Ralph Compton Blood Duel

Chapter 20

Seamus Glickman had forgotten all about the sheriff wanting him to pay a visit to the schoolmarm. The shenanigans in Coffin Varnish were to blame. He was reminded when Sheriff Hinkle came up to him in Tulley’s and said, “I just had another report of a strange gent hanging around the schoolhouse. What did you find out when you went out there?”

Seamus was tempted to lie but didn’t. “I never got around to it,” he admitted.

George Hinkle frowned. “I am not a stickler for orders and the like, but when I ask to have something done, I expect it done. Ride out there right now and talk to the schoolmarm.”

“This late?”

“I have seen the light on out there even later some nights. Miss Prescott is dedicated to her work.”

Seamus thought of the spindly, almost severe figure he had glimpsed on a few occasions. “Do you really think she keeps a man under those petticoats?”

“No, I do not. But some of the parents are talking and won’t stop wagging their tongues until they hear from us that the schoolmarm is not making a mockery of public morals.”

“And I thought having to shoot stray dogs wasn’t fit work for a lawman,” Seamus observed. “Now we are virtue inspectors.”

Sheriff Hinkle laughed. “That is what I like most about this job. One minute we are arresting a cowboy for disturbing the peace, and the next we are shooing pigs off the street.”

“You can have the pigs, and you can have our schoolmarm.”

“Be nice to her. Your visit is official.”

“You know me, George,” Seamus said. “I smile and am polite even when the person I am being polite to is a jackass. Or, in her case, a broomstick no man with any appreciation for womanhood would care to fondle.”

“I will be in the office,” Sheriff Hinkle said. “Report to me as soon as you get back.”

“Yes, sir.”

Now here Seamus was, riding out of Dodge City by a side street to go question the schoolmarm. He had half a mind not to do it and say he had. As far as he was concerned, the law had no business meddling in the private lives of people. What Ernestine Prescott did in the privacy of her bedroom was her affair and no one else’s. That a few busybodies had complained only showed that some folks were too damn willing to impose their notion of what was right on others.

His horse nickered, and Seamus looked up. A man and a woman were approaching on foot. Just as he set eyes on them, the woman pulled the man to her and turned so her back was to the road. They did not look around as he came up to them.

Seamus drew rein. A dove and a cowboy, he assumed, and said gruffly, “Enough of that. You know better. In a saloon, yes. In a hotel, yes. But not out here where everyone can see.”

“Sorry,” the woman said, still embracing the man. “We were carried away.”

“Get carried away in private,” Seamus said, and clucked to his mount. Light glowed in the schoolhouse window, so Hinkle had been right about the schoolmarm. Dismounting, he walked up to the door and knocked. When there was no response, he knocked louder, and when that failed to bring her to the door, he worked the latch and poked his head inside.

“Miss Prescott? Sorry to disturb you.”

Seamus sighed. She wasn’t there. The schoolhouse was empty. That she had gone off and left the lamp on suggested she would return. He was about to go in and wait for her when his sorrel whinnied and was answered by another horse from somewhere behind the schoolhouse.

Puzzled, Seamus took a few steps back. “Miss Prescott?” he called out. His reply was another whinny.

Suddenly Seamus thought he understood. The schoolmarm’s gentleman caller was there, out back with the schoolmarm. For once the gossip had been true. Grinning, he hastened around the corner. The man might ride off, and Seamus wanted to see who it was. He hoped the man was married. Wouldn’t that be something? He chuckled to himself. The scandal would be sensational.

But all Seamus found was a horse. A gruella, its reins dangling. He scanned the prairie, then cupped a hand to his mouth. “Miss Prescott? Are you here?” Apparently not, since there was no answer. Seamus started to head for the front of school, then stopped and stared at the mouse dun.

A gruella. A vague sense that the horse was somehow important came over him. Something pricked at his mind, a memory, words someone had said, something that had stuck with him.

“A gruella,” Seamus said aloud. He tried and tried but could not remember. Shrugging, he was almost to the side of the schoolhouse when it came to him in a rush of vivid memory. Coffin Varnish. The shootings of the Blights and Edison Farnsworth. Seamus had asked everyone what they saw and heard, and the saloon owner, Win Curry, offhandedly mentioned that he had been in front of the saloon when Jeeter Frost rode up on—

“A gruella!” Seamus exclaimed. He closed his fingers around the ivory handles of his Merwin and Hulbert revolver and again scanned the plain. “It can’t be,” he said. “It just can’t be.”

The schoolmarm and Jeeter Frost? The notion was so ridiculous that Seamus laughed. But the laugh died in his throat. He recalled that Sheriff Hinkle had brought up the rumors about the schoolmarm about the same time as those first killings in Coffin Varnish. Everyone had assumed Jeeter Frost was just passing through and happened to run into the Blights. But what if everyone was wrong? Seamus reflected. What if Frost had a reason for visiting? What if that reason, incredible as it seemed, was the schoolmarm?

Seamus abruptly remembered the man and woman he had passed on the way there. He remembered how neither had looked at him, remembered, now that he thought about it, that the woman had been thin and wore a dress no self-respecting dove would be caught dead in. The man had been short, and Jeeter Frost was supposed to be short, and might have been wearing buckskins.

“Son of a bitch!” Seamus cursed his stupidity, and ran. He practically vaulted into the saddle and applied his spurs. His sorrel, unaccustomed to such rough treatment, shot toward Dodge as if fired from a cannon. But he only went a short way when he reined up.

“What am I doing?” Seamus leaned on the saddle horn to contemplate. So far as he knew, Jeeter Frost was not wanted by the law. Frost killed the Blights, but by all accounts he shot them in self-defense. Sheriff Hinkle would like to question Frost, but that was all. So why go barreling into town after the killer and the schoolmarm when Jeeter Frost might take exception and decide the county could do without an undersheriff?

Seamus was under no delusions about his ability with a six-gun. He was fair. Only fair. Whereas Frost had to be a wizard, given the number of hombres he had reportedly slain. Even allowing for exaggeration, Frost was still as deadly a customer as Seamus ever came across. Who in their right mind would make a man like that mad?

Not Seamus. He had survived as long as he had by sticking to what he jokingly liked to call his golden rules: Never poke a rattler, never get in the path of stampeding animals, and never, ever prod a man liable to exact payment for the affront in lead.

His mind made up, Seamus gigged his horse into a different street than the one he left Dodge by. He couldn’t wait to see the look on Sheriff Hinkle’s face when he told him. The schoolmarm and the worst short-trigger man in three states. Hinkle would find it as hilarious as he did.

Horace Dundleman had been a justice of the peace since Dodge City was founded, and before that, in St. Louis a good many years. He liked the job. He met a lot of interesting people, and Horace liked people. He also liked that it was not physically demanding because at his age, seventy-one, he was not as spry as he used to be. His joints ached and creaked, and his vision was so bad he needed spectacles.

Those spectacles delayed Horace when someone began pounding on his door. He groped for them on the nightstand and accidentally knocked them onto the floor. The knocks grew louder and more insistent as Horace groped about near the bed until he found them. Finally perching the spectacles on his nose, he went to the closet, opened it, and took his heavy robe from a peg.

“Hold your horses! I’m coming!” Horace hollered as he shuffled down the hall past the parlor that served as his office. He threw the bolt that would admit his visitors. “It is awful late.”

Ernestine Prescott glanced nervously behind her before slipping inside. She had her arm wrapped around Jeeter Frost’s and had no intention of letting go. “I am sorry but it could not be helped.”

Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, Horace’s owl eyes blinked. “Miss Prescott? What are you doing out and about at this hour?” He did not come out and say that schoolmarms should be discreet in their behavior, but he was thinking it.

“You perform weddings, do you not, Mr. Dundleman?”

Horace could not have been more stunned if she pulled out a gun and shot him. He blinked anew, then focused on her companion. The man reminded him of a ferret, and was obviously on edge from the way he fidgeted and was sweating. “I perform civil ceremonies, yes,” Horace said guardedly, thinking to himself that surely the schoolmarm was not thinking of doing what her question suggested.

Ernestine smiled. “Then I would like very much for you to perform one for us, here and now.”

“At this hour?”

Jeeter Frost did not like how the old man looked at him. He did not like that a lawman had seen them on their way there. He could use a drink, could use a drink badly. To his annoyance, he was sweating like a stuck pig, and worried he was about to make the worst mistake of his life. He cared for Ernestine so much, he was afraid of shackling her with himself. But if it was what she wanted, then by God he would go through with it. “You heard the lady,” he growled. “What difference does the hour make?”

“None, really,” Horace admitted. “But this is sort of sudden, is it not?” He addressed the schoolmarm.

“Yes, it is,” Ernestine said. “So please. Can we get on with it?”

Horace adjusted his spectacles and then his robe. He was stalling. “There are formalities to observe, you know. A form to fill out. A fee to pay. Usually people fill out the form and come back in a few days.”

“We don’t have a few days,” Jeeter said. “Just get on with whatever you have to do.”

“No need to be cross with me, mister,” Horace said. He was old but he would not kowtow to anyone, particularly runts with an attitude.

“Don’t rile me, old man,” Jeeter warned.

Ernestine gave his hand a hard squeeze. “None of that kind of talk, if you please. This is a special occasion. I want to have fond memories of it.”

Horace sensed fear in her tone. Something was going on here, something out of the normal. He looked at her more closely and saw that she was nervous, too, which was not like her at all. The few times he had spoken to her, she had been a portrait of calm and serenity. “Is everything all right, Miss Prescott?”

“Of course, Mr. Dundleman,” Ernestine said. “But it is not every day a woman is wed.”

“No, it is not,” Horace agreed. “All the more reason for the woman to be positive she wants to say I do.”

“I am positive.”

But she did not sound positive to Horace, and as he led them into the parlor he racked his mind for a way to delay joining them as husband and wife. Only for a day or so. He fumbled with the lamp, got it lit, and turned it up so the parlor flooded with bright light. Only then did he see the Colt Lightning on the groom’s hip. Only then did he get a good look at the groom’s features.

“Something wrong?” Jeeter Frost demanded. The old geezer was staring at him as if he had risen from a grave.

“No, no, nothing at all,” Horace said. “It is just unusual, is all, for a man to drag a woman in here in the middle of the night to get hitched.”

“It’s hardly the middle of the night,” Jeeter said. He was losing his patience with the old man. “And as for the dragging, I do as I damn well please, or as she damn well pleases.”

Ernestine pouted. “I won’t ask you again. Be polite, for my sake if for no other reason.”

“Just so the old buzzard gets it over with,” Jeeter said.

Horace stepped to his desk and opened the top drawer. The forms were in a neat pile on the right. “You must fill one of these out. It asks your name, your age, a few other things.”

“You are a nosy old coot,” Jeeter said. The form intimidated him. He had learned the alphabet, but he wrote letters as slow as molasses.

“Not me, mister,” Horace said. “It is for the government, for their records, so everything is nice and official.”

“Official be hanged,” Jeeter groused.

Ernestine sighed. “You will not desist, will you? You push and push when there is no cause. I am here with you, aren’t I? You need not be so forceful.”

Horace wondered what she meant by that. He sat in his chair and fiddled with his robe. “I don’t suppose you would let me go get dressed?”

“No,” Jeeter said.

“I will fill in the form,” Ernestine offered. She took pride in her precise handwriting. When she was done she slid the form toward Dundleman. “We do not have a ring. Is that all right?”

“It is not essential,” Horace said, running his gaze down the paper. He read the groom’s name. He read it twice, and a lightning bolt seared him from head to toe. Struggling to keep his voice level, he said, “So you are to become Mrs. Jeeter Frost?”

“Do you have a problem with that?” Jeeter demanded.

“No, sir,” Horace lied. “There is no problem at all.”