Massacre at Idyll Valley

  MASSACRE AT IDYLL VALEY

  A WESTERN ADVENTURE

  DAVID WATTS

  Copyright © 2018 by Dusty Saddle Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  HAVE YOU TRIED “THE GUNS OF PECOS COUNTY” FROM WESTERN BESTSELLER DAVID WATTS?

  FOREWORD FROM

  ROBERT HANLON

  This new release from David Watts should be introduction enough. Watts, who has had great success, has presented a brand new novel set in the West. This novel introduces brand new characters you will love.

  Western readers…. Grab “Possum Trot” and run with it! This is one of the Westerns you will love, over and over again.

  Robert Hanlon – author of the number one bestseller “Timber U.S. Marshal” and many others.

  All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.

  — John Steinbeck

  ONE

  The prairie keeps its secrets, but the wind unroofs the deeds of men.

  An aroma lifted itself into the prairie breeze. Hardly noticeable at first, it mixed with sage and Sumac to make a potion pleasant to the senses, as musk in trace amounts might make perfume. Only when it billowed forth like eruptions from an oil fire did it make an odor that smelled like death.

  Last month, the breezes of summer whirled the dryness of a zealous sun beating down on Possum Trot, Texas and made dust devils and ribbons of grey across the landscape. Now they gathered strength in the angular September sun to grow to become the winds of autumn. And, as if to remember their place in the evolution of passing seasons, began to carry from the cold north, pressing down from Canada, the scent of hard ice.

  A sense of urgency crept into the thoughts of the citizens of Possum Trot, their crops still to harvest, their grain stores to replenish, the chinks in the wall that would let in winter’s unforgiving rage to patch and calk. The women canned fruit. The men gathered from their fields. The storm cellars filled with abundance.

  So occupied were they with their tasks that they hardly noticed a dark cluster of large birds in the branches of the oak at the far edge of town. Only when these rapacious raptors suddenly screeched and chattered did the citizens awaken to the aromas of autumn with that new scent mixed with the fermentations of a fading year. Once noticed, it grew so objectionable that the men of Possum Trot gathered at town center to talk about what they should do. It was hardly a decision. Everyone knew there was no choice but to go and see.

  Sheriff Galen Clay with five ruddy men rode off, pointed like a weathervane at the wind’s uncertain origin and fifteen miles into their journey came across the quiet town of Idyll Valley.

  The stench was so strong now it burned their noses and throats. They tied bandannas across their faces but it penetrated their lungs and lodged in their bowels. Some vomited, some sickened and turned green.

  Before them, stretched out like lumps of cattle resting in the shade, was a street lined with rotting bodies, vultures picking at the tattered remains.

  Men and women, children and dogs alike, as if the undiscriminating crush of a tornado or flash flood had showed no deference to the gentle and the young, no soft spot in the frontal slam of horror and death for the strong or the weak. It appeared as if all thirty-seven inhabitants of Idyll Valley had suffered a sudden plague and died together in the middle of what they were doing.

  The men from Possum Trot went into the hardware store with its broken windows, into the church with bullet holes in the door and pock marks strung along the arms of the cross behind the altar, into the stables to find some horses dead, some gone missing, in each location to drag bodies out to the hillside where they began the long and laborious task of digging graves.

  Galen rode the center of the street looking for signs of life. He found none. The windmill turned on the hill but the town was dead still, as if isolated within an eye of stagnation punched out in the center of an apathetic business-as-usual surround.

  Stupidity, greed, senseless violence, those were the words that rushed into Galen thoughts. Must be born with snakes in our heads, he thought, worms for hearts. The corpse in front of him split open in the poisonous sun, entrails spilling out onto the dirt like bloated sausages, their rainbow colors shifting in the relentless light like oil on water. Our sins are great, he thought, our penance weak. What insult could be strong enough motivate this atrocity?

  He got off his horse and started dragging bodies to the hillside, some of them so softened by the extent of decay that they fell apart with the effort.

  He could feel a numbness crawling into his consciousness, the protective tendency to operate automatically without reaction or response, a dulling of the senses, a dumbness of self-preservation in which the outside world stopped part way along its path of intrusion into the body, he, not certain whether to scold himself for callousness or welcome the modest blunting of acuity.

  By afternoon the street was clear but the grave digging had lagged behind so the hillside was littered with bodies.

  He climbed the hill and stood over the diggers. “We’re going to rotate the digging,” he said. “None of us can take very much of this.” He grabbed a shovel and pitched in. Two men climbed out of the grave and walked down the hill toward town.

  Galen stopped thinking and let the body take over. He felt himself drift away from the bite of the shovel, the pitching of dirt, the tug of the bodies into the grave, all happening as if by someone else’s hand, perhaps somewhere far away from him over the next pasture, out of sight.

  He looked at nothing, thought of nothing.

  Time passed grudgingly.

  A shout pricked his ears. It came from a patch just outside town and shook him from his trance. Two men, Jackson Charles owner of Rusty Bucket and Jim Clark, a neighbor, walked toward Galen with another figure in between, smaller, unsteady, barely able to walk, legs covered to his waist with shit.

  “Found him in the outhouse,” Jackson said.

  TWO

  The boy turned out to be Ethan Johnson, fourteen years old, son of the pioneering family of Caleb Johnson, an intenerate preacher, and his wife Jolene who played the Harmonium in the little, one room church that was nothing more than a wooden box with a few pews that sat about twenty people. They never expanded the church because there weren’t that many people in town. Even so, the church was almost full every Sunday, which means that about half the population of Idyll Valley showed up in their Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes.

  That horrific day that the Wells Fargo stage stopped at the livery just outside town to water the horses and refresh its passengers, a gang of outlaws showed up as if they knew all the while exactly when the stage would be there. They shot the driver and the man riding shotgun, rounded up the passengers and killed them one by one. Then they took the strong box, loaded it onto a wagon and started to make their getaway into the wilderness.

  That was the critical moment for the town. If nothing had happened a completely different pathway into the future would have opened, one which might well have been peaceful enough to contain no additional harm. But instead of remaining neutral, Richard Hawkins, a man whose wife was killed during a bank robbery, drew his pistol in a fiery rage and started picking off the outlaws as they rode along.

  Sawtooth Robbins, a blacksmith recently moved from Kansas after servin
g in the Confederate Army, came to the defense of the wounded Hawkins and was instantly killed.

  Enraged, the leader of the gang, standing atop the hillside on his roan, leaning on his saddle horn watching the happenings below, a man with scruffy black beard and a black wide-brimmed gambler hat, called his second-in-command, Hodge Mobson, a thin, sandy haired fellow with wolfish eyes, and asked how many they’d lost to the town folk.

  “Lost four, killed two,” he said.

  The leader clenched the muscles on the side of his face and spat on the ground. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked down upon the town, now with empty streets, deathly still, and said, “They’re going to pay for that.” He rose to an erect position and stood in his stirrups. “You enjoy killing,” he said, turning slowly toward Hodge.

  Hodge smirked.

  The leader spoke as deliberately and casually as he would if ordering a second whisky. “Kill everyone in this fucking excuse for a town,” he said, and turned and rode away.

  The rest was carnage.

  Ethan’s mother, Jolene, hid him in the outhouse just as the massacre got underway. She was killed coming out of the privy. Her murderer assumed she’d been there to do her business so he didn’t bother right away, to see if anyone was hiding there.

  Ethan stood in the chamber and through the cracks in the door witnessed his mother cut down like laundry in a strong wind. He lurched at the door, but stopped himself from running at the murderer, frozen by his mother’s last words: “No matter what happens to me,” she’d said, “or to your father, or to this town, you stay hidden.” She leaned over his face with a tear streaming down. “You are our only hope for the next generation. Protect that for us, please. Promise me you will!” She shook him and made him swear on his faith in God to do as she commanded.

  He lost his faith in God the nest instant as she went down.

  Frozen where he stood, unable to move forward or back, his mind had turned to mush. That the outlaw suspected nothing was a tiny but critical blessing, for it allowed the boy time to pull himself back together. Every cell in his body wanted to run out the door and beat the outlaw to death with his bare hands. Nonetheless, gritting his teeth, he obeyed his mother’s command, turned, and lifting the sitting board, he let himself down into the pit.

  The man outside heard the click as the seat returned to its place and threw open the door to find no one there. Ethan choked back an urge to retch at the stench and the ooze of three feet of shit pressing against his feet and legs. The man listened, heard a few sounds which he discounted, shook his head and slammed the door.

  The outlaws left. The sun burned down. The bodies decomposed.

  By the time the posse arrived Ethan was ill, feverish, dehydrated, and his spirit was broken.

  Galen took him to the well, stripped off his clothes and washed away the excreta of hundreds of passages into the pit. The boy’s skin was soft as bread dough from the maceration of wet sludge and it was teeming with infection, stippled with ulcers that oozed blood and pus from his legs. Galen carried him to the tavern, the least damaged of all the buildings, and stretched him out on the bar.

  He fed him water and sarsaparilla. He scraped the debris and shit-infested scabs off his wounds and poured beer over each one. As they bubbled and fizzed with festering carbonation, he wiped each crater clean with a bar cloth he’d swirled in boiling water, rung out, and cooled. He went to the kitchen and returned with a bottle of honey and poured its amber ooze over each sore. He cut wet swatches from bar cloth and patched each wound. Then he covered the boy’s trembling body with a blanket from the back room.

  “Too sick to travel,” Galen said to Jackson. “I’ll stay. The only thing that will save him now is his own will,”—He paused and looked the boy up and down— “which may not be strong,” he sighed, “after what he’s seen.”

  He stood looking at the sleeping boy for a minute as if soaking up his sorrows. He bit his upper lip, then turned and nodded at Jackson. “Take everybody home,” he said. “People will be worried.”

  THREE

  Jake Paxton had a burr up his butt. He’d had it with the troubles of Possum Trot but there was another motivation chipping at him. Displacing his affection for the town was a strong hankering for Colorado.

  His recent experiences in Possum Trot were less than peaceful. He’d survived a gunfight with Horse Diggins’ men with a bullet and a limp to show for it, and the dirty bastard had been driven out of town. On top of that, his girlfriend of umpteen years, the widow Lily Christianson, was way too lukewarm on the subject of matrimony to keep him hanging around much longer. All together, time for a goddamn change.

  The free winds out on the prairie were calling to him.

  This was not a sudden change. He’d bought another man’s dream, a cabin up in the San Juan Mountains around Durango that only Galen knew about, a place where he planned to do a powerful lot of nothing whatsoever. It was just two weeks before this dirty business at Idyll Valley that he’d decided to head out to the mountains in his flatbed wagon taking little more than the clothes on his back.

  When he’d traveled to Colorado before he took a pathway north through Oklahoma, crossed a tip of Kansas, then traveled on west to Colorado, a pathway he chose in order to avoid the Comanche strongholds of West Texas.

  But now, several years after the famous meeting between Colonel McKenzie and Quanah, the 23 year-old brilliant tactician and chief of the notorious Quahada, a subset of the murderous Comanche tribe, peace was supposed to be the rule of the land.

  The westward push of white folk had stopped dead still for years with no progress beyond a line from Ft Worth to San Antonio because of the brilliant war tribes of the Comanche, the most military of all the American Indians. They’d became excellent horsemen after the Spanish had introduced them to the animal and they converted their attitudes quickly from a domestic and peaceful tribe to the most feared and brutal of all.

  Their battle tactics of an incredibly swift movement of their nomadic settlements, nearly invisible scouting and tracking, double-back maneuvers designed to confuse and discourage their pursuers, generally left the US Troops in disarray. Only because of the westward push of the railroad and the increasing strength of US military after the Civil War were the Comanche willing to cooperate with the formation of a peace treaty. Still, Jake had to be careful. There might be splinter groups on the prowl.

  For that reason he was ever vigilant. He had two horses with him, one hitched to the wagon, one to trail and spell with the pulling. He’d loaded up with water and jerky to keep him sustained through the expanses of the Texas grasslands for he knew the land out there had killed many a white man before the Comanche could even get them.

  The sun had a more angular pose now that September was here but it could still parch and burn the unprotected. He traveled early and late in the day, resting himself and his horses in whatever cool place he might find during the midday sun.

  He constantly watched the horizon for signs of danger. Even so, he had lots of time to think about things: his life on the farm just outside Possum Trot, his tenure as Sheriff of Clarkston County, his battles with that turd-ball, Horse Diggins, all of which had made him a wiser, more reflective, yet rather worn-down remnant of a man who was starting to feel his age.

  Life ahead of him was shorter than it used to be. If he was going to get in any of that high mountain living, the scent of pine needles in his nostrils, four distinct seasons, and a long view of the surrounding terrain, he had to get off his butt and get going while the going was good.

  He pulled up to settle for the night in the middle of the high planes of the Edwards Plateau near a small stream and a clutch of scrub oak so the horses could water and refresh. Flat grassy fields as far as he could see. Fragrance of Beebalm and sage. A soft prairie wind.

  He knew better than to light a campfire for that was the fatal mistake that MacKinzie’s and his Tonkawa scouts made during their first push into Comanche territory.
Dead giveaway. Like calling out your location.

  He chewed on beef jerky and cornbread and watched the sun droop. The heat rising off the prairie made it’s image slither down into the horizon like a ball of fire struggling against fate, pushed over the next ridge, digging down into a hole in the earth.

  He spread his bedroll, perched his saddle for a pillow and went to sleep. Around midnight he felt a tugging on his left wrist from the twine he’d tied to his trailing horse and popped open one eye. What he saw was a small torch illuminating three men, one, walking away with his trailing horse—the one with the twine tied to its back foot—the other two men working at untying his lead horse from its tether.

  He pulled his pistol from under the bedroll and shot the first man in his leg. The man yelled and fell to the ground. As soon as the man hit the ground he drew and fired on Jake but missed. Jake returned fire and hit the man in the chest. The other men snuffed the torch and begun to run away.

  The moon was crescent moving toward half but it produced enough light to drift over the prairie like whipped cream. With that illumination Jake could tell where everything was. He ran after the two men in bare feet but the men reached their horses and rode away.

  Jake stood in the open prairie and watched them disappear into the night. “Prairie Bandits,” he scoffed, and turned back to camp.

  He struck camp well before sunup so as to put as much distance possible between him and the thieves, taking the dead man’s horse with him. He didn’t have the slightest appetite to find out how many other members of that gang there were hiding nearby.

  Besides, the wind was blowing his direction.