Hell Snake Read online

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2021 by The Estate of Ralph Compton

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780593333808

  First Edition: May 2021

  Cover art by Dennis Lyall

  Cover design by Steve Meditz

  Book design by George Towne, adapted for ebook by Kelly Brennan

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  pid_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  For the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Immortal Cowboy

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Three

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Five

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  PART ONE

  ONE BOY INTO THE VALLEY

  CHAPTER ONE

  The eagle feather felt like a good omen. Edwin Folsom found the feather on the ground as he walked across the reservation. He called out for people to come and see it before he picked it up, but they ignored him. He raised it into the air to show them, but none of them would turn their head to even look.

  There had been no eagles seen near the settlement for months, not since the beginning of summer. They had not been circling in the air or perching on the tree branches. The eagles had not hunted and rodents had infested the people’s tepees and food supplies. Rats bit the children while they slept and many of them now had swollen faces or fingers or legs as a result.

  It would be winter soon. It was morning and frost covered the hardscrabble dirt where no crops had come. The soldiers had given them seeds to plant that they said were perfect for Oklahoma soil, but nothing grew.

  Smoke billowed in dark waves across the reservation. Many stayed in their tepees with the flaps closed, with their fires lit, and breathed smoke into their chests that made them cough throughout the night. They were the ones who had been brought there from places where there was no cold or snow and their bodies and spirits were not yet hardened to the climate. Within a few short months, when winter set in, he suspected many would begin to die.

  Folsom held the eagle’s feather against his chest and closed his eyes. He thanked the bird who’d left it for him to find. He stroked it with his thumb as he headed toward the Indian agent’s office where he worked.

  No one would look at him, so no one else saw the feather he carried. Any who accidentally caught a glimpse of him coming their way soon saw the crude metal badge pinned to his vest and immediately looked away.

  He reached the road that divided the tepees from the soldiers’ barracks and large tents where they congregated. It was early enough that the ones who’d been standing post overnight were now gathered in the tent playing cards and smoking and laughing at one another’s jokes. Food was being prepared at the far end of the tent. Eggs and bacon and coffee. It smelled so good it made his stomach hurt.

  A young man walked past the tent and one of the soldiers said something that made all the other soldiers sitting with him laugh. The young man turned his head and stared at them. Folsom was unsure if the young man understood English, but his eyes were set on them with open defiance, and the soldiers dropped their cards and stood up from the table.

  “What are you looking at, boy?” one of them asked.

  The young man wore only the plain white shirt and thin black pants he’d been issued when he arrived at the reservation. They had no belt and no pockets. He could not have been carrying a weapon if he’d wanted to. The people of the settlement were not even permitted to possess a bow and arrow to hunt with. They had all been instructed that now they were farmers, but all of the instruments they were given to farm with were crude and dull and broke apart against the rough soil.

  Every last soldier was armed with a pistol and long knife that hung from their belts. “Keep looking at us like that, you can forget your week’s rations,” one of the soldiers said. “For you and whoever you got in your tepee.”

  The young man lowered his gaze and kept walking. The soldiers soon sat back down and picked up their cards to begin playing again. “That’s what I thought,” one of them said. “Can you believe these ingrates? Living out here free of charge, getting fed for doing nothing but sit around, and still have the nerve to mouth off. Best thing the general ever done was string that last bastard up and leave him there for all to see. We need to hang us a few more. Keep these sons of bitches in their place.”

  As Folsom walked past the men playing cards one of them laughed and said, “Look out! It’s the Indian Police! Watch out now, he’s going to arrest us!”

  Folsom kept walking. The front gate slid open and he saw that another wagon was arriving. The people crowded together in the back were shivering and hudd
led close together, either out of fear, or in need of warmth, or both, Folsom thought.

  The soldier driving the wagon was dressed in a thick fur hat and had a bearskin rug draped across his lap. He brought the wagon to a stop and pointed at something dangling from the upper right corner of the gate. He turned in his seat to make sure his passengers were all listening and said, “Y’all take a good look. Hey! Stop your gibbering and look.”

  They all looked up and saw the corpse.

  The rope had stretched the corpse’s neck so that it looked too long and too thin to support the weight of the body beneath it much longer. All of it was covered in frost. The hair and clothes and hands and bare feet. Its face was swollen and purple and there were white ice crystals sprinkled across its blackened lips and bulging eyes.

  It was impossible to tell what the corpse’s face had looked like in life, but Folsom knew. The boy’s name was Menewa. He was fourteen years old.

  “Y’all see that, don’t you?” the wagon driver asked. “Good. Because that’s what happens to thieves round here. Take what you’re given and be grateful for it. Try to take anything else, we’ll put you next to this one and see how long it takes for your head to pop off too.”

  He turned around in his seat and slapped the reins. Edwin Folsom stepped out of the way to let the wagon pass.

  He walked past the tent where the general and other officers held meetings and another where the lowly enlisted men did all of the other soldiers’ laundry. He walked past a building that looked like a fortress, where stockpiled weapons and ammunition were kept. Soldiers guarded that building day and night.

  The next building was also guarded, but it held something much more precious than rifles and cans of black powder. It was filled with their food rations. Crates of eggs and cans of beans and corn and jars of fruit preserves and barrels of whiskey and wine for special occasions. There were hooks on the walls holding bundles of fresh fruit and flanks of dried beef. There were bags of salt and flour and sugar. New rations arrived for the soldiers every week and they’d swarm on them and cackle as they unloaded whatever delightful things their masters had sent.

  Folsom had seen the soldiers taking food from the storehouse and load it into wagons that left through the gate and went out into the woods. He did not know if it was food they didn’t want or something they had too much of. He didn’t know if they destroyed it, or fed it to the animals, or sold it to local merchants, who then sold it in their stores. All he knew was that the wagons always came back empty and the food was never shared with the people.

  Menewa had seen the same thing, Folsom thought. That is what had driven him mad and gotten him killed. Earlier that week, he’d been walking past the large tent while dinner was being served to the soldiers. The aroma was too much for him to bear. He darted into the tent and snatched an entire roasted chicken off one of the tables, then burst out onto the road with the chicken raised high over his head and let out a tremendous war cry.

  In front of everyone, Menewa thrust his face into the chicken and ripped off a huge chunk of it with his teeth. He chewed quickly and bit into it again and again, even as the soldiers came running out of the tent after him. Menewa turned and hurled the chicken’s carcass at them in defiance.

  Old and young alike cheered as Menewa took off running for the reservation’s front gate. He loped through the air on long thin legs like a deer, laughing because the white men who chased him could not catch him. He leapt for the gate and was able to grasp the upper rim of it. Folsom cried out for him to run, praying for the boy to make it over the gate and run into the woods, but instead, the soldiers caught him. They grabbed him by his pant legs and pulled him down.

  They beat him with the butts of their rifles until Menewa stopped moving. Then they opened the gate and dragged his motionless body through the opening and they hanged him.

  The boy’s father and a host of elders from all the various tribes in the reservation went to the Indian agent’s office. They pleaded for the body to be cut down so that it could be properly buried.

  “Thieves are displayed to deter others from meeting the same fate,” Agent Montgomery Pepper told them. “The Army is only trying to prevent it from happening again. We’ve got plenty of other young Indians running around this settlement and I’d hate to see them hanged too. I know it seems hard to understand, but by leaving him up there, they’re actually doing your people a kindness.”

  Folsom knocked on the agent’s door and heard Pepper say, “Enter.” He tucked the eagle feather inside his shirt and turned the doorknob to go in.

  Pepper was sitting behind his desk, drafting a letter. The top of Pepper’s head was smooth and bare, but he was possessed of a thick white beard. He wore a fine blue suit, and had thick gold rings on both hands.

  “Edwin,” Pepper said without looking up. “I don’t recall summoning you.”

  “I must speak with you about possible trouble.”

  Pepper’s brow raised and he said, “In that case, sit down. I’ll be with you in a moment.”

  Folsom sat in the chair across from the desk and waited. The office walls were decorated with artifacts from many of the tribes Pepper had had dealings with over the course of his career. Arrows and a yellow and blue blanket hung on one wall. There was a pipe tomahawk next to the door, with a long hickory handle that was wrapped in fringed, buckskin leather. The leather had been cleaned but there were still places where it was discolored and dark. On the tips of the fringes, it was easy to make out bloodstains.

  Spread out across the front of Pepper’s desk was a wampum belt made with purple and white clamshell beads, with long fringes that draped over each side of the desk. The wampum belt was held in place by two iron paperweights.

  For centuries, wampum belts had been used to record the passing of laws or to commemorate treaties. Messages of vital importance had been woven into their fabric and sent across vast distances. Oaths sworn by them. Treaties adhered to by them. The tribe assigned special caretakers to care for and protect their wampum belts. The iron paperweights holding down the wampum belt on Pepper’s desk were rusted and stained the threads they rested on.

  On the wall behind Pepper hung a Kiowa peyote fan made from eagle and chicken feathers. The beadwork along the handle was immaculate. Folsom rested his elbows on the arms of the chair and said, “I always meant to ask you where you got that peyote fan.”

  Pepper kept writing. “One of the chiefs gave it to me in ’71 as a gift for my dutiful service.”

  “I see,” Folsom said.

  In the early seventies the Kiowa had been fierce and determined warriors. They’d survived wars with other nations that stretched back long before the white men had first appeared. They’d fought everyone from the Cheyenne to the Tonkawa. They’d survived massacres and committed massacres and had conducted countless raids on white settlers. They took horses and scalps and counted coup from their enemies, but one thing the Kiowa did not do, not in the seventies or now, was hand out ritual peyote fans to bald, bearded Indian agents who worked for the United States government.

  “Do you remember which tribe the chief was from?” Folsom asked.

  Pepper finished his letter and drew his signature across the bottom of it. He set his pen down on the desk and slid the letter aside to dry. He turned and looked at the fan behind him and said, “He was Comanche.”

  “Is that right?” Folsom said. What he could see was that it was certainly not Comanche.

  “As a matter of fact, it was none other than Buffalo Hump himself. You know he wanted me to marry one of his daughters? That’s how highly he thought of me. Anyway, I’m getting off track. What brings you in today?”

  “Sir, I wanted to ask about Menewa.”

  Pepper shook his head sadly. “Not you too, Edwin. I’ve already spoken about this to the boy’s father and all the others. That thief stays put.”

  “I know,
sir,” Folsom said. “But he has already hanged for two days. Soon the animals will come and tear him off of the rope and there will be nothing left to bury.”

  “So what?”

  “Menewa and his parents are Muscogee. They have ways of preparing their dead for the next life.”

  “And why should I indulge their savage ways, Mr. Folsom? Why am I spending all of this time and food and resources to educate them in the ways of civilization if I am to just go on making allowances for them to continue in this fashion?”

  “That is not what I meant, sir,” Folsom said.

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “I mean that the message you intended to send has been received. On my way here today I heard many people talking about how Menewa had brought it on himself and shamed his parents. I heard them say how he had brought disappointment to the Wise White Father.”

  Pepper chuckled at that remark. “Is that what they call me?”

  “Of course,” Folsom said.

  Pepper picked his pen back up and tapped it against the desk’s wooden surface. “You know I cannot afford to look weak in front of these people.”

  “Only a fool would not see you are here to teach civilization to the people placed under your care,” Folsom said.

  Pepper nodded in agreement and gave a thin smile of self-satisfaction.

  “You have shown your strength, only because you were forced to,” Folsom said. “Now you can show them what it means to be compassionate.”

  Pepper tapped his lower lip with the pen’s end. “Are you suggesting that the savage mind is developed enough to understand a concept such as compassion, Edwin?”

  “Whether they understand it or not, when they see the example set by the Wise White Father, they will follow it.”