Winding Stair (9781101559239) by Douglas C. Jones

kicked up the fire again and the kitchen was warm and smelling of food. It was hard to reconcile that aura with all we had found in this place. He went into the root cellar and brought up a hatful of potatoes. Without bothering to brush the dust off, he put them in the oven.
    Some of the men were still in the barn and others squatted along the walls under the porch roofs, smoking. It had grown dark, and the tips of their cigarettes made hot little points of red light. The yard was a muddy pool, the lamps we had lighted inside making shining reflections across it. I wandered through the house, tired, leg-sore, and hungry, all of that forgotten when the excitement was at high pitch.
    Back in the kitchen, I found Joe Mountain carefully placing a number of bottles in Schiller’s saddlebags. He looked at me and grinned.
    â€œFound these in the cellar hid under the potatoes,” he said. “Old Thrasher made his own whiskey, I reckon.”
    â€œWhat are you doing with it?”
    â€œWe confiscate whiskey,” he said, and laughed. “You can sell this kind of whiskey in Fort Smith for maybe fifty cents a bottle.”
    â€œSell it?”
    â€œSure, Eben Pay. Sell it. Nobody here gonna need it. We confiscate lots of whiskey in The Nations and sell it in Fort Smith. A little extra money don’t never hurt nobody.”
    â€œDoes Marshal Schiller know you’re doing that?”
    Joe Mountain laughed again. The tattooed dots along his cheek were deep blue in the lamplight. “Hell, whose saddlebags you think these are?”
    There in the kitchen with Joe Mountain, I sat and tried to let it all leave my mind. This farm, suddenly depopulated by some savage bunch of drunks, a good farm probably going back to weeds now like so many of those deserted fields we’d passed in the woods crossing the mountains. I thought about the people moved here by force, into a land new and hard, already claimed by someone else. And I thought of how the vices of all men, no matter what color, seem to multiply as old social orders break down and new ones try to establish themselves.
    â€œHow could they murder three men just for a horse?” I said, and it startled me that I’d said it aloud. Joe Mountain looked at me with that long-toothed grin that was no grin at all.
    â€œWe had one a spell back, up in the Cherokee Nation,” he said. “Traveler just passing through killed a man and his little son with a sledgehammer for a pair of button shoes.”
    I started to protest the senseless brutality, and the seemingly blind acceptance of such a way of life by everyone concerned. But at that moment someone ran from the other end of the house into the breezeway and along it to the front porch, where George Moon and Schiller were talking.
    â€œCap’n!” the man shouted. “You better come. There’s somebody in the bedroom attic. We just heard ’em.”
    â€œDamn,” I heard George Moon exclaim. “I should have thought of an attic.”

Three
    W ith the first cry that someone was hiding in the house, men came with weapons up and cocked, but Schiller pushed among them, knocking down the gun muzzles. He went up onto a chiffonier like a monkey, awkward but effective, his pale eyes shining behind the steel-rimmed glasses as he found the attic hatch and pushed it aside. Charley Oskogee went up with him, his pistol ready. But there was no need for it. In a moment the two of them were pulling a girl from her hiding place. She was slack-lipped and wide-eyed, limp with shock, her long blond hair hanging over her face. They handed her down, a slender form that seemed childlike. But as we carried her to the walnut four-poster bed, her cotton dress plastered to her body with sweat, it was obvious that she was no child but a young woman full-blooming.
    Someone spread a heavy comforter over her, and Charley Oskogee bent close, pushing her hair back from her face. He spoke softly to her,