“Well, she’d better start shooting then. Now get up!”
“Oh, shit,” Thomas said. He frowned and shook his head. “I saw them one night. Two nights in fact. But I didn’t have anything to do with the robbery.”
“Why’d you see them?”
“The fire. I wanted them to help me.” He made a face. “Can I get up now?”
“Get up.”
“And you won’t hit me?”
“Not if you’re telling the truth.”
Thomas wasn’t nimble. He had to thrash around to get up. When he was upright he said, “Well, that’s damn nice. Look at my pants!” He started brushing them.
His ma shouted again, “Don’t you hurt him!”
“Tell her to shut up.”
“She’s my ma.”
“Tell her.” Fargo made it as menacing as possible.
“Shut up, Ma, and go back inside!”
“Well that’s a fine howdy-do! You tell your own ma to shut up! See if I fix you squash the way you like it again anytime soon!”
Fargo was surprised that Thomas—who had to be twenty-five or so—didn’t look embarrassed by any of this. A regular lady-killer tied tight to his mother’s apron strings.
“The fire. Tell me about it.”
“You going to tell Cain?”
“Not unless he asks me about it. Nobody was hurt, were they?”
“No.” He actually sounded humble. “It was a stupid thing to do. I was just mad at Lenihan and mad at the three boys.”
“Why were you mad at them?”
“They wouldn’t help me with the fire. Which made me mad because I knew they were going to do something. They kept smiling at each other, the way you do when you’ve got a secret. Then all of a sudden they wanted me to leave. They got real nervous. I think somebody was coming.”
“You didn’t have any idea who?”
“No. And when I said something about it they got mad. Real mad. They damn near threw me on my horse they wanted to get rid of me so bad.”
Fargo decided he was telling the truth, enough of it anyway. From what he’d seen of Thomas it was no wonder the boys hadn’t wanted to get hooked up with him. Mama’s boy. A dress-up boy for the ladies. Not somebody you’d want along on a robbery.
Thomas said, “Look at this grass stain on the side of my pants.”
Fargo was well shut of him. He walked quickly back up to the office and Ma Thomas.
“I seen you throw him down.” She still had the shotgun. It was pointed right at Fargo’s chest.
“Maybe it’s time you start throwing him down, Mrs. Thomas. He’s awful old for you to still be doing his fighting.”
She muttered something to his back as he left. He assumed she wasn’t wishing him good luck.
Fargo had heard the worst of them called “deadfalls.” And that was, in fact, what they were. Just as a deadfall was a trap for a large animal, the worst kind of saloon was also a trap. In San Francisco there were dozens of the places. A man could go into one, get drunk and wake up and find himself on a freighter bound for the China seas. All it took was for one of the saloon girls to put something in your drink and you might never be heard from again. And if the violence didn’t get you the venereal disease did. A man who survived twenty-four hours on the Barbary Coast was lucky indeed. And it was in saloons like this one that the worst of the worst was found.
The Trail’s End probably didn’t qualify as a real deadfall but it would do until the real thing came along. After riding out to see Bob Thomas, Fargo had swung back to Cawthorne to look up a man named Frank Nolan. He was the brother of Ted Nolan, the second of the three young men to be killed.
Tom Cain wanted Fargo to carry things out the way a Pinkerton would so Fargo got Cain to write down the names of people Fargo could talk to about the dead men and how they’d spent their final days.
The Trail’s End was long and narrow and lighted only by lanterns placed along the bar and at tables. Though it was barely midmorning, drunkards could be seen passed out along the bar and at one of the tables. Judging by the stench, the place could have doubled as a latrine. In the smoky lantern light, Fargo approached the crude plank bar and the beefy bald man with the black eye patch. The man’s wide face reflected his displeasure with Fargo. People like the Trailsman didn’t belong here. They could be law and they could most certainly be trouble.
“You lost, stranger?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, I think you are.”
“Nice place you got here.”
“Nobody asked you to come.”
“Looking for somebody.”
Eyepatch smiled. “Well, if it’s anybody respectable, you sure won’t find him here.”
“His name is Frank Nolan.”
Eyepatch’s gaze flicked to the table where the man was passed out. “Never heard of him.”
Fargo tossed a coin on the bar. “Beer and a shot.”
Eyepatch smirked. “Cold day in hell when I serve you a damn thing.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means I don’t like your looks. Means I don’t like you standin’ in front of me.” He leaned forward and gave Fargo a shove.
Fargo’s move was almost invisible in the shadows. He grabbed the man’s right arm and twisted it with enough force to lift him up off his feet and hunched over the bar.
“Shit!” Eyepatch cried.
But Fargo didn’t relent. He kept on turning the arm slowly back on itself. One of the drunkards at the bar managed to raise his head from his stupor and focus long enough to understand what was happening. And what was happening made him grin. “Looks like you met your match, Earl.” Then he nudged the man slumped over to his right.
The man’s head was lost beneath a wide sombrero. The enormous hat began its ascension and finally a small dark Mexican face could be seen. The face was suddenly lit by a huge smile. “Earl, man, you be in trouble.”
Done with him, Fargo flung the man back against the wall, rattling the six bottles of rotgut that rested on a raw two-by-four.
“There wasn’t any reason for this,” Fargo said. “All I wanted was a beer and a shot.”
Rubbing his arm, wincing in pain, burning with shame, Eyepatch obviously thought of saying something. But then immediately realized that Fargo might just come over the bar and start it up all over again.
“I’ll take that beer and shot now.”
Cursing, moving in and out of the flickering light of the lanterns, Eyepatch got Fargo what he wanted. He slammed them down hard on the bar. Fargo pitched the coin at him, grabbed his alcohol and then strode over to the table where Frank Nolan was just now sitting up and crawling out of his liquid hibernation.
He was a round little man with frightened eyes and a bad complexion. At one time his shirt had been white probably but not anymore.
“Eyepatch holds grudges, mister.”
“So do I.”
“I heard you askin’ for me. How come?”
“Your brother.”
“Oh.” He was hound-dog sad suddenly. “Near to broke my ma’s heart. She’ll never get over it.”
“My name’s Fargo. I’m working with Sheriff Cain. We’re trying to find out who killed your brother and the two others and why.”
Nolan sat back in his chair. The move put him in deep shadow. He was almost a disembodied voice. “Glad Tom Cain’s getting some help. He kinda let everybody down.”
“How so?”
“Well, he didn’t have no luck catchin’ any of the stagecoach robbers who killed that Englishman and driver. He’s usually pretty good at huntin’ people down. And then right on top of it he hasn’t had any luck finding out who killed my brother and them others. I try to give him the benefit of the doubt but a lot of people are sayin’ maybe he’s too old now. And maybe he’s good with a gun but nothing else. The Denver paper’s always got stories about detectives finding killers and maybe that’s what we need here. I hate to see the town turn against him but with three of them dead—”