Winchester 1887 Read online

  His heart pounded. He smelled the manure, but did not care. He was alive. He was on the train.

  Someone grunted, and James quickly rolled over, his racing mind suddenly aware of what had just happened. He slid across the hay-carpeted floor until his back pressed against the wood-slated wall. The boxcar rocked as the train picked up speed.

  A match flared, briefly illuminating the bearded face of a dark man. Then a giant hand shook out the match, and all James could see was the glow of the end of the cigarette when the man inhaled.

  “You owe me,” a haggard voice said.

  James was too scared to reply.

  “Got victuals in that sack, I hope. Ain’t et in three days.”

  The only sounds that followed were the clicking of the wheels and the pounding of James’s heart.

  “Answer me, boy. I saved your hide.”

  “Some . . .” James tried to remember. “An apple. Can of peaches. Some jerky.”

  The cigarette glowed for a long time and then the glow died.

  “I’ll have the apple. And jerky. Peaches hurt my teeth. They’s rotted, most of ’em. My teeth.”

  Again, the cigarette shown orange, revealing just a shadow of the man.

  “I said,” the voice returned after the glow died, “I ain’t et in three days.”

  “Oh.” James moved in the darkness. “Let me find my bag.” He fumbled in the darkness, feeling like an idiot, feeling petrified. For a moment, he wished he had not run off from home. His hand touched the cold barrel of the Winchester, and he froze.

  “Find it?”

  “No,” James said, and moved over the rifle, remembering where it was. “I stepped in something else. Well, my hand did.”

  Sniggering, the man drew on the smoke. “Reckon they dumped a load of horses up north, right afore I gots on this train.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He found the bag and opened the sack, reaching in, but the man’s voice stopped him.

  “You tossed something else in here, boy. Somethin’ heavy. Like maybe a—”

  “Walking stick,” James sang out. “It’s gotta be somewhere around here.”

  “A stick?”

  “Walking stick. You know . . .” Something about the stranger James didn’t like. He didn’t trust the man, even if he had pulled him aboard the boxcar.

  “You a cripple?”

  “No, sir.”

  The man laughed. The cigarette flared again. “Run like one. Iffen I hadn’t been headin’ fer that door to take a leak, you’d never be ridin’ with me. Might have even gotten a bath of my pee.”

  The thought soured James’s stomach, but he said, “Yes, sir,” and found the apple, then two pieces of jerky. He figured he would leave the third for himself, not quite certain how long it took to travel to Fort Worth. He saw the glow again, and realized his eyes had adjusted to the darkness. He could see a bit better as he weaved across the rocking floor of the car, getting his bearings from the cigarette. He stopped, knelt, and held out his offerings. “Here you go. Name’s Mann.”

  He smelled tobacco smoke. A rough hand snatched the jerky, disappeared, then came back and took the apple. The man did not say his name, and James knew it would be rude to ask.

  “That all you got?” the man asked.

  “In the bag?” James fell back on his haunches. Cigarette wasn’t all he smelled on the stranger. Months must have passed since the guy had felt soap and water. “Just some extra socks.”

  “Where’s yer hat?”

  He reached to his head and realized his slouch hat was gone. Probably had fallen off as he had scrambled to make the train. He smiled, although he doubted if the man could have seen it. “Lost it.”

  “Get sunburnt in this country, kid.”

  “I’ll get another.”

  “With what?”

  That caused James Mann to stop and let out a long breath. He was an imbecile. He had left home with an apple, some jerky, an empty rifle, and a tin star. He hadn’t thought about money. Rarely did he have any and he could never have brought himself to borrow—no, steal was the word—some of the cash and coin his ma and pa had stashed away in the coffee can.

  The stranger, however, thought the silence meant something else.

  The smoke turned orange again and then went straight into James’s cheek, burning just underneath his right eye as a wicked left fist that felt like a hammer slammed into his jaw.

  Down went James, blinking back pain and surprise, feeling the breath explode from his lungs as the stinking man leaped onto his gut. Giant hands fell to his throat, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

  James couldn’t breath. Couldn’t move. The man had pinned James’s arms with his knees. He laughed. Saliva dripped into James’s eyes and onto his nose.

  The curve saved his life. The boxcar tilted, just enough that the man lost his balance. He had to let go of James’s throat with one hand and brace himself against the floor. Using that to his advantage, James turned with the man, and the crazed killer fell to the floor.

  He made himself get up, run, though where he had no idea. The man’s hand got his foot, just enough to send him sprawling through old horse dung and stale straw.

  “Give me yer money, boy,” the man said.

  James wanted to scream at him that he had no money, just one more piece of jerky, but the fiend was on his feet, moving slowly. James backed away, past the sack with his uncle’s badge and that jerky, those socks, when he felt the Winchester’s stock.

  The man laughed. He sounded like a hydrophobia coyote. “Ya gots to pay to ride with me, kid. That’s why I pulled ya aboard. Gots to pay. One way or—” The laugh and words died in the man’s throat when the metallic clicking of the Winchester being cocked filled the entire boxcar.

  “Stop or I’ll blow your head off,” James said in a hoarse voice.

  He prayed, prayed that the man wouldn’t call his bluff. In the week since his father had returned with the Model 1886 and the news of Uncle Jimmy’s death, no one had bothered to find any shells for the .50-caliber repeating rifle. His pa never had been much for guns anyway, except for hunting. The way James figured things, his pa never wanted him to have the rifle.

  “Boy,” the voice called out icily, “you ain’t got the guts.” Another crazed laugh. “But I sure do.”

  A flash blinded him, and the bullet clipped off a strand of hair. James screamed. There was a new smell of brimstone and gun smoke in the boxcar . The man laughed again, but James came up as the second shot slammed somewhere into the floor. Somehow he grabbed the bag with that piece of jerky as he ran, thinking he never would make it, never could make it.

  Those two shots from the revolver had blinded the killer and thief more than they had blurred James’s eyesight. The man began cursing as he heard James coming toward him and spun around, jerking a shot. It went into the ceiling for the man had lost his footing and was falling.

  So was James. Falling through the open door. Into the night. Into eternity.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Randall County

  Nothing but bitter disappointment. Millard Mann came riding back to the boxcar when the sun reached noon-high, feeling as if he had been in the saddle for a week. Slowly, he eased his body to the ground, the leather creaking, and led the bay mare to the corral. He removed the saddle and turned the horse into the corral. Pulling his hat low, he walked toward the boxcar.

  Libbie lowered her head as he walked inside.

  Kris asked, “You didn’t find James, Papa?”

  His head shook and he took the cup of water Libbie had filled from the bucket on the table.

  Millard did not speak until he had finished two cups of water.

  At last, he gestured toward the east. “Trailed him to the tracks. Found his hat. Nothing else.”

  Jacob stepped back, his eyes wide with amazement. “You . . . trailed . . . James?”

  Despite how he felt, Millard smiled and tousled his son’s hair. “Wasn’t that hard, son. Pretty easy
.”

  “But you didn’t find him,” Kris said.

  “I will.” He looked at his wife. “He jumped the southbound.”

  Their oldest son had taken the rifle and probably Jimmy’s badge. He hadn’t robbed them. Maybe some food, socks, a shirt. Millard thought of something else. An extra hat would come in useful. He frowned. That was a stupid joke.

  “Where would he go?” Jacob asked.

  “South,” Kris answered.

  Wordlessly, Millard moved past them, stopping only for another cupful of water, and then heading through the kitchen and into the bedroom.

  “What’s Pa doing?” Jacob asked.

  “He’ll be along,” Libbie said. “Come help me with the laundry.”

  “But I want James!”

  “Hush.”

  When he stepped back outside, Millard Mann had changed. Not just clothes—although he wore trail duds and a linen duster that, surprisingly, still fit him—but the weapons he carried.

  His family was surprised. They had seen him as a railroad boss and with the Jenks, a .54-caliber carbine he had handled since the Civil War that he used when hunting deer.

  That was long ago . . . when he was but a mere button himself, much younger even than James. He had only used that carbine for deer hunting; ducks and other game he usually opted for the Colt twelve-gauge shotgun, but those weapons he had left behind.

  He had opened the old trunk in the bedroom, pulled out the blankets, the heirlooms, the clothes, and keepsakes until he had found the long fringed leather rifle sock and withdrawn a rifle Kris and Jacob didn’t remember having ever seen.

  It was a Winchester Model 1873 repeating rifle. One of One Thousand. The dream rifle of just about every shooter in the United States.

  Something else was different.

  He had buckled on a long-barreled Colt Army .44. That, too, had been used during the Civil War, but back around 1871, a man who’d worked for Colt, Charles Richards, had gotten a patent for his plan of converting the old percussion cap-and-ball Colts to cartridge revolvers. A year later, William Mason, who had also worked for Colt, improved on Richards’ methods.

  To Millard’s surprise, the Richards-Mason conversion model .44 felt natural. As if he had been wearing it all his life. He would buy shells for it in McAdam, clean the pistol, and ride south.

  “Where you going, Pa?” Kris asked.

  “To find James.”

  No one mentioned the short gun strapped to his hip, but every eye kept falling to it.

  “Will you take the train?” Libbie asked.

  Millard nodded. “I’ll ask Luke to bring the horse back. And check on you every now and then. I expect James to go all the way to Fort Worth—providing no brassy railroad dick tosses him off for freeloading—but he might get off in Wichita Falls, Henrietta, Bowie . . . just no telling. But I’ll find him.” He leaned over and kissed Libbie’s cheek, and knelt to hug his youngest son and daughter.

  At forty-five years old and after years of railroading, he felt different, too. Hadn’t felt this way since those few years after the war, when he and his brothers—the dearly departed Jimmy and Borden—had sown their share of oats in the wild Panhandle as Texas went through Yankee Reconstruction.

  Some words from Jimmy ran through his mind. He couldn’t remember when Jimmy had said them, certainly before Jacob had been born. He smiled at the memory.

  “You ain’t cut out for this life, Brother.”

  Millard sipped his whiskey. “What kind of life you think suits me, Jimmy?”

  Jimmy smiled that devilish smile of his. “Like mine.”

  Millard shook off the memory and looked at the horse. Probably shouldn’t have bothered unsaddling the mare, but, well, the notion hadn’t struck him until he had finished that second cup of water.

  “I’ll write you,” he told his wife. “You kids be good.” Hurriedly, he made his way back toward the corral before his resolve faltered.

  Fort Smith, Arkansas

  “You were not surprised by the death of Deputy Mann?” Judge Parker asked. “I should say, former Deputy Mann.”

  “No.” Jackson Sixpersons did not care much for being in the judge’s chambers. Too stuffy and being in the room with the powerful white man gave him an uneasy feeling.

  “I see.” But clearly, the judge did not.

  Sixpersons knew there was no reason to tell him what he was thinking. I knew Jimmy would not return when he left. I could see the death in his eyes. He thought back to the time at the depot in Vinita up in the Cherokee Nation. Remembered telling Jimmy, probably his best friend, “This is something you have to do. But I can’t go with you.” Jimmy was going on a vendetta, not for justice. He had no jurisdiction in Kansas, nor anywhere else he went.

  Strange as it seemed, the white man’s law meant something to Jackson Sixpersons. Yet he thought of that day, watching Jimmy Mann take the train and leave him, his job, his career, going after Danny Waco. Jimmy had told Sixpersons to take care of his horse, and Old Buck was back in the barn at his place near Webber’s Falls.

  “May I see your shotgun, Deputy Sixpersons?”

  Nodding, he handed the weapon to the judge.

  Parker was an old man, hair, mustache and beard completely white, having served as U.S. district judge for twenty years. The May term had just finished. Old Parker wouldn’t have to bang that gavel or do what he did so well, and fairly often, condemn some ruffian to swing on the gallows erected outside the courthouse, until August. “I haven’t been bird-hunting in ages.” He looked weak.

  Sixpersons had heard someone whisper that the judge was suffering from Bright’s Disease, whatever that was.

  “Twelve gauge?”

  Sixpersons nodded then remembered he was supposed to show respect to a white man like Parker. “Yes, sir.” Bird-hunting? He pondered at the idea. The Winchester Model 1887, the barrel tightly choked, and with that three-inch drop at the heel . . . well, it wasn’t really made for hunting doves or quail.

  John Moses Browning had designed it. Considered the best gun maker in the United States, he had done a lot of work for the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and had made his pile. Plenty of piles. Since Winchester was known far and wide for its lever-action rifles—the 1866 Yellow Bow; the 1873, likely the most famous, most popular rifle on the frontier; the 1876 Centennial; and that cannon, the 1886 that got Jimmy Mann killed—well, the boys that ran the company decided that Winchester needed a lever-action shotgun. To keep up appearances.

  The ’87 had a two-and-a-half-inch chamber, held five shots, and had the Winchester Repeating Arm Company’s monogram and the company’s address in New Haven, Connecticut, engraved on the receiver. It was the perfect shotgun, with a powerful rolling-block design. Of course, Jackson Sixpersons had made his shotgun even better by sawing off ten inches of barrel.

  Although he had designed Winchester’s 1885 single-shot rifle and the ’86 repeater, John Browning, the story went, did not care much for the idea of Winchester’s shotgun. A shotgun would work better with a slide, more like a pump, action. Not levers. The slide action would be easier to operate, Browning had argued, but levers were what defined Winchester Repeating Arms Company. And, well, Winchester was paying him good money—old Browning had earned $50,000 for the patent to the 1886 Model rifle.

  Naturally, he took it and told the Winchester boys he could get a lever-action shotgun design to them in two years. It took him about a year, and in June of 1885, the patent on what became the Winchester Model 1887 was filed.

  Oh, it wasn’t the first repeating shotgun. Others had been tried. As early as 1839, Samuel Colt’s Patent Arms Manufacturing Company had produced a few revolving shotguns, improving on the design with its Model 1855. About 1,100 1855 models had been produced, and you could still find a few of those ten-gauges in the territories. Back in 1884, Christopher Spencer had designed a pump shotgun for New York–based Bannerman’s in ten- and twelve-gauge models.

  Yet Winchester’s 1887 was the first t
ruly successful model.

  A Mormon, John Browning hung his hat in Ogden, Utah. The Latter-Day Saints sent their people out on missionary work, and Browning had gone with another Mormon to Georgia. In some Southern city, he and his accompanying Mormon missionary had passed a sporting goods store and seen the Winchester ’87 on display in the window. Bearded, dusty, and tired, the two had entered the stop, asked to see that shotgun, then, before the store clerk could tell him no, Browning picked up the Winchester Model 1887, worked the lever, checked the action, the balance, and smiled.

  The clerk had scratched his head and said that Browning knew his way around that shotgun.

  Browning’s companion had grinned. “He oughta. He invented it.”

  The clerk, already suspicious of the two bearded men who looked like vagabonds, took the shotgun from Browning’s hand, replaced it on its case in the window, and told the two “liars” to get out.

  Judge Parker finished his perusal of the shotgun and held it out to Sixpersons. The deputy U.S. marshal took it from the judge’s trembling hands and butted it on the floor.

  “Most deputies carry Winchester repeaters. Or double-barrel shotguns. Why the lever-action twelve gauge?”

  Sixpersons could only shrug. It was a simple design, made of only sixteen parts. The barrel was Damascus, and the stock had fancy checking and a rubber butt plate. On the other hand, the shotgun was affordable. Sixpersons had paid thirty dollars for his twelve-gauge. The most expensive models he had found cost forty-eight dollars. More than a double-barrel or single-shot and pricier than many rifles. But that’s not why he had picked the shotgun. He pointed at his spectacles. “I’m an old man.”

  The judge laughed. “So am I, old friend.”

  Still laughing, Parker found some papers on his desk and coughed.

  Time for business, Sixpersons figured.