“Realize I’m only telling you this because the poor man has passed on. I believe a doctor has a moral obligation to keep it secret what happens between him and a patient. A practical reason, too. Patients would stop visiting if they knew the doctor made their business public.”
He ran his fingers across the top of his head, looking for energy to continue.
“Calhoun came to me because of nerves,” Doc said slowly. “Wanted a potion that would stop his hands from shaking, let him walk the streets without worrying about runaway horses, let him work without fearing a bank robbery.”
“Give him whiskey?”
“Not funny,” Doc said sharply. “This man’s fear ate at him. I did what I could. Just listened. Some times that’s all a doctor can do.”
Instead of offering a comment to lighten the mood, I took Doc’s advice.
“Calhoun was afraid of the world,” Doc said. “The big wide world with all the things beyond his control. His way of getting around it, I believe, was to regulate everything that he could control.”
An ironic smile. “Banking was perfect for him. Ledger numbers on paper. Black and white. No grays. Work the numbers right, and there are no mistakes.”
“He found some,” I guessed. “Worried at them like a dog on a bone.”
“Until Crawford told him to set the bone aside.”
“Calhoun told you that?”
“Yup.” Doc took a deep breath. “I told him to disregard Crawford’s order. If it was looking for the sense behind those numbers that got him shot, it was my advice that killed him. That’s why my first thought was murder.”
He held his hands out, the action of a helpless man. “I told him that because I knew he’d get no rest until the numbers made sense. I thought that finding the courage to disobey Crawford would help him realize the world wasn’t so frightening.” Doc dropped his voice to a whisper. “I should have stayed with pills and potions.”
“Did you pull the trigger?”
Doc didn’t answer.
“Doc, unless you pulled the trigger, it ain’t fair, you trying to shoulder the load for the same world Calhoun had enough sense to know you can’t control. Your advice seems solid to me, and beyond that, there’s no saying Calhoun was killed over those numbers.”
I remembered something Doc had said earlier. “Besides, you told me you didn’t figure Crawford was behind this.”
“Someone was behind it.” Doc had straightened, and by the strength in his voice, I knew anger was taking him. “The same someone who used a pillow to muffle the sound of the shot. The same someone who took his time to clean up after. Someone who wanted the rest of us to think only two people had been involved.”
“The feathers.” I said.
“When I cleaned up the entry wound, I was low to the ground, and I found something in the blood between the two bodies. Bits of feather stuck in the blood. Like feathers from a pillow.”
Doc stood, then set his hands on the top of the chair back to lean forward. It brought his face directly to my level. He stared into me.
“Samuel, all I can figure is someone pressed a pillow into Calhoun and looked him in the eye. Just like I’m doing to you right now. And both of them knew why the gun was pressed into that pillow.”
Now Doc’s face was granite. “Calhoun, the one person most afraid of fear, had the time to look right back and know what was coming. Those seconds for him would have been an eternity of hell.”
Doc put his right hand on my shoulder. I doubt he even knew he was doing it, or that his hand dug into me like an eagle’s talon.
“Samuel, find that man.”
Chapter 12
Most often on the plains, a man learns news through gossip and stories, and a smart man will discount half of what he hears. But I was there at Fort Robinson in Nebraska that summer afternoon a few years earlier, and have only my eyes to blame for any of the times I may have mistold the story when it came my turn at trail campfires or saloons.
I have always begun the story by asking if anyone around me would hesitate to reach into a pail of water for a handful of silver dollars. When asked why a body would not, I generally smile.
For I had reached into that pail of water. It was set up near the entrance to the officer’s messroom at Fort Robinson, and I did not recognize the apparatus set up nearby that pail. Captain John Bourke, aide-de-camp to General George Crook, had invited me to supper, and then at the door, to help myself to the coins magnified so shiny at the bottom of the clear water.
“Go ahead,” he told me, “you need an excuse to wash your hands anyway. Busting horses all day is dirty work.”
I agreed with both his comments. While I knew something must be wrong with his invitation — nothing in life worth having comes without a price, and Bourke’s reputation as a practical joker was as widespread as the military — I saw no harm in amusing him. After all, he was the man who was purchasing my horses for the cavalry troops.
I plunged my hand in and nearly jumped from my boots. The water had bitten me with such savagery that it felt as bobcats had attached themselves to my fingers. My hand jerked and spasmed to those invisible bobcats for what seemed like two minutes before I managed to pull loose.
“Well, sir,” I said as calmly as I could, hoping to appear unfazed, “I prefer a mean horse.”
It was the best I could think, yet nothing would have forestalled his laughter. The shock was plain on me, and the other officers in the mess, who had watched expectantly, were slapping their thighs with glee.
“Electricity,” he said when he caught his breath.
I peered into the water to find the source of its painful bite.
That filled him with more mirth. “It’s nothing you can see,” he told me. “Think of it as tiny lightning bolts, ready to grab your hand.”
He caught my sour glance at the other officers. “They’re laughing double hard because each and every one suffered the same fate.”
Bourke went on to explain that the apparatus hooked by wire to the pail consisted of a revolving handle that generated volts of this electricity which were stored in the square block that he called a battery, not to be confused with the military term for cannon or mortar stations.
I thanked him for expanding my knowledge in a way I’d never forget, and over the meal he explained further that this joke had provided many hours of entertainment, especially during visits by the Injun chiefs who lived on agencies nearby the fort.
For them, Bourke called it his medicine box. It hadn’t taken long for word to get around that it held medicine so powerful even Spotted Tail and Dull Knife had been unable to overcome it. Fact was, Bourke told me, more than a couple medicine men from Sioux and Cheyenne tribes had come in from days away to prove their medicine stronger than his. All, of course, had failed. None had received Bourke’s explanation for the source of his medicine.
I had originally intended to stay at Fort Robinson for a few days, long enough for the quartermaster to approve of the twenty horses I’d brought in. Long enough to enjoy what civilized pleasures could be found at the fort. Bourke that night informed me that he — along with several chiding Cheyenne women — had finally convinced High Wolf to attempt to overcome the medicine box that had defeated all other medicine men within a hundred miles of Fort Robinson. As High Wolf was the most renowned medicine man among the Cheyenne, it didn’t take much for me to decide this showdown would be worth the wait. And it wasn’t as if I had anywhere pressing to go anyway.
Three days later, High Wolf appeared. He drew a considerable crowd of Injuns and soldiers as they made room for him to face the medicine box in the middle of the barracks grounds. For this great occasion, some of the more confident officers smiled broad triumph and openly dropped more silver and gold dollars into bottom of the pail.
High Wolf had painted himself as if possessed. His leggings were decorated profusely with bright beads in ornate patterns. He wore eagle feathers and fox fur across his shoulders.
; Captain Bourke stood nearby in full uniform.
High Wolf reached into his medicine bundle and withdrew some fresh stems of sweet grass. Captain Bourke saluted the pail of water.
Then High Wolf became serious about his foe, the medicine box. High Wolf balled the sweet grass around a small stone taken from his medicine bundle and held it high and proclaimed it to be a magic object. He placed the wrapped stone in his mouth, made obeisance to the sun and four winds, and began to hum a medicine song.
Captain Bourke responded with his own seriousness. He began to spin the handle of the battery’s generator.
In the half hour that passed, no person in the crowd stirred or made noise as High Wolf gradually increased the volume of his humming. Captain Bourke increased the tempo of his handle-cranking.
High Wolf could hum no louder and still had difficulty overcoming the noise of that spinning handle, so he broke into a chant. Bourke replied to this new power by dancing as he cranked, and launched into a rendition of the ballad “Pat Malloy”.
Finally, High Wolf stopped abruptly and Bourke respectfully stilled his own voice.
In the silence broken only by wind sweeping across all of us, High Wolf moved close to the pail, and raised his arms to the sun. Without warning, he plunged his brawny forearms into the water.
I can only guess at how many volts Bourke had cranked into his battery. While I’d hopped and cussed at the bite the water gave me earlier, High Wolf convulsed as if hanging on to a grizzly’s tail. That medicine man proved his mother should have named him Iron Mule, for only one animal could have matched him that moment for the strength and stubbornness and kicking ability he displayed as he bravely held his hands deep in the water.
High Wolf bounced in a tight circle around that pail, legs smashing in all directions as he kicked like a Texas congressman, and still he managed to keep his hands in the water. By the time all those bolts of lightning finally threw him free of the pail, he had smashed the rickety battery to pieces.
To all our surprise, High Wolf showed neither humiliation nor defeat as he pushed himself up from the ground. He shook his head, spit out shreds of grass and the medicine stone that had failed him so badly, panted until he’d gotten his breath, and requested a second try, something that Bourke could not honorably refuse.
The captain put his contraption back together, but High Wolf’s desperate flailing had done its damage. No amount of cranking could produce enough volts to deter as man as motivated by reputation and crowd as High Wolf. Minutes later, High Wolf easily fished the silver and loose from the pail and held it high to the whoops and cheers of all the Cheyenne and enlisted men gathered around.
That was the story that went through my mind as I rode alone southwest on a trail that ran alongside the Laramie River. I had two destinations this morning. First the Bar X Bar, which I’d been told sat on the edge of the river bank, then a few hours ride later, the Rocking N.
This double murder was that pail of water, at first deceptively clear and still. I knew as much about murder and finding murderers as High Wolf had known about electricity. And I would have prefered the bite of electricity. Someone had been able to coldly kill, and had the brains to coolly attempt to disguise those deaths as a sudden shootout. In the open, that someone would be a formidable opponent, and I didn’t even have the edge of knowing who he was and from where he might come shooting.
And I’d be plunging my hands in that pail by fishing around with no real sense of what to ask when I got to those ranches. And all I’d be able to do is hang on as long as possible if my questions became as dangerous as the ones that had killed Calhoun. Did I have the choice of pulling my hands loose? High Wolf had the crowd and his reputation to drive him. I had the memory of the the look of pain and anger and anguish on Doc’s face as he told me to find the killer.
I just prayed that if something knocked me down as badly as High Wolf had first fallen, that I’d have the chance and courage to get up again and return to the pail.
Chapter 13
I saw the top of the windmill first— store-bought — mounted on a wooden derrick easily as tall as the Pacific Railroad Hotel. The blades whirred and swung in the wind, and steady creaking told my ears it was in full use, pumping the hundreds of gallons a day that would be used for drinking, cooking and washing.
When I broke out of a gully, I saw the rest of the spread from the top of my horse. Wood corral fences stretched in one direction, outbuildings in another. The ranch house was nearly a mansion. It had a gray, stone walls, a wide sloping roof that led down to a veranda the width of the house, and most telling luxury of all, large windows set in every side.
In one of the far corrals, I saw dust and commotion as a cowboy cut loose on a green bronco, and against the haze and the sun, I could make out the figures of other cowboys leaning on the fence to add whoops and catcalls to the lone rider.
I smiled. It had been a while since I’d fought a tornado of fury in the same way. There was an exhilaration in surviving, feeling the horse quiet to a standstill, nodding casually at the spectating cowboys as if the task had been nothing at all. Yet not once had I swung off such a horse without walking stiff-legged in agony, and rarely had I finished a day of breaking horses without passing blood when I watered. At five dollars a bronco, the pay was good, and riders with less brains than guts could make a month of cowboy’s wages in a single day, but few could put three days of that kind of work together without suffering an injury that kept them out of the saddle for weeks.
Someone touched my leg and took me from my recollections.
I looked down to see a dipper of water extended to me by a older woman in a bonnet.
“Thank you Ma’am,” I said as I dropped down from my saddle and removed my hat for her. “I look that dusty?”
“I was in the garden when you rode in,” she said. She pointed at a small, square corral on the other side of the windmill where I would not have noticed her without looking hard. Between the horizontal wood posts of the corral, I saw several baskets, filled with, I guessed, potatoes.
“Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but are you Mrs. Ford?”
She looked down at her plain dark dress and her soiled hands and shook her head. “Not dressed like this, Mister.”
I didn’t understand until the screen door banged open several seconds later and another woman moved onto the veranda. Although the porch roof screened her from the sun, she shaded her hands to scan the yard, a theatrical movement that served sufficient notice of her curiosity.
“That’d be the mistress of the ranch, Mrs. Ford,” the woman said. “I’d best get back to the garden.”
She scurried away with the dipper, lifting her dress from her ankles to miss some of the horse apples scattered in the main yard. I took my horse’s reins and led it toward the ranch house.
“Morning, Mrs. Ford,” I said as soon as I was close enough not to have to raise my voice. “My name’s Samuel Keaton. I’m the marshal over to Laramie.”
She nodded without leaving the veranda. “Come into the shade. I’ll see that someone takes care of your horse.”
“Obliged Ma’am,” I said. I looped the horse’s reins over a nearby rail. “But I doubt I’ll be here long. I’m on my way to the Rocking N and thought I’d swing by to see if I could talk to one of your men.”
She moved to the edge of the veranda to look down on me. My hat was already in my right hand, and I used the excuse of running my other hand through my hair to study her in return.
She was petite with a tight-fitting dress that showed it. Her dark hair was drawn back in a tight bun. She had a remarkable face, barely creased with wrinkles, and her dark brown eyes regarded me with seriousness, but no real interest.
“You’ll at least sit,” she said.
I saw no chairs on the veranda. I decided that told me something about Mrs. Ford and her husband. Faced southwest as this veranda was, with the rounded tops of the Medicine Bow mountains rising against the horizon, a man would be h
ard pressed to find a prettier or more peaceful view, especially with the sun setting in the cool of an evening. No better place to sit and relax and enjoy a cup of coffee at the end of a day. Yet they kept themselves inside.
I dusted my hat by slapping against my thigh and followed her into the ranch house.
What drew my eyes first was the fireplace. An ox could roast comfortably in there. The wood floor was smoothed and varnished, covered here and there by rug, or in the far corner, by a bear fur, its head snarling a silent protest against such a captivity. The furniture gleamed. Paintings filled the walls. There wer Knick-knacks in all directions. I’d seen houses like this before, but only in St. Louis, affordable only to the wealthy there. It strained my mind to imagine how much it would cost here, what with the need to ship everything by rail and transport it the dozen or so miles from Laramie.
“Have you had breakfast?” The words were friendly, but sounded aloof, as if she knew she was obliged to ask.
“Yes ma’am.”
“You’ll take tea?”
“If it’s no trouble.”
She lifted a bell from a nearby table and tinkled it twice. That didn’t appear to be much trouble.
“It will be a few minutes,” she said. “Please, sit down.”
I declined the stuffed armchair. It looked as if I’d sink deep, putting me in the position of a child peering upward at the adult world. I was also conscious of my jeans, dusty from the ride here, and how horse hairs would cling to the material of the armchair. I choose instead a chair at the dining table.
She sat at the other corner of the table and waited for me to speak.
“A red-headed fellow,” I said. “By the name of Clayton Barnes. He worked for you long?”
She bit her lower lip. “I can’t really say. Our foreman does the hiring.”
I should have known. The rail that had made it possible to ship materials for a house like this was also the rail that had suddenly made it possible to ship cattle east. Big-time ranchers were growing rich by letting cattle graze the wide-open government land, and Easterners and Europeans were investing millions in this new industry.
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