Cottonwood Death
by Mark Hinton

The boy was standing with his head down looking in the creek. He wasn’t looking up at the tree line when the riders came dropping out of the hills. By the time he noticed them, they were working across the meadow towards him. They came in a line. The rider in front wore a tan duster and black Stetson and rode a big blue roan. The second rider was wearing a gray hat and duster and was riding a small appaloosa. The rider in the back wasn’t wearing a hat. His hair was long and brown and blew out behind him. He wore a brown duster and rode a pinto that that was almost as big as the roan. Other riders were making their way down where the first three had descended.

When the first man got to the boy he stopped the roan and sat looking down at the boy. The roan tried to step closer to the creek for a drink but the man stopped it. It was a big horse. But the man was bigger.

The boy lifted his hand up to shade his eyes as he looked up at the rider who was hard to see because his back was toward the sun. The boy said nothing. The man whose eyes were hidden in the shade of his hat turned and watched the two nearest riders catch up. When he turned, the boy could see a scar running down his unshaved cheek. When the others got to where the boy was standing they stopped their horses, too. One horse and one rider on both sides of the big blue roan.

“That’s a nice horse, mister,” the boy said.

The man on the roan reached into his duster and pulled out a thin cigar. He put it in his mouth. He didn’t light it. He just sat there looking at the boy.

“It’s good fishin’ here. Usually when I come I bring my pole. You get some nice brookies in here.” He gave up looking at the man on the roan and turned his attention to the man without a hat. He wasn’t looking at the boy though. He was looking thorough his duster for something. 

The boy looked over at the man on the appaloosa. The man was holding a walnut handled .44. It was pointed at the boy. The boy opened his mouth to say something. Whatever he was about to say was lost in the roar of the pistol going off. The boy’s arms flew wide open and he tumbled over backwards into the creek. 

The man without a hat brought a match out of a pocket deep in his duster and handed it to the man on the roan. The man on the roan took the match, scratched it on his belt buckle and lit his cigar with it. When the cigar was lit he flipped the match towards the creek. It landed in the water next to the boy. The man on the appaloosa opened his pistol, pocketed the spent casing, and put a new shell from his belt into it. He put the .44 back into his holster. 

The big man on the blue roan spurred his mount forward into the creek. If the horse was bothered about stepping over the lifeless body of the boy, it gave no indication. When the horse had gotten upstream of the boy the man stopped and let the horse drink. He sat looking behind him at the line of men coming down the ridge and  through the trees. There were six of them. They brought their horses up to the creek and let them drink.

When the horses had drunk their fill, the riders turned downstream and up the gentle bank on the opposite side. There was a small road, wheel ruts really, that ran on that side of the creek underneath the cottonwoods. The ruts came through trees and around a bend and ended where the men sat on their horses. The man on the roan looked back over his shoulder at the ridge they had just come down. The sky was dark in that direction. 

“Storm might be comin’. Let’s get to town before it begins.” He said. He spurred his roan and the riders started down the road.

* * *

  Tom Stewart was walking between his small barn and the corral where he kept his team of mules when he saw the line of riders come out of the canyon and hit the main road to town. They were riding fast. He was surprised to see riders coming out of the canyon because he had been working along the creek and the creek road most of the day and had not seen anyone but the Kavanaugh boy go up that direction that day. 

When they hit the main road they turned south, away from Tom Stewart’s place towards town. From where Stewart was standing to the crossroads was a good quarter mile, but he knew he did not recognize any of the men or their mounts.

The road to Cottonwood turned south and dropped deeper into the valley. At the speed they were going the horses and riders were soon gone. Stewart stood looking at the faint trail of dust hanging above the road. After awhile he turned his head towards the creek and the canyon. Above the ridge line the Pintlers rose high and jagged against the darkening sky.

He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and pulled out a watch. He opened it, looked at it, then turned back toward the road. He closed the watch, put it back in his pocket and started towards the corral. He took just a few steps than stopped. He rubbed the back of his neck, looked back over his shoulder at the barn, and then looked back toward the road. The dust still hung in the air. It had been a long, dry summer. 

Stewart had been waiting for the Kavanaugh boy all afternoon. He was going to give him a ride to town. He had business with boy’s father and had a couple of errands in town. 

He headed toward the barn. If he was going to town he wanted the beat the storm that looked like it was coming in over the peaks.

* * *

  Pat O’Reilly had just finished loading his wagon at Kavanaugh’s General Mercantile when he heard the sound of horses. A group of men were coming across the bridge in a hurry… yelling. The noise grew louder as they got closer. Jack Kavanaugh and his wife Katie stepped out of the store and came and stood next to O’Reilly.

As the riders got closer O’Reilly and the Kavanaughs could hear what the riders were yelling. “Help! Help!” At the sound of the commotion the few other buildings that made up the little town of Cottonwood began to empty. Children running barefoot, men without hats, women walking as quickly as their skirts would allow started gathering around the three mounted men. 

One rider without a hat began to shout, “The priest! Where’s the priest?” As he was calling, the door to last building on the street opened up. A man in a black cassock came running up the street. His head was bare. He was thirtyish with short red hair and sun-burned skin.

“I’m Father Sullivan. What ‘s the problem?” he asked as he came to a stop in front of the big pinto. 

“You’re the problem, Irish.” The man on the pinto said pulling out a gun and pointing it at the priest. The two other men pulled their guns, too. Other riders were now coming hard down the road and across the bridge.

One of the women in the crowd screamed. The man without a hat turned his mount toward her and fired in one movement. The bullet hit her just above her nose and hit a man standing behind her in the shoulder exiting out the back of her head. They both went down.

Before they hit the ground, the other men on the horses started firing, too.

* * *
 

              When Stewart came out of the cottonwoods into the meadow, he was riding a big  dun and trailing a smaller pinto. He saw the boy right away, he was laying on the edge of the stream, his feet were in the sand but his shoulders and head in the water. Stewart dropped off the dun and ran to the boy, even though he knew it was too late. He pulled the boy out of the water and the sand up onto the clean grass. Above the boy’s left eye was an angry hole. Most of the back of his head was gone. Stewart stood for a while looking down at the boy. He went back to the pinto and brought it over to where the boy was lying. He took off the boy’s oversized coat and covered his head and shoulders. Then picked the boy up in his arms and carried him toward the pinto. The pinto shied back so Stewart had to try a couple of times to get the boy’s body draped over the saddle. When the boy was over the saddle Stewart tied him on and began leading the pinto back through the stream towards the dun.

* * *

The road into Cottonwood came out of the sage brush hills in a long, straight line until it reached the little bridge that crossed the cottonwooded creek that gave the town it’s name. From the top of the hill, Stewart looked down on what was left of the town. A few of the bigger structures, the general store, the O’Brien house, and the church still burned. Smoke and the smell of smoke hung over the little valley. Even up-wind where Stewart was, the smell was strong. He rode with his Colt in is right hand.

By the time he got to the bridge he could see the bodies laying in the middle of the street, in front of buildings, across the boardwalk. Men, women, children, horses, and even dogs lay where they fell. Moving down the street the smell of smoke was strong. But not strong enough to cover the smell of death. The pinto began pulling at its lead. Stewart got down, took the boy off the horse and laid the body gently down in the street next to the body of his mother. He untied the lead that held the small pinto. Once free it turned and ran back up the street and over the bridge. The dun stayed where its reins were dropped, trembling but not moving.

Stewart moved among the bodies. Looking for signs of life. He moved slowly. Looking at the bodies of children who had had parts of the faces blasted away. Mothers killed holding their dead and dying infants. Men shot in the back.

A dog was laying next to a little boy. The boy was missing part of his arm and nearly all of the right side of his face. The dog had been gut shot and had died slowly next to the boy.

Stewart moved down the street toward the church. As he got closer the bodies were fewer. When he got to the church he stopped. On the lawn in front of the smoldering ruins of the little church was a rough-made cross of fence posts and barbed wire. The lifeless body of the priest was tied to the cross with wire, a bullet hole in his head. His pants were off and someone had cut off his manhood. It was nailed onto the cross above his head with a rough painted sign that said, “Death to Papists”

It took him hours to carry all the bodies up to the graveyard that was on the hill above town. He found an overturned oxcart that he turned right-side up and hooked to the horses. He stacked the broken bodies like cordwood but it still took three trips. At first he tried digging graves, but the ground was hard and the bodies too numerous. Finally he took the cart down and filled it with wood that had not burned. He found kerosene in a root cellar behind one of the smoldering houses. He stacked three loads of wood over the bodies and doused everything with all the kerosene he could find. It was full dark by the time he lit the pyre.

He rode back to his place. The wind had shifted direction and he rode downwind of town and the pyre that flamed like a beacon in the night. He didn’t look back but the smell rode with him. When he got to his place, he took off all his clothes out in the yard and took a bath in the stock tank next to the barn. When he was clean he went up to the   little house and got dressed. 

It took him the rest of the night to pack the horses and supplies. The sun was just coming up over the hills when he swung up onto the dun. The pinto and the mules he had turned out into the pasture. He did not know how long he would be gone, but the meadow was big and there was was plenty of water. He had packed his gear onto a blue roan and brought an appaloosa as a spare. 

He rode back through town and picked up the trail. As best as he could figure there were nine to twelve riders and about two dozen horses, they hadn’t killed many horses. They had taken the best with them.

They were moving fast. He tried not to think of the head start they had on him. He knew that for awhile they would be moving as quickly as they could. But as the miles passed, they would begin to relax the pace. The trail was easy to follow because they were following the road that headed towards the Yellowstone. About mid-morning he came across where they had camped the night. The coals were long cool. 

Late in the afternoon he came to where they had stopped for coffee and something to eat. The coals where still a little warm. They had slowed their pace. 

A mile from where he found the coals the trail split. Most of the horses kept west along the Yellowstone road. But seven riders turned north and towards the mountains. He left the road and followed the tracks up into hills. 

* * *

They were not even trying to hide the fire. He had seen glimpses of it dancing and glittering in the night for last hour that he had been working his way through the trees up to the edge of the big box canyon where they had made camp. He had left his horses hidden in some thick firs next to the creek that the riders had been following all day. He had brought with him two pistols, a couple canteens, and his buffalo gun. His pockets were filled with shells.

He had been moving as silently as he could and it had taken him a long time to get where he could see the camp and the canyon. For the last half hour he had heard their voices growing louder as he got closer and closer.  Now that he was close enough to see into the camp, he could see that they were drinking and making so much noise that he could probably have ridden to where he was with cowbells on and they still would not have noticed.

He counted six men sitting around the fire passing around a bottle, and he counted seven horses staked up about seventy-five feet away along the little creek. He could not find the seventh rider. He wondered if he was guarding the horses.

Stewart started working his way around toward the horses, scanning the trees for  the guard. He moved as slowly as possible from tree to tree and shadow to shadow. Just before he got to the horses he looked again towards the men and the fire. He was above the camp a little and looking at it from a different angle. It took him awhile to understand what he was looking at, but when he did, he knew that there was no guard at the horses.

Lying just at the edge of the firelight was the still and nude form of a girl. She was laying on her side and in the firelight and the light of the moon she looked very white and very dead, her blank eyes staring out from beneath a big hole in her forehead. 

He unpicketed the horses. One of them nickered quietly but when he looked towards the fire he knew that no one had heard anything over the laughter and the loud voices.

It was like shooting fish in a barrel. They were night-blind from fire and three sheets to the wind. His first shot with the big buffalo gun took the head a man who was in the middle of some song that only he knew the words of.

Stewart dropped the big rifle and ran toward camp firing as he moved. Two of the men managed to get shots off but they were shooting blindly and drunkly into the dark. 

When he got to the fire he moved among the wounded, shooting each one in the head, until only one was left alive. He was a big man with a dirty duster who had been shot in his big belly. He was laying on his side, breathing hard through clenched teeth.

Stewart rolled him over with his foot. He had gone back into the night and gotten the buffalo gun and reloaded it. He pointed at the man’s forehead.

“I came across a prospector up above Bannock once. Someone had robbed him, staked him to the ground and shot him in the scrotum with a buffalo gun. It had taken the prospector a couple of days to die. The last thing he saw was a cy’ote eating his manhood,” Stewart said moving the barrel of the gun slowly down until it was pointed between the man’s legs.

“Now, you are gut-shot so you might not last the whole three days....” Stewart smiled slowly, “But then again the coyote’s probably won’t take three days to find you here neither. There is a lot of meat to draw their attention....”

The man’s eyes were huge.

Stewart continued. “The way I see it you got two choices, a bullet in the head or a bullet between your legs. Either one,” he said raising his eyes toward where the girl lay, “is better than you deserve.”

“What do you want...” the man hissed between his clenched teeth.

When the man had told him what he wanted to know, Stewart turned and started to walk away. 

“You said you would kill me,” the man said, grunting as he tried turn onto his side.

“So I did,” Stewart said, turning. He put the gun down and picked up a rock that was next to the fire and started back towards the man, “but a man like you ain’t worth the price of a bullet.”

* * *

He left the men lying where they had fallen. But he buried the girl as best he could under some firs far enough from the creek that spring runoff would not disturb where she lay. When he dropped the last stone on her grave he took his hat off and stood for awhile with his head down. He lifted his head and put his hat back on. He followed the creek back to his horses, saddled up, and followed his own trail back to the road and where the riders had split. 

He was dead tired but the road was straight and wide and he knew where the three men were headed, so he he dozed in the saddle and let the horse carry him along the wide, flat road toward Helena.

* * *
 

He rode up to the building and dismounted. He had boarded the other two horses at a livery on the edge of town. He thought he might have a hard time finding the building but it had been easy to find. The Masonic Temple is always easy to find. When Bannock had been the territorial capital, the Masonic Temple had been above the school. Here in the more prosperous and stable state capital it was a big stone building along Last Chance Gulch.

No one asked him for a sign or anything when he went in. He knew they wouldn’t. The temple in Helena was as much supper club and social club as anything else. A place for the rich and powerful to meet and socialize. 

At the first floor bar, he found out that the men he wanted were in a meeting up on the second floor. If the bartender who had gave him the information gave any thought to the long duster he was wearing or the stiff way he was walking, he gave no indication. 

When he got to the door, he unbuttoned the duster and untied the double-barreled 12-guage he had bought yesterday. He opened the door and walked in.

Four men were sitting at a table. There were papers in front of them and it was obvious that they were talking about whatever was in them. They all stopped talking and had their eyes leveled at the shotgun pointed at them. 

Stewart had been in Helena for three days. Two of the men he wanted were sitting at the table. The third, Johnson, was in a latrine behind his house four blocks away. His face had been beaten with the stock of the shotgun so bad that even his wife would not recognize him when she found him the next morning, lying on his back in the muck beneath the latrine 

“Whose armed? he asked. They all shook their heads.

“Jack White and Henry Stone” he said. Two men pointed and two just sat and looked at him. 

“You two, stand up slowly and go to that far wall and sit down on the floor... On your hands with your back to me. I got no business with you that I know of. I got two barrels though and they will tear the hell out of you if you don’t do exactly what I say.” Both barrels stayed on White and Stone.

When the two men were on the floor, Stewart looked at White and Stone. The Kavanugh boy would hardly have recognized the two men that killed him, except for the scar. They were clean and dressed in the fashion of prosperous businessmen. Stewart did not know what they looked like on the day they killed the Kavanaugh boy and the townspeople and priest of Cottonwood, but he knew what they looked like now. Arrogant and and angry.

“What is the meaning of this, sir” said the biggest of the two who had a scar running down his cheek. 

“Cottonwood, Montana.” Stewart said. The expression on the big man with the scar did not change. But the other man grew notably paler.

“What about it?” said the big man.

“Five days ago nine men rode into the town of Cottonwood and killed every man, woman, and child in town but one. The girl they did not kill there they took with them. Six men took her into the mountains and raped and killed her there. Three rode to Helena.”

As Stewart spoke the smaller of the two men got paler and paler and slumped back in his chair. The big man with the scar finally began to sweat. Stewart continued.

“I followed the six men and the girl up into the Big Belts. I was too late to save the girl but I gave her a decent burial. The men I left for the coyotes and the buzzards.”

“The other three I followed into Helena. One of those three men is dead.” Stewart said, looking at the big man with the scar. “He died this afternoon. I killed him. He told me the same story as I heard from one of the men in the Big Belts. But he knew more details.”

The smaller man had his head in his hands and he was crying softly. The big man with the scar was sweating profusely.

“Nobody will believe your story,” he said.

“I don’t care what other’s believe. I believe it.” Stewart said raising the shotgun.

“Are you a papist?” the big man asked, “An irishman?”

“My wife was.” Stewart said looking down the barrel at the two men. “When she died I figgered I had no more use for religion.”

“You think you’re some kind of avenging angel?” the big man said getting angry. “You think your going to Catholic heaven?” he asked his eyes shining and bright.

“I think I’m going to hell just like you, Reverend Stone. But you’re going there first,” Stewart said, smiling. Then he pulled the trigger.

The End