And then Hoke knew. Clutching at the key ring in his vest with one hand, he clapped the other against his forehead, and the moan came from deep in his throat.
He was the first one back to the jail, but when he raced past the smashed door of the smallest cell and saw the fractured lock on his private strongbox beneath the cot, he did not even have to look into the box itself. He sank to his knees, burying his face into the mattress. “I might have knowed,” he told himself, sobbing, “I might have knowed. And now probably he don’t intend to go rob that train, neither!”
That was when the outrage had begun for C. L. Hoke Birdsill. It ran deep now, refulgent and intractable, as he stood in the alley behind the Yerkey’s Hole livery stable six months later clutching the Smith and Wesson he had just emptied at the sight of that long-familiar and hateful Mexican vest, confronted by the sprawled form of a man who was not Dingus Billy Magee and not anyone else he had ever seen and whose name, he would learn, was Turkey Doolan. Hoke commenced to curse unremittingly.
There was gathering chaos about him now, however, and there were incalculably more people than the lone stable-hand with whom he had been talking when the shooting began, when he had heard the stablehand shout and had glanced up to see the fool he had taken for Dingus riding brazenly past the livery’s rear doorway and had flung himself behind the nearest animal, snatching at his revolver— townspeople collecting, come in their cautious good time now that the firing was patently done with. Hoke cursed them also.
“Who is it? Who’d Birdbrain go shooting this time?”
“Is it Dingus? Did he finally nail the critter?”
“Fooled him again, I reckon”
“Say, I know that feller — jest a Missouri drifter, name of Rooster something— “
“Hoke done shot up some chickens, you say?”
Hoke gazed at Turkey, who had been lying beatifically for several moments now, since muttering some words about his comradeship with Dingus Billy Magee. And then abruptly the youth began to scream.
“It’s stopped!” he cried. “The dripping’s stopped! All my blood is dripped out! I’m kilt, I’m kilt!”
People were kneeling near him. “Easy now, easy,” someone told him. “Hold him down, somebody!”
“Well, he sure ain’t dead, anyways,” Hoke said.
“I am dead!” Turkey screamed. “My blood is all dripped out! I could hear it dripping and now I can’t!”
“Does look like he’s lost a intolerable amount at that,” a cowboy remarked. Hoke could see it now also. “Lying in a whole flood of it there—”
“I told you!” Turkey wailed. “And now there ain’t no more to drip!”
“Can’t be from this here wound in his side. This ain’t nothing but a harmless crease.”
“I doubt if’n I hit more than the once,” Hoke said. “Durned forty-fours jest ain’t no account fer accuracy.”
“You think maybe he jest done peed in his pants with the fright of it?”
“I dint never pee!” Turkey cried. “I’m murdered!”
“Oh, thunderation, ain’t blood. Ain’t pee neither.” A man had lifted something from beneath him. “Ain’t nothing but his canteen been dripping here. It got punctured.”
Turkey fainted on the spot.
“Somebody lug him down to the doc’s,” Hoke said. He did not assist them. He had lost his derby while shooting and he went to retrieve it now. Then, still outraged, he was striding toward the main street when someone called to him.
“Hey, Sheriff, look here—”
“I got work to do,” Hoke snarled. “If that diaper-bottomed damn desperado thinks he can keep getting away with riding in here and making me shoot up innocent folks he’s got another think coming. And I don’t give a whorehouse hoot if’n he does face up to Wyatt Earp and the rest of them. I got to git back to my office and ponder what sort of mischief he’s most likely got in mind. Because this time I’m gonter—”
“You better look at this here blood first, I reckon—”
“I already seen it. I been hearing enough about it too. All that commotion over a little bullet hole in the belly—”
“Not this. This ain’t his’n.”
“This ain’t whose’n?”
“Here, where the second horse skittered afore it run off. Bring a lamp, somebody. This is too far aside to be that Turkey feller’s.”
Hoke gazed at the stains in the dim light. He ran his tongue across his mustache, which tasted faintly of gunpowder at the moment.
“What do you think, Hoke? You think maybe one of the five bullets that didn’t hit the one you thought was Dingus and was aiming at might of hit the one you didn’t think was, and wasn’t?”
“Unless it’s horse blood,” someone else speculated.
“Ain’t horse blood neither,” Hoke said, “but either way he ain’t going far, and that’s the Lord’s truth of it.” He started off once more, then whirled anew. “And you’re all witnesses to that blood now too,” he said, “jest in case he crawls into a dung pile somewheres and dies, and somebody else goes picking up the remains and claiming them rewards. Because he’s worked hisself all the way back up to nine thousand and five hundred dollars last I were informed, even without no train, and that money’s mine!”
3
“When I play poker, a six-gun beats four aces.”
Dingus, on the other hand, was mostly amused.
He had spurred his mount through a back trail to the far end of the town, and then he had almost fallen from the saddle, but even this failed to disturb him. “That Hoke,” he told himself merely. “He gets into the habit of shooting folks he ain’t pointing at and I’m gonter have to commence wearing that vest again myself.”
He rested beneath a cottonwood tree while waiting for the blood to stop, which it did. It was lull dark now, and not far away he could see a lamp burning within the doorway of a makeshift clapboard miner’s shack. There was an odor of woodsmoke in the air, faintly tinged with kerosene and manure.
When he stood again he discovered he had bled a good bit down his right pantleg and into his boot. That sock was soggy, and he limped gingerly with his weight on the other foot. “Well, howdy do,” he muttered. He kept one hand clasped over the wound, which pained him only slightly.
The shack was set apart from several others like it, amid tall weeds. There was no door, only a threadbare horse blanket hung from nails. Dingus considered this for a moment or two, then lifted the blanket and peered in.
The single room was dense with smoke from an untrimmed wick, and the faulty lamp itself stood on an upended wood crate. Beyond that Dingus saw a disreputable shuck mattress on the dirt floor, a half-finished tin of beans on an upturned nail keg with flies swarming around that, and some rag ends of clothing hung from pegs. Otherwise there was nothing in the rank room except the man himself, whom Dingus did not know. He doubted that he wanted to. The man was tall and gaunt, with a face like a hastily peeled potato, and he had only one arm, the right one. He was also completely bald.
“I’m ahurtin’,” Dingus told him.
The man had been gazing emptily into the uneven, flickering glow of the lamp, and when he turned toward Dingus it was slowly, without surprise and without evident interest either. His long yellowed underwear was out at elbow and knee, spotted with savorings of a hundred meals. For a time he stood absently. Then his one arm lifted as if in accusation. “There’s gonter be violence wrought upon this new Sodom,” he intoned. “The wrathful fist of the Lord is gonter bring down fireballs and brimstone on it, sure as bulls has pizzles.”