The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  * * * *

  His stomach pressing tightly against his snugly cinched belt after a breakfast of bacon, beans, biscuits and coffee, Kelly turned to the rails.

  His eyes glowed with pleasure as he toured the gangs, whipped to more and more speed by the hawking buckos. A gang of twenty, well forward of the rest, graded the rise and filled in the hammock, lashed by the guttural tongue of ex-Sergeant Otto Pottsman, who had ridden with Sheridan. Behind them, three gangs received the ties from other gangs who hauled the heavy gear from wagons and carts. The drivers of the supply wagons whipped their horses furiously, their carts bouncing on the rough open plains in a mad dash back to the supply train farther up the line. Jehu was the name given to the wagon drivers, after the Biblical king who raced his horses to death. Since most of the drivers were young boys, they were proud of the title.

  Further back, more gangs slid rails from carts and dropped them deftly into place, working in swift rhythm. Then came the gaugers and the mallet men to tap the rails into position before the spikes were driven home in three perfectly timed swings. There were ten spikes to the rail, four hundred rails to the mile, and the men had been known to lay eight miles of track in a working day.

  Liam Kelly was too simple a man to characterize his love for railroad building as a dedication. He would have laughed in the man’s face should one dare propose he was anything but a black-hearted Irish rail pusher—one who would drive, swear, plead, threaten, bluff, fight or kill to get the rails down. Kelly, who had seen his father push rails up and down the thin spine of the British Islands as a boy, and who himself had bucked the Cumberland Mountains when hardly out of his teens, ramming the rails westward for the Baltimore and Ohio, found happiness only when he could hear the incessant ripples of hammer strokes driving the spikes down and tying the rails to the earth forever.

  Throughout the war Kelly had kept troops, supplies and munitions moving on the Pennsylvania with his unlimited strength, knowledge of railroads and uncanny knack for getting more out of men than they thought was in them. As a bucko in charge of a repair gang, Liam Kelly had more than once kept rolling stock flowing across the rails when raiders or Southern sympathizers wrecked terminal points, ripped up track and blew up trestles. Kelly had no side in the war. He worked for the railroad and would have thrown his strength to the Confederacy just as easily if he had been on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line when the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter.

  The men worked well and freshly today, Kelly thought. Well, why shouldn’t they? He turned to look down the thread of track that was all but hidden by muleskinners pulling in with fresh cross ties and black, smoking iron men bringing up fresh rails, food, and other provisions. On either side of the double railing, a city of tents, all shapes, sizes, and colors, sprawled. And all of it pointed, like the razor-sharp head of a Cheyenne arrow, to the railhead where the Johnny-Jacks laid rail.

  The men worked well, Kelly knew, because it was Saturday, and payday. He wondered if the pay train would be on time, or would Goose Face know about that too and waylay it? No, he thought, not with a full detachment of Union soldiers aboard.

  The pay train would bring not only money for his Johnny-Jacks, Kelly thought morosely, walking swiftly toward the general’s big tent. There would be more whisky for Watson’s tents, more raffish women, more gunslinging drifters, and always—always—rails, ties and equipment. And there would be the letters and boxes that kept the men from being lost in a sea of grass, buffalo meat and Indians.

  Cheyenne Indians, Kelly grunted.

  There would be new men on the train, too, replacements for those who had died, or ducked out on their contracts, or been killed in grog-tent brawls—untrained workers who would hold up the others until they caught the driving rhythm of the railhead that was linking two oceans.

  Kelly stood outside the general’s tent and looked at his watch, an old, gold Ever-Scott Hyland his father had given him. The pay train was due in half an hour, at six-thirty a.m. He nodded to the soldier on guard outside the general’s tent, and entered, leaving behind the anvil chorus of the railhead pushing for the Continental Divide.

  * * * *

  “The general is tied up, Kelly,” the young ex-major said amiably. “Can I help you?”

  Kelly hesitated. “I kinda wanted to talk to him personal, Major.”

  Billy Brighton, graduate engineer, who had served with the general during the Civil War, tapped his lips thoughtfully with a pencil. The general personally had picked Kelly to be his troubleshooter when red tape and the character of the general’s position would not allow him to handle it himself. Kelly was the man the general sent back to Omaha to find out why there was a delay in getting the Johnny-Jacks’ mail to them. Six-feet-four-inch Kelly was the roving bucko who quelled riots and gang fights when feuding over the late war broke out among the laborers; Kelly was the man who beat four hard, tough muleskinners with his bare hands for threatening to dump their load of ties into the North Platte if they didn’t get double wages. When the Johnny-Jacks were too hung over from their bouts in the grog tents to go to work Monday morning, it was Kelly who got them up on their feet and out to push rails.

  A good man for his job, wise in the ways of railhead camps, Kelly knew when to be gentle and when to be rough. And Kelly also knew how to read the signs that foretold trouble. Anything, anything at all that would delay the Johnny-Jacks for three hours from laying rails was bucko Liam Kelly’s job. And if he could ward trouble off, Kelly answered only to the general as to his methods.

  “It’s Goose Face, Major,” Kelly said. “There were rumors in camp last night.”

  “Goose Face!” Brighton looked grim. “The graders—the surveyors—they didn’t get back to camp last night. That must be the reason.”

  Kelly’s jaw set hard on his tobacco cud. “That settles it, Major. I have to see the general.” He pushed past Brighton and through another corridor of tenting on into a larger tent. The general was talking to three men in Eastern clothes. He looked up.

  “What is it, Kelly?”

  “Goose Face, sir. And the graders and surveyors haven’t gotten back to camp yet.”

  “Have you any specific information?”

  “No, General, just suspicions.”

  The general stood up. “What about the scouts?”

  “Jake didn’t get back either, sir. I’ve sent for Little.”

  The three Easterners listened to the exchange between the general and the big, rough-looking man who could barge in unannounced. “Who is Goose Face?” one of them asked the general.

  “One of Black Kettle’s renegades,” the general said.

  “Who the hell is Black Kettle?” asked another of the Easterners.

  “Congressman,” the general said heavily, “if anybody should know who Black Kettle is, you should.”

  “See here—” the man protested.

  The general waved a hand to indicate that he had not intended to be rude. “Black Kettle, gentlemen, is chief of the Cheyenne.”

  “But we are at peace with the Cheyenne.”

  “Not,” said Kelly heavily, “since the massacre at Sandy Creek, Colorado, back in sixty-four.”

  “Sandy Creek, Colorado? Massacre?” one of the three said. “What’s that?”

  “The United States Government had a peace agreement with the Cheyenne. In eighteen-sixty-four Union soldiers swooped down and killed every man, woman and child in a Cheyenne village on Sandy Creek,” the general said bitterly. “Black Kettle swore vengeance.”

  “That’s Black Kettle,” one of the men said, “but who is Goose Face?”

  “Goose Face, gentlemen,” Kelly said, and spat onto the grassy floor of the tent, “is supposed to be the only survivor of Sandy Creek. He was only a kid of fifteen at the time.”

  “A soldier’s bayonet,” the general interrupted, “slashed the boy’s face. He was left
for dead. But he lived,” the general added heavily, “and there are a lot of settlers, Johnny-Jacks, women and children who would be alive today if he hadn’t. He took a blood oath, or so the story goes.”

  “I believe it, General,” Kelly said.

  “I do too, Kelly.” The general nodded. “The boy’s wounds healed but left him horribly disfigured. The injuries to his chin and nose make him resemble a goose.”

  Kelly took up the narrative. “Since Black Kettle has declared war on all whites, Goose Face, a bitter lad of eighteen now, has gathered around himself a band of about a hundred renegades—Cheyenne, some Sioux and any others who will swear death to the white man.”

  “Why hasn’t something been done about him?” demanded one of the congressmen.

  The General answered patiently: “We’re building a railroad, Congressman—not fighting Indians. Goose Face is—though only eighteen—a full-grown man in warfare. He’s cunning and ruthless. Very few men have ever seen him, and the story goes that he paints his face into a mask trying to cover his disfigurements. I‘ve heard that he has killed men of his own who looked at him too long, or laughed.”

  “And you think he’s near here?” one of the congressmen demanded. He turned to Kelly. “You think he might attack?”

  “I don’t ever think, mister,” Kelly said without expression. “I can’t answer your question until I know.”

  “When Little returns from his patrol, inform me immediately if Goose Face is in the area,” the general said to Kelly, on a note of dismissal.

  Outside the tent, Kelly snorted in annoyance at the dandified Easterners, even if they were congressmen. If they wanted to visit the railhead, Kelly grumbled to himself, they shouldn’t mess their britches at the mention of a possible Indian attack. But Kelly, in his heart of hearts, didn’t really blame the men from the East. There were tough Micks and ex-Confeds who thought twice before they dismissed the possibility of an Indian raid. And there wasn’t a man in camp who hadn’t heard about Goose Face’s ruthlessness.

  Kelly looked around for Slocum and Little. Not seeing either of them, he started off toward Watson’s grog tents. Kelly didn’t mind a Johnny-Jack throwing his money away in poker games, or on women or grog, but he hated the manner of men who inevitably dealt in such services. And Jeremy Watson was as bad a man in that regard as Kelly had ever run up against. More than once the big Irish bucko had gone into the main saloon tent to pull Johnny-Jacks out by the neck and send them scurrying for the railhead. Watson would grin and say, “It’s not my fault if they can’t hold their liquor, Kelly.” When a railman lost heavily at poker and complained, Watson’s gang of toughs would soon put an end to any bellyaching.

  So far Kelly had managed to stay shy of an open conflict with Watson, though he had been itching for one for months now. If a man couldn’t hold onto his pay after working so hard for it, Kelly reasoned, then he deserved to lose it. But when a man was beaten so badly that he missed days and weeks on the rails, or perhaps even had to go back East, then Liam Kelly was involved. It took too long to get new recruits for the railhead, and that meant delay, and where there was delay, it was Kelly’s job to put an end to it.

  It would have been simple for him to have the general order Watson and his women away, but the men working the rails wouldn’t have stood for it. Isolated out here in these great, sandy plains, they had to have someplace to blow off a little steam.

  He had gotten no more than twenty feet from the general’s tent when he heard the howl and roar of the pay train. The railhead encampment greeted it with hoarse Irish curses and rebel yells. Tonight, Kelly thought wearily, the women in Watson’s tents would get a big play, as would the gambling tables and the whisky crocks.

  He turned in his tracks and went to meet the train and the new labor gangs from the East. And there was a little hope in his eye that a thick stack of letters would be on the train from Dublin and his Kathleen.

  * * * *

  The detachment of armed guards had escorted the money boxes to the pay tent and gangs worked and sweated under the urgings of their buckos to unload the rails and new equipment. To one side, nearly a dozen newly arrived painted tarts joked with the men while waiting to be transported to Watson’s tents. The mail had been taken off and carried to the general’s office to be sorted and, with the mail, a column of engineers had marched off to be introduced to the general.

  Further to one side, a group of nearly fifty raw labor recruits in ill-fitting city clothes threw nervous, excited glances over the sprawling tent city. It was to this group that Kelly attended.

  “You’ve sold your souls into hell, lads,” he bawled. “From here until the rail is down and tied to the earth at the Pacific shore, you’re Johnny-Jacks! And you work until you break your backs!”

  The men grinned awkwardly at each other. “We’re building a railroad, lads, and we’ve come a hell of a long way without you, and I reckon we’ll make it if you decide you can’t take it. You’re here to work and work you will, and I’m the bucko that can see there’ll be plenty of it for you. We do one thing, and one thing only: we lay the rails down, lads, thataway—”

  Kelly turned and pointed toward the west. “Now you‘re to work in gangs and you’ve got a boss—a bucko who knows you haven’t had experience, so he’ll be patient with you—for one hour! Then you start working. All right, McCoy, call out your gang!”

  A thin, deathlike figure in faded homespun trousers, battered hat and Confederate boots stepped forward and began reading off names.

  The men fell out into a group, and a second bucko stepped up to collect his gang. Kelly stood to one side looking them over as their names were called, by and large quite pleased with the size of most of them. His eye fell upon one lean, bony-faced new arrival sitting on a Texas saddle, wearing Texas boots and hat. The man appeared to be ignoring the buckos forming up their gangs.

  The man got up slowly and Kelly was surprised to see he was as tall as he himself was, though less bulky and given to the leanness and stringy muscles of Texans. Then Kelly saw the heavy black Colt anchored in a holster slung low and tied down to the thigh. Picking up the saddle, the man turned away from the other laborers and started to walk away.

  “Just a minute, lad,” Kelly said. “Your name’s not been called yet. You’ll get lost if you don’t know your gang.”

  The tall man turned slowly, his voice gentle, his eyes steady on Kelly’s face. “I don’t reckon he’s going to call my name.”

  “Didn’t you come out here to work on the Union Pacific?”

  “No,” the man said, “I didn’t. But if you’ll tell me where I can find Jeremy Watson’s place, I’d be much obliged.”

  Kelly snorted. “Another worthless drifter come to scavenge around the railhead while honest men labor.” Kelly spat a stream of tobacco juice in disgust. “Watson’s place, eh! You’ll find that easy enough. Just follow the worst stink in camp and you’ll be home. That’ll be Jeremy Watson’s.”

  “I’ve heard stories about big Irish mouths but I never believed them, up to now,” the tall man said.

  Kelly’s head snapped up as if on a string. “And I’ve heard that gunslingers quiver in their own spit when they unbuckle their irons and drop them in the dust.”

  Smiling tightly, the bony-faced man lowered the saddle to the dust and unbuckled his heavy gunbelt. His eyes never leaving Kelly’s face, he unleashed the tie-down of the holster.

  Men stopped in their labor to watch as the two moved toward each other. It was not often that Kelly found anyone who would argue on a second breath with him, but from the size of the tall Texan and his ham-like fists, there were Johnny-Jacks in the crowd who thought they were going to see Kelly meet his match.

  A circle had been made and the onlookers began to chant to mix it up. Kelly advanced, alert and ready. The Texan waited for him, arms hanging loosely at his sides.

  “Mr. Ke
lly!” a voice yelled from the circle of men. A boy of fourteen slithered through. “Mr. Kelly, the general wants to see you right away. He said right away!”

  “Boy!” Kelly roared. “Can’t you see I’m about to mix with this no-good son of a bitch? Now git outa here!”

  “But, Mr. Kelly! The general said right away!”

  The Texan straightened up and backed off. “I wouldn’t want you to lose your job, Irishman. You better hop to it before you get slapped on the wrist for neglect of duty.”

  Kelly’s face went crimson. He spat out his cud. “God damn it! Come on, come on and fight! Hang the general!”

  But the Texan was smiling openly now, and so were many of those in the circle. “Naw, I ain’t going to fight you. You come look me up after you’ve polished the general’s brass.”

  Kelly nearly exploded. “You promise me that!” he demanded. “You give me your word as a worthless skunk you won’t run out until we meet—man-to-man—you promise?”

  “I promise,” the Texan said, buckling on his gunbelt. “You’ll find me at Jeremy Watson’s.” And then, with a twinkle in his eyes, the tall Texan looked down at the boy. “Son, are you sure the general sent you after this Irishman?”

  Kelly stamped with rage and disgust. Then he turned and pushed through the laughing men. “Boy,” he said, and bit down on a fresh chew of tobacco. “If’n the general don’t want me as bad as you say, I’m goin’ to tan your sittin’ place.”

  “Oh, he wants you all right, Mr. Kelly. There’s an Injun fighter in buckskin wanting to see you,” the boy replied, trotting alongside him. “And Mr. Kelly, sir.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This Injun fighter—is a woman.”

  * * * *

  Kelly stared at Liza Reeves and couldn’t help but wrinkle his nose. “You’re Jake’s brother—” Kelly said. “I mean, Jake’s your sister—”

  “You don’t talk good, do you, mister?” Liza Reeves said tartly.

  “I—I’m sorry, ma’am,” Kelly said, searching her person with his eyes and taking in her worn buckskin trousers and buckskin blouse with half the fringe gone, used long ago to lace something or other together. She wore a battered Texas hat and her jet-black hair had been pulled back over her ears to hang in a tangled mat on the nape of her neck. Her face was burned nearly brown-red from the plain’s sun and the color accentuated the flashing blue eyes. Her teeth were white and strong. Kelly figured she couldn’t be more than twenty-two or three. And even underneath the grime and the buckskin, he could see there was a strong, hard body. A very womanly body. And Kelly thought, looking at her, wanting desperately to hold his nose, if she didn’t smell so bad she might even be pretty. He glanced toward Billy Brighton, who stood at a safe and respectful distance, holding the tent flap open for fresh air. No wonder the general said hurry!