Thunder Wagon (Wind River Book 2)

by James Reasoner

  Michael felt relieved as he left the hotel. Now he could write a story for tomorrow's edition of the Sentinel that would tell the truth about the Chinese newcomers. Maybe that would help prevent any more trouble and put a stop to the rumors about how the Chinese were coming in to take over the work on the Union Pacific.

  A grin appeared on Michael's face. It looked like this day was going to work out all right after all.

  * * *

  It was late morning before Cole reached Wind River again. On the trail, he had passed Lon Rogers and Frenchy, who were on their way back to the Diamond S after their errand in town. The saddlebags of both men were packed with supplies they had picked up at the general store, and they each lifted a hand to wave at Cole as they passed. They probably wouldn't have been so friendly if they had seen him arguing with their boss earlier, he thought when the two cowboys were out of sight.

  He came into town on the main trail, swung right onto Grenville Avenue, and headed for the livery stable, intending to drop Ulysses off before going on to the office. He hadn't reached the barn when he heard the sharp crackle of gunfire behind him.

  Cole hauled the sorrel around and searched for the source of the trouble. There had been three shots, but they hadn't seemed to be directed at him. People were shouting and running toward the cluster of tent saloons at the eastern end of town, the "hell on wheels" that had arrived with the railhead. Suddenly Cole spotted a man stumbling out of one of the tents. There was a gun in his hand, and as Cole heeled Ulysses into a run, the man turned around shakily and fired back into the tent.

  Leaning forward in the saddle, Cole weaved expertly around wagons and buggies and other horsebackers as he galloped toward the man with the gun. The man was earing back the hammer of his weapon for another shot when Cole reached him. Cole left the saddle in a dive that sent him crashing into the gunman. Both of them went down.

  Cole landed on top, as he had planned. The impact knocked the breath out of the other man and made him drop the gun. Planting his knees on the man's chest, Cole palmed out his own Colt and growled, "That'll be enough shooting! What's going on here?"

  A voice behind Cole shouted, "Don't let him up, Marshal! He's crazy! Tried to kill us all!"

  Cole glanced back over his shoulder, saw a man in a gray-striped suit and dark vest emerge from the tent. The man had black, curly hair and a thick mustache, and there was a smear of blood on his right cheek underneath his eye. He put a hand to the injury, which looked like a bullet crease, and winced.

  "What's this all about, Langdon?" demanded Cole. He recognized the man with the mustache as Abner Langdon, the owner of this particular tent saloon.

  Langdon pointed at the man Cole had knocked down and said, "Nichols there tried to get rough with one of my girls. He was already upset because he'd lost some money at the poker table, and when he started bothering the girl and Bert told him he'd have to leave, he pulled his gun and started shooting up the place."

  A burly, fair-haired man appeared at Langdon's shoulder. "That's right, Marshal," he called. "That's what happened. You better lock up that son of a bitch."

  The man Cole was holding down—Nichols, Langdon had called him—abruptly let out a moan. He hadn't struggled since Cole had tackled him, and now as Cole looked more closely at him, he saw the dark stain on the man's midsection. Nichols's eyes were closed, and he didn't look like much of a threat anymore. Cole holstered his gun and moved into a crouch beside the man.

  "He's been shot," Cole said grimly as he pulled aside Nichols's shirt and saw the bullet hole in his belly. "Somebody fetch Dr. Kent."

  One of the bystanders started down the street at a run, heading for the physician’s office. Cole looked at Langdon again and went on, "Who shot him?"

  The fair-haired man called Bert spoke up. "I did," he declared belligerently. "What the hell was I supposed to do, stand there and let him gun down me and the boss without even fighting back?"

  Cole straightened and moved over to the two men. He held out a hand. "Let me see your gun."

  Bert took a Starr four-barrel pepperbox from his pocket and handed it to Cole, who sniffed the barrels. The gun had been fired recently, all right.

  "Only shot him once," Bert said. "That was all it took. He was a pretty wild shot even before he was hit."

  Cole nodded, recalling the shaky way Nichols had aimed at the tent. He looked down at the wounded man again just as Dr. Judson Kent came bustling up and knelt beside Nichols.

  It took Kent only a glance to determine what Cole could also see for himself. "This man is badly hurt," the doctor said. "I need some men to take him down to my office as quickly as possible. Carefully, though," he added as several men stepped forward to lift Nichols's unconscious form.

  Cole caught Kent's arm as the doctor started to follow his patient. "I'll be down there in a few minutes," he said. Kent nodded and hurried on down the street.

  "What about my gun?" Bert asked. "Aren't you going to give it back?"

  "Not just yet," Cole replied. "Not until I've talked to some of the people who saw this ruckus start."

  Bert's face, which was naturally florid, flushed even more as he started to step forward toward Cole. Abner Langdon moved smoothly between his employee and the lawman and said, "That's fine, Marshal. I'm sure anyone you talk to will tell you that it happened just as we said. But you go right ahead. Bert and I know you're just doing your job, don't we, Bert?"

  "Yeah, I guess so," Bert said grudgingly. He didn't like giving up his gun, even for a little while.

  Plenty of the saloon's customers had come out of the tent behind Langdon and Bert, and it took Cole only a few minutes to question them and determine that the two men had been telling the truth. He handed the pepperbox back to Bert, who accepted it with the same lack of grace with which he had given it up.

  "You'd better try to keep things under control a little better in your place," Cole advised Langdon. "Right now Wind River's still pretty wide open, but one of these days folks are going to demand that all these killings stop."

  Langdon shrugged. "It's not my fault if people can't handle their drinking and their tempers, Marshal. But we'll try to avoid such situations in the future."

  "See that you do," Cole snapped. He headed down the street toward Kent's office as Langdon, Bert, and their customers went back into the tent saloon.

  Cole heaved a sigh as he walked along. It wasn't like this was the first saloon killing he'd run into since taking the job of marshal. There were plenty of saloons in town, and they drew customers from all of this part of the country, since Wind River was the only real settlement between Rawlins and the Snake River, farther to the west.

  Nobody was ever going to mistake the motley mix of railroaders, cowboys, trappers, gamblers, and outlaws for a bunch of Sunday-school psalm singers, either. Men like that were accustomed to settling their own differences, and settling them sudden and violent-like. Cole knew that. But it was still his job to keep the streets of the settlement as safe as he could.

  The sheet was already drawn up over the face of the man on Kent's examining table when Cole entered the doctor's office. Kent had taken off his coat and was drying his hands on a towel, probably after washing off some blood. He shook his head as Cole looked an unspoken question at him.

  "The fellow never had a chance," Kent said. "But you seemed to know that as well as I, even without any medical training."

  "I've seen men gut-shot before." Cole nodded. "Sometimes it takes 'em longer than that to die, but they generally wind up dead."

  "Are you going to arrest that man Bert?"

  Cole shook his head. "Nichols pulled his gun and fired the first shot."

  Kent put his towel down. "One of the disadvantages of being the first outpost of civilization in a wilderness, I suppose, is that it attracts all sorts of violent men."

  "It'll change one of these days," Cole said.

  "Yes, but will any of us still be alive to see that day?" Kent asked with a slight smile.
r />   That was a question Cole couldn't answer.

  Chapter 7

  Former brigadier general John Stephen Casement was only five feet four inches tall, but he seemed taller than that to the hundreds of Union Pacific workers who followed his orders. As the construction chief of the UP, Jack Casement was in charge of the actual details of laying the tracks, as well as the surveying and grading work that had to be done miles in advance of the steel rails themselves.

  Grenville Dodge might be the brains of the project, but Casement was its heart and soul. He might turn up anywhere along the fledgling line, ready to bark orders, spot problems before they became catastrophes, and generally keep things moving.

  Today the stocky Casement was riding on horseback several miles ahead of the work train, along with a couple of his assistants. The roadbed through this stretch had already been laid out and graded, of course, and Casement had sent a crew out here earlier in the day to make sure the bed was still ready for the rails.

  Sometimes a storm could wash out part of the route, or a wandering herd of buffalo might chop up the roadbed so badly with their hooves that it would have to be graded again before the real work could proceed. Casement wanted to make sure nothing was going to interfere with the progress of his railroad.

  The scouts hadn't reported back yet, however, and as the day advanced toward noon Casement had begun to worry. Taking a couple of men armed with Spencer carbines with him, he had ridden out here to take a look for himself.

  A lot of this prairie appeared flat at first glance, but that was deceptive. There was a rolling nature to the plains that concealed ridges and gullies and long slopes. Casement and his assistants were nearing the top of one such slope when they heard the faint popping sound of distant gunfire.

  "Hold it!" Casement called sharply, habitually lifting a hand in the military signal to halt.

  The shooting continued, somewhere on the other side of the ridge ahead of the three riders. Casement's assistants nervously lifted the carbines they carried across their saddles.

  "What do you think, Jack?" one of the men asked after a moment.

  "Sounds like our boys are in trouble, all right." Casement leaned forward in the saddle, chewed the unlit stub of a cigar in his mouth for a few seconds, then said, "Let's go. We won't ride right in until we know what's going on, though."

  The men with him exchanged a look that said they would have preferred hotfooting it back to the work train, where there were plenty of rifles and men to use them, but they both knew better than to argue with Casement. They fell in behind the construction boss as he nudged his horse into motion again.

  The three riders reined in at the top of the rise. They had been following the roadbed, and the graded path was easy to see as it traced its way down the far side of the slope and across a wide valley.

  Dust hung in the air about two miles to the west. Casement pulled out his field glasses and lifted them to his eyes. Frowning, he studied the scene. He could make out some moving figures on horseback, but the distance was too great for him to tell anything else about them. They seemed to be galloping around a small cluster of rocks about a hundred yards north of the roadbed.

  The shooting was more sporadic now, and as Casement watched, the riders closed in on the rocks. There were a few more shots and some milling around, then the men on horseback galloped away, crossing the roadbed and veering off to the south. Casement watched their progress until they vanished over a distant ridge.

  "It doesn't look good," he growled to the men with him. "I'd say somebody ambushed our scouts and pinned them down in some rocks. The fight's over now, though."

  "What about our men?" asked one of the assistants.

  "Let's go find out. I don't imagine it'll be a very pretty sight, though."

  Cautiously, Casement rode forward, the other two men trailing him with their rifles ready. By the time they reached the rocks, buzzards had begun to wheel high overhead in the blue sky, confirming what Casement suspected.

  They found the five scouts sprawled among the rocks. The men had been shot and scalped. Mercifully, none of them had been left alive. One of Casement's assistants turned away and heaved, while the other couldn't even bring himself to look at the corpses.

  Casement regarded them with the steely detachment of a veteran soldier, however. Only the anger glittering in his eyes showed how deeply he was affected by this atrocity.

  Casement turned his horse and stared off to the south, where the marauders had disappeared. "That's Shoshone country," he grunted. "They hadn't given us any trouble . . . until now."

  "What are we going to do, Jack?" asked the man who hadn't gotten sick. He was looking around nervously, jerking his head from side to side as if he expected a band of murderous savages to appear at any moment out of thin air.

  "We'll ride back to the work train and alert everyone there," Casement said. "Then I'm heading for the telegraph station at Wind River. The army's got to know about this."

  "You think they'll send some troops?"

  Casement rolled the cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. "Damn right they will. The country's got a lot riding on the completion of the transcontinental railroad. If the army has to put down an Indian uprising or two along the way, then so be it."

  He kicked his horse into a run and headed east without looking back to see if the others were following him. Somebody was threatening to slow up his work, and Jack Casement wasn't going to stand for that!

  * * *

  Cole met Billy Casebolt on the way to the marshal's office after he had left Ulysses at the stable. "I heard some shootin' a while ago," the deputy explained, "but I had my hands full and couldn't come see about it until now."

  "Somebody tried to shoot up that tent saloon owned by Abner Langdon. Langdon's bouncer shot the fella. Killed him."

  Casebolt shook his head. "Damn. Folks go for their guns mighty quicklike around here. Anybody else hurt?"

  "No, we were lucky this time—just one dead man." Cole started back to the office with Casebolt beside him and asked, "You said you had your hands full?"

  Casebolt's frown deepened. "Yeah, and it was a mite strange, too. You recollect what Doc Kent was tellin' us at the cafe this mornin' about that feller with his ear cut off?"

  "Sure. I'm not likely to forget about that."

  "Well, it happened again."

  Cole stopped and turned to stare at his deputy. "What did you say, Billy?"

  "A gent come down to the office with his head all bandaged up and said he'd been jumped early this mornin' whilst he was leavin' Miss Lucy's place. Couple of fellers knocked him down, stole his money, and sliced his right ear clean off."

  "Did he get a good look at them?" asked Cole.

  "Didn't get any sort of a look at all," Casebolt answered mournfully. "It wasn't dawn yet and was still pretty dark."

  Cole rubbed his jaw. "Wonder why Dr. Kent didn't say anything about this one?"

  "Oh, the feller didn't go to Doc Kent. He staggered back into Miss Lucy's, and she patched up his head for him. He said she done a good enough job for him and that he didn't want no real doctor like Doc Kent. Said he'd rather have a whore takin' care of him than a sawbones any day."

  "I reckon that's his right." Cole hesitated a second, then asked, "Was he one of the men who were mixed up in that fracas last night?"

  Casebolt nodded solemnly. "Sure was. He didn't much like comin' to the marshal's office to report what happened to him, neither. But whoever robbed him and cut him up got off with his daddy's watch, and he wanted us to know about it in case we turned it up. I told him we'd keep our eyes open but that we couldn't promise nothin'."

  "Did he stay in town?"

  "Couldn't say for sure. He said somethin' about goin' on up the line with a handcar full of supplies later on this mornin'. Could be it's left by now."

  Cole thought that was probably the case. His frown deepened as he turned over in his mind everything Casebolt had told him. This attack was a dupl
icate of the one Dr. Kent had reported, and it had to have been carried out by the same criminals. The robberies themselves weren't that unusual; it was a rare night in Wind River when somebody didn't get robbed. But this business of cutting an ear off the victims . . . that was definitely out of the ordinary.

  Cole wanted to do some poking around in this matter, but it would have to wait. There were more pressing problems than somebody with a knife and a penchant for cutting off ears. He said to Casebolt, "You'd better go get some lunch, then I've got a job for you. I want you to ride out and see if you can find Two Ponies' band."

  Casebolt looked at him intently. "What'd you find out yonder at that farm?"

  "Some prints of unshod horses," Cole said, "and some moccasin tracks, too. It sure looks like Indians were responsible for the raid."

  "Any arrows or anythin' else like that?"

  Cole shook his head. "I thought of the same thing. Without some markings to go by, we can't be sure the Shoshones are to blame. I thought you'd have a better chance than anybody else to find out the truth, Billy, since you've spent some time with Two Ponies and his people." Cole added, "Of course, if the Shoshones are on the warpath, I could be sending you into some mighty bad trouble."

  "I'll take my chances," Casebolt declared without hesitation. "I trust ol' Two Ponies 'bout as much as I do any redskin out here. He's a good man, and his people have always been friendly to me."

  "Sawyer's pushing me to call in the army," Cole said quietly. "I don't want to do that until I've got some proof. That could start a war quicker than anything else."

  "You're right about that, Marshal. May take me a day or two, but I reckon I can scare up Two Ponies and find out the truth."

  "Thanks, Billy."

  "You'll be all right here in town till I get back? Folks're still mighty touchy 'bout them Chinamen."

  "They'll get over that," Cole said confidently, hoping he was right. Casebolt's comment reminded him that he had intended to have a talk with Simone McKay. There just hadn't been time so far. Events had kept him hopping.