by Brom Kearne
6
Dr. Long took a long time with Arnold Keech despite Thorn’s desire to be out of town as quickly as possible. Thorn was afraid that Keech would sit up from that operating table and walk out of there, and Thorn didn’t have any more buggies to wreck. He figured if that happened he’d just let Keech go. He thought that if someone could get up and walk away after a wreck like that they deserved their freedom.
In the meantime Thorn allowed himself to be pulled along with the rest of the townspeople to the Stag’s Bells. He shook so many hands that he began to regret his decision not to have Dr. Long take a look at him. But Thorn hated doctors. If he was able to grit his teeth and bear the pain he figured he wasn’t hurt bad enough to warrant a doctor.
They had swept away most of the debris and broken glass in the Stag’s Bells. The money that Keech had thrown at Thorn was, of course, gone. Thorn had no idea who had taken it. Tyler Cates joked that rather than refurnish he should just hang a sign over the door saying, “Biggest Dance Floor in Town!” He brought out what Keech hadn’t smashed or drank of the booze. All of the grain whiskey was gone but Keech hadn’t touched most of the homegrown potato mash. And since Crooked Crag was the hops capital of the Western Frontier there were plenty of untapped kegs that hadn’t been touched.
After Thorn got a few drinks in him he started feeling better and his arm didn’t hurt quite as badly. That potato mash wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Mostly Thorn was just feeling down as he always did after a hunt. It was the low following the high, and the low points always allowed bad thoughts to begin creeping in. He knew he’d get over it, as he always did, and despite the pain in his arm he was glad to be in the saloon around a lot of people. The thing that was weighing the most heavily upon his mind was the destruction of his buggy. Once he got over this low point his buggy was still going to be wrecked and he was still going to be out a ride.
Thorn excused himself to use the bathroom and slipped out the back door to have a moment to look at his buggy. They were drinking hard in there. Music, conversation, and laughter followed him out until he closed the door on it.
Someone had towed the buggy and the motorcycle off the road in an alleyway between an upholsterer’s shop and a wooden furniture showroom. Being a bounty hunter and being used to looking for notices that might fetch him a reward, Thorn noticed right away the print posters in the shop windows. They were for missing teenagers. Runaways. Thorn paused a moment to look them over. The parents were offering a reward. Not very much, but probably all they could afford. Said they’d been missing a few weeks. Thorn kept walking. Runaway teenagers weren’t really his thing.
Thorn could see some of the debris piled at the end of the alley. He closed his eyes before making the turn. When he opened them he saw that the wreck was every bit as bad as he remembered. He walked around the wreckage with his hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.
It didn’t look like much was going to be salvageable from the two vehicles. Actually, they weren’t even two vehicles anymore. Separating them was going to be difficult. Thorn had been holding out some hope that the banker would be offering a reward for the return of his motorcycle, but after getting a closer view of its condition that hope began to wane. The best he could probably do at this point was hope for a few dollars from a salvage yard.
As he was looking at the wreck Thorn became aware of a shadow watching him from the mouth of the alleyway. Thorn glanced over his shoulder without turning around to see that it was a young woman. She was watching without making herself too conspicuous, letting Thorn’s mind wander in his dark mood.
“Can I help you?” he asked after a few moments’ silence.
“I’m sorry about your buggy,” she said. “It looked fast.”
“At least she died on her feet, so to speak.”
“They’ll be telling this story for years. She’ll be immortalized in legend, so there’s that. I’m sorry, I saw you leave the Bells and I wanted the chance to thank you for helping me out back there.”
Thorn turned and looked at her. She was young and pretty, with her light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. It took him a moment to recognize her as one of the women from the Stag’s Bells. She was the barmaid that Keech had threatened to kill and then thrown at Thorn as a distraction. She looked so different without the make-up, the fishnets, and the corset.
“My name’s Shari,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but you looked so sad I can’t help it. We got you a surprise.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve said too much. Tyler donated it but it was my idea. Mayor Haversham wanted to make a big deal about it. That’s why they sent me out to find you.”
“I thought you wanted to say thanks.”
“That was my cover.” She smiled. She had a very cute smile, like she was doing something wrong and was afraid of getting caught for it. “I really did want to thank you, though. I’ve had to deal with some rough people, especially during harvest season when we get all sorts through here, but nothing like that.”
“Well, you’re welcome. Now what is this about a surprise?”
She smiled again as she took his hand. When their palms touched her smile broadened and she looked especially like she was doing something wrong, like the proverbial cat being caught with the canary halfway down his gullet.
It looked as though the Stag’s Bells had emptied onto the road. A large crowd of inebriated people was awaiting Thorn’s arrival. Mayor Haversham was standing in front of the group holding his lapels and rocking back and forth on his heels. The crowd was doing their best to conceal a large object under a tarp. Thorn looked quizzically at Shari, but she just smiled again and led him to Mayor Haversham’s side before taking her place at the front of the group.
“Mr. Thorn,” Mayor Haversham began, stuffing out his chest pompously as he addressed the crowd, “we threw together this little celebration in your honor, and we are deeply honored that you graced our little town with your presence and drove out the villain Arnold Keech who did terrorize us to the point of despondency.”
He was greeted by a smattering of applause. From his grandiose speech Thorn began to wonder what, exactly, he was getting into. The last thing he wanted right now was a celebration to honor his honor. He exchanged glances with Shari and she nodded eagerly.
Mayor Haversham cleared his throat and said, “For our hero Mr. um . . .” He leaned in and whispered, “I’m afraid that I don’t know your first name.”
“Thorn.”
“Ah, then I’m afraid I don’t know your last name.”
“Don’t have one.”
“You mean you’re just Thorn?”
“That’s right.”
“Well don’t you have any parents? What were their names?”
Thorn just shook his head.
Mayor Haversham looked perplexed for a moment before he regained his composure. He cleared his throat again. “Very well, for our hero Mr. Thorn, who rid our town of a vile miscreant that destroyed our homes, destroyed our farmland, and abused our citizens, let us have three cheers!”
They answered on cue with three loud cheers. They were drunk and unruly cheers, but they silenced the moment Mayor Haversham cut them off with a sharp wave of his hand.
“For services to this community above and beyond the duty of a hired bounty hunter, we would like to present you with a small and humble token of our gratitude. We have taken up a humble collection, as promised, for your aid to our town in our time of need.”
Thorn perked up at the mention of a collection. He had almost forgotten that the mayor had promised one.
“Shari, if you will,” Mayor Haversham said.
Shari stepped forward to present Thorn with a basket of potatoes, in which was nestled a full bottle of their home-grown potato mash. Thorn’s smile faltered. Shari stood on tip-toe to kiss him on the cheek as she passed the basket over. She flushed visibly when she did so, and retreated to the front of th
e audience to applaud with everyone else.
“And furthermore,” Mayor Haversham continued, holding up a finger to silence the applause, “since you sacrificed your buggy in the service of protecting our humble town of Crooked Crag, we have a bit of a surprise for you.”
Thorn was somewhat relieved that the basket of potatoes wasn’t all the collection they had taken up. He looked at the large object under the tarp as the audience stepped aside from it. It was certainly the right size and shape to be a buggy.
“This is too much,” Thorn said, but he was silenced by the wagging finger of the mayor.
Shari darted to the corner of the tarp and awaited her cue to throw it off. She was smiling broadly. Thorn thought she looked a lot prettier now compared to when they had first met. Or maybe it was the difference in her demeanor: she had been terrified and crying earlier. Now she was smiles and expectation.
Could he have really gotten so lucky to have a replacement buggy so soon? Thorn had resigned himself to renting one from someone to make the trip back, but to be given one by the town? It was too much. These people had been through a lot and would have to spend a lot to rebuild what Keech had torn down. Thorn didn’t want to inconvenience them by accepting such a lavish gift, especially when he was already being paid two hundred dollars by the province.
Mayor Haversham looked to be just about as pleased as he could be as he rocked back on his heels and gave the signal. Shari tore the tarp off in one graceful movement.
This time Thorn couldn’t muster a smile at all. The buggy she revealed was ancient. It was a tractor buggy that looked like it had been sitting idle behind a barn for at least ten years. Rust had eaten away significant portions of it, even into the frame and the axles. And worst of all it was a slop engine that looked so gunked up Thorn doubted whether it had any moving parts left to it. The fuel compartment was so caked over with grease and hardened gunk that it looked like it wouldn’t open at all. Thorn could only wonder what shape the engine was in.
Thorn’s eyes flicked from the rusted old tractor buggy to the townspeople, and in particular to Shari. She, and they, had such genuine expectation on their faces that he realized how rude he was being. Of course these people didn’t have much to give and most of what they had would go towards rebuilding. Keech had destroyed a lot of property and farmland. This had been a bad situation for everyone involved. If anyone should pay for all this it was the lawyers back east who kept deciding to release repeat criminals like Arnold Keech.
“Thank you,” Thorn said, much to the relief of the townspeople. He began shaking hands with them and though he didn’t really mean the words at first, they grew in meaning each time he repeated them.
“Do you like it?” Shari asked, appearing at Thorn’s side and taking his hand again after most of the crowd had gone back into the Stag’s Bells.
“Yeah, it’s uh, it’s great,” Thorn said.
“Come on,” she said, pulling him back towards the saloon. “Take me dancing.”
They danced and drank and listened to music long into the evening. The townspeople would be going all night in the way that only simple and hard-working people could when they found reason enough to celebrate. Tomorrow they would have a lot of work to do and they would hunker down and get to it, but today and tonight it was time for celebration.
It was late in the evening when Dr. Long found Thorn in the Stag’s Bells and informed him that Arnold Keech was ready for transport. Thorn groaned. He had been hoping that Keech wouldn’t be ready until tomorrow morning. He didn’t want to leave the party and he didn’t want to leave Shari. But then again he didn’t want to leave the journey for the next day, either. He was still afraid that Keech would get up and start causing trouble halfway back to Herrickstead. Dr. Long put those fears somewhat to rest when he took Thorn into the operating room. Arnold Keech was heavily sedated and most of his body was encased in plaster casts. Dr. Long assured him that Arnold Keech would be no trouble, but Thorn was afraid of taking the chance.
Thorn went to pay the doctor for his services, as it was Bradenfield law that the bounty hunter was liable for injuries suffered during apprehension, but Dr. Long wouldn’t allow it. He said he found some money in Arnold Keech’s pockets that more than covered the cost of the treatment he had received.
Thorn began to wonder just how much of that stolen bank money Arnold Keech had dropped on this little town.
He went back to the Stag’s Bells to tell Shari that he was heading out to deliver the bounty. If he had been sincere about wanting to leave tonight he would have just left without saying goodbye. Instead he wanted to give her the opportunity to talk him into staying and she did that most insistently, and entirely without words.
She lived in a farmhouse with her parents and Thorn had little recollection of going out there the night before. That part was a blur, although the night they spent together certainly wasn’t. He’d put up only moderate resistance to spending the night, and the more he resisted the more physically insistent she got. But as they lay together in the dark her true motivation was revealed as she spoke of getting out of this little town and seeing what adventures the wide world had to offer her. She never specifically said she wanted Thorn to take her, but the meaning was clear.
He was up before she was and despite the pleasurable night he had spent here, he began to feel the usual pangs of guilt: that he should have stuck to his job and gotten Arnold Keech back last night, and more importantly, that he had somehow taken advantage of the young woman. He knew it was bollocks, but the feeling that he owed her something for the magnificent night weighed heavily on him as he found his clothes and escaped through the window. He missed the days when sex was easy. Heck, he missed the days when everything was easy. And on top of everything else he also had a pounding hangover to contend with.
He found the general store in the town proper and bought some supplies to build a sled with which he could pull Keech’s unconscious body, along with enough straps to hold him down. He chained up his former buggy and the motorcycle to the back of the sled so he could take those as well. At the very least he’d be able to make a few dollars from them as scrap metal. Then he went to the physician, made sure Keech was sedated for the journey, and strapped him down to the sled.
Thorn didn’t know if the tractor buggy could carry all of this extra weight. For that matter he didn’t know if the tractor buggy was going to fire up in the first place.
Everyone else would be waking up this morning and suffering through their own hangovers as they got back to work. Thorn did regret leaving Shari behind. She had a very cute smile and a very eager personality. He could live among people and act as one of them, but he never truly felt like he belonged with them. He was always restless. He was always looking for the next challenge, always wanting to move on before he became too attached to one place. His childhood in Collective City had left him scarred with regards to human contact. He felt lonely even when he wasn’t, and while he could act warm he was, deep inside, perpetually cold, and that cold nature had cost him many hours of potential happiness. He wondered if leaving Shari behind was one of those moments of costing himself something that might have been good. On the other hand, she could very well be quite loose and plied her seductive wiles on every eligible traveler that came through town.
Thorn pushed these thoughts from his mind as he attempted to fire up the slop engine. He had bought a cube of the foul quivering fuel from the general store when he’d bought the supplies for the sled. It should be enough to get him back home. It turned over laboriously and he could imagine all those years of slop in there like thick paste preventing the parts from moving. He tried again and the crank shaft began lurching and the engine fired and rumbled beneath him. And he was quickly reminded of another reason he hated slop engines: they didn’t run smooth. At all. Thorn’s rear end was already going numb before he even got out of town.
Despite Thorn’s fears and misgivings the trip back was uneventful. Keech spent the whole
time sedated and moaned when he was dragged over rocks or bumps, and Thorn spent most of the time clenching his jaw out of fear that the slop engine would give out or the frame would break in two from rust damage. Twice he had to stop and chop up a few pieces of solid fuel to cram into the fuel compartment. He wiped his greasy fingers on Keech’s cast before driving on.
He kept mainly to the roads because the off-road capabilities of the tractor buggy were severely limited. That meant the trip back took much longer than the trip out here. The baking sun helped him sweat out the alcohol he’d drunk the night before.
He was finally able to breathe a heavy sigh of relief when he pulled into Herrickstead late that evening. Marshal Wolcott met him outside in the doorway to his office, his steel-grey eyes surveying the scene as Thorn unhooked Keech’s sled from the back of the tractor buggy. Wolcott winced when he saw how badly Thorn’s face was swollen.
“Do I even want to know what happened?” he asked in his gravelly voice.
“He’s caught,” Thorn said. “That’s all that matters. You just do what it takes to hold onto him because I don’t know if I’ll be so eager to go chasing him next time.”
Marshal Wolcott took the foot end of Keech’s sled and Thorn took the head. Thorn grimaced and nearly dropped it from the fresh pain that shot down his arm.
“You ok?” Marshal Wolcott asked.
“Fine,” Thorn growled through gritted teeth.
Somehow they managed to maneuver the sled into one of the cells. They didn’t even unstrap him. Only after Marshal Wolcott had closed and locked the door, and they had returned to the office, did Thorn allow himself to collapse in a chair and breathe a sigh of relief. The job, at last, was done.
“Keech may be worse for wear but you don’t look so good yourself,” Marshal Wolcott said. “You need to see someone about that arm if nothing else.”
Thorn shook his head.
“Just as stubborn as always.” Marshal Wolcott pulled the lower corner of his grandfather’s painting and it swung outward on a pair of hinges, revealing a wall safe behind it. The large painting swung towards Thorn, who looked up into the face of the man who could have been Marshal James Wolcott himself, if only he had a few years on him.
“I’m authorized to give you a twenty-five percent bonus for a speedy recovery,” Marshal Wolcott said as he set the lockbox on his desk. He pulled out his key ring and selected the smallest key, which he fit delicately into the lock. “I reckon you’ll need it for a new buggy.”
Thorn didn’t know if he was authorized to give him that bonus or not, but he wasn’t about to turn it down. It wouldn’t be enough to cover a new buggy, but it was a start.
“Are you going to be at the pub tonight?” Marshal Wolcott asked as he counted the money into Thorn’s hand.
“The only thing I want to do right now is soak in a hot bath.”
“You know they’re going to be talking, right?”
“Yeah, I know. But they can wait until tomorrow.”
Thorn shoved the money into his pocket and shook Marshal Wolcott’s hand.
Ever since he’d left Crooked Crag Thorn had been looking forward to taking a long hot bath to soak his aching body, but when he finally crossed the threshold into his cabin he was too exhausted to think about hauling in the buckets of hot water from outside. He collapsed in bed and slept for hours.