The Stalkers

by Terry C. Johnston

  “Hot enough to boil the fat off a flea, sojur.” Donegan started off. He watched the sullen, glaring faces of those soldiers lounging in knots round the parade, faces filled with distrust and downright hatred for the black soldier at the Irishman’s side.

  “I’ll go back to my unit now.”

  “Think I’ll walk you there,” Seamus replied, nudging the soldier off. “Not much of a happy place, this Fort Wallace.”

  “Thank you again … for coming to help me with them boys hacking on me. I owe you one, Mr. Donegan.”

  Donegan smiled, slapping the soldier on the back as they trudged toward the far side of the parade. “Call me Seamus, sojur. What’s your name?”

  “Waller, sir. Given the slave name of Reuben. Took my old field-boss’s name after my master was killed in the war … when I run north to fight in the war on the Union side.”

  “Reuben Waller, is it?” Seamus said with a grin, gingerly feeling the growing knot at the back of his skull. “Glad to meet you, Reuben Waller.”

  Chapter 1

  “What you make of that, Sam?”

  Sam Marr turned, staring up the side of the hill where another civilian employee of Fort Phil Kearny’s army labored among the timber above Pine Island in the middle of Big Piney Creek.

  “Looks to be traveling alone, don’t he?” A second woodcutter inched up beside Marr, asking his question as all work on the slope ground to a halt.

  “Let’s hope he is, boys,” Marr, a Missourian, replied with a drawl that had all the warmth of a cheery firepit on a winter’s evening. “This ol’ body of mine doesn’t need it any more bullet holes.”

  They watched the lone horseman halt upslope. Then slowly raise his right arm in signal.

  “Halloo!”

  With the lone stranger’s holler, most of the civilians looked again at one another in disbelief. One of them nervously levered a shell into the chamber of his Winchester repeater. Sam braced his hand out, forcing the man’s rifle down.

  “I got more reason’n any of you to be jumpy, boys,” he whispered gruffly now. “I say he’s a white man——”

  “Shit, Sam!” one of the workers growled. “Ain’t no white man gonna be coming up outta the Peno.”

  “That bastard’s riding outta Injun country——”

  “——crawlin’ with Sioux and Shians!”

  Marr took two steps forward and turned on the others. “Let’s be hospitable, boys. But keep them fingers near your triggers.”

  Sam cupped a hand at his mouth. “Halloo! Come on in, stranger!”

  He watched the man’s eyes as he came on slowly, easing his pony down the slope. Long ago, Sam had learned to watch the eyes. Even more important than watching a man’s pistol hand. These eyes talked nervousness, while the stranger’s face tried to display calm detachment.

  “You’re from Dixie, aincha?” the horseman asked, his hard eyes center-firing on Marr. He stayed atop his pony.

  The horse-breeder in Marr saw the animal was badly in need of a curry. No saddle poking up beneath the greasy trade-blanket neither. Sam’s eyes narrowed. The horseman’s Southern accent came more as an affront than did his question.

  “Missouri.”

  He nodded, those red-rimmed eyes bouncing finally over the others. Marr couldn’t help feeling a bit of relief that those dark, marble eyes flicked to someone else for a moment.

  Killer’s eyes, he thought to himself. Cold, downright, blooded killer’s eyes.

  “Missouri, eh? I spent some of my time in——”

  “What brings you down outta Sioux country?” asked one of Sam’s companions suddenly, made bold by the wizened stranger who looked more in need of a meal than did a stray trail-dog.

  His eyes flashed a moment. Then cooled before he opened his mouth, showing more of the browned, rotting teeth. He spat a stream of warm juice into a patch of melting snow left on the hillside by yesterday’s first storm of the coming winter. “Come down from Fort Smith, I did.” He leaned forward on the pony. “Watched all the way for Injun sign. Nary did I see one of Red Cloud’s boys.”

  Marr watched the tobacco juice hiss into the soft October snow. “We figure they still licking their wounds from the fight we give ’em couple months back.” When he looked up, he found the horseman’s eyes narrowed on him.

  “You there?”

  “I was,” Sam answered. Something eerie and chilling about the man had sent a single drop of cold spilling down Marr’s backbone.

  The stranger only nodded at first. Then finally leaned back on his trail-weary pony. His shoulders sagged a bit. “Won’t be staying here, fellas. Moving on. Just looking for a fella … friend of mine. Irishman.”

  One of the boys turned to Marr, whispering. “He talking about Donegan, Sam?”

  Marr watched the stranger perk up, his jaw jutting.

  “That’s him,” he replied. “The Irishman. Named Donegan. Knowed him up at Fort Smith. Heard he come down here.” His eyes darted anxiously. “He … he around here someplace?”

  There it was. Bigger than life. Sam Marr felt it crawl round his belly. But before he could let the others know of his suspicions, slow-witted Silas Heeley blurted it out.

  “Ain’t here, stranger. Donegan ain’t. Come through here, on his way down from Smith, all right. Heading south to Laramie. Going on to Kansas from here, weren’t he, Sam?”

  Marr turned from Heeley’s open, blundering face to find the stranger coldly waiting for Sam’s answer.

  “That where my friend went … Sam?”

  “Yeah. Went to Kansas. Some reason you’re looking for the Irishman, stranger?”

  “I owe ’im, friend.”

  “Card game, I bet,” Heeley said.

  He smiled. “Might say that, yessir.” He nudged heels into his pony.

  Marr snagged the pony’s rawhide bit with a hand. “’Fraid you didn’t tell us your name, stranger.”

  He smiled as he gently used the muzzle of his brass-tacked Winchester to nudge Marr’s hand from its grip on his pony. “Didn’t.”

  “And your business?”

  “Finding the Irishman.”

  Marr was forced to step back out of the way with the others as the ugly cayuse carried its owner on down the hill and across the Big Piney.

  “You ever see a rigging like that on a white man’s horse before?” Sam asked the group.

  “Never,” replied one of the workers. “That was out-an’-out Injun. No two ways ’bout it, Sam. And them britches, that shirt he wearing … and capote he got tied behind him. Injun doin’s.”

  “Figured that,” Marr replied, eyes locked on the stranger’s back. “Seamus Donegan never been the luckiest man playing cards I know of.”

  “Maybe he run off last summer owing that stranger,” Heeley said, puffing his chest out as if he had just read the tea-leaves at the bottom of a soothsayer’s china cup.

  Marr wagged his head, watching the stranger nudge his pony into a lope, bypassing the wood-road that would take him to the fort, instead turning south on the Bozeman Road. Toward Fort Reno. Fort Laramie. And all points south.

  Kansas.

  Sam sighed. “I’ll wager it ain’t money that renegade bastard’s out to collect.”

  * * *

  Jack O’Neill swiped a dirty sleeve across his mouth. From his mustache and beard hung bits of the slop the bartender in this piss-hole of a saloon called a two-bit meal.

  It wasn’t that a woman’s scream was all that unusual. Hell, the chippies who worked places like this accepted that they’d get knocked around a bit in their particular line of work. So, hearing a woman scream a bit from the back where three slick-worn saddle gals plied their trade from tiny cribs wasn’t anything new.

  He went back to eating, and nursing the two fingers of what passed for rye in this part of the world.

  Jack had had much better in his time. But sadly, that was a time both come and gone.

  Son of a Southern plantation owner who again and again slipped down to the
slave-quarters to take his pleasure, mulatto O’Neill had quickly become his daddy’s pride and joy. From knee-bouncing child, to under-wing favorite, Jack’s mama always said she was proud Mr. O’Neill done right by her boy, even if he couldn’t do right by her.

  Then the Yankees up north started rattling about wanting to free the slaves. And a young man barely twenty and helping his father run his Georgia plantation couldn’t understand why that man Lincoln and the rest were hollering about taking a man’s slaves away from him. From the way things looked to young Jack O’Neill, his daddy’s slaves had everything they could ever want. Besides, there wasn’t much beating going on neither.

  Ebenezer O’Neill had proudly bankrolled his own company of Confederate volunteers and set the plantation womenfolk to sewing butternut uniforms so that when the family patriarch had marched away that day in late 1861 at the lead of his private army, he left young Jack behind to see after things until he should return at the head of a victorious Southern army.

  That damned war anyway, Jack brooded again. Had a way of changing everything … for everybody.

  His daddy never came back. But the Yankees come, and they took the plantation when Jack couldn’t pay taxes. No wonder. The help all run off, up north and God knew where. No one tending field. No money neither. What paper script they had wasn’t worth wiping his ass with in the outhouse back of the big-house.

  Jack O’Neill wandered west in the early spring of 1867.

  A big, strapping mulatto nudging shoulder-close to thirty years, Jack had adapted as he always knew he could. Working for a short time on a dock in Independence, Missouri, before he hired on to drive freight for the railroad. K-P. Like a second daddy the Kansas Pacific had become for the man who followed orders, stayed out of the way of others. And watched his money when he came to town.

  Drop his wagon off to have it loaded for a return trip while he walked down the muddy, slushy streets, looking. Maybe spend a little of his money for something hot to eat. A little more for a few drinks like daddy used to pour from cut-crystal decanters back … hell, it hurt Jack to think about it.

  But O’Neill always saved a little something for the chippies. Lord, was he happy the first time he found out at least one of them girls who worked the back didn’t mind having herself a black man … at least a half-black man with a little money to jingle in his pocket.

  Emmy was her name. And damn, if that didn’t sound like her scream now.

  Jack looked up over the lip of his bowl, staring round the murky, lamplit room that reeked of urine and dried blood and red mud melting into stinking puddles on the pounded-earth floor. With all the snow building up on the roof this February, no small wonder it leaked here and there.

  Seemed to him just about every man there was staring at him, all of them listening to Emmy scream. Their faces dumb with curiosity, or fear. Beyond the back door that led to the cribs, the noises grew louder still.

  Sounds like he’s cuffing her, his warm, dulled mind thought, working its way through the rye, nuzzling the thought the way a child will curl up with a favorite scrap of blanket.

  Then he heard furniture scraping and banging against the thin, pine-plank walls. Starting to rise from the table. All six-foot-some-seven-inches of thick, sinewy, rope-muscled frame. His skin beaded with diamonds of sweat, warmed with the sheet-iron stove at the corner, the pale lamplight giving his skin the color of old butter-scum set out too long in the springhouse churn.

  Halfway across the floor, Jack suddenly wondered what he was doing, heading like he was for that shabby door hung like a limp, broken shutter on the servants’ quarters back home. Slap-banging, that one back home would always batter the side of the house in a storm. Then as he stopped, not sure what to do … when the sound of it crawled up from the bitty-bottom of his spine and liked to knock the top of his head off.

  Never heard nothing like that, except when they gelded the colts.

  Emmy was no longer just screaming. That screech meant something terrible had happened back in that crib the girl called her home.

  Funny the easy way the door came off in his big hand as he yanked it out of the way, shouldered left, then found the latch to Emmy’s room with both big hands. Jack threw his weight against it. The door ripped back, sending splinters into the room as his eyes struggled to focus in the cloud of coal-oil and tobacco smoke.

  A strange and awful, wild stench stung his nostrils as he leaped into the room, eyes squinting, searching for her.

  “Jack! Jack! He’p me … oh, God!”

  She loomed out of the yellow haze. Naked. His eyes went to hers. Hers both bloodied and bruised. Puffy lips spouted flecks of crimson as she tried to talk. Frantically, he fumbled to make sense of it. Looking at the rumpled bed, the rickety nightstand toppled nearby. The place a shambles. With one hand she covered a white breast. A tiny stream of red pushed between the fingers she held against her freckled flesh.

  Then Jack was ashamed to look at more of her nakedness. That dark, curly triangle of hair at her crotch. Where she clamped the other hand as she slowly sank to her knees in a puddle of blood.

  “Oh … God—he cut me…”

  As Emmy collapsed to the side her hand fell away, revealing a butchering that no man could heal. Purple gut spilled forth from her belly, just above the dark, moist, shining triangle mat of curly hair.

  “Who cut you——”

  “He did!” shouted a voice behind him.

  Jack jerked his head around. Suspended behind him in the doorway must have been a half-dozen faces, all gone white and wide-eyed. One of them pointed to the far wall.

  Through that yellow haze and wild stench that was as thick as gut membrane he would slash when butchering cow buffalo, Jack O’Neill caught the filmy movement toward the tiny window that led to the alley. And he realized suddenly what the wild smell was. Remembered it from times he had bumped into them on the streets of these far western towns. It was the wild, bear-greased stench of an Indian.

  Jack lunged for the Indian’s shadow, slipping in Emmy’s blood. Landing on his knee with a loud grunt and scrambling again on his hands to the window. He caught the man’s ankle in one big paw, yanking the moccasin back into the room. The killer turned like a wild thing, hissing and snarling like a trapped animal. Jack jerked back, startled. It was not for the wide, white eyes of the man, nor the seething hiss between his teeth like something cornered crazed. But, this was a by-God white man!

  No Indian a’tall.

  And the white man still held the long, graceful knife in his hand. Still sticky and damp with Emmy’s blood as he waved Jack back.

  “She ain’t even good as a ’Rapaho squaw … that slut!” the man drawled.

  Jack figured him for no-good white … from the South, same as him. O’Neill squatted there, stunned, not believing any of this had happened. Not to him. Not to Emmy——

  “Squaws know how to make the poking fun for a man … this’un started screaming just when I was having fun. Sluts like her don’t matter anyhow. Don’t deserve to live noway. Woman can’t give a man his fun—she gonna get stuck!”

  He whirled into the tiny window again before Jack clambered off the floor. The mulatto grabbed for a foot again. He was too late in letting go as the knifeblade slashed back at him. Across both wrists.

  Sharp as daddy’s razor … he remember thinking, pulling the arms back, looking at the purple-white of bone. Blood spurting from the clean slices.

  Outside he heard the killer drop to the snow and mud with a drunken grunt. Moccasins sloshing away across the sleety puddles … then the snort of a horse and the clopping of hurried hooves.

  “Jack?”

  He turned, finding two of the men crammed in the tiny crib with him now, kneeling round Emmy. He crawled across the slickened floor to her side.

  “Jack? You there, ain’t you?”

  Lifting one of her hands against his rough cheek, he felt tears begin to fall.

  “Cain’t see you, Jack?” She whimpered, more
weakly now. “I don’t wanna go … oh, God—he hurt me!”

  The big mulatto shouldered one of the men aside as he cradled the whore across his legs, clutched her to his breast.

  “Always promised you’d take me away from here, Jack. Denver——”

  “I’m here to do just that now, Emmy. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “S-soon, Jack.”

  He gazed up at the anxious faces crowding into the room, the murmuring lips of those explaining what they had seen to those come too late. Then he realized his blood was mingling with hers.

  And knew there no longer was anything keeping him here among these whites.

  Time it was that he should find his own kind. Back to what was left of home.

  Emmy dying in his arms. Her blood and his on this dirt floor. Killed and cut by a white man dressed like some wild, savage, killer Indian. And talking like Southern slave-hating trash.

  Oh, for the love of a whore … time for Jack to go home.

  Chapter 2

  The cruel March wind hurled itself through the plank door with the half-dozen soldiers pushing into the Shady Rest, nothing more than a watering hole squatting here in Hays City along the Smoky Hill River. Three miles west where Big Creek flowed into the Smoky Hill, Fort Hays itself stood like a prairie-dog town on the flat prairie in that same brutal wind, reminding Seamus Donegan that winter was far from done with the Central Plains.

  Eighteen sixty-eight was little more than two months old. The buffalo grass gone brittle and winter-dried. Beyond Hays City, the prairie lay sleeping beneath a coating of frozen sleet and snow. Outside the Shady Rest, those rutted mud-wallows the citizens of Hays City charitably called their streets had to be negotiated by the unwary stranger or drunken customer leaving any one of a string of watering holes and smoky cribs where a man could buy himself a bottle of bad whiskey and an ugly woman to share it with.

  Seamus drank his whiskey alone.

  Sucking at the lip of his cloudy glass, the Irishman delicately ran his tongue across a missing chip. And drank deep of the familiar smells of the Shady Rest. Spilled whiskey and ale. Urine and dried blood. A good mix of mule-skinners’ unwashed anuses and soldiers’ sweat. Struggling against it all the heavenly perfume of plug burley and the lilac-watered chippies who peopled places like this on the far-flung distant prairie of Kansas’s Smoky Hill country.