by John Shirley
“We’re short men for the bank job, ain’t we?” said Briggs. “Buster didn’t look too good back at the camp. Sweeney’s dead. Bettiger’s dead.”
“As to that—I have me a notion. . . .”
* * *
* * *
It was in sight of midnight when two exhausted cowboys, on two exhausted horses, rode into Freeman from the eastern road. Seth and Franklin had struggled through seemingly endless swampy ground and muddy streams before finding a trail that led them to the east–west road into Freeman.
“I suppose we should find the town’s law and tell them what happened,” Franklin said as they trotted their mounts through the outskirts of town. “I shot a man off his horse. And we come upon Hannibal Fisher. They’ll want to know. Someone will want to go out there and look for Fisher and pick up that body.”
“Be better to report it in Prairie Fire,” Seth said. “They might hold me up here and could be that Josette’s gone back home. I need to be free to move around. But if you want to do it, I can’t stop you.”
“We can wait. Sweeney can wait, too. We’ll report it to Marshal Coggins.”
Seth’s left arm was aching, but the bullet had passed clean through, and when he touched the skin close to the wound, he didn’t feel the telltale hotness of infection.
“We’ll never find a doc for that arm of yours this time of night,” said Franklin.
“There’s a big party still going on—you hear it? If we find a doc, he’ll be drunk! My arm’s not so bad. It’s Josette I’m here for.”
“Hate to say it, Seth, but by now, she’s married and, well, Heywood’s got her alone somewhere.”
Seth wasn’t so sure. “Wouldn’t be easy to get her married, it being night and with all these goings-on. But it could happen in the morning. And I don’t know how to find her. I’m not even sure she’ll want me to come get her.”
“You really think she’d choose him over you—I mean, without feeling forced into it?” Franklin snorted. “Heywood Kelmer? That strutting rooster?”
“A woman has got to be practical. How is marrying me practical? Maybe what she said about wanting to keep me safe was . . .” He shrugged.
“You think it was just an excuse?”
Franklin was putting Seth’s innermost fears into words. It made him feel sick to hear it aloud. “I sure don’t know, Franklin.”
They reached the noisy square and rode around the edges of the crowd, looking for Josette but not truly expecting to find her here. Then they went on to the courthouse. It was closed and locked. No one answered Seth’s knock.
“Seth—you want to keep looking, you can do it. But I’ll have to be afoot. I got to find a place to stable my horse before he folds up under me. He’s like to founder.”
Seth shrugged. He was so tired, it was hard to think. “We can’t find her this way. Let’s see if we can get a pint of whiskey—mostly for my wound. But I believe I’ll have a pull on it. We passed a livery back there; I saw the stableman watching the party from his loft window.”
They returned to the stable and made a deal with the gruff, half-drunk stableman. The stalls were full, but there was room out back, with water and grass, and they were permitted, for an extra dollar, to stretch out near their horses.
Sitting on a pile of hay with his back to the stable wall, Seth tended his wound and decided to have another look for Josette. Franklin was already asleep, but Seth could get up and start walking about, asking folks if they’d seen her.
But his eyes were heavy. He’d lost some blood and . . . he was dead weary. Wouldn’t hurt to close his eyes for a few minutes before setting out.
He was asleep before he knew it.
* * *
* * *
Gaines almost didn’t make it here,” said Feathers Martin. Fisher, Cletus Spence, Feathers, and Briggs were standing at the foot of the bed—a big four-poster that was usually a kind of workshop for a soiled dove. They were looking at the delirious Buster Gaines. It was a hot day, and the room stank from sickness and sweat. “Seems he couldn’t find a doctor in Freeman, so he went to a barber.”
“When I was a boy,” Briggs remarked nostalgically, “barbers had two jobs. They cut hair, and they dug rifle balls out of folks. Sewed up the hole, too. Leastways that’s how it was in Kentucky.”
“This barber had a bad cough, and he carved Buster up some, getting at that bullet,” Feathers went on. “That’s how Gaines told it. Didn’t burn the wound or nothin’. So’s it got infected, and when he rode in here, he was already burnin’ with fever. Hadn’t been that he rides with you, Fisher, I’d have turned him away.”
Gaines moaned and thrashed and opened his eyes but didn’t seem to see them. “Daddy said he’d whip the skin off you, Buster . . .” Gaines mumbled, closing his eyes again.
Fisher shook his head. Gaines wasn’t going to be much use. “Feathers, let’s have a drink and a talk.”
The four men trooped to the stairs and down to the saloon, where Cindy poured them out drinks without having to be asked. There was no one in the saloon except a working girl at the bar and Diamond, sitting in one of the chairs against the wall, playing solitaire on a small tabletop, his chest bare except for bandages around his pellet wounds. The whore, Fisher noted, was three sheets to the wind, her head drooping over her drink, her elbows on the bar. Her bright blond sausage curls, gaily dyed, were beginning to lose their shape; she wore a patchy bare-shouldered pink dance hall frock, and in her right hand was the smoking stub of a cigar. Her name was Rosie, Fisher knew, and Gaines was in her bed. Cindy was keeping her in free drinks.
“Hey, boys, who’s lonely?” Rosie asked, slurring her words, as they took up their drinks. “I can work a bunk. Done it more’n once. How about you, Smiley?”
“A leetle later, I’ll take you up on that, Rosie,” Briggs said, raising his glass to her.
“Feathers,” Fisher said, toying with his glass, “we’re short on men. And you said you weren’t making ends meet.”
“These women and my guards, they eat me out of house and home,” Feathers groused. He pushed the whiskey aside. “Cindy, get me the cold beer.”
She nodded and opened the trapdoor as Feathers went on. “And we’re just not getting much trade in here lately. Word’s getting around, and the fellers are spooked that the law will come. I ain’t quite down to the blanket, but I’m getting there.”
Fisher suspected that Feathers had a good deal stashed away somewhere. But that was a thought for later. “Well, now, seems like you need to get the gold flowing. Maybe get you a bag of bank cash and use it to fix this place up. Make it more respectable. Fact is, I need another man for the bank. Good-sized bank—only bank in Prairie Fire, and there’s no other for a day’s ride.”
“That’s a notion,” Feathers said, taking his cold beer from Cindy. He drank half of it off in one great gulp, wiped his beard with the back of his hand, and said, “I was thinking on something along them lines but figured to do it on my own.”
“Safer to ride with us where we can watch your back. There’s a guard at the bank and a marshal across the street.”
“Haven’t robbed nobody in years.”
“Then you’re getting rusty!” Fisher said, winking at him. “You need to show you’ve still got the goods, Feathers!”
“Oh, hell, if I wanted to, I could do it. What’s the split?”
“We’re cutting it equal,” Fisher said, though he had no intention of sharing the split equally.
“Why—shore. It gets powerful dull out here. Is Curt coming? He’s some chewed up himself.”
“I am certainly coming!” Diamond called, smacking a card down onto the table. “Ain’t but scratched.”
“How about me?” Cletus demanded. “Kin I come?”
“I do have a use for you,” Fisher said, slapping Cletus on the shoulder.
&nbs
p; “I guess I can get Attic Bird to watch the shop,” Feathers said. “When’s this little ball gonna open, Hannibal?”
“A few days, maybe,” said Fisher. “What say we pay Cindy to slip into Prairie Fire. I don’t expect she’s known there. She can finish the sizing up that Sweeney started and meet us at the camp.”
“I guess that’d be okay,” said Feathers.
Smiley Briggs looked at the ceiling. “I want to stay some tomorrow, see if Buster’s going to get any better.”
Feathers snorted. “He’s got that fast-moving sickness that gets deep in a man. He’ll be in the bone orchard in a day or two—I’ll bet ten dollars on it right now!”
“I’ll take that bet!” said Briggs. “Now, I need me another drink . . . and then I’m gonna take Rosie to the bunkroom while she can still get there.”
* * *
* * *
Josette used every penny she had for the stagecoach trip, and she was beginning to wish she’d ridden the roan after all. She’d never traveled in a stagecoach before—her father didn’t hold with any sort of travel unless absolutely needed—and she was amazed at how much dust came in the open windows, and how the metal-shod wheels seemed to find every hole and rock in the road to bounce on, jarring her over and over.
The two other passengers were not pleasant company. Josette sat facing the front of the coach; on her left, overshadowing her and pressing her into a corner with his bulk, was a great fetid bull of a man all in buckskin who had barely fit through the door. He had dozed for most of the journey thus far, his long greasy black hair and mustaches waggling, his bristly chin bouncing on his chest with the jolting of the stagecoach.
Across from Josette was a middle-aged woman with a long, sallow face; she was dressed all in black. She seemed newly widowed, and she’d sat staring at her wringing hands for the entire two hours they’d already spent in this dust-choked stagecoach. The widow had murmured, “Good day to you,” on stepping into the coach and had been unapproachably silent ever since, looking like she might at any moment burst into tears. Josette’s heart went out to the woman, but she found her presence oppressive, for it was a dark reminder that she might herself be a widow now. It was true she had not been married to Seth to the letter of the law, but she had felt married all the same. And if Fisher had caught up to Seth . . .
The stagecoach hit a particularly grievous bump, and the big man in buckskin woke up, blinking around. “Still here,” he muttered. “Still here.” He dug a flask from a coat pocket and swigged, then offered it to Josette with a yellow grin. “Wet your whistle?” She only shook her head.
“What’s your name, little chickabiddy?” the big man in buckskin asked, leaning closer to Josette.
Completely unwilling to engage in such familiarities with this man, Josette tried changing the subject. “Do you find your living in the mountains?”
“Oh, aye, yep,” he grunted. “Furs!” Then he bobbed his thick eyebrows at her. “Got me a nice, private cabin up there! Mebbe you’d like to see it!”
She ignored the invitation. “You are far from the mountains here.”
“Weary of the High Lonely! Decided I wanted to see Topeka. Heard it was wild. ’Twas not! Sheriff didn’t like me. The girls, now—they liked me!” Another leer.
Josette sighed at that and looked pointedly away.
The coach bounced again, and more dust swirled in, making Josette cough. To avoid the big man’s steady gaze, she looked out the window, mildly curious at hearing horses riding up behind the coach. It occurred to her then that the riders might be her father and Heywood, come to reclaim her, and she cringed inwardly.
She stuck her head out a little, just enough to peer back at the riders, and caught a glimpse of one of them. . . .
“Seth!” she blurted. Then she shouted it. “Seth!”
But he didn’t seem to hear her over the clatter of the stagecoach.
The coach was tracking right down the middle of the road, and the riders came up on their right to pass it. Looking grim, Seth had his eyes fixed on the road ahead and rode quickly past.
“Seth!” she called out with everything she had. “Seth Coe!”
Now he turned his head, and he saw her, his face lighting up with surprise and wonder. “Josette!”
Josette shouted up at the driver, “Stop! Stop the coach, driver!”
There was no response.
“Stop!”
The stagecoach didn’t slow a whit.
The widow was staring at her aghast. Josette didn’t care. “Stop, driver, or I’ll throw myself out the door!” she shouted.
It seemed to her the coach sped up a touch then. But Seth was riding up close to the lead horses, flicking his lasso and catching one about the neck. Winding the rope at his end around the saddle horn, he pulled back hard on his horse’s reins so it dug in its hooves. The lead horse of the stagecoach team slowed, struggling with the rope.
“Stop, damn you!” Seth shouted.
Josette recognized Franklin’s voice shouting something she couldn’t quite make out and then the coach’s brakes squealed; she had to brace herself, and she could smell a little smoke from the friction of wood on wood as the stagecoach ground to a halt.
“Put that damn shotgun down. This ain’t a robbery, you chucklehead!” Franklin bellowed as Josette climbed out of the stagecoach and ran to Seth.
He slid off his horse, his eyes full of questions, but Josette didn’t give him a chance to ask them.
She simply threw herself into his arms.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Shaking her head in wonder, Daisy poured a cordial for Josette, and they sat across the wooden table near the kitchen stove. “And there he was, riding past you, thinking you were married up to Heywood back in Freeman!”
“Daisy—he was looking for me all that morning in Freeman! And all the time, I was out on a little farm to the edge of town, waiting for the stagecoach. It comes right by there. I was scarce a mile from him—thinking he might be dead, and him thinking I’d left him for Heywood!”
“Freeman is a tolerably sizable town,” Daisy said, pouring herself a cordial. “Easy to miss someone. You two must’ve had a lot to say to each other. He had reason to think you left him for Heywood!”
“I had to do some explaining. But he was so glad we found each other again, he didn’t say much besides asking me for a kiss. He settled up with the driver, and we rode up top with all the bags. Franklin led Seth’s horse, and we just took our ease on those bags, talking all the way to Prairie Fire.”
“Did Doc Twilley see to his arm?”
“Yes, when we came in yesterday. It seems he’ll be all right. I suppose it hurts him some, but you know how men are!”
“Oh, I do. They will not tell us! Why, one time Sol fractured his wrist and didn’t tell me for two days!”
Josette chuckled at that, but she knew women hid their pain, too. She thought of her mama.
She sipped her cherry cordial, thick, sweet, and with just a little kick to it. They were waiting for the men to come back. Seth had gone into Prairie Fire to see if the stableman would take Sweeney’s horse, and perhaps thirty dollars, to make up for the dead gelding, and Sol was out in the fields.
“Josette—you may as well get married in Prairie Fire. Your father’s here in town, sure, but word is getting around he was working with outlaws and all but kidnapped you. You’ve got Judge Twilley on your side and the marshal, too. If I was you, I’d get married in the wink of an eye. Maybe tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow!”
“Now, listen—we can hitch up Goliath to the buckboard. You can ride into town and make all the arrangements. Seth’s not been gone long—he’s got business with the marshal and Sheriff Dawson and the stableman. He’ll be around when you get there. Just take him by the ear and drag him to the city hall, fix up the papers and the time for marrying.
Get it done soon and there’ll be no more interference from your father.”
“Daisy! When did you hatch this plan?” Josette laughed, delighted.
“Just this minute. Are you willing?”
“All except for the part about taking him by the ear.”
“Oh, I was joshing. He’ll come along, honey, if you so much as crook your little finger at him.” After a moment, she added, “Maybe you should wait for Sol; he can go in with you. After all you’ve been through . . .”
Josette stood up. “I’ll be fine! Seth left his Winchester here—I’ll take it along. I can shoot, too, you know.”
* * *
* * *
Fisher and his men were back at the same camp on Black Creek. Gaines would not be coming with them to Prairie Fire. They’d seen Whistler dragging Buster’s body behind a horse out to the bone orchard when they’d set out from Buffalo Junction that morning.
The remaining men had cursed Fisher every way from Sunday when he’d dragged them from their beds at ten in the morning. Fisher needed them ready, close to Prairie Fire; that way, when Cindy returned with her report, they could hit the bank, supposing the report was favorable.
These complexities were lost on men with aching heads, owing to the oh-be-joyful they’d imbibed the night before, but Fisher had enticed them into their saddles with vivid descriptions of the riches that would come if they followed his plan. And besides, they could take turns napping in camp.
As it happened, they were all snoring—except Fisher, who was standing watch—when Cindy came riding up on her paint. She looked almost ladylike, wearing a riding habit and a feathered hat.