Tamer, Chapter Ten

Winged!

Sizemore found following the deer track through the thicket harder than it had seemed when Kuttner was riding point. The brush slowed his mount to little more than a walk and the second lieutenant was forced to bat low branches out of his face with Kuttner’s pistol. The gun seemed heavier than any sidearm he had used in military academy, which wasn’t surprising since his experience with pistols was limited to a cap and ball model: most of his firearms training had been with a flintlock carbine and the Mississippi rifle, the Army’s two standard weapons.




He ended up switching the big gun from his right to his left as he made his way through the wood because holding it at port arms for long in either hand wearied his shoulders and made his forearm numb.


He had been annoyed when Riley ordered him to accompany Kuttner to San Francisco, feeling the general was getting rid of him temporarily by sending him on a goose chase. He felt that Kuttner had been right in suggesting that a squad of pony soldiers would be a more secure way of sending the stolen gold back to the Presidio. Now that he and Kuttner were being tracked by strangers, his conviction was even stronger; Kuttner’s speculation notwithstanding, for all they knew, those horsemen behind them might be robbers who had somehow found out about the gold they were transporting.


“Damn it,” he muttered to himself. “This scheme of sending two men to do the job of six is going to end up getting both men killed and putting the gold back in the hands of outlaws in the bargain!”


As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized that he was supposed to keep his noise to a minimum and fell silent; his horse was making enough racket as it was.


He had been pushing through the wood for only a few minutes when he heard the sound of a shot far behind him, followed seconds later by another. The reports sounded like rifle fire and he hoped that it was Kuttner who was doing the shooting and not the strangers pursuing them. He spurred his horse, worrying about the fourth horseman that Kuttner said had split off from the others. He supposed that the missing man might have taken a route closer to the crest, where the big pine trees tended to keep down the undergrowth and he could circle back around in ambush. If that was so, he figured that the fourth rider might be someplace ahead of him, lying in wait.


Sizemore swallowed nervously and urged his mount on.


Only a few minutes more had passed when he heard another series of shots to his rear. Unless his pursuers were shooting at each other, he thought to himself, at least Kuttner hadn’t been killed in the initial fusillade of bullets!


Sizemore continued to push on through the brush, growing edgier with every step his horse took. He guessed that he had travelled at least a mile or more when the brush began to clear out and he found himself moving through a stand of fir trees that allowed him to pick up his pace. He still had seen no sign of the fourth rider, though he realized that his pony could be following another horse’s tracks without his knowledge. It began to occur to him that little of what he had learned at West Point had prepared him for the wilderness of California’s coastal mountains. He would happily have traded several weeks of studying historical battle tactics for a few days of training in woodcraft and tracking.


It had been getting darker for some time and the gloom of the forest intensified Sizemore’s jumpiness. He had begun to imagine leering gunmen behind every tree he approached, so when one did emerge from behind a stand of fir only twenty feet in front of him, the split second it took him to realize that the figure in the brush was not a phantom was long enough for the man to drop to one knee and get off a shot that drilled the second lieutenant’s mount in the middle of its breast.


The bullet apparently passed directly through the animal’s heart, killing it instantly, because the horse crumpled to its right side with barely a sound, pinning Sizemore’s leg underneath. As Sizemore struggled to pull himself free, the gunman circled his fallen mount and cocked the hammer on his pistol. Belatedly, the second lieutenant realized that the real threat was the man in front of him raising his gun, not the dead horse on top of his leg. Kuttner’s big colt was still in his left hand and as Sizemore cocked the weapon with his right, his assailant fired his own pistol.


The bullet struck the second lieutenant in the right shoulder with the force of a mule’s kick, knocking him flat on the ground. The pain was agonizing and Sizemore groaned, close to swooning, as the fourth rider stepped closer. The second lieutenant opened his eyes to see the gunman, almost on top of him, cock his pistol for the killing shot.


Sizemore swung the Colt up toward his assailant’s face and pulled the trigger in desperation. The roar of the pistol was deafening and to Sizemore’s surprise, a black hole nearly a half inch wide appeared in the middle of the gunman’s forehead . Sizemore wasn’t the only one who was surprised; his assailant’s face registered open-mouthed astonishment for a split second, just before he sagged to the ground silently like a marionette with its strings severed, his eyes frozen in a stare of disbelief.


Grunting with effort, Sizemore struggled to free his leg. Fortunately, the ground where the animal had fallen was covered with a heavy coat of fir needles and cones and the mat had helped cushion the fall so the horse’s bulk hadn’t broken the second lieutenant’s leg. After a few moments’ effort, Sizemore had managed to pull himself free of his dead mount; shivering with cold as blood pumped from his shoulder, he managed to drag himself to a nearby fir tree he could lean back against.


He pulled his John Russell knife out of his pocket, worked the blade open with his teeth and his left hand, and then used it to cut the sleeve of his woolen shirt off his useless right arm. With some difficulty he cut a strip from the sleeve. He wadded the remaining material and used the strip to fasten it against the bullet wound in his shoulder, tightening the binding by twisting it with a stick he found on the ground nearby.


His entire shoulder was aflame with pain and he figured the bullet must have shattered his shoulder blade or collarbone. There wasn’t much he could do about that. He knew that the man who had shot him must have a horse tethered someplace nearby, but he felt too weak and dizzy to get up, so looking for the animal was out of the question. He would have to rest a while first. Maybe in a little bit he would feel well enough to find the animal.


He wondered about Kuttner. Had he survived his encounter with the other outlaws or had he, too, been shot? Even someone who seemed as lucky as Kuttner couldn’t cheat death forever. If one of the other riders had killed him, his killer might be coming after Sizemore next.


He shivered and hefted Kuttner’s Colt. It might be the only thing standing between him and an early grave.


Sizemore looked at the dead outlaw on the ground near his horse with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion. The man he had killed might have been as much as ten years older than he was and the expression on his face as he died had made him appear shocked at how easily his life had been taken.


Since he had joined the Army, Sizemore had often wondered what it would feel like to kill a man. The only dead people he had ever seen before this had been an invalid aunt who had been staying with his parents when she passed on and the five bandits at the undertaker’s office back in Monterey.


He was surprised to find that he didn’t feel much at all. As he slipped into shock, he shivered with cold but didn’t have the energy to get the bed roll off the saddle on his dead horse. I just need to rest a bit, then I can sort things out, he thought, his head clouded with pain. A little rest will do me good.


A few seconds later he passed out.






#






Kuttner was making good progress through the chemise and Manzanita when he heard the sound of a shot some distance ahead, followed quickly by another. He stopped for a moment, straining to listen. In a few seconds, he was rewarded by the sound of another blast—one that sounded like one of his own Colt pistols. As the forest once again fell silent, he spurred his horse forward, fearing the worst for his traveling companion’s safety.


It took him about ten minutes to find the break in the underbrush and he could see Sizemore’s track on the forest floor when he reached easier going in the woody area on the shoulder of the ridge. Sizemore had been traveling at a pretty good pace in the open area between the trees, judging by the hoof prints that had turned up moist earth under the dried fir needles and cones. The trace would have been harder to see if the weather hadn’t been unnaturally dry, but Kuttner had to follow it quickly because night was already falling in the forest and soon he would be unable to make out the marks made by Sizemore’s mount.


His pistol at the ready, Kuttner urged his horse forward at the trot, watching the trail at the same time he scanned for danger ahead. Sizemore’s track was solo, so whoever was responsible for the other shots apparently came on him from his front rather than his rear. It was clear that what he had feared had happened: the missing rider had followed a faster trail farther from the ocean than Kuttner had selected and had managed to circle around to wait for the second lieutenant.


The woods were in nearly complete darkness when he spotted the dark mass of Sizemore’s horse on its side near a stand of firs about fifty feet away. He dismounted and moved forward quietly, his Colt cocked for action. Peering into the gloom, he saw a human form sprawled on the ground a few yards from the horse.


“Oh, shit!” Kuttner said fearing the body was that of Sizemore.


But when he got closer, he could see by the duster he was wearing that the fallen man was the missing rider. The outlaw, who was still holding a cocked revolver in his hand, had taken a shot in the forehead that had knocked off his hat. He was quite dead.


Nearby he heard a groan that made his drop to one knee and raise his Colt. Although it was nearly completely dark, he spotted another body propped up against the trunk of a fir tree. Crouching, he made his way to the figure.


“Thank God!” he said with relief when he realized that the other man was the second lieutenant.


Kuttner gathered some dead wood and dry twigs from the forest floor and built a small fire that he got burning by quickly using some of his rifle powder and a Lucifer from the store he kept inside a bottle in his ammunition kit. He examined Sizemore’s wound under the light from the blaze with a frown.


“Well, son,” he told the unconscious officer, “You have lost a hell of a lot of blood, which isn’t good. On the plus side, you managed a pretty damn fine field dressing for that bullet hole in your wing and I think you can thank it for saving your life. It managed to stop up the hole enough to keep you from bleeding to death before I got here.”


He swaddled the wounded man with the blanket from Sizemore’s bedroll and tossed more wood onto the fire to help keep the second lieutenant warm while he dragged the outlaw’s body away from the clearing, hunted down the dead man’s tethered horse and brought the animal back to his makeshift campsite.


Through a stroke of good fortune, the dead horseman had some beans in his gear and some ground chicory that would stand in place of coffee. Kuttner salvaged the tack from Sizemore’s dead horse by torch light and then found a little creek a few hundred yards away where he could water the horses and fill his and Sizemore’s canteens. When he returned, he found the second lieutenant had regained consciousness but was racked with pain.


“Take it easy, son,” he said, giving Sizemore some water. “I’ve got some water heating for dinner and a hot drink. We’ll see if we can get you to Santa Cruz tomorrow. Hopefully somebody there will be savvy enough to get that gunshot cleaned up and dressed so we can take you to San José for some real medical care.”


Sizemore shivered, still feeling chilled by his loss of blood. “I’m glad to see you again, Amos,” he said. “I wasn’t sure whether you made it or not. When I woke up, I didn’t know where in hell I was. I killed that fellow, didn’t I? It sort of seems like I dreamed it.”


Kuttner smiled. He’d noticed that Sizemore called him by his given name instead of his military rank. That seemed right to Kuttner: Sizemore had showed courage and cool in killing an outlaw who had already seriously wounded him; He had earned the right to call the lawman by his first name and Kuttner intended to respond in kind.


“It wasn’t any dream, John,” he said. “You put a bullet right through his skull. That’s pretty fair shooting for somebody who already had an ounce of lead in his own shoulder. You showed great presence of mind, son. Where’d you learn to shoot like that?”


Sizemore grinned wearily despite his pain. “Skill my ass,” he said gruffly. “That son-of-a-bitch was almost right on top of me when I pulled the trigger. I can’t even remember if I had my eyes open or not. It would have been pretty hard to miss him at less than six feet.”


Kuttner gave him more water. “Well, whether you were looking or not, you hit what you were shooting at, and that’s all that counts,” he said. “Besides, you finally got your wish.”


Sizemore frowned. “What wish was that?” he asked.


Kuttner grinned. “You’re finally off the back of a horse,” he said. “Unfortunately, it took a bullet in your shoulder to get you there.”

(Continued)


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Tamer, Chapter Nine

Trouble Times Three

Kuttner worked his way to a stony outcropping about two hundred yards above the deer track he and Sizemore had been following and pulled out the spyglass. He had a good clear view about two miles back down the coast and his elevation gave him a much better perspective than he had the last time he had checked to see whether those four riders were behind them.

By resting the horses frequently and alternating between a canter and a trot on the trail, they had managed to cover nearly half the distance to Santa Cruz over the last seven hours. Now that they were climbing up alongside the Pacific, however, they were reduced to leading their horses and picking their way through chaparral, live oak scrub and coast redwood.


Wiping the lenses with a pocket flannel, Kuttner extended the brass tube and leaned against a granite boulder for stability, then peered through the glass as he scanned the trail. What he saw didn’t make him happy: the riders were behind them again, but there were only three of them now. The fourth fellow was missing completely.


He slid the glass back shut and put it back into the leather pouch around his neck, then half hopped and half slid down the side of the cliff to where Sizemore was waiting with the horses.


“Trouble,” Kuttner said breathlessly as the second lieutenant rose to his feet. “We’re being followed again, but I can only see four of those old boys who were behind us when we left Monterey.”


“Are you sure they’re the same men?” Sizemore said, clearly rattled.


Kuttner nodded curtly. “Count on it, son,” he said. “All four of those fellows in Monterey were wearing light gray dusters and hats, and the three back there on the coastal trail are in the same sort of rig. What’s more, one of their horses was a big Bay with a long black mane, white stockings on his front legs and a white patch shaped like a teardrop right between his eyes. I’d recognize that horse anywhere. The second rider in the group is riding the very same animal.”


“Shit,” Sizemore said angrily. “I was hoping we could make camp soon, damn it. My ass is just about to give out. Who do you figure they are?”


Kuttner glanced back the direction they had come. “I’m pretty damned certain that they’re most of what’s left of the Morales gang,” he said grimly. “Nobody else would be going to this much trouble to follow us. Lord knows how far toward San Juan they got before they figured out we’d doubled back on them and gone North along the coast. It must have taken them a while to find our track, and they had to ride like the devil to catch up as much as they have. Anybody who works that hard to stay on someone’s trail sure as hell isn’t just planning to pay them a social call.”


Sizemore looked as if he was going to be ill. He originally had figured that the worst hazards he would face on this jaunt to San Francisco would be boredom and saddle sores. Now that he faced real danger, he was beginning to wish he had been right.


“I’m going to lay up here and wait for those three while you move on ahead,” Kuttner said, pulling his Mississippi percussion cap rifle and ammunition pouch out of the scabbard attached to his saddle. “They’re out of rifle range right now, but I’m going to see if I can pick them off when they reach that big sweep alongside the ocean we passed about a half hour ago. I have good vantage point from that granite shelf up there on the hillside. I want you to go on. Follow this deer track we been tracing. I’ll catch up after I do what I have to do.”


Kuttner grabbed Sizemore by the wrist as he swung up into his saddle. “Lieutenant, keep your damned eyes open as you go, you hear?” he said, locking eyes with the junior officer. “There’s another one of those hombres out here somewhere. If I was him, I would be working my way around and trying to set up an ambush someplace ahead myself.”


Pulling one of his Colts from its holster, he handed it to Sizemore, butt-first.


“You ever shoot one of these?” he asked.


Sizemore, his face ashen, shook his head.


Kuttner pulled his own revolver and held it up sidewise so Sizemore could see it. “Pull back the hammer until it seats to fire, like this,” he said, thumbing his back. “Then all you have to do is pull the trigger. You have to cock it each time you fire it, but you have six shots total and it fires a hell of a lot faster than some damn ball and cap pistol.”


He watched as Sizemore demonstrated that he could cock the Walker.


“Now, let the hammer back down real easy,” he said. “That’s it! As long as you don’t cock it, it isn’t going to fire. Keep it in your hand and be ready. You may just have to use it before too long. Now git! I’ll catch up with you.”


He waited until Sizemore had disappeared into the brush and then worked his way back up the skid on the hillside from his earlier climb.


The boulder he had set his spyglass on made a good brace for Kuttner’s .54-caliber Mississippi rifle, a weapon he had retained when he mustered out of the Army. He poured a charge of powder into the muzzle, tamped it with the ramrod that fitted into the stock beneath the barrel and used the rod to set a ball for his first shot. He set his powder horn and two more balls in a small depression in the granite next to where he rested the rifle’s stock.


Sighting down the barrel of the weapon, he swung it toward the long crescent of shoreline that he and Sizemore had crossed a short time earlier. If he started firing when the riders entered the patch of light sand at its most distant point, he would have to hit his first target at roughly 800 yards. It would be a tough shot, but well within his rifle’s range.


From there on, however, things would get tricky. If the riders were cool headed and went to the gallop when the first shot was fired, Kuttner would probably only manage to shoot one of them before the others reached cover. The entire length of the beachfront was unobstructed: there were no large rocks and almost no sizeable stumps or lengths of driftwood to hide behind, so he figured that the horsemen would have to cross about three hundred yards of open space once he began shooting. He would have to aim carefully and reload as quickly as possible to have a chance at stopping all three men—and he also would need some of that good luck that he had mentioned to Sizemore.


One thing was certain: unless the three riders dismounted and lead their horses up some difficult rocky terrain inland, they would almost certainly have to come the same way Sizemore and Kuttner had; all he had to do was wait.


The sun hung over the ocean for what seemed like hours but had to be only a few minutes as Kuttner rested against the boulder, watching. When they appeared, however, he was surprised to see that they were spread out and moving fast, and that each had a pistol in his hand. Whoever was in charge apparently saw that the strip of beach they would have to cross was a likely spot for an ambush and had decided to gain an edge by crossing the clearing armed and at the gallop.


Cursing quietly, Kuttner took aim on the lead horseman’s mount, deciding that the animal was a better target than the rider. Putting the man on foot was almost as good as killing him, Kuttner figured. He led the galloping beast with the muzzle of the rifle, and squeezed the trigger with assurance. As soon as his first shot was off, he prepared for his second.


As he was loading the rifle, his first .54-caliber ball struck the lead horse on the left side of its breast, puncturing the animal’s lung and sending it sprawling onto the sand. The man in its saddle managed to get one foot clear of its stirrup as the animal fell but the other was trapped beneath the animal, which, carried by its momentum, rolled over the rider before lurching to its feet, staggering two steps and falling on top of the man, who was still dangling from the tack by one leg.


By that time, Kuttner had aimed and fired at the second rider—the man atop the big Bay with the tear-shaped mark on his head. The horseman had reined his mount up to avoid his fallen comrade and the animal’s delay made Kuttner miss the horse entirely. Unfortunately for the rider, the rifle ball hit him instead, striking him almost squarely in the center of his chest with the impact of a sledgehammer and pitching him over the horse’s buttocks in a backward flip as neatly as an acrobat in a circus.


With an empty saddle, the Bay careened madly up the beach, bucking and rearing as he went. The third rider’s horse was spooked by the frightened animal and veered toward the ocean instead of the end of the beach. Kuttner frantically reloaded as the third rider struggled to gain control of his mount. He had managed to guide the horse back out of the shallow surf onto the hard packed sand by the time Kuttner took aim and was riding, hell-for-leather, toward the shelter at the end of the shore nearest Kuttner. Letting his breath out slowly, Kuttner fired at the animal, but the shot went wide and the third horseman disappeared into the scrub oak at the near end of the beach strip.


“Damnation!” Kuttner said, collecting his ammunition and sliding back down to the trail where his mount was tethered. He tucked the Mississippi back into its scabbard, slung himself onto his horse and spurred the beast back down the trail, drawing his other Walker revolver on the way.


He knew he was making a racket as his horse plunged through the chaparral, but he reckoned haste was more important than stealth at this point. He wasn’t going to take the third rider by surprise anyway—not after having gunned down two of his comrades.


Kuttner strained his ears for any sound of his adversary as his animal moved forward, but the thick brush in front of him was eerily quiet. He reckoned that the third rider had abandoned his horse temporarily to gain stealth and make himself a smaller target. The sun was nearly down and the surrounding thicket was growing impenetrably dark. Slowing, he slipped off his mount and tied its reins to a small willow, then proceeded quickly on foot, taking care to make little noise and listening carefully as the gloom gathered around him.


Suddenly, he heard the sound of a twig break in a grove to his left a short distance up the grade. Spotting movement behind a stand of oak saplings, he hurled himself to the ground at the same moment as a pistol fired and the flat buzz of a bullet passed a couple of feet over his head. Crawling on his belly like a snake toward the source of the gunfire, Kuttner kept his cocked revolver pointed directly in front of him. His motion was clearly audible and let his opponent know where to fire, but it couldn’t be helped; the alternative was to lie there in the undergrowth indefinitely in the dim hope that the third outlaw would show himself.


A second shot kicked up a spray of moldering oak leaves eight inches in front of his face, stinging his eyes but also giving him a clear muzzle-flash to aim at. Kuttner fired, cocked and fired again. His second shot was answered by a cry of surprise and pain and the roar of a pistol’s accidental discharge as the man wielding it fell, wounded.


Kuttner crawled to a large oak and crouched, peering into the shadows in an effort to see his foe. His revolver at the ready, he moved forward staying close to the ground until he could hear a labored grunting sound behind a fallen trunk a few yards ahead.


The grunting sound was the third rider, supine behind the log, using both his hands in a feeble effort to staunch the gouts of blood pumping from the dark-stained left side of his gray duster. The glassy look of the man’s eyes showed he was already in shock; a wide red pool had spread out from his flank, making it clear that he was bleeding to death as the Lieutenant watched.


Kuttner lowered the hammer on his Colt and holstered it. On the ground a few feet away was the rider’s five-shot Paterson Colt revolver; he picked up the weapon and tucked it into the empty holster that normally would have held his other Walker. Squatting next to the wounded man, Kuttner quickly went through his pockets looking for extra bullets for the Paterson. The rider, still making his odd grunting sound as the blood gushed out of his body onto the forest floor, did not seem to know he was there. The wounded man gave a final spasm and died as Kuttner finished the search and the Lieutenant used his fingers to gently close the rider’s staring eyes. Then he rose and hurried back to his horse.


He didn’t know how far Sizemore had managed to get, but he knew the greenhorn was in danger. That fourth horseman was still out there somewhere, and it was clear he was not a friend.

(Continued in next chapter)

**********

Tamer, Chapter Eight

The Red Sash Warrior

By dawn, Kuttner had managed to cover about two thirds of the distance back to bivouac and he was beginning to feel more confident about successfully completing his mission, though he still had no idea what might have happened to the troops trapped by the Kiowa. He nourished hope that he might be able to summon help before the Indians murdered every man in the platoon.


But as he dog-trotted through the hip-high grass of the prairie, he heard the sound of a horse approaching from his rear. Turning he could see that it was a young Kiowa warrior, lance at the ready, bearing down on him as he crossed the plain.


“He was only a kid, probably about the same age as me, but he already wore a red sash, showing he was a dangerous raider, a member of the Kiowa Society of Ten Bravest, the fiercest warriors in the tribe,” Kuttner recalled, his eyes dreamy with recollection.


“He was coming fast—his mount was at full gallop when I turned—and it was clear he meant to stick me with his arrow lance. Killing me that way, hand-to-hand, would show real battle bravery. Anybody who is any good with a bow and arrow can kill an enemy with them from a distance. It takes balls to go at somebody with a blade on the ground.”


Kuttner had nothing but his maneuverability to save him. On horseback, the young Kiowa brave had every advantage, including a superior weapon. The flintlock pistol Kuttner carried had only one shot, and was about as accurate at a distance as throwing bricks, though considerably less likely to stop a horseman.


Instead of shooting at the Kiowa, Kuttner determined that his best chance at survival was to shoot the brave’s horse. At least putting his opponent on foot would give him some possibility of prevailing in combat. With the additional bulk of the Indian’s horse behind his lance thrust, the spear would probably go all the way through Kuttner’s body.


Kuttner ran, dodging to left and right to make himself more difficult to run down. As he did, he drew his flintlock pistol and cocked back the hammer. From the sound of his horse’s hooves, he could tell the Indian warrior was closing on him, and at the last possible moment, he turned, threw himself on his back on the ground and fired the pistol as the warrior’s horse passed by, missing him by a foot or so.


The bullet hit the horse in the flank. It probably punctured the animal’s lung, because the horse faltered and then slowed to a walk, despite his rider’s frantic urging. The Indian struggled to turn his mount, but the horse took two steps and went to its knees, then its side. Apparently, Kuttner’s shot had been good enough to rob the animal of its wind, permanently.


The Indian slid easily off the horse’s back as it collapsed and advanced on Kuttner warily, lance in one hand, knife in the other. Kuttner shifted his pistol to his left hand, but held onto it; even though it was empty, it was still heavy and hard enough to use as a club. He drew his knife with his right hand. He had once used it to skin a two-year-old buck he’d shot, but had never considered it a weapon. He wasn’t completely sure how to fight with a firearm, let alone a knife.


The Kiowa moved in a circle around him, feinting occasionally with the lance, but not pressing his advantage. The little cries he made as he hopped toward Kuttner, thrusting the spear at him, were less intimidating than annoying. Once or twice, Kuttner swatted the lance aside with the brass barrel of his pistol, but after a few moments of fencing with the Indian, he didn’t even bother. He didn’t know who the brave had killed to earn his red sash, but whoever it was could easily have died of old age waiting for the Indian to attack.


The two combatants circled for what seemed an eternity and Kuttner eventually tossed his pistol aside to leave his hand free, hoping for an opportunity to grab the Indian’s lance away from him. But the Kiowa brave was cagey and shifted to wielding the spear with both hands, holding his knife alongside the shaft. He grew more aggressive in his thrusts and finally rushed Kuttner headlong.


Kuttner evaded the point of the spear without much difficulty and locked one hand on it as the Indian bowled him over. The two rolled over on the ground and Kuttner managed to knock the lance out of the Indian’s hand in the struggle. Kuttner was aware the Kiowa had opened up a hole in his side with his knife. He swore and rammed a fist into the Indian’s face that landed flush on the brave’s nose, breaking the cartilage. With each combatant spouting blood from a different wound, the two rolled over again, struggling for advantage.


“Have you ever been cut in knife combat, or with a sword?” Kuttner asked Sizemore, pausing momentarily in his account of the confrontation.


The second lieutenant, engrossed in Kuttner’s story, shook his head in the negative.


“The worst thing about being in a knife fight for most people is getting cut,” Kuttner said, struggling to find the words to explain the experience. “Usually, the first person to wound the other wins the fight. Having a knife open you up hurts like blue blazes and the sight of your own blood makes you feel weak and dizzy. That’s just about all it takes for most folks to give up.”


“But once you’ve had a blade in you, you realize it really isn’t that bad,” he continued. “It’s hard to punch a hole in a man’s heart with a knife coming at him from his front. Most blades aren’t long enough. And trying to stab somebody in the chest is pretty much a waste of time unless you have the sharpest weapon in the world. There’s too many ribs there to keep you from getting a clean shot at the heart or the lungs.”


“So I was cutting on this Indian boy with my knife and he was cutting on me with his, and we could probably have gone on like that for the rest of the day until both of us ended up mincemeat, except that he managed to roll loose, pick up that lance and get onto his feet.”


“At that point, I was pretty much a goner,” he said. “I was on my back on the ground with nothing my damn skinning knife, while he was standing there with a spear about five feet long to work with. Both of us were winded, but he had the advantage. He pulled back that lance and got ready to drive it down through me and I’ll be damned if I had the energy to roll out of the way.”


“But just as he got ready to run me through like a chicken on a spit, there was a lot of gunfire and something like the sound of a hornet’s nest emptying out around us as rifle rounds went flying by. The Kiowa straightened up, arched his back, and keeled over into the grass.”


“I managed to drag myself up into a sitting position and saw that while we had been rolling around in the grass, fighting, Riley and a platoon of soldiers had managed to get within rifle range,” Kuttner said. “At least three of Riley’s men put rounds into that Kiowa red sash just as he was getting ready to send me to St. Peter’s Gates.”


As he learned later, when Kuttner and his unit failed to return the night before, Riley had put together two squads to go looking for them at daybreak; The senior scout had been out with another patrol when Kuttner’s platoon had left the previous day, so the Major had him available to track the missing soldiers through the prairie.


The missing unit had beaten an obvious path, moving two abreast through the hip-high prairie grass, so the senior scout was able to set a pretty pace, sitting high in the saddle a half-mile ahead of Riley and his men. The troops, moving at a canter, made excellent progress and had actually seen Kuttner racing on foot through the wild oats when the red sash warrior tried to run him down with his lance on horseback. The Indian had been so intent on making his kill that he didn’t notice the line of horsemen approaching from the east horizon. His inattention cost him his life, as it turned out.


“That was probably the closest I ever came to cashing in my hand,” Kuttner concluded. “And I would be dust out there in the Kansas prairie if it hadn’t been for Riley coming to my rescue. That’s why I say I would do just about anything the man asked me. I owe him the last twenty years of my life.”


Sizemore gave a low whistle. “Lieutenant, you are one of the luckiest men I think I have ever met,” he said, shaking his head with wonder. “I can see how you consider yourself in General Riley’s debt, but what astonishes me is that you escaped sure death twice in the space of two days: once, when you were the first man on horseback to ride into the Kiowa trap and again at the point of that warrior’s lance. You should try your hand as a professional gambler: Dame Fortune seems to have her eye on you.”

Kuttner grinned. “I’ve always been lucky at staying alive,” he said. “And I’ve been pretty damned lucky at killing people, too. I’m just hoping my luck continues to hold. Come on, Lieutenant—we still have a far piece to go; let’s pick up the pace.”

(Continued in next chapter)

 

Tamer, Chapter Seven

Kuttner's Debt

As they rode north through a steep cañon lined with scrub oak and coyote bush, Sizemore found his tongue again.


“You said Riley once saved your life,” he said. “How did that happen?”


Kuttner smiled grimly at the memory. “It was just about 20 years ago to the day,” he said. “I first hooked up with Riley as a junior scout on the Santa Fe trail.”


Santa Fe, the capitol of the province of New Mexico, was already an old town by the early 1800s and it had several thousand residents, all potential customers for goods from the eastern U.S. Merchants in the Midwest were eager to accommodate the city’s residents. The problem was, there were hardly any settlements along the route – just several hundred miles of Indian country, much of it inhabited by hostile tribes.


In 1821, an Army Captain named Becknell had escorted a small party of traders from Missouri to Santa Fe, and when the merchants arrived, they were surprised at the amount the New Mexicans were willing to pay for their goods.


“That was that,” Kuttner explained. “Those mercantiles had their own sort of gold rush. The Santa Fe Trail became the road to wealth for some of them and there was no turning back.”


For several years, the annual caravan continued, but dangerous Indian bands were a constant threat and in 1828 two men were killed by raiders, making some sort of protection mandatory.


“Riley was assigned to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas at the time,” Kuttner said. “After those two old boys got killed, the Army ordered him to take four companies of infantrymen to accompany the caravan in 1829. He was supposed to take them no further than the New Mexico border. Beyond that, the Army figured the Mexicans would see it as an invasion.”


“I was a Kansas lad, myself, and I joined up as a scout, because I knew the territory and how to read a trail,” Kuttner said. “I was only just 19 years old at the time, and I hadn’t even seen a dead man yet, let alone killed one myself.”


“The caravan started out from Round Grove, Kansas right about this time of year,” Kuttner said, casting his mind back 30 years. “We accompanied those mercantiles to Chouteau’s Island in the Arkansas River, but we never saw a single Indian – at least not up until we left the caravan and it continued on toward Cimarron Spring.”


No sooner were the traders out of sight than Indians attacked, killing one member of the party. The merchants sent back riders to summon aid from the Army and Riley crossed into Mexican territory to drive off the raiders, even though his orders forbade it.


“We joined up with the wagon train and ran off the Indians,” Kuttner said. “We stayed with them another day and then went back to the Arkansas. We arranged to meet up with the caravan on its return home the following October.”


While in bivouac on Chouteau’s Island, Riley’s troops had a series of confrontations with Indians, Kuttner said.


“There were a lot of hostiles,” Kuttner recalled, “but the most dangerous were the Kiowas. They were real bad actors, son. They fought white people, Mexicans and Spaniards. Hell, they fought practically all the other tribes as well – the Navaho, Ute, Cheyenne, Osage, even the Mescalero. They killed people and made war pretty much all the time.”


“They didn’t take anything from anybody,” Kuttner said, spitting on the ground. “About the only thing those sons-of-bitches took was scalps.”


“We spent our time in camp by sending out patrols to scout the local area and try to keep the Kiowa off balance,” Kuttner said. “Usually we didn’t cover more than ten miles or so in a day—five miles out and five back. Sometimes we ran into Indians but most of the time not, so we got sort of sloppy and started taking chances. That’s never a good idea when you’re dealing with the Kiowa.”


Kuttner’s unit—two squads of mounted troops with a sergeant and a seasoned corporal in charge—left one morning to patrol north along the river. When they got about five miles west of camp, Kuttner, riding forward, spotted a couple of Kiowa on horseback a half mile ahead, heading up into a series of cañons in the foothills that slope into the Rockies. Riding back, he warned the sergeant about what he had seen.


“The prudent thing would have been to turn back and report the sighting to Riley at the bivouac,” Kuttner said. “But this sergeant, his name was John Roark, as I recall, was a real hothead. He decided to follow the Indians with the entire unit,” Kuttner said.


“Well, that probably wasn’t a very bright thing to do, but we did it anyway,” Kuttner said. “With me following the pony track, we got about a mile and a half up into the gullies and ran smack into a Kiowa trap: the Indians had lured us up into a box canyon where they held the high ground on both sides. Once we were jammed up in that draw, they plugged the bottom, pinning us inside, and started to lay down a steady fire with bows and arrows.”


The soldiers furthest to the rear tried to break out, but were savaged by Indians on foot with lances, Kuttner said. The remaining troops, outnumbered and armed with slow-loading flintlock rifles of dubious accuracy, fought back from what shelter they could find. Of fourteen men in the unit, four—including the sergeant—were killed in the first clash with the Indians. Three others suffered serious wounds. Five horses spooked and pitched off their riders to flee; three of the remaining mounts were so badly injured by arrows and lances that they couldn’t carry a rider.


Besieged, the unit remained trapped in the canyon under hostile fire as the sun went down.


Miraculously, Kuttner, who had been riding point and tracking the Kiowa when the Indians attacked, escaped serious injury, though his horse had to be put down after it fell among the rocks hit with arrows in the eye, left foreleg and throat.


The corporal, who had taken an arrow in his calf during the first minutes of the clash, called Kuttner over and ordered him to scale the cañon wall and make his way back to camp for help.


Kuttner shuddered as he recalled the bloody encounter. “Before the attack, I had been way up front, and I could see that the weak point of the Indian forces was directly ahead,” he said. “They didn’t leave many braves there because none of our horses could have scaled the rock face, anyway, so they didn’t have to worry about us escaping that way. But to get out of the canyon, I was going to have to climb up and circle around the Kiowa to go back the way we came. It was probably a mile’s creep on hands and knees to get out of the gully and around the Indians, then another six or seven miles on foot back to Riley at the bivouac.”


He turned to Sizemore with a grim smile. “When I signed on, I was just a farm boy, looking forward to the danger and adventure,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much of the damn stuff I was going to be getting.”


Kuttner carried no rifle. His weapons consisted solely of a sheath knife with a six-inch blade and a .56-caliber brass-barreled North 1819 pistol. He made sure the gun was loaded and ready to fire, then surrendered his powder horn to the corporal so he would have less to carry. Creeping like a beetle, he began crawling up through the granite boulders at the top of the wash, stopping frequently to listen for any sounds that might alert him to Indians nearby.


The progress was painstaking and difficult. It took him nearly two hours to climb up out of the gully, avoiding any contact with Kiowa on the way. When he reached the hillcrest, it took him nearly another hour of slow, careful movement to hook sufficiently far away from the cañon to clear the Indians and turn back toward the encampment. His progress was nerve-wracking: he was constantly on the alert for the enemy because of the importance of making it back to Riley in one piece, and every breeze that made the brush shake had to be seen as evidence he was on the verge of capture or death.

(Continued in next chapter)

**********

For a first hand look at the merchant caravan Riley escorted, read his own account, Military Escorts on Santa Fe Trail.
Other good sources include:


For those looking for a classic western film with a highly romanticized sensibility that is set in a later part of the 19th century from Riley's expedition, check the
Errol Flynn swashbuckler below.

Spoiler alert: history takes a back seat to drama in this flick.

Tamer, Chapter Six

Unwelcome Company

Kuttner and Sizemore headed north by northeast, climbing the rolling coastal foothills through a sea of grassland already burned golden by the mid-June sun. To the left, the real sea—the Pacific--stretched blue into a bank of offshore mist. A little before noon they reached the Salinas River and forded it at a shallow spot a mile or so from its mouth.



Once they had crossed the stream, reduced to a trickle by the dryness of summer, Kuttner slid off his horse and walked to the river, removing his new hat as he went. He dipped the outside of the crown into the water and dipped a couple of handfuls from the stream inside it, then poured them back out.


Climbing back into the saddle, he worked the hat with his fingers quickly punching down to top of the crown halfway then rounding a small dome up from the depression.


“What are you doing?” Sizemore asked, blinking with curiosity at Kuttner’s actions.


“I met some fellows up from Australia when I was in New Helvetia,” Kuttner replied, concentrating on working the wet felt with his fingers. “They said they were miners who had travelled to California for gold, but they seemed to spend most of their time drinking whisky and telling tall tales.”


“Anyway, I liked the way they wore their hats—they had the crown sharpened up at the front and wore them with the brim turned down. I asked them where the style came from and they told me it was the fashion among drovers in the Australian prairie.”


“I was thinking about buying a hat like that myself when if I got to San Francisco,” he added, pinching the front of the crown with his fingers and molding the still-wet felt, creasing the folds he had made. When he had shaped the hat to his satisfaction, he set it back on his head and gave the front of the brim a tug. “Mrs. Shortis, may the good Lord bless and keep her, saved me the need.”


Sizemore looked at the hat with a critical expression. “Well, it definitely has an edge,” he said. “I have to say, the style seems to fit you.”


Sizemore had spent most of the morning getting used to making a long trip on horseback, shifting frequently in an effort to find a comfortable position in the saddle. He didn’t seem to have succeeded and Kuttner figured it was time to let him get the kinks out of his legs and back. When they reached a rise in the trail, He called a rest stop and both men dismounted.


“I think Mrs. Shortis has taken a liking to you, Lieutenant,” Sizemore said as he took one of her sandwiches out of his satchel and began unwrapping it.


The idea startled Kuttner. “What makes you say that?” he asked.


Sizemore held up his sandwich. “She got up before daybreak to make these for one thing,” he said. “I’ve been General Riley’s assistant for the last two months and I must have seen her a dozen times during that period, but she never made me a sandwich or gave me a piece of pie. She meets you once and gets up early to fix you a picnic.”


He pointed to the hat on Kuttner’s head. “That, too,” she said. “She makes you a gift of her late husband’s hat, something that she obviously kept to remember him by.”


Kuttner swallowed. “Maybe she’s just being friendly,” he said. “Maybe she’s grateful that I shot the man who killed her husband.”


Sizemore smiled. “The hat and the sandwiches are pretty obvious to me, but I noticed the way she kept watching you at dinner last night when you weren’t looking,” he said. “And the way she smiled at you today when she saw you off.”


Kuttner held up a hand. “Hold on there,” he said, stammering slightly with embarrassment. “She brought lunch for you, too. And she told you goodbye, not just me.”


Sizemore shook his head in disbelief. ““You haven’t spent much time around women, have you, Lieutenant?” he said, a wry expression on his face. Slipping into a falsetto, he added, “Come back this way in one piece and I will bake a fresh dried apple pie for you!”


Kuttner shot him a irritated look but Sizemore didn’t notice: he had already taken a bite of his sandwich and was chewing with his eyes closed, a smile of ecstasy on his face. However, as Kuttner mulled over what Sizemore had said, he began to smile himself.

#

While Sizemore finished his lunch and the horses browsed on wild oats, Kuttner climbed to the top of one of the hills on foot and scanned the trail behind them with his brass spyglass.


He and his companion had managed to gain a sizeable lead, but the four men on horseback he had spotted at the undertaker’s were just within range of the glass, following their tracks in the straw. He slid the glass shut and made his way down the hillside.


“We’ve got company,” he told Sizemore without explanation. “Let’s ride. I want to throw them off our trail.”


Back in the saddle, Kuttner picked up the pace to a trot, hoping to lengthen their lead on the four strangers.


“What did you see?” Sizemore asked nervously.


Kuttner glanced at him, trying to determine how much nerve the tenderfoot had picked up at West Point. “Remember those four riders at the undertakers?”


Sizemore shook his head.


“Well, I did,” Kuttner said. “They took a keen interest in those five coffins back there. And now they seem to be following us.”


Sizemore was puzzled. “So, what if they are?” he asked. “What do they have to do with us?”


“Maybe nothing,” Kuttner said. “But I’ve never been wrong when I planned for the worst. There are five of Morales’s men unaccounted for. They peeled off with the horses they took in the robbery and headed south from the San Joaquin while I was following Morales and the rest of his crew east into the mountains. I never saw those five. The men back there,” he concluded, jerking a thumb behind them, “may be members of the gang; if they are, it means trouble.”


Sizemore was silent for a distance as Kuttner led them a half mile due east then circled up an easy grade to the crest on the north side of the hills behind a stand of cottonwood trees and reversed direction, turning back to the west again.


“Wait! I thought we were going to take the Mission Trail,” the lieutenant said in surprise, a bit winded from the jostling he was taking in the side. “That’s the other direction—toward San Juan Bautista.”


“I know,” Kuttner said. “We’re changing our route. I wanted to get on the north side of these hills so we can’t be seen by those fellows behind us. I’m hoping they continue on to San Juan. Morales and his four men were sloppy and never caught on that somebody was following them until I stepped out of the brush with my revolver in my hand. Maybe the rest of his crew is just as sloppy, maybe not. I don’t reckon backtracking on them will fool them for long if they are any good at following our trail, but if they are just keeping us in sight in front of them, this will lead them a merry chase for a while.”


“Where are we going, then?” Sizemore asked.


Kuttner nodded to the north. “We’re going to follow the coast to Santa Cruz,” he said. “Judging by the map the General gave me, it’s about 10-12 miles to the Pajaro River from here. If we can get all the way to Santa Cruz, we’ll be a day ahead of those four and it won’t make much difference who they are.”


For the next two hours, Kuttner and Sizemore switched off riding at the canter and then walking the horses to let them cool down. They took an extended rest break at the Pajaro, watering the horses and letting them eat wild grass while Sizemore wolfed the rest of his sandwich and enjoyed a respite from the saddle. During the stop, Kuttner took one of his sandwiches and climbed to the top of a hill nearby with his glass to check on their pursuers.


Sizemore did not look overjoyed to see him return. His rear end had gone numb from the pounding it was getting in the saddle and he was finally getting some feeling back.


“Saddle up, Lieutenant” Kuttner said curtly. “We seem to have left them behind, but I don’t know how far. It’s a long way to Santa Cruz yet and the shadows are getting longer.”

(Continued in next chapter)

Tamer, Chapter Five

Leaving Monterey Behind

As it turned out, the job Riley offered Kuttner involved more than serving as the only Governor’s representative in the northeastern quarter of the territory: it also included transporting the gold that Morales and his compadres had stolen in the payroll robbery back to San Francisco.



And if that wasn’t challenge enough, it also meant playing wet nurse to Second Lieutenant Sizemore – a man for whom Kuttner was developing a casual dislike.


Kuttner had tried to duck both additional chores, saying they would only delay him reaching his ultimate goal of the Azimuth District, but his efforts had been in vain. When he asked if it wouldn’t make more sense to send a squad of soldiers from the Pacific Division to escort the gold, Riley was steadfast.


“A mounted unit is going to attract attention,” the General argued. “Nobody is going to pay any attention to two men on horseback traveling the Mission Trail. With the money split in two satchels between you, you don’t really need a mule to pack it. You’ll each be carrying less than 25 extra pounds.”


Kuttner grimaced, recognizing the validity of Riley’s point. “That makes a certain amount of sense,” he said grudgingly, “but Sizemore is a tenderfoot. He doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. Why are you sending him along? He’ll just be in the way.”


Riley shook his head adamantly. “Lieutenant, that is exactly the reason I want him to go with you,” he said. “His head is stuffed full of strategy and tactics he picked up at West Point. He knows what cutlery to use when he dines with a general, but he doesn’t have a lick of practical knowledge. Some time on the trail with a seasoned hand will do him a world of good.”


In the end, arguing with the General did not good. It never had, so far as Kuttner knew. To his knowledge, the only thing anybody had ever got from arguing with Bennett Riley was a headache.


So two horses were saddled and two riders mounted them as rays of sunlight began to creep over the Santa Lucia Mountains and filter down the streets of Monterey.


Riley turned out to wish them well.


“Lieutenant,” he told Kuttner, “get word back to me as soon as you can. Delegates from all over the state are going to be arriving here this fall for the constitutional convention. I sent out a proclamation setting a date in August for the meeting. That’s less than two months from now. I would like to have this business in Azimuth settled long before then.”


“Yes sir,” Kuttner said, giving the General a salute.


Turning to Sizemore, Riley added: “And bring Second Lieutenant Sizemore back in one piece, if you please. We will have plenty to keep him busy here as the convention draws near.”


Kuttner grinned. He could tell by the expression on Sizemore’s face that the junior officer was no happier to be going along on this party than Kuttner was to host him. The second lieutenant’s displeasure with the arrangement gave Kuttner a measure of consolation.


“I’ll do my best, Governor,” he said.


“You have everything you need?” Riley asked.


Kuttner patted the pocket on the left side of his blue roundabout jacket. “I got wages and my reward money right here,” he said. Patting the pocket on the other side, he added: “And the expense money is here. I cleaned and oiled my weapons last night, have plenty of ammunition for the Walkers and my Mississippi rifle. The payroll gold is divided up between the two of us. I think that’s everything.”


“Here’s your letter of commission,” Riley said, handing him a document that had already been folded in three.


Kuttner opened it. It said:

Order of The Governor of California

The bearer of this notice, Lt. Amos Kuttner, USA, ret., is appointed a special agent of Alta California Governor Bennett Riley, Maj. Gen, brev. He is to be given safe passage on business of the Governor and has full law enforcement powers as an agent and marshal of the government under the laws of Alta California.

Bennett C. Riley

“I guess that’s it, then,” said Kuttner, folding the paper and tucking it inside his jacket.


“Not quite,” said a woman’s voice to his rear. Turning, Kuttner saw Anne Shortis walking toward them with a canvas carryall in each hand.


“This will keep you from eating pilot bread and jerky, at least for a day or so,” she said handing one up to Sizemore and the other to Kuttner. “I couldn’t bear the thought of the man who brought me a measure of justice and peace of mind riding all the way to San Francisco on such pitiable sustenance.”


Kuttner peeked into his bag to see several items that were wrapped in paper. “What’s in here?” he asked as a pleasant aroma reached his nostrils.


“Sandwiches made with fresh-baked bread and some of that leftover roast from last night as well as what’s left of the dried apple pie,” she said, showing dimples as she smiled. “It should keep you going at least until you get to Mission Santa Cruz.”


“Thank you, ma’am,” Sizemore said, looking cheerful for the first time of the day. Obviously he had not been looking forward to eating jerked beef and weeds collected from the California hillside.


“Much obliged, Anne,” Kuttner said, taking off his Army cap to her.


“Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot! This is for you, too.”


She lifted a plait that circled her neck over the top of her hair. It was attached to a brown felt hat with a high crown and broad brim that she handed it up to him.


“It was Clement’s,” she said, somewhat at a loss for words. “I hope it fits you. That Army cap makes you look like some sort of vagabond. This is a proper Californio hat – the brim will keep the rain out of your face when it storms and the sun out of your eyes when it doesn’t. It seems more suitable for a lawman than a cloth cap.”


Kuttner hung his cap on the pommel of his saddle and placed the hat on his head with the plait under his chin. His untrimmed hair took up any extra space in the crown, giving it a snug fit. He pulled the front of the brim down slightly.


“How does it look?” he asked.


Anne beamed. “Splendid,” she said, showing off those dimples again. “Wear it in good health. Come back this way in one piece and I will bake a fresh dried apple pie for you.”


He handed down his cap to her and touched the brim of his new headgear in a gesture of farewell.


“It’s a deal,” he said giving her a smile. “I’ll return the lunch satchels you fixed for us when I come back, so you might as well hold onto this for me until then.”

#

About a mile north of the U.S. Custom House and the Larkin residence, Kuttner and Sizemore passed by the undertaker and Kuttner was shocked to see five coffins lined up at a slight tilt with their tops off so you could see inside them. Each contained the corpse of one of the outlaws that Kuttner had gunned down in the gold country. A placard in front of each casket identified the villain it contained. Above them was a hastily hand-made sign:


MEMBERS OF THE MORALEZ GANG, WANTED FOR MURDER, ROBERY AND MAYHEM. TAKEN JUNE 1849 BY U.S. ARMY CAPT. AMOS CUTNER.


“Whose idea was this?” Kuttner said, turning toward Sizemore. “Did you know about it?”


Sizemore looked equally befuddled. “No – all I know is that the Indians were told to put the bodies onto a wagon and bring them down here for burial,” he said. “That was the last I heard of it.”


The bodies were beginning to decay and the sight—not to mention the smell—was hideous. A number of people were enjoying the grisly spectacle, chattering to each other in Spanish. A short distance away, four men in dusters were watching on horseback. Kuttner swung down off his mount and tossed the reins to Sizemore.


“Try to keep our horses from running off with you,” Kuttner said, irritably. “I am going to find out what this is all about.”


Inside the undertaker’s, a small man with his mustaches swept upward into heavily waxed prongs was writing in a ledger. As Kuttner approached the man looked up at him through oval rimless spectacles that were barely perched on the end of his nose.


“Can I help you, sir?” he asked, pushing his glasses back up with an ink-stained forefinger.


“Are you the proprietor of this place?” Kuttner asked. “I’d like to know what those five bodies are out there on display for. They should be in a grave, not left out in public to rot.”


The small man shot Kuttner an equally testy look.


“Those five are notorious outlaws who have been preying on this community for the last three years,” he said with an edge to his voice. “I put them out front so that the good citizens of this village would know that they no longer have anything to fear from them.”


Kuttner leaned down until his face was only about six inches from the undertaker’s. “Well my name is Amos Kuttner and I killed those men, so I think I have something of an interest in what happens to their bodies,” he said, showing his teeth in an unpleasant way.


“They were rotten sons-of-bitches in life, but they’re dead now and their punishment in the next world is in God’s hands, not yours, friend. I appreciate the fact that you want to show the local folk that they are safe, but I think you are going about it the wrong way. You do realize that there were ten men in Morales’s gang, don’t you? That means half are still on the loose. What do you think might happen if one of them rode by and spotted the corpses of his compadres out on public display? If it was me, I would probably want to put a couple of bullet holes in whoever it was that put them out there.”


“Who do you suppose would be the first person they ventilated?” Kuttner asked, underscoring his point.


The undertaker, who had mistaken Kuttner for some busybody, was stunned speechless. He seemed frozen in his tracks. The color drained from his face as Kuttner’s warning sunk in.


Kuttner cleared his throat and gestured to the front of the undertaker’s business. “If I was you, friend, I’d get those bodies out of sight right quick, before anybody else sees them,” he said quietly.


The undertaker put down his pen, sputtering apologies.


“I assure you we intended no harm by putting those scoundrels on public view,” he said hastily, licking his lips and taking off his apron. “But I can see how displaying their bodies might be offensive to some. As you say, Mr. Kuttner, they are in the hands of their maker now.”


The small man almost ran out of the store to comply.


As Kuttner walked out, he noted the four men on horseback waiting under a large oak tree some distance away, watching the coffins being closed and nailed shut. By the time that the sign that bore Kuttner’s misspelled name was removed and he swung himself back into the saddle, all four had disappeared.


He spurred his horse forward, saying to Sizemore, “I hope we just headed off some trouble, but I think we might have been too late.”

(Continued in next chapter)