Winchester 1887

by William W. Johnstone

  Millard’s throat turned to sand, but he scoffed. “Then who am I?”

  McCoy and Maxwell didn’t seem to hear Millard. They stared hard at the one who had been talking.

  “What do you mean, Smith?” Maxwell asked.

  “Bodeen the whiskey runner is knowed to have only one eye. Like Whitney yonder.”

  The gunman with the brown leather patch over his left eye didn’t appear to enjoy having his imperfection singled out.

  McCoy stepped forward, not stopping until the sawed-off barrel of his ten-gauge pressed against Millard’s shirt.

  “And,” Millard said, trying to sound calm, “Link McCoy wears a wheat sack over his head when he’s pulling a job on a bank or train. So does Zane Maxwell.”

  “So?” Link asked icily.

  “So it’s a disguise, you blasted fool.” Millard shook his head in disgust. “You think I could get along without landing in Judge Parker’s dungeon or up at the federal pen in Michigan if I showed everyone how handsome I actually am.” He laughed then sighed, finally letting out a long breath. “You fellows been known to change clothes after a bank or train robbery. You go from looking like men who ought to be in the calaboose to respectable, law-abiding citizens. I heard that once you even pinned on deputy sheriff’s badges so you could fool real posses into thinking you was actually looking for yourselves.” He slapped his thigh. “That was a good one. A bona fide stroke of pure genius.” He pointed at his eyes. “I see fine. And I make whiskey fine.”

  “Or not so fine.” At least McCoy had lowered his shotgun.

  “What’s your pleasure?” Millard asked.

  “The worst you can brew.”

  Millard grinned, but before he could speak, Zane Maxwell shot out, “We don’t have a whole lot of time. Let’s forget about this whiskey angle—”

  “It ain’t eighteen-year-old Scotch I’m making, boys,” Millard said quickly. “It’s rotgut.” He had to think fast. If they decided against whiskey, he—and James and Robin—were dead.

  “I tell you this ain’t Bodeen!” cried out Smith.

  Thankfully, McCoy and Maxwell didn’t appear interested.

  “What’ll you need?”

  “Raw alcohol,” Millard said. “Sugar. I’ll burn it. Unless you can find me enough oak sawdust to do the job. Adds color. And some taste. Plugs of tobacco. Cures it, adds some mighty fine whiskey color to the brew, and gives some bite. Some chopped up rattlesnake heads. And strychnine.”

  “Strychnine,” Maxwell repeated.

  Millard nodded. “Gets the heart started again.”

  “Or not?” McCoy asked.

  Millard made himself grin. “Or not. You see, in the old days, my grandpa used to make good corn liquor. A bushel would produce three gallons of pure whiskey, if it was the best corn my grandpa growed. But then some distillers learned that if they could mix a bit of strychnine in their yeast, they’d be able to average four bushels per gallon. Take three cents worth of strychnine and a gallon of water, and put that atop the brewed three gallons of pure whiskey . . .”

  They stared at him with blank faces.

  “I reckon you don’t rightly care to hear about stramonium. Some folks like to use it rather than strychnine. Easier to find. Or was, back in Grandpa’s day. The problem with stramonium is it makes one’s stomach a little irritable, but you can cure that by adding some opium. But then you got to take the opium into account, counteract it, you see, and you do that by just a pinch of potash. That’ll give you the right smell, pretty fair taste. Wouldn’t cost no more than four cents, maybe five, to make a lot of good sipping whiskey. Back in my Grandpa’s day.”

  “This gent ain’t Wildcat Bodeen!” Smith snapped.

  “And who is you?” Millard put a challenge in his voice.

  The man started to swing the rifle toward Millard, but stopped and answered, “John Smith.”

  Millard laughed hard, though he had to summon every ounce of strength just to make himself laugh and slap his thigh. He almost doubled over. “Well, that’s mighty original, fellow.”

  Smith started to press against the trigger, but one word from McCoy and one move of his shotgun made the outlaw back off.

  “You say he’s not Bodeen,” McCoy said.

  “I know he ain’t.”

  “You know Bodeen?” McCoy asked.

  “Well . . .”

  “Have you ever seen him?” Maxwell tossed in.

  John Smith frowned. “Not exactly. But I know of this whiskey runner. Heard him described plenty of times. I got friends—”

  “You don’t have one friend in the world.” Millard figured that was absolutely true.

  The conversation was interrupted when Tulip Bells jumped out of the back of the wagon and came running with the old single-shot horseman’s pistol and the Winchester ’86. “Look what I found, gents!” he announced proudly.

  “They’re empty,” Millard said. “Traded with some injuns for a barrel of fine sipping whiskey.”

  “Well,” Bells had to agree, “they ain’t loaded. That’s for sure.”

  Millard decided to go back to talking about whiskey. “You can also use cocculus, but it’s hard to find. Comes from Africa, or so Grandpa used to tell me, and it can make a body sick, even cause prostration. Unless you use too much. Ten grains would be enough to send a good oxen or strong horse into convulsions and spasms and kill it. Some tribes in India, I hear, would even poison wells with cocculus. And—”

  “Shut up!” McCoy snapped.

  “He sure talks like a whiskey runner,” Jared Whitney said.

  “Look,” Millard said. “You want whiskey and you want it in a hurry. Who’s it for?”

  McCoy glanced at Maxwell, and then Maxwell said. “Chickasaw Indians and Texas ranchers.”

  Millard nodded. “Well, you don’t want to tell the injuns that I brewed the whiskey. But Chickasaws and Texans don’t have much in the way of taste buds. They want liquor. They want to get drunk. That’s what I can deliver.” He began counting off items on his fingers. “Raw ethyl alcohol for starters. I’ll toss in some chewing tobacco, tea, coffee—prune juice if we can lay ahold of some. Nah. Forget the prune juice. Too hard to come by. Red pepper and gunpowder. If you can’t get me no sugar—burnt sugar’s the best, but molasses can do in a pinch. I can even get some sagebrush if need be. Or creosote.” He looked at the sky, nodded to himself, and went on. “Tartaric acid. Maybe sulfuric acid. Or ammonia. No, those aren’t gonna be readily available. But you can get strychnine anywhere there’s wolves, and there are wolves and coyotes aplenty. So strychnine. Maybe some turpentine.”

  He waited.

  “Rattlesnake heads?” Jared Whitney asked.

  “The snakeheads ain’t what kills the drinkers,” Millard said. “It’s the strychnine. Or colossus. Stramonium don’t quite do the job if you want to kill someone. Make them sick, stramonium’s fine. All the snakeheads do is add a bit of power to my busthead.”

  He didn’t let any silence linger, but wondered how long he could keep on talking. “Ask folks anywhere, and they’ll tell you that Wildcat Lamar Bodeen knows everything you needs to know about bug juice, coffin varnish, gut warmer, nose paint, tanglefoot, tongue oil, skull bender, sheep dip, stagger soup, leopard sweat, corpse reviver, widow-maker, phlegm-cutter, widow-maker, scamper juice, John gas-remover Barleycorn, snake poison, pop skull.”

  “Only he ain’t Bodeen.” John Smith wouldn’t let that notion die.

  “We’re about to find out,” McCoy said.

  That made Millard sweat. “Now I can also make you some halfway decent champagne cider. It’ll get you roostered, but won’t kill you. Just need brown sugar, water, yeast, and I’ll add a little grape juice to it. Cost you only five dollars a quart.”

  “Here they come.” Maxwell pointed his Winchester barrel off to the north.

  Slowly, everyone turned around.

  Millard eyed the new arrivals. The waddie with the Yellow Boy Winchester—the one with the red mustache—was c
oming back, herding along the other horses. He wasn’t alone. Another rider came along, smoking a cigarette. Millard couldn’t tell who the man was, but he knew enough to figure his impersonation of the whiskey runner was about to end. Along with his life.

  The rider was tall, but from the color of his skin, the length of his hair, and the way he forked a paint horse, Millard knew the man was an Indian.

  Still, he’d run his bluff as long as he could.

  “You see,” he said to no one in particular, “you heard tell of sink-taller whiskey, I presume. No? Well, if the whiskey has been diluted, you can drop in a piece of tallow. Beef usually, but mutton’ll work. If that taller sinks, well, that’s how you know the whiskey ain’t what it once was. But in good bona fide rotgut hardcore John Barleycorn, that chunk of taller will just sink like an ironclad to the bottom of the keg. And . . .”

  A few of the gunmen went to help with the horses, ground-reining or hobbling them, while the Indian remained in the saddle.

  “Hey, breed!” Maxwell shouted. “Ride here. We need you to settle something for us.”

  Millard wet his lips, glancing over toward the wagon to warn Robin and James with his eyes that the game was up, that they should make for the river, run, swim, hide, just get out of there before they were all gunned down. All he could see, however, were the faces of a few of the gang members.

  He kept looking, kept his face turned away from the Indian, just to hold out a little longer. The paint horse’s hoofs clopped slowly—an eternity—each sound of the unshod hoof on the ground driving nails into Millard’s heart, into his coffin. He had to steel himself not to break through the men circling him. He wet his lips again.

  The horse stopped.

  “Smith says this ain’t Bodeen,” McCoy said. “You tell us.”

  That was Millard’s cue. Slowly, defiantly, he turned around and looked at the long-haired, slim, old Indian sitting on a worn saddle but one mighty fine horse. The Indian, Choctaw—at least part Choctaw—from the looks of him, busied himself sprinkling tobacco onto a paper in his fingers. The pouch dropped into a vest pocket, and he rolled the cigarette with one long-fingered hand, brought the smoke to his thin lips, then found a match, which he struck on this thumb.

  The Lucifer flamed to life, and his hand brought the match up to the cigarette, which flared to life. Finger and thumb held the smoke in his lips then pulled it out. The Indian raised his head toward the darkening sky and blew out white smoke.

  “Is this Wildcat Bodeen?” Link McCoy asked.

  The Indian looked directly into Millard Mann’s paling face.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “Of course it is,” the smoking Choctaw half-breed said. “Halito, Bodeen. Chish nato?”

  Millard Mann breathed out a sigh of new life. While a couple outlaws were shaking their heads at or cussing out the man called John Smith, Millard nodded at the smoking Indian. “Hello yourself, Newton Ah-ha-lo-man-tubbee.” He waved at the Indian. “Been a long time. And”—he couldn’t help but grin and shake his head in wondered amazement at his good fortune before answering the Indian’s question—“I’m doing mighty fine.” Now.

  It was a puzzlement. Holding the reins to his paint horse in his left hand and the Winchester shotgun in his right, a kneeling Jackson Sixpersons studied the signs. The tracks of the massive freight wagon led right into the roaring, flooding waters of the Red River.

  Yet the oxen had not pulled the wagon into the river. Several men had pushed the wagon into the Red and the current had pummeled what had been left of Wildcat Lamar Bodeen’s whiskey hauler. The remains must be resting on the bottom or smashed along the banks farther downstream.

  Several men had come across where the wagon had been parked, approaching on foot. Later, horses had joined them, and they had ridden not along the riverbank, heading for one of the ferries downstream to go into Texas, but north and east. The oxen had been scattered by a rider on a good cow pony.

  What did it all mean?

  Well, for one, they didn’t want or need the wagon. But they wanted the three people with the wagon. Also, they weren’t going to Texas, but staying in the Nations.

  Chickasaws? No. Those Indians had turned back earlier. The riders had come in from the east, but they weren’t Choctaws. At least, most of them weren’t. Sixpersons had known Newton Ah-ha-lo-man-tubbee long enough to recognize the half-breed’s moccasin prints. He’d also spotted the markings of the shoe on his pony’s left forefoot. He had made a note of that track when the cigarette-addicted Indian had told him about the whiskey runner Bodeen.

  Counting the rider who had held off the Chickasaws when Bodeen had been killed, Sixpersons knew he was chasing eleven. Newton Ah-ha-lo-man-tubbee? There was no telling which hand the Choctaw breed would play. He might help out Sixpersons; he might kill him. The three from the wagon? He didn’t know them or anything about them, other than he could arrest them for running contraband spirits into Indian Territory. The others? Well, he had a good inkling those would be Link McCoy, Zane Maxwell, Tulip Bells and whatever other gunmen they had recruited.

  Sixpersons studied the twelve-gauge. He would need a whole lot more firepower to tackle that gang, and he had more than a fair idea that those marshals he had asked to rendezvous with him at Fort Washita were probably still in Arkansas.

  Sixpersons started to stand then heard the twin clicks of a double-barrel shotgun being cocked behind him.

  Orr, Chickasaw Nation

  There wasn’t much to the town (settlement might have been a better word) of Orr—yet—but it had what the McCoy-Maxwell Gang needed. It was so new, not enough years had passed to fade the whitewash on the frame buildings. It had boasted a post office since ’92, and although probably fewer than two hundred people called Orr home, it brought in farmers, Indians, and traders for business. After all, in that part of the Indian Nations, cities and stores could be hard rides apart from one another.

  Orr dreamed of having a famous city square like Santa Fe, New Mexico Territory, or Fort Worth, Texas, but the merchants had yet to buy into the city founder’s fancy, evidenced by the dominant feature of vacant lots. A few single-story buildings had been erected, and business boomed in two buildings cattycorner from one another. Both general stores boomed because anything could be purchased at either of the mercantiles.

  Like raw ethyl alcohol.

  Like sugar.

  Like plugs of tobacco.

  Like red pepper, gunpowder, and strychnine.

  “What’s the poison fer?” asked the mustached clerk in sleeve garters and an Irish cap.

  “What else?” Millard Mann answered. “Wolves and coyot’s.”

  The clerk nodded. “What else you need?”

  “Five pounds of bacon,” Millard answered. “Sack of flour. Sack of corn meal. Tub of lard. Some of those cans of peaches and tomatoes, about ten each. Let’s say a half-dollar’s worth of those penny candies you got in that jar. And three or four cans of that.” He pointed to the shelves behind the clerk’s head.

  The clerk had written it all down on his order form, then licked his pencil, made a few additional notes, and nodded as he stuck the pencil above his right ear. “Take me a while to get it all fer you.”

  “No rush. Let me have one of those plugs of tobacco, and me and my pard ’ll wait on the bench. Just holler when it’s all ready.” Turning, Millard nodded at the mustached villain called Red, picked up the tobacco the clerk slid in front of him, and walked out onto the boardwalk in front of the store. He sat on a crate that served as a bench, leaned against the rough frame wall, and opened the tobacco.

  “I heard what all you told that fella.” Red leaned on the wooden column that held up the awning and stared hard at Millard.

  “Wasn’t a secret.” Millard bit into the tobacco, tore off a chunk, and pitched it to the gunman, who caught it, studied it, smelled it, and finally decided it wasn’t poisoned.

  He bit off a fair-sized wad and began softening it with his molars. “That coffe
e and such. Maxwell didn’t tell you to order that.”

  “You don’t drink coffee?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Tell Maxwell. Tell McCoy. Tell anybody.” Millard paused to let a couple Indian women carrying paper-wrapped packages to pass, worked the tobacco some more. It had to be the lowest grade he had ever tried to chew. “Two strangers come into this store, buy nothing but what anybody in these parts knows is usually bought to make forty-rod whiskey, and what do you think that clerk’s going to do? He’s going to alert the town law, if a place this size has a law—”

  “It ain’t.” Red grinned. “That’s how come Maxwell picked it.”

  “But Tishomingo’s not far from here, and that clerk would be letting the United States Indian Police know his suspicions. Or some federal deputy. Ordering coffee and that other stuff makes the clerk thinks he’s outfitting a couple new settlers to the territory, ones who have a coyote and wolf problem and like to chew a lot of tobacco.” Millard spit perfectly between Red’s boots.

  “Well . . .”

  Thinking, Millard knew, was not Red’s strongest suit.

  “Well . . .”

  “Well,” Millard said, “I told McCoy that if he wanted not to attract suspicion, he shouldn’t buy everything in one store.”

  He had told McCoy no such thing, and actually, the gang leader was across the town square—empty except for a well and some hitching posts—buying a few other items, including kegs to put the poisoned whiskey in, kettles to help brew the concoction, and, if he had more brains than Red, flour, bacon, coffee, and tobacco to throw off any suspicion. Maxwell was over at the livery off the town square, buying two wagons, one to pick up the supplies McCoy was ordering and one to haul the strychnine and alcohol and other items to wherever it was that they planned to brew the liquor.

  Millard looked across the street. He couldn’t see McCoy inside still dickering with a clerk, but he could see Tulip Bells, Jared Whitney, and Steve Locksburgh positioned at various points in case something went wrong and gunplay erupted in the small but busy town of Orr. Bells waited closest to the livery. Undoubtedly, he’d be driving one of the wagons. The man called John Smith had stayed outside of town in an arroyo with the half-breed Choctaw, keeping a watch on Robin Gillett and James.