David Ohle - The Devil in Kansas

On a sudden impulse, Jonah jerks the ball-peen hammer from the Blacksmith’s hand. “Two horses! You hear me?”

“The hell you say.”

“I’ll take a sick one. You got any that’s gone lame?”

“Go on ‘fore I git the sheriff.”

“The hell you say, you miserly old coot.” Jonah strikes the blacksmith a hard blow to the head with the hammer. As the blacksmith falls, he pulls a hot coal along with him. The ember ignites a clump of hay. Jonah and Dewey quickly saddle up two horses, the sheriff’s and the deputy’s. They mount, ride up the alley and out of town just as the fire begins to blaze out of control.

Peppard and Ratoncito rush past the flames to rescue the wind wagon while the undertaker drags the blacksmith’s body out.

Two days of hard riding later, Dewey and Jonah come to a creek and dismount near a tall cottonwood tree, their horses exhausted. Nearby is an abandoned homestead with a small house, a well, a windmill and a leaning barn. The old windmill, not oiled for many years, gives off eerie tones as wind whistles through holes in its wooden blades, which cast moving, free form shadows.

The frame of an outhouse remains, too near the well for proper sanitation.

A scarecrow stuffed with cottonwood leaves and dry prairie grass is all that’s left of a garden plot gone fallow and weedy over the years. Hundreds of prairie dog hillocks dot the area. While the horses drink at the creek, Jonah climbs the cottonwood and looks westward through a telescope. Dewey stretches and arches his back to take the kinks out, then limps toward the empty house. On the way he accidentally steps into a prairie dog hole, turning his good ankle. “You devils! You already got one o’ my feet.” Furious, he fires a shot at the nearest prairie dog, blowing it to pieces.

In the house a few things have been left behind: three dishes, a child’s doll, a gnarled boot, a dead rat rotting in a corner, a Farmer’s Almanac . Dewey walks around, checking things out. He is startled to see a rat terrier behind a broken chair with its foot on a half-eaten prairie dog carcass. Dewey snaps his fingers. “Here, little feller. Come on over here. Looks like you done been left behind.” He kneels. The dog creeps warily over to him. He pets it. Its tail wags.

Jonah yells, “Git on out here, Mr. Dewey! Lord God a’mighty. Look what’s comin’ after us.”

With its masts and sails in place, the wind wagon glides through high grass and over rough sod at a fast clip, blown along by strong winds from the west. Sheriff Peppard operates the rudder while Ratoncito mans the brake.

“You see ‘em yet, Ratoncito?”

Ratoncito applies the brake. Peppard lowers the sails. They roll to a slow stop. Ratoncito climbs out of the wagon, kneels, shoos flies and sniffs at a pile of horse dung.

“How long are we behind ‘em, Ratoncito?”

Ratoncito holds up two fingers, then three.

Dewey looks through his scope. “It’s the sheriff and that little Mezkin deputy. They’re in that damned wind wagon. God-damn it, why’d you crown that old smithy like that? Now we’re not jes’ horse thieves, yore a murderer. Shit.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, jes’ how was we gonna git us them horses? He wadn’t gonna bargain.”

“He’d a give one horse, you ignorant cretin. I’d be on my way to Nogales.”

Jonah spits tobacco. “All right, then, we are where we are, so what do we do now?”

Dewey rolls a cigarette. “Lemme think on this a minute.” He surveys land and sky, searching for inspiration. He looks up the creek, down the creek, up at the sun, kicks the soil. A prairie hen suddenly rushes from a clump of grass and flails around pretending to have a broken wing, trying to lead Dewey away from its hatchlings. As he watches this, an idea comes to mind. “I know what to do! Jonah, you ride north, I ride south. They won’t know who to foller.” Dewey mounts his horse.

“Hell, when am I gonna get somethin’ fer my trouble? When am I gonna see you again? Hell, I drove you all the way to Hays. Ain’t I entitled to somethin’?”

Dewey unsheathes the Sharps and tosses it down to Jonah. “Take my Sharps and git!”

Jonah mounts Ratoncito’s horse and rides north. As soon as he is out of sight, Dewey rides to the abandoned barn, grabs an old rusted pick from the wall and digs a hole as fast as he can with his gimpy foot. He buries the gold pouch, scatters straw over the spot, and rides south.

Atop a rise, Peppard and Ratoncito see two horsemen riding in different directions. “Lookee, Little Rat, they’re splittin’ up. If it was me, I’d sure be headed south for the border. You agree?”

Ratoncito nods.

Several hours later, Dewey rides the last breath out of his horse. Its forelegs buckle and it falls, throwing Dewey to the ground. The wind wagon is very close now. Dewey kneels, looks intently at the bright blue sky and the billowing white clouds. “Lord, I’m gonna hafta put this whole thing in them tender and merciful hands of your’n. Looks like what’s come to pass is too powerful for a weak and sinful man like me to figure his way out of. Please, strike these men dead or somethin’. Maybe a bolt of lightnin’.”

Dewey surrenders to his fate and holds his hands up as the wind wagon glides bumpily toward him, the sheriff and deputy standing in the bed with guns drawn, their badges glimmering in the sun.

Prison sounds: men shout, men scream, men fight, doors clank, men sing. Dewey wipes his finger across the small kerosene lamp that sits on a tiny table near his cot and uses the soot to do a multiplication problem on the wall: 365 X 10. After a brief but intense mental struggle he writes the answer: 3,650. He stares at it and his eyes moisten with tears.

A guard comes to Dewey’s cell door, holds a Bible between the bars. “Here’s you a copy of the Good Book, Howard Dewey. It would be a wise thing if’n you read it, ever’ word.”

“I cain’t read worth a flip.”

“Take it anyway and learn.”

Dewey lies on his cot, opens the Bible to page one. “All right, here we go. Genesis. One. In the be…be…beginnin’ God cre…cre…created the heaven and the…earth. Two. And the earth was with…out form, and vo-ide er vo-eed, and…dark…ness was upon the face of the deep.”

The abandoned homestead. Burning summer sun. Jonah pulls up in a dilapidated, ox-drawn wagon piled with supplies, the Sharps at his side, his stolen horse tied at the rear. He steps down and unloads building materials and commodities: wire, a keg of nails, hammer and rough-hewn lumber, sacks of beans, coffee and flour.

He puts his hands on his hips and admires his new home place. As if to greet him, the old windmill turns squeakily in a sudden gust of wind and the outhouse topples over. He glances at the leaning barn. “She’ll fall in the next storm,” he says to himself. Prairie dog warrens surround the house. Their towns, one a few feet from another, stretch as far as the eye can see. Hundreds of them stand sentinel behind their hillocks, all watching Jonah and yelping.

Dewey’s cell. Thirty days have been marked by lampblack streaks on the wall. He places his small table beneath the high window and stands on it tiptoe to look out at the only outdoor scene afforded him: a high stone wall and a four-seater outhouse with prisoners lined up to use it. All are naked and hatless under a broiling sun. They sweat so profusely the ground is wet beneath them.

Now he lies on his cot and opens the Bible. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruit-ful, and multi…multi-ply, and replen-ish the earth, and sub-due it: and have dome-onion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”