“I’ll have a whiskey,” Joseph said as he pushed the warm jar away. “And if you put any water in that, I’ll make you drink it.”
For a moment, the Indian was quiet. Then, his smile returned and he laughed loudly. “I wouldn’t ruin whiskey that way,” he declared, taking the jar away and dumping it on the floor.
Joseph watched the Indian like a hawk, but didn’t see anything besides whiskey go into the glass he was given. After taking a sip, he set the glass down. The Indian stood directly in front of him.
“What else did you want to ask?” the Indian said.
“I want…a job.”
“I don’t need any help.”
“Not here,” Joseph added. “I’m a brand artist.”
The Indian nodded. “You’re too late. Someone came around hiring cowboys a few days ago.”
“Did they get any takers?”
“A few. Some gun hands went along. Sons of bitches still owed me money.”
Since he didn’t know what else to say, Joseph looked down at his whiskey and then took another sip. The burn of the liquor didn’t do much to ease the frustration filling his gut.
“I don’t know how to catch up to them,” the Indian continued without missing a beat, “but Schultz might.”
“Schultz?”
“Fat man with hair that looks like a bird’s nest. He owes me money, too.”
“Tell me where he’s at and I can see about collecting that debt.”
The Indian grinned as if Joseph were a child who’d decided to stand up to him. “That’s asking for a lot of trouble. Too much trouble to be worth eighteen and a half dollars. He drinks and sleeps at the Six-Forty, down the street. One of his brothers rode off with those cowboys.”
“You sure?”
“Shultz was bragging about how his brother gave him some of the advance pay he got when he was hired on. Like I said,” the Indian added with a deadly glint in his eye, “that son of a bitch owes me. Waving money around without paying doesn’t sit right. If you see him, punch him in his fat stomach for me.”
Digging in his pocket, Joseph took out a carefully measured wad of money and set it on the table. “There’s twenty dollars,” he said. “I made the offer, so I’ll back it up.”
“What about the rest of it?”
“I’ll try to punch him at least once.”
Joseph could hear the Indian laughing even after he’d walked out of the saloon.
TWENTY-FOUR
Joseph realized he should have asked for better directions. He assumed “Six-Forty” was the name of the place, but half the saloons he saw didn’t have any signs on their fronts. One of them, however, had an old clock dangling precariously from a copper arm. Sure enough, the hands on that clock were stuck at six-forty. Joseph stepped into that place and wasn’t as affected by the pungent aroma that hit him in the nose. This saloon was a bit bigger than the first one and even had a real bar. Looking around, he spotted a couple of card games going on in the back.
The sound of knuckles cracking against flesh and bone rattled through the stale air, followed by a torrent of raucous laughter as something heavy hit the floor. Two skinny drunks with half a set of teeth between them were fighting. Sitting close to the fracas was a fat man, wearing a gray shirt, who seemed to fit the Indian’s description.
Joseph walked up to the fat man and tapped him on the shoulder.
“Uh?” the fat man grunted as he strained to look up and around at Joseph.
“Are you Schultz?”
“What the fuck do you care?”
“Is that a yes?”
“Sure it is, now go fuck your mother.”
Joseph balled up his fist and slammed it into Schultz’s mouth. The sound brought another wave of cheers from the surrounding drunks, along with two men who stood up and marched toward Joseph with fire in their eyes.
Seeing those other men close in around him, Joseph turned and said the first thing that came to mind. “Stay out of this. I’m collecting money for the Indian.”
One of the other men was a stout fellow wearing at least four different pelts buckled around different parts of his body. He squinted through a pair of light brown eyes and asked, “What Indian?”
“The one behind the bar at the saloon down the street. Which one did you think?”
The men looked at one another, studied Joseph and then looked at the fat man with the fat lip. Sniffing once, like a dog examining a table scrap, the man with the furs said, “Sorry, Shultzie. You’re on your own.”
Joseph did his best to keep the confident look on his face as the other men slowly drifted away. At the very least, he managed to keep himself from looking too surprised when they left him and Schultz alone at the table. By that time, the rest of the saloon had already found other things to worry about.
“Look here,” Schultz said as he squirmed around to the other side of the table. “I got the Indian’s money. I just don’t got it with me.”
“Then tell me about the men who came through town looking to hire cow hands.”
Shultz squinted and sputtered, “What?”
“You need to be more helpful, or I’m supposed to start taking scalps.”
The moment he said that, Joseph thought he might have pushed just a little too far. Judging by the horrified look on Schultz’s face, however, the Indian barkeep must have been known for worse things than just serving piss to his customers.
“This ain’t a cow town,” Schultz quickly said. “There’s no work for cow hands.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. You know what kind of work I mean.”
“Then you already know they was looking for branders and anyone who would get their hands dirty for pay. They also needed scouts.”
“Scouts?”
“Yeah. Riders with fast horses who could cover a lot of ground. My brother weren’t one of them, but one of his friends fit that bill just fine. Anyone looking to work was supposed to meet someone in San Trista.”
“Where is that?”
“A few days’ ride south of here. It’s just a hacienda with a general store that serves drinks. Ride south until you hit a dried up riverbed. Follow that until it hooks east and turn west, instead. You’ll hit San Trista before long. I don’t know who’ll be there, though. They said not to bother if it took too long to make up their minds.”
“I’ll just have to take my chances.”
“You like taking chances, don’t ya boy?”
“Pardon me?”
Schultz spread the corners of his mouth apart in a wide, filthy grin. He snorted and wheezed with the effort of leaning forward until he was close enough for Joseph to smell the rotten meat stuck in the fat man’s teeth.
“You ain’t asked for the money I owe that Indian,” Schultz grunted. “I bet you can’t even tell me how much it is.”
“Eighteen and a half dollars,” Joseph recited.
“You still seem to have forgot all about it so you could ask about them men that came along to give my brother a job. You the law, boy?”
Every time Schultz called him boy, Joseph felt his teeth grind together. The fat man seemed to have picked up on that right away and now put extra emphasis on the word.
“I asked you a question, boy. You the law or are you just trying to stick yer nose into my brother’s affairs?”
Before Joseph could answer that, he heard boots scraping against the floor behind him. A few quick glances over his shoulders told him that those men who’d been scared off before were now closing in on him again. As the men got closer, Joseph wondered if he could draw his gun before they made their move. In the time it took to ponder that question, he knew he was already too late.
“We don’t take to the law ’round here, boy,” Schultz grunted. “Fact is, we like to slice law dogs open and pin their badges to the fucking wall behind you. That’s why I prefer this here place over that Indian’s saloon. What do ya say, Stein? You think this asshole’s got another badge to pin to the wall?”