Stagecoach to Purgatory

by Peter Brandvold

  Wherever it had come from and whomever it belonged to, Wells and the other outlaws must have found out about it. Had they known what this box was carrying, or had they just learned about the stage line’s new trick and assumed this coach was carrying something of value in the box?

  Prophet heard a shoe crunch gravel behind him.

  He jerked with a start to see Mary standing there, holding a pistol in her hand. The barrel was aimed at Prophet. She stared down at the drawer containing the three sacks that probably contained specie, judging by the clanks they’d made when the box had hit the ground.

  Sliding her dark eyes to Prophet, she said, “What’s that?”

  Prophet looked at the gun. His throat had gone dry. He reached up and wrapped his hand around the gun, angling the barrel away from him, and gently pulled it out of Mary’s hand.

  “Hidden strongbox,” he said, scowling up at the girl. He hefted the .45 in his hand. “What about this?”

  “It’s a gun.”

  “I know it’s a gun. What were you doing with it?”

  Staring dully at the box, Mary hiked a shoulder. “It was on the ground near Aunt Grace. I picked it up. I don’t know why. What’s in the box?”

  Prophet looked at Mary, looked at the gun, then opened the loading gate, shook out the cartridges while spinning the wheel, and tossed the pistol away. He picked up the pouches, hefted them in each hand.

  “Money, looks like. A good bit, judgin’ by their weight.”

  “Do you think Aunt Grace will go to heaven?”

  Prophet looked at Mary again, incredulous. She had turned to look back at where her aunt lay by the cabin porch, not far from Beermeister. The breeze was nipping at Aunt Grace’s gray hair, blowing it around the old woman’s head, like dry corn silk.

  “She was good,” Mary said. “Deep down . . . in her heart . . . she was good.”

  “Well, I reckon she will, then.” Prophet cast the puzzling, obviously worried girl a reassuring smile. “If that’s where she’s headed, she’s already there.”

  Mary stared at Aunt Grace as though pondering what Prophet had said.

  “Wait here,” Prophet told the girl, placing both hands on her shoulders.

  He went inside and dragged the body of Diego Bernal out onto the porch. Prophet paused to catch his breath. Bernal was a big man. The bounty hunter saw Mary sitting on the porch’s bottom step, looking off toward Aunt Grace. She’d pulled a dress out of one of Aunt Grace’s several bags; she’d used it to cover the old woman’s bullet-chewed body.

  Now Mary just sat there on the step, leaning forward as though chilled.

  Prophet went inside and found a blanket in a back room of the shack. He walked back outside and draped the blanket over Mary’s shoulders.

  “Cold and gonna get colder,” he told the girl. “Why don’t you go on inside? Can you build the fire up in the range?”

  Mary turned to him, nodded.

  “Are you going to be all right, Mary?”

  She stared at him. “Who are you, Mr. Prophet?” She canted her head toward the dead outlaws. “Are you a man like them?”

  Prophet pursed his lips. It was a fair question. He probably looked much like the men he’d killed. At least, he dressed similarly, and his features had been seasoned by the western sun and wind. Now, Mary’s aunt was dead, and she was alone with a strange man out here in the middle of nowhere.

  She might have looked the wild savage, but she’d been raised a civilized white girl.

  “No, I’m not one of them.”

  “Will you help me take Aunt Grace home, so she can be buried in the family plot?”

  “You bet.”

  Mary nodded. She rose and, frowning pensively, holding the blanket taut about her shoulders, walked into the station and closed the door against the chill. Prophet heard a scraping sound and then a dull thud as she dropped a locking bar into place across the door.

  * * *

  Prophet dragged Diego Bernal into the barn.

  Then he dragged Aunt Grace into the barn.

  And then Seymour and Plumb.

  He left the dead outlaws where they lay. He’d dumped the bullet-riddled body of Jimmy Wells into the yard with the others. The stage line could decide what to do with them. Such craven killers didn’t deserve a burial, decent or otherwise. They deserved to have their carcasses chewed on by whatever predators that were lured in by their stench during the night.

  That grisly task completed, Prophet back-and-bellied the coach back onto its wheels. It wasn’t all that heavy though he cursed a little and noted a hitch in his lower back. He cursed again when he saw that the left-front wheel was badly twisted, the felloe broken, the brake blocks snapped off and lying on the ground.

  He pushed the carriage into the barn, found a new wheel, and wrestled it onto the axle, and lubed it before replacing the hub. He didn’t bother with the brake. He didn’t think there were any steep hills between here and Jubilee. He hoped he was right. He’d find out tomorrow.

  If someone from Jubilee rode out looking for the stage, he wouldn’t have to find out. Men from the stage company could then decide what to do about the coach.

  He stowed the three money sacks in his saddlebags. He wanted to keep it close to him tonight, in case anyone else came looking for it. Mainly out of curiosity, he also wanted to count it.

  By the time he had Aunt Grace, Seymour, and Plumb wrapped in blankets and strapped to the top of the coach, the sun had gone down. A stiff, chill wind had risen and a rainstorm had blown in. He closed the barn door and, hefting his rifle and shotgun, adjusting his saddlebags on his left shoulder, he jogged across the rain-pelted yard to the cabin. By the time he’d made it up the porch steps, he was soaked to the bone, rain sluicing down the funneled brim of his hat onto his face.

  He flipped the door latch, pushed. The door wouldn’t budge. He remembered that Mary had locked it. He moved over to the window to the left of the door, and, crouching, lifted his right fist to knock on the glass.

  He froze.

  His eyes widened and his lower jaw loosened as he stared into the shadowy cabin where Mary was standing naked in a corrugated tin washtub, not far from the window.

  A lamp flickering on a near table caressed her smooth, wet, brown skin that owned the luster of varnished walnut. Mary was brushing her damp hair, tilting her head from side to side and raking the thick, coarse, blue-black mass from the inside out.

  The girl’s body belonged to no girl. It was the body of a young woman in full flower.

  His heart skipped beats as, ears warming with shame, he continued to stare, riveted, through the window.

  “Holy hell on the devil’s stick,” Prophet wheezed.

  Mary owned the body of a beautiful young squaw ripe for childbearing . . .

  The girl suddenly turned her head toward him, as though she’d glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye. Both eyes snapped wide in shock and fury. She flung a hand toward the table, where a pistol lay beside the flickering lamp.

  “Oh, tarnation,” Prophet yelled. “Oh, wait, now . . .”

  The girl pivoted on her beautiful hips, taking the pistol in both hands and gritting her teeth as she thumbed back the hammer. She aimed hastily. The gun cracked. Flames lapped from the barrel. There was a tinny ping as the bullet hurled through the glass just as Prophet slid his head away from the window.

  He winced as a sliver of glass dug into his left cheek, just beneath his eye.

  “Hold on, Mary, it’s me—Lou!” Prophet yelled as another crack sounded inside the shack and another chunk of the window was blown onto the porch floor. “It’s Lou! Lou Prophet!” He plucked the sliver of glass from his cheek and yelled at the window beside him. “I was just wantin’ in—that’s all! I saw the door was locked!”

  Running footsteps sounded inside the shack. There was the scrape of the locking bar being removed from the brackets. The door opened.

  Mary looked out. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know it was you! I thought .
. .” She let her voice trail off. “Come in.”

  As she stepped back, Prophet walked into the cabin. She stood before him, wrapped in a towel, her damp hair hanging down past her brown shoulders. Looking up at him, seeing the blood running down his cheek, she sucked air through her teeth. “Did I do that?”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Prophet hung his shotgun on a wall peg and leaned his rifle against the wall beside the door. He dropped his saddlebags onto the floor. He removed his wet hat and tossed it onto the bags.

  Mary closed and locked the door. “You’re soaked!”

  “Yeah, well, it’s rainin’.”

  “Don’t be mad at me. I’m sorry!” Mary rose onto her bare toes to look up at his bloody cheek. “Does it hurt?”

  Prophet pressed his soaked neckerchief against the cut. “Like I said—don’t worry about it.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sit down!” Mary pushed him into a hide-bottom chair at the long table running along the front of the cabin. She cupped his chin in her right hand, and tipped his head back. She lowered her head to get a look at the cut. “I can stitch it. Do you think it needs stitches?”

  Prophet brushed her hand away. “Hell, no, it don’t need stitches.”

  “It might—sit still!” Brusquely, she grabbed his chin in her hand again and tipped his head back once more. She crouched to one side, angling his head to the light of the flickering lantern.

  Suddenly, she looked into his eyes, scowling suspiciously. “Were you looking in at me?”

  “Huh?”

  Mary stepped back, drawing the blanket more tightly around her. Her breasts strained against it—two large, rounded mounds. Prophet tried hard to keep his gaze off the girl’s frisky bosoms but they were like magnets to the steel balls of his eyes. “You were—weren’t you?”

  Prophet’s ears warmed again. “Well, hell, I didn’t mean to. I was just tryin’ to get your attention, and . . .”

  She arched an accusing brow. “And then . . . ?”

  Prophet averted his eyes in shame. “And then . . . I seen you in here, an’ . . . I don’t know . . . you was naked an’ just standin’ there, an’—”

  “And you decided to get an eyeful, didn’t you?”

  “Ah, hell—I didn’t know what to say!” Prophet shifted around in his chair, shame burning in him.

  “Well, did you get an eyeful?”

  “What?”

  “You seem awfully tongue-tied, Mr. Prophet. This whole trip I’ve never heard you at a loss for words.”

  Prophet looked up at her glaring down at him. He was indignant. “Well, hell, ain’t you suddenly the chatty one! For a long stretch of this trip I thought you was a mute. Now I can’t get you to stop talkin’ long enough for me to look around for a bottle. I’m powerful thirsty, and if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you’d accept my heartfelt apology for ogling you through the window. It ain’t every day a man sees somethin’ like that, if you’ll forgive me for sayin’ so, and I reckon, yeah, I had me a good look. I apologize. Now, can we get on with the business at hand?”

  Mary gazed at him. Her eyes lost a little of their incrimination. She stepped forward and grabbed the handkerchief out of his hand. “Here, give me that. Let me see how deep this is.”

  “I told you—it ain’t that deep.”

  She dabbed at the cut with the wet handkerchief, pulled it away. “It’s already starting to clot. You’ll live, though it’s more than you deserve for ogling a girl through a window. I thought you told me you weren’t like one of those men outside.”

  “I’m not! Ah, hell . . .”

  Mary tossed the rag down on the table and stepped back, looking him up and down. Her eyes seemed to linger as she took in his chest and the width of his shoulders, and her voice was a little softer when she said, “You’re soaked.”

  Prophet felt the cold from the rain penetrate him. He shivered. “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ll heat water for a bath, but I have to get dressed first.”

  “I’ll just sip whiskey in front of the range.”

  He started to rise but Mary pushed him back down in his chair. “No, you won’t. Just stay there. I’ll add wood to the fire and heat you some water, but I’m going to get dressed first, so you don’t get any ideas about me. I am not a savage.”

  She gazed down at him, defiantly, as though to drive her words home.

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I was raised in a good home, by a good man. Aunt Grace ruled with a switch and she could be short with me at times, but I needed it. I was born a savage, but I had it raised out of me.”

  Prophet stared at her, shivering. “Mary, fer chrissakes—I don’t think you’re a savage!”

  She stepped back. A flush darkened her cheeks, deepened the red in them.

  Prophet frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  Mary’s bosom rose and fell sharply as she breathed. “I feel . . . strange.” She paused. A look of terror slackened her face. “Noo!”

  She turned away sharply, chewed on the nail of her right index finger. Her shoulders rose and fell as she breathed. Her thick, black hair hung straight down to the middle of her back.

  “Mary, are you all—?”

  She swung around. Tears glazed her eyes. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “What the hell do you mean?”

  “I’m not a savage!” she exclaimed, pressing the heels of her hands to her temples. “I am not wanton!”

  “Hell, I didn’t say—!”

  “I am not a craven heathen!”

  Prophet just stared at her, mouth ajar. He began to understand that those were the things she’d been called—maybe by her foster father and Aunt Grace, maybe by her teachers and the other girls at school. Maybe by everyone she’d known since she’d come to live in the so-called civilized white world.

  Mary stared at him, chocolate eyes glazed with tears.

  She reached up and untucked the towel from over her bosom. She let it fall to the floor at her feet.

  Chapter 12

  Prophet’s heart hiccupped as Mary stood naked before him.

  Her swollen lips were parted. She shoved her face up close to his, pressed her mouth to his lips.

  Prophet was so startled by her sudden change that he sat frozen. But then as she kissed him, desire rose in him, hot and heavy, chasing out the chill, and he held her in his arms and returned the kiss.

  Before things could go any further, Mary said, “They were right about me.”

  “Who was right about you, darlin’?”

  “Aunt Grace. Pa. The preacher from our church. The preacher’s wife.”

  “What were they right about, darlin’?”

  Mary squeezed her eyes shut and bawled as she yelled, “That I’m a whore!”

  Prophet stared at her in shock. “What’re you talkin’ about? You ain’t no whore. They do it for money!”

  Mary turned to gaze up at him through tear-filled eyes. “Back at the ranch . . . I knew a boy. Son of one of Pa’s hands. We did it in a barn stall, on a horse blanket.

  “Pa caught us the third time. That’s when he called me a whore. Aunt Grace, too. They made me see the preacher and the preacher’s wife. They called me a whore, too. Not in so many words, but I could see it in their eyes. I was a savage heathen whore!”

  Mary sobbed for a time and when she could catch her breath again, she said, “That’s when Pa and Aunt Grace and the preacher said I should go to Mrs. Devine’s Christian Academy for Wayward Girls!”

  Again, she sobbed. Prophet let her cry. He just lay beside her, running his big right paw slowly through her hair.

  She turned to look at him again in anguish as she said, “That was two years ago. I spent two years there in that place around those good Christian girls and those good Christian teachers, and still they couldn’t school the savage out of me. I’m just what they said I was and always will be what they said—a savage strumpet. Oh, how can I go back
to the ranch knowin’ I’m no better than before I left, and that Pa wasted all that money on tryin’ to set me straight?”

  “Easy, darlin’, easy,” Prophet cooed into her ear.

  She turned to him again. “The first time I looked at you, big, tall man that you are, I had an unclean thought. It popped right into my head—I tried so hard to cleanse my mind of the thought. I stared and I stared out the stage window, and I prayed for salvation from such awful thinking, but I couldn’t do it.”

  Prophet said, “Your pa and Aunt Grace and the preacher and the preacher’s wife had it wrong. They shouldn’t have called you a whore just for bein’ with a boy.

  “Especially when they were as old as you were when you frolicked with that boy. You just had the rotten luck of gettin’ caught in the act. The most natural act in the world, I might add. Every girl and boy in the world feels the need to do just what you done. It’s nothin’ to be ashamed about, and I’m sorry they made you feel ashamed. If they was here right now, I’d take the strap to the backside of each one in turn!”

  Mary stared into his eyes. Her upper lip no longer trembled. “You’re sayin’ . . . you’re sayin’ that—”

  “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with you. You’re a pretty girl who enjoys life.”

  Mary’s eyes brightened.

  Prophet slid a lock of tear-soaked hair away from her right cheek and tucked it behind her ear. “I bet your pa and Aunt Grace and the preacher and the preacher’s wife didn’t enjoy life half as much as you do. That’s their problem. Not yours. From now on, darlin’, you don’t listen to what small-minded people say about you. You’re pretty and good and kind and you’re sharp as a tack. Don’t you ever let anyone make your shoulders slump ever again just because you enjoy life—do you hear me, Mary?”

  “I—I think so, Lou.”

  “Good.”

  Chapter 13

  Prophet woke early the next morning.

  Fatigue lingered.

  He groaned at the aches and pains from having been shaken like dice in a cup when the Concord had rolled, and from his and Mary’s prolonged tussle in Diego’s bed. He was sore, but at least he was clean. When they’d taken a break from the night’s festivities, Mary had thrown together a supper of beans and bacon and baking powder biscuits, and Prophet had taken a bath.