Skull Moon

Lauters swore beneath his breath and lowered himself down there. He thanked God it was November. Had it been the warm months…well, he didn't want to think about the stink and the flies.

"It must've killed him and threw him down there," Perry suggested.

"No shit, Doc."

The sheriff wasn't in the mood for Perry's bullshit speculation. He wasn't in the mood for anything these days. He searched around and could find no sign of the man's missing appendages.

Above him, Perry stared down at the ruin of Segaris' face.

His left eye was gone, as was most of the flesh around it. But his other eye was wide and staring with an accusatory glare. His mouth was frozen in a scream. The top of his head bitten clean open-even from five feet above, Perry could see the teeth marks sunk into the skull. The brains had been scooped out and, it would seem, the gray splatter in the corner was what remained of them.

Lauters looked up at the doc with pleading eyes. "God help us," he uttered.

"I hope God can help us, Sheriff, I really do," Perry said stoically. "But if he can't, then we'd better start thinking about helping ourselves."

Grumbling, Lauters pulled himself up out of the root cellar, ignoring Perry's outstretched hand. He stood and brushed himself off.

"It would be interesting to know the turn of events," Perry mused. "In what order they occurred."

Lauters glared at him with watery gray eyes. "What possible use would that be? A man's dead. Murdered. Half-eaten for the love of Christ."

Perry nodded patiently. He brushed a silky wisp of white hair from his brow. "What I mean, Bill, is that it would help us to understand our killer if we knew a few things."

"Like what for instance?"

"Well, for starters, I'd like to know if Segaris was killed before or after this place was torn apart. If it was after…well, then we're talking about an act of hateful, willful destruction here, an act of vengeance. Hardly an animal characteristic."

Lauters shook his head. "You look too deep into things."

"And you," Perry said, "don't look deep enough."

Lauters ignored him. "Let's get back to town. We've got to get Spence out here with his wagon to cart this body off."

"'His wagon?'" Perry said. "Hate to be the one to tell you, Bill, but Spence is a woman."

"That's your opinion." Lauters sighed and sipped from a pocket flask of whiskey. "Sooner we get that body into the ground, sooner folks'll stop speculating about it."

Perry followed him and mounted.

"Yes," the sheriff said, finishing off his flask and stuffing it in his saddlebag, "I see trouble on the horizon, Doc."

Perry said nothing. His eyes, however, looked to the mountains for an answer. There was none. Only wind and cold.

17

Later, standing outside his office and listening to the relative calm of a Sunday evening, Lauters kept drinking. He didn't even feel the cold that swept down from the mountains. In his mind he saw only blood, death, and a forecast of more dying.

Wolf Creek was almost peaceful this night.

The ranch hands had stayed home. The miners had stayed up at the silver camps. Few people ventured out of doors. Maybe it was the frigid temperatures or the blowing snow. But maybe it was something else. Something that killed people for sport as well as food. Maybe this is what kept people behind locked doors.

Lauters took another pull from his silver flask.

Even the old Blackfeet beggars were nowhere to be seen. Come to think of it, he hadn't seen any injuns around for some time. Since the killings began, it seemed. This stopped the flask at his lips.

Was that worth considering? he wondered.

Could the Indians have something to do with the murders? Maybe. Maybe not. The local Blackfeet tended to steer clear of town for the most part, being that a lot of folks tended to harass them for no good reason. And when a major crime like a murder or robbery came down, they were nowhere to be found. Again, because if a scapegoat was needed, an injun was always a good bet.

Thinking of this, made the sheriff remember the time that Blackfoot was hanged.

He scowled and took another drink.

The Blackfoot's name was Red Elk. He was being held in connection with the rape and murder of a local white girl, name of Carpenter. The girl had no family. She was new to Wolf Creek. Red Elk had supposedly surprised her one night as she left the dry goods store she worked at, forced himself on her and then cut her throat.

The second night the injun was in jail, the vigilantes came. They wore black hoods with eye and mouth slits. Nine of them pushed their way into the jailhouse.

"We want the injun," the leader said. "And we plan to have him."

"You boys better clear out of here," Lauters had told them.

The vigilantes all carried guns and they were all on the sheriff.

"You don't understand," the leader said. "We want that murdering redskin and we'll kill you if need be to get 'em."