Bloody Trail (3 page)

As Chang started to come round, Logan chided
himself. Poor child! What a fool he had been to show the
blood-soaked shirt when youngsters were around. No little kid
should have to see a mess of blood like that. And certainly, not a
sensitive boy like Li Chang. Especially not on a beautiful morning
like this.

Yet, although the sight of blood had caused
Chang to faint, the experience did not bother him. He sat up and
grinned at the sight of his brothers pursuing his mice. “Give them
to me!” he cried as two of his brothers presented them to him by
their tails. “Not like that. They don’t like it.”

“
Chang likes his animals. I think
he likes them better than his brothers sometimes,” Mrs. Li said
with a shy smile. “Sorry if the mice upset you, Miss
Haselton.”

The teacher recovered herself and shrugged her
shoulders with embarrassment. She turned to Logan.

“
You—you won’t say anything to
Bill Torrance about me being frightened of mice, will you, Doctor
Munro? He loves animals and he might think I was just a silly
woman. I can’t help it, but mice just make me squirm.”

Logan smiled and shook his head. “Not a word
from me. A breach of confidence would be against the Hippocratic
Oath.”

****

After a change of shirt and a breakfast of
bacon and eggs washed down by several cups of coffee at Ma’s Café,
Logan had opened up his office and settled down at his big roll-top
desk to await his first patients of the day. Ordinarily, he would
see about twenty or so in the morning before setting off on a
walking round of Wolf Creek and Dogleg City. Later on, he would
head out of town to visit the ranches or homesteads as
needed.

While he waited, he looked over his notes for
the monograph he was writing, The Use of Tincture of Love Vine
(Clematis virginiana) in the Treatment of Gonorrhea, Gleet and
Chancre in a Kansas Cowtown.

He glanced over at his medicine mixing table
with its myriad of bottles of colored liquids, jars of powders,
pestle and mortar and the small vat which he used to prepare the
tincture that, so far, had proven to be at least as efficacious in
treating venereal disease as the standard treatment with mercurial
ointment.

“
I wonder how many ladies of the
night or their clients I’ll be treating today?” he
mused.

His mind strayed back through time, to other
offices and past patients of other races. And inevitably, as his
gaze wandered over the walls to his framed degree and his citation
for the Crimean and Turkish Medals from the Crimean War, and to the
picture of Helen and himself on their wedding day in Lucknow,
surrounded by his comrades from the British East India Company Army
and Helen’s lady friends, he felt the old pangs of loneliness and
desolation. He relived the attack as he and Helen had returned to
Lucknow one evening during the early days of the Indian Mutiny.
Helen screaming and clutching her young charges to her while he
emptied his Beaumont-Adams revolver into three turbaned, charging
rebels. He had saved her from that, but not from the malaria that
followed the cholera outbreak among the surviving
garrison.

He reached for his meerschaum pipe and stuffed
tobacco into its bowl from his battered, old oilskin pouch. A smoke
would calm his nerves.

****

Emory Charleston mopped his brow with a
kerchief, stuffed it into the back pocket of his canvas trousers,
then put the last hard heft on the axle wrench to the left rear
axle nut, and that job was done. He pulled the kerchief from his
back pocket and again mopped the sweat off his wide forehead and
the back of his thick neck.

All the iron tires had been retightened and
axel stubs replaced on farmer Derrick McCain’s dray, but now it
would be good for at least another year’s bouncing along rutted
roads with a two thousand-pound load of corn or other produce
aboard. As was his custom, Emory meandered completely around the
wagon, carefully checking all the fittings, secretly admiring his
work. It had only been ten years that he’d been out of the fields,
doing the work of a free man.

Thanks to Mr. Lincoln, it was no longer
necessary for him to worry about not having manumission
papers—which he’d never had, as he’d earned his freedom ten years
ago by applying the hard hickory handle of a hoe to the back of
overseer Augustus St. Germain’s almost equally hard head, then
outrunning a dozen Louisiana redbone hounds for two days and a
night until he could launch himself into a roiling over-the-bank
Mississippi. The river’s condition had saved him, as it made him a
very hard follow—all riverside roads were awash belly deep,
impassable even to a horsebacker. By the time St. Germain’s kinfolk
could launch boats, Emory was miles downriver—munching fruit,
coasting along in the high water astride an uprooted apple tree, as
comfortable as baby Moses had been in that reed basket.

His woman and knee-high girl child both dead
of the yellow fever, there was nothing but fear to hold him to his
masters, and he’d managed to quell that emotion long ago. And
hearing that slaves were being freed, or hot-footing it for freedom
all over the south, he decided to take his leave of the slave
life.

He’d been three months finding his way back
upriver, all the way up the Mississippi to the Missouri, then up it
to Kansas, where he strode west, thinking California a fine
destination. But he settled into Kansas, where there seemed to be
lots of work for one willing. He made friends with other folks of
color and even a few not, and soon learned whom to befriend and
whom to fight shy of. And after years there doing odd jobs, dodging
Redlegs up to and even after the great war of rebellion was over,
he’d heard of work to the south in a booming railroad town. Work
there came to him by way of a blacksmith who only seemed to judge a
man by the amount of work he could do—even though the smith had
worn General Lee’s colors. Emory could work like two men, and
stayed on with Angus “Spike” Sweeney.

He’d never looked back after putting that
hickory to good work alongside the overseer’s head-bone, except for
many times during the war while watching for border ruffians and
slave catchers.

As fate would have it, his new overseer soon
came to be his partner—although they didn’t advertise it about
town. Work and pay had gotten short, so Emory worked on for a
share. There were many who’d take great umbrage with a man of color
being partner to a white man, particularly to one who’d worn the
butternut and fought with the Davis Guards. Emory and Angus had
long ago agreed not to discuss the relative merits of gray and
blue, nor their financial association. It was an easy chore as
Angus Sweeney, known as Spike to his friends, hardly said a word to
anyone about anything. He was silent as an iceberg, and some
thought as cold, but Emory knew better. He knew Spike well enough,
after years of bending hot iron elbow to elbow and shoeing
knot-headed horses shoulder to shoulder, horses who’d as soon kick
you into next week. He knew a better friend couldn’t be
found—white, black, yellow or brown. Spike Sweeney had something
engraved into a timber over the door to the shop, something that
came from the South—in fact, it was reputed to have been engraved
on General Lee’s sword. Strangely enough, it was something Em
believed with heart and soul…Help Yourself and God Will Help
You.

Em had few friends in Wolf Creek. Many of the
newer town folk were southern sympathizers and thought little of
any man of color, whereas most of the citizens who had lived there
longer had been the sort of Unionists who had opposed the
enslavement of black people on principle, but didn’t necessarily
want to be seen speaking to one on the street. At least Emory knew
where he stood with the Texan cowboys and assorted ex-Rebs. Most of
the blacks in town at any given time, on the other hand, were
migrant cowboys or railroad workers. Sometimes Em shared a drink
with George Alberts, who’d also escaped slavery and now owned the
leather shop, at Asa’s saloon down in Dogleg City—but that was a
very rough place. Asa’s patrons, generally, were not the sort of
company Emory preferred to keep. Em’s best friend, Charley
Blackfeather, was half-black, and half-Seminole, and Charley didn’t
spend a lot of time in town. But he, like Angus ‘Spike’ Sweeney,
was a friend to have, and Em would hate to have either of them as
enemy. They’d both proven many times they could be fearsome to
their foes.

Satisfied with his work, Emory moved across
the shop to a scuttlebutt and scooped up a ladle full of cool
water, drank it dry, then ladled up another and poured it down the
back of his neck. Felt damn good, as his thick neck was knotted
from throwing around five foot high rear wagon wheels. He looked to
where his partner worked, thinking he’d take him a ladle of the
cool drink, but Angus was concentrating on the fine work at hand,
and Emory knew he wouldn’t want to be interrupted.

Emory smiled to himself. Angus was equally his
tall, but only half his weight. Where Emory’s arms were the size of
many a man’s thigh, Angus was long and lean for a smithy—but those
arms were strong as oak hogshead barrel staves. Where Emory was a
mite slow to move, a plow horse, Angus was a racehorse; where Emory
was slow to anger, Angus had a short fuse. They made good partners
in many ways, even if Angus was a bloody Rebel, a Texican, and an
Anglican converted to Lutheran.

Emory had only worked under Angus’s tutelage
for a short while before he figured that Angus had fought, in what
many Southerners called the “recent unpleasantness,” for family,
honor, and home, and not for the sham-honor of one man owning
another. Even Angus’s father had not condoned the owning of
slaves—if Angus could be believed, and Emory had yet to find him to
exaggerate, much less lie—and had given many a Negra his
manumission. Most of those men had stayed on the Sweeney farm,
working harder than they’d ever worked as slaves. Some even saved
enough to buy relatives from slave owners, with Nigel Sweeney,
Angus’ father, acting in their stead as purchaser. The father had
come from the old country, and Scotland and England had outlawed
slavery decades ago. It had taken a while to worm that out of the
quiet-spoken Angus, but after a year or two of working together,
with Emory as an employee, Emory came to understand him and even
admire him. And when Angus fell on hard times, Emory worked for
beans and bacon, shared with Angus out of the same pot. They both
used the same privy and washbasin, and both slept in the shop. Em
worked until he had enough back wages coming to buy into the place
in lieu of receiving the cash, luckily just before the business
turned. It gave Emory a flush of pride when he thought of it; he
had taken the chains off his own feet, and was now part owner of a
forge, not only a free man but a blacksmith and a farrier (Angus
was forever reminding customers that the two are not the
same—blacksmiths work iron, farriers shoe horses.)

It did niggle at him that Angus always wore
that damn Confederate kepi, with some fancy medal attached above
its eyeshade. One of these days, Emory was going to slip it into
the forge, and it would no longer be a bone of contention. Of
course, he’d remove the medal first, as Angus seemed to put great
stock in the piece of brass.

Emory turned his attention to a wagon tongue
that needed its fittings re-welded.

****

Angus looked over and smiled to himself. He
knew it would have taken him another two hours to finish the dray
wagon had it been him rather than Em doing the work; damned if Em
wasn’t getting to the point he could outwork the senior partner.
That was a hell of a note, but then he could have worse trouble. In
fact, it was music to his eyes and ears.

To Angus Sweeney, the generally perceived lone
proprietor of Sweeney’s, the ring of a four-pound hammer on anvil,
swage block, or mandrel was as beautiful as the melody he once
heard emanating from the stage door of the Opera House in St.
Louis. Of course, he’d just finished off a bottle of Black Widow
hooch and was face-down in the alley at the time, but the strains
from the violins and cellos, and the voice of a Jenny Lind imitator
who was a Nightingale in her own right, stuck in his mind to this
day. But, to be truthful, it was his own music he preferred even
over that heard through the back door—his was the music of good
honest work, and resultant tires, barrel hoops, shovels, hoes,
axes, and rigging that would outlast any who didn’t mistreat them.
Iron on iron, ringing in regular four-four time, was the echoing
melody of a man’s sinew, muscle, and bone—making hard metal bend to
his will.

At the moment, he was busy on the mandrel.
He’d formed a half-dozen cinch keepers and was now forming the
circular side as the iron was cooling after being welded into the
rough shape that would serve to bind latigo to saddle after George
Alberts, the saddle maker, stitched them in place on one of the
fine saddles he made. Before he’d started on McCain’s dray, Em had
just completed rebuilding some hinges on Albert’s draw-down table,
and Albert was eager to get back on the saddles and get them
shipped off. This was fine work, as fine as that of a tinsmith, not
the bone-jarring pounding necessary for forming wagon tires or ax
heads or railroad spikes, which he often had done for miners who
wanted ore car rails snaking into the holes they cut into the
mountainside. In fact, that was how he got his nickname, Spike.
He’d worked sixteen hours a day for a good long while, fulfilling a
contract for a thousand such rail spikes, much to the chagrin of
others who wanted some work out of him. They thought it a
derogatory name, but he kind of liked it.