The Bold Frontier (15 page)

Magee snapped the brim of his derby down to snug it; the shadow bisected his nose. In the shadow, his eyes gleamed like discs of ivory. He took ten long strides, rapidly, along the cleared lane, his posture soldier-perfect. He stopped, knocking his heels together, at attention. He about-faced. He was standing a foot from a tipi with a great ragged hole in its side.

“Aim the pistol, Charlie.”

Christ, how could he?

“Charlie! Aim for the chest. Dead center.”

Charles felt the sweat crawling down into his beard. Whistling Snake leaped up, his fan flicking very fast. Red Bear rose too. Charles drew the hammer back. Magee’s shirt was taut over his ribs and belly. Charles’s arm trembled as he extended it. He couldn’t—he wouldn’t—

Magic Magee said, “Now.”

He said it loudly, a command. Charles responded to the tone as much as to the word. He fired. Sparks glittered, the priming pan ignited, the pistol banged and kicked upward.

Charles saw a puff of dust, as if something had struck Magee’s chest three inches below the breastbone. Magee stepped back one long pace, staggering, closing his eyes, snapping his hands open, fingers shaking as if stiffened by a lightning charge. Then his arms fell to his sides. He opened his eyes. Whistling Snake’s fan hung at his side.

“Where is the bullet?” Whistling Snake cried. “Where did it strike?”

In a drill-ground voice, Magee said, “King Death is dead. You will answer our questions and release us without harm or I will bring back King Death, riding the winds of hail and fire, and this village will be finished.” He shouted, “Tell them.”

Charles translated quickly. Gray Owl’s guards had drifted away from him as awed as he was. While Charles spit the words out, trying to make them as fierce as Magee’s, he scanned the trooper’s shirt. He saw no sign of a tear. Magee brushed his shirt off as if something had tickled him.

Red Bear listened to the threats and instantly said, “It shall be so.”

Whistling Snake screamed in protest. The sound broke the moment. The Cheyennes rushed forward to swarm around Magee, touch him, pat him, feel his black curls. Charles stared at the old flintlock pistol, felt the warm barrel. King Death was dead, and there through rifts in the surging, laughing crowd was the banner of his conqueror. The familiar huge white smile of Magee, the wizard.

Red Bear prepared a pipe while Gray Owl attended to the horses. Charles didn’t want the forgiving mood to fade, didn’t want to linger and possibly lose their advantage and their lives. Ceremony required that he sit at the fire with Red Bear, however. Magee sat on his right. The village chief and several of the tribal elders passed the pipe.

Red Bear had forced Whistling Snake to join the group. When his turn came he passed the pipe without smoking. He snatched a handful of ashes from the edge of the fire and flung them at Charles’s crossed legs. They covered his pants and the toes of his boots with gray powder. Red Bear exclaimed and berated the priest, who merely dusted his hands and folded his arms. Red Bear looked embarrassed, Gray Owl upset.

Since the ashes did no real damage, Charles forgot about it. Having finished his cigar, he was grateful for a deep lungful of pipe smoke, though as always, the unknown mixture of grasses the Cheyennes smoked left him light-headed and euphoric, not a good thing at a time like this.

Red Bear was not only polite but respectful. After asking Charles to describe again the white man he sought, he said, “Yes, we have seen that man, with a boy. At the whiskey ranch of Glyn the trader, on Vermilion Creek. Glyn is gone and they are staying there. I will tell you the way.”

He pointed south. Charles was so dizzy with relief, his eyes watered.

Silently, the People formed a long lane through which the three trotted out. Looking back, believing their luck would break any moment, Charles heard Gray Owl laugh deep in his chest. A single figure remained by the campfire, apart from the others. Charles saw Whistling Snake raise his golden feather fan and disdainfully walk away.

They put miles and all of the rest of the night behind them before Charles permitted a stop. Spent men and spent horses rested on the prairie in the cool dawn. Charles knelt beside his black friend.

“All right, I know you don’t tell your secrets, but this is one time you will. How did you do it?”

Magee chuckled and produced the hand-carved wooden box. He removed one of the round gray balls and displayed it sportively, just out of Charles’s reach. “An old traveling magician taught me the trick back in Chicago. Always wanted to do it for an audience, but till this winter I couldn’t afford the right pistol. Saved my pay for it. First thing I did was to short the powder. You never saw it because everybody looked down for a few seconds when I pretended a bug bit me. A little misdirection. But that’s only half of it. The trick won’t work without this.”

“That’s a solid ball of lead.”

Magee dug his thumbnail with its great cream-colored half-moon into the pistol ball. The nail easily cracked the surface of the ball. “No, it isn’t solid, it’s melted lead brushed all over something else.”

He caught the ball between his palms and rubbed them hard back and forth. He showed the crushed remains, tawny dust. “The rest is just good Kansas mud. Hard enough to build a house, but not hardly hard enough to kill a man.”

He blew on his palm. The dust scattered against the sun and pattered on the ground. He laughed.

“What d’you say we ride and find your boy?”

W
HEN THE WAGON BLEW,
Jeff Croydon had no time for thinking. His dozen high-sided wagons were pulling up, one after another, to the boxcars on the siding in the town of Sooner. Number four wagon had just pulled away, the skinner bawling lusty obscenities at the mules, and number five was swinging in toward the car. Jeff Croydon stood near the wagons, the hot dust clouding around him, sweat dripping down his plain, serious face. Several of the handlers, stripped to the waist and shining with perspiration, stood in the open door of the freight car in which the barrels of crude were transported east, adequately if not safely.

The skinner pulled number five wagon up beside the door. Someone in the crowd of town loungers standing by the freight train whistled shrilly. Croydon’s head whipped around as he heard the nervous bray of the mules and the curses of the skinner trying to frighten them into line once more.

Croydon saw no one in the crowd whom he recognized. At the moment the thing had the quality of an idle prank, but Croydon knew and respected the hellish power lying dormant in the gummy crude. As he turned back to the wagon, something bright flickered in a downward arc across his line of vision. A short stick, with a flaming rag attached to the end. With a curse he turned instinctively back to the crowd. They were brawling now, slugging senselessly at each other, their voices a roaring babel. He still couldn’t spot a familiar face, nor a guilty one. Right then his thinking processes stopped.

From down the line he heard the wild shout of Dune Limerty, the oldster who helped run his freight line. “
Holy God, get that stick outa…
” The wagon exploded. The skinner howled and jumped to the ground. The sweating workers backed into the car, shouting like everyone else. Croydon saw flames licking at the flimsy boxcar walls. Then heat fanned his cheeks like the air from hell’s own ovens. The deadly fire so frightening to men here in the oil fields danced out like whirling human figures, extending sudden gouting arms into the car door. Another minute and the whole train might blow. …

Croydon had no thought of heroism. He thought only of the flames as a danger. He shoved the frightened skinner out of the way, yelling at the spooked mules as he vaulted onto the wagon seat. In the seconds following the explosion, the mules had begun to move, so the flaming wagon was actually rolling when Croydon hit the seat and gathered up the reins. Banners of flame streaming behind him, he swung the wagon over rows of tracks, cut down a side street and headed past a few last shacks into open country. The rush of wind kept the flames away from him, but the great heat flayed his back. Croydon held his balance, standing wide-legged. He spotted a patch of arid ground ahead. He used all his strength to halt the frantic mules, swing them to the left and brake the wagon.

The mules brayed and threw themselves back and forth in the traces. Croydon dropped to the ground, jerked the pin and let them break free. Then he backed off and watched the wagon burn itself out. He stood there, empty-eyed, counting the loss. Each barrel of crude delivered to eastern oil companies was paid for with monies transferred directly to the well owner, who then paid Croydon a percentage based similarly on barrels delivered to the railroad.

Croydon stared bleakly at the forest of derricks thrusting up all across the face of the land. He freighted crude for none of the big outfits, like that of the wealthy midwesterner, Senator Lucas Bryant. He handled only the shoestring outfits, and barely kept his nose out of debt. This calamity, the first in his three years of management of the small outfit, had come at a time when success had seemed forthcoming at last. Now, he didn’t know.

A wagon rattled toward him, and he came back to reality. He squinted against the sun and saw Dune Limerty driving. Dune’s weary eyes took in the charred ruin of the wagon as he braked. He scratched his beard and shook his head. “T’warn’t no accident, Jeff.”

“I know,” Croydon said, climbing up beside him. “Let’s get back to Sooner.”

Limerty swung the mules, and they jogged along back toward the boomtown. The older man reported that the rest of the shipment had been safely loaded on the train. Croydon said, “That still doesn’t cancel the loss. Dune, somebody tossed that burning stick from the crowd. It wasn’t just some fool’s idea of a prank. Somebody’s out to get us.”

Limerty grunted agreement. The clapboards of Sooner rose ahead of them. The freight train was chugging slowly away from the yards. “Think it’s Hunter?” Limerty asked.

“If it is, I sure as hell don’t see why,” Croydon answered. Tom Hunter ran the big freighting outfit in Sooner, handling shipments for the larger wells including Senator Bryant’s holdings, largest of all in this field. Hunter was the established business man, Croydon the johnny-come-lately trying to compete. Croydon pointed out that Hunter was making as much money as any man would want.

“And besides, Hunter’s not that stupid. He’s got all he needs. I don’t think he’d risk putting us out of business when we don’t even make a dent in his contracts.”

“Well,” Limerty declared, “you o’ course may be right. But I saw an hombre named Flinch in the crowd. Flinch did the whistlin’ that spooked the mules, and though I didn’t see him toss the stick, he sure as hell got out of there right after the fire started.”

“I don’t know this Flinch,” Croydon told his partner. “Skinner?”

Limerty spat contemptuously over the wagon side. “Naw. Six-gun artist. Dirty work boy. But he works for Tom Hunter.”

“Still,” Croydon said, “I can’t figure Hunter to make a play like that. It just isn’t like him.”

No more was said of the matter until they had unhitched the wagons in the freight yard and Croydon lay on his belly on the cot in the cubby-hole office while Limerty slapped liniment onto his back. Driving the flaming wagon had scorched his shirt. “Things can change fast in the oil fields, Jeff,” Limerty observed. “I’d sure ask around and see if you can figure out what’s going on. You can’t get the law to investigate when it looks like Hunter had no reason for jinxing us, even if I did see Flinch. Somebody else would swear he was in the Sooner House having a beer.”

Croydon nodded. He pulled on his rough shirt, feeling it prickle against his singed hide. He strapped on his six-gun, more for appearances than anything else, since he was a business man and not inclined to settle matters with lead.

He started on a tour of saloons. He drank beer with drillers, listened to their woes, their laments, their sudden dreams of glory waiting under a new patch of earth, bubbling and black and worth a fortune in the country of quick gains and quicker losses. Slowly he pieced a story together, a story that had come out in the two days he had been out in the field getting this shipment together. When he joined Limerty for dinner at the Sooner House, his mind seethed with anger.

“Wal,” Limerty drawled, brushing away foam flecks from his beard, “what did you do, carouse all afternoon? I thought you’d never show.”

Croydon ordered a steak and beer. “Hunter’s got a damned good reason for wanting us out of the way, Dune. Senator Lucas Bryant died over a month ago, and nobody knew it until yesterday.”

“I can’t understand why,” Limerty said dryly. “Men forget they’s got a Christian name when they smell oil. Nobody in town’s interested in anything that can’t be put in barrels and sold.” He frowned. “But what’s the connection?”

“Senator Bryant’s widow is arriving here tonight on the train. They say she’s a hell of an independent woman. Smart. She’s going to look over Bryant’s holdings, and the word is she’s tossing the freighting contract up for grabs.”

“Hell’s bells,” Limerty exclaimed. He set down his schooner. “That means we can underbid Hunter and cut ourselves in on the Bryant holdings.”

Croydon nodded. “Tom Hunter had that contract when I started up here. Now he could stand to lose it. That’s reason enough.”

Limerty indicated Croydon’s six-gun. “You better practice up with that thing, and get real good. You may need it.”

He and Dune Limerty went down to the depot to watch the evening train come in. Croydon felt like a ragged urchin in his grimy clothes. He spotted Tom Hunter sitting in his buggy, heavy-faced, confident, a cheroot tilted in the corner of his mouth. Hunter’s clothes were Eastern, expensively tailored.

The funnel-stacked locomotive chuffed its way through the twilight, sparks flying up like red insects. In the smoky glow of the passenger coach lanterns, Croydon saw a woman standing on the platform, obviously impatient to get off. She wore a brown traveling dress, a feathered hat tilted gaily on her head. Her eyes were dark like her hair, and … my Lord … she was
young.