Savage Texas: The Stampeders (16 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN

Like many in Hangtree that morning, Otto Perkins was awakened by the feeling of something like an earthquake. In the back room of his makeshift studio and shop, he sat up in his bed, confused and wondering whether the poorly made building enclosing him would stand up. When he felt a tremendous jolt and heard a nearly explosive slamming noise at the front of the building facing the street, he was convinced he was about to be buried in falling lumber.

The rumbling and shaking continued, but the room stayed intact around him. Perkins rose and slid the half-circle grips of his eyeglasses around his ears, and rose with trepidation.

Out the front window of his building he saw an amazing sight: waves of bovine flesh and the flashing broad expanses of wide cattle horns, tossing and tilting as they moved. He noticed his front porch was knocked nearly loose from the building; the falling of part of the porch roof and two of the supports accounted for the jolt and slamming noise he’d heard. He felt and heard the building creak, and yelled in surprise when a side window exploded inward and a young bullock burst through, having been driven against the building by the pressure of the herd. The window frame and some of the wall splintered apart as the entire young bull came inside. Perkins backed up and clambered fast onto the shop counter and stood there cringing, the heels of his hands pressed to his whimpering mouth. He looked like a sissified schoolmaster terrified by a rat on the classroom floor. The bullock, eyes wild and glaring from the animal emotion of the stampede, burst its way out the double front doors, across the porch, and back into the surge.

Only then did Perkins notice that the stampede did not appear to be a totally natural one. Occasionally a rider would pass on the side of the thundering herd, whooping and waving a hat and seemingly trying to avoid having the cattle turn down side streets and alleys.

It struck Perkins that this was the most exciting event he’d seen in his life, yet it was one he was in no position to photograph, for reasons both technical- and safety-related. But if his building could hold up and he could survive this, there would be plenty of damage to photograph all through Hangtree. Maybe even a few corpses, trampled and ruined. Oh, how he’d love to photograph those. It became something like a silent prayer in his mind as he watched the rumbling onslaught go by: God, let there be corpses!

As if in answer, he saw the remarkable and revolting sight of two men being carried along in the flow, impaled on the six-foot longhorn racks of two huge bulls. “Them Drunken Earhardt Brothers” had surely, given their alcoholic lifestyle, anticipated that they might likely reach the end of their days on some dusty street or alleyway, but surely neither had supposed those deaths would come on the stabbing and swaying horns of a massive surge of longhorn cattle stampeding through the streets of their town as the morning lightened around them.

 

 

Over at the Cattleman, Pedro Sanchez, finished with dumping grease, had turned his attention to chalk-writing the day’s special on the blackboard sign that sat just by the front door.

Engrossed in his scribing, he did not look up until the thundering noise he seemed to be hearing, and the strange vibration of the ground, could not be ignored. Crouched before the sign, he turned his head, and time stopped.

“
Dulce madre de Dios!
” He leaped up and ducked inside the recessed entrance as a wall of living muscle powered past the building, hooves hammering the Texas dirt. An errant horn nicked at the sign he’d just chalked and sent it flying into the welter, where it was trampled into splinters.

 

 

Johnny Cross had seen many a sight in his day. Never anything like this.

Hangtree was being slammed by the biggest herd of stampeding cattle he had ever seen, or so it appeared to him. With everything in dust-blurred motion, it was difficult to gain perspective on just how big the herd really was. Whatever the answer to that question, the herd was stampeding with lethal force. From his perspective in an alleyway, where he had stopped for his morning bladder-draining, he saw something tumbling under the unending hoofbeats, and recognized an old dog that typically roamed up and down the street all day. A sad but fast ending for a harmless old beast.

A rider, moving along beside the herd, was suddenly pushed, on his horse, into the end of the alley where Cross was. The horse, terrified, had been trying hard, against its rider’s guidance, to get out of and away from the stampede flow, and the alley had come up at just the right moment to let it do so. Johnny Cross watched the rider trying to calm and still the horse, recognized the man’s face, and quietly drew his sidearm.

“Excuse me, Mr. Toleen,” he hollered above the rumble. “Once you get that mount settled, why don’t you get down off that saddle and let’s you and me have a little talk about what the living hell is going on here?”

Drew Toleen finally got his panting, heaving horse under control, and looked at the man who had accosted him. He had the look of law about him, and Toleen didn’t like it. He glared at Cross as he drew his pistol.

“I got no time for jawing with a law-dog,” he said, and raised his weapon.

Johnny Cross put the bullet right into the space between Toleen’s brows. The outlaw grunted and jerked, the horse backed up and bucked, and Toleen was thrown out into the stampede, where his corpse was trampled and rolled until Drew Toleen, who had shot his own brother to death and left his carcass beside the Hangtree Road, was little more than pulp wearing filthy, battered clothing.

“One more bad man gone,” Cross muttered to himself. He refreshed the spent chamber and holstered the pistol, and wondered how it was that all this was happening, and why.

“And I thought it was going to be a quiet day,” he muttered to himself.

 

 

Sam Heller discovered the stampede in much the same way Johnny Cross and most of the townsfolk did. He was heading for an early breakfast at that same little struggling café he occasionally visited because he liked seeing David competing with Goliath, the latter being the well-established Cattleman eatery.

He heard the rumble first, saw the cloud of dust moving toward town, then the lowing and bawling of cattle and the yells of men seemingly steering them along, as best an amazing conglomeration such as this one could be steered. Heller gaped and backed up against the wall of the nearest building, and moments later the herd flashed past him. If he’d stepped forward as much as a foot, he’d have been pulled under the hooves.

It was the fact that men were driving this stampede that revealed the most. These were the same cattle, quite surely, that had been rounded up and held in the vicinity of Resurrection Gulch. He recalled how he’d viewed the big herd and thought about that story out of East Texas about the robbery done there under the cover of a stampede.

Forget breakfast. He had to get to the bank.

It would be no easy task, considering the current circumstances in Hangtree. Which, he supposed, was exactly the intent of the bank robbers . . . assuming there were any.

One thing was sure: This wasn’t being done for recreation. Something meaningful was happening here. Something was behind this.

Heller waited until the density of the stampede lessened. Gaps began to appear in the driving herd, not short enough to let him get across, not yet, anyway. He steadied and readied himself, waiting for the right moment.

The tip of a longhorn slashed across his right cheek, cutting it. He grunted in pain and pulled back, blood running down his face and under his collarless shirt. With his tongue he explored the inside of his jaw. No, the cut had not gone all the way through. Just a painful, bleeding furrow across his cheek.

A moment later the biggest gap he’d seen appeared, and with hardly a moment to think about it, he raced out into the street and across the open space. He barely made it before the next surge of cattle filled the gap and pursued the younger and faster cattle ahead of them. The mass of cattle was less dense here, stragglers and older beasts for the most part.

Sam saw his own brand on some of the cattle, and an idea came. A loco notion, but everything happening here today was loco. As another gap appeared, Sam picked out a particular old longhorn, one he actually thought he recognized. Seeing his own brand, seared in at an odd angle on this bovine, he was almost certain this was the longhorn that one of his hired drovers, lanky Bernard Silverman, would sometimes ride around the camp for comic effect. It was a slower cow than most of those that had passed, and Sam could see that it was near the end of the herd. Sam darted out to it and swung himself up on its back, leaning forward and holding to its horns. The beast didn’t much like it, but being ridden was not new to it, thanks to the joker Silverman, so it made only feeble efforts to shake Heller off.

“Bossy,” he said in the longhorn’s ear, “take me to the bank, please. Fast as you can go.” Then he hung on and rode, his unusual mount falling farther and farther behind.

 

 

Johnny Cross had worked his way around to the bank and ascertained what was going on. There was activity in there, and it was well before the bank’s usual opening time. It all came together in his mind, and without hesitating he made a crouched dash for the back door.

From the vantage point she had attained on the balcony of the farrier’s, Julia Canton should have been able to see Cross making his run toward the bank. She did not, though, because she was no longer where she had been. She was lying atop the rubble of the balcony, which had had its supports knocked from beneath it by errant stampeding cattle. It had gone down hard and fast, and in the process of falling with it, she had knocked her head hard against a plunging balcony rail. With her prior concussion still in the healing process, she had gone out cold at once, and only by good fortune and the fact that the rubble on which she lay made for a high enough stack that the cattle avoided it had she avoided being trampled.

She came to slowly, the stampede continuing but thinned greatly from what it had been when she fell. It was impossible to recall exactly what had happened, but she knew what she was seeing when her blurry eyes took in the sight of young Angeline Caldwell sitting in the middle of the street, her leg oddly twisted. The child was sobbing pitifully.

Julia did not know exactly from where the girl had come, but her best supposition was that she had been at the bank with the robbers and had found an opportunity to flee. She must have been caught in the stampede, but been lucky enough to avoid being trampled. Trampled, at least, any more severely than to give her a leg injury.

If she remained out there, though, the next surge—and there was one coming that Julia could hear already—might well squash the little girl into the ground.

Julia rose and, despite finding herself quite dizzy, moved out into the street. She swept the crying little girl into her arms and made for the other side of the street, getting Angeline safely into a recessed corner doorway just as the new clump of racing cattle rumbled by. Not even realizing that her face was half-covered in blood running from her reopened head injury, she smiled at the girl she had rescued, and had a sense of well-being despite the dangerous circumstances . . .

. . . A sense of well-being that was still lingering when the top of a horn gouged into Julia’s side and lifted her up and away, leaving the sobbing Angeline instantly alone. The horn cut deeply into Julia’s innards, driving up inside her like a spike and rupturing several organs, including her heart. When at last Julia’s body fell from the horn that held it, she knew nothing of it, and was no longer present to feel her body being beaten to jelly, bones shattering into splinters, ribs collapsing, spine broken in multiple places.

 

 

The tombstone was the finest in the church burial ground. No rough wooden marker this one; Sam Heller had a fine stone marker made and engraved. The plaque given to Julia by the town the night before she died was inset into the stone to perfection, leaving the young woman forever memorialized not as the daughter of the criminal she really was, but as
Julia Pepperday Canton:
B
RAVE
M
AIDEN
OF
H
ANGTREE
.

While her battered corpse still lay in the street, Otto Perkins had done his best to get a photograph of it in all its gore, but Sam Heller had knocked him cold with the butt of his mule-leg firearm and had her body carried away before the meager little man could wake up.

In years to come, when the magic of the kind of photography practiced by Otto Perkins had evolved into moving pictures, many a Saturday morning serial reel would feature one variation or another of the way Sam Heller and others had managed to stop the robbery at the last moment.

One of the others was Arvil Caldwell, who, while the outlaws in the bank lobby were preoccupied with watching the stampede passing the windows, had gotten hold of a particularly well-filled and therefore heavy bank strongbox. In it was gold that was the possession of Sam Heller. As Cale Pepperday was looking out of the open bank vault and realizing that his little girl hostage had managed to get away, Caldwell had slammed the heavy box hard against the side of Pepperday’s head, nearly crushing it between the box and the vault door. Pepperday collapsed with a low moan, knocked senseless. He was thus spared some of the pain he would have felt had he been conscious when Caldwell carefully dragged him to just the right spot at the vault entrance to have his head crushed like a walnut when Caldwell closed the vault upon it.

It took the bank janitor almost a week to fully clean up the resulting bloody mess.