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Published in Cross Plains, Vol. 1 No. 4 (Summer 1974).
Clamor of cowtown nights . . . boot heels stamping on sawdust-strewn floors . . . thunder of flying hoofs down the dusty street . . . yipping of the lean trail drivers, reeling in the saddle, hilarious after the thousand-mile trek . . . cracking of pistols, smash of glasses, flutter of cards on the tables . . . oaths, songs, laughter in all the teeming saloons and dance halls, louder yet in the plank-barred Silver Boot.
Grizzly Elkins slapped a twenty dollar gold piece down on the monte game. Elkins stood out, even in that throng of tall men. He was hairy as a bear, burly and powerful as a bear. Burned dark as an Indian, he wore the buckskins and moccasins of an earlier day. His shoulders were broad and thick as those of an ox. One of the army of buffalo hunters wandering between the Pecos and the upper Missouri, he was as much a part of that wild land as one of the beasts he hunted.
He leaned over the table with the men about him, watching the play of the cards. He grunted explosively as he saw the winning card come up.
The dealer’s narrow white hand raked up the coins.
“Wait there, you!” Grizzly Elkins’s voice was a roar that filled the saloon. “Gimme my change. I bet just five outer that twenty piece.”
The dealer looked up with a sneer on his thin lips. He was Jim Kirby, gambler and gunman, his metal proven in many a game of chance—both with cards and with sixshooters.
“I never give change,” he retorted. “If you don’t want to bet your wad, don’t lay it on my board. I’ve got no time for pikers.”
Elkins’ small eyes blazed.
“Why, you dirty thief—!” His bellow brought the men at the bar around as on a pivot.
Kirby’s hand darted like the head of a snake to his scabbard; but Elkins, for all his bulk, moved quick as a great cat. With a berserk bellow he ripped out his butcher knife and hurled himself recklessly across the table. The great blade flashed blue in the lamplight and plunged to the hilt in the gambler’s breast, as the table tilted and buckled beneath the headlong impact. The explosion of Kirby’s gun nearly deafened the hunter, the flash of powder stinging and blackening his neck and beard. Out of the tangle of chairs, limbs, and broken wood, Elkins heaved up like a bear out of a trap, roaring and brandishing his knife, red to the hilt. Under his feet Kirby lay still and white in a broadening pool of crimson.
For an instant Elkins rocked on his straddling legs, glaring about him, shaggy head jutting truculently, knife lifted. Then with a yell he turned and ran for the door. A clamor broke out about and behind him, as a pack bays the fleeing wolf. Jim Kirby had been popular with the scum of the cowtowns.
“Stop him!“ ”Grab him!” “Shoot him!” “He murdered Kirby, the son of a—”
Another stride would carry the fugitive through the door and into the night, but in the square of light outside, a tall, lean figure loomed suddenly—Buck Chisom, the marshal’s gunfighting deputy. He heard the yells and acted with the steel-trap comprehension of his breed.
Elkins halted short; his thick arm shot back—but before it could snap forward in the motion that could nail a man to a tree with the thrown knife, Chisom’s hand, moving too quick for the sight to follow, came up with a gleam of blue steel. A jet of flame ripped the night. Elkins jerked spasmodically; he swayed backward, then pitched on his face, his fingers relaxing about the bloody hilt of his butcher knife.
When the buffalo hunter regained consciousness, his first sensation was a dizzy pain in his head. His next was an astonishment that he was alive, after having been shot by Buck Chisom at such deadly close range. He lifted his hand tentatively to his scalp and discovered it was crusted with dried blood, with which his bushy hair was likewise clotted. He swore. The bullet had merely creased his scalp, knocking him senseless. Evidently the light directly behind his target had dazzled Chisom. That his captor had not bothered to bandage his wound, Elkins did not resent, or even think about. Born and bred on the frontier, living a life incredibly primitive, the buffalo hunter had all the tough stoicism of the wild, and its contempt for pain and injury.
He was lying on a rude wooden bunk, which was scantily covered with a ragged blanket. He sat up, swearing, and instinctively reaching for the butcher knife he always wore strapped high on his left side, hilt forward. The sheath was empty, as he might have known it would be.
As he glared about him, a mocking laugh caused him to bristle truculently. He was where he would have expected to be—in the jail. It was a one-room building, made of undressed logs, with one door and one window. The window was barred, but even without the bars, it was too small to have accommodated Elkins’ bull shoulders. There were two bunks, and on the other sat the man who had laughed.
Elkins glared at him with scant favor. He knew him: a fellow named Richards, a lean, black haired, shifty eyed cowboy.
“Well, how you like it, fellow?” this customer greeted the discomfited plainsman.
“How would I like it, you bow-legged hedgehog?” roared Elkins. Attuned to the wide spaces and the winds of the great plains, the buffalo hunter’s voice was always a roar. “Just wait’ll I get my hands on that blamed marshal and his gun-throwin’ deperty! I’ll scour the street with their blasted carcasses!”
“Talk’s cheap,” sneered Richards.
“What you doin’, takin’ up for them rats?” demanded Elkins. “Didn’t they throw you in?”
“For drunk and disorderly conduck, yes,” admitted the other. “But I ain’t no derned murderer.”
“Who is?” rumbled Elkins, bristling instantly.
“You murdered Jim Kirby.”
“You’re a liar. I killed him like I would any other varmint. And when I get out of this den, I’m a-goin’ to commit some more necessary homicides.”
“When you git out,” predicted Richards vindictively, “you’re goinf to be decoratin’ a tree limb at the end of a rope. Listen!”
Elkins stiffened abruptly. The night wind carried the various sounds of the cowtown—but it carried another sound: the swelling, awesome roar of maddened men. The hunter knew what it meant.
“They’s enough rats in this town to hang me if they could get me,” he snarled; “but I reckon the marshal will handle ’em.”
“Well,” Richards leered as if at a secret jest, “I wouldn’t rely too much on Joel Rogers if I was you—nor Buck Chisom neither.”
Elkins wheeled suddenly. He seemed to fill the place, not only with his great bulk, but with his somber and ferocious personality.
“What you mean?” he demanded.
“That’s all right,” grinned Richards. “What I know, well, I know it; and what you don’t know won’t hurt you none—not after tonight!”
“You damned rat!” roared Elkins, eyes a-flame, beard a-bristle; “you’ll tell me right now what you’re a-hintin’ at!”
As he rushed like a maddened bull at the cowboy, the latter leaped from his bunk and met the hurtling giant with a smash that spattered blood from his mouth. Elkins replied with a bloodthirsty yell, and bent the lanky puncher double with a mallet-like blow to the belly, and then they grappled and went to the floor together.
Richards lacked the buffalo hunter’s bulk, but he was equally tall, and as hard and rangy as a timber wolf. Neither knew anything about scientific wrestling or boxing, but both were products of the frontier, and their style of fighting was as primitive and instinctive as that of a pair of grizzlies.
Kicking, biting, tearing, gouging, mauling, they rolled back and forth across the floor, smashing into the bunks and caroming against the walls. Rearing upright again, they slugged with primordial abandon, oblivious to the growing roar of the mob, to everything but the lust to obliterate each other. There was no attempt at defense; each blow was driven with the power and will to destroy.
Reeling back from a bear-like smash that tore his ear from his head and left it hanging by a shred of flesh, Richards kicked savagely at Elkins’ groin. The plainsman caught his ankle and wrenched sideways. Richards went down with a crash, and Elkins’s moccasin heel caught him squarely in the mouth, splintering his teeth.
With an inhuman yell the hunter leaped on the fallen man, driving his knee into Richards’s midriff; then seizing the man’s throat, he began to hammer his head against the log wall with a fury that would quickly have put the cowboy beyond human aid.
“Wait!” gasped the victim. He was a sorry sight, with one eye closed, an ear mangled, face skinned, blood streaming from smashed nose and torn lips. “I’ll tell you—”
“Then hustle!” panted Elkins, spitting out the fragments of a broken tooth. Blood trickled down the hunter’s beard, and his buckskin shirt was ripped open, revealing his great hairy chest which heaved from his exertions. “Hustle! I hear that derned mob.” His big hands maintained their vise-like grip on his victim’s neck.
“I had a bottle about a quarter full of whiskey on me when I come in here,” mumbled Richards. “I drunk it and laid down on the bunk to sleep, and whilst I was layin’ there, I woke up and heered Rogers and Chisom talkin’. They seen the empty bottle and thought I was dead drunk. They throwed you in here, and Rogers said tonight was as good a night as any to pull what they aimed to pull. He said he’d planned to set a house on fire, and do it whilst everybody was at the fire, but he said he knowed a mob was gatherin’ on account of Jim Kirby, he had so many friends, and people would turn out to a lynchin’ even better’n they would to a fire, so tonight was the night. And Chisom said yes.”
“But what they plannin’ to do?” roared Elkins bewilderedly.
“Rob the bank!” answered Richards. “I heered ’em talk about it.”
“But they’re laws!” protested Elkins.
“I don’t care. I knowed Chisom in Nevada. Regular outlaw then, and I guess he ain’t changed none. Who knows anything about Rogers? Ain’t no tellin’ what he was before he come here.”
Elkins realized the truth of this statement. In the cowtowns officers were likely to be chosen for their gun-skill, and no questions asked about their previous life. Hendry Brown came straight from Billy the Kid’s gang to the office of marshal of Caldwell; John Wesley Hardin, with a price on his head in Texas, was deputy sheriff in Abilene.
The buffalo hunter sprang up, brought back to a realization of his own predicament by a clamor that surged up and around the jail. He heard the sound of many feet running up the hard-packed road, a mingled thunder of shouts and oaths. There is no sound on earth so terrifying as the roar of a mob bent on the destruction of a fellow man. Richards, though he was not the one menaced, turned white and cowered back on one of the bunks.
Elkins snorted, much as a wicked old bull might snort in defiance. His beard bristled, his eyes flamed. A stride took him to the window and he gripped one of the long, thick bars in both his hands. Outside, men surged around the building, gun butts hammered on the door. Strident yells cut the night. Pistols cracked, and lead thudded into the door, bringing a yell of agonized protest from Richards, who was trying to compress himself into as small a space as possible. Elkins yelled back in wordless defiance. He braced his feet; his muscles cracked and bulged; the veins in his temples swelled. An explosive grunt burst from him, as the bar gave way at one end, and was torn out bodily. Another heave, and it was free in his hands.
He wheeled to the door, now groaning and bending inward beneath a terrific assault—he knew the mobsters had a log that they were using as a battering ram.
The door splintered inward, and for an instant he glared into the convulsed faces of the lynchers that ringed the doorway in the light of flickering torches—gamblers, bar-men, gunmen—tinhorns, thieves, criminals—not an honest cowboy or hunter among them.
An instant all stood frozen as he faced them, an awesome figure, tousled, blood-stained, gigantic, with his blazing eyes and iron bludgeon—then with a roar he hurtled through the broken door and crashed into the thick of them.
Yells of fury rose deafeningly, mingled with howls of pain and fear. Torches waved wildly and went out. Guns cracked futilely. In that melee, no man could use a pistol effectively. And in the midst of them Grizzly Elkins ravened like a blood-mad bear among sheep. Swinging the heavy bar like a club, he felt skulls cave in and bones snap beneath its impact. Blood and brains spattered in his face; the taste of blood was in his mouth. Men swarmed and eddied about him in the darkness; bodies caromed against him, wild blows fanned him, or glanced from his arms and shoulders. A better aimed or more lucky stroke crashed full on his head, filling his eyes with sparks of fire, and his brain with momentary numbness. A blindly driven knife broke its point on his broad belt buckle, and the jagged shard tore his buckskin and gashed his side raggedly.
Hands clawed at him, booted feet stamped about him. He tore, slugged, and ripped his way through a seething, surging sea of gasping, screaming, cursing humanity, ruthlessly smashing out right and left. Driving like a crazed bull, he plunged through the bewildered throng, leaving a wake of writhing, bloody figures to mark his progress. A dimly seen hand jammed a gun-muzzle full into his belly, but even as he caught his breath, the hammer snapped on an empty chamber, and the next instant the iron bludgeon fell and the unknown gunman crumpled.
Over his fallen form Elkins leaped, stampeding for the darkness. Behind him the crowd surged and eddied, screaming, cursing, not yet aware that their prey had escaped them. Blows were still struck blindly, pistols banged in the dark.
Reaching the first of the houses that lined the straggling street, a short distance from the isolated jail, Elkins darted behind them, and keeping to the darkness, gained the hitching rack of the Silver Boot. No one was in sight; even the barmen and the loafers had gone to watch the lynching. His bay horse stood as he had left it.
“Blast ’em!” swore Elkins, swinging into the saddle, “reckon they’d of left my hoss here to starve, dern ’em!”
He wheeled his mount, then hesitated, remembering what Richards had said of Joel Rogers and his gunfanning deputy. He did not doubt its truth. The time could not be riper for a bank robbery. In it reposed thousands of dollars, belonging to the cattle buyers, ready for the herds that would soon be drifting up the Chisholm Trail. Elkins had no love for the buyers or the trail drivers; the animosity between the buffalo hunters and the cattle men was a living issue. But the marshal and his deputy had done him an injury, left him as a bait to the raving mob; and in Elkins’ primitive code, a wrong unavenged was an unpaid debt. He reined his bay around and rode swiftly toward the bank.
He approached the building from the back. Like all things in that rude town on the western prairies, which had never seen steel rails until the past few months, it was crude—merely a plank structure, unpainted. Inside a wooden grille cut the building in half, and near the back wall stood a heavy iron safe which served as vault. No regular watchman was hired; guarding the bank was part of the duties of the marshal and his deputies.
Elkins halted behind the bank, threw the reins over his horse’s head, and drew from its saddle-scabbard the heavy single shot Sharps .50 caliber buffalo rifle. He had no sixshooter, and his knife was gone. Silently as a panther he approached the back door, ordinarily kept bolted. Now it stood partly open, and nearby Elkins saw a couple of horses standing in the deep shadow of the building. The thieves intended a quick getaway. A light showed through the crack of the door. A small candle on the floor lighted the figures of Joel Rogers and Buck Chisom. They were bending over the safe, and as Elkins looked, he saw Rogers strike a match and put it to the end of a fuse.
“We got to jump quick now, Buck,” the marshal hissed. “They’s enough of that stuff to blow us clean out—”
At that instant Elkins plunged through the door, threw down his big rifle and roared, “Han’s up, you all!”
Both men cursed, wheeled and came erect simultaneously. Rogers’ hand lurched to his scabbard. The roar of the big Sharps was deafening; a gush of smoke filled the place, through which Elkins saw Rogers sway and fall, his head a gory travesty. At that range the heavy slug had torn off the whole top of his skull.
Through the swirling smoke Elkins saw Buck Chisom’s hand dip like a flash and come up with a long sixshooter. Helplessly he stood, the empty rifle in his hands for the flashing second it took to transpire—then, even as the gunman’s blue barrel leveled—behind Chisom belched a cataclysmic detonation, the whole building rocked drunkenly; there was a terrible, blinding flash, the rending crash of tortured metal, the air was full of singing fragments, and something hit Elkins with a paralyzing impact.
Half conscious, he found himself lying out in the dust behind the bank, with a heavy weight pinning him down. This weight was Buck Chisom, whether dead or unconscious, the buffalo hunter did not stop to determine. Groggily he realized that the fuse lit by Rogers just before he ordered the men to surrender had exploded the charge meant to blow the safe. And he realized that an explosion terrific enough to catapult Chisom against him and hurl them both through the door, would have been heard for miles. People would be coming on the run to investigate, and he did not care to be found there.
Thrusting aside the limp figure of the gunfighting deputy, the hunter staggered up and whistled shrilly. His horse had bolted with the others, but obedient to its long training, it came galloping back, its reins streaming. On the great plains of the buffalo, a man’s life depended on his horse. Elkins swung into the saddle and headed south.
“Get along, Andrew Jackson; I don’t crave no words with the people of this here town. I’ve saved their dern’ bank, or anyways, the money in it, and I’ve done rid ’em of a couple of law-shootin’ thieves, but I don’t reckon I’ll try to explain. Things moves too fast for me in town, anyway. It’s us for the Nations, where nobody but Comanches yearns for our scalps.”