Dooley’s head shook at that logic. After a sigh, he said, “Don’t you think the ferry man might be suspicious as to why I’m traveling with a girl in buckskins when I crossed that same ferry just a few hours afore with a man as big as one of those steamboats lining the wharves in town?”
She laughed again, turned the pony around, and dashed up the bank.
“Hell, no, love. Folks in this part of the country minds their own business. Wagon, ho-oooo!”
CHAPTER TWENTY
All of the ferry workers did eye the wagon, the riderless horse, the dirty woman, and Dooley Monahan with both suspicion and trepidation, but nobody said anything, and no one came close to the wagon. Dooley paid the toll, and they rode south—but only for a short ways.
Dooley had to remind Zee that the wagon that was loaded down with supplies and a ripening corpse had been stolen from a farm just a ways south, and the owners might want it back.
So they turned east, sticking close to the southern banks of the Missouri River for a few miles before the mosquitoes and gnats drove them about a hundred and fifty yards farther south.
As dusk fell, they rode back to the Missouri, where they made a cold camp that night, too close to both the farm and Yankton to risk a fire. Zee fashioned a couple of fishhooks, and they sat on the banks while Zee fished, watching a stern-wheel riverboat make its way up the river, showering the night sky with sparks from the smokestacks like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Zee landed two fair-sized catfish, and the hunger in both of their stomachs caused them to forget about Yankton and the farmers. They gutted, cleaned, and roasted the fish quickly, doused the fire, and ate.
“Pretty good eatin’, ain’t it, love?”
Dooley nodded, and licked his fingers.
“Like mine with paprika, though,” Dooley added. She looked up, “Hey, did Pa ask you to buy some paprika whilst you was in Yankton?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Hell. That’s a shame.”
Dooley tossed the bones into the ashes of the fire. “What did you use for bait, by the way?” he suddenly asked.
“Ol’ Ewin’s brains,” she answered. “What else?”
Dooley spent the rest of the night on his knees, puking into the wide, muddy river.
* * *
The next day brought them into the Niobrara Reservation, which made Dooley worry that maybe the Santee Sioux confined here had been family and friends of the Indian war party that had attacked Dooley and Zee what seemed like an eternity ago. Zee, however, told Dooley that those dead Indians had been Brulé Sioux from up north of there. He didn’t know why, but he believed her.
They made it through the reservation, too, and that night camped on the banks of the Niobrara. They made a fire this time without much worry, and Zee fried up salt pork for supper, but Dooley stuck with black coffee and some soda crackers. His stomach had not completely recovered from the catfish dinner.
By the next afternoon, Ewing Atkinson was beginning to smell and draw flies.
“Maybe we should bury him and forget about the reward,” Dooley said. He spoke through his bandanna, which he had pulled up over his mouth and nose to reduce the stench and awful reminder of part of the cargo they were hauling in the back of a wagon stolen from churchgoing farmers southeast of here.
“Huh?”
Dooley repeated his suggestion.
“Nah.” She spit out brown juice and tilted her head south. “Little town called Maple Grove about two miles from here. Ain’t no grove to it. And no maples this side of the Missouri. But they’s a lawdog there. And a bank. I know. We robbed the bank four years back. Maybe five. No, four. Well, four and a half.”
Maple Grove—all seven buildings, one corral, and no maple trees or any trees for that matter—was more than two miles, but fewer than twelve, and the wagon pulled up beside a building with a sign nailed to the post in front of the hitching rail. The sign read:
BAR
BANK
CONSTABLE
Dooley set the brake and wrapped the reins around the handle. He nodded at the sign. “Is that in order of importance?”
After a short chuckle, Zee shook her head. “Allfee-betickal.”
“Bank comes before bar,” Dooley pointed out.
“It did four and a half years ago.” She moved her horse to the other side of the wagon, pulled her hat down low over her forehead, and pulled the bandanna up. “You best do all the talkin’,” she said. “In case it’s the same lawdog and banker who was workin’ four and a half years back.”
It wasn’t. Zee must have forgotten that Doc Watson had killed the banker four and a half years ago, and that Frank Handley had trampled the constable to death. The bank had not recovered and had been forced to shutter its doors a month after the raid. The bartender had replaced the constable, but he had not been working that morning four and a half years ago.
He gave Dooley a whiskey on the house.
“Ewing Anderson?” the barkeep/lawman asked.
“Atkinson,” Dooley enunciated, and then spelled out the name. The lawman worked through one drawer, closed it, opened the other, and made it halfway through it before he pulled out a weathered, crumpled piece of parchment.
“Ewing Atkinson,” the man read. He was slight of build, with bloodshot eyes, beard stubble on his chin but a well-groomed mustache. He wore red sleeve garters to push up the arms of his pink calico shirt, and an unbuttoned vest. He wore no star, no badge, or any sort of identification, but, then, Dooley did not expect a lawman had much business in a town like Maple Grove.
“Six foot seven inches tall, two hundred and seventy pounds. Uses a bowie knife with deadly accuracy and is known for decorating his person with scalps.”
Dooley nodded. “That would be him.”
“And it says he’s wanted for.” The man’s lips moved, but no words escaped as he read and read and read before finally passing the wanted poster to Dooley. “Been easier had they just listed what that dude hadn’t done.” He poured himself a bracer, downed it, smiled with pleasure, and asked, “That him?”
“It’s certainly his likeness.” Dooley slid the paper across the bar. “You want to identify him?”
“Guess it comes with my other job.” The man grabbed his hat and a notepad, stuck a pencil over his ear, and held the door open for Dooley.
They stepped outside, and the bartender/constable spotted Zerelda Dobbs. He studied her, looked curiously at Dooley, and said, “Who is that?”
“I’m his fiancée,” Zee called out, and laughed so hard she had to slap her thigh, sending clouds of dust up toward the buzzing flies.
“What the hell is that smell?” the bartender/ constable asked.
“Ewing Atkinson,” Dooley answered, and led the young man to the wagon. He climbed into the back, unloosened the tarp, flung it over, and pulled away the blankets covering the bloated face of the corpse. It was harder to do than Dooley had imagined, and quite grotesque, for the blood had dried and stuck to the wool. Skin ripped. Dooley’s bowels and stomach began to trouble him, but he looked away as the blanket tore free.
“Close it,” the man said in a gasp. “Close it. It’s him. I’ll swear to it. I’ll swear to anything just as long as you cover him back up.”
Dooley did not need any further instructions.
The bartender/constable stared again at Zee as he made his way back to the bar/insolvent bank. This time he did not hold the door open for Dooley but made straight for the bar, uncorked the bottle of gin, and drank it down greedily. Dooley closed the door behind him and went to the bar, hooking his boot on the brass rail and leaning onto the rough, warped pine.
He hoped the bartender/constable would offer him some gin, or anything, and Dooley was willing to pay.
The man just drank, until he finally let out a heavy sigh and tossed his hat onto the bar. It slid down to a bunch of empty beer mugs.
“Well?” Dooley asked.
“I’ll have to write you out a receipt,”
the man—now acting as a town constable—said. He pointed to the open vault, still hanging off one hinge from that robbery not five years ago. “Don’t have the funds to pay you the three hundred and thirty-six dollars you got coming.”
“All right,” Dooley said. He remembered the receipt he had carried for the first outlaw, Jason Baylor, he had killed. He had carried that one for a long, long time.
The lawman pulled the pencil from his ear, found that note tablet, and began writing. He had nice penmanship, too, though not quite as pretty as Doc Watson’s.
“What’s your name?” the constable asked.
“Dooley,” Dooley said, and spelled it, too. “Dooley Monahan. That’s M-o-n-a-h-a-n.”
The middle-aged man stopped writing and lifted his face to stare Dooley right in the eye. “The Dooley Monahan?” he asked.
“Don’t know about that the part, but I’m the only Dooley Monahan I know.”
“The Dooley Monahan that wiped out the Baylor brothers?” the constable asked.
Dooley sighed. “And their cousin,” he added with regret.
“You’re the most famous bounty hunter we’ve ever had in these parts, Mr. Monahan,” the constable said, and held out his hand to shake.
Considering what Dooley had seen of Maple Grove, that did not sound like great praise.
They left the ripe body of the late Ewing Atkinson at the undertaker/barber/land agent’s office in Maple Grove, Dooley using the brute’s horse and rigging to pay the bony, bald, pale gent with the thick spectacles for the burial of the dead outlaw. The old undertaker demanded more on account of the deceased’s size and smell—the last of the money Hubert Dobbs had given Dooley to spend on supplies in Yankton.
Then Dooley and Zee followed the Niobrara River on its northwesterly course for a couple of days until the river began to bend. At that point, Zee Dobbs told Dooley they needed to turn south.
Two days later, they crossed the Elkhorn River, made camp, ate salt pork as they caught no catfish, and rode on the next morning. Around dusk, Zee told Dooley to stop the wagon. He obeyed, and Zee rode on ahead roughly two hundred yards. There she stood in the stirrups, proceeding to call out like a turkey, then a duck, and finally she made a bunch of grunts like a buffalo in heat. As she settled back into the saddle, four riders appeared out of the brush. Three of them stopped in front of Zee, but the fourth rode straight up to the side of the wagon.
Hubert Dobbs stuck out his right hand and grinned.
“By thunder, Dimly Monograms, I knowed you could do it. Sure as shootin’, I knowed you’d be the one to put Ewin’ Atkinson, that fat, worthless turd, under. Knew it as well as I knowed anything. It’s great to see you, pard. How much reward did that tub of lard bring?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
A few days later, Dooley cashed in his voucher for Ewing Atkinson at the town marshal’s office at Plum Creek. Not that he got to hold on to the greenbacks for long. Hubert Dobbs took the money out of Dooley’s hand as soon as Dooley came to the bar in the town’s one saloon. He did buy Dooley a beer, though. Just one.
When the bartender moved to the far end of the bar to serve three cowboys, Frank Handley suggested that they rob the bank, but Doc Watson pointed out that a bunch of army troopers were drinking across the street, and the telegraph wire would likely be singing if they made it out of town.
“The army, eh?” Dobbs scratched his beard. “Maybe we can rob the blue-belly paymaster.”
“I think,” Dooley said, “the paymaster has already been through this month.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because soldiers are drinking in the saloon across the street.”
Dobbs snorted and wrapped his thick arm around Dooley’s neck, pulling him close, and pounded the top of the bar to bring the beer-jerker back to that end of the bar. “I like you, boy,” Dobbs said as he released his grip on Dooley. “You ain’t dumb like Ewin’ Atkinson. You got a head on your shoulders. You’ll do fine by me and Frank . . . and even Zee.”
The bartender had arrived.
“Four beers,” Dobbs ordered. “Pay the man, Doomey. This is yer round.”
Three rounds later—Hubert Dobbs had bought only one round, and that was before Frank Handley and Doc Watson joined them—the leaders of the gang decided that Plum Creek offered little opportunity for any robberies, and they seemed to be well funded anyway, thanks to the reward Dooley collected for Ewing Atkinson. Anyway, they did not want to stick around for another month to wait on the next army paymaster, so that evening they rode out of town and followed the wide, dusty trail on the north side of the Platte River, which seemed twice as wide as it had been down around Omaha, and maybe even shallower.
They camped that night in an abandoned log cabin that had once served as a Pony Express station and, before that, as a trading post along the old Oregon Trail. It was nice to have a roof over his head—and a real roof, not a bunch of dirt like that time at Ole Something-another-dorf’s sod hut. This was a regular log cabin, sturdy—because it would have to be solid for Pony Express riders, Dooley figured—with a couple of windows and one door. Dooley spent the night in the northwest corner, as far away from Zee Dobbs as he could possibly be. It prohibited any chance of escape during the night, because he would have had to sneak over the bodies of eight well-armed, lightly snoring, desperate characters who slept with guns in their hands. Not to mention past Zee herself, who slept in front of the doorway. Besides, Blue was sleeping in the southeastern corner, with a rope affixed to the dog’s neck and the other end wrapped around Doc Watson’s gun hand. Doc Watson, it appeared, did not trust the dog or Dooley Monahan.
A wagon train lumbered past around noon the following day, but Hubert Dobbs, Frank Handley, and Doc Watson saw no need to rob any wagon train. They had enough supplies in the stolen farm wagon—even after everyone had collected his, or her, ammunition. A Union Pacific freight steamed past them, heading west, two hours later, and the boys considered robbing it, but by the time they had reached any decision, the train was practically in Ogallala.
On the following morning, they left the wide trail and began to skirt a very wide loop north, away from the Platte, away from the well-traveled road, but mostly as far away as possible from Fort McPherson.
The next morning they rode into the town of North Platte from the north.
Grenville Dodge had platted the town a year or so after the Civil War had ended, when the Union Pacific was building the first transcontinental railroad. North Platte had started as a regular “hell on wheels,” rough and rowdy, and the town’s reputation had not changed much over the past decade.
“Fall and Parker,” Handley ordered, and two gunmen nodded. “You two’ll stay with the wagon and the dog. Don’t worry. You’ll be the first into town when we hit Ogallala. The rest of you, don’t get too drunk, don’t get in no fights, don’t steal nothin’, and don’t kill nobody. We’ll save all that fun for Ogallala, too. Do yer drinkin’ on the south side of Front Street. They’s a U.S. marshal, a county sheriff, a judge, a jail, and a town law on the north side. Nobody knows the Handley-Dobbs Gang is—”
“It’s the Dobbs-Handley Gang, Frank,” Hubert Dobbs interjected.
“When you say it, Hubert,” Frank Handley told his partner, and then nodded at the gathering of gunmen. “We pull out at first light.”
* * *
Everyone entered the Red Dog Saloon on the south side of Front Street, but quickly split up to the bar, tables, roulette wheels, faro layouts, or the hurdy-gurdy girls working the floor. Dooley hung back, watching a dice game, but not betting, and when six railroaders pushed through the batwing doors, and four army soldiers from Fort McPherson staggered inside while singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Dooley took advantage and slipped out onto the boardwalk.
“Too noisy in there for ya?”
Dooley stiffened. That nasal voice made his skin crawl. He turned around to see Zee Dobbs sitting on a trash barrel at the corner of the saloon, puffing on
a pipe instead of dipping snuff.
“More than one saloon on this side of the street,” Dooley said. Actually, he had hoped to cross to the other side, find that U.S. marshal, that county sheriff, and that town lawman.
“That’s so.” She climbed down off the trash barrel, removed her pipe, dumping the tobacco and ashes onto the boardwalk, and slipped the pipe into the pocket on her canvas jacket.
“Why aren’t you in one of the saloons?” Dooley asked.
Cackling as she approached Dooley, she raised a bony arm and put it around Dooley’s neck, pulled him close, and kissed him on the cheek. “You fool boy. Ladies ain’t allowed in saloons.”
She released him. “Let’s take us a stroll, love,” she said. “I ain’t never seen no real city in Nebraska.”
“What about the bank you robbed in Omaha?” Dooley asked. “Or Dutch Bluff.”
“That was work. Work don’t count. This is pleasure. Let’s have some pleasure.”
She linked their arms and led him down the boardwalk to the edge of town.
Zerelda Dobbs was twenty-four years old, an old maid by her standards, and itching to get hitched. This was the gang’s first foray into Nebraska, having been driven out of Kansas, and as she told Dooley, Zee’s pa wanted them to make for Wyoming, maybe rob that Cheyenne Social Club there before heading up to Deadwood in the Black Hills.
“Deadwood?” Dooley’s stomach started feeling queasy again.
“That’s where the gold is,” Zee answered.
“Sioux Indians, too.”
She leaned closer. “I done seen how you handle Sioux braves, love.”
Queasier. The stomach got even queasier.
“I hear Buffalo Bill Cody’s got hisself a ranch just west of town,” Zee said. “Maybe we could go pay him a visit. Sure like to meet him.”
“So would I,” Dooley said. Of course, he was thinking that if anyone could bring down the likes of Doc Watson, Frank Handley, and Hubert Dobbs it would be a man like Buffalo Bill Cody.
But they weren’t walking west, but east, and now that he thought about it, he seemed to recall reading that Buffalo Bill Cody was acting in some play back East. On the other hand, Dooley had also heard that Wild Bill Hickok was in Cheyenne, maybe even in Deadwood by now, and Wild Bill, the prince of pistol fighters, would be even a better famous Westerner to bring the Dobbs-Handley (or Handley-Dobbs, depending on who was doing the speaking) Gang to justice.
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