But he had also not been thinking about Firecrow or his status or the charges that had been falsely leveled against him. He was watching the young woman for any signs of deterioration or improvement. He saw a little of both. The fever had not risen, but color had not returned to any part of her. With the help of Firecrow he had removed her garments to put her in closer contact with the cooling soil, laying the clothing on top of her for the sake of modesty. His own, he suspected, more than hers.
Bishop had scrubbed his hand with the moisture and skin of a cactus. He used his index finger and thumb to gently part her lips, make sure her teeth were not locked. A small opening remained and, pulling the cork stopper with his teeth, holding it there, he poured a few drops of the blue formula into White Fox’s mouth. He saw her gullet move very slightly.
“Good girl,” he said in a soothing voice. She might not hear the words, might not know it was him, but patients, even unconscious, were known to respond to tone of voice.
Assured that she could swallow, he heavy-dosed her with half the contents, poured slowly in little tips of the bottle but following hard-upon so that one would pile on the next and force her to swallow.
She did, coughing lightly. But the curative went down.
All the while Firecrow was watching the doctor, not the treatment. Bishop did not know what was on his mind. It could be humiliation. Hate. Suspicion. Anything. Cheyenne were easy to read if you were a Cheyenne.
When he finished, Bishop replaced the stopper by mouth, with a tigerish parting of his own lips.
“You care for her,” the constable observed.
“Very much, Firecrow.” Bishop watched for any reaction from the girl. He was hoping she did not regurgitate. In her state, vomiting was always a risk.
“Even without an arm, you are a doctor as you are a warrior.”
“A warrior by necessity,” Bishop said.
“Nuh-cessity?”
“Need. I had to become one,” Bishop said. “I wish—Lord, how I wish—I could still be just a doctor. With my wife and son and an oath to heal still my highest priority. My . . . reason for living,” he clarified for the Indian.
“White Fox has told me your life,” Firecrow said. “I have seen the pictures. I heard what she said to you”—he hesitated, hating to admit his error—“I think I understand.”
Bishop did not ask him to explain. He didn’t care. Not right now.
“A girl saw a demon,” the Cheyenne went on anyway. “With a gun-arm. Spreading sickness. We came to stop this. It may be she saw someone showing pictures in those books.”
More false evidence, Bishop thought. Convincing people of something that wasn’t true. It was easy. All you had to do was say it over and over. And with authority. He had heard it in the army, had seen hysterical sickness in the medical tents. One person suffered an amputation, suddenly everyone was fearful and planning for a life with one arm or one leg.
It was ironic. Bishop had never done anything of the sort. But here he was, a hollow sleeve pinned to his lapel.
“One thing I learned in the army,” Bishop said, “you don’t attack strength. You go around it. This lie about me. That has been supported here and there and has taken on the likeness of truth. Like the dancing shadows of hands around a campfire, now an eagle, now a horse.”
“Stories for children,” Firecrow said reflectively.
“Very much so.” Bishop adjusted his seat, stretching a cramped leg without releasing White Fox’s hand. “I did not attack the lies because more flow in to fill that space. Only the truth is a beaver dam. I have sought that.”
“What is truth?”
Bishop snickered. “Greater men than you and I have asked that very question. I don’t know, exactly. All I do know is that someone is trying to blame me for the spreading of disease. Why they are causing widespread illness I do not know. But I will find that out.”
“We,” Firecrow said.
Bishop regarded him. “Thank you. Yes, we. For this is our fight now.”
Off beyond the blanket, at Firecrow’s direction, the braves had been using the remaining spears, other blankets, and tumbleweed—softened by kneading fingers, then crushed into doeskin sacks—to create a stretcher. Others were making torches. As soon as the sun went down, when the night air was cool and invigorating, White Fox would have to be brought back to the settlement for her tepee and rest. Since she could not sit a horse, a comfortable carrier slung between horses would be used to transport her.
The men sat in silence while the others worked swiftly but efficiently. When they were finished, all but two of them plus Knob Pipe were sent back to the settlement to prepare for the arrival of the patient. Through Firecrow, Bishop had given the little man instructions about caring for the woman. He also said that none of the healers, himself included, should remain in a tepee of the sick for long. No one in camp should drink from a skin that has touched the lips of the ill. The exceptions were those who were recovering. Their bodies would be strong enough to fight new illness. He also said the open air would help to heal and carry away the evil spirits.
“These spirits must not find a new place of rest,” Bishop said simply. No slight was intended, but this was not the time to explain about communicable diseases.
The sun dragged itself along the sky, bright blue turned to purple, and as the sun set the Cheyenne woman seemed to find new life. Her head moved; there were sounds that were like those of a sleeper, dreaming, and not of a patient in pain.
“This is good?” Firecrow asked.
“It is,” Bishop said, a choke in his voice. “It is very good. We have to listen to hear breathing. She has trouble even when she isn’t sick.”
“Her mother told her it was the work of Wihio, the breath-stealing spider.”
Bishop made no comment. He did not want to contradict an elder, an insult to a Cheyenne. Not when they were getting along so well.
The men watched as the night bloom seemed to come to life. And then, distant thunder.
Firecrow turned to the northeast, his eyes scanning the skies.
“No storm,” he said.
Bishop had looked as well. There was a second boom. There was not a third. He felt sick inside.
“What then?” Firecrow asked.
“It’s a signal, probably from the fort.”
“Fight?”
“Not as you mean it,” Bishop said. “That is a signal for no one to approach.”
* * *
Weiber-Krauss sat alone in his office, medical texts stacked to one side, drawings scrolled tight on the other, tied with red tape. In the center was a Bible, in German. It was open to Exodus 15. He was puffing on his meerschaum pipe, reflecting on the book and its wisdom.
The doctor was not a man of faith. Even had he been so inclined, wars and suffering had made the idea gagging. To believe that anyone other than man had dominion over Earth and fate was disproved by the state of things. He had become a doctor to heal, but then a service he had chanced upon at that camp outside of Gettysburg gave him a new idea just how to do that. You don’t keep fighting disease. You eliminate it. In this case, the disease was greed and the carrier was men. He saw that in his own day-to-day life now. Pay men to do evil and there was never a shortage of takers. He needed them. He didn’t like it but they were necessary—like marksmen were necessary in combat, like scalpels were necessary in the hands—hand—of someone like John Bishop.
The sermon he had heard was about the great flood, and the preacher had been equating the war to a wiping-clean of the continent beneath the foundations of Union. Lincoln was Noah. The ark was the Constitution, and it was reinforced later in the Proclamation freeing the slaves. More oarsmen, liberated in the South to carry the flood to Georgia and the Carolinas and eventually to Richmond.
Weiber-Krauss bought a Bible in Philadelphia and read it page by page. Therein lay the answer. The word of God Himself. A flood had cleaned away one kind of sin. One form of rotted growth and fruitless ground. The a
nswer was in the story of Moses and Pharaoh. In the plagues.
The part beyond that, in the Wilderness of Sin, was not for now. Those rigid laws provided no room for the action that needed to be taken. One line had told Weiber-Krauss what must be done, Exodus 15:7: “And in the greatness of thine excellency thou hast overthrown them that rose up against thee: thou sentest forth thy wrath, which consumed them as stubble.”
Great wrath had Weiber-Krauss. Great majesty had Weiber-Krauss and the noble line that had been descended from the Alter Adel, the ancient nobility that dated to the fourteenth century. The House of the Count of Rotwang. Weiber-Krauss had come to America as a boy to study with his uncle Franz, who ran the shipping enterprises. Though the formation of the German Confederation in 1815 had cost them some of their autonomy in their state of Hesse-Kassel, the true ruin had come in 1866. Weiber-Krauss had been about to return home, having completed his medical studies and field education in the war. He had been about to go back when a new German unification left Hesse-Kassel absorbed by Prussia, denuded of many holdings, and retaining titles only in name.
Weiber-Krauss stayed. He was established. He had skills. And after reading of the work of an Austrian geneticist, in particular his methodology more than his findings, Weiber-Krauss had a vision that joined both disgust with the world and the loss of familial prestige. He would loose his own plague on the world. One that he could release. Or cure. One that he would constantly refine so that any solution crafted by other doctors would avail them not at all. He would always be ahead of them. John Bishop had been his inspiration that way. His mind never rested. His desire to help was a mission.
If anyone was a threat, it was that man. Which was why Bishop had to take the blame for this. Weiber-Krauss had not wanted to hurt him. But there was no one else who had the genius for such a scheme. The publications had seen to that. He was a perfectly suited scientist. A perfectly outfitted killer. Everyone would believe those grotesque stories . . . the satanic images.
Weiber-Krauss lay a hand on the thin page of the Bible. As much of the words he liked the feel of the paper. It was such a thin fiber to carry such a great message. It hadn’t needed the stone tablets of Moses. Just mulched, pressed slivers from trees. That is how mighty were these ideas. And in the back of the book, written at the foot and backside of Revelation, beneath the very name of Lord Jesus, amen, was irreverently written in a small, cursive hand the names and addresses of those whom Weiber-Krauss had employed—willingly, and not. With any pertinent information he might need to reference.
There was a rap at the door. Weiber-Krauss turned in the candled light.
“Doc, we got some news,” Cavanaugh said.
The medical man raised his eyebrows to encourage the man: speak.
“Two o’ the linens I sent out—they encountered Walter G. Dent. They brought him here. They also found Innocence Lee and Randy Coward. Dead.”
“How?”
“Not by the shotgun of the Shotgun,” Cavanaugh said. “They were shot or gutted. And—.” He hesitated.
The German’s eyebrows went up again.
“Randy’s arm was cut off,” Cavanaugh reported. “Left with him, courteously, but axed clean off with a couple chops.”
“Bring Dent,” Weiber-Krauss instructed. “And get the men ready to ride.”
* * *
Bishop did not want to leave White Fox, but she was on the mend. That told him so was the tribe. He would not be needed there. A fort under quarantine was a different matter.
“I come with you,” Firecrow announced when Bishop told him his plan.
“You must look after White Fox.”
“These men can see to this,” he assured the doctor. “Knob Pipe is the mate of my sister. I trust him with her life.” He retrieved one of the torches, which had been lit with the coming of twilight. “And one of us must carry these.”
Bishop considered this. The last statement was true. But it might do to have another with him. Someone who might not be shot on sight.
* * *
Walter G. Dent had been relatively serene sitting atop a cart laden with dynamite, the fuse lighted. As he made his way upstairs, a surly man to his front and another to his rear, he was not serene. He was terrified. The terror was like a serpent’s tongue, two-forked. First, he was going to see the man who had hired him. Second, he was going to see the man who hired him on the heels of bad news. He had been with the men when they had uncovered the bodies of Innocence Lee and his brute of a partner. Dent had been a detonations expert during the war, had worked for the mines afterward. He had seen people blown apart. Blood and the body parts whence it spilled did not alarm him.
But the man who killed them, the man with the gun-arm . . . he did. Especially if he had survived, as it appeared, the carefully laid double-walled ambush. Dent did not doubt that his employer was even more deeply dismayed. What he feared was that he had no information to add. Not really.
The wound in Dent’s neck troubled him. Throbbing. Behind tightly closed lips he cursed the man working for this man, the driver, Smith, for having given it to him. As a warning, because savages like Smith put no trust in words, only action. He couldn’t tell if the stairs were wobbly or if that was his legs. Probably both. His lower half was not used to riding so much, and the pressure on his backside could not have done him any good. He smelled the candles and lanterns, mixing with odorous overkill. At least the wafting, oily stench killed the reek of his own unwashed body.
The chief was seated alone behind a desk as the men showed him in. Dent caught the glimpse of two others in the shadows outside. There had been a lot of those . . . mysterious shades doing the master’s bidding. He assumed, but could not be certain, that one of them was the mentally deranged Smith.
The leader motioned for the door to be shut. Dent stood just inside, deciding he would neither speak nor move until instructed to do so.
“What can you tell me about your time with John Bishop and your last meeting with my two assassins—who have heaped disrepute upon that good name?”
After a deferential, “Mr. Weiber-Krauss, sir,” Dent told him. About the meeting at the trading post. His willing capture. His ride with Bishop at shotgun in back. The Indian maiden. The spiel of Innocence Lee, which was so over-the-top as to be riveting. Riveting enough for Dent to slip away from Bishop and White Fox.
“White Fox?” Weiber-Krauss interrupted.
Dent told him about the Cheyenne woman. Strong, caring, beautiful. He said everything he knew about her, then resumed his narrative, spoke about his encounter with Randy Coward and his meeting and payment by Innocence Lee. He paintbrushed every detail he could remember, since the German did not stop him. He recounted his departure, his ride, his having heard nor seen no one or nothing until the two Muddy Linens met him in the foothills where he was moving slowly, cautiously, because he would rather risk a gopher hole than the possibility that John Bishop would come after him.
When he was done, Dent stopped. With a clap of mouth and teeth that was not only audible but comical in the small, dark, quiet room.
“What was your assessment of John Bishop?” the German asked.
“The shrinking fuse of my dynamite did not faze him,” Dent said. “He observed things.”
“As?”
Dent raised a stubby finger and pointed to the bandaged wound. “He knew I did not get this in a fight. From the way it was cut.”
“Impressive. Anything else?”
“Ants,” Dent remembered. “He saw where they were eating crumbs from my meals. Where I dropped my drawers. He smelled that. His senses were like little machines, seeing everything.” Dent swallowed his own excited admiration as he said again, “Ants!”
Weiber-Krauss closed the Bible and leaned forward, his hands folded upon it. “He was brilliant during the war and he is—well”—Weiber-Krauss sat back—“he is now man plus machine, as you say.” His eyes drifted to Dent. “And he is still out there.”
Dent didn’t spea
k, again.
“The ability to observe,” Weiber-Krauss went on admiringly. “During the war, he saw that men with typhoid, in the tents, died. When conditions became too crowded and the sick were placed outside, they often got well. The communicable nature of disease. His observation. My benefit.” He tapped a thumb thoughtfully on the cover of the Bible. “He has the help of the Cheyenne, you say?”
“He does, Mr. Weiber-Krauss.”
“The victims themselves, helped by his skills and medicines, will help to clear his name.”
Weiber-Krauss flipped to the back of his Bible. He took a look, shielding the page from Dent’s view. Then he closed the book and took paper and pen from his desk. He held up an empty, unaddressed envelope.
“You will receive this at your home perhaps a week hence,” the German said. “When you do, you will put it in a safe place, unopened. I will ask for it back. If I do not, you will bring it to a newspaper office in a city—not in your town.”
Dent was so relieved that he wasn’t going to die here that he did not ask for payment.
“There will be script inside,” Weiber-Krauss added. “When you open it, that money will be yours. Again, only if I do not call for it—in, say, a month?”
“A month,” Dent repeated.
“Have Smith take you to your horse,” Weiber-Krauss said. “You may stay tonight in the stall or you may go. Just be out of my way. Yes?”
“Yes, Mr. Weiber-Krauss,” Dent said, his voice high. He had to fight to keep from laughing.
“Smith!” the German yelled.
The burly driver had been right outside the door. He leaned in with the informality only a trusted confidant would dare.
“Accompany this gentleman to his charger and then come back with Cavanaugh,” he said. “We will be leaving. At dawn.”
These Violent Times Page 18
