At the cemetery, after a brief funeral service at the Bethany Lutheran Church in town, Minister Calvin Whitehead bowed his head to recite a prayer. The dozen or so mourners who’d gathered around the grave followed suit. The undertaker’s two sons had just finished digging the rectangular hole as the mourners had walked or ridden out from the church to the cemetery here on a rise overlooking the river.
Neal Hunter bowed his head, as well, and sighed.
Whitehead’s prayers could last as long as it had taken the two Gibbons boys to dig six feet down through rocks and sand. The sun was blazing straight down through the leaves of a cottonwood, searing the back of Hunter’s neck.
He was uncomfortable for other reasons, as well. Verna McQueen was one of the mourners, standing not ten feet to Hunter’s left. She was fetchingly dressed all in black, almost as though she herself was the widow. Her lush hair tumbled across her shoulders, strands of it dancing in the breeze and fairly sparkling in the sunlight.
Mona Wayne herself wore only a shapeless gray and white frock, and a straw hat with an appropriately black band that she’d probably borrowed for the occasion. She sat near the hole and the closed wooden casket, sweating and weeping into a handkerchief. One of Eldon’s battered hats sat on the ground near one of Mona’s stout ankles for folks to toss “memorials” into as they left the proceeding.
Hunter didn’t know if Helen, standing to his right, had seen Verna or not. He doubted that Helen would make a scene here at Eldon’s funeral if she had. Still, his and Helen’s argument earlier, and now Verna McQueen showing up to the funeral, was enough to give Hunter a bad case of indigestion.
He jerked with a start when someone poked him from behind. He glanced over his shoulder. Glen Carlsruud stood behind him in a three-piece black suit. Carlsruud canted his head slightly to his right, rolling his eyes in the same direction.
Hunter turned to see what the mercantiler was indicating. He frowned at first, unable to see anything in that direction except patchy green and brown hills spotted with post oaks and juniper. But then Hunter saw the man standing on a slightly higher hill to the northeast of the cemetery, maybe a quarter mile away, and he felt his heart hiccup in his chest.
The man was tall and broad-shouldered. He wore a cream shirt under a brown leather vest, and Hunter could see the gun thonged on the man’s right thigh, the funnel-brimmed Stetson on his head. The tips of twin shotgun barrels poked up from behind his right shoulder. The shotgun’s bandolier was slanted across his chest. He held a pair of field glasses to his eyes. The glasses were directed at the cemetery.
As Hunter stared back at the man who was undeniably the bounty hunter, Lou Prophet, Prophet lowered the glasses, turned his head to one side and down, as though spitting, and then raised the glasses once more. The skin over Hunter’s chest rippled. He felt as though the glasses were directed specifically at him.
Maybe they were.
Hunter felt weak and sick to his stomach. Anger burned in him.
What in the hell was he doing up there, anyway?
Hunter looked around at the other mourners. All of the other men who’d ridden in the pack the night before last were here. Even Melvin Bly, though his arm was in a sling and he looked pasty and jaundiced and in severe need of a drink. No, not all the men from that night, Hunter saw. L.J. Tanner wasn’t here, which wasn’t all that unexpected. The hard-bitten Tanner did not hold with such formalities as funerals.
But all the rest were here. And the bounty hunter had probably known they would be here at the funeral of one of their fallen. He was probably scrutinizing each of the mourners right now as the preacher droned on, asking forgiveness for Eldon’s sins and beseeching Him to welcome Eldon into his open arms. Prophet was probably trying to figure out which of the mourners had been there that night at the Ramsay Creek Outpost.
He was also strategically making his presence known. He was making sure the men who’d ambushed him knew he was hunting them.
Hunter glanced away and caught Verna McQueen staring at him. Verna’s chin was dipped slightly, head bowed, but her head was also turned to her right and she was giving Hunter a sly, cunning smile beneath the brim of her black hat. That dubious smile coupled with the bounty hunter’s presence there on the nearby hill caused Hunter’s guts to churn with more vigor.
What in hell was she smiling about? Had she seen Prophet and was she amused by his presence? Or was her smile more sinister? Was she reprimanding Hunter in her own, subtle, ironic way?
Perhaps she was threatening him?
He’d have to talk to her as soon as possible. He’d have to explain the situation to her. That wouldn’t be easy, however, since obviously Helen was suspicious.
He looked away from Verna McQueen. Out the corner of his right eye, he saw Helen move her head. Helen was now gazing toward the preacher, but had she a moment before caught him meeting Verna’s oblique, smiling stare? If so, she gave no indication.
The preacher droned on, his head bowed so low that his chin nearly touched his black wool clergy blouse and white collar. His grizzled gray hair blew around the freckled, bald, domelike top of his head.
“For Christ’s sake, Reverend,” Hunter was on the pointing of shrieking. “That’s enough! We’re burying only Eldon Wayne here today, not the King of friggin’ England!”
Just then a baby started crying, and Whitehead took that as a cue to end his soliloquy. After the mourners had filed past Mona, offering condolences and dropping a coin or two into her husband’s old, salt-stained hat, Hunter managed to step far enough away from Helen long enough to grab Carlsruud’s arm and whisper, “We all need to meet at Tanner’s. Spread the word. One hour. Call it a memorial libation for our dear friend, Eldon, if you like.”
Whether or not Helen Hunter had caught the glance her husband and Verna McQueen had exchanged during Reverend Whitehead’s belabored prayer, young Marshal Roscoe Deets had. He and Lupita had been standing to the Hunters’ far right, at one end of the curve the standing mourners had made around Mrs. Wayne, the Reverend, the coffin, and the open grave.
Deets had gotten a good look at Mr. Hunter and Miss McQueen sharing that furtive glance, Miss McQueen with that funny, almost ominous smile on her pretty, doll-like face.
Right then and there, Deets knew his suspicions had been correct. Miss McQueen had something to do with the powder keg of trouble that was sitting in the middle of Hazelton Street, just waiting for someone to touch a match to the too-short fuse and blow the whole town to kingdom come.
Now Deets fished in his pants pocket for a dollar’s worth of change. He could only produce eighty cents, however. With a sheepish smile at the sobbing Mrs. Wayne, he dropped the coins into the hat, hoping that neither she nor anyone else around them was counting. Stepping away from Mrs. Wayne, following the line of mourners out toward the trail leading down Cemetery Hill, he glanced at Lupita.
Deets’s pretty, round-faced wife smiled up at him, squeezing his hand.
She said nothing more as she and Deets made their way to the bottom of the hill, where several buggies were parked and two saddle horses were tied to the wrought-iron hitch rack festooned at each end with a winged iron cherub strumming a harp. Deets caught movement in the distance to his right.
He stopped and swung his head in that direction.
His belly soured as he watched the bounty hunter ride his dun horse up to the top of a distant butte, heading away from Deets and the other mourners. The man’s broad back bobbed with the lunging of his horse. His faded Stetson was snugged down on his sandy-haired head, and his double-barreled, savage-looking shotgun hung at a slant across his back.
He and the horse crested the butte and then dropped down out of sight on the other side.
Deets had spied the man glassing the cemetery earlier. He was like a ghost, Prophet was. Haunting the town. Making a mockery of Deets’s authority. Or whatever authority he had, which wasn’t much, the young marshal had recently realized. The badge he was so proud of was a sham, worth about as much as the cheap nickeled copper it was made of.
“Who was that?”
Deets jerked, startled by his wife’s voice from just off his right shoulder. She was staring up at him from beneath her straw boater festooned with the black ribbons she’d arranged earlier that morning for the funeral. Under a light tan shawl, she wore a plain, brown and white print dress that wasn’t nearly as nice as the red one he’d given her. But the red dress hadn’t been suited for a funeral. On her feet were worn, brown, side-button shoes she was unaccustomed to wearing.
Lupita stared up at her husband with concern.
“He was standing on that hill during the funeral,” Lupita said. “He was looking through binoculars at us. Why?”
Deets led Lupita along the side of the trail, heading toward Box Elder Ford sweltering in the midday heat, dust lifting as a hot breeze kicked up.
“Don’t worry about him,” Deets said.
“Now I am worried,” Lupita returned, wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her nose as she studied her husband’s eyes. “Who is he, Roscoe? Please, tell me. I can tell you are concerned about him.”
Deets didn’t want to worry her, but she already was worried. Besides, he felt like getting his own worry off his chest, although merely speaking about it certainly wasn’t going to get rid of the cause. No, only action would get rid of the cause. Deets severely doubted he was up to that kind of action . . . again.
“That’s the bounty hunter who killed Eldon,” Deets told his wife as they continued walking down the hill, to the right side of the trail. He could hear the other mourners speaking behind him as they, too, headed back toward town.
“Dios mio,” Lupita said, staring dully forward in shock. She looked up at Deets. “What was he doing up there?”
“Sending a message, I guess.”
“How unholy of him . . . to spy on the funeral of a man he killed. How disrespectful!”
Deets chuckled morosely.
“You are concerned,” Lupita said, looking up at her husband again.
“Yeah, I’m a little concerned. But that don’t mean you need to be, honey.” Deets patted Lupita’s hand. “I’ve . . . I’ve got it all under control.”
“Are you going to arrest him?”
Deets chuckled again.
“What is so funny?”
“I was just thinkin’ how you sound like Hunter, Carlsruud, and the others. They all want me to arrest him, too. Only thing is, I don’t know if I got any cause to arrest him.” Well, it wasn’t the only thing. There was a little problem with his nerve, as well, though of course Deets wasn’t going to admit that to his wife. “They and several others shot his partner, a young lady. She’s over at Doc Whitfield’s place, gettin’ tended. Might live, might die. Meanwhile, Prophet’s on the lurk and makin’ everybody nervous as rabbits at a rattlesnake convention.”
Lupita studied on that for a time, frowning down at the ground as they turned onto their street and headed for their little house. “Why did they shoot this young lady, Roscoe?”
“That there I don’t know,” Deets said. “They won’t tell me nothin’. All I know is a passel of ’em rode out of town together a couple nights ago and not all of ’em came back upright. Wayne and Melvin Bly took bullets—Wayne, of course, fatally.” The young marshal kicked a rock in frustration. “What I should do is get everybody, including the bounty hunter, Prophet, in one room and have ’em all lay their cards on the table for me.”
“So . . . why don’t you do that?”
Deets and Lupita stopped walking as a buggy came rattling up behind them. Deets turned to see the polished leather chaise of Verna McQueen rolling up from the direction of the cemetery, her smart Morgan trotting handsomely in the traces. Miss McQueen dipped her chin cordially and smiled winningly with her rich, red lips and said, “Good morning, Marshal. Good morning, Mrs. Deets.”
She passed on by, dust lifting from her high, thin, red wheels.
“Miss McQueen,” Deets said, pinching his hat brim to the woman.
“She is so beautiful,” Lupita said, gazing admiringly after the buggy, which was crossing Hazelton Street now, heading north. “Why do you suppose she lives alone? A woman so beautiful must have had many suitors.”
Deets glanced at his young wife. Since she was half-Mexican, Lupita lived on a veritable island here in Box Elder Ford, subtly shunned by the white women. Aside from a couple of full-blood Mexican women, the half-Arapaho woman the blacksmith had married, and the occasional saloon girl, Lupita was the only woman in Box Elder Ford without pure white blood running through her veins.
She didn’t seem to mind the lack of social interaction. After all, she’d grown up on a small, remote ranch with only her father and brother and a few wild horses and some chickens, until Deets had taken her away from there only a little over a year ago. Growing up, her closest companion outside her family was a coyote she’d raised from an orphaned pup.
The lack of socializing, however, had kept her in the dark about such things as the rumors going around town about Miss McQueen.
“Yeah, you’d think she would marry, wouldn’t you?” Deets said, staring at the sleek, black buggy curving up the trail between buttes on the north side of town. “Maybe she’s just got so many choices she can’t make up her mind.”
“Hmmm,” Lupita said, also staring at the chaise, speculatively.
“Well, I’d best get back to the office,” Deets said, thinking that he might soon pay a visit to the woman they’d just been talking about. Maybe from Miss McQueen he could get some answers, but he wasn’t sure he really wanted any.
Deets doffed his hat and leaned down to kiss Lupita’s cheek.
“Wait, Roscoe,” Lupita said, clutching his arm. “You still haven’t told me all that concerns you. I am your wife. You should share such things with me.”
“All in good time, honey,” Deets said, giving her slender shoulders a reassuring squeeze. He himself wasn’t at all sure about anything. “All in good time.”