“Dean Goose!” she cried. “Dean Goose for real, greatest bim-bam there is! Never mind that floppy-dong old Hoke Birdsill, oh you betcha! Come to Anna Hot Water, oh my Dean Goose lover!”
He felt his bandage tear loose as he vaulted Hoke’s desk. He had to sprint the width of the town before he was certain he had lost her.
He broke stride once, dodging behind Miss Pfeffer’s house to snatch up a fistful of the revolvers he had deposited there earlier, but she was still close enough behind him at that juncture that he had to leave his holster belts in the entangled sage, along with his Winchester. He ran on with the Colts clattering inside his shirt.
When he had finally drawn clear, he found that he had stopped not far from the dilapidated miners’ shacks he had seen before. In fact the lamp still burned in the one where he had come upon Brother Rowbottom, the dubious preacher. It took him time to catch his breath, especially since consideration of the manner of his deliverance had set him to laughing again, but eventually he limped back over there.
The man himself still sat amid the disheveled shacks as if having scarcely moved in the several hours except perhaps to raise the whiskey jug, which was wedged between his bony knees at the moment. He wore the same disreputable woolens, and the fight reflected dimly from his hairless lumpy skull. His empty left sleeve had become wound around his neck, draped there.
He did not appear thoroughly drunk, however, and he eyed Dingus quizzically. “So you come on back, eh? Heard the call of the Lord’s need after all, did you?”
“I were jest passing the vicinity,” Dingus replied. “IPn you’ll excuse the intrusion, I’ll make use out’n your lamp.” Not waiting for an answer (none was forthcoming anyway) Dingus set aside his weapons and then lowered his pants, twisting about to inspect the dressing. He had bled again, but not significantly. Watching him, or perhaps not, the man, Rowbottom, belched expressively.
“I reckon you’d better give me that damn dollar,” he decided then, as Dingus readjusted the bandage. “The Lord don’t cotton to critters repudiating His wants two times in the same night.”
But Dingus was not really listening. Because if he could afford to be safely amused again, it also struck him as time to turn serious about certain matters. “I reckon I’d best at that,” he told himself, “afore I wind up too pooped out for even simple stealing.” He fastened his belt, wondering if Hoke Birdsill had heard the shotgun.
“So do I get the lousy dollar or don’t I?” the preacher wanted to know.
Dingus reached absently into a pocket, then into a second one before recalling that Hoke had emptied them. But at the same time the first remote intimation of an idea was crossing his mind. He lifted his face to meet Rowbottom’s flat, oddly refractive eyes.
“You shy of cash money pretty bad, are you?” he asked then.
“The Lord’s work ain’t never terminated,” the man said.
“Tell you the truth now, I weren’t rightly thinking about His’n,” Dingus said, still pensive. “You got any sort of scheme in your head, maybe, about how a feller might go about getting a certain local business establishment empty of folks fer a brief spell? Like say a certain whorehouse — if’n you’ll pardon the term?”
“Women flesh runs a’rampant,” the man shrugged. “I been trying my best. But you drive ‘em out one door, they jest hies their abominations back through the nearest winder.”
But now Dingus was attending more to the tone of the man’s voice, its resonance, than to the content of his speech. “I dint mean preaching,” he explained. “You reckon folks’d hear you from a fair piece, if’n you had a sort of public announcement to make — say a announcement worth maybe twenty cash dollars?”
The preacher had been raising the jug. He dropped it as if struck. “Brother, leave us not bandy words. For twenty dollars cash currency I would hang by my only thumb at Calvary itself, hind side to.”
“Never mind getting no horse soldiers involved,” Dingus said. He retrieved the oldest of his Colts, hefting it momentarily. Then he tossed it pointedly onto the shuck mattress.
So then the preacher sat absolutely without movement, staring at the weapon, for perhaps ten seconds. “Fifty dollars,” he proclaimed finally. “The Lord couldn’t condone mayhem for less.”
“Ain’t mayhem neither,” Dingus said. “That there’s your pay. Twenty-two dollars, more like, standard saloon pawning price on the model.”
So the preacher inspected it then, trying the hammer gingerly several times. Then it disappeared all but miraculously beneath the shucks, as the man himself arose and stepped decisively toward the peg from which his clothes were hung. “The Lord’s will be done,” he intoned.
Dingus considered his antiquated watch as the man dressed. It was approximately eleven-thirty.
“Starting in jest about fifteen minutes from now,” he said, “all up and down the main street, but most especially up to Belle’s. Loud as you kin call it out, I want you to inform folks that Dingus Billy Magee done escaped jail again. And that he’s putting it to Hoke Birdsill to meet him fer a pistol shoot.” Dingus thought a moment. “Yair. Pronounce it fer out front of the jailhouse, at midnight sharp.”
Brother Rowbottom could not have been more unimpressed. “Feller name of Dingus Freddie Magee has got escaped again,” he repeated without emphasis, “and he hereby challenges Hoke Birdbelly to a fight with hoglegs, front of the jail come midnight. That the entirety of it?”
Dingus nodded, still contemplative. “But you pronounce it jest afore twelve up to Belle’s, that’s the crucial part. Folks’d be more interested in the chance they could see a bloody murder, than in jest some common everyday one-dollar poontang, don’t you reckon?”
“Ain’t mine to judge,” the preacher said. “The Lord sends me His missions in devious ways. You plumb sure I kin get twenty-two dollars on that Peacemaker single-action? Firing pin’s a mite wore, there.”
“You don’t,” Dingus said, “and somewhat later’n midnight I’ll give you payment for it myself — in dust gold or minted silver or paper currency or any other form you so desire.”
The preacher eyed him opaquely, buttoning a threadbare frock coat. Then he belched again.
“Amen,” Dingus said.
“So you’re a lamb of the Lord after all, eh?”
“Jest insofar as nature is concerned,” Dingus said. “Trees and clouds and such, sort of transcendental.”
So this time the preacher broke wind. “Emersonian horse pee,” he grunted.
But Dingus had already closed his eyes, leaning against the wall until he heard the man depart. Then, fingering the most recent bullet hole in his trustworthy vest, and with his young brow furrowed from the gravity of it all, he commenced to devise the remainder of his strategy.
“So even if’n I never had no mother at that,” he remarked aloud, “ain’t nobody gonter be able to say Dingus Billy Magee dint truly apply his talents in this life, after all.”
But certain sensuous remnants of the preacher’s flatulence were abruptly wafted toward him then, and he had to go hurriedly elsewhere.
6
“A loaded man is hopeless against a loaded six-shooter”