“Yeah, I reckon,” Lonnie said with chagrin.
The Confederate pocketed the watch, rested his rifle on his shoulder, and began slouching up the slope in the same direction from which he’d come. Lonnie watched him, puzzled. He wasn’t sure why, but he was reluctant for the man to leave him alone with the three dead men.
The man had saved Lonnie’s life, after all.
“Hey,” the boy called. “What’s your name?”
The Confederate stopped and slanted a wily look over his shoulder and down the hill. “What’s yours?”
Lonnie got the message.
The Grayback winked and then continued trudging up the hill through the trees.
CHAPTER 14
When the Southerner was gone from view, Lonnie turned reluctantly toward his camp littered with dead men. Though he still felt as though he’d been kicked in the belly by an angry mule, and the dead repulsed him, he couldn’t help walking over to the other side of the fire and having a look.
There was something oddly fascinating about the dead. Fascinating as well as horrifying. Lonnie had seen his father after he’d died in bed of an apparent heart stroke, Calvin Gentry’s face twisted in horror, his slitted eyes downcast.
Lonnie had also seen a young man Lonnie’s own age after the boy had been kicked in the head by a calf he’d been trying to brand. The calf’s hard, sharp hoof had cracked young George Perry’s skull above his right ear, and Lonnie and the others had gathered around the branding fire to pay their respects to the dead youngster. Young George had seemed to be smiling up at those gathered around him, his upper lip curled, eyes heavy-lidded but open, almost as though he now knew the answer to a secret that the living could only guess at, and he was gloating about it.
That would have been just like George.
Lonnie stared down at the long-haired gent who appeared to have learned no such secret. His eyes were bulging in their sockets, and his tongue was poking out the right side of his mouth. He looked as though he were strangling. His face was pale, turning blue at the nubs of his cheeks. The sight of him and the blond young man made Lonnie feel wobbly-kneed and heavy-gutted, and he turned away quickly.
He kicked dirt on his fire and packed up his gear. He set the moneybags over General Sherman’s back, tightened the buckskin’s saddle cinch, and pushed the bridle bit back into the General’s mouth. When he had the horse ready to go, Lonnie unsaddled the dead men’s three horses and turned them loose. They ran off down the slope toward the canyon bottom, buck-kicking and shaking their heads, eager to be a long way from the smell of their dead, bloody riders.
Lonnie didn’t blame them. He stuffed his carbine down into the General’s saddle boot and headed the buckskin in the same direction.
It was dusk when Lonnie reined General Sherman up on the crest of a hill and stared toward the north.
The town of Arapaho Creek was a fuzzy gray mass at the bottom of a rise of snow-tipped mountains. The snow shone brightly against the otherwise dark ridge crest, the edges of the glaciers limned in the salmon rays of the fast-falling sun.
The only way that Lonnie could tell that a town lay a half mile ahead was by the cluster of yellow and orange lights flickering against the velvet brown ridge beyond it. And by the occasional whoops and yells of men as well as women, by the barking of a dog, and by the jocular fiddling emanating from that direction, as well.
Arapaho Creek wasn’t much of a town, but it was a mining town that also provided supplies for local ranches, and while Lonnie had never visited the settlement at night, it obviously came alive when the sun went down. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure the saddlebags filled with loot were still draped across the General’s hindquarters, over Lonnie’s own saddlebags.
Riding into town with as much as he was carrying made him nervous, but he had to get the loot to the town marshal some way, and how else could he do it? He supposed he could hide the saddlebags out here somewhere, and lead Dwight Stoveville out for it later, but the way Lonnie’s luck was going, he’d probably forget where he hid it. Or someone would come along and take it.
Lonnie glanced behind him. At no time during the day had he detected sign of anyone following. That made the boy uneasy for his mother, but it had made getting to Arapaho Creek a whole lot easier despite his run-in with the three men who were now most likely feeding the wildcats and wolves.
Uneasiness like a heavy, laughing monkey straddling his already burdened shoulders, Lonnie touched spurs to the General’s flanks. Horse and rider trotted on down the hill and along the trail that was a fast-dimming butterscotch line before them. They crossed Arapaho Creek via a wooden bridge, the General’s hooves clomping hollowly on the planks. The bubbling stream was a black-and-silver skin flashing beneath Lonnie, the water chuckling and gurgling.
The air over the river was humid and sweet-smelling.
And when they left the bridge, they were in the town of Arapaho Creek itself where the sweet smell was gone, replaced by the smell of fires and the stench of privies and rotting trash heaps.
Lonnie reined up at the edge of the business district and looked around, getting his bearings. The main street was broad and dark, but the lamplight pushing through the windows of saloons and the still-open shops helped. Silhouetted men shifted around the streets, crossing and recrossing to saloons or to the mercantile or drugstore or to one of the several bawdy houses that were usually shuttered and silent when Lonnie and his mother had journeyed here for supplies or to sell their eggs.
Remembering that the town marshal’s office sat on the far side of the town, on the street’s west side, Lonnie gigged the General out from under the sprawling cottonwood he’d stopped under, and headed into the fray.
CHAPTER 15
As Lonnie passed saloons and parlor houses, he heard men laughing and women singing.
The fiddle music seemed to be coming from somewhere on Lonnie’s left. Men and women were clomping and clapping to the raucous music. They were having a good time. Lonnie found himself absently envying their lack of care as he put the General ahead, trying to avoid the largest clusters of men along the street, trying to ride through the town as inconspicuously as possible, hoping that no one would see the overstuffed saddlebags resting behind the cantle of his saddle.
He didn’t want to have to explain anything to anyone except Marshal Stoveville. And when that was done, he’d ride back out of town the way he’d come and head for the line shack, as his mother had instructed, and wait for his trail to cool.
A couple of dogs were fighting over a bone in the street before the jailhouse, so Lonnie swung the General wide around them and put the horse up to the hitch rack to the right of the steps that climbed the dilapidated front stoop. The jailhouse itself was a rectangular, block-like stone barrack behind the wooden stoop. A sign over the veranda announced simply TOWN MARSHAL.
The front door was propped open with a rifle.
Lonnie looked around him. There were only a few men on this end of the street. One of the fighting dogs gave a sudden yip and wheeled away from the other one, a German shepherd, with its tail down. Lonnie swung down from the General’s back. He tied the reins around the worn hitching post and then went back and pulled the saddlebags down from the General’s hindquarters.
He slung the bags over a shoulder, tipped his hat down low over his eyes, and mounted the porch steps, his spurs ringing, the rotting steps creaking beneath his boots. He paused at the top of the steps when he heard a woman chuckling from inside the place, the laughter echoing faintly off the stone walls. A man said something that made Lonnie’s ears warm, and the woman laughed harder.
Lonnie cleared his throat to give the pair ample warning and walked across the stoop, loudly stomping his boots and ringing his spurs, before stopping just outside the front door and glancing inside.
The office was lit by a couple of lamps, one on a cluttered rolltop desk left of the door, another bracketed on the back wall in which three jail cells were set. A long wooden
table stood in the middle of the room beyond a potbelly stove that pushed its large, tin pipe through the ceiling above Lonnie. At the table cluttered with the paraphernalia of a recent meal as well as bottles, glasses, and playing cards, a man was sitting with a large, dark-haired, brown-eyed woman wearing a red dress. The woman was perched on the man’s knee and she was lolling back against the man’s shoulder.
The dress revealed as much of the female form as Lonnie had ever seen, and more, and it was startling as well as shocking to see so much exposed flesh. The woman’s eyes snapped wide at the boy in the doorway, and she scrambled off the man’s knee to drop into a chair beside him, flushing and laughing and saying, “Looks like you got a customer, Chase!”
She glanced at the man, who was wearing a five-pointed star on his blue shirt. The man was not Stoveville. That puzzled Lonnie, touched the boy with apprehension. He’d thought there was only one lawman in Arapaho Creek, and that lawman was Marshal Stoveville. Though he was sitting down, this lawman appeared tall and lean, with a high forehead from which thin strands of sandy-brown hair were swept straight back. He had a black mole as large as a silver dollar on his left cheek.
Scowling at Lonnie as though peeved at the interruption in his affairs, the lawman—Lonnie saw that his badge said “Deputy Town Marshal”—removed a smoldering cigarette from between his teeth, and blew smoke at the open doorway. “Hey, kid, I think I heard your mom callin’. Suppertime!”
The large woman in the skimpy red dress closed her upper teeth over her bottom lip as though to stifle a snicker.
Lonnie looked around the room. They were the only two here.
The boy adjusted the heavy bags on his shoulders and said, “I’m lookin’ for Marshal Stoveville.”
The woman looked at the man, who took a drag from the quirley, slitting his eyes against the rising smoke, and said, “Over at the Ace of Diamonds.” He blew out another long smoke plume toward Lonnie. His eyes, which were the same color as the mole on his cheek, glittered with mockery.
The boy said, “Obliged,” and, anxiety eating at him—he hadn’t thought Stoveville had any deputies—turned and walked back down the porch steps. Behind him, the woman snickered. The boy looked down the street on his right, saw a collection of jostling shadows in a large pool of light spilling out of a building a block away, and patted the General’s wither.
Quietly, he said, “Stay, boy. I’ll be back soon. I’m gonna get shed of these bags, and we’ll get shed of this trash heap.”
He could have left the bags with the man who was presumably Stoveville’s deputy, but Lonnie didn’t trust anyone except the town marshal himself. Besides, he hadn’t liked the look in the deputy’s eyes. They’d been cold and cunning, sort of like Shannon Dupree’s eyes.
Dupree …
Lonnie looked around for the outlaw and his “boys” once more. He couldn’t see much of anything except shadows on the street, but none appeared to be moving toward Lonnie. He adjusted the saddlebags on his shoulder again, and drew a deep breath, steeling himself for his journey into the crowded saloon but also buoyed by the thought that Stoveville would soon relieve him of his burden.
Lonnie moved through a cluster of men gathered in front of the saloon’s batwing doors. The men looked at him strangely, frowning curiously at the bags on Lonnie’s shoulder. Lonnie kept his head down and kept moving, pushing through the doors and into the saloon which assaulted him instantly with the nearly overwhelming stench of alcohol and tobacco fumes laced liberally with the smell of unwashed bodies and stale sweat and women’s perfume.
There were between a dozen and twenty men in the place, and three or four ladies … if you could call them ladies, dressed as they were. They were all obscured by dull light and shadows and the wafting webs of tobacco smoke. Lonnie couldn’t pick Dwight Stoveville out of the crowd.
Several faces turned toward Lonnie as he made his way over to the bar. The man behind the bar was large and as round as a rain barrel, with a soiled green apron straining across his waist. He’d been drawing beer from a tap and frowning curiously at Lonnie, who stopped between two men much taller than he at the bar, and stretched his gaze over the edge of the bar to meet the barman’s quizzical gaze.
“I’m lookin’ for the marshal.”
The barman couldn’t hear above the din, so Lonnie had to repeat himself. Deep lines stretched across the barman’s forehead. He glanced at the two men nearest Lonnie who were staring down at the boy with expressions similar to the barman’s.
Then the barman said, “Stoveville?”
“That’s right.”
“Stoveville’s in the gamblin’ den,” the barman said after glancing once more at the two patrons standing in front of Lonnie, both now smirking down at him. “Gamblin’ den,” the barman repeated, canting his large head toward the back of the room.
Lonnie moved off down the bar. He didn’t look at any of the men lined up to his right, leaning against the bar top. All were glancing back and down at the boy with the bulging saddlebags draped over his right shoulder. Lonnie was going to feel light as a feather as soon as he turned Dupree’s loot over to Stoveville. He was so eager to do that, in fact, that he had to fight off the urge to sprint to the back of the room and into the gambling den, where Stoveville was likely playing poker with his cronies.
The closed door at the back of the room, behind the stairs that climbed to the saloon’s second story where only God knew what went on, opened suddenly. Two well-dressed gents stepped out, both setting their bowler hats on their heads. They had grave expressions and they were talking amongst themselves, both shaking their heads, but they stopped the instant they saw Lonnie.
CHAPTER 16
The two well-dressed gents scowled down at the boy, who ignored them as he stepped around them and strode through the half-open door.
He vaguely heard several snickers behind him, but he couldn’t hear much of anything above the ringing in his ears as he stared into the gambling den that was rife with the stale smells of tobacco smoke, liquor, and varnish and was furnished with several baize-covered tables and a roulette wheel. What had caught the brunt of Lonnie’s attention, however, were the two pine coffins sitting on either side of the room, each straddling two abutting billiard tables.
A girl in a black dress and a small straw black hat with a veil of black lace sat near the coffin on the right. She had her head down and she was quietly sobbing into a white handkerchief. She wore black gloves, and her hair was pulled behind her head in a thick braid of sorts. A French braid, Lonnie thought it was called.
On the floor to her left, a man’s dark-green Stetson sat crown down. Green bills poked up around the sweatband. A collection hat.
Lonnie again felt his blood quicken and his throat turn dry. He stood frozen inside the doorway, looking around for Stoveville, the ringing in his ears gradually growing louder as he started moving slowly forward. He tried to step as lightly as he could, so that his heels wouldn’t thud too loudly on the wooden floor, and his spurs wouldn’t ching.
He stared into the casket nearest the girl. When the corpse’s face became visible, Lonnie stopped and stared, aghast. The man in the casket was Marshal Stoveville. The marshal wore a dark-blue suit over a white cotton shirt with a celluloid collar and a string tie, and his light-gray hair was combed sideways across his head. His brushy mustache nearly hid the thin, purple line of his mouth. His large hands that looked waxy beneath their deep tan were crossed on the bulge of his belly.
Most startling to Lonnie were the two large silver coins that had been placed over his eyes. Beneath the rose petals, the man’s eyes appeared not quite closed, as though Stoveville were merely pretending he was dead. A foxy smile quirked his mouth corners.
He was not pretending to be dead, though. The man whom Lonnie had ridden all this way to deliver the money to was really, truly dead.
As the girl continued to sob quietly into her hanky, Lonnie stepped over to the other casket. His eyes had no sooner found the fa
ce of the second corpse with the puckered purple hole in the pale band around the dead man’s forehead just above his eyes, than Lonnie took one loud, stumbling step backward, and said much louder than he would have liked, “Oh, God!”
He may have only gotten a fleeting look at the face of the man he’d inadvertently killed, back when he’d killed him, but he knew that he was getting a much longer look at him here, in his casket. This man had a pink, sunburned face and shaggy brown mustache and goatee, but now his face looked waxy behind the burn. His eyes were also covered with coins.
To Lonnie’s right, the girl stopped sobbing. She sniffed, cleared her throat, and said, “Who’re you?”
Her voice had sounded far, far away. Lonnie’s mind was spinning so fast that it took him nearly fifteen seconds after he’d turned toward the girl to realize that the face peering at him from behind the black lace veil was beautiful. Lightly freckled and tanned behind the mourning veil, with expressive hazel eyes and a straight, fine nose.
He recognized her. He’d seen her in McGuffin’s Mercantile several times, but it had only taken him one time, his first time, to have fallen head over heels in love with the girl, whom he guessed was close to his own age, maybe a little older. Of course, he’d never introduced himself or inquired about her name. There’d be no way he could have ever spoken to a girl as beautiful and self-possessed and assured as she had always seemed.
He’d admired her from afar, looking forward to each infrequent visit to town, so he could lay his eyes on her again in the mercantile and fantasize about her someday being his.
Seeing her here, with these dead men, merely added to Lonnie’s confusion.
He must have been staring at her like a nitwit, because as she gazed back at him from behind her veil, her gold-blonde brows became more and more furled until she said slowly, annunciating each word clearly, as though she were speaking to a half-wit, “Your name. I asked you your name. And what on God’s green earth do you have in those saddlebags?”
Lonnie Gentry Page 6