We paused at the door, clustered there, not knowing what to expect, but Brother Elisha walked up and bowed his head, placing the palm of his right hand on Colvin's brow, and then he prayed. Never did I know a man who could make a prayer fill a room with sound like Brother Elisha, but there at the last he took Ed by the shoulders and he pulled him into a sitting position and he said, “Edward Colvin, your work upon this earth remains unfinished. For the Glory of the Lordâ¦
Rise
!”
And I'll be forever damned if Ed Colvin didn't take a long gasping breath and sit right up on that table. He looked mighty confused and Brother Elisha whispered in his ear for a moment and then with a murmur of thanks Ed Colvin got up and walked right out of the place.
We stood there like we'd been petrified, and I don't know what we'd been expecting, but it wasn't this. Brother Elisha said, “The Lord moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform.” And then he left us.
Brace looked at me and I looked at Ralston and when I started to speak my mouth was dry. And just then we heard the sound of a hammer.
When I went outside people were filing into the street and they were looking up at that barn, staring at Ed Colvin, working away as if nothing had happened. When I passed Damon, standing in the bank door, his eyes were wide open and his face white. I spoke to him but he never even heard me or saw me. He was just standing there staring at Colvin.
By nightfall everybody in town was whispering about it, and when Sunday morning came they flocked to hear him preach, their faces shining, their eyes bright as though with fever.
When the reverend stepped into the pulpit, Brennen was the only one there besides me.
Reverend Sanderson looked stricken, and that morning he talked in a low voice, speaking quietly and sincerely but lacking his usual force. “Perhaps,” he said as we left, “perhaps it is we who are wrong. The Lord gives the power of miracles to but few.”
“There are many kinds of miracles,” Brennen replied, “and one miracle is to find a sane, solid man in a town that's running after a red wagon.”
As the three of us walked up the street together we heard the great rolling voice of Brother Elisha: “And I say unto you that the gift of life to Brother Colvin was but a sign, for on the morning of the coming Sabbath we shall go hence to the last resting place of your loved ones, and there I shall cause them all to be raised, and they shall live again, and take their places among you as of old!”
You could have dropped a feather. We stood on the street in back of his congregation and we heard what he said, but we didn't believe it, we couldn't believe it.
He was going to bring back the dead.
Brother Elisha, who had brought Ed Colvin back to life, was now going to empty the cemetery, returning to life all those who had passed onâ¦and some who had been helped.
“The Great Day has come!” He lifted his long arms and spread them wide, and his sonorous voice rolled against the mountains. “And men shall live again for the Glory of All Highest! Your wives, your mothers, your brothers and fathers, they shall walk beside you again!”
And then he led them into the singing of a hymn and the three of us walked away.
That was the quietest Sunday Red Horse ever knew. Not a whisper, all day long. Folks were scared, they were happy, they were inspired. The townsfolk walked as if under a spell.
Strangely, it was Ed Colvin who said it. Colvin, the man who had gone to the great beyond and returnedâ¦although he claimed he had no memory of anything after his fall.
Brace was talking about the joy of seeing his wife again, and Ed said quietly, “You'll also be seeing your mother-in-law.”
Brace's mouth opened and closed twice before he could say anything at all, and then he didn't want to talk. He stood there like somebody had exploded a charge of powder under his nose, and then he turned sharply around and walked off.
“I've got more reason than any of you to be thankful,” Ed said, his eyes downcast. “But I'm just not sure this is all for the best.”
We all glanced at each other. “Think about it.” Ed got up, looking kind of embarrassed. “What about you, Ralston? You'll have to go back to work. Do you think your uncle will stand for you loafing and spending the money he worked so hard to get?”
“That's right,” I agreed, “you'll have to give it all back.”
Ralston got mad. He started to shout that he wouldn't do any such thing, and anyway, if his uncle came back now he would be a changed man, he wouldn't care for money any longer, heâ
“You don't believe that,” Brennen said. “You know darned well that uncle of yours was the meanest skin-flint in this part of the country. Nothing would change him.”
Ralston went away from there. Seemed to me he wanted to do some thinking.
When I turned to leave, Brennen said, “Where are you going?”
“Well,” I said, “seems to me I'd better oil up my six-shooters. There's three men in that Boot Hill that I put there. Looks like I'll have it to do over.”
He laughed. “You aren't falling for this, are you?”
“Colvin sounds mighty lively to me,” I said, “and come Sunday morning Brother Elisha has got to put up or shut up.”
“You don't believe that their time in the hereafter will have changed those men you killed.”
“Brennen,” I said, “if I know the Hame brothers, they'll come out of their graves like they went into them. They'll come a-shootin'.”
There had been no stage for several days as the trail had been washed out by a flash flood, and the town was quiet and it was scared. Completely cut off from the outside, all folks could do was wait and get more and more frightened as the Great Day approached. At first everybody had been filled with happiness at the thought of the dead coming back, and then suddenly, like Brace and Ralston, everybody was taking another thought.
There was the Widow McCann who had buried three husbands out there, all of them fighters and all of them mean. There were a dozen others with reason to give the matter some thought, and I knew at least two who were packed and waiting for the first stage out of town.
Brace dropped in at the saloon for his first drink since Brother Elisha started to preach. He hadn't shaved and he looked mighty mean. “Why'd he pick on this town?” he burst out. “When folks are dead they should be left alone. Nobody has a right to interfere with nature thataway.”
Brennen mopped his bar, saying nothing at all.
Ed Colvin dropped around. “Wish that stage would start running. I want to leave town. Folks treat me like I was some kind of freak.”
“Stick around,” Brennen said. “Come Sunday the town will be filled with folks like you. A good carpenter will be able to stay busy, so busy he won't care what folks say about him. Take Streeter there. He'll need a new house now that his brother will be wanting his house back.”
Streeter slammed his glass on the bar. “All right, damn it!” he shouted angrily, “I'll build my own house!”
Ralston motioned to me and we walked outside. Brace was there, and Streeter joined us. “Look,” Ralston whispered, “Brace and me, we've talked it over. Maybe if we were to talk to Brother Elishaâ¦maybe he'd call the whole thing off.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
His eyes grew mean. “You want to try those Hame boys again? Seems to me you came out mighty lucky the last time. How do you know you'll be so lucky again? Those boys were pure-dee poison.”
That was gospel truth, but I stood there chewing my cigar a minute and then said, “No chance. He wouldn't listen to us.”
Ed Colvin had come up. “A man doing good works,” he said, “might be able to use a bit of money. Although I suppose it would take quite a lot.”
Brace stood a little straighter but when he turned to Colvin, the carpenter was hurrying off down the street. When I turned around there was Brennen leaning on the doorjamb, and he was smiling.
Friday night when I was making my rounds I saw somebody slipping up the back stairs of the hotel, and for a moment his face was in the light from a window. It was Brace.
Later, I saw Ralston hurrying home from the direction of the hotel, and you'd be surprised at some of the folks I spotted slipping up those back stairs to commune with Brother Elisha. Even Streeter, and even Damon.
Watching Damon come down those back stairs I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Brennen standing there in the dark. “Seems a lot of folks are starting to think this resurrection of the dead isn't an unmixed blessing.”
“You know something?” I said thoughtfully. “Nobody has been atop that hill since Brother Elisha started his walks. I think I'll just meander up there and have a look around.”
“You've surprised me,” Brennen said. “I wouldn't have expected you to be a churchgoing man. You're accustomed to sinful ways.”
“Why, now,” I said, “when I come into a town to live, I go to church. If the preacher is a man who shouts against things, I never go back. I like a man who's for something.
“Like you know, I've been marshal here and there, but never had much trouble with folks. I leave their politics and religion be. Folks can think the way they want, act the way they please, even to acting the fool. All I ask is they don't make too much noise and don't interfere with other people.
“They call me a peace officer, and I try to keep the peace. If a growed-up man gets himself into a game with a crooked gambler, I don't bother themâ¦if he hasn't learned up to then, he may learn, and if he doesn't learn, nothing I tell him will do him any good.”
“You think Colvin was really dead?”
“Doc said so.”
“Suppose he was hypnotized? Suppose he wasn't really dead at all?”
After Brennen went to bed I saddled up and rode out of town. Circling around the mountain I rode up to where Brother Elisha used to go to pray. Brennen had left me with a thought, and Doc had been drinking a better brand of whiskey lately.
Brace had drawn money from the bank, and so had Ralston, and old Mrs. Greene had been digging out in her hen coop, and knowing about those tin cans she buried there after her husband died kind of sudden, I had an idea what she was digging up.
I made tracks. I had some communicatin' to do and not many hours to do it in.
I spent most of those hours in the saddle. Returning to Red Horse the way I did brought me to a place where the trail forked, and one way led over behind that mountain with the burnt-off slope. When I had my horse out of sight I drew up and waited.
It was just growing gray when a rider came down the mountain trail and stopped at the forks. It was Ed Colvin.
We hadn't anything to talk about right at the moment so I just kept out of sight in the brush and then followed. He seemed like he was going to meet somebody and I had a suspicion it was Brother Elisha. And it was.
“You got it?” Ed Colvin asked.
“Of course. I told you we could fool these yokels. Now let'sâ”
When I stepped out of the brush I was holding a shotgun. I said, “The way of the transgressor is hard. Give me those saddlebags, Delbert.”
Brother Elisha stared at me. “I fear there is some mistake,” he said with dignity. “I am Brother Elisha.”
“I found those cans and sacks up top of the hill. The ones where you kept your grub and the grass seed you scattered.” I stepped in closer.
“You are Delbert Johnson,” I added, “and the wires over at Russian Junction say you used to deal a crooked game of faro in Mobeetie. Now give me the saddlebags.”
T
HE REVEREND HAS a new church now, and a five-room frame parsonage to replace his tiny cabin. The dead of Red Horse sleep peacefully and there is a new iron fence around the cemetery to keep them securely inside. Brennen still keeps his saloon, but he also passes the collection plate of a Sunday, and the results are far better than they used to be.
There was a lot of curiosity as to where the reverend came by the money to do the building, and the good works that followed. Privately, the reverend told Brennen and me about a pair of saddlebags he found inside the parsonage door that Sunday morning. But when anyone else asked him he had an answer ready.
“The ravens have provided,” he would say, smiling gently, “as they did for Elijah.”
Nobody asked any more questions.
DESPERATE MEN
T
HEY WERE FOUR desperate men, made hard by life, cruel by nature, and driven to desperation by imprisonment. Yet the walls of Yuma Prison were strong and the rifle skill of the guards unquestioned, so the prison held many desperate men besides these four. And when prison walls and rifles failed, there was the desert, and the desert never failed.
Fate, however, delivered these four a chance to test the desert. In the early dawn the land had rolled and tumbled like an ocean storm. The rocky promontory over the river had shifted and cracked in an earthquake that drove fear into the hearts of the toughest and most wicked men in Arizona. For a minute or two the ground had groaned and roared, dust rained down from cracks in the roofs of the cells, and in one place the perimeter wall had broken and slid off, down the hillside. It was as if God or the Devil had shown them a way.
Two nights later, Otteson leaned his shaven head closer to the bars. “If you're yellow, say so! I say we can make it! If Isager says we can make it through the desert, I say we go!”
“We'll need money for the boatmen.” Rodelo's voice was low. “Without money we will die down there on the shores of the gulf.”
All were silent, three awaiting a word from the fourth. Rydberg knew where the army payroll was buried. The government did not know, the guards did not know, only Rydberg. And Otteson, Isager, and Rodelo knew he knew.
He was a thin, scrawny man with a buzzard's neck and a buzzard's beak for a nose. His bright, predatory eyes indicated his hesitation now. “Howâ¦how much would it take?” he asked.