by J. Lee Butts
Bad Blood
Lucius Dodge and the
Redlands War
J. Lee Butts
Beyond the Page
Publishing
Bad Blood
J. Lee Butts
Beyond the Page Books
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Copyright © 2005, 2014 by J. Lee Butts
ISBN: 978-1-937349-89-9
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For Carol
Whose patience and support surpass all understanding
and
Linda Mckinley
A good friend and most valued reviewer
whose comments always make my work better
STEPPING INTO THE MIDDLE OF HELL
Don't exactly know where the first shot came from. Way I stood in the street made it hard to see most of them boys. But it sounded like someone from the Pitt bunch fired the round that tipped us all into a bloody inferno. Could have been someone from either camp, though, I suppose.
Truth is, the concussion from that first blast almost blew my hat off. Marshal Stonehill went down like a burlap bag of horseshoes. Every hair on the back of my neck turned into barbed wire.
Nick Fox went for his guns. We were so close to one another, the highly concentrated wad of a double fistful of lead damn near blew him in half. Dropped both hammers of the shotgun on his sorry ass. Splattered him all over the board fence. Pistols popped out of holsters all over the street like rabbits from a traveling magician's hat.
I headed for the doorway of the barbershop fast as I could hoof it. Arrived just in time to turn and watch as men from the Tingwell gang pushed their way into the Matador, while wildly firing over their shoulders. Front window of that cow-country oasis exploded in a hailstorm of shattered glass.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to Kimberly Lionetti for her continued faith, belief, help, and understanding. Much gratitude to Samantha Mandor for all her efforts on my behalf. Texas longhorn kudos to the DFW Writers' Workshop—the absolute best place in the country for an aspiring writer to hone his craft.
"Damn all family feuds and inherited scraps," muttered Ranse
vindictively to the breeze as he rode back to the Cibolo.
—O. Henry, The Higher Abdication
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. . ."
—Julius Caesar I, ii, 134
"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be
shed: for in the image of God made he man."
—Genesis 9:6
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
EPILOGUE
1
"PUT ENOUGH BUCKSHOT IN HIS BACK TO MAKE A BOAT ANCHOR"
'FORE GOD I swear ain't nothing like the rigors of advanced age for setting a man's mind to wandering. Seems like everything I see these days reminds me of something, or someone, from my explosive past.
Visited Cooley Churchpew's place yesterday. He runs a grocery and mercantile outfit about five miles up a dirt road from my Sulphur River ranch. Yanked open his screen door, the one with a rusted Nehi Cola sign dangling from a single screw, and almost stomped all over a young woman on her way out. Damned good-looking gal. Had red hair, blue eyes, and smelled like chubby little angels had bathed her in something wild and expensive. Thought for a minute I'd seen the ghost of Ruby Black. Sent shivers all the way to the soles of my muddy boots.
Finished my business with Cooley quick as I could. Jumped back in Ezemerelda, my should-be-in-the-scrap-heap pickup truck, and headed home all flusterated and shaky. Flopped into my favorite back-porch chair, rolled a smoke, and poured myself an extra large tumbler of bonded Kentucky bourbon. Spent the next hour or so watching the sun sink to the bottom of the river.
Something about the way light bounced off the sparkling water, and that little gal's fiery hair, transported me back more'n sixty years—a summer of matchless heat, windblown gun smoke, and uninvited death. The past has such power, you know. It can jump up and gobsmack you right into another time and place as easy as eatin' fried chicken with your fingers.
Summer of 1879, or maybe '80, I think, but don't hold me to it as the righteous truth. Not certain of the year but, by God, I remember the weather—hotter than a fresh-forged horseshoe. Camp dogs had taken almost every bit of shade available. Lack of water caused cottonwoods to shed their leaves so fast that standing under one was similar to being in a snowstorm. Live oaks drooped like creek-dwelling willows. Light breeze didn't do much of anything toward relief. Simply carried a gritty layer of Texas topsoil into every exposed wrinkle and crack on a man's body where it could cake up.
Me and my partner, Randall Bozworth Tatum, raised our tent's side flaps, and tried to enjoy a bit of refuge from the blistering sunlight and dense humid air—air that had the seeming power to suck all the life right out of a man. Our private site, which Boz referred to as The Viper's Nest, was part of Ranger Company B's command center out on the Trinity River north of Fort Worth. At least a hundred men in camp at times, but that day, couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty.
My partner and I made courageous, but losing, efforts at trying to get some rest after a month of beating the briars and brambles around Abilene in search of a wife-killer named Chauncy Pepperdine. Chauncy had taken an ax to the poor woman, and chopped her into four roughly equal pieces, after an argument over a less-than-tasty plate of biscuits and gravy she fixed for his supper. My God, biscuits and gravy. Damned amazing what people will kill one another over. Never did find the picky son of a bitch.
Heard later, Chauncy got his very own self murdered to death by an angry whore over in El Paso. Story went as how he tried to shortchange her after an extended night of raucous sex and whiskey-swilling pleasure. She jammed a six-inch bowie knife into his neck—all the way down to the bone handle. Pulled up a chair and watched him bleed out, right there in her rumpled bed. Everybody who knew Pepperdine felt God took care of the sorry son of a bitch's sinful way
s, and figured that whore's brutal method of execution was simply good riddance.
Think I'd just managed to drift into a uncomfortably clammy nap when our commanding officer, Captain Wag Culpepper, summoned us to his pavilion. Wag wore his fancy full-blown English naval officer's outfit that morning. Gold braid, brass buttons, red sash, and all. He even strapped an impressive CSA cavalry sword around his stout waist. My guess was he wanted to make sure me and Boz left his rough office duly impressed with the gravity of whatever he had in mind as an assignment.
Our scruffy behinds had barely hit the canvas camp chairs, arranged in front of Wag's Civil War-surplus field desk, when he thumped ashes from a smoldering panatela, slapped the tabletop, and growled, "I have, this very morning, received word from my good friend Sheriff Andrew Cobb of San Augustine that he has captured Jackson Toefield. Want you boys to stroll over Cobb's way. Bring the murdering bastard back for trial and suitable hanging."
Boz snatched the palm-leaf sombrero from his sweat-drenched head and used it to whack at the layer of fine dust covering the sleeve of his faded bib-front shirt. He said, "Toefield's a bad 'un, Wag. What if he wuz to make a break for freedom, or accidentally get loose and beat the hell out of me and Lucius, or God forbid, kill one of us? Worthless stack of hammered meadow muffins is fully capable of it."
Culpepper eyeballed my partner like one of those bug collectors examining a newly discovered kind of beetle on a pin. He smiled and said, "Well, Boz, you'd probably have to shoot him. Wouldn't you?"
"Just wanted to make sure you didn't have your heart dead set on a hanging, what might not occur should I find it necessary to put eight or nine holes in the guest of honor," Boz said.
"Can I ask a question?" They'd left me totally in the dark, and I needed a mite more in the way of information. "Exactly who is Jackson Toefield, and why do we want to hang him?"
Culpepper shifted his grizzly-sized bulk into a more upright and imposing position. Blew a smoke ring the size of a washbasin my direction. "Well, Lucius, about six months before you joined up with us, Toefield got into an argument at one of the green-felt gaming tables in a now-defunct Hell's Half-Acre gambling parlor over in Fort Worth."
Boz jumped in and added, "Seems he didn't like the way his luck fell out. Heated exchanges involved hidden cards, dealin' seconds, shaved decks, and other such mouthy trash. Ole Jackson wasn't armed at the time. When he huffed out of the place, everyone in attendance at that particular prayer meeting thought he'd retired for the evening and was headed to the midnight singalong, revival, and free meal down at the rescue mission."
Our captain looked irritated at the interruption of his tale and boomed, "But their judgment proved faulty, and deadly. Toefield returned, in less than a minute, carrying a double-barreled coach gun loaded with buckshot. Splattered the dealer, and three other deacons at the table, all over the back wall of Bucky Greeb's Tin Pin Saloon. Hell of a goddamned mess. Place emptied out quicker'n a galvanized bucket in a drought."
Not to be denied his chance at the least contribution, Boz kept going like the tale belonged to him. "Before anyone had nerve enough to go back inside, Toefield disappeared like a puff of smoke in a cyclone."
Culpepper held a quieting finger in Boz's face and said, "Greeb posted a two-thousand-dollar bounty on the murderous slug's sorry hide. Naturally, that offer is probably null and void now. Bucky's business went straight to hell faster than small-town gossip at a church social, and never recovered. He closed the Tin Pin, left town seeking more lucrative opportunities, and has been gone for more than a year."
Boz threw his head back and snorted. "Guess Toefield ain't worth much these days, except maybe the entertainment of buying an ear of smoked corn on the cob and watchin' his sorry ass swing from the nearest tree limb."
Culpepper snapped, "Well, Boz, all your philosophical musings on future executions are neither here nor there. Once you've got that gob of spit shackled hand and foot, in custody, and are headed back this way, I want you to swing over to Iron Bluff on the Angelina River."
This unexpected ingredient in the mix threw me into a serious puzzlement. I glanced over at Boz. Man looked like someone had jerked his pants down and dropped a rabid weasel in his drawers.
He ran a damp palm from forehead to chin and moaned, "Why would you want us to stop in that Redlands hellhole, Horatio?" Use of the captain's given name by a close and trusted associate brought a new, and more serious, element to the discussion.
"The Redlands, you say? Us wet-behind-the-ears Waco natives must have led pretty sheltered lives. Never heard the term. Where is it?" I asked.
Boz kind of dismissively waved in my general direction. "Aw, it's just a big chunk of east Texas, from about Shelbyville south. Folks called it the Neutral Zone before Texas became a state. Most of the soil over there's that foot-stickin' red stuff. Town of Iron Bluff sits on a rust-colored piece about two hundred feet above the river. Never been over that way, huh, Lucius?"
"Passed through just ahead of a posse when my family vacated Louisiana. Our migration occurred so long ago, I don't really remember it."
Water-starved cottonwood leaves rustled underfoot on a blistering breeze as our bearlike leader frowned and leaned back. The dilapidated canvas chair complained from the stress as Culpepper twisted in his seat and tapped nervous fingers on the desktop. Took him almost a minute more of contemplative thought before he got around to answering Boz's original question.
Finally, he stood, moved to a spot less than arm's length from my partner, and said, "My brother's stepdaughter stopped in San Augustine, on the way back from her New Orleans school for genteel young ladies, almost three months ago. Initial correspondence led the family to believe she'd taken a teaching position in Lone Pine—a peckerwood-sized community ten miles south of Iron Bluff. Her letters stopped more'n a month ago. We're very concerned, Boz. Since I couldn't send you out on my own personal private business, Toefield's capture simply occurred at a most opportune time."
He rested a trembling hand on Boz's shoulder. "There's no one else I would trust with such a responsibility. We've been close friends for over twenty years. Need your help, old friend. I know you'll ferret out what has transpired with the girl, and return her to the bosom of a desperately concerned family, if at all possible."
"She got a name, Cap'n?" Both men turned my direction.
On the way back to his chair, Culpepper said, "Ruby Black. Can't miss this woman when you see her, Lucius. Quite possibly the most beautiful female in Texas. Blazing red hair, blue-eyed, and feisty as hell."
Being a man of action, who didn't take well to loafing around The Viper's Nest with nothing much to do, Boz jumped at the opportunity to hit the trail and get out on the prowl again. Man loved sleeping on the ground under an open sky more than anyone I've ever known.
He stood and said, "When do you want us to leave, Cap?"
"Tomorrow morning. I've already arranged a fully equipped mule for your trip. You might need to buy a few necessaries. Personal stuff mainly. At the very least, it's a two-hundred-mile trip. You'll be living in the open for a week or more." Culpepper looked burdened with concern when he added, "My brother and his wife are distraught. Don't think I've ever known a child loved like this one. I'd appreciate it if you'd get word to me as soon as you know anything useful, Boz."
"You have my oath on it, Wag. Any way under God's blue heaven, me and Lucius will get her back home."
"Always knew you would, Boz, but be careful, old friend. You know what it's like over that way. Easy to get dead in Iron Bluff."
2
"GONNA CUT YOUR
NOSE AND EARS OFF"
WE SET OUT from Fort Worth before good light. My anxious partner took the lead, and set the pace. He didn't work himself into anything like a rush. Kind of moseyed along, and enjoyed the increasingly greener, and somewhat cooler, rolling woodlands of east Texas.
For the most part we kept clear of towns along the way. But Boz had a serious tobacco habit. The man smoke
d cigarettes as fast as he could roll them. Always felt he would've smoked a crowbar if he could've lit it. Most times he fired a new coffin nail off the dying one. Didn't take long before he ran low on papers, tobacco, matches, and every other thing imaginable to feed his habit. So we headed for Tyler.
I found me a chair out front of a place named Gillam's Mercantile. Dropped into it and tried to catch myself a little siesta while Boz shopped.
Ain't that just the way of things? Try to mind your own business, maybe sneak a few winks on the side when you can, and what happens? Botheration comes and finds you. Seeks you out. Trouble is like that, you know. Just when you think life, the world, and the future are going along smoother than a newborn baby's rump, mayhem shows up and throws an iron bar right into the middle of everything.
I'd barely managed to relax a bit when a man with a voice that sounded like a bull snake hissing stopped in the street and said, "Well, I'll just be damned. There really is an all-seeing diety in heaven. He done let me find the one and only Lucius "By God" Dodge."
Heavily armed nimrod, a good head taller than me, swayed in the street like a split-trunked cottonwood tree in a heavy wind. Greasy black hair sprouted from beneath his ragged plainsman's hat. He held a quart-sized whiskey bottle in one hand and stroked the butt of a walnut-gripped Colt with the other.
Studied his twisted face for a spell before I recognized the scurvy dog. Hadn't seen the evil son of a bitch in almost three years, and harbored some difficulty placing who he was. His scraggly beard threw me off for a second or so. But less-than-fond recollection of his worthless soul finally came creeping back to the forefront of my memory.
"Well, now, I do believe we've got the renowned Hang-town Johnny Crusher here in the flesh. Thought me and Boz put your ugly ass in prison, Johnny. If memory serves, the judge said you were supposed to be away for at least five years."
"Judges don't know ever-goddamned-thang, Dodge. Neither do you." His rasping voice sounded like spit on a hot stove lid. He upended the bottle and took a long sloppy swig. Some of the liquid fire dribbled around cracked lips into his disheveled beard.
