by Gene Curry
“You better pull on me,” Danner said, his whip hand motionless, the rhino hide snaked out behind him. “Got you shitting your pants, don’t I? You’re thinking, will he go for my hand or my eyes? How about the jugular? I can cut it across so it’ll gush like a broken pipe. What’re you afraid of? But I’ll tell you, cobber, no man can say Bullwhip Danner is an unmerciful cutter. Unbuckle your gun belt and your pants and shuffle over here with your unlawful gains. Do that, and maybe I’ll give you a dollar for a drink.”
I said nothing. I no longer wanted to walk away. Men have talked to me like that in the past; most of them are dead. A few I let live because they were just drunk, or foolish or crazy. You have to be careful about the men you let live. They have to be harmless or plain crazy. To kill such men does more harm to your reputation than letting them run off at the mouth. A dangerous man is altogether different; as a rule, you have to kill him, even if you don’t especially want to.
I was in a bind, and good old Buffalo got me out of it by pulling a gun on me while I was watching the whip. Maybe the slug of whiskey made him do it. His hand snaked inside his coat and came out with a stubby revolver and he nearly got to fire it. My gun came out and knocked him down, but then the whip snapped my gun out of my hand with the force of a bullet. The whip cracked again and caught my gun while it was still skittering across the floor. I jerked my head to one side as the whip snapped straight at my eyes. It split the flesh on my forearm. Blood came with the pain, and I backed away with blood dripping from my hand, the whip snaking and snapping at my face. My ass hit the edge of a table and Danner yelled, thinking he had me where he could cut me up. The whip cracked an inch from my eye.
But then the city drummer yelled and threw me a short-barreled, double-action .38. The whip cracked at the gun as it sailed through the air. It missed. I caught it with my left hand and gave Danner four of the five small-caliber pills in the cylinder. You never saw a man more surprised, as all four bullets got him in the chest, in and around his heart. It was the fourth bullet that drilled through. Until then he was still moving at me, wounded but still on his feet. The one in the heart stopped him in his tracks, and he keeled over and died before he hit the floor. A foul stench filled the room as he voided his bowels.
But Buffalo wasn’t dead. Though badly wounded, he tried to crawl toward the gun he had dropped. I got to it before he did and threw it away. The little man stopped crawling. His eyes rolled back in his head. Blood leaked from a hole in his chest, but no blood was mixed in the spit that dribbled from his mouth, so it looked like his lungs hadn’t been damaged. I didn’t care what shape his innards were in; if I hadn’t been forced to fire so fast, I would have blown a hole in his head.
The drummer stepped forward to claim his gun, unmindful of the sour looks he was getting from the gamblers and the drinkers. I thought he was one dandy drummer; there was a real man underneath the big belly and the loud suit and the jowly face, baby-ass pink from hot towels in barbershops. I guessed he was a Jew. I didn’t know much about Jews, but I liked this one.
Handing him back his .38, I said, “Thanks for the use of the weapon.”
He said his name was Jacob Steiner, and we shook hands. “I could have shot him for you, but I thought you’d rather do it yourself.” Steiner prodded the empty shells out of his gun and reloaded it before putting it in a shoulder holster under his coat.
Some of the drinkers pushed two tables together and put Buffalo aloft to wait for the doctor. His breathing was light and shallow. The blood from the bullet hole was dyeing his shirt a dark red.
Steiner told the barkeep to set out a bottle and clean glasses. “I should be buying,” I said. “Who was that I just killed?”
Steiner slid the bottle towards me. “You mean you don’t know? Me, I’m just a bauble salesman, but I know Bullwhip Danner. Knew him. They say he was one hell of a hunter and troubleshooter. He said it a lot himself. The name means nothing to you?”
Steiner drank good whiskey, and the bottle had his name on it—always a good sign. “I guess I heard it once or twice”, I said. “How did he manage to live so long?” Steiner raised his glass. “Your health, sir. Our late friend lasted so long because he thought he couldn’t be killed by mortal man. I guess he’d been scouting and hunting with the wagons about five years. A determined sort of a man. He wanted to be a scout but didn’t know beans about the country, being a foreigner. You know what the bastard did?”
“Bought that rhino whip?”
Steiner laughed. “I guess he brought that from Australia. What he did was to cross the Plains from California all by himself. Fought off Indians, got lost, all but starved. But he got to know the Plains pretty good. Folks here didn’t take him too serious, him a foreigner. Then he convinced some hard-up train to give him his first job. The next five years he got as good as the best. Better, in his own opinion.”
I grinned at the tough Jew. “You almost make me sorry I killed him, a man with such pluck and determination.” Steiner grinned back. “Don’t be. That dead man was a son-of-a-bitch. No better man on the trail, but he was loud, stupid, and always looking for a fight.”
I was thinking about the sheriff. He’d be there soon. “You know this town. How do you think this will go over?”
They said Jews don’t drink. This one hadn’t heard about that. He was putting two away for my one. “You won’t even be charged,” he said. “That doesn’t mean they’ll pin a medal on you. You’d think a brute like Danner wouldn’t be popular. If you did, you’d be wrong. Bullwhip—such a name!—was what they call a colorful character. Besides, the wagon people need all the good men they can find.”
Everybody turned to look at me when the sheriff and two hard, young deputies came in.
Chapter Two
I got out of it, just like Jacob Steiner said I would. That fat salesman stood by me like a rock. It turned out that he studied law in his spare time—all those long evenings when the card games were over and he was holed up in some crossroads boarding house. The inquest was short and sour, because they didn’t like Steiner and they didn’t like me. Fishing for votes, the sheriff—a grimfaced oldster named Vardiman—made a lame effort to pick a few holes in our story. He managed to get in a few licks about stamping out lawlessness wherever it raised its ugly head. But it didn’t work, and they had to let me go. Go! That was my main idea. When you kill a man in a town, it’s best to be gone, unless you have some important reason for staying. I had nary a one.
As a town, Independence was busier than rich. You never saw so many restless farmers in your life. Outside of town were great parks of wagons forming into wagon trains. Many of the emigrant trains had already formed; whole counties of people were on the move. Not all the wagon people were poor, and many had left good farms to push off into the wilderness. California and Oregon were the two big places to go. I guess California had a magic sound to its name; more pilgrims were going there than to Oregon. Rumors of gold strikes persisted in spite of the fact that the big strikes of’49 were already history.
There was considerable politicking going on among the wagon people, too. Back home, men with strong wills or smooth tongues had been picked to boss the trains, and these same men expected to be the mayors or town fathers of the settlements they would found in the Far West. But some of the arrangements were changed or bent once they started out. All too often, by the time they got as far as Independence the bickering and the politicking had already started. It really got going when two smaller trains banded together for protection against the Indians and the outlaw bands that preyed on the trains far out on the trail.
All this was none of my business. I had been to California more than once and could pass up another visit. Let the sodbusters fight—I was going to Kansas, where I planned to do all my farming indoors at the card tables. After the inquest was over, I had another drink with Steiner and said I hoped I’d see him again someday, though I never expected to. He went off down the street carrying his two leather valises, an
d I went back to my rooming house to get my gear together.
While I was getting ready to go my landlady’s daughter came in without knocking. She didn’t have to knock: she’d been in and out of my room since I had arrived in Independence. And she always came to fuck. She was no kind of professional whore, or any kind of whore, though she might have ended up as one. I gave her more money than a working whore would make, and she took it without embarrassment. “Many thanks for the present, Mr. Saddler,” she would say. I could never get her to call me Jim. Maybe that was because I was thirty-eight and she was eighteen.
But she wasn’t formal when we fucked; the difference in our ages was forgotten then. She fucked like a trooper and wasn’t quiet about it either. When she was working up to her come, she gave out loud groans of joyful torment. When we had our first bout of sex, I was nervous because of her mother and told her so. I didn’t want to get chased out of there by a carving knife or a shotgun. But she told me not to worry about it. Her mother had been a saloon girl in her younger years, and though she was long-retired she hadn’t turned into a churchgoer, or any kind of hypocrite. Peggy—that was her name—said her mother’s only regret was being too old to keep working the saloons. “She knows what I do,” Peggy said, “and she appreciates the little presents you give me.” After that I felt a lot better and I was able to fuck this nice, open-minded girl without looking over my shoulder.
There was none of the jaded whore about Peggy. When she got horny, and was really aroused, there was no faking. She loved sex, she said, and she loved to handle my cock, my magic wand, as she called it. When she sucked me off, and I came in her mouth, she swallowed it. According to her, come was good for a woman. It was better than a tonic; it kept a woman looking younger, and it was good for the complexion. I don’t know where she’d read or heard such a thing, but she insisted it was true. True or not, it was a sure sign of affection. When a woman swallows your come it means she likes you.
I was just about packed when she arrived, but I didn’t think I had to run out the door. She was wearing a dress of some thin material that did nothing to hide the curves of her lovely young body. Looking at her, my cock stirred and came to life. She had auburn hair, wide brown eyes, an oval face—her’s was altogether a very pretty face. Her breasts were large for such a young girl. I knew what they looked like: I had sucked them many times. Suddenly I felt a strong need for her.
“You’re leaving?” she said, looking at my bag. “I hate to see you leave.” She sat on the edge of the bed.
“Better I moved on,” I said. “That business with Danner.”
“Yes,” she said. “Danner had some friends, men as dangerous as he was. They could come looking for you. I hate to see you go, but it’s better you do. But they’re not here yet, are they?”
That was what I wanted to hear. “No, they’re not. You want to? I do. We have plenty of time.”
“Yes, we do, Mr. Saddler. I’m already wet, and I can see you’re hard. Sometimes at night when you’re out gambling and I’m in bed by myself I have to squeeze my legs together, thinking how much I’d love to have your thing in me. But I never pleasure myself the way some women do with their finger or a cucumber. I think it’s a waste.”
“So do I.”
She fondled my cock while I undressed her. She liked to be undressed by a man. When my pants were unbuttoned my cock stuck out like a flagpole. “Do you ever pleasure yourself, Mr. Saddler?” she asked. “When you’re in some wild place and there are no women, do you .. .”
“It would be a waste,” I said. And then I got the rest of her clothes off. There she stood, sweet eighteen, bright-eyed and ready for my shaft. She stretched out on the bed with her legs spread, a little trickle of joy juice leaking through her auburn beaver, and the sight of that drove me wild. I have to say women’s beavers get me all heated up. I can’t help it; it’s the way I am. This was going to be our last fuck, so I wanted it to be a good one. Luckily, Peggy had the same idea.
I thrust it on into her and she gave out a groan of pleasure. She wrapped her legs around my back, which pushed me deeper into her every time I thrust forward. Soon she was so wet and I was pumping so hard that a sucking sound filled the room. Between groans and breathy sighs she called out, “Oh, Mr. Saddler, I’m going to miss your thing so much. Shove it into me hard, sir. In all the way, as far as it will go.” Peggy reached down so she could touch my thrusting cock. That made me pump harder and harder, and she begged me not to let up.
If Bullwhip’s friends had burst in at that moment, they would have had me dead to rights. But they didn’t.
“Come, Mr. Saddler,” she called out. “I want to feel your hot gush inside me.” I geared myself up for my come and I came like a stallion. The danger I was in must have been part of it. I kept coming after I should have stopped. Her own come lasted a lot longer: one orgasm after another. It was so intense that her eyes rolled back in her head. I’ve never seen any woman have such a total orgasm. It was so deep, so complete that for a moment I was afraid she had lost consciousness. But she hadn’t. After a few moments she opened her eyes and smiled up at me. Her legs were still locked around me, holding me in her. I couldn’t have taken my cock out of her even if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to.
“Oh, Mr. Saddler, what am I going to do without you. I’m thinking of the long days and nights when I’ll be without your cock, wanting it so bad, and it won’t be here. It will be deep inside some other girl, and I’ll be as jealous as hell. I’ll pretend I’m that other woman and maybe I’ll feel better. Promise you’ll come back here some day. Please promise.”
“I promise.”
We both knew I’d never see Independence again. She left after a while and around about noontime the landlady, Peggy’s mother, hollered up the stairs and said the Reverend Claggett wanted to have words with me. At first I thought it must be a joke, some old hard-assed friend full of whiskey was setting me up to have some fun. I had been stuffing the last of my stuff into my warbag when she wheezed upstairs and said the man of the cloth was waiting for me in her private parlor. There was a pretty young lady with him, the landlady said.
The landlady, randy old bitch that she was, guessed what was in my mind. She liked me for reasons too unpleasant to talk about. I think I was the man of her sweaty dreams.
“There’s nobody holding a shotgun, if that’s what’s bothering you,” she said. “Nobody—not even you—ever threw a leg over that young lady down below.” Heartened by the knowledge that I wasn’t about to be threatened with a buckshot marriage, I went downstairs, and there was the Reverend Josiah Claggett and his pretty little daughter. The name suited the reverend, and his pretty little daughter looked like she had a sky pilot for a daddy, only more so. Hannah was her name, I was to learn later, and it suited her from the poke bonnet on her head to the rough farmer boots on her feet.
The father was grim, the daughter was pale—not just pale, but pinched and unhappy, as if she never expected to be anything but unhappy. That was a shame, because she was pretty, washed-out or not, and the tension inside her quivered like a wire. They stood like a father and daughter in a sad old photograph, and even the airless parlor with its overstuffed and never-used furniture might have been a photographer’s studio.
“I’d like to have a word with you, Saddler,” Claggett said.
“What about?” I didn’t like the man. He looked like he had been born wearing a parson’s black suit and flat-crowned hat.
“It’s about the man you killed—Bullwhip Danner. He was a good man, in spite of everything, and you snuffed out his life in a drunken brawl. Have you any idea what you’ve done?”
“Sure,” I said. “I killed Danner.”
“You did more than that. By killing him you have set back the Lord’s work.”
“How so, Reverend?” I wished to hell he’d just of told me what was on his mind.
The girl had been staring at the floor as if she expected to find the meaning of life in one of
the cracks between the boards. Now she looked up, more afraid of her old man than of me.
“Father,” she ventured. “This isn’t going to do any good.”
Claggett said, “Hold your tongue, girl. I know what I’m doing.”
I didn’t like the way he talked to the girl. “What are you doing?” I asked.
At least that got a straight answer. “I demand that you take Bullwhip Danner’s place. All the other reliable guides and hunters have been hired. Most of them. The few men left, we can’t meet their price. It’s up to you to take Danner’s place. Lead us across the Plains to California. I know you can do it. You’ve done it before.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Sheriff Vardiman says so. He knows more about you than you think. It’s his business to know. How many times have you been across?”
If it hadn’t been for the girl, I would have told him to go fuck himself. He looked like he took out a lot of anger on the girl. “Only twice. You better get somebody else. I won’t do it.”
Reverend Claggett’s face got angrier than it had been. “Are you deaf or still befuddled by whiskey? There is nobody else.”
“There’s always somebody else,” I said. “You’ll just have to wait. You got this far, so what’s the big hurry? You must be growing some green food while you wait.” Any wagon train that had to lay over in some town usually plowed up enough prairie to grow potatoes and green stuff for the cook pot.
“We did that,” he said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is we must move on now.”
“Why? Winter’s over, no snow coming. It won’t make any difference.”
I was speaking the truth, and it wasn’t the money or lack of it. I was going to Kansas to see what I could see. Going there was the best idea I could think of. A long, hard journey of more than two thousand miles didn’t appeal to me one bit. Out there on the trail there’s nothing to do but work. At night you lie down too tired to talk, not that the talk is all that good, even if you feel like it.