After a time, the volunteers burned the church and dynamited the adobes until there was nothing left to mark the village of Del Barra but embers and smoke and the stink of death.

And that’s how they left it.

 

***

But, of course, the war had to come to an end.

After Monterrey and Camargo, Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo and Palo Alto, the Mexicans, beaten and weary and just simply tired of the carnage, signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the war ended.

The Americans filtered back into Texas and New Mexico.

Some were grateful that it had come to an end.

Others just went looking for another fight.

James Lee Cobb went looking for something, too…he just wasn’t sure what.

 

5

Long before the Mexican-American War, the Mexican authorities paid private armies to hunt down and kill marauding tribes of Indians—particularly Apaches and Comanche’s—that were harassing Mexican towns and villages. The Indians would swarm down from the U.S side of the border, killing men, kidnapping women, stealing livestock and horses…in fact, anything they could lay their hands on.

The Mexican army simply couldn’t contend with these raiders, so scalp bounty laws were enacted. The scalps acted as “receipts”: each worth roughly a hundred pesos. And for industrious, prolific bounty hunters the rewards could be quite lucrative indeed. One might think the repellent nature of the business would limit the amount of hunters, but this wasn’t so. After the Panic of 1837, there were plenty looking for quick cash. And they weren’t real particular as to what they had to do to get it.

During the Mexican-American War, Indian depredations diminished somewhat. Mainly because U.S. soldiers spent their free time hunting down renegade bands. When the war ended…the Indian raids picked-up considerably. Comanche’s and Apaches killed hundreds of Mexicans, stole thousands of heads of livestock, and kidnapped an untold number of women and children.

The scalp bounties were revived in most Mexican states, but particularly in Chihuahua and Sonora…and with a vengeance.

The price was now $200 American for a single “receipt”.

James Lee Cobb, like many other soldiers, found himself suddenly working for the very government he’d done his damnedest to sack during the war. The whole thing became something of a cottage industry complete with regulatory committees and inspectors. Standards were set by the Mexican authorities to prevent fraud—a scalp had to include either the crown or both ears and preferably both. This prevented fresh scalps from being stretched and sliced-up, sold off as a dozen or more.

Cobb worked with a team consisting of himself, two ex-Texas Rangers, and three Shawnee Indians who were expert at removing scalps. They hunted down Apaches, Comanche’s, even Seri Indians. They scalped men, women, children…sparing no one.

Since it was easier to work on a freshly-killed body—the living ones protested the practice vehemently—Cobb and his boys usually put their rounds into the chests of their victims. A clear heart-shot simplified the hell out of things. Their prey went down dead and you could get to work on them right away, instead of waiting for them to expire from their wounds. Because scalp-hunting was a business like any other and time was money. Of course, to save time you could slit their throats or stab them in the heart to speed things along. Women and children you could lay in wait for, lasso ‘em like stock and gun them down.

Drop ‘em and peel ‘em, as Cobb liked to put it.

The braves took a little more stealth. Sometimes Cobb and his boys sprang carefully-arranged ambushes to bring down hunting parties and sniping from a distance had its merits. The Shawnees were real good with the wet work. They’d slit around the crown of the head and then, sitting with their feet on the victim’s shoulders, yank the scalp free. They could go through a dozen Indians in record time.

Of course, Cobb and the Texans were no slouches either.

After the scalps were yanked, they were salted and tied to poles to preserve them until they could be cashed-in.

One time, in Durango, Cobb’s hunters killed a party of thirty braves by sniping them in a dry wash with long rifles. After they’d dropped and peeled ‘em, they backtracked to the Indian’s camp and slaughtered no less than sixty women and children. Though, truth be told, they spent most of the day beating the brush for those that had run off.

Eventually, the scalp business fanned hateful animosity from the targeted tribes. They began a program of bloody reprisals. This more than anything made Cobb and the boys start hunting peaceful tribes like the Pimas and Yumas in Arizona Territory. In a single raid, they took nearly four-hundred scalps. But the real boom for them came about the time the Indians started actively hunting the hunters.

See, Cobb had come up with a better idea.

Scalps of Mexicans looked the same as scalps of Indians. There was no true way to tell the difference…so why not? Let the Mexicans pay for the murder of their own people. It was a novel idea.

One of the Texans, a fellow named Grendon, wasn’t entirely taken with the idea. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, shit, killing injuns is one thing…but Mesicans, they’s almost like real people.”

“Ye killed ‘em during the war, didn’t ye?” Cobb put to him. “What’s the difference now? They ain’t real folk anyhow, they’s just injuns what like to act like white men. All the more reason to drop and peel ‘em, ye ask me. Fuck, son, we got us a crop ready for the harvesting, one that’ll turn into lots of green and folding…if ye follow me on that.”

The others agreed most heartily, particularly Coolan, the big ex-ranger who it was said decapitated no less than two dozen Mexican officers during the war…using nothing but a short-bladed hunting knife. But Grendon just couldn’t get by his morals and ethics, so they shot him and Coolan scalped him as a joke.

They hit a Mexican village and caught the entire population in church. They charged in on horseback, pulling triggers and throwing knives and hatchets until their arms were sore and pistols smoking and the dead were heaped-up like sheaves of wheat. It took them the better part of four hours to scalp all two-hundred of ‘em, but they went at it with the diligence and zeal that marked the professional. They made a broad sweep through central Mexico and harvested so many scalps, they began wiring them together in bails.

In 1850, just before the boom died out, they rolled into Sonora with nearly 8,000 scalps piled high in the bed of a wagon.

Shortly afterwards, the scalping business went belly-up and Cobb rode hell-for-leather out of Mexico with a price on his head for murdering Mexicans.

But as Cobb said later, it was fun while it lasted.

 

***

The next twenty-odd years of his life passed in the blink of an eye.

Cobb rustled cattle and horses. Worked as range detective for various cattle combines, a hired gun for just about anyone who would pay him. He robbed banks and stages, made something of a name for himself as a road agent. Was arrested no less than three times and escaped the noose each time by breaking out of jail. He served as scout during the Indian Wars, sold guns to renegade Apaches, and managed a brothel in San Francisco. But that came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that he and the ladies under his employ were not only robbing their patrons, but murdering them and burying their remains in the cellar. After that, he ran roughshod through Indian Territory, stealing and killing and forcing Indians and whites alike to pay his gang protection money. He became something of a terror along the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.

Then in 1873…he lost five-thousand dollars gambling in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Lost it to a professional gambler named Maynard Ellsworth. Cobb pulled his hatchet and split the crown of Ellsworth’s head. After that, he lived his life pretty much on the dodge.

But in 1875, he was arrested for extorting mining camps in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming Territory and sentenced to five years in the territorial prison. Of which he served every single day. As the warden was heard to say to a parole board, “James Lee Cobb is completely lacking in anything which might be even remotely considered human. He is, gentlemen, the very epitome of what the territories need to be purged of—creatures that walk like men, but think like animals.”

When Cobb got out, evading bounty hunters and numerous warrants out circulating for him under various aliases, he joined three men—Jonah Gleer, Lawrence Barlow, and Butch Noolan—in a peculiar undertaking. Cobb had coerced them into following him up into the Sierra Nevadas to search out a gold mine he had heard of in prison.

Problem was, Cobb didn’t really know where it was.

See, a voice in his head told him that up in the high Sierras he would find his destiny. The voice was not vague as usual, but quite absolute and determined that Cobb should listen to it.

So he did.

And this is how the elements of his life—a vile stew at best—finally came full circle.

 

6

Six weeks then.

Six weeks Cobb had been trapped up in the high country, just waiting and waiting. Gleer, Barlow, and Noolan waited with him…though Barlow had suggested a heroic outbreak through the snows that had sealed off the pass and locked them tight at the foot of the summit. Nobody took him up on it.

At least not yet.

They weren’t desperate enough.

But it was coming, God yes, you could see it just as Cobb was seeing it now as he looked into those weathered, rutted faces burned by subzero winds and discolored by frostbite. You could see it there along with the bitterness and unease and animosity that was fermenting in them. For the past week it had been raging inside each of them, a potent and toxic brew bubbling up from the seething pit of each man. A brew that was sheer poison, seeping and simmering and smoking. It was fast becoming a palpable thing in the confines of the cedar-post cabin and its stink was raw and savage.

None of them had spoken in three days now.

They were reaching the point where their choices were being made for them. By nature. By God. By whatever cruel force had imprisoned them up in the mountains with no hope of deliverance. It was fed by hatred of Cobb, of course. For, although none of them had voiced it yet, they all blamed him for their predicament. He was the one that had insisted they stay into the winter, hunting that mine, and by the time January had sealed them up tight…there was nothing to do but wait.

Wait and go mad.

Yeah, they went through a stiff semblance of culture, but culture, like ethics and morals, died a long, hard death in those godless wastelands. Gleer still worked his traplines. Barlow went out hunting each morning with his Hawkens rifle. Cobb and Noolan still cut brush for the fire. But there was no food coming in and a warm fire and plenty of water didn’t fill their bellies.

They were slat-thin to a man, like skeletons covered in membranous flesh. Eyes jutting. Cheeks hollowed into cadaverous valleys. Teeth chattering and bony fingers wrestling in narrow laps. They had already eaten the horses. Even boiled the hooves for soup. Barlow had been nibbling on his belt and Gleer was chewing on a deerhide knife sheath.

So, if there was madness here, it was born of hunger.

Of solitude.

Of hopelessness.

No game was coming in and even the few rabbits Gleer had brought in last week were not enough to stave off the hunger pangs for more than a few hours. They needed meat. Real meat. Their bellies cried out for it, their teeth gnashed for it. Their tongues licked fissured lips, dreaming of venison steaks and beef shanks. Blood. Meat.

Of all of them, only Cobb took it in stride.

Something in him was enjoying the plight of the others. Was enjoying how they’d slowly become living skeletons, ghoulish figures that would’ve looked perfectly natural…or unnatural…wandering from the gates of a cemetery worrying at their own shrouds. As starvation progressed, social amenities failed one after the other. Their thoughts were of meat. Their dreams were of meat. In that high, wind-blasted netherworld of snow-capped peaks, shrieking winds, and whipping blizzards, there was only one way to get meat.

One last, unthinkable way.

Cobb was waiting for it. He already saw it in the dead pools of their eyes. The way they looked at each other and at him. Survival had canceled out any bond they’d once shared. To a man they knew one thing in their fevered, deranged minds…only one of them could come out of this in the spring.

And the hunger was upon them. The taboo lust for flesh of one’s own kind. And in the close, confined atmosphere of the cabin, you could smell it…a heavy, sour, vile odor tainting the very air.

And maybe it was starvation that was bringing it on, forcing them into damnable regions of thought, and maybe it was something else.

Maybe it was what they found in the cave.

Or what found them.

 

***

It was Barlow who located it.

He had been out hunting with Noolan. They both stumbled back to the cabin, winded and worn, with something like fear in their eyes. They stood in the doorway babbling, framed by a field of white and blowing death, rifles in fur-mittened hands, snowshoes on their feet.

“What?” Cobb had put to them. “What in the name of Christ is it? What did ye find?”

And maybe part of him was thinking, hoping, they’d found the mine…but he didn’t really believe it. For what he saw in their eyes plainly told him it was not good. If a regiment of injun ghosts had descended upon them, they could not have looked more grave.

“You better come,” Noolan said. “You just better come.”

So, wrapped in buffalo coats and bearskin hats, swaddled up like babies in all their gear, they fought through the drifts and winds that tried to knock them off the narrow trails along the jagged cliffs. The world was white and whipping and immense. The sky seemed to reach down and become mountain and it was hard to say where one began and the other ended.

Noolan led them to a little cave mouth set into the base of a limestone bluff with craggy walls and a jutting overhang which looked as though it might fall and crush them at any moment.

Cobb could see the snowshoe prints leading away. Looked like they’d been in one hell of a hurry to get some distance between themselves and the cave mouth.

“All right, goddammit,” Cobb said, his breath frosting in clouds. “What is it? Goddamn mother lode or the Devil his ownself?”

“You better just go in,” Barlow said, secretive as a schoolboy.

Cobb went in first, with Gleer at his heels. Both of them were grunting and puffing as they wedged their way in flat on their bellies. The shaft was barely big enough for a man to snake his way through. With the heavy furs and leggings, it took some time to corkscrew themselves into the central chamber. Like forcing a wadded-up rag through the neck of a wine bottle.

Inside it was black as original sin.

Cobb called out to Gleer and his voiced echoed eerily into unknown heights. Gleer had the oil lantern. He struck a match off the cave wall and touched it to the wick, adjusting the flame. The cavern was big enough to shelter two freight wagons side by side. It continued on up a gentle, pebble-littered slope into another darkened chamber. Cobb looked around, seeing lots of granite and gravel, great masses of bedrock that had fallen from the roof in years long past. He saw nothing else noteworthy.

Yet…yet, there was something here. Something unusual. He could feel it same way a man can feel his own skin or the balls dangling between his legs. There was something here. Something important. Something secret.

Gleer held out the lantern at arm’s length, wild lurching shadows darting about them. Rising and falling, swimming and diving and leaping. He licked his lips. Licked them again. It was warmer inside and ice began to melt on his beard, water dripping onto his shaggy coat.

“What the hell did they find in here?” he wanted to know. “Ain’t shit but dirt and rocks. Ain’t shit else.”

But there was and they both knew it, felt it, but did not dare let their lips frame it into words. Instead, they stood side by side, waiting and wondering and maybe even worrying. Way a man will when he knows something is circling his campfire. Something big. Something awful. Something with teeth and attitude.

Cobb did not feel afraid.

He told himself in many a situation that as far as fear went, he inspired it, he did not experience it. And maybe that was true and maybe it was bullshit, but, at that moment, he was not afraid. For a voice in his head was telling him that yes, yes, this is what he had come to find. Somewhere in this cave and it passages was sheer revelation.

“Ain’t nothing here,” Gleer said, his voice dry. “So let’s just—”

“There’s something here, all right.” Cobb looked over at Gleer, motes of dust drifting around him like moths. “Cain’t ye smell it?”

“Yeah…yeah, I guess I can.”

Cobb was likening it to decay. Sweet, gassy decay like a bin filled with rotten potatoes or a flyblown corpse washed-up on a riverbed. A moist, rank smell which simply did not belong in this dry, hollow place where even the air was grainy and tasted of dust.

A muscle was jumping in Gleer’s throat. “Don’t like it none. Let’s make to getting the hell out.”

“Follow me,” was all Cobb said.

He followed the stink like a tasty aroma, led it pull him into the kitchen of this place where the goods were simmering and steaming. He moved up the slope, stepping carefully around razorbacked outcroppings and over flat tumbled stones. Together they moved up into the passage which was tight and twisting, the ceiling brushing their fur caps. And in the next chamber, they found—

They found bones.

Maybe some animal bones, but mostly human.

A great central pit had been carved out of the floor, hacked out as if with picks and shovels to a depth of maybe ten or fifteen feet and it was filled with bones. An ossuary. A charnel pit of ulnas and femurs, vertebrae and ribcages. And skulls…Jesus, what seemed to be hundreds of skulls. Adults and children. And the only thing all those bones had in common was that they were charred…as if they had been roasted. Blackened skulls stared up at them, alluding to ghoulish secrets they would not tell.

A scapula shifted and it caused a minor rain of arm and leg bones. A skull tumbled from its perch and grinned at them, its lower jaw missing.

“Moved,” Gleer said, his face lined with tension. “Something in there…Mary, Mother of God, something in there moved…”

He had his Colt pistols out and he wanted very badly to empty them into something, anything. Because he was a man who handled the unknown with knife and gun, hatchet and bow. And what was eating into him then could not be found nor defined quite so easily.

“Dead,” Cobb told him. “All long dead. Just settling is all. If they was just rocks and one fell, ye wouldn’t come out of yer skin, would ye?”

Gleer calmed, shook his head. “Suppose not.”

“Well, them bones cain’t hurt ye no more than rocks can.”

But what he wanted to say was that he had a weird, unearthly feeling that whatever was in the cave, whatever was hiding and whispering around them, just might have caused those bones to shift. Just like it might cause more trouble. And maybe, hell, maybe it would make them bones stand right up and walk about.

Cobb and Gleer moved around the chamber and came to another just off the first.

And it was the same. Bones. More and more bones. Whoever had owned them had been long dead. There were what looked to be ancient, rusted ringbolts pounded into the high, flat table rock above. From them…ancient lengths of hemp rope hanging like dead snakes. From a few of them were brown, mummified hands. As if, people had been hung there and left, allowed to putrefy and drop, only their hands left to mark the grim occasion.

Cobb touched one of the ropes…it began to flake away in his fingers.

“This place,” Gleer said, his eyes fixed with an almost religious ecstasy, “it’s goddamn old. I mean really old, Jimmy-boy. Lookit at all, will you? This place…ha, ha…I think it was chopped right out of the mountain. People…injuns…worked it like we would a mine shaft.”

Cobb studied the rough-hewn walls. You could see they’d been chiseled, hacked from solid rock. None of it, save the original cavern was natural. The tool work on the walls was all-too apparent.

Gleer was making a funny sound in his throat that was somewhere between gagging and laughter. He played the light around some more. There were pictures on those walls. Primitive paintings, etchings. Mostly run-of-the-mill stuff like bear and mountain lion and bison. Things Cobb had seen splashed or carved into many cave walls and rock faces in the Southwest. Even up north in the Montana and Dakota Territories. Herds of animals. Stick figures hunting them. Dancing. Sitting around fires. Just your basic depictions of tribal life.

But Gleer, whose mama was half-Chickasaw, seemed fascinated by them. He studied them, making those gulping/giggling sounds in his throat, whispering things beneath his breath.

“See? See?” he said. “See how down low here, down here you got your oldest images. Most of these are faded, worn by time…shit, hundreds and hundreds of years old if not more. Maybe thousands.” He was breathing hard now, licking his lips. He followed the paintings and cuttings up the wall with the lantern. “You get up here, Jimmy Lee, you get up here and, sure, you can make ‘em out better. These ain’t as old, eh? But still old, old, very old.”

Cobb still was not impressed. Just injun-art. What of it?

But Gleer wouldn’t let it go.

He explained in some detail what it all meant, what the rock was saying to them, how it reached out across the centuries telling them a tale of life long gone from these hills. Hunting. Fishing. Battling enemies. Birth. Death. Religious ceremony. Marriages. Funerals. If you could read it and it wasn’t too hard, Gleer said, it was just like a book.

“Looks like a village there,” Cobb said, indicating a cluster of lodges. “Wonder what the hell happened to it?”

“Probably down there in that valley, what’s left of it,” Gleer said. “Covered in snow.” He followed the art across the wall. “See? See this?”

Cobb saw it. Was so impressed he stuck a cigar in his mouth and smoked it, knowing there was more here than just silly injun-art.

“They…they were working this mountain, maybe these caves, tunneling…”

Cobb could see it fine. Stick figures at work. Using what might have been primitive shovels and picks, staffs and baskets to haul out rock. Looked like drawings of ants working their hive. Figures everywhere.

Gleer was getting real excited now. “Right here…Jimmy, right goddamn here, something happened,” he said, stabbing the wall with a dirty index finger.

“What?”

Gleer told him it was big, bad medicine, whatever it was. All the symbols and hex signs attested to that. To Cobb it looked as if down in their tunnels they had dug into another chamber. The chamber was represented by a jagged gouge…and out of it, something like smoke misting out.

“A catastrophe,” Gleer said. “See? All them figures are laying about now. All dead.”

“Gas probably. Hit a pocket of poison gas.”

“No…no, I think it’s worse than that.” He was panting now, rubbing grime and settled dust from the walls, close to something, but he wasn’t sure what. “There…not gas…something else…something they dug out of the ground, something real bad…”

Cobb was studying it pretty close himself now.

Another representation of that jagged chasm, more smoke or mist seeping up and out. Only the mist was now shown to have gathered above the dead and the living like some storm cloud. A storm cloud made of skulls and devil-faces. The drawings went on and that cloud appeared to have come up out of the cave and settled over the village.

“It got to ‘em,” Gleer said, his eyes wide and the lantern trembling in his fist now. He looked afraid. His face was tight and set with wrinkles and taut cords. “It got to ‘em, Jimmy? Don’t you get it? Don’t you?”

The paintings abruptly ended there and there were no more.

Cobb didn’t really get it. Something was crawling in his belly like worms and it made him feel giddy. The birthmark on his back was throbbing. Something was happening to him, but he didn’t see. Not really. Not just yet. The Indians had been mining or something. They had cut deep into the mountain and uncovered a hidden chamber, dug into it…and something, something had come out. Something that killed a lot of ‘em. Something real bad came out of the ground.

Gleer was half out of his mind now.

He was running around, handling bones and skulls, waving femurs and tibias about. He set the lantern at the edge of the pit and dove into all those bones like some insane swimmer into a charnel sea. He paddled and sorted, handled and searched. His fingers traced the craniums of skulls, poked into orbits, tapped at yellowed teeth set in pitted jaws. He stroked the rungs of a ribcage, eyed a blackened pelvic wing like maybe it was his own.

“Get the hell out of there,” Cobb told him and meant it. “Yer losing yer mind, damn ye!”

Gleer climbed out, the bones falling away from him with a sound like tumbling kindling. Cobb grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pitched him to the floor.

“I ain’t mad, Jimmy! It’s just…hell, it’s just that I know! I know!” He was cackling now, drool running from the corners of his lips. His entire body was shuddering. “These bones…lookit ‘em, will ya? Look close.”

Cobb did.

And then he got it…or some of it. The bonesall the bones in fact were riddled with tiny cuts and gashes and nicks. Somebody had been hacking and cutting on their owners. And maybe worse…because he found what looked to be teeth marks set into them.

“Cannibals,” Cobb said in a low voice. “Just like in them Pacific islands I read about when I was a kid. Man-eaters…”

“That’s right, yes sir, that’s right.” Gleer was still laughing, but tears had welled in his eyes now. “But they didn’t do it on their own, Jimmy Lee, no sir! What they cut out of the ground…whatever it was…it turned ‘em that way, took hold of their savage heathen minds and turned them into monsters…”

Cobb took hold of him and got him out of those caverns. Gleer was stark raving by that point. And maybe it was just Cobb’s imagination, but that high, hot gassy smell seemed almost stronger. Rancid, even.

As if whatever was dead in there, had begun to decay once again after many long years.

 

***

Cobb got Gleer outside and with the help of the other two, they wrestled him back to the cabin. But he was in a bad way. They had to shackle him to the wall with chains snapped from beaver traps and nailed into the logs themselves. He was talking crazy, shaking and gibbering, hearing things scratching around outside that none of the others could. Talking with people that weren’t there. Going native like his mother’s people and asking for protection from the Great Spirit. So they left him shackled for a week like that, pissing himself, drooling and screeching.

“Think I’m crazy, don’t you? Think I’ve lost what mind I did have, don’t you?” he rambled on incessantly one afternoon as the wind made the cabin shake. “But I ain’t nohow crazy. Because I know what was up there…I could smell it there and I can smell it here now. Maybe you, Cobb, or you, Barlow…maybe you don’t know what I’m taking about. But Noolan…I don’t know about you. It might have touched you the way it touched them injuns. Ain’t saying it did…but it got to one of us, ‘cause I can smell it! Hear? I can smell it. One of you, yes sir, you know what I’m talking about on account you’re just waiting for the lights to dim so you can feed on the others. I know it! I know it! Oh…ho, ho, my God, my dear Lord Jesus, them injuns, them injuns. Roasting babies and sucking brains from skulls and chewing on the flesh of their young…eating, eating. Offering up their daughters to that, that thing come straight out of hell…”

“Shut the fuck up!” Barlow snapped finally. “You shut up with that talk or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I’ll kill you!”

Gleer was getting to everyone by that point. Maybe even Cobb. But you couldn’t tell it from that cool smirk on his face. Noolan calmed Barlow down and took him outside for some fresh air being that it was the one thing they had plenty of.

When they were gone, it was just Cobb and Gleer in the cabin. The logs popped and shifted in the hearth. The air was smoky and thick. It stank of body odor and charred logs. What it didn’t stink of these days was food.

“Ye’ve got to get a hold of yerself, Gleer,” Cobb told him. “Ye carry on like this…well, one of them boys is gonna shoot ye dead.”

Gleer just played with his chains, running the loops through his fingers. He nodded. “I know, I know…but I’m scared, Jimmy Lee. I’m damn scared. I’m thinking…thinking that one of us just ain’t what he appears to be. That something got in him…inside him…and that man, he’s a monster now…”

Cobb considered it a moment and shrugged. “Maybe ye right,” he said. “Maybe you and me, maybe we better had keep an eye on them other two.”

 

***

Eventually, Gleer came back to his senses.

Barlow managed to shoot a couple wolves. They were rawboned things with hardly any meat on them, but it was something in their bellies. And Noolan made a hearty soup from the blood and fat. It didn’t taste all that wonderful, but it stuck to the bones. With some meat and soup in him at last, Gleer came to his senses.

They cut him loose.

But they kept an eye on him.

In fact, everyone kept an eye on each other. It was like everyone was afraid to be alone with anyone else. All four of them went about their daily routines with knives and pistols hanging from their belts. And when one came upon another out in the woods or poking through the ice that covered the stream…well, it was only sensible to give advance warning. For up there in that awful place, only the guilty sneaked around or moved silently.

Things got bad in the week following Gleer’s release.

The wind shook and rattled the cabin continually. It picked up sheets of snow and flung them all and everywhere. Visibility outside was down to eight, ten feet at any given time. The air was unnaturally cold. Sometimes the wind carried funny sounds with it, sounds like weeping or screaming. The voices of children chanting in some distant place. There were odd noises in the dead of night…noises like something walking up on the roof or scratching at the shuttered windows. A pounding at the outside walls. Weird distorted tracks found in the snow outside. Tracks that started suddenly and ended just as abruptly…like something had leaped down from the cold stars above and then leaped back up there again.

Noolan and Barlow could be heard whispering prayers at night.

Gleer just hid beneath his elk hides silently.

And Cobb, he just grinned, head always cocked like he was listening for something.

Because he had secrets from the others.

They didn’t know about him slipping off that night they’d found the cave. About him crawling in there in the frigid, dark hours. Walking amongst the bones with a lantern in hand. They didn’t know how it was for him when the gassy, fetid odor rose up from the trembling marrow of the mountain and fell over him like a shivering, stinking blanket. Or how it held him and made communion with something already hiding deep within him. Something planted there like an obscene seed in the blighted soil of his soul by his father. How it reached out and found this sleeping other and became one with it.

Because Gleer was right—there was a monster among them.

And it was getting hungry.

 

***

It had been three weeks since they found the cave now.

Two weeks since the last of the soup and wolf meat was eaten. Their bellies had been stark empty since and something in each and every man was decaying at an unpleasant rate.

Except for Cobb.

What was in him had already rotted to carrion.

 

***

Cobb was alone in the cabin…or nearly.

Noolan and Barlow had run off hours ago. Run off when they’d returned early from their hunt and found Cobb dressing out Gleer’s corpse, happily sorting through meat and muscle, selecting the finest cuts for steaks and the poorer ones for stews.

“Hungry, gents?” he’d said, gore dripping from his mouth because, well, dammit, it was hard to do that sort of work without a little taste here or there. “Pull yerselves up a seat and see what old Jimmy Lee can do when the proper victuals is available.”

Barlow and Noolan just stood there, rifles in hand, mouths sprung like spittoons, staring and staring. One of them—Cobb couldn’t be sure which—let out a wailing scream and together they’d run off into the snows. Damn fools left the door open, too. Born in a goddamned barn, the both of ‘em.

That had been three, four hours before.

But Cobb knew they’d be back. Unless they decided to winter it out up in the cave; but they wouldn’t like that very much. It was one thing to be up there with light and heat…but when the lantern died out and the blackness swam up like some ravenous shark from a primeval, godless sea like it had for him, well that was an entirely different kettle of fish, mind you.

Cobb had long-since finished slaughtering Gleer.

When Cobb had pulled his Arkansas toothpick and walked up to him, speaking in the voices of long-dead injuns, Gleer had just gone to jelly. Slicker than shit, Cobb had slit his throat ear to ear and Gleer just accepted it. Now, there wasn’t nothing but a pile of bloody bones to mark his passing. His skin was drying on a rack before the fire, smartly salted for leather. His organs were gently layered in a black pot of brine, seasoning up for a fine stew that would last Cobb for weeks and weeks. The meat had been carved from his buttocks, belly, and breast and packed in snow so it would keep fresh and sweet. His blood had been drained off into buckets for soup and broth. Even his fat was saved. His ligaments and sinew were drying for catgut. And right that moment as Cobb listened to the wind speaking and cackling in the chimney pipe, he was grinding up muscle and organ to be stuffed into bowel casings for sausage.

Gleer’s head was sitting across from him.

The eyes were blanched and the tongue protruded blackly from those seamed lips. His bearskin cap was still on his head. A few greasy strands of hair had fallen over the sallow, blood-spattered face.

If Cobb concentrated real hard, he could even make it speak.

When he was done stuffing his sausages, whistling some old Indian deathsong he’d never once heard in his life, he nibbled on a little finger food he’d boiled from the bones below. One of Gleer’s legs was spitted and roasting over the fire, carefully seasoned. It was getting nice and brown, gobs of fat dropping from it and sizzling in the flames beneath. The meaty, rich smell filled the cabin and went up the flue.

Cobb knew the meat-smell would bring the others home.

They wouldn’t have a choice.

And he would welcome them, surely. He figured two more kills and he’d have more than enough meat to put up until spring, if he practiced a little conservation, that was. Avoided his usual gluttony. But he was no savage. He would invite both Barlow and Noonlan to break bread at his table. He’d give ‘em both a good meal before putting them to the knife.

It was the Christian thing to do.

So Cobb nibbled and waited, a curious light flickering in his eyes.

He remembered the night he’d crept back up to the cave, something in him telling him it was the right thing to do. That what was in there, what was hiding in the cracks and crevices and maybe the bones, too, was the very reason he had come. Not gold. But…it. Whatever in the hell it was. The very thing them injuns had cut from the ground. He could remember it started with that gassy smell. A foul, yellow odor it was, a terrible sweet smell of unburied corpses and miasmic tombs.

It had touched him.

Physically touched him.

In his headas it held him tightly, nursed him against its breast like an infantit had told him what to do. How long it had waited for him. How it was he could survive if he could simply overcome certain social taboos, that was.

But Cobb would not listen, would not.

He’d been thinking along those lines, but he wasn’t ready just yet.

And the thing had pressed him into itself, squeezed him so that he thought his bones would come busting out of his mouth. It told him there was no other way. If he wanted power…and he did want that, didn’t he? Then there was only one way to have mastery over men. Same way you had mastery over animalsby eating them. Devouring the flesh and absorbing all that they were and could be.

This, it said, was the path to invincibility and immortality.

But Cobb just was not sure, so the thing sweetened it a bit for him. It talked to him like an old friend. It didn’t try to intimidate or terrify him, it just talked in a natural, easy rhythm. And, funny thing, it had a deep Southern accent, a hellbilly accent just like his kin from the Missouri Ozarks.

Well, at least it seemed that way…but maybe it was just a breathing gray sibilance forming words in his head.

Now, let me tell ye something, Jimmy Lee. Jus’ mind me and listen, hear? Shet up now, this here’s important. Once upon a time, there was these injuns what lived up here in these hills. Just yer ordinary savages, I reckon. They was some shirttail kin of the Shoshoni called themselves the Macabro. Well, cousin, these Macabros, they started tunnelin’ in the earth like worms into pork…well, sir, weren’t long before they dug somethin’ up, somethin’ mebbe they weren’t a-supposed to find at all. It jumped up, said hello and how you be, and rode down hard on them savages like Christ come to preach. Now this thing here, it crawled into their skins. Ran roughshod all over the tribe like Yankees marching through Georgia. I shit you not. Ye remember them bad things what were supposed to live down in them hollers back home in Missourah? Yessum. This thing, it was like that. Now, it weren’t exactly neighborly, this critter. It got into them injuns deep. Sure as Christ was hammered to the cross, the Macabro belonged to this thing.

Now, cousin, lemme tell ye how it were fer them.

These injuns, they took to etin’ human flesh and what not, sacrificin’ their firstborn and all. The shaman would et the little shitters raw and wrigglin’. Yep, their own children, that’s what I said. But adults, too. Jus’ about anyone. And virgins…heh, that sumbitch what out of the ground, he was real sweet on maidens, see. Now, the Macabro were always fighting one tribe or another. When they caught some, they’d make burnt offerings of their enemies, nail ‘em upside down to poles and sometimes put ‘em to the flame and sometimes jus’ left ‘em there to rot to bone.

Now wait, son, keep yer Henry in yer pants…yep, there’s more. See, these Macabro…they started digging up their dead and the dead of anyone they could find, yessum. Started worshipping bones and skulls. Made altars of ‘em and doin’ things with the dead uns ye just don’t want to think about. They was jus’ real soft in the heads, this bunch.

Now these shaman, priestswhichever ye want to call them baby-rapin’ devilsthey was quite a bunch. They called all the shots. Sumbitches didn’t cotton to bathin’ no how. A filthy lot what jumped and hopped about in their cloaks of baby-skins, snakes just a-twisting in their long filthy hair. They sang them profane songs and wore skull masks and chattered their teeth what were filed to points to rend and tear, ye see. These shaman, they controlled everything. Their bodies were tattooed with snakes and symbols and witch-sign, what they called the Skin-Medicine. Some sort of conjurin’ and magical formula written right on their skins. It was said that with this Skin-Medicine, them heathen devils could control the spirits of the dead and change themselves into man-eating beasts jus’ any old time the need struck ‘em. Now on nights of the full moon, the Macabro priests would light big fires and them injuns would dance naked in the snow while the priests read from their own skins. Injuns what had been captured from other tribes would be slaughtered, their flesh eaten, and the snow would just stain red with their blood. And if the Macabro could get some of those injun’s young-uns, well, a regular party they’d have chompin’ up that fine, fat squib.

Well, cousin, ye get the picture.

These injuns was mad, yessum, but they had it half-right about etin’ other peoples to absorb all they had. Now the Macabro, they was all wiped out by the Ute two-hundred year ago, but what ye found in the cave, yes sir, that was their legacy. See, the Ute herded them Macabros what weren’t killed outright and all the dead uns up into that cave, burnt ‘em up alive, seeded their bones in them pits. Yessum, the cave. It was fitting, I reckon, in that the cave is where a lot of that pagan sacrificin’ went on.

And now, Jimmy-boy, ye understand? Do ye? Do ye?

Cobb didn’t remember much after that.

Just that he wasn’t quite the same. Sometimes he was himself and sometimes part of the thing that had impregnated his mother and sometimes part of that rabid hillbilly out of the cave. Sometimes they were all just one mind. The next day and all the days after, Cobb just waited and plotted the getting of skin and meat and bone.

And that’s how it all came about.

Cobb, a chunk of finger meat packed in his cheek, went over and turned Gleer’s leg on the spit. He poked it with a fork and the juice ran free and clear, telling him it was done. His belly was rumbling at the nauseating stench.

Just then, he heard movement outside the cabin.

He grinned, his eyes flashing with hellfire. It was Barlow and Noolan being real quiet and stealthy, sneaking about like red savages. They were doing a good job of it, too, but Cobb heard them. The sound of their boots breaking the crust of snow. The roar of the blood in their veins, the throb of their hearts. And mostly, yes mostly, he could smell their fear and to him it was like freshly uncorked brandy.

Cobb went about setting the table.

His back to the door, they came bursting in, the both of them. They held pistols on him and they were both shaking from the cold, their faces pinched and mottled and edged with fear.

“You’re crazy, Cobb, you sick sonofabitch,” Barlow said. “Now real careful like, I want you to take that pistol out of your belt…with your left hand. Real slow now, let it drop to the floor…”

But Cobb just giggled. “Ye stop with that talk, friend. I’m just a-setting the table here. I want the both of you to sit with me and have a fine meal. Ye know ye want to, so why fight it? We’ll have us some eats and discuss this like men.”

Barlow and Noolan just stood there, not sure what to do. Cobb was insane, sure, but why was he so damn calm? What was that funny light reflected in his eyes? There was something very wrong about all this and it wasn’t just the cannibalism either.

“We better just shoot him,” Noolan said.

“That wouldn’t be very neighborly, cousin,” Cobb said.

“See? See? He’s crazy! Watch him now, watch him real careful, because James Lee Cobb he’s right fast with that Colt,” Noolan was saying. “He can pull it so fast you—”

“Drop that gun on the floor,” Barlow said.

Cobb sighed, shrugged, went for the gun with his right hand. And actually cleared leather before two bullets ripped through his belly. But all that did was make him laugh as his blood dripped to the floor. He dipped one finger into the hole in his buckskin shirt like a quill into an inkwell. He pulled it back out, licked the tip. His face was narrow and pallid, real tight like a skull wearing skin, his eyes lit like glowworms.

But he had his Colt out and, barking a short laugh, put a slug right between Barlow’s eyes, dropping him dead in the doorway.

“Now,” he said to Noolan. “Why don’t ye join me for supper? What’s say?”

The pistol dropped from Noolan’s fingers and he started to whimper. Whatever was in Cobb’s eyes had him tight. He stumbled over to the table, his own eyes wide and unblinking and filled with tears. He sat down and watched dumbly as Cobb pulled the leg off the spit and began to carve it up.

Then he began to eat.

His fork jabbing and his teeth chewing and his throat swallowing, his mind gone to a formless putty. He ate and ate while Cobb watched him, all the while holding Gleer’s head by the hair. And the real bad thing was that Gleer was speaking, that white furrowed face was speaking. The eyes were rolling in his head and that black tongue was licking his lips. Cobb asked him questions and he answered in a dry, whistling voice, telling Gleer exactly what it was like down in that black pit of death and how Noolan’s kin were all down there burning with him.

Sometime later, Gleer’s head screaming and the cabin filled with chanting injun voices, Cobb slit Noolan’s throat and dressed him out.

 

***

In the Spring, Cobb came down from the mountains on foot, his parfleche still packed with dried human jerky. His travels after that were unknown for the most part. What is known is that he assembled a crew of blooded killers with similar leanings and tastes as his own. That they accompanied him back to Missouri where there was something he needed to collect. And sometime later he made for the Shoshoni peoples. Knowing he had something in common with them now.

And somewhere along the way, he heard about a Snake medicine man called Spirit Moon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part Four:

The Good, the Damned, and the Deranged

 

1

 

Whisper Lake by daylight.

It was afternoon by the time Tyler Cabe rolled out of bed and even later by the time he stepped out onto the streets, his brain still reeling with the sight of the murdered prostitute. He stood before the St. James Hostelry, breathing in the air which, although not cold as the night before, was kissed by a chill blowing down from the mountains.

He hadn’t even been in Whisper Lake a full twenty-four hours yet. It was hard to believe. He thought of the crazy hillbilly Orville DuChien. Jackson Dirker. The crazy tales that bartender—Carny—at the Oasis had told him about the local animal attacks. The Texas Ranger, Henry Freeman. Sir Tom English. Virgil Clay laying dead in a pool of his own blood. The jail and Charles Graybrow. And, yes, Mizzy Modine.

It all came together in his brain and made his head ache.

He lit a cigarette and wondered what would come next.

Licking his lips then, he made his way down the muddy, rutted street, taking in the town an inch at a time. It was his first real look at it. Whisper Lake was like other mining camps he had ridden through: a congested, dirty mess of humanity.

High above town, clinging to the rises and mist-cloaked slopes were the looming steel headframes and drum hoists of the mines themselves, the outcroppings of assorted buildings and sheds that rose up around them. There was a constant thundering and booming and clanking from up there, as the earth was gutted of silver. Ore wagons made the run continually from the chutes to the looming refineries down by the lake itself…you could see the gray, toxic smoke that belched from the stacks and fell back to earth, dusting everything in filth.

It looked oddly as if the town itself had once been part of the mine systems above and had slowly slid down the muddy inclines to its present position.

It was laid out with no plan or pattern, just a haphazard collection of log buildings and false-corniced stores, tents and shanties, brush huts and wooden shacks cut through by a maze of intersecting dirt roads that dipped into little hollows and climbed up low hills. There were a few brick buildings and an elaborate system of board sidewalks. Just a crazy-quilt of hotels and boarding houses, assay offices and saloons, brothels and churches, liveries and lumber yards with a Union Pacific railroad spur winding around the northern end.

Everything from privy to meat market was darkened with soot from the mines and refineries.

The roads were filled with horses and wagons, prospectors and business-owners, immigrants pushing carts and dirty children chasing balls with sticks. Cabe saw ladies with parasols clustered in whispering groups and whores in their petticoats emptying chamber pots into the streets. The ground rumbled from the industry of the mines above and voices chattered and people shouted and bodies threaded in every which direction. Unlike other frontier towns, you saw very few people lounging about. Everything was business and money and there was no time for loafing.

Cabe, his boots plastered with mud up to the shafts, stepped up onto the boardwalk, then stepped back down again as a trio of elderly ladies passed. He touched the brim of his hat to them. A freight wagon and team roared past him, nearly running down a group of black-faced miners, and splashed dirty water over his pants. A group of men fought to push a buckboard that was buried to the axle in a muddy hole. The batwings of a saloon flew open and a drunken man stumbled out, leaned over the hitching rail and vomited out coils of foam. Dark-clad foreigners gesticulated and mumbled in a dozen different dialects. Indians in blanket robes stood around, watching the ruin of their land.

Cabe kept walking, weaving through groups of miners and laborers, trying to find a place where he could get away from all the noise and activity. But everywhere he turned, every alleyway and street, was crowded with more people and more wagons and more industry.

Dear Christ, he thought, maybe Dirker was right…there’s just too many people here, I’ll never find the Strangler in this piss-pot.

But he wasn’t about to give up.

He would crawl into every crack and alcove of this seething, pulsing hive if he had to.

But he was going to run the Sin City Strangler to ground.

 

2

Jackson Dirker, looking decidedly pale, said, “I’ve seen atrocities, Doc, I’ve seen true horrors…but this, something like this, I can’t begin to even understand it.”

Dr. Benjamin West, a Whisper Lake surgeon and the Beaver County coroner, just nodded. He was a tall, reed-thin man in a charcoal suit with a gold watch chain that flashed in the sunlight like a winking eye. He clutched his derby hat to his chest and ran long, delicate fingers through his sparse white hair. A cord jumped in his throat.

“Although I’m a man of science,” he finally said. “I would think the Devil rode through here in a black mood.”

Dirker did not disagree with that.

They were standing outside the general store that had served as not only the market, but saloon and gambling house in the placer camp of Sunrise. They stood outside the double doors, looking and looking, and seeing and wishing they were blind. Because what they saw in Sunrise was permanently burned into their vision like a sudden, hurting arc of light.

Dirker was studying what was on the door.

A man with an eagle tattooed on his back had been skinned completely, his hide nailed there in one piece. No less than three heads hung over the entrance like ghastly lanterns. Copper wire had been jabbed into their ears and looped to nails above. The faces were splattered with dried blood, blanched eyes staring dumbly. The head on the left looked like it was about to say something.

Doc West waved a few flies from it. Though the wind had a bite to it, the sunshine was heating things up. Bringing the bugs and the ever-present reek of bacterial decay. “I’m guessing that these heads,” he said, “were not cut off as with a hatchet or knife, but actually ripped from their bodies.”

Dirker had already figured that.

At the stump of the necks there was a great deal of tissue and vertebrae hanging out like party confetti. No clean slice was evident. Someone...or something...had the strength to actually pull a man’s head from his body. Dirker didn’t like to jump to fantastic conclusions like that, but what else was he to think? The evidence spoke volumes.

Sighing, as used to the carnage now as he would ever get, he looked over the shacks and weathered buildings that had made up Sunrise in its heyday before the veins of gold had played out. It looked like a cemetery to him…the gray, windowless structures very much like tombstones in some lonesome, windy graveyard. The mountains brooding above looked down silently like mourners.

A miner named Jim Tomlinson had ridden down from the high country to provision at the store and found the massacre. He was so overwrought by the time he made it to Whisper Lake, Doc West had to shoot some morphine into him to get anything sensible out of him. An hour later, Dirker, West, and two deputies—Henry Wilcox and Pete Slade—made it up to Sunrise.

Henry Wilcox—a man who’d seen his fair share of blood and guts—took one look at what was in the store and promptly ran outside to vomit. The other three were inclined to do the same, but held their own.

Massacre was what Tomlinson had called it and massacre is what it was. Period. There was no way to tell just yet how many had been killed. Corpses and parts thereof where littered about like bison carcasses at a buffalo camp. The bar was heaped with dismembered limbs…legs, arms, hands, feet. Some hands still gripped pistols and some legs still wore their boots. There was blood everywhere, oceans of it dried in sticky pools on the floor and splashed on the walls and spattered up onto the ceiling. Tables had been overturned, chairs shattered to firewood. Sacks of salt and flour had ripped open, their contents powdered over everything like a down of snow. Poker chips and playing cards scattered in every which direction.

Slaughter, plain and simple.

The store had sold everything from picks and shovels to Rochester lamps and sluice boxes. One of the picks had been put to good use—it had been used to impale a man to the wall, his feet a good six inches off the floor. Dirker couldn’t even begin to imagine the strength it would take to do something like that.

And if all of that was bad enough down here, upstairs…Jesus, even worse.

Like a slaughterhouse. The corridor was actually painted red like a child’s fingerpainting, filled with bodies and limbs and viscera. Dirker didn’t do much exploring up there—the sight and smell of all that spilled blood and raw human meat was simply too much for any man—but what he had seen was enough to haunt his dreams forever. Whoever or whatever had been at work up there, had taken their time. Unlike downstairs which was, save a few grisly examples, like a free-for-all just this side of Hell, in the upstairs corridor, the fiends had been in no hurry whatsoever.

Five bodies had been ritually pulled apart—limbs and heads cut from torsos—and then reassembled on the walls where they had been nailed in place. Dirker suppose that was evidence of a sick, grim sense of humor. When he first saw it, he thought he was looking at bloody manikins, but the truth found him soon enough. He hadn’t bothered with the other rooms up there. No doubt they hid more horrors, but he simply wasn’t up to it.

Downstairs with Doc West, Dirker watched the medical man examine the bodies. He probed punctures and gashes with instruments, measured wounds and abrasions. Dirker was thinking about the others. About the miners that had disappeared up in the hills these past months. And the ones that had been mauled by animals…at least what he had thought were animals.

Now, well, he knew better.

But if it wasn’t animals, then what? Lunatics with dogs?

There were bullet holes everywhere—in the walls, the ceiling. Slugs had ripped through barrels of salt pork and jerky, had shattered the liquor bottles behind the bar. Shotgun blasts had blown holes in tabletops and pellets were peppered in the plank flooring.

Doc West sighed. Examined an obvious bite mark in a woman’s buttocks. “Some sort of animal did this…but the spacing of the teeth, I just don’t know. Like the others before.” He stood up slowly, a immense weight bearing down on him. “These people were killed in a number of ways. Some were shot. Others stabbed. Still others had their throats torn out or were eviscerated. But, ultimately, they were all partially eaten. Killed for sport and for food. And as a bonus, most of them were scalped.”

That was a new wrinkle, Dirker knew. The other bodies they had found in weeks previous had not been scalped.

Dirker cleared his throat. “So we’ve got ourselves a pack of animals that carry weapons and scalp folks like Indians?”

“That would be correct, yes.”

Dirker licked his lips with a tongue dry as sandpaper. “The scalping…we’d better keep that to ourselves. People hear that and they’ll be running Indians again.”

Doc West nodded. “We had better keep most of this to ourselves.”

Dirker walked back outside, to get that abattoir stink out of his face. Outside the wind blew and howled amongst the leaning, ramshackle structures. In his mind, it was the wail of ghosts demanding justice. He thought of the bounty he had put out. The one on the animals he had hoped were responsible. So far, hunters brought in three pathetic black bear, two slat-thin wolves, and a badger of all things.

It would have been mildly humorous, if it weren’t so terrible.

Henry Wilcox was leaning against the shack across the road. The door was open and there was another body sprawled in there. This one had taken a load of double-ought at point-blank range. Probably the only truly normal death in Sunrise.

Wilcox and Dirker avoided looking at each other.

Dirker, his belly filled with something like wet sand, followed the muddy, overgrown road up amongst the empty buildings. The killers had impaled a series of heads on waist-high stakes to mark the path. Considerate of them. They had found three other bodies in one of the shacks—an old assay office. They had been hung by the feet and disemboweled. Dirker tried to suck in fresh air, but all he could smell was decomposed, maggoty death.

There was a gray false-fronted building at the very end with boarded-over windows. Dirker hadn’t checked that one yet. He supposed he had to, like it or not.

He had to kick the door free of its hinges to get in.

And right away he smelled it—a wet and rancid stink. Feeble sunlight filtered in through gaping rents in the walls where boards had peeled loose. Motes of dust danced in the beams. The building had been something of a hotel once, but the furnishings had long ago been stripped away. Even the staircase leading above had been purloined, probably for firewood. It was dirty in there, shadowy and dank like a crypt. There was a bloody handprint on the faded wallpaper, a single bootprint pressed into the settled dust.

Dirker, sucking in a lungful of stale air, walked over to a door that was open maybe an inch. He could hear the wind whistling through holes in the roof, making the building groan and creak and tremble. There were another noises, too…the buzzing of insects. Meatflies, no doubt.

Dirker grasped the door, yanked it open.

A man stood there before him.

Stood stock still for a split second, then fell straight forward like a post and almost knocked Dirker on his ass. Dirker let out a little strangled cry, but the man was dead. A bubble of hysterical laughter slid up the sheriff’s throat, but he would not set it free.

Just another corpse, that’s all. The insides hollowed out, the face covered in flies. In the room behind him, there was dried blood everywhere. Bloody bootprints led to a window where planks had been knocked free.

Dirker left the corpse there and made for the door.

He heard the sound of hooves hammering up the road.

He knew it was Pete Slade riding back in, but for moment, one moment he thought that maybe it was—

Outside, Slade was speaking with Wilcox. Dirker made his way over to them.

“Anything?” he said.

Slade just shook his head, stroking his mustache. “I followed the tracks up pretty high. I’m figuring seven horses, but no sign of animal with ‘em, dogs or otherwise. About three miles from here, the riders cut into a stream. I followed it for a mile or so…but I saw nothing that made me think they ever cut up the bank.” He pulled a cigar butt from the pocket of his leather vest, stuck it in his mouth. He did not light it, just chewed on it. “That stream winds through the mountains for miles and miles. Maybe if we had some dogs, we could cast for scent.”

Dirker swallowed. “That’s fine. I don’t want you to go up against…these people on your own. Our time will come, just not yet.”

Slade said, “I think these boys…I think they know what they’re doing. They been tracked before, I’m guessing, and their smart.”

Dirker told him and Wilcox to bury the heads on the poles, what bodies they could find. Then he went back to the general store. He didn’t bother trying to drag the bodies out. When Doc West was done, he spilled kerosene around and lit the place on fire.

A cleansing then, of a sort.

 

3

Although Dirker very much wanted only a sanitized version of events of what had occurred up at Sunrise to circulate through Whisper Lake, the miner who had discovered the slaughter beat him to it. By the time Dirker and the others made it back to town, the story was out. It was out and people were crawling up the sheriff’s ass like mites.

Over at the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister and three other men—James Horner, Philip Caslow, and Luke Windows—were gathered in the upstairs rooms, speaking in soft, careful tones. The rooms had once been used by Hiram Callister, but were now a sort of meeting place for Caleb and his friends.

“It’s worse than anything thus far,” Caleb said to them. “An out and out slaughter and I think we all know who’s responsible.”

“Scalped, too, you say?” Caslow asked.

“Yes.”

Horner looked angry. “I’m not surprised. Them goddamn Mormons think this is their place, that the whole of Utah Territory belongs to them. They’ll do anything to push real Christians out.”

Windows lit a cigarette. He was a blacksmith and his hands were huge, callused. “See? What they got in mind is for us to blame injuns. That’s what they want. But we ain’t rising to that bait. We got us a pack of them Danites, them Destroying Angels hiding over in Redemption or maybe Deliverance.”

“Exactly,” Caslow said. “It’s only a matter of deciding which snake pit we root out first.”

“Redemption,” Caleb said to them.

He knew if he suggested Deliverance, he’d get no takers. No man in his right mind wanted to ride up to Deliverance, not with what was said about that place. Maybe all of it wasn’t true, but if some of it was, then it was enough. Besides, even the Mormons shunned the place.

“Tonight then,” he said. “Tonight we sack that heathen nest and burn it to the ground.”

No one disagreed with that.

 

4

Sitting atop packing crates in the alley behind the Red Top Saloon, Jack Goode was saying, “I’ll tell you something, Charlie Graybrow. Just between you and me and that heap of dogshit over there, this town has the curse all it over it. Yes sir, right from its bones to the roofs above, cursed, that’s what. Lookit me for instance. Just take a look at me and tell me what you see.” Goode paused, pulling from a bottle of whiskey, wiping a few drops from his white beard with the back of his hand. “No comment? That’s fair. Sure enough. Well, I’ll answer it for you. You’re looking at a man what won’t see sixty again. Hell, won’t see sixty-five, I reckon. A man that’s been here and there and everywhere. I fought in the army, I trapped in the mountains. I whipped a mail coach down the Overland trail and I was even a Pony Express rider until some Cheyenne bucks in Wyoming Territory filled me so full of arrows they could’ve used my ass to water flowerbeds. What I’m saying, my red brother, is that I ain’t afraid of shit. Never have been.”

Charles Graybrow took the bottle, had a taste. “But now?”

“Now things is surely different, ain’t they?”

Charles Graybrow agreed with that silently. He knew bad things were happening and would continue to happen. All those disappearances and killings out in the hills. And now this latest massacre. Bad medicine. That’s what it was. Then the vigilantes out tormenting the Mormon squatters and now that prostitute getting slit from kitty to chin.

Not good, not good at all.

Even a fool (or a white man) had to sense the bad aura in and around Whisper Lake these days. It was so thick you could hold it in your hand. Almost as if that particular corner of Beaver County was a gathering point for noxious forces. Made a fellow think. Even made an injun think.

“Things keep up,” Graybrow said, “well have the army in here.”

Goode pulled from the bottle. “Yes sir, you probably got a point there, my friend. Damned and dandy if you don’t. Because I’ll admit before God and the Democrats and gladly so that I’m shit-scared over this place and what’s happening here. You ask me, there’s a poison here and old Whisper Lake is just rotten to the roots. And it’s getting worse by the day. This town, my friend, is as surely fucked as a three-dollar whore.” He sighed, looked skyward as if he expected the hand of the Lord to smite him from above. “And you know the worse thing of all, Charlie?”

Graybrow shook his head.

“I think I’m to blame,” Goode admitted. “Somehow, some way…I brought hell down upon this here burg.”

Graybrow took the bottle from him. “How do you figure that?”

Goode sighed. “It’s a long story, but I’ll make it quick for you, I reckon.”

“Yeah, I’m an injun and all, so don’t go confusing me. I’m real simple.”

“Now, don’t be like that, Charlie. That’s not what I meant. You know I got nothing but respect for your people.”

Graybrow nodded. “Surely. Amongst my tribe we consider you to be something of a holy figure. Many is the day we pray for your guidance.”

“No shit? Goddammit…you’re tugging my cord again.”

“I’m funny like that,” Graybrow said. “Maybe it’s because I’m an injun.”

Goode told him that might be the reason, yes sir. “Anyway, about seven months ago I landed me this job. I was hired by this injun, a Goshute, from the Skull Valley Band. He wanted me to transport this body from up there down here to Whisper Lake. A hundred U.S. Treasury greenbacks he promised me. I jumped on it. Figured I’d come down here, maybe do a little panning up in the hills. Now, this body we were talking about belonged to a fellow name of James Lee Cobb. You hear of him?”

Graybrow washed whiskey around in his mouth. “Some sort of killer, I think. Outlaw. Pistol fighter. Something like that.”

Goode clapped him on the shoulder. “And then some. A cold-blooded killer is what we’re talking, Charlie. Cobb came out of Missouri and his trail was red and hurting. Fought in the Mex war. Robbed. Killed. Raped. Got trapped up in the high Sierras with a few saddle tramps, ate the sumbitches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, you get the idea. Old Cobb…why he was just as low as the belly of a squashed rattlesnake in a wagon wheel rut.”

“Why’d that Goshute have you bring him here?”

Goode shrugged, shook his head. “Hell if I know really. Said something about it being Cobb’s last wish. Had some sort of half-brother living in these parts. About all I could figure is that Cobb was wanted for just everything just about everywhere, so he was on the dodge in injun country.”

“So you brought the body here?”

“Yes, damn if I didn’t. Me and this little squirt of piss name of Hyden brought the box clear from Skull Valley and right across the San Fran mountains…”

Goode went on to tell him what that had been like. And as he told it, his eyes got wide and staring, his face rubbery and discolored. A tic jumped at the corner of his lips as he told his story, gazing fearfully into the distance as if he saw the Devil riding in on horseback. When he finished…he was shaking and breathing hard.

“Sounds like what?” he finally said. “About thirty pounds of prime manure? Maybe. But I swear it’s true. That body in that box…it weren’t dead. Least not in the way we understand dead, you and me. It was crawling and scratching and nails were popping free…and Jesus, Charlie, I coulda pissed myself. Whatever was in that box, well, it weren’t right at all. Like its spirit had just gone sour like bad milk.”

Graybrow listened and kept his sarcasm to himself, because he knew Goode. And Goode was about as superstitious as most atheists. He wasn’t above telling a few tall ones, but Graybrow knew this was not one of them.

Goode pulled hard off the bottle. “I never told a living soul about this, Charlie. And I’m telling you only because I trust you and we killed a few bottles together and you’re an injun. You people know about shit like this. White folk? Hell, we’re black and white from toe to skull. Something don’t fit in our worldview, we pave it over with bullshit so’s we can sleep at night. But Indians…yeah, you people ain’t afraid to look the dark things in the face, ain’t afraid of admitting that there’s black, evil things that can drive a man mad to look upon.”

Graybrow appreciated that, even though he didn’t say so. “You think that Cobb wasn’t human as such any longer?”

“I don’t know what to think,” he said, “but what was in that box…well, I’m not above admitting that if it had gotten out, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

“And you think that Cobb brought hell to this place?”

Goode licked his lips, thought it over real carefully. “Well, I keep my ear to the ground and I hear things. We brought the body to Callister’s Mortuary. And that night, they say, Callister was found dead. And it weren’t suicide. Rumor has it Cobb’s body was nowhere to be found, but the other Callister—Caleb—he shushed it up. Now, I don’t think I have to tell you what’s happened over in Deliverance since then. Even the Mormons themselves won’t go within a mile of that place.”

“And you think Cobb went there? That he’s the…focus of this?”

But Goode would only shrug. “Those are the facts way I know ‘em. First chance I get, Charlie, I’m gonna fill my poke and ride out of this graveyard Hell-for-Leather. The idea that old James Lee Cobb might come knocking at my door one night keeps me awake until the wee hours.”

Graybrow thought it over for a long time as they finished the bottle. Either Goode was crazy or maybe he had something. But even if he was right, there wasn’t a man in Whisper Lake that would ride out to Deliverance to check it out.

“Well, dammit, enough confessing, Charlie. I ever tell you about the time I sold my wife for a dollar? Truth. She was a mean outfit from back east used to gargle with scrap iron and piss tacks. One time we was in this saloon at a mining camp up in the Big Horn range, Wyome Territory. This big dirt-mean sumbitch named Johnny Houle says to me, ‘How much fer ye wife, son?’ And, hoo! Me and Thedora, we had been going at it for hours. So I say, a dollar. He pays me, drags her off. She shows later, dress torn and face bruised, just a-ready to skin and scalp me. Next day, old Johnny finds me. He’s walking funny like there’s a boot and spur up his ass sideways. You know what? He wanted his dollar back…”

But Graybrow was not listening.

He was thinking of Deliverance and James Lee Cobb. Wondering just what it was he could do about it. And right then, he thought of Orville DuChien. His second sight. Orv would probably know if Cobb was up there. And if he did?

Graybrow started thinking about Tyler Cabe then.

 

5

Tyler Cabe thought about it real hard and decided there was only one way to hunt the Sin City Strangler: He had to make friends with the whores in town. These women would be the Strangler’s targets and if he haunted their establishments, well, just maybe, he might catch sight of the bastard. If nothing else, Cabe could put the word out about who he was and what he was doing and that might make the Strangler nervous. And that would either make him bolt…or do something careless.

And if it was the latter, Cabe planned on being there to capitalize on his mistake.

Although Whisper Lake was like any other wild mining town and had its fair share of sin and vice, its red light district was restricted to a seedy run down near the refineries ubiquitously known as Horizontal Hill. Caught between mill and lake, but hidden from the rest of Whisper Lake by a high, juniper-covered bluffPiney Hillthis run of brothels, sporting houses, tents, and cribs was no less busy than the rest of the town.

And at night, a sight busier.

It was allowed to operate by Jackson Dirker for two reasons. The first being that if he tried to close it down, the miners and railroad men would no doubt jump him and stretch his neck within an hour. And the second…because each and every establishment had to be licensed by the county. And that meant that the senior county official did the licensing—the county sheriff.

Dirker licensed not only whorehouses, but gambling halls and saloons as well. And pocketed an easy 10% of not only the licensing fees, but the taxes themselves.

Anyway, the whores plied their trade and kept it (for the most part) in and around Horizontal Hill and the genteel folk of Whisper Lake didn’t have to look upon it, so it kept right on rolling and swelling week after week.

Tyler Cabe strolled right into that den of vipers and fit like a hand in a glove. Just another prospector or gunman or hunter with iron in his pants and cash in hand. He worked the circuit and talked with dozens and dozens of madams, their prostitutes, and assorted freelancers. He made it known to everyone within earshot who and what he was.

His spiel generally went something like this: “Afternoon, ma’am, name’s Tyler Cabe and I’m here on business.”

The average response was: “Well, I’m in business, Mr. Tyler Cabe, so you surely came to the right place.”

At which point, Cabe would have to be a little more specific about what his “business” was. The whores listened to his tales of the Strangler with great interest and considered Cabe to be something of a saint for wanting to protect them. They fed him and gave him drinks, offered him free lodging. Shanghai Marny Loo, the Chinese madam of the Orient Bathhouse, tried to hire him strictly to protect her girls. She was something of a legend in her own right in that she carried no less than six short-bladed knives on her person at any one time and could throw them with frightening accuracy. Cabe told her he’d keep the offer in mind.

It was, all in all, an interesting and enjoyable way to spend the afternoon and evening.

But there were hazards, of course.

More than one whore wished to show her appreciation in a more intimate way, and Cabe found himself in bed twice that day with grateful ladies—one a handsome high yellow girl and the other a flame-haired vixen from Alabama. But every job, of course, had its waters that had to be waded through.

He visited cribs that were no more than wooden shacks to sporting houses where expensive French girls ran the gaming tables and would take you straight to heaven for several hundred greenbacks. There were high dollar joyhouses like the Red August Social Club that featured deep-pile carpeting, cut chandeliers, gold leaf mirrors and tables, and imported European tapestries and Greek sculpture. A man could drop thousands in such a place, enjoying exotic delights beneath stained glass ceilings…but was assured of satisfaction and refined sin. Then there were mid-range bordellos like the San Francisco Common House where the girls were no less attractive, but they were all trained thieves who specialized in picking pockets and rolling drunken men. And if your poke wasn’t full enough for those places, there were cheap brothels like the Russian Café where you could get drunk and fucked for the price of a grubsteak…long as you weren’t too picky about the cleanliness of your lady.

Cabe hit them all and heard all the stories.

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.

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?”

Dirker sighed. “I stayed in the army. Was sent west to fight Indians.” His eyes narrowed. “I thought what I had seen in the Civil War was bad. But it didn’t prepare me for what I saw out there. The atrocities, the wanton murder of innocents.”

Cabe didn’t press it. He knew plenty of what had happened out there, the indignities and cruelties pressed upon the tribes. And generally, unwarranted. Treaties were made between whites and Indians. And the ink was barely dry before the whites had again violated them.

“But you left the army?”

Dirker was smiling now. “No, I was relieved of my command. A band of Arapahos had raided a settlement and I was told to hunt them down and massacre them. Well, we couldn’t find the perpetrators, so my commander decided that any Arapahos would do. There was a village of maybe fifty on Cripple Creek. They had nothing to do with the raid and that fact was well known…yet I was ordered to go in there with my men. And when we came out, I was instructed, there was to be nothing left alive.”

“You refused?”

“Yes, I did. And I am proud of that fact. I was a soldier, not a hired killer.” Dirker sighed, licked his lips. “I was relieved of my command, court-martialed and discharged. Honorably, much to the dismay of some.”

“And after that?”

“I was a lawman. One town after another. Eventually Janice and I bought this hotel. Of course, there was trouble between the miners and the Mormons, the Indians and the settlers…I was approached and given the job of county sheriff on the spot.”

Cabe took it all in. His story was no different from that of many a veteran—trained as a soldier, they invariably became either lawmen or outlaws, sometimes both. Cabe rolled a cigarette, lit it up. “Tell me something, Sheriff. This business I’ve been hearing about a little camp called Sunrise…anything to it?”

Dirker nodded after a time. “Horrible, horrible.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to hunt down who’s responsible, of course.”

“Of course. And while you’re at it…there’s this fellow named Freeman. Says he’s a Texas Ranger. Think you could look into that for me? Maybe wire the Rangers?”

“You think he’s lying?”

Cabe told him he wasn’t sure what he was thinking. “All I know, Dirker, is that he’s giving me a real bad feeling in my guts. And I can’t figure out exactly why…”

 

8

Later, at the Oasis Saloon, a knot of men gathered around Cabe as he tried to drink his beer. Tried to relax a bit and put all this business with Dirker into some sort of perspective. Were they friends now or enemies? And what about his wife? Cabe had been around, he knew very well the way she was looking at him and what such a look entailed. She had gotten down right excited as he joked about the whores and what he’d done with them. He had not imagined it.

“So, this killer, this Sin City Strangler,” one of the men said, a miner with a shaggy gray beard and no upper teeth. “They say he slits ‘em clean open. That true?”

“It is,” Cabe told him.

He had been casually discussing a few particulars of that business with Carny, the bartender, and it had drawn the others like a rope. They wanted to know everything, everything.

Another said, “Why in Christ he rape ‘em? Whores? You don’t have to rape ‘em…they give it up for two bits, some of ‘em.”

“Yeah, why did he rape ‘em?” another wanted to know.

“He never says.”

A tall man in a gray wool suit and polished black boots was shaking his head. “Seems to me, sir, that this is no fit conversation in the presence of

ladies.”

The miners were looking around, trying to find the ladies. All they saw were a few whores mulling about. They didn’t figure that sort counted as being ladies.

“They ain’t no ladies here, chief,” a miner said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“I find it objectionable all the same.”

The miners laughed at that to a man. Looked like maybe they were going to start trouble over it…but then they saw the pistols hanging from the man’s belt. Fine and sleek they were, Colt Peacemakers with ivory handles. The weapons of a shootist.

The miners filtered away, figuring today wasn’t the day to die.

“And you, sir,” the tall man said to Cabe. “If you are a bounty hunter as you claim, if you are indeed hunting this man, then I seriously doubt you will find him in the bottom of a glass of beer.”

Cabe looked at Carny, just shook his head. “Listen, mister. I came in for a drink, not to listen you run that silver-plated mouth of yours.”

The tall man took a step forward. “All the manners of a rutting hog. How wonderful that is.”

“Like I said, I just want to drink my beer. So will you kindly go fuck yourself?”

The tall man’s face drained of color. “That, sir, is no way for a gentleman to talk. Profanity is the product of a weak mind.”

“Well, that’s me—weak-minded Arkansas trash. I claim to be nothing else.”

An easterner. A dandy. That’s what this fellow was. These days, didn’t seem you could spit without hitting one. Cabe generally just left them alone, regardless of how he felt about that sort. Most of ‘em didn’t bother no one. Then there were this kind.

“No, sir, you are certainly no gentleman, surely. You are rude, coarse, and obnoxious.”

“Yes, sir, as you said.” Cabe set his glass on the bar, put his hat on. “Now please kindly step out of my sight before the doc has to pull my spurs out of your fine white ass.”

But he wasn’t moving and Cabe was starting to wonder if he’d have to bury this sumbitch, too.

“If your mother had any sense, bounty hunter, she would’ve drowned you in a sack before you grew to stink up this country.”

Cabe felt the hairs along the back of his neck bristle. No, no, he wasn’t going to let this bastard push him into something he would regret. Just wasn’t going to happen. He was walking away from this one.

The tall man had positioned himself between Cabe and the door now.

Which meant that Cabe had two choices: go around him or right through. It wasn’t much of a decision for Cabe, being that he went around no man. It wasn’t his way. It had cost him in blood and bruises through the years, but he backed down from no one.

He thought: I will not pull my pistol, not if there’s any other way.

The dandy stood his ground and Cabe came right at him, not slowing, not so much as breaking stride. When he was precious feet away, the tall man pulled his Colts. Pulled ‘em pretty fast, too. But not fast enough. By the time he cleared leather, Cabe was close enough to smell. A few quick steps and he had hammered the dandy in the face with two quick, straight jabs that put him to his knees. Cabe kicked him in the belly to keep him down. Somewhere during the process, the tall man lost his pistols. Cabe saw them and kicked them away.

“Now,” he said, just plain sick of bullshit like this, “y’all go home to Boston or Charlottesville or where ever in the fuck you came from. You go back home to daddy’s money and his title. Because out here, you’re gonna get your fool self killed.”

Cabe went right past him, left him coughing and gasping, blood bubbling from his dislocated nose. He had almost made the front door when the dandy screamed out obscenities and pulled a little five-shot Remington Elliot .32.

Cabe just stood there, knowing he couldn’t move quick enough.

The gun was on him.

The tall man was filled with rage and hate.

Just then two men carrying shotguns burst through the door. They were dressed in dusty trail clothes and plainsman-style hats.

“You there,” the first said. “Drop that pistol or I’ll cut you in half.”

The dandy lowered it, let it slide from his fingers.

The second one turned to Cabe, looked him up and down. “You Cabe? Tyler Cabe? The Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“I would be.”

The shotguns came around in his direction now. “Then you better come with us.”

 

9

For some time after Tyler Cabe left, Janice Dirker found herself thinking about him. About how he carried himself, the way he spoke, that unflappable honesty that was the earmark, it seemed, of who and what he was. She found herself thinking about these things and knowing that he excited her. Excited some part of her that had lain long dormant like a volcano just biding its time until it would erupt.

Tyler Cabe was a free-spirit.

He seemed to be entirely unconventional. Had no true respect for money or position, for authority or cultural values. He lived as he chose, said what he pleased to whom he pleased. He was a rogue element. Seemed to have more in common with the red man than the white. Maybe this is what excited her. He was so different than the other men she’d known. Now, her husband Jackson, was completely the opposite. He had bearing, had station, had unshakable confidence. But he was stiff and unyielding and emotions seemed to be a foreign thing to him. Mere malfunctions of character, rather than compliments to it. For though Jackson was a good man who invariably did the right thing at the right time, he was cold. Terribly cold and methodical.

And Tyler Cabe?

Anything but. He was tough and trail-weary, had ridden the backside of society for far too long. He was surely lacking in refinement or social graces, but what he lacked there he surely made up in warmth and humanity. He was warm and friendly and wore his emotions proudly. He had depth and sincerity and compassion. He was everything Jackson wasn’t and was not afraid to be so. Her father would have despised him. And although Jackson was a Yankee, he was exactly the sort of man her father would have paired her with—a man of dignity, resolve, and bearing. His idea of what a man should be. And Cabe? Her father would have instantly dismissed him as “hill-trash”.

Cabe, however, was not the most outwardly handsome of men.

He was tall and lanky, powerful without being manifestly muscular. His face was weathered from hard-living and hard riding, set with draws and hollows, lined by experience. Then there were those scars across his face. He would have been a menacing character had it not been for those beautifully sad green eyes that offset the rest and gave him a pained, melancholy look.

There was no doubt in Janice’s mind that she was attracted to him.

Maybe it was the hotel and the staff and daily drudgery of keeping things running. Jackson was part of that, she supposed. Just another reminder of toil and unhappiness…and perhaps all these things combined is what made Tyler Cabe seem so fresh, so exciting. For he was, if anything, the image of a pirate from her teenage fantasies—a scoundrel, a libertine, a wolf in a world of sheep and dogs.

These were the things Janice mulled over that windy evening when the giant came through the door.

Maybe giant wasn’t entirely applicable, but there was no getting around the fact that her visitor was closer to seven-feet than six. He was dressed in a shaggy buffalo coat that was just as ragged and worn as the hide of a mangy grizzly. Crossed bandoleers of brass cartridges were belted over his chest. A big Colt Dragoon pistol hung at the crotch of his fringed deerskin pants. His face was hard, his eyes like unblinking iron, a steel gray beard hung down to his chest.

Janice felt her insides go to jelly. She begin to quiver at the sight of him. “May…may I help you?” she managed.

He stepped forward, casting a shadow over her. His belts were set with knives and pistols. He took off his hat and his head was just as bald as wind-polished stone. He tapped the ledger with the barrel of a shotgun.

“Surely,” he said. “And evenin’ to ye, ma’am. Name’s Clay, Elijah Clay. I’m a lookin’ fer the squeeze of shit what killed m’ boy.”

Janice just stared dumbly.

He looked around, nodded. “Ye happen to know the whereabouts of some Arkansas trash name of Tyler Cabe? I’m gunnin’ fer this yellow-livered, dog-rapin’, greasy squirt of hogfuck and I don’t plan on leavin’ till I get him.”

Janice wanted to lie, but deception was not among her natural rhythms. And this man…well, you didn’t dare lie to him. “He’s not in, I’m afraid. He…he just left about a half-hour ago. Didn’t say when he’d be back.”

“Didn’t, eh?” Clay sighed and shook his head. “That’s probably fer the best, I reckon. Ye got yerself a fine place here, ma’am. Just fine. And with all due respects to ye and yer fine establishment, I wouldn’t want to a-dirty it up none with the likes of Tyler Cabe and spill that goatpiss he calls blood here, there, and everywheres. When I git him and I surely will git him, I’ll take that drip of shit outside and carve him like a rutting buck. Use his goddamn ball sack fer a tobaccy pouch. Yes, sir.”

Janice was speechless.

“Ye figure ye can tell him I stopped by, ma’am?” Clay said, oddly cordial for a monster. “Tell him I been here and I’ll be back and have no earthly intention of leaving until his scalp’s a-dangling from m’ belt.” Clay slapped the sodbuster hat back on his head, turned and made for the door. Hand on the brass knob, he paused and touched the brim of his hat. “Ma’am.”

And then he was gone.

 

10

The finest hotel in Whisper Lake was undoubtedly the Stanley Arms which catered to mining officials, rich cattlemen, and wealthy investors from back east. It was owned by a two-fisted Scotch highlander by the name of McConahee who came to this country to fight for the North in the Civil War and later made millions as a cattle broker. The Stanley boasted furnishings from European castles, imported Italian tile, and not one, but three French chefs.

And it was here that the two men with shotguns took Tyler Cabe.

Once outside, the guns were lowered. The men made it clear that he was not their prisoner, but equally clear that he was going to go where they said. Cabe was ushered through the great carved oaken doors, up the marble steps to the third floor where he was deposited in a suite of rooms carpeted in oriental rugs and told to wait.

And he did…drinking it all in.

There was a rosewood étagère set against one wall with a crystal mirror and ornamented shelves. Turkish armchairs, rose-carved side chairs, and a medallion sofa all upholstered in plush red velvet. There was a swan coffee table, high mahogany bookcases, and a gleaming eight-arm brass chandelier above.

A British manservant decked out in spats and tails told Cabe to make himself comfortable. Which wasn’t too difficult on a camel-backed loveseat that nearly swallowed him alive in plush comfort. So Cabe sat there, a snifter of Napoleon brandy in his hand, amongst the lush accoutrements, pretending he was some high-born lord.

But all the while he was thinking: Okay, Cabe, you must’ve really pissed-off somebody important this time. So enjoy your brandy, because it might be your last.

Cabe was smelling his buckskins and armpits when someone entered the room. It was a white-haired man with a hawkish nose, just as thin as a porcupine quill.

“Mr. Cabe, I presume?” he said, sounding more than a little amused.

“You…ah, presume correctly, sir,” Cabe said. “And don’t get the wrong idea, Mister, I don’t go around smelling myself like an ape in the zoo all the time. I was just concerned about stinking up your nice couch.”

“Sofa, Mr. Cabe,” the man said.

“Sofa?”

“Sofa.” The man was high and mighty and something about him seemed to demand that. He poured himself some brandy and turned to his visitor, his eyes simply cold as ice chips. He cleared his throat. “I apologize for the somewhat unconventional invitation, but it was important I speak to you immediately.”

“And you are?” Cabe said, knowing that to this guy not introducing himself was a grave social error.

“Yes, of course. Excuse me. Forbes, Conniver Forbes. I’m the chairman of the board and controlling stockholder of the Arcadian Mine, which is a merely a holding of the National Mining Cooperative. Perhaps, you’ve heard of us?”

Cabe had. They had more money than any three countries and more pull than a dozen state senators. “Sure. You people own lots of people. Folks just like me.”

Forbes arched his left eyebrow. “I have some business I would like to discuss with you…perhaps over dinner?”

But Cabe shook his head. “I just had me some pickled eggs. Besides, that French food gives me the gas something awful.”

“Yes.” Forbes sat down. “I’ll make it simple then and lay my cards out for you. I’m here as not only a representative of National Mining and the Arcadian, but of the Southview and Horn Silver mines as well. You see, we have a problem. A problem you may be able to help us with.”

“Such as?”

“I understand you’re hunting this deviant known as the Sin City Strangler?”

“That would be true, yes.”

“And the compiled bounty on this individual is…?”

Cabe rolled himself a cigarette, amused as always how rich folk could never say what was on their minds. “About five-thousand, I reckon. Seems to go up every month.”

Forbes nodded, stroked his chin. “I would like to hire you, Mr. Cabe. Hire you to address a problem which is much more severe than this Strangler. You see, there has been some problems in this town of late…”

He explained in some detail about the murders and disappearances up in the hills. Those which were originally thought to be the work of some large predators, but after the slaughter at Sunrise…well, other avenues of thought were being considered.

“See, Mr. Cabe, this Strangler business is bad, yes, but our problem here is tad bit worse. The Strangler has killed…what? Seven, eight women? Horrible to be sure, but minor in comparison to dozens and dozens that have disappeared or been slaughtered outside this town. And when you levy on top of that the massacre at Sunrise, well, you can no doubt see the time has come for action.”

Cabe lit his cigarette, told Forbes it was not his problem. That such things were being handled by the county sheriff. He had put bounties on the animals thought to be responsible. And if they weren’t animals, then just what in hell were they? He was not much of an investigator. Not given to wild leaps of speculation in general. He usually went after a man or an animal that had been identified in some way. But this, this was—

“Out of your realm?” Forbes said. “Maybe, maybe not. The fact is you’re a bounty hunter, Mr. Cabe. You hunt for a living, men or beasts. As far as being an investigator goes, I think you’re being modest. Your record is impressive. I want you to turn your complete attention over to our problem here.”

“Why should I?”

Forbes, not a man used to having to beg, told him that there was a bigger issue at hand here than lives. There was money to be considered. If the killings and disappearances continued, the mines would be in trouble. People were already running scared. More than a few had already left and what they—the mining people—did not need was a mass exodus which would put a stranglehold on profits.

“A mine does not exist without men to work it,” Forbes pointed out.

“Well, shit, you’re right,” Cabe said. “Men dying is one thing, but when all them bodies piling up starts to cut into the profit…well, damn, something had better be done.”

Forbes just stared. “Whether you agree with our motives or not, Mr. Cabe, is beside the point. We’ll pay you and pay you well to handle this matter.”

“Why don’t you bring in hunters from outside?”

“The time factor. This has to be moved on and contained immediately.”

Cabe thought it over. Decided he did not like this manipulative sumbitch who stank and stank bad of boardrooms and privilege. “Sorry, but I got me other matters to attend to.” He butted his cigarette and stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“We’ll pay you fifty-thousand dollars, Mr. Cabe.”

Cabe felt light-headed. He sank back down on the loveseat. He cleared his throat. “Course, first thing you need in something like this is facts. So, tell me what you know…”

 

11

Like vultures gathered around a fresh, meaty kill, the vigilantes (sans hoods) gathered around the body of James Horner. He was laid out on a slab in the mortuary, just as dead as 150 pounds of trail-killed steer. His eyes were glazed over, but wide and staring.

One of the vigilantes, a mine captain named McCrutchen kept pressing them closed, but the lids just popped back open. He crossed himself. “Don’t like that,” he said. “Don’t like that at all.”

A few others laughed.

“Nothing supernatural about it,” Caleb Callister explained. He took a brown glass bottle of liquid and brushed the inner eyelids, gumming them shut. He held them closed for a moment and when he released them, they didn’t open back up.

Horner was covered in dried blood. It had soaked into his blue overcoat and spattered across his face. The side of his throat was a great blackened chasm.

“Slug must’ve ripped out most of his neck,” Luke Windows said.

“And his carotid artery with it,” Callister said.

He pulled a sheet up over the body, the dead face making the others uneasy. They were down to six now without Horner—Callister, Windows, Caslow, McCrutchen, Cheevers, and Retting. They had been harassing the Mormons for better than three months now. Mostly they preyed on small groups caught away from the villages. The raid on Redemption tonight had been the first action of its kind. But now with Horner’s death, it would not be their last.

Windows said, “I grew up with Horner, I grew up with him.”

“He died bravely for the cause,” Callister said, although it had a decidedly hollow ring to it. But what else could he say?

McCrutchen had been uneasy since they got Horner’s body back to town. “I wonder if this is some sort of omen,” he said.

Caslow just shook his head. “Since when is a shot man an omen?”

“I’m just wondering is all.”

“Crazy,” Retting said. “Crazy talk.”

But Cheevers wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we offended God with this business and we’re being punished.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Windows told him.

Callister knew he had to get control of them or this in-fighting would be the end of their little society. “All right,” he said, stepping between Windows and Cheevers. “Enough of this horseshit. We’re all part of the same thing here, we’re brothers. We all took the oath, did we not? As far as Horner goes, his death had nothing to do with God or the saints or the Devil himself. It was an accident. We rode in there shooting and burning. With all that lead flying about, we can count ourselves lucky no one else took a round. Maybe the Mormons hit Horner or…maybe one of us did. Ricochet. It’s possible, very possible.”

That shut them up, gave them something to chew on for a time.

“So enough of this nonsense,” Callister said to them. “Those bastards’ll pay for this, just not tonight is all.”

“And what about Horner?” Windows wanted to know.

Callister sighed. “We have to get rid of the body.”

“Now wait one goddamn minute,” Windows said angrily. “He was my friend. I grew up with him, I—”

“We have to get rid of him,” Callister cut in. “You mark my words, the Mormons are going to come screaming to Dirker first light. If they saw him get shot, they’ll tell Dirker as much. If Dirker gets a look at Horner’s wound, well, that wily sonofabitch’ll put two and two together. He knows who Horner’s friends are, he’ll know who to roust.”

There was silence after that. A great deal of it. All you could hear was the wind outside and the ticking of a mantle clock inside. Callister told Windows and the others to take the body out into the hills, plant it in a shallow grave where it would never be found.

“Horner will have his day of reckoning…through us,” Callister promised them. “Maybe tomorrow night, maybe the night after, but he will certainly have it. The next time we ride on Redemption, we’ll be carrying more than guns and kerosene.”

“Like what?” Caslow asked.

“I was thinking about all that dynamite up at the mines,” Callister said.

The others began to grin.

 

12

The next morning dawned cool and overcast, a light rain drizzling over the San Francisco mountains and the towns and mining camps that had sprung up around them like weeds.

In Redemption, a group of men dressed entirely in black stood in a large barn. They stood staring down at the bodies laid over an expanse of hay bales. They were the bodies of men, women, and children killed by the vigilantes. They numbered nearly two dozen.

Though the men followed the teachings of Brigham Young and the path of righteousness set forth by the prophet Joseph Smith, they were not like other Mormons. These men carried Colt pistols and Greener shotguns, repeating rifles and army carbines. In a religion that espoused the gentle way of the lamb, these men were wolves, hunters and predators.

They were called Danites, though gentiles knew them as the “Destroying Angels”.

They were the ultra-secret, ultra-clannish enforcement wing of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. Since before the days of the Mountain Meadows Massacre when as many as a 150 California-bound gentiles were slaughtered by Mormon militias and Indians under the direction of the Danites, they had been actively righting wrongs and settling scores for the Mormon populations of Utah Territory. And this under orders of Brigham Young, though he had denied the same again and again.

And now they were in Redemption.

A village elder was pacing before the bodies, openly weeping. “Only through the Holy Scriptures may we know of God’s plan, the beauty of God’s mind and will,” he was saying. “For we are all God’s children, are we not? Man, woman, and child? And are we not promised salvation for our toil and trouble and earthly torment?”

There was a chorus of “Amens”.

“Yes, brothers and sisters, we have been charged by the Lord Almighty to go amongst the nations and spread His word. We are empowered by Him to baptize the heathen into His Church. And this, oh yes, this is our task, nay, our divine right! Yet, there are those who would visit foul deeds upon us! Foul deeds perpetrated by foul minds and foul hearts! They spurn the word and the teachings of the Lord God of Hosts! Not only do they refuse to be saved, but they refuse the way of salvation and eternal life! They spit in the face of His Son Jesus Christ! And worse, yea, possibly worse, brothers, they would burn and murder us from the very lands promised to us by the Prophet Joseph Smith! And when they molest our children, are we not angered? When they spill the blood of our kin, are we not enraged? And when they murder our brethren, are we not moved to revenge?”

The “Amens” of those gathered in the barn were loud and resounding now. The elder was openly plagiarizing both the Book of Mormon and the works of William Shakespeare, but no one seemed to notice. The elder was known for his fiery sermons and no one was disappointed this morning as they looked upon the burned and bullet-ridden corpses before them.

“The Lord has told us to love Him, to love all His Children…but what of they who do not love us? That do not chose the way of salvation and peace? What then, you may well ask? Well, brothers, I will tell you! For as the Lord has said that vengeance is mine, so is it ours! Our blood-right to avenge the murder of our kin! And, brothers, so shall it be…”

The Danites stood there, neither smiling nor frowning, but knowing that a task had been handed them and that they would accomplish that task even at the cost of their own lives.

So it was.

 

 

13

Charles Graybrow tracked Orville DuChien down to a shack on the edge of the lake itself. It sat on a little hill crowded by trees that were all dead from the filth pouring down from the nearby refinery stacks. The air stank sharply of chemicals and industrial waste. The water washed in a slick of black foam. Orv was sitting on a rock, staring over the misty waters, mumbling something.

Graybrow came up behind him, making sure he made a lot of noise so Orv would know he was coming.

“They told me about it, yes sir, all about it,” Orv was saying. “Said this injun’s gonna come and gonna want to know things. Gonna have questions for you, they say, and when they say…sure, they’s always right, ain’t they? Well, ain’t they?” Orv rubbed his temples. “Sometimes…sometimes I talk crazy on account m’ head, it hurts, just plain hurts, what with them voices, blah, blah, blah!”

Graybrow nodded, figured it probably wasn’t easy. “Mind if I sit here by you?”

Orv scratched at his beard. “Injun, ain’t you? Don’t matter you being an injun, just saying it is all. I knew injuns back home, yessum, lots of injuns. Cherokee. Cherokee Nation, sure. Yes, you sit down there, Charlie…see, I remember you from way back.”

Graybrow had brought a bottle of whiskey with him. He took a slug and passed it to Orv.

“Right neighborly of you, Charlie. Yessum.” Orv took his drink and passed it back. “I try…I try to keep m’ head, but it don’t always work. I start talkin’ in circles and what not. But you…you understand me, don’t you? Some don’t, but you do…”

“Yes, I think I understand.”

Orv was gnashing his teeth. “Deliverance…the town the Devil built. Oh, think about it, Charlie! Them that don’t like the light, but the dark places! Them that lives in cellars and attics, them that don’t come out by daylight! Them that likes the meat and blood of men! Them with the Skin Medicine…oh, yessum, tattooed on their flesh!”

“Who are they?”

But Orv refused to answer. He just held himself until whatever it was drained out of him. “You…you remember Johnny Hollix?” Orv wanted to know. “He…he was the Indian Agent back home, gave them Cherokees a real bad time. Course, some of m’ kin did, too. Like Cousin Stookey…but he weren’t never worth a shit to no one. But I recall Johnny Hollix…he used to fish river cats with Grandpappy Jeremiah down on the south fork of the Suck River. Sometimes I went with ‘em and sometimes that Cherokee medicine man…you recall his name, Charlie?”

Graybrow just pulled off the bottle. “Afraid it escapes me.”

Orv began slapping his hands against his legs, shaking his head. “Yes, yes, yes, I remember! You don’t have to shout! Charlie! Tell ‘em not to shout!”

Graybrow went up behind him, feeling a great deal of pity for the man. He laid his hands on his shoulders, massaged the bunched muscles there the way his mother had once done for him. Gradually, gradually, Orv stopped 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.

Graybrow stood there, studying the sky which was leaden and turbulent. A chill breeze ruffled his long iron-gray hair which was tucked under a campaign hat. One eye was squinting, the other open in that solemn brown face.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” he suddenly said. “You figure I wear a fancy whiteman’s suit and hang around the depot, folks might think I’m some rich banker from back east?”

“Doubt it.”

“Because I’m an injun?”

Cabe shrugged. “That might tip ‘em off.”

“Damn, it’s hell to be an injun some days. Maybe I’ll get the suit, though. Way I hear it, Elijah Clay’s in town. They say he’s looking for you.” Graybrow just shook his head. “So I might get some use out of the suit after all.”

Cabe just chuckled. He crushed his cigarette in the dirt and pulled off his hat. Not looking up, he fumbled with the rattlesnake band above the brim. “Already got me dead and buried, have you?”

Graybrow nodded. “Me and a bunch of my red brothers are taking bets. I’m saying your dead before tomorrow morning. But maybe I’m just a pessimist. Folks say that about me. Go figure.”

Cabe put his hat back on. “You’re gonna lose some money, I think.”

“Maybe.” Graybrow looked over to his Indian friend. “Hey, Raymond? You think you can fix up my amigo here?” Then he turned to Cabe. “I call him Raymond because his name is Raymond Proud.”

“No shit?”

Raymond Proud stood up and he was a big man dressed in wool pants, suspenders, and a lumberjack shirt. “Is this the Arkansas bounty hunter?”

“Yes. Calls himself Tyler Cabe.”

Proud nodded, scratched at his chin. “Yeah, I’m thinking I could fit him. I got some spare scrap lumber out back.”

“Yeah, that would work. He don’t want no fancy nameplate. Just the box.”

“Well, I’d need a little money up front.”

“That could be arranged.”

Cabe just stood there, not getting it at all. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

Graybrow patted him on the shoulder. “Just stay out of this, okay?” he said in a whisper. “I’m getting you a good deal.”

“On what?”

“A casket. You’ll need one soon enough.”

Cabe felt his mouth drop open. “Well, you two just got all sorts of faith in me, don’t you?”

“Nothing personal, is it, Raymond? We just know Elijah Clay is all.”

Cabe let out a sigh and walked away, deciding to take a look around the depot. Somewhere, that hellbilly was hiding out and he planned on getting the draw on the sonofabitch come hell or high water. Because, honestly, for the first time in a long while he felt that he had a damn good reason to go on living.

“Hey, Tyler Cabe,” Graybrow said. “Slow down, I need to talk to you.”

But Cabe didn’t slow down. “If you found me a nice plot of earth, I ain’t interested.”

Graybrow caught up with him, put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “No, nothing like that. Just stop now.” He was panting. “It’s not that I’m old, but I don’t want to show off and run you down.”

“Course not. Wouldn’t be your way.”

Graybrow smiled thinly. “You didn’t like my little joke back there?”

“Not much.”

“It’s my injun sense of humor, it’s kind of strange, I reckon. White folks never seem to get it.” He followed Cabe to a bench by the telegraph office. “All us injuns got it. Take Custer at the Big Horn, for instance. He would’ve just waited for the punchline, things would have turned out different.”

“You’re crazy, that’s what.”

Graybrow offered him a drink. “It’ll settle your nerves.”

“My nerves are fine. Besides, it’s a little early.”

“You white folks…boy, I’ll never understand you. You bring the whiskey out here, get my people hooked, then you act like it’s not good enough for you.”

Cabe smiled. “That’s our little joke.”

Graybrow took a good pull off his bottle. “Since you already know about Clay being in town, I won’t warn you about that. But I hear them miners hired you to sort out all these killings. That true?”