Long Way to Dodge

By Bryan Davidson

Thomas Bertram is one unlucky man. Leaving Denver and heading home to Mississippi, the 22-year-old soon finds himself shot, robbed, and left to die. He recovers from his wounds and sets out on the trail of his would-be killers, but before he can catch up to them, he makes a big mistake: he sticks his nose into someone else’s business. When he comes upon a wagon train under attack, he helps fight off the Indians and finds that the only survivors are two children and their wounded father. A foolish promise to a dying man leaves him saddled with a 13-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and an obligation to get them somewhere safe. The Indians want them dead, outlaws want the girl, and when he discovers that someone from his hometown has put a price on his head, it doesn't seem like his luck is going to be changing anytime soon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryan Davidson
• Release date: Jan 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310419362

Bryan Davidson

I was born and raised in Oklahoma, and still reside there in a small town east of Oklahoma City. In my early years I discovered John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies and this led to a lifelong interest in the old West and the firearms that allowed its settlement. Being right smack dab in the middle of outlaw and cattle country, there are many museums around that only fueled the fire. With the passage of years, my interest has not diminished and after taking a few online writing classes, I discovered that I had devolved into a writer. Add all of that together, toss in a little imagination, and you end up with something like Long Way to Dodge, my first novel.I love to travel and see new places and things. I adore warm, tropical, beachy places, or just about anywhere else that happens to feature a plentitude of bikinis. The Caribbean would be a favorite. Some of my interests include hunting, fishing, high-performance machinery in the form of motorcycles, cars, airplanes or nearly any other form of motorized transportation, and watching outdoor related programs on TV. I can often be found sitting in front of my computer, daydreaming about the red rock canyons and the high mountain peaks of the Rockies.

Book preview

Long Way to Dodge

Bryan Davidson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2013 Bryan Davidson

Cover design by Vila Design

www.viladesign.net/

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotes or passages used in reviews, no part of this book may be copied, reproduced, stored or transmitted in any way or form without the express written consent of the author.

Dedicated to my parents, who have provided me with the greatest gift imaginable- their unfailing love and support.

This book would not exist if it wasn’t for the ongoing encouragement and unrelenting pestering of my writing buddies. I’d like to thank Suzanne, Joni, Jerusha, Dianna, and the late Fiddler. An even bigger thank you goes to Brenda and Ann. They know what they did.

I am also grateful to the friendly and knowledgeable folks over at http://castboolits.gunloads.com/ for their help in answering obscure and detailed questions about 140-year-old weapons. A special note of thanks to Kirk Durston for his assistance and suggestions.

This book is a work of fiction. Aside from a couple of historical figures briefly mentioned, all names and characters in the book are entirely made up and any similarities to actual persons are unintentional. Many of the locations and the places named are also fictitious and do not exist.

Thomas Bertram is one unlucky man. Leaving Denver and heading home to Mississippi, the 22-year-old soon finds himself shot, robbed, and left to die. He recovers from his wounds and sets out on the trail of his would-be killers, but before he can catch up to them, he makes a big mistake: he sticks his nose into someone else’s business. When he comes upon a wagon train under attack, he helps fight off the Indians and finds that the only survivors are two children and their wounded father. A foolish promise to a dying man leaves him saddled with a 13-year-old girl, a 10-year-old boy and an obligation to get them somewhere safe. The Indians want them dead, outlaws want the girl, and when he discovers that someone from his hometown has put a price on his head, it doesn't seem like his luck is going to be changing anytime soon.

Table of Contents

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

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23.

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Note from the Author.

Chapter 1

With the rays of the late afternoon sun streaming from my right, I was riding along, letting my horse pick his own way down a dry wash while I kept an eye out for a good campsite for the night. As we rounded a boulder, flame stabbed from the shadows of a juniper sixty yards ahead and my eyes shifted just in time to witness the cloud of gun smoke erupt from the tree branches. Even as my brain began screaming at me to put the spurs to my horse and get out of there, I knew it was already too late.

I was a dead man.

Before I could react, something walloped me in the head, and with the sound of the gunshot ringing in my ears, I was falling.

****

My eyes opened to an inky blackness. As I pondered why this was, I soon became aware of something else.

Pain. A deep, dull pounding in my head. How bad does it hurt to die, I wondered? And is it supposed to keep on hurting even after you're dead? I closed my eyes once more to shut out the pain, but it only worsened.

When I opened them again, directly above me were pinpoints of light, so distant that they provided no illumination. From somewhere off to my right side came a loud noise that startled me and I jerked my head around, searching for its origin.

My head exploded in agony and I immediately regretted the movement. Expecting my skull to burst wide open at any moment, I lay there suffering in silence. As I waited to see if the pain was going to stop, my mind wandered, trying to make sense of the situation.

Stars. The lights had to be stars. They were directly above me, so I knew I must be lying down. And it was night time. That would explain the cold. Boy, it was cold. But what about that noise I'd heard? A moment later the noise repeated itself and I knew what it was.

The snorting sound was a horse. My horse. Turning once again, I inched my head around far enough to look in that direction, invoking a new round of pain. At least it wasn't as bad if I took my time and moved slowly.

There he was, a dark shadow standing thirty feet away, jerking on something. As my eyes focused, I could see that he was busy nibbling away at a bush. Good old Jackson. I'd always been able to count on him and he had not deserted me now.

Why was I lying here? I'd been riding along the bottom of the sandy wash, all by myself. Now I was on the ground, hurting like hell. How had that happened?

Then I remembered. Ahead of me off to the left there had been a flash that came from the bushes. There was smoke and a loud noise and I was falling.

I began a delicate and methodical exploration of my head to locate the source of pain. Just above my left ear my fingers touched a big lump on the side of my head. Directly in the center of the lump was a deep gouge through the skin, about four inches long. The surrounding tissue felt grotesque and swollen and the wound had bled a lot, leaving the edges crusted with blood and a puddle of it on the sand beneath my head.

So that was it. A bullet wound.

Someone had fired at me. Shot me and left me for dead. Someone had tried to kill me.

Who? And why?

No answers came to mind but pretty soon I decided that since I wasn't dead, I'd better see what I could do to keep myself that way. Later on I could worry about who shot me and why.

I managed to get my hands out beside me and tried to sit up but the effort ushered in a new onslaught of pain and dizziness that overwhelmed me, plunging me back into the void.

****

When my eyes opened again there were more stars and a moon that occasionally emerged from hiding among the clouds. It was even colder now. At least that's what my feet were telling me.

Trying a different approach this time, I rolled over on my stomach, pulling my knees up beneath me, turning and twisting myself into a sitting position. When I looked down I discovered why my feet were so cold. My boots weren't where they were supposed to be. They were gone.

My boots weren't the only thing absent. My pistol and gun belt were gone. Dreading what I would find, I went ahead and checked my pockets anyway. My knife wasn't there and something else was missing also, something more important.

I'd been carrying $163, all that I had left from eight months' wages. Leaving Denver and headed for home 900 miles away in Mississippi, I'd been counting on that money to get me there.

Now it was gone, all of it.

Slowly the realization hit me. I was flat broke, penniless. What was I going to do now?

I looked around and located Jackson again. At least they hadn't taken my horse. That didn't make sense though. Why would someone kill a man and then take everything except his horse? Why had they left him?

There would be plenty of time to wonder about that later. At the moment, all I knew was that I was alive and as long as I had Jackson, there was at least a fair chance that I wasn't going to die. Not yet, anyway.

I tried to stand but another wave of dizziness came over me and I nearly passed out again. After a few minutes it had subsided enough that I was able to crawl on my hands and knees to my horse. He shied away from the smell of blood. I spoke quietly to him, crawled to him once again and reached up, catching the stirrup with my hand. After a minute or so I was able to pull myself to my feet, leaning heavily against the saddle as I spoke to Jackson and scratched his neck.

After the dizziness had lessened to a tolerable level I was able to get the reins in my hand and claw my way into the saddle. There was only a slight chance that whoever had shot me was still in the area, but a slight chance was enough to scare me. Hunched over the saddle horn, I started off in the brush with no idea which direction I was heading. All I wanted was to put some distance between myself and this place where I had been ambushed.

Half an hour later I could go no farther. I had to get warm.

I slid from the saddle, tied the reins to a bush, and turned back to Jackson to take inventory. My canteen hung from the saddle horn, just like always. And on the back of my saddle, my saddle bags were still there. Maybe things weren't as bad as I had first thought. I staggered around to the other side of the horse and my spirits soared to the heavens. There was my Winchester!

Pulling the rifle from the saddle scabbard, I quietly levered a round into the chamber, held the trigger back as I eased the hammer down, and then leaned the weapon against a nearby rock. If the killer returned to finish the job, at least now I could fight back.

A bonfire was out of the question, but I had to have some type of fire. I grabbed bits and pieces of dried grass, twigs and branches and piled them behind a large rock before fishing some matches out of my saddlebag. The grass lit, sputtered and flamed up again as I added more, then piled on a few twigs and larger branches. I stayed in front of the fire for a couple of minutes until it got large enough to give off some light. Grabbing my Winchester, I carried it with me as I scouted around for larger pieces of wood.

I gathered up as much burnable material as I thought I would need throughout the night, and then gathered up even more. Firewood has a bad habit of never lasting as long as you think it will and I didn't want to go stumbling around in the dark again. Huddled in my blanket with my feet stretched out before the flames, I spent the next hour holding my rifle and peering out into the darkness. Gradually the heat given off from the flames and reflected from the rock warmed me enough that I stopped shivering.

Boiling some water in my small coffee pot, I added to it the cleanest rag I could find. I held the rag on my head until the dried blood had softened and I managed to clear away most of it, and then held the hot rag on the wound as long as I could stand it. It felt good and I repeated the process three more times, doing my best to clean the wound. I had no medicine with me; I would just have to keep it as clean as possible and hope that infection would not set in.

I boiled more water, adding some dried jerky to it to make a broth. It tasted so good that I drank three cups of the hot liquid. Between the hot broth and the fire, my body temperature gradually climbed and I began to get comfortable and sleepy. The next thing I was aware of was the sunlight and the sound of the birds singing.

I awoke with a start, scooting over closer to the boulder for better cover. What was it that had awakened me? The birds? A strange smell? The sun? Or was it only my body telling me it was time to get up?

Crouching behind the rock, I let my eyes roam, studying the surroundings in every direction. There was no dust. No birds flew up, frightened from their perches. There was no crackling of brush. No noises except those of the natural environment. I seemed to be all alone.

Still, I waited. It didn't pay to be careless. Half an hour passed with no suspicious noise or movement, so I rekindled the fire, warming up more water to bathe my wound and make two more cups of jerky broth. An hour later I was in the saddle, carrying my rifle at the ready, heading back to the ambush site.

I had no pistol, no boots, no knife, no money and no idea who had tried to kill me. What I did have was a Winchester rifle, a terrible headache and a growing irritation with someone who would hide in the bushes and shoot a man for no apparent reason.

First, I had to find out who had tried to kill me. Only then could the proper steps be taken to correct the situation.

Chapter 2

It was nearly two miles back to the place where I'd been shot. When I got within half a mile of the spot, I took my time, stopping frequently to look, listen, and smell. With 400 yards to go, I took a long look at things, and then circled far around to the east, out on the open ground. So far there had been nothing suspicious but I was taking no chances.

Intending to make a huge circle of the entire area, I'd covered no more than a third of the distance before I came across two sets of horse tracks, coming from the east and seemingly headed for the ambush spot. One of them was a big horse with a long stride and worn down horseshoes. The other horse was smaller but his left rear shoe had a slight overhang on the inside edge, just a small piece of metal protruding that the blacksmith had neglected to file off.

I looked at these tracks for a long while, keeping an eye out all around me at the same time. Then I rode on. Within another 300 yards I came across another set of tracks. These were from the same two horses, only this time they were coming from the ambush spot, going eastward across the prairie.

I studied these tracks further. Insects had crawled across them during the night, the same as they had on the tracks I had found a few minutes earlier. Yesterday two people had come and gone, either directly from the ambush site or very near to it.

Each person and every horse has a slightly different track than any other. Sometimes the differences are obvious and sometimes they are slight, but they are there. Looking at the tracks a bit longer, I committed every detail to memory. I would not be forgetting these horses.

I rode on, completing my circle of the area. There were no other tracks either entering or leaving the area except my own from the previous day. The bushwhackers had gone.

It was an easy task to find the place where I'd been shot. The pool of blood staining the sand had turned dark and was buzzing with flies. And now I understood why they hadn't taken my horse.

Judging from the tracks, after I had fallen, Jackson had taken off at a dead run down the wash toward the south. Either the shooters didn't want the horse bad enough to engage in a lengthy chase, or perhaps they didn't feel they had the time to do so. Sometime after they left, however, Jackson had come back and stayed near me. At that moment my affection for my horse grew by leaps and bounds and I made a mental note to reward him with an apple the first chance I got. Of course, somehow I would need to get some money to buy the apple.

The brush where I thought I had seen the flash was directly ahead of me and I went there next. Getting off to investigate, I carried my rifle with me and left my horse tied to a tree.

The bushwhackers' hiding place was easy enough to find; the signs told the tale. A few yards on the east side of the wash were a clump of juniper trees with some manzanita and mesquite scattered among them. Beneath the biggest juniper were cigarette butts, more than a dozen of them. Someone had waited here for quite a while, at least a couple of hours, likely more. Two someones, in fact.

One of them had been a large man wearing new boots and he smoked his cigarettes down to the nub, probably burning his lips sometimes. There were branches lying on the ground, branches broken off from the tree where he had cleared a firing lane to shoot from. And there was a fresh cartridge case on the ground in front of where he had knelt.

So it was the big man who had fired at me. I picked up the empty cartridge and inspected it carefully.

It was a large case, .50-70 government caliber, made of copper. There was a deep indentation in the middle of the case head where the firing pin had struck, but aside from that, there was nothing else notable about it. After looking it over, I deposited the empty shell in my saddlebag just in case I happened to run across a sheriff.

The caliber itself was not uncommon. After the Civil War ended, the armory at Springfield had converted many thousands of percussion rifles to fire the .50-70 government metallic cartridge, and from 1866 to 1873, these rifles had been the standard military arm. In 1873, the .50-70 caliber rifles were replaced by a nearly identical rifle that fired a new, smaller, .45-70 government cartridge. The.50-70 rifles had been sold off as surplus and many of them remained in use all across the country.

There had been other rifles available in that chambering as well and it was a fairly popular round among the buffalo hunters. The first large scale production of repeating rifles began around 1860, and in the fifteen years since, Winchesters, Spencers, and other repeaters were becoming so prolific that someone still using a single shot .50-70 might stand out and be remembered. It was something to keep in mind.

The smaller footprints were from well-used boots. The right outside corner of the heel was worn down drastically more than the rest of the boot. This man walked with some sort of a limp or odd gait in his right leg. And he wore spurs. The smaller man only smoked his cigarettes down about halfway. Was he the nervous type who couldn't even concentrate on smoking a cigarette for very long? I committed these boot tracks to memory also, and then checked the spot where they had kept their horses. There were tracks from the same two horses whose tracks I had seen earlier. There were several yellow horse hairs caught on the tree trunk where the smaller man's horse had rubbed.

So, the man who shot me had been a large man wearing new boots, he liked to smoke his cigarettes completely, and he rode a big horse with worn horse shoes. Then there was a smaller man. He smoked his cigarettes only halfway, his right boot was worn from limping, and he rode a yellow horse with an overhang on its rear hoof. They had waited here for some time. This implied that they had known I was coming.

How could they have known I was coming? Why had they wanted to kill me? And the biggest and most important question- who had tried to kill me?

I wasn't carrying so much money that it would really be worth the risk of killing me for it, and besides that, they wouldn’t have known how much I had. I certainly was not dressed in the finest and most fashionable clothing imaginable, and I had no fancy gear or belongings. The surrounding territory was beginning to get a little bit civilized. There was at least a slight chance that they wouldn't get away with it. So why?

It didn't seem like much to go on, and it wasn't, but at least it was something. I stood there thinking, sifting through my memories and list of acquaintances for someone who wanted me dead, someone who might match the vague description I had. The problem was, there was no one who came to mind.

What should I do now? I was going to have to do something about food. There were a few pieces of jerky left. I had just a little flour, salt and coffee. If I really stretched it out, I could get by for three or four more days. I had no boots or shoes. No knife. And no money. Someone wanted me dead and they undoubtedly thought that I was. What was going to happen if I showed up now, alive and well?

This was the most confusing fix I had ever been in.

Two days earlier the cavalry patrol I was riding with had crossed the Santa Fe Trail. Yesterday I had taken a bit of a chance and left the safety of the soldiers, taking a route directly southeast that would shorten my trip by a couple hundred miles. I wasn't sure where the nearest town was, yet the two bushwhackers seemed to have been headed toward somewhere specific, a place known to them. A town? A ranch where they worked? A railroad station?

I was going to have to do something, to go somewhere. But where? Which direction? I had only a general idea of where I was.

While I stood there thinking, my peripheral vision picked up a sudden movement and I dropped to the ground, turning my head to look as I did so.

Five hundred yards down the wash a deer scampered into the trees. My hunter's instinct kicked in and suddenly my food situation didn't seem quite so dire.

Chapter 3

Slipping my socks off and carrying my rifle, I walked silently through the sand. I stayed low and out of sight, bypassing the stand of trees where I'd seen the deer. I continued farther down the dry riverbed until it turned and doubled back on itself. Satisfied that I was on the opposite side of the trees where the deer had disappeared, I chose a large rock and stood up slowly beside it. The doe was ninety yards away with her head down, feeding. She was nervous, stamping her feet and twitching her tail. I knew she was about to look up so I raised the rifle, thumbed back the hammer, centered the sights just behind her shoulder and pulled the trigger, all in one smooth, fluid movement.

As the shot rang out a flock of crows took to the air, screaming their displeasure at the interruption. The deer ran a dozen steps before it fell to the ground, kicked a few times, and was still.

Now I had food. That had been the easy part. I still needed to skin it.

I could have used my knife right now. My father had given that knife to me on my ninth birthday. He had decided that I was old enough and responsible enough to keep track of it and I had not disappointed him. With handles made of deer antler, it had two blades-- one for whittling and one for skinning, each three inches long. It was a good knife, a handy tool, and because I had kept it clean, sharp and free of rust, it had served me well through many years of daily use.

Now it was gone, stolen by would-be murderers, and I intended to get it back. It was too good a knife to leave to a couple of no-accounts.

As I walked toward the downed animal, my eyes scanned the ground in all directions. At last I found what I was looking for, a dark-colored rock. But this wasn't just any old rock. It was a large piece of obsidian. I picked up an even bigger rock and smashed it against the obsidian, breaking off several smaller pieces. Each piece had razor sharp edges; one of them was a little shorter than my longest finger. Just what I needed.

Using the obsidian, I skinned the deer, just as our ancestors had done for countless millennia. I wrapped up the best cuts of meat in the hide and took it to an out of the way, sheltered spot beneath two large trees where a fire would likely not be noticed. After building a small fire, I roasted as much deer meat as I could eat. Putting the rest of it on a rack and setting it beside the fire to smoke, I began to work on some moccasins.

As a child I sometimes played with