Bride's Flight from Virginia City, Montana Page 21

  “No matter.”

  He turned and began to crawl toward Raber, propelling himself with his good arm and leg. When he reached Raber’s side, he collapsed.

  “That you, Captain?” asked Raber in a raspy voice.

  “Sure is, General.”

  “How’re we doing?”

  “Lynndae’s fine. You saved her life.”

  “I saved her life? I recall as you were the one who pulled a pistol out from under all those Amish clothes and stopped Early from shooting her.”

  “The same way you stopped those two sharpshooters at the gate from killing all of us.”

  “It’s strange the things a man will do for family, Captain.”

  “I know it. Are you hurt bad, General?”

  “No, no. Early always was a poor shot, and Billy and Wyatt were only reliable if the target was a thousand yards away.”

  “Never thought I’d have to come all the way back here to Pennsylvania just to get a proper wound.”

  Raber laughed and coughed up blood. “Ain’t it the truth? The ways of God are past finding out.”

  Lynndae was at their sides. “Oh, no, oh, no no no, my Angel, my Z,” and she began tearing at the hem of her dress to make bandages even though both Zeph and her brother protested. She moved swiftly to staunch the flow of blood from her brother’s two leg wounds, and then she bandaged Zeph’s shoulder, leg, and foot. Turning back to her brother, she whipped the bonnet off her head and pressed it down over a large wound in his chest. But he firmly placed a hand on her arm to stop her from doing anything more.

  “What I really need, Little L,” he whispered, “is someone to pray with me.”

  “There are three or four other wounds—”

  “Let it be. I’ve only got time enough for one good confession and one good prayer, so pay attention to my words and not my wounds. The holes in my spirit are bigger, and you need to tend to them first.”

  He reached up a hand to her face. “I haven’t felt shame in more years than I can count, but I felt shame today when you spoke to me like you did. It’s as if your talk snapped me out of some kind of spell. Seems I haven’t been able to see straight or think straight for a long time. I fooled myself into believing God approved of what I did because He never meant for the war to end until all slavery was vanquished. Now here I’m about to meet Him, and my hands are smothered in blood. I can’t undo the wickedness I’ve done. I can’t stop what my men are doing right now at Bird in Hand. All I got to offer up in place of all my murders is saving your life today. That’s a big thing to my way of thinking, but big as it is, I know it’s not near enough. Little L, can God forgive me?”

  She kissed the hand against her face. “Oh, Angel, if you are sorry for all the killing you’ve done—”

  “I believe I am.”

  “—and you know you’ve committed terrible sins—” “That I am certain of.”

  “—and you repent of all the crimes and bloodshed—”

  “I do, I do repent. When you spoke to me, I wished again and again I had laid down my sword at Appomatox.”

  “—then the Lord has promised to forgive you and cleanse you. Jesus has died for your sins on the cross. You know that, Angel, you know that.”

  His whisper grew harder and harder to hear. “Sure, I know that. I just needed to hear it again coming from Little L.”

  He turned his head. His eyes were almost colorless.

  “Captain?”

  “Yes, sir,” responded Zeph. “Pleasure to soldier with you, Captain.” “Pleasure to soldier with you, General.” “They say we’re all of us Americans now, Captain. What do you say?”

  “I believe that’s so, General.”

  “Then you take good care of my sister and you raise a good American family, y’all hear?” “I will do that.”

  “Got any names picked out? For the first one?” “How’s Angel suit?”

  Raber smiled and closed his eyes. “Works for a boy or a girl.” He drew a deep breath. “Lord Jesus, have mercy on my soul, have mercy on me a sinner.” His breath came back out in one long sigh, and he was gone.

  As Lynndae cradled her brother’s body in her arms and wept, Zeph looked on and felt a great sadness well up inside him. Here was the man they had been fleeing, who had sworn to kill the children, who had left a trail of innocent blood behind him all of his adult life, and now Zeph wished, like Jesus with Lazarus, he could bring the man back to life. He groped for one of Raber’s hands with his good hand and held it tightly. A verse passed through his mind:And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified.

  Zeph felt a pounding in the frozen earth he was lying upon. Horses. There was nothing he could do if this meant more of Raber’s men. He could scarcely move. Turning his eyes to the left, he saw three men ride up through the snowstorm and dismount, each of them bristling with guns. They stood over Lynndae and him, and he could tell one of them was surveying all the bodies and trying to figure out what had just happened.

  “What in the world? Did you folks have a need to refight the battle or something? Can either of you explain to me just what went on here?”

  Zeph looked up into a face with a chin beard and a mustache that drooped around the corners of the mouth. “Who are you?”

  The man pulled aside the flap of his winter jacket so Zeph could see the star. “Sheriff Buck Levy. Gettysburg township. Adams County. Elected, genuine and official. These are my full-time deputies, Mister Flint Mitton and Mister Josh Nikkels. Our citizens heard the gunfire and became concerned that Lee and Meade were going at it again.”

  “These men are the last remnants of the gang that Seraph Raber led.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “I am Zephaniah Parker, Deputy US Marshal. This woman has just lost her brother. He died defending us.”

  The man stooped over Zeph and flipped both the front of the overcoat and the mutze open and found the badge on his vest. He grunted. “Kind of a funny occupation for an Amish man like yourself, isn’t it, Mister Parker?”

  “I’m not Amish, though this woman is. It was simply a way for me to travel unnoticed in these parts.”

  “That so? Maybe you can explain to me how your travels brought you to my battlefield cemetery and involved the deaths of four men.”

  “That’s a long story, Sheriff, and I’m not sure I’m up to telling it right about now.”

  “Maybe not. But I need some kind of explanation to take back to the town fathers.”

  For the first time, Lynndae pulled herself away from her brother, laying him gently back on the ground, and turned her grief-stricken face toward the sheriff and his deputies. Her features were so distraught and broken that all three men took off their hats and bared their heads to the snowstorm.

  “Sorry for your loss, ma’am,” mumbled Mitton. Snow had already made his red beard white.

  Lynndae stood to her feet, snowflakes catching in her pinned-up hair and eyelashes. “Deputy Parker came from Lancaster to Gettysburg to apprehend these members of the Raber Gang, Sheriff. They were supposed to talk, but the gang members chose to ambush him. I traveled down on my own to see if I could be of assistance. I can assure you, the first shots were fired by the gang members and my brother, and Mister Parker returned fire only in self-defense.”

  “I’m sure that’s the case, ma’am, but we do have to check the facts. Flint, Josh, make sure all those bodies are armed and that their weapons have been discharged.”

  The deputies placed their hats back on their heads and made their way through the blowing snow to the bodies by the gatehouse and to Early. Sheriff Levy returned his hat to its rightful place as well.

  “Sorry, ma’am, I realize this is a bad time to question someone who has lost a loved one under such circumstances—”

  “Do your duty, Sheriff,” replied Lynndae coolly.

  “But
what brought your brother into this fracas? You make no mention of him being a lawman or being deputized by Mister Parker here. Was he your escort?”

  “No, I escorted myself from Lancaster.”

  “Very well.”

  “My brother was in the company of the gang itself, Sheriff, but it was his express desire that he disentangle himself from his involvement with notorious criminals and take that opportunity to live an honest Christian life.”

  “That so?”

  “His dying wish, Sheriff.”

  “And the point of your traveling from Lancaster County to Adams County unescorted was perhaps to coax your brother to initiate this disengagement from the remnants of the Raber Gang?”

  “Quite so.”

  Levy scratched the scrap of beard on his chin. “Maybe this will all come together for me if I start with your name.” “I am Lynndae Raber.”

  Sheriff Levy stared at her through the shower of snowflakes. “And your brother?” “Seraphim Raber.” “The Angel of Death himself.”

  “So the newspapers called him. At the end, if anything, he was an Angel of Life.”

  Levy shook his head. “This has to be some story you’re spinning me, Miss Raber, and I’m not exactly sure why, unless it’s meant to cover up the murder of these four men—”

  “This is no cover-up, Sheriff, I assure you.”

  “Seraphim Raber and his whole crew were hung by the neck until dead in Cheyenne, Wyoming a week ago. You must’ve missed that little bit of news before you concocted this yarn of yours.”

  Even through the snowfall Zeph could see Lynndae’s eyes turning to blue ice. “I haven’t missed a thing, Sheriff, and you’ll look the fool when you speak with Sheriff Friesen of Lancaster County or Colonel Austen, a federal marshal out of Cheyenne, or the commander of K Company, Second Cavalry, at Fort Laramie. I think you’d be better off taking my story to heart just as I’ve told it to you.”

  Levy nodded. “I’m sure you think so. But the way I look at it, I’d be better off getting you and Mister Parker down to my humble accommodations in town while I send out a few telegrams to the sort of people who can offer me a yea or nay on all this stuff you’ve been selling. If you’re on the money, I’ll know about it in a few hours and, by way of apology and redress, I’ll buy you steak and eggs for dinner. If you’re not on the money, well, you’ll have to settle for whatever’s on the jailhouse menu for Monday night.”

  “All of them had guns,” said Flint Mitton, walking back through the snow, “and all of them have been fired recently.”

  “Well, that’s something,” grunted Levy.

  “Something else. Josh noticed the two guys who had rifles, well, they’re for sniping, Federal Army issue, the sort of guns Raber’s men’d be toting.”

  The sheriff wasn’t impressed. “Maybe.”

  “They’re Sharps rifles and they fire a big cartridge. We pull a bullet like that out of one of these two, it’ll go a long way to making their case for self-defense.”

  “Hm.”

  Zeph saw the sheriff look down at him, but it seemed like Levy was at the end of a long hallway with white walls, a hallway that was getting longer all the time. It came off as comical to him when the sheriff’s face took on a sudden look of concern.

  “How many times was he hit?” he heard the sheriff ask Lynndae.

  “I bandaged three bullet wounds.”

  “Three! Flint, you get this man over your saddle and in to Doc Murphy as fast as you possibly can. We’re standing here yapping and the man’s losing blood. Look at him—you can see how much blood he’s lost. Josh!” “Yes, sir.”

  “Help Flint get him over the saddle. Then you go in and get a wagon for these others. You understand? Pick up the horses they staked out yonder. And that bedroll and those saddlebags.”

  “Yes, Sheriff.”

  “Come on now, get him up, get him up. This ain’t no Presbyterian picnic, get moving.”

  Far away Zeph heard Lynndae asking, “Is he going to be all right?”

  The last thing he could make out was the sheriff’s response: “I hope so, ma’am, I hope so, but I had no idea he was losing so much blood.”

  Chapter 30

  The feeling came over her that she liked least of almost any feeling she had to deal with, including grief—the feeling of being utterly and unbearably alone.

  She was sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair outside one of the rooms in the doctor’s three-story brick home, which also served as his surgery. Across from her was Flint Mitton, an apologetic look on his face, left by Sheriff Buck Levy as her guard. The fingers of her hands kept knotting and unknotting. Behind the closed door, Doctor Clyde Murphy was working feverishly, along with his wife and an assistant, to save Zephaniah Parker’s life.

  Lynndae could not stop condemning herself for putting Zephaniah in this situation. She had been so stricken by her brother’s death she had sat crying and rocking him when she knew with every fiber of her being his body was only an empty shell and that his spirit had left to be with God. Yet while she wept over Angel’s body, the man who was to be her husband was bleeding to death in the snow. How could be she be so thoughtless?

  To make matters worse, she had then proceeded to argue with Sheriff Levy, too proud to back down, too headstrong to wait for the truth to come out later, stubborn to the point of stupidity. Ten minutes or more lost for no good purpose other than to satisfy her own vanity, wanting the final word, while Z continued to lie cold and bloodless, snow covering his body like a winding sheet.

  Oh, Lord, forgive me. Spare his life, oh, please, spare his life. Do not pile sorrow upon sorrow.

  She wiped away tears quickly, not wanting the deputy’s sympathy.

  The door opened and the doctor came out of the room, his shirt red with blood. His young face was lined with sweat and worry. He was holding a pan in which several small objects rolled back and forth.

  “The bullets are out,” he said.

  She was not interested in the bullets, instead looking at him with fear and hope for news about Zephaniah, so he handed the pan to the deputy. Flint Mitton fished out the larger of the three bullets and looked at it closely.

  “That’s no 44,” he said. “It’s like Josh was talking. One of the men at the gatehouse got him with a Sharps.”

  “That came out of his shoulder,” the doctor told him.

  Flint eyed the other two bullets. “That woman’s brother was using a 45 and these are both 44 caliber. Had to come from their pistols and not his. The evidence is backing her story more and more.”

  “Where is Sheriff Levy?”

  “Getting Lance to take care of the bodies. Sending and receiving telegrams.” He flicked open the lid on his watch. “It’s half past five. He’ll be by shortly, I expect.”

  The doctor turned to Lynndae. “Miss Raber. We are doing the best we can. His blood loss is acute.” She felt a sting in her heart as Zephaniah’s bleeding was brought up before her yet again. “We may be able to save his arm and leg; it’s too early to tell.”

  “Oh, please try, doctor.”

  “There’s massive tissue damage to his left shoulder and the back of his right leg. I may have to remove the limbs to avoid gangrene. I’m going to get some coffee, and then I’ll take another look. My wife and Tommy are cleaning his wounds as thoroughly as they can right now. Deputy, we need more ice to keep the fever down.”

  Flint Mitton looked confused. “I have to watch Miss Raber here.”

  “I need the ice. Either you go or she goes or you both go together.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” cried Lynndae, “where do you think I am going to run to when the man I hope to marry is fighting for his life in the next room?”

  She saw Mitton glance at her empty ring finger and said, “He only asked for my hand yesterday afternoon. There hasn’t been time for any of the formalities yet. In fact,” she added, her eyes meeting those of Mitton and the doctor, “you are the first people to know. We never told a sing
le soul, everything happened too fast.”

  The doctor nodded. “Congratulations. Flint, I’ll be responsible for Miss Raber. Go get that ice. We have a wedding to look forward to.”

  The deputy got to his feet and placed his hat on his head. “Sorry, ma’am, I’ll go get the ice.”

  Suddenly there was a knocking on the front door. The doctor shook his head. “I need to coffee up and get back into the surgery. Miss Raber, could you see who that is?” He vanished into another room.

  Lynndae stood up, and she and Flint Mitton walked down a hall to the front of the house. Before they could get there, the door burst open and Aunt Rosa rushed in, followed by Augustine Yoder. Behind them were Sheriff Rusty Friesen from Lancaster County and Sheriff Buck Levy, who looked like he’d been kicked in the stomach by a horse.

  Lynndae and Aunt Rosa flew into each other’s arms.

  “Oh, Rosa,” cried Lynndae, a little girl again, allowing the tears to streak down her face, “he’s in the surgery. He covered my body with his. Oh, Rosa, he took the bullets meant for me.” She sobbed in the older woman’s arms.

  “Hush, hush,” Aunt Rosa soothed, patting Lynndae on the back, “everything will be all right. That is why the train brought us. We are in this place to pray with you; God will hear.”

  “He took the bullets meant for me.”

  “Hush, hush.” But tears sprang into Aunt Rosa’s eyes as well.

  Augustine Yoder was pale, watching the two women hold one another with large liquid eyes. Snow melted on his hat and overcoat.

  Flint Mitton looked at Sheriff Levy. “I was just going out to get some ice. The man has a bad fever.”

  Levy nodded. “Go quick and get it.” As Flint stepped around him, Levy took him by the arm. “I got telegrams back from everyone and their horse. Seems I heard from every person in the country but President Grant. Her story checks out. This is Sheriff Friesen from Lancaster. He confirms those were the last of Raber’s gang.”

  Lynndae broke away from Aunt Rosa. “What happened? Was anyone hurt?”

  Mitton hung back to hear the news, but Levy fixed him with a glare. “We caused enough heartache for these folk,