Two nights later the moon was hidden by clouds, making the streets darker and the saloons and dance halls brighter. Joseph Carrigan, wearing his badge, roamed from one den of vice to another, playing the lawman for Charles Bassett. At each stop he was greeted by men who either slapped his back in admiration or looked on in awed respect. Every female stared at him as though he were a god. Amazing, what gunning down a few criminals could do for a man’s reputation.
But it all seemed unreal, dreamlike. It felt more as though he were observing it all from outside himself than actually experiencing it.
As a lawman, he had the privilege of going armed in a town that denied that right to others—and for good reason, given the amount of liquor that flowed in Dodge City. But the pistol he wore was not the bone-handled Colt that had been stolen by, then recovered from, the burglar gang. He wore the one that Liam had seized from Mack Stanley. It was a less flashy weapon. The gleaming bone-handled Colt had always tended to draw notice and admiration; men wanted to look at it and heft it in their hands and talk about what a fine piece of work it was. Right now Joseph didn’t want that. He was already perceived, against his wishes, as a heroic gunman. He didn’t need to carry a pistol that only heightened that image.
All the veneration would fade with time, he supposed. He looked forward to that, but with apprehension mixed in. As the notoriety faded, so would fear of him. And life might grow more dangerous.
It didn’t matter. He’d already decided that his time as a lawman would be brief. He was doing this only for the moment, and for the money—and for Arment, who was extraordinarily proud of having a hero working for him and living in a room right there in his own livery stable. The way Arment had been going on for the past couple of days, Joseph wouldn’t be surprised if the livery stableman put up a brass plaque on the door of the sleeping quarters after Joseph moved on from Dodge: JOSEPH CARRIGAN, THE HERO OF DODGE CITY AND BANE TO THIEVES, SLEPT HERE.
Sleep there he did, hard and deeply, every night. After a day of shoveling out stalls and brushing down horses and hefting heavy saddles on and off, followed by a few hours of trudging up and down the streets of Dodge’s seamier districts, Joseph slept like a dead man. Liam did the same: For the past two nights he’d been snoring his head off when Joseph got in from making the rounds. Their interactions had been limited to early mornings, when both were getting ready for their day’s work. Liam would clean up, run down to a café, and bring back eggs and biscuits for their breakfast; they would talk briefly and superficially while they ate, and Liam would be off to the wagon works.
At length, Joseph’s allotted hours as a deputy marshal ticked off for one more day, and he headed gladly for his bed in the livery. Liam was there, asleep as usual.
That night, however, Joseph did not sleep deeply and dreamlessly as usual. He had a vague stomachache that kept him from fully relaxing. He had dreams, and not good ones. He was back in the war again, in his blue Union uniform, dodging cannonballs and bullets. Then suddenly he was outside the freight house again, shooting at burglars, but this time with pistols that fired haphazardly and couldn’t be aimed. He dreamed he was looking down the wrong end of a sawed-off shotgun that was about to blow his head off. He woke up in a sweat.
Joseph sat up in bed. By the moonlight streaming through his window he read his pocket watch. Three in the morning, on the dot.
He almost dropped the watch when Liam bolted up suddenly in his blankets, yelling and clawing at his face.
“No!” Liam yelled. “No, no!”
“Liam!” Joseph exclaimed sharply. “Wake up—you’re dreaming!”
Liam jerked his head around and stared at Joseph. His face transformed as he slowly awakened. “Good Lord…what a nightmare!”
“Must have been. I thought you’d tear your face off.”
Liam, breathing heavily, shook his head. “Don’t say that.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Just a dream.”
“I haven’t had a chance to talk to you much since I started the deputy work.”
“No.”
“The wagon job going well?”
“I’m learning a lot. I seem to suit Drake.” He shook his head like a wet dog. “God help me, what a dream!”
“What was it?”
“I dreamed a man shot my face off with a shotgun. During the war.”
“I dream about the war too.”
“I know. I’ve heard you talk and yell in your sleep sometimes.”
“Really?” Joseph looked away. “Kind of embarrassing.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. I just sat up in bed clawing my face like a fool. I hope I didn’t scratch it up. You care if I have a smoke to settle my nerves?”
“Go ahead.”
When the small cigar was glowing red in the darkness, Liam spoke again.
“There’s been something I’ve been wanting to tell you for two, three days now, and there hasn’t been a chance.”
“That thing you were going to tell me the night of the big shooting?”
“That’s right.” Liam drew on the cigar. “I got drunk that night because I’d seen Mordecai Scott.”
“Who?”
“Mordecai Scott. The man with the ruined face.”
“Oh, yes. Poor wretch. But why would you get drunk just over seeing him? The war left a lot of men mangled up.”
“Yes…but he’s the only one who is mangled up because of me.”
“What?”
“I’m the one who did it, Joseph. I’m the one who shot that poor man’s face all to hell with a shotgun. I never knew he lived through it until I saw him outside the wagon shop the first time I went to ask for work. It hit me like a falling stone when I realized who he was.”
Joseph was trying to make sense of it. “Wait, Liam. There’s no way you could know it’s the same man—not if his face is mangled up.”
“I didn’t know him by his face. He has a mark on his hand. I saw that mark clearly when I was fighting him hand to hand before I shot him. And I saw it when he raised his hand to wipe sweat off his face—what’s left of it. I saw the face, too, because he lifted the hood. He didn’t know I was there. God, it’s awful what I did to him.”
“That accounts for the dream you just had.”
“Yes. The man shooting me in the dream was Mordecai Scott.”
“Tell me how it all happened.”
“Might take a few minutes. Can you spare the sleep?”
“I can spare it. But if you’re right about this, it’s amazing. What are the odds that you two would cross paths again?”
“I figure they’re slimmer than the odds he could have even lived through such a horrible wound. But he did live…and now here we are in the same county. So now I’m starting to think like you. I’m thinking that maybe it ain’t a matter of odds but of destiny, or pre-destination, or whatever you call it. Maybe I was supposed to run across him again.”
“For what reason, though?”
“So I can help him. Make up for what I did to him.”
“You must not feel guilty for what you did, Liam. It was war. Kill or be killed.”
“I know. But I didn’t kill him; that’s the point: I just mangled him awful. Lord, when I think what that man must have suffered all these years, going through life so chewed up that he can’t even show his face…”
“It was a shotgun, you say? Since when did you Rebs fight the war with shotguns?”
“It was an old smoothbore, a farmhouse weapon. I didn’t know what it was loaded with, but it turned out to be shot. This all happened in a skirmish, not a battle. Five or six of us on either side. We were shooting at each other, fighting hand to hand in a couple of cases. I saw one of the Yanks run into this farmhouse. It was empty: The family had fled. I followed the Yank inside. We fired off our weapons at each other, both of us missing. It was hand-to-hand after that. He came out with a knife and slashed at me. He cut me right across the belly—not deep, but it bled. You’ve seen the scar yourself.”
“You never would tell me how you got it. I figured it was a woman or a jealous husband.”
“Well, now you know. Anyway, I got the knife away from him, but he knocked it back out of my hand and it landed over behind some furniture where we couldn’t get to it. Scott and me struggled and fought and did our best to kill each other bare-handed, but we couldn’t do it. All this time I’m thinking how strange it is to be fighting with a man I don’t know, for reasons I don’t really understand, when in another situation we might be taking a drink together in a saloon. Funny how you can think like that while you’re fighting for your life. Somewhere along the way, I bump up against a wardrobe and the doors open up and this shotgun falls out. I got hold of it, yanked it up…I don’t remember firing it, but I did. It was as loud as a cannon, and this poor fellow fell back clawing at his face…but the face wasn’t really there anymore.” Liam paused and shuddered. “There were parts of it hanging off of him, Joseph. Hanging off like pieces of loose meat. And his hand just groping at it, and me staring at the birthmark until blood covered it up so you couldn’t see it no more…. God. God.”
Joseph drew in a long breath and blew it out slowly through rounded lips.
“He grabbed at that face, rolling around, not screaming or anything…just groaning. Terrible groans. Then he lay still. No moving, no breathing that I could see. I was sure he was dead. I didn’t check him close: There seemed no need for it, and I had to get back outside to help against the others. Besides, he was my enemy. I wasn’t supposed to care whether he was dead. You know how it is in wartime.”
“I know.”
“Anyway, the skirmish broke up after that. None of my group was killed. One man wounded slightly. The Yanks all got away, except for the one I shot…except for Scott.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Liam. It was war.”
“I know. But it was still me who did it. And now, out of the blue, here I am again, and here he is.”
“But why do you think you’d be brought together with him after all these years? What would be the purpose in it? You can’t undo what was done.”
“I’ve been thinking on that lately. It seems to me that sometimes things a man did in the past are like unsettled accounts. They come back up due and payable, and you have to deal with them. I think maybe I’m supposed to do something to help Scott and his family. And I swear I’m going to do it. It’s why the good Lord brought me to Dodge City. I believe it to be a fact.”
Joseph was surprised to hear his generally faithless brother talking in such a way. “But what can you do for them?”
“I don’t know. I’ll think of something.”
“Do you know where they live?”
“Not exactly. I can find them, though.”
“Will you tell Scott who you are?”
“I don’t know. I’ll have to just see how that all falls out.”
“What if he knows you?”
“He might, but probably not. If not for him having that mark on his hand and being wounded in such a specific way, I’d never know him. He’d be just another stranger, one more in the blur of all the other strangers you see in war. You know, I’ve sat at bars many a time sipping whiskey and sharing laughs with strangers I just met, and wondering if at some time along the way the two of us shot at each other across a battlefield. It’s a strange and wicked thing, war.”
“Maybe you should think awhile before you go find Scott. You don’t know what he’ll think about it. You don’t know what he’ll do.”
“I have to do it, Joseph. I’ve wrestled with it since I saw him.”
“Then you should do it. Want me to help you?”
“Thank you, Joseph. But I think this is one I’m supposed to do alone.”
“Liam, Arment keeps a little bottle of brandy in his desk inside. He’s not the kind who minds sharing. If you’d like a little of it, he’d not care at all.”
Liam nodded and crushed out his cigar on the floor. “I believe I will. It might be just the thing to help me sleep. I’ve talked so much that I’ve wore off my tiredness. You ought to take some too. For sleeping medicine.”
Joseph, the nondrinker, thought about it. “Sleeping medicine. Sounds good to me. Come on in. I’ll find us a couple of medicine cups.”
Minutes later they stood by the window with brandy in coffee cups, moonlight streaming in around them. “Here’s to Liam Carrigan, and to his mission,” Joseph said.
“And here’s to Joseph Carrigan, heroic lawman of Dodge City,” Liam replied.
“May both succeed.”
“Indeed.”
They clinked the cups together and drank.