Powder Burn

by William W. Johnstone

  After a few minutes, when the old man was already breathing heavily, Rubin felt compelled to comment. “You’d best slow down a little before you bust a gut.”

  “You just be ready to get that shovel workin’ on this part I’m breakin’ up,” Ike told him. “I can go at this pace all day long, and half the night, if I have to.” To emphasize, he sank the pick deep in the ground and pulled a large chunk of dirt back.

  As he had boasted, the old man maintained the demanding pace until he had broken up enough of the bank for Rubin to dig out a suitable grave, resting only long enough to catch his breath. “That’ll be wide enough,” he told Rubin. “There ain’t no reason to bury ’em in them coffins. Levi ain’t in no coffin. We can put the wood in them coffins to better use, even if we was to use ’em for nothin’ but firewood.” He spat on his hands, rubbed them together, then grabbed his pick again and started in on the third grave, attacking the ground with the same tenacity he had shown before. And as before, the hard ground was no match for the big man’s resolve, until he encountered a large root that was as defiant as he was determined.

  “Damn you!” Ike cursed, and strained in an effort to pull the root loose from the ground. It seemed a standoff for a time, causing Rubin to pause to watch the contest. That was enough to inspire Ike to reach down deeper inside. A grin slowly began to form on his grizzled face when the root gradually began to give way—until he was struck in the chest by a blow so strong that he was sure he had been shot. Suddenly, he could not breathe. He dropped the pick handle and sank to his knees, clutching at his shirt collar, trying to loosen it to help him gasp for air.

  All the while, Rubin stared wide-eyed, astonished by his father’s bizarre actions. Standing knee-deep in the grave he was digging, he was stunned by what he was witnessing. Finally the dumbstruck son realized that something was dreadfully wrong. “Pa!” Rubin bellowed, and scrambled out of the grave. He crawled over to his stricken father’s side. “Pa!” he pleaded. “What’s the matter?” When Ike did not respond, instead clutching his chest, Rubin yelled for Hannah and his mother. They both rushed out of the shack, alarmed by the panic in his cries.

  “What is it?” Hannah demanded, then saw her father keel over to lie on his side, still clutching for his heart. She and her mother reached him at the same time. “Papa,” Hannah pleaded. “What happened?” But Ike could not answer. She knew then that it was his heart and turned an accusing eye in Rubin’s direction. “Why did you let him work so hard? You know he’s gettin’ too old to work like that.” Rubin could only respond with a helpless look. “Damn fool,” Hannah muttered, and returned her attention to her father.

  “He’s still breathin’,” Lorena said. “Help me carry him in the house.” The three of them carried him inside and put him on the bed, then Lorena covered him with a heavy quilt. She stood wringing her hands, watching him for some sign of recovery, at a loss as to what she could do to help him. “I knew it was gonna happen,” she murmured over and over, then looked at Hannah and said, “He ain’t no young man no more. I tried to tell him that.”

  As much at a loss as her mother, Hannah could only reply, “Ain’t your fault. Can’t nobody tell him nothin’.”

  After what seemed a long time, Ike’s eyelids fluttered and opened halfway, and he seemed to relax under the quilt. In a few more minutes, he opened his eyes fully and cursed. “Damn.” He looked up at the anxious eyes staring down at him. “Damn,” he repeated. “That felt like the devil hisself reached up and grabbed me round the chest.”

  “You’re all right now, ain’tcha?” Rubin asked hopefully.

  “I reckon,” Ike said, “as all right as a man can be after gettin’ kicked in the chest by a mule.”

  “You had a heart attack,” Hannah said. “Sure as hell.”

  “Maybe that’s what it was, and maybe it wasn’t,” Ike replied, feeling better now. “Whatever it was, it’s over and I’m still here.” He started to get off the bed, but Hannah stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “You’d best take it easy for a spell,” she said. “The Lord don’t give too many warnings before he says ‘To hell with you.’”

  “It’ll take more’n that to put me under,” he blustered, although a little weakly. In fact, the pain had been so intense it had scared him plenty. And he couldn’t help thinking how disastrous it could have been if it had happened while under attack by a posse. “We’ve got to get back to work, so we can get outta here before Tanner and his men show up.”

  “How do you know you ain’t gonna have another one of them attacks?” Lorena asked, worried to have seen a sign of weakness in the strongest man she had ever known. “I think Hannah’s right, you need some rest.”

  “Damn it, Mother!” he stormed, “It’s gonna be damn hard to rest while fifteen or twenty men are circled around this shack shootin’ it to pieces. Don’t argue with me. Pack up our stuff and get ready to roll. Rubin, finish diggin’ those graves. I want them boys to have a fittin’ burial.” Although he made a show of throwing off the quilt and sitting up on the side of the bed, he was aware of a feeling of weakness, and it worried him. One thing for sure, he knew that he wanted to get away to someplace safe where he could get his strength back. And then he would track Will Tanner down and settle up his debt. No sooner did that thought occur than he experienced another sharp pain in his chest. It was nowhere near the crushing blow he had experienced before, so it gave him hope that he was getting over the attack. He decided, however, that he was past the time in his life when he should be thinking about what he wanted done if anything happened to him. Although Rubin was the eldest, and his son, Ike felt that Hannah was the strongest, so it was his daughter he motioned to come to him.

  “It’s time I talked to you about what I want you to do if anything ever happens to me,” Ike said. “Just in case,” he added when she reacted with surprise.

  “All right,” she said. “You want me to go get Rubin?”

  “Nah,” Ike said. “Let him finish diggin’ them graves. You’re the one with the most backbone, so it’s you that oughta run things if I ain’t here.”

  “Whadda you talkin’ like that for, Papa?” she replied. “You ain’t goin’ anywhere.” She clearly didn’t want to have any such discussion.

  “Yeah, but in case I do, you most likely wouldn’t know what’s best. It’s your mama I’d be worried about. Rubin, I ain’t worried about him. He can just figure out how to make it on his own, without nobody to tell him when it’s time to squat and empty his bowels. I keep waitin’ for him to start actin’ like he’s his own man, but so far I ain’t seen no sign of it. So here’s what you need to do. Take your mama back to her sister’s place up on Blue River in Injun Territory. They’ll take her in, as long as I ain’t with her. Then you can stay there, too, if you want. If you don’t, it’s up to you.” When he was finished, he paused to test her reaction. “Will you do that?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “I’ll take Mama there, but I doubt I’ll stay there at Uncle Albert’s place.”

  He grinned. “I didn’t expect you would. Ol’ Albert and your aunt might have you goin’ to church on Sundays.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Hannah said, and grinned back at him. “Where do you think we oughta be headin’ right now?”

  “I’m thinkin’ the best place to go is straight north, back to Injun Territory to that little camp we had at the fork of Clear Boggy and Muddy Boggy.”

  “Injun Territory?” Hannah replied, surprised. “Hell, that’s Oklahoma. That’s where they say Will Tanner’s a deputy marshal. He could arrest us up there.”

  “That’s the reason he ain’t gonna think we headed up that way. I expect that’s the last place he’d look for us. We’ll start out from here, due west, leave him an easy trail to follow till we hit the river. Then we’ll lose him there and head straight north.”

  “Ain’t it gonna be kinda hard to cover our trail drivin’ a wagon?” Hannah asked.

  “We ain’t t
akin’ the wagon,” Ike said. “It’ll slow us down too much. We can tote ever’thin’ we need on the horses. The only thing we can’t haul on the horses is this broken-down old bedsprings, and we can do without that easy enough.” She nodded her understanding. “Now,” he continued, “let me get up from here and let’s get ready to ride.” He got to his feet, although a little unsteady, and went outside to supervise the digging of the graves.

  Sweating heavily in spite of the cold wind that ruffled the cottonwood leaves over his head, Rubin climbed up out of the second grave when Ike walked up. “You all right?” he asked. Ike said that he was, so Rubin said, “I’m done. We can put ’em in the ground.”

  “You need to shave some off the side of that one,” Ike said, indicating the grave Rubin had just stepped out of.

  “Why?” Rubin replied. “Luke oughta fit in there all right.”

  “Ain’t wide enough for the coffin,” his father said.

  “You said we was gonna keep the coffins,” Rubin reminded him.

  “I changed my mind. We ain’t takin’ the wagon, so we can’t haul the coffins.”

  “Ah hell, Pa,” Rubin protested, “I’m tired of diggin’ in this damn hard ground. I’m done with it. Like you said, Levi ain’t got no coffin, so Luke and Buck don’t need one, neither. To hell with the coffins.” He threw the shovel to land on the pile of dirt between the two graves and picked up the pickax as if ready to defend himself with it. Although he couldn’t really understand it at the moment, his defiant reaction to his father’s orders had exposed a new vulnerability in his father. All he realized was that he was tired of the fearful obedience he had always shown.

  Ike paused to stare at his eldest, standing poised with the pick in his hands, his outright expression of defiance undisguised. Instead of igniting what would have been a typical storm of fury, Ike welcomed a sign he had waited for in vain up to now. It was the first hint of real backbone in Rubin and came with a sense of relief for Ike. After a long moment, Ike simply said, “All right, then, let’s put ’em in the ground, and we’ll get Hannah and your ma to say a few words over ’em.”

  Surprised by his father’s lack of anger, Rubin hurried to help him drag the coffins off the wagon. They laid the bodies in the freshly dug graves, and Rubin called out for the women to come to the burial. It was a solemn funeral for the two departed brothers, with no tears shed, even from their mother, who rocked from side to side in silent grief. When Hannah finally pulled the grieving woman away, Ike and Rubin hurriedly filled in the graves, anxious to put some distance between themselves and the posse they felt certain would be on the way in the morning, and possibly sooner.

  * * *

  In spite of the frightening attack he had suffered earlier, Ike was feeling pretty much back to normal by the time the four of them reached the Sulphur River, a ride of no more than ten miles. They paused there to rest the horses and eat something before starting out to follow the river. Riding in the shallow water for over two miles until finding a flat rock next to a grassy bank, Ike decided it was the best place to exit the river. Carefully leading the horses onto the rock, they spread them out and walked them across the grassy bank, trying to leave as little evidence as possible. “They’re gonna have to be pretty doggone good to find these tracks,” Rubin declared when they were ready to climb in the saddle again.

  Just in case Tanner and his posse were that good, Ike led them west again, skirting a long bank of berry bushes and heading toward a low ridge of pine trees not far away. Riding up through the pines, they crossed over the top of the ridge before turning back north and heading for Oklahoma. “They might trail us,” Ike said, “but it ain’t gonna be easy. It’s less than a two-day ride from here to the Red River. And if they don’t start out till tomorrow mornin’, we’ll have too good a start on ’em for them to catch us. If that posse does cut our trail after we turned north, they ain’t gonna wanna keep ridin’ across the Red into Oklahoma.” That made sense to Hannah and Rubin. If what they suspected, that the posse was made up of cowhands from the ranches around Sulphur Springs, then they wouldn’t likely want to be gone from their work too long. So Ike Cheney and what was left of his family just concerned themselves with making as good time as possible.

  It was already getting dark when Ike picked a spot to camp by a tiny stream. He and Rubin took care of the horses while Hannah and her mother got a fire started and prepared to cook something for supper. “We’ll be startin’ out early in the mornin’,” Ike told them, “so don’t set around drinkin’ coffee too long.” Feeling a bit weary from the day’s ride, he climbed under his blankets while the others were still finishing up their supper.

  “Best get some more wood for this fire,” Hannah said to Rubin, speaking softly so as not to disturb their father, who was already snoring. “It’s gonna be cold as hell tonight, from the feel of that wind. I just hope it don’t snow.” If it did, there would be no point in trying to hide their trail.

  Without protest, Rubin did her bidding, then rolled up in his blankets close to the fire and was soon asleep. Hannah helped get her mother settled up against her father’s back before climbing into her bedroll. Lorena Mashburn Cheney had borne four sons and one daughter for Ike Cheney. She had always imagined that someday she would watch them all grow old and start families of their own. It had not happened, and now she lay awake grieving over the loss of three of those children. She found herself praying that maybe this was enough to persuade her husband that it was time to find a place to build a proper home and abandon his lawless ways. Even as she prayed, she knew it was a hopeless endeavor. The man had lived on the wrong side of the law for too long to change his ways now. After a while, she succumbed to her weariness, pressed up close against her sleeping husband, and finally drifted off to sleep. In the wee hours of the morning, she did not feel him suddenly jerk violently when his heart suffered the attack that carried him away.

  * * *

  Hannah was awakened the next morning by her mother’s sudden outburst of agonized wailing. Thinking they were under attack, Hannah bolted upright, her pistol in hand, to discover Rubin already on his feet, having thought the same. After looking frantically all around them to discover no threat, they hurried to their mother’s side. They saw immediately the cause of her beastlike howling, like that of a coyote, as she bent over her husband’s cold body. Hannah was immediately shocked. Somehow she had thought it impossible that her father should succumb without a fierce battle with death. For him to have passed on while he was sleeping peacefully seemed to her to be a cowardly act by the grim reaper.

  Rubin had yet another grave to dig for the men of Ike Cheney’s family, the only one that Hannah admired. Like her brothers, her father’s death was surely by the hand of Will Tanner. They buried Ike near the bank of the rocky stream, and Hannah looked for a sizable rock to use as a headstone. When she found one that would do, she also noticed an unusually smooth pebble lying next to it in the water. She picked it up and turned it over and over in her hand. It felt cold to her touch, like her father now. She dropped it in her coat pocket, resolved to let it remind her of her promise to avenge his death.

  * * *

  Will walked the big buckskin gelding slowly through the band of cottonwoods that lined Kettle Creek. Scanning the trees before him, as well as those on the other bank, alert for any sign of a reception, he continued until he got the first glimpse of the line shack. He dismounted then and drew the Winchester from the saddle sling. After looping Buster’s reins loosely around the branches of a laurel, he made his way cautiously along the creek bank until he could reach a clear view of the cabin. He dropped to one knee to look the place over. For all appearances, the shack looked deserted. There were no horses in the small corral, and no smoke from the chimney. The wagon Hannah Cheney had driven into town was in front of the shack, but there was no sign of anyone about. His gaze fell upon the three freshly dug graves on the other side of the creek, under a large cottonwood. The coffins Luke and Buck had occupie
d had been discarded and lay not far away from the graves. Back to the cabin again, he watched it for a long spell until there was no doubt Cheney was gone, so he got to his feet and went back for his horse.

  It didn’t take long to confirm his first impression. They had vacated the cabin, all right, leaving nothing behind but the wagon and an old bedspring. From the cold ashes in the fireplace, Will figured they had been gone since the day before. This suited him just fine. He was glad they had decided to depart instead of making a fight of it. He had to admit that it surprised him, though. He might have misjudged old Ike Cheney. I reckon he figured he’d lost enough of his family, Will thought. Left to determine now was which way they had gone. He scouted around the cabin and the corral looking for their tracks. It didn’t take much of a search, for there seemed to be no effort to hide them. They led straight west. Thinking he’d like to know if they held to that trail, he guided Buster along after them. He followed the tracks until he struck the Sulphur River and the first place they had attempted to lose anyone coming after them. There were no tracks on the other side of the river, so he followed the river north, looking for a good place to come out of the water. He found what he was searching for a couple of miles above the spot they had entered. It would have been the spot he might have picked, had he been the one being followed, so he dismounted by a large flat rock at the water’s edge. As he suspected, there were still traces of the horses’ passage over the short grass beyond the rock. Still on foot, he followed the tracks for a short distance. They never varied from a straight course west, and seemed to be heading toward a low ridge of pines a mile or so distant.