The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

I was moving away fast, then I stumbled into the creek, and the water was icy cold so that it felt like it burned. I gasped when I fell and nearly lost my grip on the 10-gauge, but rose again, and scrambled out the other side, breaking open the shotgun as I went, picking out the spent shells and replacing them with extras from my pockets.

  I looked back again, couldn’t see anyone against the skyline, no flashes of muzzle or sounds of gunshots. I think shooting Bob’s arm off was just enough to make them think about coming after me in the dark. I know it would have me.

  I moved toward the shape and shadow of the lone cabin, remembering what Burt had told me about the woman living there. It lay fifty yards or so directly across from the main house.

  I came up silently on the back wall. It was crudely built, just curled unpainted boards chinked between. I remembered seeing a single window when we came down off the grade in the fading light. I moved around toward it, tried to look in, but the room was dark.

  I heard something scratching, then a low moaning sound.

  Across the creek I could see the lights from inside cast outward, see the outline of the coach, see the shadows of men, hear their voices.

  “Where’s the damn’ key to unlock that strongbox?”

  “Hell if I know,” Burt’s raspy voice said.

  Then there was a bone-crunching sound followed by an utterance of someone in pain.

  “I’m going to ask you again, but only one last time. Where’s the damn’ key?”

  I heard Burt curse. “Screw you!” he said.

  Then a gunshot and in that momentary flash I saw what had to be Burt collapse.

  “Maybe you know now, you son-of-a-bitch,” the voice said.

  I slipped inside the cabin. Not surprisingly the door had no lock or bolt. I heard a sharp intake of breath, then the words: “Please don’t hurt me no more please.” A woman’s voice.

  “Hush,” I said, crossing the space between me and her.

  “Please.”

  I reached out blindly and felt bare skin, felt her jerk back from my touch.

  “I’m not here to do you any harm,” I said in a low voice. “I need you to be quiet.”

  “They hurt me bad,” she said.

  “They’ll not hurt you again,” I said. “You got some clothes to put on?”

  I felt her twist away and reach for something.

  “Easy,” I said.

  “My shirt,” she said.

  I went back over and cracked the door wide enough to see across the creek. Heard the voices of frustrated men.

  “What we goin’ to do, Davy?”

  “Get up in that driver’s seat and let’s get the hell going. Shoot these other sons-a-bitches.”

  Then there was a short silence before the gunfire crackled again, then more silence. I heard the crash of glass, then saw flames lifting up inside the house. They’d set it afire. The fire caught and spread quickly, probably because the house was old and the lumber dry, and the flames soon enough were licking at the black spaces around the house and throwing light into the yard. I saw men lying on the ground and knew one of them was my old friend.

  Then the stage and the saddled horses with their riders rode out, leaving just the fire, the dead, me, and the woman.

  “Wait here,” I said to the woman.

  She was still sobbing, a muted wounded sound.

  I crossed over the footbridge, my clothes still wet and cold from falling into the creek earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention to any of that. When you’re in a fighting mode, you don’t pay much attention to anything other than what you aim to fight.

  I found Burt first and he was dead, and it pained me that he was.

  I crossed the ground to the other three men. The Chinaman was also dead and so was the rancher with the peaked hat, both lying on their sides like they were sleeping and I guess they were—that eternal sleep we’ll all take one day or another.

  The last man I thought was dead, too, but, when I touched him, he groaned and sat up suddenly and said: “Jesus, I’ve been killed.” He looked at me, then fell back. He was the one I’d taken for a gunfighter back at the ticket station.

  I felt blood on the front of his shirt and he groaned, and I helped sit him up again.

  “Can you stand?” I said.

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  “Can you try?”

  “I reckon.”

  I helped him to his feet, and he stood, wobbling like a newborn colt.

  The timber in the house cracked sharply, then the roof fell in, and minutes later the walls collapsed.

  The woman had come from the cabin, dressed now in denims and a man’s shirt and coat, her hair tied off with a length of ribbon. She was staring at the flames.

  “Walsh,” she said. Like it was the name of something. Only I knew it was the name of the stationmaster.

  She pointed at the fire just as it started eating itself because it had nothing else to eat.

  “Zelda,” she said, her mouth agape.

  I figured they were both inside but probably dead before the fire was set because I hadn’t heard any screaming.

  “Can you get some water and something to bind this man’s wound?” I said. She looked at the shot man, and then went to the cabin and returned in minutes with both. She had him sit on the ground as she cleaned his wound.

  “There’s something in him,” she said.

  “Yeah, I figure it to be a bullet,” he said.

  “No, right here under the skin.”

  I went over and knelt, and sure enough the bullet was just under the skin, and I couldn’t figure why it would be. Then he pulled back the lapel of his coat and I saw a dented badge and the light of the flames ran over it and exposed the words: The Pinkerton Detective Agency.

  He fingered the badge. “For once this here did me some good,” he said.

  “I’m going to pluck that bullet out of you if you can stand it,” I said. Then I asked the woman if she had some sort of knife, and she went to the cabin again and came back with a butcher knife, and the man looked at it and said: “That’s a lot of knife.”

  I used the tip to pluck the lead slug out, and it was bloody and warm still.

  “You might want to keep it for a good luck charm,” I said.

  He flung it away.

  “I guess having a shotgun messenger didn’t do much good this run,” he said sourly.

  “I guess having a Pinkerton detective on board with the very man who shot you didn’t do much good, either,” I said.

  The woman bound his wound as best she could, and we helped him to his feet again.

  “Name’s Dew Hardy,” he said. “Pleased to make everyone’s acquaintance.” But there was no warmth behind the words.

  The woman stood silently. The flames kept growing smaller. I knew I couldn’t track them in the dark, and I knew I wanted to bury my friend. I knew I’d find them sooner or later and that I wouldn’t stop looking until I did find them.

  And I knew when I found them, I’d kill them.

  Chapter Eight

  By dawn I’d completed the back-breaking work of digging one large grave. I hated like hell to bury Burt that way, but I had no choice. The Pinkerton couldn’t dig, and, although the woman tried, she couldn’t get the spade through the cold rocky ground. I dug and took breaks and made myself a shuck and smoked, and then dug some more and kept at it.

  At one point the woman asked if I’d make her a smoke and I did, and we sat and smoked together while the Pinkerton slept nearby.

  “I don’t know why they didn’t kill me, too,” she said.

  “I don’t know why, either,” I said.

  We sat and watched the flames go to embers.

  “Walsh and Zelda was in that house,” she said.

  “I kind of figured they were,” I said.

  “I heard her screaming just before they came for me,” she said.

  I didn’t want to talk about what they might have done and I don’t think she did, either.
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  “I watched them beating Walsh in the yard while some of them were inside with Zelda,” she said. “I tried to hide, but they found me and . . .”

  “I was told there was a black man working here?”

  “George,” she said. “He run off.”

  She pointed toward the east.

  “I wish he’d taken me with him,” she said.

  She sat with her knees pulled up, one arm wrapped around them as she smoked as though she was still trying to protect herself.

  “I’m sorry for whatever they did to you,” I said.

  “Why should you be? You don’t know me or nothing.”

  “I don’t need to know somebody to feel sorry for them.”

  She looked at me strangely.

  “I never have known anything but cruel men,” she said.

  “Maybe that will change,” I said.

  We smoked, then I went back to digging the grave.

  Dawn broke—a seam of yellow light rimmed along the horizon. Then a bright orange sun lifted up and burned away the haze.

  The Pinkerton roused from his sleep just as I was putting the bodies of Burt and the others into the big grave.

  “I got to go off to that privy,” he said.

  “You don’t need my permission,” I said.

  “I wasn’t asking for it,” he said.

  The woman had gone back to the cabin for rest and was still there.

  When the Pinkerton returned, he was carrying something in his right hand.

  “Look what I found,” he said. It was part of an arm with the hand—the one I’d shot off Bob.

  “Get rid of it before the woman comes back,” I said.

  He tossed it into the smoldering ashes of the house, then said: “I saw a skull. There’s body parts all over.”

  “Don’t say anything about it to the woman,” I said.

  He sucked at his teeth, then looked down into the top of his shirt at the wound.

  “It don’t feel half bad,” he said. “I never was shot before. I thought it would feel worse.”

  “Be glad it doesn’t,” I said, and put the last of the bodies—Burt’s—into the grave next to the others, and started filling it in. The Pinkerton watched.

  Then the woman came from the cabin; this time she wore a big felt hat and was carrying a carpetbag in her hand.

  “I’m set to go,” she said.

  “Where?” I said.

  “With you.”

  “Not with me,” I said.

  She looked to the Pinkerton. He shrugged, said: “Don’t ask me nothing, lady.”

  “You’re a son-of-a-bitch if you leave me here,” she said to me. “You’re no different than any of them who raped me. You might as well put a bullet in me.”

  I was exhausted from digging the grave, no sleep, anger, frustration. I didn’t need a woman reminding me I wasn’t the perfect man. I saw in her eyes the same thing I’d seen in my wife’s the day I left the cabin to go find the bear. It pained me to see that look again.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll carry you to the nearest settlement.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  I went to the horse shed and found an old spring wagon under the lean-to at the end, then roped two of the horses, and hitched them to the wagon. I helped the woman into the back along with her carpetbag. I supposed her only possessions were in that bag.

  The Pinkerton climbed onto the seat next to me, and I took the reins after I rested the shotgun down under the seat and headed out toward the road and the direction the stage had gone.

  “You know where the next station is?” I asked the woman over my shoulder.

  “I don’t know where nothing is,” she said. “Walsh never took me nowhere but to my cabin.”

  “You ever hear of a town near here?”

  “No,” she said.

  I looked at the Pinkerton. He’d seemed deep in thought.

  “What about you?” I said. “You know this land?”

  “Not much,” he said.

  “You ever track?”

  “I can cut sign,” he said.

  “Good. Keep an eye out for that coach’s wheels in case it turns off this road.

  The sun was lifted, burning brightly over the pale green sage and chaparral, and the air was clean and cool but warming fast. And the mountains in the distance shimmered with fresh snow that had fallen up there overnight.

  To look at it you could fall in love with that country. But it was a mean hard place for the unwary, and even for the wary it could be a mean hard place. I thought about the burned house and the skulls and the part arm and all the rest of what had happened in the last few hours, and it made me weary to think about it, and it made me want a drink worse than I ever wanted one.

  “That fellow we’re chasing,” Dew Hardy said of a sudden.

  “What about him?”

  “I know who he is now.”

  “You want to share that information with me?”

  He sort of half smiled but it wasn’t from pleasure that he was smiling.

  “Gypsy Davy,” he said.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Well, I sure enough have. I’ve been dogging him for half a year now. That’s why I’m in these parts . . . to find Gypsy Davy.”

  “It maybe would have been easier if you’d arrested him before he shot you,” I said.

  “I didn’t recognize him. He dyed his hair yellow and grew that fancy Dan mustache and acted like a fairy. The Gypsy I heard of was always rough-and-tumble and wore a leather vest and leather britches and so forth. I never figured him to be a fancy Dan type.”

  “Don’t they train you detectives?” I said.

  “They do some, but rely most heavily on our innate skills.”

  “Innate?” I said.

  “Why, yes.”

  “Maybe you ought to brush up on those innate skills then.”

  “And that woman,” he said. “That had to have been Belle Moon, known associate of Davy’s most recent. She used to run a whore house in Creede, but I guess she’s done gone to outlawing.”

  “I guess she has,” I said. “Probably pays better and is less stressing on the flesh.”

  “Only if a body don’t get shot doing their outlawing,” he said.

  “You’d be the expert on getting shot,” I said.

  “I reckon,” he said.

  “You two jabber like magpies,” the woman said.

  “Just what I need,” I said. “Criticism.”

  We rode on. To what our destination was, I couldn’t say, nor did I choose to guess. But whatever it turned out to be, I figured it would be short, violent, and bloody.

  Chapter Nine

  We followed the road for the next three hours until we came to another station set far back from the road. It wasn’t dissimilar to the previous one except it wasn’t burned to the ground and there weren’t any dead bodies lying around.

  I drove the team up to the main house.

  There was a man in the corral, checking a horse’s hoof, and another stood on the roof of the house with a hammer in his hand and a mouthful of nails.

  A third man emerged from inside with a bandanna tucked into the top of his shirt and what looked like a half-eaten chicken leg in his hand. He had grease around his mouth and wore baggy, wrinkled trousers. His thick, rough shoes curled up at the toes and his ears stuck out like a baby elephant’s.

  “How-do,” he said, and I returned the greeting. He looked at me first, then the Pinkerton, and then the woman. Especially at the woman. So, too, did the man standing on the roof, staring down at us, and the man in the corral who let the horse’s hoof back down and straightened again. He might have been part Indian or Mexican judging by the color of his darker skin.

  “Climb on down and stretch your legs,” the man with the chicken leg said. The meat where he’d gnawed into it was pale and pink.

  We climbed down, and I asked the man, could we water the horses, and he said—“Yes, help yourself.”—and p
ointed with the drumstick toward a water tank near the corral, and I led the team over and let them drink.

  The man followed us over but his interest was all about the woman.

  “The Deadwood to Cheyenne stage come through here recent?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Way off schedule,” he said.

  “You notice anything unusual?” I said.

  “Different driver than usual,” he said. “Usually it’s Burt Bee whipping the horses.”

  “Burt Bee’s dead,” I said. “Killed last night at the Broke Creek station.”

  The man bit off another piece of his chicken, chewed it slowly, still looking at the woman. “No shit?” he said.

  “Killed Burt and the stationmaster, his wife, the Mexican boy, and some of the passengers. Made off with the strongbox.”

  The man scratched his chin whiskers, rubbed the grease from his mouth with his fingertips, and looked at them.

  “That’s hard news.”

  “You got somebody here can ride to Deadwood and let them know?”

  He turned and looked at the man in the corral.

  “Reckon I could send Frank.”

  “Then please do,” I said.

  “What about you-all?” he said.

  “I’d like to leave the woman here until somebody can come for her. Me and this man are in pursuit of those on that stage.”

  He swallowed hard like a piece of that chicken was stuck in his throat and his eyes grew moist with the desire for her.

  “That’d be peaches,” he said. Then to the woman: “You was Walsh’s woman, wasn’t you?”

  She gave him a hard glare. The man on the roof hadn’t moved.

  “I wasn’t nobody’s woman,” she said.

  The old man held up the hand with the chicken leg.

  “My apologies, I thought you was.”

  Then to me she said: “I’m not staying with this old coot and them others.”

  “I don’t reckon you have any choice,” I said.

  “Why is me coming with you a bother?”

  “You’ll just slow us down.”

  “Slow you down? You think me riding in that damned wagon is somehow going to slow you down?”

  “I aim to ask this man to lend us some saddle horses,” I said, and turned to the man to ask him just that.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I got none I can lend you. These horses is all company horses for the stages.”