The man did not hear my approach and I jammed my Colt hard into the hollow of his neck and cocked it. He froze and the smoking pipe dropped from his mouth.
He started to turn and I jabbed the Colt in harder. ‘Not a word,’ I said quietly. ‘Not even a whisper.’ I pulled back the gun and slapped him very hard alongside the head with the steel barrel, stepping clear as he rolled back toward me, dead to the world.
I carefully picked up the young raven, familiar with the bird as I had a tame one as a kid. For a long time it had been my only companion, the brightest of birds. This one settled in my hands after I had cut his restraint with my folding knife, and I carried him to the edge of the small pool. He drank, filling his beak and holding his head back as he swallowed the cool water, but made no attempt to fly away. His wing settled back to its normal position and he sat on my hat for an hour or so, watching carefully as I tied the hands of his captor and attached his booted feet to the peg vacated by the raven. Seemingly satisfied with my actions, he made a squawking noise, whistled, and hobbled to the edge of the clearing. He looked back just the once before launching himself down the escarpment, flying too close to the ground for a while before gaining lift and soaring upwards and over the rocky cliff and lost to my sight.
‘What the hell . . .’ the man said, shaking his head as he emerged from the darkness of his unexpected sleep and finding himself tethered as had been his Judas bird. ‘Cut me loose, damn it.’
‘You have two chances, Mister. Maybe your friends will find you, or you may free yourself; the restraints are not that firm. Either way, I will look back this way in a couple of days and if you are still here and a big cat hasn’t found you, I will free you or bury you.’
‘I get out of this, I will find and kill you. You can’t ride far and fast enough.’
‘The ramblings of a fool,’ I said, removing his neckerchief and using it as a gag, ‘and best to go unheard.’ I left him there with those few words of wisdom, wondering what he made of them and why I had not told Henri Larsson about the inspiration for my tattoo.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Margaret Vagg
Frank Vagg was an impatient man. Several of his life-shaping decisions on the long journey from the green pastures of Virginia to the dusty border town of San Pedro had been hasty and spur-of-the-moment affairs. Some had worked out while others had not, but he had learned one valuable lesson, and that was not to press his sister. Margaret Vagg had arrived home that morning. The liveryman’s surrey had brought her, Lefranc and her moderate luggage back out to the Circle V. She was dusty and irritable, and insisted on a hot bath and a change of clothes before reporting in full to her brother. Vagg settled on the porch and chewed on a cheroot, fighting the urge that boiled within him to know of her news from San Antonio.
Margaret Vagg was, like her older brother, slight of stature but not to such a degree as to be unattractive to men. An inch or so taller than Vagg, with auburn hair, a pale, high-cheekbone face and piercing blue eyes that could at one and the same time attract the attention of a man and warn him that it was not an open invitation to flirt; that was left to her full red lipped mouth. Those lips, if the eyes agreed, could welcome a kiss, but if they did not then the curl of the upper lip could destroy him in an instant. Margaret Vagg was very aware of these facts and used them to profound effect while dining and dancing in San Antonio at the expense of the businessmen who sought her out, not only for her own charms, but for the fact that any dealings with Frank Vagg could sometimes lead to a healthy profit.
Vagg looked up, dogged his cheroot and got to his feet, giving her a gentle hug and a kiss on each cheek as she reached him and sat herself beside him. ‘Drink, Marge, dear?’ he asked.
She hated being called Marge, but it was his little intimacy and she bore it, albeit somewhat grudgingly. ‘I have asked Miguel to bring us a bottle of chilled white wine and two glasses,’ she said quietly, a deep, pleasant voice that, given the occasion, could render a good tune.
‘How was San Antonio? Worthwhile, I hope?’
‘That depends, brother mine.’
‘On what?’
‘On how we move forward from here.’ She took a small leather-bound book and sheaf of papers from her purse and set them in front of him.
Vagg gave them a cursory inspection and pushed them to one side. He waited knowing she would condense their content in a few clear and concise sentences if she so wished.
Miguel, the manservant, brought a silver tray, a jug of ice, a bottle and two long stemmed wine glasses. He uncorked the bottle as was his duty but knew better than to pour the wine. That, as always, was the master’s task.
They sat there in the early afternoon sunshine, sipping their wine and making small talk about the ranch until, much to Vagg’s relief, she told him of her visit to the halls of power in uptown San Antonio.
‘Things are not as they were when I last visited. There are nervous men everywhere. Talk is that the railroad could go either way, and only one of them is our way.’ She reached for the box of cheroots on the table and Vagg leaned forward and fired it for her. She inhaled deeply and, tipping her head back, blew the smoke into the air above them before stubbing the smoke out in the ashtray provided earlier by Miguel. ‘Filthy habit,’ she said. ‘Tobacco on the breath of a man is not pleasant, so I would guess it to be doubly unpleasant to a man on the breath of a woman.’
‘And the other?’ Vagg asked, ignoring her thoughts on tobacco as he had so many times before.
‘Diablo is on, all good there; we will receive more information and details on that in the next two weeks, but I have no doubt that is ours for the taking.’
Vagg could not hide his delight and whooped, laughed and drained his glass. ‘If the railroad comes here then we will make a killing, enough at least to leave this godforsaken place and return to a com- fortable enough civilisation. Great, but if Diablo pays off then we will be walking in tall cotton for the rest of our lives; now that is something to look forward to.’
‘How have things been here, Frank? I saw Jimmy Olds skulking out by the barn with a large bandage on the side of his head and Heck Monroe sitting on the bunkhouse stoop, looking to be the saddest man I ever did see. He hardly acknowledged my passing; so unlike him.’
‘The men are restless, bored maybe. Jimmy took it upon himself to roust a stranger in town and said stranger shot his ear off. I sent Monroe into town to see to this hombre and he put poor old Heck on his back with a kick to that region on a man’s body that is most vulnerable.’
‘He kicked him in the cojones? Poor old Heck, he won’t be riding for a spell then.’
Vagg winced; there was a certain vulgarity about his sister of which he did not approve, but which he accepted, knowing it was one of the so-called virtues that endeared her to the rich and the powerful men of San Antonio. She could, at one and the same time, be one of the boys or one of the girls, depending upon her own needs. ‘I guess not,’ was all he could think to say.
‘What do you intend to do about the men here? We cannot afford to draw any attention to this place; at least not until we have finished with it.’
‘That’s exactly what I told Temple.’
‘And what did good old Jack say. . . ?
Vagg ignored the sarcasm in her tone, knowing full well that his sister did not approve of his reliance on the bodyguard. ‘I suggested and he agreed that we hire this stranger, have him on the inside of the house pissing out rather than on the outside pissing in, so to speak.’
‘Delicately put as usual, Frank.’
He dismissed her remark with a thin-shouldered shrug. ‘I am just saying, is all.’
‘Who is he? What is he? Would he take the job?’ she said.
‘Billy Bob says there is a federal warrant on the man from sometime back, and Jack says he knew him a long time ago in Wichita. Got in a bit of a hole there, according to Jack. Says he’s called the Peaceful River Kid but no one other than Jack seems to have heard of him. Whatever, I
am in town day after tomorrow so Jack will introduce us. We’ll see how it goes.’
‘I’m coming with you: I have to see the man fast enough to outshoot Jimmy the Deuce and hard enough to beat up on Hector Monroe. He must be some kind of a man; the kind of a man I would like to meet.’
Vagg did not like the licentious chuckle that followed her words, but knew only too well that it would be useless to object to her company.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Invitation with a shotgun
It was little Willy Jones, the unfortunate companion of both Jimmy the Deuce and Big Heck Monroe, who braced me somewhat nervously at the bar of the Red Diamond. I looked up from my newspaper, dropped my reading glasses an inch or two and stared down at him over the metal topped frames. He cleared his throat several times but was having trouble with the words.
‘Come on, Willy, have you brought another little friend for me to fool around with? Been kind of a slow day?’
‘Mr Vagg would like you to join him over at the Drover’s Club for a private dinner and drink, sir.’ Jones stuttered out the words.
‘I already ate,’ I said.
‘Perhaps, Mr Bassett, just for the drink then?’
‘He told you to say that?’
‘Yes, sir: he said if it were too late for dinner, would you please join him for a nightcap? Those were his exact words.’
I could not help feeling sorry for the little man; he had seen me shoot his friend’s ear off and then floor another buddy with a crotch kick. He looked at me like he was a pack rat face-to-face with a sidewinder and with nowhere run. ‘Look, Jonesy, you tell your boss that if he wants to talk to me then I am in the Red Diamond. I would be happy to share a nightcap with him. You tell him I am kind of comfortable here right now.’ I turned back to my paper and watched him in the long bar mirror as he crossed the room and walked out into the flickering darkness.
An hour later, after a pleasant jaw with Ben the barber I shared a drink quietly with Mort Cullis the undertaker, a friendly but sombre-looking man befitting of his trade. He was unsettling in the way he looked at me sideways, like he was estimating my height. I folded my glasses, said goodnight and left. Main Street was quiet. A drunken cowboy walked his pony toward me. It seemed he was having difficulty staying in the saddle, as he rolled forward I stepped out to steady him and, all too late, I saw the grin on his face and felt the jab of something hard in the small of my back. The rider was the man I had hogtied for trapping the raven, and the voice behind the gun at my back was that of Jimmy the Deuce. I felt like Jonesy’s rat when confronted with a rattler.
‘This is a sawed-off twelve gauge, Bassett, loaded with double ought buck, and you so much as move towards that fancy Colt on your hip and I will happily blow you in half. Happily, you understand that?’
I nodded and raised my hands.
‘Put your hands down. We do not want to attract attention. Step back here into the shadows. Jerry, get his gun, and be careful: he is a tricky sonofabitch.’
The man called Jerry reached out and removed my gun. I did not even twitch, although every inch of me wanted to. Sometimes you just know that hole card is the one-eyed jack of hearts when you really need the ace of spades.
Jimmy Olds jabbed the shotgun in a little harder than was necessary to get me moving. ‘The Drover’s Club it is then, boys,’ I said, cheerfully. ‘But easy with that shotgun, because when this is over – and it will be over – I am going to shove it up your fat ass, Jimmy the Deuce.’
One-Eyed Jack Temple opened the door to Olds’ knock. He smiled at me and took my Colt, offered him by the man called Jerry. ‘That will be all, boys. Go get yourselves a drink. I will let you know when Mr Vagg is leaving.’
‘You sure, Mr Temple?’
‘Very sure. Goodnight.’ He closed the door behind them, smiled some more and handed me back my Colt. ‘Try not to shoot anyone this night or I might get fired. Come, follow me.’
He led me through to a larger room: a dining room with the remains of what looked to be fine supper spread out on the table. A woman was seated at the head of the table, an unlit cheroot in her hand. I reached into my vest pocket and, crossing the room, pulled out a blue top, thumb lit it and held it for her. She leaned forward and looked at me straight in the eye as she did so, drawing deep and blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth and not at me as I expected.
‘A man with manners at last. You and Jack here seem to be the only two in this godforsaken town.’ She offered me her hand and I took it. ‘Margaret Vagg. You can call me Margo, but never Marge.’
I gave her my winning smile. ‘Pleasure to meet you, Margo.’
‘Can I offer you a drink while we are waiting for my brother, Mr Bassett?’
I nodded.
‘Whiskey or wine, sir?’
‘Whiskey would do just fine, thank you.’
She poured me a generous measure from a crystal decanter, but I supposed it would have tasted just as good from the bottle. A small side door opened and a very frail man stepped into the room and surveyed it carefully before stepping out of the shadows. Frank Vagg was not very tall and his white suit hung on his bones like a drooping flag on a still day. He was of undetermined age, probably not as old as he looked. His skull-like head was framed in wisps of grey hair, and were it not for the shining black eyes then he could have been mistaken for a walking dead man. He moved towards me and held out his hand. It was moist, cold and limp in mine and I felt an urge to dash from the room and wash away the dampness transferred to mine in that brief moment of contact.
‘Forgive me for the heavy-handedness of your invitation, Mr Bassett, but time is time and it passes so quickly at my age. I do have need to speak with you tonight and I do not frequent saloons on any occasion. You do understand, I hope.’ His voice was little above a whisper.
‘No, not really,’ I said, sipping my drink and looking beyond him to where One-Eyed Jack Temple had stationed himself by the door, I assumed in readiness for any threat to his employer’s health.
‘It is really very simple, Mr Bassett.’ Margaret Vagg got to her feet and refreshed my glass. ‘We would very much like you to come and work for us. Mr Temple here regards you as the right man for the job at hand.’
‘I will handle this, Marge,’ Vagg interrupted her.
‘Well, then for goodness sake, get on with it. I am sure Mr Bassett has other things to do: shoot someone or beat them up or whatever it is he does best. Call me when you are agreed and we can take coffee and maybe a little champagne. Do you like champagne, Mr Bassett?’
I did not answer her but spoke directly to Vagg. I could see this irritated her and I thought to hell with them both.
‘You have shown yourself to be very capable at handling difficult men, sir, and I have several such men in my employ.’ The thin man fixed me with his dark eyes. ‘I am trying to run a cattle ranch, conduct business with the Mexicans and secure a future that is fitting and beneficial for all but alas, in some areas, I seem to be wanting. Mr Temple here tells me you know of such matters and would be a great and well-paid asset to my organisation. Are you interested?’
I set my empty glass on the table and declined a refill. ‘I have had a look around your organisation, Mr Vagg. A bunch of border trash, mostly: idle men who don’t know one end of a steer from the other. Your range is awash with unbranded cattle feeding on bad pasture when there is good grass to be had. Your fences are down and mostly these roughnecks sit around playing cards, drinking or killing wild birds for fun.’
‘A harsh judgement, sir.’
‘I wouldn’t take your coin if I was down to my last dollar, and I am a long way from being that.’
‘I take that as a no then, Mr Bassett. Pity, I admire your abilities but not your intellect, which is probably only one step above those you so readily choose to judge. You are a fool, sir.’
‘I have great faith in fools. Self-confidence, my friends call it,’ I said.
‘And you are very well read. Edg
ar Allen Poe, I believe. An even bigger fool.’
I turned to Margaret Vagg who was, sparingly, smiling at the exchange. I picked up my hat and bowed slightly toward her. ‘Thank you for your hospitality, Ma’am; I hope we meet again sometime.’
‘As do I, Mr Bassett,’ she said softly, and I could see the implied intimacy of the exchange annoyed the hell out of her brother.
I nodded to Temple but ignored Frank Vagg and said quietly, ‘I have some business to attend to in the Red Diamond. Come midnight you may well be two men down on the trash you employ.’ I turned and left them with those words. Only Jack Temple acknowledged my departure. I was a happy man.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A cold beer and hot lead
I believe in meeting trouble head on, and Jimmy the Deuce was trouble for me. I knew that I had to put an end to it; better it be sooner on my terms than maybe later on his from some dark alley. Releasing the hammer strap, I checked the loads in my Colt, put a couple of cotton plugs in my ears and walked across the dark street to the Red Diamond. It was a hot night and the double doors were open; there was still a sprinkling of customers drinking their nightcaps, thirsty or simply too reluctant to call it a night. Mort Cullis and the barber were exactly where I had left them and Billy Bob was at his usual table playing dominoes. A man in a straw hat and striped vest was playing the out-of-tune piano. The man called Jerry and his friend Jimmy Olds were standing in the centre and saw me in the long mirror. Both men froze.
It happens like that. The piano fell silent, conversation dried up and men moved out of the line of fire, seeming to know what was about to go down. I supposed Jimmy and Jerry had been bragging on how they rousted me.
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