Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Damn if I didn’t try to get everyone up.”

  Dixon nodded, a grim look to his dark eyes. “That business with the ridgepole was a good’un, Jimmy. So, you doing any good with that Sharps I gave you?”

  Hanrahan gazed at it. “Everyone else has a rifle now but Sheppard. Still, the worse thing is we’re running out of ammunition for what guns we do have. Scarcer than a harpsichord playing choir music in a Dodge City whorehouse.”

  Dixon nodded without humor, grim-lipped as he said, “My cartridges left over at Rath’s store.”

  The saloonkeeper grinned. “So—where you figure the odds are in us making it, Billy? Over to Myers’s? Or run for Rath’s?”

  He bit softly on the inside of his cheek, wishing he had another slice of chew right now to nestle beside his tongue. He was hot and thirsty and …

  “Rath’s. ‘Sides, that’s where the most ammunition is right now—just come down from Dodge. You fixing on coming, Jimmy?”

  He nodded. “You and I see things through the same keyhole, my friend. I figure there’s gotta be at least two of us go. Carry back enough ammunition to make that run worthwhile.”

  The far side of the room erupted with cheers.

  Hiram Watson turned to yell over to them, “Billy Ogg just dropped one of the sonsabitches. Shot his pony clean out from under ‘im.”

  At that same wall James McKinley announced that another warrior was racing in for a rescue on a white pony. Dixon got to the east wall just as the rider swept by the unhorsed warrior, heaving him up behind him. They wheeled about in a spray of dust as Ogg and McKinley trained their rifles on the pair. Ogg’s gun roared first, the bullet striking a rear leg of the white pony.

  It faltered, nearly spilling the rump rider desperately clutching the first warrior. They both began to frantically whip the pony toward the far meadow and safety atop the staggering three-legged animal.

  “You ready?” Hanrahan asked.

  Billy sucked a hot, bitter breath down his throat. The acrid taste of burnt gunpowder choked him. “Ready. Go out the door—or the window?”

  Hanrahan shrugged, figuring it on his own. “I allow as how we can be at a full run better coming out that door.” He motioned to the west.

  Dixon considered. “I’ll take the window. It’s a straight shot to Rath’s.”

  “All right, we’ll do it,” Hanrahan agreed. “After you, young’un.”

  “I’m taking odds on ol’ Hanrahan beating Dixon to Rath’s store!” shouted Bermuda Carlisle, stirring up the rest.

  “Hah! He’ll hoof about as awkward as a bear in a bramble patch!” Billy Ogg replied with a snort. “I’ll take some of that! Twenty dollars says Dixon beats Hanrahan!”

  “Fifty says Dixon don’t!” Oscar Sheppard piped up.

  “Shit, you’re crazy!” McKinley chimed in. “Another twenty on Billy. Sometimes a man just don’t know what another can do until it comes down to the nut-cutting.”

  Dixon didn’t listen to the rest of the wagering. He had himself pressed against the earth wall beside the wide window … then flung himself through it and was on the ground, hitting the dirt at a dead run, trying hard to remember if he had even touched the windowsill on his way out and down.

  It did not matter now, for he could hear the pounding of his own heart. No—it was the hammering of Hanrahan’s boots right behind him. The older man was huffing like a steam locomotive. And the raspy howl of his own breath as he closed on the Rath store reminded Billy of a buffalo bull bellowing in the rut.

  With some surprise he realized he really was hollering, his throat burning from the torture. And Hanrahan was yelling right at Dixon’s shoulder.

  Lord, that old man has long legs, Billy thought as Hanrahan surged ahead.

  “Open the goddamned door!” shrieked the saloonkeeper as the air around them whistled and whined, snarling bullets beginning to smack the earth wall ahead of them like hands slapping wet clay.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph—Hanrahan!” Billy crowed as the doorway ahead of them opened like a blessing from St. Peter and God Himself. “Can you ever run for a old man!”

  17

  June 27, 1874

  If nothing else, Masterson had sand.

  Donegan had been the one to hold the door ready to open as the young hunter sprinted across the open ground from Hanrahan’s saloon.

  “He’s my best friend in Dodge,” Bat huffed, still breathless as he knelt to cradle Billy Tyler’s head in his lap, wiping some blood from Tyler’s lips with the sleeve of his grimy long-handles.

  “He called for you special,” said the oldest man there, Billy Keeler. “Times like this for a man, he wants his friends around.”

  Masterson eased some of Tyler’s long hair out of the youth’s eyes. “I’m here now, Billy. I’m here.”

  Seamus thought he saw some real gratitude there in Tyler’s eyes—Masterson’s only reply.

  With the sun rising ever higher in the midsummer sky, the morning had dragged on and on interminably. With the doors closed and not a breeze stirring, the men in the Myers store began to suffer, most in stony silence. To Seamus, it felt hot enough to render a panful of lard from a single flea, as if every pore in his body were opened and leaching. Even on that stinking island six summers back, Forsyth’s men had themselves a breeze, he recalled. Then he remembered how the flies and beetles and spiders had found the dead horses and the oozy wounds of the men. And then evening came with its blessing of sundown, substituting the noise of Cheyenne gunfire for the buzzing curse of winged torment. Mosquitoes.*

  But right now, he’d take those mosquitoes—if he could only have the cool, have that breeze moving down into the valley of the Arickaree even with the noisy torment on wing.

  “Hot as a Dutch oven with my baking-powder biscuits burning,” Keeler muttered on the far side of Masterson.

  “He could use some water,” Bat said, running a fingertip over Tyler’s slack, parched lips.

  “Wounded man always needs more water’n the rest,” Seamus said, remembering how the wounded hollered or whimpered from those rifle pits, stretched out beneath a relentless sun that baked Beecher Island.

  “Billy needs some water,” Masterson said again, a little more anxious this time.

  He pulled himself out from under the wounded hunter and crabbed over to a wooden bucket. He looked in to find it all but empty. In a crouch he scurried for the west door.

  “B-Bat?”

  “Hold up, Masterson,” Donegan ordered.

  Keeler stopped the young hunter at the same time. “Tyler wants you.”

  “Don’t go, Bat,” Tyler implored his friend. “I took it in the lights out there … the stockade.”

  “I gotta, Billy,” Masterson replied, filled with youthful bravado. “You need water.”

  Keeler wrenched the bucket’s rope handle from Masterson. “You’re staying with Tyler.”

  “No I ain’t—”

  Donegan pulled Masterson back down. “Do as Keeler tells you, Bat. No man gonna think less of you for staying with Tyler. Besides, we’ll tell you if you’re standing a little short around here.”

  “Don’t you see—them Cheyenne know me, Bat,” Keeler tried to explain. “They might’n give me a break—but none to a dad-blamed stranger to ’em like you.”

  The old cook creaked to his feet, leaned against the door a moment, gazing through a bullet-splintered hole in the planks, then pushed the door open just as Keeler’s black dog dove out between its owner’s legs. The cook stumbled, nearly sprawling, but caught himself as the bucket went tumbling and the west wall of the stockade erupted in a fury of gunfire.

  As Donegan watched and the dog whimpered in its death throes, Keeler picked himself up and dashed for the well, threw the bucket in and hauled it back out as the top of the stockade wall continued to spit fire and belch a gray pall of smoke. The bullets sang around the lithe old man as he sprinted back to the store. Earth erupted in tiny volcanoes, slapped the earth wall ahead of him, splattered
against the plank door that Donegan thrust open to admit Keeler.

  Then the old man handed the bucket to Masterson and collapsed against the wall. He began to laugh.

  “Son of a whore,” he exclaimed, his brown tongue licking at the graying beard and mustache that was tobacco-stained yellow around his thin-lipped mouth. “Them bastards hauled Hell out of its shuck … but I made it whole. By God—I’m still whole, ain’t I?”

  “That’s right, you bone-rack crowbait,” growled Dutch Born. “Cain’t believe you made it back.”

  Donegan was chuckling with him. “No one else as lucky as you, Keeler. No one else would ever made it to the well—and you come humping back here without spilling a bleeming drop!”

  “Should’ve been whiskey, by God!” Mike McCabe growled.

  “Been whiskey I was bringing back, them Injun’s aim been a lot better, I’d wager!” Keeler bellowed. He wagged his head, as if still stunned that he had made it.

  “Don’t be so damned surprised,” Seamus told him.

  He looked up at the Irishman, his eyes alive and sparkling, more young than the wrinkled flesh around them. “Shit, son—it’s just that I couldn’t not go. Don’t you see? I’ve lived many a year and I’ve come to know most men are often betrayed by their weaknesses.”

  “No man would’ve thought less of you if you hadn’t gone, Keeler,” Born said.

  The old cook smiled at them, seeing their new respect in those eyes. But what was more, Donegan figured, was the new respect Keeler had for himself.

  “I know what you mean about a man doing what he fears most doing,” Donegan replied quietly, patting the old man’s knee and then moving away to rump back against the wall.

  “Here, Billy,” Masterson said to Tyler as he dragged a greasy bandanna from his neck, dipped it in the cool water and bathed the wounded man’s face.

  “Gimme a drink—wouldya, Bat?”

  Keeler handed Masterson a cup, and Bat propped Tyler’s head up as he drank. When Billy had enough, he gazed up into Masterson’s eyes and sputtered away from the cup.

  “Thankee, Bat. You been the best friend I ever had.”

  Then ever so slowly as they all watched, Billy Tyler’s eyes rolled back and closed, his head collapsing against Bat Masterson’s shoulder.

  After a few minutes Donegan inched closer. “He’s dead, Bat.”

  Masterson was some time in answering as the nearby rattle of gunfire continued, unabated, rising then falling. “I know.” He sighed, touching his friend’s gray, waxy face. “I … I just wanna sit here with him for a while.”

  Donegan patted the young hunter on the shoulder before he moved off again. He felt like he might cry if he didn’t. As hard as he was having to fight off screaming Comanche and the rest, Seamus was also having to fight off crying. Young men dying on damn fool errands. If it weren’t some young soldier riding off on an Indian campaign, then it was a young buffalo hunter come to make his fortune in hides.

  He choked on the gall of that. Remembering he had come to this valley to find his own fortune. And it would likely mean his life. What did he have to show for these years?

  Times such as these always nudged a remembrance in him that he had again stretched his good fortune about as thin as spider silk.

  Then Seamus tried squeezing that dark brooding from the front of his mind. He had been through all of this before—and what it always forced him to think on. But after all this time and all these years and battles and blood and scars, he still didn’t have any better an answer. How many times had he gallantly or reluctantly bellied up to stare death in the eye—so many times a naive young soldier blue charging forward through smoke thicker than a hickory ham shed in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, bellowing at the top of his lungs and waving cold steel at the end of his arm, ordered forward whenever the Confederate artillery had paused to cool its sooty throats?

  It was times like this that such fears gathered back around the Irishman, in gentle wind whispers of a moment when he was forced once more to soberly betake his innermost doubts on those yesterday trails not put beneath the heels of his big boots, forced to consider the sour forks of the road not taken, and the path that had brought him here.

  Why, oh why hadn’t he chosen the simple path that Uncle Ian had taken? It was a life he had watched others earn, the life he himself probably wanted as much as any down in the core of him, a life that had so far eluded him—

  “Listen!” Ed Trevor shouted above the clamor in the store.

  “Sounds like someone chopping wood,” said James Campbell.

  “Coming from the Scheidler wagon, boys,” Charley Armitage said. “That’un them bastards tipped over for a barricade.”

  “Chopping through the bottom, I’ll bet,” Frenchy put in.

  “You figure they’re making loopholes to shoot at us?” asked Seth Hathaway.

  “Naw. Them red devils is pilfering through the Scheidlers’ plunder. Kinda like them—rather steal than fight,” answered Dutch Born.

  “Lookee,” said Fred Leonard. “C’mere—you can see ’em hacking on it with their tomahawks. Five of ’em.”

  Several of the others huddled at Leonard’s loophole.

  “Let’s give ’em a greeting,” Leonard suggested.

  Armitage and Born stuffed their barrels through the pickets with Leonard, then Fred counted.

  “One, two, three—fire!”

  Each bullet hit a target, sending splinters and a spray of flour into the air, along with one cry of pain. Two warriors burst onto their feet and sprinted a retreat.

  “Lookit them run, will you?” exclaimed Keeler as the riflemen reloaded.

  Suddenly a sixth figure arose from the bullet-riddled wagon and took off in a crouch.

  “It’s a goddamned nigger!” yelled Trevor.

  “Nigger’s painted up just like a Comanche, he is!” Hathaway said.

  “That’s the sonofabitch blowing the goddanged bugle!” shouted Born. “Shoot him, Fred!”

  Leonard shoved his rifle into Armitage’s hands. “You’re a better shot—take him!”

  Charley did not wait to be nudged into it. He stuffed the loaded .40-caliber Sharps through the wall, drew his bead down on the coffee-skinned back and glittering trumpet slung over the runner’s shoulder, and squeezed back on the trigger.

  The Sharps roared, belching smoke as the white men set up a cheer. The renegade pitched forward as if hammered by a mule hoof, spilling a tin cup filled with sugar and another filled with coffee that he had tried to carry away in each hand.

  “You drilled him clean through the lights!” McCabe hollered, dancing a bit of a jig, his long red hair flying.

  “That’ll end his damned music,” Born sighed. “Hate bugle music, I do. Always did, matter of fact.”

  Another darky, Seamus thought grimly. What was it that led men like them to abandon the life they had and go over to the blanket? What made a former soldier for the Negro Cavalry join up with the Comanche? Was life so bad for a darky on this southern frontier that he’d just up and go over to the h’athens that way, given the chance? And as that thought rambled through Donegan, it pricked a memory he had long held buried below the surface of many fears.

  Jack O’Neill—the mulatto who had tracked Donegan for the better part of a year, so the story was told years ago in those forts of western Kansas. O’Neill, who had become a Cheyenne Dog Soldier and run with Roman Nose, until Forsyth dogged their backtrail long enough that the Cheyenne and Brule Sioux were forced to turn around and fight.* The mulatto who had come closer to killing Donegan than any man before him—with the exception of that smooth-faced Confederate officer who had carved a long slice along the Irishman’s back with Toledo steel. Had it not been for Bill Cody taking care of that giant Jack O’Neill,† Seamus knew he would not be hunkered here in this hot, stinking hellhole, fighting off the Comanches.

  How many times had he promised himself to get away from putting his life on the line as it was at this moment? How many more
times would it come down to the nutcutting—them or he?

  “Lookee here now,” Frenchy said from his loophole. “One brave bastard riding in close to count his coup on this here building.”

  Seamus stirred, thankful to have his thoughts yanked from O’Neill and that brush with his own mortality. Perhaps it was time to do more than think about making a change in his life. To consider settling down with a woman who could keep him pleased. Someone who would take his mind off chasing this pot of gold. Just like Sharp Grover himself had said before: true wealth is found in a man’s own happiness, not in the depth of his pockets.

  Her vision swam before him, looking willing and warmer and all the softer than spring wind. Samantha even loved poetry. How many women had ever asked him to recite some for them? Not one since Boston Towne, where as a youngster he first memorized what was in the books on that shelf in the tawdry house men visited after dark. Samantha Pike had listened to his words as if they were songs of love between only them. And he remembered how she had seemed to touch something deep and long submerged within him as she rocked atop his rigid manhood.

  No, it wasn’t only the all-consuming physical draining she took of him—she had looked down at him with those moist lips and teal eyes of hers and a smile that would crack glacial rock, moving atop him as he caressed and kissed her suspended breasts—begging him to whisper more poetry to her. Faith, but she had touched a part of him not touched before.

  Few men could walk away from a woman like that. And he had. But had he come away whole? A man was bound to leave something of themselves behind with a woman like Samantha Pike. Maybe he had left something with Jennifer Wheatley as well. Maybe his willingness to trust, to have faith in another. If not a willingness to trust Samantha, then perhaps he had sacrificed his willingness to trust in himself. But she had been willing to heal him, to allow him time to let the poison seep out of the wound caused by another. She had trusted in him. He had felt it from the first. Samantha Pike had completely, irrevocably, and irretrievably trusted in him.