“Because by then, I expect she’s going to be the mayor,” Bo said with a smile.
Scratch shook his head. “That brain of yours is just brimmin’ over with ideas today, ain’t it?”
“Mankiller needs a real mayor and a real town council if we’re going to be able to get anything done around here.”
“That means havin’ an election,” Scratch pointed out.
“That’s right.”
“You think Pa Devery’s gonna stand for that?”
“He’ll have to unless he wants to draw more attention to the town, which wouldn’t be a good thing for him and his family. They’ve had things their own way for long enough. They need to realize that they’re going to have to give up some of their power.”
“That’s liable to bust things wide open.”
“Well,” Bo said with a smile, “that might not be such a bad thing.”
Scratch chuckled. “I can’t argue with that.”
“One more thing we need to do is see if we can get a small advance on our wages,” Bo went on. “If we’re being provided with room and board, we won’t need much money, but there might be times when a little cash would come in handy.”
“Yeah. You haven’t forgot that we came here to hunt for gold, have you? This whole business of takin’ the deputy jobs was just so’s we could build up a stake for prospectin’, ain’t it?”
“Oh, sure,” Bo agreed easily. “There’s no reason we can’t try to do a little good for the town while we’re at it, though.”
Scratch looked a little dubious, but he didn’t say anything else.
They were far enough up the street now that they could get their best look so far at the old Devery house. It was a sprawling, two-story structure built of unpainted boards that had faded and warped from time and weather. Several one-story additions had been built onto it, probably as more family members arrived from Kansas. Bo wondered idly if all the Deverys in Mankiller lived there, or if some of them had houses of their own. It didn’t really matter, but he was curious.
The roof over the verandah sagged a little in places. The beams that held it up were crumbling. Weeds grew wild in front of the house, with a narrow path hacked through the briars. Clearly, the people who lived there didn’t believe in taking care of their home. Folks could get away with that for a while, but sooner or later it always caught up to them, Bo thought. It was a good indicator of just what sort of people the Deverys were, too.
There were two gables with windows on the second floor, above the verandah. Ratty curtains hung inside the windows. As Bo watched the curtains in the window on the left moved a little, as if someone in the room had twitched them aside. He caught a glimpse of a pale face peering out, and even though he couldn’t see the person’s eyes at this distance, the gaze seemed to hold a peculiar intensity. He was about to ask Scratch if he saw the same thing, when the curtains dropped back into place and the face was gone.
“Looks like the sort of house all the kids would stay away from when we was young’uns,” Scratch commented. “Like there were ghosts or monsters livin’ there.”
“If they were ghosts, they wouldn’t actually be
Scratch chuckled. “I reckon not. Monsters, then. Is that all right?”
Bo thought about the Deverys and said, “Yeah. That’s a pretty good description.”
They crossed the street again and turned down-slope, heading back toward the sheriff’s office. They hadn’t gone even a block when they got a vivid reminder of the fact that the Deverys weren’t the only troublemakers around here. Mankiller was a boomtown, after all, and had all sorts of vice and iniquity competing for the attention of a couple of newly minted star packers.
In other words, a man came crashing through the batwings of a saloon, sailed across the boardwalk in front of it, and landed in the street. He had nearly knocked down a couple of miners who were walking past.
Raucous laughter followed the luckless hombre who obviously had not left the saloon of his own volition. He had been tossed out. Several men emerged onto the boardwalk. One of them stepped to the edge and silenced the laughter of the others by pulling his gun. He looped a thumb over the hammer and cocked the revolver, saying with brutal amusement, “We’ve seen you fly. Now we’re gonna see just how good you can jump, Peckham!”
CHAPTER 14
“Hold it!” Bo called, his voice ringing with command.
The man paused and turned a sneering, rawboned face toward the Texans. He was medium sized but powerfully muscled, wearing a leather vest over a faded blue shirt and gray wool pants tucked into high-topped boots with big spurs strapped to them. A flat-crowned black hat was thumbed back on his thatch of equally black hair.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked in flat, dangerous tones.
“Reckon that ought to be obvious,” Bo said. “We’re the law in Mankiller. Part of it, anyway.” He inclined his head toward Scratch. “He’s Deputy Morton. I’m Deputy Creel.”
“Well, I’m Finn Murdock, and I don’t give a damn. You old geezers run along now, and me and my friends won’t teach you a lesson for interferin’ with our fun.”
The three men who had followed Murdock out of the saloon had the same sort of lean, wolfish faces. They wore their guns low and looked like dangerous men. Bo had no doubt that they were.
But he wasn’t going to let that keep him from doing his job, and neither was Scratch. The silver-haired Texan drawled, “You fellas leave that hombre alone and run along now, and
