Tim Curran - Skull Moon

Lauters touched his nose. "I know what he's like, just like I know he hides behind that badge and the U.S. Government."

"He do that to you, Sheriff?"

Lauters nodded. "He did."

Gantz' eyes narrowed. "He's a rough one, that Longtree. How well I know that. He's fast with an iron and faster with his fists. He was a scout for the army, you know that?"

Lauters shook his head.

"Pretty good one from what I hear. Not surprising with that Crow blood in him. I heard tell he was a fighter out in San Fran before turning bounty hunter and lawman."

Lauters didn't doubt this. There were few men he couldn't lick, but Longtree fought like a possessed man. "A professional, eh?"

"Yep. Back in the early sixties. They called him Kid Crow out there. He barefisted with some of the best, made a roll of cash I heard. Went ten rounds with Jimmy Elliot, I'm told. Got his plow cleaned pretty good, but he held up."

Lauters took this all in. "He's trouble, Gantz. We gotta get rid of him."

"A federal marshal?"

"Don't matter," Lauters explained. "Like I said, I'm the law around here. If a man was to say, shoot him in the back, there'd be no questions asked. And there might be some money to be had for the man who did it."

"Keep talking, Sheriff, you interest me…"

"Strange him not being around, wouldn't you say, Bill?"

Lauters was at Dr. Perry's house. After he struck his deal with the devil, he rode back into town and stopped by Perry's for some dinner and conversation. The dinner was good-smoked ham, roasted potatoes, apple pie-but the conversation was lacking.

"Everything about Claussen is strange to me," Lauters said, lighting one of the doctor's cigars. "If he ran off it suits me fine."

Perry stroked his mustache. "But did he? That's the question."

"What're you getting at, Doc?"

Perry licked his lips, thinking it out carefully before speaking. "You rushed out of here this afternoon saying you were going to take care of him. Remember? And now no one can find him. Claussen's not one to miss services. He takes his religion a might serious, if you know what I mean."

"Are you saying I had something to do with it?"

"Did you?"

Lauters frowned. "Goddammit, Doc, what do you think I did, kill him?"

Perry sat back in his chair, staring at the darkness outside the window. "I hope not, Bill, I truly do. But when you left here today you looked, well, like a man capable of just about anything."

"I didn't kill him," Lauters maintained.

Perry looked at him with steely eyes. "Then what did you do?"

Longtree and Bowes rode up into the hills at an almost leisurely pace. They moved quietly, trying to stay in the shadows. To be caught on Blackfeet lands like this would not have been good. They paused in a thicket to make sure they were alone.

"What in Christ made you come out here on a dare?" Longtree said.

Bowes just shook his head. "I don't know…young…stupid…who can say?"

"What happened?"

Bowes' face looked to be cut from bloodless stone in the wan moonlight. But you could see his eyes and they were wide and unblinking. "I was ten years old at the time. Couple of the local kids talked me into and I felt I had to prove myself. Now, you know Crazytail-he's not a bad sort, you can deal with him, anyway. But his old man? Shit, he was a real spook. They called him Ghost Hand and the name fit. He was a big shot Blackfoot medicine man and folks around here, both white and red, were scared of him. He was our local bogeyman. You grew up around these parts, you were spoon-fed stories about him. Crazy stuff, sure. They said he once put himself in a trance that lasted for six weeks. That he did it another time for twice that long and they even buried him and one night he came walking back into Wolf Creek like Lazarus, thin as a skeleton, his face all white like death and his eyes like silver moons, dirt and roots still clinging to him. Our local minister at the time was the first to see him. He screamed, they said, fell right off his horse and broke his leg. The whole town thought Ghost Hand had come back from the dead and, who knows, maybe he did.

"They said he could pull down the stars and create storms and winds with a single thought. That he could blight your crops and call up devils to tear your head off if he didn't like you. All sorts of crazy shit like that, you know, like pulling rattlesnakes from his sleeves and conjuring up spirit warriors. That he spoke with wolves and hawks. Folks around here used to go see him when kin were sick and he'd brew up some herbs and weeds and crap and more often than not, the cure would work. He could sort through the innards of a buffalo calf and tell you if the hunt would be successful, if your cattle would get screw worm, if your crops were gonna die. They said he told a miner the day he would die and how…and it happened.

"You get the idea. I only saw him in the flesh once. He came into town with Crazytail and a few of the others to buy some provisions. He sat in the back of the wagon and I tried not to look at him, but I felt his eyes crawling over me like spiders. I turned and he was staring holes through me and those eyes, damn, like steel balls, like glass mirroring the sun. Those eyes caught and held you and they told you things, Marshal, showed you things. Told you that Ghost Hand knew all there was to know about you-all those things you didn't confess to nobody but yourself. He knew your nightmares and dreams, exactly what scared you. And all your dirty little secrets? Yeah, he was privy to them, too.

"Anyway, Ghost Hand had been dead maybe four, five months when I came up here. Damn. It was night and filthy black and the wind was howling and I could hear things moving in the darkness around me. And I swear to God I could hear footsteps crunching through the dry grass and voices whispering. I got up by Ghost Hand's grave and, Christ, I swear I saw him standing there all done up in his funeral finery-robes and beads and bones and his hair squirming around like snakes and his eyes were yellow like a rattlesnake's by firelight and…shit, I was just a kid all worked up and all. I screamed and ran all the way home."

Longtree thought about it. He wasn't about to tell Bowes he'd been imagining things. The very quality of his voice was very convincing. It made Longtree's hackles rise. So he said: "Some of them shaman…they're pretty spooky."

"You have no idea," Bowes said and his voice was filled with dread.

"If we're caught here," Bowes said, "we're dead men."

Longtree nodded, saying nothing. They were in the foothills of the Tobbacco Roots, in Blackfeet territory. They brought with them shovels, pickaxes, and enough extra ammunition to turn back the Sioux Nation.

They were taking no chances.

"You come here much?" Longtree asked.

"Just the once," the deputy admitted, "when I was a boy. On that dare…scared the life out of me. And I don't care for it much now."

The Blackfeet cemetery was located in between two forested ridges, in a little, moon-washed valley of dead, clawing trees. This was sacred ground. This was where the Blackfeet buried their dead and had for countless centuries before white men walked this land. Longtree and Bowes were astride their horses in a copse of dark pines, waiting.

"You sure you want to do this?" Bowes asked one final time.

"Yes."

"Are you going to tell me what we're looking for?"

"In due time. Let's go."

Bowes nodded. "It won't matter if we're caught digging or not, just being here and being white is enough reason to be killed."

Longtree pulled his hat down over his brow. "Let's get it over with."

The moon brooded high in the hazy sky, illuminating everything, casting crazy, knife-edged shadows everywhere. A cool wind whistled out of the north, skirting the jagged peaks of the mountains.