Fair Is the Rose (2 page)

Doc reluctantly looked over to the seventh white-draped figure. In all his days he'd never seen a man so difficult to put atop a horse and get a noose around his neck. Cain had required every one of the sheriff's deputies and even at the end, when his face was covered by the black bag and the men were ready to put the whip to his horse, Cain struggled and demanded that they wait for that telegram, the one he claimed was going to clear him.

The one that never came.

"Son of a bitch."
Doc hated a bad hanging. It made a man feel right uncomfortable inside just thinking about the horse rearing and Macaulay Cain twisting in the wind, no broken neck to put him out of his misery.

When all was done, the deputies had brought Cain to the office. They cut the hands free and crossed them over his chest in a reverent manner. But Doc was the one to take the black bag off the head. No one else would do it. In a really bad hanging the tongue gaped out and the expression was frozen into a mask of terror as the poor bastard struggled to breathe while the noose tightened around his neck. The deputies visibly flinched when Doc removed the bag, unsure of what they might see. But before the sheet went over Cain's head, they all were relieved to see the expression loose and peaceful beneath the outlaw's scruffy growth of beard.

Resigned to his task, Doc walked over to the last body. The sheriff would be there soon to take the gang away for burial. He'd best be quick.

He bent to get a length of rope to tie the shroud. The room was quiet except for the buzz of green flies against the windowpanes and the sound of Doc's breathing. He leaned over the body, hand outstretched to grasp the sheet.

Then he felt it.

Another man might not have taken note of the small drop of blood that plopped onto Doc's black store-bought shoes. A man less trained in the medicinal arts might never have given it a thought, but John Edward Amoss had spent forty of his sixty-odd years learning one thing: Dead men don't bleed.

Sure, in a hanging there was always some oozing around the neck, but not enough to run off the table and plop right onto his toe.

The hairs on the back of Doc's neck rose. His hands itched to remove the sheet, but his feet were wiser. He stepped back.

Too late.

The hand shot out from beneath the sheet and clamped around his neck. Doc squeaked like a prairie dog caught by a coyote, but no one heard him. The townfolk had all gathered on the prairie waiting for the burial.

A long moment passed while neither man moved, Doc and the infamous gunslinger poised like statuary. In the silence Doc heard the man's labored scratchy breathing as Cain greedily filled his lungs.

Unable to help himself, Doc croaked, "You coming alive just now, son?"

The outlaw swept the sheet from his face. He looked bad.
Too bad for a miracle.
His voice was painfully hoarse.
"Yeah.
Sure. I'm the Second Coming."

Doc nodded, too scared to laugh.

"The telegram.
Where's the goddamned telegram?" the renegade choked out, his words barely discernible.

"Nobody cleared you, son. No telegram came." All the while Doc said this he kept thinking about the twelve men the Dover gang had been convicted of shooting and wondered how many of those men were this one's doing. He wondered too if in the end the final toll wouldn't be thirteen.

Cain's hand tightened around his neck. Doc could hardly swallow.

"
You lying
to me?" The outlaw's features tightened, already pale with the trauma of the hanging.

"I wouldn't
lie
to you at a time like this, son."

Cain looked straight at Doc. Then he smiled, the smile never reaching his eyes. "I reckon I'll have to take you with me, Doc. I'm hell-bent to get outta this hanging town.
One way or the other."

The man quit smiling. His wrists bled, his neck bled. And by God, thought Doc, he has cold eyes.

Doc swallowed. Not easily, with the man's steely grip on his throat. "They ain't going to hang you again. They owe you. We all agree. It was a bad hanging."

"Bad all around," the man spat.

Doc didn't answer, his eyes drawn to the man's neck. The rope had sure made a bloody mess.

"You got a horse?"

Doc drew his gaze away from the wound.
"Yep.
Out back.
Good solid Indian pony. Take her."

"Gun?"

"Ain't got one.
Don't rightly believe in them.
Being a doctor and all."

"Then I'll take you with me. I gotta have some insurance." The man massaged his sore throat,
then
swung his legs over the side of the wake table. The fringe of his chaps was almost all sheared off, a sign of a renegade. Men running from the law sure as hell couldn't waltz into town to repair a harness. They used their fringe for everything from buckles to bootlaces.

Doc
swallowed,
conscious of the hand on his throat, the hand that at any minute could close and choke the life out of him. Fear made the blood drain from his face. "How far do you think you'll get with me dragging behind you?"

The outlaw stared. Those frigid gray eyes assessed Doc's paunch and balding head. "I need time" was all he offered.

Doc understood. "I won't tell. Not for a while anyways. That'll buy you some time. Get on out of here."

Those eyes
narrowed,
reminding Doc of a wolf s he'd once seen in the dead of winter. "Why would you do that for me?"

"I don't believe in hanging a man twice is all. You survived it.
Must be for some reason.
I ain't playing God."

The man pinned Doc with those eyes as his hand pinned him by the throat. "I need five minutes," he finally rasped. "If I don't get it, if you don't give it to me, I'll come back from the grave to get you."

"I swear you'll get your five minutes if I have to barricade the deputies from the door." Doc nodded as best he could.

Cautiously the man slid to the floor, his hand still clamped to Doc's throat. Together they walked over to the back door. For one brief second the two men looked at each other, a strange understanding passing between them. Just like that wolf, Doc thought, remembering how he'd lowered his rifle and die wolf ran off, leaving only the memory of those shattered-ice eyes.

The outlaw was at least a foot taller than the doctor, lean, hard, and capable from years in the saddle. There was no reason for Doc to say it, but he whispered it anyway, his throat still constricted from the power of the man's grip. "Good luck to you, Macaulay Cain."

The outlaw glanced at Doc, his expression startled. He looked as if he was about to say he didn't need any good luck from a man who had tried to hang him. But instead he took his moment, like the wolf, and he cleared the back door in a dead run. He leapt onto the startled Appaloosa in the corral and
hightailed
it west as if he were part Indian, with no need for a saddle or bridle to take him to the mountains that jagged up from the blue horizon.

And Doc watched him. Strangely anxious to see him free and gone, like that wolf in the snow.

Red is the rose

That in yonder garden grows

Fair is the lily of the valley

Clear is the water that flows from the Boyne

But my love is fairer than any. . . .

I
rish folksong

    
WRITTEN RY
T
ommy
M
akem

August 1875

When traveling she always wore black.
Widows were never questioned. They said all that needed to be said in the color of their weeds. Christal Van Alen had learned to wear black. She had learned the trick of wearing the black cotton gloves so no one would see she didn't have a wedding ring and therefore no late husband. And she had learned to wear the long black netting over her face, labeling her as a widow, veiling her features, obscuring her age. Dressed as she was, she rarely got inquiries, or conversation. It was safer that way. One would think that a woman traveling alone would want the friendly solicitations of her fellow passengers. But she'd learned, too, in her time out west that the only thing more dangerous than a renegade band of Pawnee was a stranger too inquisitive about her past.

The Overland Express coach hit a rut in the road, shoving her into the sharp corner of an object next to her on the seat. She eyed it, a small replica of a bureau that was the pride and joy of the hefty furniture salesman who held it.

She straightened, almost envying the salesman his wide girth. The stage accommodated six passengers, but the man next to her had been charged double fare because of the room needed for his samples and his large size. Squeezed between him and the side of the stagecoach, Christal could barely keep her skirts from being crushed. Her petite stature was no help. While the salesman was so heavy he hardly bounced around at all, she was thrust onto the corner of that tiny bureau at every jolt.

Clutching her grosgrain purse, she resumed her position, sitting primly, ankles crossed, hands placed one on top of the other in her lap. The ride grew smoother and she chanced a look at the other three passengers who had boarded the coach with them at Burnt Station.

One was an old man with a placid grandfatherly face. She thought he might have been a preacher when he reached inside his breast pocket and pulled out a book of Scripture. But then she noticed that the inside of the book was carved out to hold a small metal flask, which he eagerly swilled from, and she wasn't so sure anymore.

The young man next to him—a kid, really—looked anxiously out the window as if he was ashamed of riding in the coach instead of doing the manly thing by pulling his weight alongside on a cow pony. His traveling companion might have been his father, a grizzled character with a faded indigo vest and a large wiry gray beard that would have benefited from a pair of shears.

No one chatted. The "preacher" drank; the man in the blue vest dozed; the salesman stared at his little bureau as if thinking of his next account. Another jolt of the coach sent her once again into the vicious corner of the bureau.
This time she sat back rubbing her ribs.