“Mr. Henniston, you recall that dutchman we spoke to in Cherryvale?”
He nodded. “He was a queer sort. Awful skittish, now that I reflect on it.”
I told them my story, not forgetting the smell emanating from the floorboards, and Henniston became more and more excited as I went on. Herbert, at a loss for how to spend his afternoon, suggested we ride out to the farm and strong-arm the Benders and see what they really knew. With the promise of a free drink I sent one of the men to find Hans to take my place for the day. Under the bar I kept two loaded guns, my own Colt and the Dragoon I had taken off the drummer on the day of the Levals’ arrival in town; I stuck them both into my belt, and we left as soon as Hans arrived, happy for the chance at a second day’s extra shift in a row.
We headed to the livery stable where we rented the same horse Henniston had ridden the day before and a second for Herbert, and for fifteen minutes we struggled to get Henniston aboard his mount, a considerably more difficult job than it had been the day before, since in addition to being morbidly obese he was also two-thirds drunk. We made even worse time as a result of it; he rode in humiliated silence, concentrating all his efforts on not falling off the tame old mare. A low fog now lay over the entire area, making matters worse for the fact that the horses couldn’t see their feet meeting the ground.
When we got to the Big Hill Creek ford we ran into a farmer on horseback, another German, and I asked him in his native tongue if he’d seen Henniston’s partner. He replied that he hadn’t, but when I told him we were heading for the Bender place to ask them about the matter he reported that he’d been hearing their animals since morning.
The first sight that greeted us as we approached the claim was a mule that had been staked out in the middle of the mound, thirty feet or so from the house. It brayed frantically at the sight of us and tugged pitifully on its tether. It was a fleabitten animal, with patches of fur missing and a sizeable chunk missing from its left ear.
From the stable to our left flowed the sounds of a cow and a calf frantically crying out to one another. There stood a month-old calf in one pen, and two stalls down was its mother, her udder swollen painfully; she had gashes on her side where she had tried to knock the sides of her pen down to reach the hungry calf. She had nearly succeeded, too, since the whole stable was rudely constructed of scrap wood. I dismounted and reunited the two, relieved to have that part of the barnyard chorus quieted.
Herbert dismounted in his turn and he and I drew our weapons.
“John Bender,” I yelled. “Need to have a word with you.”
There was no answer, and I leaned over to Herbert. “I’ll go to the door, you stand behind me with weapon in hand.”
A goat as thin as a two-by-four slowly and arthritically limped toward me as I neared the door. I rapped with my knuckles and again yelled, “John Bender,” again with no response. I pulled the latchstring, opened the door and stepped into that dark house and found the front part unoccupied. The roughhewn furnishings remained, and I noted that the copper pot was gone. I stepped behind the canvas sheet dividing the structure into two rooms, calling out as I did so.
“I’m armed and I’ll fire without a thought,” I said, but there was no one there to hear it. I relaxed and noted the same smell I’d detected months earlier, seemingly stronger now despite the cold, wet air, and I called out to my comrades to join me inside.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Henniston said upon entering, and after inhaling a single lungful he stumbled back outside, nearly knocking Herbert to the ground as he passed, hurriedly placing a handkerchief to his mouth. As Henniston vomited, leaning against the side of the house, Herbert stepped across the threshold and took a deep breath, his mouth pinched tight.
“Calls to mind a battlefield,” he said.
I nodded and pointed at the trapdoor. “See that? I noted that on my last visit.” We moved the table and chairs outside, I pulled the curtain down from the window, and then we knelt on the floor. Herbert pulled a jackknife from his vest and inserted it into the space between the trap and the surrounding puncheons. Prying the door loose we lifted the thing up and were nearly overcome by the foulness of the air wafting upwards, to the degree that we tossed the trap door to the side and both exited in a hurry, taking in deep, grateful draughts of the fresh air outside.
“A day as dark as this one we’ll be needing a lantern to see what’s down there,” I said.
Herbert took a deep breath and stepped back inside, and I followed. The house was dark, but there was enough light coming through the door and the window to give a vague idea of what was in the pit.
“Looks to me like there’s nothing down there but stink,” Herbert said. It appeared to be dirt, soaked at bottom with a quantity of blood and gore, which in itself proved nothing sinister. Old Bender might have used it to kill goats, for all we knew.
We stepped outside again for a break from the noxious gases. “I suppose we ought to head back to town with word of this.”
Herbert nodded. “Why don’t we take a quick look about the place first,” he said, “see what we can find before we go.” He nodded discreetly over at Henniston, who still sat on his ass next to the ramshackle structure the Bender men had built, looking dazed. “Shame we can’t send your banker back to town in our stead, but he’d never get there.” He chuckled, slapped me on the shoulder and set off in the direction of the stable.
I circled the house and could see nothing unusual, hampered as my vision was by the mist, then tried the small orchard to the north. The first thing that struck me was the beauty of the budding fruit trees. The Benders might not have been much to crow about as farmers, but they had a mighty healthy looking bunch of apple and peach trees, and planted just two or three years earlier. The second thing I might not have noticed had I not served on occasion as a battlefield gravedigger, and recently as a municipal one; the low fog gave an enhanced sensation of relief at ground level, laying thick and milky upon a number of rectangular depressions in the soil. These stood out in ethereal, vaporous white against the dark gray-brown of the orchard’s tilled soil, varying in width from about three feet to about four, and all were six or seven feet long.
I yelled at Herbert. He came running, and stopped short at the sight of the concave earth.
“I spied a shovel in the stable,” he said, and he hurried to get it.
When he returned I eagerly grabbed the shovel from his outstretched hand and began digging at the first mound I had spotted. It was good dirt for digging, neither too viscous from the recent rains nor too claylike, and before I had gotten five feet down my blade struck something solid. I began digging more carefully by hand, excavating around the object, and soon enough I had uncovered most of a man’s upper torso. I then reached down and gingerly picked the clumps of earth away from the face. It was dark, loamy dirt and came away easily enough, and before long I saw through the vapor the yellow hairs of a blond mustache; a bit more hand-digging revealed the whole head of Mister A. J. Harticourt, the drummer who’d fucked my Ninna some six months earlier, his eyes sunken into their sockets and his nose gone but otherwise remarkably well preserved for a man half a year in the ground. His throat had been slit open, and even fixed in its matrix of cold earth it was plain that the back of his skull had been caved in by something heavy. Further digging revealed him to be unclothed apart from a pair of long underwear; they had even taken his ruined bowler from him. I felt a little sorry for our disagreement the day he rode away with Kate Bender, and with the dirt of his grave still packed under my fingernails I muttered, sotto voce, that I wouldn’t let it go.
“Come along,” Herbert said with a hand on my arm. “Let’s head back for some men and some shovels.”
We determined that I would head to Cherryvale and Herbert would return to Cottonwood. Henniston would have slowed either one of us down, and we insisted that he stay. He sputtered and choked but agreed to stay behind, and Herbert and I went our separate ways, leaving him alone there with the
animals and the dead in their graves for company.
5
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, KANSAS MAY 1873
Gun Play
It was late in the day by the time I returned to the Bender claim, followed by two dozen men and equipped with lanterns, shovels, guns, and provisions for a ride of several days’ duration. Word had spread quickly in Cherryvale, and by now it would have reached Independence, and Parsons would get it by nightfall as well; I suspected that by morning the Bender farm would be swarming with the curious and the vengeful.
Linder, the German farmer I had encountered earlier, had run into Herbert on his way to Cottonwood and had hastened to the farm; he was waiting when I returned with the men from Cherryvale. I asked him in German if the Benders typically traveled by wagon or on horseback. He replied that the men usually traveled in the worn-out old platform spring wagon we’d seen young John driving in Cherryvale, with the women occasionally in the back. There was no such wagon on the property currently, and we quickly determined that the two horses Linder knew the Benders to possess were gone as well.
Poor Henniston had retreated to the stables and the company of the cow and her calf, and was barely coherent when I found him there. Soon after that Herbert arrived Marc, followed by a small army of men and equipment. Several of the men had entered the house with lanterns lit and proceeded to remove all the furniture in the house, placing it next to the table and chairs we had removed earlier. I called out to Dr. Salisbury among a crowd that surrounded Marc, and we descended into the pit together with a lantern. The walls were solid enough, but the ground was horribly soft, and our boots sank an inch or more with each step.
“In my opinion, it’s earth mixed with a quantity of human blood,” he told me, “though I couldn’t prove it right here and now.”
He climbed out of the pit with my assistance and I followed; then we went outside to the orchard to examine the bodies as they were brought up. The digging was going quickly, as there were many men working the shovels, and most of the graves were no deeper than four feet. Michael Cornan, looking no more disturbed than a man digging for nightcrawlers, and Tim Niedel, looking like a man who wanted to call out for his mother, had just lifted a corpse from the dirt. Despite the damage done to his face by his killers and its subsequent decomposition there was a general agreement that these were the remains of Otis’s apprentice Mr. Perkey, and I stood above him wondering about his dying mother, and whether he’d been killed on the way to or from her sickbed in Lawrence. Before Perkey’s departure the loft above the forge had been his bed, and if he’d returned as planned I would have had to bunk elsewhere, maybe even back at the farm.
“Say, Bill,” Tiny Rector called out to me from above another grave, one row over, “isn’t this Juno, your hired man?”
I stepped through the trees and peered down into the hole. It was still overcast and nearly dark now, and I had to descend into the grave with the lantern to see the face clearly. The body was further deteriorated than the drummer’s or Perkey’s and mostly without flesh, but it was Juno, without question; his high forehead and thick jaw gave him away. What desiccated tissue remained about his throat had been hacked through to the vertebrae, and the back of his skull had been fractured by a heavy blow, as the drummer’s had. I began digging around his hands and was sorry to find his soft fingers ringless, though I would have been shocked had the Benders failed to steal the ring he had stolen from me, and which I in turn had stolen from my father’s corpse; all seven bodies we had found thus far were naked of jewelry and clothes, except for one or two who still wore the threadbare remnants of their undergarments. As I had for the drummer, I regretted my differences with Juno, who had been my friend once, and climbing out of his grave I wished I’d let him stay on at the farm.
“Looks like they slit his throat, don’t it? Wonder how come they cracked his head, too.”
A hardware dealer from Cherryvale came over. “We found three hammers in there, in the second room behind the canvas curtain. There’s blood on that, too, right about where a head’d be if a man was seated on that bench. My guess is they’re all going to have their heads bashed in like that from behind.”
“How come they cut their throats, then?” Tim said.
The hardware man looked sick. “You suppose they bled the bodies dry down in that rootcellar before they buried them out here?”
“But what for?” Tim asked.
No one answered him. Another body had just been removed from the freshest-looking of the graves, corresponding roughly to the description of Henniston’s partner Mr. Sheale. I went over to the stable to speak to Henniston and found that Herbert had brought him back a bottle from the saloon, which had made him considerably more collected than before. I walked him to the orchard, and he looked down at his friend disappointedly. The feeble sun was nearly down, and by the flickering light of all the lanterns the orchard began to resemble an eerie garden party. I held my own lamp next to the corpse’s ghastly face, and Henniston readily identified it despite the mottled gray skin of the face, as wrinkled and fragile as that of an overripened peach. His throat, too, had been cut, and the rear portion of his skull was entirely caved in.
“That’s him, all right. What shall we do to get him back to Kansas City?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Tim Niedel was standing next to me. “Easy, we’ll haul him to Cottonwood in a wagon with the rest of these poor souls and we’ll load him onto the train. You paying for it?”
Henniston nodded, then took another consoling nip from the bottle.
“Main question is, shouldn’t we be setting out after them sons of bitches already?” Tim waved an arm in the direction of the orchard graveyard, where men still toiled to bring the dead above-ground.
I hadn’t thought about it until then, but I called Marc over. “You think we ought to start organizing the men into search parties before the Benders get too far?”
I knew Marc was calculating in his head the amount of damage this was going to do the town’s reputation in the nation’s press, but I was nonetheless surprised at his response. “Useless. They’ve a day’s head start on us or better.” It was the first time he’d spoken to me since he’d arrived.
“All the more reason to set out now, rather than wait for tomorrow. And we can make up some of that time while they sleep.”
Several of the men were listening, and unaccustomed as he was to being contradicted he knew better than to allow his anger to show in their presence.
Tim spoke up, loud as he always was and not at all cowed by Marc. “There’s seven men dead over there at least, and surely more still in the ground, and who knows how many they kilt and throwed in the river like they did poor Hiram Steig, and we owe it to them to get the dirty bastards.”
Another man I didn’t know pushed his way over. I saw one-eyed Herbert coming our way.
“We don’t even know in which direction they fled,” Marc said.
“You think they might have passed through town?” I asked Tim.
“They’d be taking an awful chance. If they thought they was about to be found out, or maybe already had been, town’s the last place they’d want to be found passing through.”
“Could have gone south.”
“Could have,” Herbert said. The light from a torch was shining on him at such an angle that his eyesocket looked especially deep and round. “Open prairie down there, though. Nowhere to hide if anyone was to spot ’em, and you can see for miles to the south from these mounds. Me, I wouldn’t have gone south.”
“North,” I said, “along the Verdigris.”
Tim nodded. “There’s trees alongside the riverbank for miles and miles. That’s cover in the daytime, and you could travel at night. They could catch a train at Toronto or Eureka, and then they’re gone forever.”
I remembered finding young John Bender that night hiding in the trees alongside Big Hill Creek, and it made sense to me. “That’s for me, then. Time we started breaking the men
down into search parties.”
Marc saw that the posses would organize themselves and get under way under his command or not; choosing the former, he raised his voice and made as though it had been his idea all along. “Gather round, men, we’re going to split up into companies and head out in search of the assassins.”
In the end there were six groups of four men each; each was assigned a particular trail that seemed a more or less likely escape route. My party consisted of Herbert Braunschweig, Tim Niedel, Marc, and myself, and we were assigned the northern track, along the Verdigris river, which all seemed to consider the most likely route for the Benders’ escape. There was some grumbling among the other groups, but no one questioned Marc’s right to assign himself the best chance for capturing the Benders.
At the outset there were eight of us; we would split up when the river forked into two, up by Neodesha. We reached it after a couple of hours, with the Fall running westward to Eureka and the Verdigris eastward to the town of Toronto, and then we were four. The fog had begun to clear by that time, and from behind a gauzy cloud cover the moon bathed the land before us with enough silvered light to ride without much difficulty. The ground beside the river was soft without being too muddy, and when the last of the fog had lifted we learned that we had unknowingly been following a set of tracks, those of a wagon whose front wheels were narrower than the rear pair, pulled by a single horse with another walking beside it. The hoofprints of both beasts were narrowly spaced, suggesting a slow pace and a heavy burden; whether this was the Benders’ own wagon or not we had no way to know, but we took it for a good sign.
At Guilford, whose town limits bordered the river, we spotted a shanty near the trail and awakened its sole occupant. Standing outside, we described to the drowsy farmer the horrors that had brought us there, and the family we sought. Half-sleeping, shrouded in an atmosphere of whiskey fumes, he reported that he had spotted a wagon carrying a man and two women, and another man with them on horseback, sometime late in the day; he had no clock of any kind and couldn’t be any more precise.
Cottonwood: A Novel Page 13
