A Bad Day to Die: The Adventures of Lucius “By God” Dodge, Texas Ranger (Lucius Dodge Westerns Book 1) Read online

  A Bad Day to Die

  The Adventures of

  Lucius “By God”

  Dodge, Texas Ranger

  J. Lee Butts

  Beyond the Page

  Publishing

  A Bad Day to Die

  J. Lee Butts

  Beyond the Page Books

  are published by

  Beyond the Page Publishing

  www.beyondthepagepub.com

  Copyright © 2004, 2014 by J. Lee Butts

  ISBN: 978-1-937349-88-2

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now know or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this book. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now know or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of both the copyright holder and the publisher.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  For Carol

  She’s still with me this deep into the game.

  AND

  Ole Texas Cowboy Neil Ross

  He personally handed me the basic ideas used in the story you’re about to read.

  IN NEED OF SOME PERSUASION

  Bone looked up at me and sneered. The man appeared absolutely certain of his position. “Well, you’ll have to kill me in cold blood, boy, ’cause I ain’t about to fight you.”

  Shot him in the left elbow. Must’ve hurt like the dickens. He fell out of his chair, and flopped around on the porch like a beached fish. Squalled and bellowed so loud, I was afraid some of them cowboys out on the range might hear him. Got tired of listening, after a minute or two. Grabbed him by the collar, stood him next to a porch pillar, and stuffed his pistol back into its holster. Backed off about four steps and let him know how the cow ate the cabbage.

  “Here’s how this dance works, Bone. You’ll draw that pistol, and I’ll kill you. Or, you can stand there, all weepy and red-eyed, not do anything to protect yourself, and I’ll kill you. However you want to do the deed’s fine with me . . .”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Continued thanks and appreciation to Michael and Barbara Rosenberg for their efforts on my behalf. Special expressions of gratitude, once again, to Kimberly Lionetti for her invaluable help and understanding. A big tip of the sombrero, and deep bow from the waist, goes to the membership of the DFW Writer’s Workshop for a weekly dose of reality. And finally, a number-10 washtub of appreciation wings its way to Roxanne Blackwell Bosserman in Shreveport, Louisiana—a cheerleader the likes of whom every writer should have.

  Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord

  —Romans 12:19

  All existing civilized communities appear to have gone through a stage in which it was impossible to say where private vengeance for injuries ended and public retribution for offenses began. . . .

  —SIR FREDERICK POLLOCK,

  from The King’s Peace in

  the Middle Ages

  The country around the hamlet of Sweetwater is under a perfect rein of terror from a family of desperate characters and thieves, named Nightshade, who infest the entire area. It is a sparsely settled region, and the opportunity for unlawful behavior is presently unfettered. I believe Boz Tatum and Lucius Dodge should easily remedy the wicked state of affairs.

  —CAPTAIN WAG CULPEPPER,

  in dispatches to his

  Austin-based superiors

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  EPILOGUE

  PROLOGUE

  Lucius Dodge’s Sulphur River ranch

  near Domino, Texas, October 1948

  Little over a week ago my old friend Hayden Tilden hoisted his ancient bones aboard the Texas Flyer and rode her down from Little Rock for a visit. He’d been out here in the mosquito and tick-infested boonies a couple of days, slapping and scratching, when—late one cool damp evening—we wallowed out individual spots in the overstuffed chairs I keep on my back porch. Stoked up the tin stove till she glowed, cracked the seal on a jug of mighty fine Kentucky sour mash, and us two decrepit, broke-down, old lawdogs spent the rest of the night slinging massive amounts of fully aged, manly bullshit around.

  Whole jawbone session and square dance concerned evil men we’d chased, fought, or killed, and the occasional beautiful woman left behind, who waved good-bye and wept with regret. And, being as how there weren’t no women in attendance that evening, our spur-of-the-moment prayer meeting turned out about the way you’d expect. Don’t know ’bout you, but it’s been my experience that when unsupervised old running buddies, who can chew off each other’s plug anytime the urge hits them, sit down for a snort or three, well, Katie bar the door. The rough and ready profanity that escaped our whiskey-soaked mouths would have put plenty of snap in a spinster schoolmarm’s garters.

  Hell, we recollected a boatload of windy whizzers about our respective gunfights, fistfights, knife fights, ax fights, and horse fights. Spent damn near an hour just comparing bullet holes, knife wounds, and scars. Had a ton of fun going over the time the two of us blew the hell out of Martin Luther Big Eagle with Cletis Broadbent’s Civil War-vintage cannon, Beulah, up in Red Rock Canyon.

  ’Bout halfway through our free-wheeling shindig, I managed to curry an oft-repeated tale from my nearly fossilized brain concerning a couple of drunken fellers, from over in the vicinity of Mineral Wells, who went at each other with red-hot horseshoe tongs. Worm-brained ignoramuses ended up setting one another on fire. We got a damned fine laugh out of that one. But Good Lord Almighty, I had a hell of a time cleaning that smoldering mess up. Swear before Jesus, there ain’t much of anything worse than folks that have been burnt crispier than a piece of well-charred beefsteak.

  Then, Tilden recounted my favorite chestnut about his best friend, wild-man Carlton J. Cecil. All about the time that hot-tempered rowdy whomped the hell out of a killer he’d just shot to death. Used the day-old corpse of a dog. Cain’t beat memories like those, my friends.

  Couple of times, we laughed so hard I thought my moth-eaten socks might pop right out of my mouth. Messed around, and got the old-man croup going once. My sidekick had to roust hims
elf out of his lumpy lair and thump me on the back for almost a minute. Tilden slapped me a-twixt the shoulder blades about twenty times and kept yelping, “Come on, Dodge. Spit ’er up. Ain’t gonna let you choke to death on memories.”

  Long about my fourth or fifth dipperful of hundred-and-ninety-proof spider killer, something my friend recalled brought home to me as how maybe some events might not have transpired exactly the way I always remembered. Or told them, when the golden opportunity presented me with an appreciative audience.

  Gave the question about five seconds worth of serious thought. Then Hayden shook a jelly tumbler full of scamper juice my direction and said, “By God, even if things didn’t happen the way we remember ’em, they should’ve. And think on this, Lucius. It don’t really matter how anything we ever did actually came to pass anyway. All that matters is the way we tell it now. All them other folks are dead—good and bad. We’re the living, by-God authorities on this stuff. We can say whatever in the blue-eyed hell we want. Besides, once you get as old as we are, people will believe anything you tell them. Amazing how gullible young folks are these days. Write it down, put it in a book, and, by God, they’ll believe every word.”

  He lost the string on his thoughts there, for a bit, I guess. Scrunched up his eyebrows, sifted it all around in his brain again, then spit the end of a maduro panatela on the floor. Man looked like he’d been hit by lightning when he said, “Can you call to mind the time we met out on the Red River over near Coffee’s Bend? You, me, Daniel Old Bear Westbrook, and my big yeller dog, Caesar, started out from there looking for Rufus Bloodsworth and Blackie Daggett.”

  Soon as the question passed his cracked purple lips, I realized my antique friend just might have retained about a handful more active brain cells than me. Ever so often, these days, I spend considerable time puzzling over things scattered amongst the cankered cogs of my rusted-up thinker mechanism. It’s even got to the point where I might have to consider keeping my spectacles on a piece of string. Sometimes go a day, or two, wearing one boot because I can’t find both of them.

  Tried to put him off till the foggy past came hoofing back my way with, “Sweet Jesus, Hayden, that had to have been sometime back in the eighties. Good God Almighty, that’s more’n sixty year ago. We was just a couple of hen-wrangling kids them days, and too damned green-assed stupid to know it.” Scratched one of the three remaining hairs on my head and added, “Am I anywhere close on this thing, pardner?”

  “Yeah, fall of ’85, or maybe ’86. She’s a mite hard for me to summon up exactly which myself. Was somewhere in that general vicinity, though. Don’t matter if the year’s exactly dead-on. We’re close enough for government work.”

  Sucked down another tongue-singing swallow of tonsil paint, and gandered at the sun’s dying reflection in the river. Hesitated for about a minute before I offered up anything that resembled an honest-to-God, for-certain answer. Absolute truth be told, I wouldn’t have known either one of those maggots he’d mentioned if they had popped up next to my red-hot stove and asked for a drag on our bottle.

  “Blackie Bloodsworth and Rufus Daggett, huh?”

  Tilden’s head snapped back. He blew a gunmetal-colored smoke ring from the stump-black stogie he’d bought at my friend Cooley Churchpew’s general mercantile, a few miles up the road, and huffed, “No, Lucius. Rufus Bloodsworth and Blackie Dagget. Hell’s bells, surely you remember that pair of murderin’ skunks. Don’t you? Ain’t no way you could have forgotten the trouble we had with that brace of night-crawling, three-tailed rattlers. You especially. Running gunfight, you boys ended it all with, turned me into nothing more’n an awe-struck spectator.”

  Well, friends, he didn’t help me out a whole bunch. I fought so many horseback pistol duels in them days, I still couldn’t sort that particular one out. Waved at him with my own see-gar like a sideshow magician, trying to make doves appear out of the tobacco-laden cloud hovering over the stove, and with the greatest of confidence said, “Oh, hell, yes. Remember them boys well. Rufus was that cold-eyed killer who robbed the Kay-Tee Flyer just outside McAlester, and killed a couple of freight handlers and a woman bystander in the process. Weren’t he?”

  Considerably more irritable when he snapped, “No, no, hell, no.” He leaned over, and decorated my glowing wood burner with a gob of spit that sizzled and danced, then thumped ashes in the general direction of the coffee tin, next to his chair. Most of them landed on the floor beside the bit-off tip of his cigar.

  He snatched at the collar of his jacket, and jerked himself around in the chair. “Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, Dodge. Don’t tell me you’re getting as forgetful as all the rest of my own personal crew of hundred-year-old gomers still gumming their lime Jell-o at the Rolling Hills Home for the Aged. Most of those walking corpses can’t be trusted to remember whether they’re sporting any underwear these days.”

  I let his cantankerous slur lie there for about a minute, but couldn’t pass the opportunity to offer up something like a defense. “Well, by God, Tilden, I can damn sure tell you, with little fear of contradiction, that I am not wearing any underwear myself, and never have.” Mumbled off into my favorite grape-jelly glass with, “Personally ain’t never had any use for the damned things.”

  Then, it hit me like a frozen steer had dropped from Heaven’s Pearly Gates, right through the roof, into my lap. “Now I’ve got it.” A golden spark suddenly appeared in my brain and led me in something like the general direction Tilden wanted. “They’re the pair of evil bastards who killed that horse-tradin’ Jameson feller, over near Choska, in the Creek Nation. Did him in for a long-legged bay gelding and a bag of cash. Am I closer this time?”

  A curtain of rum-saturated haze rose between us. He grinned again and propped his booted foot on a piece of split firewood. “Knew you’d find ’em, if you scratched around long enough in that rat’s nest you call a brain, old man. Yeah, they’re the ones, sure as long-horned steers in Texas. Them bad boys wore out saddle leather headin’ for the Red River, but stopped long enough to attempt a robbery at Charlie Youngblood’s Store, on the Canadian, in the Chickasaw Nation.”

  “Right. Right. And Youngblood didn’t take kindly to folks trying to steal from him. You told me he put up a noggin-knotter of a fight. So, Blackie Daggett just naturally chopped him up with a double-bit ax from a barrel of ’em sittin’ at the end of the crude store’s counter.”

  “There you go, Dodge. While Daggett was killing Charlie, Rufus murdered Mrs. Youngblood, after he’d gone and raped the hell out of her. Thank God Almighty, a terrified Chickasaw gal, working as a clerk, witnessed the whole mess while hiding behind a rack of newly arrived women’s clothing. Killers stole a five-pound sack of pork cracklin’s, and all the sugar tits in the place. Damned poor showing for the lives of two mighty good Christian folk.”

  Entire account came a-pouring out of my old trail mate with the same kind of passion I’d known him for when it all happened. Appeared residence at Rolling Hills hadn’t affected his ability to recall the past. Shamed me into trying to respond in kind.

  “Well, now the fog has lifted, Tilden. Don’t know how I managed to forget scum as murderous as them ole boys. Remember as how I got your wire, and rode like yellow-eyed demons chased me to meet you at Coffee’s Bend. Claimed you wanted an o-ficial lawman type from Texas along for the hunt, in case those killers crossed the Red, and ended up trying to hide out with relatives, or some other such horse manure.”

  He chuckled, grabbed hold of the yarn, and started running with it. “Old Bear, Caesar, and me had been on their trail for about three weeks before the Jameson and Youngblood slaughters. You surely remember now as how them bloody fellers had actually started the ball rolling by sending a Fort Smith prostitute, everyone called Sweet Sweet Sally, to meet the Good Lord by beating her to death with a hoe handle.”

  “Oh, my God, yes. They’re the ones who nailed that sad girl’s nude broken body to an outhouse door behind one of the dance halls, down on the Arkansas Rive
r.”

  “Yep. Liquor-crazed churnheads thought no one cared what happened to whores. Next day, they bragged about the killing to anyone willing to listen. Fort Smith policeman named Rufus Crossley tried to arrest ’em. They shot the hell out of him. Man lived, but never worked again. Turned him into a twenty-two-year-old shuffling cripple who lived another fifty years.”

  Tilden blew about half-a-dozen smoke rings at the ceiling, spit a chunk of errant tobacco toward the stove, and went to hacking at the tale again. “They ran from Crossley’s leaking body to a cock fight over near Tuskahoma. Got into an argument with the owner of a well-known fighting bird named Bloody Bill. Heard tell he was a beautiful piece of poultry. Had a head the color of fire. Blackie and Rufus ended up killing the rooster, and its owner. Afterward, my friend Billy Bird always noted as how it takes some pretty sorry fellers to pull a pistol on a defenseless pullet. Two-man plague left bodies everywhere they stopped long enough. So I wired you, and we met up at Coffee’s.”

  “We damned sure did. Chased that pair of murdering slugs out of the mountains, through the grasslands, to windswept nothingness, all the way to the Mulberry River, and then some. Almost three weeks on their trail. One of the roughest runs I ever made. Hard to believe I’d managed to forget it.”

  A blanket of good feelings dropped over me, and brought the entire chase back in a flash of electric energy that snapped through my brain like ball lightning flying along telegraph wires. Glad the memory finally made an appearance. But what happened out west of the Mulberry didn’t turn out to be much fun—leastways not for me. Closed my eyes, and could finally see them ole boys’ ugly, perambulating swath of death and destruction as if it all happened yesterday.

  Murdering scum turned north from Coffee’s, and made for the Wildhorse River. Then, hoofed it for the Salt Fork of the Red, where they met up with two other hymn-singing pilgrims who were equally famed for piety and love of their fellowman. Nevada Nate Billingly and a renegade Comanche called Wolf Tail were as bad, maybe worse than either of the fugitives we started out looking to catch. The four of them together resembled a living pestilence, sweeping across the land in front of us. We couldn’t ride fast enough to stop them, once the killing started.