Bleeding Kansas

by Judd Cole

  “But if it was just a reward seeker,” Bill added, “why the link to this telegram?”

  “You mean,” Josh said, his reporter’s nose starting to sniff a story here, “that somebody’s been waiting for Pinkerton to telegraph you? Somebody within Western Union?”

  Bill nodded. “Somebody who expects me to be sent to Abilene. Whatever’s going on down there, it must be some pumpkins if security is this tight. Hand me that nib and ink, wouldja?”

  Josh watched Bill dip a brass nib into a little pot of ink, then scratch out a short message on a sheet of hotel stationery.

  “We’ll get more information from Pinkerton,” Bill said, handing the sheet to Josh. “But take this to the telegraph office and wire it to him immediately. We need to make sure all future communications are secure.”

  Josh read the brief message: “‘Telegraph may be compromised. Use the code.’ What code?”

  “Me and Pinkerton used it when we worked together during the war,” Bill explained. “It’s called an alphanumeric code; you can change it at any time. Each letter of the alphabet gets a numerical value that stands for a completely different letter. Say, the letter A equals five or the fifth letter of the alphabet. It’s cumbersome but safe.”

  “Man alive! Espionage! But shouldn’t this be in code, too?”

  Bill shook his head. “Nope. Cuz I want you to study the telegrapher’s face close for me, Longfellow, use all that writers’ intuition. Watch him close while he’s tapping out the Morse, decide what you think about him.”

  Josh was halfway to the door when Bill added, “Kid?”

  He turned around. “Yeah?”

  “C. J. Keep a weather eye out for her.”

  Josh paled a little. “You still think she’s looking for you?”

  Bill nodded. “No bout adoubt it.”

  He added a sly grin as he relit his cheroot. “And if she can’t find me, young Joshua, you’ll do just fine.”

  “Brother,” complained Ansel Logan, “why don’t God at least send me a woman out here?”

  “Your trouble,” said his huge companion in a lazy southern drawl, “is that you always want toast steada bread. The hell’s your dicker, anyhow? You sit on your duff all day for top dollar. I do all the work.”

  ’Bama Jones said all this while he carefully cleared stones and debris aside, leveling off a spot to set up a metal bipod. The two men occupied a stand of scrub pine, a rare island in a sea of grass in central Kansas just west of the sprawling stockyards at Abilene.

  “Work?” repeated Logan, mocking the word. “Look who’s feelin’ a mite scratchy today. You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about when it comes to work, you tub of lard. Nobody shoots back at you.”

  “That’s on account I always kill what I aim at.”

  “You sayin I don’t?”

  “Ahh, go crap in your hat.”

  ’Bama grunted hard when he dropped to his knees beside the bipod. He wore filthy buckskin trousers, a faded gray Rebel tunic, a broad-brimmed plainsman’s hat. The tunic no longer fit, and he’d left the buttons unlooped.

  Logan watched him, picking his teeth with a twig. His companion opened a buckskin rifle sheath. With loving care, ’Bama removed a Big Fifty Sharps equipped with a fancy German scope. The weapon fired seven-hundred-grain slugs that could easily drop an adult buffalo from a mile off.

  Logan rolled a smoke and expertly quirled both ends. He was short, but descended from big-boned Ulster stock, the same tough, hard-knit men who filled the ranks of America’s police forces and Army barracks. He wore fancy star-roweled spurs of Mexican silver. His steel-framed Smith & Wesson pistol was tied low on his thigh. He had filed off the notch on the hammer so it wouldn’t snag coming out of the holster.

  Logan raised a pair of brass field glasses and turned his stubbled profile to the north, studying the distant activity along the horizon. He spotted a team of work mules, their bits flecked with foam.

  “I see plenty of targets,” he announced with satisfaction. Everything in his face smiled except the eyes. “They got a surveyor and an assistant holding the sticks for him. Plus you got free pick from the grading crew.”

  “Like shootin’ fish in a barrel,” ’Bama agreed, taking up a prone position behind the Big Fifty, now secured to the bipod. “It’s no skin off my ass which one I drop.”

  “Air out the surveyor,” Logan suggested. “They’re worth more.”

  “Out here I run the roost,” ’Bama reminded him. “And I don’t take guff from you. I pick the targets.”

  “Don’t get your bowels in an uproar, porky. I’m just tryin’ to help.”

  “Help yourself straight to hell.”

  ’Bama wisely bit back a harsher reply. Ansel Logan, he had learned from experience, was a bomb with a very short fuse. Like a wild Indian, he was capable of instant brutality at any moment. And the former circus shootist had few, if any, peers when it came to drawing and shooting a short iron. That’s why Logan had been hired as ’Bama’s personal bodyguard for this job. As ’Bama had insisted to the railroad baron who secretly hired him—he was a sniper, not a gunfighter.

  “Reach me them spy glasses,” ’Bama said.

  The big man pushed his hat back, then studied the Kansas-Pacific work crew.

  A scout had passed by earlier. But ’Bama let him go when he saw the man’s brass stirrups— former Reb cavalry. This surveyor below was a thin, hatless man with a soup-strainer mustache. He was just now stretching out a Gunter’s chain, sighting through the route for a new spur line. Behind him, the graders leveled off a low ridge, preparing the way for the tracklayers.

  ’Bama chuckled, tickling his trigger. “Oh, Chumley! This is like money for old rope. Get set to hightail it.”

  ’Bama centered the crosshair sight just above the surveyor’s left ear.

  “Gotta drop two clicks for elevation,” he muttered to himself, whispering like a man in church. “And add one click right for windage.”

  “How’s ’at?” Logan said. “Speak up!”

  “Shh,” ’Bama whispered. “Shush it now, bo. It’s time to kiss the mistress.”

  An eerie, intense focus came over the big sniper’s moon face. Damn, Logan thought, feeling his skin prickle. That son of a bitch looks like he’s taking a woman.

  ’Bama inhaled a long breath, expelled it slowly while he relaxed his entire body. His trigger finger took up the slack in one long, continuous pull.

  “Shh,” he said with gentle reverence. “Shhh! Just a little-bitty kiss ... ”

  Logan, watching through the glasses, flinched hard when the Big Fifty suddenly exploded. The top of the surveyor’s head lifted off as neatly as the lid of a cookie jar, releasing a pebbly spray of blood and brains.

  The surveyors knees buckled like an empty sack, and the body folded into a twitching heap.

  “Hellfire!” Logan roared. “You may smell like a bear’s cave, ’Bama. But gawddamn can you aim a smoke pole!”

  ’Bama whooped and shook a fist as solid as a cedar mallet. “Hell, I ain’t had this much fun since the hogs ate Maw-maw!”

  “Let’s make tracks,” Logan urged. “They’re pointing over this way.”

  A sorrel and a claybank—good horseflesh, but both badly neglected—waited for them in a nearby defile, hobbled foreleg to rear. By the time the shaken pursuers had saddled mounts to give chase, the long-distance killing team had opened up an insurmountable lead.

  Chapter Three

  “‘Killed instantly,’” Josh read out loud from the Ellsworth, Kansas, Advocate, “‘was Danny O’Neil, 34, a chief surveyor who had worked for the Kansas-Pacific Railroad since August 1865. As with the other killings recently plaguing the Kansas Pacific, the assassin used a high-powered rifle from a tremendous distance. Witnesses estimate the killer fired from almost a mile away. This—”

  “Whoa there,” Wild Bill cut in. He snapped his head around from the monotonous view out the train window to stare at his young companion. “Did you skip a
line? A mile away?”

  “A mile, yessir. It’s got to be the sniper Pinkerton mentioned.”

  “The way you say,” Bill agreed.

  “And since the sniper is killing so many KP workers,” Josh continued, building a case like a lawyer, “doesn’t that point to a competing railroad line?”

  “A good bet, but not a sure one. They call it railroad law out here, and it does get mean. But could also be a wealthy cattleman behind it. There’s three cattle trails coming out of Texas, and each one ends at a different railhead. This new spur line the KP is building will draw even more of the cattle business to Abilene. There’s others would love to see it swing south to Dodge City or Newton.”

  Wild Bill fell silent, turning his face to the window again. Outside, the vast Great Plains rolled on toward the unbroken horizon. Country so wide open, Josh had written in a recent dispatch, a man could almost see tomorrow.

  “Almost a mile away,” Bill muttered thoughtfully. Josh watched him frown so deeply that his reddish-blond eyebrows nearly met.

  The two friends had almost an entire Pullman luxury car to themselves. Green plush leather, satin curtains, new gaslights, even a piano for sing-alongs. The Kansas-Pacific had booked special passage for both men and their horses. It wasn’t just Hickok’s fabled reputation—the famous frontiersman was a former railroad scout and guard who had saved plenty of lives at great risk. Now he rode free everywhere on any line in America, even back east.

  But in remote Miles City, the two men had to board a no-frills, narrow-gauge mining train financed by private investors. It brought them down from the Yellowstone drainage, following the Powder River south. West of Fort Laramie, in the Wyoming Territory, they transferred to the Union Pacific line for the long, serpentine journey through the North Platte and South Platte valleys.

  At Ogallala, Nebraska, they jogged due south on horseback to connect with the KP at a remote water stop. Now they were only a few hours west of Abilene.

  After a minute of mulling things, Josh spoke up.

  “That ‘mile’,” he suggested, “could be a stretch. Most newspaper writers don’t know beans from buckshot about marksmanship.”

  Josh hadn’t meant to sound like he was boasting. But Hickok snorted. “They ain’t been to high school in Philadelphia like you have,” Bill roweled the kid.

  But Hickok added, “There’s at least one man I know of who can kill at a mile. But I figured him for dead by now. Hoped so, anyhow.”

  “Who?” Josh demanded.

  Wild Bill, Josh had learned long ago, had an aggravating habit of ignoring questions until he was good and ready to answer them. He did so now, chewing thoughtfully on an unlit cigar.

  “Pinkerton,” Bill said, “is sending more information by special courier from Denver. But I like your theory, kid, about railroad competition. I’ve heard some scuttlebutt about how the Santa Fe Railroad is looking to push a line through southern Kansas. If they could stop this new KP line cold, or even slow it down considerable, that’s money in the bank for them.”

  The door at the end of the corridor swung open, and Hickok automatically scrutinized the new arrival. It was a porter with a wooden bucket. He filled it from the Pullman’s ice closet and left again. Perhaps recalling the “delivery boy” in Miles City, Hickok kept the porter in constant sight until he was gone.

  Bill noticeably relaxed again. This kind of routine vigilance was required night and day, Josh realized. So many sensation-seeking hack writers pretended it was such great larks to be the most sought-after target on the lawless frontier. But his few short months at Bill’s side had convinced Josh that “excitement” was for clerks and old ladies—a man gets damned tired, damned quick, of constantly looking over his shoulder. And now look! Hickok was returning, of all places, to Abilene. Not just the lion’s den, for him, but the lion’s jaws.

  “Bill?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Who’s this man you say can kill from a mile off?”

  But again Bill frowned and ignored the meat of the question.

  “Out here,” Hickok mused, “the outlaw trail is long and crowded. The war made plenty of new criminals from both sides. And plenty of them have drifted west on the dodge. Could be anybody. Anybody, kid. This is Bleeding Kansas.”

  Josh nodded. He knew that Jayhawkers still plagued the new state. Abolitionist guerrillas during the war, they were now just plundering, murdering thieves. There were also the so-called holdout Rebels who once rode under insane marauders like Quantrill.

  Bill shifted his shell belt, transferring its considerable weight so it could chafe a new spot.

  “Well, Longfellow,” he remarked, “you told that Quaker ma of yours yet?”

  “Told her what?”

  Bill gave another little fluming snort like a horse drinking. “Ain’t he the frosty one! ‘Told her what?’ Told her that her son has killed a man, that’s what.”

  Now it was Josh who sought refuge in the view outside. “Naw. It wouldn’t set too well with her. She made me promise to turn the other cheek.”

  “That sweet-lavender humility is all right for some. I like a gentle, peace-loving man, matter fact. But I’m damn glad you got starch in your collar, kid. You kept me above the ground a bit longer. You’ll do to take along.”

  “Thanks. Hey, Bill?”

  “Hey what?”

  “You do know who this sniper is, don’tcha?”

  “Yeah,” Bill confirmed. “’Fraid I do. But I won’t say his name today.”

  “Aww, man alive, Bill! Why not?”

  “Cuz,” Bill replied with his usual poker face, “its Sunday.”

  “So what?”

  “Even a heathen like me,” Bill said in a flat, humorless tone, “won’t pronounce the Devil’s name on the Sabbath.”

  Every hour or so, the two men went back to the stock car and checked on their horses.

  Josh’s quick little piebald, only fourteen hands but broke to halter by a Sioux warrior, acted nervous and fretful despite a roomy stall, clean straw, and the nose bags of crushed barley Josh had strapped on with generous regularity.

  However, Fire-away, Wild Bill’s pretty little strawberry roan, had learned long ago to enjoy train travel. The gelding greeted both men with a contented whicker, nuzzling Bill’s shoulder.

  “We’ll stretch out the kinks at the next water stop,” Bill promised his horse, scratching its withers.

  Bill kicked open the sliding door to let some fresh air blow in. Josh felt autumn cold slice at his neck, and he turned up his collar. He looked out over the waving grass, stirrup-high in some places.

  Bill stood quietly beside him, also looking out. But Josh got the definite impression Wild Bill was seeing only with his inner eye. His next remark confirmed this.

  “Out here, no trees for hanging a man,” Bill observed.

  “Do they execute outlaws with bullets?”

  Bill took his cigar—lit now—out of his teeth and frowned at it. “Nope. You just drag-hang ’em behind a horse is all. It’s still a necktie party but with plenty of dust.”

  Josh wasn’t sure if Bill was twitting him—with Wild Bill, it was sometimes hard to tell the line between fact and irony. The tracks dipped close to a creek, and Josh spotted a nester digging holes and setting posts. Slab lumber was rare out here. Most buildings were made of sod bricks, and most corrals of sturdy Osage orange planted close together.

  They passed an Abilene-bound stagecoach rocking on its braces. The horses looked worn down from pulling mud-caked wheels. Still, Wild Bill seemed to see little of this.

  It’s because we’re getting closer to Abilene, Josh figured. But again Bill’s next question suggested otherwise.

  “You’re sure,” he asked Josh for the second time, “everything seemed jake at the Miles City Western Union?”

  “The telegrapher never batted an eye at your message. Honest Injun. I’ll bet the telegraph lines are safe.”

  Bill shook his head. “I wouldn’t put one red penn
y on that. He was just a good actor. Somebody knew we had a message coming and was waiting right there for it.”

  Josh started to ask once again about the mystery sniper who was troubling Bill. But an exclamation from Hickok cut him short.

  “Well, God kiss me! Wouldja look at that, kid?”

  Now Bill was indeed staring outside, and pointing, too. Josh followed his finger, then felt a jolt of shock.

  “Ho-ly Hannah!” the youth exclaimed, unable to believe his eyes.

  About fifty yards away, parallel with their train car, a ruggedly built Studebaker Brothers wagon bounced and jostled across the prairie at a brisk clip.

  A woman—hell, thought Josh, a girl—was hunched over on the box, clinging for dear life while her blond braids flew out behind her like lance streamers. Three little tow-headed kids were crowded close behind her, faces drained white with fear.

  But what Josh couldn’t believe, despite the evidence of his senses, was the fact that no team pulled the wagon!

  The wagon tongue had been tied up to keep it from dragging. And a sturdy pole—now a mast— rose from the center of the wagon bed. A huge white wagon cover, swollen tight with a stiff west wind, now served as a main sail!

  “Great day in the morning!” Josh exclaimed. “It’s a prairie schooner!”

  “The wind has got too strong,” Bill said. “Christ, they’re going full-bore! She’s going to crack up, the damned little fool!”

  “Kid,” he added, giving Josh a push, “climb up topside and tell the brakemen to start turning their wheels. She swerves left, we’ll run right over her.”

  Josh hustled above while Bill watched the girl trying to slow down the flying juggernaut her wagon had become. But even as Bill watched, the wooden brake handle snapped off in her hand. The Studebaker dipped into a swale and nearly capsized.

  If it goes over, it could crush those kids, Bill thought, sliding the Peacemaker from his right holster. Even as the metallic groan of braking train wheels began, Bill aimed six well-placed shots at one spot on the mast, weakening it considerably.