Katana and the Peacemaker

Chapter Two

From Bad…



The Pinkerton leader’s azure-blue eyes had watched the entire scene of lawmen chasing outlaws and horses chasing lawmen unfold from a long distance, his back pressed firmly against the wood of the locomotive car behind him.



Sighing and shaking his head, he limped around and hopped up onto the steps leading into the last coach car before the caboose. Looking inside, he clicked his teeth. It was a bloody mess.



Windows shattered and bullet holes in the walls and seats were the absolute least of problems. Several passengers had been shot in addition to the two outlaws sprawled on the floor of the aisle. The remaining passengers, some of whom were drenched in the victims’ blood, were all frozen in alarm.



He stepped into the car slowly, his boots making no sound even as he stepped upon shards of glass on the floor. The very way he walked amongst the terrified people reminded them of how phantoms moved in horror stories. Even his limp stemming from the wound in his foot went unnoticed by the passengers.



However, another agent’s bungling steps onboard behind Buchanen could be heard as clearly as a buffalo stampede. He was a short man wearing spectacles and carrying his coat over his left arm. His entire body’s movement was very twitchy and nervous, including his right hand as it rested on the butt of his holstered revolver.



“Um-m, M-M-Mr. Buch-ch-chanen… w-we g-g-g-g-g – Damn it! We g-g… g-got ’em?” he managed to blurt out in spite of his horrendous stuttering, his body seeming to twitch more when he spoke.



Agent Donald Buchanen stood nonchalantly over the Mexican’s body, riddled with bullets in the chest, identifying him as the criminal known as Iñigo who claimed to be Joaquin Murrieta. Wanted for eight known murders during robberies in records stretching back three years; who he really was and what he did before then was unknown.



Drawing his pistol and cocking it, Buchanen lazily fired a single shot into Iñigo’s forehead to be sure the man was dead. The body did not even move in reaction to the shot, with the exception of the head lolling over onto its side, blood flowing from the wound to the floor as easily as water from a leak in a sink.



“Yeah,” came Buchanen’s answer to the stuttering agent’s question.



One passenger, a thin man wearing a fine vest and bowler hat, stood from his seat to confront Buchanen, who was only somewhat listening anyway. “Excuse me, sir… Would you mind telling me, as you are a respectable lawman, exactly… WHY THIS SORT OF BARBARISM WAS NECESSARY?! Your own men shot innocent people here! Well, this absolutely will not stand… We will all go to higher authorities, inform them of the cold-blooded manner in which you dealt with these ruffians, and you… you and your men will all be sued and tried and convicted for –”



BANG!



The man was silenced when he was thrown forward into a couple of old ladies’ laps, his back ripped open from a shotgun blast. The women threw their gloved hands to their mouths and screamed in terror, kicking the limp body off their laps in their panic and dropping it onto the floor at their feet. They recoiled their feet away from it in their frightful state.



Buchanen and the man behind him both had their guns raised and aimed at the other outlaw they had thought was also as dead as his Mexican companion.



No, Jedediah McElroy, better known as Babyface, was very much alive. He had his arm wrapped around a young lady’s throat from behind, holding her in front of him for protection from the lawmen’s guns. The shotgun lay spent at their feet. In his other hand, he held a lit stick of dynamite, and the fuse was going out fast.



None of this surprised Buchanen. He had read up on the outlaw’s notorious exploits and could recognize that childlike face of his anywhere. He was innocent enough in appearance to ward off any suspicion he was the murderer of over thirty men and as cold-blooded as, if not more so than, the men he rode with during the Civil War, from William Anderson, better known as Bloody Bill, to the brothers Jesse and Frank James.



“No shootin’! No shootin’ or you’ll hit this little cunt here!” he shouted while keeping her in his hold even as she struggled against him and screamed. “Shut up!”



The rest of the passengers had their heads ducked and were all whimpering like a terrified bunch of puppies.



“Now… bein’s I got this…” He held up the dynamite a bit higher for emphasis and then lowered it again. “I’m gonna run out the door behind me… on the count o’ three… You’re gonna let me go… an’ nobody’s gotta die…”



Buchanen’s eyes were still as stones through everything Babyface said.



“One –”



Bang!



The woman shrieked and fell to the floor clutching her chest, which was bleeding as surely as a fountain-like stream through her fingers from Buchanen’s bullet.



Babyface’s eyes shot wide open, whether out of shock or because he was seeing his life flash before his eyes was unclear. The next bullet was meant for him, hitting him in the shoulder and throwing him back against the car door with the back of his head smashing a hole in the glass window. He dropped the dynamite to the floor, clutched his wound tightly, and slumped against the door with his eyes firmly shut.



Buchanen strode smoothly over to the man, stepping over the bodies without looking down at them. Grabbing Babyface by his head, he heaved the man up and turned him to face the broken window. Then he slammed the outlaw’s face down against the jagged edges of the glass in the window, shattering more glass even as large shards stabbed into his head and remained stuck penetrating his face.



This act of brutality even further stunned and horrified the car passengers.



Buchanen then spun around and threw Babyface to the floor. As the outlaw writhed a bit sluggishly in pain, afraid to move, the Pinkerton cocked his pistol and aimed it. Then he fired a final shot right into the man’s throat, killing him in seconds. For some reason, the little geyser of blood spurting from the bullet hole for a few moments amused Buchanen and he smirked.



The woman that Buchanen had shot had been weeping on the floor, bleeding all over the arms of two men as they helped her up onto their seat in their laps.



One of the men shot a look of pure disgust at Buchanen and said, “You son of a bitch. What kind of lawman are you?!”



Buchanen nodded to the other agent in the car, signaling with his finger for him to exit. The man gave a nod in return and bustled out the door at the opposite end, shutting it tightly.



The Pinkerton leader took a glance down at the stick of dynamite, its fuse almost out. Then he looked back at the man who had shouted at him. That was when the man realized Buchanen absolutely no depth to his eyes. He was as empty as a young child’s favorite splash puddle on a hot summer day.



Put simply, Buchanen did not care.



As smoothly as though he were walking in slow motion, he turned toward the door with the broken window, opened it, stepped out of the car, and shut the door behind him.



In spite of his limp, it did not take very long for him to put an adequate amount of distance between himself and the car. He even had enough spare time to turn around and watch the people inside the car panic and try to escape. Then the expected happened.



BOOM!!!



The car was not blown sky-high like in the dime novels, but the windows were all blown to pieces. The roof caved in and crashed down upon the car, crushing or trapping those inside who were not killed by the blast. There were some small flames around the area of the car where the dynamite was located. Also, even from the distance Buchanen was at, the blast’s noise was tremendous.



As soon as all the flying debris had landed on the ground, Buchanen limped over and barked to his men standing by, “Palance, shoot anyone who tries to get out! Holden, Borgnine, Oates, Johnson, Sánchez, douse this car in whiskey an’ light her up!”



He was answered with a “Yes, sir!” from all the men, who quickly set to their tasks. Three of them did so in spite of excruciating leg wounds.



Turning to face the men returning from the chase, several of whom were wounded or dead and being carried on the backs of their comrades, Buchanen settled his hands on his hips and growled through tightly clenching teeth, “Let me see if I have this straight… There were twenty of you… Twenty of you! That’s not including these seven dicks behind me… Now, you each have two pistols and a rifle… How many times would you say you’d reloaded, from the monkey wagon to the tree?” Buchanen was biting the inside of his cheek as he grew increasingly irate.



“Uhh… five or s-six times at the caboose? Maybe five times after that,” answered one.



“No, it was twenty times or somethin’. You got two pistols,” one corrected.



“An’ a rifle… So, uh… about twenty times for all of us, boss,” one finished.



Buchanen nodded and looked up at the pinkish-blue sky. “Twenty men… About forty revolvers reloaded twenty times each… Five bullets a gun, that’s… about 4,000 bullets… not including rifle rounds…. So you’re telling me… that with over 4,000 bullets an’ only eight targets once the first was taken out… YOU DIDN’T MANAGE TO HIT A SINGLE ONE?!!!”



The men took two steps back and looked at their feet, half in shame and half out of fear of what their boss would do next. They knew what he was capable of.



Buchanen pointed at the five men shot by the Italian outlaw and continued ranting, “Even those shits managed to hit a couple men in the car behind me with maybe fifty shots.”



Even in anger as tempestuous as a god’s wrath, Buchanen maintained a very tightly controlled composure. From such a calm expression on his face, it was difficult to tell how angry he was if he were not yelling at the top of his lungs and biting the inside of his cheek.



“Now… can somebody explain to me why you all missed?”



A long silence commenced, during which only the hushed whistling sound of the slight wind was heard. Then one young agent spoke up, “Sir.” He was considerably taller than his peers and somewhat lanky in a virile kind of way.



Buchanen’s sharp eyes focused on the man. “Yes, Marion?”



The others sniggered a bit. Marion Morrison was the young man’s name and the thought on every single man’s mind was, What sort of mother would name her son Marion?



“Sir, we did hit one,” Marion answered, his facial expressions straining to appear unfazed by his comrades’ amusement at his name. He gestured toward a body slung over one man’s shoulder. It was the Irishman, and he was still breathing.



“Drop him,” Buchanen ordered, pointing to the ground at his feet.



Like a bag of potatoes, the outlaw was dropped without a moment’s hesitation on the part of the agent who lugged him over his shoulder. The force of his back hitting the ground caused the man to cough ferociously. It did not help the wound in his chest was still bleeding.



Looking down at the pathetic being at his feet, Buchanen pointed his pistol directly at the man’s face while slowly loading the chamber for intimidating purposes.



“Dodger Amsterdam… come a long way since the Dead Rabbits booted you out of New York, haven’t you, you Irish bog bastard? Listen, I want to make this quick, so… I’m going to ask you one question, no more an’ no less… You follow me? Nod if you follow.”



Dodger could barely lift his head from the ground.



Buchanen took that as a “No.”



While the train car behind him was set on fire by his men and the flames reached soaring heights, the Pinkerton raised his knee high and slammed the heel of his boot right into Dodger’s leg wound, moving it around to add insult to injury.



“AGH, F – AGGGGHHHH!!!” He did not stop screaming for the duration of the act.



Once Buchanen had let his boot off the wound, he leaned down and snarled into Dodger’s ear, “Your compadres all made off with 300,000 dollars an’ killed eight of my men. Your options are to either tell me where the rendezvous point is an’ who they really are or the second option, which you do not want to know or experience.”



Companionship and a sense of brotherhood amongst criminals often weakened and expired the moment one was caught by lawmen, about to be sent to prison, tortured, killed, or a broad variety of combinations of the four.



Dodger was no exception. Once he had calmed his aggrieved breathing down, the wounded Irishman sang like a bird. “Bodie… Keyesville… or the Vasquez Rocks… Those are our rally points… Their real names are… uh… Billy Ringo… uh… Jack Dobbins… He’s a half-breed, I know that… I dunno… the name o’ the third one… He goes by Eastwood, Joe, Monco, Blondie, Stranger, or Preacher…”



Buchanen gave a wide grin with the charm of a snake. “Thank you kindly.”



Marion broke the windy silence. “So what do we do with him, Mr. Buchanen?”



Buchanen glanced at Marion for a moment in a partial glare. Then he returned his gaze to Dodger and said, “Well… now that you’ve called me by name…”



Dodger’s quivered breathing hitched in frightened anticipation.



That deceitful grin along with the towering plume of smoke emerging behind him from the burning car and blackening the sky like a scar made Buchanen look every bit the part of the Devil in the Irishman’s eyes. The ruthless Pinkerton leader cocked his revolver and fired a bullet into Dodger’s cheek, the sound echoing over the hills for miles like the thunderous clap of God’s wrath.









Author's Notes

* My inspiration for the character of Donald Buchanen came from three sources: Horribly corrupt and violent lawmen of the Old West; the villain Frank from the film Once Upon A Time In The West; and certain elements I borrowed from The Joker in certain Batman comics.

* The henchman Palance was a reference to Jack Palance, who played the hired gunman Jack Wilson in the film Shane.

* The henchmen Holden, Borgnine, Oates, Johnson, and Sánchez were references to the actors who played robbers/gunmen in the film The Wild Bunch.

* The name of the henchman Marion Morrison was the birth name of famed Western film actor John Wayne.