“Thanks,” Dooley said. He was now an officer of the law. In a one-horse town. His horse. That was about to become a one-building town.
* * *
It worked out all right. The cabin went up quickly. Not that it would ever compare to that really nice hotel Dooley had stayed in that time in Freemason City, Iowa—back when he was riding with Monty’s Raiders—the one the guerrillas had burned down after sacking the town. It wasn’t that nice, but it had a roof, sort of, and a window, sort of, and a door, if you could call the saddle blanket a door.
There would be no more buildings, though. Everyone could sleep in the cabin, if on the floor, and that was enough for the people from the Blue Chip City. As soon as the cabin had its roof and its door, the men and the Widow Kingsbury went back to the stream to wash their plates, which was about all they did, because no one ever ran back to Slim Pickings proper saying, “I’ve found the mother lode.”
One person did not pan, and that was Logan Kingsbury. He just slept through the morning, and ate supper with the rest, and shrugged when they asked him about the riches, and reminded them that he had told them, “Slim Pickin’s has pert much played out.”
“So why,” Dooley asked Miss Sabrina Granby one day, “does he stay here? If a gold town isn’t producing gold anymore, it usually becomes a ghost town.”
“I wouldn’t call Slim Pickings a town at all, Dooley Monahan,” Miss Sabrina pointed out.
“Still. He’s still here.”
“He has no horse,” she said.
Dooley moved closer to General Grant. This was his time of the day to take his bay gelding out of the woods and to the meadow to graze on luscious grass. It also, he figured, helped him keep his sanity. A man cooped up in thick woods like that might go mad—like Logan Kingsbury. “You can cross this country afoot,” Dooley told her. “We did.”
“We weren’t packing a fortune in gold,” she said.
She would make a good lawyer, Dooley thought. “Bury the gold. Come back with wagons or mules, or an escort of heavily armed men, and take it to Denver. Or even Deadwood.”
There was no answer. Dooley just liked thinking aloud, especially when he had a woman with such a lovely face and soothing voice such as Miss Sabrina to think aloud with him. You always want to finish a day a bit smarter than you was the day before, his ma had always taught him, or, at least, had tried to teach him.
Dooley led General Grant back into the forest with Miss Sabrina walking alongside him. He was smarter. He had learned something. From here on out, he would sleep in the corral with General Grant. That was the only horse in this one-horse town, and Dooley didn’t want Logan Kingsbury, or any of those three other Cincinnati men, to steal the gelding and leave him in this miserable patch of earth.
Two days later, he became even smarter. That’s when he discovered the trail.
It wasn’t much of a trail, in the woods just behind the little clearing—well, it wasn’t actually a clearing—that was big enough for General Grant’s corral. It led around the trees and began climbing up the hard granite slope. Dooley had only gone in that direction to answer nature’s call, because it would not be polite if Miss Sabrina happened that way after breakfast and caught him with his pants unbuttoned. So he and Blue walked into the woods, a bit deeper just to be safe, and that’s when Dooley realized he was following a trail.
You found trails all the time in woods. Usually they were made by animals, and that’s what Dooley thought this one was. After all, Blue was using it, and there was this strange-looking footprint on the ground. So Dooley urinated on a tree, and Blue made his own mark on a pinecone, and Dooley rebuttoned his pants, and wiped his hands on some pine needles, and wanted to hurry back to the corral because he still did not trust Logan Kingsbury . . . or McCreery, Hentig, and Abercrombie—or, come to think on it, Logan Kingsbury’s aunt.
Yet as he rubbed his hands on the pine needles, he saw the print again, and he put his fingers in the dust, and tried to fathom what kind of wild beast could make such a mark. It did not look human. No boot heel, nothing store-bought had he ever seen that would have left such a print. Not that Dooley was scared yet, but it was still early in the morning, and he did not want to be leaped by some part-cougar, part-grizzly type of beast, with a great big stride from the other prints he saw, but seeing how he could smell coffee back in Slim Pickings proper, he figured he might as well go back and see Miss Granby.
When he reached town, the others were up, eating their boiled corn mush and leftover rabbit. Well, as the group’s hunter, Dooley had told them it was rabbit. He believed that they would have balked had they known they were eating marmot. It had a gamey bite to it, and Dooley could not compare it to horsemeat or mule meat, and if he never ever had to eat marmot again he would be satisfied.
Miss Sabrina brought him a cup of coffee and asked if he wanted rabbit or mush.
“Just coffee,” he told her.
“Why don’t you pan for gold, Logan?” Mr. McCreery shouted.
Logan Kingsbury was up, even this early in the morning, and walking toward the cook fire.
“I did my pannin’,” Logan said. “Made my riches.” The men from Cincinnati looked at one another, likely thinking, Is this how we’ll look when we’re rich men?
“Where’s your gold, then?” Mr. Hentig said.
“At the First Bank of Ogallala,” Logan Kingsbury said.
Dooley sipped coffee and looked at Logan Kingsbury. The Widow’s nephew was a liar. Dooley had been in Ogallala, and had ridden past the First Bank of Ogallala one evening with Zerelda Dobbs. The Dobbs-Handley Gang might even would have considered robbing that bank had not the signs on the door knocked off its hinges and hanging above the broken windowpanes announced that the First Bank of Ogallala had gone bust.
“When was that?” Dooley asked, just to make certain.
“Oh, three weeks back, I guess.”
Liar, Dooley told himself, and as the tall man made his way to get that cup of coffee, Dooley again found himself studying the man’s feet and his makeshift moccasins.
* * *
“Why do you stay here?” Miss Sabrina Granby asked.
It was that special time of the day. Dooley knew he should wait until dusk to let General Grant graze, but, well, Miss Sabrina would not accompany a man alone after the sun had set. She wasn’t that type of girl. And Dooley couldn’t figure any reason to walk out of a dark woods into a dark land. He wanted to see and feel the sun.
So, the gelding contented himself on the bountiful offering, and Dooley chewed on a blade of grass himself, feet crossed at the ankles, leaning against a rock, hands behind his head, talking to Miss Sabrina.
“It’s . . .” He did not finish, because, truthfully, he did not really know. He ran the options through his mind.
It’s because Frank Handley, Doc Watson, and Zerelda Dobbs would never find me in Slim Pickings.
It’s because I couldn’t find my way to Deadwood from here.
It’s because I can’t leave a woman like you behind with a fellow crazier than a bedbug and three men from the Queen City of the West who are closing in on insanity at a right good clip.
“I guess we should go now,” he said.
He gathered the reins, called for Blue to quit that digging, and took Miss Sabrina’s gentle hand in his, the one not holding the leather reins. He led her out of the meadow, and into the woods, and only once glanced over his shoulder at the vast flatlands to the south.
Miss Sabrina had not spotted the rising dust. But Dooley had.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“You’re in an awful hurry, Dooley,” Miss Sabrina told him.
Dooley tried to paint a smile, tried to shrug his shoulders, and tried to find some way to laugh off what the late preacher’s niece had said, but he could only grunt and practically drag her through the path in the woods.
“Dooley!” Miss Sabrina complained, but by then they were deep in the woods, and Dooley stopped, out of breath, and now found a
way to grin.
“Sorry,” he said. “Reckon I was hungry.”
“For rabbit?” she asked.
Dooley found a way to shrug. Rabbit? Marmot? Porcupine? Possum? Did it matter? It wasn’t going to be a T-bone steak anytime soon, and he had not seen an elk, mule deer, or antelope in ages.
“I don’t know about you, Dooley, but that rabbit you shot and cooked tasted . . . well . . . peculiar.”
He didn’t answer, but gallantly waved his arms and let her take the lead. She did not have the fierce intent to reach her destination that Dooley had, but now he could at least watch their backs.
Nothing.
That didn’t make Dooley feel any better, but he had another idea. When they reached the one-cabin, one-lean-to, one-something-sort-of-like-a-tent settlement of Slim Pickings, Dooley exchanged a few pleasantries with Mr. McCreery and the Widow Kingsbury, then said he would put General Grant in the corral and maybe try to find something else they could eat.
“Not another one of those rabbits, Dooley,” the Widow told him.
He told Blue to stay with Miss Sabrina. He did not see Logan Kingsbury, or Mr. Hentig or Mr. Abercrombie, but decided they must be panning for gold that likely was not here. Picking up the Winchester, he made haste as he pulled General Grant to the corral. His first thought was to leave him in the corral, but he had not seen the Widow’s favorite nephew anywhere in the camp that thought it was a town, and did not trust Hentig or Abercrombie or McCreery. Maybe the horse could make it up the trail.
While he had been letting General Grant graze and listening to Miss Sabrina’s nice voice, and talking about this and that with her, he had been studying the hill behind them. The tree line ended at maybe a thousand feet in elevation, and Dooley made some calculations that the trail he had discovered behind the General’s quarters would likely lead up that ridge, maybe even past the tree line. Above the trees appeared just a lot of black for maybe another five hundred and a thousand feet. Black . . . granite . . . or some hard rock. Black as in the Black Hills.
No one had found much pay dirt in the stream, and maybe Logan Kingsbury and his dead partner had taken most of that out. And maybe the mother lode was higher up.
“Up there,” Dooley had told himself. “Up there’s where I have to go.”
Now . . . he went.
Not for the gold, though. No, Dooley decided that just above that tree line, he would have a good view of not just the meadow and the valley, but those flatlands of sage and sand all the way to Fetterman City, or maybe even Denver. From there, in the right spot, hidden by the black rocks and shadows of the tall trees, he would be able to see without being seen. He’d be able to tell just how many Sioux or Cheyenne warriors had been raising that dust. Or could it even be the leftovers of the Dobbs-Handley Gang?
An hour later, he had renamed the unnamed trail Heart Attack Trail.
He stopped, leaning against a tree that had been splintered years ago by lightning. Sweat streamed down his face, and his shirt was drenched. His lungs heaved. His heart raced. He felt light-headed. He tried to figure out how in tarnation a man like Logan Kingsbury had made this climb. One switchback after another, over rocks and loose shale. Over boulders and fallen timbers. Straight up for a hundred and fifty yards with little handholds.
He couldn’t even see daylight, but, still, he kept telling himself. “Up there . . . up there . . .”
After another forty minutes, he decided General Grant might as well just stay here. The Winchester in the scabbard? Dooley considered it, but decided he didn’t want the extra weight. The Colt on his hip would have to do, and, well, as many dead outlaws could somehow attest, he was better with a short gun than a repeater. Not that he thought he would run into any outlaw on this climb. He wrapped the reins loosely around a bush, drank water from the canteen still on the horn, and moved on, alone now, up and up and over and over and up and up and up . . .
Then, he saw the blackness of rock, the steep ridge of the mountain, or hill, or whatever it was, and he felt slightly better, despite the screams of his muscles and the shooting pains running from his heels to his hips. He stepped out of the woods, found a good rock to lean against, and looked across the flats.
It was, he told himself, not Iowa.
Beautiful. Rugged. The sun now to his back, casting long shadows across the high prairie. After wiping sweat from his face, he studied the land below. No dust. Nothing at all. No movement, but then only a fool would be moving hard at this time of day. Like Dooley had been doing.
Dooley waited until his breathing did not seem quite as labored. He wet his lips, mopped off more sweat, and looked slowly, left to right, up and down, down and up, right to left. Make sure you don’t miss anything, he told himself.
He didn’t. Nothing was out there. Not now.
Which, he knew, meant nothing. They could have found a hollow to wait out the heat of the day. They could have covered the country in the long, grueling eternity that it had taken Dooley to make it above the timberline. They could have been not Indians, not outlaws, but buffalo or elk or marmots.
“No.” Dooley shook his head. “Not marmots.”
He was no tenderfoot, no fool. Down below, he had possessed the presence of mind not to leave that canteen on the horn of his saddle. After unscrewing the cap, he drank more water, wanted to drink even more, but knew better. Refreshed, he looked again at the view below.
Whatever had raised that dust, was gone . . . or at least, out of view.
He corked the canteen, and stood to head back down to Slim Pickings. Dooley Monahan, somehow, still possessed that quick thinking, that instinctive presence of mind. He ducked, and let the machete slice over his back.
“What the hell!” Dooley’s momentum carried him forward, and if he had not reached out with both hands and stopped himself against the black, triangular boulder, he would have plummeted over the edge. Instead, he righted himself, and turned to face a wild-eyed Mr. Hentig.
“You’re not getting my gold!” Hentig roared, and let the machete fly over Dooley’s head again.
“What . . . gold?” Dooley leaped back, as he clawed for the Colt in his holster.
It came out easy enough, but Dooley dropped it when the machete came inches from severing his right hand. And Hentig kept swinging that big knife, driving Dooley away from the six-shooter lying on the ground between two smaller black rocks.
“I found it.” Hentig’s eyes were even wilder than Zerelda Dobbs’s, and Dooley, drained from the hard trek up Heart Attack Hill, was slow. The tip of the machete cut a furrow across his ribs, from nipple to belly button, and Dooley fell against the boulder, which moved under his weight.
He forced himself up, instead of leaning against the boulder, which shifted and sent pebbles and dirt and rat droppings down a two-hundred-foot drop to more black rocks and long-dead pines.
“I found it!” Hentig said. “It’s mine.” He swung the machete again. “I put that bridge up.” The machete came back around. “I risked my hide.” Another swipe that almost nicked Dooley’s Adam’s apple. “Stay out of that cave.” Dooley leaped away from the blade once more. “It’s mine!” The machete slammed into the boulder, making an unnerving whine and even sending a few sparks into the abyss.
Dooley moved, leaped back, leaped forward, and tried to tell the insane man from Cincinnati that he was up here to get a look at whoever had been sending dust into the sky.
Hentig, however, did not seem interested in Dooley’s excuse. He didn’t even seem to have a two-year-old’s grasp of English.
After rubbing the bloody front of his ripped shirt, Dooley felt and heard something new. Avalanche was his first thought, but then he felt the wind, icy and cold and hard, and the noise was not that of stones rolling over the edge. It was . . .
“Thunder!” Mr. Hentig shouted.
Yes. The crazed fool was right. Dooley chanced one look while Hentig shifted the machete from his left hand to his right. The skies were blackening, and the wind had
become fierce. Dooley remembered warning the wayfarers he had been guiding that it could snow this time of year. Snow. Those ominous clouds were more likely to be loaded down with hailstones. Lightning flashed, still far enough away, but scary, foreboding.
That’s when Mr. Hentig screamed. What he said, Dooley could not recall, nor did he want to. He leaped to his side. Well, he didn’t actually leap. He tripped over a stone and fell, scraping both knees, and saw only the lower part of Mr. Hentig’s pants as the Ohioan charged past. He landed against the boulder that had supported Dooley only moments earlier.
It did not support Josiah Hentig.
Dooley caught only a glimpse. Of the machete blade, of Mr. Hentig’s legs, and as Dooley rolled onto his back, he saw the man from Cincinnati slam against the boulder, saw the boulder move, saw it disappear, and saw Mr. Hentig for just a moment before he vanished, too.
After that, all Dooley heard was Josiah Hentig’s scream.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Dooley sat up, pressing his left hand against his bloody shirt, and with a grunt, made himself stand. Tentatively, he inched his way to the edge, sucked in a deep breath, and looked down. The fall, Dooley told himself, had likely killed Josiah Hentig instantly. The Cincinnatian never felt a thing. Especially not the boulder that had landed a few yards above the dead man, before the impact of Hentig’s body must have caused the big rock to roll over and settle atop the dead man.
All Dooley could see were the man’s shoes, poking out from beneath the boulder.
“It’s sort of like a burial,” Dooley told himself. After all, there wasn’t much chance of anyone climbing down there and hauling the corpse up even had that boulder not moved over and mashed the dead man down to . . . Hell?
Dooley turned away. Gold. Hentig had said he had found gold. What all had he said? A bridge? A cave? Did the creek that ran through Slim Pickings begin up here? A bridge over a creek? Or . . . ? The cave. Dooley scanned the black rocks trying to find something that looked like an entrance to a cave. This could have been where Logan Kingsbury had found his fortune. But where?
Monahan's Massacre Page 27
