Hell's Half-Acre

by Nicholas Nicastro

  They rode like the devil, north. Reaching the riverbank, they paused until first light, then forded the river at a place where the late summer drought had narrowed it to twenty yards. There was a meadow on the far side. Bone tired, they turned the horses loose and laid out their gear to dry on the short grass. Still fraught after the night’s events, Leroy lay on his back and felt the morning sunshine strengthen on his face. There was not much talk; though their objective was achieved, none of them felt his conduct merited much glory. The flag they had stolen was puddled on the ground, forgotten. When Fess made a show of belting out a self-­satisfied yawn, Bannerman told him to shut his trap.

  Leroy had been dozing for a time—­he couldn’t tell how long—­when he was nudged awake by Bannerman’s boot.

  “What is it?”

  The other pointed with his chin across the river. Rising to his elbows, Leroy swept the far shore and then up the hill beyond it. There, at the crest, two riders in long, foul-­weather coats stood silhouetted against the blue. Their faces were too far away to read but seemed set in their direction, as if appraising their defensive position. Rising to his feet now, Leroy watched another rider join them, and another after that. As the last rose from the far side of the hill, he could clearly see the red kerchief tied around his neck.

  “Pukes,” Bannerman said.

  Leroy watched as the party opposing them swelled to six, seven, then nine mounted men. Though roving Defensives were not common this far from the borderlands, the developing logic of the situation was hard to dismiss: if the party was indifferent, retreat would do no harm. But if hostile, the Devil’s Angels would have to give ground or get the worst of a fight.

  “Get to your horses. But don’t make it look like you’re in a hurry.”

  The newcomers weren’t fooled. The instant the three of them made as if to escape, the posse whipped their mounts and barreled down the slope. Leroy and company got a good head start, as the bushwhackers had to cross the river. But there was a bitter taste in his mouth as he realized he had left some important kit drying on the grass behind him: namely his boots, a good blanket lent by his father, and a certain other item of apparel.

  “Say, Leroy, did you happen to know you’re ridin’ in yer union suit?” Fess yelled from behind.

  “Long as he keeps the trapdoor shut it’s nothing to me,” chimed Bannerman.

  Leroy stood up in his saddle and looked back just in time to see eighteen pairs of hooves rumble over his britches.

  Breaking through the last of the tree cover, they struck out across the prairie as the sun buried itself in a stratum of bruise-­colored clouds. These gathered its rays into great lancing columns of light that cut the dusty atmosphere and lit upon the Leavenworth line of the Union Pacific Railroad. In ten minutes of hard riding they reached the tracks, and for no other reason than to keep the glare out of their eyes, they turned to follow the roadbed west.

  The double track ran straight and level through this corner of Kansas, creasing the gently undulating landscape like a suture. Miles ahead the buff of autumn prairie met the blue sky in a line precisely bisected by the railroad. On the featureless expanse they made for that point of convergence almost by geometric necessity, exhausting their horses as they chased the receding intersection.

  As space stretched before him, time became foreshortened. He rode with a monomaniacal intensity, obliterating miles and spitting them back in the faces of his pursuit. Yet the landscape around him didn’t change: the track still ran straight, the clouds stalled, the same fringe of switch-­grass as if he were stationary before a short loop of theatrical backdrop. In what seemed like only a few minutes the sun was at the meridian. Waking from his trance, Leroy noticed his horse was lathered, the froth of its exertion flying back into his face. Soon he would have to choose between reining back or riding him to ground.

  Meaning to signal his companions, he looked to Bannerman to his left and Fess to his right. The first was riding with one hand on the reins and the other grasping his side, like a man suffering a cramp. Fess was hunkered down in his saddle, trusting in mere solidity to keep him upright. The pounding of hooves—­and a dryness in his throat from mouthfuls of trail dirt he had swallowed—­made it impossible to get the attention of either.

  He pulled up, wrestling with the pitching head of his horse until, as the trail of his dust caught up with him, he stopped. Surprised, the others went fifty yards farther on until they wheeled. Looking back, they saw Leroy turning in tight circles as his agitated mount danced with hot blood coursing through its legs. He had his weapon drawn and was peering back through the haze at the bushwhackers.

  They were far behind—­at least half a mile, perhaps more. And they were dismounted, standing with their horses loosed and grazing around them.

  “Congratulations, boys!” declared Fess. “Looks like we rode ’em right out of the saddle!”

  “And ourselves too.”

  “This is our chance, Leroy,” Bannerman said. “If we can get enough ahead of ’em.”

  Dubious, foreseeing disaster, Leroy agreed to push on. Immediately, the bushwhackers rounded up their horses and resumed the chase. The parties went on like this a little farther, the landscape around them changing little except for the slow retraction of roadbed behind them. A sense of disorientation rose, making him feel he was riding not on the level ground but steadily upward, into the sky on a ladder composed of railroad ties. But in a short time, no longer than it took for the sun to proceed its own width in the sky, he heard a particular wheeze from his horse. It was a sound like a man attempting to breathe through a shallow pan of water.

  “There’s nothing for it,” he cried out. “Got to stop.”

  He reined up, gun drawn. Yet just as he stopped, the posse did the same. Leroy then understood their true position: having ridden farther, the bushwhackers were in worse shape than they were. For the moment they meant only to prevent the three of them from escaping, and nothing more.

  And so the antagonists stared up and down the line. They were out of earshot, out of pistol range, but close enough to monitor each other. The Bushwackers squatted on the gleaming rails, the tails of their dusters tenting in the breeze. They tilted canteens into the air; the Devil’s Angels did the same.

  Bannerman spat a mouthful into the weeds.

  “Unless we run out of prairie, reckon they must have us.”

  “Looks like it,” granted Leroy.

  “We could split up.”

  “They would do the same.”

  “So we just sit here?”

  Leroy laid back. “For now,” he said, lacing his fingers behind his head and showing a grimace of contentment.

  The interlude went on as the sun crossed the tracks and arced toward Colorado. As the wind freshened, a flotilla of cumuli floated above, casting first one party and then the other in shadow. The momentary coolness relieved the pounding in his head; he might have fallen asleep there, with his head against the rail and nostrils full of the odor of creosote, if the string of his cares did not suddenly pull taut. His eyes shot open to find Fess standing over him.

  “Train’s coming.”

  Leroy jerked erect. Where the westbound track met the eastern horizon, there was a gleam, flickering and ruddy like a candle reflected in bronze. It strengthened as he watched, becoming whiter and steadier as a high-­pitched, faintly pneumatic roar rolled across the prairie. Closer, and the crown of gray smoke unfolded, almost translucent in the distance but gathering substance as it approached.

  The bushwhackers wandered off the track, gathering on the north side as their coats whipped in the train’s wake. Leroy, Fess, and Bannerman were standing on the south side; as the train approached at an oblique angle, it screened the two parties from each other. The bushwhackers were uncovered again when it was a hundred yards from them. At this, Fess lifted a fist to the sky, proclaiming, “The devil take �
�em, I think I’ve got it!”

  “What are you talking about, you jackass?”

  “Tell me, is that or is it not a streambed down there?”

  He gestured north to a line of scrub that seemed to march as long and straight as the track.

  “Likely. And how does that help us, if they can plainly see us make for it?”

  Fess winked. “You just get ready to move when I say!”

  The train passed at forty miles an hour. It had six cars and no caboose, with a smoking platform on the end. Two figures stood on it: a gentleman in a stove-­pipe hat and a woman in a lavender dress, elbow bent under mutton-­chop sleeves as she dragged on a cigarette. Leroy caught her eye as she looked upon him blankly, like he was some nameless feature on the landscape. He imagined she forgot him a moment later. But under the strain of their desperate situation, her glance, delivered as it was from a place of gentility and perfect security, made a permanent impression on him. Her face came back to him for years after, when he thought on his misadventures during the war.

  The boys had their first bite in twelve hours—­stale biscuits from the Dicks’ breakfast table two days previous—­as they sat and waited to behold Fess’s coup. The Defensives down the line made themselves a smoky fire out of grass and prairie muffins, and set up a stand to boil coffee. Fess was soon standing there with his nose in the air as if he could smell their brew. Bannerman laughed. “Thinking of joining them, you slanticular snake?”

  “It may come to that,” he replied, and resumed plucking his mouth harp. Leroy liked the sound no better than before, but under the circumstances, he preferred it to the desolate hiss of the breeze through the weeds. Weeds that, likely as not, would soon cradle his rotting bones.

  It was well on toward sunset when their opportunity came at last. The next train appeared as evening rose on the eastern horizon, pure white headlamp piercing the dusk. As it neared the posse, Fess, who was keeping very still, murmured, “Don’t move a muscle, but be ready to take horse.”

  After meditating on the angles and the timing, Bannerman vented a snort. “I think I see what he’s cookin’,” he said.

  “Will it work?”

  “How fast you gonna ride?”

  When the train was abreast of them, the bushwhackers again shambled to the north. The locomotive, which let out a whistle either in salutation or warning, barreled through and interposed itself between the parties.

  “It’s now or never, boys!” Fess cried.

  The three of them were mounted and running before they could get their boots in the stirrups. As they made for the stream, Fess led them on an oblique angle to the southwest, keeping them screened by the train as long as he could. Leroy hadn’t ridden in such disarray since the first time he had galloped a horse. Already out of a pair of britches, he lost his hat and the gloves from his pocket too. When they finally reached the scrub he was almost out of his saddle, face buried in the mane but still on the daylight side of his horse.

  The stream was little more than a rivulet this time of year, the bed barely low enough for a prone man to keep out of sight. Bannerman and Fess lay hatless on their bellies, peering at their pursuit. After tying his horse behind a screen of blackberry bushes, Leroy retrieved his Sharps and a bandolier. Then he scurried back, half running and half crawling, to join the others.

  It took some time for their pursuers to register their absence when the train was gone. Their faces were too far away to see, but to Leroy they seemed to stand around in erect, attentive disbelief for a while—­until the notion of giving chase came over them, though without much urgency as there was no sign of other riders for miles in every direction.

  Fess punched Leroy in the arm. “You’re more likely to catch a weasel asleep than outfox old Fess!”

  “We’re not in the clear yet,” said Bannerman.

  The Defensives trotted their horses down the roadbed, guns drawn as if they expected their quarry to leap suddenly from the earth. When they reached the spot where Leroy and Company had rested, they paused, circling as they read the ground. Leroy felt his gut lighten as he watched them pick up their trail and follow it. They were heading straight for their hiding place.

  “Well, that was a nice try,” said Bannerman as he turned over to extract a second Colt from under his jacket.

  “So we make a stand here?”

  “Do you want to keep running?”

  They were closer now than they’d ever been. Bewhiskered, wind-­chapped faces resolved as they approached, eyes flicking between the ground and the cover ahead. They wore a chance collection of duds salvaged from corpses—­Union army jackets, gaiters, cattlemen’s dusters, one or two breeches in Confederate brownish-­gray. One of them had lieutenant’s bars on his shoulders. No order was necessary for them to space themselves across their exposed front and hold their fire without a clear target. They were a hard, scary-­looking crew.

  Leroy swallowed. “Nathan, the three on the right?”

  “I hope.”

  “Got the left,” declared Fess.

  Laying his Colt within easy reach in the grass, Leroy cocked and sighted along his Sharps. He had a bead on the one with the officer’s bars when he looked into the man’s eyes—­and was chilled to see those eyes look straight back.

  By some quirk of his attention he didn’t register the rifle’s kick, but he did hear the bullet pierce the man’s breast, striking it like the open-­palmed slap of a woman. A look of incredulity came over the man, for he was evidently one of those Defensives who never believed the wages of his crimes would ever be repaid. He stopped his horse, sorted his reins. Then he tumbled.

  The gunfight erupted so fast that its exact progress was only clear to Leroy later, when they all had time to discuss it. Bannerman winged his first target in his nonshooting hand; the man shot back in haphazard fashion, pouring blue smoke from barrel and cylinder. Fess missed clean with his first shot, then hacked off four more with his eyes closed against the roar and the spit of powder. When he peeped over the rise again, he saw he had taken one man in the head and wounded the horse of another. The latter whirled in panic, its rider cursing and contorting himself to bring his gun to bear.

  With the flight of the wounded horse, the bushwhackers’ line broke. The seven still in their mounts scattered in a generally northeastern direction, shooting wildly into prairie and sky. None of their bullets came anywhere near them, but one severed the branch of a tree, which fluttered down upon Bannerman and rattled him so severely that he rolled over firing blind. Fess brayed with laughter.

  “You go get ’em, gunfighter! You kill that tree dead!”

  Leroy stood to watch the posse scatter. Euphoria, ballasted by relief, came over him as he watched their backs recede. At last, he had been measured against his heroic imaginings, and had not come up short. But his joy was brief, for there were two corpses left in the grass, and one of them, though just as certainly dead as the other, was still kicking its legs.

  Leroy went to check on the horses. Climbing around, he found them with heads up, lips stained green, eyes whiteless and calm. Back on the turf, Fess and Bannerman stood over one of the Defensives. Kneeling, Fess extended the corpse’s right hand and spread the fingers. Then he stood, cocked his Smith, and sighted along the barrel at the dead man’s palm.

  “Hey Daniel, what’re you doing?”

  So rarely was Fess called by his real name that he paused.

  “Hey Leroy. Watch this.”

  The .22 cracked and kicked. The corpse’s forearm whipped and twisted with the force of the shot, coming to rest at an oblique angle, as if the man were giving a companionable wave. A moment later Leroy heard something land in the weeds behind him.

  “Didn’t I just tell ya!”

  “Well I’ll be damned,” marveled Bannerman.

  “What’re you apes talking about?”

  “Look,”
said Fess, pointing with his gun. “Hit ’em in the lifeline and the fingers come off just as you please.”

  It was true: there were five clean, red, empty sockets where the Defensive’s fingers had been. The digits were missing entirely, ejected in every direction.

  Bannerman whistled, unholstered. “Let me try that.”

  “No you’re not,” Leroy said.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “We don’t do that, is all.”

  “Yeah? Well I don’t take orders neither.”

  “Call it a strong suggestion, then.”

  He took out his Paterson and let it hang by his side.

  “What is it to you, Leroy?” Fess repeated. And indeed, he would have been hard pressed to explain these sudden, unthinking qualms—­except for the image, indelibly engraved in his memory, of Tubbs’s similarly mutilated remains. The smell of it, the rank congealed finality, still lived in his nostrils. He trembled despite himself.

  Bannerman stepped over the body to come within twelve inches of Leroy’s nose.

  “Ever been to Osawatomie?”

  Leroy shrugged.

  “They found six jayhawkers dead there last month. Hanging from trees. Guts split from collar to crotch. Any petikler thoughts on that, Leroy?”

  “Wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Funny. Funny man.”

  After fixing him with a last glare, Bannerman stepped back and holstered his pistol. But then Fess piped up: “Now I’ve seen the elephant! Tough guy turns out to be a damn yella sheeny!”

  “Shut up, Fess,” Bannerman and Leroy said in unison.

  “I wouldn’t take that if I were you” Fess said. “Somebody might think I’m missing a load of sand.”

  “I said I’m warning you.”

  “Are you? Better ask Leroy before you do anything . . . sheeny.”

  In a flash of herringbone and flying nickel plate, Bannerman was on him. He cracked Fess across the jaw with his gun hand, hooking his lip with the trigger guard and ripping it to the gum line. Fess hit the ground unconscious. A stream of blood poured down his chin, over his neck, and into a pool in the dirt.