Mankiller, Colorado

CHAPTER 9

“Shit! Wake up, Bo, wake up!”

As awareness seeped back into Bo’s brain, he recognized Scratch’s voice as the silver-haired Texan spoke urgently to him. A terrible stench filled his nostrils, and he wondered if that stink was what prompted Scratch’s exclamation. It sure smelled like they were rolling around in some sort of dung.

Something wet and slobbery prodded his face. Bo forced his eyes open and found himself staring at close range into the beady little eyes of a massive hog. He yelled as he jerked away from the beast. Then someone grabbed his arm and hauled him up and out of a sticky, stinking morass that tried to drag him back down.

As he staggered to his feet, he looked over and saw that it was Scratch who had hold of him. At least, he thought it was Scratch. He couldn’t be sure, because the hombre appeared to have been smeared from head to foot with a mixture of mud and other foul substances. Bo wondered suddenly if he looked the same way. He considered the likelihood to be pretty strong.

His eyesight was blurry because of gunk dripping over his eyes. He tried to wipe it away, but his hand was even filthier and just made things worse. Scratch tugged at his arm and said, “They threw us in a damn hog pen! We gotta get outta here ’fore those blasted porkers get us, Bo!”

Bo knew his friend was right. He saw a number of huge, muddy, bloated shapes around them. A bunch of hogs like that could consume anybody unlucky enough to fall in among them, and nothing would be left of the poor son of a bitch.

With the mud of the hog wallow dragging at their feet, Bo and Scratch fought their way toward the pole fence that surrounded the pen. They didn’t know where they were, other than in a heap of trouble, but they could figure that out later, after they made it over that fence, away from the hogs. They reached it and began climbing, a task made more difficult by the slippery mud that coated their hands, and everything else.

Hogs snuffling hungrily around their legs added urgency to their actions. They struggled to the top of the fence and swung over it, but both Texans lost their grip as they did so and fell hard to the ground on the outside of the pen. At least now they were where the hogs couldn’t get at them, so they were able to lie there and catch their breath for a few moments.

Not that they wanted to breathe much of that stinking air. Bo coughed and gasped and tried not to think about how much of the mud must have gotten in his mouth. As he and Scratch pushed themselves to their hands and knees and began to crawl away from the pen, both of them started spitting as hard as they could.

They made it about twenty yards before they collapsed. That was far enough so that the smell wasn’t quite so bad. They could still smell themselves, though, and that was a terrible reek.

“We gotta…we gotta find some place to wash off,” Scratch said.

Bo lifted his head to look around. He heard the bubbling, chuckling sound of running water, and after a moment he located what appeared to be the Animas River. He and Scratch were lying on a hillside. The stream was at the bottom of the slope, about fifty yards away.

Bo’s eyes followed the river back along its course. He saw the sturdy wooden bridge in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile way. That meant they weren’t far out of Mankiller. They could walk back to the settlement.

But not looking and smelling like this. They had to clean themselves up first. Then they could take stock of the situation and figure out what to do next.

“Let’s see if we can…make it to the river,” he suggested to Scratch.

They fought their way to their feet and began stumbling down the hill. The rocky banks of the Animas were about eight feet high, but they weren’t so steep that the Texans couldn’t slide down them. That’s what they did, coming to a stop on a narrow strip of grass at the edge of the water.

They were about to lean forward and plunge their mud-caked heads into the chilly, fast-flowing stream, when a rifle shot blasted somewhere nearby and a bullet kicked up dirt and gravel just a few feet away. As Bo and Scratch froze, a voice ordered harshly, “Don’t move, you filthy bastards!”

Bo turned his head and saw a man coming toward them along the riverbank. He was a little below medium height and seemed to be almost as wide as he was tall. He wasn’t fat, though. Instead, he bulged with muscle all over. A derby was pushed down on his bald head, and a red handlebar mustache curled over his mouth. He had a short, black cigar clenched between his teeth in one corner of that mouth.

He kept Bo and Scratch covered with the Spencer repeating carbine he had fired a moment earlier. He jerked the barrel a little and said, “Get away from that water!”

“Mister, we just want to clean up,” Bo said.

“I know what you want to do. My claim’s downstream, and I don’t want you fouling the water with all that pig shit.”

“You can’t expect us to just stay like this!” Scratch protested.

The man shrugged wide shoulders. “It’ll dry and crack off after a while.”

“By then we’ll be dead from the stink!”

“Yeah, well, you should count yourself lucky that you’re not filling up the belly of some hog by now.” The man’s face became even more grim. “You wouldn’t be the first fellas to wind up disappearing in the Devery hog pen.”

“The Deverys own those hogs, do they?” Bo asked. Somehow that idea didn’t come as any surprise to him.

“Yeah, sure. You boys get crosswise with that bunch?”

“Before I answer that, tell me…your last name wouldn’t happen to be Devery, would it?”

The man’s face darkened with anger. The tips of his mustache seemed to bristle with outrage.

“It would not,” he said. “My name is O’Hanrahan, Francis Xavier O’Hanrahan, and I’m no relation to those damned Deverys!”

“It would seem that you’re no friend to them, either.”

“You could say that.”

“Well, neither are we,” Bo said, “and like Scratch told you, if we don’t get cleaned up, the smell of this stuff is likely to kill us.”

Francis Xavier O’Hanrahan grunted. “It won’t kill you, but it might make you so sick you’d wish you were dead.” He lowered the rifle’s barrel. “Maybe I can help you. Come with me, if you want. Just don’t try any tricks.”

“Mister,” Scratch said, “we ain’t got any tricks left to try, even if we wanted to.”

That was the truth, Bo thought. He had already realized that his gun was gone, and so were Scratch’s Remingtons, along with the gun belt and holsters. Bo could tell as well that the money belt that was supposed to be under his shirt was gone. He would have been willing to bet—if he’d had anything left to wager—that the part of their stake Scratch had been carrying had vanished, as well.

O’Hanrahan motioned again with the rifle barrel and said, “Just walk on down the bank here. I’ll be behind you with this Spencer, so don’t get any funny ideas.”

They did as the burly Irishman said, trudging along the bank until they rounded a bend and came in sight of a rough dugout sunk in the side of the hill. A hundred yards or so up the slope yawned the open mouth of a mine shaft. Bo knew this had to be O’Hanrahan’s claim.

O’Hanrahan stopped them and said, “Wait right here.” He went to the dugout, stepped inside, and came back a moment later carrying a bucket in one hand and the rifle in the other. He laid the rifle across the top of a barrel and went to the river with the bucket.

“You intend to dump that over our heads, Mr. O’Hanrahan?” Bo asked.

“Take it or leave it,” O’Hanrahan said around the unlit cigar still clenched between his teeth. “It’ll be cold, but it’ll wash some of that muck off.”

“We’ll take it,” Scratch said. “I reckon I’d rather freeze to death than keep on smellin’ like this.”

O’Hanrahan filled the bucket in the stream, then carried it over to the Texans. “Who’s first?”

“It doesn’t really matter,” Bo said. “It’s going to take several buckets for each of us, at the very least.”

“You’re right about that.” With that, O’Hanrahan lifted the bucket and upended it over Bo’s head. The river water poured down and washed over Bo, dislodging some of the mud. It was just a start, though.

By the time half an hour had gone by, both of the Texans were soaking wet and shivering. Their teeth chattered. The ground around them was muddy from all the water O’Hanrahan had poured over them.

As the man stepped back after dumping a bucket of water over Scratch, he motioned toward the Animas and said, “All right, I reckon you’re clean enough now you can jump in the river and finish the job. Take those clothes off and leave them on the bank. They’ll have to be soaked and scrubbed, and even that may not be enough to get them clean. When you’re done, come inside. I’ll have a fire going in the stove and some blankets ready for you.”

“Th-th-thank you,” Bo managed to say through chattering teeth. It wasn’t all that cold. The sun was even a little warm as it shone down over the hillside. But the water from the snowmelt-fed stream had leached all the heat out of the Texans.

They hurried over to the river, stripping off their wet, filthy clothes, and dropped them on the bank before wading out into the stream. Scratch cursed as the cold water rose on his legs. Bo just took a deep breath and went under.

They scrubbed away at themselves for long minutes before they felt clean enough to come out again. Circling around the dirty clothes and dripping river water, they headed for the dugout.

O’Hanrahan met them at the doorway with blankets, which they gratefully wrapped around themselves as they stepped inside. The dugout was made of stone and logs and had a thatched roof. The floor was dirt. It was simply furnished with a potbellied stove, a rough-hewn table, a couple of chairs, and a low-slung bunk with a straw mattress. A man could eat and sleep here when he wasn’t working on his mine, but that was about all.

“Sit down at the table,” O’Hanrahan told Bo and Scratch. “I’ve got coffee on the stove. I imagine that sounds pretty good right about now.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” Scratch said.

“Call me Francis.” He brought the coffee to them as they sat down. “If you’re enemies of the Deverys, then you’re friends with just about everybody else in this part of the country.”

“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Bo quoted. “Is that about the size of it?”

Francis grinned. “Aye. The Deverys are well hated in these parts, except by some who try to curry favor with them. And if the truth be told, probably even they can’t stand the Deverys, either. They’re just more pragmatic about it.”

“What makes that bunch so powerful?” Scratch asked. “Just the fact that they own some land around here?”

“Not just some land,” Francis corrected. “They own the whole town and this whole side of the valley for a good five miles. In other words, all the land where that big vein of gold is located.”

Scratch stared at their host for a second before he said, “Well, hell! Why aren’t they gettin’ rich by minin’ the blasted stuff?”

Francis poured a tin cup of coffee for himself. “Because that would be too much hard work for the Deverys. They’d rather get rich by raking off fifty percent of everything the miners take out of the ground. That’s not including the hefty cut they take from all the businesses in the settlement. That arrangement is in the lease of everybody who moved in there.”

“Wait a minute,” Bo said. “How in the world did they manage to get a jump on everybody else and claim all that land after the gold strike?”

Francis shook his head. “They didn’t claim it after the gold strike. They already owned it. They’d been farming here for several years before anybody found any gold.”

“Farmin’?” Scratch repeated. “This ain’t good territory at all for farmin’, I’d say. Of course, I wouldn’t really know, not havin’ done much of it in my life.”

“Oh, it’s not,” Francis said. “Not at all. From what I’ve heard, the family just barely eked out a living, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a little rustling and the like to help them get by. Jackson Devery and his sons came here from Kansas, and I’ve got a hunch they pulled up stakes and moved west because the law made it too hot for them back where they came from.”

Bo had only seen Luke Devery and his cousin Thad, but he didn’t doubt that Francis was right. Luke and Thad appeared to be brutal, vicious men, the sort who wouldn’t be above committing a crime. For that matter, Bo was fairly certain that Luke and Thad had been among the men who’d attacked them at the livery stable and robbed them, and the others had probably been members of the Devery family, too.

He indulged his curiosity by asking, “The fella who owns Edgar’s Livery Stable in town…would Devery happen to be his last name?”

Francis nodded. “He’s Jackson Devery’s younger brother. He came out here right after the town got started. That was before the gold strike, too. Jackson and his boys built that big house at the top of Main Street. You’ve seen it?”

“Yeah,” Scratch said.

“That may have been the last real work they did. After a while, Jackson sent word back to his kinfolks in Kansas, and some of them came out to join him. They started the town. Even now, you can tell an original Devery building.”

“They look like they’re about to fall down,” Bo guessed.

Francis laughed. “I see you paid attention when you rode in.” He sobered. “Then a cowboy who was just passing through here found a gold nugget where there’d been a rockslide not long before, and he told people about it, and, well, you know what happened next. There was a big rush, and not just miners, either. All the sort of folks who flock into every boomtown showed up, from the gamblers and whores and saloon owners to the honest businessmen. Didn’t matter what they had in mind. When they got here, they found that if they wanted to go into business, they had to promise the Deverys a healthy share of the profits. Same was true for the prospectors, like me.”

“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Scratch commented.

Francis shrugged. “I was a newspaperman at one time, and the habit of asking questions never got out of my blood. I talk to people, and they seem to want to talk to me. Most of them, anyway. Hard to get a word out of Jackson. He doesn’t come out of that old house much. But Edgar likes to talk.”

Bo sipped his coffee, relishing the warmth of it. The chill was mostly gone from his bones now. He said, “I don’t imagine folks like it very much when the Deverys carve off half the pie for themselves without doing any work for it.”

“No, of course they don’t. But the Deverys own the ground, so what can they do?”

“You made it sound a while ago like the Deverys have committed crimes. You implied that they had killed people and thrown the bodies in that hog pen, the way they did with me and Scratch.”

Francis frowned. “I don’t know that for a fact. But I do know that some of the business owners who have complained too much about the Deverys’ share have wound up missing. No one’s ever seen them again.”

Scratch said, “Down in Texas, folks’d call in the Rangers if things like that started happenin’.”

“This isn’t Texas. If the Deverys have broken any laws, they’ve covered it up.” A bitter laugh came from Francis. “Anyway, if you’d met our local lawman, Biscuits O’Brien, you’d know it’s not very likely he’d ever stand up to the likes of Jackson Devery and his sons and relatives. Biscuits is such a pathetic excuse for a human being that I hate to claim him as a fellow son of Ireland.”

“We have met him. Why do they call him Biscuits?” Bo asked.

“I don’t have any earthly idea. But it suits him, don’t you think?”

Bo had to admit that Francis was right about that.

“So, how did you boys get on the wrong side of the Deverys? You must’ve done something to offend them to wind up in the hog pen like that.”

Bo felt instinctively that they could trust the burly O’Hanrahan, so he explained about the encounter at the bridge, with Scratch adding some of the details. By the time Bo got to the part about taking their horses into Edgar Devery’s stable, Francis was shaking his head.

“You fellas really are lucky to be alive,” he said. “I’m sure when they dumped you in the hog pen, they figured you’d be out cold until it was too late to stop the hogs from eating you. You must be tougher than they thought.”

“They took our guns and our money,” Scratch said. “Probably our horses and the rest of our gear, too.”

Francis nodded. “Oh, yes, I think you can be pretty certain of that. I’d say that you boys don’t own anything at the moment except those filthy clothes you left outside.”

“That’s not true,” Bo said. “Those other things still belong to us, whether the Deverys have them or not.”

Francis looked at them and frowned. “How do you figure that? You can’t get them back.”

“Sure we can,” Scratch said. “All we have to do is kill all them damned Deverys first.”