The Ripper of Storyville and Other Ben Snow Stories Read online

  “They are. We will surrender the body if it will ensure safety to the people of the fort.”

  Running Bear’s eyes flicked shut an instant, then opened. “No, a single life will not avenge the death of my people. I was promised the lives of one hundred men.”

  “Promised?” Schult exploded. “Promised by whom?”

  “I was promised,” Running Bear repeated, and that was all he would say.

  “What of the women and children?”

  “If possible we will not harm them.”

  “You be damned,” the major shouted. “We’ll meet you at the gates with bullets and sabres.”

  The Indians tightened their circle around them, and Ben saw one fitting an arrow into his bow. Another held a rifle ready.

  “Remember,” Ben told Running Bear, “we come under a flag of truce.”

  The Indian nodded slowly. “You come, and you go. I hope you reach the fort in time. Go now, and be ready to meet us.” His words carried a note of menace that made Ben’s hair tingle. The circle opened for them and he spurred his horse around.

  “Come on, Major. Let’s get out of here.”

  But Schult held his ground. “Hand me your gun,” he said. “I’ll settle this war right now.” He let the truce flag fall to the ground.

  Ben could wait no longer. He slapped Schult’s horse into motion and led the charge out of the circle of braves. Behind them, he heard Running Bear’s voice raised in some ancient command.

  An arrow bit the dirt a few feet ahead of Ben’s galloping horse, and another whistled past his head. “We’ve had it now,” he shouted back at Schult.

  “Any day I can’t outrun Navajo arrows!”

  “What about bullets?”

  “They won’t chance the noise if they’re riding to attack the fort. This way they can be into the valley before my men see them coming.”

  Ben drew his gun and twisted in the saddle, but there was no sure shot open to him. The warriors of Running Bear were all around them, but well out of pistol range. He cursed himself for not bringing a rifle. “Well, at least I can get off a few shots in the air,” he said.

  “Save them. We might need every one.”

  Their horses were sweating with the strain now, hoofs pounding the dust. And around them Indians on horseback were swarming down into the valley, like the melting snows of spring. One warrior, his painted naked body glistening, drew up not a hundred feet away, raising his bow in silent challenge. Ben twisted in his saddle and shot the Indian dead.

  “Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?” Schult gasped out, beginning to fall a bit behind.

  “When people think you’re the ghost of Billy the Kid, you’ve got to be able to shoot.”

  Ahead, perhaps two miles down in the valley, the guarding walls of Arrowhead rose suddenly into view. They might just make it, he thought. And then the sky was filled with a great tide of arrows, falling from either side like a summer cloudburst.

  “Schult!”

  Behind him the major’s horse went down, sliding in the dirt. Schultstaggered to his feet as a painted brave charged in on them. Ben wheeled his horse around and fired twice as the Indian met Schult’s body with a feathered spear. At that range he couldn’t miss and the enemy’s skull seemed to blow apart under the bullet’s impact. But the major had fallen now, bleeding from the side where the spearhead had scraped and cut at flesh. “Come on,” Ben shouted, pulling at him.

  Somehow they made it onto the single horse, riding on down the valley. And the arrows followed them down. Schult, riding behind him, grunted once—and Ben knew an arrow had found its mark. “Hang on,” he said. “Not much farther now.”

  The doors of the fort were opening before them, and the bark of rifles was sending an answer to enemy arrows. They’d made it, somehow. Ben slid to the ground as Roberts and another captain came running over. They helped Schult out of the saddle, trying not to look at the blood and mess of his torn uniform. There was one arrow still in his back and Ben pulled it out, bringing a new gush of blood.

  “He can’t last,” Captain Roberts said.

  “Bandage him up,” Ben said. “He’s not dead yet. And who’s next in command?”

  “I guess I am,” Roberts told him.

  “Well, get up to that wall and feast your eyes on more damn Indians than you ever saw before. They’re comin’ like the wind and nothing’s goin’ to stop them.”

  Roberts looked briefly frightened. Then he ran off to issue orders to the men who would defend the fort. It was the women who took up the task of caring for the wounded major, and Ben saw Anita Roberts unrolling a clean bandage for him. It surprised him somehow, to see her out here in the daylight with the other women.

  “Mrs. Roberts . . .”

  She looked up at him. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Overhead, a single arrow cut the air and clattered harmlessly off a tin roof. “Everybody under cover,” someone shouted. “Here they come.”

  Ben pulled her under cover as the air was suddenly torn with sound and fury. Two men hurried to carry the wounded major inside.

  “Oh, God,” Mrs. Roberts gasped at his side. “Will they kill us all?”

  He didn’t bother to answer. High on the wall a soldier toppled backwards in death. The arrows kept coming, and now there was rifle fire from the Indians too, as they began risking their small supply of ammunition.

  “Your husband’s in charge now,” Ben said. “He’ll hold them off.”

  “But that’s just it,” she gasped. “He won’t. He likes them better than white men. He . . .”

  Ben stared. Her words dug into his brain and he moved. Of course! Captain Roberts . . .

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll be back,” he shouted. “Stay under cover.”

  The arrows thudded into the ground around him as he ran, and he could see that some of the Indians had already gained the top of the wall, battling hand to hand with the defenders. But Ben kept going, bursting through the door of the post headquarters.

  Captain Roberts was there, alone, sitting very still in the colonel’s old chair.

  “This is where I find you while your men die out there,” Ben said.

  “What is this, Snow? What are you doing here?”

  “You’re the one who betrayed the fort, Roberts. You rode out yesterday and met with Running Bear. When I followed your tracks here and told the colonel, you had to kill him. That arrow was never fired from a Navajo bow. You used it as a dagger to stab him. That’s why you rushed out after your wife tried to kill me. That’s when you did it—in those few minutes before Schult found the body. You overheard what I told the colonel and tried to lure me to my death too. You knew Anita would try to kill me.”

  Captain Roberts rose from behind the desk. He was holding his service revolver pointed at Ben’s chest. “It doesn’t matter now what you know. Running Bear is knocking on the gates. The fort will be his within an hour.”

  “Why?” Ben asked him. “Why?”

  “Because I like Indians. Because I hate every damned man in this outfit. Because just for once I want to play God.”

  “Put down the gun, Roberts.”

  “Oh, no. You won’t talk me out of this. Nobody will.”

  The door behind Ben burst open and a sergeant rushed in. “Captain—they’re massing for a final charge. What’ll we do?”

  “Do?” Roberts brought the gun around slightly to cover them both. “We’ll surrender. Pass the word to surrender.”

  “But Captain . . .”

  “That’s an order, Sergeant. Surrender!”

  Ben made a move toward his gun but the captain’s weapon was back on him at once. “No moves, Snow. This is my day.”

  And so they waited like that, while the sergeant passed the order to surrender. Gradually the firing on the walls grew less, and then suddenly there was the terrible squeak of the great gates being thrown open. The fort was in the hands of Running Bear.

  Roberts motioned Ben outside with his gun, and Ben saw the Navajo braves charging through the open gates with unrestrained shouts of victory. And in their midst rode the triumphant, fantastic figure of Running Bear, his white hair flowing behind him, unarmed yet somehow the strongest of them all.

  “Greetings, Running Bear,” Roberts shouted from the steps of the building. “I have delivered the fort into your hands as promised.” There was an angry murmur from the men at this, but already the forces of Running Bear were in control. Arrows and rifles covered every man and woman.

  At a motion from the Navajo chief, a warrior took up his position directly behind Ben, his bow bent and ready. “Now,” Running Bear said. “A single movement and you die. An arrow can be quite effective at a range of six inches.”

  “It can be quite effective at any range,” Ben agreed. “But I don’t think you want to kill me.”

  Running Bear moved his horse a bit closer. “No? All adult white men here will die. You among them.”

  “I will fight you for their lives,” Ben said. “Just you and I. If I win, everyone lives.” It was a dangerous move, but he figured a fifty-fifty chance with knives and better than that with guns.

  But Running Bear shook his head. “I carry no arms. I fight no man.”

  “You just watch while your men do the torturing and killing, huh?”

  “No torture. The deaths will be swift and as painless as possible. I am not a savage.”

  “If you won’t fight me, let me fight your friend Roberts here,” Ben said.

  But the officer took a backward step. “No! Don’t listen to him, Running Bear. Kill him!”

  “Yes,” Running Bear agreed suddenly, and motioned to the warrior who stood behind Ben.

  This is it, Ben thought, tensing his back for t
he bite of the arrow. But instead there came the crack of a pistol, and the Indian toppled, his arrow zinging into the ground.

  They turned as one man and saw Anita Roberts in the window of one of the buildings, gripping her pistol with both hands. And Ben supposed there was something right and just about her saving his life after trying to kill him. But already a Navajo brave was raising his rifle to the window where Anita stood. Ben tensed for a leap across the ten feet separating them, but at the last second there came a scream from Roberts.

  “No!” he shouted. “Not Anita!” And the army pistol he still held barked twice. The Indian dropped his rifle and toppled to the ground, but before his body hit, five arrows thudded into Roberts’ chest and back. He twisted, clawing at them, a look of amazement written across his face. Ben looked quickly away, because he did not want to see this man die.

  The Indians brought Anita to her dead husband, and stood by quietly as she sobbed over him. Through it all Running Bear sat motionless on his horse, moving only to raise a hand of command against a brave who gestured with his knife toward Anita. “We have killed her husband,” he spoke. “That is enough.”

  And so they stood there, Ben and Running Bear facing each other across the sobbing woman and the dead traitor, with two hundred soldiers and four hundred Indians waiting for the word, the command, that would mean death to so many.

  “Now what?” Ben asked finally.

  And Running Bear spoke. “Show me the body of Colonel Noakes,” he said.

  Ben led him inside, with two armed braves following, and in an inner room they found the colonel’s body stretched out on the floor, covered with a blanket. “Here,” Ben said softly. “Captain Roberts killed him.”

  And Running Bear bent and lifted the dead eyelids, and stared for a long time into those unseeing eyes. “Yes,” he said finally. “Yes.”

  And then, with his long white hair trailing behind, he left. He mounted his great horse and spoke a few brief commands to the warriors. Then he turned one last time toward Ben, standing on the steps. “We will meet again,” he said, and it was not a threat but rather the words of one warrior to another.

  Then they were gone, riding back through the gates of Fort Arrowhead like the very wind that rose in the west. And as they rode, a gentle rain began to fall from the gray clouds over the valley. And everywhere the soldiers of the fort began to pick up their weapons and care for their wounded.

  And Ben Snow went with Anita to tend to Major Schult’s torn body. And presently a burial detail took away the body of her husband to the graveyard outside the walls.

  And there, in the rain, a great peace settled over the valley . . .

  GHOST TOWN

  Ben Snow had been riding for half a day when he spotted the lonely sheepherder and his flock, blots of white against the gray of the valley. He spurred his horse a little faster, and saw the man look up, startled, fearful with the age-old terror. Whether gunman or cowpoke, a strange rider most often meant an enemy of sheep.

  But Ben Snow was hardly interested in the bleating creatures that now ran from his path. Night was fast approaching over the eastern hills, and he would be needing a camp for the resting hours. “How far to the next town?” he called out to the sheepman.

  The man on the ground, a pale youth still in his early twenties, eyed Ben uncertainly. “Raindeer’s just over the next hill,” he said finally. After a moment he added, “But you don’t want to go there.”

  “Why not?” A night in a hotel was better than one under the cold stars anytime.

  “Raindeer’s a ghost town.”

  “That doesn’t bother me. Sometimes I like to be alone.”

  “You don’t understand, mister,” the sheepman said slowly, as if addressing some St. Louis dandy. “It’s a ghost town with a ghost. It’s haunted. No one goes to Raindeer anymore . . .”

  Ben smiled down at the man. “Well, I guess I can risk a ghost for one night. Thanks a lot.” Then his horse was under motion again, scattering sheep before it.

  The wind was turning colder as he rode. It was the hour of dusk, a dismal one on the plains at any time, but especially bleak this night when he rode alone. It wasn’t as if he was riding toward anything—that would not have been so bad. But he was riding away from something. He’d been riding away from something for as long as he could remember.

  The sheepman had spoken the truth. A town stretched out before him, a town of shacks with only a semblance of a street. It might have been a deserted mining town, except that there were no mines within a hundred miles. As he rode down along the dusty trail he passed a weather-beaten sign that might have been standing for a century:

  WELCOME TO

  RAINDEER

  The Town That

  The last words, whatever they were, had long ago faded and rotted away. There was a date, too, that looked like 1866. Perhaps the town had been born in that first brave year after the War, when men still thought the worst was behind them.

  Ben Snow hardly remembered the end of the War. He’d been barely alive at its beginning. A book about it, The Red Badge of Courage, had just been published back east, and Ben had found a copy that had drifted into Santa Fe somehow. He could have been a young man then, and perhaps he wouldn’t have acted much differently from the young man in the book. He didn’t know.

  Instead, he’d been born a generation later, two thousand miles further west, in a country where men were only now beginning to hang up their guns.

  Welcome to Raindeer . . . Ghost town in a valley that time had passed over.

  He tied his horse to a wobbly hitching post and went into one of the darkened buildings, searching for a lamp. There was nothing but dust and sand and sagebrush. And memories. The big mirror and the place where the bar had stood (for this had been a saloon). Bars were valuable west of Texas, and they were often moved from one place to another.

  He wondered where the name of Raindeer had come from.

  “Stand right there, mister.”

  Ben turned around slowly, his hands carefully away from his sides, and looked into the barrel of a rifle. That didn’t surprise him half as much as the person who held it—a dirty-faced girl with a kerchief wrapped around her head, wearing a sweat-stained blouse and tight jeans. She was standing in the doorway, caught in the fading dusk, and she must have had eyes like a bat to see him in the darkness.

  “I was told the town was haunted,” he said, taking a step forward.

  Without changing her expression she fired a bullet into the wall a close two feet to his left. “I said to stand still.”

  “I heard you. Be careful with that thing.”

  There were riders outside now. Two, no, three, and they’d been riding hard. She didn’t seem surprised to hear them. “Come on in,” she called out.

  “We have a visitor.”

  They had lamps and these were quickly lit, bathing the scene in a sort of red glow. And by this light Ben first saw them: the Indian, wearing white man’s clothing but carrying a knife instead of a gun on his belt; the Beard, a foul-mouthed old man who constantly chuckled to himself, who wore his gun down on the hip and chewed tobacco; and lastly the Preacher, whose gun was almost hidden by his black suit. Almost but not quite.

  It was the Preacher who spoke first, and he spoke as their leader. “Toss your gun over here, mister, and she’ll put down the gun.”

  Ben shrugged and unstrapped his belt. “I was only looking for a place to spend the night,” he said. “I thought this town was deserted.”

  “It is deserted, mister,” the Preacher replied. “We’re only spending the night too. Who are you?”

  “My name is Ben Snow.”

  The name meant something to the Beard. His hand went for his gun in a flash, until he remembered that Ben was unarmed. But even then he kept it resting on the butt. “That’s Billy the Kid,” he croaked.

  The Preacher frowned. “Billy the Kid’s been dead a long time.”

  “I’m glad you agree,” Ben said. “I’ve been trying to convince people for years.”

  “Don’t let him fool you!” the Beard said. “I saw him kill a man back in ’90.”

  “Is that right, Snow?”

  “I’ve killed a few men. Who hasn’t?”

  “I haven’t,” the Preacher said. “But that’s beside the point. We’re going to have to tie you up and leave you. Can’t take a chance of your causing trouble.”