for an artist to work in.”
So Hoke was content again, almost euphorically so. Because it had been a long and dismal six months, more full of frustration and bitterness than he wanted to remember.
Nor was Hoke thinking merely of that disastrous pretended jailbreak which had cost him both his reward money and his sinecure at Belle’s, since that had only been a beginning. After that there had still been the duplicity of the vest for him to endure, if not to say almost becoming a murderer over — not only tonight with Turkey Doolan but twice before. Even now, as he smirked over his ultimate victory, the memory of those earlier misdirected shootings still brought a taste of gall to Hoke’s mouth.
Both episodes had occurred very soon after Dingus tricked him. Hoke had taken instinctively to hanging around Belle’s again, in the hope that he might redeem at least part of the calamity by getting his original job back, but Belle would not hear of it. As a matter of fact she had finally added insult to injury by ordering him to keep away from the bordello altogether unless he had money to spend.
So he was actually moping disconsolately outside the house one night — wistfully eyeing Belle’s own prohibited upper rear doorway, in fact — when the first of the new indignities befell him. Two riders appeared along a rarely used trail, and before Hoke quite knew what he was doing he had emptied his Smith and Wesson at one of them. The second rider spurred off, but Hoke could not have cared less — until he discovered that the man he’d hit, the man in the red-and-yellow hinged Mexican-wool vest, was an inconsequential saddle tramp named Honig. The tramp had suffered a mild gash in the hip. What Hoke himself suffered at the realization of this new treachery was hardly endurable.
So he began to spend time behind the bordello deliberately after that, well-hidden in a grove of cottonwoods and no longer even caring that he was further alienating Belle by being there. In fact he virtually camped in the trees for eight days, or more precisely nights, until Dingus cantered up along the same trail once again. This time it developed that he had presented the vest to a down-at-the-heels prospector named Arden. Hoke had set out three revolvers on a dry pine stump, and his third shot from the second gun nicked the prospector in the shoulder, going away.
So by then the outrage was more than unappeasable: Hoke was almost mad. Belle actually threatened to shoot him on sight if she caught him within a hundred yards of her premises now — as did one of her better customers likewise, an elderly, normally undemonstrative barber who had suffered a mild stroke in the arms of a twelve-year-old Mexican girl while Hoke was blasting away at the vest for the second time, yet Hoke ignored both threats. In fact he was even starting to construct a semi-permanent lean-to shelter in the trees before the doctor finally managed to calm him down somewhat.
Reluctantly Hoke let himself be talked into returning to the more banal routines of his office. But then it did seem most sensible to wait anyhow, since, abruptly, new warrants on Dingus began to cross his desk with gratifying frequency. In quick succession the youth was accused of stopping a Wells Fargo stage, of emptying a bank, of removing the contents of a safe in a freight office. Little more than a month after his escape, he was worth exactly fifteen hundred dollars more than he had been the last time.
Then,just as suddenly, all this ceased. Ordinary circulars came in as usual, but no more concerning Dingus. The price on his head held fast at four thousand five hundred dollars for the next three full months.
So Hoke was more than anxious again. And when he finally heard a rumor that Dingus had been seen in a town named Fronteras, some three days’ ride from Yerkey’s Hole, he oiled his Smith and Wesson, two Colt.45 Peacemakers, a Buntline Special, a shotgun, and a repeating Winchester, and he rode off.
He didn’t find Dingus. He almost did not find the town either, since its mines had played out a year before and it had been summarily abandoned, at least by its builders. It had never numbered more than a dozen structures to start with, and now a motley gathering of displaced Indians was camped near its wells. Hoke had not even unsaddled when a short, square-headed, foul-smelling squaw whom he took to be at least part Kiowa approached his horse.
“You want bim-bam, hey? Only damn bim-bam two-day ride any direction.”
Hoke ignored her, although she gave him an idea. In the four months since Belle Nops had fired him he had earned a grand total of one hundred and sixty dollars as sheriff. He was still living at the jail, but food alone had cost him almost a dollar a day for some hundred and twenty days. Hoke commenced to study the females in the tawdry encampment.
Several of them appealed to him. They were fairly young, and Hoke knew that they would not be married, since there were no buck warriors in evidence (he hardly would have stayed if there had been). He sought out the chief, an ancient, gnarled creature with a head startlingly flattened at the back from having been strapped too tightly to a cradle-board decades before, and with a face that had weathered into a mask of sewn leather. Hoke made his offer. “These here two Colt revolvers,” he said, not wanting to part with what meager cash he did possess, “or the nice hand-tooled Buntline.”
But the chief could only gaze at him vapidly, not understanding English. He was eating something which Hoke made out to be an unskinned wood rat, evidently boiled. Even before Hoke could seek her out then, the squaw who had stopped him initially again materialized at his side. “Why you trade for bim-bam, hey? You take Anna Hot Water, she come for free. Sick and tired, live with all these damn savages anyways. Anna Hot Water fix you up pretty damn nifty, sure hey?”
Most of the thirty-odd people in the encampment had gathered near them in curiosity, and Hoke had already settled on a thin girl of no more than thirteen, who appeared cleaner than most. “That there one,” he pointed. “Tell the chief them’s real accurate Colts, too.”
“Ah, listen, Anna Hot Water plenty better for you than those damn baby bim-bams, no yes? Plenty experience, even married one damn time. Hey?”
Hoke fumbled in a vest pocket and came up with a silver dollar. “Here,” he said, “I’ll pay you, you put it into a lingo he can savvy. That skinny one over there, tell him.”
Anna Hot Water tested the coin first on her teeth, then shrugged and commenced to speak, gesturing frequently. The young girl blushed, but the chief remained sullen, still gnawing on the rat. Finally he muttered something, nodding toward Hoke and then toward Hoke’s mount.
“Chief say you stick lousy old Colts up you know where,” Anna Hot Water interpreted. “He take Winchester repeater rifle, damn sure. And he say your loco hat too, hey.”
Hoke frowned, briefly contemplative. The derby was not his best, however, and he finally removed it. He also lifted the Winchester from its scabbard. Then he motioned for the girl to follow, turning to mount but suddenly the chief had begun to mumble again.
“What’s that, now?” Hoke asked.
“Tribal custom,” Anna Hot Water explained. There were seven or eight birch wickiups in the encampment, and several tepees, and she indicated one of the latter. “Chief say not enough you pay, you got to prove you make good husband. You go into wigwam, you unbutton old Sitting Bull, and when him standing, girl she come in too. She not happy, you lose girl.”
Hoke raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”
Then he saw that several old men, carrying rifles of their own, were eyeing him threatfully. “Oh, now look here,” he said, “first off, it’s broad daylight, and I ain’t never remarkably interested unless’n it’s dark. And anyways I—”
“You be pretty damn interested I think,” Anna Hot Water said. “Because if first girl no happy, chief send in second. If second say bum job, send third. Because it got to be fair trade, and it damn sure he not give back Winchester. He keep send in girls until one say okay.”