Ralph Compton Doomsday Rider

  DO OR DIE

  The Apache sprang at Fletcher, a low growl escaping his throat. He feinted to his left; then the bright steel blurred as he swung the blade blindingly fast to the right, leading with the razor-sharp edge, a cut designed to disembowel.

  Fletcher was unable to block the blow, but he stepped back and knocked the Indian’s arm down, and the knife flashed past his belly, opening up a six-inch slash in the thick sheepskin of Fletcher’s mackinaw but failing to reach the skin.

  The two men circled each other warily, Fletcher holding his Colt up and ready. With the forearm of his knife hand, the Apache wiped away blood from his mouth that ran in a scarlet stream from his smashed nose. But his black eyes glittered with hate and he showed no fear of the gun. Fletcher realized the warrior understood that he dare not shoot, so he was right in assuming there were others close by.

  Around the men the land lay silent and snow drifted softly between them from the black canopy of the sky. The rock towered above their heads, a stony, unfeeling witness to a desperate fight that must soon end in death for one man and perhaps two.

  Ralph Compton

  Doomsday

  Rider

  A Ralph Compton Novel

  by Joseph A. West

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, December 2003

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2003

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  ISBN: 978-0-698-18504-3

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Historical Note

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, where there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  One

  Swollen by an unseasonable snowmelt across the Great Plains that early December of 1872, the Big Muddy threw itself against an arrow-shaped sandbar three miles downstream of Lexington, Missouri. The river was turned aside, white water foaming in angry impotence around the northern bank of the promontory. Frustrated, the Missouri channeled a swift torrent of brown water and ice around the bar and hurled it venomously into the path of the 212-foot stern-wheeler Rajah.

  Rajah was firing hard, preparing to skirt the sandbar. Capt. Amos Buell, commanding, anxious to reach the city and unload his two hundred tons of freight and twenty-six passengers.

  Rajah’s boilers were glowing cherry red, her exhausts hammering, but Buell called for more power to the boat’s two engines.

  The river was coming at him fast and furious, challenging the stern-wheeler to reach its goal, no sure thing for a craft that drew just twenty inches and had 80 percent of her ramshackle bulk above the waterline.

  The paddle wheel had been rotating at twenty times a minute. Now the cast-iron-and-wood monster, twenty-five feet wide and eighteen feet in diameter, churned faster, increasing its revolutions to twenty-three a minute. Startled fountains of foam were thrown up as high as the boiler deck as the wheel’s paddles dipped into the river 168 times every sixty seconds.

  Captain Buell recklessly hurled his boat against the flood. Huge chunks of ice slammed into Rajah’s bow and banged against her iron sides, to be slowly washed astern. Her exhausts, located on the foam-lashed boiler deck, were pounding now, rattling the stabilizing hog chain that ran from the stern to the wheelhouse.

  Time and time again Rajah made a few feet of headway, only to be driven back by the river, the powerful torrent twisting the boat’s bow violently toward shore.

  Buell called for more power, but the Rajah had given all she had. There was nothing left to give.

  The boilers would not take a pound more pressure than they were carrying, and the engineer warned that the boat was in danger of being blown apart.
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  Buell decided against another attempt to round the sandbar where the river narrowed and thus concentrated its mighty strength. He’d smash right through the bar, trusting Rajah’s weight and momentum to carry her through.

  The captain reversed engines and Rajah backed up, going with the current, shuddering as huge slabs of ice thudded into her, threatening to buckle her thin plates.

  Standing on the boat’s hurricane deck, Buck Fletcher watched all this with interest but little joy. He was familiar with the stately, floating palaces that plied the Mississippi, but this boat was smaller and slower. However, he knew enough of river navigation to piece together Amos Buell’s strategy and the thoughts running through the man’s head.

  As Rajah continued to reverse, Fletcher guessed that the captain was going to let her pick up speed and meet the sandbar head-on.

  He did not give much for their chances, especially if the boilers burst and blew them all to smithereens.

  But then, a man shackled hand and foot, guarded by a nine-man infantry detail, had little to lose, including his life. He faced twenty years’ hard labor in the hell of the Wyoming Territorial Prison, and that was just another kind of death, slower certainly, but just as certain.

  “What’s he going to do, Major?”

  Fletcher turned as 2d Lt. Elisha Simpson stepped closer to him, his round, freckled face anxious, revealing the infantry soldier’s instinctive distrust of anything that floated on water. The boy was a West Pointer and looked to be about eighteen years old.

  Fletcher’s bleak smile lit up his long, lean, and hard face, still brown from the sun and untouched as yet by the gray pallor of prison, his wide, mobile mouth revealing teeth that were very white under a sweeping dragoon mustache.

  “I guess the captain is going to climb right over that sandbar ahead,” Fletcher said. “He knows he can’t buck this current and that’s the only way he can make Lexington this side of spring.”

  Fletcher shook his head. “And Lieutenant, don’t call me Major. The War Between the States is long over.”

  “Yes, Major,” Simpson said, only half listening as he studied the ice-studded river beyond the bow of the boat. The boy stood in silence for a few moments, his face screwed up in thought; then he turned his head and called out over his shoulder, “Corporal Burke!”

  The corporal, a grizzled veteran in his early fifties, stepped smartly beside the young officer and saluted. “Yes, sorr.”

  “Strike those chains from the major,” he said. “If we have to swim for it, I don’t want him weighed down by thirty pounds of iron.”

  Burke’s face was a study in confusion. “Sorr,” he said, his Irish accent strong, “does the lieutenant think that’s wise?”

  Such was the reputation of Buck Fletcher as a skilled and ruthless gunfighter and convicted murderer that the corporal was completely taken aback, an understandable reaction not unmixed with a certain amount of fear.

  “Yes, Corporal,” Simpson said, “the lieutenant is sure.”

  The officer studied Fletcher closely, taking in the amused blue eyes in the hard hatchet blade of a face. “Major, will you give me your word as an officer and a gentlemen you won’t try to escape if we have to swim?”

  Fletcher smiled again. “Lieutenant, if this tub blows up, we’ll all be dead and it won’t matter a damn whether you have my word or not. If we have to swim, we’d last about two minutes in that freezing water, so it won’t matter a damn that way either.” As he saw doubt cloud the boy’s eyes Fletcher’s smile widened and he nodded. “Sure, Lieutenant, you have my word.”

  That was all it took. The young officer didn’t question Fletcher any further. This man had once been a major of horse artillery in the army of the United States and he had given his word. That he might be lying did not, for even a single moment, enter into Simpson’s thinking.

  “Corporal Burke,” the lieutenant said, “strike those chains.”

  Grumbling under his breath, Burke unlocked the padlock that held the chains together, releasing Fletcher’s leg irons and then the manacles around his wrists.

  The soldier gathered up the chains and laid them, clanking, on the deck. Burke gave Fletcher a sidelong glance, his black eyes ugly. “Sorr, permission to fix bayonets.”

  The young officer hesitated for a few moments, then nodded, saying nothing, his cheeks reddening a little as he refused to look Fletcher in the eye. Burke gave the order and the detail fixed twenty-inch-long, spiked bayonets to their newly issued Springfield rifles. The young soldiers stood alert and wary, mindful that they were guarding a dangerous prisoner, a gunfighter who was said to have killed a dozen men in shooting scrapes from Texas to Kansas and beyond. Such men were deadly, certain, and almighty sudden, and there was no taking even the slightest chance with them, especially now that Fletcher’s chains had been removed.

  Despite the cold, as he shivered in his prison-issue canvas pants and shirt, Fletcher was amused. He understood how the soldiers felt. Most of them were raw recruits, and he knew he’d feel the same way if he were in their shoes.

  “She’s slowing,” Simpson said, looking back at the paddle wheel.

  “Now the captain will order full speed ahead and challenge that sandbar,” Fletcher said. He rubbed his wrists where the manacles had chafed them raw, a small motion nevertheless noticed by Simpson, who threw Fletcher an apologetic glance.

  “Better brace yourself, Major,” the young officer said. “When we hit, this boat could come to a mighty quick stop.”

  Fletcher grasped the rail in front of him and spread his feet wider.

  Rajah’s wheel was turning faster now, biting into the muddy water, propelling her forward. Thick black smoke and showers of sparks poured from her twin stacks, and her exhausts were thumping loud again.

  Chunks of ice, some of them as big as river barges, slammed into Rajah’s bow and sides, and the little boat shuddered and recoiled under the impact. Up in the wheelhouse Buell blasted the whistle, defying the river to do its worst. The whistle’s screams echoed along miles of the winding river valley, penetrating even the dank, crowded back alleys of Lexington. The ship’s bell was pealing, adding its incessant clamor to that of the whistle.

  It was said, Simpson yelled to Fletcher over the din, that Buell had melted five hundred silver dollars into the metal from which the bell was cast to improve its tone.

  “Sounds like six hundred to me,” Fletcher said, but the lieutenant didn’t hear.

  Rajah charged ahead, her paddles churning, shouldering aside ice as she rammed through coffee-colored water, the sandbar getting closer with every revolution of the wheel. . . .

  * * *

  “Life is just one big wheel,” Fletcher recalled warden Nathaniel K. Boswell saying to him just before he was taken under escort from the newly opened Wyoming Territorial Prison in Laramie two weeks before. “One day you’re on top of the world; then the wheel turns and you’re at the bottom again. That’s where you are, Fletcher, at the bottom, and you can’t get any lower.”

  The man had not gone into details about why Fletcher had served only a month of his twenty-year sentence before he was dragged from his cell and told he was being taken under army escort to Lexington, there to meet a man he didn’t know.

  “This man has a proposition for you, Fletcher,” Boswell had said. “I’m told there could be a great deal of danger involved, but I think you’d be very wise to take it.”

  Boswell shrugged, scratched under his beard with the stem of his pipe, then waved an indifferent hand. Apparently bored, he added, “Take this man’s proposition or stay here and rot with all the rest. The decision is yours, and I don’t give a damn one way or the other.”

  It was a choice of a sort, but really no choice at all, and Fletcher had jumped at it.

  “Who is this man?” he’d asked. “And why in Lexington?”

  Again the warden shrugged. “I have no idea, but he has considerable power and influence. I know that.” Boswell was a former United States
deputy marshal and his eyes were cold and unforgiving. “If it was up to me, I’d pen you up forever, Fletcher, you and all your kind, paid killers and plunderers. But President Grant himself signed the order for your temporary release, and I can’t ignore that kind of authority.”

  The warden nodded to the guards who flanked Fletcher. “Take him out of my sight until his army escort arrives.” As Fletcher was shuffling from the man’s office, his heavy leg irons clanking, Boswell had called out after him, “Do us all a favor, Fletcher. Get yourself killed.”

  * * *

  “A man could get killed this way, Major,” Lieutenant Simpson yelled to Fletcher above the roar of Rajah’s engines and her shrieking whistle, bringing him back to the present. “I’ve never had much love for boats.”

  Fletcher nodded and placed his mouth next to the young officer’s ear. “Best you tell those boys of yours to find something to hold on to,” he said. “When she hits the bar some of those men could end up going over the side.”

  Simpson half raised his arm in salute, then realized what he was doing and his face colored again. “Corporal Burke!” he yelled more loudly than necessary, covering up his mistake. “Get the men braced for a collision.”

  Thirty seconds later Rajah hit the sandbar hard. She rammed through half the bar’s width and came to a jolting stop. Her wheel was still churning, throwing up high fountains of muddy water, black drops spattering Fletcher and the soldiers far forward on the hurricane deck.

  Buell backed his boat off, readying Rajah for another try. It seemed that more ice was banging against her hull, driven by raging, ugly water, and now, adding to everyone’s misery, sleet began to fall, driven by a rising wind from the north.

  It had gotten progressively colder since the day began, and as the gray afternoon slowly shaded into night, the temperature plunged, surely ending any hope of residents along both banks of the Missouri that the recent snowmelt portended an extended Indian summer.

  Rajah charged the sandbar again, backed off, charged a second time. Then a third, and a fourth.