Episode 44
Riders of the Twisted Tree
Furious over the Paradise incident and the death of Big Cal, riders from the Twisted Tree ranch pulled a long length of fence from the pens. Using rope flails and shots from their rifles, they encouraged a panic that sent a rush of cattle up the center of Mercury Wells. Two thousand head or more in a blind rush.
The animals, mad with fear, funneled into the main street. Thousands of tons of live, enraged, terrified Texas steers drove straight into the heart of the town. They crowded flank to flank, fighting to find open sky beyond the enclosure of the buildings and tents hemming them in either side. The beeves climbed boardwalks, their weight bringing down uprights. The front façade of the Dollar Store was sent crashing into the street, crushing the bones of two steers and driving the rest to a higher frenzy.
With a shower of shattered glass, the front windows of a sutler’s store imploded. Steers were crowded onto the boardwalk, goring one another to fight their way clear. A half dozen sought the interior of the store as refuge. They trod barrels and shelves to splinters. The wooden staircase to the second floor buckled and fell under their assault. The sutler’s family stood horror-struck at the top of the stairs, clutching one another in fright, to witness their once going enterprise turned to worthless debris.
A thunderous cacophony of beating hooves and cracking timber filled the air as tent after tent and shack after shack were torn down under the surge of senseless beasts. Screams arose above the rumble of their passage. A steer, its horns snagged in a tent line, ran about in ever decreasing circles with a bloodied nightgown tangled under one hoof. Somewhere in the collection of tents, a swatch of canvas was splashed with the oil from a smashed lamp. A blaze rose and swiftly spread, the flames stirring up the fear in the cattle to new heights. The beeves were shrieking now, mad with terror.
They swept down the street for open country where they spread out in all directions as though to race their own shadows to the mountains just turning gold under the rays of the rising sun.
When the bovine tide finally passed the ruin was terrible. A wide swath of Mercury Wells was destroyed, either trampled to wreckage or burning. Bodies, barely recognizable as human lay crushed into the dust of the street. A few wounded beeves thrashed out the last of their lives until put down by men with guns. Wails of despair and cries of anguish echoed off the fronts of the buildings that remained.
And at far edge of town lay the sad remains of the Holy Crusade Committee tent. A few poles still stood, shreds of canvas hanging to flap in the breeze. The rest of the tent, and its contents, had been stamped to rubbish under thousands of hooves.
At the center of the destruction, Adeline Tibbets was on her knees weeping over the trampled bodies of two of her sisters. She was surrounded by a ring of her followers holding hands with heads lowered.
