Winchester 1887 (7 page)

“Good thing, on account that we et last night.” He moved with the harnesses, chains, and curved wooden yokes like a dancer, with ease, unaffected by having lost one eye. “An' we gots miles to make up.”

“Can I help you?” James asked, hoping the old man would say no.

“Nope. 'Bout done here anyhows. But take the spade from offen t'uther side of the wagon, and make sure that fire is out. Cover it good. Like we was never here. Do that fer us?”

“Sure.” He walked to the end of the wagon, found the spade, and went to work.

Like we was never here.

Fat chance of that happening,
James thought, staring at the giant wagon with its massive wheels, pulled by the four behemoth oxen. Anybody would be able to follow that trail.

Suddenly, he paused, and a shiver raced up his spine.
Even Pa.

“Hey, boy!”

The old man was calling him, so James took the shovel with him and hurried to the front of the wagon.

“Spade goes yonder,” Wildcat ordered. “Then come back here.”

When he had finished returning the tool to its proper spot, James found that no one sat in the driver's box. For the first time, he realized that he would not be riding to Fort Smith.

They would be walking alongside the oxen and wagon.

All the way across Indian Territory.

The end of a long blacksnake whip dragged on the ground in front of Wildcat's boots. “Ever skint a mule, boy?” the one-eyed man asked.

“No, sir,” James answered honestly.

“Well, we ain't got mules. Just mule-headed oxen. Ever driven one of 'em ignorant beasts?”

“No, sir,” he said again.

Wildcat handed the whip, handle first, toward James. “Time ya learnt.”

Link McCoy picked his room at the Draper House Hotel perfectly. On the second floor right above the hotel's bar, which brought in travelers and cowhands and railroad workers and gamblers and had the loudest, most out-of-tune piano in the county, played by a drunk whose two thumbs had been cut off by a soiled dove five years earlier down south in San Angelo. Nobody ever wanted that room. Nobody could get a good night's sleep in such a place—which was why Link McCoy picked it.

Above the din, he laid the Denison newspaper on the dresser, right in front of the pistol-grip Winchester shotgun, and motioned the others to get closer. When everyone, including Jeff White, had gathered around, he tapped the end of his unlighted cigar on the story.

 

 

Below that, in a smaller point size

And then in slightly larger type and italics

He waited as Zane Maxwell read the headline and the story to Tulip Bells, who grinned.

“It'll have to be easier than robbing banks,” Zane Maxwell said. “I reckon we learned that in Arkansas.”

“Same as Jesse James and his crew learned in Northfield,” Bells said, “and the Dalton boys learned in Cof-feytown.”

“Coffeyville,” Maxwell corrected.

“I know that. I was jokin'.”

Jeff White merely took another pull on the bottle of rye.

“We do run the risk,” McCoy said, “of riling a bunch of Texas ranchers.”

“And Chickasaws,” Tulip Bells pointed out.

“Indians we can handle,” Maxwell said. “Texans can be another matter, and we won't be far from the state.”

“Where's the money go?” Jeff White finally spoke. “It don't say that in the story.”

“The Bank of Tishomingo,” McCoy replied. “In the Chickasaw capital.”

White stepped back. “How you know that?”

McCoy grinned. “I have sources.”

“You know when?” Maxwell asked.

“It won't be until after the cattlemen's association finish their meeting in Fort Worth,” McCoy said. “That's where they'll be collecting the grazing fee for the Indians. They'll take the train up through here, I expect, then escort their money across the Red River and to Tishomingo. That's where we'll hit them. That money won't reach Tishomingo.”

Downstairs in the saloon, a fight broke out. Some chirpy screamed. Men cursed. Glass shattered.

“In town?” Tulip Bells sounded as if he had had enough of committing armed robbery in towns. The incident at Greenville, Arkansas, had put the fear of God—or, rather, the fear of farmers and city folk with rifles and shotguns—in him.

“South of town,” McCoy said, and saw the faces of White and Bells relax. Even Maxwell nodded his approval.

“At Fort Washita,” McCoy said.

“A fort!” Jeff White took another pull on the bottle.

Below in the saloon, a shotgun roared. The Denison law had come in to break up the fight. More curses, a few shouts, and then someone below told the piano player to get with it.

“A fort, but no army,” Maxwell said. “Bluebellies gave up that post twenty years ago. Probably even longer than that. Indians have been using it since then.”

“So have the whiskey runners,” McCoy said.

Tulip Bells was the first to understand everything. He snapped his fingers. “Yeah. I've bought me some Choc beer there before. And whiskey, too.” He laughed and slapped his thigh. “Those Texans, those devils. So that's their plan.”

White frowned. “I don't get it.”

McCoy didn't expect the blowhard to have understood. He grinned, and had to speak up. The piano player was hammering out “Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.”

“Get the Indians liquored up,” McCoy said. “Cheat those Chickasaws out of that twenty-five grand.”

“And those Texas waddies riding guard for the cattlemen's association,” Maxwell guessed, “will be roostered pretty good by then, as well.”

“Maybe,” McCoy said.

“Easy pickings.” Jeff White had come around.

“Don't go spending that gold before we've got it,” McCoy cautioned. “Any number of things can go wrong, and I'm not going through another massacre like Greenville again. This is my last score. After this, I'm taking my share and riding to Mexico. Figure on buying me a hacienda and sitting back with nothing to do but drink tequila and watch Mexican women feed me grapes.”

“Grapes?” Tulip Bells asked.

“Red grapes. I like grapes.”

They laughed.

Below, a banjo and some fool on a Louisiana accordion joined the piano player, along with another idiot playing the triangle. Loud. Real loud.

Just the way Link McCoy wanted it.

“Zane will take the train to Fort Worth, pretend to be a reporter from Kansas City, since Kansas City has an interest in what goes on with Texas cowboys because of all the packing plants. Nobody around here would likely know of some ink-slinger with a Missouri newspaper. As soon as the meeting breaks up, and the money is loaded on the train, he'll send us a telegraph.”

“That says the gold's comin'!” White was drunk and excited.

“Well, not quite in those words,” Maxwell said.

“Right.” McCoy picked up his shotgun. “We take the Katy north to Durant. That's just over the Red in the Choctaw Nation. Tulip will already be there. With good horses. Then we ride over to Fort Washita.”

The rest of the plan was easily explained. Maxwell and Bells listened. White finished the rye.

“We'll need a few more men,” Maxwell said.

“I figure six men, including us,” McCoy suggested, and Maxwell and Tulip Bells agreed. Not too many men, so the split would be higher for all of the robbers.

White just giggled, already counting his share of the loot.

“A good or bad whiskey runner,” McCoy concluded. “And some liquor.”

Bells stepped away from the dresser, picked up McCoy's bedroll from the end of the bed, and rolled it onto the floor.

White turned around. “What are you doin'?”

“Getting ready to turn in,” Bells said, and stood.

“In here?”

“That ruckus downstairs don't bother me.”

“Crazy fool.” White drank more from the bottle. He grinned at Maxwell. “So we need just two more fellers for our job.”

“Three,” the outlaw leader said.

“Three? We got four already.”

McCoy shook his head. “No, you won't be with us, Jeff.” The barrel of the shotgun pressed against White's belly button.

The bottle fell to the floor, and White reached for the butt of his pistol, but stopped suddenly, hearing the noise downstairs, and smiled. “You won't kill me. Not here. Even that racket downstairs won't drown out a blast from that—”

Suddenly, he gasped as if sucking for breath that could not, would not, come, and Tulip Bells withdrew the Arkansas toothpick he had plunged into the man's back.

“You drink too much,” McCoy said as Bells dropped the knife onto the bedroll, and slid his arms underneath Jeff White's armpits as the man fell back, his mouth moving, eyes darting every which way.

White tried to speak, but no words could come.

“And,” McCoy said, “I don't cotton to be called a thief.”

Slowly, Tulip Bells laid the outlaw on McCoy's bedroll. No need in getting blood all over the floor. The management would frown upon such things, might even fetch the law, and with a $25,000 payday coming, McCoy could splurge on a new bedroll. In a town like Denison on a loud Saturday night, they could sneak the body out and deposit it where no one would find it for years.

Zane Maxwell pulled a watch from his vest pocket, opened the case, looked at the dying Jeff White, and said, “I'll say three minutes.”

“Two,” McCoy said.

Maxwell stared at the watch.

Tulip Bells said, “Since I know where I stuck him, I don't reckon I can bet.”

All three men looked down at the floor, listening to the awful music and clamor below, waiting to see how long it would take Jeff White to die.

Downstairs, the piano player banged out “There Is a Tavern in the Town.”

Millard Mann returned to where he had found his son's hat.

He had taken the Fort Worth–Denver City northbound back to McAdam and gone home—only to find, as his head had told him over his heart's wishes, that James had not come home. Millard had then ridden over to Charles Goodnight's spread, bought the best horse and pack mule the old rancher had, and ridden south back to Mulberry Station, where he had discovered James's hat the morning after his oldest son had run away from home.

Millard cursed. He should have looked at the sign closer, realized that James—. Millard stopped that thought. The boy had hopped the freight right there. That much had been clear. There was no way to even guess that he would have jumped out of the car just a few miles down the tracks.

Millard rode carefully, dismounting often, trying to find some track, some bit of trail he could follow. Two miles he covered. Then two more. Then he rode back north a mile, two, three, four.

There was no sign. The massive storm that had hit earlier had wiped out anything he might have found. All he had was . . . nothing.

“Fort Smith.”

He was squatting on the east side of the rails, looking at something that might have been a footprint. How old? He had no idea. Many workers went up and down those rails. So did hobos. Anyone might have made that track.

The voice whispered into his ear.
“Fort Smith.”

He looked north, then behind him, standing. The horse, a broad-chested blue roan, snorted. The mule grazed contentedly. Millard saw nothing. No one around to have whispered. The closest person was a few miles up the line at McAdam. The voice . . . Millard shivered. It had sounded . . . just like Jimmy's.

Only then did Millard realize that no ghost had spoken those two words. He had whispered them himself. He said it again. “Fort Smith.”

He turned and looked east, across the Staked Plains. It made sense, good sense. James had taken the big rifle and his uncle's badge. He planned to follow Jimmy's footsteps, take a job as a deputy U.S. marshal—as if the federal lawman or Judge Isaac Parker would hire a fool-headed, strong-willed seventeen-year-old kid.

Millard shook his head. Jimmy wasn't that crazy. He would have waited for the next southbound, not traipse off across the Llano Estacado. The rains
could have
washed away the tracks that would have shown James hopping another southbound.

No. Millard sighed. His son had decided to walk. East.

Four hundred miles. With summer heating up the temps. Across the Indian Territory. Through the reservations of the Comanches, other old warrior tribes, and then through the lands of the Five Civilized Tribes. A country full of men who would cut a person's throat for a nickel to buy a bottle of contraband beer.

Swearing again, Millard Mann stood and swung into the saddle, patted the blue roan's neck, and turned the horse around. He rode east, pulling the pack mule behind him.

In the distance, Millard saw turkey buzzards circling, and his heart fell like a stone. His throat turned dry, but he refused to waste water. Slowly, he kicked the blue roan into a trot, and headed across the Staked Plains.

He found debris scattered all over the plains, a few dead animals, and two uprooted trees. Strips of canvas from what appeared to have come off a covered wagon. Sprigs from a clump of sage that had been driven, like a nail, into an old headboard that marked a grave, the year carved into the marker too faded to read.

A tornado had come through recently, and he might have marveled at what he had just seen. The twister had had enough force to drive a needle from a sagebrush into a practically petrified piece of wood. Yet the wood, marking a grave, remained untouched.

The circling carrion, however, blocked out anything to marvel at.

He rode on, knowing he was on his son's trail. He found a few bits of sign, some tracks made by a not-too-heavy lad afoot. Every now and then, he found spots not wiped out from the storm, tracks made by James's boots and the stock of that big Winchester .50-100-450 rifle he was toting with him.

Closer to the turkey buzzards, he left the trail and rode toward the edge of an arroyo. He caught his breath, steeled himself for what he might find, and then dismounted, ground-reined the blue roan, and walked the last forty feet to peer into the arroyo.

Wolves were at the carcass, keeping the buzzards at bay, but the big beasts did not care about Millard Mann.

His heart eased, and he let out a heavy sigh. An ox. How long it had been dead, he didn't know, but he doubted if it had been more than a few days. It was a big animal, and there were only six wolves tearing at its flesh.

He moved back to the horse and mule, mounted, and rode away a few feet, then stopped. “An ox? Here?” That struck him as peculiar, but a few miles back on the trail, he found something even stranger.

The tracks led east. Toward Indian Territory. The best he could tell, he was following a big wagon, a Murphy maybe, or something like that. It was carrying quite the load, pulled by four oxen. Three men were walking with the wagon, which left tracks so deep a blind man could have followed them. The tracks disappeared into the horizon, but for once Millard felt a little bit of relief.

Maybe James was still alive. Luck had found him. The boy was in the company of a couple teamsters, and Millard should be able to catch up with them . . . if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

Luck, he decided, had also smiled upon him. He would soon be reunited with his son.

Two miles later, the blue roan came up lame.