Ever since that time he’d vowed always to remain conscious till he’d removed his holster and had been careful to slip no more than five shells into the chamber.
At the front door he shrugged his bear-like shoulders round and growled so viciously at his landlady’s request for some rent money that she retreated as fast as she could behind her parlor door and worked at her sampler as quickly as her swollen and arthritic fingers would allow.
Fowler stood for a few minutes on the sidewalk and looked up and down the tree-lined street and decided for the fifth time in the past five days that he was as sick of Sacramento as a jelly roll stud who’d fallen through the roof of a whorehouse and couldn’t get back out.
He sniffed at the air and found it treacherous enough to merit a shot more bourbon. The silver flask came out of his hip pocket almost as fast as another man would draw a pistol. Thing was, the bourbon took a deal longer to stretch a man out and was a sight more pleasurable in the process.
He walked towards the livery stable with all the assurance of a man whose mind is toying with the idea that the earth is liable to crack apart at any moment. Which, since he was in California, was not quite as fanciful as it might seem.
~*~
Mrs MacPhail lived in the foothills of the Sierras, about an hour’s ride north-east of Spanish Flat. Fowler had quarreled with the office, demanding that his client, if that was what she was to be, should get in one of the several fancy carriages she obviously owned and get herself driven down to Sacramento. But his argument carried no weight with the Old Man, who was too pleased with the prospect of some of the MacPhail gold coming his way to pay heed to the likes of Fowler.
Indeed, he was loath to send someone as disreputable as Fowler at all but all of the other operatives were out of town on other work and the only alternative would have been to have made the journey himself.
He didn’t want the gold in his safe that much.
So it was Fowler who sat heavy in the saddle of his placid chestnut mare and took the Green Valley road to the American River, sweated and cursed up the Marshall Grade until he leveled out on the Black Oak Mine road and was all set for Spanish Flat.
Well, he should have been set, anyway. But other things intervened, like the mare taking a stone in her back shoe and Fowler getting a powerful thirst that his flask couldn’t handle. He had no sooner wiped the dirt from the knees of his suit after dealing with the horse’s stone than he remembered there was a little general store up into the hills to the north of Black Oak Road. It sold about every damn thing you could think of, from hard tack to nails, and at times a man could be excused for thinking he’d paid for one and come away with the other. But what mattered to Fowler was that the place also sold liquor.
He managed to make his way up the winding track, ducking under low branches that sought to unseat him, and succeeded in tearing a rent several inches wide across the center of his coat back. Insects swarmed about his face and lashing out at them angrily he bloodied his knuckles against a tree close enough to meet the end of his swing. By the time he’d convinced himself that he’d taken the wrong track – or that the store had been a figment of his drunken imagination – there it was. Built out from the hillside so that the earth formed the back wall and part of the roof, it was fashioned from all manner of planks and boards and packing cases, patched here and there with tin. A mule was tied up outside and gazed at Fowler forlornly before depositing a giant turd as a form of greeting. A black and white goat, attached to a stake, sat on the roof and bleated.
Fowler tethered his horse out of range of the mule and pushed open the door.
The interior was dark and musty and smelt of rancid goats’ cheese and corn liquor and a few other things Fowler likely could have identified if he’d worked at it. Instead he nodded briefly at the couple of farmers who were taking a drink at the only table, set a squat hand on the greasy counter and asked the one-eyed man back of it for a shot of bourbon.
When it came it was in a glass that was chipped in several places round the edge as if one of the previous customers had tried to bite his way through the rim. The contents bore about as much resemblance to bourbon as a Nogales whore to a convent nun. Fowler drank it with his eyes more or less shut and his breath clemmed up in his throat. It still didn’t taste any better.
He wiped the back of his grazed hand across his mouth and put the glass back down with a bang. ‘Sure that’s bourbon?’
‘What it says on the label.’
‘Put up a sign out front callin’ this the Excelsior Palace, still wouldn’t be no more’n a flea-bitten old shack stinkin’ of goat shit!’
The one-eyed man stood back from the bar a-ways and set his head to one side. ‘Shouldn’t say things like that, mister. T’ain’t nice. ’Specially from strangers.’
Fowler nodded. He was hot and thirsty and riding up the Grade hadn’t helped his temper. At the end of it all he’d likely spend ten minutes with some rich old woman who’d give him orders like he was a kid with dirt hangin’ out of his ears and send him on his way without so much as a drink. He leaned a little towards the man and said in his growl of a voice: Tell you what you do, you throw some lamp oil about the place an’ hand me a match. That’s about the only way you’ll clean this hole up and make it fit for callers. You understand me?’
One-Eye scratched at a red sore at the side of his neck, close by a jutting angle of bone. His fingers were long and ingrained with dirt, their nails cracked and jagged. His single eye was large and dark and watery, a sliver of deep yellow passing over the top of the pupil. As Fowler stared at it, the eye twitched.
‘Got scratched an’ stung all the hell comin’ up here,’ Fowler went on, warming to his subject, letting all of his anger and frustration well out. ‘All for what? A shot of somethin’ out of a bottle with a bourbon label stuck on it which you get filled by lettin’ that mule of yours out there piss in it!’
‘Hey, mister!’ called one of the farmers off to the side. ‘That’s my mule you’re talkin’ about.’
‘You shut your damned mouth!’ burst Fowler, swinging him a threatening look. ‘This ain’t none of your concern.’
‘I told you, that’s my mule.’ He stood up and it took him a long time before he stopped. He wasn’t slow, just tall. Very tall. With his black hat crammed right down on his head, he was too tall for that room by a good twelve inches.
Fowler shrugged his heavy shoulders and turned away. The feller behind the bar was still looking put out and he showed a few broken ends of tooth in an otherwise empty mouth. Fowler wasn’t sure if the man was about to say something or spit.
Either way, Fowler moved to one side and slid his hand over the counter pretty quick, palming the quarter he’d paid for the drink.
The single, watering eye stared at him astonished. ‘Mister, you can’t—’
‘Just did,’ Fowler informed him, and he tipped the coin down into the side pocket of his torn coat.
‘That’s robbery.’
‘If that’s robbery, what d’you call chargin’ a quarter for that rotten mule’s-piss you call bourbon?’
‘I told you afore, stranger,’ called the farmer, his head jammed up against the ceiling, ‘don’t you go bad-mouthin’ my mule.’
‘An’ I told you to shut your mouth!’ Fowler scowled at him and his partner and headed for the door.
‘Mister!’
Fowler shook his head and kept on walking. The farmer was beginning to move across towards him and he glanced round and looked to see if he was carrying a gun. Which he wasn’t.
One-Eye was.
He’d pulled it out from where it lay inside an old biscuit box under the counter and now he was holding it at arm’s length, the long barrel pointing towards Fowler’s back.
‘Mister, you come back here with my money!’
‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Fowler, turning just before the doorway. ‘How many times I got to explain …’
Then he saw the pistol and knew that the time
for explaining had run out. As the man’s bony finger started to pull back on the trigger, Fowler decided to take evasive action. He threw himself sideways as quick as he could, his burly body hammering into a couple of flour sacks and driving them into a crate of assorted nails and a pile of boots and shoes, none of which matched. The moment he hit the floor the gun exploded and a bullet tore away a section of the roof a couple of feet from the top of the door.
Fowler shook his head, breathing with difficulty. His elbow stung where it had struck the floor and his forearm was numb. He made the mistake of taking his weight on that arm and toppled forward, butting one of the flour sacks. Over his shoulder he could see the one-eyed man struggling with the hammer of the long-barreled gun. He shifted his weight onto his other arm and started to reach inside his jacket for the Smith and Wesson. The stubbed ends of his fingers had just passed between coat and shirt when the tall farmer kicked him in the chest, the toe of his boot landing immediately below Fowler’s arm.
He was shunted several feet backwards, mouth open to a roar of surprise and pain, hand still half inside his coat. The farmer laughed and advanced on him, swinging his leg back to take a kick that sought to take his head clean off his body.
At that moment One-Eye succeeded in releasing the hammer of his gun and the slug ripped through the side of the farmer’s throat and embedded itself in the front wall. Blood spurted up over the ceiling, down the wall and across the floor. The farmer’s hands were at his throat, clapped over the wound as if trying to hold the torn flesh together. Blood seeped between his fingers and dribbled down his arms.
His friend ran towards him, stopped when he saw the extent of the wound, the amount of blood.
One-Eye now had the pistol in both hands but it was pointed down towards the top of the counter and slowly sliding forward through his long fingers.
A loud gurgling sound came from the farmer, but not from his mouth.
The man back of him cursed and turned away, one hand to his mouth to catch the vomit.
Fowler managed to get to his feet and to clear his Smith and Wesson from his holster. He approached the bar side-on and took the gun from One-Eye’s hands without the least resistance. He thought about pushing it down into his belt but didn’t want to blow his balls off so he ended up hurling it through the door.
The wounded man pitched forward until his forehead was resting on the scarred boards and the blood was running freely down both sides of his face, curling, some of it, into his nose and eyes. His hands fell away from the back of his neck and smeared the floor.
The sound of his partner’s vomiting was loud in the enclosed space.
Fowler waited until the retching had stopped and pulled the man over the table and made him sit down. He forced a glass of corn liquor down his throat so that the tears sprang to his eves. He asked him his name and that of the dying farmer. The feeling returning to his arm so that the blood tingled and itched like crazy, Fowler wrote out an account of what had happened, using a stub of pencil in the front of the notebook the Old Man insisted he carry but which he hardly ever used.
When he’d done that he read it to the man at the table and to One-Eye, taking the words clear and slow like he would have done talking to a child or an idiot. All the while, the farmer’s throat was gurgling air and spluttering blood through the wound at its back.
Fowler got the two men to make their marks at the bottom of the paper, though he doubted if either of them had really understood what he’d written or what they were doing.
Fowler looked at the farmer, whose long body was now stretched across the flour sacks, the front of his work overalls deep with blood. The building stank of blood and vomit now, to accompany the smell of goats’ cheese and liquor. He reached over the bar for the bottle labeled bourbon and took a swig from the neck, washing it quickly around his mouth before spitting it out without swallowing a drop.
Outside, his chestnut mare looked at him questioningly and he gave her some water in an old bucket before mounting up and riding out. Half-way down the track he looked back and could only see one small section of the ramshackle wall. He wondered if the farmer had managed to die yet, whether the other two were in a strong enough state to bury him before stiffness set in and they would have to break his long limbs to fit him into the ground.
Chapter Three
There were two envelopes waiting for Wes Hart in the postal office at Virginia City. One had been there a month and the other no more than two days; both were held behind a crisscross of colored string back of the main counter. The clerk would keep them there for a six-month and, if no one had claimed them by that date, consign them to one of the drawers in the outer office. There they’d slowly begin to fade and yellow until their messages of hope or hate, love or greeting, would be illegible.
As it happened, Hart had been in Virginia City the best part of a day without checking his mail. Since he could count on the fingers of both hands the number of letters he’d received in his entire life, that’s hardly surprising. It had seemed more important to get his mare, Clay, stabled and tended to, find himself a room and stash away a few of his belongings, sit in the barber’s chair alongside the plate glass window and watch the world go by while the beard was shaved clean from his chin and mouth, his lank hair was trimmed and hot rough towels were laid over his face.
Half an hour later and still smelling of the toilet water the barber had managed to splash onto his face unawares, Hart went into the first store he came to and bought two pairs of long socks in dark gray wool, a red vest, two cotton shirts – one plain green, dark rather than light, and one a brown and red check – a box of .44 cartridges which would serve for both his pistol and rifle. He mulled over buying some ten-gauge shot and finally decided against it.
The sign painted outside Hart’s next stop was bright and confident: Wasting and Ironing – Hot Bath 10 cents. He gave the contents of one saddle bag to the Chinaman behind the counter and asked for a bath. One Chinaman led to another and then another and finally Hart was led to a converted shed with a corrugated iron roof and four tall baths which were made in such a way that the customer sat up in them while alternating buckets of hot and cold water were poured over him by a fat Chinese who climbed unsteadily up and down a ladder resting on one of the old roof beams.
Hart pulled off the clothes he was wearing and gave instructions that the shirt, vest and socks be added to the pile he’d left out front at the laundry. Grudgingly, he got into the bath and waited for the fat man to pass him a cake of soap so large he could only just hold it in one hand.
As he washed himself he recalled a time when he’d taken a bath in a whorehouse and his back had been soaped and lathered by a beautiful girl with traces of Cree and Negro blood whose hands had been like butterflies. There’d been a bottle of good brandy within reach on the floor and she’d put a good cigar between his teeth and lit it for him, striking the match against the four-inch heel of her fashion shoe.
That had been back when he’d been good friends with Kate Stein and he’d acted as a trouble-shooter for her, keeping out the drunks and making sure that any complaints didn’t come to blows. No one drew a weapon all the while Hart and Kate were together, their business relationship never quite straying over the line where it would have become personal. But Hart had ridden out from Creek City to clean up a place called Tago and when he finally got back Kate had sold out and gone and their business relationship was over. The place had been bought by a sanctimonious and tight-fisted Scot by the name of Kennedy who’d hired Hart to look after his daughter, Alice. After that things had got pretty complicated and the presence of a detective called Fowler hadn’t helped. Well, at first it hadn’t but finally Fowler had dragged himself clear of his bourbon-haze long enough to throw in with a strong hand and the two of them had parted more or less friends.
Hell, thought Hart as he toweled himself down, it all seems a long time back, a lot of towns ago. He dressed himself in his old denim pants and scuffed, plain boots,
his new vest and the new green shirt; he threw the fat Chinaman a quarter and pushed his wide-brimmed, flat-crowned hat down onto his head. Out on the sidewalk he didn’t look so much different from any other cowboy or wrangler that might be in town. Except there was something about the way his wiry, strongly muscled body moved – a sense of power under keen control, strength kept in check. His cheek bones were high and showed clearly against the tanned and now smooth skin of his lean face. The faded blue of his eyes told part of what he’d seen, understanding mingled with regret. He walked with purpose, his right hand brushing the holster of his gun belt, fingers close to the mother-of-pearl grip of his Peacemaker.
When men came towards him on the boardwalk, it never occurred to Hart to step aside: it never occurred to them to do anything else.
Hart glanced at a hay wagon moving slowly down the center of the street, drawn by a team of four mules and driven by a kid who wasn’t many months past his twelfth birthday. For an instant the thought of the son he’d never had tugged at him the way it sometimes did and as swiftly passed away again. He waited till the wagon had passed and crossed the street towards the nearest saloon. A quick shot of whiskey broke the dust at the back of his throat and he was ordering another to chase down the first when both doors, front and back, opened at the same time.
Hart dropped the glass to the counter and his hand sped to his gun but the fingers froze around the butt.
Standing at the rear a heavy-bellied man cradled a shotgun over his arm like he meant business. The curled twin hammers were held back and the barrel ends angled up sufficiently to cut a deal of Hart into two where he stood. The other door was occupied by a tall man leaning his left hand on a walnut walking stick, most of his weight going with it. The other hand was filled with a Colt Frontier and the finger was tight against the trigger.
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