Bloody Newton

by Johnny D. Boggs

Genres: Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

A new standalone novel based on one of the greatest gunfights in American history from one of the most popular and respected writers of Western fiction, multiple award–winning author, Johnny D. Boggs.

BLOODY NEWTON
 
A decade before the legendary Gunfight at OK Corral, there was a much bloodier showdown with a much bigger body count—and Wichita Herald reporter Cindy Bagwell was there to see it all. At first, the fledgling journalist had no idea why her boss would send her to what hardly even passes for a town. But Texans, including trail boss Gary Hardee and his sons, are bringing longhorns to Kansas. And Newton aims to take over the cattle market. Hardee has his hands full—and that’s before he reaches Newton, where Texans and Kansans don’t get along. Tensions escalate from fisticuffs to brawling to fatal shootings in short order. But that’s just a warm-up. On August 19, 1871, in a gambling room at Tuttle’s dance hall in Hide Park, this powder keg of bad blood and bitterness between two rival groups explodes—with one young reporter, a restaurant owner, and Hardee’s sons caught in the middle . . .
 
This is the story of the deadliest gunfight in the American West. Of the passionate men and women who fought for a piece of the American Dream. And of the ultimate price they’d have to pay . . .
 
“Boggs is unparalleled in evoking the gritty reality of the Old West.” —The Shootist
 

“Johnny D. Boggs tells a crisply powerful story that rings true more than two centuries after the bloody business was done.” —The Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier on The Despoilers

Release date: June 25, 2024

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

That morning, he awakened to her smell. She had bathed before coming to bed that night, washed her hair, and they had made love. He treasured mornings like this, especially in the spring, breathing in that fragrance of the rose powders she used. Wind blew the curtains, a horse in the corral neighed, and he rolled over, putting his right arm around her. She giggled, and took his hand in hers, giving it that soft squeeze.

She liked to say how their hands were made for each other, that they fit perfectly.

He pushed himself up, found her earlobe, kissed it, found her cheek, kissed that, too. Waited for her to turn her head, so he could dive into pure blue eyes.

When she did, he kissed her again.

“Careful now,” she whispered, but her eyes told him they both wanted to abandon any notion of caution.

He smiled. She puckered her lips. They kissed. She had the most inviting lips. Her mouth opened. He explored it. Her arm came around his back.

Then, from the barn, a voice shouted:

“Pa. Aren’t you awake yet?”

Another echoed: “Those steers won’t drive themselves.”

She fell back onto the pillow.

He rolled away to glare at the ceiling.

Both voices outside yelled something unintelligible.

He groaned.

After trying, but failing, to stifle another giggle, she sat up and stared down at him. Stared with those hypnotic eyes. He memorized that nose, her freckles, the golden hair, gazed upon her, naked and beautiful and everything a man could dream of a wife.

“You’re the one,” she told him, “who wanted sons.”

And rolled out of bed, found her robe, slid her feet into those satin slippers he bought for her last year, and went to make coffee.

“Pa! Aren’t you awake?” That would be Taylor, the oldest, eighteen and already taller that Gary Hardee.

“You’ve already slept through the best part of the day.” That was Evan, fifteen, and just as tall as his old man.

By then, Gary Hardee had pulled over his shirt, shoved on his hat, and was trying to jerk up the canvas britches. He stifled a curse. From the winter kitchen, he heard Jane getting a fire started in the Charter Oak. He had seen one in Kansas three years ago, and listened to the salesman make his case—till the skinflint figured out that Gary was a Texan and went to talk to a local lady. Not that Gary could have gotten that heavy piece of iron all the way back to Fort Bend County, and he felt better anyway after he had worked out a deal with a fellow in San Antonio, who brought in this Charter Oak from a hardware merchant down in Galveston.

Jane loved the stove. Sure beat cooking in a fireplace or over a pit outside.

The sons shouted at him again, while he was pulling on the boots. That caused his hand to slip and catch the rowels on the spur on his right boot. Right below the thumb, breaking the skin. Irritated, he shouted back at those greenhorn kids, before he brought the hand to his mouth and tried to close the cut.

The boys laughed.

From the cook stove, Jane said, “You can’t jump on those two boys for taking our Lord’s name in vain when you do it yourself, Gary Hardee.”

He pulled the silk handkerchief from his back pocket and pressed it against the cut. “I didn’t take God’s name in vain,” he said.

“Oh, I am pretty sure you did, and I am even more certain that Preacher Colquhoun would agree.”

“They caused me to cut my hand on a spur,” he pleaded.

“And how many times have I asked you to remove your spurs before you walk into the house?”

“Waste of time,” he whispered.

“Pa!”

He returned to the fight with his boots.

She came through the door. He remembered when the bedchambers had been separated with a blanket during the winter, checkered sheet during the summer. She let him finish getting the left boot on, then he held up his injured hand.

“Almost cut off my thumb,” he said.

She unwound the wrapping, looked over his hand and into his eyes, and let the end of the silk fall. “It’s already stopped bleeding.”

He smiled. She grinned.

“Pa!”

He sighed. She laughed, bent down, pulled off his hat, kissed the top of his thick hair, returned the hat, and walked back to the stove.

The blue silk neckerchief lay atop the back of the rocking chair, the one Jane had used to rock the boys to sleep, the same one her mother had used to rock her five sons and four daughters to sleep. He tied the scarf around his neck and grabbed the vest that the neckerchief had laid on. Finally, he made a beeline to the window, pushed back the curtains, and leaned outside.

Taylor sat on the top pole of the round pen, rolling a cigarette. At least Evan was doing something productive, cleaning the chestnut gelding’s hooves with a pick. Taylor’s sorrel was ground-reined near the barn. But he gave both of his sons credit. They had saddled his dun. Gary almost laughed.

Instead, he cleared his throat, and both boys—no, they were young men now—looked his way.

“Won’t never get to Kansas if you keep burning daylight,” Taylor said.

He nodded. “One thing both of you might ought to remember.” Gary waited. “Wat leaves all the hiring and firing to me. I pick who takes a herd to Kansas. I pick who doesn’t. And I say who rides drag all night eight hundred and fifty miles. And who gets to be the cook’s louse.”

The two glanced at each other. Taylor stared at the cigarette he had just licked, and slipped it above his left ear before he pushed himself off the corral post. Evan lowered the chestnut’s leg, straightened, set the pick on atop a corral post, and started brushing his hands on his chaps.

Taylor motioned toward the dun. “We saddled your horse, Pa,” he said.

“I can see that. Wash up. Your mother’s making the last good meal you’ll taste till we get back home.” Once he came back inside, his smile come out of hiding.

Gary ran the back of his hand over his cheeks. He would have to look closer at Jane’s neck. Sometimes that stubble could leave a rash. The thick mustache, Jane always said, just tickled. Had he been smart, he would have shaved before he came to bed, but when a husband’s about to leave home for three, four, maybe as long as five months, more often than not, brains got bucked off in a hurry.

Bacon sizzled, and he thought he heard Jane cracking eggs, so he glanced at the mirror and wash basin. He wouldn’t get a good shave for months, so he might as well clean up a bit. He was just about finished when he saw her reflection as Jane opened the door. Smiling, he scraped the last bit of graying brown from his throat, wiped the lather on the towel, and folded the razor into its handle, then splashed water on his face and toweled himself dry.

Turning, he found her staring with those intense eyes, her head cocked, a smile beginning to form. Her head shook, and she sighed.

“I know,” he said. “Should’ve thought to have shaved when I got home yesterday.”

“It’s not that,” she said.

He waited. She didn’t say another word. “Well?” he tried. “What is it?”

“You don’t take your hat off to shave?”

His eyes shot upward, saw the brim of the battered hat some folks might call gray, or charcoal, maybe the color of the dun gelding. After a year, he couldn’t remember what color it had been when he had pulled it off the shelf in Abilene.

“Oh.” He made no effort to take it off, though.

“Breakfast is ready,” she said.

Those blue eyes were turning sad now. Like they always did this time of year.

“I can leave Evan—” He didn’t come close to finishing.

“Oh, no, you won’t, Gary Hardee. No-sir-ree-bob. You left him behind last year—and I never heard the end of it. For the umpteenth time, Evan’s going with you and Taylor, and that’s settled.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The eyes slowly started to lose that heat. He walked toward her, enveloped her in his arms, and pulled her tight to his chest. He felt her arms wrap around his waist.

“I’ll miss you,” she whispered.

“You don’t know how much I’ll miss you,” he told her. “Wat says he’ll send a rider over every now and then, and if you need anything, you know where to find him.”

Major Walter Pool “Wat” Anderson usually organized the gathers in the county between the Brazos and Colorado Rivers. Since Wat owned the biggest spread, the smaller ranchers left all the decisions to him. That is, until the herd started north. At that point, Gary Hardee took command.

“Hugh’s still going with you?”

Hugh, a bit older than Taylor, was Anderson’s youngest son.

“Last I heard.”

“Rich?”

That was Wat’s oldest boy.

“No.”

“Good,” she whispered. Word was that Rich had killed a man down southeast a ways in DeWitt and Karnes Counties in a feud that had started up a few years back between two muleheaded families.

“Last I heard,” Gary told her, “Rich was down in Indianola. He never took to cowboying anyhow.”

She pulled her head from his chest, and stared into his eyes.

“And Hugh has?” The sarcasm could not be missed.

“He’s the Major’s son,” Gary said, “and Taylor’s best friend.” He read the worry in her face. “I don’t think any Suttons will be following us to put a bullet in Hugh’s head.”

“You’ll be careful,” she whispered.

“I always am.”

He bent down, kissed her. Her arms tightened around his waist.

“I thought you said breakfast was ready.” That was Taylor, who must have just stepped in off the porch.

“We keep Major Wat waiting,” Evan chimed in, “and he’ll likely send those beeves north without us.”

Pulling away from him, Jane shook her head and let out a long sigh.

Gary Hardee smiled. “You’re the one who bore me sons.”

“Sis, where we goin’?”

Three miles out of town—no, she had to remind herself, that Neodesha was a city now—and those were the first words her brother had spoken. Denise Beeber had prayed that Arthur would have remained mute another one hundred and twenty miles or so.

Sighing, she flicked the lines, which the two jacks ignored as they pulled the wagon along the trail. “Newton,” Denise finally answered.

“Where’s that?”

“North of Wichita. We’ll be there in a week or so.”

“What’s in Newton?” he asked.

“I’m hoping nothing when we get there,” she told him. “But the Santa Fe Railroad is supposed to reach there this summer.”

He sniffed, pulled a frayed handkerchief from his vest pocket, and blew his nose. She had not glanced at him once since leaving Neodesha.

“Sis . . .”

Denise knew Arthur stared at her, but she kept her attention on the backsides of the mules, and the road. She didn’t dare look her kid brother in the eye. If she had, she might blacken the one that wasn’t already raw and bruised. Knock him out of the wagon onto the road, and still not look back.

“I’m sorry.”

Biting down the curse, she drew in a breath, exhaled, and still focused on the road.

“Arthur,” she whispered after a long moment, “you’re always sorry.”

How many times had she heard that? Growing up in Little Rock . . . then that brief stay in Eureka Springs . . . over to Fort Smith . . . then up to Missouri—Carthage, Springfield, Nevada—finally into Kansas at Fort Scott, down to Baxter Springs, and then Neodesha, where everything seemed to be going just fine. Until Arthur had to start being Arthur again.

Mayor A.K. Phelon’s voice rang through her head one more time.

“What you have to understand, Miss Beeber, is that Neodesha is not just a town anymore. We are a third-class city with more than one thousand people. Good people.”

Then A.C. Nycum, who won the election as constable in a landslide, added: “Except for one black sheep.”

Yes, Arthur Beeber was the black sheep. He had always been the black sheep. He kept a job about as long as he stayed sober, a trait that reminded Denise of both her mother and father. Her brother had tried religion—four of them, by her count—and had even visited that witch down in the Indian Nations just south of Baxter Springs—but the bottle and many of his friends enticed him back to wickedness. She would have liked to have blamed it on the recent unpleasantness, but both armies had drummed Arthur out of their corps. He had served eight months wearing butternut, and six months donning the blue, returning to Little Rock with the only scars on his right ankle and both wrists from iron manacles.

“He was playing billiards on the Sabbath,” she had told Neodesha’s duly elected officials. That sharp tongue was a product of being her mother’s daughter. She knew that was a mistake before she even opened her mouth.

“One day, Miss Beeber,” the mayor said, “the state of Kansas might lawfully stop such a violation of public decency, and maybe the owners of our saloons shall come around to showing some regard for the feelings of their fellow citizens. But your brother picked up a billiard ball and threw it hard into the face of the Reverend Ross.”

Denise would always wonder if the good preacher had stepped into Urgel Soney’s place for a friendly game or to buy a cigar that he often called “the Devil’s weed.”

The constable had picked up the list of complaints.

Arthur threw a stonemason through the billiard saloon’s window.

Spit tobacco juice onto the shirtfront of lawyer Yoder, who last month had gotten Arthur Beeber off from a lengthy jail stay with a dazzling defense before Police Judge Hays.

He threatened Mr. Harkullas with a razor and refused to pay for a shave and haircut at the kindly barber’s tonsorial parlor.

Urinated into the well on the lot on Wisconsin Street, then tried to throw the real estate agent into said well.

All of that might have read like some whimsical story reprinted in the Citizen had it not been for the fact that Arthur wound up on Main Street, where he punched Mr. Roberts in the stomach, brought his right knee up into the poor man’s face, then threw him through the front window into the new restaurant he had opened.

She could hear Judge Hays again:

“Roberts inquired if the assault on him was your idea.”

Denise had labeled that statement as ridiculous.

Now she knew better than to take her eyes off the road. She tried to dam the tears that wanted to flow like the Verdigris and Fall Rivers. She wanted to lash out at her brother the way her father and mother had until their dying days. She heard again what she had heard just a few days ago.

Hays: “Miss Beeber, I asked Arthur himself, and he did not deny William’s statement. In fact, your brother laughed and said, ‘Ask Denise.’ ”

Phelon: “You both compete for business.”

Denise: “There are more places for hungry men and women than Mr. Roberts’s place and mine in this town . . . I mean, city . . . gentlemen.”

Nycum: “But William has certainly cut into your patronage, ma’am, since he opened.”

Denise: “I have frequented his place myself, sir. I can better him when it comes to pies, cakes, and bread, but his confectionery is extraordinary. I have complimented Mr. Roberts many times.”

And it might have gone on and on like that till Judgment Day, but Hays leaned forward, his eyes sad, his voice quiet but strong.

“Denise. He called Annie Bass a whore. In public. You know Missus Bass. She’s as fine a lady as you’ll find in all of Kansas.” Denise did know Annie. Now she knew why the dressmaker hadn’t been into Denise’s restaurant. Her heart started pounding against her ribs, and she slipped her hands under her thighs to keep her arms from shaking.

“He put a knife against Mr. Cowgill’s throat. Now you’ve got the Masonic Lodge against Arthur—and you. He might have cut Cowgill’s throat had it not been for Missus Bass’s scream. That turned his attention back to her. And that’s what gave me the opportunity to bust your no-good brother’s head with my walking stick.”

“Missus Bass has approached James McHenry about a lawsuit,” Mayor Phelon said. “That lawsuit would name not only your brother, ma’am, but you, too.”

“The Citizen would be forced to publish articles on such a trial, ma’am.” Until that moment, John Gilmore, who had been dining at Denise’s restaurant for as long as Denise had been in Neodesha, had not spoken. “And it is undetermined as of this moment if there shall be an article in Friday’s paper.”

Her hands came from beneath her thighs. Her elbows found the end of the mayor’s desk, and she rested her head in her hands.

Constable Nycum cleared his throat. “There’s a lot of trees around here, ma’am. And Baxla and Windowmaker sell a lot of rope in their store.”

Hays again spoke with that calm voice. “Denise, we decided to meet with you for your own sake.”

“We should have run Arthur out of town months ago,” Nycum cut in. “Or called on the—”

“Shut up,” Hays barked. He smiled the saddest smile Denise had ever seen. “I thought grits were biscuits before you came to town, Denise. Guess that’s the Yankee in me. And Roberts might make fine candies, but you wallop him in everything from coffee to pot roast. And your pies . . .” He sighed.

She waited until she thought her voice would not crack. Then she found the real estate agent, the one Arthur had threatened to throw into the well.

“I guess I know why you’re here, J.W.,” she said. “How much will you give me? But savvy this: the stove’s coming with me. So are all the copper and all the cookware. And no way are you getting my recipes.”

She smiled. “Because I never put them on paper.”

Three days they traveled. Denise cooked breakfast; Arthur hitched the team. They stopped only to rest the mules, or let them drink. And whenever they passed some wayfarer who asked about Neodesha, Denise told them how far away it was, and agreed that it was a fine city. You couldn’t call it a town anymore.

“Any hard cases around?” one hard-shell Baptist woman asked.

“No, ma’am,” Denise told her. “They’ve driven out the hard cases.”

Arthur pouted the next four miles.

On the fourth morning, just after they crossed the Little Walnut, Denise heard galloping hoofbeats behind her. Arthur’s head had slumped forward, sleeping again. The boy could fall asleep anywhere, yet he never once toppled over the wagon’s side. She looked back, and pulled the two jacks off to the left, to give the two men an easy pass.

They passed, and she pulled up the scarf, pulled down her hat, and lowered her gaze to let the dust pass.

Arthur jerked awake, and Denise saw the two men slowing down, then stopping their horses at the creek’s edge. But they turned their mounts around and walked them a few yards back down the trail.

She didn’t recognize them, but Arthur’s soft curse told her that he sure did. They had reined up by now, blocking the road.

“What’d you do?” Denise whispered.

“Nothing,” Arthur answered. But he was already sweating. And this morning wasn’t hot enough to sweat.

Both men smiled. One wore the blue shell jacket of a soldier, but she didn’t think he belonged to any of the Kansas forts. He could have been a Yankee from the late war, or he might have been a deserter. The other was big and tall—so tall he looked ridiculous on that small mustang he rode—dressed more like a farmer than anything else, though he did have a pistol stuck in a holster underneath his left shoulder.

She couldn’t run over them. So she pulled hard on the leather and held tight to the lines after the mules stopped.

“Mornin’,” said the one in the blue jacket.

Denise answered with a nod. Arthur stared ahead, his blue eyes darting between Soldier Coat and the Shoulder Holster.

“Arthur,” the tall one said. “You never told us your sister had hair like a Kansas sunset.”

Flattening her lips, Denise gave her brother a brief yet intense scowl; then she looked back at the two men. She waited for her brother to say something before she gave the two riders a chance to explain. When no one spoke, she did.

“You got business with my brother?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Soldier Coat tipped his battered hat. “We surely do.”

“Arthur.” But Denise did not take her eyes off the two riders.

The wind stilled. No prairie hens sang, and the creek gave no sound. The only noise came from the heavy breaths of tired mules and hard-ridden horses.

“Well, we got business with you, too, ma’am,” Soldier Coat said, grinning and standing in his stirrups, looking Denise up and down.

“Rex.” The big one pushed back his hat. He started to dismount, thought better of it, and put both hands on the horn of his saddle. “Lady. Arthur, Rex, and I, and a few others, had a dice game going inside that run-down old frame house nobody’s lived in on Mill Street. Your brother was hot for a while, but then his luck ran out like his whiskey.”

“He bet your eating house,” the other one said. “And I won it.”

Arthur started breathing in and out in short breaths, but Denise did not look at him.

“He didn’t own my place of business, gentlemen,” she told them. “It was never in his name. So you were misinformed.”

The mules snorted.

“We don’t see it that way,” Soldier Coat said.

“Arthur running off like he did, and you running with him, well . . .” Shoulder Holster shrugged. “You see how it looks.”

“Word around Neodesha is that you sold your eating place for a right smart of money,” Soldier Coat said.

Her mouth and throat turned into a desert. And for a cool morning, now Denise started to feel the beads of sweat popping out on her forehead. Her heart pounded. She tried to work up enough moisture in her mouth, tried to get her brain to be reborn, tried to make her stupid brother say something that would straighten out this entire mess.

Another mess in which she found herself right in the middle.

“You were misinformed.” It sounded like the lie it was.

Soldier Coat lowered himself into the saddle, then dismounted, and handed the reins to his partner.

“Rex,” the big one said.

“Shut up.” The man kept smiling as he walked toward Denise’s side of the wagon. “Arthur, you should’ve told us that your sister didn’t look nothing like you. Just put her up instead of her lousy victualing house.”

He stopped at the side of the wagon and offered his hands to help Denise to the ground.

She felt confused. This had to be a dream. She was twenty-five years old, on her way to Newton, Kansas, simply because of one paragraph she had read in the Citizen. On her way from a successful victualing house in a fine third-class city in a pretty town in Kansas where she had neighbors and friends.

Well, she had had neighbors and friends and a successful business.

Then she caught a glimpse of the revolver, a Navy Colt, at the side of her head. Not pointed at her, though. She was staring down at the man called Rex. The revolver was . . .

It roared before she made the connection. The flash of white smoke and orange flame blinded her, and the roar so close to her head left her eardrums throbbing. The last thing she remembered seeing was Rex’s blue eyes—widening in horror, his mouth opening to scream, as his right hand shot down toward the butt of a revolver shoved inside his waistband. His left hand came up in a fruitless defensive gesture.

The mules jerked the leather lines from her hand, and she felt herself falling over the wagon’s side. Maybe she fell. Perhaps Arthur pushed her. She knew she had not jumped. She didn’t have enough muscles to do that.

Somehow, she managed to stretch out her arms to break her fall, flipped over, landed.

Echoes popped around her. Hooves pounded sand. Her left wrist hurt like the devil. Mules snorting, the wagon lurched forward while a horse splashed across the creek. When she could breathe again, when she thought she could move, she opened her eyes and put the nightmare behind her. Until she rolled over, pushed herself up with her right hand, and looked into the face of Soldier Coat, his eyes staring straight up, mouth open, and a small hole in his left cheek.

Somehow, Denise fought down the bile in her throat, and sat up. She found another hole in his chest, just below ribcage.

Arthur.

She realized she hadn’t said anything. Now she turned where the wagon should be, but wasn’t. She looked toward the creek and saw the back of the stove, still on the wagon, the mules stopped in the shallow water. The horses Shoulder Holster and Soldier Coat had ridden were gone. Which way, she didn’t know, didn’t care. Her eyes swept over the road, and she saw Shoulder Holster lying in the grass on the north side of the trail, on his side.

“Arthur.” This time she shouted loud enough for one of the mules to answer with a bray.

She didn’t realize she had managed to stand, but she stepped onto the road, started for the one in the grass, but stopped. There was no need to look at him. She had already seen one dead man.

“Help.”

That was stupid. Only the mules heard her.

“Arthur.”. . .