Deadlands--Thunder Moon Rising

by Jeffrey Mariotte

  Sadie closed the door and stood just inside. After a moment, the girl appeared at the opposite doorway. First it was just her fingers, gripping the jamb. Then she showed the top of her head, and her eyes, wide and questioning.

  “It’s all right,” Sadie said. She spoke as she might to a frightened infant. “You can come out. Please.”

  The girl revealed more of her face. She had a nose that might have been cute, except for having been broken at some point, so that it sat crookedly on her face, out of alignment and pointing a little to her left. Her lips were parted. The effects of weather and her harsh journey were evident: lips raw, skin burned and scraped. Sadie felt momentarily sorry for the girl.

  Little Wing didn’t budge from the doorway. Sadie glanced around and spotted a chair that didn’t look too dusty. “Do you mind if I sit?” she asked. “Generally when one has visitors, one invites them to sit.”

  The girl didn’t speak. Sadie took that as license, and sat. “Tell me,” Sadie said. “How did you come to be here? How are you finding it? I trust we’ve made you feel welcome.”

  “A baby laughing,” the girl said. Speaking seemed to make her more comfortable, and she moved through the doorway. As Sadie had suspected from a distance, “girl” hardly defined her. She was a young woman, with a healthy figure that would have made her popular at Senora Soto’s. She had thought as much, from the way her husband had eyed her.

  She didn’t believe that Del had accosted Little Wing in any way, or made any overtures to do so.

  Yet.

  But she didn’t doubt that he would, in time. If she had faith in anything in this world, it was that betrayal was inevitable.

  “I’m sorry?” Sadie asked.

  “What makes you happy?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with—”

  “Happiness? That has to do with everything.”

  “Not with why I came to visit you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry?” Sadie asked again.

  “Not yet,” Little Wing said.

  Sadie was losing patience with her nonsense. “Excuse me?” she snapped. “I don’t understand what on earth you’re saying, young lady. Make yourself clear.”

  “He would not, you know.”

  “Who? Who wouldn’t do what?”

  “You met him because he did, but he would not. No more. No longer.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t think you do, either.”

  “It will not be the death of you,” Little Wing said.

  Sadie bolted from the chair. “What won’t?”

  “Little bottle.”

  “Excuse me?”

  The girl finally came fully into the room, and crossed the distance between them with a few quick strides. Sadie tried to back away but the chair blocked her path. Little Wing took her forearm, held it in a tight grip. “Your bottle. It will not kill you. You might wish it had.”

  The laudanum? But how could this child know about that?

  She couldn’t. That was impossible. She was guessing, that’s all.

  “I came here to be nice to you,” Sadie said, though that wasn’t quite true. She shook her arm free of the girl’s grasp and spun away from her, making for the door. “I can see that was a mistake.”

  She yanked the door open and burst through, storming past the startled private. Outside on the parade ground, she nearly bowled over Mrs. Hannigan, the captain’s wife, who was walking in the twilight with her young daughter. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Oh, Mrs. Cuttrell,” the woman said. “Were you coming from that strange girl’s house? The one with the Indian name?”

  “She’s as crazy as I don’t know what,” Sadie said. “Completely insane. You can’t believe a word she says.”

  Mrs. Hannigan cast a worried eye toward her daughter. “Is it safe to have her here?”

  “As long as they keep guards on her, I suppose,” Sadie replied. “I’ll see if my husband can do anything about her. Excuse me now, I’ve got to get home.”

  Had to get back to her bottle, she meant. She was so upset that it would take more than a few sips to calm her now. Mrs. Hannigan said something else, but Sadie was already stalking toward home, her mind fixed on that shelf in the pantry.

  * * *

  Kuruk had seen Mrs. Cuttrell leave Little Wing’s quarters from across the parade field. He watched her have a brief, animated conversation with Captain Hannigan’s wife, then bustle away toward her own house. An Apache learned as a young boy to cover ground with economy and grace, and the parade ground was considerably flatter and less full of dangerous creatures, thorny plants, and other threats than the mountains where he had grown up. He made it across to the house. Private Lamar saw him coming and stepped to the side.

  “Was Mrs. Cuttrell just in here?” Kuruk asked.

  “For a little while,” Lamar said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. She wanted to see the girl.”

  “I mean, why did she get in? Aren’t you supposed to be keeping people out?”

  Lamar shuffled his feet nervously. “She’s the colonel’s wife.”

  “Is she the colonel?” Kuruk knew he was overstepping. Lamar was only a private, but he was a white man and a soldier. Kuruk was an Apache. If Lamar wanted to shoot him, he wouldn’t have to explain his action in any more detail than to say he thought the Indian was threatening him or the girl.

  “Of course she ain’t.”

  “Then she doesn’t get in, unless the colonel is with her. Understand? Nobody goes in there without my say-so. Is that clear? Nobody.”

  “Yeah,” the private said. “Sorry.”

  Kuruk rapped on the door three times, then opened it. “Little Wing,” he called. “It’s me. Kuruk. Are you all right?”

  There was no answer. The house was dark inside, except for a single lamp burning in the front room. Just that morning, seven members of the Ladies’ Church Auxiliary had called on her. They were a group of women from town who had never met a sinner they couldn’t despise or onto whom they couldn’t slip a second helping of shame. They had come to warn Little Wing of the pernicious influences of the town’s soiled doves, and of the soldiers who patronized them; or more likely, Kuruk thought, had come to express their disapproval of one they believed was already plenty soiled. They had clucked and complained, and Little Wing hadn’t come out from under her bed for hours. “Little Wing!”

  He hurried through the rooms, peering through the gathered darkness. In the room she had taken as her bedroom, he found her, crouching in the corner. Her eyes were wide, darting here and there, her mouth open, her breath coming in ragged gasps.

  “Little Wing,” he said. “It’s me. Don’t fret, little one. Nothing will hurt you here.”

  Her gaze fixed on him, but her expression didn’t change. She reminded him of nothing so much as a cornered animal, desperate for a way out.

  He lowered himself to a crouch, across the room from her so he wouldn’t make her feel more trapped. He put a hand on the floor for balance, and to let her see that it held no weapons. “Little Wing,” he said, his voice as soothing as he could make it. “There’s nothing to fear. I don’t know what that woman said to you, but don’t let her upset you. She has no power over you, anyhow.”

  As he spoke, she relaxed, some of the tension visibly leaving her. She moved to a sitting position, her legs splayed out, hands between them, resting on her skirt. Her mouth closed and her eyes calmed. “Afraid,” she said.

  “I know. But you don’t have to be.”

  “The night. The dark.”

  “You’re safe here, Little Wing. Private Lamar is right outside your door, and—”

  “No!” she said, nearly shouting it. “Let her in. That lady.”

  Sometimes she seemed like a lost, sorrowful six-year-old, but she could just as easily come across as wise beyond her years. There was a mystery about her, but Kuruk couldn’t make out the shape of it. A
s if to prove his unspoken point, she said, “She is a bad woman. She is not good for the colonel or the lieutenant, or herself.”

  “Can you explain that?” Kuruk asked.

  She looked down at her hands. “No.”

  “Cannot, or don’t want to?”

  Little Wing didn’t answer. He crouched with her for a few more minutes. “Do you want to talk?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll be outside your door all night. Not Private Lamar. Me. Will you feel safe, then?”

  She hesitated before answering, but not for too long. “Yes.”

  “Sleep well, Little Wing. Soon, we must talk. Really talk.”

  “Yes,” she said again. He wasn’t sure if she was agreeing, or just reiterating her satisfaction with his offer.

  He had been up with the sun, as usual. Now he would be up until it rose again, and after.

  It was a sacrifice he would make, for Little Wing.

  If he had been asked, though, he couldn’t have explained why.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Marshal Tucker Bringloe walked the streets of Carmichael, reflecting on change.

  Just days ago, he had been a worthless drunk, someone the town’s upright citizens would cross the street to avoid. Had he been on fire, most of them wouldn’t have spared the liquid to spit on him, or taken the effort to kick him into the rain. Was he really different now? Or did the badge he wore just create the impression that he was different? Could a piece of tin make a man acceptable in the eyes of those who had previously despised him, if they thought of him at all?

  And if it could, what did that say about the man? It was the tin that had changed their minds, if in fact they had changed. How long would that last? Would the effects wear off once they saw that he was the same man? Or was the badge so blinding that they would never realize it?

  He had walked all the way to the edge of town and stood there, looking into the open high desert beyond. Scattered clouds blotted out the stars here and there, now and again showing the moon as it swelled toward full. He didn’t think it would rain tonight. A brisk, warm wind blew out of the southeast, though. Tuck let it wash over him, almost as if it were the first time he had felt such a wind. Almost as if he really were a new man.

  But as he considered it, he heard something underneath the gusts, a kind of scrabbling, scratching sound. Wind whipping tumbleweed across the desert floor? Some night creature, a javelina or a wolf or even a deer, making its way unseen in the dark? He thought he saw motion out there, but whether it was a windblown creosote bush or something else, he couldn’t be sure.

  Maybe it was nothing at all, a trick of the wind and the shifting moonlight through the clouds.

  He wished he could convince himself of that. He lowered his hand to the Colt he had kept, the one Hank Turville had loaned him for the posse. It was town property, so his to use as long as he wore the star. But he didn’t draw it, and he couldn’t tell if the sound and motion had been anything or not. He watched and listened awhile longer, but they didn’t recur.

  The gun felt comfortable in his hand, he realized, and that disturbed him. It was as if his hand was made to hold a whiskey glass or a gun. He had seen what guns could do, and had foresworn them because of it. They were, in their own way, as compelling as whiskey, and at least as destructive, though a gun could more rapidly destroy others as well as the one who held it.

  The two things in life his hand was made for, and he hated them both. Hated them, because of how much he loved them.

  Disgusted with himself, he headed back to Main Street and the marshal’s office.

  His office.

  As he was nearing Senora Soto’s, he heard shouting and cursing, the crash of furniture and glassware breaking. A brawl. His first real task as marshal.

  He started toward the door, but before he reached it, two men tumbled out. They were battered and bloody, their clothes torn, and they were hanging on to each other with murder in their eyes. Tuck didn’t know either of them; if he had ever seen them, he had been too drunk to remember it.

  On the boardwalk outside the door, one man clambered to his feet and launched a fierce kick at the one still on hands and knees. His boot caught the other man in the chin, whipping his head backward and dropping him back down again. “Hold up there!” Tuck called. He threw his arms around the standing man and wrenched him backward before he could throw another kick. The guy was short and stocky, with a barrel chest and dark hair and whiskers. He smelled like he’d bathed in a barrel of beer. “That’s enough of that!”

  “Let me go, you bastard,” the man said. “I’ll kill you once’t I’m done with him!”

  “I’m the law,” Tuck said. “Marshal Bringloe. You don’t want to spend the night in a cell, you won’t talk like that.”

  The man on the ground rose to a shaky crouch, then held on to the saloon wall to draw himself up to a standing position. He glared at the man still struggling against Tuck’s grip, and his hand pawed at an empty holster on his belt.

  “No guns,” Tuck said. “You gonna behave, now?”

  The man in his arms nodded, and Tuck released him. “Let’s all just cool down,” Tuck said.

  He started toward the second man, who had released the wall and was wobbling like he might fall down again. “You okay, partner?”

  Tuck heard the motion from the first man more than he saw it, but he whirled around at the rustle of clothing and the stamp of a boot on the boardwalk, and he spotted the glint of steel in the man’s hand. He caught the man’s wrist just as the Bowie knife arced toward him. He stepped to the side and used the man’s momentum to tug him forward, and threw his left fist into the man’s chin.

  The guy’s head snapped back under the impact. At the same time, Tuck wrenched his knife arm. The weapon dropped from his hand and clattered to the boardwalk. Kicking it away, Tuck twisted the man’s arm behind his back and bent him forward.

  By this time, the doorway had filled with spectators from inside the saloon, and more had spilled out. “Anybody know which one started it?”

  “It’s hard to say, Marshal Bringloe,” a woman answered. Tuck looked at the crowd and saw that the speaker was Missy Haynes. She pushed through to the front and pointed at the man Tuck was holding. “That one stumbled into him, and he pushed back, and then they were at it. They’re both pretty drunk.”

  Tuck had already reached that conclusion, from the smell and the fact that he had overpowered the one so easily. “They do much damage?”

  “Broke a table and about eleven glasses.” This was Jack, the barkeep. “A dozen, might could be.”

  “You know ’em?” Tuck asked. “They local?”

  “Yeah,” Jack answered. He gestured to the one Tuck had doubled over. “That there’s Ned Calhoun. He works for Alf Maier. T’other one’s Billy Simpkins. You workin’, Billy?”

  Simpkins had given up trying to stand, and was leaning against the saloon wall. He was even struggling with that. He was in his early twenties, Tuck judged, lean and fair-skinned. “Naw,” he said. “Not no more.”

  “Well, you’re both coming with me,” Tuck said. “You can spend the night in a nice, dry cell and see how you feel in the morning.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” Calhoun said. He was having a hard time speaking clearly.

  Tuck gave his arm an extra twist, earning a pained grunt. “You going to go along quietly? Or do I have to take you there like this?”

  “I’ll go,” Calhoun managed.

  “What about you, Simpkins?”

  “Might have some trouble walkin’,” he replied. “But I’ll try.”

  “Anybody want to help Simpkins walk to my office?” Tuck asked.

  Nobody answered for a bit, then Missy spoke up. “I will.”

  “Can you handle him?”

  She threw her head back and laughed. “Marshal, I guess you never were in my line of work. We can’t handle a man’s got a few drinks in him, we don’t las
t long in the trade.”

  The rest of the crowd chuckled at that. Tuck eased up on Calhoun’s arm and let him resume a more or less upright posture, but kept a grip on him. “Let’s go,” he said. “Pretty sure you know the way.”

  They started toward the marshal’s office. Missy came behind them, one arm looped around Simpkins’s waist to keep him on an even keel. “How do you like the job so far, Marshal?” Missy asked.

  “I don’t hardly know yet, Missy,” Tuck said. “And please, call me Tuck.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said.

  “You two lovebirds gonna jaw all night?” Calhoun grumbled.

  Tuck gave his arm another wrench. “You want to keep this in its socket, you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  Looking ahead, he saw Mo Kanouse standing outside the open door to his office. “That Ned Calhoun?” Mo asked. “Guess I shoulda told you to keep an eye out for him.”

  “You know him?” Tuck asked.

  “He’s kind of a regular guest.”

  When they reached Kanouse, Tuck shoved Calhoun into his arms. “Put him to bed,” he said. He relieved Missy of the burden of Simpkins. “Come on, Billy. Time to turn in.”

  Simpkins felt like he weighed almost nothing. He gave Tuck a sleepy smile. If not for the fact that his clothes were torn and blood caked his mouth and chin, he hardly looked like someone who had just been brawling. Kanouse took Calhoun into the office, and Tuck followed with Simpkins. “Thanks, Missy,” he said over his shoulder.

  “I’ll be getting back, then,” she said. “I hope all your days on the job are this easy.”

  “First day in town and he’s already got a whore girlfriend,” Calhoun said as Kanouse shoved him in a cell. There were three of them lined up along the back wall. The one Calhoun occupied had a small barred window, too high for a man to reach on his own and too narrow to fit through. Two desks, a safe, a stove that was burning despite the season, and a rifle rack on the wall completed the furnishings. On the wall behind the marshal’s desk, a map of the area had been tacked up, but what Tuck had at first taken as possibly significant markings had turned out to be swatted flies and other insects, along with a few bloodstains of uncertain origin. On the desk was a glass vase containing wildflowers of various colors that he was certain hadn’t been there before. A gift from Kanouse? Seemed unlikely.