Hour of Death

by William W. Johnstone

  Freedy knew that. He also knew what Hooper was going to do and what he, as the one with the most experience, must do to take advantage of such knowledge.

  “Gonna shoot us in the back?” Hooper’s voice held a mocking quality, like a schoolboy sassing back his elders.

  Sixkiller said, “If that’s how you want it—”

  Hooper drew wicked fast. With lightning speed, his hands were a blur of motion snaking the twin guns out of their holsters. At the same time, he spun to his left, playing it cute. Instead of turning all the way around to face his man, he tried to sneak a shot under his left arm with the gun in his right hand. He was so quick that he almost made it . . . he got a shot off.

  It followed less than an eye blink after the second of two shots spitting from Sixkiller’s gun, both shots tagging Hooper in the back, knocking him down.

  Freedy had known all along that Hooper was going to make a play—never any doubt about it. A damn-fool kid stunt, drawing against an already drawn gun, but that hadn’t stopped Hoop. It distracted the stranger for a split-second, a delay of less than a heartbeat, but maybe enough time to make a difference.

  Freedy wasn’t one for trick shots. He whirled around, swinging the rifle with him, sweeping the muzzle in line with the stranger’s torso—and a thunderbolt hammered him—no, two. Double sledgehammer blows hammered his chest, pounding him down.

  Sky and earth spun in a dizzying vortex, then Freedy lay on his back looking up at the hazy blue sky. Blackness boiled, seething at the edge of his vision. His eyes still worked, but not much else. He tried to sit up, but nothing happened.

  He couldn’t feel his hands—or much of anything else—as he reached out to find his rifle. The smell of grass was sweet in his nostrils.

  Freedy heaved for breath, making a ghastly bubbling sound, like fat sputtering on a fire. It was the sound of a sucking chest wound from one of the bullets that had torn through his lungs.

  He couldn’t breathe! Sparks of panic flew upward against the great suffocating weight of nothingness pressing down on him.

  A figure loomed, blotting out a big swatch of sky. The stranger, looming titanic and treetop tall, looked down at Freedy from a remote height. He was a mountain of a man with rocklike solidity.

  Freedy’s lips formed a single word. “Who . . . ?”

  The stranger understood. “John Henry Sixkiller.”

  Sixkiller! Freedy’s eyes widened. He knew the name and had heard tell of the man, a big Cherokee lawman from the Nations in Oklahoma Territory. But that was a long way off and Freedy would never have figured him to operate so far from his home grounds.

  That explained a lot, including why Freedy lay on his back with two slugs in his chest, dying. His heart lurched like a machine throwing a wheel. The darkness edging his vision arrowed inward, racing to the centers of his eyes. Total blackness filled his sight.

  And then he was dead.

  Chapter Six

  Sixkiller reloaded his gun. The Colt was clean and so were his hands. No dirt or grit to foul its workings. He’d made sure of that before making his move on Freedy and Hooper. His life depended on his gun being in perfect working order.

  He must look a sight, he thought, covered as he was with yellow-gray alkali dust from head to boot toe. Powdery specks flecked off him with every move . . . and when he was standing still, too.

  He holstered his gun.

  Down on one knee, he turned out Freedy’s pockets, looking for clues that would lead him to Bart Skillern, the Utah Kid. It was too much to hope that Skillern would come in person, but Sixkiller couldn’t help but feel a twinge of disappointment. Coming face to face with Bart Skillern was an encounter he anticipated with relish.

  He found a thin fold of small denomination greenbacks and some loose change. The only object of interest was a fifty-dollar gold piece, shiny and new. Sixkiller gripped it in blunt, square-tipped fingers, holding it up to the light. Blood money? Maybe so. Payment in part or full for killing him. He hoped it was in part. He liked the idea of being worth a hundred dollars dead more than being worth fifty dollars dead.

  Back in Oklahoma and throughout the border states and Texas, there were more than a few men and some women, too, who would have paid a whole lot more than one hundred dollars to see John H. Sixkiller dead.

  But Bart Skillern didn’t know Sixkiller was on his trail—or did he?

  If he did, and he’d only posted a price of a hundred dollars per man to would-be killers, it was kind of insulting. Sixkiller vowed that the Utah Kid would set his value a lot higher than that before he was done.

  He pocketed the cash and the gold piece and patted Freedy down, squeezing the folds of cloth of his garments to make sure nothing was hidden in a secret pocket or hiding place. He wrestled off the killer’s boots and searched them to determine that nothing was hidden inside. Freedy’s corpse yielded nothing more.

  Rolling Hooper’s corpse on its back, he repeated the process—patient, painstaking, and methodical. Sixkiller made the shiny new fifty-dollar gold piece and the small amount of money his own. Neither gunman had further use for it.

  “All in the line of duty,” Sixkiller said to himself. He was liable to run up some expenses working in the field. He had to eat, and had a big appetite. Hard to get along on a U.S. deputy marshal’s pay.

  The pocket litter and the personal items the two had been carrying, he let slip through his fingers to the ground. Whoever found them was welcome to them, or the wind could carry them away.

  Careful not to skyline, he stood, thinking of the two men he’d killed. He had no trouble recognizing them, though he did not know their names. They’d come into town the day after he’d arrived in Rock Spring, trying to get a line on him without betraying their interest—impossible in a place as small as Rock Spring.

  He’d spent a day and night circulating around, drinking and buying drinks, roping the locals into conversations which inevitably included inquiries about the Utah Kid. Nobody had known anything useful, of course. He wondered which of his newfound acquaintances had given him up. Not that it really mattered.

  The older man had tried to avoid tipping their hand, but the youngster hadn’t been bothered. He’d eyed Sixkiller like he was measuring him for a coffin.

  They were gunmen, hired killers, a type Sixkiller knew well. He’d seen hundreds in his day. Their faces didn’t match any of those on the countless WANTED posters and circulars that had gone through his hands in his office back in Tahlequah. But then he was a long way from there.

  The old man and his partner had made their play and died trying. They could stay there until Doomsday as far as Sixkiller was concerned. In other circumstances he might have taken them into town and turned them over to the local law, claiming whatever reward there was, but for his present purposes, he didn’t want to be tied to their killing.

  He turned away and scanned the landscape in all directions for other humans. Seeing none, he thought, Mighty lonely country.

  Taking one last look at the corpses before collecting his horse at the bottom of the rise, he said harshly, “A couple varmints aiming to dry-gulch me. Damned if I’m gonna go to the trouble of burying you. The buzzards can have you for all I care. It ain’t nothing to me.”

  Chapter Seven

  Sixkiller halted at the top of a rise facing north. The wind blew stiffly at times, but with far less dust than in the Powder Basin. Breezes were rich with the scent of sweet grasses and rich dark loam. A rampart of the Black Hills was visible in the distant northeast.

  Below, lay Ringgold in the heart of the Glint River Valley. The landscape presented a broad and pleasing prospect of gently rolling hills and vast meadows spread out under strong, slanting rays of the late afternoon sunlight. The blocky mass of the town threw a long shadow eastward.

  Sixkiller reviewed some of the history of the area that Vandaman had given him.

  North of the valley lay a wide, gentle slope climbing to the base of the Lonesome Hills. It topped out on the le
vel plateau of Sagebrush Flats, a kind of shelf, fronting apronlike at the foot of the hills.

  Lead mines in the area had long been a mainstay of the town’s economic activity.

  Originally a trading post for fur trappers back in the heyday of the mountain men, Ringgold first came into being as a boomtown borne from a gold strike on Yellow Creek, a feeder stream of the Glint River. The initial gold strike was fast and furious, fortunes made and won literally overnight. Later, it served as a jumping-off place into the Yellow Creek gold diggings. But like so many other such finds, the riches of Yellow Creek gold had proved short-lived. The vein of precious metal was substantial, but not inexhaustible.

  When the lode played out, the boom went bust. Bitter survivors sardonically renamed Yellow Creek to Fool’s Gold Creek. The miners went elsewhere, trailed by their legions of camp followers—merchants, traders, tinhorns, whores, and such—leaving Ringgold almost as much of a flyspeck town as it had been before the boom.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Yellow Creek, Fools Gold Creek, call it what you will, took its source in streams running down from the mountains. Prospectors were hopeful creatures, romantic and filled with illusions as young girls. Hope sprung eternal in their hardened hearts. Perhaps higher up was the mother lode, source of the gold that had trickled its way down the creek to lay up in deposits in the Glint River Valley.

  Prospectors and geologists surveyed the hundred foothills rising from Lonesome Hills in search of that precious yellow gold. They found none, but did not come up empty-handed. The foothills were rich with deposits of another ore, one less glamorous, less valuable than gold, but not without worth to a growing national economy. Plumbum—Latin for lead. By any name, a valuable mineral vital to Manifest Destiny and the spread of Empire. Lead for making bullets, shot, and shells. The deposits were found at a critical time, right on the eve of the Civil War.

  Mining resumed on a grand scale in the Lonesome Hills, requiring millions in capital from Eastern investors and mining syndicates. They supplied the massive industrial base for hard rock mining to dig networks of shafts and tunnels. They provided rock crushers to pulverize the ore and separators to draw the pure elemental lead from rock.

  The nature of the terrain made it impractical and too costly to run a railroad spur through steep and jagged foothills to reach the mines. Traffic was handled by fleets of freight wagons running the ore down to the depot at Rock Spring for transshipment nationwide.

  The premier operation was the Western Territories Mining Company. On the western side of the flat, hidden by a limb of one of the Lonesome Hills, was Mine Shaft Number Seven. It showed every sign of being a rich deposit of lead and indeed it was. In its first few months it yielded lead-bearing ore that assayed of a high purity.

  The tunnels were dug deeper—only to break through a rock wall behind which lay an underground spring.

  Mine Shaft Seven flooded. A number of miners working the lethal rock face lost their lives in the sudden surprise flooding that submerged the lower levels, but most made it to safety.

  The mining company made heroic efforts to plug the leak, seal it off, but to no avail. The volume of flood water made it impossible. The mine was so drowned there was no way to salvage it, and Mine Shaft Seven was abandoned. All that remained to mark it was a fresh torrent of water that streamed from the tunnel mouth to spill down the northwest slope of the rise.

  Up on Sagebrush Flats near the tunnels in the northeast side of the hills were the main diggings, safe from the danger of flooding. Lead mining furnished steady dependable returns year after year. No fabulous fortunes were made boom-style, but it was good, dependable, steady money for the mining company and steady work for several hundred miners who had built a shantytown on the flat and who did their business and bought their provisions in Ringgold.

  In recent years, the Glint River Valley had begun to experience a cattle boom. The cattle-raising lands were well west of the mine areas, avoiding the risk of lead-contaminated waters that otherwise might have proved detrimental, if not fatal, to the growing cattle empires in the northwest part of the valley. The miners were eating well on prime beef at rock bottom prices thanks to the availability of stock from Glint River Valley ranches.

  As he scanned the hills and the valley, Big John Sixkiller mused on The Western Territories Mining Company’s current big headache—robbers. Road agents in general and Bart Skillern in particular. It was said in grim jest that the freight haulers and shotgun messengers responsible for getting payroll funds to the WTMC camp saw more of Skillern than anyone, except for his gang.

  The Utah Kid threw a wide loop when it came to frontier crime. As the cattle ranches prospered, he divided his energies between stagecoach robberies and cattle rustling, with a nice sideline in horse theft.

  Sixkiller knew a little about mining and a lot about cattle and cattle raising. He eyed the land that Skillern regularly plundered and found it good, sizing it up as prime grazing ground for livestock. It was a land blue-veined by the Glint River and its feeder streams and tributaries, marbled like a side of richly fatted, succulent beef—the kind being raised on the Glint in contrast to tough stringy longhorns.

  He moved his gaze to Ringgold, nestled in a bend of the river. Buildings with the bright yellow newness of raw pine and other lumber brought down from the wooded foothills populated the town.

  Wagon trails and dirt roads arrowed into Ringgold, one from the northeast mines on Sagebrush Flats and beyond them the Black Hills, another from the northwest and the rich cattle country along the main stem of the Glint. A southeast road angled from Laramie and the south road headed up from Rock Spring. A number of lesser trails wound their way to the town.

  Sixkiller’s first impression was one of liveliness. Lush green meadows bordered the town. Swarms of people threaded the street grid.

  Ringgold! A tough town, by all accounts.

  Sixkiller had faced tough towns before and tamed them.

  Ringgold! He rode down to meet it.

  * * *

  The Banner was Ringgold’s weekly newspaper. Its only newspaper. The office was located on the northern side of Liberty Street, set down near the edge of town in a row of shabby, marginal enterprises—a laundry, a seedy boardinghouse, a pawnshop, and a couple rowdy dives and saloons.

  The stand-alone, one-story, wooden-frame building was a single room with a waist-high, dark-wood balustrade dividing it in half. The front half held the administrative office area where publisher-editor Cassandra Horgan—Cass to her friends—had her work space. It was furnished with secondhand furniture, dingy and shabby. A rolltop desk backed with pigeonhole shelving held an ink well, steel-quill pens, scissors, paste pots, and suchlike paraphernalia.

  Thirty years old, she was a full-bodied redhead with green eyes and a heart-shaped face. She looked a little tired around the eyes, but was strong, vital, and lovely.

  She wore a lightweight, pale green-and-white-checked gingham dress, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. Her hands and forearms were ink-stained and smudged and the hair piled up high on her head seemed in imminent danger of becoming disarranged. On her feet were black leather ankle boots that laced up the front.

  Edmond Bigelow, a printer and editorial assistant, sat at a second desk, even more battered and less fancy. It had been said that he put the tramp in tramp printer and he would have been the first to agree. He was fortyish, a hard forty that looked more like fifty. He was grizzled and thick-bodied with a red bulbous nose, small narrow eyes nested in a mass of wrinkles, and a bristly beard which failed to hide the many gin blossoms on his weathered face. He wore a brown jacket with yellow spiderweb pattern, an orange-and-silver checkered vest, no tie, and rust-colored pants.

  The massive printing press, bristling with levers, hand cranks, rollers, and metal wheels sat in the rear, midpoint of the long east wall. More than one visitor had observed that it looked like some kind of medieval torture machine. Bigelow maintained that’s exactly what it was.
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  Near the press were racks with shallow metal trays and pans filled with blocks of type, rollers for applying ink, scrapers, flatteners, paper cutters, and more. Massive rolls of newsprint paper and rows of ink-filled carboys lined the back wall.

  Reeve Westbrook, the Banner’s feature writer, columnist, reviewer and jack-of-all-reportorial trades made up the third member of the staff. He was slim and straight, with a sharp-featured, birdlike face. He had wispy fair hair, a thin mustache and reedy chin whiskers. He wore a maroon velvet jacket and tan pants over elegant mahogany-colored custom-tailored boots.

  Members of the Fourth Estate, all three were at work, putting out the next edition of the Banner.

  Bigelow was going over pages of handwritten notes, musing aloud. “A brawl at the Lucky Star saloon that left seven miners laid up with fractured skulls and broken bones . . . two soiled doves fighting it out with a razor in the street in broad daylight . . . six shootings two of them fatal, five stabbings none fatal . . . man dragged by runaway horse, he’s expected to live—the man that is. The horse had to be shot to save him—”

  “I call that a waste of a damned good horse,” Westbrook said.

  “Depends on the man,” Cass said. “Who was it?”

  “Damned if I know,” Bigelow said, shrugging.

  “You’re supposed to know. You’re a newspaperman.” Cass said the last word like it meant something, which to her, it did.

  “Around here I’m a glorified typesetter,” Bigelow said cheerfully enough. He nodded at Westbrook. “Ask Golden Boy here. He’s Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to local doings.”

  “Powell. Bud Powell,” Westbrook said.

  Cass frowned. “Who?”

  “Bud Powell. He’s the one who was dragged by the horse,” Westbrook explained.

  “What’d I tell you? He knows,” Bigelow said.

  “If you got off that oversized rump of yours and got around town to see what’s going on, you might break a few stories yourself,” Cass said.