Under the Vultures Moon

by William Stafford

  “You want your daughter dead. Your own flesh and blood, dead.”

  Carriage looked flustered and took Jed further from the others in case they overheard.

  “Now, there ain’t no proof of nothing like that. It’s the word of that varmint against mine. You ain’t a father, Jed; you wouldn’t understand. I just wanted our mutual friend to scare the girl a little bit.”

  “That ain’t my understanding and I don’t think it’s Flint’s. Scare her - why?”

  “That kind of life - show business, I mean - ain’t right nor decent for a young lady. You see what I’m saying.”

  Jed didn’t answer. He thought of Miss Kitty at the Last Gasp saloon and then tried to think of somebody more decent. He couldn’t.

  “Lookit,” Carriage continued. “I cain’t have word getting out of me employing that man’s services. You appreciate my position. So let me handle it, Jed. I’m asking you as one lawman to another. Leave them all with me and purty soon, there’ll be no danger of waggling tongues saying what they shouldn’t ought to.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Well...” the arm snaked around Jed’s shoulders again. “Let me put it this way: questions might be asked about your involvement in the outlaws’ flight from justice. There’s a store owner over at Crosspatch Hill will testify you bought nine skirts, blouses and bonnets from him the very day these guys left town.”

  “Ain’t no law against buying clothes,” said Jed.

  “Not yet,” said Carriage. “What do you say, Jed? You go about your business and leave me to go about mine.”

  “Where you taking them?” Jed sounded resigned to this new arrangement.

  “Tarnation’s nearest,” said Carriage. “Let them sweat in the jailhouse and then we’ll put on a show in the main street. If’n you know what I mean.”

  Jed knew. “Tarnation,” he said. “I’ll ride with you. I got an appointment there myself.”

  Carriage wasn’t overjoyed but he made one of his deputies surrender his horse for the brave gunslinger who had single-handedly rounded up all these miscreants and felons all by himself.

  He was further put out when said brave gunslinger offered a ride to his wayward daughter. Miss Dupree accepted. A look passed between the sheriff and the bounty hunter. Carriage spat in Flint’s face.

  The men’s protests of innocence were ignored. They were tied together, and Flint along with them. The entourage moved out from under the trees and made steady progress along the road to Tarnation.

  Chapter Twenty

  Jailbreak!

  Sonia Dupree - or to call her by the name her parents gave her: Eugenia Carriage - set about ignoring her father as soon as they rode into Tarnation. The sheriff, not wishing to have his authority undermined in public, forbore from making a scene and made instead a magnanimous gesture of ‘allowing’ Jed, once dismounted, to escort his wayward daughter to the Last Gasp saloon.

  Eugenia muttered to herself all along the town’s main thoroughfare but Jed paid her no mind. Now he had reached his destination, a terrible sinking feeling all but consumed him. The boy Wyatt’s hours were numbered and for what? The child was an innocent in all this, an unwitting pawn in a battle for ownership of Vultures’ Moon itself - for Jed was under no illusion: with Farkin Plisp resurrected, everyone and everything was in mortal peril.

  But if I get Horse back, I’ll be able to combat Plisp at every turn. Every move he makes, I’ll block him. We’ll block him, Horse and me. On my own, I doubt I’m up to it. But me and Horse are unstoppable. Surely that’s worth the sacrifice of one little life? So that I can save all the others?

  No.

  Without Wyatt’s sacrifice, Plisp won’t come back and that’s Farkin Shish scuppered before he even gets started.

  But without Wyatt’s sacrifice, I don’t get Horse back neither.

  Oh, think harder, Jed, he scolded himself, and think fast!

  “It’s good to see you too.” The sardonic tones of Miss Kitty cut into Jed’s thoughts. “I’m fine; thanks for not asking.”

  Jed blinked away his contemplations and apologised. “Miss Kitty, this is, uh -”

  “That’s all right,” Miss Kitty waved the end of her feather boa, “the young lady has introduced herself. Had to, while you had your head in the clouds.”

  “Sure is a nice place,” Sonia-Eugenia looked around the bar with appreciative eyes. Bartender Lem froze, his hand in a half-polished glass.

  “Ain’t nobody called this place nice afore,” he muttered. He spat on the glass and resumed his polishing.

  “Miss Kitty,” Jed began but the veteran showgirl was a step ahead.

  “- Might you prevail upon me to take this here young lady under my wing?”

  “Yup.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miss Kitty!” Eugenia threw her arms around her newly-appointed mentor. Jed’s mouth twitched almost imperceptibly but Miss Kitty perceived it sure enough.

  “What kind of trouble?” she arched a painted eyebrow.

  “Oh, nothing,” the girl affected nonchalance. “Just my daddy. He’s an old blowhard, is all.”

  “Who’s your daddy?”

  “Oh, nobody. Just the sheriff of Silicon County.”

  Miss Kitty marvelled. “You cain’t mean Orson Carriage!” Her laughter was like birds on a glockenspiel. “That old rascal! Well, I declare! If’n that great galoot comes in here a-shooting his mouth off - or anything else for that matter - he’ll have to answer to me.”

  She linked her arm in the girl’s and invited her to see her dressing room. “There ain’t no star on the door,” she confided as she led Eugenia away, “but on a clear night you can see plenty through the hole in the ceiling.”

  Nonplussed, Lem polished the same glass all over again. Jed knocked back the shot of red eye (complimentary, of course) and announced he was off to see the sheriff - Dawson, that is, not Carriage.

  ***

  Deputy Dawson had been promoted to the office of sheriff after the events of a year ago. Since then he’d had a pretty quiet time of it with only the occasional rowdy drunkard to toss behind bars to sleep off his (or her) excesses. Not that Sheriff Dawson was complaining - no, siree! He knew that a certain gunslinger had a soft spot for the town, and outlaws, bandits and ne’er-do-wells tended to behave themselves - if they came to Tarnation at all.

  That certain gunslinger seemed uneasy. He was pacing Dawson’s tiny office; there was clearly something on his mind. The sheriff, with his boots upon his desk, nursed a shot of the red eye Jed had brought with him. A deck of cards sat, shuffled but undealt; the usual game seemed unlikely this evening. Dawson took a sip of the smoky amber liquid and only grimaced a little. He knew better than to question Jed. The gunslinger was notoriously a man of few words, not given to prattling on for the sake of it. If’n he had anything to say, he’d say it.

  “He’s going to hang ’em,” he said eventually. Dawson knew at once who both the ‘he’ and the ‘’em’ were in that announcement: Carriage, and the strangely attired men who were currently languishing in the lock-up. “Ain’t right nor fitting.”

  “Ain’t nothing I can do, Jed. Carriage has got his own men building the gallows.”

  “Cain’t you pull rank? This town is your jurisdiction, ain’t it?”

  Dawson shook his head. “Don’t work like that. Carriage is a county sheriff. He outranks me.”

  “Well, cain’t you tie him up with paperwork or something? Find a discrepancy in his death warrants - he does have death warrants, don’t he?”

  Dawson had rarely seen the gunslinger so worked up - unless it was something to do with that fine Horse of his. Come to think of it: where was that magnificent critter anyhow?

  “Paperwork’s all signed and sealed by Judge Knott. C
arriage works fast. Cuts corners.”

  “Like a proper trial...” Jed’s voice was a low rumble.

  “Come on, Jed; you know and I know that ain’t the way it works out here. This ain’t Wheelhub with its fancy-shmancy civilised ways.”

  “But they’re innocent,” Jed kicked a chair. He knocked back his red eye and Dawson poured him another. “You ever ask yourself....” The booze was making the gunslinger comparatively loquacious, “...why things are the way they are? How they got to be this way?”

  Dawson’s lips curled in a kind of shrug. “I don’t know no different. Things have always been the same. Even you, Jed. I’ve knowed you since I was a kid in diapers and here you are, exactly the same. You haven’t aged a day. You’re just the way you’ve always been. Apart from a few changes of hands and eyes and what-not... Say, is that a new pair of baby blues? I thought so.”

  Jed lowered himself into a chair, facing the man who was the closest he had to being a friend. Dawson was wrong about one thing. Not only had the past year seen a change in the deputy’s fortunes, but the gunslinger had changed too: Jed was now possessed of knowledge he didn’t used to have. It was akin to getting your memory back only instead of actually remembering, he’d been told, by Doc Brandy, of memories he used to have. Jed was the last of the Pioneers and the oldest man on Vultures’ Moon. He pondered how much of this he could impart to his drinking buddy and poker nemesis.

  “The Pioneers made a mistake,” he said sullenly.

  “Coming here, you mean?”

  “No - well, yes, that too probably. I mean in making this world the way it is.”

  “I’m not following...”

  “They could have done anything with it. Could have done something new. They could’ve made a paradise.”

  “If you asks me,” Dawson poured again, “any place that has humans in it ain’t gonna turn out to be paradise.”

  Jed raised his glass to toast that remark.

  A flash of memory hit him in tandem with the sour sting of the whisky - or perhaps it was the memory of something he’d been told. A little boy in a laboratory, listening to tales of cowboys and Indians, and the hardships of the Wild West that had never truly existed in the first place...

  “What do you want to be when you grow up, Jed?” He remembered Doc Brandy’s voice at the side of his cot.

  “A gunslinger!” the young Jed’s answer had been immediate and unequivocal.

  “Why’s that, little one?”

  “So I can stop the bad men and keep everybody safe”...

  The men carried on drinking in companionable glumness.

  Then Dawson almost fell off his chair, startled by an idea that had ambushed him. “He may have the paperwork and he may have the gallows but he cain’t have no hanging if’n he ain’t got the prisoners.”

  Jed stared at him.

  “What I’m saying,” Dawson leaned across the table and lowered his voice, “is what if I was overpowered and tied up and what-not and - why! There’s my keys just a-hanging and a-dangling off my belt and then, when I comes to, I wakes up to find the lock-up empty and no clue as to who’s responsible or nothing...”

  Jed continued to stare.

  “Well, say something, Jed! And those new eyes sure are mighty purty, if’n you don’t mind my say-so.”

  “Thanks,” Jed muttered. He sprang to his feet.

  “What for? The compliment or the idea?”

  Jed was pacing again, more urgently this time; the whisky-induced lethargy completely evaporated.

  “Just don’t hit me too hard, you promise?” Dawson braced himself against the table. “And try not to mark my face.”

  Said face hit the table top as the blow Jed fetched him to the back of his head knocked the sheriff clean out of consciousness.

  ***

  The men in what was left of their skirts were delighted to see Jed although they suspected he had come to say his last farewells. He turned the key in the lock and gestured to them to be quiet. He ushered them from the cell, ignoring their confused expressions.

  In the corner, on the floor, the bounty hunter gave the gunslinger a smirk.

  “Well, ain’t this unorthodox! Good to see you, Jed. I am invited to this here party, ain’t I?”

  Jed demurred. Flint got to his feet.

  “If’n you leave me here, I could bargain my way out of trouble with Carriage by offering to identify the man who helped the others get away...”

  Jed snarled. He turned from the cell but left the door open.

  “Thank you, Jed!” Flint boomed and then mock-castigated himself for being so danged loud. Jed was herding the men from the jailhouse. He instructed them in urgent whispers to walk along the street as if they belonged there. Walk tall, he said, and keep your bonnets on. Like a deputation from the Crosspatch Hill townswomen’s guild, come to protest the depravity at the Last Gasp.

  The men played their part; they even sang a hymn but Jed thought that was overegging it. They marched to the saloon but Jed signalled them to go around the back of the building, to the stage door.

  He looked over his shoulder to see if Flint had followed. There was no sign of the bounty hunter, which was good. But what would be better, Jed considered, was to know exactly where that lowdown snake was at all times.

  ***

  Once more Miss Kitty was prevailed upon to help. She rummaged through backstage trunks for costumes to disguise the fugitives from injustice. They weren’t overly pleased with her choices but then they had no say in the matter.

  Jed left them to it and walked the streets of Tarnation. The only lights and sounds were coming from the saloons. The rest of the buildings were in darkness and silence, looming like giant tombstones on either side of the road. In a house not far from here, the boy Wyatt would be sleeping - probably in a bunk with Billy - his face scrubbed clean and his belly full of wholesome vittles, courtesy of Billy’s ma.

  It would be the boy’s last night in Tarnation, Jed was certain of that much.

  Can I do it? Can I really tear him away and deliver him to Shish?

  Or have I already decided I ain’t going to do it? And I’m never going to see my Horse again.

  His strides took him out of town. He found some higher ground from which to watch the sun come up. First things first: there would be the wrath of Carriage to deal with. Jed couldn’t imagine the sheriff shrugging off the loss of his scapegoats with no recriminations or reprisals.

  Men like that shouldn’t be in office but it was the same all over the Moon. Tin pot despots, abusing their power. Jed was sure they caused more trouble than they solved. But what could he do about it?

  What can I do about anything without my Horse?

  Scarlet slashes spread like blood from a wound as dawn broke in the sky above Tarnation. The tolling of a bell roused Jed from his half-dreams. It took him a minute to realise it was the Execution Bell, calling the townsfolk to bear witness to justice in action.

  But - who?

  How could there be a hanging when all the prisoners had escaped? Unless Flint had indeed followed them and had exposed their concealment in the saloon... Unless the bounty hunter himself had been recaptured and had proved unable to weasel his way out of Carriage’s bad books... Jed hoped it was the latter option; that Flint deserved what was coming to him.

  But when he arrived back on Main Street and under the stretching shadows of the gallows, Jed was shocked to see the situation was much worse than he had imagined.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  A Hanging!

  The prisoner on the scaffold had his head covered by a burlap sack. Sheriff Carriage was waiting on the platform, his ginger mutton chops spread further apart by his grin. One of his men had been recruited as hangman and sported a black hood. The townsfolk were gathering; it had been a
long while since a public execution had been held in Tarnation. There really had been no need for such barbarism - such thrilling barbarism! - since Jed had taken a special interest in the folk and their affairs.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, farmers, townies and all the rest of you,” Carriage addressed the crowd, savouring his moment. “We have before us a traitor, a traitor I have rooted out from among you good folks, a traitor who has been holding a position of trust, which position he has betrayed along with every man jack of you. This low-down, yellow-bellied lizard has brought about a miscarriage of justice. He has permitted the escape of the dangedest bunch of bandits I’ve ever had the misfortune to come across - those very varmints responsible for that terrible shuttle crash in which so many innocent folks, just like you, needlessly lost their lives. Oh, he tried to dress it up as an attack by persons unknown. He tried to make it look like an unknown confederate of those men assaulted him and set those wicked hellions free to propagate their evil all over again. Such is his treachery. Such is his deceitful nature.”

  By this point, Jed had forced his way to the front of the crowd. Carriage saw him and smirked. He nodded to a henchman who whipped off the prisoner’s hood.

  The crowd gasped to see the bowed head of their beloved Sheriff Dawson. His hands were bound in front of him and there was a tear in his shirt where his badge of office had been ripped from him.

  “Any last words, you skunk?” Carriage offered as though he was the most generous man in town.

  Dawson looked at the upturned faces of the townsfolk he had served and protected all his working life. Without looking directly at the gunslinger, he spoke out above the crowd.

  “I’m sorry, Jed.”

  Carriage signalled to the hangman, who took Dawson’s arm and positioned him on the trapdoor. The other henchman began to play a drum. Carriage was grinning broadly; he was having the time of his life. The hangman placed the noose over Dawson’s head. The crowd held its collective breath.

  The drummer built to a climax. The hangman waited for silence. Then he pulled the lever, the trap fell away and Dawson plummeted through it - clean through it. He didn’t dangle on the rope - the rope went with him, shot through by an unknown gunman. The crowd cried out at the condemned man’s surprise disappearance. Jed ducked under the platform. Dawson was on the ground, nursing a broken ankle.