The Last One Standing
‘I rode out beneath the soft moonlight, with a single intent, to kill a man.’
In the Territories one man is more evil and terrible than all others. From murdering Chinese immigrant workers on the Transcontinental Railroad to slaughtering anyone who dares beat him at cards, Moose Schmidt kills and maims for no other reason than to enjoy the surge of control and power it gives him.
Callum Johnson’s father was killed by Moose Schmidt when Callum was a young boy. Now it is payback time. Teaming up with his father’s old Cherokee scout and a beautiful Chinese girl, Callum ventures deep into Moose Schmidt’s territory seeking justice and revenge.
But Moose Schmidt has eyes and ears across the land. He knows Callum is coming and he is ready and waiting. And determined to have fun killing the young man.
Armed with just a six gun and the lessons his father taught him, can Callum and his companions succeed where even the greatest bounty hunters have failed?
By the same author
Vengeance at Tyburn Ridge
Yellow Town
The Bone Picker
Last Stage From Hell’s Mouth
Dead Man’s Eyes
Dead Man Walking
Dead Man’s Return
Easy Money
The Last One Standing
Derek Rutherford
ROBERT HALE
© Derek Rutherford 2019
First published in Great Britain 2019
ISBN 978-0-7198-3018-1
The Crowood Press
The Stable Block
Crowood Lane
Ramsbury
Marlborough
Wiltshire SN8 2HR
www.bhwesterns.com
Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press
The right of Derek Rutherford to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Chapter 1
Indian Territory 1875
My father was Samuel Johnson. He was a big and fearless man, and for many years he brought outlaws back from the Indian Territory and handed them over to the authorities, usually to hang. Unless he brought them back already dead, which happened occasionally. Sam Johnson liked to fight, he liked to drink, and he loved women. He had reputations for all three vices. But he also had a weakness for believing that there was good in all people – even wanted men – and that’s what got him killed.
Sam was on the trail of a fellow by the name of Moose Schmidt. There was, reputedly, nothing good about Moose at all. He was a known killer. A cruel man who liked to inflict pain simply to enjoy the surge of power it gave him. Several authorities had warrants out for Moose, but my father wasn’t working for any of them. A Chinese woman who had come to New York from England and had travelled as far west as Natchez had employed my father to bring her Moose Schmidt.
Back then I didn’t know what the Chinese lady wanted with Schmidt. I only knew that my father took me all the way to Natchez with him, and in the stifling heat we drank iced tea, watched painted riverboats, and met the Chinese woman, who was the most exotic person I had ever seen.
Ten days later, after a long ride home from Natchez, my father spent a cordial evening with my mother and I at home in St Mary’s Gap. They were in love, and yet often couldn’t stand the sight of each other. Leastways, my mother couldn’t stand the sight of Sam Johnson. I don’t think he ever had that trouble with her. He always had an eye for a pretty woman and my mother was as pretty as they come. Trouble was she could see all those other pretty women in his eyes and no matter how much she loved him, she hated him too.
In the morning he lit out for Fort Smith and it was the last time we saw him alive.
Those days my father travelled with a Cherokee scout by the name of One Leg Hawk. One Leg was in a bad way when he told me the story of how Moose Schmidt had killed my father. One Leg was in that hinterland where, for a couple of days and nights, life and death tried to outbid each other for his soul.
‘Schmidt asked to see his boy,’ One Leg told me, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘Or at least one of his boys. They say he had many scattered around.’
We were in the Agent’s office in Green Springs on the eastern edge of the territories. It wasn’t but a day’s ride from there to St Mary’s Gap and two men had arrived the previous afternoon to pass on the news about my father. I’d left my mother crying and cursing in equal measure and I rode back with the messengers, driving our flatbed on which to bring my father’s body home. By the time I’d got to the Agent’s office, which was a white brick building as nice on the outside as anything in St Mary’s, the doctor had already dug a bullet from the side of One Leg’s chest and another from his shoulder. He was bandaged up and he was lying on blankets close to the kitchen stove despite it being summer. He was shivering and he was sweating and he stank of the whiskey they’d poured on him and into him while the doc operated.
‘Schmidt said he knew it would be the last time,’ One Leg said to me, grimacing as a spasm of pain ripped through him. ‘But the least your father could do was to grant him that much. “Just let me give him one last handshake”,’ Schmidt said.
‘ “How old is this boy of yours?” your father asked.
‘Schmidt said, “He’s five years old”.’
‘Your father said, “Then you should give him a hug, not a handshake.” ’
The way One Leg told it, Schmidt’s boy was a breed who was living with his mother, a Choctaw, not more than a half day’s ride from where my father had captured Schmidt. Schmidt was tied up and he had a resigned look on his face. One Leg estimated Schmidt was in his forties by then. ‘It looked like all the fight had gone out of him,’ One Leg said. ‘Too many years running.’
So my father had taken a diversion to allow a defeated man one last hug with his boy.
‘He knew,’ One Leg said. ‘And I knew. And of course your father knew, that you couldn’t hug someone if your own hands were tied up. So that moment was coming when we were going to have to untie Schmidt.’
It happened in a dirt clearing next to a wooden hut where the Choctaw woman and Schmidt’s boy lived. Out front a pot was suspended over a fire, bubbling and smelling pretty good for Choctaw food, One Leg said. Three dogs lay in the shade. When the men rode up the dogs started whimpering. As Schmidt climbed down from his horse the dogs slunk away around the back of the hut.
It was around midday, maybe an hour past, and the air was hot and still. The dust from the horses hung in the air and dried the men’s throats and there were lizards basking on a pile of rocks that the Choctaw woman had cleared to make a small vegetable patch.
She stood in the doorway of the hut, no expression on her face, no smile, not even any acknowledgement. ‘If she did anything,’ One Leg said, ‘it was just to nod slightly as if she had been expecting this moment for a very long time.’
Then she turned and said something into the hut and a moment later Schmidt’s boy appeared by the side of her legs. He was dressed in western clothes – a loose-fitting shirt and blue pants, and he was wearing tan moccasins. His hair was jet black and his eyes were as hard as his mother’s.
Schmidt crouched down
to the boy’s level and held out his hands – still tied – in front of him. He smiled and called to his son. But before the boy moved Schmidt turned, rising up to his full height again, and he held his tied wrists towards my father.
‘Two minutes,’ Schmidt said.
My father untied the knots and then he took a step backwards, easing his gun from his holster. One Leg, up there on his horse, already had his rifle lowered and was pointing it at Schmidt’s belly. Schmidt’s own Navy Colt was back on my father’s horse, buried deep in a bag.
‘Thank you,’ Schmidt said. He smiled and he turned back to his son, crouching down again, holding his arms wide open now.
The boy ran into Schmidt’s arms, smiling. Even his mother smiled then.
‘They must have tucked the gun into the back of the boy’s pants,’ One Leg said. ‘Schmidt hugged his son, and in the same movement he stood up, holding the boy like a shield so neither your father nor I dared shoot, and there was a gun in his hand and he didn’t even blink. That gun blazed, once, twice, three times.’
All three bullets hit my father. One in the throat, one in the heart, and one in the eye. Any one of those bullets would have killed him.
One Leg couldn’t shoot back because of the boy. But the fact that Schmidt had been so determined to kill my father that he’d done it three times gave One Leg the split second he needed to turn, to crouch, to spur his horse. To run.
But Schmidt was quick and two of his bullets still ploughed into One Leg and those bullets almost knocked the scout from his horse. Somehow One Leg held on. The last bullet from Schmidt’s gun left a hole in One Leg’s hat and a crease along his hairline but it didn’t even draw blood.
‘By the time a couple of marshals made it back there Schmidt and the Choctaw and the boy were gone,’ One Leg said. ‘They’d taken your father’s horse, too. But he was still lying there in the dust and the dogs were beside him, looking at your father’s body and wondering, I guess, if it was safe to eat him.’
That’s how my father got killed.
I was fourteen.
Chapter 2
The way it was out there in the Territory, if you kept your ear to the ground you could pretty much follow a man around. I don’t mean track him, the way a good scout like One Leg Hawk would track him; I mean hear stories about him, and follow him through those stories.
Moose Schmidt killed a man in Gentry when I was fifteen. It was over a game of cards, supposedly. The story was that Moose called the man out for cheating, but the fellow – and all the other players – were adamant that he hadn’t been. Nevertheless, Moose was so mad that the fellow said, ‘OK, you say I’m cheating, I say I’m not. You take your money back, despite the fact I won it fair and square, and I’m gone. Nothing I hate more than a sore loser.’ But Moose wasn’t interested in the money. He was in the mood for killing someone and he followed the fellow out onto the street and called him a cheat and a thief and he insulted the fellow’s mother and eventually the man had no choice but to draw, and that was when Moose shot him dead.
When I was sixteen Moose hanged two fellows he insisted had been trying to steal his horse when he was camping in the wilds north of Broken Arrow. The story was Moose actually forced one of the men to hang the other in exchange for allowing the first man to go free. After the fellow had hanged his partner, Moose, of course, reneged on the deal. Later the same year he shot dead a man he said had been getting ready to rape an Indian squaw. I was seventeen when I heard a story from a little further north about how Moose cut off a man’s thumbs when the man refused a gunfight. Moose said the fellow had stolen money from him. There was no one to deny it, or at least, there was no one prepared to stand up and deny it. They said Moose gave the fellow chance to apologize for the stealing between cutting each thumb off. One story said there were three hours between the two thumbs.
It seemed to me, from the stories that I heard, that it wasn’t just the killing and maiming with Moose, but it was the manner of the acts. It was as if he enjoyed them so much he wanted to make the moments last.
When I was almost eighteen, there came word about how Moose Schmidt had shot dead a very exotic and beautiful Chinese lady. He shot her in the back, they said. And he did so because he was scared.
I followed Moose through these stories, and many other tales too, because one day I was determined to set out to kill Moose Schmidt.
My mother ran a small boarding house in St Mary’s Gap. St Mary’s was getting to be like a proper town. A whole row of brick buildings had been raised, entrepreneurs were setting up all sorts of shops and concerns, there was even a small theatre being constructed. Business at the boarding house was generally brisk. A lot of men figured that a pretty woman on her own might be in need of a good man. They were wrong, and most of them weren’t good men, anyway. Not that they were bad. Not bad like Moose Schmidt. But they didn’t always have a whole lot going for them. They came and they stayed for a while and if they didn’t find a way of making a go of things in St Mary’s then on they drifted. If they did find a way of making regular money, then they usually also found a permanent place in which to live. I helped out keeping the place fixed up. I also worked with horses down at the livery and I learned to break them, too, over at Crawford’s ranch. I used to light out for days and nights at a time, hunting. I shot rabbits and deer and coyote and once a wolf, all with a Springfield musket that my pa had given me. He told me it had belonged to a Confederate soldier. I bought myself an Army Colt, too, and I practised the hell out of that thing.
I recall my father showing me how I could make paper cartridges. Until that lesson it had been a laborious process loading that gun. First of all you had to make sure the chamber was clean, then pour in just the right amount of gunpowder. Luckily the powder flask that came with the gun always dispensed a perfect measure. After that came the wadding which one would compress down tight against the powder using the ramrod lever below the gun barrel. Then came the ball itself, which was also rammed into place. Do all of that five times, then for each of those loaded chambers place a percussion cap on the nipple at the back of the cylinder and you were good to go.
Sam Johnson taught me early – probably before I even had my own gun – that you always left one chamber empty, and that was the chamber you rested the hammer on when you were riding, or walking, or just going about your daily business.
I think I asked, the way a young boy would, what happened if you were up against six men? If you’d only loaded five chambers then how were you going to kill the sixth man?
My father didn’t mention the obvious flaws in my question – how likely was it that you were ever going to be up against six men? And if you were, was another bullet really going to make a difference? He did show me how to fan the hammer on that gun, though. Just in case, he said, I was ever up against five men. But he also explained the benefit of the empty chamber.
‘Your horse lands heavily and the shock goes all the way through you, doesn’t it?’ he said to me. ‘Well your gun feels it too, and if the hammer is resting on a loaded chamber that shock can be enough to discharge that bullet. You could shoot your horse accidentally. You could shoot yourself accidentally. Just because your horse landed heavily.’
It was another day that he showed me the paper cartridges. I recall him sitting at the kitchen table first demonstrating how to clean the gun. Ma was in the background sort of glaring at him, but also smiling because the moment, in its own way, was nice. And pretty rare, too.
After we’d got done on the cleaning, my father showed me how to roll and load a paper cartridge. He said back in the war the soldiers were given prepacked boxes of such cartridges, and when I got rich I could buy those myself. But in the meantime knowing how to roll them would save me time. And it certainly did. Once I got the hang of it I would take a tin of those handmade cartridges up in the woods and practise fan-shooting that pistol like Samuel Johnson had showed me. Over and over.
Years later, when I had just turned eighteen, m
y ma – having watched my endless gun work – said, ‘When you find him, you kill him straight away. You don’t talk and you don’t ask questions, and you don’t get to wondering on anything. You just shoot him like he did your father. Then you come home.’
I almost said that I didn’t know what she was talking about, but the look in her eyes told me she knew more about me than I knew about myself.
‘He’s way up north, at the moment,’ I said. It didn’t mean I wasn’t ready to go. It was just my way of saying, ‘Thanks, Ma.’
I figured the time was only weeks away. I was a pretty good shot now, and I was as quick on the draw as anyone I’d seen. But before I could set off another Chinese lady came into my life.
Chapter 3
I was in the King’s Arms drinking whiskey and water at the long bar when Lin Wu Jia walked in and stood next to me. I glanced across without really focusing and saw a dusty cowboy, a brown hat pulled low, a red neckerchief, and a mustard-coloured coat that was white in patches with salt and dust. The coat was unbuttoned and revealed a navy pin-striped vest and blue work trousers. I returned to my whiskey but the quick glance at the cowboy had left a residual image in my mind. The cowboy had dark and beautiful almond-shaped eyes, red lips and smooth perfect skin.
I looked into the mirror at the back of the bar.
The mirror was cracked and the silver was coming off in places. There was a shelf running the length of it on which bottles and glasses and clay mugs blocked the reflection.
But I could see the cowboy was looking at me.
I turned and now I saw that the cowboy was a girl, an Eastern girl no less. Eastern as in Chinese, although I didn’t know such specifics until a minute or so later. Even with the hat and scarf covering some of her face, I could see that she was beautiful.
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