Marshal Roscoe Deets checked the chestnut down to a dead stop on a narrow cross street with a two-story frame house on the right side of the street and a mercantile warehouse on the left. The house was his own and Lupita’s. Roscoe had built it himself just after he and Lupita married last fall. He’d knocked down an old trapper’s cabin that had occupied the lot, and he’d planted rose bushes and a couple of cottonwoods. He hadn’t yet gotten around to painting the house, but he planned on it soon.
He was about fifty yards from the main street, Hazelton. Dust whipped up around him, powdering him. He blinked against it.
The chestnut snorted and shook his head.
Deets pulled his hat off his head and batted it in frustration against his thigh. He cursed loudly and then looked around, wondering if anyone had heard, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment.
The house’s front door opened and Deets’s wife, Lupita, stepped out onto the porch. She was a short, busty, full-hipped half-Mexican girl—simple, kind, and eminently loving and devoted to Deets. An earthy girl five years younger than Deets, she’d grown up on a remote horse ranch with her old Mexican father and her brother. Lupita’s rich, curly, dark-brown hair fell to her slender shoulders.
“Roscoe?” Lupita said, frowning. “Roscoe, what is it?”
“Lupita,” Deets said in surprise. “Please . . . go back inside.” He’d stopped here instinctively in front of his home, a place of safety. He’d been a fool to do so and to let Lupita see him in the state he was in.
“You better come in, too. You do not look so good, mi amor.”
“Me?” Deets laughed without humor and brushed his coat sleeve across his mouth. His knees were still tingling. He’d damned near tangled with Lou Prophet, the notorious bounty hunter. “Me?” He laughed again and sucked a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “Ah, hell, no—I’m just fine. Nothin’ a couple belts won’t cure.”
He laughed again, his nerves firing like six-shooters beneath his skin.
Prophet had been ready to shoot him. If Deets had slid his hand toward one of his own six-shooters, he’d be dead now. As dead as Eldon Wayne lying dead out in the bluffs around Ramsay Creek.
Wayne, dead. Killed by Lou Prophet. And now Prophet was here in Box Elder Ford with his equally famous partner, Louisa Bonaventure, otherwise known as the Vengeance Queen.
Why?
What was this all about?
Why had Eldon Wayne and seven others bushwhacked the two bounty hunters up by Ramsay Creek? And why in hell hadn’t the town marshal of Box Elder Ford known about such a scheme beforehand?
“Roscoe?” Lupita said, coming down the steps in her red dress trimmed with white lace, holding the hem above her ankles.
As usual when she was home, she was barefoot. Deets often laughed and said it was harder keeping his young wife shod than it was a broomtail bronc. Her dress was a low-cut little number, outlining her firm, round breasts beautifully. It was the first dress Roscoe had bought her after they were married and he’d earned his first paycheck as town marshal of Box Elder Ford, Colorado Territory. That was just after he’d lost his nerve. The red frock was a little dressy for everyday wear, but Lupita knew that Deets liked the way it flattered her figure, so she wore it often.
“Roscoe, please don’t . . .”
Deets turned his horse into the yard that he had not surrounded with a picket fence yet, though he intended to do that, as well. A white picket fence. He stopped near Lupita, who stood at the bottom of the porch steps, arms crossed on her breasts, looking worried. She wore a thin, gold-washed necklace with a small, gold cross hanging an inch above her deep, tan cleavage.
“Not to worry, Lupita,” Roscoe said. “I don’t know why I said that. I’m done with that. I’ll never take another drink again—you know I won’t. I just run into a little problem, and I reckon it rankled me more than I expected. But I’m gonna get to the bottom of it now.”
“What problem, Roscoe? I don’t understand.”
“I don’t understand it, neither. But I’m gonna understand it soon.” Deets winced. “Ah, hell—I’m sorry I worried you, Lupita. There’s nothin’ to worry about. You go on back in the house. I’ll stop back soon for some cookies and afternoon coffee, just like I always do.”
He offered a weak smile.
She returned it, lifting her chin. She was a stalwart girl, and her toughness, coupled with a kind heart, not to mention her lush figure, had been what had drawn Deets to her in the first place way back when she was still living out on that wild horse ranch in the Jasper Buttes.
“All right,” she said. “You go on now and solve your marshaling problems. I will have the cookies and coffee ready by the time you get back. I have your socks boiling, so I’d best get back to work, too.”
Deets leaned down over his left stirrup. Lupita rose up on her tiptoes, and they kissed.
“Later, Lupita.”
“Later, my love.”
Lupita smiled brightly, knowing how her smile always buoyed her often-troubled husband. Deets pinched his hat brim to her and swung the chestnut back into the street.
When he’d turned away from her, he clenched his fists and hardened his jaws. Damn his nerves! They’d turned him into a coward. Ironically, it had happened just before he’d pinned the cheap tin badge to his chest, taking the luster out of it for him. He’d wanted the job so badly, but what he’d had to do to acquire it had soured it.
When Deets came to Hazelton, he turned left and rode down the middle of the street, nearly vacant this time of the hot afternoon. There was one wagon parked before the mercantile, and a couple of horseback riders were walking their horses through town—two Double H Connected men. Roscoe knew, by face if not by name, most folks in the town and surrounding county. Miss McQueen’s red-wheeled leather chaise was parked in front of Johnson’s Millinery & Accessories.
As Deets passed in front of the millinery, which sat on the street’s south side, Goose Johnson himself was standing in the open doorway in his white apron and bowler hat, smoking a cigarette. Deets could hear Johnson’s wife and Mrs. McQueen talking in the shadows behind him.
Johnson stared at Deets without expression. The lanky man had a dark look in his eyes. Curious about that, Deets swung the chestnut toward the millinery. As he did, Johnson flicked his cigarette into the street and then turned back into the store, closing the door behind him.
Deets stopped the chestnut, which he’d named Kiowa back when he was still a drover for Old Chester McCrae on the other side of the Jasper Buttes. That was back when he’d still had his nerve. (Losing his nerve had become a dark milestone in his still-young life.)
Deets studied the closed door. Johnson had not wanted to talk to him. Deets looked at the half-smoked cigarette smoldering in the well-churned dirt and horseshit of the street.
He looked around. He could see a gaunt, mustached face in the window of the barber and bathhouse shop behind him. Quickly, the face disappeared. The face had been obscured by the reflection of the sun off the dark window, but that would have been the barber, Melvin Bly. He was acting damned odd, as well.
Deets continued to look around the nearly silent street. A few chickens were pecking out front of the Occidental Feed Barn. That was the only movement now aside from a couple of breeze-jostled tumbleweeds. The wind was picking up, moaning between the tall buildings around him, rattling a couple of shingle chains.
It was a hot day. But Deets had a cold, dark feeling deep in his twenty-six-year-old bones. An old man kind of cold.
What was going on?
He booted Kiowa on up the street. He turned at the next cross street and stopped in front of a sprawling shack of gray boards and shake shingles, with a brush-roofed gallery out front. This was Eldon Wayne’s place. Wayne did everything from fixing leaky roofs to hauling wash water for the old ladies in town, and from cutting and hauling firewood to shoveling snow in the winter.
He was a big man with a bullish personality, and he’d often worked as a bouncer in the town’s three saloons on Saturday nights when the boys from the Double H Connected were in town. He’d worked as a night deputy for the previous town marshal, Bill Wilkinson, whose name Deets wished like hell he could scour from his brain.
Wayne had been a big man, according to the bounty hunter, Prophet. Now he was lying dead somewhere out near Ramsay Creek.
A saddled piebald gelding stood in the shaggy front yard littered with junk of all kinds—ancient washtubs, rain barrels, hay rakes, a mound of long saw blades, several small wagons with missing wheels. There was even a pile of wagon wheels around which the bunchgrass had grown thick. The front porch of the shack, supported on stone pylons, had spikes driven into it. All manner of harnesses, chains, and hides hung from the spikes.
As Deets pulled into the yard and weaved Kiowa through the junk and trash, he heard voices inside the sprawling shack. The voices were muffled, so he couldn’t make out specifics of the conversation until he’d tied his chestnut to a porch rail and climbed the steps to the porch.
“. . . and you just left him out there?” a woman’s voice said. It was the voice of Wayne’s wife, Mona.
Several men were talking over each other, so Deets couldn’t make out what they were saying. He opened the screen door. The inside door stood about six inches open. When he knocked on it, the door creaked open on its leather hinges. The voices died instantly.
“Who the hell is it?” Mona Wayne called.
“Marshal Deets,” Deets said as he pushed the door wide and, politely removing his hat, stepped into the large, open room that served as parlor and kitchen.
It was as cluttered with junk as the yard, with crates and old steamer trunks, some of which had rugs draped over them. Animal hides and skulls were tacked to the walls. A large, fieldstone hearth sat against the far wall from the door and it too was loaded down with junk of every shape and size, including a mess of wicker chicken crates, one of which had a sleek golden rooster in it with long, dark-brown saddle feathers.
Mona Wayne raised chickens—had even bred up her own line, which she loudly espoused to be the most productive chickens alive. She sold the eggs as well as the chicks throughout the county. Lupita bought eggs from the woman weekly.
“Well, well, well,” Mrs. Wayne said, eyeing Deets. She was a large woman in a shapeless dress, with skin like suet and long, dark-brown hair streaked with gray. She sat in a rocker far to Deets’s right, between two piles of crates or something similar, with Indian blankets draped over them to make them more appealing to the eye. “You in on this thing, too, young Marshal Deets?” Mona asked in a faintly mocking tone, rocking slowly in her chair.
Her pale cheeks were mottled red with anger.
“Mona,” said one of the three men either standing or sitting around the big woman, like three subjects who’ve come to pay their respects to some shabby queen.
James Purdy had said the woman’s name with gentle admonishment. He added, “This is private business. No need to trouble the young marshal about it.”
“Private, huh? Phooey! You left my husband out on the range somewhere, probably dead, and you’re tryin’ to tell me it’s private business?”
“He’s dead.” Deets moved into the room and stood before the three men—Purdy, Neal Hunter, and Glen Carlsruud. Purdy ran the town’s only livery barn. Carlsruud had the Arkansas River Mercantile Company, and Neal Hunter owned the hotel with his pretty wife, Helen, who had once been a saloon singer in mountain mining camps in the first years after the war.
Mrs. Wayne and the three men stared at Deets, incredulous. The woman’s large, round eyes glazed with tears and her upper lip trembled. “How do you know, Marshal? These men said they left him out there last night on their way back from some . . . some errand they felt was so important. Ran off in the middle of the night. I didn’t even know Eldon had gone until I got up this morning and found his bed empty.”
“A bounty hunter killed him,” Deets said, worrying the brim of his hat in his hands. “The bounty hunter who told me eight men from Box Elder Ford ambushed him last night. Shot his partner, Miss Louisa Bonaventure. The bounty hunter is Lou Prophet, a man of some renown.”
“Infamy, you mean!” said Neal Hunter, pointing his hat at Deets. He was a darkly handsome, middle-aged man with long sideburns and a thick mustache just now showing some gray.
“Ambushed?” Mona cried. “What in the hell were you boys doin’—ridin’ off in the middle of the night to ambush bounty hunters?”
“I’d like to know that, as well,” said Deets, when all three men merely stood there, defiantly silent, glancing around at each other.
“Mona,” Glen Carlsruud said, “we did no such thing.” He looked quickly at the other men, as though silently ordering them to fall into step behind him. “No such thing at all. In fact . . . those bounty killers ambushed us. Shot Eldon, and his horse ran off, leaving the rest of us long before we knew it.”
“That’s not how Prophet tells it,” Deets said, feeling that chill again, feeling that old weakness in his knees. He was up against the top men in the town, maybe even the entire county, and he was still wet behind the ears as a town marshal, having spent most of his life up to a year ago punching cattle. “He says you ambushed him up by Ramsay Creek. Ambushed him and Miss Bonaventure.”
“You’d take a bounty hunter’s word over ours?” Hunter asked Deets threateningly.
Deets didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. His heart was grinding nervously away in his chest. His ears were ringing. Nerves. Those blamed nerves of his. He just couldn’t tamp them down once they got sputtering around just beneath his skin.
Once, he’d been a man. Now, he was a mere mouse peeping around in the brush, afraid of its own shadow . . .
“What were you doing out there?” Mrs. Wayne wanted to know, pounding her fist on the arms of her rocking chair.
“It was a private matter,” said Hunter. “Private business.” He looked at Deets again, threateningly. “Our own private business. All you need to know, young Marshal Deets, is that those two bounty hunters ambushed us last night in the dark. If Eldon is dead, it is they who killed him.”
Before Deets could respond to that, Purdy said, “Where did you see Prophet?”
Deets hesitated, not sure he should answer the question. The three men stared at him. Mrs. Wayne was staring off into space, letting the information she’d learned here this afternoon sink in, not the least of which was that her husband was dead. The three men’s eyes were demanding, threatening. Deets found himself shriveling beneath those hard, commanding gazes.
Turning his hat in his hands, he said, “At the doc’s. He brought the girl in. She’s wounded bad.”
“Yes, well, we had to fire back, of course,” Neal Hunter said, glancing conspiratorially at the others.
“I . . . I don’t get it,” Deets said. “Why would they fire on you?”
“Because they’re killers.” Purdy turned to Mrs. Wayne. “We sent two men out looking for Eldon. They’ll find him and bring him home.”
She was staring now at Deets, wide-eyed. Her cheeks were flushed, lips set in a straight, tormented line. She wanted to say something, but, she, too, felt beaten down by these men—the most powerful men in the town.
“We’re sorry for your loss, Mona,” Carlsruud said, donning his black bowler. “We’ll make sure you’re taken care of . . . in Eldon’s memory.”
As she continued to stare at Deets, her eyes filled with tears. The corners of her mouth wrinkled as she pursed her lips with sorrow and frustration. Obviously, she saw that the town marshal would be of little assistance.
Purdy squeezed the woman’s wrist.
“I’ll send Helen over, Mona,” Hunter said, patting the woman’s shoulder and donning his own hat. She kept her accusing eyes on Deets, who lowered his own in chagrin.
The three men strode over to where Deets stood near the door. Hunter glanced over his shoulder at Mrs. Wayne and then turned to the young marshal. He leaned forward until his mouth was only six inches from Deets’s left ear.
“I suggest you arrest the bounty hunter, Prophet, for the murder of our friend, Eldon Wayne. That’s all you need to concern yourself with, Marshal.”
“I think I’d best talk to the county sheriff about this,” Deets said and swallowed.
“Sure, sure,” Glen Carlsruud said. “We wanna dot all our i’s and cross all our t’s, of course. You send a telegram off to old Boss Crowley. Keep in mind he’s damn near thirty miles from here. He’s sixty years old and laid up with the Cupid’s itch from those cheap, disgusting whores he frequents . . . and both his deputies are drunks. But you’d best let him know, sure enough.” The mercantiler winked, sneering.
Purdy said, “Then you arrest Prophet and wire for the circuit judge. I reckon we’re gonna have us a murder trial.”
“And keep in mind,” Hunter added with a frigid smile, “the trouble you had a while back. The trouble we helped you get out of . . . young marshal. No one wants to dig up old bones—both literally and figuratively—now, do we?”
He patted Deets on the back, and he and the others walked out of the house.
Deets’s heart thudded.
He looked at Mrs. Wayne. She was still staring at him, sneering at him, lips pursed.
Deets cleared the dust from his throat. “Mrs. Wayne, do you have any idea—?”
“Good day, Marshal,” she said and turned her head sharply away from him.
Deets pinched his hat brim to her and left.