From below came a loud whump.
Lola rushed to her rescuer’s side as they both looked out the window.
Rhomer was plastered down there on the hotel’s wooden awning, on his belly, breathing hard, but out.
“Little boy’s had a busy day.” The stranger turned to her, touched her face gently near where her mouth bled. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. Something shaky in her voice, she said, “You really think saving my virtue was worth the risk?”
He grinned. The only blood on him was Rhomer’s. “Anytime. And I’m not about to stand by and see a woman get manhandled.”
“But you couldn’t see it.”
He shrugged, nodding toward the wall they shared. “I could hear it. Anyway, how’s a man to get any sleep with all that racket?”
“You joke.” She nodded toward the window. “Rhomer will kill you for sure now.”
“Well, he’ll try. Are you going to the sheriff about this? That deputy isn’t about to.”
She shook her head. “I’ll find Rhomer tomorrow, give him his gun, and tell him I’ll keep my mouth shut if he does the same.”
He jerked a thumb at the shattered window. “Why not let those two bums shoot it out?”
“I have my reasons. My secrets.”
He gave her half a grin this time. “Don’t we all? You better have that desk clerk give you another room for tonight.”
She put a hand in his hair, then brought it back. “We could always share yours.”
“Lovely thought. But this little man has had a busy day, too.”
He broke away from her to take another glance out the window, and she came along. Rhomer was still down on the awning, sleeping off his drunk and his beating. A plump, little man on a horse came riding along Main Street, in no hurry, a Gladstone bag tucked on the saddle before him.
“Isn’t that Doc Miller?” he asked her.
“That’s him. Why? You want to get Rhomer a doctor?”
“Not hardly.”
Then he kissed her on the forehead and left her there.
In the moonlight, the expanse of range looked like the aftermath of a terrible battle, the kind where there are few if any survivors, corpses strewn everywhere. Only this was a war where the casualties were cattle.
Harry Gauge and his grizzled foreman Gil Willart stood over one such victim, whose exposed fleshy underside bore telltale blisters.
“Cowpox, all right,” Gauge said with a sigh and a shake of the head. His hat was in his hand as if out of respect for the dead steer.
Willart shot a stream of tobacco sideways into the night. “What now, boss?”
The moon was painting the grotesque landscape an unreal off-white. It was cool out, almost cold, and a breeze made a hoarse, spooky whisper.
Gauge pointed to the east. “Drag these damn carcasses over to the ravine and start a slide and cover ’em up.”
“We can do that. But the men won’t take to handlin’ such dead critters as these.”
He frowned at the foreman. “They’re already wearin’ gloves, ain’t they? They’ll be fine. Tell ’em I’ll pay double wages.”
Willart nodded. “That should do it. What about the main herd?”
Gauge gestured toward the landscape of death. “These were too far gone to follow the graze. The others should last long enough to get themselves sold.”
The foreman nodded, then raised his eyebrows skeptically. “Even our survivors are pretty scrawny, up against the Bar-O herd. As it stands, boss, Cullen’s likely to get the lion’s share of buyer dollars.”
The sheriff gave his man a surly grin. “Not after tonight. Get started cleanin’ up this mess... Hey, Tenny!”
The foreman went off, just as Joe Tenny, a cowboy who had run with Gauge in outlaw days, ambled over. He had shaggy eyebrows that met in the middle and a lazy smile with a droopy, thick mustache shaped like the smile’s upside-down twin.
“Y’know,” Tenny said, “I was thinkin’ maybe we oughter have ourselves a bar-be-cue. Or maybe you got a better idea?”
“Funny feller.” Gauge nodded vaguely north. “Listen, you know those foothills near the Sangre de Cristo?”
That was the mountain range that expanded northward to become the Rockies.
“Ought to,” Tenny said with a nod. “We hid out there enough times.”
Gauge put a hand on his old accomplice’s shoulder. “I want the Bar-O cattle driven into those canyons. Every damn cow. Main herd’s in the valley now, and you can get them over the foothills before daylight.”
Tenny raised his shaggy eyebrows. “That’ll take a heap of men.”
“Not so many,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “Those Bar-O boys won’t be expectin’ us to hit their camp. Anyway, they’re spread thin over there. Hell, you won’t even have to waste bullets killin’ ’em.”
Tenny frowned. “You know, Harry, I ain’t real big on leavin’ witnesses...”
Gauge patted the man’s shoulder. “Joe, in this case it’ll be better if you do. Wear masks or somethin’. But leave them breathe so they can spread word that the Bar-O is finished. What hands Cullen does have left’ll leave like rats off a sinkin’ ship.”
Tenny was thinking that over, his battered hat pushed back on his head. “There’s no water in them draws, y’know.”
“Those cows’ll get by till I need ’em.”
“What do you need ’em for?”
Gauge gave his old friend a big, beautiful grin. “Why, Joe, we’re gonna kill off the rest of our sickly beeves and restock with Bar-O cows.”
Tenny gave up his lazy smile of approval. “I like it. Damn, if I don’t like it a bunch. Always figured offerin’ money to that blind old coot was a waste when we could just take what he had.”
Gauge glanced again at the moon-swept, remains-strewn terrain, where cowhands were dragging dead cattle off through grass riffling with the breeze. “All right, Joe. Get the men you need and move out.”
Tenny nodded and went off to do that while his boss stayed back to watch cowhands haul dead cattle by their hooves to the nearby ravine. It was a bizarre-looking process and it took a while. Gauge didn’t supervise — he left that to foreman Willart.
They were just starting to get a slide going, to cover up the dead cows, when Gauge collected his horse and started back to town, as his underlings continued his dirty work. He felt very much a cattle baron in the making.
Never realizing that even after all he’d accomplished, he was still no more than the leader of an outlaw gang.
On the Cullen range, a camp of sleeping cowhands were kicked awake by armed, masked gunmen. Without a word, in the glow of a small fire, the invaders gestured with weapons toward the small remuda, and without having to be told, the cowhands walked to their horses and rode off into night, heads hanging, while behind them the herd that had been their responsibility was being driven off by more armed men on horseback.
Two of the Cullen cowhands paused atop a bluff, reins pulled back, and looked down as their herd disappeared off toward Gauge range.
“I guess that’s the end of the Bar-O,” one said.
“I guess so,” the other said. “Never had a chance, did we?”
“Never a chance in hell.”
And they rode away — away from the herd, away from Cullen land, on their way to somewhere else.
Dr. Miller had his latest patient — the corpse of Cyrus Swenson — on his examination table in his simple surgery. His office and living quarters were on the second floor of the brick building that housed the bank.