After six months of searching, he found them at a place on King Fisher Creek in the Nations, where they were, illegally, selling whiskey to the Indians. He made a positive identification, by binoculars, of the two men; Amon Kilgore and Fred Toombs.
For a moment, Cade considered confronting them. Part of him wanted them to know who killed them, and why. Then he decided they didn’t deserve to be faced down. He had killed men during the war, good men, sons, husbands, and fathers, for no reason other than that they were wearing a different color uniform. If he could kill good men from afar, he could kill these two sons of bitches.
He made two head shots from five hundred yards away with his Sharps Fifty, and left them where they fell. There was no need to check on them, he knew they were dead.
Cade jumped out of bed drenched in sweat. Nothing in his entire life had affected him the way Arabella’s death had done—not hiding under a mound of dying men at the battle of Franklin, not surviving a year in a Yankee prison camp, not escaping a tyrant in Argentina, not even killing Kilgore and Toombs. All of those actions were meaningless, when they were compared to the anguish he felt as he watched the flicker of life fade from Arabella’s eyes.
Cade had to get out of this room. He needed a drink.
Cade and Jeter were camped on Soldier’s Creek two days into what would be a four-day trip back to Buffalo City. Jeter brought out the last of the biscuits he had brought with them from Caldwell.
“We’ll have to do some huntin’ tomorrow,” he said, handing a piece of ham to Cade.
“It shouldn’t be too hard to bag a prairie chicken or a jack rabbit,” Cade said as he grabbed the coffee pot. “Damn, that thing’s hot.” He drew back his hand quickly.
The two men sat around the fire until Jeter finally broke the silence.
“What are you going to do when you get back?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can get a job at one of the saloons, or maybe I’ll just keep playing poker for a living. You know, I’m pretty good.”
“You don’t have to do that. If you’re going to work at a saloon, why don’t you work at the one you own?”
“It doesn’t belong to me,” Cade said. “You and Magnolia are the ones who have built up the business.”
“The hell it doesn’t,” Jeter said. “The Red House Saloon belongs to you just as much as it belongs to me. We sold the ranch and the money we made from the cattle drive paid for the place. I could use your help. With the railroad coming I expect the town will grow, and our business will double. And besides that, Magnolia needs to stay home with the girls.”
“Your ma’s not there anymore?”
“Of course she is, but she was stoved up before I brought her up from Texas. And with Bella and Chantal growing like weeds, she can’t keep up with them.”
“Are they walkin’?”
“Chantal is. If you came around more, you’d see how cute they are together. Both have black hair and big black eyes just like their mothers. When people see ‘em everybody thinks they’re twins.”
“That’s good. Magnolia’s a fine mother.”
“She is. You know, she lost our baby a couple months back. Nearly killed her.”
Cade jerked his head up.
“No, no. I didn’t mean to say that, Cade. It wasn’t like Arabella. She wants another baby—our baby and it just hasn’t happened yet. But it will.”
Cade took a deep breath. “What about Pete Cahill? Is he still working for you?”
Jeter smiled. “Checkin’ up on your investment, are you? I thought you didn’t care what happened to The Red House.”
Cade shrugged his shoulders. “It doesn’t matter to me, just as long as you make enough to keep your family together.”
“And that we make enough to keep bailing you out of jail,” Jeter added. “When is all this carousing gonna stop? You need to think about what you’re doing with your life.”
“No, I don’t,” Cade said. He walked over to the fire and, using his hat as a heat pad this time, picked up the coffee pot and poured himself a cup. “It’s better when I don’t think about anything at all.”
“You can’t go the rest of your life like this, Cade.”
“Why not?”
“You just can’t. You’re a young man, barely thirty years old, and you need a woman—a wife, like I’ve got Magnolia. Do you think I don’t know the hell she’s put up with? First New Orleans, when it was Arabella who showed her a way to get out, and then those bastards, what they did to her. But we’ve put all that behind us, and you could do the same thing,” Jeter insisted.
“You think I don’t want to?” Cade asked. He took a swallow of his coffee as he composed his thoughts. “More than anything in the world, I want to put Arabella’s death behind me. But I can’t get that awful image out of my mind. Whether my eyes are open or closed, all I can see is Arabella, lying in that pool of blood, her life slipping away before me. And I was helpless . . . helpless to do anything!” Cade threw the tin cup into the bushes as he kicked at the fire.
“I shouldn’t have brought this up,” Jeter said. “I just made it worse.”
“You didn’t make it worse,” Cade said, shaking his head. “Nothing could make it worse than it already is.”
Ten miles north and west of where Cade and Jeter were camped, a small band of Indians was watching the house of a homesteader. Waquini, a self-proclaimed medicine man from the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation, waited with four warriors who had agreed to follow him. Translated into English, his name meant One with Hooked Nose, the name given him when, as a child, he had fallen and broken his nose.
Waquini had taken it upon himself to punish the White Man for the wrongs they had done the Indians, and if it meant leaving Indian Territory and coming into Kansas, so be it. He and his followers had reached the farmhouse just before dawn. Now the sun was up, and they could smell the rich aromas of bacon and coffee.
“I think we will eat well this morning,” Waquini said.
“I hope the woman has made much bacon,” Keytano said.
“Quiet, the man comes,” Waquini cautioned.
Waquini and the others saw a man walk toward the small house where the Whites did their toilet. They watched him as he went inside, then waited for a short time. When he came back outside, he was hooking his suspenders over his shoulders.
Waquini drew back the bow then released the arrow. It flew true, the shaft burying the arrow head deep into the man’s chest.
With the man down, Waquini and the others charged the house. The woman looked up shocked and terrified by the sudden and unexpected appearance of Indians in her kitchen. She screamed just as she was knocked to the floor.
“Ma!” a shout came from the sleeping loft, and a boy, about twelve dropped to the kitchen. He grabbed a butcher knife and ran at one of the Indians, but Waquini killed him with the same war club he had used to kill the boy’s mother
“The boy was brave,” Waquini acknowledged as he grabbed a biscuit.
“There’s no need to hunt today,” Cade said when he and Jeter were striking their camp the next morning. “We should be passing the Johansson place around noon.”
“They’re good people, Halen and his wife,” Jeter said. He laughed. “Do you think she’ll have a pot of rabbit and dumplin’ stew going?”
“Don’t Swedes call that klimp?” Cade asked.
“I don’t know what she calls it but it sure was good the last time I was out this way.”
The two men rode in relative silence for the rest of the morning until Cade saw the buzzards.
“Cade?” The tone of Jeter’s voice made it obvious that he had seen them as well. “Could that be . . .?”
“The Johansson place, yes,” Cade said, answering the question before it was asked. “Come on!”
Cade slapped his legs against the side of his horse, urging it into a gallop. Jeter was right behind him.
When they reached the farm, Cade saw the buzzards. Pulling his pistol, he fired a couple of sh
ots into the air and a dozen or more birds took to the sky, leaving a bloody body on the ground.
Cade dismounted and hurried to find a body where he saw an arrow shaft sticking from the chest.
“Is it Halen?” Jeter asked.
“There’s hardly enough left to identify, but I’m sure it is,” Cade said. The body had been scalped, stripped, and mutilated.
With pistols drawn, the two men went into the house. Cade was saddened, but not surprised by what he found. Astrid Johansson and her son were lying on the floor, their bodies only slightly less desecrated than Halen’s had been.
“Do you think this was done by Indians, or was it those damn bastards who are roaming the country stealing horses, making it look like it’s Indians?” Jeter asked.
“Either way, these people need to be buried,” Cade said. “I’ll find a shovel.”
3
When Cade and Jeter rode into town Cade was amazed to see all the activity, as frame buildings were going up on every street. These were replacing the tents that had been thrown up when the military had expanded Fort Dodge, forcing the closing of the settlement that had grown up across the Arkansas River.
“What’s happening to Buffalo City?” Cade asked.
“Mainly, the railroad,” Jeter answered. “And it’s not Buffalo City any more. The railroad wants it called Dodge City, so that’s what it’s going to be.”
“Tell that to the buffalo hunters.” They passed by a large, fenced-in lot, in which were stacked thousands of dried buffalo hides. Cade read the sign. “Rath and Company. Would that be Charlie Rath?”
“Yes, and the ‘company’ is Bob Wright. He’s still out at the sutler’s store, but he thinks thinks he can make more money in Dodge City,” Jeter said.
Cade began counting the saloons along the main thoroughfare. “It looks like your saloon has a lot of competition,” he said.
“Everybody wants to be close to the railroad. That is, if it ever gets here.”
“I think I heard the track’s already been laid west of Larned,” Cade said. “If ever there was easy track laying it’s going through Kansas.”
“Geography’s not the problem. It’s horse thieves,” Jeter said.
“Indian raids?”
“I suppose some of it’s done by Indians, but most of the stealing’s done by whites. The military went after the bunch that took close to a hundred head when they were laying track up by Hutchinson.”
“Did they catch ‘em?” Cade asked.
“Sure did. The herder disappeared the same night the horses did, so the Army pretty much knew who they were going after. But the forty horses that were taken from the graders a week or so back—nobody knows who did that. They’re long gone.”
“We should tell the army what we found out at the Johansson’s,” Cade said.
“I’ll let Bob Wright know. He’ll tell Colonel Dodge about the raid,” Jeter said. “I expect the army will send out a patrol.”
“I hope they find whoever did this, whether they be Indian or whites.”
“They might find who did it, but I wouldn’t count on it. If it is Indians, it’s generally just a few out on their own, to cause trouble, and if it’s whites, they run the stock out of here as fast as they can.”
Jeter reined his horse in and stopped. “I’m going this way, Cade. Why don’t you come with me? I’ve put up a house over on Walnut and we can make room for you to stay there. And besides that you’d see Magnolia and the girls.”
“No.”
“Cade, I really think you should.”
“No,” Cade repeated, more forcefully.
“All right, I sure as hell can’t force you to come, even though you do have a responsibility toward Chantal.”
“Is Magnolia not getting enough money out of the saloon to look after her? Or do I need to pay you more?”
“That’s a hell of thing to say,” Jeter said, his voice clearly showing his disgust. “You damn well know it’s not about money.”
“Jeter I . . . I just can’t,” Cade replied, as he looked away, not wanting to face his friend.
With a resigned sigh, Jeter answered. “If that’s how you want it.”
“That’s what I want.”
Jeter extended his hand to Cade with a twenty-dollar bill in it. “I thought you might need this.”
“I don’t need your money, Jeter. I’ll be just fine.”
“It’s not my money, it’s your money. Anyway, how do you expect to finance your first hand of poker?”
Cade took the money, then the two men separated. Jeter turned to go to his house and his wife, and Cade rode down to the end of Front Street. He was surprised to see a new hotel called The Essington House. He walked in to inquire for a place to stay.
“Yes, sir,” the clerk said, “we’ve got a room for you. It just got the roof put on yesterday.”
“A roof’s a good thing to have,” Cade said, as he signed the book.
“How long will you be staying . . . Mr. McCall?” the clerk asked reading the name upside down.
“I don’t know.”
“Well, sir, I’ll have to have the money now. New people are flocking into Buffalo—I mean Dodge City—every day. And you can see we can’t get lumber fast enough to build more rooms. Everybody’s waiting for the railroad.”
“All right, how much?” Cade took out the bill Jeter had just given him.
“It’ll be a dollar a day.”
“Mark me down for three days. I’ll let you know how much longer I’ll be here.”
Cade went up to his room. The walls were covered with tar paper and the floor was bare boards, but the bed was clean and it looked comfortable. Smelling meat being cooked, he walked over to the window. He looked down at a tent which must have been serving as a kitchen for the restaurant he had seen to the left of the clerk’s desk.
And then he saw it. A house not two blocks distant.
He knew without a doubt, this was Jeter’s house. A white house with a red door and red shutters.
The Red House had been a boarding house in Galveston that Arabella had opened after she had left New Orleans. She bought it with money she had stolen from Cade, and when he had tracked her down, she had given him half ownership in the business. That was the start of his infatuation with Arabella DuPree, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Jeter had named the saloon they had bought together The Red House to honor the original building bearing that name, and hearing those words and seeing this house, so clearly meant to recall earlier times, brought back painful memories.
As he was watching, Cade saw Jeter stable his horse in an outbuilding behind his house. The red door opened and a slender woman with black hair came running out to meet him. She threw herself into his arms, and arm in arm he watched them go through the door and close it behind them.
A feeling of melancholy came over Cade. What made him think he could come back here? He had to ride on. Maybe Colorado, maybe Texas, maybe New Mexico. He didn’t much care where it was, but the first order of business would be to make some money.
4
The Red House, one of only a handful of saloons that was a frame building, was crowded with men even though it was 10:00 a.m. There were buffalo hunters, bullwhackers, muleskinners, track layers and soldiers all mingling together, either standing at the bar or sitting at one of the tables playing a game of chance. Oliver Frost was running a game of chuck-a-luck, while Pete Cahill was tending bar. All seemed to be running smoothly and money was flowing into the coffers.
“Boss,” Cahill said when Jeter entered the bar. “Heard you got back yesterday.”
“I should have stopped by, but I knew you could handle it. Anything happen while I was gone?”
“Not much. Three more saloons opened and there was a killin’ yesterday,” Cahill said.
“Not here, I hope,” Jeter said as he stepped behind the bar and retrieved an apron.
“No, it was over at Fat Tom’s.”
“Was it
anybody we know?”
“No. Some track worker got a little rowdy and a bullwhacker took him out.”
Jeter shook his head. “Something’s got to be done about all this killing.”
“And that’s what I’ve come to talk about,” a man said as he stepped up to the bar, extending his hand.
“Morning, Charlie,” Jeter said. “What will you have?”
Everybody knew Charles Rath. He had moved West in the fifties as a young man, eventually becoming the leading trader with the Indians and buffalo hunters, as well as establishing a flourishing general store. And now he had established his business in Dodge where he was stockpiling buffalo hides awaiting the arrival of the railroad.
“I’ll have a beer,” Rath said. “I stopped by to see you a couple of days ago, but Pete told me you were out of town.”
“That’s right,” Jeter said without further explanation.
“The talk is you had to go down to Caldwell and bail McCall out of jail again.”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t know but that’s what all the wags are saying. You should have left him in jail.”
“I couldn’t do that. He’s my friend, and he’s my business partner.”
“What kind of partner is he? He’s never here, and when he is around, he’s usually three sheets to the wind,” Charles said. He took a swallow of his beer. “At one time, I thought he was a good man, but when that wife of his died, it changed him. If you ask me, McCall’s as worthless as tits on a boar hog, and you’d be a hell of a lot better off if you just shucked him.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
Jeter moved down the bar to get another drink for a customer. When he returned, Charles was still sitting there, his glass empty.
“I came in here because tomorrow morning most of the businessmen are meeting over at Fringer’s Apothecary, and you might want to come join us.”
“What’s it about?”
“The killings.”
Jeter nodded his head. “Pete said it was at the dance hall.”
The Western Adventures of Cade McCall Box Set Page 43
