Doc - Mary Doria Russell [69]
He never knew until that day how cold a man could get. He was shaking like anything, but all he could do was wrap his arms around himself, curl up like a babe and wait for the storm to blow itself out, except it didn’t. It just went on and on like that, and then the air started crackling, and there was lightning and thunder—in a snowstorm!—which seemed against nature.
“By God, it’s the End,” John cried, and gave himself up to Jesus and prayed for salvation. Sure enough, he felt strangely warm after a while and finally stopped shivering. In the peacefulness that followed, he believed he was dying, and though he regretted leaving his family, he was happy that the Lord was coming for him.
Later, the Ford County Globe reported that the temperature hit sixteen below, and that the plains surrounding Dodge were littered with the carcasses of antelope and deer and livestock and coyotes and birds. Several farmhands froze to death, but John Riney had always been a lucky man, and the proof of it was that Mabel and the boys got to him before he died, digging through the snow with their hands and an iron fry pan. They slid him out of the shed and drug him back into the house, where the door faced southeast and could still be opened, even though the snow on the northwest side reached the roofline.
It was the Lord’s mercy that John only lost parts of his feet and most of his fingers instead of his life, but there he was: a cripple, and no farmer anymore. And you’d have to call that bad luck, except that very year, Dodge City got itself a committee and built a bridge over the Arkansas.
In those days, the river was swimming-deep and too fast to cross without danger most of the time. Freighters needed to double up their ox teams to pull the wagons through it, and that meant a lot of extra work, unyoking and yoking and what all, and then their merchandise got wet because the wagon beds weren’t high enough to stay above the waterline. Or let’s say you were trying to take a herd through the river. Some of the cattle you drove all the way up from Texas would get pulled downstream and be lost, just before you got them to market. Now and then, somebody on your crew’d drown, too. That was a hell of a thing.
So it was pretty bad until Bob Wright figured out that a bridge would make Dodge more attractive as a railhead for the cattle trade. Bob’s old partner Charlie Rath knew how to build bridges, from during the war, so they got together with a finance man from Leavenworth and ordered in a lot of wood, special, and construction began.
Then Bob had the notion that folks would be willing to pay to drive across the only bridge between Hutchinson and the Colorado line just to avoid the trouble of crossing that damn river for free. Which they were. And that meant there had to be a tollbooth, and someone to be there all day and all night to collect the tolls, and you didn’t hardly need more than four fingers, total, to do a job like that.
See? That’s how lucky John Riney was, and he defied anyone to tell him different.
There was a nice tollhouse for him and Mabel and the kids to live in, fairly large and built real tight against the storms, and the boys swam all summer in the river, and John himself could just sit there and let the world come to him. He collected $1.50 for a two-horse team and wagon, $2 for a four- or six-horse hitch, and two bits a man, mounted. Pedestrians were 25 cents, too, but since 1874, John Riney had never once seen anybody walk across the bridge, until this very day.
“Official business,” Bat Masterson told him, ducking under the gate.
“Me, too,” said Charlie Bassett.
They were both carrying shotguns and wearing two pistols apiece. So were Morgan Earp and John Stauber, but those two didn’t cross the bridge. They just waited on either side of the end nearest the tollbooth.
Morgan said, “John, you might want to send Mabel