After a flurry of excitement, Dane Coleman had a restful sleep and awoke ready for more action.
He found Joshua loading up a cart with the more presentable of the two bodies and he helped him with the other one. Joshua had attached the draft horse to the cart and brought a riding horse with him.
“You know how to drive a cart like this?” Joshua asked.
Dane thought back to the transports he had dealt with in his other life and realized none were quite like this. “Depends how tricky it is?”
“Then you ride Esther there and Jezebel and I will take the cart.”
“This one of the horses from st night?”
“Nah, the crazed one who did not run is a stallion, the other was gelded. Will probably have to geld the wild one too, or he might cause trouble with our boy Solomon,” Joshua replied.
Dane just noticed something and asked: “You name all your animals from the Bible?”
“It has some good ones. Like Joshua,” the other man replied, grinning broadly. “Our resident cats are Delih, Hephzibah and Goliath, though Goliath and ‘Zibah tend to come and go as they please unless ‘Zibah is pregnant again. Never bothered to name the chickens or cattle though.”
Dane walked over to Esther and greeted her, then turned back to Joshua and started to ask, “Do you have any?..” but stopped as the other man handed him a small paper bag holding a few sugar cubes. Dane nodded appreciatively and offered one to the horse before attempting to get into her saddle. Took him two tries and he was sure he looked awkward doing so; he’d spent a bit of time around horses as a kid but that was two decades ago, and in another life.
Joshua simply watched silently and then said: “You look like you used to know what you're doing but are now way out of practice. When we get back, after watering and milking the cows, we can do a bit of riding. Matt could use some time in the saddle too. I have him feeding the animals this morning.”
“That sounds like a good pn,” Dane confirmed.
“Now just follow along side of me and we will drop these guys off at the church first and then report their deaths to the sheriff and maybe grab a drink and a te breakfast at The Dusty Gulch before heading back.”
“The church?” Dane asked, surprised, as they started on their way.
Joshua answered. “Don’t much like the new parson, but he’s got the best pce for storing bodies and is next door to Ken Ellis, the local barber.”
That puzzled Dane for a few seconds and then he remembered “Ah, Barber, dentist and doctor, so also the closest thing to a coroner outside of the big cities?”
“Exactly.”
***
Elsewhere, just as they were setting off, three disheveled men were standing before another figure, concealed in shadows.
“When we found they’d fixed the fence we knew something was wrong, and then Damian screamed and the horses were going crazy. Carlos tried to calm one but fell off and got trampled.”
“So not only did you fail to trash the Sievert ranch as we had been pnning for three weeks, you managed to lose two men and four horses, each horse worth more than the lot of you combined?” An angry man’s voice hissed out of the shadows. As it spoke, one arm briefly moved into the light; if he were there, Dane Coleman might have been very surprised to recognize the woven blue suit jacket sleeve and the distinctive, locomotive-shaped cufflink worn by the man in his bizarre dream of the night before.
“It wasn’t our fault, boss,” another man chimed in. “Either they got a new hand who really knows how to shoot, or the kid has been practicing. And then when the ni…”
The figure in the shadows interrupted him with a roar: “Use his name like a civilized man, not THAT word like those barbarians in the Confederate States do! We aren’t savages here!”
The man swallowed hard and resumed: “when Joshua and that shotgun of his showed up, we were lost. I half expected none of us to get out alive.”
The man in the shadows held up a hand for silence, and spent a few moments clearly lost in thought before speaking again: “Must be the stranger who paid off the Sievert debt yesterday. You three lie low for a day or two while I figure out our next moves.”
Almost in perfect unison, the three men replied “Yessir, boss!” And almost fell over each other to leave his presence.
***
When Dane and Joshua reached the church with their grim cargo, Joshua knocked at a side door. A pretty young woman with skin darker than his opened it fairly quickly: “Good morning, Miss Kimberly,” Joshua greeted her. “Is Reverend Norris in?”
“I think he stepped out for a bit, Josh. I can check. What is this about?” She replied. Her voice had a slight rasp to it that reminded Dane of an actress and singer he’d been a fan of in his youth, Eartha Kitt. Come to think of it, the woman herself bore a strong resembnce to Eartha, though perhaps a bit taller.
“We had an attempted cattle rustling at the ranch and the other side wound up far worse for the experience.”
Her eyes went wide at this: “You know where to put them. I’ll go get Ken to look them over, and then see if I can find Reverend Norris,” she replied.
Joshua nodded and she went in to grab a hat and gloves before heading off to the barber while Johsua led Dane to an outbuilding. A small stream, one that Dane noticed by the erosion of the banks was likely closer to a river in early spring or after a heavy rain, flowed through part of the building, and when Joshua opened the door, Dane felt a bst of cooler air - not icy, but much cooler than the outside. He had heard of old school ice houses but had never seen one before. Inside he saw a wrapped object about the same size as the ones they had with them, as well as some perishable food items that Dane did not think he would trust to eat, as well as a rge bank of heavily packed snow.
“Every spring we set a wagon train to bring ice down from the mountains," Joshua said, waving off to the west. What we bring back usually sts about four to six months, depending how hot it gets.”
They id the two bodies out as carefully as they could and were ready to leave when Ken showed up - he was a tall, thin man with sandy brown hair and a very nasal voice, but who seemed to be always cheerful.
“Greetings Joshua - I see you brought me two more non-paying customers?”
“Didn't go through their pockets so they might be paying ones,” Josua replied, grinning.
The thin man acknowledged this with a slight smile and then asked: “And your assistant here is?”
Dane answered, though did not offer his hand, seeing as Ken kept his stiffly at his side: “Dane. Dane Coleman. Ranch hand.”
“Ah, I see,” Ken replied, with a slight nod. “Let us see what you brought in.”
He immediately went to the messier of the two and held up a hand for silence. He unwrapped the mess, making “tsk, tsk” sounds and walking around the body once it was exposed. “Looks like he was trampled by something, most likely a horse. Also has a wound that looks like a rifle shot to the base of his skull”
“He was trying to…” Dane began but was interrupted by the barber: “Save the expnations for Sheriff Tanner, I just want to know if my assessment is right?”
“Exactly correct,” Dane replied. “He was shot while riding and then fell off and under a horse.”
“Most unpleasant,” Ken replied, covering the body. “Don’t recognize the face, though if that’s due to him being a drifter or just too badly damaged I can't say for sure yet. Now on to our other customer “
He walked over to the other bundle and repeated the ‘unwrap, walk around and make tsking noises’ behavior of before.
“Looks like two gunshots, the first to the shoulder, which probably would have killed him eventually, unless he found a really good doctor to treat him very quickly. The second severed his spine, making any recovery far more difficult; maybe not one hundred percent more difficult but at least ninety percent. Was instantly unconscious from pain and bled out within an hour.” He turned away from the corpse and looked at Dane. “Does that sound correct?”
“I thought he died before that but the injuries and order of them is spot on.”
“Very good. Now run along to the sheriff to report this and I’ll take care of everything else. Oh, this one is Damian Cooper, sometimes rides, er rode, shotgun with the stagecoaches in and out of town and did a lot of odd jobs, allegedly not all of them legal, around here. No local family, but maybe Mister Grant or Reverend Norris knows more.”
