Sudden Country

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I didn’t catch a wink that night for wondering if that breed was really dead or just foxing,” Ben Wedlock said. That he had, without preamble, taken up his recollection of the night before where he had left off, made me jump. The sound of a human voice in that funereal treescape was as of a great bell rung in a deserted cathedral. “I snapped his neck, see, and there was no question but that the thing was done, and proper. But that don’t cut water when you’re alone with the sun gone and the stink of some squaw’s bastard still up your nose. I bet I got up a hundred times to walk over and see was he still stretched out there, square on his back but looking at the ground, way his head was twisted.

  “His pards come for me before dawn. I was in tall corn that summer from selling the freight business and I reckon them road agents seen me flashing the roll in town and followed me. Well, I gutted the first with my Green River knife and he was still twisting on the end of it when I shuck loose and throwed him at two more and tipped them over like lawn pins. I taken a ball in the meat of one arm then. It stung, so I laughed.”

  “You laughed?”

  He nodded. “Stood there under the moon with blood shining on that knife and my own blood dripping off my fingers, laughing and bellering out ‘I’m a Good Old Rebel,’ all the verses I knowed plus a few more I made up and ain’t for repeating here.”

  “What then?” said I, for he had paused, and I was caught up in the tale despite myself. Later I would represent that I was playing the wide-eyed youth in his thrall, as I had been charged. Thus was I my own dupe.

  “Them highwaymen are all yellow. They expect folks they meet to be just as yellow as them. When they seen me standing there caterwauling square into Old Boneface like Ned’s Crazy Uncle, it fair caught them up. Six on one it was, but here’s the one winding himself up to take some down with him–and at night, yet, when scarecrows walk and Scratch brings in the harvest. Bandits is superstitious as niggers. Well, they fell back. I waited a little and then I got Old Deuteronomy out of the ravine where I had him tied and lit out before they changed their minds again. Barber dug the ball out of my arm and patched me up in Colorado Springs.”

  “You said Deuteronomy was killed at Second Manassas,” I said, before I could catch myself.

  “So I did, and so he was. I meant Nicodemus. Names and such all run together when you get to be my age.”

  I was relieved not to have unsettled him, for it was my responsibility not to let on that I knew him for a prevaricating scoundrel. And yet I was depressed by his slip, which had brought home to me the conviction that nothing he said was to be credited. Death Song indeed! He was as great an inventor as Judge Blod, who at least was not a bandit and murderer masquerading as a colorful old frontiersman. It occurred to me then that in the space of a few weeks I had fashioned rather more heroes than fell to the common lot of youth, only to see them crumble. I wished heartily that I had never heard of either Jed Knickerbocker or his half-dime dreadfuls.

  “You’re a quiet one today, Davy.” Wedlock’s eye was on Mr. Knox’s wagon ahead. “I reckon old Ben spooked the tongue out of you last night.”

  “No,” I said; and before he could fashion another, more dangerous explanation for my silence: “I was thinking about that Sioux policeman, Corporal Panther. Do you think he did what he said he would?”

  “I didn’t take him for a liar. He’s bones by now, or soon will be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A bird told me.” He pointed. High in the east, a great black vulture traced circles in the sky.

  “It could be anything,” I said. “A dead elk.”

  “Or a Panther.”

  I changed the subject. The vision of that splendid horseman lying stiff and cold and blind did not please me. “You said you prospected these hills once. Did you ever find gold?”

  “Found some, not enough. Worked for it, too. Custer told the newspapers his horses was kicking up nuggets all over, but it weren’t so. There was money to be made, but I was too lazy. Also I liked my scalp on top of my head and not swinging from some lodgepole.”

  “You don’t want to be rich?”

  “I got a business, a good horse even if he ain’t Old Deuteronomy, and a friend or two amongst that flea-bit crowd back of us. How rich can you get?”

  I believed then what Wedlock had told Deacon Hecate about himself and the church. No one who acknowledged the existence of God could say the things he said and not be constantly searching the heavens for signs of lightning.

  A mule brayed at the rear of our procession, and for an instant I thought it was lightning. Someone shouted. I was off the wagon before Wedlock could set the brake. Ahead of us, Mr. Knox was reining in his team, and Judge Blod was just struggling down from his own seat behind the chuck wagon when I passed him running. I had an idea what I’d find. There was only one mule in our party.

  A gang of riders made up mostly of Amarillo recruits had gathered behind the Judge’s wagon. Mike McPhee had hold of Elder Sampson’s big mule by the bit and was maneuvering his horse closer to avoid being torn out of his own saddle by the mule’s plungings. The Elder lay on his face in the dirt. Long before I reached him I knew he was lost, for the back of his head had been laid open like an orange. I remember searching for a place to vomit, and finding it. I had never seen a man’s brains before.

  “What happened?” Deacon Hecate’s voice was pure thunder. He towered tall and terrible astride his bony mare. His hat was off and his white hair whipped about in the wind.

  “Cinch busted,” Blackwater, who had dismounted, approached the Deacon carrying Elder Sampson’s saddle. “I seen him fall. Reckon he hit his head on that rock.”

  The Deacon directed his predatory glare from the frayed end of the dangling cinch to the piece of shale that Blackwater had indicated on the ground near the body. “Indeed. And how came he to end up on his face?” He drew the yellow-handled pistol from under his coat and cocked it.

  A very long silence followed. I stood crouched over my own bile in a patch of seedling pines beside the trail–disgraced, unarmed, and unable to come to his aid. Mr. Knox and Judge Blod had reached the scene on foot, hands inside their own coats, but judging by those concealed among the clothing of the others present, the Deacon had been correct in assuming that not everyone in the party had been disarmed at the outset. Even the wind died away, as if the Black Hills themselves were holding their breath.

  It was Ben Wedlock, standing apart from the group with his thumbs in his belt, who broke the tension. “Blackwater, didn’t your mother ever tell you a man’s not to be moved until you know what ails him?”

  The tall man with the feather in his hatband took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the cold end. “Well, you’re right, Ben. I turned him over before I knew what I was about.”

  “Impatient as ever, ain’t it? Can’t wait to start a thing before its time. What’s your head for if not to keep your hat off your shoulders? I’m damned–” He seemed to realized suddenly that we were all watching him. Looking down at the body, he removed his hat. “Well, he’s deader’n Prince Albert anyway. I don’t reckon you damaged his case.”

  “Knox, inspect that cinch.” Graven as was his expression, the Deacon swayed with the effort to check his fury.

  Mr. Knox accepted the saddle from Blackwater and did as directed. “It has worn through and broken,” he reported.

  “We’d best bury him,” said Wedlock, tugging on his hat. “They bloat up quick in this heat.”

  Hecate swayed. Finally he took his pistol off cock.

  “You and you. Shovels.” He pointed at Blackwater and McPhee, who had succeeded at last in calming the mule. The Irishman dismounted and the two went forward to Mr. Knox’s wagon. “Back away, the rest of you. This is not a wolves’ frenzy.”

  They buried Elder Sampson at the base of a hill, mounding the grave high and covering it with rocks to prevent coyotes from scratching up the remains, and fixed a cross made of pine boughs at its head. Deacon Hecate stoo
d at the foot of the grave, his great white head bare and bowed.

  “Seven sons and three daughters had Job,” he said, and in his tone there was little of his customary thunder. “Friends and prosperity were his. But God was unsatisfied. To prove Job’s loyalty, God permitted Satan to afflict him with boils, to impoverish him utterly, to slay his seven sons and three daughters. Later, as reward for Job’s faith, God blessed his end more than his beginning. He gave him fourteen thousand sheep, and six thousand camels, and a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand she-asses. And Job had seven new sons and three new daughters.”

  For a long time he was silent. I thought the service had ended. Then he raised his long arms to the heavens; his head fell back, and on his face was an anguish I had never seen before. Indeed, I have not seen it anywhere since, although forty years have passed. His voice rose.

  “But where, O God, are the seven sons and three daughters with whom Job started? What manner of heavenly grace can repay a life? What value loss, that it can be wiped away as with a damp cloth? I have not Job’s patience, nor his great wisdom. I am sorely tried. Sorely tried. And I am not equal to the trial.

  “Smite the evil that has claimed Thy son Schechaniah Sampson!” he shrieked. Every head came up. “Smite it low, that it shall not rise! Smite it with all Thy great might, or by the chaos that made Thee, Thy servant Philo shall seize that vengeance which is Thine, and though he crackle in Hell until Judgment, shall smite the evil himself if it means a cabal with Satan!”

  This blasphemy was not lost upon even the group’s most godless, for every man stood as if stricken throughout the Lord’s Prayer that incongruously followed, and those who had not yet forgotten the pious lessons of childhood crossed themselves. Long seconds after the Deacon had barked “Amen” and walked away to mount his mare, no one stirred.

  “A crisis of faith,” pronounced Judge Blod in a loud whisper. “I had not thought the two that close.”

  Mr. Knox said, “They weren’t.”

  “Did the cinch really wear through?” I asked.

  “There are ways to help it along, but the break appeared genuine. I doubt strongly that the rock was placed as conveniently as Blackwater claimed. Likely he saw his opportunity and acted, even if it meant upsetting Wedlock’s timetable. Our saloonkeeper friend very nearly spilled the beans in his rage.”

  “What is our support?” asked the Judge.

  “There in the Cheyenne party. I am uncertain of the fourth, and we know young Tom is lost.”

  “Not good.”

  “There is a bare possibility that today’s incident will force Wedlock to begin early. However, I think he will wait until our quarry is assured. He’s waited too many years to gamble upon our destroying all record of the gold’s location on the very eve of victory.”

  “What is our plan?” I inquired, before the Judge could beat me to it.

  Mr. Knox was grim. “There is no question but that the enemy has fired the first shot. It falls to us to fire the second. We move tonight.”

  Chapter 15

  INDIANS!

  Son, it’s time.” There is a quarter hour, just before the first steel shaft parts the sky to the east, when the night loses its velvet gloss and becomes as flat and black as coke. It was in that quarter hour that Mr. Knox’s words, whispered so close to my ear his lips almost touched it, brought me awake.

  I was surprised to learn that I had lost consciousness at all with our plot about to unfold and its chief target lying only a yard away; but the sleep I had missed the previous night had caught up I had left on my boots, and thanks to that ancient bed of pine needles managed to roll out and make away in Mr. Knox’s footsteps without a sound.

  Sleep now was as remote as Cathay, there in the predawn Dakota chill with the birds mute in the trees and crickets stitching deep in the forest, as we crept past motionless blanketed figures–enemies all–toward our rendezvous. For the second time since we had entered these hills I felt poised on the edge of something. Was it just weeks ago that I had sat at my little desk, fretting over the rainfall in Argentina?

  A crowd awaited us behind the wagon where the weapons were kept. At first I thought, with a tightening in my stomach, that the would-be mutineers had anticipated us, but then in the smoky starlight I recognized Judge Blod’s rotundity and Deacon Hecate’s angular height among three of the men whom the Deacon had drafted in Cheyenne. One, Will Asper, was a slim sandy youth, not ten years my senior and a contemporary of the treacherous Tom; the others, older, were an ox-shouldered Swede named Dahlgren–corrupted to Dolly by his peers–and a swarthy man, clean-shaven and balding in front, who was nearly Ben Wedlock’s age and whose surname was Aintchell, although he was sometimes called H. L., which as pronounced by the Deacon sounded like “Angel.” He seldom spoke and his eyes held a curious deadness I found unsettling. I understood that he had been a guard in the federal penitentiary at Yuma, Arizona, until a wave of humanitarian sentiment had forced officials there to replace its more brutal personnel. This was our army.

  The Deacon issued pistols. I inspected the Navy Colt’s load and thrust it inside my belt, feeling taller and older. Will Asper spun his balanced Russian like the gunmen Judge Blod wrote about, and Dolly wrapped a huge hand around a converted Army Colt’s of Civil War vintage that obscured all but the end of its barrel. Aintchell dropped a short ugly bulldog revolver into his pocket after an indifferent glance and unfolded a fat jackknife to expose a blade with a wicked blue edge. He tested the point against the ball of one thumb. A drop of blood appeared. He licked it off.

  “No unnecessary slaughter.” The Deacon’s low command seemed to be directed at Aintchell exclusively. “We shall want something to hang.”

  “Back in civilization,” clarified Mr. Knox; “following a trial.”

  “Civilization is a world and a heaven away. Tonight we are fighting for our lives.”

  “You’re fighting for your lives,” Will Asper said. “What’s our cut?”

  “Equal parts of whatever we find. Which will amount to equal parts of nothing if we do not win tonight.” Mr. Knox was emphatic.

  Judge Blod said, “This is not a fit assignment for men of education and breeding. We should send Master Grayle for help.”

  Thus were the Judge’s true colors hoisted at last. Mr. Knox ignored them, twirling the cylinder of his pocket Lightning.

  “Even if he made it, he would return to find us all murdered. You all know the plan. Deacon, you and the others will throw down on the Amarillans and our two recalcitrants from Cheyenne. David, the horses are your responsibility. If anyone makes for them, run them off. They won’t wander far, and we cannot afford to let any of Wedlock’s men ride back for reinforcements. Wedlock is mine.”

  “I claim Wedlock,” said the Deacon.

  “We shall go together. That puts you in charge of the others, Judge. Remember, no shooting unless they produce a weapon.”

  “Or knifing.” This time there was no question that the Deacon was addressing Aintchell, who shrugged as he wiped his blade rhythmically on his shirt.

  Mr. Knox said, “You have five minutes to reach your stations. When I fire my pistol, that will be the signal to act.”

  “You best fire it now, schoolteacher.”

  None of us had observed Mike McPhee gliding through the shadows, and now he stood ten paces away with his back to the camp and the first gray streaks of dawn shining on his drawn pistol, a small instrument of the pocket variety like Mr. Knox’s, but with a larger bore. His loud brogue rang in the morning stillness.

  “If you ain’t fixing to fire it,” he said, “maybe you best toss it back with the rest. Now.” He cocked his weapon for emphasis.

  Mr. Knox let out his breath, half turned, and tossed his pistol into the wagon with a clatter.

  “Unburden yourselves, the rest of you. That goes for the brat.”

  Judge Blod was the first to obey. Deacon Hecate opened his stern mouth as if to deliver an oration from Scripture, then seemed to t
hink better of it and added his yellow-handled pistol to the pile in the wagon. This prompted Will Asper and Dolly to relinquish their arms. I surrendered the Navy. Aintchell alone hesitated. In the growing light, McPhee’s face grew dangerous. “You too, Fisheye. That short piece in your pocket.”

  Aintchell drew out the bulldog revolver carefully and flipped it with a nonchalant movement into the wagon.

  “Try to get the better of Bloody Bill’s men, is it? You’ll learn–”

  Turning back, Aintchell made a little sidearm gesture as if sweeping open a door. The Irishman’s reactions were fast. He fired and Aintchell doubled over. But not before McPhee reeled back with the black handle of the jackknife standing out like a stud from the center of his chest. Correcting himself automatically, he lurched forward a step, then stumbled back two and sat down hard on the ground, losing his grip on the pistol. His face was in shadow now and I could not imagine its expression. After a moment he heeled over.

  By this time Aintchell was in convulsions on the ground, both hands clutching his belly. A hideous stench of blood and excrement and spent powder fouled the morning air.

  There was, however, no time to see to him. “Quickly, now!” barked Mr. Knox, reaching back inside the wagon. With startled obscenities the camp was coming alive around us. I moved to join him. Irrationally, I groped for my own weapon in the darkness, ignoring all others. The Deacon shoved me aside to capture the instrument most handy, after which there was a scramble.

  “On the ridge!”

  The Judge’s baritone was nearly as loud as McPhee’s shot. In my excitement I applauded him, imagining that his wits had overcome his native cowardice and that he had sung out to distract the raiders while we established our position. A sudden stillness among my fellow defenders killed that thought. The entire camp, in fact, had fallen silent except for the mortal groans of the wounded Aintchell at our feet. I withdrew my hands from the arsenal and followed the others’ gaze to the high ground in the east, where the sun was rising behind a line of mounted men crowned with feathers and painted barbarically from hairlines to moccasins.