Chapter 14

They came upon Henry in the hours of early dark before dawn. Excepting an occasional, solitary candle there were no lights, no signs of activity. The Matador saloon, when they passed, winked with a few last strands of drunken consciousness, a wastrel or two finishing their messes inside. Women with chalky white made up faces and dressed in dragging cheap gowns had surrendered their evenings and stood out on the verandas and porches slugging whiskey and counting their night's earnings. They passed the blacksmith and the timberman, both empty, vacant lots, and arrived in the front of the stables. Across from them was the saloon. They were quiet, watching through the windows of the Matador and seeing nothing.

"They's all closed up, looks like," said Julius Rice, cupping his hands and lighting a cigarette.

"You got the back if I take the front?" Molet knew the Matador rather well, having been there more than once to recover a missing rancher from Glory's Dawn for Drake. He took out his six-shooter, a Schofield plated in black and silver, and checked the cylinder. He did the same with his other. He liked to carry a backup sidearm, and he liked his snub-nosed shotguns.

"Man, what's your plan with that handcannon sawed-off! Who the hell we shooting?"

"Army," sneered Molet. "Army and Calvary and other uniformed men. Wales' men. I'm gonna waste them."

"What for?"

"That's the enemy," Jean said matter-of-factly. "They're great friends of ol Uncle Sam--in our town, scoping out our territory. That's enough, ain't it?"

Rice sighed and produced his own firearm, a Lightning double-action with a jeweled pearl grip. He loved this gun, and before every use of it he gave it a loving peck from his bristled lips. He did so now, quickly and quietly so that Molet couldn't see him. He then checked his cylinder and closed it back up. "Let's do it," he said at length. Then, "And let's be quick, too now. I'm freezing my balls off, man."

"Hey, I told you to wear a coat," Molet hissed. His own coat clung to him, giving him a wavy, mysterious form against the foreground of a decently-lit Matador saloon. As he began headed away, the tail of the jacket flapped and waved above his bootheels. He looked like a specter from some gothic.

Rice, in just his plain shirt jeans and gunbelt, followed Molet to the front and they both stopped again. Molet was glowering, waving at him.

"Round back!" he said. "I said you take the back!"

Rice nodded, bickering under his breath. Molet was a hardheaded brute--there was no telling what he was thinking. Why was it so important to stalk into Henry in the dead of night to off some military folk? It wasn't, but Molet wanted it so. What Drake saw in the growling old sharpshooter Rice could never say.

Ol Julius was a man of pleasure. Give him a fine cigar--though a cigarette will do--and a bottle of whiskey or rum, a woman and you won't hear a peep from him. He called himself a trickshooter, or a trickshot. In the days after his emancipation he killed folk out of anger and necessity, and he did it fast, using his old slaver's dueling guns. They called him MagicMan. And so he engraved MM in all of his stuff, his saddle his clothes his guns. He would brand his old mustang if he found the time and the ambition.

He laughed at himself, at the idea of branding MM on his own black forehead. Why not? He was branded with other folks' names.

Reaching the back door Molet was talking about Rice looked around and decided he hadn't been to this saloon yet after all. He thought maybe he had since he tried to never miss a saloon when blowing through a place, but now that he was really looking at it and racking his brain, the emptiness was startling. No matter. He tried the door knob and it wouldn't turn. His instinct was to shoot at it but he laughed that away. He did like to shoot.

Instead he took out his carving knife and shimmied it between the frame and the lock. He wiggled the blade carefully, gave enough torque to whittle away at the frame and with a few more wriggles the door simply swung open towards him, easily and quietly, the lock still engaged and poking out of the side. He chuckled and put away his knife.

Damn Molet was a madman. He was facing a corridor that if he went straight would bring him out to the main floor and if he took a left would lead him up a staircase to the second floor. He took the stairs.

This was cold-blooded. No way around it. Rice was almost impressed.

When he got to the top of the stairs he was taken aback at how eerily empty and quiet the place was. Moreover, there weren't many doors that he could see from the landing, and as he walked further out he saw that this was no place for lodging. Then he heard his name called in a loud whisper.

It was Molet. "Got anything?"

Rice went to the railing and looked down. He saw Molet's dark form in the center of the floor beneath him. "Nothing here. It's empty."

"Guess they ain't holed up here as I thought. Let's try next door."

"Next door?"

"That's what I said. Follow me."

When they were back outside Rice asked Molet what he was high on.

"Shut up and listen," Jean said. "Go in back and I'll go in the front. Stairs are in the back, so same thing. We're on a hunt, understand? Our objective is to claim our prey."

"Whatever you say boss. I thought this would be entertaining, but we're out here in the cold hunting shadows from your memory."

Molet gave a dismissive wave and distanced himself from Rice by hurrying his gait. Rice drifted into the long shadows cast from the Matador and followed them to the smaller building next door. It wasn't anywhere near as nice as any of the numerous boarding places Rice had stayed in, but then it wasn't often he was this far West. His name had been forged in Carolina, then Tennessee, Florida, Georgia and finally Texas. Much better, richer and more cultured society than these cattletowns and boomtowns. All shit and mud and blood.

He needed a drink, deserved one. Maybe another encounter with that Indian girl. What was her name? Something Injun, something with a color in it. Blue Wind? Yellow Woman? Shit, whatever it was, her buttocks were much easier to remember.

He got to the back and when he tried for the door as he had the last time found it unlocked. Unlocked? That seemed funny. Rice didn't like it, his gut didn't like it. So he tried a window. Most folk never locked their windows, that was for city folk. Rice, keeping himself as alert as possible, slowly lifted the pane and sent a searching leg through the opening. He swung around a bit, but soon found the floor and he was able to bring the rest of himself fully inside.

The place was better lit than the saloon, owing to the fact there were people in here. Kerosene light in glass lamps lined the walls. There was an armchair propped up next to the window Rice had entered from. Then a wall. At the end of the hall going the other way was the staircase Molet had mentioned.

Directly in front of him was a reception desk and another corridor obfuscated from view by a divider wall. Somewhere down that way lurked Jean Molet.

Rice had his hand hovering over his pistol. Suddenly, he was wondering if the jewels in his grip twinkled in the moonlight. He wondered if he wasn't already spotted.

Would explain that funny feeling.

On his left there were two doors that he had to check. Great. He got that nervous, excited energy which always visited him before a fight. He could feel the hairs on his arms stand up. The beating of his heart slowed. His hand gripped the doorknob.

The other palmed the grip of his pistol.

He pushed, lightly. The door actually opened with a slow creak. That's lucky. Or unlucky. Time would tell which. He stood for a moment with the door cracked open. Then, taking a breath, he slipped inside all at once, drawing his gun. Nothing. Light from the hallway poured into the room, revealing it to be without an occupant.

"Shit," Julius laughed at himself. He was on edge. To calm his nerves he lit a cigarette. Fools be damned if they smell him. He'll outshoot them anyway. That was, if indeed there were fools to be shot at all. Molet was more than a little "off". Probably he hallucinated the military folk he claimed to have ran into. Probably.

There was one more door to check and then the stairs. Collecting himself, drawing in a lungful of smoke and letting it out slowly, he left the empty room and sidled over to the next. Same process, nice and easy. This time he had his Lightning drawn. Swing this door open, and if a person is in there, military or not, Rice is shooting. All there was to it, nothing to be excited over. Fish in a barrel was all it was.

He opened the door, again unlocked, and found a supply room. There were sacks of seed on the floor, bundles of linens, blankets, pillows, brooms, mops. "Molet, you crazy bastard," Julius muttered, shaking his head and pulling the door closed again. He put away his pistol, threw down his cigarette and smushed it out with his boot heel.

He climbed five steps to a landing. Here the kerosene light gave way to the light of the moon, shining in through a large window positioned above the landing. Rice crept forward, silhouetted against the window. He looked up the next set of stairs and saw a figure standing at the top. The figure was a dark blur but enough moonlight reached him that he could see it was not Molet standing there.

"You headed for the outhouse, old man?" Julius said. He thought he saw white hair on the figure's head.

He heard the sound of a shell being loaded into the chamber, the familiar deadly click. He smiled. He hadn't seen that the shadow was armed, but noticing the position the figure now struck, he should have seen it right away.

"You got some balls," Rice sneered. "You know who it is you got your gun on?"

"I ain't got no sympathy for you, son," the stranger said. His voice--he was black too. An old Uncle Tom type, probably. "You arrogant as you is blind, like old Polyphemus."

"Least I ain't dead." He went for his gun. In a fraction of a second his Lightning was in his hand, spitting lead. His six shots rocketed up the stairs one after the other with impossible speed. Folks could be heard crying out from their rooms. The bullets made a ruckus tearing through floorboards and ceiling beams and through walls. The cylinder was emptied. Julius Rice stood grinning with a smoking barrel and gunpowder in his nostrils.

But the old man was still standing.

"You done took every shot you could have took, all at once," the stranger said, in a tone that suggested less mockery and more chastisement. "Like I said, I got no sympathy."

The stranger fired his gun. A fat heavy slug crashed in between Rice's eyes. The impact broke bones and sent the gunslinger dazzling backwards and toppling over himself. His blood pooled out black as oil in the relative dark. One of his eyeballs had been dislodged and had actually ricocheted off the window behind him. Sass watched the eyeball roll about in the middle of the stairs.

"Damn fool kids," Sass said. Then he was surprised.

Soon as he started to turn back from the staircase he caught a glimpse of that trash Jean Molet, but there wasn't much he could do. Molet brought the butt of his shotgun down hard on the back of Sass's skull. The old man's eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped to the floor unconscious, dropping his own shotgun.

As Jean knelt to examine the incapacitated Sass he heard the opening of doors, and when he stood again he was facing Major Wales, Santiago Guerrero and a third man he recognized from the saloon but whose identity was a mystery to him.

"That's alright, Molet," said Wales. He looked cool. His eyes were narrowed to slits and his nostrils flared. He was holding a rifle and pointing it at Jean. "Real steady now, drop that gun and surrender. You might get to live, yet."

Molet said nothing. Instead, with a calm becoming an experienced shootist, Molet flipped the shotgun he held in his left hand and fired the first barrel into Wales's torso. The buckshot ripped the poor bastard apart. Blood-soaked shreds of his nightshirt went sailing across the hall. His body collided with the ground with a magnificent thud, and he could be heard wheezing as his hands, forgetting the rifle, flapped helplessly at the hole in his chest.

Molet sent the second barrel into the downed Wales and the flailing arms stopped at once, dropping lifeless to floor. Molet was swift to draw his Schofield, holding his breath and staring down the man whose name was unknown to him and not blinking as the man fired his revolver. The first shot whizzed just past Jean's ear, the second missed him wide to the right and went whistling over the stairs. Then, with perfect ease, Molet leveled his own revolver and shot his oppenent high in the shoulder, breaking through the clavicle. The man was compelled to drop his weapon, and when he did so Molet fired a second shot past him that landed in between the eyes of Guerrero, who was shooting madly in every direction. Molet's shot halted him at once, and he crashed sideways deader than wood.

The nameless man set to crawling back onto his feet, as he turned over and struggled to push himself up. Molet walked over to him and shot him in the back. The man bowled.

"I don't know you, sir, but you've fallen in with a bad crowd," Molet offered.

The man groaned, then spat in the general vicinity of Molet's steel-tipped boots. "Fuck off," he growled.

"For that, I'm gonna bust your knee." He shot his fourth bullet where he said he was going to. This time the man did not scream, but simply hissed. Molet picture the man's teeth grinding against each other, buckling beneath the pressure of the man's excruciating breaths.

"Why don't you just kill me?" the man asked.

"Well..." but before he could finish off the job another unknown man burst into the fray. He came stumbling out of a room at the end of the hall, where Molet had come from. He was wearing longjohns and waving a pistol about, threatening and cussing. Molet fired his fifth and it got the man's neck. By din of the fountain of blood which was unleashed, by its ferocious velocity spraying wall and ceiling, the bullet had passed through the jugular artery. The man looked pathetic, wrapping his own fingers around his neck and sliding to his rear. Once he sat upon the floor his head fell sideways and more blood was launched across the floor, making a large trail across the body of Guerrero.

"Alright," Molet said. "That's enough commotion. Let's go, friend."

The man resisted until Molet clonked him on the head like he had Sarsparilla. He dragged the man down the stairs with his arms wrapped under the armpit, pulling him down the hall and out the back door from which Rice had entered. Leaving the man there, Molet decided to go back for Sass. He got the old man down and outside in much the same way he had with the younger one, and once they were both lying outside on the ground he went and got his mount and Julius's, bringing them both over and tying the unconscious bodies of his captives onto Rice's mount. He then jumped on his horse and set to leave. The sun was beginning to crest. The dark was fading.

"Jean Molet what in holy hell kind of madness is this?" said a familiar voice.

Molet smirked and tipped his hat at the marshal and his posse. "Official business of Hassidius Drake, sir."

"As always," laughed the marshal, shaking his head. He looked at the pair of men on the other horse. "Don't let me keep you. Send Drake my regards, will you?"

Molet threw up his middle digit and as he departed with Rice's mustang and the Army boys he heard the man cackling behind him.

Bethany Bergen had a blurry recollection of men in her room sometime in the morning before dawn. Alarmed, she was quick to sit up but was pacified by Drake, who intercepting her and sitting on the bed they shared, leaned in and coaxed her to lie back down. He kissed her and she heard him leave and the heavy leaving of those who had originally woke her.

She didn't go back to sleep. She lay with the buffalo fur blanket up to her chin, comfortable in the chill of early morning, listening to the world of the ranch come alive around her. She heard the barking of dogs outside, the grunting of hogs and the of course the cattle beginning to stir. Some mornings she woke up like this and wondered how she had come to adopt such a circumstance for herself. Sometimes her mood allowed saccharine reveries of meeting Drake by chance on a ferry along the Mississippi. His dress and faux confidence that day amused her--she thought him a gentleman. Even to recollect her imperessions of him made her smile to the present. Other times, though, she woke steeped in some strange malaise, and with lamenatation her belly shook though she was lying still. She couldn't help but think she hadn't taken the commitment to him seriously, that she hadn't taken Drake seriously. Because if she did then she would have to ask herself what she wants with the land called "New Attica". She would have to decide what about the Ixopaw she stood to defend, and to love them as Drake loved them.

After some time she got out of bed and dressed. She liked to go out and help feed the animals but this morning she asked someone else to do it, and instead she put on her boots with the idea of taking one the horses out for a ride. She could tell it was going to be a day of contemplation. Her mind was restless.

She dressed in her coat to protect against the chill and put on her beaver gloves and went out. Sunlight cold as steel rained down. A pink fire burned over the distant black forests of New Attica. Headed for the stables, she saw Drake already there with Jean Molet, Sebastian Tick and a crowd of others.

"What's the commotion so early this morning?" she asked upon entering the group.

Drake turned to her with a face of strained pleasentry. "Ah, Bethany, you're up. You've seen to the animals then?"

"They're being seen to. What's all this about?"

Their eyes were all set on her. She felt a tug in her stomach that she was amidst some sort of secret, but pushed through it anyway. This was her ranch too, Drake had said. He'd said that.

She looked behind Drake and saw a pair of men sitting on the ground, their hands bound at the wrist.

She looked back to Drake but he spoke first.

"They're enemies, Bethany. Soldiers. Working towards infiltrating my farm, weren't you?" He was looking at them but they gave not the satisfaction of a response. He turned back to her and tried to soften his expression. "Molet found them hiding in the Henry boardinghouse. Lucky to have him."

She looked over to where Molet stood with his son. Jean raised his coffee cup when he noticed her staring and embarrassed she quickly looked away. Molet always made her shiver. She didn't know why, but she didn't like him.

Drake addressed the small, collected crowd. "I have to admit, I've forgotten more than once about the old fort to the south. Let's make it go away. Black Heart?"

"Yeah, Drake, that ain't no problem," said Sebastian Tick. His tone was so flat sarcasm was difficult to pick up. "Cept for cannons, and the Gatling and the riflemen."

Drake frowned. "So then we leave ourselves vulnerable and ignore them? Ah. New friends, won't you tell us about Fort Labrador?"

Bethany stared at the two men. The black man had dried blood crusting on the side of his head. He glowered into the ground, his head bowed. The other threw his head back and she saw his face. He had a handsome, tragic face.

Drake kicked at the men, then drew his gun. The men around them, Drake's men, laughed and cheered. Bethany averted her gaze. She could not disappear or leave. Drake would be watching for her reactions.

His gun barrel nuzzled into the black man's temple. "Tell me all about that fort, please. How many strong is it, now?"

The old soldier breathed hoarsely. His pale eyes roved about those surrounding him. When they settled on Bethany she felt a sensation of misery. She almost lurched backwards.

"Perhaps the old man is deaf," said Drake. He returned his pistol, crouched on his heels, and took the black man's face in his hands. "Oh, that you could hear me, but for the reflection of your soul in the waters of Babylon, would you be a free and able wanderer. Alas, out of the mercy of your Christian God..." and without warning his hands flew back and until Drake's arms were fully extended outward, and in a flash his hands clapped together again, each open palm crashing into either ear of the old soldier. Then man gave a quick, monosyllabic yelp and was quiet again.

Drake stood up again and kicked him in the stomach.

He pulled his gun again and pointed it at the white soldier. "What about you, friend? What have you got for me?"

"Let me see that gun and I'll show you."

The crowd laughed.

Drake laughed. His gun spun round on his fingertips. It spun and spun again. Then it fired. The soldier was bleeding at his neck.

"Oops! My apologies, friend," Drake said, feigning embarrassment and shock. "Guess I shouldn't play with it, huh? I see I grazed your neck there."

"I don't know much about Fort Labrador. I was there but for a week or so, mostly bedridden."

Then Drake's face changed. The clear morning sky overhead seemed to grow bluer, darker. Wisps of clouds began to swirl and fatten. His lips were tight. The barrel of the gun got close to the soldier's face.

"What's this, here?" Drake said quietly. He removed something from the man with his gun. He took it in hand, examined it, then put it away. His face changed again. He smiled. His eyes brightened. "I've been looking for that. Has that put me over the moon or what? This necklace belongs to my brother, you know. How you came to have it is a mystery, but that doesn't matter. You've seen fit to deliver it back to me, and for that my humble thanks." His revolver reared back behind Drake's head, then came flying forward as if he was swinging a sword. The iron bludgeoned the soldier's face. Blood spooled from the soldier's mouth. A tooth was sent hurling into the crowd. Men laughed again and whooped.

"Someone get these men into the cattle shed. Let's prepare them for work. I'm in such a mood I'd sooner feed a man some slop then put a bullet in em. As for Fort Labrador, I recollect its location. Remember men, they were to aid and abet our friends from Fort Abraham. Let us relive them of their post. Molet, Tick, have you met Black Heart?"

"Jus now," growled Tick.

Molet shook his head. Bethany saw the Ixopaw woman in the crowd. She wore a pretty dress for an Indian. She had a gun and several knives in her concha belt. Bethany thought the woman fancied herself a Joan of Arc, but likely she was only imitating a man. Bethany had heard of Viking shield-maidens and Amazonians, but she nevertheless found the idea of women warriors a bit preposterous.

"She's nothing but a stone cold killer," Drake said. "Like Molet. You two get her a horse and ride south to the fort. Start a fire. And most importantly, make it look like injun who did it."

"That ain't quite impossible," Molet said, "but it's close enough."

"Go on then," Drake said. He then locked eyes with Bethany. His look was fierce and seemed to ask her, How did I do?

She smiled. Just fine, she meant to say. You've done just fine.

But her heart wasn't in it.