The man from Cheyenne knew Ella Watson had something he and his fellow cattlemen did not. He knew he wanted it.
“Mister Bothwell, sir.”
The man from Cheyenne perked up in his chair, reached for his pistol in the dark. “Who’s there?”
“It’s Henderson. George Henderson, sir.”
“Ah. One moment, detective.” He stood and brought a match to the overhead lantern. The light brought a stocky man into focus.
“You okay, Mister Bothwell?”
“I’m fine, George. Just thinking. Were you able to make it out to Watson’s property?”
“Yessir,” said George. “I just come from there. Hopped the fence and checked out the land for a bit. Checked some of the cattle, too.”
“Anything?”
“Nothin’ outta the ordinary, aside from just how goddamn green that whole place is. Saw a canal on the west end of the parcel but it ain’t been used lately. Not sure where all the water’s comin’ from. What a spot, huh?”
“Some of the men I sent out to her parcel before said Watson had something that created a blue light. Did you see anything like that?”
George rubbed his chin. “You know, now that you mention it, she did carry something out into field with her and I did see some kinda light, maybe it was blue. Couldn’t get close enough to see what it was, though. She looked damn jumpy.”
The man from Cheyenne took a step closer. “Where does she keep it? The thing she carried out into the field.”
“Somewhere near the cabin, I reckon. She already had it in her arms when she come away from the front porch.”
“Good. Very good. Did you see anything else, detective? Anything that might be able to give us legal cause to go through her fences?”
“Well, I dunno about that.” George paced in front of the office for a moment. “You know, some of them cattle had fresh brands on ‘em. Now I’m not sayin’ she’s wranglin’ mavericks or rebrandin’ any of yer stock, but that wouldn’t prohibit someone from makin’ the argument to the right folks.”
For the first time in days, the man from Cheyenne smiled. “No, I suppose it doesn’t,” he said and clapped George on the shoulder. “My friend, you may have just ridded me of some rather persistent troubles.”
* * *
For two weeks, Loretta mended fences, tended to the small vegetable patch, and helped cook meals for the boys Ella and Jimmy had adopted away from broken homes. She rarely said much of anything, choosing instead to observe her hosts as they went about their humble concerns. In doing so, she gradually pieced together a respectable line of scandals in which the couple had been entangled. Respectable for such barren territory, anyway.
Ella’s parcel had been granted to her on the notion that she was an unmarried woman. Her and Jimmy had been married in secret and although they did not share a name, they shared everything else on and beyond their conjoined parcels. Including a store and saloon out in the small town of Sweetwater, which Jimmy minded often.
The handful of times Loretta saw Ella and Jimmy together, it was like watching a flame being brought to a stick of dynamite, and the resulting display of passion was something she hadn’t thought a woman like Ella capable of affecting. It was enough to give Loretta pause and revisit the prospect of killing the two outright. She would often imagine herself with the Colt’s revolver in hand, waiting until the two went in for their long embrace and tender kiss. If she aimed her shot right, she’d only need one bullet.
But something would always turn her stomach in those fantasies, likely a symptom of what Swearengen often called “an affliction of conscience,” and she came to the tepid conclusion that she wouldn’t be able to kill the couple outright.
Robbing them blind, however, contested none of her morals.
Most nights, Ella paced around the cabin with a Remington scattergun, occasionally peering out into the dark as if awaiting some wicked approach. Tonight, however, when all the boys were gone to Jimmy’s place, the woman departed without preamble. Loretta sat up from her feigned sleep, crept to the window, and watched Ella disappear beyond the light of the porch lantern with what appeared to be a burlap sack cradled in her arms.
Loretta went to work. Every drawer and every cabinet was opened and scrutinized. She stuffed an entire pillowcase full of clean clothes, oddly-shaped decorations, and a few baubles she mistook for silver. As for money, Ella kept that on her person, though Loretta was able to find a few nickels behind the nightstand.
Satisfied that the worth of her haul would be enough to get her out of the territory, Loretta aimed herself toward the nearest gate. There was a feeling of contentment within her she couldn’t deny as she skipped along into the pitch darkness, and it stayed with her until she heard the unwelcome sound of a horse’s gallop coming down the path.
She about-faced and took off at a sprint. When she started to lose her balance, she dropped her pillowcase of stolen goods, cursing under her breath as she let it slip away. Just when she thought her pursuer was about to overtake her, a bright blue light burned away the darkness.
“Shit!” Loretta tumbled onto her hands and knees. The light before her was suspended in the air without a source, eddying slowly through the night in a way that reminded her of laudanum in water.
“Funny running into each other out here.” Ella stepped through the glow, which seemed to part down the middle to allow her through.
“The hell is this?” Loretta asked.
As if in answer, she felt the ground heave beneath her feet. Her eyes found what appeared to be a ragged chunk of black granite nestled in the grass, and at its center was an eye of pure crystal the color of a cloudless sky. The dirt around it saturated into mud as water gurgled up to the surface.
“It claimed we were befit for a good miracle,” said Ella, distantly. “I wasn’t in a place to disagree.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
Ella gestured to the black granite stone in the churning waters. “It dropped out of the sky right in front of me when I was moving out here from Denver. And no sooner had I edged up to the crater did it begin to speak.”
“Speak?”
Ella passed a hand through the swirling light. “Introduce yourself.”
The specter appeared from nothing, standing only a few feet away from Loretta with a cowl pulled low over its face that shone with the light of a thousand constellations.
“Jesus Christ!” Loretta cried out, stumbling back. “The hell is that!”
The specter spoke a thousand overlapping words in a thousand different tongues before it finally replied: “I’m a friend.”
Seeing Ella standing there without a worry helped Loretta recover some of her courage. She inched closer to the specter. “Ain’t never seen a real life haint before.”
“It’s no ghost,” said Ella. “Look at the water.”
“The stone does that?”
Ella nodded. “Pulls it up from below, even when there’s none to be found. Sent to us from one of them stars up above.”
“That why this place is so green?”
“Yes.”
“Is that what Bothwell really wants with this land?”
Hesitation, then: “He’s always coveted what he cannot have. Probably has all the passages that mention Heaven in his King James bookmarked.” She shook her head. “When I think of his trespasses, and what he’d do with this stone if he ever got it...”
Buchanan came riding up just then, stopping just at the edge of the light. Loretta was relieved to know it hadn’t been one of Bothwell’s folks trying to run her down, but her teeth clenched when she saw Buchanan dismount with a stuffed pillowcase in his hand.
“Seems we got more’n a few problems tonight.” He handed over the pillowcase to Ella. “Girl was tryin’ to make off with the store.”
Ella rummaged through the pillowcase, frowning. “I can see that.” She sighed. “We’ll deal with this when we get back to the cabin.”
“Afraid we might not
have the time,” said Buchanan. “I just come from Rawlins. Couple of boys in the Bon Ton Saloon were talkin’ big about a posse Bothwell’s gatherin’. Said they’re ridin’ after you and Jimmy tonight. Might already be on their way.”
Even in the bright light, Ella paled. “He wouldn’t dare.”
“We knew it was only a matter of time, Ella. And we had best sit this fight out.”
While Ella paced in the grass, Buchanan’s attention was momentarily stolen by the specter. He stared at the stars that speckled its cowl and looked away when it turned to face him.
“Buchanan,” Ella said, her voice firm, “I’ll need you to ride out to Jimmy’s place and warn him. If he ain’t there, look along the road to Sweetwater. Tell him to meet me in Casper.”
“I’m already gone, Ella.” Buchanan remounted his horse. “We’ll see you in Casper. Good luck to ya.” He whipped the reins and disappeared into the night.
Ella turned to Loretta, hands balled into fists. “As for you...” For a moment, she just stared, disappointment and desperation waxing and waning across her face. Then, gingerly, she picked up the black stone and placed it into the pillowcase with the rest of the stolen goods. She handed everything over to Loretta.
“Don’t think that’s whatcha meant to do,” said Loretta, holding the sack at arm’s length as though it might bite her. “I think ya meant to shoot me.”
“And give you a stern talking to, but I don’t got that luxury right now. I need someone to start walking this off my property while the way is still clear.”
“Me?”
“I need to get my weapon and saddle my horse. If Buchanan can’t find Jimmy, I’m gonna be riding all over the county to make sure he gets to Casper all right, likely dodging Bothwell’s men the entire time.” She placed a hand on the pillowcase. “I can’t take the chance of getting caught with the stone, not while they’re looking for me.”
“I ain’t gonna haul this all the way to Casper in the dark with Bothwell’s posse on the warpath!”
“I have a feeling you can manage.” Ella reached into her coat and produced the Colt’s revolver. She shoved it into the belt of Loretta’s pants. “You’ve been desperate. You still are, maybe all your life, but I’ve been there. Desperation don’t always gotta mean destruction. Your moral sum don’t gotta ride in deficit.”
She leaned over, took Loretta by the shoulders. “Do this for me. If money has to enter into the equation, I’ll see you’re well-paid in Casper. But I need to trust that you’ll get there first.”
Loretta turned from Ella’s expectant glance and watched the specter as it took in its surroundings with almost infantile curiosity. “Yeah,” she heard herself say. “Yeah, if the money’s right I’ll meet you in Casper.” And her answer brought a small measure of relief to Ella’s face.
“Thank you.” Ella turned to address the specter. “My friend, you’ll be going away with this young woman. Her name is Loretta Vaine.”
The specter spoke in a voice eerily similar to Ella’s. “I’m happy to meet and archive you, Loretta Vaine.”
“I...” Ella struggled to find the words, taking small steps back into the night as the silence between them grew longer. “It was a pleasure to know you.”
The specter managed a smile. “Yes, a profound pleasure. Shall I count the ways in which we’ll meet again?”
* * *
Six cattlemen broke through the fence and rode fast into Ella Watson’s homestead, hollering loud into the night. The man from Cheyenne rode among them, his sights set on the lonely cabin in the distance. Along the way, his men took potshots at any cattle that crossed their path, cussing and roaring from the depths of their bloodlust.
They found and surrounded Ella as she was carrying a saddle out to the stable, and in response she brought her Remington scattergun to bear on the nearest rider.
“Never thought I’d see the day,” Ella said, her voice all but silencing the cattlemen’s ecstasy. “Even you, Bothwell. I never thought you’d stoop to such an act.”
The man from Cheyenne dismounted and walked up to Ella with confidence. “I’m not stooping to the act, and it ain’t stooping to me.” He waited for the last of his riders to catch up, this one pulling a buckboard behind his horse. There was a man tied up and gagged on it, and when Ella saw who it was she lowered her weapon.
“Jimmy.”
“None of this comes easy, I assure you.” The man from Cheyenne shrugged. “I was just born fitted for the task.”
With unmeasured delight, he introduced her to the noose.
* * *
Gunshots cracked through the dark like thunder and Loretta hunched down each time. Occasionally she would see torches on the horizon, hear the rattling of a buckboard and the complaints of frightened horses.
Her arms were beginning to tire from all of the items in her sack, and every so often she emptied some of the stolen goods into the grass to lighten the load. Before long, there was only the stone and a few coins inside. She couldn’t even remember what she had dropped.
Another hour into the countryside and the prairies ended at a rocky gulch that flickered brightly with firelight like a great maw that reached down into the infernal depths. Loretta approached it with hesitation, still hunched over as if there was a chance the thinned grasslands would hide her.
More gunfire exploded out of the gulch and the lights were snuffed. While Loretta waited, she heard someone riding towards her, away from the gulch. She went prone just as a rider blew past on a lathered mustang.
“You’ll pay for this!” cried the rider. It was Buchanan. “You’ll all pay for this! I’ll see you all strung up, each and every one of you fuckers! Goddamn you! Goddamn you!”
And then Buchanan was gone into the night.
Loretta inched her way to the cliffs overlooking the gulch. In the gunfight with Buchanan, the men down below had snuffed out all the torches. All she could see were shadows, all she could hear were sinister voices shouting out in celebration. Only one man stood apart, his figure and confident gait unmistakable.
She knew that one to be Bothwell.
Between the group was a cottonwood tree, stripped bare of leaves. From its sturdiest limb, two figures swung by their necks. They convulsed slightly, kicking and knocking into each other, and from their throats issued forth tortured gags and coughs. Each little twitch sent the men on the ground into a frenzy of cheers and embraces.
Loretta, trembling and aching, pulled the Colt’s revolver from her pack. Even in the dark, she thought she could hit one of the men.
“Don’t,” the specter whispered, sounding for all the world like Ella herself. “Nothing can be done for them, Loretta. You’ll only get yourself killed.”
“I can’t just…I can’t…God, they’re dyin’.”
“Look away, Loretta. Just look away.”
Through her tears, she could see that the hanged figures had stopped moving.
“Come on. We have to go.”
Loretta wept into the dry earth for a long minute, watching Ella and Jimmy swing gently from the cottonwood. Wiping her eyes, she crawled away from the gulch and followed the stars for a time while the specter hummed a mournful lullaby.
* * *
“I’m tellin’ ya, ain’t nothin’ here, sir.” The foreman swept his arm around so that the man from Cheyenne would take notice of Ella Watson’s dismantled cabin.
“You still have Averell’s cabin to check.”
“We checked that, too. And Buchanan’s house. Even tracked down Watson’s boys and they have no idea where it’s gone, whatever it is yer lookin’ fer exactly. Can’t interrogate kids when ya don’t even know what yer askin’ after.”
The man from Cheyenne could feel anger boiling up his veins.
“Look, I just dunno what else we can do, sir.”
“Contact George Henderson. He’s one of our detectives, you’ve met him. Tell him to track down that girl I sent after Watson some weeks back. Vaine, I think was her name.”
“Sure thing.”
“In the meantime, I don’t care who we have to piss off around here. I want this entire territory turned upside down. Folks who’ve so much as tipped a hat in Watson’s direction, I want them found.”
“Well, shoot, folks is already pissed off ‘round here. Them folks in Johnson County are already liable to start doin’ more than talk back.”
“Do what needs to be done,” said the man. “Just get on it.”
“Yessir.”
The man from Cheyenne strode down the front steps of the ruined cabin and looked out over Ella’s homestead, which he now owned, and found a golden horizon Watson herself must have seen every morning.
He was looking through her eyes, yet all he desired went unseen.
Near the stables, the wind caught the tattered laces of a bonnet that Ella had been wearing during the scuffle, and he took aim at it with his pistol.
* * *
Loretta read the news as it echoed away from Wyoming. In each paper the event lost definition, dimming beneath lies and speculation. By the time she reached Oklahoma, it was proclaimed that a rural prostitute by the name of “Cattle Kate” had been hung with her pimp near the thriving boomtown of Bothwell. That the two had been justly lynched as a pair of cattle thieves, maverickers of the worst sort.
That Jim Averell had begged for his life, attempted to blame his wife for their supposed trespasses.
That Cattle Kate, a licentious virago, had died expelling foul curses unfit for publication.
That the six men who had done the deed should receive commendations for dutifully upholding an agreeable form of frontier justice, going so far as to put their own lives at hazard.
Loretta tossed away the newspaper into the street and marched into the newly-formed city with an oddly-shaped object wrapped in a pillowcase cradled in her arms.
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