These Violent Times

by C. Courtney Joyner

  Dressed in Coward’s clothing, Bishop kicked the Colts out of reach with the toe of his right boot; the boot and the long johns were all that remained of Bishop’s clothing. He squatted in front of the dying man, tucked the revolver in his a-little-too-big blue jeans, and reached across his own belly. He pulled the severed, still-bloody arm from the sleeve of the buckskins, the arm he had fixed there with parts of his rig harness. The Spencer was set in a fist tied tight around it with the dead man’s shoelaces. He plopped the tomahawk-hacked limb across the legs of the failed assassin.

  Dr. Bishop, a man of acute medical knowledge and skill, had struck breastbone to dull the impact of the bullets. The lungs of his victim, both left and right, would still drown in blood, and soon, but not too soon. Not soon enough for Innocence Lee.

  Bishop crouched and put a palm to the two wounds, which were essentially one. He applied pressure, not to stop the bleeding but to cause pain. Innocence Lee screamed deep in his throat, the awful sound staying there.

  “Who are you working for?”

  The question was calm but the need was urgent.

  Innocence Lee made an effort of shaking his head, managed impressively if briefly. Bishop leaned into his palm a little. Innocence Lee screamed again, this time the sound rising about to his tongue.

  “It will take you, I’d say, another half-hour to die,” Bishop informed him. “I can probably draw that out. I can certainly make it hell. Or you can talk and die now, without any pain.”

  The head shook again, a little.

  “I’m guessing there’s evidence of some kind in your saddlebag,” Bishop went on. “I doubt that other lunk could write or read, but you can. Maybe a letter with a postmark? A map in handwriting I’ll recognize? Notes you made when Dent passed through?” Bishop pressed again. “I am sure, very sure, Walter G. Dent did not cover his tracks, because he did not expect anyone but you and your partner to follow them.”

  Innocence Lee was panting to keep from screaming and also to keep from speaking.

  Bishop covered his mouth with a bloody hand. “Oh no. You don’t hyperventilate yourself into oblivion. You will live and feel the full term of your injuries unless you tell me what I want to know.” Bishop waited a moment. “Maybe it will help if you think of this as ’last rites.’ Are you remotely religious, Innocence Lee? Secretly devout? If you confess your sins, God may yet forgive you. Thirty, forty minutes is a long time for Him to make a final, eternal judgment.”

  This was something else that had played through the mind of Innocence Lee before sleep. Maybe a self-hating part, he didn’t know. But it was: how will you die? If dying was the only thing left to do, would you stay true to your life or repent it all in an uncharacteristic act of terror? And most of all—this had to do more with being caught by the Indians, who were known to delight in torments of the flesh, of others—would you have the resolve to take your own life by direct action or as a result of direct action?

  With supreme effort, Innocence Lee rolled his spine off the cottonwood and reached to where Bishop had kicked one of his Colts, not because he expected to reach it but because he expected Bishop to stop him the quickest way possible. The only way a one-armed man could be sure of stopping him.

  As Innocence Lee rolled-flopped toward his right, Bishop stepped back with one leg, still at a crouch, drew the Remington, and shot the man in the side of the head. Innocence Lee jumped back, into the tree, wrapped around it slightly from the impact, stiller than the dying crack of the firearm.

  Bishop exhaled. The man had principle. And in the end, he died in a quasi-religious state. The bullet had struck him in the temple.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Divide and Conquer

  The helpless mass that was Joseph Daniel Avery had used the inattentive comings and goings of Cavanaugh and Smith to rally his wits. The man beside him was still unconscious, as whispered pssts had determined whenever the others were gone. Smith was the one who came in, mostly, working over on his little table. On what, Avery had no idea. Except that it smelled like compost.

  He tried not to be scared, but that was increasingly difficult. No one abducted men, locked them to a bed, and experimented in a corner with rot unless he had malicious intentions. Avery recalled some of the blacks in New York, the ones from the islands, who had potions and animals and put the two together in bizarre ceremonies, with dance and blood. Voodoo, they called it. The Municipals had called it “Caribe Kick-a-row,” when the immigrants all went mad.

  These men were not mad, far as Avery could tell. They were quiet and methodical and for that reason, frightening. They had a plan and he was a part of it. The fact that he was being forced to participate was not a good sign.

  Someone entered and the man in the bed looked over. It was a dark but familiar shape—the hat. He recognized the homburg. The wearer came over, to the far side of the bed, away from the other prisoner.

  “Good day, your excellency,” Weiber-Krauss said, leaning over the bed, one hand on the wall. “Or should I say, more formally, ’Mr. Mayor-sheriff-bartender . . . opportunist’?”

  Avery continued to breathe through his poorly coordinated mouth, which was about all he could do with it.

  Weiber-Krauss continued to peer down through the darkness. “Mr. Avery,” he went on smoothly, “how would you like—to remain alive?”

  The man in the bed looked up. His eyes, which had been struggling to see in the dark, relaxed. So did the rest of his face. It wasn’t until that moment Avery realized there were choices.

  “I can see that you would, and I suspected as much,” Weiber-Krauss said. “Which is one reason you are here. I think you would rather live and be quite well-off instead of dying and being merely and conclusively—dead.”

  Avery nodded weakly. Weiber-Krauss motioned him still with a little downward wave of his hand.

  “Can I assume we have an agreement?” Weiber-Krauss asked. “A nod will do.”

  Avery nodded once. It was only when fear started flowing away that he realized how tense he had been. Bishop had said he’d sell his grandmother; he was ready to listen to terms.

  “Very good,” Weiber-Krauss said, openly pleased. “We are partners, then, and I will tell you now what I want you to do. You are going to be set free. Not just from this bed, but . . . freed. Liberated. You will be given a wagon. You will drive it to Fort Collins—with one passenger, the gentleman to your right—and then you will return here. You return the wagon, you receive one hundred dollars in gold. How does that sound for three days’ work?”

  It sounded, Avery thought, too good to be a sincere offer . . . but it was the only offer on the table and he knew he was going to take it.

  “To spare you the effort of speech,” Weiber-Krauss said, “I will answer questions you probably would ask if you could. First, why did we abduct you? Well, honestly, I did not want you distracted, I did not want this to be a negotiation like the one about the three cousins, and I did not want anyone else involved. Except the gentlemen who we also abducted. Second, what about your friend Homer? He is dead. Smith killed him. You will never find him. We did that to convince you that we are in earnest. You betray me, we will kill you—but not as quickly. Third, you will be hearing about John Bishop, no doubt. He is involved. How he is involved is not your concern. By now, I am certain he is also dead. Fourth, what is this all about? Why am I doing this?”

  For the first time, Weiber-Krauss rose, hooked fingers in the pockets of his black silk vest.

  “I am seizing power,” the German said. “Power and wealth. I am going to run this territory and, from here, the rest of the nation. Those who are not part of my movement are in the way. They will be destroyed. You are being offered passage on that train, Mr. Avery. I advise you to keep the ticket with you at all times.”

  Avery nodded again and, with an encouraging smile and a hand laid reassuringly on his shoulder, Weiber-Krauss left the man to his visions of freedom and riches and, perhaps, even a thought or two about the dead man Bis
hop who he had once called a friend.

  * * *

  “Do you think they’ll make it to the fort?” Cavanaugh asked when Weiber-Krauss returned to the adjoining office.

  “Who can say?” Weiber-Krauss replied. “All that matters is they get close enough to be found, isn’t it? The marshal’s uniform will do the rest.”

  Cavanaugh gave his puppet’s-head an acknowledging tilt as they waited for Smith to finish mixing his chemicals, precisely to the formula Weiber-Krauss had devised and tested on mice in this very place. Though Avery would not be here to witness it, what the German had said was not a pipe dream, not the reverie of an artillery-maddened veteran of the War Between the States.

  It was going to happen and it was going to happen in a way that would make said war perhaps the last that would ever be fought on American soil . . .

  * * *

  Bishop returned to the lake to set his clothes out to try and to recover his rig and White Fox’s horse. He had, with him, the saddlebags of Innocence Lee and his partner, whose name was Randy Coward. Their horses he left behind, as he would do with these items and most of their contents when he was finished going through them.

  The first things he’d checked were the bodies of the two men. All he learned from them was that Coward had once worked on a Mississippi Steamboat named Nelle, according to a tattoo . . . Innocence had been shot in the neck, which was probably why he wore a high collar. It was an old wound, indicative of nothing. Considering how few people there were in the West, a high percentage of them got shot somehow, somewhere.

  The contents of the saddlebags were equally unhelpful. No travel documents, correspondence, souvenir wanted posters of themselves, bankbooks—aught. Just chewing jerky, chewing tobacco, a local map, a newspaper from Denver that was two weeks old and unmarked, and a copy of Infamous Crimes and Felons Magazine, with Bishop’s picture on the cover. Though his rig was discharging and his expression grim, the text made a point of noting that Bishop was defending himself. It was libel to imply that he was an infamous felon.

  Bishop repacked everything and left it as he found it, except for the men. He dragged both men to the pit he had hatcheted out for himself, and, stuffing them more or less inside, he kicked rocks over them, hat-scooping pebbles as fill, added a few branches as cover so the birds and cats wouldn’t get him. He left the horses untethered. Eventually someone would find them; at least they wouldn’t be eaten.

  It was nearly nightfall, and without a moon to speak of Bishop decided to make camp farther back along the trail. He would set out after White Fox in the morning. There was certainly no point going after Dent. The bastard was long gone and probably too frightened to stop anywhere, even in the dark.

  Bishop rested where he had spent the previous night with White Fox. He didn’t light a fire; he’d rather deal with predators circling him—they never did more—than moths swatting their dusty wings on his face. He closed his eyes thinking of the Cheyenne woman, her long onyx hair flying behind her, war club tethered to her belt as she rode the painted, this painted, to fight or to heal. He remembered the time and way she had first said his name.

  “Bish-op.” The syllables equally accented. The lips pursing and ovaling. They had become so close in spirit as to be soul mates. Not less, and not more. His own losses made intimacy impossible, at least for now. Unless he considered the torture of Innocence Lee intimate—which he supposed it was. The Chinese cook had told him that enemies create their own “whole” in the same way lovers do. Attentive, intense, and ultimately achieving a climax.

  He fell asleep on his back, on White Fox’s saddle, his rig attached, propped and angled low on a rock, ready to fire if he heard anything that sounded anything like a hammer, trigger, cylinder, or some combination thereof.

  * * *

  The syringe was the size of a six-shooter. It was adapted from an Indian enema syringe by Weiber-Krauss, not just for its volume but for its metal casing. The contents were too dangerous to trust to glass. If the living patient flailed and it flew, and it broke, it would have the same effect as the glass globes filled with toxins.

  The man in the marshal’s uniform was still not awake, though that wasn’t because of his injuries. He had been given opium, injected with a medical syringe, both of which were stored in a large tin that had been hand-carried from Germany. That injection, like this one, was administered by Weiber-Krauss and not Smith. Smith held the lantern that helped the doctor find the vein.

  Avery watched it all from his cot, where he had been allowed to sit, unshackled, provided he did not move. He did not move. He did not speak, though he was curious as all get-out what was going on. Weiber-Krauss being a doctor, he assumed it was an experimental treatment—one that the medical profession would not have sanctioned had he asked. So he didn’t ask. Outside of prisons, volunteers for new medicines were also probably scarce. Perhaps it was a miracle cure. That might have been what Weiber-Krauss meant when he said they would all profit from this enterprise.

  Avery didn’t know. He was guessing. The entirety of his experience with science came from the dreadfuls, where things like this usually created a monster or a lunatic.

  In addition to his other titles, Joseph Daniel Avery, medical pioneer. Weiber-Krauss was correct. That it might be illegal did not matter. And immorality depended on who was judging. Like that shoot-out with Bishop and the cousins. Ask ten people and you’d get ten different views of who was in the wrong. Though Avery did wonder why this marshal had been selected for this, whether the injury to his face had occurred before or during his selection.

  It was not his problem. Come daylight, all he had to do was sit on his ass and coax a horse along. Though he had to say, in addition to curiosity, he was plagued a little by Smith. The man looked bad, felt wrong, seemed soulless. He had felt that back in Good Fortune, the little muleteer with his whip.

  Now that he thought of it, Avery wondered why the driver wasn’t driving? Probably because he was needed here. Maybe driving was just something he did in public. If Weiber-Krauss was a doctor, maybe this man was a chemist or a botanist. In dreadfuls, the mentally twisted always traveled about in a profession people paid no heed to.

  Weiber-Krauss gave Avery a brandy and told him to rest, since he’d be leaving in a very few hours. The portly man nodded, his three chins agreeing, and lay back enjoying the feel of not being tied to the bed. As he lay there, he heard quiet conversation about “Someone” Lee being late, and a randy coward being late, but Weiber-Krauss didn’t seem overly perturbed. It was night, after all, and even snakes stayed put in the dark, he said.

  Cavanaugh chuckled but there was no humor in it. There was no humor anywhere, Avery thought, and he missed that. He always tried to be, at least, jovial. Like with Bishop.

  Bishop. He couldn’t grasp the implications of the man’s death, if it were true. He didn’t press Weiber-Krauss on that either. The Shotgun had made a lot of enemies and, again, there was no saying which was bad and which was good. He would miss the man if he were gone, but Avery couldn’t even think about that now. Those were thoughts for the Hospitality House, the memorial wall. The legend and the man were all part of that other world now.

  The brandy had its way and Avery slipped into slumber with the image of the penny-dreadful front pages plastered across his mind’s eye, the words floating as before . . .

  * * *

  Long before darkness fell, White Fox had stopped by a creek to water the horse and make a torch. The horse was skittish and she saw why. They had come upon the remains of a black bear, its carcass picked nearly clean. Used one of its leg bones, packed on still-damp patties of the coyotes that had eaten it, and lit it with a match. Then made a second. She stuck them both at the side of the buckboard and hurried on. As night came the malodorous lamps were both light and distant signal that help was coming. Her clackety arrival was met by an elder’s croaked cries of a’o’sémstaa’e, a’o’tsémstaa’e. Ground owl.

  The shouts of the sentry woke th
e Cheyenne camp, the few who could walk emerging into the light of their own few campfires. The tepees of the sick and dying already stood like grave markers. White Fox continued on to one in particular before stopping. She had already marked, in her mind, the box she would need and went to it immediately after leaping to the soft ground. Her knife stabbed through the cord of a box marked the same as the one that Innocence Lee had selected from. He seemed to know—she didn’t wonder “how,” not too deeply—what medicine was needed. A bottle in one hand, a torch in the other, she ducked under the flap of her own doeskin tepee.

  The girl and an old woman were there, beside a little fire, the former very still, the latter attentively applying a wet cloth to her brow. Having known many illnesses over many scores of years, the white-haired woman seemed untouched by this one.

  What passed for a smile bent the toothless mouth of the leathery face and the woman scooted back.

  “The wagon,” White Fox said in her native tongue. “See that everyone sips once from each bottle. Healthy first, then the sick. Use only half. I must soon go to another settlement.”

  The woman grunted understanding and rose.

  “Snow Getting Deep,” White Fox said after her. “Where is Firecrow?”

  She made signs as she backed through the opening. The two gestures were ominous. They informed her: war party.

  “Why?” White Fox asked as she opened the bottle.

  “Hávêsévemâhta’sóoma” was the hushed reply.

  The men were going after the Demon. John Bishop.

  That was not something White Fox could do anything about. Not now. She silently prayed that he did not follow her, even knowing that he would. That her very tracks would lead the braves to him and him to them.

  “The girl.” White Fox focused herself.

  Through the open flap White Fox heard tribe members already gathering, opening the boxes. They would do as she asked, do it cautiously, understanding what the old woman repeated to them.