A Congregation of Jackals Read online

  He heard hooves to his right and pointed the tip of his rifle in that direction. A pocket in the maelstrom opened, revealing the dark silhouette of a horse upon which a rider clung, hunched forward, face pressed to the saddle. Dicky squeezed the trigger, flung the lever forward and fired again at the dark shape. The second bullet sped through the cylinder in the dust sliced by the first, into the rider’s back. The man cried out and fell from his horse. Before the pocket in the maelstrom closed, the New Yorker saw a hoof land upon the fallen rider’s right shin and snap it.

  A faint creaking of wood sounded behind Dicky; he spun to it. A dust-obfuscated man had his hands clasped to the balustrade—he was pulling himself up to the platform. The New Yorker pointed the tip of his gun at the climber and threw his trigger-guard forward. The metallic clack alerted the man; he reached for his hip; Dicky squeezed off a shot that splattered crimson upon the dust behind the foe’s head. The agglutination of grit and blood fell like gumdrops to the ground; the man toppled a moment later.

  A pocket in the dust revealed two horses carrying hunched riders toward the church. Dicky aimed his gun; dust abruptly swirled in the gap and precluded his shot.

  The muzzle of a revolver pressed into Dicky’s nape. Only after he felt the cold contact of the weapon did he notice that the floorboards of the gazebo had sunk an eighth of an inch.

  The owner of the weapon said, “Drop it.”

  Dicky hesitated.

  A fist pounded the right side of the New Yorker’s head; his right ear rang and burned; his cheek swelled with an instantaneous bruise. Dicky gasped and then coughed the handkerchief from his mouth.

  “Drop it,” the man commanded.

  In that moment, Dicky contemplated spinning around and firing at his assailant, an act that would likely end his foe’s life and certainly call his own to a close, simply and swiftly.

  Instead, the great seducer dropped his rifle; it clattered upon the gazebo planks. He did not know if this act was the result of cowardice or optimism. Clearly some part of him felt that he had a chance against Quinlan . . . or at least a chance to somehow escape this showdown alive.

  The captor snatched the revolver Dicky had secreted beneath his belt and flung it to the platform, where it bounced twice.

  The New Yorker glanced behind him and saw a person he did not recognize. The man was an Indian about his age with a scarf drawn across his nostrils and mouth, and spectacle lenses pulled against his eyes by a rag with two holes in it. He wore a vest made from the skins of wolves.

  “Turn around,” the Indian said. The New Yorker complied.

  The captor pressed his gun into Dicky’s back and urged him toward the steps with a sharp jab and the word “walk.” The New Yorker strode slowly across the planks, his hands in the air. When he reached the stairs, he intended to fall down them and lunge to the right . . . and hope that the dust obscured him well enough to provide an opportunity for escape.

  The fickle wind languished for a moment and then blew south.

  Standing outside the gazebo were three more men; all of them had guns pointed at Dicky. The New Yorker recognized none of them, but they all recognized him through the owlish lenses pressed to their eyes.

  “Bind him,” the Indian said just before he shoved Dicky from the gazebo. The ground slammed into the most handsome man within the Trailspur city limits. The wind burst from his lungs; when he gasped, he inhaled a small sharp rock.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A Holy Union

  T.W. walked his daughter up the blue carpet that delineated the two filled halves of the church. Wilfreda enthusiastically played the hymn Beatrice had selected, an ornate composition called “He Observes His Children with Love,” written by an English composer a century earlier. James stood on the podium, his hands clasped together to keep his fingers from fidgeting. In the sheriff’s estimation, the groom’s anxiousness had dissipated during the last hour. Perhaps the threat that worried James and his friends would not disturb this sacred day after all.

  Minister Orton walked to the edge of the dais, stopped, put his hands behind his back and looked at the congregation; a toothy grin creased the beard that surged like a waterfall from his face. T.W. walked Beatrice to the holy man; the minister delicately took her left hand and led her to James. The sheriff walked away from the dais and sat in the aisle seat of the front right pew, beneath which he had earlier secreted the box containing the shawl and revolver.

  Meredith took his hand, squeezed it and kissed his cheek; the affections helped dull the unexpectedly sharp pangs of melancholy that the act of handing over his daughter had engendered. Wilfreda’s hands wove a difficult counterpoint upon the piano; for a moment, T.W. thought he heard a dim rumble beneath the music, but the elusive noise was covered over by the minister’s explosive laughter.

  “Isn’t this a handsome couple,” the holy man said, surveying the bride and groom. “Are you two ready to make yourselves one in the eyes of the Christ?”

  “Sure am,” James said.

  “I know he likes the look of you two together,” the minister said and clapped his hands.

  Beatrice, less interested in the man’s patois, nodded and said, “Thank you. Please begin the ceremony, Minister Orton.”

  “First I want to show you something I brung. Just the bride. It’s something I only take out on special occasions like this. Follow me.”

  Beatrice, surprised by Minister Orton’s request, walked away from James and strode alongside the holy man.

  When they stood beside the lectern, the minister said to the assemblage in a cold and unfriendly voice, “I want you fools to pay attention to this.”

  T.W. felt a chill crawl up his spine; he rose from his chair, as did Goodstead one pew behind him. James stared at the minister, mouth open.

  With his steely left hand, Minister Orton grabbed the back of Beatrice’s head and slammed her face into the lectern, where the cartilage of her nose snapped. She cried out in surprise and pain.

  T.W., James and Goodstead ran at the minister.

  The holy man withdrew a revolver from a hollowed-out Bible and pressed the wide barrel to the back of Beatrice’s head. He thumbed the hammer; the metal clicked.

  T.W., James and Goodstead stopped.

  The sheriff looked at his daughter; her face was pressed flat to the hard surface of the lectern; her shoulders shook; a thin moan escaped her lips that made him want to die.

  The minister leaned his left elbow on Beatrice’s nape and tapped the back of her skull with the butt of his revolver.

  “Back off fellas.” The three men withdrew.

  “Leave off of my wife,” James said.

  “You didn’t get married. And you shouldn’t lie about your vows in God’s house unless you want something bad to happen.”

  “What do you want?” T.W. said, unable to look at his convulsive daughter, his hands balled up into hard fists.

  “There’s still some more guests coming. All we’ve gotta do is wait for them to show. Quiet now.”

  The shocked congregation was silent. The sound that T.W. had barely discerned during Wilfreda’s playing became audible to the entire congregation—it was the rumbling tattoo of hooves.

  A gunshot echoed in the distant plains, followed by another and then another.

  “That’s them,” the minister said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Late Arrivals

  Oswell and Godfrey unhitched Tim Halders’s carriage; the freed brace of horses fled from the oncoming dust storm. The Danfords pulled the coach in front of the main church doors, dug their fingers beneath the lower planks and heaved; the vehicle tipped onto its side, upraised wheels spinning.

  Godfrey reached his hand into the dirt, found the coil of rope buried there and yanked hard. The trunk opened, revealing the three lever-action rifles they had earlier secreted there. He grabbed the guns by the barrels.

  Oswell yanked the rope from the trunk lid, hurried to the church entrance and wound the co
rd tightly around the bronze doorknobs to discourage anyone within from poking his or her curious head out into the middle of a gunfight.

  Godfrey stacked the loaded magazines beside the rifles on the bulge of the overturned carriage.

  Oswell snatched the pair of binoculars from the trunk and shut it. The rancher looked east: the gazebo and everything beyond it was obliterated by the dust storm, now only two hundreds yards off.

  Godfrey said, “I hope Dicky got some of them.”

  “I recognized the sound of the lever-action. He got some shots off.”

  “He didn’t run out on us.”

  “He didn’t.”

  The Danfords, all but their heads shielded by the tipped-over carriage, watched the oncoming storm and waited.

  “I didn’t expect anything like this,” Godfrey said. “I can’t believe he did all this just to get back at us.”

  “He might have more than just revenge on his mind.”

  Godfrey ruminated for a moment and said, “Maybe we were fools to think we could outsmart a fellow like Quinlan at his own setup.”

  “We didn’t have choice. We couldn’t leave this mess to Lingham.”

  “Yeah.”

  The brothers looked at each other for a moment, then looked back at the dust storm one hundred yards off.

  Godfrey said, “If you make it and I don’t, will you bury me next to Ma? I said I never wanted to go back to Pineville, but I can’t think of another place for you to put me.”

  “I’ll bury you there.”

  “Thanks.”

  They watched the maelstrom inhale the sky and the ground, a filthy eclipse.

  The Danford brothers pulled handkerchiefs from their pockets and tied them over their noses and mouths. They fastened the leather cords of their hats securely beneath their chins.

  The brothers snatched up their rifles and trained them upon the center of the column, pressing the stocks of their rifles deeply into their armpits. Less than fifty yards separated them from the roiling grit. Oswell felt the rumble of hooves in his stomach.

  The prow of the dust storm struck the Danfords. They tilted their heads down, using the brims of their hats and the butts of their guns to shield their aiming eyes. A dark horizontal shape flickered by.

  “No rider,” Godfrey said.

  The Danfords withheld their fire.

  The silhouette of a low-flying bird floated across the haze, the air’s usurpation by soil leaving it befuddled. A gunshot cracked; the shadow flinched and then sank from the sky, flapping only its right wing.

  “That shot came from over there,” Oswell pointed.

  Each Danford fired a round, threw the lever and fired a second round. A weak moan sounded from the other side of the veil.

  The wind turned; a pocket of clear air opened up. Oswell saw the haunches of a horse and the edge of a saddle. He pointed where the rider ought to be (if someone was atop the horse—he could not tell) and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle cracked; the bullet whistled, scoring a groove across the dust. He threw the lever on his rifle and fired a second shot before he knew if the first one had hit its mark.

  A man clasping his bleeding neck fell backward into the pocket of clear air, gurgling.

  Oswell raised his binoculars and looked at the fallen rider.

  “Do you recognize him?” Godfrey asked.

  “No.”

  Godfrey snatched the binoculars and caught a glimpse of the dying man before swirling motes filled the gap.

  He said, “Looks like a rough or a mule skinner.”

  “Quinlan’s throwing cheap guns at us first. Each of these we put down is one less he has to pay when it’s over.”

  Godfrey set the binoculars down, wiped grit from his aiming eye and nodded.

  The dust swirled in a strong crosscurrent; the Danfords waited for other gaps of clarity to appear in the dingy maelstrom, but instead found themselves in an exposed pocket. Six whistling gunshots lanced through the haze at them, one of which cracked and spun the wheel beside Godfrey’s head. The Danfords returned fire until their rifles were empty, at which point they ducked behind the carriage. The duo plucked magazines from their stocks, rammed new ones in and flung the trigger guards forward to draw bullets into the chambers.

  Oswell laid upon his stomach, inched across the dirt to the edge of his cover and pointed his muzzle up. At the other side of the carriage, he saw Godfrey kneel and aim his weapon out.

  A gap opened up in the dust immediately before Oswell. A boot came down and stomped upon the barrel of his gun, pressing the muzzle into the dirt. A stillborn round caused the weapon to lurch in his hands. He looked up.

  “Hello, Oswell,” one of the twins said, the grin on his cracked bronze face framed by a prickly beard and tangled black hair. He drew his gun and pointed it at the rancher’s face more quickly than the pinned man could even pull a trigger, much less draw.

  Oswell turned and yelled, “Godfrey, they’re at us!”

  The rancher finished his sentence an instant before a boot kicked the rifle from his brother’s hands; the weapon spun into the air and struck the church behind them. The other twin drew two revolvers and pressed their barrels to Godfrey’s skull.

  The one standing over Oswell said, “I hope there’s room for all of us at the service. I love weddings, and so does Arthur—though he gets weepy sometimes.”

  Oswell glanced at the other twin’s face; the swarthy, thorny visage was an inscrutable mask.

  “He don’t talk no more. After you left us to those Appanuqis we got into a predicament where the toddler got killed and my brother lost his tongue.”

  The talkative twin kicked the pinned rifle from Oswell’s grip; it spun across the dirt until it struck a rock five yards off.

  “Both of you get up,” the talker said.

  Oswell pressed his palms to the dirt and began to rise. The talker kicked out his left hand; he thudded back to the ground.

  “Up, I said.”

  Oswell put his palms to the ground, waited for a boot that did not come, and stood up; the top of his head came to the talker’s eyes.

  “Put your hands behind your backs.”

  Godfrey reached behind his back; Arthur swept his legs out from under him, sending him to the dirt. The silent twin stabbed a knee into the plump man’s spine, holstered one of his own guns and plucked the hidden revolver from Godfrey’s belt.

  “You don’t have a gun back there, do you?” The talker spun Oswell around and felt his lower back for a weapon that was not there. He did not check the rancher’s boot.

  Arthur wove a burlap cord around Godfrey’s wrists in the shape of an eight; he pulled the binding tight; the twines creaked. He sheathed his gun and tied an adamantine knot with both hands. The silent twin stood up and pointed his weapon at Oswell.

  The talker said, “I’m trussin’ you like your brother—if that’s actually him neath all that whale blubber.”

  Oswell felt a piece of cord encircle his left wrist and then wind around the other. The talker yanked the binding; the twines creaked; the rancher’s wrists throbbed and his fingertips became cold, yet he remained silent—he knew that an admission of pain would add to the twin’s enjoyment of this act.

  “Don’t blame me—Arthur’s the one who wants it tight. He likes it when the hands turn purple.” The captor sheathed his gun and then tied a firm knot; Oswell’s middle and ring fingers twitched from the constrictive binding. Arthur grabbed Godfrey by the collar and pulled him to his feet.

  Oswell saw the talker turn east and wave; the rancher looked over his shoulder. The tops of four horses and the riders they carried glided across the settling dust toward him like swans on water. Slung like a rice sack over the rear of one of the steeds was Dicky, covered with grit. Oswell had presumed that the man had died at the gazebo, but seeing him captured—and neutralized for certain—dashed his last reasonable hope of regaining his freedom.

  “There’s only one more of you—that dumb giant—and I’m certai
n Orton’s got him cowed with the rest of the congregation by now.”

  Oswell and Godfrey exchanged a morbid glance.

  “Fooled you, didn’t he?”

  The Tall Boxer Gang’s efforts as sentries had safeguarded the guests from nothing more dangerous than that idiot turkey farmer. They had trusted in Sheriff Jeffries’s assessment of the minister, but the lawman had not known how cunning and dangerous the enemy was. Oswell would have wagered that Minister Orton was a real holy man (albeit one who had fallen from His graces) who could have talked at length about any section of the Bible and also performed the ceremony believably. Quinlan was a man of minutiae.

  “You ain’t got somethin’ to say about all this?” the talker asked Oswell.

  He did not respond. He knew from experience that anything he said to the misanthrope would encourage more violence.

  “Look over there,” the talker said.

  Oswell looked east to where the man pointed. A small black square appeared in the swirling motes, though at this distance he could not identify what he was looking at.

  The four men on horses, including the Indian who carried Dicky, rode up alongside the twins and the Danfords. Oswell looked at the New Yorker’s face; blood ran from cuts on his bruised brow and cheek up his forehead and into his black hair, the result of being slung head down over the horse’s hindquarters. Dicky was conscious, though beaten and dazed.

  “Tie those horses up,” the talker said to the four men.

  The Indian, clothed in moccasins, trousers and a vest made from wolf skins, climbed off of his brown mare and pointed to the New Yorker slung over its haunches.

  “We’re taking him in,” the talker clarified.

  The Indian grabbed Dicky by the hair and yanked him to the ground, where he thudded like a dropped bag of laundry. The bloodied man raised his head from the dirt and looked at the Danfords; none of them said anything.

  Oswell looked back at the dark square and found that it had resolved itself into the front view of a beige and green stagecoach pulled by a team of six horses at a steady canter. Godfrey looked over at the vehicle. Dicky raised his head and stared at it through bleary eyes.