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  They rode through the middle of the devastation. “What if the law decides to come for us after all?” Charley Broadwell asked.

  Botis listened to a man in the street preach about the End of Days. He had a respectable crowd of faithful around him, listening to his apocalyptic sermon.

  Botis turned from the scene, a smile touching the corners of his lips. He was a man much in his element.

  “Then we will kill them in this place of worship,” he said.

  They dismounted and led their horses to a livery stable.

  CHAPTER 19

  “I know how it began,” an old man told Marwood. “I was here when The Flat was founded. I will be here when it turns to dust.”

  They sat around a communal bonfire behind one of the saloons. Spaw had built the fire for the company, but the light drew citizens from all parts of the surrounding town. To be certain, there were other fires scattered throughout the streets. But these wild men dressed like buffalo hunters, with the faces and manner of warm-blooded killers, were strangers who’d come to Fort Griffin of their own merit. They were, therefore, a curiosity to the inhabitants. After all, where else could townsfolk get news of the outside world, and perhaps find a glimmer of promise in the midst of their own desperation?

  Ed Gratton boiled coffee. The back street they inhabited was a mud pit filled with refuse and sodden filth. The old man holding court held out his tin cup. He was dressed like a monk, in a mud-splattered white robe and creased leather boots with wooden soles.

  There were a few women in the crowd, intermingled with the men. One of the women went off with Charley Broadwell. Another held a baby to her breast: her face was ashen and drawn; her slack clothes were mud-stained on a scarecrow frame. The baby in her arms did not move and it did not cry. It was only later Marwood surmised it must have died that very morning, and she was loathe to give it up.

  “We are looking at the face of God’s punishment,” the old man said. He slurped his coffee and smacked his lips. “It is a dreadful countenance.” He stared up at the night sky and drew his attention back to the fire. “Fort Griffin has always been an evil place. I used pull stock for John Melkin. He had a ranch on the Clear Fork. Mr. Melkin went into New Mexico Territory one day to buy short-horned Mexican cattle. He trusted his foreman, a man by the name of James Fisher, to watch the ranch in his absence. Fisher rebranded all of Melkin’s steers and milled them into his own herd. When Melkin returned he hired nine men and they went after Fisher thinking to steal the cattle back. But Fisher outsmarted them. He ambushed Melkin and killed every man out by Bush Knob. They never did prove nothing against Fisher, even though Melkin and his nine gunfighters were shot in the back. Later, Fisher built a nice ranch house for his wife on the Butterfield Stage Route. Out by Camp Cooper, I think it was. One day, when he was out with his spring herd, she packed her bags and flagged down the stagecoach. They say she went to San Francisco, but others believe she died in Arizona Territory, and was scalped and raped by Mescalero Apaches.”

  The old man swirled his coffee, took a drink. “Killer, cattle thief, Fisher became the first sheriff of Fort Griffin. This was before the buffalo hunters came in with their loud stink and took it over. This place wasn’t nothing but a grease spot on the map in them days. Fisher, he remarried, and hired two Irish stonemasons to build a limestone wall around his ranch house. When the time came for payment he and his deputy shot the Irishmen in the heads, weighted them down with stones, and threw their bodies in the Clear Fork. The house was struck by lightning and burned down during a big thunderstorm, but you can see the walls and foundation if you ride past it.”

  The old storyteller coughed and shook his head with deep sorrow. “Yes sir, Fort Griffin has always been a bad place to die, and a worse place to live. Five thousand buffalo hunters, crooked ranchers, prostitutes, drunks, and criminals in one place can’t never be no other thing but ripe pickings for hell.”

  The old man talked through much of the night. As men came and went from the central fire, they heard different parts of another story. Later, when they got together to compare what they had heard, they discovered each man had listened to something quite different from the other.

  Some men said the old man talked about his life back east, where he had a wife and child in Charleston who died of pneumonia. Others claimed he had been a hilljack in California, and had made—and lost—a gold fortune there. Others swore he talked about his life as a trapper in the High Rockies, and how he travelled shank’s mare to the western coast and gazed upon the blue Pacific waters, and even saw whales.

  Every man heard something different, because no man stayed at the fire for the entire night. Even Marwood had gone off to relieve himself at one point, and then went into an all but vacated restaurant to eat a plate of pinto beans and mule deer backstrap. When he returned, the old man was still speaking, and Marwood sat down and listened to what to him was the same story.

  But every man present heard their own bits and pieces, and they cobbled together the thread of a tale they would take with them the rest of their lives—a tale they’d tell others, or their children, or their grandchildren. And the stories, bits of stories, lies, and half-truths would be written down as Texas history and taught to generations unborn as the truth of the west.

  A red band of light shone like a sash in the eastern sky. Tunk Quillen stepped up to the firelight.

  “Captain,” he said, “you better come see this here.”

  Botis, Marwood, and Lovich followed the resurrectionist. They squelched down an alley and across another mud-filled street, and stood behind the corner of a hotel turned into a temporary deadhouse.

  Half a mile away, riding between blazing wagons of newly dead, was a big party of Texas Rangers, hired guns, and Kiowa scouts. The Rangers had caught up to the Kiowas. The scouts were pointing to the plague town.

  “Goddamn,” Lovich said, “do you think that’s Jack Hays out there after us, Captain?”

  “Hays is retired in California, fucking his fat wife,” Botis said.

  Lovich leaned and spat. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets. “Well, whoever this Texas Ranger sumbitch is, he has a tenacity like old Hays.”

  Botis and Doc Quillen returned to the bonfire and gathered the rest of their company. Everyone walked their horses through the dead city toward the deep running waters of the Clear Fork. Marwood paused at the edge of the river. It looked deep and fast.

  “How do you aim to get across?” Lovich asked.

  Botis’s face was grim with determination. “If they are any smart they have men waiting to ambush us at Daws Crossing. We can’t wait to find another ford. We will have to swim it out here and trust to chance.”

  “That’s a bad current to fight,” Charley Broadwell said, “with a lot of snags and tree roots. A man could go under and you’d never see him again.”

  They were preparing to leave when they heard an uplifted cry of surprise behind them. The people of Fort Griffin were shouting as with one voice in praise and mortal fear.

  Across the sky, a great bolide crossed from eastern fire to western night. Huge fiery chunks splintered off the blunt head of the thing, and again into smaller firework fragments. Spaw and Lovich thought they heard a deep whistle from the meteor as it streaked across the sky, but Marwood and Broadwell were not so certain.

  The shooting star disappeared to the west, its fire sputtering out somewhere over Comancheria. But even then an auroral shimmer remained, for close to a minute showing where it had whipped across the sky.

  The killers gathered up their their guns. They did not speak for they had become adept at pulling out of a place in silence. They brought the horses quietly down the bank, past the deserted laundry site, and entered the cold river water. Marwood held his gun above water in case he had to shoot his way clear on the other side. The men around him spurred and larruped the horses up the far bank and through a spindly sta
nd of juniper and pin oak. They followed this tree line until they came upon open prairie.

  “Expected to see someone guarding this side of the river,” Spaw said.

  “This way lies Comancheria,” Marwood told him. “They don’t have to guard it.”

  They rode without stopping. All through the day men looked up at the sky with wondrous eyes, searching in vain for some new portent of their future.

  CHAPTER 20

  Charley Broadwell got sick three days out of Fort Griffin. He vomited clear water early one morning after he woke up. Later that hour he lost control of his bowels and passed rice water. Doc Quillen pulled the shaking man aside while they rested the horses. He examined Charley’s sunken eyes and felt his wrinkled hands.

  “He’s got the cholera,” he told Botis.

  “Oh, Lord,” Spaw said.

  “Will he live?” Botis asked.

  “That ain’t but for God to decide.”

  “Bind him to his horse so he can ride.”

  They did. When they accomplished this task Quillen turned to the men.

  “You boys listen good. Don’t eat or drink nothing after Charley. I mean it. Don’t wear his clothes nor take his boots even if’n after he dies. Not even his gun.”

  Spaw looked at Charley sitting the back of his horse, doubled over and shivering. The man’s pants and saddle were soaking wet with diarrhoeal water flooding out of his body. It stank of raw fish.

  “You think we might catch it, too?” Spaw asked Quillen.

  Quillen studied the man’s boils and face warts. “You will know for certain in another two days,” he said. “We are in the middle of the incubation period. If we make it past that . . .” he lifted his hands and let them drop in a helpless gesture.

  The miserable day surrendered the sun. Broadwell’s health worsened.

  They rode out the night and half the next day before arriving at an encampment of sod and mud-brick structures stuck in the middle of the wide-open, sun-baked prairie. They sat their horses on a grassy rise, watching for signs of life or a flicker of movement between the two houses.

  “I don’t see nobody around,” Lovich said. His knee had gotten better over the past few days and he was much his old self. But the eeriness of the silent prairie, along with its appalling vastness, unnerved him. They were sitting downwind, but neither horses or Tonkawas smelled anything amiss.

  “Maybe they got some medicine for Charley,” Gratton said.

  “These sons of bitches ain’t got nothing.” Spaw spat from his saddle. “That’s why they’re out here.”

  “And what about us?” Gratton asked.

  “Let’s not go into that right now,” Spaw said.

  Botis laughed, for he was always one to find humour in even the direst of affairs. “You boys best take hold of your shrunken pizzles,” he said. “You get the wim-wams out here you won’t never make it out alive.”

  Spaw and Gratton approached the house and the smaller shed out back. Marwood had his Sharps rifle out and was covering them from afar. When they were within a furlong of the first house Rangers pushed their guns out the doors and windows and opened fire. Botis and company lifted their guns and fired back.

  “How did these whore sons get ahead of us?” Lovich asked.

  “They didn’t.” Marwood jumped from his saddle and pulled his horse behind a hummock of grass and bristle. “These are new men.”

  Gunfire became sporadic. Botis turned and addressed his command. “Make sure Charley is tied down so he doesn’t fall.”

  Marwood was closest to the dying man. He checked the knots and walked Charley’s horse past Botis, with Charley slouched over in his saddle, hardly knowing what was happening.

  Botis brought out a hobble rope and lashed Charley’s horse across the haunches. The horse started across the prairie at a rocking-chair gallop, angling away from the house. Several Rangers on the other side, hiding at the bottom of a trash ditch, popped up and banged away at the fleeing horse and rider. Botis and his men poured lead into them, sent two men reeling back with mortal wounds. Charley’s horse stumbled and fell, a half dozen bullets buried in its heart.

  A man quit the smallest house, little more than a round barn built of prairie sod, and walked toward Charley’s body.

  “Can you get him?” Botis asked Marwood.

  “No,” Marwood shook his head. “He’s too far even for the Sharps.”

  The lawman walked across the flat prairie directly toward Charley. Charley reached out to the man in a plea for help. The ambusher brought out his gun and shot Charley in the forehead. Then he walked back to the shed.

  They fought for three days, along the dry hollows and grassy hummocks, in a 500-yard circle around the two sod huts. The other posse from Fort Griffin joined the battle on the third day, catching Botis and his men in a murderous crossfire.

  Botis held the higher ground, and with it a tactical edge. One morning the lawmen made a foolish charge on his strong position. Botis beat them back and they retired to the sod huts to lick their wounds and count their dead.

  At night, both sides lighted false fires and sat on the ground a quarter mile away, hoping to decoy the others. The day following they set fires with the wind. Walls of flame and smoke raced over the countryside. Around them, men rode for their lives. They hooded their horses and rode straight through the fire before falling to the ground and batting their smouldering clothes.

  They kept fighting. There was no end to it. The huts had all the water, while Botis had the high ground. Neither side would quit.

  One night, when they were at the end of their tether, Little Shreve looked at his younger cousin. Red Thunder did not say a word but gave a quick nod. Little Shreve rose from the decoy fire and walked away into the closing night.

  Botis watched him leave. They all did.

  The men listened and waited, barely breathing. They heard nothing other than the night sounds of the prairie. Whispering grass and the click of insects. They were exhausted, but they could not sleep. If they were men of prayer, they would have worn out the knees of their breeches.

  An hour before first light Little Shreve returned. He dropped three bloody scalps in the dirt beside Spaw. He had also stolen four horses from the lawmen and hid them in a secluded draw a mile and a half away.

  He sat beside the coal fire without speaking and scratched himself. Lovich offered the Tonkawa the last of their water.

  “Take it,” he urged.

  Little Shreve crossed his arms and turned his face, refusing to drink.

  By the fifth day both sides were out of ammunition. They fought hand-to-hand—men used their guns and rifles as clubs. Water was short to nonexistent—they drank their own urine when they had anything to drink at all—and there was nothing to eat except raw horseflesh. Marwood killed two men with a brush hook, hacking their bodies apart to retrieve their waterskin. When he reached it, it was empty.

  Red Thunder, Lovich, and Spaw crawled onto the larger of the two sod huts and cut through the roof. They dropped one by one inside the barricaded house, which was being used as a temporary hospital. They killed men with their knives, and cut the throats of five wounded lying in stinking pools of blood and foul, gangrenous rot. They scalped the dead, taking ears, noses, teeth, and scrotums, and left the sod hut trailing blood and gore on their clothes, hands, and beards.

  By the end of that same day Botis calculated they had whittled the other side down enough to attempt a break out. They brought the horses up, the animals all but dead themselves, and stepped wearily into saddle.

  Marwood was tired, torn, and bloody. He had lost the brush hook somewhere. He sat saddle with reins in one hand and a knife in the other. The blind ancient thing inside his heart had long awakened; its red roaring hate filled his whole head, and thrummed his chest.

  “Ride through them and ride them down,” Botis
said. “Kill them all.”

  The Hydra reined their horses around and kicked into a phalanx. They held short rein, leaned as close to the necks of their horses as they could. Men rose from the high grass to meet them, holding sticks and knives and metal rods. Marwood hacked at a defender, missed. There was a brief flurry as the horses slowed and men fought. Acheron reared and brought his sharp hooves down, ripping one man from throat to stomach. Botis forced his way through the salient, his men strung out behind and racing for their lives across the flat red plain.

  They were a quarter mile out, and safe, when, with the capriciousness so often seen on those plains, a prairie storm blew in from the north. Cold, drenching rain. Botis and his men reined their horses and looked at one another, water dripping from their faces and hats. Nothing was said between them. As one, they turned back. They rode with faces grim and knives out. They plunged into the unsuspecting Rangers, lawmen, and Kiowa spies gathered around the sod huts filling canteens and leather sacks with rainwater streaming off the eaves.

  They rode into them from blowing clouds of sand, grit, and rain, and they threw themselves from their saddles screaming incoherent war cries. They killed, and they kept on killing.

  Little Shreve ran in a bowlegged frenzy from dead man to dying, scalping and disembowelling. His arms gleamed with blood, and it dripped from his knees. Marwood pushed one of the men hired by the Double-barred V cattle barons into the ground as the rain beat upon his head, and he stabbed that man in the face, leapt up, and looked around for another victim.

  The Hydra feasted. They killed, and when the killing was done, they tore the sod huts apart, using what little lumber and lathes they could scrounge—buffalo chips, cut saddles, clothes, everything that could conceivably burn. They built a tremendous bonfire, and into these flames they cast the bodies of the men they had all but destroyed.

  As the flames consumed the bodies, blood, fat, and grease ran in sheets from the charred bodies, which swelled as their internal juices expanded. Their hides burst from the massive heat amidst cracking bone and brains whistle-steaming from ears and noses.