Dying Thunder

by Terry C. Johnston

  As he joined the rest peering through the loopholes, they watched a lone warrior loping his pony in a weaving pattern, heading straight for the Myers store. He carried a shield near the top of his left arm, and in his right hand, a huge Walker Colt.

  No one thought to shoot at the solitary warrior as the horseman approached, likely stunned at this show of courage. But when the Indian made it to the southeast corner of the wall, he promptly and without ceremony shoved his pistol through an opening in the mud chinking and emptied the Walker Colt.

  The store filled with noise and more blinding gun smoke from the Walker Colt, bullets rattling off tables and clanging against tin plates, crashing through expensive bone china that tinkled over tin cups and broken glass oil-lamp globes. But not one of the six bullets hit its mark—none of the white men were hit.

  “Don’t let that one ride off!” Born shouted, drawing a bead on the horseman. “The rest will get their balls swolled up to come in and try that shit too.”

  At twenty yards from the store Born’s shot knocked the warrior off his pony. As the animal pranced away, the courageous Indian struggled to his feet and began walking—calmly, deliberately, for the hide ricks not far away.

  “Die, you red bastard!” Fred Myers growled as his bullet hit the warrior.

  “Right through his bellows!” Armitage cheered.

  This time the Indian fell to his knees, collapsing onto his side. Pulling another pistol from his breechclout belt, he pressed it into his mouth. Yanked back on the trigger. A spray of gore and blood splattered the grass as the brave warrior convulsed, then lay still.

  Things got quiet for a while as the white men settled back against their grain sacks and barrels of trade goods, each of them considering that singular act of bravery. Outside, the warriors would yelp and holler, firing occasionally as the afternoon wore on. With hot breeze hissing past his face, Donegan wondered if he would have the nerve to put a pistol in his own mouth when the time came. Nerve enough when the warriors swept over the walls. Nerve enough to pull the trigger and blow his own brains out.

  And all of this doubt come now, regretting that not once had he given Samantha any idea how deeply she had touched him. That was the worst part of his curse and this fear he felt—unable to tell a woman just how vulnerable he was to her. How many times had drink been nothing more than something to kill the despair he felt for not being able to talk of what lay in his heart? How many times had whiskey been something to dull the sadness and loneliness never far from haunting him in those sober moments?

  “Wish we knew how things was with the others,” McCabe said absently.

  “I figure they’re holding out,” Donegan replied, glad once more not to be alone with his thoughts. “Hear gunfire still coming from the direction of the saloon. And some gunfire beyond it. Who was over there in Rath’s last night, besides Olds and his wife?”

  “Langton and Eddy, no doubt,” said Leonard. Then he growled, “They work for Rath. Son of a bitch, Rath is—running out and knowing about this attack coming.”

  “Anyone else with ’em?” asked Trevor.

  “Probably Andy Johnson and Sam Smith. They been working for Rath,” Hathaway commented.

  Donegan looked around. “Where’s O’Keefe? You figure the Injins got him? He wasn’t over to the saloon when the first dance of the grand ball was called.”

  Masterson shook his head. “No, he weren’t at Hanrahan’s. But I remember seeing him hotfooting it to Rath’s when the whole shebang got started.”

  Donegan sighed, chuckling a bit. “Been quite a dance, ain’t it, boys?” Then he clucked, eyes narrowing. “Shame, it is. Over there at Rath’s—they’re poor on riflemen right now. By the saints, I do pray they’ll fare well.”

  No one said anything for a long time after that. And Seamus figured they were doing some praying like he was, each man in his own way.

  He laid his head back against the sod and closed his red, smoke-burned eyes for a moment. Outside, for that moment, the sounds faded, thankfully. He thought again of Samantha, easily—then grew irritated again as the memory of her got all jumbled up like snarled latigo with the memory of another who had come through his life before—the woman who had promised, then withdrawn her love and left him high on the Bozeman Road. Jennifer Wheatley.*

  A man wasn’t supposed to be ruined by love. A man was just expected to find it easy mending a broken heart. And still no one would ever know how long and hard he had despaired of vanished dreams. Unable to free himself of her memory—of Jennifer Wheatley’s wild sort of softness that day as she bathed in the waters of Piney Creek, the sun shimmering off her auburn hair like red fire. A vision of her beauty that for all the intervening years had grown to become more and more unsettling and unnerving.

  He squeezed his eyes tightly. It helped some of the burning. Hid a few of the silent tears. One day, should he make it out of this bloody meadow, he would tell Samantha. Some way to find the words to tell her of the others. And then his need for her swelled in him like a tangible thing.

  Damn, but one of them had to be the answer.

  Then the noisy crow was back at the doorway, cawing loudly. He smiled. And it felt good. How that huge black bird had survived the long and bloody morning, he had no idea.

  There’s been plenty of death for you already, he thought. Go now. Why don’t you fly far away now and be satisfied?

  It made Donegan’s stomach go cold, looking at that big, sleek, black bird nestled on a wooden shelf, cocking its head as it stared directly at him. And he remembered Reuben Waller telling him about crows. How the black bird was a harbinger of death.

  So why does this black bastard keep coming back to stare at me?

  18

  June 27, 1874

  Dixon watched Hanrahan go, bolting through the door and sprinting across the open, dusty ground as fast as a man could who was carrying two burlap sacks of cartridges for the riflemen over in the saloon. Billy was staying put.

  As soon as the two had flung themselves into Charley Rath’s store, the defenders had begun begging one or both of them to stay. None of the six already there was that good a shot. Besides, they pleaded with Dixon, there was Hannah to think of. Billy had gazed a moment over at the old woman’s prairie-wrinkled face as she knelt beside her husband, and decided then and there he would stay.

  Billy vowed that if the warriors overran the store, he would be the one to kill the woman rather than allow her to fall into the hands of those warriors, Hannah Olds could have been his mother.

  As soon as the spouts of dirt were no longer kicked up around Hanrahan’s boots, and the saloonkeeper lunged through the door opened to welcome his return to the soddy saloon, Billy turned back to gaze around the store and its defenses. The others had done a good job of it, piling sacks of grain and beans, along with a few kegs along the walls. In those furious first minutes, someone had kicked over the slop pail that had been sitting next to Hannah’s stove. Sometimes now, when the breeze might move just right, the air stunk of old grease gone rancid. From a far-off corner came a whiff of something thick and oily—the smell of kerosene pitch. Likely spilled or bullet-riddled.

  For now it seemed like a long-distance waiting game. With the warriors abandoning their horses and taking up positions to snipe at the three buildings while the hunters and skinners and cooks and clerks hid in the shadows, every man jack of them growing hotter and hotter still as the summer sun climbed relentlessly into a pale Panhandle sky.

  From time to time the warriors seemed to act in concert, firing heavy volleys that proved to be the signal for their wounded among the grass and brush to retreat. Then the air would grow still again for a long while and Billy could hear the arrival of another horse from the meadow. He wagged his head sadly. Horses being the gregarious sort of creature they were, any company was better than none whatsoever. So it was that the animals belonging to the hide men had been wandering back to the buildings all morning, most of them already seriously wounded, yet return
ing to the sod walls knowing this was where they would find a master, perhaps in some dull-witted way hoping for someone to relieve their suffering. Some of the horses and mules whinnied or hawed in their pain. Others had fallen and thrashed more quietly near the sod walls.

  From time to time Billy could hear the warrior bullets hit the big animals, smacking like sodden putty. Breath driven out of him with every wound until the screeching animal fell. Until there were no more animals left standing outside those three earth buildings. The Indians had seen to it there would be no chance of escape come nightfall.

  “What time you figure, Billy?” asked Andy Johnson quietly.

  Time had clearly stiffened that afternoon, sun sulled like it was in the sky. Dixon studied the quality of light coming through the window and over the transom just above the place where he lay. “Figure it’s getting on to four o’clock, Swede.”

  “I reckon you’re right as tits on a sow’s belly,” Johnson replied. “Makes me spooky, this quiet.”

  With that reminder, Dixon realized the firing from the meadow had slackened considerably. For so long the guns had rattled incessantly that he had grown numb to it.

  “You figure they’re up to something?” asked Tom O’Keefe, the blacksmith.

  “Do turkey buzzards eat strange meat?” Billy answered with a shrug, the cold sweat down his backbone finally starting to dry. “I think they’ve learned the hard way about our guns. They know that we hit what we aim for.”

  “That, and our guns shoot far,” Johnson added. “We been shooting the billy-be-hell out of ’em, and I haven’t seen any gun smoke from their side except a long ways off. Looks to me like them red devils is pulling back a ways and staying quiet as hay-bale mice.”

  “Got out from under our goddamned guns is what they’re doing,” Sam Smith exclaimed, one man as homely as blue sin.

  “I’ll get me a good look,” Dixon said, craning his neck to look up the stack of feed sacks the others had piled near the door at the north end of the west wall of the store. It was there that construction supervisor Andy Johnson had cut a crude transom over the door. As there was no glass for it, the transom had remained open.

  Sack by sack, with the borrowed .50-caliber Sharps in hand, Billy made his way to the top of the door and peered out, squinting into the late afternoon light, still brilliant at this time of year. From south to north he screwged his eyes across the western extent of the meadow that stretched toward a line of low, rugged, buzzard-bone bluffs. Across the flat ground lay a litter of wagons, hide ricks dead horses, mules and ponies. Besides a few of the dozen or so brown bodies that Dixon could see from his wobbly perch. Those, the warriors abandoned where they fell, too close to the white man’s guns.

  As his eyes slowly crawled back from north to west, Billy vowed he wanted to remember this scene well, to mark it in his heart, if not sear it in his memory—

  He saw something stir in the tall grass … eight hundred yards off toward those low ridges. Eight hundred at least. He squinted, shading his eyes with one hand. Sure enough, something was moving through the grass out there. About all there was moving out there for the time being.

  Carefully, he dragged the Sharps up from under his leg and poked the barrel through the transom.

  “You see something?” O’Keefe asked.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Shoot the red bastard where he looks the biggest,” said old man Olds.

  Feeling uneasy about his wobbly perch, Dixon brought up the rear sight and quickly gauged his windage. Then squeezed back on the trigger.

  He was abruptly shoved backward with a grunt, toppled by the recoil of the powerful weapon. He came down in a clatter of washtubs, tin cups, china dishes and a shower of dust.

  “Oh, God—Dixon’s shot!” George Eddy shouted to the others as he rushed over to the young buffalo hunter.

  “I ain’t hurt, dammit!”

  “You shot, Billy?” asked James Langton as the rest hurried around him, looking down as Dixon lay in a heap at the bottom of the pile of grain and flour sacks.

  “Nothing hurt but my pride,” Billy snorted. “Got knocked off my set is all.”

  O’Keefe and Johnson helped him up, dusted Dixon off.

  “There’s something out there I need to find out about,” Billy said as he turned to make his way back to the top of the stacks.

  At the transom, this time he carefully adjusted the top two sacks, eased down among them so that when the recoil hit his shoulder, he would not lose his balance. Finding his far-off target still crawling through the tall grass, making for the distant trees, Dixon took his sight picture, held, and pulled the trigger.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he muttered.

  “You hit it?” O’Keefe asked.

  “No, dammit,” Dixon growled. “Saw where my bullet went, though. Held a hair too high on the bastard.”

  “In a pig’s eye—you’ll get ‘im this time,” cheered Sam Smith.

  Dixon loaded again, then nestled his cheek along the stock a third time. When the pungent smoke again drifted from the transom, he stared at the far grass, eight hundred yards distant. Nothing moved. He waited the longest time, watching, thinking his eyes might be playing tricks on him. Still nothing moved.

  “S’pose I got ‘im,” Dixon said.

  There was a sudden cheer from the rest. He turned and grinned down at them, watching the dance of William Olds’s Adam’s apple up and down the thin cords of his wrinkled neck. Ex-Confederate Sam Smith, who had fought with Hood, was he-coon yelling, ki-yipping and slapping his leg.

  It was something short-lived, but joyous just the same. For too long that day they had been without reason to celebrate.

  * * *

  In the shade of a plum thicket, Quanah Parker had laid out of the sun for the middle of the day. Now the great orb had slipped from mid-sky and was halfway on its journey toward its nightly rest.

  Over the hours, feeling had returned to his shoulder and arm. Each time he had put his hand back to touch the shoulder blade, his fingers had come away with very little blood. So it had made him wonder—so much pain, this wound that took away the use of his arm … yet no great flow of blood.

  But, that wondering was nothing compared to his anger and confusion, thinking how it was that he had been shot. Over and over he had attempted to put the pieces of it together, like the cleaning of each piece to the Walker Colt his father gave him as a youth. The horse had been shot out from under him, and when Quanah had taken refuge behind an old buffalo carcass that wood rats had nested high with weeds, it was there the bullet had struck him.

  By the time a half-dozen young Kwahadis had come to rescue him from the plum thicket where he had crawled, the war chief was convinced one of the Indians had tried to kill him.

  So with his piece of red blanket, Quanah had called back his warriors, assembling the war chiefs for an immediate council. He demanded of his lieutenants to know who would be courageous enough to confess their poor marksmanship, if not their dark intent. With mutual distrust, every man there denied shooting the Kwahadi chief.

  “This is a day for evil medicine,” Isatai declared, quick in his attempt to make up for the failure of his prophecy. “The white man makes evil medicine over his guns.”

  In that anxious, frustrated circle of war chiefs gathered in safety behind the crest of a low hill, that explanation made as much sense as anything. Not able to understand anything having to do with ballistics and ricocheting bullets, the Indian grasped onto what he could fathom: the evil ways of the white man and what dark spells the buffalo hunters could put upon their weapons.

  “Perhaps,” Quanah said finally, seeing all eyes on him as he carefully volved the wounded, prickly-numb shoulder. “It is as I thought while I waited in the plum brush. Perhaps the white man has made him a fearful new weapon that fires bullets that can circle around and shoot a man in the back.”

  Then he glanced at Isatai, finding on the young shaman’s yellow face something new. No longer
was there the face of haughty arrogance staring back at him. Isatai realized his claim of power had been found to be impotent.

  “The Cheyenne,” Isatai grumbled, his eyes gone wild and feral as they dodged from chief to chief. “They have ruined my medicine!”

  “You are no shaman! You no longer have the special skunk medicine to make bullets into water!” retorted Hippy, a Cheyenne war chief. “There are many good men dead because of your foolishness!”

  “Yes!” shouted Elk Shoulder, another Cheyenne. “We should kill you ourselves, rather than let the white man do it for us!”

  “You Cheyenne are to blame,” Isatai argued. “One of you … yes—you,” he pointed. “It was you who killed the skunk on the way here. I ordered you not to.”

  “You are without courage!” Elk Shoulder shouted. “My own son is killed. Down in that meadow. Will your medicine protect you, Isatai? Will you go recover his body?”

  “You Cheyenne ruined my medicine!”

  Elk Shoulder spat on Isatai’s bare, ocher-painted leg, which hung off the side of the yellow pony. The shaman stared a moment at the spittle as it slowly oozed down his flesh.

  The Cheyenne’s voice rumbled with foreboding as he inched toward the Comanche shaman. “If you are truly powerful, go down to that meadow and bring me the body of my son. Then I will believe the words of your mouth.”

  “Will you Cheyenne not listen?” Isatai roared, stunning them all. “When you killed the skunk, you destroyed my personal medicine with the Spirit Above. I am not to blame—”

  With a loud splat and a muffled scream of surprise and pain, a bullet hit the yellow painted pony Isatai sat upon, squarely in the head.

  Backing away suddenly, several of the war chiefs clamped hands over their mouths while Isatai scrambled from his pony as it crumpled to the ground.

  “Aiyeee!”

  “The white man shoots us when we cannot see him!”

  Now even Quanah was frightened. This was the second time this day that he had experienced such evil from the white man’s guns. First he was hit by a bullet than skulked around behind him and struck from the back. And now, as they sat talking behind a hill, a bullet came out of nowhere and killed Isatai’s pony. This was truly powerful magic. And he loathed his white blood all the more for it.