Doomsday Rider

Twenty-one

Buck Fletcher lay on top of his bed in his room at the Cattleman’s Haven Hotel, a strange, echoing restlessness tugging at him.

Earlier he had seen Estelle settled in the room next to his. The girl was completely exhausted and badly needed sleep.

“I’ll wake you at first light,” Fletcher had told her. “Best you try to get some shut-eye and rebuild your strength.”

Hays was a wide-open, exciting town with plenty to see, but Estelle made no objection. Dark circles stained the pale skin under her eyes, and it was obvious to Fletcher that the strain of the past weeks was beginning to tell.

“Buck,” she’d said before he closed the door to her room, “be careful.”

Fletcher smiled. “I will.”

“Buck.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know why I said that. I don’t know why I told you to be careful.”

Fletcher shrugged. “A man can’t be too careful, Estelle. I’m not on the prod, and, believe me, I’ve no intention of borrowing trouble.”

Now he stared at the ceiling, listening to the noises from the saloons, the roar of men, the laughter of women, the whirring click of roulette wheels and always the tinny, out-of-tune pianos dropping notes like bad coins into the night.

Over the years, how many towns had he known like this one? Hundreds maybe? And how many more would he see before it all ended for him? A thousand? More that that?

Often he’d pause for only a night or two in such a town, just riding through. But there were other times, using his Colts for pay—the hard chink of gold in the palm—when he’d met belted men in gunfights who were every bit as fearless, skilled, and tough as himself.

Those were days spent along the dangerous, ragged fringes of hell, blazing, searing days, when men died, falling behind a cloud of gray gunsmoke, Colts blasting in teeth-bared defiance, battling until the very end.

Fletcher closed his eyes against the echoes, reaching for sleep, but saw only the wild, reckless, and laughing faces of men he’d known who lived by the gun. Men like Wes Hardin and Cullen Baker and Clay Allison, men he’d ridden with, men magnificently, vibrantly alive because, every single day of their lives, they lived so close to death.

Sleep would not come to him.

Fletcher swung his long legs off the bed and rose to his feet. He stepped to the window and looked outside.

Along the boardwalks oil lamps had been lit against the gathering darkness, casting dancing pools of yellow and orange on the rough pine planks, lights that could be seen for miles out on the plains.

Men came and went, heels pounding, leaving one saloon, heading for another.

The scent of cigar smoke and rye whiskey and women’s perfume hung in the air, and overlaying it all another, subtler odor—the smell of excitement. The restlessness pulled at Fletcher, refusing to let him be.

He ran a hand through his thick, shaggy hair, trying to reach a compromise with himself.

A glass of rye, maybe. Just one. Then long enough to stand in a saloon to bring it all back and no longer.

He scrubbed a hand over the harsh stubble of his cheeks but decided a shave could wait. He also thought to trim his mustache, but that too could be put off until later. Besides, he knew there was little he could do to bring even a remote suggestion of handsomeness to his saddle-brown, hard-boned features.

Fletcher put on his hat, then tugged on his boots. He picked up his gun belts, but decided against wearing them. A belted man could be seen as a threat—or a challenge.

The short-barreled Colt he slid from the holster and stuck in the waistband of his pants, covering the gun with his mackinaw so it would not show.

He checked in his shirt pocket to make sure he had his tobacco, and then studied himself briefly in the flyspecked mirror above the washstand.

What he saw did little to cheer him, but then it seldom did.

Fletcher stepped out of his room and closed the door quietly behind him. For a brief moment he stopped outside Estelle’s room but heard no sound. The girl must be sound asleep.

He went down the stairs, ignored the lifted, quizzical eyebrow of the bored night clerk, and stepped onto the boardwalk, his spurs ringing.

There was a saloon a short distance away. Like most drinking establishments in Hays it had a false front, twice as high and twice as wide as the real single-story timber shack hiding behind it. A faded sign hanging on rusty chains proclaimed the place to be Chris Riley’s Saloon. It looked as good, or as bad, as any other, and Fletcher made his way toward it.

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The saloon was a long, low room, dimly lit by oil lamps strung along the entire length of the vee-shaped ceiling that valiantly tried to penetrate the fog of cigar and pipe smoke. A mahogany bar at least forty feet long dominated the room, the rest of the space taken up by tables and chairs.

The saloon was crowded with the usual flotsam and jetsam of the frontier. Buffalo hunters, huge and shaggy in hide coats, rubbed shoulders with ragged miners, drifted in from God knows where, both noisily rejoicing in their youth and great strength. Long-limbed cowhands in from surrounding ranches stood, one high-heeled boot hooked on the brass rail, drinking rye, telling each other lies about deserts they’d crossed, blizzards they’d known, and horses they’d ridden. Gamblers of high and low degree went about their business with careful eyes and handled the pasteboards with white, sensitive fingers.

The tables were crowded with people of both sexes, playing poker, drinking, smoking, talking all at once at the top of their voices. The women were no longer in the first flush of youth, painted faces hard and knowing, drinking vinegar and water bought for them by lustful admirers at champagne prices.

Here and there pasty young clerks in celluloid collars and grinning farm boys in ill-fitting suits were getting their first lessons in sin, the tantalizing joys of hard liquor and the soft flesh of women.

At a table set apart from the rest were five black troopers of the Tenth Cavalry, barely tolerated and for the most part ignored.

A piano player was hard at work in one corner, competing with flush-faced waiters calling, chairs shuffling, drunken men shouting, women’s voices joining in, the clash and chink of glasses and the noise of the street outside, all of it blending together in one deafening din.

All this Buck Fletcher saw, heard, and smelled with considerable joy. He managed to find a space at the bar long enough to order a rye, then took his drink to an out-of-the-way corner, already feeling the tensions of the past weeks slowly drain from him.

He held his glass in an elbow jammed into his side and built a cigarette. Then he smoked and sipped his whiskey, an interested observer of what was going on around him but carefully making himself no part of it.

Much of the crowd’s excited talk centered around the recent visit of President Grant, two distinguished senators, the Russian count and countess, and Wild Bill Hickok—and there was much speculation as to whether or not the buffalo herds had already drifted too far south into the sheltering buttes and ravines of the Bear Creek country and spoiled the hunt.

This heated conversation muted and staggered to a ragged halt when Chris Riley, a round-faced man with muttonchop whiskers, a white apron tied around his waist, stepped beside the piano and held up his hands for silence.

After he’d called out, “Ladies and gentlemen, please,” several times, all talk died away into quiet, and the man beamed and yelled so that everyone could hear him, “As you are all aware, our fair city was recently honored by the visit of President Grant, that gallant hero of the late War Between the States.”

There was some scattered applause and more than a few boos and catcalls, the war still a festering wound that refused to heal.

Nonplussed, Riley continued: “With the president were a distinguished senator, members of the Russian aristocracy, and that peerless prince of pistoleers, that paladin of the plains, the one we lesser mortals, rejoicing when a god deigns to make one of his periodic visits to Hays, have yclept Wild Bill.”

Again there was applause and a few boos and Fletcher heard a man’s voice yell, “God, my ass! Hickok ain’t much.”

Alone among a mostly good-humored crowd, this voice was unnecessarily belligerent and aggressive, gratingly out of place, and Fletcher recognized it as such. Without turning his head, his eyes sought the man who had spoken.

He was not hard to find.

Sitting at a table to Fletcher’s right was a big, wide-shouldered man, his ruggedly handsome face revealing an ominous hint of brutality around the mouth and hard blue eyes. He wore two Colts low on his thighs, as some professional gunmen were starting to do, and there was no doubt in Fletcher’s mind that the man could use them well. He knew the type. Here was a bully and a braggart who had killed before and would kill again without even giving the death of another human being a second thought.

The man beside him was cut from the same mold, a little older, with a sweeping dragoon mustache above a wide, thin-lipped mouth that was now curled in a cold smile, eyes gray, glittering in the lamplight like steel blades.

On the table in front of them was an almost empty bottle of whiskey. They had been drinking heavily and the alcohol had made both men mean and hostile, stirring the inner anger that drove them. Now, confident, combative, and eager, they were very much on the prod and looking for a fight.

Fletcher had run into men like these in the past. Clay Allison for one. An affable, pleasant enough man when sober, he was a touchy, dangerous demon in drink and best left strictly alone.

Accepting his own counsel in this matter, Fletcher rolled himself another cigarette, fading as much as he was able into the background. A man might die here tonight, shot down by the guns of the two at the table, but that was no concern of his. It was for the law to handle.

What Fletcher, from long experience, had heard, seen, and evaluated, passed unnoticed by the saloon patrons. All eyes were on Riley, who was speaking again.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I am not here to talk of Wild Bill—”

“Yeah,” the older of the two men yelled, “shut your trap about ol’ duck beak!”

A few of the people around the two gunmen laughed nervously, but the four black cavalry troopers, vulnerable in this place, were suddenly wary and alert, taking notice.

“Before,” Riley said, refusing to be intimidated, “I was so rudely interrupted, I was saying that I’m here not to speak of our former town marshal, but of our other distinguished visitors, those glittering scions of the Russian nobility, those blue bloods from the steppes”—he finished with a flourish—“Count and Countess Vorishilov.”

The crowd, half-drunk and ready to cheer anybody, applauded wildly, and again Riley held up his hands for silence.

“To commemorate this auspicious occasion, the first visit to our city of any royalty, Russian or otherwise, I have the honor to present to you the famous tenor Mr. Francis Fitzhaugh, recently returned to us from Boston town, who will sing a ballad in honor of that illustrious couple.”

“Let’s hear it, Frank!” the younger gunman yelled, and his companion laughed and slapped him on the back.

Fitzhaugh was small and portly, a perfectly round belly protruding from the opening of his frockcoat. His hair was black, parted in the middle and slicked down on both sides with pomade, a carefully arranged kiss curl at each temple, and he sported a narrow mustache cultivated into points that stuck out on each side of his face.

Fussy and fastidious, the tenor was the kind of man who would cut quite a dash among the ladies, and indeed, the women in the saloon were regarding him with more than a passing interest.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Fitzhaugh said, “this is a serenade to the count and countess and to all our Russian friends o’er the foam, as the poets say. The ballad is sung to the tune of ‘Old John Brown.’” The man turned to the piano player and gave a little bow. “Maestro, if you please.”

Fletcher was thoroughly enjoying this unexpected treat. He had a great affection for singers of all kinds, his own voice being so unlovely that during a brief stint as a puncher a few years back he was excused night hawk duty for fear his caterwauling would stampede the herd.

Now he took a step closer to the piano, eagerly anticipating the song as the pianist pounded out the opening chords with a deal more enthusiasm than skill.

Fitzhaugh clasped his hands together and laid them on the top of his round belly and in a fair, high tenor sang:

Mid the grandeur of the prairies, how can youthful Kansas vie

With her Russia-loving sisters, in a fitting welcome cry?

With her heart give full expression, and the answer echo high

The Czar and Grant are friends!

Ho! For Russia and the Union

Ho! For Russia and the Union

The Czar and Grant are friends!

There were other verses in the same vein, and after the song was over Fletcher applauded as loudly as the rest, and was even moved by Mr. Fitzhaugh’s touching rendition to give the man a resounding “Huzzah!”

As Fitzhaugh bowed his way through a door at the rear of the saloon, a bevy of squealing women chasing after him, it was Fletcher’s intention to call it a night and return to the hotel.

But then he looked around him and saw the trouble coming.

Later Fletcher would be unable to determine why he’d decided to stay where he was for a few minutes longer that night. Had it been mere curiosity? Or his gunfighter’s instinct telling him that he might have to get involved?

He would never find the answers to those questions, though many a time he would think about them, wondering.

During the singer’s performance, a tall, gawky farm boy in a homespun butternut shirt, bib-front overalls, and a threadbare wool coat three sizes too small for him had been talking and giggling with one of the saloon girls, spending his hard-earned money on beer for himself and “champagne” for her.

The younger of the two gunmen rose slowly to his feet, the menacing chime of his spurs on the rough pine floor and the purposeful way he walked hushing the people nearest him into an uneasy silence.

Riley saw it coming as clearly as Fletcher did. “Here,” he said, stepping to the edge of the bar, “we’ll have no trouble in here.”

“No trouble,” the gunman said. “All I want is this pumpkin roller to sing the song again. He spoiled it for me the first time with all his damn yakking.”

Now the entire crowd was quiet, waiting for what was to come, some faces concerned, others grinning and eager.

A man beside Fletcher, a freighter by the look of him, in a plaid shirt, his pants tucked inside mule-eared boots, leaned closer and whispered, “Now there’s going to be hell to pay. The farm boy is about to dance with the devil, because that there is Arkansas Jack Dunn, and the one with him is Will French.”

The names meant nothing to Fletcher. He’d known gunmen with local reputations as hard cases all over the West, and usually they amounted to nothing.

But even so, Dunn was more than a match for any farm boy. Dunn knew it and apparently so did the kid, a skinny youngster with big hands and wrists, no more than eighteen, freckles scattered over his cheekbones and nose.

The boy’s face was flushed, but whether from fear, beer, or anger, Fletcher could not guess.

“I don’t know the song,” the boy said, his voice unsteady. “An’ I never did learn how to sing except maybe a hymn or two.”

“Then you’d better learn real fast,” Dunn said. “I want to hear the song.”

“You heard the song, mister,” the boy said. “The man already done sung it oncet.”

Dunn smiled, a thin, hard grimace that didn’t reach his eyes. “Boy, I swear, you just called me a liar.”

The saloon girl, experienced in such matters, moved quickly away from the boy, as did the crowd around him. Now the kid was standing at the bar alone.

Fletcher turned to the freighter. “Where’s the town marshal?”

The man shook his head. “He ain’t here. He escorted the president’s wagons part of the way and he ain’t expected back until tomorrow. Maybe the day after that.”

The freighter looked Fletcher up and down, measuring him. “You thinking about taking a hand in this?”

“No,” Fletcher said. “It isn’t any of my business.”

The freighter nodded, dismissing him with a scathing, sidelong glance. “Jack Dunn is no bargain. All you’d do is get your fool self kilt.”

The railroad clock hanging on the saloon wall ticked loud in the silence; then Dunn said again, “Did you get my drift, boy? You called me a damned liar.”

The kid swallowed hard, his throat bobbing. “I didn’t mean to, mister. Honest I didn’t.”

Dunn shook his head. “It’s too late for that now.” He jutted a chin toward the boy. “When you call a man a liar, all you can do next is haul your iron and get to your work.”

“I don’t have a gun,” the kid said, looking around the room like a cornered animal, his eyes wild.

Fletcher knew the boy was desperately trying to find a way out of this situation. He’d walked into the saloon to drink beer and talk to a pretty girl, and now he was going to die—and for nothing.

“Somebody give this man a gun,” Dunn said, not taking his eyes off his victim.

One of the black troopers rose from his seat and stepped to the boy’s side. He unfastened the flap of his holster and laid his blue, long-barreled Colt on the bar.

“Take mine, kid,” he said with rough kindness. “She shoots true to the point of aim.”

“I ain’t never used a Colt’s gun before,” the boy said, looking down at the revolver as if it was a living thing that might rise up and bite him. “Had me a Kentucky squirrel rifle one time, but my folks never could get together twelve dollars for a Colt’s gun.”

“Well,” Dunn said, “you got one now, sodbuster. Pick it up.”

The boy knew he was trapped. He swallowed hard, and Fletcher saw him tense as he summoned his courage, determined, now that the chips were down and there was no way out, to die like a man.

Fletcher nodded his admiration. The final measure of any man, even one as young as this, is how well he acts when he stands on the threshold of eternity.

But with cold certainty Fletcher knew that as soon as the kid’s fingers touched the Colt, Dunn would draw and shoot him. And later he’d giggle and cut another notch on his gun handle or whatever tinhorn trick he used to keep count of his dead.

The boy’s hand moved slowly toward the gun and, silently cursing himself for being a meddling fool, Fletcher dealt himself a hand in the game.

He walked quickly to the middle of the floor, past the gawping crowd of onlookers, and said, “Hey, Dunn.”

Surprised, the gunman’s head turned in Fletcher’s direction, his eyes snake cold. “Who the hell are you?”

Fletcher shrugged. “Just a man who wants to buy you a drink.”

“I buy my own drinks,” Dunn said. “Now get the hell away from me.”

Trying a different tack, Fletcher said, “The boy didn’t mean anything. He was just having a good time like the rest of us. Take that drink, Dunn, and let him be.”

“Well spoken, stranger.” Riley beamed. “We’re all friends here.”

Fletcher stepped closer to the bar and laid down his empty glass. He turned to Dunn. “Care to join me, friend? I can recommend the rye.”

At first the gunman was taken aback, but he very quickly recovered his composure. “Step away from the bar, mister,” he said, his eyes ugly. “Unless you want to die alongside the sodbuster there.”

Fletcher shook his head. “It makes me downright sad that there’s so much incivility in this world. Dunn, let’s you and me be friends.”

Two things happened very fast.

The first was that French, smiling thinly, rose from his chair and stepped beside Dunn. French saw what Dunn saw. Facing him was a big, homely man with a wide grin under a straggling mustache, his clothes shabby, boots down at heel, his entire, slightly stooped posture seemingly awkward and unhandy. What he didn’t see, but should have, was that the man’s eyes had changed from blue to a cold gunmetal gray, and that he showed no trace of fear.

The second was that the kid tried to pick up the gun.

Fletcher could do little about the first, but he took care of the second, stiff-arming the youngster away from the Colt, hurling him backward into the onlookers.

“Keep him there!” Fletcher yelled.

Dunn’s face was livid. “I’m going to kill you for that,” he said.

Fletcher sighed and picked up the trooper’s Colt in his right hand. He did a fast border shift and drew his own gun from his waistband, the trooper’s long-barreled Colt thudding into his left hand.

Dunn, stunned at Fletcher’s speed, quicker than the eye could follow, was momentarily frozen into immobility.

Fletcher smiled pleasantly, letting the Colts hang loose at his sides. “Right, Mr. Dunn, you’ve insulted me by refusing my offer of a drink, and for that I’m calling you a low-down, dirty, no-good, lying skunk. You’ve proved yourself real good at frightening farm boys, so now why don’t you try to scare me.”

“What name do you want on your tombstone?” Dunn asked, smirking even as he tensed for his draw.

“Most folks call me Buck Fletcher.”

A ripple of surprise went through the crowd. This was a known name and one to be reckoned with, and Dunn had heard it before.

The gunman hesitated, and French, suddenly looking a little green around the gills, stepped back and moved quickly away from him.

“This isn’t my play,” he told Fletcher, his hands wide, away from his guns. “I don’t want any part of this.”

“Stay in or sit this one out,” Fletcher said. “It’s all the same to me.”

French slumped into his chair on unsteady legs, poured himself a drink, gulped it down, and poured himself another, his hands trembling.

“What about you, Dunn?” Fletcher asked. “Ready for that glass of rye now?”

“Damn you!” Dunn screamed. And he went for his guns.

The trooper had been right—his army Colt shot to the point of aim, and Fletcher’s aim was the middle of Dunn’s chest.

His bullet crashed into Dunn, staggering him. The gunman tried to bring his Colts up and Fletcher fired again, this time with his own revolver. The second bullet took Dunn a few inches lower, another flower of red suddenly blossoming below the first, and the man cartwheeled backward and crashed against the wall. Dunn straightened, fired once, twice, his bullets wild, slamming into the front of the bar, scattering tiny chips of wood. Then, approaching death robbing him of strength, his Colts slipped from his hands and thudded one by one onto the floor.

The gunman went to his knees, his face shocked, unable to believe that it was he who was dying, then sprawled his length on the pine boards, his eyes staring into darkness.

Fletcher stepped out of a gray cloud of gunsmoke, looking for French. The man hadn’t moved. He kept his hands on the table in front of him and said again, his voice cracked and urgent, “For God’s sake, Fletcher! I’m not in this play.”

The farm boy moved up beside Fletcher and looked down at Dunn’s blood-splashed body. He opened his mouth, eyes wide with horror, and tried to say something. The words wouldn’t come and he turned quickly away, retching uncontrollably, all the beer he’d drunk suddenly leaving him in a heaving gush.

Fletcher strolled over to the cavalry troopers and gave the gun back to the man who had loaned it to the kid.

The soldier grinned and slid the Colt into his holster.

“Mister,” he said, “Jack Dunn killed eight men, but he only picked on them he figured were a lot slower than himself, or scared stiff maybe. He made a mistake this time, was all.”

Fletcher nodded. “All I wanted was a rye whiskey and a quiet corner to drink it in. It wasn’t any of my business.”

Another trooper smiled, his teeth very white against the dark brown of his skin. “Mister, my name is Johnson, and the next time you decide something ain’t your business, I sure hope you tell me. I want to be around when the lead starts flying.”