Winchester 1887 (17 page)

They made camp in a small clearing along the meandering creek, thinking that the forest thick with hickory, elm, ash, and hackberry trees would provide them plenty of cover. Several yards from where James was getting a fire going and tending to Robin's wounds, Millard butchered a six-point buck he'd risked a shot on earlier in the evening, knowing and regretting that much of the meat would have to be left behind for coyotes and other scavengers.

So far, luck had favored them. The Indians had not followed them in the two days that had passed since he'd rescued the kids and unceremoniously left the dead whiskey runner lying among the wrecked barrels that once had held his poison.

With enough venison steaks in his bloody hands, he walked back to the camp and deposited the steaks in an iron skillet.

Robin Bodeen, if that indeed were her real name, had finally come back into consciousness. She wore Millard's extra shirt he'd put on her. It fit her like a short dress. She stared at him, trying to figure out just who he was.

“That's my pa,” James said.

Millard washed his hands, dried them off, and picked up the One of One Thousand Winchester. He kept it on his thighs as he kneeled beside her. “How do you feel?”

“All right. I reckon.”

He waited a few moments then decided there was no use bandying words and beating around the bush. “Your father's dead.” He did, however, have enough compassion not to let the child know that her old man had taken his own life.

“He weren't my pa,” the kid said.

James gasped. “What?”

“'Bout two years back, my pa traded me to Wildcat.”

James sang out in shock, “He traded you?”

“For some whiskey.”

It didn't surprise Millard. Oh, it might have, a few weeks earlier, but he wasn't working for the railroad any longer—wondered if he'd still have a job when he got back to McAdam, Texas—and had covered too many miles in too lawless a land to be shocked by anything anymore.

“It wasn't pizened.” Her face hardened. “Though sometimes I wished it was.”

Millard leaned over, lifted the shirt to check the bandages, and said mainly to change the subject, “One of the bullets went through. Clean shot. I just drew a silk bandana through it to clean it. The other one”—he nodded at the one through the ribs—“I had to dig out.” He grinned at her. “You were tough. Tough as nails.”

“Don't remember it,” she said.

“That's good.” He peeled back the bandage and nodded in satisfaction. “I got the slug out. Didn't go too deep, and don't think it hit any vitals. It doesn't look like infection has set in, but I want to get you to Spanish Fort first. Find a doctor there. Let him finish what I started.”

He noticed James staring at him.

“Where'd you learn to do surgery like that?” James asked again. He had asked earlier when Millard had forced the bullet out with a pocketknife blade he had held over a small fire the first night out of Wild Horse Creek.

Millard had not answered, and might not have replied again had not the girl's penetrating eyes locked on him.

He stood, forcing a smile. “My brothers and I kinda ran into some trouble when we were growing up.” Surprisingly, that sentence made him feel pretty good, better than he had a right to feel, and memories came flooding through his mind. He could see Jimmy and Borden, younger, full of vim and vinegar, and see himself, much younger, although Borden had always said Millard was the old man of the bunch, even if he were the middle child. “I had some practice, doctoring.”

He smiled at his son. It was good to see the boy . . . alive. They had not had a chance to do much talking, for James to explain why he had run away from home—although Millard had a fair idea of that reason—or how he had teamed up with an Indian-hating, man-killing whiskey runner and this girl who had been pretending to be a boy.
That
Millard could understand. Especially with rogues and ruffians—those who scoffed at the law and killed without cause—running loose.

He remembered the three men he had killed earlier, and the smile faded. That was one side of him he had hoped his children would never have to see.

“Bring me that Remington,” he said, and watched James tug the revolver from his waistband and hand the. 44 over, butt forward. Millard set down the Winchester, took the revolver, and began plucking the casings from the cylinder. “Fry up those steaks while I do this.”

James went to the skillet and Millard worked on the Remington.

He had found the powder flask in the leather pouch, along with a smaller pouch of lead balls. Those would work, though he'd have to melt them down and use the bullet mold, also in the pouch, to make the bullets. It would take a while, and he wasn't sure it would work, for he would have to trim the .54-caliber slugs with his knife to fit into the .44—actually, .45—caliber chambers for the revolver.

Years, practically a lifetime, had passed since he had made his own reloads. He moved to the fire to begin the process, Millard melting down the lead bullets, and James across from him, frying venison steaks for supper.

The steaks smelled better.

He heard James's sigh over the sizzling of the deer and grease in the skillet, followed by his son's soft voice. “I'm sorry, Pa.”

Millard lifted his gaze, but all he could do in response was just nod.

“I didn't mean for all this to happen.”

After exhaling, Millard's head shook. “You figured your mother and I'd just let you run off.”

“It was just . . . I just . . . well . . . I had to.”

“To do what?”

James forked the steaks, turned them over. “Follow Uncle Jimmy.”

Millard let out a mirthless chuckle. “Be a lawman? Pin on that tin star?”

“Yes, sir. Something like that.”

“Seventeen years old. I'm not rightly sure, but I think even in Fort Smith they'd want a man old enough to vote to enforce the laws and keep the peace.”

“I figured—”

Millard laughed with humor. “To lie about your age.” He waited.

His son's head bobbed. “Yes, sir.”

“There are easier ways to get to Fort Smith than travel in a freight wagon with a whiskey runner.”

“Yes, sir.” James proceeded to tell him everything that had happened, about the ruffian in the boxcar—Millard did not interrupt to let him know he knew about that fiend—the tornado, and finding himself underneath the wagon after that savage storm.

Millard liked hearing his son's voice. It had been a long time, and now that he had to think about it, he had never really had much of a father-son conversation with James. Maybe the whole situation was Millard's own fault.

There was no
maybe
. Millard could have been a better father. He could have taught his son how to shoot, instead of leaving that more or less up to Jimmy. The railroad, that job, had just kept him so busy, and he'd left most of the child-rearing to Libbie. If anyone should be apologizing, he realized it was him.

“Well,” Millard said when James had finished. “You're all right. I'm all right. We'll get this girl to Spanish Fort, then head back to McAdam.” His eyes hardened. “Your mother, brother, and sister will want to see you.”

James's mouth turned into a hard frown, and Millard knew his son was still bent on making it to Fort Smith.

“I want to be a lawman,” James said. “I have to be one.”

Millard's head shook. “It's not all that it's cracked up to be, son.”

“But you wouldn't know—”

“Wouldn't I?” Millard's head tilted toward the Winchester '73 leaning against the wagon's wheel. “Your two uncles weren't the only ones in that line of work. That's one reason I got that rifle.”

“I'd never seen it.” James motioned at the belted old Army revolver. “Or that?”

“That's because it was history. To me. A part of my life”—he almost said that he wanted to forget, but found other words—“that came mostly before you and your siblings.”

“You were a lawman?”

“For a while. Sheriff 's deputy . . . and Jimmy, Borden, and I all served with the Texas Rangers briefly.”

James could only stare for the longest while. Like he was in shock. Sometimes, thinking back to those years shocked Millard himself.

“Why didn't you . . . let us know?”

Millard's head shook. “It never came up.” He stared at the pot, wishing those balls would start to melt. “People change. Jimmy was cut out for that kind of life. And Borden, too, in his own way. I wasn't. It never came easy for me, and I never really liked it. Then I met Libbie. Then you came along.” He had to think back. “I reckon you were maybe five years old when I decided it was time to turn in that tin star, find something different to do, something safer.” He found the words. “I didn't want your mother to be a widow. I didn't want you, Kris, and Jacob to grow up without a father. That's why Jimmy never married, you know. That's the kind of life you'll have if you go to Fort Smith, if you somehow pin on a badge. And about all you can hope for . . .” He couldn't finish.

Borden had been lucky. He had a wife to grieve over him, and a funeral that had attracted many to that Kansas town where they'd lived. Jimmy had been buried in the worn-out cemetery in a fading Texas town that would be blown away in a few years.

“It's still something that I have to do,” James said.

Millard's head shook wearily. “When you're twenty-one, you can see—”

“How old were you?” James cut him off.

That took Millard back. He had been younger than James when he had first held a Winchester Yellow Boy. Jimmy had been even younger. He had been in his early twenties when Winchester had introduced its 1873 model.

“Times were different then,” he said, but that sounded and tasted like a lie on his lips. Because it wasn't true. He had realized that when he had been forced to cut down those three outlaws up on Camp Creek. The Indian Territory could be just as wild and brutal as Texas had been back when he and his two brothers had ridden for the law.

Millard nodded at the skillet. “Those steaks are burning.”

After James had flipped the meat again, he pointed the fork at the now-sleeping girl. “What will the law do to her?”

“I'm not turning her into a sheriff. She goes to a doctor—if there's a sawbones in Spanish Fort.”

“What'll happen to her?”

Millard looked at the girl and again at his son. No romance between the two. By thunder, James had not even realized Robin was a girl until after she had been shot by the Chickasaws. “That's up to her.”

“She's had a hard life.” James shook his head sadly. “A father . . . who'd sell . . . his own flesh and blood . . . for whiskey!”

“It's a hard life,” Millard said. “For everyone.”

He studied his son. He would always imagine him, always see him, as that five-year-old boy who had laughed a lot or a boy not yet in his teens, but those years had flown by. James was no longer that boy, not even a kid, but a man. Inexperienced, sure, but growing up and learning fast. He probably would pin on a badge, no matter how much Millard and Libbie protested. What's more, he'd make a fine lawman.

“She's old enough to make her own way,” Millard said, just to keep talking, to push aside those thoughts that told him that eventually James would find his own path, and was likely already choosing it. “She can choose her own path now that she doesn't have that—” The rest he left unsaid.

“What about the Chickasaws?” James asked.

“I don't think we have to worry about the Indians,” Millard said. “If they wanted to attack us, they'd have hit us before now.”

“So why make bullets?”

Millard smiled, but once again, the humor had left him. “Indians aren't the only ones a body has to worry about in the Indian Nations.”

The piebald gelding fought bit, reins, and stirrup as Deputy U.S. Marshal Jackson Sixpersons eased toward the ruins of a campsite. He couldn't blame the horse.

Death hung in the air.

When he had forced the gelding a few more yards, he reined up and swung down into the dust. He wrapped the reins around a limb, but just to be safe, withdrew the hobbles from the saddlebag, and secured the paint horse's black front feet, as well. He did not want to be left afoot.

He found several blood droppings, casings from a Winchester—a small caliber—some other brass cartridges, and the remnants of a few copper percussion caps. In front of him lay the smashed remnants of whiskey kegs. Nearby that lay the body of a white man vultures and other carrion had picked over.

The corpse wasn't going anywhere, so Sixpersons tried to piece together what had happened. Horse tracks showed riders had come in from the north and left that way in a hurry. Chickasaws. The heavy wagon and oxen had gone south and without the dead white man. One horse, shod, had gone with the wagon. The Indians had later returned and followed.

There couldn't be any whiskey left in the load, not with all those busted barrels. Maybe the Indians had destroyed the batch of poisoned brew.

Jackson Sixpersons knew how to be patient and precise. He worked methodically, studiously, and carefully, piecing everything together. The wagon had arrived without a horse—that shod horse had ridden in from the south then left with the wagon. The Indians had come from the north, left in a hurry, and a few more had come back. Those had scalped the dead white man, but had they destroyed the contraband liquor? That he could not make any sense out of.

Yet he knew a fight had broken out, a quick but deadly one. Bodies, wounded or dead, had been carried away when the Indians had retreated. Probably attributed to the arrival of the man from the south, the rider with the good horse. Only later did the Chickasaws, if they were Chickasaws, had returned.

One of the members of the wagon crew had been wounded, possibly killed, and most likely had been loaded into the back of the wagon, but the whiskey runners had not taken the dead man with them. Why not?

He went to the dead man, used his right foot to roll him over, and knelt beside the already bloated, stinking body. One eye had been missing for a long time. The other had fed a raven after the man's death. The dead man's tongue was missing, cut out. That had been after his death, probably by the Indians when they had returned.

However, the man had not been killed by Indians. The old Cherokee lawman could see the powder burns on the corpse's temple, as well on the rigid fingers of his undisturbed right hand. He had put a gun to his head and shot himself. The large-caliber slug had not exited, because his skull was thick and hard.

Sixpersons saw few other wounds. He rose, knees popping, and spit the bitterness out of his mouth. He stared down at the corpse. “Lamar Bodeen, you saved me and Judge Parker a lot of trouble.”

Behind him, the piebald snorted and stamped his feet nervously.

There was nothing more for Sixpersons. He walked back to the piebald, removed the hobbles and returned those to the saddlebags, gathered the reins, and mounted again. His report would say that he had found Lamar Bodeen, whiskey runner, dead, apparently by his own hand. His report would describe the powder burns, the single entry wound of a large-caliber bullet, and a description of the man that would likely convince all of the courts that it indeed was Lamar Bodeen, alias Wildcat Lamar, alias Wildcat Bodeen, alias, alias, alias.

Maybe Sixpersons would see, eventually, a little bit of the reward money the state of Texas had posted on this killer—yeah, about the time he got a fourth set of teeth. He would leave out the fact that the man had been scalped. Not that Sixpersons cared much about the Chickasaws, but he did not want to bring anymore anger to any Indian people, and white men did not like to hear about white men, even outlaws, being scalped by Indian hands. The cutting out of Bodeen's tongue would fail to make his report, too, for the same reason. However, the next time he went to Fort Sill and ran into any Comanches on the federal reservation, he might let it slip to those Indians what had become of the fiend who had killed so many. Not that he cared much for the Comanches, but they were Indians . . . and so was he.

He would not say that he had buried the dead felon, because that would be a lie. Maybe the white peace officers would just assume that he had buried the dead man as that would have been the decent thing to do. Maybe he would have taken the time to bury the dead man, had Lamar Bodeen shown any decency during his wretched, wicked life.

Sixpersons kicked the piebald into a walk, then a lope, for the horse—and the deputy marshal himself—wanted to get away from the foul, evil place.

The tracks of the wagon were easy to follow.

Six miles south, he ran into other tracks and realized that he was not alone. The Indians following the whiskey wagon had turned back, but someone else was following the wagon of the whiskey runners. On shod ponies. Likely, those men were not Indians.

He decided to check the loads in his Winchester '87 before continuing south toward the Texas border.

The river ran red.

Muddy, high, it was an angry torrent that sent logs spearing downstream like torpedoes. Texas longhorns and trail-weary cowhands used to cross there on their way to the Kansas cattle towns before the trail moved westward and Dodge City had become the Queen of the Cow Towns, but no trail boss in his right mind would have tried to ford the Red when it raged like that.

Millard Mann could scarcely find the bank, the water had risen so high. He spit, slogged through the mud back to where he had ground-reined his liver chestnut, and looked at the wagon. The girl and James sat in the driver's box, anxiously waiting. Robin could sit up, which made Millard less nervous about his doctoring abilities.

“Might as well light down,” he said as he led the gelding toward the oxen. He looked at the sun. Still enough daylight to make a few miles, but they could eat their supper before moving downstream a ways and run a cold camp. The Chickasaws were not coming after them, but he still did not want to take any chances or lower his guard while in Indian Territory.

“We're not crossing?” James asked.

“Not here. Unless you two swim like an otter.” Millard smiled.

The two kids grinned back with utter relief. They had seen that river. To attempt to ford there would have meant a sure, wet death.

After wrapping the reins around the rear wagon wheel, Millard tilted his head eastward. “We'll follow the river. There's a ferry at Willis. We can cross there and head to Denison instead of Spanish Fort. Better chance of finding a doctor in Denison anyway. At least, a doctor who works on people more than horses and mules.”

Usually, the Red stretched only one hundred yards or so there. Back in the late '80s, some entrepreneur had stretched a cable about twenty feet above the water line, put together a rope-and-pulley system, and built a wooden ferry that could carry people, horses, and wagons with the east-southeast current.

He should have headed for the Willis Ferry to begin with. Denison was much bigger than Spanish Fort, which wasn't more than a cattle crossing and farming community, and the railroad ran through Denison. He would leave the girl with the doctor, and board a train for Fort Worth. He would begin the long journey home with his son, back to McAdam. He would be a better father. Take the kid hunting. Fishing. Maybe get him a job on the railroad, if Millard could talk his way back onto the crew himself. He never had expected to be gone as long as he had. Anyway, in Denison, he would send a telegraph to Libbie and the kids. Let them know he and James were all right, and that they were coming home.

 

 

With the last of the deer meat frying in the skillet, and the last of the coffee boiling in the pot, Millard brought out the Winchester rifle, ejected all the shells, and began cleaning the .32-20.

“That's a One of One Thousand,” Robin said, eyes wide with wonder.

Millard nodded.

Winchester Repeating Arms began advertising its One of One Thousand series around 1875. If you believed the company, every sporting rifle was tested, but some barrels proved to be significantly better than others—though all, Winchester proudly claimed, were mighty fine and all shot true. Yet those top barrels seemed worth their weight in gold, so the One of One Thousand series had been created, at a price of one hundred dollars. You could, of course, elect to buy the not-quite-as-good-but-better-than-many rifles known as the One of One Hundred, which added just twenty dollars to the model's factory price.

Granville Stuart, the famed Montana rancher, had a One of One Thousand. So did the legendary sharpshooter Doc Carver. Millard Mann never thought he deserved one. After all, there had not been many special rifles made. In fact, when it was all said and done, Winchester produced only one hundred and thirty-three One of One Thousand Model 1873s, while the One of One Hundreds would be even rarer, with no more than eight produced. The company had also produced One of One Thousands and One of One Hundreds in its 1876 Centennial Model, but Millard had never seen many of those big monsters in any version.

“How did you get one?” Robin asked.

Millard lowered the rag he was using to wipe the receiver. “You know about guns?” He didn't think the girl had picked that up from a rogue like Lamar Bodeen.

She nodded. “My pa”—she looked away—“rode with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West for a while. Till the whiskey got him.”

“Whiskey'll do that,” Millard said.

“Where has that rifle been all this time?” That question came from James.

“In a scabbard. In a trunk.” Millard patted the butt of the old Colt revolver. “Along with this.”

“You never—”

“It's part of my past,” Millard interrupted his son. “Never saw any need of it once I got the job on the railroad.” He tried to smile at James. “It would have been yours, eventually. Will be yours, someday.” He focused on the rifle.

“My name's Gillett,” the girl said.

James and Millard looked at her. “Ain't Bodeen. Gillett. Robin Gillett.”

Millard nodded. “I once knew a Texas Ranger named Gillett.”

She laughed. “Wouldn't be no kin to my pa.”

He went back to cleaning the rifle. “No, I expect you're right.”

The girl wanted to talk, to get everything off her chest, and suddenly she was spilling it all out, no holding back, tears streaming down her face.

Mal Gillett drank more liquor than even Buffalo Bill Cody, only Robin's pa couldn't hold his booze. It got to the point where he couldn't fork a horse or hold a rifle, and for a hard-riding, sharp-shooting cowboy in one of the biggest shows in the world, that wouldn't do. Colonel Cody had fired the drunk, and Mal Gillett had returned home, six months later, to Baxter Springs, Kansas.

His wife and his children—Robin had two sisters and three brothers—were happy to have him home. For a short while. His drinking picked up, and he wasn't a happy drunk. Liquor made him mean.

“Before that, he was a good pa,” Robin said, dabbing her eyes with the tails of the long cotton shirt Millard had given her. “I was the oldest. Tomboy. He'd take me huntin'. It was him who taught me how to shoot. But then he found likker. Maybe it found him. Or they jus' found one 'nother.”

So Mal drank. And drank. His wife had to get a job in town, clerking in some mercantile, and before long the two oldest boys were working. Just trying to make ends meet. Robin had to care for the little ones, staying home, and she had to put food in the pots, and that she did by hunting.

That was all fine and dandy until someone in town jokingly told Mal that Colonel Buffalo Bill Cody had hired the wrong Gillett. Cody should have hired Robin, and not Mal, and that maybe Robin could have challenged Cody's sharpshooting girl, Annie Oakley, and won over all of America's hearts.

It was the wrong thing to say to Mal Gillett.

A week later, Wildcat Lamar Bodeen happened through Baxter Springs, on his way to sell contraband whiskey in the Indian Territory, and he sold a few jugs to Gillett.

Mal Gillett didn't have any money to pay for hooch, but he had a daughter that he jealously despised.

“So he beat me and tossed me in the back of that wagon,” Robin said. “An' that's the last I ever seed of my ol' man or my family.”