“Burn it. Burn it.”
It became like a battle cry.
“No, for crissake. That’s valuable property.” Wolfson was screaming now, but if anyone heard him, they didn’t care.
“Cato and Rose,” Wolfson screamed.
The mob did hear him.
“Cato and Rose,” somebody yelled.
Once again, the mob took it.
“Cato and Rose,” they screamed, “Cato and Rose.”
Boyle took a slug from his bottle.
“Yes,” he shouted. “Yes.”
“Get them,” Wolfson yelled. “That’ll end it.”
“Drag them out of there and hang them,” Boyle said.
“And don’t burn the saloon,” Wolfson screamed.
I walked to the back of the room where Virgil stood motionless, leaning on the back wall. My eight-gauge was leaning on the wall beside him. I picked it up.
“Cato and Rose,” Boyle screamed, still standing on the bar.
“Cato and Rose,” the mob answered.
“Between the mob and the booze,” Virgil said to me, “Henry’s ’bout as brave as he’s ever gonna be.”
“Think they’ll do it?”
“Yep.”
“I seen you face down a mob this big,” I said.
“No. You seen me face down a bunch of cowboys and gun hands. This is a mob. It’s killed ten, fifteen people, and it’s drunk.”
“Cato and Rose,” Boyle screamed.
He jumped off the bar and headed for the door. The mob crowded after him. They burst out of the saloon and into the street.
“Cato and Rose,” the mob chanted. “Cato and Rose.”
Virgil and I walked through the suddenly empty saloon and looked out.
Across the street, in front of the Excelsior, faceup in the dirt, was O’Malley’s body. Cato and Rose came out the front door of the Excelsior. Cato never took his eyes off Henry Boyle. Rose looked down at the body in the street. He smiled for a moment, nodded, and made a small, silent whistle. Then he surveyed the mob.
“We’ve come to hang you bastards,” Boyle said.
Cato said nothing. Rose continued to survey the mob.
Then he said, “You sure you got enough?”
Virgil and I stepped out onto the porch of the Blackfoot. The mob didn’t see us. It was focused on Cato and Rose.
“You won’t be such a smartass cocksucker,” Boyle screamed at him, “when your feet are kicking air.”
Rose looked past him across the top of the mob at us standing on the porch across the narrow street.
“We gonna let this happen?” I said.
“No,” Virgil said.
I nodded so that Rose could see me, and held the eight-gauge up over my head.
Rose smiled.
“I’m a talker,” he said to Henry Boyle. “I’ll stand out here all evening and chew the fat with you, Henry. But Cato ain’t a talker. You don’t get this smelly pack of vermin out of here, he’ll shoot you and I’ll have to start in, too.”
“Like hell,” Boyle yelled, and started toward the porch. The mob went with him. Cato shot Henry after he’d taken one step. Rose shot the men on either side of Boyle. Virgil shot the next one in line, and I cut loose with the eight-gauge and knocked down two people at the back. The mob turned in on itself. The eight-gauge must have sounded like a cannon from behind them. Some of the mob tried to turn toward us, some of it continued toward Cato and Rose. Some of it tried to run. We had the mob in a crossfire, and we cut it into scraps. The mob got off a few rounds, but the mob was shooting like a bunch of drunken wild men, in all directions. It hit nothing that mattered. After some frantic milling that maybe lasted a minute, the mob broke and ran, leaving Boyle and six others dead in the street with O’Malley. After they ran, there was no sound. Only the hard smell of gunpowder and some faint smoke hanging in the air. Virgil was reloading his gun. I broke the eight-gauge and put in two fresh shells. Across the way, Cato and Rose were reloading as well.
Then, in the stark silence, Cato and Rose, guns holstered, walked among the corpses across the street and joined us on the porch of the Blackfoot. Cato nodded his head once at us, and stood silent.
“Any of us get shot?” Rose said.
None of us had.
Rose said, “Thanks for the backup.”
“Professional courtesy,” Virgil said.
Rose nodded. Cato nodded. Both of them looked at me. I nodded.
“Lemme buy us a drink,” Rose said.
“Your saloon or ours?” I said.
“We’re already here,” Rose said.
“We are,” I said.
And we all went into the Blackfoot.
34.
You saved the building,” Wolfson said.
"Collative,” Virgil said.
Wolfson looked at him blankly.
“Collateral,” I said. “Saving the building was collateral to saving Cato and Rose.”
“Oh.”
“Virgil reads a lot,” I said. “He got a bigger vocabulary than he knows how to use.”
Virgil nodded.
We were alone in the Blackfoot, except for Wolfson and Patrick behind the bar.
“Well,” Wolfson said, “whatever. I’ll have the windows fixed over there by tomorrow. I’ll have the sign changed and have it open and running by tomorrow night.”
“Any deeds involved,” Rose said. “Titles, anything?”
“Hell, no,” Wolfson said. “There’s a piece of property standing vacant and decrepit. A blight on the town. I’m going to rescue it, restore it, make it an asset.”
“Maybe there’s heirs,” Virgil said.
“They show up, we’ll deal with them,” Wolfson said.
We all sipped a little of Wolfson’s best whiskey.
“How ’bout the copper mine,” I said. “If it’s still worth anything.”
“If it is I’ll add it to Blackfoot,” Wolfson said.
“What if the miners object?” I said.
Wolfson shrugged.
“How ’bout Stark?” I said. “Think he’ll give you trouble.”
Wolfson grinned, his loose eye wandering as he spoke.
“He won’t like it when I take his lumber business,” Wolfson said.
“Him, too?” I said.
“I’m going to own everything in this town,” Wolfson said. “Simple as that.”
“Ranches, too?” I said.
“Ranches,” Wolfson said, “lumber, mining, bank, general store, saloons, hotel, everything.”
Virgil was looking at Wolfson thoughtfully.
“We just shot hell out of your army,” he said to Wolfson.
“Which means if I hired you four boys to help me with this,” Wolfson said, “we should be pretty successful.”
“What would we be doing when we weren’t shooting ranchers and miners and lumberjacks?” Rose said.
“You could pretty much intimidate all those people,” Wolfson said. “Don’t know you’d have to do much shootin’.”
“Fine,” Rose said. “So what would we do otherwise?”
“Keep order,” Wolfson said. “There’s no law in this town. You boys could be like the law. Like Everett was in here.”
“’Cept we wouldn’t be the law,” Virgil said.
“Be the same,” Wolfson said. “’Fore you boys came here. Everett had this place turned into a damn refuge, you know? People got in trouble anywhere in town, they run here, to Everett.”
“But you wasn’t the law,” Virgil said.
“Just in here,” I said.
“Hell.” Wolfson drank some more whiskey. “We be running things on this whole side of the mountain. You want laws, I’ll write up some laws. You boys want to be lawmen, I’ll make you lawmen.”
“Just you,” Virgil said.
“Boys, a town’s got a right to appoint lawmen,” Wolfson said. “And right now, I’m the town.”
Virgil got up and walked to the saloon door and looked out at the silent street, lit by a full moon.
“Bodies are gone,” he said.
“Chinamen,” Wolfson said. “Take everything valuable and dump what’s left outside of town. Animals eat ’em pretty clean in a couple days.”
Virgil nodded slowly, staring out at the street.
“So we got a deal?” Wolfson said. “Pay you top wages.”
Cato looked at Rose. I looked at both of them. None of us said anything. We all looked at Virgil, who was still staring out into the street.