by Matt Cole
Marlene nodded to herself in agreement. She considered that the Daniels would be making a huge mistake by hunting that gang, even with Frank to lead them.
Her face shadowed at the thought of Frank Daniels, her former lover. Friends said that Marlene Welch still carried a torch for Frank, and that was why she had never taken an interest in anyone else since. She was still thinking of Frank when she saw him. His size made sure that he stood out amongst the group of men walking towards the jailhouse. She had measured him once: six feet five inches tall. Big Frank. He had been much younger then. That was before Frank Daniels began his wandering, building a kind of legend as a winner at just about everything he attempted.
Now he was back, right here in Blue Springs Creek – but not for long. Marlene could tell just by his look that it would not be for much longer. Frank Daniels never forgave a wrong.
Marlene doubted that he could do it, even if he tried or wanted to.
Marlene was leaning half out of her chair to watch until the voice behind her said, ‘Is that Frank Daniels?’ She leaned back in her chair and looked up at Lucy Keller, the Bella Union’s sweet-voiced singer and Marlene’s surrogate daughter.
‘Oh, you startled me, sugar,’ Marlene Welch said. ‘Yes, that is Frank. The big fella.’
Lucy, pale and slender, moved to the window to take her first look at the man all of Blue Springs Creek was making a fuss about. She did not enjoy good health and had missed yesterday’s funeral with a high temperature. Marlene mothered her, and thoroughly approved of her keeping company with Casey Daniels.
Lucy rubbed her arms as though cold.
‘Is it true that they are all going, Marlene?’ she asked softly.
‘I am afraid so, sugar. All of those boys,’ Marlene replied simply.
‘Will . . . will they be all right?’
Marlene Welch looked away before she began her reply. ‘Well. . . .’
‘I would like the truth, Marlene. You seem to understand about things like this. One of the girls said that the Murdock Gang will kill them all if they go chasin’ after them.’
Marlene stood up and put her arms around the girl’s slim shoulders.
‘What nonsense. I will not hear such things. They are just another bunch of hellions, nothing special about the Murdock Gang.’
‘I would die if anything happened to Casey,’ the girl said, already looking tearful at the awful thought.
‘Nothin’ will . . .’ Marlene hesitated and then added, ‘What say I try and get Frank to change his mind?’
Lucy grabbed her shoulder.
‘Oh, would you do that for me? Would you really ask him to do that? Marlene, when will you see him?’
Marlene Welch smiled as she answered, ‘He will come to see me. I guarantee it.’
Lucy studied her face.
‘You are still in love with him, aren’t you, Marlene? I can see it in your eyes.’
‘Will you please go and let me get on with my work?’ Marlene replied. The girl lingered before she added, ‘Go on . . . go on . . . shoo!’
It was a long time before Frank Daniels came to the Bella Union Saloon, but he came. He and Marlene embraced warmly, like old friends. At least that was how it was supposed to be, but for Marlene Welch it would always be something else. It was her secret that Frank Daniels had spoiled her for anyone else. If it were possible for someone to be too much of a man, then that was Frank – too big, too strong, too stubborn, too iron-willed, too everything. And too much his own relentless man, so it seemed, to be somebody’s husband.
‘You look well, Frank, considering what you have been up to.’
‘And you are lovelier than ever, Marlene girl.’
To her, his deep voice had always held the secret comfort of a stream running over smooth stones. She touched his cheek in sympathy, then moved back to look him over.
‘Are you all right, Frank?’
He nodded silently as he took out his cigar case. Frank Daniels looked older than his thirty-nine years, with the deep bronze of his skin and the lines in his face. Yet his body was that of a younger man, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with thick arms and long legs. This was a man of the open spaces. Today, as always, Marlene felt that she sensed the clean breath of the far places coming off him, bringing the old excitement.
‘Don’t do this, Frank,’ she heard herself say.
The blue Daniels eyes looked at her sharply. ‘What? Hunt them down? Of course I will do it, Marlene. For my mother,’ he paused. ‘Somebody has to.’
‘Not you,’ she said. ‘Why does it have to be you?’
Frank bit off the tip of the cigar and spat it away. He scraped a match into flame and sucked the cigar into life.
‘You are goin’ to start lecturing me, aren’t you?’
‘Frank, the Murdock Gang isn’t like other gangs. Everybody says so. There are too many of them and they are too dangerous, and everyone who mixes with them gets themselves . . .’
His eyes were glacial now. ‘. . . killed?’ He took a breath. ‘They murdered my mother in cold blood. What do you expect me to do?’
She took his hands in hers. ‘Frank, darling . . . it is too late to help your mother now. And even if it wasn’t, you would be the wrong man to go after them . . .’
‘What the hell do you mean by that, Marlene?’ his voiced boomed.
She squeezed his big hands.
‘You know what I mean, Frank. You hate too hard; you do everything too hard. You would go on after those outlaws or anyone else, and nothing would stop you, not even if you knew you would die. Don’t you understand, Frank? It isn’t worth it. You could get killed. You could all be killed. All of your brothers. And what good would that do your dear mother – Dorothy? Tell me that.’
He pulled away from her, his face closing.
‘I have got things to attend to . . .’
Marlene was getting desperate.
‘Frank, if you have to go, please go alone. Don’t take the boys with you.’
He moved towards the door, and now the seamed face was expressionless.
‘There would be none of them would stay behind. They lost their mother too.’
‘Well, at least not Casey,’ Marlene insisted. ‘Not the kid.’
But Frank just shook his head and went through the batwing doors, his shoulders seeming to fill the doorway. Watching him cross the street on the planks, Marlene stood with her hands clasped tightly to her middle as though in pain. . . .
‘Don’t go . . . don’t go, my love,’ she whispered. She knew all the while that he would. Whoever did Frank Daniels wrong and got away with it?
Marlene Welch went to the bar and ordered a double. She would need it before telling Lucy the bad news.
Glancing out at the street again, she glimpsed Frank standing on the porch of the law office with his four brothers. They were looking at him as though he were some kind of god.
CHAPTER 2
HARD NEWS AND HARD CASES
The Indian pony twitched its ears and turned its small head to stare into the black patches of moon shadow where four white men went very still, staring back at the horse with unblinking eyes. After a time, the pony went back to grazing on its tether rope. Henry Lowe was able to reach out slowly to mash the midge that had sunk its proboscis deep into his neck.
Henry signaled, and his comrades inched forward – cousin Newson Murdock and two more distant kinsmen. They were after the Indians’ horses. The gang had been short of horses ever since leaving the Indian Nations, and even the raid on the ranch in Missouri had only secured them a handful of mounts. Henry, with a major job planned for which extra horses were needed, was getting desperate. You had to be desperate to try and steal horses off wild Indians.
Like figures from a badman’s nightmare, the feathered riders loomed black against the night sky, exploding into a headlong charge as they came down the steep slope, howling and screaming and waving murderous lances that flashed in the moonlight.
The Ind
ians came straight at them, proving that they were far from surprised. Dark-faced and muscular and bent on killing, they came charging across the grass past the tethered ponies, sounding more like wolves than men as they closed in. Before they reached their quarry, the outlaw guns overrode their cries. Three of their number went down in threshing heaps.
A horse with a broken leg lunged into another rider, causing his mount to lose its footing. The buck threw himself into the air and landed with cat-like agility on the balls of his feet. He emitted a blood-curdling shriek, rattled his feathered tomahawk, and took one mighty leap forward, only to run headlong into a slug from Henry Lowe’s pistol.
Lowe grunted in satisfaction as he rolled behind a deadfall. But one of his men went down under a storm of unshod hoofs. Lowe heard him howl in pain. It was a sound he wouldn’t be able to remove from his mind any time soon.
Touching off another two shots, Lowe dropped flat to reload while his two remaining men kept the enemy at bay. The Indians whirled away and circled, coming straight back at them in a charge as they filled the air with arrows.
‘Lucky they don’t have rifles,’ Ernie Gross shouted, ducking low as a whistling arrow parted his hair. He quickly felt to see if it had cut him, and it had just barely.
It was Henry Lowe’s turn to duck as a spinning tomahawk hissed close to his face. Bobbing up, he pumped three screaming slugs into a rushing figure. He rolled aside and kept rolling as the dead horse and rider smashed into the space where he had just been.
The fierce fight ebbed and flowed for several minutes as the outlaws fought their way back to a nest of rocks on a low hill. A spear came within an inch of pinning Lowe to the dirt. Moments later, a reckless buck put his mount into a spectacular leap that carried him right over their heads. The rider swung an ax that split a wounded outlaw’s skull as though it were a ripe melon.
These goddamn crazed Indians meant business!
Henry was turning away from the spurting blood as a lithe figure dived over the rocks and fell on him, one hand clawing for his throat and the other wielding a knife. Unable to use his Colts at such close range, Henry Lowe butted and smashed the buck’s nose and blood ran down into the buck’s mouth. Next he elbowed the buck in the Adam’s apple. The Indian was choking from blood in his mouth and lack of air and going black in the face as he fell away. At that very moment, a bowstring snapped, and Lowe heard the hiss of an arrow. He ducked, hoping he wasn’t too late. The shaft slammed into the choking Indian, the arrow piercing his eye – it drove him screaming from the rocks.
Lowe’s brutal laughter sounded as the Indian buck let out a yip of emotion, seeing his bloody mistake. He had made a second one. The white man now had room to use his pistols and use them he did.
But there was no time to gloat for Henry Lowe. Another of his men was gone, and now it was just two of them, himself and Newson Murdock, against a superior number of enemies. How many Indians, Lowe wasn’t sure, but the answer was simple – too damn many. This would have been plain to a blind man, Henry’s father used to say – but if Lowe saw it, he showed no sign.
‘Back to back!’ he ordered in a roar, the whites of his eyes showing in the smoky moonlight. They pressed their broad backs together, and Newson Murdock grinned over a broad shoulder as each man reloaded and waited for the next onslaught to start.
‘The poor bastards, Lowe. They still think they can lick us!’
This wasn’t bravado: it was the spirit that made the Murdock Gang something special. There was no doubt that Murdock and the gang were murderous human vermin who deserved to dance at the end of a rope. That description fitted several hundred men in the sparsely populated West. The Murdock bunch stood out in the crowd because they believed that they were unbeatable. A lot of folks on both sides of the law had come to that assessment of the gang.
The spirit of the gang came from Henry Lowe, a man who it seemed was born for battle.
With two men slaughtered and another wave of blood-hungry riders coming at them in a rush, the outlaws stood back to back with their chests and guns out and chins high.
Riding with the fury of thieves who had suffered a theft, the leading savage bore down on the rock nest relentlessly, his wicked lance tucked beneath his right arm. The heavy spearhead was held steady and pointed straight at Henry Lowe’s heart.
At the last possible moment, Lowe’s pistol roared, and the bullet swatted the Indian from the bony back of his pony.
The others kept coming in a dark flood. The bad man had just a handful of seconds to wonder if, after all, this might be the fight they would not win.
Murdock’s heavy revolvers churned as two racing figures sped close. The recoil of the guns pulsed through his big body into Lowe’s back. Then Lowe’s weapons chimed in. The sensation of shared violence was like a drug, keeping them fighting, killing, and somehow staving off the end – that is, until the enemy was ‘wedged.’
The wedge that split their ranks was a tight bunch of horsemen who came around the shoulder of the low hill. Roaring gunfire cut into the Indians’ ranks. Outlaw horses used weight and momentum to knock the Indian mustangs off their feet.
Riding at the head of the relief was an old man with silver hair flowing behind him and a sawn-off shotgun clasped in his heavy hands.
Uncle Birch Murdock, Newson Murdock’s older brother.
Behind him came other members of the gang and hangers-on, all rebel yelling, all shooting like there was no tomorrow.
‘The old bastard!’ Henry Lowe breathed aloud and Newson turned to take a look, powerful teeth showing in a huge grin.
‘I should’ve knowed . . . he said all along that we were crazy to hit this camp . . .’ Newson added.
Then an arrow thrummed close – too close. With a roar of pure relish, Lowe sprang forward to seize a powerful buck by the topknot. The outlaw jammed the muzzle of his pistol against the Indian’s ear and jerked the trigger.
He flung the corpse aside and went after another quarry. Newson joined him. Body piled upon body and blood ran like rain water as the short, fierce skirmish reached its raging climax and then ebbed into hard-breathing silence.
The outlaws would happily have gone on killing, but there were no Indians left to kill. A boy too young to have earned a feather for his hair was still groaning weakly. That feeble show of life drew enough lead to wipe out ten men.
Henry Lowe leapt nimbly backwards as a wounded horse fell against him.
‘Told you,’ Olly Murdock growled behind his brother and gang member.
‘So you did, you old bastard,’ Newson Murdock grinned.
‘How many men did you lose?’ the older Murdock brother inquired.
Both Newson’s and Henry’s grins faded fast.
‘We don’t lose men, dammit! Some just don’t make it back, is all,’ Henry answered.
The bad old man nodded like a pupil absorbing a valuable fact. None admired Olly Murdock like the members of his gang, especially his younger brother. Olly Murdock had always aspired to become an outlaw hero, but his own career in the dark brotherhood had been totally unremarkable, until his younger brother Newson and his best friend, Henry Lowe, grew to manhood and showed him how it should be done.
Henry was a natural. Even his worst enemies said that. His father always suspected his boy would turn bad. Nonetheless, Olly and the rest were proud to be in his presence, despite the gang being named for Olly.
The outlaws rounded up the Indian ponies and rode back to their camp at an easy pace. They left their dead for the scavengers. There were no burial rites in the Murdock Gang, and mourning was a sign of weakness.
Leading a string of three paint ponies, Newson Murdock called to the ‘unofficial’ leader of the gang, Henry Lowe.
‘Have we got enough horses, now, Henry?’
‘Enough for what?’ Lowe called back.
‘For whatever it is you have in store for us next,’ Newson replied.
‘Who says I have something in store for the gang?’
Henry Lowe was not fooling anybody. Ever since the gang had suffered one of its few reverses and had been driven out of the Indian Nations by a federal posse, Lowe had been after replacement horses. Down at Blue Springs Creek they had even taken the risk of hitting a big horse ranch, only to find that the main herd was elsewhere, on the summer range. Their raid on the Indians had produced a score of hardy Indian ponies – nothing like the quality of the five horses from the Daniels spread, but these horses had stamina, even so.
A rough count now indicated that there were at least two mounts for each member of the twenty-man gang.
Even when Newson’s father pressed to know what Henry Lowe was planning, the outlaw leader only said, ‘If I want to advertise, I can always run a few lines in the papers.’ And no one questioned him again. When it was time for the rest of the gang to know, he would tell them.
CHAPTER 3
TRAIL OF BLOOD
‘Hurry up and wait,’ Virgil Daniels said wryly. ‘It’s just like being in the army again.’
‘There he goes, braggin’ about his fightin’ days again,’ smiled Hugh.
‘Nothin’ worse than when old guys get to reminiscin’ about days past, is there?’ added Casey. ‘Like old ranchers and attorneys, I mean. Ain’t that so, Urban?’
Urban Daniels was not making the same effort to keep the mood light that his brothers were. In truth, he disapproved of banter at a time like this. His tanned face was sober as he continued to stare out of the ranch-house window at the man they were all watching: Frank.
‘He is sure takin’ his time,’ was Urban’s comment.
‘That is what I said,’ rancher Virgil reminded him. ‘Hurry up and wait. He didn’t give us five minutes to decide that we all wanted to ride with him, but now he acts like we have nothin’ to do and all day to do it in.’
‘I guess Frank knows what he’s doin’,’ Hugh said seriously, leaning on the sill.
‘He always did,’ affirmed Virgil, using that tone bordering on awe that was often noticeable in the Daniels brothers when they spoke of their eldest brother. He nodded. ‘He’s readin’ signs now. Trackin’ was just another thing he always did better than just about anybody I ever seen or knew.’