by Ed Kurtz
“The lanterns!” Boon hollered from the roof. My ears were still ringing so badly from the last deluge I couldn’t be sure I heard her right at first. “The lanterns, Edward! Like I done that night in Texas!”
I almost smiled. She’d finally taken the blame for that foofaraw. About damn time, too, seeing as I was more convinced than ever my time was very near its end.
Something like glass shattered close by and there was shouting inside the hotel. If Stanley had stationed men ahead of us in Handsome Frank, there was no telling how many more he had at his disposal. I crawled on my belly through a mess of mule shit and got clear of the wagon, where I rose to one knee and fired at one of the lanterns on the porch. The chimney exploded and the oil splattered the dry-rotted porch for the flames to eat up and grow, spreading quickly over the splintered wood.
Next I beaded down on one of the lanterns inside, which I could just see through the developing blaze and the broken windows. It, too, burst like a bomb and spit fire over everything near to it. Two shots, and the Handsome Frank Hotel was ablaze.
The muleskinner was clean passed out in front of the farrier’s, but I decided I didn’t have a whole lot of sympathy in my heart for the old boy, so I let him alone. The heat grew with the bright light of the inferno, so I scrambled away and into the street. From that vantage point, I could look up at the big gun, which was no longer manned by my friend. She was gone.
I peered into the fire, looking for signs of life, but saw nothing. Either Arthur Stanley was dead already, or he’d escaped. I didn’t know how Boon had gotten up onto the roof, much less Irish Bill, but I assumed there had to have been a ladder in back. So, I levered another round into the carbine’s breech and got to limping in that direction.
The blaze illuminated a great deal of the otherwise barren foothills bordering the back of the main structures. I could see the outhouses and some frightened vermin scampering into the low brush behind them. So, too, were the horses we’d ridden into Burnside before splitting up. They were hobbled a fair piece from the ghost town. Boon had known exactly how this was going to go down and didn’t want the mounts burned up.
It came as some surprise to me that she’d bothered with bringing along the second horse for me when it could only have encumbered her journey, but I was soon to realize it had little or nothing to do with me at all. Squatting in the brush apart from the beasts was Meihui, her arms wrapped around her knees and eyes wide as double eagles as she surveyed the destruction we had wrought.
I saw her before she saw me. I didn’t know whether I should call out to her or not. Mostly I was just shocked all to hell Boon had brought the kid along with her. The smart and decent thing to do would have been to stash her somewhere else entirely. This was no place for her to be. It was just too God damned dangerous.
And, frankly, so were we. She might have been better off with Boon and me than she had been in the whorehouse where we’d found her, but not by much. The girl needed good folks, decent folks to look after her and keep her safe. Maybe try to heal up some of the scars her short, miserable life had left all over her little heart. Boon most likely had her reasons—she just about always did, whether I understood them out or not—but I didn’t like Meihui being there in Handsome Frank.
Particularly when I knew damned well it wasn’t over yet.
Just then, the girl caught sight of me and went rigid. I stepped toward her and she leaped to her feet with a small yelp of terror.
“Meihui,” I said, but it was too late. She was up and running.
Backlit by the terrible fire, she couldn’t have told me from any other grubby fat white man with a gun. While I stood there and worried myself into a tizzy over her welfare, the best I could do was scare her half to death and push her still further into harm’s way.
And where in the blue hell was Boon?
Somewhere deep in my mind, I half-wished she’d just left me there and gone off somewhere safe with the girl. The thought felt something like an omen, the kind of bad signs I’d heard about Comanche medicine man seeing. This wasn’t a talking crow or anything like that, but the feeling burned in me.
The fire grew rapidly and by the time I’d turned back round to look at the hotel, the roof caved in, taking the Gatling gun with it. The massive contraption fell through, clanging loudly as it crashed through the floor and down to the ground level, smashing everything in its path. Flames roared out from the middle of the ground floor, sending up plumes of black smoke and dancing sparks like stars. If Arthur Stanley was still in there, he had to be dead now.
Only I knew he wasn’t.
I made damned sure I had a round in the breech and went looking for him.
Chapter Forty-One
Boon found me first. She looked more than a little worse for wear. Some of her raven-black hair was singed, which I could smell, reminding me of the smell of our old hound dog, Amy, when she got caught in that barn fire when I was a boy. Boon’s face was smudged black and so were much of her clothes. She sported several new holes, ringed with black, on her shirt and trousers. In one hand she carried a makeshift torch that used to be this or that part of her father’s hotel. In the other she gripped her Colt. Her chest heaved with heavy breaths and she bared her teeth when we first met eyes, back in the street where the mules had bled out and the wagon was starting to burn.
“Where is he,” she said.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “But Meihui…”
“I’ve got to find him. Now.”
“Listen,” I pressed. “You oughtn’t have brought Meihui. She ain’t safe here.”
“It’s Stanley who ain’t safe,” she said, and she cocked the revolver with her badly calloused thumb. “He dies today.”
There was no use getting through to her. Her eyes were afire, and it wasn’t just the reflection of the hotel. She had a bloodlust in her something fierce and this was the end of the line for her. Nothing else in all the big, rotten world mattered one whit.
“All right,” I said. “He dies today.”
With a sharp nod, she went by me with long, stiff strides toward the front of the blazing hotel. The farrier’s was almost completely burned to the ground and even the mules in the street were smoldering, giving off a terrific stench. I hurried to catch up with her, narrowing my eyes to look for any hint of our quarry. The incredible heat of the fires made the skin of my face tingle and feel too tight for my skull.
Boon crouched, carefully surveying her environment, when someone coughed to our right. I swung the carbine about to find the drunken muleskinner staggering from the smoking alley between the hotel and the farrier’s shop where he’d previously slouched. He was muttering something low and waving his hand in front of his face to ward away the smoke that was choking him. I lowered the rifle, uninterested in him. But Boon raised her Colt and shot him in the chest.
The drunk sighed and dropped to his side. He died in the dust, and he didn’t seem too bothered about the whole thing.
“He was only a mule driver,” I told Boon.
She ignored me and rose back to her full height.
“One less to worry about.”
“Sure,” I said.
She walked right over the dead drunk’s body and disappeared into the smoke. I followed.
The horses she’d brought and ground-tied were still there. No one else was. I decided to try raising the issue of Meihui again, since this was where I’d last seen her.
“Boon, the kid.”
“A man like Stanley is always a coward underneath all that bluster,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “He’s scared now. He’ll try to get shucked of this place if he can. How many horses did you ride in with?”
“Three,” I said. “But he wasn’t on any of them. He was already here, and six or more men besides. The ones you cut down with that big God damned gun on the roof. Might could be more. I don’t know.”
“In other words you don’t know shit.”
“One way to say it.”
&nb
sp; “Then what fucking good are you,” she said, and she moved on, alongside the back of the hotel with her eyes on the foothills.
I let her get ahead of me and watched her back. Probably my mouth was hanging open. I had a hundred things I’d have liked to say to that, but none of them wanted to make their way to my mouth. So I said nothing and kept on after her. Like always.
She got away from me again, out of my line of sight, but I found her some minutes later. She was on her knees by a shallow creek, fussing with some grass. I came up beside her and knelt down, too. She didn’t say anything to me, so I cupped my hands to scoop up some water. Before I could get it near to my mouth, Boon slapped my wrists and made me lose all of it.
“Don’t drink that, it’s gyppy,“ she said. “Big operation like this ruins the water. You’ll be shitting like crazy for days.”
“Thanks.”
“Look at this,” she said, her voice low. She grabbed a fistful of the grass she’d been bothering and held it out in the palm of her hand. We were far enough away from the blazing ghost town that I couldn’t easily make out what she was trying to show me. “Grease and fat in the grass. Somebody was scraping out a pan here.”
“Camp nearby?”
She pointed into the trees, black oaks and gray pines. The men who’d already been here had staked out for a spell, I reckoned. Probably there were more of them. And if these were the last of Stanley’s forces at Handsome Frank, that’d be where he went, too.
“You ready?” she said in a whisper.
I nodded soberly, wishing to hell I was neither ready nor sober.
“Been studying on what I said to you a ways back,” she said.
“Said what?”
“That I don’t trust you.”
“Been a while since then.”
“Been studying on it a while.”
“That a fact,” I said.
“I’m harder than I want to be,” Boon said, dropping the greasy grass and wiping her hand on her trouser leg as she stood up. “Things don’t always come out right. Trust is something you got to treat like fine china out here. Or anywhere. With anybody, I guess.”
“Hard to come by,” I said. “Harder to keep.”
“I trust you, Edward Splettstoesser,” she said. “You are the only man on the whole face of this world that I do, and I am sorry I said that I don’t.”
She held out the hand she’d just wiped and I accepted her offer of a handshake. I wasn’t sure I’d ever shaken hands with Boon before, but I was pert near certain I’d have recalled if I did—her hard grip was like to crush the bones in my fingers.
I said, “Let’s us go see about that camp.”
The firelight was visible in another twenty feet or so through the grove, and as soon as we saw it, we both crouched and watched. Figures were definitely moving between us and the fire, but there was no telling who they were or how many of them were around from our position. Boon signaled for me to move around to the west side, then gestured to the east where she would go. I nodded my agreement and slowly made my way through the brush, trying not to make any noise despite the piles of dry detritus underfoot. Ahead of me I could make out a jutting gray rock upon which a dead pine trunk lay black and rotted. I could not have asked for better cover, so I went directly for it. The moment I reached the rock, I heard what I could have mistaken for the small yelp of a kicked dog.
I could have, that is, if I didn’t know for a fact that it was Meihui.
Shit.
Rifle in one hand, I maneuvered around the rock to where I could lean against the pine and get a good line of fire without being seen. My lungs burned and my body ached. I was getting old and I’d been fat, and being injured did not much help that mix. I decided to worry about it later and pushed my mind through. I had a decent view of the camp, which consisted of three canvas tents, probably Army issue, with half a dozen horses hobbled to the north side of them. Beyond the mounts, I saw a massive contraption, half-grown over with weeds and vines; iron-shod stamps fixed to a rotting wooden frame by way of cams and shafts. Around the fire a pair of men slouched on the ground. One sucked idly at a clay pipe while the other worked with a mess of biscuits in a Dutch oven over the fire. Other men spoke in hushed voices, men I couldn’t see from where I was. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, either. I wasn’t close enough.
Somebody laughed. I heard the small voice whine again. The fingers of my left hand tightened around the forestock. My right forefinger grazed the trigger. I knew what to do next, and that was wait for Boon to make the first play. After that was anybody’s guess.
I held my breath and moved around the rock a few feet. Then I could see that the camp sat right at the mouth of what looked at first like a cave, except that there was timber framing the mouth and tracks leading out from inside. It was no cave, but rather a mine. In all likelihood, this was the motherlode that led to the construction of Handsome Frank, for what little time it lasted. I wondered briefly just how much gold they’d hauled out of that hole they blasted out of the Earth, but I quit pondering gold when I saw another man—this one tall, bony, and wearing a long, black beard that trailed down to his sternum—lurching for the mine. He was dragging Meihui by one arm, and despite her struggling to get free of him, he only chuckled and overpowered her.
“No,” I whispered. My heart got to slamming against my ribs. I was sweating considerably and felt a tremor in my hands. I knew I ought to wait for Boon, like we always had done, but I knew still better that this man needed killing.
I raised my pilfered carbine back into position, drew a bead on the bearded man’s skull, and squeezed the trigger. His head jerked back in a dark spray and Meihui shrieked. The ball was up, so there was no sense hiding anymore. Jacking another shell into the breech, I called out, “Meihui, over here!”
Frantically, she looked around in every direction as the other men shouted and one of them fired a wild shot in my general direction. I burst out from behind the rock and swung the rifle at the campfire, where the cook had abandoned his biscuits in favor of a Henry rifle that he pointed at me as he lunged and aimed.
“Edward,” the girl cried.
I shot the cook. I only struck him in the shoulder. It was enough to make him lose his grip on the Henry, but he didn’t drop it and he didn’t go down. Instead, he growled like a bear at the pain and pushed through it to get the gun back up to try again. Ornery cuss.
A second later, he and I were drawn down on one another. The next few seconds passed slowly, like long minutes, while we each tickled our triggers and sweated through our determination to kill and not be killed. In the end, neither of us got off a shot. A knife appeared out of the shadows and slit the cook’s throat, the metal gleaming in the sparse firelight and the blood falling like a red curtain over the man’s neck and chest and belly.
“Jesus Christ,” cried another man, who I recognized as the other fellow at the fire earlier. He’d run off, but now he was back with a rusty old Navy Colt in one hand. “Fuckin’ Apaches.”
I could have laughed at that. Boon did not. Instead she drew her .44 with her left hand and drilled a hole through the man’s skull. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her shoot with her left before, but I wasn’t altogether surprised to find she was damned near as good with it as she was with her right. The man she’d shot dropped into some brush and she knelt by the man whose throat she cut to wipe the blade on his shirt.
“Three down,” I said as I approached. She looked up at me, the fire dancing in her huge brown eyes. “They got Meihui.”
Boon gasped and leapt to her feet, but she saw the girl soon thereafter. Meihui was standing apart from the center of camp, her arms wrapped around herself and avoiding eye contact with both of us. The poor kid shivered, from the chill or just plain fear. Probably both.
“God damn me,” Boon said. “God damn me to hell, I am sorry, Meihui.”
The girl sniffed, rubbed her nose. She swallowed hard, twice, and gradually raised her face to us,
having to swipe a lock of dirty black hair from her eyes to see us. Then, just as she was about to say something, an errant shot cracked the silent night air and by matter of instinct, all three of us ducked. Boon cocked her Colt and I rushed to jack another cartridge into the carbine’s breech. She and I were crouched, but Meihui had full hit the dirt, laying on her belly.
“Come to us,” Boon told her. “Slowly, now.”
The kid started to crawl through the brush and dirt, but stopped cold when a man swung out from behind one of the canvas tents and fired another shot at us. The round slammed into the ground not fifteen inches from my face, kicking up a passel of dust that stung my eyes and filled my mouth. I was temporarily blinded, but I’d seen who it was—one of the men who’d ridden to Handsome Frank with me, and in point of fact the one I thought I’d killed back at the adobe huts right before Stanley’s secret contingent of men came racing out after me.
If it hadn’t been for them, I would have gotten him, too. I cursed every man jack of them in my head and scrambled to get out of sight while I rubbed the grit out of my eyes.
“Don’t let the fat man go,” I heard a deep voice command. An English voice.
Another shot caromed over my head and struck somewhere close by. I dug the butt plate into the ground and clumsily catapulted myself out of range, back to my position behind the rock with the fallen pine. Tears ran in rivulets down my cheeks, turning the dirt caked in my beard to mud. Gradually my bleary eyes started to make sense of the jumbled colors they were trying to see, and with one last wipe on my shirt sleeve I turned back to look on the camp. Boon had retreated behind a black oak, where she squeezed off a couple of shots at the man I should have killed, who fired one back. No one was hit.
