To Hell on a Fast Horse

by Peter Brandvold

  What in hell was she smiling about? Had she seen Prophet and was she amused by his presence? Or was her smile more sinister? Was she reprimanding Hunter in her own, subtle, ironic way?

  Perhaps she was threatening him?

  He’d have to talk to her as soon as possible. He’d have to explain the situation to her. That wouldn’t be easy, however, since obviously Helen was suspicious.

  He looked away from Verna McQueen. Out the corner of his right eye, he saw Helen move her head. Helen was now gazing toward the preacher, but had she a moment before caught him meeting Verna’s oblique, smiling stare? If so, she gave no indication.

  The preacher droned on, his head bowed so low that his chin nearly touched his black wool clergy blouse and white collar. His grizzled gray hair blew around the freckled, bald, domelike top of his head.

  “For Christ’s sake, Reverend,” Hunter was on the pointing of shrieking. “That’s enough! We’re burying only Eldon Wayne here today, not the King of friggin’ England!”

  Just then a baby started crying, and Whitehead took that as a cue to end his soliloquy. After the mourners had filed past Mona, offering condolences and dropping a coin or two into her husband’s old, salt-stained hat, Hunter managed to step far enough away from Helen long enough to grab Carlsruud’s arm and whisper, “We all need to meet at Tanner’s. Spread the word. One hour. Call it a memorial libation for our dear friend, Eldon, if you like.”

  Whether or not Helen Hunter had caught the glance her husband and Verna McQueen had exchanged during Reverend Whitehead’s belabored prayer, young Marshal Roscoe Deets had. He and Lupita had been standing to the Hunters’ far right, at one end of the curve the standing mourners had made around Mrs. Wayne, the Reverend, the coffin, and the open grave.

  Deets had gotten a good look at Mr. Hunter and Miss McQueen sharing that furtive glance, Miss McQueen with that funny, almost ominous smile on her pretty, doll-like face.

  Right then and there, Deets knew his suspicions had been correct. Miss McQueen had something to do with the powder keg of trouble that was sitting in the middle of Hazelton Street, just waiting for someone to touch a match to the too-short fuse and blow the whole town to kingdom come.

  Now Deets fished in his pants pocket for a dollar’s worth of change. He could only produce eighty cents, however. With a sheepish smile at the sobbing Mrs. Wayne, he dropped the coins into the hat, hoping that neither she nor anyone else around them was counting. Stepping away from Mrs. Wayne, following the line of mourners out toward the trail leading down Cemetery Hill, he glanced at Lupita.

  Deets’s pretty, round-faced wife smiled up at him, squeezing his hand.

  She said nothing more as she and Deets made their way to the bottom of the hill, where several buggies were parked and two saddle horses were tied to the wrought-iron hitch rack festooned at each end with a winged iron cherub strumming a harp. Deets caught movement in the distance to his right.

  He stopped and swung his head in that direction.

  His belly soured as he watched the bounty hunter ride his dun horse up to the top of a distant butte, heading away from Deets and the other mourners. The man’s broad back bobbed with the lunging of his horse. His faded Stetson was snugged down on his sandy-haired head, and his double-barreled, savage-looking shotgun hung at a slant across his back.

  He and the horse crested the butte and then dropped down out of sight on the other side.

  Deets had spied the man glassing the cemetery earlier. He was like a ghost, Prophet was. Haunting the town. Making a mockery of Deets’s authority. Or whatever authority he had, which wasn’t much, the young marshal had recently realized. The badge he was so proud of was a sham, worth about as much as the cheap nickeled copper it was made of.

  “Who was that?”

  Deets jerked, startled by his wife’s voice from just off his right shoulder. She was staring up at him from beneath her straw boater festooned with the black ribbons she’d arranged earlier that morning for the funeral. Under a light tan shawl, she wore a plain, brown and white print dress that wasn’t nearly as nice as the red one he’d given her. But the red dress hadn’t been suited for a funeral. On her feet were worn, brown, side-button shoes she was unaccustomed to wearing.

  Lupita stared up at her husband with concern.

  “He was standing on that hill during the funeral,” Lupita said. “He was looking through binoculars at us. Why?”

  Deets led Lupita along the side of the trail, heading toward Box Elder Ford sweltering in the midday heat, dust lifting as a hot breeze kicked up.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Deets said.

  “Now I am worried,” Lupita returned, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose as she studied her husband’s eyes. “Who is he, Roscoe? Please, tell me. I can tell you are concerned about him.”

  Deets didn’t want to worry her, but she already was worried. Besides, he felt like getting his own worry off his chest, although merely speaking about it certainly wasn’t going to get rid of the cause. No, only action would get rid of the cause. Deets severely doubted he was up to that kind of action . . . again.

  “That’s the bounty hunter who killed Eldon,” Deets told his wife as they continued walking down the hill, to the right side of the trail. He could hear the other mourners speaking behind him as they, too, headed back toward town.

  “Dios mio,” Lupita said, staring dully forward in shock. She looked up at Deets. “What was he doing up there?”

  “Sending a message, I guess.”

  “How unholy of him . . . to spy on the funeral of a man he killed. How disrespectful!”

  Deets chuckled morosely.

  “You are concerned,” Lupita said, looking up at her husband again.

  “Yeah, I’m a little concerned. But that don’t mean you need to be, honey.” Deets patted Lupita’s hand. “I’ve . . . I’ve got it all under control.”

  “Are you going to arrest him?”

  Deets chuckled again.

  “What is so funny?”

  “I was just thinkin’ how you sound like Hunter, Carlsruud, and the others. They all want me to arrest him, too. Only thing is, I don’t know if I got any cause to arrest him.” Well, it wasn’t the only thing. There was a little problem with his nerve, as well, though of course Deets wasn’t going to admit that to his wife. “They and several others shot his partner, a young lady. She’s over at Doc Whitfield’s place, gettin’ tended. Might live, might die. Meanwhile, Prophet’s on the lurk and makin’ everybody nervous as rabbits at a rattlesnake convention.”

  Lupita studied on that for a time, frowning down at the ground as they turned onto their street and headed for their little house. “Why did they shoot this young lady, Roscoe?”

  “That there I don’t know,” Deets said. “They won’t tell me nothin’. All I know is a passel of ’em rode out of town together a couple nights ago and not all of ’em came back upright. Wayne and Melvin Bly took bullets—Wayne, of course, fatally.” The young marshal kicked a rock in frustration. “What I should do is get everybody, including the bounty hunter, Prophet, in one room and have ’em all lay their cards on the table for me.”

  “So . . . why don’t you do that?”

  Deets and Lupita stopped walking as a buggy came rattling up behind them. Deets turned to see the polished leather chaise of Verna McQueen rolling up from the direction of the cemetery, her smart Morgan trotting handsomely in the traces. Miss McQueen dipped her chin cordially and smiled winningly with her rich, red lips and said, “Good morning, Marshal. Good morning, Mrs. Deets.”

  She passed on by, dust lifting from her high, thin, red wheels.

  “Miss McQueen,” Deets said, pinching his hat brim to the woman.

  “She is so beautiful,” Lupita said, gazing admiringly after the buggy, which was crossing Hazelton Street now, heading north. “Why do you suppose she lives alone? A woman so beautiful must have had many suitors.”

  Deets glanced at his young wife. Since she was ha
lf-Mexican, Lupita lived on a veritable island here in Box Elder Ford, subtly shunned by the white women. Aside from a couple of full-blood Mexican women, the half-Arapaho woman the blacksmith had married, and the occasional saloon girl, Lupita was the only woman in Box Elder Ford without pure white blood running through her veins.

  She didn’t seem to mind the lack of social interaction. After all, she’d grown up on a small, remote ranch with only her father and brother and a few wild horses and some chickens, until Deets had taken her away from there only a little over a year ago. Growing up, her closest companion outside her family was a coyote she’d raised from an orphaned pup.

  The lack of socializing, however, had kept her in the dark about such things as the rumors going around town about Miss McQueen.

  “Yeah, you’d think she would marry, wouldn’t you?” Deets said, staring at the sleek, black buggy curving up the trail between buttes on the north side of town. “Maybe she’s just got so many choices she can’t make up her mind.”

  “Hmmm,” Lupita said, also staring at the chaise, speculatively.

  “Well, I’d best get back to the office,” Deets said, thinking that he might soon pay a visit to the woman they’d just been talking about. Maybe from Miss McQueen he could get some answers, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted any.

  Deets doffed his hat and leaned down to kiss Lupita’s cheek.

  “Wait, Roscoe,” Lupita said, clutching his arm. “You still haven’t told me all that concerns you. I am your wife. You should share such things with me.”

  “All in good time, honey,” Deets said, giving her slender shoulders a reassuring squeeze. He himself wasn’t at all sure about anything. “All in good time.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  One hour after the funeral, Neal Hunter met Glen Carlsruud out front of the Arkansas River Saloon. They exchanged matching frowns and turned to the batwings over which L.J. Tanner could be heard shouting, “. . . and then he threatened to blow out my friggin’ mirror!”

  “Shit!” said big Lars Eriksson as Hunter and Carlsruud pushed through the batwings and let them clatter into place behind them.

  The two stopped just inside the saloon. Hunter scowled when he saw L.J. Tanner, Eriksson, Goose Johnson, Jim Purdy, and the sick-looking Melvin Bly gathered around a table in the middle of the room. There were three other men there, as well—two shopkeepers and the round-faced and portly banker, George Campbell, who had not taken part in the fracas up at the Ramsay Creek Cavalry Outpost, but who was listening in scowling consternation at Tanner. The saloon owner was the only one standing. He had a boot propped atop a chair and he was leaning forward on that knee, holding court, as Tanner tended to do.

  Tanner’s beefy half-breed bartender and business partner, Arnell Three-Bears, stood behind the bar, toweling out a beer mug with a typically bland expression on his wide, flat, crudely chiseled features framed in long, coal-black hair hanging to his shoulders, the ends haphazardly hacked off with a knife.

  Like Tanner, Arnell wore a patch over one eye, which he’d apparently lost in some grisly childhood accident when he and his brother had been practicing with their slingshots down by the river. Behind their backs, Tanner and Arnell were often wryly, mockingly referred to as the “Blinky Boys,” though Hunter failed to see either the reason for or the irony in the moniker.

  It had most likely arisen because Hunter and Arnell, both bullies, were roundly feared. The popularity of Tanner’s saloon was owed to the fact it was roomy, handily located in the center of town, served the best liquor at the best prices, and provided the best whores, though Tanner, who mistreated the girls, had trouble keeping them.

  Hunter thought he only had one, possibly two, at the moment, both girls probably asleep upstairs.

  “Gentlemen,” Hunter said, scowling and casting a cautious glance over his shoulder, “don’t you think it might not only be wise but prudent to take this meeting to the privacy of the billiard room? For chrissakes!”

  “Yeah,” said the liveryman, Jim Purdy, who dressed more like a well-to-do rancher than your typical, shit-shoveling livery stall swamper. “He was on that bluff overlooking Cemetery Hill. Watching the funeral through a pair of binoculars. No tellin’ where he is now!”

  “Can you believe that?” exclaimed Melvin Bly. He’d just taken a deep sip from his beer mug and wiped his mouth with the palm of his good hand. “Skulkin’ around up there in plain sight, watchin’ us like he was darin’ us to ride up there and tell him not to!”

  “Gentlemen!” Hunter wheezed out, trying to keep his voice down.

  “All right, all right,” said Tanner, removing his boot from the chair and straightening. “Let’s head for the billiard room, boys.”

  As the others rose from their chairs and started tramping toward a door at the back of the main drinking hall, Hunter turned to Arnell Three-Bears. “A pitcher of beer and a bottle of whiskey, Arnell. The good stuff.”

  “It’s all good stuff,” Tanner said, scowling his typical belligerence.

  “Ah, stow it, L.J.,” Hunter said, having no time for the saloon owner’s schoolyard bravado.

  He brushed past the man, heading for the billiard room, but he stopped abruptly and swung around toward the two men who had not been part of the eight who’d ridden out two nights ago.

  “Henry? Jack? I’m sorry, but this is a private meeting.”

  The men glanced at each other, crestfallen.

  “And keep everything you’ve heard here today under your hats, for chrissakes,” Hunter said, glaring at the impertinent L.J. Tanner, who merely returned a flat stare. Turning to the rotund banker, Campbell, he said, “You’re welcome, of course, George.”

  Campbell might not have ridden out that night, but he’d been part of the group who’d decided to go. Since Tanner worked closely with him, using his belligerence and, if necessary, his brawn to force repayment on mortgage loans, it was roundly assumed that Tanner had ridden in the fat man’s stead. Hunter doubted that Campbell had ever straddled a horse in his life.

  When the two extraneous men had left, grumbling, Hunter and the others gathered in the billiard room. They sat around one of the only two tables in the long, narrow room, against the far wall, between two tall windows. There were two billiard tables running nearly the length of the room, and Tanner sat on the edge of the one nearest the table the other men sat around, doffing their hats, clearing their throats, and exhaling cigarette or cigar smoke. Tanner held a half-filled beer mug in his right hand.

  When they’d all gotten comfortable, Arnell Three-Bears brought in a pitcher of beer, a whiskey bottle, and a stack of shot glasses. He also brought beer schooners for Hunter and Carlsruud.

  As he turned to leave the room, Hunter said, “Arnell, make sure we’re not interrupted, will you?”

  The half-breed merely grunted, went out, and closed the door behind him.

  Hunter filled his and Carlsruud’s beer mugs and then splashed whiskey into each of the shot glasses.

  “How’s the wing?” he asked Bly.

  “Aches somethin’ fierce,” Bly said, sulking.

  He lifted his whiskey to his lips and threw back half. “I still can’t believe that son of a bitch was bold enough to stand atop that butte yonder, watchin’ the funeral.”

  He chased the whiskey with a deep swallow from his beer schooner. “And Deets just stood there as though he didn’t even see him!”

  Tanner said, “Wilkinson would have dealt with this little problem when it first rode into town. Soon as we asked him to. Gibbons’s boys would have dug another hole up on Potter’s Field and they’d already have them friggin’ two bounty hunters dumped into it an’ snugglin’ with rattlesnakes!”

  Hunter said, “You wanted Wilkinson retired as badly as the rest of us did, L.J.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe I did. And maybe it was a mistake. What were we thinkin’ when we hired that kid?”

  “We hired the kid,” Campbell said in a resonate voice that bespoke the refinement of h
is moneyed class as well as the sonorous lilts of his Virginia upbringing, “because we knew we could control him. We ceased being able to control Bill Wilkinson. The power went to his head—you all remember that. It wasn’t all that long ago.”

  Tanner hung his head like an admonished schoolyard brat. Campbell was the only man in town who could cow Tanner, but only because Campbell held the note on the Arkansas River Saloon and paid Tanner handsomely to flex his muscles for him. Most of said flexing consisted of Tanner merely paying “courtesy” visits to the homes in Box Elder Ford of slow loan repayers or even just glaring at same from across his saloon floor. That was usually all it took.

  Hunter said, “I suggest we forget Deets for now. We’ll think about what to do about him once this little problem has been cleared up.”

  “And how do you propose to do that?” the bleary-eyed Bly asked, wincing against the pain in his arm, which he was cradling across his chest.

  “Look—there’s seven of us, for chrissakes,” Tanner said. “I say we gang up on the son of a bitch.”

  “What?” Campbell said. “Shoot him on the street? In front of the women and children and the men not part of this nasty little problem?”

  “After dark,” Jim Purdy suggested, taking a deep drag off his loosely rolled quirley and blowing the smoke toward the ceiling.

  Campbell shook his head. “Not in town, boys. Not in town. We cannot look like savages. Besides, we do have a town marshal.”

  “He’s not gonna do shit!” Tanner said, laughing.

  Campbell said, “Yes, but if we did that—shot a man down in the street—we’d be making a mockery of the young marshal. He’d be useless to us forever more . . . whatever we decided to do with him, and I don’t think I’m going to be for cutting him loose.” The fat banker gave a sly, heavy-lidded smile and puffed the fat stogie in his soft fingers. “He just bought a house. How would he pay for it without a job?”

  The others chuckled—some with genuine humor, some ironically, casting each other furtive glances.