Winchester 1886

by William W. Johnstone

  Certainly, he had gotten his name back in the newspapers. Will Drake, legendary lawman, had killed the “Ace of Spades” in Denver. Self-defense. The mad-dog murderer of an innocent woman in eastern Wyoming had pulled a gun, tried to gun down the legendary lawman and author, but Drake had shot him first. Even used the killer’s rifle.

  “Poetic justice,” was how that scribe had put it in the Denver Post.

  Eastern newspapers had picked up those reports, and Will Drake was again on top. But he needed to go a bit higher, and he knew how to do that.

  Bring in Danny Waco, the West’s most notorious outlaw.

  Drake knew where he would most likely find him.

  Elizabethtown. E-Town for short. Or, as some of the more colorful writers put it, “Hell Town.”

  Lying in the shadow of Baldy Mountain, E-Town had seen its ups and downs since it was founded after the discovery of gold back in 1866. In fact, it became New Mexico Territory’s first incorporated town. For a while, E-Town was gloriously wild and wicked, the Colfax County seat, boasting a population of 7,000—during spring and summer. You didn’t want to be there in winter, not in those mountains, so folks would pack up, move south, then come back after the thaw.

  That was until the gold played out, the county seat moved to Cimarron, and everyone left. But not for long. One thing about some mining towns—they lived, died, and were reborn. E-Town had been reborn a couple times, never regaining that glory from the late 1860s and early 1870s, but it just would not stay dead.

  Miners had started dredging, although, to Will Drake, such an idea sounded ludicrous. How could you dredge in a place with so little water? But, somehow, they had managed to make it work, loading the ore into huge wagons and hauling the cargo up and over Raton Pass to Trinidad, Colorado.

  Riding down the main street, Drake heard a fiddler playing in some stone saloon. Most of the buildings were rotting cabins and crumbling ruins, leftovers from early E-Town. The walls of the livery looked as if they wouldn’t stop the wind, but he heard the whistle of wind from one of the mines or maybe one of the dredges. He wasn’t sure.

  He glanced up at the hill, saw the iron fence around the cemetery, and found the saloon with the fiddler. Several idlers were hanging around on the boardwalk, and the hitching rails were full of horses.

  He figured he would find Danny Waco there.

  As he rode into the town, Drake wondered if perhaps he should have leveled with Jimmy Mann. After all, they had been friends once, had ridden across the Indian Nations together, probably had saved each other’s lives a few times. Jimmy was a good shot, a good man to have around. Besides, he had a legitimate reason to go after Danny Waco.

  All Drake wanted was the glory, the prestige, a few more book deals, and another lecture circuit to take him around the country. New York. Chicago. Boston. San Francisco. Seattle. Charleston. Richmond. Kansas City. Omaha. Salt Lake City.

  He could go to the local law, but decided against it. Maybe in the old days, E-Town had a tough lawman, but the sheriff or marshal or constable or whatever they called him was probably some portly old man who minded his business and didn’t even pack a gun.

  In front of the two story saloon, which had no name painted outside, Drake reined up and smiled at one of the loafers. “Full up, I see.” His tone was friendly as he pointed at the rails. In answer, one of the horses lifted its tail and began to urinate.

  “Yeah,” the loafer said.

  The loafer, Drake knew, was an Indian, a big, stout hombre with hair in braids, taller than any Navajo or Apache that Drake had seen around that part of the country. It reminded him of something else that lawman up in Trinidad had mentioned. Danny Waco had arrived in the Colorado town with two men, one of them believed to be Gil Millican, his longtime accomplice. And the other? A Sioux Indian.

  “Well . . .” Drake nodded at the building next door. “Reckon I should get a little food in my belly before I start drinking, eh?” He eased his horse down the muddy street, and dismounted in front of a log cabin that had no name, either, but was obviously a café.

  He removed his linen duster, took the Winchester 1886—the rifle he had used to kill Ian Nisbet—from the scabbard and stepped onto the boardwalk, trying to get most of the mud off his boots. He did not look back toward the saloon or the Indian and moved inside, walking straight toward an empty table. He slid the rifle atop the table and sucked in a deep breath.

  “What’ll it be?”

  He pushed his hat brim up, wet his lips, and smiled at the young waitress, a plump girl, red hair, and freckled face. Drake had expected to find some Mexican waitressing in a town like E-Town. “The back door.”

  “Huh?”

  “Where’s your back door?”

  She blinked. Finally motioned. “Through the kitchen.”

  “Is there a back entrance to the saloon next door?”

  “Huh?”

  He wished the waitress had been a Mexican. Or anyone with a brain in her head.

  He repeated the question.

  “Yeah . . .” She said after a long pause. “I think so.”

  He pulled a coin from his jacket pocket. “Good.” He rose, taking the rifle with him, and moving past the redhead toward the door that led to the kitchen.

  That is, Danny Waco thought, the worst fiddler I have ever heard. He checked his watch, wondering just how much longer he would have to sit in the poor excuse for a saloon in the poor excuse for a town.

  At last, the door to the storeroom opened, and the man with the bowler hat came inside, Winchester at the ready.

  Sight of that big rifle caused Waco to leap from his chair and bellow, “That’s my gun!”

  The lawman whirled toward him and tried to bring the ’86 up to his shoulder, but he was too late. Fool never had a chance.

  Indian had been standing with his back to the wall, behind the fiddle player, waiting for the John Law to come sneaking into the saloon. It made Waco think that he had been smart, killing Tonkawa Tom like he had done, replacing him with the Sioux.

  The big Indian stepped forward and slipped that pig-sticker of his between the lawdog’s back ribs. The man gasped, but that was all, because Indian had stuck him good. The rifle fell to the floor. Indian grabbed the dead man’s shoulders and dragged him back into the storeroom, probably outside, leaving just a trail of blood.

  The music had stopped—for that, Waco was grateful—and the patrons and barkeep stared as he moved to the floor where the law had just expired. He snatched the rifle from the floor, lowered the hammer, and screamed in delight. “It’s mine, I tell you!” he shouted to no one in particular.

  “Sure it is.” Gil Millican had been standing at the far end of the bar, holding that big Smith & Wesson revolver in case he needed to kill the law.

  “No!” Waco stepped to the bar. People gave him a clear path, and the bartender quickly filled him a shot glass of rye. “It’s the one from the train.”

  Millican holstered the revolver and walked down the creaking floor. At that moment, most of the drinkers decided to take their business elsewhere. Indian stepped back inside, wiping the blood off his hands.

  That lawman had been a fool. Figured he could ride into a town like E-Town and get the drop on Danny Waco. As if he or Indian or Gil Millican or half the outlaws hiding out in such a town, wouldn’t recognize a man like Will Drake, legendary lawman and author. Will Drake, deader than dirt because he was a fool.

  Waco held out the rifle for Millican to study.

  “The train?” Millican said.

  “In the Nations, fool. The one in the express car. Look!” He pointed at the barrel, the marking of the caliber

  50-100

  450

  “You sure?”

  “Of course, I’m sure. It’s the rifle that sharper cheated me out of. In Caldwell.”

  Millican looked at the Indian. “But it wasn’t that cheat that Indian just knifed. Wasn’t him at all. That was—”

  “I don’t rightly care who that
was. Will Drake, a cardsharper from Caldwell or German Stevens. He’s dead. And he brung me my rifle. My rifle!” Waco rubbed the stock and barrel and laughed before turning back to the bar to pick up the shot glass and down the whiskey. “Mighty nice of the law, don’t you think so, boys?”

  Millican scratched his chin. Indian just stood there, waiting.

  “What’s it been?” Waco asked. “Six months. No, closer to eight.” His head shook. “But now it’s back with me.” He shook his head again. Luck. Fate. Whatever you wanted to call it. He had that rifle, the 1886 Winchester in .50 caliber. He had a job waiting for him in Tascosa. That bank would go down a lot easier with this rifle. Then he could just kill German Stevens and not have to worry about splitting the take with that cutthroat.

  Waco laughed again. Fate. That’s what it had to be.

  After shaking his head, he motioned toward the door. “Might be time to leave this burg, boys.” He knew that knifing that law would rile the good, God-fearing citizens of E-Town and maybe even the territorial law.

  It was, after all, a long, hard ride to Tascosa, Texas, and German Stevens was waiting.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Tascosa, Texas

  Late Spring 1895

  The town blended in with the sand, and the dust, and the canyons, mesas, and perhaps even the river—if anyone would call the Canadian River a river at that time of year. Maybe a creek, although it looked no bigger than those irrigation ditches the Mexican sheepherders had dug back when the settlement was called Plaza Atascosa.

  It was a town of adobe huts and jacales. You wouldn’t find a frame home or a log structure larger than a lean-to or outhouse. In fact, you would hardly even find a tree in that part of the world, even along the shallow sand bog they called a river. About the only things that country grew, other than scrub and grass, were tombstones, and most of those were rocks or crosses manufactured from broken spokes of wagon wheels or planks pulled from wagon beds with names carved with pocket knives into the faded wood. The graveyard, however, seemed to be a veritable garden.

  Although Tascosa dated back to the last years of the Comanche troubles, it had boomed in the 1880s, serving as shipping quarters for the big ranches of the area—the XIT, the LIT, the LS, the Frying Pan, and the LX. During those years, Charlie Siringo, Billy the Kid, Dave Rudabaugh, and Pat Garrett had done their share of drinking and gambling in the saloons. More cowboys passed through there on the Tascosa-Dodge City trail, herding beef to the railroad in Kansas. Tascosa had become the county seat in 1880, and the stone courthouse still stood, although it had been converted into the bank.

  Oh, Tascosa remained the Oldham County seat, but the courthouse had moved into a smaller building. That was merely another sign of the times. You would hardly be able to count forty or fifty people, although Boot Hill quadrupled the population. By Jacks, they probably let the dead vote, which was the only way that Tascosa hadn’t lost its designation as county seat.

  The beginning of the end came back in 1887, when the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway laid tracks on the other side of the riverbank. Most businesses and entrepreneurs had moved to the rails, but the ranchers were a stubborn lot. They liked Tascosa, and wouldn’t let it lose its designation as county seat. They liked the country, and the whiskey, and the rawness of life and liberty. They liked a town where a man could wear his pistols on his person and not have to worry about getting arrested or his skull bashed in by some gun hand with a badge. They liked those old days, when a man could shoot another man in a quarrel and not have to worry about a hangman’s rope or a wasted day or two in that hot courthouse listening to some pettifogging lawyer.

  They liked the money the cattle and cowboys brought in to Tascosa.

  Danny Waco and German Stevens liked that, too.

  “Ja.” The German gunman grinned and refilled his stein with more thick black beer. “Dat is plan. Ja.” He nodded and sipped his beer, leaving thick sudsy foam on his handlebar mustache. “Ya do vell, ve be rich.”

  “Yeah.” Waco walked to the window, pulled back the curtain, and stared out the dirty glass at the dirty street and the dirty saloon. “So let me get this right. While Gil, me, and my Indian are in the bank, you and those two ol’ boys”—he tilted his hat slightly at the two gunmen German Stevens had brought along—“will be waitin’ in that grog shop.” He cleared his throat. “Ahem. . . . makin’ sure nothing goes wrong.”

  “Ja.” The Hun’s head nodded.

  He was a big man with a big head and big mustache. Despite the heat of the Texas Panhandle, he was dressed in a black broadcloth suit that didn’t fit well at all. In fact, it looked as if his buttons would pop off at any moment. His blond hair was close-cropped, probably shorn so no one would really notice how bald the fat man was getting. The eyes were cold blue, but for such a big man with a fat belly, his feet and hands were downright tiny.

  German Stevens carried two Remington .44s, nickel plated with pearl handles, stuck in a red sash. He must have thought he was Wild Bill Hickok or some gunman like that, instead of a fat, beer-swilling idiot who had stepped off the boat and found a pretty good job as a hired thug in the Five Points region of New York killing men and maybe two women. When the law started coming after him in New York, German Stevens had moved west, killing men and maybe two other women in Kansas, Missouri, the Indian Territory, and Texas.

  He had decided to branch out. Rob a bank. With help from Danny Waco.

  “Sounds simple.” Waco stepped away from the window and found a bottle of some sweet-tasting syrup that Stevens considered whiskey. Tasted like peppermint candy. A petticoat’s drink.

  Stevens kept nodding as he swallowed down the rest of his beer. “Ja,” he said happily. “Ja. Very easy. Ve vill be rich.”

  The two gunmen tagging along with Stevens were young men, slim, out-of-work cowhands by the cut of their clothes and the condition of the six-shooters in their holsters. They had likely been fired by one of the ranching outfits along the Canadian River, had a grudge, or like German Stevens, just didn’t cotton to work.

  “And if something goes wrong?” Danny Waco asked.

  German Stevens belched. “Nein. Vat could go wrong?”

  “Reckon it’s about that time,” Oldham County Sheriff Clete Stride said on that Saturday as he compared the time on his Illinois pocket watch with what the Regulator clock on the wall showed.

  Jimmy Mann answered by jacking a shell into the chamber of his Winchester .45-70, lowered the hammer, and fingered out another cartridge from the box, sliding the long brass shell into the loading gate on the rifle.

  “The way it’ll work”—Stride snapped shut the case on his watch, and let it fall into his vest pocket—“is this way . . .” He went at it again, the same way he had told Jimmy for two weeks. The payroll would come by stagecoach from the railroad, with riders from various outfits serving as guards. The moneyboxes would be unloaded into the bank, which once had been the county courthouse. It was the sole permanent structure in the dying town, made of stone more than a foot thick. The boxes would be loaded into the vault, and closed up until payday on Monday. “I hope you’re wrong, Mann,” Stride finished.

  “So do I, Sheriff.” Jimmy Mann knew that was a lie. He had come this far. He needed to end it. Today.

  He saw his reflection in the mirror and practically did not recognize who he had become over the fall, winter, and spring. He was leaner, harder, his hair grayer, but he was not an old man. His face was bearded and the whites of his eyes red. His left hand still had no feeling.

  Much like the rest of me, he thought.

  Jimmy had been in Tascosa for weeks, waiting. His brother and his brother’s family, including young James Mann were maybe a day’s ride from there. If he had any feeling left in him, he would have ridden to see his brother, to see James, to rejoin the living. Instead, he had remained in Tascosa, waiting for Danny Waco.

  He had become a dead man, living on hate, living for revenge.

  However, he had pinne
d on that deputy marshal’s badge and could see how tarnished it was. He told himself that he should not wear it, that he did not deserve to wear it. Everything he had sworn when he had first became a lawman he had trampled in the dust along the trails through Indian Territory, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico Territory and Texas.

  No, his search for Danny Waco needed to end today.

  It had to end today.

  “I’ve got two men atop the roof of the bank,” Stride said. “Five more waiting inside the bank. Three at the livery, up in the loft, two at the undertaker’s on the south side of town. Got two men with spyglasses atop Boot Hill. And that busts my budget for two years, Mann, paying these boys.”

  “You’ll get it back, Stride.” Jimmy made himself stand. He pulled on his hat. “Rewards for Danny Waco and German Stevens will make you richer beyond your years even after you pay off those . . .” He had almost said clowns. Instead, he said nothing.

  Jimmy touched the knob, looked down the street, and opened the door. “I’ll wait in the saloon. Keep you covered in case anything happens.”

  “All right,” Clete Stride said to the door as it slammed shut.

  Fluid piano keys rang out an off-key version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” from the Canadian River Saloon as Jimmy Mann pushed through the batwing doors. He kept the big rifle in the crook of his arm and did not step inside the saloon until he was certain Danny Waco and German Stevens were not around.

  He could see only the back of the piano player’s head. A woman who didn’t look like she fit in the place. The saloon seemed quiet, with only a few cowboys drinking beers, their boots propped up on the brass rail that ran underneath the bar.

  The owner of the establishment had spent a small fortune in freight charges to have that bar and back bar hauled to Tascosa during the glory days. Likely, he would move it to some other town as soon as Tascosa was dead and buried.