Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  As the last bits of gravel thump back onto the ground and the smoke from the blast is blown away on the wind, a pregnant silence settles over and around the train, like that which precedes a cyclone.

  It’s short-lived.

  The growing thunder of galloping hooves replaces it.

  A man sticks his head out of one of the open train windows and points toward the riders converging on the train in front of their own tawny dust clouds.

  “It’s them!” the man screams shrilly. “It’s the Devil’s Horde!”

  Inside the passenger car, a woman screams.

  Men shout. They curse.

  A woman sobs.

  A baby wails.

  A great commotion begins inside the car and you can hear the rumbling with your keen hearing. Up where you are soaring on thermals, the wind rippling your sunshine-burnished feathers, you can distinguish the scrambling sounds inside the car from the thunder of the galloping riders.

  Several guns are aimed out of the passenger car windows. In the locomotive, the engineer and the fireman have armed themselves, as well.

  Guns bark and pop. Smoke puffs in the coach windows and from both sides of the locomotive.

  The riders converge on the train. They whoop and yip like coyotes as they aim their own rifles and pistols and return fire on the locomotive and on the two passenger coaches. Some of the riders check their sweat-lathered mounts down to skidding halts and leap out of their saddles.

  They drop to their knees and aim rifles from their shoulders, picking out targets on the train. They fire, whooping and yelling and pumping their rifles as the empty casings arc up and over their shoulders to flash in the sun before landing in the wild rye and bromegrass. Bullets blast out of the windows and the passengers scream.

  Four riders leap from their saddles and run to the express car. Two duck under it, each carrying a burlap bag. The other two riders fire rifles at the express car’s sliding door while shouts resound from within the car.

  A man dressed in the blue wool coat and leather-billed cap of a conductor, a gold watch chain drooping against his vest, fires a pistol from the first passenger car’s front vestibule. He triggers only two rounds before bullets punch into him from front and back, jerking him wildly. He drops to his knees and rolls gracelessly down the vestibule steps to the ground, where two of the attackers each trigger another round into him.

  Four of the attackers run into both passenger coaches—two for each car, one entering by the front, the other by the back. Each is holding an empty burlap sack. They bellow commands and shoot their guns, and more passengers wail and scream and shout curses. In a little over a minute, the attackers emerge from the passenger cars, whooping and howling even more loudly.

  Their bags have grown larger and heavier.

  Another loud blast assaults you, pressing your feathers up taut against your slender body. The express car door has been blown open and into the roiling black smoke three of the attackers run, also carrying bags.

  A passenger stumbles out onto the second passenger car’s rear vestibule. He walks as though drunk. He is slender and he wears a gaudy checked suit. He is bald, and his rimless glasses hang by a single bow from one ear. He stumbles off the last vestibule step and falls to the ground. He scrambles to his feet, wails, “Don’t kill me!” and runs straight out away from the train.

  There is so much smoke, and the attackers are so distracted by their plunder, that they don’t see the running man.

  Laughing together, two attackers stumble out of the dining car, each holding a bag in which whiskey and wine bottles clank together. One sees the suited man fleeing to the north, running shamble-footed and almost falling with every third or fourth step.

  “Hey, look there, Bryce!”

  “Hah!” Bryce sets his bag on the ground then straightens, palming his pistol. “You wanna take him or should I?”

  “Go ahead, but if you miss, you owe me ten dollars.”

  Bryce curses and, grinning, raises his pistol. “If I get him with my first shot, you owe me twenty!” He fires. The bullet furrows the prairie grass well ahead and to one side of the fleeing man.

  The man howls, stumbles, and nearly falls before he gets his feet set beneath him again and continues running.

  Bryce curses.

  The other man mocks him and raises his revolver. He fires. That bullet also misses, blowing up bits of a prickly pear just off the running man’s left heel.

  Another attacker, hefting a bag he carried out of the express car, steps up in front of Bryce and the other man. He raises his short-barreled Winchester rifle, cocks, aims, and fires it one-handed at the running man. The bullet drills the running man in the back of the neck. His arms fly up as he falls forward to lie unmoving in the tall grass.

  The man who shot the fleeing passenger turns to the other two attackers, showing his teeth like a vicious dog. “Now, will you two blanketheads get mounted and ride the hell out of here?”

  They mutter and grumble and then both jog out to where their horses are milling, ground-reined about fifty feet out from the train, grazing or looking around at the carnage and switching their tails. More of the attackers leap down from the train and jog out to their horses. The train itself is quiet now though the express car is still smoldering after the explosion.

  Four passengers lie on the ground outside the passenger cars, blown out of the windows when the attackers stormed onto the train. One stout old woman in a black sweater and dangling poke bonnet hangs out the window, half in and half out of a passenger car. A bullet hole pocks her forehead.

  The train’s engineer lies slumped over the side of the locomotive, arms and gloved hands drooping toward the ground. The iron housing of the locomotive around him is smeared with his brains and blood, the result of the bullet that smashed into the back of his head and exited through his left eye.

  The fireman lies at the engineer’s feet, writhing in unbearable pain from the bullets that invaded his body. He will be dead soon. Quietly, he prays for his soul, hoping that when he dies his beloved mother, dead these thirty years, will be awaiting him at the pearly gates, as she’d promised on her deathbed.

  One of the train’s two brakemen is running to the west between the tracks. He is sobbing and limping, for he carries a bullet in his right leg. He has several more bullets in his chest and belly but the adrenaline spawned by fear drives him forward, awkwardly hopping the ties.

  From inside one of the passenger cars, you indifferently note the regular screams of a woman. “My baby!” she cries. “My baby! My baby! My baby!”

  The attackers flee, retracing the spokes of the wheel away from the hub and toward all points along the horizon. One of them riding off to the west shoots the brakeman in the back twice without his horse even breaking stride. The brakeman screams and falls. The rider continues riding past him, whooping victoriously and pulling his dust plume along behind him.

  The others do the same.

  They are gone as fast as they appeared.

  Behind them, the express car smolders.

  The young mother continues to scream with metronomic regularity: “My baby! My baby! My baby!”

  You voice your own ratcheting cry of delight, lower a wing, and swoop downward.

  If you hurry, you’ll beat the buzzards.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wolf Stockburn rode his rangy, smoky gray stallion up to the stone well and swung his lean, long-legged frame down from his saddle. He spied movement in the corner of his left eye but did not turn his head in that direction. No stranger to ambush, he knew the best way to trigger a bushwhack was to let the bushwhacker know he . . . or they . . . had been spotted.

  The stallion gave a low whicker of warning.

  “Easy, Smoke,” Wolf whispered, patting the big beast’s wither reassuringly. “I saw it.”

  Calmly, he dropped the bucket into the well. It landed with a wooden thud and a splash that echoed up out of the stone-lined chasm. He winched the bucket up out of the we
ll. Water slopped down the sides and made mud of the straw-flecked dust around the soles of his low-heeled black boots.

  As was the case with most legendary men, Stockburn had been tagged with several nicknames over the years. One of them was the Gray Wolf. He’d come by the handle honestly, for there was something wolfish in Wolf Stockburn’s demeanor. He sported roached hair coarse as wolf’s fur and so gray that it was almost white and had been since his late twenties. His face was strangely, primitively handsome with deep-set gray eyes that sometimes appeared a faded blue. V-shaped, strong-jawed, his features were broad through the cheekbones, tapering down to a solid, spade-shaped chin. The predatorial nose was long. Contrasting sharply with the man’s short gray hair and trimmed gray mustache and sideburns, his features were weathered and sun-bronzed.

  Stockburn was a big man, over six feet tall, all gristle and bone, customarily clad in a finely tailored three-piece suit with a long black frock coat, white silk shirt with upraised collar, black foulard tie, gray-striped black vest, and black cotton trousers.

  Owning the primitive senses of his Scottish warrior ancestors, Wolf’s perceptions were keenly alert as he ladled up some water for himself. As he drank, he peered furtively up from beneath the severe ridge of his gray brows and the broad brim of his low-crowned black sombrero, directing his gaze in the direction of a small barn hunched on the yard’s northwest edge.

  When he had had his fill of the cold water, he stepped up in front of the stallion and set the bucket down so the horse could drink. He’d no sooner removed his hand from the bucket’s rope handle than he spied movement again off the barn’s far corner.

  The horse had seen it, too. Smoke whinnied shrilly.

  Lightning-quick, one of Stockburn’s two single-action Colt Army .45 Peacemakers was out of its holster and clenched in his right hand. He swung hard right, raising and cocking the nickel-plated, ivory-gripped piece, and fired.

  His bullet struck the barrel of the rifle aimed at him from around the corner of the barn. The clang of lead on steel reverberated shrilly. The rifleman screamed and staggered away from the barn as he dropped the rifle then lowered his right hand toward the holster on his right hip.

  Again, Stockburn’s .45 roared.

  The bullet tore through the short, thick-waisted rifleman’s hickory shirt, blowing dust and punching the man backward into a large cottonwood. The man’s high-crowned black hat, trimmed with an eagle feather, bounded off his shoulder before tumbling to the ground. Glimpsing more furtive movement to his left, Stockburn whipped his tall cavalryman’s body back that way, aiming the Peacemaker at the sprawling brush-roofed log shack sitting forty yards to the north.

  Another rifle barrel bristled from behind the shack’s partly open door.

  Stockburn’s Colt spoke two more times, flames lapping from the barrel.

  As the thundering reports chased each other’s echoes skyward, both bullets punched through the crude plank-board door. A man’s muffled wail sounded from behind the door. There was a thump as the would-be shooter’s rifle struck the shack’s wooden floor. Then the door lurched open as the rifleman fell forward onto his face. He lay half in and half out of the shack, the bullet-scarred door propped open by his right shoulder.

  Another gun thundered. This one had been triggered from inside the shack.

  A man yowled.

  A body flew out the large window to the right of the open door. The flying man wailed again as glass rained around him. His two long, black braids whipping around him like miniature wings, he landed with a grunt and a loud thud in the dirt fronting the shack. The double-barreled shotgun he’d been holding clattered onto the ground beside him. He writhed and groaned for a moment, gave another grunt, then relaxed with a final sigh.

  Silence save for Smoke’s uneasy whickering.

  Boots thumped inside the shack.

  The sounds grew louder until a comely female figure clad in men’s rough trail garb appeared in the half-open doorway. “Damn!” she trilled, looking at the glass spilled around the dead man with the braids. “I just replaced that window last week!”

  She turned her Indian-dark face with a patch over one eye toward Stockburn. Her good eye flashed wickedly. “Look what you made me do, Wolf!”

  “I do apologize, Comanche.” Stockburn scowled at the broken-out window. “A right fine window, too. Leastways, it was. Did you ship that all the way out here from Bismarck?”

  “Where else?” asked the pretty half-breed Comanche in her late thirties, early forties—a lady didn’t go around announcing her age—as she toed the broken glass with one of her high-topped, beaded moccasins. “Look at that!”

  “I know, I know,” Stockburn said. “Every time I ride out here—”

  “You end up costing me money.”

  “Well”—Wolf shrugged, casting the woman a disarming grin—“I do appreciate you coring Santana for me. If he’d drilled me through that window it would have cost you twice.”

  The pretty, curvaceous woman scowled. “How so?”

  Stockburn shrugged again. “This way you just have to pay for the window. If Santana had shot me, you’d have had to pay to have me buried. Or at least wear out a good horse riding to Thornton’s Ford to send a telegram to my boss in Kansas City, have him send a wagon for me. Oh, the time and effort involved! This way, you can just drag Santana and his pards—I’m assuming those two are Mortimer Frieze and Spike Caine—off to the nearest ravine.”

  Comanche—born Denomi though she hadn’t answered to anything but Comanche since she’d left her white foster parents in Texas many years ago—crossed her arms on her well-filled blouse and tapped a boot toe.

  “Comanche!” Stockburn intoned. “You wouldn’t just drag me off to the nearest ravine, would you?”

  “Let’s just say you’re fortunate I don’t have to make that decision.” She paused, glaring at him with her one good, coal-black eye, then added for effect, “Yet.”

  A tittering rose west of the main shack. Comanche turned toward the sound of the commotion then drew her mouth corners down as she said, “I see your admirers have gathered.”

  “I wonder what woke them,” Stockburn said ironically, having turned to the three brightly and scantily clad doxies standing on the stoop of the secondary shack sitting about fifty feet to the west of the main one, and back off the yard. It was sheathed in brush and shaded by cottonwoods. Between two cottonwoods hung a clothesline drooping with the weight of ladies’ delicate, brightly colored clothes. The sporting girls were milling and smoking, casting their own coquettish gazes toward the tall, handsome man with high-tapering cheeks and deep western tan.

  In the bright sunlight reflecting off their skimpy clothes, and jet-black, copper-red, and gold-blond hair, respectively, they resembled brightly colored birds in their soft pinks, greens, purples, and powder blues. One in particular—the green-eyed blonde—held Stockburn’s gaze, broadened her smile, and gave her pink parasol an extra twirl.

  “What . . . or who?” Comanche gave a husky chuckle. “They hear enough gunfire to be deaf to it by now. They heard the Wolf of the Rails was on his way here on his smoky-gray horse, and they’ve been waiting to feast their eyes on the manly likes of Wells Fargo and Company’s senior detective for their Railroad Division.”

  Stockburn started to blush, a rarity for him, then frowned. “How’d they know?” He glanced at the two dead men again. “In fact, come to think of it—how’d Santana know I was headed this way?”

  “One of their fellow riders of the long coulees saw you in Sioux Lance and rode out here to alert him and the others. A smelly devil named Bertram.”

  “Ah, Bertram. The wheelwright.”

  “That’s the one.”

  Comanche had turned to stare at Miguel Santana, the big, thickly built man with two black braids, lying in the glass to her right. The one nearest Comanche was Mortimer Frieze. The first man Stockburn had shot over by the barn was Spike Caine. Or had been. All three were had-beens now.

&
nbsp; This bunch, which included the older Hollis “Dad” Drago, had robbed a stagecoach near Pierre three days ago. Stockburn had heard about the robbery when he’d pulled into Fargo on the Northern Pacific, which he’d taken from his company’s Northern District office in St. Paul, Minnesota. He’d had no idea he’d find the stage robbers here, but he wasn’t surprised. When the outlaw gang made up of Santana, Frieze, Caine, and Dad Drago plied their nasty trade, they usually holed up somewhere in the belly of this vast territory, which was still mostly wild despite the coming of the iron rails and telegraph cables and rumors of imminent statehood.

  Comanche’s ranch, as it was called, though it hadn’t been a working ranch in years but a general store, saloon, and brothel, was often a prime hideout for such desperadoes as Santana’s lowly bunch.

  “They were alerted by the outlaw telegraph, eh?” Stockburn turned to the doxies still fluttering on the stoop of the second shack. He grinned and pinched his hat brim. “Ladies . . .”

  They batted their eyelids and flounced.

  “Get your eyes off those girls, you rake,” Comanche chided the detective good-naturedly. “The oldest is young enough to be your daughter. I, on the other hand . . .”

  “Yes, you,” Stockburn said, feasting his eyes again.

  Comanche chuckled. He thought she might have even blushed though, like himself, he’d never known the half-breed beauty to blush.

  She jerked her chin toward the shack. “Get in here. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “You know you’ve never had to ask me twice to drink with you, Comanche.” Stockburn returned the Colt Peacemaker to the black leather holster on his left hip. Its twin resided on his right hip. He closed his long black cutaway coat and strode forward, addressing his horse over his shoulder. “Stay, Smoke. I’ll give you some oats after you’ve had your fill from the water bucket.”