The preacher, though broken and peeled, tried to crawl, straining at his leash like a fool dog testing his boundaries. The vigilantes watched him, just expecting him to curl up and expire…but it wasn’t happening. He coughed out loops of blood, legs pistoning him forward, arms still fixed to his sides. Slinking and inching along like some human worm. And just as freedom, maybe, seemed to beckon…the rope snapped taut.
“ Best accept the fix you’re in, preacher,” one the vigilantes said to him. “It ain’t like rain…it won’t go away.”
“ Much as you might like that,” said another.
They sat on their mounts, smoked, passed a bottle of whiskey, and watched Redemption burn like a torch in the distance. Gradually, slowly, the blaze became separate fires that were brought under control one after the other.
Then they drew straws on who got the preacher.
Luke Windows was the lucky man. He decided to drag the preacher around for awhile. And he did. After another twenty minutes or so, he got tired of it and the preacher still wasn’t dead, so he emptied his Colt Navy. 44 into the man.
Then he joined the others to celebrate.
7
After a somewhat exhausting day spent making the rounds of Horizontal Hill’s varied brothels, Tyler Cabe walked back to the St. James Hostelry. His belly was empty and his temples were pounding like jungle drums from all the free liquor he’d swallowed. He walked into the dining room and Jackson Dirker was there, along with his wife and five or six other guests. Dinner consisted of roast chicken and potatoes with an apple crumb for dessert. It was damn good and Cabe’s respect for Janice Dirker went up a notch.
Jackson Dirker was surely a lucky man.
Cabe and Dirker made small talk, but mostly just listened. One of the tenants was a medical supply drummer from Wichita named Stewart. He spoke at some length-and in unsavory clinical detail-about his products which ranged from liver pills to trusses, hygienic whiskey to colonics. Particularly the latter…which, of course, didn’t do much for the digestion of the apple crumb.
After he excused himself and the other tenants slipped off, it was just Cabe and Dirker together, with Janice flitting back and forth collecting dishes.
“ Mr. Cabe tells me that the two of you are acquainted,” she said to her husband.
He barely looked up from his newspaper. “In a manner of speaking.”
Same old Dirker, Cabe found himself thinking. Cool as ice. If he had any emotions buried in that thick hide, it would have taken twenty men with shovels to unearth them. Maybe if Dirker had simply said, yes, yes, we know each other. We fought against each other…but that was years ago. Maybe had he said something like that, Cabe would have been satisfied to let it go. But now he felt surly.
“ Yes,” he said, “once upon a time, your husband and I were brothers in arms. We fought on opposite sides, but spiritually we were one. Ain’t that so, Jack?”
The newspaper lowered an inch. A set of crystal blue eyes found Cabe, did not blink. The newspaper slid back up. “I wouldn’t go that far,” was all he would say.
“ Nonsense. Maybe your recollections of me are vague, Jack, and rightly so…but mine of you? Hell, sharp as a whip. How I remember you at Pea Ridge! What a fine and striking figure you were!”
“ That’s enough, Cabe.”
Cabe smiled now, fingers brushing the webbing of scars that ran across the bridge of his nose, cut into the cheeks. “Your husband is modest, Madam. I would say that Jackson Dirker was an officer and a gentleman. Fair and sympathetic in all matters.”
Dirker was staring holes through him now.
Cabe was staring right back.
Janice, sensing something was terribly amiss here, just cleared her throat and picked at imaginary lint on her velveteen dress. “If I may be so rude and impertinent, Mr. Cabe…did you, did you get those scars in the war?”
But if she was rude or impertinent, it only made Cabe’s grin widen. His fingers explored the familiar slash-and burn-geography of those old scars. “Yes, I received them in the war. I carry them with a certain amount of honor. Battle wounds. You remember when I got these, Jack?”
Dirker set the newspaper down. “Yes, I do. But, tell me, Cabe, how did you find our brothels? Word has it you spent most of the day there. Did you find our red light district to your liking?”
Whatever Cabe was going to say evaporated on his tongue. Dirker. That wily sonofabitch. “I…um…”
Janice smiled thinly. “Our Mr. Cabe certainly is a saucy one.”
“ Isn’t he, though?” Dirker said, enjoying himself now.
Cabe swallowed and swallowed again. “It was purely business, Madam. The man I’m hunting preys upon prostitutes, so what choice do I have but to befriend them? To know them and the places they work.”
“ The things a man must do to make a living,” she said, shaking her head. “Tsk. Tsk. And all day you spent among them? How tired you must be…after such an exhausting enterprise.”
“ Madam-”
Dirker was smiling now. “You are a most determined man, Cabe. If any man can root out this killer it will be you.”
Now here Dirker thought he was being funny and it made Cabe smile, too. If the man was more like that on a regular basis and not so damnably stiff and formal…he almost would have liked him. Cabe figured he was being baited, so he did what came natural to him: he rose up and bit down. “Yes, Madam, it was tiring, but I kept at it until most men would have been spent with fatigue.”
Janice blushed…blushed, but did not turn away. There was something smoldering behind her eyes and she made sure Cabe saw it.
Dirker raised an eyebrow. “Did you now? Gave them the what-for?”
“ Oh yes.”
“ I’ll leave you gentlemen to it,” Janice said, leaving the room.
Cabe figured he’d either offended her…or excited her. In his experience, Southern women could be like that. Excited at what they found most offensive. It was the breeding, that’s what. Antebellum society said a lady had to repress her basal instincts. That such things as lust and desire had no place in the higher scheme of things…but like any beast, the more you starved it the hungrier it became.
And there was hunger in that girl. A barely-concealed need to cast-off her upbringing and get down and dirty.
Dirker said, “Is it going to be this way every time we meet, Cabe?”
Cabe looked away from him. So many things he wanted to say, but to what end? What true end? He’d already violated two rules of his upbringing-that a man did not bring his business or personal affairs to the dinner table and that he did not hash out problems with another man in the presence of a lady. Maybe now was the time…if he wanted a fight, then it was high time to quit beating around the bush.
But he did not want that, not anymore. “No,” he said, surprising even himself, “I would prefer we could put all that aside. I reckon it would be the proper thing to do. At least for the time.”
“ Agreed. But just so you understand, Cabe. What happened at Pea Ridge is not something I am proud of. A day does not go by that I don’t think about it, wish things had been different.”
“ You willing to admit that all we were doing was scavenging some essentials off them dead boys?”
Dirker nodded. “I know that, yes. Maybe I knew it then, too, but I lost my head. What I did was wrong.”
Damn. Now if that didn’t suck the wind right out of a man. Dirker admitting he was wrong. Cabe felt suddenly very loose, boneless. He almost felt embarrassed that he’d even brought it up. “All right, all right. Fair enough. We were all young and hot-headed, I guess.”
“ What did you do after the war, Cabe?”
Cabe told him about his years riding steer and nightherding, being a railroad detective and shotgunner on the bullion stages. How it all led to bounty hunting. “Yourself?”
