Skull Moon

A full moon. Big, bloated, obscene.

Its pallid light filters down on the craggy, shadow-pocketed landscape of the northern Wyoming Territory. Black surreal clouds roll in the sky. A cool wind howls and shrieks, the dark pines bend and sway.

A lone, crooked oak claws at the sky, its stripped limbs creak and moan. From one blasted fork a body hangs, strung by the neck with a coil of frayed rope. The body swings and turns with a gentle tenebrous motion, urged by the night winds.

With a sound like dry lips parting, the eyes open.

The Indian was old. His burnished face a map of the rocky, gouged landscape around him. He wore a faded gray army shirt and a tattered campaign hat with the crossed silver arrows of the scouts. On his knotted feet were black moccasins, the soles threadbare. Wrapped around him like a sheet of misery was a stained blanket. He carried an oil lantern that hissed and sputtered, casting grotesque shadows over the rocks and leafless, stunted trees.

He was very old. Even he couldn't remember just how old. He knew only that in his youth he had fought the beaver trappers in the mountains. And much later, had been with them when the mountain men had their final rendezvous in 1840. And he had been old then, nearly forty years before.

His name was Swift Fox and he was Flathead.

He knew this just as he knew some of his tribe called him Old Fox or Sly Fox behind his back. Just as he knew he'd first fought, then befriended the whites, even serving in their Army in campaigns against the Dakota.

Swift Fox kept walking.

He mounted a rise, the cool November wind blowing dust in his face. He saw the big oak in the distance and made for it. He stepped carefully, a lifetime of navigating such terrain teaching him the value of patience. He'd seen too many men scramble over the rocks and slopes in a rush only to catch their boots in a yawning crevice and snap their ankles. This had never happened to Swift Fox and he planned on keeping it that way. Old men's bones, he knew, didn't mend so well.

The temperature was in the mid-forties.

Seasonable for that time of year in the Wyoming Territory. Yet the chill dug into him, laid on his skin like frost, clotted his old, sluggish blood with ice. This more than anything told Swift Fox in no uncertain terms he was an old man.

At the big oak, he stood motionless for some time, watching the hanged man.

The breed, Charles Goodwater, had told him of this. He'd seen the hanged man from a distance as he stalked a deer and had quickly returned to camp to report it. Swift Fox had come, knowing if he didn't cut the man down no one else would. Not Indian nor white. And in his way of thinking, there was something blasphemous about letting a man hang in the wind until he rotted and dropped to bones.

So he had come.

Holding the oil lamp with a steady fist, Swift Fox studied the hanged man. He was dressed in a long midnight-blue broadcloth coat with black pants, scuffed Texas boots, and a dark flat-crowned hat. He wore a white cotton shirt that was brown now with dried blood.

Swift Fox wetted his lips and set the lamp down. The flickering light threw huge, maddening shadows. The man hung only a foot or so off the ground so Swift Fox only needed to climb up a few feet. He slid a long, curved skinning knife from the sheath at his hip and sawed at the rope. The blade was sharp enough to take off a finger with a single slice, but the rope was stubborn. It took Swift Fox a few seconds to cut through it, the blade winking back moonlight and steel.

The body hit with a thud.

Slowly, patiently, Swift Fox climbed down and sat next to the man. His old bones creaked in protest. The man's hands were tied behind his back and Swift Fox cut them free. The arms were not stiff as he worked them free and rolled the man over. He hadn't been dead long.

Swift Fox pushed aside a strand of his white, blowing hair and brought the lantern closer to the man's face. The hanged man had dark skin like an Indian, yet his features were European. A half-breed maybe or just a white who'd spent his life in the wind and sun.

The wind howling like the spirits of the dead in this lonesome place, Swift Fox checked the man's pockets. He carried no weapons, no identification. Just inside his coat, Swift Fox felt metal beneath his fingertips. He turned the flap of material out.

A badge.

Swift Fox looked closer.

The hanged man had been a deputy U.S. Marshal.

There would be hell to pay for this, the old man knew. The murder of a federal marshal meant nothing but trouble and a lot of it. Swift Fox looked into the dead man's face.

And the eyes opened.

For the next four days, the many daughters of Swift Fox cared for the hanged man. They wrapped him in buffalo blankets and fed him a hot broth of deer blood. While they did this, the old man kept watch and smoked his pipe. On the morning of the fifth day, the hanged man regained full consciousness.

He looked at the old man's daughters and then at the old man himself. Then he asked for water in a dry, dead voice. The old man sent his daughters away and let the hanged man drink all he desired from a jug fashioned from the bladder of a buffalo.

"My throat burns," he finally said, his eyes blue and icy.

"It is not broken, " Swift Fox said. "By the grace of the fathers, you lived."

"You speak good English."

The old man took this as a fact, not a compliment. "I was a cavalry scout."

"Did you bring me here?"

"Yes."

The man nodded painfully. He looked around. "Flathead?" he asked.

"Yes. I am called Swift Fox."

"Joseph Smith Longtree," the man said. "Where am I exactly?"

"You are in a camp on the north fork of the Shoshone River. Less than a mile from where I found you, Marshal."

Longtree coughed dryly, nodding. "How far are we from Bad River?"

"Two miles," the old man told him. "No more, no less."

Longtree sat up and his head spun. "Damn," he said. "I have to get down to Bad River. The men I'm hunting...they might still be there."

"Who are these men?"

Longtree told him.

There were three men, he said. Charles Brickley, Carl Weiss, and Budd Hannion. They ambushed an army wagon in Nebraska that was en route to Fort Kearny, killing all six troopers on board. The wagon had carried army carbines which, it was learned, were sold to Bannock war parties. That was a matter now for the army itself and the Indian Bureau. But the killing of soldiers was a federal offense which made it the business of the U. S. Marshals Office. Longtree had trailed the killers from Dakota Territory to Bad River. And in the foothills of the Absarokas, they had ambushed him. They jumped him, beat him senseless, strung him up.

"But you did not die," Swift Fox reminded him.

"Thanks to you." Longtree was able to sit up now without dizziness.

Swift Fox was studying him. His hair was long and dark, carrying a blueblack sheen foreign to whites. "You are a breed?" he asked.

Longtree smiled thinly. "My mother was a Crow, my father a beaver trapper."

Swift Fox only nodded. "When do you plan on hunting these men?"

Longtree rubbed his neck. "Tomorrow," he said, then laid back down, shutting his eyes.

The wind was blowing when he made it into Bad River.

It wasn't much of a town. A rutted road of dirt and dried mud meandered between rows of peeled clapboard buildings. What signs hung out front had been weathered unreadable by the elements. There was a livery, a blacksmith shop, and a graying boarded-up structure that might have passed for a hotel. There was no law here, no jailhouse. What Longtree had come to do, he would do alone.

Dust and dirt in his face, the wind mourning amongst the buildings, Longtree hitched the horse Swift Fox had loaned him outside the livery barn. The horse--an old gray--wasn't too happy about being left in the wind.

"This won't take long," Longtree promised him.

He broke open the short-barreled shotgun the old Flathead had given him, fed in two shells, and started down the rotting, frost-heaved boardwalk. His army spurs jangled as he walked. Swift Fox had done some checking and found that the men Longtree was looking for often frequented the Corner Saloon in Bad River.

This is where Longtree went now.

He had his neckerchief pulled up over his nose and mouth so he wouldn't be breathing grit. The shotgun was held firmly in his fists, his eyes narrowed. His dark clothes were gray now with dust and wind-blown debris. Outside the saloon, he paused. It was a decaying structure, single-story, its boarding warped and peeled, the doorway askew with an old army blanket tacked to the frame.

Longtree went in with a slow and easy pace, the shotgun ready in his hands. It was dim inside, lit only by sputtering lamps. The floor was uneven and covered in layers of pungent sawdust. The stuffy air stank of cheap liquor, smoke, and body odor. Beaten men lounged at the bar. A few more in booths. An obese, toothless bar hag slicked with sweat and grime grinned at Longtree with yellow gums.

"What'll ya have?" the bartender asked. He was bald and had but one arm, an empty sleeve pinned to his side.

Longtree ignored him, keeping his neckerchief up over his face so the men at the back table wouldn't recognize him.

They were all there.

Brickley, thin and wizened, hat pulled down near his eyes. Weiss, chubby and short, grinning at his partners. Hannion, a muscled giant, a knife scar running down one cheek.

Longtree went to them.

"You want somethin'?" Weiss asked, a single gold tooth in his lower jaw.

"I have a warrant for the arrest of you men," Longtree said. "Murder."

They looked up at him with wide, hateful eyes.

Longtree flashed his badge and pulled down the neckerchief.

"Oh God," Weiss stammered. "God in Heaven...you're dead..." He fell backwards out of his chair as Brickley and Hannion went for their guns. Longtree shot Brickley in the face, his head pulping in a spray of blood and bone. Hannion pulled his gun and took his in the chest, hitting the floor and flopping about, pissing rivers of red.

Longtree broke open the shotgun, emptied the chambers, and fed in two more shells. He stepped over the corpses and towered above Weiss. Weiss was trembling on the floor, his crotch wet where he'd pissed himself, bits of the other two men sticking to him.

"Where's my horse?" Longtree asked him. "My guns?"

Weiss shuttered, unable to talk.

Longtree kicked him in the face, the boot-spur slicing off the end of his nose and dumping the man in the wreck of Hannion. Weiss screamed, left arm sunk up to the elbow in the bloody crater of Hannion's chest. Longtree grabbed him by the hair and pulled him to his feet.

"My things," he said in a deadpan voice. "Now."

Barely able to walk, Weiss led him out of the saloon and through the screaming wind to the livery stable. A lamp burned in there; a grizzled old man oiled a bridle. He saw the blood on Weiss. Saw Longtree's badge and fled.

Weiss pointed to Longtree's horse and saddlebags, his bedroll and weapons lying in the corner. Then he fell to his knees, crying, whimpering, drool running down his chin.

"Don't kill me, Marshal! Oh, God in Heaven, don't kill me!" he rambled in a broken, lisping voice. "Please! They made
me do it! They made me!"

Longtree kicked him in the face again and the man howled in agony.

Sighing, Longtree turned to his things and went through them. Everything was in order, save the warrants and wanted fliers of the men--they were missing. His gun belts and nickel-plated Colts were untouched. His Winchester rifle had been emptied of cartridges. Nothing else had changed.

Behind him, he heard Weiss make a run for it.