by Bill Brooks
Henry felt grouchy at having to miss his lunch and go in search of the young villain. It was bad enough a man had to miss his lunch, but to have to go tromping around in a blizzard searching for desperadoes made it all feel that much more onerous.
As it turned out, Henry didn’t have to search long.
He came upon the young man in an alley not ten minutes later. The alley ran between two brick buildings that muffled the sound of the shot. The muffle of the shooting was further abated by the howling wind of the snowstorm and the fact that hardly anyone was out on the streets at that hour in such bad conditions, or else someone might have come to Henry’s aide.
Henry felt horse-kicked. The bullet flung him back onto a heap of trash and he lay there for several moments, trying to get the weight off his chest. Only there wasn’t any weight to get off.
So this is what it is like to get shot bad.
In all his years as a lawman, he’d never taken a bullet, but had delivered several—most of which were fatal.
His blood flowed warm and thick between his fingers when he placed his hand over his chest to try and stopper the leak. The snow fell onto him and melted in the blood.
The young dark stranger stood there looking down at him. He sure enough was Indian, Henry could see that plainly. Just a boy.
“I…I…” Henry wasn’t sure which words he wanted to say, but he felt the need to say something. The dark face leaned closer. Henry Egg could see snowflakes on the eyelashes of his assassin.
“You should have left it alone,” Bob said. “You white people just can’t leave anything alone…”
Henry was thinking about his wife, Cora, back at the house waiting lunch for him, wondering why he was so late and probably getting upset that he was, not knowing Henry was never going to have lunch with her again.
Henry looked down at his fingers. The blood was freezing on them. The weight on his chest heavier now.
“You should have just left it alone,” Bob said.
Henry didn’t know what the boy was talking about.
Snow fell into his eyes, then melted and it felt like tears.
Henry gasped, the way a fish out of water would do. Bob looked away and when he looked back again Henry’s eyes were just staring up at the snow that fell into them, his gasping stopped.
Bob searched through the dead man’s pockets and found a set of keys. Then he took Henry by the boot heels and dragged him farther back up the alley and left him there, knowing the snow would soon cover him up.
Pearl was there, locked up in the little jail, when Bob came in and unlocked the door and said, “We can go now.”
“Where will we go?” she said.
“We will go and pay this Indian Slayer, Cody, a visit.”
“How will you find him?”
“I’ll ask somebody,” Bob said.
It was about as simple a plan as Pearl had ever heard of. Pearl saw blood on Bob’s fingers.
“I can’t go with you,” she said. “I can’t be part of any more killing.”
“I know it. I didn’t want it to be this way, but I’m not completely sorry either. I figure those men are just paying the price for being what they are. The whites have killed a lot more of my people than we’ve killed of them.”
“I’m going back on the next train,” Pearl said.
Bob nodded.
“I knew it was too good to last forever,” he said.
“That’s the way love is,” she said. “Too good to last forever.”
Pearl’s lip trembled when she said it. Bob didn’t want to see her that way. He took the money out of his pocket and handed it to her.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I am too, Bob. I’m sorry for you and for me and for the men who died. I’m sorry for everything in this miserable goddamn life…”
“Go on home, Pearl. You’ll find you a man you don’t have to be sorry for.”
She stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek.
“It was good for a while,” she said. “It was the best.”
Bob walked out of the jail with her, the snow falling so hard neither of them could see as far as across the street.
“I guess this is it, then,” he said.
She blinked back the tears.
“Run, Bob, run.”
He shook his head, then walked off down the street and she saw him disappear in the falling snow. He became like a ghost.
Chapter 28
They awoke to howling winds and a driving, blinding snow.
“Damn it,” Billy grumbled. The others shook themselves loose from their ice-caked blankets. Teddy had already arisen and was saddling the horses. It was the most ferocious storm he’d ever witnessed.
Billy came over and began to help with the horses.
“We’re liable not to make it back to camp today,” Billy said.
“We’ll have to stay close together so nobody gets lost in this.”
“I know it. We’ll ride single-file.”
The wind raked their faces and they did their best to talk above it.
Banks came over and said, “What do you think, Colonel?”
“I think we’re in for a hell of a time.”
“We should try and find some cover out of this,” Banks said.
“We need to get back to the others at camp,” Teddy interjected.
“Seems to me they are in better shape than we are,” Banks said.
Edgar Rivers came up and joined them.
“Jesus, this storm…” he said.
“Saddle up,” Billy said. “I’ll ride lead, Mr. Blue, bring up the rear if you will. Everybody stay close together, don’t let the man ahead of you out of your sight.”
And so they rode into the teeth of the storm, unable to see more than a few feet ahead of them. Billy knew the land, had a map of it etched in his brain, but the storm made the going tricky at best, wiping out landmarks, confusing his sense of direction.
I can’t help wondering if the Creator is taking out his vengeance on us all for killing the last of his great creatures, he thought. He knew it was foolish to think in such a manner, but things were disappearing fast in his world.
Billy thought of Louisa and the girls, how the girls were growing tall as weeds and how him and Louisa’s love for each other had faded till it wasn’t hardly love at all but more akin to the feelings of a brother and sister who didn’t care for each very much. He thought too about how Texas Jack had abandoned him. And he thought about Wild Bill and Georgie Custer, now gone for all eternity. Never again would those old boys ride into the teeth of a blizzard, nor have to face the prospect of death. One thing about being dead was you didn’t have to worry about it any longer.
He made a point of checking the others over his shoulder every few minutes, knowing from experience how easy it was to lose men and beasts in a storm. He tried to read the map in his head, even while everything in front of him looked like a white sheet somebody was waving.
After a mile or so, Teddy could only sense the others were still in front of him. He worried about Anne and the others back at camp, knew that there wasn’t much even John could do for them against such fury.
The wind’s force became a roar that deafened as well as blinded. His moustaches grew thick with ice and he had to swipe his eyes and keep his head tucked. There was little they could do but forge ahead.
They rode maybe an hour, maybe two, it was hard to tell. Teddy thought he heard something through the shriek of wind, couldn’t be sure, then came upon the lump in the snow, his mount almost stumbling over the struggling form of Edgar Rivers.
“Whoa!” Teddy barely managed to sidestep his horse around the man who was struggling to gain his feet.
“What happened?”
Edgar Rivers looked at him, his face caked with ice and snow, his skin bluish.
“My horse threw me…He…he ran off.”
It was a bad piece of news. Teddy kicked a foot free of one stirrup and reached a hand for
th, telling the man to climb aboard behind him. Edgar struggled but finally got purchase and Teddy hauled him up.
“I think he ran off that way,” Rivers said.
“It doesn’t matter, we can’t chase after him in this.”
Edgar shouted in his ear that he was genuinely apologetic for being a burden, saying he owed Teddy his very life.
Teddy could only guess the others were still ahead of him, that he was still headed in the right direction.
They rode on for maybe another half hour, then Teddy said, “We’ll have to dismount and walk for a spell to give the horse a blow.” He knew that they would fall farther behind and were now completely separated from Cody and Banks.
“Grab a handful of tail,” Teddy shouted. “Yell out if you stumble.” Teddy took the reins and led the horse while Rivers grabbed its tail. The snow was now nearly to their knees in some places.
“How long?” Edgar Rivers shouted.
“How long what?”
“How long will we have to walk?”
“Twenty minutes, maybe; we can’t break the horse down. Walk twenty, ride twenty.”
Their feet began to grow numb, their hands, as well. Teddy’s face stung like it had been burned. The realization that they might die became a real possibility with every step. If the storm didn’t give up its fury sooner rather than later—and he’d heard of storms that lasted for days—they were in some nasty trouble.
After what he guessed was the allotted time to walk, Teddy could see that Rivers was having a hard time of it. He stopped and went back to him and said, “Climb aboard,” then helped him into the saddle.
“What about you?” Rivers said when he saw that Teddy was still going to walk.
“I’m good for now. One of us riding is better than two. I’ll go as long as I can.”
Oddly, he felt a reserve of strength flooding into his blood that he hadn’t counted on. It was as though the storm had become an adversary, a thing that wanted to beat him down, defeat him, possibly kill him. The threat was as real as the gunfighter, Hank Rain, who’d tried to kill him in Cheyenne—the first man he had ever shot. And like that situation, he felt a calm resolve take over.
John had told him once long before that fateful day that every gunfighter had a certain cool reserve when faced with a foe. “It’s something you can see in their eyes, in the way they moved with deliberation. You can’t scare ’em when they get like that. They’re like rattlesnakes,” John said. “They get coiled because they know what they need to do and they get zeroed in on their target and then you better kill them or they’re sure as hell going to kill you.”
Teddy understood it that day in Cheyenne when he was faced down by Hank Rain. He felt the rattlesnake in him. He felt it again now. The storm might kill him, but it didn’t scare him, and if it was going to kill him, the killing wasn’t going to be easy.
They went on and he wasn’t sure how long he walked, but he heard Edgar shout, “Should I get down and walk now too?”
Teddy turned his back to the wind to look at the rider.
“You feel like you can walk some more?”
Edgar shrugged.
“Maybe.”
But Teddy could see the man had no resolve, that asking too much of him would be the same as putting a bullet in him. He thought of Anne and Edgar together. He thought how easy it would be to just keep going and let Edgar flounder—survival of the fittest. No one would blame him for saving himself. Edgar stumbled and fell and stumbled again. He seemed a pathetic figure. Teddy turned to face the wind, stood there for a long few moments, considering whether to just go on without Edgar. But at last he turned back and trudged toward the man. He figured he owed it to Anne to bring her fiancé back alive. She had a right to make her choice, not him, not an easy death. He grabbed Edgar up and helped him into the saddle. They went on, the storm battling and battering them every step of the way.
Come on, Teddy thought. Come on, you son of a bitch.
It only got worse and both men knew it.
The horse began to falter. Teddy stopped and told Edgar he’d have to get down.
“I can’t feel my feet or hands,” he said as he dismounted, fell, and Teddy helped him up again. “We’re done for, aren’t we, Mr. Blue?”
“No. Hang on to its tail,” he said.
They stumbled on.
Then something appeared out of the blizzard. It was Billy.
“Jesus!” Billy called above the storm. “We thought we lost you boys.”
“Colonel,” Teddy said.
“Come on, they’s an old shack up ahead. It ain’t much but it will give us some shelter.”
And when they made it to the shack they stumbled inside, glad for the relief from wind and snow. Rudolph Banks was there waiting for them.
“Edgar,” he said worriedly when he saw his assistant’s condition.
They helped him to sit, trembling as he was. He was barely able to speak.
Billy pulled a silver flask from an inside coat pocket and said, “Have some of this firewater.”
The whiskey helped warm the blood and they sat in a circle Indian-style, passing the flask back and forth, and Billy said, “The one time I should have carried more liquor on my person, I didn’t. There’s a half case of it back at camp if White Eye and Yankee ain’t drank it all up.”
The wind rattled the loose boards and blew in through the small open windows and sifted in through the multitude of holes in the roof. But for the most part they were protected.
“I wonder how the others are making out at camp?” Banks said.
“Yankee and them have been through tough winters before,” Billy said. “They’ll make out.”
“This must be a dreadful trip for the women,” Banks replied, taking another sip from the whiskey flask.
Teddy took out his makings and said, “Anyone else want a shuck?”
Edgar Rivers waved a shaky hand, said, “I never developed the habit.”
“Take my advice,” Teddy said. “It’ll warm you some.”
Banks said, “I’ll have one, if you don’t mind.”
Teddy rolled one and handed it to Banks, then rolled himself one. He found a match and struck it and lit the ends of both cigarettes.
“Too bad there aren’t extra boards in this old shack,” Billy said, “or we’d build us a fire.”
Teddy saw that one wall had been lined with old newspapers, yellowed and curled and as fragile now as butterfly wings. There wasn’t a chair or a single stick of furniture to burn. He wondered about the person who had built the place and what sort of man he was and did he have a wife and kids or was he a loner, a trapper maybe, and what had happened to him to cause him to abandon the place?
“Too bad we ain’t got us a deck of playing cards,” Billy said. “Something to pass the time by.”
“I think we’ll cut the trip short,” Banks said abruptly. “I think soon as we return to camp we should head back to town and catch the first train east.”
“The contract states seven full days of hunting,” Billy said.
“Oh, not to worry, Colonel. You’ll get the amount agreed upon.”
“The bonus too?”
Banks hesitated a moment and said, “If you get us all back safely, the bonus too.”
Billy seemed satisfied and about drank the last of the liquor, then thought better of it and said, “They’s one swally left, who wants it?”
Banks extended his hand for the flask, took it and handed it to Edgar Rivers, saying, “He needs it more than any of us.”
It earned him some points in Billy’s eyes and it did in Teddy’s too.
The storm raged on without letup as Teddy studied Edgar, thought to himself his decision could have just as easily gone the other way out there before Billy showed up. And he wondered what sort of man he was turning into.
Chapter 29
White Eye and Jane had been wrapped in each other’s arms and faded dreams when the storm struck. Yankee had been off in the too
lies, squatting with his pants down. John had been trying to get a fire going to heat coffee before the red dawn. He was the one who felt the first winds of fury cutting down through one of the canyons. Then it began to snow. And John knew it wasn’t an ordinary snow, the on-and-off kind they’d dealt with the last several days, but a true snow, the kind he’d seen only once or twice before—the last being in Montana when he worked for the Lazy Hat Cattle Company. He swore after that winter he’d never let himself get caught in another bad snowstorm if he could help it and promptly went off to south Texas, where all a man had to deal with were cyclones, stampedes, and murdering drunks with guns.
Yankee came trotting back to camp, buttoning his drawers.
“It’s a bad one coming,” he said.
“I know it,” John said. “Better get everyone rousted and figure out what we’re going to do.”
“You go wake the women, I go get White Eye and Jane.”
John called into the tent opening of Emma Banks.
“What is it, Mr. Sears?” Emma asked.
“Bad storm, ma’am. We’re going to have to find better shelter.”
John saw no panic in the woman’s eyes when she emerged from the tent.
“I’ll get my sister,” she said calmly.
Yankee ducked his head into Jane’s tent. She was sitting up and White Eye was trying to put on his drawers.
“You all better hurry and get dressed,” Yankee said. “It’s coming a bad blow.”
Jane said, “Oh, Yankee, that’s such a brave thing for you to do—to come and warn us.”
Jane’s gushing did not escape White Eye’s notice. “Okay, you was real brave to warn us, now you better run off and warn the others,” White Eye said sarcastically.
Yankee said, “I could have just let the storm blow you away, if that’s what you want,” and then ducked back out again, angry he’d even tried to save White Eye’s jealous old hide.
They all joined John and he told them they’d better go on up in the canyon and try to find a lee from the storm and nobody disagreed with him.
