To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  Now he had Louisa to worry about. Sometimes that worry was an anvil on his shoulders. It was an especially heavy burden now. Louisa was at death’s door. If she walked through it, Prophet was tempted to follow her. That’s how wretched his life would seem without her in it.

  Even though they didn’t always ride together, because they were too damned much alike not to be constantly locking horns, he felt the world was a little kinder, softer, with a little more poetry in it, knowing she was out there somewhere, riding hell for leather against bad men of which the frontier had plenty.

  Outside, the clattering of a wagon rose.

  Prophet turned his head to peer out the window. A chaise buggy was just then rattling into the yard behind a fine, sleek bay horse with three white stockings. A Morgan horse, judging by the clean, firm lines and compactness, the proud arch of its neck. The white socks stood out now in the dusk as the woman who was driving the buggy turned the horse in a broad circle. A striking woman, indeed, from just the brief look Prophet had gotten of her.

  Horse and buggy and the woman driver clattered past the window and continued up toward the front of the house.

  Prophet rose from his chair and looked out the window. The chaise had stopped near the doctor’s front porch. The woman was stepping down.

  Prophet glanced at Louisa. Her eyelids were no longer twitching. He walked over to the bed and leaned down. She was breathing. It sounded as faint as a bird’s breath, but she was breathing, just the same.

  A knock sounded from the front of the house. Prophet pondered it. The woman was here to see the doctor. The doctor wasn’t here. Let the boy deal with the woman. Prophet had returned to his chair and was about to pick up Louisa’s pale hand again and place it between his own hands, when a knock sounded on the screen door, just outside Louisa’s room.

  “Hello?” said a woman’s voice. “Anyone here?”

  “Christ,” Prophet muttered. He looked at Louisa, smoothing her sweat-damp hair back from her pale, warm forehead. “I’ll be right back, darlin’. You stay right where you are, hear?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Prophet ducked through the curtain and turned to the screen door. The woman stood just beyond it.

  “Doc’s not here,” he said.

  From the other side of the screen, which turned her into a gauzy brown blur, the woman said, “Oh. Hello. I was told he had an injured young lady here. I came to inquire if he needed assistance.”

  Prophet toed the screen open with his boot and leaned a shoulder against the doorframe. His heart lurched when he saw the quality of woman standing out there—dressed to the nines in the most lavish gown he’d ever seen and wrapped in a heavy cape made from what appeared the feathers of some exotic, chocolate-brown bird. They ruffled gently in the breeze.

  She wore a spruce-green hat with a black veil that lent an exotic, mysterious quality to her face, which was ivory, oval-shaped, and clean-lined, set with smoldering brown eyes and full, ruby lips. Earrings the same green as her hat dangled from her ears down her long, fine neck.

  She smelled richly of ripe cherries.

  All in all, the entire package was one of lush, ripe, maybe slightly sinful womanhood. She was the kind of woman who made a man feel as though he had ants crawling around in his trousers.

  She let her eyes drop and then rise, taking in the man before her.

  “And you’re . . . ?”

  “Prophet. You’re . . . ?”

  “Verna McQueen. I just now heard that the doctor had a patient. I usually assist with his female patients. It’s only proper a woman be near, you know.” She tipped her head slightly to look around Prophet. “Clay’s not here?”

  “If you mean Whitfield, he’s off tending another patient. Well, I’ll be seein’—” Prophet had started to turn away, letting the door close.

  The woman stopped him with, “If the doctor’s not here, I should probably look in on his patient—should I not, Mr. Prophet?”

  Prophet toed the door open again. “She’s resting.”

  “May I see?” the woman said stubbornly and then smiled to soften it.

  Prophet scrutinized her, customarily wary, especially where Louisa was concerned. He shrugged. “I reckon if you work for the doc . . . why not?”

  He held the door open with one hand and stepped aside. Verna McQueen carefully climbed the three stone steps, holding her skirts above her ankles, which were delicate and slender, Prophet couldn’t help noticing. Her aroma filled his nostrils, made those ants crawl around as though energized by lightning. Under the circumstances, the feeling was annoying.

  Verna McQueen pushed through the curtain, and Prophet followed her into the sickroom. The woman removed her cape and her hat, hung both on the chair, and took up the washbasin and cloth that had been residing on a crude wooden stand. She was in her late, well-tended twenties, Prophet judged. Removing the cape had revealed the low-cut, opulently trimmed, and pleated gown and the fullness of her figure. Her skin was translucent cream with undertones of peach.

  Without the veil, Prophet could see that she was beautiful enough to have her visage carved in ivory and set into a cameo pin. Her long, almond-shaped eyes were deep brown with copper tints and long lashes, and they had a faintly smoldering, devilish glint in them.

  She was a full-figured, exotic beauty—that was for sure. Prophet wondered what she was doing here in Box Elder Ford. The richness of her attire and jewelry—she wore a choker studded with what was obviously a diamond—bespoke immodest wealth.

  “Her color is not good.” The woman sat on the chair beside the bed and laid her hand against Louisa’s forehead. “Very warm. Clammy. She has a fever, all right. That’ll need to come down.”

  “The doc mentioned that.”

  “Too bad the ice has all melted in Eldon Wayne’s icehouse. He usually freezes a tub of water over the winter, to supply the town with ice for as long as it lasts. This year it was gone by the Fourth of July.”

  Verna McQueen soaked the cloth in the water basin, wrung it out, and gently ran the cloth across Louisa’s forehead. “The doctor’s well is deep, however. The water nicely cold.” She dabbed Louisa’s cheeks, rewet the cloth, and caressed Louisa’s neck.

  Louisa’s eyelids fluttered a little, and she moved her lips, but if she made any sounds, they were too low for Prophet to hear.

  As Verna continued to bathe Louisa’s face in the cool water, she glanced at Prophet. “Who is she, Mr. Prophet?”

  “A friend.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” the woman said, holding the cloth against Louisa’s right cheek. It was as though she’d almost anticipated Prophet’s response. “And is she your—?”

  “No.”

  She glanced at him, dubious. Drenching the cloth and wringing it out once more, she said, “How did this happen?”

  “We were ambushed.”

  “Was she hit bad?”

  “Bad enough. Two bullets. One in her chest. One in her leg.”

  “And what was Clay’s . . . er, Doctor Whitfield’s prognosis?”

  “I don’t know.” Prophet sighed. “He said it don’t look good. If she gets through tonight, she might have a little better chance.”

  “This is obviously very hard on you.”

  “Yeah, well . . . she’s a friend, like I said.”

  Miss McQueen hung the cloth over the side of the washbasin. “Well, I’ve done what I can. She seems a little cooler.” She looked at Prophet. “You look as though you could use a drink.”

  Prophet looked at her, frowning. He hadn’t expected to be invited to a drink by a woman so obviously out of his class. He hadn’t bathed since Colorado Springs, a hundred and fifty tough trail miles back. Like the doctor had said, he smelled of horses and cigarettes.

  “A drink?”

  “Sure. I know Clay has a bottle around here somewhere.”

  “I need to stay with my friend.”

  The woman scrutinized him more closely, turning her head and tipping it slightly. She bounced
slowly up and down on the heels of her delicate shoes and said, “Maybe some other time.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I live right up there,” she said, pointing toward the north and raising her finger, squinting one eye beguilingly. “A pretty little house on an ugly old hill.” For the first time, Prophet detected a southern accent.

  “You live up there all by yourself, Miss McQueen?”

  “Yep. Pretty much.” Her shimmering eyes were crawling all over Prophet, making him feel a little self-conscious. He didn’t think he’d ever been scrutinized so closely. “All . . . by . . . myself.” Her gaze dropped to his boots and leaped to his sandy-haired head. “You’re tall—you know that, Mr. Prophet?” She smiled, waved, and turned toward the curtained doorway. “Please tell Clay I dropped by . . . to assist . . . won’t you?”

  “I’ll tell him you were here to assist, Miss McQueen.”

  “Good day, Mr. Prophet. Or good night, as the case may be.”

  She pushed through the curtain and disappeared. Prophet heard the screen door close. He was back sitting in the chair by Louisa’s bed when the chaise rattled out of the yard and back onto the trail. The woman yelled to the horse.

  The rattling and the hoof clomps dwindled to silence.

  Prophet stared out the window, pondering the lushly gorgeous Verna McQueen, who still had ants crawling around inside his dusty denims, to his dismay.

  For some reason known only to some sixth sense he had, a chill touched him.

  He scrubbed a big hand across his cheek, deep lines cutting into his forehead, which was floury white where his hat brim had hidden it from the sun. “Now . . . what in hell was she all about . . . ?”

  The doctor put his roan mare up to the back of Melvin Bly’s barbershop and bathhouse. There was a hitch rack and a stock trough back here. The doctor swung gently down to the ground, tied the mare to the hitch rack, and unhooked his medical kit from the saddle horn.

  He looked around to make sure nothing lay between him and the sprawling, adobe-brick and rickety wood-frame structure that he might trip over. Bly was a sloppy fool who didn’t tend much to his place. Seeing nothing in his way, Whitfield limped on up the steps to the door, which stood partway open.

  It was nearly dark outside and even darker inside. Bly had no lamp burning. The doctor negotiated his way through the barber’s boiler room, where he heated water to fill baths, and made his way over to the part of the building where Bly lived.

  “Bly?” he called. “Bly, you here?”

  He thought the barber might have gone over to one of the saloons, but then a man’s gravelly voice called, “Here, Doc!”

  Whitfield pushed through a door and into Bly’s main living quarters, which was a single, large room outfitted about the way you’d expect a sloppy bachelor with no upbringing to outfit such a place. It was crude and it smelled crude, with the odor of cheap tobacco hanging heavy.

  Bly sat in shirt and suspenders at his eating table against the far wall, under a dimly glowing Rochester lamp that hung over the table. The barber’s right arm was in a sling.

  There was a shuffling sound and the clattering of small nails on the floor. Whitfield turned to see Bly’s cat, Jasper, playing with a half-dead mouse behind Bly’s cold wood stove. The cat turned its copper eyes to the doctor, meowed in annoyance, and then went back to swatting the mouse back and forth between its paws.

  “You could do with cleaning this place up a little,” Whitfield told the barber.

  “My cleanin’ lady ain’t worth a damn.” Bly laughed ironically.

  He didn’t look good. His gray eyes, one of which forever wandered to the outside corner of its socket, were heavy-lidded. He was only in his mid-thirties, and he was a relatively large man with a pronounced potbelly, but his lightly freckled cheeks were sallow and gaunt.

  Sweat stood out on his forehead. He had thick, unkempt brown hair that was prematurely graying, and long sideburns. He had a Remington revolver on the table beside a whiskey bottle and a speckled blue tin cup.

  The doctor had heard that Bly, who was known for his laziness as well as his penchant for alcohol, had been married once, but his wife had left him for another man—a fellow shopkeeper—and they’d left town together amidst the scandal. Bly had never gotten over the shame and humiliation.

  Very early that morning, Whitfield had been summoned here to tend the barber’s arm. A bullet had shattered his right humerus and cracked the medial epicondyle.

  “How are you doing, Melvin?”

  “My arm hurts like a son of a bitch.”

  “It’s badly broken, Melvin. You should be in bed.”

  “Hurts worse when I lie down.” Bly lifted his rheumy gaze to Whitfield. That wandering eye made him look both stupid and slightly off his rocker, though Whitfield knew him to mostly be stupid. “He’s here, isn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Who? Bullshit, Doc. You know who. I seen him ride in with that girl. She took a bullet. You got ’em over to your place, don’t you? Come on—everyone knows you do.”

  Whitfield shrugged. “All right—they are over at my place.” He stared down pointedly at the injured, sweating, half-drunk barber. “You keep in mind that my place is off limits to trouble. I won’t put up with anyone coming onto my property looking to further their fight with those two bounty hunters. I will not have my boy’s life endangered.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Doc.” Bly lifted his cup to his lips. “I’m done fightin’. I’m prob’ly done with everything else, too, until I can start usin’ this arm again. You know how long that’s gonna be, Doc? Shit, I got a business to run. I can’t shave and cut hair one-handed!”

  Whitfield decided it would be best not to tell the man just yet that he’d probably never regain full use of the arm. He set his medical kit on the table and slid a chair up beside the barber. “You just have to be patient, Melvin. Patience and bed rest is what you need. And you really must eat something. I can understand the need for whiskey to dull the pain, but you won’t heal without proper fortification. And please go easy on the whiskey. All things in moderation.”

  “I don’t have no one to cook for me, Doc.”

  “I’ll see if I can talk Alma Cartwright into coming over and frying you a steak.” Whitfield looked at the shelves in the kitchen part of the room, near the wood stove, a sink, and a rusty iron pump. He saw two airtight tins and a wrinkled potato with long, green sprouts. That was all. “Do you have anything edible at all here, Melvin?”

  “I usually take my meals at Cartwright’s Café. I ain’t no cook. Dolly was a cook—a damn good cook, too. But she’s somewhere over in Nebraska now, cookin’ for Wally Earle and the two brats I heard they got now.”

  “There is no point in ruminating on the past. We all have our grievances with the Fates, but it’s best to suppress them and move forward. Like I said, I’ll have a talk with Mrs. Cartwright about getting some food over here. Now, let me check the bandages on that arm. Might need to replace them, though I’m thinking we might be able to wait till morning.”

  “Oh, shit—that hurts, Doc!” Bly complained childishly as Whitfield eased his wounded arm out of the linen sling.

  As Whitfield gently opened the bandage over Bly’s upper arm, he glanced tentatively at the man’s gaunt, sweating face and asked, “Now that you’re a little more coherent than you were this morning, I’d like to ask you how you got into a foofaraw with those two bounty hunters.”

  “I appreciate what you’re doin’ for me, an’ all, Doc,” Bly said, stretching his lips back from his teeth as he stared down at the bandage the doctor was peeling slightly away from his arm, “but that topic’s off-limits.”

  Whitfield glanced at the man again. He waited a few seconds before he said, “It has something to do with . . . her . . . doesn’t it?” He pressed the bandage back into place over the wound.

  Bly scowled at Whitfield darkly. He licked his cracked lips and hardened his jaws. “Like I done told you, Doc,
” he said with barely bridled anger, “that ain’t a subject I’m allowed to discuss. Now, please, don’t you ask me ever again!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was completely dark when young Marshal Roscoe Deets checked the front door of the Arkansas Federated Bank & Trust, which sat on the far east side of Box Elder Ford, on the north side of the main street.

  He always started here at the bank on his nightly rounds, checking all the doors of the business buildings in town. After making a full circle of the main street, he ended up here again, where he checked the bank’s door one last time.

  Usually, unless the bank president, George W. Campbell, had been overly preoccupied with his accounts when he’d left the building around six-thirty, the door was locked. Tonight it was, as well.

  Now Deets could go on home and have dessert with Lupita. After a slice of dried apricot pie and a cup of coffee with his pretty wife, he’d make one more round, checking all three saloons to make sure everything was quiet, as it usually was here in the mostly quiet town on weeknights. Then Deets would tramp on home and sleep in his bed snuggled up against the lithe, supple body of Lupita and rise at six to start his marshal’s chores all over again.

  Deets had to admit that when he’d considered the city council’s offer of the town marshal’s job, he hadn’t taken into account the boredom involved with law dogging. But in stark contrast to his romantic views of what carrying a badge and a six-shooter would entail, it was often mind-numbingly tedious. Sometimes he found himself kicked back in his chair in his office, sound asleep not because he hadn’t slept well the night before but because he was just so damned bored.

  Still, it was a good job. A steady paycheck and not nearly as dangerous as cow-punching had been. Few cowpunchers he’d ever known had lived much past thirty-five without getting killed or at least severely injured when thrown by a half-broke bronc, kicked by a calf during branding, bit by a rattlesnake, or struck by lightning. Many caught their death of cold during spring and fall roundups and died from influenza. Many drank themselves to death while numbing themselves from the exhausting grind and the danger, which is what Deets had once done before he’d met Lupita.