Damnation Road

by Max McCoy

  The engineer pulled off his glove and returned the universal salute of displeasure. Then he ducked back into the cab and pushed the throttle forward, and the locomotive belched smoke and fire from the stack as the train struggled to pick up speed.

  Gamble laughed.

  Then he looked the other way and could see the end of the train approaching. It consisted of only twenty or so cars, probably moving local stock, and there was no caboose.

  Gamble rolled over, stuffed the gun in his pocket, and got to his feet. He picked up his hat from the ground and jammed it on his head. Through the gaps between the trucks as the train rushed past, he could see the three cousins stooped down, guns in hand, searching.

  Gamble limped toward the moving cars. Between the slats of the stock cars, he could see frightened cow eyes and matted hair and filthy hide. The stench from the cattle hit him like a wave, and the scrape and screech of iron was deafening. He knew the cousins were shooting at him from beneath the train, because he could see the bullets sparking on the ballast and rails, but he couldn’t hear the shots.

  The train picked up more speed.

  Gamble broke into an uneven run and lunged for the grab iron on the corner of the next to last stock car. His hand closed around the rust-stained metal and it felt like his arm was going to come out of its socket as he was jerked off his feet. His boots skittered along the stones and ties for a moment. He got his other hand around a grab iron and he pulled himself up, then planted his left foot on the iron rung.

  Gamble hooked an arm through the grab iron and looked behind to see two of the cousins standing on the tracks, watching the freight as it receded.

  Where was the third?

  Gamble rested his forehead against the rough wood of the stock car. He was too tired to curse. He forced himself to climb, hand over hand, the grab rails to the top of the cattle car, then pull himself up to the roof. He sat down on the flat portion that ran along the peak of the roof, facing the back of the train. He took the Manhattan out of his pocket, checked the cylinder to make sure that the last round would be under the hammer when the gun was cocked, and took a deep breath, trying to clear his mind of the pain that was beginning to telegraph up his right leg.

  Soon, he saw a hand reach up to the roof of the last car, followed by a blond head. It was the youngest cousin, the athletic one, and he was trying to keep hold of the stock car with one hand while wielding a revolver in the other. He looked forward, squinting against the wind and smoke, and saw Gamble sitting forty feet away, holding his gun in both hands, taking aim. Just as the German ducked, the Manhattan barked, and the slug hit him in the upper right arm. His gun flew out of his hand as he was knocked spinning off the stock car, and he landed in a rolling heap in the reedy grass alongside the tracks.

  Ten minutes later, the train slowed. A white sign with black letters slid past, proclaiming GUTHRIE. Approaching the depot, the locomotive switched to a siding to wait for a northbound express to pass.

  Gamble climbed down the corner of the stock car and eased himself to the ground, then made his way toward town through the shacks that dotted the edge of the rail yard. Some of the shacks offered popskull liquor, others housed cribs where the unluckiest of whores plied their trade. A prostitute leaning in the doorway of one of the rough-hewn establishments watched through morphine-clouded eyes as Gamble limped past.

  “Lover,” she said. “You look worse than I do.”

  He touched the brim of his battered hat and kept walking, the sole of his right boot scraping the ground. Not far beyond the shanty town he found Oklahoma Avenue, a broad street paved with bricks that ran uphill to the center of town. Each side of the street was thick with lampposts and utility poles carrying a confusing array of wires. The buildings were all new or nearly so—Guthrie, the capital of Oklahoma Territory, had sprung from nothing only eight years before, during the land run of 1889. The architecture ranged from Victorian to Greek Revival to Byzantine, and the street corners had stone steps that led to an underground level of warehouses and stables.

  It was a Friday morning and the street was thick with pedestrians and wagons and carriages. The people he met glanced away as soon as their eyes met, and if they were alarmed or concerned about the blood flowing from the wound in his right leg, they said nothing.

  Gamble knew the cousins would be close behind, and his eyes scanned the storefronts for a hardware store. He was badly in need of—what was the expression that Dutch had used?—blue beans. On the northeastern corner of Oklahoma and Second Avenue, he found Farquharson and Morris Hardware.

  THREE

  “Never mind about how many times I’ve killed,” Gamble said, the shotgun draped over the crook of his right arm. “I’ll save answering for my sins to a somewhat higher inquisitor, which might take place directly.”

  “Want to pray?” the boy asked.

  Gamble shook his head.

  “I’m a good Methodist,” the boy said. “I find it helps, sometimes.”

  “I’ll bet you are and I bet it does,” Gamble said, then laughed. “But asking God to help me kill? No thanks. I won’t add hypocrite to my list of sins.”

  Gamble took another whiff from the ammonia-laden bandanna, then flung it down as he walked away, his boots making an unsteady rhythm on the floor planks. He kicked open the screen door and strode out into the street.

  Thirty or so citizens were on the street, their hats and bonnets pulled low over their faces, tending their business.

  “Clear out!” Gamble shouted.

  The crowd paid him little note.

  Gamble pointed the shotgun skyward and pulled the trigger. The gun was louder than he expected and the report echoed sharply from the storefronts. The bystanders, frozen in their steps, stared at the thin one-eyed man in the black coat holding a new shotgun.

  “Run!” Gamble shouted as he pumped a fresh shell into the chamber. “Find cover, or trouble will find you.”

  The citizenry scrambled away, leaving three men standing in the middle of the hard-packed street, thirty yards away from Gamble. Each held a weapon. All of them were blond. The youngest of them had his right arm in a linen sling draped around his neck. Their horses were hitched at the mercantile across the street.

  “There he is!” the tallest of them called, swinging his pistol around.

  Gamble shouldered the shotgun and pulled the trigger. The gun boomed and the stock bucked reassuringly against his left shoulder.

  The buckshot struck the tall man on the right side of his chest and spun him around, making his legs cross at an unnatural angle. The gun remained in his right hand, unfired.

  Gamble jerked the slide back and the spent shell was kicked spinning out of the top of the receiver, and he kept the trigger held tight as he threw the pump forward. The barrel, which had drifted upward, now settled back on target. The gun spoke again the moment the action locked, and this time the buckshot snapped the tall man’s wrist and the gun fell barrel-down in the street. The hammer fell and the gun discharged, bursting the sand-clogged barrel in a puff of white smoke and sending shards of metal singing through the air.

  The tall man was now on the ground, bloody and unmoving.

  Jaeger, who was nearest the dead man, laughed. Then he touched a bloody spot on his cheek where a sliver of the ruined revolver barrel had embedded itself.

  “Hurensohn,” Jaeger said, looking at his bloody fingertips.

  Held loosely in his other hand was a strange-looking gun. At first Gamble thought it was a Bisley, but the cylinder was too big and the hammer had a curious flowing S-shape.

  The cousin with his arm in a sling was walking forward, a Colt in his left hand. He stepped over the body of the dead man without taking his eyes off Gamble.

  “Two shots,” he said. “His shotgun is empty, no?”

  Gamble pumped another round into the chamber and put the front bead on the chest of the man who had laughed. He was the oldest of the cousins, he was more heavily muscled, and his hard eyes told Gambl
e that he was in charge.

  “I’m not so sure, Fritz,” Jaeger said. He held his revolver loosely at his side. “It is a new type of gun, I think. Like the lever-action Winchester shotgun of a few years ago, but with an improved action.”

  “I should kill him now?”

  “You level that peashooter at me and I’ll excavate a hole in Dutch’s chest where his heart should be,” Gamble said.

  Fritz thumbed the hammer back on the Colt, but Jaeger raised the hand with the bloodstained fingertips.

  “Wait, Fritz.”

  “Good thinking, Dutch.”

  “Don’t call me Dutch. My name is Max Jaeger and I have a writ to deliver you to the district court at Wichita to stand trial for the murder of Lester Burns.”

  “What about poor Werther?” Fritz asked. “And Adolphus, lying dead on the creek bank? This bastard has murdered two of us, and you want him to live?”

  Jaeger spoke to him sternly in German.

  “We are not in the wilderness now,” Jaeger said. “There are witnesses. We will return Jakob Gamble to Kansas, and we will collect the full reward, and he will hang there. Dead is dead, no?”

  Gamble let the barrel of the shotgun drop a bit.

  “Why are you doing this? There can’t be much in this for you. What does the court pay for the serving of a warrant? Two dollars? A few cents a mile in travel? Seems you have already paid pretty dear, in chasing me to hell and back and losing your relation.”

  Jaeger smiled.

  “Is that what you think? That we are working for pfennigs?”

  He pulled a paper from his coat pocket.

  “There is a reward offered by the governor of Kansas, John Leedy. It guarantees five hundred and fifty dollars in cash for your capture and return to Kansas to stand trial for the murder of one Lester Burns.”

  “The bastard deserved it.”

  “The bastard was Leedy’s brother-in-law,” Jaeger said.

  “I think we should kill him now,” Fritz said. “Then we cut off his head and take it to Wichita”—the word came out as Vichita—“and leave the rest of him to rot here in the territory.”

  “Five hundred fifty?” Gamble asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I thought it would be more.”

  “You’ve robbed no banks or trains.”

  “I have a rule against that.”

  “You fear the Pinkertons.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I admire them,” Jaeger said. “I would like to one day be a Pinkerton operative. I believe I have what is called the necessary qualification.”

  “You never sleep?”

  “I am a hurensohn,” Jaeger said. “A ruthless sonuvabitch.”

  “I believe you,” Gamble said from behind the shotgun barrel.

  “What is all of this talking?” Fritz asked. “Let us kill him. With cousin Adolphus and brother Werther dead, the reward is split only two ways—that’s two hundred and seventy-five dollars each.”

  “No, Fritz. With him dead, we split only one hundred thirty-seven dollars and fifty cents.”

  “But you said we were going to kill him at the creek—”

  “It was a trick, Fritz,” Jaeger said. “To intimidate him.”

  “You were lying?” Gamble fumed, jabbing the shotgun forward.

  “This outrage, from the king of liars?” Jaeger asked.

  “Let us kill him.”

  “Go ahead,” Gamble said over the shotgun, which was still trained on Jaeger. “Maybe you’ll get lucky—a head shot, perhaps. But even then, I think my reflex will be to pull this trigger and blow Dutch’s heart and lungs through his back. Let’s give it a whirl.”

  Jaeger sighed.

  “Put your gun down, Fritz.”

  “Vot?”

  “You heard me. Lower your gun. You want revenge because he shot you in the arm, but the truth is that you were careless. You and your idiot brother Werther have been worse than useless to me, and I am sorry now that I brought the both of you. If you do not lower your pistol, this man with the rather large shotgun will kill me.”

  “You do not grieve for poor Werther?”

  “I grieve for Adolphus,” Jaeger said. “He was the best of you all. I wish the criminal had killed you instead.”

  “Then to hell with you,” Fritz said.

  Jaeger lifted his strange pistol and fired. The bullet struck Fritz in the forehead and he fell dead next to Werther. Then Jaeger spread his arms and let the Colt dangle from his trigger finger.

  “That was cold,” Gamble said.

  “It was necessary.”

  “Drop the iron.”

  Jaeger let the gun fall to the ground.

  “What kind of gun is that?”

  “German military issue. A Reichsrevolver.”

  Gamble lowered the shotgun, walked forward, and nudged the revolver with the toe of his boot.

  “Nasty little thing.”

  “I think the design is quite bold.”

  “Shut up and put your hands behind your head.”

  Jaeger did. Then he smiled.

  “You haven’t killed me yet. You lack the necessary qualification.”

  “You think so?”

  Gamble stepped forward and drove the walnut butt of the shotgun against the side of Jaeger’s head. It made a hollow-sounding thump. Jaeger went down heavy.

  Gamble put the butt of the shotgun on the ground and knelt, then went through Jaeger’s pockets. He found a wad of paper money and coins and slipped these into his own vest pocket. Then he retrieved the Kansas warrant from a back pocket and studied it for a moment, and then the reward poster. It was a bad likeness. He tore both papers to shreds and threw the pieces into the air.

  “I won’t stand trial in Guthrie,” Gamble told the unconscious man, “but you will, when you wake up, for killing your cousin Fritz. I’m sorry I won’t be here to see you hang.”

  A crowd was beginning to cluster around Gamble and the two dead men. He noticed that the knuckle of his left thumb was barked and bleeding, from the slide shooting backward out of the receiver every time he chambered a round. Gamble stood up, cradling the shotgun in the crook of his left arm, and walked through the crowd back toward the hardware store. He tugged the brim of his battered black hat to every wide-eyed citizen he met. He could feel the whiteness creeping in again at the edge of his vision.

  The boy was still behind the counter, and he raised his hands above his head when he saw Gamble approach.

  “Put your paws down,” Gamble said.

  Gamble threw a twenty-dollar gold piece and a ten-dollar bill on the top of the glass display case.

  “Now we’re square.”

  A bell mounted on a curious wooden box on the wall behind the counter rang twice, the clapper vibrating like an alarm clock. It stopped for a moment, then rang twice again.

  “What’s that racket?”

  “That’s our number—twenty-two.”

  Gamble paused.

  “It’s a telephone,” the clerk said. “You talk into it ...”

  “I know what the hell a telephone is. Just never seen one before.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Tend to it.”

  The clerk nodded. He picked up the ear set from the side of the box. He listened for a moment, then nodded and turned to Gamble.

  “It’s for you.”

  “Of course it is.”

  Gamble was losing the feeling now in both legs. He slumped toward the floor, but found a wooden crate and sat down on it. He rested the butt of the shotgun on the floor between his feet and allowed his chin to fall to his chest.

  “It’s the marshal,” the clerk said.

  “Tell him to hold his water.”

  Gamble stared at the floor. Beside his right boot was a growing puddle of blood.

  “That’s going to make a helluva stain.”

  Then Gamble lifted his head and pul
led a pipe from the pocket of his vest and carefully filled it with tobacco from a leather pouch. Then he struck a match on the side of the crate and brought the flame over the bowl and sucked the fire into the tobacco.

  There was a stack of photo postcards next to the cash register on the counter. Gamble motioned for one, and the boy handed it over. The photo was of the outlaw Bill Doolin, dead as Hamlet’s ghost, propped up on an undertaker’s board, a couple of dozen buckshot wounds across his bare chest, his hair wild and his beard scruffy, his eyes open and one brow arched, as if in surprise. Gamble studied the intricately woven wicker board on which Doolin’s punctured and emaciated frame lay.

  “He was killed near Lawson in an ambush led by a federal marshal named Heck Thomas,” the boy said. “They hauled his body to Guthrie and propped him up so that Dougherty the photographer could make the picture, then they planted him in Summit View Cemetery, east of town. Doolin’s wife, Edith, had ’em printed up to sell for twenty-five cents each to pay for his funeral.”

  Gamble took a quarter dollar from his pocket and tossed it to the boy.

  “There’s a poem on the back.”

  Gamble tucked the postcard into his vest.

  The boy surveyed the blood on the floor.

  “Do you require a dressing?”

  “Ask me later.”

  “There will be more shooting?”

  “Almost certainly.”

  Gamble closed his eyes. He was tired.

  There was squawking from the listening piece the clerk held.

  “What should I tell the marshal?”

  “Bid him good-bye,” Gamble said.

  The boy nodded and replaced the ear piece on its hook.

  “You may do me one kindness,” Gamble said. “Keep the old revolver for me. I will be back for it, if I am able. If not—well, it’s yours.”

  The shotgun began to lean, and Gamble had to concentrate to correct the angle. The pipe hung limply from the corner of his mouth.

  “Have you always been an outlaw?”

  For nearly as long as he could remember, Gamble thought. He had carried the old Manhattan for a good part of the war. He was twelve years old when it first filled his hand, shortly after he saw his father dead at a Yankee prison in Missouri. At thirteen, he saw his mother dead at a guerrilla winter camp in Texas—while giving birth to his bastard baby brother. Twenty years later he held that brother’s hand while he died in Arizona Territory. And he had watched his wife and newborn baby butchered by a doctor near Kansas City.