falcon and wolf 3

 

Chapter 3

 

“How are we going to bring Weston down? I can’t condone poisoning wells or anything like that,” said Barton.

“Dear God, no!” said Luke, in horror. “Why punish the cattle and horses? They are innocent.”

“It’s the sort of thing I believe Weston would do,” said Barton.

“You got a farming claim shanty that he’s driven anyone out of?” asked Luke.

“Yes, but nobody will take it on,” said Barton.

“Oh, yes, they will,” said Luke. “Jed, I want you to ride into town and make the claim in the name of Luke Sokolov; and send a wire for me. I want my fiancée and my sister in on this. And my brother here, of course,” he slapped Wolf on the shoulder. “And meantime, we’ll be digging in the cellar of the claim shack, or building one if it doesn’t have one, to make a well which can’t be touched. With food for a siege, and a number of traps set for anyone attacking, we’ll make it one trap to take down numbers; and we can still abandon it at any time as it doesn’t mean our livelihood.”

“You surely can’t mean to risk your fiancée and sister, though?” said Jed.

“They’re as good a man each of them as I am,” said Luke. “M’sister Kalina’s a crack shot; I expect Ida is, too, by now. And she’s wicked good with a whip.”

“No serious weapon, though,” said Barton.

Luke laughed.

“With an iron ball on the end of a good blacksnake whip I can kill any man in pistol range and it doesn’t need more ammunition.”

Barton blinked.

“I see,” he said.

“Wolf learns whip too,” said Wolf. “Is most satisfying.”

 

In the morning, Jed Barton rode to the railhead; it may be said that he ground his teeth when skirting his own small town to see the jailhouse and his home next to it a smoking ruin.

Any reservations he may have had about trapping the Westons vanished; the buggy skeleton at the back door plainly showed that the intent was to trap him and his wife inside to burn together.

Well, if the Westons thought him and Lily dead, they would not expect him to be ready to act as sheriff. He would have a word with the marshal at the railhead, and have him refuse to issue a star to anyone else without seeing a body. The marshal was likely to come and investigate as well.

 

What the marshal, a man named Sam Douglas, said was, “What the hell are you playing at, Barton?”

“Saving my wife’s life,” said Jed. He told him the story.

“Oh, well, if you have the Black Falcon…,” said Douglas. “He’s a menace to any owlhoot. I may blow in to see the fun and add a gunhand. I hate these upright citizens who are rotten to the core. File a claim for Luke Sokolov? I can do that.  What else has he asked for?”

“To wire to his sister and fiancée to come, and prepare them a prairie schooner packed with provisions, gunpowder, dynamite, and casks of clean drinking water. He also asked me to see if I could procure a Gatling gun, or failing that, a Mitrailleuse volley gun. He said if I can, the new two-row Gatling. Apparently it has two magazines, so you can fit a second to keep firing while you change the first.”

“Sounds like he knows a thing or two about siege warfare,” said Douglas. “It seems a bit of an overkill, and I may not be able to get one; an older one should be available as army surplus.  I’ll see about your Gatling gun while you see to the Prairie Schooner. I assume he gave you money?”

“He gave me an open draft on his bank,” said Jed. “I’ve been terrified the whole way in case I lost it.”

“Take it to the bank and tell them you’ll have the suppliers charge them; I’ll give you a chit so they know it’s all hunky-dory,” said Douglas. “Hell, this is all irregular; but you tell him, he’d better make sure them varmints open up first.”

“I fancy he knows,” said Barton. “He was entertaining my wife about his stint as deputy sheriff somewhere up north east aways.”

 

 

oOoOo

 

Wolf and Luke rode out to the claim shanty Barton had told them about, having rested all day, and riding out in the evening.

“Some crop in field,” said Wolf. “We harvest.”

“When we have a well indoors, and a cellar,” said Luke.  “I smell water; there’s a spring or a well.”

The shanty was a half-house made of board with a tar-paper roof.  Luke sniffed.

“Living in a cupboard,” he said. “Lookee here, though. Board paving where a second half would be stood.” He kicked at the board and it made a hollow sound. 

They went in; the little house was very bare. Luke found the trapdoor and went down it.

“Oh-ho!” he said, holding up a lantern. “Wolf, you tell me, is this good clay?”

“Uh.  River clay, long time since,” said Wolf. “You think clay bricks?”

“They dug it out. It’ll be somewhere,” said Luke. “But let’s get a well dug first. I want water.”

“Water go through sand; sit on clay,” said Wolf.

“And we got layers here,” said Luke. “Next clay layer…”

“Uh.” Wolf agreed.

“We keep a candle to go down, make sure there’s no bad air,” said Luke.  Wolf nodded.

Two fit young men made short work of digging down ten feet or so to where water started seeping.

“Put me on the rope, Wolf, and stand by to pull,” said Luke. “It won’t fill without a bit more work, but then I fancy it will fill faster than anyone might like.”

Wolf grunted, and stood by to take the strain, the rope over the rough windlass they had put together to raise buckets of soil and mud. It was no more than a pole balanced between two posts lashed as an ‘X’ shape, but it worked well enough.

“Pull!” yelled Luke, suddenly, as his spade went through mud and tried to keep going. He clung to it, and climbed, one handed, as Wolf pulled, and barely beat the water to the top. “Nice little gusher,” he added, stripping off his wet levis and pink flannel underwear. “Good job I have a few changes of clothing,” he added. “I don’t feel like living dangerously.”

“Be mobbed by squaws and torn apart,” Wolf commented. Luke flushed, and grinned.

 

“Most women are not ready for my Cossack glory,” he said.

Wolf laughed. “Nor Wolf’s Cherokee glory,” he said.

“We’ll make a Cossack of you, yet,” said Luke.

 

oOoOo

 

Jed Barton rode back to the old mine, by a circuitous route, arriving shortly after dark.

“They already left,” said his wife, who was looking out for him.  “They took some supplies, and left us some. Jed, can they do it?”

“I really believe they can,” said Jed. “We need to lie low for a while. I’m plum tuckered out, and I can’t go join them tonight.”

“Well, I can think of a few things to do, that you’ve been too busy to do for a while,” said Lily Barton.

They were too busy for a while to worry about what the two intrepid young men were up to.

 

oOoOo

 

Having got a well, Luke and Wolf rode into the town before daybreak.  Weston’s timber yard was due a visit; and had a cart and a pair of heavy horses for carrying timber. Luke and Wolf helped themselves. They added some more supplies from the store, and all the burlap sacks they could find. Once having unloaded the cart back at their claim shanty, they slapped the cart horses on the rump and left them to find their own way back to their feed.

The framework of a house went up before dawn; then Luke and Wolf set up camp in the spinney of cottonwoods behind the house, and slept for four hours.

Luke’s clothes were drying on a bush.

 

Luke set to, when they awoke, to make a dish of pork and beans, whilst Wolf put together a couple of rough brick moulds from some of the boards they had brought.  After eating, Luke mixed a slurry of clay and added straw from the barn, and they began casting bricks.

“We need to know if they’ll work,” said Luke. “We’ll use the sandy soil to fill the sacks as sandbags. They’ll make a useful and bullet-proof wall. But I’d like the existing hut protected with a layer of bricks.”

“Bricks no burn,” said Wolf.

“Not easily, anyway,” said Luke. “We’ll make do with sandbags round the floor area currently without a roof, unless we have time to improve it.”

“Wolf reckons we have maybe a week,” said Wolf. “Weston no want farmers, and chase um away, but he no take land yet.  We have time til someone notices shack occupied.”

Luke nodded.

“Jed said he’d ride over and help build for a couple of nights, and the girls will be here soon. It’s your turn to cook, and then we’ll sleep again.”

“Why did we bring planks if we are building brick walls?”

“To shore up the tunnel from the cellar to the barn.”

“There isn’t a tunnel from the cellar to the barn.”

“We have spades.”

“Luke, I think I hate you.”

“You won’t if it saves our lives.”

“They can still fire the barn and kill our horses.”

“The horses will be well away; I’ll send them back to the mine. Blackwind will take them.”

“And if we need to escape in a hurry?”

“We’re Cherokee trained and Cossacks in spirit.”

“You’re enjoying yourself.”

“Yes, Wolf, I am. I love justice and I love being young, fit, good at what I do, able to turn my hand to just about anything, and deal out violence where it is needed.”

“How can I argue with a man who looks so happy?”

“Cheer up; we’ll have aid soon.”

“Can your women dig?”

“At need, but they can also make bricks, and cook for us, and see to the horses whilst we dig. It shouldn’t be a problem, the barn isn’t far and we don’t need to drive a cart along it.” He grinned. “And if the owlhoots hole up in the barn, they might find some dynamite going up under them.”

“Now you’re talking, brother,” said Wolf.

He might not be as good a cook as Luke, but he knew how to care for himself, and made a hotpot with some of the vegetables being grown, and wild herbs.

“Ah, that puts heart into a man,” said Luke. “I reckon we can make at least fifty bricks an hour each, and we’re getting quicker, and one of the girls could mix the clay with water and straw. It’ll take… two hundred or so bricks for one wall. I think we can do it, and start building in brick between posts out here, too.”

“Can do,” said Wolf. “My back not want to dig.”

“Nor mine, but we can do it,” said Luke.

 

They awoke with the instincts both honed at the cautious approach of a rider.

Jed almost jumped out of his life as one materialised each side of him.

“You two are uncanny,” he said.

“You’ve eaten?” asked Luke.

“Yes, and I brought pasties for all of us, courtesy of my lady, only water flour and pan fried, but full of meat.”

“She good woman,” said Wolf.

“Thank her for us,” said Luke. “If you’ll go on watch and make mud bricks, we’ll go dig a tunnel. And we might as well fill our sand bags while we do so.”

 

oOoOo

 

Ida and Kalina had very little trouble on the train, once Ida had used her whip to jerk the legs of an overly familiar cow poke out from underneath him so he fell, heavily, and Kalina used one of her throwing knives to pin the ear of another to a post of the station building.  Luke had wired ‘Invitation to war with owlhoots. Bring kit if coming.’ It had never occurred to either young woman not to take him up on his invitation.

They were met by a marshal named Douglas, who showed them on a map where they were headed, and provided them with a sturdy pair of horses pulling a covered waggon, which sported a machine gun.

“He wasn’t joking about war,” said Ida. “Do you know how to work one of those things?”

“Yes, Papa has several,” said Kalina.

“You’ll have to teach me,” said Ida.

“You learn fast, it will be no trouble,” said Kalina.

Marshal Douglas shook his head dubiously. Such pretty girls, one a redhead, one strawberry blonde with ginger in it, fragile and… well, they seemed confident.

“Take care,” he said. “I’m heading for the town nearby, I could ride part way with you.”

“If you want the company, we’ll be happy,” said Kalina.

They wore some kind of cross between divided skirts and wide trousers that came in tight to tuck into boots, checked shirts, broad straw hats, and were festooned with knives and guns. And the blonde one set an apple on the fence, and showed him how she could mash it with a weight on her whip, or toss it into the air with the end of the whip, and catch it.

Douglas was somewhat mollified by this performance.

He still rode with them, and noted that they took turns to drive, and to look out behind.

He parted company with them as they veered off towards the claim shanty, and he kept on for the town of Delaney, where he would stay in the inn to investigate the burning of the jailhouse. The rumours were that it had been done by some indio known as The Black Falcon, and his confederate, known as Wolf, since the first had been arrested, and had had himself broken out of jail with explosives, and you could never trust injuns.

Marshal Sam Douglas listened politely and proceeded to engage in his own investigation. Until that had been investigated thoroughly; and he was not about to hurry himself.

 

Sam Douglas was a patient man, well able to wait on something happening, beyond the theft of wood from a woodyard.

Sam asked Martin Weston to describe exactly what had been stolen, including distinguishing features of each piece of wood.

“It’s just wood, goldarn it!” said Martin.

“Well, how can you identify it if we find any in suspicious circumstances?” asked Douglas. “Can’t go around accusing folk of stealing timber if they’ve cut it themselves, can we?”

“It’s milled,” said Martin.

“And are all the dwellings made of wood from your store?” asked Douglas.

“No, some was brought in,” snapped Martin.

“Well, seems to me you can’t prove nuthin’” said Douglas, who had had similar words used to him by the likes of the Weston family, and was mighty pleased to throw the words back at him.