Worse Than Death Read online

  CONTENTS

  About WORSE THAN DEATH

  Quotation

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Preview of CROW 3: TEARS OF BLOOD

  About the Author

  About Piccadilly Publishing

  Copyright

  ‘Know what Crow used to say about livin’ by your guns? Said it made him like a kind of alchemist. Said he was the first man in history to turn lead into gold. Yeah. Meanest son of a bitch ever. Crow.’

  No other name. Just Crow. Dressed in black from head to toe. The meanest man in the bullet-scarred annals of the West. Nobody ever turned their back on him. A cold voice in the shadows, a vengeful angel of death …

  Time was when Crow was a loner, with just his weapons and his horse for company. A time when the snows covered Dakota Territory. When Many Knives led the Shoshone in battle against the Whiteman. Against Captain Hetherington and a wagon train of helpless women. A time when Crow joined in the fight on an isolated plateau above the raging Moorcock River and defeat meant something worse than death …

  ‘Time is easy to come by,

  You just have to take it that’s all …’

  From Border Country by Lee Clayton

  This is for Trevor Hoyle who lives up in the cold north country. He’s a writer and a friend.

  Chapter One

  ‘Crow and women?’

  The old man started to laugh as though the question had stirred something so deeply buried in his past that he could only catch a half-remembered glimpse of it way back through the mist.

  ‘Sure Crow knew some women. He was a good-lookin’ fellow was Crow. Tall and lean and kind of . . . I don’t know. Scary, I guess. Sort of man brings out somethin’ in a woman she don’t even know is there.’

  A cold blue norther came whining through the dusty streets of Abilene making women clutch their bonnets and men curse and rub their eyes. The old man in the chair began to cough, leaning forward and straining. Wheezing and breathing in great rasping gulps of air until the stranger in the neat city suit wondered whether he should try and get some help.

  But the fit passed and the old-timer’s breathing returned to normal. He wiped his nose and spat out into the street, narrowly missing a car as it rattled by.

  ‘Can’t stand them God-damned buggies. Ain’t natural, Mister. Just ain’t. Couldn’t ever see Crow takin’ to a machine like that. Foulin’ up the air with its stink.’

  He spat a second time to show his contempt for the progress that was dragging the country into the twentieth century.

  The Easterner hunched his shoulders against the biting cold and shivered. Waiting for the old man to slip his mind back into gear again. And tell him a little more about the man who had been called Crow.

  Nothing else.

  Just Crow.

  ‘You feel the chill, Mister?’

  The stranger nodded, watching his breath plume out In front of him. Waiting.

  ‘Sure makes your balls rattle in your pants, don’t it? I seen it so damned cold the water froze your eyes together. Spit and it sang in the air. Ice before it hit the dirt. This ain’t nothing to that. Folks died, back in the old days. Sixties and seventies. Heard of the Donner Party in the Sierras?’

  A shaking of the head.

  ‘Got frozen in. Folks in wagons. Women. Children. All iced in for the winter. They started dyin’ from a lack o’ food. So they ate what there was. And that was themselves. Said they only ate those already stiff and cold. I wondered ‘bout that. Kind of convenient.’

  The old man was moving in the right direction to telling what the Easterner wanted to know and he stayed silent, letting him ramble on.

  ‘You heard tell of Alferd Packer?’

  He wasn’t sure if he’d heard the name right. It rang a bell somewhere way back in his mind. Some dreadful and macabre incident on the frontier.

  ‘Met the son of a bitch. Saw he’d died near Denver. Not long back. What he done was terrible. Like the Donners. I once was with Crow when some school ma’am said there was a fate worse than death. Crow laughed at her. Said she didn’t know her ass from a hole in the ground. That there just wasn’t a fate worse than dyin’ . . . Hell, I lost the thread. What was I talkin’ on ’bout?’

  The stranger prompted the old man’s cluttered mind back on the tracks.

  ‘Yeah, Alferd. He and five others was up at Ouray’s camp. The Ute chief. Back around seventy-four, this was. They was headin’ for the gold fields around Breckenridge, Colorado. Somethin’ over a hundred miles. Weather like we got here only ten times colder and fifty times wetter. Two months later and Al Packer appears on his own at the Los Pinos Agency. Not even fifty miles off where they all started. Got lost and snowbound.’

  The Easterner was interested and asked the old-timer to go on.

  ‘The rest of ’em? I recall there was a tame Indian at the Agency. Took one look at Alferd when he collapses in and just said: “He’s too plenty fat.” That was true enough. Been livin’ high on the hog during those weeks. Or I guess you’d say high on five hogs. Don’t remember all their names. Swan. Bell. George Somethin’. Called him “California”. And the others.’ He began to chuckle. ‘Alferd just up and ate ‘em all. Ran away. Got caught years later. Served time in the penitentiary. Now he’s dead. So many dead. Ain’t no fate worse than death, Crow used to say. Now he’s gone too. Long, long years . . .’

  The voice faded away and the stranger leaned forwards to look, fearing the man in the chair had fallen asleep, but his eyes were open and clear.

  ‘I told you how Crow got hisself booted out of the U.S. Cavalry, and what happened after, didn’t I?’

  The tall man from the East nodded.

  ‘Well, next I heard of him was when he gotten mixed in with them women.’ He looked round, grinning at the expression of interest on his listener’s face. Cackled at it, showing the few remaining rotting and stained stumps of teeth spaced out through his mouth, like ramshackle buildings waiting for a developer. ‘Yeah. Somethin’ ‘bout old Crow and women. That boy was so ornery with women, you’d have thought none of ’em would have come within a thousand miles of him. But they just flocked around. Guess women’s like a bitch that you whip and kick and tie up and beat on, and it comes whinin’ and lickin’ your boots for it. Women’s like that. Crow never lacked for them. Used them and threw them away. Like old clothes. Heard tell there was a whore once. Out Dallas way. Met her, too. Don’t recall the name. Saw her at a funeral. Way off at the side. Old one-eyed John knew her. She was the only one cried. No. Not for Crow. Nobody cried for him. Hated him. Cursed him. Wished him dead. Cried on account of things he done. Not for him.’

  It was getting dark all across the town of Abilene in Kansas and the two men shared the dusk in silence. The stars were already beginning to show themselves like pinpoints of diamond light against the deep blue of the sky.

  ‘Time to be goin’ in, I guess,’ said the old man, shifting in the chair.

  ‘Nothin’ more I can tell you, Mister? Not tonight. Too cold for me. Maybe tomorrow. Tell you all ‘bout Crow and that wagon train of Cavalry wives and womenfolk. Fall of seventy-six. Shoshone.’

  He struggled to his feet, seeing his reflection in the window of a five and dime. Grinning and dropping his right hand to his hip in a slowed down copy of a shootist’s draw. The stranger smiled at him, watching him as he walked unsteadily away down the Abilene street towards the rooming-ho
use where he’d lived for the past twelve years.

  He could hear him still mumbling to himself. ‘Shoshone. Seventy-six. Damned cold. Ain’t nothin’ worse than dyin’. Nothin’.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘And I tell you, Rachel Shannon, that there is nothing worse. It is a fate worse than death itself.’

  ‘But Mrs. Hetherington …’

  ‘No buts, my lady. I have lived out in this savage wilderness with Captain Hetherington for long enough to know what I am talking about.’

  ‘But Papa says that the Indians do not harm the white women when they …’

  ‘Harm them!!! Land’s sakes, child!’

  If Rachel, sixteen years old in a week’s time, had suggested to Mrs. Hetherington that Crazy Horse would make an acceptable husband, she could not have looked for a stronger reaction to her words.

  The older woman—Martha Hetherington was easing away from the wrong side of forty, though she still claimed to be in the middle thirties—stood and placed her hands on her waist, staring at Rachel. Her eyes popped from her head like the stops on a mission-hall harmonium and breath hissed from between narrowed lips like steam from a faulty boiler.

  ‘Papa said …’

  ‘Your father, Lieutenant Shannon … Lieutenant … has only been west of the Missouri for six months, child. How can he know anything about the ways of the heathens out here?’

  ‘They don’t harm white women,’ insisted the girl, sticking valiantly to her guns in the face of the other woman’s scorn.

  ‘That depends on what you mean by harm!’ snorted Martha. ‘There’s worse than killing, you know.’ She lowered her voice. ‘You’re too young to know, but they’d far worse to women they capture.’

  There was a momentary silence between the two of them. They were standing in a corner of the parade ground of the temporary fort, among the hills in the part of the Dakota Territory. All about there was the bustle of a wagon-train being made ready. No the usual Conestoga rigs that carried so many hundreds of settlers westwards from Independence, Missouri, Oregon and the new lands there. These were the Doughertys. Mule-drawn ambulances that were always using when the issue was the transportation of officers’ wives. And, indeed, of the wives and daughters of noncommissioned men and Troopers.

  The Dougherty was possibly the single most uncomfortable kind of wagon ever invented by the mind man. It was not unlike the ordinary small wagon that followed the cattle drives. Narrow and high-sided. Water and feed for the mules slung beneath the front axle. Water for the passengers under the rear. At the back of the wagon was a boot, supported by chains, like that at t back of a stage.

  Inside there were two seats facing each other with the driver perched up outside. The Dougherty had canvas sides and end flaps that could all be closed to give wounded men—or the ladies—some privacy and protection from the heat and dust.

  Beyond the train the Cavalry patrol that was to guide them on their journey was also getting ready. Every trooper standing by his mount, wearing his winter greatcoat against the October chill. There had already been a light dusting of snow, unseasonably early, and their trip westwards through Shoshone lands was threatened by worse weather to come.

  Captain Hetherington was inspecting his men. Marching along with his gauntlets clasped behind his back, the tip of his brass-hilted eighteen-sixty issue saber trailing in the dirt behind him. He was a small fighting-cock of a man, who had spent much of his life acting under the orders of others. This women’s train was to be virtually his first independent command of any size and he was relishing the power and authority it gave him. Strutting up and down, calling out commands to his Corporals and Sergeant. Pointing out this and that wrong with the saddles or the men’s equipment.

  ‘I hear the Shoshone have been off their tribal hunting lands and causing trouble, Mrs. Hetherington,’ said Rachel Shannon, eager to change the subject.

  ‘I believe that their leader, the one they call Many Knives, has inspired his young men to follow him in a rising against us. But my husband has more than enough men with him in this patrol to conquer the entire Sioux nation if need arises.’

  ‘The Shoshone are not Sioux, are they?’

  ‘No!’ snapped Martha Hetherington. ‘Of course they are not. It was a figure of speech, young lady.’

  ‘Why is he called Many Knives?’

  ‘Why do you suppose?’ replied the older woman, tartly.

  ‘Because he carries many knives with him, I expect,’ replied Rachel. Shannon, glancing away to see if she could make out her father anywhere among the busy throng around her. But she guessed that he would be inside with the remainder of the officers, poring over maps and plans. With foul weather imminent, the temporary fort would soon be untenable there had been cases in the past of snow so deep in the northern Territories that it reached the top of the Cavalry forts’ defenses, and hostile Indians had been able to easily creep in at night and overcome the soldiers.

  There was a better site along Greenbriar Canyon, over one hundred miles west, through a land of deep moving and treacherous rivers. Already one quarter of the unit were there. The finest and most experienced soldiers the command. Preparing the site for the rest of the par one third of the soldiers would accompany the women under the command of Captain Hetherington. Many of them green recruits from the south. The balance of the outfit would follow on in a week. Rachel knew that her father disapproved of doing this way. Feeling the command was split too many ways for too long. ‘It would have been better to make the trip in two halves,’ he’d said. But he was only an aging, junior Lieutenant and nobody paid much attention to him.

  He’d mentioned the over-confidence that had led to the appalling disaster earlier in the year at the Little Big Horn when the boy wonder, Autie Custer, had been butchered with all of his men. Though there were some who said that the General had been betrayed by other officers who deliberately chose to desert him and let him die. Reno and Benteen were the two main officers in the camp gossip.

  But Rachel didn’t much care. It was clear to her that there were plenty of soldiers to guard her and the other seventeen women on the train. And one or two of the Troopers were bright-eyed young boys who had smiled at her.

  It promised to be a fine trip, despite the cold.

  Captain Hetherington had made them a brave speed concerning the journey.

  ‘My dear ladies,’ he’d begun. ‘It is with pride and deep sense of humility that I stand before you all today. In a couple of moments from now I shall be giving the signal. The bugler will blow for us. And our little train will be on its way.’

  Rachel Shannon had to share a Dougherty with the Captain’s wife and she sat huddled on the hard seat. A grey blanket around her thin shoulders barely keeping out the rising wind. She’d travelled on a wagon train before, but never in winter. In the past she’d suffered agonies from the sweltering heat and flies that they’d encountered. This time was surely going to be different.

  ‘The journey will take us a few days before we reach our destination. My men will be all around us and the Sioux are not going to harm us. Not so close to winter when they will want to be holed up safe and warm to brag of their infamous victory over …’ Hetherington considered going on about Custer and then decided that it might be tactless to do so.

  Rachel noticed that he hadn’t mentioned the Shoshone Indians at all. And their chief, Many Knives. She understood that there might be more danger there than from the Sioux.

  ‘The weather is going to be severe.’ He paused for dramatic effect. ‘But we shall win through.’

  Rachel glanced around the packed wagon and saw that Martha Hetherington was gazing at her husband with a simpering smile of total infatuation. Rachel’s own mother had died of cholera at Fort Phil Kearney a year or more back but she’d never looked at her father like that. Not that they hadn’t loved each other. Just that they didn’t go in for that kind of mooning.

  ‘I have sent out scouts. Two of the best Troopers in this entire comman
d. They will be reporting back to me when they see anything suspicious or anything that might threaten us with the least hint of danger. Perhaps I should say “if” they do, rather than “when” they do, for I vow that I do not anticipate the smallest problems to our journey, either from the inclement weather or from the Indians.’

  The scouts had gone off a few hours earlier. Brothers, both Irish, named O’Hanlon. Both with the brightest crop of red hair that Rachel Shannon had ever seen.

  ‘I know you will have heard that the Indians hope to defeat us and drive us from what they have the nerve the damned nerve to call their lands.’ He waited for the polite ripple of laughter to sink away before continuing. ‘They say they will wring our necks like a bunch of wild turkeys.’ Again the studied hesitation. Standing in the stirrups of his chestnut mare. ‘I say they will have difficulty.’ The Captain looked around the men and wagons. ‘Some turkey, huh? And some damned neck I wring!’

  They finally clattered from the temporary fort, past the saluting sentries. Hearing the Troopers in their double line singing out with “Garryowen”. The famous marching song of the Cavalry. A song about a woman faith to her soldier love, even though he is far, far away.

  It always made Rachel cry.

  Martha Hetherington looked across at her with contempt.

  ‘Stop your sniveling, Miss Shannon! You’re a disgrace to the honor of the Cavalry. Whining like that!’

  ‘But it is so sad, Ma’am,’ moaned the girl. Peering out of the back of the rig through the opening, fringed with dusty canvas. Seeing the five men bringing up the rear, led by her father.

  ‘Not so sad as being caught or killed, girl. I believe was going to tell you earlier about the ways of the savages with the women they take.’

  ‘I do not believe I want to hear it, if you do not mix Mrs. Hetherington,’ said Rachel quietly. Wiping her face with a soiled handkerchief.