Appaloosa vcaeh-1

by Robert B. Parker

  “How many hands,” Cole said.

  “With Bragg? Fifteen, maybe twenty.”

  “Gun hands?”

  “They all carry guns,” May said.

  “They any good with them?” Cole said. “Anybody can carry them.”

  “Good enough for us,” Raines said. “We’re all miners and shopkeepers.”

  “And we’re not,” Cole said.

  “That’s for certain sure,” Olson said. “I heard after you and Hitch came in and sat on Gin Springs one summer, babies could play in the streets.”

  “That’s why we sent for you,” Raines said. “We’re ready to pay your price.”

  Cole looked at me.

  “You game?” he said.

  I shrugged.

  “It’s what we do,” I said.

  A smile like the flash of a spark spread across Cole’s face.

  “It is,” he said, “ain’t it.”

  The smile went as fast as it had come, and Cole turned his somber, shadowy face to the three aldermen.

  “Money’s all right,” Cole said.

  “Then you’ll do it?”

  “Sure.”

  The dining room smelled of cooking and tobacco and the lamp oil that kept it bright. The room was nearly full of men. The sound of cutlery and men’s voices sounded civilized and normal.

  “What do we have to do?” May asked.

  “Tell him, Hitch.”

  “Who makes the laws in this town?” I said.

  “The laws?” Raines said. “I guess we do: me and Earl and, ah, Phil. There’s a town meeting twice a year. But between times, we do it.”

  “Cole and me’ll do the gun work,” I said. “But we’re going to button the town up like a nun’s corset. And we need you to make laws, so we can enforce them.”

  “We got laws,” Raines said.

  “You’re gonna have more. We need a lot of laws to make it all legal.”

  “Well, sure, I mean, you tell us what you need,” Raines said, “and if it seems reasonable, we’ll put them right in the bylaws.”

  Cole said, “No.”

  “No what?” Raines said.

  “No,” Cole said. “You do what we say or we move on. You solve your problem some other way.”

  “Christ,” May said. “That would mean you was running the town.”

  “It would,” Cole said.

  “We can’t have that,” May said.

  Cole didn’t say anything.

  “I mean, you’re asking us, so to speak,” Raines said, “to turn the town over to you.”

  Cole didn’t say anything.

  “Far as I can see,” I said, “you’re gonna turn it over anyway. Us or Bragg.”

  “But what if you ask for laws that we think are wrong?” May said.

  Cole was entirely still.

  Then he said, “We’ll give you a list.”

  “A list.”

  “A list of rules,” Cole said. “You agree, we have a deal. You don’t, we ride on.”

  They all thought about it. The door in the hotel lobby opened, and it stirred the air in the dining room. The lamp flames moved in the stir, making the shadows shift in the room. The door closed. The flames steadied. The shadows quieted.

  “Sounds fair,” Raines said after a while, as if he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “We’ll bring you the list in the morning,” Cole said.

  “I’ll be here,” Raines said.

  3

  We’d had a list of rules printed up five towns ago, and in the morning, Cole took them down to the hotel and gave them to Raines in his office. The laws were Draconian. The paper had a lot of aforesaids and wherebys in it, but, if you prune the thing to its essence, what it said was that what Cole said was law. Raines frowned as he read it and moistened his lips. Then he read it again. He looked at Cole. Then he looked at the paper again. The door of Raines’s office opened suddenly and a round-faced little waitress came in. Her face was flushed.

  “Mr. Raines,” she said.

  Her voice sounded foreign. Swedish maybe. She seemed short of breath.

  “Not now, Tilda,” Raines said.

  “Trouble in the bar, Mr. Raines.”

  “Can’t Willis handle it?”

  “It’s Mr. Bragg’s men.”

  “Jesus God,” Raines said.

  He looked at us.

  “Space for your signature down there at the bottom,” Cole said. “On the right.”

  Raines looked at us and at the paper. Cole never moved.

  “There’s four of them,” Tilda said. “They have guns.”

  Raines’s mouth trembled very slightly, and I thought he was going to say something. But instead, he clamped his jaw, took out a pen, and signed the sheet. Cole picked it up, looked at the signature, waved it a minute to dry the ink, then folded it and put it inside his shirt. With no change of expression, he nodded toward the door and I went out. The bar was to the right of the lobby. You could enter it from the lobby, but most people went in through the street entrance on the opposite side. It was the kind of thing I’d learned to notice without even thinking about it. Always know where you are, Cole used to say.

  I went straight through the lobby to the street, and turned right and walked to the corner and went in through the swinging mahogany doors of the saloon. The late-afternoon sun, slanting through the doorway, made the smoky air look sort of blue. I let the doors swing shut behind me and moved to the left of the door while my eyes adjusted.

  The center of the room had cleared, tables had been pushed aside, and most of the people in the saloon were standing against the walls. Four men, all wearing guns, were drinking whiskey at the bar. Behind the bar, the strapping, red-faced bartender stood stiffly, not looking at anything. There was a big, brass spittoon in the center of the cleared space, and two of the men at the bar were trying to piss in it from that distance. Neither was having much success. Cole came into the saloon through the lobby door, and watched for a moment.

  “Button them up,” he said in his light, clear voice.

  One of the men faltered in his stream and looked at Cole.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he said.

  “Virgil Cole.”

  “Virgil Cole? No shit? Hey, Chalk,” he said to his partner in piss. “Virgil Cole wants us to stop.”

  Chalk turned toward Virgil, his equipment still fully exposed, like his partner’s.

  “Step a little closer, Virgil Cole,” he said. “And I’ll piss in your pocket.”

  Chalk was a skinny guy with a hard little potbelly that pushed out over his gun belt. He had a meager, shabby beard, and it looked, from where I stood, like he needed to trim his fingernails. His pal was tall and thick and had long hair like Bill Hickok, except Hickok’s was clean.

  “I am the new city marshal,” Cole said. “Put it away or lose it.”

  “Hey, Bronc,” Chalk said. “They got a new marshal.”

  The other two men, who’d been leaning on the bar, straightened a little and moved slightly apart.

  “Didn’t they have another marshal, ’while ago?” Bronc said.

  “They did.”

  “Keep using them fuckers up, don’t they?” Bronc said.

  “Got no use for them anyway,” Chalk said.

  Cole didn’t seem to mind the small talk. He seemed entirely relaxed, almost friendly, as he stood just inside the doorway from the lobby.

  “Put them ugly little contraptions away,” he said. “I’m going to walk you down to the jail, and I don’t want to scare the horses.”

  No one stirred in the room. It was like one of those high-plains days in the summer, when it’s hot and still and a storm is coming and you feel the tension of its coming long before it gets there. Both men buttoned up their pants. It’s easier to be dangerous with your breeding equipment stowed.

  “You ain’t walking us nowhere, Virgil Cole,” Bronc said.

  He was squat and muscular, wearing a little short-brimmed hat. His g
un was butt-forward on the left side, almost in the middle. The walnut handle looked worn. Chalk stepped a little way from Bronc and loosened his shoulders. His Colt was in a low holster, tied to his thigh. It had a silvery finish with curlicue engravings. Chalk thought he was a fast-draw gunman.

  “You pull on me, either one, and I’ll kill you both,” Cole said.

  At the other end of the room, behind Cole, a thin man with no beard and limp, black hair took out a short revolver and held it on the tabletop.

  Chalk and Bronc stared at Cole. Then Chalk laughed.

  “Bullshit,” he said and dropped his hand.

  Thoughtfully, Cole shot him before his hand ever touched the gun’s butt, and he was already beginning to fold as the man at the back table raised his gun. I shot him. Bronc had his gun just clear of the holster when Cole’s second shot hit him in the face and he fell backward against the bar and slid to the ground next to Chalk. The noise of the gunfire still rang in my ears. Cole was looking slowly around the room. No one moved. The fourth man held his hands high in the air; his face was pale, so the web of broken veins showed clear.

  “I ain’t shootin’,” he said. “I ain’t shootin’.”

  I walked over and took his gun out of its holster and handed it to the big, red-faced bartender.

  “I warned them,” Cole said, and opened the cylinder on his Colt, replaced the two expended shells, closed the cylinder, and put the gun away. It was one of Cole’s rules: Reload as soon as the shooting is over. I put a fresh bullet in my own piece and put it back in its holster. Cole walked to each of the three down men and felt for a pulse. None had one.

  4

  Cole and I rode up north of town one morning to look at the wild horses in the hills, a little west of where Randall Bragg had his ranch. They were there for the same reason Bragg was, because of the water. We sat our animals on top of a low hill and watched the herd graze in the sun on the eastern flank of the next hill. Seven mares, two foals, and a gray leopard Appaloosa stallion that looked to be maybe sixteen hands. The stallion raised his head and stared at us. His nostrils were flared, trying to catch more scent. His tail was up. His skin twitched. He pranced a couple of steps toward us, putting himself between us and the mares. We didn’t move. The stallion arched his neck a little.

  “They hate the geldings,” I said.

  “Stallions don’t like much,” Cole said.

  “They like mares,” I said.

  The stallion went back to grazing, but always between us and the mares.

  “Virgil,” I said. “I’m not minding it, but why are we up here, looking at these horses?”

  “I like wild horses,” Cole said.

  “Well, that’s nice, Virgil.”

  Cole nodded. The horses moved across the hillside, grazing, their tails flicking occasionally to brush away a fly, the stallion now and then raising his head, sniffing the wind, looking at us. There was no breeze. Occasionally, one of the mares would snort and toss her head, and the stallion would look at her rigidly for a moment, until she went back to grazing.

  “Easy life,” Cole said. “They get through here, there’s another hill.”

  “Stallion looks a little tense,” I said.

  “He’s watchful,” Cole said.

  “Don’t you suppose he gets worn down,” I said, “all the time watchful? For wolves and coyotes and people and other stallions?”

  “He’s free,” Cole said. “He’s alive. He does what he wants. He goes where he wants. He’s got what he wants. And all he got to do is fight for it.”

  “Guess he’s won all the fights,” I said.

  In a cluster of rocks on top of one of the hills west of us and the horses, several coyotes sat silently, watching the herd with yellow eyes.

  “Foals better not stray,” I said to Cole.

  “The stud knows about them,” Cole said. “See how he looks over there. Foals are all right long as they stay with the herd.”

  The sun was quite high now. Maybe eleven in the morning. Our own horses stood silently, heads dropped, waiting.

  “Virgil,” I said after a time, “these are very nice horses, but shouldn’t somebody be upholding the law in Appaloosa?”

  Cole nodded, but he didn’t say anything. And he didn’t move. To the east of us, a thin stream of dark smoke moved along the horizon. The stallion spotted it. He straightened, staring, his ears forward, his tail arched. Small in the distance, barely significant, more than a mile away, a locomotive appeared from behind the hill, trailing five cars. The stallion stared. I could see his skin twitch. The train moved along the plain, toward Appaloosa. Then the stallion wheeled toward the herd and nipped at one of the mares and the herd was in motion, the stallion behind them, herding them, the foals going flat out, all legs and angles but keeping up.

  We watched as they disappeared west over the hill, away from the train. And Cole stared a long time after them before he turned his horse east toward Appaloosa.

  5

  We had a jail, but when there was nobody in it, Cole liked to sit in the saloon and watch what was going on. He liked to nurse a glass of whiskey while he watched, and so did I. We’d sit together most of the time. But if there might be trouble, we sat on opposite sides of the room. It was Cole who decided. It was one of his rules. Today we were on opposite sides of the room. While we were sitting and nursing, inside on a hot, bright morning, Randall Bragg came to see us. He walked into the saloon with half a dozen men, and paused inside the door and looked around while he waited for his eyes to adjust. Then he nodded his men toward the bar, and walked over to where Cole was sitting. His spurs jangled loudly in the suddenly quiet saloon.

  “My name’s Randall Bragg,” he said.

  “Virgil Cole.”

  “I know who you are,” Bragg said. “We need to talk.”

  Cole nodded toward a chair. Along the bar, Bragg’s men had spread out, watching Cole. Bragg sat down.

  “I see the big fella across the room with a shotgun,” Bragg said.

  “Eight-gauge,” Cole said.

  “Good idea, spreading out like that.”

  “It is,” Cole said.

  Bragg gestured toward the bar, and one of Bragg’s men brought him a bottle of whiskey and a glass. Bragg poured himself a shot and looked at it, like he was thinking about it. Then he drank the shot down and poured himself another one.

  “You a drinking man?” he said to Cole.

  “Not so much,” Cole said.

  “And Mr. Eight-gauge over there?”

  “Everett,” Cole said. “Everett Hitch.”

  Without looking at me, Bragg said, “You a drinking man, Everett?”

  “Not so much,” I said.

  “Hard to like a man that don’t drink a little,” Bragg said.

  His high, black hat was set square on his head. Even sitting, you could see that he was tall, and the hat made him look taller. He had on a starchy white shirt and black pants with a fine chalk stripe tucked into hand-tooled black boots. His spurs were silver. His gun belt was studded with silver conchos, and in his holster was a Colt with white pearl grips. Cole smiled.

  “But not impossible,” Cole said.

  “Well,” Bragg said, “we’ll see.”

  He drank most of his second drink and wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger, pinching his lower lip in the process.

  “You shot three of my hands,” Bragg said.

  He wasn’t looking at Cole when he said it. He was carefully pouring more whiskey into his near-empty glass.

  “Matter of fact,” Cole said, “I only shot two. Hitch shot the other one.”

  I smiled and shrugged.

  “Point is,” Bragg said, “I can’t keep having my hands come in here and you boys shooting them.”

  “I can see how you’d feel that way,” Cole said.

  “So we need to make an arrangement,” Bragg said.

  “We do.”

  Bragg smiled slightly and nodded. Everyone was loo
king at Cole and Bragg. While they were looking, I picked my shotgun up off the floor under my table and held it in my lap just below the tabletop.

  “You have a suggestion, Marshal?”

  “There’s a set of town bylaws posted right outside the door of this here very saloon,” Cole said. “Your boys do like the bylaws say, and everything will be muy bueno.”

  Bragg’s face pinched a little.

  “And if they don’t?” he said.

  “Then I arrest them.”

  “And if they don’t go along?”

  “I shoot them.”

  Cole smiled sort of happily at Bragg. He nodded toward me.

  “Or Everett does.”

  I had moved the shotgun onto the tabletop. As Bragg looked over at me, I cocked it.

  “That’s your idea of an arrangement?” Bragg said after a moment.

  “The law is all the arrangement there is,” Cole said.

  “Your law,” Bragg said.

  “Same thing,” Cole said.

  The men along the bar were looking at Bragg and looking at the shotgun. Bragg sat silently for a moment, looking at Cole. Deep in thought, maybe.

  Then he said, “This town belongs to me. I was here first.”

  “Can’t file no claim on a town, Bragg.”

  “I was here first.”

  Cole didn’t say anything. He sat perfectly still with his hands relaxed on the top of the table.

  Leaning forward toward him, Bragg said, “I got near thirty hands, Cole.”

  “So far,” Cole said.

  “You proposin’ to kill us all?”

  “That’d be up to you boys,” Cole said.

  “Maybe you ain’t good enough,” Bragg said.

  I could see it in the way he sat, in the way he held his head and hands. He was trying to decide. Could he beat Cole? Should he try?

  “Don’t be so sure you’re quicker than me,” Bragg said.

  He was trying to talk himself into it.

  “So far I been quick enough,” Cole said.

  Bragg was silent for a moment. Then I could see him give up. He stood carefully with his hands apart and flat on the tabletop.

  “This ain’t the time,” he said.