by John Jakes
The second rider tossed the box on the ground. The lid pooped off. The box held some kind of doll.
The leader motioned and the file of riders moved out. Andy decided he’d seen enough. He started back through the yuccas to the thick woods from which he’d emerged. His mistake was glancing over his shoulder to check on the Klansmen.
He stepped too near one of the yuccas. The point of the long leaf stabbed his leg through his pants, and he exclaimed in pain. Not loudly, but he drew the attention of the night riders. Someone yelled, rifles came up, pistols came out. The leader signaled toward the black man bolting for the trees.
Leaves daggered his legs as two hooded men rode him down, one on each side of the clump of yuccas. Panting, Andy ran faster, out of the yuccas. A musket butt slammed his head and knocked him to his knees.
The men dismounted and dragged him around in front of the porch. One of the white women, the one nursing, leaned over and spat in his hair. Held by his ears and shoulders, he was pushed near the leader’s horse.
“Niggers were warned from this gathering,” the leader boomed through the trumpet. He was a fearsome, towering figure, looming over Andy in robes that shone as if on fire. “Niggers who defy the Invisible Empire get what they deserve.”
Another Klansman pulled out an immense hunting knife. The blade flashed as he turned the knife this way and that. “Drop his pants. You’re through, boy. We boil nigger heads and nigger balls for soup.”
“No.” The leader slashed the air with the trumpet. “Let him carry word of what he saw here. Show him the coffin.”
A man yanked Andy’s head around so he could see the box open on the ground. A bullet had been fired into the velvet dress of the crude cornhusk doll inside the box. The leader indicated blackened letters burned into the coffin lid. Crooked letters, but legible.
“Someone read him what it says.”
“I know this nigger,” another Klansman said. “He’s a Mont Royal nigger. He can read it for himself.” Though the speaker tried to roughen his voice to disguise it, Andy recognized Gettys.
He was so frightened, his eyes blurred. He had to clamp himself tight with his inside muscles to keep from urinating. The leader roared, “All right, then. You tell that woman what you saw and what you read right there, nigger.” He signaled again. Andy was released and kicked toward the woods.
He staggered forward. A pistol boomed four times. Each time, he started violently, expecting to be hit. He kept running, past the yuccas toward the woods. Luckily, he didn’t fall. He twisted when he reached the trees and saw gun smoke drifting blue above the robed men. They laughed at him. He ran into the dark.
Unable to sleep all night Andy saw the Klan, and what they had burned into the coffin representing their intended victim. He wrote it out for me, his hand shaking, sweat dripping from his brow to the old brown paper:
“Dead Damned & Delivered”
the nigress
MAIN
44
ON THE DAY OF the trouble, Charles woke an hour later than usual—five in the afternoon. He reached under his cot, uncorked the bottle, and took his first drink before getting out of bed. It had become his habit to start the day this way.
It was mid-August. The shanty where he slept, behind the place he worked, was airless and hot. Noisy, too. Texas cowhands shouted and stomped around the dance floor in the main building while Professor played a polka on the establishment’s brand-new Fenway upright.
After a second drink, he reluctantly got up. He was already dressed; he usually slept in his clothes. He faced a twelve-hour shift as night bouncer at Trooper Nell’s. Nell’s was a thriving dance hall with upstairs rooms for the whores and their clients. It was located on Texas Street, between the Applejack and the Pearl, south of the railroad. If he listened carefully, he could hear the horses and hacks bringing paid-off trail hands to this less-than-respectable section of Abilene.
Trooper Nell’s never closed. Abilene was booming, quickly becoming the most popular shipping point in Kansas. The gamble of Joe McCoy, an unassuming Illinois farm boy with a keen business sense, had paid off. Last year, in its first season, McCoy’s two-hundred-fifty-acre complex of pens and chutes had loaded about thirty-five thousand head of Texas cattle aboard the U.P.E.D. This second season promised to double that. Despite the Indian trouble all summer, herds continued to pour across Humbarger’s Ford on the Smoky Hill south of town. Almost every night, Charles had plenty of free-spending, hard-drinking cowpokes to sit on when they got out of hand. The Dickinson County sheriff did little. He was a grocer by trade, with no talent for handling rowdies.
Charles used his fingers to comb tangles from his long beard. From a chair with a broken leg, he picked up a canvas scabbard he’d sewn together after studying a picture of a fierce Japanese warrior in an old copy of Leslie’s. The warrior, called a Samurai, carried his long sword in such a scabbard on his back, the hilt jutting above his left shoulder. Charles put on the scabbard and shoved his Spencer into it. That plus his strapped-on Colt usually damped the fighting urge of the cowboys. He’d taken a lesson from Wild Bill, who’d become quite a legend in Kansas. Sometimes Hickok wore as many as five guns, plus a knife. That way, he cowed men instead of having to kill them. Charles hadn’t seen Wild Bill in a while; he’d heard he was riding dispatch for the Army.
It was Charles’s had luck that he wasn’t employed the same way. In fact, he hadn’t put his sights on an Indian since his dismissal from the Tenth. And this was surely the year for it. The tribes had wintered peacefully enough. But then the Washington politicians had been unable to agree on the amount of the annuities to be paid under the terms set at Medicine Lodge Creek. Rations, guns, and ammunition went unissued as well. Last spring the angry Comanches had broken loose and gone on the warpath in Texas. Then the Cheyennes under Tall Bull, Scar, and other war leaders stormed into Kansas, supposedly to attack their old enemies the Pawnee. Before long they turned their hostility on the whites.
The Saline, Solomon, and Republican river settlements soon felt the fury. Fifteen whites were killed, five women raped in just a few weeks. So far August had been the worst month, with a wagon train attacked and almost destroyed at Fort Dodge, three wood choppers slaughtered while they worked near Fort Wallace, a Denver stage caught in a four-hour running fight from which driver and passengers barely escaped.
Agent Wynkoop could control the peace chiefs, but not the young men. Sheridan was in trouble. He had but twenty-six hundred infantry and cavalry with which to stop the raids. He’d sent a couple of experienced scouts, Comstock and Grover, to try to restore peace with the Cheyennes. A group under Turkey Leg welcomed the men, then turned on them with no warning, murdering Comstock and badly wounding Grover before he got away. The treachery didn’t surprise Charles.
He hated being trapped so far from the action. But he didn’t know any Indian-fighting outfit that would take him, and he wasn’t fool enough to set out alone, a solitary executioner. So he worked in Abilene, and drank, while his rage and frustration built inside him.
One more drink and he left the shanty. He trudged across the trash-strewn backyard toward the rambling two-story building. He’d slept hard, but with more nightmares. He usually dreamed the old dream of blazing woods, wounded horses falling, his own slow death from smoky suffocation. Last night it had been different. In his dream, Elkanah Bent dangled a big pearl earring in front of him while he pricked Charles with a huge knife.
Early in the year, a telegraph message sent care of Jack Duncan had informed Charles of the murder of George Hazard’s wife. Bent’s long vendetta against the two families only strengthened Charles’s conviction that the world and most of those in it were worthless. He didn’t suppose Bent would ever come after him, though. Charles had frightened him badly in Texas before the war.
Since January, Charles had returned to Leavenworth only twice. Duncan treated him with stiff-necked correctness, but no warmth. He let Charles know that he disapproved of the frequency with
which Charles took a drink. Charles had tried to play with his son, talk to him, but the boy didn’t like to be alone with him, always wanting to return to Maureen or the brigadier.
There were no letters from Willa waiting at Leavenworth, either. Nor had he written.
He was in his usual sullen, spiteful mood as he yanked the flimsy back door open and stalked down the dim hall to start work.
Professor was hammering the Fenway. Two cowhands were dancing with two of the whores on the plank floor. Three tables held groups of noisy, dusty drinkers. Charles saw some of the cowhands eye him as he strode toward the end of the shiny fifty-foot brass-fitted bar.
“Hit me, Lem.” The bartender dutifully poured a double shot of his special-stock bourbon. Charles knocked it back, not noticing a seated cowboy whispering to another, who had curly blond hair. The blond youngster studied Charles with contempt.
The place smelled of spit and sawdust, cigars and trail dust, and of cow chips someone had stepped in. Trade was brisk for half past five, and no more boisterous than usual. Down a staircase opposite the bar came the owner, five-foot-tall Nellie Slingerland. Nellie was somewhere over forty, always wore high-necked gowns, and had the biggest bosom Charles had ever seen on a woman so petite. Her eyes were bright and calculating, her cheeks pitted from some childhood disease. Nellie cost twice as much as any of the other whores, but to Charles she gave herself free. They slept together once or twice a week, usually during the day, and Charles always had to be good and drunk first. “Roll over here, buck,” she’d say, and then he’d straddle her and push in and hold himself with straightened arms while he did her. She always yelled and jumped a lot. Because he was so tall, his head stuck out beyond hers. She never saw his closed eyes, or the strange twisted-up expression on his face. He always tried to pretend she was Willa. It never worked.
“How are you, buck?” Nellie’s expensive tooled mule-ear boots thumped as she approached. She was called Trooper Nell because she refused to take the boots off for any man, Charles included. Abilene told a lot of tales about her: She was a former schoolteacher; she had poisoned her husband for his money on their farm near Xenia, Ohio; she preferred women.
“I’d be better if this heat would break,” Charles said. He hated her term of address, buck, as if he were some field hand. But she paid him, so he put up with it.
“You look mad enough to chew a brick.”
“I didn’t sleep so well.”
“Something new,” she said sarcastically, reaching for the glass of lemonade the bartender poured from her private pitcher. She drank no strong spirits. “You’re a damn good bouncer, buck, but you make it pretty obvious you don’t like it. I’m starting to think you don’t belong here.”
She helped herself to more lemonade while surveying the customers. She paid special attention to the table where the blond cowhand sat. He was making all the noise.
“Watch that bunch,” she said. “The young ones cause the most trouble.”
Charles nodded and remained lounging with his back against the bar, the Spencer stock jutting above his left shoulder. Presently the blond cowboy staggered to the dance floor, rudely pushing Squirrel Tooth Jo and her customer out of his way as he veered toward Professor. He requested something. Professor looked dubious. The cowboy slapped gold pieces on the top of the shiny black upright, looking truculent. Professor shot a look at Nellie and swung into “Dixie.”
The blond cowboy whooped and waved his hat. He stepped on his chair and then onto the table where his friends were seated. Nellie bobbed her head at Charles. It meant, Stop that.
For the first time since awakening, he felt a pleasant anticipation. A roughly dressed man pushed the street doors open just then, caught Charles’s eye, and grinned. The big bearded fellow in quilled pants and a fringed buckskin coat was familiar, but Charles couldn’t quite place him. He had other things on his mind.
At the front end of the bar someone had left half a glass of whiskey. Charles gulped it, then reached across his left shoulder, unslinging the Spencer. He walked toward the table where the cowboy was dancing. The other men at the table stopped talking and pushed their chairs away. The cowboy’s boot heels kept pounding the table, which sagged now.
“Buying drinks doesn’t entitle you to break the furniture,” Charles said, forcing a conversational tone.
“I like to dance. I like this music.” The cowboy was no Texan. His thick accent said cotton South. Alabama, maybe.
“You can enjoy it sitting down. Get off the table.”
“When I’m ready, soldier.”
Charles’s eyebrows shot up. The cowboy gave him a bleary grin, challenging him. “Soldier, I heard all about you in a place up the street. Hampton’s Cavalry, but you went back in the U.S. Army afterward. We’d tar you for that in Mobile.”
Out of patience, Charles reached for his leg. “Get down.”
The cotton South cowboy hauled back with his boot and kicked Charles, clipping his left shoulder and throwing him off balance. The cowboy jumped down as Charles staggered.
Another cowhand snatched Charles’s Spencer. Two more seized his arms. Charles bashed one and temporarily drove him back. Loco drunk, the blond youngster drove two blows into Charles’s belly.
The impact knocked Charles away from his captors. He slipped and skidded, then dropped into a crouch. His Spencer lay six feet away.
“Stop that damned fool,” Nellie cried as the cowboy pulled his .44 revolver.
His friends dove out of the way on either side, leaving no one near him. A similar exodus emptied the dance floor. The cowboy fired as Charles rolled to the right. The bullet flung up splinters and dust.
Nellie screamed, “That floor cost three hundred dollars, you son of a bitch!”
The bleary cowboy aimed at Charles again. Something slid along the floor to Charles’s right hand. He saw only the boots and quilled pants of the man who’d slid him the Spencer. Before the cowboy could shoot again, Charles shot him in the stomach.
The cowboy flew backward, landing on the table and breaking it. Charles lurched up, favoring his left leg, which he’d twisted badly. One whore shrieked; Squirrel Tooth Jo fainted. In the ensuing silence, Nellie began, “Well, I guess that—” She got no further. Charles put a second bullet in the fallen cowboy. The body jerked and slid a foot. Charles fired a third time. The body kept jerking and sliding.
“Leave off,” Nellie said, dragging his arm down.
“Self-defense, Nellie.” He was shaking, fury barely under control.
“The first time. Why’d you need the other shots? You’re as bad as any damn Indian.”
Charles stared at her, trying to summon an answer. His left leg gave out. He hit the floor in a sprawl.
They carried him to the shanty and lowered him to the cot. Nellie shooed the barkeep and the porter out and regarded him soberly.
“The boy’s dead, buck.”
He said nothing.
“You can rest here till you leg’s better, but I’m giving you notice. I know you had to defend yourself but you didn’t have to mutilate him. Word gets around. Temper like yours, it’s bad for business. I’m sorry.”
Stony, he watched her turn and leave. Goddamn her, he was only trying to save himself—
No. That was a lie. Trooper Nell was right. One bullet was enough to finish the foolhardy youngster and he knew it. Why couldn’t he get rid of the rage that had prompted him to fire the other shots?
A knock. He lifted his forearm off his eyes.
The shanty door opened. Against the fading August daylight, he recognized the silhouette of the bearded stranger, quilled pants and all.
“Griffenstein,” the man in buckskin said.
“I remember. Dutch Henry.”
“Had a hell of a time finding you. How’s your leg?”
“Hurts. I’ll be off it a while, I guess.”
“I hate to hear that. I rode a hundred miles. All the way from Hays.”
“For what?”
; “To recruit you.” Griffenstein pulled up an old crate and sat down. “The Cheyennes are running wild and all the cavalry does is chase ’em, so Phil Sheridan’s decided to take the offensive. He’s ordered one of his aides, Colonel Sandy Forsyth, to hire fifty experienced plainsmen and go into the field and kill all the hostiles they can find. I said we couldn’t get a better man than you. You’re still the talk of the Tenth Regiment.”
Sourly, Charles said, “You mean my bobtail.”
“No, sir. They talk about how you whipped those colored men into some of the best cavalry in the Army. They don’t call your old troop Barnes’s Troop, they call it Main’s Troop—your real name—and the old man says amen.”
“That a fact.” Charles gripped his aching leg. “Here, give me a hand. I know I can get up.”
He did, but he fell right back down, tumbling across the cot. “Damn. I wish you’d come one day sooner, Griffenstein.”
“So do I. Well, next time. The way the red men are scalping and burning, there’ll be a number of next times. You can join up then.”
“Count on it,” Charles said.
“How will I find you?”
“Telegraph Brigadier Jack Duncan. He’s with the Departmental paymaster at Fort Leavenworth.”
“A relative, is he?”
The convenient lie: “Father-in-law.”
“Nobody said you were married.”
“Not any more. She died.”
And you killed every iota of feeling in the only other woman you ever loved as much.
The big man said, “Truly sorry to hear that.” Charles’s curt nod dismissed it.
They shook hands. Dutch Henry Griffenstein tipped his hat and left, closing the slat door, leaving Charles to swear with renewed frustration. In the dark he reached for the half-empty bottle under the cot.
Nellie Slingerland stuck by the firing. Charles was bad for business. Trooper Nell’s was almost empty for the entire seven days that he lay in the shanty. The grocer turned sheriff dropped in on the last day to say witnesses had exonerated Charles on the grounds of self-defense.