Dry Gulch’s Last Stand

Or

The Naming


       In the morning twilight the kid rose from the field of slaughter.   From the freshly dead he took their rings, their jewels, their eye glasses and purses and coins, jeweled letter openers, small pewter statues in the shapes of great beasts that the children used as toys, and food—salted pork and hard loaves of gritty bread—from their upturned wagons.   The sun rose fast, casting its withering gaze on the blood-scabbed heads of the dead where the scalps had been taken.   The remains of the caravan smelled of rancid meat.   The kid took his treasures and put them in his pack.   He left the dead where they lay.

       He followed the trail of the Manchuros to the west.   At noon the kid stopped at a brown pool to drink and fill his waterskin and eat the bread, and then he moved again.   The kid wished for the horse he had once, a while ago.   He wished he hadn’t left that horse behind when he was chased out of Hell’s Canyon.  

       In the late afternoon he tasted the caked dry at the edge of his lips and wished for a town with a barn to sleep in.   His waterskin dangled empty at his side.   He heard the sound of horses from the east; he wedged his pack in a rocky crevasse and waited by the side of the road.

       It was a stagecoach.   The kid saw it crest the rise in the distance and thunder down the road towards him—orange and brown with flaring red rails rising to form the platform for the driver, pulled by two laboring horses, nostrils dripping, corded bunches of rooted muscle rippling under the mottled skin.   The driver wore a thick-brimmed white hat and a glaring red kerchief at his neck.   His eyes were dark and his face pale.   The driver yelled at his team.

       The kid watched the distance behind the coach, seeing no sign of pursuit.   Dust flew about it in small storms.   The kid backed from the road, glanced to the rocks where his pack was hidden, felt the form of his empty waterskin at his side, and inched forward again.   The coach ripped towards him.   The driver screamed a warning but didn’t halt.   As the coach passed the kid leapt forward from his right foot—caught one of the fiery handrails at the rear of the coach and gripped it hard as his feet were swept out by the road, passing earth and stone tearing at his shoes.   He pulled his feet up to the ledge and made himself small as the eastern distance passed behind.  

       The kid rode like his—how long he couldn’t tell, until he saw the afternoon dip in the sky and the coach came to a halt.

       “Madeline!” the driver yelled.

       The kid peered over his station.   From the coach came a young women—seventeen, maybe, if that—in a pale blue dress and long feathered hat.   Her arms were gloved in lilac cloth.   The kid thought he smelled flowers as she stepped up past him.  

       The woman said, “What is Nathan?   Have we reached Gradston yet?”

       “I reckon we’re in the neighborhood.   But look down there.   There’s been Manchuros here—recently too, if I mark it right.”

       “Manchuros?   What are they doing all the way out here?”

       “Don’t know.   But it’s trouble for us if we meet them.”

       “Oh, Nathan.   Maybe we should turn around and—”

       “Don’t talk like that, sweetie bell.   I know people in Gradston.   We’re going to get married in Gradston, minute we step off this coach!”

       The kid sat up and said, “You’re not even close to Gradston.”

       “Cow minerals!   A stowaway?”   Nathan was on his feet in an instant, covered the distance between them and grabbed the kid by the back of his shirt.   The kid kicked and bit at him.   “Get outta here you little rat!”

       “Nathaniel Whitehorse!   Put that boy down.”

       “He’s gutter trash, Maddie.   He’d slit your throat for a half-nickel.”

       “But he may know where we are.”

       The kid, who had stopped kicked during this exchange, was lowered down to his feet.   He brushed his tattered shirt and straightened it.  

       “There you are,” Nathan said.   “No hard feelings, eh?”

       “Nossir,” the kid snorted.   “Do you have any water?”

       “Of course,” Madeline said, ducking into the coach and returning with a full skin.   The kid drank deeply.   Nathan and Madeline waited until he had his fill.

       “Now, maybe you can tell us whereabouts we are?”

       The kid handed the half-empty skin back to Madeline and looked around.   “Dunno, really.”

       “You little bast—”

       The kid stepped back.   “Holdit, there.   I know yer a long ways away from Gradston.   Going in the wrong direction, too.   What map you been followin?”

       Nathan blushed.

       “We forgot our map,” Madeline said.

        “There’s a scatter of little towns along the road down this way,” the kid said, pointing to the west.

       Nathan spat.   “That’s the same way the Manks are going.”

       “Dry Gulch,” the kid said suddenly, remembering.   “Turn north at Manassas rock and there’s a place called Dry Gulch.   They might help you.   Turn you in the right direction, leastways.”

       “Thanks, kid.   Now get offa my coach.”

       “Nathan!”

       “What?”

       “We can’t leave him out here.   He’ll die of thirst.”

       Nathan pushed the kid towards the front of the coach.   “Fine, but he rides with me.   Just as far as the Gulch.”

       “If the Manchuros don’t get there first,” the kid said.

****

       There was a lone Manchuro at Manassas rock.   Nathan Whitehorse barely saw the creature, huddled over some embers in the shadow of the monolithic rock.   He halted the coach and rubbed the gritty growth at his chin, considering.   The Manchuro was an elder, a shaman by the looks of him, with ruddy brown fur and faded blue miniscule wings that hung in tatters on its back.   It wore red and black paint on its face, and held a gnarled staff where at the top hung two fresh human scalps, the hair matted with blood.

       “Kwai.   Nd’elewizi Elejano.   Nia onjihila Saronji.”   The aged Manchuro looked up at them and shuffled around the fire on small feet.  

       “Filthy thing,” Nathan muttered.   He drew his revolver.

       “He was tellin us his name and clan,” the kid said.

       Nathan looked surprised.   “You speak their language?”

       “A bit.”

       “Wigôdamana spemki aki n`lôdwawôganna nspiwi kiowô.”

       “What did he say?”

       “He said he’s seen us dead.”

       “Filthy Mank!”   The revolver came up and thundered once.   The Manchuro fluttered his useless wings and cried out in a loud, shrill call before falling forward onto the small fire.

       “How’s that!”   Nathan Whitehorse plunged the revolver back into its scabbard and leapt down from the coach.   He kicked the body once and rolled it over.   “Animals,” he spat.   “Hand me that length of rope.”

       The kid said, “He was sayin the same thing that they all say to each other.   It’s like sayin hello or goodbye or how’s the weather.”

       Nathan shook his head.   “No man wants to hear about his own death.   Stinky Mank shoulda known better.   Now hand me the rope.”

       The kid dug around at his feet and came up with rope.   He tossed it to Nathan and the young man tied one end to the foot of dead Manchuro and the other to the rear of the coach.

       “Nathan?”   Madeline’s head appear in the window of the coach.   “What’s going on?   I heard a shot.”

       “Nothing to worry about, Maddie.   We’re almost to the village.”

       “Did you shoot something?”

       Nathan Whitehorse didn’t answer, but stepped back up to the top of the coach and set the horses off with a loud shout.   Behind them, the body of the slain Manchuro trailed, kicking up great cones of dust.   The kid watched follow it follow them the entire way.

****

       Horace Sharpe watched the stagecoach descend the rocky flats into the basin of the gulch, past Meade’s farm and the tavern where Frank Lily and his sons were swilling thin bourbon over cards with the local miners.   Horace Sharpe was a tall man, bald as a stone but thick in the chest and the arms.   He wore a beard that came in dark red and a black bandana to protect his head from the sun and a Desert Wyvern in an oiled leather scabbard at his hip.   He was the mayor of Dry Gulch.

       From the barber’s porch he watched a young dandy and a dirty kid climb off the top of the coach.   The dandy, a tanned young man in a high white hat, helped a woman out of the coach.   The kid hovered nearby.   The dandy walked around the rear of the coach and came back in carrying a body.   Horace Sharpe squinted.   It was a Manchuro corpse.

       The dandy dragged the thing back across the road to Meade’s field and draped it over the scarecrow, arms hugging the chest of the wooden man like a child grips its mother about the neck.   Sharpe had seen enough.   He walked down to the coach.

       “Mind telling me what you’re doing, stranger?”

       The dandy was back with his woman.   She looked upset.   The young man said, “We’ve been running scared of bloody Manks ever since we came this way.   Caught this one alone on the road.   Said he had seen me die or likewise nonsense, so I sent him to his maker.   Filthy thing.”

       Horace Sharpe looked the group over.   The woman was young, younger than he first thought.   She wore an expensive gown, and as he looked closer he saw the young man was wearing a silk shirt with buttons of black ivory under his heavy riding coat.   The stagecoach itself was bright with opulence, the horses majestic.   Horace Sharpe bit off a curse.

       “What’s your business here?”

       “Nathaniel Whitehorse,” the dandy said, extending his hand.   “And this is my wife, Madeline Sly.   We’ve come for supplies and directions.”

       “Horace Sharpe,” the mayor said, shaking the dandy’s hand and then quickly letting it go. “I’m the mayor of this town.   You’ll find the things you need here in Dry Gulch, but not if you don’t show some respect.”

       In Meade’s field, a small gathering of children had assembled around the desecrated Manchuro corpse.   The face of the Manchuro elder, brown fur painted red, had been ripped and torn by the road, and it hung over the scarecrow’s shoulder like a paper clown.   The children poked at the corpse and giggled.   They stuffed dirt in its mouth kicked its furry shins.

       “What about you?” Sharpe asked the kid.   “You got a name?”

       “Not that I reckon, said the kid.   “I mind my own affairs.”

       The mayor eyed the kid over.   He was a wiry little scamp, all bones and ripped clothes.   His youthful face was crusted with dirt, and he had ragged long hair falling over a widow’s peak at the top of his forehead.

       Sharpe said to Whitehorse, “Take that dead Manchuro down and we’ll see to your needs.”  

       But Whitehorse didn’t move.   “Do you think those filthy Manks will come and take it back?   I’d like to be there when they try.   Bet I could send a whole lot them hurtling into the pits.”

       Horace Sharpe watched the children in the field, who had been joined by the kid.   The kid sat at the edge of their circle, watching them.   Sharpe replied, “I’m not a betting man.”

       In the field, the children were throwing stones at the dead Manchuro.   The kid picked up a small smooth stone and hit the closest child near him, and then another.   He was older than them by a few years.   They ran away.   The kid laughed at them.   The furry clown face of the dead Manchuro seemed to laugh with him.

****

       In the evening the kid took water from the local well and a hunk of cheese and some fresh bread from the mayor’s house.   He retreated to the loft in the barn by Meade’s field and stayed there unmolested, dozing on the soft hay without dreams.   Tracker Meade saw the kid sneak into the barn but Sharpe told him to leave the kid be, so he did.

       In the mayor’s house Sharpe and his wife, Julie, were sitting around his hearth, sipping Steppe Coffee with the woman called Madeline Sly.   Nathaniel Whitehorse was out gathering his supplies.

       “I hope you don’t mind me asking, miss,” Sharpe said, “But how comes it that a woman doesn’t take the same name as her husband?”

       Madeline blushed deeply.   “You’ll forgive Nathan.   We’re not married.   Intended, of course, but not yet married.”

       “Leave them be, Horace,” Julie Sharpe said.  

       “No, it’s fine.”   Madeline sat straight in her chair.   “We come out of Mauston.   I was betrothed to another man from a family my father wanted to strengthen ties with.”

       “I see,” Julie said, “And you were in love with Nathan so you ran away.”

       Madeline said, “Not at all.   I told my father I was in love with Nathan and he broke the deal off.   But Nathan’s temper can get away from him.   He can be a bit rash.   He went and challenged the man I was betrothed to even after the deal was cancelled.”

       “And he killed him,” Sharpe supplied.

       “Again, no.   It was a freak accident—both shots missed, but Nathan missed wildly.   He’s not a very good shot, you see—which is why it was so brave of him to duel in the first place—and he struck one of the spectators, the man’s mother.   The shot grazed her face, cutting her just under the eye.”

       Sharpe swore.   “That’s one helluva miss.”

       Madeline smiled.   “Yes.   Anyway, the man’s family overreacted and called for Nathan’s head.   We came out here to get away from the fervor until we can go back.”

       “You’re welcome here as long as you wish, dear,” Julie Sharpe said.

       A shout sounded from the black outside the home, and Horace Sharpe was on his feet.   “Stay put, ladies,” he said, and was gone.

****

       Tracker Meade watched them in the distance.   There were seven—no, eight—cresting the rise of the hill, making their way slowly down into valley towards his field at the edge of Dry Gulch.   Meade was a careful man, a skilled plainsman, a former soldier and a farmer, a husband and a father, and he felt no fear, but sniffed plainly the menace in the air.

       He dared not move as they approached, but soon his head was swimming with the dull moan that signaled their advance, a soft humming, an omen carried by the night breeze.

       “Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki.   Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki.”

       They were chanting.

       Tracker Meade heard the thud of footfalls in the distance and a shot broke the stillness of the night.   Nathan Whitehorse was ambling towards the center of the field where the intruders were converging.   Manchuros, Meade could see them now, the Wandering Moogles.   Scalpers.   Even with no moonlight he could see the faint outline of their useless wings.   Whitehorse fired again and missed wildly.

       “Come on, scum!”

       “Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki.   Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki.”

       Blades left sheaths with steely groans and one of the Manchuros lashed out at Whitehorse.   Meade had no weapon but rushed forward, barreling into the one closest to him and knocking it from its feet.  

       Whitehorse fired again and again, missed both times, then deflected a descending blade with the barrel of his revolver.   The blade glanced off and struck his arm below the bicep.   Warm blood gushed forth.

       “Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki!   Spemki chajab lôdwawô aki!”

       Horace Sharpe appeared in the middle of them, his Desert Wyvern booming.   Two Manchuros went down.   One of them twisted a savage cut at Sharpe’s head, and the mayor ducked and stumbled over his own feet.   The blade redirected towards his exposed form but veered off suddenly as a small dark shape came and took the Manchuro’s legs out from under it.   The kid kicked the fallen Manchuro and then Sharpe was again on his feet.   His gun blazed a third and fourth time but found nothing, and then they were gone.

       “Sweet mercy,” Nathan Whitehorse breathed, holding his arm.   “I think I’m dying.”

       “They took the corpse,” Tracker Meade said.

       “I hit two of them,” Sharpe said.   “Thought I killed them.   Either way, they’re gone too.”   He looked down at the kid.   “Thanks for that, kid.”

       The kid said nothing.

       “What were they saying?”   Whitehorse asked.

       “It’s the song they sing for those yet to be dead,” the kid answered.   “They sing it just before they kill and take your scalp.”

****

       Meade and Sharpe woke Frank Lily and his sons and the group of them stood watch through the night.   Julie Sharpe stitched the cut to Whitehorse’s arm as Madeline fell asleep in the mayor’s living room and the kid in front of the hearth.

       In the morning the men did not go to the mine but sat on their porches with their rifles and revolvers and rusted blades.   Meade and Sharpe went back to the field along with the kid.   The scarecrow had fallen down, and there was evidence of the fight.   Dried blood dotted the ground.   A farther ways away a design had been drawn in the dirt, a half-circle and some jagged script.

       “You know what this means?” Sharpe asked the kid.

       “Haven’t a clue.”

       “But you knew what they were saying lat night?”

       “I’ve run into the Manchuros before.”

       “How of them are there?”

       The kid said, “Maybe a hundred.   Maybe two.”

       Sharpe said, “There are thirty eight men in Dry Gulch, at least as many women and children.   Thirty nine, if you count that Whitehorse fella, and he couldn’t hit an antwerp bouncing six feet in front of him.   Maybe every other man has a gun.   Maybe.”

       “I wager we don’t see tomorrow if they all decide to come back,” Meade said.  

       “You’ll lose that bet,” Sharpe said grimly.   “We all knew this was sticks country when we came here.   Ain’t no justice but our own.   That fool ass boy Whitehorse mighta brought them here by killing one of their own and dragging him here, but maybe not.   Maybe they woulda come anyway.   Either way, we built our homes here and this is where we stay.   If the Manchuros want to have it otherwise, they’ll pay a heavy price.”

       Meade looked uncomfortable.   “I spent my time in the army, Horace.   I’ve got a wife and two girls—I didn’t come out here for this.”

       “None of us came out here for this, but here it is anyways.”

       The kid stood to the mayor’s side.   He brushed out the Manchuro design in the dirt.

****

       The Manchuros did not come the next day, or the day after.   Nathan Whitehorse wanted to leave but the wound in his arm took infection and he was laid up in the spare bed in the mayor’s house, Madeline dabbing his brow with a wet towel.   Julie Sharpe took care as best she could.
       
       “I’m not sure that boy is going to live,” Julie told her husband.

       The kid spent the days in Horace Sharpe’s shadow as he went about his rounds, cataloguing weapons and posting men to different watches.   Eight men took their families and left.   Tracker Meade stayed.

       “This is my home now,” he told Sharpe.   “We’ve made this a fine place to live.   Damned if I’ll leave it now.”

       Sharpe just nodded.   Each night the kid slept at the base of his hearth, and when Sharpe was out Julie Sharpe came downstairs and a sigh caught in her throat at the sight of the boy sleeping there.

       “He’s a good kid,” Sharpe said, slipping through the entrance and coming alongside his wife.

       Julie Sharpe turned away.   “We have time yet for a son.”   She was crying.

       Sharpe took his wife in his arms, and rocked her back and forth to the rhythm of the kid’s gentle snores.   The night passed.

       The Manchuros came.   In the deep red they appeared near the crest of Meade’s farm.   Already Meade had brought his family down to the gulch, along with the other men and families that had chosen to stay.   The stagecoach was parked in the center of town—it had become a landmark, of sorts, a strange testament to the quivering danger that filled the air all about.

       The Manchuros filled the horizon.   They were dull and brown and terrible wearing human scalps at their belts and faces painted in reds and yellows and flightless wings fluttering nervously.   They wore jagged swords, rows of wicked triangles cut into the length of each blade, and each had a curved dagger for scalping.

       The kid watched them and knew fear.

       Tracker Meade appeared among the townspeople and said, “There’s another party approaching from the north.”

       Horace Sharpe nodded.   The door to the mayor’s house flew open and Nathan Whitehorse stepped out, Madeline struggling to keep him on his feet.   His face was pale, his lips near purple.   He held his revolver limply in one hand.  

       “Dirty, filthy Manks!”   Whitehorse laughed shrilly.   “Look, there’s so many I can’t help but hit them!”

       “Maybe we should try to talk to them,” Frank Lily said.

       “Don’t reckon they’ve come here for talk,” Sharpe said, but he turned to the kid.   “What do you say, kid?”

       The kid looked up at the Manchuros.   There was nothing more he wanted in life but to be back on that road, with his pack full of treasure, watching the stagecoach rumble past.   Sharpe watched him calmly, his eyes resigned.

       The kid met those eyes.   “Yeah, I’ll try.”   The mayor put a firm hand on his shoulder.

       The kid stepped forward.   He could see no discernable leader among the Manchuros, so he stopped within speaking distance.   The silence was unnatural.   He knew little of their language, only what he had picked up following in their wake and living off of their slaughter for all those months and what travelers had taught him.

       “Why do you come here?” he asked in the Manchuro language, stumbling over the syllables.

       One of the Manchuros, exhaled deeply, and answered, “We have a name for you, youngling.   We call you Pestering Rat.   You pick over our leavings.   You scurry, you jabber.”   He paused.   “But today you appear before battle.   Eagles talk and act.   Are you one such of these?”

       The kid barely caught only a few words.   He said, “You must leave.   This place is not for you.”

       The Manchuro patted human scalps at his belt.   “This place is not for you either, Pestering Rat.   But everywhere spirits cry for us to free them.   And so we do.”

       With that, the Manchuros hummed loudly and rushed past the kid, down the rise and into Dry Gulch where Horace Sharpe and Nathan Whitehorse and the other men and women and children waited with guns and pitchforks until they clashed, and the two sides ground together with a great noise of chaos and death.

****

       In the evening dim the kid wandered down into the field of slaughter.   The vultures had not yet come.   He passed the bodies of Tracker Meade and Nathan Whitehorse.   He tried not to look at the bodies of the women.   Horace Sharpe was leaning against a fence, his chest pierced.   They had not taken his scalp.   The kid wondered if it was because he was bald.  

       The kid buried Horace Sharpe’s body, working long into the evening twilight.   He took the mayor’s bandana and his empty Desert Wyvern.   He could find a reload in the next town, maybe.

       Pestering Rat, the Manchuros had called him.   It was the only name he had ever known, and the kid found as he left Dry Gulch that he did not like it.   The kid looked up at the blossoming black of the sky and gave himself a new name.

       Eagle Sharpe kept wandering, west.