more frightened as the Great Day approached. At first everybody had been filled with happiness at the thought of the dead coming back, and then suddenly, like Brace and Ralston, everybody was taking another thought.
There was the Widow McCann who had buried three husbands out there, all of them fighters and all of them mean. There were a dozen others with reason to give the matter some thought, and I knew at least two who were packed and waiting for the first stage out of town.
Brace dropped in at the saloon for his first drink since Brother Elisha started to preach. He hadn't shaved and he looked mighty mean. 'Why'd he pick on this town?' he burst out. 'When folks are dead they should be left alone. Nobody has a right to interfere with nature that away Brennen mopped his bar, saying nothing at all.
Ed Colvin dropped around. 'Wish that stage would start running. I want to leave town. Folks treat me like I was some kind of freak.'
'Stick around,' Brennen said. 'Come Sunday the town will be filled with folks like you. A good carpenter will be able to stay busy, so busy he won't care what folks say about him. Take Streeter there. He'll need a new house now that his brother will be wanting his house back.'
Streeter slammed his glass on the bar. 'All right, damn it!' he shouted angrily, 'I'll build my own house!'
Ralston motioned to me and we walked outside. Brace v was there, and Streeter joined us. 'Look,' Ralston whispered, 'Brace and me, we've talked it over. Maybe if we were to talk to Brother Elisha ... maybe he'd call the whole thing off.'
'Are you crazy?' I asked.
His eyes grew mean. 'You want to try those Hame boys again? Seems to me you came out mighty lucky the last time. How do you know you'll be so lucky again? Those boys were pure-dee poison.'
That was gospel truth, but I stood there chewing my cigar a minute and then said, 'No chance. He wouldn't listen to us.'
Ed Colvin had come up. 'A man doing good works,' he said, 'might be able to use a bit of money. Although I suppose it would take quite a lot.'
Brace stood a little straighter but when he turned to Colvin, the carpenter was hurrying off down the street. When I turned around there was Brennen leaning on the doorjamb, and he was smiling.
Friday night when I was making my rounds I saw somebody slipping up the back stairs of the hotel, and for a moment his face was in the light from a window. It was Brace.
Later, I saw Ralston hurrying home from the direction of the hotel, and you'd be surprised at some of the folks I spotted slipping up those back stairs to commune with Brother Elisha. Even Streeter, and even Damon.
Watching Damon come down those back stairs I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Brennen standing there in the dark. 'Seems a lot of folks are starting to think this resurrection of the dead isn't an unmixed blessing.'
'You know something?' I said thoughtfully. 'Nobody has been atop that hill since Brother Elisha started his walks. I think I'll just meander up there and have a look around.'
'You've surprised me,' Brennen said. 'I wouldn't have expected you to be a churchgoing man. You're accustomed to sinful ways.'
'Why, now,' I said, 'when I come into a town to live, I go to church. If the preacher is a man who shouts against things, I never go back. I like a man who's for something.
'Like you know, I've been marshal here and there, but never had much trouble with folks. I leave their politics and religion be. Folks can think the way they want, act the way they please, even to acting the fool. All I ask is they don't make too much noise and don't interfere with other people.
'They call me a peace officer, and I try to keep the peace. If a growed-up man gets himself into a game with a crooked gambler, I don't bother them ... if he hasn't learned up to then, he may learn, and if he doesn't learn, nothing I tell him will do him any good.'
'You think Colvin was really dead?'
'Doc said so.'
'Suppose he was hypnotized? Suppose he wasn't really dead at all?'
After Brennen went to bed I saddled up and rode out of town. Circling around the mountain I rode up to where Brother Elisha used to go to pray. Brennen had left me with a thought, and Doc had been drinking a better brand of whiskey lately.
Brace had drawn money from the bank, and so had Ralston, and old Mrs. Greene had been digging out in her hen coop, and knowing about those tin cans she buried there after her husband died kind of sudden, I had an idea what she was digging up.
I made tracks. I had some communicatin' to do and not many hours to do it in.
I spent most of those hours in the saddle. Returning to Red Horse the way I did brought me to a place where the trail forked, and one way led over behind that mountain with the burnt-off slope. When I had my horse out of sight I drew up and waited.
It was just growing gray when a rider came down the mountain trail and stopped at the forks. It was Ed Colvin.
We hadn't anything to talk about right at the moment so I just kept out of sight in the brush and then followed. He seemed like he was going to meet somebody and I had a suspicion it was Brother Elisha. And it was.
'You got it?' Ed Colvin asked.
'Of course. I told you we could fool these yokels. Now let's '
When I stepped out of the brush I was holding a shotgun. I said, 'The way of the transgressor is hard. Give me those saddlebags, Delbert.'
Brother Elisha stared at me. 'I fear there is some mistake,' he said with dignity. 'I am Brother Elisha.'
'I found those cans and sacks up top of the hill. The ones where you kept your grub and the grass seed you scattered.' I stepped in closer.
'You are Delbert Johnson,' I added, 'and the wires over at Russian Junction say you used to deal a crooked game of faro in Mobeetie. Now give me the saddlebags.'
The reverend has a new church now, and a five-room frame parsonage to replace his tiny cabin. The dead of Red Horse sleep peacefully and there is a new iron fence around the cemetery to keep them securely inside. Bren- Then still keeps his saloon, but he also passes the collection plate of a Sunday, and the results are far better than they used to be.
There was a lot of curiosity as to where the reverend came by the money to do the building, and the good works that followed. Privately, the reverend told Brennen and me about a pair of saddlebags he found inside the parsonage door that Sunday morning. But when anyone else asked him he had an answer ready.
'The ravens have provided,' he would say, smiling gently, 'as they did for Elijah.'
Nobody asked any more questions.
*
DESPERATE MEN
They were four desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment. Yet the walls of Yuma Prison were strong and the rifle skill of the guards unquestioned, so the prison held many desperate men besides these four. And when prison walls and rifles failed, there was the desert, and the desert never failed.
Fate, however, delivered these four a chance to test the desert. In the early dawn the land had rolled and tumbled like an ocean storm. The rocky promontory over the river had shifted and cracked in an earthquake that drove fear into the hearts of the toughest and most wicked men in Arizona. For a minute or two the ground had groaned and roared, dust rained down from cracks in the roofs of the cells, and in one place the perimeter wall had broken and slid off, down the hillside. It was as if God or the Devil had shown them a way.
Two nights later, Otteson leaned his shaven head closer to the bars. 'If you're yellow, say so! I say we can make it! If Isager says we can make it through the desert, I say we go!'
'We'll need money for the boatmen.' Rodelo's voice was low. 'Without money we will die down there on the shores of the gulf.'
