The town of Good Promise, never much as it was, now seemed very small. with its few boarded stores and shacks on the prairie. Outside the town lay dozens of abandoned homesteads, and farther out a handful of isolated ranches, where stubborn men nursed their small herds on prairie browse, and beyond that lay the Indians, some thousands of them, and the Ghost Dance.
A lone rider came up the unpaved main street of Good Promise, the dust of the street hanging fetlock high about the hoofs of his rangy sorrel stallion.
He was a stranger and so was marked by the people of Good Promise. No one came to Good Promise in these days. Plank bars lay near the doors. Many of the windows had been shuttered, except for the cracks you could shove a rifle barrel through. At each end of town there were men on the roofs of buildings. Wagons were bunched at each end of the street, so they could be drawn by men across the street, making a barricade, closing the town, making it into a fort. No children played in the street. There were no women in sight. Not many men. Those there were carried weapons, and they watched the rider as he approached.
The stranger had a beard some six or seven days heavy on his face, and it was a tired face, not old, but worn and lined. His eyes were half closed, and he slumped in the saddle, and the boots in the stirrups moved with the horse’s pace, and you had to look to make sure he wasn’t asleep, but he wasn’t. You could tell that from the eyes. They weren’t much open, but they were, and he was looking.
Back of the saddle, fastened with the blanket roll over the saddlebags, was a small black bag, something like those physicians carry around in their buggies.
This man wore a dark shirt, plaid, cotton, and over this shirt, like a jacket, he wore another shirt, this one of brown corduroy, with the sleeves cut off at the elbows. His pants were blue denim but pretty much white now, from the sun and the rain, and washing. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, white and low-crowned, something like those once favored by Southern gentlemen.
He also wore a Colt, and when he dismounted in front of the saloon, the natural fall of his hand was at the handle of the weapon.
Edward Chance tied his sorrel to the hitching post and entered the saloon.
Edward Chance was tired, and he wanted to cut the prairie dust with a drink, and find some place to wash, and eat and sleep.
Mostly he wanted to be left alone.
When Chance shoved open the swinging doors and entered the saloon he was surprised at the number of men inside. The street outside had been mostly empty.
Of course in the days of the Ghost Dance it was good to have a place to gather together, and talk and drink, and tell each other there was nothing to worry about, and see plenty of men and guns in the same place.
Hadn’t troops been ordered into the area? Hadn’t they taken target practice near the ration points on Saturday? There was nothing to worry about, but the saloon was a good place to listen for news, to meet friends, to forget the dust and the wind outside.
Chance noted that there were about nine tables in the saloon, and each was full; at most of them men were playing cards, nursing their drinks, making them last a long time from the looks of it, almost all the glasses about half full.
The bar, too, was crowded, and there Chance saw the blue uniforms of two or three soldiers, contrasting with the vests and jackets of the civilians.
There must have been townspeople there, homesteaders, too, probably, some ranchers, and the soldiers.
These people suddenly seemed to have one thing in common, their interest in Edward Chance.
The cards had stopped clicking and slapping.
It’s because they don’t see many strangers, said Chance to himself.
It could have been that, but what Chance didn’t know was that no one came to Good Promise in these days, because of the Ghost Dance, the Indians. A man would have to have plenty good reason to come to Good Promise this dusty, dry fall. And the men in the saloon, looking at Chance’s bearded face and haggard features, decided that he must have had that plenty good reason.
And so it was that most people, for the wrong reasons, figured Edward Chance right that afternoon in Good Promise-that here was a man running from something, and they figured him wrong only in figuring he was running from the law.
He was running from Lester Grawson, whom he would not kill, who would kill him.
Chance was running because he wanted to stay alive.
The resources of the law though, Chance had told himself a dozen times a hundred times, could always be tapped by Grawson, with his badge, his credentials, with documents from Charleston, forged or otherwise, to which he would have had access.
Thus the people of the town, supposing him to be fleeing from the law, were not as mistaken as one might have supposed.
For most practical purposes Edward Chance was indeed running from the law, and knew it, that law that might with a shuffling of papers, benignly surrender him into the hands of Lester Grawson, Charleston detective, for return to the scene of some hypothetical crime, a return that once had stopped short in an alley in New York City, and next time might terminate in some grove of cottonwoods, or perhaps on the open prairie, or perhaps in some homesteader’s abandoned shack, wherever Grawson, at his pleasure, would decide to perform the execution.
Chance went to the bar. “Bourbon,” he said.
The bartender set a small heavy glass before Chance, turned, took a squarish bottle from in front of the mirror and filled the glass.
The bartender hadn’t said anything, nor had anyone else.
Irritated, Chance threw the drink down, not looking the way it tasted. The swallow of amber fire burned its way down his gullet and hit his empty stomach like dropping a torch into a barrel of oil.
Chance put down a silver three-cent piece on the bar, which the bartender retrieved.
Chance became aware of a burly figure in an unfastened blue jacket next to him.
Chance put down another three-cent piece. The bartender picked up the second coin, then refilled the glass.
“Where you from, Stranger?” asked the voice of the man next to him, the man in the blue jacket. Chance noted the two wide, yellow chevrons on the sleeve. The speaker was drunk. The voice was not pleasant.
Chance turned to look at Corporal Jake Totter. He saw the heavy face, its lines loose from alcohol, the unfriendly gray eyes red and prominently veined. Mostly Chance noted that the nose had been broken and had not been set properly, or had never been set.
“East,” said Chance.
Chance returned to the drink. He picked up the glass.
“I said where you from, Stranger?” repeated the voice. A wide hand, heavy as a wrench, held down his arm.
Chance turned again to regard the man in the unbuttoned blue jacket. He saw long white underwear under the jacket, black around the collar. The man wore suspenders. On the back of his head was a cavalry hat, with crossed sabers on the turned-up brim. Around the man’s neck there was a yellow neckerchief.
“You’re out of uniform, Soldier,” said Chance.
“You ain’t from the East,” said the voice. The words had been slow, measured, slurred with drink, hostile.