Skin Medicine

Cabe didn’t press it. He knew plenty of what had happened out there, the indignities and cruelties pressed upon the tribes. And generally, unwarranted. Treaties were made between whites and Indians. And the ink was barely dry before the whites had again violated them.

“ But you left the army?”

Dirker was smiling now. “No, I was relieved of my command. A band of Arapahos had raided a settlement and I was told to hunt them down and massacre them. Well, we couldn’t find the perpetrators, so my commander decided that any Arapahos would do. There was a village of maybe fifty on Cripple Creek. They had nothing to do with the raid and that fact was well known…yet I was ordered to go in there with my men. And when we came out, I was instructed, there was to be nothing left alive.”

“ You refused?”

“ Yes, I did. And I am proud of that fact. I was a soldier, not a hired killer.” Dirker sighed, licked his lips. “I was relieved of my command, court-martialed and discharged. Honorably, much to the dismay of some.”

“ And after that?”

“ I was a lawman. One town after another. Eventually Janice and I bought this hotel. Of course, there was trouble between the miners and the Mormons, the Indians and the settlers…I was approached and given the job of county sheriff on the spot.”

Cabe took it all in. His story was no different from that of many a veteran-trained as a soldier, they invariably became either lawmen or outlaws, sometimes both. Cabe rolled a cigarette, lit it up. “Tell me something, Sheriff. This business I’ve been hearing about a little camp called Sunrise…anything to it?”

Dirker nodded after a time. “Horrible, horrible.”

“ What are you going to do about it?”

“ I’m going to hunt down who’s responsible, of course.”

“ Of course. And while you’re at it…there’s this fellow named Freeman. Says he’s a Texas Ranger. Think you could look into that for me? Maybe wire the Rangers?”

“ You think he’s lying?”

Cabe told him he wasn’t sure what he was thinking. “All I know, Dirker, is that he’s giving me a real bad feeling in my guts. And I can’t figure out exactly why…”

8

Later, at the Oasis Saloon, a knot of men gathered around Cabe as he tried to drink his beer. Tried to relax a bit and put all this business with Dirker into some sort of perspective. Were they friends now or enemies? And what about his wife? Cabe had been around, he knew very well the way she was looking at him and what such a look entailed. She had gotten down right excited as he joked about the whores and what he’d done with them. He had not imagined it.

“ So, this killer, this Sin City Strangler,” one of the men said, a miner with a shaggy gray beard and no upper teeth. “They say he slits ‘em clean open. That true?”

“ It is,” Cabe told him.

He had been casually discussing a few particulars of that business with Carny, the bartender, and it had drawn the others like a rope. They wanted to know everything, everything.

Another said, “Why in Christ he rape ‘em? Whores? You don’t have to rape ‘em…they give it up for two bits, some of ‘em.”

“ Yeah, why did he rape ‘em?” another wanted to know.

“ He never says.”

A tall man in a gray wool suit and polished black boots was shaking his head. “Seems to me, sir, that this is no fit conversation in the presence of ladies.”

The miners were looking around, trying to find the ladies. All they saw were a few whores mulling about. They didn’t figure that sort counted as being ladies.

“They ain’t no ladies here, chief,” a miner said. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

“I find it objectionable all the same.”

The miners laughed at that to a man. Looked like maybe they were going to start trouble over it…but then they saw the pistols hanging from the man’s belt. Fine and sleek they were, Colt Peacemakers with ivory handles. The weapons of a shootist.

The miners filtered away, figuring today wasn’t the day to die.

“And you, sir,” the tall man said to Cabe. “If you are a bounty hunter as you claim, if you are indeed hunting this man, then I seriously doubt you will find him in the bottom of a glass of beer.”

Cabe looked at Carny, just shook his head. “Listen, mister. I came in for a drink, not to listen you run that silver-plated mouth of yours.”

The tall man took a step forward. “All the manners of a rutting hog. How wonderful that is.”

“Like I said, I just want to drink my beer. So will you kindly go fuck yourself?”

The tall man’s face drained of color. “That, sir, is no way for a gentleman to talk. Profanity is the product of a weak mind.”

“Well, that’s me-weak-minded Arkansas trash. I claim to be nothing else.”

An easterner. A dandy. That’s what this fellow was. These days, didn’t seem you could spit without hitting one. Cabe generally just left them alone, regardless of how he felt about that sort. Most of ‘em didn’t bother no one. Then there were this kind.

“No, sir, you are certainly no gentleman, surely. You are rude, coarse, and obnoxious.”