Dakota Ambush

Tanner was a little surprised by the unexpected answer, and he blinked a couple of times.

“What? What did you say?”

“I said, go ahead, shoot him,” Butrum said.

“Maybe you think I ain’t serious,” Tanner said.

“No, you told me you are goin’ to do it, so I figure you are serious, but I don’t care. Go ahead, kill him. He don’t mean nothin’ to me. I don’t even like the son of a bitch,” Butrum said.

With a loud yell, Tanner suddenly swung his pistol toward Butrum but, as he did so, Butrum drew, the gun appearing in his hand so fast that John wasn’t certain it hadn’t already been there. Butrum pulled the trigger and Tanner, with a look of shock on his face, dropped his pistol, then slapped his hand over a chest wound. Blood began spilling through his fingers as he fell back onto the road.

After the shot, at least ten men, all armed, came out of the trees alongside the road. John recognized Slater, Dillon, and Wilson, but there were also some he had not seen before. That was when he realized that Denbigh, having heard of the plans of the small ranchers and farmers, had put into operation, a plan of his own.

“Well, now,” Bleeker said. “It looks to me like Mr. Butrum just saved you boys a dollar. With that feller dead, that means you only owe me twenty-two dollars, and you can either pay me now, or you can turn around and go back home.” He paused for a moment, then added, “Or you can try and force your way through and wind up just like your friend there. Which will it be?”

“Come on, men,” McCann said, turning his horse. “We’re goin’ home.”

A couple of the men with McCann dismounted and picking up Tanner’s body, laid it belly-down over his own horse. Then, remounting, they rode off with the others.

“If any of you folks want to come through here on your own and pay the toll, why you’ll be mighty welcome,” Bleeker called out to them as they rode away. He, and the men with him, laughed out loud.

John Bryce had not shown himself throughout the entire event. Now, sick at heart over what he had just witnessed, and angry to his very core, he remounted his horse and rode back to Fullerton.

As the newspaper editor rode back to town, he began composing the article he was going to write. His newspaper was a weekly, and the next issue wasn’t due until Thursday, but he had no intention of waiting that long. He was angry, and he wanted to take advantage of that anger in order to give the story the piquancy it needed.

John Bryce was forty-five years old, and had been in the newspaper business for twenty-five years. A bad leg had kept him from the war, but he had become a correspondent for Harper’s Weekly, covering the war from battlefield and campground, facing the same dangers and hardships as if he had been a soldier.

After the war he came West, working for one newspaper after another until his chance encounter with Matt Jensen enabled him to buy a press and start his own newspaper. Before coming to Fullerton, he had published newspapers in four other towns. He had named his newspapers The Avenger, The Crusader, The Monitor, and The Guardian, choosing such names in keeping with his philosophy of being an investigative journalist, always ready to crusade for truth, right, and justice.

Oftentimes, he would attach himself to the fortunes of a particular town, moving on when the town itself went bust. But sometimes, he was forced to leave when his method of crusading journalism stepped on too many toes. Two years ago, which was one year after he’d arrived in Fullerton, Dakota Territory, he’d met and married, Millie, the daughter of Reverend Landers, the preacher of the only church in Fullerton. On their wedding night, he took an oath to quit moving from town to town, promising her that the Fullerton Defender would be his last newspaper.

He had been here for a little over three years now, and in that time had built up quite a loyal following. But a newspaper could only be as successful as the town it served, and that was becoming a problem. Fullerton had once shown great promise of developing into a productive city—there had even been talk of building a spur railroad to connect them to the Chicago and Western at Ellen-dale. But now the town was dying, and the cause of the demise of Fullerton was Nigel Denbigh.

John had already written a few articles about Denbigh, and though he knew that most of the citizens of the town agreed with him, a few had asked him to tone it down a bit.

“Why be such a crusader?” Doc Purvis had asked. “You are just going to get yourself on Denbigh’s bad side, and he doesn’t seem to me to be the kind of man you want to anger.”

“I don’t have any choice, Doc,” John had told him. “Denbigh is killing this town and if this town dies, so does my paper. I promised Millie I would stick it out here, and I don’t intend to let some English son of a bitch take over this town without a fight.”

John’s wife, Millie, was cleaning the newspaper office and arranging the type for Thursday’s issue when she heard John come in.

“Well, was your ride out there newsworthy?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was newsworthy,” John replied. The tone of his voice was flat, and pained, and Millie picked up on it immediately.

“What happened?” she asked.

“They killed Frank Tanner, Millie. They shot him down in cold blood.”

“Oh, John, no,” Millie gasped. “His poor wife. Amy will be lost without him.”

“Yes,” John said.

“And he was shot down in cold blood, you say? Who did it?”

John sighed. “Actually, it wasn’t really cold blood,” he said. “Tanner had his pistol out and was threatening to use it. He always was pretty much of a hothead; you remember how he got into a fight with that miner at the dance that night, just because he asked Amy for a dance.”

“Yes, I remember. Who shot him, do you know?”

“Oh, yes, I know. It was Butrum, the same person who shot those two cowboys.”