trembling.
“You got them hands, good hands,” Orv said. His head tipped forward until his chin touched his chest. “Yessum, I hear, I hear. That Cherokee medicine man, Charlie, his name was Spoonfeather or something like that, but everyone called him King Paint. King Paint. Him and Grandpappy Jeremiah had a love of the roots and herbs, power doctors, eh? King Paint’s wife-that pretty young one that was all legs and tits and big eyes, yessum, that one-she got herself mixed up with Johnny Hollix. One day, old Johnny just disappeared and that squaw? Hee, hee, hee! The most horrible thing, the most horrible!”
Though Graybrow had come there to learn certain specific things, he knew he would have to let Orv talk in circles. Let him do his bit and, sooner or later, he would get to more pressing matters. So Orv told him about King Paint’s squaw and the awful punishment visited upon her for laying with Johnny Hollix on a regular basis. There was a horse that was lying in a ditch, ridden to death. Using ropes, they strung it up six feet in the air between two trees and sewed-up the squaw alive in the hide so only her head was poking out its flanks. The carcass was full of flies and ants and beetles. Pretty soon, it was full of maggots, too. That carcass was all soft and putrid and wormy. Orv said after a week, it was so filled with maggots that it looked like it was dancing up there, rolling and pulsating. And the squaw, of course, sewn up in that putrescence with millions of worms crawling on her, went insane. Laughing and cackling, spitting and screaming. She bit her tongue off, shredded her lips. The crows and vultures were picking at her face and inside that hide…well, you just didn’t want to think of what that was like, just boiling away with grave worms.
“Terrible, Charlie, that’s what it was,” Orv said, shivering now. “And it was two weeks, two weeks before that horse rotted and fell to ground. And the squaw? Dead, eyes picked out and skin stripped clean off her face…oh, and you don’t want to mention the rest, do you? No, sir! No, sir!”
Graybrow had to admit that he’d heard of some positively obscene punishments for adultery, but this one surely took the cake. The icing, too. Orv went quiet, alternately giggling and whimpering, whispering to his brothers Roy and Jesse who were apparently both dead.
“Orv?” Graybrow finally said. “Tell me about Deliverance.”
Orv actually let out a scream and began to cross himself. “I cain’t! I cain’t! Oh, that’s him, that’s that devil James Lee Cobb! He…he…he was born out of darkness, yessum, I know it. Something that crawls and slithers in them dark places where folks ain’t got no bodies, that was his father! Oh, oh, oh…his mother! Jesus help her! Help her! And Cobb, Charlie, hee, hee, Cobb he went up into those mountains and found that other one what had been waiting for him all them years! That which waited in them caves for the Macabro…oh, don’t ask me no more, no more! Because it was in Cobb and then Cobb came down…he ate ‘em, ate them men…came down and wasn’t long, wasn’t long before he heard tell of Spirit Moon…”
Orv went into hysterics after that. Crying and shrieking. Graybrow had to keep feeding him whiskey until the man was beyond pain and then he brought him into the shack so he could rest.
He wasn’t sure what it was all about, but there was no doubt anymore that James Lee Cobb was the catalyst for something. If Orv could be believed, then something sinister had taken control of Cobb up in the mountains, something that had touched him at birth.
And that something had brought him to Spirit Moon, who was a very powerful Snake medicine man.
Things were beginning to come together and Graybrow didn’t care for what they hinted at.
14
It was the next morning that Janice Dirker told Tyler Cabe about the giant who had come gunning for him the night before. As she spoke, she practically went white with fear. And Cabe had a pretty good idea that she was no shrinking violet.
“Elijah Clay,” was all Cabe could say, shaking his head. His breakfast of cakes and fried taters suddenly forgotten. “Jesus H. Christ, that sumbitch is really hunting me down. I’ll be goddamned.”
Janice looked more than a little concerned. “Who is he, Mr. Cabe?”
So he told her, told her everything about shooting down Virgil Clay and Charles Graybrow telling him about the animal old Virgil’s father was…half-grizzly bear and half-ogre and one-hundred percent ass-kicking, life-taking, intolerant hellbilly. Those dark, wonderful eyes of hers were on him the whole time and there was real concern in them, real fear.
And Cabe thought: I’ll be damned, this lady actually cares about me.
“I don’t like one bit of this. Mr. Cabe,” she said and her voice was deep and sensual and it made the bounty hunter’s insides bubble like sweet molasses. “I fully realize this is none of my affair, but I think it would be wise for you to hide out for a time. Let my husband deal with this human pig. He’ll know what to do.”
Cabe found himself smiling like a little boy.
Smiling, mind you.
Here he had just about the meanest bastard imaginable wanting to make a tobacco pouch out of his privates and he was grinning like a little boy with a peppermint stick all his own. And it was because of Janice Dirker. Though he wasn’t much prettier than your average wild boar (and would be the first to admit the same), Cabe had had his fill of women over the years. He had been desired and lusted after. But no one had ever really cared if he lived or died…and now someone did. He felt a lot of things right then: confusion, bewilderment, and, yes, even fear.
But he liked it all, God yes.
“Ma’am, y’all very kind to me. Very caring to some worn-out saddletramp like me and I can’t tell you how I appreciate it,” he told her, feeling his voice squeak with emotion. “But, really, I can take care of my own affairs. Always have, always will. And Jackson…the Sheriff, that is…well, I think he’s got enough problems without worryin’ over me.”
Janice was breathing hard and Cabe was, too.
What was it all about? Lust? Passion? Yes, surely those things were evident, but something more too. Something that went deeper. Something that he could feel burning deep inside of him like hot coals and blue ice. There was a word for it, but he didn’t dare think it.
“Please, Mr. Cabe. You are, without a doubt, a man who can handle his own affairs, but…”
“But what?”
She averted her eyes. Cabe reached out and pressed his hand over hers. It was like an electric shock passed through him. She started as well. She made to pull her hand away as color touched her cheeks, but didn’t. And under his rough, callused paw, her hand was petal-soft and fine-boned. It felt so very good.
She licked her lips. “I don’t…oh what in God’s name am I doing?”
“Say it,” he told her.
She sighed. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“If that’s what you want, then I’ll make sure nothing will.”
They stared into each other’s eyes for a time and then Janice pulled away, rushing from the dining room as fast as she could. And Cabe just sat there a time, feeling like a man flattened by some tremendous wave.
It was some time before he could so much as stand.
15
“Well, I see you’re still alive,” Charles Graybrow greeted Cabe later that morning. “I was planning on buying a nice whiteman’s sort of suit for your funeral. Maybe I was rushing things.”
Cabe dragged off his cigarette. “Maybe just a bit.”
After his talk with Janice Dirker, he finally found his guts again, tucked ‘em back in, and took to the streets. Started walking. Checking Whisper Lake out saloon by saloon. And not for drinks, but for Elijah Clay. At the far end, near the Union Pacific railroad depot, he spotted Charles Graybrow having a taste at a lumber yard, chatting it up with another Indian who was cutting barrel staves.
