Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Masterson nodded, knowing the others were hiding in the brush, barely feet away. “You bet that’s a Injun fire. Damn, but now I know why I been having nightmares last few nights—woken up in a cold sweat, getting chased by them red fiends.”

  “God bless!” Fairchild whimpered, lips trembling.

  “What? You turning yellow, Bat?” Myers said, playing it up big. “I don’t think that’s a Injun fire in the first place—and if it was … Fairchild here has said he’s gonna raise hair on the first warrior he lays his hands on. Ain’t you, Fairchild?”

  The easterner began to snivel, “Well … I—”

  “Looks to be you’re rattled, Bat. But I ain’t a damn bit scared,” Myers plunged ahead. “You can run if you got a streak up your back. I’ll stay right here with Fairchild and let him get his Injun scalp. Maybe more’n one—right, Fairchild?”

  The tenderfoot swallowed hard, his eyes wide already, unable to speak for the moment.

  “With that rifle and skinnin’ knife of his, Fairchild could whip all the Comanche in the whole damned Panhandle, you give him a fair show of it. And I want to be here to watch Fairchild lay into ’em for certain!”

  “N-Now,” Fairchild sniveled, “let’s not be too hasty about this here!”

  “We best get our own scalps out of here while we can, fellas,” Bat said. “I don’t have a good feeling about this—”

  At that moment Masterson pulled his hat from his head, the signal to Donegan and the rest.

  One shot, then a heartbeat later more rattled over the heads of the would-be hunters, whistling out of the night, crashing through the leaves and branches behind them.

  “Lord God Almighty!” Fairchild shrieked as he crumpled to his knees.

  “Injuns!” Masterson yelled, leaning over to pull the greenhorn to his feet.

  Playing his role perfectly, Myers wasn’t anywhere close to reply. He had already bolted off at a full sprint through the brush along the creek, hollering his bloody alarm with every leap.

  “Just like I always say,” Bat hissed in Myers’s direction, “there’s five miles of nerve between pointing a gun and pulling the trigger. Run, Fairchild!” Bat suddenly hollered as he pushed the tenderfoot off in the direction of camp, dropping to his knee to fire off a few shots with his pistol. “Run for your life!”

  The greenhorn did not need any more coaxing, bounding away from Masterson like an antelope, hurtling headlong through the brush on Myers’s heels. It took but a few yards until Fairchild passed the trader, careening toward camp as if the devil himself were on his heels. For more than half a mile he kept up that wicked pace until he tore into camp, collapsing on a pile of blankets and bedrolls, heaving, his tongue lolling from his wild escape.

  Many of the others, also in on Donegan’s and Master-son’s practical joke, quickly gathered around, each one shouting a multitude of questions.

  “What happened?”

  “Where’s Bat?”

  “Why’d you leave Myers behind?”

  “Who fired them shots?”

  With his eyes bugging and his breath coming harsh and hammered, Fairchild was a few moments before he could get the single word past his trembling lips. “I-Injuns!”

  “Injuns?”

  “Timber … it’s crawling with ’em!” declared the shaky tenderfoot as the others pulled their weapons up, readying for a fight.

  “It’s us or them, boys,” someone declared.

  “I knew it’d come down to it,” another declared. “Been good riding with you.”

  “Oh, God…” Fairchild whimpered. “Myers and Masterson, they’re surely … surely dead!”

  “You’re shot!” screamed Frenchy, suddenly kneeling over Fairchild. With a flash, the skinner yanked his butcher knife from his belt and ripped through the side of Fairchild’s shirt, pushing the easterner over on his belly.

  Emanuel Dubbs had a coffeepot ready, pouring the warm dregs over Fairchild’s bare back.

  “You can’t feel your own blood?” Frenchy asked.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Fairchild moaned. “The Injuns got me. Got me!”

  “Get some water!” Dubbs hollered into the crowd. “We got to pry that bullet out!”

  “B-Bullet?”

  “We can’t let it set in there too long,” Frenchy said gravely. “Blood poisoning.”

  “Just dress it for now!” Charlie Myers huffed as he darted into camp. “You got more ambition than a mustang stud in spring—and we got Injuns to fight!”

  “Charlie! Fairchild claimed you was dead!”

  “Would’ve been,” Masterson said as he too came to a halt. “Fairchild run off from us—left us to fight alone.”

  “How many?” Frenchy asked.

  Masterson shook his head. “Woods is alive with ’em. We ain’t got time to yank that bullet out now, Fairchild.”

  “I say we head for Dodge City!” Prairie Dog Dave hollered.

  “They got us surrounded. We’d never get out,” Masterson said dramatically. “Grab that big Sharps of yours, Fairchild—you’ll stand guard on the edge of camp like the rest of us.”

  “I say we try for Dodge City,” Fairchild whimpered. “They can’t follow us at night.”

  “We’ll never make it through the noose they’ve thrown up around us.” Bat whirled on the rest as they swept up their rifles. “Sell your lives dear, boys. Take some of those bastards with us!”

  “The devil’s here to pay—and no pitch is too hot, fellas,” shouted Seamus Donegan as he, Dixon and Hanrahan rushed into camp as if just answering the call to arms. “We expected trouble—and it’s found us. Rally forth!”

  They all spread out as planned, making sure the frightened, half-naked Fairchild was taken to the far edge of camp where there would be some timber between his sentry post and the main fire.

  “You must keep a vigilant watch here, Fairchild,” Seamus said with all the seriousness he could muster. “The rest of us are depending on you—despite your wounds. You mustn’t allow those bloodthirsty h’athens to ford the creek and plug you for good. Keep your eyes moving and your nose in the wind, boy.”

  Fairchild nodded, more than nervously.

  “Your rifle still loaded?” Masterson asked.

  Again the easterner nodded.

  “We’ll be back to relieve your watch in an hour,” Dixon said as the three turned and left the tenderfoot in the brush along the creekbank.

  Back at camp, fresh coffee was a’brew and muffled laughter greeted each new “guard” who quietly slipped back in, unbeknownst to the terrified Fairchild, abandoned at his solitary post by the stream. Time and again someone new would arise in the firelight and mimic the tenderfoot in word and action, until they all suffered aching bellies from suppressing the laughter.

  “Got him—slick as the inside of a willow whistle!” Frenchy roared with laughter.

  That hour passed as the stars whirled overhead and the moon climbed out of the east, and still no Fairchild.

  But when another hour had passed and still no guard came to relieve him, Fairchild’s curiosity overcame his crippling terror. Cautiously he inched his way back to camp, there to find every one of the traders, hunters and skinners sharing their merriment around the fires.

  He stood trembling at the edge of the firelight. No more was he frightened. Now he was beyond angry, realizing he had been made the butt of their joke.

  Donegan was the first to spot the greenhorn at the edge of the light.

  “Fairchild! C’mon on in and have yourself a cup of Frenchy’s coffee.”

  “Him?” the tenderfoot shrieked. “He’s the one ripped my shirt—thought I was shot.”

  “Frenchy’s coffee is about as bad as being gut-shot sometimes!” Dixon roared, ducking the skinner’s swinging arm. “But you are one bad actor.”

  “You sonsabitches!” Fairchild yelped with blood in his eye, dropping his rifle and bolting into a dead run for Masterson.

  Donegan and Andy Johnson caught him, holding the sma
ller man back as Fairchild’s legs continued to pump, his arms flailing, sputtering his curses at them all.

  “We was damned worried you’d go off half cocked and get us all in a world of trouble,” Dixon tried to explain.

  “We’re sorry if there’s any hide wore off,” Masterson said.

  “No hide,” Donegan said, having lifted Fairchild’s shirt. “Just might’ve rubbed raw the man’s pride a wee bit is all. Will you quit your squirming!”

  “When I get my hands on one of—”

  “We done it for your own good,” Masterson said.

  “You let me go and I’ll show you for your own good.”

  But he eventually calmed down enough for Donegan to release him. And then Fairchild accepted a cup of Frenchy’s coffee.

  One by one the ringleaders of the great practical joke came up and offered their hands in peace. With a self-deprecating grin, Fairchild accepted those hands.

  “You’ll make a damned good hunter after all, you will,” Seamus said, clamping a big hand on Fairchild’s shoulder as they drank coffee beside that fire, near the ruins of the old adobe walls beneath a spring moon, deep in the heart of buffalo country. In the land of the Indian. “Not a bad. sort for a friend either.”

  “You … you mean you still want to be my friend—after I made such a damned fool of myself?”

  Donegan pounded the tenderfoot on his back. “We’re all friends here, Fairchild. ‘Cause down here in the land of the Kiowa and the Comanch’—a man needs all the friends he can find to watch his backside.”

  7

  Early April 1874

  West Adobe Walls Creek coursed through the valley from the northwest, creating the broad, open meadow. Along its banks grew a profusion of bluestem and beargrass, pokeweed and sage, hackberry, chinaberry and willow. Overhead towered the sheltering cottonwood.

  For some time Charlie Myers and Fred Leonard simply stood in silence at the center of the meadow that lay on the west side of the creek some two miles north of the main branch of the Canadian, a mile or so upstream from the ruins where they had camped the night before, their sixth coming south from Dodge City. The more they considered the location, the better it seemed. By erecting their stockade here, they would command a broad field of fire in the event they would have to defend their lives and property from the warriors most of these men knew would come. Only a matter of time. One day the warriors would come.

  The two traders nodded to one another, shook hands, and announced their decision. It was here they would raise their trading post. And they would pay all those hide men who would stay to help build the post, making their offer before the hunters and skinners scattered across the surrounding countryside.

  When the hurrawing throats and the hearty backslapping died down, the work of off-loading the wagons began. The hide men had come to stay.

  Although few white men had ever crossed the meadow until that time, it was far from being an unknown speck on the mental map of those red men who traveled the great expanse of the buffalo country known as the Staked Plain. Here, just north of the Canadian River, this broad meadow allowed for an easy crossing of the river, while in either direction the banks proved much steeper and more difficult to negotiate for horse and travois.

  The second morning in the meadow saw Myers contracting with Dirty-Face Ed Jones and his partner Joe Plummer, both accomplished teamsters, to officially blaze the trail that would be used by Myers and Leonard freighters between the trading post and their store in Dodge City. It was bound to be a well-used route, bringing in merchandise and trade goods from Kansas, freighting back a fortune in buffalo hides for the eastern markets.

  “You’re sure now you won’t throw in and come along?” Billy Dixon had asked Seamus that third morning.

  Donegan had shaken his head. “I know you’re like a boy with a new gun, wanting to look over that buffalo country south of here again.”

  Dixon had smiled. “I want to be the first to find them.” Wistfully he had looked off into the distance across the Canadian. “They’re out there. I can feel it.”

  “And they’ll come soon enough,” said Seamus. “I think I’ll stay for a while and help the rest get these buildings raised. It’s good pay, and the work ain’t half bad. Besides, I want to have a better look at those old ruins back down the creek. Get to know them a wee bit better, Billy.”

  Donegan stood back now, gazing again at the immense Myers and Leonard stockade, remembering how it had looked after those first few days of work plowing up the grass at the far ends of the meadow, throwing into the empty wagons those sod bricks they had carved from the earth, using a special plow made by Dodge City blacksmith Patrick Ryan, hauling the sod to the site where Myers and Leonard had staked out the dimensions of their new domain. While the first buds were swelling in the sunnyside places along the creeks and watered places, brick by sod brick, the foot-thick picket walls were slowly raised, some two hundred feet wide by three hundred feet long on the east and west. Small loopholes were placed four feet from the ground, at intervals of every ten or so feet, which would allow riflemen to fire from the safety of the stockade walls.

  At the northeast corner of the immense rectangular stockade stood the store itself, some seventy feet long and twenty feet wide. After a center ridgepole was laid across the entire length of the store, supported by upright posts, cross members were laid, extending from the sides of the walls. Atop that was laid a thatching and a layer of sod.

  At the southwest corner stood the mess hall with four separate entrances, where Billy “Old Man” Keeler would soon serve as cook. Near it, along the west wall, they built a covered stable with stalls for seventeen animals. Completing the entire rectangle, roofless bastions were erected at all but the southeast corners of the stockade.

  An unusual gate was placed across the large opening in the east wall, itself balanced on an immense cottonwood trunk the men sunk deep in the ground. This gate “floated” from this single pole, counterbalanced by a large cage made of wooden pegs, in which the men placed heavy rocks dug from the meadow or hauled up from the creek bank. This ingenious floating arrangement made it possible for a single man to open or close the immense, heavy gate. Timber for these pickets and gate were found along Reynolds Creek, some six miles down the Canadian.

  When the major work had been completed on the walls, Seamus spent a day working with fellow Irishman Tom O’Keefe to erect a blacksmith shop about a hundred feet south of the rectangular stockade. Together they first dug a trench of about twenty-four feet by twenty-one feet in which they buried their eight-foot pickets, then over it all the two laid a thatch roof. Besides what circulation could be provided by the two doorways, O’Keefe did not daub any mud between the wood pickets, so that the constant breeze blowing through the meadow would make his work over the glowing forge just a little cooler.

  It was near the end of the third week in the meadow that another small wagon train was spotted rumbling into the valley of Bent Creek.

  “Looks like Rath is making good on his promise,” Charlie Myers said to his group of laborers as he came to a halt by them, dusting his hands across his dirty canvas britches.

  “He say he was coming down to give you some competition, did he?” Jim Hanrahan asked.

  “He did,” Fred Leonard said as he strode up to watch the arrival of the wagons coming past the far buzzard-bone ridges ringing the meadow.

  “There’s enough business for two outfits,” Donegan said.

  Myers nodded grudgingly. “Aye. There’ll be so much business soon enough that we’ll all be rich by autumn.”

  While Charlie Myers and Fred Leonard had been the first to seize the opportunity, there were others who had been just as anxious to seize upon what appeared to be a safe bet. Longtime Dodge City businessmen Charles Rath and Robert M. Wright threw in together with a young Irishman named James Langton and outfitted a train for the buffalo country. They had followed the wagon tracks south, passing Jones and Plummer on the teamsters’ trail-bl
azing journey back to Dodge City.

  “By Jesus, Myers—you damn well knew we weren’t going to let you have all the business!” Rath sang out, standing in the foot well of his high-walled freighter as he rolled to a halt in the meadow and legged-down on the brake handle.

  “You’re late, Rath!”

  “And I see you doing a land-office business, do I?” Andy Johnson called out from his wagon as employees of both outfits began to shake hands. Johnson had a reputation as the most reliable and trusted of the Rath employees.

  “Get down here, Swede—and you too, Rath. Let’s have a drink to the hide business!” Myers growled.

  “Now you’re talking,” Rath replied. “Where’s Hanrahan?”

  “Here I am,” Jim Hanrahan answered, emerging from the brush where he had gone to relieve himself.

  “Button your goddamned fly and get over here, Jim,” Rath said. “I got a proposition for the likes of you that will keep you so busy, and make you so much money—you won’t need to think of shooting another buffalo.”

  The next day, while Myers and Leonard and their employees returned to finishing their stable, store and mess hall, and while Rath and his bunch began work erecting their modest store, some twenty-two by sixty feet, along with a corral and an outdoor privy, all constructed south across the meadow from the other structures, Jim Hanrahan strode over to ask for Donegan’s help in his new venture.

  “Blessed Mary!” Seamus exclaimed that morning over strong coffee and soda biscuits while the wiry cut of the spring breeze made a sound like mocking laughter in the new leaves. “Your bleeming building will be the most important of all. A saloon. By the saints, a saloon!”

  Another fifty feet south of O’Keefe’s blacksmith shop, Hanrahan selected a level piece of ground to stake out his rectangular sod house, twenty-three by thirty-nine feet. A door they left at the east and west ends, with a single glazed window on the south wall, along with two open windows each along both east and west walls.

  Meanwhile, Charlie Rath had no intention of giving the restaurant trade over to Myers and Old Man Keeler. From Dodge City, Rath brought Mrs. Hannah Olds to serve as cook, along with her husband, William, who had already been a Rath employee for some time. Therefore the Rath & Company store was divided into three rooms: the kitchen, the sales room, and a small partitioned area that served as private quarters for William and Hannah Olds.