CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
“Here they come, boys!” Saturday Brown roared. “Let ’em have it!”
The men among the greenstone fired a ragged volley. Watching from the window of the depot office, Shawn O’Brien saw no hits.
Thomas Clouston’s men came on at the gallop, firing their revolvers.
The window where Shawn stood shattered as a bullet hit the glass high up, and behind him he heard Hamp Sedley curse as the ricocheting bullet nicked him.
“Damn! Look at that!” Pete Caradas said. Three men left the firing line, tossed away their rifles, and headed for town at a run. “We better get down there.”
“No, not yet,” Shawn said. “When the greenstone slows them we’ll play our hand.”
Below them Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy stood, his crutch under his left arm. Unable to work his rifle, he fired his .32 steadily but to no apparent success.
Clouston’s men, yipping like savages, were less than a hundred yards away . . . ninety . . . eighty . . . seventy . . .
The Medicine Bow militia gallantly tried to service their howitzer and get off another shot. But Colonel Jeb Calhoun took a bullet in the head and fell, sprawling across the barrel. Clouston’s men targeted the cannon. Major Sheehan and Captain Delaney fell in quick succession and then a man who rushed to their help went down, screaming, his right leg shattered by a bullet.
“O’Brien!” Caradas called out. “For God’s sake!”
“Get ready,” Shawn said.
“You boys stay right where you’re at,” Burt Becker said. “You, O’Brien, let go of the iron or I’ll drill you square.”
For a moment Shawn thought about going for it and Becker read it in his eyes. He reached out, grabbed Jane Collins, then threw her violently on the floor. “She gets it first. Now drop the gun.”
“Do as he says, O’Brien,” Caradas said. “He means it.”
As contract killers, the D’eth brothers mentally took a step back. This was no part of why they were in Broken Bridle. It was a time to wait and see. Outside guns banged and men roared their battle anger.
“What happened with the jaw, Becker?” Shawn said.
The big man removed the bandage. “It would take a better man than you to bust my jaw, O’Brien. As long as I made as though it was broke, I didn’t have to answer any fool questions about missing women and the like.”
“What’s your game, Becker?” Shawn said.
“Game? No game. I surrender you to Thomas Clouston and then me and him cut a deal. My gun protection for a share of the gold.”
“He doesn’t need you, Becker,” Shawn said. “He’ll kill you.”
“No, he’ll need me after today,” the big outlaw said. “He’s losing men down there.”
But the sound of the gunfire suddenly changed. It slowed down, ended, and was replaced by shrieks of terror and primitive screams of rage from many throats.
Alarmed, Burt Becker took a quick glance out the window. It was a reaction that came and went in a split second. But it was all the time Shawn O’Brien needed. He drew in one fluid, graceful motion and fired.
Becker was fast. He took the shoulder hit and shot back. His bullet ripped a gouge across the top of Shawn’s shoulder and burned like a red-hot iron. But Shawn’s second bullet hit true and slammed into the center of Becker’s chest. The big man staggered back, his eyes wide and in shock. Shawn fired again, a second hit, this time to the base of Becker’s throat. Some stubborn, inner strength kept Becker on his feet, but he was gone and Shawn could see it. His gun fell from his hand and he went to his knees. He stared at Shawn and managed to say just one word: “Fast.”
Then Becker’s eyes clouded and he fell flat on his face.
His anger up, the roar of gunshots ringing in his ears, Shawn swung on Pete Caradas. “Damn you, make your play,” he said.
Caradas lifted his hands. “Your friends need help, O’Brien.”
“Shawn!” Hamp Sedley’s voice seemed to travel from far off. “Your enemy is outside.”
Shawn forced himself to come back, out of the tunnel that stretched between him and Pete Caradas. After a few moments his Colt dropped by his side and he walked past Caradas to the door and then stepped outside . . . into carnage.
In the moment of victory, Thomas Clouston lost.
A thousand Chinese men swarmed over his mounted men and dragged them from the saddle. Clouston, his massive horse rearing, roared and laid about him with his battle-ax splitting heads and cleaving off hands, but the Chinese swarmed over him and hauled him to the ground. Clouston’s battle cries turned to screams of terror as he was carried above the heads of the crowd in the direction of the Rattlesnake Hills.
Shawn, followed by Sedley and Caradas, waded into the brawl, their guns drawing. But they found no targets. Despite huge losses, the Chinese had overpowered all of Clouston’s men and hacked them to pieces with whatever weapons they’d carried from their camp, knives, picks, shovels . . . and their bare hands. There was no longer anything human about the Clouston gunmen; here and there bloody remains spread across the ground like cherry pies dropped to the stone floor by a careless baker.
Shawn watched the D’eth brothers run in hot pursuit of the Chinese who’d taken Clouston. They still had their contract to honor.
“O’Brien!”
Shawn looked around the battlefield at the hurting dead and dying. The air was thick with gun smoke and the hot iodine smell of blood.
“Over here! You ain’t very bright, son, or you’re deef!”
Saturday Brown lay under a pile of bodies, white and brown tangled together, united only by blood. The old lawman’s face was ashen.
“Are you hurt?” Shawn said.
“All shot to pieces, son. Now git me to my feet.”
Shawn and Hamp Sedley helped the marshal stand. Sedley looked Brown over and said, “You’re shot through and through.”
“Yup. Noticed that my ownself,” Brown said.
“We need to get you to the doctor,” Shawn said.
Brown said, “There are others here who need a doctor. See to them first. Then bring me the butcher’s bill.”
The bill was steep. Six dead, including the militiamen, and all the rest wounded, one of them, Brown, seriously. Clouston had lost three men during the charge and one more at the barricade. The Chinese had done for the rest.
Dr. John Walsh did the best he could, but Deputy United States Marshal Saturday Brown, shot four times, died within an hour of the battle’s end.
Shawn O’Brien took his death hard.
“What the hell happened?” Hamp Sedley said. He stared at the body of Dr. Thomas Clouston hanging by its neck from the gallows noose. “His whole damned chest is open. Man, look at the damned flies. Hundreds of them.”
“I’d say the D’eth brothers took his heart,” Shawn said. “I guess it was a clause in their contract.” He turned to Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy who had his wounded left arm in a sling. “You sure you know how to work that thing?”
“I watched Colonel Calhoun do it,” Purdy said. “She’s all set and ready to go.”
“What do you think Pete?” Shawn said. “Will it shoot?”
“Yeah, it will shoot. If it doesn’t blow up first,” Caradas said.
A townsman with a fat bandage around his head nodded, his face wise.
“Seen a cannon blow up once, but it was double-shotted. Killed the gun crew though.”
“Is that thing double-shotted?” Sedley said, stepping away from the howitzer.
“No,” Purdy said. “One ball ought to be enough to bring down the overhang.”
“Aim for the crack, Pete,” Shawn said.
“Easy,” Caradas said. “Like looking down the barrel of a Colt.”
Shawn eyed the overhang, the great fissure like a terrible scar.
“Let her rip!” he yelled.
The howitzer roared and its wheels bounced a foot in the air. Rancid smoke enveloped Shawn, but he heard a loud explosion and the crash of the
collapsing rock face. When the smoke cleared there was no longer an overhang, just a pile of rubble at the bottom of the cliff.
“Didn’t take much, did it?” Caradas said. Temporary deafness from the blast made him shout.
Shawn waved away smoke and dust from the front of his face and said to Purdy, “How much shot do we have left?”
“Enough to bring down the whole cliff face,” Purdy said.
“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Shawn said. “The greenstone has caused enough death and disaster. Let’s bury it forever.”
He felt worn-out, used up, and depression hung on him like a wet cloak.
EPILOGUE
Depression, the Celtic malady, ran rife in the O’Brien family, and at one point had driven Shawn’s brother Jacob into a monastery. It was a black dog that lurked in dark corners, always ready to spring.
For a month, Shawn retreated to the hotel and saw no one but Hamp Sedley. During that time Jeremiah Purdy and Jane Collins got married, then left Broken Bridle never to return. Pete Caradas rode out for places unknown, and Judy Campbell sold the Four Ace to another rancher and took up a teaching post in the Arizona Territory.
Broken Bridle could not survive the deaths and exodus of so many of its citizens, and the town began its long dying process that would last until 1926 when the Streetcar Saloon burned down.
Shawn O’Brien blamed himself for all that had happened. He’d promised to help Sheriff Purdy tame the town and make it a fine place for American families to live. But instead, he’d destroyed it.
Sedley pointed out that it was a great evil that had devastated the town and that Shawn had defeated a monster and saved the lives of many women and children, both white and Chinese.
But Shawn would not be convinced and sank deeper into blackness.
Alarmed, Sedley wrote a letter to Colonel Shamus O’Brien, Dromore, New Mexico Territory, begging for his help.
It took the best part of the month before Jacob O’Brien arrived by train to take his brother home.
“Jake, I failed this time,” Shawn told him. “I destroyed the very people I’d come to save.”
Jacob said, “It’s a long way to Dromore, Shawn. We’ll talk about it.”
And Sedley said, “Can I tag along?”
Jake, tall, gaunt, and grim, looked the gambler up and down with his icy stare and said, “Suit yourself.”
“Thank’ee,” Sedley said. “This is shaping up to be a fun trip.”
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In 1887, a boy in Texas waits for a Christmas
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PROLOGUE
Fort Smith, Arkansas
Spring 1899
When he was older, though still a young man, serving as a deputy marshal for the United States District Court for the Western District of Arkansas, James Mann would ignore irritating questions.
“Why do you carry that cannon of a rifle?”
“You got some prejudice against short guns?”
“Reckon you’ll run into any elephants down in the Winding Stair Mountains?”
He seldom carried a revolver on his hip, and when he did, Mann hardly ever pulled that Colt from its holster. Yet always—always—he had that Winchester 1886 rifle. It chambered the .50-100-450 round and .50 calibers favored by a few old buffalo hunters in single-shot rifles, but rarely found in lever-action repeaters.
Mann’s Winchester ’86 looked older than it actually was, the stock and forestock battered and badly scratched, the barrel losing some of its bluing. Yet it was always clean.
Always loaded.
And quite often cocked.
A drummer who had traveled all the way from North Haven, Connecticut, once offered Mann a Marlin ’89 . . . free, with a year’s supply of ammunition. Mann turned him down cold.
When Mann won a turkey shoot, Buffalo Bill Cody said he would pay $1,500 for that rifle and give Mann a brand-spanking new one in return. Mann thanked Colonel Cody for the offer, but said he liked his rifle just fine. He was used to it. It was like family.
Truth was, that rifle was family. Blood kin.
He did, however, answer one question. After testifying in one of Judge Rogers’s trials—Rogers having replaced Isaac Parker a few years back—Mann had retired to the Texas Corner Saloon on Garrison Avenue. Alone. The rifle lay on the table next to a pitcher of beer.
The owner of that watering hole, Katie Crockett, dropped into the seat across from Mann. “Rough day at the courthouse?”
“No more than usual.”
By that time, practically everybody from western Arkansas to the Chickasaw Nation had heard about the trial, how the defense attorney had accused Mann of abusing his power, using a .50-caliber weapon on a seventeen-year-old kid, forcing the doctor to saw off the boy’s right leg, which had been shattered by two shots from Mann’s Winchester. Never mind that that boy had killed five people in cold blood and had been trying to make Mann number six.
Katie drew a long finger down the Winchester’s barrel. “You and this gun . . .”
He poured her some of the beer.
She shook her head. “I don’t see how it’s all worth it.”
“What?”
“The abuse you get for carrying it.”
He lifted his stein in salute. “It’s worth it.”
“Why?” Katie asked.
He drank some beer, and she figured he would just shrug off her question the way he always did when anyone asked him what made that beat-up rifle so special.
But he put the stein on the table, wiped his mouth, and locked his eyes on Katie’s for a moment, before falling onto that well-used, often-criticized Winchester. “My uncle,” Deputy Marshal James Mann said softly, “went a long way to get this rifle. For me.”
CHAPTER ONE
Randall County, Texas
Late summer 1894
“Kris,” James said to his sister, shaking his head. “I’m too old to play that game.”
“You’re yeller!” his kid brother Jacob said with a challenging sneer.
Beside him, his twelve-year-old sister dangled the Montgomery Ward & Co. catalog, showing off imported China fruit plates like she was clerking at the mercantile in McAdam, which passed for a town in the Texas Panhandle.
Eight-year-old Jacob lost his sneer. “Please,” he begged.
James Mann stared at him then at Kris, before dropping his gaze to the McGuffey’s Sixth Eclectic Reader. He was making his way through the book for the fourth time, and, honestly, how many times did his ma and pa expect him to read a scene from George Coleman’s The Poor Gentleman? Besides, Ma was shopping in McAdam, and Pa w
as working on the Fort Worth–Denver City Railroad up around Amarillo. The Potter County seat wasn’t much more than a speck of dust on a map, but Amarillo boasted a bigger population than McAdam.
Since James had finished his chores and had been assigned the grim duty of keeping his younger siblings out of trouble, that child’s game seemed a whole lot more appealing than reading McGuffey’s.
He slammed the book shut, hearing Jacob’s squeal of delight as he slid the Reader across the desktop, and pushed himself to his feet. “No whining when you don’t get what you want!”
Following Kris and Jacob, he pushed his way through the curtain that separated what Ma and Pa called the parlor, and into what they called the dining room. Another curtain separated the winter kitchen, and beyond that lay his parent’s bedroom and finally the room he shared with his brother and sister. All were separated by rugs or blankets that Ma called curtains and Pa called walls.
The Mann home, a long rectangle built with three-inch siding and three-inch roof boards, stretched thirty-four feet one inch long and eight feet, nine inches wide, while the ceiling rose nine feet from the floor. The only heat came from the Windsor steel range in the kitchen. The only air came from the front door, which slid open, and the windows Pa had cut into the northeast corner of the parlor and the southwest corner of Ma and Pa’s bedroom. At one time, the home had hauled railroad supplies from Fort Worth. The wheelbase and carriage had been removed from the boxcar, although the freight’s handbrake wheel and grab irons remained on the outside . . . in case someone needed to climb up on the roof to set the brake and keep the Mann home from blowing away.
Jacob was young enough to still find living in a converted boxcar an adventure. At sixteen, James Mann had outgrown such silly thoughts, although he was about to take part in a game he hadn’t played with Kris and Jacob in years.
The door had been left open to allow a breeze, for the Texas Panhandle turned into a furnace in August, and the nearest shade trees could be found in the Palo Duro country, a hard day’s ride southwest.
Kris and Jacob already sat at the rough-hewn table, the thick Montgomer y Ward catalog in front of them. James took his seat across from them, giving his younger siblings the advantage. He would be looking at the catalog pages upside down, but, well, he didn’t plan on winning anything. It wasn’t like anything they allegedly won would actually show up on Christmas morning. It was simply a kid’s game.
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