A Tale Out of Luck by Willie Nelson, Mike Blakely Page B

to the boardwalk to beat on the door of the general store, for Sam Collins served as the coroner in Luck. Flora recognized the wagon driver as Eddie Milliken, the Double Horn Ranch foreman who had started all the trouble with Jane the night before.
    Though she dreaded it, she resolved to walk right up to the wagon with Hank. If one of those boys was in there, she didn’t want him to see it alone. Fearing the worst, she peeked over the edge and saw the body of a more mature man, and felt a moment of something like relief, though the corpse full of arrows hardly set her mind at ease. She didn’t look at the face long, for the top of the poor man’s head was a horrible sight, and one of his eyes was missing. She turned and rested her cheek on the back of Hank’s shoulder, half hiding from the dead body until she could get hold of herself.
    Jane had not had the stomach to even look. “Is it?” she asked.
    Flora shook her head. “Some stranger.”
    With her cheek still on Hank’s shoulder, Flora felt his arm reach forward, and wondered why on earth he would want to get any closer to touching that ghastly corpse. She looked around his shoulder toward the wagon and saw Hank’s gnarled fingers stroking the red markings painted on one of the arrow shafts. Her eyes swept up his arm, to his face. She had never seen such a look in the Ranger’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was stunned disbelief, or fear, or a combination of the two. She had never known Hank to fear anything before.
    The door to the general store burst open as Sam came out to stand beside Eddie Milliken on the boardwalk across the wagon from the saloon crowd. He grimaced as he took in the sight of the one-eyed cadaver, then looked at Milliken. “Well?”
    Milliken had pushed his hat back on his head and was standing hip-cocked on the boardwalk as if he was showing off some prize buck deer he had killed and hauled to town. “The boss found him on top of Shovel Mountain this morning.”
    Sam looked down at the body, the revulsion plain on his face. “Anybody know who it is?”
    Milliken spoke up again. “Jack says just some drifter he recognized from the saloon.”
    “Did you ever see him before?” Hank asked Flora.
    She set her jaw and took another look at the man’s face. She nodded and looked away. “He said his name was Wes. Wes James. He rode a tall claybank horse. He fancied himself a mavericker.”
    “You’re sure about all this?” Sam said.
    Flora nodded. “I remember him well. He made Dottie mad because she went to sit on his lap and he told her she was too fat.”
    A group of men let out a whiskey chuckle, until Hank’s disapproving gaze silenced them.
    “What were you boys doing on Shovel Mountain?” Hank asked.
    “We were huntin’ strays we might have missed, and noticed the buzzards circlin’. Jack rode up on top of the mountain to see what was dead, but he was a little too late to save that eye.”
    Flora had noticed the bedrolls and skillets under the buckboard seat and judged the claim of a late-fall cow hunt logical enough.
    Hank continued his interview. “Where’s Jack and the rest of the outfit now?”
    “We drove the dead body over to Fort Jennings. Major Quitman took some buffalo soldiers over to that Indian camp on Flat Rock Creek. Jack and the rest of the boys went with the cavalry.” Milliken spit a brown stream of tobacco juice on the boardwalk. “Your boy, Jay Blue, was there. And that kid, Skeeter.”
    Hank’s eyes flashed up from the arrows sticking out of the dead man. “Did they ride with the soldiers, too?”
    Milliken smirked and shook his head. “The major wouldn’t let ’em. He told ’em to go home.”
    Hank breathed a sigh of relief, but then set his glare on Milliken. “Were you one of the boys that ganged up on my son last night?”
    The cowboy almost swallowed his quid as Hank’s eyes drilled him. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.”
    “He was the one who grabbed Jane