It was trumpery, Andy knew. A childish masquerade. Yet he also knew the hearts of the hooded men, if not their faces. They were determined, and full of hate.
"Let the word go out," the leader bellowed through the dented trumpet. "Here is the first who will feel our wrath."
The second rider tossed the box on the ground. The lid pooped off. The box held some kind of doll.
The leader motioned and the file of riders moved out. Andy decided he'd seen enough. He started back through the yuccas to the thick woods from which he'd emerged. His mistake was glancing over his shoulder to check on the Klansmen.
He stepped too near one of the yuccas. The point of the long leaf stabbed his leg through his pants, and he exclaimed in pain. Not loudly, but he drew the attention of the night riders. Someone yelled, rifles came up, pistols came out. The leader signaled toward the black man bolting for the trees.
Leaves daggered his legs as two hooded men rode him down, one on each side of the clump of yuccas. Panting, Andy ran faster, out of the yuccas. A musket butt slammed his head and knocked him to his knees.
The men dismounted and dragged him around in front of the porch. One of the white women, the one nursing, leaned over and spat in his hair. Held by his ears and shoulders, he was pushed near the leader's horse.
"Niggers were warned from this gathering," the leader boomed through the trumpet. He was a fearsome, towering figure, looming over Andy in robes that shone as if on fire. "Niggers who defy the Invisible Empire get what they deserve."
Another Klansman pulled out an immense hunting knife. The blade flashed as he turned the knife this way and that. "Drop his pants. You're through, boy. We boil nigger heads and nigger balls for soup."
"No." The leader slashed the air with the trumpet. "Let him carry word of what he saw here. Show him the coffin."
A man yanked Andy's head around so he could see the box open on the ground. A bullet had been fired into the velvet dress of the crude cornhusk doll inside the box. The leader indicated blackened letters burned into the coffin lid. Crooked letters, but legible.
"Someone read him what it says."
"I know this nigger," another Klansman said. "He's a Mont Royal nigger. He can read it for himself." Though the speaker tried to roughen his voice to disguise it, Andy recognized Gettys.
He was so frightened, his eyes blurred. He had to clamp himself tight with his inside muscles to keep from urinating. The leader roared, "All right, then. You tell that woman what you saw and what you read right there, nigger." He signaled again. Andy was released and kicked toward the woods.
He staggered forward. A pistol boomed four times. Each time, he started violently, expecting to be hit He kept running, past the yuccas toward the woods. Luckily, he didn't fall. He twisted when he reached the trees and saw gun smoke drifting blue above the robed men. They laughed at him. He ran into the dark.
Unable to sleep all night. Andy saw the Klan, and what they had burned into the coffin representing their intended victim. He wrote it out for me, his hand shaking, sweat dripping from his brow to the old brown paper:
44
On the day of the trouble, Charles woke an hour later than usual — five in the afternoon. He reached under his cot, uncorked the bottle, and took his first drink before getting out of bed. It had become his habit to start the day this way.
It was mid-August. The shanty where he slept, behind the place he worked, was airless and hot. Noisy, too. Texas cowhands shouted and stomped around the dance floor in the main building while Professor played a polka on the establishment's brand-new Fenway upright.
After a second drink, he reluctantly got up. He was already dressed; he usually slept in his clothes. He faced a twelve-hour shift as night bouncer at Trooper Nell's. Nell's was a thriving dance hall with upstairs rooms for the whores and their clients. It was located on Texas Street, between the Applejack and the Pearl, south of the railroad. If he listened carefully, he could hear the horses and hacks bringing paid-off trail hands to this less-than-respectable section of Abilene.
Trooper Nell's never closed. Abilene was booming, quickly becoming the most popular shipping point in Kansas. The gamble of Joe McCoy, an unassuming Illinois farm boy with a keen business sense, had paid off. Last year, in its first season, McCoy's two-hundred-fifty-acre complex of pens and chutes had loaded about thirty-five thousand head of Texas cattle aboard the U.P.E.D. This second season promised to double that. Despite the Indian trouble all summer, herds continued to pour across Humbarger's Ford on the Smoky Hill south of town. Almost every night, Charles had plenty of free-spending, hard-drinking cowpokes to sit on when they got out of hand. The Dickinson
County sheriff did little. He was a grocer by trade, with no talent for handling rowdies.
Charles used his fingers to comb tangles from his long beard. From a chair with a broken leg, he picked up a canvas scabbard he'd sewn together after studying a picture of a fierce Japanese warrior in an old copy of Leslie's. The warrior, called a Samurai, carried his long sword in such a scabbard on his back, the hilt jutting above his left shoulder. Charles put on the scabbard and shoved his Spencer into it. That plus his strapped-on Colt usually damped the fighting urge of the cowboys. He'd taken a lesson from Wild Bill, who'd become quite a legend in Kansas. Sometimes Hickok wore as many as five guns, plus a knife. That way, he cowed men instead of having to kill them. Charles hadn't seen Wild Bill in a while; he'd heard he was riding dispatch for the Army.
It was Charles's bad luck that he wasn't employed the same way. In fact, be hadn't put his sights on an Indian since his dismissal from the Tenth. And this was surely the year for it. The tribes had wintered peacefully enough. But then the Washington politicians had been unable to agree on the amount of the annuities to be paid under the terms set at Medicine Lodge Creek. Rations, guns, and ammunition went unissued as well. Last spring the angry Comanches had broken loose and gone on the warpath in Texas. Then the Cheyennes under Tall Bull, Scar, and other war leaders stormed into Kansas, supposedly to attack their old enemies the Pawnee. Before long they turned their hostility on the whites.
The Saline, Solomon, and Republican river settlements soon felt the fury. Fifteen whites were killed, five women raped in just a few weeks. So far August had been the worst month, with a wagon train attacked and almost destroyed at Fort Dodge, three wood choppers slaughtered while they worked near Fort Wallace, a Denver stage caught in a four-hour running fight from which driver and passengers barely escaped.
Agent Wynkoop could control the peace chiefs, but not the young men. Sheridan was in trouble. He had but twenty-six hundred infantry and cavalry with which to stop the raids. He'd sent a couple of experienced scouts, Comstock and Grover, to try to restore peace with the Cheyennes. A group under Turkey Leg welcomed the men, then turned on them with no warning, murdering Comstock and badly wounding Grover before he got away. The treachery didn't surprise Charles.
He hated being trapped so far from the action. But he didn't know any Indian-fighting outfit that would take him, and he wasn't fool enough to set out alone, a solitary executioner. So he worked in Abilene, and drank, while his rage and frustration built inside him.
One more drink and he left the shanty. He trudged across the trash-strewn backyard toward the rambling two-story building. He'd slept hard, but with more nightmares. He usually dreamed the old dream of blazing woods, wounded horses falling, his own slow death from smoky suffocation. Last night it had been different. In his dream, Elkanah Bent dangled a big pearl earring in front of him while he pricked Charles with a huge knife.