The Hanging of Charlie Darke Read online

  The Hanging of Charlie Darke

  Will DuRey

  Contents

  Title Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  In the summer of 1869, when I arrived in the Wyoming township of Beecher’s Gulch, I was in my thirty-fifth year. I was christened Weston Gray but among the tribes of the Arapaho and Sioux I am known as Medicine Feather. I’ve lived and travelled with them for twenty years, sharing their summer hunts and their winter deprivations; fighting their enemies and dancing at their ceremonies; speaking as an equal around their village fire, and as their spokesman at treaty meetings with the white man. Among the nomad tribes of the Plains the name Medicine Feather is acknowledged with honour. My own people tread cautiously when they hear the name Wes Gray.

  I have been a trapper, a wagon-train scout and, for a short while, during the last weeks of the War between the States, a reluctant army scout. A Confederate sniper put a lump of lead in my right thigh and the war ended before I was fit again for service. Since then I’ve ranged the land north to south and east to west, spending each winter with Kicking Bear’s Arapaho people in the Wind River country. Come spring I take my haul of beaver pelts to Fort Bridger, along the Oregon Trail, and set by enough money to stock me with provisions for the following winter. Then it’s east, to Steelsville, a small town east of Council Bluffs, where I wait for word from Caleb Dodge. I’m the chief scout for the wagon trains he leads west. Sometimes we take settlers to the farm lands of Oregon, and sometimes, their minds still lured by thoughts of gold, we take them to California. Now and then we’ve made the shorter trip to Montana. Virginia City, once a haphazard arrangement of tents and flimsy structures, now boasts those icons of civilization, a church, a school, a hotel and a jail. Settlers, encouraged by the government, are pouring into the area. The land is good for cattle grazing and farming. Only the truculent Sioux are a cause of anxiety.

  But this summer I hadn’t got my telegraph message from Caleb. He’d been sore at me during our last trail to California. Sore because I’d married Marie Delafleur, the daughter of a French baker, one of the families we’d led to Virginia City when the war still raged in the South. I could accept Caleb’s disagreement with my marriage but I couldn’t accept that he wouldn’t avail himself of my services because of it. We both knew I was the best scout west of the Missouri. Still, that year his wife had taken a sudden fever and died. The fact that he hadn’t been with her played on his mind for a while and excited some religion in him that I never suspected existed. I’m not saying he hadn’t been a good man before that, but he’d looked at the necessity of things rather than their face value. He hadn’t questioned my need for two wives, I didn’t understand why a third angered him so. He ranted and swore at me like I was a devil bearing gifts of sin. I suppose it was because my marriage to Marie was preacher-spoke, but that didn’t make it any more real than my marriages to Little Feather, the Arapaho who lived in the village on the Snake, and Sky, the Minneconjou Sioux girl who chose me after the death of her first husband.

  Let me explain about living in this vast land. There are no rules that guarantee survival. Strangers are regarded with suspicion by white men and red men alike. Actions which threaten the accepted behaviour of a society are punished, usually with pain and death. To be accepted into a strange community means adopting their ways, recognizing their laws, observing their religion. I’d wintered with the Arapaho for several years before I took Little Feather as my wife. Apart from the feeling that Little Feather and I had for each other it was a symbol to the entire village that my relationship with them was permanent; their needs were my needs, their enemies my enemies, their struggles my struggles. From that point on I was one of them, a brother of the Arapaho. Not only did they teach me their spoken tongue, but through them I learned the sign language common to the tribes of all the nations that wandered the Plains.

  Sky’s first husband had been a white man, a settler who had worked a triangle of land where the Mildwater Creek ran into the Platte. After his death she chose me as her husband. Such is the way of the Sioux. A widow may choose the warrior she wants in her tepee. Again, setting aside our mutual attraction, we each gave the other an insight into an alien way of life, an insight as vital to the survival of the Sioux as a people as to me as an individual. The Sioux were more anxious to understand the ways of the white men than most of us were to understand theirs. Their way of life, their existence, was threatened by the advancement of the white people. They needed someone like me to speak for them. My service to them meant their co-operation with me when I led the wagons through their land. My Sioux wife provided evidence that when I spoke for the Sioux my words were true.

  But a Sioux wife may leave her husband and take another without recriminations. If my long absence from Sky’s lodge displeased her she was at liberty to choose someone else, and, perhaps one day, I would ride into the village on the North Platte and find the lance and shield of another brave outside my tepee. I would accept that. A warrior doesn’t mourn the loss of parents, children, wives or horses.

  Little Feather knew about Sky and Sky knew about Little Feather. Neither objected to the other. I was a warrior who travelled far and they understood a man’s needs. I wasn’t able to provide for either of them in the traditional way of their people, I was rarely in the villages when the buffalo came, but I brought white man’s goods that I shared with her relatives so that my wives were brought meat and hides while I was away.

  Marie Delafleur was different. I married her for her survival. Her family had been part of a wagon train who’d made the shorter journey to Montana. Her parents were French immigrants who had arrived as newlyweds in New Orleans, moved to St Louis with two young children and finally headed west to Virginia City to establish a family bakery business. But disaster befell the family. Charles Delafleur was crushed to death while repairing a wagon wheel just two days short of the journey’s end. His wife, Elinore, having opened an eating house, less grand than had been her dream but providing meals that ensured a constant line of customers, was shot dead less than six months later. She got in the way of a drunken roustabout’s bullet and died instantly. The townspeople hanged him before he’d sobered up.

  Marie, with the help of a local widow and her son, kept the business going. Her brother, Giles, a bright lad, she sent back East to college. But Virginia City was no place for a young girl alone. The town was full of ne’er-do-wells; drifters who hadn’t settled after the war, riff-raff looking for an opportunity to fill their pockets with other people’s money. Their intentions toward Marie were obvious as their eyes followed her every step.

  To keep her more lecherous pursuers at arm’s length she’d got in the habit of telling them she was my girl. True enough, there’d been some sparking between us on the way to Montana but that was never going to amount to anything because she wanted a man at home in a ranch house or on a farm, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of life. I’d promised her family I’d look them up whenever I was in Virginia City, and when I returned it was easy to fall into the way we’d been the previous year. I soon learned of her ruse for keeping away unwanted suitors and I fully approved. Her family had been good to me on the trail and I was happy to give her what protection I cou
ld. To give truth to her claims, we married, and if that seems a cold statement let me reassure you that our relationship was quite the opposite. I loved Marie as much as I did Little Feather and Sky, and like Sky, when the time came that someone replaced me in Marie’s thoughts, as it surely would, I would ride on. But while she was my wife I knew that no one in Virginia City would interfere with her. I had Indian ways of killing people that would exact the most dreadful revenge.

  When Caleb’s telegram didn’t arrive by the second week of June I rode south to Independence where he assembled the wagons he would lead west. It didn’t take long to discover why I hadn’t heard from him. His horse had fallen and rolled on him, breaking his right leg and three ribs. Fears that his lungs had been damaged were now removed but he’d spent a painful and feverish two weeks and was still bedridden. Another leader had been found for the wagons he had proposed to lead to Oregon and there was no job for me.

  Caleb looked pale and older when I visited him at his sister’s home. We exchanged pleasantries until she tactfully withdrew saying, ‘I suppose you men will want to talk!’

  ‘Pleased you came,’ said Caleb. Trying to make himself comfortable seemed awkward. He shuffled in the bed, his face showing the discomfort that movement gave him.

  ‘Wondered why you hadn’t contacted me.’

  ‘Yeah. Fell under the horse on the way to the telegraph office.’

  ‘Could have told the fellow who’d taken over that I would scout for him,’ I said.

  ‘I know. But I didn’t want you to do that.’ I threw him a questioning look. ‘I need a favour, Wes. Something I was going to ask you to do even if I hadn’t had the accident.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve had a letter from Annie, my niece. Seems that her and her husband have got themselves some trouble.’

  ‘What kind?’

  ‘Can’t rightly say, but she sure sounds worried. Now that her parents are dead she doesn’t seem to have anyone else to turn to.’

  ‘What did the letter say?’

  ‘Someone’s trying to ruin them. Run them off their land. Even poisoned some of their stock.’

  ‘Does she know who’s doing it?

  ‘Didn’t mention any names in the letter. Says there’s nothing she can prove against anyone.’

  ‘I guess that means she hasn’t involved the law.’

  He shook his head. ‘Damnation,’ he said as he tried sit up higher in the bed.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go out there. See if there’s anything you can do to help.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘They’ve got a spread in Wyoming. Near a place called Beecher’s Gulch. Tarnation, I’d go myself if it weren’t for this busted leg.’

  The wagons had gone without me. There didn’t seem much else to do.

  After ten days in the saddle I sat on a ridge looking down on the one street of timber buildings that was Beecher’s Gulch. Dust coated my face and clothes, and the tired muscles of Red, my saddle horse, quivered as we paused there. The anticipation of a cold beer in the saloon drew my tongue along my lips. I tapped Red’s neck with the knuckles of my right hand, no need to use spurs, and he began to pick his way down the trail to the town. As the full length of the street came into view I could see a cluster of people outside a building three-quarters of the way along. Judging by the number of cow-ponies at the hitching rail out front, it had to be the saloon. Voices, indistinct, a low murmur, came to me as I reached the beginning of the town. Suddenly the crowd began moving, moving like an emptied bucket of water in my direction.

  Now the voices were louder, clearer. ‘String him up.’ ‘Get a rope.’ ‘Tie his hands.’ ‘Let’s get it done. Thief.’

  There were about two dozen men, some waving rope lariats, others gesticulating with unholstered handguns. They came forward, the front two dragging between them a young man whose face was bloodied and whose expression showed both anger and fear. He wore a crumpled, plain white shirt over denim work pants. His gunbelt was empty. His head was bare. As they drew level with me he renewed his struggles. Those closest to him punched and kicked him while the men at his sides held his arms. This was a lynch mob. I’d seen them before, surely and swiftly dispensing justice. There was a big tree at the beginning of the street. I’d passed it on my way in. That was where they were heading. The prisoner was trying to talk. I heard him tell them they were making a mistake. I’d heard every lynching victim say the same words. I let them pass. It wasn’t my business.

  A storekeeper came to his doorway. ‘What’s happening?’ he called.

  ‘Rustling,’ someone answered him. ‘Caught red-handed.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Charlie Darke.’

  I pulled Red to a halt and turned him back to watch the mob. Charlie Darke was the man I’d come to see. The husband of Caleb’s niece.

  CHAPTER TWO

  They had got their man on a horse and someone had thrown a noose over a high branch of the tree, one man busily securing the loose end of the rope to a lower branch while another, mounted, slipped the noose over Charlie Darke’s neck. The rest of the mob stepped aside to leave a clear run for the horse when the preparations were complete. Charlie Darke had run out of words. Only his eyes, wild with fear, appealed to the men around him. Their bravado, too, was on the wane. Fewer people were shouting as the realization of their actions dawned on them. Charlie found some words. ‘Please. I didn’t do it.’

  A big man bustled his way to the horse’s rump. His clothes rough and dusty, his wide face unshaven. In his right hand he carried a coiled lariat. ‘Let’s get it done,’ he yelled, and raised the rope to slap the beast’s hindquarters.

  I’d already drawn my rifle from the saddle boot, and as his hand raised I took careful aim and fired. His yell and slap on the horse’s rump coincided with my bullet splicing the rope where it hung over the branch. The horse, with Charlie still in the saddle, galloped down the street toward me. Someone, perhaps the owner of the horse, stepped into the street to stop its charge. I put a bullet in the dust near his feet to discourage him. Charlie, noose around his neck and hands tied behind his back, galloped past me.

  Though my words were hardly necessary, I yelled, ‘Keep going.’ I swung the rifle round to cover the astonished mob. I began backing Red along the street, steadily pointing the gun at the centre of the mob.

  The big man tried to rile the others. ‘Don’t let him get away with this.’ He pointed at me. ‘He can’t shoot everyone.’

  ‘I’ll make sure I shoot you first if anyone tries anything.’ No one did, because they knew as well as I did that I was now beyond the range of their handguns. I hadn’t seen anyone carrying a rifle. No one was a threat to me while I had them covered.

  A shuffling on the boardwalk to my right caught my attention. It was the storekeeper, a slim, greying man, a full-length white overall tied at his waist and a broom in his hand poised in mid stroke. ‘I ain’t no threat to you,’ he said. ‘But he might be.’ He indicated with his head to the building across the street. The door was beginning to open.

  A balding man with a heavy paunch was shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun. He wore a bemused expression as he looked first at me, then at the group at the far end of the street, then back to me. ‘What’s going on?’ His voice didn’t carry a great deal of authority and it wasn’t clear whom the question was aimed at, but there was a star pinned to his shirt-front. His gun was still in its holster.

  ‘Just stay there, Sheriff,’ I told him, ‘and there’ll be no reason for anyone to get hurt.’

  He squinted against the sunlight and examined my face. Red continued to back down the street. When we reached the last building I turned him and put him to the gallop. I heard a couple of shots fired by someone in the mob. A token gesture. The slugs would have dropped in the dust half-way up the street.

  I could see Charlie Darke ahead. The horse was running hard, the free end of the rope around Cha
rlie’s neck snaked through the air behind him. They were on a trail that led into open grassland. I put my rifle back into its boot and urged Red to greater speed. Within minutes we’d caught them. I grabbed the bridle and brought both horses to a standstill.

  Charlie gushed out words of gratitude as I sliced through the rope that bound his hands. ‘Thanks, mister,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who you are but I’m sure pleased you turned up when you did.’ He removed the noose from about his neck and flung the rope into the long grass.

  ‘Conversation’ll keep ’til we get back to your spread. I don’t expect the townspeople will ride after us but whoever charged you with cattle rustling may be reluctant to see you get clear away.’

  ‘It ain’t true,’ he said, ‘I didn’t steal any cattle.’

  ‘Like I said, this ain’t the time or place for conversation. Lead on.’

  It took half an hour to reach the small ranch that lay in the lush meadow west of the Powder River. There was a house, a barn with a privy behind, and another building that could have been a bunkhouse for half a dozen men. The house was mainly timber but a stone chimney rose at one end and dull grey smoke drifted from it. There was a veranda on the west-facing front where a woman stood and watched our approach. We came between two corrals, one of which was empty while four placid horses watched us from the other.

  The woman stepped down from the veranda as, in a cloud of dust and scattered pebbles, we drew our horses to a halt.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Charlie wiped his brow as though confused by his wife’s question, then jumped from the saddle to take his wife in his arms.

  ‘Whose horse is that?’ she asked. ‘Where’s your hat? And your gun?’

  Charlie held her by her upper arms and looked down into her face. Unable to find any easy answers he said, ‘Come inside. I’ll tell you what happened.’