Bodeen turned away from James and stared. Millard had asked a question, not stated a fact.
“That the idea?” Millard asked.
A tear rolled down the old man’s cheek. From one eye. The other eye was nothing more than a dark, ugly hole. The old man did not speak.
Millard knew that the girl, Bodeen’s daughter, had passed out—which, he figured, was a good thing.
“Put you out of your misery,” Millard said, not taking his eyes off the whiskey runner. “You swallowed enough of your brew to know what’s in store for you. The same as those folks you poisoned in Texas. And all those Indians you’ve murdered.”
“Savages,” the old man hissed.
Millard said nothing. He just stared, but he could feel the chill racing up his spine, a chill that was maybe a hundred degrees from the heat he felt, heat from anger and the intense summer sun that sent beads of sweat down his face. His hands felt clammy. One wrong move, and Bodeen would kill James. Millard had traveled too far, seen too many men die already—from his own hand—to be the cause of his oldest boy’s murder.
He knew what Bodeen wanted. Knew why the old man was playing this game. And he had an idea how it would end. But if he played the wrong cards, James would be dead.
“I’ll . . .”—the whiskey runner shook from a spasm that sent a mixture of blood, vomit, and saliva dribbling from both corners of his mouth—“kill . . . the . . .”—he almost collapsed, but somehow found enough strength to stay alive, and steady the gun a little, staring at James—“the . . . the . . . boy.”
“Or me.”
The man’s eyes locked again on Millard. “No . . . the . . . kid.”
Millard said in a steady, deliberate voice, “Go ahead.”
Fort Arbuckle, Chickasaw Nation
The old army post sat on the southern bank of the Washita River. Many years earlier, when Jackson Sixpersons was in his teens, the place had bustled with white men. A captain named Randolph Marcy had selected the site to put up a fort to protect the white settlers traveling westward on the California Trail from Comanches, Kiowas, Cheyennes, and Arapahos. The Army would also protect the Choctaws and Chickasaws, those civilized Indians, from being butchered by the warlike Indian tribes.
The fort had been crowded with soldiers, but had never been much of a fort. It was a long rectangle, barracks facing each other from the two longest sides, the quartermaster’s compound on the third side and a commissary across from it. Roughhewn log cabins numbered close to thirty or so, but it was not enough for the white men. Before Arbuckle was even ten years old, the army had sent most of the troops stationed there to build another base called Cobb. Texas Rebels took over the fort during the Civil War, and after the rebellion had been put down, the 6th Infantry and the 10th Cavalry, the latter regiment one of the all-black “buffalo soldiers” troops, came back to man the fort.
About all the fort was ever used for was to feed and grain horses and other livestock, mostly during the army campaigns against the Cheyennes in 1868. By the time Fort Sill had been established in 1869, there was no longer any reason for Fort Arbuckle to exist, and the army had abandoned it a year later.
It still looked abandoned.
“They got coffee at this here post?” Virgil Flatt asked.
Jackson Sixpersons did not answer, and refused to shake his head at the tumbleweed wagon driver’s joke. Or maybe Flatt was that stupid.
Malcolm Mallory shouted, “You fool. This fort is named after General Matthew Arbuckle, a great man in this part of the country. Not after Arbuckles coffee.”
“Iffen he was such a great general, how come they named this rawhide lookin’ outfit after ’im?”
Flatt was right. It was one rawhide-looking outfit, held together by spit and sand, and maybe the wind kept some of those rotting buildings from collapsing in a heap. A few had been burned already, leaving nothing but stone fireplaces as their tombstones. But two horses were tethered in front of a stone powder house, and a tall man in a gray hat stepped outside.
Sixpersons reined in and held up his left hand. His right did not lessen its hold on the lever-action shotgun. “O-si-yo,” he called out in Cherokee.
“Don’t hello me in your heathen tongue,” responded the man in the gray hat. “Come get this man-killer and take him to Arkansas so he can be jerked to his Jesus.”
“Open the door,” Sixpersons told Malcolm Mallory. “Let the prisoners empty their bladders. I’ll fetch Doc Starr.”
He rode up to the half-breed lawman for the Chickasaws, and saw the gray-hatted Indian disappear inside the powder house. By the time Sixpersons had ridden close enough to dismount, a thin man sailed through the opening, landed in the dirt with a grunt, tried to stand, but collapsed.
The Chickasaw in the gray hat stepped outside, wiping his hands on his black britches.
“He’s all yours, Sixpersons.”
The Cherokee lawman nodded before swinging from the saddle. Doc Starr lifted his head, spit out dirt and saliva, and pushed himself to his knees, before he wiped the sand from his lips.
“Doc Starr?” Sixpersons asked.
“Yeah.” At least that half-breed did not deny it.
“I have a warrant for your arrest. You are charged with murder—”
“Eat it.”
Sixpersons pressed the barrel of the twelve-gauge atop the man’s bald head. “Up. I carry you in alive to hang or dead to be buried.”
The half-breed rose, stared at Sixpersons’ spectacles, and then looked at the barrel of the Winchester ’87.
“Walk to the wagon,” Sixpersons said. “Run, I shoot you. Trip, I shoot you. Do anything other that walk straight to that wagon and climb inside and I shoot you.” He watched.
Doc Starr was no fool. He did not run, did not trip, did not stagger, but walked straight for the wagon where the other prisoners were climbing back inside. Doc Starr found a comfortable spot on the floor and sat down. A few moments later, Malcolm Mallory was locking the door, and looking across the old fort’s parade grounds at Sixpersons.
Sixpersons turned to the Chickasaw in the gray hat. “I’m after a whiskey runner.”
The man in the gray hat, whose name was Folsom, nodded. “So are many.”
“He poisoned a lot of Comanches a while back.”
“I care not for the Snake People,” Folsom said. “Let them die.”
“I’d like to bring this white man in.”
Folsom grinned. “I think he is dead by now.”
Possible. Probable. “Then where might I find his body?”
No answer. Instead, Folsom pointed to the blue roan mare next to his sorrel. “I will keep the killing doctor’s mare. It is not a bad horse . . . for a white man.”
Sixpersons nodded. He could have taken the horse back to Fort Smith, but he knew how to barter with a Chickasaw.
After gathering the reins to the blue roan mare, Folsom swung into the saddle on the sorrel and turned to ride southeast. “I must be at Fort Washita in a week’s time.”
“Shouldn’t take you anywhere near that long.”
“No. We will meet the Texans there. They bring us money for grass to feed their beef.”
“Good for you and your people.”
The Indian nodded. “Maybe.”
Sixpersons waited.
Folsom tilted his head. “This man my people know as Wildcat. He was to bring them whiskey.”
Sixpersons nodded.
“Wild Horse Creek. At the crossing near the hills.”
“I know of it.” Sixpersons felt relief. That wasn’t more than a day’s ride west.
“He was to bring them whiskey,” Folsom said again. “My people were to bring him death.”
Wild Horse Creek
“What?” The .54-caliber cannon in Wildcat Lamar Bodeen’s hand shook wildly, but the whiskey runner recovered and used his free hand to help steady the big pistol.
“You heard me,” Millard Mann said. “Kill the boy.”
The one-eyed ma
n sneered. “And then you kill me.”
“I’d have to drop your daughter to fetch my pistol. Might break her neck.”
“Like I give a fig.”
Millard made himself look away from the whiskey runner and killer. Those Chickasaws might have found enough courage or help to come back, and those oxen wouldn’t make good time. They needed to head out of the place already reeking of poisoned whiskey and death immediately. Else they’d all be dead.
“Son,” Millard said easily.
James, his face pale, blinked and stared at his father, his father who had just told a man holding a Dragoon’s old horse pistol to go ahead and blow his boy’s head off.
“This girl’s getting heavy. Let’s walk over to that shade and set her down for a spell.” Millard waited.
The boy did not move.
Millard couldn’t blame him. “It’s all right, James. Trust me. Let’s go.”
Slowly, James took a tentative step back. His Adam’s apple moved up, then down, and he took another step. He made himself look at his father as they slowly carried the unconscious body of Robin Lamar away from the giant freight wagon and the one-eyed whiskey runner with that massive single-shot pistol.
“Stop!” Wildcat Lamar Bodeen croaked.
Millard merely nodded at his son, who took another step back.
The old man would be aiming at Millard’s back, for James stood in front of his father. If Bodeen pulled the trigger, the .54-caliber ball would tear through the flesh of Millard Mann, and not his seventeen-year-old son.
“I’ll kill ye both!” the whiskey runner called.
Millard nodded, and James took another step. Then Millard whispered, “Stop.”
“One more step . . . and yer . . . dead!” Bodeen managed to spit out the order.
Slowly, Millard Mann turned. He was staring at the cavernous barrel of the big pistol. “You got one shot, Bodeen. Best remember that. And how that poison you brewed killed all those Indians and white folks in the Panhandle.” He turned back around, smiled at his son, and nodded.
James took another step. Millard walked with him.
Another step.
Another.
Bam! They heard the gunshot.
Fort Arbuckle
“That don’t make a lick of sense, Jackson.” Shaking his sweaty head, Deputy U.S. Marshal Malcolm Mallory slapped his fancy hat, ordered from the Sears & Roebuck Company, against his pants, sending dust sailing into the air.
Not to you, Sixpersons thought, but, in true Cherokee style, held his tongue.
Sitting on the driver’s seat of the tumbleweed wagon, Virgil Flatt bathed a beetle with a thin shot of brown tobacco juice. “Ya know what yer doin’?” the cantankerous coot asked.
The Cherokee lawman nodded. “I want you to take these prisoners back to Fort Smith,” he repeated. “Once you get there, find Judge Parker, tell him to get Crump and send some good marshals—good marshals, savvy? That don’t mean Boston Graves. Send them to”—he had to think—“Fort Washita.” That was close enough and in the Chickasaw Nation. It wasn’t a real fort anymore, but it was a major stopping point in the territory. If the Chickasaw lawman named Folsom had not mentioned it, Sixpersons didn’t know which Chickasaw stagecoach stop, inn, or campsite he would have suggested.
“How many laws?” Virgil Flatt asked, and then shifted the quid of chewing tobacco to his far cheek.
About a hundred and fifty, thought Sixpersons, but he shrugged. “A dozen.”
Judge Parker, as good as he was, would be forced to reduce the number to six, and Marshal Crump would dwindle the six to maybe only three. But that would have to do. Unless one of those three happened to be Deputy U.S. Marshal Malcolm Mallory.
“But you know Judge Parker’s orders,” Mallory said. “No deputy is to travel through this country without someone to back him up.”
Then why do I have you and Flatt? Again, Sixpersons merely nodded. “Chances are this is nothing, but I don’t want to risk the lives of these prisoners.” Even if the tumbleweed wagon is full of killers, rapists, thieves, and whiskey runners, men who don’t give a spit for the law or the Indian people who live in this country.
Outlaws like Link McCoy and Zane Maxwell would not care if they gunned down a bunch of wanted men, unarmed, riding in the back of a prison wagon. For all Sixpersons knew, those outlaws might even free the prisoners and force them into the McCoy-Maxwell Gang. All he knew was that that always-smoking Newton Ah-ha-lo-man-tubbee had told him that Link McCoy was looking for a whiskey runner to help him pull off a job, some kind of robbery somewhere in Indian Territory.
And Sixpersons was right close to finding the crazed, killing whiskey runner named Bodeen that McCoy needed. Find Bodeen, and Sixpersons was that much closer to catching and arresting—or killing—Link McCoy and his confederates.
Sixpersons certainly did not need a couple imbeciles named Virgil Flatt and Malcolm Mallory to foul up his chance or possibly, probably, get himself killed.
“But Judge Parker and Marshal Crump won’t like this at all,” Mallory whined.
“They will if this leads me to who I think it will.” Sixpersons was tired of talking. He wanted to get the tumbleweed wagon moving west and wanted to put his horse into a lope toward Wild Horse Creek.
“Well, who is it yer goin’ after?” Flatt asked.
“Tell Judge Parker and Marshal Crump it’s Link McCoy and probably Zane Maxwell.”
That caused Flatt’s mouth to fall open, and Mallory to straighten in his saddle.
“Tell them,” Sixpersons repeated. He had dallied long enough. He adjusted his spectacles, pulled down the brim of his hat, and, still holding the Winchester ’87 twelve-gauge in his right hand, he kicked his horse into a fast walk, riding away from Flatt, Mallory and the prisoners in the wagon.
Before Flatt or Mallory could holler some other fool question at him, he kicked the horse into a steady lope.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wild Horse Creek
Texas had been a hard place for Millard, Jimmy, and Borden Mann to grow up as young teens, and even as young men. It could still be hard. Jimmy had learned that, and so had Millard, up in Tascosa earlier that year. Indian Territory could be just as lawless.
Millard remembered back in 1890 when the U.S. Census Bureau’s superintendent had said that the Western frontier of America was history, that the West had been settled, that the frontier was closed, a thing of the past. Maybe two years back, he had read a newspaper account of some talk this historian named Turner had given up in Michigan or Minnesota, maybe Wisconsin, pretty much saying the same thing.
The West might be settled, a part of American history, and the frontier might be officially closed from a population standpoint, but Millard knew that the West could be just as hard, just as mean, just as bloody, and just as tough as it had been back when he and his brothers were growing up. Back when Jimmy and Border were still alive.
“Don’t look,” Millard told his son. “Just lower the girl to the ground. Gently.”
When they had Robin Bodeen lying in the dirt near the destroyed whiskey barrels, he said, “Stay with her,” and walked back to the big freight wagon.
Wildcat Lamar Bodeen, or whatever his real name was, had indeed made his one shot count. He had pressed the barrel of the horseman’s pistol and sent the ball through his temple. The old one-eyed man lay on his side, still holding the smoking single-shot weapon.
After climbing up into the wagon, Millard pried the warm gun from the dead man’s cold grip. The weapon was slick and slender, a fine pistol in its day. Briefly, he studied the gun before tossing it near the wreckage of whiskey barrels.
The Christian thing, the decent thing, to do would be to bury the man, but being visibly dead might buy the living some time. Millard rolled the corpse out of the wagon, heard it crash on the dirt, and jumped down. He dragged the remains of Wildcat Lamar Bodeen to the whiskey barrels and left him with his poison.
He had no time for a prayer or eulo
gy and doubted if Bodeen would have wanted one anyway.
Millard walked away, back to his son and the still unconscious girl. “All right.” He nodded to James, and they picked the girl up and carried her back to the wagon. They did not toss her into the back like a sack of flour, but moved her up gently. Millard had to climb up and ease her into the shady side of the wagon. He found a blanket, covered her, and hurried out of the back, where he picked up the Winchester ’73.
James stared at it. “Whose rifle is that?”
“We need to ride. Make for the Red.”
“It’s a One of One Thousand,” James said.
“Can you drive this team?” Millard looked at the oxen. They appeared to be bone-tired and half-starved, but that’s all they had.
“Yes, sir.” James wet his lips and started to say something else, but his pa interrupted.
“Climb up. I don’t want you walking alongside the wagon. In case something happens. You got any bullets for your rifle?”
Your rifle. Not Jimmy’s. Millard realized he had said it and was pointing at the Model 1886 repeater.
James picked it up, swallowed, and shook his head.
A quick glance revealed the pitchfork, the empty Remington .44, and a few assorted old weapons, none of which Millard would put his trust—his life—in. The Remington would be the best, but there was one problem. The shells for his Army Colt would not fit the Remington .44 even though his Richards-Mason design used a conventional .44-caliber centerfire cartridge—not as powerful as .44-40s, but strong enough to get the job done—and even though the Remington .44 had been converted from cap-and-ball to centerfire, too.
Truth be told, although both models had been labeled. 44 caliber, neither the 1860 Colt Army or Remington’s 1858 Army had been truly bored in .44. The balls they had used in the percussion cap days took a ball with a. 454-inch diameter, and the barrels were bored .451. Technically, both of those models were actually .45 caliber.
After the Civil War, conversions became the rage, if companies could find a way around Smith & Wesson’s patent for bored-through revolver cylinders that chambered brass centerfire cartridges. Colt engineer F. Alexander Thuer had done just that with its Colt conversion by using a cone-shaped round that was loaded from the front of the cylinder.
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