Winchester 1887

by William W. Johnstone

  “I like to kill my people slow,” Millard said. “Make them suffer.”

  James stared at his father in utter wonderment. His pa seemed to be a natural thespian, taking on the role of Wildcat Lamar Bodeen the way one of the Booth brothers might have tackled Hamlet or Macbeth.

  “How long till you want them dead?” Millard snapped his finger, which caused Robin to jump as if she’d been struck. “Quick. Take a sip and keel over deader than a doornail? Make them cough up blood and die in agony a week later? I got to know those things, boys. To figure out the proportions and all that. This is science. Pure science. Ask anyone in Indian Territory, and they’ll tell you that Wildcat Bodeen is a regular scientist, an apothecary.”

  Seeing the look on the men’s faces, Millard laughed, walked over to one of the boxes, and pulled out the small bottle of strychnine, holding it up. A skull and crossbones appeared on the label. He slipped his pinky finger into the lanyard and pulled out the cork. James could not take his eyes of the tiny bottle, maybe holding one-eighth of an ounce of the pale grains. The poison had been manufactured by a chemist in Baltimore.

  “You two boys know nothing about strychnine, do you? Well, here’s the way it works. Not much color to it, as you can see, but it tastes bitter as gall. The sugar and the pepper and all that tobacco will disguise that bitterness when folks is drinking their liquor. First they’ll get sick to their stomach, puke their guts out, but nobody will think nothing of it because that’s what drunks do when they’ve gotten themselves liquored up. They’ll wish they was dead. That’s also what drunks do when they’ve had that much whiskey.

  “Just when they think they can’t get no sicker, the convulsions will start up then get longer. And longer. Then they’ll be frothing at the mouth like one of them hydrophoby dogs. That’s how it’ll go. Worser and worser, until their guts start with spasms that’ll double them over. They’ll beg for death, and it’ll come. Not soon enough. But it’ll come. They won’t be able to breathe. And they’ll get lucky because the spasms will knock them out. And when they wake up, they’ll be in hell.”

  He shook his head in delight. “That’s what you want to know, ain’t it? What you want to hear?”

  Maxwell did not answer, but stared hard at his partner, which led James to believe it was McCoy’s show. Well, it was the McCoy-Maxwell Gang.

  McCoy stopped fanning himself and put on his hat. “Not instant death. But quick.”

  “Hour? Week? Month?” Millard fired off the questions like rifle shots.

  “Six hours.”

  To James’s surprise, McCoy’s words came out like a tremble.

  “No more . . . than . . . say . . . eight. . . . No less . . . than . . .”—he swallowed—“um . . . four. No, six. No less than six. No more . . . than eight.”

  Millard grinned. “Troubles you, don’t it?” He followed that with a slap of his knee and a belly laugh. “You like to kill quick. That’s why you cut down that old Winchester shotgun of yours. Kill quick. This ain’t your game, is it?”

  “Just do your job. Or I’ll kill you quick.” McCoy stormed outside to breathe in fresh air, to get away from the stink.

  Maxwell stayed inside for another minute, still fanning himself, and finally put his hat on. “You sure this’ll work?”

  “On my end, absolutely. I don’t know nothing about what you’re planning, but this whiskey, it’ll kill . . . in six to eight hours. That much I can promise you. All the rest? Well, that’s up to you and him.” Millard pointed at the open doorway through which McCoy had exited. “Will that plan work?”

  “It’ll work,” Maxwell said. “We can guarantee you that.”

  Even James could detect the false bravado in the killer’s voice. Their plan wasn’t a bank robbery, a stagecoach holdup, or some train job. The McCoy-Maxwell Gang was branching off into a new territory.

  “Reckon you’ll see,” Millard said.

  Maxwell had turned to climb out of the dugout, but he stopped, turned, and stared hard at Millard. “You’ll see, too, Bodeen. Because you’ll be with us.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  They had taken his converted Colt, and the Winchester rifle remained sheathed in the scabbard on his saddle, which lay in a lean-to next to the corral. So far, none of the outlaws had even noticed that the rifle was a One of One Thousand, but the handful of cartridges Millard had managed to shove into his pants pocket wouldn’t do much good without that rifle. He knew he had to be patient, wait for the right time. To rush his move would mean his death. That didn’t worry Millard. What worried him was the knowledge that it would also lead to the murders of Robin Gillett and his oldest son.

  So he brewed whiskey.

  He had grown up in East Texas, where he had known quite a few peddlers of whiskey. Stills had been common, and a drunk could find good corn liquor, or bad corn liquor, whiskey distilled from potatoes, or anything from the champagne cider he had talked about back along the Red River to the worst rotgut whiskey that would eat off the taste buds on a man’s tongue.

  He kept the dugout a furnace, which kept most of the outlaws outside, and brewed whiskey. When he figured he had the alcohol hot enough, he got Robin and James to help him and carefully poured the scalding liquid into one of the kegs, in which he had evenly distributed the plugs of tobacco. Pretty soon, he had three of the six kegs filled. Then all six.

  He decided to burn the sugar, which he then dumped into the kegs.

  “Bodeen, when do you add the poison?” McCoy had dropped in again to hurry up the whiskey man, to make sure Millard remembered the deadline.

  “Last. I done told you that. Then we seal up the kegs, so the strychnine will settle. Load it up and haul it off to”—he smiled—“Fort Washita.”

  That turned McCoy’s cold eyes icy in the hellhole. “Who told you about Fort Washita?”

  Millard smiled as he noisily scraped the burned sugar from a cast iron skillet into one of the kegs. It had been a guess. “Closest place. And I’ve heard a lot of whiskey peddlers make stops there. What’s happening? Some sort of whiskey runner convention?”

  “Just brew the stuff, Bodeen.” Gripping his wicked-looking Winchester ’87 ten-gauge, McCoy hurried out of the swelter box.

  When he had left, Millard pulled another skillet filled with smelly burned sugar from the fireplace and stepped to the next keg. In the corner, Robin sat dividing the red pepper evenly into tin cups.

  “When do you add the poison?” James asked.

  “I don’t.” Millard rested the heavy skillet on the rim of the keg of steaming raw ethyl alcohol. “I’m not killing anyone. Not even by accident.”

  He had already taken care of that during the first night at the dugout. As soon as the kids were asleep, and most of McCoy’s and Maxwell’s gunmen drunk in the yard, Millard had opened all of the poison bottles, which took a good length of time, with those boxes full of eighth-ounce bottles. He’d dug a hole, dumped the poison into it, covered the hole, and used the leftover sand to fill the bottles of poison. The whiskey he brewed might have some sediment in the bottom, but it wouldn’t kill anyone. He had even washed the severed rattlesnake heads before adding those to the barrels.

  “This whiskey might make some people sick, but it won’t kill them.” He laughed. “By Jacks, it might even taste halfway decent.”

  The smiles on the teenagers’ faces pleased him.

  His mother had always told him that as long as you laughed or smiled, life would turn out all right. “I’m holding you to that, Ma,” he said thoughtfully.

  “What?” James asked.

  Millard shook his head. “Nothing.” Then he thought better of that. “No, it is something. Something my mother, your grandma, told me and Borden and Jimmy. Smile and laugh. Smile and laugh. Keep that up, and life will turn out just fine and dandy. Don’t forget it.”

  All right, Millard thought, I’ve taught my son everything he needs to know. I can die now. His smile faded. Because pretty soon, I’ll likely be killed.

>   Orr

  If there was one thing a Cherokee was good at, it was listening. Jackson Sixpersons had the patience of an oyster, which was a good thing, because the clerk at the general store in Orr talked forever.

  The Ranger, whose name turned out to be Alan Clarke, did not have patience. “They didn’t say where they were from?” he practically shouted when the clerk stopped for a breath.

  Frowning, the store clerk answered. “No, sir.” His eyes fixated on the cinco pesos star, and he knew the Texan was out of his jurisdiction. “No, sir. I didn’t ask them.” He went on, counting on his fingers the merchandise purchased by the two farmers or ranchers or maybe prospectors—if there was anything in that country other than dirt, dust, and dung to dig up. “Bacon. Flour. Cornmeal. Lard. Some cans of fruit. Candy. Let’s see.” He thought a moment. “Castor oil. Ain’t figured that out yet. And a box of .32-20 slugs for a Winchester.”

  Jackson Sixpersons didn’t care about those items. What had interested him was the raw alcohol, sugar, tobacco, red pepper, and gunpowder. Key ingredients to a man who wanted to make contraband forty-rod whiskey.

  “Oh, strychnine,” the clerk added. “Bought a lot of that. Said they’d be used for wolves and coyotes.”

  “Strychnine.” The word hung like death on the Texas Ranger’s tongue.

  “How much?” Sixpersons asked.

  “Four boxes.”

  That was more than enough for coyotes and wolves, not to mention the little dose some whiskey peddlers would add to their scamper juice—to get the heart started again.

  A quick glance at Clarke told Sixpersons that the Ranger was thinking maybe someone else . . . like old Bodeen’s daughter . . . planned on poisoning Indians and kids with rotgut whiskey.

  “Middle-aged men, you said,” Sixpersons reminded the clerk—and the Texas Ranger.

  “One in his forties,” the clerk said, nodding in agreement. “The other I’d say in his thirties. Whiskers on their faces. Usually first place a man like that goes to is the barber, but not these boys. They rode out of town. Funny thing about that. They bought that wagon at Kennedy’s Livery over yonder.” He nodded in some general direction. “Had their horses tied behind the rig when they left.”

  Ranger Clarke leaned forward. “Which way did they go?”

  The clerk’s thumb jerked. “South. Way they come.”

  “Kennedy sold two wagons that day,” the clerk said. “Big day for him.”

  That, Sixpersons already knew. They had stopped at the store across the practically vacant square first, learning that two men had purchased kegs, kettles, and other sundries—and also had loaded their merchandise into a new wagon purchased from Kennedy’s Livery.

  “South,” came from Charley with the Greener. “Back fer Texas maybe.”

  Clarke had the same thought as Sixpersons. “No.” The Ranger shook his head. “No, that’s a ruse. They’ll be going north. Or east.”

  “What about west?” Charley asked.

  Sixpersons answered. “Not unless they want their hair lifted by Chickasaws, Comanches, Kiowas, or Apaches.”

  The clerk started talking again. “A right fair amount of gunpowder, too. Right fair.” He smiled at the attention the lawmen gave him. “I was thinking same as y-all. That they was buying that to brew whiskey. Contraband, you know. But . . . no . . . you don’t put that much gunpowder in whiskey.” He paused, paled, and added. “Least, that’s what I’ve heard tell over at John the Barber’s.”

  “To reload their cartridges?” Charley with the Greener asked.

  The clerk laughed. “Not unless they’re part of an army.”

  That caused Sixpersons to think they might be an army.

  “But I figured they’d just blast out some of them wolf dens.”

  Sixpersons had all the information he needed, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. What would Link McCoy and Zane Maxwell need those supplies for? Why had they destroyed Bodeen’s wagon and bought new ones? He nodded at the answer that formed in his head. Mules and horses would pull those small wagons a lot faster than oxen could pull that giant freight vehicle.

  Whiskey. Poison. Gunpowder. The gunpowder he could understand. To blow open a safe. Orr wasn’t that far from the Katy railroad, but the McCoy-Maxwell Gang had not robbed a train in years.

  He thanked the clerk again and stepped toward the door.

  “One more funny thing about one of them boys,” the clerk said.

  Clarke and Sixpersons turned, sighing heavily. Charley with the Greener stepped outside and went to his horse.

  “What’s that?” the Ranger asked irritably.

  “Well, one of the gents, the older one, he asked for that box of .32-20 shells, like I said. Spilled some, then knocked the whole box onto the floor. I went to pick them up, and . . . well . . . when I started putting them back into the box, he said he didn’t need any more. Took only, I don’t know, four, five, six maybe. Those he stuck in his pocket.”

  Clarke saw nothing funny or peculiar about that and stormed outside.

  Sixpersons started to do the same, but stopped. “The older one?”

  “Yep. Other one was outside. He was coming in when the one who’d asked for the shells knocked them to the floor.”

  “And when did he tell you he didn’t want them, just the few he had put in his pocket?”

  The clerk thought about that. “Well, right after I had—”

  “Was his partner in here?”

  The clerk thought again then flattened his lips. “I couldn’t tell you. Sorry. Don’t remember everything.”

  “Wait till you get to be my age,” Sixpersons said and went out the door.

  The bend of Caddo Creek

  Robin and James were the first ones through the door, shielding their eyes from the bright sun.

  Then came out Millard, that supposedly loudmouthed whiskey peddler and killer, waving a jug over his head. “It’s whiskey, boys,” he announced proudly and pitched the heavy piece of stoneware at Tulip Bells.

  Thinking that maybe the poison would kill him just by touching the jug, the outlaw caught it before he let it fall onto the grass and backed away as if it were a grenade.

  “Har!” The whiskey runner spit tobacco juice and shook his head. “It ain’t been doctored with that magical element called strychnine, gents. Just wanted you guys to get a sample of what I cook.”

  Link McCoy rose easily, shifting the Winchester ’87 shotgun he had been cleaning to his left hand and waking past Tulip Bells. Kneeling, McCoy picked up the jug and held it out to Jared Whitney.

  “No thanks,” the killer said.

  “Just pull out the cork,” McCoy ordered.

  Whitney did as told, but reluctantly, squeezed his eyes shut, and jumped back when the cork popped out.

  “Bottoms up,” the blowhard of a whiskey runner said with a grin.

  McCoy did not drink. Did not even smell. He simply walked over to the peddler, and shoved the jug at Millard. “You first.”

  He grinned, slapped his thigh, and took the bottle. His Adam’s apple bobbed three times, and when he lowered the jug, he smiled, smacking his lips.

  “Have another,” McCoy said.

  “Glad to.” Millard drank again and followed it with a loud belch that smelled just like bad whiskey. “You want me to take another snort, boss? To prove to you that I ain’t built up no immunity to the poison?”

  McCoy waited.

  “Or is you yellow?”

  He could have, maybe should have, killed the crazed whiskey runner for that, but he accepted the jug and drank a wee taste. It burned. It was bitter. But it had kick, and when it went down, it wasn’t any worse than some of the rankest rotgut he had tasted in his life.

  “It ain’t Irish. It ain’t Scotch. It ain’t rye. It ain’t gin. But she’ll do the job, and do you right proud.” Millard took the jug again, drank another sip, and pitched the container to Zane Maxwell. “You told me to have it ready by today. Well, it’s ready. Want me and the kids to
start loading?”

  “Yeah.” McCoy walked over to Maxwell.

  They passed around the jug, and watched as Millard and the two kids rolled one keg out of the dugout and to the covered wagon. The Choctaw breed went over to help. None of the others seemed so charitable. They even bragged that the whiskey tasted mighty fine.

  “Well?” Maxwell asked.

  McCoy just nodded. The jug was empty. No one looked sick. No one was dead. No one was even drunk.

  The outlaws watched the others work until the wagon was loaded with all six kegs, and the sweating whiskey maker, the Choctaw and the two kids walked over.

  “I go with you, eh?” Millard asked.

  “Yes,” McCoy said. “We’ll go this afternoon. It’s your whiskey. You’ll serve it. You’ll sell it. Then you’ll head back here to pick up the two kids.”

  “And my money?”

  “Your split will come to you in Paris, Texas. In two weeks. Can you find that?”

  “On the Texas-Pacific line. I also know some things about railroads.” Millard’s eyes brightened as though he had just told some inside joke.

  “Get moving,” McCoy told him. “Breed. You ride with him. You, too, Smith.”

  McCoy waited for a minute and then looked at the two kids. “You two just wait here. Don’t do anything stupid. That’ll get you killed. By him.” He jerked his thumb at Whitney.

  “How’s that?” the gunman asked.

  “You stay here,” McCoy said.

  “And miss out on the deal? I’ll be—” The next thing Jared Whitney knew he was doubling over from the punch of the sawed-off Winchester shotgun in his stomach.

  “I don’t take arguments.” McCoy nodded, and Zane Maxwell and Tulip Bells straightened the coughing gunman. McCoy stepped closer. “You won’t miss anything, Whitney,” McCoy whispered. “I need every gun I can muster. Wait here. For a day. Then ride hard, real hard, for Fort Washita.”

  “What . . . about . . . the kids?” Whitney gasped.

  “Kill them right before you leave.”