by J. Lee Butts
A lot of yelling and screaming from inside followed my blast. After a bit, it finally quieted down again and I yelled, “Brutus Sneed, come out here and give yourself up for arrest. You will be taken to Fort Smith to stand trial in Judge Parker’s court for the murder of Deputy U.S. Marshal Harry Tate—or you can fight—and I guarantee we’ll see you dead before the day’s out.”
A booming voice from inside the house screeched, “You shot Albino Bob, you son of a bitch! Whoever you are, you can go straight to hell!” From what he said, it sounded like I hadn’t managed to kill Albino Bob. Didn’t usually miss that much on a shot that close. Hunkered down in the ditch, checked the sights on my rifle, and wondered how I’d managed to let him get away.
“You’re talking to a deputy United States marshal who is in possession of a warrant for your arrest, Sneed. My name is Hayden Tilden, and you’ve got exactly one minute to come out of Matthew Broken Hand’s house and surrender—or my posse has been instructed to kill you where you stand.”
Some real hot discussion flared up inside the house. Men yelled back and forth at each other again. Could only make out snatches of what got said from where I stood. From the tone of it, I gathered one of them didn’t like their prospects and wanted to give it up. Another one shouted him down. Squeaky voice I took to be Albino Bob’s dying effort to contribute didn’t sound very enthusiastic about any of it. Got quiet for a second or two. Then all hell broke loose.
Guess the two who could still move around stayed in a dead run from window to window for the next twenty minutes or so. Sprayed bullets at anything and everything that moved. Then all their guns turned my way long enough to pin me down for a few seconds. While I tried to keep my head from having windows put in it, that fat bastard must have stepped out on the porch and tossed a stick of his favorite explosive my direction. He came up short by about twenty feet, but the ground bucked, snorted, and threw clods, horse manure, and chicken shit all over me. He followed the first one with another. It came a lot closer, and set my ears to ringing like church bells on Easter Sunday.
Put the rifle aside and pulled my pistols, Harry’s ivory-handled scroll-engraved Colts, and held them over the lip of the ditch. Couldn’t see a damn thing for the smoke and dust, but ripped off six or eight shots real quick. That stopped the blasting on my side. But they must have run to the back and pitched a few at Lucius to get his undivided attention. Heard his rifle go off several times between the explosions.
When I managed to get a peek over the lip of my creek bed, saw Charlie Three Bones lying on the ground underneath the corner of the front porch. Watched as he crawled further under the house till I couldn’t see him anymore. Then, guess he started rolling around and shooting up through the floor planks. Heard yelping and gunfire from inside the house, none of it directed at the outside. Gave me a chance to get reloaded, scramble out of the ditch, and land between the front window and the porch in a blind spot where they couldn’t have seen me unless they were outside looking back at the house.
Old Bear and Lucius had made it to the rough building too. We all started pouring lead through whatever window we could reach. Heard heavy feet stomp up the stairs and quicker’n a turpentined cat, they were firing down on us from the windows above. Only safe place was under the house or the first floor. Lucius and me hit both doors at about the same time. Old Bear followed Lucius. Charlie Three Bones snugged up behind me.
Soon as we got inside, I almost tripped over Albino Bob. Opening round I pitched in his direction must’ve caught him about three fingers below the heart. Guess he lived about long enough to contribute to the initial disagreement before God tore his ticket for the great beyond.
Lucius made a motion at the ceiling, and we all started firing at the same time. The four of us must have put close to fifty shots up their britches legs before we had to stop and reload. Then I heard this odd thumping noise outside, and got back to the front porch in time to see Brutus Sneed hobbling for the wooded area where we’d staked our animals. Lucius and I both sent lead after him, but he managed to make the curtain of trees before we could get him lined up in our sights.
Levered a round into my rifle and started for the horses. “Check upstairs, Lucius. Make sure Dynamite Dave is no longer with us.” Carefully made my way from stump to stump till I got to the trees. Turned out not to be a problem. Found Brutus Sneed lying spread-eagled flat on his back about ten feet from where the horses stood. His head was all caved in. Squatted down to check him over a bit closer, and heard a single gunshot back at the house. A few minutes later my friends all snaked their way up to Sneed’s body.
Looked from face to face as they scratched their chins and walked around the fallen outlaw. “Can’t figure it out, Lucius. You got any ideas, Old Bear? He seems to have made it to here just fine, but something happened and he ended up with a busted skull.” I grabbed the man’s chin and pulled it to one side so they had a better view of his sunken forehead.
Lucius scratched his jaw, looked from the horses to the body, and started laughing. He dropped his rifle on the ground, placed both hands on his knees, and went at it like someone had loaded the biggest heap of hilarity on him he’d ever heard. He jerked his hat off and started slapping his crusty thigh with it. Dust flew in all directions.
I stood and faced him, but he couldn’t seem to get hold of himself. “What the hell’s so funny? Is this some kind of joke only half-witted Texicans can understand?”
He grinned and wiped the tears from his eyes. “Oh, hell, no, Tilden. I think almost any of you Arkansas clod-kickers can get this one.” He swabbed his face with a bandanna and stuffed his hat back on. “Our dearly departed friend Mr. Sneed has been the victim of God’s own personal brand of swiftly applied justice—meted out by one of his favorite creatures. Ole Brutus made the singular mistake of trying to walk up behind Hateful. I think she kicked the hell out of him.” He peeked at me from under the brim of his Texas sombrero, and a wide, toothy grin lit up his face again. “Seems fitting, don’t you think? God came down here and used my horse to take care of the man who killed Handsome Harry Tate. Honest, Tilden, if Providence got any better, I couldn’t stand it and the law wouldn’t allow it. An outcome like this one is what a south Texas rancher would refer to as larrupin’ good. Sweet Jesus, it just can’t get much better than this.”
Old Bear absolutely loved the cosmic implications of our Texas Ranger friend’s philosophical meanderings about Brutus Sneed’s exit from this life. He got to mumbling stuff about the Great Spirit and a whole heap of other mumbo jumbo I couldn’t understand. Hell, it was just an accident as far as I was concerned.
“Well, Lucius, there is one glaring problem with this whole thing.”
“And what would that be, Marshal Tilden?”
“Call it God’s hand in the matter or fate or luck or whatever else you want. But the simple fact is your horse cheated me out of an opportunity to even the score with the ever-lovely Mr. Sneed. Personally, I wanted to put a few chunks of lead into the murderin’ bastard before he departed this life.” Pushed at the corpse with the toe of my boot. “Hell, he never knew what hit him. Hateful did Sneed a huge favor as far as I’m concerned. If I’d caught him alive, it would’ve been tempting to pull a Saginaw Bob, Minco Springs song and dance on his sorry behind.”
Lucius led Hateful away from his stake and stroked the beast’s neck. “Who the hell’s Saginaw Bob, and where’s Minco Springs?”
“Hell, I’ll tell you later. What happened to Dynamite Dave?”
Old Bear stepped up, let the hammer down on his Winchester, and said, “We wounded Mr. Dynamite. Several times. But he could still walk. When we got to the second floor, he tried to climb out the window behind his friend. Charlie Three Bones and I shot him in the right leg at the same time. Could have broken the other one when he hit the ground. Don’t think he’ll be going far from where we left him.”
Holstered my pistols, pulled my own bandanna, and wiped all the sweat and grit off the back of my neck
. “He’s still alive?”
Old Bear and Charlie Three Bones grinned. “Was the last time we saw him.” He nudged his companion and said something in Kiowa. They both laughed. Charlie Three Bones spoke and made broad motions as Old Bear interpreted. “My friend says he’ll be glad to kill the big man for you. Wants the scalp. Been so long since he’s taken one he’d be right grateful. Might put him back in touch with the past and his ancestors.”
Lucius got all puffed up and started blowing steam. “Ain’t gonna be no scalpin’ done as long as I’m around. Hell, I’ve seen enough of that kind of stuff from years of fighting the Comanche down in Tejas to do me. So the two of you, and any of your ‘ancestors’ that may be floating around in the air hereabouts, can forget about taking a knife to Dynamite Dave’s hair.”
“Can he talk?” Figured I might as well see what could be learned from the man if he was still alive.
Old Bear shrugged and winked at Charlie Three Bones. “We shot him. Didn’t try to talk to him.”
Well, Dynamite Dave turned out to be a lot more man than any of us expected. By the time we got back to the house, he’d crawled all the way to the dry creek bed and was lying under the bridge in almost the same spot I used when the dance started. He attempted some more-than-worthless defensive shooting as soon as he heard us coming in from the trees, but couldn’t do much damage lying on his back, punching holes in clouds. Once we’d flanked him, by crawling up on either side and pumping a few more in on him, he gave up pretty quick. But I’ve got to hand it to Dynamite Dave—he was one tough ole bird to have made it as far as he did with all those leaking holes in him.
Took all four of us to pull the bastard from his hidey-hole. We got him out into the ditch and propped him up. Our randomly placed shots up through Broken Hand’s second-story floor had shattered his left arm above the elbow. Several others had burned trenches up his front and backside. The top of one of his ears sported a nice new notch, but I can’t remember which one. One round had blasted most of his left heel away. His left leg was broken, and Old Bear’s shot, which knocked him out the window, had shattered the big bone in his upper right thigh below his hip socket. The man was a hell of a mess, and to this day, I can’t imagine how he managed to live as long or crawl as far as he did in what had to have been an incredibly painful attempt to get away.
At first blush we all offered up opinions that none of his wounds were life-threatening when viewed separately. But on closer examination we decided that given the number of them, and his loss of blood, he didn’t have much time left. So we got him in as close to a sitting position as we could and poured some water down his throat.
He gagged and spat up all over his chest, reached around, pulled his vest aside, and exposed another hole below his rib cage and a few inches above his belt. “You . . . badge-wearin’ . . . bastards done put a . . . lot of lead in me . . . today. Swear . . . to an everlastin’ . . . God . . . your type . . . has been a bane to my existence . . . since the . . . day my sainted . . . mother gave birth to me.” His breathing came in ragged gasps, and it took a great deal of effort to force his words past split bloody lips.
He grabbed a spot above the hole in his belly and groaned. Near as I could make out, if that one came up through the floor, it had probably punched a hole down low, then spurted upward and lodged somewhere in his chest. Pretty soon he started spitting up a lot of blood. From then on we knew he wouldn’t make it too much longer.
“Hell, this . . . wasn’t even . . . my fight. Still don’t know . . . why . . . you boys . . . wuz a-chasin’ Brutus . . . to begin with. Didn’t have . . . time . . . to find out . . . much before the shooting commenced. Acorse . . . don’t guess it . . . woulda mattered. Hate you . . . sons of bitches so much . . . I couldn’t . . . pass up . . . a chance to kill a few of you.” His head fell back, his eyes rolled around, and for a moment we thought he’d bought it. Then, damned if he didn’t come back to life again.
Lucius poured some more water down him. Didn’t help any. Think it actually made his situation worse, but he kept calling for it and given he was on his last few minutes of life, no one objected.
“Guess you . . . can collect some . . . money on me, boys. They’s posters out . . . all over Texas. You’ll get . . . to split a nice little sum . . . for puttin’ an end . . . to Brutus and me. May even . . . get something . . . for Albino Bob’s . . . nasty, stinking hide.” His words came out slow, painful, and bloody. “Bob . . . had only been . . . with Brutus . . . a few weeks. Think he . . . came in from Mississippi . . . or Louisiana. Lot of fog . . . in my brain . . . right now, you know. Just . . . can’t remember . . . for sure.”
He faded off on us again for a minute or so, and I got to thinking he’d finally made it to his personal spot in line shoveling coal for that forked-tailed fellow’s furnaces in hell. But then his droopy eyes snapped open again, and he took one final run at the world before he checked out.
“There’s . . . a letter . . . in my inside . . . jacket pocket. Addressed . . . to my mother . . . in Uvalde, Texas. Appreciate it . . . if one of you boys . . . could post it. She always knowed . . . I’d go out . . . like this . . . sooner or later. Just . . . to let her know . . . I’m dead. So she won’t . . . spend a lot of time . . . wondering what happened to me.”
By the time he got that far along, his speech had slurred down to the point where I could barely understand him. Then his head kind of flopped over to one side and his eyes froze open like he’d just seen something that surprised the hell out of him. Didn’t relish carrying his letter around next to Harry’s, but it’s awful hard to deny a man much of anything when he’s about to meet his Maker.
Clear as an icy cold morning in February, that dead man said, “Wish I’d never left Texas. You can rob anybody you want down there.” He mumbled something about someone named Ramona, and was finally deader’n a can of corned beef.
Lucius leaned over to make sure the big man had gone to the Maker for certain. “Damned if that ain’t about the most touching scene I’ve had to witness in an Arkansas coon’s age.” You couldn’t have cut the sarcasm from his mocking line with a barber’s razor.
Well, leaving a bunch of bodies out in the middle of nowhere was one thing, but we couldn’t ride away from Broken Hand’s house with dead men all over his property. So we stayed around another day to clean up our mess, as best we could. He and his family came back about the time we threw the last shovel of dirt on the three killers. Always felt those terrified folks had been watching us from a distance and waited till it looked safe enough before coming back in for a good look.
Broken Hand’s wife pitched a hellacious purple screamer of a fit when she got inside and saw what had happened to her house. Felt so bad about all of it I gave them twenty dollars out of my own pocket to start repairs, and promised I’d send some more from any rewards we managed to collect. The gesture seemed to take some of the edge off the whole thing. Filed a claim for the damages with the court, and when everything finally shook out, was able to send them another two hundred dollars. Several years later, I served a warrant on one of his neighbors, fellow named John Shoots at the Moon Moses. Went by to check on the place. It was as nice as any house in Fort Smith.
Soon as we got all that sorted out, I headed everyone north for Big Cougar Bluff. Took us another week. When we finally arrived, Billy and Carlton were nowhere to be seen, and according to Old Bear hadn’t been there. So we squatted and waited. Hell, when those boys showed up a few days later, they had a tale to tell that trumped ours like an ace-high flush.
Lightfoot squirmed in his chair, dropped his pad on the floor, stretched, and stared at me from under hooded eyelids.
“Hayden, you’re gonna have to tell me that one tomorrow. I’m about worn down to the proverbial nub today and need to take a break. Do you think we could start this up at about ten o’clock tomorrow morning? You can tell me Carlton’s tale then.”
“Well, yes, Junior, we could do that. But the absolute truth of the thing
is it’d be a whole bunch better if you got Carlton to enlighten you about his particular piece of Smilin’ Jack Paine’s story.”
“Carlton? Hell, Carlton has tried to die on us at least twice since I’ve started coming here. He’s spent the last few days in an all-out effort to do a jackknife into the great beyond, and on top of that, he doesn’t even seem to know where he is about half the time. Do you really believe the man has the residual mental capacity to keep his mind on and tell such a story if he can recover from this latest episode?”
“Oh, hell, yes. This kind of stuff happens two or three times a month. Back a couple of years ago, he had one of these spells at least once a week for months. Most people would be slobbering vegetables by now if they’d experienced all the unfortunate crap that falls on ole Carlton. Believe me on this one, Frank. Carlton J. Cecil’s tougher than a deep-fried cavalry saddle. God’s been trying to carry him away about every other day now for almost five years, and that crazy old jaybird keeps fighting him off. You take a break and come back in two or three days, my friend. I guarantee you Carlton J. Cecil will recover.”
He slumped in his chair, stared at me for a minute, winked, forced himself to his feet, and headed for the door like a man pulling a plow. Remember thinking, well, hell, I’ve done it now. If Carlton can’t make it back onto his wheeled throne pretty quick, I’m gonna look about as smart as a guy who’d use a shotgun to hunt flying fish.
