Hunters

by James Reasoner

  “Just tryin’ to get things under control, Marshal.” Flint hopped down from the desk with a spryness that belied his obvious years.

  The men in the office stepped aside to let Bill through. He went to the desk and pulled open the middle drawer. Taking out a pad of paper and a pencil, he set them on the desk and said, “You men who are volunteering, write your names here. Put down whether or not you already have a gun, and what kind if you do.”

  The men started to crowd up to the desk. Flint said, “Keep it orderly now.”

  The old-timer took to giving orders real well, Bill thought. Maybe too well. But he had to admit that under Flint’s urging, the volunteers formed a rough line and stopped jabbering so much.

  While the men were signing up, Flint turned to Bill and said, “We best figure out how many guns and rounds of ammunition we got on hand here.”

  “That’s a good idea. You can do that later. You can count things up and write ’em down, can’t you?”

  Flint scowled and drew himself up to his full height, which was still a head shorter than Bill.

  “Of course I can cipher! You reckon I’m uneducated or somethin’, Marshal?”

  “I wouldn’t know. We never met before today, remember?”

  “I’ll have you know I went to school for two whole years when I was a younker back in Kaintuck. I can cipher, I can sign my name, and I can even read a mite.”

  “That’s good,” Bill said. “A lawman needs to be able to read a little sometimes. Speakin’ of which…stay out of the desk from now on unless I tell you otherwise.”

  “You talkin’ about this badge? I figured if I didn’t have it, folks might not believe you really deputized me.” Flint fingered the tin star. “I ain’t been in town long. What happened to the last fella who wore this?”

  “I killed him,” Bill said.

  Flint’s eyes widened. After a couple of seconds of silence, he burst out, “Are you just gonna leave it at that?”

  “Ask somebody else,” Bill said. “I’d just as soon not hash it all out again.”

  The men had finished signing the list of volunteers. Bill turned the paper around, looked it over, and nodded in satisfaction. It looked like all the men owned at least one gun.

  “If you know anybody else you think would like to help, talk to them and tell them to look me up,” he told the men. “Right now, let’s figure out who wants to climb up on the roofs to stand guard and who wants to ride the circuit around the settlement. You heard what Mr. Flint—”

  The old-timer cleared his throat meaningfully.

  Bill took a deep breath. “You heard what Deputy Flint said,” he went on. “Being an outrider is a dangerous job, so keep that in mind. Any man who takes it on needs to have a good, dependable horse and a rifle. Probably be better if you’ve got a handgun as well.”

  He paused so they would understand the importance of what he said next.

  “You’ll be our first line of defense. You’ll be taking the biggest risks, and we’ll be depending on you the most. So be sure you’re ready for that before you volunteer.”

  The men were quiet for a moment. Several of them exchanged glances.

  Then a young man with a thatch of fair hair under a battered hat stepped forward and said, “I’ll be an outrider. I’ve got a fast buckskin pony no Injun can catch, and I’m a fair hand with a rifle.”

  “What’s your name?” Bill asked.

  “Aaron Wetherby.”

  “You married, Aaron?”

  Bill thought that was unlikely, since Wetherby was even younger than him, but he figured he needed to ask anyway.

  “No, sir, Marshal.” A cocky grin appeared on the youngster’s face. “I’ve still got a heap of wild oats to sow before I settle down.”

  “Let’s hope you live to sow them,” Bill said. That probably wasn’t the smartest comment in the world to make, but he wanted Wetherby to take this seriously. “Now, who else thinks they can handle the job?”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Bill sorted out the tasks and got volunteers for all of them. He drew up a schedule of shifts and saw right away that they were going to be short-handed if nobody else came forward to help.

  But this was a start, he told himself. If the Pawnee showed up now, they wouldn’t find Redemption completely unprepared. Even though he didn’t have any experience fighting Indians, Bill sensed how important that was.

  As long as they weren’t taken by surprise, they would have a fighting chance.

  That was all most folks ever got out of life, anyway.

  “I hate a damn cripple,” Jacob Fraker said as he watched Fred Smoot roll across the floor of the saloon’s main room. “He gives me the fantods.”

  Luther Macauley said, “The way I heard the story, it’s not his fault he’s stuck in that chair. Somebody shot him.”

  Fraker downed the shot of whiskey in his hand and thumped the empty glass back down on the table. “I don’t care. A man who ain’t whole shouldn’t be out in public where people can see him. It’s disgusting.”

  The third man at the table, whose name was Oscar Kipp, asked, “What if you was to lose an arm?”

  “Same thing,” Fraker said. “If something like that ever happened to me, I reckon I’d drink down a whole bottle of whiskey and then blow my own brains out.”

  “Seems a mite drastic to me,” Macauley said.

  Fraker snorted. “Yeah, well, you use words like ‘drastic,’ whatever the hell that means.”

  In addition to cripples, Fraker also hated the way Macauley sometimes acted like he was so much smarter than him or Kipp. It was true that Macauley had gone to college down in Louisiana or somewhere, but in the real world that didn’t mean squat.

  When it came time to figure out how to go about robbing a bank or holding up a train, all the book learning in the world wasn’t any help.

  That took a man with guts and cunning, and Jacob Fraker had both of those things in spades.

  Macauley came in handy for other reasons, though. For example, he could kill a man without blinking, just like Fraker and Kipp. He’d proven that more than once.

  Fraker was a lantern-jawed man with dark hair under his tipped-back black Stetson. The hat matched the black leather vest he wore over a faded red shirt and the black gun belt strapped around his lean hips.

  In the thirty years Fraker had been on earth, he had killed eight men: two in face-to-face gunfights, six from ambush. He had cut a whore’s throat, too, but that didn’t count because she had tried to stab and rob him first.

  Shocked the hell out of her when he took the knife away from her and carved her a new grin.

  He had cleaned out seven banks, stopped and robbed three trains, and even held up a few stagecoaches—he didn’t remember how many for sure.

  He had been partnered up with Kipp, a big, sandy-haired man with a mustache that hung over his mouth, and Macauley, a skinny blond dandy who had been a tinhorn gambler before turning outlaw, for several years now.

  Other hombres came and went sometimes, depending on what sort of job they were looking at, but those three were the core of the gang.

  They were also the only ones in Redemption at the moment. They had ridden in a day earlier to take a look around, leaving the rest of the bunch camped in a canyon several miles northwest of the settlement.

  And what did they find? A town all worked up over a possible Indian attack. That was just going to complicate things.

  But if there was a way to turn the situation to their favor, Fraker thought, he would find it. He always did.

  Earlier today they had stood on the edge of the crowd, listening to that kid marshal and those stuffed-shirt politicians on the town council talking about how the Pawnee might raid the town and how they had to get ready. With all the talk about hostiles, nobody had given the three hard-bitten strangers a second glance.

  Night had fallen now, and those guards the marshal had recruited were out there somewhere in the darkness trying to protect the town.


  The possibility of an Indian attack was still all that the people in the saloon could talk about. Fraker listened to the buzz of conversation in the room and heard the fear in their voices.

  Those yokels just don’t know what they really ought to be scared of, Fraker told himself with a faint smile as he poured another drink from the bottle in the center of the table.

  Sometimes the real threats came from within, where folks hardly ever thought to look.

  Kipp leaned forward and said, “You reckon we ought to get out of town while the gettin’s good, Jake? I’d sure hate to run into those Pawnee.”

  “Getting out of town’s the last thing we need to do,” Fraker snapped. “There’s no proof those Indians are anywhere near here.”

  “Anyway, we’re safer here than we would be elsewhere,” Macauley pointed out. “It’s the boys out at the canyon who really have something to worry about…and they probably don’t even know it.”

  Fraker had thought about the rest of the men in the gang. If that war party jumped them, they might not have a chance.

  But life was full of risk, he reminded himself. There were no guarantees.

  Except that no matter what the situation, he would find a way to make some money out of it.

  “The boys can take care of themselves,” Fraker said. “As for us, we’re staying right here in Redemption.” He lifted his glass and looked at the amber liquid in it. “And we’re not leaving until we’re rich men, Pawnee or no Pawnee.”

  Chapter 13

  Costigan’s pulse hammered wildly inside his head as he listened to the distant shots. There was no doubt in his mind what they meant.

  “Come on!” he said to Captain Stone. “We’ve got to go help them!”

  “Wait!” Stone said. “You said the Indians’ trail is here.”

  Costigan yanked his horse into a tight circle and leveled an arm toward the south.

  “But now they’re there, you idiot! They’re attacking the hunting party!”

  “We don’t know that. Perhaps your friends are firing at the buffalo herd.”

  Hutton said, “Beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n, but Costigan’s right. That ain’t the sort of shootin’ they’d be doin’ if they were killin’ buffalo. They’re tryin’ to keep from gettin’ killed.”

  “The hell with all of you,” Costigan said. He jammed his heels into his horse’s flanks and sent the animal leaping into a gallop.

  Behind him, he heard Stone shout, “Sergeant! Sergeant! Stop that man!”

  No shots rang out. Either Hutton was being slow about following the order…or he wasn’t obeying it to start with.

  Costigan didn’t care which it was. He leaned forward in the saddle and raised his left hand to hold his hat on as the wind threatened to pluck it from his head. His horse raced southward, toward the sound of battle.

  Not the first time, he thought. Not the first time he had hurried toward death while it claimed those who were his friends.

  If he had been the sort of man to pray, he would have sent a plea heavenward right about then, a prayer that McGinty and the others would survive until he got there to help them.

  It had been years since he had believed that anybody was up there to hear his prayers, though, so he concentrated on keeping the horse from stepping in a prairie dog hole or tripping on some other obstacle instead. That was the best thing he could do right now.

  After a few minutes, curiosity made him look back over his shoulder. Dust boiled up in a cloud behind him. The troopers were coming after him, whether to arrest him or help him, Costigan didn’t know. With the lead he had on them, he didn’t think they were going to catch him.

  With his horse’s hooves pounding the ground the way they were, he couldn’t hear the shots anymore. After he had covered a couple of miles, he reined in for a moment after checking to see that the cavalry patrol hadn’t narrowed the gap between them.

  Breathing hard, Costigan sat there and listened. He didn’t hear any shots…because there weren’t any to hear.

  The prairie was silent except for the faint moaning of the wind.

  Or was it the moaning of dead spirits? Costigan asked himself. Had the rest of the hunting party been wiped out?

  “Hyaaah!” he said as he kicked his mount into a run again. He knew he was asking a lot of the horse, but he would ride it right into the ground if he had to.

  I should have stayed with the others.

  That thought echoed through his head. It didn’t matter that Stone and Bledsoe both had ordered him to accompany the patrol.

  Nor was it important that other than Dave McGinty, he didn’t particularly like any of the other men in the hunting party. He had signed on to come out here with them. They were all partners, in a way, and if they had fallen into danger, he should have been there with them.

  A dark mass bulked on the horizon. The buffalo herd, Costigan thought when he spotted it. The hunting party would be somewhere near the herd.

  A couple of minutes later, he saw the wagons parked off to his right and veered in that direction. He fully expected that when he galloped up to the vehicles, he would find the bodies of McGinty, Bledsoe, and all the others littered on the ground around the wagons, bristling with arrows and probably scalped and mutilated.

  He wasn’t prepared for what he found instead.

  A lot of shots had been fired here. The air still carried the acrid tang of burned powder. Men holding rifles stood around the wagons. They weren’t dead after all, Costigan thought as his heart slugged. They had survived.

  But there were bodies on the ground anyway. More than a dozen of them in buckskin leggings and breechcloths. Their coppery bodies were bloody and torn apart where they had been riddled with lead.

  Costigan slowed his horse to a halt and sat there looking around at the carnage. None of the members of the hunting party paid any attention to him at first. They seemed as stunned as Costigan was.

  Then Dave McGinty turned his head and looked at Costigan with haunted eyes. His voice was hoarse with strain when he spoke.

  “We didn’t know, Ward. I swear we didn’t know.”

  Costigan knew what McGinty was talking about.

  All the Indians appeared to be no more than fourteen or fifteen years old.

  McGinty’s words seemed to snap Bledsoe out of his reverie. The colonel looked at Costigan and said, “They’re all savages, by God! We have nothing to apologize for. They’re savages!”

  Costigan swung down from his saddle and stepped over to McGinty. A glance to the north told him that the cavalry patrol was still headed in this direction. The column of dust steadily drew closer.

  “Tell me what happened, Dave,” Costigan said.

  Bledsoe stomped over, his face a mottled red.

  “I’ll tell you what happened!” he said before McGinty could respond. “We acted in self-defense to save ourselves from those bloodthirsty Pawnee!”

  Costigan lost his temper. His hands shot out, grabbed the lapels of Bledsoe’s suit coat, and shoved the colonel against one of the hide wagons.

  “Shut up! I want to know what really happened, and I want to know fast, before Stone and the rest of those troopers get here.”

  “What does it matter?” Bledsoe asked with a sneer. “We didn’t do anything wrong. Not one damned thing.”

  Behind his bravado, though, his eyes were filled with fear. Costigan saw that plain as day.

  McGinty wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and said, “We came up on the herd, just like we expected to. But there was a bunch of redskins already goin’ after those buffs. When they saw us, they charged us, whoopin’ and yellin’ and wavin’ their bows in the air. We couldn’t tell they were just kids, Ward. I swear we couldn’t.”

  Costigan walked over to one of the corpses and looked down at it. The Indian youngster’s face was twisted from his death agonies.

  But it didn’t bear even a trace of paint.

  “They aren’t painted for war,” Costigan said. “Not o
ne of them. You couldn’t see that?”

  Tolbert and Browne came up, cradling their buffalo rifles in their arms. Browne said, “What are you accusin’ us of, Costigan? Are you sayin’ we murdered these savages?”

  “They came at us first,” Tolbert added.

  Costigan took his hat off and wearily rubbed his other hand over his face.

  “They were scared of you,” he said in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper. “They were hunting, like their fathers and their fathers before that hunted, and then all of you came up, and they were scared. So they tried to run you off, because they were just kids and they weren’t thinking straight.” He looked around. “Did they have any rifles?”

  “No,” McGinty said. “Just the bows and arrows.”

  “They couldn’t have hurt you. At worst, you could have shot the ponies out from under them.”

  “You weren’t here, by God!” Bledsoe said. “Don’t you judge us, you son of a bitch! You weren’t here.”

  “No, but I am now. And so’s the cavalry.”

  Costigan turned his back on the corpse-littered plains and walked over to one of the wagons. He didn’t even notice the stink coming from it as he lowered the tailgate and sat on it, suddenly too tired to stand up anymore.

  They came through the wheat field, the Stars and Bars waving in the sun, a piper somewhere in their midst piping “Dixie,” an officer in front carrying his sword above his head as he led his troops into battle. The sun was bright and warm, and a breeze ruffled the stalks of wheat.

  In the trees, Costigan lifted his spyglass to his eye. It was his job to kill that officer, and as soon as his shot rang out, all the other troops in the trees would fire, too. The battle would be joined.

  Costigan peered through the lens and settled the glass on the commanding officer. His breath hissed through his teeth as he saw that the man had to be seventy-five years old, at least. He swung the glass to the soldiers in the front rank of the Confederate troops advancing through the field.

  Children. Boys as young as ten, none older than fourteen or fifteen.

  But they had muskets in their hands, muskets that could kill no matter how old the fingers that pulled the triggers.