Episode 36

Worse Than Expected

It was just as bad as Joe Wiley expected. In fact, it was worse.

He wasn’t sure if it was because of a particularly good payoff for the cowboys or if they had been working too hard for too long. Or maybe they’d been owed back pay a while. Or perhaps it was something in the water.

Whatever the reason, Joe and his deputies were hard pressed to keep up with it all. The drovers off the Three Rivers poured into town and set to tearing it apart board and nail.

The Dugans, Coolie, and Joe rousted and ran in so many cowpokes that the jail was full to capacity. Joe had made a makeshift holding area in the livery stable. He had cowpokes in leg irons and chains secured to the roof beams. The blacksmith hammered rivets in place to secure the manacles to their ankles. Coolie held each man supported with one leg resting atop the anvil. Hungover and still half drunk, the drovers moaned with each strike of the hammer.

“This place stinks of horse shit!” a bedraggled cowpuncher moaned.

“It’s gonna smell of your shit soon, buster. Ain’t nobody running you to the privy,” Coolie growled.

“What’s stoppin’ us from tearin’ these chains loose?” another sorehead asked, giving his chain a tug.

“Be my guest. You’re welcome to bring the whole damned roof down on the bunch of you,” Joe said. “I suggest settling down and find a dry spot and sleep it off.”

Joe turned to the livery caretaker. A cotton-haired older man named Pete, though due to his propensity to stutter was called Repeat. He was sitting on a comfy hay bale with an old Hawken Rifle across his lap. Repeat was rail thin but had outsized hands and wrists from years of swinging a hammer. The man looked like he’d been carved from a tree stump and left in the sun to dry. His eyes were hard and black under snow white brows.

“Repeat, if they so much as make a move to get out of that pen you put a hole through the first one,” Joe said.

“Will do, mister marshal. Will do,” Repeat repeated and spat a glob of tobacco juice onto the straw strewn floor. “It’d be my pleasure. My pleasure.”

“I believe it will.” Joe nodded with a hint of a smile.

All that evening and into the night found the lawmen dealing with one altercation or another. In the saloons, the streets, and once in a bath house when there was an argument over who was next to wash the filth of the trail off of themselves. Two other fights broke out over the pecking order at one of the whore tents.

“Goldamn!” Coolie Taylor said. “This is worse than fighting Yankees!”

“How you figure that?” Seth Dugan asked.

“At least the Yankees would just kill ya and get it over with or run away back to Philadelphia,” Coolie explained. “This is like herding chickens or unruly brats. And it’s thirsty work.”

“I grant ya that,” Seth agreed before laying out a cowboy with a bone shattering elbow.

Just when Joe thought they might have finally got the tiger by the tail he witnessed Adeline Tibbets and the sisters of the Holy Crusade Committee marching toward the Paradise once again armed with axe handles and torches. He’d seen them stern and angry before but there was something different in their stride, something purposeful and menacing. They weren’t going to the Paradise to preach. This was a Jesus and the money changers moment. This was a retribution and a reckoning. He hurried to catch up to them with Coolie in tow. They came up alongside Adeline who was staring ahead, her face a mask of righteous fury.

“Where’s the fire, Sister?” Joe asked hoping to quell her fervor.

“That man took her, marshal. That filthy pig of a man took Sister Hester back to his den of iniquity, his seraglio. We mean to take her back!” Adeline said.

“The little who—the little redhead? You sure she was took?” Joe asked. He also wondered what a seraglio was.

“I know how dubious you are of Sister Hester’s redemption. But I assure you she was one of us. She heard The Word and The Truth and turned her back on sin. Then that animal came like a thief in the night for her,” Adeline said. Her eyes bored holes through Joe. “His brute accosted her and took her back to Bratt to be used for his benefit. We will not allow that to happen, marshal.”

“All due respect, ma’am,” Coolie said, “but them axe handles ain’t gonna help much against guns. I know this type of human trash from personal experience. They’d as soon shoot you as say hello if they think they can get away with it.”

“And you being ladies won’t slow Bratt’s hand even a little. Let me handle it, Adeline,” Joe said, hand on her shoulder. “It’s my job. And I don’t want you and the rest of the sisters getting hurt. I’ll get her back for you.”

Adeline regarded him, eyes searching his face. She sighed and nodded.

“Very well. But if you fail, we are resolved in this. Sister Hester is one of us and we are charged with her protection and well-being. We will do what we must to make certain of that,” Adeline said.

Joe looked Adeline in the eyes. Conveying his feelings through his gaze and the soft pressure of his hand on the fabric covering her shoulder.

“That’s fair enough. But I won’t fail. I promise you that.” Joe let his hand fall away from Adeline with reluctance and turned to Coolie. “Let’s go.”

Joe and Coolie closed ground towards the Paradise. Inside, the place was foggy with smoke and packed side to side with drovers, drummers and others who drifted into town to celebrate the end of the roundup. The marshal and deputy were greeted by T.J. Bratt standing behind the bar. The lumbering Bear beside him clutched the terrified Sister Hester with an iron grip on her slim wrist. Her eyes were glassy with drink. A half empty bottle rested on the bar before her. Her white dress was in tatters, a sleeve torn away and the front ripped down to reveal her breasts. A black weal was swelling under one eye.

Her reintroduction to her former life of sin was in progress.

“Welcome, marshal. We’ve been expecting you,” Bratt said. A cocky sneer on his smug face.

“We?” Joe asked. Not liking the bravado Bratt was showing one tiny bit.

“We,” Big Cal Randall said as he emerged from the crowd with a brace of men from the Twisted Tree ranch. “Good evening, marshal.”

“Damned if it is,” Coolie said.

It was an ambush. Joe cursed himself for a fool.

“We have some unfinished business, marshal,” Big Cal said ominously.