This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  Reining Locomotive around, Billy resumed his way toward the Madison. He’d heard that, being a day’s ride, most folks camped down by the river where they could water their animals before or after the pull from Virginia City.

  As he neared the trees, Billy slipped the Sharps from its scabbard and laid it across Locomotive’s saddle bows.

  He saw them as soon as he rode under the first of the cottonwoods; the branches had barely sprouted green with the first leaves, the ground covered with fallen blossoms.

  The rope was already over a limb, Parmelee’s hands tied behind his back.

  Two of the men turned toward him, riding out, their Henry rifles at the ready. Nothing in their expressions had changed since Billy had seen them leaned against the shop.

  “Hold up!” one called, leveling his rifle.

  “Why, I do declare,” Billy cried. “Reckon you all are riding for that vigilance committee we hear so much about. Who you got there? Some road agent? Who’d he kill?”

  “I said, hold up!” the man repeated.

  “Aw, you’re not gonna shoot me,” Billy told him. “I ain’t a robber or a outlaw. You all only hangs bad men. And if that’s Win Parmelee you got yonder, he’s one of the worst. What the hell did he do?”

  “Murder and rape,” the man barked.

  “Son of a bitch,” Billy drawled. “Hell, mister, I’ll help y’all pull on the rope.”

  Daring the devil, he rode right up to the men, his heart pounding, knowing he was beaming his excitement. By God, he was tired of sneaking. He could feel the thrill, missing for so long. The same as when he’d walked into the middle of Dewley’s camp.

  Then he was in the middle of them, grinning, staring at Parmelee, seeing the man’s fright—the half-crazy look of a galoot facing his final extinction. Under the rope, the pulse was beating in Parmelee’s neck; he kept swallowing as if his throat had gone dry.

  “Who are you?” one of the men asked, his old Colt Army leveled on Billy.

  “Billy Hancock. You sure you want to hang him? Might be money for handing him over.”

  “All it takes is his head,” another said. “We pack it in a nail keg filled with salt and ship it.”

  “Damn, do declare?” Billy shook his head. “Well, come on, boys, let’s see the son of a bitch swing!”

  Parmelee whispered, “I’ll see you all in hell!”

  “Maybe so, you piece of shit,” one of the men replied, stepping off his horse and walking over where the loose end of rope lay. He was in the process of wrapping it around the tree to knot when Billy eared the hammer back on the Sharps and shot the nearest man through the chest. At the big gun’s concussion, the horses shied. By the time he had Locomotive under control, Billy had the Remington leveled and shot the mounted man to his left.

  Wheeling the big black horse, he spurred it toward the third rider, one of the Henry riflemen, and shot the man through the face as he fought his bucking horse.

  Wheeling around, Billy instinctively ducked the shot as the man on the ground thumbed the hammer back on the Starr revolver he’d pulled from his belt and triggered it.

  Billy took a breath, aimed, and shot him through the forehead as the vigilante leveled his pistol for another shot. The man dropped as if he were poleaxed.

  But for the scattering horses, one tripping over its reins, the evening had gone quiet.

  “By damn!” Billy cried. “Now that’s just daisy, ain’t it? Haven’t felt this fucking good for ages!”

  He slipped the Remington into its holster, pulled a cartridge from the box on his belt, and after inserting it into the rifle’s chamber, he plucked a cap from its tin and pressed it onto the nipple.

  Only then did he ride over to where Parmelee sat on his horse. The animal had backed away, pulling the rope up over the branch.

  Billy caught up the animal’s reins, turning Locomotive so that he could reach out with the Bowie and sever Parmelee’s bonds.

  The man wasted no time peeling the rope from around his neck and throwing it aside. For a moment he just sat, hunched in the saddle, breathing heavily.

  “Reckon you got a right to be shook up some,” Billy remarked as he considered the men he’d killed. One was going to need another bullet or he’d linger.

  “I’ve got no idea why you did that, Mr. Hancock, but I’m damned sure glad you did.”

  “Reckon I been curious about you since Fort Benton.”

  “Why?”

  “That a fact? That you murdered and raped?”

  Parmelee was recovering his wits, the cold glare was back. “The man was a deserter. The women were both his whores. By definition, you can’t rape a whore.”

  Billy walked Locomotive over and pulled the Remington. Calling, “Whoa, now,” he steadied the horse and shot the lingerer through the head.

  Rather than reload his empties, he pulled the loading lever down, pressed out the cylinder pin, and reached into his pocket for a second cylinder with five loaded chambers. Fitting it into the frame, he pressed the pin back in and clipped the loading lever home.

  “We’d best take them Henry rifles,” Billy said. “Especially for the trail on the other side of Bozeman. A smart man wouldn’t risk his hair crossing the Powder River country. I figure it’s chancy enough if we head down through the Big Horn Basin. Them Henrys might come in handy.”

  “You always thinking?” Parmelee asked as he stepped down from his horse and started rummaging through the vigilantes’ clothing.

  “Yep. Like it might not do to have those horses get back to where people could recognize them any too quick. I’ll be back just as soon as I get them.”

  As Billy rode after the horses, he felt jubilant, as if his chest were going to explode with sheer unadulterated joy. In his mind he kept replaying the shooting, seeing it over and over again.

  By damn, he did good work when the devil was in him!

  105

  April 10, 1868

  They called the windswept cemetery hill just east of town Jack O’Neill’s Ranch in honor of the well-liked bartender who’d been buried there. John Walley—self-declared undertaker—had claimed possession of the graveyard. Walley had started out as a cabinetmaker. A talent that easily had been turned to the manufacture of coffins—a commodity in perpetual short supply on the Colorado frontier, but in particular demand in violence-prone Denver.

  Sarah stood in the blustery cold, bracing herself as the wind tried to billow her dress into a sail and blow her off to Kansas. Low blue-black clouds scudded toward the southeast; misty drops, little more than drizzle, beaded on her wool coat, turning the black fabric light gray. Here and there droplets had streaked.

  She kept her back to the wind, as did Philip. He stood, head down, hat off, heedless of the fine misty rain that was already darkening his blond locks and sticking them to his skull. His gaze was fixed on the two freshly dug graves. One large, the other small.

  God, Sarah’s heart ached for him. He looked as if he were a husk. Nothing more than skin wrapped around a frame of bone and absently clothed. Emptiness lay behind his eyes—a blue vacancy that had retreated beyond distance and time. The old Cherokee stories about soul loss that she’d heard as a girl came back to haunt her.

  Philip had thrown every bit of himself into his marriage. He’d worshiped Aggie, blossomed with the growing promise of a child. Having invested that much of himself, the loss of lover, wife, partner, and child had crushed him the way a stone did a berry.

  Had Aggie’s and his unborn son’s deaths forever ripped the soul from his body?

  “And so we lay our beloved sister, wife, and mother, Bridget Hancock, to rest,” the preacher droned on. “At her side, taken too early, we inter the physical remains of her son, James Butler Hancock. Yet, in doing so, we are reminded that the dead are resurrected in eternal glory. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

  As the preacher went on to recite the Lord’s prayer, Sarah stepped up to Philip and took his hand. Followed his gaze down into the ragged holes
Walley’s men had hacked through the plains’ sod and down into the buff-colored dirt. Both coffins were covered with a smattering of wildflowers that Agatha had purchased for a penny from a street urchin. At least they hadn’t had to use paper flowers as was the winter custom.

  After saying the obligatory amen at the end of the prayer, Sarah squeezed Philip’s hand. “She was my dear friend. Odd, isn’t it? For all the family’s prominence in Arkansas, we children had so few friends.”

  “How am I going to live?” Philip’s voice sounded distant.

  Sarah glanced at Walley, standing in the rear, and nodded her head. The two gravediggers started forward with their shovels. They drove their blades into the dirt piles, and tossed the first shovelfuls back into the holes. The soil thumped hollowly on Aggie’s casket. Little James Butler’s barely made a sound.

  Aggie’s casket. Not Bridget’s. It was how Sarah would remember her. That part of her friend’s identity was hers, while Philip could claim all of her that was Bridget.

  “Dear brother”—she took a deep breath—“how many times have you told me that a physician is one of the most impotent of men? That so many maladies defy your skills?”

  He glanced at the small grave immediately to the right. “My little boy was dead in the womb. I can take that. But not Bridget.” He closed his eyes, tears trickling down to mix with the light rain in his beard. “I don’t want to live. Not without her.”

  She pulled him to her shoulder, pressing his wet head against her, feeling the sobs rack his body.

  “Wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.”

  “I couldn’t stop the bleeding!” He swallowed hard. “And the worst part was, she knew she was dying, and she kept saying ‘Don’t blame yourself, Philip. Promise me.’ But I couldn’t … couldn’t…”

  “Are you God, brother?”

  “My wife and my son are dead”—he shivered against her—“I’m not even dirt.”

  106

  April 26, 1868

  As Butler rode up the mountain pass he realized he’d never been better. The whole of his life had changed, and for the first time ever, he felt truly happy.

  He’d just spent the winter in a four-pole Sheep Eater tipi in the high mountains. The winter’s diet had consisted of pit-roasted mountain sheep, elk, sage grouse, fish, and stews made of netted waxwings. Along with root breads, he’d devoured cakes made of crushed crickets and buffalo pemmican. His body had never been stronger, his wind deeper, or his thoughts more clear. He was possessed of a new energy.

  The men watched him with worried eyes, sometimes they even faded, seemed to slip away for hours, even a day or two.

  Nights around the fire with Mountain Flicker at his side, Cracked Bone Thrower and Red Rain across the fire, not to mention the boys, had been among the finest in his life as he’d found a home in Puhagan’s small family band.

  Cracked Bone Thrower had taught him to make and walk on snowshoes, and he’d learned how to snare elk with a braided rawhide lasso and a bowed fir tree. Snare elk? Who would have ever thought?

  Better yet, on those days when Pettigrew and the men pressed in on him, no one in the Dukurika camp looked at him askance. Not even when he spent hours talking to Jimmy Peterson about St. Francis County, or listening to Johnny Baker chatter on about his two sisters back in Arkadelphia. The Sheep Eaters just shrugged and considered it his special Power—along with those granted him by Water Ghost Woman.

  Though no one had any idea who or what the silver eagle might be.

  The winter had given him time for introspection. He could recall his boyhood in the Arkansas mountains with joy. Remember hiking and hunting in the forested uplands around the White River; reading by the nightly fire during winter’s chill; and the joy of dressing out a hog with anticipation of Maw’s culinary magic as she cooked the loin. It all lingered like honeyed joy in his memory.

  His days in the academy in Pennsylvania had been filled with thrill and terror as he pitted his brain and intellect against that of other students, sometimes retiring in triumph, other times in ignominious defeat. Challenging. Fun. And forever filled with the stress of constant study and testing.

  And then had come the war.

  As his horse climbed the trail behind Cracked Bone Thrower and his pack of dogs, Butler struggled to make sense of the things he’d witnessed, participated in, and somehow survived.

  Glancing off to the side, he could see the men marching along in their tattered uniforms, rifles pitched across their shoulders.

  Phantoms. The creation of his broken mind.

  Doc had told him over and over that they were a figment of his madness, but Water Ghost Woman finally had convinced him. Some part of his white man’s brain had wanted to blame the narcotic Power of the toyatawura. But, damn it, he’d seen Water Ghost Woman, felt her body against his. Died down there in the watery Underworld. And what the hell? He was crazy. If he could see dead Confederate soldiers marching along in ranks, of course he could see terrifying mystical Indian spirit beings.

  That day back at the lake when he’d related the story to Cracked Bone Thrower, who’d told Puhagan, they’d sure as hell believed. Though it amazed them that a taipo, a white man, had survived one of their most dangerous spirit journeys.

  Apple’s hooves cracked hollowly on the rocky trail as Puhagan—up in the lead—pulled up. He was surrounded by six pack dogs, all panting under their loads. Behind the elder followed Cracked Bone Thrower and Red Rain—with her infant daughter in her cradleboard on her back.

  Butler was proud of that little baby girl. He’d been called to help deliver her. Cracked Bone Thrower and Red Rain’s two young sons, Cricket and Water Snake, each with their own packs, immediately threw themselves down to rest. Among the Sheep Eaters everyone carried part of the load.

  Mountain Flicker turned back toward Butler. As she smiled, her teeth gleamed in her triangular face with its broad cheekbones.

  Butler grinned back. My, how life had changed.

  Checking on the men, he saw that they had already dropped onto the rocks and taken seats in the sagebrush. Over his shoulder the view was spectacular. He could see clear across the basin, rimmed as it was on the west-southwest by the Wind River Mountains, and on the south by the Sweetwater Rim. To the east and below he could make out the green line of cottonwoods that marked the Wind River’s course. It was said that it ran through the Owl Creeks in a narrow-walled canyon.

  The trail followed a small canyon cut into the limestone slopes. Ancient, it was said by the Dukurika to have been used since the beginning of time. Clear back to when the first humans escaped from First Woman’s basket. Butler could believe it. The ground was scored by the passing of numerous old travois poles, and winter-bleached piles of horse apples could be seen here and there.

  Earlier Puhagan had told him, “We wouldn’t take the Red Canyon Pass if the snows were not so deep in the high peaks. Too many enemies use this trail. But this early in the season we should be able to get through and down to the safety of Anikahonobita Ogwaide.”

  “Red something.” Butler had struggled with the words. He was learning, but Shoshoni was a difficult language.

  “Red Canyon’s Creek,” Cracked Bone Thrower had told him. “That is where the injured taipo is. The one they have asked the puhagan to heal. The one that perhaps you, too, can help heal.”

  Maybe it was Water Ghost Woman’s gift. Maybe it was the time he’d spent with Philip, but he did have a gift. In addition to delivering Red Rain’s baby, he’d helped Puhagan set broken bones, stitch wounds, and treat fevers. To his, and the men’s, amazement, his patients had all gotten better.

  And then, three days ago, a runner had arrived from Ducha Goobai’s camp by Red Canyon’s Creek informing Puhagan that a white man had been badly mauled by a spring grizzly. Ducha Goobai, Dirty Face, was a longtime friend of Puhagan’s. Would the Spirit healer bring the Man Who Talks to No One—the one who had been given healing Power by Water Ghost Woman—and come imm
ediately?

  Butler wondered how Dukurika from all over the mountains seemed to know about him. As far as he’d seen, throughout the winter, most everyone had spent their time in the lodges.

  The climb continued up through the shallow valley, and over the divide. As they passed through the summit, a panorama unfolded to the north bounded by the tall Absaroka Mountains on the west—the crags dominated by the peak called Iszupa Wean, the Coyote’s Penis. The lower peaks and cliffs were gleaming and snow covered. In the east, the Big Horn Mountains—capped in pristine white—towered over the basin. And in the far north, Cracked Bone Thrower pointed out a mountain. “The whites call those the Pryor Mountains. Named for one of Lewis and Clark’s men. That’s Crow country. Mostly they are horse people, we avoid them by staying in the high mountains.”

  Before them the trail descended in a long slope toward a magnificent line of bloodred sandstone buttes and upthrust ridges. As the sun sank toward the northwest, Puhagan followed the trail—marked as it was with elk and bison tracks. While snow still filled the narrow drainages that incised the slope, green grass, sagebrush buttercup, shooting star, and the first shoots of balsam were coming up.

  Flicker had slowed to walk beside Butler’s horse. Maybe he should have walked like the rest of them, but he’d dedicated himself to leading the packhorse, loaded as it was with the folded covers of three small elkhide lodges and baskets full of provisions. Among the Sheep Eaters it was considered rude to just show up without bringing some contribution to the stew pot.

  And besides, he didn’t trust leaving the horses with the other Wind River Dukurika. It would have been shirking his responsibility to the animals. Even the biggest antihorse skeptic had admitted that the animals had been most helpful packing meat for the camp, but Sheep Eaters were dog people. And with good reason. When they retreated to the high peaks for summer, most of the trails were impassible to horses. Dogs, however, could scamper up and down rocks and over fallen timber, and leap from boulder to boulder with the same agility as people.

  “How far is Red Canyon’s Creek?” Butler asked Mountain Flicker, at the same time keeping an eye on the two boys. Off and on Butler had taken turns walking, and letting them ride on the saddle. From the looks of their stumbling fatigue, it was almost time again.