Black Sun, The Battle of Summit Springs, 1869 (40 page)

And it was time to move on.

“You're ready?”

Seamus looked up to find Cody's face.

“Is the horse—”

“Saddled and watered. Packhorse too. Tied out front. McDonald and the others are out there. Waiting.”

Behind Cody a throat cleared and the young scout turned, stepped aside to allow Major Eugene A. Carr into the tiny space.

“Mr. Donegan, I wanted to bid you farewell myself,” he began, taking his hat from his head. He held out his hand. “You proved yourself of great service to the Fifth.”

“Thank you, General Carr,” he said as they shook.

He put his hat back on his head then fussed with his mustache a moment. “I'll be on my way, Irishman. Just wanted to let you know of my appreciation. And, for some reason I can't shake—I feel certain we'll see one another again.”

“I don't figure on being back here for a long time, General.”

Carr smiled. “Be that as it may, the plains aren't all that big, Mr. Donegan. So, till we meet again on another trail.”

“General,” he replied, watching the officer go.

Cody came up to the cot. “This all you have?”

Seamus looked down at the bedroll and the saddlebags beneath his heavy mackinaw coat. It wasn't much, he had to admit that. “Man don't need much where I'm going.”

Cody scooped them up then moved slowly behind Donegan as the Irishman inched his way to the door. “Where's that, Seamus?”

“Hell, in the end, Cody. Hell.”

They laughed all the way down the canvas-walled hallway and out the back-door hung on leather hinges. A cold November breeze greeted him among the shadows of morning.

“I can smell Louisa's perfume on you, Bill.”

Cody smiled as they shuffled slowly down the side of the saloon. “She's waiting to see you off. Little Arta too.”

That made him feel sad and happy at the same time. Thinking about Jenny of a sudden—sensing the completeness Cody had in his own life.

There beside the horse and pack-animal, Seamus said farewell to the civilians and the soldiers alike. Louisa Cody pecked him on the cheek and stepped back while Cody hoisted up his daughter for a quick hug with the Irishman. Then it was time to pull himself into the saddle.

At first Bill stepped in to help, but with a stern look of admonition from Donegan, the young scout backed off.

Seamus did it himself.

Cody handed him the rope leading back to the packhorse. “You write me when you get down to Denver,” he said, his hand on the stirrup fender next to Donegan's wounded leg.

“I ain't much at writing.”

“Damn you—I know good and well you've written your mother every time you were back here at McPherson or Sedgwick, Fort Lyons or Wallace.”

“Didn't think you paid much attention to that.”

“It don't have to be much in the way of a letter—just let me … let us know how you're faring, Irishman. We'll run across one another sometime soon.”

Donegan smiled, something reassured inside him. “I know we will, Bill Cody.” He reached down and shook hands with the scout. “You take care of that family of yours.”

“You take care of yourself, Seamus.”

“God bless you, Seamus Donegan,” Louisa Cody sang out, waving.

“God bless you too, Louisa. See that you take care of Bill for me.”

He sawed the reins aside and tapped heels. The packhorse came along smartly. There was little for it to carry—but the animal might bring a price in Denver if the need arose. And come spring, there was still that trip over the mountains into the unknown—all the way to the western sea. Looking for …

Seamus turned once in the saddle and looked back as he left behind the squat buildings of Fort McPherson beneath the rose of a rising sun of that November morning. Heading south by southeast along the Platte for Colorado Territory and the ten-year-old settlement sprung up alongside Cherry Creek.

Waving, he choked down the remorse of a sudden he felt for leaving. Not in leaving so soon, but in leaving people behind at all. He was always pulling away from what he knew and understood. Forging ahead into what he knew least but what drew him most, like iron fillings to a lodestone.

Liam's clue might take him far enough come spring. Eighteen and seventy it would be, he thought as his leg adjusted to the sway of the horse, and the taut muscles of his back grew accustomed to the rhythm of the saddle. He knew of nothing north of California—only Oregon country. Perhaps that alone was the pull west to find Uncle Ian O'Roarke.

But first he would winter in Denver City, working as need be to pay for room and board. The men down at the Elephant Corral might have work, even Marshall Dave Cook might prove in need of help.

There in the shadow of the Rockies he would be close to Cripple Creek and the miners who might have heard or know of the O'Roarkes. It was there in the mountains south of Denver City that the brothers had their falling out before Ian fled west and Liam began haunting the plains.

The last known whereabouts of Ian O'Roarke was the place to start—Cripple Creek.

And the only way to get there was to put one mile at a time behind him, one sunset at a time.

He looked back on the little gathering once more, feeling the pull like working the new, taut skin on his leg as he stretched it each day. The group stood there still, watching him reach that first rise in the landscape behind which he would disappear from them, they from him.

Tonight's sunset would be the hardest, he realized. It never got easier saying good-bye to friends.

But tonight's sunset would be the hardest of all.

 

HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM
DEVIL'S BACKBONE,
THE NEXT VOLUME IN THE ACCLAIMED
PLAINSMEN
SERIES BY TERRY C. JOHNSTON:

Chapter 1

Early Spring, 1871

“Bloody right we'll share a drink one day soon, old man,” Seamus Donegan whispered quietly to himself as he folded Sam Marr's letter and stuffed it in one of the big pockets on his canvas mackinaw, his heart awash wth memories of the man who had ridden north up the bloody Bozeman Road with him five years before.

With a sigh, he stepped down into a stream of sunshine that poured through the breaks in the pewter clouds like liquid butterscotch.

The tall Irishman had to admit there was something about this high country that could capture a man's heart. Both that country down around Cripple Creek in Colorado Territory and up here in the Montana diggings. He had left the first behind a year before to follow the ghostly trail of his uncle here to the gold boom towns that had sprung up along Alder Gulch. Seamus had passed his thirtieth birthday getting here up the backside of the Rockies.

He smiled as the sunshine warmed a freshly shaved cheek. Seamus still favored the sweeping mustaches and the long, bantam tuft sported just beneath his lower lip. The smile was as warm as the sunshine—warm in remembrance. Was a time he and Sam Marr had tried their hand getting up the Bozeman Road into this part of Montana—and both had been lucky to come through those days with their hair.

Unconsciously he caressed his fingers on the old mountain man's medicine pouch Seamus carried, tied, around his neck on a buckskin thong beneath his woolen shirt, then swung into the saddle atop the ugly roan he had traded from Teats at the Elephant Corral in Denver City back in the fall of 'sixty-nine. Coming there from Fort McPherson and his brush with death at the hand of a renegade mulatto.

Seamus nodded to the owner of the shanty mercantile who also served as Nevada City's postmaster and reined up the street. Headed out of town and bound for northern California.

He had been a long time coming this far, learning this much. But he sensed he was on his last leg of a long, long journey at last. Spring was breaking winter's hold on the high passes, and Seamus figured he could be in California diggings by early fall.

What would happen when he arrived there was no way to tell. If only he could only find another wisp of a clue to the whereabouts of Ian O'Roarke out here in northern California …

Perhaps that fickle, fickle bitch called Fate would smile on him as warmly as the sun caressed his neck right now. It had been a long winter going here in Montana Territory. After a long winter down in Colorado as well. Both winters filled with too damn much time spent remembering faces, tastes and smells—and the touch of a certain woman who alone still kicked around inside his empty heart.

Back to the fall of 'sixty-nine he had gone to Denver City, his wounds still taut and pink and puckered. But the work he hired on to do at Teats's Elephant Corral slowly loosened up hide and sinew. Through that winter he had bedded down in the corner of a spare room at the back of a gambling hall place. Denver City was full of gambling halls and whore-cribs, and there was never any lack of something to do for a man with healthy hands and strong back in that town. Nor were there any lack of diversions for a man's purse.

The whiskey was strong—better than a man would find out along the string of posts and forts dotting the high plains where the sutlers invariably watered down their stock, stretching their profit margin.

Besides the more potent whiskey, in Denver City a man could find the girl of his liking, be she fleshy or thin, dark or pale, Mexican, Oriental or a smoke-skinned buffalo-haired chippie.

Many were the times it ate at him—this not knowing why the coffee-colored mulatto had hunted him down and nearly killed him in that stinking slip-trench latrine back of Bill McDonald's watering hole serving the frontier soldiers stationed at Fort McPherson, Nebraska Territory. If it hadn't been for Bill Cody come back to the latrine looking for him …

Time and again he shook off the dread of the thought and learned to celebrate each new night he allowed himself to share with a new chippie in a different crib. One hurrah a week was about all Donegan could afford dipping into his purse, what with the way he went at the whiskey and the women. As the months following Summit Springs had become years now, he had noticed some subtle changes that warned him he was getting older. No longer did he revel in all-night celebrations, wearing down the whiskey and the women both as he had once done. No, it was plain as paint he was slowing. It took longer to pull himself from the blankets the next morning when the sun came brutally calling.

As if that weren't the damnedest thing about aging now—not only were the bad times getting him down all the more, but the good times took their toll on him as well.

Come the spring of eighteen and seventy there in Denver City, Seamus admitted he had his gullet fill of it all and promised himself he would follow down the only clue Liam O'Roarke had left of his brother Ian. The two had their falling out in a place called Cripple Creek, Colorado Territory.

There had been times the Irishman wondered why he was even trying to follow the ghostly trail of his uncle when it seemed the only one who cared was his mother. And each time Seamus finally admitted it mattered every bit as much to him. It was family.

Surprisingly, it hadn't taken all that long to find some sign of Ian. A few questions asked at the marshal's office led him to track down a one-legged ex-prospector who lived in a shanty down below the creek. It was he who had known the O'Roarke brothers in better days.

“You do resemble 'em both, come to look at you,” said the old man as he backed up to allow the Irishman room to pass into the low-roofed shanty built back into the hillside.

They both settled at the sheet-iron stove. Eventually that night, Seamus eased around to telling the man Liam was dead—buried in an unmarked grave out on the prairie.

“Heard something of that fight you had out there on the Arikaree, son,” the old man admitted with no lack of admiration. “There was talk of it for weeks.” He shook his head. “Must've been something—nine goddamned days. Shame though … Liam's gone.”

Seamus found the old man's eyes boring into him.

“He was the better of the two, boy. You know that, don't you?”

He had to nod. “You're not the first to tell me.”

The old man went back to gazing at the glow of the fire through the slots in the stove door. “Not that the older one was really a bad sort—just that … seems he was weaned on sour milk. Always took offense at everything.”

“You knew them—both me uncles?”

He finally nodded. “We panned—worked the same sluice.”

“Threw in together?”

“For some time, we did,” he replied. “Until the woman came to mess things up.”

“The woman?”

With a gap-toothed smile, he answered. “Woman always does make for the devil with a man, don't she?”

“I suppose she does, at that,” Donegan admitted. “What happened?”

“She belonged to another man. He bought her in Denver afore crossing over the hills here to Cripple Creek.”

“She was bought?”

“Paid for proper—with paper money. A young thing, too. Her folks was poor-off, so they up and sold her to the fella.”

“How was it Ian O'Roarke ended up with her?”

“She was tired of the beatings from the man—so cast her eye out for someone who'd help her,” he replied. “Ian was there—under her spell from the start. Not that I blame the girl none. She was needing help—and that's the Bible's truth of it.”

“They ran off—Ian and this girl?”

“Not before things got ugly, son. One Sunday morning, it was. The fella—this husband of hers—he found out she had been talking to O'Roarke. Others with loose jaws that liked to flap had seen 'em together a'times in secret. He come roaring in, saying she was his property, bought and paid for proper. If O'Roarke wanted her, he'd come up with the money or leave Cripple Creek for good.”

Seamus wiped a hand across his dry mouth. “How much?”

“Five thousand in gold.”