The Messenger

by Bill Brooks

  “We just need two,” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “How about the use of some saddles, then. We’ll saddle the two I got hitched to the wagon.”

  He turned and called to the man on the roof.

  “Jake, you want to lend this man your saddle?”

  “Hell no!” Jake shouted. I couldn’t be sure if he was smiling or not.

  “Frank, you want to lend these fellows your saddle?”

  “Not on my worst day!” Frank called from the corral.

  The old man shrugged.

  “Whisht I could help you out, but thems the only two who own a saddle ’round here. I quit horseback riding when I turned seventy.”

  Then he gnawed the meat of his chicken leg down to the bone and gnawed the bone and then sucked on it before tossing it aside.

  “I got a nice extra room you can stay in, miss,” he said. He was practically slobbering on himself, looking at her.

  “You’d have to shoot me first,” she said without pleasure. Then she looked at me, too, as though the statement was made for both of us and not just that old lecher. “Where’s the nearest town from here?” I asked.

  He looked off and pointed toward a flat valley.

  “Beyond there,” he said. “Two Cents.”

  “That’s the name of the town . . . Two Cents?”

  “I know it,” he said. “But that’s about all it’s worth and that’s what ever’body calls it. Two Cents.”

  “How far?” I said.

  “Twenty miles or so.”

  “How do we get there?”

  “Up the same road you was on about two miles, then turn off it and follow that other ’un the rest of the way.”

  “Let’s go,” I said to the Pinkerton and the woman.

  She didn’t even bother to say thank you. I guess I couldn’t blame her.

  “When we get there,” I said as I started off toward the road again, “you’re staying there, no more arguments.”

  She gave me one of those assassin stares.

  Chapter Ten

  We found the Deadwood stage where the road toward Two Cents came in from the west. We found bodies, too. The stage doors were wide open, the horses gone, and the dead had each been shot in the back of the head. One of them was missing an arm that had been crudely bandaged, the bandages crusted with blood.

  “What do you figure happened here?” the Pinkerton said as we cautiously climbed down.

  There were three of them. Men still wearing pistol belts but their pistols were gone.

  “My guess is they’re part of your man’s gang,” I said.

  Dew Hardy went over and more closely examined each of them, worked his hands through their pockets.

  “That part of your job?” I said. “Robbing the dead?”

  “It’s called investigation,” he said.

  “So you say,” I said.

  A wheel of buzzards, their dark bodies turning against the sky, had already sniffed out the tragedy and were waiting for a feast. Dew Hardy saw them, too.

  “The Lord does provide,” he said with an ugly smile before continuing to search the men.

  The woman sat silently in the back of the wagon, staring at them, then she climbed down and came over to look as Dew Hardy turned them onto their backs to have a go through their front pockets.

  “That one was one of them,” she said, then spat on his dead face.

  “Enough,” I said, and stepped between her and the bodies.

  “He hurt me,” she said. “And so did these others.”

  She was mad as hell and in a way I couldn’t blame her.

  I walked the trail back and forth and saw three sets of horse tracks leading off down the road to Two Cents. I saw some other tracks leading down into the nearby arroyo, figured they were part of the team cut loose from the stage and set free. Odd that a man would kill his companions but set horses free. But then nothing made any real sense to me anymore.

  “They went this way,” I said, pointing up the road.

  Dew Hardy had taken from the dead men a total of one pocket watch, two clasp knives, an Indian head penny, and a deck of dog-eared playing cards.

  “They didn’t leave this world with much more than what they had when they came into it,” he said.

  “You don’t call that robbing?” I said.

  “Somebody would have searched them and taken what they had,” he said.

  “Leave it,” I said.

  He looked at the paltry bounty, then at me, then at it again.

  “Hell,” he said, and tossed the few items down.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “We could be riding straight into a trap,” he said. “There must be a reason for them to go this way.”

  “Or maybe they’re just trying to get the hell gone and this was the way to go,” I said.

  “Davy’s a real sly buck,” he said.

  “I reckon he thinks we’re dead,” I said.

  “Maybe so.”

  “Let’s go,” I said again.

  We headed off to Two Cents. It took half a day to get there, but when we topped a rise, we saw the collection of buildings down below that looked enough to be a town but not much of one.

  We paused long enough to study on it, then I drove the team down to it.

  Two Cents was just a crossroads mostly with a road running north and south and one running east and west—both meandering and cut like a brown scar on the earth. A river of no important size rippled along the east-west road and disappeared in both distances and maybe that’s what started the town—its ready supply of water—or it might have been the mines I saw on the hills above the town with their piles of tailings sloping down the hillsides.

  We rode in and I figured we best eat something since we hadn’t for some time. I was starved and I figured the woman was, too.

  I stopped the wagon across the street from a building simply marked RESTAURANT and we went in and found a table near one wall and sat. Over our heads was a large cardboard print of a sprawling battle between Indians and soldiers that read:

  Custer’s Last Fight

  ANHEUSER-BUSCH BUDWEISER

  The boy wonder stood in the middle with his sword raised, fighting off the swarming horde of Sioux. Trouble was none of those boys ever took swords with them into the fight the way I heard it. Still, it made for a dramatic scene, one that would stir the blood of young men anxious to go and kill off the last red man that ever was.

  “I bet he made a pretty corpse,” Dew Hardy said, looking up at it.

  We ate our meal without humor. Nobody wanted to think more about corpses. Seemed to me the earth had soaked up as much blood as it could hold.

  After we finished, Dew Hardy said: “Where do you propose we begin looking for Davy and Belle?”

  “You’re the detective,” I said, “skilled in such matters. Where do you propose we begin?”

  “I say we go and check in with the local law if there is any and ask him.”

  “Sounds like a capital idea,” I said. “But I want to get her settled into a room.”

  The woman looked at me.

  “Why don’t I settle her into a room and you go ask the law?” Dew Hardy said.

  “You always so damn’ disagreeable about everything?” I said.

  “Mostly, yes,” he said.

  We paid our bill and walked outside. I could see the eyes of men watching us from under their hat brims, and even the few women that were out and about, walking the plank boardwalks, gave us stares. We were strangers and it wasn’t unusual to keep an eye on strangers and, I reckon, we were an odd-looking trio, me, Dew Hardy, and the woman—all three of us muddy and looking run over as we were.

  I saw a hotel sign up the street.

  “I’ll meet you out front of that hotel in twenty minutes,” I said to Dew Hardy.

  “Fine,” he said, and stalked off.

  Sara got her carpetbag from the back of the wagon, and I walked her over to the hotel.
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br />   A skinny fellow stood behind the desk and his hands shook almost as much as mine were beginning to without having had a drink for however long it had been. He had a high, thin, nervous voice: “Can I help you two?”

  “I’d like a room for the lady?”

  He sort of laughed and his laughter sounded sort of like a strange bird—one of those sandhill cranes from a long distance.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, and asked her to sign the register, and then said: “For how long . . . just the afternoon?” Then he looked at me like I knew something only the two of us knew and we weren’t about to tell anybody.

  “For two weeks,” I said. Then I looked at Sara. “Do you think two weeks will be enough for you to find some work and get settled in?”

  “How the hell should I know,” she said.

  “Well, nothing like a show of gratitude to make a fellow feel good,” I said.

  “Ten dollars and that’s with the long-term discount,” the fellow said. Come to think of it, the more I looked at him the more he looked like a sandhill crane.

  I paid him out of the advance that Burt had given me.

  “You want a room overlooking the street or somewhere in the back?” he asked Sara.

  “Overlooking the street,” she said.

  He reached in a cubbyhole and took out a key and said: “Room Ten, up the stairs and second door on your right.”

  I carried her bag up for her. It wasn’t a fancy hotel, but it wasn’t a pigsty, either. It had carpet on the stairs, although worn and stained with mud and tobacco juice. The stairs squeaked when we climbed them.

  She unlocked the door and we went in and the room was full of light from a floor-to-ceiling window. She went to it and looked down. I put the carpetbag on the bed.

  “You all set?” I said.

  “I’ve got a few dollars I saved up . . . my sugar money,” she said.

  “Sugar money?”

  “I always thought someday I’d buy myself passage somewhere . . . to a sugarland of a place and find true happiness,” she said. “So I saved up every cent I could.” She patted one of the pockets of her trousers.

  “Well, I’d hardly say that Two Cents looks like a sugarland, but it has to beat hell out of that station.”

  She looked at me oddly then and came and stood close to me.

  “You can stay if you like,” she said.

  “I’ve got to find those two killers,” I said.

  “You look wore out,” she said.

  “I am.”

  “Then stay, at least tonight. And if you decide to leave tomorrow, then let it be tomorrow.”

  “I thought maybe by now you’d had enough of men,” I said.

  She stared hard into my eyes.

  “Certain kind of men, yes,” she said. “But I’ve not known many men with a kindness about them like you.”

  “Nothing kind about me,” I said. “I’m just a man looking to drink himself into a grave and kill a few people before I do it. You call that kind?”

  She put her hand on my arm.

  “You wouldn’t be killing nobody without reason,” she said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I just know. I got a good sense about people.”

  “I’d trade you for a bottle right now,” I said.

  “No. You wouldn’t,” she said.

  “I might.”

  She kissed me suddenly and I had almost known she would do it, but I didn’t kiss her back because I knew how easily I could give myself to her and I knew that, if I did, it wouldn’t be the right thing for either of us.

  When she finished and drew back, she said: “Is it because of what those men did to me?”

  “Don’t be crazy,” I said. “It ain’t got nothing to do with you.”

  “Then what?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  She turned and walked to the window again, the light glowing around her in a strange sort of way.

  “I’ll be here if you change your mind,” she said. “Thank you for helping me.”

  I turned and walked out and back down the stairs, and, as I passed the front desk, the crane said to me: “My that was quick.”

  I stopped and looked at him.

  “Anything happens to that woman,” I said, “I’ll take it real personal.”

  His gaze dropped to the shotgun.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, or maybe it was a birdcall, I couldn’t rightly tell.

  I waited out front of the hotel. I made myself a shuck but spilled half the tobacco doing it. I needed a drink badly. I thought I’d smoke and wait for Dew Hardy until I couldn’t wait any longer. It didn’t take long.

  Just about every other door along the street was a saloon, and I went into the first one I came to and walked down to the far end of the bar. Eyes watched me. The place was long and narrow and the air was smoky from men’s cigars. Voices that were talking to each other momentarily paused in order for them to study me.

  I took up residence and set the shotgun atop the wood. The old man tending bar had a hairless skull but a mustache like bicycle handles. He walked down and I ordered whiskey. “Make it quick,” I told him, and he poured, then stood and watched as I tossed it back. Then he said: “You want another?”

  “Of course,” I said, and he poured another.

  “You got it bad, don’t you?” he said.

  I stared at him.

  “I ain’t judging you, mister,” he said. “I’ve been there myself and know what it’s like. Have another.” He poured. “This one is on the house.”

  I nodded and with the third one tossed back my nerves started to settle some. Those along the bar had stopped watching and had gone back to their intimate conversations about the weather, the mines, women, horses.

  I stood apart from them, and they from me, and that was the way I preferred it. I didn’t trust anyone, not even a woman who was willing to give herself to me because that’s how I had grown since it’d happened. . . .

  The barkeep left the bottle as he tended to business farther down the bar, and I poured myself another, and this time just stared into it, seeing some of my own reflection.

  You’re a damned boozer, I told myself. You’ve crawled into the bottle and into the bottle is where you’ll die.

  I lifted the glass to my lips and drank.

  Chapter Eleven

  I walked back to the hotel and waited. Again I rolled myself a shuck but my hands didn’t spill as much tobacco. Passers-by still looked at me oddly, at the shotgun leaning against the wall by my right leg. I didn’t much care.

  Finally Dew Hardy came swinging up the street.

  “You find the law?” I said.

  He snorted. “Not exactly but I did find somebody told me the marshal was away fishing. You think it might have something to do with Gypsy and Belle being around . . . that the only law this dog-shit town has is away fishing?”

  “Sounds suspicious,” I said. “What do you think our next move should be, detective?”

  He looked at me, then at the entry to the hotel.

  “You get her settled in nice and proper?” It wasn’t a question born out of concern as much as it was suspicion.

  “She’s settled,” I said.

  “Be best if we split up and went separate ways looking for them,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t be because you’d like to get that gold for yourself, would it?”

  “Hell, no denying I would.”

  “Well, at least you’re honest about it. But I’m not going to let you take that gold,” I said.

  “So’s you can keep it for yourself? You and her maybe?” he said, looking at the hotel door again.

  “Because I aim to take it back to Deadwood and give it to those who own it.”

  He looked at me like I’d just stepped on his toes.

  “Shit, I’m like old Diogenes,” he said. “Still looking for one honest man.”

  “Why am I not surprised you’ve read the classics?” I said.

 
; “Why ain’t I surprised you even know about the classics?” he said.

  “OK,” I said. “We’ll split up and meet back here in a few hours.”

  “I might not learn anything till the night comes and men’s tongues get loose with liquor?” he said.

  “Then tomorrow morning first thing,” I said.

  “Sounds like an ace plan.”

  He went his way, I went mine.

  The first place I checked was the livery.

  A man in a shiny bowler and dress shoes sat out front on a wood bench with a pitchfork in one hand, looking defeated. His dress shoes were mucked up. I could hear horses snuffling in the shadows.

  “Help you?” he said.

  “I’d like to look over your horseflesh,” I said.

  “You a buyer?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  “Well now,” he said.

  He stood with a hopeful look in his round little face and offered me his hand to shake and I shook it. It was small and soft and damp.

  “You mind if I wander through your barn and take a look at what you have?”

  “Be my guest. Where’d you say you were from?”

  “Cheyenne,” I said. Another lie.

  “Cheyenne, eh?”

  I entered the barn and it smelled of hay and horse. A blade of light ran down the center from the front to the back door. I checked each stall for a branded horse—one that would have the mark of the stage line. I found it on a blaze-faced sorrel.

  I turned to the little fellow who trailed me, hopeful.

  “This one,” I said.

  “Yes, sir, fine horse, real fine horse.”

  “How’d you come by him?”

  The little fellow shrugged. “Honestly I can assure you about him.”

  “I’d like to see the papers on him.”

  The little fellow looked nervous.

  “Well, they sort of got lost.”

  I shifted my shotgun from cradling it to one hand.

  “This one is stolen,” I said.

  “Oh, no, sir.”

  “He’s got a brand on his flank. He came off a robbed stage.”

  He stammered and shuffled his feet.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he said. “I wasn’t here when the horse came in.”

  “Who was here when he came in?”