Winchester 1887

by William W. Johnstone

  Another bullet sang through the trees.

  Sixpersons freed his left hand from the shotgun’s walnut forearm and found his spectacles. He had to adjust them so he could see clearer, but all he saw above him was a blur. “Sweating like a pig,” is how that worthless deputy marshal he partnered with, Malcolm Mallory, would have described it. Idiot white man. Pigs don’t sweat.

  He found one end to his silk wild rag and wiped the glasses free of perspiration. His right hand never left the Winchester, and his finger remained on the trigger.

  A Model 1887 lever-action shotgun in twelve-gauge, it weighed between six and eight pounds and held five shells that were two and five-eighths inches long (ten-gauge shells were even slightly bigger). The barrel was twenty-two inches. When Sixpersons got it, back in the fall of ’88, the barrel had been ten inches longer, but he had sawed off the unnecessary metal over the gunsmith’s protests that the barrel was Damascus steel. Thirty-two inches was too much barrel for an officer of the U.S. Indian Police and the U.S. Marshals.

  “Did you get him, Ned?” a voice called out from the woods.

  “I think so. He ain’t movin’ no-how,” came Ned’s foolish reply.

  “He was a lawdog, Ned,” the first voice, nasally and high-pitched, cried out. “I see’d the sun reflect off’n his badge, Ned.”

  “He’s a dead lawdog now, Bob.”

  “Mebbe-so, but you know ’em federal deputies—they don’t travel alone.”

  That reminded Sixpersons of his partner. Where in the Sam Hill was Malcolm Mallory?

  Footsteps crushed the twigs and pinecones as someone moved away from Sixpersons.

  The Cherokee lawman rolled to his knees and pushed himself up. He was tall and lean, had seen more than sixty-one winters, and his hair, now completely gray, fell past his shoulders. His face carried the scars of too many chases, too many fights. He kept telling his wife he would quit one of these days, and she kept telling him as soon as he did, he would die of boredom.

  In the Indian Nations, deputy marshals did not die of boredom.

  Sixpersons rose and moved through the woods—like a deer, not an old-timer.

  Tucked in the southeastern edge of Choctaw land just above the Red River and Texas, that part of the country could be pitilessly hard. The hills were rugged, the ground hard and rocky, and trees, towering pines and thick hardwoods, trapped in the summer heat. The calendar said spring. The weather felt like Hades. He didn’t care for it, but passed that off as his prejudice against Choctaws. Cherokees, being the better people, of course, cared little for loud-mouthed, blowhard Choctaws.

  He could hear Ned and Bob lumbering through the thick forest, thorns from all the brambles probably ripping their clothes and their flesh.

  Sixpersons figured where they were going, moved over several rods, and ran down the leaves-covered hillside, sliding to a stop and disappearing into another patch of woods. Ten minutes later, he pushed through some saplings and stepped onto the wet rocks that made the banks of the river.

  The country was green. Always seemed to be green. The water rippled, reminding him of his thirst, but Jackson Sixpersons would drink later. If he were still alive.

  He stepped into the river, the cold water easing his aching feet and calves, soaking his moccasins and blue woolen trousers as he waded across the Mountain Fork. A fish jumped somewhere upstream where the river widened. He had picked the shallowest and shortest part of the river to cross and entered the northeastern side of the woods. He moved through it, heading back downstream, hearing the water begin to flow faster as he moved downhill.

  How much time passed, he wasn’t sure, but the water flowed over rocks—running high from recent spring rains—when he dropped to a knee and swung the shotgun’s big barrel toward the other side of the Mountain Fork.

  Bob and Ned burst through the forest, fell to their knees, and dropped to their bellies, slurping up the water, splashing their faces, and trying to catch their breath.

  Through the leaves and branches, Sixpersons could see the two fugitives clearly. Luck had been with him. Well, those two boys weren’t bright or speedy. He wet his lips, feeling the sweat forming again and rolling down his cheeks.

  “C’mon, Bob,” Ned said as he pushed himself to his feet. “This way.”

  Sixpersons waited until they were near the big rock in midstream, not quite waist-deep in the cool water. Only then did he step out of the forest and bring the Model 1887’s stock to his right shoulder.

  He did not speak. He didn’t have to.

  The two men stopped. Their hands fell near their belted six-shooters, but both men froze.

  Slim men with long hair in store-bought duds, they had lost their hats in the woods. Their shirts were torn. One of them wore a crucifix, another a beaded necklace. Not white men, but Creek Indians—Cherokees didn’t care much for Creeks, either. Jackson Sixpersons didn’t consider these two men Indians. Not anymore.

  They were whiskey runners, selling contraband liquor, some of it practically poison, to Indians, half-breeds, squaw—men, women, even kids. Jackson despised whiskey runners. He had seen what John Barleycorn could do to Cherokees . . . and Creeks . . . and Choctaws . . . and Chickasaws . . . and all Indians in the territories. He recalled all too well that wretched state liquor had often left him in.

  He had, of course, been introduced to bourbon. Grew to like it, depend on it, even became a raging drunk for twenty-two years. Until his wife told him that if he didn’t quit drinking, she would pick up that Winchester of his when he passed out next time and blow his head off.

  No liquor, not even a nightcap of bourbon, even when he had an aching tooth, had passed his lips since ’89.

  Ned and Bob could see the six-pointed deputy U.S. marshal’s badge pinned on Sixpersons’ Cherokee ribbon shirt. Sixpersons figured he didn’t have to tell those two boys anything.

  “He can’t kill us both, Bob.” Ned, the taller of the two Creeks, even grinned. “He’s an old man, anyhow. Slower than molasses.”

  Jackson Sixpersons could have told Ned and Bob that they would likely get two or three years for running whiskey, maybe another for assaulting a federal lawman, but Judge Parker, being a good sort, did show mercy, and probably would have those sentences run concurrently. It wasn’t like those two faced the gallows.

  Instead, he said nothing. He never had been much for talk.

  “Reckon he’s blind, too.” Bob grinned a wild-eyed grin.

  Silently, Sixpersons cursed Malcolm Mallory for not being there, but waited with silence and patience.

  “Die game!” Bob yelled. He clawed for his pistol first.

  The shotgun slammed against the Cherokee marshal’s shoulder. His ears rang from the blast of that cannon, but he heard Bob’s scream and ducked, moving to his left, bringing the lever down and up, replacing the fired shell with a fresh load.

  Most lawmen in Indian Territory favored double-barrel shotguns, and Jackson Sixpersons couldn’t blame them. There was something terrifying about looking down those big bores of a Greener, Parker, Savage or some other brand. With cut-down barrels, scatterguns sprayed a wide pattern.

  Yet that master gun maker, old John Moses Browning—old; he had turned thirty-two in ’87—knew what he was doing when he designed the Model 1887 lever-action shotgun for Winchester Repeating Arms. That humped-back action was original, even compact considering the ’87s came in those big twelve- and ten-gauge models. When the lever was worked, the breechblock rotated at lightning speed down from the chamber. Closing the lever sent the breechblock up and forward, with a lifter feeding the new shell from the tubular magazine and into the chamber. This action also moved the recessed hammer to full cock.

  A double-barrel shotgun could fire only twice. The ’87 had four shells in the magazine and one in the chamber. It fired about as fast as a Winchester repeating rifle.

  Jackson Sixpersons didn’t need five shots. Ned’s shot hit nothing but white smoke, and the big twelve-gauge roared again.

>   When the next wave of smoke cleared, Ned lay on the rock, faceup, his chest a bloody mess. The current had swept Bob’s carcass downstream a few rods before he got hung up, facedown, on some driftwood on the far bank.

  Birds had stopped chirping. Sixpersons set the shotgun’s half-cock safety notch, rose, the joints in his old knees popping, and stepped into the stream.

  He reached the rock, closed Ned’s eyes, and looked for the pistol the Creek had carried, but the weapon must have fallen into the river. It was likely nearby, but Sixpersons wasn’t bending over to hunt for some old pistol. Likely, he would get wet enough just dragging the dead punk across the cold, fast-flowing river.

  Cursing in Cherokee, then English, he moved toward Bob’s body. At least this one had the decency to die near the bank. Sixpersons laid his shotgun on dry ground and pulled the dead whiskey runner onto the bank. The blast had caught Bob in the stomach and groin, and he had bled out considerable. Still heavy, for a corpse. Probably from all the buckshot in his belly.

  Sopping wet by the time he got Ned onto the bank, out of breath, and sweating, the deputy cursed the two Creeks. “Die game.” He shook his head. “Die foolish.”

  After wiping sweat from his forehead, he looked at the woods he would have to travel across. Getting those two boys to Fort Smith would prove a big challenge, and that caused him to laugh. He had taken Deputy U.S. Marshal Jimmy Mann deer hunting up in the Winding Stair Mountains where Jimmy had bagged a twelve-pointer with a clean shot from his Winchester. But it was Sixpersons who had butchered the deer and hauled it those grueling four miles back to camp.

  Shaking off the memory, he reloaded the Winchester before he drank water from the stream or wrote in his notebook—still dry—what would pass for a report on the attempted arrests and subsequent deaths of Bob Gooty and Ned Yargee, whiskey runners, Creek Nation.

  He found a couple corndodgers, stale but salty, and a tough piece of jerky in his pocket. That was all he had to eat. The rest of his food lay in his saddlebags on the horse he had tethered to a pine back near where the whiskey runners had camped. Their horses had run off when they started the ball after Sixpersons had demanded their surrender.

  Three miles. Not as many as he had had to cart that deer Jimmy Mann had killed. But there were two carcasses this time.

  It would have been easier in the old days. All he would have had to do was cut off their heads, stick those in a gunnysack, and carry them to the Indian court. But Judge Parker and the Senate-confirmed U.S. marshal, Mr. Crump, frowned on such things in the civilized word.

  And the ground was too hard to bury the Creeks and come back later with horse and pack mules.

  Sixpersons was ready to call it quits, just leave them there for coyotes and ravens, and forget any reward that might have been posted, when he heard a horse’s whinny.

  He came up with the Winchester, aiming at an opening in the woods a quarter-mile downstream. A dun pony stepped out and into the water, and the shotgun was lowered.

  The rider eased the horse out of the river and up onto the bank, grinning at Jackson Sixpersons. “Howdy,” Deputy Marshal Malcolm Mallory said.

  Sixpersons didn’t answer with word or nod. The fool hadn’t even ridden out of the woods with pistol or rifle ready.

  “Dead, eh?”

  The Cherokee’s head bobbed, though it was one stupid question.

  You kill ’em?”

  He answered. “No, Wild Bill Hickok shot them.”

  Mallory laughed like a hyena and dismounted, which was one good thing.

  “I’ll hold your horse,” Sixpersons told him. “You put the bodies over your saddle.”

  “But—”

  “How else are we getting them back to Virgil Flatt’s tumbleweed wagon?”

  Deputy U.S. marshals did not work alone. At least, they weren’t supposed to. It was too dangerous. But sometimes Jackson Sixpersons wondered exactly what U.S. Marshal George J. Crump, appointed and confirmed by the Senate back in April of ’93, was thinking.

  Working with Malcolm Mallory and Virgil Flatt, Sixpersons might as well be working alone.

  It was Flatt’s job to drive the tumbleweed wagon, which was basically a temporary jail on a wagon bed. Iron bars were affixed to the reinforced wooden floor, with a padlocked door swinging out from the rear of the wagon. The roof leaked, and if the prisoners got too rough, they could be chained to the floor. Painted on the side of the wagon was U.S. COURT.

  Under Judge Parker’s orders, the driver of the wagon was not allowed to carry a gun. So in essence, the party of deputies was limited to two—Jackson Sixpersons and Malcolm Mallory. The way the Cherokee did his math, basically one.

  The sun was setting, but the day had yet to cool by the time Sixpersons and Mallory reached Flatt’s camp. The two deputies had found the dead whiskey runners’ horses and transferred the bodies to those mounts. Ned and Bob were pretty much bloated by the time they reached camp, causing Flatt to curse and moan.

  “We’ll pack them down in charcoal when we reach Doaksville,” Mallory said, the one sensible thing he had spoken all day, maybe all week.

  “Who kilt ’em?” Flatt asked.

  Mallory tilted his hat toward Sixpersons, who was rubbing down his horse.

  “Got coffee boilin’.” Flatt did something unusual. He filled a tin cup and took it to Sixpersons.

  The Cherokee knew something was wrong. Besides receiving the coffee, he could read it in the tumbleweed wagon driver’s eyes. He accepted the cup, stepped around his horse, and waited.

  “Trader come along, headin’ for Texas,” Flatt said.

  Sixpersons waited.

  “I give ’im some coffee and a bit of flour.” Flatt’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “He give me a paper. Newspaper, I mean.” He reached into the rear pocket of his duck trousers, pulled out and unfolded a newspaper. “Democrat, only two weeks old.”

  Sixpersons took the newspaper.

  “Second page. Well . . . it’s . . .” Flatt stepped away.

  Sixpersons opened the newspaper, saw the story just above an advertisement at the bottom of the page for Straubmuller’s Elixir Tree of Life.

  “What is it?” Mallory asked.

  Sixpersons read.

  Flatt answered. “Ex-marshal, Jimmy Mann. Seems he kilt Danny Waco, the old border ruffian, over in Texas, but he got hisself kilt doin’ it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Greenville, Arkansas

  To the teller at the Greenville Independent Bank, the gun in the hand of the man in the hood looked like a cannon. Five other men inside the bank also wielded guns—one a rifle, the others revolvers—but those weapons weren’t four inches from Mike Crawford’s face.

  “You tell me there’s a time lock on that safe again,” Wheat-sack hood said, “and I’ll wallpaper this place with your blood and brains.”

  Crawford had seen shotguns before, but nothing like that one. It had no stock, but a pistol grip that ended just beyond the lever. The wooden fore end was covered with beaded leather and the case-hardened, blued barrel had been sawed off just in front of the tubular magazine. He had done enough dove and deer hunting to know that the bootlegged Winchester shotgun was a ten-gauge. It wouldn’t just wallpaper the back wall with his blood and brains; it would blow his entire head off.

  He had already lost his watch. The man with the pistol-grip Winchester ’87 scattergun had ripped the Waltham out of his vest pocket and dropped it into his own pocket. To Mike Crawford, that watch—a gift from his dearly departed father—was worth more than all the money in the bank, though he knew his boss would disagree with any such sentiment.

  Crawford nodded just slightly and backed away from the counter. One of the hooded men with a revolver hurdled over the gate and followed him to the vault door. As soon as he turned, he felt the barrel of the pistol ram into his back. He flinched, but at least the man did not shoot. Slowly, he pulled open the heavy vault door, walked inside, and easily opened the safe.

  “Payday, boys!”
the man said, pushing Crawford aside. “Come and get it.”

  Two other men rushed through the gate, into the vault, and began filling sacks and saddlebags with greenbacks and coins.

  Crawford found a handkerchief in the pocket of his waistcoat and wiped his brow. He heard the man with the shotgun say from the bank’s office, “You. Empty the tills. Now, or you’re a dead man.” He was talking to Spencer Tillman, assistant cashier.

  Crawford returned the soaking piece of cotton to his pocket and stood ramrod straight as the men in the safe stuffed money into their bags, not even bothering to pick up the bills and coins that fell onto the floor.

  Greenville, Arkansas, was not a big town, and the Greenville Independent Bank was not a big bank. The town was located between the St. Louis & San Francisco Railroad and Indian Territory, southwest of Fayetteville, practically due north of Van Buren. The bank held maybe $2,500, if that, between what was in the vault and in the tills of the tellers. It hardly seemed worth the outlaws’ time, but Crawford wasn’t about to tell anyone that—especially the man with the cut-down Winchester ’87 shotgun.

  He just wanted to get out of there alive, back to his wife and three little girls. He was praying that if he did survive, well, he would even stop seeing that Cherokee soiled dove over in Flint, and might—no he would—rejoin the choir at the Methodist church.

  The bank robbers had no reason to kill him. He had opened the safe, wasn’t doing anything, and there was no way he could identify any of them with those wheat-sack masks they all wore. He frowned, remembering the shotgun. There couldn’t be two like that west of the Mississippi River.

  Five seconds later, he heard words outside the bank that he had prayed he would not hear until the robbers had left the Greenville Independent Bank.

  “Robbery! Robbery! Robbery!”

  The words were followed by a gunshot. Then another. Moments later, the streets of the small town sounded like Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.

  Glass shattered somewhere inside the bank.