“So you’re one of us now, at least for the time being.”
Conway frowned, visibly upset by Frank’s words. “No offense, Frank,” he said, “but this fellow is an outlaw. As far as we know, he may be the one who killed Neville.”
Jennings shook his head emphatically. “I didn’t kill nobody, Mr. Conway. I was holdin’ the horses while the rest of the boys jumped your camp and grabbed them ladies. I swear it.”
“Yeah, you’d say that whether it was true or not,” Conway said with a disdainful grunt.
Jennings held up a hand like he was being sworn in to testify in court. “Word of honor, sir. I…I stole plenty of things in my life, but I never killed nobody, at least not that I know of.”
“You can travel with us as long as you behave yourself,” Frank said. “Get out of line, though, especially with the women, and you’re on your own.”
“You can count on me, Mr. Morgan.”
The three of them walked along the street, Frank resting a hand on Jennings’s shoulder to guide him. Ike’s was a tent saloon with a couple of stumps in front of it where pine trees had been cut down. When Frank pushed aside the canvas flap over the entrance and stepped inside, he saw several more stumps sticking up from the dirt floor. Men sat on them to drink, using them as makeshift chairs. The bar was to the right. It consisted of rough planks laid across the tops of several whiskey barrels. As a saloon, Ike’s was about as crude as it could be.
It was doing good business, though. More than a dozen men stood around nursing drinks from tin cups, and all the stumps were occupied. Frank looked around and spotted a familiar pile of furs shuffling along the bar, stopping next to each of the customers to ask something. Each of the men shook his head, and some of them barked angrily at the desolate old-timer.
In fact, one of the drinkers seemed to take offense at being approached like that. He turned toward Salty and said loudly, “Get away from me, you damned bum.” He drew his arm across his body, as if he were about to backhand the old-timer.
Frank’s left hand fell hard on the man’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, mister,” he said.
The man jerked around with a furious glare on his face. He started to say, “Who the hell do you think you—” Then he stopped short as he saw the menace glittering in The Drifter’s eyes. He said, “You know that old tramp?”
“We’re amigos,” Frank said.
“You ought to keep him from bothering people, then.”
Frank took his hand off the man’s shoulder, reached into his pocket, and found a coin. He tossed it on the bar and said coldly, “Next drink’s on me. Just take it down to the other end of the bar.”
“Sure, sure,” the man muttered. He held out his tin cup to the moon-faced bartender for a refill, then moved away toward the other end of the bar.
“Thanks, Tex,” Salty said, “but you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorta used to gettin’ walloped.”
“Well, you shouldn’t be. We want to talk to you, Salty. Is there someplace better than this?”
Salty licked his lips, which were barely visible under the bushy white mustache and beard. “I reckon we could go to my shack.”
“How about if we take a bottle with us?”
Salty cackled. “Now you’re talkin’! Damned if you ain’t!”
Frank bought a bottle from the bartender, who looked like a half-breed. The bottle had no label on it, and he was sure that what was inside had been brewed up in one of those barrels. It was probably raw stuff, but if they were lucky, it wouldn’t give them the blind staggers.
The four men went outside. Salty led the way to the edge of the settlement, stopping at something that was more shed than shack, a haphazard arrangement of broken boards, tarpaper, tin, and canvas. It looked almost like the various parts of it had been thrown up in the air, and however they came down was the way Salty had left it.
The place had a door, though, and when they went inside, Frank saw that it had a rickety table as well, and a tangle of blankets in a corner that served as a bunk. The only places to sit down were a wobbly stool and an empty nail keg. Frank told Salty and Jennings to take those seats, and then placed the bottle in the center of the table.
Salty licked his lips again and obviously ached to grab the bottle, but he resisted its lure for the moment. “How come you’re bein’ so nice to me, Tex?” he asked.
“I told you, we’re from the same part of the country. And the name’s Frank Morgan, by the way, not Tex.”
Salty’s head jerked up. “Frank Morgan!” he repeated. “You mean The Drifter?”
“Heard of me, have you?”
“Damn straight I have! You might not know it to look at me, but there was a time I worked as a range detective with a cousin o’ mine and his pardner, and I was friends for a while with a deputy U.S. marshal, too. I weren’t never an official lawman, mind you, but I was next thing to it.” The old-timer sighed. “Them was better days, that’s for damn’ sure. Anyway, I heard of you, sure enough, Mr. Morgan. And the way I heard it, you’re one o’ the fastest fellas ever to slap leather. If anybody’d asked me, though, I’d’ve had to say that I didn’t know whether you was still alive.”
Frank grinned. “I’m still kicking, all right. Tell me, Salty, where are you from?”
“Well, I was born in Arizony. Or was it New Mexico Territory? Been so long ago, I don’t rightly remember. But I growed up all over the whole Southwest, a-huntin’ and a-trappin’. Met one o’ the last o’ the old-time mountain men once, a contrary ol’ critter called Preacher. When I got a few more years on me, I done a mite of scoutin’ for the army and drove a stagecoach for a while out Californy way. It was a while later I met that marshal fella and then went to range detectin’. Been a good life, a mighty full life.”
Conway said, “A man your age ought to be sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, enjoying his old age.”
Salty got a truculent look on his bushy face. “Old age, is it? I’ll have you know, young fella, that I can still mush all day on a pair o’ snowshoes if I have to, and I can grab a gee-pole and handle a team o’ sled dogs just fine, too.”
“What brought you to Alaska in the first place?” Frank asked.
“Gold, o’ course, same thing as brought all these other cheechakos and stampeders up here!” Salty paused, and when he went on, there was a wistful note in his voice. “And I, uh, got a mite tired o’ sittin’ on my granddaughter’s front porch in that rockin’ chair the young fella just mentioned. Figured I might have one last grand adventure in me, so I took off for the Klondike! Found me a nice gold claim, too, and worked it for a while. Had me a poke full o’ nuggets when I got back here.”
“And then what happened?”
“Soapy Smith and his gang o’ thieves and swindlers and murderers happened,” Salty said. “Soapy claimed I was breakin’ a local ord’nance when I got drunk, and he got his pet judge to sock a big fine against me. One o’ his pickpockets finished cleanin’ me out. I couldn’t go home, couldn’t go back across the passes to Whitehorse, couldn’t do nothin’ but stay here and become a bum.” The old-timer spread his hands. “And that’s what you see before you now, gents. A plumb worthless excuse for an old fool.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Frank said. “You say you’ve been to Whitehorse, so you must have been over Chilkoot Pass.”
“Yeah, and White Pass, too. You got to go over it before you get to Chilkoot.”
“What do you think? If a party left Skagway in the next day or two, could they get over the passes and make it to Whitehorse before winter sets in?”
Salty frowned, but the only way to tell it was by the way the scraggly curtain of white hair lowered over his brow. “Well, I don’t rightly know. I’d have to think on it…and I think a mite better when my thinkin’ apparatus is lubricated.”
Frank pushed the bottle of rotgut toward him. “Oil it up, old-timer.”