Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  14

  June 27, 1874

  The air was sticky. Billy feared last night’s clouds had foreboded rain.

  He glanced up at the sky to the west, across the flat meadow in the direction of the ruins at the distant flash of some heat lightning streaking from the ground into the heavens with a ghostly light, green and phosphorescent.

  The air was still and heavy, portentous of the coming thunderstorm.

  After Hanrahan had some of his men climb up on top of the saloon to hurriedly throw dirt off the overburdened roof, and had the others muscle a stout prop beneath the huge cottonwood ridgepole that the saloonkeeper claimed had cracked in the middle of the night, awakening at least a half-dozen men sleeping off their cups inside the soddy, Jim Hanrahan invited everyone to belly up to the bar for free ones. And while about fifteen hunters and skinners were drinking to their red-eyed health, the saloonkeeper suggested that Dixon get a head start on the day.

  “Since you’re up, Billy,” Jim said, “whyn’t you get on the road north afore the sun catches you and your crew sleeping? Have Billy Ogg to catch up our animals for you.”

  Dixon had thought a moment on it, then decided it sounded as good as any idea. After all, the moon had eased on out of the sky about the time all that ridgepole commotion got started. True too, every one of the outfit’s wagons were loaded. All that was needed was to bring in the stock from the meadow and roust the rest of his men. With Masterson and Donegan along as hunters, the three would surely keep more than nine skinners busy. It was bound to be a profitable summer hunt, moseying along as they followed the herds north.

  “Ogg! Roll out!” Dixon shouted, nudging the skinner’s stockinged foot, having found Ogg sleeping just outside the saloon door, likely able to get no farther than that with his blanket after last night’s late celebration followed by that early scare with the ridgepole.

  “Shit, Billy! I just laid down four winks ago,” Ogg grumbled, coming up slow but rubbing his face briskly with both hands. “What time is it anyways?”

  “I figure it can’t be too much after four from the looks of the sky to the east. Jimmy figures we ought to leave soon’s we can. Go fetch up the stock.”

  “The stock?”

  “We’re rolling soon as we’re hitched.”

  With his folding pocketknife Dixon shaved off a sliver of chew and plugged it in his cheek as he turned to the north. The Scheidler brothers had their two wagons parked some distance from Myers’s stockade, their tongues still down.

  At least I’ll get a jump on Ike and Shorty, Billy thought to himself. Hell, even that big damn dog of theirs was sleeping sound as sowbugs.

  He whistled for Fannie, and when the dog came to him from the direction of the Scheidlers’ wagons, stopping between his legs for a vigorous rub, the breeze shifted a moment, and Dixon thought he heard something out of place, a sound from somewhere off across the meadow to the south. He raised his nose into the breeze, like a hide man would. Disgusted, he went back to scratching Fannie, his nose only able to smell the cinder and charcoal of O’Keefe’s forge which stood nearby, on the far side of Dixon’s wagons.

  There was the sound again, almost like hail rattling through dry cottonwood leaves. But he convinced himself as quickly that he was just hearing things.

  Billy told himself he was just spooked. What with all that talk the last few days, and then Hanrahan pulling that damned stunt a couple hours ago. There was no goddamned crack in that ridgepole—Billy and Bat had seen that with their own eyes. Jimmy looked sheepish enough when they asked him about it, saying with that smile of his that at least if any trouble did show, they’d now have the whole durn settlement up and ready for what came.

  He knelt beside Fannie and let her lick his cheek as he listened to the peep-frogs down in the trees. Then they went quiet and the air was still.

  The east was growing red. Like Hanrahan’s eyes this morning. Jimmy had been punishing the bottle pretty hard the last few days. Hell, Dixon thought. Hanrahan had everything he had ever owned tied up in that saloon now. Billy couldn’t blame the man for being worried about that rumor Amos Chapman had carried all the way in from Camp Supply.

  “That coffee?” he asked Masterson as the young hunter strode up from the saloon, a steaming cup in hand.

  “I ain’t got the belly like them others to be drinking Hanrahan’s saddle varnish this time of the morning,” Bat replied, hoisting his tin mug.

  “Whyn’t you roll Donegan out with that coffee of yours. It sure smells good.”

  “Want me fetch you some?”

  “Get some soon as Ogg gets back with the stock. G’won and get Donegan out—but be gentle about it. He made a rough night of it,” Dixon commented as he turned away from Fannie and went to lash up his bedroll.

  “So the Irishman’s going with us after all?” Masterson asked as he wheeled slowly, stomping over toward the sleeping form darkening the ground. Donegan was snoring with a flat-back, hung-over rumble.

  “Says he’ll tie in with us. Wants to hunt buffalo now. Not just his next round of whiskey.”

  Masterson knelt to nudge Donegan. “Time to open them bloody eyes of yours.”

  As Billy turned from the rear gate of the wagon where he had just thrown his bedroll, he knelt to retrieve his new Sharps. A bullbat swept overhead, keening quietly as it disappeared in the darkness. Something brought Dixon around slowly, to look at the awakening meadow. And at that same moment Dixon thought he heard that sound again, sound carried on the breeze as it shifted out of the south, rustling the long hair at his shoulders. It was … Billy Ogg. He was yelling something. Probably having him a bit of trouble with some of Hanrahan’s stock.

  Dixon watched the murky light shift, like the sandy bottom of the Cimarron, revealing a wide fan of dark objects throbbing at the nearby horizon. Nearer still, Ogg was yelling at him. Then, straining his eyes, Dixon saw them.

  Seamus growled as he rose beside young Masterson, one hand against his shaggy head, hawking and spitting to clear the night-gather from his throat. “Too bleeming old to be—” He blinked. “Just what the hell time is it, you two rousting me out? I ain’t in the goddamned army no more. You two rounders out to—”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” Dixon roared, thunderstruck, his voice as tart as pickling brine.

  He stood gape-mouthed three heartbeats more as the cries of the warriors set the hair on the back of his neck to standing. He had never seen anything like this before. Likely, his mind fixed on it suddenly, no one else had ever seen anything like this before—and lived to tell the tale of it.

  “By the saints!” Donegan bellowed, clambering to his feet, weaving unsteadily and grabbing for the seven-foot-tall wagon wheel.

  “Billy—come back!” Masterson shrieked.

  “I gotta get my horse!” Dixon shouted as he ran straight for Ogg, who was galloping on foot in a beeline away from the oncoming charge.

  He felt his insides draw up just as if they had been salted. There were hundreds of them—more than he had seen since … since the government peacemakers had that October parley with all the tribes seven years back up on Medicine Lodge Creek.

  Now he knew what it had been. That faint noise, not so faint now. The sound had grown—almost deafening, the thunder those hooves made. Suddenly ponies shrieked as they spilled their riders among the prairie dog village in the meadow.

  The war cries of those horsemen were enough to make a lesser man’s heart turn to water. As he reached his frantic, plunging horse, Billy snorted. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid—because he damned well was. He was just fool enough to try to save the horse he had a genuine affection for.

  Then he swallowed hard, convincing himself the warriors were just making a charge on the herd—simply to run off the stock.

  Ogg sprinted past him as Dixon pulled up the picket pin, his mouth pumping faster than his legs. It was all Dixon could do to get the tether freed from the pin and drag the rearing, frightened horse over to the wagon wheel, whe
re he lashed the animal.

  “They ain’t turning!” Dixon found himself shouting, more thought than intent to speak.

  “They come at us without turning—our meat’s cooked! Godblame it, Dixon—c’mon!” Donegan’s rough brogue cut through the shrieking war cries. “The bastirds coming for the buildings!”

  In that next instant, Seamus was yanking on Dixon’s arm with one hand. Then he stopped, whirled and levered a cartridge in that brass-mounted Henry. The Irishman brought it calmly to his shoulder, nestled his cheek against the stock and fired.

  Dixon wasn’t long in acting behind him. That space between the cracks of the Irishman’s Henry was suddenly punctuated by the boom of Billy’s single shot with the .44 Sharps. Dixon stood there in awe for a long breathless moment.

  “It’s almost beautiful.” Billy finally found words for this bowel-numbing sight as he drove home a cartridge, watching the onrushing cavalcade as the sky lanced red-orange arrows out of the east. “Look at them feathers and lances and shields—”

  “Shut up and run!” Donegan growled, dragging the younger man back toward the saloon and the greasy yellow light spilling from the east door. “We ain’t got time for talking or shooting!”

  They both heard the door slam shut against its rough-hewn jamb. Inside the saloon men were yelling in surprise and fear. Outside, Dixon thought it was nothing less than how Hell itself must sound on a man’s ears, just as he and the Irishman reached the plank door.

  “Open up!” Donegan boomed, his big fist hammering against the door.

  “It’s Dixon!” Billy hollered. The first bullets were beginning to kick up dust around their feet. Slap the earth walls around them. “And the Irishman—let us in!”

  Seamus brought the Henry back, preparing to ram the rifle butt against the door when it suddenly opened. A bullet whined past them, snarling somewhere into the saloon’s interior. Billy Ogg dove between them, coming out of nowhere on the fly, the first to lunge across the threshold. He stumbled and fell facedown, climbing onto his knees as he scrambled into the interior of the saloon.

  “Damn! I ain’t got but a handful of cartridges!” Donegan moaned as he collapsed against the wall, pulling the brass casings from his canvas britches.

  “Where’d you leave your gear?” Dixon asked, settling next to him and patting his own pockets.

  Seamus nodded north. “Myers’s place. When I walked over last night to have a drink—”

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph—I’m low on ammunition myself,” Dixon interrupted. “Enough to keep me shooting for a while, but—”

  “Well boys, I can stay here and watch the rest of you fellas stand these h’athens off,” Donegan hacked as he rolled over onto his knees in a crouch. “Or, I can make a fight of it back to Myers’s place while I still have some cartridges left me.”

  Dixon grabbed the Irishman’s sleeve. His palm was sweaty. Keeping the older plainsman there beside him might be just his brand of luck. “You’ll be a damned fool to try it out there now, Seamus.”

  “I wait another minute more and I won’t stand a whore’s chance in mass.” He was crouching toward the doorway now, flinging his voice over his shoulder. “Close the door behind me!”

  Donegan was gone.

  Hanrahan flung the door shut as angry wasps of bullets stung the doorway, slapped the side of the saloon, whined incessantly outside.

  Still the war cries did not cease. Nor the whinnying of the hide men’s horses, answered by the screams of the war ponies as the white men hunkered down and put those powerful buffalo rifles into service for the first time, yellow-orange flames spurting into the murky light of dawn this Saturday morning.

  The frightening, bowel-puckering shrieks of those countless warriors grew in volume … drew closer and closer still.

  And Dixon knew they were in for a long siege of it.

  * * *

  An old cavalryman like he had reacted on instinct. And right at this moment as he reached the back wall of the Myers stockade where the shadows hung thickest, Seamus Donegan was downright amazed he had made it this far without being picked off or ridden down in all the mad confusion.

  By the time he had dashed away from the scant safety of O’Keefe’s shop, dragging a broken wagon wheel bouncing across the sage behind him, the phalanx of warriors had engulfed the Rath compound.

  His heart in his throat, Seamus squeezed down the fear. More so the memory of fear: surrounded and outnumbered and on the verge of being overrun in that hayfield corral a handful of miles from Fort C. F. Smith.* The foggy image of his uncle Liam swam before his eyes as his breath caught high in his chest. Once more he had become surrounded and outnumbered by the screaming hordes who appeared out of the last gray moments of night beside a sandbar in the middle of a nameless river.†

  Hearing the hoofbeats hammering closer and closer, Seamus realized he could wait no longer in these shadows. Instead, he had to chance climbing into the new day’s light to clamber over the wall.

  The toe of his boot found the wheel hub. His left hand sought a grip around a stockade picket here behind the Myers & Leonard stable. Unsteadily, his leg craned his weight upward. His left foot found a shaky rest at the top of the broken wheel he had dragged from O’Keefe’s just as his left hand screamed out in pain—a splinter almost the size of a wiping stick burrowing itself in his palm. That hand grew warm and wet as he dragged himself to the top of the stockade and hurled himself over, landing in a heap beside the stable.

  Bullets rattled the wooden pickets behind him, scattering splinters and chunks of dried mud.

  Those bullets hadn’t come from outside the compound—they were fired from the store …

  “Hold your fire!” he shouted, holding the Henry up, waving it at the end of his arm. “It’s Donegan, by damned! Don’t shoot!”

  “The Irishman!”

  He recognized the voice.

  “McCabe! It’s me—Seamus!”

  Of a sudden the redheaded skinner stood in the doorway at the back of the store with that surprised look of a turkey gobler peering over a downed cottonwood log. “If you’re fixing on joining us—best you do it now, Donegan!”

  He was off and running before McCabe had finished.

  “Lord, but you do look a sight,” growled Seth Hathaway as Donegan slid to a stop and McCabe slammed the plank door closed.

  “Where the hell were you?” asked Charley Armitage, Dixon’s skinner.

  “Sleeping, when Masterson woke me up—just before the bleeming Injins come calling,” he wheezed, his heart a ringing, anvil beat in his ears as he sank against an inner wall.

  Seamus gazed around the room quickly, taking a count. Besides Armitage and McCabe, there were another nine men in the store. Fred Leonard, Myers’s clerk and partner; James Campbell, a skinner; Edward Trevor, hunter; Seth Hathaway, another hunter; “Dutch” Henry Born, a hunter; Billy Tyler, skinner; Billy “Old Man” Keeler, Myers’s cook; Fred Myers, another hunter but no relation to Charlie; and Frenchy, also a Dixon skinner.

  As he clicked them off in his head, Donegan almost felt sorry for those he left behind at Hanrahan’s saloon, as it appeared that the best shots and the calmest heads were gathered under this roof. Better than half of them weren’t dressed, crouched at the walls and doorway in their long-handles, gun belts around their waists, bandoleers of Sharps ammunition slung over their shoulders. Yet most still hadn’t taken the time to pull on their boots.

  “Ah, Jesus…” groaned Leonard at the east wall, where he peered through a loophole he had chiseled between the pickets.

  To a man, the others came to the wall and gazed at the open meadow in the gray light of dawn, watching the brown horsemen swarm over the Scheidler brothers. Ike grappled with three warriors in the back of a high-walled freight wagon, tripping and falling backward over the loose canvas shroud. Shorty bolted over the side of another wagon and was sprinting for the stockade, hollering at the top of his lungs when he suddenly skidded to a stop and started clawing at his b
ack, screeching in horror.

  When Shorty turned to look behind him, Donegan and the rest saw the arrow buried halfway to the fletching between the teamster’s shoulder blades. In the next instant a huge horseman atop a tall gray horse appeared out of nowhere with a huge club, the head of which was made with terrifying iron nails, swinging at the end of his arm. Prancing across the meadow so gracefully, standing more than sixteen hands high—Seamus was reminded of the huge gray horse he had once owned. The General.

  A piece of Donegan’s heart had been ripped out that day the renegade North had killed The General during the Irishman’s frantic race to a sandy island that already had about it the smell of cold sweat as the warriors closed in, drawing their noose ever tighter. Remembering the smell of cold sweat dripping down a man’s spine … if not the stench of death itself.*

  “Uncle Liam,” Seamus whispered, blinking his eyes clear as he peered like a shabby voyeur through the earth-coated pickets. “God bless you wherever you are…”

  The huge warrior brought the terrible studded club down into Shorty’s face and came away with the top of the white man’s head, screeching his glee as he shook the skull and gore free then wheeled his huge gray horse about in a prancing circle, rearing the animal as he retreated from the stockade walls.

  Donegan grew sickened, watching the spray of blood and brain as the body quivered, still standing for some reason. Then Shorty finally sank to the ground in a heap, where his body trembled for a moment. Seamus had to turn away.

  It brought back memories of that rain-soaked bowl among the Lava Beds, just beneath Black Ledge where the Modocs had come down to do their evil work on the soldier dead. And found some, like Donegan, still alive. And again his soul caused him to wonder why the Modoc leader had called off his warriors, sparing the undead that day.*

  “Virgin Mary, Mother of grace,” he muttered, and crossed himself. Then looked around to find some of the others staring at him, their faces sharp-stitched with lines of hard living every bit as white as he felt his to be.

  “How many of us are there?” asked the Irishman.