These Violent Times Read online

  Cavanaugh’s lips pursed, then opened. “That I did.”

  They were angling their horses through a small break in the rocks that led to the main, cleared trail near the Sweetwater Fork—a small sloping of gray that gave way to a plush run of grass and a patch of blooming, full dogwoods. The surrounding greens becoming orange and tinged yellows, all leading to the river.

  “You know this country, Marshal. I don’t think I could’ve found this cut, even with a map.”

  Duffin kept his horse in pace with Cavanaugh, saying, “When you were a sailor, did you do any navigating?”

  “Plenty,” Cavanaugh said. “It all depends on what you’re used to. I’m good at finding my way on the water. Stars at night, wind direction in the day, sextant when I had one, coastline whenever possible. Here? I could ride all day and into the next, it wouldn’t make any difference. I’d just as likely end up where I started.”

  “So how did you end up here? I don’t mean this place, I mean this ’profession’? You needed the money, you said.”

  “I did, and piracy—well, that’s got too many people already both for and agin’. Let’s put it that the oceans led to the rivers.”

  Duffin’s glance was sideways, and had the pistol aimed at Cavanaugh’s spine. “That’s not an answer.”

  “All right. Let’s put it that after the war, the only job I could get was pulling lines on a riverboat. Met a gentleman who wanted to know all about ironclads. I had crewed one of the last . . . I understood his passion. Together we went looking for the remains of the submarine Hunley, and he paid to hear everything I could recall.”

  “You didn’t find it?”

  “Not a speck of her rust.”

  “You said ’gentleman,’ a gambler?”

  “Actually,” Cavanaugh said—suddenly a gambler himself, drawing the word out as though he were laying a full house on the card table—“he’s a doctor. Later, he hired me to push a broom at a sanitarium. It was honest work anyway.”

  “That’s who’s paying you now?” Duffin asked obliviously.

  Cavanaugh said, “Indirectly,” he answered. “I was working with the man you turned to ashes.”

  Duffin had the gun braced against his leg, pointed up at Cavanaugh’s chest, or neck. He didn’t care. “Remember what I said about you breathing wrong? That’s what you’re doing now.”

  Cavanaugh said, “See, Marshal, I think that’s the pain talking. The gentleman doctor I know would fix up that leg.”

  Duffin said, “It’s already been fixed.”

  “Doctor Bishop and his squaw, but did he give you anything for pain?”

  “What he had in his kit, which wasn’t much.”

  “My Lord, a doctor without tools, without medicines, without a goddamn arm.” Cavanaugh laughed easy. “You know, since the war—”

  Duffin said, “I’d tread lightly.”

  Cavanaugh extended his cuffed hands completely in front of him, palms up. “We’re just having a talk. I’m still your prisoner, and I’m saying the world’s turned upside-down, and you think it hasn’t? Look at you. Leg paining, and the man that shot you, he was full of cocaine and morphine, and you could use either one. That’s upside-down to me.”

  “How do you know who shot me?”

  “He was one of the ones I rode in with,” Cavanaugh told him.

  “Who was he?” Duffin urged.

  The Confederate sailor shrugged, again one-shouldered. “Names don’t make a never-mind. Cannon fodder. They followed orders because none of ’em had their minds right anymore. You fail to notice they didn’t make a sound? Even dying?”

  “I was too busy surviving.”

  “See, that’s where you and the doc—your doc—differ. He don’t miss a thing. You ask, I bet he noticed. Cocaine and morphine needled directly into the voice box, maybe a little taste of laudanum. That’s how they kept them from screaming in the crazy houses. The doctor—my doc—showed me. You never heard of any of this before?” Cavanaugh stopped his horse, mostly using his legs, looked to Duffin, grinning. “Marshal, I was right. Jesus wept, you’re still in your short pants.”

  Duffin stopped, turned the horse when he was sure of his seat, and aimed again at Cavanaugh’s chest. Then the world turned red.

  The whip slashed across Duffin’s face, splitting his nose in half, peeling back, blood pouring over his mouth and chin and also splashing his vision. His horse reared back, legs chopping, as a lasso dropped around Duffin’s shoulders, yanked tight, then catapulted him from the saddle.

  Pulled into the air, Duffin landed on his back. Dazed. Bones unbroken, unless a rib or two had cracked, but the pistol lost in the grass and his leg felt like it was between a log and a saw blade.

  Smith was stepping from the cover of the dogwoods, taking in the rope’s slack, tightening the lasso, when Cavanaugh brought his horse around. “Where the hell have you been? I was running out of things to say to this asshole.”

  “Never happen. You were just changing tones, I heard it.”

  The bullwhip hanging around his neck, Smith coiled the lasso with his massive hands before hauling Duffin to his feet, saying, “You’re not where you said you would be.”

  “Blame the preacher’s son here. At least you found us. Where’s the wagon?”

  Smith said, “Over next rise,” then fist-smashed Duffin in the temple. A single blow with the fleshy anvil, sending his head lolling forward and to the side, like a broken doll.

  Cavanaugh said, “Easy, big man, you just near took his head off.”

  “It’s what you always say.”

  Cavanaugh held out his hands. “What about these?”

  “Knees,” Smith said. “Get down onto them.”

  Cavanaugh swung one of his puppet-legs wide over the pommel and dismounted. He settled to his haunches, awkward moves, followed Smith’s thick, pointing finger and placed his hands on top of a long, flat rock protecting a gopher hole. Smith stood over him, a wide-blade hatchet raised, and brought it furiously down. Metal sparked. Rock chips flew. The gopher rustled somewhere.

  Cavanaugh yelped and stood, his cheek bleeding from a splinter of granite under the skin, the links to the cuffs nearly cut. Smith grabbed hold of Cavanaugh’s wrists and pulled his thin arms away from each other like a huge wishbone, finally splitting the handcuff chain.

  The former prisoner walked in circles, rotating his arms, working his joints back together. “Sweet Jesus on a crutch, son. You almost pulled me apart.”

  “Nah,” Smith said, throwing Duffin facedown across his saddle. “You just didn’t know you had the strength to beat the chain.”

  The Confederate found the cigarette he had wanted earlier, lit it, inhaled hard, then looked from Smith to Duffin to his horse. He swore he didn’t know which was dumber.

  * * *

  It was shaping up to be a bad day, continuing.

  The old woman outside the trading post looked as if she were made of clay, with brittle straw for hair, and eyes that were completely veiled by yellow cataracts. She sensed White Fox riding toward her, but didn’t move from her place on the long sun-blanched bench next to the trading post door, as she hadn’t moved for the previous twenty-five years. She nodded her head in greeting, hearing White Fox tying the horses to the single hitch rail.

  White Fox nodded back, though she knew the woman to be blind. She noticed the bold red nose sniffing, tugging at wrinkles all around. The smell of the burned forest had come along for the ride. But that was not all White Fox noticed.

  Bishop drew the rig from the saddle-sling and dropped to the dry ground, dust rising, before chambering two shells. His eyes were elsewhere as well.

  White Fox knelt before the old woman, taking her hands and speaking in an almost-whisper of Northern Cheyenne. The woman smiled, her face breaking apart, while Bishop moved around the side of the post, noting that both of its windows were broken and their frames fire-blacked.

  Bullet holes pocked the log and mud walls.

  The old w
oman, her narrow eyes an opaque white, slipped her arms beneath the blanket that draped her, then came back with a flat-blade knife and a small, carved figure. The knife was a pounded iron edge, with no handle, and the figure, a perfect Cheyenne maiden that was cut from hard, red maple, with exquisite details decorating her dress and eyes.

  She held out both, and White Fox reached for the carving, but the woman pulled it back, blindly slapping the iron knife in White Fox’s hand instead.

  White Fox looked at it, said to Bishop, “A sign left for others. She heard the leader say his name. It is Walter G. Dent.”

  Bishop went through the door first, letting his eyes adjust to the heavy smoke and flour dust that was the air of the place. He passed the dead-cold iron stove, walked to the main counter, and leaned across it like an old, familiar customer, calling: “Dent, greetings from the high country!”

  No answer. Beside the counter was a gun case, glass sides gone, with only ghostly impressions of pistols left in its green felt lining, and not a single weapon. On the stock shelves, there were no airtights, just empty tins dumped with a pile of slashed flour sacks.

  A single bison hide hung from a hook in the ceiling, the squeak from the support chain as it moved freely back and forth, the only sound. Something had recently collided with it, sent it spinning.

  Bishop took a step from the counter, the broken glass from the gun case under his boots, blood spatter across the pieces. The brown hide was still moving, the chain crying. Back and forth.

  White Fox was now through the door, grasped the hide and stopped it, the iron knife in her hand. Quiet. Bishop regarded her where she stood. Not moving. A jar of peaches rolled from a shelf, shattered on the floor. Bishop jerked his look to the counter, the rig swinging up from his waist. It was just the wood gave way, weakened by gunshot.

  As in Avery’s place, but longer ago, slugs had been fired from across the room, ripping the shelves. Wood splintering. Empty jars exploding. There was a creak that wasn’t the bison.

  Bishop dropped, pivoted, the double-barrel turning toward the movement on the far side of the trading post; what he’d caught from the corner of his eye was enough. He fired, not a killing shot. An outlaw screamed out, diving from behind a stove, blood striping his legs.

  The gunman ran low, trying for the cover of some stacked crates. Trying to aim his drawn Colt. Bishop fired again, the thunder sending the first gunman spinning against a wall, his chest opened wide by buckshot and powder.

  Bishop, holding his place, called out, “Whoever you are, I don’t give a spit. We just want to do some business! We intend to. You want to get yourselves killed over that?”

  A second gunman charged through the door, his arm instantly around White Fox’s neck, pulling it back, knee into the small of her back. She strained, but without calling out. He pulled tighter and whispered a threat into her ear. He couldn’t see over her chest. She used that, fitting the blade between her fingers, then, yanking her arm backward, jammed it into his thigh. To the bone.

  The second gunman cried out. A howl. His grip went limp, then went away entirely. White Fox broke her stance, turning in place, and pulled the blade from the leg, then brought it up, all speed and force, through the bottom of his jaw and into his mouth, the knife point pricking the bottom of the gunman’s tongue.

  Blood geysered, filling his mouth and throat to overflowing. White Fox wiped a spot from her cheek. He collapsed, eyes surprise-wide, trying to comprehend as he hit the floor, unconscious and on the way to dead. White Fox clamped a foot over his throat. Silencing any last screams.

  It was over in simultaneous moments; Bishop reloading, and two more guns diving from behind the main counter, firing. White Fox spun to the earthen floor, the slugs ripping the wall behind her, punching the corpse with the blade in his throat, moving its arms and legs herky-jerky.

  More shots from behind shelves and around corners filled the room with smoke and noise, echoing, deafening. Bishop held to a far wall, not wanting to draw the fire toward the blind woman, the rig leveled and steady on the back door, the only other way out.

  Five quick shots through the broken gun case from a back room brought Bishop up from his cover, turning his aim and firing. A third gunman was blown back against empty shelves, then lurched forward onto the case’s metal and glass, landing hard on the sharp ruins.

  The dead man’s partner hit the back door, turning to lay cover fire, then running.

  Bishop loaded shells from the bandolier, closed the breech with a quick move, then silently went for the front door, signaling White Fox to stay low with a gestured wave. He walked the opposite way from where the old woman was still serenely seated and stayed by the frame, shotgun gyroscoping from his shoulder, as he looked for a target beyond the horses tied at the rail.

  There was nothing.

  Bishop cocked his eyes toward the old woman, who let one hand drift out of her blanket and to the right. She had heard what he had failed to see. He shouldered the rig, stepped out and to the right.

  “White Fox!” he called firmly, not a warning but a summons.

  White Fox shut her eyes, calmed her breathing, before working the flat blade from under the gunman’s jaw and pulling it free. She wiped the edge clean on the corpse’s shirt, before following Bishop back into the bright noon.

  * * *

  The wagon was an old freighter, with dynamite fuse strung along its sides, wrapped around powder casks, and then connected to six-stick bundles at each corner. Additional dynamite was set on top of a barrel in the center of the medical supplies that loaded the wagon down, and Dent was braiding that fuse with the other pieces hanging from the tailgate.

  A large bandage, soaked reddish brown, hastily applied, covered Dent’s thick neck, and he didn’t even glance at the feel of the Smith & Wesson jammed into his ribs by the last surviving gunman.

  The new arrival was panting from the run, swore as much from momentary relief as fear. His back was to the no man’s land he had just navigated.

  Dent wrapped fuses, saying, “Who’s left alive?”

  Bishop stepped from the sun’s glare, the double-barrel aimed directly. “You two are the last.”

  The last gunman turned with an expression of monkey-faced horror. Dent, sporting a bowler and waxed-up mustache, smiled at the silhouette and continued doing what he was doing.

  “Doctor, you think being here changes anything? Make a move with that hardware, the wagon goes up. Don’t make a move, wagon goes up. Want to guess what happens if I kill you and that bitch?”

  “You just made a hell of a mistake,” Bishop said.

  “I think not,” Dent replied. “I’ve been out here, waiting since we took the place, knowing you’d come.” He cocked his head toward an arroyo. “Bodies’re over there if you’re interested. Four. I was the only one hit. Flesh wound. They just weren’t prepared. Like my four, just now.”

  “We couldn’t fight that !” the fourth gunman said, retrieving his gun but fearing to point it in the direction he was looking, at Bishop’s rig.

  White Fox was now at the edge of the trading post, standing under the long shadow from the roof’s eve, keeping her hands down, with the knife hidden, aligned behind her wrist.

  “Get off the wagon,” Bishop ordered.

  The gunman said, “Why, because she’s killed some men?” He shrugged. “I’ve already been paid, took care of my kin.”

  “Boss?” the gunman said anxiously.

  Dent ignored him. He looked from his work, swallowed in pain, then struck a sulfur head on his heel and touched it to the fuse. It sparked, then burned. The still-panting gunman didn’t know if this was a bluff or if he should run, and if he ran if he could get far enough before the wagon blew up or he was shot or knifed by the man with the gun-arm or the Cheyenne, or maybe by Dent if he got annoyed. The gunman stayed, shaking.

  “Won’t be nothing but ashes in just a few breaths,” Dent said, the sizzling of the fuse behind his words. “This is the job, making sure n
obody gets their hands on what you want. Feel bad for this sack, though. He always wanted to dog-hump that one you brought. Got drunk, claimed she’d been coming to see him for years, but was now with a famous one. Guess that’s you, ain’t it?”

  Bishop felt the double-barrel’s weight, the tension from the trigger lines, not hearing, but watching the fuse burn across the wagon, toward the dynamite bundles. Then, with a quiet sound of sliced air, the blade whipped from White Fox into the gunman’s shoulder, the one attached to the arm with the hand with the gun.

  He squealed once when it went in, once when Bishop yanked it out, tossed it to Dent. “Cut it!”

  The gunman brought his pistol up with his other hand but a shotgun blast from Bishop spread him across the dirt.

  Dent flipped the knife so it faced Bishop. “Why?”

  “Because you don’t want to die.”

  The man had a long, narrow face that grew longer at the top as his brows arched, almost touching his hat. “Oh?”

  “You didn’t get that wound in a fight.” He indicated the man’s throat. “Someone cut you, along the jawline. To convince you to sit here and do this if your moron gang failed, which they weren’t supposed to.”

  “You are guessing.”

  “I am not guessing about the basic yellow in your backbone,” Bishop added pointedly. “You pissed on that rock”—he cocked his head to the left—“shat behind it. For a couple days, I’d say. You did not want to go to the outhouse back there, or anywhere near the place where bullets were sailing.” He toed the soil. “Ants eatin’ your crumbs. Too many to have gathered in just a day or even two.”

  Dent didn’t move. Until he did what he was told and cut the fuse. The fire reached the end of the line and perished.

  Bishop walked over, rig still alert, and pulled down the edge of Dent’s bandage, stopping where it had stuck to the skin by clotting. It revealed a string of raw, ragged stitches along the front of his neck, slashed from one side of his jaw to the other. “Who cut your throat?”

  Dent pain-swallowed. “Someone—someone who wanted to remind me of our business together.”