“Couldn’t resist getting in a lick for fun. As to who was picking on who, the midget had the advantage, as well as the choice to make it a serious fight.”
“Advantage? Poor horse turd didn’t come up to your bellybutton!”
“made me the bigger target. As you can see, we were both throwing.44-40 balls at one another, so if anything, I had to aim better, since there was so much less to hit. He likely became a gunslick in the first place when he noticed that while God created Man, Sam Colt and other gunsmiths made them equal.”
Timberline watched the cowboy roll the little corpse up in the groundcloth as he shuddered and said, “My head tells me you’re likely right. But I’m glad it wasn’t me that killed him. Looks like Windy’s wrapping up a baby!”
“Let’s get back with him. It’s too late to think of bedding down, ‘cause the sun’s creeping up on us. We’ll get an early start. We can eat right away and break camp by first light.”
He turned and walked toward the campfire winking up at him through the trees, feeling more morose about the killing than he’d really let on to the men behind him. It didn’t bother him that the man he’d killed had been so small. It bothered him that he’d had to kill at all. He’d trained himself not to show the sick feeling these affairs left in his stomach. He’d steeled himself to eat his next few meals mechanically, tasteless as they might be. He knew why so many men in his line of work wound up with bleeding ulcers, or like poor Jim Hickock, got to be ugly drunks toward the end.
He wasn’t given to probing the dark shadows of his own mind, but he knew one night he’d dream about that ugly little gargoyle, as he had again and again, about the others he’d had to kill. It wasn’t as if he felt guilty. He couldn’t remember shooting anyone who hadn’t deserved it. At least, not since the war. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t sure why he should feel so drained after a gun fight—and disappointed.
Maybe it was just the waste. People lived such a short while at best. Man was born with a death’s-head less than an inch below the soft skin of his face. By the time he was old enough to talk, he knew the graveyard waited just up the road ahead. What was it that made some men rush the process so?
He remembered that first one in the dawn mists of Shiloh, shouting fit to bust as he charged through the spring greenery into another boy’s gunsights. He remembered the kick of the old Springfield against his shoulder as the world dissolved in gray-blue smoke for a long, breathless moment and how, as the smoke cleared, that other boy had been lying under a budding cherry tree with a surprised look on his face, and how the cherry blossom petals had fluttered down like gentle, pink snowflakes as the body stopped twitching. The first man he’d killed had been fourteen or so. A farm boy, from the looks of his dead hands as they lay, half open, near the stock of his musket in the cherry blossoms. It was later, when the kitchen crew brought the evening grub up to the line, that he’d noticed the ball of fuzzy, gray nothingness in his gut. He hadn’t been able to eat a thing. By the second evening of the battle, he’d been hungry as a bitch wolf and pinned behind a stone wall without so much as a plug of tobacco to chew on. He’d learned, by the time they marched him beyond Shiloh Church through the sniper-haunted forests, not to let his feelings show. But he still wondered sometimes, late at night, who that other boy had been, and why he’d been in such an all-fired hurry to end the life he’d hardly started.
“The City of the Saints” lay at the base of the Wasatch Range, staring out across the desert to the west. Salt Lake City had grown some since Longarm had been there a few short years before. The outlying houses now extended into the foothills and the party had to ride for more than an hour through the town before they could get to the part they were headed for.
Little kids came out of the somber Mormon houses along the gravel road to stare at the big party riding in. Some of the kids threw sassy words or poorly aimed horse turds at them before scooting behind a picket fence. Longarm didn’t know whether they were just being kids, or whether the Mormons were still telling them bedtime stories about how cruel the outside world could be. As long as they didn’t improve their aim or throw something solid, it wasn’t worth worrying about.
Timberline was leading the mount Mabel Hanks, handcuffed to the saddle horn, was sitting. Mabel had simmered down to a sullen silence, with a just-you-wait! look in her smoldering eyes.
Longarm found himself riding alongside Kim Stover, who seemed sort of quiet herself, since breaking camp. Longarm thought he knew what was bothering her, so he didn’t say anything. They were riding in at an easy walk, for they were too far from the center of town to lope the rest of the way in and Longarm had warned his Wyoming companions not to make sudden motions in sight of the sometimes-truculent Mormon folk they were paying a call on.
After perhaps five minutes of silence, the redhead said with a disgusted tone in her voice “I’d as soon you’d ride with someone else, Deputy Long.”
“Oh? Well, you can drop back if you’ve a mind too, Miss Kim. I’m up here near the head of the column ‘cause I know the way to Main Street and will likely be dismounting first, at the Federal Building.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I mean to head direct to the depot.”
“I never try to change a lady’s mind, but I did offer you and yours a free ride up to Bitter Creek. I figure it’ll take an hour or so to do the paperwork on my prisoner. Then I’ll be free to see about getting all these hands and horses fixed with transportation.”
“You’re not taking that woman back to Denver?”
“Nope. They never sent me to get her. I’ll let the Salt e office do the honors. Maybe ride back to Denver in one of them fancy Pullman cars. Be nice to stretch out between clean sheets for a change and I’m overdue for a good night’s rest.”
“I should think you’d enjoy another night with Mabel Hanks. But I suppose you’ve tired of her, eh? You men are all alike.”
Longarm rode in silence for a time before he sighed, observing, “I might have known you gals would have your heads together on the only subject womenfolk never get tired of jawing about.”
“Don’t look so innocent. She told me everything.”
“She did? Well, why are you keeping it a secret? Where did she say she buried Kincaid and that other feller from Missouri?”
