“So you know who I am.”
Penelope glared some more as she said, “I knew something was wrong about you as soon as you came into Campos’s place with that Chinese whore.”
“She’s not . . . Never mind.” There were more important things to consider right now than defending Wing Sun’s honor. He gestured with the Colt and went on, “Stand up and move over there into that corner.”
With a surly pout on her face, Penelope followed his orders, keeping the bedspread wrapped around her as she did so.
“If you were a gentleman, you’d at least let me get dressed before you arrested me.”
“And if I was a fool, I’d give you a chance to get your hands on a weapon. I like you better the way you are right now, defenseless.”
Her chin jutted defiantly as she said, “You really think I’m defenseless?” She started to lower the bedspread.
“Let’s not have any of that,” John Henry said sharply. “Despite what you think, I was raised to be polite to ladies. And even to females who aren’t ladies.”
“You think you know so damned much,” she said.
“I know you’ve been passing bogus bills from here to Wichita,” John Henry said. “I know you’re working for Ignatius O’Reilly and that Clive Denton and Nick Prentice, if those are their real names, are part of the gang, too.”
A small frown that appeared genuinely puzzled appeared on her face as he spoke, but when he finished she burst out with a laugh.
“You’re even more ignorant about what’s going on here than I thought you were,” she said.
“Enlighten me, then,” John Henry told her. “Explain the whole thing to me.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. I’m just going to let you make a fool of yourself, Marshal Sixkiller!”
He wondered for a split second why her voice suddenly went up like that at the end, but then the answer burst on his brain and he twisted toward the door, which he had pushed on with his heel but it hadn’t closed all the way because he had sprung it getting into the room.
Too late. It exploded open, and the edge of it cracked against the wrist of his gun hand, knocking the Colt to the side. He was able to hang on to the gun, but he couldn’t bring it to bear before Clive Denton barreled into him. The collision’s impact propelled John Henry backward onto the bed.
Denton landed on top of him. The man’s left hand gripped John Henry’s wrist and kept him from bringing the gun around, while his right fist hammered into the lawman’s face. Denton wasn’t exceptionally big, but he had a lot of wiry strength and the sheer ferocity of his attack had taken John Henry by surprise.
John Henry jerked his head to the side to avoid another blow and threw a punch of his own. His fist caught Denton on the jaw and drove his head to the side. Denton hung on stubbornly, though, and tried to ram his knee into John Henry’s groin. John Henry twisted away from it.
“Get out of the way!” Penelope yelled. “Get out of the way and I’ll shoot him!”
She had dropped the bedspread, darted over to the dressing table, and snatched up the little pistol. She couldn’t get a shot at John Henry, though, while Denton was so close to him. John Henry grappled with his opponent, trying to keep Denton between him and the muzzle of Penelope’s gun.
As the two men lunged back and forth, straining against each other, they slid off the edge of the bed and crashed to the floor. That was enough to break them apart. Denton rolled and lashed out with a foot. The heel of his boot connected with John Henry’s wrist, and this time he couldn’t hold on to the Colt. It flew from his fingers and went spinning and sliding under the bed. Penelope dived after it, maybe thinking that she wanted a bigger-caliber weapon.
Denton leaped on John Henry and wrapped both hands around the lawman’s throat. His fingers clamped down cruelly and his thumbs dug in as he tried to crush John Henry’s windpipe. John Henry hooked a couple of punches into Denton’s ribs, but they failed to loosen the man’s grip. Denton was fighting with the strength of insane desperation.
“I’ve got his gun!” Penelope cried exultantly. “Clive, I’ve got his gun!”
John Henry clawed at Denton’s fingers around his throat. The room was starting to spin crazily now. He knew he was on the verge of passing out. He tried cupping his hands and slapping them against Denton’s ears, but the man hunched his shoulders and pulled his head down, and John Henry’s hands skidded off the sides of his head. Despite his rather mild appearance, Denton obviously had plenty of experience at this sort of bare-knuckles brawl.
He lifted John Henry’s head from the floor and then slammed it down against the boards. John Henry was barely hanging on to consciousness now.
He might have blacked out if Denton hadn’t let go of him. Denton reared back and staggered to his feet. He reached over, said, “Give me that!” and jerked John Henry’s Colt out of Penelope’s hands. He stood over John Henry and pointed the revolver at him.
“What are you going to do?” Penelope asked.
“I’m going to shoot him, of course!” Denton said. “Finish off the troublesome bastard with his own gun!”
“Wait!”
Denton glanced over at her in surprise. His brown hair was askew from the battle, with strands of it hanging over his eyes. He raked it back with his free hand and said, “Wait? Why would I do that?”
“I . . . I wasn’t really thinking when I said that before about shooting him. Surely we don’t have to kill him.”
“Of course we have to kill him,” Denton snapped. “He’s been dogging your trail for days. If he wasn’t the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen, he’d already be dead!”
He pulled back the Colt’s hammer.
“But . . . but if you shoot him, it’ll make a lot of noise,” Penelope objected. “People will come to see what happened.”
“Nobody in this cursed town will care about a gunshot. The poor devils are all too worried about surviving that fever.” Denton sneered. “But I suppose if you’ll hand me one of those pillows, I’ll use it to muffle the shot. We might as well be discreet . . .”
John Henry was thinking clearly enough again to consider making a desperate roll to the side. Maybe while he was doing that, he could sweep Denton’s feet out from under him and turn the tables yet again.
Suddenly Penelope exclaimed in surprise, a sound followed immediately by a dull thud. Denton’s eyes rolled up in their sockets as he sagged forward. A man’s hand reached around him and plucked the Colt from Denton’s fingers. Denton pitched to the floor and landed facedown next to John Henry, out cold.
Nick Prentice pointed the gun he had just used to knock out Denton at Penelope, who was naked again, having dropped the bedspread when she scrambled to retrieve John Henry’s gun. A grin spread across the big man’s face as he looked from Penelope to John Henry and said, “Well . . . this is a mighty interesting situation, Marshal.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
John Henry pushed himself up on an elbow and groggily shook his head. He wasn’t sure he was any better off than he had been a moment earlier, since he suspected that Prentice was part of the gang, too.
But then his thoughts began to clear and he realized that couldn’t be right. If Prentice was one of the counterfeiters, he wouldn’t have stopped Denton from shooting John Henry. Not only that, but Prentice currently held two guns, and he wasn’t pointing either of them at John Henry. He covered the unconscious Clive Denton with the weapon in his left hand while the gun in his right was pointed toward Penelope.
John Henry reached up, caught hold of the sheets, and used them to brace himself as he pulled himself to his feet. He gave a little shake of his head and asked, “What’s going on here?”
Before Prentice could reply, Penelope said coldly, “I’m naked, you know.”
“So I noticed,” Prentice said, still grinning. “I sort of like you that way, Miss Smith. Not only for the obvious reasons, mind you, but because I can tell at a glance that you’re una
rmed.”
“Don’t tell her that,” John Henry said. “She doesn’t like it.”
“Why don’t the two of you trade places?” Prentice suggested. “Marshal, you step over Denton and move around me.”
John Henry did so, and when he had, Prentice moved back a little and motioned with the Colt for Penelope to slide past him and stand next to the unconscious man.
“That’s better,” Prentice said. “Now I’ve got you where I can keep an eye on both of you at the same time. Marshal, I suppose you can hand the bedspread back to the lady. Wouldn’t want her to catch a chill.”
John Henry’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t much care for the way Prentice was giving orders, and the man’s last comment made John Henry think that maybe Prentice didn’t know about the outbreak of sickness in Copperhead. That would indicate that the man had just gotten to town.
John Henry picked up the bedspread and tossed it to Penelope. As she wrapped herself in it again, he told Prentice in a flat voice, “I’ll take my gun back now.”
Prentice hesitated for a second, but then he shrugged, reversed the Colt, and held it out butt-first to John Henry. John Henry felt a little better about things once he had wrapped his fingers around the revolver’s walnut grips.
Prentice wore a brown tweed suit and had a dark brown bowler hat set at a jaunty angle on his head. A gold watch chain was looped across his vest. The gun he had used to knock out Denton was a short-barreled Smith & Wesson .38 that he carried in the shoulder rig visible under his open coat.
“I appreciate the helping hand,” John Henry went on.
“I’d say it was more than a helping hand. I saved your life, Marshal, just like I did when Denton ambushed you in Stockton and hired a local badman to help him try to kill you.”
“That was you?”
“I wouldn’t know about it if I hadn’t been there, would I? I’ll bet if we took off Denton’s coat and shirt, we’d find the wound where I grazed him and made him drop his rifle when he was about to ventilate you.”
Prentice had a point about that. John Henry said, “So you’ve been following me.”
“Not really. I’ve been following her.” Prentice nodded toward Penelope. “You were just between us part of the time.”
“You were on her trail in Los Angeles,” John Henry said as the picture began to clear in his mind. “That’s why you were at Campos’s place, pretending to be a gambler. You barely caught the same train for San Francisco that she did.”
“That’s right. I would have closed in on her eventually, but then you showed up in Frisco, too, and I figured why not let you be the stalking horse. I knew she had to be working with somebody, and sure enough, you drew Denton out of the woodwork.”
“How do you know his name?” John Henry asked. “Or did he introduce himself to you on the ferry, too? I’m assuming you were on the same ferry.”
“Sure,” Prentice said easily. “I’m good at blending in with crowds. That’s not easy for a big fella like me to do, but I’ve learned how to manage. And no, I didn’t talk to Denton on the ferry, but I saw him talking to you and when we got to Oakland I wired his description to my boss. Before I left town to follow you and Miss Smith, I got a wire back tentatively identifying him as Clive Denton. Born in London, but he’s been over here in the States most of his life, making a name for himself as a crook. Mostly as a confidence man, but he’s dabbled in embezzlement, extortion, and blackmail, too. And now counterfeiting.”
“Who are you?” John Henry asked. “Who do you work for?”
“Nick Prentice happens to be my real name. I work for the Secret Service.”
John Henry had heard of the Secret Service. He said, “Pinkerton’s bunch.”
“Well, not exactly. Allan Pinkerton formed what was called the Secret Service during the war, but it was more of an espionage and intelligence outfit. The agency I work for is part of the Treasury Department, and it’s our job to track down counterfeiters . . . like Miss Smith here.”
“I’m in no mood for a history lesson,” Penelope snapped. “I’d like to get dressed.”
“Not just yet,” Prentice said. “And don’t try telling us that you’re embarrassed, my dear. After some of the entanglements you’ve been in, I know better.”
She just said, “Hmmph,” and glared at him.
“So once I’d drawn Denton into the open, what was your plan then?” John Henry asked Prentice.
“Keep an eye on him and follow all of you, of course, until the trail led to the ringleader.”
“Ignatius O’Reilly.”
John Henry saw something flicker across Penelope’s face when he said the name. He couldn’t tell for sure what the response meant, but he thought she didn’t like hearing O’Reilly’s name.
“Yep,” Prentice said. “They have to be planning on rendezvousing with him sometime. I would have preferred to hang back and wait for that, but then when I took a peek through that door and saw Denton about to shoot you, I knew I had to step in.”
“Thanks,” John Henry said dryly. “Sorry I ruined your plans.”
Prentice’s broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug.
“It’s all right,” he said. “We’ll just have to make the girl tell us where to find O’Reilly.”
“You’re not going to make me do anything,” Penelope snapped. “Anyway, I don’t know where this man O’Reilly is, because I don’t know him. I never even heard of him.”
Prentice shook his head and said, “It’s not going to do you any good to lie, darling. Those fake bills you’ve been passing for the past six weeks are O’Reilly’s work. Not his best work, mind you, but we’re convinced that he printed them.”
“I’m not saying anything else,” Penelope insisted.
“There are still a couple of things I’m not clear on,” John Henry said. “How did a Secret Service agent and a deputy U.S. marshal wind up on the trail of the same bunch of counterfeiters?”
“You don’t know much about Washington, do you, Marshal? Those bureaucrats back there are always falling all over themselves trying to get a jump on some other agency or department. Then there’s the matter of one hand seldom knowing what the other is doing. If everybody in Washington would just cooperate, they could get things done a lot easier. But then there wouldn’t be a need for so many people to work in the government, would there?”
“Sounds to me like a loco way to do things,” John Henry muttered.
“Ah, now you’re beginning to understand! What was the other thing you wanted to ask me about?”
“Denton used dynamite to cause an avalanche that nearly buried me under tons of rock. Where were you when that happened?”
“Following you, of course. I was about half a mile behind you. There was nothing I could do to help you. And then it took me a good while to get here because I had to find another trail and take the long way around. To tell you the truth, I was a little surprised to see you, Marshal. I thought there was a good chance Denton had gotten you that time.”
“He came closer than I like to think about,” John Henry admitted.
Penelope frowned. She said, “There wasn’t supposed to be any killing. That was the plan all along. Nobody was supposed to die.”
“Obviously you didn’t know all the plan,” Prentice said, “because Denton tried three times to kill Marshal Sixkiller. Who knows what else he did since the two of you started this whole thing in Wichita?”
“I didn’t want anybody to die,” Penelope insisted.
“So that’s why you caused that duel between me and Quentin Ross?” John Henry said. “Ross wound up dead, too.”
“I know.” Penelope looked down at the floor. “I just wanted to stage some sort of distraction so I could get out of there. It was time for me to leave Los Angeles. I guess I just didn’t think about what might happen. It wasn’t my intention for him or anybody else to be killed, though.”
“You know what they say about the road to hell,” Prentice told her. “Now, where d
o we find Ignatius O’Reilly?”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Penelope remained stubborn, continuing to insist that she had never heard of O’Reilly. She sat on the edge of the bed with the spread wrapped around her and shook her head to every question Prentice asked her.
While that was going on, John Henry tied Clive Denton’s hands behind his back and propped the man in a corner. Denton was starting to come around. He shook his head slowly from side to side and moaned softly.
With a sigh, Prentice finally gave up and told Penelope, “You might as well get dressed. I don’t suppose we can take you over to the local jail and lock you up like that.”
“We can’t lock her up in the jail at all,” John Henry said.
Prentice frowned and asked, “Why not?”
John Henry felt a little satisfaction because there was something he knew and the big, self-assured Secret Service agent didn’t. That was probably petty of him, he thought, but he enjoyed it anyway.
“You don’t know what’s going on here in Copperhead, do you, Prentice? Half the town is sick. There’s some sort of fever on the loose, and the town marshal has it. None of us are setting foot in that jail.”
A worried frown creased Prentice’s forehead.
“So there’s a little fever—” he began.
“That’s killed four people so far. No telling how many more it’ll kill before it runs its course.”
Prentice looked even more worried.
“What are we going to do with these two?” he asked.
“The hotel is safe, as far as I know. We’ll have to keep them here until morning. Then I suppose we can take them on to the next town, since we can’t go back to Sonora because of that avalanche.”
“What about O’Reilly?”
John Henry went over to a small table with a carpetbag sitting on it. He unfastened the catches and opened the bag. Inside were several tied-together bundles of bills. He picked up one of the bundles, riffled through the ends of the bills, and studied the printing on the currency.
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