“You the marshal?” he said.
“Virgil Cole.”
“Name’s Whitfield,” he said. “I need to talk.”
“That’ll be fine,” Virgil said, “but I need to take that iron you got in your pocket.”
“You want my gun?”
“Just while you’re in town,” Virgil said. “ ’Gainst the law in town.”
Whitfield reached to his right-hand pocket.
“Very slow,” I said.
“This your deputy?” Whitfield said.
“Everett Hitch,” Cole said. “Hold it by the barrel.”
Whitfield handed it butt-first to Cole. It was a pocket gun, hammerless and nickel-plated. It looked like a .32.
“What’s this for?” Cole said, “shooting women?”
“It’ll keep somebody off ya,” Whitfield said. “If they’re close.”
Cole put the gun on the table next to me. Allie sat very still, watching everything that happened. She seemed to like it.
“Have a seat,” Cole said. “Maybe some coffee?”
“Coffee be good,” Whitfield said.
Whitfield took his hat off and put it on the table. He looked at Allie.
“This the missus?” he said.
Cole’s face colored a little.
“No,” Cole said. “This is Mrs. French.”
The cowboy said, “Pleased to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Allie said. “I’m sure.”
Tilda brought some more coffee. Nobody said anything. Allie waited, interested. Whitfield was silent. Finally, Cole said, “Allie, I got to talk to this fella alone.”
“Oh? Well, certainly, Virgil. I’ve got to do my piano exercises anyway.”
She stood.
“Nice meeting you,” she said to Whitfield.
“My pleasure, ma’am,” Whitfield said.
Allie walked off toward the piano beyond the bar, and sat at it. She opened the cover and began to play some sort of musical exercises that didn’t sound much different than when she really played.
“I used to be a deputy here,” Whitfield said.
Cole was quiet.
“Worked with Jack Bell.”
Cole nodded.
“I knew Jack,” Cole said.
“Went up to Bragg’s place with him one day to arrest coupl’a Bragg’s men.”
Cole nodded.
“Bragg wouldn’t give ’em up,” Whitfield said. “They was too many, but Jack, he…”
“I know what happened,” Cole said.
“Was me,” Whitfield said. “And Dave Long, and Jack.”
Cole nodded.
“They was too many,” Whitfield said.
“I know,” Cole said. “And they shot Bell and the other deputy and you skedaddled.”
Whitfield nodded.
“You know it happened,” he said.
“Know it, can’t prove it,” Cole said.
“No witnesses,” Whitfield said.
“Un-huh.”
“I run off like a yellow dog,” Whitfield said.
“No reason to die for nothing,” Cole said.
“But I come back.”
Cole nodded.
“And I’ll be your witness.”
“Good,” Cole said. “Care to go with us?”
“Go with you?”
“When we go to apprehend Mr. Bragg,” Cole said.
Whitfield shook his head.
“Can’t,” he said. “I… I dunno, it busted me up inside when Jack got killed and I run. I… can’t do gun work no more.”
“But you’ll testify,” Cole said.
“I will.”
“With Bragg looking right at you,” Cole said.
“I will.”
“I don’t want to go up there,” Cole said, “and shoot up a lotta people, and get Bragg into court, and have you dry up and blow away.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t relinquish on your testimony.”
“I’ll say what I seen,” Whitfield said.
Cole was silent. He looked at me. I nodded. Whitfield saw the nod.
“That’s right,” he said. “I’ll stand. I can’t do gun work no more, but I can say what I seen, and I’ll stand and say it.”
“I got your word on that?” Cole said.
“You do.”
“All right,” Cole said. “Everett and me will go up and apprehend him.”
15
" A lone?” Raines said.
“Me and Everett,” Cole said.
“But that’s all?” Raines said. “You two alone?”
“Me and Everett,” Cole said again.
“Bragg’s got forty gun hands up there.”
“Twenty-five,” Cole said.
“You say that like it made a difference.”
“Makes a difference of, ah, how much, Everett?”
“Fifteen,” I said.
“It’s still so many,” Raines said.
“Specimens I’ve seen so far don’t enliven me much,” Cole said.
“We could get a posse up, deputize a bunch of us.”
“Coulda done that ’fore you hired us, Abner,” Cole said.
“You don’t want help?”
“No. I got help, I gotta worry about them. They get in trouble, I got to get them out. Better just me and Everett.”
I thought Raines looked relieved.
“Well, you say so, Virgil. It’s your kinda work, I guess.”
“It is,” Cole said.
Raines stood and walked out of the marshal’s office. He turned left on the boardwalk and disappeared.
“You got a plan?” I said to Cole.
“Well, we ain’t going to go riding in there bold as brass,” Cole said. “Like Jack Bell done.”
“I hear Bell was good,” I said.
“He was. He was good with a gun. Worked a lot of tough towns.”
“Overconfident?” I said.
“Be my surmise,” Cole said. “Thought he could back Bragg down. Thought they wouldn’t shoot lawmen.”
“You think you could back Bragg down?” I said.
“Just me and him?” Cole said. “Just the two of us? I could back him a ways. And then he wouldn’t back no farther.”
“You know this?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Been doing this a long time, Everett. Ain’t just gun work. Gotta think about men, too.”
“Which would, I guess, be one reason you’re here and Jack Bell ain’t,” I said.
“Yep,” Cole said and nodded his head. “That’d be a reason. You’d be another.”
I opened my mouth and closed it and sat. I didn’t know what to say. Cole had never been quite so straight with me about what I was worth. I sort of smiled to myself.
“What you smilin’ about,” Cole said.
“I caught myself thinking,” I said. “And what I was thinking was that you was right.”
Cole didn’t comment.
“So,” he said. “What we got to do next is drift on up there and look at Bragg’s layout.”
16
Bragg’s ranch was on an upland meadow with a stream. There were some trees along the stream, and a small herd of beef cattle grazed in the grass under their shade.
“Pretty place,” Cole said.
We were sitting our horses behind the ranch, on a hill that looked over it. We could see across it to Appaloosa in the sere valley below. Someone spotted us there, and several men gathered on the porch of the big ranch house and looked up at us. I saw Bragg was taller than anyone else.
“No cover,” I said.
“Nope, nothin’ much,” Cole said. “Maybe a little among them trees.”
“For how long?” I said.
“Long as it would take them to send some people around behind us,” Cole said.
“No real way to slide in on them without them knowing it,” I said.
“Depends how hard they sleep,” Cole said.
“Do
n’t think they got a nighthawk?” I said.
“If they did, depend on how hard he listened.”
“There’s a way to find out,” I said.
“Un-huh.”
“ ’Cept now they seen us,” I said. “Makes it likely they’ll be more careful.”
“Don’t matter,” Cole said. “We’ll expedite us a way.”
“ ’Spose we will,” I said.
Cole was silent, looking down at the gray, weathered ranch buildings. There was a barn with a corral. Some horses stood quietly in the corral, the way horses do, heads down, doing nothing. There was a bunkhouse on the other side of the barn, with a cookshack angling off it. There were two outhouses: a big one near the bunkhouse, and another smaller one near the ranch house.
“We’ll ride on back to town,” Cole said. “Give them time to relax a little, and maybe two, three nights from now, we’ll ride on back up and see what happens at night.”
The horses knew the way back, and they moved almost without guidance. Behind us, as we moved downhill toward Appaloosa in the punch bowl, half a dozen riders from Bragg’s outfit sat their horses on the hilltop where we’d been and watched us go.
I said, “Law’s a little thin on this, Virgil.”
“Don’t see why. Bragg killed the marshal. Now I’m the marshal and I can prove he done it.”
“There’ll be twenty of them all swear he didn’t.”
“That ain’t up to me,” Cole said. “That’s for the trial.”
“Ain’t even sure we got jurisdiction,” I said. “We city lawmen. Bragg might not even be in the city.”
“He’s close enough,” Cole said. “He killed Jack Bell.”
“Might be able to prove Jack Bell got killed up there. Hard to prove exactly who done it.”
“Everett,” Cole said. “You gettin’ gun-shy.”
“Just examining the situation, Virgil.”
“Pretty soon you’ll be telling me Jack Bell ain’t dead.”
“Truth is, Virgil, we don’t know that he is.”
“Well, where the hell is he?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s dead. But we don’t know it, you understand, we only been told it.”
“What’s the difference,” Cole said. “You know it. I know it. You ever read this man Ralph Emerson?”
“Some sort of philosopher,” I said.
“ ‘What I must do concerns me, not what people think.’ ”
“He said that?”
“He did,” Cole said
“He might not’a been talking about the Appaloosa marshal,” I said.
“I knew Jack Bell,” Cole said.
Cole’s horse tossed his head and skittered a couple of quick steps sideways. I didn’t know if Virgil asked him, or if something had caught his notice. Didn’t matter. I knew there was no point talking to Virgil anymore. He was going to do what he was going to do. All I could do is trail along with him and keep him from getting back shot.
“Everything good with you and Allie,” I said when I got beside him again.
“Lovely,” Cole said. “She’s a lovely woman, and everything’s lovely between us.”
“She can rile you a little,” I said.
“She’s playful,” Cole said. “It don’t rile me at all.”
“Didn’t have nothin’ to do with you pounding on the teamster, Gillis.”
Cole didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard.
“Sorta thought it mighta had somethin’ to do with you bein’ annoyed at Allie.”
“She’s a very lovely lady,” Cole said. “Very lovely.”
17
We looked at Bragg’s spread for half of a brightly moonlit night. We rode up there in the afternoon another day. Always we sat, looking down at the ranch in plain sight. One day we rode up real early, while it was still dark.
Dawn was just starting to streak the eastern sky when we got there and held up on the hill above the ranch, where they could see us.
“Might be more clever,” I said to Cole, “if we was to sneak a little.”
“No need to sneak,” Cole said. “We’re the law.”
“Might be more clever if we got him to come into town and jumped him there.”
“I’m going to take him out here at his ranch and bring him in like Jack Bell was going to do.”
“Because?”
Cole didn’t answer. He sat his horse, looking at the ranch.
“You close with Bell?” I said.
“Not so much,” Cole said.
“But he was city marshal and now you’re city marshal.”
Cole nodded.
“And this is all about the law?”
“Killing a city marshal ain’t legal,” Cole said.
“Ralph philosopher fella say that?”
Cole grinned.
“Virgil Cole,” he said.
We sat some more. I had looked at the ranch so much that I felt as though I’d worked there. Smoke began to wisp up out of the cookshack. A couple of hands stumbled down to the big outhouse. Somebody lit a lamp in the main house, and then Bragg came out shirtless with his pants on and walked to the small outhouse.
“Now, you see that,” Cole said. “They got them a big privy down there, probably a four-holer, for the hands. And Bragg got his own personal one, nearer the house.”
I nodded. Cole never talked just to be talking, though when he did talk, he seemed to ramble. That was mostly he wasn’t talking, he was thinking out loud and new thoughts occurred to him in the process. For actual talking, if it wasn’t for me prodding him, he might not talk at all.
“All we got to do,” Cole said, “is get hold of him. Once we got him, it don’t matter how many gun hands he got.”
I nodded.
“See how them orange Osage come off at a angle from the cottonwoods along the stream?”
I nodded just to be doing something. Cole wasn’t really talking to me.
“Probably ran it up there for a windbreak in the winter,” Cole said. “Ain’t enough of it planted to fence off cattle.”
“Too short a span,” I said, just to be saying something.
“If we was to set in there behind that Osage orange, with an extra saddle horse, and maybe we be there before the sun’s up. Then we wait, and when Bragg comes down to use the privy, we move in close and take him.”
“What about the night rider?” I said.
“He’ll be looking for us up on the hill,” Cole said.
“That’s why we let them see us up there all that time,” I said. “That’s where they’ll expect us to be.”
Cole paid no attention to me.
“Before or after?” I said.
“Before or after what?”
“Before he goes into the privy, or after he comes out.”
“After,” Cole said. “I don’t want to get pissed on.”
18
There was a night rider. I couldn’t see him, but I heard his horse blow from the direction of the hill. We had a livery horse, saddled, on a lead. We were on foot, leading the horses as we went in the darkness down along the row of trees. We stopped fifty feet away from the privy. It was still too dark to see, but we could smell it. I took the shotgun off my saddle. We tied the horses loosely to one of the hedge apples. And we stood. Somewhere far off, some prairie chickens boomed. The sky in the east began to lighten. A rooster crowed. We stood. I smelled wood smoke. The sky was pale now in the east. We could see the outhouse on the other side of the trees. Uphill toward where we always sat and watched, I could see the night rider moving across the slope halfway up.
In back of us, I could hear the bunkhouse’s door open, as some of the hands went to their privy. I smelled coffee mixed with the wood smoke. Then bacon. Beside me, Cole murmured.
“Here he comes.”
I didn’t hear anything. But I was used to that. Cole always heard things sooner than I did and saw things sooner. I heard his footsteps. I heard the door to the privy open and swing shut. Then nothing.
Cole gestured toward the privy. I slipped through the trees and along one side of it. Cole went around the back to the other side. And we waited. When Bragg came out, we were on either side of him. Cole took a handful of Bragg’s hair in his left hand and pressed the barrel of his Colt against Bragg’s temple.
“Not a fucking sound,” he said softly.
I pressed the two barrels of the eight-gauge up under Bragg’s chin. And packed close together, we walked back behind the Osage orange trees toward the horses. When we reached the horses, Cole let go of Bragg’s hair.
“Mount up,” Cole said.
I eased off on the shotgun so Bragg could climb into the saddle. It made him a little braver.
“You can’t do this,” he said.
“Can or can’t,” Cole said. “Won’t make no difference to you. First time there’s trouble, we kill you.”
Bragg’s mount had no reins. The horse was on a lead, tethered to my saddle horn.
“Ride,” Cole said.
We moved down the line of trees, walking the horses. Cole rode on one side of Bragg and I rode on the other with the eight-gauge resting across my saddle, pointing at Bragg. As we cleared the trees near the stream, the nighthawk spotted us and came down the hill at a gallop, shouting.
“Pull the horses in tight as we can,” Cole said. “Make it hard to shoot us without shooting Bragg.”
We kept walking. By the time we neared the river, there were half a dozen horsemen coming toward us on the run.
“Put that brush cutter right up against him, if you would, Everett,” Cole said. “Being sure that it’s cocked.”
It was too hard to ride tight and keep the gun under Bragg’s chin. I settled for pressing it into his side. We reached the river and moved toward the ford. At the ford, there were maybe twelve riders with guns.
“Tell them to let us pass,” Cole said.
Bragg was silent. We kept walking toward the ford. Holding the reins in his left hand, Cole drew his Colt, cocked it, and placed it carefully against Bragg’s cheekbone. If it began, Bragg didn’t have a prayer. We were bunched together, so we were barely more than a single target. Cole had a gun against Bragg’s face. The two barrels of my shotgun were digging into his side.
“What you want us to do, Mr. Bragg?” one of the riders said.
“Hold off, Vince,” Bragg said.
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