He found that while most of the girls were just your average poke-and-tickle painted ladies, many went the extra mile. One particular high-priced Asian girl named Songbird could do amazing things with oils and hot candle wax. Abilene Sue, a buxom free-living Texan, generally employed a double-cinch saddle and riding crop into her act. And Fannie the Fortune Teller liked to start her sessions by diving your future. A future which always ended the same way-with her riding on top of you, trying to break you like an ornery bronc.
Somewhere along the way, Cabe met Mama Adelade, the proprietor of Mother French’s Old Time Theater. What it was, was basically a steakhouse with vaudeville acts and imported French girls-or just girls who could affect a convincing French accent-and a booming business upstairs. Place smelled of fine French perfume and offered Parisian wine and cuisine.
Mama Adelade? a slight black woman who could not have weighed much more than ninety pounds? dressed in a yellow silk dress with embroidered purple roses sprouting at the bosom.
“ Honey,” she told Cabe after he introduced himself, “I surely appreciate what it is you’re doing. My girls are getting more than a little skittish. And I can’t have that, no sir. For here we offer only one real thing and we offer it three different ways. And that would be love-the fine, the mighty fine, and the very fine. Now, I’m thinking what you need is the mighty fine. The very fine…no, boy, you ain’t up to it.”
“ What’s the ‘very fine’?”
“ Hee, hee,” Mama Adelade tittered. “The very fine is just about dying and going straight on to heaven. It involves two girls and sometimes three, hot oil and busy hands.”
Cabe admitted he surely wasn’t up to it.
Mama Adelade told him that she had been a slave on a Baton Rouge plantation. When she got her freedom and, Lord, how she’d wanted that, it wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. “Boy, the massah, you know, he might of owned us, but least he fed us and put a roof over our heads. I think maybe some of us forgot about that. For when we was freed…hell, we had to fend for ourselves. No easy bit, that.”
Mama told him that it wasn’t long before she realized that there was only one way a black woman was going to make any money in a white man’s world. So she started small and built up her stable year by year.
“ Had me a son, too, Mr. Cabe. But as he grew to manhood, he found religion and didn’t care much for how his mama made her living. Last I heard of him, he went out to Indian Territory to preach. Hee! You imagine that? A black man slinging the white man’s gospel to a bunch of red heathens! Something funny about that, you think?”
It was a long day, but by the time Cabe retired from Horizontal Hill, he was no closer to the Sin City Strangler than he had been before. But something had to give. Sooner or later, it was going to.
While he was at a teahouse, he bumped into Henry Freeman, the Texas Ranger, who claimed he was out “inspecting the stock.” And that made Cabe remember he had to wire the Rangers in Texas, see if old Henry was who and what he claimed to be.
Because, honestly, Cabe had his doubts.
6
The riders thundered into Redemption like demons loosed from the lower regions of Hell.
The vigilantes had arrived.
They came pounding up the dirt street on black mounts, seven men wearing long blue army overcoats and white hoods set with eye slits pulled over their heads. They carried repeating rifles and shotguns and Colt pistols. They charged down the streets and down alleyways with an almost military precision.
What they brought to the little Mormon enclave of Redemption was death.
And with it they brought every intolerance and prejudice that had been boiling in the black kettles of their hearts for weeks and months and even years.
Without haste then, they started shooting.
The Mormons knew they would show, but had hoped it would not be for some time for they were ill-prepared to fend off such a bold attack. Men carrying muskets and bolt-action rifles ran out to oppose the riders and were cut down in lethal rains of well-directed gunfire. Women screamed and children cried and shotguns boomed and pistols barked. Lead was flying like hail, peppering doors and shattering windows and killing livestock that had not been carefully stabled.
One of the town elders stomped out onto the porch of his house, his three sons at his heels. A rider passed by, giving the elder both barrels at close range. The buckshot blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest and splattered gore over his sons. And the sons had little more time than to shriek as gunfire from Winchester and Sharps rifles raked them, killing them on the spot. An old woman ran out amongst the vigilantes, waving a prayerbook at them and they rode her down, crushing her beneath the hooves of their horses. The same fate met three young children who’d seen their mother and father put down by pistol fire.
The wise townsfolk stayed behind locked doors or returned fire from gunports cut into shutters. But they were not seasoned fighters, and very few of their rounds came within spitting distance of the vigilantes. Though a single bullet-whether directed or ricocheted? ripped through the throat of a vigilante and he collapsed in his saddle.
But that didn’t even slow the killers down.
They reigned and fired, tossing flaming kerosene torches into bales of hay and piles of lumber and very often right through the windows of stores and homes. And in the midst of that, they kept riding and shooting and killing and scattering horses and mules, using cattle and sheep for target practice.
Within twenty minutes of their arrival, Redemption was blazing like the nether regions of Hell. Flames engulfed barns and livery stables. Licked up the walls of houses. Vomited from exploded windows. The town became an inferno of fire and smoke and screaming. Bucket brigades worked to douse the conflagration even as the vigilantes shot them dead.
In the noise and confusion and shouting, a lone figure clutching the Book of Mormon stumbled into the streets, already bleeding from a stray bullet that had creased his temple. He made quite a sight out there on foot, shouting prayers and oaths, trails of blood streaking down his face.
“… the Antichrist will come among the people, commanding his legions…and ye shall know him by his name! Nation shall make war, horrendous and godless war upon nation, man will kill his brothers in a rapture of evil! Evil! And…and…the unclean shall make unclean laws to enslave the righteous and the fornicator will be smitten by the hand of the Almighty…”
He never got much farther than that, for a lasso of horsehair rope swung down and over him, locking his arms tight against his body. The rope was tied off to the saddlehorn of a vigilante’s horse and then lastly, finally, the riders rode out of the purgatory they had created.
Rode out, dragging the preacher behind them.
They dragged him for maybe a mile.
Over rocks and stones and stumps, through dry ravines and up craggy hillsides. When the vigilantes did finally stop, atop a low flat-topped hill fringed by rabbit brush, the preacher was barely alive. He looked, if anything, like a threadbare scarecrow. His rag and straw stuffing was hanging out and sticks were protruding from his legs and arms…except it wasn’t rags and straw and what stuck out weren’t sticks. The flesh had been worn from his face and the backs of his hands. He had numerous compound fractures and broken bones. His jaw was dislocated and still he tried to speak, a bloody gurgling sound bubbling forth.
One of the vigilantes pulled off his hood. It was Caleb Callister. Squinting his eyes in the darkness, he watched the glowing, flickering bonfire in the distance. Redemption.
“ If your people are smart, preacher-man,” he said, slipping a thin cigar between his lips, “they’ll heed our warning this time. Because next time, next time-”
“ Next time there won’t be anybody left when we ride out,” another vigilante finished for him.
This got a few chuckles from the others.
