I scratched my head. “Now that I think of it, Mrs. Murdo was among that last batch of people.”
Blacke said, “That might mean something, might not. We’ve got to go on the assumption that every bottle of that stuff might be deadly.”
“Any suggestions, Doctor?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin. At this moment, someone might be having difficulty sleeping, or feeling a twinge of neuralgia, and pouring the dose of poison that will kill him. If only there were some way to speak to everyone at once.”
“Mr. Bell’s telephone is still years away from Le Four,” I said.
“This is no time to worry about what’s impossible.” Blacke was not angry, but his voice commanded instant attention. He was the marshal again, telling his deputies what had to be done.
He turned to Mayhew. “Doctor, you and your wife stay here to deal with any more patients who turn up. Can you spare Merton?”
“Well, yes, I suppose. What can he do?”
“He can knock on doors, same as me and Becky and Mrs. Sundberg. We’re going to rouse the town, recruit more volunteers, send riders out to the ranches and farms, collect every bottle of Ozono we can for you to test. We’ll also find the other cases that way, maybe sooner than if we waited for the news to come to us, or stop people from using the stuff if they haven’t already.”
“By all means,” Mayhew said. “I’ll tell Merton to put himself at your disposal.”
Blacke managed a smile. “I expect you know how lucky you are to have a son like that,” he said. “You may be the only man on earth I envy.”
That elicited one of the doctor’s rare smiles. “Yes,” he said. “I know.” He left.
“Um, Blacke,” I said. “You seem to have left me out of your battle plan.”
“I’ve got a separate plan for you. Maybe the toughest thing of all.”
“Which is?”
“Go next door to the sheriff’s office. Get Harlan out of bed with whatever whore he’s got tonight, and get him out to the orchard at the gallop. Go with him. Have him arrest Herkimer and his whole troupe, and bring them in, and get them locked up in jail. Have him bring the wagon to the livery stable under guard so the doctor can take a look at what’s in there if he has a chance.”
“Any suggestions on how I should go about this?”
“Yeah. The quickest way. Do it at gunpoint if you have to, but get it done. You’re good with him, God knows why. But every second counts, Booker.”
He leaned forward, his voice even more intense. “Because this is not going to be hard for folks to put together. What time is it?”
I consulted my watch. “Just after midnight,” I said.
“Then sunup’s in about five hours. Folks will be getting up, and they’ll be hearing about this, some seeing it for themselves. By six o’clock at the latest, Le Four is going to see its first lynch mob. They must not be allowed to succeed. Lynching kills the soul of a town. Goddammit—”
I jumped to my feet. “All right, I understand. If I said something to the effect that I’m honored you have the confidence in me to trust me with this, you’d call me a fool, wouldn’t you?”
“Yup.”
“Then I won’t say it.”
“Good. And don’t block up the door. I’ve got to get out of here and knock on doors.”
Merton and the ladies had already started to work, and tired, muddled, confused, angry, and horrified voices filled the night air. It occurred to me that the very act of telling everyone within reach what had happened that night would very likely accelerate the birth of the lynch mob Blacke so feared, but what else was there to do? We certainly couldn’t sit tight and let the townspeople poison themselves in order to protect the man who had sold them the poison.
The buzz of voices added even more urgency to my mission. I ran down the boardwalk the few yards from Dr. Mayhew’s surgery to the sheriff’s office. I tried the door. It was locked. Impatiently, I pulled the cord and rang the bell outside the door. The clanging seemed loud enough to be heard in Cheyenne, but it brought no response from within.
“The quickest way,” I muttered, and proceeded to take off my boot and use it to smash the glass in the door. I reached in, turned the lock, and entered.
“Harlan!” I yelled. “Sheriff Harlan!”
No answer. İ went to the back of the ground floor to the iron door with the serious lock and yelled through the strap-iron window.
“Anybody back there?”
“Just me, Cap’n,” said a tired voice.
“Franklin?”
“Tha’s right.” Franklin Warrum was the town drunk. He never did anybody any harm; Harlan locked him up from time to time to keep Franklin safe.
“Where’s the sheriff?”
“Ain’t seen him since he brung me my dinner. Went upstairs to his quarters, I guess. Said he was gonna turn in early.”
I climbed the stairs, shouting as I did so. Just short of the top, I got a response. A croaking sort of a sound. “What the hell? Go away and leave me in peace!”
This door, at least, was not locked. I opened it up and saw the sheriff sitting on the edge of a rumpled bed with his galluses up over his long underwear.
He said, “What are you doing here, Booker?” and raised a bottle to his lips. Through the man’s fat fingers, I could see the distinctive yellow and black of the Ozono label.
I sprang at him and knocked the bottle from his hands. Amber liquid spewed around the room.
“Damn you, Booker, are you crazy?”
“How much of that did you swallow?”
He clutched his stomach and looked a little woozy. “Not enough. Had too much chili at Maisie’s tonight. Instead of sitting here suffering, I thought I’d try some of that medicine.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“Took it off Franklin. He was out at the medicine show and bought the stuff. Cheaper than booze, you know.”
“How much did you swallow?”
“Just a little. Ooooh. See if there’s any more in the bottle. That chili is getting me something wicked.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll bet. You’re going to Dr. Mayhew’s office. He’s got something that’ll clean you right out.”
“He does?”
“Yeah, it’s called a gastric lavage. You’ll love it.”
I grabbed the sheriff by the elbow and heaved him to his feet. He was too heavy to carry downstairs, so I more or less dragged him. If he hadn’t still been able through his cramps to take some of his own weight on his feet, I would have had to roll him down.
I stopped for a second in the office, pulled open drawers in the sheriff’s desk until I found what I needed.
I pinned a deputy’s badge on my vest. “Swear me in, you goddam fool. Somebody has to be arrested, and you sure aren’t up to doing it.”
He blinked his eyes a couple of times. “You want to be a deputy?”
“That’s the idea.”
“Okay, you’re a deputy. Say I do.”
“I do.” I’m sure that wasn’t the way the laws of the Wyoming Territory would have had it done, but it would have to suffice. As his first official act, Deputy Booker dragged the sheriff to the doctor’s office.
12
AS I’D LEFT THE town behind me, heading north toward Grechtstein’s orchard, I was not a happy man. Nor an especially confident one.
I had urged Posy to a fast canter, and alone on the moonlit trail, with the heat of the day having given way to the cool of the evening, she actually seemed to be enjoying it.
But I felt all too keenly the weight of the gun on my right hip. This was now my gun, but it had been the gun of Lobo Blacke, feared throughout the West, revered as a symbol of justice, all the kinds of nonsense I used to write in my dime novels.
It had been a gift to me from Blacke himself, and that was something else that had honored me almost beyond expressing. But the last time I had buckled the holster around my waist in the anticipation of having to use it, I also had
detailed instructions from Lobo Blacke in exactly what to do with it.
I don’t mean shooting it. I’m actually quite a good shot, with pistol and rifle. The colonel had seen to that. I mean the hard part, the dangerous part. Knowing when to shoot; how to tell that you have no choice but to shoot. That kind of thing. My father never bothered to teach me about that—as far as he was concerned, I’d point my weapon where ordered and set it off when told to do so.
And as Posy’s easy lope ate up the distance between me and the Great Medicine Show, I had to admit the notion of taking orders had never before seemed so appealing.
The best thing to do, I decided, was to dismount a few hundred yards from where they were camped, approach quietly on foot, and get the drop on them while they were all asleep. I reined Posy in and tied her to a patch of scrub just below the orchard. Then, as quietly as someone city bred could, I made my way toward the wagon.
There was a crack and a whine as a rifle bullet whizzed by close to my head. I hit the ground and rolled sideways, finding a little hollow in the earth to burrow in.
“Who’s out there?” a voice demanded. Joseph Feathers. It didn’t sound as if he was wearing his usual smile at the moment. “You’d better get going, or the next one won’t miss!”
It was only then that it occurred to me that people who had just taken in a couple of hundred dollars in hard money wouldn’t be likely to go to sleep all at once and let someone sneak up on them. I was showing little aptitude for the deputy business, and the difficult part of it yet to come.
“Joseph Feathers!” I called.
“I know who I am. Who are you?”
“Quinn Booker! I have to talk to you right away!”
“Booker? Why did you try to sneak up on us? Why didn’t you just ride right up, like a decent man?”
“Because I’m not a decent man anymore! I’m a deputy sheriff!”
“What?”
“I’ll explain when I get there!”
“All right, then, come on ahead! But keep your hands where I can see them.”
That was fine with me. I was just happy to be able to quit shouting. It seems wrong, somehow, to be shouting late at night out on the prairie, even though there are fewer people around to disturb.
I kept walking forward, arms visibly open and out to my sides. When I got within ten yards of the wagon, Joseph Feathers said, “I guess that’s close enough.”
He was sitting on the board of the wagon as though ready to drive it off, though the horse wasn’t hitched up. He had a Winchester repeater cradled across his lap, a weapon, I knew, that in seconds could put more holes in me than a player-piano roll has.
“Now,” he said. “What’s so all-fired important as to bring you creeping around up here in the middle of the night?”
“I came to admit you were right about something.”
“Oh? And what might that be?”
“Well, first, I want to say again that I’ve been deputized by the sheriff this evening, so this is official, and your pointing your gun at me after I show you this badge”—I twisted it so it glinted in the moonlight—“constitutes assaulting an officer, but we’ll overlook that.”
“Big of you,” he said. He hitched the rifle a little higher.
“I also want to say that Dr. Herkimer and the princess ought to hear this, too. They can’t possibly be asleep with all the yelling we’ve been doing.”
Herkimer’s voice came from within the wagon. “We’re fine where we are,” it said, and I knew I had at least one other gun pointed at me. “Say your piece.”
“You say you came to tell me I was right about something. Why couldn’t that wait until the morning?”
“I didn’t know if you’d still be around in the morning.” Feathers shrugged, admitting I had a point. “True. We usually break up camp at first light, and I ride on into the next town to do the advance work.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”
“Well, why don’t you just tell me what you do mean?”
“I mean, when you told me that after the people of Le Four had a chance to take the Ozono, the place would never be the same, I never dreamed how right you could be.”
White teeth gleamed as his big, friendly smile split his face. “You’ve seen the results already?”
I forced myself to smile back as I walked up to the front of the wagon. “Yes,” I said, “and they’re breathtaking.”
I reached out my left hand, as if to climb up there with him, but instead, I grabbed his rifle by the barrel and pulled hard, at the same time drawing Lobo Blacke’s gun.
He never let go of the rifle; instead, he half fell, half jumped off the wagon after it. Now I didn’t dare let go of it, either. I had to keep pulling to keep the opening of the barrel behind me. This locked us in a strange embrace, and soon we lost our balance and went down. Feathers kept trying to roll away from me and kept us thrashing back and forth. This undoubtedly saved my life by making it impossible for the man in the wagon to get a clean shot.
It ended when I was able to push open a space between us and bring my gun up, and jam it hard under his ribs. Feathers froze as soon as he felt it there.
“All right,” I said. “Let go of the rifle.”
As soon as he did, I pulled it free, sat up, and threw it into the woods. Still holding the gun in place, still looking Feathers in the eye, I called to the wagon.
“All right, Herkimer. If you’ve got a gun on me, you’d better get me in the head with your first shot, or Mr. Feathers will be plucked off to heaven. Or wherever it is that he belongs.”
No answer. I was tempted to look at the wagon, but that would give Feathers a chance to grab for the gun, and that would never do.
So I stared at him, waiting, not even blinking. Silently, I slowly counted to ten, then again.
“Of course, if you have no great love for Mr. Feathers, then the joke is on me. And on him. Because if I don’t see both of you out here by the time I count to ten, I’m going to pull the trigger. One. Two. Thr—”
They must have loved Mr. Feathers very much indeed, because they were both out of the wagon before I finished three. They came out the front, obligingly in the direction I was looking. They jumped down off the wagon to the ground.
“All right,” I said. “Hold it right there.”
I put my free hand on Feathers’s face and held it there while I stood up and backed away from him.
“Now, before you stand up, Feathers, throw the sandbag away.”
He did, and went to stand near the others.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “why don’t you take off your jacket, so I can see that you don’t have any other surprises under there.”
Once I’d eased my mind about that, I was able to take a good look at the other two. Dr. Herkimer and the princess were wearing identical white nightshirts. The style was much more becoming in her. Unfortunately, they could have been hiding a cannon under those things.
“I apologize,” I said. “But in the interests of safety of all concerned, I’ll have to ask you to take those off.”
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Feathers sneered. “A chance to see her naked.”
“Oh, shut up. I swear to heaven, Feathers, I’m here to save your life, and you are certainly making it a chore. Go ahead, get them off.”
Since I’d already seen more of the princess’s skin than of any woman with whom I did not intend to become intimate, it was no surprise that naked in the moonlight, she was breathtaking.
Dr. Herkimer, however, was no advertisement for his own product. His rubbery skin was saggy and wrinkled, and speckled with purplish spots.
“You may clothe yourselves again,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it had to be done.”
Herkimer scurried back into his nightshirt, but the princess merely picked hers up and held it before her. Maybe she thought it would distract me. She was probably right. I was going to tell her to put it on when Feathers spoke first.
“What is
it you are here for, then? Not to give a testimonial to Ozono. And that business about saving our lives was a lie, too.”
“No,” I said. “No testimonials. But I haven’t told you any lies, either. I am here to save your life. And Ozono has had a breathtaking effect on the health of the town. It was loaded with arsenic. When I left, nine people had died of it. There are probably more by now.”
Well, the princess might not speak, but she wasn’t a mute; there was plenty of voice in her gasp. As for Herkimer, he turned white and looked as if he was going to faint. Feathers caught him and held him up. There was a look of real concern on his face.
“He looks as if he could use a shot of tonic,” I observed. “But I don’t recommend it.”
Herkimer, the mesmerizing orator, was having trouble finding his tongue.
“No. No. Nonono. It’s... it’s impossible. It can’t have happened.”
“It happened,” I said softly. “I watched them die. The thing is, I don’t want to watch you die. The first stirrings of lynching fever are beginning now. There isn’t a lot of time. So what do you say we all go back to town before they can get really started, and get you safely in a place where we can guard you?”
“It’s a trick,” Feathers said. “He’s after the money.”
“Don’t make me laugh,” I said. “I’m the third- or fourth-richest man in town” (depending on how much Lucius Jenkins pays Asa Harlan under the table, I thought), “and I could buy and sell your little medicine show.”
Feathers sneered, “Why should I believe that?”
“You’ll believe it when they stretch your neck on that tree over there.”
“But it’s impossible,” Herkimer said again. “Ozono is made only from the purest ingredients. Oh, sure, I exaggerate some, but you know, you’ve got to, the ru—the customers expect it, don’t you see? But there’s nothing in there that could ever, ever hurt anybody.”
“There was tonight,” I said softly.
“Then I’ve been set up. Sabotaged! I’ve been selling Ozono for thirty years, and never given anyone so much as a bellyache.”
“I’m not saying,” I told him quietly, “that you’re not telling the truth. In fact, I’m sure you probably are. Lobo Blacke—you know about Lobo Blacke?”
Fatal Elixir Page 8
