by Carl Dane
Apaches are nomads by custom. They can erect surprisingly comfortable buffalo-skin teepees in a matter of minutes and some can construct domed wickiups in a couple of hours. So moving around some rocks and placing some logs that at a casual glance appear like light artillery emplacements – especially to men who have just emerged from twilight into blinding sunshine and heard blasts of undetermined origin – isn’t much of a challenge.
The odds were in our favor now, even without the mocked-up guns. Even if there were a hundred pursuers, we had seven armed Apaches, four experienced gunfighters, enough guns, ammunition and dynamite to start a mining company and an army, and perhaps our most formidable weapon: a newly freed woman with revenge on her mind and the apparent ability to exact it.
Moreover, they had to come out in the open to meet us, and we had some cover from which to shoot.
But we also had a wounded man who could die without medical attention. We couldn’t wait there forever.
But neither could the outlaws, because they’d suffocate in the gassy passage.
One of the canyon dwellers, a lanky fellow with long, greasy hair, was the last to retreat to the opening. He had a strategy in mind: take a gulp of air, duck back where he couldn’t be seen, and fire.
We could see him outlined in the gloom as he brought a rifle to his shoulder.
Miller raised a finger and shouted. “I wouldn’t…”
He stopped and looked at me.
“Should I tell them?”
Munro butted in.
“Why the hell should we…”
And then the rifle went off, spitting fire in the gloom, and there was a whoosh and the tunnel lit up with a harsh blue light.
Chapter 42
“I don’t think that was enough of an explosion to kill anybody,” Miller said. “Gave them a pretty good sunburn though, I imagine.”
We’d tended to Carmody as best we could. Taza had torn some strips from his tunic and constructed bandages and a sling.
Carmody came to a few times and mumbled something about Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant and then drifted off again. We tied him to his horse and headed for Gray Springs, the nearest town with a doctor. Miller knew the way.
“What was that stuff? Harbold asked.
“Gas from swamp,” Taza said. “Like swamp farting.”
“That’s exactly right,” Miller said. “It’s formed by decomposing matter, and you find that in a swamp and in your guts. Ben Franklin wrote about it. Called it ‘flammable air.’ I was a mining engineer and it’s common, though I never saw a concentration like that.”
“It smells like shit,” Lydia said.
Miller actually smiled. For the first time I’d seen, ever.
“Methane itself doesn’t smell. It’s the rotting stuff that produces it that stinks.”
“And scares big war hero,” Taza said.
Of course, that was directed at me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “You’re the one who gave me that ‘bad medicine’ excuse because you were afraid of the place.”
“Not afraid. But not stupid, either. Apache is smart enough to not go where air stinks and blows up.”
We rode for a while in silence.
“Most Apache, anyway. I get worried and come in to save you, that show I have bigger heart than brain. I saw end of fight. Flying mountain man pretty quick for man his size.”
More silence.
“Old man with voice like goose move like young warrior. I read a lot of books written in English and learn word for old man like that, but I forget.”
“Spry,” I said.
Miller looked back at me.
“I don’t like that word.”
“Neither do I,” Munro said.
“Anyway,” Taza said, “you all very good fighters. When I saw I did not have to save, how do you say it – your sorry asses – I come back to stand by phony guns.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You are fine warrior.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it this time.
“It will be honor to kill you someday. But that is after you keep your promise. You remember promise you made to me to get me to do all this? Promise that make me breathe air that smell like back end of buffalo and play with sticks when I should be working?”
I assured him that I did and would take care of it as soon as possible.
No one spoke until we reached Gray Springs.
Chapter 43
The doctor told us that Carmody had lost a lot of blood and had a shattered rib where the bullet had lodged, but barring any infection or other complications he would be back on his feet in a week or two, although the arm could take months to heal.
Carmody was drifting in and out the first night when Munro said he was leaving to take Lydia back to Austin the next day. Harbold would go with them.
Carmody waved weakly and in a creaky voice asked Lydia to say hello to President Grant for him.
“I get a lot of that,” she shrugged.
Munro sent a telegram to Judge Gates Davis to let him know that Lydia was safe and unharmed, and at my request he cabled Elmira to let her know that I was safe and Carmody, while injured, would recover, and I would be along in a couple of days.
I asked Miller if there was anyone who should be notified, but he shook me off.
“The kid who cleans up for me has been handling the shop and I told him I had to leave on a family emergency,” he said. “Let’s leave it at that.”
Munro and Lydia slept late the next morning.
They slept late together. Harbold spotted them coming out of the same hotel room.
“That is a very strange romance,” Harbold told me as Munro and Lydia’s thunderous bass voices rumbled a duet as they walked down the street.
“You mean a May-December-kind-of-strange romance?” I asked.
“No, I mean the-two-scariest-people-in-the-world-somehow-find-each-other type of romance.”
He shook his head for a full minute.
There would be some housekeeping to take care of over the next few days and weeks. Munro needed the horses back, so I’d have to ride to Austin with my own horse and the cavalry mounts and return home.
We’d also have to sort out whether we wanted to return to the Canyon of the Long Shadows and finish up the job. It appeared there was substantial reward money to be collected, and when Carmody and I perused some more wanted posters, we thought we might find a few more golden eggs in that basket of thieves and killers.
Also, justice seemed to dictate that we go back and clean up the mess. But I was in no hurry; each experience with white-hot flying lead trying to embed itself in my brain increases my appreciation of being alive and bolsters my determination to stay that way.
Then, there was the problem of Gillis and Weed. Munro had said that Davis had promised to make the problem go away but wasn’t too clear on the precise mechanism.
I didn’t worry about it until two days later. I’d stayed by Carmody’s bedside as he regained his senses, what senses he possessed, anyway, and slept in the chair beside his bed as he moaned an accompaniment to his nightmares about, from what I could understand of his mumblings, exploding farts and the president’s wife.
I took walks, ate a lot, and on a whim stopped by the local bank to have a talk about the evils of paper currency in general and Greenbacks in specific.
I left early on Friday. Miller would stay another couple days and travel back to Shadow Valley with Carmody when the doctor said it was safe.
I took my time getting back. I was anxious to see Elmira and sleep in my own bed – her bed, actually – but I enjoyed the traveling, too. There’s some beautiful country to the northwest of my adopted home.
I’m not an outdoorsman like Carmody. I have a complicated relationship with nature: I appreciate its beauty but at the same time am no fan of bugs, snakes, heat, cold, and the exquisite variety of nature’s booby traps – vines, chuckholes, and the like – designed by some higher powe
r to make you fall down and hurt important and painful parts of your body.
It was about an hour from sunset when I got off the trail near the delta and headed into town. It was quiet for a Friday night.
I wanted a beer, a bath, and a bed, in that order.
The Spoon seemed subdued.
And so, oddly, did Elmira.
She smiled, but it was tentative. And when I kissed her, she kissed back but it was short and perfunctory.
I asked her what was wrong. She said nothing was wrong; she was just unnerved by the danger I’d faced and the fact that Carmody had been injured.
But she told me I had done a good thing, even though she seemed inexplicably uncertain about it.
And she also told me that Judge Gates Davis was here, in her back office, to thank me personally.
That was nice, I supposed. A beer would have been better, but that could wait. I was bone-tired as I followed her in to meet the judge and get it over with.
Judge Davis was seated at her desk with his fingers interlaced and an expression that said he was waiting a second to make up his mind about me. He raised a hand and beckoned for me to come forward, wagging all four fingers, and then made a palm-up gesture toward the chair he wanted me to occupy.
I sat down.
From behind me I heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle cocking, and an oily voice told me to raise my hands.
I did, and a hand slithering in from behind snatched my revolver out of the holster.
Then Jefferson Gillis came through the door and sat on the edge of the desk.
He smiled at me.
Chapter 44
People who’ve never been knocked unconscious don’t understand the process.
You hardly ever remember the blow that put you out. Sometimes, you might not remember anything for the minute before having your lights turned off, or the hour, or even the whole day. If you’ve lost a lot of memory, some part of it usually comes back to you, but never the moment of the blow.
When I woke up in the cot in my own cell, I didn’t remember what happened but was able to put two and two together. There was a long and painful bruise on the back of my head and a cut at the top of the crease. The bruise, I surmised, came from a gun barrel and the cut from the sight digging into my scalp as the barrel slid across. When I felt the wound, my hand came away covered with brown, clotted blood.
It takes about an hour for blood to turn that color.
I sat upright and the room began to spin, so I lay back and turned on my side to get an idea of what was going on.
A kid with a droopy lower lip and dull dark eyes was sitting at my desk. Wordlessly, without changing expression, he arose and walked out of the room, not bothering to shut the door.
I was able to stand up by the time he reappeared with Gillis, Davis, and two other men.
Droopy and the strangers were obviously hired muscle.
Droopy didn’t worry me too much, nor did the oaf who entered after him. He was a doughy man with a two-day growth of beard and a paunch and a body odor that could etch glass. Stinky looked dirty; even the whites of his eyes looked like they needed a cleaning. I pegged him and Droopy as exemplars of the species of losers who realized they couldn’t handle the tedium and labor of a cattle drive and now postured as tough guys while scraping for a few dollars here and there, working in the margins of the outlaw world.
But there was one other man. He looked like the real article.
I recognized him.
In those dime novels you read about lawmen who scour their wanted posters and through preposterous coincidence just happen to bump into the perpetrator next week.
That sort of coincidence never happens. Until it does.
Droopy and Stinky instinctively edged aside as Ben Tremaine stepped between them.
Chapter 45
There’d probably never been that big a crowd in my office before.
Judge Gates Davis, who seems to like other people’s desks, took a seat at mine, though he had to turn his chair 90 degrees to face me. It wasn’t easy for him; he probably weighed 280 pounds.
Gillis, who seemed to like leaning on desks, rested the considerable mass of his hip on the corner, with portions of it dangling below the edge. It looked uncomfortable digging into him like that, but he apparently liked the posture.
Percival Weed stood in the corner, shifting his weight from foot to foot and blinking a lot. He’d taken off the robe and wore a suit that had probably looked pretty sharp a week ago. Now it had turned into rumpled leaves of black cabbage.
Droopy and Stinky stood on either side of the room and Tremaine planted himself behind Judge Davis.
I heard the wail coming toward us. It grew in volume, an unceasing howl of despair, until it hovered outside the door.
The door opened and Elmira walked in, wailing some more.
She lunged toward the cell door and nobody stopped her, and then she realized there wasn’t much she could do when she got there, so she leaned her head against the bars and decided to keep wailing.
“I didn’t want to,” she said, and then tried to catch her breath. Wailing takes it out of a person.
Gillis heaved himself off the edge of my desk and grabbed her by the shoulder.
“Get out,” he said, and gave her a shove toward the door.
“I believed you,” Elmira said to Gillis, and panted for a moment.
Gillis ignored her, so she turned to me.
“He told me he cared, and I believed him.”
I leaned my arms against the bars and looked at the floor. I wasn’t angry. Not at her, anyway. At least not too angry at her.
“Those words,” I said, “have caused more misery throughout history than almost anything else every spoken. ‘He told me he cared.’ How could you fall for that? That’s the second-biggest lie in history.”
Elmira took a deep breath and told me what I knew was coming.
“He said what he was doing was for your own good.”
“And that’s the first-biggest lie in history.”
Elmira pulled herself up to the bars and began whispering, as though the crew five feet away somehow wouldn’t be able to hear.
“Mr. Gillis said you had to be arrested. And he said that if they did it the normal way, you might fight back and you’d be killed. So I made sure nothing happened. They promised that you’d be all right and that the system would be fair.”
I looked straight at her and her face twisted back into a mask of misery and she let loose with a cry of primal anguish. I actually felt badly for her. She was no kid and no dummy. She’d survived in a tough world and a tougher business and shown more than her share of resilience and smarts.
And she was not the first woman or man to fall victim to a smooth talker who says one thing and does another. In her case, it was a politician with a broad Southern accent who assured her that “ahhh care ‘bout you,” but wasn’t above shoving her around a bit.
Which he did, again. Gillis grabbed a handful of her dress and pushed her hard against the bars.
“Shut up,” he said.
There are plenty more of his type. The society lady who raises money for charity and gets her name in the paper for her effort but fires the maid for missing a morsel of dirt on the floor. The big people of the world who loudly proclaim their support for the little people of the world but wouldn’t be caught dead actually interacting with one of them, except maybe to hire one to shine their shoes.
Elmira was gullible. But honest.
There were only two other honest people in the room.
I like to think I was one of them. Tremaine was the other. We were both in the business of killing and knew it and admitted it and didn’t tell anyone it was for their own good.
Tremaine wanted me dead after he’d tortured some information out of me, and he wanted to be paid well at the end of the deal, and that’s the straightforward reason why he was here.
I wanted Tremaine dead because I wanted to stay alive, but als
o because I wanted to win, and I also wanted the rest of them dead – if it became convenient and I could get away with it – because I hated them and their kind.
Tremaine was following my thoughts, or maybe it just seemed that way, because he nodded.
He pulled Gillis’s hand from Elmira and slowly turned her toward the door, marching her out at a methodical and measured pace.
When he shut the door behind her, he turned and told me that things didn’t look too good for me.
Chapter 46
“The kid died,” Davis said.
I knew he expected me to ask what kid, but I didn’t want to let him get too comfortable. You play a man’s game by his rules and he generally thinks straight. I needed to throw him off-track.
“The kid died,” Davis said again, tapping an index finger on my desk. “The one you beat so badly when Gillis came to talk with you. He died a couple days later of his injuries.”
“You mean Bucktooth,” I said. “I doubt that he’s dead, and if he is, you killed him.”
I was going to mention that it was really Carmody who scrambled the kid’s eggs but didn’t want to seem like I was passing the buck.
“It was you,” Davis said. “He came to see you and you instigated violence and he wound up dead. You’re just as guilty no matter who did what. That’s murder.”
Percival Weed cleared his throat and looked uneasy.
“Sir, I’m sure you meant to add that a murder charge is not always the case when –”
Davis cut him off as though he hadn’t heard.
“And as I am a real judge, as you like to say, I can hold court right here.”
Gillis settled himself back on the corner of the desk.
“And as a member of the governing body of this town,” Gillis said, “I can appoint Tremaine as marshal and he can see that the legally determined sentence is carried out.”
Weed cleared his throat again and Davis silenced him with a glare.
Davis leaned back in my chair and touched the fingertips of both hands in front of his chest. He was a big man, fat but broad-shouldered, with longish dark hair and an expression that betrayed the self-assured zeal of a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He carried himself in a way that was reminiscent of eras gone by, both in his mannerisms and his dress.