The rest of the lights sprang on and the adversaries pranced into the center of the arena newly vacated by the announcer. Following the script, George circled Comanche Tom while the other danced his beast around to keep him in sight. Twice around, building suspense, and then Quanah charged. With an earsplitting whoop he snatched the tomahawk off his belt and swished it at Tom’s head, missing his hat by inches as the scout ducked. The rubber blade whistled convincingly and Tom kicked out a long leg that was supposed to brush the Indian’s ribs so he could fake a fall. Instead it connected with full force, driving the air from his lungs and unseating him for real. George landed hard on his right shoulder.
True to its training, the paint trotted toward the bleachers and the waiting attendants. Meanwhile Comanche Tom stepped down from the palomino. By this time the Crow had recovered himself enough to stand, though breathing was difficult and his rib cage was on fire. The scout removed his hat with a flourish and scaled it after the departing steed. This was a fairly new addition to the act, quietly incorporated after an embarrassing episode in which the hat had been knocked roughly from his head during the sham battle and his hairpiece had come off with it. At a distance of eight feet the opponents sank into a crouch and circled, eyeing each other warily.
“You miscalculated that kick,” said George in a low voice, and feinted with his right hand.
Tom dodged the maneuver. “Want to bet?” He lunged, grabbing for the Indian. George sprang back.
Here the script called for Quanah to produce a knife and charge the scout. Tom would lose his balance and fall and the two would begin wrestling, the wicked-looking blade inches away from slashing the white man’s throat until he threw the Indian, disarming him and winning the battle. George reached back for the rubber knife, and while he was reaching he kicked Comanche Tom as hard as he could in the groin.
The showman’s hoarse cry was heard all over the tent. He doubled over, only to be straightened out by George’s linked hands scooping up with all the force he could muster under Tom’s chin. It was enough. Fans of the Great Scout watched openmouthed as their hero tipped over backward like a great paunchy board and landed spread-eagled in the dust. The bleachers were silent.
Out of the corner of his eye George glimpsed the rotund Irishman gesticulating wildly at the band. As the brass hurled itself into Comanche Tom’s victory sting, the Crow had a sudden inspiration, bent over the fallen scout, and yanked off his toupee. To the accompaniment of blaring horns he held up his trophy for all to see, then tossed it onto Tom’s heaving chest, where it clung for a moment like some large hairy parasite before sliding off.
The laughter deafened him as he thrust the warbonnet into the hands of the startled Negro grip and left the tent for the last time.
Chapter Four
The Lamp of the Wicked
No one hated the Roman Catholic faith more than Midian Pierce, and yet he was inclined to agree with its followers that a house of God should represent His holy majesty on earth. Stranded in a box of a one-room Nebraska schoolhouse that was his only on Sunday afternoons, his nostrils full of chalk dust and cheap varnish and pencil shavings, he envied that Church its vaults and groins and lofty graven altars, its receptacles of blessed water and acres of gold candlesticks. Especially the gold candlesticks. He had stolen one from a church during the Lawrence raid in ‘63 and, when camped, used to take it out of his saddlebag and study it by firelight, tracing with callused fingers the lips and whorls cast (or so he fancied) from the heathen wealth of some dead Aztec long after the flames had guttered out. The stick had been taken from him when he was arrested in Hannibal after the war, but he never forgot it, or the opulence of the place from which it had been seized.
But daydreaming was sinful, and he was annoyed to find himself fondling the metal rule on his desk as if it were that long-lost booty. It dropped with a clank, startling fourteen-year-old Becky Howlett out of her contemplation of the Young People’s Book of Bible Stories open on the desk in front of her. The teacher’s fierce countenance, however, drove her back to her studies. Immediately after her eyes dropped, so did the stem expression. She was a pretty blonde with a woman’s burgeoning body under the little-girl gingham, which was the real reason he had asked her to remain after class.
Midian Pierce was born under a different name sixty-one years earlier to an unlettered Illinois farmer and his slowwitted wife, who stood by desperately trying to understand what was happening whenever her husband took a harness to the boy for some real or suspected transgression. At twelve Midian was seduced by his seventh-grade teacher, a tall woman with a moustache and a bosom like a pillow, and he left home in a hurry eighteen months later upon learning that a neighbor was looking for him with a hay knife in connection with the not entirely one-sided violation of his sixteen-year-old daughter.
He found employment as a mule driver maintaining the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which ended when he tired of the back-bending labor and broke his foreman’s jaw. He used his wages to purchase a plot of land near Springfield, Missouri, and took a wife, only to find that the work involved in maintaining both a farm and a marriage was worse than what he had left behind. Shortly after hostilities broke out between the states in 1861 he left his plow standing in the middle of the field and signed on with the Confederacy. He never saw his wife or his land again and seldom thought of either. When Missouri was occupied by Union forces he deserted his company and joined the guerrillas led by William Clarke Quantrill, with whom he distinguished himself at Lawrence and Centralia as a cool and efficient killer.
Fortunately for him, Pierce was slight and ordinary of feature, and after his arrest in Hannibal none of those who had survived the band’s two most notorious raids could identify him as one of the perpetrators. Instead of hanging, he was therefore found guilty only of stealing from the Church and sentenced to serve two years in the state penitentiary at Jefferson City. There he pursued his newfound interest in religion when a fellow inmate convicted of rape and murder bequeathed him his Bible shortly before mounting the scaffold.
Three years’ studyâhe served an additional twelve months for crippling a cellmate who had laughed at his nightly prayersâfitted him for a career as an itinerant preacher. From the day of his release to this, with but an occasional lapse into his former ways and one long period spent as a professional manhunter with Irons St. John in the Nations, he had plied his trade with a purpose, depending upon the generosity of the faithful in return for the Word. A fundamentalist by necessity, he cared little for individual denominations save where they suited his convenience. If the community were largely Baptist, then a Baptist he became; Episcopal, then he reversed his collar and cursed the Pope; Presbyterian, then he sprinkled his sermons with quotes from Ecclesiastes and Calvin; and so on, except for Catholicism, which he despised without really knowing why; except that it seemed to be expected of him.
And in every community, he recalled with a prim little smile as unconsciously he resumed fingering the steel rule, there had been a Becky Howlett, bright-eyed and fresh-scrubbed, full of the ecstasy of true devotion. How many he had blessed! And yet his mission was still so very far from over. So much to do and so little time.
“Come here, child.”
She glanced up hesitantly, perhaps fearful that she had done something to arouse the instructor’s wrath. Often enough she had witnessed the short, swift arc of the rule, heard the sharp crack of steel on bone as classroom malefactors meekly extended their knuckles for punishment. But she found no reproach in Pierce’s expression, and so she closed her book and got up to obey.
The teacher flattered himself that age had been more than kind to him, stamping character upon features that in his youth had been only average and weaving distinguished gray among auburn locks parted neatly but not severely in the middle, worn long over the tops of his ears and gathered into an old-fashioned queue behind his neck. His frame was small but slender, for he was indifferent to food, and his worn black suit fitted him li
ke a sheath the knife for which it was designed. He had brown eyes, a gentle jaw, and the general appearance of a Puritan straight out of the lithographs in the history textbooks used in that same room during the week. Most people were surprised when he told them how old he was.
“Fear not, child,” he said, when she stopped six feet short of the desk, hands folded in front of her. “Am I so hideous that you fancy I will devour you?”
“Oh, no!” she blurted. “You’re veryâpleasing.”
“Pleasing.” He picked up the rule and dropped it, picked it up and dropped it twice more. “Come closer, child. Shouting is not my way. No, no. Behind the desk.”
When she drew near he learned that she was wearing lemon verbena, and scowled. He disapproved of scents. Later he would lecture her on the anointing of corpses. Later, definitely.
Someone battered the door. The girl sprang away, her eyes wide and frightened like a deer’s. He got up with an oath and strode down the aisle to the door, tagging down the corners of his vest. The knocking grew insistent.
“Patience, in the Savior’s name,” he muttered and opened the door on the sheriff.
Now six months into his first term, Fred Dieterle was a hard-eyed oak of a man thirty years old in a buff uniform with a gold star pinned over one leather pocket. He dwarfed the teacher, the crown of his slouch hat brushing the top of the doorway. His gaze swept past Pierce and lighted on the girl.
“Go home, Becky.”
Flushing from neck to hairline, she hastened down the aisle, collecting her book on the way. Dieterle stepped aside to let her pass.
“Your jurisdiction hardly extends to this classroom, Sheriff,” Pierce said. “I am in charge here.” He was bartering words for time, wondering whether it was the girl’s parents or another student who had reported him. He had to know who before starting his defense. This had happened before in other communities and he had always managed to talk his way around the local unshod law.
“Not much longer. You’re going to jail.” Dieterle unhooked a pair of bright steel handcuffs from his belt. “Am I allowed to ask on what charge?”
“Child molesting, as if you didn’t know already.”
Pierce was on firm ground now. There was no case. By bursting in when he had rather than waiting ten or fifteen minutes, the fool had spoiled the prosecution’s chances. “And may I also ask whose child I’m accused of having molested?”
“Seth Johanson’s girl. It happened Friday night, when you went out to his place to tutor her.”
“Gerda Johanson!” That cow? He hadn’t touched her. “Who claims this?” he demanded.
“Gerda. She says you put your hands all over her. I think you done more. It’ll come out at the trial. We ain’t hung nobody in this century yet. Let’s have your wrists.” He rattled the cuffs.
“Those won’t be necessary. You’ll find innocent men make peaceful prisoners.” He took his soft black hat from the peg and put it on, smoothing the brim between thumb and forefinger. “I trust your position can stand the waste of taxpayers’ money. Who do you think the jury will believe, a man of God or the fat daughter of an illiterate Swede?”
“That’s up to them. Meantime I got deputies phoning your name and description to police departments and sheriffs’ offices all over this part of the country. We’ll see what folks in the other places you stopped got to say about you.”
The teacher held on to his dignity with difficulty. To have lived through so much, only to swing for the wish-dream of a pathetic child! The Scriptures did not deal adequately with the Lord’s sense of irony. “I’ll just get my Bible.” He turned.
Dieterle drew his belt gun and rolled back the hammer with a noise like walnuts cracking. “I’ll go with you.”
Pierce approached the desk on stiff legs, the revolver at his back. He pulled open the top drawer.
“Hold it!” spat the sheriff. Pierce froze while the other reached past him and plucked the Navy Colt off the leather bound Bible.
“I forgot it was there.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s just see what else you forgot.” He tucked the confiscated weapon under his belt next to the cuffs and picked up the book. First he hefted it, then rifled through the coarse pages, looking for a hollow.
Pierce fired the derringer through his right coat pocket, shattering Dieterle’s kneecap and cutting short his career.
The sheriff went down shrieking. He tried to raise his gun, but by that time his assailant had freed the small firearm from his pocket and he emptied the second barrel at Dieterle’s throat. The heavy slug tore through his vocal cords, brushed his spine, and exploded the blackboard behind him, shards of black slate rattling down like dead leaves.
Dieterle supported himself on one hand, the smashed leg stretched out to one side and his other hand clasping his throat. He was coughing blood. Humming “Nearer, My God to Thee,” Pierce picked up the sheriff’s Smith & Wesson from the floor and reached for the long-barreled Colt in the sheriff’s belt.
“Always keep two guns,” Pierce told him, cocking the Colt. “Once they find one, they hardly ever look for another.” He placed the muzzle to the wounded man’s forehead. Dieterle let out a strangled moan.
The door flew open, whacking against the wall on the other side. A big revolver towed a fair-haired deputy over the threshold. Wide blue eyes like Becky’s leapt from the man on the floor to Pierce and back to the man on the floor. His mouth hung open. Dieterle had told him to wait outside; two armed men apprehending a child molester looked silly.
The child molester whirled and fired, the report sounding like an echo to the crash of the door, only louder, deafening in the confines of that room. The bullet slapped the deputy’s hand into the doorframe and his gun went cartwheeling.
Pierce pulled the trigger twice more. One shot thupped against the curve of the lawman’s hat brim, and as he ducked, the second nicked the inside of his right thigh. He was bleeding copiously when the fugitive shoved him aside and ran out.
Dieterle’s Winton was parked with the motor running in front of the schoolhouse, looking forlornly like a two-seat buckboard after the horse has run off. The county had bought the automobile for his predecessor a year before, but the old peace officer had preferred his buggy and the machine had stood unused in a local barn until after the election. Pierce’s horse was three miles down the road at the boardinghouse where he was staying. Curse him for the sin of pride in his physical fitness! He clambered under the wheel.
Pierce had never driven a motorcar, but once in St. Louis he had ridden in an Oldsmobile during a parade and had watched closely the driver’s machinations as they were setting out. Reasoning that all these contraptions were alike, he pushed and pulled levers until the car hiccoughed forward with a jerk that snapped his jaws together. A bullet whanged off the left rear fender just as he pulled away. He loosed lead back at the schoolhouse. The deputy ducked back inside. Thus did a peace officer become the victim of the first automobile theft in Nebraska history.
Steering was easy. Pierce had gone half a mile, however, before he grasped the concept of gears and was able to make speed. Road dust billowed over him, breading the heavy black stuff of his suit and lodging in his nostrils and throat. Judgment was surely at hand when machines such as this ruled the highways.
At first he had no idea where he was going, beyond the boardinghouse stable and more familiar means of transportation. Then something crackled in his breast pocket as he manipulated the car around a gopher hole. He took it out. It was St. John’s telegram from Kansas City, Missouri, received yesterday. He had read it and stuck it away, glad those posse days were behind.
“Mysterious ways, Midian,” he reminded himself, over the sputtering of the engine.
Chapter Five
Old Home Week
Though he had been expecting something of the sort, Emmett Force Rawlings was nonplussed when he opened the door of St. John’s hotel suite to an Indian, and a singularly sinister-looking one at that. The round face and
flat features, dented all over with smallpox scars, came straight out of photographs taken in enemy camps at the close of bloody cavalry campaigns. His white man’s attire of woolen greatcoat and shapeless felt hat pulled low on his forehead served only to make him look moreâforeign was the word that came inappropriately to mind.
For his part, the Indian betrayed no surprise at finding a stranger in his old superior’s quarters. His black eyes were flat and lusterless and he seemed content to stand in the hall gripping a battered Army footlocker rather than request admittance.
“Yes?” inquired the Pinkerton.
“I’ll be damned. George!”
St. John, emerging from the bathroom in vest and shirt sleeves, hooted and loped across the floral-print carpet to seize the visitor’s free hand. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming. How the hell are you? Come in, for chrissake.”
Smiling thinly, the Indian entered and set down the suitcase, then nodded at the empty hearth. “Get something burning, will you? It’s damn cold traveling across country in an unheated baggage car.”
“You’re in the wrong century,” said the old lawman, kicking a dull gong out of the gray steel radiator next to the door. “Don’t tell me they still won’t let injuns ride with the gentlefolk.”
“People don’t change as easy as calendars. Your desk clerk tried to throw me out when I came through the lobby. He failed.”
“That son of a bitch. I hope you hit him where it shows.” St. John clapped a hand on the newcomer’s broad shoulder. It wasn’t padded as the Pinkerton had suspected. “George American Horse, meet our meal ticket this trip. Emmett Rawlings is that detective I wired you about.”
“That much I figured out.” The Indian made no move to shake hands. His eyes slid past Rawlings, and the smile faded. “Hello, Testament.”
Mr. St. John Page 3
