THE BELLS OF AUTUMN
A Western Novel
The Bells of Autumn
Based on the novel by James Hufferd
Contact James Clois Smith Jr., Sunstone Press (505)988-4418
Log Line: A wealthy bully dominates and militarizes a town, terrorizing Indian sympathizers, and provokes a last unlikely battle with reservation Indians in 1903 Wyoming. Younger Indians and an aging ex-sheriff resist.
Act I
On New Years Day, 1903, Daniel, an adolescent, and Old Chessler, his adoptive pa, enjoy a rare feast in the drafty pioneer dugout they are forced to inhabit outside Newcastle, the wind, cold, and snow penetrating. Daniel is sent to bring in more wood, fighting the wind.
Cut to
Daniel, like Chessler, generally shunned for having a sympathetic attitude toward Indians, is privileged to sit with Penny, the smart and beautiful granddaughter of the majority of the town’s owner and patron Martin at the high hilltop town school.
Fade to
Flashback, with narration, to Old Chessler’s early life as son of the store keeper at Fort Laramie, before the Indian wars, slaughter of the buffalo, and taking of the land, a position young Martin as a youth loses for selling whisky to Indians, whom he obsessively hates. Chessler, as a motherless boy at the fort, sometimes goes and stays with his young friends’ families, encamped Indians, later on loses his young wife and child in a renegade raid and works as a contract hauler.
Cut to
[Still in flashback:] Bitter and cunning, Martin starts a Wyoming Volunteer Regiment of teamsters between forts, modeled after the earlier Colorado Volunteer Regiment, at the start of the Great Sioux War, to wipe out innocents. Chessler, in effect drafted into it, sabotages an attack he is sent on by loosening bolts on a cannon cart.
Fade to
Martin meets around with his early 20th-century Newcastle cronies, whom Chessler aside refers to as the “loungers”, to run the town as a shadow government, resurrecting early in 1903 Newcastle his old Wyoming Volunteer Regiment. He seeks recruits, warning of attacks coming from reservation Indians on recurrent hunting trips.
Martin’s “loungers” avoid older ex-sheriff Johnny Owens’s drinking and entertainment establishment, the House of Blazes, having installed the near-legendary honest-guy gunman as sheriff to clean up a tough town, then gotten him defeated by younger, more tractable Billy Miller. Martin and friends continue to trumpet preparedness to counter the alleged Indian threat.
Cut to
Major John Brennan, Superintendent at Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation two-hundred miles away sits, in uniform, in his makeshift office in the midst of the bleak site and receives cordially Eagle Feather/ Charlie Smith, a young Carlisle-educated half-breed, who solicits permission for a fall hunting excursion.
Flashback to a run-in Major Brennan had years before with a young Martin in early Rapid City seeking lodging at his makeshift hostelry. Brennan, smelling a rat, has his friend, a rolicking giant bar keeper nearby, dress as an Indian and deposit the vainglorious bigot in a creek.
Act II
Old Chessler is at home alone dressing a serious leg wound probably the result of an infected cat scratch. Daniel brings word that their close friends John and Luella Church have been murdered at their rural home and their hand, known as Diamond Slim Clifton, arrested. Chessler implies that he doubts Clifton is responsible, noting the Churches rather frequently harbored traveling Indians.
Flashback to Daniel, Old Chessler, and their dog Red in their buggy on the way over to their water well post east of the town, surreptitiously to recover brick-by-brick the previously-undiscovered stash of the jettisoned stolen gold, stopping by the Churches’ for a friendly visit, as they did often.
Cut to
Ex-sheriff Johnny Owens, keeping his own counsel, also suspects Clifton wasn’t at the bottom of the murder. Bobby Gammage, the newspaper editor, is warned not to interview the suspect in jail.
Fade to
Old Chessler recalls his first introduction to Johnny Owens [flashback], then running a roadhouse near Fort Laramie. Chessler, much younger, has hired on to drive a payroll stage north from that point, and Johnny, having gotten wind the stage was going to be robbed, simultaneously with a gold-transport stage coming south from Deadwood, replaces the military man posted to guard it and in effect foils both robberies, although the gold under transport disappeared as word travels of his dreaded coming before he meets it on the road.
Cut to
Young Sheriff Billy Martin and his growing family are shown squeezed into restricted quarters sharing space with the county jail.
Fade to
Martin and the “loungers” meet and decide to renege on their deal to spring Clifton, opting to expend him so he won’t talk. They also discuss what might be done about another Indian-lover, Chessler.
Cut to
Old Chessler worries about his steadily-worsening wound, and Daniel finally asks him about it and why he doesn’t go to the hospital for help. He responds that he did, but received no attention.
Cut to
Daniel reluctantly discloses to Penny at school his worry over his pa’s wound.
Fade to
Iris, Penny’s aunt and a nurse, the widow of Martin’s upright son whom he’d clandestinely had murdered, alerted by Penny, begins visits very quietly at night to dress and clean the pariah’s wound to promote healing.
Cut
Sheriff Miller proudly brings home word that TR, the president, is coming to Newcastle for a visit and speech.
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Old Chessler, honoring his special friendship with the Churches, tries to go to the jail to visit Clifton and ask some questions, but arrives just in time to see him loaded up, bound, to be temporarily transferred across to Edgemont, South Dakota until after the presidential visit. Martin observes the same from a distance.
Fade to
Martin rides around on horseback at night drunk to try to rally the town menfolk to join the Wyoming Volunteer Regiment in order to protect the town of Newcastle and their families.
Act III
TR visits, speaking to the festive, adulating, biggest crowd in Newcastle’s short history, with Sheriff Billy Martin up on the stage beside him. Town father Martin is conspicuously absent, eliciting a few murmurs. Chessler and Daniel are in the crowd.
Cut to
Martin, just before the event, shows up at Iris’s apartment door drunk and, as he often secretly does, forcing her into impotent sex, humiliating her and keeping her from attending as she and Penny had planned. Penny, not knowing what happened, is devastated. Iris partly blames herself.
Fade to
Just as TR’s train pulls out at sundown and the crowd disperses, an angry mob converges on the county jail, to which Diamond Slim Clifton has been quietly returned. The mob demands he be turned over to them. Both the sheriff and ex-sheriff Owens face the mob and try to talk them down. Somehow, the bolted back door of the jail swings open, and Clifton bolts out into the dark, running into a field of brush across the street with the mob in hot pursuit. They grab and hang him from the rail trestle, dropping him with such a jerk his head pops off and his body thuds sickeningly onto hard ground below. No one is arrested, and Gammage, the news editor, is intimidated into not printing an account of the lynching to dampen the otherwise glorious day’s news.
Cut to
Newcastle’s expanded 4th of July parade features veterans and the Wyoming Volunteer Regiment’s call to prepare for a likely attack.
Cut
[Narrator’s voice:] The Chicago Opera Company is scheduled to perform a two-night stand of “Marriage of Figaro” at the resplendent new opera house championed by Martin to, in effect, spoil the success of Johnny Owens’s House of Blazes theatre. The only other venue in the state chosen for a performance of the acclaimed Company is the capital, Cheyenne.
The opera troupe arrives, and the tiny world-acclaimed diva, Chantelle Holiday, is given a joint room at the town’s boarding house with Margaret Downing, rough, big-hearted and oversized piano player at the hotel bar. The two unexpectedly become friends, and when Chantelle learns that Martin has had Margaret’s illegitimate newborn taken away to be raised by proper family, she jumps into action and shames and threatens Martin with boycott into restoring the child.
At the first night’s performance, which delights nearly everyone, Martin’s cronies, irate at Chantelle’s highhanded intervention, stand up together to pan the program for singing in “Eye-talian”. After the troupe has left, word filters back that a doctor down the line saved Chantelle’s life from poisoning that occurred most-likely in Newcastle.
Act IV
Iris is followed in one of her night visits to treat Chessler’s wound and taken away by Martin’s men. Then Chessler is threatened and has to pay on the spot an enormous fee (which he, surprisingly, can) to avoid paramilitary service he is morally unprepared to perform.
Fade to
A series of rather transparently staged attacks and incidents occur in and near Newcastle, blamed on Indians to fan the flames of apprehension and conviction. Johnny Owens openly (and in vain) tries to convince people it’s all a ruse.
Fade to
John Brennan and Eagle Feather share an awareness of national attitudes, especially since Little Bighorn, and the policy background of the Indians’ plight. Major Brennan, superintendent at the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, agonizes over the decision of whether to grant permission for the requested fall hunt into Wyoming, informed of how Martin is shaping opinion locally.
Fade to
The hunt begins, with Indians crossing the state line on horses and in wagons and looking around a bit as tourists, some killing cattle to revenge the whites’ killing all of their cattle.
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Sheriff Miller is pushed by Martin’s partisans to intervene, and the main body of Indians are confronted by Sheriff Miller and charged with game law violations. Eagle Feather/Charlie Smith refuses to be taken back to Newcastle, which has happened previously. Finding himself outmanned, the sheriff turns back toward Newcastle to recruit more deputies, and stops by at home for a change of clothes, unfortunately finding his wife away, gone shopping in Rapid City.
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On Billy Miller’s return with more men, Eagle Feather and a few of the other Indians still refuse arrest. A shot starts the “Battle of Lightning Creek”. Both Sheriff Miller and Eagle Feather are killed in the ensuing melee, the former slowly bleeding to death in a cabin across the road. Some of the Lakota flee eastward. The rest are overtaken by posses arriving from three directions and taken to Douglas, the seat of Converse County, where the actual battle occurred, to face murder charges.
Cut to
Old Chessler, the lowly church sexton, is to await a call from Douglas disclosing the results of the trial on the Indians, at Newcastle’s only telephone, in a little cabin in the west part of town, and then ring a church bell nearby – once for guilty, twice for acquittal, or three times for continued proceedings. The crowds in the bars downtown remain quiet throughout the evening to hear the signal, and Daniel waits nearby in the falling snow with his bicycle.
Everyone waits, on edge, until, late in the evening, Daniel heads off through the storm to find out what happened. He finds his pa lying on the ground in the swirling snow, having tumbled down the bell tower when a previously-sound wooden step inexplicably collapsed under him. Chessler, apparently not too badly injured, tells Daniel that the caller said the judge had acquitted the defendents because he couldn’t determine who had fired shots and who hadn’t, and sends him on to an old ruins of a church on a country hilltop with its bell intact to toll the signal.
Cut to
The startled and irate citizens in the saloons refuse to believe that the verdict could have been acquittal, reasoning that a third peal of the distant bell must have been covered up by the wind. They wait morosely through Sunday.
Fade to
Early on Monday morning, they wait en masse outside the news office for Gammage to distribute a news summary off the wire. In short order, Johnny Owens, cooking up and selling breakfast at his establishment, gets wind of a lynch mob being formed.
Cut to
Ex-sheriff Owens goes to speak with the interim appointed sheriff, Fred Coates, and gets him to send a posse to stop the Martin-inspired lynch mob, and then trails Martin himself southeast out of town.
Fade to
Chessler and Daniel, oblivious to the morning’s happenings, have gone out to their water spring post and treasure trove. Arriving and routinely checking under the floorboards of the old cabin, Chessler sees first that his prized buffalo gun is missing – meaning that someone is likewise aware of the gold stashed awaiting shipment, and onto them – a mortifying realization.
Old Chessler, pondering in shock inside the open doorframe, sees Martin approaching and taking a bead on him with his (Chessler’s) buffalo gun. Martin quickly fires point-blank – and misses. Then, reloading and taking aim again, while Chessler freezes, staggers drunkenly. A shot rings out, and Johnny Owens, on his prize horse, emerges from the road through a line of trees.
Having strafed Martin across the knuckles, he captures him easily and wraps him in a net to haul back to town. The two exchange terse charges and insults, and Owens says he knows all about Martin, and only his insanity might save him from hanging, opining that Iris will be put in charge of Martin’s extensive business interests, and informing that she has told him on his inquiry about Martin’s longtime abuse. He vows that Chessler and Daniel, as rightful finders of the gold dumped there decades ago, will be protected and helped in their enterprise.
Cut
The surviving Indians, set free, accompanied by relieved Pine Ridge superintendent, Major Brennan, cross the border back into South Dakota for the final time, troubled by the spirit of Eagle Feather. A stately brave accepts a cup of water from a little girl living in a farmhouse at the border, proud parents, Wyoming pioneer settlers, looking on.
END