Cheyenne Saturday - Empty-Grave Extended Edition

by Richard Jessup

  Cheyenne Saturday

  by

  Richard Jessup

  Empty-Grave Extended Edition

  Inside Flap

  It's Saturday. Payday. Workers at the railhead prepare for a night of drinking and carousing as the supply train rolls into camp—bringing with it fresh workers, additional soldiers and, most importantly, the chest containing that weeks wages. The train also brings Nathan Ellis—a Texan with his holster hung low and tied at the thigh—looking to deliver a payment of his own.

  On the horizon, Goose Face and his band of exiled indians watch the railhead slowly piercing the heart of indian country. He is looking to collect on a debt—and the only currency Goose Face accepts is the white man's scalp.

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2011 by A.Nicolai, Empty-Grave

  This book is copyrighted. Reproduction of this work, or any portion of this work, requires the full and written consent of A.Nicolai or Empty-Grave Publishing.

  Original Copyright © 1957 by Richard Jessup

  Editor's Note

  Dear Reader,

  As I was reading Cheyenne Saturday I found myself wondering about the “railhead” setting. The information I found may be of interest to other readers so I’m releasing this book as an Extended Edition and including a brief photo history of the Transcontinental Railroad. Enjoy!

  The rest of Jessup’s work will be released over time and my intention is to have just about everything he wrote back in print by 2015. Project information and updates are available at www.RichardJessup.com.

  A.Nicolai

  Empty-Grave Publishing

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  Chapter 1

  THE JUNE SUN climbed quickly above the rim of the Nebraska plains and began drawing off the morning freshness of the grass. The railhead was now west of the North Platte River and with the first streaks of dawn, massive, burly Irishmen began moving out of their tents to stand before the flaps and stare out into the endless plains. In the distance, those farthest to the west could see the unhurried movements of black-brown buffalo grazing contentedly. And beyond the buffalo, they could see the markers of the surveyors where rails would be laid by nightfall.

  The railhead began to stir itself awake. Voices of lean and hungry men broke the air. There were men wearing faded uniform trousers of both Confederate and Union Armies, with accents from a dozen regions and broken English from as many countries. And now, in the fullness of the chill morning, buckos, gang bosses, ex-sergeants and ex-officers moved among the sea of tents whipping their work gangs into haste. And the men who labored on the Union Pacific Railroad for seventy dollars a month whipped back at their buckos, often good-naturedly, often, too, with temper. They were not all ex-soldiers, obeying commands with the dispatch of army discipline. There were malingerers too, surly men who gambled and drank in the grog tents by night and sloughed their jobs during the day, whisky sweat drenching them under the Nebraska sun. But good-tempered or foul, they were wary, all of them, and alive to danger.

  Danger on the railhead of the Union Pacific came any way at all. From the serpent-like slash of an enraged Confederate's knife; the sly, unwarned blow of a drunken Irishman; the dart of a rattlesnake; the crash of a rail on a leg, leaving an injured man to die of gangrene far from home on the hot grassy plains. But more dreaded than these dangers, or the civilized threats encountered in Jeremy Watson's grog tents, from his women or his gambling tables, were the swift, brutal attacks of the Indians.

  As the men grumbled and stretched their way into the cook tents for breakfast, Liam Kelly, six feet four inches and two hundred seventy pounds of Black Irishman, emerged from his tent. Thoughtfully, his eyes traveled the length of the plain's horizon, stopping momentarily on the herd of grazing buffalo, and then skipping to a low, swollen rise some twenty miles out ahead. His eyes rested on the hump while he bit into his first chew of tobacco of the day. He would use up five plugs before the sun went down.

  “Slocum, lad,” Kelly said to a young man passing him, “did the surveyors and graders all get back to camp last night?”

  Slocum followed Kelly's gaze to the distant rise. “You thinkin' Goose Face out behind that hillock, Mr. Kelly?” he asked. He wore threadbare Confederate-gray trousers stuffed into the top of Texas boots.

  “If he isn't, lad, I'll be more worried than I am, wondering where the bloody bastard might hit us next.” Kelly shifted his tobacco cud to his other cheek, lodged it snugly behind his teeth, and spat neatly and accurately. “He's a clever bugger, Slocum, and he knows that today is Saturday—when the Johnny-Jacks will be drinkin' and carousin' in the grog tents with their pay.”

  “Well, Mr. Kelly,” Slocum said, dropping easily to his haunches and sucking on a blade of grass, “seein' how this is war—fer him it's war leastways—I reckon I'd do the same thing. Hit us when we wasn't expectin' it.” He nodded. “I never learned much else but fightin' in the conflict between the states, but I learned that. Hit ‘em when they don't expect it.”

  Slocum, who was hardly more than twenty-one, twisted around. “I don't see Jake's hoss,” he said thoughtfully, “so I guess he ain't in from scoutin'.”

  Kelly grunted. “I'll send Little out. Even if the graders and surveyors did come back, I don't like it. Now you get down to the grog tents and rush Little back here. Bring him to the general's office, and I want him sober, lad. If he's drunk, soak his head in a bucket of brine.” He squinted toward the rise. “If Goose Face is out there, I want to know about it. And I want to know how many of them black-hearted braves he's got with him, and just what his position is.”

  * * *

  His stomach pressing tightly against his snugly cinched belt after a breakfast of bacon, beans, biscuits and coffee, Kelly turned to the rails.

  His eyes glowed with pleasure as he toured the gangs, whipped to more and more speed by the hawking buckos. A gang of twenty, well forward of the rest, graded the rise and filled in the hammock, lashed by the guttural tongue of ex-Sergeant Otto Pottsman, who had ridden with Sheridan. Behind them, three gangs received the ties from other gangs who hauled the heavy gear from wagons and carts. The drivers of the supply wagons whipped their horses furiously, their carts bouncing on the rough open plains in a mad dash back to the supply train farther up the line. Jehu was the name given to the wagon drivers, after the Biblical king who raced his horses to death. Since most of the drivers were young boys, they were proud of the title.

  Further back, more gangs slid rails from carts and dropped them deftly into place, working in swift rhythm. Then came the gaugers and the mallet men to tap the rails into position before the spikes were driven home in three perfectly-timed swings. There were ten spikes to the rail, four hundred rails to the mile, and the men had been known to lay eight miles of track in a working day.

  Liam Kelly was too simple a man to characterize his love for railroad building as a dedication. He would have laughed in the man's face should one dare propose he was anything but a black-hearted Irish rail pusher—one who would drive, swear, plead, threaten, bluff, fight or kill to get the rails down. Kelly, who had seen his father push rails up and down the thin spine of the British Islands as a boy, and who himself had bucked the Cumberland Mountains when hardly out of his teens, ramming the rails westward for the Baltimore and Ohio, found happiness only when he could hear the incessant ripples of hammer strokes driving the spikes down and tying the rails to the earth f
orever.

  Throughout the war Kelly had kept troops, supplies and munitions moving on the Pennsylvania with his unlimited strength, knowledge of railroads and uncanny knack for getting more out of men than they thought was in them. As a bucko in charge of a repair gang, Liam Kelly had more than once kept rolling stock flowing across the rails when raiders or Southern sympathizers wrecked terminal points, ripped up track and blew up trestles. Kelly had no side in the war. He worked for the railroad and would have thrown his strength to the Confederacy just as easily if he had been on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line when the first shot was fired on Fort Sumter.

  The men worked well and freshly today, Kelly thought. Well, why shouldn't they? He turned to look down the thread of track that was all but hidden by muleskinners pulling in the fresh cross-ties and black, smoking iron men bringing up fresh rails, food, and other provisions. On either side of the double railing, a city of tents, all shapes, sizes and colors, sprawled. And all of it pointed, like the razor-sharp head of a Cheyenne arrow, to the railhead where the Johnny-Jacks laid rail.

  The men worked well, Kelly knew, because it was Saturday, and payday. He wondered if the pay train would be on time, or would Goose Face know about that too and waylay it? No, he thought, not with a full detachment of Union soldiers aboard.

  The pay train would not bring only money for his Johnny-Jacks, Kelly thought morosely, walking swiftly towards the general's big tent. There would be more whisky for Watson's tents, more raffish women, more gun-slinging drifters, and always—always—rails, ties and equipment. And there would be the letters and boxes that kept the men from being lost in a sea of grass, buffalo meat and Indians.

  Cheyenne Indians, Kelly grunted.

  There would be new men on the train, too, replacements for those who had died, or ducked out on their contracts, or been killed in grog-tent brawls—untrained workers who would hold up the others until they caught the driving rhythm of the railhead that was linking two oceans.

  Kelly stood outside the general's tent and looked at his watch, an old, gold Ever-Scott Hyland his father had given him. The pay train was due in half an hour, at six-thirty A.M. He nodded to the soldier on guard outside the general's tent, and entered, leaving behind the anvil chorus of the railhead pushing for the Continental Divide.

  * * *

  “The general is tied up, Kelly,” the young ex-major said amiably. “Can I help you?”

  Kelly hesitated. “I kinda wanted to talk to him personal, Major.”

  Billy Brighton, graduate engineer, who had served with the general during the Civil War, tapped his lips thoughtfully with a pencil. The general personally had picked Kelly to be his troubleshooter when red tape and the character of the general's position would not allow him to handle things himself. Kelly was the man the general sent back to Omaha to find out why there was a delay in getting the Johnny-Jacks' mail to them. Six-feet-four-inch Kelly was the roving bucko who quelled riots and gang fights when feuding over the late war broke out among the laborers; Kelly was the man who beat four hard, tough muleskinners with his bare hands for threatening to dump their load of ties into the North Platte if they didn't get double wages. When the Johnny-Jacks were too hung over from their bouts in the grog tents to go to work Monday morning, it was Kelly who got them up on their feet and out to push rails.

  A good man for his job, wise in the ways of railhead camps, Kelly knew when to be gentle and when to be rough. And Kelly also knew how to read the signs that foretold trouble. Anything, anything at all that would delay the Johnny-Jacks for three hours from laying rails was bucko Liam Kelly's job to fix. And if he could ward trouble off, Kelly answered only to the general as to his methods.

  “It's Goose Face, Major,” Kelly said. “There were rumors in camp last night.”

  “Goose Face!” Brighton looked grim. “The graders—the surveyors—they didn't get back to camp last night. That must be the reason.”

  Kelly's jaw set hard on his tobacco cud. “That settles it, Major, I have to see the general.” He pushed past Brighton and through another corridor of tenting on into a larger tent. The general was talking to three men in Eastern clothes. He looked up.

  “What is it, Kelly?”

  “Goose Face, sir. And the graders and surveyors haven't gotten back to camp yet.”

  “Have you any specific information?”

  “No, General, just suspicions.”

  The general stood up. “What about the scouts?”

  “Jake didn't get back either, sir. I've sent for Little.”

  The three Easterners listened to the exchange between the general and the big, rough-looking man who could barge in unannounced. “Who is Goose Face?” one of them asked the general.

  “One of Black Kettle's renegades,” the general said.

  “Who the hell is Black Kettle?” asked another of the Easterners.

  “Congressman,” the general said heavily, “if anybody should know who Black Kettle is, you should.”

  “See here—” the man protested.

  The general waved a hand to indicate that he had not intended to be rude. “Black Kettle, gentlemen, is chief of the Cheyenne.”

  “But we are at peace with the Cheyenne.”

  “Not,” said Kelly heavily, “since the massacre at Sandy Creek, Colorado, back in ‘64.”

  “Sandy Creek, Colorado? Massacre?” one of the three said. “What's that?”

  “The United States Government had a peace agreement with the Cheyenne. In 1864 Union soldiers swooped down and killed every man, woman and child in a Cheyenne village on Sandy Creek,” the general said bitterly. “Black Kettle swore vengeance.”

  “That's Black Kettle,” one of the men said, “but who is Goose Face?”

  “Goose Face, gentlemen,” Kelly said, and spat onto the grassy floor of the tent, “is supposed to be the lone survivor of Sandy Creek. He was only a kid of fifteen at the time.”

  “A soldier's bayonet,” the general interrupted, “slashed the boy's face. He was left for dead. But he lived,” the general added heavily, “and there are a lot of settlers, Johnny-Jacks, women and children who would be alive today if he hadn't. He took a blood oath, or so the story goes.”

  “I believe it, General,” Kelly said.

  “I do too, Kelly.” The general nodded. “The boy's wounds healed but left him horribly disfigured. The injuries to his chin and nose make him resemble a goose.”

  Kelly took up the narrative. “Since Black Kettle has declared war on all whites, Goose Face, a bitter lad of eighteen now, has gathered around himself a band of about a hundred renegades—Cheyenne, some Sioux and any others who will swear death to the white man.”

  “Why hasn't something been done about him?” demanded one of the congressmen.

  The General answered patiently: “We're building a railroad, Congressman—not fighting Indians. Goose Face is—though only eighteen—a full-grown man in warfare. He's cunning and ruthless. Very few men have ever seen him, and the story goes that he paints his face into a mask trying to cover his disfigurements. I've heard that he has killed men of his own who looked at him too long, or laughed.”

  “And you think he's near here?” one of the congressmen demanded. He turned to Kelly. “You think he might attack?”

  “I don't ever think, mister,” Kelly said without expression. “I can't answer your question until I know.”

  “When Little returns from his patrol, inform me immediately if Goose Face is in the area,” the general said to Kelly, on a note of dismissal.

  Outside the tent, Kelly snorted in annoyance at the dandified Easterners, even if they were congressmen. If they wanted to visit the railhead, Kelly grumbled to himself, they shouldn't mess their britches at the mention of a possible Indian attack. But Kelly, in his heart of hearts, didn't really blame the men from the East. There were tough Micks and ex-Confeds who thought twice before they dismissed the possibility of an Indian raid. And there wasn't a man in camp who hadn't heard about Goose
Face's ruthlessness.

  Kelly looked around for Slocum and Little. Not seeing either of them, he started off toward Watson's grog tents. Kelly didn't mind a Johnny-Jack throwing his money away in poker games, or on women or grog, but he hated the manner of men who inevitably dealt in such services. And Jeremy Watson was as bad a man in that regard as Kelly had ever run up against. More than once the big Irish bucko had gone into the main saloon tent to pull Johnny-Jacks out by the neck and send them scurrying for the railhead. Watson would grin and say, “It's not my fault if they can't hold their liquor, Kelly.” When a railman lost heavily at poker, and complained, Watson's gang of toughs would soon put an end to any bellyaching. So far Kelly had managed to stay shy of an open conflict with Watson, though he had been itching for one for months now. If a man couldn't hold onto his pay after working so hard for it, Kelly reasoned, then he deserved to lose it. But when a man was beaten so badly that he missed days and weeks on the rails, or perhaps even had to go back East, then Liam Kelly was involved. It took too long to get new recruits for the railhead, and that meant delay, and where there was delay it was Kelly's job to put an end to it.

  It would have been simple for him to have the general order Watson and his women away, but the men working the rails wouldn't have stood for it. Isolated out here in these great, sandy plains, they had to have someplace to blow off a little steam.

  He had gotten no more than twenty feet from the general's tent when he heard the howl and roar of the pay train. The railhead encampment greeted it with hoarse Irish curses and rebel yells. Tonight, Kelly thought wearily, the women in Watson's tents would get a big play, as would the gambling tables and the whisky crocks.

  He turned in his tracks and went to meet the train and the new labor gangs from the East. And there was a little hope in his eye that a thick stack of letters would be on the train from Dublin and his Kathleen.

  * * *