“Weren’t nothing to be done,” said Jed. “Tree gave out; that’s all.”
The showgirl flung herself at him, burying her face in his shirt. Jed grimaced. The chain had cut into his torso. The last thing he needed was someone holding onto him, however distraught that person may be.
He waited, stoic, until the girl had cried herself out. The ladies in black were standing or sitting around in most unladylike postures. Some had removed their bonnets. Miss Dupree dried her eyes and stared at them.
“Something different about you ladies,” she said.
“You could say that,” the nearest stood up straight and met the showgirl’s gaze. He sent an apologetic look to the gunslinger. “Sorry, Jed; the jig’s up.”
***
The men in skirts, now numbering nine, were warming themselves around the burning remains of the horses. They stepped aside to allow the showgirl to join them.
Nights are cold out here, Jed knew, but he also knew they couldn’t stay there, all lit up by firelight. That hole through the driver hadn’t spontaneously appeared of its own accord. Jed was keen to get everyone under cover before the shooter tried again.
“What happened, Jed?” shivered one of the men, hugging himself within his shawl. “Why’d we go off the road like that?”
Jed spat into the fire. It sizzled.
“Mechanical fault,” diagnosed a second man. “Never did trust these contraptions.” He made to kick at a chunk of burning horse but the flames grabbed the hem of his skirt and he flapped around in a panic to extinguish them.
Everyone was looking at the gunslinger. His strong features were illuminated from underneath. A red glow danced in his eyes.
“Ain’t the horses,” he said, keeping his voice low. Perhaps they were being watched right then; perhaps they were being overheard. “Our driver was -”
“Shot!” gasped a man, clutching at his blouse. He dropped to his knees and fell face down in the fire. The others flew into a panic.
“Get down and stay down!” Jed yelled, his revolvers drawn.
The men dropped to the ground. Some pulled their skirts over their heads and lay there trembling. How anybody could take them for hardened outlaws was beyond Jed’s understanding. He took Miss Dupree by the hand and led her, stooping low, to a clump of brush. By daylight it would provide no cover at all but in the middle of the night, its shapeless shadow was good enough - Jed was banking on it.
“What’s happening?” the showgirl said a little too loudly in her alarm.
“Quiet!” said Jed. “Ain’t no time for exposition. Now, you sit tight, Miss; I’ll be right back.”
Miss Dupree was reluctant to be left on her own. She clutched at Jed’s arm but he was gone.
Jed dropped to his belly and crawled along like a lowdown yellow-bellied lizard, using his elbows as both hands and feet.
That feller had been shot in the front... Jed gauged the direction whence the bullet had come. There was, within range of your average firearm, an elevated area of land with steep sides, worn smooth by the passage of time and the course of some long extinct river. Of course, Jed realised, the shooter could have moved. Or he could be setting up to pick off another of Jed’s party. All Jed knew was getting up on that mesa was his best bet.
He scooted around to the far side and flattened his back against a wall of rock to catch his breath. Then he held it. And listened.
A fall of small stones, no bigger than grit most of them, rained on Jed’s hat. There was somebody up there! And that somebody was on his way down. He’s doing what I’d do, Jed thought, coming down the far side so nobody don’t plug him. He’s coming to ground level because he cain’t see nobody from up there. The men’s black attire was making them nigh on invisible against the ground and with Miss Dupree stashed in the shrubs...
Jed could see a shadowy figure about twenty feet above him. He got to his feet and aimed both revolvers at the feller’s back.
“Just come down real slow,” was Jed’s advice. “You and me going to have a nice little chat.”
“D - don’t shoot!” the climber pleaded, almost losing his hold on the slippery surface.
“Take your time,” said Jed. “Ain’t nobody in a rush.”
The shooter’s boots touched the ground. He was facing the rocks but he raised his hands high.
“Now turn around,” said Jed. “Real slow.”
The feller complied. Jed could see he was a slender man, well dressed. He had a thin moustache that drooped to match his bootlace tie.
“Move!”
Jed made him march towards the dying embers of the fire. In their glow he could see the man was wearing rings and chains of gold. His ear was pierced with a gold hoop and his waistcoat was of the finest scarlet silk. The ostentatious garb of a successful bounty hunter.
The men in skirts peeled themselves from the ground. They grouped behind the gunslinger and hurled invective at the captive.
“You shot Jeremiah!”
“Shoot the varmint, Jed; right between the eyes!”
“That’ll learn him!”
“Yeah!”
“Quiet!” The word from Jed was enough to silence but not appease the eight angry men at his back. He kept a revolver trained on the prisoner. “Who are you? Which of us have you come for?”
The second question elicited gasps from the men in skirts. The prisoner looked at them all in contempt. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell over, revealing the panting figure of Miss Sonia Dupree with a hefty rock in her hand. She spat on the prone figure. “That’s for Filbert Finn,” she scowled.
The feller wasn’t dead but would have a week-long headache when he came to. Jed prised the stone from the showgirl’s hand in case she set about the varmint again. Miss Dupree collapsed into sobs; there was no shortage of men, albeit skirted ones, to console her. Jed set to tying up the unconscious man with the lasso old Zeke had given him.
“Who is he, Jed?” asked one of the party. “Why’d he come after us?”
“Bounty hunter,” Jed shrugged. “I figure he’s after yonder songbird. Tried to get all of us, just to make sure. Then, in the dark, he couldn’t tell who was who, what with y’all dressed like ladies.”
Jed felt a mite guilty about that: the cross-dressing had been his idea.
“Whatcha gonna do with him, Jed? Shoot him? Leave him here all trussed up to die?”
Jed sent the questioner a look that said neither of those options was viable.
“Shooting a man in a gunfight’s one thing,” he said, his voice even, “But I ain’t in the business of gunning anybody down like a mad dog. Ain’t my place. We’ll take him with us to Tarnation. Sheriff Dawson’ll take him off our hands and he’ll be tried in a court of law, as is right and fitting.”
“Then they’ll hang him or shoot him, won’t they, Jed?”
“If that’s what’s right and fitting.”
“Do you think it’s right and fitting? A man kills so that man must be killed?”
Jed took a while to answer. “I uphold the law. And if the law changes then I’ll uphold the new one.”
His interlocutor was dissatisfied. He looked at the unconscious figure on the ground and gave him a kick before shuffling off to join the others gathered around Miss Dupree, who was singing a melancholic lullaby.
Jed looked down at the bounty hunter. A mercenary killer with dollar signs where his conscience ought to be. Am I any different, he asked himself? Except instead of cash, I’m on my way to hunt down and kill a ten-year-old boy - for - for what?
To save my friend.
Somehow, Jed didn’t feel any nobler or more willing to pursue his quarry.
Chapter Seventeen
On Foot!
The plan was to get moving at first light and try to reach t
he nearest outpost or hamlet or what-have-you before the sun got too high and too mighty but, with the bounty hunter still dead to the world come sunup, their departure was delayed until he could be woken up. Ordinarily a bucket of water would do the trick but considering all their provisions were at the bottom of Greenhorn Canyon, they had no water to waste - or indeed to use wisely. Jed had to resort to other means.
He pulled off the varmint’s expensive boots and tried scratching the soles of his feet with a sharp stone. The bounty hunter didn’t stir; the showgirl had brained him good.
“Leave him be, Jed,” the expert brainer of bounty hunters whined. “No better’n he deserves. Lousy skunk would’ve murdered us all without blinking.”
Several of the men in skirts shared Miss Dupree’s opinion. Jed ignored them and continued his efforts to revive the lousy skunk. He crouched near the bounty hunter’s head.
“He is breathing, ain’t he, Jed?”
“Shame if he is,” added Sonia Dupree.
Jed leant in close. He bit the bounty hunter’s ear.
With a scream, the feller came to, flailing and wailing, with the disoriented demeanour of someone rudely yanked from a nightmare. His eyes grew wide and darted around all the faces standing over him. To see so many men in ladies’ clothes was a surprise to him but it was the pain in his earlobe that was commanding the major part of his attention.
“You bit me!” he gasped in shock and disbelief. He tried to touch the offended extremity but saw that his hands were bound together in front of him.
“Woke you up, didn’t it?” Jed straightened up. “Can you walk?”
“Not without my boots, I cain’t.”
Jed retrieved the footwear in question from the man in a skirt who was attempting to requisition them. Jed threw them at the bounty hunter’s chest. “Put them on. We’re hitting the trail about five minutes ago. As we walk, we’ll talk.”
While the bounty hunter tried to slide his feet into his boots, handicapped by his harnessed hands, Sonia Dupree expressed her indignation through some huffing and puffing and the employment of several choice terms that some of the men had never heard before. She would lead, she declared; the eight ladies would follow and Jed and the scoundrel skunk, snake-in-the-grass (and many other epithets we shrink from publishing) could bring up the rear.
“Keep him away from me, Jed,” she warned. “There’s more than one way to put up a parasol.”
Off they set. Some of them were already complaining about the heat. Jed didn’t respond - what the hell was he supposed to do about it anyway? He knew they’d fall quiet soon enough when their throats got too parched for complaining.
With his hands bound in front of him, the bounty hunter looked like a supplicant on a pilgrimage or one of those praying bugs. Jed kept a gun drawn in case the varmint should try to escape: shooting a criminal evading justice was acceptable to Jed’s moral code. They walked in silence.
Jed took a swig of water. The bounty hunter said nothing, didn’t even look, but he must have heard the sloshing of liquid in the canister. Jed held it towards him. The bounty hunter made a face that questioned whether Jed remembered his hands were tied. Jed made him stop walking. He tipped the container at the bounty hunter’s dry lips.
“Only fitting,” the prisoner opined, water droplets clinging to his neat little beard. “My water in the first place.”
Jed ignored him and passed the canister up the line. Everybody got a swig. They walked on with the sun pounding their heads like a frenzied drummer.
“Name’s Flint,” the bounty hunter piped up after another mile. “Jackson Flint. You’ll forgive me if I don’t shake your hand.”
Jed spat.
“Weren’t nothing personal,” Flint continued, “Tipping the stage like that. I only meant to clip the driver’s wings a little bit so you’d all slow down.”
Jed said nothing. Flint chuckled.
“Just my dumb luck to find a coach full of menfolk all dressed up like womenfolk. Hell, it was so dark I couldn’t see who was what.”
Jed bristled. Flint’s casual attitude to the murder of innocent folks rankled with him - to put it mildly - but more than that, it irked Jed to know he’d been right: the bounty hunter would have picked them off one by one until he hit his target - and then would have wiped out the rest anyhow because dead men tell no tales.
Flint’s next remark made the gunslinger feel worse. “We ain’t so different, you and me. And you can spit on the ground as much as you like and show me contempt with your boot heels but it don’t make it any less true.”
Jed’s forehead furrowed. He wasn’t going to dignify the mercenary’s commentary with an answer.
“Think about it,” Flint went on. “We both get paid to do a job. And that job is getting people out of the way. We just show up out of the blue when it ain’t none of our business and POW! We remove people from that situation and then we get paid. Only our paymasters are different. Excepting I’m free; it’s up to me if’n I takes on a job or not. You think I ain’t picky? That there ain’t nothing I won’t do? Ask yourself the same question, Mister Hotshot Gunslinger. Is there anything you won’t do in order to get your job done?”
“I think...” Jed growled, “...I think I’ve heard enough jabbering from you.”
The gunslinger’s pent-up aggression amused the bounty hunter. He held his tongue for another mile before starting up again.
“Like I say,” he resumed as if there had not been a lengthy hiatus, “it wasn’t my intention to kill the driver or crash the coach. I just wanted to stop it. Guess I got a mite over-enthusiastic on the job. And now I’m hurt, Jed - and I don’t mean the wallop I took to the back of my head, although that sure is hurting like a doozy. I mean my professional pride. I ain’t never mussed up a job like this before. And to see her there, larger than life and busting with it, walking ahead of me, twirling that purty parasol, it grieves me, Jed. It sorely does. You must know what I’m talking about, Jed: that feeling when the one you’re after gets away.”
Jed allowed himself the slightest smirk. “Cain’t say I do.”
“Well,” Flint waxed philosophical, “the day is not yet done”
Jed wondered what he meant by that but didn’t like to ask. He hoped he wasn’t going to regret not putting a bullet in the bounty hunter’s brain. Onward they trudged and the sun approached high noon.
***
As the afternoon dragged on, the landscape became somewhat more accommodating to the weary walkers. The ground was softer under their feet, thanks to lush grass, vivid green and yielding. Trees spread their canopies over the track, providing pools of shade. The group paused to take shelter and to ease their aching feet.
“Cain’t be far off farmland,” said one of the men in skirts, with more hope than judgment in his remark.
They rested for a couple of hours while the sun was at its strongest. Jed tied Flint’s rope around a tree trunk. The bounty hunter was able to sit but not move.
Flint smirked and took advantage of the opportunity for a nap. Jed took advantage of the break to approach Miss Dupree to ask her a couple of pertinent questions. The showgirl was in no mood for talking but she offered to share her parasol. She patted the grass beside her and batted her eyelashes but Jed remained standing.
“Tell me, Miss Dupree, why would somebody sic a weasel like our friend over yonder on you? And who would do such a thing?”
The eyelashes flickered in a hummingbird’s blur. “Why, sir! I do declare! I have no idea what you’re talking of.”
Jed’s lower lip curled with impatience.
“Oh, all right!” Sonia Dupree got to her feet. She drew Jed aside from the rest of the group - most of whom were asleep anyhow. “I cain’t lie. Not to you - to myself maybe, but not to you.”
“Miss Dupree...”
T
he showgirl didn’t look so sassy all of a sudden. She had the forlorn look of a castigated child caught dressing up in her mother’s finest things.
“There’s only one man who’d want me dead and want it enough to hire some varmint to do the dirty work.” Her lips quivered. Tears stained her powdered cheeks with kohl. She sniffed and looked Jed in the eye. When she spoke, her voice caught in her throat.
“That man is my father.”
***
Ain’t my business prying into family business, Jed thought, but when that family business intrudes into my business, which is upholding the law - then it becomes my business.
He didn’t need to know the details; he assured the young lady she was as safe as she could be, with her would-be assassin trussed up like a turkey, in the company of eight other men besides himself - even if those fellers were gussied up like spinsters of the townswomen’s guild.
Rested but hungry and parched, they pressed on into this greener and more pleasant land. It was not long before they were confronted by a fence running in either direction as far as the eye could see. It was the height of a man (skirted or otherwise), this fence, and was comprised of five horizontal bars, evenly spaced, spanning between uprights at regular intervals. It wasn’t so much for keeping critters in or out but chiefly a demarcation of a boundary. On one side of this fence, the land belongs to the erector of the fence, was all the fence seemed put there to say.
The party clustered at the fence, waiting for Jed and Jackson Flint to catch up.
“What should we do, Jed?” one of the skirted men asked as the gunslinger and his prisoner drew near.
“Ain’t no signs warning against trespassing,” piped up another.
“Don’t mean nothing.” Jed narrowed his eyes as he scanned the fence from left to right and back again. “Folks don’t wear signs saying DON’T MURDER ME but it still happens.”
Everyone looked pointedly at the captive bounty hunter. Miss Dupree looked about ready to introduce her parasol where the sun don’t shine.
Under the Vultures Moon Page 11
