The Kid raised his eyebrows. “You’re saying he’s a revolutionary?”
“So he claims.”
“Sort of odd that a man like that would have a bunch of gringo gun-wolves working for him, don’t you think?” the Kid mused.
“General Ramirez hires anybody he believes can help him out, I reckon,” O’Reilly said. He drew the second beer and set it in front of the Kid. “From what I just saw, I think he’ll want to hire you, Mr. Callahan . . . if he decides he can trust you.”
“So I reckon this fella Ramirez is north of the border right now?”
“He’s got a place not far from here. An old abandoned rancho. He and his men moved in there a while back.” O’Reilly’s voice dropped even more. “Rumor is that the Rurales made it too hot for him across the line. That doesn’t stop him and his men from paying a visit now and then, when their funds run low. There’s a railroad that runs not too far on the other side of the border and a few settlements within a day’s ride.”
“So you’re saying that he’s really more of a bandit and train robber than a real revolutionary.”
At that moment the three men at the far end of the bar pushed their empties across the hardwood, turned away, and started toward the entrance. O’Reilly picked up a glass from the backbar, plucked a rag from an apron pocket, and began industriously polishing the glass as he whistled, a low, tuneless sound.
The gunnies cast idly curious glances at the Kid as they walked past. None of them had stepped up to defend Bracken or try to settle the score for him. That didn’t surprise the Kid. The gunman’s code said a man was supposed to stomp his own snakes, and you never risked your life unless you were getting paid for it.
The Kid drank some of his beer while the three men pushed through the batwings and departed. The poker game continued, but the men there were engrossed in their cards. The two townsmen weren’t paying any attention to the Kid and O’Reilly, either.
“I reckon you didn’t want those hombres to know you were talking about their boss,” the Kid said quietly.
O’Reilly shook his head and said, “I just don’t want to get in any trouble. I’ve said too much already. I got to live here.”
“You own this saloon?”
“No, it belongs to Mr. Griffith over there.” O’Reilly nodded toward the frock-coated man at the poker table. “But I’ve got a home. A wife and a kid. Just forget I said anything, all right? Just do me that favor.”
“Like I told you, you don’t have to worry about me, friend.” The Kid set the half-empty mug on the bar. “Sure I can’t pay you for this?”
“No, it’s all right.”
The Kid nodded and said, “I’ll be seeing you, then.”
O’Reilly still looked nervous as the Kid left. That was the permanent expression on the faces of the town’s citizens. The ones who didn’t work for this General Diego Ramirez, that is.
The Kid untied the buckskin from the hitch rack and led the horse along the street to a livery stable. The man who greeted him was tall and rawboned, with graying, rusty hair and a black patch over his left eye. He hooked his thumbs in the straps of his overalls and cast an approving eye over the buckskin.
“Fine-lookin’ hoss, mister,” he said to the Kid. “You lookin’ for a place to put him up?”
“For now,” the Kid replied. “Probably a day or two, maybe longer.”
“Four bits a day, countin’ feed.”
The Kid nodded and handed over two silver dollars.
“That’ll take care of the bill for a few days. My name’s Callahan, by the way.”
“Ezra Dawson.” The liveryman cocked the brow over his good eye. “You got business in Saguaro Springs?”
“That remains to be seen,” the Kid replied dryly. He took his saddlebags and Winchester and headed diagonally across the street toward the Chuckwalla Hotel.
It was a decent-looking place, not fancy, at least on the outside, but sturdy and probably comfortable. As he stepped up onto the low porch, one of the double front doors opened and a woman came out.
She was in a hurry, and she was agitated, to boot. She wasn’t watching where she was going. The Kid stepped aside quickly and neatly to avoid being run into. Only then did she notice he was there. She stopped short and said, “Oh, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he told her. “No harm done.” He smiled. “Even if you’d plowed right into me, I don’t reckon I’d have had any cause to complain.”
That was the truth. The woman was young, early twenties more than likely, and quite attractive. Her long blond hair was pulled back and tied tightly behind her neck to hang in a horsetail down her back. She would have been even prettier, the Kid thought, if she wore her hair loose around her face, so it would soften the rather stern lines of her features a little. She was dressed in a white, long-sleeved shirt and long brown skirt.
Her striking blue eyes looked over the Kid and she didn’t seem too impressed with what she saw. He couldn’t blame her for that, since he knew he looked like a saddle tramp covered with trail dust.
“You’re a bit forward, aren’t you, sir?” she said. “Commenting on a . . . a physical collision between us is improper.”
“Not my intention,” the Kid drawled. “I just try to tell the truth as I see it.”
She nodded toward his saddlebags and rifle and asked, “Are you planning to get a room here at the hotel?”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Then I’m sure we’ll see each other again. Don’t feel any necessity to engage in conversation on those occasions.”
“Keep my improper mouth shut, eh?” The Kid shrugged. “If that’s the way you want it, miss.”
“It is,” she said. She turned and headed off along the porch without looking back.
The Kid started to go inside, but he paused in the door to glance after her. As he did, he caught her looking back over her shoulder at him. He smiled, and she jerked her head around and walked quicker.
He couldn’t help but wonder who she was.
He went into the hotel, looked around the lobby, and saw that his hunch had been correct. The furnishings weren’t the newest or the most elaborate, but they were well cared for. Everything was clean, from the windows to the potted plants to the rugs on the polished floor. For a hotel in a settlement not far from the Mexican border, the Chuckwalla was a nice place, and that had to result from the pride of the people who ran it.
A handsome, middle-aged woman with graying blond hair stood behind the registration desk on the other side of the lobby. As the Kid approached, he saw a resemblance between her and the young woman who had almost run into him outside. Given their ages, more than likely this woman was the younger one’s mother.
She gave the Kid the same sort of wary look that the woman on the porch had and asked, “Can I help you?”
He set his saddlebags on the counter and tucked the Winchester under his left arm.
“I’d like a room,” he said. “I’ll probably be staying several days.”
“Rooms are two dollars a night,” she said, her tone indicating that she believed he wouldn’t be able to afford that.
“All right,” the Kid said as he took a ten-dollar gold piece from his pocket and slid it across the desk. “That ought to buy me five nights, if I’m doing my ciphering right.”
The woman arched her eyebrows and said, “Yes, that’s correct.” The swiftness with which she made the gold coin disappear told the Kid that the hotel probably didn’t do a great deal of business. The woman wasn’t going to miss out on this chance to collect. She turned the registration book around. “You’ll need to sign in.”
He picked up a pen from a holder on the desk and wrote John Callahan on the next empty line in the register. In the space for where he was from, he wrote simply Texas. That was a big place, and nobody was going to question him claiming it as his home. He wasn’t going to put Boston, where he had grown up.
The woman must have had experience reading upsi
de down. She took a key from the rack on the wall behind the desk and placed it in front of him as she said, “All right, Mr. Callahan, you’ll be in Room Nine. Turn right at the top of the stairs. The room is on the front of the hotel, so you’ll have some breeze, at least part of the time.”
“I’m obliged to you,” he said as he picked up the key. He glanced around the lobby. “The hotel doesn’t have a dining room?”
“No, but there’s a good café in the next block. It’s called Abuelo’s. You should be able to dine satisfactorily there.”
The Kid nodded and said, “I have one more question, if you don’t mind.” When she just looked at him and didn’t say anything, he went on, “Why is this place called the Chuckwalla Hotel?”
For the first time, her serious expression eased slightly. She said, “My late husband named the hotel. He was a prospector, you see, and in the days before the settlement was here, he got lost in the desert and nearly died of thirst. Then he spotted a lizard scurrying along and decided to follow it, thinking that it might lead him to water. He wound up at the springs, and they saved his life. When he looked around, he thought it might be a good place for a town, so he gave up prospecting and started a little trading post and hotel.”
“You’re saying that he founded the town,” the Kid said.
“For all intents and purposes, yes. He called it Chuckwalla Springs at first, after the lizard, but some of the other early settlers convinced him that Saguaro Springs sounded better. He gave up the trading post to concentrate on the hotel, and he said that he was going to name it after the chuckwalla that had saved his life, and no one was going to make him change his mind. I’d met and gotten married to him by then, and I knew how stubborn he could be, so I didn’t even try. This place has been the Chuckwalla ever since.”
The Kid had gotten more of a story than he had bargained for. The woman suddenly looked a little surprised and flustered that she had told him the whole thing, too.
“Listen to me ramble on like that,” she said. “I’m sorry to have bored you, Mr. Callahan.”
“You didn’t bore me,” the Kid assured her. “Anyway, I’m the one who asked the question.”
“Yes, but my daughter, Peggy, says that I talk too much. I’m Henrietta, by the way. Henrietta Cole.”
“I’m guessing your daughter left here right before I came in.”
“That’s right. How did you—Oh. You saw her on the porch, I suppose.”
“Yep. And I can see the resemblance between you. I figured you had to be mother and daughter.”
“At least you didn’t waste your time and mine by pretending to think we were sisters.” Mrs. Cole sobered again. “I run a clean, decent hotel, Mr. Callahan. I don’t know your business here, and I don’t want to know. As long as you don’t cause any trouble, that’s all I care about.”
“I don’t know exactly what my business here is, either,” the Kid said. “I was just sort of drifting, but then a fella talked to me about a job. Man named Kern. You might know him.”
The woman’s lips thinned in disapproval. She said, “I know of him, and the other men who work for that self-proclaimed general. You didn’t really strike me as the same type, Mr. Callahan, otherwise we probably wouldn’t have had this conversation. I have no dealings with gunmen and thieves.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to rent me a room after all?” the Kid asked quietly.
Mrs. Cole hesitated, then said, “No, I wouldn’t go that far. You didn’t say you were actually working for General Ramirez yet. If you do, he’ll probably want you to stay out there at that cursed hacienda of his, at least part of the time, so you may not want to keep your room here.”
The Kid arched an eyebrow and said, “Cursed? What do you mean by that?”
Mrs. Cole drew in a deep breath and shook her head. “I’ve said too much already,” she told him. “I have work to do. Room number nine,” she repeated. “Top of the stairs and turn right.”
With that she went through a door behind the registration desk and closed it behind her, leaving the Kid standing there to digest all the things he had found out since riding into Saguaro Springs . . . and wonder about the things he had just gotten hints of.
Chapter 16
The room was comfortable, with a good bed, a chair and a table with a wash basin and pitcher on it, a woven rug on the floor, and sunny yellow curtains over the window that overlooked the street. The air in the room was a little stale, so the Kid pushed the curtains back and raised the window.
As he did that, he looked diagonally across the street at the Cactus Saloon. A couple of gun-hung hardcases who undoubtedly worked for General Ramirez pushed out through the batwings and slouched off down the street. The townspeople all stayed out of their way.
The Kid wondered just how many gunnies the general had working for him. They seemed pretty abundant in Saguaro Springs, and they had the settlement’s citizens spooked.
He stretched out on the bed for a while but didn’t sleep. Instead he stared toward the ceiling and pondered on the task facing him. It seemed obvious that this self-styled General Ramirez was responsible for Frank’s kidnapping. The ransom he had demanded would go to fund his revolution.
Such a bold move told the Kid that maybe Ramirez was serious about trying to raise an army and overthrow President Porfirio Díaz. Other revolutionaries were content to use such political posturing as a cover for being bandits, plain and simple. Such men rose to prominence from time to time but always were crushed by Mexican government forces or else faded away for some other reason.
From what the bartender O’Reilly had told him, the Kid knew that Ramirez and his men sometimes held up trains and raided settlements below the border, but if they could get a quarter of a million dollars for Frank Morgan, they wouldn’t have to do that anymore. Ramirez could buy enough guns and ammunition and recruit enough men to make a serious stab at unseating Díaz.
Honestly, the Kid didn’t know if that would be a good thing or a bad one for Mexico. Sure, Ramirez was an outlaw, but Díaz had a reputation as a brutal dictator. Mexico had almost always been ruled by men who were bandits at heart. Ramirez might do just as good a job as any of the others.
None of that was his business, the Kid decided. Ramirez had kidnapped Frank and threatened his life, and that made him an enemy. Not only that, Ramirez’s men were terrorizing this town. That was another good reason to make sure the general’s plans didn’t succeed. The Kid realized the odds against him were high—one man against several dozen hired killers and desperadoes, maybe more—but he planned to have the element of surprise on his side. And if things worked out the way he wanted, he would be striking at them from inside . . .
As evening came on, he went downstairs to the lobby, figuring he’d go look for that café Henrietta Cole had mentioned earlier. The older woman wasn’t behind the desk, but Peggy was. The Kid couldn’t resist sauntering over to talk to her.
“I see you help your mother run the hotel,” he said to Peggy.
“That’s right.” Her chin jutted out a little. “I thought I told you it wasn’t necessary for us to have any more conversations.”
“People do a lot of things that aren’t strictly necessary, just because they want to.”
“But I don’t want to talk to you, Mr. Callahan.”
“You saw my name in the book, eh?”
“I keep track of whoever is staying here, yes.”
Her chilly attitude was beginning to annoy him. He said, “Look, I don’t know what I did to rub you the wrong way, Miss Cole, but it wasn’t intentional. I’d just as soon call a truce and see if we can’t be friends.”
She glared across the desk at him and snapped, “You haven’t rubbed me in any way. That’s the sort of bold talk that I don’t like.”
“I didn’t mean it like that, and you know it.”
“Do I?” she asked coolly. “I’ve heard that you may be going to work for Ramirez. His men have a habit of swaggering around town and takin
g whatever they want, and nobody dares to try to stand up to them. Not after what happened to Mr. Jenkins—”
Her voice choked off and she looked down at the desk. After a couple of seconds, the Kid asked, “Who’s Mr. Jenkins, and what happened to him?”
Her blue eyes lifted. Defiance flared in them. She said, “He owned one of the stores. A couple of Ramirez’s men came in there, said unspeakable things to Mrs. Jenkins, and started to take some things without paying for them. Mr. Jenkins was already upset because of the way they had behaved toward his wife. He tried to stop them from leaving with his goods, and they beat him very badly.”
“I’m sorry,” the Kid said.
“That’s not the worst of it,” Peggy said. “He got the gun he kept under the counter and followed them into the street. When he brandished the gun at them, one of the men turned around and shot him. Killed him.”
The Kid shook his head and said, “That’s a shame, but if this fella Jenkins had a gun in his hand and was threatening to use it—”
“I know, I know,” Peggy said bitterly. “It was a fair fight. That’s what the law would have said—if we had any law in Saguaro Springs. But honestly, an elderly storekeeper like Mr. Jenkins against a cold-blooded killer like Carl Bracken . . . how could that possibly be fair, no matter who had a gun in his hand first?”
Bracken. The Kid wasn’t surprised that he had gunned down one of the townspeople. More than likely, Bracken had gone into the store just looking for an excuse to kill somebody.
“Anybody else in town have a run-in like that?” the Kid asked quietly.
“Shot down in the middle of the street like a dog, you mean?” Peggy shook her head. “No, but Señor Hernandez at the blacksmith shop got into an argument with some of the general’s men, and he disappeared that night. He hasn’t been seen since. And other men who clashed with them have been beaten. It’s only a matter of time before someone else is killed.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with any of that,” the Kid pointed out.
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