Winchester 1886 Read online

  “Wounded him.” Trooper Andy Preston sank beside O’Donnell. “I see he got you, too.”

  O’Donnell moved his hand and let Preston press a handkerchief over the wound. While he worked, O’Donnell leaned his head back against the chalk rock, his lungs still heaving, and pain burning his side.

  “I’d say it’s just a scratch, Sarge, but . . .”

  O’Donnell knew what Preston meant. A .50-100-450 slug did not leave just scratches. It dug ditches. His side would sport one mean-looking scar, something he could brag about.

  At least, the wound appeared far from fatal.

  Another soldier knelt, ripping the sleeves off his calico shirt. He and Preston tore the garment and wrapped it tight around O’Donnell’s waist.

  While they were finishing, Trooper Roger Jones hurried over, sliding to a stop. “The Apache’s back in them rocks. I know we got him. In the leg. He was hollerin’ like a stuck pig for a minute, but he ain’t sayin’ nothin’ no more.”

  “Bled out?” the soldier who had sacrificed his shirt asked hopefully.

  “I doubt that,” Preston muttered.

  O’Donnell jerked his thumb back through the hole in the rock. “He doesn’t have much lead to throw. There’s a handful of shells on the other side. He left them in the dirt.”

  “How many will an ’86 hold in the tube?” Preston asked the sarge.

  “A .45-70 holds eight if it’s a rifle or musket. I’d have to guess that a .50 would hold about the same. Maybe one fewer if it’s a carbine.”

  “It’s a rifle,” Preston said. “So eight shots. Nine if he jacked one into the chamber.”

  “Likely less than that in that buck’s repeater,” Jones said. “He cut loose with a few shots.”

  “Still enough to kill a couple more of us, though,” said the soldier without sleeves.

  O’Donnell made himself stand. The sun had dropped well below the chalk pyramids off to the west, and it was growing darker with every passing second. He leaned back against the rock, wet his lips, and looked down at the .44 in his right hand.

  “Let’s finish this,” Preston whispered.

  “You bet,” echoed Jones. “Win us some medals.”

  “Posthumously.” Sergeant Major Sean O’Donnell tilted his head toward the sun. “Medals are one thing, if you’re alive to get them. You boys itching to get killed?” He waited. “Chasing an Apache in the dark ain’t my idea of having fun.” Drawing a deep breath, he said, “Put some guards on both sides of those rocks. Tell them not to shoot Trooper Preston’s horse by accident. Tell them don’t fall asleep. We’ll get Mr. John York come morning.”

  “Was that thunder?” Peggy Crabbe asked.

  Her husband Matt was already tugging on the lines to the Michigan A Grade Combination Market and Pleasure Wagon. He called out, “Whoa” to the mules and looked across western Kansas toward the chalk monuments in the distance just beginning to show in the morning light.

  “There it is again,” Peggy said, shielding her eyes and fair skin, staring to the southeast. “But there’s not a cloud in the sky.”

  He considered lying. Telling his new bride that certainly, it was thunder. She’d heard of heat lightning, no doubt. So what she’d heard was heat thunder. Common in western Kansas. A body gets used to things like heat . . . and the wind, which was just beginning to pick up.

  He couldn’t do it. “No, Miss Peggy, it ain’t thunder.”

  The sound rumbled across the plains, despite the fact that the wind was blowing away from Monument Rocks.

  She knew. “Gunfire?” The word came out like a gasp.

  His head bobbed as he scanned the plains. He turned in the comfortable seat with the lazy back, reaching into the back, and pulling up his beaten-like-the-Dickens Spencer carbine.

  “Hunters?” she asked.

  He shook the lines, yelling at the mules to hurry, and slid the rifle onto the seat between his wife and himself. It struck him as one of his fool notions. But so had marrying the pretty little brunette who thought Terre Haute, Indiana, had been a wild, lawless town.

  “Come on, you fool mules!” He found the whip and lashed out with it, just managing to catch a glimpse of his wife’s horrified face.

  Crabbe had twenty-three years on the twenty-two-year-old girl he had saved from a spinster’s existence teaching school in La Crosse. He didn’t know what that pretty young gal saw in him. Fresh out of Indiana, she could read, write, speak French, and make mighty fine biscuits.

  And him? He had met a Frenchman once, had even hired out to serve as one of the monsieur’s guides on a hunt the aristocrat had arranged with a couple generals, a consulate—whatever that was—from Washington City, and the commanding officer at Fort Wallace. That’s as close to he’d come to speaking French. Monsieur. Ouí. And a couple cuss-words that Frenchy, one evening after too much Champagne, had discretely told him . . . words he’d never mention to Peggy.

  He could read sign, but not his letters, signed his name with two Xs and wasn’t much for cooking anything that he hadn’t killed. He’d never been to Indiana—hailed from Kentucky—although he had told Peggy that he had, back when he had been courting her.

  He had worked on the Kansas Pacific, hunted buffalo, served as a beer-jerker in one or two hell-on-wheels, served as a deputy during the cattle seasons in Newton and Ellsworth, and scouted for the U.S. Army out of Fort Wallace. It was where he was taking Peggy, more or less.

  The Army had closed up shop at Wallace about ten or twelve years ago, and since then he had spent his time working lousy jobs like gathering buffalo bones for fertilizer, even sweeping out the mercantile at Crider’s place in La Crosse—which is how he met Peggy.

  Actually, he was taking her to a hundred and sixty acres he had filed to homestead just spitting distance from Pond Creek. But first . . .

  “Sounds like a gunfight!” he shouted. A regular shooting scrape. He hadn’t been in anything like that since ’89.

  Swaying beside him, Peggy gripped the seat with both hands, her mouth open but her eyes screwed shut, trying to keep from tumbling out of the wagon.

  He let the mules pull the wagon—which had set him back thirty-five dollars at La Crosse (and that did not include the mules or the harness or the ring Peggy made him buy for her)—off the track. The chalk monuments slowly grew off the prairie floor.

  “Monument Rocks!” he called out, like he was offering a tour of western Kansas.

  His wife didn’t open her eyes to enjoy the view. ’Course, she couldn’t see much anyhow. On account of all the dust the two mules kept kicking up.

  Twenty minutes later, he could see the figures of men scurrying around the outcroppings. Smoke puffed from behind one of the rocks, and a moment later came the muffled report of a single-shot Springfield. Other men spread out. They seemed to have some ol’ boy pinned up behind a series of chalk ridges.

  A lawman he had worked with in Newton—before the peace officer had the misfortune of getting his head stoved in by an anvil—had once warned him to never go rushing into a fight. Not until he knew which side was the one he wanted to join up.

  Crabbe pulled back on the lines, bringing the mules to a rough stop. Her set the brake, pulled the rifle off the seat, and leaped from the rig. “Stay here!” he shouted to his new bride.

  She kept her eyes closed and her fingers tight against the seat.

  Maybe, he thought as he hurried across the prairie, running in a crouch, I should have at least kissed her cheek.

  Seven hundred yards from the pyramids, he stopped and knelt behind a clump of grass and scrub. He could make out the guidon flapping in that infernal wind and knew some cavalry boys had someone pinned down. He had never trained his sights on anyone wearing the blue.

  Deserter, he figured.

  All right. At least one thing had been settled. He knew which side he would pick in this scrape. He didn’t care for deserters.

  He started to snake through the grass, gripping the Spencer in his sweaty hands.
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  The leg no longer hurt. It did not bleed, either, but only because he had packed the ugly wound with the chalky sand. It had swollen up and was beginning to turn black.

  Soon, Yuyutsu knew, he would die. From blood poisoning, thirst, or a bluecoat’s bullet. He prayed for the latter, a fitting way for an Apache warrior to die.

  It had not been much of a raid, after all. The bluecoats had outsmarted him more than once. For that, he blamed the School Fathers and the School Mothers at Carlisle, where they had taught him to follow the white man’s road. Where they had made him forget what it was like to be a Chiricahua Apache warrior in battle.

  Still, he had made some of them pay. Their women would cut off their hair in mourning for those who were no more. Their names would never be spoken again.

  Well, if they had been Apaches—old Apaches, before the reservation days, before Geronimo had surrendered to the general called Miles—they would have done those things. The pale eyes would brag about how bravely their soldiers had died. They would erect marble monuments to their dead. They would tell lies in newspapers and books.

  The only monument for Eager to Fight, the last great Chiricahua warrior, was the chunk of stone and sand he leaned against. He stared at the Winchester in his arms. Wondered if he had enough strength to lift the weapon or even to pull the trigger.

  A rifle roared and the big slug bore into the butte far off to the right and ten or twenty feet over his head. Not even close. He wondered if the bluecoats planned on chopping down the chalk rock with bullets. Was that how they would flush him out of his hiding place?

  “Stop wasting lead!” shouted the leader of the bluecoats—the man who had barked orders since Yuyutsu had killed their chief.

  He wondered why they did not rush him. Just end the fight with one charge. He couldn’t kill them all. Yuyutsu stared at the Winchester. He probably couldn’t even kill one of them.

  Last night, when the leg pained him so much, he had thought about turning the big rifle on himself. But that was not a fitting way for a Chiricahua brave to die.

  The sun baked him. Had the bluecoats been smart, they could have come at him from that direction. He probably wouldn’t have seen them until it was too late.

  But the bluecoats were stupid.

  They could have charged him during the night, or immediately after they had busted his leg with a rifle shot, when the pain became too intense, when he could not have protected himself from a tiny ant. Or when he had drifted off to sleep, not to awaken until shortly before dawn.

  The bluecoats would not wait much longer. The sun kept turning hotter, even though it was late in the year. The men and the horses Yuyutsu had killed would begin to bloat, to stink. The soldiers would want to end the standoff. Soon.

  He wanted it to be over.

  He dragged himself to the edge of the rock, leaving behind the soldier’s black horse and a trail of blood the ants would follow. There was nowhere else for him to go.

  “John York!” the leader of the soldiers called out.

  Yuyutsu had tired of the man’s voice.

  “This is your last warning. Give it up, boy. There’s no need for anyone else to die. Listen to me, John York. It’s over. Let’s end this peacefully.”

  John York. As if he would ever answer to that name. I am Yuyutsu.

  A bullet kicked sand into his face, and he turned, surprised to find the strength back in his body, his wits keen. He blinked rapidly, cleared his vision, and brought up the big rifle. A soldier—a fool bluecoat—was running straight for him, firing a six-shooter. Smoke and flame belched from the revolver’s long barrel, yet Yuyutsu felt no bullets tear into his body.

  A running man could not shoot straight.

  “Winfield!” a voice called out. “You fool!”

  The big rifle boomed, jarring Yuyutsu’s entire body and knocking him down. He landed with a grunt, felt the wound in his thigh open up again, and pushed himself up with the Winchester.

  Just ten yards ahead of him, the foolish bluecoat named Winfield lay writhing on the ground, the sand darkening with his blood. He was crying, begging, coughing.

  Yuyutsu sat up again, bringing up the rifle and levering a fresh cartridge. He aimed at the soldier, but did not pull the trigger.

  Something in the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned and froze.

  Another man stood only twenty yards from him, right knee on the ground, elbow braced on his left thigh, holding another type of rifle. “Drop the rifle, boy.”

  He was no bluecoat. He wore tan trousers and a muslin shirt. His cheek bulged with tobacco, and his hat wasn’t even what they called hats out in this country. It was nothing more than a woolen cap of tweed, the kind Yuyutsu had seen in Pennsylvania. Not Kansas.

  “Drop the gun.” The indaaligande spoke with authority, but the big rifle trained on Yuyutsu’s chest gave a man much power. “Drop it. Else I drop you.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It had been a good fight. They would remember his name. His leg hurt . . . and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep conscious much longer. Smiling, Yuyutsu let the heavy Winchester ’86 drop from his fingers and land in the Kansas dust.

  He told himself that he had no choice. After all, the last bullet he had rested inside the bluecoat named Winfield’s guts.

  “I got him, boys!” the white man yelled, but he did not move, and took neither his aim nor his eyes off Yuyutsu.

  Yuyutsu turned, made himself smile again, though even that action sent waves of pain throughout his body.

  The soldier, the last one he had shot, moved no more. Other bluecoats, those still alive, hurried around, stopping to check the man named Winfield, praying to their god, and muttering curses. They gathered around Yuyutsu, the last great warrior of the Chiricahua Apaches. One bluecoat picked up the Winchester, but mostly they stared, some at Yuyutsu, but the majority at the man with the rifle, the man with the funny cap, the man who had stopped Yuyutsu’s great raid.

  The leader of the bluecoats was the last to arrive, moving slowly. Yuyutsu enjoyed seeing the bloody bandage around the bluecoat’s side. Had he not rushed his shot, had the gods not smiled upon this man with the stripes on his dusty coat, he would have been dead, too.

  The soldier took the rifle from the other bluecoat, cocked it, shook his head, and gave Yuyutsu a spiteful look. He faced the man who had just stood and butted his rifle on the ground. “Who in blazes are you?”

  Matt Crabbe slid the Irish eight-piece cap off his head, shoved it into his back pocket, and introduced himself as he nodded at the sergeant major. “Headin’ for my homestead over near what used to be Fort Wallace. Heard the shots. Come to help.”

  “We thank you for that,” the noncom said.

  “Winfield’s dead, Sarge,” one of the troopers said.

  Most of the soldiers look mighty green, Crabbe thought, except the sergeant major and the soldier who’s attending to the Apache buck’s leg. “You got any wounded? Other than yourself.”

  The bandage around the sergeant’s waist was blackened with dried blood on his side.

  “Four dead.” The sergeant sighed. “No, five, counting Winfield. A couple are wounded, but nothing serious.”

  Five dead. Crabbe tried not to whistle as he looked at the Apache. An Apache. In Kansas. In 1894. His head shook. The Indian didn’t look so fierce now, more like a little boy—probably had not even cleared his teens—in much pain.

  “Bunch of our horses took off,” the sergeant was saying, “and I’d like to get the lieutenant’s body—and these other poor lads—to civilization for a proper burial. We lost a few horses, too, chasing this buck.”

  Crabbe nodded. “Nearest town’s Russell Springs.” He gestured toward the northwest. “County seat. Used to be the Eaton stop on the old Butterfield stage route. It’s directly along the North Fork of the Smoky.”

  He looked over the troopers. They’d not likely be walking far. At least, not as far as Russell Springs—which is when he remembe
red Peggy. He slipped the cap out of his pocket, placed it on his head, and started walking, moving into a quickstep.

  “Where you goin’?” one of the soldiers called out.

  Matt didn’t look back. “Be back directly. I gotta go fetch my wife.”

  “Wife?” the sergeant shouted.

  She remembered her mother lying in that gray dress, the one she wore during the winter, arms folded across her chest, hair pinned back in that silver-streaked bun. Looking peaceful, beautiful. One never would have guessed how much pain she had endured before the consumption claimed her and sent her off to Glory. Father had let her lean over and kiss her mother good-bye. Then the preacher had nodded, they had closed the coffin, and taken Mother outside to be buried in the cemetery behind the First Congregational Church.

  Until today, that had been the only dead person Peggy Browne Crabbe had ever seen.

  She was a long, long way from the Wabash Valley.

  She wouldn’t get off the seat in the front of the market and pleasure wagon. Just sat nailed to that spot, wringing her hands, watching as the soldiers—and her husband—moved about the dead. Some of them had climbed into the back of the wagon, and she had heard her trunks scraping against the wood. It had made her skin crawl. She had watched them carry those trunks—with her clothes . . . her dowry . . . her books . . . everything she had to show for her twenty-two years—and place them behind one of those eerie white rocks that rose like tombstones in this bleak, foreign place.

  She wanted to be back teaching children—even the wicked, wicked sons of Franklin and Maria Mitchell—in La Crosse. Wished she had never left Terre Haute.

  Then they brought the dead, laying them beside the one she had seen. Some of the bodies seemed white as the chalk buttes and arches. Others black, bloated, hideous. Five men. No . . . five figures that once had been men. The soldiers did not even have the decency to cover the dead.

  Yet it wasn’t the bodies of the men that bothered her. It was the wind.

  It just blew. Unrelentingly, it swept down from the north. The swallowtail flag one of the troopers had planted in the ground popped like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. The wind tugged at her dress, at her hair. She figured the bonnet she had bought in La Crosse was already all the way to Mexico. The wind peppered the back of her neck with grit and sand. And throughout the series of random outcroppings of rock—Monument Rocks, her husband had called them; another had said Pyramid Rocks—the wind moaned. Like the dead groaning. Like the earth ending.