“You reckon somebody got word to him?” I asked.
“That or he wasn’t much more than a fart away all this time,” Boon said.
She looked angry to me. Not scared. Never scared, not really.
I jumped back into my boots and looked out the window. The glass was filthy and cracked, and it took me a moment to get my bearings. I was looking out the back of the building and there wasn’t a whole lot behind it other than mud and scrub and a few whores’ cribs. Red Foot didn’t comprise much apart from the main street and the ramshackle buildings that lined up tightly on either side of it with their false fronts and no boardwalk. I thought I could see some movement in the distance, but it was probably just a deer. Barry Dejasu wasn’t back there. He was downstairs or out in the street, waiting for us.
“This fuckin’ place gonna burn up like kindling,” he shouted. “Best make up your minds.”
“I guess he’s right,” I said.
“I’ll go see him, then,” said Boon, calm as you please.
“You do what you said you was going to do?” I asked her. “With that saw, I mean.”
She nodded soberly.
“I done it.”
“Barry ain’t going to like that.”
“He ain’t.”
“All right then,” I said with a grunt as I stretched my back. I wasn’t getting any younger and that lousy bed was worse than sleeping on the ground. “I’ll go with you.”
From the landing I couldn’t see him. The bar was completely engulfed in flames. It looked like he’d doused it with the rotgut the barman usually served in lieu of the Old Overholt he’d secreted away. That stuff was mighty flammable and probably not fit for human consumption, but the Lord knew I’d drunk plenty of it and its like over the years. The fire was slowly but surely crawling away from the bar, creeping over the floor and up the walls. My eyes stung and my throat burned badly. I turned away from the smoke and found the chair the judge had been sitting in, underneath that awful picture of the girl and the bear, when first we’d seen him the night before. He was there again now.
Or at least most of him was. Above the hollow of his throat there wasn’t any of Selwyn Dejasu to speak of. I didn’t know who had propped him up there, Boon or Barry, but I didn’t think it mattered. Fact was, Barry Dejasu had seen what Boon did, and whatever his purpose had been when he arrived at the Red Foot in Red Foot that morning, it was now to kill the strangers responsible for the death of his brother. In his shoes, I’d have been about the same business, so I couldn’t really blame him.
Boon knelt at the top of the steps and picked up what I figured for a sack, but turned out to be the blood-soaked shirt she’d had on throughout our hogwash trial. As a matter of fact, she’d had it on for some weeks by then, so I reckoned it was about time she changed into something else, anyway. Things worked out all right in that small way.
The shirt-sack had some heft to it due to its contents, which I could guess at. The smoke was gathering up thick at the ceiling by then, threatening to put an end to us before either the fire or Dejasu his own self could get around to it. I wondered how long it would be before the whole damn saloon was burning, and how long after that before the fire spread to the next building and the one after that. Like I said, there wasn’t much to that town other than what got thrown together there on that muddy street, and it was all pushed up on top of each other like they were hurting for room when they did it.
Boon went down the steps first, cargo in hand, with me just behind her. She drew the Colt .44 about halfway down. The smoke was so bad I couldn’t see anything anymore, and I cursed myself for not having looked around for my rifle. Had the judge or his men taken it inside when he decided on that idiotic trial? I couldn’t remember. Mayhap it was still lashed to the cantle of my saddle on the horse out of doors. Mayhap the horses had run away already, or been let loose by Dejasu, or killed by him. Mayhap he ate the damn beasts. I didn’t know.
Until that moment I didn’t think I could hate Red Foot more than I already did, but I was wrong. I still had some hate for it left to come out.
“Had a paper on you,” Boon shouted through the smoke and fire. “Guess it’s ashes now.”
“Wasn’t worth dog shit, anyways,” Dejasu called back. It sounded to me like he was laughing, but he might have been coughing, too. I sure was.
“Dead or alive, Dejasu,” she told him, alighting at the bottom of the stairs and raising an arm to shield her face. “Your call. Don’t matter to me.”
Instead of replying to that, he fired another shot into the saloon. It went wild, smashing something glass, maybe a bottle or a lantern. He couldn’t see us through the smoke, but we couldn’t see him, either. Boon moved faster to the front in spite of this, since there wasn’t really any other choice unless we just wanted to give up and die right then and there. I didn’t want that, as it happened, and neither did Boon.
Dejasu fired again, and then again in quick succession. For the first time it occurred to me that he might not have been alone out there. He seemed the type to run with a gang, and it was conceivable that he had one with him, which made our poor chances a hell of a lot poorer. Could have been there were a dozen guns out there instead of just the one. I was starting to rethink the wisdom of just sitting down and taking in all that smoke.
But Boon didn’t hesitate. Not for a second. She bolted for the batwings before the second shot ever got off, raising the shirt-sack with one hand and jutting the pistol out with the other. Dejasu shouted something more, but I couldn’t hear it on account of the bottles behind the bar were starting to burst from the heat, and the rotgut liquor inside them only fed the hungry flames. She was gone, out of the saloon, and I was starting to flinch and cower at all the destruction around me, so I thought I might as well run for it, too. On the way to the doors, I almost tripped right over my Winchester, which was laying on the ground like a gift from God. Or more probably, Satan.
Only one round in the breech, as I recalled. The rest of the cartridges were still among my sundries. I thought about that Butternut sniper and wished I had a scope, not that it would have done me any good. I was going closer to my target, not farther away.
I busted through the batwings in a plume of choking smoke, my eyes pouring tears like I just heard news my dog died, and there in the street stood two men, side by side. One was bald-headed, no hat, the hair on his face reaching clear up to his eyes. The other man was tall, his hair a curly mop of black that dangled down over dark eyes. This one wore a menacing expression, but I couldn’t get over just how boyish he looked. He worked hard on that sneer to make up for it.
“Which one of you killed my brother?” said the boyish one. I could hardly believe this pretty-faced man came from the same womb as Selwyn Dejasu. “Which of you God damned sons of fucking bitches do I kill first?”
Boon hurled the shirt-sack at him. He hadn’t expected that, and neither had I. The cloth fell away in mid-arc, revealing the gray, bloody head of Judge Dejasu as it rose and fell in Barry’s general direction. Barry let out an awful, low moan and put his hands up to catch it. The head landed right in his hands and he pulled it in close to his chest like he was going to rock it to sleep.
“Christ,” he bellowed. “Oh, Christ.”
His friend wasn’t half as shocked by Boon’s trick. He filled his hand with a Remington Navy pistol, his face cool as winter. I shot him with my lone cartridge, square in the chest. The bald man never got his shot off, and he didn’t make a sound. He just dropped to the mud like a sack of grain and lay still. At the same time, Barry Dejasu started to scream.
Barry’s gun still hung on one finger, swaying back and forth as the rest of his fingers clutched the head of his kinsman and he bawled until his face turned purple. It was an ugly thing to see, so I turned away. I didn’t have another shot, anyway, so it didn’t seem to matter if I was looking at him or not. Up the street, in the direction we’d come into Red Foot, I saw Pim, Boon’s palomino, loping idly around the undertaker’s I’d robbed the night before. My mount was nowhere in evidence.
Above our heads, the windows of the Red Foot Saloon began shattering. The fire had reached the second story. I seemed to be the only one to notice.
Boon said, “You’re coming back down to Darling with me.”
Dejasu dropped to his knees, baring his teeth like a wolf would. He carefully set his brother’s head down on the ground and got a better grip on his weapon.
“Don’t do it,” Boon warned him.
She had him covered, but old babyface Barry was quicker than either of us anticipated. He had that iron up and against his temple faster than lightning, and he squeezed the trigger, blowing his brains out the other side of his skull. He was still holding the gun when he hit the ground, face to face with the judge. I could not in that moment remember ever having seen anything sadder.
Boon, on the other hand, wasn’t in a mourning mood. She held her Colt on Barry for a minute longer, as if she expected him to get back up again and want to throw down after all, but once she was satisfied that he was dead, she leathered the gun and walked slowly over to the remains of the Dejasu brothers. She bent at the waist, picked the judge’s head back up by the ears, and walked back to the saloon where she chucked the head into the inferno. She might as well have been playing horseshoes, for all the effect it had on her.
For the first time in a long while, I silently questioned my only friend’s sanity. But not the first time. Not by a damn sight.
“Go fetch that horse,” she instructed me. “I’ll stow him.”
I didn’t argue.