God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  McDowell slumped. Dan pressed his heel on the floor to keep it from drumming while he gathered in the chips. Gallagher had changed in a blink from genial to menacing, and Dan recognized the creature sliding through the grass, heard a faint dry rattling.

  He put on his greatcoat, shouldered the Spencer, put his hands on the chips. “I’m going back to work.” Winning made this an extra payday, but he’d lose a fee if he failed to deliver his survey results.

  “Oh, no. You have to give us a chance to get even.” Gallagher’s voice was still easy.

  McDowell said, “You can’t quit now.”

  “I’ve got work to do,” Dan said. “You’ll have another opportunity.” Miners were always impatient. Every inch of surface ground meant extra feet of dirt below, more gold to be found, and the miners who had hired him wanted to be sure the other men had none of theirs.

  Gallagher aimed his Deputy’s voice, each word equally weighted, like bullets, at Dan: “You can’t quit now.”

  Dan’s gut twisted, and he shifted his weight to his left leg. If he stayed, he knuckled under. Again. He would endure more jokes about his balls. What did it matter about being thought a coward, as long as he succeeded in his mission? Go home with gold enough to restore the family’s good name, pay Father’s creditors, marry Harriet Dean. He stacked the white chips, counted them, forgot the total. If he stayed, they might clean him out. Legal robbery. He counted again, and McDowell, a corner of his upper lip lifted, tossed him the yellow chip. Coward.

  Dan grasped the yellow chip. No. Enough. He brushed the chips into his hat. “I am quitting. Like I said, you’ll have your chance another time.”

  Gallagher put his hand under the table, as if to find a pistol. “’N I said, you can’t quit now.”

  “The hell I can’t.” Back prickling, Dan walked away, men’s stares crawling over him. A smoldering cigar lay on the edge of an abandoned table. The bar, where he’d cash in the chips, was a mile away, and Con Orem brought out a double-barreled shotgun and laid it on the bar.

  “The man’s allowed to quit when he wants to, Gallagher.” Orem’s knuckles, gnarled from all his prize fights, stood out as he gripped the weapon. “You’ll have another chance to beat him.” His lips stretched, mocked a smile.

  Gallagher said, “Sure, Con.” He met Dan’s eyes in the mirror. “Another time, then.”

  Piling his chips on the bar, Dan said, “You can bank on it,” while he thought to himself, Like hell, never again. As Orem weighed out the value of the chips in gold dust, Dan caught his breath. He felt as if he’d run too far too fast. “Thanks.”

  The piano player hit a few wrong notes in the opening phrases of a new dance. Conversations rose. A man returned to the abandoned table and put the cigar in his mouth.

  “Don’t mention it. I oughta be thanking you. You didn’t use that thing.” He pointed his long crooked nose toward the Spencer’s barrel rising over Dan’s shoulder.

  The front door opened on a surge of cold air, and Jacob Himmelfarb made his way among the tables toward Dan. The wide flat brim of his black hat shielded his face, but Dan knew something had happened. “Come now, Daniel. They have a body found. No one knows him.” Before Dan could ask, he was already walking away.

  “Keep the gold for me,” Dan told Orem, “I’ll be back for it later.” He felt as if his blood stopped, as if the veins had shrunk and would not let it through.

  Gallagher stopped Jacob with a hand on his sleeve, asked a question that Jacob answered, and his own question came clearly to Dan. “You come, too, yes?”

  “You don’t need me.” Gallagher resumed shuffling. “The man’s dead. What can I do about it now?” He paused to separate two cards that had stuck together. “I ain’t paid to be a detective. Just run errands for the miners court.”

  * * *

  From where she stood on the corner of Wallace and Jackson Streets, Martha could see when, near the crest of Jackson, Daniel Stark came out of the Melodeon Hall, that rifle like always slung on his shoulder. Martha sidled over to where she could watch him hurry with that long-legged walk of his to catch up with Jacob, the foreign Jew that helped him with the surveying. They made a contrast, those two: Mr. Stark, arrow-straight, and Jacob, some younger maybe and taller, but thin and stooped like he spent too much time squinting at thick books. What folks like them and Miz Hudson got out of books Martha didn’t know, but she wished she did.

  Palmer, the wagon driver, told over again how he’d found the body, and finished up, “Providence, that’s what it was, Providence.” Someone handed him a bottle of whiskey, and Miz Hudson protested, “Don’t thee think the poor man’s had enough?” to which another man said, “Madam, after what he’s seen today, there can’t be enough.”

  John X. Beidler, that folks called X, the shortest man Martha ever did see, climbed up onto a wheel hub to peer into the wagon bed. “Oh, my God. Another one.” He sketched a cross in the air and kissed his thumb. A Papist, then. “Who do you suppose it is this time?”

  Mr. Stark, who barely nodded to her as he come around to her side of the wagon, was tall enough to see into it from the ground, and she heard him gasp, “Good God.” He whipped out a handkerchief to cover his mouth and nose. “Look in his pockets. Maybe there’s something in them that’ll tell us.” He put a foot on the step-up, but X stuck out an arm to bar him. “I’ll do it. I’m already up here.”

  So the poor man’s face –. Martha couldn’t finish the thought.

  Jacob peered into the wagon, and clutched his overcoat closer around him, so tight Martha could almost count the little bones in his back. Mr. Goldberg, who owned the Pioneer Clothing Store down toward the Creek, touched his elbow, and Jacob stepped back. Mr. Goldberg murmured something, and Jacob snapped, “Such things the good God allows.”

  Mr. Stark spun on his heel. “No, damn it, we allow it. We do.”

  Somewhere a fiddle played a dance tune. An argument rose to a shouting match, and Martha checked her path into Kiskadden’s. She’d be safe behind its stone walls if bullets flew.

  Beidler said, “He’s frozen hard. Been out in the open awhile, I’d say. Ah, here we are. A pocket knife. Anyone recognize it?” He handed the knife to Mr. Stark, who shook his head over it, and passed it on. It went from hand to hand, a small thing to puzzle over, with an ivory handle, three blades. X Beidler crouched in the wagon bed, giving the corpse a close look, his face and Mr. Stark’s grimmer by the second. They conferred together in whispers, but Martha caught a word: murder.

  “Oh, no!” came a man’s cry. “Oh, God, no! Not him!” Mr. Baume, a partner in one of the stores in Kiskadden’s, put his hand to his mouth. “It’s mine. The knife’s mine. I loaned it to Nick Tbalt the day he left.”

  A woman cried out, Martha didn’t think it was her, she couldn’t get her breath, and the world was turning wobbly. Not Nick! The big happy German boy that her little Dotty loved, wanted to marry when she got growed. How could it be Nick? A good soul if ever there was one. Murdered and left out so critters could get at him?

  A man’s strong arm held her upright, and she smelled beer and tobacco smoke in his wool greatcoat, the scent of gun oil, but underneath clean. Mr. Stark. Martha regained herself, stood steady on her two feet.

  “Are you all right?” His face was grey as wood ashes, the dark centers of his green eyes big like he’d been in the dark, and his hand trembled as it left her.

  “I’ll be fine now.” She could feel tears on her cheeks. The poor boy. How would she tell Dotty? The child had insisted since Nick went missing that he would never steal the mules and the gold Fitch had give him, never, and she had the right of it.

  * * *

  “Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer: Preserve my life from fear of the enemy. Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked . . . . ”

  Freshening with the sunset, the wind swept up the noises of gold placer mining from the creek below the knoll where Nevada City had laid its burying ground, and whisked away the words of the Psalm.
Dan said to himself, That Psalm might be a prayer for all of us, just as Tobias Fitch muttered, “Fat lot of good He did this poor lad.” Mrs. Hudson hissed at Fitch to be quiet. The reader’s lips moved, but Dan for a moment heard only ten-year-old Dotty sobbing fit to break the heart. Enfolded as she was in her mother’s blue cloak, only her face, streaming with misery, showed. Now and then, Mrs. McDowell murmured in Dotty’s ear, but the child would not be comforted. Nick’s body, wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, lay at their feet in a shallow grave the men had hacked in the frozen ground. Come spring thaw, Dan promised Nick, we’ll dig it deeper. Build you a coffin. The blanket’s red and yellow and blue stripes on white wool seemed inappropriate to a murdered man, but Major Tobias Wayne Fitch, late of the Cavalry of the Confederate States of America, and Nick’s foster father, had said Nick deserved bright colors, he’d been such a cheerful boy.

  The wind brought the Psalm to them again. “They search out iniquities; they accomplish a diligent search; both the inward thought of every one of them, and the heart, is deep.” The reader, who sold shoes from a street cart, stared about him as if to make Nick’s friends repent sins they hadn’t committed.

  “We been here long –” Fitch began, but Mrs. Hudson glared, and he closed his mouth.

  Fitch. Democrat, a Secessionist who had given half of his left arm to the Glorious Cause. Fitch financed McDowell’s prospecting in exchange for half shares in any claim he found. What would be Fitch’s reaction when he learned that he had a new partner, and a Republican, a Unionist, at that? Dan couldn’t find the idea very appealing, himself. Partners with Fitch. There was an unholy alliance for you.

  “But God shall shoot at them with an arrow; suddenly shall they be wounded. So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon themselves; all that see them shall flee away.” The man’s reading voice changed to a shout: “Lord, send down Thine arrows upon the murderers of our dear Nicholas! Send down your thunderbolt.”

  Across the “Amens,” Fitch said, “About time. I want to find my boy’s killers.”

  But it was not over. Mrs. Hudson began to sing “Amazing Grace,” and her voice quieted Dotty’s weeping, stilled the men’s random shuffling, their impatience, and fixed Dan’s gaze on the blanket-wrapped corpse whose clenched fists had frozen with sage twigs clutched in the fingers. Dan wanted to believe that Nick was in glory now, that he would live out an eternity as the happy youth they had known, and somehow the hymn made that seem possible.

  They crumbled frozen clods onto the corpse while the shoe salesman intoned, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we are as the grasses in harvest that are cut down and thrown into the fire.”

  “No!” Mrs. McDowell cried out, and he gaped at her, wide-eyed, his lips apart. Dan imagined his shock that he – in his own mind a man of God – should be contradicted, and by a woman, but as for himself, Dan cheered her. “He had the sweetest soul in the world, and the Lord has received him into His bosom and wiped away all his tears.” Her slight body tensed forward, a hawk about to drop on hapless prey, and her brown eyes sparked at the men staring at this transformed sparrow. “You-all want the Lord to smite the evildoers, it appears to me like y’all are going to have to be God’s thunderbolt.”

  Dumbfounded, the other mourners were silent, and she looked about at them, the ferocity fading from her eyes, and her cheeks reddening, while tears gathered and her shoulders drooped. She turned Dotty away from them, the child’s tears drying on her cheeks.

  “Mrs. McDowell,” Dan strode after her, where she stood near Palmer’s wagon. Palmer had volunteered to carry the women back to Virginia City so they would not have to walk through the semi-darkness of an early winter evening. Mrs. Hudson already stood behind the driver’s seat, and Palmer swung Dotty up as Dan approached.

  “I shouldn’t have spoke so,” she said, “it wasn’t my place –”

  Dan put a hand up to stop her; in his opinion she had nothing to apologize for. “You’re quite right, you know. I just wanted to reassure you that we already intend to track down Nick’s murderers. They will not go free. Not this time.”

  He would have said more, but Fitch pushed between them, took both Mrs. McDowell’s hands in his own. Dan backed away, but he read her thanks in the straightening of her shoulders, a glow in her eyes that looked past Fitch to him.

  He helped Beidler and the others bury Nick, filling in dirt and setting stones down with respect so as not to break the bones of the arms, elbows bent, the fists a clutch of bones and sinews upraised as if to fight. A magic lantern in his mind flashed recollections: Nick’s unrecognizable corpse, Father’s blasted head resting in a pool of blood, but pushing both away, crowding them out, the image of Mrs. McDowell, fierce and flaming with indignation. With her dark brown hair parted in the middle and pulled firmly back into a bun at the nape of her neck, her drab linsey-woolsey dresses, and her thin figure, he realized that she was beautiful.

  * * *

  The wagon dipped down the hill, its tailgate pointing upward like a diving duck’s, toward Alder Creek and Nevada City. Such outlandish impudence, Dan thought, for crude gold camps to call themselves cities, for they were a motley hundreds of people sheltering themselves in tents, the wagons that brought them here, caves, and cabins built of logs with the bark on that shrank from their chinking as the logs dried and the bark, loosened by industrious beetles, fell away. Or perhaps not impudence, but hope. The hopefulness of a new country, as if to think a thing would make it so. Not much to choose between the two “Cities.” Even in his thoughts, Dan couldn’t resist putting the word in quotation marks. Both were bound by Alder Creek, and slopes and hills rose under them to towering mountains in three directions. Alder Gulch. The Creek escaped southwards, into the Stinking Water Valley, emptied into the Stinking Water river, so named by the Indians. Pas-am-ar-ri. Because they raised their dead along it on scaffolds? That was one explanation.

  He picked up a stone and lugged it to the graveside. With twilight, the cold seeped through his boot soles, and soaked up into his lower legs through his pants legs and winter long underwear. A line from Emerson’s Nature came into his mind: “I please myself with the graces of the winter scenery.” Obviously, Emerson had been writing in front of a good fire with a sherry at his elbow. Sweet, no doubt, not dry. For what graces could anyone find in this landscape of forbidding, snow-laden mountains towering over hills of rocks and sagebrush and juniper trees upright in the snow, this scene of sorrow and cold misery? Sunlight and shadow chased across the knoll, across the piles of stones that marked the graves. How many of the occupants had died of natural causes? Dan was willing to bet that gunshot or knife wounds had carried them all off. Like Nick.

  He set down another small boulder beside Nick’s grave and left Beidler, Fitch, and Jacob to place it while he went back for another. But all the time he sought and carried the largest rocks he could manage, so that animals would not be able to get at Nick’s corpse, he was thinking that he did not see how to get justice for Nick. He crouched down and worked his gloved hands under a rock that time and wind had rounded smooth as a cannon ball.

  If. If’s loomed in an aggregate as heavy as the stone he carried, staggering a bit, over rocks and pits. If they had a police force. If they had a court capable of dealing with matters more important than boundary lines and claim jumpers and petty theft. If the miners court had a judge who knew anything at all about the law, instead of the popularly elected president of the mining district, a medical man by training and a gold seeker by inclination. If they had a jail in which to incarcerate criminals that a police force caught and arrested. If they had police. If they had more than three punishments: whipping, banishment, hanging. If they had any body of law to go by at all, if Congress had allocated the Constitution to the Territory when they formed it. If the miners court had a formal, twelve-man jury instead of the jury of the whole, made up of anyone – drunk or sober – who happened by when the vote was taken for guilt or innocence. If. If. And if.

 
Then they could find Nick’s killers and turn them over to the law. But to what law did they turn them over? Gallagher?

  Jacob said, “We have maybe enough rocks now, ja?”

  “I think so.” Beidler untied his Masonic apron, a small rectangular cloth marked with Masonic symbols, and stuffed it into his coat pocket. He picked up his shotgun as Dan retrieved the Spencer. “What kind of gun is that?”

  Dan didn’t hear the little man, standing just an inch or two taller in his boots than his own shotgun, until Beidler repeated the question. “Sorry. It’s a Spencer repeating rifle.”

  “Repeating?”

  “Yes.” Dan showed him how the rifle worked, how it broke at the breech and a seven-shot magazine inserted there, so that he did not have to reload after every shot. And then it would be a simple matter of removing the used magazine and inserting a new one. “It was invented a couple of years ago, and when Spencer got a Navy contract, he made a hundred or so extra so he could sell them to the public. I was lucky to get one. Ammunition’s hard to come by, though. I have to make bullets.”