Massacre at Whip Station

by Dusty Richards

  “You ready?” Joe asked.

  In response, the woman nudged the horse in the ribs and rode up beside him.

  Smiling to himself, Joe said, “Stay close ’cause I know where the gopher holes are.”

  Clarify nodded and the two cantered to the entrance.

  “Take care of yourself, Pa!” Jackson called after him.

  Joe raised a hand in acknowledgment as they passed through the main entrance and set off at a slow gallop.

  CHAPTER 6

  Douglas James Kennedy, renegade bureaucrat, was not a happy man.

  He stood by the entrance of the old copper mine, glowering at the rising moon. In his hand he held a Colt with an ivory handle, one of two that had been presented to him by the Bureau of Indian Affairs for this difficult journey. He looked at the BIA engraved in the grip and felt impatient disgust.

  It wasn’t just a matter of a carefully planned operation becoming unraveled. It was also the fact that a woman had done the unraveling. That was not something he intended to report to his superior. It was bad enough that Hathaway and the other men in the party had seen who did the shooting. The only reason it would not cost him extra to make sure they forgot it was that they would be mortified as well.

  But for him to find out—

  Kennedy did not want the intimidating, cigar-smoking swagger of the man at the top compounded by laughter. That reputation would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  The quick, disorganized departure from the station had been bad enough, Kennedy thought.

  After being driven from the station, the men had ridden to their refuge in the foothills. It lay half a mile beyond Civil Gulch, in a turn off from the stagecoach trail. The rugged path, too narrow for more than one horse in spots, ended in a copper mine that had been played out shortly before the War. The mine was an ideal hiding place and Confederate soldiers, these men included, had used it as a staging area for raids and as a sanctuary from Apaches. The Serrano and Pechanga Indians were much less hostile. Their presence in the region, crisscrossing the trail, gave it the appearance of being uninhabited. That helped keep cavalry patrols from coming around. No one wanted to stir up peaceful Red Men.

  The entrance wasn’t wide but it was long with a shallow incline. It ended with a rock wall, the result of a cave-in. The collapse left natural chimneys that carried the smoke from fires into a nighttime wind that caused it to quickly disperse. A branch of the mine had been excavated in a futile search for more copper, which the South needed for bayonets. It was an ideal place to stable horses. A ledge waist-high in the wall, protected from any seeping rainwater, was used to store ammunition and black powder. The men rarely used the explosive, which would attract attention. They had used it only once, to create a path higher into the foothills in the event they needed to escape quickly.

  Like in our original plan, Kennedy thought.

  It was ironic that one of the plans they had discarded for today was to use the powder to block Civil Gulch. Kennedy had been afraid the noise would attract the O’Malleys, who might have rescued the trapped stage. Their superior agreed. He did not want the men coming out, armed for war. Shooting a horse, stopping the coach for a time, would be enough.

  “Especially if there is a lady on board,” the luminary had said around his cigar. “No one will risk injury to a woman.”

  The irony was how wrong that thinking had been.

  In that original plan, the one that failed, the mine was where six of the men—most of the complement of nine former soldiers—had intended to lead any pursuers while Kennedy and Hathaway, along with the shaman, headed through the path they had created. Up through the foothills and then north, to where the rest of their money was waiting to pay the former soldiers. North, to where the second part of the plan awaited hatching.

  “But for a woman,” Kennedy muttered.

  “What was that?” Hathaway asked. The taller man was standing beside and a little behind Kennedy, looking down at the field mice that darted under the scrub off to the side.

  “Huh?” Kennedy said as though starting from a nap. “Oh, nothing. Nothing.”

  The other men were spread out through the dark mine, licking their wounds. Hathaway had his back against a timber that seemed sturdier, despite its burden, than any of the men present.

  “I say we go back and burn ’em out,” said Hathaway. “Or blast ’em to hell.”

  Kennedy turned toward him. “And if we kill the medicine man?”

  “One fewer Injun,” said a man from the darkness.

  Kennedy took a few steps toward the man who had spoken. “Maybe we oughta hang you, Marcus,” he said. “One fewer beef-head.”

  The man was on his feet in an instant, breathing heavily. The two were almost equal in height and stood chest to chest like puffed quail.

  “Take care, friend,” the former Confederate warned. “Your status don’t mean beans out here.”

  “Maybe not, ‘friend,’ but my money does have status, Private Stone,” said the other. “If you hope to earn the rest of yours, you will sit down and shut your overheated mouth.”

  “Better overheated than what you did back there,” Stone said, nonetheless turning away. “‘G’wan, keep your guns. We don’t need to shoot one another. No killing. Let’s be gentlemen about all this.’”

  “Let him vent,” Hathaway said into Kennedy’s ear. “No good us fighting one another.”

  “I suppose not,” Kennedy agreed. And, in truth, Stone wasn’t wrong.

  Ordinarily, a unit would not have allowed the station men to retain their weapons. Kennedy didn’t think the O’Malley men would start shooting with women present. Ordinarily, the raiders would have had men on the roof of the structure as a precaution. Ordinarily, they would not have been so civil. The way it was during the War, Crane’s Cavalry—named for Captain Tod Crane, the man with the shoulder wound—would either come in shooting or leave shooting, with only the most necessary talk in between. But with two men on the inside, Kennedy and Hathaway, none of them had expected resistance. The men from Washington, who had been listening to the dinner conversation where Joe O’Malley was confused as a junior Congressman, had miscalculated. They had finalized their plans at the previous station stop in Vallicita, where Brent Diamond assured them they would be fine if they corralled the men. They sealed the deal by swapping firearms—in Alabama, a symbol of trust and a long relationship.

  “They won’t risk their women,” he was assured.

  They did not expect a mousey girl with a preacher for a brother to get involved.

  And now that stain of miscalculation was on Crane and his elect band. They were right to be bitter. The money was important but so was removing that blot. Kennedy suspected it would be removed either with his cooperation or without it.

  Kennedy continued looking out the mouth of the mine. The air here wasn’t quite as damp and tart as it was inside. Each breath still carried a taste of copper, groundwater releasing whatever particles still remained in the stone walls. Those slivers were stirred by walking and lodged in the nostrils, giving every breath a metallic taste. There was also a smell of burned flesh and doctoring in the stable area. Gus Peterson, the group’s medic, was finishing up with Crane. The bullet had gone clear through the man’s shoulder. The entrance and exit had been cauterized and Tod had nearly passed out from the pain. He fought to stay awake, not just as an act of bravado but to finish the mission he had started. It was now a matter of bandaging the wound. One of his men, Dan Ridgewood, had the man’s head in his lap and was pouring water between his lips from a tarnished CSA canteen. Another, Mute Pete, stood nearby looking down. Pete had been Crane’s aide during the War. The giant of a man wasn’t mute. He just preferred to talk with his fists.

  Kennedy envied the obvious care the former sergeant showed to his captain.

  “We gotta go after the stage,” Stone said from the dark.

  Hathaway turned. “You really think they’ll try and leave?”

  “I
know these drivers,” Stone answered. “This one is going to try and make up every minute of lost time.”

  “The way I hit him?” Hathaway said dubiously.

  “Hell, he could take that trail in his sleep,” Stone replied. “I drunk with him once at Vallicita. He’s like a bull in a ring. Jab, jab, jab, he keeps going. He will also honor every ticket that was purchased for the ride. That includes getting the Indian to San Francisco.”

  “His Shotgun ain’t going anywhere,” said Silas Welch, the rider with the GA-stamped ammunition box. He was chewing on beef jerky and washing it down with river water from his canteen.

  “No, he ain’t,” agreed Stone. “But he won’t ride alone and he won’t take the gimp. That means either Joe O’Malley or that kid, Slash, will sit in the box.”

  “Or the two Mission Injuns?” a man named Madison suggested.

  “Not the Indians,” Kennedy finally spoke. “They’d need orders from whichever fort they came from before taking on that duty. And from what I saw back there, I don’t think this Joe O’Malley would leave the station in the hands of just one man, two women, and an injured Shotgun.”

  Hathaway paced around a circle of moonlight on the floor of the mine. “What are the O’Malleys doing right now, you suppose?” he asked.

  Kennedy looked back at him. “That’s what I’m wondering. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who liked sitting still.”

  “You think he’ll come looking for us alone?” Hathaway said.

  “I don’t know,” Kennedy replied.

  “Why not?” Stone said. “This is his land. He probably knows every stone and gully.”

  “It’ll be tough to follow a trail at night, even if he does know the terrain,” Madison pointed out.

  Kennedy turned to Silas Welch. The lean, tall, bearded man was the one who had brought the horses to the station.

  “Silas, maybe you better pick a lookout spot and keep watch over things,” Kennedy said. “Marcus will relieve you in a few hours.”

  “‘Watch over’ meaning what?” he asked.

  Kennedy shook his head. “What was so confusing about that instruction? Watch over means go out there and see if anyone comes looking for us. It’s pretty simple.”

  Silas rose. “Simple? If I have a shot, do I take it?”

  “To what end?”

  “He sniffs us out, goes back for the two Indians,” Welch said. “You want that?”

  “I do not,” Kennedy said. “I also don’t want this to become a matter for a U.S. Marshal.”

  “Mr. Kennedy,” Madison said, “he finds us, and he’s not alone, he can pin us here while another of the O’Malleys gets help from the Gutenbrunner place to the north.”

  He was referring to an inn southeast of the Oak Grove Station. The German immigrant was a sympathizer to anyone who could pay for lodgings or storage—which included weapons or people. It was said that more bodies were buried on his property than in Gettysburg. Rebels were frequent, long-term guests. They were allowed to stay in exchange for hunting and providing protection from troops or Indians.

  Kennedy nodded. “That’s true. That’s possible. But we’re here for something larger than horses or a mine and you’re being very well paid to advance that cause.”

  “Which you still haven’t told us about,” said Welch. “Maybe them two purposes, yours and ours, merge, like great rivers.”

  Kennedy stepped closer to the man he still could not see. “You know something, Silas? You have accidentally stumbled upon the truth. Our purposes do merge. You have undying hatred of Washington, and we share some of your views. So why don’t you just trust me, do as you’re told, and see if it all doesn’t work out in the end?”

  Silas Welch snatched a rifle from where it leaned against the wall. His back was to the others. Where he stood, it was lit by the dull glow of the doctor’s lamp as he retrieved a box of shells from the ammunition niche. There was also a collection of Apache weapons in the cleft, snuck from their settlement the previous day. Welch turned and lay the gun across his shoulder, looking to Kennedy like a thin, rusted tin soldier.

  “I’ll do my job,” Welch promised him. He stopped briefly as he passed the man from Washington. “I don’t wanna see your cause or ours suffer another setback.”

  Stepping from the mine, the rangy Southerner went across the rocks that had been excavated from the mine years earlier. Though there was a path, dirt and dry brush made sounds when you stepped on them. After four years out west, fighting for the losing side in a great cause, Welch knew that if he could hear something, chances were good that an enemy could hear it better. The country had a way of magnifying sounds through endless, hidden echoes.

  The men in the cave heard his scraping footsteps—and then silence.

  “You shouldn’t talk like that to Silas, to any of these men.”

  The voice belonged to Gus Peterson, the medic who had been with the original unit. He said it loud enough for all to hear. “They’re proud men, Douglas. They fought a proud war.”

  Hathaway wandered into the back of the mine. He had no desire to be caught in this verbal crossfire . . . again.

  “Seven months ago, that mattered,” Kennedy replied. He also spoke loud enough for the benefit of others. “They’re being paid now to put aside that fight and win this one.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, you need Silas. You need every man here.”

  “We all need each other,” Kennedy said moderately. “You folks weren’t exactly swimming in prosperity from the occasional holdup and bounty.”

  “We accepted our lot—”

  “And my money,” Kennedy said thickly. “And, today, you failed to deliver that for which you have already been paid a substantial sum. You want to talk to me about prairie honor and cruel history, I will be happy to do so in a saloon in San Francisco. Not before.” He looked around the dark chamber. “We recover from this setback and we move forward aggressively.”

  Gus Peterson sighed and took the empty canteen from Ridgewood. He ambled to one of the barrels that held their water. He filled the container and went back to where his patient lay. Ridgewood was wiping perspiration from his grit-covered forehead.

  Kennedy resumed staring out across the lowlands, then up at the stars as they struggled to be seen above the moonlight. His ears drew his eyes back down to the plain. He wondered about the meaning of the cries he heard in the distance from coyotes and owls. Were they hunting? Mating? Dying?

  Were they Indians?

  Though he had been with the Indian Bureau for three years, Kennedy was no closer to understanding the Red Man than when he started. They wanted peace but they made war. They wanted goods but they attacked the wagons that brought them. They wanted their way of life but they fell to pestilence and weather and hunger.

  They made no natural sense—and each tribe had its own form of madness, whether it was torturing for amusement or proving how brave they were by dying. It was no wonder that Washington struggled with moving them around or killing them off outright.

  And concerns like Butterfield were caught in the middle. Eastern interests were reluctant to invest in the West as long as there was no peace. Coming out here, Kennedy had seen what he had only heard about, the Butterfield terminals each bearing a poster with this legend:

  YOU WILL BE TRAVELING THROUGH

  INDIAN COUNTRY

  AND THE SAFETY OF YOUR PERSON CANNOT BE

  VOUCHSAFED BY ANYONE BUT

  GOD.

  For all the confidence in his voice, in his manner, the Easterner did not feel at ease out here. That bothered Kennedy a great deal. He knew Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, not territories. He knew restaurants, not jerky. He knew metal or glass washbasins, not barrels and creeks. He knew hotels, not bedrolls. He had expected to be on his way north now, camped in the higher elevations miles from here—not hiding in a rank hole-in-a-hillside with unshaven, unwashed Confederates.

  But President Andrew Johnson, the ranking hypocrite among a d
istrict of liars and self-absorbed men, wanted this thing taken care of. He was busy trying to rebuild the South, trying to fight back the radical Reconstructionists in Congress who wanted the former Confederacy turned into a military fiefdom. The president did not have time to concern himself with the pacification of the western Indian. He wanted them dead. That was why he had the Serrano Tuchahu brought to Washington. To make promises to the revered and influential leader. Have the shaman’s photograph taken with the white chief and distributed to newspapers and posted on billboards. Johnson wanted to send him home with assurances of peace and plenty.

  Then make sure he did not reach his home. That would cause the Serrano and other western tribes to go to war with the settlers. Then, with the support of the press, the electorate, and finally Congress, the president would send the cavalry after the savages in force, with merciless resolve. After all, he had all those generals, North and South, who—like these Confederates—still wanted to go to war against someone.

  They would solve the western Indian problem. It would also hopefully subdue the Indians in the South and the new Indians the federal government would acquire if they purchased the northwest lands above Canada from Russia.

  Kennedy did not think large like that. He and Hathaway were just college-trained administrators who enjoyed the fine life and, like everyone else in the Bureau, skimmed funds that were supposed to go for food and clothes for the Indians to food and clothes for themselves and their wives and mistresses.

  What did savages need blankets for, anyway? They had their animal skins. Tuchahu was not wearing anything from among the many garments and decorations that had been gifted to him in Washington. All of that was done for the press, for the pitying, soft shell old widows whose fortunes lined political war chests and endowed the charities of politicians’ wives. It was for students whose anger could turn to rock-throwing protests unless it was deflected.

  It had nothing to do with the way things really were.

  Governance never did. And the men who practiced it . . .