by Chuck Tyrell
In a few words, Stryker told the bishop and the woman what they’d found at Harlan Taylor’s spread. “If Mercy Taylor’s mother is nearby, it would be best if she could recuperate with her own family,” Stryker said.
“We’re all family,” Westfall said. “Brothers and sisters.”
Stryker gave the stocky man a sharp look. “This ain’t no time for preaching, Westfall. Mercy’s been through more than any woman ought to have to bear. Does Mercy have family in town or not?”
“No preaching, deputy. As for going through trials, we’ve had more than a few. You may know it’s legal in Missouri to kill Mormons just because we’re followers of Joseph Smith. Now. If you’d be so kind, we’d like to help Mercy Taylor.”
Stryker stepped back so Westfall could get to the travois where Mercy lay. He watched closely. He’d heard that Mormons were hard on their women.
“Mercy. Dear Mercy,” Westfall said. “You know me, sister. I’m Bishop Westfall.”
The woman bustled around to the other side of the travois. “Mercy, dear. Sister Hunt. I’m Sister Hunt. Don’t you worry, dear. We’re here.”
More people began to arrive, and Bishop Westfall directed them. “Brother Williams, Brother Hall, Brother Swensen, if you will help, we’ll carry Mercy to the Wilson residence.”
The men positioned themselves as Westfall directed.
“Take hold of the blanket. Lift. Careful. Careful. Now. On to the Wilson house. Sister Hunt. If you’d have the Relief Society sisters come over to the Wilson’s, that would be good.”
As the men carried Mercy past Stryker, Bishop Westfall paused. “Thank you so much, deputy, for taking care of one of ours. We are indebted,” he said.
“The law is meant to help people,” Stryker said. “Although my jurisdiction is only Silverton.”
Westfall nodded. “Still, we’re beholden for what you’ve done.”
The men disappeared around the corner with the woman called Sister Hunt close behind.
“I reckon those folks’ll take care of Mercy as best they can,” Milt said. “Let’s get on after those Shadow Box badmen. They still got Elly and Maggie.”
“Yeah,” Stryker said. “You’re right. Let’s go.”
They unhooked the travois, removed the bottom blanket, and left the poles next to the hitching rail. From Moapa, Stryker and Milt Robbins followed the Muddy River south towards the Colorado River. If they were lucky, they’d catch the Shadow Box Gang before the badmen got to Pearce’s Ferry. Dred met them on the outskirts of town.
Moving away from Taylor’s rawhide ranch, Cahill Bowman felt good. Now he not only had sixty pounds of gold bullion, he also had all the flour and lard and salt and stuff that the rancher had in store. He had Elly Nation so the people in Silverton would think twice before they tried following the Shadow Box Gang. Yeah, the little missus had blasted Big Ed with both barrels of a Greener shotgun, but she’d got what she deserved later. Bowman smiled. He’d punched her good and hard. Maybe her face wouldn’t look so pretty. They had left her on her own the bed, bloody and beaten, with nothing to eat. She’d be dead. Served her right. Killing Big Ed like that.
The Shadow Box Gang felt like a real outfit now. Extra horses. Extra food. Twenty-five thousand or so in gold. Hostages to clear the trail. He turned in the saddle to look back. The only one riding head up was Maggie Brown. She never missed a thing. Elly Nation rode beside Maggie, and every once in a while, the woman would reach out to touch Elly and say something to her. That was OK. Couldn’t have the little one breaking down or something.
A smile flitted across Cahill Bowman’s face. Being a bad man wasn’t such a bad life. A man didn’t have to pick and shovel or eat dust behind a herd of cows. All he had to be was a little smarter and tougher than whoever was the law.
Muddy River tightened and sped up as it wound its way through a gaggle of low hills. The Shadow Box Gang followed it through, sometimes walking their horses in the stream itself when there was no room on either side.
Past the first riffle of hills, the land spread out, green with grass near the river, fading to dirty brown toward the surrounding hills.
“We’ll camp here,” Bowman said. “Maggie, you’ll fix something to eat.”
Maggie nodded and dismounted. “Come, Elly dear,” she said. “You can get off that hammerhead for a while. Help me get supper ready, could you?”
Elly looked at Maggie with a blank expression, but she slid off the horse and went to stand by the older woman.
Maggie made a ring of stones and placed three as a trivet where she set the deepest cast-iron skillet. As it heated, she mixed saleratus biscuits, the easiest kind of bread to make on the trail.
“That’s a good woman,” Bowman said. “You just may keep Elly Nation alive long enough for me to get back at Walt Nation.”
Maggie said nothing, nor did she so much as look at Cahill Bowman. Soon salt pork sizzled in a frying pan and the biscuits began to brown. The Shadow Box Gang gathered round like hungry vultures. They stood silent, except for a little cough now and then, and the sound of someone spitting a stream of tobacco juice onto the dry ground. She flipped the biscuits to brown the other side, then dumped one batch of fried salt pork into a tin pan. She sliced a second mess of salt pork into the hot skillet. “Sow belly an’ biscuits,” she said. “Ain’t much, but you can have at it.”
The vultures descended, and in minutes, the Shadow Box Gang was no more than hungry men chomping on biscuit and bacon sandwiches.
Maggie got a biscuit and some bacon from the melee and gave them to Elly. “You’ll need this,” she said quietly. “We’ll walk out of here when everyone’s sleeping tonight. All that food’s gonna make ’em sleepy. And if we walk, there’ll be no horse noise to wake ’em up.”
Elly said nothing in reply, but started eating her biscuit and bacon faster. Maggie went back to the fire and put out the second batch of biscuits and sowbelly. She heaped the food on the tin pan and said, “Don’t let me see you men wasting this good food. Eat up.”
“Yes’m,” Flapjack Kranz said with a lecherous grin. “I can guess what’s for dessert.”
“Not in a thousand years,” Maggie said. “Good boss like Cahill Bowman don’t let his men take advantage of a woman who’s done for ’em.”
Bowman broke in. “No touching the woman for now,” he said, “but I’ve got a bottle of good Turley’s Mill whiskey. That’ll have to do.”
Maggie smiled inside. Whiskey made men sleepy. Sleepy men didn’t watch sharp. Cleaning up after the men started passing the bottle, she secreted the little knife she’d used to cut bacon in her clothing.
“Bottle’s dry,” Geebee Mills said, the whiskey beginning to show in his speech. “Got a nothern?”
“It ain’t Turley’s Mill,” Bowman said, “but I got some skull buster that’s better’n nothing. He retrieved a long-necked bottle from his saddlebags, popped the cork, and took a healthy slug before handing it to Geebee.
Talk got louder as the level of the whiskey in the bottle sank. Two bottles were not enough to make the men pass out, but they were more than a little tipsy. They had to concentrate to put words together in a way that made sense.
Maggie’d prepared a small bundle that she laid behind her saddle. She just hoped Elly was up to run away.
“Junior,” Bowman said. “You and Geebee get over by those box elders and keep watch first. Rastus and Billy Bob can take the second turn at midnight, and me and Flapjack’ll take the dawn watch.”
“Yo,” Geebee said. “Ain’t nothing comin’ this way, but we’ll sure watch.”
They finished up the bottle of rotgut, grumbled as they rolled out blankets they’d taken from the rawhide ranch, and settled down, heads on saddles, as the horses cropped the grass that grew along the banks of the Muddy. Snores soon announced alcohol-induced slumber.
Maggie could see Geebee sitting with his back to a box elder, head slumped, asleep on watch. Likely Junior was, too, but she couldn’t see him. She’d
take the chance. At first, if anyone asked, she’d be taking Elly to answer nature’s call. After that … who knew what she’d do?
Before they’d killed the rancher and abused his wife, the Shadow Box Gang had kept a rope around Maggie’s neck. Now they didn’t, for whatever reason. Maggie stood and walked to the fire.
No one said a thing.
She wiped out the bacon pan with a rag, then put it back near the fire. She picked up a canteen.
No one said a thing.
She went to Elly, who lay back against her saddle, eyes wide open. “Come, Elly,” she said in a natural voice, “you know you can’t sleep the night through without answering nature’s call first.”
“Yes, of course,” Elly said. She scrambled to her feet.
Hand in hand, Maggie and Elly walked away from the camp.
No one said a thing.
They didn’t walk fast, but not too slow, either. They crossed two hundred yards of grass before coming to a line of one-seed juniper that looked almost straight enough to have been planted by hand. When they’d put another hundred yards of tree cover between themselves and the Shadow Box Gang, Maggie stopped. Although the moon was full, the stand of juniper made the landscape shadowy and almost impossible to see anything that didn’t move. Maggie put her mouth to Elly’s ear. “Thirsty?” she said.
Elly shook her head.
Maggie patted her on the shoulder. Mouth to Elly’s ear again, she said, “We’ll keep moving through the night. The more distance we can put between us and Bowman’s Shadow Box Gang, the better off we’ll be.
They kept walking until dawn, and then sat down to rest. Far in the distance, someone screamed. A shot sounded. And another.
Chapter Seven – Hit the Shadow Box Gang
About five miles down the Muddy, Stryker pulled up. Milt and Fletcher Comstock rode up, and he pointed to a thin smoke rising from hills to the south.
“What?” Milt said.
“Dred killed two outlaws.”
“Why?”
Stryker shrugged. “He has the women, too.”
“How?”
“He’s coming this way. We’ll go meet him.”
“Rider coming,” Milt said.
Stryker checked their back trail. The rider sat a black-pointed smutty Morgan, riding with his back straight as if he were on a military review. He wasn’t sneaking or trying to hide, and he kept the Morgan to a fast single-foot. He wore a black hat with a stiff flat brim set low over his eyes.
Milt moved off to one side and pulled her Winchester ’73 carbine from its saddle scabbard. Fletcher Comstock did nothing.
As he got closer, the man in black raised his hands shoulder high, palms out. “Looking for Marshal Stryker,” he said, his hard voice carrying clearly in the dry air.
“I’m Matt Stryker.”
“And I’m Gideon Orrin Rockwell.”
Stryker gave the man a sharp look. “Rockwell. Orrin Rockwell.”
The smile on the man’s face held no warmth. “That’s right, and before you ask, Porter Rockwell, God rest his soul, was my own father.”
“What do you want with me, then, Orrin Rockwell?”
“Most folks call me Gideon, or Gid,” Rockwell said.
Stryker gave him another long look, which Rockwell met without flinching. “All right, Gid, the question still stands. What do you want with me?”
“Folks in Moapa say your posse is out after the dastardly men what misused Mercy Taylor, killed her baby, and pert near killed her. That’s what they said.”
“We are trailing the Shadow Box Gang, as they call themselves,” Stryker said.
“Would it be intruding too much to go along with you?”
“We can do the job, Rockwell.”
“Not saying you can’t. I’d just like to see those jaybirds brought to justice. Like to see it with my own two eyes.”
“I’ve heard of you, Rockwell,” Milt said. “Some people call you the ‘avenging angel,’ I heard. Just like your pa. Only he was a U.S. Marshal.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Rockwell said.
“Avenging angel, is it?” Stryker said. He tapped the star on his chest. “We’re law-abiding people, Gid. No lynchings. No back-shooting. None of that mob stuff. If the Shadow Box Gang chooses to fight, we’ll fight. If they surrender, we’ll take them back to Silverton for trial and punishment.”
Rockwell nodded. “I can see that,” he said. “And if you don’t mind, I’ll tag along. Might do to have an extra gun with you when you meet up with those Satan-bred scallywags.”
“Milt. Fletch. Whattaya say?”
“OK by me,” Comstock said.
Milt said nothing, but she gave a curt nod.
“Let’s move along, then,” Stryker said. “Dred’s a waiting.”
Stryker led, and somehow Gideon Rockwell rode last, as if he were watching the back trail.
Stryker paid no attention to the trail left by the Shadow Boxers. Instead, he rode for a jumble of hills to the east of the Muddy. The half posse didn’t stop for a midday meal, they just dug into their saddlebags for whatever could be eaten horseback. Matthew Stryker ate nothing. Nor did Gideon Rockwell.
Away from the Muddy, the land grew sparse. Trees gave way to bushes and brambles, bunches of creosote bush, yucca, and rabbit bush. The hills, now clear in the dry Mojave air, were much higher than they had first seemed. Arroyos and washes slashed the land where they’d carried floodwaters from monsoon rains to the Muddy. A man would need a thousand acres or more to run ten cows. It was not a land where ranchers would congregate, and there was little to no water for irrigation. A tough land, but a land that had supported Paiutes and Mojaves and Mescaleros since long before any white man came.
Nothing moved except Stryker’s posse and a lone red-tailed hawk in the western sky.
They came to a cut, an arroyo sliced from the surrounding hills by eons of flash floods. Carcasses of trees and countless sticks were stacked behind boulders and hung up on dried roots along the banks, and they said the floodwaters still ran whenever it rained.
Dred stepped out from behind a boulder the size of a log cabin. He stood easy as Stryker’s posse rode up, but he didn’t take his eyes of Gideon Rockwell until Stryker spoke. “The new man is Gid Rockwell,” he said.
“I know of him,” Dred said. “Some say he is an angel. Others claim he is a devil.”
“Ha annsi,” Rockwell said.
“I’m Seminole,” Dred said. “And you Mormons figure us black people are cursed.”
“Black or white or red, good men’re good,” Rockwell said. “An’ bad is bad. A man should be judged by what he does, not by the color of his eyes or the hue of his skin. You can say all you want to, but at the end of the day, it’s what you do that counts. That’s the way I see it anyway.”
“Your smoke said you had the women,” Stryker said.
Dred nodded.
“Show me.”
Dred strode away. Stryker’s posse followed.
The scream and shots brought the sleeping Shadow Box men awake instantly. Cahill Bowman, who was on his way to relieve Billy Bob Hunt, whipped out his own revolver and went crashing across the rock-strewn ground toward where Flapjack Kranz still shouted.
“Jayzus! Mary! Virgin Mother! Filthy godforsaken heathens. Goldam coyotes.”
“I’m coming, Flapjack. Don’t you shoot me.” He led with his revolver and came out of the box elder thicket on the downside of the one where Geebee had first stood watch.
Bowman had to turn his head and take a big gulp of air before he looked again.
For an instant, it looked like Billy Bob stood against the big box elder Geebee had chosen. He was upright, but that’s where resemblance to a man left off. His throat was slashed and the piggin string that held him upright ran right through the gaping cut. Billy Bob had been proud of his long hair. He said he kept it long so any Indian who thought he could take that scalp was more than welcome to try. The long hair was gone, and the top of Billy Bob’s
head was a bloody dome. The dead man’s tongue hung out as if he were panting for breath, but a closer look showed Bowman that the pink thing protruding from Billy Bob’s mouth was not a tongue, it was his severed pecker, stuffed in bloody end first. Bowman had a time holding his gorge as his eyes traveled on down Billy Bob’s dead carcass.
The killer, and Bowman had no doubt what that it was an Indian’s work, cut Billy Bob’s belly open, pulled his guts out, and left them hanging, almost to the ground. A coyote lay dead, shot through by Flapjacks six-gun. Even in death, the coyote had refused to let go of Billy Bob’s intestines.
“Goldam,” Bowman said. Then he hollered, “Rastus? Rastus! You hear me? Rastus, hey!”
No one answered Bowman’s call.
Bowman lit out for Rastus’s position at a run, his revolver in hand.
Where Billy Bob was stood up and tied to a tree, Rastus lay spread-eagled on top of a boulder. Rastus wore his hat day and night because mostly he was bald. The killer had still scalped him, then left the skin from his head lying on the boulder as if tossed away as worthless. His throat, too, was slit, as was his belly. Blood had run off the boulder in rivulets, and now flies attacked it. Rastus also had a mouthful of severed penis, and the killer poked his eyes out with long acacia thorns.
The Shadow Box Gang was down to four men. Four men to keep two women … women! Bowman ran back to camp. The sun pushed its way up over the western hills.
No women. No Maggie. No Elly. “Hey!” he roared. “Where’d the women go to?”
Geebee raised his head and rubbed at an eye with the back of his hand. “Huh? No women? They was right over there when I hit the soogans, I think.”
Bowman stomped over to where the women’s saddles were supposed to be their pillows. “They ain’t here.”
“I didn’t hear no one running,” Geebee said. “You was here, boss, right over there. I seen you. How come you never woke up?”
Bowman didn’t have an answer, but the more he thought about things, the more he figured what the Shadow Box Gang—what was left of it—would have to do to put things straight. The more he brooded over the situation, the more he convinced himself. Walt Nation. It was all his fault. Walt Nation. That no good straight-laced lawman was the reason, the total reason everything went haywire. He blew off a stream of curses that would have burned the ears off a twenty-mule team.