The next morning, turned on his sore shoulder, and groaned with pain. He felt like someone had hammered a dull rail spike deep in the joint.
Opening his eyes, he stared around the cabin, half-hoping he’d find himself in the Waddy’s Cottage in Henry’s Crossing, clean sheets beneath him and the smell of breakfast emanating from the kitchen downstairs.
No such luck. He was lying on a spindly cot in the ancient cabin, the morning sun glaring through the four-by-four-foot hole in the roof, beyond which occasional birds fluttered. As his vision cleared, he saw the blood splattered on the walls and smeared on the floor, making several gruesome trails to the door and outside.
He’d dragged the bodies out last night, after he’d jerked his shoulder back into its socket and the smoke had cleared. He’d decided not to head for Henry’s Crossing until morning, as his arm had been too sore to lift the cadavers onto the horses. Also, the trail was dangerous at night, haunted as it was by roving outlaw bands and renegade Indians.
He’d boiled coffee over an outdoor fire, eaten some jerky and stale biscuits he found in his saddlebags, and used a few tips of his whiskey bottle to relieve the pain in his shoulder enough to conjure sleep. He’d slept rather well, too, in spite of the shoulder, the ceaseless yammering of coyotes and wolves, and the coppery smell of blood in the cabin.
Throwing his blanket aside, he swung his legs to the floor, stomped into his boots, donned his hat, and headed outside, working the kinks out of his neck. Gazing across the shabby yard, which the morning sun had discovered and painted a soft gold, lightly brushed with a fuzzy breeze, he inspected the bodies laid out side-by-side before the corral. The outlaws’ horses stared at Prophet across the prone, blanket-covered figures of their former owners, as if to say, So what now, hotshot?
Prophet’s shoulder barked at the mere thought of wrestling those bodies onto their mounts, but that’s exactly what he had to do. He couldn’t wait around here another day. His grub was low, for one thing, and this was outlaw country, for another. Bounty hunters and outlaws rarely mixed without fireworks.
He approached the bodies, squatted down, and threw the blankets back from the pale faces, belligerent-looking even in death. He recognized McTeague and Clawson, having cowboyed with both down on the Staked Plain one summer. The other two—a burly, middle-aged hombre with a long gray beard, and a tall, stringbean fellow with receding blond hair and hand-tooled Texas boots— he didn’t know.
Hoping he hadn’t made a mistake, he reached into his shirt pocket for the descriptions, and let out a sigh of relief. Since he’d turned to bounty hunting six years ago—after having tried everything from soldiering and scouting to bartending, cowboying, riding shotgun for a stage line, and even wearing a deputy sheriff’s badge for a year—he’d had nightmares of drawing down on the wrong man, one of the many hazards of the job. Witness descriptions were not always accurate, and neither were the pen sketches on wanted posters. And Prophet would have been the first one to admit, if only to himself, that he got a bit careless at times, having been raised by a Georgia cotton farmer who believed the best way to approach any obstacle was head first. You could reflect once the dust settled.
In bounty hunting, however, the slightest mistake could put you on the wrong side of the law in a heartbeat, make you a target of your own breed. Odd how that made the job both nasty and compelling, Prophet thought now, stuffing the papers in his pocket. He knew it was not to his credit that he liked doing what he did, and he could understand the revulsion of others. But there was just something dangerous enough about it to make every other job look dull.
And like his old man had said—foul-mouthed drunk that Silas Prophet was—you’re dead one hell of a long lime.
“Well, there’s no time like the present,” the bounty man said as he headed for the barn, where the outlaws had put up their tack.
He dreaded the nasty job of lifting the bodies onto the horses but was eager for its completion. When he got to Henry’s Crossing, he’d stay there awhile and pay a whore to coddle him with whiskey and lovin’. Maybe he’d go down to Mexico, spend a few months by the ocean. He’d heard the senoritas were something special, cheap as snake-water but sweet as sugar. Hell, maybe he’d even find another line of work—in Texas, say, where the winters weren’t so harsh. Something less revolting but equally interesting. Maybe he’d even find a woman to settle down with. Hell, stranger things had happened ...
Saddling the horses was a big job in itself, straining Prophet’s shoulder. Several times he considered leaving the tack, but couldn’t do it. He knew that if the dead men’s kin didn’t claim them, which they probably wouldn’t, he could sell them to a livery barn, upping his take-down by as much as a hundred dollars. Prophet was many things, even a spendthrift at limes, but he’d been barefoot-poor enough lo never turn his back on an extra cent.
Saddling the horses was a job, but getting the dead men onto the horses, even with the help of his horse and lariat, about made him faint. That railroad nail he’d woken up with had doubled in both size and number, and they were tearing around in his bruised shoulder, probing for nerves. The morning was cool, but he sweated like a butcher, and by the time he was through, his face was as pale as the cadavers lashed to their horses.
He boiled coffee and took his time sipping it and eating the last of his jerky and biscuits, waiting for the hammer in his shoulder to ease its pounding. It did so after about twenty minutes, and Prophet kicked sand on the fire, returned his coffee pot to his saddlebags, and mounted the ugly dun, heading out, leading the four horses, tied tail-to-tail, by a rope.
The day warmed quickly, and as he headed east, the sun was warm on Prophet’s stiff, aching shoulder, which he couldn’t wait to soak in a hot tub and hire a pleasure girl to knead gently with her fingers, caress with her naked breasts. Mile after mile, he thought about those fingers, those breasts, a tall glass of pilsner, fresh tobacco, and a bottle of Tennessee whiskey. To pass the time, he hummed and occasionally even sang a few bars of songs from his Confederate past: “Jeff Davis built a wagon and on it put a name, and Beauregard was driver and Secession was the name ...”
He made it to the outskirts of Henry’s Crossing at midday, halting the string of horses on a chalky clay butte overlooking the town, a collection of primitive buildings scattered about the little yellow shack that did duty as the ferry office. Like many Western towns, Henry’s Crossing had been spawned by river traffic and the intersection of several freight roads.
At the moment, Gil LaBlanc’s ferry was leaving the town side of the Missouri with a big Murphy freight wagon and four mules, the ferry bucking the waves and taking on water like a half-submerged tree. In town, a terrier tied outside the mercantile was barking at two kids teasing it with slicks.
Prophet hiked a leg around his saddle horn and rolled a cigarette, giving the horses a breather after the long climb up the butte. He studied the big painted letters— WADDY’S COTTAGE—on the side of Henry’s Crossing’s only hotel—a thirty-room affair with a veranda on both the lower and second floor, and the best cook this side of the Rockies. The woman who owned the joint, Ma Thurman, was the most persnickety bitch you’d find north of the Pecos, but she ran a tight ship, nearly bedbug free.
Thinking of those beds, and the whiskey and women over at the Queen Bee, Prophet heeled the roan, jerked on the lead rope, and started down the trail into town, sucking on the quirley until it was no longer than a thimble, then tossing it in the well-churned, clay-colored dust of the trail.
“... and Beauregard was driver and Secession was the name ...”
He rode past the boys now sitting on the boardwalk chewing candy, past the tin-ware store and butcher shop and a half-dozen drays parked before the sawmill which filled the air with pine. He crossed the board bridge over Mud Creek and pulled up before the little mud-brick shack with a weather-beaten shingle announcing simply “SHERIFF”. He climbed tiredly down from the roan, clamping his jaws as another lightning bolt shot through his shoulder.
“You kids stay away from those horses,” a man behind him ordered.
Prophet turned to see a bandy-legged little man, with snow white mustaches and worn wool trousers held up with a pair of snakeskin gallowses, crossing the street in front of the Excelsior cafe. Wearing a tarnished silver star above the pocket of his blue-plaid shirt, Sheriff Harlow F. Fitzsimmons frowned at the two boys who had been teasing the dog. They’d been attracted by the blanketed bundles on Prophet’s horses, and were heading this way.
“Are those dead men, Sheriff?” one of the boys asked, eyeing Prophet’s bundles.
The sheriff stopped in the middle of the wide, dusty street and aimed a crooked finger at the kid. “I told you to git!” His voice was as high-pitched as an old woman’s.
The boys turned tail and ran back toward the mercantile.
The sheriff walked up to the last horse in Prophet’s string and lifted a blanket. “Can’t you come in the back?” he snapped.
“I didn’t know you had a back door,” Prophet said.
“I don’t, but you could tie the horses back there, then come around the front and get me. You have to make such a goddamn spectacle?”
“Well, I got ’em covered this time, for chrissakes!”
“And watch your goddamn mouth! There’s ladies shoppin’ in town today.”
Prophet mopped his forehead with a cuff of his sweat-soaked shirt. He was used to being received this way by tin stars like Fitzsimmons, or “Little Fitz,” as he was known by the townsfolk. “All I want is my money, and I’ll be on my way.”
Fitzsimmons shoved his hands in his pockets and approached the bounty hunter suspiciously, his washed-out blue eyes going over the taller man as if sizing him up for a hanging. “These the ones held up the express office? Where’d you find ’em?”
“Down in Horsetail Valley. There’s an old buffalo camp out there.”
“You back-shoot ’em?”
“No, I didn’t back-shoot ‘em!” Prophet protested. He would have been the first to admit he wasn’t the most scrupulous of bounty men, but he didn’t go in for back-shooting. He took pride in that and was thoroughly indignant that anyone would suspect otherwise—even “Little Fitz.”
“Well, how’d you bring down all four of ‘em, then? They musta been sleepin’.”
“No, they’re weren’t sleepin’, neither.” Prophet hesitated. “They were, well...” He slid a glance at the wrapped bundles on the four horses, trying to come up with a reasonable explanation that wasn’t too terribly far from the truth. He knew that if anyone found out he’d fallen through the roof of the outlaw shack, the story would spread faster than cheap whiskey to every saloon in the Beaverhead. He’d never live it down.
“There was a hole in the roof,” he explained finally, with an air of haughty indignance. “I saw that from the hill above, and I decided to use it to my best advantage. That’s how you stay alive in my line of work, Sheriff. You use whatever they give you ... you use it against ’em.” That last sounded even smarter than Prophet had intended.
Fitzimmons cocked his head and squinted one eye skeptically. “The roof?”
“I jumped through the roof, landed feet-first on their poker table, and caught ’em with their pants down. I ordered them to drop their irons, but as you can see”— he turned to the bundles on the hang-headed horses, two of which were drinking from the trough along the boardwalk—“they didn’t take my advice.” Prophet pursed his lips, so satisfied with the story that he was eager to tell it to the girls over at the Queen Bee.
The sheriff rolled his eyes and shuffled toward the door of his shabby office. “Come on, Prophet,” he grumbled. “Let’s get to the paperwork. A hole in the roof, you say. Huh!”
The paperwork would have taken five minutes if the sheriff had been faster with a pencil and hadn’t had to spell every word aloud before he wrote it down. When he finished, he set the pencil aside with the air of a difficult job well done, folded the reward request, and dropped it in a desk drawer.
“Well, you know the drill, Prophet. It’ll take a few days for the express company to process your request. I guess you’ll be waiting around for the money.” Obviously, the prospect of Prophet’s remaining in Henry’s Crossing did not appeal to the aged lawman, who scowled and gave his head a sharp sideways jerk.
“I reckon, Sheriff,” Prophet said. He enjoyed antagonizing the old coot, who wore the badge only because no one else wanted it. He was about as effective at keeping the peace in Henry’s Crossing as a broken-down nag would have been, but fancied himself the next Wyatt Earp. Deep down, Prophet didn’t mind. It was ineffective lawmen like Fitzsimmons who made the pickings rich for bounty hunters.
“Don’t worry, I’ll mind my p’s and q’s,” Prophet said, like an unctuous schoolboy, squeezing the old man’s shoulder. “Wouldn’t want to cross a man with your sand.”
“Well, see that you don’t!” Fitzsimmons barked as Prophet headed for the door. “If I have to turn the key on you, it might be a while before I turn it back again.”
“I hear ya,” Prophet said, throwing up a wave as he stepped outside.
He was riding off down the street, in the direction of the undertaker’s, when the sheriff called his name. Befuddled, Prophet turned around, and Fitzsimmons beckoned him back. Prophet shrugged and reined the dun back to the jail, where the sheriff stood gazing indignantly across the street.
“I forgot,” he said grudgingly. “The sheriff over to Johnson City sent you a letter a few days back.”
Prophet was incredulous. “A letter?” Prophet was friends with Owen McCreedy, the sheriff of Johnson City, but couldn’t imagine what he’d be writing him about.
“That’s what I said.” Fitzsimmons turned into his office. He reappeared a moment later and offered Prophet an envelope which had already been opened. Prophet glanced at the sheepish-looking Fitzsimmons and removed the letter. It read:
Dear Proph:
Time to call a favor in. Please find a showgirl named Lola Diamond and bring her to me by the 19th. She’s traveling in your area, with Big Dan Walthrop’s Traveling Dolls and Roadhouse show. Should be in Henry’s Crossing soon. I need her for questioning at a court hearing. Find enclosed $150 for your trouble and $15 for two stage tickets to Johnson City.
Hoping like hell you’ll take the job,
Your pal,
Owen McCreedy
Scowling, Prophet folded the letter and returned it to the envelope. He looked at Fitzsimmons. “What’s it all about?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Don’t ask me. McCreedy didn’t tell me much more than he told you. Just said he needed her there in six days, which is gonna be a problem since her troupe ain’t due in here till the fifteenth, day after tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you just tell her the law wants her, and let her find her own way down to Johnson City?”
“My guess is she won’t go unless she’s got a ... uh ... escort, I guess you’d call it.” Fitzsimmons smoothed his mustache with the thumb and index finger of his right hand, wagging his head dourly. “Don’t ask me what ol’ McCreedy has goin’ down there, but it sounds to me like he’s got his hands full. Otherwise, he’d send his deputy for her. Instead, he’s got you...” He chuffed without humor and shook his head once more.
Prophet lifted his hat and scratched his head. McCreedy’s cryptic note befuddled him. Its desperate tone, and the fact that he owed McCreedy a favor, was making it hard for him to turn the job down—in spite of his exhaustion and aching shoulder. He and McCreedy had once ridden for a cow outfit in western Kansas, and the favor Prophet owed McCreedy involved the ranch owner, his daughter, and the lie McCreedy had told the man to save Prophet’s hide.
“She gets in day after tomorrow?” he asked Fitzsimmons thoughtfully.
The sheriff nodded. “Her troupe’s due to play here again in two days. She’s a redhead. Pretty. Big blue eyes and a figure, that ... well, you can’t miss her.”
“I’m not so sure I want to find her,” Prophet groused.
“Well, that’s up to you and McCreedy. I don’t want no part of it. Downright unprofessional, you ask me. Sendin’ a bounty hunter after a murder witness. Ain’t even sure it’s legal.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
“’Cause I’m needed here, for godsakes!” Fitzsimmons defensively exclaimed. “The goddamn city council hasn’t hired me one single deputy. Not one! If I took this little ... this ... tart ... down to Johnson City, hell, not only would my wife prob’ly leave me, but the town would be burnt to the ground by the time I got back. What with all the rivermen and owl hoots and soldiers on the prod every day and night—”
“All right, all right, I get the drift,” Prophet said, thinking it over.
Taking a showgirl down to Johnson City shouldn’t be such a hard way of making a hundred and fifty dollars. Hell, he’d been planning to head that way anyway, as soon as he’d pocketed his reward money and rested his shoulder a few days. He’d heard the gambling was good down there, and the whiskey and women were even better. Why not repay an old friend a favor and get paid for it?
The decision must have been apparent on Prophet’s face. When he lifted his eyes from the boardwalk, he saw that the sheriff was holding out an envelope. “You’re to serve her with this here subpoena. I reckon it’s legal, but I won’t vouch for it. Like I said, this is between you and McCreedy.”
“A showgirl, eh?” Prophet said, ignoring the paper and staring at the false front of the Queen Bee with a shit-eating grin on his face. Hell, he’d tracked renegades through deserts for little more than a hundred dollars. Even with a sore shoulder, how hard could it be to accompany some showgirl down to Johnson City? Prophet could catch up on his shut-eye between relay stations.
“A right purty one,” Fitzsimmons said, slapping the subpoena against Prophet’s chest. “And a right ornery one to boot ... or so I’ve heard.”
“Ornery, huh?” Prophet said, taking the paper. “Will I have your help corralling this little tomcat in the stage?”
Fitzsimmons’s eyebrows furrowed and his chin lowered. “Uh ... well, I’d like to help you out there, Lou. Really would. But if the townsfolk see me helpin’ a bounty man cart off a showgirl ... well, you know ...”
“Guess it wouldn’t look too dignified, eh, Sheriff?” Prophet said sardonically.
“Well, dangit, a lawman has to look professional, you know. And I have a feelin’ more than one or two people around here aren’t going to want to see ... ” Fitzsimmons ended the sentence abruptly, looking off and gritting his teeth as though he wished he hadn’t said as much as he had.
Prophet thought he understood. Handling the girl would no doubt require finesse. Some of the men in town would probably try to intervene, if they had the chance. Not to mention the people the girl worked for. But Prophet, unlike the hapless Fitzsimmons, knew how to work around such obstacles. He’d been doing so for a good many years, and prided himself on his cunning.
“Well, it’s about a two-day stage trip,” Prophet said. “I reckon we can start after I’ve collected my fee for these hombres—and still get to Johnson City by the nineteenth.”
“The show’s supposed to be through the weekend,” Fitzsimmons warned tauntingly, “so you’re gonna make her and her handler a might angry.”
“Well, I guess I should expect to put up with a little hardship,” Prophet said, trying to get the old man’s goat as he started off again with the horses. He smiled and shook his head.
But as he stopped and waited for a passing string of freight wagons, he pondered the fact that, while he’d tracked enough thieving and murdering men to fill a good-sized prison, he’d never hunted a woman before. Especially a showgirl with a good many surly fans, not to mention a male handler or two. On the surface, such a job appeared relatively easy. But Prophet knew from experience to look beneath the surface ... and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw.
Besides, he didn’t like the desperate, cryptic tone of Owen McCreedy’s letter. Prophet knew there was a lot the sheriff of Johnson City hadn’t told him, and he wondered why.
As he headed down the street, he turned a look behind to see Fitzsimmons staring after him with a big coyote grin on his face.