Dead Man’s Hand (5 page)

Morgan suspected that the stranger was right. This gambler needed to be stopped. But
killing a clockwork wouldn’t be easy. Their inner parts were shielded by nickel and
tin, and you never knew where their vital gears hid. Thirteen Comancheros had had
a bout with one down on the border a couple years back. Rumor said it had taken twenty-three
bullets to bring him down. Eleven Comancheros died.

Clockworks were quick on the draw, deadly in their aim. The stranger called this one
a “gambler,” but clockworks had been created to be soldiers and guards and gunslingers.

“What brand?” Morgan asked.

“Sharps.”

Morgan ground his teeth. He’d hoped that it might be some cheap Russian model, built
during the Crimean War. The Sharps clockworks had a reputation. Going up against one
was almost suicide.

Yet Morgan had taken a handout from a
stranger
, and he’d known that there would be a day of reckoning. “Where do I find him?”

“Heading toward Fort Laramie…” the stranger said. “The gambler is like a bomb, with
a fuse lit. In four days, six hours, and seven minutes, he will kill again.”

The stranger turned into an oily shadow and wafted away.

* * *

Morgan hardly slept that night. Gold had been discovered in the Black Hills, and prospectors
were crawling all over the wilderness north of Fort Laramie, the biggest supply depot
in the West. Tens of thousands were riding in on the new rail lines.

The Indians didn’t like it. After getting pushed around for years, Sioux holy men
like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were on the warpath, trying to drive off the miners,
much as they’d tried to hold off the homesteaders and buffalo hunters.

Only this time, the way Morgan figured it, there was going to be a bloodbath. You
can only steal so much from a man before he has to push back. Morgan didn’t fancy
blundering into such a mess. Some Sioux had big magic.

At dawn he rode east toward Frenchman’s Ferry, climbing over the hills. A day later,
he found a single skinwalker’s track between two boulders, in a land covered by worn
sandstone rocks and sparse grasses. The creature had been leaping from boulder to
boulder, hiding its trail. But it had come to a place where the rocks were too far
apart.

Like many skinwalkers, Coyote Shadow had turned himself into a beast once too often,
and now he’d lost himself. His print was something halfway between a human foot and
a bear’s paw. Coyote Shadow had become only half a man.

Much like me
, Morgan thought. He’d carried a torch for Sherman, had forced womenfolk from their
houses and set entire cities aflame. Sometimes folks had refused to leave their homes,
and he’d heard the women screaming in the fires.

He forced down the memories.

Morgan slid from his saddle and studied the print. The dusty ground here had given
easily, yielding a deep track with crisp ridges. The track looked fresh—hours old.

Morgan searched the bleak landscape: sandstone thrusting up from broken ground, dry
grass and sage, and little else.

During the heat of the day, any sane Indian would have stopped in the shade, though
there wasn’t much of it here to take solace in.

Morgan’s mare nickered and shied back a step, as if she’d caught a dangerous scent.

Morgan sniffed. Between the iron odor of rocks and dry grass, he smelled an undertone—like
garlic rubbed in fur.

A skinwalker.

He’d been hunting the creature for months, and now he resented finding it. He was
on his way to kill the clockwork gambler.

But justice demanded that he finish this monster.

He searched uphill. A pile of sandstone boulders stood at its crown, with a single
rock jutting up from it in a small pinnacle. Yucca plants and a few junipers grew
tall in the pinnacle’s shadow.

The skinwalker is up there
, Morgan realized.
He could be watching me.

Morgan studied the shadows. Nothing stirred. Perhaps the skinwalker was sleeping.

Morgan tied his pony to a mesquite bush, pulled his Winchester from the saddle holster,
and began picking his way uphill, weaving behind rocks and bushes in case the skinwalker
tried to take a long shot.

Fifteen minutes later, Morgan reached the rocks, and in the shade of a juniper found
some crushed grass where the skinwalker had bedded. He’d left only moments ago.

Biting his lip, Morgan leapt to the far side of the rock and scanned the landscape.
He saw the skinwalker, rushing uphill toward the next ridge, a lumbering mound of
shaggy fur. His long arms swung with every stride, and he ran low to the ground, like
an ape, but Coyote Shadow still wore the scrap of a loincloth. He moved fast, faster
than a horse could run.

The creature was more than two hundred yards out, and as he neared the ridge, he turned
and glanced back.

Morgan had time for one shot before the sorcerer escaped. He crouched behind a rock
and steadied his aim. The skinwalker saw him, whirled, and doubled his speed.

Morgan’s hands shook. Mouth went dry. Heart pounded. He gasped.

Buck fever.

He didn’t want it to end this way—shooting the skinwalker in the back. Morgan had
imagined catching Coyote Shadow, taking him to some town where a judge would see that
he was hanged proper.

Morgan forced himself to stop breathing, lined the skinwalker up in his sights, and
squeezed gently.

The rifle cracked and jumped in his hands. The skinwalker didn’t jerk or stumble.
Instead, his stride seemed clean, uninterrupted, as he disappeared over the hill.

Still, that didn’t mean that Morgan hadn’t wounded the beast. Morgan once had seen
a rebel lieutenant die in combat—he charged into battle, swinging a sword in one hand
and shooting a revolver from the other while bullet holes blossomed on his chest like
roses. “Charging Dead,” Morgan called it.

So he took note of the place where the skinwalker had stood as Morgan fired, near
a large rock with a yucca plant, then hurried to the spot.

He found the monster’s tracks and studied the ground for blood, a clump of hair, hoping
for or any other sign that the skinwalker was wounded.

Morgan tracked the monster over one ridge, then another.

As the sun began to wallow on the horizon in a leaden sky, and bats wove through the
air, he admitted defeat. Not a drop of blood could be found. He’d missed.

* * *

That night, the moon hid beneath bands of clouds, and a south wind from the Gulf of
Mexico smelled of rain. Morgan camped without a fire, not wanting to risk setting
the prairie alight.

He couldn’t sleep. He’d ruined Coyote Shadow’s rest, and he worried that the skinwalker
might come creeping into his camp, hoping for vengeance. So for long hours, Morgan
lay quietly listening for the crunch of a foot in the prairie soil with his pistol
in hand, just beneath his blanket.

As the hours stretched, he dozed sporadically, but would wake again with a start.
A screech owl hunted nearby, flying low, shrieking every few minutes as it tried to
startle mice from their hiding places.

Long after midnight, Morgan decided to relax and put his hat over his eyes. Suddenly
it was knocked away, and he rose up and fired blindly, just as the owl winged off.

His hat lay on the ground next to him. The bird had swooped low and struck it. Apparently
the bit of rabbit fur on the brim looked too much like a varmint to the owl.

Morgan turned over, indignant, and after many minutes he slid into an uneasy slumber.

He dreamt that he was in a shop, where a tinkerman with a big, white handlebar moustache
and penetrating blue eyes worked at piecing together clockwork soldiers.

One soldier lay like a patient on a surgeon’s table. The tinkerman had its chest cavity
open and was grasping something inside: it was a huge golden coil spring, nearly lost
amid gears and pistons. Part pocket watch, part steam engine, the insides of the clockwork
soldier were somehow more greasy and filthy than Morgan had imagined they could be.

The tinkerman nodded toward a crate and said in a deep Georgia drawl, “Son, would
you be so kind as to fish a heart outta that box?”

The shop had bits and pieces of clockwork everywhere: a shelf of expressionless faces,
waiting to come to life; arms and legs hanging from the rafters like dry sausages
in a Mexican cantina; tubes and gizmos lying in heaps on counters and on the floor.

Morgan looked into the box. He found dozens of hearts in it, barely beating, covered
in grease and oil, black and ugly.

Morgan picked up the largest, strongest-looking one. It throbbed in his grip, almost
slipping away. He handed it to the tinkerman.

“Much obliged,” the tinkerman said.

He thrust the heart into the contraption, piercing it through with the gold coil,
and the clockwork soldier jolted to life—hands flexing, a strangled cry rising from
its throat. Its mouth opened, and it whined stupidly, like an animal in pain.

The tinkerman smiled in satisfaction. “Perfect.”

Somehow, that pronouncement scared him. Would the clockwork gambler that he was hunting
be “perfect?” It sounded presumptuous.

Morgan wondered at that. He said, “When God made man, he only allowed that his creation
was ‘good.’”

The tinkerman glanced up, lips tight in anger, eyes twinkling. “God, sir, was not
a perfectionist. He failed as an organism. We superseded him.”

“Superseded?”

The tinkerman smiled cruelly. “He drove Adam from the Garden of Idunn. In some tales,
afterward, Adam made a spear and sneaked up on God while he was sleeping…”

Morgan woke, wondering. He’d heard in the war that God was dead. He never heard any
legends, though, about how it happened.

* * *

Morgan woke with a start, afraid that someone was sneaking up on him. He lay still
for several minutes, listening for the crackle of a footfall. Thin clouds filled the
sky, which was beginning to lighten on the horizon. Morning would not be far off.

Small birds flitted about in a nearby sage. Here in the desert, most birds were silent,
unwilling to call attention to themselves.

Morgan felt that something was wrong.

Suddenly, he realized that he hadn’t heard anything amiss. It was what he
didn’t
hear that bothered him—his horse. He lurched to his feet, swung his pistol around,
and peered into the shadows.

His horse was nowhere to be seen.

* * *

Coyote Shadow had circled Morgan, stolen his food, his hat, his rifle, and his horse.

Morgan must have worn himself out, trying to keep watch. The skinwalker could have
killed him in his sleep, but this Indian was more interested in counting coup, humiliating
Morgan, than taking his scalp.

“Hope you’re getting a good chuckle out of this!” Morgan shouted to the horizon.

He turned away from the skinwalker’s path and set off for Frenchman’s Ferry.

Morgan wasn’t the kind of man to chew on regret. In life, he believed that you have
to do the best you can. Sometimes you succeeded, sometimes you failed.

He’d lost Coyote Shadow, and by now the renegade was probably heading to join up with
Crazy Horse’s men; either that or he’d gone up into the aspen forests in the high
country. Morgan figured he’d never see Coyote Shadow again.

Yet he began to regret missing his shot at the skinwalker. He wondered about his buck
fever—the shaking hands, the dry mouth.

Too many men, when they get in a gunfight, will draw and fire wild, hitting only empty
air. That’s what gets them killed. A more experienced man will take a moment to aim—half
a second, if need be—and thus shoot his opponent.

Morgan was fast on the draw and had a steady aim, but he’d gotten buck fever.

His failure seemed a portent.

The clockwork gambler wouldn’t suffer from human debilities. He wouldn’t get excited
and drop his gun. He wouldn’t get a case of tremors. He wouldn’t pause because he
was having an attack of conscience.

He would just kill.

In some ways
, Morgan realized,
he’s better than me.

Morgan survived the next two days off strips of sliced prickly pear cactus, which
tasted like green beans, and yucca fruit, which were more like potatoes. The odd jack
rabbit added protein to the fare.

Four days after meeting the stranger, Morgan was hobbling along on sore feet, thirty
miles from Fort Laramie. If the stranger was right, someone would get killed today.
Morgan wouldn’t be there to stop it.

When he reached Frenchman’s Ferry, down on the North Platte, he spotted a miserable
little log shack. Bear traps, snowshoes, and other durable goods hung outside. A pair
of dogs—half mastiff and half wolf—guarded the door. Its smokestack was roiling, even
in the heat of the day, producing black clouds of smoke.

A bevy of greenhorns had just left the post, heading north into the wilderness.

Morgan hurried inside.

At the counter, an aging squaw sat with a basket of big turkey eggs. She hunched over
a lightbox—a box with a mirror on one wall, and an oil lamp in the middle. By holding
an egg up to the contraption, a person could check it for cracks or the blobs of half-formed
fetuses.

The squaw’s blouse was white with red polka dots—a Cheyenne design. But she wore buckskin
pants like a trapper, and her perfume smelled imported. She didn’t spare him a glance.

“Look around,” she offered in that Indian way that was more “careful” than “slow.”
The shop was filled with merchandise—tins of crackers, barrels of pickles, beans,
rice and wheat. On the wall behind the counter were hunting knives, a pair of shotguns—and
above them hung Morgan’s Winchester.

So the skinwalker had been here.

The gun didn’t interest him right now. The skinwalker had stolen it fair and square.
He’d counted coup and sold the gun. No sense arguing with the squaw about who owned
it. Morgan would just embarrass himself by admitting that it had once been his.