The Dead Preacher's Boots

Words by Marlin Bressi

Art by Ann van der Giessen

On the very backbone of the Rockies a man can relieve himself as Nature intended, and if he is facing to the left, his stream will flow into the Pacific. If he turns to his right, the stream will flow into the Atlantic. If a man’s bladder is large enough, a slight swiveling of the hips allows a man to piss into two oceans at the same time.

Augie Kauffmann’s father—God rest his gangrenous rattlesnake soul—had given him this useful bit of knowledge when Augie was just a boy, and if he’d only decided to water the top of a mountain like his daddy had recommended, instead of the wheel of Mayor Hughes’s wagon, he never would’ve found himself staring at the charmless walls of the Deer Lodge lockup.

“But public urination ain’t no felony,” said Augie’s cellmate from the bottom bunk. “Least not in Montana Territory.”

“You’re quite right, Clete,” replied the recalcitrant wagon-pisser. “But when the mayor hauled me into town hall for a stern lecture, I was recognized by a sawed-off muttonhead shopkeeper from Warm Springs.”

“A friend of yours?”

“More like a mark,” replied Augie with a guffaw. “I bought some merchandise from his general store a couple of weeks earlier with some bogus greenbacks. Long story short, Judge Potter felt that I ought to spend about fourteen months at Deer Lodge thinking about what I’d done.”

Augie had been locked up for scarcely a week, but had already managed to cram fourteen months of thinking into that condensed allotment of time and had come up with a plan. He kept in touch with an old dance hall flame in Missoula who had long since traded in her rouge and garters for a mahogany desk in the district attorney’s office, where she worked as a file clerk. Over the course of the winter Augie exchanged letters with his former paramour, promising her a reunion if she would furnish Warden O’Neill with a letter from the Missoula County District Attorney requesting the appearance of August Kauffmann as a witness for the prosecution in a fictitious larceny case. Since no one in Deer Lodge had ever seen District Attorney Bower’s signature before, they had no way of knowing that it was every bit as authentic as the traditional Chippewa Miracle Elixir that Augie had purchased from the mutton-headed shopkeeper in Warm Springs, or the money that Augie had used to make the purchase. In April, when two of Mabel’s brothers arrived at Deer Lodge wearing surplus Army uniforms and homemade tin badges and walked into the prison as if they owned it, no one batted an eye.

Mabel’s brothers transported Augie as far as Butte, forty miles to the south, after the escapee promised to pay them two hundred dollars, which they could find hidden inside a tin can buried in the dirt beneath the front step of Augie’s shack near Missoula. This was no great loss to Augie, who reasoned that he’d be long gone before they realized the banknotes were bogus.

* * *

The stranger continued to stare in bewildered confusion at the strange coins inside the shell of a dead tortoise. There was something unsettling about the reptilian remains that he couldn’t put a finger on. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected to find inside an opium den, but a hollowed-out tortoise was the last thing he had anticipated.

“Itching!” Mai Wu repeated. Augie threw up his hands and shrugged helplessly at the proprietor’s daughter.

“Then scratch yourself, for cripe’s sake!” he repeated. They had apparently reached an impasse.

Mai Wu sighed loudly, then reached across the table for a crumpled Western Union telegram and a well-chewed nub of a pencil. I Ching, she wrote on the scrap of paper.

“I, Augie!” said the stranger, pointing to himself and wondering if the young woman in the pink silk dress had gone insane. They had known each other for two weeks, and Augie felt the time for introductions had long since passed.

The young woman shook her head ferociously and tried to explain that I Ching—which Mai Wu pronounced ee-cheeng—was not an introduction, but an ancient method of fortune-telling. Each of the three coins had a square hole in its center, and Mai Wu insisted that she could see into the future by the outcome of six tosses of the coins. She had learned the skill from her grandmother in Peking, but never had an occasion to shake the coins and decipher their magical message from the charts in the Book of Changes. That is, until the brown-haired stranger with the slightly receding hairline showed up at the opium den begging for a job.

Augie flipped through the girl’s book, but could make no sense of the mysterious symbols. He’d saved up enough money to continue his flight into the untamed Western wilderness and was anxious to go to the stables to buy a horse before sunset. Realizing that it was unwise to remain in Butte for longer than was necessary, Augie hunkered down in Chinatown, performing odd jobs for the immigrant merchants of Galena Street.

“I really must be going,” Augie explained, but Mai Wu was determined. Now that her father’s business was booming—as was every other business in the rapidly-growing copper city—Mai Wu believed that she could earn a comfortable living by reading the fortunes of the patrons. All she needed was practice. Augie threw up his hands in resignation. He’d been in Butte for fifteen days without seeing a trace of a posse, U.S. Marshal, or Pinkerton agent. What difference could one more day possibly make?

Mai Wu shook the tortoise shell and poured the bronze coins onto the table. “This one is yin,” she said, pointing to the coin with four Chinese characters etched into its worn surface. “These ones are yang,” she explained, pointing to the other two coins.

“Terrific,” sighed the reluctant customer. “Now what does that mean?”

Mai Wu consulted the Book of Changes, then drew a line on the table with a piece of chalk. Five subsequent tosses were made, each one followed by the drawing of another line. Some of the lines were broken, like hyphens. Others were straight and unbroken like dashes. But where the escaped counterfeiter saw nothing but punctuation marks, the young woman in the pink dress saw terror.

With a frightened expression on her face, Mai Wu furiously flipped through the weathered pages of her grandmother’s book.

“What’s wrong?” asked Augie. “What does it mean?”

A quiet tinkling signaled the arrival of customers, and Mai Wu laid down her book. The customers, two white women whose style of dress was more suitable for a Sunday picnic than a drug-induced stupor, were led to a table next to an elaborate oriental tapestry. Two Chinese boys, who appeared no older than ten years of age, presented the women with long, silver-stemmed pipes and a glass lamp. Augie picked up the book and searched the page for an explanation, but the symbols remained as cryptic as ever.

“You must leave now,” whispered Mai Wu, after the patrons had been seated.

“But what about my fortune?” demanded Augie. “You can’t refuse to tell me now, not after that gruesome expression appeared on your face. Is something bad going to happen? Is somebody trying to find me?”

Mai Wu muttered beneath her breath as she led Augie by his shirtsleeve to the back door. In the twilit alley they stood shivering. Springtime in Montana Territory was just another name for an extended winter, and while the evening air of some places carried the sweet perfume of crabapple and dogwood blossoms, the air of Butte was eternally acrid with the smell from the Anaconda smelters. The chirping of crickets had been supplanted by the grunts of prostitutes who openly plied their trade in Venus Alley, in wooden double-decker cubicles that lined the brick-paved street like carnival booths.

With conversation hindered by a combination of unfamiliar linguistics and the chattering of teeth, it was difficult for Augie to grasp the young woman’s explanation of the ancient method of divination, but from what he gathered it seemed that Mai Wu had been focusing her thoughts on his boots while she shook the coins inside her reptilian bowl. “Fortune-teller must concentrate on one thing at time,” she said. “Focus on thing that first stand out. First impression, very important.”

“What was it about my boots that made such an impression?” he demanded.

“I not know,” she replied with a frown. “But coins say your boots will be death of you, Mister Jones.”

Augie wondered if his fortune might’ve been different if he hadn’t used an assumed name while hiding out in Butte. He glanced at his boots and, admittedly, felt a pang of shame. They were shabby, filthy things, with miles of stories etched into the creases of the leather. The soles were worn thin, perhaps dangerously so. Ice still glazed some of the trails in the gulches and darker hollows where the sun dared not reach. Might he slip and fall and break his neck? Might one of the steel buckles or bullhide straps get caught up in the stirrups of a saddle, causing him to be dragged to his untimely demise?

He was still thinking about Mai Wu’s unsettling prediction when he heard his name being called. Not the assumed name he had given to the merchants of Chinatown, nor any of the sobriquets he had used in his mining days, but the Christian name he believed would be inscribed upon his headstone some day.

“Augustus Frederick Kauffmann!” came the voice again, booming from the end of the alley. “I have a warrant for your arrest!”

Augie looked for Mai Wu, but she was gone. He tried the back door to the opium den but it had been locked. Forgetting momentarily the slickness of his soles he took off running. It wasn’t until he reached the foothills of the Bitterroot Range in the morning that he felt the stinging in his shoulder and noticed the river of blood dried to his left arm.

* * *

The Good Book has a lot to say about wisdom, though Augie hadn’t seen a Bible in eleven years, when the Baptist preacher read from the Twenty-Third Psalm as his father was being covered with dirt. The Book of Proverbs, in particular, has a great deal to say on the matter: Blessed is he who finds wisdom, and by wisdom a house is built.

If Augie had been familiar with Scripture, he would’ve thought that no truer words had ever been written, because Wisdom was also a ranching settlement of about fifty souls, far from the madness of the mining camps, and the sight of it certainly made him feel blessed, especially after four weeks of tramping through the mountains of western Montana.

It was Lewis and Clark who had given the Wisdom River its name, which had been forgotten and re-named as the Big Hole River, but frontier ranchers didn’t care much for change, and so they decided to name their tiny village Wisdom. As for the river itself, no one was quite sure whether it was William or Meriwether who had christened it, or what made them choose the name, but, looking down from the western slope of Bobcat Mountain into the valley, Augie decided that one would need to possess the wisdom of Solomon to figure out how to navigate the thing. The winding stream crossed itself like a Catholic on his deathbed, breaking off into dozens of serpentine branches that sliced and diced the marshy landscape into hundreds of islands. From a distance, the river looked like a blue rope that had come unbraided.

By Wisdom not just one house was built, but several. As the wounded wanderer straggled toward the cluster of frame dwellings, he was surprised to discover that a welcoming committee had been formed. A party of ten or so residents, ranging in age from toddler to mummy, must have seen him coming a mile away. They reached Augie before he reached them.

“Reverend Kipp!” one of the ranchers cried out in delight. “They told us you’d been killed, but Louisa and I refused to believe it.”

“Killed?”

“That’s what Arrow-Not-Afraid down at the trading post said,” chimed in Louisa. “Said you’d picked up typhoid fever while preaching to the Alpowai. Said they buried you last Sabbath in the graveyard in Bannack.”

Augie had intended to reply, but he felt his legs giving out beneath him. He reached out for something to hold on to, but found only an empty patch of Montana sky. When he came to, he was propped up on a feather mattress in a log cabin, snug as a bug in front of the fireplace. A middle-aged woman looked up from her needlework, and Augie recognized her as the one called Louisa.

“The fever mightn’t a-killed you, but it ain’t gone yet,” she said. “You’d best take it easy for a while, Reverend.” Augie began to protest, then thought better of it. His sights had been set on Idaho Territory, not Wisdom, but he understood that sick men make lousy fugitives. A man rendered delirious by fever and weakened by hunger is a man who’s likely to get captured, or worse, killed. The frontier is a cruel place, and a man needs his wits about him. Hungry men make stupid mistakes because, in the battle of brains against belly, the belly wins every time.

A little girl soon appeared at his bedside with a cluster of purple onion flowers clutched in her tiny, delicate hand. Augie noticed that her knees and elbows, as well as her blue gingham dress, were stained with green and brown blotches, evidence of an afternoon spent rambling through the pastures.

“I picked these for you, Reverend,” she said with a smile as she presented her offering. “You told me these were your favorite, remember?”

“Sure I do, sweetheart,” replied the escaped convict. If he hadn’t felt so weak, he might’ve pulled the child closer, just to imbibe the essence of carefree youth, to revel in the smell of pollen and wildflowers. He was keenly aware of the smell, because for the longest time his nose had known only gunpowder, smelted ore, and the ink used to print counterfeit currency. All stank of sulphur, like the brimstone caverns of hell.

“Now, Sally, you let Reverend Kipp rest, you hear?” interrupted Louisa. She instructed Sally to fetch some water. “A little broth will bring some color back into those cheeks. Lord, I reckon you must’ve lost thirty pounds since you were here last.”

The broth resurrected Augie, and soon he was feeling as strong as an ox. He was certain he didn’t have typhoid fever; it was merely an infection caused by the gunshot he’d taken in Chinatown. Another day or two and he’d be ready to continue his journey. As he finished his broth a handful of villagers arrived. They entered the cabin and began placing gifts on the table: freshly baked johnnycake, rock candy, tobacco, bottles of Kessler beer. Anything they had in their possession that they were willing to give to an old friend, they gave. One fellow plopped a pot of Holloway’s Ointment onto the table, another donated a tin of Dr. McLane’s Liver Pills. One elderly woman deposited a handful of coins.

“Buy something nice the next time you go to the city,” she said with a mischievous wink.

Augie was taken aback by this unexpected generosity. A lump climbed his esophagus and his eyes grew misty. He thanked the villagers of Wisdom profusely, then excused himself to go outside for some fresh air. He walked to the edge of the river, sat down on the bank, and watched the water flow by, winding a similar zig-zag course as the warm tears rolling down his cheeks.

“By the rivers of Babylon,” said a deep, baritone voice from behind, “we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.” He turned around and saw that it was Louisa’s husband. “Psalm One Thirty-seven? Or maybe it was Proverbs. You’ll have to forgive me, Reverend. I’m not as much of an expert on the Good Book as you are.”

The two men talked for an hour on the riverbank, though Augie was careful not to speak too much, for fear of giving himself away. By listening to Louisa’s husband—whose name, he learned by way of observation, was Tom—he arrived at the conclusion that Reverend Kipp stopped in Wisdom every six or seven weeks, stayed for a few days spreading the Gospel, then moved on to the next settlement. As an itinerant frontier preacher, he had no church; the buttes were his altar and the Big Hole was his holy water. The ranchers, homesteaders, and a friendly band of Nez Perce Indians who called themselves the Alpowai were his congregation. Reverend Kipp was a man who was well-loved, he discovered, and because Reverend Kipp was so well-loved, Augie Kauffmann decided to become him.

It was the perfect cover. No one would confuse a kindly traveling preacher with an escaped convict from the territorial prison. And if anyone did, why, he had a whole damn village of honest, salt-of-the-Earth ranchers who could verify his identity. Augie Kauffmann, for all intents and purposes, was dead. Long live Reverend Kipp!

But there was just one little problem.

Should Augie ever find himself in a compromising position where he needed more than just the say-so of pioneers to establish his identity as Reverend Kipp, he would need things that had actually belonged to the preacher. He would need a Bible, he would need the preacher’s billfold, or hat, or some other physical item that would prove beyond a doubt that he was the genuine article and not an imposter.

“Say, Tom, would you happen to know where a man might be able to procure a shovel around here?”

“I’ve got a spade I could lend you, Reverend,” answered Tom, as the two men walked toward the house. “Why do you ask? Plan on digging up some gold?”

“Something like that,” replied Augie.

“Whereabouts? If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

“Just a little place I know of, down around Bannack.”

Tom stopped in his tracks, then turned to Augie with a raised, wiry brow. Augie wondered if he had raised Tom’s suspicions.

“Something the matter?” Augie asked.

“Just a mighty strange coincidence, is all,” mused Tom. “A couple years ago I lent my grub axe to a neighbor. Rufus Huckabee was his name. He also wanted to do a little prospecting, down Camas Creek way. You wouldn’t remember him from your previous visits, of course. Old Rufus wasn’t much interested in the Gospel.” Tom chuckled softly to himself. “I reckon he must’ve struck the mother lode.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Augie.

“Because he never came back to Wisdom.”

* * *

Augie concealed himself among the trembling aspen and black cottonwood in a thicket above the hillside graveyard at Hangman’s Gulch, and waited in the darkness until the last lamp of Bannack was extinguished. Satisfied that the only sounds were the ones produced by the racing of his heart and the knocking of his knees, he emerged from the thicket and shinnied down the pebbled slope, shovel in hand, and crept toward the burial ground.

Finding freshly-dug graves in this part of Montana Territory was easy; large rocks were piled on the grave to prevent wolves and coyotes from digging up the recently deceased, and there was only one pile of rocks to be found. Augie glanced around at the weatherbeaten wooden markers, and beheld the final resting place of the heroes of his youth. A stone’s throw away from where the preacher was buried, rotting planks marked the graves of Ned Ray and Buck Stinson, the two deputies of the infamous outlaw sheriff, Henry Plummer. All three men had their necks stretched on the same blustery January day in 1864 by the vigilance committee. As for the ringleader, Augie knew better than to look for his marker. Legend had it that Plummer’s corpse had been dug up years earlier, the skull stolen as a souvenir.

“Alright, let’s get on with it,” he mumbled to himself, before rolling the stones from Reverend Kipp’s grave.

As it turned out, the shovel wasn’t necessary; the preacher had been buried scarcely six inches below the boulders, and the gravel was easy to sweep away by hand. Augie lifted the thin top of the cheap pine box and saw that, yes, he did bear an eerie resemblance to the deceased. The body was remarkably preserved—the cold nights had kept decomposition in check—and the preacher had been buried with his trusty Bible. The moon was nearly full, and its glow illuminated the pages. The bookplate confirmed the identity of its owner: Jonathan Andrew Kipp.

Augie suspected the Bible alone wouldn’t be enough to establish his new identity. He searched the dead man’s pockets, but found them empty. There was no pocketwatch or jewelry, of course. If the preacher had any possessions of value, the undertaker would undoubtedly have stolen them, and if the preacher had owned a hat, he hadn’t been buried with it. After thinking it over, he decided to strip the corpse of its clothing. Augie had no intention of pilfering the preacher’s boots, which were an ugly shade of tan that didn’t particularly suit his tastes, until he suddenly recalled the nearly-forgotten warning of Mai Wu. Augie laughed as he pulled the tan boots from Reverend Kipp’s cold, purple feet.

“My boots can’t kill me if I trade them for yours,” he stated to his doppelgänger’s corpse. “Don’t fret none, Rev. I reckon they won’t do you any harm, either.” After the swap was complete, Augie stood up and paced around the open grave.

“You may not’ve had much of an eye for style, Kippy, but these things are pretty damn comfortable, if I do say so myself.”

Augie was so distracted by his new boots that he failed to notice the small, crude headstone marking the grave of an unnamed infant. He tripped and landed painfully on top of a large rock, then let out a terrified shriek when he saw three pairs of glowing green eyes staring at him from the crest of Hangman’s Gulch. The eyes drifted closer in absolute silence, and Augie’s thoughts turned to Henry Plummer and his two evil deputies. Though he’d never been much for religion, he scrabbled for the dead man’s Bible which lay on the ground. He held the book to his chest and ordered the ghosts to leave him alone.

The floating, glowing orbs moved closer.

Augie opened the Bible and read aloud the first verse his eyes fell upon, as if reciting a magical spell of protection. It was the fifth verse from the third chapter of Exodus:

“Do not come near! Take your shoes off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground!”

The orbs drifted closer still, until the moonlight revealed the source of Augie’s terror.

“Just coyotes,” chuckled Augie, thankful that no one had been around to witness his momentary loss of composure. He was just about to shoo them away, when he had an idea. “Here, doggies,” he called out. One of the animals pricked its ears and assumed a defensive posture. “Here, doggy, doggy, doggy,” he repeated, slowly backing away from the open grave. “Are you hungry, little doggies? Here you go, here’s your dinner.” When the coyotes stalked to the edge of the grave and began sniffing and pawing at the late Reverend Kipp, Augie turned and ran like the devil.

* * *

It had been a good summer for the Reverend. He discovered he had a knack for oration and was tickled pink by the large crowds he soon began to attract. For the first time in his life, when he spoke people listened to what he had to say, and he learned that Scripture was just like a lie: the more often it’s told, the easier it is to believe. In July, after saving up enough money, he purchased a canvas tent and became the first preacher in Beaverhead County to hold a tent revival. He solicited donations as he preached to enraptured crowds throughout the Bitterroot foothills—even the drunkards and prostitutes showed up to hear his sermons—and by the end of August he’d collected enough money to establish a Sunday School in Wisdom. He appointed Louisa as the first teacher.

“I do hope you’ll consider my husband’s offer,” she said after the first class was held in late September. Tom had offered to donate four acres of his property along the Big Hole River to Reverend Kipp if he would agree to erect a proper church and settle down in Wisdom.

“Like I said, Missus Ross, I rightly appreciate the generous offer, but you know how passionate I am about my work,” explained the reverend. “See, if I build a church here I’ll be waiting for people to come to me. But as a wanderer, I can go straight to the people, spreading the Word wherever they need it the most.” He knelt to muss the hair of the girl in the blue gingham dress. “Don’t you worry, little darling. I’ll be back again real soon.”

“How soon?” asked Sally. The preacher promised he’d return when the onion flowers blossomed, and said that he had to reach Eagle Rock by winter.

“That’s in Utah Territory,” he explained, drawing a crude map on a scrap of paper. “Right here, see? It’s a godless place, or so I’ve heard. I’m fixing to head on down there and save a few souls, if I can.”

The journey was a two hundred mile slog along the Montana Trail and would require changing coaches every twenty miles or so. It had been a coon’s age since he’d traveled by stagecoach, but it was the safest option; the trail was a haven for footpads and highwaymen, though Deadeye Dan, the driver’s shotgun man, assured his passengers from his lofty perch that he was the surest shot in the territory.

By the time the coach and its four ponies had crawled to the top of the Monida Pass, the reverend had shared his coach with more than a dozen passengers, though he was still rusty on the etiquette of stage travel. On the clunky descent, after the spent ponies had been swapped for fresh ones, the reverend attempted to eject an estimable volume of tobacco juice from his mouth, forgetting one of the cardinal rules of physics.

“Spit with the wind, you dunderhead!” roared the passenger seated next to him. Augie apologized profusely and the passenger, a portly dandy from the East, frantically dabbed at the spreading brown stain on his collar with an expensive silk handkerchief. The dandy’s traveling partner, who was even dandier than his friend—which was no small feat—needled Augie about his sartorial choices.

“Where in tarnation did you get that suit?” he asked with a wrinkled nose. “It smells like someone had been buried in it. And those boots, my olfactorily offensive friend, are just about the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.”

The preacher, suppressing an urge to strangle the dandy with his own ascot, swallowed his anger and tried to smile.

His journey had gotten off to a rocky start, but it turned out his troubles were just beginning. The wheel of the coach came loose, forcing an unscheduled stop at Sage Junction. Purloined in a one-horse town with several hours to kill, the weary traveler nursed his wounded feelings at the saloon. There was something eerie about the place, though he’d never been there before. The atmosphere portended something calamitous; the air was musty with the suffocating stench of impending doom.

As he stood with his belly to the bar, trying to get the barkeep’s attention, a large hand grabbed him firmly by the shoulder. He jumped, quickly composed himself, and turned around. Gathered around him were a group of rugged men with the gleam of revenge in their bloodshot eyes.

“Jonathan Andrew Kipp?” asked the leader of the group.

“Yes?” replied the preacher.

“We’re the local vigilance committee, and we’re placing you under arrest.”

His thoughts immediately returned to the two dandies in the stagecoach. Had they gone to the sheriff to lodge a complaint? Was he being sued for damages caused by wayward tobacco juice? These questions, and a million others, raced through his mind as the mob pinioned his arms and dragged him out of the saloon, to the hill where the gallows had been erected.

* * *

“The Camas Creek Killer is dead!” proclaimed Brownie, the leader of the vigilantes, after marching into the saloon, with just about half the village population in tow. The saloon patrons hoisted their glasses in unison and cheered.

“He went without a fight?” asked the barkeep. “Did he have any last words?”

Brownie laughed.

“He tried to convince us that we had the wrong man, that his name was Augie Kauffmann and the worst thing he’d ever done was pass off some bogus greenbacks up in Big Hole country,” he replied. “But it was Kipp, alright. Those boots were a dead giveaway.”

“I tell you, Brownie, that dirty snake had some nerve showing his face around here after all these years, thinking we’d forgotten about those poor folks he slaughtered,” said the barkeep. The leader of the vigilance committee nodded.

“He had even more nerve,” said Brownie, “wearing those boots that he made from the skin of Rufus Huckabee.”

About the author

Marlin Bressi is the author of four nonfiction books, including Hairy Men in Caves: True Stories of America's Most Colorful Hermits (Sunbury Press, 2015) and Pennsylvania Oddities (Sunbury Press, 2018). His fiction has appeared in Suspense Magazine, Capsule Stories, Multiplicity Magazine, 365 Tomorrows and other publications.

About the illustrator

Ann van der Giessen is an author and artist living in Wales. Her work has appeared in several publications both online and in print. She is the author of four poetry books under the pseudonym Juliette van der Molen. You can connect with her via Twitter @ann_vdGiessen, Instagram @ann.vandergiessen or through her website at www.JulietteWrites.com.