“Why are you telling me this, Mr. Prophet?”
“Because you seem to think your problem is with me.” Prophet shook his head. “It ain’t. It’s with the men who ambushed her.” He jerked his head to indicate Louisa behind the blanket curtain. “Good night.”
He turned and walked out of the house, letting the screen door slap shut behind him.
The doctor opened the door and said, “Mr. Prophet, I’ve had a change of heart. I don’t want you spending the night in my stable.”
“Don’t blame you a bit, Doc,” Prophet said, striding off in the night.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Neal Hunter yawned as he pulled his suspenders up over his shoulders and left the room that he and his wife, Helen, shared on the second floor of their Grand View Hotel. Still blinking sleep from his eyes, he ran his hands through his hair and stumbled down the hallway. He descended the stairs and frowned, puzzled, as he passed the front desk in the lobby.
“Where in the hell . . . ?” he muttered as he turned into the doorway opposite the stairs.
Helen was sitting at the table they customarily had breakfast at, in the corner on the far side of the dining room, where they had a view out two large windows—one facing the front porch and the main street, the other facing a side street.
Helen sat in her customary place at the table, her back to the front window. A silver coffee service sat on the table, as well as china cups, saucers, a small china pig creamer that had been handed down in Hunter’s family back in Ohio, and a bowl of granulated sugar.
The dining room was still foggy with night shadows though the sun was just then rising. Steam curled from Helen’s coffee cup, which she absently stirred cream into while gazing out the side window to her left.
“Oh, there you are,” Hunter said, yawning and striding into the room, in his sleep fog, careful to avoid the chairs arranged around the other oilcloth-covered tables.
Helen was the only one in the dining room so far, which wasn’t unusual for a weekday morning. The Hunters did more lucrative breakfast business on the weekends. Soon, however, the two drummers from Denver, likely still asleep in their rented rooms, would be down for their morning meal, and Hunter would have a little cash in his cashbox.
“Helen, where have you been?” Hunter asked as he strode toward the spot where Helen’s coffee steamed on the table, in the coppery light angling through the window over her left shoulder. “Didn’t you ever come to bed?”
When he’d awakened, he’d been surprised to see that her side of the bed hadn’t been slept in.
“I slept on the lobby sofa,” Helen said, regarding her husband coolly with her large, round brown eyes. Helen was a pretty blonde, though she’d been prettier a few years ago, when the crow’s feet hadn’t yet showed up around her eyes, before her face had lost its youthful glow to the ravages of the Colorado sun, and the eyes themselves had started taking on a weary, slightly jaded cast.
The blonde in her hair now came from a bottle, Hunter knew, despite Helen trying to keep it a secret.
She was thirty-three, and the wear and tear of the years and the hard work of running the hotel had taken its toll on the woman, whom Hunter had married back in Ohio, though he’d met her first in the Colorado mountain mining camps. She’d been a saloon singer, and a good one. Only a singer. Not a percentage girl.
“Why on earth would you do that?” Hunter asked her. “It’s only Thursday. We won’t be getting any late business till the next stage pulls through.”
“I wasn’t sleepy,” Helen said. “After returning from Mona’s, I felt restless.” She sipped her coffee. Her tone was low, crisp. “I had a million thoughts running through my head, Neal, if you must know.” She sipped her coffee again, holding the delicate cup in both her small, work-thickened, lye-reddened hands, her eyes not meeting his.
Hunter sat down in his usual chair. “Oh?”
The Box Elder Ford Bugle was on the table—two pages of large print that came out once every two weeks and which Hunter had already read twice all the way through. The Chinese cook always placed it on the table beside Hunter’s cup and saucer, whether Hunter had read it or not, so Hunter usually read it again over the cup of coffee that preceded breakfast.
Hunter could hear Huang, pronounced “Wang” by Hunter and all the other locals, banging pans around in the kitchen and opening and closing the rusty stove door.
This morning, Hunter ignored the paper. Tipping the silver pot over his cup, Hunter glanced at Helen. She was staring at him now. It was hard to read her thoughts, though it was easy to see her expression was grave. Maybe a little suspicious, even angry.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?” Helen asked.
“Tell you what, dear?”
“How Eldon was killed.”
Hunter leaned forward, his arms folded on the table, his right hand wrapped around his cup. “He was shot by a terrible man.”
“How did he . . . and you . . . and the other men come to be out there wherever Eldon was shot?”
Hunter smiled as he reached over to place a placating left hand on Helen’s right one. “That isn’t something you need to worry about.”
Helen pulled her hand out from beneath her husband’s and said firmly, “That seems to be the answer of choice. It’s the answer coming from all you men—Bly, Goose Johnson, Jim Purdy, that fool Carlsruud. Their wives are very upset. I talked to most of them over at Mona’s last night. Look, Neal. We want to know why you men snuck out of town so late two nights ago. Snuck out like schoolboys up to no good, mentioning nothing to your wives. We want to know what you were doing that got Eldon Wayne killed.”
She added quickly, anticipating her husband’s response, “Don’t you think we have a right to know?”
Inwardly, Hunter shrank from Helen’s uncharacteristically direct assault. It wasn’t like her to get this angry and demanding. Usually, she went her way and he went his. While they worked together running the hotel, they didn’t spend a whole lot of time together, and their conversations had become almost like the conversations between strangers waiting in a train station.
Hunter sipped his coffee, carefully setting the cup back onto its saucer. “It’s not something we want you ladies to trouble yourselves over.”
“We already are troubled over it, Neal. Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“Yes, but you shouldn’t be. I and the other men have the situation under control.”
Laughing with bitter exasperation, Helen said, “Neal, what situation got Eldon Wayne killed and left poor Mona a widow?”
“Ready eat?” came Huang’s cheerful voice from the kitchen door. The stocky Chinaman wore his white apron and black silk hat embroidered in red and gold. Long mare’s-tail mustaches dangled down past his chin. He was wiping his thick hands on a towel.
“Ham and eggs and two pancakes for me, Huang,” Hunter called. He glanced at Helen. “You, dear?”
“I’m not hungry this morning, Huang. Coffee is all.”
“No hungry?” asked Huang, crestfallen.
“Really, dear?” Hunter asked.
Helen pounded the table, causing coffee to slosh over the top of her cup as well as Hunter’s. “I am not hungry, Huang! All I want is some answers!” She hammered the table again and fired a hard, demanding look at her husband.
“Whoa,” said one of the two drummers just then moving into the dining room from the lobby, both men doffing their bowler hats. They paused right inside the door, staring warily toward Hunter and Helen.
“Come in, gentlemen,” Hunter said, smiling and beckoning. “Everything’s fine. My lovely wife didn’t sleep well, is all.”
“Coffee?” Huang asked them from the kitchen door.
“Coffee, please, Huang,” one of the drummers said, the other nodding in agreement.
When the drummers had been seated at a table near the door, Hunter smiled and nodded at them and then lifted his coffee cup to his lips. He looked across the table at Helen, whose face had turned to wax
as she scrutinized him angrily.
As Huang came in from the kitchen, his slippers slapping his heels, and headed for the drummers, singing softly under his breath and smiling in his customarily ebullient way, Helen said to Hunter, “It has something to do with . . . her . . . doesn’t it?” She sort of tossed her head, as though to indicate the north side of town.
Hunter felt his cheeks warm. His lower intestine snaked around in his belly. Trying to compose himself, he frowned as though with genuine bewilderment. “Her?”
“Her,” Helen said, glancing over to where Huang was chatting with the drummers. “You know who I mean, Neal.” That’s all she said. She just let it hang there in the air between them like some noxious gas. She stared at her husband with cold, light-brown eyes and pursed lips, as though sealing the words with an invisible hammer.
“Please, Helen. Why don’t you go up and lie down? You know we have Eldon’s funeral to attend at ten o’clock this morning. In your current . . . confused and overwrought . . . condition, I doubt you’ll be able to manage it.”
Helen continued to gaze in the same off-putting, waxy way as before, as though she hadn’t heard what he’d just said. She glanced at the drummers again. Huang had returned to the kitchen to begin cooking their breakfast, and the men seemed to be absorbed in their own conversation.
Helen ran her tongue along her bottom lip and returned her hard, accusatory stare to her husband. “You know, Neal, I began to suspect something after Vernon Waddell was hauled out of her place feet first.”
“What?” Hunter said, chuckling with incredulity.
“Yes, late at night. Three months ago. Maggie Smith told me. She lives near where . . . she . . . lives. Maggie was sitting up late with her poor, old, confused father who’s gotten his days and nights mixed up, and Maggie saw several men from town, including Gibbons, the undertaker, cart him out of her house. Heart attack.”
“Yes, I know that Waddell died of a heart attack,” Hunter said, keeping his voice down and trying to casually sip his coffee. “Is Maggie sure that he was carried out of . . . her . . . house?” He glanced toward the drummers, glad to see that they were still absorbed in their own conversation.
“She’s quite sure,” Helen said. “Of course, the story as Vernon’s wife, Marjorie, told it, was that Vernon got up at night to use the privy and she found him in there later . . . dead. Maggie says that Marjorie’s story is hogwash. Maggie is quite certain it was Waddell who was hauled out of that pretty little house on the hill north of town. By that no-account bartender, L.J. Tanner, and a couple of Tanner’s hired help.”
Hunter chuckled. “How in the world would Maggie know it was Vernon? It was at night and Maggie’s father’s house is situated a good fifty, sixty yards away!”
“I don’t know why she’s so certain it was Vernon, but she is. Tanner and the other men drove a wagon right past Maggie’s house. She saw them clearly.” Helen shook her head in annoyance. She pitched her voice low and cold as she leaned forward. “The point is, Neal, someone was hauled out of that woman’s house that night and the next morning we all learned of Vernon’s fatal heart attack. No one else in town died that night, Neal.”
Helen sealed the statement with a faintly mocking quirk of a corner of her mouth and an arch of her brow.
Huang came out of the kitchen and set Hunter’s steaming food in front of him. When Huang had left, the hotelier busily draped his napkin over his right thigh and picked up his knife and fork. Helen was watching him, awaiting his response.
He cleared his throat and said, “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Helen. I didn’t know that about Vernon.” He feigned a laugh but it came out brittle, betraying his nerves. “Who’d have known old Vernon had it in him to carry on like that!”
“Yes, who’d have known?” Helen finished her coffee and set her cup in its saucer. “But then, who’d have known one woman could turn nearly every man in an entire town into a lovelorn schoolboy. Oh, don’t look at me that way. Don’t you dare laugh at me!”
She was hissing this out now, leaning low over the table, her face a waxy mask of fury, no longer caring if the drummers heard or not. “I’ve seen how you all treat her whenever she rides down from her little castle on the hill. Why, every man on Hazelton Street stares out their shop windows at her, tongues hanging, or rushes out to help her out of her buggy . . . to open and close doors for her. To carry her shopping bags for her!”
Hunter could only stare at his enraged wife, stunned. He’d had no idea that he and the others had been so transparent.
“Anyway,” Helen said, straightening in her chair. “That’s when I began to suspect certain things.”
“Helen,” Hunter said. “She’s not married. All alone here in Box Elder Ford. We’re merely being gentlemen.”
“Let me just say this, Neal, and then I will say no more about it. I know that this mess you’re all involved in with the bounty hunter somehow involves her. I don’t think I even want to know all the sordid details. But know this, Neal.” Helen narrowed her eyes at him as she rose slowly, stiffly from her chair. “I will no longer be taking sedatives to help me sleep, and you will no longer be down here alone at night, manning the front desk. Do I make myself clear?”
Helen didn’t wait for an answer. She swung around and, chin in the air, strode across the room, her spruce-green skirt billowing and brushing tables and the backs of chairs. She gave a cordial nod to the two drummers who, having overheard the last, loudest part of the Hunters’ conversation, regarded her with flushed, hang-jawed looks.
When Helen had left the room and mounted the lobby stairs, the drummers glanced at Hunter.
The hotelier smiled, nodded, cleared his throat, and started eating although he was no longer hungry.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
At the cemetery, after a brief funeral service at the Bethany Lutheran Church in town, Minister Calvin Whitehead bowed his head to recite a prayer. The dozen or so mourners who’d gathered around the grave followed suit. The undertaker’s two sons had just finished digging the rectangular hole as the mourners had walked or ridden out from the church to the cemetery here on a rise overlooking the river.
Neal Hunter bowed his head, as well, and sighed.
Whitehead’s prayers could last as long as it had taken the two Gibbons boys to dig six feet down through rocks and sand. The sun was blazing straight down through the leaves of a cottonwood, searing the back of Hunter’s neck.
He was uncomfortable for other reasons, as well. Verna McQueen was one of the mourners, standing not ten feet to Hunter’s left. She was fetchingly dressed all in black, almost as though she herself was the widow. Her lush hair tumbled across her shoulders, strands of it dancing in the breeze and fairly sparkling in the sunlight.
Mona Wayne herself wore only a shapeless gray and white frock, and a straw hat with an appropriately black band that she’d probably borrowed for the occasion. She sat near the hole and the closed wooden casket, sweating and weeping into a handkerchief. One of Eldon’s battered hats sat on the ground near one of Mona’s stout ankles for folks to toss “memorials” into as they left the proceeding.
Hunter didn’t know if Helen, standing to his right, had seen Verna or not. He doubted that Helen would make a scene here at Eldon’s funeral if she had. Still, his and Helen’s argument earlier, and now Verna McQueen showing up to the funeral, was enough to give Hunter a bad case of indigestion.
He jerked with a start when someone poked him from behind. He glanced over his shoulder. Glen Carlsruud stood behind him in a three-piece black suit. Carlsruud canted his head slightly to his right, rolling his eyes in the same direction.
Hunter turned to see what the mercantiler was indicating. He frowned at first, unable to see anything in that direction except patchy green and brown hills spotted with post oaks and juniper. But then Hunter saw the man standing on a slightly higher hill to the northeast of the cemetery, maybe a quarter mile away, and he felt his heart hiccup in his chest.
&
nbsp; The man was tall and broad-shouldered. He wore a cream shirt under a brown leather vest, and Hunter could see the gun thonged on the man’s right thigh, the funnel-brimmed Stetson on his head. The tips of twin shotgun barrels poked up from behind his right shoulder. The shotgun’s bandolier was slanted across his chest. He held a pair of field glasses to his eyes. The glasses were directed at the cemetery.
As Hunter stared back at the man who was undeniably the bounty hunter, Lou Prophet, Prophet lowered the glasses, turned his head to one side and down, as though spitting, and then raised the glasses once more. The skin over Hunter’s chest rippled. He felt as though the glasses were directed specifically at him.
Maybe they were.
Hunter felt weak and sick to his stomach. Anger burned in him.
What in the hell was he doing up there, anyway?
Hunter looked around at the other mourners. All of the other men who’d ridden in the pack the night before last were here. Even Melvin Bly, though his arm was in a sling and he looked pasty and jaundiced and in severe need of a drink. No, not all the men from that night, Hunter saw. L.J. Tanner wasn’t here, which wasn’t all that unexpected. The hard-bitten Tanner did not hold with such formalities as funerals.
But all the rest were here. And the bounty hunter had probably known they would be here at the funeral of one of their fallen. He was probably scrutinizing each of the mourners right now as the preacher droned on, asking forgiveness for Eldon’s sins and beseeching Him to welcome Eldon into his open arms. Prophet was probably trying to figure out which of the mourners had been there that night at the Ramsay Creek Outpost.
He was also strategically making his presence known. He was making sure the men who’d ambushed him knew he was hunting them.
Hunter glanced away and caught Verna McQueen staring at him. Verna’s chin was dipped slightly, head bowed, but her head was also turned to her right and she was giving Hunter a sly, cunning smile beneath the brim of her black hat. That dubious smile coupled with the bounty hunter’s presence there on the nearby hill caused Hunter’s guts to churn with more vigor.
To Hell on a Fast Horse Page 10
