by Mark Henry
When he could, Trap eschewed a sidearm during a scrap, preferring his trusty long gun if given time to make a choice. He’d seen too many men he needed to stay down walk away from a pistol wound. Many of them died later, but in a fight, he preferred those he dispatched to go down and stay there. Good men had been killed by good-for-nothing hombres who didn’t have the sense to know they were already dead. On the field of battle nothing beat the huge hunk of lead the rifle spit for assuring that sort of thing didn’t happen. When the fry-pan-sized bullet hit, a person knew they were done for.
Both the rifle and pistol had their niches, but when a scrap got tight Trap preferred his knife. The blade rested in a simple leather scabbard off his right side, held in place by an antler button on a leather whang. It was relatively short as far as sheath knives went, barely nine inches overall. With a simple stag handle, it was in all ways unremarkable except for what it could do in Trap’s capable hands. He’d proven more than once that his knife could work miracles in close combat, and it had the added advantage of never needing to be reloaded.
Hashkee covered the ground quickly, a jarring grudge in his normally smooth mule-gait at having to work on such a sweltering, smoky day. Standing in the flat stirrups designed to be more comfortable on his moccasined feet, Trap squinted into the hazy glare and made out two riders up the narrow valley. At a distance, at least, his eyes still worked the way they did when he was a young man. He was relatively certain it was Blake and Ky, but he hadn’t survived these forty-eight years by stumbling into things on easy assumptions. Pointing Hashkee into the shadowed forest and up a steep grade alongside the train tracks, he lost only five more minutes and came in beside his two friends from a small knoll, slightly above them. The sun was to his back.
“Thought I was foolish to look for you to come up the road like a normal human being.” Roman shielded his eyes as he watched mule and rider slide down the hill on low haunches among a skittering shower of dirt and pebbles. He held a hand across the pommel of his saddle as the mule came up next to him and released a low growl.
Trap shook the offered hand and shrugged. “These don’t sound like normal times, Captain. Fact is, I don’t think I remember ever livin’ in what a man could call normal times.”
“True enough.” Ky nodded.
“It gets less and less normal every minute, Pa.” Blake’s brow creased and he twirled the end of his leather reins.
“How’s that?”
“Just got a wire from Mr. Madsen. He’s already in Montana and on his way to see you. Seems someone offered him a job working security for the railroad. He was up in Helena talking with them about it.”
“Clay Madsen in Montana?” Trap smiled. He stood in the stirrups with a slow groan and rubbed the small of his back.
“He’s on his way to see you.”
“I haven’t seen either of you boys for twelve years and now I get a full dose of both of you all at once,” Roman told Trap, grinning, showing his teeth. “When did you two part company?”
“Almost three years ago,” said Trap. “His father died and he went back to Texas to give the family ranch a go. I came north with Maggie—away from the heat.” Saddle leather creaked when O’Shannon resumed his seat. He needed to do something so he could digest this new information. “I’d like to get on over to Goblin Creek and take a look if we could, Captain.”
Ky tipped the wide brim of the mouse-brown hat that he’d replaced his bowler with.
“Lead on, Blake. Take us to Goblin Creek. We’ve got work to do.” With the same ease that he’d switched hats, Roman went from a visiting guest to commander.
* * *
Jailer Joe Casey probably thought he was doing his level best to keep folks away from the bloody carnage that surrounded the stage—but he was old and there was only one of him against an endless tide of gawkers. There weren’t that many automobiles in this part of Montana, but a few folks had them. Trap supposed the snaking set of tire tracks leading back down the creek-side road belonged to Peter Kenworth. Other onlookers had been coming in by the wagonload all day long, braving the smoke and heat to set eyes on what was already being called the Goblin Creek Indian Massacre.
Trap shook his head slowly while he took in the scene. No matter the brutality, someone would enjoy looking it over. He’d seen people bring picnic lunches to hangings to gnaw on chicken legs while they watched condemned men dance their last mortal steps at the end of a rope. Trap didn’t have a stomach for such things. He’d taken the lives of other men, even looked them in the eye while he did, but he took no joy in it. And he certainly never stood around to admire his own handiwork.
People were softer now, protected from the harshness that used to mark the frontier. He supposed these folks had never been exposed to the real thing, so the green flies and glistening gut piles in front of them seemed more like an imagined illustration from a dime novel than the soulless carcasses of once-living, breathing human beings. Civilization might have come to Montana, but the people were no more civilized for it.
Overwhelmed by so many visitors, Casey had slipped from his role as guard to that of an informal tour guide. He kept the onlookers back a few feet from the bodies, but pointed out this wound and that, gesturing with outstretched arms to share his theories about what had happened. His gray hair blew in thin wisps on the hot breeze and the sun had severely pinked the top of his bare scalp. Trap shook his head in quiet wonderment that a man would be out on such a fiercely cloudless day without his hat.
Scarcely ten yards from the corpses, three women in plain cotton dresses stood, hands to their mouths, in front of a weathered buckboard and tired gray horse. Gaping at the scene before them, one held the hand of a curly-headed toddler, who hung disinterested at his mother’s side. He wiped his runny nose on the hem of her dress. Beyond the women two boys, no older than thirteen, stared slack-jawed at the naked, mutilated bodies tied to the coach wheels.
“Get back from there, all of you,” Ky growled in a righteous indignation that caused the boys to scamper up the side of the hill, where they disappeared into the jack pines. Casey began to stumble over his own feet, trying to get away himself. The three women snapped out of their stupor, and the young mother suddenly thought it necessary to cover her little boy’s eyes with the palm of her hand.
Ky stopped his snorting horse upwind, a scant twenty yards from the bodies. Dismounting, he flipped the leather reins around a scrub of buck brush. Trap and Blake followed, but remained in the saddle.
“I’m ashamed of you folks standing around here like this,” Roman told the women as he would a group of small children. He meant to scold harshly, but without particular malice. “Have you no reverence for the dead? Now go on home.” He nodded his head with an air of such finality, Joe Casey looked over at Blake, whom he considered his immediate superior.
“Me too, O’Shannon?” The sudden arrival of more lawmen had put Casey on edge, and his shoulders flapped up and down toward his ears with so much nervous energy when he spoke, he’d have taken flight if wings were attached. His face twitched and popped like a pot of simmering oatmeal. Trap had never met Casey, but it was easy to recognize him as the man Blake called Jiggin’ Joe.
“No, you stay,” Blake snapped, with a considerably harder edge than Ky had used to speak to the gawking townsfolk.
“There was too many of ’em to fend off,” Casey whined. “I did the best I could.” The twitching man looked ready to burst into tears.
Blake glared and raised a hand to silence him. Turning without another word, the young deputy looked over the bloodbath in front of him and closed his eyes.
Trap gave his son a nod of approval. It was the boy’s second time to look at the mess the killers left behind. Trap was glad to see it disgusted him. A second helping of carnage like this shouldn’t be any easier to stomach than the first.
Plumes of dust puffed up from Trap’s moccasins as they hit the parched ground. What little wind there was had fallen off completely. The
brooding smells of blood, death, and fear filled the void it left behind. He tied Hashkee to a twisted scrub so dry, one good pull from the mule would turn it to dust. It really didn’t matter. The thin leather reins were no more than a bluff anyway when it came to keeping a one-thousand-pound animal tied. Stepping closer to the coach, Trap was careful to watch where he put his feet. He almost chuckled when he saw what the old fool Casey had done with his hat.
A stout, blond man, obviously muscled by hard work in life, hung like a flaccid doll, tied to a front wheel of the coach. His body was riddled with a half-dozen arrows. Only a trace of blood oozed around the wooden shafts at their entry points. Trap hadn’t seen anyone scalped in some time, and the sight of it caused him to go hollow inside. Glistening flies, black and metallic green, crowded around the bloody edge of the white bone circle on top of the dead man’s head. Flies were as bad as gawkers, and there always seemed to be some nearby to exploit such a gruesome occasion.
What was left of the man’s hair lay in crusted locks against a swollen face. Long cuts ran up, down, and sideways across the puffed skin of his nude body like a scored ham. Whoever tied him to the wheel had been unwilling or unable to lift him any higher, so he sat, arms outstretched to the sides and legs straight out in front of him, like a great, bloated bird coming in for a landing. Casey’s tattered hat lay across the man’s lap, covering his mutilated groin.
“I kept pukin’ every time I looked at what they done to him.” Jiggin’ Joe hung his head between bobbing shoulders.
Trap leaned over the body, careful to avoid any footprints that might remain unsullied by the curious onlookers that had visited the scene before him.
“Wound on his left side below his heart . . . bullet came out the back there, but the wagon spoke’s untouched,” Trap mused to himself. “Must’ve been killed somewhere else.” A look inside the coach confirmed his theory.
“They did all this to him after he was dead, didn’t they?” Blake stood a step closer to his father.
“Reckon so.” Trap pointed at the arrow wounds. “All these are for show. Dead men don’t bleed very much. What little bit you see there is likely from the bloating. If it was Indians that done this, they were mighty angry about somethin’. I worked the border nigh on to thirty years. Seen some mighty rough things, but this scalping business has got me puzzled.” He took a small notepad and pencil stub from his shirt pocket. Touching the tip of the pencil to his tongue, he began to make sketches while he spoke.
“It’s not that Apaches never scalped, mind you, but they generally did it in retaliation for something. In all those years, a lot of the meanest renegades we ever came across didn’t even know how to take a scalp. Of course, the rest of this . . . I’m sad to say, I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”
O’Shannon shook his head and groaned while he looked at the young woman tied to the back wheel. It seemed unthinkable that Casey had been moved by the butchered man enough to cover him while he’d left the poor woman so exposed.
Fleshy and pale, her skin had taken on the appearance of soap left too long in the tub. Already a day and a half under the blazing sun, she’d begun to cook. She was tied upside down, her legs lashed crudely to opposite spokes of the large coach wheel. A jagged, half-moon gash along her belly nearly cut her in half and her bowels spilled down the front of her, obscuring her face in an obscene, buzzing mass of flies and stinking entrails. She had no arrow wounds, but she’d been scalped like the man. Bruises the shape of a large hand encircled her trailing wrists. Dried blood from her scalp drenched her face and hair. The dead didn’t bruise—or bleed so profusely, even from a head wound. Much of this had been done to her while she was alive.
She was lighter than the man, and her tormentors had been able to lift her a little higher on the wheel. Her head just touched the ground, and her neck bent unnaturally under the weight of her slumping body. Trap had to get down on his hands and knees to examine it more closely. A bullet behind her ear had ended her suffering. The gutting had been for show after her body was tied to the coach wheel. She’d been positioned to make a point.
The driver, apparently overlooked, had been spared from mutilation and lay undisturbed, but every bit as dead as the others, beneath the coach. A fusillade of gunfire and arrows had brought down the four horses and they lay in bloating heaps, still in their traces.
Trap closed his eyes and tried to imagine the bloody scene as it happened. The driver shot, the groans of the butchered man, mixing with the terrified screams of the poor women, the crack of rifle fire, and the wild squeals of the horses. He could smell the gunpowder—hear the laughter of the killers—for they had surely laughed.
The men who did this took great pleasure in their work.
Hoofbeats, loud and hollow, like the thumping of a melon, drummed over the dusty ground and shook Trap from his imaginings. Five riders, dressed in starched clothes for a town visit instead of rugged travel, reined up beside the coach. The youngest of the bunch, barely old enough to coax a whimsical bit of hair from his chin and upper lip, rode a fresh horse. He had trouble controlling the animal at the smell of so much gore.
There was still enough fear in the air that Trap could smell it, even above the smell of death. The animals smelled it too, but he doubted anyone else did. The stench of fear was worse than death. Everyone died, but there were few who deserved to die afraid.
“Tom Ledbetter,” Blake whispered under his breath. “I’m sure of it. Rides a big dun. He’s got the reputation of a troublemaker. Been in jail a few times for letting his temper get the best of him.”
“Reminds me of a scalp hunter I once knew.” Trap took a step closer to his son to show some solidarity as well as protect the spot where he thought he’d have some good tracks from further defilement. “Who’s he workin’ for?”
“Kenworth.”
Trap judged the frowning man to stand a shade under six feet tall. Thick-necked and broad-shouldered, he looked strong as a range bull. Dark eyes raged with an irrepressible anger under the brim of his high-crowned hat. He had a dangerous smell about him that made folks slink out of the way when he came toward them.
Most folks.
“We got a few tracks we need to keep undisturbed, if you don’t mind, sir,” Trap said, standing his ground as the burly man unhorsed himself and strode forward ahead of his four cronies.
“Well, I do mind, not that it’s any of your business, Stubby.” Ledbetter tugged his hat lower over angry, deep-set eyes. Muscles twitched along an angular jaw as he clenched his teeth. He continued to walk as if he expected Trap to spring to one side and clear a path. When that didn’t happen, he pulled up in a blowing huff. “I’m gonna get one of them arrows for my proof when I have to hang the Indians that did this.”
Blake yanked an arrow out of a dead horse and offered it to Ledbetter. “Take this one, and move on. But be careful who you hang. You could end up swinging yourself.”
Ledbetter spit on the ground, narrowly missing the dusty toe of Blake’s boot. “I was just about to say the same thing to you, Red Bug.” This brought a chuckle from the group behind him. “Just wearing that fancy badge don’t make you any more white or more of a man.” Hand on his gun now, Ledbetter pressed closer.
A purple vein pulsed on the side of the man’s thick neck. Molten hate hung in the dead air around him. His vehemence wasn’t for show.
Blake stood his ground, but flipped the arrow so the bloody point faced Ledbetter and pressed against his gut enough to dent the tight cotton shirt. The young lawman held the arrow in his left hand and touched the butt of his pistol with his right.
“Mr. Ledbetter, I don’t want this to go the way it’s goin’, but make no mistake, this is the scene of a crime and I’m not about to let you muck it up.”
The big man wrinkled his long nose. The taut muscles in his reddened jaws flexed as he stared hard at Blake, studying him through narrow eyes. His nostrils flared and he took a step back, accepting the bloody arrow with a toss of h
is head.
Trap moved sideways to take up a position away from Blake. He found himself glad he’d decided to strap on the old Scofield. Ky cleared his throat, rifle in hand, on the other side of the interlopers, and Ledbetter nodded, smacking his jaws. Casey stood a few feet behind Ky with a shotgun, trying to redeem himself from his earlier foolishness. His shoulders still flapped, but not enough to keep the scattergun from providing a worry for Ledbetter and his men.
“I see how this is gonna be.” Ledbetter stared daggers at Trap. “I shoulda known when I saw you wearin’ the moccasins. Bein’ shod like that, you got red nigger blood in you; I’d bet my life on it.” He wheeled, striding defiantly over to his dun, and swung easily into the saddle for a man of his bulk. The bloody arrow was still in his hand, and his used it to drive home his point as he spoke to Blake.
“You just keep pokin’ about in the blood and gut piles, boy. We’ll see to catchin’ the savages that did this. Mark me good, though, you best watch your own hair. I’ve seen Indians scalp other Indians as quick as they would a white man.”
Ledbetter turned his big dun on its haunches and loped away, spanking it on the rump with the arrow. The greenhorn on the frisky mount whirled three times before he got it pointed the right direction and galloped off after his compatriots.
Blake and Trap let them leave without a word. Taunts and threats didn’t do much for men like Ledbetter. He was a problem that would require seeing to sooner or later, but he’d chosen later. Neither O’Shannon saw any reason to provoke a showdown at a moment when time was of the essence.
“Got a moccasin track over here and some horse prints as well,” Ky said when the riders were out of earshot. After the initial examination of the bodies, he’d moved to the perimeter, leaving the close work to Trap. Roman was a pious man and the sight of the woman’s nude body troubled him. Trap was certain of that. It troubled Trap as well, but not in the same way. Roman had always been more bashful.