Straight Outta Dodge City

by David Boop

  Outside the tent, the air was so thick with the dust churned up by the fifty thousand or so people that had taken over this town that it was impossible to keep anything clean. There wasn’t enough food or water, and Baumgartner must have used his connections with the Army to get both, though the food was hard biscuit and the water looked like sludge.

  First, he called on his powers to purify the bucket of water beside the bed; like much of the water in this town, it was more mud than water. He made the silt in it gather all the contamination, then solidified the particles of tainted earth into a rock-hard ball that he lifted out and rolled out the door of the tent. Getting a dipper full of the now sparkling water, he held up the stricken man’s head and put it to his lips while he assessed the man’s condition.

  Earth Masters were often doctors, but Andy was no physician, and to his dismay he quickly realized there was nothing much he could do to help the poor man, even with his powers. He could try and strengthen the surveyor, but in the condition the he was in now, that would be of limited help. Andy himself just didn’t know enough about medicine and the human body to purge the disease out of the poor man.

  So once he had lent all the strength the man could take in, all he could do was what Heinrich had been doing. Apply damp cloths to the man’s forehead, give him water and watch over him as the daylight faded and sunset turned to night. Just before it got too dark to see, he lit the lamp sitting on a small crate next to the man’s cot, and turned to see that the fellow was awake, his eyes, bright with fever, fixed on Andy.

  He expected the man to ask who he was, or where Heinrich had gone. But instead, the cracked lips parted, and what issued from them, in a harsh whisper, were the words, “You are an Elemental Master.”

  Andy started. “Yes—” he blurted. “But—”

  “I am—an Earth Master.” The man gripped his wrist with surprising strength. “Listen. This is important. You must—go on the Land Run. Go for me.”

  “I can’t—” Andy began.

  “You must. There is a section—must be protected—” The man shook with the effort of speaking. “Notebook. In vest.”

  Andy extracted the notebook from the man’s vest pocket. Written down were explicit instructions on how to find a particular section in the eastern panhandle of the Unassigned Lands. “Go there—claim it—protect it. Promise!”

  Andy feared what would happen if he didn’t promise, and so he gave his word, and the surveyor settled back satisfied, and soon drifted back into feverish sleep. Andy tucked the notebook in his own vest pocket and thought nothing more of it. Instead, he again did what little he could to bolster the surveyor’s strength in hopes the fellow would manage to fight off the disease himself with support. In the morning, refreshed by a good twelve hours of rest, Heinrich took over, and it was Andy’s turn to bolt some of his provisions, and fall into the cot.

  But by the time he awoke, the poor fellow was dead. Heinrich was just overseeing the undertaker as the body was removed. “A gut fellow you are, Andy,” Heinrich said sadly. “I vill vire my vife, den I must see Hardesty’s vife in Chicago and bring her der sad news und her husband’s body. I vill see you in Milwaukee.” And Andy could only nod, knowing that if he did get back to Milwaukee, it would be long after Heinrich returned.

  * * *

  Andy pondered all this as he readied Prinz for the dash. He’d done what he could to prepare; Heinrich had left behind the bulk of the dead surveyor’s goods and gear, telling him to take what he needed, so he had appropriated the clean cotton shirt and canvas trousers as being much more appropriate for the conditions than his woolen suit. There had still been army biscuits enough for several days, which Heinrich evidently had been subsisting on since his friend fell ill; Andy had taken this, the man’s two canteens, a canvas shelter, a couple blankets, and his long rifle and ammunition. The rest he had packed up and left in the care of the owner of the General Store, with the understanding that he was to hold it until Andy or Heinrich came to claim it.

  Four days before the Run, the soldiers guarding the Unassigned Lands had allowed those waiting on the Kansas border to cross the Cherokee Outlet and assemble on the northern border. Following the instructions in the notebook, Andy had worked his way to the eastern panhandle of the area, until he was due north of the section he was supposed to find, a spot divided into two equal halves, north and south, by a waterway the surveyor had noted as “Lagoon Creek.” There he planted Prinz right on the line being maintained by the soldiers, and waited with the rest.

  To stake a claim, he, like all the others, had a two-foot-long wooden stake carved with his initials and entry on it. He had to get to the center of the section he was looking for, find the surveyor’s stake and land description, replace it with his own, return to the land office with it, and register his claim.

  This was the only part of the mission he was certain of; as long as a “sooner” hadn’t snuck in ahead of the appointed time and claimed the prize, Prinz could, and would, outrun and outlast every other horse he could see from where he sat. Not only was Prinz from a long line of hardy warhorses, able to carry a man in heavy armor all day, he came from a long line of fleet hunters. He had the speed, strength and stamina most of these other horses lacked.

  And he had Andy’s Earth Magic to replenish his energy and keep him fortified.

  “President Harrison’s Hoss Race” was what they were calling it, although besides horses, there was every sort of vehicle imaginable here, wagons, buggies, carts, and every sort of animal and none. Some hardy individuals evidently intended to make a run for their stake on foot. There were even a couple of high-wheeler bicycles, although Andy could not imagine how they thought they were going to negotiate the land he sensed in front of him now, crossed with hidden ravines and other obstacles.

  That was another advantage he had as an Earth Master. Every inch of the land in front of him was as clear to him as if he himself had surveyed it. He knew were the ravines were that could break a horse’s neck—where creeks of slippery stones were hidden—where there were gopher burrows that would break a horse’s leg. Many horses would probably die or be hurt in this race. Prinz would not be one of them.

  “It’s going to be a beautiful day, isn’t it, Earth Master?”

  Andy jumped, as startled by the melodious feminine voice at his stirrup as he was by being addressed for the second time as an Earth Master. He looked down.

  And Elsa fled from his mind as quickly as if she had never existed at all.

  The woman at his stirrup had straight, brown hair done in a practical knot at the nape of her neck, not Elsa’s flowing golden curls. She had brown eyes, not Elsa’s cornflower blue. Her face was thin and a little sunburned, and another man might have called it “plain.” She held the reins of a rangy roan mare, her tack was worn, and her faded calico dress and white bonnet looked to have plenty of wear on them. But Andy thought he had never seen a woman so alive, her eyes dancing with good humor, her mouth curved in a slight smile, as if she knew amusing secrets. Beside her, Elsa was just a china doll.

  He had heard of love at first sight, especially among Elemental Masters, but he had never believed in it.

  Until now. He felt terrified and elated, all at the same time. Every nerve in his body tingled, as if he was about to be struck by lightning. His mind was incredibly clear, and yet he could not get a single word out. He stared, and tried to breathe.

  “Alice Brown, Air Master,” she said, with a tiny bob of a curtsey, just enough to make a joke of the gesture.

  “Andy Falk,” he replied, managing to get his wits about him.

  “You do know,” she continued, as if they had known each other for years, “that only a head of a household can stake a claim.”

  His heart plummeted. He had not known that! What—

  “If you get your claim, I’ll marry you,” she continued, electrifying him all over again. She patted the shoulder of the mare next to her. “If you want. Daisy and I may not be able to outrun
most of these nags, but we can follow you, and I can guard the claim while you make the run to the registry.”

  “Why would you do that?” he asked, after gulping down astonishment. This was surely too good to be true. There had to be a catch. Had she enchanted him somehow?

  And yet, he could not detect any deceit in her, and he was usually good at picking out the sharpsters, even when they were women.

  “Because I haven’t a cent to my name that’s not with me, and that purse is too thin to live on for very long,” she said frankly. “My folks are both dead of fever. My brother got married and his wife made his life hell until he sent me packing with a lot less than the half of the inheritance my parents left me. I need a place to live and food to eat, and I ain’t afraid of hard work. We’re both Elemental Masters, so we ought to get along all right, and if we don’t, well, a hundred sixty acres can make two farms, easy.” She had gone pale while she talked, as if she was now afraid of her boldness, afraid he’d think badly of her, afraid he’d think of her as some kind of hussy, or that she meant to cheat him somehow. “I may be no prize, but where else are you going to find a wife who’s another Master?”

  Now, he could have said he didn’t need a wife, but that would have been a lie, and it wasn’t a good idea for magicians to lie, as their lies all too often came true in the worst way. He could have said that he had a girl, but that would have been a half lie, for he was only one of half a dozen suitors, and anyway, after one look at Alice, Elsa had been driven clean out of his head. He could have said he didn’t want a wife, but that was as big a lie as the first two. And anyway, his mouth blurted, “Done!” before his head had gotten through half of those thoughts.

  But then he added, for the sake of getting everything out in the open, “I’ve made a promise to a dead Master. I’ve got a map to a stake, but it’s on land he pledged me to protect, and I don’t know why. It may be worthless. It may be dangerous. But a promise is a promise, and I aim to keep it.”

  “Then I’ll help you,” said Alice, and then there was nothing more to say, because it was coming on noon, and it was time to fill Prinz full of as much sustaining magic as the horse could hold. Prinz was used to this, and held rock steady while Andy reached deep into the earth, brought up its power, and passed it into his mount. He just finished as the nearest trooper began riding his horse back and forth, restlessly, peering to the west, where presumably the signal to let the race begin would come from. Alice mounted Daisy and backed her a little way out of the line; wisely, he thought, because when the shot came to send them on their way, the front of the line was going to be a dangerous place. She wasn’t the only person to do so; the cautious and those who intended to remain behind were doing the same, and the wavering line on the border separated into two.

  Andy bent down over Prinz’s neck. Prinz, the veteran of many a race, knew what this meant, and Andy felt the stallion gathering himself for a racing start.

  Andy felt, rather than saw, the line at the very limit of his vision jerk forward, and at that moment, the trooper in front of them shot his pistol straight up in the air.

  Prinz threw himself forward with a tremendous leap, trusting to Andy to feel out the ground in front of them, and getting himself a nose length in front of any other horse in their part of the line. Around him, behind him, it was utter chaos, the thunder of horses’ hooves on the ground, the clatter of wheels and the clashing of wagon chains. The horses all surged forward, some of them already tangling with others and going down with screams of fear and pain, taking their riders with them. Wagons careened wildly forward, and some were wrecked immediately. Behind them, the screams of horses and men and women pierced the cloud of dust that arose. But Andy could take no thought for them. He extended his senses, into the ground before him, and into Prinz, warning him of gopher holes, hidden rocks, uneven ground. Prinz surged into the lead with Andy’s help and guidance and, in fifteen minutes, they were far ahead of the pack.

  But Andy didn’t rein him in. He could run for hours like this, with his strength bolstered, and he would have to. The claim Andy had been told to make was a good hour from the border at Prinz’s top speed. He kept feeding Prinz with energy, and kept a lookout for the landmarks the surveyor had left in his notebook. Here a dry creek bed. There a creek with a trickle of water in it. There a particular clump of three trees. There weren’t a lot of such landmarks; this was not the fertile land of Wisconsin. This was a harder soil, and his Earth senses told him it didn’t see water nearly as often. It would take a special sort of farming, and even then, there would always be danger of losing everything to drought. Drought came often here, the land told him. That was why the trees here had deep taproots, and only grew where water flowed all year long.

  He felt the claim before he saw it, which he had not expected. His Earth sense stretched nearly a mile in front of him, and the difference, the specialness spoke to him. At that point the trees of the bottomlands of Lagoon Creek were little more than a dark mist on the horizon. And then he knew why had to protect it.

  It was sacred land, deep in the heart of that section. Land where once gods had walked, and might walk still.

  Andy was a Christian, but he was also no fool. He knew very well that there were other gods, and that they still had power. Why else would the God of Moses have said, “Thou shalt not have other gods before me”? To his mind, that implied there were plenty of other gods, and that it was perfectly all right to give them honor in their own place, as long as Jehovah took precedence.

  He didn’t have long to think about this, however, as his final landmark, a lightning-blasted tree that had been drawn with exquisite detail in the notebook came into view. He aimed Prinz for it. If a sooner hadn’t managed to hide out here and run in to claim it, he was far enough ahead of the pack it should be his.

  And his heart leapt as his Earth senses coursed ahead of him, and he realized this was some of the best land he had felt yet on his ride. If he could stake it, claim it, and protect it—he could also farm it.

  Prinz plunged through the woods—and these actually were woods, more trees than he was used to seeing here—and he wrenched his attention away from his Earth senses and to his ordinary ones. The section marker should be down here, in this rich bottom land, just before the creek itself.

  There! He spotted the two-foot-tall stake, surveyor’s papers fluttering at the top. It hadn’t been claimed yet!

  He pulled Prinz to a sudden stop, the stallion’s feet slipping and skidding on the lush prairie grass beneath the trees, tumbled from his saddle, and seized the stake with both hands. He wrenched it out of the earth, ignoring the splinters in his palms, pulled his own stake out of his saddlebag and—grabbing a hand-sized stone from beside the hole where it had been—hammered it home. And only when the claiming stake and the papers attached to it were safely in his saddlebag did he breathe again.

  And then he lost his breath all over again, as an Indian rose up out of the grass, long rifle trained on his head.

  He was an old man, but Andy didn’t doubt for a moment that his hand was steady and sight keen. His head had been shaved except for a stiff crest of hair, like the crest on a roman helmet, to which an eagle feather had been attached. His chest and arms were bare, his neck adorned with strings of beads and a round pearl-shell ornament. He wore a breechcloth and leggings of deerskin. And Andy had no idea which of several tribes hereabouts he could have come from—but he had no doubt that the man was here to protect this land.

  Last night he’d done his best to commune with the elementals of this place, asking them to give him all the human languages hereabouts that they knew. So he took a deep breath, held up his hands to show they were empty of weapons, and tried Cherokee.

  “I am here to protect this place, not claim it,” he said.

  Nothing.

  He tried Caddo. Then Sac and Fox. Then Osage. Then Kaw. Still no reaction. And he began to grow desperate.

  And then, suddenly, as he groped for the words from
yet another tribe, the old man—laughed.

  “I wish that you could see your own face, white-skin,” the old man said around laughter, in perfect English. “I thought I had better ease your mind before you pissed yourself.”

  Andy nearly fainted with relief.

  “Where is Hardesty?” the Indian asked, moving forward through the waist-high grass with an ease and grace that belied his age. “I was expecting him, not you.”

  “Dead. He got cholera from bad water on the other side of the border, and I got there too late to save him,” Andy replied sadly. “I’m very sorry.”

  The old man grounded the stock of his rifle and sighed. “I’m sorry too, and for his wife. He was a good man. I did not know him long, but everything I learned of him told me he was a very good man, as well as a fine Medicine Chief of Earth, as you are.”

  “And you are also a Medicine Chief.” This much Andy was sure of; he felt the power radiating from the man.

  “The last of my band,” he replied. “And the last to guard their resting place and the dancing floor of our gods. Hardesty pledged he would do the same.”

  “And he sent me in his place.” Andy fished the notebook out of his vest and handed it to the old man who looked through it. “I’m Andy Falk, and I promised to claim this land and protect your sacred ground.”

  “I am Red Hawk.” The old man held out his hand to Andy, who shook it, not at all surprised to discover the man had a powerful grip. “We now have a problem before us. There are those coming who will try to steal this place from us before we can register the claim.”

  Andy felt his insides clench up. He had been hoping that with all the troopers out here claim jumpers would be taken care of. But he had no doubt that Red Hawk was right. “Then we will—” he began, and then heard the galloping sound of hooves.

  Before he could react with alarm, though, he saw the sort of Air Elementals he was used to—three little half-naked girls with butterfly wings—come zipping toward him through the treetops. That would be Alice, he thought, and turned to see Red Hawk staring at the Sylphs with his eyes wide and jaw slightly dropped.