The Sons of Grady Rourke

by Douglas Savage

  “Like I said,” Billy grinned toward Patrick through his crooked teeth. The men took up position inside the sawmill.

  The Regulators waited inside until Roberts dismounted and tied his horse to the hitching post. Then, one by one, the gunmen came outside. Each pulled his long duster from his handiron. Patrick did not touch his weapon and remained in the shadows of Doc Blazer’s office in the sawmill.

  When Andrew Roberts stood beside his horse and looked up at men facing him, it was too late to retreat.

  “You’re under arrest, Andrew Roberts,” Dick Brewer called. His right hand rested on the walnut grips of his holstered sidearm.

  “Says who?”

  “We have warrants for Morton’S posse signed by Justice Wilson.”

  “He ain’t justice no more. Not in Lincoln County. You’re the outlaws now; not me.”

  “Lay down your piece,” Brewer ordered.

  The odds were fourteen to one, not counting Patrick who had not come out. Roberts lowered his hand and smiled.

  The out-numbered House man cleared leather in a heart beat. He cracked off one shot as he dove headlong into the sawmill office. Behind him, Dick Brewer rolled his eyes, sighed once, and fell backwards. Roberts’ bullet had blown his forehead off and shreds of his brain ran red and gray down the white-washed wall of Blazer’s Mill.

  As Roberts rolled into Doc Blazer’s office, Patrick charged past him into the sunshine. Each man was so surprised by the other that neither popped off another round. Patrick rolled in the moist earth until he felt far enough away to jump to his feet and run for a safe corner of the mill.

  For ten minutes, the Regulators peppered the dentist’s office with gunfire. Roberts kept up a brave volley from inside. When the barrage of small arms ended, Roberts lay in a pool of blood and intestinal juices, fatally gutshot. Brewer was dead and Billy Bonney was slightly wounded in the arm, four days after taking his leg wound in Lincoln.

  When Patrick stood up in the silence, he felt a splinterlike sting on his left arm. Raising his hand to his shoulder, it came down bloody. A ricochet had creased him between the elbow and shoulder. The wound was not serious. Pain was quickly replaced by white-eyed anger. He stood shaking in the sun beside two dead bodies. Patrick wished that one of the bullets had ripped out Billy’s throat. But the boy gunman just laughed at Patrick’s side. A fierce light seemed to burn in Billy’s pale eyes.

  It was almost midnight Thursday when Patrick rode home alone. By the time Cyrus met him at the door, his left arm was badly swollen. Brown, dried blood caked to his shirt. Cyrus was aghast.

  “Dick Brewer’s dead along with one of Morton’s men. Down south of here at Blazer’s, near the Indian Agency.

  “You’re hurt.”

  “Just grazed. Damned Billy won’t be happy till I’m in the ground beside Tunstall.”

  Cyrus stood aside so Patrick could come in out of the pitch darkness. Blinking at the bright fireplace, Patrick looked for Liam.

  “Where’s Liam?”

  “Outside, by the well.”

  Patrick tossed his duster onto a chair.

  “What the hell is he doing outside at midnight?”

  “Waiting.”

  * * *

  WORD OF THE Blazer’s Mill shootout went mouth-to-ear throughout Lincoln by Friday noon. Passersby on the dirt street spoke in hushed voices of yesterday’s deaths of Dick Brewer and Andrew Roberts. They spoke as people do in a sickroom. The war between the House and the Regulators was a contagion not fit for public discussion among decent people.

  Jesse Evans brought word to Sean of Patrick’s wounding at the mill. Jesse knew no more than escalating rumor-and that he was glad that he had not ridden out with Roberts.

  Sean had not stood outside Melissa’s doorway since Sunday. He half-remembered arguing with her, if a man can argue with a mute woman. He thought of the physician in Roswell who had a potion for ending pregnancies. The picture rattled around his mind like a vague pain: the kind that cannot be located with precision, yet prevents sleep none the less. The counsel of Jesse Evans and the memory of the hurt in Melissa’s breath-taking eyes tumbled together inside Sean’s head in a single tangled mass of grief. Sean already regretted knocking on her door.

  “Mama can’t come out now,” Abigail said without any hardness in her voice.

  “She didn’t come to work today.”

  “No. She’s sick.”

  “Sick?” The coming of spring would bring with it the diseases and infections that the mountains’ hard winter had put to sleep for five months. “How sick?”

  “She throws up every morning. Today it just started later than usual. She said it would stop in another few weeks.”

  “Did she eat something what went bad?”

  “I don’t know. I ain’t sick. Must be different.”

  Sean felt people watching him from the street and stores.

  “May I come in, Abbey?”

  “What if you get sick?”

  “I’ll take my chances.”

  “All right.”

  The little girl opened the door wide and Sean walked inside as he removed his hat. Melissa sat head-bowed at the little table. Her face looked gray.

  “Abbey said you was sick.”

  Melissa looked toward her daughter and shook her head when the child was not looking at her. The mother waved quickly as if to say Nothing Serious.

  “Good,” Sean said slightly breathlessly. “Good. I’m sorry to bother you. But I can’t find Bonita. It’s Patrick, my brother.”

  Melissa’s face perked up. She wiped her mouth on a napkin and pulled her long black hair from her face. The open door on the stove cast a red glow upon her moist cheeks that gave the illusion of health.

  “You heard about the sawmill yesterday?”

  The woman nodded.

  “Patrick got wounded.” Sean choked on the last word.

  The sickly woman stood up and went quickly to his side. She touched his drooping shoulder covered by the thread-bare duster.

  “Jesse told me. He don’t know how bad. I can’t go to him just now. I thought maybe that ... ”

  Melissa stopped him short with her index finger across his bearded lips. She pointed to the wall and Abigail followed her finger to a heavy blanket on a peg. The child took the blanket from the wall and handed it to her mother. Melissa picked up a basket from a comer and pushed a pile of bed linen inside. Then she kissed Abigail on her forehead and opened the door. She waited for Sean who stood with his chin on the collar of his dirty shirt.

  In the early afternoon daylight streaming through the open door, Melissa saw a tear roll down the purple side of the big man’s face.

  * * *

  “MY NAME IS Lieutenant Colonel Nathan Augustus Monroe Dudley. Effective this date, Friday, 5 April 1878, I hereby take command of Fort Stanton, by order of the War Department. Captain Purington is hereby relieved of duty for transfer elsewhere at the Army’s pleasure. We wish him well. Dismissed!”

  The colonel took off his steel spectacles and two lines of black troopers fell out of formation and returned to their duties that included keeping a loose guard on Alex and Susan McSween. Robert Widenmann. and David Shield. He walked beside George Purington.

  “Our job is fighting Indians, not keeping the peace in some rat-hole hamlet.” Lt. Colonel Dudley’s breath already smelled of alcohol in the middle of the afternoon.

  “With my respects, Colonel, Governor Axtell ordered me to respond to Sheriff Brady’s request for assistance.”

  “I know that, Captain. But we weren’t ordered to impose martial law. Without it, we are doing nothing but exposing these troops to a potentially hostile situation. Africans or not, these are good men who don’t get paid to be civilian deputies.”

  Captain Purington stopped walking across the open parade ground in the center of the fortress which had no stockade walls.

  “Colonel Dudley, it’s all your problem now.”

  The senior officer surveyed his new comm
and. Not far away, Alex and Sue McSween strolled the campground like they were on a picnic safely removed from Acting Sheriff George Peppin’s men.

  “Thanks, Captain. Makes me wonder who the hell I offended in the War Department.”

  “Colonel, they must have been mighty important.”

  The retiring commanding officer had to smile. Colonel Dudley did not.

  * * *

  PATRICK ROURKE SAT alone on the front porch of his father’s home. He wore shirt sleeves in the unseasonably comfortable afternoon sunshine. One sleeve bulged where a clean bandage was wrapped around a poultice of pine tar that Cyrus had made to draw out any infection in the surface wound. Armed with a soldier’s knowledge of battle dressings, the ex-sergeant hoped to see what the Anny surgeons called laudable puss within a week. Inflammation would mean that the flesh wound was healing. A clean wound would be a sure sign of deep rot with blood poisoning certain to follow.

  Liam had been working on fence repairs since before daylight. He had not slept more than an hour after Patrick returned from the sawmill. Cyrus helped him dig post holes in the thawing earth. The big man never strayed far from Liam, whose eyes were only thick black circles of thinning skin. Only Patrick saw the buckboard approaching at four o’clock. He squinted down the lane to make out its single driver.

  Patrick could see the sky reflected in the driver’s incredibly blue eyes even before he recognized Melissa’s pale face.

  Chapter Fourteen

  LIAM SLEPT IN THE BARN FRIDAY NIGHT SO MELISSA BRYANT could have his bed in the bedroom, which had a door. The woman’s eyes reflected her relief when Patrick took off his still-bloody shirt to show her his minor wound. But she silently changed the brown bandage anyway since infection can come quickly to a wound made by a dirty lead bullet on an arm born to work in a barnyard.

  Melissa tore the linen in her basket into neat strips of white muslin, which she piled atop the bureau in front of the portraits of Sean and Grady Rourke. From the bottom of the basket she retrieved a covered plate overflowing with fresh meat and biscuits from the Wortley’s kitchen. Cyrus recognized the taste of Bonita Ramos’ cooking. Melissa nodded when he asked if Bonita had sent the meal that was set in front of the three hungry men.

  Patrick had insisted that she not drive the buckboard back to Lincoln after dark. So Cyrus bedded down in the greatroom and Patrick took the loft. Only Liam did not eat their first real meal since leaving South Spring River Ranch. He pushed his meat and potatoes from one side of his plate to the other like a small boy stacking his food to make it appear that half had been eaten. “It’s all right,” Cyrus gently told Melissa when Liam took four blankets and trudged alone into the darkness toward the barn. “He ain’t himself right now.”

  The oil lamps were extinguished well after midnight. When Cyrus and Patrick heard the woman close the bedroom door, they laid awake for a long time—Cyrus by the hearth and Patrick beyond the top of the wooden ladder. Each man stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of Melissa undressing under their roof. Each felt ashamed and each knew that the other did not nurse such sordid longings.

  Alone in the dark barn, surrounded by the earthy and musty smells of dozing horses, Liam’s nighttime thoughts were also filled with images of a woman. But his wore a blanket brightly colored with Cheyenne medicine hexes. Although the fifth night of April was comfortable, especially inside the now tight barn warmed by five horse bodies, Liam did not strip down to his woollies. He only removed his boots before climbing into his heavy blankets on a bed of hay.

  Liam’s empty stomach churned as if looking from side to side for food. At two o’clock in the morning, one of the horses whinnied when the growling of Liam’s narrow belly disturbed its horse dreams. The man opened his eyes and blinked. He pushed his curly blond hair from his forehead.

  He was not surprised to see dark eyes shining down at him from five feet away. Sitting up, he pulled his single, top blanket to his chin to keep out the night chill blowing in through an open side door. He had slept with three blankets under him since cavalrymen know that bodies sleeping on the hard ground loose heat into the Earth rather than into the air through the top blanket.

  Liam’s eyes were already adapted to the dark and he could see Spirit Keeper clearly. Four of the horses in their stalls slept silently, standing upright with one rear hoof cocked against their other back foot. The fifth horse from Melissa’s wagon was too tired to sleep standing after dragging its feet through five miles of mud. So he slept on his side with his feet straight out in front of him like a colt. The weight of the animal’s body on his lungs made him snore like a grandfather.

  Spirit Keeper faced Liam for a long time, perhaps an hour. The longer he looked at her, the clearer her features became: dark skinned, black eyed, and hair flowing to her waist in back. Liam was surprised at how young she was. While he sat transfixed, she opened her robe which was long enough to reach the dirt floor. She pulled out a spirit post.

  The woman slowly knelt on both knees. She leaned forward, put her hands together, and began to scrape out a small trench as long as the sacred post. Liam could hear her moaning softly as she peeled back each layer of the hard ground. In the dark, he imagined that he could see her fingers bleed. When the hole was two feet long and six inches deep, she laid the post into the tiny grave and carefully adjusted the hair bound to the top of the post. Pushing the soil on top of the stick, she whispered unintelligibly.

  In the cavalry, Liam learned that many of the Indian Nations believed that hair was the visible extension of the human soul since both grow every moment of life. Some medicine men would let their hair grow until it dragged across the ground to show the power of their souls. Keeping the hair of a dead loved one was a special honor. It comforted the soul of the dead. And attaching a dead child’s hair to a spirit post was the most sacred rite of all—done usually by the grieving mother.

  Liam had only two close friends in the Army. One was Sergeant Buchanan. The other was a skinny cavalryman from back East. Being raised in a tenement slum, the second soldier had a strange respect for the Nations he was paid to destroy. He studied their ways and spoke of such things to Liam around many campfires. From him, Liam learned that those Nations that scalped their enemies did not always do the ugly deed for the coups hanging on a lodge pole. Many did it to keep part of their defeated foe’s soul as the ultimate battle trophy. Liam’s friend’s soul now dangled from a Sioux pony’s war bridle.

  When Spirit Keeper’s little ceremony was finished, she stood and wrapped her blanket around her shoulders. Even in the dark, Liam could see perspiration glistening on her prominent cheeks.

  “What do you want with me?” Liam asked. Although his lips moved, he did not hear his own voice and the horses around him did not stir. He still sat cross-legged under his blanket.

  Spirit Keeper made a fist, which she beat gently against her breast in time to her heart.

  Liam bowed his head and closed his eyes. His breath came in slow, shallow movements. He seemed to sleep sitting up, as peacefully as the horses around him. When he opened his eyes and looked up, Spirit Keeper was watching him closely. She cocked her head slightly to one side. Moonlight glinting off puddles of melted snow cast its coldly white glow through the door and upon her face. Liam was mesmerized by the pale light on her dirty cheeks. She was not only young; she was beautiful. The man let a weak smile cross his silent lips.

  Then Liam reached under his bed of hay and pulled out his heavy revolver. Looking up into the old soul shining out of her young eyes, he slowly pulled back the hammer which clicked into the cocked battery with a cold, metallic sound.

  The smile slowly evaporated from Liam’s lips as he raised the weapon with his right hand and laid the muzzle against his temple. He was surprised that the steel felt so cold against his skin.

  “YOU AIN’T WELCOME here.” Lt. Colonel Dudley spoke on whiskey vapors over his plate of cold hash. “I have Sheriff Peppin’s word that you will not be molested. There ain’t n
o evidence that you played any role in Sheriff Brady’s assassination. I can’t say the same for William Bonney or the Regulators. You, your wife, Shield, and Widenmann are free to leave.”

  “Peppin will murder us like he did Tunstall.” Alexander McSween was perspiring heavily in the office of Fort Stanton’s new commanding officer. “I demand that you keep us here for our own protection.”

  Colonel Dudley pushed his breakfast away and stood up behind his desk.

  “This is a United States Army post, Mr. McSween. When you commit a crime against the United States of America, I shall take you into custody until a United States Marshal rids me of you. Until then, the War Department has no jurisdiction in civilian brawls. You may leave after you have taken breakfast in the mess if you don’t mind eating with darkies. If you don’t leave by ten o’clock, I shall have a company of troopers escort you off post and dump you by the side of the road. Your choice, sir.”

  “I demand protection, Colonel. At least for my wife.”

  “Sir, I remind you that you were born in Canada. I don’t even know if you are an American citizen. Either way, this interview is terminated.” The slightly inebriated officer squared his shoulders. “Orderly!” A black private threw open the door. “You are dismissed, Mr. McSween. Orderly, show our guests to the mess tent and have the First Sergeant hitch up their wagon. They will be leaving directly.”

  “Yes, Colonel. This way, sir, if you please.”

  “Our blood is on your hands, Colonel.” The lawyer slowly buttoned his black frock coat with some ceremony. He pulled on his short gloves like gauntlets.

  The colonel smiled sourly.

  “I shall try to live with that, Mr. McSween.”

  When the door slammed, Colonel Dudley stood red-faced for a moment. Then he sat down, opened a desk drawer and brought out a bottle.

  * * *