Río Chama, page 10
The fort did not last long, as the reader should remember how we ended the Ute troubles rather quickly, and by the early 1870s the fort was no longer an active post but instead the agency headquarters for the Utes and Jicarilla Apaches. Roman Cole served as Indian agent there until 1875, before being first elected senator. By the time the agency was consolidated with the agency up in Pueblo, Colorado, around 1880 or 1881, Roman Cole was considered among the most powerful men in the territory.
As we talked outside the courthouse, the senator told me he would wait to hear from me, or Archie Preston or Dan Augustine, at the High Mountains Hotel in Chama. Then he brought out the county sheriff, an Irishman of no account or honor, and I was duly deputized. After a dinner of mutton stew, Archie Preston and I rode south for Abiquiu to meet up with Dan Augustine. Roman Cole had given me a wad of greenbacks and simple instructions: fetch his son home alive, and bring him the head of Britton Wade.
By the time we arrived in Abiquiu, however, we received word that Jeremiah Cole and Britton Wade were trapped in a church in Santa Cruz, a small community a couple of miles due east of Española. Archie Preston and I hurried our horses, catching up with Dan Augustine and his party of rogues, but a great snowstorm slowed us, and we reached the church too late. Our prey had vanished in the blizzard, much to the anger of Dan Augustine.
I was glad, for now I felt that I might earn my pay from the senator. What was the challenge of a siege? What was the honor in starving out a gunman and gambler racked with consumption—none other than Britton Wade—who had pleaded for sanctuary, and gotten it from a Mexican priest? He had also gotten some help. Four men had joined Britton Wade’s posse, or so I thought at the time. Within a few days, however, having picked up the trail, I realized that one of those men was actually a woman. I’ve often been asked as to how I could guess a person’s gender when on the trail, but all I can say is—it’s never a guess. I know it as a fact! Signs never lie, if you know how to read them.
Ours was an odd party, filled with a few gunmen Dan Augustine had recruited, and cowboys who took wages from Senator Cole. I think, however, that I would have preferred to have ridden with Britton Wade. A smart man. A brave man. Just a mite careless.
He used the rivers to his advantage, first the Santa Cruz, then the Chama, but I realized what he was doing fairly quickly, and, when I discovered a pewter flask at some abandoned homestead not far from Abiquiu, I knew it would only be a matter of time before I had my prey. The flask was empty, forgotten I suspect, with Britton Wade’s name etched underneath an eagle’s outline, and some words in Latin, or so I was informed by a rather educated gunman, his name lost after these last hard years, hired by Dan Augustine.
Dan Augustine was not educated. Nor was he patient, whereas I have always been a cautious man. I wanted to see what exactly Britton Wade had planned. Would he risk taking the road north of Abiquiu, or would he try something even more strenuous, and head up the Chama River and through its tortuous cañon?
Late in the day after we had passed through Abiquiu—where Archie Preston sent a telegram off to his boss—using my spyglass, I could view Britton Wade and his gang, and by that time I had a difficult time reining in Dan Augustine and his Hessians.
“You can’t chase them across open country,” I warned the notorious shootist.
“And you’ll never catch ’em just watchin’ ’em run, you old fool,” he said.
Twenty or thirty years earlier, such words would have provoked a round of fisticuffs, but I was wiser at sixty years, and saw no need to muddy my buckskins. Letting his comment pass, I informed him that, if we went charging up to those men (and woman), they would likely shoot Jeremiah Cole dead. The territory’s Mexicans and sky pilots did not care how the senator’s son died, by rope or lead, just as long as he died. “And the senator,” I said, “isn’t paying us to bring him Jeremiah’s corpse.”
That shut up the man-killer, but my victory lasted scarcely a moment, for one of the Triangle C cowboys suddenly shouted: “Look!”
Off in the distance, the chestnut horse exploded out of the arroyo, splashing through the mud and grass, heading for the Abiquiu-Chama pike.
“That’s Jeremiah!” another cowboy cried. “He’s getting away!”
White smoke drifted above the arroyo, then a pistol’s report, and an instant later, the buckskin was charging after the chestnut. Britton Wade, riding hard, chasing Jeremiah, still hatless, riding harder. A bay horse climbed out of the arroyo, and its rider cut loose three or four rounds from a rifle, then stopped. Jeremiah crouched in the saddle, but I didn’t think any bullet had found its mark.
Still, I cursed, furious, for Dan Augustine and two of his men were already loping across the country, swearing oaths, whipping their mounts furiously. The rider on the sorrel saw them, then he was shouting something, and a moment later he led the rest of his party toward the cañon of the Chama River.
I swung around, crying out: “Archie, you try to head off those making for the cañon!”
More gunfire erupted.
“The hell with that!” shouted a Triangle C rider. “I ain’t lettin’ that lunger kill Jeremiah!” He cut dust after Dan Augustine.
“You do as I say!” My rebuke proved hopeless, but, when another Triangle C waddie tried to join the race, I cut him off as quickly and as cleanly as he could sort out one of Roman Cole’s shorthorns. This rider had the misfortune to stare down my Hawken rifle. When another man reached for his six-shooter, Ol’ Griz practically tore off his arm, knocking him from the saddle and into the rocks.
“Griz!”
I called off my shepherd, leaving that gunman with a bloody arm, sitting up, his face pale as pale can be, and just a-whimpering as he looked at his mangled flesh.
“You go after them riders!” I barked out, madder than I had been in twenty-one years. “Keep them out of that cañon. I’ll light out after those other two, just in case I’m wrong!”
I spurred my blue roan.
* * * * *
The horse of one of Dan Augustine’s men had stepped in a hole, spilling its rider and breaking its leg. I loped past both man and steed, lying on the rocky ground. The killer was lucky to have come away from such a wreck with just a busted collar bone. I’ve often wondered if he knew how much he owed that horse, for saving his life.
The riders hit the road, turned north for a few miles, loped around the bend, then spurred off the road, and I felt that Britton Wade had hornswoggled us again. By the time I caught up, I found a bunch of winded horses, pawing the earth, longing for water: a chestnut, a buckskin, and the lathered mounts of Dan Augustine, a gunman named Andy O’Neill, and a young cowboy called Buttons.
I couldn’t see the men, for they had disappeared in the thick of trees, mostly piñon and juniper, but also Douglas fir and mountain mahogany. Off to my left, El Pedernal remained in view, but, closer, more ominous, rising above the trees and cactus stretched a cliff wall, painted red, white, and yellow, the top a brown limestone dotted with more piñon and juniper. In the middle of the wall, God had carved out an opening, not quite a cave, but a natural amphitheater, one that, for my money, rivaled anything the Greeks built at Epidaurus.
“Jeremiah!” came the cry of Buttons. “Where are you, pal?” His second shout was almost drowned out by an echo, and a gunshot followed, bouncing across El Muro de Muchas Voces, The Wall of Many Voices.
Another shot. I turned one way, then another, circled around, listening, realizing, at last, that the voices came from the right, the echoes rolling off to my left. Ol’ Griz growled, and started through the trees, down the rocks, but I called her back. I wasn’t about to lose her. Not for the likes of that priest-killing boy. Not against a man like Britton Wade.
“Hornswoggled,” I said again with a snigger, and heard the shouts, the shots, the chorus of echoes.
Spirits of the dead, the residents from Abiquiu to Chama often said, haunted The Wall of Many Voices.
“Wade!” It was Dan Augustine’s voice. The name reverberated across the rocks and trees.
Wade . . .
“It’s me, damn you.”
Damn you . . . damn you . . .
“Shut up, Dan!”
That had been O’Neill. He was smarter than his boss.
A gun roared. The whine of a ricochet, and the sound sang repeatedly off the cliff, through the forests, from hell to heaven and back again. Voices weren’t so bad, too faint, but the echoes of gunshots and ricochets bounced all asunder. Even though I knew where I would likely find my prey, I was sweating like it was July in the Mojave.
Honestly I hated to go into that place, but I had taken Roman Cole’s money, had given him my word, and owed him my life.
“Stay here,” I told Ol’ Griz. “Watch the horses, girl. I’ll be back.”
At least, I hoped so.
* * * * *
The first one I found was Buttons, leaning against a boulder near a dry wash, tears rolling down his cheeks, a mixture of blood and saliva seeping from his lips, clutching his belly, trying to keep that lifeblood from pumping out of his body.
I knelt by him, heard another shot, and its echoes.
“I’m sorry, boy,” I said. There was nothing I could do for him.
“It . . . it was . . . A-A-Augustine . . . who . . . sh-shot me.” He coughed, shuddered, his face masked in agony, his voice frail, young, and pathetic. “Didn’t even . . . s-say . . . he was . . . s-s-s-sorry.”
He was dead before I climbed up the sandy hill. I wonder if he knew he had died for nothing. A loyal rider for the brand, who had gone off trying to save his boss’s son—or maybe he had been chasing that reward—but I had known it back near the river, or had at least suspected it. Jeremiah Cole hadn’t been riding that chestnut horse. They had switched mounts, swapped some duds, and lured us into an ambush.
One savvy man, Britton Wade.
Another cannonade ripped through the thicket. My ears rang without mercy, trying to pinpoint the direction of the gunfire, trying to hear above the echoes. Trying to get out of this place alive.
What likely saved my life was my own cursed luck. One minute I was picking my way down the rocks, clutching the .38 revolver in one hand, using the Hawken to balance, and an instant later one of those rocks give way. Too many bear-grease biscuits, I concede, and down I fell. Hard. Started a little rock slide, and above all that noise the crack of bone jarred me as the pain raced through my leg. I’d heard that sound before, felt that agony before. There I lay, half covered with rock and dirt, the Hawken out of my reach, the revolver somewhere under yellow earth. Pinned like a jack rabbit in a hawk’s talons. My right leg busted just below the kneecap.
But I had the best seat in the balcony, as they say, for what was about to transpire.
Yonder stood Dan Augustine, shucking spent cases from his Colt, his back pressed against a giant Douglas fir, blood dripping from a cut above his right eye. He pulled bullets from his shell belt, reloaded the short-barreled .45, crouched, and peered around the pine’s trunk.
A pistol cracked again, echoing. Augustine moved, stopped, turned, addled, sweating, and then, just as the echoes of the report faded, someone called out the sidewinder’s name. Closer, though, and Augustine was spinning, dropping while thumbing back the Colt’s hammer.
Next came the deafening roar of a nearby gun, so close my ears rang, and I’m sure I could smell the sharp odor of gunsmoke. Augustine fell against the tree, a splotch of red on his shirt front blossoming, but, game as ever, the savage man still gripped his Colt, tried to bring it up as he himself slid down the pine. The other gun spoke. Augustine shuddered as he was hit again, and he pulled the trigger, but the bullet dug into the earth at his feet, and he fell over to his side.
Just a few yards ahead of me, a man appeared from behind a mound of reddish-yellow rocks, lean, not as tall as I had expected, wearing a Mackinaw and a used-up Stetson, the smoking pistol in his right hand still aimed at the fallen form of Dan Augustine. He moved cautiously forward, kicked the Colt away from Augustine’s hand, kept the barrel trained on the gunman’s head, which lifted for just a moment, then fell back onto the ground.
Another sense, the acute awareness of an experienced gunman, turned the man in the Mackinaw, none other than Britton Wade, toward me. Looking right into my eyes, he brought up the big pistol, and I bet I was about to cash in my chips. The man who had just killed Dan Augustine, a pale man, clean-shaven except for a mustache and long under-lip beard, with the merciless eyes of a killer, walked toward me.
He said nothing, still cautious, almost frail-looking, stopping about ten paces in front of me.
“Who are you?” he asked softly.
As I answered him, Andy O’Neill, the other black-hearted henchman hired by Augustine, came into my view near the back of the amphitheater, some twenty yards behind Britton Wade.
“Name’s Stone,” I said, never giving away the fact that I was eyeing a man intent on putting a bullet in Wade’s spine.
O’Neill brought up his rifle.
“I’d be obliged if you’d dig me out of this mess,” I said.
“Hey!”
At first, I thought O’Neill was being a man, refusing to shoot Wade in the back, but the warning had been voiced by another fellow, and he was calling out O’Neill. Wade dived to his left, turning in the air, fast, smooth, smart, but, before he knew how close he had been to death, somebody else practically blew Andy O’Neill’s face apart with a rifle blast, and the gunman tumbled down the incline.
I thought the echoes of that final gunshot would never end.
A tall man, wearing the prison shirt that had been on Jeremiah Cole, walked over to O’Neill, made sure he was dead, then rushed over to me and Britton Wade, who picked himself off the ground, and shoved his big pistol in a holster.
“I guess I’m beholden to you,” Wade told his companion.
“You are.” His friend was taller, heavier than Jeremiah Cole, for now that I could see him up close, I realized how short the sleeves were, how poorly the striped shirt fit. Oh, he had sandy hair like Roman Cole’s son, but he looked nothing like the kid I had viewed from my spyglass.
Like I said, hornswoggled.
“But,” the sandy-haired gent told Wade, “it would have soured my stomach to let that fellow do you like that, pard.” He pointed the rifle barrel loosely at me. “Who’s your pal?”
“Zechariah Stone,” Wade said, and I was honored that he knew me.
“No foolin’?” The sandy-haired one looked at me with respect. His trousers were torn above his right boot, and I could see blood, but he didn’t seem to be hurting. “The senator hire you to track us down?”
“No,” I said, irritated. “He hired me to fall and break my leg.”
“He’s half buried, Brit. Want me to finish the job?”
Wade shook his head, and looked at me. “You leave a man guarding those horses?”
“Nope.”
“There were three of you lopin’ after us,” Wade’s hatless companion reminded me.
“You’ll find the third one about a hundred yards back yonder. Augustine shot him in the belly. Accidental, I think. He’s dead. I sent the rest after your pards. No man’s back that way. Not alive.”
I’m not sure they believed me, but, when they started to go, I called out, not for help, but a bit of a warning. “Listen,” I said, when both gunmen were looking back at me, “I said no man, but . . . I got a dog.”
My first thought had been to let Ol’ Griz chew them up, but the more I studied on it, the more I worried for my great shepherd.
“She’s old, but she’s ornery. You go over there, without me, and she’ll rip your throat apart. The lucky one amongst you would have to kill her.”
They said nothing.
“My dog ain’t dying with Dan Augustine. And not for some priest-killer, no matter what I owe his pa.”
They looked at each other.
“You dig me out, help me back to the horses, I’ll call her off.”
Much has been written about Britton Wade, about his drinking, his brutality, but I will say this of the man: on that spring day, he done me a world of right.
They pulled me out of those rocks, carried me back to the horses, and left me a canteen and my pipe and pouch of tobacco. The taller one, the man who had killed Andy O’Neill, even squatted and scratched Ol’ Griz’s ears, but only after I let that great canine know that everything was all right. And it was. All right, I mean. Then they mounted and rode away, most likely cutting through the rocky hills north of The Wall of Many Voices, and down into the cañon.
A half hour later, Archie Preston and the riders returned, finding me smoking my pipe to take my mind off the pain in my leg. One of them explained that they had heard the gunfire, and came loping back to assist Dan Augustine and me, although I had them pegged by now, and knew they returned to reap the senator’s reward.
“The only thing Augustine needs,” I informed them, “is burying.”
“He’s dead?” Archie Preston looked like he had been struck by lightning.
“And O’Neill. And your cowboy. And almost me.”
“How about Jeremiah?” another asked. “He ain’t dead, is he?”
“You fools!” I was riled. “He was never here. That’s why I sent you after that other bunch. Only y’all let him get into the cañon!”
After hearing what had happened, Archie Preston swung back into the saddle, said he was riding back after Jeremiah.
“No need for that,” said I. “They got to come out of that cañon, if they live, so I figure to get some splints on my leg and wait for them up north.”
