FORTUNE TELLER part 3

Copyright (c) 2019 by Randall R. Peterson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED This is a work of fiction. All persons, locations and actions are from the author's imagination or have been used in a fictitious manner.

FORTUNE TELLER

Part 3

By R. Peterson

Ben McCoy slowly lowered the smoking pistol and glared at Parley. “Now look what you’ve made me do! Don’t you know better than to startle a man when his finger is on a trigger?”

Parley turned. Behind him, Jesska and Lakasera ran to where Redonici had crumpled to the ground. They carefully lay her on her back. A patch of crimson was spreading in the frilly white blouse from a bullet wound just above her left breast. “Red?” Parley forgot about McCoy and ran to his cousin. “Do something!” Jesska screeched.

Parley unbuttoned the blouse and pulled it back. Carl Brown, who had been standing up naked in the tub gawking, now turned his head at the sight of the blood. “You gonna shoot me too Ben?”

            “Shut up and get your clothes on,” McCoy growled. “She was just a damn whore.”

Carl wasted no time scrambling out of the tub and running for his pants and long johns piled on a tree-stump.

            “Is she going to die?” Melania had awakened to the gunshot and come from the wagon in her nightgown. All three women looked at Parley.

            “She’s hurt bad,” Parley said. “The bullet just missed her heart but there is possible damage to her left subclavian artery. I won’t know until we open her up!”

                “You’re going to operate on her here?” Jesska gasped.

            “I have no choice,” Parley said. “If I don’t repair the damaged vein in the next twenty minutes she’ll bleed to death.”

            “What can we do?” Lakasera asked.

            “Make sure we have plenty of boiling water,” Parley said, “and cover the table inside the wagon with three clean bed-sheets from my trunk. You’ll have to help me carry her. I have to keep pressure on the wound until we’re ready to repair the damage.”

Jesska and Lakasera carried Redonici into the wagon while Parley walked alongside. Melania ran to the fire and began to add kindling to the pot of hot water that was meant for McCoy’s bath.

 Carl Brown was already on horseback and was waiting while Ben McCoy rummaged through Lakasera and Redonici’s tent. He appeared holding a quart pickle jar filled with silver coins. “You’re a murderer … and a thief!” Melania screamed at him.

            “Your big sister ain’t dead yet … but you will be,” McCoy said as he stashed the bottle in his saddle bags. “It was just a darn accident but we’re apt to have the sheriff riding our tail just the same. Some folks place a value on whores that I don’t. I ain’t leaving this place empty handed … Hell! I didn’t even get a bath!”

Melania began to pelt both horses with pebbles as McCoy slipped into his saddle. “Wow! Ain’t you the feisty one,” he drew his gun and began to fire. Both horses were bucking and all five shots went wild.

            “She ain’t my sister … she’s my cousin,” Melania danced away from the bullets. You two are snake-in-the-grass outlaws … I hope the Indians catch you and stake you both out over red-ant piles!”

“Kill her!” Carl yelled.

            “Can’t … I’m out of bullets,” McCoy cursed as he tried to rein-in his horse.

            “Then use your knife!”

“We got no time to waste on a yapping girl.” McCoy argued. “We best light out afore the sheriff comes.” He smiled and touched the knife strapped to his belt. Broken teeth gleamed in the moonlight. “Besides I got me a recanting mail-order bride that needs her skin took!”

Melania began to make signs with her hands.

McCoy laughed but Carl stared wide-eyed. “You puttin’ some kind of gypsy-curse on us little girl?”

            “I can and I will,” Melania screeched as she threw more stones. She burst into tears as the two men rode away … and a cloud of dust blotted out the stars.

           

-------2-------

Sheriff Thomas Lang looked upward as Jeddah Martin and Clifford Williams both began to laugh. He thought he’d heard gunshots in the distance. What a night! Amos Wilkes dangled from a broken tree limb by the seat of his torn overalls. He began to kick his legs when he knew he’d been spotted. “What in tarnation are you doing?” the sheriff said.

            “I figured I’d hide up here until I found out how mad they was,” Amos looked at the ground instead of at his mining partners. The branch I was standing on broke while you was calling-camp, sheriff. I was hoping nobody heard.” Amos began to sob. “I don’t want to die!” Tears made tiny white-lines as they ran down his dirty face. “I’m sorry! I figure you boys know now it was me that ate-the-all of our bacon … yesterday … and the week before.” The tears were falling like rain now. “I traded Jed’s horse blanket to an Indian back in Dodge for some chewing tobacco.” Each time the sheriff thought he’d stop he went on.  “And it weren’t no critter broke Cliff’s whiskey. I poured that Tennessee sipping liquor down my gullet afore I smashed the bottle and then made them coyote tracks with a rock and a pointed stick!”

The two miners smiling faces were slowly becoming somber as Amos kept talking. Sheriff Lang hoisted himself into the tree and was trying to unhook Amos’s pants. “I think you’ve done enough confessing for one night, Amos” the sheriff whispered as he worked at the snag. ‘This ain’t any church … and neither one of your friends looks like a priest”. But Amos was like a broken dam … and the waters of repentance kept pouring out.

            “It was me told Jose Gonzales, back in Santa Fe, that Jed was upstairs in the hotel with his pretty young esposa! And I lied about being a king back in France … I ain’t never been to Louisiana! It was me put that snake in your boot Cliff … I didn’t know you’d be bit! I was sure I’d checked him over for rattles! I’ve been sifting white trail dust into both your flour bags every time I woke up with a hankering for flap-jacks … even when my own bag was full. It was me caught the tent on fire … smoking one of Jed’s cigars …”

            “Shut your mouth you lying, thieving, no good, skunk!” Both men still had guns in their hands. Cliff fired his. The branch holding Amos’ pants shattered and Amos fell to the ground. Sheriff Walker looked at the smoking gun and then upward at the moon. This was turning out to be a bad night!

-------3-------

            Melania held the oil lamp steady and wiped Parley’s forehead at the same time. It didn’t seem especially warm inside the gypsy wagon but her older brother was sweating profusely. All the metal parts of his medical instruments were emerged in scalding hot water and the tiny space smelled of ether “Hand me the forceps,” Parley spoke to Lakasera. “Careful! Only touch them by the handles.” He allowed them to cool slightly while his mother read aloud from a medical textbook titled Antiseptic Principles in the Practice of Surgery, Melania didn’t want to look at the bloody chest of her older cousin but she was forced to – to the keep the incision area lit. “Suction!” Parley stuck the medical pinchers deep inside the wound as Lakasera used a syringe with a rubber bulb on one end to suck excess blood from the cavity. “Got it,” he said. A piece of lead somewhat smaller than a marble plunked into a bowl filled with clean water. “Now to repair the vein.”

            This was the part that Melania found fascinating. The last time the Descombey family butchered a hog, Parley had kept numerous parts of the dead animal in sealed canning jars filled with a substance called formaldehyde. Lakasera removed a tiny piece of hollow bone from one of the bottles and then her brother trimmed and cut it to length with a surgeon’s knife. He inserted the tiny piece of bone into each end of the severed artery and then pulled the veins together. He used special magnifying glasses and a needle and cat-gut thread from the hot water to stitch the pieces together.

            “It’s like you’re making repairs to a pipe,” she said.

            “A pipe that must not leak and work like new,” Parley gasped.

            “Why do you use parts from a pig?” Melania asked.

            “Pigs have almost the same thoracic and abdominal organs as humans,” Parley said. “We can only hope her body won’t reject this stent and allows her vein to heal.

            “Will she die?”

            “Only God knows,” her brother said, “him and the Devil.”

Ten minutes later, Parley unclamped the arteries and then sewed-up the incision. An exhausted Melania stumbled outside to get air.

The six-year old was using tiny broken sticks to make patterns in the dirt when her mother found her. "Che cosa stanno facendo mio figlio?" Jesska frowned and then scuffed away the drawings with her boot.

            “I’m making a maledizio to punish those bad men that hurt Redonici!” Melania began to bawl.

Jesska took her daughter in her arms and held her tightly as the child sobbed. “We must have forgiveness,” she whispered. “Curses are like Australian boomerangs. They always come back to who throws them!”

-------4-------

Sheriff Lang shook his head. There seemed to be no end to Amos Wilkes’ confessions.

Amos was on his knees with his arms spread-wide, bawling like a preacher caught by his congregation spending their donations in a whore house.

            “It was me locked the skunk in the outhouse behind the restaurant in Kansas City. I marked them poker cards! It was me that dropped Jed’s pistol into that pickle barrel …”

            “Go ahead and hang him,” Tom said as he jumped out of the tree. “If you don’t … I think I will!”

            “Hang him?” Jeddah Martin and Clifford Williams looked at each other and holstered their guns. “We’re just having a little fun with our partner!” Jed laughed.

            “Amos is our good luck charm,” Cliff explained. “If it wasn’t for him we would have never found the mother-load!”

            “We both know he’s a sorry pile of wasted flesh and he lies at least twice with every word he speaks,” Jed said. “But he’s with us for a reason …”

            “We went looking for him down-stream this morning,” Cliff said. “We figured he got drunk and fell in the creek. We checked all around the back side of a big bend covered with rocks and black sand hoping we’d find his mangy corpse snagged on something!”

            “That’s when I plucked out these nuggets, some as big as chicken eggs, on my first pan,” Jed opened a bag and poured out a handful of gleaming gold ore. “He’s like a gunshot wound to both our backsides but we can’t do anything good without him!”

Ten minutes later when the sheriff walked back to town Amos was demanding to be served breakfast.

-------5-------

Lakasera was pounding on the door of the newly built jail and sheriff’s office. Tom looked at his watch he’d only been asleep for a little more than two hours. He groaned. After the gypsy woman explained what happened, the sheriff rode with her back to the camp.

            “My cousin is sleeping now … and with a little luck she might make it,” Parley explained.

            “You say one of these men had a scar running down the left side of his face?”

            “Yeah he had a thick beard … but it didn’t quite cover it! He said his name was McCoy … Ben McCoy!”

The sheriff was back in the saddle before Parley could ask him if he wanted breakfast. “You going to track them now? It’s still dark out!”

            The sheriff stared at the ground as the horse began to move. “The tracks head north … I ain’t got time to gab!”

The wild Texas mare named Comanche was at a dead run within seconds. The murdering outlaws had at least a two-hour head start. Tom knew where they were headed … to Elisabeth Walker’s ranch!

TO BE CONTINUED …