The Independence Trail

by Lyle Brandt

  On preceding visits to the Red Dog, Oren Dempsey had become acquainted with its layout, mapping entrances and exits in his mind against a day like this, when he might have to flee in an emergency. He’d also stumbled on the narrow hallway that connected Lonnie Kilgore’s private office to the bar, and used it now in hopes he could surprise his unknown enemies and turn the tables on them to his own advantage.

  It was something of an edge—but, then again, not much of one.

  No sooner had he eased into the murky corridor than Dempsey realized someone was passing through ahead of him. He recognized the slump of Kilgore’s shoulders and the bald spot on his crown that had increased in size a bit since Dempsey last stopped off in Devil’s Crossing, roughly five months earlier.

  He reckoned going bald was an embarrassment, but nothing that Kilgore would have to suffer with much longer.

  Dempsey suspected that his host had put tonight’s ambush in motion. As to why, the Comanchero leader neither knew nor cared. To his mind, it was normal for a businessman to be corrupt, scheming to offer Dempsey’s men a place to drink and get their bell ropes pulled for pay, while setting up a massacre that would eliminate them, letting Kilgore loot their corpses afterward.

  In fact, it was the kind of plan Dempsey himself might have devised, if he were a more settled type, amenable to staying put and managing a tavern-cum-bordello rather than ranging at will and hunting victims on the plains.

  He understood betrayal, sometimes practiced it himself, but deemed it unforgivable when he wound up on the receiving end.

  With that in mind, he shouted out to Kilgore from behind, making his presence known.

  “Hey, Lonnie! What’s your goddamn hurry?”

  Kilgore spun around to face him, letting Dempsey see the coach gun in his hands.

  “Are you deaf, Oren?” Lonnie answered. “Can’t you hear what’s going on out front?”

  “I hear just fine,” Dempsey replied. “And the next thing I wanna hear is why in hell you pulled this crap on us.”

  Kilgore blinked at him, frowning as he feigned confusion. “What? Have you been sucking locoweed? You think I want my own damned place shot up?”

  “I reckon that depends on what you hope to get from it,” Dempsey replied, and fired the shotgun barrel of his big LeMat revolver without bothering to aim. The pellets staggered Kilgore, dropped him to his knees, gaping in wonderment at how his night had gone so suddenly, disastrously awry.

  Gasping through his pain, Kilgore began to curse Dempsey. “You dumb son of a—”

  “Dumb, am I?” The Comanchero leader cut him off. “Which one of us is gutshot, on his knees, you rotten piece of—”

  In his outrage, Dempsey barely saw the sawed-off coach gun’s muzzled rising, had no time to cock his pistol for another shot before both barrels roared at him and he was airborne, tumbling backward into black oblivion.

  * * *

  * * *

  Art Catlin fired his fourth shot at the Comancheros on the Red Dog’s stairs, by which time all of them were down and either thrashing on the floor or lying deathly still.

  Counting the bodies, he called out to his companions from the cattle drive, “There’s three still unaccounted for.”

  “I heard a couple shots back here somewhere,” Tippit advised, moving behind the bar until he stood before a door that wouldn’t open when he tried its knob. “Locked from the other side,” he said.

  While Catlin went around to join him, Zeb Steinmeier and Julius Pryor covering their backs, Tippit picked up what must have been the barkeep’s scattergun. He found fresh shells in a box under the bar, then ditched the shotgun’s empties and reloaded it.

  “Fire in the hole!” their foreman warned the rest of them, before he fired one barrel, shattering the door’s lock, then proceeded through it with the Greener raised and ready.

  “Two more down!” Tippit called out, then backed out of the hallway set behind the door, while Catlin peered inside.

  “I doubt the heavyset one was a Comanchero,” he told Tippit.

  From the far side of the bar, Steinmeier asked him, “Does he have a mustache and bald spot? Wearing little wire-rimmed spectacles?”

  “He does,” Catlin confirmed.

  “That’s Lonnie Something, I forget his last name,” Zeb replied. “He owns this place.”

  “Not anymore,” Tippit advised.

  “The other one must be a Comanchero, then,” said Catlin. “Guess we’ll never know what made the two of ’em draw down on one another.”

  “Doesn’t matter now,” said Tippit. “We’re still missing two more raiders by my count.”

  “That matches horses at the livery,” Steinmeier said.

  Julius Pryor put his two cents in, saying, “We need to find ’em, then.”

  “Fan out,” Tippit ordered, “but watch yourselves. Unless they got away somehow, don’t count on them to fold without a fight.”

  While Zeb and Pryor made their way upstairs, Catlin trailed Tippit down the corridor obstructed by two bloody corpses, finally emerging in a cluttered office where Art guessed the bar’s proprietor had been disturbed while going over paperwork. From there, a left turn took them to the hallway Catlin had traversed between the back door of the Red Dog and its barroom, now a slaughter pen.

  They checked the kitchen—no sign of the cook Catlin had braced before—and tried a closet filled with mops and brooms, but not a fugitive in sight. Relaxing just a smidgen, Tippit said, “They must still be upstairs.”

  “Unless they jumped out of a window,” Art replied.

  “Or that.”

  Before they could retreat to mount the stairs, a crackle of gunfire resounded from the Red Dog’s second floor. A woman screamed, immediately followed by more shots, and then a wail of pain that could have been produced by either sex, depending on the injury.

  They clambered up the stairs and reached the upper story just as Pryor and Steinmeier left one of the bedrooms, Pryor looking slightly green around the gills.

  “You two all right?” asked Tippit.

  “If you want to call it that,” Julius said.

  “We found the last two,” Steinmeier elaborated, “holed up with a couple of the whores. Held pistols on ’em, threatening to kill ’em if we wouldn’t let the Comancheros go.”

  “And then?” Art asked.

  “I reckon they got tired of waiting,” Zeb replied. “Shot both of ’em like it was nothing, then pulled down on us. That didn’t go the way they’d hoped.”

  Tippit went down to check the crib while Art hung back. He’d seen enough blood for one night and didn’t need two ventilated women added to the butcher’s bill.

  “Well, damn it!” Tippit growled, retreating from the small bedroom. “At least that makes a dozen.”

  “So, we’re finished, then?” asked Pryor staring at their foreman.

  “Done with this, at least,” Tippit replied. “Now all we have to do is catch up with the herd.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Wednesday, May 21

  Wabaunsee County, Kansas

  It had taken Sterling Tippit’s manhunters two days to track and overtake the Bar X herd. During that time, they’d talked a bit about the firefight they’d engaged in with the Comancheros and the women who’d been killed, besides.

  Of all the raiders they had killed, only the leader of the pack had been identified by name. The hooker he’d monopolized while they were staying at the Red Dog heard the owner—Lonnie Kilgore, also dead now—call the man in charge “Oren” on one occasion, “Mr. Dempsey” on another, but the rest, all white or Mexican except one Chinaman, were being planted without markers to identify them.

  That is, if the residents of Devil’s Crossing felt like digging thirteen graves, instead of dragging them a mile or so from town and letting nature take its course.

&
nbsp; Whatever, Catlin thought. The dead, in his opinion, neither knew nor cared what might become of their abandoned bodies once they’d ceased to serve a purpose.

  On the ride back to resume their paying jobs, there’d naturally been some talk about the killings, Catlin staying out of it as much as possible. Before dropping his bounty hunter’s trade, he had collected twenty-seven fugitives, eleven of them still alive when he’d delivered them to lawmen scattered from Wyoming Territory to Nevada, Southern California, then back around through Arizona and New Mexico.

  Another way to say it: he’d killed sixteen men, counting the Grimes brothers, who’d brought his years of hunting wayward humans to an end.

  Or so he’d thought when he joined the Bar X drive.

  Since then, six weeks and four days gone, he’d taken part in killing more men than he had gunned down altogether in the previous five years. That said, Art couldn’t claim the simpler life of punching cows had worked out very well for him so far.

  Still, it had come as a relief to join up with the herd again, get back into the old routine that he’d become accustomed to since setting out from Santa Fe on the first Saturday in April. There had been a rain squall on May 9 that left the drovers soaking wet before they had a chance to don their slickers, but it hadn’t been a cold rain, and there’d been no claims of illness afterward.

  The week after that storm, they’d passed through territory rife with timber rattlers, losing three steers on successive days to bites around their throats and muzzles while they grazed by night—a waste of money and of meat, since Piney Rollins claimed he couldn’t serve the beef without a risk of poisoning whoever ate it. Catlin reckoned that was false—he’d heard of people drinking rattler’s venom without injury, unless they had a cut or open sore somewhere between their lips and stomach—but he’d kept that to himself in case those tales were wrong.

  Now that they were past the snaky district, there had been no other predators to fret about except coyotes, who were prone to following the longhorns from a distance, sneaking closer after dark to see if they could spot a lame or ailing steer to savage, fleeing with whatever morsels they could claim before the drovers came at them with guns.

  So far, the stalk had been in vain.

  And rustlers?

  They would be a constant threat, preying on Mr. Mossman’s mind until his cattle were secure inside corrals at Independence, still roughly a hundred and twenty miles away, to the northeast. That meant another ten days on the trail if no other calamities surprised them on the meantime.

  Which would suit Art Catlin fine.

  If he could pass the last ten days of their excursion without drawing down on anybody else, he would be satisfied. Hearing the boss talk to his foreman over meals, it seemed the problems on this drive so far had been unusual—which didn’t mean that Catlin planned to turn around and do it all again.

  But if he did . . .

  Well, he would have to wait and see about that, ten days, maybe two weeks down the road.

  * * *

  * * *

  Bliss Mossman saw his foreman drawing nearer as he sat astride his flea-bitten gray gelding, watching as his herd passed by. Slightly diminished since they’d started out from Santa Fe, the stock that still survived should turn a handsome profit in Missouri.

  But until they reached that terminus, he couldn’t count on anything.

  Wabaunsee County had been formally created back in 1859, nearly four decades after statehood was achieved, named for a chief of the Potawatomi tribe. Five years before that, while Kansans and Missourians were at each other’s throats on slavery, famed abolitionist Reverend Henry Ward Beecher had endowed a local congregation of his Free Soil church, shipping rifles to the faithful in crates labeled “Beecher’s Bibles,” used to defend cover waystations along the Underground Railroad.

  The net result, of course, had been more bloodshed, though the Show Me state had no monopoly on that during those years before the Civil War. John Brown’s raiders had started out in “Bleeding Kansas,” executing slave owners before they marched on Harpers Ferry in Virginia and their grim messiah finally stretched rope for “treason” against Dixie.

  There was irony in that, Mossman supposed, since barely one year after Brown was hanged, South Carolina had seceded from the Union, followed in the next six months by ten more states that cast themselves as traitors to the USA. Four years of bloody conflict later, all the states were reunited, but old hatreds simmered just below the surface, and not only in the so-called Solid South.

  On balance, Mossman was relieved that he had spent the war and misnamed “Reconstruction” in the West, where every individual was free to come and go, provided he or she had ample cash in hand.

  Tippit was close enough to speak now without shouting as he said, “We’re in the home stretch now, boss.”

  Mossman nodded, still watching the longhorns passing in review. “Don’t want to count those chickens yet, though.”

  “No, sir,” Tippit granted, then felt moved to follow up. “You smell more trouble coming?”

  “I’m no psychic, if that’s what you mean,” Mossman replied.

  He read a couple of the eastern papers, mostly keeping up with beef prices, but Mossman knew about the “seers” and table-tappers, also known as “mediums,” who claimed they could foretell the future and commune with ghosts. Until he saw a ghost himself and couldn’t blame it on mescal, Mossman dismissed all that as bunkum.

  “Want to clue me in, then?” Tippit asked.

  “Just life and herding steers,” Mossman replied. “On any morning when the sun comes up, I look for problems down the trail.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” his foreman said.

  “Expect the worst,” said Mossman. “In my personal experience, you won’t often be wrong, but when you’re disappointed, take it as a nice surprise.”

  “One way to look at it,” Sterling granted.

  “The only one I’ve found so far that doesn’t let me down,” Mossman replied.

  “No towns so far, at least.”

  “They come and go,” the boss reminded him.

  At the last census, three years earlier, Wabaunsee County claimed some thirty-three hundred inhabitants, most of them clumped around the county seat at Alma. Smaller settlements sprang up and died away from year to year, at wide spots in the road like Newbury and Volland. When their people packed it in, the tiny towns soon blew away as if they’d been a mere mirage.

  And maybe it was just as well.

  The fewer people he encountered on a drive, the easier things seemed to go.

  * * *

  * * *

  Jed Findlay didn’t know Bliss Mossman or his foreman, much less any of the Bar X drovers. If they’d passed him on a city street, he guessed that few would notice him. None would perceive him as a threat.

  He had that kind of face, not hideous or handsome, nothing to get lodged in any stranger’s memory. If Findlay had been called on to describe himself, he would have said that he was average: five eight in cowboy boots, a trifle on the slender side, with mousy-colored hair under his flat-brimmed hat. His clothing was trail-worn and verging on threadbare. Even his horse was average, a dun with no distinctive markings anywhere, no brand to signal where he had acquired it, or from whom.

  A stranger’s interest in Findlay wouldn’t perk except where weapons were concerned. He wore twin Colt Single Action Army revolvers—the “Peacemaker,” Colt’s newest six-gun—and the rifle in his saddle boot was another newcomer on the market, Winchester’s Model 1873, chambered for the same .44-40 Winchester rounds as his sidearms. In a boot sheath, on his right-hand side, Jed also packed an Arkansas toothpick, its double-edged blade fourteen inches long.

  The hardware marked Jared as a killer to discerning eyes, and the observer would have been correct in thinking so.

  Findlay
wasn’t the sort to keep a score, much less to notch his guns, but if required to guess—say, on a bet—he would have estimated twenty-five to thirty-odd. He wasn’t known for it, like others he could name, except in certain circles where such skill was valued and rewarded properly.

  Like now.

  This month, Jed Findlay was a scout of sorts. His job was to patrol Wabaunsee and adjoining Morris County, to the southwest, watching out for travelers worth stopping and relieving of their goods, whether the loot was livestock, cash, or personal belongings that could easily be sold—or “fenced,” as top professionals preferred—for legal tender on illegal spoils.

  Jed sometimes scouted westbound travelers along the Cimarron, but never recommended raiding wagon trains, with their inherent risk of trigger-happy yokels on the move and large numbers of witnesses who’d have to be eliminated in the process. Cattle drives were better, all depending on how many drovers were involved, along with stagecoaches that might be bearing mail or a Wells Fargo strongbox carrying a treasure trove of bank deposits.

  * * *

  * * *

  Railroads were outside Jed’s line. He left them to wild-eyed former Confederates like the James-Younger gang, still fighting a war that they’d lost years ago.

  Today, Jed was covering cattle drive, using a telescope to track its progress overland. He didn’t recognize the outfit’s brand, nor did that matter to him. Findlay had his orders—to observe, assess, and then report—providing only certain basic information to the men who paid his salary.

  He counted sixteen riders, each packing at least one firearm, plus two men—make that a man and boy—aboard the chuck wagon. There might well be more guns in among the pots and pans, tin plates and bedrolls, dried goods, and smoked meats the wagon hauled, its stores diminishing each day it traveled farther from wherever home might be.

  Again, Findlay had no idea and didn’t give a damn.

  Counting the stock was trickier, the way those longhorns jostled one another without doing any damage, stretching from southwest to northeast nearly as far as he could see. Jed knew he couldn’t calculate their numbers with any precision, but an estimate would satisfy his bosses.