Thanks to Cal Gal for betaing.

Hallelujah Harry

Two miles. Two miles from the April Valley stage station. Two long, blessed miles, and he ought to know. Hallelujah Harry had walked it, step by step, keeping a sharp eye out for the tracks of his missing wagon.

Stolen wagon, that was.

At least it hadn't been as hard as it might have been, sorting out the trail of his own rig from among all the other marks in the dust of the road. Thummim, the off horse, had cast a shoe a week or so back, and the new one the farrier had put on to replace it had been of a different design from the rest. This made picking out his own wagon's trail somewhat easier. The fact that it was one of the most recent to travel this way helped — and also the fact that, once he'd passed through April Valley and set out on the road south, he'd found that there hadn't been much traffic in that direction. Precious few folks seemed to be inclined to go down the southern road out of April Valley. And with all the time in the world to let his mind wander hither and yon, Harry wondered why.

That wasn't the only thing he wondered about as he pursued the thief who had taken his wagon. His mind kept coming back to the idea, crazy as it was, that his wagon had been stolen! That he was on the trail of a thief! Preposterous! Why would anyone want to make off with a bright red glory wagon all decked out with the words:

HARRY'S THE NAME
SAVING'S MY GAME
HALLELUJAH HARRY
BEARER OF THE TRUTH

on both sides of it, painted in gold and white letters a foot high? What in Heaven's name could the thief have been thinking of?

He was still embarrassed about the whole business, though. Two miles out from April Valley, Harry had reined up his wagon and hopped out to take advantage of a small stand of trees to, er, answer the call of nature. It was while he was thus occupied that he had heard the horses whinny and peeked out from around the closest tree – and just in time to see some stranger dressed in a mighty familiar outfit of black frock coat and top hat, dressed in other words as if he were some twisted version of Harry himself, some sort of scruffy twin! The stranger had clambered up onto the seat of Harry's wagon, flicked the reins, and been off away down the road before Harry could do a thing about it.

And with nothing else to do and nowhere else to go, Harry had started walking.

At length he had arrived at the April Valley stage station and made some inquiries. More than one person at April Valley had seen the wagon pass through. Of course they had; the wagon was unique. They had all pointed him down south along the road by which the wagon had left April Valley, and that was the road he was taking now.

Still on foot, mind. His money was in the wagon; he only had a couple of dollars on him, and that hadn't been enough to take the stage or rent a horse. He'd shelled out half of his few bucks to buy a canteen which he'd then filled at the town pump, and now onward he trudged, with all the time in the world to think.

But it was madness for anyone to steal that wagon! Bright red with Harry's name all over it? As soon as the description of it got around, anyone with halfway decent eyesight would know the wagon in a heartbeat. The only way to hide it would be to paint it, and painting it would take hours. So why had anyone been crazy enough to take a wagon he couldn't use?

Unless…

Oh, that was a chilling thought! Harry'd been out on the road for plenty of years now, moving from place to place, preaching the Gospel. He'd met plenty of others in the same some of ministry in that time too. He's come across lots of folks who, as soon as they saw a street preacher coming their way, they would put their hand over their wallet and keep it there till the… well, till the danger was past. And there were also, sad to say, far too many street preachers Harry knew that, when he saw them coming, he himself was inclined to protect his wallet from them. He knew that kind. Con-artists, money-grubbers, the type Saint Paul had warned about, saying they looked on Godliness as a means to gain money. The kind the Lord Jesus had called wolves in sheep's clothing!

Was that why someone had stolen his wagon, to use Harry's good name as a means to fleece some poor flock? For there were those kind as well, Harry knew, folks who were as simple as lambs, trusting every man who named himself as a preacher of God to be honest, holy, guileless.

Oh, no. Harry shook his head. That was all he needed! He had long — well, not exactly prided himself, knowing as he did of King Solomon's warning that pride leads to a fall — but Harry had long viewed himself as standing between the trusting sheep and the ravening wolves. A sheepdog, so to speak. And was someone out there dressed up like him, pretending to be him, and up to no good?

He hurried on, following the tracks of his rig. After a bit he spotted a sign announcing that Epitaph, Colorado, was three miles further on.

Harry paused to pull off his hat for a moment and mop his forehead with his handkerchief. Epitaph! What kind of name was that for a town? No wonder so few folks were headed this way!

But there were the tracks of his wagon, going on before him towards Epitaph. And Harry followed the tracks.

…

If it hadn't been for the buildings, Harry would never have guessed he was coming into a town. Where were the people?

Or to be more specific, for as he walked down the middle of the main street, Harry was pretty sure he saw an armed man poking the business end of a shotgun in at the doorway of the mercantile before vanishing inside — where were the women? And the children? Why was there no one in sight that wasn't armed and male?

Harry started to head for the mercantile himself to call out to the fellow with the shotgun and ask him those very questions. But then he thought better of it. What good could come of startling an armed man whose weapon might well have a hair trigger?

And besides. As Harry rounded a bend in the main street, he saw a sight for sore eyes: his glory wagon!

Harry broke out in a grin as he rushed to his rig. "Urim! Thummim! Are you two all right? Did you miss me?" Harry searched his pockets and found some sugar cubes for his team, then gave each horse a thorough going-over and plenty of petting. "We'll be out of here as soon as possible," he promised the pair. Now that he was assured his horses had not been ill-treated on this little excursion, he next climbed onto the driver's seat and checked beneath it. Well, he sighed with relief, here was his stash of money, undisturbed. At least that!

Now he parted the plain tan canvas curtains behind the seat and had a look into the interior the wagon. The sight here brought a scowl to his face. What was the meaning of all this? Fireworks? Fuses? And a barrel full of some foul-smelling liquid? He had no idea what it all was, except that at least it wasn't booze. But, jumping Jehoshaphat, what was going on here? Well, he had his wagon back again, and that was the important part. He took up the reins and started to drive off, then changed his mind.

No, he was going to see the sheriff. Something strange was going on here, and Harry decided he was going to get to the bottom of it. Now he knew that the penalty for horse-thieving could be mighty severe, since depriving a man of his transportation could conceivably end in the robbed man's death — but as Harry hadn't been particularly harmed by the afternoon's loss of his wagon, he figured he would put in a good word for the thief so as to have the man locked up in the jail rather than wind up dangling from the wrong end of a noose. Sitting in jail would give the thief a fine incentive to contemplate his sins at his enforced leisure — and once the man was sufficiently sorrowful, Harry would talk to him, find out what all this was about, and do what he could to steer the sinner towards the Strait and Narrow.

But first Harry needed to find the sheriff. The jail he found quickly enough, but when he looked inside, he saw no one in the building, no one at all.

Strange.

Harry came back out and stood for a moment alongside his wagon, pondering. Oh, there was that man toting the shotgun again. He came out of the mercantile, then went into the barber's shop next door. Harry started to call out to him.

But just then a sound of voices, loud and rapidly getting louder, wafted out from one of the buildings down the street. With a murmur of "Wait here," to Urim and Thummim, Harry headed for the source of the ruckus: the hotel.

Just as he stepped up onto the porch, Harry heard a voice saying, "…the Maccabees and the Romans! You just leave Epitaph long enough to embolden West to come out of hiding. And the minute he does…"

"Then we grab him," said a second voice. Harry's eyebrows rose; he'd heard that voice before! And now that voice was demanding, "Why didn't one of you dummies think of that?"

Harry stepped inside the hotel to find a tableau of four men across the lobby from him at the foot of the stairs. Three of the men were surrounding the fourth, a figure who was all too familiar to Harry, a figure dressed in a black frock coat and top hat. In fact, even as Harry watched, the man swept the hat from his head to lay it over his heart as he said, "Well, they ain't students of history, brother."

"Yeah, you're my kind of man, preacher!" declared the owner of the second voice. He too was a figure Harry recognized: Diamond Dave Desmond. And as he had just come out with a perfect entrance line, Harry pounced on it.

"I don't think so, Mr Desmond," he said. Instantly all four men whirled to stare at Harry as he strode on into the hotel and pointed a finger at his evil twin. "That's him. That's the sinner that stole my wagon just two miles from the April Valley stage station."

With a scowl, Desmond growled out, "Well, who are you?"

In perfect imitation of his imitator, Harry removed his own hat and laid it over his heart. "Hallelujah Harry," he replied, "and that's the mug that stole my wagon just two miles from the April Valley stage station."

One thing about the fake Harry, he had a lot of nerve. Caught flatfooted, he was, but he wouldn't back down. For he stood right there and lied to them all, saying, "Now, that's ridiculous! I've had that wagon for over six years!"

Harry smiled, knowing that was a prevarication, and that he could prove it. "That wagon is two years old," he stated positively, "and if you don't believe me, look at the year plate under the step."

At this point Desmond and the two others turned to glare daggers at the fake Harry, who still wasn't ready to admit the truth. "Well, well," he sputtered, "there… there… there must… There must be some kind of mistake, then, that's all!"

"And you made it, brother!" Desmond snarled. His hand slapped out and knocked the fake Harry's hat off his head.

One of the other two, the one who wasn't wearing a sheriff's badge, piped up with, "Now I know why he didn't want us to look into the church!"

"No," said fake Harry quickly, "it was because, uh, I'd been up there looking myself, that's all."

Desmond snapped toward the sheriff, "Bring him along!" then stormed past the real Harry and on out of the hotel. The two others grabbed the faker, even as he protested loudly, and hauled him out after their boss.

Harry popped his hat onto his head and joined the end of the parade. The plans he'd made earlier to put in a good word for that rascal had evaporated by now; he just wanted to return to his wagon and get out of Epitaph.

But just as Harry climbed to the seat, Diamond Dave Desmond stopped dead in his tracks and hollered, "Wait, wait, wait!" He whirled and pointed his unlit cigar at the real Harry. "You there, preacher! You called me Mr Desmond. Do you know me?"

"I know of you, yes," said Harry. What he mostly knew about the man were the rumors he'd picked up while visiting criminals in the San Francisco jails, mainly to the effect that it was a woeful thing to owe money or favors to Diamond Dave Desmond; most of the men in the jail swore up and down that they never would have engaged in whatever activity had landed them behind bars if it hadn't been that Desmond had ordered them to do it.

Desmond shook his head. "Too bad for you, preacher!" He snapped his fingers and a couple of men appeared from the surrounding buildings. "Take him and toss him into the jail till we're done with West and this joker here," he ordered. "We'll have to deal with him too once that's out of the way. He can identify us."

Up until that point Harry hadn't had a good idea of what was going on here in Epitaph, but hearing Diamond Dave Desmond say he would be dealing with him later because he could identify that ruiner of lives gave the preacher a pretty good inkling of what was in store for him, at least. Instantly he grabbed the reins of his horses and hollered, "Get up!"

The next moment he and the wagon were barreling down the street. Harry hadn't been in Epitaph long enough to get a mental map of the town in his head. He just drove.

And the next moment afterwards, when a bullet went whizzing past his head, he turned the rig into a reckless right-hand turn up the nearest crossing street. This proved to be little more than an alley; at the end of it he turned right again onto what seemed, strangely enough, to be a second main street through town. He could see the church building standing all by itself off to his right, a gunsmith's shop opposite the church, and a hotel that wasn't the one where the confrontation had just taken place on down the street beyond the church.

But then the two men Desmond had sent after him, one of them bearing a shotgun, the other a rifle, came racing out from the far side of the church and took aim at Harry. "You hold it right there!" the man with the rifle ordered, "or he'll shoot your horses…" A loud ka-click as he cocked the rifle's hammer. "…and I'll shoot you."

For a split second Harry hesitated, wondering if he could just bowl the pair over and hope to escape unscathed. The sight of two more armed men charging out of buildings on this stretch of street disabused him of that notion. Harry hauled back on the reins and his wagon came to a halt right in front of the gunsmith's shop directly across from the church.

The four men surrounded him and dragged him down from the wagon. "Ok, preacher, off you go to the jail, just like Mr Desmond said," announced the man with the rifle. They trooped him down along the side of the church and back to the spot where he'd last seen their boss.

"You got him, huh?" said Desmond. "Good! You two keep a close eye on him, and I'll be back for him later. The rest of you, c'mon! We're going to have it out once and for all with West." And he with his four minions led the captive fake Harry round the corner of the church, heading around front.

This wasn't good, thought the real Harry. He was heartily wishing he'd just left with his wagon as soon as he'd found it and not stuck his nose into whatever business was going on around here. He suspected that, by accusing the fake Harry in front of Diamond Dave Desmond, he'd stuck both the fake Harry's neck and his own into a pair of nooses, and he didn't even know what was going on! One thing he was sure of, though, and that was that if these two gunmen ever shoved him into that jail cell and shut the door on him, his goose was cooked for sure.

He had to stall them, to prevent them from locking him up. But how? He was an itinerant preacher; the only thing he had was…

"You're tough men, aren't you?" said Harry. "And your boss there is the law in this town, a law unto himself, is that right?"

"Shut up, preacher," said the one, but the other said proudly, "Yep, that's right. Here in Epitaph, we're the ones who wear the badges!"

"And you're about to commit murder. More murders than one is my guess."

"That's why Mr Desmond said to lock you up, preacher," the man with the rifle said darkly. "You know too much."

"I know more than that. I know that whether man's justice ever catches up with you or not, you'll never escape from God's justice. You may never swing for the killings you're about to do, sanctioned by Mr Diamond Dave Desmond. You may live to be a ripe old age and die peacefully in your beds surrounded by your loving wives and families. But believe me, men, once you close your eyes upon this earth and breathe your last, you'll wake up to unending torments. The lake of fire, like the Good Book says, burning forevermore, prepared for the devil and his angels, but it'll be your eternal home too. Where the fire is never quenched and the worm never dies. Is that what you want waiting for you: an eternity in Hell?"

"Shut up, preacher!" snarled the one with the rifle.

The other, though, was listening, eyes wide and face pale. "My old granny used to talk like that, telling me if I didn't turn from being such a wicked boy, I'd fry in Hell!"

Harry shook his head solemnly. "And I can just imagine what your dear sainted granny would say right now if she could see what you're up to." They had reached the door of the sheriff's office, and Harry could see that the hotel he'd entered earlier was a couple of doors farther down the street. This was it; he had to make sure the gunmen didn't take him into the jail. Pointing a finger at the heavens, he proclaimed in full street-revival thunder, "No doubt she'd urge you, son, nay, implore you with tears coursing down her cheeks to repent! Repent! Before it's too late, before your soul is like a rotting corpse within you and your heart is as hard as a stone, hard like flint! Before the weight of your sins drags you down to the devil's pit, there to endure torments unimaginable forever and ever. Repent, son! Repent and call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that you may be saved from that terrible fate! The thief on the cross repented, and Jesus promised him paradise. And as the Bible tells us…"

"Shut up!" growled the man with the rifle. "Now get on inside that jail before I…"

"No, you shut up!" said the man with the shotgun heatedly. "I wanna hear the preacher man! He talks just like my old granny, and I'm thinking if I'd listened to her more when I was little, I wouldn't be in the fix I'm in now!"

"The fix you're in! What fix? We own this town. We're in high cotton! What kind of fix do you think you're in?"

"You heard him! I don't wanna die and go to a devil's Hell and burn for all eternity!"

"You lummox! Preachers always talk like that. They scare folks with talk of Hell so they'll live good little boring lives and give money to the church. This preacher ain't…" The man with the rifle broke off and stared in all directions. "Wait a minute, this preacher ain't here! Where'd he go?"

Hallelujah Harry had slipped quietly around a corner once the argument was in full swing and was now holding onto his hat as he ran for his life. He came up on the back of a blacksmith's shop and ducked inside, barring the door behind him. Throwing a prayer of apology heavenward, for he did wonder if he had just misused the Gospel to save his life – ah, but the incident in the Book of Acts when Saint Paul had cried out that he was a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee, thus dividing the assembly that had gathered to judge him, popped into his mind. And if it was good enough for Paul, Harry thought.

He listened at the backdoor he'd just entered by, hearing the gunmen now arguing about their missing prisoner. The man with the rifle sent the other off to search the hotel while he prowled down this very back alley. And so Harry hurried to the front of the smithy, hoping to get out of here and make his way to his wagon again without being spotted.

He looked out the front door, seeing no one in sight. Oh, but there was the back of the church right in front of him! "I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the house of the Lord," Harry quoted, and bolted across the street and in through the church's back door.

It was quiet in here. He barred this door as well, then slipped through an inside door into the small vestibule of the church to peek out the curtains of the front windows. To his shock, Harry saw that Desmond and his group of minions were standing right in front of Harry's wagon! The captive fake Harry was just taking a puff from the cigar in his mouth as Desmond cried out, "Five! Four!"

A countdown? What was that all about?

Fake Harry lifted his left hand toward his cigar, then abruptly switched off and used his right hand instead. As Desmond continued on with "Three! Two!" fake Harry's hand carried the cigar down to his side, then swung backwards a bit. To the real Harry it looked like the man was reaching behind the wagon wheel he was standing by in order to touch something at the rear of the glory wagon.

And then, before Desmond could call out the final number of the countdown, all Hell broke loose. Explosions burst forth from the roof of Harry's wagon along with copious clouds of smoke. Above Harry's head came a splintering crash as something in the bell tower burst to pieces. Harry hit the floor, and by the time he scrambled back up and looked through the curtains again, the fake Harry along with someone the real version never got a good look at were driving away as fast as the horses could go with red smoke pouring from the back of the wagon. Desmond's men raced into the street firing after the fugitives, but from the way their boss ran out there as well, then flung his pocket watch down on the ground in disgust, it was obvious the fake Harry had gotten away, wagon and all.

It was too bad, Harry thought, that the same couldn't be said for himself. Surely before long Desmond would remember his other captive, learn from the two men he'd put in charge of that captive how he had managed to escape, and start a manhunt for the real Hallelujah Harry! "Oh, Lord," the preacher whispered urgently, "please, be merciful and save your servant!"

From out in the street, Harry heard Desmond growl, "All right, we haven't much time. Once those two feds get Plank to the nearest telegraph office, they'll be sending out troops to pick us up. Move! Everybody out of town right now. We're heading for Mexico!"

"What about that other fellow, Boss? The other preacher you said you'd deal with later?"

Desmond rounded on the man in a fury, waving his arm after the departed wagon. "And what difference does he make to us now, Monk? The feds will identify us! Forget the preacher and let's go!"

Hallelujah Harry, with a fervent though silent exclamation of "Hallelujah!" dropped back down out of sight from the church window and waited until all sounds of activity outside at length died away. Indeed, he waited another half hour afterwards for good measure before he emerged into the instant ghost town. His wagon, of course, was long gone, nor had any other forms of transportation been left behind. Not that he was particularly worried about that; he'd walked from April Valley to Epitaph, and he could walk back. He just wasn't sure what he'd do from there, having even less money now than before he'd…

Oh. Having less money now than before he'd bought that canteen. Yes, his canteen for carrying with him precious water through the wilderness – the canteen he'd left in the wagon that was no longer here.

Well. There was nothing to do about that but head over to the Epitaph town mercantile where he availed himself of a new canteen, leaving the rest of his money on the counter along with a note detailing what he had bought. Yes, he was sure the proprietor of the mercantile would never come back to ring up the sale, but Harry just couldn't reconcile it within himself to steal the canteen, not even from thieves and murders.

And so he set out for April Valley again, on foot, knowing he would be footsore, hungry, and plumb tuckered out when he would arrive there, and dead broke to boot with no money for supper or lodging. But for the moment, his thoughts were turned in a different direction:

The man who had impersonated him and stolen his wagon was a fed? What was that all about? And having plenty of time to think about the conundrum, he ruminated on the curious matter most of the way to April Valley.

…

It was a couple of months later. Hallelujah Harry was just driving into San Francisco in his trusty wagon pulled as usual by Urim and Thummim. He'd had a wonderful pleasant surprise when he had at last reached April Valley at the end of that long strange day to find his wagon and horses waiting for him. And now as he arrived at the boarding house when he generally stayed in the city by the bay, his landlady came out onto the porch to greet him.

"Hello, Mrs Fletcher!" he returned the greeting warmly. "The Lord's blessings on you and yours. How have you been?"

"Keeping fine, thank you, parson, keeping fine. You've got some mail here." She took out a letter and passed it to him.

Oh? Harry examined the envelope, which had nothing upon it but his own name, then slit it open with his pocket knife and read:

Dear Harry,

Trusting you found your rig and horses in good order at April Valley, and thank you for the loan of them. Or perhaps I should call it, the rental of them. If you look at the year plate under the step – yes, that year plate, the one that got me into such trouble! – you'll find what else I left behind for you when I returned your wagon. Take it with my compliments in consideration of my, shall we say, unauthorized borrowing. One of these days perhaps I'll come hear you preach and maybe even explain why I dragged you into a criminal investigation with which you had nothing to do. For now, suffice it to say I had need of a glory wagon. (And I hope I didn't do too much damage to your good name.)

All the best,

AG

Harry frowned at the letter. AG? Who was this AG? Was that the federal agent who had stolen – rented indeed, let alone the bit about unauthorized borrowing! – stolen the wagon from him that strange day? Turning to Mrs Fletcher, he quizzed her about the letter and where it had come from, since it didn't even bear a stamp on the envelope, but she only shrugged and said she'd found it in the mail slot with the rest of the letters nearly two months past, and she'd put it by to give him whenever he next turned up, that being today.

Mystified, Harry went back out to the wagon to have a look at the year plate under the step.

Well, that was odd. There seemed to be yet another envelope, this one somewhat the worse for wear. Harry found a screwdriver and took loose one end of the plate to get at it, and soon the well-scuffed envelope was in his hand. He slit this one open with the screwdriver.

And inside he found a one-hundred dollar bill. He gaped at it, then held it up to the light. It certainly seemed genuine!

A quick trip to a bank confirmed it. One-hundred dollars from the mysterious AG, the federal agent who had engaged in a bit of unauthorized borrowing in order to secure the use of Harry's glory wagon. Of all things!

"Well," Harry murmured to himself, "that wasn't the proper way to do things at all… But I'm sure there's quite a story behind all of it, and I hope that fellow does in fact show up some day and fill me in on the details. In the meantime, though…" Deciding not to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth, Harry said, "Well, hallelujah, Lord! This is a fine contribution toward the ministry, and it'll go a long way towards supplying the Hopahaki tribe with plenty of good food and warm blankets to see them through this coming winter!"

Harry thought a bit more, then added, "Now, as for this AG fellow, Lord, I ask Your richest blessing upon him. But I'd also like to put in a request of You, Lord – if it's not asking amiss, that is – that You'd just fetch him a good sound thump upside the head if Mr AG ever goes to 'borrow' anything from anyone ever again without asking their permission first!"

FIN