Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  Wearily all four men wolfed down their corn dodgers and lean buffalo meat seared over the merry flames where the coffee bubbled and boiled to a heady, fragrant brew, its aroma lifted on the air of each summer evening. Overhead the night sky deepened into coal-black, the color of a well-worn kettle bottom as they smoked their pipes in silence, perhaps wandering a few yards onto the starlit prairie to spray the sage before climbing into their bedrolls without a protest. The next morning always prodded them early, and the day’s labor took care of itself. Every man was in the process of making himself a small fortune that hot summer as the days lengthened perceptibly. And no one really thought about Indians, much less worried to keep an eye on the far horizon.

  It was man against the buffalo for now. And the hide men were clearly winning.

  When the time arrived that Dixon was to take Sewell back to Adobe Walls, Billy drove Frenchy and Armitage out to the killing ground and left them with plenty to do while he turned the wagon due north, striking for the Canadian River. Upon reaching the unpredictable river, both hunter and skinner found its banks frothing and swollen with spring runoff.

  “She’s damned well got her back up, don’t she?” Dixon said as he sat there on that plank of a wagon seat, those reins slung loosely through his fingers and across his palms, as he stared down at the boiling, turbid, muddy water.

  “Banging and smashing everything gets in her way, that’s for sure,” Ned Sewell groaned. “How we get this wagon across that?”

  He wagged his head. “We don’t. Be suicide to try, I’m afraid. We’ll push on over to White Deer Creek and see if that isn’t a better place for us to ford.”

  But the mouth of the White Deer wasn’t all that much better, although Dixon knew it offered their best chance in many a mile should they ride in either direction. Billy quickly stripped off his clothing and eased down into the cold, swollen river, moving slowly, leaning against the flow as his feet sought out the footing his mules would need in crossing. Inside of twenty bone-numbing minutes he was back on the south bank, shivering and blue-lipped as he yanked on his boots, explaining to Sewell that they could make it, with a little luck and the cooperation of the mules, Joe and Tobe. They had become seasoned by Dixon across the last three seasons, and should be able to ply those frothy, reddish waters.

  “Only fifty … maybe sixty yards,” Billy regarded. “That’s all Tobe and Joe will have to swim. Then they ought to be across the sand and up on some pretty solid footing.”

  “You fixing to take the wagon over?” Sewell asked, wide-eyed and tight-mouthed.

  “Naw. We’ll leave it here. I can get you back to the Walls on the mules, then bring ’em back to fetch up the wagon when the river’s run itself down a might.”

  They both turned at the sudden sound of hooves, grabbing up their rifles as a pair of white men appeared out of the cottonwood and willow from downstream.

  “Ho, Dixon!” one of the riders shouted in his unmistakable booming voice.

  “That you, Donegan?”

  Billy Tyler and Seamus Donegan reined up.

  “You going in to the Walls, ain’t you, Dixon?” Tyler asked.

  He nodded. “Got to get Sewell back for his—”

  “You still got men back in your camp, Billy?” Donegan asked in a gush.

  Dixon nodded again, something gnawing at his belly with that pinched look on the Irishman’s face. “What you got to dust off, Seamus?”

  “Riders just come in from Chicken Creek. They found two hunters butchered there. Been a couple days back, likely.”

  Dixon squinted to the east. “That’s twenty, twenty-five miles off.”

  “We’re riding out to tell the other camps,” Tyler announced.

  “You figure to get everyone in?” Sewell asked, slow to tear his eyes off the gray-eyed Irishman.

  “We just figure to let everyone know that Injins’re riding this country,” Donegan answered, his own eyes seeming to study Sewell’s hard smile.

  “We’re obliged, Seamus,” Billy said finally, not liking the way Sewell raked his gaze over the Irishman. Long enough he had been around his share of men on this frontier to catch a whiff of trouble brewing between a pair of them. And this smelled. But, he figured, he’d be shet of the hired man, and Ned Sewell would soon be on his way back to Dodge City—where there wouldn’t be a threat of something starting between Donegan and Sewell. Something bloody.

  “See you back at Adobe Walls, Billy,” Donegan said, finally bringing his eyes from Sewell’s challenging sneer.

  Dixon watched after the pair of riders for only a moment before he turned to his hired man. “I don’t figure to leave this wagon here now—not with Injuns in the country. We’ll float it across with us. Help me get the mules hitched.”

  When he had pulled the first animal around in a tight circle, Dixon inquired, “Just what you got against Donegan?”

  Sewell seemed to jerk in surprise, then shrugged. “Him? Nothing, goddammit. Don’t even know the man. Never talked to him.”

  As Billy backed the first mule into harness at the singletree, he said, “You two was both at the Walls long enough to know one the other.”

  “I just figured I’d stay out of his way,” Sewell said, backing the second mule into harness. “Heard he was bad medicine down the pike.”

  Dixon had to laugh as he patted Tobe’s neck. “Donegan? He’s as good a heart as they come.”

  “He don’t like me,” Sewell huffed.

  “He got any reason not to like you?” Billy asked, his eyes climbing over Joe’s back. The sudden fire in the other man’s eyes gave him some caution.

  Sewell finally looked down and put his hands at work on the traces. “Never did I give one single man a reason not to like me. No man I ever worked for.”

  “You two don’t seem to hit it off—”

  “Why the hell don’t we talk about something else?” Sewell snapped, more than a hint of iron in his tone.

  That drew Dixon up so abruptly it was like Sewell had just yanked on his short hairs. “Yeah—let’s see about getting these mules swimming this wagon.”

  Billy had enough to think about for the moment. A man of the plains knew the odds were against him bucking a wagon across a swollen river like the Canadian, but with a little savvy and a lot of luck, they could make it. And for the moment, he wished he had someone working with him he trusted. Sewell was no longer a man Billy trusted.

  Dixon squinted across the rippled, sun-glimmering water, choosing a point on the far bank where he wanted to bring the mules and wagon out. The odds were against them: a mule had smaller hooves than a horse, so it wouldn’t work to ply their way across the bottom of a river ford the way a horse would; and once a mule got its ears filled with water, he quickly became frightened and worse than useless.

  But this was far from the first time Billy Dixon had played himself against house odds.

  “Hang on, Sewell. Here we go. Hep, hep! Hee-yawww!”

  Slapping leather down on mule hide, Billy drove Joe and Tobe down into the muddy water, which instantly nudged and shoved against the high sidewalls with a groaning might that surprised him. The mules were in the current sooner than he had expected. Their eyes wide and nostrils flaring, Joe and Tobe were swimming already, yanking the wagon along in spurts as they caught a hoof here and there on the shifting bottom, struggling against the current.

  With a frightened snort, old Joe, the upstream animal, fought the first big wave as it swamped both mules.

  “We’re going over!” Sewell shrieked. He stood and lunged for the muddy river.

  Dixon was standing at the same instant, sensing the foot-well shuddering beneath his boots. With a prolonged creak, the wagon started to ease over, then as he cleared the seat, the wagon tumbled in a full, free circle and tumbled again. Billy was swimming on the upstream side to stay clear of the huge, iron-rimmed wheels, clawing at the red, boiling water in an effort to reach the hee-hawing mules as they bobbed up and down in the White Deer Crossin
g.

  Pulling himself inch by inch along the traces, he got on the upstream side of that gee-ward mule, snagging a death grip on Joe’s bridle to yank his head out of the water with all the strength the hunter could muster. Behind the mules the wagon pulled and spun on the end of the singletree like a child’s string toy. Except this bobbing, groaning toy repeatedly yanked two mules and a man beneath the muddy surface of the Canadian each time it spun against the surging current.

  “Sewell!” he shouted at the skilmer’s head bobbing just ahead of the wagon atop the surface. “Help me cut ’em loose!”

  “Let ’em go!” he yelled as he swam away with the current.

  “Damn you!” he roared against the braying of the mules and the roaring river. “I’ll kill you myself if the Canadian doesn’t!”

  Evidently the look on Dixon’s face was enough. In but a moment the skinner was wildly flailing away with his arms, struggling back through the few yards of murky, angry water to reach the haw-side mule.

  “Cut him loose, dammit!” Dixon said, his own knife sawing at Joe’s thick leather harness.

  More than halfway across, the animals were freed and finally came up snorting. The wagon itself went tumbling on downriver, lost in the sunlight around a bend sheltered with willow and overhung with the rattling green leaves of cottonwood.

  Billy hung on, murmuring to Joe, clinging to a bit of its severed harness, urging it through the terror of that river.

  Then he felt the first hoof scrape bottom. Joe got a hold, then lost it against the powerful current. He fought with his arms, pulling as hard as he had ever swam, sputtering water, choking on it, his eyes burning with sandy grit as he struggled to keep them open. Then the mule got a second hold with a hoof. And held on this time. With everything Joe had left in him, the animal pulled against the current with those small hooves until it had all four down on something more or less solid.

  Hanging to those severed traces for his life, Dixon was dragged from the Canadian River, his boots and clothing filled with water and sand. He dropped to the muddy bank, gasping as the mule eased down on its front haunches, eyes rolling back and wheezing. Joe suddenly collapsed onto its rear haunches and sputtered as he eased onto his suddenly motionless ribs.

  Billy watched the animal die without a struggle, its lungs already filled with sand and river water. Crawling across the muddy bank, Dixon dragged his old friend’s head against his leg and stroked the wet jaw, the sopping forelock, wishing he weren’t crying but knowing that with his own dripping hair, Sewell wouldn’t notice anyway. Besides, the skinner lay on his back, gasping for air beneath the other mule’s belly. Tobe. The younger mule had made it alive and stood shuddering from exertion and fright. But, Tobe had made it.

  Reluctantly, Billy looked back at Old Joe. It was hard keeping it down, this hollow feeling inside him at this moment. The soles of his boots lapped by the river that had taken the wagon, his rifle and everything in it. And it had just claimed one of his two mules, the two friends that had seen Dixon through so many seasons beneath so many skies.

  But now Old Joe was gone.

  And just when things had seemed they were going to work out for this summer’s hunt, the Indians had started raiding again.

  And now, Old Joe was gone.

  11

  Late June 1874

  June was growing old, and he with it, Seamus cursed sourly.

  No fool like an old fool.

  And he had been as big a fool as any man, chasing after the merest wisps of dreams harkening from untold wealth. Just like any other addle-brained Irishman who believed in rainbows and leprechauns and pots of gold just waiting to be discovered.

  Myths, legends … nothing more than a dream dispelled come the morning’s light.

  Damned foolishness is what it had been for him to stake so much on finding a treasure near the old ruins of the adobe walls. Yet something at the pit of him kept nagging Donegan nonetheless, ready to convince him again and again that if there were no substance to the rumors and legend about the place, if there were nothing tangible come of that old map and the hefty chunk of gold bullion two crazed civilians had died for—then why had a man like Louis Abragon wanted him killed in Dodge City?

  And if unable to kill Donegan there, then why had Abragon for certain assigned someone to follow the Irishman all the way south to Adobe Walls?

  Work. It had always been one form of work or another for him. And that was the wellspring of all his dreams of treasure and fortune and the soft life. For certain Seamus damn well knew what it was like, knowing nothing but work and want. Work and want.

  Then with Donegan’s growing doubts concerning his own venture came the troubling belief among the others that their combined fortunes at Adobe Walls were about to go belly up. Back there on the first of May, after the buildings were completed and both trading posts opened for business, along with O’Keefe’s blacksmith shop and Hanrahan’s shady saloon, things couldn’t have looked brighter. But with the passing of each new day gone without sighting many buffalo, much less the great herds they had ventured south to hunt—the mood over the meadow grew increasingly somber.

  But of a sudden, just as if Lady Fortune was playing them all like the fickle bitch she so often proved herself to be, they awoke one morning to the distant, but distinct, lowing of the bulls, presaging the return of the great southern herds. That very day, Seamus had watched every outfit pack and leave as if the life itself of the settlement were being sucked out of Adobe Walls. Any and all men there who called themselves hunters or skinners mounted up and were gone before the sun set on that meadow ringed by buzzard-bone ridges and leafy cottonwood where the deer-flies buzzed and the air grew suffocatingly hot late each afternoon.

  Dame Fortune had once again smiled on those ragtag bands of free-roamers who made their living on the comings and goings of the buffalo. Them, and smiled too on the traders who catered to their every need, except one. Charlie Myers had made it clear as crystal when he organized this entire endeavor back at Dodge City that there would be no women come to buffalo country. Fine it was that the only woman had been brought here by Charley Rath, along with her husband, and both of them clearly getting on some in years. But Myers had little time for any man who wanted to argue about his decision not to bring whores to buffalo country.

  “You wanna get some honey on your stinger, boys,” Myers told them, “saddle up and make that long ride back to Dodge. Plenty of whores up there. But down here—we come to work.”

  Damn that trader’s hide anyway, Seamus had thought more than a half-dozen times in the last week alone. He was needing to get himself a woman, be her copper-skinned, coffee-skinned or Irish pink. As long as she knew what it took to please a man and just didn’t want to lay there beneath him. So much better when she joined in the celebration of all that bare flesh and moist, sweaty exertion.

  The very thought of it made his mouth go dry. Yet those thoughts on other women failed to long pull his thoughts from her.

  From Samantha Pike and how she had wrestled with him, scratched him, bit him and held him locked inside her arms and legs until he was for certain they were one heaving animal that first night in Sharp Grover’s barn. Indeed, she had been like an animal unleashed, and her pot like the warm, sweet honey he had long craved, were he to admit it now to himself. Seamus the bee, and Samantha Pike the hive that beckoned to him beyond the miles.

  “Sweet Mother of God!” he exclaimed, physically trying to shake off the thought of her, those large breasts exposed with her blouse and bodice opened, that pair of sweet, ripe melons heaving with every rapid breath she took, shuddering as he kissed and licked and kneaded their juicy firmness.

  Hard, so hard it was, not to remember how he had struggled so with the many buttons on her skirt until she had laughed at him in that way of hers, eyes like fire, and ripped both skirt and the many petticoats off herself, like a madwoman tearing the bloomers down to her ankles and kicking them over her boots—the only thing she kept on,
the only thing from her feet all the way up to that welcoming moistness that beckoned his rigid flesh.

  “But she wants a husband out of you, Seamus,” he scolded himself. That’s why Sharp himself wrote you that goddamned letter you got last summer.

  And if that husband-molding wasn’t a cold jolt of January ice water down Donegan’s spine, nothing else ever could be. Just the merest mention of marrying and settling down and having to contend with but one woman for the rest of his days—why, the thought of it …

  That wasn’t true either—is it? He had dreamed of many tomorrows with that dark-haired colleen in Boston Towne who had ushered a big, overgrown youth into the wonders of women and ecstasy. And thought of the very same thing again with sweet, auburn-haired Jennifer Wheatley, she of the beautiful freckled shoulders and breasts that he had gazed upon but had yet to touch. But Samantha Pike—hers was the sort of body that begged him to touch and fondle it, taking as much pleasure as Seamus in his growing madness, in the boiling froth it brought to his passion as Donegan had ripped such wild, fragrant pleasure from her soft, rounded body.

  “Perhaps she’ll just come to understand I’m not the marrying kind,” he told himself as he stood from his fire and tossed the dregs of his coffee into the nearby grass.

  Coals dying in his fire pit, lamps blinking on in the trading houses and Hanrahan’s saloon, Seamus decided he’d go over there and see if anyone new had shown up today. More hunters coming and going each day now, here to trade or get the latest bits and fragments of news—what with the recent Indian scares. The hide men came and went, sharing what they knew, asking questions about what they didn’t know and feared most. And making plans to gather here should there be a general outbreak.

  They reminded Seamus of lone bulls by instinct gathering in a crude circle, rump to rump, horns out and to the ready when confronted with the packs of quick, lithe prairie wolves. Men who preferred being alone or in small groups, come together here in a time of danger to ensure the safety of all.