by Hayley Stone
“Boss,” Dempsey interrupted, laying a hand on my shoulder. “If Guillory’s as bad as everyone seems to think, it might be a good idea not to provoke her.”
“What are you thinking?” I said.
“I’ll wait outside with Fairly. Keep an eye on him while you go in.”
“Oh, hell no,” Fairly said, backing up from the younger man. He looked at me, shaking his head. “No fucking way. After what he did to Joe? He blew his damn head off! For looking!”
Dempsey glanced away angrily—or ashamed. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that the confrontation back on the road was likely Dempsey’s first time taking another man’s life. Even if it wasn’t, it was still something worth talking about the next chance we got.
“My colleague took what he felt was appropriate action at the time,” I told Fairly while looking at Dempsey. The younger man continued frowning at the ground, a small line of thought appearing and disappearing between his brows. “I expect him to do the same now.”
Dempsey looked up at me. Nodded.
“Looks like you’re getting your wish, after all, Mister Fairly. You get to stay outside with Mister Du Pont here.”
He cursed again but didn’t object. Dempsey was clearly the lesser of two evils.
“You sure you’re good for this?” I asked Dempsey in a private aside, just as Fairly plopped himself down beneath a small overhang beside the stairs. We spoke in subdued voices so as not to alert those inside to our presence. “Because if you’re not, you need to tell me right now.”
“I’m good,” Dempsey promised.
“All right then. Goes without saying, you keep an eye on him. He starts giving you any trouble, you do whatever you have to.”
I turned to head inside but stopped when I felt a hand on my arm. Dempsey’s blue eyes were clear but worried. “Are you good for this? You’ll be in there alone, with nobody watching your back.”
Craning my neck, I stared up through the rain at the white steeple. The church wasn’t big, just a one-room mission for the local population. In a town like this, I had to wonder how many parishioners it received. The windows were shuttered, though that could’ve been because of the storm. Some dry weeds grew in the corner of the steps, and the paint was peeling away from the wood. Gave the church a tired look. Still, the fact it was here at all and hadn’t been burned to the ground boded well.
“Well, not nobody,” I said with a reserved smile.
Dempsey looked stumped, no doubt trying to figure out a polite way to argue with my faith.
“Try not to hurt yourself now,” I said gently. “I know what you meant.” I waved my Colt at him. “That’s why I’m bringing the gun. Don’t believe there’s any scripture that says the good Lord’ll make me bulletproof, though that sure would be nice.” I absently rubbed my shoulder where my old buckshot injury was acting up again. Too bad I hadn’t had Almena Guillory around back in the day to fix me up with her fancy powers.
Dempsey exhaled slowly. “If you’re sure.”
“One more thing,” I told him, even more quietly, hand resting on the door. “You hear any shooting, you don’t stick around for the blood. You get the hell out of Coffeyville, hear? Forget about Fairly; forget about Guillory; forget about me. I want no heroics from you. Understood?”
Dempsey gave me a mute, obedient nod. I didn’t believe for a second he meant to honor our agreement, being young and hot-headed, galvanized by the idea of a West that could be won, like it was a game or a friendly competition. He hadn’t seen any fighting during the war, or else he would’ve realized the hard truth: a good man could still die even when he was fighting on the side of right.
The door opened suddenly beneath my hand, almost causing me to lose my balance.
I recovered just as a preacher appeared, draped in the customary black of his position.
“I’m sorry, friends, but the chapel is closed right now,” the preacher said, an unexpected lion of a man. His shirt strained to contain him, the muscle in his arms congregating like cannonballs beneath its tight sleeves. I didn’t notice until he hobbled out from the black gap of the door a little further, but one of his trouser legs was pinned back behind his thigh. He held on to the door frame for balance. “You’ll have to come back another time.”
I scanned his face quickly, searching for any sign of stress or anxiety. Had Guillory somehow caught on to us? Was she holding hostages in there? The preacher’s face did seem drawn, like he hadn’t slept recently…but he didn’t appear frightened either. If anything, he looked annoyed by my interruption, impatient to get me gone.
“Preacher.” I removed my hat out of respect, despite the weather. “I’ve traveled a long way, and it’d be a great relief to spend some time in the presence of the Lord.”
“The Lord is all around us,” the preacher replied. “There’s a hotel down the street. Spend some time with Him there.”
He started to close the door, but I pressed my shoulder into it, keeping it open. Listening, I could hear breathing and movement, the sound of a fairly large crowd. There were also voices, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. “Sounds like you’ve got a few friends in there.”
“This is my church, and as I’ve said, it’s closed.”
I removed my badge from the pocket of my coat. “Might be your church, but this is federal business. With all due respect, preacher, I’m going to need to come inside.”
The preacher’s eyes were pale bores, trying to blow me away. I half-expected him to take a swing at me.
“I have a right to offer sanctuary to whomever I please,” the preacher said defensively.
“There a problem, James?” a female voice asked from the shadowy room behind him. The preacher craned his neck to look back at the speaker. “You need me to run off some more drunks again?”
I immediately recognized the voice as belonging to Almena Guillory and shoved my way inside, gun drawn.
Chapter Ten
The moment I stepped inside, half a dozen Osage turned to look at me. Two men, four women. Upon my rude entrance, many of the women reached for weapons—not just daggers or bows and arrows, but old rifle models, too—and began yelling at me. I didn’t have to speak their language to know it probably wasn’t anything nice.
The men, on the other hand, were too badly hurt to move or speak, if they were even conscious. Their tall, lean bodies barely fit the pews, legs hanging off the ends. The Grizzly Queen of the West stood among them, looking out of sorts, her skirt messed with dark blood and a smear on her cheek where she must have thoughtlessly tried to clean away some dirt.
I didn’t know what to make of the scene, especially in the context of the church setting. The preacher grabbed my gun arm, as if he thought I meant to start shooting wildly, waking me from my stupor. Try as I might, I couldn’t initially free myself; the man was as strong as he looked, and his grip functioned like a clap of irons.
He forced me to pistol whip him. Wasn’t very Christian, I’ll grant, but the preacher didn’t give me a choice. Without two good legs for balance, he collapsed against the wall, hands pawing for something to catch himself on. He eventually righted himself by climbing up the door frame.
I quickly looked back at Guillory.
She had a gun trained on me now. My gun, actually. Same one she stole off me back in Asher. She kept it?
“Apostle Richardson. You’re like a bad itch. You just keep coming on, don’t you?”
“You keep killing, the law’ll keep coming after you, Miss Guillory,” I replied. “That’s how it works.”
She tilted her head slightly and parted her lips for a rebuttal, but the preacher cut in.
“How dare you barge in here and wave that gun around? This is a church.” The preacher held his nose, blood running through his fingers. For that reason, his voice arrived muffled, resembling a sound like thunder.
“Calm down, James,” Almena said. “Don’t you know this man here’s a bona fide U.S. Marshal?”
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nbsp; “I don’t care if he’s Ulysses S. Grant himself. No guns in my church.” He rounded on Almena. “Same goes for you. Of all people, Mary. You should know better.”
“Mary?” I said, recalling our conversation back in Asher. “Like the queen?”
She smirked. “Sure as shit not like the virgin.”
Guillory didn’t pardon me from her sights, but a small smile played in the corners of her lips, and her gray eyes were soft. Actually, fatigued was probably a better description. She was slouching a bit.
I moved deeper into the church, maintaining eye contact with Almena while backing toward the wall so no one could get the drop on me from behind. From the corner of my eyes, I glimpsed Dempsey outside, trapped at the bottom of the church stairs, gun in hand. His frozen posture didn’t betray fear so much as indecision, undoubtedly torn between joining me, like he wanted to, and continuing to guard Fairly, like I’d told him to. The outlaw was currently pressing his spindly frame against the wall like a spider trying to disappear into a crack.
“Preacher,” I said, “I’m not here to cause trouble.” He made a skeptical noise. “I realize it may not look that way at the moment, but I’m not here to bother the natives, if that’s what you’re worried about. My business is with Miss Guillory.”
“Who?” he said.
“Mary.”
“Can we do this another time, Marshal?” Almena asked wearily, like this was all a mild inconvenience. An Osage woman stood next to her, holding a rifle, and looking mean enough to use it. The other native women had since retreated to their men, attempting to soothe them with quiet words and gentle hands. “I’m busy. In case you haven’t noticed.”
“Maybe you ought to explain what’s going on here first,” I suggested. “And lower that gun while you’re at it.”
“You first,” she said.
“Last time I gave you the benefit of the doubt, I got shot.”
“Not by me.”
“No. You just threatened to shoot me.”
“House. Of. The. Lord,” James said, his face cloudy with annoyance. “Both of you holster your weapons, for God’s sake.”
“Yes,” Almena said. “For God’s sake, Marshal.”
I chewed my bottom lip. “On the count of three, we both lower. Agreed?”
She nodded. “Agreed.”
“One.”
“Two.”
“Three.”
Taking one of the stupidest risks of my life, I rolled the hammer back into a resting position and sank my revolver into its holster.
Almena held out a second longer, no doubt waiting to see what I’d do, and then lowered hers, though she didn’t put the piece away entirely. It was a compromise I was willing to accept.
“Now we can talk,” I said. “You can start by explaining this here… powwow.”
“We were attacked.” The Osage woman’s voice was quiet, but she spoke in clear English. Her face was round and honest, coming to a slight point at her chin, and her hair was tied into a practical braid at the back of her head. As I recalled, she was the only person, apart from the preacher, who hadn’t gone for a weapon when I burst in. She knelt beside one of the men—they appeared close in age—and held a wet cloth to his head while he shook with pain or fever.
“Who attacked you?” I asked.
“Soldiers on horseback,” she said. “They wore blue coats. They accused us of smuggling whiskey into Indian Territory.”
“There’s your so-called federal business,” the preacher added, giving me a dirty look. I tried not to take it personally. Man was probably a greyback, born and bred. Still fighting the War of Northern Aggression in his heart, if not in reality. It explained the attitude and the leg, anyway.
I divided my attention between Almena and the Osage woman who’d spoken, glancing frequently between them. “Forgive me, ma’am, but I have to ask. Were you smuggling whiskey into Indian Territory?”
Selling spirits to Indians on their lands was against the law. If they wanted the liquor, the government encouraged them—forced, more like—to trek into Arkansas or Kansas to purchase it from a respectable merchant. As with most things in the West, the fact that it was illegal didn’t stop a few enterprising souls from smuggling barrels of John Barleycorn across the border in the dead of night. It was a victimless crime for the most part, so the marshals usually left the problem to local sheriffs. The only time I’d ever caught a smuggler myself, it was along the Shawnee Trail, and he’d been carrying food and medicine in addition to the whiskey, headed into Cherokee territory. I let him off with a warning and slept just fine that night.
To my relief, the Osage woman didn’t look offended by my question. She held my gaze a moment, before answering with a simple “Yes.”
“Is that why you’re helping them?” I addressed Almena. “For the money?”
Almena flattened herself into a pew, resting her arms along the top. It seemed a touch too orchestrated—every movement planned, every posture thought out. She was working too hard to look casual. “Think what you like, Marshal.”
I rubbed my forehead and looked back at the Osage woman. “Ma’am… you do understand smuggling is against the law?”
“But we are not citizens of your United States,” she said. “Or is that not what we have been told, again and again, by the actions of your government?”
I suspected I’d insulted her, after all, and now we were trading barbs. Much like a rose in a Texas song, somewhere beneath the woman’s sweetly expression, she was hiding thorns.
“What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?”
She gave me her native name, but when I struggled to pronounce it, added, “You may also call me Footprints-in-the-woods.” She said it in a way that sounded like she was used to white folk being unable to get it right, and was too tired to listen to me butcher it. “The whiskey was not for drinking. We use it for medicine, as well as to barter with the other tribes. The rations your government offers us are…”
“Shit,” Almena supplied. I expected Preacher James to chide her for her language, but he didn’t. “They’re starving,” she added.
“They could send in a request for more goods and supplies,” I said. “If things are as bad as you say, surely the government will do something.”
Almena shook her head. “I knew you were naïve, Marshal, but I never took you for stupid. The government’s not going to do anything contrary to its interests, and it’s got no interest in Indian lives. It’s like a stubborn mule. Only way to get the damn thing to go is by threatening to crack a switch across its back. And the only way it answers to that threat is by making good on it in the first place.”
“Stealing whiskey,” I supplied, frowning.
“It isn’t stealing, not really. Consider it a form of redistributing the wealth to those who need it the most.”
Looking at the Osage in the church, I couldn’t deny the sense of injustice. If what Almena said was true. But it was still breaking the law, and I was still a lawman. Wasn’t my place to adjudicate, only to enforce. “So I’m to add smuggler to your repertoire. That about the cut of it?”
“Where’s that rank on the list?” Almena asked. “Above or below cow rustling? Or maybe just south of a hold-up?”
“You angling to swing again, Miss Guillory?”
“Why? Am I getting on your nerves?”
“Enough,” the preacher said, though I could see by the confused look he was giving Almena that ‘Mary’ never divulged all the sordid details of her past life. Smart of her. “These people weren’t smuggling when they were set upon. The blue coats attacked them with no provocation.”
I wanted to find that hard to believe, but truth was I didn’t. Former soldiers of the Union Army were notorious for their bad behavior out here, unleashed by the war and far from the eyes and judgment of Washington. “Why come back here, then? If it was U.S. soldiers who attacked you?”
“Because of her,” Footprints-in-the-woods said, meaning Almena.
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nbsp; Almena stared at her lap. Her finger had stopped bouncing.
“How’s that now?” I asked.
“She’s a healer,” Footprints-in-the-woods answered. “The soldiers killed ours.” I wasn’t sure whether she meant some kind of medicine man or someone with the same powers Almena possessed. It hadn’t occurred to me until then, but it stood to reason that more fleshcrafters like Almena existed, though they likely went by another name in the Osage community. “She can help them.” Footprints-in-the-woods gestured toward the men.
Just how many times had she performed her healing trick for others, I wondered? For the Osage to have known they could find her here, they must have had prior contact, and for them to take such a tremendous risk in reaching out, they’d need to trust her. Almena Guillory, a woman famous for shooting, killing, and thieving. A woman often compared to a beast for her brutality. The woman who saved my life. And the same woman who’d shoved a pistol under my chin, at the same time carrying my bullet hole in her belly.
“Yes,” Almena answered after a long moment, standing. “I’ll help. That is, if it’s all right with Mister Richardson here.”
“You’re full of contradictions, aren’t you?” I said, and Almena smiled like I’d landed on a secret. I shook my head, feeling more than a little uncomfortable. “I won’t stop you from helping these people, but after that’s through, you’ll need to answer for some things.”
Almena gave a short nod. “Isn’t that always the way?”
While I watched the Osage women gather in a tight semi-circle around Almena, Dempsey came in out of the rain, shaking the wet out of his brown hair like a dog, and dragging a reluctant Fairly by his shirt collar. I nodded to Dempsey as he pushed Fairly down into the pew just a few rows ahead of mine.
The Osage women made Almena look small, each being a height comparable to any man, including myself. Their brown skin looked like dried parchment, full of bloody scratches, which angered me almost as much as their gaunt faces. Something should have been done to help these people. Instead, they’d been attacked for merely trying to survive the conditions the government had created. Wasn’t right.
