Prentice spoke up, saying, “I’m feeling better now. I think I could use some coffee. Was there any left in the pot when you got some, Sixkiller?”
“Yeah,” John Henry said. “I could use a cup, too, if you feel up to fetching it. And if you’re sure you’re not coming down with whatever it is that ails these folks around here.”
“I just felt a little sick at my stomach from getting hit in the head. I’m fine now.” Prentice stood up. “But I think it would be better if you stayed here and kept an eye on these two. I can find the kitchen all right.”
John Henry took Prentice’s place in the chair. He propped his right ankle on his left knee, then drew his Colt, draped his thumb over the hammer, and rested the gun on his crossed leg. The barrel pointed about halfway between Penelope and Denton.
“Go ahead,” John Henry told Prentice. “I think things are under control here.”
Prentice grunted and said, “That’s what I thought, until that she-devil pulled her tricks.”
“It’s not my fault you’re dumb as a rock,” Penelope said without looking at the Secret Service man.
“You’re the one who’s going to prison. I’m still free as a bird. Who does that make dumb?”
With a haughty sniff, Penelope ignored the question and still didn’t look at him.
“Go ahead,” John Henry said again. “We’ll be fine.”
“If either of them try anything . . . shoot ’em. Shoot ’em both, for all I care.”
Prentice jerked the door open and stalked out of the room.
John Henry saw a trace of a smile hovering around Penelope’s lips. She knew she had gotten under Prentice’s skin, and that pleased her.
That cup of coffee was going to please John Henry, if he ever got around to drinking it.
* * *
The night was a long one, just as John Henry expected. He was able to doze a little while Prentice stood guard, but by morning he was pretty tired. Both of them were.
Penelope, on the other hand, had curled up on the bed and apparently slept soundly.
Obviously that didn’t require a clear conscience where she was concerned.
When the sky began to lighten outside with the approach of dawn, John Henry left Prentice guarding the prisoners and went downstairs to the kitchen. He found Weaver there, removing a pan of biscuits from the oven.
“My regular cook is sick,” the hotel keeper said. “I don’t know if these biscuits I made will be fit to eat or not, but maybe they’re better than nothing. There’s a fresh pot of coffee on, too. Will you be leaving Copperhead today, Marshal?”
“I’ll be riding out, all right,” John Henry said.
“Still looking for that woman you asked me about yesterday?”
“No. I found her.”
That made Weaver turn toward him and frown in surprise.
“Where was she?”
“Right here in the hotel. You just didn’t know it. The fella who called himself Edward Munroe gave her the key to his room, and she slipped in without you seeing her.”
Weaver’s head did its little darting-forward-and-back motion. He pushed the thick spectacles up on his nose.
“This is my hotel,” he muttered. “People shouldn’t sneak around.”
“There’s some damage up in Room Fourteen, too,” John Henry went on. He took a double eagle from his pocket, one of several coins he had found in Denton’s pockets when he searched the man. As far as he could tell, it was genuine, although he supposed that with Denton, you never could be sure.
He laid the double eagle on the table and said, “That ought to be enough to cover it, along with breakfast this morning and some of those biscuits to take along for the trail. You got a canvas bag I can put them in?”
When he went back upstairs, he was carrying the bag of biscuits and three cups of coffee. Denton could do without, or Penelope could share hers with him if she wanted to. John Henry didn’t care one way or the other.
Before going into the room, he called out, “Prentice!” He didn’t think there was any way Denton could have gotten loose again, but he wasn’t going to take any unnecessary chances.
The door swung back and Prentice appeared in the doorway, holding his .38 Smith & Wesson.
“Everything all right this time?” John Henry asked.
Prentice scowled and said, “I didn’t let this blond hellcat trick me again, if that’s what you mean.”
“Just checking,” John Henry said dryly. Prentice had made enough snide comments that John Henry didn’t mind returning the favor a little.
Prentice jerked his head and said, “Come on in. I need that coffee.”
Half an hour later, they had all eaten a couple of biscuits and drunk some coffee, with Penelope sharing her breakfast with Denton. The biscuits Weaver had cooked were edible but not particularly good. As he had said, though, they were better than nothing. With breakfast finished, it was time to start thinking about the next move.
“I’ll go down, saddle our horses, and hitch the team to the buggy,” John Henry said. “I suppose one of us will have to drive the buggy.”
“I’ll do that,” Prentice volunteered. “Just throw my saddle in the back of the buggy. I’m not that fond of riding.”
“Not sure there’s room,” John Henry said. “I figured on stashing Denton behind the seat.”
“Fine, put the saddle on my horse. It doesn’t really matter.”
Penelope asked, “Where are you taking us?”
“Oroville,” John Henry said. “It’s the next town. I’m hoping they have a jail and a telegraph office there.”
“Orville? What sort of name for a town is Orville?”
“Oro . . . ville,” John Henry said. “Probably because somebody found gold ore near there.”
“Oh. Well, I guess that makes sense.”
“Stop stalling,” Prentice said. “Go ahead and get everything ready, Sixkiller. I’ll watch these two.”
“Keep your eyes open.”
“Just get it done,” Prentice said. He hefted the. 38. “They’re not going to try anything.”
John Henry wasn’t so sure of that. He didn’t see how Penelope and Denton could get away, but he had learned not to underestimate that shady pair. He would be glad when cell doors clanged shut behind them.
The sun was up by the time they were ready to leave. John Henry saw a few people moving around or looking through doors and windows, but for the most part Copperhead still looked like a ghost town. He would be glad to put this place behind him. It gave him the fantods.
He had tied Prentice’s horse to the back of the buggy. Denton—his wrists tied behind his back and his ankles lashed together—sat on the floor behind the seat. It had taken both John Henry and Prentice to put him in there, and he had cursed them the whole time. If he kept that up, they would stop and gag him, John Henry decided.
Penelope had put on a straw hat with a flat brim and crown. It was tied in place with a couple of ribbons under her chin. She had a shawl draped around her shoulders, too, because early mornings were cool up there in the mountains, no matter what time of year it was. She sat stiffly in the front seat as Prentice climbed into the buggy and settled down beside her.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her. “Don’t like the company?”
“I wouldn’t even if you weren’t taking me to jail,” she said without looking at him.
Prentice chuckled and slapped the reins against the backs of the two horses hitched to the vehicle.
John Henry had already swung up into the saddle on Buck’s back. He said, “Let’s go,” and fell in alongside the buggy as Prentice sent it rolling along the street toward the edge of the settlement.
Good riddance, John Henry thought as they rode out of Copperhead.
About a quarter of a mile out of town, the road began to rise again. It went through a gap in a ridge with steep cutbanks on both sides, a sign that the route was man-made and not natural. The road was about forty feet wide.
One of the horsebackers spurred his horse ahead of the others, raised an arm in a signal to stop, and shouted, “Hold it right there or we’ll open fire and blow you all to hell!”
Chapter Thirty-one
John Henry hauled back on Buck’s reins. Beside him, Prentice brought the buggy to an abrupt halt as well. John Henry’s first impulse at being confronted like this was to reach for the gun on his hip, but they were too outnumbered to fight their way through the blockade.
Besides, he regarded the prisoners as his responsibility, too. If lead started to fly here in the gap, there was a good chance some of it would find Penelope and Denton.
“What the hell?” Prentice muttered. “Road agents?”
“They don’t look like it,” John Henry said.
The leader of the group blocking the road, the man who had called out to them, wore an expensive, western-cut black suit and a black Stetson with silver conchos studding its band. He had a bright blue bandanna tied loosely around his neck. He moved his horse a few feet closer and shouted, “Get on back to Copperhead, now! Don’t make us kill you!”
“Stay here,” John Henry told Prentice.
“What do you think you’re—” the Secret Service agent began.
John Henry didn’t wait for him to finish the question. He started Buck forward at a slow walk. The men on horseback raised their rifles, and so did the ones on the cutbanks. John Henry felt the tension in the air. One little bit of pressure on a trigger, and all hell would break loose.
“Mister, I think there’s been some sort of mistake,” he called to the black-suited leader.
“You made it,” the man said flatly. John Henry was close enough now to see that he had a weathered, deeply tanned face and white hair under the brim of that black Stetson. “We’re not allowing anybody out of that pesthole to spread your filthy contagion. You reckon we haven’t heard over in Oroville that the whole town’s sick?”
So that explained it. This wasn’t the holdup it had appeared to be at first.
It was a quarantine.
A quarantine enforced at gunpoint.
John Henry had brought Buck to a halt. Fifty or sixty feet still separated him from the man in black. He had a hunch that if he came any closer, the other men would start shooting.
“None of us are sick,” John Henry said. “We’re not carrying the disease.”
“How do you know that? You came through Copperhead, didn’t you? You’ve been exposed to it, and you don’t know how long it takes after that before you actually get sick. We don’t aim to take a chance on you spreading the damned fever!”
The only person John Henry had seen in Copperhead who was actually sick was the town marshal, but from the looks of him, the fever was indeed pretty bad. He couldn’t really blame outsiders for wanting to keep it contained to the settlement. But at the same time, he and Prentice needed to get through with their prisoners.
“Listen, I’m a deputy United States marshal,” he said. He edged Buck forward as he reached inside his coat. “I can show you my badge—”
“Hold it!” the man in black yelled. “One more foot and we’ll shoot!”
He pulled the bandanna up over his mouth and nose as his horse moved around skittishly. The animal must have sensed the bloody violence hanging in the air.
John Henry brought Buck to a stop again. Since he already had hold of the leather wallet containing his badge, he brought it out and opened it, holding it up so that the badge was visible, shining in the morning sun.
“You see? I’m a lawman, just like I said. Now let us pass, and that’s an order!”
One of the men on the left cutbank shouted, “You can take your orders and go to hell! I’d rather risk jail than let my family get sick and die!”
Mutters of agreement came from the other men.
John Henry glanced back over his shoulder at Prentice, who was watching the exchange tensely. If his deputy marshal’s badge didn’t sway the blockaders, he doubted if Prentice’s Secret Service credentials would make any difference, either.
What made it worse was that he understood how these men felt. Disease was one of the biggest fears on the frontier, along with other natural disasters like fire, flood, and cyclones . . . all the things that human beings had little or no control over. Probably most of these men had wives and children, and all they wanted to do was protect those loved ones. He didn’t want to try to shoot his way through them, even if he had stood any chance of doing so.
“Mister, what’s your name?” John Henry asked the man in black.
“What does that matter to you?”
“I like to know who I’m talking to, that’s all.”
The man hesitated for a moment, then answered in a voice slightly muffled by the bandanna over his face, “I’m Baird Stanton. I own the Sunburst Mine, over by Oroville.”
“I’m Deputy Marshal John Henry Sixkiller. The man in the buggy back there is Nick Prentice, an agent of the Secret Service from Washington, D.C. We have a couple of federal prisoners, and we need to get them to the nearest jail so we can lock them up. We need to find a telegraph office, too, so we can send wires to our bosses.”
“Let’s say I believe you,” Stanton said. “I’d like to help you, Marshal, I really would, but you’re coming from Copperhead and we can’t let you through. You know good and well why we can’t.”
“How come you don’t have the road blocked on the other side of the settlement?”
“We were going to do that today, but some fellas we sent around there yesterday to check it out came back and said the road’s already blocked. There’s been an avalanche.”
John Henry looked down, smiled wryly, and shook his head slightly. Quarantine by rifle on one side of Copperhead, quarantine by avalanche on the other. The settlement was cut off, all right. Of course, people could probably still get in or out through the rugged mountains surrounding the town, but it wouldn’t be easy.
He lifted his head and said to the mine owner, “I give you my word none of us are sick, Mr. Stanton. We were in the hotel the whole time, and no one there is sick.”
“You can’t guarantee that,” Stanton insisted. “You can’t know where everybody’s been or who they’ve been around.” The man shook his head. “No, sir, it’s just too risky.”
John Henry had been trying to keep his temper reined in, but angry words welled up in his throat at last. He said, “So you’d commit murder? You think that’s what your wives and children would want you to do? You think they want you to become killers?”
“It wouldn’t be murder,” Stanton snapped. “No more so than shooting down a rabid dog. What we’re talking about here is self-defense, nothing more, nothing less.”
“The law won’t see it that way.” John Henry raised his voice a little so that all the men from Oroville could hear. “You kill us and you’ll hang for it. I can promise you that.”
“Nobody will ever know,” Stanton said, his voice as hard as flint. “If we have to shoot you, we’ll leave you where you fall for a few days, then burn the bodies just to make sure there’s no danger.” A shudder went through Stanton as powerful emotions gripped him. “By God, I’d burn the whole town to the ground if I didn’t have to go into that den of contagion to do it!”
John Henry stared at him, struggling to believe what he’d just heard.
“You’d wipe out a whole town full of innocent people? They didn’t do anything to cause themselves to get sick!”
“Doesn’t matter. That fever’s got to be stopped.” Stanton dragged in a deep breath. “But nobody’s going to bother the folks in Copperhead as long as they stay there. And when the sickness finally goes away, then things can get back to normal. You can avoid any trouble, Marshal, by just turning around and riding b
ack to town.” He squared his shoulders. “I’m done talking now. Make your choice.”
In a low voice that only the mine owner could hear, John Henry said, “Your men can’t kill me quick enough to stop me from getting a bullet in you, Stanton. You’ll die, but it won’t be from a fever.”
“I’ll die to protect my town, and don’t you doubt it for a second, Sixkiller.”
John Henry didn’t doubt it. He saw the fires of fanaticism burning in Stanton’s eyes. The man had gotten himself so worked up that he really wasn’t afraid of death, his own or anybody else’s.
There was only one thing John Henry could do.
He lifted Buck’s reins and turned the horse back toward the buggy.
“What are you doing?” Prentice demanded. “They have to let us through!”
“They’re not going to,” John Henry said. “We’ll have to turn back. We can hole up in Copperhead until the fever burns itself out. It might take a week or two, but there’s no reason we can’t figure out a way to lock up these two until it’s safe to leave.”
Prentice looked angry and exasperated, but he must have realized that they couldn’t shoot their way through twenty or thirty determined and well-armed men. Muttering curses under his breath, he started turning the buggy around. He had to maneuver it back and forth a couple of times to get the vehicle pointed back toward Copperhead.
John Henry cast one more look over his shoulder at Baird Stanton. The mine owner still sat there on his horse, a sentinel determined to keep anyone from passing.
“I suppose we head back to the hotel now,” Prentice said. “Maybe there’s a storeroom or something like that where we can lock up these two.”
Penelope said, “You’re going to stick me in a stuffy storeroom with a cot or just a blanket on the floor to sleep on? For a week or more?”
“You should have figured that things might not work out too well before you decided to break the law,” Prentice told her.
She stared at him with narrowed eyes and said, “I’m going to make your life a living hell, lawman.”
Dead Man Walking Page 17
