Hour of Death Read online

  “You’ve got some idea of how I go about my work, Governor,” Sixkiller said guardedly. “It can get messy. Bodies tend to pile up. I wouldn’t want to embarrass the White House.”

  “I can assure you that you’ll have a free hand in this matter,” Wallace said. “Do whatever it takes. Anything is better than the violent lawlessness running amok in Ringgold, Wyoming.”

  “In that case, I’m your huckleberry, Governor.”

  Wallace looked puzzled.

  “That means it’s a go,” Sixkiller explained.

  “Good man! I knew we could count on you,” Wallace enthused.

  “Of course, you’ll have to clear it with my boss Judge Parker,” Sixkiller said.

  In the chain of command of federal marshals and magistrates, Sixkiller answered to Judge Isaac Parker, notorious throughout the frontier as The Hanging Judge. Parker was based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, but his jurisdiction also included sections of the Oklahoma territory—one of the most violent and lawless regions on the North American continent.

  Sixkiller’s bailiwick as U.S. deputy marshal covered the Indian Nations region of the territory, originally set up as a homeland/reservation for the Five Civilized tribes. One of those tribes were the Cherokee, Sixkiller’s people. Or half his people, rather, for he was part-Indian and part-White.

  Owing to the peculiar legal status of the Nations, fugitives from other states could not be easily extradited from there nor could outsider lawmen pursue fugitives into reservation lands, causing it to become a haven for some of the West’s most vicious outlaws.

  A quirk in the law prevented Indian tribal police from arresting, trying, and imprisoning non-Indians who committed a crime in the Nations. Judge Parker had gotten around that miscarriage of justice by appointing one John H. Sixkiller a deputy federal marshal under his jurisdiction.

  Sixkiller was legally authorized to make arrests. Prisoners had to be taken to Fort Smith for incarceration and trial. Malefactors usually received short shrift and harsh penalties from the famous law-and-order judge.

  Sixkiller was good at his job of man hunting, though generally he more often brought them in dead than alive, a policy with which Judge Parker could find no disagreement. The lawman’s growing renown had become known to the higher-ups in the federal law enforcement system, who sent him on special assignments far outside his home grounds. Most recently he had served in New Mexico and now it seemed he was headed for Wyoming.

  Sixkiller had no cause for complaint. He liked going to new places and meeting new people, even though he often wound up killing them in the name of the law.

  Wallace assured Sixkiller there would be no problem squaring his temporary duty in Wyoming with Judge Parker. “After all, the judge works for the same boss as you, the president of the United States.”

  “Well, as long as Judge Parker’s got no kick, I’m ready to pitch in and get to work,” Sixkiller said.

  “How soon can you hit the trail?” Wallace asked.

  “Right now. My work here is done. Wyoming, here I come!”

  “Not quite,” Wallace said with a small smile. “The shortest distance between here and Ringgold is not necessarily a straight line.” He leaned forward, intent. “Let me give you the rest of it.”

  Sixkiller did not take notes during Wallace’s briefing. He was not much of one for keeping written records when he didn’t absolutely have to, although he could read and write adequately well. The church fathers at the mission school had seen to that when he was growing up.

  In his line of work, which frequently required him to go undercover with an assumed identity, anything written down had the potential danger of being able to unmask him to his enemies.

  He committed the facts to memory.

  “That’s all I know about the case,” Wallace said, summing up and bringing the interview to an end. “I’m satisfied the matter couldn’t be in more capable hands.”

  Sixkiller drank the last of his drink, emptying his glass. It was good brandy. He and Wallace had made serious inroads on the liquid contents of the decanter.

  The lawman rose, readying to depart. “Reckon I’ll be on my way then, if that’s all of it.”

  “The next man along the line—Vandaman, the federal agent in overall charge of the case—will fill you in on the rest.” Wallace stood up behind his desk.

  “It’s been a pleasure working with you Governor, especially drinking your brandy and smoking your fine cigars,” Sixkiller said.

  They shook hands across the desk.

  “No need to disturb yourself, Governor, I can find my way out. Maybe I can get a couple hours of shut-eye before catching the train early tomorrow morning.”

  “My only regret is that you can’t extend your stay longer here in New Mexico,” Wallace said, grim-faced. “I’d like to set you on Billy the Kid and the rest of those troublemakers who’ve been raising hell in Lincoln County—clean up on the whole kit and kaboodle of them!”

  “Well . . . maybe next time Who knows? I might be passing this way again sooner than you think.” Sixkiller crossed to the door.

  “Good luck, and don’t get killed!” Wallace called after him.

  “I’ll try not to, sir,” Sixkiller said dryly.

  He paused at the door gripping the door handle when a thought struck him. “Good luck with your book, Governor,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Thank you! I’ll send you a copy when it’s done! Whenever that is. At the rate I’m going, it might be several more years. At least it feels that way!”

  “I’d surely appreciate it. Just send it to me care of the general post office in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.”

  “I’ll make a note of it.”

  Sixkiller said good night and went out into the hall. The Palacio was largely deserted. Office rooms were dark, doors were closed, long marble halls were dimly lit with scattered lamps. Few people were about—only sweepers, cleaning ladies, a couple guards.

  Sixkiller’s long, narrow, booted feet were surprisingly elegant for such a big man. He moved noiselessly along the bare marble floors. He went through the better-lit main hall and front lobby, nodding to the uniformed armed doorman. “Night.”

  Sixkiller exited into a broad square plaza, largely empty of all but a few scattered wanderers. Overhead, a black vault of star-dappled sky smeared with the city-light glow of Santa Fe.

  He had a lot to think about during the walk back to his hotel, but not so much that he didn’t keep his eyes and ears open and a ready hand near his gun, alert for trouble, though finding none. He couldn’t help but chuckle at the thought of Governor Lew Wallace writing a book—and a novel at that! Of all the foolishness for a seemingly sensible hardheaded ex-military man and politician to devote himself to, that took the cake.

  What was it the governor called his work in progress? Ben-Hur? Even if he finished the book and somehow managed to get it into print, it would most likely die a lonesome death by neglect, unsold and unnoticed by the world.

  Shaking his head at the foolishness of the mighty, Sixkiller made his way to the hotel, vowing to stick to his line of work. It was a lot easier and more profitable to bring in deadly WANTED outlaws than to chase the elusive phantoms of Fame and Glory.

  Chapter Three

  Sixkiller’s trip from Santa Fe to Ringgold, Wyoming, took a detour by way of Salt Lake City, Utah. A thriving metropolis, it was brought forth out of the desert wasteland by the hard work and sacrifice of the community of the Mormons, the Church of the Latter Day Saints.

  Thirty-six hours after boarding the northwest-bound train out of Santa Fe, Sixkiller found himself on a ridge with a posse readying for a pre-dawn raid on an outlaw hideout near the town of Rush Valley, one of a handful of would-be rivals to Salt Lake City as capital and predominant city in Utah Territory. The men were spread out among the rocks on a rise overlooking a stone cabin in a place called Red Ravine.

  It was little more than hole in the rock walls, a cleft in red-orange-brown cliffs that was about
an eighth of a mile deep. A box ravine, with one way in and no way out except by the original entrance, it lay in stony hills several miles outside of Nibiru. “A pretty poor excuse for a town,” in the words of Malachi Keene, white-haired Mormon elder and leader of the posse.

  When the transcontinental railroad was built in the late 1860s, Salt Lake City seemed like a natural depot for the line. But the Union Pacific was in a race with Central Pacific to lay the most track in the least amount of time in order to claim the most in government funds and bypassed Salt Lake City altogether, throwing its line north of the city.

  A half dozen or so small towns along the line, one of them being Nibiru, tried to position themselves as the central city of the territory.

  Ultimately and before too long, all the would-be usurpers fell by the wayside, unable to compete with the city in the desert by the Great Salt Lake. Undaunted, the citizenry of Salt Lake City held a massive fund-raising drive and got a spur rail line built connecting the city to the main trunk line.

  Most of the challenger towns simply dried up and blew away. One or two managed to survive and hang on in a sickly kind of half-life. Prime among them was Nibiru, subsisting by becoming a nest of outlaws—rustlers, robbers, horse thieves, tinhorn gamblers, and whores.

  Periodically, posses or vigilante bands cleaned out the town, but the riffraff always came trickling back to start anew.

  Federal agent Vandaman, Sixkiller’s contact in the Bletchley Party Case, had trailed a lead to Nibiru. The bad men were holed up in Red Ravine.

  The posse had set out after dark from a stable on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, taking a wide and circuitous path to bypass Nibiru unobserved. They’d ridden in single file, renowned lawman Malachi Keene at the point, and had reached the mouth of Red Ravine about an hour before dawn.

  He addressed the men. “This should go without saying, but I’ve found out the hard way that the things you think should go without saying are usually better for being said. From here on, there’ll be no smoking. The light of a match or glow of a lit cigarette can be seen a long way off in the dark. Burning tobacco can be smelled from a long way off. Mormons are forbidden the use of tobacco, but we’re not all Mormons here so I want to make sure you all get the message. Our aim is to surprise our quarry, not be surprised by them.”

  Three posse members stayed behind to hold the horses. The others moved on ahead, light-footing it through the pre-dawn darkness. All had rifles and side guns.

  The moon had already sunk behind a western scarp. Stars were hard bright pinholes of light in purple blackness. The Milky Way was a creamy, glowing blur in remote heights.

  Sixkiller was happy in his way. It all spoke directly to him—the night, the stars, and the hunt. He moved along like a gliding shadow, never stepping on a twig or scuffing a stone, never rustling through dry, dead leaves or clinging, high weeds. A hulking shadow black against the purpling sky, starlight glimmered on the metal parts of his Winchester rifle.

  Behind him was Vandaman, the man Governor Wallace had sent him to meet. Vandaman, too, was an outsider. It was impossible to tell from his face whether he was thirty or forty. He was medium-sized with short dark hair, dark eyes, and a mustache. He wore a brown suit, boots, and a side gun. Nothing about him made him stand out in a crowd, an asset in the detecting game.

  A “government man” and a pretty high-up one, Vandaman had a treasury department badge that he kept out of sight in a thin leather cardholder except when he’d taken it out to identify himself to Sixkiller at the Salt Lake City train station.

  Apart from the three stay-behind horse holders, there were ten men in the posse infiltrating the ravine.

  Unlucky thirteen? wondered Sixkiller. Or merely a baker’s dozen?

  That remained to be seen.

  During a pause, Malachi Keene passed along some information, low-voiced. “The ravine’s the hideout for Towhead Jimson’s outfit. Horse theft and cattle rustling is their game, mostly, but they’ll set their hands to anything that turns a crooked dollar. Ever since Dean Richmond moved in, they’ve graduated to highway robbery, stagecoach holdups, and the like. Apparently Towhead don’t like it much, but it’s Dean who calls the shots now.”

  Malachi was one of Brigham Young’s longtime, top law-enforcement agents. He was sixty, tall, spare, and straight-backed, hollow-cheeked and rawboned, with a full head of thick white hair and a bushy white mustache. Burning eyes were set back in deep sockets; cheekbones jutted like walnuts set beneath the skin.

  He wore a black hat with rounded crown and round flat brim, black frock coat and pants, gray shirt with black ribbon tie knotted in a bow. A .44 was worn holstered low on his hip.

  At various times he’d been a scout, Indian fighter, shotgun messenger for Wells Fargo, and before that for the Overland Stagecoach line. He’d also led a band that mercilessly harassed the invading U.S. Army infantry column to distraction during the U.S. government’s abortive war on the Mormon colony in Utah several years before the Civil War. It was rumored he’d been one of the faithful’s squad of elite Avenging Angels gunmen before graduating to become one of Brigham Young’s personal bodyguards.

  He circulated among the posse men in position on a rocky ridge overlooking a knoll with a small stone cabin, having a quiet word or two with them. They had nothing to do but wait for morning light. It was then, they’d make the strike.

  Sixkiller and Vandaman sheltered in a hollow behind a big boulder. During a private moment, the federal agent said of Malachi, “That old gent has five wives, the youngest in her teens, and two of them currently pregnant. He’s got enough grown sons to field his own posse except that he raised them to be professional men mostly—doctors, lawyers, bankers, businessmen. He discouraged them from going into the family business of shooting and getting shot at, all except Caleb, the black-bearded man on the dun horse.

  “Caleb was too strong-willed to be denied. A good lawman and handy with a gun, he’s a dependable, capable man. But not an Angel of Death like Malachi.”

  Presently, Malachi hunkered down beside Sixkiller and Vandaman. They talked in whispers of the Red Ravine bunch.

  “Bart Skillern and Dean Richmond used to run the outfit, back in the day,” Malachi began.

  “Bart Skillern? Seems I’ve heard that name before,” Sixkiller mused.

  “You probably know him better by his nickname, the Utah Kid,” Vandaman said, chuckling.

  “That name I know.” Sixkiller recognized it from any number of WANTED posters and circulars that had passed across his office desk in Tahlequah, though the Kid’s base of operations was far west from Sixkiller’s home ground of Oklahoma.

  “Around here we call Skillern the Wyoming Kid,” Malachi said, not without humor, though generally he was not a particularly humorous personality.

  “I guess it’s a case of whose ox is being gored, eh?” Vandaman asked.

  “Skillern’s what we call a gentile. That’s non-Mormon to you. Dean Richmond’s one of our own. Neither of them was ever any damned good,” Malachi said. “Folks hereabouts were almighty glad to see the last of those two. Least we thought we’d seen the last of them.

  “Dean came back about a month ago, returning to his old haunts and pards in Nibiru. He fell in with his old crowd and took it over from Towhead Jimson, who’d been running the bunch since Dean and Skillern first lit out for greener pastures. Towhead couldn’t have been too happy about that. But not so unhappy that he was minded to go up against Dean, not face-to-face. A bullet in the back is more Towhead’s style.

  “He’s been content to let things take their course. Dean’s been making money for the boys. He’s got big ideas. Since he came back a couple banks and stagecoaches have been robbed and mining payrolls have been snatched.

  “More shootings, too. Guards have been wounded, hurt bad. One died from his injuries. That makes it murder,” Malachi said grimly. “We ain’t been able to prove it’s the Red Ravine bunch because the outlaws always wore masks. None of the victims co
uld make a proper identification. I’ve been itching to have a reason to move against them, but I didn’t have one till now—thanks to Mr. Vandaman here.”

  Vandaman took up the tale. “That’s where I come in—and you too, Sixkiller. Richmond and Skillern had been operating in the Glint River Valley for four months. Two months ago, Dean cleared out in an all-fired hurry and roamed around the Northern Range for a month before coming home to roost in Nibiru. Skillern stayed put in Ringgold.”

  “Those two have been pards since boyhood days. What could have made them split up?” wondered Malachi.

  “Yes, why split up a successful partnership?” seconded Vandaman. “Especially when there was still plenty of money to be made selling their guns on the Glint.”

  Sixkiller knew what they were driving at, but decided to play devil’s advocate. “Partnerships break up all the time. Gunmen are a restless breed. Their feet get itchy, and they like to wander. Or they fall out over some small thing—splitting the loot, a woman, the last drink in the bottle. They’re a quarrelsome lot, too.”

  “Two red hots like Dean and Skillern fall out, it usually ends up with one or both going to Boot Hill,” Malachi said.

  “What, then?” Sixkiller asked.

  “I figure Dean got spooked by something bigger than he wanted to tie into,” Vandaman said.

  “Like robbing and killing the Bletchley party?”

  “It’s starting to look that way,” Vandaman said. “There’s more. Dean brought back a souvenir of his Ringgold sojourn—a rifle, the likes of which has never been seen before in these parts and damned few places elsewhere.”

  “Tell me about this rifle,” Sixkiller prompted.

  “It’s some piece of work, a heavy-caliber weapon made for big game hunting, the biggest of big game. It’ll stop a charging elephant or rhinoceros dead in its tracks with one well-placed shot, by all accounts. It’s a beautiful thing too, decorated with gold plates engraved with hunting scenes. It’s one of a kind—literally.” Vandaman paused, then delivered his tagline. “It was custom-made in London by a specialist gun maker exclusively for Lord Dennis Bletchley. There’s not another one like it in the world.