Massacre at Idyll Valley Page 9

  These were large flakes, collections of flakes actually, heavy enough and wet enough to fall out of the sky, just cold enough to make it all the way to the ground. Jake watched from his porch enchanted. Something inside him clicked shut in that moment like the closing of a box, as if there had been an open space of longing unfulfilled until this very hour when, on his front porch, watching out into the valley, what he had come for had finally arrived.

  He spoke to the flakes as they fell. “Glad to see you,” he said. “Hope you had a pleasant fall.” He laughed at himself but didn’t care. He rose like a novitiate to the altar, caught flakes on his tongue, and couldn’t help grinning like he’d gotten away with something. Finally he just stood there and let the flakes fall on his shoulders, pile up on his hat brim, and stick to his boot tops as he shuffled through the yard.

  He went back to his perch on the porch. “Well,” he said, “I guess I got what I came for.” He soaked up the moment to prolong it. Then he surveyed the drifting fluffs of down far out into the valley. “But little flakes,” he said, “my friends. . . I’m going to have to leave you now. Have to tend to my flock back home.” He shook his head and pursed his lips. “You know, they sometimes need a little help. You can’t let them struggle alone.” He paused, surveyed the panorama once more. “Just you keep on falling,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He rose, picked up a duffle bag he’d made ready, threw a serape over his shoulders, saddled up his horse and rode into town.

  He stopped at Pop’s General Store. Emily was helping a customer. She caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye and didn’t like what she saw. It was one of those moments that stops moving forward, as if time is temporarily weighted down with more than it can carry, when something that is greater than how things appear on the surface has attached itself, buried itself somewhere inside where it waits with the true meaning of what it carries.

  She finished. The customer left. Jake approached the desk.

  She looked up into his face and immediately a tear rose to her eyes. Saying not a word she rushed around the counter and hugged him long and hard. “Travel well,” she whispered. “I’ll be here when you return.”

  Jake had a little speech all prepared while he sat on that porch, a speech that did not get said. He was going to say something like. . .

  “You don’t want an old hound dog like me. You want to get one of those young ponies running around here like they was fresh into locoweed. Throw out a lasso and domesticate you one.”

  She would say: “But they’re all so dumb.”

  Then he’d say: “All men are dumb when they’re that age. And most of them don’t get any smarter. What you gotta do is pick the future.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look them over real hard and pick the boy with the soft eyes, he’ll be the one with enough room in his soul to add a few smarts along the way and maybe get a little kinder as he piles on the years.”

  And if she said, “But I might rather have you.”

  Then he’d say, “You need someone who’s going to last long enough to get you knocked up with a couple of kids and still be around when they’re up and gone.”

  She might say. “Taming one of these buckaroo’s? That sounds like way too much work.”

  “It’s an investment that’ll pay off,” he’d say. Then he’d kinda smile and tell her something she already knew. “But while you wait for that boy to grow up, get ready to put up with a whole lot of foolishness.”

  He never got to say it. She just linked arms, walked with him to the door, kissed him straight on the lips, and watched him ride away in the new fallen snow.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Galen called a another town meeting when he returned. He took the podium in the church sanctuary and spoke to the gathered crowd.

  “There’s reason to believe that the Dry Creek Gang will come to attack our town,” he said.

  The crowd moaned.

  “Ethan and I travelled most of the way to Caprock Canyon and we talked with the Apache who live there. That’s what they think.”

  “How do you know they might attack?” It was George from the General Store who spoke.

  “The Apache have the ability to travel unobserved and they’ve been watching the Dry Creek Gang. They’ve detected an increase in activity of the sort that always comes before they go out on a mission.”

  “That could be any mission,” Jackson Charles said. “What reason do you have to suspect they will come here?”

  “There’s a long history that we have with the Dry Creek Gang. First of all, we were the ones who cleaned up the carnage they left behind over at Idyll Valley. The leader of the gang, a man who goes by the name of ‘Boss,’ believes in letting his lessons sink in the hard way. How that applies to Idyll Valley is that he would have wanted to just let the poor people rot in the streets just to make sure everybody got the message that you don’t cross the Boss.”

  “Cleaning up his mess makes us targets?” said Rosalie from the Angel Dust.

  “We interfered with his message to the universe. He’d get steamed up over that.”

  A man stood up in the back of the church. “I have something to say,” he said.

  Everybody turned to look. It was Johnny Tallmountain.

  “Everybody knows I was a member of that gang once upon a time. It is a chapter of my life I will have to live with forever but I can tell you that Boss already had it in for Possum Trot. I don’t know why, he never said. But he did mention time and again, that he’d like to do some significant damage here.”

  The crowd murmured.

  Johnny continued. “There’s another reason he might come here. I don’t know if he knows I’m here but he doesn’t take kindly to deserters or to the people who harbor them. My presence here is a danger to this community. I have volunteered to leave this town before. Maybe now’s the time.”

  The people in the church talked to each other so loudly that the din rose to a peak where no one could hear. Galen pulled and shot a hole in the ceiling.

  The crowd silenced.

  Galen began with measured words. “Like anything else in life it’s not a simple question. Johnny Tallmountain has been a service to our community. He saved Sally Swenson when she fell and got caught on the wall at the Angel Dust. He’s helped Lily Christianson restore her place after the shootout there last summer.”

  Sterling Jennings, the banker, stood up. “I say he’s right. It’s too dangerous for us to have a known target of that horrible gang right here in our midst. I say he should go!”

  The crowd roared.

  Ruth Ann stood up. “I watched this man endanger himself for a little girl he did not know and had never even seen before. I saw him crawl out on the ledge and perform a miraculous rescue that we should all be thankful for. I don’t care what his past has been this is a man of decency and courage. I say he stays!”

  The crowd roared again.

  “One thing I would add,” said Galen. “Johnny is a crack shot. He would be of value to us in our defense.”

  The crowd responded with nods and gestures.

  Galen held up his hand. “Shall we vote on whether Johnny stays?”

  The crowd murmured approval.

  “All in favor of sending Johnny away.”

  Three people raised their hands, then one more, then two more.

  “I count six. All in favor of keeping him in our community.”

  Thirteen people raised their hands.

  “Then it’s settled,” Galen said. “Now we need to plan how to defend ourselves.”

  Jigsaw Higgins stood. “We should do what responsible towns in the past have done when facing such an adversary. We should send the women and children away to safety somewhere outside the town.”

  Everyone cheered.

  Johnny Tallmountain stood up. “There’s a cave not far from here called ‘Fat Man’s Misery’ because of all the narrow passages it has. I heard about it when I was growing up. I came a
cross it on my way here when I was trying to hide from the gang. I spent a couple of nights there. The entrance is small so it is hard to see. But the chamber immediately inside is large enough to hold maybe thirty people. The narrow passages don’t start until you go deeper into the cave.”

  “Wouldn’t everybody be trapped in there?” asked Sterling Jennings.

  “It’s pretty invisible. And it’s easy to defend,” said Johnny. “There are boulders at the entrance that make for good shields while shooting the enemy. And the terrain around it is barren so that anyone approaching would have no safe place to hide from our marksmanship. The mouth of the cafe is at the base of a vertical cliff so there’s no chance of coming around from above or from the side.” He paused. “Since I am the one who does not wish to be yet another reason to enrage the Boss, I should be the one to lead the people there and stay to defend them against any attacks.”

  Ruth Ann stood. “As fate would have it, I just happen to have a double barrel ten gage and a few sticks of dynamite that might come in handy. I’ll be happy to go there with Johnny and defend.”

  George stood again. “I’m still not convinced that we have reason to worry. Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I agree it’s smart to have a plan and to prepare, but what tells us that this gang who thrives on robbing stages will take the time and trouble to come all the way to Possum Trot to destroy us? And how would we know when they were coming? We could prepare all we want to and they might never come. Or they might surprise us and catch us with our guard down.”

  “Sabo will come and warn us beforehand,” said Galen. “He’s our watchdog.”

  Silence.

  “Still not convinced,” said George.

  The silence in the room thickened like a cloud of humidity.

  Galen stepped down from the pulpit into the aisle. “There’s another reason,” he said. “The Boss knows this town very well. He lived here. He worked here. He was rejected by this town, hated by this town, fought against by the people of this town, and driven out of here in disgrace. That gives him a very strong reason to despise us, to turn his unimaginable force of malice against us, even to come all the way here and do what he did, for very little reason, to our friends over in Idyll Valley. He’s got us in his crosshairs, all right. We’d be foolish not to prepare. We cannot trust any lasting peace from that monumental pile of evil.”

  The crowd was stunned.

  “Who is it?” shouted Jackson Charles.

  Galen raised his hand and formed a pointing finger aimed out the door at the back of the church. “He’s the former owner of the Angel Dust. He’s Horse Diggins.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Next day a delegation of citizens went to Fat Man’s Misery and made preparations. They inspected the cave for rattlesnakes or other dangerous critters, cleared the floor from debris, and brought in a supply of firewood, lamps and kindling.

  They left behind clothing, bedding, basic utensils and non-perishable foods locked in a secure box. Then they returned to town.

  Back in town George made available his stock of rifles, shotguns and munitions asking only that the people return them when the fracas was over. The Hampton boys carried kegs of nails and scrap metal up to the loft in their stables and placed them near the loading deck where the hay comes in.

  Three men loaded large stones into a wagon and brought them into town. They fashioned two bunkers, one on each side of the street, two semi-circular walls of stone that closed off short cull-de-sacks between the walls of adjoining buildings placed at a recessed position so as not to be obvious from the street.

  The parson announced that he was going to turn the church into a battleship, though he wouldn’t tell anyone how he was going to do it. He would only say, “The Lord has mysterious ways to do His work.”

  Three days passed and Sabo appeared at the edge of town. Everybody went out to meet him.

  “The Dry Creek Gang will be at your town limits by nine o’clock tomorrow morning. They are bringing fifteen men and they are heavily armed. Are you prepared?”

  The town folk nodded.

  “The Apache cannot help you in this battle because any attack we make on white folk will be interpreted as hostile to your race and we will be annihilated.”

  The town folk groaned.

  “But we send Ysun, the Creator Spirit to be with you. May he make you strong to face your trial.”

  “Thank you, Sabo,” said Galen. “You’ve been good to the people of our town.”

  “I do have a personal trick that may help you. I go now to make that happen. You have to trust it will do you no harm.”

  With that he turned and went away.

  Nine o’clock came next day and sixteen men appeared on the hillside just out of town.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  What the sixteen men saw, standing at the outer margin of town, was nothing.

  Nothing. No smoke. No dust. No windmill turning. Nothing.

  The houses and buildings stood as lonely statements of a civilization lost or destroyed, leaving only structures behind to mark their past.

  No people. No horses. Nothing moving.

  Five men split off and followed a trail of footprints up the mountainside.

  Five men split off and rode cautiously into town, passing by the Hampton Stables on their way in.

  Five remained on the hill alongside Boss. One man apart. That would be Boss. Another man turned his horse that direction and approached the master. That would be Hodge Mobson, his very lethal right hand.

  “Looks like a trap,” he said.

  “Don’t give a shit,” Boss said. “I intend to either possess this town for myself or burn it to the ground. No flea-bit, asshead towners are going to get in my way.”

  Hodge smiled. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk,” he said and split off on his own to enter town by the main street a quarter way around from the Hampton Stables.

  The five that went up the hillside followed what they believed to be footprints of a migrant population. Their journey took them to the base of Throckmorton’s Teeth, the rock formation that presided over the town to the south, then along the ridge to the west where a new crop of mountains rose to meet them.

  Back in town Hodge Mobson arrived at the junction of streets and joined the original five. No need to ask. Not a living person had been seen. Three of the five continued on down Main Street.

  Hodge turned back and rode along the boardwalk outside of the buildings, stooping and peering in the windows as he went. All he saw was furniture: tables and chairs, dressers and beds, counters and shelves, and behind them, invisible to the street, were the few remaining people of the town who refused to leave, safely concealed, listening to the clop, clop, clop, of Hodge’s horse.

  Five quick shots suddenly cracked the still air. The three advance members were caught in the crossfire from the two bunkers situated on opposite sides of the street. That’s all they had time to see before they fell to the ground.

  At the sound of the shots the Hampton boys rolled their kegs of nails and scrap metal out of the loading dock where they crashed to the street below spreading debris in a wide circle of dust.

  The other two advance party members tried to retreat out of the town through the way they came in but their horses struck their hooves upon the nails and scrap metal and they tumbled to the ground. A rifle barrel appeared out the upstairs windows of the General Store and fired on the two riders. They did not rise again.

  Boss growled. He shouted to the remaining five standing with him to enter the town at the other end of Main Street. They had to cross into Main by passing in front of the church.

  At the sound of the second set of shots Parson Tull rolled his “surprise” to the front window and pressed it against the cloth curtain he’d recently placed there. It rippled ominously in the tentative, shimmering breeze.

  The five turned into Main Street. Ten seconds later a huge explosion shook the town and a cannon ball the size of an orange knocked down t
wo of the five horses. It sent the riders hurdling through the air, crashing into the walls of separate buildings. At the same time as the explosion the parson appeared at the doorway dressed in black shirt and black pants, black broad-brim hat, black and silver gun belts, a black bandanna tied to his face in the style of a rustler, two guns blazing, reciting scripture at the top of his voice while firing shots—

  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death

  I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me,

  Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.

  Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies

  Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over.

  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life

  And I will dwell IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD FOREVER.

  —dropping two of the three men still standing.

  “What the hell?” said the one remaining outlaw and turned and fired back at the parson, hitting the door facing where he stood. The parson stood in, firing again and again, plugging the unconscious men thrown to the ground and winging the one last remaining. The wounded man dismounted and escaped into the Angel Dust.

  Hearing the commotion in the town three of the five men in pursuit of the trail of escapees turned back. Two pressed forward.

  When the three arrived alongside Boss, he was swearing and spewing. “Do I have to go into this town myself? Are my men so incapable as to let a set of cretins do them in? Horse shit! Come on if you dare.”

  The four came around and joined Hodge at the south end of Main Street. They came forward little by little, five against an invisible foe.

  The five stopped.

  “There’s another way to flush out these ground rats,” said Hodge and he lit a torch and threw it into the General Store.

  The flames started quickly and lapped up the dried wood with a ravenous hunger. George Pickens, hidden upstairs, first heard crackling of the wood, then saw the room fill with smoke.