William Johnstone - A Good Day to Die

The line of smoke streaking the sky took its origin in the valley below. It pointed down, an elongated gray-black finger whose tip touched a wrecked, half-burned covered wagon. The bodies sprawled around it and the ground in the immediate area showed white, powdered white, as if touched by frost.

But it couldn’t be frost, not in that heat.

The air was still, with barely the breath of a breeze to ruffle the thin feather of smoke rising from the smoldering wagon. Sam studied the scene, scanning it. Some minutes passed. The valley seemed empty, peopled only by the dead. More time passed, with no change in the surroundings.

“Well,” Sam said to himself, sighing, “can’t stay here all day.” The ground looked safe, harboring no skulking bushwhackers, as far as he could tell.

How safe was it, though, with corpses strewn about?

He glanced at the deer slung across the horse’s back. He should cut it loose, to lighten Dusty’s burden if he had to run. But he had a powerful hankering for venison steaks. He was frontiersman enough to not throw away anything of value unless he damned well had to. He could always cut it loose later.

Sam mounted up. He undid the leather strap at the top of the long, custom-built holster and hauled out the mule’s-leg. He rode through the gap, down the other side of the hill. No shots greeted him, no charging horsemen.

Dusty descended at a steady pace. Nearing the valley floor, Sam smelled wood smoke from the burned wagon. and other less pleasant odors, including burning flesh. Human flesh.

The big, bulky Conestoga wagon, the kind generally favored by emigrants wending their way westward to new lands, stood about a dozen paces to one side of the dirt road. Its passengers had suffered an interrupted journey. He closed in on it.

The horses were gone. They had been cut loose from the traces binding them to the wagon tongue, most likely stolen. Its canvas-topped covering had been consumed by fire. Scraps and shreds of the charred canvas littered the ground nearby. Part of the right-hand side of the wagon was scorched and burned, but the rest was intact.

The white powder dusting the ground around the wagon was flour. It had been poured out of a slashed-open sack. Much of it had been poured over the dead.

The wagon had been vandalized. Baggage was thrown out of the wagon, suitcases and trunks breaking open upon impact. Ransacked contents, pawed over, were strewn about the ground. Various items of household bric-a-brac were broken up—chairs, a table, a cabinet, and sacks of bean, grain, and seed.

A wagon train had arrived at Hangtown the night before, laying over in the campgrounds southwest of town. The victims must have been on their way to join them when they’d been attacked by marauders. The bodies strewn about appeared to be a family of seven—two oldsters, a gray-bearded man and an old woman; a middle-aged couple, probably man and wife; a beardless youth in his mid-teens; a twelve-year-old girl; and a boy of ten. Most of the bodies were naked, their nudity white and pale as grubs that swarm in the rotten wood of fallen trees.

Robbery and murder were frequent occurrences on the frontier, but this outrage was marked by an emphasis on torture and murder. It was ghoulish bloodletting, executed, no doubt, with lipsmacking relish.

The middle-aged man, squat and stocky, was tied upside down to the right rear wheel of the wagon, braided buffalo-hide ropes binding him in place. Underneath him was a slow-burning fire. His face and head were burned beyond recognition.

The gray-bearded oldster had been shot several times, none of them fatal. He’d been cut up pretty badly, his naked torso scored with multiple stab and slash wounds. His crotch was worked on with a hatchet, but that wasn’t what killed him. He’d been scalped—alive—and then his skull was bashed in by stone-headed war clubs.

Nearby lay the corpse of a young girl, thin, scrawny, and long-limbed, about eleven or twelve years old. She’d been shot once through the side of the head. A mercy killing.

Sam guessed the old man had shot her before she could be taken alive by the raiders. Cheated of their fun, they’d taken their wrath out on him, killing him by slow degrees.

A teenage boy lay facedown in the grass, pierced with arrows.

The woman, middle-aged and thick bodied, lay on her back, faceup. She’d been raped, of course, not once but often. She’d been beaten, broken, mutilated, and scalped.

The old woman had had similar treatment. As an added refinement, a tree branch had been shoved between her legs and set on fire. Sam could only hope it had been done after she was dead.

“Devilments!” Sam muttered to himself. His voice sounded strange, a toad’s croak, startling him. His mouth was bone dry.

Obscene butchery was nothing new to Sam Heller. He’d grown up in southwest Minnesota where the eastern branches of the Sioux roamed, raided, and killed, terrorizing settlers. In the Dakota badlands—what the Sioux considered their home grounds—he’d seen similar remains of pioneers, prospectors, and other white invaders.

No less enthusiastic aficionados of torture were the Apaches, whom he’d tangled with in Arizona and New Mexico territories. And he’d seen plenty of atrocities committed by and against soldiers and civilians of both sides during the Civil War.

This outrage figured to be the handiwork of Comanches.

Recent reports had reached Hangtown of Comanche raids on the plains west of the Breaks. Isolated incidents as yet, brutal and alarming, prompted the commanding officer at Fort Pardee to detail a cavalry troop to meet Major Adams’s wagon train at Anvil Flats and escort it safely to the Santa Fe Trail. There it would be met by another cavalry troop from a New Mexico fort. That rendezvous was scheduled for sometime that day.

Sam’s scalp tingled, with good reason. He wore his yellow hair long, scout-style. It was a scout’s way of taunting the savages, as if saying, You can’t take my hair. For a moment, the boast rang a tad hollow. Still, he intended to keep his shoulder-length yellow hair intact for a while longer—a good while longer. Or die trying.

The prospect had been made less sure by the grisly evidence before his eyes of Comanche raiders.

Sam examined the sign. The marauders’ tracks went east along Rimrock Road through the valley.

He cut the deer carcass loose and threw it in the brush.

Pointing Dusty’s head south, he moved forward, climbing the north slope of the far ridge, up and out of the valley. Away.

FOUR

One second, they weren’t there; the next, they were.

Seton Fisher was carrying water back to the ranch house from the stream. He had a full bucket in each hand, held by the handles. It was early afternoon, it was hot, and the buckets were heavy.

In his mid-forties, Fisher was strong armed and thick bodied. Sweat stung his eyes, blurring them. He paused, trying to blink them clear because he didn’t want to interrupt toting the water back to the house by setting down a bucket to wipe his eyes clean.

Fisher’s ranch was near the south rim of the Upland Plateau. It was a good location, but a hard go to eke out a living from the Texas hill country for himself and his family.

The site occupied a saddle between two ridges running east-west. The south ridge hid the edge of the plateau and the flat below, screening them from view. The north ridge lay on a flat below Sentry Hill, the most prominent landform in the area. Between them lay a valley of gently rolling grasslands—Seton Fisher’s spread.

A small herd of cattle, widely scattered, grazed on the greenery. A south-flowing stream ran through the property. A flat-roofed house sat on a rise within walking distance of the water. Ringed by cottonwood trees, the rise gave welcome shade on hot summer days.