Sheep's Clothing (6 page)

             
I opened my mouth to remark that a stranger, regardless of his prestige, was unlikely to gain such influence so quickly... but then I remembered how giddy May seemed when she talked about him, as though he were a great philanthropist rather than a man with dead eyes who just blew in a few days ago. May was friendly with most, but she seldom fell to celebrity worship.

             
I did end up having to make brief idle small talk with two of the locals while Wolf was digging around in the carriage. While I was commenting on the weather with the second, though, I saw DuPont returning and had to quickly excuse myself to warn Wolf.

             
I let out a couple of whistles in the direction of the stable, in the nearest imitation of a quail I could manage. Wolf raised his head from his task at the signal, and presently drew one of his revolvers and pointed it. For a few hair-raising moments he appeared to be pointing it at me.

             
“Doc, down!” he barked.

             
I threw myself aside and felt a lance of burning pain shoot up the back of my left arm. I landed on my side in the turf and grabbed at the wound; my fingers came away bloody. I looked up and saw DuPont advancing on the carriage, unafraid of the gun being aimed at him. I saw that he was wielding a knife with the last inch or so of its point broken off, and one edge was red with my blood.

             
I don’t know what I was thinking in those next few moments. Thoughts raced past almost too fast to recognize:

             
He’d tried to kill me.

             
That was the knife whose point I’d dug out of Wolf.

             
That meant that he’d intended to kill Wolf.

             
He might still intend to kill Wolf.

             
He might aim to kill me after.

             
What would happen to Salvation if I couldn’t stop him?

             
So it was that, when DuPont stepped over me to get to Wolf, I kicked out at the man’s knee out of sheer instinct.

             
As one of the primary load-bearing joints of the human body, the knee is surprisingly vulnerable to sharp blows. Even if one does not manage to break the joint itself, any number of tendons can be torn with even a weak kick: the hamstring, the illotibial band, the patellal tendon... I could go on, but the results are largely the same regardless.

DuPont’s knee bent sideways with a visceral crunch, and he fell, mainly on top of me. Within a heartbeat Wolf had pounced on DuPont and wrestled the knife out of his hand. He dropped the weapon almost immediately with a snarled curse, though, as though it were red-hot.

“Doc!” he barked, as he endeavored to pin the struggling DuPont. “Get the knife!”

I reached out gingerly and picked it up, and found it was cool to the touch. I placed it in my pocket for safekeeping. “What are you going to do with him?”

“I’d like to beat his head in, but I don’t think that’ll endear me to the local sheriff,” Wolf replied. “Ya hurt?”

“He slashed my arm,” I replied. “I don’t think it’s serious, though.”

He nodded. “Good. I’ll sit on him while ya fetch help.”

And he proceeded to do exactly that, seating himself squarely on DuPont’s back, pinning the man’s wrists behind him.

“Are
you
hurt?” I asked, glancing at his hand.

“I’ll be fine for now,” he returned. “Now git.”

I left the two of them and dashed into the Lucky Lady.

May glanced up as I entered, and immediately her eyes found where I was clutching my arm.

“Goodness gracious, Doc!” she exclaimed. “What happened to ya?”

“A man outside slashed my arm with a knife,” I said. “I got someone out there sitting on him.”

May nodded sharply and called into the back for Gib to fetch the sheriff. As he hurried out, May tossed me a clean towel.

“
Ya get that wrapped up, Doc,” she said. “Best not to let that thing fester.”

I thanked her and wrapped the towel around my arm as a makeshift bandage. By the time I’d finished with my task I saw that she’d picked up a heavy iron ladle.

“Now,” she said evenly, “Ya show me where that scoundrel is, and I’ll give him a lesson he won’t forget in a hurry.”

“No need for that,” I said quickly, not wanting to put her in danger. “Just stay here, and we’ll get him taken care of.”

She snorted and turned to put the ladle away.

Just then, I got a dreadful sense of filled space behind me, and my throat dried up like a riverbed in a drought. I turned, and saw Russeau standing less than three feet from me, watching me.

In daylight hours, Russeau did not seem to be quite the soulless monster that he had appeared the previous night. He was handsome, but not unnaturally so, and while his eyes were dark they were not the black pits of oblivion they had been the previous night. His complexion was fair, as red-haired individuals tend to be. His features were sharp and chiseled, with an aquiline nose, defined cheekbones, and a strong chin. As before, he was well-dressed and well-groomed, but he stank of cologne, which made me wonder why I hadn’t smelled his approach. He looked down at my bandaged arm.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asked, his voice as smooth as ice.

“I was attacked,” I summarized. “Fortunately, the cut is not deep.” I did not want to mention the identity of my attacker, lest Russeau think it strange that I would know DuPont’s name.

“Perhaps so,” said he, his eyes fixed on my arm, “But such wounds do tend to bleed so.”

I glanced down at the wound briefly. “Fortunately,” I returned, “I’m a doctor. I know how to take care of such things.”

He smiled, his eyes now flicking back up from my wounded arm to alight on my face. It was all I could do not to flinch away from the intensity of his stare.

“Ah,” he said, “It’s always a delight for me to meet men of medicine. I am Alexandre Russeau.”

He held out his hand to me. The fingers were long and slim, their nails a bit overlong and slightly pointed.

I clasped his hand, and found the flesh to be cool to the touch. “Nathaniel Meadows,” I said, hoping that my revulsion was not visible on my face. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to meet with the sheriff when he arrives.”

“I will not keep you, then,” he said, releasing me and dismissing me with a wave as he turned away. With a great effort, I turned my back on him and headed out the door, perhaps a bit more quickly than I otherwise might.

Outside, I saw Pack returning with the sheriff, a broad-shouldered man who answered to Abraham Smith. He nodded a greeting to me.

“Pack says someone attacked
ya?” he asked, his gaze also flicking to the towel bound around my arm.

I nodded. “I have a friend holding him down over by the stable,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

Wolf was still perched atop DuPont out by the stable but leaning close by his ear as though holding a clandestine conversation with him. He looked up a bit warily as we approached. Abe’s gait slowed a bit.

“Is this the man who attacked
ya?” he asked.

“It is,” I said, but then noted where Abe’s gaze had landed. “The one on the bottom is, I mean.”

“Who’s the Indian?” Abe asked dubiously.

“He’s a patient of mine,” I said. “If it weren’t for him, I probably would have gotten the knife between the shoulder blades instead of getting winged.” I saw Abe’s expression lose its edge just a bit, and I relaxed. “Go ahead and get him to his feet, Wolf.”

Wolf dragged DuPont upright, still favoring the hand that had grabbed the knife. DuPont let out a low groan of pain, and I saw that his knee was no longer properly aligned, causing him to favor that leg. I restrained my natural instinct to set it at once—the man had tried to kill me, after all—but I knew I might be called upon to do so later.

Abe looked DuPont over. “Huh,” he said. “Aren’t
ya the feller who came in with the Frenchman Russeau?”

DuPont remained sullenly silent.

“Well,” Abe continued. “I don’t know how things are done where ya come from, but we don’t hold with foreigners knifing the town doctor around here.” He looked down at DuPont’s leg. “What happened here?”

“I kicked his knee after he knifed me,” I said. “I believe he aimed to attack Wolf next.”

Abe frowned, but nodded. “Ya certainly did a number on him,” he said, sounding more impressed than disapproving as he looked back at me. “We’ll get him fixed up back at the jail, don’t ya worry. Russeau needs to keep a tight leash on his servant.”

I nodded in agreement and watched him take custody of DuPont. Once they’d gone some distance down the street, I turned to Wolf.

“Let me take a look at that hand,” I said.

Wolf kept his eyes on the retreating forms of DuPont and the sheriff, but held out his hand to me. Across the palm was a band of angry red flesh, an inch and a half wide, where it appeared he’d grabbed the blade of the
knife.

“No blistering,” I said, “But it burned you pretty good, looks like.”

“It’ll heal,” he grunted. “It’ll just hurt like the dickens in the meantime.”

“And that was the same
knife he’d stabbed you with?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Why silver?” I asked.

He finally looked over at me, but initially said nothing.

“You can tell me while I get that hand wrapped up… and you can tell me what you were looking for.” I glanced back at the Lucky Lady. “And I thought you said he wasn’t active in the daytime.”

“I said he tended to be up and about at night,” he corrected me. “Ain’t nothing keeps him from walking around in the sunlight, except he’s less powerful then.”

I sighed; more riddles and hints and no straight answers. “You can give me the details back home.”

***

As it turned out, the burn on Wolf’s hand was already subsiding by the time we got back to my clinic. I treated it anyway, because a burn was a burn, regardless of the cause or the recipient.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I asked as I worked.

“Not exactly,” he said. “No pine boxes, but I did find a bit of dirt scattered in the luggage compartment and across the top of the carriage.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means DuPont’s already moved them.” He grinned wolfishly. “Fortunately, he and I had a nice little chat while ya were getting help.”

“Find anything out?”

He nodded. “It looked like they were lugging six boxes of dirt, and DuPont was kind enough to tell me the locations of three of ‘em. Now we can go consecrate them so they can’t be used.”

It sounded like a plan, however absurd a plan it might be, but one detail still puzzled me. “I still don’t quite understand—why is the dirt so important?”

“Russeau needs to sleep with some of his home soil near him. Folks like him usually sleep in a coffin with a layer of dirt at the bottom, but in a pinch they can keep a smaller amount with ‘em. Otherwise they can’t sleep worth a darn, and if they get tore up in a fight they can’t heal right.” He must have seen the confused look I still wore, because he sighed. “Earth from his homeland. It’s like a feather bed to him.”

“I… still don’t understand,” I confessed.

He sighed. “It’s how they
work
, Doc. I don’t know why. As long as they’re good and hid, we’ll never be able to properly destroy Russeau and his ladies. They’ll just keep coming back. So we need to find all the boxes and destroy them.”

Now that Wolf’s bandage was secured, I started to attend to my own knife-wound, only to find that I could not readily examine the slash without assistance, such was its positioning at the back of my arm.

“Here, let me take a look at that,” Wolf offered.

“Are you familiar with medicine?” I asked.

“I know nuff to patch someone up. Go on.”

I stripped off the makeshift bandage—making a mental note to replace the ruined towel—and removed my coat, rolling up the left sleeve of my shirt as far as it would go so Wolf could tend to my wound. After working in silence for a few minutes, he spoke.

“Got a bee in yar bonnet about something?” Wolf asked. I glanced back at him, a bit surprised.

“That
knife was made of silver,” I said. “That’s a pretty soft—and expensive—metal to make a weapon out of.”

“Yep,” he said.

“So it seems likely that it was made for some specialty purpose,” I continued, following my unlikely train of thought.

“Yep,” he said again.

“But it seemed to be exactly the sort of weapon he needed to lay you low,” I said, hoping he would jump in at some point.

“Yep,” he said a third time, with almost maddening patience.

I sighed. “Why silver?” I asked.