CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Look there. MacCallister is leaving,”
Slayton said. “And he’s the son of a bitch I want the
most.”
“Dewey, you, Slayton, and Taylor follow
him. Keep an eye on him and find out where he’s going. When you
find out, come back and tell us.”
“How about we just kill him?” Slayton
asked.
“No, don’t do anything yet. We’re going
to do this right, so we have to plan everything all out,” Ebersole
replied.
“He’s going,” Taylor said.
“Come on,” Slayton said. “I don’t
intend to let him get away.”
After the audition and judging, Buffalo
Bill began interviewing several of the participants to see who
wanted to join his Wild West Exhibition, and who in fact he wanted
to recruit. Prentiss Ingraham was part of the interviewing process,
but Falcon had no particular interest in it, so he decided to take
a walk through the small town of Cinnabar. He, Buffalo Bill, and
Prentiss Ingraham had made arrangements to stay at the Cinnabar
Hotel, which was the only hotel in town. The Cinnabar Hotel was run
by George Canfield, who was Sherman Canfield’s father, and he, like
Sherman, was an old friend of Buffalo Bill’s.
Nearly every cowboy in Cinnabar, those
who had performed well and those who had performed poorly in the
tryouts, now seemed bent on getting as drunk as they could. Falcon
had no more desire to get drunk than he did to be a part of the
interview process, and nothing seemed more unappealing to him than
to be around a lot of men who were drinking heavily when he wasn’t
drinking at all, so he had no problem in avoiding the
saloon.
Though he did not go into the saloon,
it was nearly impossible to avoid it, as the laughter, shouts,
hurrahs, and singing spilled out of the saloon to fill the streets
of the little town.
“Hey! Hey! Hey!” a cowboy’s loud voice
carried over all the others. “Did you boys see me ride that
sumbitch? I stayed in that saddle liken as if I was glued to
it.”
“Well, hell, Connie, that ole’ cayuse
didn’t buck more ’n two or three times!” someone
replied.
“Yeah, but on them times when he did
buck, I stayed on,” Connie insisted, and his reply was met by a lot
of a laughter.
“Hey, anyone know the song ‘Buffalo
Gals’? What do you say we sing ‘Buffalo Gals’?”
“The piano player ain’t playin’
that.”
“That don’t make no never mind. He can
play what he wants and we’ll sing what we want.”
Discordant singing followed, joined by
other singers, but not the piano player who continued with his own
tune.
Heart
Mountain, Wyoming Territory
At that moment, some one hundred miles
away as the crow flies, Sam Davis, Lee Regret, and Sergeant Depro
were waiting at Heart Mountain for their rendezvous with Mean to
His Horses. The army wagon that Depro had used to transport the
guns and ammunition up from Fort Keogh was pushed up into a ravine
and covered with sage brush.
“Here they come,” Davis
said.
“They?” Depro said. “What do you mean,
they? I thought we were dealing with just Mean to His
Horses.”
There’s five of them, and each one of
them is leading a pack horse,” Davis said. “It makes sense when you
think about it. There’s no way Mean to His Horses could get all
those guns back by his ownself.”
“I reckon you are right,” Depro said.
“But I don’t like it.”
“Bet you’ll like spending all that
money though,” Regret said.
“Yeah, I’ll like that just fine,” Depro
agreed.
“You have guns?” Mean to His Horses
asked as he and the other Indians rode up.
“You have gold?” Davis
replied.
Mean to His Horses threw down two bags.
Davis opened the bags and dumped the contents out on the ground.
They were all twenty-dollar gold pieces.
“Good Lord,” Regret said. “There must
be two hundred of them.”
“Give me guns,” Mean to His Horses
said.
“They are in the wagon,” Davis said,
pointing to the ravine where the wagon lay, covered with
sage.
“You’re going to need bullets for them
guns, chief,” Depro said. “And that’s goin’ to cost you
extry.”
“Already I give you more money than you
ask,” Mean to His Horses said. “I will take bullets
too.”
“Huh, uh. Not without payin’ extry, you
ain’t,” Depro said.
Mean to His Horses was already armed,
and he raised his rifle and pointed it at Depro.
“Give me bullets,” he said. “Or I will
kill you and take the bullets.”
“Back off, Depro,” Davis shouted. “The
chief is right. There is more money here than we asked
for.”
“All right, all right!” Depro said,
holding up his hands. “Take the bullets. Davis is right. I reckon
you have already paid for ’em.”
All the Indians but Mean to His Horses
had already gathered around the wagon and were jabbering excitedly
among themselves as they broke open the boxes and began pulling out
the guns. They started whooping and hollering and dancing around,
holding the rifles over their heads.
“Boys, I think we would be smart to
ease on out of here while they are busy with those guns,” Davis
suggested.
“What about the wagon?” Depro said. “We
can’t leave it here.”
“Why not?”
“It’s got army markings on it. Sixth
Cavalry markings. If someone finds it here, they can trace it back
to me. I ain’t leavin’ without that wagon.”
“Depro, take it from me,” Davis said.
“If you don’t leave without the wagon, you won’t leave at all. I
think them Injuns mean to kill us.”
“Davis is right,” Regret said. “We need
to get out of here now.”
“Yeah,” Depro finally agreed. “Yeah,
that’s probably a pretty good idea.”
The three men slipped off quietly,
leading their horses until they were some distance away. Then,
mounting, they rode off at a gallop.
One hour later, after the three divided
the money, Depro started back to where he had left the wagon. It
was his intention to burn it so that nobody would ever be able to
recognize it and connect it to him. He had just gotten the fire
started when two Indians came out of the brush and grabbed
him.
Cinnabar
Falcon had not gone far when he
realized that he was being followed; but who it was, and for what
purpose, he didn’t know. He altered his route, leaving the main
street and choosing the new route, not only to see if he actually
was being followed, but also because he saw ahead of him several
open lots. One of the lots was filled with cut logs, preparatory to
building a cabin. If he was being followed, this would be good
place to confront them.
When Falcon reached the lot where the
construction was pending, he stepped off the street and slipped in
behind the logs. Pulling his gun, he looked back into the direction
from which he had come.
By the light of a full moon and the
ambient light of the nearest street lamp, he saw the men who were
following him. He could see their forms, but not their faces, so he
would have been unable to identify them even if he had known
them.
There were three of them, all with
drawn pistols. They had come off the main street and were now
walking in the same direction Falcon had taken, pausing for a
moment to look around. Evidently they had not seen him slip behind
the logs and now they were wondering what happened to
him.
From the center of the town could still
be heard the raucous sounds of cowboys celebrating their selection
or lamenting their failure. There were shouts, laughter, and loud
conversations, even as the discordant singing continued to do
battle with the tinkling of the only piano in town.
“What the hell?” Slayton asked. “Where
did he go, Dewey?”
“I don’t know, one minute he was right
in front of us, the next minute he was gone,” Dewey answered. “He
just disappeared, like a haint or somethin’.”
“MacCallister ain’t no haint, I can
tell you that,” Taylor said. When you and the others left me behind
back at the train robbery, I got a chance to see him up real close,
remember?”
“Yeah, well, we didn’t have no choice,
we had to leave you,” Dewey replied. “But we come to break you out
of jail, so you really ain’t got no complaint now, have
you?”
“Keep your eyes open. He has to be down
here, somewhere,” Slayton said.
“Yeah, Slayton, we know he is here
somewhere,” Dewey said. “We all seen him come this way. The
question is, where?”
“Wherever he is, I aim to find him, and
I aim to kill the son of a bitch,” Slayton said.
“Ebersole said don’t kill him yet,”
Dewey said.
“I don’t care what Ebersole said, I say
we should kill him. Hell, I should have killed the bastard back in
Sheridan when I had the chance.”
“Haw,” Taylor said. “From what I heard,
you didn’t have no chance with him back in Sheridan.”
“That’s ’cause he got the drop on me
when I wasn’t lookin’,” Slayton said. “Well, I’m lookin’ now, and I
aim to kill ’im.”
“I don’t know,” Taylor said. “Maybe we
should go back and get Ebersole, Peters and Hawkins.”
“No, I think Slayton is right,” Dewey
said. “Ebersole and the others is keepin’ an eye on Buffalo Bill,
and we may not get another chance this good. Besides, there’s three
of us and only one of MacCallister. Just how damn hard can it be
for three people to kill one man?”
“From what I’ve heard of MacCallister,
it ain’t goin’ to be easy, even with the three of us,” Taylor
said.
Because he had overheard the
conversation, Falcon now knew who was after him. He recognized
Taylor’s voice and knew that he was the one they had captured after
the aborted train robbery. And from Taylor’s comment about being
left behind, he knew that the other man must have been one of the
train robbers who escaped. He recognized Slayton too, from the run
in he had with him back in Sheridan. What he did not understand is
why Slayton was with the train robbers.
Looking around, Falcon saw a fairly
good-sized rock lying on the ground. He picked it up and tossed it
toward a rock outcropping. As he hoped it would, it made a loud,
chinking sound.
“He’s over there, by them rocks!” he
heard one of them yell out loud.
“Shoot him! Shoot the son of a
bitch!”
All three men began shooting then. The
night was illuminated with muzzle flashes as guns roared and
bullets screamed as they ricocheted off into the darkness. There
were flashes of orange light as the bullets sparked little
fireballs when they hit the rocks.
Falcon was well positioned to pick out
his targets. The three shooters were clearly visible in the moon’s
glow, backlit by the street lamp behind them, and illuminated by
their own muzzle flashes. They made perfect targets, and Falcon
picked one of them off with one shot.
“Damn! He’s seen us!”
“Son of a bitch! He ain’t by the rocks,
he’s over there! Kill him! Kill the son of a bitch before he kills
us!” the other yelled.
Amazingly, the remaining two attackers
made no attempt to find cover or to run away. Instead, they stood
their ground and continued to shoot at him.
Falcon shot two more times, and the
final two went down.
Then it was quiet, except for the
barking of some nearby dogs and the ongoing singing and celebration
from Cinnabar’s lone saloon. A billowing cloud of gun smoke drifted
up over the deadly battlefield and Falcon walked out among the
fallen assailants, moving cautiously, his pistol at the
ready.
He needn’t have been so cautious. All
three men were dead.
By now the insistent singing of the
cowboys had won over the piano player and the piano joined them as
more began to sing, the words and celebratory music incongruent
with the scene that had just played out in this open lot, could be
heard all over the little town.
Buffalo Gals
won’t you come out tonight,
Come out tonight, come out tonight?
Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon?
Come out tonight, come out tonight?
Buffalo Gals won’t you come out tonight
And dance by the light of the moon?