouter than his predecessor and had on a stained linen duster and a hat with a rattlesnake band. He was not much younger than Blackwater, although he had a baby face and no whiskers. He was holding a burlap sack at a peculiar angle from his body.

  “Christopher Agnes, you still clubbing rattlers for your supper?”

  “Not no more. There’s better money in bagging ‘em live. I know a man in Frisco can’t get enough of ‘em. Sells ‘em to pilgrims for luck. This’n here’s worth two bucks if it’s worth four bits.” He shoved a leather-gloved hand inside the sack and drew out the largest diamondback I had ever seen, holding it behind its ugly squat head while it coiled its body around his arm. Its rattles buzzed. Every man in the room drew back except Wedlock. The baby-faced man cackled.

  “Put that up, Christopher Agnes,” Wedlock said calmly. “I’m signing men, not sidewinders; though I’m studying on making an exception in your case.”

  Christopher Agnes pressed a thumb behind the diamondback’s head, popping its fangs. A drop of venom plopped to the table. “Old Ike wouldn’t hurt you, Ben. He’d likely curl up and die.”

  Wedlock picked up the Remington, cocked it, and aimed it at the reptile’s gaping mouth. “He’ll do it quicker without brains. You’ll just go on like always without yours, but it’ll smart A snake’s head makes sorry cover.”

  Someone coughed in the silence. After a moment Christopher Agnes cackled again and started to return the snake to the sack. Wedlock took the pistol off cock and put it down. Suddenly the diamondback flexed its body, breaking its owner’s grip, and sank its fangs into his forearm. He shouted and dropped the snake. In the next instant, half a dozen guns came out. Old Ike’s head was obliterated in the fusillade. It thrashed about for almost a minute, then relaxed with a shudder. The room stank of spent powder.

  “Someone get a doctor!” cried Mr. Knox.

  “No need.” Christopher Agnes finished rolling up his sleeve, unfolded a jackknife from his pocket, and slashed the wound in two directions, making a neat X. He sucked out a mouthful of blood and spat it on the floor. Returning the knife, he took a piece of sticking-plaster from another pocket and pressed it to the wound, holding it there until it adhered. “I been bit I bet a hunnert and sevenny-five times,” he said. “First ten or twelve I figured I’d kick over sure. Now I just run a fever. I’ll be fit to ride by morning.” As he rolled the sleeve back down, I noticed that his arm was mottled all over with X-shaped scars.

  Marshal Honyocker came in from the back presently to investigate the shots. Showed the dead snake, he stood sucking a cheek. His spectacles glittered. “Conducting business, Wedlock?”

  “This here’s a private party,” replied the saloonkeeper.

  “See it stays private.” He withdrew.

  After that, the others in line were a blur. Wedlock was interviewing the last man when a newcomer entered. He was slat-thin in clothes that hung on him like wash on a line and his face was a matting of black beard that started just below his eyes and grew down past his chin so that when he grinned, a gold tooth shone like a nugget in a bed of moss. He had a slouch hat pulled low and his right arm hung in a sling of filthy muslin. He was carrying a coiled bullwhip in his left hand.

  “Afeared I went and missed it.” He squirted tobacco juice into a cuspidor, making it wobble. “Bull’s-eye! They ain’t ary a soul in Armadillo’d give a honest man the time of night.”

  His nasal whine had the same effect on me as the shining object in my dream. I grasped Mr. Knox’s sleeve. “That is Pike!” I exclaimed, pointing. “The man with the whip the night Flynn was killed!”

  Nazarene Pike turned murderous eyes on me. The hand holding the whip drew back. Mr. Knox reached inside his pocket, but before he could bring out the pistol, a metallic crunch announced that Ben Wedlock’s reflexes were faster. The Remington was trained on Pike, who froze.

  “What’s this about killing?” The saloonkeeper’s attention remained on Pike, but the question was directed at me.

  I glanced at Mr. Knox, who nodded shortly. I said, “He used to ride with Jotham Flynn, the Quantrill man I told you about. He was one of the men who killed him.”

  “A raider, you say?” Wedlock turned his head my way. Suddenly the whip lashed out, snatching the Remington out of his grasp. Before anyone could react, Pike vaulted the bar and ran out the back. Mr. Knox gave chase, weapon drawn. Presently he returned from the storeroom. “Twice now that man has eluded me,” he said. “There will not be a third time. How many other nightriders are you recruiting, Wedlock?”

  “None, if I’ve a voice.” Rubbing his hand, he turned to the bartender. “Hold that man for the marshal if he comes back. Shoot him if he gives you cause. I’ll have no bushwhackers on this expedition.”

  “I think it is up to me what we will and will not have,” Mr. Knox reminded him.

  “Yes, sir. Just looking out for your interests.”

  “That fellow seemed to know his way about the place.”

  “I do a good trade here. I cannot answer for everyone who moves in and out.”

  The schoolmaster pocketed his pistol. “Wedlock, I’ve reserved a Pullman and a stock car on the ten-ten to Cheyenne tomorrow morning. You will have your band of heroes at the station. Each man will supply his own provisions and mount, or arrange for them in Cheyenne. This should get them started.” He removed a sheaf of notes from his wallet and laid them on the table.

  Wedlock seized the money. “Count on us.”

  “I intend to. What became of the Judge?”

  “Present.” Judge Blod stepped from behind a coatrack. As we went out the back, Mr. Knox asked, “Judge, what have we wrought?”

  Behind us, Christopher Agnes was demanding to know who was going to pay him for his damaged rattlesnake.

  Chapter 8

  WE BEGIN OUR QUEST

  Our group attracted considerable attention at the depot later that morning. Passengers, greeters, and hangers-on forsook their various pursuits to stare at the men in rough clothes carrying rucksacks and blanket rolls, from the ends of which protruded rifles and carbines of every make and manufacture, yet forswore to ask them what they were about. Those in our party who had horses led them to the stock car for loading and stood around pummeling one another and laughing coarsely at tales of past journeys and adventures. Christopher Agnes arrived with a squirming burlap sack and the notion of hawking live rattlesnakes at every stop; after some persuasion by Mr. Knox and Judge Blod and an exchange of money, he released them in a sandy lot nearby and clubbed them to death with a blackthorn stick he carried for that purpose. The snake-catcher complained of stiffness in the arm that had been bitten ten hours earlier, but otherwise appeared no worse for the experience. Of all my recollections from the time, that one is questioned most often. I have never met anyone else who demonstrated immunity to poisonous snakebites.

  And the weapons! Amarillo’s ordinance prohibiting the carrying of firearms did not apply to men leaving town, and so the parade of long guns and pistols–thrust inside belts, riding in holsters on hips and under arms, or just simply carried by hand–suggested a convention of gunsmiths. In addition to the expected array of Colts and Winchesters, there were Sharps and Remington buffalo guns, Creedmore competition rifles with mounted scopes, LaMatte .36 caliber pistols equipped with secondary barrels that fired birdshot, pepper-boxes, Greener shotguns, Yellow Boy Henrys, and, in the possession of the man called Blackwater, a British Enfield carbine that he insisted had seen action in the Zulu War of 1879, in the hands of a cousin who had sold his services to Her Majesty’s army. In the Texas of 1890, large public displays of percussion weapons were confined to hunting parties and not usually on railroad platforms; hence our celebrity. I confess that I myself carried my blanket roll with the Winchester stock exposed rather higher than necessary.

  By contrast with all this ostentation, Ben Wedlock cut a subdued figure in an old Confederate campaign hat wit
h the brim tugged down over his Dresden eye and a canvas coat buttoned over a bulge that I supposed belonged to his Remington revolver. He was carrying a McClellan saddle and pouches and leading a sorrel stallion that stood at least eighteen hands high. True to his prejudice, the animal was all one color. The muscles on its flanks stood out like sculpture. I asked Wedlock what he called it.

  “Nicodemus. I’ve had him ten year come August, and I do believe he’s commencing to be a patch on Old Deuteronomy.” He laughed when the horse whinnied angrily. “Listen to him. He don’t countenance being compared.”

  “Is that not a Union saddle you have?” I asked.

  “I inherited it off a Yankee officer at Second Manassas. I taken the rag for it often enough. If you ride with the stirrups low it’s the second next best thing to sitting at home. The next best thing is walking.” He took his place in line at the bottom of the ramp to the stock car.

  “Did you know Robert E. Lee?”

  “Seen him horseback once at Sharpsburg. He looked a vengesome angel with his white hair and beard.”

  “Did you fight for slavery?”

  “Didn’t none of us do that. Most of us never seen a slave our whole lives, much less owned any. That war wasn’t over slavery. We was fighting for Southern independence. You’ll hear different, but they’re lies.”

  I changed the subject, for I sensed that I had struck a raw place. “Will we see Indians where we’re going?”

  “As well ask will we catch fleas in a kennel.”

  “Are they as savage as Judge Blod says they are in his books?”

  “I don’t read much. But some are, some ain’t, same as white men. One thing you got to have in bushels with an injun is patience. He’ll talk about the weather and his wife’s piles and how many buffaloes he seen that week and just about anything but the thing you come there to talk about till he runs out of it. Then he’ll get to business. But that’s talk. If it’s your scalp he admires he’ll get to it first thing. They got priorities.”

  “Mr. Wedlock–”

  “There ain’t been no Mr. Wedlock since a free nigger named Eustace dropped a rooftree on my paw’s head accidental-like back in ‘56,” he said. “I’m Ben if you’re Davy.”

  “Ben. Did you know that man Pike?”

  “Seen him in there a time or two. I reckon he got wind there was hiring going on. Mind, if I knew he kept company with the likes of Quantrill and Anderson, I’d of run him out before he ever threw a lip over any glass of mine.”

  “I’m glad. I don’t like what I saw of that border trash.”

  “Someday when you trust me, I’d hear how that came about.”

  I hesitated. “It is not that I don’t trust you.”

  “Course you don’t. It’s the eye. It was a leg or an arm or even what makes a man a man, you’d call me cripple and pay me what’s due. When folks look at me all they see’s the eye. You’ll get used to it. They all do. I did.”

  His turn came and he mounted the ramp with the sorrel’s bit in hand. He handed the reins to a railroad worker sweating in the car and together they struggled against the determined might of the horse, which had set its hoofs and refused to proceed. The railroad man cursed.

  “Will I see you in the Pullman?” I called.

  “I’d best stay with Nicodemus this trip.” Wedlock’s voice was strained. “He don’t take to travel that ain’t his own doing.”

  Disappointed, I walked down the platform past Marshal Honyocker and two of his deputies, who had evidently been informed that a number of heavily armed men were gathered at the station. The marshal’s men were perspiring freely, but in his tight waistcoat and level hat he looked contained in the dry heat. Whatever Mr. Knox and Judge Blod had told him, he seemed satisfied that the situation was moving out of his jurisdiction.

  At length the animals were secured, seats taken, and with the conductor’s cry of “Board!” the train whistled and slid out of the station. I had a window seat next to Mr. Knox facing Judge Blod, who had begun a log of our journey and was filling pages of foolscap on the tilted surface of an ingenious collapsible writing desk provided by the railroad. His afflicted foot rested in the aisle. I wondered if it would prove a hindrance on the trail.

  “Who is meeting us in Cheyenne?” Mr. Knox asked the Judge.

  “Major Alonzo Rudeen, the acting commander at Fort Laramie. He has offered us the escort of a patrol as far as the Dakota border. I wrote about him in Rudeen of Raton Pass. It played no small role in his promotion.”

  “Is there anyone out here whom you do not know?”

  “We have not met. I based the book upon newspaper reports and information supplied by the War Department. He wrote to thank me. We have been in correspondence since that time.”

  The train racketed through countryside that remained constant through that part of the Nations that extends north of Texas, and which has since been renamed the Oklahoma Panhandle; flat yellow earth like crinkled paper, pocked with mesquite and bunch grass, each clump casting a small crescent-shaped shadow looking like the holes that horned toads scoop in the sand just before they vanish beneath the surface. As the day wore on, however, the scenery began to change, subtly at first, then dramatically, becoming green and grassy, the horizon less a straight line as mountains began to take on a deep blue form. I knew then that we were in Colorado. I was now farther from home than I had ever been. Even the air smelled different.

  We had an excellent supper in the dining car and retired to our berths for the night. Lying there between the curtains and the curving varnished wall of my wooden womb, I let the car’s swaying motion and the mesmeric chattering of the wheels pull me into darkness. This time there were no nightmares, only oblivion.

  In Denver the next day, the train stopped for passengers, and we alighted to stretch our legs. I saw Ben Wedlock leading his sorrel down the ramp from the stock car for the same purpose, but as he was deep in conversation with one of the men he had signed in Amarillo, I passed by them after an exchange of greetings. Wedlock seemed refreshed and not at all stiff from what must have been an uncomfortable night in the company of beasts. I saw Christopher Agnes prowling the cinderbed with his stick in one hand and the ubiquitous sack in the other, apparently in vain, for he returned to the Pullman with a dejected aspect.

  I was back aboard when a new passenger carrying a worn valise paused just below my open window to ask the conductor if the train was going straight through to Cheyenne. In looks and posture he was ordinary, of middle age and height, with sunburned skin and a brush moustache the color of sand. His store suit and slouch hat were unremarkable and far from new. I could not say what it was about him that interested me. Only when he left the conductor and mounted the next car in line did I place his voice, and even then I was not certain. The West was large, after all. It would contain any number of men whose speech resembled the pleasant tones of Charlie Beacher, one of Nazarene Pike’s partners and another of the nightriders who had brought death to my mother’s boardinghouse.

  Chapter 9

  PHILO HECATE

  “Judge, I must urge you to reconsider this excursion.” Major Alonzo Rudeen was in his middle thirties and inclined toward stoutness, with a mealy complexion and red muttonchop whiskers that underscored the begin-flings of jowls. He wore the full cavalry uniform and gauntlets and a fawn-colored hat with the brim pinned up on one side. His saber slapped his heels as he strode across the Cheyenne platform to shake Judge Blod’s hand. If the Judge found Rudeen’s person less heroic than he had imagined, he did not betray disappointment. “Has the situation deteriorated that far?” he asked.

  “It has. Moreover, it is still deteriorating. The newspapers have whipped Washington into a fine lather. I expect orders to report with my command to Standing Rock any day. I cannot warrant that you would not be leading your band of civilians into the middle of a war.”

  “What news of Sitting Bull?”

  The major regarded Mr. Knox with a watery stare that he evidently consi
dered martial. “Boiling roots and making dreams in his cabin on Grand River, just as he did at Little Big Horn. Who are you, sir?”

  Judge Blod apologized for his poor manners and introduced the schoolmaster and, as an afterthought, myself. I had noticed a distinct drift in his affections away from me since the Joe Snake affair. While he was not precisely hostile, I sensed a distance between us, as between a boy and a man who had no use for him. This sentiment appeared to be shared by Rudeen, who ignored me.

  “Young men on the Standing Rock reservation have been observed purchasing arms and ammunition from contraband traders,” he said. “Sitting Bull and Wovoka, the Paiute charlatan, have convinced them that if they dance until they drop from exhaustion, the Indian slain will rise, the white man will withdraw from their ancestral lands, and the buffalo will return in numbers. The Sioux believe exclusively that the mystic symbols painted on their shirts will protect them from bullets, which is the most disturbing thing about this entire business, as it means that they are spoiling for a fight. It is a preposterous stew of Christian thought and pagan superstition that can have but one outcome. You would be placing your party in extreme jeopardy if you set out for the Black Hills in this climate.”

  “Are you ordering us not to proceed?” There was defiance in the Judge’s tone.

  “I have not that authority. However, I can withdraw my offer of an escort.”

  “The Rudeen I wrote about was a man of his word.”

  “I have acknowledged my debt to you, with reservations concerning your more creative flights,” said the other. “I am extending this counsel in partial repayment. If you insist upon continuing, I cannot in good conscience refuse protection. I must impose a condition.”

  “Indeed.”

  “You know that I may not accompany you into Dakota without orders. This would expose you to the most perilous part of your journey without military protection. I would rest easier knowing you had a guide who is familiar with the country and the current situation. The man I have in mind is a short walk from this place.”