Doomsday Rider

Twenty

A thick fog curled over Lexington, drifting off the Missouri, pooling yellow around the guttering gas lamps that lit the main streets of the city.

Carriages clattered along cobbled roads, the hooves of the horses clanging loud, and people on the sidewalks stepped hurriedly, coat collars pulled up against the clammy evening chill so only their eyes showed above red, pinched noses.

None spared a glance for the train that had brought Fletcher and Estelle on the last leg of their journey to Lexington.

The iron monster hissed and steamed, billowing white clouds escaping from under its wheels, competing with the fog.

Fletcher and Estelle coaxed their horses down the ramp from the boxcar and led them around the station and Main Street, the cold nipping at their faces and hands.

The horses had been a trial and a tribulation on a journey of close to a thousand miles that began on the northern side of the Mogollon Rim and had taken them across parts of New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Kansas.

Horses were difficult to transport and expensive to feed, and in the past nineteen days much more money had been spent on their grain than on food for Fletcher and Estelle.

But a man without a horse could not travel fast and far if the need arose, and Fletcher had not sufficient money to buy another.

They’d traveled by train where they found a railhead, by stage where such was available, and by horseback where there was neither.

For hours they’d kicked their heels waiting at railroad stations that were sometimes no more than an old boxcar and water tank set at the end of a lonely spur, and all too often a stage ride represented cramped hours of jolting misery, choked by dust or frozen by cold winds, their horses trailing behind.

Through it all, Estelle had held up well, a sense of grim determination driving her.

Now she mounted her horse and gathered the reins. “I can sense him,” she said to Fletcher. “I can feel his presence.”

As for Fletcher, he felt only the chill that bit at him and the depressing lightness of the money belt around his waist.

In a few minutes he and Estelle would confront Falcon Stark. How would the man react? That he would break down and confess his transgressions in front of others, Fletcher doubted. More than likely he’d fight. But how?

Fletcher eased the guns in his holsters and decided to cross that particular bridge when he came to it.

Estelle led off, her big roan up on his toes, tossing his head, eager for the trail after being confined for four days in the boxcar. Fletcher trotted after her and together they made their way along Lexington’s busy main thoroughfare, two riders lost amid the swirling fog and a churning, bobbing sea of carriages, wagons, other horsemen, darting pedestrians, and swaggering, half-drunk riverboat men, painted, hard-eyed women with scarlet mouths hanging on their arms.

Stark’s house was as Fletcher remembered it, a sprawling white mansion fronting the street, every room aglow with lamps and candles.

He and Estelle tied their horses to the hitching posts, small black boys made of cast iron, resplendent in a livery of blue and yellow.

Fletcher followed Estelle to the door, recalling the last time he’d been here, a time that already seemed an eternity ago.

Estelle rapped on the door and a few moments later it was opened by the same high-nosed butler. The man stood there for a few moments, disdainfully looking them over, apparently not liking what he saw.

“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.

Estelle introduced herself and then Fletcher, but the captain’s brow was furrowed in thought.

“Are you by any chance related to Senator Falcon Stark?” he asked finally.

“He’s my father,” Estelle replied, her voice cold.

“Ah,” Ferrell said, apparently content to say no more as he tasted the coffee the cook had poured for him.

“Have you met him, Captain?” Fletcher asked, speaking for the first time.

“Indeed,” Ferrell said. “The senator is out on the plains right now with President Grant, Senator John Gray and his wife, and last, but certainly not least, Count and Countess Boris Vorishilov, straight from the Russian imperial court.” The officer smiled. “I’d say that was a very distinguished company.”

“How large an escort?” Fletcher asked.

It was a soldier’s question and Ferrell was eager to answer it. “None. The president said he didn’t want a clanking cavalry troop—his very words—scaring away the buffalo. He told the colonel there were four hunters in the party, including himself, all superbly armed and good enough shots to beat off any Indian attack.”

The captain grinned. “And besides, they have about a dozen servants with them, maybe half that many skinners—and Wild Bill.”

Fletcher nodded. “Bill can make a difference.” He paused, then asked, “How long do they plan to be out?”

“Two weeks, maybe three. I’d say it depends on how quickly Hickok can locate a buffalo herd, how long the snow holds off, and how badly they’re slowed by their wagons. That’s the best-equipped hunting party I’ve ever seen. The five wagons are packed with fine linens, crystal and silverware, to say nothing of cases of wine, champagne, bourbon, and cigars. They’ve even got silver candelabras. It’s the Russian count more so than the others who loves to travel in style.”

“Indians?”

Captain Ferrell shrugged. “Normally the Sioux and Cheyenne like to hole up somewhere snug in the winter. But a week ago four buffalo hunters were ambushed and scalped about sixty miles south of here down on the Santa Fe Trail at the bend of the Arkansas River. With Indians you never can tell. When you least expect them, that’s when you’ll find them, or rather, that’s when they’ll find you.”

“And Senator Stark, where does he figure in all this?” Fletcher asked.

“The trip was his idea.” He turned to Estelle. “I’m sure you know your father plans to run for president. I believe this is his way of winning hearts and minds—mainly the support of the president and another very influential Republican senator.”

The food came, and while Fletcher and Estelle ate they talked to the soldier of other things, mainly the harsh winter weather on the plains, the much-anticipated arrival of the spring cattle herds, and the dearth of decent officers’ quarters at Fort Hays.

When they’d finished eating, Fletcher built a smoke and poured more coffee for himself and Estelle.

“Do you intend to join your father, Miss Stark?” Captain Ferrell asked.

Estelle nodded, saying nothing, and Fletcher stepped into the conversation. “I think we’ll stay at a hotel here tonight and move out at first light tomorrow.”

“The best hotel in town, and that’s not saying much, is the Cattleman’s Haven at the eastern end of town. At least the beds are clean and free of unwanted guests.”

Estelle caught Fletcher’s eye and they both rose. The girl extended her hand and Ferrell bowed over it gallantly.

“You’ve been a great help, Captain,” she said.

Fletcher dropped money on the table, then asked the soldier, “What direction did the president and Senator Stark take?”

“Due south from right where you stand. Hickok says he plans to scout all the way to the Santa Fe Trail, then swing west well before he reaches the Cimarron.”

Fletcher nodded. “Much obliged, Captain.”

He and Estelle took their leave of the officer and stepped out of the restaurant and back into the rowdy street.

They were untying their horses when a commotion at the end of town toward the stock pens attracted their attention.

Five riders, buffalo hunters by the look of them, were surrounded by a cheering, laughing crowd, and the man in front was brandishing a bloody scalp above his head.

“Boys, we caught the damned savages camped at Twin Butte Creek and we had at ’em,” the buffalo hunter yelled. “By God, when we lit into them with our Sharps they didn’t know what hit them.”

The hunters stopped at a saloon and were carried inside shoulder-high by the crowd, the man with the scalp still waving it as he ducked his head under the door.

“Buck,” Estelle whispered, her face pale, “how horrible.”

Fletcher nodded, lips a tight, grim line under his mustache. “I got a feeling there’s going to be hell to pay out there on the long grass,” he said. “That was a woman’s scalp.”