“I’ll help too,” she said.
“Caroline,” he breathed, “you’ve got a beautiful face and a beautiful body and plenty of guts but you’re short on sense. It’ll be tough enough without having to keep one eye out for your safety.”
“He was my husband,” she snapped, and strode away fast, leaving the words hanging behind in the still air.
Eleven
He didn’t like either one of them. Obie Macklin was small, a quick-moving man, all sharp angles. His eyes never stopped moving restlessly. His biceps were thick, his hands calloused and scarred from foundry work, but he looked unsteady, undependable. The other one, Mordecai Gant, was even worse: a burly ex-convict down on his luck, Gant was a used-up tough, with no skill but thievery and fighting, and no future in sight. He had been reduced to cleaning out stables for a living and he smelled like it. Gant protested to Floyd Sparrow in a pained whine: “Look, it may be a half-assed pissante job but it’s the first one I ever had where I didn’t have to rob somebody or kill somebody to get paid. I made myself a nice quiet nest here and I don’t want nobody shake the limb.”
They stood in the dark maw of the stable; it was past midnight. Floyd Sparrow said to Tree, “He’ll work for you. He just likes to whine.”
Gant clamped his mouth shut. He was squat and greasy, his features fleshy, his cheeks folded and jowled; he looked like a thief.
“He’ll come,” said Obie Macklin. Mackjin ended every sentence with a nervous, meaningless laugh. “He’ll think about his share of that ree-ward money and he’ll come.”
Gant glared at him. “Obie, I’ll do my own thanking. You about four seconds short of losing your front teeth.”
“You wouldn’t hit me-I’m littler’n you are!”
Gant said, “Nobody that wears a gun is little. If you got the guts to pull that on me.”
“Listen,” Floyd Sparrow said, “try saving the violencing for the Earps.”
Gant turned and gave Sparrow what passed for a shrewd squint. “Buddy, less I get paid in advance, I ain’t about to go fool with the Arp brothers.”
“Sure you are,” Sparrow breathed. “You made a deal, remember?” Then, without warning, he slugged his little fist into Gant’s unsuspecting face.
It hardly budged Gant but his nose immediately began to bleed. He touched it, looked at the blood on his finger, and held his hand cupped under his nose to catch the blood as if he had some compelling reason „to avoid staining his filthy shirt or the manure-fouled stable floor. He said in a slow-grappling, awkward way, “Whud you do that for, Floyd?”
“To remind you you gave your word on this little thing.”
“They ain’t enough of us. You didn’t say they’d only be three of us.” Gant tugged a shirttail out of his pants and bent his head to wipe his nose.
Sparrow said, “You’ve got a choice, Mordecai. You can go up against the Earps, which gives you a chance, or you can go up against me, which gives you no chance. You’ve seen me work on a man. Now which is it to be?”
Sparrow’s voice had been more gentle than Tree had ever heard it before, but something in Sparrow’s manner carried absolute conviction. It struck Tree for the first time that Sparrow’s carping, nervous personality was a ruse, that the man behind it was as ruthless and hard as any man alive. Sparrow was a dangerous man.
Now, with a guilelessly dour glance at Tree, Sparrow said, “There they are-not much, I’ll admit. Can you use them?”
“I’ll have to.”
Sparrow said, “You heard the man, boys. Pay attention to what he says and follow his orders to the letter. I’ll bid you all good night.” With a sardonic salute, Sparrow walked out of the stable.
Mordecai Gant wiped his nose and looked at Tree with baleful reluctance. Obie Mack-lin put a chaw of tobacco in his mouth; it bulged in his cheek, squirrel-like. He gave a nervous bray of laughter that trailed off into silence.
Tree gave them both his unhappy scrutiny and began to speak.
He got back to his room late that night. He didn’t have to check the tenpenny nail because the door was wide open, the lamp alight; Caroline was inside, gnawing on a hunk of cheese.
He pushed the door shut and said, “I want you to go home to your daddy, Caroline.”
With her mouth full she said, muffled, “You set it up for tomorrow night like you planned?”
“Uh-hunh. I don’t give much for our chances now I’ve seen Sparrow’s two prize boys.”
She swallowed, wiped her mouth, and said matter-of-factly, “I’ve been thinking on it. Suppose you get the Earps out of the hotel. You can’t use the railroad because the Earps’ mining boss friends could have the train held down the line, intercept you. So you’ve got to go out horseback.”
He made a patient grimace.
She grinned. “I know-I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But you’re going to need somebody to hold the horses ready for you, and more than that, you’re going to need a goddamn chaper-one.”
“A what?”
“Chaperone, you know-duenna”
“I know what the damned word means,” he growled.
“Well, then?”
“Well what?”
“You can’t get Earp out of his hotel room without her knowing-Josie, his wife. You leave her behind, and she’ll raise a hue and cry they’ll hear from here to Leadville. You’ve got to keep her quiet, and you can’t very well shoot her. So you’ve got to take her with you. Besides, Earp might be easier to handle if she was along-he wouldn’t want to risk getting her caught in the middle of a shooting war.”
Tree glared at her. She was smiling innocently; she said triumphantly, “So you need a chaperone to look after the lady prisoner. Me.”
“No. Absolutely no.”
She sighed. “Look, Jerr, forget that I’m Rafe’s widow, which gives me a stake in this too. Forget that if you want to, but think of this: you need all the help you can get, and I’m not just a frilly petticoat schoolmarm all aflutter with my-goodnesses. I’m a ranch girl born and bred. I’m full of fight and vinegar. Maybe I don’t shoot so good but I don’t intend to shoot anybody. I can handle horses almost as well as Rafe could. Horse for horse I can probably outride you because I weigh fifty pounds less than you. I’m not dead weight, Jerr. I can help. I mean it.”
She picked up the hunk of cheese and bit off a corner, watching him out of the side of her vision. “You need every pair of eyes you can get to keep watch on those Earps. And one more thing: you don’t know how far you can trust those two bully boys of Floyd Sparrow’s, if you can trust them at all. You do know you can trust me,” she finished, and added after a moment, “all the way.”
He said sourly, “Thought it all out, have you?”
“It’s a couple of hundred miles from here to Denver and you’ll have to horseback across some of the ruggedest mountains this side of Hell. It’ll take a week to get there and you can’t stay awake the whole way. You’ll want somebody on your side that you can trust.”
He said, “Your daddy was right about you.”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Damn it,” she said, “I only want you to have the best possible chance of coming out of this alive-I want you to make it, Jerr.”
Her eyes were open wide; her breasts lifted and fell with her breath. Her lips were parted, moist and heavy in repose. She wrenched her eyes away, walked quickly to the door, and went.
When it came time to perform, Macklin and Gant did better than he had expected of them. They were like garrison soldiers who only griped when there was nothing better to do. Once the action started, they did fine.
The operation was as simple as it was desperate. Because of its boldness, and because of the strength of the Earps’ defenses, Tree gave it a fifty-fifty chance to succeed: the Earps were so well defended that their sentries were less alert than they would have been had the situation seemed precarious. Their complacence was a formidable weakness.