Skin Medicine

One of the vigilantes, a mine captain named McCrutchen kept pressing them closed, but the lids just popped back open. He crossed himself. “Don’t like that,” he said. “Don’t like that at all.”

A few others laughed.

“Nothing supernatural about it,” Caleb Callister explained. He took a brown glass bottle of liquid and brushed the inner eyelids, gumming them shut. He held them closed for a moment and when he released them, they didn’t open back up.

Horner was covered in dried blood. It had soaked into his blue overcoat and spattered across his face. The side of his throat was a great blackened chasm.

“Slug must’ve ripped out most of his neck,” Luke Windows said.

“And his carotid artery with it,” Callister said.

He pulled a sheet up over the body, the dead face making the others uneasy. They were down to six now without Horner-Callister, Windows, Caslow, McCrutchen, Cheevers, and Retting. They had been harassing the Mormons for better than three months now. Mostly they preyed on small groups caught away from the villages. The raid on Redemption tonight had been the first action of its kind. But now with Horner’s death, it would not be their last.

Windows said, “I grew up with Horner, I grew up with him.”

“He died bravely for the cause,” Callister said, although it had a decidedly hollow ring to it. But what else could he say?

McCrutchen had been uneasy since they got Horner’s body back to town. “I wonder if this is some sort of omen,” he said.

Caslow just shook his head. “Since when is a shot man an omen?”

“I’m just wondering is all.”

“Crazy,” Retting said. “Crazy talk.”

But Cheevers wasn’t so sure. “Maybe we offended God with this business and we’re being punished.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Windows told him.

Callister knew he had to get control of them or this in-fighting would be the end of their little society. “All right,” he said, stepping between Windows and Cheevers. “Enough of this horseshit. We’re all part of the same thing here, we’re brothers. We all took the oath, did we not? As far as Horner goes, his death had nothing to do with God or the saints or the Devil himself. It was an accident. We rode in there shooting and burning. With all that lead flying about, we can count ourselves lucky no one else took a round. Maybe the Mormons hit Horner or…maybe one of us did. Ricochet. It’s possible, very possible.”

That shut them up, gave them something to chew on for a time.

“So enough of this nonsense,” Callister said to them. “Those bastards’ll pay for this, just not tonight is all.”

“And what about Horner?” Windows wanted to know.

Callister sighed. “We have to get rid of the body.”

“Now wait one goddamn minute,” Windows said angrily. “He was my friend. I grew up with him, I-”

“We have to get rid of him,” Callister cut in. “You mark my words, the Mormons are going to come screaming to Dirker first light. If they saw him get shot, they’ll tell Dirker as much. If Dirker gets a look at Horner’s wound, well, that wily sonofabitch’ll put two and two together. He knows who Horner’s friends are, he’ll know who to roust.”

There was silence after that. A great deal of it. All you could hear was the wind outside and the ticking of a mantle clock inside. Callister told Windows and the others to take the body out into the hills, plant it in a shallow grave where it would never be found.

“Horner will have his day of reckoning…through us,” Callister promised them. “Maybe tomorrow night, maybe the night after, but he will certainly have it. The next time we ride on Redemption, we’ll be carrying more than guns and kerosene.”

“Like what?” Caslow asked.

“I was thinking about all that dynamite up at the mines,” Callister said.

The others began to grin.

12

The next morning dawned cool and overcast, a light rain drizzling over the San Francisco mountains and the towns and mining camps that had sprung up around them like weeds.

In Redemption, a group of men dressed entirely in black stood in a large barn. They stood staring down at the bodies laid over an expanse of hay bales. They were the bodies of men, women, and children killed by the vigilantes. They numbered nearly two dozen.

Though the men followed the teachings of Brigham Young and the path of righteousness set forth by the prophet Joseph Smith, they were not like other Mormons. These men carried Colt pistols and Greener shotguns, repeating rifles and army carbines. In a religion that espoused the gentle way of the lamb, these men were wolves, hunters and predators.

They were called Danites, though gentiles knew them as the “Destroying Angels”.