He is also blunt: “Shoot or wade,” Culver says.
CHAPTER ONE
Death Pays for an Insult
Grant Culver was walking along, minding his own business and thinking of Nancy Atwood, when the man bumped into him and sent him staggering off the sidewalk into mud that was Gun Gulch’s main street.
Culver lit flat on his back. His hat flew off and was ground beneath the wheels of a passing wagon. His carpetbag slipped out of his hand and splashed into a waterhole a good six feet away. On the porch of the Crystal Bar a crowd of loafers laughed uproariously, bent over, slapping one another on the back.
Culver sat up, the cold ooze seeping through his clothing, and eyed the laughing crowd. Sort of an initiation, he figured. A joke they played on tenderfeet.
He rose to his feet and singled out the man who had pushed him, a bear of a man who was roaring with laughter.
Culver waded to the boardwalk, mud and water dripping from his clothes. He gained the walk and stood wiping his hands on the front of his coat. The laughter quieted and the man who had bumped him turned around and faced him. Culver studied him, saw the sneer on his face.
“I presume,” Culver said, “that it was an accident.”
The man took his time in answering, his little pig-eyes small and red and watchful.
“Hell, no,” he said. “I done it on purpose.”
Deliberately, Culver wiped the back of his right hand against his coat and as the hand traveled down the fabric it became a fist, a fist that struck with savage, blistering speed.
It came so fast the man didn’t even duck. It smacked against his chin with a hollow, thudding sound to lift him from his feet and slam him back. He landed in the mud with a splash that sent yellow water geysering high into the air.
Culver snapped a quick look over his shoulder at the jaspers on the porch, but they had not moved. They stood like frozen men, waiting for the earth to open underneath their feet.
Out in the street Culver’s antagonist had lumbered upright, was heaving himself back onto the boardwalk. He stood there, shaking his hands to rid them of the clinging mud and on the porch back of Culver the silence was deep.
“You win, mister,” Culver told the muddy man. “You made a bigger splash than I did.”
The man lumbered forward a step or two, pig-eyes glaring from above the bushy beard. Then his arm was moving, coming up and crooking, pistoning down for the gun butt at his side.
Culver’s fingers snapped around his six-gun’s grip and spun it free of leather. His wrist jerked to the impact of the recoil.
Out on the sidewalk the bear-like man straightened out of his gunning crouch, straightened until it seemed that he was standing on his tiptoes, while a tiny stream of red came out of his forehead.
He tottered, the gun dropped from his fingers, then he fell, like a tree would fall, stiff and straight. His head and shoulders splashed into the mud, but his boots stayed on the sidewalk.
Culver turned to face the porch. Slowly he lifted his six and blew across the muzzle to clear away the smoke.
“Perhaps,” he suggested softly, “one of you gentlemen wouldn’t mind stepping out into the street to get my carpetbag.”
They stood still and silent, watching him with steady cold eyes, but he noticed that their hands were very careful not to move toward their belts.
Culver sighed. “I should hate to insist,” he told them.
One of them moved out of the crowd and started down the stairs, hobbling on the wooden peg that served him for a right leg. The peg tapped loudly in the silence as the man inched slowly down the steps.
“Wait a second,” Culver said sharply. “You aren’t the one to do it. You didn’t laugh half loud enough when I was lying out there.”
He singled out a man with his six-gun barrel. “Now, that gent there,” he told the crowd, “was fair beside himself. I never saw a man get so much entertainment out of such a simple thing. …”
“If you think I’m going out to get your bag,” the man roared at him, “you’re loco.”
Culver shrugged one shoulder. “I suppose you have a gun,” he said.
He saw the man’s face go white and drawn.
He blustered. “If you think. …”
“Shoot or wade,” Culver told him, almost indifferently.
Another man spoke quietly, sharply. “For God’s sake, Perkins, go and get it. You wouldn’t have a chance.”
Perkins looked around, searching the faces that ringed him in.
His shoulders drooped. “All right,” he said.
He came slowly down the steps, crossed the sidewalk, stepped gingerly out into the mud. The mud was to his knees when he reached the bag, tugged it out of the grip of the clinging gumbo and brought it back. Carefully he set it on the sidewalk, climbed the stairs again.
Culver searched the faces on the porch.
“Satisfied?” he asked.
One or two heads nodded.
“Just want to be sure no one feels he’s been slighted,” Culver told them.
No one seemed to be. He holstered the six-gun, picked up the carpetbag.
“One thing you fellows have to remember,” he told them. “It’s damn bad manners to push strangers into mud-holes.”
He turned and headed down the sidewalk, but behind him came a tapping and a hailing voice. “Just a minute, mister.”
He swung around and saw the peg-legged gent hurrying after him. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
Peg-leg fished a notebook from his pocket, flipped the pages, took a pencil stub from behind his ear and wet it on his tongue.
“I wonder if I could have your name,” he said.
Culver started at the question. “Why, I suppose you can. Culver. Grant Culver.”
The man wrote with cramped and laboring fingers.
“From where?” he asked.
“From the Mississippi,” Culver told him. “Sometimes the Missouri.”
“The jasper you smoked out,” said Peg-leg, “was Stover. He had a big time pushing people in the mud. Thought it was a joke.”
He closed the notebook and put it in his pocket, stuck the pencil stub behind his ear. “Thank you very much,” he said and started to turn away.
“Say, wait a second,” Culver told him. “What’s all this about?”
“Vital statistics,” Peg-leg said.
“You mean you get the names of everyone who comes to town.”
“Most of them,” Peg-leg said. “Once in a while I miss a few.”
“Have you got a Nancy and Robert Atwood? They should have come in yesterday.”
Peg-leg got out his notebook, thumbed it through. “Yep, here they are. Got in yesterday. Staying at the Antlers Hotel just down the street. Gal’s a looker. Brother’s an engineer and damn poor poker player.”
He snapped the book shut, put it in his pocket. “That will be a buck,” he said.
“A what?”
“A buck. A dollar. A cartwheel. For information. I don’t give out information free of charge.”
Culver gasped. “Oh, I see,” he said. He took a dollar from his pocket, handed it to the man. He took it, touched his ragged hat by way of thanks.
“Anytime you want to know something just come to me,” he said. “If I don’t know, I’ll find out.”
“I wonder—” Culver began.
“Yes. What is it? Want to know something else?” Peg-leg’s hand was dipping in his pocket for the book.