“Uh-huh, tangled with a passel of them north of here,” I said, sampling the ale. It was cold and good.
The big puncher guffawed. “Yeah, sure you did. Why, you ain’t old enough to have left your momma’s teat. You didn’t tangle with no Apaches. A passel o’ them my ass.”
Now a couple of things displeased me about this man. The first was that he’d called me a liar, the second that he sported a fine, sweeping dragoon mustache that put to shame the fuzzy growth on my top lip.
But I was in no mood for a fight, so I let it go. “Believe what you want,” I said, shrugging. “Makes no never mind to me.”
I turned back to the bar and said to Doan: “Beer is real good, Mr. Doan.”
I felt a rough hand on my shoulder that half-turned me round and the huge puncher stuck his face into mine, whiskey heavy on his breath. “Doan,” he said, “bring a bottle. I’m gonna teach this whippersnapper how to drink like a man.”
“Let it be, Burt,” Doan said. “This boy means you no harm.”
The man called Burt grinned, his eyes bright and cruel. “Aw, Doan, I won’t hurt him too bad. All I’m gonna do is pour some of your rotten whiskey down his throat.”
I sized this man up as a mean drunk and a remorseless bully. He was huge, six inches taller than me and maybe sixty pounds heavier, the kind smaller men are all too willing to step around.
But now I was getting good and mad and maybe he saw something in my eyes because he took a single step back and his grin slipped a little.
“Mister, I don’t want your whiskey,” I said. “I’m wet and tired and I’m not here to borrow trouble, so let me be.” I moved my slicker again, clearing my gun. “You’ve been duly notified. Let me be.”
At heart this man was a coward used to knocking around men who were weaker and scared of him. But I wasn’t afraid, and he knew it, because Burt dug deep, found no reserve of courage and retreated into bluster.
“When I say you drink with me, you’ll drink with me,” he yelled, turning to his grinning compadres at the table, seeking their support. The man knew he had gone way too far to back down, and though I’d given him an out, his pride wouldn’t let him take it. He swung back to the bar. “Damn you, Doan, I told you to bring a bottle.”
“Mister,” I said again, “I don’t want your whiskey. I’m not partial to it.”
Burt jerked the bottle from Doan’s hand, pulled the cork and held the whiskey high. “Open your trap,” he said. “You’re either gonna drink like a man or be carried out of here with two broken legs.”
Me, I’d had enough. I was tired and wet and as far as I was concerned this hoedown was over.
Two things happened very fast. First, Burt grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me toward him, the splashing bottle poised so he could ram it into my mouth. Second, I palmed my Colt and slammed the barrel hard against the side of his head.
For a moment the man just stood there, looking at me with glazed eyes that rolled like dice in his head. Then he collapsed to the floor with a crash that shook the building, as though an anvil had just dropped on his head.
I swung the Colt, covering the three punchers at the table, but not a one of them even twitched an eyelid. Three pairs of eyes regarded me in stunned horror, like I’d just scared them into salvation and Sunday school.
“Yee-hah!” The old man by the stove sprang to his feet, spry as you please, and threw his arms into the air. “Man, oh, man,” he yelled, “I never seen nobody draw a Colt that fast. Boy,” he hollered at me, “you’re quick as double-geared lightning an’ no mistake.”
I ignored the oldster and spoke to the punchers at the table. “The man at my feet was duly notified,” I said. “Any of you three have a problem with that?”
The youngest of the punchers, a boy about my own age, shook his head. “We got no problem with you,” and after a moment’s hesitation, he added, “mister.”
I nodded to the fallen Burt. “Then carry him out of here and let him sleep it off.”
The three waddies rose as one and helped their limp, groaning compadre to his feet. I watched them carry Burt through the door before I turned back to the bar.
Jonathan Doan was looking hard at me, a strange expression that I found difficult to read in his eyes. “You’ve grown up, Dusty,” he said finally. “I’d say you’ve grown up considerable since the spring.”
He reached under the bar, found another bottle of Bass Ale and slid it across the bar.
“This one’s on me, Mr. Hannah,” he said.
Chapter 9
I rose at first light and brushed straw from my hair and clothes, stepped down the ladder from the hayloft, then checked on the black. The big horse seemed rested and looked like he was ready for the trail.
Corwin Doan was asleep in his office and I didn’t wake him. I found a tin cup, quietly helped myself from the coffeepot on top of the stove and stepped to the door of the livery stable.
The rain had stopped for now, but a heavy mist hung over the Red, thick gray fingers spilling over its banks, probing among the buildings and corrals of the crossing so the cabins and fences looked like they were emerging from a cloud.
I set the cup at my feet, rolled a cigarette, picked up the cup again and smoked and drank, enjoying the sharp morning tang of tobacco and coffee and the quiet tranquillity of the breaking day.
Ten minutes later I saddled the black and rode to the general store. Jonathan Doan was already up and doing and he told me Burt, nursing a hangover and a busted head, had ridden out an hour earlier. He said he didn’t much care, on account of how he had no regard for the man, him being a bully and a no-account an’ all.
I bought coffee, a little baking powder, cornmeal and flour. Bacon being expensive at that time and place, I settled for a slab of salt pork and my only extravagance was a small sack of the black-and-white peppermint balls I’d seen the night before.
Before he made up my meager order, Doan poured me a cup of coffee and told me to help myself to some soda crackers and cheese. Thus I made an excellent breakfast before I took to the trail again, riding through a gray mist under a grayer sky.
I figured I was due north of the SP Connected, but before I reached the ranch I must cross a hundred miles of broken, hilly country with two questions uppermost in my mind: Where were Lafe Wingo and the Owens brothers? And where were the Apaches?
For these I had no answers, neither question being calculated to set a man’s mind at ease. When the rain began again, a steady downpour accompanied by the rumble of distant thunder, it only added to my gloom.
Ahead of me lay both forks of the Wichita and beyond that, down to the Cottonwood Creek country about twenty miles west of the dogleg of the Western Trail, was the SP Connected.
Before I reached the ranch, I had to catch up with Wingo and the others, dodge Victorio’s Apaches and recover the thirty thousand dollars. It was a tall order growing taller by the minute, and a nagging doubt that I could achieve it was gnawing at me, giving me no peace.
I had no idea how I’d tackle a deadly gunman like Wingo if and when I caught up to him, but that was just another bridge I’d have to cross when I got to it. As for the Apaches, I determined to ride careful and take my chances.
Always being of a mind to wed and bed pretty Sally Coleman, I’d saved my money and forgone the silver hatbands and conchoed saddles much loved by Texas punchers, so there was nothing about me that glittered and would catch the eye of a scouting Apache. My range clothes were much faded and muddy from the trail and the black horse I rode merged into the background of brown grass and deep-shadowed hills.
At noon I sheltered for a while in a thick grove of shin oak and mesquite growing at the base of an outcropping of red sandstone that jutted up like the prow of a ship from the slope of a low hill. Enough rain had collected in a natural basin in the rock for me to fill my coffeepot and among the trees I found dry wood to start a small fire. I trusted to the oak branches to scatter what little smoke the fire made and I eased the girth on the black and let him graze on a patch of good grass behind the rock where he’d be hidden.