A Thousand Texas Longhorns

by Johnny D. Boggs

  Grover drank coffee. “I don’t think you’d want to see Lake Michigan now, John. It’s colder than a witch’s teat outside.”

  Spring, summer, and fall came and went, and here they sat, ten minutes later, at the Dining Palace in La Porte. Most likely, the waitress had started her fifth half-dime novel. The cook was probably on his third marriage. The owner might have sold his interest and taken the Bellefontaine to . . . anywhere.

  “What would you tell them?” Grover asked.

  “Tell who?”

  “The Union Girls. Or St. Rose’s Academy, were they to ask you again.”

  “Oh.” Catlin shrugged.

  He finished his coffee.

  “Coffee was better in the 87th,” he said. “Grub was, too.”

  “That’s what you’d tell them?”

  “Who?”

  “Missus Yoho, you dern fool. Charlie Powell at the La Porte Herald. The headmistress at St. Rose’s. The governor. President Johnson, were he to give you a medal. Your ma. Your pa. Anybody who asked.”

  “Oh. No. I don’t talk about it much. When I do get asked, I just shrug, say, ‘We won the war, saved the Union, freed the slaves.’ If I say even that.”

  “I’m the same.”

  The clock ticked. The waitress stared at them long and hard, before she turned another page in some yellow-covered book.

  “Well.” Catlin stretched. “Guess it’s about that time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Getting late.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ought to get my wagon, head back home.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Might come a good snow.”

  “Maybe. Moisture would help.”

  They waited.

  “We did it, though. Didn’t we?” Grover said.

  “What’s that?”

  Grover punched at the newspaper. “‘The Union—It must be preserved.’ We sure preserved her.”

  Catlin nodded. He made himself stand, otherwise they might be here till the century turned. The waitress looked their way, relief washing over her face. Catlin found his watch in his vest pocket, checked the time, sighed.

  “You know what I’d tell them?” A sadness filled Steve Grover’s eyes.

  “Tell who?”

  “The Unconditional Union Girls.”

  “Oh,” Catlin said. “What?”

  “I’d tell those ladies this: I never knew how gol-durn boring Indiana was till I went off to war.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When he came to, the first thing Mason Boone did was vomit. During a pause between his retches, he heard a snigger and a laugh. Once his eyes finally focused, he realized that he wasn’t in the cold street and that that black-haired, dark-eyed angel had vanished. From his own stink, he knew he hadn’t had any peach pie. No, the woman had been hawking apple pie. Dried-apple pie. The thought of pie left him dry-heaving.

  Another aroma eventually reached him, and Boone lifted his eyes toward a tin cup. Past the cup, he made out yellow teeth grinning between a brown mustache and goatee.

  “This’ll cure you,” the voice said.

  Groaning, Boone lifted his head as much as he dared and took the tin cup. The liquor practically burned his eyes as he brought it to his lips. It didn’t go down any better, but it stayed down. For now. The forty-rod took away the headache, though, until Boone gently fingered the pulpy knot on the top of his head.

  The man with the goatee splashed more rotgut into the cup, then brought up the jug to his own lips. Another voice in the shadows said, “Looks like you got tomahawked with a Cree war club.”

  “Story swings it like an ax,” Goatee said.

  This time, when Boone lifted the cup, his stomach recoiled and bile started climbing up his throat. He rested the cup on his knee.

  A horse snorted.

  Hooves stamped.

  He smelled wet hay, grain, leather. Figured he had to be in a livery stable or barn.

  “Story?” Boone asked.

  Goatee nodded. “You were accosting his wife.”

  Boone had to think. Bits of memories came to him. He remembered the woman, and the pies, but not any husband.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “He never saw the bastard,” another voice, more mouse than man, whispered from the darkness. “Story ain’t one to give a body no chance.”

  Goatee drank more home brew. The jug found a spot on a bale. The man found a more comfortable position. “From the looks of them butternuts and brogans, or what’s left of shoes, I say you fought for the South.”

  Boone delicately traced how big the scalp injury was. No stitches that he could detect, but he knew from experience just how hard it was to stitch a head wound. At least no one had tried to cauterize it. They had just packed it down tight with some sort of salve, or maybe mud. For all he knew, it could have been bandaged with horse apples. He ignored Goatee’s comment. He had been in Montana Territory, or Idaho Territory, or whatever the damned government wanted to call it these days, long enough to realize more Yankees mined up here than Johnny Rebs.

  “I like a man who don’t talk much,” Goatee said. “They call me Plummer.”

  Boone looked harder at the man.

  “So you been here long enough to hear that name.” Goatee nodded. “I figured it’s a name to be remembered. It ain’t my real name. You don’t need to know that. Hell, I’ve practically forgot it. You just call me Plummer.”

  “Damn fool alias to use if you was to ask me,” one of the voices said. “Get your neck stretched just like ol’ Henry.”

  “You got no imagination, Freddie,” Goatee told the mousy voice behind him. “That’s why I took the sheriff’s name. What are the chances two men using the same handle would get killed in the same district?” Grinning, he tapped his temple. “Brains. That’s what I got. Brains.” He wet his lips. “Was you here when they stretched the sheriff’s neck?”

  Boone’s head shook. All he had heard were the tales—he didn’t know what he ought to believe—about one Henry Plummer, who not only had been sheriff and, simultaneously, leader of an outlaw gang. Until the folks around Bannack began to suspicion the lawman, persuaded a captured bandit to give up some names, and then lynched the sheriff and other brigands. That had been early back in ’64. And in Bannack. Boone hadn’t reached Alder Gulch until the following fall, and he’d never even seen Bannack.

  “I’m gonna let folks think I’m Henry Plummer’s kid brother. Put the fear of God into the vigilance committee. Let them worry if the sheriff’s brother plans to getting hisself a little revenge. You savvy what I’m saying?”

  Boone didn’t understand a thing. But at least he was out of the cold. He asked, “Was it Plummer that buffaloed me?”

  “Plummer’s dead, you idiot.” Goatee turned his head, spit, and swore. “What have we been talking about? I asked you if you were here when the sheriff got killed, you said no, and then you ask me . . .”

  “Leave him be,” said a voice, the one more Virginia than mouse, and not slurred as much as Goatee’s. “Fellow gets his brains knocked to his bowels, a four-inch gash in his noggin, and you interrogate him like you’re the professor at the Post. Man ought to be dead, hard as Story hit him.”

  “Story hit me?” Boone said.

  “That’s right,” Plummer said. “You got your head practically cleaved in two by N. G. Story—and that N. G. stands for ‘No Good.’ So me and the boys are gonna put Story in his place, and we figured—since it was Sandy yonder who got your head put back together . . .” The nod was too vague, Boone’s vision still not quite adjusted to the light, whiskey, and headache to determine which voice belonged to Sandy. “. . . we figured you’d like to get a chance to get even with the damned head-splitter. You game, boy?”

  His stomach had settled, he hadn’t vomited, so Boone figured he might have nodded in agreement. He reached for the forty-rod. Not that he remembered doing it, but his hand held the cup, the fumes almost disintegrated his nose hairs, and he drank
.

  “That a boy, Reb. We’ll show Story and his vigilantes just who runs Virginia City and Alder Gulch these days. Rest up, pard. Drink up. Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen till dawn.”

  “They giving Timmy, Mikey, and Mark that long to get right with God,” the mouse squeaked.

  “We’ll see who’s meeting St. Peter first in a couple of hours,” Plummer said.

  “Story’s got balls,” the deeper voice said.

  Plummer took another pull from the jug. “Yeah. But come dawn, all of Alder Gulch will find out if Story’s balls are brass . . . or papier-mâché.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  There were five of them, not including Goatee, who called himself Plummer. Not including Mason Boone, either, since Boone didn’t consider himself a member of the gang, or posse, or whatever they were. His head hadn’t cleared up enough to savvy much of what was happening. If he understood anything at all.

  Light began creeping through the open door of the barn, though Boone wouldn’t call it morning. Outside, what looked like snowflakes swirled in the wind.

  When was the last time it snowed back home in Tyler, Texas? Boone couldn’t recollect, but at least he remembered he grew up in East Texas. That meant he didn’t have anemia. No. That wasn’t right. Not anemia. What was it?

  “I know how it is, pard.” Goatee slurred words even worse now. “You come up here expecting to find the mother lode and get nothing but tailings and tailrace.” The man who wanted to be mistaken for a dead thief and lawman tried to suck the last drops out of the jug.

  Boone felt the knot on his head. He could touch it now. Mother lode, Goatee had said. The fool didn’t know much about Alder Gulch. There might be some lode mining going on somewhere in these hills, but all Boone had seen were placer outfits. Boone wouldn’t call himself an expert, but...

  The man named Sandy came over with a pot of coffee, filling Boone’s cup and ignoring goateed Plummer.

  “About that time, Ambrose,” Sandy told the boss, which triggered Boone’s memory.

  “Amnesia,” he said aloud, causing Sandy, Plummer, and the three others to stare in his direction.

  Boone almost grinned and held his cup up. “Thanks.”

  “Drink up.” Plummer, or Ambrose, or Goatee—whoever he was—pitched the empty jug into the nearest stall and tried three times before he climbed to his feet.

  “We got business. Time for us to save our McGee cousins. Time for us to show Virginia City who runs Alder Gulch.” He unbuttoned his coat, revealing an old horse pistol stuck inside the waistband. Plummer seemed to sober up instantly. “Sandy, you and Robin back me on the street. Donnie, I want you and that Colt’s revolving carbine at the corner, and you make enough noise so the vigilance boys think they’s fifty of you right behind you. Howard, you stand on the other side. When I nod, send a blast of bird shot into the sky. When those pellets start raining down, you train the barrel with the buckshot at the crowd. If they start the ball, you finish their dance. You savvy?”

  All but Sandy nodded. Boone’s head started hurting again, so he kept still. Besides, Plummer hadn’t given him any directions. Now that he could see better, Boone realized that the leader of this gang couldn’t be out of his teens, and that the mustache and goatee were pasted on like a young thespian playing Shakespeare in some chintzy troupe.

  Plummer said: “And you, iron head, you hold our horses. We ain’t got that many, so we’ll be riding double.”

  With that, the men walked outside. Boone was the last one out of the barn, and to his surprise, he found several horses tied up at hitching rails. He counted five mounts. He watched the men marching toward the main street, and did some math. Three McGee boys. Plummer with the Goatee. Sandy and the four others whose names he had already forgotten. And Boone himself. Ten men. Mrs. Mary Alma back at the Tyler Subscription School would be beaming with joy, at least, if Boone’s ciphering was right. Boone could figure which one wouldn’t be riding double. The men didn’t look back. They had already turned the corner.

  Mason Boone walked after them, but he left the horses in the alley.

  * * *

  If he hadn’t already figured out that Ambrose, alias Plummer with the Goatee, was a damned fool, he understood that before he climbed halfway up the hill on the northwest side of town. A crowd had come out this fine, if snowy, Monday morning to watch the hangings. Not that Virginia City was as big as it had been when Boone had briefly passed through on his way to that god-awful mining camp fourteen months or so back, but Boone figured at least fifty people braved the cold to watch the show.

  Fifty against five? Boone had already dealt himself out of this hand. Plummer with the Goatee had gumption. No brains. But Boone watched those men keep right on up the hill, and it wasn’t an easy hill to climb even without snow and wind. Plummer’s group didn’t seem to care that the hangings weren’t happening in town, but up at the pauper’s cemetery.

  Three wagons had brought each of the McGees up, and the teams had been unhitched, and the tongues pushed up, with ropes attached and hangman’s nooses ready. The McGees, already hooded with hands tied behind their backs, had been hoisted atop separate crates, and now three businessmen in greatcoats and mufflers began tying their legs with short ropes.

  Plummer with the Goatee drew out the Dragoon, cocked it, and the other men spread out on either side of him.

  I wonder if these McGee boys know what fine fools they have for friends. A horse’s snort and a squeaking wheel interrupted Boone’s thought, and he turned and stepped aside as a surrey made its way up the hill. Boone reached for his hat, only to realize he hadn’t seen his hat since the previous evening. The cold wind and snow seemed to ease the pain in his head.

  “Stop.”

  The rig’s driver obeyed. A woman leaned out. Boone’s heart leaped.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  God must have rendered him mute, but Boone nodded at the lovely woman.

  “I apologize for any inconvenience, any injury,” the angel spoke. “My husband has . . . well, if you are in town tomorrow, see me. The pie will serve as payment and apology.”

  She vanished. The whip lashed. The surrey continued its climb.

  Boone followed, no longer trailing the friends of the McGees, but the fancy rig.

  * * *

  “My word, Missus Story, you should not be here, not to witness this.” A pale man with a thick mustache, and dark hair combed back to hide his thinning locks, with the palest eyes Boone had ever seen, and a delicate English accent, hurried up to the rig. He turned his head and coughed.

  “And you, Professor Dimsdale,” the black-haired woman said, “should not be here in this weather.”

  The hacking cough almost doubled the slim man over, but he straightened, glanced at his silk handkerchief, which he used to wipe his pallid lips before slipping it into the outside pocket of his gray coat.

  “Mr. Story will be having a benny if he sees you,” the man pleaded.

  “I know of his temper, and I live here. This is something I should see.”

  The man started to protest, but he detected Boone easing up the road.

  A shotgun’s roar turned the attention of the weak English gentleman, Mrs. Story, the driver of the rig, Mason Boone, and everyone at the edge of the cemetery to Howard, the skinny redhead with the shotgun. He now stood next to Plummer with the Goatee, after thumbing back the hammer of the barrel holding the buckshot. Pellets must have been falling harmlessly to the hilltop now, but the only sound Boone heard was the wind moaning through wagons and over remnants of shoddy crosses. Howard’s shotgun pointed in the direction of the men closest to the three wagons that had been turned into hangman’s scaffolds.

  “First one of you sons of bitches that even looks crossways gets killed.” Plummer with the fake mustache and goatee took center stage. “You yellow dogs ain’t hanging nobody because it’ll be you who gets buried. My name’s Plummer, if that means anything to you. So here’s how we’re playing this hand. I got m
e a hundred and fifty men at Daylight Creek. And another fifty over yonder.” The wave seemed vague. “And if one more gunshot sounds, those boys are riding up here like Quantrill done at Lawrence.” He waved the heavy pistol. “So which one of you’s got the guts to take on another Plummer?”

  The wind stopped as though ordained by God.

  A voice near the wagons said, “Come on, Ben.”

  A tall man wearing a black hat stepped out of the sea of bearskins, sheepskins, and dark wool. The woman by the surrey and the lunger gasped. The man with him, the one named Ben, stopped, turned, and put his hand on a holstered revolver, but did not draw. The other man walked to the first McGee and kicked over the crate.

  As the man danced, twisted, and died kicking, the man moved to the second wagon. This particular McGee was pretty heavy, and the man in the wagon grabbed the tongue with both hands just before Nelson Story—Mason Boone had no doubt who had taken on the job of executioner—kicked over that crate. The snapping of the man’s neck sounded like thunder. He didn’t kick at all, just twisted on the cord.

  The last of the McGees started singing, sobbing, crying, and praying at the same time. Story kicked over the crate and moved down the hill as the last McGee kicked so hard, his pants fell down. The man called Ben drew a pistol and put a bullet in the kid’s head, then yelled, “Cut the bastards down.”

  Nelson Story stopped about twenty paces in front of the quiet Plummer with the Goatee and the shaking Howard with the shotgun.

  No one spoke. Plummer turned around slowly, lowered the pistol to his side, and moved back down the hill. No raiders swarmed up the hill from creek beds or streets. Howard laid his shotgun gently on the ground, then hurried after his leader. The other once-vengeance-minded men mingled ever so discreetly with Virginia City citizens.

  The wind resumed. So did the flurries.

  The professor named Dimsdale said, “Bloody hell. Bloody hell. Bloody hell.”

  And as Howard and Plummer with the fake mustache and goatee walked past the surrey, Mason Boone cleared his throat and said: “They’re brass.”