Skull Moon

1

The good Reverend Claussen, scarf wrapped around his throat, fought through the biting wind to the undertaking parlor. He paused in the street outside of a peeling gray building. A wooden, weathered sign read: J. SPENCE, UNDERTAKER. It was barely readable. Too many seasons of harsh winters and blistering summers had faded the black lettering to a drab leaden color.

Clenching his teeth against the elements, Claussen went in.

He went directly into the back rooms where the bodies were prepared.

In there were Wynona Spence, Sheriff Lauters, and Dr. Perry.

The reverend eyed them all suspiciously. “Why is it,” he said in his New England twang, “that I wasn’t told of another death? Why must I learn these things by word of mouth, by rumor?”

“Keep your shirt on, Father,” Lauters said. “I—”

“I’m not a Catholic, sir. Please address me accordingly.”

Lauters scowled, fished a plug of tobacco from his pouch and inserted it in his cheek. “What I was trying to say, Reverend, was that this here is Curly Del Vecchio. Or what there’s left of him. Curly wasn’t what you’d call a religious man.”

Claussen, his close-cut steel-gray hair bristling, said, “The dead are granted certain considerations, Sheriff. By the grace of God let me give this poor man spiritual absolution.”

Dr. Perry, standing next to the sheeted form on the table shrugged and pulled the sheet away.

Reverend Claussen paled and averted his eyes.

“Not very pretty, is it?” Wynona Spence said, her pursed lips pulled into a thin purple line which might have been a smile. “But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Claussen glared at her. He saw no humor in death.

Wynona Spence inherited the business from her ailing father. Being a female, she was a rarity in the business. But truth be told, she was the perfect undertaker. God molds men and women for certain tasks in life, the reverend knew, and she could have been nothing but what she was. Cadaverous, tall, bony with tight colorless flesh and bulging watery eyes, she was the very image of her father. Only the drab gray dresses and the tight bun her colorless hair was drawn into marked her as a woman. Her voice was deep and velvety, her face hard and narrow. Unmarried, she lived in rooms above the funeral parlor with another woman…and the gossip took off from there.

Claussen went through the ritual over the body almost mechanically.

The words flowed from his lips like wine with the perfect intonation and breath control, but he was not aware of them. He saw only the plucked, slit, and hacked thing laid out before him staring up with blanched, bloodless eyeballs.

Claussen completed the ritual with a few prayers and an “amen”. He turned and faced Lauters with a bizarre species of contempt on his rosy features. “The members of my congregation want something done, Sheriff. They demand resolution.”

Lauters stared at him with unblinking, dead eyes. “We’re doing all we can.”

“Do more! Do it in the name of our Lord!” the Reverend exclaimed piously. “The dead deserve justice! The living, protection!”

Dr. Perry folded his arms and turned away, hiding a smile.

Wynona leaned forward, lifeless eyes examining a new type of insect.

“We’re doing our best,” was Lauters’ only comment. He was visibly trembling, not the sort of man who liked to be told his job.

“One would think your best isn’t good enough,” Claussen said dryly.

Lauters face went red. “Now, listen here, Reverend. My mother taught me to respect the clergy. God knows I do my best. But don’t you dare tell me my goddamn job,” he said, finger stabbing the air. “I don’t tell you how to pray, so don’t you tell me how to run the law around here.”

The reverend, electric with religious zeal and self-imposed holiness, stepped forward. “Perhaps someone should.”

“Listen, you little sonofabitch, I’ve had all I’m going to fucking take—”

“Your profanities fall on deaf ears. Such talk is the work of a weak mind.”

Lauters grabbed him by the arm, not too roughly. “That’s it, Claussen. March your holier-than-thou butt right out the door before I kick your teeth so far down your God-loving throat that you—”

“Sheriff,” Perry said, flashing him a warning look.

Claussen, his eyes bulging in fear, rushed out the door like something was biting his backside.

Wynona giggled. “My goodness.”

Perry sighed. “Not a very good idea, Bill. If you make him angry he could turn his whole congregation against you.”

Lauters bellowed with laughter. “He’s already turned one of them against me,” he said sourly. “My wife.”

With that, he turned and left.

“My, what excitement!” Wynona exclaimed as best she could. “We never have this much excitement here. I feel as though I’ve stepped into a dime novel. Tsk, tsk.”

Perry said, “You’re a strange one, madam.”

And she was. Perry could never understand a woman wanting to be an undertaker. But he honestly couldn’t picture her doing anything else. Even her movements-the slow stiff motions of her skeletal fingers, that slat-lean face pulling into a skullish grin-bespoke a worker of death and graves. Wynona Spence looked much like the bodies she prepared for burial and was only moderately more animated. Whereas most women boasted of perfume, Wynona always smelled vaguely of chemicals and dry flowers.

“I still don’t understand what attracts you to this profession,” Perry said, shaking his head. “But I suppose, given your particular talents, you’re well-suited.”

Wynona smiled as if it was a compliment. “The sheriff really should control his outbursts, though,” she said sincerely. “Not good for a man his age.”

Perry lifted his eyebrows. “He’s not even fifty yet, madam.”

“He looks seventy,” Wynona observed. “One of these days, I fear he’ll be here as a customer.” She sighed, looking at the corpse of Del Vecchio. “Well, we’ll be glad to have him, won’t we?”

Perry scowled. “He’s not in the best of health. In the past year he’s gone downhill. Must be the job.”

“Stress. It takes the best of them. You can take my word for that.”

“Ever since they lynched that Indian,” Perry said, “he just hasn’t been the same.”

2

Joe Longtree came to the undertaking parlor less than an hour later.

Wynona saw him come in and her first thought was that the man was a shootist. He wore a black flat-crowned hat and a long midnight blue broadcloth coat, unbuttoned, that went to his knees. He carried a buffalo coat over one arm. The spurs on his black, scuffed and scraped Texas boots rang out with each step. There were twin Colt pistols slung low on either hip like a gunman would wear them.

“Can I help you?” Wynona asked.

“Joe Longtree,” he said, turning the lapel over his heart inside out. There was a badge pinned there. “Deputy U.S. Marshal.”

“Ah, yes. The Sheriff said you’d be coming.”

Longtree smiled. “I’ll just bet he did.”

Wynona was unsure what was meant by that. Lauters said this federal man would show up and begin nosing about. Lauters also said to beware of him. Longtree, he’d said, was pushy, arrogant, and mouthy. Wynona was expecting the very worst. She had no earthly intention of opposing this man in any way; he was, after all, a federal marshal and carried a certain amount of weight because of it. That and the fact Longtree looked dangerous. His eyes were deep, fathomless blue. Very intense. They were the eyes of a man that killed for a living. Had she been moved by such things, she would have found him exciting.

“I’ll be glad to help the law in any way,” Wynona told him.

“I’d appreciate that, Miss Spence…you are J. Spence, aren’t you?”

“No, unfortunately not. J. Spence was my father, Joshua, dead these past seven years. I’m his daughter, Wynona,” she explained in a flat voice. “Do you find it strange for a woman to occupy herself in such a profession?”

Longtree shrugged. “Family business, I guess. Most natural thing in the world for your father to want his kin to carry on things. As long as you’re happy with it.”

“Oh, I am.”

“Then you don’t need my approval.”

Wynona found herself staring at him, finding him a remarkably enlightened man. It only added to his air of mystery, made him seem exotic somehow. Interesting. Wynona figured she would’ve fallen in love with him years ago. But not now.

Longtree said, “I don’t know what Sheriff Lauters told you, but I can assume it wasn’t good. He’s taken an instant dislike of me. I’m only here to look into these murders, not take over his job or bully anyone into confessing to the crimes.”

Wynona sighed. “Of course not.” Longtree had an easy way about him. He seemed well spoken as if he were educated, sincere, honest. He seemed to be the kind of man it would be easy to like, easy to trust. “Would you like to see the body?”

Longtree shook his head, pulling up a chair. “No, I got my fill of that last night. I want to talk about the others.”

Wynona sat down. “Very well.” She seemed almost disappointed.

Longtree lit a cigar, pulling out a little notebook and pencil.

Wynona watched his every movement, somehow fascinated by him. He was maybe an inch under six feet, muscular without being stocky or massive. His face was clean shaven, rugged, handsome, the skin nearly as dark as that of an Indian, yet the features-long jaw, high cheekbones, aquiline nose-were clearly European in origin. His hair was long, black, a lustrous tinted indigo like that of an Indian. It was pulled back tight and tied with a leather thong.

“My mother was a Crow,” Longtree said, reading her thoughts.

Wynona blushed a bit. “My Lord…how did you know I was thinking that?”

“In my profession, mind-reading comes in handy.”

Wynona swallowed. “Yes, I imagine it would. So you are an Indian, then?”

Longtree just smiled. “Not too many people ever guess. They think my skin is darker from too much time spent in the sun and wind.”

The glow faded from Wynona’s cheeks, her skin now sunless again. “No, I don’t imagine too many do. The study of physiognomy is something of a hobby of mine. I often try to guess from skin coloration, features and the like where a man’s point of origin in the world might be. Do you know, Marshal, that the Indian has dark skin not only because of heredity but because of his lifesytle? If the white race were suddenly to take to the plains and live out in the elements like the Indian, within a few hundred years or so we’d probably look much like them.”

“I don’t doubt it. My father was English. In the summer he was dark as any Indian. Only in the winter did his skin pale.”

“Fascinating,” Wynona said sincerely.

“Did you examine the other bodies?”

Wynona nodded. “Yes, sir, I did. In some depth.”

“Tell me what you found.”

Wynona spoke in some detail of the victims. She gave Longtree very detailed information not only on the physical remains and their condition, but on the men themselves. Their habits and lifestyles as best as she knew them.

“Abe Runyon, Cal Sevens, Charlie Mears, Pete Olak, George Rieko, Nate Segaris, and finally Curly Del Vecchio,” Longtree read from his notebook. “All men. Odd that this beast hasn’t gotten a woman or child. It’s almost like its killing selectively.”

Wynona raised an eyebrow. “I doubt that. We’re dealing with a beast here, Marshal, not a reasoning being.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“You don’t…I mean, you don’t think a man is responsible for any of this?”

“No, not a man, I don’t think.”

“You mean a beast which… reasons?”

Longtree did not comment on it.

Wynona considered it. Yes, all men…but it had to be a coincidence, right? It could be nothing else. The idea of a creature that selected its victims…now that was frightening. She’d never even contemplated such a thing. But now that she had, she feared it would never leave her brain.

“Well,” Wynona said, “you’ve certainly given me food for thought. Dark food, at that.”

Longtree thanked her for her help and left.

Wynona shrugged and went back to the cadaver of Nate Segaris. “Well, Nate, back to work. Did I ever tell you that I was well-acquainted with your mother? No? It was when you were off fighting the war…”

3

Longtree next did what he dreaded: he went to the Sheriff’s office.

He’d dealt with countless local lawmen in his tenure as a federal marshal. They came in all varieties as did all men. Some were kind and friendly, glad for his assistance. Others were suspicious, yet helpful. Still others were like Lauters: arrogant, hateful, self-serving. They saw the advent of a federal man in their territory as an insult, the government’s way of saying they weren’t doing their job. And nothing could be farther from the truth.

Longtree fought through the vicious winds and entered the jailhouse. As he feared, Lauters was there. Without the heavy coat on, he was still a large man, earning his nickname of “Big Bill”. He was a powerful fellow, Longtree decided, both physically and psychologically. But well past his prime. He was fat, bloated almost, having the look of a man who drank heavily on a daily basis. His face was puffy and white, the eyes bloodshot, blood vessels broken in his nose.

He was a veteran alcoholic. There was no doubt of this. Longtree, a man who’d battled the bottle himself, knew a drunk when he saw one.

“Morning, Sheriff,” Longtree said.

Lauters just glared. His pale lips spread in a frown. They didn’t have to go very far. “Well, well, well, the Marshal has come to save the day.”

Longtree suppressed a grin. Lauters was drunk. “I need a little information on the murdered men.”

“Well, you won’t get it from me.”

“C’mon, Sheriff. What’s the point of this? You know the law; you have to cooperate. Help me out here and I’ll do my best to stay out of your hair.”

“Yeah, I know the law, mister,” Lauters said slowly, his eyes not quite focusing. “I know the goddamn law and I don’t need no yellow sonofbitch like you to tell it to me. Damn breed.”

Longtree sighed and put his hat on the desk. “You got a deputy?”

“None of yer fucking business.”

Longtree sat down and stared at the man. Obviously, he’d been doing some checking to know that Longtree was a half-breed or “breed”, as he called it. That meant that he probably knew everything there was to know. Not that it mattered.

“You’re wrong there, Sheriff, it is my business. I’ll ask you again: Do you have a deputy?”

“Goddamn breed. You know how many injuns I’ve killed? Do you?”

Longtree grinned sardonically. “Know how many white men I’ve killed?”

Lauters stood up, swaying a bit. “I oughta take yer sorry ass out back and teach it a lesson.”

“Nothing you can teach me, Sheriff. Nothing at all.”

“Wanna slap leather, boy? You wanna—”

“Sheriff.” The voice was stern, authoritative. It belonged to a white-haired man with a drooping gray mustache. “That’ll be enough now. We got enough problems around here without you being put in your own jail.”

Lauters grimaced and staggered into the back room. Another man came out, shutting the door behind him. He was tall and thin, not more than thirty, wearing a deputy’s badge.

“I’m Doctor Perry,” the old man said. “This here’s Alden Bowes. We’re pleased to meet you.”

Longtree shook hands with both of them.

“What you’re seeing there,” Perry said, stabbing his thumb at the back room, “is the wreck of a good man.”

“Too bad,” Longtree said.

Bowes shrugged. “He never used to drink, mister. Maybe a drop or two on Saturday night, never more. I swear to God.”

“I believe you,” Longtree said. “The fact remains that he’s in a bad way now. He’s a menace. A man in his position can’t go around in a drunken stupor. He’ll kill someone eventually.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Bowes affirmed.

“You don’t think so?”

Neither Perry nor the deputy bothered arguing the point.

“I gotta get back,” Perry said, tipping his hat. “Marshal.”

Longtree took out his tobacco pouch and rolled a cigarette. “I don’t know what you might think of me, Deputy, or what the Sheriff has filled your head with, but—”

“I draw my own conclusions on a man, Marshal.”

Longtree nodded, lighting his cigarette, a cloud of smoke twisting lazily away from his face. “We’ve got us a major problem here, Deputy. We’ve got a slew of killings and they ain’t gonna stop the way Lauters is doing things. You and I, we’ll have to work together on this.”

Bowes leaned back in the chair behind the desk, knowing, as all did, it would soon be his chair. He scratched at his thin beard. “I’m all for that, Marshal. But where the hell do we start? Folks around here are all for putting up a bounty on this animal. You know what that would mean? Every drifter with a gun who fancied himself a hunter would be crawling out in those hills, shooting any damn thing that moved and each other in the process.”

“Yeah, I figured they’d be thinking that way.” Longtree smoked and was silent for a moment. “We’ve got to think this thing out carefully. There’s no room for mistakes here. We’re dealing with something much more dangerous than any animal I’ve ever come across.”

“What the hell is it, Marshal? What kills like that? What sort of beast kills like it… enjoys the act of killing?”

Longtree shook his head. “Something’s going on here. Something the likes of which neither of us have ever seen.”

“Like what?” Bowes asked.

“I’m not sure,” Longtree admitted. “Not just yet.”

Bowes looked irritable. “If you’ve got some idea, let me in on it. Christ, this is madness.”

“I’ll keep my thoughts to myself for now,” Longtree said. “No point in going off half-cocked or making myself look foolish.”

Bowes didn’t look happy. “Okay, have it your own way.”

Longtree would have liked to share his thoughts. But as yet, they were just thoughts. Half-formed ideas with no basis in reality. Yet. They were dealing with something horrible here. Something unknown. Something that didn’t follow the rules, but set new ones. A beast that killed like an animal, but seemed to be almost following some indecipherable pattern. Once Longtree could figure out what that pattern was, they would be close to finding out what sort of killer they were dealing with.

“What’s our first step, Marshal? Can you tell me that much?”

“I need to know about these men that were killed,” Longtree said.

“Why? They were just men.”

“I need to know about them,” Longtree maintained. “If there was anything they might have had in common.”

“You aren’t suggesting that this beast picked these men to kill, are you?”

“Could be,” Longtree told him. “I just don’t know yet. I won’t overlook anything at this point.”

Bowes shrugged and talked at some length about the victims.

He covered a lot of the same ground as Wynona Spence had. Abe Runyon had been a railroad man, quick with his temper and fists. Not well liked. Cal Sevens had worked at the livery where he was killed. He was a newcomer to town, been there only a few years and kept mostly to himself. Charlie Mears lived at the Serenity Motel. He was a miner and had been fired from the mines for drinking. But he always seemed to have plenty of money and some suspected he was a highwayman. Pete Olak was a woodsman who cut firewood for a living. He had contracts with a few hotels and the railroad. He had been married with two kids and was well-liked. George Reiko was little better than a drunk. He lived with the Widow Thompkins and never seemed to do much but drink and gamble. Nate Segaris had a little spread outside town and had gone to seed since the death of his wife. He had a few horses. Gambled a bit. Drank with the miners and ranch hands on Saturday nights. Curly Del Vecchio was an ex-con, a veteran gambler and drunk, and pretty much just a plain nuisance.

Longtree mulled this all over. Despite the fact that a few of them tended to drink and gamble, there was no thread that tied them together. And drinking and gambling hardly made them members of an elite club.

“Nothing more?”

“Well…they all hated the local Indians. I know that much. Most folks around here do,” Bowes said, unconcerned. “I didn’t know all of them that well, but I’ve dealt with them in my job. None of ’em really seemed to associate together. I’ve heard all of ’em talk about what they’d like to do with the injuns more than once.” Bowes shrugged. “But there’s a lot of folks around these parts with the same leanings. Those men were just like a lot of ’em.”

“There’s a Blackfeet reservation outside town, isn’t there?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t advise going up there. They don’t like white folks much. Especially ones that carry badges.”

“I’ll keep it hidden.”

“You’re crazy, Marshal.”

“Maybe, but I’m going.”

“Well don’t expect me to drag yer body out come morning.”

Longtree just grinned.

4

Dewey Mayhew looked down on the sheriff. “Had yourself a good toot, did ya?” he said.

Lauters grimaced. “What the hell do you want?”

“To talk. Nothin’ wrong with old friends talkin’ is there?”

The sheriff tried to sit up but his head was pounding. An oil lamp was going in the corner. Darkness was pressed up against the little window. God, how long had he been out? Hours? Last thing he remembered was some run in with that Longtree fellow.

“What do you want to talk about?” Lauters grumbled.

Mayhew looked very solemn, scared almost. “About the murders.”

“Ain’t nothing new to say.”

“There’s been seven killings, Sheriff. Seven killings.”

Lauters rubbed his eyes. “I’m aware of that.”

“Those men—”

“I know.”

“There’s only three of us left,” Mayhew said desperately.

“Keep your voice down.”

Mayhew was trembling. “That thing won’t stop till we’re all dead.”

“That’s enough, Dewey.”

“Tonight it’ll come for me or you or—”

“Enough,” the sheriff said with an edge to his voice. “You just keep quiet about things. If you don’t, I’ll kill you myself.”

5

Longtree rode into the hills with only the vaguest of directions from Deputy Bowes as where to find the nearest of the Blackfeet encampments. The wind had died down from what it was earlier in the day and the temperature was above freezing. Longtree’d experienced things like that before in Montana and Wyoming. Blizzards and freezing winds followed by a brief warming trend, a thaw that would turn everything to slush and then to ice a week later when the temperature took another dive below freezing.

The country above Wolf Creek in the foothills of the Tobacco Roots was beautiful. Brush and scrubby cedar on open slopes gave way to snowy peaks, twisted deadfalls, and thick stands of pine and spruce. The mountains were huge and jutting above the timberline, barren and majestic.

But dangerous.

This whole country was like that. It was almost a religious experience viewing it, but the reality was sobering. This was a place of sudden landslides. Blizzards that kicked up with no warning. Frozen winds that seemed to rise up out of nowhere. Starving wolf packs. Marauding grizzlies that were anxious to pack extra meat and fat in their bellies before hibernation. It was also the home of the Blackfeet Indians, considered by some to be the most bloodthirsty nation on the upper Missouri.

Coming up over a ridge, Longtree saw the camp. Knowing they’d probably seen him coming for some time.

6

Longtree rode unmolested into the Blackfeet camp, accompanied by barking dogs.

There were about twelve buffalo skin lodges, most painted with geometric designs and huge, larger than life representations of birds and animals. A few weathered faces poked out of the flaps of tipis and withdrew at what they saw. Around twenty people were formed up in a camp circle around a vast blazing fire.

Longtree dismounted and tethered his horse to a pine. He approached the band cautiously, making it known he was no threat.

The Indians seemed intent on ignoring his very presence.

The men remained seated, dressed in buffalo hide caps with earflaps and buffalo robes with the fur next to their bodies. A few wore hooded Hudson Bay blanket coats and heavy moccasins. The women were dressed pretty much the same in robes and trade blankets covering their undecorated dresses. Babies poked out of the furry folds of their robes. A few women were nursing older children.

Longtree tried to communicate with a few via sign language and a bastard form of Blackfeet Algonkian he’d learned many years before.

No one paid any attention.

Finally, a young woman in a knee-length buffalo coat and black buffalo hide moccasins approached him, stopping a few feet away. She was beautiful in a wild, savage sort of way. Her eyes were huge brown liquid pools, the cheekbones high, the lips full, the skin lustrous. She had a raw, unbridled sexuality about her that you rarely saw in white women. And she had the look about her that told Longtree very clearly that she was tough as any man.

“I am Laughing Moonwind, daughter of Herbert Crazytail. What do you want here?” she asked in perfect English.

Longtree cleared his throat. “I need help. I wish to speak with the tribal chief.”

Longtree knew that, this being a small group, it would have only one chief. Larger tribes had several, but only one was considered the acting chief and his position was really that of a chairman of the tribal council. Many whites thought the chief was something of an executive officer in the tribe, but this wasn’t so. His rank was of little importance save during the summer encampment. The Blackfeet were very democratic and most major decisions were reached by the tribal council acting with the chief. Most chiefs were the leaders of the hunting bands, the basic political unit of Blackfeet culture.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Joe Longtree. I’m a federal marshal.”

“I will ask Herbert Crazytail if he will speak with you.”

Longtree stood waiting and watching as she disappeared into a lodge. It was larger than most of the others, the hide covering painted with wolves in deep, rich reds. There were also numerous skulls, gruesome things with huge eye sockets and sharpened stakes for teeth. Longtree knew the wolves signified that the owner of the tipi considered the wolf to be the source of his supernatural power…but the skulls, who could say? Along the bottom, the lodge cover was red with unpainted discs. Along the top, it was painted black with a large Maltese cross.

Many of the Indians were watching him now, wondering what his business could possibly be. Children gawked at him, but were silent as only tribal children could be.

There were long racks of buffalo meat drying and hides staked out to cure and bleach in the sun. A few of the women were eating, chewing bits of pemmican mixed with sarvis berries. The men sat smoking from gray shale tobacco pipes, clenching ash pipestems in their fists. Horses were corralled out near the treeline, pawing away at the snow to reach the grasses below. A few dogs lapped from rawhide troughs.

Laughing Moonwind finally returned. “My father will see you. Come.”

He followed her to the lodge just as three other women departed it. Longtree assumed they were Crazytail’s wives.

Inside the cavernous lodge, a small fire burned in a pit. It cast crazy, dancing shadows everywhere. The air smelled of smoke, tobacco, and dried meat. Moonwind by his side, Longtree sat across from an old man wearing a buffalo fur headpiece with horns intact. He was wrapped in a blanket, his left shoulder covered, his right arm and shoulder uncovered. His face was shadowy, the skin a leathery seamed brown, the eyes dark and unreadable. He smoked a long pipe ornamented with beads and eagle feathers.

Longtree knew it to be a medicine pipe, a sacred object.

Moonwind chatted in low tones with her father, then turned to Longtree. “My father wishes you to know that Chief Ironbrow is ill. He will speak in his place. What is it you wish here?”

“I need help. There have been killings in Wolf Creek. Brutal slayings that seem the work of an animal.”

Moonwind relayed this. Crazytail blinked, nothing more. Then he spoke.

“My father is aware of the killings. He can tell you only that they will continue.”

Longtree expected as much.

Long experience with Indians had taught him that you couldn’t take what many of them said at face value. Crazytail saying the killings would continue meant nothing. It wasn’t an admission of guilt; merely something the man had probably seen in his visions or dreams.

“Does Crazytail know what this beast is?” Longtree asked of her.

She relayed the information. “Skullhead,” she said.

Longtree shifted uneasily on the buffalo hide bedding beneath him. “Ask him who or what this Skullhead is.”

Moonwind did.

The old man talked at some length, finishing with a shake of his head.

“Many, many years ago, long before the dog days, Crazytail’s great ancestor, Medicine Claw, a member of the Skull Society, spent twelve days on a mountain plateau,” Moonwind said, “calling up the spirits of sky, earth, and water. He fasted for ten days and drank water but once. His guide spirit, the Wolf-Skull spirit, came down to him and taught him many things. He taught Medicine Claw the ways of the Skullhead, his sacred ways and rituals. The enigma of the Blood-Medicine. It has been passed down through a hundred generations of the Skull Society.”

Longtree stared at her, hoping there was more. Crazytail had said before the “dog days.” The dog days, Longtree knew, was the period before the Blackfeet were using horses, when they had only dogs to move camp with. This was before white men had come into contact with them. And Crazytail had said it was before this time, a “hundred generations” ago. This would mean that Longtree was hearing a tribal memory, something handed down for hundreds of years if not more.

“When Crazytail was a young man,” Moonwind went on, “he, too, spent many days fasting on a mountainside as all men of the Skull Society must do. The Wolf-Skull spirit came to him saying the Skullhead was always near, close enough to touch. But that Crazytail must be cautious, for the Skullhead was fierce and voracious, a force of nature like thunder and wind. To contact Skullhead he must use the sacred Blood-Medicine, but this medicine was holy and not to be used foolishly. For the Skullhead, once summoned, could not be sent away until its appetite was satisfied with the blood of enemies. Two months ago, in the sweat lodge, Crazytail was again visited by the spirit Wolf-Skull. The time of the Skullhead is at hand as it was in ancient times.”

Longtree felt a chill go up his back. “Who is the Skullhead?”

Moonwind shook her head. “My father will speak no more. No white man may know of this. The Blood-Medicine is sacred to the Skull Society. The Skullhead has been summoned. He is among us now,” she said, her eyes shining, “and getting closer.”

Longtree felt a certain uneasiness worm through him. His skin had gone cold now, his stomach stirring sickly. There was a veiled threat in her words.

He was half-white, yes, and that half wanted to laugh at all this nonsense. Nothing but injun gobbledegook, ghost stories, old wives’ tales. Crap handed down generation by generation. Just shit that had been dreamed up by some injun shaman blown clear into dreamland by peyote. But Longtree was also half-Crow. And that part of him was concerned. It knew better than to scoff at the medicine of the tribes. And it was commonly known that the Blackfeet were possessed of a very powerful medicine.

But, damn, it was all a load of horseshit, right?

He left Crazytail, knowing he’d get no more this night. He mounted his black and looked down at Moonwind.

She watched him, her lips forming words silently. Under her breath, she said, “Beware, Joseph Longtree, for the Skull Moon grows full.”

Longtree rode off into the dead of night, shivering.

7

At around ten that night, Lauters-not drinking for the moment-decided to pay a visit on Dr. Perry. Anna, Perry’s housekeeper, answered the door and led the sheriff through the maze of the surgery to the little study at the back of the house.

“Didn’t expect to see you this late, Bill,” Perry said.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Lauters explained. “I can never sleep worth a damn anymore.”

Unless you’re dead drunk, Perry felt like saying, but didn’t. He was sitting behind his desk, a brass microscope set out before him. There were other things there as well-a box of slides, a few dark corked bottles, several jars, an array of metal instruments. A dissection kit stood open, a scalpel and forceps missing from the felt-lined case. There were several tufts of fur laid out as well.

“What are you doing, Doc?”

Perry stroked his mustache. “A little detective work.” He motioned to the tufts of fur. “You know what these are?”

“Bits of animal fur,” Lauters said, examining books in oak shelves, most titles of which he couldn’t pronounce.

“Not just any, though. I have pelts from grizzlies, foxes, coyotes, wolves. In fact, from all the known predators in this area,” he explained. “I’m examining hairs from each with those of our mysterious friend here.”

Lauters sat down across from him. “And?”

“And I’ve concluded what we already know. This tuft of fur is not from any of these creatures. Though,” Perry confided in a low tone, “it shares similarities with human hair. But much more coarse.”

“So what does this tell us?”

Perry cleared his throat. “Do you know what a mutation is, Sheriff?”

“Haven’t the foggiest.”

Perry studied him closely. Lauters’ fingers were trembling. He was bloated and pale. The tip of his nose was purple from ruptured blood vessels and capillaries. Liver spots were numerous on his hands. He licked his lips constantly. These were the signs of the chronic alcoholic.

“Doc?” Lauters said.

“Oh yes, sorry. Getting old. My mind wandered.”

Lauters fixed him with a cold stare. “I’ll just bet it did.”

“Anyway, Sheriff, a mutation is simply a variation in a known species. A physical change that occurs suddenly or slowly, either from environmental factors or hereditary factors or any number of reasons that science has yet to determine.”

“What does this have to do with anything?”

Perry smiled. He knew Lauters understood very well what he was getting at. But the sheriff was a man who liked things explained to him in very clear language so there was no possibility of misinterpretation.

“What I’m saying, Bill, is that we’re dealing with a new life form here, an animal unknown to science.”

“I thought we already figured that.”

Perry nodded. “Yes. But what sort of animal walks upright like a man?”

8

Longtree made it back to his camp around midnight.

He had been originally planning on spending the night in a hotel in Wolf Creek, but the warming trend changed his mind. Tonight would be a good night to sleep out under the stars by the fireside. He rode down into the little arroyo and tethered his horse for the night. After getting the fire going, he had himself a little supper of beans and salt pork from his grub sack and washed it down with coffee.

He had a lot of thinking to do.

Sprawled out on his bedroll by the blaze, a cigarette between his lips, he did so. First off, only the facts. Fact. There were seven murders in and around Wolf Creek. Fact. Same method used on all victims-they were torn apart as if by some wild beast, eaten, mutilated. Fact. All evidence would suggest the attacker to have been some animal, some large and powerful predator. Fact. Nearly all the victims had been armed and had shot at their attacker, either missing (which seemed unlikely given that two of the men had shotguns and they all couldn’t have missed) or their bullets having no effect on said attacker. Fact. Though supposedly an animal, the creature attacked with an almost human rage.

The facts pretty much ended there.

Longtree took a long, deliberate pull off his cigarette.

Now for the speculation.

Speculation. The attacker is an unknown form of animal. Speculation. The attacker is somewhat intelligent. Speculation. The attacker seems to be targeting a certain group of people, but where their connection might be is unknown. Speculation. The attacker is tied up with the local Blackfeet tribe.

That pretty much did it.

Once the facts and speculations were done with, there were only more problems. If the Blackfeet were involved, then how were they directing the attacks of this wild beast? And what of Herbert Crazytail and his Skull Society and this mysterious other called Skullhead? Was it just a bunch of bull? Was the crazy old Indian allowing a bunch of savage murders to justify his own mythologies and visions?

Longtree had no idea whatsoever. His mother was a Crow. He had Indian blood in him and as a boy in the Crow camp before the Sioux raiders had murdered everyone, he’d witnessed the spiritual and mystical side of Indian life. But he’d forgotten most of it in the Catholic mission school as Christianity was rammed down his throat. And later, with Uncle Lone Hawk, there’d been little mysticism. Lone Hawk was a Christian. He was a practical man, having little use for the supernatural. Yet, despite the fact that Longtree knew very little of Indian spiritualism and the assorted, complex myth cycles and legendry of the tribes, he wasn’t above believing there were mysteries in this world. Things unknowable, things dark and ancient that white man’s science or religion couldn’t hope to explain.

The world was a wild place.

And though there was no one better than the whites at collecting information and dissecting it for truths, there were some things in the world that defied rationality and scientific realism.

Longtree winced, knowing he was thinking like a superstitious man.

But all men were superstitious at their core, it was the nature of the beast. Men thought certain rifles and knives were lucky. That wearing a particular coat or pair of boots would bring them good fortune or, at the very least, keep them alive in this hard country. In the army he’d known officers that were highly-educated men who would only put their boots on a certain way or carry lucky coins or pictures of their children as talismans.

Superstition was everywhere.

And that was the same now as it had been two hundred years before or would be two hundred years in the future.

Longtree was confused about this thing with Crazytail, this talk of the Skullhead. Something was slaughtering people, something that left huge prints like those of some monster.

Crazy?

Perhaps. But he would’ve liked to have known something of this Skull Society and particularly this Blood-Medicine. It was, according to Moonwind’s translation, the medium through which this Skullhead was called up like some Christian demon out of hell. But…Christ. Monsters? Demons?

You’re a lawman, he told himself.

This was true. A lawman. A peace officer. A deputy U.S. Marshal. A special federal officer. He was a man of facts, not fantasy. He didn’t deal in Indian superstitions or half-forgotten folklore.

Yet, Longtree was scared.

He would never have admitted it, but he was. There was a deep-rooted fear crawling in his belly and he couldn’t shake it. After all the things he’d done, all the danger he’d faced, this scared him. He was frightened like he’d never been before.

(beware for the skull moon grows full)

The import of that unnerved him. Devils. Monsters. Primal beasts. There were names for things like this, for beasts that prowled the lonely countryside. Longtree was well-read, he knew something of folklore. Knew that even white European culture had their bogeymen, their haunters of the dark, their atavistic horrors. Bogarts and ogres and assorted flesh-eaters. Things with claws and teeth that stalked the dark forests.

Enough, he thought, enough.

And then out in the moon-washed countryside he heard it. A low, awful, evil sound that perfectly punctuated his thoughts: a mournful, drawn-out howling. He bit down on his lower lip, his head suddenly filled with nightmare imagery, terrible things that stalked the wind-swept shadows of cemeteries and burial grounds. Impossible, red-eyed horrors with long claws and sharp teeth that waited on frosty, forgotten lanes for wayward travelers…

He shook it clear from his head.

A monster of Indian myth given life, hunting enemies of the tribe. That was insane.

And the night went silent, even Longtree’s horse dared not breathe. An eerie abnormal hush had taken the world now, enclosing it in folds of midnight satin. A heavy breathing stillness.

Then the howling began again.

9

Sheriff Lauters was on his way back to his office when he heard the screams.

He had half a bottle of rye in his desk drawer and the thought of it warming his belly and lulling him into an easy sleep was all he cared about. He didn’t pay any attention to the miners he saw fighting in the streets outside the saloons and gambling halls. He didn’t pay no mind to the lewd behavior exhibited by a few ranch hands outside the parlor houses.

He saw nothing but the bottle and the sweet release it offered.

Then he heard the screams.

They stopped him dead.

He’d heard men cry out after being shot, knifed, and even scalped. But this was like none of those. This was a bloodcurdling screech that went right up his spine like spiders. And gave him about the same sense of aversion. It sounded again. Weaker now. It was coming from behind the smithy’s shop.

A few others were running in that direction now, guns drawn.

Lauters raced by younger men and elbowed aside men and women alike. There was no time for courtesy here. When he rounded the shop and made it to the alley out back, people were already turning away in disgust. Rikers, the blacksmith, had a lantern going and what it revealed was a horror.

Lauters knew it was Dewey Mayhew.

Somehow, in the back of his mind, he’d suspected it.

Mayhew was lying in the hard-packed snow, blood sprayed out in every possible direction. He was curled up, fingers trying to press his internals back in through the ragged incision in his belly. He was open in half a dozen places and blood ran from all of them. The left side of his face was stripped clear down to the meat. His legs were broken and twisted out at odd angles, bone pushing through the tears in his pants. The left side of his neck was ripped open, a great chunk of flesh missing. He bled from nose, mouth, ears-too many places to count.

But he wasn’t quite dead yet.

He was trying to talk.

Lauters kneeled next to him, trying to hear what he said. Blood gurgled from his mouth, his lips shuddering, his remaining eye staring off into space.

“What?” Lauters said softly. “Tell me.”

Mayhew kept trying to talk. Lauters put his ear to the man’s bloody, torn lips.

“…those eyes…” Mayhew sputtered. “…those red eyes…”

His body shook with spasms for a moment and went still.

“All right, goddammit,” Lauters said, climbing to his feet. “The man’s dead. All of you clear out of here. Now.”

Slowly, the onlookers vacated the scene, leaving only Rikers and Lauters. Lauters went up to the man who, despite his powerful physique and girth, was trembling, the color gone from his usually ruddy face.

“You find him?” the sheriff asked.

“Yeah,” Rikers said slowly. “I…I heard the screaming…lit the lantern and came out… Jesus, oh sweet Jesus…”

Lauters turned him away from the body. “What did you see?”

“Something…something running…I don’t know…”

“Think man, dammit,” Lauters commanded. “This is important.”

Rikers swallowed. “It happened so fast…I’m not sure…”

“What? Tell me.” He was shaking the man now.

With a look of anguish, Rikers broke free. “A shape…a shadow… gigantic…Christ, I don’t know…something moving away fast, down the alley.”

“What did it look like?”

Rikers’ eyes were glassy, staring. “The Devil.”

10

The body was taken over to Wynona at the undertaking parlor in the back of a farm wagon. Wynona was her usual cadaverous self, not disappointed in the least that a new customer had arrived despite the hour.

Always room for one more, she was fond of saying.

“I seem to be seeing a lot of you, Sheriff,” she said. “I never really thought I would until—”

“Shut up, Wynona,” Lauters snapped.

“Ah, well,” the undertaker said, pulling the tarp back from the ruin of Dewey Mayhew, “life goes on. Unfortunately.” She smiled at her morbid joke as was her habit and gave the body a cursory examination. “And whatever did you get into?” she asked the cold, staring face. “Don’t worry, I’ll fix you up.”

“You give me the willies, Wynona.”

Wynona lifted one eyebrow. “Simply because they’re dead doesn’t mean they’re not people, Sheriff. I’m sure they enjoy my chit-chat in their own way. People treat them like bags of meat, sides of beef. I treat them like people. I offer them the same social graces I would in life. Isn’t it what you would want?”

“Just get on with it, you damn ghoul.”

Wynona inspected the corpse with more attention now. Checking each wound and abrasion. She shrugged. “There’s nothing I can tell that you don’t already know, Sheriff.”

“Which is?”

“This man has died from massive loss of blood. He appears to have been attacked by some sort of animal.”

Wynona looked up as someone came in. The corners of her thin lips twisted up a bit in a smile. “Reverend Claussen,” she said, expecting trouble and relishing the idea.

“In the flesh,” Claussen said.

Lauters rubbed his eyes. He looked disgusted. “Evening, Reverend.”

“But what sort of evening, Sheriff?” Claussen asked. He’d brought a crucifix and prayer book along with him. “An evening of murder and mayhem, I would think. An evening not fit for decent folk to walk the streets without fear for their lives—”

“That’ll do, Reverend.”

Wynona was still smiling, enjoying this exchange to no end. Carefully, she snipped the bloody garments away from the body.

Claussen held his prayer book over his heart. “Oh, dear Lord,” he said, “an evil is amongst us. A savage and unholy beast. We pray for your guidance, for your deliverance from—”

“Oh shut the hell up,” Lauters snapped.

Claussen looked as if he’d been slapped. “You, sir, are a heretic.”

“No, I’m just dead tired and don’t want hear any of that Jesus-crap right now.”

“How dare you, sir!”

Wynona stopped snipping.

“You know where I’ll be if you need me, Wynona,” Lauters said, stomping off. “I better get out of here before I make the dear reverend here into another customer for you.”

“At the jailhouse?” Wynona asked.

“No doubt the nearest tavern,” Claussen said bitterly.

Lauters clenched his teeth. “Shut your goddamn mouth.”

“Your words, sir, again fall on deaf ears. The Lord will protect me from violent men with weak minds.”

But Lauters was already gone. Weak mind or not, there was a lot on it.

11

The moon was up now.

It was a fat, yellow orb that painted Wolf Creek up in a grim, pale illumination that reflected off snow and ice and hard earth. Wynona Spence stared out the window at the town from her rooms above the undertaking parlor. She was thinking of Joe Longtree and what he had said, wondering, wondering.

Could any of that be possible?

A beast with the mind of a man?

Unthinkable.

Wynona turned from the window. Candles were lit, spread out almost strategically. They cast a sickly orange light and fed shadows into flesh. As she moved, they danced and swayed and stalked. She had a bottle of whiskey set out. Good whiskey, too, all the way from Baton Rouge, imported via Ireland. Label was even written up in Gaelic. Not the cheap swill they served up in Wolf Creek. Fermented goat piss is all that was. Good enough for the ranch hands and hardrock miners who only wanted to get drunk, fight, and fuck, but hardly satisfying to the discerning palate.

A love of good whiskey, like mortuary science, was something Wynona had inherited from her father. The dead did not frighten her. They were old friends and childhood playmates. She grew up with their staring, gray faces and empty eyes. Spent hours at her father’s side while he stitched and sewed, gummed and glued, snapped and twisted bodies back into something vaguely human that could be cried over at a funeral. In a town like Wolf Creek, there were always plenty of dead bodies. Plenty of shootings and knifings and beatings and the occasional hanging. Then there were the mines, the inevitable quarrels between rival ranching combines. None of that even took into account death by natural causes. Yes, in the end, all roads led to the mortuary.

Those who had spurned Wynona in life always came around to her in the end.

It made Wynona smile.

When she was young and first felt the stirrings of love, of desire for the opposite sex, the boys shunned her. She was never what you would’ve called physically attractive, there was more of the skeleton to her than the seductress. She was thin and bony by nature. Her flesh was cold to the touch. And she was the undertaker’s daughter. The boys picked up on that, of course. They had no more use for her than the girls. Had she been a leper she could have been no more alone, no more shunned, no more banished from their social circles.

Without the benefit of male or female companionship-even her mother had passed on before her tenth birthday and Wynona remembered her father painstakingly preparing mother for the worms-Wynona withdrew more and more until by age sixteen, she was little more than a hermit, spending most of her time with her father and his work. The cadavers became her friends. She developed secret relationships with them, named them. She would sing songs to them and play games with them. Tell them stories, secrets. She was always sad when it came time for them to go.

And in the dark recesses of her brain, an evil seed was planted: One day, perhaps, she would select a special friend. And that friend she would keep with her. That friend would not be surrendered to dank earth and feasting worms.

Wynona had something else in common with her father: She robbed the dead.

Call it desecration if you must, but to Wynona it was merely a way of supplementing her income. Watches, jewelry, silver buttons. She sold them to a jeweler in Nevada City who did not ask questions. Gold teeth to a goldsmith who melted them down and fashioned them into settings for rings, chains for necklaces. Some might have called Wynona ghoulish, but ghoulish or not, she was not wasteful. Now and then she found money on her customers. Usually it was already purloined by the time the body came under her care. But when it hadn’t, she rejoiced. Fringe benefits. Even a fine pair of boots or undamaged hat could fetch a handsome price.

And why, she often thought, should such treasures languish in the ground?

Wynona filled a glass goblet with whiskey and began slowly blowing out candles, until all that illuminated her rooms was the yellow glow of the fireplace and the anemic moonlight which filtered in with ghostly fingers.

She unlocked her bedroom door and sat on the bed, on the purple velvet coverlet, her head reclined against an avalanche of feather pillows.

There was a shape in the bed next to her. It did not stir.

Wynona sighed. “Oh, what a day I’ve had, Marion. What a most interesting and unusual day,” she said, sipping whiskey. “More murders. More business. And a most interesting man. A deputy U.S. Marshal named Joseph Longtree. A fascinating man. What? Oh, don’t act like that, I assure you he means nothing to me…”

12

Deputy Bowes watched the sheriff come in and was glad to see the man was sober for a change. “Another one?” he said.

Lauters sat behind his desk. “Dewey Mayhew.”

Bowes set a cup of coffee before him. “No point in asking the particulars, I guess. I know ’em all well enough by now.”

Lauters nodded. “Same three-toed prints in the snow, spur at the heel. Goddammit.”

“Should we try tracking it?”

Lauters didn’t answer. He stared off into space, his lips moving with silent words. He sipped a third of his coffee away and opened the bottom drawer. He took out the fifth of rye, pulled the cork with his teeth, and poured some in his coffee. “Any excitement tonight?” he asked, wincing as the liquor settled in his belly.

“Not too much. Got a miner by the name of Ezra Wholesome in lock-up.”

“Wholesome?”

Bowes scratched his beard, grinning. “Yeah. Lost five hundred to the house over at Ruby’s. Wouldn’t pay. Pulled his iron.”

Lauters looked up. “Any shooting?”

“No, I talked him out of it.”

Bowes was good. You had to give him that. Lauters never once regretted signing the man on. He had an innate gift for soothing the savage beast, cooling hot blood with carefully-chosen words. He could talk sense to gunmen and crazy injuns with equal ease. Lauters figured he could’ve charmed the habit off a nun.

“You wanna tell me about it?” Bowes said.

The sheriff nodded. “Mayhew was alive when I got there.”

“What did he say?” Bowes asked this intently.

Lauters told him. Then told him what the blacksmith, Rikers, had seen. “Devil, he said. Looked like the Devil.” Lauters drank straight from the bottle now. “Goddamn Devil. What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Bowes shrugged. “You think there’s anything to it?”

Lauters shrugged. “Hell if I know. Tomorrow, I’m gonna have Johnson over at the paper print up some bounty posters. It’ll draw some professional hunters in. Couldn’t hurt.”

“It didn’t make any moves against Rikers?”

“Not a one. He came out there with his lantern, frightened it off. Lucky to be alive, I suppose.”

Bowes sighed. “Longtree,” he said carefully, “thinks these killings are related. That the beast is going after certain people.”

Lauters took another drink. “You believe that?”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”

“Longtree don’t know his ass from an umbrella stand, son.”

“He seems like a smart fellah, though.”

Lauters did not comment on that.

There was no point: He knew Longtree was smart. Knew it well as any man, but he’d never admit to it. Couldn’t bring himself to. Federal intervention had always been a sore spot with Lauters. And now here comes this big-mouthed deputy marshal and he was a goddamn breed to boot. And a crafty, smart sumbitch, too. Lauters didn’t like a guy like that poking around. There were too many skeletons in too many closets and the last thing this town needed was some breed rattling them loose.

Besides, dammit, how was it going to look if that wily, hotshot bastard solved these goddamn murders while Lauters, a white man, was running around in circles scratching his fat ass? Not good, that’s what.

But the murders.

Jesus. Those bodies. Despite himself, he wouldn’t be one bit surprised if Rikers was right and it was old Satan himself. Those tracks…

Lauters gulped off the bottle again. Rye ran down his chin. He didn’t bother to wipe it off. He just stared into space with wide, bloodshot eyes. His lips trembled with a tic.

“Something the matter, Sheriff?”

“Yeah,” Lauters, said staring into the amber depths of the bottle. “I’m scared shitless.”

13

It was getting on around two when Longtree heard the horse approaching.

He’d been sleeping an hour or so and started awake at the sound. Years of hunting and being hunted by dangerous men made him a light sleeper. He woke at almost anything. Sometimes a good wind stirring the trees was enough.

He pulled himself free of his bedroll. His horse snorted.

The rider stopped in the treeline surrounding his little gully. “Come on in,” Longtree called, pistols out now.

The rider came down the trail slowly, the horse’s hoofs crunching the snow with gentle, timed steps. Longtree fed a few logs into the dying fire and it blazed with flickering orange light. The rider was an Indian. There was no doubt of this. A long buffalo robe was pulled over his head and he sat astride a rawhide saddle.

But it wasn’t a “he.” It was Laughing Moonwind from the Blackfeet camp.

She wore buffalo mittens and carried an old Kentucky rifle. She tethered her horse and sat by the fire.

“I guess you were the last person in the world I expected,” Longtree said, putting his pistols away and sitting by her side. He rolled a cigarette from his tobacco pouch.

“You came to ask us questions,” she began, “and now I’ve come to do the same.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Who sent you? Crazytail?”

She fixed him with her huge brown eyes. Fire was reflected in them. It seemed to belong there. “I said I was asking the questions,” she said sternly, then softening a bit, “I came of my own accord.”

“Your English is good,” Longtree commented, not bothering to ask her where she learned it.

“I was schooled by whites.”

Longtree nodded. “Me, too.”

“Why are you here?” she inquired. “Why does this matter involve the U.S. Government?”

“People are being killed. I was sent here to find out why.” He briefly sketched out for her the trouble all this could cause, what with the mines and the reservation lands and the general hatred existing between white and red man.

“And you think you can solve all these problems?”

“No, but I can try.” The flickering firelight fanned his face with jumping shadow. “Somebody has to. This is way out of control. Keeps up, people are going to start pulling out of Wolf Creek. That may be a good thing for your people, Moonwind, but not for the white man.”

She had no reaction to this. “And you won’t leave until you’re finished?”

He shook his head. “Can’t.”

“Even if it means dying?”

He shrugged. “I’ll take my chances. It’s what I’m paid for.”

“You’re very stubborn. Very foolish.”

She slipped the buffalo robe off, letting it fall to the ground. The fire was throwing off a lot of heat. Longtree was down to his shirtsleeves now, too. He sat smoking and watching her, letting her direct things here. She knew something and he wanted to know what.

“The buffalo herds are thinning, “ she said. “Soon my people will be starving like the rest of the Plains tribes. We are a dying race.” She studied the ground with sadness, a sadness not so much learned, but bred. The sadness of her race. “Of all the indignities forced on us by the whites, this is the worst. They are taking away our ability to feed and clothe ourselves. We will be reduced to a race of beggars just to feed our children. We have never liked the whites. But we could even have forgiven them of this if it was an accident. But it is no accident.” She stared into the fire, solemn, proud. “The army is directing the slaughter of the buffalo and as they die, so do we.”

Longtree said, “I think the army wants to stop the Sioux and the Cheyenne. So the Indian Wars will end.”

“And what of us?” Moonwind asked. “Must we perish with them?”

Longtree sighed. “I wish I had an answer for that.”

“Your people, the Absaroka, the Crow, have fought with the Flatheads against us—”

“We also fought the Dakotas, the Sioux.”

“You fought against us,” she maintained.

He dragged off his cigarette. “Did the Crow have a choice? The Blackfeet raided and killed them without mercy. Moonwind, the Blackfeet are a warring tribe. They are not an innocent race.”

She ignored this. “The Crow fought with the whites against us, against others. And where did it get them? They were forgotten and tossed aside when their usefulness to the whites had ended. The Crow are few now, Joseph Longtree. They are a starving, beaten race, riddled with white man’s diseases.”

“I know what’s happened,” he told her. “I’m not ignorant of any of this.”

“The whites are treacherous.”

“Not all of them.”

“Your mother was a Crow. How can you say this?”

“And my father was a white. None of this has anything to do with why I’m here,” he explained patiently. “I didn’t come to run Indians. I came to stop some killing or at least find out why it’s happening.”

“This matters so much to you?”

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Now I’m going to ask questions and you’re going to answer them. Tell me about the Skull Society.”

She shrugged. “They are a men’s society. We have many as do most tribes. There are others-the Bear, the Beaver. The Beaver is the most spiritually powerful it is said. The Wolf and Bear produce the finest hunters and warriors. But the oldest, the most secretive is the Skull Society. It is also the most feared.”

“Why?”

“Because…” she pursed her lips as if what she revealed was taboo and it probably was. “Because they have the power to call the Skullhead.”

“And what is this Skullhead?”

“A supernatural being. Nothing more. According to tradition, the Skullhead is a righter of wrongs.”

Longtree stared at her, knowing she knew more than she was saying. She avoided his eyes. “Tell me what this is all about.”

She continued staring in the fire for some time. Then, “It has been said that those of the Skull Society have the ability to change shape, to shift themselves into other forms.” She let that lay with him. “It is a fairly common belief with my people. The Bear Society believes they can assume the shape of their spiritual guide, the great bear. The Wolf Society believes they can become wolves.”

“Do you believe in this?”

“I believe many things.”

“But do you believe in this? The whites have a name for shapeshifters. Do you know what it is?”

“Werewolf,” she said softly.

He nodded. “A legend.”

She seemed unconcerned with his label. “It has been said the ancients were in league with many creatures. Some no longer walk this land. Some are distant memory. That they hunted with them, as them. That they could reverse their skins. Beneath their flesh were the pelts of wolf, bear. This was accomplished with the Blood-Medicine my father spoke of.”

Longtree tossed his cigarette into the fire. “Okay. That’s fine for the Wolf and Bear Societies. I don’t ridicule their beliefs. But what of the Skull Society? What is it they claim to become with this Blood-Medicine?”

“With the Blood-Medicine, men of the Society could become the Skullhead.”

“What else?”

She went silent again. Then she turned and looked at him, her eyes drinking him in, making him shiver. Shadow and light played over her face. “It was said my grandfather was a shapeshifter. That he often hunted in the form of an animal. That his father was one and his father’s father.”

“And Crazytail?”

“Yes, he, too.”

Longtree licked his lips. “Are your telling me your father is killing these people in the form of an animal? Some primal beast? This Skullhead?”

She looked angry. “No. You wanted to know about the Skull Society. That’s all I’m telling you.”

But was it? Was she laying it all out for him? No, he decided, she was spinning tribal tales, nothing more. People didn’t turn into animals. There were no werewolves. Or Were-bears. Or Skullheads. If he started believing garbage like that then it was time to turn in his badge. It was madness.

“One year ago,” she said, “a local white girl was murdered in Wolf Creek. Her name was Carpenter. She was raped, then stabbed. My brother, Red Elk, was arrested for the crime.”

“Did he do it?”

“No, he wouldn’t do such a thing.” She seemed to believe this. “He had too much honor. He was found stooping over the body, so, of course, being an Indian, the whites decided he was guilty.” Her lips tightened down like a vise. “He was arrested and put in jail. Two nights later, vigilantes stormed the jail and hanged him.” She laughed dryly, without emotion. “At least, this is the story Sheriff Lauters told.”

“And you think he was lying?”

“Yes. I don’t know why he would, but I think it was to protect someone.” Moonwind had planted the seed of uncertainty, now she nourished it. “In recent years, the local ranchers have been plagued by a cattle rustling ring. Red Elk told me he thought he knew who the members of that ring were.”

“So he was arrested and lynched to shut him up?” Longtree asked.

“Yes, I think so. But there’s more to it than that. A rumor circulated after he was hanged, mainly among the whites, that Red Elk didn’t kill that woman. That he came upon her as she was dying and she told him who her attacker was.”

“One of the ring?”

“It would seem… logical, don’t you think? Red Elk knew who her killer was and he knew who the rustlers were.”

Longtree sighed. “You’re just guessing.”

“Am I? I visited Red Elk in the jail the day before he was lynched. He told me he knew who the killer was. That in the courtroom he planned on pointing the finger at not only the killer, but at the entire ring.”

“But he didn’t tell you who this person was?”

She shook her head. “He said it was too dangerous for me to know.”

Longtree thought about it. It made a certain amount of sense. If Red Elk knew who the real killer was and who the rustlers were, then certain parties would have every reason in the world to have him jailed and lynched before he came to trial. But what of Lauters? What was his part in this? Logic dictated that he was one of the ring, that the killer was another. Lauters didn’t want this killer going on the stand because, facing the noose, he’d have told everything. Red Elk was seen stooping over the body, a very convenient surrogate. Everything fell into place after that. The ring must’ve have known Red Elk knew about them. It made sense…it answered many questions…but was it true?

Longtree rolled another cigarette and lit it with an ember from the fire. “Who,” he said, “saw Red Elk bending over the body?”

“Sheriff Lauters.”

Longtree winced. Damn. It was all too obvious now. Or was it? He couldn’t jump to conclusions here. He would have to proceed slowly. Check out all this as quietly and covertly as possible. If Lauters was involved and he discovered Longtree nosing into the affair…it could get ugly. Still, none of this explained the series of killings.

“I’ll look into it,” he promised. “But my first consideration is still the murders.”

“Maybe if you solve one crime, you’ll solve the others.”

Longtree looked at her. Moonwind knew much more than she was saying, but she was fiercely stubborn. She would tell no more than she wanted to. A woman like Moonwind couldn’t be coerced into talking. He had to gain her confidence and the only way he could do that was by investigating her brother’s lynching and what led to it.

One step at a time.

“If I didn’t know better,” Longtree said to her, “I’d say you were suggesting these killings were done as revenge.”

She shrugged. “You’ll have to find that out yourself.”

He let it rest. He’d suspected a connection between the murdered men and now one was offered him-they had to be the rustlers, the same ones who’d lynched Red Elk and of which one was a murderer.

Take it easy, he cautioned himself. Be Careful. She could be lying about all this.

But he’d made no decisions yet. He would investigate it all and then draw his conclusions.

He found himself staring in her eyes and she into his. He arched his head toward her and she took him in her arms, kissing him passionately. She pulled away, slipping free of her calico dress. Longtree followed suit. Her taut body was bathed in orange light. He kissed her breasts, her belly, everything. She drew him on top of her and guided him in. And even as he pounded into her with powerful thrusts and stared into her savage, hungry eyes, he saw the face of Lauters.

But not for long.

Some time later, they lay together before the fire, covered in Longtree’s blankets. The night was cold, but they were sweating and filled with that pleasant warmth that only comes after sex. They didn’t speak, not for the longest time. There didn’t seem to be a need to. The breeze was crisp, yet gentle in the arroyo beneath its wall of pines. The stars overhead were brilliant.

Sitting up on one elbow, Moonwind said, “You were raised in a mission school?”

“Partly.” He told her of the Sioux raiders that had destroyed his village, his family. “You could say, I was equally schooled by the Crow and by whites.”

“The whites often place things in categories. Have you noticed this?”

“Yes.”

“Everything must be labeled and organized and separated into appropriate boxes. A strange thing.”

Longtree laughed. “They find life easier that way.”

Moonwind said, “My father, Herbert Crazytail, is a very wise man. When I was young he was friends with many whites. When they built the mission school in Virginia City, he sent me there so that I could learn the ways of the whites. That I would speak their tongue and know their god. He said that the whites were possessed of a strong medicine.”

“He was right,” Longtree admitted. “It’s something I’ve learned and sometimes the hard way.”

“Yes, my people as well. Crazytail wanted me to know the ways of whites and to understand that, although their medicine was strong, they misused it. I learned this. He wanted me to know that their god and his teachings were wise, but that the white man did not follow them. This also, I learned. The white man is wasteful, Joseph Longtree. He destroys what he does not understand and laughs at that which he cannot fathom. He has a god, but he profanes him, ignores his teachings.”

Longtree couldn’t argue with any of that. White religion, unlike red, was generally a matter of convenience. It was practiced only when it did not interfere with other aspirations or needs.

“The white man separates the natural and the supernatural. But my people-and yours-do not. We have no words to divide them. They are one and the same,” Moonwind said, her eyes sparkling and filled with fire. “If the whites believed this, they would accept us and we, them.”

“You might have a point there,” Longtree said. “What you have in this land is a collision between cultures.”

“Answer me this,” she said to him, holding his face in her long, slender fingers. “Since you are half-white, do you believe in the supernatural or only that which you can touch, can feel, can hold in your hand?”

It was not an easy question to answer.

And the only way he could was to tell her about Diabolus. “It was in the Oklahoma Territory along the New Mexico border. Many years ago. I was a bounty hunter at the time. A man paid me to bring him a body…”

14

Joe Longtree rode almost 200 miles to collect the body, and all the way the demon wind was blowing. It came out of the north, screaming over the dead, dry land with the wail of widows.

When he finally made it to Diabolus, he knew there would be trouble. The town was a desolate place, a typical failed Oklahoma/NewMexico border town with skeletons lining the street: closed-up, boarded-down buildings weathered colorless by the winds and heat. He saw no one and he didn’t like it at all. In another year, this place would be another ghost town, blown away by the desert dust, sucked dry of humanity and hope. And after Longtree got what he’d come for, it could do just that.

“Shit and damnation,” he cussed under his breath and steered the wagon down the black, lonesome street. The thud of the horse’s hoofs was like thunder on the hardpacked clay, echoing through abandoned buildings and thoroughfares.

A few tumbleweeds chased each other down the road.

Longtree had two lanterns hung on long hooked poles to either side of him and they did little to light up the ebon byways. It was like creeping through the dark innards of a hog.

Up ahead, there was light and people. Horses were hitched up before a sagging single-story saloon and there were fires lit in the street, groups mulling around them.

He stopped the wagon a reasonable distance from them and dismounted.

Indians. He saw that much.

But this was the Oklahoma panhandle. These were not his people, not his mother’s people. She had often told him that the Crow were not the same as other tribes. That the Sioux and Ute and Flathead and Bannock were all separate peoples. That they had only the stars and moon and sun in common, but nothing else. But Longtree’s white teachings had told him that all Indians were the same-they were all heathen savages, no more, no less.

And in those dark days after his tenure as an Indian scout for the army and time spent beating men in the ring, he had little use for anything but money. Men, white or red, were all savages to him. He thought of himself as truly belonging in neither world so he hated equally.

He watched the Indians and they watched him.

A beaten, lean lot they were, all bundled up in rags and moth-eaten blankets and cloaks of dusty despair. Zuni, he figured. They studied him with hateful, mocking eyes sunk in burnished skins. And who were they to look on him like that? These pathetic, hopeless sonsofbitches who begged for crumbs in a white town and warmed themselves around a buffalo shit fire?

Longtree despised them.

He tethered up his horses so the thieving redskins wouldn’t make off with them and, gathering up his shotgun and saddlebags, went inside.

There was a fire burning in the hearth and a few depressed and drunken men slouched over shots of whiskey or forgotten card games. The place smelled of piss, sickness, and misery.

There was a Mex behind the bar, a greasy little thing missing an eye.

Longtree set his shotgun on the bar. “Gimme a shot of something,” he told the Mex.

The Mex poured him whiskey.

Longtree looked around surreptitiously. “You know a guy named Benner?”

Someone walked up behind him and Longtree turned around real fast, hand on the butt of his Navy Colt.

“I’m Benner,” a man said. He was so ravaged by the climate he could’ve passed for an Arapaho. “You here for the body?”

“Yeah,” Longtree said absently. He was listening to the commotion out on the street. The injuns were chanting and pounding gourds and rattling beads. Commingled with the moan of the wind, it all took on a very eerie, haunted sound.

“Heathen Halloween,” Benner croaked.

Longtree eyed him up to see if it was a joke. Benner’s face was forbidding. “Since when do redskins celebrate that?” Longtree asked. “Halloween’s a whiteman’s—”

“It don’t belong to any Christians,” Benner said in a low, guarded voice. “Halloween’s a pagan ceremony, my friend.”

“Halloween…out here? That’s crazy. Out east, maybe, but not here.”

Benner shrugged. “That’s what we call it. Heathen Halloween. They celebrate it this night every year.” He seemed disturbed at the idea. “Now, we’d best get you what you came for.”

Longtree downed his shot and followed Benner into a claustrophobic back room. A match was struck and a lantern ignited. There was a wooden box sitting atop a heavy table. It was about six feet in length and looked much like what it was: a coffin. Benner pried open the lid and held the lantern close so Longtree could see.

“Christ,” Longtree muttered.

It was some sort of Indian chieftain done up in skins and beads and necklaces of animal teeth. The face had the texture and color of tanned animal hide, the skin just barely covering the ridges of the leering skull beneath. The eyes were empty, grizzled pits, the teeth broken and pitted like deadwood. A beetle crawled out of one eye socket and Benner brushed it aside.

“Almost two-thousand years old,” he told Longtree. “Been baking in the sun and drying in the wind since before white men ever set foot here…”

Longtree shrugged and thought of the money they promised him in San Fran for it. A smile brushed his lips. “Some people’ll pay good money for anything, I reckon.”

But an Indian chief, is what he was thinking. I’m taking money to deliver an Indian chief. That’s what it has come down to.

“Those Indians out there,” Benner said in a whisper, “usually they have their October heathen service out in the hills where we can’t see. But they brought it to town now that he’s here. They’re mighty ornery about me having stolen him. They want him back. Some sort of god to them, I guess.”

“Don’t look like a god to me,” Longtree said.

Benner was staring at him. “You’re kinda dark yourself friend…you ain’t got no injun blood in you, do you?”

“No,” Longtree lied.

“That’s good. I can trust you then, I guess.”

Longtree grunted and looked down at the chief and couldn’t help shuddering: the old boy looked angry. His leathery, crumbled face was hitched in a sneer, it seemed. There was something else that bothered Longtree, too. Now that he studied the old ghoul’s face, there seemed to be something slightly off-kilter about it, almost as if his bones weren’t laying quite right. His face had a narrow, inhuman cast to it, the eyes too large, the jaws exaggerated. It was reptilian somehow, suggestive of the skull of a rattlesnake.

“We’ll have to take him out the back way,” Benner told him, “those injuns’ll be angrier than a fistful of snakes if they know he’s gone and you’re taking him.”

Longtree nodded.

Benner suddenly took a step backward, one trembling hand grasping his temples, his lips pale as fresh cream. He was whiter than flour in a sack. His eyes were lunatic, rolling balls shifting in their swollen sockets.

“What the hell is it?” Longtree asked.

Benner shook his head, mouthed a few unintelligible words and then seemed to calm down. For one awful moment he looked as if he’d seen something Longtree hadn’t. “I’m okay,” he said.

“You accustom to spells?”

“No, I’m fine,” Benner assured him. “Just this place, I guess. Gets to a man after a time. Nothing here but injuns and sand and the wind. Goddamn snakes everywhere.” He mopped his forehead with a discolored bandanna. “I wish them redskins would take that damn heathen ceremony somewheres else.”

Benner put the lid back on the crate and opened the rear door. The wind slammed it violently against the outer wall and both men started. Longtree brought the wagon around. The box didn’t weigh much and it was a simple matter to load it.

“Where did you find this, anyway?” Longtree asked him in the whispering darkness.

“Out in the hills,” Benner said hesitantly. “Out in some burying ground the injuns call Old God Hollow. Lot of curious things out there. I’m probably the only white man who has ever been to that awful place. It’s an ancient place and an evil one, friend, only in your nightmares will you ever see such a thing. Must be ten or fifteen other scaffolds there with injun corpses drying out on them, injuns with devil-faces like his. There’s faces carved into the rocks and bones everywhere, piles of ’em. And scalps…Christ. Must be thousands, strung up on poles and not recent ones either, but old things tanned by the wind into leather.” He paused, lowering his voice. “This old chief and the others I saw, there’s something not right about ’em. I’ve heard stories about an older race…shit, I don’t know. But somebody had to teach them injuns how to scalp folks.”

“A fellah down in Tucson told me white folk started that,” Longtree said.

Benner grinned. “You believe that, do you?”

“Nope. Just mentioning the fact.”

“If you coulda seen them scalps in the Hollow, you’d think different.”

“Where is this place?” Longtree asked.

“About ten mile, due east.” That crazy look was in Benner’s eyes again. “I heard about it from an old Kiowa name of Hunting Lizard or Hopping Lizard, can’t remember which. He wasn’t much then, just some old rummy who’d sell his soul for a bottle, but I guess in the old days he was some big shot medicine man. He called it the Snake Grounds. Told me there was gold up there, more than a man could carry away in a week. I fell for it. He got a bottle out of the deal and sent some white fool to his death, that being me. No gold there, of course, just them mummies and scalps and other things meant to drive a sane man crazy.”

Longtree nodded with disinterest. “Gold, you say? Maybe you didn’t look too good.”

“Maybe not. I just wanted out. Goddamn place.”

“So, you took one of these dead ones instead?”

Benner was brushing the palms of his hands against his pants as if he were trying to rub off some old stink. “Yeah. I was hoping I could sell it to a carnival or something. Damn. The wind was howling like nothing I’d ever heard before and there were snakes everywhere, biguns, coiled around them scalp poles and hiding in the rocks. Rattlers bigger than anything you’d want to see. Must’ve killed a dozen, barely got out of that devil-yard alive.”

Longtree said, “Country’s full of snakes.”

“Not like these, friend, not like these.” Benner was grinning like a desert-stripped skull. “If you coulda seen ’em, seen what was in their demon eyes…”

“I’d best be on my way,” Longtree told him, wanting nothing more than to get out of that damn town.

“I hope God rides with you, son.”

Longtree paid him and unhitched his horses.

“Good luck,” Benner said and was gone.

A few of the injuns were eyeing up Longtree and what he had under the tarp in the back of the wagon. He set out his shotgun and Navy sixes on the seat next to him.

If it’s killing you want, it’s killing you’ll get, Longtree thought at them. This old boy’s going to a museum, Heathen Halloween or not.

The Indian’s chanting took on a raw, expectant tone, the lot of them dancing in crazy circles, shaking bone and feather talismans and waving skulls about.

Longtree urged the horses around facing the way he’d come and started to make his run. He’d barely gotten them up to a trot before the Indians made their move. They came on foot, brandishing knives and ceremonial spears. They were a howling pack of crazy men, their eyes bulging, blood boiling like hot tar. If Longtree had ever seen true religious fervor reach its ugly, insane climax before, he would’ve known what this was, but he never had. He only knew they stood between him and freedom, him and a lot of cash.

He left them behind in a cloud of dust, laughing to himself.

It was a long, hard ride through the desert at night. Somehow, somewhere, he’d gotten turned around. There was heavy cloud cover so he couldn’t see the stars, had no true way of navigating. It was just Longtree and that wagon and the body in the box. The horses started acting funny right away. They moved with starts and jerks, pulled the wagon in circles. Even the bite of the whip could not convince them to do his bidding.

After a time, Longtree just stopped them completely.

The desert had gone cold and lonely and silent as the crypt.

There was something in the air and he felt it then: heavy, ominous, enclosing. It seemed that the very air around him had gone strange. It was thick, suffocating, hard to pull into his lungs. It had the consistency of coagulated grease. He could actually feel it laying over his skin like a motheaten tarp. It smelled funny-like spices and age and things shut up for too long.

He stepped down off the wagon and could not get his bearings.

Longtree had been a scout. And it had once been said of him that he could track a pea through a blizzard…but now he was blind, his senses-always so preternaturally sharp-were completely shut down. Had he been dumped on the desolate plain of some alien world he could have been no more helpless.

He thought: What gives here? What is this about?

It was so black suddenly it was like being sewn-up tight in a bag of black velvet. The horses were snorting and neighing and pawing at the earth. A breeze had picked up, but it carried a horrible stagnant odor on it. Not natural in the least. Longtree had never smelled anything like it before, but it made his skin go cold, wrapped icy fingers around his heart.

He wanted to run.

Something in him was demanding it, screaming it in the blackness of his brain: Run! Run, goddamn you! Take flight while you still can! Before, before-

The wind kept picking up, adding to his disorientation.

His own breathing seemed loud, almost deafening.

The wind was beginning to make a low, moaning noise that dragged fingernails up his spine. Distant, was that sound, but getting closer by the second and sounding like voices mourning in unison and coming from every direction.

Longtree uttered a strangled cry and pulled his Navy six.

The mesa and towers of black rock seemed to rise up higher and higher, reaching into the sky and…and then leaning out, pressing together, drawing over him like fingers trying to clutch and hold him.

The wind became gale force and picked up sand and bits of rock and grit that peppered his teeth and forced his eyes shut. And echoing everywhere, those voices moaning and screeching and whispering what seemed his name. And it became a real, full-blown sandstorm that whipped and howled and blasted everything in its path. It carried an odd half-light about it that created shadows and shapes and forms in a murky, surreal illumination. It forced Longtree to his knees next to the wagon and he pulled his neckerchief over his eyes and that was okay, that was just fine.

Because the sand was peopled now with lurching, angular forms that reached out for him, clutched at him. The wagon rocked and seemed to be pushed gradually by the force of the wind. Longtree held on, figuring it was his only link to the real.

The wind subsided a bit and he could see no forms through his squinted eyes…save for one.

In the maelstrom of raging, spitting sand, there was a shape-tall, skeletal, ragged. Bits of it flapped and shredded in the wind. It seemed to be looking in Longtree’s direction and there was something about it that seized up his heart and made him want to wail like a child. It stood so still in that churning sand, impossibly still. Nothing living could withstand this, even the horses had been hammered down now.

Yet, it stood there, perfectly still and Longtree could almost feel its eyes on him, feel that remorseless, glaring hatred that ate through him like acid.

Then it was gone.

Gradually, almost casually it seemed, the shape stalked off into the wind and tornadic sands until it faded away and became part of them. A few minutes later, the storm abated. Longtree lay there, skin raw from the kiss of pulverized rock and sand granules. He pulled himself up, his legs and boots buried in dirt. Shaking himself off and seeing to the horses-they were all right, just frightened and skittish. He soothed them and dragged himself back to the wagon.

The clouds were gone.

The stars were out, the moon. But the crazy thing, the thing that stomped him down hard and would not let him up was the fact that he was miles away from where he last remembered. And not two or three, but twenty or thirty, possibly more. The landscape by moonlight proved it. Flat, empty desert. No mesas or cliffs or towers of sedimentary rock carved by ancient seas.

In the bed of the wagon, the box was open.

The chief was gone.

15

Longtree told Moonwind the story, realizing now that he had finished, he was shivering. Despite the blazing fire and Moonwind’s warm body pressed to his own, he was shivering.

“You ask me if I believe in the supernatural,” he said, rubbing his tired eyes. “And I guess I’d have to say yes. The white man in me conjures up all sorts of rational explanations for what happened that night, but none of ’em fit.”

Moonwind held onto him, looked upon him with great compassion.

Longtree just shook his head. “I know what you must think-either that I’m totally crazy or that I pissed-off that ugly old chief and he taught me a lesson. And maybe you’d be right on both counts.”

This elicited a short, but welcome laugh from her. “You weren’t crazy. You ran up against a medicine so powerful it reached out from the grave. Such things are not unknown to our peoples, Joseph.”

“I suppose. Since I came to Wolf Creek, I been thinking about that old chief and how they said he was part of some ancient race. It gives me pause to think. Food for thought, don’t you think?”

But Moonwind pulled him down next to her and would hear no more.

16

The next morning, Dr. Perry spent an hour or so with the cadaver of Dewey Mayhew.

With forceps, scalpel, and post mortem knife, he urged the body to give up its secrets. What it told him was nothing he didn’t know or suspect: Mayhew, like the others, had been killed by a large predator. He was, for the most part, less mauled and mutilated than the others, given the fact that the beast had been surprised as it plied its trade on him. Mayhew’s abdomen had been opened from crotch to mid-chest, but none of the viscera were disturbed. Death had been caused probably from massive bleeding and trauma brought on either by the abdominal wound or the wedge of flesh and muscle bitten from his throat. And given such injuries, shock had played a major part.

“That’s about it,” he told Wynona Spence.

Wynona nodded and draped a sheet back over the body.

Perry packed his instruments back in their respective cases. He’d brought his microscope along for minute examination of fluids and tissue. This told him nothing new either. The only interesting, but not surprising, thing was the discovery of several coarse hairs lodged in the wounds. These matching the ones Perry had taken from Nate Segaris’ house exactly.

“Tell me, Wynona,” he said. “How is Marion getting along?”

Wynona looked at him, then looked away. It might have meant nothing…but it might have meant everything. “Oh, fine, just fine.”

“She ever come down?”

“No, she prefers solitude. I tend to her needs.”

Perry just nodded. He supposed it was none of his affair. “I see.”

She cleared her throat, fell into character. “I’ll have to leave you now, Doctor,” Wynona said. “I have an appointment to keep.”

Perry badly wanted to ask with who, but he knew it wouldn’t be polite. She was an odd woman, yes, but her affairs were her own business and no one else’s. So he bit his tongue and said, “Go on, I’m pretty much done anyway.”

Wynona grinned slightly. “If any of my customers get restless,” she said, “do calm them…they’ve already been paid for.” She laughed a morbid cackle. “It’s my motto: ‘No one gets out of here alive.’”

Perry just stared at her.

If anyone else had said it, he would have jumped down their throat. But Wynona? No, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had known her since she was a baby. Her father had been one of Perry’s few friends and one hell of a chess player. Wynona had always been a deadpan girl, buttoned up tighter than a corset. It was only in the past few years she’d developed this morose and aberrant sense of humor. Something her father always practiced so well. She was finally showing some life and Perry was not about to crush it. No, let her have that. Maybe, like her father, it made the grim nature of the business go down better. Merely human nature, he supposed. The same way medical students (even himself, once upon a time) made unwholesome and sometimes downright gruesome jokes about the cadavers they dissected.

Whatever it takes, Wynona, Perry thought, just do it.

“On your way, Wynona, you damn ghoul,” he said.

She chuckled. “As you wish, sir.”

Perry managed a smile himself, but it didn’t last long. Too many things worried him these days. Just too many things.

Wynona hadn’t been gone but a few minutes before Reverend Claussen came in, looking disturbed. “I think it’s time we had a talk, Doctor.”

Perry’s drooping mustache seemed to droop a bit lower. “What could we possibly have to talk about, Reverend?”

“The well-being of our flock,” Claussen said in all seriousness. “You tend to their physical wounds, I to their spiritual wounds and wants.”

Dr. Perry wasn’t a religious man. After his wife died during an influenza outbreak ten years before, he hadn’t stepped foot in a church. “I’m listening.”

“What do you know of the supernatural?”

Perry sat down, sighing. His eyes swept the shelves of chemicals and instruments. He didn’t look too happy. “Not a damn thing.”

“But you’re an educated man,” Claussen argued. “Surely you’ve read of such things.”

“I have, Reverend, but it doesn’t mean I know a damn thing about it. The supernatural is your province, not mine.”

“Something is killing people, Doctor. Something inhuman.”

“I’m aware of that, Reverend.”

“Word has reached me that the Sheriff has decided to post a bounty on this beast,” Claussen said. “To have it hunted down like a common wildcat. What do you think of this?”

Perry shrugged. “It’s worth a try, I guess.”

“I don’t believe any hunter can hope to outwit this beast.”

“I see.” Perry pursed his lips and said, “You think we’re dealing with something supernatural? Is this what you’re getting at?”

“Yes. I believe this beast is no normal animal.”

“I’ve already figured that much. But the damn thing’s flesh and blood, Reverend. It’s no ghost.”

Claussen, a small and petulant man, stabbed a finger at Perry. “Ah, I never said anything of ghosts, Doctor. I’m referring to an old pagan superstition concerning the transmutation of man to animal.” He stalked around as he said this, as if he were delivering a sermon. “Shapeshifting, it is called. The Indians believe in such things, it forms part of their pagan worships.”

“Werewolf?” Perry said incredulously.

Claussen nodded. “That is the European term, I believe.”

“Christ in Heaven, Claussen, have you lost your mind?”

“Not in the least.”

Perry shook his head. “I’m a man of science. Men cannot transform themselves into animals. It’s a physical impossibility.”

“Regardless, Doctor,” Claussen maintained, “history is full of the lore of shapeshifters. I studied the matter in some depth at the university. It forms a portion of the legendry of all cultures.”

Perry grunted. “Of course it does. You’re talking pagan religions, primitive peoples. Is it that odd that a man from a primitive society would consider himself in league with a creature he admires?”

“No, not at all. Unfortunately, we’re not dealing with only backward cultures here, but advanced ones as well.”

“I can’t buy any of this.” Perry just wasn’t in the mood. His back was acting up and it felt like the muscles were knotted and tied. “It’s ridiculous.”

Claussen pressed his fingertips together, undaunted. “Are you aware, dear Doctor, that our own local Blackfeet tribe has a religious order called the Skull Society?” the Reverend asked. “This is true. An old prospector told me of this. He said that the initiates believe they can transform themselves into monsters.”

“Forget about this, Reverend,” Perry said calmly. “There are no monsters, no werewolves. If you start spreading this crap around, you’re going to stir a lot of people up. Too many people in this town are looking for scapegoats for the murders and I don’t want to see a lot of harmless Indians getting killed for some damn fool reason. There’s been too much of that already.”

Claussen looked insulted. “Harmless Indians?” he said. “Those savages? They’ve done their share of murdering I might remind you. They’ve caused dying—”

“There’s been a lot of dying on both sides, Claussen,” Perry interrupted. “Trust me, we’ve done more damage to the Indians than they’ll ever be able to do to us. We don’t need your ghost stories stirring up more trouble.”

Claussen looked as if Perry had slapped him. “You, sir, may dwell in your ignorance. I will not. If Hell has unleashed its terrors upon the living, then let no man stand in my way.” He nodded curtly to the doctor. “Good day, sir.”

Perry watched him leave and sighed. “Damn fool,” he said under his breath. “Goddamn pious fool.”

17

The sun was well up when Longtree finally woke.

Moonwind was gone and the day was bright, the world warming. He crawled out into the cold and got his fire going again. He had a quick breakfast of coffee and tinned biscuits with jam. Around him, the countryside began to wake, to shake loose the ice and snow and greet the day. He heard birds singing and animals foraging. It was a good thing to wake to, feeling fresh from a night spent outdoors. Maybe it was his mother’s blood in him, but he enjoyed sleeping outside.

He wondered when Moonwind had left.

She had heard his tale and seemed to believe it. Which was good because sometimes Longtree wasn’t sure if he did. He had experienced it, but still it just seemed impossible. But had Moonwind scoffed at him…it would have been hurtful. Not only because he was developing strong feelings for the woman, but because he’d never told a soul that tale.

No matter.

Wolf Creek was a distance away through the hills, but already he could hear it, smell it, feel the presence of other men. He fed and watered his mount and wondered what this day would bring. Something told him nothing remotely good.

And he believed it.

18

“I guess I never expected to see you alive again,” Deputy Bowes said when Longtree walked into the jailhouse later that morning. “I thought I’d be forming a posse one of these nights to retrieve your body.”

“I didn’t have any trouble with ’em,” Longtree admitted. “Where’s Lauters at?”

“At home, I suspect. Haven’t seen him yet this morning.”

“Good.”

“Those injuns tell you what you wanted to know?”

Longtree took off his hat and set it on the desk. “You know a fellow up there by the name of Herbert Crazytail?”

Bowes nodded. “You could say that. His people got themselves a little worked up about a year ago after his son was lynched. Vigilantes forced themselves into the jail, overpowered the sheriff, and strung the poor bastard up.” Bowes looked as if this was something he’d rather forget about. “Things got a little tense after that.”

“How so?”

“Crazytail’s son-Red Elk-was accused of raping and killing a local white girl, name of Carpenter.” Bowes pursed his lips. “You can imagine how folks around here felt about that. Well, Red Elk swore he was innocent. Vigilantes didn’t believe him, I guess. After the hanging, trouble started.” Bowes stared into his cup of coffee. “A few prospectors were killed out in the hills, a schoolmaster by the name of Penrose was murdered. A few other killings followed. Retribution by the Blackfeet, I suppose. A few Indians got shot. It looked like all hell was about to break loose. Goverment sent an Indian Agent down here. He smoothed things out with the tribes and business settled down. But I’ll tell you something, Marshal,” Bowes said, giving Longtree a warning look, “only a damn fool goes up into Blackfeet lands now. They never had much use for us whites and they have a lot less now after that thing with Red Elk. I think that goes both ways.”

Longtree chewed on this for a few moments. “Were any Indians arrested for those murders?”

“No,” Bowes sighed. “As far as the prospectors went, they’re always getting themselves killed jumping each others’ claims. No proof there. And that schoolmaster…again, no proof, just a lot of hearsay.”

“But you think the Blackfeet were guilty?”

“It seems mighty coincidental,” Bowes said. “But…hell, who knows?”

Longtree poured himself a cup of coffee. “The night the vigilantes raided the jail, Lauters was alone here?”

The deputy looked pained. “Yeah. I was delivering a prisoner to Virginia City. I didn’t get back till early the next morning.” Bowes reclined back in his seat, locking his fingers behind his head. “What does any of this have to do with why you’re here?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I have to look at this business from every side.”

“Are you thinking these murders might be some revenge by the Blackfeet?”

“It’s a possibility I can’t overlook.” Longtree sipped his coffee and asked the question that was really nagging him. “Who was this prisoner you took to Virginia City?”

Bowes scratched his beard. “Fellah by the name of Carson. He was a miner, worked at one of the silver camps. Word reached us he was also wanted for murder in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. We took him in. Marshals Office wired us, said to deliver him to Virginia City and lock him up there until one of their men came by train to take custody of him.”

“Was there any urgency in getting him to Virginia City?”

Bowes narrowed his eyes suspiciously. “You asking why I took him that night and not another?”

“Yes.”

“Sheriff told me to. That’s all. There was no hurry. Jail wasn’t crowded, that marshal from Dakota Territory wasn’t expected for a week or so. Sheriff just up and told me to deliver the prisoner one morning. Nothing more to it than that. Just what are you getting at?”

Longtree swallowed. “I just want to know what was so urgent about getting that prisoner to Virginia City, is all. Why that night?”

“You’re thinking the Sheriff was involved in that lynching, aren’t you?” Bowes asked pointedly. “Well, if that’s the case, Marshal, I’d say you’re listening to too much local gossip. I would think after all this time them rumors would’ve died out.”

“Rumors about Lauters being mixed up with the vigilantes?”

“You know what I mean.”

Longtree suppressed a grin. If nothing else, their little talk here had established the basic facts of what Moonwind had said: Red Elk had been lynched and there were rumors about Sheriff Lauters’ complicity.

Bowes fixed him with a lethal stare. “I’ll tell you something, Marshal. I’ll tell you something right here and now. I’m loyal to Bill Lauters and I don’t want to hear that kind of talk. You investigate these murders all you want and I’ll gladly help you all I can, but I don’t want to hear you insulting that man. He might not look like much now, but once, once he was a fine lawman.”

Longtree nodded. “Don’t get yourself upset, Deputy. Nobody’s insulting him. You have to remember that my job is to look into every possible motive for these killings. And if I start thinking the Indians are involved, I have to ask myself why?” Longtree told him sincerely. “And if you tell me this Red Elk was lynched and there was bad blood following that business and rumors flying around, well then, I’m going to get suspicious. I wouldn’t be worth a shit as a lawman if I didn’t.”

“Okay, Marshal, I understand. And I think you understand me.”

Longtree studied Bowes with narrowed eyes. “Tell me about these cattle rustlers.”

Bowes laughed. “Damn. Not too much you don’t hear about is there?”

“It’s my job.”

Bowes shrugged. “Nothing much to tell. In the past three, four years, during the warm months, we’ve had some rustling. No one was ever caught, few were questioned. No leads, no nothing. Just a lot of hearsay.”

“Tell me the hearsay.”

“Folks say there’s a ring involved here, a group of men who are responsible. Some say they’re based here in Wolf Creek, others say Virginia City or even Bannack. Take your pick. Nothing’s ever turned up, I’m afraid. Folks in these parts call ’em the Gang of Ten. I don’t know why. That’s it.”

Longtree was listening to this and remembering all Moonwind had said about the vigilantes being the rustlers and Lauters being involved. He was also thinking that if it was this Gang of Ten that were the vigilantes, that possibly eight of their number had been murdered. There was no proof of this Skullhead or that the Indians were out for revenge, but Moonwind had certainly wanted him to think so.

He needed proof.

Any kind of proof. But how could he get it? Getting something on Lauters would be tough. But what about the Indians? Also tough. Moonwind had said Red Elk, her brother, was a shapeshifter. It sounded crazy, impossible, but…

“The Blackfeet bury their dead, don’t they?”

Bowes looked at him as if he were insane. “Yeah, they do. They put ’em in the ground same as us.”

“Where would Red Elk be buried?”

A shadow crossed Bowes’ face like he didn’t care for where this was leading. “Up in the hills. There’s a burial ground up there. But get any crazy ideas out of your head, Marshal. That cemetery is sacred ground to them. You get caught nosing around up there-won’t be enough of you left to bury.”

“Let me worry about that,” Longtree said. “How can I find it?”

Bowes looked upset. “It’s in a little valley, hard to find.” He sighed heavily. “I could show you, I guess. I went up there once as a kid. On a dare. I could take you. That is, if you’re determined.

“I am.”

Bowes just shook his head. “What do you want up there?”

“I want to examine Red Elk’s remains.”

19

“Yes, I do think we’re looking at a banner year, Marion,” Wynona Spence said, beaming. “We shan’t see a year like this again.”

She sipped her tea and thought about the killings and, though she did not take pleasure in anyone’s untimely death (as if death were ever timely), she couldn’t help but feel a certain satisfaction in the money she was taking in. And that was just good business sense, nothing more. When she had taken over her father’s operation, people treated her as if she were crazy. A woman undertaker? Good God, who’d ever heard of such a thing and what woman in her right mind wanted to while away the hours processing the dead?

The general consensus in Wolf Creek was that she would not last.

She would certainly fail.

But she had not failed-she had prospered. She took command of the business her father had built, working it and oiling it and crafting it carefully with nimble fingers until it was a sure success. So successful that she had branched out and now owned considerable stock in a silver mine and controlling interest of some three businesses in Wolf Creek. Gone were her father’s charming, old world country boy idiosyncrasies-embalming and burial on credit, coffins on a promise of future reimbursement, gravestones and plots given to friends at cut-rate prices. Such things were not only bad business, but self-defeating. The mortuary business was no different than any other: it existed to make money, to show a profit, not to engender the proprietor to the locals with reams of homespun compassion.

Perhaps Wynona wasn’t well-liked in general, but she was a very shrewd businesswoman.

And regardless of all the gossip she inspired living with another woman that no one ever saw, they couldn’t take that away from her.

She set down her teacup and swatted at a fly. “Flies and at this time of year, Marion. Can you believe such a thing? Must be that sun warming ’em up in the windowsills. Do you suppose?”

Marion, dressed-out in a fine and flowing bedroom gown of fine lace and spiderweb satin, said nothing. The coverlet was pulled up beneath her armpits and her hands were folded over her bosom. She did not stir. She did not do anything.

Wynona added a touch of Irish whiskey to her tea, sipped it, approved. “Yes, I do think father would be quite proud of me. Wouldn’t you agree, Marion?”

Marion just laid there, eyes shut, lashes resting against her sallow cheeks like the fine and feathery legs of a moth. A fly lighted off her hair and landed on her face. It walked a tickling tread down and across her lips.

Marion did not move.

20

Sheriff Lauters was at Dr. Perry’s, sitting in his little study, thinking over all the mumbo-jumbo Claussen had told the doc and the doc had told him. And every moment, he got a little angrier.

“Damn that Jesus-spouting fool,” Lauters said. “If he was here now, I swear to God I’d ring his scrawny neck. Stupid sonofabitch.”

“Take it easy, Bill,” Perry said, stretching his back and wincing. “Claussen doesn’t know any better.”

“Yes, he does. Goddamit, he does. He’s an educated man. He should know better than to be spreading around old wives’ tales like that. Werewolves, monsters…my ass.”

“Hopefully, he’ll keep it to himself.”

The sheriff grunted in disgust. “That’s a whole hell of a lot to be hoping for, Doc.”

Perry shrugged. It was his back he was concerned with at the moment. Not murders. Not Claussen. Not werewolves and bogies. His lower back was knotted up with a raw, twisting pain. It was not getting better. One of these days he wouldn’t get out of bed at all.

“You mark my word, Doc. Come Sunday that damn ass will be spouting off about werewolves and devils and God knows what in his sermon.”

“Nothing we can do about that, Sheriff.”

“We’ll see about that.” Lauters strapped on his guns and took off out the door. “We’ll just see.”

“Sheriff—” Perry started to rise, but the pain in his back set him down again, his forehead beaded with sweat. Licking his lips, he opened his lower desk drawer and took out a small black box. In it was a syringe and several small bottles of morphine.

Alone, Perry injected himself.

21

Reverend Claussen sat in the rectory and heard only silence. He was alone today. He was alone and on the desk before him were about a dozen books on folklore and the occult. A portion of his personal collection. He scanned the spines. Man into Beast, De Lycanthropia, Der Werewolf, De transmutations hominum in lupos, Uber die Wehrwolfe und Thieverwandlungen im Mittelalter, Demonolatry. There were others. The one he was most interested in was called, Indians of the Upper Plains: Common Beliefs and Myth-Cycles.

Everything he needed was here.

Everything with which to do battle against the evil that had taken Wolf Creek in its foul jaws. Claussen didn’t care if anyone believed him or not about what was happening. He’d tried the doctor first, simply because Perry was an educated man. And that had been a mistake.

Now he would have to hunt down the evil himself.

The door suddenly swung open. Standing there, was a young woman without a stitch of clothes on. “I feel sinful,” she said.

22

Sheriff “Big” Bill Lauters stood across the rutted dirt road from the church. Looking around, he fished out his pint of Rye and guzzled down the remainder, tossing the bottle. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his sheepskin coat and waited to see if anyone was around.

He saw no one.

He had business with the good reverend, the nature of which necessitated that they be alone. It seemed that he’d come at a good time. There was no traffic whatsoever in and around the church. No old ladies from the various church groups. No sinners seeking forgiveness.

A good day for a little discussion.

A good day to straighten out Claussen once and for all.

Lauters saw no one in either direction on the road and quickly crossed the hard packed snow and went into the church. It was silent inside. He peered out the door to see if he was being observed. He was not.

He walked down the aisle between the polished pews. He moved slowly, his footsteps landing without sound. And this was a great accomplishment when you consider that since he’d left Perry’s house well over an hour before, he’d been doing nothing but drinking. Lauters had a taste for Rye. In his coffee. With water. Straight out of the bottle. It didn’t matter. He only knew that without it, he was miserable. A hopeless wreck. But with it…well, he was a man of means, a lawman who could face down any gunman in the Territories without a hint of fear.

Lauters took his own sweet time approaching the altar.

On the way, in the shadowy stillness, he took note of where the carpet was thinning, which prayer books lacked covers, which pews needed replacing.

Lauters was, his head swimming with alcohol, a confident man. He had a job to do and he would do it.

Claussen wasn’t in the church itself, which meant he would be in the rectory. This was the place in which he slept and took his meals, Lauters knew, and also the place in which he plotted out his little games.

“Not anymore,” Lauters said beneath his breath. “Not anymore.”

The Sheriff had been waiting for this day for a long time. He’d said nothing when Claussen had rolled into town, reeling with self-importance and holiness. He said nothing when Claussen had condemned honest men from his pulpit with sermons of hell-fire and everlasting torment. Lauters even said nothing when the Bible-thumping crazy had turned his own wife against him. He accepted it. But when Claussen had begun criticizing the job he did as sheriff and his lack of progress with the murders…that had been it. And now, this superstitious horseshit about spooks.

Lauters would take no more.

It was time for Claussen to pay for his sins.

Lauters had no intention of letting that goddamn Holy Joe drive Wolf Creek, his town, into panic with these horror stories. No, what was going to happen now was long overdue.

Lauters passed through the vestibule into the rectory.

There was a little sitting room with a fire blazing in the hearth. Lauters warmed his hands for a moment. He looked in the kitchen and Claussen’s cramped study. The reverend was nowhere. That left only upstairs.

Lauters moved up the narrow stairwell and froze on the second step.

He could hear sounds.

Moanings.

A thrashing of bed springs.

Either Claussen was in lot of pain or he was being killed or…

Well, Lauters decided, the other alternative was impossible.

Not Reverend Claussen. Pious, self-righteous Claussen.

Lauters moved slowly up the stairs, pausing at the top. He could hear two distinct sets of moans now. Those of Claussen and those of a woman, heated, breathless. Lauters grinned and moved up the short hallway to the first door which was ajar slightly. He stood there a full minute before kicking it in all the way.

When he did, no one noticed him at first.

Claussen was on the bed, quite naked, his wrists tied with leather straps to the bedposts. On top of him, also naked, was Nell Hutson, a young whore from Madame Tillie’s parlor house. Her back was wet with sweat, her ample hips pumping with a ferocity that threatened to drive the good reverend straight through the mattress.

“Well, well, well,” Lauters said. “What do we have here?”

23

Up in the hills, at the Blackfeet camp, Laughing Moonwind peered out through the flaps of her lodge. She was watching the sweat lodge in the distance. Her father, Herbert Crazytail, and the other members of the Skull Society had just stepped out of it. Their faces were set and grim, painted a deathly white with black streaks under the eyes. They were dressed in wolf and bear pelts and nothing more, as was the way of the Society. They were pallid, dead-faced spirit warriors now heaped with skins. One of them wore the hideous mask of some grinning demon fashioned from the huge skull of a grizzly and strips of tight-fitting leather.

One by one, the others put on similar masks.

These were actually fashioned from the stretched and cured heads of wolves, painted up with ritual colors.

Crazytail in the lead, they started off through the forest to the sacred grove on the mountainside where they would begin their rites.

Tonight would be a bad night.

The smell of death was already on the wind.

24

Deputy Bowes stood before the window of the jailhouse, looking down the rutted, frozen drive that cut through Wolf Creek. The sky was overcast, threatening snow. The temperature was up in the lower forties today, turning the world into a melting, wet swamp of filthy snow and mud.

It wouldn’t last.

Within a few days, the winds would start to scream down from the mountains again, driving the mercury down towards zero.

Bowes was wondering where the sheriff was. He hadn’t seen the man all morning and it wasn’t like Lauters not to show up. At least for a little while before he went about his business of (drinking) policing the town.

Bowes stood there a moment longer and then sat behind the desk, sipping coffee. There was no one in lock-up today. No meals to fetch or piss pots to empty. Ezra Wholesome had been released earlier, agreeing to pay for the damages he’d caused. Beyond that, it was a quiet day. If nothing else, the murders had certainly made his job easier. There’d been few arrests since this all started with Abe Runyon’s mutilated corpse. Even the miners were quiet, most of them preferring to stay up at their camps, not caring much to be caught on those lonely mountain roads after dark.

Bowes wondered where Longtree was and what he was nosing into.

If Lauters found out what he was up to, Longtree was a dead man. And if he was killed, the Marshals Office would spare no expense in bringing in the man responsible.

Wolf Creek was in deep shit any way you looked at it.

25

Longtree was just riding down the slope from the nondenominational cemetery outside town when he saw the smoke of a campfire in the hills. He’d gone up there to examine the graves of the murdered men for no other reason than he thought he should.

There wasn’t much to see.

The markers had all been hewn from wood being that none of them were men of means. Snow had fallen since their burials, covering the graves. The markers were blanketed with melting ice.

Then he saw the smoke and thought he should investigate.

Maybe it was from the fire of some freelance prospector who might know something of the murdered men…or the rustlers. It was worth a shot.

After leaving Bowes that morning, he had talked with some of the widows of the victims. He learned nothing new. They were in mourning and he wasn’t about to push them for seamy details concerning the dead.

Longtree urged his black up a rise and through a stand of pines. He could smell the air-fresh, cool-and the smoke of the fire. He also caught hints of bacon and coffee.

He approached the camp slowly, cautiously.

It paid to be careful, particularly with a murdering beast on the loose. People tended to be quick with their guns when they heard someone or something coming.

The closer he got, still out of visual range, he could hear the steady whacking sound of an axe splitting wood. The chopping kept up as he got closer and closer, moving the black along at a slow trot over the slushy ground. He came to a small opening in the trees, a rabbit darting off into the brush.

The chopping stopped.

The world was silent.

Longtree could see the fire and a team of horses picketed near the treeline. An old mud wagon was pulled up near a small army tent. There were a few rifles leaning up against it-a Winchester and a Sharps “Big Fifty”. Steel-jawed traps and pelts of every description hung from it. There was a woodpile and enough kindling to last for a week.

But there was no one in sight.

Longtree grimaced. “Rider coming in,” he called out.

He stopped the black by the wagon and tethered it. He warmed his hands by the fire and looked around. He knew the owner of the camp was hiding in the trees, getting a bead on him. But the fact that he hadn’t shot yet meant he probably wouldn’t.

“Who are you?” a voice called out and it was familiar somehow.

It came from behind him, but the marshal didn’t turn around. “Joe Longtree, deputy U.S. Marshal,” he said.

He heard the man swearing as he came out of the trees. He didn’t seem too happy to have the law visiting.

Longtree snaked a hand inside his coat and withdrew one of his pistols. He made no menacing moves with it, he just kept it handy, his hand on the butt.

“What the hell do you want?” a gruff voice asked.

Longtree turned very slowly.

He found himself staring at a bear of a man, his shirt open, his chest gleaming with sweat. He was bearded and carried an Army Carbine. It was pointed at Longtree’s head.

“I only came to warm myself,” the marshal said.

“Warm yourself somewheres else, Longtree,” the man told him.

The way he said it made the marshal sure this man knew him. But from where? The voice was familiar, but nothing more. Maybe without that beard. Then it came to him. This was Jacko Gantz.

It could be no other.

Ten years ago, before Longtree was a lawman, he’d been hunting men for money. There’d been a five-hundred dollar bounty on Gantz for robbing stages in the Arizona Territory. Longtree had caught up with him at a saloon in Wickenburg after three months on his trail. There’d been some shooting. Longtree took a bullet in the shoulder, Gantz caught one in the leg and one in his gun hand.

This took the fight out of the road agent.

Longtree cuffed him and got the both of them to a doctor. Three days later, he delivered Gantz to Phoenix and placed him in the custody of Tom Rivers, then just a U.S. Marshal before his appointment to chief marshal. Gantz, after his trial, had been sentenced to ten years in the Arizona Territorial Prison at Yuma.

“When did you get out, Gantz?” Longtree asked.

Gantz kept the gun on him. “Two years ago, Longtree. I did eight long years in that fucking hellhole. Thanks to you.”

Longtree’s face betrayed no emotion. “I only did my job.”

“Yeah, you sure did, you sonofabitch,” Gantz said angrily. “Eight years of my goddamn life. Eight years. And what happened to you in that time, Longtree? You became a lawman, a federal marshal. How the hell did a breed like you swing that?” He laughed through clenched teeth. “Rivers got you that appointment, didn’t he? He’s a big wheel now, so I hear.”

“I’d appreciate it, Gantz, if you’d lower that rifle.”

Gantz kept it where it was. “Oh, I bet you would, Marshal, I just bet you would.” His eyes never left Longtree for a moment and in them was a hatred that burned black. “I thought about you a lot in prison, Longtree. Didn’t a day go by that I didn’t think about killing you. And now, look what’s happened? I got your sorry hide in my sights.”

“Drop that weapon,” Longtree said flatly.

“Or what? You gonna shoot me down unarmed like you did—”

“You weren’t unarmed, Gantz. I took a bullet in the shoulder as proof of that.”

“I oughta shoot you down like a sick dog,” Gantz grumbled.

Longtree’s eyes narrowed. “Drop your weapon, Gantz. Now. This is a U.S. Marshal ordering you to drop your weapon.”

Gantz just stared at him. Longtree had his Colt aimed at the man’s belly. They stood like that for a few moments, neither saying a word. Longtree squatting by the fire and Gantz standing with his carbine pointed at the marshal’s head.

“You must be a real fool, Longtree,” Gantz said. “Badge or no badge, I pull this trigger and I’ll scatter your brains for a hundred yards.”

“Maybe. But the second you shoot, so do I. And my bullet goes in your belly. And if you think you can make it down to Wolf Creek gutshot, then you’re a bigger asshole than you look. You’ll bleed to death long before.”

“Maybe it’s worth it.”

Longtree raised an eyebrow and stood up very slowly. “Maybe. But even if you live, you’ll spend your days as a hunted man. Killing a federal officer is a serious offense, Gantz. The law’ll hound you to an early grave.”

Gantz said nothing. The barrel of his carbine was still pointed at Longtree’s head. He licked his lips.

“If you’re gonna shoot, then shoot!” Longtree shouted in his face. “Pull that trigger, boy! Shoot, goddammit, shoot!”

Gantz looked uncertain. He lowered the carbine, smiling. “Never said I was going to.”

Longtree made like he was going to holster his pistol and then brought it up in a vicious arc, cracking Gantz along the side of the face with the butt. Gantz went down with a cry, blood running from a gash in his cheek. Longtree pulled the carbine from him and kicked him in the ribs.

“I could have you back in prison for this, Gantz.” He ejected the shells from the rifle and tossed it in the woods. “Do it again and I will.”

Gantz sat up, moaning and pressing a trembling hand to his wound. “You sonofabitch,” he gasped. “You didn’t have to do that.”

Longtree ignored him, lighting a thin cigar. “Why are you here?”

“To get that animal. To get the bounty.”

Longtree spat in the dirt next to him. “All you’re going to do is get yourself killed, hear? If you’re smart, you’ll haul ass out.”

“No law,” Gantz murmured, “against hunting a dangerous animal.”

“Nope. But there is one against endangering the life of a federal officer.”

“I didn’t mean nothin’.”

“Keep out of my way, Gantz. If you fuck with me again, I’ll kill you deader than deerhide.”

Gantz nodded.

Longtree untethered his black and climbed back on, riding off. He knew this wasn’t at an end. Not by any stretch. He had a killer beast on his hands. A sheriff who was a violent drunk. And now Gantz.

There’d be some dying before this mess was wrapped up.

26

“Get your clothes on, Nell,” Sheriff Lauters said. He didn’t watch her dress; he gave any woman that much respect, even a prostitute. “You, too, Reverend. It turns my stomach some to see you in the flesh.”

Claussen was beyond embarrassment. He was mortified. There was no color left in his once ruddy face. His self-righteous pomposity had crumbled to ash. He was a beaten, broken man whose filthy little secrets had been exposed and this by the man he despised most.

“Sheriff…” Nell began.

“Just get out of here, child, and don’t let me catch you plying your trade around a house of worship again. Understand?”

She nodded. Her blue eyes tearful as if she’d been caught in the act by her father.

“Forget about what happened here today,” Lauters instructed her. “Forget about seeing me, forget about the reverend. Nothing happened here today. Got it?”

She nodded, sobbing.

“Now, git!”

Nell took off down the stairs, not looking back. Lauters knew she’d say nothing of this. Not ever. If she did, she’d be in serious trouble and she knew it.

Claussen was sitting on the bed, staring at his hands. They shook. As did the rest of him. Lauters just glared at him for a moment, not bothering to mask the disgust on his face. He took off his sheepskin coat and hung it on the door.

“My Lord,” Claussen whimpered. “My Lord.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Lauters snapped. “You and God have parted company, Reverend. And being that this probably isn’t the first time you’ve done something like this, I’d say you parted company some time ago.”

Claussen said nothing more, he sobbed, his entire frame shuddering.

“Jesus wept,” Lauters said. He fished out his tobacco pouch and wedged a chunk of chew between his cheek and gum. He polished his badge and took it off, setting it on the nightstand by the bed.

“Now I’m no more a man of the law than you are a man of God,” he said.

“Sheriff, I—”

“Shut up,” Lauters said. “How long have you been deceiving the good people of your church?”

“Not long, I swear. Sin overcame me—”

“You piece of shit,” Lauters grumbled, taking the reverend by the shirt collar and tossing him to the floor. He tried to get up and Lauters kicked his legs out from under him.

“When you were a man of God,” Lauters began, “I had to take a certain amount of guff from you. After all, it isn’t proper to strike a man of the cloth. But now that you’re just a sinner like me, there’s no reason not to.”

He hooked his arm around Claussen’s elbow and pulled him to his feet.

They stood eye to eye.

Lauters spat in his face and the reverend only trembled. “Sinner,” Lauters said, slamming a fist into his belly. Claussen doubled over with a gasp. Lauters grabbed him by an ear and pulled him back up, striking him in the face with one massive closed hand. Claussen stumbled over a chair and went down, blood streaming from his broken nose. Before he could rise or even recover, Lauters was on him. He grabbed the back of his shirt and planted his knee in the reverend’s face.

Claussen’s head shot back and struck the wall. He slid down into a heap.

“You turned my wife against me,” Lauters said.

Claussen, tears streaming from his swollen eyes, shook his head and Lauters slapped him across the face. Then he did it again, laughed, and backhanded the man. Red, hurting handprints were imbedded in the reverend’s face. Blood and drool coursed from his mouth.

Lauters pulled him to his feet, patting him on the shoulder. “You would have turned the whole town against me in time.” He slammed Claussen against the wall and held him there with one meaty fist. “I’ve fought worse enemies than you, Reverend. I’ve beaten and killed the meanest, ugliest men this vile country has thrown against me. Did you think you had a chance?” He slapped him in the face. “Answer me!”

“I never…I didn’t…”

Lauters kneed him in the groin and then in the stomach. Claussen doubled over, going to his knees, gasping and wheezing, and Lauters struck him in the face with a series of upper cuts and tossed his bleeding, broken body out into the center of the floor.

The reverend lifted his head up. His face was an atrocity. His left eye was swollen shut and puffed red. His nose was smashed at an angle towards his cheek. His lower lip was bulging and gashed. Blood was smeared over his chin and cheeks. His remaining good eye studied the sheriff with a raw hatred.

Lauters kicked him in the face.

With a drunken, psychotic rage, he pulled the reverend to his feet and hammered him in the face with his right fist while holding him up with his left. He kneed him in the stomach again and watched him fall, pounding the back of his head unmercifully with a savage series of blows from both fists.

Claussen dropped to the floor and didn’t move.

Lauters, panting with exertion, alcohol sweating out of his bloated face in rivers, rubbed his cut, bleeding fists. “This isn’t over yet, Reverend.” He took a china pitcher from its stand and filled a basin with water and dumped it on the still, broken heap of the minister.

Claussen came to, his good eye focusing and unfocusing, his head swimming with dizziness. Lauters picked him up and dropped him on the bed.

“I want you out of this town, Reverend. If you’re still here day after tomorrow, I’ll kill you. Is that clear?”

Claussen attempted a nod.

Lauters patted him on the chest and put his badge back on, then his coat. He stood in the doorway and smiled. “School’s out.”

27

Wynona was doing what she did best.

After she had stitched up the gaping wounds in Dewey Mayhew’s hide (just so nothing would spill out, mind you), she dressed the man in an old suit provided by his widow. It was no easy task. Mayhew had curled up in a semi-fetal position as he lay dying behind the smithy’s shop. Rigor mortis and a nasty wind out of the north had done their best to freeze up his ligaments and muscles permanently in that position. They’d straightened him out some when Doc Perry had done his little autopsy…but not enough.

It was Wynona’s job to force things into their proper places. Otherwise, Mayhew wouldn’t fit in the box. Dressing the cadaver was one thing, but making him lie flat was quite another.

“Come on, Dewey,” Wynona grunted, “work with me, old man.”

Wynona was up on the slab with him.

She’d gotten his legs straightened and one arm flat, but the other was no easy task. Every time she pressed his shoulder down that arm swung up from internal stress and slapped her. Wynona was kneeling on Mayhew’s bicep and bearing down on his wrist with everything she had. Handling the dead had made her strong. She could toss around 200 pound cadavers like a farm woman handling feed sacks.

But sometimes, the dead were not cooperative.

Dewey was every bit as stubborn in death as he had been in life.

“Come on, you sonofabitch,” Wynona groaned. “No need for this now…just help…me out here…uhh…” Wynona gasped for breath. She’d moved the arm enough to fit it in the box, but she wanted to lay it over the breast with the other. It was the traditional position. “You’re going in that coffin whether you like it or not…so, please, cooperate…”

Wynona mopped her brow, pushed aside clumps of hair that hung in her face, took a deep breath, and waded back into battle. With a gruesome snap, she got Mayhew’s other arm into position. “There,” she panted, “that wasn’t so bad, now was it?”

“What in the name of the Devil are you doing?”

Wynona, not accustomed to anyone speaking in the preparation room, nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned and saw Mike Ryan standing in the doorway.

“Oh, Mr. Ryan… “ Wynona giggled. “You scared the death out of me.”

“What in blazes are you doing, woman?”

She smiled, straddling the corpse, very much aware of how it looked. How indecent it might have seemed. “Why, Mr. Ryan…what do you think I was doing?”

“Well, it’s just that…”

Wynona giggled again, slid off the slab. “Sometimes you have to straighten them to fit them in the casket. Unpleasant…but necessary. Every job has its unpleasantries, does it not?”

Ryan ignored her, staring at the body. “That Mayhew?” It was hard to tell. Ryan had known Dewey Mayhew for years, but this…this was only vaguely human. It was a bloated, discolored, stitched-up grotesquerie out of a sideshow.

“Yes,” Wynona said, covering the body quickly with a sheet.

“My God, he looks worse than they said.”

Wynona looked hurt. “There’s only so much that could be done.”

Mike Ryan was a big man with bushy eyebrows, a hard face, and an intense glare that looked right through a man. He was a local rancher and a very rich man. He dressed in fine vested suits from St. Louis, owned hotels in both Virginia and Nevada Cities, and controlled stock in several copper and silver mining companies. He was a man to be reckoned with. If he liked you, you were set; if he didn’t, he could destroy you, being that he owned just about everything and everyone in and around Wolf Creek. He was a good friend of Sheriff Lauters and had been the primary mover in getting Lauters his current post. He was also the mayor and the city council all rolled into one.

Wynona washed her hands in a basin and dried them, powdered them. “What can I do for you this fine day, Mr. Ryan?”

“Fine day?” Ryan said angrily. “What’s fine about it, Wynona? Men are being killed out there!”

“A figure of speech.”

He looked at her with complete loathing. He didn’t care for undertakers in general and a woman undertaker…well, it was just plain unnatural. “Yes…well, I didn’t come here to chat with the likes of you.” He pulled out a gold pocket watch. “I need a headstone.”

“Oh, I see,” Wynona said, putting on her best synthetic demeanor. “Has there been a death in the family?” She controlled her voice carefully; didn’t want to sound excited.

“No, no death,” Ryan said slowly. “Not yet. It’s for me. I want a headstone and a coffin. The best you can get. When people see my stone, I want them to stop and think, ‘Here lies a man of worth.’ Got it? The very best.”

“I know of a fine sculptor and mason in Virginia City, Mr. Ryan, he can create something befitting a man of your station.”

“Marble. The finest marble money can buy. Get the very best. Imported. Can you do that? I have imported Italian marble in my bathhouse. I fancy it.”

“Oh, you can be assured—”

“Don’t assure me, dammit, just do it!”

“Yes, sir. It will be done.”

“Fine,” Ryan said. “Get on it, woman. I’ll be back day after tomorrow to discuss the particulars.”

Ryan stormed out, leaving Wynona with a widening grin on her pale face. Whistling a happy tune, she went about pressing Mayhew into his cheap pine casket.

Life was rich.

And so was death.

28

Dr. Perry, his back a catalog of discomfort with the sudden change in the weather, made his way to see Claussen. He moved up the rutted road, cursing as he slipped and slid on the melting pockets of snow.

“If I fall,” he said under his breath, “God knows I’ll never get up again.”

Wagons rolled past him and riders and people out going about their business. Everyone waved at him. More than a few wanted to chat. But Perry wasn’t in the mood for any of that. He’d been trying to keep his injections of morphine to a bare minimum and such was the way of the drug that, what was enough to blot out the pain a week ago, was only enough to tease him now.

But he had to be careful.

Narcotics were nothing to fool with.

Dependency came easily and he was already beginning to exhibit the signs of it: loss of appetite, euphoria after injecting, a building need that demanded more and more.

Damn, Perry thought, but I’m a fool.

He knew better than to be fooling around with the stuff, had seen countless men turned into addicts during the War Between the States, and yet he’d willingly started a progression of dependency that could only end in disaster. But his lower back troubles-which had started after he was thrown from a horse five years before and slammed against a rock outcropping-had gotten progressively worse. It had reached the point in the past few months where he could barely function. Getting out of bed was a task, examining a patient with all the bending and turning required, was agony.

If it hadn’t been for the drug, he would’ve had to give up his practice some time ago. That and live the doubtful existence of an invalid, confined to bed for the remainder of his years.

Perry couldn’t let that happen.

People depended on him and the lifestyle of the aged and infirm would’ve killed him faster than any drug could hope to.

He came to the church and forced himself up its steps. Inside, it was dark and quiet. He called out for Claussen a few times, but there was no answer. He made his way to the rectory and looked around. Claussen didn’t seem to be there. Perry thought once of looking upstairs, but he had no intention of invading the man’s privacy. That and the fact that it would be hell on his back.

In Claussen’s study, Perry found the books he was looking for. He wasn’t about to accept any of this monster nonsense, but only a fool dismissed something without a thorough study. He wrote a note to the reverend and took as many books as his back would allow.

As the doctor left, he thought he heard a moan from upstairs.

He dismissed it and went on his way.

29

Some time later, Abigail Lauters, the sheriff’s wife, and her cousin, Virginia Krebs, came to the church and couldn’t find the reverend. It wasn’t like him to miss their bible study meeting.

“My God,” Abigail said, “I don’t like this. Not one bit.”

Virginia looked around the dim church and shivered. “Maybe he’s in the rectory. Poor dear’s been working himself sick.”

So they went to the rectory.

“Where do you suppose he could be?” Abigail wondered.

“I do hope nothing’s happened.”

Abigail touched the broach on her throat. “I better tell Bill about this. He might know where he is.” She said this with a certain amount of distaste for she had precious little use for her husband these days. A drunk. A sinner. A poor father to their children. Reverend Claussen remonstrated him from the pulpit on Sundays and Abigail agreed completely. Something was killing people and all Bill did was drink. Shameful.

Virginia said, “This is a bad omen. I’m sure of it.”

Neither of them thought of looking upstairs.

30

The reverend heard people come and people go. But he was in too much pain and suffering, too much humiliation to call out. Lauters had beaten him good. Beyond his shattered nose, nothing seemed to be broken but his pride. But he hurt all over. His face was a swollen purple and yellow mass of bruises. One eye was closed. He was missing two teeth. There was a lump on top of his head the size of a baseball and his nose was a bloody flap.

He didn’t want anyone seeing him like this.

He heard the doctor come and go. He heard Lauter’s wife and her cousin come and go. He was thankful that neither tried to look for him. To be seen like this…it was unthinkable. They would ask questions and how could he answer? If he said who did it, Lauters would expose him for what he was.

The reverend couldn’t allow that.

There were only two possible choices: Either get out of Wolf Creek and give up all he had worked to build for so long or get rid of the man who had done this to him.

Kill Lauters?

It was unthinkable, yet it was exactly what he was thinking-kill the bastard. But how? How in God’s name could he kill a man who was both handy with a gun and his fists?

The reverend wasn’t sure. But it had to be done.

31

Longtree caught up with Lauters at the livery.

“I’d like a word with you, Sheriff,” he said.

Lauters grumbled. “I ain’t got nothing to say to you, Marshal. Just get out of my way.”

But Longtree wasn’t moving. He was blocking the door. “I wanna talk about the rustling ring. The Gang of Ten.”

Lauters wiped his mouth with the back of his fist. “That’s a local problem,” he said calmly. “It’s none of your damn business. You came to stop these killings, so get to it and keep your nose out of the rest.”

Longtree hadn’t expected cooperation. It was the farthest thing from his mind. The only reason he’d tracked down Lauters was to put him on the spot, to hammer him with questions about the ring and the lynching and their possible connection. And see just what kind of reaction he would get.

“I’m thinking, Sheriff, that these murders and the ring are connected.”

Lauters licked his lips. “If you think that you’re just a damn stupid breed like I thought all along.”

“I wanna know about the Gang of Ten.”

Lauters’ colorless face was touched with red now. “About all you’re going to know is a bullet in the belly if you don’t get out of my way.”

Longtree ignored him. “I’ve been hearing talk that these rustlers might be mixed up in a lynching a year back.”

“Out of my way, you sonofabitch.” Lauters’ eyes were bulging now.

“Folks are saying you might know more than you’re telling.”

Lauters’ hand was on the butt of his gun. “You little—”

“Why’d you send your deputy away that night?”

Lauters was trembling. “Shut up! Shut up or I’ll kill you! I swear to God I will!”

Longtree had to suppress a grin now. Not because he liked any of this, but because he was pushing Lauters’ buttons and the man was reacting accordingly. Longtree had been a lawman for too long not to see that the sheriff was hiding a few things.

Then the ultimate question: “Were you involved with the rustlers?”

Lauters took one step forward. “You’re a dead man, Longtree…”

Longtree pulled his coat aside so the pistol on his right hip was exposed. It wasn’t a threat…just a warning. “If you’re planning to shoot me, Sheriff, you’d best think again.”

Lauters glared at him. There was a tic now in his lower lip. His huge hand was shaking on the butt of his Colt.

Longtree stood his ground. “Go ahead, Sheriff, slap that leather. If this is how you deal with your problems, then I guess all my questions have been answered, haven’t they?”

Lauters made to turn away, then he launched himself at the marshal. Longtree was caught off guard. Lauters’ fist caught him upside the head and he went down.

“Big mistake,” Longtree said.

Lauters yelled something and reached down for Longtree. Longtree went back on his elbows and thrust out with his leg, catching the sheriff in the stomach with his boot. Lauters staggered back, but didn’t go down. It was enough of a diversion to allow Longtree to get to his feet.

The sheriff came at him, spit running down his chin. “I’m going to kill you, breed! With my bare hands!”

Lauters swung roundhouse and Longtree dodged both blows, coming back instantly with two straight jabs to the face. Lauters fell back, looking shocked, blood running from his nose. With a war cry, he came on again, his punches wild. Longtree kneed him in the midsection, blocked a punch with his left and took another fist on the ear, spilling him sideways.

“All right, you injun bastard, now you’re going to get yours,” Lauters said, wading in again.

Longtree ducked two more roundhouse blows and smashed Lauters in the face with three lightning quick left jabs, followed by an upper cut that snapped the sheriff’s face skyward and sent his hat pinwheeling through the air. Longtree kicked him in the stomach and spun around delivering an elbow to the bleeding wreck of his nose. Lauters went down on one knee, coughing and gasping, arms cradling his belly.

“You want some more?” Longtree asked him.

Lauters shook his head slowly and then drew his gun.

Longtree saw it coming, but there was no time to draw his own weapon. He threw himself sideways just as Lauters’ Colt barked. The bullet ripped across Longtree’s ribs with a raw and real explosion of pain that made black dots dance before his eyes. He hit the ground, clenching his teeth, unable to draw.

Lauters took aim, his face smeared with blood, his eyes rolling in their red-rimmed sockets.

“Sheriff!” Bowes screamed from the door. “Drop it!”

Lauters looked like some wild, insane thing. One of his eyes was swollen nearly closed and his face was painted up with streaks of red. He was puffy and red and panting. He looked from Bowes to Longtree, muttering under his breath.

“For the love of Christ, Sheriff!” Bowes said, pulling his own iron. “Drop it! Drop it now! You can’t shoot a man who hasn’t drawn…it’s murder!”

Lauters grimaced. “I’m gonna kill that redskin bastard!”

Bowes had his pistol on Lauters. “Please, Sheriff… Bill, for goddsake drop it! I don’t wanna shoot you!”

“Injun…just a goddamn half-breed—”

“He’s a deputy United States Marshal, Sheriff! You’ll hang!”

Lauters cursed and spat, dropping his gun. “Look what he did to me, goddammit!” Lauters cried. “Look what he did!”

Longtree moaned and sat up. “I came…to ask him questions…he attacked me…I only defended myself…”

Bowes helped him up. “All right, the both of you, we’re going to see the doc. And I don’t want any trouble.”

“Your time’s coming, breed,” Lauters said, marching ahead of them.

Longtree swore at him.

“Shut up,” Bowes said through clenched teeth. “The both of you.”

32

Later, in the jailhouse, Bowes looked disgusted. “It ain’t safe to have you two in the same town together,” he said. “I stopped it today, Marshal, but tomorrow…”

Longtree took a drag from his cigarette. “He’s out of control and you know it.”

“Don’t you tell me what I know!” Bowes slapped a hand flat on the desk and ground his teeth together. “I can’t have this, Longtree, you know I can’t. Goddamn, I’ve got enough trouble without nursemaiding the two of you. This fucking town is like one big cauldron of shit cooking up hot and filthy. It’s gonna boil over, goddammit. See if it don’t.”

Longtree sighed and placed a hand lightly against his ribs. They hurt considerably, but the wound wasn’t serious. Lauters’ bullet had cut a trench there, but did no real damage. Longtree had been shot before and knew from experience that flesh wounds were often no less painful than taking a bullet in the belly.

“I’d get the hell out of here if I could,” Longtree told him, “but it’s not that simple. Not now.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Do you really want to know?”

Bowes stared at him. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

Longtree butted his smoke and rested his hands in his lap. “All right, I’ll tell you. Lauters flew into a rage when I asked him about the rustlers, about the lynching—”

“Do you blame him, man? He took a lot of heat about that.” Bowes shook his head. “This town went crazy. It’s something we’d all soon as forget.”

Longtree nodded. “I understand that, Deputy. But why did he fly off the handle about the rustlers?”

“Same reason,” Bowes said as if it was all too evident. “He’s taken heat about that, too. He’s never been able to stop the Gang of Ten.”

“Do you think that’s the reason?”

“I do.”

Longtree said nothing. Bowes was unflinchingly loyal. You had to respect that in a man even when the loyalty in question was extended to a rat like Lauters.

“Those rustlers have always been a sore spot with the sheriff.” Bowes looked unhappy as he said this. “He’s did his damnedest to bring them in.”

“Has he?”

Bowes lifted an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Lauters is one of them.”

“Bullshit!” Bowes cried. “Are you drunk, Marshal? He’s a good…was a good lawman.”

Longtree showed no emotion. “Even the best of us get corrupted.”

“I don’t wanna hear that crap, Mister, I just don’t. The sheriff is not mixed up with the Gang of Ten.”

“Or should you say Gang of Two?”

Bowes just stared across the desk, drumming his fingers.

“Yes, Gang of Two, Deputy. Because I think eight of their number have already been killed off. There’s only two left.”

Bowes stood up, getting himself a cup of coffee. “You think that all you want, Marshal, but I don’t wanna hear it. Understand? If word gets around, Lauters will kill you. And I got enough trouble without the killing of a federal officer and the arrest of a man I’ve known for years.”

“That’s fine, Deputy,” Longtree said. “Since we’re on the subject, I got some more trouble for you.”

Bowes sighed. “Yeah, I need that, Longtree. You’re just a prize package, ain’t you?”

“That bounty the sheriff posted,” Longtree said, “it’s drawn in someone. A fellow by the name of Jacko Gantz. Bounty hunter. I had a little talk with him earlier. He’s camped outside town.”

“I don’t see that as trouble.”

“Ten years ago I was a bounty hunter, Deputy. I took Gantz in. He spent a stretch in prison. He holds a grudge against me.” Longtree explained the rest and what had happened in Gantz’ camp that afternoon.

“Well, you just got friends everywhere, don’t you?”

Longtree smiled thinly. “The point being, Deputy, that if I was to turn up missing, you know where to start looking.”

Bowes laughed. “You’re wrong there, Marshal. Lots of men want you dead.”

Longtree couldn’t argue with that. He had a way of making serious enemies whichever way he turned. But Lauters…Christ, he topped the list. Tom Rivers had said he was an ignorant, violent bastard, but that didn’t even begin to tell the story. Longtree figured if he somehow managed to get his scrawny ass out of this particular mousetrap, he was going to have something to say to Tom Rivers. And most of it would be of the four-letter variety.

“I’m just making you aware of what could happen,” Longtree said. “Gantz is a killer and he’s gonna try for me. Believe that.”

Bowes looked disgusted. “And let me guess, you’re gonna sit on your ass and wait for him.”

Longtree smiled.

And outside, Lauters slipped away, his ear cold from being pressed against the seam of the window.

He knew all he needed to know.

33

It was night by the time Lauters made it out to Jacko Gantz’ encampment. He saw much the same things Longtree had-the wagon, the traps and pelts, the rifles, the army tent. There was a smell of coffee and roasted meat in the air. Lauters tethered his horse to the wagon and went to the fire.

“Anyone about?” he called out.

He closed his eyes and winced. Talking above a whisper made him wince. Longtree had put the boot in on him but good. He was sore everywhere. His nose was bandaged. It had been broken and Doc Perry had to twist it back into shape. Lauters had never known such pain. Once, he’d tracked a Cheyenne horse thief up into the Tobacco Root Mountains and had gotten a bullet in his belly out of the deal. He’d had to dig the bullet out with his knife and even that hadn’t been quite so painful.

Goddamn Longtree.

Goddamn half-breed sonofabitch.

“Who’re you?” a voice called from the darkness.

Lauters didn’t turn. “Lauters. Sheriff of Wolf Creek.”

“What the hell do you want? I ain’t done nothing.”

“I know. I just wanna talk a spell with you. That’s all.”

Gantz sat across from him at the fire. He was a big, bearded man with dark eyes. “There was another lawman here,” Gantz spat.

“Longtree?”

Gantz nodded.

“Well, he ain’t the law around here-I am. Don’t you pay no mind to what that breed says, Gantz.”

Gantz smiled. “You know my name?”

“Word travels fast. I heard Longtree talking to my deputy about you.”

Gantz spat a stream of tobacco juice into the fire. It sizzled. “Yeah, well, I was just minding my own business, Sheriff. That bastard hit me with his gun for no good reason.”

“I don’t doubt it a bit. What’s the story between you two?”

Gantz, sensing he had an ally here, told the sheriff in detail. His version was a bit different than the one Lauters had heard Longtree tell. “He’s a sadistic bastard, Sheriff. I wasn’t exactly a law abiding citizen…but he didn’t have to shoot me.”

Lauters touched his nose. “I know what he’s like, just like I know he hides behind that badge and the U.S. Government.”

“He do that to you, Sheriff?”

Lauters nodded. “He did.”

Gantz’ eyes narrowed. “He’s a rough one, that Longtree. How well I know that. He’s fast with an iron and faster with his fists. He was a scout for the army, you know that?”

Lauters shook his head.

“Pretty good one from what I hear. Not surprising with that Crow blood in him. I heard tell he was a fighter out in San Fran before turning bounty hunter and lawman.”

Lauters didn’t doubt this. There were few men he couldn’t lick, but Longtree fought like a possessed man. “A professional, eh?”

“Yep. Back in the early sixties. They called him Kid Crow out there. He barefisted with some of the best, made a roll of cash I heard. Went ten rounds with Jimmy Elliot, I’m told. Got his plow cleaned pretty good, but he held up.”

Lauters took this all in. “He’s trouble, Gantz. We gotta get rid of him.”

“A federal marshal?”

“Don’t matter,” Lauters explained. “Like I said, I’m the law around here. If a man was to say, shoot him in the back, there’d be no questions asked. And there might be some money to be had for the man who did it.”

“Keep talking, Sheriff, you interest me…”

34

“Strange him not being around, wouldn’t you say, Bill?”

Lauters was at Dr. Perry’s house. After he struck his deal with the devil, he rode back into town and stopped by Perry’s for some dinner and conversation. The dinner was good-smoked ham, roasted potatoes, apple pie-but the conversation was lacking.

“Everything about Claussen is strange to me,” Lauters said, lighting one of the doctor’s cigars. “If he ran off it suits me fine.”

Perry stroked his mustache. “But did he? That’s the question.”

“What’re you getting at, Doc?”

Perry licked his lips, thinking it out carefully before speaking. “You rushed out of here this afternoon saying you were going to take care of him. Remember? And now no one can find him. Claussen’s not one to miss services. He takes his religion a might serious, if you know what I mean.”

“Are you saying I had something to do with it?”

“Did you?”

Lauters frowned. “Goddammit, Doc, what do you think I did, kill him?”

Perry sat back in his chair, staring at the darkness outside the window. “I hope not, Bill, I truly do. But when you left here today you looked, well, like a man capable of just about anything.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Lauters maintained.

Perry looked at him with steely eyes. “Then what did you do?”

35

Longtree and Bowes rode up into the hills at an almost leisurely pace. They moved quietly, trying to stay in the shadows. To be caught on Blackfeet lands like this would not have been good. They paused in a thicket to make sure they were alone.

“What in Christ made you come out here on a dare?” Longtree said.

Bowes just shook his head. “I don’t know…young…stupid…who can say?”

“What happened?”

Bowes’ face looked to be cut from bloodless stone in the wan moonlight. But you could see his eyes and they were wide and unblinking. “I was ten years old at the time. Couple of the local kids talked me into and I felt I had to prove myself. Now, you know Crazytail-he’s not a bad sort, you can deal with him, anyway. But his old man? Shit, he was a real spook. They called him Ghost Hand and the name fit. He was a big shot Blackfoot medicine man and folks around here, both white and red, were scared of him. He was our local bogeyman. You grew up around these parts, you were spoon-fed stories about him. Crazy stuff, sure. They said he once put himself in a trance that lasted for six weeks. That he did it another time for twice that long and they even buried him and one night he came walking back into Wolf Creek like Lazarus, thin as a skeleton, his face all white like death and his eyes like silver moons, dirt and roots still clinging to him. Our local minister at the time was the first to see him. He screamed, they said, fell right off his horse and broke his leg. The whole town thought Ghost Hand had come back from the dead and, who knows, maybe he did.

“They said he could pull down the stars and create storms and winds with a single thought. That he could blight your crops and call up devils to tear your head off if he didn’t like you. All sorts of crazy shit like that, you know, like pulling rattlesnakes from his sleeves and conjuring up spirit warriors. That he spoke with wolves and hawks. Folks around here used to go see him when kin were sick and he’d brew up some herbs and weeds and crap and more often than not, the cure would work. He could sort through the innards of a buffalo calf and tell you if the hunt would be successful, if your cattle would get screw worm, if your crops were gonna die. They said he told a miner the day he would die and how…and it happened.

“You get the idea. I only saw him in the flesh once. He came into town with Crazytail and a few of the others to buy some provisions. He sat in the back of the wagon and I tried not to look at him, but I felt his eyes crawling over me like spiders. I turned and he was staring holes through me and those eyes, damn, like steel balls, like glass mirroring the sun. Those eyes caught and held you and they told you things, Marshal, showed you things. Told you that Ghost Hand knew all there was to know about you-all those things you didn’t confess to nobody but yourself. He knew your nightmares and dreams, exactly what scared you. And all your dirty little secrets? Yeah, he was privy to them, too.

“Anyway, Ghost Hand had been dead maybe four, five months when I came up here. Damn. It was night and filthy black and the wind was howling and I could hear things moving in the darkness around me. And I swear to God I could hear footsteps crunching through the dry grass and voices whispering. I got up by Ghost Hand’s grave and, Christ, I swear I saw him standing there all done up in his funeral finery-robes and beads and bones and his hair squirming around like snakes and his eyes were yellow like a rattlesnake’s by firelight and…shit, I was just a kid all worked up and all. I screamed and ran all the way home.”

Longtree thought about it. He wasn’t about to tell Bowes he’d been imagining things. The very quality of his voice was very convincing. It made Longtree’s hackles rise. So he said: “Some of them shaman…they’re pretty spooky.”

“You have no idea,” Bowes said and his voice was filled with dread.

36

“If we’re caught here,” Bowes said, “we’re dead men.”

Longtree nodded, saying nothing. They were in the foothills of the Tobbacco Roots, in Blackfeet territory. They brought with them shovels, pickaxes, and enough extra ammunition to turn back the Sioux Nation.

They were taking no chances.

“You come here much?” Longtree asked.

“Just the once,” the deputy admitted, “when I was a boy. On that dare…scared the life out of me. And I don’t care for it much now.”

The Blackfeet cemetery was located in between two forested ridges, in a little, moon-washed valley of dead, clawing trees. This was sacred ground. This was where the Blackfeet buried their dead and had for countless centuries before white men walked this land. Longtree and Bowes were astride their horses in a copse of dark pines, waiting.

“You sure you want to do this?” Bowes asked one final time.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to tell me what we’re looking for?”

“In due time. Let’s go.”

Bowes nodded. “It won’t matter if we’re caught digging or not, just being here and being white is enough reason to be killed.”

Longtree pulled his hat down over his brow. “Let’s get it over with.”

The moon brooded high in the hazy sky, illuminating everything, casting crazy, knife-edged shadows everywhere. A cool wind whistled out of the north, skirting the jagged peaks of the mountains.

They picketed their horses at the foot of a rock outcropping. If they had to get out fast, the horses would be hidden from view. Course, if they had to get out fast, it was unlikely they’d get out of this country at all.

Collecting their rifles, ammo belts, and digging tools, they started into the graveyard. Longtree wasn’t sure what it was, but he had an awful feeling in the pit of his belly…a crawling apprehension. He had gone white and cold inside and something had pulled up tight in his belly. He could not adequately put a name to what he felt, only knew that, yes, it was a mixture of fear and anxiety and irrational terror. And that it was very old. An ancient, primal network of horror.

They didn’t belong here.

No living thing belonged here.

Longtree thought: Imagination, that’s all it is.

But he didn’t believe it for a second. No more than he’d believed it when he was caught in that sandstorm in Oklahoma Territory.

Bowes was pressed up close to him and when Longtree stopped, he bumped into him. “Quite a place, eh?” Bowes said, his voice thick like tar. “Anytime you’ve had enough, you let me know.”

Longtree assured him that he would.

Despite the fact that the temperature was hovering just above freezing, there was a stink on the wind, like salts and spices and dry things locked in moldering cabinets. Longtree tried to swallow and couldn’t…he didn’t have any spit.

Certain they were alone, Bowes lit the lantern. It cast wild, leaping shadows over the graves and mounds. The wind began to pick up, sounding at times like cold, cackling laughter. Vines of mist tangled at their legs.

“Think you can find the grave?” Longtree asked softly.

“I can find the site,” Bowes told him. “I know where Crazytail’s people are buried…once you see it, you won’t forget it. He’s part of some society, some weird group. Something funny about it all, if you ask me. I came here on that dare just after sunset that time. And I saw, I saw—”

In the bleak, shivering distance, a wolf began to howl. It was a low, drawn-out mournful baying.

Longtree’s skin went cold. The back of his neck went rigid with gooseflesh. “Just a wolf,” he said dryly.

Bowes licked his lips. “I surely hope so.”

Longtree fed a cigarette into his mouth, lit it. Bowes joined him. They were in a bad place here and they needed very much to steel their nerves. Somehow. Longtree was used to trouble, he fed off it like a leech off blood. He was not scared of it, it was part of who and what he was. But this…Jesus, this place, the atmosphere was simply noxious, simply rotten and pestiferous. Longtree felt for sure they were not alone, that cold and malefic eyes scanned them from the mists. He couldn’t seem to shake it. A hush had fallen over the surrounding hills and woods. Shadows rose up and paraded around them.

Longtree felt like he was carved from wood.

“You feel it don’t you?” Bowes said.

“Yes.”

The images of that burial ground at night were locked hard in Longtree’s mind where, he supposed, they’d linger now forever, showing up in nightmares and at four in the morning when he jerked awake with the sweats. The moon gleamed sickly off the graves and cairns of stones, casting huge, nebulous shadows. Crooked, black trees rose up from the frozen, cracked ground, their skeletal limbs like dead fingers scratching at the sky. There were great towers of rock and broken slabs fringed with frost and carved with grotesque images of animals and nameless gods. They raged underfoot and climbed into the dismal sky. And everywhere, a strange mephitic odor of mold and rot.

“Can’t say I like this place much,” Longtree said.

Bowes looked at him with a cold glare in his eyes and looked away.

There were bones everywhere, animal bones. The skeletal trees were decorated with them. Some were fresh, bleached white with bits of meat clinging to them, others gray and cracked with age. All were covered with frost. They were from large animals. Longtree saw a few horse skulls, half-buried in the uneven ground.

“Why the bones?” he asked.

“It’s a custom with these people to kill the deceased’s favorite horse upon burial of its master,” Bowes pointed out. “Sort of a sacrifice, I guess. That and the Skull Society, maybe.”

“Up there,” Longtree said, gesturing to a low bluff crowded with dark shapes.

“That’s the place,” Bowes said.

The graves of Crazytail’s clan were set on a long, low bluff of misshapen, craggy trees. Wooden frames-some new, some old, others impossibly ancient and crumbling-were set about, covered in tanned buffalo hides scrawled with drawings and weird letters. Other frames carried the stretched and sunbleached hides of wolves. There were wooden staffs driven into the hard earth, decorated up with feathers, paint, and beads. On them were the skulls of wolves and men. Dozens and dozens of them. They were all yellowed, cracked, ancient.

Bowes set the lantern down atop a cairn of stones. It was a recent piling. These stones didn’t have the weathered, arid look of the others and they weren’t covered in blankets of furry, winter-dead moss and fungus.

“My guess is Red Elk’s under here,” Bowes said.

Longtree, the tails of his coat flapping in the wind, said, “Let’s take a look.”

It took them about thirty minutes to remove the stones, most were frozen in place and only a good blow from a shovel would loosen them. Longtree then took the pickax and broke through the frozen ground. None of it was easy. The frost line went down a good ten inches and the earth splintered with each blow like flint.

“That’s good,” Bowes said. He took the shovel and carefully dug through the soft, sandy earth. “The Blackfeet don’t bury their kin very deep. Shouldn’t have to dig down,” he grunted, “more than a few…feet.”

When they caught sight of a flap of cloth, Bowes used his hands to clear away the soil. Red Elk had been wrapped in a blanket. Bowes, with what seemed genuine respect for the dead, gently pulled the blanket open. Beneath, there wasn’t a body, but something that looked like a buffalo skin shroud, stitched up and painted with images of the sun and moon.

“We’ll have to cut this open to take a look at him, “ Bowes said, like it was the last thing in the world he wanted to do.

Longtree kneeled next to the body, pulling his knife from its sheath. “Just one quick look,” he said. He cut the buffalo sinew stitching as far down as where he figured Red Elk’s waist would be. With one look at Bowes, he pulled back the skin shroud.

“Are you going to tell me what we’re looking for now?” Bowes asked.

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

Red Elk had been buried in his finest. He wore a shirt of soft antelope skin and leggings of the same. Both were decorated up with dyed porcupine quills, feathers, beads, and little bells. The women who’d prepared him for burial, as was the custom, had painted up his face with intricate streaks of white clay and earthen yellows and blacks. A war club ornamented with eagle feathers was sewn up in the shroud with him, as were his tobacco pouch and medicine bundle, both of the softest unborn buffalo calfskin.

Longtree examined him minutely with aid of the lantern. His neck was twisted at an odd angle from the hanging and his skin had shriveled to a blotched brown that clung to the skull beneath. Beyond that, the cold and soil had stopped any real decay.

“Well?” Bowes asked impatiently.

Longtree covered Red Elk back up and wrapped the blanket over him. “Nothing. I’m relieved. Very, very, relieved.”

“What did you expect to find?”

Longtree ignored the question and filled in the grave. Bowes helped him pile the rocks back in place. In a few days, after the frost settled back in, no one would know the grave had been tampered with.

“Look at this,” Bowes said.

Longtree looked where he indicated. Another grave, an ancient one by the look of it, had been opened. Rocks were scattered aside. All that remained of the grave was a four-foot deep trench. But it was gigantic. Far too large for a man. You could’ve buried a horse in there. Maybe a couple of them.

“That grave was opened,” Longtree said. He pawed in the trench with his shovel. “Empty. Now why do you suppose the body was carted away?”

Bowes shook his head.

Longtree took the lantern to another grave a few yards away. This one was particularly ornamented with skull poles and painted up hides on frames and slabs of rock covered with drawings and writings that were obscured by the years. There were no less than half a dozen human skulls here and twice that many of wolves. Some of the poles had fallen, the skulls shattering like brittle yellow porcelain. It looked to be very ancient.

“Who do you suppose is down there?” Longtree asked. “Ghost Hand?”

“No, he’s farther up on the next hill.”

“I’d say whoever it was must have been important.”

Bowes licked his lips. “They’re all important up here. All big, bad medicine men,” he told Longtree. “But this one…shit, he’s been in the ground a hundred years or more. Maybe twice that.”

Longtree was thinking the very same thing. He wasn’t sure why, but he was certain there was an answer up here somewhere. And this grave…it was so ornamented, so well-tended…it spoke to him.

Longtree removed a stretched yellowed skin atop the cairn and it came apart in his fingers like candied glass. He began to loosen the stones with powerful swings of the pickax.

“I’m finished,” Bowes said, throwing up his hands. “I wanna know what the hell this is all about.”

Longtree kept working. “When we find it-if we find it-you’ll know.”

“Goddammit, Marshal, I’m risking my neck out here! Tell me what’s going on or I’m riding out!” Bowes shook all over. Then, calmer, “Digging up Red Elk’s one thing, but this one…Christ, he’s been dead for centuries. What can he have to do with anything?”

“I hope nothing,” Longtree panted.

Bowes spat. “Damn you, Longtree.” He came over and started working.

It took them longer to take apart this cairn. Countless generations of rains, freezes, and baking summers had welded the rocks together as if they’d been mortared in place.

When they were done, both men had long since shed their coats, sweat steaming on their faces. A slab of rock was beneath the cairn, this one painted with things that were neither animals nor men. They had to use the shovel handles like levers to slide it free. And then they had to chop through the frost line and the hard packed earth beneath.

The wind had picked up considerably, howling out of the north. Wolf hides and moldering ceremonial blankets rustled and snapped on sagging willow frames. That wolf started up in the distance, baying its ancient dirge. The pale moon looked down, piercing the grotesque, dancing shadows.

Longtree found the first tattered remains of something like a skin-tarp and the two of them cleared away dirt and rubble. The tarp came apart in their fingers, rotted and half-frozen.

“Christ,” Bowes said, turning away, “that stink.”

Longtree smelled it, too: A heavy, thick smell of decay and grave mold. An odor nothing dead for untold years had the right to possess. It was a black smell, a suffocating evil odor of slaughterhouses and disturbed graves.

“This ain’t right,” Bowes said in a weak voice.

The grave, once completely unearthed was huge. Gigantic.

The body was stitched up in a hide shroud, too, but blackened with age, covered in spots with mildew and damp gray fungi. And it was not buffalo skin. It had a smoother texture. Was very fine. Longtree suspected human skin, but didn’t mention the fact. Whatever it was, given the size, it had taken a lot of pelts.

Longtree slit it open, not being too careful. His fingers trembled. The baying of that wolf took on a high, shrill pitch. Swallowing, Longtree pulled back the shroud. Bowes held the lantern.

“Jesus in Heaven,” he muttered.

Longtree backed away, his skin cold and tight with gooseflesh. A nameless dark madness teased at his brain.

Whoever it had been…he wasn’t human. He was a giant.

The head was huge and distorted, ridged with jutting bone and covered in a tight flaking gray skin that had burst open in spots like badly worn canvas. There were darker patches of mildew stitched into it. The heavy jaw was pushed outward like a flattened snout, the blackened gums set with irregular crooked teeth, sharp as spikes, fragmented and splintered. There were no eyes, just black yawning sockets, one of which was threaded with moss. Tufts of silver hair jutted from the obscene skull in irregular patches, blowing in the wind like strands of cornsilk.

Longtree just stared. There were no words to be said. A flat, clawing emptiness raged in his brain and he knew then what it was like to go insane, how sometimes madness was the lesser of two evils.

“It can’t be, it can’t be,” Bowes kept saying over and over in a silly, defeated voice.

But it was.

Longtree kept looking. The cadaver had been interred in this unhallowed ground in a shroud of skin that had rotted to rags now, through which protruding bone and withered flesh could be seen. One skeletal hand was thrown over the chest, the fingers covered in parchment skin and ending in hooked claws. There were only four fingers on that hand and they were easily twelve or fourteen inches from knuckle to nail tip. Big enough to palm a man’s head. The giant also had a tail wrapped around it, a bony thing that looked oddly like vertebrae.

One of the fingers moved.

“Jesus,” Bowes whispered, “bury it! For the love of God, bury it!”

Longtree turned away from the horror in the grave. This is what he’d been looking for, what he knew they must find, but in finding it, the revelation was simply too much. He listened to the wind howling, the wolf baying, could feel the sickly light of the moon on his skin.

It wasn’t human, whatever it was. Not in the least. Just a mummy of some ghoulish, perverse tribe, some nameless monster far larger than a man and twice as wicked.

Skullhead.

Yes, of course. It’s body was skeletal and chitenous, the head like a huge misshapen skull. It all fit.

Bowes’ eyes suddenly went wide and he stumbled back and fell. He was pointing and muttering gibberish, drool coursing down his chin.

“What—” Longtree began, but by then he knew.

A huge and hideous shadow fell over him with the icy kiss of tombs. He heard something like old, dehydrated kindling snapping and popping. The wind carried a musty stink of old bones and wormy shrouds.

He turned and saw what he knew he would. A warm wetness spread in his belly; his head was full of noise. His lips opened and he could draw no breath.

The thing was standing up in the grave, a decayed scarecrow with a grinning, crumbling skull for a head. Its mummified skins flapped in the wind. The jaws parted with a groaning click, a hissing, reptilian noise issuing from the collapsed throat. It stood seven feet if it stood an inch. That tail-like the spinal column of an animal, all spines and bony ribs-whipped around it and thudded against the ground.

Longtree couldn’t move; he was paralyzed.

Bowes fumbled for his gun and drew it, his hands trembling so badly he couldn’t hold it still. The first shot ripped apart the stagnant night with a thundering explosion, the bullet whistling past its target.

The dead thing shambled over to Longtree, a discordant, bellowing howl rising from its throat and echoing through the burial ground. One atrophied claw snatched at Longtree’s hair, yanking back his head, as the bobbing skullish face went in for the kill, the shriveled lips drawing back a good inch from hooked, yellow teeth and festered gums.

The next two shots found their marks.

The first took the top of the ghoul’s head off in a spray of dust and filth. The second punched in its chest, dirt and sandy fragments blasting from the wound. The jaws opened with a great whining squeal, a cheated sound, the desiccated flesh of the face splitting open with a series of fanning cracks from the stress. It released Longtree, staggering back, more bullets opening it up in more places.

By then, Longtree was on his feet, a shovel in his fist. When he heard Bowes gun click again and again on an empty chamber, he launched himself at the monster, swinging the shovel like a club. The blade bit into the ghoul’s throat and cleaved its head free with the sound of roots being yanked from the ground. The ruined head spun back into the grave. For a few moments, the headless monstrosity stood there, its knotted fingers clawing at the air. Then it went still and fell straight as a plank to the ground, striking with a cloud of dust. It was nothing more than a heap of brittle, broken bones and filthy rags now. There was no life nor semblance of the same.

It was some time before Longtree moved and when he did, it was slowly. He turned from the moldering wreck and went to Bowes. Bowes wasn’t moving, just staring with unblinking eyes. Longtree put a hand on his shoulder and Bowes slapped it away.

“Don’t touch me, by God,” he snapped. “Don’t you dare.”

“Easy, Depu—”

“Don’t touch me, dammit!”

Gently, Longtree said, “Let’s bury that thing and get out of here.”

Bowes shook his head. “I can’t…I can’t move.”

“Then stay here and I’ll do it.”

It took Longtree some time to fill in the grave and pile the stones. When it was done, he helped Bowes to his feet.

“What was that?” the deputy inquired.

Longtree looked away towards the mountain. “It’s the patron saint of the Skull Society. The same kind of thing that’s killing people in your town.”

37

It was nearly two in the morning by the time Longtree made it back to his little camp in the sheltered arroyo. Bowes and he had made it out of Blackfeet country without any trouble. Even the shots fired had brought no attention. They both ate and had baths drawn for them at Bowes’ house. If nothing else, this unknotted Longtree’s muscles-none of which were feeling too good after hours spent digging in the frozen graveyard. And to add insult to injury, all the exertion made the bullet wound on his ribs ache all the more. Afterwards, Longtree rode back to his camp and found Laughing Moonwind waiting for him. He knew someone was there long before he got there-a fire was blazing and he saw the smoke from a long way out. He was glad not to find Gantz or Lauters waiting in ambush for him. But had they been, it was unlikely a fire would be lit.

“Have you been here long?” he asked her.

“Yes. I was waiting for you.”

Longtree sat next to the fire and warmed himself. She had made coffee and he helped himself to a cup.

“Word has reached me,” Moonwind said, “that you have made dangerous enemies.”

“You don’t miss much, do you?”

She brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. “It’s not my way.”

Longtree rolled a cigarette and lit it with an ember from the fire. “I seem to make enemies wherever I go.”

“I think that is our way”

Longtree laughed dryly. “You could say that. No one seems to like the law and I doubt they ever will.”

“Sheriff Lauters is a dangerous man to cross, Joseph Longtree,” Moonwind said, showing little concern. She was simply stating a fact. “I heard you were shot today.”

“Just grazed.”

“Soon, you will have worse enemies than Lauters.”

He scratched his unshaven chin. “How so?”

“The Skull Society knows of you and what you’re doing.”

“I’m no threat to them.”

“But you are. You are here to stop the killings and you might have to stop them in order to do it.”

He smiled grimly. “You still hanging on to that Skullhead business?”

She just looked at him with all the knowledge in the world. “I think you know better.”

Longtree kissed her on the mouth and told her where he’d been and what he’d done and what he’d seen. She didn’t seem surprised by any of it, merely unhappy with him for going to the burial ground in the first place.

“You visited sacred ground,” she said in a low voice. “You desecrated my brother’s grave. I should kill you. If I was good Blackfoot, I probably would.”

“But you won’t.”

She shrugged. “But how do you know I won’t tell others of what you’ve done? That you won’t be killed as an act of revenge for this sacrilege?”

Longtree took a slow drag off his cigarette. “Because you won’t say a thing. If you do, I’ll be killed. And if I’m killed I’ll never sort out what really happened to your brother…and I’m probably the only man who can.”

Moonwind allowed herself a thin smile, her dark eyes sparkled in the firelight. “You’re right. My brother’s honor is more important than any burial ground. Regardless, you committed a blasphemy in doing what you did.”

Longtree glared at her. “That thing would have killed me.”

“That thing was a god.”

Longtree smoked in silence now. God or not, that horror from the grave was nothing remotely human. It was a demon. No more, no less. The dead didn’t walk. This was an established fact…or had been until tonight. He doubted there would ever be anything too far-fetched for him to believe again.

“You believe everything I’ve said,” Longtree said sourly. “Why? If anybody told me a tale like that, I’d laugh in their face.”

Moonwind frowned. “That’s the trouble with you whites-you think you know everything, that nothing exists or can exist that you have not seen or experienced. Well, now you know different. There are many things in this world outside your limited experience.”

“Like dead things that walk?”

“It was a god as I have said. And it was not dead…merely waiting.”

He sighed. “Bowes told me some stories about Ghost Hand.”

“Ghost Hand was my grandfather, a great medicine man, a legend among our people,” she explained. “I heard once that he brought a drowned man back to life, that a baby frozen two days lived again when he breathed life into it.”

“What did you know about your grandfather?” Longtree asked.

“I knew he was a kind and gentle old man, little else. He died before I was born. He was a medicine man and a Skull Society member.”

“And a shapeshifter?”

“Possibly.”

“I think we can dispense with that. Skullhead is no man, shapeshifted or not.”

“No, he is a god. But you weren’t sure, were you?”

Longtree shrugged. “No, I wasn’t. I had to be sure. I had to know what I was hunting. The truth, not double-talk. Red Elk was just a dead man when I examined him. He was no beast.”

Longtree had been thinking long and hard about what he’d seen in that burial ground. He still didn’t buy any of that business about Blood-Medicine, but that mummy had risen from the grave and it had been more beast than man. There was no getting around that; the impossible had happened. But whatever else he might believe, he would never accept that the creature he’d seen was even remotely human. Not even a medicine man could look like that.

“These are interesting tales we’re swapping here, girl,” he finally said. “Very interesting stuff about the Skull Society, Blood-Medicine, and your grandfather. But they’re just tales, aren’t they?”

“The Skull Society exists,” she said angrily.

“Course they do. But do you really expect me to believe these men are changing themselves into monsters? What I saw was no human being. Wanna tell me what it was?”

“It wasn’t Blackfoot.”

“I gathered that,” Longtree smiled. “No family resemblance…thank God.”

She fixed him with a steely glare. “This isn’t something to joke about.”

“Tell me.”

She swallowed. “What you saw, Joseph Longtree, was something my people once worshipped. Something from the beginning of time. They were called the Lords of the High Wood. They were here before men.”

“Before the Indians?”

“Before anyone.” She pulled her robe tighter around herself. “You were digging in a sacred plot. The place where the last of the Lords were interred countless centuries ago.”

“There was an empty grave—”

“And I think you know why. What was in there, now walks again.”

“How?” he asked incredulously.

“The Skull Society once worshipped them, ages ago. They would have ways to resurrect them. I know nothing more.”

“Don’t you?”

She looked angry, mellowing then by degrees. “I commit a sacrilege against my ancestors. I hope they will forgive me. The white man tells us that the Blackfeet Confederacy has only been in this part of the world for three or four hundred years. But that is wrong. We have been here for untold millennia. Our oral traditions reach back thousands of years. Long ago, in what is called the Dark Days, our people came to these mountains. It was so very long ago that the mountains were hills. There were other mountain ranges then that are no more than foothills now. In the Dark Days, the Blackfeet came here, following the herds of beasts upon which they hunted. What they found was a huge forest, a gigantic forest that covered the world. The trees were so tall they touched the sky. And beneath those trees, in the sacred groves and hollows, there was darkness and shadow in which many strange creatures lived. Tradition tells us our ancestors discovered the ruins of ancient cities of stone, all crumbled and collapsed. But these ruins and the dark woods beyond were the hunting grounds of the Skullheads. There were hundreds of them. They were known not only as the Skullheads, but as the Cannibal Giants, The Mountain Lords, Kings of the Hunt, the Eaters of Men.

“Our people made war with them, but the Skullheads were fierce, they were devil-warriors. The only way we were allowed to live and hunt in their forests and glens was by making sacrifice of our children. A dark practice administered by priests who were to become the Skull Society. It went on like this for many, many centuries.

“Eventually, the forests thinned, the swamps dried-up, sunlight penetrated the lairs of the Skullheads. The ruined cities were dust blown away by the winds. Things had changed. Our people grew numerous and strong, but the Skullheads weakened and died. By the time of the dog days, there were but a handful. And these were laid low by our medicine men, bound by the old ways, held and imprisoned. They were buried alive. But they never died. They could not know death as we do. They only waited as the centuries passed. Whenever our people were wronged, one of them was resurrected to dole out punishment, to seek justice. And this is all I know. There is only two or three of them now up in the burial ground. And one of those, walks.”

Longtree found it all compelling, a glimpse of prehistory, of the antediluvian world handed down for thousands of years from father to son, mother to daughter.

“Those ruins you spoke of,” he said. “The cities-who built them?”

She shook her head. “They were dust long before the Blackfeet came, but the Skullheads did not build those cities, it was another race.”

Longtree figured none of that really mattered. “The Skullhead who walks…it’ll have to be destroyed.”

“I wish you luck.”

Longtree nodded. She had said he soon would have bigger enemies than just Lauters. And what did that imply? Was this Lord of the High Wood going to come after him now? He put this to her.

“Possibly,” she admitted. “If the Society learns you have opened the grave of one of their gods…”

He sighed. “Then I’d better get him before he gets me.”

There was no more to be said.

Longtree pulled Moonwind to him and kissed her forcefully. She didn’t refuse his advance, her strong arms pulled him closer and held him in a tight embrace. She pulled open her buffalo robe and pushed his lips onto her jutting breasts. Before the fire, he made love to her with his mouth, teasing out her secrets and passions with his lips and tongue. Then she did the same for him. When he entered her, he did it slowly with a gentle rocking motion, urging moans and cries from her. As he pushed into her harder, faster, her legs locked around his hips, she panted in his ear, whispering her desires, and biting at him tenderly. They were like two animals at the end, lost in the heat and need, swimming burning seas, their hips slamming together with raw hunger. The beast with two backs, as it was known.

When it was over, she said, “I’m your woman now.”

They held each other before the fire, their lips brushing in soft kisses and caresses. Moonwind stayed with him until just before dawn. When she left, she kissed him and rode off quietly, so as not to disturb his sleep.

With what came next, it was better she wasn’t there.

38

Just before first light, Longtree heard a horse coming. He was half awake at the time and the slow trod of the horse’s hoofs told him danger was near. Whoever was coming, was coming very slowly. Longtree worked himself quietly from his bedroll, donning his coat and strapping on his pistols.

The rider stopped just outside the weave of trees that ringed the little arroyo. The horse was tethered and the rider approached now on foot. He was being very quiet, pushing his booted feet down in the snow very slowly so as to make little sound.

But Longtree heard him, all right. He’d been a scout and he knew all the tricks of stealth-how to use them and how to know when someone else was using them. This fellow wasn’t especially good. If he had been, he would’ve picketed his horse a half a mile away and come on foot, sneaking into camp to do whatever it was he’d come to do.

But he hadn’t. Longtree decided this man was no professional, much as he thought he was.

Longtree hid in the same outcropping of rocks he’d hid in the night Lauters and his posse had come. It was an excellent place to hide during the night, but now with day breaking…it was less than desirable. It was defendable, all right, but there was no escape route from it if things turned bad. Behind him was sheer rock rising twenty feet and much the same to either side. Longtree didn’t like it. He always sought a place with cover and a backdoor to slip through if it came to that.

In the grainy, pre-dawn light, he saw the man ease through the trees into camp. He suspected it could only be Lauters or Gantz.

It was the latter.

Gantz carried a shotgun and pistols on either hip. There was no question as to why he’d come. He approached Longtree’s bedroll cautiously and, when it was in plain sight, aimed the shotgun at it. Cursing, he lowered the barrel, realizing it was empty.

“Drop it, Jacko!” Longtree called out, knowing it was a mistake.

Gantz threw himself to the ground and fired in the direction of the marshal’s voice. The blast loosened some debris over Longtree’s head, but did no real damage. Longtree shot back, his own bullet kicking up snow and dirt inches from Gantz’ head. Gantz rolled away behind a tree.

“Give it up, Jacko,” Longtree called out, “before this gets any worse.”

Gantz’ only reply was another round from the shotgun that exploded more debris from the outcropping. Longtree didn’t shoot back. He wasn’t going to waste the ammunition until he had a clear shot at the man. This was about to become a lethal cat and mouse game, a waiting game. Longtree wasn’t going to say anything else; let Gantz believe he’d been hit if the man was fool enough to think that.

“Throw out your weapons, Marshal,” he said. “I just wanna talk…”

Somehow, Longtree didn’t believe that.

He kept quiet and said nothing.

This affair could end only one way and both men knew it. If Gantz was taken alive he’d be going back to prison and Longtree knew he wouldn’t let that happen. So, one of them had to die. It was an ugly situation. Gantz had the upper hand here. He was in the treeline and he could move around in there at will, under heavy cover, while Longtree could go nowhere. And there was nothing stopping Gantz from slipping around the other side of the arroyo and shooting down on Longtree. Nothing at all. But if Longtree tried to escape, there was no cover until he reached the trees. Easy pickings either way it seemed.

It all depended on how smart Gantz was.

Longtree could see part of the man’s elbow sticking out from behind the tree. At this distance, hitting it was unlikely, but worth a chance. At the very least, it might scare the bounty hunter out into the open for a split second…long enough to put a bullet in him.

Longtree took aim and squeezed the trigger.

The bullet missed its mark by a few inches, gouging free bark and making Gantz dart for fresh cover. The next bullet Longtree fired caught Gantz in the leg and solicited a howl of pain from him. It probably wasn’t much more than a flesh wound, but it was something.

Within seconds after the bullet had hit, Longtree came charging from his hiding place, both pistols drawn and firing, slugs ripping apart the brush Gantz was hiding in.

But Gantz was no fool.

He saw what the marshal was doing and he wasn’t about to let it happen.

Dragging his injured leg, he hobbled from the trees, bullets zinging past him, shotgun held out and firing. Longtree hit the dirt, felt the first burst of buckshot scream over his head, the second erupt snow and dirt in his face. He rolled and came up firing. The first and second bullets punched holes in Gantz’ stomach, blood gushing from the wounds. The third and final bullet ripped into his chest.

Gantz staggered forward, dropping the shotgun, trembling fingers reaching for the pistols at each hip. His bearded face was pale, compressed into a rictus of agony and hatred. He tried to speak, but blood sprayed from his mouth and froze on his beard, his gasping breath frosted in the air. He staggered and went down on one knee, his eyes rolling back white. With a final coughing, gagging wet gasp of air, he fell forward into the snow. His blood steamed in the chill temperature.

He was dead when Longtree reached him, the crunchy snow red with his fluids.

“Shit,” Longtree said, flipping the dead man over with his boot.

He’d wanted very much to take Gantz alive. He wanted to ask him why he’d let this happen, why he’d been pushed into such action. These were questions Longtree never tired of asking and the answers were often less than satisfying. But he always asked them, good or bad.

With a sigh, Longtree turned away.

He’d killed more men in his time than he liked to think about. And each time, death left him feeling the same-empty, hopeless, physically ill. There was never anything to be gained from violent death, only pain and suffering and guilt. But that was the way of this land; it respected nothing else.

Longtree went up into the treeline and retrieved Gantz’ horse. He slung the dead man over the saddle and roped a blanket over him. That done, he broke camp and packed up all his things and led Gantz’ horse into town.

He wouldn’t be coming back here again. Tonight he would stay in town and every night after. Next time when a gunman came after him, he might not be so lucky.

But, ultimately, it wasn’t men that worried him.

39

“You should’ve known better than to be up there, “ Sheriff Lauters said to Bowes. “You should’ve known better than to listen to that damn breed.”

Bowes hung his head. “That’s not important, Sheriff. Because what happened up there—”

“Enough!” Lauters snapped. “I ain’t listening to your goddamn ghost stories no longer. Christ, Deputy! What’s come over you? Before this you were the most level-headed man I knew!”

“I saw what I saw.”

Lauters sighed and popped the cork from a fresh bottle of rye. He upended it and gulped, stopping only when he began to cough and gag. “ I don’t know,” he gasped, “what you and that marshal are up to, but it had better stop. Monsters rising from the grave… shit!” Lauters pulled off the bottle again, his hands shook and he made gagging sounds, as if he could barely hold the liquor down.

“I’m sorry, Sheriff, that you think I’m a liar, but I saw what I saw. And the last thing I’m going to say on the matter is that these murders are more than we can handle.”

“This country can’t throw anything at me I can’t handle,” Lauters insisted. “Not a goddamn thing.’’

There was a blast of cool air and both men turned to see Longtree standing in the door. “Nothing a bottle can’t help you with, eh, Sheriff?”

“You sonofabitch,” Lauters growled, his hand sliding down to his gun. “You started all this mess, you—”

“I wouldn’t draw that unless you wanna die,” Longtree said calmly. “Never met a drunk in my life I couldn’t outdraw.”

Lauters hand stopped. “You threatening me, breed?”

“No, sir, I’m warning you,” Longtree said. “I’m warning you that if you ever again try anything as stupid as you did yesterday, I’ll fucking kill you. And be within my rights.”

Lauters clenched his teeth. “Maybe we ought to settle this out back.”

Longtree opened his coat, fingers tapping the butt of one of his Colts. “If you’ve got the stomach for it, Sheriff.”

“All right now,” Bowes said, stepping between them. “None of that here. You’re both lawmen and you’re both doing the same job, so knock it off.”

“What do you want here, Longtree?” the sheriff asked.

“A fellow by the name of Jacko Gantz tried to kill me today,” Longtree announced.

Lauters just stared, his eyes bulging. A touch of color spread into his cheeks, then fled. He said nothing. He touched his tongue against his lips.

“That’s the fellah you were telling me about, wasn’t it?” Bowes asked.

Longtree nodded. “His body’s outside.”

Lauters licked his lips. “You killed him?”

“He didn’t give me much choice.”

Lauters pushed past him and went outside.

“If I didn’t know better,” Longtree said, “I’d think the sheriff was disappointed Gantz didn’t succeed.”

40

There was a light, cool mist in the air by the time Lauters made it out to Mike Ryan’s ranch. Ryan had one of the largest ranches outside Wolf Creek and he was, without a doubt, the richest man in that part of the Montana Territory. He had some seven hundred head of cattle at present and twice that amount in another ranch near Bannack. He owned several hotels in Nevada and Virginia Cities as well as a variety of dance halls, saloons, and gambling halls. He was a major stockholder in several copper and silver mining companies and sat on the board of directors at the Union Pacific Railroad.

Ryan was waiting for Lauters as he rode up.

“What happened, Mike?” Lauters asked.

“Hell broke loose, Bill.”

Ryan had dispatched a rider to fetch the sheriff. At the time, Lauters was at Spence’s undertaking parlor with Longtree and his deputy, having a look at the man Longtree had killed. He was glad to be called away. He had an ugly feeling Longtree knew damn well that he’d had something to do with Gantz’ attack.

A ranch hand brought the two men mugs of steaming coffee as they walked through the grounds. The ranch was like a little city. Ryan’s huge white house sat serene and omnipotent on a hill overlooking everything, its great carved pillars and fancy latticework gleaming in the weak sunlight. Below, was a sprawl of buildings-bunkhouses for the men, livery barns, log barns, outbuildings, a fine insulated ice house set in a low hill, a smithy’s shop, a cookhouse twice the size of Lauters’ home, and an intricate network of working corrals stretching off towards the horizon.

It was all very impressive.

“Tell me what’s been happening in this town, Bill,” Ryan said. Ryan had only arrived back in Wolf Creek the day before after some six weeks spent touring his various holdings.

Lauters laid it all out for him. About the killings and the inhuman nature of them, putting special emphasis on who the murdered men were. He spoke of Longtree and Bowes and the death of Gantz.

“That injun’s gonna be trouble, I take it?” Ryan said.

“More than you can imagine, Mike.”

Ryan nodded. “A federal officer, too. That could make things difficult for us. He’s not some sodbuster no one will miss.”

Lauters nodded, knowing this all too well.

“But every problem has its solutions.” Ryan said this with total conviction.

They came to a corral near the house and Lauters saw the reason he’d been called…or one of them. This was where Ryan kept his racing horses. These animals had been, once upon a time, his pride and joy, but now…now they were so much meat. Lauters was looking at the slaughtered remains of some five thoroughbred horses. They had all been disemboweled and decapitated, the flesh stripped down to muscle, the hides ripped free and draped on the fence. They were partially eaten, but food didn’t seem to be the primary reason for this carnage. The heads lay in the frozen mud, staring up with bulging eyes.

“I loved these animals,” Ryan said calmly. “I truly did. Much as a man like myself can love. Whatever did this…is as good as dead.”

“Looks like the work of an animal, but…”

“But with a man’s twisted intelligence behind it,” Ryan interrupted. “An animal will kill for food, to protect itself, but only a man kills for the sport of it. Only a man does something like this.”

“Longtree’s got it in his head that we’re dealing with something that might be a little of both, so I hear.”

“Tell me,” Ryan said. He wasn’t asking, he was demanding.

Lauters told him everything Bowes had said, even the bit about what they’d seen up at the burial ground. “A load of crap, if you ask me.”

“Deputy Bowes doesn’t strike me as the sort of man who makes up tales.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But nothing, Bill. Longtree might be a pain in the ass, but he’s right about one thing-we’ve got ourselves a monster here.”

Lauters just stared.

“Don’t look at me like that, Sheriff,” Ryan snapped. “The evidence speaks for itself. I was in Virginia City last night and…that thing must have come for me. When it couldn’t get me, it got what I loved best-my horses. Tonight it’ll probably come again, maybe for me, maybe for you.”

Lauters swallowed. These were things he had thought about quite a bit, but had dismissed as fantasy. Hearing another man say them made it all that much harder to brush them aside.

Ryan turned away from the bitten, clawed horses. “It came last night…and no one heard a thing.” He threw his mug of coffee into the snow. “I have nearly a hundred men here, Bill, and no one heard a goddamn thing. I’ve heard horses die, I’ve heard the sounds they make when a hungry wolf pack sets on them…it carries for quite a distance. Anything that can slaughter five horses and do it silently, is no mere animal, no man.”

Lauters looked skeptical. “But a monster…”

“Look,” Ryan said, leading the sheriff into the corral. There were prints in the mud and snow. “It was warm last night. Our beast left tracks that froze hard this morning.”

Lauters examined them carefully. The prints were huge, splayed out. Exactly like the ones in Nate Segaris’ house: immense, unnatural, triple-toed like a lizard with a thick spur in the back.

“Physical evidence, Sheriff. We need no more proof.” Ryan crossed his arms and glared at the mountains in the distance. “Eight men are dead, Bill, and not just any eight men. I don’t have to tell you what you and I and those men have in common, now do I? This creature is killing selectively, very selectively. And, if my memory serves me, exactly one year since that injun was lynched.”

Lauters shook his head. “This is all crazy.”

“Yes, it is,” Ryan admitted, “but it’s happening all the same. That injun was lynched and now his people have called up something to take revenge.”

Lauters looked beaten. “What can we do?”

“First, we take care of Longtree.”

“How? Hire gunmen?”

Ryan shook his head. “No, this is something you and I have to do. We don’t want anyone to wag their tongues about this down the road. We take care of that marshal tonight and plant him somewhere he’ll never be found.” Ryan grinned. “And then we’ll take care of Red Elk’s clan.”

Lauters looked suspicious. “We’ll need a lot of men.”

“I have thirty men right here that have done jobs for me in the past, all of them handy with guns. I can raise another thirty from the mining camps, men who need money and are just looking for a reason to spill injun blood.”

Lauters nodded. “Tonight, then.”

“Your man Gantz failed, Sheriff, but I guarantee you, we will not.”

41

Longtree was with Moonwind again at the Blackfeet camp. They were in the lodge of Herbert Crazytail. Longtree had rode into camp and requested a meeting with the old man. And after some wait, it had been granted.

“My father says you are wasting your time,” Moonwind translated.

Longtree was a stubborn man and he fully intended to get what he came after: answers. He didn’t bother bowing his head in respect to the medicine man, because he no longer had respect for him. Crazytail sat on a bed of dried grasses covered with buffalo hide and tended the fire. He was wrapped in a Hudson’s Bay blanket, his right arm and shoulder uncovered. Strips of buffalo meat were cooking on wooden spits. Crazytail was gnawing on bits of pemmican.

“Tell your father to stop the Skullhead,” Longtree said. “If the killings continue, soldiers will come. His people may be killed.”

It was a lie, but neither the old man or his daughter knew it.

Crazytail turned the spits in the fire, mumbling something.

Moonwind said, “It is too late. What has been set into motion cannot be stopped. Even soldiers cannot stop the Skullhead. He has been called.”

“Who called him?” Longtree asked pointedly.

Moonwind translated, but the old man just shook his head.

“I don’t think he wishes to talk any longer,” Moonwind said.

“He doesn’t have a choice,” Longtree said angrily. “If these killings aren’t stopped, soldiers will come and your people will be killed. Those that aren’t will be taken off to prisons and distant reservations. They will never see this land again. Tell him that.”

Moonwind, sighing, did so.

For the first time since his arrival, Crazytail looked at the marshal. There was hatred in his eyes, the hatred of an entire race. He began talking loudly now, jabbing his finger at Longtree.

“He says our people have a right to vengeance, we have been wronged. The whites must be taught a lesson.” Moonwind cleared her throat. “He also says he is sorry you have involved yourself in this, that you will die also. He says if you are wise, you will leave this place before night falls. The Skullhead will not stop killing.”

“Tell Crazytail that I want to know where the Skullhead is. I can stop him.”

Moonwind translated. “He says no man can stop what has been set into motion. Once the Skullhead is called, he cannot be put down.”

Crazytail, the fire reflected in his narrow eyes, began speaking again.

“After the guilty ones are killed,” Moonwind translated, “the Skullhead will begin killing indiscriminately. So we have nothing to fear from the soldiers, for the Skullhead will take us all as sacrifices. Our fate is sealed.”

“And after you’ve all died in vain,” Longtree said, “then what?”

Moonwind, looking very unhappy, translated: “Then the Skullhead will go down into the town of the whites and kill everyone.”