“This all you got?” he asked.
The man nodded. “Business shot to hell,” he said, “ever since the town got all pure and saintly. Used to have a dozen in here, but not any more.”
Clay looked at the three horses again. They were sorry beasts, none of them the kind of horse he needed.
“This one of yours won’t be traveling for a while,” said the livery man. “You pushed him pretty hard.”
“Stepped on a stone,” said Clay.
He went outside and stood for a moment, hitching up his gun belt, sizing up the place.
Gila Gulch slept in the early morning sun, quiet and dusty, but with an unpainted, weather-beaten look about it even in the softness of the sun’s first light.
He walked down the street to the place that said Hotel and went into the bar entrance. A barkeep was dusting off the furniture and he took his time getting back behind the bar.
“I need something,” Clay told him, “to cure my saddle sores.”
The barkeep set out a bottle and a glass.
Clay took them and walked to a table and let himself down easily into a chair, for the first time feeling the utter weariness that almost a thousand miles of riding had hung upon his massive frame. He pushed his hat back off his forehead and slapped dust off his legs. Then he shoved the glass aside, uncorked the bottle and raised it to his lips.
He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth and felt the liquor hit his stomach and explode and warm his whole insides.
But it didn’t taste the same, he told himself. It didn’t taste as good as it tasted once. It failed to take hold of him the way it once had taken hold of him.
A lot of things, he thought, aren’t the way they used to be.
A fly buzzed nerve-wrackingly in the silence of the morning, trying to get through a window pane.
Clay sat sprawled in his chair, thinking of the way things used to be, ticking off the names of men who now were dead, of women who were almost forgotten, of towns that were no longer anything but names.
The barkeep leaned upon the bar and picked his teeth with a sharpened match end. Clay kept on sitting there, drinking every now and then.
“Want some breakfast?” the barkeep asked.
“Breakfast and room,” said Clay. “I’m way behind on sleeping.”
“What you want for breakfast?”
“Anything you got,” said Clay. “I’m not particular.”
He was eating breakfast when the kid came in with the star shining on his vest.
The kid walked over and sat down across from him.
“First time in town?” the kid asked.
Clay nodded.
“I got to tell you then,” said the kid. “We got a rule around here about checking in your guns.”
“I’m a stranger here,” said Clay. “I hadn’t heard about your rule.”
“You check them in,” said the kid, speaking free and easy. “When you leave town you get them back again.”
“And if I don’t?” asked Clay.
“You’re heading into trouble,” said the kid, businesslike and crisp, but still with friendliness.
“I’d feel undressed without my guns,” said Clay, thinking that he couldn’t very well tell the kid John Trent might come riding into town and he would need those guns.
“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m going straight to bed. I don’t aim to cause no trouble.”
“I’ll give you until sundown,” the kid told him evenly. “At sundown I’ll walk up the street. If you aim to keep those guns, you be there to argue, or I’ll come in and get them.”
“I’ll be there,” said Clay, and he said it matter-of-factly, for that was the way it was. That was the way it had been many times before. It was just a part of living. And, anyhow, this brash kid had no idea who he was calling out.
He ate in silence after the kid had left, the barkeep leaning on his elbows and still picking at his teeth.
Later, in his room, lying on the hard bed and staring at the ceiling, he thought about the kid and the star he wore and the way he talked, not tough or mean, but businesslike and calm.
And those kind, Clay told himself, were the ones to be afraid of. Although Clay had not been afraid of any man for many, many years. He was not afraid of men and he no longer cared for men. He no longer cared, he forced himself to admit, for anything at all. Not even for his own life, probably, although he’d never thought of that before.
And now here he was, staring at the ceiling. Here he was, one day away from freedom, one day from the moment when he could put his past behind him and start a new life. Lying there, he wondered what he had to start a new life with.
A hundred thousand dollars, of course, tucked away across the border, and that was a lot of money. But it was all he had. He’d have a new name, too, but that didn’t really matter. Names never really mattered. A hundred thousand dollars safe across the border and ten thousand on his head, with John Trent riding hard just a day behind to collect the ten thousand.
He’d ride out in the evening, on one of the sorry nags at the livery stable and although the horse would not be the kind he wanted, it would take him where he wished to go. But before he left, he’d have to kill the kid, and that was a bothersome thing to have to do at a time like this.
I’d rather not kill him, he thought, but he shouldn’t talk so big. He could take his guns down the street, of course, and give them to the kid and say take good care of them, I’ll be back to get them along toward suppertime. But he might need those guns before suppertime and, anyhow, no one ever before had taken the guns of Coleman Clay and it was too late to let it happen now.
Too late, he thought. Too late to bring back the way whiskey used to taste, too late to give back the lives of men that went to buy the hundred thousand safe across the border.
He closed his eyes and sleep hit him like a hammer.
The sun was low in the western sky when he awoke and went downstairs.
A team of horses stood at the rail in front of the hotel, hitched to a ramshackle buck-board. A man was talking with the clerk.
“I’m checking out,” said Clay.
“That’ll be two dollars,” said the clerk.
Clay paid him and asked, “Got some paper and a pencil? I want to write a letter.”
The clerk nodded. He tore a sheet of lined paper from a cheap tablet and handed it and a pencil stub to him.
“If it ain’t too long,” said the man who had been talking to the clerk, “I’ll wait for it.”
“Jim’s the mail carrier,” said the clerk. “We ain’t got no post office here. Nearest post office is Buckhorn.”
“You’re lucky, stranger,” said the mail carrier. “I just go over there twice a week. It’s a long pull. Sixty miles, almost.”
Clay nodded his thanks. He went to the table in one corner of the room, wrote laboriously:
Dear Sis: I’m on my way down to Mexico to look over something. I may take it in my head to settle down there. I’ll write you later.
You haven’t told me where Gordon is lately. I thought maybe I’d run into him, but I haven’t.
He signed the letter with a name that was not Coleman Clay and went back to the desk to get an envelope. He went back to the table and addressed the envelope to Mrs. Esther Blaine, Pontiac, Ill. Then he took a roll of bills out of his pocket, peeled off half a dozen, folded them carefully with the letter and sealed the envelope.
At the desk he bought a stamp and the clerk reached down behind the desk and brought up the mail bag. He held its open mouth toward Clay and Clay dropped the letter in it. The clerk jerked it shut.