Remington 1894

by William W. Johnstone

  Those boys were not snakes in the grass.

  The Sharps roared. Another Confederate soldier died.

  About halfway down the hill, the two Rebs charging toward McMasters turned around and fled.

  Southerners were not the only men who could scream out a Rebel yell. After years of war, some Union boys could do a damned fine imitation. The Michigan boys and platoons from Ohio and Wisconsin followed, waving their colors. Sabers glistened in the morning light.

  And the Rebs retreated.

  CHAPTER 33

  The memories continued in spite of the circumstances.

  * * *

  They gave Private John McMasters the Medal of Honor for that skirmish.

  “He killed a hundred men,” the general bragged.

  “Actually,” Colonel Berdan said, “it had been fifteen. But from what a distance!”

  And they said he had turned the battle—a skirmish, actually, McMasters thought—and saved the day for the entire Corps, if not the entire United States. They had driven off the Rebs, and Grant could march on toward Richmond.

  And all John McMasters thought was that those who really deserved that medal the general had pinned onto his tunic were those lying on that field, hundreds of yards away from a pecan tree. Those who had died. Those who had faced death practically every single day of the war. Those who had not been blessed with a keen eye, a calm nerve, and the ability to shoot and kill with a big Sharps rifle that had a brass telescopic sight.

  * * *

  Shaking off the memory, McMasters stepped up, looked off at the rocks where the man had fallen, and dropped the Burgess in the dirt. He stared at the two dead men before him, the young punk who had ridden with the Butcher Gang, and the one-eyed Reb who had died in the cactus.

  I killed because I had to kill, he told himself. I killed to save those lives. And now I kill because I must kill. He picked up the Burgess, moved back into the entrance in the rocks, picked up the Remington, and stepped back away from the twin rocks.

  “It’s over!” he yelled then heard his echoes. He saw the figures of Bloody Zeke The Younger and Marcus Patton climbing out of a ditch, bringing their horses behind them, and swinging into the saddle. He walked back, leaving the dead in the desert, and headed toward Mary Lovelace and his own horse.

  She swung into her saddle and loped up the hill. He watched her ride past him, and stop, turning as the mustang carried her beyond the twin rocks.

  “Where’s she off to?” yelled Marcus Patton as he and Bloody Zeke The Younger rode up.

  McMasters swore and gestured with the shotgun. “Catch up to Carter. Keep after Butcher. We’ll be along directly.”

  Zeke kicked his horse into a trot, and Marcus Patton, shaking his head, followed. Once they cleared the incline, they spurred their mounts into gallops. McMasters watched them, but only for a minute. Then he took the reins to his horse and walked back to the bloody scene.

  The redhead had carelessly ground-reined the mustang. McMasters cursed and grabbed the reins of her horse, which was backing away, snorting, about to run off from the blood and gore from the two dead men lying on the ground. He did not see Mary Lovelace anywhere, but heard the cabin door open.

  “Hey,” he shouted. When no response came, he tried again. “Mary?”

  Silence. “Damn it,” he said to himself, and pulled his chestnut and Mary’s mustang behind the towering rocks. He tied them to a brush tight and short, drew the Remington from the scabbard and slid the Burgess into the empty scabbard on Mary’s saddle. He moved back up the hill, around the rocks, and headed for the opening in the rocks. He did not look at the corpses on the ground.

  He stopped when he saw her, suddenly feeling awkward, as if he had stepped into some private matter, seen something he was not supposed to see. She just stood, leaning against the door frame, looking inside at the Spartan quarters of the hideout.

  The cabin smelled of dust, as it had been those years before. She saw the bottle of forty-rod whiskey, half empty, on the floor. She did not look through the porthole, did not turn to see McMasters waiting for her, annoyed, impatient, but silent. Her eyes kept returning to the bed.

  She had been on the westbound stagecoach bound for Florence when the Butcher Gang had held up the stage about twelve miles east of her destination. Twelve miles. Only twelve measly miles. How her life might have turned out. She could have been in Florence, teaching at the subscription school, and not just making her students learn by memorizing the Readers and such. She thought she could actually teach. Make them think for themselves.

  That had been the plan, anyway. Suddenly, she was lost in the memory.

  * * *

  She was going to teach school, save up what money she could, and then marry Chandler Taylor. He had left Monroe, Michigan, two years earlier but kept writing her. He had been a clerk but dreamed of becoming a farmer. It struck her odd that a clerk from Michigan would go to the Arizona desert to farm. But he had explained to her that a canal had been built from the Gila River, so farming would become profitable in Florence and Pinal County.

  The stagecoach was suddenly surrounded by outlaws. They killed the messenger and wounded the driver. They ripped off an elderly woman’s broach and stole the wallet, watch, and pocket pistol of the lone male passenger. The thin bandit with the wheat sack over his face took her billfold and her watch. He dropped them in the flour sack, and stepped back, staring at her. She looked down.

  “What do you think?” the thin one asked.

  “Take her,” the big man on the dun horse said.

  “Now just a danged minute—”

  A rifle blast splintered the brake lever and silenced the driver.

  And they took Mary Elizabeth Carmen. To the hut hidden in the Superstition Mountains.

  * * *

  Lost in the memory, she could hear their laughs. She stared at the bed.

  * * *

  She was there two weeks.

  “The longest,” Ben Butcher told her, “my brother has ever stayed put in this Superstition camp.”

  Then Chandler Taylor drifted in. He was no farmer. He had not been farming all those years. Not from the cut of his clothes, not from the Schofield revolver on his hip. Not from his slick, smooth hands.

  He smiled when he saw her, but she did not smile. She wanted to die.

  “How much?” Taylor asked Moses Butcher. “For the redhead?”

  “You want her... after . . . ?” Young Ben Butcher laughed.

  She hung her head in shame, and cried again.

  “A hundred dollars,” Moses Butcher said.

  “We could play cards for her,” Chandler Taylor suggested.

  “I know how you play cards,” Moses Butcher said. “A hundred dollars.”

  “She’s not worth a hundred,” Taylor said. “Not anymore.”

  For a brief moment, she thought he had ridden to her rescue. To buy her freedom, the way she had read—back home in the safety of the two-story home she shared with her parents and younger siblings—about Texas men buying white captives taken by savage Indians. Her beau had come to buy her freedom from savage white men.

  But, no, Moses Butcher and Chandler Taylor knew each other. They were . . . she turned and gagged . . . bartering. Like they were trading horses or selling a cow. She wanted to die. But she hadn’t died. She hadn’t killed herself. She had let Chandler Taylor buy her from Moses Butcher for forty-two dollars, and that came over Ben Butcher’s protests that she could not leave, not alive. That had always been the rule.

  “She won’t remember nothing,” Moses Butcher said. “Hell, Chandler here’ll kill her when he tires of her.”

  And maybe he would have. Often, she prayed that he would. She wished to God Almighty that Moses Butcher had listened to his kid brother, and that one of them had put a bullet in the back of her head. That’s what Ben said they did, after the fun wasn’t fun anymore.

  Instead, Chandler Taylor took her to Casa Grande, checked into a hotel, let her bathe and then .
. . and then—

  * * *

  She shook her head, found herself shivering, and made herself stop the memories, yet she continued to stare at the room.

  He’d taught her—forced her to learn—how to help him win at cards. He wasn’t a good card player, and when the cards did not fall, he was an even worse cheat. But when he had a woman who looked like Mary Elizabeth Carmen to distract the gamblers at the table with him, he played a lot better poker.

  Tucson . . . Tombstone . . . Phoenix . . . Wickenburg. . . Prescott . . . Fort Verde . . . Williams . . . until his luck finally ran out so much that even Mary could not help him. They had taken the last name Lovelace by then, and he said they were married, although no minister had blessed them while it felt like everyone had kissed the bride, especially when the cards did not fall his way. In Flagstaff, his luck had gone so cold, he’d made her help him hold up a stage.

  More memories assailed her.

  All those horrors, all that shame, from the Superstition Mountains to what had happened in Flagstaff. By then, she knew what he had done. Maybe he wasn’t to blame. Hell, how could she blame the man for being a coward?

  * * *

  She knew.

  In one of the rare drunken benders in which he did not hit her, he cried. “I didn’t know what would happen. I mentioned to Moses Butcher and his kid brother over a poker game that my fiancé was coming to Florence. I didn’t know they robbed the stagecoach and took you until the driver limped the Concord wagon into town with the news. I came after you, though. You have to know that.”

  As the posse closed in, Taylor’s horse went lame. He hurried to her, lifted her from the saddle, and threw her into the rocks where she struck her head.

  She knew something else about the man who called himself Taylor Lovelace. He had wanted Butcher to take her from that stage, to rape her, to shame her, to reduce her to some puppet that the cheating gambler and coward could use for his own personal gain. How had she not been able to see through his mask back in Monroe, Michigan, and in all those letters of lies he had written her?

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” Taylor Lovelace cried as he climbed onto her horse. “I’m sorry. They might go easy on you, baby. They won’t on me. I’m sorry.”

  Before he could spur her horse, she told him, “I’m sorry, too.”

  He turned to see her holding the Schofield .45 . . . the last thing Taylor Lovelace ever saw.

  * * *

  Mary Lovelace straightened, turned away from the bed, and looked directly at John McMasters.

  “Do you believe in God?”

  The tough man with the sad eyes looked up. His Adam’s apple bobbed.

  “I did,” he finally answered. “Maybe I still do.”

  “Fate?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you and me and Bloody Zeke . . . and Moses Butcher.”

  “I’m not good at thinking anymore, Mary Lovelace.”

  “It’s Carmen. Mary Elizabeth Carmen. At least, that’s who I used to be. Who I wish I could be. But she’s dead. So Mary Lovelace will do.”

  His head tilted, and he drew in a deep breath. He had no clue what she was talking about.

  “We best get going. Or you can stay. Wait here. Posse’ll be along directly.”

  She let out a humorless laugh. “I’m not waiting. I’m going with you.”

  He turned, but she stopped him. “You got a match?”

  As he came back toward her, she bent and picked up the whiskey bottle and splashed most of it on the blanket on the awful bed. The rest she tossed into the ceiling of dry brush and what she hoped would prove to be tinder.

  “This is adobe,” he told her. “It won’t burn.”

  “Enough of it will.” She took the match he held out in his hard fingers, struck its tip against the door, and the flame erupted. Raising it toward the ceiling, she watched the blaze erupt, and ducked down, astonished by the intensity. The match still burned, and she flipped it onto the bedding. The fierce whoosh drove her back, into the arms of John McMasters, who dropped his shotgun and pulled her back.

  Her face felt flushed from the blaze.

  He stopped, and she spun around, close to him. Too close. Their eyes met, and she could smell him. He could smell her. She saw something different in those eyes, then, not the hardness, the coldness, the ruthlessness that matched her own hatred. Somewhere beneath all that, there was human decency. Like she had once thought might be locked down somewhere, out of reach, in her own soul.

  He released her, and she backed away from him, turned, picked up the twelve-gauge and held it out for him. He took it, but he did not look away from her. Maybe John McMasters had seen the same thing in her eyes that she had found in his.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  She followed.

  Behind them, black smoke and orange flames roared as the wind moaned through the open doorway and the porthole. Or was it the wind? It could have been, Mary thought, the souls of all those tortured in that awful place. But no more. No one else would have to endure what the late Mary Elizabeth Carmen, God rest her soul, had gone through in a nightmare that had begun two years, four months, and seven days ago.

  They put their horses into a trot, riding side by side.

  “You want to talk about it?” McMasters asked.

  Mary Lovelace grinned to herself. She wondered how much strength that had taken the old man to ask.

  “Do you?” she called out over the clopping of hooves.

  He did not need to answer.

  They rode on in silence. They did not look back at the belching black smoke.

  That would, Mary figured, at least draw the attention of any of those idiot townsmen who came after them, which would occupy the posse long enough. Maybe by the time the good citizens of Goldfield resumed their chase, it would all be over. Moses Butcher could not be that far ahead of them. And the big black scout, Alamo Carter, would be following them.

  She hoped she would find her peace—or as much of it as she could hope for—within the next few hours.

  * * *

  When the desert flattened, they pushed their horses into a lope. The mountains were soon behind them, and they slowed down, saving their horses. The trail was easy enough to follow.

  She brought up her canteen, drank, and returned it to the horn. After wiping her lips with her shirtsleeve, and still looking across the desert in front of her, she asked, “Tonight?” One word was all she needed.

  John McMasters knew what she meant.

  “Tomorrow. Unless they ride through the night. We’ll—” He stopped in midsentence and raised the shotgun slightly.

  She saw them, as well. Two men on foot, holding their horses. One of them waved his hands in a signal, telling them to slow down, keep their horses quiet, and walk.

  Even though he was a good two hundred yards away, that man was easy enough to recognize. Bloody Zeke The Younger still wore the prison duds he had been issued at Yuma Territorial Prison.

  McMasters reined up, easily dismounted, and waited on Mary Lovelace to do the same. They covered half the distance together before he stopped and handed his reins to her.

  “Wait here”

  He took off at a jog toward Bloody Zeke The Younger, who was crouching as he sprinted to meet him. They met amid catclaw and the bleached, scattered bones of a coyote.

  “We got us a bit of a problem,” Bloody Zeke said, motioning to a wash that dropped off another hundred yards past where the gambler, holding his and Bloody Zeke’s horses, waited.

  McMasters waited.

  “It’s the darky.”

  McMasters frowned. “Butcher?”

  “No. Six or seven white men. Miners. Likely fools out chasing after the Dutchman’s mine. Southerners. Too bad Logan got himself kilt. At least he could understand their damned language.”

  McMasters cursed.

  “Wait here with the girl.” He moved ahead, straightening as he walked, and shifted the shotgun to his
other hand. When he reached the gambler, Marcus Patton opened his mouth but quickly closed it. Something told him that John McMasters was not in a talkative mood . . . as if he ever felt like having a conversation. He moved on, slowing down until he could hear the laughter. He dropped to his belly and crawled to the edge of the wash.

  He lifted his head and looked at the scene ten feet below. He looked for only five seconds then he rose and brought the shotgun to his shoulder.

  CHAPTER 34

  Six men in ragged clothes and filthy beards had somehow stopped Alamo Carter. His horse lay dead about forty yards down the wash. He must have been stunned from the fall after they had shot the horse out from under him. That’s the only way they could have stripped him naked and lashed him to the arms of a saguaro. They had whipped him with a bullwhip, and one of them held a massive bowie knife in his right hand, taunting the black man with it, laughing as another of those worthless scum threw water in Alamo Carter’s face to keep him conscious.

  “Bastards!” McMasters fired the shotgun’s first barrel, sending buckshot slamming into two men close together—but not the two nearest Alamo Carter. McMasters turned, triggered the second barrel, and leaped down the embankment, landing before the third of the fiends fell crashing against the picketed horses and mules, which freed themselves from the tethers and thundered off to the southeast.

  McMasters pitched the smoking empty shotgun to the ground and clawed for his .45.

  He saw the man with the knife drop his bowie and paw for a belted pistol. He saw the man with the gourd of water drop it and rip his shirt as he pulled the revolver he had stolen from Alamo Carter. Drawing the. 45 from his holster, McMasters thumbed back the hammer. He knew he could not kill the remaining three . . . but he would do his damnedest to keep Alamo Carter alive as long as possible.

  Blood spurted from the forehead of the man who had been wielding the knife, and he spun around and dropped behind the cactus. The other one stumbled back, turning his attention and his aim away from McMasters and looking up. He went down with a bullet in his throat and began rolling over and over, clutching at the blood that pulsated from the ghastly wound. But not for long. Within seconds, he lay facedown in the lake of blood that quickly soaked into the sand.