Skin Medicine

Graybrow knew what it was. Sure, he was crazy. Crazy because of what was inside of him. Whites would have said he was just plain touched or maybe bewitched and they would be right on both counts…but there was more to it than that. Much more. For Orville DuChien had the talent, he was “sighted”. He had the gift. Just like that grandfather he spoke of. It ran in families sometimes. The tribal shaman had it…ability to see sprits and know what would happen before it did. Yes, this hillbilly was a prophet. Undirected, but a prophet no less.

Orv pointed at something, something Graybrow could not see, started jabbering, then shook his head. “You tell yer daddy, you tell him it ain’t right takin’ the strop to you. Weren’t yer fault that pony ran off…weren’t yer fault…”

Graybrow was shaking himself now. That pony. He remembered. He had forgotten, but now he remembered. The pony that ran off into the hills and how very angry his father was. The hillbilly had plucked it from his mind.

Orv walked out into the street, stopped, nearly got run down by a lumber wagon. He stumbled back, fell against the hitching post. “Injun…you hear me…you…you tell him the bad man, the bad man is real close…the bad man will kill a fine lady what ain’t no whore!”

“ Yes, I’ll tell him, I-”

But Orv was already gone, running away down the street, clutching his head in both hands, as if trying not to hear something. And people fell out of his way like dominoes, because everyone in Whisper Lake knew Orville DuChien was just plain touched.

Everyone except an old Ute Indian.

19

And each in his or her own way, greeted the new day.

At the Union Hotel, Sir Tom Ian strapped on a customized leather cartridge belt and slid a British. 44 Bisley pistol into the holster. As he did so, he thought of what he had witnessed at the Cider House Saloon the night before. He was impressed that Tyler Cabe, though well into his cups, had managed to survive an encounter with Virgil Clay. It was sheer luck that Clay had missed his target at such close range…but there was no luck involved with a man who could dive out of the way and shoot with such accuracy as he fell. Impressive. Sir Tom had no love for Virgil Clay. He had put up with the man following him around like a stray, amused by his lack of social graces. That he was dead now, meant little to Sir Tom. He had a job waiting for him down in Sedona, Arizona Territory…a wild town in need of a crack pistolman with a reputation. But he was in no hurry. And particularly now that Tyler Cabe would have to deal with the likes of Elijah Clay…

And high above Whisper Lake in a sheltered arroyo surrounded by stands of juniper and pinon, Elijah Clay was loading his pistols and sharpening up his knives. Word had reached him about Virgil’s murder…and, to Elijah, it was murder. Chewing a strip of jerky, he ran the blade of a bowie knife over a wetstone, thinking hard and thinking long about a Arkansas bounty hunter named Tyler Cabe. For Elijah was from hill people. He was part of a hill country clan back in West Virginia. And there were certain codes that were invariably followed. Wrongs were always righted. When kin was killed, blood called that you settled matters. Flesh for flesh. That Cabe was a Southerner meant very little to Elijah. He had taken up no side in the War Between the States, knowing that one government was equally as corrupt as the next. He was a free-liver and a free-thinker as all hill people were. And when it came to vengeance, hill people meted it out accordingly. Thinking these things and knowing them to be true, Elijah found himself thinking of that fancy pistol fighter from Texas that had gunned-down his brother Arvin. It had taken that cowardly sumbitch near eight hours to die when Elijah had worked him with the knife…

At the Callister Brother’s Mortuary, Caleb Callister found himself looking at a horror. His new embalmer, Leo Moss, though every bit the ardent professional, was equally as morbid as Caleb’s deceased brother Hiram. As Caleb had been going through the books after a heady night of sex and gambling, Moss had called him into the undertaking parlor at the back of the building. You’ve got to see this, Moss told him. On the slab was some transient found dead in an alley. Thin, wasted, he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. Moss had been sorting through his innards since before first light and now proudly revealed his prize. A tapeworm. He had it in a five-gallon glass jar of alcohol. It floated in the brine, coiled like some obscene snake. A parasitic flatworm, cut free in sections. Thirty-two feet, Moss told Caleb. Now ain’t that just something? Caleb had to agree it certainly was. Life was just full of odd surprises.