Vengeance Moon

by Charles G. West

  “I think it’s best to rest you up another night before we start out,” she said in response to his suggestion to get under way. “Let’s go back up to the room now, where we can talk.”

  “About what?” Cotton asked.

  “There’s parts about this deal that I ain’t showed you yet. Come on, get up.”

  He shrugged indifferently, drained the last swallow of coffee from his cup, and got up from the table. Without hesitation, she reached into her pocket, pulled out a sizable roll of bills, and paid for his breakfast. The wad of money was enough to capture Cotton’s interest, so he made no objection to following her upstairs.

  She led him into the room, then locked the door behind them. He gave it a moment’s thought, but no more than that. “I don’t want nobody botherin’ us,” she said by way of explanation. Cotton was still clueless until she removed her hat, and unpinned her hair, letting it fall almost to her broad behind. A germ of suspicion sprouted in his mind then, but he told himself what he suspected was highly unlikely. She made it unquestionably clear in the next few moments, however, when she started unbuttoning her shirt.

  “What the hell’s goin’ on?” Cotton blurted, still finding it hard to believe she was intent upon what her actions indicated.

  “I’m just makin’ myself comfortable,” she said, gazing at him much as a bear might gaze at a salmon. “I’m gettin’ ready to give you a bonus, for joinin’ up with us. You’d best come outta them clothes if you wanna take a ride.”

  Fully aware of what the game was at that point, Cotton was not at all sure he wanted to play. He was never one to turn down any opportunity to enjoy a woman’s favors, but this seemed more like a tussle with another man. “I don’t know,” he stammered, taking a backward step. “I’ve got this shoulder . . .”

  “That shoulder ain’t the part of you I’m fixin’ to use,” she said as she removed the shirt, revealing two almost flat sacks that rested comfortably upon an ample belly.

  Cotton wavered, still uncertain that when she removed her trousers, he might discover the same equipment down there that he saw when he looked down at himself. He slowly unbuckled his gun belt, but went no farther, his eyes riveted to the woman undressing before him. Down came the trousers, and he released a tiny sigh of relief. It occurred to him then that he had, on more than one occasion, paid women who didn’t look much more attractive. Of course, I was a helluva lot drunker than I am now, he thought. What the hell—ride a horse, ride a mule; they’re both going to the same place. She had the necessary equipment; it was just poorly arranged and not in the best condition. Rising to the occasion then, he started peeling off his clothes.

  She paused to watch. “When’s the last time you took a bath?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. When’s the last time it rained?”

  She grunted in response. At this stage in the game, it was going to matter little, anyway. The sap was rising in both parties. She couldn’t help but comment, however, “Damn, when you take your pants off, there ain’t a helluva lot to look at, is there?”

  “There’s enough to take care of you,” he replied indignantly. But he was about to find that it almost wasn’t. As Arlo had predicted, it was a hard ride for Bill Cotton. Unable to operate according to her timetable, he finished far in advance of her fulfillment, causing her to exhort his extra effort, playing on his pride at first, until soundly cursing his feeble attempts to stay with her to the end. When she finally arrived, she began hooting like an owl, over and over. It was a reaction that Cotton had never heard before, and, at that moment fearing he was near death, cared less about.

  In a minute or two, P. D. calmed down. She lay there in relaxed satisfaction for a brief period before shoving her exhausted lover off the edge of the bed. Her sense of relief could be compared to the feeling of finally ridding herself of a splinter that had irritated her for a spell. She got up from the bed then, and went to the pitcher and basin on a stand next to the wall. “Get your clothes on and get on outta here,” she ordered. “I’ve got to clean up.”

  He did as he was told, feeling spent, used, discarded, and totally dismayed. “I reckon I’ll sleep in here again tonight,” he said, heading for the door.

  “Like hell,” P. D. retorted. “I’m gonna need to get some sleep tonight. You can bunk in with the boys, or sleep in the stable with the horses. I don’t care which.” Then, remembering that she still needed him to find Slaughter, she softened her tone. “Maybe you and me will have us another go at it in a day or two. Be ready to ride out in the mornin’, though.”

  When the door closed behind Bill Cotton, P. D. walked up close to the small mirror over the basin. She examined the rough, lined face in the glass as if searching for some remnants of her femininity. She often felt it a curse that she had not been born a man. It was a man’s world. When she was younger, she had halfway accepted that truth. But life had gotten harder with every year after her father ran off, abandoning twelve-year-old Priscilla Delores and her mother.

  The two had taken up with a mule skinner after that, a man named Barnhill, who had two sons from a former marriage. It was a rough existence for Priscilla. After two years of abuse from Barnhill, the fourteen-year-old girl decided she was going to strike out on her own, feeling anything would be preferable to living under Barnhill’s oppressive yoke. She did not leave without baggage, however, for the night before her departure she was impregnated with her first child, the result of a rape by one of Barnhill’s sons.

  Having not been endowed with the beauty of some of her species, Priscilla nevertheless tried her hand at whoring to feed her infant son and herself. She was able to survive due to the indisputable fact that the drunker a man got, the prettier she became. She moved from town to town and camp to camp over the next few years. The inevitable side effects of her occupation resulted in the birth of another son, and a growing contempt for men in general. Only one man penetrated the hard shell of distrust and loathing, Buck Wildmoon, the father of her third son, Wiley. That germ of affection was destroyed when she found Buck with another prostitute astride him. It was at that time in her life that she found her real satisfaction could only be realized with a gun in her hand.

  Looking in the mirror now, she could find peace in the knowledge that she would probably not have feminine urges for another year. Bill Cotton had served that function, even if he never fulfilled his job as a guide. She gazed at her image for a few moments longer. Then she walked over to her gun belt hanging on the bedpost and drew the long skinning knife from its scabbard. Without another moment’s hesitation, she began to hack away at her long hair, knowing that she would most likely have the urge only once more by the time it grew down to her fanny again.

  Downstairs, Arlo looked at Bo and laughed. As they walked in the front door of the hotel, they had heard the loud hooting sounds from upstairs. “Ma’s cured the itch,” Bo said. A few minutes later, they met Bill Cotton coming down the stairs. All three brothers grinned knowingly at the disheveled man as he passed by them with nothing more than a brief nod of recognition.

  Chapter 7

  Bill Cotton’s wound was healing nicely, a testimony to P. D. Wildmoon’s surgical skills. It still pained him some after a full day in the saddle, and with P. D. giving the orders a full day meant from sunup to sundown. It had taken him three days to reach Virginia City when he fled the trading post, and that included pushing on past sunset on the first night. P. D. seemed intent on cutting the time required to cover the same distance.

  “I’ve gotta go in the bushes for a minute,” Cotton announced as they followed the Yellowstone beyond its confluence with another river, one that Cotton couldn’t name for them. The disturbance in his bowels made him wonder if the side meat they had packed might have turned rank. No one else seemed to have any complaints.

  “We ain’t got time to stop,” P. D. said. “Get your business done and catch up with us. Bo, you drop back and wait with him.”

  “Yessum,” Bo responded, and immediately r
eined his horse back.

  “I don’t reckon I need nobody to watch me,” Cotton said.

  “I know you don’t, Bill, darlin’,” P. D. said, a smile of amusement playing faintly upon her lips. “But there may be Injuns around that we don’t even know about, and Bo can keep watch for you.”

  Cotton made no reply, simply giving the grinning Bo a glance before guiding his horse toward a clump of berry bushes near the river. It ain’t much different than taking a shit with a dog or a horse watching you, he thought as he shucked his gun belt and fumbled to get his britches untied, feeling a sudden need for haste. As his troubled bowel rushed to divorce itself from the tainted meat, Cotton gave thought to another thing that puzzled him. He didn’t believe for one second that Bo had been left behind to watch for Indians. It was a thought that had occurred to him the day before. Some one of the Wildmoon family was always watching him. It was almost like he was a prisoner. Why, he wondered, would they suspect he might desert them? The promise of five hundred dollars was incentive aplenty for an outlaw mind like Cotton’s. Maybe they’re worried I might go after that wad of money P. D. carries, he thought, smiling to himself between grunts. I wonder how much that ol’ bitch has got on her. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that it was the reason he was being watched all the time.

  He had speculated a great deal about the party he had joined during the first two days on the trail. The more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that he was being played for a fool. P. D. needed him to take her to that Crow village. Once she found Slaughter, Cotton would indeed be a fool to think she would pay him the money promised. She would most likely tell him that he had to wait until she received the balance of the bounty from some jasper in Virginia—that, or simply shoot him in the back and be done with it. Of the two possibilities, he figured the second most likely. The joke’s on her, he thought. Bill Cotton ain’t that easy to skunk. I don’t exactly know where that Crow camp is, and I sure as hell ain’t got no idea where Slaughter is. He issued a final grunt of relief, and pulled some leaves from the berry bushes. I expect I’ll get my chance to catch Miss Wildmoon and her boys sleeping long before we start looking for that Indian camp.

  It was late afternoon when they reached the point where the Boulder River joined the Yellowstone. A few hundred yards east of that, they came upon the ruins of the Frenchman’s trading post. The stockade was still intact, untouched by the flames that had left the store a pile of charred timbers. The gate faced the east, so they could not appreciate the degree of destruction until they rode around to the far side of the compound. Approaching the gate, they were met by Bordeaux’s mongrel dog, the only other survivor of Slaughter’s vengeance. With fangs bared, the snarling beast challenged the strangers. In a motion that was quick but casual, P. D. drew her pistol and shot the surly cur. “I ain’t got much use for dogs,” she said.

  “That dog never got along with nobody but Luther Rainey,” Cotton commented. “We always figured it was because Rainey wasn’t much smarter than the dog, hisself.” He pulled up to gaze at the two bodies close by the door of the store. “Funny thing, ain’t it? I figured that dog would be long gone by now.”

  “Hell,” Arlo replied, pointing toward a charred lump inside the burned-out back wall. “He warn’t about to run off and leave his food supply. From the looks of this’un, that ol’ hound liked his meat cooked.” He laughed at the thought. “I reckon he’da started on them fellers out in the yard next.”

  Cotton dismounted and stepped closer to view the ragged remains that had once been Luther Rainey. Blackened and baked to a turn, Rainey’s half-eaten carcass triggered an amused grunt from his former partner. Cotton found it ironic that the dog had chosen the only person he liked to start in on.

  P. D. walked her horse around the ruins, looking the situation over. “There ain’t nothin’ left worth takin’,” she decided. “He musta cleaned the place out before he burned it down.” She turned her horse toward the gate. “Let’s get outta here and find a place to camp. Somewhere upwind,” she added. “These corpses is startin’ to get ripe.”

  “Reckon we oughta bury ’em, Ma?”

  P. D. turned to look at her youngest. Of her three boys, Wiley was by far her favorite. P. D. didn’t have many soft spots in her heart, but Wiley came the closest to being one. Maybe it was because, of the three different men who sired her sons, she had a casual fondness for Wiley’s father, enough to have taken his name for her own. Possibly she nurtured a germ of compassion for the boy because he was slow-witted. Whatever the reason, he was the only one for whom she exhibited any show of patience. “I reckon not,” she finally answered his question. “We’ll just let the buzzards and the wolves feed off ’em.”

  Bo, standing next to his younger brother, rapped Wiley on the back of his head with an open palm, knocking his hat off. “Reckon we oughta bury ’em?” he mocked. “I swear, Wiley, you’re dumber’n dirt.”

  Wiley quickly reached down to snatch his hat from the ashes of the cabin wall. When he came up again, he had his pistol in his hand. “Put it away, Wiley,” P. D. commanded, and guided her horse between the two brothers. “Get on your horse, and let’s get outta here.” She watched him with a stern eye until he holstered the weapon. While he turned to step up in the saddle, she rendered a quick swipe across Bo’s face with her quirt.

  “Goddamn!” Bo howled, and grabbed his cheek. “I was just funnin’ with him,” he complained. “The dumb bastard,” he added under his breath.

  The family squabble dispensed with, P. D. turned to question Cotton. “Which way to that Crow camp?”

  “Back yonder,” he replied, pointing toward the Boulder River. “Up that river.” He had no idea if the Crow village was up that river or not, but whenever Indians from the village had come to the trading post, they had followed the river. He figured he could trust to luck, and maybe they would stumble on it. “’Course, there ain’t no guarantee they’re still in the same place.”

  “How far?” P. D. wanted to know.

  Now Cotton was really out on a limb, but he didn’t want to admit that he had no idea. A confession such as that might convince P. D. that his services were unnecessary. “Why,” he allowed, “as near as I remember, no more’n half a day’s ride.”

  “As near as you remember?” P. D. questioned. “Hell, back in Virginia City you said you could lead us right to it.”

  “Well, I could, but like I said, the damn Injuns mighta moved their camp since then.” Cotton decided at that moment that P. D. was starting to question his story, and maybe his best bet was to take the first opportunity to kill the lot of them, and be satisfied with what money the suspicious ol’ gal had on her.

  P. D. said nothing more on the subject, but continued to give Cotton a cold eye for a few moments longer before announcing, “Sun’s gettin’ low. We’d best find us a place to camp.”

  Retracing their trail for a few hundred yards, they started up the Boulder River toward the towering Absarokas, riding no more than a mile before P. D. picked a spot for their camp. “Suit you, Bill?” she remarked pointedly, as if his opinion meant something.

  Cotton shrugged. “Suits me fine,” he said, and dismounted.

  They unsaddled the horses and hobbled them after taking them to drink. P. D. took care of building a fire while Arlo took care of her horse. Cotton laid out his blanket a little apart from the other four, next to a sizable rock that extended a foot or more out into the river. The rock would partially shield his movements should he decide to move about any during the night. From that position, he was also a little above the other four. As he finished arranging his blanket, he felt P. D.’s eyes upon him. When he looked around, she was indeed watching him, and when he met her gaze, she smiled. Like a cat watching a mouse, he thought. Thinking how good I’m gonna taste when she eats me. He returned her smile. She’s on to me, he thought. She’s thinking I don’t know where that village is, and she doesn’t need to share that reward with me. He had li
ttle doubt that P. D. would put a bullet in his back with no more compassion than she had with Bordeaux’s dog. Well, this is one mouse that ol’ cat ain’t gonna get the chance to taste.

  The eye contact was broken when Arlo and Bo started rummaging through the packs that held the supply of bacon. “What are you boys doin’ in them packs?” P. D. demanded.

  Bo answered, “Lookin’ for a little piece of bacon. Me and Arlo’s gonna rig up a line to see if we can catch us a fish for supper.”

  “More’n likely you’re feedin’ our supper to the damn fish,” P. D. retorted. “I didn’t tote that slab of bacon all the way out here for you boys to throw in the river.”

  “We’re just gonna take a little piece,” Arlo said while his brother cut off a small corner of the slab.

  “Wrap that meat up like you found it,” P. D. prompted. Then she looked at Cotton and smiled again, like any mother of a couple of rambunctious cubs.

  It struck Cotton how much she looked like a man; even more than before with her newly cropped hair. He thought back to the incident in her hotel room, amazed that he had been able to accommodate her. Her attitude had changed perceptibly since they had stopped to make camp. The gruff exterior had given way to something remotely akin to a mannerism approaching femininity. He considered the possibility that she might be thinking along the same lines as during that tussle in the hotel. He quickly rejected that notion. She was getting friendly for a decidedly different purpose, he thought, to put him at ease so she could put a knife in his gut while he slept. We’ll see about that.