Worse Than Death

by James W. Marvin

  He glanced round behind him and saw three Shoshone move quickly back into cover high up the cliffs. It was only a fleeting look but Crow would have sworn that one of them was the taller figure of Many Knives.

  It wasn’t any more than he’d thought to see. But what shocked him was what he saw around the wagons.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said quietly, to himself, heeling his mount forwards at a fast canter, kicking up tinkling splinters of glassy ice behind them.

  ‘All’s well, Crow!’ called out Muir, standing by the nearest rig cradling a carbine in his gloved hands, blowing breath out in the cold air.

  Crow didn’t answer, wanting to find out what had happened before he trusted himself to speak. Gilbert came out to meet him, shaking his head when he saw that Crow’s saddle-bow was empty of game.

  ‘Figured you’d find nothing. We got the water in, but that loose rock is a bastard to move on. One of the women sprained her wrist on the way down. We see nothin’ of them bastards ’cept for up on … What wrong, Crow?’

  Gilbert suddenly found that there didn’t seem enough air around him to fill his lungs and he drew in a shuddering breath. There was a red light glimmering in the shadowed pits of Crow’s eyes and the tall man’s right hand had dropped to the stock of the Purdey, where it hung just above the holster. The fingers clenching and opening.

  ‘Gilbert,’ grated Crow.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The dead horses and the Indians.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘They’re gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  Trooper George Gilbert pointed back behind him, trying to stop his hand from shaking. There weren’t a lot of things in his life that had truly frightened him. But the anger and uncontrollable violence of this man Crow was surely one of them.

  ‘In the river.’

  ‘In the river,’ repeated Crow, unbelievingly. ‘You dragged them out of the snow and you threw them all in the Moorcock. Is that right?’

  ‘Sure is.’

  ‘Your idea?’

  ‘Kind of.’

  ‘What’s that mean? “Kind of”?’

  ‘Some of the women said they was upset by those mounds in the snow there. Brought to those who’d lost kin the nearness of death.’

  Crow could feel the fires of his anger rising tow an uncontrollable pitch. But he fought against the blind rage that would lead him to kill the soldier as surely as the sun rose in the eastern sky.

  ‘And the mules?’

  ‘Mules?’

  ‘The damned mules! They in the river as well?’

  ‘They kept on cryin’ out for feedin’ and for water and we …’

  Crow turned to face Kemp, who’d interrupted them. His fingers were twitching for the butt of the sawn-down Purdey and he was breathing faster. It had been a long time since the killing urge had come to him this strongly, and it was hard to resist it.

  ‘When I’m talkin’ to the organ-grinder, Trooper, I don’t look to hear anythin’ from the God-damned monkey. Just shut your mouth.’

  ‘It’s true what Pete says, Crow. The mules was makin’ so much noise that I figured it’d be better to butcher them with the knives and heave ‘em out of the way. They might have given cover to the Shoshone.’

  Crow closed his eyes and lowered his head. Taking his time before he spoke.

  ‘Gilbert, you’ve got rid of the mules. I can see reasons for killin’ them. But to throw the bodies in the river. And the ponies.’ His voice was calm and gentle, like the lull that hangs at the center of a hurricane.

  ‘Then …’

  The explosion of anger when it came was more devastating after the quiet.

  ‘They were food, you brain-crippled bastard!’

  So quick that nobody even saw the movement, the shotgun was in his right hand, the hammers clicked back, the twin barrels gaping at Gilbert’s belly, only a couple of paces away from him.

  ‘Crow …’

  ‘Food. Twenty mules and the Shoshone ponies. In this cold they’d have kept us for weeks without any kind of trouble. Maybe months. Those animals could be the whole difference between us livin’ and dyin’. Between me livin’ and dyin’, Trooper.’

  ‘I just never thought of that, Crow. The women were’ on ‘bout them and I …’

  ‘Oh, Christ?’ muttered Crow, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You’re an ordinary soldier, and that’s how you’ll die. I ought to wipe you away here and now as a lesson. And take some of these useless prattlin’ bitches with you, Gilbert.’

  ‘No.’ The soldier’s voice was loud in the white stillness, ‘My decision. You left me in charge, Crow and everythin you say’s right. But there ain’t no call to take it out on the ladies. They didn’t know better. I just … well, I never thought. You want to kill me for that then you pull those triggers. All I can say is that I’m surely sorry for it.’

  It was bravely put, with the snub barrels waiting to vomit out a double charge of ten-gauge shot into his stomach at point-blank range. And Crow respected courage. But that wouldn’t have stopped him killing the soldier for his crass stupidity. The little speech had given him time to cool his temper and think about losing a quarter of his command in one murder.

  ‘Fairly put, George,’ he finally said, easing down on the hammers and slipping the gun back into its holster. Turning away and going to see to his stallion, leaving Trooper Gilbert to wonder how he was going to get his breeches cleaned without everyone else knowing the gut wrenching extent of his fear of the tall man in black.

  That was the first; and worst thing that happened that day. It threatened the whole train.

  The second thing came as the light was beginning to fail, and it affected only one person on the train. The rest were touched by the horrific event, but only Rachel Shannon was opened to the core of her being by it.

  Crow had been over to the top of the cliff of loose scree to make sure that none of the animal corpses had been caught up short of the river. But Gilbert and his party had done their work well. At the same time as they brought up enough water to keep them going for days, so they had tipped every single animal into the Moorcock. Even the Shoshone corpses were gone.

  That was bad. Though he knew that most of the people on the train would rebel at the thought, Crow knew that it was more than possible to eat human meat. Those dead braves would have provided enough nourishment for a week or more. With the snow and ice to keep them fresh like in a cooling-house.

  But there was no profit in worrying over things that had happened. Thing to do was to look forwards. Even though the next few days looked like they’d be hard and grim, with the Shoshone coming back as sure as eggs was eggs.

  They’d been readying for the night when it happened. Crow had organized a rota for sentry duty that meant one man and two women on watch all the time, alternating after four hours. Keeping moving and staying awake. He’d warned them what would happen to anybody who he found asleep, and they knew he meant it.

  The light had almost gone across the plateau and the distant hills had vanished in the murk. During the late afternoon the clouds had come down again and there was a light veil of snow drifting silently across the land.

  Crow had been in the wagon, ready to snatch some sleep. He’d picked the last watch for himself and for Rachel Shannon and another older woman. The most difficult, running through into the uncertain light of dawn. When they all heard the shout.

  ‘Rachel!!’

  A man. Calling from somewhere out in the dimness. Repeating the cry.

  ‘Rachel! It’s me!! Rachel!!!’

  ‘Papa!!’ screamed the girl, out of her wagon even before Crow had moved from his blankets.

  ‘Stop her, McLaglen!’ yelled Crow, sticking his head from the canvas, seeing the big Irishman grab the running girl and swing her clean off her feet.

  ‘Let me go!’

  ‘Hold her!!’

  ‘Please, that’s my Pa out there and he needs help! Let me be!’

 
Crow was out in the center of the defensive circle of Doughertys, holding the Winchester under his arm, looking round the ring of people. Counting with his eyes.

  ‘Rachel, dearest! Oh.. . Ooooooohhh …’

  The cry faded out in an unearthly wailing scream that died with a dreadful bubbling gasp.

  Rachel Shannon suddenly stopped struggling and began to weep, McLaglen still holding her in his arms. Crow turned to Gilbert.

  ‘George. Every person here on guard with guns. Could be this is the start of the next round of the battle.’

  Reluctantly, everyone moved to obey him, except for, the crying girl and the Irishman. Crow walked over to them, nodding to McLaglen. ‘Let her go, Mac. Don’t do nothin’ silly, Rachel. Won’t help a thing.’

  The soldier put her gently back on her feet and went to his own post, holding the carbine in his big hands making it look like a child’s toy.

  ‘Oh, Mister Crow,’ she cried.

  ‘Hold on, girl.’

  ‘My Papa.’

  ‘Nothin’ we can do.’

  ‘He might have escaped.’

  ‘Pigs might fly,’ he replied, cruelly, knowing that she must face up to reality.

  ‘How do you know?’

  She was stopping crying, which was a good sign of self-control returning.

  ‘He’d wait for full dark, being a good officer. No, I’m certain sure he’s not free out there.’

  ‘Then …?’ They were interrupted again by that freezing scream from the snowy blackness beyond the wagons. Sounding around a hundred paces off. A cry that seemed to plumb the depths of agonizing loneliness and bitter despair. A long, long keening moan of rending pain.

  With the name of Rachel somehow tangled up in the midst of it, like a tender deer trapped among cruel briars.

  The girl began to snivel again and Crow reached out a hand to comfort her. To quieten her. Trying to stop her upsetting the rest of the women.

  ‘He’s alive,’ she whispered brokenly, letting herself slip into the tall man’s arms.

  ‘Not for long, little lady,’ said Gilbert, standing close by them.

  ‘Can we save him?

  ‘They’d like that, Rachel,’ replied Crow. ‘Like us to go ridin’ out after your Pa, leavin’ ourselves bear-naked out there.’

  Again the cry, with a peal of demonic laughter that ringed it about, like the happiness of the fiends of Hell.

  ‘They got him staked,’ said Gilbert. ‘Bastards must have come in quiet behind the snow to get close. How d’you figure them? Hundred paces?’

  Crow nodded, moving Rachel from him. ‘Guess so. Look, yonder.’

  The women had also seen it. A light. Flickering feebly at first, then gathering strength, visible through the clearing curtain of white.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus Christ,’ said McLaglen, softly, crossing himself and beginning to patter a prayer

  ‘Pa,’ said Rachel, unbelievingly.

  Crow said nothing, reaching out for a pair of glasses that Gilbert had taken from one of the trunks and now wore constantly around his neck. They were a Swiss pair, finely finished in brass and leather. Crow placed them to his eyes. Adjusting the milled screw to bring the scene into focus.

  Speaking to McLaglen without looking around. ‘Get Miss Shannon into her own wagon, Mac. Out of the way. Now!’ The last word was like the crack of a whip and the Irishman stepped forwards and held her arm.

  As he did so the light brightened again and they could all see what was happening. Hear the crackle of the flames almost drowning out the feeble cries of the helpless man. A dark figure against the red-orange fire.

  ‘Pa,’ said Rachel, then fainted dead away into the arms of the Trooper.

  ‘Better that way,’ said Martha Hetherington. ‘Sort of a kindness.’

  For once she was right.

  It was difficult to make the binoculars crystal-clear through the snow that still flurried across the open space, blurring the vision. But Crow could see enough. See more than enough.

  The Shoshone squaws had been busy with Lieutenant Shannon during the previous night and that day. It was possible with the glasses to see dim figures moving jus at the outer edge of the firelight. Shadows in long robe of buffalo hide, watching the wagons for a sign of some response.

  The stake had been driven into a hole dug silently in the earth, surrounded by brushwood and kindling, piled nearly as high as Shannon’s waist. Flames dancing among it, reaching for the bound man.

  Without the glasses it would not have been possible to see that Shannon had been viciously tortured before being left there to burn in full view of everyone on the beleaguered train.

  The hair had been peeled from the top of his head and the raw scalp decorated with pretty patterns of sewn beads. The eyes would have gone late on. So that the pony-soldier was able better to appreciate what was being done to him by the giggling women of the tribe. The sockets had been filled with tiny splinters of wood that had then been ignited, filling the bony hollows with scorching pain.

  There was more sewing on the face, the threads pulled tied across the gaping hole where the officer’s nose had once been. Normally the tongue would also have gone, but Crow appreciated well enough why the Shoshone had left him his voice.

  ‘Rachel … Oh, God … Help me. Rachel …’

  The flames would soon be reaching his legs and then devouring upwards.

  Burning across his naked skin.

  The chest and what Crow could see of the belly was a maze of slices and cuts, none of them deep enough to kill but all of them enough to add to a portrait of agony that must seem endless to the man.

  The flames and the wood hid Shannon’s lower stomach and genitals, but Crow knew from remembered experience that the squaws would have taken special pleasure in working on those vulnerable regions of the Lieutenant’s flesh. The same would be true of fingers and toes. Out of sight from his glasses, but doubtless broken and mangled.

  ‘Oooooooooohhhhhhhhh …’ the cry seemed to go on and on, and Crow finally lowered the binoculars, handing them silently to Gilbert.

  ‘Bad?’ asked the soldier.

  ‘As could be,’ Crow replied, lips a thin line of anger.

  ‘We goin’ to try and…?’ asked Kemp, stopping in mid-sentence when he saw the look on Crow’s lean face.

  ‘Tell you once, Kemp,’ said Crow, the velvet voice perfectly under control. ‘They brought him here to end it in front of us. Just hopin’ that we’re goin’ to play heroes and try to save him. Must be most of their war-party out there, hid and waitin’. Waitin’.’

  ‘Can’t we do somethin’ for the poor son of a bitch?’ asked Muir.

  ‘Look after his kid. And the rest of the women. And end it easy for him.’

  ‘How can …? Oh, I get it’

  Crow had pulled up the Winchester, leveling it across a wagon wheel. Wiping a few flakes of snow off the front sight. There was no need to lever a bullet into the breech. In that kind of situation Crow always kept one round ready to fire under the pin.

  ‘Keep watch, the rest of you!’ shouted Gilbert, looking around and seeing that everyone was watching the last act of the tragedy.

  There was a brief gust of wind, kicking up more snow, making Crow pause, finger on the trigger of the rifle, waiting to send the forty-four bullet hissing across the cold ground on its errand of mercy. They could still hear Shannon screaming. The noise louder and with a greater urgency. Crow guessed that the flames must be reaching his body by now.

  The moment the vision cleared again, Crow tightened his index finger, feeling the rifle kick back against his right shoulder. Taking the rifle down, the breeze clearing the smoke. He didn’t need the glasses that Gilbert offered him again.

  ‘Day I can’t kill a bound man at a hundred paces with the Seventy-three, George, is the day I quit tryin’.’

  There was a shout of rage from the darkness and a few shots were fired, only a couple of them hitting the wagons, injuring nobody.

  ‘Spoile
d their fun,’ said McLaglen.

  A brave way to go. A good death,’ said Martha Hetherington, piously.

  ‘Lady,’ said Crow, ejecting the warm cartridge into the snow. ‘There’s no such thing as a good death, just easy and hard. That was hard.’

  Chapter Nine

  Four days dragged slowly past.

  Rachel Shannon became sixteen, not that anyone noticed it.

  And Mary-Lou lost her baby.

  The rest of the women had tried to help her, but it wasn’t straight. Breeched, they said. And despite all their efforts to save it, the little wrinkled, purple bag of flesh was delivered dead.

  Mrs. Brittain was utterly desolate, weeping constantly. Sometimes seeming to think that her baby was still alive and asking to hold it. The others were gentle with her, trying to make her understand what had happened.

  Her husband had been a Corporal with Captain Hetherington and she had been broken by his death. Now she kept crying for him to come back and hold her. Screaming out twice during the night that the Shoshone were coming for them. And for them to spare her little child. Her first baby.

  Kemp had taken the body and thrown it out into the Moorcock, where it had Instantly disappeared. The rest of the ladies had pressed for a Christian burial, but Crow had refused. The ground was simply too hard for that.

  The Shoshone had still not mounted any kind of major attack. Every now and then a few bucks would come shooting from one of the two defiles off the plateau, screeching and firing a few shots. Just feeling them out. Never coming too close. Crow had shot one and Muir had killed a pony stone dead with a fine shot at well over two hundred paces, sending the rider skidding over its neck to lie still and broken on the rutted ice.

  There had been no more snow during the three days, but all the time the sky seemed to grow ever more threatening, hanging low over the besieged wagons like a great shroud of hammered lead.

  The spirit of the defenders was being slowly eroded by the inactivity, and Crow could feel the specter of defeat stalking among them.

  It was the cold that hit hardest. An unrelieved biting chill. Combined with the damp rawness it made it impossible to get warm. To get dry. Clothes wouldn’t dry. properly and sleep was difficult.