Doomsday Rider

One

Swollen by an unseasonable snowmelt across the Great Plains that early December of 1872, the Big Muddy threw itself against an arrow-shaped sandbar three miles downstream of Lexington, Missouri. The river was turned aside, white water foaming in angry impotence around the northern bank of the promontory. Frustrated, the Missouri channeled a swift torrent of brown water and ice around the bar and hurled it venomously into the path of the 212-foot stern-wheeler Rajah.

Rajah was firing hard, preparing to skirt the sandbar. Capt. Amos Buell, commanding, anxious to reach the city and unload his two hundred tons of freight and twenty-six passengers.

Rajah’s boilers were glowing cherry red, her exhausts hammering, but Buell called for more power to the boat’s two engines.

The river was coming at him fast and furious, challenging the stern-wheeler to reach its goal, no sure thing for a craft that drew just twenty inches and had 80 percent of her ramshackle bulk above the waterline.

The paddle wheel had been rotating at twenty times a minute. Now the cast-iron-and-wood monster, twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet in diameter, churned faster, increasing its revolutions to twenty-three a minute. Startled fountains of foam were thrown up as high as the boiler deck as the wheel’s paddles dipped into the river 168 times every sixty seconds.

Captain Buell recklessly hurled his boat against the flood. Huge chunks of ice slammed into Rajah’s bow and banged against her iron sides, to be slowly washed astern. Her exhausts, located on the foam-lashed boiler deck, were pounding now, rattling the stabilizing hog chain that ran from the stern to the wheelhouse.

Time and time again Rajah made a few feet of headway, only to be driven back by the river, the powerful torrent twisting the boat’s bow violently toward shore.

Buell called for more power, but the Rajah had given all she had. There was nothing left to give.

The boilers would not take a pound more pressure than they were carrying, and the engineer warned that the boat was in danger of being blown apart.

Buell decided against another attempt to round the sandbar where the river narrowed and thus concentrated its mighty strength. He’d smash right through the bar, trusting Rajah’s weight and momentum to carry her through.

The captain reversed engines and Rajah backed up, going with the current, shuddering as huge slabs of ice thudded into her, threatening to buckle her thin plates.

Standing on the boat’s hurricane deck, Buck Fletcher watched all this with interest but little joy. He was familiar with the stately, floating palaces that plied the Mississippi, but this boat was smaller and slower. However, he knew enough of river navigation to piece together Amos Buell’s strategy and the thoughts running through the man’s head.

As Rajah continued to reverse, Fletcher guessed that the captain was going to let her pick up speed and meet the sandbar head-on.

He did not give much for their chances, especially if the boilers burst and blew them all to smithereens.

But then, a man shackled hand and foot, guarded by a nine-man infantry detail, had little to lose, including his life. He faced twenty years’ hard labor in the hell of the Wyoming Territorial Prison, and that was just another kind of death, slower certainly, but just as certain.

“What’s he going to do, Major?”

Fletcher turned as 2d Lt. Elisha Simpson stepped closer to him, his round, freckled face anxious, revealing the infantry soldier’s instinctive distrust of anything that floated on water. The boy was a West Pointer and looked to be about eighteen years old.

Fletcher’s bleak smile lit up his long, lean, and hard face, still brown from the sun and untouched as yet by the gray pallor of prison, his wide, mobile mouth revealing teeth that were very white under a sweeping dragoon mustache.

“I guess the captain is going to climb right over that sandbar ahead,” Fletcher said. “He knows he can’t buck this current and that’s the only way he can make Lexington this side of spring.”

Fletcher shook his head. “And Lieutenant, don’t call me Major. The War Between the States is long over.”

“Yes, Major,” Simpson said, only half listening as he studied the ice-studded river beyond the bow of the boat. The boy stood in silence for a few moments, his face screwed up in thought; then he turned his head and called out over his shoulder, “Corporal Burke!”

The corporal, a grizzled veteran in his early fifties, stepped smartly beside the young officer and saluted. “Yes, sorr.”

“Strike those chains from the major,” he said. “If we have to swim for it, I don’t want him weighed down by thirty pounds of iron.”

Burke’s face was a study in confusion. “Sorr,” he said, his Irish accent strong, “does the lieutenant think that’s wise?”

Such was the reputation of Buck Fletcher as a skilled and ruthless gunfighter and convicted murderer that the corporal was completely taken aback, an understandable reaction not unmixed with a certain amount of fear.

“Yes, Corporal,” Simpson said, “the lieutenant is sure.”

The officer studied Fletcher closely, taking in the amused blue eyes in the hard hatchet blade of a face. “Major, will you give me your word as an officer and a gentlemen you won’t try to escape if we have to swim?”

Fletcher smiled again. “Lieutenant, if this tub blows up, we’ll all be dead and it won’t matter a damn whether you have my word or not. If we have to swim, we’d last about two minutes in that freezing water, so it won’t matter a damn that way either.” As he saw doubt cloud the boy’s eyes Fletcher’s smile widened and he nodded. “Sure, Lieutenant, you have my word.”

That was all it took. The young officer didn’t question Fletcher any further. This man had once been a major of horse artillery in the army of the United States and he had given his word. That he might be lying did not, for even a single moment, enter into Simpson’s thinking.

“Corporal Burke,” the lieutenant said, “strike those chains.”

Grumbling under his breath, Burke unlocked the padlock that held the chains together, releasing Fletcher’s leg irons and then the manacles around his wrists.

The soldier gathered up the chains and laid them, clanking, on the deck. Burke gave Fletcher a sidelong glance, his black eyes ugly. “Sorr, permission to fix bayonets.”

The young officer hesitated for a few moments, then nodded, saying nothing, his cheeks reddening a little as he refused to look Fletcher in the eye. Burke gave the order and the detail fixed twenty-inch-long, spiked bayonets to their newly issued Springfield rifles. The young soldiers stood alert and wary, mindful that they were guarding a dangerous prisoner, a gunfighter who was said to have killed a dozen men in shooting scrapes from Texas to Kansas and beyond. Such men were deadly, certain, and almighty sudden, and there was no taking even the slightest chance with them, especially now that Fletcher’s chains had been removed.

Despite the cold, as he shivered in his prison-issue canvas pants and shirt, Fletcher was amused. He understood how the soldiers felt. Most of them were raw recruits, and he knew he’d feel the same way if he were in their shoes.

“She’s slowing,” Simpson said, looking back at the paddle wheel.

“Now the captain will order full speed ahead and challenge that sandbar,” Fletcher said. He rubbed his wrists where the manacles had chafed them raw, a small motion nevertheless noticed by Simpson, who threw Fletcher an apologetic glance.

“Better brace yourself, Major,” the young officer said. “When we hit, this boat could come to a mighty quick stop.”

Fletcher grasped the rail in front of him and spread his feet wider.

Rajah’s wheel was turning faster now, biting into the muddy water, propelling her forward. Thick black smoke and showers of sparks poured from her twin stacks, and her exhausts were thumping loud again.

Chunks of ice, some of them as big as river barges, slammed into Rajah’s bow and sides, and the little boat shuddered and recoiled under the impact. Up in the wheelhouse Buell blasted the whistle, defying the river to do its worst. The whistle’s screams echoed along miles of the winding river valley, penetrating even the dank, crowded back alleys of Lexington. The ship’s bell was pealing, adding its incessant clamor to that of the whistle.

It was said, Simpson yelled to Fletcher over the din, that Buell had melted five hundred silver dollars into the metal from which the bell was cast to improve its tone.

“Sounds like six hundred to me,” Fletcher said, but the lieutenant didn’t hear.

Rajah charged ahead, her paddles churning, shouldering aside ice as she rammed through coffee-colored water, the sandbar getting closer with every revolution of the wheel. . . .

* * *

“Life is just one big wheel,” Fletcher recalled warden Nathaniel K. Boswell saying to him just before he was taken under escort from the newly opened Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie two weeks before. “One day you’re on top of the world; then the wheel turns and you’re at the bottom again. That’s where you are, Fletcher, at the bottom, and you can’t get any lower.”

The man had not gone into details about why Fletcher had served only a month of his twenty-year sentence before he was dragged from his cell and told he was being taken under army escort to Lexington, there to meet a man he didn’t know.

“This man has a proposition for you, Fletcher,” Boswell had said. “I’m told there could be a great deal of danger involved, but I think you’d be very wise to take it.”

Boswell shrugged, scratched under his beard with the stem of his pipe, then waved an indifferent hand. Apparently bored, he added, “Take this man’s proposition or stay here and rot with all the rest. The decision is yours, and I don’t give a damn one way or the other.”

It was a choice of a sort, but really no choice at all, and Fletcher had jumped at it.

“Who is this man?” he’d asked. “And why in Lexington?”

Again the warden shrugged. “I have no idea, but he has considerable power and influence. I know that.” Boswell was a former United States deputy marshal and his eyes were cold and unforgiving. “If it was up to me, I’d pen you up forever, Fletcher, you and all your kind, paid killers and plunderers. But President Grant himself signed the order for your temporary release, and I can’t ignore that kind of authority.”

The warden nodded to the guards who flanked Fletcher. “Take him out of my sight until his army escort arrives.” As Fletcher was shuffling from the man’s office, his heavy leg irons clanking, Boswell had called out after him, “Do us all a favor, Fletcher. Get yourself killed.”

* * *

“A man could get killed this way, Major,” Lieutenant Simpson yelled to Fletcher above the roar of Rajah’s engines and her shrieking whistle, bringing him back to the present. “I’ve never had much love for boats.”

Fletcher nodded and placed his mouth next to the young officer’s ear. “Best you tell those boys of yours to find something to hold on to,” he said. “When she hits the bar some of those men could end up going over the side.”

Simpson half raised his arm in salute, then realized what he was doing and his face colored again. “Corporal Burke!” he yelled more loudly than necessary, covering up his mistake. “Get the men braced for a collision.”

Thirty seconds later Rajah hit the sandbar hard. She rammed through half the bar’s width and came to a jolting stop. Her wheel was still churning, throwing up high fountains of muddy water, black drops spattering Fletcher and the soldiers far forward on the hurricane deck.

Buell backed his boat off, readying Rajah for another try. It seemed that more ice was banging against her hull, driven by raging, ugly water, and now, adding to everyone’s misery, sleet began to fall, driven by a rising wind from the north.

It had gotten progressively colder since the day began, and as the gray afternoon slowly shaded into night, the temperature plunged, surely ending any hope of residents along both banks of the Missouri that the recent snowmelt portended an extended Indian summer.

Rajah charged the sandbar again, backed off, charged a second time. Then a third, and a fourth.

Finally, her straining hull plates groaning, threatening any minute to tear away from their rivets, the boat rammed through the bar. Rajah brushed aside the white trunk of a dead dogwood tree that angled up from the sand, its branches spread wide like thin, surrendering arms, and, as she cleared the bar, fussily straightened her bow like an old dowager straightening her bonnet. Then, gathering around her what was left of her shabby, rickety dignity, she floated into calmer water.

Buell nosed his battered craft into a Lexington wharf, vented Rajah’s steam, and tied her up. As Buell ran out the gangplank for the passengers, mulatto dockworkers were already scrambling on board to unload her cargo, and the captain, somber, thin, and bearded, left the wheelhouse to oversee the operation.

Lieutenant Simpson turned to Fletcher, his eyes miserable. “Major, I must . . .” The young officer stumbled, trying to find the words, and Fletcher smiled. “You have a duty to do, Lieutenant. Best you do it.”

Relieved, Simpson nodded and turned to Corporal Burke. “The shackles, Corporal.”

“There’s no need for that.”

Every head swiveled toward the tall man who had just stepped onto the hurricane deck. He wore a black overcoat with an astrakhan collar, his eyes shaded by the brim of his top hat. The man took a step toward Simpson. “We must be discreet, Lieutenant,” he said. “I don’t want this man brought to my home in chains.”

“I have my orders, sir,” the young officer said, his face stiff. “I was instructed to conduct Major . . . uh . . . this prisoner by train and stage to Missouri, join the steamship Rajah in Jefferson City, and when we disembarked in Lexington remove him in chains to the home of Senator Falcon Stark.”

“You’ve done well, Lieutenant,” the man said. “I am Senator Stark, and I will take custody of the prisoner.”

“Sir, I think I should provide an escort and remain with you until your business with the prisoner is concluded.”

“I’ll be quite safe, I assure you, Lieutenant,” Stark said. His voice was as smooth as watered silk but it was edged by impatience and not a little anger.

This, Fletcher thought, is a man grown well used to the arrogance of power, a man who cuts a wide path and expects lesser men to scramble out of his way.

A sleet flurry scattered wet drops between Stark and Fletcher and the others. Through this shifting gray curtain a man as tall as Stark but dressed in a wide-brimmed hat and sheepskin mackinaw, a red woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, stepped to the senator’s side.

The man’s cold eyes swept the green young soldiers, dismissed them as unimportant and irrelevant, then came to rest on Fletcher.

“Been a long time, Buck,” he said, without friendliness.

Fletcher nodded. “Wes Slaughter. You’re a long way from El Paso.”

The gunman shrugged. “You know how it is; in our line of work we go where somebody’s doing the hiring.”

“I don’t know how it is,” Fletcher said, his eyes changing from blue to a hard gunmetal gray. “In my line of work I meet my enemies face-to-face. What’s your line of work, Wes?”

The gunman was stung and he let it show. “Damn you, Fletcher. Someday I’m going to take great pleasure in killing you.”

Fletcher nodded, his smile thin and humorless. “You told me that same thing in the Sideboard Saloon in Cheyenne not two months ago. But when we came right down to it and the talking was done, you wouldn’t draw. I guess it will have to be in the back, a specialty of yours, I believe.”

“Cheyenne wasn’t the right time or the right place is all, Fletcher,” Slaughter said, refusing to be baited further. “If we ever meet again when the talking is done and it’s the Colts’ turn to speak, it will be face-to-face, all right. I’ve seen you draw, Fletcher, and on your best day you couldn’t come close to shading me.”

“The day I can’t shade a back-shooting polecat like you, Wes, is the day I hang up my guns for good,” Fletcher said, his eyes holding a challenge he knew the other man could not ignore.

Angry, Slaughter opened his mouth to speak again, but Stark waved an irritable hand. “Mr. Slaughter, if you wish to remain an associate of mine, don’t bandy words with a convicted criminal.”

He turned to Simpson, who seemed baffled by this exchange. “Lieutenant, surely you understand that I don’t want to attract the unwanted attention you and your men would cause by leading this prisoner to my home in chains. I have a carriage waiting, and I assure you Fletcher will be quite secure with me and Mr. Slaughter.”

“I have my orders, sir,” Simpson said, but this time he sounded uncertain.

“I’m countermanding them, Lieutenant,” Stark snapped. “Or do I have to go over your head to your commanding officer?”

Fletcher smiled. “His commanding officer is in Wyoming, Stark. I’d say that’s a fair piece from here.”

Stark turned on Fletcher, his face black with anger. “You will address me as senator or not at all.” Then to Simpson: “Captain Buell sails at first light tomorrow morning for Jefferson City. Make sure you and your men are on board.” His voice softened a little. “I will personally inform President Grant how well you performed your duty. Ah, what is your name, Lieutenant?”

Defeated by this man’s air of command, backed up by the real power and influence he wielded, the officer let his shoulders slump. “Well,” he said, “my orders were to deliver the prisoner to you, Senator. I guess I’ve done that. And my name is Simpson.”

“You’ve carried out your duty, Lieutenant Simpson, and again let me say most excellently.”

The young officer turned to Fletcher. “Major,” he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you this before, but somehow I never quite got around to it. It was a long war and I guess you’ve no call to remember, but at Antietam your guns covered the retreat of a surrounded infantry brigade from the West Woods, despite the fact that you were under heavy fire yourself. You saved not only the brigade but also the reputation of the colonel in command.” He stuck out his hand. “That colonel was my father. It’s many years after the event, but on his behalf I wish to thank you.”

Fletcher took Simpson’s hand. “Lieutenant, there were a lot of woods and a lot of brigades in that war.” He smiled, a wide, warm smile that relieved the hard severity of his features. “But now I study on it some, I do recollect supporting a retreating brigade at Antietam. I was going backward myself that day, in what’s called a recoil retreat. I bet they didn’t teach you that at the Point.”

Simpson shook his head, and Fletcher continued: “You let your guns recoil and you reload and fire them from their new position. Then you do the same thing over and over again as long as you’re able. The cannons dictate the pace of the retreat, but the main thing is you keep your face to the enemy and continue firing.” Fletcher’s smile grew wider. “When you come right down to it, I guess we’ve all had our duty to do at one time or another.”

“This is all very interesting, I’m sure,” Stark said, in fact shrugging a complete lack of interest. “But we have to be going.”

The lieutenant ignored Stark. “Good luck, Major.” He was silent for a few moments, then added, “It’s been an honor.”

Fletcher stood with Stark and Slaughter, watching Simpson and his detail walk down the gangplank to disappear into the sleet-lashed gloom.

“Mr. Slaughter,” Stark said, nodding in Fletcher’s direction.

The gunman’s smile never reached his eyes as he opened his coat and drew a long-barreled .45 Colt from a cross-draw holster. He pointed the gun at Fletcher’s belly. “You,” he said, “git going.”

“Remember, Mr. Slaughter,” Stark said, “always discretion. Keep that weapon under cover until we get into the carriage.”

Stark at his side, Slaughter following a few steps behind, his gun concealed under his mackinaw, Fletcher left the Rajah and walked onto the dock, where a closed carriage stood waiting, its twin lanterns glowing orange in the darkness. A coughing, red-nosed driver was up on the seat, his breath smoking in the cold air, and the horse stamped, its iron shoes clanking loud on wet cobblestones.

“Just a word of warning, Fletcher,” Stark said as he ushered the gunfighter into the carriage. “One wrong move, even blink in a way I don’t like, and I’ll order Mr. Slaughter to shoot you.” He climbed into the carriage and sat beside Fletcher. “Do you understand?”

“Perfectly,” Fletcher said.

Wes Slaughter, his narrow, rodent face eager, sat opposite Fletcher, his Colt across his knees. “Do something the senator don’t like, Fletcher,” he said. “Give me the chance to kill you.”

After the cold of the boat deck, the carriage was reasonably warm. Fletcher settled back against the leather cushions and smiled.

“Go to hell,” he said to Slaughter.