Thar he goes!
Now we’ll hafta hang him shore!
The warmth of her breath has just fallen damply upon his parched lips when there is a sudden violent explosion that shakes the whole jailhouse — instinctively he pushes her aside, spins round, and draws: it is the black mare, wild-eyed and swelled up to twice her size, who’s come crashing in on them, taking out door, frame, and a portion of the wall, shattering all the windows with the impact, and sending the men scrambling and tumbling now to get out of the way of her rampageous hoofs.
Hey! Look out! It’s thet outlaw mare! they cry. She’s gone loco!
The schoolmarm has fallen to the floor behind him in the open cell door and is clinging to his legs. He tries whistling to the mare to calm her but it seems only to enrage her all the more. Up she rises against the ceiling, frothing at the mouth and nostrils flared, and down she comes, crushing all in her path and sending glass and dust and woodchips flying.
Look out!
Halp! I caint see! I think I ketched a splinter in my eye!
She’s mashed my laig!
The white-jacketed bent-backed deputy grabs a lasso off a wall peg and with a grunt flings it over the crazed horse’s neck, but she rears up and with a single blow stoves his head in with her hoof, spraying them all with blood and brains and leaving nothing on the deputy’s busted neck but his toothless lower jaw, hanging there like a melon rind.
Do sumthin, sheriff! Git aholt on thet devil hoss afore she’s killt us all!
Shoot the goddam animule! Whuddayu waitin fer?
He is face-to-face now with the foaming red-eyed beast, his back to the empty cell, roped to that place by the schoolmarm’s entwining arms. Both his pistols are pointed at the mare’s rolling eyeballs, but, for all that she has spoilt his singular moment with the marm, he cannot bring himself to pull the triggers, for he has never had a horse like this one and he does not want with rash haste to lose her. Particularly not now when he might most need her. She snorts and whinnies, shakes her black mane fearsomely, pounds the floor with her hoof, then seems to pump it toward his legs, behind which the schoolmarm is cowering still, peeking out between them. Then up she goes again, her forelegs churning, hind legs stepping forward, her neigh more like a terrifying shriek, and she comes crashing down (the schoolmarm screams), smashing, over and over, at the bars of the cell on either side of him.
It’s the marm she’s after!
Give her over, sheriff! Dont rile thet savage critter up no worse’n it is!
Now hole up thar, damn yu! he yells at the maddened mare. Yu back off! Yu wanta stomp sumbody, yu pestiferous jughaided scrag, yu stomp me! The horse blows through her nostrils and bangs the floor, and arches her head back so far toward her tail all he can see is her black throat, and lets out a whinny more like a quivering howl. Then she drops her head down between her knees and peers at him beseechingly from under her forelock, scuffing at the floor planks with one hoof. Awright, thet’s better. Now git outa here, he says. She swings her head from side to side, her lips curled away from her teeth, her damp gaze now more aggrieved than defiant. Git! He lowers one of the pistols and fires a shot that nicks the dead toe of her hoof. She raises it from the floor, bends her head toward it, sets it down again, and, after a mournful pause, turns to plod slowly, nose down, from the room. Someone fires a shot, she staggers slightly, pauses, then continues on her deliberate way. The rest of the men, emboldened, grab up their weapons and start shooting wildly at her as she lumbers past, following her on out the hole in the wall where the door used to be, shouting curses and blasting away.
He helps the schoolmarm to her feet, feeling tender toward her as before, all the more so as her high-collared bodice has come unbuttoned and there is a sweet powdery smell emerging from the glimpsed whiteness within that unhinges his articulations in a way the mare’s assault or any other could never do. Her own hand, however, is like a stiffened claw and is instantly withdrawn, the sentimental mood clearly no longer upon her. Why didn’t you shoot that wicked beast? she cries. In the street, he can hear the men doing just that, the explosive rattle of their barrage like a fireworks display, and for the second time in so short a while, a wetness mists his vision. She was trying to kill me!
I dunno, he sighs. I figgered ifn I could calm her down we could mebbe ride her outa here.
What? Leave this town? I could never do that, you fool! Anyway, she adds, glaring with seething fury at the dampness that has crept upon his cheeks, thet aint why.
He says nothing and she slaps him. So hard she knocks his hat off and her own dark bun is tipped askew. Outside, it sounds like the whole town is being torn apart, and inside his breast it feels that way too, for he has beheld the strands of orange curls peeking out beneath the unsettled bun.
And then the uproar suddenly subsides and the men come piling back into the jailhouse, heated up and blustery with the excitement of their kill, a turbid blur before his eyes of hats and hair and noses.
Whoa, sheriff! Yu shoulda witnessed the way thet crazy mare tuck out yer gallows!
Turned the whole bizness inta nuthin but a passel a toothpicks!
Whoopee! Never seed the like!
Obstructin justice, she wuz!
And more holes in her by then than a cribbage board!
She never even tried t’run. It wuz like she wuz plumb heart-sick’n jest hankerin t’cash in!
But it warnt easy! Thought we’d never bring the ole nag down!
Pumped everthin I had inta the colicky critter!
Criminently! She wuz some goldurn hoss!
Course, now we gotta build thet dodrabbid thing all over agin so’s we kin string up this onfortunate buckaroo.
Aw hell, we’ll never git it done in time, thet damned mare has seed to thet. I say we jest fergit it’n go git drunk instead.
Now yu’re talkin, hombre. I wouldnt keer t’put down mebbe jest a jug or two.
Shore, they all agree. Let him go. He aint hardly done nuthin wrong.
No, boys, says the saloon chanteuse, taking the dark bun off to shake her ginger locks loose, one ruby-tipped breast now bouncing free from her undone bodice, yu caint do thet. The scrofulous varmint is broke the lawr and he’s gotta pay fer it.
Aw, Belle, he aint but only a killer, hoss thief, cattle rustler, trainrobber, ‘n card cheat, whutsa harm in thet?
The sumbitch jilted me, she says bitterly. Hangin’s too good fer him.
The men glance wearily at one another, their shoulders sagging. Shit. Yu shore, Belle?
I’m shore.
Awright. Better go rustle up some hammers’n nails, I reckon.
Thet wood out thar’s all kicked t’smithers. We’ll hafta rip down the stables’n start over.
Sorry, sheriff, says a baggy-eyed oldtimer with a scar running across his bulbous nose from ear to ear like a clothesline for his beard, and now wearing the deputy’s badge. Aint nuthin we kin do. He strips him of his sheriff’s star and weapons. Better git yer pore fucked butt inta thet cell thar, whut’s left of it, and behave yerself whilst we git on with whut we hafta do.
Whutsamatter with him anyhow, deppity? someone asks and they all turn toward him. He’s watching her fasten the ruby pin into place in her pierced cheek. And reflecting on how he was never really cut out for the civilized life and how considering for a moment that he might be was a weakness and a flaw in him, a fatal one as it turns out. The jasper looks like a mule jest kicked him in the cods.
It’s Belle. Seein her fitted out like thet.