The Edge of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  Both men held repeating rifles, the one with the checked trousers shooting a Spencer, the one in the red duck pants holding another Henry.

  Colter brought the pistol up. His first shot missed. He had rushed his shot, jerked the trigger, a foolish mistake that often cost a lawman his life. But Colter had always been lucky. The Spencer’s next round merely nicked the side of his head. He blinked back pain, shook his head to clear his vision and his mind, and squeezed one shot that dropped the man with the Spencer, right in the forehead. Somehow the man fell forward and to his left as he died, and tripped the guy carrying the Henry.

  On the other side of the cabin, Stewart Rose cursed, but kept on charging, his twin Remingtons punching holes that splintered the shack.

  Ignoring the leader of the gang for just a moment, Colter aimed the smoking-hot revolver. The man who had tripped came up, searched for his rifle, but saw it was well out of his reach. Thus, he reached down and jerked a Navy Colt from his waistband.

  His yellow shirt exploded crimson, and the man fell back.

  “What the hell!” Stewart Rose yelled. “You ain’t got two guns!”

  Colter leaped back through the shack’s door. As he did, he worked the big pistol, flipping the lever that moved the pivoting striker. He dropped to his knee, tightening the grip on the curved handle of the revolver, bringing up his left hand to steady the big pistol.

  Stewart Rose rounded the corner, brought up one of his revolvers, his face masked by anger and confusion.

  The grapeshot barrel of Colter’s handgun sent a twenty-gauge charge that, at this range, practically tore Stewart Rose in half.

  * * *

  Tim Colter held the smoking gun over Stewart Rose’s body. The outlaw lay on the dead grass, shuddering, spitting out blood, practically choking to death on his own blood. His stomach was a bloody mess, but his eyes managed to focus on Colter.

  “It’s not a Colt. It’s not a Remington.” Colter held up his pistol for the dying man to see. “It’s a LeMat. Nine-shot cylinder,” Colter explained. “Forty-two caliber. Plus a smoothbore secondary barrel. Sixty-caliber.” The smoothbore barrel had sent the twenty-gauge buckshot into Stewart Rose’s middle.

  Somehow, Stewart Rose managed to shake his head. Underneath all that blood, he appeared to smile.

  “Good thing you didn’t have one more man with you, Rose,” Colter said. “Because—now—I am empty.”

  Stewart Rose might even have laughed just before his eyes glazed over and his chest stopped rising and falling.

  * * *

  The LeMat was relatively new, designed in New Orleans by a gunsmith and doctor named Jean Alexander Francois LeMat, with a push by an army major named P.G.T. Beauregard, who went on to resign his commission when the Southern states started pulling out of the Union. Beauregard joined the Confederate Army as a general.

  Although a few of the massive weapons—weighing more than three pounds before they were loaded and with an overall length of 13¼ inches—had been produced in Philadelphia, most of the LeMats were manufactured in Belgium and France before they went back to Birmingham, England, to be proof-marked and shipped to the Confederate States of America—if the ships could run the Union blockades.

  Blue-steeled with checkered walnut grips, it was a pretty weapon, and quite deadly. Although a few generals like J.E.B. Stuart had carried LeMats in the war, it had never been popular among the regular soldiers. Cavalry troopers preferred to carry two or more revolvers rather than a heavy LeMat. And the Union blockade prevented too many of the pistols reaching Southern hands.

  Apparently, John H. Mosby never carried a LeMat. If he had, maybe the late Stewart Rose might not have been quite as confident before his bloody departure.

  * * *

  It took a while for Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Colter to get everything in order. He bandaged his wounds—neither serious—the best he could, but only after he had reloaded the LeMat, both the .42-caliber cylinder with its nine rounds, and the twenty-gauge underneath barrel with more buckshot. That took longer because he had to find his copper powder flask.

  Always honest, so to speak, Stewart Rose had not been lying when he said he had been standing on the flask. Tim also collected his saddlebags, rain slicker, saddle, blanket, bedroll, and bridle from Kilroy. He wasn’t about to leave a horse like that, a seventy-five-dollar horse, for wolves and bears and crows, so he covered it with dirt and rocks, having found a shovel inside the shack.

  By the time he had found where the outlaws had stashed their horses, it was getting too dark to travel, so Colter took advantage of the line shack, and dragged all of the dead men inside it. He found most of the money that had been taken from the bank in Grants Pass, which Colter figured would make everyone in that little town happy.

  He mounted the best horse, a black stallion that wasn’t anything close to the now-dead and partially buried Kilroy, and rode up the trail a while, then turned and picked a path down to the Rogue River, where he bathed his wounds, re-dressed his bandages, and drank greedily. He also managed to catch a couple of fish, which he took back with him to the line shack and fried for supper.

  The outlaws had also carried hardtack, jerky, and corn dodgers, so Tim Colter ate like a king that night. The fire was warm, and cut the night’s chill, and the coffee Colter had packed in his own saddlebags made him relaxed.

  He slept well, got up before dawn, heated up the coffee and the leftovers for breakfast, and then wrapped the dead men in their bedrolls, strapping them on the horses, two dead men for a horse. He rigged a lead rope and set out east to Grants Pass, leading the horse with the dead men, and those with only saddles and packs.

  It snowed twice before he got out of the high country, and carrying that load, it took Colter five days before he rode into Grants Pass. Luckily, the weather remained cold—though the snow hadn’t followed him out of the higher elevations—so the bodies of the dead outlaws did not stink too much when he left them at the constable’s office in Grants Pass.

  He filed his report with the constable, a bespectacled man named Talent, and the local judge, a fat man with a forked beard who called himself Malcolm Prine. He gave a traveling journalist and artist named Vale Baker an interview, even let the fellow draw his likeness and he kept a sketch of him leading his strange cargo into the town for himself. Vale Baker said he contributed to Harper’s Weekly. Colter gave him an address to send a copy of the magazine if it ever got published.

  Colter doubted if it would.

  And after having the dentist examine his wounds, and shaking the banker’s hand for the umpteenth time, Deputy U.S. Marshal Tim Colter left Grants Pass on the black stallion he decided might as well replace Kilroy.

  He rode north, roughly 140 miles to Eugene. Then turned west and rode through the thick forests for another sixty miles.

  He rode home.

  CHAPTER 6

  Home.

  It didn’t feel like home for Tim Colter. It had not for some time now.

  Waves crashed against the rocks, spraying him with the salty mist as he stood by the bougainvilleas, only vines now at this time of year, so brittle, so fragile, that it appeared as though they might crumble in the cold. Dead. Which fit Tim Colter’s mood.

  His house stood a couple of hundred yards away from the Pacific, miles from his nearest neighbors, in part of Lane County. Actually, it had been part of Umpqua County when he had moved here back around 1852. The Klamath Exploring Expedition had established a town near the old Hudson’s Bay Company trading post, which eventually would be replaced by an army post during the final days of the Rogue River War in 1856. The fort had been abandoned during the Civil War.

  The settlement, well east of where Colter now stood watching the morning waves usher in high tide, was called Elkton, which vied with Scottsburg for the county seat until Elkton finally took that over, permanently, in 1855. County seat—but never a courthouse. Umpqua County didn’t last long enough to have a courthouse. Like the gold rush that had brought Tim Colt
er here.

  * * *

  Tim Colter had not come alone. Patricia, his wife, had been the one who wanted to leave their farm in the Willamette Valley. She had always been the adventurous one. Colter had thought she would not want to risk anything, especially remembering everything she had gone through on their way from Pennsylvania to Oregon Territory back in 1845, when they were still in their teens. But Colter had listened—after all, she was carrying their child—and they had sold their farm to Colter’s sister, Nancy, and her husband, Chase Burgess, and joined the flood of settlers, taking a line among the pack trains and freight wagons that crossed the Umpqua River.

  They found just enough pay dirt to keep from starving, and then rode out to see the Pacific Ocean, and all those wrecked ships lining the coast. That’s where Colter found his success. Salvaging cargo from wrecked ships.

  He did all right. Built a house—the only house on the coast in Oregon, probably—pampered his wife, and his son. Then a daughter. Until the gold camps began fighting each other, and Elkton sent a citizens committee to ask Tim Colter to serve as marshal.

  “What would I know about marshaling?” Colter had asked with a laugh.

  “You know about guns. That much we know of you,” the leading merchant, a mercantile owner named Horace Friedman, had said. “Everyone in the territory has heard about you, sir. How you rescued your wife, your sisters, and others from renegades. What you did at Colter’s Hell.”

  Colter had frowned. “I had help.”

  He thought about that Cyclops he had befriended—Jed Reno. The mountain man had saved Colter’s life, taught him how to survive, and, yes, taught him how to kill a man who was trying to kill you and not feel any regret.

  “Yes. Of course. And you’ll have help, too. With our Vigilance Committee.”

  “I’m no lawman,” Colter had argued.

  “But you’re a legend, Colter. And we need you. You’re the best man with a gun we know.”

  Patricia had told him to do it. She could take care of the children. And Elkton was offering him two hundred dollars a month in gold. Which certainly topped anything that he had pulled out of wrecked ships. Patricia said she would stay here, out of harm’s way, and watch the children and the bougainvilleas.

  She loved the spring and the summer here. The purple flowers. The rains. The wind. The smell of the salt air. To her, it was paradise, and Colter could not deny that. After growing up among the coal mines, furnaces, and foundries of Danville, Pennsylvania, and then laboring sunup to sundown on the Oregon farm.

  So Tim Colter left her and the children and pinned on a gold-plated badge in Elkton.

  If what he had done in the Wyoming country— surviving a massacre by white and Indian renegades, burying the dead with his own hands, leaving South Pass afoot to rescue the women captives, joining a mountain man, fighting the elements, black-hearted villains, crossing mountains he would have thought impossible, and then rescuing the women (with much help from Jed Reno and some Cheyenne Indians)—had made him a legend along the Oregon Trail, what he did in the Umpqua’s gold country secured his fame.

  “You’re the best man with a gun we know,” Friedman had said.

  The merchant was right.

  Colter cleaned up those bandits—and without much help from the town’s so-called Vigilance Committee.

  Back home along the Pacific, he met Walter Forward around Christmas, 1858. Forward had just been appointed United States Marshal for the District of Oregon, and wanted Tim Colter to be his first deputy. Patricia smiled and told him to take the job, that there had not been any ships wrecked along the coast since the lighthouses had been built. So Colter rode with Forward back to Eugene, then on to Salem, Portland, Medford, Corvallis, Oregon City, farm towns, forts, mining camps, fishing villages, mountains, rivers, the dry country . . . wherever he needed to go—but always returning to the coast west of Eugene.

  Dolphes B. Hannah took the marshal’s job in August ’59, a few months after the territory had been granted statehood—a free state, of course—and Hannah had been no fool. He could see the record of arrests, and he could read the articles published in the Oregon Spectator, the Oregonian, the Western Star, the Statesman, and the Free Press. Hannah kept Tim Colter on the U.S. marshal’s office payroll.

  Then, the Civil War erupted. Most federal troops in the state and up in Washington Territory left the Pacific Northwest for the East. A few men of Oregon went east to fight. Edward Baker, who had been a U.S. senator from the state, would die at Ball’s Bluff, leading his troops in Virginia. A Jacksonville lawyer named James Lingenfelter, who had been in Pennsylvania when the war started, stayed there to fight with the 71st Pennsylvania Infantry and was shot dead while on the picket line.

  But with settlers still making their way from the East, to join the gold camps in Oregon and over into Idaho Territory, organized in 1863, and with Paiutes, Shoshones, and Bannocks causing trouble, Tim Colter stayed in Oregon. When Governor John Whiteaker granted George Wright permission to form a cavalry regiment, Colter joined the 1st Oregon Cavalry.

  Colter lasted longer than Colonel Wright, who was replaced by some half-wit Californian named Cody before Colter, or anyone else, even joined. Cody was gone, too, before Thomas R. Cornelius was commissioned in November 1861 and ordered to raise ten troops of cavalry.

  Although Colter couldn’t claim to have seen much action, he rode with the blue—when he wasn’t sick from bad water or worse food or having caught some complaint from one of his fellow troopers—from the summer of 1862 to the summer of 1865.

  It was after the 1st had returned from a little affair along the Malheur River and Camp Lyon in mid-July of ’65 that he got the letter. Numbly, Colter had gone to Colonel Reuben F. Maury, who had assumed command of the 1st that January. Maury granted Colter a leave, and he would not return to active duty, even when he and everyone else in the regiment was mustered out in November of ’66.

  Tim Colter rode back to the Pacific.

  To an empty house.

  Diphtheria.

  That’s what the doctor had called it. The epidemic had swept through much of Elkton. Patricia Scott Colter had likely picked it up when she came to Elkton for supplies. Because she lived so far from any neighbors, no one had known she was sick, or that the children had come down with the disease. The old sawbones had said that, likely, Patricia had thought it was just the croup at first. Bad cough, sore throat, a touch of fever. Elkton or Eugene or anywhere else would be too risky to travel to see a doctor. By the time the noses started bleeding, it would have been too late, anyway, for even the best doctor to treat them. Certainly, Patricia could not have gotten herself or the kids out of the house.

  Remembering that Patricia had come to town during the early outbreak of the diphtheria epidemic, Horace Friedman had traveled those rugged sixty miles down the river to the coast, then across the sand dunes to the mouth of the Siuslaw and the home Tim and Patricia had built with their own hands.

  The merchant had buried them by himself.

  * * *

  Colter left the bougainvilleas and walked to the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the graves. The fence had been a gift from the people of Elkton, Marshal William H. Bennett, who had replaced Dolphes B. Hannah in ’62, and Governor A.C. Gibbs.

  He looked at the marble stones, small, just names, and ages, and the year.

  PATRICIA COLTER

  36 YRS

  1865

  JED COLTER

  13 YRS

  1865

  MATILDA COLTER

  10 YRS

  1865

  CLAUDE COLTER

  4 YRS

  1865

  Colter swept the hat off his head, keeping it in his right hand, and wrapping his left around one of the wet, cold iron bars.

  “I won’t be coming back,” he told the graves. “You once told me if anything happened to you . . .” He had to stop, let the tear slide down his cheek, swallow down the lump in his throat. “. . . to . . . keep livin
g. I come back here . . . and . . . I just remember you . . . now. Dead. All of you. And I know . . . even if I hadn’t been gallivanting across the country play-acting like I was a real soldier . . . that I couldn’t have done anything. I know that. But . . . I think . . . that maybe . . . if I’d just . . . if I wasn’t here, that I’d remember you alive. And that’s how I’d like to remember you. I love you. I’ll always love you. I’ll never forget you.”

  He felt a little better, oddly enough. Colter released his grip on the fence. He watched the ocean, the waves crashing, and he knew, come spring, this cemetery, this homestead, this whole beachfront, would be covered with bougainvilleas.

  “You got a pretty place here,” he said. “Real pretty. Just like all of you. Take care. I’ll see you all . . . when it’s my time.”

  When he left, a few hours later, the wooden home, the lean-to, the shed, and even the outhouse were burning.

  Tim Colter did not look back.

  That was another thing Jed Reno had taught him.

  CHAPTER 7

  The federal district offices were in Portland, but the state capital remained in Salem—at least it had since the 1864 election—and new marshal Albert Zeiber was meeting with Governor George Lemuel Woods, and had asked to meet Tim Colter at the capitol.

  That suited Tim Colter well enough. He would rather spend time in Salem than Portland.

  He stood that morning on the corner of Commercial and Ferry, staring up at the three-story building Joseph Holman had built, most people said, as a hotel. Then some arsonist or arsonists—at least that’s what most of the citizens still claimed—torched the Oregon State Capitol a few days after Christmas, 1855, and Holman changed his plans. He was, after all, a fairly civic-minded gent—one of the trustees of Willamette University—had settled in the country around Fort Vancouver and up in Champoeg in the 1840s. His hotel was turned into a temporary house for the Oregon State Capitol, with the Oregon State Senate meeting on the third floor, the House of Representatives on the second, and other state offices on the first.