Massacre at Whip Station

Book 3: O'Malleys of Texas

by Dusty Richards

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

From Western Writers of America Spur Award–winning author Dusty Richards comes a blistering new novel
in his O’Malley saga, trailing one family’s epic struggle to live out their dreams on the deadly battleground of
the Texas Frontier …
Whip Station, a critical stop on the Butterfield stagecoach line, is dead smack in the middle of no-man’s land. The
lawless call it an easy target. Joe O’Malley calls it home. If anybody can tame a wild, violent territory, it’s the seasoned
frontiersman. So can his family, who have the same pride and honor coursing through their veins.
Helping to plant roots is his son Jackson, a former wrangler married to a steadying force of nature. Joe’s grandchildren
have their own brand of grit. The boy—a firebrand with a knife. The girl—book-smart and wicked-wise. But Whip
Station is also hunting ground for Mexican revolutionaries, savage Indians, post-war renegade Confederates, and the
deadliest outlaws who ever drew a breath. It’s time for the O’Malleys to take aim. With a rawhide-tough will to survive,
they’re banding together to protect their future against the most savage odds imaginable.

Release date: April 28, 2020

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 352

Sample

B. W. Beauregard Lafayette, stagecoach driver—“Brother Whip” as those of his profession were called—was a devout man.

His one constant companion was a rain-wrinkled, sunbaked, dusty-spined, bullet-dinged Bible with the words “God’s Testimony” written in chipped red paint across the cowhide cover. The book had ridden beside B.W. on the stagecoach for the four years he had been a Butterfield driver. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping he was prone to turn its thin, thin pages. It bounced beside him between the driver’s box and the shotgun seat to his right in good times and bad.

And they were bad right now.

Within the last few moments, the Good Book had acquired a new blemish. It was right there on the side of Deuteronomy, glistening in the afternoon sun. Spotting the leather strip was a snake-like constellation of splashed blood. It had been ripped from the right thigh of the shotgun rider, Dick Ocean, by a rifle shot. The bullet cracked as they passed through Eagle Pass, which had lately been renamed Civil Gulch by the local Californians. They had taken that step less than a year before, at the spot where a gunfight was about to erupt between Union Rebel hunters and the Confederate Yankee haters. Minutes after the men had assembled on the abutting cliff sides, even as the last of the locals were gathering on the plain to watch the fight, word reached them by a rider holding a newspaper that the War Between the States was done. Abe Lincoln had decreed, in so many words, that the men who were about to kill each other were to be loving brothers once more.

Men on both sides spit into the ground over one hundred feet below and began to leave. The assembled citizenry, with their picnic baskets and blankets, were determined to finish their outing. It was right there and then they selected the name Civil Gulch for the pass. There was a wooden sign at a post that bore the branded legend, LET ALL WHO PASS BE CIVIL. It had been shot at some, but was still legible. It would have been shot at more if more people could read. The War was over but the veterans who lived and migrated here had not made a true peace.

B.W. was Southern to the roots and had not embraced the reconciliation. Which wasn’t to say he hated Northerners. Dick Ocean was a Caribe from Massachusetts, who he had ridden with for a while now, and who seemed a decent enough man. Ocean was certainly worthy of saving, which is why B.W. was racing ahead and the Bible was bouncing and a few of the six passengers—the preacher and reporter, it sounded like—were shouting with a combination of fear and discomfort.

The stagecoach had sped up after the shot. It had just cleared the high-walled rocks that bordered the gulch and was tearing across a well-rutted path in an open plain, stirring a ball of dust that was like some monster, cotton tumbleweed hitched to their rear box.

Seated on the right side of the driver’s box, B.W. was snapping rein and whip with equal urgency.

“Why couldn’t this have happened closer to Fort Yuma?” complained the injured man. “They got a doctor. Not a girl.”

“’Cause the Lord Jesus has His way,” B.W. replied.

“He must,” Ocean bellowed to his right. “They was aiming at you!”

“Don’t think so,” B.W. replied. “Shot was too low.”

“Where’d the other two shots hit?” Ocean asked.

“One kicked up dirt, the other splintered off the rear box.”

“That don’t make no sense,” Ocean said through his teeth.

“No, it don’t,” B.W. replied.

“Had to be trying to hit you,” Ocean resumed. “Horses too valuable.”

“Mebbe,” B.W. said. He didn’t agree but he didn’t want to argue with a wounded man. “If you’re right, Dick, then thanks from me and the passengers.”

The cannonballing stagecoach hopped unpleasantly over a flat rock and came down hard. The slender shotgun rider winced at the jolt. He was pressing on his leg with both of his long, slender palms, one atop the other. Though Ocean had slowed the leaking somewhat he could feel the throb of the vein pushing blood out. His carbine had dropped to the front box and it lay there still, bouncing around by his left box. He was grimacing through the pain, the burning sensation being preferable to bleeding out.

B.W. thumped and bumped in his seat as they raced ahead. The Whip Station was just about a mile away and the driver didn’t want to stop until they reached it. He whipped the reins up and down to spur the horses, though the shots had stirred them up on their own. It was too loud and too dusty to determine if anyone was following them. He didn’t hear any shooting, but then there really wasn’t a target from behind. The rear box was stuffed with cargo and mail. More than passengers, it was the post office that paid the Butterfield overhead.

The stagecoach strained hard against the broad, sturdy leather straps that served to absorb some of the jolts. B.W. was glad when the steel-rimmed wheels bumped their way into the ruts cut over many years of travel. It was like a narrow flume in a logging camp where he’d once worked. The little gullies steadied the wheels, lessened the dips, and cut down the side-to-side sway of the carriage.

Ocean shook his head.

“Sounded like a revolver,” the injured man said, wincing as blood crept along his ivory-colored trousers. He leaned into his leg, pressing harder, causing the pain to intensify.

“It was,” B.W. told him. “Sound had no long-range guts to it. And no marksman behind it, which leaves me thinking that if they was soldiers they hadn’t seen much action.”

“Banditos?”

“Possible,” B.W. said. “But they don’t shoot from faraway—they jump out and bushwhack you. Redskins prefer the long rifles, so not them.”

“We ain’t even got gold,” Ocean said.

“No. And who in God’s dry desert would care about the passengers we’re carrying?”

It was a rhetorical question and neither man offered any additional thoughts.

With a good half a mile between the stagecoach and the gulch, B.W. slowed the horses and picked up the fallen carbine. He handed the reins to Ocean, who gripped them firmly in one hand. Then B.W. swiveled within the box, knelt on the seat, facing backward. He looked around the lumpy mounds of baggage that were also piled on top of the stagecoach.

“Crap and damnation!” he shouted.

“What is it?”

“An answer, I think.” B.W. used the handrail to steady himself as he swung back around. Ocean handed him the well-worn leather reins. “There’re two cowhands riding hard, side by side,” the driver said.

“Uniforms?”

“None that I can tell,” B.W. answered. He gave a hardy “Gyahh!” to the horses and whipped the reins to goad them on. “Ha-yaaah—go! Go!” he repeated, shouting as much to vent his own worry as to drive the horses.

Ocean released the pressure on his leg and took the carbine in his bloody hands. He did not have much mobility but he could pivot a little to keep the men from his side of the stagecoach.

“See to your leg,” B.W. said. “No sense us both dying!”

“But you said—”

“Whatever happened back there, they’ll like be coming after me for sure, if their aim is to stop us.”

Ocean ignored his partner. He tried to turn and put a knee on the seat to shoot over the top of the luggage. But he cried out, the pain in his leg dropping him.

“Sit, damn your eyes!” B.W. shouted.

Ocean was forced to flop back and put his palms back on his sodden pant leg.

B.W. heard the hoofbeats approach—on his side, as he had expected. He stole a quick look at his Bible but did not think about dying, about God’s golden grandfather clock ticking out what could be the last seconds of his life. He stayed focused on trying to stay ahead of the gunmen and watching the ruts for any rocks that might have been washed in. Better to slow if need be than to break a wheel.

The driver did pray, however. Silently. Not just for himself but also for his passengers, for Ocean, and for his family back in Louisiana. He used his own words, not those from God’s Testimony. There were times for familiar prayer like at grace, and there were times for heartfelt sentiment, not recitation. This was one.

Suddenly, there was a sound louder than the clattering of the wheels, deeper than the clunk-clunk-clunk of the coach on the thoroughbrace. A sound sharper than the creak and groan of the straining tongue . . .

The West is a vista of unchanging wonders, from the rock formations to the majestic canyons, from the vast skies to the churning rivers. Since the earliest memories of the locals, the same birds and beasts and insects had flown and crept and buzzed around the eternal trees and caves and banks. Even among the humans, there were sights and sounds that endured the passing years.

From the time he could crawl, Slash O’Malley had played hide-and-seek with birds—first back home in the wild Oklahoma Territory, then in Texas, and now here in California. He used to scrape his knees, then, and didn’t realize it, so fixed was he on following each bird he encountered. Nowadays he was tall enough to cut himself on cacti and still didn’t pay it any mind.

Back then his quarry was usually roadrunners, darting one way and then the other, low-running and fast. They were a challenge and they made him laugh. Later, it was mostly quail. Today, like now, it was wild turkey. Slash had spotted this big male before, but the tom was always too alert. The big bird took off with a big head start each time. Now and then, while hunting, Slash thought back to his meeting at the river with the Pechanga medicine man who was skin-walking. That encounter had given him a brief, frightening insight into the way animals saw the world.

Slash preferred his own. It was safe and familiar. He enjoyed the challenge of being a man entering their abode, challenging them on grounds that were familiar to them. Especially today, like this afternoon, when the big gobbler got lazy from the heat.

Slash was a man now, and he had learned things about tracking and lurking and lying low. The nineteen-year-old was about a foot shy of lashing out and clipping the old boy’s neck with his knife when he heard the distant shots. Gunfire was uncommon enough in this humid wilderness. Usually it was his pa or grandpa doing the shooting, or an Apache passing through. But the fact that it was so near and seemed to come from along the Butterfield Trail made it more surprising. Also, it didn’t sound like Dick Ocean’s carbine. That old girl let go with a coffeepot pop-pop. What he had just heard was a series of tin-plate bangs.

The shots scared the turkey, which fled. Frowning, Slash glanced across the grass.

“You will be supper,” the annoyed young man promised the turkey in the straw.

Rising and turning from his fast-moving prey, Slash sheathed his Bowie knife in a single, artful move. The twelve-inch blade and its beaded leather covering rested naturally, comfortably on his left hip. Both were a gift from Grandpa Joe on the boy’s ninth birthday and the two went on every morning, directly after his trousers. The Slash nickname followed, after young Lemuel caught and skinned his first hare that very day.

The rangy six-footer swung onto his black mustang, Young Thunder. Drawing his Remington six-shooter that rested on the other side of him, Slash galloped hard toward the rutted path. Leaning forward slightly, his head to the right of the horse’s neck, he peered ahead, seeing the world as the mustang saw it. Everything was in motion up and down, the terrain rushing toward them, the wind blowing past. Within just a few moments it was no longer just the gunshots that interested Slash but the twin dust clouds he saw roiling from behind a rise to the west. They came in steady, locomotive-like puffs, brownish white against the crisp early afternoon sky.

“Coach is moving fast,” he said, tugging the reins gently to the right so he could intercept whatever trouble there was. That would be at the back end of what the local Indians called the mpothsh mshidevk vidiik.

The coming of the frightening dust.

Slash had learned that phrase from his twin sister Gert, who spent more time in primitive settlements than their parents would have liked. But then, both of the youngest O’Malleys had traits of which their parents disapproved. Like his, of getting involved in trouble that wasn’t his to begin with.

Yet, it might be necessary, he thought.

What the Indians meant by that description was a natural phenomenon, a big rolling storm of wind and dust half as high as a mountain. But it came and went and things better built than a tepee were usually okay in their wake. When people stirred dust, it was almost always bad for someone.

Out here, anything that affected the Butterfield line affected the Whip Station, which the O’Malleys owned and would defend to the grave. It would be a real tragedy to lose the livelihood they had come for. Owning the new Whip Station was not the reason the family had left the Oklahoma Territory—the Cherokee civil war did that. But it was the reason they had come to California instead of staying in Texas, where they had family. For Grandpa Joe, opening new territories to the sea held a kind of spiritual appeal that being a cattle rancher did not represent.

The low hill quickly behind him, Slash tilted his new flat-brimmed Stetson to block the late afternoon sun. It had arrived on the previous stage, straight from Chicago, a birthday gift from his sister.

He saw the stagecoach, a silhouette drawn by black horses, careening ahead. There was no gunfire from the box. That was surprising. He saw the two men in pursuit, just behind the first cloud of dust. They were gaining on B.W. at a fast clip. Slash also saw the legs of the lead horse nearest him bend and wobble a little every few paces. The animals were tiring and at this rate they would not reach the station—either from exhaustion or from being taken.

The young man straightened in the saddle and fired three shots in the direction of the riders. The pursuers were out of range and so was he—but not for long. That was to get their attention. He got it. The men looked over and reared to a stop. Moments later the stagecoach slowed to its usual pace, safe from immediate danger.

Continuing his approach, Slash bent low again by the horse’s ear.

“The varmints or B.W.?” he asked.

The idea of trying to outgun two men with just three bullets left held very little appeal. Instead, Slash veered toward the stagecoach, about three hundred yards away. The revolver was firmly in his right hand, pointed toward the men. They made no move to close in. Instead, they wheeled around and headed back the way they had come.

“They must not’ve wanted to face us,” Slash said to the horse.

More likely, though, the pursuers didn’t want to be delayed by him and then have to shoot it out closer to the station. The O’Malley reputation for strong justice was known to most around these parts.

The young rider turned so that he was parallel with the stagecoach driver. The curtains inside the carriage were drawn and he had no idea who was inside. There was nothing but cargo in the rear box. He had guessed as much from how low the coach was riding. The extra lower paying passenger or two who could be tucked in there tended to be smaller and lighter.

Slash narrowed the distance between them, quickly coming up alongside B.W. Beauregard Lafayette. He noticed that Dick Ocean was listing toward the center of the box, the spot where the driver kept his Bible. That explained why the stage wasn’t returning fire. Even from this low angle, Slash could see that the man was not carrying his carbine.

“Dick hurt bad?” Slash called up, rising in the saddle.

“Thigh,” B.W. answered in his lightly accented Southern voice.

Ocean said something that Slash could not hear.

“Says he took the shot for me,” B.W. remarked.

“He have a choice?” Slash joked.

B.W. made a long face and shook his head once.

“I’ll ride ahead and let Ma know you’re coming in wounded,” Slash said, hunkering back down beside Young Thunder’s neck. Before he rode off he asked, “Any idea who they were?”

“Not a noontime shadow of a clue,” B.W. replied.

“Cargo? Passenger?” Slash asked.

“Passenger only possibility,” B.W. replied, whipping the horses up. “Tell you more around some coffee.”

Slash holstered his gun and threw B.W. a small salute. As he rode ahead of the team, he dragged a bare hand across the neck of the lead horse as he passed. Most people who did not spend much time in the saddle were unaware how much horses and dogs appreciated gestures like that after a hard run.

Pushing Young Thunder ahead of the coach team, Slash made for the large stacks of boulders that marked a natural passageway. The iron supports and wooden sign announced Whip Station just beyond.

The young man felt a deep sense of calm envelop him whenever he passed that threshold. That was especially true when the late afternoon sun was starting its final descent, as now. The winds changed. The day and its denizens—including the damned turkey—would be turning over the land to the creatures of the night. There was a sense of change everywhere he looked, listened, smelled.

Behind him, in the still-day-lit wilderness, Slash had to be constantly on guard. He had been out there a little over two hours, riding and then hunting. He stayed sharp by slicing cacti from horseback at a gallop, then turning and stabbing the severed pieces with his knife. In the open, there was danger from many quarters—human, animal, and element. But here, beyond the rock entrance, was safety and home. It was a feeling most Butterfield travelers experienced as well after their arduous journey from the last stop, in Vallicita. That timber and adobe structure—a long, flat shack with a well that tended to go dry every summer—was more than a day distant. It had been bought about a year earlier by a Southern transplant, a dandy named Brent Diamond, who showed up with his Colored lady and her boy. In terms of comfort, Whip Station was what B.W. once described as “a gift from God and St. Christopher to California.”

However, as Slash rounded the innermost of the boulders, he saw something he was not expecting to see.

Outside the solid log structure, just beyond the inviting porch with its wooden benches, Grandpa Joe was talking to two men. They were familiar Mission Indians—one Yaqui, one Chumash—of the 1st California Cavalry Battalion.

Their presence was not likely sociable.

Joe’s hearing wasn’t what it used to be, but he thought he had heard shots. The two Indians who were with him also turned in the direction of the flatlands beyond the station.

There were a lot of things out here that could sound like gunfire. Rocks hitting one another as they tumbled from a ridge. A whip cracking, then cracking again. A tree snapping, the branches cracking as it uprooted. With the echo and each sound stepping on the one before it, it was difficult to say.

The thing to pay attention to was whether the sounds happened again. They did not. There was no need for Joe to retreat to the station, to the door frame that was his usual spot to protect the women and seek cover, if needed.

Maybe Slash gave up and just plugged that bird he was talking about, Joe thought. That was the difference between man and wild turkey. We have more twists and turns in our kit.

Joseph James O’Malley was six-foot-three, seventy years old, with a ramrod straight posture and steel gray eyes. He was described by those who knew him as “that bull with the leather face and broom mustache.” Joe didn’t look anything like a bovine, save for his scowl, but maybe that was enough. A frontiersman didn’t survive for very long without a strong, set, immediately threatening look.

“In that respect,” his granddaughter Gert said when he turned his present age, “you do ‘cow’ other men.”

Joe didn’t like when people laughed at him, but there and then, at his party, it was good to laugh with family.

The “cowing” look worked on Red Men just as well as mountain lions, and it had helped Joe survive this man-killing land before it was even a little tamed.

For decades, the North Kansas–born frontiersman had been a scout. First for surveyors from the East, then for the military hunting Indians, and then for John Butterfield and his American Express Company. During that time he had endured desert and frostbite, war and savages, and gunslingers representing rival interests. In 1857, looking for an adventure westward, he went to work for the newly born Butterfield Overland Mail Line. Back then, when way stations were still in the talking stage, Joe staked a claim on this one for his son and daughter-in-law. But then he got to thinking about it.

There had been letters, a lot of them, between him and his young cousin Long O’Malley about joining their ranching operation in Texas. After a big cattle sale in Abilene, the O’Malley kin were building a family ranch—and probably a family empire—back in Texas. They were going to need good men and, looking ahead, their families as well.

While cattle was lucrative, and growing fast, ranching didn’t seem right for Joe or for his son Jackson. Not after the younger O’Malley—a wrangler, then—fell from a horse and busted his leg. It set crooked and ended his career. Besides, though Texas was big open country, what Joe had seen of California while scouting was something more to his liking. It had mountains and water, sun and nourishing, cleansing gully washers of rain—and best of all, the smell of ocean coming from somewhere to the west.

The far west called to him. It called to Jackson. And it called to Jackson’s devoted wife, Sarah.

Plus, here at the way station, Joe got to meet interesting people. Some of them were just passing through on the stage, everyone from actors to scientists. Some worked for Butterfield, like B.W. and Dick Ocean. Then there were others who were stationed out west by the federal government like Sisquoc and Malibu, who sometimes came just to visit but this time had come on the kind of mission Joe hated down to his knees.

The men made a striking contrast as they stood there. Joe wore the buckskins that made up the bulk of his wardrobe, save for the suit he wore whenever he went to the bank in San Diego or to church. The Indians were dressed in the dark blue jackets of the battalion but wore their own black trousers and hats. The tall, lean Sisquoc had on a brown beaver fur felt hat with an eagle feather in the band. Malibu, the Chumash, was a short, wide man who wore a white hat with a downturned ranch brim.

The three men were just outside the fence that ran along the front of the station. There were cowbells attached its entire len’th. Struck with a . . .