by Len Levinson
Stone decided to trick Muldoon, and fell back as if hurt. Muldoon rushed forward, his right hand dropped, and Stone put each of his two hundred forty pounds behind the bruised and battered bare knuckles of his right fist.
Muldoon faltered for the first time in the fight, but Stone didn’t step back to assess damage or contemplate future strategy. He lowered his head and moved in for the kill, flinging his fists at Muldoon’s body.
Muldoon took a step backward, and every man who bet on him knew it was a bad sign. The crowd became silent, awestruck at the sight of the champion on the receiving end for a change, but some men fight harder when they’re hurt.
Muldoon couldn’t give up easily, and reached inside for his remaining reserves. Stone hurled solid thuds into Muldoon’s face, dodged Muldoon’s punches, jabbed Muldoon’s left eye, hooked him to the belly, threw a right cross at his ear, blocked a right cross, caught a hook on his bicep, landed an uppercut to the point of Muldoon’s chin; Muldoon floundered.
Stone could barely see, his breath came in gasps, he pushed his man against the ropes. Muldoon fell backward, bounced; Stone cracked him in the mouth; Muldoon’s legs wobbled. Muldoon raised his fists and massive hairy arms to protect his head and upper body; Stone smashed his belt line. Muldoon threw a jab at Stone’s face, Stone wiped it away, landed a right hook to the side of Muldoon’s head.
Muldoon went sprawling backward, his punches wild and erratic. Stone stayed on top of him, tasting victory. Lobo power crackled in his veins, he saw himself as an injun warrior with a feather sticking out of his hair. I’ve got him!
“Six!”
Stone lay on his back, his head spinning. He hadn’t even seen the punch.
“Seven!”
He scrambled to his feet, tripped to the side. Muldoon snorted like a bull and charged, but was hurt and unsteady. The two fighters banged away at each other, dug shots into each other’s ribs, butted each other with foreheads and elbows. Muldoon tried to poke a thumb into Stone’s good eye, while Stone caught him with a hard right cross, threw an uppercut, then measured Muldoon with his left hand, while he loaded up with his right.
Stone drove his right fist forward with all his strength; Muldoon’s legs buckled. He slammed Muldoon’s face again and again, and the crowd watched in silence as the heavyweight champion of the Seventh Cavalry sank to his knees under the onslaught of the blows.
It was the first time Muldoon had ever been off his feet in the ring. The audience was thunderstruck. Sergeant Major Gillespie counted, while Muldoon struggled to rise like a bloody phoenix from the ground. Stone stood in a neutral corner, wiping blood out of his eye with the back of his hand.
Muldoon reeled in the center of the ring, blinking, wondering what had gone wrong.
“You all right?” Sergeant Major Gillespie asked him.
Muldoon grunted something unintelligible. Sergeant Major Gillespie stepped back.
Stone tasted San Francisco. He grit his teeth and fired powerful punches at Muldoon, worked him up and down with jabs, hooks, uppercuts, mixing his attack. Muldoon desperately tried to cover and fight back, but he’d taken too many hard punches for too many rounds, and was wearing down.
He looked like a naughty little boy as he tried to hide behind his ham fists. Stone picked him apart methodically, fighting pity at the same time. When Muldoon raised a hand to protect his face, Stone buried a fist in his belly. When Muldoon tried to clinch, Stone stepped back and hit him with an uppercut.
Muldoon wouldn’t go down. The crowd was silent, Stone’s fists an unrelenting drumbeat. He wondered what he’d have to do to knock Muldoon out. He pawed with his left, ducked a lazy punch from Muldoon, cocked his right hand for the knockout blow. He saw the opening, let fly.
It rattled Muldoon to his toes, he sprawled backward onto the ropes, bounced, fell forward like a tree to the ground.
“One!” shouted Sergeant Major Gillespie.
Muldoon didn’t move.
“Two!”
Stone shifted his weight from foot to foot as he stood in a neutral corner. At the count of eight Muldoon pushed himself to his knees, but his arms collapsed and he fell on his face.
“Nine.”
Muldoon wasn’t going to make it. Stone jumped into the air, and threw his fist at the sky. Slipchuck screamed like a maniac, he’d bet his entire poke at high odds, a rich man! The crowd watched dumbfounded as Sergeant Major Gillespie hollered, “Ten!” Sergeant Major Gillespie raised Stone’s hand. “The winner, and new heavyweight champion of the Seventh Cavalry—John Stone!”
Chapter Eleven
Stone was awakened by the sound of shots. He opened his eyes and saw fellow passengers firing out the windows of the train. He turned to his right and saw a lobo streaking over the prairie, kicking up dirt.
The passengers shouted merrily, but Stone rooted for the lobo dodging and twisting for her life. She disappeared over the rise, and the passengers pulled their rifles in from the windows.
Stone sat in the rearmost seat with his back to the wall. A wood stove was bolted to the middle of the floor, radiating heat. The weather had turned cold; Stone needed a sweater under his fringed buckskin jacket. Pick one up in the next town.
The passengers closed the windows, the train rocked from side to side. Stone had been riding the rails since leaving Hays City early that morning. He and Slipchuck were on the way to San Francisco at last.
They’d said good-bye to General Custer and Libbie at the train station. Stone and the general spoke to each other in clipped sentences, made slim smiles, tried not to let their sadness show, as good friends came to a parting of the ways. They shook hands one last time; Stone and Slipchuck climbed aboard the train; it pulled out of the station and had been chugging west ever since, over the wide unchanging prairie. Stone dozed throughout the day, aching all over. He still felt the effects of the fight.
San Francisco in a week, depending on track conditions. He prayed Marie would be there when he arrived. Now at last he was hot on her trail. He took her picture out of his shirt pocket; she smiled at him, he felt good. They’d be together soon.
The door at the far end of the car opened; Slipchuck came into view, wearing a white frock coat, pants, stovepipe hat, and gold chain hanging over his belly, on his way back from the saloon car. He wavered from side to side as iron wheels rolled over iron tracks, producing a constant roar. Ladies raised their arms in alarm, afraid Slipchuck’d fall on them, but he made his way around the stove and dropped to a seat beside Stone.
John Stone’s manager, trainer, second, and cut man closed his eyes and passed out. He’d been drunk since the end of the fight, spent all night in the hog pens, carrying on like a young man.
The train sped across the plains; Stone thought of his old friend Fannie Custer at Fort Hays, with his two principal subordinate commanders hating his guts, most of his men inferior soldier material, preparing for a major campaign against the injuns. It wasn’t the prescription for success, but every man had to face his destiny, and even New York tycoons died.
Stone’s sharp range-experienced eyes spotted a man on a far-off eminence. Probably an injun watching mystified as the iron horse crossed his ancestral lands, scaring away the buffalo. Stone felt his spirit go to the injun, and wished he could join him. In some strange part of his soul, Stone loved injuns. He raised his arm and waved, could swear the injun waved back.
The train jiggled and shook as it rumbled over the West Kansas plain. Stone wondered if injuns had got Tomahawk, and he was a war pony now. Or he gave himself up to some cowboy and was herding cattle, a task at which he excelled. He might’ve been killed by lobos, or maybe he was running free with a pack of wild mustangs. Stone hoped he’d see him again someday. Tomahawk was the best horse he’d owned in his life.
With shame, he remembered the fight with Bull Muldoon. He’d beaten the champion to a pulp, for the almighty dollar. Muldoon never did anything to him, and probably was a decent man. Stone felt as though he’d been through a s
ausage grinder. I’ve got to stop fighting.
The conductor, wearing a blue beetle suit and black visored cap, entered the car. “Bradshaw, next stop!” he announced. “Passengers departin’, don’t leave nothin’ behind.”
Men and women pulled down their bags from overhead racks. Stone figured they were nearing the border with Coloraddy. In two days they’d be in Denver, one of the wildest spots on the frontier.
The train slowed as it approached Bradshaw. Stone looked out the window, and saw the usual scattering of shacks. An old newspaperman said to Stone once: “You tell me the population of a town, I’ll tell you what it looks like.”
Stone gazed at the sun sinking low on the horizon. The train slowed, with longer intervals between chugs of the engine. Black cinders blew from the smokestack and covered everything with a fine ash. The engine came to a stop; Stone looked down the main street: saloons, a barbershop, general store, pawnshop, broken-down hotel. Passengers dragged their luggage to the doors.
The conductor held an excited conversation with a man in a suit in front of the train station, then walked resolutely back to the train. “Track damage ahead!” he announced. “Should be fixed in a few days! Silver Palace Hotel straight down the street! Sorry fer the delay!”
Stone groaned. Just when everything was going beautifully. He stuck his elbow into Slipchuck’s ribs. Slipchuck opened his eyes and looked out the window.
Stone told him what happened. They pulled their saddlebags from the racks and followed the other passengers out the door. Stone stepped to the ground, a cinder from the smokestack landed in his left eye. He rubbed it with the back of his hand, corrosive coal smoke belching from the furnace of the train engine.
“Let’s find a saloon,” Slipchuck said.
The cool autumn wind whistled past Stone’s ears as he walked onto the main street of Bradshaw. It was a dot in the middle of the plains, built to service the railroad, trying to grow and prosper deep in injun country, far from forts.
The third building down was the Blue Bonnet Saloon, and Slipchuck inclined toward it. A beggar on the sidewalk held out his filthy palm, and Slipchuck gave him a few coins. Stone pushed the swinging doors, and stepped out of the backlight, hands near twin Colts in crisscrossed holsters. A man in a derby tinkled a piano against the wall. Stone headed for the bar, spurs jangling with every step. Slipchuck came behind him, small eyes peering into the darkest corners, looking for enemies, card games, the best-looking whore in the establishment.
Stone rested his foot on the bar rail and spat into the big brass cuspidor nearby. Behind the bar was a painting of a woman reclining on a leopard-skin sofa, naked except for the diamond and emerald tiara binding her golden hair. Stone had to blink, because she looked something like Marie.
“What’s yer pleasure?” asked the bartender, a bald man with long sideburns, wiping his hand on his dirty apron.
“You got any sarsaparilla?” Stone asked.
“No, sir, but we make root beer for fellers like you.”
“A large glass, if you don’t mind.”
Stone heard a voice next to him roar: “Who’s this galoot askin’ fer baby water?” A man with a long lantern jaw looked contemptuously at Stone. “I don’t drink next to sissies!”
Stone was about to say, then get out, when something at the far end of the bar caught his eye. It was an old Confederate cavalry hat, could it possibly be ...? Stone stepped around the man with the lantern jaw and walked toward the hat. The closer he got, the more familiar it looked, with the same dark stain on the left side of the crown. Then he recognized his shirt. Stone leaned against the bar, and examined the profile of the man wearing his clothes. Snead stood with one foot on the rail, staring into the middle distance. He’d beaten Stone, robbed him, and left him to die. Stone promised to kill him if he ever found him, saw no reason to change his mind now.
“Remember me?” Stone asked.
Snead turned toward Stone, and examined his face through narrowed eyes. Then Snead’s jaw fell open, and he reached for a Colt. The barrel of Snead’s gun cleared his holster, when Stone opened fire from a distance of three feet. The space between them filled with thick gunsmoke, shots reverberated through the saloon, and men dived to the floor.
Snead rocked back on his heels. He clasped both hands to his bleeding gut, stumbled to the side, and looked up at Stone, astonished by what had happened. One moment he was drinking whiskey, the next …
His mind blanked out, and he crashed into the floor at Stone’s feet. Stone reached over and picked up his old Confederate cavalry hat. He inspected it carefully in the light of the coal-oil lamp. Pretty much the same. Stone removed the cowboy hat from his head, and put on his old Confederate cavalry hat. A surge of electricity passed through him, and he felt like a young officer again. He pulled his old Apache knife out of Snead’s boot and dropped it into his own, beside the Sioux knife. Then he strapped on his old twin Colts, glad to have them back again. A glass of root beer sat before him on the bar.
“You don’t mind?” Stone asked the man with the lantern jaw.
“Not me,” the man replied nervously, stepping backward.
Stone looked in the bar mirror, and was himself again. He raised the root beer to his lips, and drained the glass dry. It had no wallop, but slaked his thirst and washed the cinders out of his mouth. He turned, and looked around the saloon for a gun pointed at his back.
All eyes were on him. It was silent as a tomb. Nobody dared move. He might be a dangerous maniac who’d shoot them all. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Slipchuck.
The ex-cavalry officer and ex-stagecoach driver walked toward the door, and everyone got out of their way. The strange pair stepped outside, and the saloon remained quiet for a few moments, then the bartender reached for a bottle and poured four fingers of rotgut.
“Anybody know who he is?” asked one of the patrons.
“Never seen him before,” the bartender replied, “but he’s got gunfighter writ all over him.”
“Maybe he’s famous,” declared a gambler at the other side of the bar.
The bartender knocked back his glass, then refilled it with a shaky hand. “I never seen him before. Somebody better go fer the sheriff. Drinks on the house!”
The piano player pounded his keys as men crowded around the bar. The bartender filled their glasses. “Must’ve knowed each other. Wonder what it was all about?”
“Women or money,” an old cowboy replied. “Ain’t it always? Life don’t mean much to them fellers. Always think they’re a-gonna win.”
They drank their toast as Snead lay in a pool of coagulating blood. Wind caused lanterns to swing back and forth from the rafters, and lobos could be heard howling on the distant prairie.
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