Silver Moon

by Sigmund Brouwer

  I told all of this to Crawford to interrupt his wheezing thoughts.

  “But I made a round of the saloons today,” I continued, “and found a few of the boys from Bar X Bar. Learned two things. They’d spent most of the night carousing with this Clayton Barnes. And when they left, he stayed behind in a poker game that went through the night.”

  I took my Colt out of my holster.

  Crawford’s nostrils flared as he took a startled breath. I ignored his sudden and unjustified fear as I spun open the chamber and continued to speak.

  “That means Clayton Barnes couldn’t have been in the vault,” I said. “So you have to decide whether that Bar X Bar cowboy found the horse with the saddlebag open or closed.”

  I held the revolver upside down and emptied the five bullets into my hand. Three I dropped into my shirt pocket. The other two I palmed.

  “See Crawford, was I him on my way home from an all-night poker game and I found a full saddlebag of First National money, I’d be real tempted to throw enough into the breeze to make it look like it did blow away, and give you back enough to keep you happy.”

  Crawford did not look happy.

  I found my pocketknife and flicked open the blade. “Of course,” I said as I began to pry at one of the brass cartridges, “if I were you, I wouldn’t speculate much on that possibility.”

  Crawford was staring at my actions with puzzlement. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Even if you found him with a pile of money, unless you got a way to prove those notes belong to you, it’d be a real fight to get them back.”

  “No cowboy earns that kind of money!”

  I pried more with my knife, working slow to keep gunpowder from spilling loose when I finally popped the pepper lead free.

  “He could find a lot of different ways to claim the money came in. Or, if he was real smart and didn’t want a whisper of trouble, he could wait a year, clear out, and spend it out of the territories.”

  Crawford’s glum silence confirmed my suppositions.

  He wheezed a few more minutes and finally, as I nearly finished working the second bullet, he asked me what it was I intended to do next.

  I didn’t answer.

  Instead, I pulled a piece of paper from his wastebasket, tore corners away from the paper, and wadded the corners into small chunks that I pushed into each of the open cartridges. When I was satisfied with my handiwork, I loaded the two cartridges into my Colt, reached over his desk, and handed the revolver butt-first to Crawford.

  “Take this into the vault. Close the door partway. Fire both shots at the floor. Don’t worry about bullets, you’ll be firing blanks.”

  He didn’t try to rise. Just stared confusion at me.

  “I’ll be outside the bank,” I explained. “If I don’t hear those shots, it’ll explain why I could find nobody that heard shooting last night.”

  Out on the street, it was near dark.

  I stood and waited.

  Barely a minute later, I heard the report of two muted shots. Had I not been listening, I might easily have decided a door had been slammed in a building nearby.

  Crawford met me at the entrance to the bank. I accepted my revolver and decided it was not worth the effort to comment on the fact that he had not extended it to me with the barrel pointing in my direction.

  “That seems about it,” I said. “Best as I can tell, it had happened the way it appears. Nichols more than likely forced Calhoun to the vault. Nichols maybe steps outside to pack the money on his horse, and that gives Calhoun a chance to dig a gun out of a safety deposit box. Nichols goes back inside for more money, and they have a shootout, which leaves the horse free to wander until it’s found.”

  Crawford seemed satisfied with that. “Good work, Marshal. I’ll pass on my favorable impression of your diligence to town council.”

  He looked at me as if he expected my tail to wag. It did not. I had nothing else to say, so I left him there, in the doorway of his bank.

  Down the street, I stopped.

  The air had a bite to it, and I turned to feel the freedom of the wind in my face. The stars had brightened against the deepened purple of the sky, and a harvest moon hung low and yellow and clear to show the outlines of the building rooftops.

  I did not need the moon as a reminder of the Sioux medicine bundle carefully stowed in the bedroom of my small, rented house. It was the only physical proof I had of love from the woman now far from me and living among the Sioux north in the territory. I knew her as Rebecca Montcalm; the Sioux called her Morning Star in honor of how her mother had died. She’d given me her most precious possession, this medicine bundle, on our last afternoon together, telling me the Sioux legend about the first medicine bundle and a boy and girl parted, then reunited. The way we’d promised each other we would be.

  Tonight when the moon was high and white would be a good night to ride, to leave the confines of my house, and go out across the plains to listen to the quiet. I knew exactly how it would feel, to be lost in the openness and to see in the night light the dark land as it stretched into the blackness of the far mountains. It would be a good night not to hide from the ache, to smile in mournful agreement with the lonely howls of coyotes, and to wonder in that cleansing infinity of solitude about Morning Star, where she might be, and if I were in her thoughts. Since I could not hold her, I would embrace the sadness that stole into my heart with the thoughts of her, and accept that sadness as her presence. It was very little to have, but much much more of her than I had once dreamed I could possess, and that made it bearable.

  After I get through tonight, I thought, there would be tomorrow, and tomorrow night, and the following day. I knew that and, as always, steeled myself to think only of the moment I was in, not the time that remained until we met again, or what she might become by then.

  As I stepped down from the wooden sidewalk onto the street and resumed my solitary walk, I told myself it was a small consolation that holding the truth from the mayor might help me find a way to pass some of that next stretch of time.

  Chapter 8

  Cornelius Harper’s office did not appear to belong to a doctor.

  Most offices I’d seen on the frontier held a collection of the doctors’ handiwork — organs and amputated body parts supposedly removed from once-ailing human beings and then preserved in alcohol to impress prospective patients. If the doctor could afford the luxury of a waiting room — otherwise the next patient stood outside in the hallway or on the street — its shelves would be lined with those bottled leftover bits and pieces of former patients, pills and chemicals, jars of leeches, and displays of surgical instruments. The more curious and astonishing the contents of the shelves, it was felt, the more credible the physician.

  By the plainness of his office, however, Doc Harper did not feel a need to impress his patients.

  His waiting room barely fit the three cane-backed chairs set against a wall. It contained a potbelly stove and nothing else.

  I knocked on the door to his inner office and received no answer. The door was unlocked, and I looked inside to see if I could find anything that would allow me to leave him a note.

  It was an office as plainly decorated as the waiting room. On the left was a a low, long table. On the far side of the room stood two book shelves, tidy but crammed with volumes and volumes of books — great luxury here in the territories. Alongside those book shelves, a shorter shelf held splints of assorted sizes, bandages, and a few bottles of pills. Atop that shorter shelf was an small instrument I had not seen anywhere before, which appeared to be a narrow, brass urn, its base screw-mounted into the bottleneck of a tripod.

  And on the right side of his office, his desk, a roll top of exquisitely polished walnut, set so that Doc Harper faced toward the window when he was sitting in the chair behind it.

  Except for one sheet of paper and a pen and ink bottle beside it, the surface of that desk was totally without papers or anything else to indicate it might have ever received
use.

  I moved closer. The piece of paper was a note explaining, in neat script, that Doctor Harper had left before dawn to remove a gall bladder at the Thompson’s homestead. It also suggested that anyone who could read that note and needed Doc Harper’s assistance should leave word for him with the pen and ink provided.

  One person had already visited his office. Betty got bad throte and cant hardly breeth nun. Abe.

  I jotted a message of my own beneath the scrawled words. Please stop by marshal’s office when best for you. Sam Keaton.

  Then I sat in the waiting room, on the chance that Doc Harper might return in the next half hour. I had already taken a good breakfast, had nothing urgent of my own to do, and was in no hurry to return to the unwelcome guest preacher who was making my own office a prison for me.

  I could also think clearly in this welcome solitude.

  While I knew why I had chosen to mislead Mayor Crawford in delivering my opinion on how Nichols and Calhoun had shot each other, I did not know why I could not believe in the conclusion I had offered for Crawford’s benefit.

  Keeping my true thoughts from Crawford made sense simply because I felt he was involved in some way. Crawford seemed less than sharp for someone in his position of power. Or was it that he was so smart, he did a good job of playing stupid? And if that was the case, did he have a reason for playing stupid?

  Furthermore, ten thousand dollars of his was missing. Why — especially in light of the fuss he had made trying to recover a few hundred from Old Charlie — wasn’t Crawford visibly upset over how much still remained unfound? And why hadn’t Crawford been the one —not me — to immediately point out how easily Clayton Barnes could have kept a portion of the bank notes?

  Unfortunately, it appeared Crawford had a good alibi for his whereabouts during the night, and I didn’t know if, despite my gut feelings, I could find anything to tie him into the murders.

  As to my reluctance to accept the double deaths as the simple shootout I had described to Crawford, it bothered me that I could find no reason for the doubts that tugged at my mind every time I recalled the dead bodies. Unless something turned up soon — I had felt I had done most of the important backtrailing yesterday — my public conclusion would have to stand.

  Leaving the conclusion there, of course, would make it easier for me to continue quietly searching for the tracks of a third person in that vault — tracks that I was convinced existed, even with no good reason to back that conviction.

  I poked at the same thoughts again and again as I waited for Doc Harper to return, telling myself that he had good reason for calling it murder, telling myself he had something which could start me looking in the right direction.

  When I began to feel a headache from all my useless speculation, I borrowed a book from Doc Harper’s inner office. After a half hour of reading, he still hadn’t returned. I returned the book to its place, and forced myself to return to my own office farther down the street.

  ***************************

  “Lawman, that Injun squaw — did she look as good as folks say?”

  I was glad that I stood at my office window watching the street for the Chinaman with lunch or Doc Harper with answers. Had I been facing Brother Lewis as he taunted me with that question, he surely would have caught the reaction that sent a tremor through me.

  “Lawman,” he said. “You heard me. Tell me about that squaw of your’n.”

  I took a deep breath, and found the strength to turn toward the jail cell at the back of my office. If I continued to ignore him, Brother Lewis would know he’d managed to pull a scab loose from a painful wound— how badly I missed my Evening Star, Rebecca.

  He leered at me as I gave him a level gaze. “Small town, lawman. First thing I heard about you was your Injun-loving ways. How you helped save a couple of Sioux necks before moving here. How one of those necks was real pretty.”

  “I ain’t allowed you visitors, so you must have done your asking early,” I said. My voice came out even and slow, remarkable considering how much I raged inside. “Most preachers have little cause to inquire as such. Where’d you find the need to acquire that habit? You on the run from the law?”

  That shut him up but only for a moment. When he resumed, he exaggerated the backwood rhythms in his words, as if it were easier to grind me down away from the loftiness of the educated tones he had used in the revival tent.

  “Some folks wonder, lawman. More and more noise is reaching us about Redskins on the warpath. Whose side you on, I heard them ask. Like you’re soft on Injuns. And on Chinamen, too, the way you spend your time in his eatery. You don’t like regular folk? Or they don’t like you?”

  I sat in my chair, leaned back, and set my feet on my desk, easy and relaxed as if I were about to enjoy a nap. What I wanted to do was borrow a patch of Old Charlie’s smelly longjohns so I could roll it into a ball and stuff it in Brother Lewis’s mouth.

  I pulled my Colt loose from my holster.

  “Aiming to shoot me, lawman? Figure that’ll shut me up? Let me loose, boy, send me on my way out of town, and I won’t be able to cause you more grief.”

  I took a small bottle of gun oil from the left hand drawer of my desk. I found a piece of cloth from the other drawer. Without hurrying, I opened the cylinder and began to clean the revolver.

  Where was the Chinaman with the lunch I’d ordered for the prisoner?

  “Anyway, lawman, you can’t rightly jail a man for dropping rattlesnakes. That’s what is was, you know. I feared what that crazed pillroller might do, and I plum dropped those snakes in my panic. Judge’ll see it that way, too, and he’ll set me loose.”

  Once I got Brother Lewis his lunch, I could in good conscience lock the office behind me again and leave him alone for the afternoon. I would not worry about him making an escape. A few months earlier, my own time behind those same bars had shown me the futility of that attempt. The only way he’d get out was if he had help and dynamite, and the dynamite it would take to bust him loose would kill him in the process.

  Another marshal might have set him loose already, but the more this man riled me, the more I was determined to make him stand trial. It bothered me, too, thinking about him setting up tent in another town and preying on folks so hurt in spirit they’d reach into a basket of snakes for a momentary illusion of glory.

  “She going to come visit Laramie, lawman? The Injun squaw. Or you ashamed of her? She’s fine and warm out of sight of respectable folks, but just an old blanket when you get back to civilization. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  I smiled lazily from the chair. But my stomach muscles were clenched with rage, and it seemed my vision was clouded over with blood.

  Fortunately for the preacher, the door banged open.

  Unfortunately for me, it was not the Chinaman.

  “Suzanne,” I said. Suzanne from the Red Rose, a singer and dancer.

  “Marshal Keaton.” Her voice was breathless. Not the husky breathlessness she used on cowboys in the Red Rose saloon when sweet-talking them into buying a whiskey. But the breathlessness of someone who has just finished running.

  I stood.

  “Here’s a white woman you should show some interest in, lawman,” Brother Lewis called. “She know about your squaw?”

  During my stay in the jail cell a few months earlier, Suzanne and I had established something more than an aquaintance, with little said and much understood. The result had been friendship, not what Brother Lewis insinuated in his voice.

  “Suzanne, got a moment to spare?” I asked. She nodded from where she waited in the doorway. Although she was a slim woman, the skirt hoops of her satiny blue dress made it appear as if the doorway blocked further entrance. Sunlight behind her bounced off her piled blond hair, and put her face into shadow.

  “Thank you kindly,” I told her.

  I loaded six bullets into the Colt, slid the cylinder shut and held it chest high as I walked the few paces back to the jail cell.

  �
�Put a hand through the bars,” I told Brother Lewis.

  He did not.

  I pointed the barrel at his belly. He understood my face correctly, and placed his hand on my side of the cell before I took the next step of cocking the hammer.

  “Good,” I said. I took his pinky finger and smiled mildly as I began to twist. “You can say all you want to me, but while I’m marshal in this town, I expect you to show manners around womenfolk.”

  He was on his tiptoes now.

  “Understand?”

  I took his grunt of pain as an answer and let go. Before I had reached the door to grab my hat, I already felt stupid for my childishness. He had just won a small battle by getting to me, and probably knew it.

  “Suzanne?” I said.

  “Come to the saloon, quick.”

  “Trouble?”

  “Old Charlie.”

  “He hurt?” I could not imagine Charlie being the source of someone else’s trouble, unless they were particularly sensitive to his need for greens.

  “Probably soon,” she said. “He called out four men in the Red Rose. Tie-down men.Then lit for his shack to fetch a shotgun. And Charlie’s so whiskeyed up, they’ll gun him down before he figures which end of the shotgun first gets into the saloon.”

  Chapter 9

  Tie-down men.

  Before stepping into the Red Rose, I paused to look over the saddle-wing doors and saw the four gunslingers seated at the saloon bar with their backs to me.

  It was a small saloon — five running steps could take me to them — and even in the dim, smoky interior, I saw enough. Three of the four wore Confederate gray-old uniforms. Those three carried their guns in holsters tied against their right leg. The other had his tied against the left. I made a mental note of that, even though I didn’t expect the knowledge to help much if it came down to a fight. For this was no front cover of a Ned Buntline dime novel; I’d never win a shootout against four men.