Bishop lightly touched the stitching, taking back his fingers to check for blood on the tips. “Not the work of a surgeon.” He stepped back, motioned Dent from the wagon. The man eased off. “Were you really going to blow yourself apart?”
“I guess I was. I’m pretty used up.”
White Fox was walking over, her hatchet in hand.
“You let the old woman live,” Bishop observed. “To warn us?”
“To warn you,” he agreed. “And . . . I have a mother.”
“So, a beau geste,” Bishop said.
Dent held up his palms. “If you like.”
Bishop said, “You were waiting for us? For me and White Fox?”
Dent adjusted against the wagon wheel. “We were told to. The papers are always full of how White Fox used to trade here, so they figured one or both of you would end up here, no matter what.”
“Now the big one, Dent,” Bishop said. “Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know a name. German. Good with a scalpel. Not so good with thread.”
White Fox moved to Dent with, “This German did your doctoring?”
“His heart really wasn’t in it,” Dent said. He looked back. “Like mine, here.”
Bishop pulled Dent to his feet with one strong hand, then shoved aside the crates in the back of the wagon, checking for labels. “Field kits, for doctors riding out to the reservations.”
Dent said, “The blue crates, I think.”
“We’ll get you cleaned up,” Bishop said. “Give you a drink you can swallow, then you can try to be a little more complete with your answers.”
“Doctor Bishop—yes, I knew your name and I read about you, which is why I was dynamite-sitting here—I’ve told you much of all I know. We, this bunch, been here a few days, using up the one whore I got and all my corn liquor. We got paid to take the place and then wait. Then a fella showed with more money, and they paid me out for everything in the place. Weren’t even going to go to the black market, just blow it up or burn it so it wouldn’t reach them ailing tribes. They paid me to sit here, like this. I sent the cash home to my old mother in Littleton by post. Things haven’t been the same since the Pike’s Peak gold played out. That’s all I know.”
White Fox said, “They cut your throat.”
“Yeah.” Dent held his bandage with his hand. It was loose from everything he had done just now that wasn’t sitting still. He swallowed painfully. “Wish you had your chance?”
“The way you helped rob my people makes you one of the worst men I’ve ever known,” White Fox said. “If I wanted to end you, I would rub your skin raw with a stone, then cactus, everywhere, then take you to a salt flat to die.”
Dent had paled under his sunburn. He turned from White Fox, breaking her gaze. Bishop pulled a blue crate from the buckboard and dropped it, splitting the sides. Rolled bandages and bottled medicines poured onto the bloody ground.
Bishop said, “I’m with White Fox. There’s a lot of help in this wagon you were going to destroy.”
“But I didn’t,” Dent said. “Hell, before they kilt—I don’t know his name, the owner.”
“Grant Foster,” White Fox said. “You killed Grant Foster. Who is where?”
Bishop told her. She gripped the hatchet harder.
“Jeb . . . Mr. Rawlins,” he corrected himself, “he told me he’s been here more than twenty years, and nobody trades no more. Land’s been picked clean by the railroad hunters, and the army moved the tribes, and I can’t live off the dog-eaters who’re left. You don’t think he would have taken a deal to get out of here clean, forever?”
“He got out of here clean, forever,” Bishop noted.
“All right, okay,” Dent said. “I’ve been a bad’n forever; they bought me and my gang, and I didn’t even get a name of who hired me or who I kilt,” Dent said, watching Bishop unpack bandages one-handed. “You’ve done the same, and for no reason other than to kill. Kind of makes me the better man, don’t it?”
“Don’t believe the crap you read.”
“You shot Leech, here.” Dent looked at the mess on the dirt.
“Before he could shoot,” Bishop said.
That ended that. Dent eyed the bandages covetously. “You still going to doctor me up proper, Doc?”
“Better than proper.” Bishop popped the cork on a bottle of iodine, gesturing to White Fox. She yanked the kerchief off, causing Dent to yelp, then to yelp louder as Bishop splashed the antiseptic across the crude stitching on Dent’s cut throat, burning it clean. “Because you’re going to send a wire to Marshal Duffin at Fort Collins about what happened here, that we’ve got the wagon and supplies to move with your help.”
“I’m not going,” Dent replied.
“You are,” Bishop said. “Looks like you have an infection. It needs treating. They can’t amputate a gangrened head.”
Dent cried out as the burning went deeper . . . wiped tears on his shirtsleeve.
Bishop unwrapped a clean bandage, handed it to White Fox. She tore a section with her teeth, lay it on the wound, turned the section once, then tucked the end behind the gauze behind the neck.
The old woman called just then. White Fox turned to see her, now leaning against the trading post wall, egg-yolk eyes toward the sun, and holding out the tiny Cheyenne maiden for White Fox to take.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Lady Freemont
I know you can’t be angels; the stench here is too great. He thought a long moment; at least, it felt long. And it isn’t brimstone either.
Avery’s words, spoken in his head, were magically written in the dark, drifting from the direction of his mouth, actually moving in front of him like smoke signals, when he saw the two men enter the tiny room. He thought he was speaking, but there was only paralyzed silence from his throat. But he was still seeing the letters swirling in the air, then dissolving away. It probably came from the Bishop Memorial Wall. Seeing headlines all day and night kept them with him, announcing the events in his own life.
He smiled. He couldn’t help it. Hallucinations, a quiet, opium-like haze, were something he’d enjoyed more than once. The only difference was, he didn’t hurt then. He hadn’t been beaten, and scabbed blood wasn’t loosening from his scalp and floating into the sweat pouring down his face. The metallic smell was in his nose, the scent of rot.
Still drugged, Avery didn’t have the strength to move and plead at the same time. He tested the ropes chopping his wrists and ankles, then gave up, the cot sagging under his enormous weight. He tried to wiggle his fingers, to assure himself he could, but they wouldn’t move.
A wide, leather belt, with steel hooks, held his bruised head in place, as if he were being prepared for surgery.
His eyes blurred when he opened them, tears welling, struggling to focus on the figures moving about the room; brown shadows in front of dim light. He tried to give them faces but couldn’t, even as they stood close by and spoke.
“How much longer do we have to wait on this one here?”
The Southern-scented voice was answered the way the felon Smith answered everything: “Until the doctor tells us.”
Avery didn’t know what they were doing, other than talking. He could hear but not see them as they carried Marshal Duffin by his ankles and shoulders, dropping him on the cot opposite Avery, scattering insects, and tying him to the headboard and footers. That much the sheriff-mayor could determine by sound alone. Smith yanked the belts into place across Duffin’s head, buckling tight, as Cavanaugh double-knotted his slack arms and legs, anchoring him to the cot’s frame, then gave the ropes a little tug to make sure.
Cavanaugh said, “The marshal won’t last ’til morning, and I’ll wager good silver against it. Good silver.”
Smith said, “You don’t need your nose to breathe. Just the slits.”
“True, but he’s damn, damn near,” Cavanaugh said, coughing up at the smell of the room. “I know the boss wants a few more blood draws, but these boys
smell like rotten meat.”
Smith said, “Quiet your mouth.”
“Fine, fine. You’re not going to take the bet?”
“I am not a gambler,” he said. “But if you want box—?”
“The injury,” Cavanaugh said. “The injury.”
The men left. Avery could hear, now, the rasping breath of the other man. He was mouth-breathing, apparently having lost his nose in some manner.
Avery’s takeaway from the visit was not complicated. If the others weren’t angels, and there was a still-breathing—barely—man beside him, then he was still alive. And being alive, he must be needed by these people, whoever they were. Weiber-Krauss the German. And Smith—the pig. And the man with a Confederate voice that he didn’t recognize.
Avery had to smile—that, too, inside, since his mouth didn’t seem inclined to move. Here he was, a man who was no way a hero, splayed like the star of a penny dreadful.
No angels, but there’s a God for sure and he’s laughing at me. Me and—
That brought him to the other captive, who he couldn’t see, whose smell was lost in the mustiness of the room, whose breathing was like an accordion without the music.
And we are going ripe, he remembered. The other man must be injured on more than just his face.
As his brain came slowly to wakefulness if not focus, Avery recalled fragments of the assault that brought him here, thought with a sense of deep futility the useless discharge of his derringer. He felt betrayed by the little firearm. All those years, never having had to fire it, and the one time he did—
Bishop. That is why Bishop is such a man, he thought. He doesn’t carry what belongs in a woman’s handbag.
His roaming mind anchored itself to Bishop. Avery wondered where the doctor was and whether he would think the barkeep had received his just rewards. And then he remembered the German better—
It was your victims they were after, Dr. Bishop!
Avery considered that, in as much as he could consider anything. The victims—okay, the bodies for display or interment. Then why take him? Why not Homer? Where was Homer?
The man beside him moaned. In a way that said he hadn’t been cut in the throat or bashed in the mouth but had gotten hurt somewhere else. Probably the head. He sounded like any man Avery had ever heard crowned sideways by a bottle.
The moan came again.
And then so did the man with the voice like a cherry blossom. By now, Avery could crack his eyes. He watched the man, who was wearing Confederate pants, no shirt, and a swagger. It looked like he had on a cummerbund, but Avery decided it was a bandage taped carefully across his belly.
The Southerner turned up a lantern. Unless it was Avery’s imagination or the lingering effects of a drug, it was swaying a little.
No. The Confederate had bumped it with a shoulder, that was all. Yet the man could not be that big; the ceiling had to be that low.
The newcomer stepped around the cots, to where a dentist’s chair, outfitted with leather and steel restraints, was surrounded by shelves of antiseptics, glass bulbs, and beakers of various sizes. He selected a small bottle.
“Smith, did I ever tell you my mama ran a pest house? Right in the middle of Savannah. Rooms full of terminal cases, bedpans of infection emptied over the back fence. And the neighbors had no idea.”
“So, you know how fevers work, how infections spread,” Smith said, following him in. “Maybe you shouldn’t mouth so much, Cavanaugh.”
“I know more’n that,” the Confederate replied. “I’ve learned when folks are ready to die, so we can get maximum use from these, take the blood before it stops bein’ made.”
Smith eased his mass on a stool behind a rolling porcelain table covered with hypodermic syringes, amputation blades, and blood-collecting equipment all precisely laid out. He filled a surgical pan with carbolic solution, saying, “The doctor decides what happens here, not you.”
“I’m just telling my experience.”
Smith rinsed his hands in a pan of alcohol, then dried them with a towel he dropped into a wire basket. “I don’t think. I do what I’m ordered.”
“Unless it’s putting down a horse, right?”
“Horses are pure and good,” Smith said. “We are not.”
Cavanaugh snickered, uncorking some violet water and holding it under his nose to break the smell. He saw Smith’s hands curling, face turning beet red, and said, “Easy, big man. You need to learn how to take a joke.”
“You need to learn to make one.”
Cavanaugh looked toward the door and froze.
“Ja,” Smith said. “I heared it too.”
* * *
Dr. Weiber-Krauss’s buggy was a so-called gentleman’s carriage, with a folding top that he’d pulled up when he felt the first spittings of the afternoon shower. The wheels were as tall as the doctor’s chest, and handled the road to the Lady Freemont by bouncing over ruts and scattered mine debris, then landing hard, their shock-absorbing springs offering nothing.
He had trailed behind Smith and Cavanaugh, watching for danger. He had also been going slower than they, keeping one hand on a leather pouch on the seat beside him, holding in place fluted glass containers of blood and clouded water. Each bump brought down his hand, keeping the bottles from colliding. He rounded a bend in the old mine road, and was waved on by a man in muddy linens, perched on a slag ledge with a rifle cradled in his arms. The Muddy Linens man saluted the buggy as it passed, which Weiber-Krauss half-returned—more like a wave—before snapping his horse toward the Lady Freemont’s mine shack and tower.
Patches of snow laced the hills around the mine; frozen white sliding into the gray rock that had rolled down from the mountaintop, forming its own barrier around the ruined stables, shack, and laddered entrance to the shaft, which was blocked with rubble. The churned earth of the place was the color of old metal, with no plants growing at all. There were a few hardy weeds, and whatever fed on them moving low to the ground.
Weiber-Krauss circled his buggy around the buildings. The horse clopped loudly on the hard ground and occasional wood plank that had come from something once standing.
The office shack was on huge supports, built against the mountainside, that were collapsing inward but holding. The mountain itself was doing the heavy lifting. The corral was below and to the side, canvas nailed into place to cover where its walls had once stood, and the miners’ quarters were now an open pit, filled with blowing trash and the rusting corpse of a hand-pulled mine elevator. If this were a tale by the Brothers Grimm he had so loved as a boy, gnomes would live here.
They do, Weiber-Krauss thought without amusement or irony as he considered his two workers.
The Lady Freemont reminded Weiber-Krauss of ruins he’d seen on his travels throughout the South, homes and ports and factories and mills left skeletal and useless by Sherman and Lee, except there was no battle here, only abandonment. Now, these many years later, all of them that had not been torn down or rebuilt were simply rusted.
Cavanaugh stepped onto the deck outside the old office, leaning against a weather-beaten railing, lighting an already-rolled, and watching as Weiber-Krauss stopped the buggy next to a new, polished steel hitch in the shape of a wolf’s head. The sprinkling of rain picked up as he tied his horse, the storm rolling in across the Rockies carried by a snake of cold wind.
Behind Cavanaugh, Smith jumped four stairs at a time, then down around the Confederate and running around the side of the shack to the corral to unhook the hearse team, and lead them under the canvas and scrap-board shelter he’d hammered together.
Cavanaugh spoke from the deck. “We’ll be hearing about this one, Doctor, packing that marshal inside but letting our horses get their rumps wet. Smith complained all the way.”
Weiber-Krauss didn’t bother to answer. He came up the rickety stairs, satchel tucked under his arm and holding the leather pouch, which he placed by the shack door.
“This is difficult, gruesome work for most people,
” Weiber-Krauss said. “Smith isn’t human, I don’t care, but you—I still do not understand what a man of your refinement is doing here.”
“The pay is good and the entertainment, sir—you cannot beat it. We lost every man you gave me. At least in the war, the crews of the ironclads had training or skills or passion. These men had the ability to stop bullets with their bodies.”
“That was their purpose, if needed,” Weiber-Krauss said, opening his satchel with a snap of wrist movement.
“Well, they sure fulfilled it, and without a single scream,” Cavanaugh said, relighting his rain-dampened cigarette with a grin. “But one of them put a slug into the marshal’s leg, and he howled like a bayonetted dog.”
Weiber-Krauss said, “Where were you?”
Cavanaugh half-edged the spyglass from his pocket. “On watch, as ordered, after taking care of those crazy bastards in the junkyard, just like a Cheyenne would.”
“What happened after?”
“Bishop and the marshal blew it up, as you expected,” Cavanaugh said. “No more blacksmith. No more chubby man from Good Fortune.”
“Again, my confidence in your dead soul has been rewarded,” Weiber-Krauss said, handing Cavanaugh a small, tied sack.
The Confederate gave it a shake, hearing the jangle of the gold inside, saying, “I watched that Bishop, doctoring the marshal’s leg, that Cheyenne there too. Later, when he had me on the ground, it was quite a thing to look up at that shotgun, pointed at my face like a twenty-four-pounder cannon. Seeing it for real, it’s quite a weapon.”
Weiber-Krauss said, “Not as effective as ours.”
Cavanaugh looked at him. Weiber-Krauss was right, though the Confederate had never looked at a disease as a weapon. Not exactly. But it was, wasn’t it?
The rain was falling steady as oversized drops now, splattering the ground like bullet strikes against the slag and mud. Weiber-Krauss and Cavanaugh pressed themselves against the shack, under its bent-back tin roof and out of the afternoon shower.
Weiber-Krauss said, “This will pass in a few minutes.”
Cavanaugh closed in his shoulders, slumping, but still towered over Weiber-Krauss. He was still thinking about sickness as a weapon.
These Violent Times Page 12
