The Ballad of Dingus Magee

7

Meanwhile, back at the bordello, for some time before the fire Hoke Birdsill had been remarkably confused himself. He had not heard the early shotgun blast which indicated that Dingus was escaping from jail, nor did he hear the preacher, Rowbottom, verifying the accomplishment. Once he had been confronted by Belle’s protestations of abiding devotion, and her proposal of marriage, sense of the inescapable had clouded Hoke’s mind like mist.

So he probably did not realize either, when he finally awoke, that he had fainted. He was still in Belle’s bedroom, but he had no notion whatsoever of the time. And why was he undressed, stripped to his woolens? What made his jaw ache is it did?

Hoke could only moan, feeding upon his own malaise. And it was about to get worse, since there remained the rest of it to be remembered now also, the incredible climax of his visit to Miss Pfeffer’s, his subsequent meeting with Anna Hot Water in the street. “Three?”he asked himself miserably. “Three separate catastrophes all scheduled for the same solitary hour?”

Like some wet, furred beast, Hoke shuddered, burrowing more deeply into Belle’s blankets. He lay with his angular knees drawn up against his chest, his eyes closed. “But maybe I’ll jest up and die,” he speculated hopefully. “Maybe that initial doctor back there in Santa Fe were right that time, and all of them others made a error, and I ain’t got but a few months left. A man could face that much, I reckon.”

Hoke had ventured only one glance about the room, through a single, heavy-lidded eye, bothered by the lamplight. He had thought himself alone. But gradually now he became aware of sounds behind him, although he did not turn. “Three?” he asked himself again.

But when the sounds increased, almost as if some heavy object of furniture were being disturbed, Hoke at last rolled from the wall. The light remained insupportable, but one of the girls was in fact moving something, dragging an enormous wardrobe trunk toward Belle’s rear door, or trying to. She was new to the house, or moderately so, since Hoke scarcely recognized her. “Well, howdy do,” she greeted him. “You sure did have yourself a snooze, dint you? Why, you was jest snoring to beat a brass band.”

Hoke forced himself to sit, if with inordinate effort, then scrubbed at his mustache with the back of a wrist. “What time’s it got to be?” he asked wearily.

“Jest a mite before midnight, I do believe,” the girl said.

Hoke gazed blearily at nothing. “You happen to notice my duds around anywheres?”

“Don’t seem to,” the girl said. Hoke saw now that she was quite young, and fairly appealing also, although somewhat excessively rouged and powdered. Watching him in turn, after a moment she sighed. “Meantimes I jest don’t know how I’m ever gonter get this trunk down those high stairs now,” she told him.

Hoke scowled, considering it without exuberance himself. The trunk was as large as any he had ever seen, and very much like one of Belle’s. In fact he was almost certain it was hers.

So then he sobbed. “Don’t tell me she’s already done got readied up for a honeymoon?”

“Who would that be?”

“Jest Belle, I reckon,” he said wretchedly. “Excepting what she don’t know is that there’s two other female personages doubtless preparing to do the same thing at the same—”

“Oh, well, say now, is Belle getting wedded? Truly?” The girl tittered. “And are you the lucky feller? Why, I declare, if’n that ain’t jest the wonderfulest thing!”

This time Hoke could only groan.

“Except I wouldn’t know anything about Belle’s own packing,” the girl went on then. “But concerning the trunk, well, Belle said I could borrow that. It’s my poor aged mother who’s pitifiil ill, you see, back home in Texarkana. I jest got the sad news tonight, from a wayfaring stranger who did the kindness of carrying the letter, and I have to hasten to her bedside. I’ve got a buckboard all prepared down below, too, but I jest can’t fathom how I’m gonter get it loaded, I mean all by my helpless self, and—”

“Huh?” Hoke finally roused himself from his stupor. “Oh. Oh, yair.” He got to his feet. “You’ll pardon my woo-lies, I reckon. But I’m still durned if’n I kin recollect what happened to my duds.”

But for that matter he was unable to remember having undressed either, on top of which his jaw did seem injured now at that. Rubbing it, and troubled by a persistent sense of disjunction, Hoke hestitated briefly. Then, with a shrug, he bent to the trunk.

Hoke blanched. “Whatcha got in there,” he asked, “Belle’s table silver?” It took virtually all of his strength to jerk it into the doorway.

The girl averted her face with a giggle. “Oh, you know the way a female does collect pretty things, like frilly drawers and such—”

Hoke shook his head. “Well,” he breathed. But at least he could see the buckboard hitched and accessible in the yard below. “I’m gonter have to bounce her some, going down.”

“Why, I think you’re doing right heroically—”

She waltzed down ahead of him while he coped with it as well as possible, which meant assaying no more than a step at a time and having to rest after each. He managed with an extravagant final effort to shoulder it onto the rear rack of the buckboard itself, however, although for an instant it teetered precariously when his knees threatened to give. Hoke staggered against the back wheel, panting.

So he was by no means fully recovered when the pistol shot cracked somewhere in the distance, although it was not merely fatigue which kept the sound from interesting him particularly. Rather it was the girl herself, only that moment mounting the wagon and suddenly, startlingly, presenting Hoke with a spectacular new perspective on her appearance. Viewed from below, massive and pillowlike, her bosom was little short of astounding.

But when a second shot followed, and quickly after that a third, even Hoke found himself disturbed. “Oh, dear me, then they truly are having that dreadful gun battle after all,” the girl exclaimed. “Why, it almost makes a lass happy she’s leaving, when—”

“Gunfight?” Hoke frowned. “Now who would be—?”

So then a new explosion cut him off, this time the roar of a shotgun instead of a pistol, or so it appeared from the booming echo that slithered and clapped about the town.

Yet Hoke’s attention reverted to that improbable bosom once more despite all, drawn there this time by the girl herself as she pressed a hand to it in concern. “But surely you heard the announcement? Heavens jest about every soul in the house ran on out seeking sheltered locations to watch it from. Because it’s that wicked desperado, Dingus Billy Magee, and—”

“Dingus?” Hoke raised his chin skeptically. “Shucks now, must of been somebody pulling your leg, Miss, since Dingus is locked up over to the—”

“Oh, yes,” the girl insisted. “Dingus William Magee himself. And the other one is the sheriff of the town, Mr. Broad-bill. Mr. Birdsoak? I’ve never had the opportunity to make the gentleman’s acquaintance myself, unfortunately, but I’m certain he’s involved also. Yes, positively. Dingus William Magee and Sheriff Birddripping.”

“Dingus and—” But Hoke decided there was no point in attempting to explain, since it was obviously some sort of joke. And the girl was seated now anyway, adjusting the reins. “Well,” she said, “I’d sure like to hear how it come out, but my poor aged mother is doubtless sobbing my name even as I dawdle. But I jest don’t know what I’d of done without your gallant and manly help, sir.”

“Oh, weren’t nothing—”

The girl blew him a kiss, bashfully it seemed, then roused her team, and Hoke stood watching with a knowing smile as she moved off. “Now ain’t that jest somebody’s smart idea of exactly the right girl to play a trick on, too,” he mused, “even if’n she sure is built fer better pastimes’n that. Dingus and me. And with the one of us standing right before her very eyes with a slow-rising johnny all the while!”

Yet back in Belle’s bedroom, when he still could not seem to locate his clothes, Hoke became perplexed after all. And then when he opened the opposite door, glancing into the main upper corridor, it developed that the girl had been right about that much at least, since the house itself could not have been more quiet. “Belle?” he voiced finally. “Well say, now, jest what in the—?”

So he was wandering thoughtfully back into the room, and exploring the extent of that curious injury to his face again now also, when the puzzlement suddenly became absolute. Because Belle was just arriving then herself, through the same rear door by which he had removed the trunk only moments before. She was carrying a shotgun, or so he noticed tangentially, although this had very little to do with his reaction. Neither did the sight of his clothes at last either, actually, so much as the diverting realization that they could hardly have fit her any better had they been her own. Even the derby rode with a reasonably natural jauntiness atop her tied-back hair.

“Sweetie pot!” Belle flung the shotgun carelessly onto the bed. “And you’re awake again. I’m so glad—”

Hoke stopped in his tracks. “And what say to a short snort in celebration?” she went on effusively, not really looking at him as she discarded the derby then also. “Oh, I doubt I murdered the critter, but I scared the crabs right off his smelly bottom for fair, and that’s a fact. He sure comprehends Hoke Birdsill is no titty-licker to be trifled with now, by golly!”

“He comprehends what?” Hoke kept on gawking. “Who does? Lissen, Belle, I’d sort of take it favorable if’n you’d inform me jest what all is—”

But Belle had already marched to a cabinet, selecting a whiskey bottle. Beaming from behind it she withdrew the cork with her teeth, then spat that aside. “Yep. Because I waited too durned long since my one previous marriage to let some runny-nozzled twerp of an outlaw turn me into a widow from this present one even before we got around to holding the official ceremony, I reckon. But jest how much of that cotton-picking nonsense did he think a girl would stand for anyways, busting out of jail and farting around challenging folks’ fiancees to gunfights, and smack in the middle of my busiest night of the week yet, or—”

“Busting out of — huh? Lissen, lissen, you mean he truly— and she weren’t jest—?”

“Oh, but it’s over now, ducky nuts.” Belle disregarded his confusion. She was pouring two drinks. “On top of which the whole cock-knocking town saw how brave you faced up to him, likewise. I hope your jaw don’t pain you too much, meanwhile — didn’t give you but a incidental jolt with the side of my fist, was all, especially since you were snoring up a storm from that there swoon you’d had to start with. But here, here, guzzle your booze—”

Hoke was too stupefied not to accept the glass. “Right smart fit in these duds too,” Belle continued happily. “I used your Smith and Wesson here, first couple of shots, but then when the mangy little sidewinder actually had the gumption to let fly back at me once, why I jest twiddled that ole scattergun and gave him hallelujah. And he sure lit out pronto after that, I reckon. Well, anyways, drink up, honey jewels, and as soon’s I get changed into something a shade more appropriate we’ll go fetch Brother Rowbottom. Any of the girls ain’t getting reamed can do for witnesses. But here’s to it, meanwhile, doll of mine!”

Belle threw down her drink at a gulp, smacking her lips and then wiping them on the sleeve of Hoke’s most costly frock coat. Hoke was barely watching, however, still struggling with it. “Escaped?” he repeated. “But I got the durned key right in my pocket here, I mean there, but—”

“Aw, sugar boots, now who gives a good gob of spit about how the ballbreaker ever done it? Good riddance, I say, and—”

“But — but there’s all that bounty payment, my rewards that I worked so hard to — all of nine thousand and five hun—”

“Now Hoke Birdsill, you don’t truly conceive you have to fret your cow-punching ass over any piddling little sum like that? When you’re no more than minutes away from being wedded to Belle Nops herself? Why, if I ain’t got twenty times that amount in cold cash in my safe here, if not to mention six outsize pisspots full of dust in there that ain’t even ever been properly weighed yet likewise, and—”

Belle dismissed his meager concerns with a confident, expansive gesture in the direction of a corner beyond her desk, where the safe had long reposed, although Hoke was still far too vexed to glance that way. Then he could scarcely help himself. Her shriek tore through the roof.

So Hoke himself was barely able to begin to explain then either, since almost before he started she had taken him by the shoulders and was shaking him maniacally, still screaming also. “Girl!” she cried. “Sick mother? Why there hasn’t been a bimbo in this house in ten years who ever knew if her mother was dead or still peddling it, let alone ever got a letter from one or could even read it if she—in my own wardrobe trunk? And you helped her carry it down? HELPED HER!”

Hoke was sick. But he understood the remainder of it now, of course, saw it with all the certainty of prophetic revelation. “Oh, no!” he moaned. “No. Because then who was you shooting at out there? Out in that street, at exactly the same time when her and me was standing next to that buckboard and you fired my Smith and Wesson and then the shotgun, who was—”

“Well who in thunderation do you think it was? Dingus Turdface Magee, that’s who, and anyway what’s that got to do with—”

But Hoke went on with it, torturing them both now, compounding the ordeal. “Sure,” he said. “Sure. And meantimes you got a bright frilly red dress somewheres maybe, with a bow jest under the boobies? And a red sunbonnet to match, with strings you kin pull tight so’s your hair would be covered up, and—”

“Well blast that too, you’ve seen me wearing them. They’re right in—” Belle whirled, as if to retrieve the garments from her closet. Then she stopped, finally, utterly, for the instant actually rigid with the comprehension. She stared and stared.

“And you never truly seen him neither, did you?” Hoke said. “Yair, because it were dark as a Ethiopian’s bunghole out there, weren’t it? So if’n I ought of thought to burn the confounded thing six months ago, only I dint, then tonight I should of took it offn that Turkey Doolan feller and put it into a crate and mailed it to somebody in Siberia. Because it were that vest. All you seen were that red-and-yeller vest and that makes four times now he’s done give it to somebody else to get shot at in, only this is the first of the times he his-self went and put on something else in its place. And with a pillow stuffed inside his—”

Belle hit him. Her fist materialized like the hind hoof of a mule and took him on the opposite side of the face this time, slamming him back against the wall and leaving him with his legs stiff but with his heels beginning to slide from under him at once anyway, not trying to stop himself and not really hurt either, not hurting even when he thumped noisily to the floor itself, simply beyond all ability of feeling. “Because I’m probably gonter have heart failure anyways,” he thought. “Because I doubtless am.”

So it was not until he was climbing into Belle’s surrey five minutes later that he began to curse, began to match Belle’s incessant, monotonous yet unrepetitive stream word for word with one of his own, reminded faintly of something by the very sound of it also, although he could not think what, nor did he care. And even then it wasn’t the money, not the long-despaired eight hundred dollars from his derby hat which had started it all and not the subsequent three thousand from the original rewards either, not that and not this latest, the nine thousand five hundred. Nor was it even the dress which he himself, Hoke, was wearing now, the dress which Belle had only moments before flung into his face while changing hurriedly into one over his pants herself and scattering what remained of his own clothing through the upper rear door and into the yard at the same time, telling him, “Yes, a dress, and the damndest gaudiest silkiest one I own likewise, so maybe the next time you spend half a night being helpful to some other saggy-tooled cluck in one of them you’ll have the sense to lift his skirts and see if he’s got the right sort of equipment under there or not.” It wasn’t even that which evoked the oaths.

So it was the pillow, the false bosom. “Because I almost grabbed a quick feel on him,” Hoke realized. “I mean her. Him. Standing next to that buckboard and thinking on how all of a sudden I had three durned women to get myself hid from, which it looked like I’d already done give up trying anyways, and I almost grabbed holt of that one right then and there, jest to show myself a man’s still got some free choice left. And it wouldn’t of been the first time I were in bed with the erection-wasting skunk neither. So now I’m gonter git him. I’m gonter git him now if’n it’s the last thing I do on this earth!”

The surrey skidded and slewed, careening out of the alley and into the street, the road. “Yaaaa!” Belle’s voice roared and roared, her whip exploding over the mares. “Yaaaa!” Hoke rode with his head held low, fearing the sunbonnet might fail to disguise him adequately even in the darkness, and with a hand clasped across his mustache also, until they had thundered well beyond the town itself along the only obvious trail for the top-heavy Dingus to have taken with his prize.

As for the vest, Brother Rowbottom had put that on in all innocence.

He did not understand why it had been left in his shack, although the preacher found it folded far too carefully to suggest inadvertence; in fact it lay atop the very corner of the mattress beneath which he himself had deposited the recently acquired single-action Colt. And the revolver was what he had returned for, of course, after concluding his brief chore. Actually his inquiry had been superfluous; he knew full well that the model would pawn in any saloon for just the figure its previous owner had named.

But then he almost did not go out again after all. Instead, musing absently, he stood for a period as if expecting something, his eyes fast to nothing in particular and yet quite bright, quite alert. What the preacher hoped for was a call, a beckoning, an invocation from elsewhere than in this world. He had been anticipating one for some time now.

Because he had heard such pronouncements before, if not recently. The earliest had come at sixteen, when his family was migrating westward from Tennessee. Indians had attacked their wagon string, killing everyone except Row-bottom himself, although leaving him with his left arm so severely mutilated they obviously believed him dead, and failing to lift his scalp only because, inexplicably, he had already been completely bald for years. Rowbottom wandered in a delirium for days before stumbling into a mining camp where someone was able to complete the necessary amputation.

That was when he first heard the voice, during his convalescence. “Brother, you been chose,” was all it said, but he was confident he knew generally what was implied, if not in the particulars. His father had been a sometime preacher before him, as were several uncles. There were perhaps forty miners in the camp, and his exhortations amused them for a time. But when it occurred to him one bright morning to fire the shed in which the communal whiskey was stored, rather than any appreciation of his zeal it was only his height, and his correspondingly exceptional stride, that got him out of the territory alive.

But he was to change his mind about drink as a vice anyway, or have it changed. This happened after he made his way to Oklahoma to live with a relative, one of the preaching uncles. The man accepted Rowbottom as an acolyte of sorts, restricting him to such ministrations as driving tent pegs and hawking Bibles initially, but finally letting him try his hand in the pulpit also. He made no comment afterward, offered no criticism, or not until some weeks later when he suggested that the boy try again. “But this time you might interpolate a bit more hot pee and vinegar amid the words,” he said then. This was about three o’clock, with a camp meeting scheduled at five, and he handed the boy a jug. Rowbottom almost fell from the improvised dais half a dozen times. He made twice that many conversions.

So if it wasn’t drink, he began to wonder if his special vocation might have to do with women. There was only one in the uncle’s home town, or one of the sort he had in mind, and Rowbottom set out with a characteristic vengeance to redeem what he took to be her unwittingly strayed soul. Surprisingly, the whore proved interested in the notion herself, or so it appeared when she cooperated to the extent of letting the boy talk himself hoarse for three consecutive hours, and even supplied him with whiskey of her own when it became evident that this was what primed him. But then when he was barely able to keep his feet she locked the door and proceeded to teach him a thing or two about what he thought he had been talking about. “So I got to marry you,” he said, “as a penance. It’s the sole way to salvation, fer the both of us.”

The woman threw him out then, but he persisted, if limited to remonstrance from beneath her window now. And when even a bucket of slops over the head failed to deter him, she at last seemed to capitulate. “All right,” she told him, “since it looks like I either got to be saved from ordinary everyday sinning or else have murder on my conscience to boot. Tomorrow then. You come back tomorrow night and we’ll get fixed up.”

She had six or eight of her better clients in on it by then, one of whom happened to be the local justice of the peace, the rest ostensibly serving as witnesses. Rowbottom himself failed to discern how any of them were expected to fulfill the latter function in a room where all the lamps had been extinguished, but the woman insisted. “It’s more romantic in the dark,” she assured him, even squeezing his hand, although the ceremony did not take long anyway. But then when a lamp finally did go on the whore lay doubled up on the floor laughing and the hand he now found himself clutching belonged to a squat, dumpy, incredibly square-headed Indian girl, a Kiowa apparently and obviously as befuddled as Rowbottom himself, if also too drunk to stand.

He was in Sweetwater, Texas, a month after vaulting the whore’s window ledge, when he glanced up from a pulpit one evening to find her gazing at him blissfully from the rear of his newest congregation, unpresuming actually, and with the expression on her quadrangular face very much like wonderment at her own temerity, but at the same time waving a small, folded, and already long filthy paper that he understood from the length of the room away would be the certificate, the Oklahoma license. It was only chance that the first horse he spied belonged to a federal marshal. And even then Rowbottom was another full week’s ride removed in less than four days, but they had telegraphed ahead.

So he was on the rockpile when the voice came again. This time it said only, “Wait, now,” but he might have anticipated that. He had been given ten years.

Two years after he got out he was still waiting. But then when he happened upon Yerkey’s Hole, finally, at long last, he began to sense a certain urgency again, a renewed purpose, although he could never fully grasp it. But even the town’s name was a hint. “Yerkey’s Hole,” he asked someone. “You mean it were a famous water well?”

“It were a whore,” he was told, “name of Yerkey.” So when he started to preach at the brothel, it was in the realization that he had best keep his hand in. Because it could not be long now.

Then something horrendous happened to him. He had been in the town perhaps a week and was strolling aimlessly one evening, passing an abandoned suder’s wagon, when she loomed up from the shadows behind it. “You want bim-bam, mister?” she asked him. It was dark, and it had been exactly twelve years. But there was no mistaking that blunt, flat head, that squat form. Rowbottom almost collapsed on the spot.

But a miracle occurred. She was peering directly at him, seeming almost to study him even, yet no recognition crossed her face at all, and when she persisted in hailing him it was only in regard to her original proposition, her modest semiprofessional offering. Rowbottom ran into her several more times in the next weeks, once at last deliberately approaching her wagon in daylight, but by then he was positive she had forgotten. “So that’s a sign by itself,” he decided. “Because she must of been brung here special, jest for me to understand I’m truly released of that one trivial burden now. Which doubly indicates there’s got to be a momentous new Call acomin’, and pronto.”

So he had been waiting more anxiously than ever tonight, listening with palpable concentration, after he found the vest. And then when he gave up again temporarily, he put on the vest itself only because wearing something, for a man minus one arm, had always struck him as more practical than carrying it. He thought he might sell the garment at the same time he pawned the pistol. That he tucked into his waistband.

So at first, approaching the wagon, he thought it no more than the usual solicitation, although it did strike him as curious that she carried a shotgun.

Then Rowbottom halted, still some distance away beneath a rapidly diminishing moon, remotely curious yet not hearing her too well either, and wondering what had happened to her usual wares, since what she attempted to merchandise now seemed limited to a “mean goose.” But something turned him wary also. “You run pretty damn fast,” she went on incomprehensibly, and still from quite far off, “for a feller squish out seventeen bim-bam in twenty damn hours, oh yeah. But I think I damn catch you this time, you betcha.”

Rowbottom knew a moment of debilitating uncertainty. Could he have misinterpreted the signs somehow? Was this some mysterious new revelation, a delayed recognition after all? He was backing off slowly, not yet completely panicked, when suddenly she sprang.

His stride was still extraordinary. But luck was with him also, since by the time he paused for breath, a good half the town away, not only did it appear that he had lost her but the moon was fully hidden now as well. He waited until he was certain there were no further sounds of pursuit, then ventured on toward the main street. “So maybe His scheme is jest more complicated than I knowed,” he was thinking. “Because if’n I got to move on, it were right accommodating of Him to hold off on informing me until I had that money from the pawning almost to hand.”

So then she shot at him.

Now this was a development considerably beyond any possibility of immediate analysis, although Rowbottom retained the presence of mind to start running again first, before pondering it. Actually he had not seen her this time at all. But when a second bullet proceeded to gouge a foot-long sliver from the planked sidewalk directly ahead of him, just as he bounded through the spillage of light from a saloon doorway, he stopped long enough to disengage the Colt from his trousers and fire once himself, if only into the affrontive blackness.

Whereupon a blast from the shotgun slammed and clattered about him like the ultimate Wrath. Rowbottom got out of there without further contest then.

He shed himself of the vest as he went now also, realizing that in any light at all it rendered him far too inviting a target. “Anyways I reckon I got the point of it by now,” he said. “Not jest git, but git quick.” But he held up guardedly in a stand of pines for at least ten minutes before daring even the rear alleys again. Then, making his way stealthily through some cottonwoods behind the bordello, he almost took to his heels one more time, although the furor was only Belle Nops herself evidently, and one of her uglier girls, departing hastily in a surrey.

Then a further and even more portentous aspect of The Scheme was revealed to Brother Rowbottom. For reasons fabulously beyond his own imagining, in the ill-kept yard behind the house someone had discarded a spanking outfit of men’s clothing, lacking the trousers but with each remaining item almost miraculously a perfect fit and all of them far more expensively tailored than any he himself had ever possessed. Only the derby hat gave him pause, but not for long. “Because it ain’t fer me to go questioning His helpfulness,” Rowbottom declared. “And if’n He deems I got to approach that there new calling in style, well that’s jest Hoke Birdbugger’s poor lookout, I reckon.” So he had just stepped into the shaft of lamplight from the open upper doorway, the better to contemplate his transformation, when she hove into view again.

Rowbottom’s pulse skipped, even as he commenced to grope hopelessly for the pistol that still reposed among his other clothes some feet away. But Providence had not yet ceased to work its wonders: not only was she no longer carrying the shotgun, but she came plodding toward him so forlornly, and in such abject spirits, that it scarcely seemed credible she had ever pursued him with violent intent at all. In fact when she finally noticed him she reacted to his presence with a gesture almost of resignation. After which she actually shrugged. “Oh, well,” she said, “so I don’t get Dean Goose, greatest bim-bam there is. So I back to you again, you dud-cartridge son-um-beetch. And I think it damn past midnight now too.”

So again Rowbottom had not the vaguest idea what she was talking about, although he was not really listening either, already eyeing favorable directions for flight. And she had begun to stalk him too. But then, backtracking cautiously, he stumbled over the lowest of the bordello’s rear steps.

She was at him with a leap.

Rowbottom bolted upward, the least cluttered avenue. The door was wedged open, or perhaps hooked into place, but he had no time to close it anyway. He dove headlong beneath an enormous disheveled bed as she trundled up behind him.

She stopped just short of his derby, where he had lost it ducking under. “All right, you son-um-beetch, where you went?” she demanded immediately. “Because I pretty damn pooped, chase you, chase that Dean Goose feller from jail before, chase him again when I see damn vest in dark out there, damn near get shot too. So I settle for short end now, be wife to Hoke Birdsill. But right damn quick I think, oh yes, hey. So you drag bumpy ass on out or I come scoot down under — which you want, you son-um-beetch?”

So this time he understood just enough — that she had never recognized him after all, that doubtless the whole ordeal had been just that, a trial, a test of his mettle before the final glorious Calling would be proclaimed at last. So he was free to ready himself now, could prepare for the visitation. “Shucks,” he said, already sliding back out, “you want the sheriff, I reckon, Hoke Birddiddler. Well, I ain’t him, as you kin plainly see. I’m jest acting sheriff fer a brief spell, is all, so he done give me the loan of his duds to make it more official. But if’n you’ll pardon me I’ll jest mosey on along about the outlaw-catching business then, and—”

“Hey?” The squaw scowled at him uncomprehendingly as he retrieved the derby. Then she went so far as to lift the lamp from its stand, peering at him from beneath it. “Sure ain’t Soapy-Tool Birdsill okay,” she admitted finally. “But how come is that?”

But Rowbottom was already edging toward the door, unobtrusively, while she peered and peered. Then, glancing that way to avoid any misstep, perhaps he failed to notice it immediately — the slow, speculative narrowing of the eyes, the hesitant pursing of the lips, the profoundly visible evidence of the toils of elemental retrospection. “One-arm feller?” she said. “Ten times I hear people say it, one-arm, bald-headed preacher feller. Couple damn times I see you too, hey. But where I see you before? What your names, hey?”

And then it came, incredulous and exultant at once, with all the apocalyptic resplendence of a trumpet in thunder: “Rowbottoms! Rowbottoms! Oh, my husband man, from so damn long I damn near forget whole damn thing!” Maybe she realized she had been holding the lamp, maybe Row-bottom did also. Maybe they both saw it crash into the wall as her arms shot outward, scattering fuel and flame alike, maybe they saw the bed blossom like a pyre. “Oh, my husband man!” she cried. “All these years Anna Hot Water wait, dream of first bim-bam with my husband! Who need that son-um-beetch Hoke Birdsill, who want Dean Goose, when I find my husband lover bim-bam again!”

Rowbottom stood for a time transfixed, mesmerized. Then, when he fled, when he devolved through the door, it was with no thought of the stairs at all, but into space, heedless and unfettered, like a man touched by assurances not of this world — like one who has penetrated The Scheme Itself, who is privy to The Very Word. His feet were already moving, however, even in passage, and he was running when he hit.

It was dawn when Belle and Hoke met the cavalry patrol. By then Belle’s rage was insupportable. The moon had reappeared perhaps thirty minutes after they had left the town itself, perhaps twenty after Hoke, chancing to look back, had noticed the fire, and had understood immediately by its very enormity what was burning also, if not how or why. He had said nothing, however, no solitary word, merely casting surreptitious glances across one silk-garbed shoulder now and then as they fled onward, while Belle’s own furious intractable glare remained fast to the trail ahead of them as if fixed there hypnotically, and through all the hours since then the road had stretched before them across the mesa like something unspooled. Frequently in the night’s fresh settled dust they had obliterated recent hoofmarks with their own, had flung their spume across the stark virginal scars of wildly skidding blackboard wheels. But Dingus himself still raced on somewhere unseen beyond them.

So she was reining in the lathered, foaming team the instant the patrol cantered into view, pausing to sob once out of fatigue or possibly dumb rage again, but then had bounded from the surrey and was rushing to accost the troopers even before Hoke himself fully realized they were no longer moving. There were about a dozen riders, led by a captain whose braid Hoke could distinguish even at a substantial remove. Then as they came on in the lifting gray light he recognized the man, a grimed youth named Fiedler. His entire patrol was haggard and spent. The officer recognized Belle immediately in turn (very few male residents of the territory would fail to) but she allowed him no time for pleasantries. “Dingus Billy Magee!” she shouted even before he had halted. “That slimy, yellow-scrotum’d, dingleberry-picking polecat — in a buckboard, headed this way. Did you pass the—?”

For a moment Captain Fiedler simply gazed at her, his lips puckered. Nor was it just puzzlement, mere astonishment at this disheveled and furious yet familiar apparition so frantically hailing him here in the empty mesa at dawn. It wasn’t even the sight of Hoke’s striped pants beneath her dress. Because when he began to curse his sudden implosive anger left even Belle’s protracted blasphemy wan by comparison. “Because I’ll be damned on Judgment Day for a knave,” he explained. “Dingus Billy Magee. Surely. Because ever since we ran into the two of them yesterday I’ve been wondering who he was, where I’d seen him before. Sending us on a wild goose chase after nonexistent Apaches, when there isn’t a—”

“What?” Belle cut in, cried in annoyance, “yesterday? No, I’m talking about today, tonight, right on this road, in a—”

“And I’m talking about yesterday, in the afternoon,” the captain said. “When we were finally on our way into Yerkey’s Hole for a bivouac after a patrol that was already weeks too long and met two riders who told us about a Mescalero abduction raid on a pair of wagons. Wagons that don’t exist any more than the Indians do. Pounding our backsides raw over some saddle tramp’s idea of a joke, and through it all a bell kept ringing in die back of my mind — where had I seen one of them before? The one who called me Fetter-man. Surely. So now I finally remember. It was on a reward poster. The—”

Belle snatched at the man’s pantleg where he sat. “Hang it all,” she demanded, “now what the fornicating thunder do I give a hoot about that? It’s now, tonight, that the mangy little pudding-pounder ran off with my safe and all my life’s savings and — on this blasted road I’m standing an this minute, it’s got to be this road, in a buckboard with—”

But Hoke’s own impatience could withstand no more either. So he forgot why he had not climbed from the surrey to start with, why he had been sitting with a hand shielding his mustache. “In a dress!” he cried. “Don’t forget the—”

He caught himself too late, wilting in mortification as the troopers turned toward him to a man in simultaneous amazement. “Why, you hairy-chested old honey,” one of them started.

But Belle was already back at it. “Will you listen, confound it! Yes, in a dress, him too. And with a trunk, a big wardrobe trunk on the back of the—”

“Dress?” The captain frowned then. “Trunk? Well, surely now, there was a dress. I mean there was a girl, if that’s what you mean. Why, she passed us not twenty minutes ago. As a matter of fact I thought she might be in distress at first, but she told us she was just rushing off to get married. But I don’t understand what—”

But Belle had already spun back to the surrey. Half boarded, she paused anew. “One hundred dollars for each man!” she shouted. “Or hell’s bells, never mind that — there’s that nine thousand or more in rewards for the first one puts a bullet up his giggy. But on top of that I’ll—”

She did not have to pursue it. Only Captain Fiedler hesitated briefly. Then he too had whirled his mount and was pounding after the others.

Nor could the surrey keep up, of course. So half an hour later they were still steaming across the broad vast mesa itself, in full daylight now and some moments after the troopers themselves had disappeared far ahead where the road twisted northward into an abrupt high upthrust of stone hills, into a defile, when they heard the shooting, the rifles. “Git ‘im!” Belle shrieked instantly in approval, harrying the thundering mares even more hysterically, “—git him good now! Fill the miserable meat-beater so full o’ lead even the vultures’ll vomit when they chomp on him!”

“But—” Hoke swallowed in disappointment, reading the same probability into the sounds and certain then that his own meager claim to the rewards was being irrevocably superseded (not by any means accustomed to the idea of a marriage that would render them inconsequential yet, either). But then he became moderately perplexed as well. “Because lissen,” he yelled, or tried to over the horses, “how long kin they keep plinking at him in there anyways? How much of a fight kin he—?”

Because the firing still went on. As a matter of fact it cracked and volleyed so incessantly that if he hadn’t known better Hoke would have estimated a good many more than ten or a dozen rifles to be involved. “My gawd,” he commiserated then, “they truly must be massacrating the misfortunate critter at that, the way they’re—”

“And I say more power to ‘em!” Belle dismissed him. “Pulverize the twerp!” she screamed enthusiastically into the wind. “String him up by his prunes and take target practice! Pop so many holes in the varmint he’ll leak until hell sprouts flowers!”

Except it wasn’t Dingus.

It took only an instant, less than that, as the surrey finally careened into the gorge itself amid high sheer walls, as it screeched precariously around the first unnavigable turn and into sight of the troopers at the same time, for Hoke to understand it had to be something different, something more. But then he was too busy to look, snatching at the reins where Belle had suddenly abandoned control in favor of the brake now but missing them completely as the amok vehicle pitched and lurched and twice almost overturned completely, stopping only after it had slewed about in a full circle to wedge itself against stone. Hoke was already leaping from it before that, however, as the bullets whined and ricocheted about his fluttering skirts, diving for shelter behind boulders where the troopers themselves were pinned down by the relentless fusillade from somewhere beyond. He buried his nose into the shiny blue serge of the soldier across whose sprawled backside he had landed, too startled to be shocked or terrified yet, although hardly failing to hear Belle’s own instantaneous new outburst despite all. “Indians?” she roared at Captain Fiedler. “Indians? Now great bleeding eardrums, it was you yourself jest said there ain’t a hos-tile Indian within six counties of this place, so how could—”

“Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t exactly call these peaceable,” the officer yelled back, scarcely in need of the irony as a new hail of bullets whistled and chinked overhead. “But at least they’ve most likely done us the favor of dispatching your outlaw friend for you, since he couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty minutes ahead of us coming through the—”

“But my trunk!” Belle wailed. “My safe! Where’s—”

And then the shooting stopped, abruptly but absolutely. Hoke himself had not previously moved, save to dissociate himself from the trooper’s bottom. But when the silence persisted he finally raised his head, finding the others near him beginning to better deploy themselves also, behind what appeared a fairly secure natural barricade, a fortuitously banked upheaval of jagged split shale. “And now what?” Belle was demanding. “What are they—?”

“Just regrouping, I’d imagine,” Captain Fiedler speculated. “Or maybe debating an attack, since it’s pretty much a stalemate the way we’re situated at the moment.” Hoke could see the youthful officer kneeling, eyeing the terrain. Then the man turned to his sergeant, indicating something behind Hoke himself with a gesture, speaking more quietly.

Hoke saw it also, however, comprehending. Close at hand, yet probably obscured from the vision of the Indians themselves, a narrow crevice broke upward through the shelving toward higher ground. And almost immediately the sergeant darted toward it, obviously for purposes of reconnoitering.

“I’ve got a hunch we can outflank them,” the captain elaborated. “It might work if we’re not too badly outnumbered, which we don’t seem to be. Let’s hold fire and wait, now—”

So they sat. Nor did the Indians renew their own fire either, except for those moments during which random troopers showed themselves fleetingly, evidently satisfied merely to hold the patrol at bay. Then for some moments only Belle’s irrecusable mutterings alone punctuated the calm:

“That lamb-ramming, rump-rooting, scut-befouling, fist-wiving, gopher-mounting, finger-thrusting, maidenhead-barging, bird’s-nest-ransacking, shift-beshitting, two-at-a-time-tupping lecherous little pox. On top of which he wasn’t born either, he was just pissed up against a wall and hatched in the sun. I’ll—”

But the sergeant finally reappeared, though it struck Hoke at once that something boded ill. In fact the man made his way toward them so thoughtfully, and in such evident distraction, that he almost exposed himself more than once. And then when he reached the captain for a long moment he merely stared, not saying a word.

“Well, drat it all, did you see them, man? What’s the—” And still the sergeant seemed wholly disconcerted, although at last he nodded. “I saw them. Yessir. Right clear in fact. But—”

“And? So? Can we take them? Can we get—”

“We could take them easy. Yessir. But the thing is, we can’t. I mean we can’t fight. Because—”

“Can’t fight? Says what? There aren’t that many of them, are there? And if there’s a good tactical approach from—”

“It ain’t that,” the sergeant said, although still he seemed incapable of coping with whatever it might be instead. “I mean we don’t even need tactics. But that’s the whole point.

I mean, it’d be almost too easy, because it ain’t Injuns. I mean, I reckon they’re Injuns all right, but—”

“Listen now, listen!” Captain Fiedler struggled to check his anger. “Sergeant, are you sick? Will you for heaven’s sake tell me what’s—”

“It’s squaws.”

“It’s — what?”

“Squaws. Ain’t one single buck warrior down there; not a one. You kin hang me for a chicken-stealer if’n every single Winchester ain’t being shot by a female. And—”

“But — but — ambushing a patrol of United States Cavalry? Squaws?”

The sergeant shrugged. “Well, it don’t sound no more loco than it looked, I reckon. But it’s even more loco’n that. Because there’s some men down there too, all right, maybe ten or a dozen of’em, but they ain’t fighters — jest the old limp-dicked kind you see on reservations, maybe. And there’s a decent-size remuda likewise, like the whole outfit’s migrating somewheres, or was, until say no more’n ten or fifteen minutes ago. But now there’s this one tepee sort of half throwed up against a couple of trees — more like a improvised lean-to is what you’d call it — and there’s this buck-board setting near it. With that there wardrobe trunk still on it, yes’m. But what I mean, all the old men are doing, they’re loafing around like somebody told ‘em they had to wait on something for a spell, while over by the lean-to — well, there was this one squaw, real purty young wench too, jest getting herself all stripped down bare-titted and crawling inside. So it’s only the other sixteen who’s deployed out behind them boulders keeping a bead on us, and—”

“It’s only—” Hoke cut the man off without intending to, the exclamation voicing itself. And then he was almost afraid to pursue it. “Sixteen?” he asked hesitantly. “You mean counting the one in the lean-to, nacherly. You don’t mean the sum total of them squaws is—”

“Jest what I said. Sixteen and one, which if’n you know how to add better’n you know how to git dressed, comes out to—”

But Hoke had already stopped listening. He had closed his eyes also. “Seventeen?” he moaned. “Seventeen?” Finally he faced it again, not able not to. “But jest tell me slow,” he said. “Down amongst the old men, you dint maybe notice one of them chewing on a nice appetizing boiled wood rat, sort offer nourishment betwixt meals? Or if’n he ain’t hungry at the moment, then doubtless he’s still wearing a expensive derby hat anyways, and—”

“Well, yair, come to think on it I did see one with a derby, but what is—”

“Nothing,” Hoke said. “Nothing at all.” His eyes were shut again, and his head was lowered. “Excepting it’ll be at least twenty hours now, or anyways that’s what it took him the last time when they was camped up to Fronteras, and I don’t reckon there’s gonter be none of them let us cut it no shorter neither, not until they all durned sure git their belly-buttons squished out, so—”

But he was not being understood, evidently. Or perhaps he had mumbled even more than he realized, slumped against a rock and not even caring, not for the moment. “Dean Goose?” he heard Belle shouting at him. And then she was shaking him once more too. “Because he’s the greatest what? Who? Now what the blazes kind of word is—”

But this time he didn’t answer at all, already banging his head against the boulder behind him where he sat, quite hard, although quite deliberately also, in that profoundly impotent, ponderous rhythm of absolute and unmitigable frustration, of futility beyond hope. They had to restrain him physically.

And he was right, because it was to be the twenty hours indeed, give or take an apparent meal or two, and by then Captain Fiedler and his troopers would be long departed for Yerkey’s Hole. But there would be another problem then too. Because it had been approximately six o’clock in the morning when it commenced, and at dusk, at twilight, it was only the twelfth squaw who was emerging from the tepee, the thirteenth who was entering. So they knew it would be under cover of darkness that it would cease. “Or when the damned thing just falls off him altogether,” Belle said.

So when (he next morning came and the Indians were furtively gone at that, and the buckboard at the same time, without there having been a single sound for Belle or Hoke to hear, without a trace now either, there was only one boon, one saving grace. There still remained only the one direction for him to have taken with his burden. At the crack of dawn, and with the further benison of well-rested horses, they were storming after him again.

“And I’m even almost glad,” Belle said. “I almost am. Because this time I’m gonter have less mercy than a aggravated rattlesnake. I ain’t even gonter kill him now, not right off. I’m jest gonter bury the little pee-drinker up to his neck Apache-style and prop his mouth open with a stick and let the ants do it. As a matter of fact I’ll sell tickets.”

Hoke said nothing. He hadn’t for most of the day and night of the waiting. Now he simply rocked in place, not even jouncing with the sway of the surrey either, but almost as if in some esoteric, mystical periodicity of his own, like a creature irretrievably lost to meditation. He still wore the dress, the bonnet, but he had stopped thinking about both. He clutched his Smith and Wesson in his right hand, its hammer uncocked but with his finger welded against the trigger for so long that he had lost all feeling there without knowing it.

They were perhaps four hours into daylight when they met the wagon, a dilapidated old Conestoga, creaking in desultory indolence toward them behind equally aged, imperturbable mules. There were two women aboard, neither of them young but not old either, wholly anonymous, undifferentiated in their drabness as well. Hoke did not even avert his face now, did not hide his mustache as Belle questioned them. “Why, yes,” one of them acknowledged, “no more than an hour ago. Indeed, a lovely girl. We chatted briefly. Her husband recently passed away, and she’s returning home to Wounded Knee.”

Then Hoke awoke to something after all, remembered it, dissuading Belle with a gesture even as she was about to urge

the horses onward again. “Yair,” he said. “Because it’s a day and a half already, and I’m about to start on the harness.” He restrained the two drab women in the covered wagon. “I ain’t particular,” he said. “Hardtack or jerky or—”

They gave him biscuits and cheese, willingly enough, if still dubious about his costume. And then Hoke refused to eat while riding too. “Because it ain’t good fer what ails me,” he said, “not after what he done put my intestines through already. But anyways, time don’t matter no more. Sooner or later, that’s all that matters. Today or next week or someyear when Mister Chester Arthur ain’t even President no longer. Because I got a whole lifetime I’m gonter be contented to devote to it now.”

So he was standing at the side of the Cones toga, dipping water from a lashed-down canister, when he overheard the conversation. The women had paused to rest now themselves, although their dialogue meant nothing to him:

“Oh, dear, sometimes I’m afraid we just won’t find him after all—”

“And it’s our own fault too, for waiting so long to look Six wasted years, when we should never have let him leave to begin with. Never—”

“Yet it frightens me at times, the extent of our obsession. Why, even that young girl these people are following, would you believe that even she reminded me of him slightly?”

“Oh, but by now he must be far too manly to resemble any young lady—”

“Of course, it was only illusion. But I’ve longed for him so deeply, so deeply—”

“I too, I too!”

“Well, shall we move on, Miss Youngblood?”

“Let’s, Miss Grimshaw.”

Hoke strolled back to the surrey.

Three hours later it happened. Afterward, Hoke would find it difficult to remember how, since he was never aware of the exact point at which logic ceased and the other, the intuitive, took hold.

Because he had been squinting ahead at the abandoned farmhouse for some time before it did. They were going fast also, passing only the first of the once-cultivated fields in fact, and there were no signs at all, nothing to indicate that Dingus had even taken this same road, let alone might have stopped. Yet suddenly Hoke knew, felt it even before realizing that he felt anything at all, because his left hand had already lifted involuntarily to obstruct Belle’s right, staying the whip. “Hang it,” she demanded, “now what the—?”

And then it must have been in his face too, the same certainty, although he still could not have explained, nor did he even glance toward her. But somehow there was contagion in it, in his posture alone perhaps, because Belle slowed the team at once. The house itself was roughly a hundred yards off the road, the gutted barn beyond that, and they were only now abreast of both. “What?” she whispered. “Do you see—?”

They went another thirty or forty yards before they stopped completely, and after that several moments elapsed in which neither of them moved, in which only the horses snorted and heaved in their traces. Belle was clutching her shotgun. A single jay swooped by in the heat, in the hot bright calm afternoon glare.

Then Hoke was running. And this too, this without question now was instinct, some queer spontaneous impulse beyond thought, because still he had not seen him yet at all — had bolted from the surrey and was sprinting across the eroded ancient plowditches and had actually covered one third of the distance to the house before he did, before Dingus appeared. Dingus still wore the red dress, although without the bonnet now, without the pillow as well. He had emerged leisurely, carrying a shovel, strolling toward the barn.

And then perhaps Hoke was thinking again at last, had begun to think, to remember, the lost money, rewards gained and stolen and re-established and lost again, frustration that seeped to the deepest marrow of his bones, the aggregate affront to his soul itself. Perhaps he was, because he told himself, “Yair, but he’s kilt now, at last he’s kilt and I kin get some peace.” But there remained something scarcely rational about him at the same time, even then, since he did not shoot but merely continued to run, if not quite without reason then recklessly at the very least since the furrowed earth had begun to give beneath his boots now, was crumbling with every stride so that he slipped and flailed and almost fell more than once. But he was lucky too. Dingus himself had still failed to notice him, still strolled there casually.

Then Hoke saw Dingus see him. And still he ran, heedless, the Smith and Wesson cocked in his fist now but with that still not raised for use yet either, toward where the other had abruptly whirled, where Dingus himself now stood likewise without firing or possibly even unarmed since he made no move to withdraw a weapon from his garments, from the red frills. Probably it was incredulity more than surprise which held him, momentary incapacity at the sight of Hoke in a dress of his own and with the irrationality patent in his very headlong attitude itself, as he stumbled and tripped yet came on maniacally like some infuriated hellbent mad scarecrow and still not firing but worse, looking as if he did not intend to fire at all but instead would obliterate Dingus through the sheer lunatic inertia of the rush alone. Hoke plunged on as if to run right over him.

Dingus threw the shovel. He was at last turning to flee then, however, so that Hoke did not have to swerve or even falter as the ponderous spinning missile shot wildly past his ear. Dingus darted back toward the house, his skirts sailing. Hoke was less than a dozen strides behind him.

He had closed half of that gap when Dingus disappeared as if swallowed by the earth itself.

Hoke pitched onto his face. In less than the duration of a blink against the sun, against the flung dirt from his heels, miraculously, Dingus was gone, Hoke was absolutely alone in the field.

But Hoke was truly thinking again now after all. Or perhaps not, perhaps this too was intuition, since it came so quickly that even bafflement was precluded for more than the first fleeting instant and after that he was up and plunging onward as before. “Because it’s jest a well,” he told himself and it was, although the mortared stones that had once encircled it had crumbled away and lay now scattered some distance beyond the pit itself. It was not wide, not four feet across. It was not deep either, clogged with earth and debris. From perhaps eight feet down Dingus was gaping wide-eyed, truly astonished — and at his own predicament rather than at the sight of Hoke now — but with his hands already braced against the shaft at his either side and posed as if to defy gravity and human capability and his own bewilderment at once, as if set to sprint back up and out again. “Now Hoke,” he said. “Now Hoke—”

Perhaps Hoke heard Belle also then, the single prohibitive outcry from somewhere behind him as she hastened across the field herself. Hoke was panting, and his chest filled and fell, but he did not wait. He did not even listen.

Steadying the Smith and Wesson in both hands, aiming with infinite deliberation, Hoke emptied all charged chambers into the narrow well.

The shots banged and echoed in the shaft, reverberating out across the low hills, repeating fitfully. Hoke Birdsill filled his lungs hungrily with the sweet warm air, with the pure cleansing taste of exoneration at last, of release. He did not look; there could scarcely be less need. With his shoulders squared as if for the first time in decades, unabashed by even the dress now, he strode back to meet Belle.

She had stopped some yards away. Nor did she move now, facing him with a kind of grim, constrained ferocity as he approached. Finally, wearily, she sobbed once. “Find it,” she said.

“What’s that, Belle?”

“What we came after, you banana-head. The safe. My money. You can use that shovel he ought to have brained you with. It shouldn’t take you more than eight or ten months to dig up every square foot of ground out here that he might have picked to—”

“But—”

She got around to hitting him then, a response he was growing accustomed to. He went down stifflegged, precisely as he had the last time, save with no wall to slump against. It didn’t hurt. He sat forlornly for a moment or two just watching while she herself gazed stolidly about, wishing remotely that he were back in Yerkey’s Hole with young Fiedler and his womenless troopers. The captain seemed intelligent, the last sort to be engulfed in such sexual maelstroms. Hoke wished advice.

“All right,” Belle was saying at last, “maybe we’ll have some luck. Maybe we’ll find fresh dirt, if the rat-holing little exhibitionist didn’t have time to disguise it proper.”

“I were digging up graves and making them look ordinary again when I weren’t but eight years old,” the voice informed them then, distantly, muffled and hollow yet hideously, sickeningly familiar. “You kin poke around from now ‘til Doomsday and you ain’t gonter find it, not unless I get drugged up out’n here first.”

Slack-jawed, Hoke had sprung to his hands and knees. This time when she hit him it was only out of relief.

“Get a ladder,” she told him disgustedly. “There must be one in the barn. If you can find the barn.”

“And git me some new boots,” the voice contributed. “You mule-sniffing blind cockroach, you done put a leak in the toe of one of’em—”

It was a cemetery in actual fact, roughly a quarter of a mile beyond the barn itself, where four rotted wood crosses marked the remains of the family whose farm it was, or had been. And he was right. The grave he had contrived for the trunk was identical with the others, undiscernible as new.

Belle stood above him with the shotgun while he performed the excavation, although Hoke had to help with the lifting. “But I weren’t never very exceptional at physical doings,” Dingus said. When they finished hoisting it aboard the surrey he turned to grin at them affably.

“Sort of a shame you caught up so quick,” he decided, “since it would of nacherly been a even pleasanter joke if’n I dint return it fer a week or so, like I planned. Oh well, it were enjoyable anyways. But seeing as how it’s terminated, I’ll jest mosey on along then, I reckon—”

“Say your prayers,” Belle told him.

“Aw now, Belle, you’re smiling when you say that, I reckon—”

“I’ll give you three minutes, twerp.”

“But—”

Dingus studied her dubiously, then looked to Hoke instead, although Hoke had hardly anything more comforting to offer. In fact he had begun to nibble his mustache in anticipation, all the promise renewed again despite its brief debacle. He was even eyeing the shotgun greedily.

Belle merely gazed at him askance.

“Aw, shucks now,” Hoke pleaded, “them durned forty-fours jest weren’t never worth much fer accuracy to start with. But if’n I had a chance with that there scattershooter— especially it still being me he done give the heartache to fer the longest spell. On top of which I could get them rewards again, and—”

“We’ll both do it,” Belle decided abruptly. “Why, sure. A gentleman and a lady planning to get spliced, they ought to start sharing their satisfactions early anyways—”

“Married?” Dingus popped back into the conversation eagerly. “Well, say now, let me be the first to—”

“You’d put a curse on it,” Belle said. “And that’s a minute gone now. You better get to praying, I reckon.”

“Oh, I weren’t never the praying sort,” Dingus went on undeterred. “Jest sort of a old Emersonian, were all. But lookie here, I ain’t truly a bad nipper at heart. Matter of fact I doubtless wouldn’t of never wound up the way I done, if’n I’d had a mother to guide me in this life. And jest to show you there’s no hard feelings — why, here, I’d be obliged if’n I could give you a wedding present. It’s—”

The shotgun lifted threateningly as Dingus fumbled in his skirts, but it was only a watch. “Don’t keep time too hot,” he admitted, “sort of antique. But it’s all engraved right smartly too. Here, what it says, it’s ‘To my darling Ding, he rings the bell.’ It were my—”

“What?”

Belle snatched the object from his hand. Then, inexplicably, staring at it, she turned livid. “Why, you immoral, dirty-livered skunk, where’d you get this? You even went and stole this somewheres too, didn’t you? Well, hang it all, that’s the end now, the absolute mother-loving end. Because if—”

“Huh?” Dingus backed off more in perplexity than protest as she glared at him. “Now confound it, Belle, I never done stole it neither. Like I jest started to remark, that watch belong to—”

“Lissen, you lying-mouthed little pussy-poacher, I gave this identical timepiece to somebody exactly twenty years ago, before the ornery polecat went and lost me to a white slaver in a faro game and started me on the road to ruin. Here, where it says he rings the bell, it was supposed to say Belle, with an e, but the jeweler made a mistake. From me to him, my first husband. And Ding was short for—”

“Dilinghaus? You? You done give that watch to—”

“What? Dilinghaus, sure. Of course. But how the thun-deration would you know that, you conniving little—”

“But that were my daddy’s name. That were—”

“Your da— But then — but then you’re—not the beautiful baby son they made me leave behind? Not the baby I’ve wept for in my secret misery for all these long, long years—”

“And then you’re my — my—”

“My baby! Oh, my precious, precious baby!”

“Mommy! Oh, my very own, my long-lost mommy!” Belle threw aside the shotgun. Dingus discarded the Colt he had been surreptitiously manipulating from beneath his skirts. Hoke stood amazed with the wonder of it, but already beginning to sob for a sentimental old fool himself, as they rushed to each other, as they embraced.

It was well after midnight before he was able to slip from the farmhouse. Stealthily he led one of the horses to the road.

There were no saddles, so he was still busily improvising a workable bit and reins when Dingus approached with another of the animals. For a time they gazed at each other without expression.

“All right,” Hoke said finally, “I’ll say it quick. And it ain’t even the idea of getting hitched, which maybe I done been a bachelor long enough to accept anyways. And doubtless I could even get used to you being a part of it. But not when she made me kiss your boyish brow goodnight like a daddy oughter, which is jest one step more’n any self-respecting man could take. So meantimes what’s your reason?”

“All that talking she done about the three of us turning respectable,” Dingus said. “About going somewheres that nobody knows us and living like good Christian folk. Because I been there before, with every danged relative I ever got tied to. I’ll take my chances on remaining a orphan, if’n it’s all the same.”

“How far will she chase us, do you reckon?”

Just south of San Francisco, an ill-guarded freight office supplied the price of their fares. She emptied several lethal devices from the wharf about seven minutes after the gangplank was raised, but the damage to the smokestack was nominal. They had to share a cabin with two other gentle-men, having been unexpected, and while they got on with both, it was the youth, Doolan, for whom they felt the larger affection. Rowbottom’s flatulence drove them above decks often. Otherwise poker for modest stakes occupied them until Valparaiso.

The Ballad of Dingus Magee

It was dusk that night when he rode on in

To the town of Yerkey’s Hole—

He was only a boy just turned nineteen,

Yet the gallows was his goal.

For Dingus Magee was a desperate lad,

The worst New Mex. then saw—

‘Twas plain he’d come with aroused intent

To trample on the law.

But the law in town was a sheriff bold,

Hoke Birdsill was his name,

And Hoke himself was no man’s fool

In that deadly shooting game.

So both were calm, and hard as rock,

Though bullets flew like hail,

As they staged their mortal duel that night,

In the street before the jail.

And then what occurred was an awesome thing

That cowards fear to tell—

For some say Hoke took so much lead

He sank clear down to hell.

But others remark ‘twas queerer still

For Dingus Magee, alas—

They claim he crawled off limp to die

While caressing a maiden’s knee.

Yet none can name, and name for true

The place where each was laid,

And none can judge, are heroes born,

Or are they only made?

But sometimes still, in Yerkey’s Hole,

Where Belle’s Place used to lie,

It seems you can hear the banging yet—

“That’s them!” old-timers cry.

Refrain

But sometimes still, in Yerkey’s Hole,

& Cetera.

Mrs. Agnes Pfeffer Fiedler

Yerkey’s Hob, 1885