God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of Montana

by Carol Buchanan

  “How is he?”

  “He’s mending. Mrs. McDowell has been looking after him.” It was pleasure to say her name.

  “That bastard’s got to be stopped,” Williams said.

  Dan did not know if he meant McDowell or Gallagher, but he agreed with Fitch, who said, “Him and McDowell both.” Fitch spat a dark stream that stained the snow.

  Despite the fire in the stove, Kiskadden’s big room had a damp chill about it. Several men gathered close to the stove, a few sitting, some stood. Paris Pfouts sat at a table, leaned on his elbows. A table lamp with a green glass shade gave his face a sickly hue. Most of the Virginia Executive Committee were there, along two others from the Deer Lodge scout besides Williams and Fitch. Dan nodded to them.

  Pfouts knocked his fist on the table. “This emergency meeting of the Virginia City Executive Committee will come to order. Thanks be to the Great Architect that you live.”

  “Thank God indeed,” Dan said amidst the others’ murmuring. He felt Pfouts eyeing him as if he had made a rude noise.

  Pfouts spoke as if there was no time to lose. “The expedition to Deer Lodge has yielded unexpected results, gentlemen. First, I have some good news. Milt Moody and Melancthon Forbes, who left a month ago for home, have apparently reached Salt Lake after being held up south of Bannack.” He raised a hand for quiet. “Two men might have succeeded in absconding with a considerable fortune, except that Lank Forbes wounded one in the shoulder, and the other man took a bullet in his chest. So watch for two men whose injuries identify them as the robbers. Now, Cap, the floor is yours.”

  Dan rested the stock of the Spencer on the floor between his knees.

  “We didn’t find Carter.” Williams waited until the disappointed mumbling had died away. “We got throwed off the track, but we got something else. We got evidence of the conspiracy we all thought was here. There’s a gang operating on the roads hereabouts – ”

  Sitting upright, Dan almost cheered aloud. Independent corroboration of the criminal conspiracy! No wonder this meeting could not wait until morning.

  “I knew it!” A man clapped his hands, then rubbed them together. “I knew it!”

  “Yeah,” Williams said. “A lot of us thought there must be. George Brown, him that lied for Ives, tended bar at Dempsey’s –?” He broke off to be sure they knew who Brown was.

  Dan’s grip tightened around the rifle barrel. Tended? Had anyone else heard the past tense?

  Williams took some small papers out of an inside breast pocket. “Brown wrote a note to Carter to get out of Deer Lodge.” He read from one paper: “‘Lay low and watch out for black ducks.’” He gave the note to Pfouts, who laid it on the table. “Red Yeager delivered it. The bastard was in such a damn hurry he killed two horses. We met Red on the Divide the second day, as he was coming back. We was pretty strung out, because our horses had a hard time finding forage, and they was weakening. We had to walk some.”

  Dan pictured a long slow cold hike over the Continental Divide, leading the horses, snow above the men’s knees on numb feet, ears and noses freezing under the rags wrapped around their faces. The horses, tough Mustangs though they were, would have had to paw down two feet or more for grass, and then maybe not find much. Not enough to sustain the effort they made.

  “Red told us different stories, but the nut of it was that Carter was in Deer Lodge sleeping off a toot. We was pretty far gone, so we laid up Christmas Day and baited the horses. By the time we got to where Red said Carter was, he’d left. The owner of the place give us that note and told us Yeager come with it for Carter.”

  He paused, swayed a little in his chair. After a moment, his voice flowed on. Hardly breathing, the men closed on him, listening. The lamplight shone on Williams’s hands, but his voice came from the darkness. What are we up against? Dan thought of the crimes in his notebook. They were not random, but somehow connected by the conspiracy. Were Yeager and Brown part of it?

  “Up on a mountain, just off the trail to Hell Gate, we saw a campfire, but there weren’t no point in going on. The horses wouldn’t have made it, so we turned around. We got to Beaverhead Rock just before the blizzard hit.”

  The great rock formation, named by Lewis and Clark, rose beside the Beaverhead river for all the world like a monstrous beaver floating half submerged on the rolling flat land. A few miles north, where the Stinking Water river flowed into the Beaverhead, the road from Bannack turned and followed the Stinking Water toward the Gulch.

  Pfouts passed a bottle. Dan handed it on to Williams, who took a drink, passed it to Fitch. Dan heard the glug as he took a swallow, smelled Fitch’s belch. He wanted to back up, but everyone stank. Himself included.

  Williams continued, “We arrested Yeager at Rattlesnake, and Brown at Dempsey’s, and took them as far as Laurin’s.”

  Someone asked, “What did you do with them after that?”

  “Hanged the bastards.” Fitch gave the bottle back to Williams.

  Dan felt a sharp twinge, like the bite of a horsefly, in his triceps. “My God.” Hanged them? Without – who – His brain stuttered, and he seemed to see, ahead in time, the accusing finger of history pointed at them. No trial, not even before a miners court? No weighing of evidence? Except by the men who hanged them.

  “Damn it! They needed hanging.” Fitch nearly shouted, oblivious to Pfouts’s repeated damping gestures to keep it down, man, keep it down. “Those sons of bitches nearly killed us. Brown wrote the note that sent Carter away – ”

  “Out into the cold. Hung over.” Williams said. “Who in his right mind would make a winter camp if he didn’t have to, unless –” He stopped to let them fill in the blanks for themselves.

  Dan obliged. “Unless he felt his life was in danger.”

  Williams glared at Dan. “You said that Ives was guilty because he tried to get away. Ain’t this the same damn thing? Flight to avoid the consequences of his crime? Ain’t that what you called it? Carter ran because he was guilty. Just like Ives.”

  “You ain’t suggesting that we was wrong when we hung Ives?” Fitch pointed his forefinger at Dan as if he leveled a gun. “You ain’t telling us – ”

  “Hell, no,” said Dan. “We were right about Ives, and you’re right about Carter. Ives stood there with the noose around his neck and said Carter pulled the trigger. That’s a deathbed statement. And Carter left the Gulch because things got too unhealthy for Ives’s friends around here, and he fled Deer Lodge because he knew you were after him for Nick’s murder. No, that’s not what I’m objecting to. You hanged Yeager and Brown without a trial.”

  “Because we had them dead to rights!” exploded Fitch.

  “Quiet, damn it!” said Pfouts.

  “The hell with that!” Fitch would not be stopped. “Those two almost killed us all. We rode more’n two hundred miles in the dead of winter, and it’s a God damn miracle nobody died. Not even a horse. When we hung Yeager and Brown we had Yeager’s confession.”

  “But did you have it when you decided to hang them?”

  Silence. A piece of wood broke apart in the stove, and pitch popped like gunshots. Dan flinched.

  “No,” Williams said. “What we had was the attempted murder of twenty-four men. All of us. We could have died in that storm, we could have died any time from the cold and – and Yeager knew that and he didn’t give a God damn.”

  “We told Yeager and Brown we were going to hang them, and then Yeager confessed.” Fitch leaned forward, propped himself by his elbow and the stump of his arm on his knees.

  “It’s all right,” Dan said. “I don’t know if I’d have done anything else if I’d been in your boots.” He could picture how it went, how exhausted men, having narrowly escaped freezing to death in the high country, would feel when they met up with the men who had made their harrowing journey a wild goose chase and nearly killed them. Dan wished they hadn’t done it, but they did not know the Vigilantes had formed in Virginia, didn’t know there was an Executive Committee whose jo
b was to weigh evidence, to prevent summary hangings. And pass sentence of death. Brown’s attempt to gives Ives a false alibi and his note to Carter put him squarely in a conspiracy to help Nick’s killers go free. And Yeager’s ride put him there, too.

  But who told Brown to write the letter? Who told Red to deliver it? Did they on their own initiative love Carter so much that Red would ride two hundred miles through the snow in such a hurry? Dan doubted it. There had to be more.

  Williams handed the other pieces of paper across to Pfouts. “When Red knew the game was up, he gave us a list. It’s members of a gang that’s been responsible for most of the robberies and murders around here. He said – ” His lips compressed for a moment. “He died like a man.”

  Fitch shook himself, like a horse shakes off excess dirt after rolling. “Yeah, it was a damn shame. If Red had just went straight. He said he deserved what we were going to do.”

  “What about Brown?” came a voice behind Dan.

  Fitch spat on the floor. “Sniveling bastard. Screamed and cried and begged till he swung.” He spat again. “And then some.”

  “Red said –” A jaw-cracking yawn stopped Williams, and Fitch finished, “Red said Brown was the secretary of the gang. That’s why he wrote the note.”

  Pfouts scanned down the paper, read one name. “Henry Plummer, leader.”

  “Sheriff Plummer?”

  “Good God!” said one man, while a second said, “Can it be true?”

  A third snapped his fingers. “I knew that bastard had to be involved.”

  “I don’t believe it!”

  “Yes,” said Williams. “Believe me. It’s true all right. The gang is led by Henry Plummer.” He added around another yawn, “Someone should ride over to Bannack and take care of that situation.”

  Dan held the papers under the lamplight to read: twenty names, their positions in the gang, crimes, dates. He visualized the notebook in his pocket, in his mind turning pages to locate names, the information against each name. Club Foot George Lane, Boone Helm, Frank Parish, Hayes Lyons, Ned Ray, Buck Stinson. Others.

  “Sanders is organizing a Bannack company of the Vigilantes,” Pfouts said. “We’d better report to him, but I can’t leave.”

  Dan wasn’t paying attention. Already there was one glaring omission.

  “Why isn’t Jack Gallagher on the list?”

  “Damned if I know.” Williams’s voice was thick with the need for sleep. “Red didn’t say.”

  “Must have been an oversight,” said Pfouts. “If Plummer’s the leader, Gallagher’s his second-in-command. He has to be.”

  Pfouts’s reasoning was good, but not good enough. Why would Yeager overlook Plummer’s surrogate in Virginia?

  “Looks like you’re our man, Stark,” Pfouts said.

  Dan pulled himself away from his train of thought. “Your man?”

  “To carry the news to Bannack. You have that notebook and the list. Tell Sanders what we know now.” Pfouts drew in a deep breath. “And bring those criminals in Bannack to justice.”

  “Even if it means hanging the Sheriff?” Dan waited for their verdict. He would not do this solely on his own authority. Hanging Plummer would put them over the line. Up to now they’d had the law to go by, and Ives’s hanging had come after a trial, and the elected officials of both Junction and Nevada had sanctioned it. Now, true, they had Dr. Glick’s statements, and other men’s, and Yeager’s list. But to arrest, accuse, hang Henry Plummer? Sheriff of Bannack and Virginia City?

  Pfouts, having consulted silently with the other men, spoke. “Even so.”

  * * *

  Martha ran plumb out of thread in the middle of darning McDowell’s sock, and what with paying Dotty’s school fee, she had no dust to spare. Thinking to maybe trade, she wove two darning needles into the collar of her shirtwaist and wrapped herself up snug in her cloak.

  The Lord had been extravagant with diamonds in the snow and pieces of blue sky for shadows. She kicked up a sparkling burst and skipped along like a girl instead of the mother of a grown son. Timmy. In clean trousers and jacket and collarless shirt, he rearranged lanterns on a high shelf in Dance and Stuart. His face made her heart lurch to see how stiff his mouth was when he smiled.

  Club Foot George, who’d gone for Sheriff Plummer, mistook her smile as being for him. Martha gave him just a little of it.

  Way at the back, where Mr. Oliver’s stage office was, he and Mr. Dance discussed something in a ledger book. Both men broke off to say hello.

  “Mam!” Tim climbed down from the ladder. “What brings you here?”

  “I’m out of thread, and if I don’t find some there’ll be buttons missing where they oughtn’t.”

  Timmy glanced at Mr. Dance. “The thread’s on the dry goods side, Tim. Under the counter in a box for men’s boots, size eleven.”

  As Timmy retrieved the box, Martha asked Mr. Dance, “Would you be willing to trade needles for thread?”

  “Yes, indeed.” Mr. Dance came to her with his hand out. “May I see them?”

  Tim straightened with the boot box. “But – ” Mr. Dance looked at him, silently telling him not to interfere.

  Martha took the needles out of her collar. “They’re darning needles.”

  Mr. Dance held one up. He was such a big man, even bigger than McDowell, but with a far different spirit in him, like Mr. Stark, a gentleness, a kindness. “Excellent! Good and straight. How about one needle for three spools of thread? Would that be fair?”

  “That’s too much!” Martha.

  “I can always sell them for a good price, dear lady. Needles are scarce.”

  So the trade was done. Timothy followed her out the door, clutched his jacket around him. “I got something to tell you, Mam. Pap’s been gambling with the claims.”

  “No.” Her blood seemed to chill in her veins. “He can’t.”

  “He did. He lost two to Mr. Stark, who said he’s keeping them till he can sign them over to me. Said they’re rightfully mine.”

  Her mind slid on what Tim was telling her, like she walked on ice. “No. Not the claims.”

  “He does. Mam, please, I’m telling you. It’s true. Mr. Stark showed ’em to me.”

  “He took them out of the box?” Her teeth chattered, and it was cold, but heat built under her skin. “He wouldn’t.” Yet a hard kernel of belief was forming in her mind. He could. He did. Legally. Just like he’d sold the farm without telling her.

  “What’ll we live on?” She didn’t know she’d spoken out loud.

  “I have a good job, Mam. We’ll get by,” Tim said. “We don’t need him, nohow.”

  Martha did not hear him as she walked up Jackson in a thick gray cloud, and took up the dulcimer and played, hardly knowing what her fingers did, but let them move on their own, the music finding its way into her heart so that when Sam crossed the threshold she was almost herself again.

  “Where’s our baby girl?” He looked around for Dotty, a half smile on his face.

  “What do you care? You’ve been off in some saloon throwing away her living.”

  He dropped into a fighting pose, fists doubled at his sides, his chin tucked into his chest. “What in hell are you talking about?”

  “You been losing claims, gambling. Gambling.” She laid the dulcimer on the eating table and stood up. “Like, like some wastrel.”

  “So what if I did? I’ll find more when it thaws.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. The way the country’s filling up with people looking to strike it rich, you might never find color again.”

  “I know where to look, dammit.”

  “You looked there already, and whatever you found you threw away.”

  “I didn’t throw it away.”

  “Might’s well. You gambled them away. Why didn’t you just take them and burn them?”

  “Woman, you don’t know what you’re saying! I’ll win them back and more.”

  “When? You promised that before. Make a strike. Find the Mother Lod
e. Now you’re gonna win back the contracts. How?”

  “My luck will turn. It always does.”

  “When? What’re we supposed to do while we’re waiting? I can’t earn enough baking pies to keep us from starving. You got to do your share.”

  “We’d be all right if that lazy son of ours would come home and do some proper work, stead of poncing about clerking in a goddam store. ‘Yessir,’ ‘Nossir,’ ‘We can get it for you sir.’ That ain’t no way for a man. It’s a sissy way.”