The sun had been down for an hour, the sky awash with stars, when the stage wheeled around a butte and several pole corrals. It pulled to a halt before the station, an inky black, two-story smudge around four lantern-lit windows.
A dog had run out from the shadows to nip at the wheels and bark. Now it ran excitedly under the idle coach, panting, tail-wagging, waiting for the door to open and the passengers to climb out.
“Well, that was an entertaining ride,” Prophet told the jehu wryly, casting a cautious glance at the building looming on his right. If one gunman had been sent, so could two, three, and who knew how many more?
“Yeah ... thanks to you and that girl,” Clatsop said sourly, wrapping the reins around the brake.
“Sorry, Mike.”
“Not that I ever took a shine to ole Frank, but shotgun riders ain’t easy to find in this hell-for-leather country.” He called down to the passengers, “Night stop!”
Gripping the shotgun in both hands, Prophet climbed down from the driver’s box and opened the coach door. He offered his hand to Miss Diamond, but she ignored him and headed for the luggage boot. He was still helping Mrs. Phelps when the showgirl mounted the porch steps with her carpetbag.
“Wait,” he told her. “Why don’t you let me check it out first?”
While Clatsop helped the others find their bags in the luggage boot, Prophet mounted the steps, on which Miss Diamond had stepped to one side and froze. Prophet opened the door and went in. He was met in the long front room crowded with oilcloth-covered tables by a heavy-set woman in an apron. The air smelled like beef and biscuits.
“The stage is late this evenin’,” the woman said, wiping her hands on the apron. Her hair was falling out of its bun. “The roast is cooked dry.”
An old, scarecrow man in coveralls and two stringbean boys sat at one of the tables, pie and coffee before them. They watched Prophet expectantly. He turned to the woman. “Any strangers here?”
The woman wrinkled her brows curiously, then laughed. “Just you!”
“You have a room for a young lady?”
“There’s five rooms upstairs. She can take her pick.”
“Obliged,” Prophet said.
As he turned back to the door, the old man said, “You ridin’ shotgun? Where’s Frank?”
“Dead,” Prophet said, too tired to explain.
The door opened, and Clatsop sauntered in. Behind him were Mrs. Phelps, the boy, and the old miner.
“Upstairs with your bags, folks,” the woman scolded. “Then come back down for food. It’s pret’ near cooked to leather, though. I don’t know what in the world Mike Clatsop was doin’ out there!”
Prophet stepped outside. “It looks safe,” he told the girl, still standing on the steps. “Rooms are upstairs.”
Wordlessly, she brushed by him, stepped inside, and crossed the room toward the stairs. Prophet followed her in and saw the woman, the old man, and the boys do double-takes, staring at the pretty, red-haired young woman who kept her head down as she made for the stairs, up which she disappeared, lifting the hem of her dress above her ankles. The boys, both unkempt towheads, one with a fuzzy mustache, the other with a mustache and sparse muttonchops, glanced at each other with faint, lewd lights in their otherwise dull eyes.
Prophet sat at a table across from Mike Clatsop. The woman brought him a plate of food—roast beef as tough as shoe leather, boiled potatoes, canned corn, and a cold biscuit. He washed it all down with several cups of hot, black coffee, then dug into a piece of rhubarb pie the woman had brought when she’d seen him swabbing his plate with the biscuit.
The pie made up for the lackluster main course—good and sweet, with a greasy, sugary crust. Not tart, the way some rhubarb pies could be, depending on the cook. Rhubarb wasn’t grown down south, and it was one of the few good things he’d found in the North. He’d vowed for years that if he married a Yankee, she’d have to bake one hell of a good rhubarb pie.
When the woman returned to take his dessert plate, she said, “Is that girl of yours gonna come down here and eat? I don’t serve in the rooms—no matter how uppity they are.”
“She’s not my girl,” Prophet said, finishing his coffee.
“She had a bad time on the trail. Why don’t you fill a plate, and I’ll bring it up to her?”
“She the reason Frank was killed?” the woman asked him, tilting her head to one side, a fist on her hip.
“Yeah, but it’s not what you’re thinkin’,” Prophet said.
“I bet it’s not,” the woman said, then wheeled and headed back to the kitchen.
When she returned with a plate and a cup of coffee, Prophet took it upstairs, leaving his shotgun propped against the table. In the hall, lit by a single wall lamp, were five doors, two on each side, one at the end. Bed-springs squeaked briefly behind the second door on the right.
He knocked.
“Go away.”
“It’s Prophet.”
“Go to hell!”
“I’ve got a plate for you.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Roast beef,” Prophet said enticingly.
There was no reply.
“Coffee?” he said.
After a few seconds, the bedsprings complained behind the door. Floorboards squawked. The door opened. The girl appeared. She grabbed the coffee from Prophet’s hand, spilling a little, and started closing the door. Midway, she stopped. She looked down and saw her hideout gun in Prophet’s hand, butt forward.
“Take it,” he said. “If you use it on me, you’ll be cuttin’ off your nose to spite your face.”
She looked at him, grabbed the gun, and slammed the door.
“Listen,” he said, bowing his head at the closed door, trying to think of something to say. “I’m ... I’m sorry about all this. I didn’t know what kind of trouble you were in. McCreedy didn’t tell me.”
The bed sang again. The door opened a foot.
“Well, now you know, don’t you?”
“You have any idea if any others are going to come?”
She smirked, her eyes almost crossing. “Oh, they’ll come.”
“How many?”
“However many it takes.”
Prophet nodded thoughtfully.
“Going to let me go?” she asked him, lovely eyebrows arched hopefully.
“No, I—”
The door closed in his face. Doubting it would open again this evening, he went back downstairs and gave the plate to the woman, saying, “She wasn’t hungry, after all.” Then he grabbed his shotgun, went outside, and stood on the gallery.
He dug in his coat pocket for his makings pouch. The coach sat before him, but the horses were gone, the old man and the two boys having led them off to the barn, which hulked across the road. Light peered between the doors.
A sickle moon hung just above the peaked roof. It was butter yellow, and two bright stars hovered nearby, one of them winking like a guttering candle. The night was so still that Prophet could hear the stomping and blowing of the horses in the barn, the tin clatter of feed buckets, and the old man’s gruff commands. The dog sniffed in the weeds left of the barn, making rustling noises and soft snorts as it hunted for mice.
Prophet turned sharply to his left as a loud snore rose, pumping his heart and nearly buckling his knees. It was Mike Clatsop, fallen asleep in the rocking chair, head back, jaw rising and falling as he breathed. A light in the curtained window shone on the pink pate of his bald head.
“Sorry for the trouble, old-timer,” Prophet mumbled, lighting the cigarette and turning to the barnyard. He squatted on his haunches, smoking and thinking.
As many men would be sent as needed. If that was so, who would the next be and when would they come? Tonight? Tomorrow? The next day?
If that was so, why was he doing this? Why didn’t he just turn the girl loose? Prophet could mail the money back. It wasn’t much in the first place, and McCreedy should have told him the danger he’d face if he took the job—if McCreedy knew. But there was the problem of Prophet’s debt to the Johnson City sheriff, who had saved him from a good, old-fashioned neck stretching down in Kansas, all those years ago.
Prophet brought the quirley to his lips and drew deep. Blowing smoke, he lowered his head and shook it, feeling the knot of anger and defiance in the pit of his stomach. He wasn’t quitting. Not only because he’d never quit anything he’d started in his life, but because someone wanted him to.
It was his own stubborn pride that might very well get him and the girl killed, but he wasn’t a quitter, and he could no more change his nature than the color of his eyes.
He finished the cigarette, stubbed it out on the ground, and retrieved his saddlebags, shotgun, and rifle from the luggage boot. He hauled them upstairs, found an unoccupied room, and changed back into his trail clothes, embarrassed about the failed ruse. What suit could hide what he was—a six-foot-three-inch, bull-necked, ham-handed Georgia hick turned witless bounty hunter? She’d seen through him from the get-go. And the badge fiasco!
“You’re about as dumb as they come, Prophet,” he scolded himself, stomping into his old boots. His face cracked a smile at the snug, familiar fit of the old leather, the calluses rubbed by the others thanking him almost audibly.
Decked out in blue jeans, buckskin tunic, blue bandanna, and weather-beaten hat, he headed downstairs with the new suit and boots rolled under an arm.
“Here you go, Pop,” he said to the old man washing up at the stove. “A new suit for Sundays.” He tossed the clothes on a chair and walked outside.
The two boys stood beside the stage, looking up at the rooftop luggage rack, where Frank Harvey still lay, wrapped in rope. Mike Clatsop snored in the rocker.
The boys turned to him. The one with the scraggly muttonchops said, “Gramps said we’re s’posed to bury him.” His voice was dull, his eyes wide with apprehension.
“So you haven’t seen a dead man before—that it?”
“That’s right,” the other boy did not hesitate to admit.
Prophet smiled. “I’ll take care of it. Just hunt me up a shovel, will you?”
Prophet climbed onto the stage.
“You’re gonna need help gettin’ him down from there,” Muttonchops said.
Prophet shook his head as he straddled Harvey’s body, slipping his knife from his belt sheath. “Gettin’ him up here was a bitch,” he said, cutting the ropes holding Harvey to the luggage rack. “Gettin’ him down’s the easy part.”
He resheathed his knife, grabbed an arm and a leg, and, with a grunt, rolled Harvey over the side. The dead man landed in the dirt with a heavy thud.
“Jesus, mister!” protested the boy with only the mustache.
“He’s dead, for chrissakes,” Prophet said. “What were you two gonna do—bust your guts for a bag of bones?” Climbing down, he shook his head. “Never send boys to do a man’s work.”
Prophet stood between Frank Harvey’s legs and, imitating a draft horse between two shafts, lifted the dead man’s ankles to his sides. He dragged him out behind the barn, one of the boys following. When he found some soft earth over a dry creek bed, the weeds and bushes glittering in the starlight, the other boy brought a shovel, and Prophet began to dig while the two boys stood there silently watching, awfully fascinated.
When he’d dug for a short time, he handed the shovel to the boy with the muttonchops, who dug for another ten minutes.
“That’s deep enough,” Prophet said. He’d been smoking and keeping an eye on the yard.
He rolled the body into the grave and, cigarette dangling from his mouth, covered the hole with dirt, patted it smooth. “Well, that about does it. Wasn’t so bad, eh?”
“Aren’t you gonna cover him with rocks?” the boy with only the mustache asked, troubled.
“What for?”
“So critters don’t dig up his bones. There’s wolves prowl around here.”
“They can help themselves,” Prophet grunted.
He returned the shovel to the boy with the mutton-chops and started back to the yard, the boys following silently behind him. When he came around the barn, he stopped suddenly, adrenaline jetting in his veins.
Two saddled horses were tied to the hitch rack before the house, lathered like they’d been ridden hard to get here.