He looked up at those thousands of stars, and began speaking pure poetry:
“Her face was veiled; yet to my fancied sight
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined
So clear as in no face with more delight.
But, oh! as to embrace me she inclined,
I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.”
He spoke pretty good. Like that thespian who’d played Falstaff in San Antonio.
When he lowered his head, our eyes locked across the coals. I figured him to be an ally, like Peach Fuzz and Jingfei. That made us three. Against seventeen hidden out in the rocks and six down yonder. Plus Candy Crutchfield, wherever she’d gotten to. Then I looked down at the girls, all jolly and young and pure and good. And a crazy notion run through my head:
If we could arm all those women . . .
Only that thought died because of something Doctor John “Mad Dog” Milton just said.
What he said was, “As far as those others were concerned . . .”
I studied him again. “What others?” I asked.
He waved off my question. “What does it matter? I am bound for the cord just as my mother’s midwife preordained when she pressed me into my precious mother’s arms. Bound for the cord. Doomed to the gallows. The others . . . to hell with their wretched souls! A wife-beater. A rapist. A drunkard who had kicked a puppy. A debtor who owed me thirty-seven dollars and ninety-one cents and bragged how he would never pay. A cheater of cards. A leper. Death was their true desserts, and death was my prescription, my cure.”
About halfway through that soliloquy was when I started thinking that maybe I’d just better count on me and Jingfei and Peach Fuzz.
He leaned forward, lowering his voice, saying harshly, “But Micah. Those men I cured by killing them, but I killed them with scalpel twice but usually with narcotic analgesics.” He smiled. “They never knew. Never suffered. Merely died and woke up in Hell.”
The voice got even lower, only this time it didn’t sound like John Milton or a Shakespearean actor down in Texas. It sounded like . . . the Voice of God.
“But she . . .” And by she I knowed he meant Candy Crutchfield. “She lives to inflict unendurable agony.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The last thing Mad Doc Milton told me that night before both of us turned in was that I needed to get plenty of rest. “Tomorrow,” he announced grimly, “we enter the Devil’s Playground.”
Next morning, after breakfast—with still no sign of or word from Verne or Crutchfield’s boys—we got a lecture that we’d be entering some rough country, to go slow, keep a lookout, not tax our horses or mules. Get through this next stretch, Crutchfield said, and it was smooth sailing all the way to Calico and a new life for the girls who’d traveled so far.
New life. Hearing that lie made me spit out my coffee.
That morn, I got a good look at how Candy Crutchfield run an operation of running mail-order brides. No Conestogas. No farm wagons. And only the one Columbus carriage that Peach Fuzz had procured. What Candy Crutchfield put her girls in was omnibuses, and I ain’t talking about the normal conveyances that you might see hauling folks from train depots to their hotels. No, sir, these was two-deckers, pulled by fine, mighty big draft mules. Two benches along the sides of the bottom where our ladies could sit and face each other and talk about the lives they expected to live once they got to Calico. The top deck had seats going the other way, shorter, and more benches, but I didn’t think anybody would be riding outside that day.
Not in the Devil’s Playground.
And I was right. Sorta. Although six fellows climbed atop each of them three mule-pulled buses. The driver sat next to a guy riding shotgun but armed with two Marlin repeaters, but what caught my attention was the four gents on the next-to-last backseat. Affixed atop the very backseat was something covered in a canvas tarp, and I stared, perplexed, watching as two of the boys on the backseat worked on the knots on the ropes that held that cover in place. Eventually, the knots got undid and the canvas come off, and I gasped. Mean to tell you I actually sucked in air hard and loud, which hurt my ribs and my back fierce. Gasping ain’t something I ever do, even when that tinhorn up in Leadville had turned over a straight flush whilst I thought I was sitting pretty holding kings over aces. What was secured onto the very backseat was something I’d never seen on no bus before. Hell, I’d never seen it on any wagon, only in woodcuts in magazines and once at a fort where I was being incarcerated in a stockade back during my brief tenure as an Army courier.
I spotted a couple of boxes beside the gent sitting closest to the edge near me.
“That can’t be,” I said.
“Aye, but it is, lad, it most surely is,” John Milton laughed, then he slapped my shoulder and hurried to one of the buses, where I watched him climb into the bottom floor of the wagon. He picked the same bus that was carrying the redheaded twins from Savannah . . . and Bonnie Little . . . and even my Jingfei.
Thinking of that crazy mad-dog doctor riding in the same coach as sweet Jingfei, I liked to have stepped on a barrel cactus, did a little jig to get away and managed not to fall on my face, and moved—still at a gingerly pace—to my wagon.
Peach Fuzz had already hitched the team, and when I climbed into the seat beside him, he leaned over, give his head this secretive nod toward the first omnibus, and he says in one of those conspiratorial voices: “If we could clumb atop one of ’em horse-buses, we could shoot down all of Crutchfield’s boys, don’t you reckon?”
He straightened up, staring at the gray horses’ tails, waiting for me to answer but not cause anybody to suspicion what we was thinking.
“No,” I said. “They look good, but Gatling guns are prone to jamming. All show. That’s all they’re good for.”
Course, I was also thinking that Jingfei might also be thinking about getting to the Gatlings. Didn’t like no thoughts of how a fool stunt like that would turn out for my China doll.
“A citizen can’t own a Gatling gun,” Peach Fuzz said. “Can she? I mean, I thought they was for the Army only.”
“I’m sure the Secret Service would like to talk to Candy Crutchfield about those,” I said.
“Do you know how to shoot one?” he asked.
“No,” I snapped. “But here’s something I do know. They got two boxes of ammunition along with those guns. On each wagon.”
I told him a few other facts. They was .45-70 cartridges, and those were fairly new fast-shooting guns, could fire four hundred rounds a minute—a lot more in theory, but theories don’t always count—and had two rows of bullets. While one row was being shot, the other could be reloaded. Which meant one gun could do a ton of shooting.
Yes, sir, you sure do learn things like that playing poker with boys from Fort Mojave in card games at Beal’s Crossing.
“Forget the Gatlings,” I told Peach Fuzz. “You try for those guns, you’ll get shot to pieces.”
“Thought you said they jammed all the time,” he told me.
I told him to shut the hell up.
Next, I done some figuring. Six men on each omnibus. That made eighteen. Plus John Milton in the last coach, the one carrying Jingfei. Nineteen. Up ahead, talking to the driver of the lead wagon was Candy Crutchfield and Candy’s—not Whip’s—boy Zeke. Twenty-one.
There was two other fellows wearing big sugarloaf sombreros on real fine horses. Arabians. Chestnuts that had to stand almost fifteen hands high, with those beautiful sloping shoulders and arching their tails real high, real proud, ’cause they knowed they was Arabians and likely the finest horses between Sacramento and Prescott. Real good. Let Peach Fuzz try to get to one of them Gatling guns. I’d rather steal one of them Arabs.
Twenty-three.
Which meant, if my ciphering was right, that there was two guys missing. Unless Jingfei had miscounted the boys last night, and I didn’t think Jingfei would make a mistake like that. I stared into one of the omnibuses, one of the two that John Mil
ton hadn’t climbed into. Maybe they was inside the coaches, which made sense. But I couldn’t see nothing but dresses of the finest moiré in a rainbow of grand colors.
Scouting ahead? That was possible. I stared out into the empty desert where we was going. Where else could them two boys be? I looked at the creosote and the couple of Joshua trees growing near where we’d camped. Covering our back trail? That was possible, too.
Two missing men. Hell, it took only one to kill you.
“Let’s ride, boys!” Candy Crutchfield was mounting her horse. “Get ready for a fun excursion, ladies.”
Folks say that the Devil’s Playground is where the Mojave River gets swallowed by sand. Which is all I saw. Sand. Oh, there was the occasional tree, a sturdy and stupid honey mesquite. Every now and then we’d come to patches of grass or some damned fool shrub trying to climb out of the sand, to blow in the wind. Around us, I spotted the faraway purple shapes of distant mountain ranges, beacons I reckon. Mostly, though, for miles and miles on end, all I saw was sand.
We were trapped in an ocean. Lost at sea.
Here’s something I learned about sand. It’s hard on horses, and especially big-ass omnibuses loaded with women, at least six men, Gatling guns, and boxes of .45-70 cartridges.
Four times or forty—that number I disremember—we had to stop, dismount, push or dig or somehow get the wagon rolling after either one of the big rear wheels or smaller front wheels, or, criminy, sometimes two of the wheels sank deep into that sand.
It was during one of those pushing and digging exercises—the one where I slipped when the mules stopped being ornery and got to pulling and the omnibus (one without Bonnie or Jingfei or Doctor John Milton) lurched forward, and I fell facedown in the sand—when the nightmare come right back into my head.
Standing in a desert of dunes . . . the wind blowing sand like grapeshot . . . No trees . . . Only sand forever, a sky without clouds, the sun baking down on us.
“You all right?”
I spit out sand, rolled over, wiped my face with my bandanna.
“Yeah,” I told Peach Fuzz. My ribs hurt from the fall, but I managed to get up on my own accord, and then Candy Crutchfield rode up, laughing like the coyote dog she was.
“You think that’s somethin’, wait till what we gots next.” Another howl, then she reined around her horse, and pointed ahead of us.
It was a wave, one of those tsunamis I read about in a Harper’s Weekly some years back. A giant wall heading right for us. Only it wasn’t moving. Yet it was. And after a while I understand that what was moving was the sand, blowing like snow in a blizzard in that horrible dream I’d had.
Most of the country we’d traveled across, excepting the wash we’d crossed maybe four miles from our camp at Cornfield Spring, had been flat. Ahead of us waited hell.
The wave was a dune of sand, only more like a mountain of sand.
“Six hundred feet or thereabouts, I’d wager,” Crutchfield called out. She must have been talking to the driver of the first omnibus. “But make it up that hill, and the others, and it’s all downhill till we climb up to Calico.”
“There must be a better trail to get to that mining camp!” the driver shot back.
“Course there is! Iffen you think Verne an’ ’em fools I sent to run a man’s errand did their job, and just didn’t come back to us because they’s all ignorant. If you want to risk things. If you think Whip Watson is burnin’ in Hell. If you know for a fact that that slick sharp Rogers Canfield didn’t have other pardners in his nefarious scheme. Sure, we’ll just take the Mojave Road and the Calico Trail all the way into that there burg. That what you want to do, fool?”
That told me something. Candy Crutchfield didn’t think Whip Watson was dead. I didn’t think so, neither. But where the hell was he? It sure didn’t stand to reason that he had run back to Wickenburg or Prescott to try to round up twenty-four other mail-order brides and win the race to bring whores to Calico.
No, he was out yonder waiting. Like a Mojave rattler—planning to strike.
We nooned before we got to the first dunes. Grained and watered the horses and mules, chewed on jerky and hardtack ourselves. Candy let her boys mingle with the brides—now, she stood over us like a chaperone, perched atop one of the omnibuses, sitting on a crate of .45-70s and spitting tobacco juice.
“Y’all can talk all you likes,” she said. “But no touchin’. Don’t want to make ’em husbands waitin’ in Calico to get all jealous.” Which she followed by more spitting and then that dreadful howling.
Brave soul that I am, I moseyed over to Jingfei, knelt beside her without asking, then taken the parasol she held to keep the blistering sun off her porcelain face, and held it for her. That’s the kind of gentleman I am.
“Have you seen the Gatling guns?” she asked.
I twirled the parasol like a regular lady.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I’ve seen all three of them. I get one. Two others get me. And fill me full of holes that’ll likely blow both of my eyeballs out of their sockets.”
I was looking around, watching the men, watching the two chestnut Arabians, watching for a chance. I knowed one thing. Omnibuses full of petticoats and Gatling guns don’t move fast. Not up a sand dune. But an Arabian. Me and Jingfei would stand a chance on them two beauts. Maybe not much of a chance, like making a straight when you need a king and three of them is already showing. But it’s been done before. Hell, I’d pulled that off two or three times.
“There are three of us,” Jingfei allowed. “You and me and him.”
I sighed, and turned to see Peach Fuzz, only Jingfei wasn’t nodding at Peach Fuzz, who was busy conversing real quiet-like with Bonnie over in the shade of one of the omnibuses. Her smooth jaw indicated John Milton.
“Him?” I asked.
“Yes. Franklin Kent.”
Murderer of widow women—I don’t give a damn about his reason—and killer of kicker of puppy dogs. The parasol stopped spinning.
“What the hell did you two talk about all morning in that coach?” Sounded, I reckon, like a jealous husband.
Her head shook, and she sighed. “Lawrence Barrett,” she said. “Do you know that Doctor Kent played on stage with that legendary thespian?”
“Really?” Like I give a damn. “Who’d John Milton play, Falstaff ?”
That did make Jingfei look up and reconsider me, and I had to thank, silently, Big Tim Pruett for dragging me to Henry IV, Part I.
“No,” she said after a moment. “Doctor Kent was a one of the Plebians, but to be on stage, watching the great Barrett play Julius Caesar.”
I said, “Et tu, Bruté?” which prompted another reconsidering look from Jingfei and caused yet another thank-you to the late Big Tim Pruett for spouting off Shakespeare in all those cabins and caves and jails we hid out in during our many sojourns before his untimely demise.
While Jingfei was giving me that second look, I found myself looking at the Gatling guns. Then I glanced over at Peach Fuzz and Bonnie. Next I was wetting my lips, dry as they was, and I realized that the only person near one of them Gatlings was Candy Crutchfield. And she wasn’t looking out at us no more, but kept her eyes pealed toward the dunes. Most, if not all, of her boys was talking to our mail-order brides. So I handed the parasol back to Jingfei, and took a tentative step toward one of the other omnibuses.
I felt a hand on my leg, above my new black boots with the fine stitching and the seventeen-inch tops.
Looked down and saw that beautiful face staring up at me with eyes that wasn’t reconsidering or hard.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’ll be killed.”
Which was a right good prediction. Before I could do something stupid like tell her “I must” or merely fell to my face because my knees had begun to buckle, Candy Crutchfield was standing atop her perch and barking, “We’re burnin’ daylight. ’Em there dunes ain’t goin’ nowhere, so let’s get at ’em, boys!”
Later, it struck me that Candy Crutchfi
eld’s impatience had probably saved me from getting killed.
The first hill proved dreadful. Our mules and horses were well fed and well watered, which made them lazy and cantankerous and heavier. I can’t say the humans in our group was well fed, but we was cantankerous, certain-sure. Then Candy Crutchfield, the damned idiot, came up with the brilliant idea that if we got the brides out of the coaches, the coaches wouldn’t weigh near as much.
A damned lot of them gals moaned—six of them throwed veritable hissy fits—about having to walk up the first dune. But it made me right proud that Jingfei didn’t say nothing at all, just made a beeline up that shifting sand. Hard to do. Hard for everyone. Bonnie didn’t complain none, either, but hell, she had Peach Fuzz helping her along the way.
After I got the Columbus carriage to the crest, I walked down and helped the redheaded twins up. They were real polite, and thanked me kindly. You ever heard an Irish brogue with a Georgia twang? It’s something. Let me tell you, it sure is something to hear.
Not long after that, all I heard was grunting and farting and cussing. We had to hitch long ropes to the double trees and practically pull them buses up that tall dune of shifting sand. Others got behind the wagons and pushed. I happened to be on rope-pulling duty, which caused me to cuss myself for not having the foresight to spend $1.19 on thirty-five-cent thick work gloves at J. M. Miller’s store in Calico.
After an eternity of backbreaking work, we got all three horse-buses up that dune. Then let the ladies ride down. Then told them to haul their asses out, and we went to work getting them wagons up the next hill.
Which is how our the rest of our day went.
And . . . pretty much . . . how the next day went, too. See, after that first night in the dunes, I was too damned beat to try to get to no Gatling gun. Ate some soup, drunk some coffee, and lay down on my battered new hat, and fell fast sleep.
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