A Time for Vultures

by William W. Johnstone

  “Is he carrying a head?” Usher said.

  “Only the one on his shoulders,” Martin said.

  Gamble drew rein, hawked up phlegm, and spat over the side of his horse. “Found another one . . . over there a ways like he was carried away from the campsite. Old feller, a tinpan by the look of his duds, and the whitest white man I ever did see.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Gamble?” Usher said.

  “I mean he looks like the Mex we found, only whiter. Looks like every last drop of blood drained out of him. I can’t find a gunshot or knife wound on him, just like t’ other one.”

  “Take me to him.” Captain Usher swung into the saddle and said, “Sergeant Martin, we’ll noon here. Use the water from the canteens for coffee.”

  “There’s a creek,” Martin said.

  “I know that, Sergeant, but I don’t trust it. I wouldn’t put it past King Fisher and his gang of desperadoes to poison the water.”

  “It’s running water, Cap’n,” Martin said. “It ain’t easy to poison running water.”

  “Carry out my order, Sergeant.” Usher looked hard into the noncom’s hard eyes. “And take that smirk off your face. I will not tolerate dumb insolence.”

  Martin saluted. “Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir.”

  As he and Usher rode away, Gamble said, “One day you’ll have to kill that man, Captain.”

  His jaw muscles bunched, Usher stared straight ahead and said nothing.

  * * *

  “Proud, what the hell are you doing?” Sergeant Rollo Martin said.

  “Doing like the captain said, using the water from the canteens for the coffee.”

  “Use the water from the creek,” Martin said.

  “But—”

  “But nothing. High and mighty Captain Usher is a drunken idiot. Use the creek water. We may need full canteens before this detail is over.”

  Corporal Ethan Stagg was a man with a full beard and shaggy gray eyebrows. Twenty hard years in the frontier army had taken their toll and had stooped his shoulders and made his face look like the cracked mud at the bottom of a dried-up pond. He said, “Before what’s over? You got something in mind, Rollo? Something maybe we should all hear about?”

  “I got nothing in mind, Ethan,” Martin said. His eyes flicked to the troopers who stood to the corporal’s right and watched their sergeant intently.

  Stagg knew what that glance implied. “Don’t you worry none about Booker and Vesey. They’ll do as I tell them. Ain’t that right, boys?”

  The two privates nodded in unison.

  Harvey Booker was a thickset man with iron gray hair, Clint Vesey a long, tall drink of water with muddy, unintelligent brown eyes. Both had served six years and were regarded by their superiors as below-average soldiers.

  “Ethan, you’ve had a burr under your saddle since we left Fort Concho,” Martin said. “If you got a gripe, let’s hear it.”

  “No gripe, but I do got something sticking in my craw,” Stagg said. “A stolen thirty-thousand-dollar army payroll that by rights should be ours.”

  Martin smiled, then found his pipe and studiously considered the bowl before he said, “Last I heard, the payroll belongs to the army.”

  “And we’re the army,” Stagg said. “We got as much claim to the money as them bigwigs in Washington. We’ll be the ones as finds it.”

  “Aye, and maybe some of us will die taking it back,” Booker said.

  Martin fingered tobacco into the pipe bowl. “Let me get this right. No, wait. Proud, are you in on this?”

  “Damn right,” Seth Proud said. “The army owes me that much and more, payback for all the rotten beef, wormy biscuits, and green salt pork it’s fed me for the past ten years. And what about the alkali water I drank that gave me bad blood and running sores? I figure it’s fair recompense for the long days, weeks, and months a-setting a McClellan saddle that galled my hide in the heat of the Staked Plains sun. And what about the Apaches? How many of us have seen the carcasses of men we bunked with and knew like brothers lying in the cold ashes of an Apache fire and the officer saying, ‘Boys, it took this soldier three, maybe four days to die. Let this be a lesson to you. Save the last cartridge in the gun for yourself.’ As if we didn’t know that already.”

  Inspired by Private Proud’s oratory, Vesey pulled up his shirt and showed the raw scar that ran from his navel to the bottom of his ribs on his right side. “A Mescalero woman done that to me with a Green River knife. Near gutted me, she did.”

  “Hell, Clint, you got that there cut in a brothel in Abilene,” Stagg said.

  “Bitch was still an Apache,” Vesey said.

  Martin joined in the laughter that followed and then lit his pipe, got it going with his second match, and said through a cloud of smoke, “You boys say we take back the payroll and then split it among ourselves?”

  “Like Booker says, shared among them of us who’re still alive, you mean,” Stagg said.

  Martin nodded and smiled as though the troopers had fairly stated their case. “I got two ways of thinking on this. The first is that I arrest all of you and see you hung by the thumbs and flogged to death at Fort Concho. The second is that I consider what you said about us having a rightful claim to the payroll money—a very profound statement, a soldier’s way of thinking. I’ll study on it tonight and give you my answer tomorrow.”

  “Captain Usher won’t throw in with us, Rollo,” Stagg said. “You come up with the right verdict and we’ll have to do for him.”

  Martin smiled. “You mean I’ll have to do for him.”

  “Whatever you say, Rollo. Whatever you say,” Stagg said.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Somebody done for him, Captain, but I sure as hell don’t know how.” Luke Gamble said. With an irritable hand, he brushed away the fat fly that crawled across his face. “You seen any dead man look that white?”

  “Bloodless.” Captain Gregory Usher took a knee next to the naked body and stared into the man’s dead face. “All right, old-timer, what killed you?”

  “Not a mark on him,” Gamble said, stating what Usher had already determined. “Maybe somebody smothered him with one of them feather pillows they got in the Denver brothels.”

  “Maybe,” Usher said, “but judging by his appearance, he was wiry—one tough old buzzard. I’d expect to see some sign of a struggle.”

  “Then he just dropped down dead,” Gamble said. “But that don’t explain the Mex we found earlier.”

  “No it doesn’t. Hello, what have we here?” Usher lifted the dead man’s arm and closely studied the inside of the man’s elbow. “There’s a tiny red mark here that I can barely see. What do you make of that, Mr. Gamble?”

  The scout kneeled and grabbed the arm. After a while he said, “Insect bite. Plenty of mosquitos around.”

  “Looks like a small incision to me,” Usher said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A cut. A very small cut.”

  Gamble said, “Well, that sure as hell didn’t kill him.”

  “No, it didn’t.” Usher rose to his feet and, as eagerly as a baby seeks a feeding bottle, took a long swig from his flask and then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I guess we’ll never know what killed this man.”

  “Seems like,” Gamble said, the smell of bourbon in the air around him.

  Usher stared at his scout for long moments. “Mr. Gamble, are you a man to be trusted?”

  “With little children and most animals. Beyond that, you never know where my loop will land.”

  “I have to trust someone,” Usher said.

  It was Gamble’s turn to use his stare to peel the skin off the officer’s face and leave the bare skull exposed. “Miss it, don’t you, Gregory? You miss it real bad.”

  Normally Usher would have taken the use of his first name as gross insubordination, but he swallowed the slight because he needed this violent, conscienceless man for his gun skills and the strength of his muscular, brutal body.
<
br />   “Miss what?”

  “You know what you miss, Captain Usher. Don’t play coy with me.”

  Usher did know. He remembered another time and place, remembered men, women, and manners unknown to savages like Gamble but once so familiar to himself. He recalled the regimental balls in Washington. Beautiful officers in blue and gold. With sad, lovely faces, tall elegant women wore ball gowns so vivid, so colorful they looked as though they waltzed through rainbows. Drifting like ghosts among the guests, flunkies, black enlisted men in white jackets, carried silver trays of champagne. The drone of male voices and the crystal notes of female laughter entwined with the strings and brass of the infantry band. In moonlit terraces, deep in the shadows, the musky sweetness of a woman’s naked shoulders, her skin like velvet on his lips, the tiny beads of sweat between her breasts, each as precious as a rare diamond.

  Usher was lost in the memories.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, take your partners for the Virginia Reel.”

  His partner smiled at him. It was a brilliant smile, white pearls in her pink mouth. She gave a tug on his arm, a not-so-gentle urging toward the dance floor.

  “But Miss Lavinia” (or Miss Polly or Miss Charlotte) “I’m, all out of practice. . . .”

  The sudden pop! of a champagne bottle . . .

  Startled, Usher blinked his way back the present.

  Gamble had just clapped his hands and he looked amused. “Where were you, Captain?”

  Usher managed a smile. “Somewhere else . . . picking up the shattered fragments of lost dreams.”

  “You can’t ever go back there,” Gamble said. “Not after Dead Tree Pass.”

  “I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Usher again took solace in his whiskey flask.

  Gamble grinned. “The Fall of the House of Usher. Ever read that story, Captain?”

  The captain nodded. “I’m familiar with Mr. Poe’s work. And yes, my house has fallen and with it what’s left of my fragile sanity.”

  Gamble, a man he’d long considered an ignorant, illiterate lout, a brutish degenerate, surprised him. “‘. . . an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.’” The big scout smiled. “But no opium for you, Captain Usher, at least not just yet, though its time will come. For now, you are a reveler upon whiskey and you fill every sorrowing glass to the brim.”

  “What the hell are you, Mr. Gamble?” Usher said. “Some kind of poet?”

  “My father was some kind of poet,” Gamble said. “Poets make lousy farmers. That’s why Ma died of neglect, and the day after we buried her, I blew his brains out. My father, Reynolds Gamble, smoked opium with Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore the night before the great man died. Pa said Poe passed away whispering his name. I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

  Usher watched a hawk drop out of the immense sky and with incredible violence hit some crawling creature in the long grass. A squeal, a small death, and the day fell quiet again.

  Smarting from the tongue-lashing he’d gotten from Gamble, Usher stared hard into the scout’s face and said, “How the hell could someone like you be the son of a poet?”

  “Because, mon capitaine, I hated Reynolds Gamble like I never hated a human being before or since. All he was, I set out to be the opposite. Where he was weak, I am strong. Where he scribbled his doggerel while my mother died, I held her head in my arms and planned his execution. He presented himself up as a good man who was misunderstood, but I present myself a bad, violent man who everybody understands, including you. That’s why you want me to help you steal the army payroll when we catch up with King Fisher and them.”

  “As I asked you before, Mr. Gamble, can I trust you?” Usher took a swig from his flask. “Give me a straight answer.”

  “No you can’t trust me. Is that straight enough?” Then, before the officer could answer, Gamble said, “I’ll help you gun them as need gunned and after that we’ll talk about how we divvy the money.”

  “I’ll settle for fifty-fifty,” Usher said.

  “Maybe so, but we’ll discuss it when the time comes.”

  “Leave Sergeant Martin to me.”

  Gamble shrugged. “I don’t care who I kill or who I don’t kill. I never have.” He smiled. “Now, shall we rejoin Sergeant Martin and the rest of the ladies?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A strange procession headed northwest in the direction of Happyville. O’Hara, bellied down in the long grass, watched it go, his brow furrowed with concern. Where was Flintlock?

  A couple riders led Sam’s limping bay and behind them rolled a covered wagon drawn by a mule team. The woman up on the driver’s seat held the reins with silver hands and beside her sat another female with a painted mask covering her face, bad omens that made O’Hara’s stomach lurch. Even more disturbing, a badly misshapen dwarf wearing a top hat and goggles trotted alongside a massive wolf as though leading the way for the others.

  But it was the great, growling wheeled machine with windows that struck fear into O’Hara’s heart. Belching steam, it was as large as a locomotive without a tender, but it needed no rails. The machine’s wheels, each as tall as a man and wide across as his outstretched arms, crushed everything in its path—grass, small trees, and scurrying animals. The steam wagon left behind tracks that scarred the land to the depth of a foot, something that the constant traffic of a hundred horse wagons would have taken years to accomplish. On top of the wagon, just behind its glassed cabin and partially covered with canvas, angled the stubby barrel of a Gatling gun and a figure with one hand on its breech. It looked like a man, but it had the head of a bird with a great beak and round, staring eyes.

  Impulsively, O’Hara clutched the Navajo shaman’s medicine bag that hung around his neck, but it was his dormant Christianity, sometimes taught, sometimes beaten into him by Dominican brothers, that made him cry out in an agony of dread. “In the name of God, what wickedness is this?”

  Sure he was watching a cavalcade of the damned, O’Hara’s eyes reached out and scanned the wagon and the steam monster. Where was Flintlock? He saw no sign of him.

  The warrior in O’Hara took over.

  After the grotesque procession passed, he got to his feet, retrieved his horse from a thicket of brush and wild oak, and swung into the saddle. He slid the Winchester from under his knee and propped the butt on his thigh.

  * * *

  Sam Flintlock almost enjoyed the luxurious brass and red velvet interior of the Helrun’s luxurious interior. He reclined in an overstuffed easy chair and next to him on a side table stood a crystal decanter and a couple long-stemmed glasses. He removed the stopper and sniffed. “Ah, sherry.” He poured himself a glass and sat back to enjoy the ride, deciding he’d deal with his problems later.

  Then trouble came looking for him.

  * * *

  “Rider ahead,” Dr. Sarah Ann Castle said, looking at Flintlock over her shoulder. “Looks like a savage of some kind.”

  Flintlock sat up in his chair. O’Hara.

  It had to be. He was the only savage around those parts.

  “He’s ordering us to stop,” the doctor said. “Wait, Jasper Aston is going to talk to him. Obadiah, stand ready with the big gun.”

  “It’s ready,” le Strange said, his voice muffled behind his plague mask.

  Wearing a black leather helmet and goggles pushed up on her forehead, Dr. Castle consulted the array of dials and valves on the panel in front of her. She pulled a lever, pushed another, and Helrun hissed to a shuddering halt. “King and Clem Jardine just left the wagon. Both are wearing their guns.”

  “Wearing guns? That will scare O’Hara all right.” Flintlock said.

  “Huh?” Dr. Castle said.

  Flintlock let his feeble attempt at humor pass, then stared over the woman’s shoulder through the glass. “The rider is a breed named O’Hara.” To his sur
prise, he added, “He’s a good friend of mine.”

  “Then I hope King doesn’t kill him,” she said. “He can be testy around strangers.”

  “Let me out of this thing,” Flintlock said.

  Steam hissed and a panel at the side of the passenger cabin swung upward.

  “Be careful,” she said. “Your friend looks like a desperate character.”

  Flintlock drained his sherry glass and stooped to leave. “He is,” he threw back at the doctor as he stepped outside. “Believe me, he is.” Flintlock had never doubted O’Hara’s courage.

  In times of trouble, the man was a rock. He was steady in a gunfight and could be depended on to stand his ground and get his work in no matter the amount of lead flying in his direction. O’Hara could understand a hired gun like Jasper Aston because he’d met his kind before, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for the likes of King Fisher and Clem Jardine. O’Hara’s face was stiff with uncertainty, his knuckles white on his rifle.

  It seemed to Flintlock that King Fisher might be talking, but the man’s back was turned to him and he couldn’t be sure. Seeking to head off any possible gunplay, Flintlock yelled, “O’Hara, over here!”

  O’Hara’s head turned in Flintlock’s direction and Clem Jardine offered a fleeting smile.

  Disaster struck.

  Grofrec Horntoe had been holding back his wolf, but with his mouth twisted in a malicious grin, he let the animal go. Quicksilver went right for O’Hara’s horse. The terrified paint reared just as the wolf hit and, surprised, O’Hara went flying off the back of his saddle. He triggered a fast shot when he struck the ground hard.

  King Fisher suddenly had a Colt in his hand. Stirrups flying, O’Hara’s horse galloped across the flat, the wolf snapping at its heels.

  “No! Don’t shoot!” Flintlock yelled. He kneeled beside the dazed breed. “Are you all right?”

  O’Hara shook his head, his eyes unfocused. “I thought Jasper might draw down on me, but I sure as hell didn’t expect a wolf.”