Doomsday Rider

Twenty-four

Fletcher stood on the bank, stunned by this melancholy development. In his befuddled state he had never even considered the possibility that he might have been washed up on the bank opposite the ferry.

He sat on the grass under a cottonwood, trying to get his brain to work. He had to think this thing through.

After a few minutes he realized there was only one solution to the problem—he’d have to swim for it.

But that solved one problem and created another. He was a poor swimmer, and the river at this point was wide.

Fletcher’s hand strayed to his shirt pocket and it took him several moments before he remembered his makings were ruined. Again he directed his growing rage at Red Jones, angrily cursing the man under his breath.

He had to get across the river and soon—but how?

The answer finally came to him.

Back at the spit he’d seen the skeletal trunk of a dead cottonwood lying half-buried in the sand. If he could get the trunk into the water, he could float across.

It wasn’t going to be easy, but Fletcher knew he had no alternative. He had to save Estelle, and that dead tree could be her salvation—and his.

Wearily he rose to his feet and retraced his steps to the sandbar.

The cottonwood was easier to move than he had feared, mainly because it had been stripped of its branches in some ancient tumble down the river when it was in flood and there was nothing left to dig deep into the sand.

Fletcher lifted one end of the log free, then the other. The trunk was heavy and awkward to handle, but after several attempts he managed to pry it loose from the sand and drag it to the water’s edge. He stripped off his mackinaw, then his boots and gun belts, and bundled them up inside the coat, using the arms to tie it all together.

Fletcher placed his wet package on top of the trunk and pushed it into the river, holding on with his right arm. He kicked out with his feet, and the log floated slowly into the current.

The water was cold and its icy slap made Fletcher gasp. He kicked out harder and the trunk, with agonizing slowness, nosed further into the wide Smoky.

The current was strong and he was slowly being swept downstream of the sandbar, but his steadily churning feet kept the trunk on a steady, if slanting, course for the opposite bank.

It took the best part of fifteen minutes before Fletcher felt the trunk grind across rock and come to a sudden halt. He was still about ten yards from the bank, but here the water was shallow, and he managed to splash his way to shore, holding his precious bundle above his head.

Fletcher clambered up the steep side of the bank and fell on the grass, numb from cold and teetering on the edge of exhaustion. After a few moments he climbed slowly to his feet and pulled on his boots, then buckled on his gun belts.

He shrugged into his wet mackinaw, then checked his Colts, punching out each round and drying them one by one, or as much as he was able to get them dry, on his damp shirt.

Reholstering his guns, Fletcher removed his spurs, shoving them into the pockets of his mackinaw where their jingle would not betray him, and walked toward the ferry and Red Jones’s shack.

The reckoning was coming, and the anger in Fletcher was a growing thing, building inexorably with each stiff, painful step he took. Jones had played his hand well and thought he had the game won.

But very soon now Fletcher would up the ante—betting all he had on a pair of Mr. Sam Colt’s sixes.

When Fletcher got close to the shack, he drew the gun from his cross-draw holster. There was no one around, and, luckily, Jones did not seem to own a dog that would bark an alarm.

The shack had one small, uncurtained window to the front. On cat feet, Fletcher stepped quietly to the window, dropped to one knee, and looked inside.

Estelle was sitting on a cot opposite Jones. Her shirt was unbuttoned and hung over her waist, exposing creamy, pink-tipped breasts that were still full and swollen from her pregnancy.

The ferryman sat at a table, a whiskey jug to his lips, never, for a single moment, taking his eyes off the half-naked girl as he drank.

It seemed that eager anticipation played a major role in Jones’s perverse sexual appetite, and he appeared to be in no hurry to throw his unwashed body on Estelle.

Fletcher shook his head. There was just no accounting for people.

A sudden shuffling noise to his right made him duck back from the window, his gun coming up fast.

The Cheyenne woman, her arms loaded with firewood, had walked around the corner of the shack. Now she stopped in her tracks, her only reaction to Fletcher’s presence a slight widening of her dark eyes.

Fletcher put a finger to his lips and whispered: “Sssh . . .” The woman stood where she was, saying nothing.

It was now or never, Fletcher decided. The Cheyenne might open her mouth and scream at any moment.

He stepped quickly to the door of the shack, judged its strength, then kicked it in with his right boot, following through when timbers splintered and the door crashed open.

Jones, his face all at once managing to register fear, surprise, and shock, let the jug slip from his hand. It crashed onto the table, spilling whiskey across the rough pine boards. The man roared a vile oath and dived for Fletcher’s rifle standing near the stove.

He never made it.

Fletcher’s Colt barked once, twice, three times, and Jones slammed heavily into the wall, rocking the flimsy shack to its foundations. He sank to the floor, three bullet holes forming a perfect ace of clubs dead center in his chest.

“I finally played my hand, Jones,” Fletcher said, talking to a dead man. “And I reckon you’ve cashed in your chips.”

“Help me,” Estelle said, without a glance at Jones’s body. She pulled up her shirt and turned her back to Fletcher.

“What do you want me to do?” Fletcher asked, smoke drifting around him. He punched out the spent shells from the cylinder of his Colt, reloaded, then holstered his gun.

“Button my dress, unless that filthy animal ripped them all off. I’m too shaken to do it myself.”

“They’re all there,” Fletcher said, his face troubled. He could handle a gun or a rope and in a pinch a blacksmith’s hammer, but women’s fixings were usually beyond him.

The buttons were small and round, covered in the same fabric of the shirt, and there seemed to be a hundred of them. It took Fletcher’s big, fumbling fingers a long time to get them all fastened.

When he finished, Estelle turned to face him. “I knew you’d come for me, Buck,” she whispered. “With all my heart and soul, I knew it.”

“Did he . . .” Fletcher stopped, trying to find the right words.

There was no need. “No, he didn’t. Buck, I am protected by the shield of the Lord, and had that animal tried to force himself on me, I would have called down the terrible thunder of His wrath.”

Fletcher nodded. “Well, I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat.” He glanced at Jones’s body without sympathy. “Or in his case a skunk.”

Estelle looked at Fletcher as if seeing him for the first time. “Buck,” she said, “you’re soaking wet!”

“Some,” Fletcher admitted.

“Let’s get you out of those wet clothes before you catch your death of cold.”

Fletcher nodded toward the dead man. “I’ll get rid of that first.”

He grabbed Jones by the feet and dragged the body outside. There was no sign of the Cheyenne woman, the wood for the stove lying where she’d dropped it.

Fletcher dragged Jones’s body into some deep brush on the riverbank, then returned to the shack.

Tired, wet, and irritable, he insisted Estelle turn her back while he stripped off his wet clothes. These he spread in front of the stove, then wrapped himself in a blanket from the cot.

“Can I look now?” Estelle asked, a barely suppressed laugh in her voice.

“Yeah,” Fletcher answered gruffly, annoyed at the girl and the way all women seemed to have of making a naked man feel foolish about his modesty.

Estelle looked around the shack and found the coffeepot and a sack of Arbuckle. There was water in a jug, no doubt brought in by the Cheyenne woman, and she filled the pot and placed it on top of the stove.

Sitting back on the bed, Estelle leaned over and moved Fletcher’s shirt and mackinaw closer to the fire. “Where is the Indian woman?” she asked.

Fletcher shrugged. “Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I don’t know, back to her people maybe. I guess living with Red Jones was no picnic and she was glad to get rid of him.”

The girl reached down and pulled a sodden wad of sack, paper, and tobacco from the pocket of Fletcher’s shirt and threw it into the fire.

Fletcher followed her movements with unhappy eyes. “I wasn’t killing mad at Jones until I discovered that,” he said. “Then it became real personal between him and me.”

Estelle smiled. She rose and picked up her coat that Jones had thrown on the floor in his haste to strip her. She held up the mackinaw and reached into a pocket, coming up with a tobacco sack and papers.

“How the hell—” Fletcher began.

“You know, Buck,” the girl said, interrupting him, “sometimes the way you talk to me, explaining every little thing, I get the impression you don’t think I’m very intelligent.”

Stung and embarrassed, Fletcher fumbled for words. “I don’t think that. I mean—”

Estelle shook her head. “It doesn’t matter; really it doesn’t. But early on I was clever enough to figure out that a smoking man without tobacco would be like a grizzly bear with a toothache.” She smiled and handed sack and papers to Fletcher. “That’s why I bought these back at the sutler’s store at Fort Apache. I thought it might be real prudent to have some spare.”

“Estelle,” Fletcher said, grinning, meaning every word, “you are an angel.”

The girl rose and found matches and scratched one alight, holding it up to Fletcher’s cigarette. He drew deep and long, then, smoke trickling slowly from his nose, sighed. “Ahh . . . that was good.”

“Nasty habit,” Estelle said, her nose tilting. “I don’t approve of it.”

* * *

Fletcher and Estelle both decided to forgo the dubious cleanliness and comfort of Red Jones’s cot, preferring to sleep on their own bedrolls. Fletcher, shivering in his blanket, found them stashed with their horses and saddles in the dead man’s small barn behind the shack.

Fletcher hotfooted it back to the shack, threw the bedrolls on the floor, and was glad to return to his coffee and the welcoming warmth of the stove.

In the early hours of the morning, he rose and brought in the wood the Cheyenne woman had dropped, and fed the fire.

Outside the night was bitter cold and a frosty moon rode high. There were a few stars scattered across the sky, but the horizon toward the north was black with building clouds. The coyotes had begun calling, and down by the riverbank a large animal crashed through the brush.

Fletcher lay on his blankets again, listening to Estelle’s soft breathing, wondering at the girl’s dry-eyed grief for her dead husband and baby and her determination to even the score with her father.

Restless, thoughts crowding on thoughts, Fletcher built himself a smoke and lit the cigarette with a brand from the stove.

Despite the still-visible wagon tracks, trying to find Falcon Stark in the vast, featureless wilderness would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. And if it snowed heavily or a cavalry patrol escorted the senator and his hunting party to Fort Hays they would have to turn back and start the search all over again. That is, if they survived. Getting caught in a blizzard on the Kansas plains was no bargain.

And Dan Cain was in Hays. The city marshal would have returned by this time and Cain had made it clear that any debt he owed Fletcher for past favors had been paid in full. Next time he would do what the law demanded of him.

Fletcher had nothing against the lawman. Cain must do his duty as he saw it, and he could not be blamed for that.

Then there was no going back to Hays. Maybe he and Estelle would head for Ellsworth and ride the boxcars of the Union Pacific east. But to where? Lexington? Or would they have to follow Stark all the way back to Washington?

It seemed the chances of clearing his name were slender and growing more so all the time. Falcon Stark was a powerful, respected man in the nation’s capital, and exposing him for the liar and murderer he was would not be easy and, indeed, might be impossible. Fletcher felt a pang of despair deep in his belly as he took a last drag on his cigarette and threw the butt into the fire.

All he could do now was play the cards where they fell and hope he could put together a winning hand.

But that was mighty cold comfort, as cold as the night outside, and just as dark and as fraught with danger.

* * *

Fletcher woke as dawn changed the light inside the shack from scarlet-streaked black to a watery gray. He rose, shivering, and piled more wood into the glowing stove. The water jug was empty, so he dressed and filled the coffeepot at the river.

When he returned Estelle was also awake, and the girl seemed refreshed by her sleep and greeted him with a smile.

Fletcher threw a handful of coffee into the pot and placed it on the stove to boil.

“We’ll head south and see where the wagon tracks take us,” he said. “Just hope the snow holds off or we’ll lose the tracks and our way.”

“What will we do if that happens?” Estelle asked, her face troubled.

Shrugging, Fletcher made an adjustment to the position of the coffeepot.

“If that happens we head to Ellsworth and try again some other day in another place.”

“That’s not going to happen, Buck,” the girl said. “We’re going to find my father. I know we will. Believe me, Buck, the Lord is on our side.”

Fletcher nodded, smiling. “That’s good, because right about now we can sure use all the help we can get.”

After a breakfast of coffee and broiled bacon, Fletcher and Estelle saddled their horses and led them onto the ferry.

They walked past where Red Jones, unburied and unmourned, lay in the brush, his bearded face turned to the sky, unseeing eyes wide open.

Neither of them felt the slightest pang at leaving the man there. You don’t take time to bury a dead coyote.

Fletcher grabbed the rope, his strong arms nosing the ferry into the river. It took him ten minutes of steady hauling to cross to the opposite bank, and after they led their horses down the ramp, Fletcher tied the raft securely to a tree.

“The way the weather is, I doubt there will be other travelers in need of this ferry,” he said. “But we might want it in a real hurry on the way back.”

He and Estelle swung into the saddle and rode south, onto flat, rolling land cut through by innumerable shallow creeks. The tracks of Stark’s heavy supply wagons still scarred the grass, but even a few inches of snow could cover them completely, leaving Fletcher to find the trail like a blind man groping for the way.

He glanced at the sky. To the east, the sun was lifting itself above the horizon, painting the edges of gathering clouds a pale rose, and the air was crisp on the tongue, tasting of frost and early morning. A few snowflakes tumbled in a fretful prairie wind that set the buffalo grass to rippling, and ahead of him Fletcher saw the parallel ruts of the wagons stretch away into the distance like phantom railroad tracks laid to nowhere.

Estelle kneed her horse close to his and Fletcher turned to the girl and smiled. He lifted his hand and brought it down in a chopping motion, directing the girl’s attention to the wagon path.

“That’s where we’re going,” he said. “Wherever the tracks lead.”

“If those tracks marked the milestones along the turnpike to hell, I’d still take it,” Estelle said, her face set and defiant, no trace of surrender and less of forgiveness in her.

Fletcher nodded, his smile fading until his mouth became a grim, straight line. “Young lady, hell might be just where we’re headed,” he said.