All this while earning twenty-five to thirty-five dollars a month.
As marshal, Deets was earning forty a month, and since his position was relatively secure, he’d been able to get a bank loan for building a house for himself and his bride.
Deets knew, however, that his job could be much more dangerous than it was, as the frontier was still largely an untamed place. Many towns across the west were still wide open and at the mercy of coulee-riding owlhoots and out-and-out renegades. In fact, Box Elder Ford had been that way until the city council had hired Bill Wilkinson, a town tamer of some repute, to file down its horns.
And Wilkinson had done just that in spades.
He and a couple of deputies he’d especially hired for their cold-iron savvy had put the owlhoots frequenting this part of the Arkansas River Valley on notice by hanging some, shooting others, and sending several passels off to the penitentiary. After a year of that, Box Elder Ford had become as docile as a newborn lamb. And so far, it remained that way.
Deets didn’t like to think about Wilkinson, however. Thinking about the former lawman made Deets’s guts turn to jelly. He ran a gloved hand across his face, hitched his gun belt up higher on his waist, and headed on down the boardwalk in the direction of home. He purposefully turned his mind to better thoughts—to a cup of coffee with Lupita out on their porch and to crawling into bed with his wife and enjoying the pleasures of her wonderful body.
She knew how to please a man, Lupita did. She knew how to make Roscoe Deets forget all his worries and all the dark thoughts that snagged in his mind like flies getting tangled in cobwebs. He thought about her smooth body now as he stepped off the boardwalk and angled over toward the side street on which his and Lupita’s house sat.
He stopped suddenly.
Shadows moved down the main drag to his right, in the west.
Three horseback riders were moving toward Deets. No, only two riders. One horse didn’t have a rider. Oh, yes, it did, Deets saw, his stomach turning sour. Only, the third rider was riding belly down across his horse’s saddle. Two other men were walking alongside the horseback riders. The two others were moving along the boardwalk, dropping down off one boardwalk and mounting the other, walking quickly to keep up with the three horseback riders.
As the riders and the walkers approached, Deets said silently, “Ah, shit,” and touched a nervous index finger to his cheek, dragging it down into the late-day stubble, digging his fingernail into the skin, making it hurt a little.
The riders were the two men who’d gone out looking for Eldon Wayne—the blacksmith Lars Eriksson and the saloon owner L.J. Tanner, a close associate of the banker, George Campbell. Tanner, a former cavalry soldier and decorated Indian fighter, was Deets’s least favorite Box Elder Ford citizen. Tanner sat on the city council, too, so he was in a good position to make Deets’s life a living hell, which this matter with the bounty hunters was sizing up to do.
Deets saw now as they approached that the two men on foot were Neal Hunter and Glen Carlsruud. They, too, were city councilmen, as were all the men who’d gone out and gotten themselves entangled in that inexplicable mess-up in the wild-ass Cavalry Creek country. The banker, Campbell, probably hadn’t gone though he was likely entangled in the same mess—whatever the mess was. He, too, was a councilman and he was tight with the others.
“The sheriff’s wrappin’ up for the day, I see,” said L.J. Tanner as he reined his buckskin to a halt about ten feet from Deets. “Kinda early—ain’t it, Sheriff?”
Deets ground his back teeth but took a deep breath, calming himself. “I always quit around nine-thirty,” he said mildly. “A man’s gotta sleep, visit with his wife.”
Tanner said, “Bill Wilkinson never slept. Leastways, I don’t remember him ever not workin’. The way he saw it, wearin’ a badge was a full-time job.” He gave a goatish smile. “But, then, he didn’t have a pretty Mex wife to go home to, neither.”
“That’s enough, Tanner,” Neal Hunter said, walking over from the boardwalk, Carlsruud at his side. “That’s enough about Wilkinson. I don’t want to hear his name again. Nobody does. Besides, you know he had deputies to back him.”
Tanner, who wore a patch over the eye he’d lost in the Indian Wars, opened his mouth to speak. Hunter cut him off with, “They brought in Wayne.” He directed the statement to Deets. “Thought you should know, Marshal. He was shot several times—once through the forehead. A killing shot.”
“It was murder,” Carlsruud clarified. “Probably shot when he was wounded and helpless. I don’t think there’s any doubt who did it.”
Tanner said, “We seen Prophet out there, ridin’ along the trail with the girl. We steered wide and holed up out of sight till they was gone. He shot Wayne, all right.”
Glen Carlsruud scoffed at Tanner. “Well, why didn’t you finish the job, for God’s sake?”
Tanner leaned forward, jutting his chin belligerently at Carlsruud. “Why don’t you just go find him and finish the job yourself, Glen, if you’re so goddamn tough? You know I can’t shoot for shit with only this one eye. A few years ago, I’d have ridden out to that post and taken care of them two alone!”
Hunter heaved a disgusted sigh and turned to Deets. “Have you arrested him yet? Both of ’em, if the girl’s still alive, I mean?”
“I’m working on it, Mr. Hunter.”
“Just how are you working on it, Marshal Deets?”
“He’s over to the doc’s place. You know how the doc is about having trouble at his place, with his boy around an’ all. I’m gonna wait till Prophet leaves the doc’s place and then I’ll have a talk with him.”
“A talk with him?” Tanner laughed.
“I mean I’ll arrest him,” Deets said, feeling his nerves popping deep down in his knees. “I’ll arrest him just as soon as he leaves the doc’s place . . . and I know I got a good reason for arrestin’ him,” he added, tentative, raking his hand across his bristled jaws.
Carlsruud lurched forward to stand a little ahead of Tanner. “We done told you, Marshal, that you have a very good reason indeed for arresting that no-account bounty killer!”
“That’s what you told me—that’s true, Mr. Carlsruud. And I know all you fellas hold my job in your hands, that I serve at your pleasure. Shit, you hold our future in your hands—mine an’ Lupita’s. But what kind of a lawman would I be if I didn’t do what the law says and make sure I got a good reason for arrestin’ a man before I arrest him? When you hired me, you said you didn’t want another Bill Wilkinson runnin’ roughshod over Box Elder Ford.”
“Yeah, well, speakin’ of Wilkinson,” Tanner said. “You didn’t much care about none o’ that official bullshit with him, did ya? Shit, you just got likkered up an’—”
“That’s enough, L.J.!” Hunter scolded the mounted man.
The big, burly, red-haired and red-bearded Lars Eriksson had said nothing so far, which was customary with him. He was a silent, savage, brooding man who lived with his part-Arapaho wife across a dry wash behind his blacksmith shop.
But now the blacksmith scrubbed dried tobacco juice out of his long, tangled, dark-red beard and said, “Why don’t you go rustle you up a cat?” He grinned, showing the large gap where he was missing his front teeth. “Let the cat do the dirty work of arrestin’ the bounty hunter for you.” He glanced at his compadre, L.J. Tanner, and pantomimed a pistol with his right hand. “Bang! Bang!”
Tanner threw his head back and laughed.
“Lars, goddamnit!” Hunter said in exasperation. “Both of you!” He chuffed another disgusted sigh and then lowered his voice as he said, “You fellas go on ahead to Mona’s place. Go on, go on—the lot of you! Helen’s over there now, sitting with her. She’ll help with Eldon’s body. I’ll be over soon.”
“Oh, hell,” Carlsruud said, giving the bottom of his waistcoat a tug. “What a goddamn mess!”
“Yes, and now we’ve got it in town,” Hunter said, keeping his voice quiet but stretched taut with anxiety. “An
d now we’ve got to deal with it. Discreetly! So you fellas go on over to Mona’s.”
Tanner cursed. Then he turned to Deets and offered a seedy sneer. “Say hi to your purty wife for me—will you, Marshal? That woman of yours is some fine female flesh—second finest in town, in fact.”
Deets ground his back teeth in fury but said nothing.
Tanner chuckled and touched spurs to his horse’s flanks. He and Eriksson moved on along the street, jerking Eldon Wayne’s horse along behind them. Carlsruud sighed, gave Deets a dark look, and continued walking along the middle of the street, behind the mounted men and the horse carrying Wayne’s body slack across its saddle.
When they were gone, Hunter wrapped an arm around Deets’s shoulders and said, “Admittedly, Marshal, this is a messy, somewhat embarrassing situation.”
Deets looked at Hunter’s right hand draped across Deets’s right shoulder. He didn’t like it there. He didn’t like it there one bit. Tanner’s words were still echoing inside his head.
He turned to Hunter standing up close on his left and he said, “Just what is the situation, Mr. Hunter? I gotta know if you want me to do the right thing here. I have to know. Is it . . . does it have somethin’ to do with . . . her?”
Hunter winced at that. It was as though the young marshal had hauled off and slapped him.
“What you deserve, Roscoe, is neither here nor there. I will tell you exactly what you need to know, and you’re just going to have to trust that it is, indeed, all you need to know to fulfill your obligations here in Box Elder Ford . . . and to keep that shiny badge pinned to your vest.”
He glanced at the mouth of the cross street lying dark to the south and along which Deets’s house sat not far from the corner. “And to keep that house you and Lupita have grown so fond of . . . and are no doubt pondering filling with little Roscoes. Am I right?”
Deets scowled at the man, who was a good three inches shorter than Deets was and who smelled like pomade and shaving oil. Hunter was clean-shaven, arrogant-eyed, and seedily handsome despite pockmarks on his cheeks.
He rolled a shaved matchstick around between his lips, and his breath smelled like tequila. With his wife, Helen, having been sitting over at Mona’s most of the afternoon, he’d no doubt dined in one of the saloons, calming his nerves with his favorite busthead.
Deets had never liked Hunter’s smug manner, but he’d been grateful to the man for a job, despite what Deets had ended up doing to win it. Now he hated Hunter right down to the man’s fancy, store-bought half boots with the little silver buckles gleaming in the starlight, against the floury dirt of the street.
“Am I right, Marshal?” Hunter asked again, smiling without mirth and giving Deets’s shoulders a squeeze.
Deets remembered a night over a year ago—a dark night not unlike this one. He remembered the cat’s meow and he heard the bark of a pistol. His own pistol. He heard Wilkinson scream and he saw the flash of the marshal’s pistol as Wilkinson triggered his Colt Lightning into the dirt near his boots.
Deets shook his head to rid himself of the memory. He pulled away from Hunter, shrugging off the man’s arm as though it were a wet, musty horse blanket.
“I’ll look into it, Mr. Hunter. That’s all I can tell you. Now, if you want my badge because I can’t promise you any more than that, then you’ll have it. But all I can tell you right now is that I’ll look into the situation and get back to you.”
Hunter wrinkled his nose and his cheeks flushed in the starlight. “Why, you coward.”
“Maybe,” Deets said with a shrug, nodding. “Maybe.”
“You’re just afraid of the bounty hunter. That’s what all this is about. You’re afraid of him and that girl he rides with.” Hunter wrinkled his nose again and twisted his lips into a ghoulish mask. “Just like you were afraid of Wilkinson, so you shot him here in the street when he was distracted. Well, shit, man—why don’t you just do what Tanner suggested? Find yourself a cat!”
Hunter laughed cruelly, clapped his hands once, and strode off in the direction of the Wayne house. He kept laughing like a madman. His maniacal laughter echoed over the star-cloaked town until a dog started barking.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Prophet was sitting in the chair by Louisa’s bed when he heard the clomps of a horse entering the yard.
The horse trotted past the house, heading for the small stable flanking the hog pen and chicken coop, where the bounty hunter had stabled Mean and Ugly and Louisa’s pinto.
Fifteen minutes later, the doctor shuffled up to the house. He was talking to the boy, who’d been playing around the yard with a slingshot, and now both came inside. While the boy scrambled off to wash for supper, the doctor pushed through the curtain into the sickroom.
Prophet was holding a cool cloth soaked with fresh, cold water he’d fetched from the well to the girl’s forehead.
“She’s awful warm, Doc,” he said.
“That’s to be expected. I’ll take over.”
Prophet rose, leaving the cloth draped across Louisa’s forehead.
“How’s your other patient?” Prophet asked the young sawbones.
“About as well as can be expected, given . . .” The doctor caught himself, and flushed. He cast Prophet an annoyed look. “Are you still here?”
“A woman came by to see you. A hell of a looker. She said she often helped out with your female patients, makin’ it all right an’ proper.”
Wringing the cloth out in the washbasin, the doctor cast Prophet another quick, troubled glance. “She did, did she?” He didn’t seem all that happy about the information.
“Does the name Verna McQueen ring a bell?”
“Yes, of course. And yes, she does help out from time to time.”
“Purty gal,” Prophet said, gently probing for information. This town was a puzzle, the lavishly dressed and erotically attractive woman who’d visited him earlier just one more.
“You said that.”
The doctor placed the cloth on Louisa’s forehead and then hooked his stethoscope around his neck.
“Mr. Prophet, there’s little reason for you to be here now. Your partner is still alive and she seems relatively stable. The fever, as I said, is to be expected. Why don’t you go into town and get yourself something to eat? I recommend Cartwright’s. Mrs. Cartwright stays open till ten and she’s a decent cook for these parts. I’d invite you to stay and join me, but I try to keep Titus clear of your sort. And, believe me”—he laughed caustically—“that isn’t all that easy out here on the frontier!”
“Yeah, we unwashed types are a dime a dozen out here in the tall and uncut. You ain’t from here, I take it?”
“No, I sure ain’t,” the doctor said, mockingly.
“Well, all right, then,” Prophet said when the sawbones didn’t bother to elaborate. “Since I’ve been dismissed, I reckon I’ll rustle up some supper.” He donned his hat. “But I’ll be back to check on her.”
“I’m sure you will, Mr. Prophet.”
Prophet dropped down the stone steps into the yard. He glanced toward the stable. Like most frontiersmen, he wasn’t accustomed to walking more than a few feet at a time, but he saw little reason to saddle Mean and Ugly just to ride into town, which was only about a couple of hundred yards away. The horse had had a big day, just as Prophet had, and Mean needed his rest.
Not that they’d be hitting the trail again anytime soon. Mean and the pinto would get plenty of stable feed for the next several days.
Prophet had no intention of leaving Box Elder Ford until he was sure that Louisa was well on her way to mending.
Still, Prophet could use a walk. The fresh air and exercise might clear his head, maybe relieve the worry gnawing at him the way a dog worries a new bone. He walked out to the main trail and turned toward town, his spurs chinging as he strode. As the outlying cabins of the town pushed up around him and he could see the lights of a saloon ahead, he stopped suddenly and swung around, one hand dropping to the handle of his
.45.
He’d heard something. He wasn’t sure what. The faint snapping of a twig under a stealthy boot?
He stepped behind the front corner of a low, abandoned-looking cabin on the left side of the trail and stared along his back trail. The trail, pale brown in the starlight, dwindled off toward the south and the doctor’s house, revealed by lights glowing in the windows. There were several shanties that also looked derelict—probably the settlement’s original dwellings abandoned in favor of roomier, more modern houses.
Prophet waited, squeezing the handle of his holstered .45. He carefully scanned the trail, looking for moving shadows. Spying none and hearing nothing more—the sound he’d heard might have been anything, maybe the breeze nibbling newspaper litter—he moved back onto the trail and continued on into the town.
He found the Cartwright Café on the town’s west-central side—a little brick adobe building with a wood-frame second story where the proprietors probably lived. Doc Whitfield had mentioned a woman cook, but Prophet was served pot roast, mashed potatoes and gravy, a generous portion of buttered carrots, and a hot cross bun by a squat man with a large head that could have been carved from granite. He had short, bristly gray hair and one of those faces that appeared incapable of smiling.
His lips appeared eternally pooched out. He breathed loudly and hard. He wore an apron, and both thick arms were covered in tattoos. One had the faded image of a fat, naked lady with a ship’s anchor drawn on her belly, marking the man an old sailor whose wife probably preferred he keep the arm and its scandalous marking covered.
It was too hot for shirtsleeves in the eatery, however.
Prophet was the only customer at this late hour. The man, on the far side of middle age, had been cleaning up when Prophet came in, and he didn’t look pleased at the interruption. He gave Prophet a couple of owly glances before resuming the chore. As he ate, Prophet caught the man studying him with interest in a window reflection.
Prophet figured the cook was aware of the problem that Prophet had followed into town.
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