Dent snorted like a bull and hurried on with his odd, stiff-necked gait as he tried to keep his head from bobbing while he traversed the uneven wooded terrain. Fallen branches under fallen leaves were the real danger, and he stepped high to avoid them.
The oncoming informant was a comic sight to Innocence Lee, who was no longer a comical sight himself. His collar was on the ground, along with his eyeglasses, along with the broken bottles of medicine he had pulled from his pocket. His thin expression was no longer as innocent as his name.
He was standing beside his horse, holding his carbine, waiting to see if Bishop got past his grizzled sentry.
Dent said, practically through his teeth, “See? I steered you right to them.”
Innocence Lee said, “You did, Dent. What can you tell me?”
“There are two Cheyenne settlements, a day’s ride, hundreds of Indians ill, many of them women and children,” he said.
“That far, that fast,” Innocence said. “The doctor will be very happy to hear that. The Indian took the wagon? Bishop’s on the painted?”
Dent nodded.
Innocence cocked a head over his shoulder. “Well done. You’ve got a palomino behind that outcropping. The gold is in the saddlebag. Take it and don’t come back. If the doctor needs you again, he knows where to find you. If you say anything, to anyone, I will know where to find you.”
Dent nodded, just a little, but it was an enthusiastic little. He scurried off as Innocence watched him go. In his other life, as a buffalo hunter for the railroads, Innocence met a lot of little men. Most of them carried pocket watches and had fat red cheeks and earned a lot of money for taking things that did not belong to them, like land and labor and sometimes lives. Walter G. Dent was not as bad as they were. They were snakes that swallowed prey whole . . . Dent just gathered nuts.
Neither had any real courage. Not like the inaptly named Randy Coward who was the first line of defense against John Bishop. There was a man, a steel driver on the railroad, who was worth every pound he weighed and then some. There was a brawler who used a gun because it was efficient, not because it gave him any particular satisfaction. Whether it was his arms against the spikes and hard ground, or facing down any Indian brave who had ever crossed his path and got his back broken in the process, Coward was the battering ram of civilization.
Innocence would have been happy to face John Bishop first. But Coward had insisted. The only reason Innocence stayed was in the event the man fell. It would not do to be running after a slow Cheyenne wagon with a fast John Bishop on his tail.
* * *
Bishop had not been surprised, so far, but neither had he been satisfied at the pace of things. It was like rooting out bees from the house, when he had one. They got in where woodpeckers drilled, then you could kill them and kill some more and there were still a colony’s worth somewhere.
This crew was not like the others he had faced. There were separate teams, independent leaders, all working under a man whose master plan was known only to him and to those who were fighting with him. It had taken an entire military garrison, a marshal, and God knew how many civilian informants for them to find out what little information they had. And it still led them to the wrong conclusion, that John Bishop was poisoning Indians and had killed the husband of his lover—who wasn’t his lover. It took bureaucratic skill to be that thoroughly and consistently wrong.
Bishop was not accustomed to the painted, and the painted was not accustomed to the weight of a man. There hadn’t been time to swap the horses out, but he didn’t like rough-handling his mounts and he was not able to go as quickly as he liked. The painted was also unused to Bishop’s one-handed control, which made a necessity of sharper pulls to execute quick turns.
Riding along the mushy lakeshore, he found it easy to follow Dent’s tracks—which may have been the point. Bishop also spotted, easily, the hoofprints of Innocent Lee’s horse. The parallel path may have been a coincidence but he didn’t think so. The librarian wasn’t a librarian; his hands were too calloused for that. The carbine had not worn its shape into the scabbard, which meant it had gone in and out so many times the leather had lost its stiffness. The opening on the bottom was worn wide from the rifle being drawn and redrawn. Equally telling, Innocent Lee knew how to stand like a man reassuring you he wasn’t going to draw. Hands out, floating alongside his hips like little hummingbirds.
No, Innocent Lee was out there, probably waiting for Dent, possibly in ambush—
Bishop reined to a stop, did not reinforce it verbally. The trail of both men turned into the woods. The branches were thick and low and that meant dismounting.
He did so, turning the horse sideways as a shield so he could peer into the semi-daylight of the shaded, uneven expanse. There were boulders ahead, fat cottonwoods with foliage so low to the ground they looked like shrubs.
He listened, heard nothing but the chatter of leaves and the occasional crow or American dipper. But those were all to the north, his right. There were no birds calling from ahead.
Because someone or several someones are there.
Thinking of White Fox, Bishop tied the painted to a tree. If something happened, she would come back for it. A killer, a good one, wouldn’t be stupid enough to take it. Not anywhere it might be recognized.
This wasn’t like preparing for the three cousins, Tommy, Vance, Edward. Innocence had staked out his quarry, come close enough to read the rig firsthand, assess its firepower. And Innocence might not be alone.
Bishop was surprised to ask himself a question he had not yet asked: why was he doing this? Dent meant nothing, except bait. If he went on, followed White Fox, he could help her cure the sick—including herself. Innocence might not follow him, and if he did Bishop would be no worse off than he was going blindly into the eternal twilight of these woods.
As a medic, even though a lieutenant, Bishop had not been involved in strategy and tactics. But there was one thing he had learned, which was that you don’t leave an enemy at your rear to nip and pick at you, at their leisure. That was why, forty years ago, the Mexican general Santa Anna had to bring in thousands of troops to crush a hundred-and-thirty-odd men at the Alamo. He had to protect his rear.
If only the penny-dreadful writers could see him now. Not afraid. Cautious. He didn’t cherish this life enough to fear death. But he didn’t want to die stupidly, carelessly. There was no going around the woods to the north; he knew they spread for miles. And to the south was the lake, too muddy and deep for the painted, and his rig wouldn’t survive.
Which gave him a sudden inspiration.
* * *
Randy Coward was not a patient man. Anyone who swung a mallet for a living learned to expect instant gratification. You bring the hammer down, something happens to whatever it hits. Happened for the years he was with the railroad, happened before that the years he was a roustabout on the Mississippi.
It wasn’t happening now and though the Spencer wasn’t a sledgehammer, he wanted to swing it. At something.
The big man had been there three hours, had emptied his canteen, but he did not want to leave his post. Or rather, he did not want to turn his back on a direction from which John Bishop might be coming. He didn’t mind putting down the Repeater to urinate, because even then he had a hand full of Remington.
Coward allowed himself to sit. He did do that, his back to a tree, facing east. As the sun moved to his back, seeing was easier as it lit the way that Dent had come, the way that Bishop would come—if he was even coming. The stories could be wrong, lies. Innocence could be misinformed. Maybe the man was all gun, no bullets. Maybe the firepower was just so much warm wind.
He pulled jerky from his pocket and tore at it. He watched a pair of chipmunks running up and down a tree. He wondered what Innocence was thinking, what he was doing. He hadn’t heard any shots from back there, so he knew Bishop wasn’t circling around. The big cartoon. The big P. T. Barnum size—
Was that splashing?
Coward held his breath. There was sound from the direction of the lake. If it were a bear, it would make noise, a lot of it. If it were not, the water would slosh, being pushed instead of struck. A lone rider wouldn’t be in the water, not with good shoreline.
The sloshing stopped. Then started again. Something was right at the edge of the water.
Coward was itching and bored and it wasn’t far. His heart started to dance as he wondered if it might be Bishop at long last. Maybe watering his horse.
A buckskin jacket hung from the nub of a branch that had broken off so long ago that the limb itself was gone. Coward put what was left of the jerky in a vest pocket, pulled it once—careful to keep a finger on the trigger of the leveled Repeater at all times—and, drawing a long breath that filled his barrel chest, he decided he had to see if it was what his sentry grandpaw used to call during the War with the Mexicans, “Foe or go.”
Palming the revolver in his right hand, he turned toward the glinting lights of the lake. He used the Spencer, held tight in his left, like a poker, pushing aside fluffy branches so he could survey the terrain ahead. Each step took him a little bit to the east or west, giving him a slightly different sliver of lake. He still didn’t see anything.
And then he did.
There was a painted in the slanting sunlight. It was just standing there, half in the water, half out, facing south. The reins were hanging over the neck, the loop dangling just above the waterline. He took that in between blinks. What interested him more was the hint of clothing he saw under the surface, bobbing there like underwater plants. Shirt nearest, pants farthest. But what interested him more was a slash of bright gold or brass or something of that hue on the narrow, pebbly beach. He’d seen it before, in magazines that got passed around at the rail sites. The cannon-arm, the limb of death, the sinew of God, the other names he’d heard read aloud around the campfire. The rig of Dr. John Bishop, the creature known as Shotgun. The name appeared so often that it was the only word Coward learned to read.
“Lord A’mighty,” he muttered.
His eyes shifted back to the painted and he saw how things had come to be. There were Injun decorations on the horse. Not his—the squaw’s, whose name Coward didn’t bother to know. The saddle was lopsided, toward him. The cinch was loose underneath. Shotgun, the killer, the legendary immortal, must have taken her horse and fallen. Tried to hold on, went over anyway, landed in the water, and drowned. His arm was off; maybe he couldn’t one-arm-push his way from the muddy bottom.
“Aw, shit,” Coward muttered. “The bastard kilt hisself.”
But then his next thought: the arm would be worth a fortune. Couple of bullets in a dead man, Randy Coward would still be the man who did him in. The metal arm was gold after all. He’d just take the horse, shoot it later, and it would be a victim of the mighty Coward fusillade.
His heart beating faster, now from riches just within reach, the big man moved ahead—still furtively, looking toward the still lake, trying to see a body beneath the sun-polished surface. A horse’s hoof came up, then down languidly. Slosh. Then again. Slosh. The end of the tree line was just a few paces away. Coward could see to the east and west—a few yards both ways, then a few yards more, then he was on the dry, open stretch maybe seven, eight yards wide. Crouching, revolver at the ready, he turned to one side, then the other, then back. There was no one in hiding.
Standing tall, remembering to breathe, Coward allowed himself a half-smile and moved toward the pants and shirt just bobbing there. Air kept them up, but there had to be a body below to keep them from drifting.
He pointed the Spencer ahead, watched the lake for any sign of movement that wasn’t a fish or burble that wasn’t a frog, just in case Bishop was hidden ’neath. He reached the edge. He looked down at the clothing, squinting through the light. There was no arm on one side and—
No arm on the other. No feet either. But he did see rocks, big ones, pinning the two sleeves to the lakebed.
He heard the rattling sound behind him, slightly to the west, the left, and turned. There were other stories in the penny dreadfuls. Stories about things they called ghouls . . . dead men that rose from their graves to eat the flesh of the living.
At first Coward thought it was a ghoul rising before him, just four feet away, shedding rocks and dirt, but it wasn’t. It was a one-armed man, bare chested, barelegged, with something glinting in his good arm. The sun shining from the polished edge of the tomahawk momentarily blinded Coward. Which, added to his confusion, delayed him from swinging the rifle around.
He stood there, dumbly, momentarily helpless in his confusion, as the blade came up, then swung down in a sharply angled diagonal line, cutting him from his right clavicle to south-left of his navel. He felt the punch of the blade but not the slice, felt the warmth of his blood as it went from the inside to the outside, felt the horror of the snarling face in his own stupefied one as the attacker’s chest hair was coated with the gore of Coward’s vitals.
The single cut of the hatchet was followed by a slight turn of the blade and a lateral cut along the waist. The slash was deep and fine and guts spilled over the lower edge, sections of intestine that had been sliced free in the same cut.
Coward dropped in sections, vaguely conscious as his knees fell forward and his half-severed upper body listed at right angles and flopped to the side. His viscera went in all directions. And the brief, glowing future of Coward died in a gory heap along with its dreamer.
* * *
Bishop stood over the dead man feeling about as much as the dead man felt. There was some satisfaction of the plan having worked. Weighting down the clothes, quietly hacking out a shallow grave for himself, struggling with his one arm to conceal himself under the rocks he had piled beside the hole before digging. All of it quietly, quietly, so as not to attract attention. If he made any noise, he tried to keep it the volume and pitch of one of the frogs that inhabited the still line of the lakeshore. Until now, he had never realized how much a bullfrog made a sound like rocks clunking in their hollow way.
He was gratified but there was no time for reflection. There was still a gunman out there. And there was still preparation to be made. Kneeling beside the dead man, Bishop took the revolver, tucked it in the band of his knee-length long johns, and went to work.
* * *
Innocence Lee was not Randy Coward. For one thing, he could read. A trainman’s son raised in Baltimore, he had been educated through high school. For another, because he was thin as a sapling, he had always relied on cunning and marksmanship more than bulging bull-muscle.
But Innocence Lee was also an experienced stalker. And he had a sense, born of a score of years plus two in the West, of hunting game and at times being hunted by game, when something wasn’t right.
Leaning against a tree, twin Colts in his gun belt, Innocence Lee chewed tobacco and mentally put holes in wildlife and thought. What wasn’t “right” was Bishop not having come through yet. He had to have known or by hours ago figured out what was what with Dent and Innocence. Innocence believed, since Bishop was no dope, that he had let Dent go because Dent was a dope and couldn’t have gotten away from a man like Bishop. Unless permitted.
So where was he? Bishop would not leave this unfinished. He would not leave a trail unfollowed, especially since there had to be so much he did not know about what was being blamed on him. Not knowing what was on Bishop’s mind was only part of the problem. It was already becoming nightlike in the woods. Innocence had not made provisions to camp here. He had planned to dispose of the shotgun, grab the mechanical contraption as evidence, deliver that and Dent’s report to Weiber-Krauss, and then return to the railroad with Coward.
That was still the plan, though the timing was now a full mess. He couldn’t see the squirrels and hares he was mentally picking off; in the hunter’s world, that was a sign to go to camp, have some coffee, call it a day, fall asleep dreaming of showgirls instead of deer.
A crunching ahead caused Innocence to
become fully, instantly alert. It came from the direction of where Randy Coward had been stationed. The skinny man had the Colts out and aimed midriff-high, wide spread . . . he could see down the center of them, shoot at anything that moved peripherally. And he would. At anything that wasn’t Randy Coward. Or if it was Randy Coward he might shoot anyway, since the son of a bitch was told not to leave his post until John Shotgun Bishop was cold.
Twigs cracked lightly, like the bones of little girls. Innocence Lee was focused on the dark ahead, watching for a familiar shape. He himself was under a large canopy, lost in thick shadow. He stopped chewing but did not spit. He would allow himself to dribble down his chin rather than spit. He did not intend to speak or breathe or swallow or do anything to give away his position.
He wouldn’t hail Coward and, until Coward knew where Innocence Lee was, he wouldn’t speak either. The two had partnered enough to know that the team leader believed in absolute invisibility above all.
There was a darker shadow upright in the dimmer shadow. A hulking figure with a rifle in one hand, a revolver in the other. The weapons were pointed down.
The bastard. The dolt. Had he given up? There was still daylight out there, by the lake. Innocence Lee screamed inside. Had Coward abandoned his post? If he had, these would be the last steps the big man ever took. The contract killer could not do his job, uphold his reputation, if he could not count on his people. As he counted on Dent to run, he counted on Coward to stay.
The silhouette of the buckskin and guns was Coward’s, and Innocence Lee spit now. He moved the twin Colts to center and fired—
At the tree line, as he slapped backward, spine first, against the cottonwood. The gunshots had come too close together for him to tell them apart, but Innocence Lee had fired second. The man emerging from the shadow, the one with the severed arm tucked up a sleeve and “holding” a Spencer, had fired first. The Remington had discharged into the chest, twice.
Momentarily pinned to the bark by the impact, Innocence Lee sucked down air as if he were a gasbag trying to float himself. But it was a failed effort. He slumped down, streaking blood, eyes staring into the dark face of a man who was not Randy Coward.
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