He climbed back onto the box and cocked his shotgun. Tiny whipped up the horses, and they started across at breakneck speed, the coach lurching as the wheels hit the soft sandy banks, and then splashing and jouncing over rocks in the riverbed.
And then the shooting started. Johnson heard the whinny of the horses, and with a final lurch the coach stopped abruptly, right in the middle of the river, and Tiny shouted, “That tears it!” and Morgan Earp began firing rapidly. “I’ll cover you, Wyatt.”
Johnson and Miss Emily ducked down. Bullets whined all around them, and the coach rocked as the men moved above them. Johnson peeked over the sill and saw Wyatt Earp running, splashing through the river toward the far shore.
“He’s leaving! Wyatt’s leaving us!” Johnson cried, and then a fusillade sent him diving for cover again.
“He wouldn’t abandon us,” Emily said.
“He just did!” Johnson shouted. He was completely panicked. Suddenly the coach door swung open and Johnson screamed as Tiny threw himself in, landing on top of them.
Tiny was gasping and white-faced; he pulled the door shut as a half dozen bullets splintered the wood.
“What’s happening?” Johnson asked.
“Ain’t no place for me out there,” Tiny said.
“But what’s happening?”
“We’re stuck in the middle of the damn river, that’s what’s happening,” Tiny said. “They killed one of the team, so we ain’t going nowhere, and the Earp boys are shooting away like blazes. Wyatt took off.”
“They have a plan?”
“I surely hope so,” Tiny said. “’Cause I don’t.” As the gunfire continued, he clasped his hands together and closed his eyes. His lips twitched.
“What’re you doing?”
“Praying,” Tiny said. “You better, too. ’Cause if Black Dick takes this stage, he’ll just naturally kill us all.”
In the reddish afternoon light, the stagecoach sat immobile in the middle of Spring Creek. On top of the stage, Morgan Earp lay flat and fired into the trees on the opposite shore. Wyatt made it safely to the far bank, and plunged into the pinewoods opposite.
Almost immediately, the shooting from the far side diminished: the Curry gang had something new to worry about now.
Then from the far shore there was a shotgun blast and a loud scream, agonizing. It trailed away into silence. After a moment, another shotgun blast, and a strangled cry.
The Curry gang stopped firing at the coach.
Then a voice cried, “Don’t shoot, Wyatt, please don’t—” and another blast.
Suddenly half a dozen voices on the far shore were shouting to each other, and then they heard horses galloping off.
And then nothing.
Morgan Earp knocked on the roof of the coach. “It’s finished,” he said. “They’re gone. You can breathe now.”
The passengers inside struggled to their feet, brushed themselves off. Johnson looked out and saw Wyatt Earp standing on the far bank, grinning. His sawed-off shotgun hung loosely in his hand.
He walked slowly back through the stream toward them. “First rule of a bushwhacking,” he said. “Always run toward the direction of fire, not away.”
“How many’d you kill?” Johnson asked. “All of them?”
Earp grinned again. “None of them.”
“None of them?”
“Those woods’re thick; you can’t see ten feet ahead of you. I’d never find ’em in there. But I knew they were spread out along the bank and probably couldn’t see each other directly. So I just shot my gun a few times, and made a few hideous cries.”
“Wyatt can really make hideous cries,” Morgan said.
“That’s so,” Wyatt said. “The Curry gang panicked and ran.”
“You mean you just tricked them?” Johnson said. In a strange way he felt disappointed.
“Listen,” Wyatt Earp said. “One reason I’m still alive is I don’t go asking for trouble. These boys are none too quick, and they got an active imagination. Besides, we got a bigger problem than getting rid of the Curry boys.”
“We do?”
“Yeah. We got to get this coach out of the river.”
“Why is that a problem?”
Earp sighed. “Boy, you ever tried to move a dead horse?”
It took an hour to cut the animal loose, and float it downstream. Johnson watched the dark carcass drift with the current until it had disappeared. With the five remaining horses of the team, they managed to haul the coach out of the sand and onto the far shore. By then it was dark, and they drove quickly to Sheridan, where they obtained a fresh team.
Sheridan was a small town of fifty wooden houses, but it seemed everyone had turned out to greet them; Johnson was surprised to see money changing hands.
Earp collected a lot of it.
“What’s going on?”
“They were wagering on whether we’d make it,” Earp said. “I had a few bets myself.”
“Which way’d you bet?”
Earp just smiled and nodded to a saloon. “You know, it would be sporting for you to go inside with me and buy a round of whiskey.”
“You think we should drink at a time like this?”
“We won’t see any more trouble until Red Canyon,” Earp said, “and I’m thirsty.”
Red Canyon
They reached the town of Custer at ten o’clock at night. The night was dark, and Johnson was disappointed; he couldn’t see much of the most famous place in the Black Hills, the Gordon Stockade at French Creek.
Just one year before, in 1875, the first miners of the Gordon party had built log cabins surrounded by a wooden fence ten feet high. They had entered the Black Hills in defiance of the Indian treaty, and they intended to pan for gold and hold off the Indians with their stockade. It had taken a cavalry expedition from Fort Laramie to get them out; in those days the army was still enforcing the Indian treaty, and the stockade stood deserted.
Now, everyone at Custer was talking about the new Indian treaty. Although the government was still fighting the Sioux in the field, the cost of the war was high—already in excess of $15 million—and it was an election year. Both the expense of the fighting and the legitimacy of the government’s position were hot campaign issues in Washington. Therefore, the Great White Father preferred to conclude the war peacefully, by negotiating a new treaty, and to this end, government negotiators had arranged to meet with Sioux chieftains in Sheridan.
But even specially picked chiefs were disgusted by the new proposals. Most of the government negotiators agreed with them. One of them, now on his way back to Washington, said to Johnson that it was “the hardest damn thing I ever did in my life. I don’t care how many feathers a man wears in his hair, he’s still a man. One of them, Red Legs, looked at me and said, ‘Do you think this is fair? Would you sign such a paper?’ And I could not meet his eyes. It made me sick.
“You know what Thomas Jefferson said?” the man continued. “In 1803, Thomas Jefferson said that it would take a thousand years before the West was fully settled. And it’ll be settled in less’n a hundred years. That’s progress.”
Johnson recorded in his journal that “he seemed an honest man sent to do a dishonest job, and now he could not forgive himself for carrying out the instructions of his government. He was drunk when we arrived, and drinking more when we left.”