Walking into Yuma by way of dark side streets, Boag added up his requirements. Two pounds of iron and a holster and cartridges for it. Clothes. A water canteen, maybe a rope; a hat. A clasp knife surely. A horse, blanket, bridle, saddle. Scabbard and rifle and cartridges. At a minimum that would do it; everything else could come off the land, although it would save him time later if he found a pack of jerky and tinned food to carry along.
He toted up the value in dollars and knew he was nowhere near cutting it with his two gold eagles. A handgun, a decent .44-40 or .45, was twelve dollars right there and that was more than half his stake; a repeating rifle would run twenty all by itself.
You could stop and earn the money doing day labor but it would take months.
Well you could steal a horse, maybe a horse with a traveler’s pack on it, and then you could steal guns and clothes here and there. But then you’d have half a dozen victims looking for you along with the sheriffs.
There was one other way and it looked better than the others.
Boag stopped in an alley and worked his boots off and got the two small gold coins out. Put them in his pocket and felt around to make sure there wasn’t a hole in that pocket, and squeezed his feet back into the boots and walked on down the slope between houses, his eyes and ears guiding him toward the town’s fandango district.
The lamps were bright along the strip of whorehouses and saloons. A steady traffic of pedestrians thickened the mudcaked sidewalks and every saloon had a crimson-faced barker out front hawking the pleasures of the place in a strident voice. A great deal of cheerful racket; and here and there a gambling loser prowling through the crowd with his hands rammed in his pockets and his face twisted up in angry defeat.
Boag had thought of trying his hand at a gambling table but he wasn’t all that good at it and had dismissed the idea instantly.
He picked a dive smaller and more poorly lit than most of the others. He pushed inside through the crowd on the porch. The place had no door, only a doorway. That meant it was probably open around the clock. It must have been one of the oldest buildings in Yuma: it was a narrow dark little ’dobe with a low ceiling and improbably thick walls, and the stucco had peeled off parts of it to expose the chipped adobe bricks. The bar was a simple affair of planks laid across big empty beer kegs; a pair of Mexican bartenders moved sweating up and down the backbar slot. There were no mirrors or chandeliers. A few oil lamps on the walls, flickering on insufficient oil, and two ceiling-hung lanterns above round card tables where players sat in candy-striped shirts and laborers’ coveralls. One poker, one faro. Scrape of chair leg and bootheels, chinking of coin, clink of bottles against glasses, lusty voices; the place was thick and close, redolent of spilled whiskey and stale beer and used tobacco smoke. The floor was scuffed adobe and boots had worn a trench in it along the base of the keg-line of the bar.
Boag bought a five-cent beer and saw the barkeep make a face when Boag presented a ten-dollar gold piece; Boag took his beer and his change and went over to the back end of the bar to eat the free lunch that came with the beer. The sandwich bread was stale as overcooked toast and the slices of dry beef had curled up at the edges but it was nourishment and he chewed steadily while he put his attention on the faro rig.
The rigger was sliding cards out of the faro box, intoning “Queen loses, six wins.” They were playing for two-bits a card and Boag switched his interest to the poker table, moving along the back wall to bring it in focus and then standing backed against the ’dobe, thumbs hooked in his pockets, keeping to the shadow where he wouldn’t draw attention.
The game was table-stakes pot limit with a four-bit ante. There were six players around the table, playing with varying degrees of interest and intensity. Boag singled out a middle-sized man whose face had a shape and texture that reminded Boag of heaped walnuts in a wooden bowl. The man played carelessly, without a great deal of attention; obviously he was playing to pass the time and didn’t much care about the game, but he was getting a good run of cards and in the first ten minutes Boag saw him rake in two fair kitties and one forty-dollar pot.
One of the others addressed walnut-face: “You finding enough good cards tonight, Elmer. You put the Indian sign on that deck?”
“You know I had it in mind to try cheating you boys,” Elmer said cheerfully, “but when you all sat down to play I saw I wasn’t going to have to. ’Scuse me a minute, save my chair. Deal me out one hand.” Elmer went over to the bar to buy another drink and the player beside him put his boot up on Elmer’s chair to keep anybody else from sitting there.
When Elmer returned to his chair Boag settled down to watch the game and wait it out.
Elmer said, “Lee Roy, when you aim to get delivery on that cherrywood bed I ordered?”
“Should of been here by now. I can’t say. You know the way things get, coming across. They had to ship it out of Boston and probably it got held up wagoning acrost Panama. Then they bring it up to San Pedro on an ocean steamer and they transfer it onto one of the Johnson-Yaeger steamers up there, and it got to come all the way back around below Baja California and up to the mouth of the Colorado and then they got to transfer it again over onto one of the riverboats. I mind that rocking horse Mrs. Watson ordered from Baltimore took eight months getting here. You just never can tell.”
Boag sipped his beer and watched with his eyes half closed. A man who could afford to order a cherrywood bed shipped from Boston wasn’t poor.
One of the other players said, “Hey talking about steamers and all, what the hell happened to the Uncle Sam?”
Lee Roy said, “What you mean?”
“She was due in yesterday. Still ain’t showed up. My cousin Brill supposed to be on board, comin’ back down from Hardyville. I hear he made two thousand on pelts this season. Man we want to rope him into this poker game, he shows up.”
“Well two days ain’t much overdue,” Elmer said comfortably. “I raise you three dollar, Sammy.”
“Fold,” Lee Roy said. “I wouldn’t worry much. She might of got hung up on a sand bar. Sometimes takes them three, four days to work loose of them sand bars in the river.”
“I call,” Sammy said, “give me two cards.”
Now that gave Boag something to think about. The Uncle Sam hadn’t showed up in Yuma yet but Boag hadn’t passed her anywhere on the river and he’d come all the way down by raft behind her. He’d expected they would probably ram right through Yuma on the river and keep going right down to the estuary of the Colorado, which was in Mexico and out of Arizona’s jurisdiction. But she hadn’t come through. Now where the hell did you hide a hundred-foot paddlewheel steamboat?
It took him fifteen minutes’ thinking but he finally worked out how they must have done it, and that made him feel better. A good deal better because it meant he wasn’t as far behind them as he had feared.
He watched Elmer’s stake grow steadily for two and a half hours until Lee Roy suddenly stood up and pressed both fists into the small of his back to lean back and stretch. “That’s it for me, Elmer, your luck’s running too good tonight. I’ll see you boys.”
It broke up the game. New players started to move in to the table and once three of the original players had left, Elmer didn’t seem to see any reason to stay around and let the others try to get even. He scooped his winnings into a canvas poke and pulled the drawstring shut and stuffed the poke down in his hip pocket, finished off his drink—it was the fifth shot of whiskey Boag had seen him down—and meandered out of the saloon, pausing twice to talk to acquaintances. While Elmer was talking to the second one, at the bar, Boag moved slowly to the door and went outside.