A Thousand Texas Longhorns

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “Hobo?”

  His eyes raised. Maybe he made a slight nod.

  “You said your father shot him.”

  He tested the coffee, but it was too hot, even for Nelson Story the Blackhearted Son of a Bitch to drink. “Dog was old, had the mange, suffering.” He kept looking at the cup.

  “Oh,” he heard her say, followed by her soft footfalls.

  “I thought . . .” He stopped. Slowly, she turned.

  “You know much about dreams?” He moved the cup closer to his lips, made himself look at her. “I thought . . . the dream was a warning. Then I buried Sibrian. What the hell did that mean? That Sibrian was no better than a dog? That I worked him like a dog?” He felt his head shake. “Now I’m still dreaming that same damn dream. What’s it mean?”

  Constance shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know nothing about dreams.”

  She returned to the wagons, and Story cursed himself for being half-asleep, talking flapdoodle to a woman, revealing just a sliver about himself to a damned stranger. He almost pitched the coffee into the dirt, but knew better than to waste water. His head lifted, and he said, “Constance.”

  Although she stopped, she did not look back.

  “Keep Hobo in the back of the wagon,” Story said. “Give him some water. Yesterday was hell. Today will be a damned sight worse.”

  Again, she started, again Story spoke. Maybe because he remained half-asleep.

  “I don’t know about dreams, either. I had one. To get a herd of cattle to Wyoming, make my pile, keep my wife from working herself to death like her ma’s doing, and my mother did. Had dreams off and on about me burying my dog. Hell, I don’t know which one is crazier.”

  * * *

  Ellen sat up, gasping, eyes darting, recognizing Montana’s cries and what must have been a battering ram on the door that made the entire cabin shudder. Muffled shouts came from outside, but Ellen couldn’t make out much of anything with the pounding of the door and the ear-ringing wails of her baby. Flinging off the blanket, she found a robe and stormed to the door.

  “I’ll be there, honey,” she snapped at her daughter, grabbed the latch, and . . .

  “Nelson?” Her face paled. News? Bad news? She pulled the robe tighter, tried to breathe, and opened the door.

  The wild-eyed man in front of her almost made her scream. “Ellen. Are you all right?”

  His breath stank. The body reeked. He had not bathed in weeks. Beard covered his face, but the voice. Dear God.

  Montana wailed.

  “Seth Beckstead,” Ellen snapped. “How dare you.”

  The impertinent drunkard pushed past her and looked across the room at the cradle. “Montana? Is she sick?”

  “No, you dumb son of a bitch,” Ellen barked. “You woke her up. And scared the life out of me.” She hit his chest with a balled fist, then again, and yelled—not caring who heard—“Get out of my house, damn you. Get out.”

  He grabbed her wrists, pulled her close, and now fear replaced Ellen’s anger.

  “Are you all right?”

  Wretched breath made her turn away. She trembled.

  “Sore throat. Cough? Is Montana all right?”

  The baby cried louder.

  “Let me see my baby,” Ellen cried.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Yes. We are fine. Please, let me care for my baby.”

  When the vise released, she wanted to rake his flesh with her nails, but he started backing toward the door. “Stay here. Stay with Montana,” he said. “You should not leave the house until I tell you . . .”

  The anger returned. She stepped to him, and spit venom. “This is my house. You will not tell me what I shall and shan’t do.” She started to gouge him, but he struck first, the slap stunning her, staggering her, and she might have fallen had he not caught her arms and pulled her close to him again.

  He whispered urgently. “Ellen. Listen to me. It’s . . . diphtheria.” He let go, ran for the door, stopping once and turning. “If you or Montana cough. A sore throat. Even if you think it’s just a cold, for God’s sake, find me. Please.”

  And vanished into the early dawn.

  * * *

  The brown gelding moved close to the brindle cow, and Story lashed out with the lariat. “Move.” He struck again. Breathing through a dust-caked bandanna, he coughed, tried to blink the grime out of his eyes, and heard his name called. Turning the gelding away, he rode through dust and haze and bawling cattle, away from the cow, realizing she would never make it, not even to the Pumpkin Buttes, let alone the Powder River.

  The cowboy waved his hat, and when Story got close, he realized it was George Dow, on his feet, holding the reins to a bay gelding. Story swore, thinking the horse had gone lame, only to realize this was worse than a lame horse.

  “I can’t get him up, boss,” Dow said.

  Story stared at the calf lying in trampled grass. He swore again, the weak bawling of cattle echoing all around him in the haze, and nodded at the cowhand. “Finish him,” he said.

  Dow’s eyes widened, but Story just stared harder. “Now,” he said, but when the drag rider reached for his revolver, Story shook his head. “Not with that.”

  “Oh.” Dow bowed his head. “Right. Stampede.”

  Let him think that, Story thought. Stampede? These cattle are too sore, too tired, to run ten yards. But he waited until Dow had drawn the knife from his vest pocket and unfolded the blade. When the cowboy knelt by the dying calf, Story turned his horse away and moved into the dust.

  Story traveled less than a hundred yards before he had to dismount, to slit the throat of a straggling year-old steer.

  * * *

  “I don’t believe it is diphtheria,” Mayor J. M. Castner said. “It can’t be. Not in Virginia City. In our existence, this city has seen no outbreaks of scarlet fever, no typhus fever, no cholera.” He pointed a long finger at Beckstead and continued to scold the doctor from his perch on the boardwalk in front of the Montana Post. “We sit at more than five thousand seven hundred feet above the tidewater, sir, and our climate is the healthiest in the territory, certainly better than Helena’s.”

  “What do you think, Dr. Yager?” the newspaper editor, Henry Blake, asked a balding man wearing bifocals and a long plaid coat.

  “I have not examined Dr. Beckstead’s poor family, but I have found no signs of diphtheria among my patients.” He smiled the smile of a jackass. “A boy with the croup, two girls with tonsillitis. Mostly, my patients have been—”

  “A boy? Girls?” Beckstead interrupted. “Did they attend the new school?”

  Yager’s smile vanished. “Doctor, those are my—”

  “Were they at the school, damn you?”

  Yager became flustered. “I don’t know. I suppose . . . maybe . . . but I tell you this is not . . .”

  “Oh, it’s diphtheria,” said the old man with a missing right hand who sat with his legs crossed on the other side of the street.

  “And how would you know?” The mayor let out a humorless sigh and painted a grin as he waved toward Beckstead and Dr. Sparhan, then spoke to the gathered crowd. “Our two most accomplished drunks are diagnosing diphtheria and trying to spread fear throughout our community.” He whirled toward Henry Blake. “I tell you, Henry, these men have been bribed by the nefarious scoundrels in Helena who want to steal the territorial capital from us.”

  A few men whispered, and Blake started to ask a question but the old man across the street stopped everyone.

  “I lost my wife to diphtheria.” Sparhan’s soft voice carried across the street. “My son. My mother-in-law.” He lifted his gaze. “I may be a drunk, gentlemen, but I have seen that family on Fremont Street. And it is diphtheria. And if you don’t listen to my colleague, you will see the wrath of God—as I saw . . . ten years ago . . . in California.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  That Indiana farm, John Catlin found himself thinking about once more, couldn’t have been all tha
t bad. He had a town to go to, a church when he felt like it, women to fancy, some even to talk to. Newspapers to read. Fresh milk. People. Yet here he was, in the middle of nowhere, with a linen rag over his mouth and nose to keep from choking, on the back of a skittish Texas cow pony, pulling guard duty to keep a bunch of unseen Indians from stealing a bunch of other bony, wiry, half-broke horses. Bracing the butt of his Enfield against his thigh, he felt autumn’s first bite.

  A rider appeared, loping hard toward the remuda, and Catlin tightened his grip on the Enfield. No Indian, he decided. At least, he didn’t see any feathers. Black horse. He relaxed, recognizing the figure as Jameson Hannah, who slowed to a trot and spoke to the Mexican wrangler, Fabian Peña, pointed northwest, then rode to Isaac Collins, another teamster turned guardian of horses, and finally reached Catlin, who reined up.

  “Water up ahead,” Hannah said. “You boys will hold the horses here till Peña says they’ve cooled off. Then let them drink.”

  That was all. Hannah loped off to tell Overholt, riding rear guard, the same thing.

  Ahead, Peña began stopping the horses, letting them graze. Catlin watched the longhorns keep going, and the wagons, including the one he should be riding in with Steve Grover. They followed the Dry Fork of the Powder River to the big river—big as you might find in this country, anyway—and Story had told them pools of water might be found before they hit the Powder. His canteen was empty, his throat ached, and he knew those cowboys’ horses, teamsters’ oxen and mules, and a thousand Texas longhorns . . . hell . . . they’d drink the water first, and what would be left for the ponies, and Catlin, would be mostly mud.

  * * *

  After Tibbetts’s hearse stopped at the cabin on the corner of Fremont and Broadway, Seth Beckstead stepped out of the cabin and nodded at the undertaker. That fancy rig had been shipped in all the way from Rochester, New York, back in ’64, when ten thousand people crammed into Alder Gulch. Or so Beckstead had been told. Tibbetts must have spent a fortune on the hearse alone, what with its bouquet holders, white curtains with gold fringe and tassels, and black-and-white plumes.

  “The girls are inside.” Beckstead’s voice was hoarse.

  Old Tibbetts nodded at the burly miners who had been walking behind the hearse. Bundled up with heavy coats, gloves, caps, and bandannas, the men grimly walked to the cabin.

  “I’ll likely send for you in a day or two,” Beckstead managed. “For Missus O’Ryan.” Hell, he could use a drink today. “And Mr. O’Ryan’s in bed now.”

  “Dr. Mathews has two cases,” Tibbetts said. “Dr. Justice, three.”

  “How about the rest of the Fourteen Mile City?” asked Dr. Sparhan as he stepped out of the cabin.

  Sheriff Andrew Snyder, mounted on a white stallion that trailed the hearse, snorted. “Doc Whitford in Nevada City won’t let anyone from Virginia City come through town.”

  “Bring the sick here,” Beckstead said. “Then you’ll have just one place to burn when the last of the dead is buried.”

  “Bring them to my cabin,” an Irish brogue rang out across the street, and a tall, well-dressed man stepped into the dirt.

  “Meagher, you can’t do that,” the sheriff said. “You just can’t.”

  “As acting governor of this territory, I can do whatever I want to do.” Thomas Meagher stepped off the boardwalk and walked around the matched pair of gray Andalusian stallions, stopping at the edge of the O’Ryan cabin. Despite the chill, Meagher wore no hat, and the wind whipped his unruly dark hair. Probably in his forties, he wore a silk cravat and Gaelic cross, and stuffed his hands inside the pockets of a Union blue greatcoat, and walked toward Beckstead.

  Meagher stopped a few feet from the cabin. “I hear you served in our late army,” he said.

  “Second Baltimore, General.”

  “Governor.” The laugh brightened Meagher’s face. “Acting governor, my rivals will point out, or dictator. Secretary if you prefer. Drunkard if you wish to be accurate.”

  “Then we are brothers-in-arms.” Beckstead smiled.

  “My cabin is yours, Doctor.” Meagher turned serious.

  “Thank you, but there’s no need.”

  “What can be done?”

  Now Beckstead sighed. “We know so little about diphtheria. What causes it. How it spreads. Treatments range from calomel to bleedings, and they are all worthless. The only way to stop it is to catch it early.” A thought seized him, and he stepped aside as the miners carried the shrouded body of the first girl to the hearse.

  “The school,” he yelled. “Have you closed the school?” The new public school had just been built, opened this term. Before that, school had been held in one of Virginia City’s churches.

  “School just opened,” the sheriff snapped.

  “Then close it. And if any of the children feel sick—sore throat, cough, cold, anything—they must be treated immediately.”

  “But . . .” someone started.

  Meagher spun around, and roared, “You pimps and poltroons can either help this valiant surgeon or you can watch what’s left of Virginia City become a morgue. Close the school.” He pointed at the Post editor, busily taking notes. “Blake, print notices and have them posted all across the Fourteen Mile City.”

  “You can’t do that,” J. B. Chapin, owner of the Planter’s House, thundered. “You’ll send this city into a panic, and no one will come here.”

  “Meaning no one will stay in your first-class hotel,” Tibbetts said.

  “He’s not the governor,” Chapin preached to the men across the street. “He’s a damned secretary who has become a despot. I’ll write President Johnson, sir.” He turned back, waving a finger, either at Beckstead or Meagher or both.

  What brought men out like this, Beckstead wondered, in the cold, to stare across the street at a house filled with sick people? As the sheriff dismounted to open the door to the hearse, Chapin and Tibbetts continued their bitter banter until Beckstead lashed out with profanity that left everyone silent, and staring at him.

  “That’s an eight-year-old girl,” Beckstead said. “Eight. Have you any decency? Any respect for a child? My God, I thought I saw the worst of mankind during the rebellion.”

  He disappeared inside the cabin.

  * * *

  When the lead steers broke into a run, Boone spurred his chestnut gelding. Bawling, the rest of the longhorns stampeded. “Let ’em run, Boone,” Dalton Combs shouted across the herd, waving his right hand forward. “They smell water. It’s the Powder.”

  Loping alongside the cattle, sweating despite the cold, Boone thought he could smell water himself. The herd hit the water at a run, wading in, drinking, splashing, and Boone and Combs rode in with them. Boone cheered. Combs whipped off his hat, leaned in the saddle, filled the crown with water, and dumped it over his head. It didn’t matter that the temperature might have been in the fifties. Boone laughed harder and tried to copy Combs’s actions, but slipped, and got a frigid Powder River bath.

  Rising out of the cold water, he laughed, spit water out, found the stirrup, and pulled himself to his feet. He didn’t even feel the cold—yet.

  “You needed a bath,” Combs yelled at him.

  “Feels damned good,” Boone said, and climbed back into the saddle, urging the chestnut downstream, letting the rest of the cattle drift into the water or move along the banks, drinking their fill.

  Twisting in the saddle, Boone watched the rest of the caravan, the running longhorns, the remuda, the wagons. Then the cold hit him, and he shivered.

  At the edge of the river, Story sat in the saddle on his blood bay gelding, letting his horse drink.

  The son of a bitch, Boone thought, looks just like Moses. He wiped his soaking face with his wet hand, then reached back to find the coat strapped behind the cantle.

  * * *

  José Pablo Tsoyio stepped back from the pot of beans and the coffeepot and watched the riders come toward the camp. All banter, all joking ceased, replaced by metallic click
s of hammers being cocked.

  “Easy.” Story had been going over tomorrow’s plan with Hannah and Lehman. Now he stood. “Keep the rifles out, and make a show of loading them. Same with the revolvers. Show them our arsenal, but no one fires a shot.” Before he stepped toward the old-but-grim warrior in the long, feathered bonnet, Story nodded at Tsoyio, who followed the tall man to about a dozen Indian warriors, well mounted, formidable, and scary as lost souls in purgatory.

  Story stopped a few rods in front of the leader, but Tsoyio walked straight to the Indian—Sioux, Tsoyio figured, though he had heard they did not care much for that name, preferring to be called Lakota.

  When Tsoyio made the sign, the tall man with bold features, black eyes, and a Roman nose seemed impressed. After handing his lance to the rider on his right, he raised his hands and began signing to Tsoyio.

  “He says his name is Four Elks,” Tsoyio said.

  “Tell him mine.”

  A moment later, Tsoyio said, “He says he likes his name better.”

  “Tell him I never thought much of mine, either.”

  That, Tsoyio was pleased to see, made Four Elks grin.

  “They’re peaceful,” Tsoyio called back to Story after the next round, and whispered, “For now.” None of the Lakotas’ faces had been painted for war, nor did their horses wear paint. The leader’s hands moved again.

  “We are in his country,” Tsoyio translated. “His hunting grounds. We are trespassing.”

  “Tell him we have hunted no buffalo, no antelope, not even rabbits or birds. And taken no fish from this river.”

  “Don’t think they eat fish,” Tsoyio said. “Same as Comanches.” He moved his hands and fingers, and waited. Then: “Four Elks says you may move through his country at peace, as long as you move fast, but he would like twenty-five beeves.”

  Story answered immediately, “No.”

  Hannah whispered, “He didn’t bring all his men with him. No telling how many he has backing his play.”

  Lehman added: “And he is right. This is his land. He has a right to ask for a toll.”

  “He’s not talking to either of you,” Story said without looking back. “He’s talking to me. And he sees our firepower.” He cleared his throat. “Tell him we will pass through quickly and that we will not come back. Tell him I need these cattle to feed my family, my child. They are hungry, too.”