by Ralph Cotton
Inside the shack, two other men stood watching with fearful expressions on their faces. The youngest of them wiped mud from his cheeks and lips. Spitting to cleanse his mouth he said in a guarded tone of voice to the ragged old man beside him, “I’ve had all I can take here, Soupbone. I’m getting out of this place. This is too much like that hell Father Jessup keeps railing about.”
“Watch your mouth, Randall,” the old man said almost in a whisper. “This ain’t the Father’s doings. It’s these saddle tramps!”
“They work for him,” the young man said. “That’s enough for me. He allows them to get by with this sort of thing.…He’s no fool. Father knows this keeps us beaten down. He knows it reminds us that he’s got us where he wants us, and that there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”
Soupbone turned his tired red-rimmed eyes to the other three wolf skinners standing behind them. “Fellows, Randall’s just worn-out. There’s no need in anybody telling the Father what he said, now is there?”
The three only stared in silence. Soupbone searched their eyes for any sign of who might be the one relaying this sort of thing to Father Jessup of late.
“I’m too fed up to care anymore,” said Randall. “Whoever tells Father what I said might as well tell him that too. Far as I’m concerned I’d as soon be dead as go on living this way. If it wasn’t for Father having my wife under his thumb I’d be in Oregon right now, living like a free man ought to live.”
“Hush, boy!” said Soupbone. “You’ve said too much already! She ain’t your wife no more. She’s Father Jessup’s. She’s the one you best be thinking about, and keep quiet!” He turned to the others and added in an apologetic tone, “I believe he might have the fever.…You can’t hold this agin him. He don’t know what he’s saying. Look how he’s sweating!” He ran a hand across Randall’s forehead and slung sweat to the ground. The others only stared.
A hundred yards out along the trail, hearing the first gunshots, Willie Singer turned in his saddle and said to Kirby Falon, “It sounds like he’s in one of his moods already this morning. Let’s be sure to keep our heads and stick to the story we came up with.”
“You’re right,” said Kirby, having flinched at the first sound of gunfire. When the rifle shot went off fifty yards ahead of them, they both knew it was a warning shot from one of the men keeping watch from the hillside. “Far as I’m concerned, I’m going to say as little as I can get by with and let you do all the talking.”
“Whoa now, hold on,” said Singer. “That ain’t what we agreed to. I’m not going to be the only one sticking my neck out! You’re going to have to speak up and back me up. I want you as involved in this as I am. Otherwise, I’ll turn my horse right here and let you face it alone!” He jerked on his reins as if he were about to turn around on the trail.
“All right then!” said Kirby. “I’m with you all the way, just like we agreed. I just got rattled there for a minute. I’m okay now.”
“You better be,” Willie Singer warned him, righting his horse on the trail beside him.
On the porch, gazing out through the binoculars, seeing the two as if they were no more than a few yards away, Frank Falon said to Ace Tomblin, “Yep, it’s just the two of them, Kirby and Willie. No sign of the others.” He studied the two a moment longer.
“What do you suppose has happened to Dick and Elmer?” Tomblin asked, also squinting toward the two riders.
Having seen Willie Singer threaten to turn his horse back on the trail, and having seen the worried look on his brother Kirby’s face, Frank lowered the binoculars and said, “I don’t know, but this ought to be good.”
Chapter 3
Kirby Falon kept his mouth shut and nodded in agreement to everything Willie Singer had to say about what had happened to Elmer McGrew and Dick Gance. When Willie Singer had finished telling the story, he stood slumped, taking all of his effort and nerve to look Frank Falon in the eyes as Frank searched deeply for any sign of deceit. Singer breathed easier once he realized that Frank saw no such signs. Holding the reins to his horse, Singer took off his hat and shook his head slowly, saying, “Lord have mercy on poor Elmer and Dick…and bless their miserable souls.”
Frank Falon only stared a moment longer at Willie Singer before turning to his brother, Kirby, and asking him, “Is that the whole of it, what he said?”
“He’s telling the truth, Frank,” said Kirby. “This man was like nothing I ever seen with gun. Lucky for me Willie came along when he did…or I’d be laying dead alongside Elmer and Dick.”
Hearing Kirby helped Willie Singer breathe even easier. He offered a slight smile and said, “I just did what any of us would for one another, eh, Frank?”
But Frank gave him a skeptical look and didn’t reply. Instead he said to Kirby, “Are you ready and able to ride?”
“Right now?” Kirby replied.
“Yes, right now,” said Frank. “We’ve been waiting on you. We’ve got traps that need running in the upper valley.” Turning a dubious sidelong glance to Willie Singer he added, “Besides, I want to see this man’s body all ‘shot to pieces,’ the way Willie said he left him.”
“Well, yes, I reckon I can ride,” said Kirby, rubbing his chin as if in speculation. “Water’s up everywhere through.…I need to get a rested horse, maybe something to eat first.”
“Good,” said Frank. He turned to the other six men gathered around him and said to Tomblin, who stood the closest to him, “We’re pulling out of here as quick as we get these two remounted and fed. We could be gone a week, so take whatever coffee and grub is in the shack. If these hiders don’t like it, they can come see me about it.”
“All right,” said Tomblin. He turned to the others and said, “You heard Frank. Let’s get buckled up and ready to ride…unless you all prefer lounging around here watching wolves boil!”
“I’ve been buckled up and ready ever since we got here,” commented a young Montana gunman named Jim Heady. “The smell of this place keeps me about half sick to my guts.”
Frank Falon heard Heady’s words and swung around toward him with an angry look on his face. “Then shut your damn mouth and saddle up! You think any of us likes this shithole?” His voice was loud enough for the hiders to hear from where they stood, away from Falon’s men. “Only some low-life bastard could stand being around this all the time!” He gave the hiders a dark look of contempt, and said in only a slightly lowered voice, “You bunch of stinking rotten sons a bitches!”
Tomblin gave a dark chuckle under his breath and waved the men off toward the horses, walking along between Jim Heady and an older gunman called Jaw Hughes, owing to the larger than normal lump of chewing tobacco he kept inside his left cheek. Jaw spit a large splattering of brown tobacco juice on the ground and said, as he wiped his hand across his mouth, “Damn, Heady, what made him fly into you that way?”
“I don’t know what the hell he’s got up his shirt,” said Heady, keeping his voice low. “I just wish he’d get it out.” He gave Tomblin a look. “Do you see anything I’ve done wrong, Tomblin?”
“Forget about it,” said Tomblin, as the three of them walked abreast through the mud to where the horses stood corralled. “He hates this place too. I reckon after a while he can’t keep from hollering at somebody.”
“Yeah, but damn,” said Jaw, interceding on Heady’s behalf, “he’s been treating Jim here like a bastard child at a homecoming lately.”
“I can speak for myself, Jaw,” said Jim Heady, giving the man a cold stare.
Tomblin gave a nod toward the trade shack attendants as they ventured on about their work while the rest of Falon’s men stepped inside the muddy corral and began gathering their horses. “You saw how he done these wretches a while ago. Be glad you ain’t one of them.”
“If I was one of them,” said Jim Heady, “I’d not only shoot myself in the head, I’d do it three or four times, just to make certain!” He gave the attendants a glance and asked Tomblin, “What the hell’s wrong
with these fools anyway, allowing themselves to live this way?”
“They’ve got no choice.” Tomblin stared straight ahead at the corral as he spoke. “They work for Father Jessup. Most of them are so deep in debt to him, they’ll be boiling wolves the rest of their lives, or whatever else Jessup can come up with. They’ll die broke and still be in debt to him.”
“Hell,” said Jim Heady, “I’d crawfish on his damned debt before I’d live this way.”
“Not if you wanted to stay alive, you wouldn’t,” said Jaw. “These men are no more than slaves of Father Jessup. He owns them from tooth to toenail, and they all know it. There ain’t a damn thing they can do about it either.”
“I’d do something about it if I was them,” said Jim Heady.
Jaw spit another stream, saying, “Hmmph…just thank your stars you’re not one of them,” as they walked into the muddy corral.
Once the men were mounted and on their way, ten of them riding in twos along the muddy trail, Frank Falon turned to his brother beside him and said, just between the two of them, “You know I wouldn’t kill you for lying to me the way I would Willie Singer, don’t you?”
Kirby sat rigid in his saddle and stared straight ahead, replying calmly, “I know that, Frank. But this ain’t no lie, none of it.”
Frank grinned slightly. He turned a menacing gaze to his younger brother and said with persistence, “I might have to box your laws and bust you upside your head a lick or two, but I wouldn’t kill you for it.”
“Damn it, Frank,” said Kirby, “why are you going on like this? I told you the truth, as best I could!”
“I’m going on like this because it’s a long, wet, muddy trail down to the valley lands. I’m going on like this because I know what a low, lying, miserable coward Willie Singer is. He never saved a pal in his life. And I wouldn’t take kindly to be made a fool of over him, going off on some wild-goose chase. Do you understand me?”
“I understand, Frank,” said Kirby, still staring straight ahead.
“All right then,” said Frank, giving up for the moment but still convinced there was something wrong with the story his brother and Willie had told him. He looked back at Willie Singer, just in time to see the other man avert his eyes. Nodding to himself with resolve, Frank kicked his horse up into a quicker pace and led the men up off the trail onto a higher, dryer path.
They rode on throughout the day, avoiding broad puddles and muddy stretches of low spots that would have sunk their horses to their knees.
By afternoon they’d reached the swollen creek and followed it down onto the valley lands for another hour before stopping and looking out at the rushing muddy creek filled with tangles of driftwood, debris and brush the storm had washed down from the rocky hillsides. Sitting farther back from Frank and Kirby Falon, Ace Tomblin said in a hushed tone to the men who had bunched their horses up around him, “See? I told him there’s not going to be any bodies laying around, after a storm that bad.”
Splint Mullins, Arby Ryan, Lewis Barr, and Quentin Fuller gave one another looks. Then Fuller said to Ace Tomblin, “Hell, I would’ve gone off chasing my tail all day, so long as it got me out and away from that shack.”
“Yeah,” said Mullins, “me too. But I see what Ace is saying. It makes us all look bad, out here traipsing around…especially since we’re looking for one man who killed two of us and sent more of our men running with their tails between their legs.”
Before anyone else could comment, Frank Falon’s voice boomed above the roar of the rushing creek, calling out, “Tomblin! Get up here!”
Ace Tomblin gave the others a quick glance, then nudged his horse forward and stopped at the creek’s edge beside Falon. “What is it, Frank?” he asked, gazing out across the muddy frothing torrent.
“Willie says this is the spot where it happened.” He shot Willie Singer a harsh stare. “Right, Willie?”
Sitting on the other side of Kirby, Willie shrugged a little and said, “Yep, it sure looks like the spot. But don’t hold me to it.” He looked to Kirby for support. “What do you say, Kirby?”
“I can’t tell nothing,” said Kirby, looking all around. “This creek is forty feet wider than it was.” He raised his hat and scratched his head.
Speaking quietly to Tomblin, Frank said, “You don’t suppose that could have been Sloane Mosely, do you?”
“Naw, I don’t think so,” said Tomblin. “Even if Kirby and Willie didn’t recognize him, Dick and Elmer would have. They wouldn’t have got themselves into a shootout with Mosely. They would have spotted him and rode wide of him. They weren’t crazy enough to take him on.” He considered for another second and said, “Willie for damned sure didn’t kill Sloane Mosely.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking,” said Frank. Gazing across the wide raging creek he said, “His house is over there. If this water wasn’t up so bad we’d ride over and see if Sloane knows anything about what happened.”
“Yeah,” said Tomblin, relieved that the water was too high to permit such an undertaking right then. “It’ll be another day or two I expect before this creek is back in its banks. We can always come back and talk to him then.”
Frank nodded, then backed his horse a couple of steps and said aloud to all the men, “All right, let’s spread out and get to looking downstream. As fast as this water’s running, Dick’s and Elmer’s bodies could be anywhere…so could the man who’s killed them. Find them all three.…Let’s go. We’ve got traps waiting to be run!”
For the next hour the riders worked their way along the sodden ground along the creek, but they found no sign of their two comrades or the stranger who killed them. At a point where the swollen creek took a turn around a tall rocky hillside, Frank Falon and Ace Tomblin stopped and watched three riders come into sight on the muddy trail ahead of them. “Looks like some of Jessup’s saints have rode down out of Paradise.” He spoke with sarcasm, then spit as if to wash a bitter taste from his mouth.
“Yeah,” said Tomblin, ignoring Falon’s contempt for the coming riders, “maybe they saw something downstream.” He gave the men a short wave of his hand, then sat quietly beside Falon and watched the riders approach them. At the front of the three riders a large man with blond hair wearing a black flat-crowned hat turned his horse sideways to Falon and Tomblin and said in a no-nonsense tone, “Are you looking for a couple of your men, Falon?”
“That’s right, Chapin,” said Falon, neither man greeting the other with anything akin to courtesy. “Why? Have you seen them?”
“Two miles down,” said the big man, “we found a hat and a wolf pelt floating among some rocks. I judged they might belong to some of your trappers.”
“You didn’t even make an effort to look around, see if somebody might need your help?” said Falon, a bit put off by Chapin.
“No,” the big man said. “We don’t attend to those not our own. Father instructs us not to.”
“I should’ve known that without asking,” Falon commented. Making little effort to hide his contempt, he said to Tomblin, “Hear that? Offering to help somebody is not their way.”
“If a man is not sanctified, what does it matter what becomes of him here on this mortal plane?” the big man cut in before.
“Beats the hell out of me,” said Falon, dismissing that portion of the conversation. “You didn’t see anything else by any chance? Some sign of a stranger traveling through here?”
“No,” said Chapin, his gaze piercing, his tone vindictive, “we saw only what I told you we saw. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that some of your men have come to a violent end. The likes of those kind most often do.”
“Well,” said Falon, settling himself a little rather than continuing in an air of outright hostility toward Father Jessup’s followers, “my men don’t concern themselves so much with spiritual sanctification as they do with more earthy pursuits, Chapin. But I’m obliged for your information.” He lifted a nod toward a higher hill line in the distance. “Did you happen up
on anybody else coming across Wolf Valley?”
“I told you already, we happened upon no one else,” said Chapin, “neither down along the creek nor crossing Wolf Valley.”
Falon gave him a crooked smile. “I thought maybe you might have seen Sloane Mosely along your way.” He gave a nod back over his shoulder toward the far side of the creek. Falon relished the fact that Jessup and his followers could not abide having a man like Sloane Mosely in their midst, but that so far they had appeared powerless to do anything about him.
Chapin answered him in a straightforward tone. “We have seen Sloane Mosely only twice since early spring.”
“I saw him myself back in the spring,” said Falon. “Saw him one evening at dark riding that big silver stallion of his along the high ridges. Talk about unsanctified, whooo-ee!” Falon grinned, taunting Chapin. “Now there’s one devil you boys ought to be casting out of Paradise, before he goes to corrupting your whole flock.”
“Sloane Mosely does not come into Paradise, not even for supplies,” said Chapin. “As long as he remains in his place, Father Jessup says we will tolerate him living up here.”
With a smug grin Frank Falon said, “Now that’s kind of you, tolerating Mosely that way, unsanctified sinner that he is.”
“Sloan Mosely will face the Creator and answer for all he is and all he has done when the Great Day of Judgment arrives,” said Chapin, sounding as if he was reading the words aloud from a book.
“Yeah, I bet he will,” said Falon, “but meanwhile, it sure doesn’t seem like anybody can unseat his sinful, sorry—”
“We best be getting on with it,” Ace Tomblin said, cutting in before Frank Falon could say any more on the matter. “We’re obliged for you telling us about our men, Chapin.”
Brother Paul Chapin only nodded, backed his horse a step, turned it and rode away, the other two men flanking him. As soon as the three were out of hearing range, Ace Tomblin shook his head slowly and said, “Frank, I don’t like these zealots any more than you do. But we’ve got to live and let live up here.”