Monahan's Massacre

by William W. Johnstone

  The cigarette fell onto the boardwalk, and the deputy marshal stepped back.

  Even with the blowing wind, Dooley could hear the whispers that grew too loud for whispers ranging from the Julesburg Saloon No. 3 all the way to the Julesburg Store. News spread faster than a fire that could have reduced Julesburg to ashes.

  The old-timer holding the shotgun rose from his kneeling position, and he stepped outside, leaving the shotgun sticking out of the window.

  “The hell you say,” the man said. He was bald, but solid, wearing spectacles, gray boots, gray pants, a gray shirt, and a gray vest. He also wore a tin star. Only his read Julesburg Marshal.

  His thick mustache was gray, but not as dark gray as his clothes.

  Slowly, Dooley stood up enough to bring the reward poster out of his back pocket. After flipping it open, he held it in the wind, and the deputy stepped into the street.

  “Check him out, Dewitt,” the marshal told the deputy. As the deputy obeyed the order, the marshal looked at the other bodies. “And the others?”

  Dooley shrugged and let out a sigh that felt more like a moan. “I don’t know. Never saw them before. I was on my way here when they rode up. Started shooting.”

  “Friends of Dobbs?” the old man asked.

  “I don’t think so. Dobbs didn’t have any friends, and they couldn’t have known it was Dobbs that I was carrying.” He looked back as the deputy pulled up the blanket. The population crowded the boardwalk. Even the women did not turn their heads as the deputy made his inspection.

  “Their horses were pretty much worn out,” Dooley went on. “My guess is that they meant to steal my bay and . . .” He swallowed down the bile. “Dobbs’s . . .”

  He didn’t finish because now he saw newcomers. Men in black broadcloth and women with their hair in buns and children . . . children! . . . walking from what at first Dooley thought must have been a wagon yard, only it seemed too far off to the north, too far out of Julesburg proper—if one could call this place proper.

  A stout woman with red hair and more rouge on her face than Dooley had seen in entire brothels stepped off the boardwalk and made a wide berth around Dobbs’s horse. She waved her fat arms over her head and shouted at the men and women coming toward them.

  “Stop. You all stop it right now. This ain’t no sight for no damned tenderfeet!”

  The procession stopped. The women took their children by their hands or swept them into their arms. They did not turn back, however, but kept watching from the distance. Waiting.

  “Well?” the marshal asked his deputy.

  “Fits the description on the dodger, Maximilian,” the deputy said, “but I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Let me take a look at that scoundrel,” the fat woman with the rouge said, and she waddled to the horse, pushed the deputy aside with her right hand, grabbed Dobbs’s dirty hair, and jerked up the dead man’s face.

  “Well, I never thought I’d live to see the day that ol’ Dobbsy got hisself shot deader than my first five husbands,” the big woman said. She let go of the corpse’s hair and backed away, wiping her hands on her dress, and moving around General Grant. “It’s him, Maxxie. Hubert Dobbs his own shot-dead self. I’ll swear to it.”

  “You knew Dobbs, Sheila?” the lawman asked.

  “Knowed him.” Sheila’s laugh sounded like a mountain lion’s cry. “I knowed ever’ inch of him, at Maude’s Place in Denver, at my own crib in San Antone, one night in one of ’em healin’ baths in Eureka Springs, an all-night poker game in Abilene back in ’69, and . . .”

  Marshal Maximilian cut her off. “I’ll let you sign an affidavit. Maybe you know the other three dead men.”

  “Four,” Dooley corrected, and nodded at the brown horse. “That one’s carrying two bodies.”

  “Hell’s bells, I gots to see this.” A little man with a waxed mustache ducked underneath a hitching rail and came to the palomino before Sheila could reach the dun horse.

  “Hell’s bells,” he said again as he looked at the corpse. As he stepped away from the horse, he asked Dooley, “Was this one wearin’ one of those big Mexican hats?”

  Dooley considered him before his head nodded. The wind had carried the hat away, across the South Platte, and Dooley had not figured chasing down the hat of a dead man was worth the effort.

  “Hell’s bells.” It seemed the only thing the little man could say, but everyone—including the men and women and the kids who weren’t supposed to be looking upon such a ghastly scene even from afar—let the little man move to the brown horse carrying the two dead men, and the dun with the man who had worn a white hat that Dooley had managed to pick up before the wind blew it away.

  “It’s them, Marshal,” the little man said, and now others were coming to investigate. The townsmen and women, not those with their hair in buns or wearing black pants, coats, and hats. Dooley could catch snippets of conversation, not that the talk would have been stimulating.

  “Yes.”

  “See.”

  “Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Didn’t that one?”

  “I think so.”

  “I know so. I was this close to him.”

  “Well, I’ll be . . .”

  “God have mercy on his soul.”

  “Do you think . . . ?”

  “Dead.”

  “Golly.”

  “Where the hell’s the money, mister?”

  Dooley turned in the saddle to find a man with a pale blue shirt and black sleeve garters pointing a long finger at Dooley’s chin.

  “What?” Dooley asked, and told Blue to be quiet when the shepherd began to growl and show the man in the sleeve garters his fangs.

  “The money these bushwhackers stole.”

  Dooley stared, blinked, and turned back to find that the marshal had pulled the shotgun through the window and now had the big bores trained on Dooley’s midsection.

  “Money?” Dooley asked. “These men jumped me on the trail.”

  “Before they done that,” Marshal Max said, “they robbed the Julesburg Store the other day and killed poor Budd Totter, who was clerking that morn.” Deeming Dooley no threat, the lawman lowered the shotgun and stepped off the boardwalk. “How much did they get, Horace?”

  “Thirteen dollars and seventeen cents,” Horace shouted from behind two of Sheila’s girls.

  “You didn’t take no money off their persons, did you, stranger?” the marshal asked as he moved to the first horse trailing the one carrying Hubert Dobbs.

  “I didn’t even look through their pockets,” Dooley said. “Or their saddlebags.”

  It was in the left-side satchel of the saddlebags on the palomino that Horace and Marshal Maximilian found the thirteen dollars and seventeen cents.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  If you could get across the boardwalk without breaking your leg, and through the batwing doors without riddling your hands with splinters, the Julesburg Saloon No. 3 wasn’t that bad of a watering hole. The beer came in a clean glass and was pretty cool, thanks to a deep basement in the back of the log cabin that the proprietors kept filled with ice chopped out of the South Platte during the winter. And the whiskey served was honest-to-goodness pure Monongahela rye from Pennsylvania.

  Dooley Monahan sat at a green felt–covered table in the corner, near a window that actually still had panes of glass, and sipped his rye. Marshal Maximilian dropped his shot glass into the mug of beer and drank down half of it while the suds foamed over his gray mustache that looked even lighter after the lawman wiped off the foam with the sleeve of his shirt.

  “So how did you catch Hubert Dobbs with no gun?” Maximilian asked.

  “He had a gun,” Dooley said, “his own gun. I didn’t have a gun.”

  The lawman smiled that smile that said, That’s a good one, boy. You ought to perform in the Denver Opera House.

  “He was going to shoot me dead,” Dooley explained. “Only I grabbed up a skillet—the bullet meant for
me hit the pan.” He rubbed his chest. “Still hurts. Probably a bruise from the impact.”

  “Of the bullet?” Maximilian inquired.

  “No. The skillet hit me. The bullet ricocheted and gave Hubert Dobbs a mortal wound.”

  Maximilian drained his mixture of beer and rye, wiped his mouth again, and flagged the bartender over for another round. Dooley saw that the beer-jerker was bringing two more mugs and two more shot glasses, so he finished his rye and sipped some beer.

  When the new beverages arrived, Maximilian did not dump his rye into the beer, but downed it with one quick shot, stifled a cough, and leaned forward, both elbows on the green felt and his hands folded to make a table for his chin.

  “You’re serious, ain’t you?” the lawman asked.

  “Yes. That’s exactly what happened.”

  Maximilian reached for his beer. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and finished it off in three gulps.

  * * *

  The lawman took down Dooley’s statement, let Dooley read over it and make any corrections, then had the paper “notarized” by Sheila and the bartender, although the bartender could make only an X and had Maximilian write his name, Jude Smith, neatly underneath the rough-drawn X.

  Dooley and Maximilian left the Julesburg Saloon No. 3, maneuvered their way safely past the boardwalk, and walked down the dusty street to the Julesburg Café, but were interrupted by the owner of the Julesburg Store, who needed to speak to the Julesburg marshal about some important business. So Dooley waited in the street and stared down at the encampment. The women with the buns in their hair and the men in the black pants, black coats, and black hats had taken their children back to the line of wagons. Only one man had ventured into town as soon as the bodies of the dead men had been positively identified, and he had just offered to pray at the funeral of the deceased and maybe preach a sermon or two.

  Dooley turned back and stared at the cemetery, where the marshal’s deputy and two other men—one from the livery and the former owner of the Julesburg Saloon No. 2—were busy digging the graves. The ground here must have been right hard. The preacher—Dooley at least assumed that man had been a preacher as he sure had the face of one, as well as a Bible—had returned to the wagons to wait until it was his time.

  Hearing bits and phrases of the conversation between the marshal and the store owner, Dooley looked back at the wagons. He could see the oxen picketed probably too far away from the wagons. Indians—if any Indians were around—could easily steal those animals during the night. Some girls played roll-a-hoop in their muslin dresses. The men busied themselves greasing the axles of their wagons or doing other camp chores. The women cooked or worked on a quilt. If they were old enough, the boys did their chores, which pretty much amounted to collecting dried buffalo dung for fires. Younger boys taunted the girls with the stick and the hoop, or tossed a ball to each other.

  To his surprise, Dooley found himself envying those greenhorn tenderfeet. The scene away from Julesburg seemed idyllic. He could picture himself among those people, probably heading west to farm. Yes, that would be just fine, and some of those younger women—the ones working on the quilts or listening to the bossy old crone who stirred the stewpot—didn’t look bad at all. At least, from this distance. But, compared to Sheila or any of the girls who worked for her, Marshal Maximilian looked good.

  “You hungry, Dooley?” the lawman asked. He had stepped out of the store and returned to the street.

  “I can eat,” Dooley said.

  “Well, let’s see how much.”

  * * *

  “So you’re the man who killed Doug Wheatlock,” Marshal Maximilian said.

  Dooley finished forking the last bit of steak, coated with mashed potatoes, into his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, washed the grub down with coffee, and set the cup by his cleaned-over blue-enamel plate.

  The food, while not the best or even close to the best that Dooley had ever eaten, was filling, and tasty, and satisfying. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and looked at the grinning lawman. Dooley decided he wouldn’t let Maximilian spoil his appetite.

  “And his cousins,” Dooley said.

  “Huh?”

  “Jason Baylor,” Dooley said. “And the Baylor brothers.”

  “I see,” the lawman said, and lifted his glass of water.

  “I killed Ewing Atkinson, too,” Dooley added. “Well, no. I didn’t really kill that one, but I got the reward. Dobbs took it from me, though, but that was fine with me.”

  “So you killed Dobbs for the reward of Jason Baylor,” Maximilian said.

  “No. Ewing Atkinson.”

  “Who’d Atkinson kill?”

  “I don’t know. Plenty of people. Almost me.”

  “Well, the world and the West won’t miss the likes of Hubert Dobbs, Dooley. That’s for sure. But I want to know just how you came to kill a man like Dobbs.”

  So Dooley told him. Told the lawman everything. Then he started to keep talking. It’s amazing what a plate of steak, onions, mashed potatoes after two ryes and two beers can do for a man’s tongue. Yet after he had finished with the shooting of Hubert Dobbs and the killing of the robbers of the Julesburg Store, Marshal Maximilian raised his hand.

  “I don’t need to hear anything else, Dooley,” he said. “You tell me where you’re going, well, I might just tell someone who undoubtedly would tell Frank Handley.”

  Dooley’s stomach started doing one of those dances that it had been doing quite often since he had ridden into Omaha, Nebraska.

  “What . . . why . . . ?”

  “Oh, they wouldn’t want to, son. Whoever told those murdering fiends about you. Talk to Handley. Or Doc Watson. Or that daughter you told me about. Dobbs’s girl. Wouldn’t want to. On account that they like you. I like you. But . . . well . . . you got to think that men like Frank Handley and men like Doc Watson have ways of getting information they want to know out of men like . . . well . . . even womenfolk . . . hell, anyone in this town. Don’t you think?”

  Dooley wished the Julesburg Café served rye whiskey, or any liquor. He narrowed his eyes as he focused on the lawman.

  “But you wouldn’t tell them.”

  The marshal laughed and rocked back in his chair. “On account that I won’t be here, son. No. No, sir.” The chair came back to the floor, and Maximilian put his elbows on the table, folded his hands into a table, and rested his chin on his hands.

  “It’s a little more than thirty miles from Julesburg to Ogallala. You covered that in two days, and that’s after killing five men dead, loading their dead carcasses on four horses, and riding fairly easy. Typical. Two-day ride here. Two-day ride back. Meaning that Frank Handley and those others’ll be expecting you to return to Ogallala in two days. And when you don’t show up, well, the United States Cavalry says they can make forty miles a day. Forty miles on beans and hay, ain’t that how that goes? So I think those murderers will be here in three days. And probably not that long. Killers like Doc Watson and those of his ilk, they don’t have much use for patience. So . . . let’s see . . . today’s Tuesday.” He counted on his fingers. “Wednesday. Thursday. Yeah. Friday afternoon, maybe even Friday morning if they left at dusk Thursday. That’s when I figure they’ll be arriving in Julesburg. Since, as you’ve already told me, Hubert Dobbs said he was coming here. And when they come . . .”

  He made that cutting motion with his finger across his throat.

  “Well,” Dooley said, after easing the dryness in his throat and mouth with a few swallows of water, “I thought you could send a telegraph to the marshal at Ogallala. Maybe even the commander at Fort McPherson. And . . .”

  Dooley stopped. Maximilian sadly shook his head.

  “You saw the telegraph poles, didn’t you?” Dooley didn’t have time to answer. “Poles are still standing, but the murdering scum who you brought in along with Hubert Dobbs cut down the lines, east and west, after they robbed the store and done their killing. Haven’t been able to reach anybody at the U.P. t
o fix ’em.”

  “And the trains?” Dooley asked but without much hope.

  “Eastbound, which I could send somebody on, is due Friday, probably about when Dobbs’s avengers ride here. So wouldn’t be no need to send word to Ogallala that late in the day. Westbound, if the bridge ain’t washed out forty-nine miles east of here, should pull in Monday at noon, or midnight.”

  Dooley felt hopeless, and Marshal Maximilian went on without lifting Dooley’s spirits.

  “Now, we do get a stagecoach through here, eastbound or westbound, once every two weeks. So that don’t do you, or Julesburg, any good. I guess I could send out a rider, my deputy maybe, but that bay gelding of yours is the best horse I’ve seen in Julesburg since those bandits you killed rode in here. And those fools run those horses down so much, before you sent them to Perdition, that they won’t be much good for walking, let alone a full gallop, for . . . my best guess . . . a week or two. And not only that, my deputy don’t ride worth a damn.”

  He sighed. “So, no, Dooley Monahan, we can’t get the word to any lawman or army officer in Nebraska. Hell, we can’t even get word to Denver until the westbound comes through . . . and that’s not due till Sunday, the stage I mean, and the train, like I’ve already pointed out, on Monday, maybe Tuesday, but no later than Wednesday.”

  “I see.”

  The marshal chuckled and pulled out a yellow piece of paper. “Naturally, the Julesburg Bank doesn’t have the funds to pay off the reward for Hubert Dobbs, so this is a voucher. Let me explain how these work . . .”

  Dooley raised his hand. “I know how those work, Marshal.”

  “Oh.” He slid the voucher across the table. “Next time, Dooley, kill your man in a big city. Denver. Hell, Denver’s got its own mint.”

  As he slid the voucher into his trousers pocket, Dooley mumbled, “I’ll try to remember that, Marshal.”

  “And here’s something else.” The marshal slid a twenty-dollar gold piece across the table.

  “What’s this?”

  “That’s the reward,” Maximilian said.