IT WAS FULL dark when Prophet dropped down off a low hill, trailing the horses of the two dead outlaws, the outlaws themselves hanging belly-down over their saddles, hands tied to their feet. He walked Mean and Ugly across a log bridge over a narrow stream and passed the first of several tarpaper shanties of the town of Luther Falls.
The bartender back at the roadhouse had told Prophet that Luther Falls was a mellow little village where he’d find the only sheriff within a two-hour ride. So Prophet had loaded up his cargo and headed northwest.
Luther Falls did, indeed, look mellow enough, with its tight little houses spewing piney chimney smoke, the windows lit with the warmth of familial associations. It was an hour past supper, but the smells of roasted meat and coffee still clung to the cool night air.
Cows bellowed in corrals, occasional dogs barked, and chickens clucked in coops not far from backyard privies. In one window that Prophet passed, well-dressed ladies sang hymns around a piano, open songbooks in their hands. The sight warmed his heart after what he’d been through back at the roadhouse, and he was glad he hadn’t ridden into this God-fearing little town, his ghastly cargo in tow, in broad daylight.
Prophet followed the meandering road, no more than two pale wagon tracks under a sky filled with small, hard stars, to the business district. He pulled up before a clapboard hovel with a peaked roof and a shingle over the boardwalk announcing sheriff. He was happy to see a dim lantern glow in the window.
‘How can I help you, stranger?’ a man’s voice called behind him.
Dismounting, Prophet turned to see a stout gentleman in a suit, a long deerskin coat, and a fur hat angling across the street toward the jailhouse. He was carrying saddlebags over his shoulder and a full-length shotgun in his hand. A briar pipe jutted from his mouth, puffing a rich, aromatic smoke.
‘I’m looking for the sheriff,’ Prophet said.
The man had stopped to look over the two bodies draped over the horses on Prophet’s lead line. ‘You found him. And I’d say you have a little explaining to do, Mr....’
‘The name’s Prophet, Sheriff. I’m a bounty man. These two men are wanted for robbery and murder in Kansas and Missouri. I’ve been following them since leaving Dodge City three weeks ago. My friend, Wyatt Earp, put me on their trail. He and Bat Masterson were too busy to go after them themselves.’
‘Earp and Masterson, eh?’ the sheriff said, obviously impressed. ‘They’re friends of yours?’
‘Wyatt is,’ Prophet said. ‘Bat and I... well’—Prophet grinned—’Bat ain’t too fond of bounty men.’
The sheriff puffed his pipe in the darkness. ‘Never been too fond of bounty hunters myself.’ He paused. ‘But I reckon if ole Wyatt Earp put you on their trail.. .’
‘Ran ‘em to ground in the Johnson Lake Roadhouse south of here,’ Prophet said. ‘You can include that information in your cable.’
‘What cable?’
‘The one I’m hopin’ you’ll send to Wyatt, tellin’ him I found his men—Benny Mack and Jack Montoya, last of the Montoya Gang—so he’ll send me the reward money.’
The sheriff stared at Prophet thoughtfully, scratched his head, glanced at the bodies draped over the saddles, then said, ‘Come on. We’ll hash this out inside.’
Prophet turned and followed the sheriff into the jail-house, a cramped, one-room office with a battered roll top desk and a heavy, locked door which no doubt lead into the cell block at the building’s rear.
‘Have a seat,’ the sheriff said as he shrugged out of his deerskin coat and hung it on an antler rack near the door. ‘Mighty cold tonight. Looks like ole winter’s raisin’ its hackles one more time.’
Prophet sat in the hide-bottomed chair beside the desk, the old chair creaking under his weight. The bounty hunter sighed, wanting to get this business over with quickly, so he could relieve himself of the bodies, pad out his belly with grub somewhere, down a few drinks, and crawl into a hot tub and a warm bed.
‘I forgot how cold April could be this far north.’
‘Yeah, we get cold blasting down from Canada pret’ near till May,’ the sheriff said, rubbing his hands before the stove, which someone must have recently stoked. ‘If I had my druthers, I’d be down in New Mexico or Arizona, where I was raised. Problem is, I married me a woman from Minnesota—one of them ornery Swedes.’ The sheriff winked at Prophet and curled his white mustache with a playful grin. ‘She’s due set on stayin’ on here with her family, and there’s not a thing I can do about it but complain.’
Prophet smiled, relaxing a little. The sheriff seemed to be warming to him, and that wasn’t always how things panned out for bounty hunters. The grisly nature of the bounty hunter’s trade often made him an outcast, disdained by many. It always seemed a little odd to Prophet that the ones who resented him most were lawmen—men whose jobs he presumably made easier by bringing in the riffraff they themselves didn’t have the time or resources to hunt.
He guessed it was probably due to jealousy, for bounty hunters, unlike lawmen, came and went as they pleased, hunted whom they pleased when they pleased, unconstrained by time or jurisdictional boundaries. In many ways, it was a dream life. The only problem was, you had to be a singular, solitary breed to live it. A man who didn’t mind giving up the comforts of hearth, home, and family for a life lived on the owlhoot trail, where you could die any second of any minute of any hour, and no one would be the sadder. .. .
‘Coffee?’ the old sheriff asked as he poured himself a cup at the stove.
‘Why not?’ Prophet said, glad the man was being friendly but really wanting to get on with his business.
That didn’t happen, however, until the sheriff had given Prophet a full cup of steaming coffee, hot and strong enough to seal a roof with, plunked down in his swivel chair, and talked about the evening he’d spent riding out to Mrs. Larson’s ranch five miles west of town.
‘She thinks Indians are stealing her pullets,’ the sheriff said, blowing ripples on his coffee. ‘She’s been thinking that for the past five years. I’ve told her over and over again that if Indians were stealing pullets, why would they just steal hers? I mean, her neighbors Mrs. Hanson and Mrs. Peterson and Mrs. Munson all have pullets, too. Why aren’t the Indians getting theirs?’
The sheriff gave a snort and plucked at the curled ends of his mustache, his face flushing with amusement. ‘So I finally ride out there this afternoon, have a look around the place. I see the dog Mrs. Larson got when he was just a pup, snoozing on the porch, stretched out like Caesar at his favorite bath. And I get to thinking, this Indian problem started occurring about the same time this dog came along. He’s old and fat now—fatter than most country dogs get on table scraps and mice.
‘So I ask her where the dog sleeps, and she tells me, and I climb into this old falling-down hog pen she’s got down by the stream that runs behind her place, and what do you suppose I find, Mr. Prophet?’ The sheriff’s blue eyes flashed with amusement.
‘Feathers?’
The sheriff leaned back in his chair and roared, nearly spilling the coffee in the cup he squeezed in his small, fat hands. ‘About five years’ worth!’
He roared again, snorting. Regaining his senses, he said, ‘When I got back to the house, that dog was gone, and I have a feelin’ he won’t be back. Not if he knows what’s good for him!’
Wheezing with laughter, the sheriff got up, refilled his coffee cup, topped off Prophet’s and plopped back down in his chair. ‘Sorry about that, Mr. Prophet. It gets kinda quiet around here—especially at night—and I just felt like cuttin’ loose with a big windy. Where in the hell were we, anyway, before all this chicken business grabbed hold of my tongue?’
Prophet reminded him that they had been discussing the cable he hoped the sheriff would send to Wyatt Earp in Dodge City.
‘Well, goddamn!’ the sheriff exclaimed, rubbing his hand across his mouth. ‘You want me to send a cable to ole Wyatt Earp, eh?’
‘Yes, sir. Explaining how I captured the prisoners, brought them to you, the nearest official peace officer, and turned them in for the bounty.’
‘Well, I’ll be goddamned,’ the sheriff repeated, obviously overcome with the idea that he would have anything—even a telegram—to do with the venerable lawman of Dodge. ‘Wyatt Earp, eh?’
‘That’s right, Sheriff.’
‘Why don’t you send the cable your ownself?’
‘I need a lawman to corroborate my story.’ Prophet smiled. ‘Otherwise I reckon I could tell him I got his men when I really didn’t.’
‘How much these boys have on ‘em, anyway?’
‘Five hundred apiece.’
The sheriff whistled and stared at his scarred desktop, thinking. ‘Why don’t you just bring ‘em both back to Dodge, show Earp himself their ugly faces?’
Prophet tipped his hat forward to scratch the back of his head. ‘Well, it’s a little warmer down there than it is up here, Sheriff....’
‘Oh, I see. I suppose they’d get a little ripe on you, eh?’ He chuckled.
Prophet nodded. ‘I have a feeling that by the time I got there, they wouldn’t be very recognizable.’
‘Yeah, I hear the faces and eyeballs are the first to puff up,’ the sheriff said speculatively. ‘I wouldn’t know.’ He leaned toward Prophet as if to share a secret. ‘You know, I’ve never had to hunt down and kill a badman as long as I’ve been sheriff of this little town? And that’s five years this July.’
‘Pretty quiet around here, eh?’
‘Nice and quiet,’ the sheriff said, packing his pipe. ‘Too quiet, you might even say. Sometimes I don’t know why I’m even needed. Just to make people feel safe, I guess.’
‘And to hunt down pullet-thievin’ Injuns,’ Prophet added with a smile.
‘There you have it.’ The sheriff lit his pipe. ‘Well, if a cable’s what you need, Mr. Prophet, I should be able to manage that much. As long as those men are who you say they are, that is.’
‘Just describe them a little,’ Prophet said, rising from his chair and donning his hat. ‘Wyatt knows what they look like. Besides, there’s plenty of booty in their saddlebags that’ll pin handles on ‘em, too.’
‘All right, Mr. Prophet,’ the sheriff said, puffing his pipe and nodding. ‘Will do.’
Prophet shook the man’s hand and asked where he could stable his horses. The sheriff told him where Dawson’s Livery was located, and added, ‘You might as well leave your expired hooligans over there, too. We have an undertaker, but he turns in early, and I don’t see any reason to wake him. I’ll call on him in the morning and have a look at those boys myself. Then I’ll get Henry over at the telegraph office to send your cable.’
‘Much obliged, Sheriff. I think I’ll wait around here for the money. Nothing else to do. Uh, if you don’t mind, that is.’
The sheriff scrutinized Prophet as he puffed his pipe. ‘You don’t look too bad. A little rough around the edges, maybe. Maybe what you need is a week or two around decent, God-fearin’ Norwegians. Bore your hide off, but smooth the kinks out of your soul.’ A whimsical smile shone far back in his eyes.
‘That might be just what the doctor ordered for me, Sheriff,’ Prophet chuckled. ‘Say, I don’t believe you gave me your handle.’
‘Beckett. Arnie Beckett.’
‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, Sheriff Beckett. Now, I just have one more favor to ask. Where can a man get him some supper and a stiff drink and then a good night’s rest?’
‘Well, the snake water you can get over at Herman Waterman’s a block west and across the street, but you better hurry. He’s the only saloon in town, and he closes at nine. City ordinance. We’re strict Lutherans around here, you understand.’
Beckett gained another wry expression and pulled at his mustache. ‘As for the rest, you’ll find Mrs. Cordelia Ryan’s boarding house a half mile north of here. It’s the biggest house out that way—a big, green, clapboard affair with a white picket fence. Nice house. Even nicer lady, but strict as all get out. The widow doubles as the school teacher, and she’ll paddle your butt if you’re bad, so mind your p’s and q’s.’
‘Oh,’ Prophet said, feeling a little disheartened. He liked the idea of resting up in a nice, quiet town, but he wasn’t so sure about the tight reins. He was known to carouse a little on his time off... to lift his tail and stomp.
Oh, well. Like Beckett had said, a week or two among good, God-fearin’ folks might be just what he needed to iron the kinks out of his soul.
After he’d brought the outlaws’ saddlebags into the jail and set them along the wall by the sheriff’s desk, he headed for the livery barn, where he rented a stall for his own line-back dun, laid the outlaws out, and sold their mounts for twenty dollars apiece.
Since it was getting late, he decided to forgo the saloon, heading instead for the boarding house. If the old biddy who ran the place didn’t confiscate his liquor, he could have a nip or two in his room, from the bottle of Kentucky rye he always packed in his war bag, for emergencies....