I finished the coffee and put the cup down and strolled Main Street. There were three saloons besides the Blackfoot. There was an unpainted one-story shack with a sign in the front window that read Genuine Chicago Cooking. There were no customers yet. A Chinaman with a long pigtail was outside, sweeping down the porch. He kept his head down as I passed. I stopped in to the livery stable to visit my horse. There was a bucket of water in his stall, and some oats in another bucket. He seemed sort of glad to see me. He nudged at my shoulder and I gave him a piece of sugar that I’d taken from the saloon.
Past the livery stable were a couple of independent whorehouses where the girls lived and worked. No gambling, no food, just short sessions for a dollar. No one appeared to be awake in the whorehouses yet. Beyond, a little away from the wooden buildings, were a few tents where the Chinamen lived, maybe ten to a tent. They cooked in the saloons, and washed floors, and washed dishes, and emptied spittoons and chamber pots and slop buckets. They laundered clothes, and ironed and sewed. They mucked out the livery stables. And I knew they stepped aside when any white man encountered them in the street. I had heard someplace that they sent all their money back to China and lived on a few pennies a month.
Where I was standing, the main street petered out into a trail that led slowly downhill toward the south. Out a ways on the trail was a small ranch. Homesteader, probably. Beyond that further out, another one, and on the horizon, a couple more. I looked at the plains for a while, stretching out wide and, to my eye, empty, to the horizon. Behind me, Main Street stretched the length of the ugly little town. At the north end it became a two-wagon rut road that went up into the hills and wound out of sight among the bull pines.
I walked back along the main street. The sun was above the low buildings now and shone hard on me from the right. I passed the Blackfoot Saloon. It was the largest building in town. Besides the saloon, there was the hotel, the hotel dining room, a small bank, and the big general store. Past the Blackfoot was a blacksmith shop. The smith was there in his undershirt, loading charcoal into his forge. We nodded as I passed him.
I reached the north end of the main street. I looked at the pines. There were bird sounds, and the rustle of a light and occasional wind in the trees. Nothing else moved. The walk the length of the town had taken maybe ten minutes. Town was pretty small. Lotta space around it.
A whore I knew back in Appaloosa had asked me once if I got lonely, moving around in all this empty space, stopping in little towns with nothing much there. I told her I didn’t. I’m not hard to get along with, but I’m not convivial. I like my own company, and I like space.
A bullet clipped one of the pine trees’ branches five feet to my right. The sound of the shot was behind me. I drew, spun, and went flat on the ground. Nothing moved in the town. I waited. No second shot. After a time I stood and holstered my Colt. I walked back to the blacksmith shop.
“Hear a gunshot?” I said.
“Yep,” he said. “I did.”
“Know where it came from?” I said.
“Nope. You?”
“Nope,” I said.
We both stood and looked musingly back along the street toward where I had been standing.
“There’s a fella, name of Wickman,” I said. “Kind of sharp face, little eyes. Wears one of them round bowler hats. Carries a gun in a fast-draw rig.”
“Koy Wickman,” the smith said. “You think he shot at you?”
“Just speculatin’,” I said. “Seen him around this morning?”
“Nope. It was Koy shot at you, though, he wouldn’ta missed.”
“’Less he was bein’ playful,” I said.
“You need to walk sorta careful around Koy Wickman,” the blacksmith said. “He’s pretty quick.”
“I’ll be sorta careful,” I said.
And I was. I walked sort of careful the rest of the way back to the Blackfoot.
4.
I was sitting lookout, with the shotgun in my lap. Wolfson was sipping whiskey and leaning on the wall next to my chair.
“Northwest of town,” he said, “there’s a big lumbering operation. Fella named Fritz Stark. Other side of the hill, on the east slope, is the O’Malley mine. Eamon O’Malley. Open-pit copper mining. There’s a rail spur shuttles through the valley, back of the hill. Picks up lumber from Fritzie Stark, copper from Eamon, and heads on east to the main line at Mandan junction.”
“Wickman works for the copper mine,” I said.
“Yep.”
"Why does a copper mine need a gunny?” I said. “Or is it just a hobby?”
Wolfson sampled his whiskey, rolled it over his tongue a little, nodded approval to himself.
“Pretty good,” he said. “Got it from a new drummer.”
He sampled it again.
“Koy Wickman’s a real gun hand,” he said. “Good at it, likes it. Most folks in Resolution walk around him pretty light.”
“What’s he do for the mine?” I said.
“I think mostly he walks around with Eamon, intimidates folks.”
“Eamon need that?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Wolfson said.
All the time we talked, Wolfson surveyed the saloon. It was kind of hard to see what he was looking at, because of the walleye.
“This is a new town,” Wolfson said. “We’re sort of just starting to figure out what we want to do here, you know?”
“And who’ll be in charge of doing it?” I said.
“Well, it ain’t come to that yet,” Wolfson said. “But you got the mine, you got the lumber company, you got us here in town, and you got a few sodbusters out in the flats below town.”
I nodded.
“They much trouble?” I said.
“Nope, ain’t that many of them,” Wolfson said. “Yet.”
“Other lookouts,” I said. “Wickman involved in running them off?”
“Yes,” Wolfson said. “Killed one of them.”
“Which you didn’t mention when you hired me,” I said.
Wolfson shrugged.
“Figured you might not take the job,” he said.
“Guys like Wickman weren’t around, there wouldn’t be work for guys like me,” I said.
“So you gonna stick?” Wolfson said.
“Sure,” I said. “But I may have to kill him in your saloon.”
“You think he’ll keep pushing?” Wolfson said.
“I think he needs to be the only rooster in the barnyard,” I said. “Or his boss does.”
Wolfson continued to look around the room for a time.
Then he said, “It’s a nice business I’m growing here. The store, the hotel, the restaurant, the saloon. Nice business.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Can’t keep hiring lookouts,” he said.
I nodded. He looked around some more.
“You do what you gotta do,” he said.
5.
Wickman came in late in the evening, wearing his fast-draw rig and his bowler hat. The hat was tipped down over his forehead.
“Hey,” he said, “Hitch. I heard you was up the north end of town this morning, looking at the pine trees.”
I looked straight at him and didn’t say anything.
“Heard somebody took a shot at your ass,” he said.
I kept looking.
“I was you I might not go walking around,” he said. “You know? I might stay right here in the saloon and hide behind my shotgun.”
Go right at ’em, Virgil used to say. There’s trouble, go right at ’em. Right now.
“You shoot at me?” I said.
“Me,” Wickman said.
He was playing to the audience that had begun to gather.
“Me?” he said. “Why would you think it was me?”
“’Cause you’re a back shooter,” I said.
The banter went out of Wickman’s voice.
“I ain’t no back shooter,” he said. “You don’t know nothing about me. Every man I killed was facing me straight up.”
“I know a back shooter when I see one,” I said. “I bet you never shot a man wasn’t drunk. This morning you missed me by five feet.”
“I missed shit,” Wickman said. “I wanted to I coulda put that bullet right between your ears.”
“So you was just thinking to scare me,” I said.
Wickman opened his mouth and closed it and backed away a step.
“Didn’t work,” I said.
“I’m just saying it was me shot at you I wouldn’ta missed.”
“Naw,” I said. “’Course you wouldn’t. You’da drilled me from behind, back shooter.”
“Don’t call me that,” Wickman said.
The audience began to spread out a little. I thumbed back both hammers on the shotgun and rested the butt on my thigh with the barrels pointing at the ceiling.
“You ain’t behind me now,” I said.
“You think I’m going up against that eight-gauge,” Wickman said.
“I ain’t pointing it at you,” I said.
The audience spread out farther.
“I’m pointing the shotgun at the ceiling,” I said. “Good gun hand should be able to clear leather and drill me ’fore I can drop the barrels.”
I was right, there were people who could win that matchup, and I wouldn’t have made them the offer. But I was betting that Koy Wickman wasn’t one of them. I was probably the first person he went up against that he couldn’t bully, maybe the first one that was sober, and almost certainly the first one that was sober and had an eight-gauge shotgun. He backed up another step. The audience gave him plenty of room.
“Want go drink a little courage,” I said. “Come back later?”
He went for it. He was pressured, probably scared, and I was right. He wasn’t that good. He fumbled the draw slightly and I hit him in the face with both barrels. It turned him completely around and propelled him about three steps before he went down. It didn’t blow his head off like I’d said it would. But it was an awful mess. I reloaded.
The room echoed with silence, the way it usually did after a shooting. The smell of my gunshots was strong. Wickman’s Colt was ten feet from his outstretched hand. He’d never even aimed it. People looked briefly at what was left of Wickman and looked quickly away. The people who had been standing closest to him were spattered with blood and tissue. One man took his stained shirt off and threw it away from him. I thought about Virgil Cole again.
You gotta kill someone, do it quick. Don’t look like you gotpushed into it. Look like you couldn’t wait to do it.… Sometimes you got to kill one person early, to save killing four or five later.
Wolfson came into the saloon from wherever he’d been, with two Chinamen. One Chinaman had a big piece of canvas, the other one had a bucket and mop. He nodded at the mess I’d made on his floor.
“You fix,” he said to the two Chinamen. “You clean one time. Chop, chop.”
The men went about it without expression. The one with the tarp wrapped it around Wickman and dragged him out through the door they’d come in. The other one mopped the floor.
“Anyone comes down from Liberty to ask about this,” Wolfson said, “I’ll talk to them. Everybody saw him draw on you… and the sheriff’s a friend of mine.”
I nodded, thinking still about Virgil’s advice. Virgil was always clear, and he was always certain. But he wasn’t always right.
I was hoping he would be, this time.