“I don’t have any food,” Mosely said. “Or a blanket.”
“Nor do I,” Bill said. Then, “Mr. Mosely, it has now occurred to me that fate has drawn us together for a reason. And that reason is to care for this poor Indian and save him from the lynch mob’s noose.”
“Maybe he did stab the puncher,” Mosely said.
“No, he did not. I am convinced that a white man made it look like an Indian killing so that Cloud Passing would get the blame.” Bill took a step back and stared at the Indian who still stood in the basket. “Behold the noble savage, the best damned horse Indian I ever had.”
“What do we do with him?” Mosely said.
“For now, nothing. Mr. Mosely you will smuggle him food and a warm blanket, and he will sleep in the bosom of your flying machine until the real murderer of Andy Porter is caught.”
“Mr. Cody, that could take forever,” Mosely said, his face distressed. “I need to repair the balloon envelope and pursue my rainmaking profession.”
“Then this is an ideal arrangement,” Bill said. He shoved his Colt back in the holster. “Repair the envelope? Does that mean there’s sewing involved?”
“A lot of sewing.”
“Then you’re in luck, my dear Mosely. Cloud Passing can help you. Cheyenne men are excellent sewers. Some say even better than their womenfolk, and that is high praise indeed.”
“The cowboys will find him here for sure, and we’ll both get hung,” Mosely said. “I’m real uneasy about this, Mr. Cody.”
“Nonsense, my boy,” Bill said. “This spot is well hidden among the trees and even I, the greatest scout on the frontier, couldn’t see you as I rode by. Only when I heard your anguished cry did I ascertain your whereabouts.”
Cloud Passing said something in Cheyenne to Bill that gave him pause. But finally he smiled, pulled his knife from the sheath on his belt, and handed it to the Indian.
“Is that wise?” Mosely said.
“It shows Cloud Passing that we trust him,” Bill said. “Yes, Mr. Mosely, it is wise.” He stepped into the saddle, gathered up the reins, and said, “Mr. Mosely, be resolute in this endeavor until I can find the murderer we seek. In the meantime, light no fires, and keep Cloud Passing calm. Should he revert to wildness, grin at him, but don’t poke him with a stick. Grinning seems to have a calming effect on the savage breast, but poking just makes him mad.”
“As I recall grinning didn’t work the last time,” Mosely said.
“That’s because I didn’t grin wide enough,” Bill said. “One more thing. Cloud Passing can speak passable English when he feels like it. He just don’t feel like it too often.”
Bill swung his horse away, made the steed rear, waved his hat to Mosely, and then galloped in the direction of his encampment.
Josiah Mosely turned and saw the Cheyenne fixedly staring at him. He tried a grin, produced only a gargoyle grimace, and Cloud Passing didn’t seem impressed one way or the other.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
At nineteen, Quinn Kerrigan had reached a man’s height but was yet to fill out with muscle, and this gave him a rangy look, wide in the shoulders and slim in the waist. To Kate’s horror, being raised among cowboys had taught her son much about whiskey, whores, and revolver fighting, but precious little concerning literature, the arts, and the ways of an educated gentleman. As she’d once told Quinn, “I wish you to learn sportsmanship, not how to get the drop, true love, not the passing affection of whores, and above all the genteel ways of gentlefolk.” Come the spring, Kate was determined to ship her younger son off to university, and Yale, Harvard, and Oxford had all been mentioned as possible choices.
For his part, Quinn hated the idea and was determined to stay in the West, setting up a future confrontation with his mother that could not be avoided.
“So why are we here, Quinn?” Frank Cobb said.
“Close the door, Frank. The walls have ears.”
Frank closed the door of Quinn’s room after Shorty Hawkins and a puncher named Chas Minor had entered. Like Hawkins, Minor was good with a gun and had been involved in several shooting scrapes.
Quinn spread out a large sheet of paper on a table and drew the lamp closer. “I spoke at some length to Zeke Cowley, and I drew up this plan based on what he could remember of the mission,” he said. Using a pencil as a pointer, Quinn said, “See here, this is the back wall of the building and it still stands to about the height of a man. The cellar where Trace is held is on the other side of the wall, entered by a door that I think was once near the high altar and is probably locked.”
Frank frowned and said, “All right, we got an I think and a probably already. Quinn, I don’t like uncertainty when Trace’s life is at stake.”
“I understand that, Frank, but hear me out. The time when the mission is most vulnerable to attack is during the hours of darkness. My plan is to strike just before dawn from two sides, front and back, and take McKenzie and them by surprise. The frontal assault will pin McKenzie and the Boswells down while the rear party scales the wall and frees Trace from the cellar. The two forces will then join and kill or capture McKenzie and his two cohorts.”
“Seems like a good plan,” Zeke Cowley said.
“The trouble is that we don’t know if McKenzie and the Boswell brothers sleep inside the mission,” Frank said. “We could attack the front of the mission and then find them behind us. And there’s another thing. We may be able to take McKenzie by surprise but not Bat and Sky Boswell. Men like them are continually on the scout. Like a pair of cougars, they sleep with one eye open and their ears tuned to what’s happening around them. Night or day, light or dark, professional gunmen don’t let themselves get taken by surprise.” Quinn opened his mouth to speak, but Frank raised a silencing hand. “And what about the butcher’s bill? With Bat and Sky Boswell in the fight, we’d have to step over our own dead to save Trace.” Frank shook his head. “Kate will never go for that.”
“Frank, you’re good with a gun,” Quinn said. “We could make it work.”
Then Chas Minor, normally a taciturn man, spoke up and surprised everybody. “Seen the Boswells get their work in one time up at a settlement on the Canadian when I was wearing a deputy’s badge for a spell. It was maybe three years ago, maybe less. Well, Sky killed a teamster by the name of Handy, Tom Handy he was called, after an argument over a fallen woman. Sky shoved the muzzle of his gun into Handy’s belly and blew his liver out. Later that day eight bullwhackers and muleskinners, all of them armed with bowie knives and revolvers, went after Sky with a noose. Him and Bat met them boys in the street and cut loose. When the smoke cleared six teamsters were dead and two wounded. One of them died six weeks later and the other survived.” Minor pulled up his shirt and revealed a red, puckered wound an inch above where the buckle of his cartridge belt would be. “The town was outraged, and I was ordered to arrest Sky Boswell for the murder of Handy. He drew down on me and cut loose before I even cleared leather. I was gut shot and I lingered in bed for the best part of a year before I could get up and walk around.” Minor smiled. “The bullet is still in me, so maybe Sky will kill me eventually. The moral of this story is that the Boswell brothers are fast, maybe the fastest that’s ever been.” He looked around at the others. “And that’s all I got to say.”
Quinn had listened in silence and now he said, revealing that Kerrigan stubbornness, “But it’s still a good plan. We can make it work.”
It was Quinn’s bullheadedness that made Minor decide to speak again. “Maybe so, boss,” Minor said. “You can take thirty punchers down there and get the job done and I’ll be one of them. But I guarantee that you’ll lose half of us. There’s something about the Boswell brothers that’s not human.”
“Trace is my brother,” Quinn said, his shoulders slumping. “But fifteen dead men is too steep a price to pay.”
Frank Cobb laid a hand on Quinn’s shoulder. “We’ll find a way. Hell, there’s always a way.”
Quinn grabbed the map from t
he table, crushed it in his hands and threw it at the wall. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t believe a two-bit piece of trash like Slide McKenzie is leading us around by the nose. How did it happen? How the hell did we let it happen?”
“I guess I underestimated him,” Frank said.
“We all underestimated him,” Quinn said. “Every single one of us.”
* * *
Josiah Mosely stood hidden by darkness and watched Frank Cobb and a couple of punchers leave the big house. Their faces were set, as though chiseled from granite, and all three gave off an air of defeat, walking head down like broken men.
Mosely understood. Yet another plan to rescue Trace and the fortunes of the KK ranch had come to nothing. The young man settled his glasses straight on his nose, but they immediately drooped askew again. For the first time in his life he wished he was taller and bigger, a giant like Paul Bunyan who could stride across the range and smash Slide McKenzie and his gunmen cohorts into a pulp. But he was not Paul Bunyan. He was Josiah Mosely, an undersized, shortsighted, little runt who once got lucky in a shooting scrape . . . the kind of luck that doesn’t happen twice in a man’s lifetime.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nellie Donegan liked to rise early and be first into the women’s tent before the canvas bathtubs and the best towels were all taken. Dubbed by Bill Cody the Texarkana Tornado, Nellie was a trick rider and sharpshooter and an occasional stand-in for Annie Oakley. She hailed from the red-light Levee District of Chicago.
Nellie stepped out of her tent before first light and pulled her red silk robe closer around her neck against the morning chill. As usual a cigarette dangled from her lips and she carried the makings in her pocket. The Texas drovers were much addicted to tobacco and had passed their smoking habit on to her. The way to the bathtubs lay between the tents of the female performers and then looped around some parked wagons before straightening out again. The large bathing tent lay directly ahead of Nellie when she suddenly stopped in her tracks. There was something or somebody lying in the long grass on the north side of the worn path. The girl’s first reaction was that it was a cougar waiting in ambush for anyone foolhardy enough to bathe before the dawn. But then as her sleep-blurred eyes sharpened, she made out the figure of a man lying on his back, his booted feet toward her.
Nellie pegged the fellow as a cowboy who’d had too much to drink or an unconscious roustabout, a notoriously drunken bunch.
“Hey, you,” she called out. “Get to your feet. What the hell are you doing so close to the women’s bath tent, you damned pervert?”
There was no response and Nellie felt a spike of alarm. Was the man dead? Had the crazy Indian returned and scalped somebody else? Raised hard in a tough town, Nellie Donegan was not a girl to go anywhere unarmed, and along with the sack of Bull Durham in her pocket, she carried a .30 caliber Marlin revolver. The girl drew the little pistol and stepped closer to the recumbent figure half hidden in the grass. The redheaded man lay on his back, his open eyes staring at a sky tinged with the lemon light of daybreak, and Nellie realized he was as dead as he was ever going to be.
She looked around and saw a man walking with a coiled rope over his shoulder. She recognized him as a roustabout named Bill, and she called his name. The laborer stepped toward her and then stopped in his tracks when he saw the body on the ground, and his eyes moved from the dead man to the gun in Nellie’s hand. “That’s Davy Hoyle the cowboy,” he said.
“Yes, I know it is,” Nellie said.
“Is he dead?”
“What do you think?”
“Hell, girl, yeah, I think he’s dead. Did you shoot him?” Bill said. He was a muscular man who sported a huge mustache, and he had a bare-breasted mermaid tattoo on his left forearm.
“No, I didn’t shoot him,” Nellie said. “I looked and can’t see a wound on him.”
The roustabout kneeled beside Hoyle and then said, “Maybe he just up and died. I’ll turn him over.”
Nellie Donegan had seen death in most of its forms but she gasped in horror when she saw the dead man’s back. His shirt, once pinstriped blue, was now scarlet, drenched with blood. The wounds in his back were numerous, wide and deep, the work of a broad-bladed knife cutting clean to the bone.
The roustabout looked at Nellie with harried black eyes. “The Indian has killed again,” he said.
* * *
Buck Nolan was beyond fear. He was petrified. “First Andy Porter and now Davy Hoyle. Funerals for two of the Three Amigos and I’m the third. Mine will be next,” he said.
“The Three Amigos, that’s what they called you?” Kate Kerrigan said.
“Yeah. When we were punchers together back in the day, working for the Circle G, old man Louis Graham’s outfit.”
“Did you make any enemies then, back in the day?” Kate said.
Nolan hesitated for a few heartbeats and she thought he looked guarded, as though he was holding something back. But the young puncher said, “No, we didn’t make any enemies.” His anger flared. “Hell, lady, our only enemy is the damned Indian.”
Bill Cody said, his voice even, “Keep a civil tongue, Buck.”
“Well, we all know who murdered Andy and Dave, don’t we? It was the Indian, Mr. Cody. He’s your Indian, and I need your protection.”
“And you’ll get it,” Bill said. “You need not fret on that score.”
As Buck Nolan talked, Kate had been looking at the others crowded into Bill Cody’s tent. Along with the roustabout foreman and a couple of riders, Annie Oakley and Ingrid Hult had shown up to represent the female members of the show. When Nolan blamed Cloud Passing all had nodded in unison, each of them convinced of his guilt. And now Kate admitted to herself that the evidence certainly pointed that way. She didn’t know where the Indian was, but he was already as good as dead.
Bill Cody rose from his canvas chair—once owned by Robert E. Lee, he claimed—and said, “I have reached a couple of decisions, but first allow me to say this in answer to a few naysayers who opine that our show is doomed and will never be allowed in London town next year. When I was informed of the death of yet another cowboy I penned some verses to be read to every member of my Wild West troupe. This is to assure each one of you that no matter the setbacks, no matter the trials and tribulations, the show will and must go on.”
Bill’s speech brought cheers from the cowboys and polite applause from the ladies. He bowed, picked up a paper from a campaign table substituting for a desk, cleared his throat, and intoned:
The Fame of Buffalo Bill
We hear that the cowboys are wonders,
And do what no rough rider dare.
So wherever the pitch is in London
Its wild horses will drag us there.
O, fancy the scene of excitement!
O, fancy five acres of thrill,
The cowboys and Indians and horses
And the far-famed Buffalo Bill!
Applause followed, and Annie Oakley cried out, “Huzzah!” Bill bowed again and continued:
They say he’s a darling, a hero,
A truly magnificent man,
With hair that falls over his shoulders,
And a face that’s a picture to scan.
And then he’s so strong and so daring,
Yet gentle and nice with it still—
Only fancy if all the young ladies
Go mashed upon Buffalo Bill!
More applause, several Huzzahs! and Bill bowed graciously. Then, apparently to assure his audience that an end was sight, he said, “One more verse.”
The world is a wearisome desert.
The life we live is a bore;
The cheek of the apple is rosy,
But the canker-worm hides in the core.
Our hearts have a void that is aching—
That void, then, O, hasten to fill
With your mustangs and Injuns and cowboys,
And yourself, O great Buffalo Bill.
Mr. Cody was indeed a gallant and dashi
ng frontiersman, but his poetry left a great deal to be desired. After another hearty round of applause, in which Kate joined in for politeness’s sake, he bowed, smiled, and remained standing. He held up his hand for silence and said, “There are some of my competitors who would delight in my misfortune and would like nothing better than to see the Texas Rangers shut us down as a hotbed of murder and mayhem.”
“For shame,” Annie Oakley said.
“Indeed, dear girl, for shame,” Bill said. “But that is not going to happen, because, as of this very moment”—he drew his brace of silver-plated revolvers and laid them on the desk—“I am placing Mr. Buck Nolan under my personal protection, and no safer haven can be found anywhere on earth. There will be no more murders, I can assure you.”
“Hear, hear,” the roustabout foreman said. But Buck Nolan did not seem impressed.
“And second, I am instituting a full investigation into the murders of Dave Hoyle and Andy Porter and I assure you the perpetrator will soon be brought to justice.”
“You don’t need an investigation,” Nolan said. “We all know who done it. I say we search for the damned Indian and when we find him we string him up. He doesn’t need a trial. Trials are for white men, not murdering savages.”
“Then we must form search parties immediately,” Bill said. “Let no stone remain unturned, no avenue of investigation unexplored, until we have apprehended the fugitive.”
“And then hung him,” Nolan said.
This statement drew cheers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hiram I. Clay’s red face got redder still when Kate Kerrigan mentioned the sum of money she wanted to borrow from the Pecos River Cattleman’s Association, of which Clay was the president.
“Seventy thousand dollars is a considerable sum, Kate,” he said.
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