Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

“Good evening, William,” Estelle said finally.

It took the butler a while; then his frozen face melted into a smile. “Why, Miss Estelle! It’s wonderful to see you again.”

“Thank you, William,” Estelle returned with the practiced, offhand ease of someone who grew up with servants.

The butler ushered the girl inside, reluctantly doing the same for the tall, grim, and unsmiling Fletcher.

“Mattie!” the man called out over his shoulder as he took Estelle’s coat. “Mattie, Miss Estelle’s home!”

The plump cook bustled out from the kitchen, grinned wide, and took Estelle in her arms, holding her tight in huge arms. “Honey,” she said, when she finally let the breathless girl go, “I swear you’re as skinny as a rail.”

She turned to Fletcher. “I can see you ain’t been eatin’ too good either, young feller.”

Fletcher opened his mouth to speak, but Estelle cut him off. “William, tell Father I want to see him in the library immediately, and I want you and Mattie there too.”

The butler shook his head. “But the senator isn’t here, Miss Estelle.”

“Where is he?” Estelle asked, her face stricken.

“Why, he’s in Kansas with the president, another senator, and a Russian nobleman and his lady,” the man replied. “Shooting wild buffalo on the plains, I believe.”

“Who’s guiding them?” Fletcher asked, such things always of interest to him.

“A frontier person,” the butler said, sniffing as his nose tilted higher. The man’s forehead wrinkled as he tried to remember. “Ah, yes, a quite famous scout named Hitchcock.”

“You mean Hickok? Wild Bill Hickok?”

“Yes, exactly, that’s the person’s name.”

Fletcher shook his head and Estelle asked, “What’s bothering you, Buck?”

“Nothing. It’s just that Bill can be all kinds of trouble on a buffalo hunt or anywhere else. He’s hard to handle.”

“When did Father leave?” Estelle asked the butler.

“The day before yesterday,” the man replied. “He and his guests took the early morning Union Pacific, bound for Fort Hays.”

Estelle looked at Fletcher, her eyes bleak. “We’ve missed our chance.”

“No, we haven’t,” Fletcher said. “Estelle, we’re going after him.”

The girl looked at him, puzzled, her slow thinking trying to catch up.

“Estelle, study on this—we wanted to confront your father and corner him into a confession. I still don’t think it’s going to happen, but if we’d managed to do it here tonight, any smart lawyer could later discredit the testimony of two servants, one of them a black cook. I don’t think that could happen with President Grant and another senator.”

Fletcher smiled. “And around Kansas, Wild Bill’s word goes a long way.”

Understanding dawned on the girl and she nodded enthusiastically. “Of course, that’s so much better.”

Fletcher put a hand on her shoulder. “Just don’t get your hopes up, Estelle. Like I just said, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

The butler and Mattie had been following this exchange, their faces showing growing bafflement, but it was the cook who brought it to a close, grasping onto something she understood and could handle.

“You two,” she said, “get on into the library. There’s a fire there and I’ll bring you both some food. I swear, you both look like you could each eat a chicken, feathers, beak, cluck and all.”

* * *

The next morning, well fed and well rested, Fletcher and Estelle loaded their horses into a Union Pacific boxcar heading west.

The train made frequent stops along the line to take on water and the coal the engine burned at the rate of forty to two hundred pounds a mile, depending on the grade.

Once they were clear of the Missouri, the remaining one hundred and eighty miles to their destination took Fletcher and Estelle across the Big Blue and the Republican and Saline rivers. There were stops at Kansas City, Abilene, and finally Salina, where the cars were hitched to a new engine for the seventy-mile haul to Hays across rolling, snow-covered prairies, the massive escarpment of the Rocky Mountains lifting their peaks above the flat three hundred miles to the west.

Two days after leaving Lexington the train pulled into the station at Hays, with its thirty-seven saloons and dance halls and a restless, shifting, and often violent population of army scouts, buffalo hunters, railroad workers, soldiers, gunmen, pale-faced gamblers, and prostitutes.

The town was a ramshackle collection of false-fronted buildings and cabins along the railroad track with nothing around in all directions but endless, windswept prairie.

The stock pens lay close to the rails to the east, ready for the spring herds from Texas; the homes of the town’s more respectable elements, the bankers and businessmen, lay upwind to the north, where the rowdy drovers were not allowed to go. Beyond the main street lay the shacks of the girls on the line, and beyond those a cemetery, a Boot Hill that did a rousing, if mostly seasonal, business.

The fort lay a few miles farther along the track to the west, but Fletcher and Estelle unloaded their horses and led them toward the town’s muddy main street.

It was yet early afternoon but Hays was up and roaring, the saloons crowded from bar to warped timber walls, an out-of-tune piano in one of the dance halls gallantly trying to compete against the racket of drunk men and laughing women.

Riders and wagons crowded the street, churning the already thick mud and slush into a rutted, clinging swamp.

Fletcher and Estelle led their horses across the street and looped the reins around a hitching post outside a restaurant with a painted sign that proclaimed: Ma’s Sideboard.

Inside it was steamy and hot, the glass panes of the two windows facing the street misted. There were a dozen tables, each covered in a checkered red-and-white cloth, but only one was occupied, by a man in railroad engineer’s overalls who left shortly after Fletcher and the girl entered.

Fletcher felt gritty and his eyes smarted from the soot and sparks that penetrated every window of the car he and Estelle had ridden, all of it made worse by the smoke of the potbellied stove at one end of the aisle.

He was sure Estelle felt the same, but somehow she managed to look fresh and pretty despite the rattling ordeal of the long train ride.

Ma turned out to be a sour-faced stringbean of a man who had the look of the trail cook about him. But he was quick with the coffeepot and recommended buffalo steak, potatoes, and boiled onions, an easy matter since those were the only items on the menu.

Fletcher had tested his coffee and was rolling a cigarette when the door opened and a soldier in a bearskin coat stepped into the restaurant, slapping his gloved hands together against the outside cold.

The man glanced at Fletcher, his cool eyes dismissing him as yet another rootless Hays gunman, saw Estelle, and, his interest pleasurably roused, smiled.

“Chilly out,” he said, taking his seat at a table next to her.

“It is indeed,” the girl said. “But seasonably so, I suppose.”

The soldier shrugged out his coat, revealing captain’s straps on his shoulders.

This time the man looked at Fletcher with renewed interest, obviously wondering what this hard-faced gunman was doing here with a young and obviously well-bred girl.

“Capt. Anthony Ferrell, at your service,” he said, speaking to Estelle but still studying Fletcher. “Tenth Cavalry, stationed here at Fort Hays.”

Fletcher had heard of the Tenth, a regiment of black buffalo soldiers that had already built an enviable combat record in dozens of battles against the plains tribes. They had white officers and Ferrell must be one of them.