by Ralph Cotton
“Jesus . . . !” he said aloud.
“What is it?” Jason asked, not daring to take his eyes away from Jennings.
“You’ll have to come see for yourself,” Philbert said in a disgusted tone of voice.
“I never done nothing to him,” Jennings said, pacing back and forth beside the flickering fire like some irritated grizzly. “I never touched that man’s eye! I only undressed him,” he said.
Jason walked over and looked down with his brother at the naked couple. Jennings had broken the broomstick in half and jammed half of it down firmly into the dead man’s right eye.
“What the hell . . . ?”
Jason and Philbert stared at each other, bewildered.
“Well, somebody sure impaled him,” said Philbert.
“I know, but it wasn’t me,” Jennings insisted. “I only undressed him.”
“But why’d you even do that?” Jason asked.
“Because, so they both could, you know . . . look just alike,” Jennings said.
“Oh, I see,” Jason said, placating the irritated, pacing gunman. They both noted that Jennings had arranged the man and woman together in some strange embrace.
Philbert whispered, “He’s one crazy sumbitch, brother.”
“Yeah, I can see that for myself,” Jason whispered in reply. “Still, he’ll do whatever we tell him.”
The two walked back to the campfire, sat down and poured coffee into tin cups, carefully keeping their gun hands free.
Jennings still paced back and forth, seething, staring at them from across the fire. Jason and Philbert looked at each other.
“I didn’t do nothing wrong,” Jennings said. He slung coffee from his cup to the ground.
“Nobody said you did, Buck the Mule,” Jason said to him. “Now, why don’t you pour yourself some more coffee, sit back down and take it easy for a spell?”
“Yeah.” Philbert shrugged. “You did like any normal person would do. You stabbed a stick in a dead man’s eye, took off all his clothes and wrapped his arms around a woman you shot.” He chuffed to himself. “Sounds right as rain to us. . . .”
The three finished their coffee quietly and crawled beneath their blankets, each of them keeping a hand close to the butt of his gun.
The next morning, before the first rays of sunlight had mantled the horizon, they awakened, saddled their horses and rode away toward Kindred.
“If nothing else, it’ll be fun seeing a whole town walking around unarmed,” Philbert said, nudging his horse up into a trot.
No sooner were the three out of sight than, in the brush, consciousness came slowly upon Celia Knox in a haze of pain and fear. Her first thought was that she had just awakened from what she imagined to be the worst nightmare she’d ever had. But as shock and horror came back to her, she realized this had been no bad dream. This was real.
She felt Charles’ cold forearm on her; she saw his pale, purple-tinted face only inches from hers. She did not realize that the broken broomstick was protruding from his eye until she had scooted back from beneath his forearm and stared more clearly at his lifeless face. When she did realize what she was seeing, her first impulse was to scream, yet she stopped herself and scooted farther away in spite of the terrible pain in the center of her back.
“Oh God . . . ,” she whispered. A few feet away she spotted her dead husband’s trousers lying on the ground. With all of her effort, she dragged herself over the downed brush and rocky ground and grabbed the trousers with a bloody hand.
Now, if she could just get those trousers on, she told herself, in her addled state. Once she had them on, pulled up and buckled around her waist, she’d be all right. . . .
Sherman Dahl watched Sara Cayes light a candle. His eyes followed her in the flickering glow as she carried the candle dish to the bedside and set it on the small, wooden nightstand. He liked being with her—liked it so much it troubled him, he thought to himself.
“Her name was Lilly,” he said to her, answering the question she’d asked as she’d walked to the table a moment earlier. “Lilly Jones,” he said, “and yes, I cared a lot for her.”
“I can tell you did,” she said. She smiled and loosened her cotton gown, letting it fall around her ankles before she stepped out of it.
“Oh? How can you tell?” Dahl said, making room for her beneath the quilt beside him.
“You’re gentle with me,” she said. “I think you must have been gentle with her. I can tell how a man treats his woman by the way he treats me. Doves know a lot about men and their women. We should, as many men as we open our knees for.”
“Don’t talk like that about yourself,” Dahl said quietly.
“But it’s the truth,” she said. “Isn’t the truth what everybody wants to hear?”
“The truth might be best for us, but it’s not always what we want to hear.” Dahl looked into her eyes. He liked it there. “Anyway, I’m always gentle with women. At least that’s what I try to be.”
“Always . . .?” she questioned, giving him a look in the soft flicker of candlelight.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
They lay in silence for a moment. Whatever troubled him about her surfaced enough for him to mention it.
“I’m not looking to replace her—Lilly, that is,” he said quietly.
“I wouldn’t try to replace her,” Sara whispered. “I know I’m only with you while you’re here.”
“And when it’s time to go?” Dahl said.
She smiled. “Then it’s time to go,” she said. “I understand that.”
Satisfied, he let out a breath and whispered to himself, “Good. . . .” And he took her in his arms.
Maybe he was trying to replace the woman he’d lost. Maybe he knew it deep down, and maybe that was what had troubled him.
“I just want whatever time we have together to be good,” Sara said, moving over and atop him, her lips close to his ear, “and that is the truth.”
Dahl smiled in response.
Outside, from a trail flanking the widow’s shack a half mile away, Tribold Cooper and Denton Bender sat atop their horses and started at the bedroom window, watching the candle glow fade and eventually go out.
“I bet I can guess what they’re doing in there,” said Tribold.
“Yeah,” said Bender, “and here we are, like geese watching thunder.” He spit in disgust. “We ought to ride over and shoot this man full of holes. To hell with what Kern says.”
“No,” said Tribold Cooper, “we do it his way, for now anyway.”
“I can’t see what the marshal’s got in mind, the way he’s talking,” said Bender.
“I see what he wants,” said Cooper. “He wants to bleed this town a little at a time instead of all at once. Once they’re unarmed, he can put the squeeze on them hard as he wants to, any time he wants to. What can they do about it?”
“I expect that’s one way,” said Bender. “But I say, once we disarm this town, we need to rob it blind, burn it to the ground, then move on. Maybe ride over to Méjico, teach a few important words of inglés to some willing senoritas.” He grinned. “Why be two-faced about it?”
“I agree,” said Tribold, “but for now it’s Kern’s play. We’re just the hired guns—I mean deputies,” he corrected himself.
The two sat in silence for a moment, staring out at the dark silhouette of the widow’s shack against the purple starlit sky.
“It wouldn’t hurt to ride over and take a closer look, would it?” Bender asked. “Maybe even look in through the window?”
“I was just now thinking the same thing,” Cooper said with a sly grin. “What Marshal Kern doesn’t know won’t hurt him. . . .”
Lying beside Sara, Dahl heard the slightest sound of hoof striking stone on a flat rocky stretch of ground beyond the shack, farther from town. He stiffened and held Sara in a way that signaled her to stay still.
After a second, she whispered in his ear, “What is it, Sherman?”
Da
hl didn’t answer. Instead, he touched his finger to her lips and gestured for her to stay put. He stood up from the bed, naked, feeling the pain in his chest, and stepped into his trousers.
Sara watched him slip his big Colt from its holster in the rolled-up gun belt. She heard the quiet, metallic click of the cylinder as he checked the gun on his way to the door.
On the rocky ground headed toward the shack, their horses at a walk, Cooper and Bender didn’t see the door open in the black of night; they didn’t see Dahl ease out onto the porch and stand with his back to the front of the shack.
“Can you keep that damn hay burner from stumbling on every rock in the territory?” Cooper asked Bender in a harsh, angry whisper.
“He’s all right now, damn it,” Bender replied in the same tone of voice.
Dahl called out, “Who goes there?”
“Oh, shit!” said Bender. Instinctively, he drew his Colt and fired toward the sound of Dahl’s voice before he could stop himself.
Identifying the flash of light from the gunshot as his target, Dahl fired three shots as fast as he could pull them off. One bullet streaked past Bender’s head, another whistled past Cooper’s side, so close that he felt the slap of its wind on his shirt. The third bullet struck Bender’s boot heel as he turned his horse and batted his heels to its sides.
Dahl heard the gunman let out a squall as the impact of the bullet stung the sole of his foot and ripped his boot away. Then he heard only the sound of running horses headed out across the rocky ground.
“What was that?” Sara asked, rushing from the bed out onto the font porch, nothing but a sheet held to her bosom to cover herself. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” Dahl said, his arm going around her as she stepped out the door. “It was nothing,” he said, gazing into the darkness. “Leastwise, nothing I wasn’t expecting.”
“You—you’re not going after them, are you?” she asked warily.
Dahl looked down at her, seeing her in the soft pale purple light of the moon, feeling the warmth of her against his bare chest. “What do you think?” he said quietly, his Colt still smoking in his hand.
The two turned and walked back inside. Dahl bolted the door behind them and followed her back to the bed.
Chapter 6
At dawn, Sherman Dahl walked out of the widow’s shack and stood in its weedy, rock-strewn yard. He carried his rifle in the crook of his arm. To his left stood the main street leading into Kindred. To his right, a dusty trail ran out across the rocky flatlands. He studied the skyline of the town for a moment, then turned and walked in the direction of the flatlands.
The pain in his chest had diminished greatly; the purple skin color had already begun to lighten and heal. He could ride, he was certain. But he was in no hurry. He liked it here. He liked Sara Cayes, he told himself, and that was as much as he wanted to make of it.
Out beyond the front yard, he found the hoofprints of the two horses from the night before. At a point where he saw the prints turn full circle and head back the way they’d come, he stooped down, picked up the busted boot heel and looked it over in his palm.
Town Marshal, Emerson Kern . . . ?
No, not Kern himself, he told himself. Maybe someone he’d sent, just to keep an eye on things.
All right. . . . He could abide that. Kindred was the marshal’s town. Kern had a right to send someone snooping if he thought it was necessary. In that case, Dahl thought, he was glad no one got shot last night. That could have complicated matters. After a moment he pitched the broken heel away, dusted his hands together and walked back to the shack. Silvery sunlight had begun to ascend, wreathing the eastern horizon.
When Dahl and Sara had finished breakfast, and the only two plates and eating utensils Sara owned were washed and dried and put away, they walked to the rickety, weathered barn where Dahl’s horse stood in the only usable stall.
“I bought some hay and some grain from the livery barn,” Sara said, gesturing toward the fresh pile and the small feed sack of grain sitting beside it. “The liveryman delivered it.”
“You think of everything,” Dahl said. Before he left, he would pay her for the hay, the grain and everything else she’d done for him. But now was not the time to discuss it.
“I try to,” she said proudly. She walked over and untied the top of the grain sack, pulling out a small wooden scoop. “See?”
Dahl walked over, took the scoop from her hand and gathered up a generous portion for his horse. He walked to the stall, reached over the rail and poured the grain into a gnawed-down feed box. The big tan dun took to the grain.
“How long have you been coming here, getting this place back into shape?” he asked.
“For a while,” Sara said, “but I don’t know if you can call this getting it back into shape.”
“All this, you’ve done with money you make at the saloon?” he asked.
“At the brothel,” she said, keeping nothing back from him. “Jake Jellico’s Lucky Devil is a saloon and brothel, remember?” she said.
“I remember.” Dahl nodded, rubbing the dun’s head as the animal munched on grain.
“Anyway,” Sara said, “I managed to save back enough of my own money and get the bedding, the curtains, the plates and dinnerware. The rest was mostly just cleaning up and fixing up a few things.”
Dahl looked at her. “You’ve done quite a lot,” he said. He wondered exactly why she’d gone to so much effort—what was motivating her—yet he wasn’t about to ask.
But as if she had seen the question in his eyes, Sara began to explain. “I know it seems foolish, a dove coming here, spending her free time . . . her money doing all this.” She gestured a hand to indicate the entire run-down patch of land and its weathered buildings. “But I figured, who knows, maybe someday things will change for me. I might not be a whore all my life.” She smiled with optimism. “Does that make any sense?”
“Yes, it does,” Dahl said. He knew few doves ever worked their way out of the brothels and moved on to more respectable lives. But it was not for him to say. He had started his adult life as a small-town schoolteacher. Look at him now, he thought. A man killer, a fighting man, a gun for hire available to the highest bidder.
The Teacher, some called him.
Sara shrugged. “Anyway, not everything we do has to make perfect sense. Have you ever done something just because it felt like the right thing to do?”
“Yes, I have,” Dahl said, “but it seems like a long time ago.” He offered a thin smile.
Sara saw the weariness in his face. She reached out and brushed a strand of his long wheat-colored hair out of his face.
“It probably wasn’t as long ago as you think,” she said, gazing into his cold blue eyes. Trying to fathom whatever secrets he kept there.
“Probably not, but it’s been a while,” Dahl said. He looked away for just a second, just long enough to keep himself from giving anything away.
But her eyes followed his.
“I’m not the person to say what’s good and what’s not.” He turned his eyes back to hers. “Sometimes what’s good take its time revealing itself to us.”
“I know,” she said softly. “But sometimes it’s all we get . . . just knowing that good might be coming to us.”
“I suppose,” he said. He tried to turn away again, but this time she pressed a hand to his cheek and held his gaze.
“Were you in the war, Sherman Dahl?” she asked, her tone trying to keep the question as light as possible. She gave a slight smile. “You remind me of men I’ve known who were in the war.”
“Oh, how so?” Dahl asked.
“Just a sadness, a seriousness or something,” she said, still holding his face. She liked looking at him. He was a handsome man, she thought, appraising him. Hair the color of sunlight . . .
His eyes were pale blue and cold at a glance, but they warmed as she searched deeper into them. He wore a trimmed downturned mustache only a shade darker than his hair. T
he shadow of his beard stubble was a shade darker yet.
“Yes, I was in the war,” he said. “Before the war I taught school. When the war had ended I went back and taught, for a time anyway.” He paused as if wondering how much further to go about himself, his past.
“And . . . ?” she asked quietly, not pushing, but still encouraging him to take it as far as he felt comfortable.
“A band of men—the Peltry Gang—attacked the town where I taught school,” he explained. “They burned the schoolhouse to the ground and rode away. I rode with a posse led by Sheriff Abner Webb, and we hunted them down.” He looked away, then back to her and said, “Afterward, I never seemed able to get settled back into teaching. I’ve been a hired gun ever since—a fighting man, I call myself.”
“Is—is teaching school what you want to do?” she probed gently.
His eyes snapped back to hers intently. “I can think of no more noble purpose in life than to acquire knowledge for the sake of passing it along to a child,” he said.
“Yes, then you do want to go back to teaching?” she asked.
His eyes seemed to withdraw from hers. “No, I doubt that I ever will,” he said.
She stood waiting expectantly for more, but he turned away from her and gazed into the dark stall, one hand on the dun’s muzzle.
“I see . . . ,” she murmured finally.
He did not turn his attention from the horse until he’d heard Sara’s footsteps leave his side and walk back to the house.
Inside, Sara sat at the table with her hands folded on her lap as he walked through the door and closed it behind himself. She looked up at him.
“Last year a man hired me to hunt down a gang of robbers led by Curly Joe Hobbs,” he said. “The gang killed the man’s young daughter during a bank robbery.”
Sara looked on quietly. “I’ve heard of Curly Joe Hobbs and his gang,” she said. “I heard they met their end, but I didn’t know who killed them. I just thought it was a posse, I suppose.”
“I killed them,” Dahl said quietly. “I brought back Curly Joe Hobbs’ head in a jar, just as I was asked. I brought the gang’s ears back on a string.”
