The Black Hills

by William W. Johnstone

  Bobby Lee lay close beside her, his head on her thigh. She stroked the coyote affectionately. The coyote gave his tail intermittent, satisfied thumps against the ground and blinked his long yellow eyes slowly, luxuriously.

  Hunter gave a wry snort. His coyote friend appeared to be appropriating the affections of his gal. It seemed sometimes that most all the males in the county were in love with Annabelle Ludlow. Hunter couldn’t blame them. She was a rare, striking beauty, and a girl of heart and substance. If he got his way—and he was determined to—he was going to marry the girl, and he and she were going to raise a whole passel of young’uns right here in the Black Hills, on a wild horse ranch of their own.

  If he had his way, and the girl’s father didn’t get his . . .

  Trouble was likely afoot in that regard, but Hunter didn’t want to think about Graham Ludlow at the moment. Right now he had his hands full with Sheriff Frank Stillwell.

  Annabelle was no hothouse flower. Despite Hunter’s protestations, she helped him haul Luke Chaney over to the wagon and dump him into the box. Most girls would have been stricken with the vapors over such a task. Annabelle merely scowled down at the dead man, her disdain for him plain in the set of her fine jaws, then brushed her hands on her jeans when they were done with the job.

  “Don’t worry about me now,” Hunter told her, taking her once more in his arms. “I’ll be fine.”

  “At least take my Winchester.” Anna glanced at the carbine she always carried in her saddle scabbard.

  “No. Going in armed will only be asking for trouble. Like I said, don’t worry, now.”

  Annabelle sighed in defeat. “I am going to worry about you,” she said with crisp defiance, gazing up at him, her green eyes as clear as a mountain lake, a wry humor crinkling their corners. “When you’re finished, you meet me at our usual place so I can make sure you’re still of one piece.”

  “And if I’m not?”

  Annabelle pursed her lips angrily and reached up to snap her index finger against the underside of his hat brim. “Everything better be in its rightful place. I’ll be checking!”

  Hunter chuckled. He kissed her once more and climbed into the wagon. Bobby Lee was already mounted on the seat to his right.

  Hunter turned the wagon around, pinched his hat brim to his girl standing gazing up at him admonishingly, fists on her hips. He rattled on past her, threaded the crease between the buttes, and swung onto the main trail.

  A half hour later, a nettling apprehension raked chill fingers across the back of the ex-Confederate’s neck as the town of Tigerville appeared before him, sprawling across a low dip of tawny ground surrounded by the narrow spikes of pine-clad knolls that sloped from higher ridges toward the town. The hillocks and natural dikes seemed to be pointing out Tigerville to weary travelers who, having journeyed this far off the beaten path, had lost hope of finding any hint of civilization at all out here in this vast, rugged, pine-bearded and gold-spotted country east of the Rockies.

  Tigerville, named after the now-defunct Bengal Mine, was far from the howling hub of boisterous humanity that was Deadwood, fifty miles north. But Tigerville was no slouch in that regard either. Now as Hunter rattled and clomped down the town’s main street, he was surrounded by the din of player pianos, three-piece bands, and laughing women disporting their wares from boardwalks and the second-floor galleries of sporting parlors, of which Tigerville had several of note.

  Men of all sizes, shapes, and colors, including blacks and blanket Indians, crisscrossed the street still muddy from an earlier rain, some with frothy ale mugs in their fists and/or painted ladies on their arms. There were miners, prospectors, cowpunchers, market hunters, railroad surveyors, soldiers from the local cavalry outpost, as well as cardsharps, run-of-the-mill rowdies, grubline-riding tough nuts, and confidence men.

  The buildings were mostly wood-frame and false-fronted business establishments with more than a few of Tigerville’s original crude log cabins and tent shacks remaining to give testament to its humble roots.

  The King Solomon’s Mine, owned by Graham Ludlow and Max Chaney, sat on the high ridge to the east of town, like the castle ruins of some vanquished lord overlooking the humble dwellings of his unwashed subjects. Gray tailings stretched down the mountain below the mine, around which was a beehive of activity including men at work with picks and shovels, handcars rolling in and out of the mine portals, thundering ore drays traversing trails switchbacking up and down the mountain’s face, as well as the constant, reverberating hammering of the stamping mill in its giant timber frame at the base of the ridge, behind the barrack-like, wood-frame mine office.

  Hunter turned his attention to the street before him. The office of the county sheriff was on the east side, roughly two-thirds of the way through the half-mile length of Custer Avenue. Hunter angled Titus toward the jailhouse, and felt another cold-fingered massage of apprehension.

  Sheriff Frank Stillwell was tipped back in a hide-bottom chair on the front porch, his five-pointed star glistening on his brown wool vest. His high-topped black boots were crossed on the rail before him. As Hunter turned the mule up to the hitching rack fronting the sheriff’s long, unpainted, wood-frame office, Stillwell’s mud-black eyes turned to regard him with customary malignancy.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Well, well—Hunter Buchanon. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  Sheriff Stillwell was slowly peeling a green apple with a folding knife. A barred window flanked the sheriff on his left. The long, narrow, mustached face of Buck Fowler, one of Stillwell’s deputies, peered out for a moment, then disappeared.

  The front door opened and Fowler, working a wad of chaw around inside his left cheek, stepped onto the porch to Stillwell’s right. Fowler, a potbellied man in his early forties, slid his hands inside his brown suit coat, tucked his thumbs behind his suspenders, and glanced down toward his boots. He hung his head as though in shame, then opened his lips slightly to let a long, wet string of chaw dribble out of his mouth.

  The tobacco plopped onto the porch between his boots.

  The man lifted his long, ugly, pockmarked face toward Hunter, and the mustached mouth shaped a jeering grin.

  Hunter looked at the porch floor beneath Fowler’s boots. The man was standing on a worn, torn, soiled, and rag-thin Confederate flag, which Stillwell had tacked down fronting his office door. The Confederate-hating sheriff used the flag as a mud mat—or, in Fowler’s case, a spittoon. Stillwell had been using the old Stars and Bars as such since he’d taken office nearly two years ago now, after a rigged election, openly insulting and mocking each and every born-and-bred Southerner and ex-Confederate soldier residing in Pennington County.

  Those he hadn’t run off, that was.

  Fowler had drawn Hunter’s attention to the flag now as if Hunter hadn’t already known it was there. As if he and every other Southerner in the county didn’t know that Frank Stillwell and his deputies used the Stars and Bars, Old Dixie, the Rebel Flag—the guidon for which so many Brothers of the Southern Confederacy had made the ultimate sacrifice—to scrub the mud and horse dung from their boots.

  “Hidy, Hunter,” Fowler said through a jeering grin, his wet, tobacco-stained lips glistening in the sunlight angling beneath the porch’s slightly pitched, shake-shingled roof. “What brings you to town? Say, you got your pappy’s beer in the wagon there, do ya?”

  “That’s right. And I got somethin’ else in the wagon.” Hunter looked at Stillwell, who was holding the apple and his knife up close to his thickly mustached mouth, squinting his eyes and furling his black brows, really concentrating on his apparent endeavor to remove the peel in one long, continuous curl. “That’s what I come to talk to you about, Sheriff,” Hunter added.

  Stillwell stopped peeling the apple to extend his mud-dark gaze toward Hunter. Holding the apple and the knife very still before his chin, not wanting to tear the peel, he slid his eyes toward Bobby Lee sitting to Hunter’s right, and scowled, his waxy cheeks flushing,
his mean eyes crossing slightly in anger. “That beast right there is pestilence. Vermin. You oughtta take it off in the brush and put a bullet in it!”

  Bobby Lee made a low growling noise deep in his chest and shifted his weight from one delicate front foot to the other, yellow eyes flashing indignantly.

  Hunter said, “It ain’t Bobby Lee I came here to powwow about.”

  “Oh, it ain’t Bobby Lee you came here to powwow about,” said Stillwell, his words thick with mockery. “Well, then what did you come here to powwow about, Buchanon?”

  “Luke Chaney.”

  “Luke Chaney,” Stillwell said, continuing to slide the sharp edge of his knife along the surface of the apple, making quiet snicking sounds. “What about Luke Chaney? I ain’t seen Luke for hours. You seen him, Buck?”

  “Not since early this mornin’. He was eatin’ huevos rancheros over at the Chinaman’s place.” Still standing on the flag, with the fresh brown stain between his boots, Fowler grinned and rubbed his belly. “Best beans and eggs I ever ate, and I lived three years in Mexico.”

  “No kiddin’?” Stillwell removed the coiled peel, inspected it carefully, then tossed it over the rail and into the dirt fronting the porch. “I don’t believe I’ve ever partook of the Chinaman’s huevos rancheros. I will remedy the matter soon, see what all the fuss is about.”

  Bobby Lee leaped out of the wagon, ran over and picked up the apple peel, giving it a few nibbles before dropping it back into the dirt with a snort, then leaping back into the driver’s seat beside Hunter.

  Both Stillwell and Fowler eyed the coyote as though it were a pile of fresh dog dung up there on the seat with the ex-Confederate.

  “Pestilence,” Stillwell snarled.

  “Absolute vermin,” Fowler added, scowling at the beast that sat with its snoot in the air, eyes half-closed, sunning hisself. The pock-faced Fowler looked at Hunter. “Good Lord, Buchanon—don’t you know all them beasts is good for is a winter coat?”

  Hunter held the deputy’s gaze for a moment, suppressing the rage that was flaring in him, keeping his expression calm, implacable. Sliding his gaze to Stillwell, he said, “Chaney’s in the wagon. He’s dead.”

  Stillwell had just removed a slice of the apple with his knife. Now, holding the slice atop his knife blade, he scowled at Hunter curiously. He repeated what Hunter had just told him, as though by repeating it he could better understand it.

  “What?” Fowler said, stretching his lips back from teeth that were as narrow and pointed as picket fencing.

  “You’d best have a look,” Hunter said, his cautious gaze glancing off the two long-barreled Colt Peacemakers strapped around Stillwell’s waist and then at the two Remingtons thonged low on Fowler’s thighs.

  Stillwell and Fowler shared a befuddled glance. Stillwell jerked his head to indicate the wagon. Fowler lowered his hands to his sides and stepped down off the porch. He walked over to the side of the wagon and peered inside.

  “Glory hallelujah,” he said, turning darkly to Stillwell. “It’s Luke, all right.” He slid his belligerent gaze to Hunter. “Gutted like a fish!”

  Stillwell’s face remained expressionless. He sucked the apple slice off his knife blade and chewed. Buck Fowler stepped back away from the wagon and drew one of his saw-handle, nickel-washed .38-caliber Remingtons, aimed the revolver at Hunter, and clicked the hammer back.

  “Easy, now,” Stillwell said, chewing. “Go easy, Buck. We don’t know what happened”—he slid his hard-to-read gaze to Hunter still sitting atop the wagon beside the coyote—“yet.”

  Hunter turned his head to sweep his gaze along the street on which most of the activity had come to a somber halt. Apparently, word had gotten around this end of Tigerville that Hunter Buchanon had come to town with more than his pappy’s beer in his wagon. Men were filing slowly out of the town’s dozen or so saloons and sporting parlors, some carrying sudsy beer mugs in their fists, a quirley or a cigar smoldering between their fingers, interested scowls on their faces.

  Stillwell’s deputies had gotten word, as well, it appeared. Hunter saw at least a half dozen of them now, most in shabby suits sporting five-pointed silver stars, elbowing their way through the crowd and slowly converging on the wagon from various points along the street, heads canted to one side, glowering toward the wagon. A few carried rifles. A few others carried sawed-off, double-bore shotguns. They were a small army of hammerheaded cutthroats, and most of Tigerville lived in fear of them.

  Hunter heard the crowd whispering and muttering, boots softly crunching horse apples and gravel as the curious onlookers made their way over from their respective watering holes and shops, the whisperings and grumblings growing ever-so-gradually louder and more heated as the crowd, including Stillwell’s deputies, drew closer to the wagon and could see, or thought they could see, who it was Hunter had hauled into town.

  Hunter turned to Stillwell. “He ambushed me out by Eagle Butte. I was unarmed. I didn’t mean to kill him. It was an accident.”

  The deputies were shoving their way up through the crowd, closing on the wagon from Hunter’s right and left. The crowd made way for them, stepping back, giving them room, not wanting to take a bullet if it came to a lead swap.

  Stillwell cut a quick, flat glance toward Fowler, then sliced off another bite of the apple and sucked it off the knife blade. He chewed slowly, ponderously.

  “Accident, eh?” Stillwell said, placing his finger on the nub of his chin and sliding a foxy glance not only at Fowler but at the other deputies now standing in a ragged semicircle around the wagon. “Hmmm.”

  “Yeah,” Fowler said, pacing his own finger on his dimpled chin. “Hmmm.”

  A funereal silence dropped over the street. The only sounds were the barking of a distant dog, the piping of birds, and a whore getting a workout behind an open window somewhere along the street to the south. For a hundred square feet around Hunter’s wagon, you could have heard a frog fart.

  Hunter stared at Stillwell.

  The sheriff swallowed another apple slice, drew a breath, and raised his voice officiously. “Mr. Buchanon, were there any witnesses to this purported bushwhacking you allege that Luke Chaney affected on you, and/or were there any witnesses to your murder . . . er, uh, killing by accident said Mr. Lucas Chaney?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then,” Stillwell said, flicking a speck of dust from his right trouser leg, then turning to his senior-most deputy, “I don’t see how we can hold him, Deputy Fowler. I suppose we should hold a—what do you call it again?” He snapped his thumb and index finger to nudge his memory. “A coroner’s inquest. Yes, that’s it—an inquest. But I see little point in wasting the taxpayers’ hard-earned money or time on such busy nonsense when there is very little reason for me to believe that any more light could be shed on the subject—there being only Mr. Buchanon here to tell the story, which he’s just done.”

  Glaring at Hunter, Fowler flared a nostril.

  A deputy now standing beside Fowler said, “You mean to tell me that he can kill Chaney and suffer no consequences at all?”

  “That ain’t right, Sheriff!” Fowler agreed.

  “That’s the way the law works, I’m afraid,” Stillwell said, slowly shaking his head in mock frustration. He looked at Hunter. “Mr. Buchanon, do you swear that you told the truth here today?”

  “I do,” Hunter said with a resolute nod. “It was an accident.”

  “Tell me how guttin’ a man like a damn fish is an accident!” shouted a deputy on the other side of the wagon from Fowler. He was a seedy, stocky, heavy-shouldered man in an opera hat and holding a double-barreled greener on his shoulder.

  “Luke wasn’t no bushwhacker!” said another deputy. The one beside him nodded while another man, an apron-clad Yankee shop owner named McGee yelled from the stoop fronting his shop, “No, sir, he weren’t!”

  Hunter leveled a look at Stillwell. “Tell these men to stand down, Sheriff. Chaney ambushed me. I was unarmed. I circled ar
ound him, laid him out with a rock. Didn’t hurt him bad, just dazed him. He pulled a knife. I kicked it out of his hand. When I went to pick it up, he came running at me. I turned and the knife went in by accident.”

  “By accident, my ass!” bellowed the deputy standing with Fowler. Hunter thought his name was Junior Edsel, a gunman from Oklahoma. He had two gold front teeth and a naked lady tattooed on his neck.

  Stillwell continued to stare at Hunter, one-half of his mouth curved in a jeering grin. “You’re gonna need to write out and sign an affidavit.”

  “A what?”

  “An affidavit. So we got it down on paper what happened. You know—to make it all official. Oh, and there’s a filing fee.”

  “A filing fee?”

  “That’s right. Standard procedure. We gotta pay someone to file it, don’t we? Fifty dollars.”

  “Fifty dollars? I told you I didn’t mean to kill the son of a—!” Hunter stopped himself, his cheeks afire with rage.

  Stillwell couldn’t suppress a smile as he cut his eyes around his deputies and the townsmen flanking him—Yankees, mostly—from whom more angry murmurs rose.

  “I just meant,” Hunter said, getting his wolf back on its leash, “that I don’t see any reason I should have to pay a filing fee. If I’d just left him out there, which I could have done, there wouldn’t be any filing fee. Besides, I don’t have fifty dollars.”

  “All right, all right,” Stillwell said with phony amiability, striding up to the porch rail and hiking a hip onto it. He dug a half-smoked stogie from his shirt pocket. “Maybe we can work something else out.”

  “What?”

  Stillwell lifted his chin to get a better look inside the wagon behind Hunter and Bobby Lee, who was growling deep in his chest again, as though the coyote were having as hard a time as Hunter was keeping his passions in check.

  “Is that your pappy’s famous ale back there?” Stillwell asked.