A Good Day to Die (6 page)

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Authors: William W. Johnstone

BOOK: A Good Day to Die
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The woman, middle-aged and thick bodied, lay on her back, faceup. She'd been raped, of course, not once but often. She'd been beaten, broken, mutilated, and scalped.
The old woman had had similar treatment. As an added refinement, a tree branch had been shoved between her legs and set on fire. Sam could only hope it had been done after she was dead.
“Devilments!” Sam muttered to himself. His voice sounded strange, a toad's croak, startling him. His mouth was bone dry.
Obscene butchery was nothing new to Sam Heller. He'd grown up in southwest Minnesota where the eastern branches of the Sioux roamed, raided, and killed, terrorizing settlers. In the Dakota badlands—what the Sioux considered their home grounds—he'd seen similar remains of pioneers, prospectors, and other white invaders.
No less enthusiastic aficionados of torture were the Apaches, whom he'd tangled with in Arizona and New Mexico territories. And he'd seen plenty of atrocities committed by and against soldiers and civilians of both sides during the Civil War.
This outrage figured to be the handiwork of Comanches.
Recent reports had reached Hangtown of Comanche raids on the plains west of the Breaks. Isolated incidents as yet, brutal and alarming, prompted the commanding officer at Fort Pardee to detail a cavalry troop to meet Major Adams's wagon train at Anvil Flats and escort it safely to the Santa Fe Trail. There it would be met by another cavalry troop from a New Mexico fort. That rendezvous was scheduled for sometime that day.
Sam's scalp tingled, with good reason. He wore his yellow hair long, scout-style. It was a scout's way of taunting the savages, as if saying,
You can't take my hair.
For a moment, the boast rang a tad hollow. Still, he intended to keep his shoulder-length yellow hair intact for a while longer—a good while longer. Or die trying.
The prospect had been made less sure by the grisly evidence before his eyes of Comanche raiders.
Sam examined the sign. The marauders' tracks went east along Rimrock Road through the valley.
He cut the deer carcass loose and threw it in the brush.
Pointing Dusty's head south, he moved forward, climbing the north slope of the far ridge, up and out of the valley. Away.
F
OUR
One second, they weren't there; the next, they were.
Seton Fisher was carrying water back to the ranch house from the stream. He had a full bucket in each hand, held by the handles. It was early afternoon, it was hot, and the buckets were heavy.
In his mid-forties, Fisher was strong armed and thick bodied. Sweat stung his eyes, blurring them. He paused, trying to blink them clear because he didn't want to interrupt toting the water back to the house by setting down a bucket to wipe his eyes clean.
Fisher's ranch was near the south rim of the Upland Plateau. It was a good location, but a hard go to eke out a living from the Texas hill country for himself and his family.
The site occupied a saddle between two ridges running east-west. The south ridge hid the edge of the plateau and the flat below, screening them from view. The north ridge lay on a flat below Sentry Hill, the most prominent landform in the area. Between them lay a valley of gently rolling grasslands—Seton Fisher's spread.
A small herd of cattle, widely scattered, grazed on the greenery. A south-flowing stream ran through the property. A flat-roofed house sat on a rise within walking distance of the water. Ringed by cottonwood trees, the rise gave welcome shade on hot summer days.
The ranch house faced south, a modest two-room dwelling with windows and a covered dogtrot passage connecting both rooms. Glass for the windows was an unaffordable luxury for the Fisher ranch. Most of the year, the windows were sealed with semitransparent oiled paper. During warm weather months, the window frames were left bare and uncovered to let in fresh air.
Outbuildings included an open-sided barn and a shed. Nearby were a haystack and a corral with several horses and a mule penned inside. The dooryard, an open space loosely bounded by the house and outbuildings, was nothing but brown dirt. Traffic by humans and domestic animals had trampled out the grass.
Fisher was squat and burly, with a barrel-shaped torso. His bushy eyebrows, the hair fringing his balding head, and a rufflike beard were all streaked with gray. He was a onetime cotton planter from the rich black-earth district around Dallas. His first wife being deceased, he'd taken a second wife, Ada, a war widow, and adopted her young daughter, Lydia.
War had killed King Cotton, closing down markets and causing Fisher, like so many others, to go bust. It had also killed his oldest son Emory, who'd fought and died for the Confederacy. His next-born, Eben, was in his midteens, but big for his age.
By 1864, Seton Fisher had feared the lad would be rounded up by the relentless recruiters of the Confederate army. He'd feared that he, too, was not immune from conscription since the army was taking pretty much any male able to stand on his own two feet who hadn't used those feet to make scarce while recruitment agents were scouring the district.
Seton Fisher had moved his family west, from Dallas to Forth Worth, then Weatherford and Mineral Wells, and still farther west until finally fetching to a halt in Hangtree County.
But there was no living to be made in Hangtown. Mindful of draft recruiters and their ceaseless quest for Confederate cannon fodder, Fisher had deemed it best to put more distance between his family and the haunts of men, claiming land on the flat west of the town.
The south rim of the plateau had looked right for his purposes. It was far enough from civilization to keep the authorities to a minimum, but not so far that he couldn't get to town within a half-day's ride to fetch supplies or flee to in case of an emergency.
Other ranches, farmhouses, and cabins lay scattered up on the south rim but their owners, like Seton Fisher, had a passion for seclusion and their own reasons for anonymity.
Brooding over the landscape lay the heights of Sentry Hill. A spring at its southern base was the source of Locust Lake, whose gray-green hue was the color of aged, weathered copper. The lake fed a number of streams running to the plateau's edge and down its southern face, coursing southeast across the flat.
Fisher settled his family on a tract of land between Sentry Hill and the south rim. The uplands were overrun by maverick cattle, runaway longhorns that had gone back to the brush. They thrived and thronged the hill country, multiplying there as they did on the flat and indeed throughout much of Texas during the war years. The increase would ultimately make a cattle kingdom of the Lone Star State—but not yet.
By hard work and great pains, the family had managed to gather and brand a small herd of longhorns, enough for their needs. Not until the family was well and truly settled did Seton Fisher discover the reason for the ready availability of good grazing land in Hangtree County.
The threat of imminent civil war in 1860 had caused the federal government to close a string of forts it maintained along the western frontier. Manned by cavalry, the forts had been strongholds designed to suppress raids by Comanches, Kiowas, and Lipan Apaches. Washington needed the troops for the coming war in the all-important theaters east of the Mississippi.
When war broke out in 1861, the Texas branch of the Confederacy was too hard pressed fighting the Yanks along the Gulf Coast, in New Mexico, and in East Texas along the Louisiana border, to spare more than a handful of troops to take up the Indian-fighting duties formerly handled by U.S. cavalry and Texas Rangers.
In Hangtree County, settlers in the uplands mostly picked up and moved out rather than stay put and be massacred. However, with the settlers largely gone, the Indians shunned their former raiding grounds, knowing they were no longer fit and ready sources of captives, scalps, and stolen horses.
“Now you tell me! ” was Fisher's reaction to these disclosures, confided to him by residents of Hangtown during a memorable visit to barter cattle hides and tallow for supplies.
It was too late for him to back out. He had filed his claim, cleared the site of trees and brush, built the house and outbuildings, and made the land his. They had equity in it now—sweat equity. To give it up was unthinkable.
Besides, the Comanche threat was overblown. He thought the Hangtown locals were having fun at the expense of the newcomer, the outsider, telling tall tales to spook the greenhorn. That's what he told himself and his wife. He pretty much managed to convince himself and she knew better than to contradict him and get a beating for her troubles.
For a fact, few Comanches had been seen in those parts in recent years, said sightings having been reported in the Breaks and farther west. Seton Fisher was a stubborn man. So long as he and his family took reasonable precautions, they would be safe from Indians.
While the Fishers did not exactly flourish on the south rim, neither did they perish. Maverick cattle provided meat, hides, tallow, and, when ground up, powdered bones for fertilizer. There was wild game aplenty—deer, antelope, pheasant, quail, and such varmints as possum, raccoon, rabbit, and squirrel.
Seeds bought or bartered from the Hangtown feed store grew in vegetable patches near the ranch house yielding corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, melons and such. Ada and her daughter Lydia tended to the gardening, as well as the cooking, cleaning, mending, and washing.
Fisher and his sixteen-year-old son Eben did the heavy labor, clearing, hewing, building, herding and branding cattle, and the like. Built like a bull, Fisher was a hard, tireless worker.
Son Eben got his growth early. He was a big, hulking youth, a towering man-boy. He did his chores like he was told—as long as his Pa was there to oversee him every minute. Fisher despaired of Eben ever making his way all by his lonesome.
Eben was in the dooryard chopping wood when his pa returned from the stream with two full buckets of water.
Although big and strong, Eben was clumsy and ill-coordinated. Coarse dark hair fell across his face into his eyes. Flailing away at sectioned log rounds with a double-headed ax, he seemed more likely to cut off some toes rather than split firewood. Working harder, as if to impress his pa with his industry, he made a noisy task of it, grunting with the effort of each stroke, splinters and wood chips flying this way and that, making a mess.
Hot, tired, and thirsty, Fisher wasn't fooled. His shoulders, arms, and neck ached from the effort of fetching water for the house cistern. His mouth and throat were dry, parched. He longed for some refreshment. But it was easier to keep moving and stumble along, rather than having to resume from a dead start. He'd dip a ladle into a bucket, taking a long drink of cool, fresh water once he reached the house and set down his heavy load.
He closed his eyes for an instant, squeezing them shut. Red and yellow suns and pinwheels blazed against the black backdrop inside his eyelids.
He opened his eyes. He saw intruders.
Indians!
Comanches
.
Four braves on horseback emerged from behind a screen of trees on the west, on his left side. They'd come as if out of nowhere, materializing like phantoms.
Fisher shook his head, wondering if perhaps that's all they were—hallucinations brought on by too much sun on his bare head.
They looked hard and cruel. Dangerous.
Reeling, he staggered back a step. A giant invisible hand squeezed his gut, the bottom of his stomach feeling as though it had fallen out. He stood frozen in the middle of the yard, buckets in hand, a stone's throw from the ranch house, Through an uncurtained window, he saw a flash of movement as Ada crossed in front of the window, moving around in the room. She hadn't seen the invaders.
Eben stood with his back to the Indians, chopping wood full tilt, sending the chips flying, blissfully unaware of the intruders.
The horses' hooves trod softly on the brown dirt of the yard. There was a faint musical whispering. Soft as the first pattering fall of raindrops, it was the jingling of tiny bells. An odd, jarring note, the musical chimings came from several strips of little silver bells no bigger than a berry. They were strung at regular intervals on rawhide thongs, braided into strands of shiny black shoulder-length hair framing the face of the Comanche riding slightly in advance of the other three.
Seton Fisher was unaware that he was in the presence of Little Bells, a member of the Bison Eyes clan and a valued henchman of War Chief Red Hand. He knew only that he and the rest of his family were in danger, deadly danger.
He wondered if he looked as sick as he felt. He had no weapon at hand. He owned a rifle, two pistols, and a shotgun, but they were all in the house.
Why weigh myself down with a gun while carrying out ordinary household chores?
he had thought earlier.
Too late, he knew why, and cursed himself for being a damned fool.
Little Bells's lithe, wiry limbs were knotted with ropy strands of muscle wrapped in veins. A red bandanna circled his forehead. Beneath it, his hair hung loose and free, a strand of silver bells on each side of his face. Deep-set eyes peered out from under an overhanging brow. His swarthy, copper-hued face was painted with vertical and horizontal black stripes. War paint.
He wore a salmon-colored shirt, a breechcloth, and deer-hide boots. He rode a brown horse with a high-backed Comanche style wooden saddle, holding the reins in one hand and a rifle in the other. The rifle was decorated by a pair of feathers tied below the muzzle by a rawhide thong.
The three braves with him were armed. Greasy Grass carried an army carbine. Thorn had a single-shot rifled musket. A bow was slung across Firecloud's back and a quiver of arrows hung over a shoulder. A six-gun was stuck into a braided rawhide belt holding up his breechclout.
They stopped between Fisher and the ranch house, their expressions remote, impassive.
Some men cling to hope no matter how grim the facts.
Why assume the worst?
Fisher asked himself silently. He'd handled stray Indians before. They were great ones for trying to get something for nothing from settlers. High-handed, high-stomached, full of themselves, they did not beg, they demanded. Feed them a meal, give them a few trinkets, baubles, and blankets to sate their savage vanity and childlike greed and they'd be on their way. That's how it had always been in the past, in other places.
But those Indians hadn't been Comanches, staring down Fisher on the lonely heights of the hill country.
Eben kept on huffing and puffing, making the chips fly as he continued to chop wood, oblivious to the danger at hand.
Damned young fool! He always was slow on the uptake, that boy.
Seton Fisher glared and called to him in a stage whisper, his voice a croak. “Hsst! Hsst! Eben. Eben!”
“What, Pa?” Eben said, not looking up from the woodpile.
“Over here, ya derned idjit!”
Eben straightened up, turning around with ax in hand. “Yow!”
“Easy, boy,” Fisher said.
Eben's expression of shocked surprise might have been almost comical in its grotesque exaggeration if the situation had not been so direfully real. He cried, “Injuns! Oh Lordy!”
“Keep still, boy! We can't show weak,” Fisher hissed.

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