God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  When Dan still shook his head, Bob said, “Come on, boys, let’s take these over to Con and sort them out.”

  Dan barely knew they sidled through the crowd around the fallen man. After some time, the packed crowd loosened, shifted, splintered into individuals, moved away. Two men lifted the wounded man onto a table. Someone stopped by Dan. “A genuine miracle. He’s going to be all right. A bullet through the neck, and it missed the artery, his spine, and his windpipe. A God-damn miracle is what it is. A miracle.”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “A miracle sure enough.” It didn’t change anything. He was still to blame. Like Bob had said, debts had to be paid. Gallagher would pay this debt. “Do you know his name?”

  “Yeah. George Temple.”

  The piano struck up the tune, “Auld Lang Syne,” but Dan didn’t feel like singing.

  It was 1864.

  * * *

  The calculations were not coming out right, and Dan could not find the mistake. He’d checked, double-checked, and re-checked the measurements against his notes, but the calculations refused to come out. Every time. Damn. Would he have to measure the claim again? It was under several feet of snow by now. Dan sighed. He laid his pencil in the tray, rose to his feet, and stretched. Then he kicked the empty slop pail across the room.

  Outside, the sun turned the world to diamonds in white and snow-blue. He pulled on his coat, hat, and gloves, tucked his pant legs into boots. Lunch time. He’d walk down to the Eatery, and maybe going outside would clear his mind. Even if it didn’t, being outside was better than sitting inside a dim and fusty cabin. Maybe he’d be in luck and see Martha McDowell. Maybe something would occur to him. Maybe he’d walk over to Creighton’s, and there would be some news from the Deer Lodge scout, gone now ten days. Had they found Aleck Carter? Or had they been lost in the blizzard? Maybe there’d be new evidence he could enter into the ferreting book. Maybe. Maybe. And maybe.

  He kicked at the light, dry snow, and it blew about him, powdered his face, momentarily blinding him. The cold seeped down his neck.

  A woman laughed. “Look,” she said to her companion, “he kicked snow onto himself.”

  Dan brushed melting snow from his face. Ten feet in front of him Sam McDowell walked arm in arm with one of the whores from Fancy Annie’s. McDowell. Pig. With a good wife at home, he took his pleasure – a sudden surge at Dan’s groin – had he no decency, to risk infecting his wife and unborn children? How could he put her at risk?

  McDowell pulled the woman close to him and casually put his free hand under her coat, over her breast. “You want some of this? Do you? Good meat here. Want to take a turn? I’ll make her, and you can make her.” His lips twisted in a sneer. “I’ll show you how.”

  “Go to hell,” shouted Dan.

  Fast steps squeaked on the snow behind Dan. “God damn you, Pap!” Carrying a snow shovel, Timothy charged his father through the snow. Dan snatched at the boy’s jacket and missed. “You son of a bitch!” yelled the boy.

  “No!” Dan leaped after him, but the boy did not hear him. McDowell was so much bigger, one blow of that fist could do such damage. Damn! How had he forgotten the Spencer? He pictured it standing against the wall near the door, and he had walked off without it.

  McDowell flung the woman aside. She fell into a drift and floundered in the powder snow that gave her no purchase to get up. She kicked and cried and screamed about the cold.

  “Walk out on me, will you?” McDowell bellowed. “You’re no son of mine, you’re someone else’s bastard.”

  At the insult to Martha, Dan felt a film over his vision as he roared at McDowell, “Damn you, no!”

  Tim swung the shovel in a wide arc. McDowell leaned away from it, seized the long handle as the blade passed him, and wrenched it out of the boy’s hands. He threw it at Dan, and the breeze of its flight brushed his cheek. Dan caught it. He was in a nightmare, running and running and never gaining, thrashing through the snow, as Tim’s momentum carried him into his father’s grasp. McDowell seized the lapels of the boy’s coat in one hand and smashed the other fist into Tim’s mouth.

  “Now, you little bastard, I’ll show you who’s boss in his own home. You’ll work the goddam claim till hell freezes over if I tell you to.” McDowell held Tim between Dan and himself, and laughed. Tim kicked at McDowell, punched at his father’s midsection, but a second blow, into his right eye and cheekbone, dazed him. Dan dodged around them, behind McDowell, and one-handed, swung the flat of the shovel against McDowell’s shoulder.

  McDowell yelled and went down, clutching his arm. “You broke my goddam arm!”

  “You’re lucky that’s all I broke!” Dan helped Tim to his feet. The boy’s mouth was cut, and blood streamed down his chin, dropped into the sparkling snow as he bent over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He spat out a tooth and felt along his jaw, moved it from side to side. “Put snow on it,” Dan told him.

  One of the town doctors squeezed through the crowd. He looked over Tim’s face, felt the boy’s jaw, peered at the cut, the reddened flesh around Tim’s swelling eye. “You’ll live. You won’t be a thing of beauty for a while, but eventually you’ll look as good to the girls as ever. Put some beefsteak on that eye.”

  “I got a better use for it,” Tim mumbled.

  “Good lad.” The doctor turned away to McDowell. As Dan helped Tim toward his cabin, he heard the doctor: “Good grief, man. What are you sniveling about? That arm’s not broken. You’ll be right as rain in a few days.”

  The sound of the woman’s weeping faded behind them. Dan held Tim with one arm about the boy’s waist; Tim dragged the shovel. My God, that a father could do this to his son. Unthinkable. And what of the mother and sister? Still in that bastard’s house, in his power, for in the law a man’s home was his castle, and Dan could not protect them while they lived there. He staggered through the drifts with the boy, who could hardly put one foot before the other. There would be a way, and he would find it. He didn’t know how. Not yet. But somehow.

  Jacob caught up to them when they were nearly at the cabin. His English failed him, and he could only stammer in German as he took the shovel out of his hand, laid Tim’s arm across his shoulders. “Ich hab gesehen – Es ist – Shrechlich. Shrechlich.” As they crossed Idaho Street, he found his English. “I saw it. Terrible. Terrible.”

  The two men removed Tim’s coat and boots and undressed him down to his long underwear and laid him in the bed, as if he were a child, and covered him with thick wool blankets. Tim protested, “I’ll get blood on – .”

  Jacob shook his head. “No matter. First you we fix.”

  Dan cleaned the cuts while Jacob applied a cold compress to the eye, now swollen shut. There was a quick light tapping at the front door, and Jacob opened it for Mrs. McDowell and Dotty.

  “Oh, dear God,” said Tim’s mother. “I heard over at the butcher shop. Timmy, Timmy, are you all right?” Dan made way for her. She knelt by the bed, lifted the compress to look at the eye, took in the split and swollen mouth, the blood from his nose. She didn’t appear to see anything but her son’s damaged face.

  “I’ll be fine, Ma.” He smiled at her, and Dan thought few but his mother would know how much that smile cost him. “It’s just my face, and I never was no beauty anyway.” He coughed, and spat some blood into a basin Jacob held for him.

  She looked up at Dan, who said, “He lost a tooth.”

  The mother’s eyes closed on the spasm of anger and fear that twisted her features, and when she opened them again Dan thought he had never seen such ferocity on a woman’s face. He knew that nothing in nature was as fierce as a mother defending her young, but he had never seen it, the look of a bear protecting her cubs, in a human being. She said, “First to throw him out into the storm, and now – this.” She laid her palm against the boy’s uninjured cheek.

  A voice beside Dan whispered, “Pap did that?” Dotty pressed her hands to her mouth.

  “Yes.” Dan crouched down, gathered the c
hild to him. She was trembling, and her little body was so slight, even with the heavy winter coat. She reminded him of his youngest sister, who would climb into his lap with a favorite book and ask him to read her a story. How he missed her! While Jacob rinsed out the basin and poured the bloody water into the slop pail, Dan sat on a stool and took the little girl on his knees.

  Mrs. McDowell stroked her son’s forehead. “It’s the drink, you know.” She wasn’t looking at Dan, just at her son. “He was all right when we was young. It ain’t him – it’s not even the War. He did terrible things, feeding great guns that tore men to shreds, so he hates himself on account of killing so many, but it’s the officers he hates most because they kept marching their men into the guns, killing and hurting thousands in a day. So when he come back, he wouldn’t be told what to do, nohow. He’d took to drink, and it’s been growing on him. He’s not a bad man, at bottom. It’s the drink.” She pulled the blanket up under Tim’s chin, a gesture so tender that Dan caught his breath. “But he ain’t stopping. I think he’ll never stop.”

  He could think of nothing to say, the law so limited him. This family, the woman and her children, belonged to McDowell, not to him. He said, “I’ll do what I can,” and cursed inwardly because it was inadequate. A mere shadow of what he wanted to do, what he wanted to say.

  She rose to her feet. “I don’t know how I ever can thank you. You’ve already done – ”

  Not enough, Dan told her silently. “There’s no need to thank me. I’m happy to help.”

  “I have some herbs and things at home that I can bring to you for healing Timmy. If – ?”

  “Yes. Show us what you want done and we’ll do it.” He paused, and plunged. “Or come any time you wish.”

  Mumbling something about tea, Jacob went outside with the water bucket.

  “That’s right kind of you,” said Mrs. McDowell. “You stay here, child. I’ll be right back.”

  When her mother had gone, Dotty looked into Dan’s eyes. “Can I sit with Timmy?”

  “Certainly.” He helped her out of her wraps, and she sat down on the bed, where her brother lay, a stoic, eyes closed, the little girl’s hand on his. Every few seconds a shiver of pain ran down his body.

  “He’s safe here, ain’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “As long as you’re here, ain’t that right?”

  “Yes.” He hung up her wraps. They looked as if they belonged on those pegs.

  “Only, you won’t be here forever, will you?”

  “No, I have to take the gold back home to my family. For them to live on.”

  “Why?”

  “They need it and I promised I would.”

  “You keep your promises, don’t you?”

  “I try to.”

  “What’ll we do when you’re gone?” She sighed. “I wish you was my papa.”

  8: Alder Gulch, Virginia City

  The woman held out her arms to him, to come to her, but a drum beat confused him, and bright sunlight behind her showed him only her outline, and the drumming thundered around her. A dog barked. Dan jerked awake, his heart’s pounding joined with the heavy throbbing in his dream. Someone was banging on the door.

  Dan stumbled out of the bed, stiff from lying too long in one position, three in a bed, spoon-fashion, and no room to turn. Jacob, awake, lay shivering in the middle, while Tim climbed over him from his place against the wall.

  “Shut up!” Tim yelled at Canary. The dog subsided to a low growling.

  “I’m coming,” Dan bellowed. He pulled on his overcoat and levered a shell into the breech of the Spencer before he unbolted the door. From behind him, Tim raised a lighted lamp to show two men standing outside.

  “About damn time you opened up,” said Fitch.

  “We need you,” Jim Williams said. “Come to Kiskadden’s.”

  “My God,” Dan said, “you’re alive. Come in, come in. I won’t be a minute.” He pulled on his trousers over his long underwear. He was already wearing his shirt and a sweater. “We were worried you wouldn’t make it. That blizzard was a son of a bitch.”

  Shivering, Jacob poked at the coals and fed more wood into the stove. Tim held the dog’s rope, turned the injured side of his face away from the lamplight.

  The two men stood close to the stove, their hands held out to the warmth. “You got that right,” said Williams. “It hit when we were on the way back, so we hunkered down by Beaverhead Rock and waited it out. No food, no fire, keep moving or die. The horses stampeded, them we couldn’t picket, and we had to round them up after. Some of us ain’t slept but a few hours in six days.” Deep furrows scored his face from nose to mouth, and his lower lids drooped away from his eyes like those of an old man. “You got any water? I’m so damn thirsty all the time.”

  “I could use something stronger.” Fitch peered into the shadows. “Thought you had a dog in here. Ain’t that Canary? What’s he ― Hey, Tim, why ain’t you at home?”

  Jacob gave Williams a dipper full of water with chunks of ice floating in it.

  Dan was pulling on a boot. “He is at home, and all we have is beer.”

  “Beer is good.” Fitch rubbed his hands together.

  The heat from the stove brought out a smell from the two men that made Dan’s eyes water. “Did you get Carter?” Dan pulled on the other boot.

  “No. We was thrown off the track.” Williams glanced at Tim and Jacob. “Long story.” He gave back the dipper. “Thank you.”

  Jacob poured beer into it for Fitch, who drank as if he had spent the last two weeks in a desert.

  Fitch held the dipper away from his lips. Melting ice dripped from his beard onto the floor. “So, kid, what are you doing here?”

  “Me and Pap had a parting of the ways.”

  “Come at last, did it?” Fitch jerked the dipper aside, toward Tim. Canary snapped at Fitch, and the boy turned his face into the light to grab the dog’s muzzle. “Thought so. He do that?”

  Tim nodded, turned the injured part into the shadows. “Yeah.”

  Dan looked for his gloves, rummaged among a rank pile of dirty clothes tossed in a corner to wait for the washerwoman to be in business again. Not there. The hell with gloves. He put on his overcoat, patted the bulging pockets. The gloves. For once he had put them where they should be. Paying attention to each task, he worked one onto his left hand over the bandage, drew on the right glove, took his hat, reached for the Spencer. The sudden night summons had rattled him, and he knew it. What was so important that it couldn’t wait until morning? Why the urgent meeting with men whose exhaustion clawed their faces, who swayed on their feet like pine trees in a wind?

  “Even if he is your Pa, he’s a son of a bitch,” said Fitch.

  Tim said, “He’d’ve done worse, except Mr. Stark stopped him.”

  “Stark did, did he?” Fitch’s fingers snagged in his beard. “I’d like to’ve seen that.”

  “Let’s go,” said Williams.

  “Obliged for the drinks.” Fitch gulped the last of the beer, gave the dipper to Jacob.

  With every step, the snow protested in the tight, high-pitched squeak of deep cold. The night sky sparkled, and the waning moon lighted the snow, laundered out all color, like a photograph, but stark in black and white, without shades of gray. Dan held the rifle in the crook of his arm. Wide awake now, he was eager for the answer to this mystery: What was up, that could not wait?

  “We saw X,” Williams said. “He found that wagon train he was looking for.”

  “Good. I’m glad you’re all right. It’s a miracle anyone survived that blizzard.”

  “We got a little chilly around the edges,” said Fitch. “Some of the boys will lose toes, ears, fingers, maybe a nose.”

  ”But we’re alive,” Williams said.

  “Thank God.” Dan could not imagine how men could endure such a storm and live.

  “X said he bandaged a fella’s hands over Bannack way a couple days ago. Damn fool was out in that storm with no gl
oves, got some bad frostbite. Lucky he met X. He’ll lose some skin. Maybe a finger or two.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Don’t know. X thought he might be from over around Bannack someplace.” Williams kicked snow out of his path, and stumbled into Dan. “Sorry.” Regaining his balance, he asked, “What’s been happening here? The roughs give you any trouble?”

  “A lot of threats. Nobody’s been killed yet, though one of them went to Creighton’s store to shoot Sanders.” Dan avoided a humped mound in the snow, probably a dog burrowed in. “We persuaded him it was a bad idea.”

  Fitch said, “I heard you played poker with Gallagher and McDowell. Again.”

  “Word gets around, doesn’t it?” Dan did not want to talk about that night. He’d been a fool to bring danger among innocent people. Thoughtless. If he hadn’t challenged Gallagher, George Temple wouldn’t have nearly lost his life. “Gallagher tried to murder a fellow named George Temple. Shot him in the back. Talk about miracles. The bullet went through his neck, and didn’t hit anything major.”