Black Valley Riders

An hour before dawn the riflemen had changed guards at the buckboards. Shear’s men had already begun to slowly rise along the boardwalk and form around the blackened fire site in the middle of the street. Ballard Swean scratched his disheveled head and looked up from preparing to boil coffee.

“That’s what I was asking myself,” said Dent Phillips. “He was prowling the streets like a bobcat when I bedded down. Said he’d stand guard all night, like he often does.”

“Crazy bastard,” said Swean. He looked back and forth, then added, “But it ain’t like him to not come sniffing around for coffee, first thing.”

Tinnis sat up from against the front of the adobe building and wiped his eyes with his knuckles and looked all around.

Having heard the conversation on his way to the front door, Shear stood in the open doorway and looked back and forth, his hands on his hips. “I don’t like this,” he said with suspicion, turning his eyes to the wagon guard at the far end of the street.

Rudy Duckwald stood and walked closer to the gambler and looked down at him. To Shear, he said, “Why don’t you ask this sneaking gambler where Fisk is?”

“Rudy, I appreciate neither your implication nor your attitude,” said Tinnis, standing as he spoke and picking up his suit coat from the planks beside him.

“No, sir, not before breakfast,” said Tinnis, slipping on his coat and straightening it down the front. “I would bring myself bad luck killing an idiot on an empty stomach.”

“Rudy! Get your bark off!” Shear shouted, seeing the gunman’s big hand ready to go for his pistol, Tinnis seeming to not take Duckwald’s threat seriously. “We’re looking for Fisk, remember?”

“Elmer’s probably gone to the jake,” Calvin Kerr cut in. “He spends more time sitting in a jake than any man I ever seen.” He gave a shrug. “I don’t know what he does in there.”

Duckwald had settled down, but he hadn’t let go of his accusations. “I say this gambler has done something to him.”

“Shut up, Rudy,” said Shear. “Tinnis Lucas is one of us now. He gets the same respect as the rest of us.”

“Sentanza,” said Shear, “go check some of the jakes along the alleyways. If he’s in one, tell him to get himself out here. We’ve got a busy day coming. I want everybody sticking close together.”

Sentanza left with his rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. He swatted at buzzing flies as he searched along the alleyway, one outhouse after another. Other men went off searching the livery barn, a bathhouse and the town dump. Ten minutes later when Sentanza was finished in the long alleyway, he walked back with his hat hanging from his hand.

“I checked them all,” he said. “Fisk ain’t back there.” Sunlight had crept over the edge of the horizon and spread slantwise along the dirt street.

Shear only nodded and looked off along the street at the buckboards. “Never trust a railroader,” he said to no one in particular.

The guards around the buckboards heard Phillips call out to Shear. They looked at one another uncomfortably as Shear’s gunmen gathered in front of the mercantile where Phillips had pulled out the shipping crates hiding Fisk’s body.

“Everybody hold tight,” the leader of the buckboard guards said with determination. “We might have our hands full any minute here.” He said to the nearest guard, Tom Marlin, “Tommy, run in and tell Mr. Brewer what’s going on out here.”

On the street, the gambler walked toward the mercantile store at an easy pace, a couple of the other men hurrying past him on his way. When he arrived at the spot where the two crates had been pulled away, he looked down innocently at the body of Elmer Fisk. A broad patch of blood had blackened on the hole in Fisk’s chest. The dead outlaw’s eyes were open, staring straight ahead in surprise.

“He’s stabbed through the heart!” said Duckwald, he and his brother-in-law, George Epson, having been the first two to arrive as soon as Phillips had announced his grizzly discovery.

Shear looked at Fisk’s gun still in its holster. “He was taken unawares. That’s for sure,” he said. “Fisk would have fought like a panther otherwise. He half turned and stared coldly at the buckboard guards. They stood curiously staring back from the far end of town.

“Here’s the son of a bitch who killed him,” said Duckwald. He stared at the gambler. “I’d bet my life on it.”

“Careful, Rudy,” said Tinnis, with no joking manner to either his tone or his expression. “You may be doing just that.” His coat lapel lay open, the Colt Thunderer Shear had given him in clear view.

“For God’s sake,” said Shear in a disgusted tone. He stared at the gambler. “For once and for all, Tinnis, did you kill Elmer?”

“Of course I killed him,” the gambler said, staring at Duckwald. He pulled the dagger from inside his shirt and held it up. “Here’s the knife I killed him with. I’ve been waiting for my chance to kill him ever since he ran me off the cliff.”

“No!” said Duckwald, getting rattled. “I mean, yes! I mean, hell, I don’t know, but Lucas must’ve thought he did. That’s all that mattered to him. You heard him. He killed Elmer.”

“All I heard was him making an ass out of you,” said Shear. His black-handled Remington streaked up from his holster, cocked and aimed at the big gunman’s face. “Get out of my sight, Rudy, before I shoot your eyes out.”

Duckwald backed away, Epson right beside him. When the two were gone, Shear turned back to the gambler, who still held the dagger in hand.

“Put the pigsticker away, Lucas,” said Shear. To the men, he said, “I know for a fact that Lucas didn’t kill Fisk. I saw one of them guards walking away from here in the night.”

“Don’t worry about them right now,” Shear said to them under his breath. “They’ll all get what’s coming to them before this day is over.” He looked back at the gambler and asked, “Why’d you say you killed him, Lucas, when you didn’t?”

The gambler didn’t answer. He slipped the dagger back inside his sleeve and looked away toward a distant mountain range.

“Even if you had, I’d have to say he deserved it, running you and your horse off the cliff like that.” He looked at the other men for support; they nodded in agreement.

“Well, hell, Dent, we all did,” Shear said, spreading his hands patiently. He said to the rest of the men, “Get fed, get ready.” He gave a secret thumb toward the buckboards and the guards surrounding them. “These jakes won’t know what hit them.”

Before the sun had reached its midmorning level in the wide blue sky, the three buckboards had rolled out of New Gold Siding, headed east into a long stretch of deep-cut hills reaching toward the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Ten railroad security riders flanked the buckboard wagons, five on either side. In addition to the security riders, a crew of five rail hands sat in the bed of the lead wagon, atop a tall load of firewood. A shotgun rider sat beside the driver of the middle wagon, the one carrying the big heavy safe covered with tied-down sheets of canvas.

“There they are, men, right below us,” said Shear, “just like plums ripe for the picking.” He looked down at the three-wagon procession from a ridge above a sandy flatlands dotted with creosote, cactus and mesquite. Along the other side of the pass, four more of his men rode along at the same fast, steady clip.

Riding parallel to the wagons below, Shear looked from face to face of the railroad men until he spotted Chester Gerst, the shoulder-length hair, the thick beard, the faded sombrero—the partly shadowed face of the man he’d seen on the street the night before.

“As soon as we can get ahead of them and catch them in a cross fire,” said Shear. He batted his heels harder to his horse’s sides. “Just remember, the second guard on the left is all mine . . . the man with the black sombrero.” He pushed his horse harder, veering away from the edge of the ridge just enough to stay out of sight for the time being.

“Is that the snake who killed Elmer Fisk?” Swean asked, gigging his horse right behind him, along with the others.

Riding side by side, Tinnis and Sentanza looked at each other. The gambler saw the question in Sentanza’s dark eyes, but he refused to reveal the truth to him.

Sentanza finally leaned over a little and said beneath the sound of the horses’ hooves, “If a man did to me what Crazy Elmer Fisk did to you, he could never turn his back on me. I would kill him any way I could, even if I had to mash his head with a rock.” He stared at the gambler as if expecting a reply.

But Tinnis had admitted the killing to Shear and Shear had turned it down. He only returned Sentanza’s stare. “I have no more to say on the matter, Mingo,” he said sidelong.

“You and I could be pals, amigos, Lucas,” Sentanza whispered, smiling. “I cover your back, you cover mine, eh?”

“I bet Callahan does too,” said the gambler. He jerked his horse’s reins and pulled the animal away from Sentanza a little. But the persistent Sentanza pulled his horse right alongside him.

“When this is over we will all split up and go our own way to lie low for a while,” he said. “You would do well to stick with me. I am going to Mexico. I have many friends there. They would welcome you, if you are with me.”

“Obliged,” said Tinnis, “I’ll keep it in mind.” They pounded on in unison, keeping up with the rest of the riders.

“Good,” said Sentanza. “You must be careful carrying a large amount of money in this wild, lawless land.”

“Sound advice,” said Lucas. He keep his horse moving quickly along the rock trail, knowing if he ever went anywhere with Mingo Sentanza, he would not even expect to ever come back alive.

In the shotgun rider’s seat in the second wagon sat an older railroad man known as Papa Dorsey. He sat in silence with his shotgun across his lap. He looked up and all around as the wagon entered a pass into the hillside that had been blasted and carved out two years earlier to allow wagons and crews to reach a new high trestle over Skull Rock Canyon.

Once the wagon had followed the lead wagon deeper into the pass, Dorsey eased the tip of the shotgun barrel over into the driver’s side.

“From here on, Mason, you’ll still be doing the driving, but I’ll be giving you the directions,” he said in a lowered voice.

“What?” said the driver, a younger man named Mason Edwards. He gave Dorsey a bemused grin and tried to scoot away from the tip of the gun barrel.

“Don’t try pulling away from me,” Dorsey said in the same low, even voice. “One more mistake like that and I’ll blow you in half.”

“Shut up and pay attention. Do like I tell you if you want to stay alive,” said Dorsey, jamming the barrel into the young teamster’s ribs to make his point. Dorsey stared straight ahead, to keep from drawing any attention from the guards. But above them he had already caught the first glimpse of Shear and his men spreading out in front of them along both sides of the trail.

The young teamster drove along with a worried look frozen on his face. But only a few seconds later both edges of the cliffs above them began to erupt in gunfire, much of it concentrated on the wagon in front of them.

In front of them the driver of the first wagon flew off his seat and fell to the rocky ground as a bullet tore through him and left a bloody mist in the air. The shotgun rider tried to grab the traces, but the wagon had already begun to veer to the right side of the trail.

“Get around it!” Papa Dorsey shouted above the heavy gunfire and screaming bullets. On either side of them, the armed guards’ horses reared and whinnied wildly. The guards struggled to get the animals under control, but the rifle fire took both man and animal to the ground.

The young teamster did as he was told, rather than be chopped down like the others. He slapped the traces to the wagon horses’ backs and sent the heavily loaded wagon around the first wagonload of firewood that had gone up one side and turned over in the rocks beside the narrow trail.

“Dorsey, help me!” the shotgun rider from the first wagon shouted as the second wagon went by. But as he grabbed for the wagon, Dorsey lifted a Colt from his holster and shot the man backward without taking the shotgun off the young teamster.

Dorsey shouted above the melee to the young teamster at his side, “You’re doing real good, Mason boy! Don’t stop now.”