“Eeeyahh!” he shouted, and the others, denied the scalp, took out their anger and left their mark by further disfiguring of the body. They hacked and cut at the dead man while, overhead, buzzards circled, waiting patiently for their unexpected feast.
By now the pain Ponci was feeling was so severe that it was almost unbearable. Every step his horse made transferred a shooting pain up his leg and into the rest of his body. He had half a bottle of laudanum left ... but he didn’t want to use it. Not yet anyway.
Up ahead, he saw what he had been looking for, and he guided his horse toward an unusual rock formation: an obelisk, with two round stones at the bottom. To Ponci, it looked like a pecker and a pair of balls. It looked like that to the Indians as well, which is why they called it Dzil Ndeen, or “Mountain Man.”
What made the rock formation particularly significant now was the fact that Ponci knew it shielded a cave from view. And right now, Ponci needed the cave as a means of getting out of the sun, staying out of sight, and providing a place to recuperate after he did what had to be done.
Ponci rode his horse toward the rock formation. When he passed a patch of vegetation, he stopped and let his horse graze.
“Eat what you can,” he said. “It’s going to be slim pickin’s for a while.”
Once in the cave, Ponci climbed down from his horse, removed the horse’s saddle, then secured him. After that he started a small fire, then took his knife out and cut his pants leg off, just above his right knee. He took off his boot, and slid the cut sleeve of the pants leg down and off.
“Oh, damn,” he said quietly as he examined his leg. From the knee down, the leg was blue. The wound was puffy, with abscesses and dead flesh all around it. “This son of a bitch is bad.”
Ponci built a small fire, then put the knife blade in the fire.
“How damn hard can it be?” he asked aloud. “Hell, when I was butcherin’, I would sometimes cut off a dozen legs a day.”
Ponci fortified himself with a few swigs of laudanum, making sure to hold some back for later. Then he took the knife from the fire and looked at his leg, just below the knee.
“Of course, them legs was on cows or pigs. This here will be the first time I ever cut my own leg off.”
Almost hysterically, he giggled. Then, holding his breath, he started to cut.
CHAPTER 14
There was a comforting familiarity to the interior of a general store. It was redolent with the scent of coffee beans, ground flour, smoked meat, and various spices. The shelves behind the clerk’s counter were colorful displays of can labels—yellows, reds, blues—advertising beans, peaches, peas, and tomatoes. A calendar on the back wall had the smiling picture of a young girl holding a bar of soap.
BUY PEARL’S SOAP, the legend said.
A long string of peppers hung from a nail, adding their own aroma to the other smells.
Falcon was here, buying the supplies he would need to sustain him during the time he would be on the trail of Fargo Ford and the others. As he called for each item, the store clerk, a tall, thin man with snow-white hair and a beard, would find it, then bring it back to the front, adding the item to an increasing pile. As he added each item, he would take a pencil from behind his ear, sharpen it between his teeth, then add the item and the price to his running total.
“Will there be anything else for you, Mr. MacCallister?” the store clerk asked, putting his pencil back behind his ear. He wiped his hands on an apron that might have been white at one time.
“Let’s see,” Falcon said, looking over the pile. “Bacon, flour, beans, coffee, salt, matches, tobacco.” He paused and looked up at the clerk. “Do you have any horehound candy?”
“Horehound is it? Yes, sir, I believe I do. How many sticks do you want?”
“Around twenty, if you have that many,” Falcon said.
The store clerk chuckled. “I wonder if the people across the country who read in the dime novels about the exploits of the great Falcon MacCallister know about this sweet tooth of yours?”
“Shh,” Falcon said, laying his finger across his lips. “We’ll keep it our secret, won’t we?”
“Turn out, turn out!” someone was yelling from outside the store. “Everyone, turn out!”
“What in the world is going on out there?” the store clerk asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll take a look,” Falcon said. He walked to the front window and looked out onto the street. In response to the man’s shout for everyone to turn out, the street was beginning to fill with the citizens of Oro Blanco.
“Do you see anything?” the clerk asked.
“No, just a bunch of people milling about,” Falcon said back over his shoulder. “Maybe I’ll go out there to have a look. What do I owe you?”
“Just a minute, let me sum it all up,” the clerk answered. Once again he took the pencil from behind his ear, sharpened it with his teeth, then began writing on the little piece of paper. “Put down the five and carry the two,” he said, talking to himself as he figured.
At that moment the door opened and Sheriff Corbin stepped inside. The clerk looked up as he did so.
“I’ll be right with you, Sheriff,” the clerk said. “I’m just finishin’ up here.” He held up the paper and examined it. “Mr. MacCallister, it looks like the whole thing is goin’ to come to six dollars and forty cents.”
“Six dollars and forty cents for that little dab of supplies,” Falcon said. He shook his head. “It’s getting real expensive just to live.”
“Put it on my bill, Mr. Dobbins,” Sheriff Corbin said to the clerk. “As he is doing a job for the city, I just got authorization from the city council. Give him anything he wants.”
“Very good, Sheriff, if you say so,” Mr. Dobbins replied.
“Sheriff, what’s all the commotion out there?” Falcon asked.
“Do you know that harness drummer Johnson? Arnold Johnson, I think his name is. He’s from Calabasas.”
“Yes, I know him. We came into town on the same stage. Not a pleasant man.”
“Yeah, well, right now he is also not a living man,” Sheriff Corbin said.
“What happened?”
“Yesterday, Mr. Johnson rented a team and a buckboard from the livery. His plan was to go up to Arivica and call on some of his clients up there. Evidently, he ran into trouble on the way up. This morning the rented team came back into town pulling the buckboard.”
“Without Johnson?” Falcon asked.
“No, Johnson come with ’em, all right. He’s in the buckboard,” Sheriff Corbin said. “Dead.” He paused for a moment, then added, “He don’t look pretty. The thing is, I don’t know if it was done by Indians, or by someone who wanted to make us think it was Indians.”
“By someone, you mean, like Fargo Ford?”
“Yes.”
“Let me take a look,” Falcon said.
“Come on, I’ll show him to you. He’s still in the buckboard, and that’s over at the livery. I told the undertaker to keep him there until you got a look at him. I figured you’d be able to tell a bit more about what happened than the rest of us.”
When Falcon followed the sheriff out into the street, he saw that a rather substantial crowd of people had gathered in the street at the front of the livery. It wasn’t just curious men, though. Women and children were in the crowd as well, all of them buzzing about the excitement.
“Look’s like the whole town has turned out,” Falcon said.
“Not much happens in Oro Blanco,” the sheriff said. “So when something does happen, it creates a lot of interest. We’re comin’ through, so make way,” he called as they approached the crowd. “You folks make way, let us through here.”
The crowd separated enough to let Sheriff Corbin and Falcon pass. When they approached the buckboard, they saw that a tarpaulin had been put over the body.