Skin Medicine

“ Hee, hee,” Mama Adelade tittered. “The very fine is just about dying and going straight on to heaven. It involves two girls and sometimes three, hot oil and busy hands.”

Cabe admitted he surely wasn’t up to it.

Mama Adelade told him that she had been a slave on a Baton Rouge plantation. When she got her freedom and, Lord, how she’d wanted that, it wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. “Boy, the massah, you know, he might of owned us, but least he fed us and put a roof over our heads. I think maybe some of us forgot about that. For when we was freed…hell, we had to fend for ourselves. No easy bit, that.”

Mama told him that it wasn’t long before she realized that there was only one way a black woman was going to make any money in a white man’s world. So she started small and built up her stable year by year.

“ Had me a son, too, Mr. Cabe. But as he grew to manhood, he found religion and didn’t care much for how his mama made her living. Last I heard of him, he went out to Indian Territory to preach. Hee! You imagine that? A black man slinging the white man’s gospel to a bunch of red heathens! Something funny about that, you think?”

It was a long day, but by the time Cabe retired from Horizontal Hill, he was no closer to the Sin City Strangler than he had been before. But something had to give. Sooner or later, it was going to.

While he was at a teahouse, he bumped into Henry Freeman, the Texas Ranger, who claimed he was out “inspecting the stock.” And that made Cabe remember he had to wire the Rangers in Texas, see if old Henry was who and what he claimed to be.

Because, honestly, Cabe had his doubts.

6

The riders thundered into Redemption like demons loosed from the lower regions of Hell.

The vigilantes had arrived.

They came pounding up the dirt street on black mounts, seven men wearing long blue army overcoats and white hoods set with eye slits pulled over their heads. They carried repeating rifles and shotguns and Colt pistols. They charged down the streets and down alleyways with an almost military precision.

What they brought to the little Mormon enclave of Redemption was death.

And with it they brought every intolerance and prejudice that had been boiling in the black kettles of their hearts for weeks and months and even years.

Without haste then, they started shooting.

The Mormons knew they would show, but had hoped it would not be for some time for they were ill-prepared to fend off such a bold attack. Men carrying muskets and bolt-action rifles ran out to oppose the riders and were cut down in lethal rains of well-directed gunfire. Women screamed and children cried and shotguns boomed and pistols barked. Lead was flying like hail, peppering doors and shattering windows and killing livestock that had not been carefully stabled.

One of the town elders stomped out onto the porch of his house, his three sons at his heels. A rider passed by, giving the elder both barrels at close range. The buckshot blew a hole the size of a dinner plate in his chest and splattered gore over his sons. And the sons had little more time than to shriek as gunfire from Winchester and Sharps rifles raked them, killing them on the spot. An old woman ran out amongst the vigilantes, waving a prayerbook at them and they rode her down, crushing her beneath the hooves of their horses. The same fate met three young children who’d seen their mother and father put down by pistol fire.

The wise townsfolk stayed behind locked doors or returned fire from gunports cut into shutters. But they were not seasoned fighters, and very few of their rounds came within spitting distance of the vigilantes. Though a single bullet-whether directed or ricocheted? ripped through the throat of a vigilante and he collapsed in his saddle.

But that didn’t even slow the killers down.

They reigned and fired, tossing flaming kerosene torches into bales of hay and piles of lumber and very often right through the windows of stores and homes. And in the midst of that, they kept riding and shooting and killing and scattering horses and mules, using cattle and sheep for target practice.

Within twenty minutes of their arrival, Redemption was blazing like the nether regions of Hell. Flames engulfed barns and livery stables. Licked up the walls of houses. Vomited from exploded windows. The town became an inferno of fire and smoke and screaming. Bucket brigades worked to douse the conflagration even as the vigilantes shot them dead.

In the noise and confusion and shouting, a lone figure clutching the Book of Mormon stumbled into the streets, already bleeding from a stray bullet that had creased his temple. He made quite a sight out there on foot, shouting prayers and oaths, trails of blood streaking down his face.