A B Guthrie Jr

by Les Weil

  Lat looked in at two saloons and saw no one he knew. Lilly's Billiard Hall didn't have a customer. He turned back from the door and poked on, to nowhere in particular. He could go and see Tom at Kleinschmidt's if Tom wasn't busy, which likely he was, or he could go and see Sugar if it wasn't that Whitey might ask him for money, or he could look up Jehu and brace him if he knew where to find Jehu. A broke stranger didn't have many choices.

  Only the fat bartender, unsmiling as ever, was in the Here's Luck saloon. He bobbed his head for hello. "Back, huh? What'll it be, bronc-fighter?" With a towel he made a swipe at the bar.

  "Broke."

  "Sorry case, all right, but more's been broke than flush. Don't take on about it. A young feller thinks what happens to him never happened before." He poured a glass of whiskey and pushed it out. "Drink hearty and say a prayer for the house."

  "Thanks." Lat raised the glass. "Seen Jehu around?"

  "Now and then."

  "Today?"

  The bartender shook his head. "He gave up the stage job as unfittin' his talents. Say, though, tell you who I did see!" He paused for the question.

  "Who?"

  "That feisty old bastard, him with the poke o' dust that went wolfin' with you."

  "Godwin!"

  "If that's his handle. Had that other man with him, that grinny feller but still salty-lookin', shorter'n you."

  "Just the two?"

  "One, he got himself kilt, so they said. Wasn't that him with the squinch face?"

  Goodwin and Carmichael had made it, out of the snow and the long wind, but Moo Cow­

  "Wasn't that Squinch Face?"

  Lat nodded. Somewhere out there Moo Cow lay, frozen and maybe chewed up by wolves, maybe untouched with his slitted eyes staring to heaven from the mismatch of his face. Moo Cow, steady loser, loser of the last pot of all. Losers weepers, they said, and the winners went on, one winner cheered by the promise of company. "Where are they?"

  "Where are they? Where you been? In a hole with the hole pulled in? Or playin' house steady with a calico queen?"

  "I asked where are they!"

  "Please to close the damper. I didn't mean to start no fire. Where are they? They're at the race, I would bet."

  "Race?"

  "Bunch of Piegans pulled in with their bellies rubbin' their backbones, but they had a dapple-assed pony with wings on his feet. Or so I hear. A bartender, he don't get to see nothin'. You know how it is -pourin' whiskey, rasslin' barrels, settin' plugs, buryin' dead soldiers and all that. All I've had a chance to see is that them Piegans is eatin' high up on the hog."

  Lat got up and faced the door.

  "Ain't a mite of use you settin' out," Fatty said. "They had to take them ponies way up on the flat where the snow's blowed off. Time you got there you would meet 'em comin' back. Set!" He refilled the glass. "You can pay when and if. I know an honest face, which them with money sometimes

  don't."

  After the third drink they began to drift in -cowmen by looks, traders, trappers or hunters, two soldiers, out-of-job idlers, businessmen. The Indian horse had won again, far as you could throw a rock. Yes, sir, there's a racehorse, and, mister, don't bet against him unless you got money to burn.

  Owned by a damn Injun, too, or more likely stolen, but that cayuse can fly.

  Lat listened, watching the door for Godwin and Carmichael while he fooled with the idea of money to burn. It took him an instant to recognize Jehu, standing tall on the threshold, his face indistinct against the sunlight outside.

  Jehu came in, walking slow, showy with his shaped hat and fringed jacket and dress pants and the revolver peeking pearly from his side. Outfit, mustache, high, curving nose, all suggested he might own the territory or have an option on it at least. Into the racket of voices he said, "Howdy, gents."

  Lat tackled him before he could get to the bar. "I've got business with you." With a hand on his elbow he urged Jehu to one side.

  Jehu let himself be led. He held out his hand for a shake. "Howdy, boy. Glad to see you again." The mustache tilted at the corners.

  "What about my money?"

  "Now that's been on my mind, I tell you. Heavy on my mind."

  "Mine, too."

  Jehu nodded gravely. "I'm glad to hear that because, you know, you didn't more than rough-break those horses." His yes lifted in a question.

  "You been working them?"

  "No, but just the other day I got some of them rounded up there where you was supposed to be taming them, and I tell you glue wouldn't stick 'em."

  "What could you expect without working them?"

  "I was expecting to sell them for something. The way they are, I bet I couldn't get twenty-five dollars a head."

  "At that price I'll take my pay in horses."

  Jehu put a hand on Lat's shoulder. His smile as much as admitted he'd been caught short. "Smart boy, but I'll gamble with them. There's suckers left somewhere."

  "I'm broke."

  "That's a shame, and it's a shame we can't settle somehow, but it's no use to dicker now. I'm in on a deal that takes capital, all I can rake up."

  "The debt comes first."

  Jehu put his hand back on Lat's shoulder. "Boy, I'll be gone for a while, two weeks or so, to Butte City and places. See me when I get back. We'll come to a figure, all right."

  The hand dropped. The curved nose and the mustache turned away. The dress pants scissored the owner of the territory to the bar.

  It was no use to wait for Godwin and Carmichael. They were wetting their whistles at some other saloon, if they had any money. He could look for them, shaking his head to bartenders' what'll-it-be. He could go home -so Miss Fran's was home now!- and hear that things would turn out all right, Lat. Now don't you worry.

  He lagged from the Here's Luck and lagged on the street and stopped at a corner. Straight ahead or to westward the roads wrenched out to the straggled edges of town and the winter-worn country beyond. A buckboard went by, leaking coal from a sack, its driver hunched up against the new­blowing chill from the north. Over the river ridge the sun was drawing away, giving up as a bad job the business of warming the world. A tinkle of music blew along Front Street, thin as a tune long lost to mind. A man in townsman's clothing hurried out from under a sign that said FIRST NATIONAL BANK, his hand patting his pocket as if all he wanted was to be alone with his money. The building was brick and three-storied. The sign said the bank was upstairs. With a gun a man bold enough might pry some cash from it. Or a man with any prospects at all. One could dare hell and the other shoot for the moon and both arrive some place at least.

  Yells came from behind. "Hey, you! Lat!" "Evans! Whoa!"

  It was Godwin and Carmichael, whiskered and still dressed in their foul wolfing clothes and both, it appeared, a little hoozed up. They pumped his hand and pounded him on the hack and invited Lat, you old bastard, you, to come have a drink. Come tell us about you, and whereabout's Tom?

  "Tom's fine," Lat said. "Working at Kleinschmidt's -but Moo Cow?"

  The whiskey cheer left their faces. "Poor devil," Godwin answered. "Shot with an arrer right through the lights while he went to look to the horses, and the horses was snuck away then, and all the time me and Mike waitin' unknowin' until we had waited too long." He spit a stream of tobacco as if to show what he thought of himself and Carmichael.

  "They raised that cache we left," Carmichael broke in.

  Easy come, easy go," he added, not as a joke.

  "So there was nothin' to do but start hoofin'." Godwin looked at his feet. "Wasn't till we tramped a million miles more or less that we found some horses to borry."

  Lat asked, "Who was it?"

  "You think if we knew 'em that we'd be draggin' butt here. Injuns, of course, but God knows which ones. Come have a drink."

  "On what?"

  "Hell," Godwin said, "we got money. I come back with a few pinches of dust and just doubled it bettin' on an Injun cayuse. Only horse I seen lately that might beat your Sugar." His hand t
ugged at Lat's sleeve. "You ain't told us about yourself. Come and ile up your chords."

  A drink or two more, and he'd ease off his edge -till tomorrow. "I can't right now," he said and saw the lie discovered in Carmichael's eyes.

  Godwin turned and spit again and fingered in his pocket. He held out a ten-dollar gold piece. "Medicine," he said.

  "Much obliged."

  "Now you're well enough to stand a round yourself, come on!"

  "Not now," Lat answered.

  Godwin stepped back as if to get a better view of him. It was a minute before he spoke. "What the hell ails you?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothin' wrong but nothin', huh?" Godwin studied him some more. "Pitiful, ain't he, Mike?"

  "Lay off, Goddy." Carmichael's half-smiling eyes held a glint of understanding. "A constipated toad don't like to jump."

  Godwin turned as if to leave. "When your bowels get circulatin', let us know."

  Carmichael held up long enough to say, still with the half smile wrinkled around his eyes and mouth, "We'll be lookin' for you, Lat, and meantime take 'er easy."

  They faded down the street. There was the chill breeze left, and the discouraged sun and the roads to nowhere and Sugar and the dappled pony and the bank.

  He pushed inside and went upstairs before more thought could keep him out. A man sat busy and unheeding at a desk, like a prisoner told to push a pencil on pain of death, but an open-faced office stared from the side, and in it a man in a wide, white collar sat grooming a mustache that horned down over his chin. His eyes, lifted up from his desk, asked what now. He didn't rise or speak but only sat and smoothed his horns and looked.

  Lat went to him. "You have the say-so here?"

  "I do."

  "I need money."

  The man weighed that a while. "A common complaint."

  "My name's Evans, Lat Evans."

  "Conrad," the man answered and put out an unwilling hand. "Will you sit?" He stacked some papers neatly on the corner of the desk. "And what do you do?"

  "I been wolfing."

  "Hmm. Not to be personal, but that work isn't a very high recommendation."

  "I know how to double a loan."

  From under the mustache came one word. "How?"

  "The Indians have a racehorse here, and I own one that can beat him."

  No answer showed in Conrad's face, but his hand came away from his mouth and stopped in mid-air and settled slowly and drummed on the desk. "There's work for those who want it," he said. "The town's shy on fuel. They're looking for men now to bring in coal from Whoop-Up and to cut wood that will be floated down Shonkin Creek when it breaks up." He waited to see how the suggestion sat.

  "I can find work like that, but now if you'll just loan me a stake-"

  "You couldn't pick a chancier thing, not even Montana weather. We're not in business, Evans, to back gamblers."

  "You gamble all the time, on weather and grass and the price of cattle and whether steamboats get through or get wrecked. Please listen, Mr. Conrad!"

  Conrad got up slowly. He put one hand flat and solid on the desk. "We're both wasting time." His eyes lifted, the "No" showing hard in them. "One thing recommends you as a businessman, Evans -your nerve."

  Lat was on his feet. "One thing recommends you as a banker. That's your want of it." He heeled around and made for the door, feeling Conrad's gaze and the gaze of the condemned pencil pusher on his back.

  He found himself hurrying down the street as if to something urgent, as if to leave behind the fool he'd been. To think a bank would back him! One foolish try, one foregone failure -but still the chance was knocking. He slowed down and dragged on.

  Murphy, Neel & Co. Tobacco. Exchange Saloon. General Merchandise. River Market. Overland Hotel. The street stirring with strange freighters, strange Indians, strange drifters, strange drunks, strange men going home to supper with time to have a quick one on the way. The early lamps being lighted. The rimed slush crying under foot. The smell of wood smoke in the air from homes unknown. The good, the well-known smell of horses. Whitey's livery stable.

  He turned back and bought a bottle and went on.

  Whitey wasn't in, though fire flickered in the smoky lamp in what he called his office. Outside it in the darkened barn Sugar whickered low, wanting hay or oats or both and a hand to scratch his head.

  Lat spoke and came up easy and felt the leaned-down muscles. "Got any money to burn, boy? Could you fly?"

  There was only a wisp of hay in the manger, and he forked it full and spilled a can of oats in the feed box and found a curry comb and, working in the darkness, brushed Sugar up.

  Whitey had returned to the office meantime. He looked up from the bench that would do as a bed, his shoulders slouched over his low pot of a belly, his eyes big in their pouches. "Bring anything?" he asked, meaning maybe money, maybe liquor.

  "It's under your nose," Lat answered and lifted the over­looked flask from the table.

  "Ah-h." He took the bottle and twisted the stopper. "Ain't had a drink in a whole day or two. Short of funds, short of fun." He drank and passed the bottle over. "Must've found yourself work?"

  "Not yet. You're protected as long as you have the horse."

  "Pertection ain't wampum. Won't buy beans or booze." He got up and went to the stove and put in a stick of wood and reached for the bottle on the way back. Before he drank, he said, "It's poor thanks I'm givin' you, Lat. The poor, all they got is poor thanks."

  "And a bed?"

  "And a bed. Anyone brings me a bottle gets a bed, such as it is. That's my rule." Whitey's eyes moved off into space. "It's hell to be poor, drawin' just flunky's wages, and double hell if your appetite's handsome." He waved toward the window ledge and the dusty jug with its pickled baby. "I even been tempted to see if I couldn't sell my little girl there. But sit down, dammit! Have a drink with me on you!"

  Lat perched himself on the stool.

  Whitey's eyes swam away again and swam back. A twist of a smile touched his mouth. "On'y thing is, she keeps me company." His face asked if Lat could understand.

  "Yes."

  "She don't cry or get sassy, and she listens when I talk." Whitey took a slow drink and wiped his mouth slowly and sighed. His gaze came away from the jar as he brought one hand up and stuck out the thumb. "See that, too?" The thumb was missing a knuckle. "That's a dally-welter for you. You savvy dally-welter?"

  "Sure."

  "He throws his rope and makes a ketch and anchors to it then by takin' hitches on his saddle horn, so quick he sometimes hangs a finger in the turns. A Texan ties his lasso to the horn and keeps his meat-hooks. Not as I go for them Rebel ways, either." Whitey kept studying the thumb. "But why am I tellin' you that knows already? Scours of the mouth, I got. There ain't no one much for me to talk to any more."

  "Go on."

  "When there ain't, damn if I don't find myself palaverin' with that stub thumb and with my little girl there yonder." He rubbed his jaw with the stub-thumbed hand. "Fool thing, but it kind of helps, 'specially when I feel low."

  "Same goes for everybody."

  Whitey hitched himself up. "Well, goddam you, Lat! You're young and strong and got spirits independent of a goddam bottle. Jesus J. Christ! What I'd give for that!"

  "You're not so old, but what would you do?"

  "Let's have a drink while I think on it." But Whitey only sipped at the bottle this time, sipped and held it in his hand, seemingly forgetful that there were two of them. His words came slowly, as if from far back in his mind and life. "I was somethin' at your age, Lat. I was really somethin', there in Nebraska and surroundin' parts. Yes, sir, made a pile of money and spent it open-handed, and the barkeeps they liked me and girls from all the topnotch houses. Bought many a round in my time and wived up with many a calico. Yep."

  "How?"

  "Movin' horses mostly and movin' others back." Now Whitey passed the bottle. His eyes were sharp. One of them seemed about to wink. "All branded stock, o' course. All legal."r />
  "All branded? All legal?"

  "Don't go nibblin' into my past!"

  "You think I care?"

  Whitey smiled, easily. "Well, now it's brung up, time was I could change a brand as quick as scat. Slow brands, but long enough. Just give me a jackknife or a hot iron and wet buckskin. Bars to boxes, circles into figure 8's, one letter to another. I was a artist then."

  Lat popped the thought that popped into his mind. "Could you do it now? Could you change Jehu's brand?"

  18

  WORK WAS SLOW in the mornings, or missing entirely, and slow in winter afternoons, too, the dullness unbroken then by the summer parades around town that teased men to the house and so made for more work at night. A girl passed time by sleeping, by tidying her room and tidying herself and dressing her hair and, off and on, talking with the other girls and Aunt Fran about the company they'd had and the ones they liked best while Happy dusted and swept and sometimes put in a word like, "Yes, ma'am! That Mist' Lat, he's a shuah-enough gennelman, on'y wheah at is he, Miss Callie?"

  She tucked fresh blankets on her bed, wishing she knew, or, better yet, that he would come back. He would have his hat off as he stood at the door and would speak like a gentleman in the presence of ladies and never openly refer to his wishes, or need to with her. Too many men seemed to think a girl in a house had no feelings at all and so could be whooped at and hazed around like a heifer. Why didn't he come? He didn't have to have money.

  She punched and smoothed a fresh pillow. Why not take, since she wanted him to? It was hers. People so close to each other didn't count tit for tat and would lose the best part if they did, for the giving was good. Let him come out ahead, if he did. That was good, too.

  The room was spic enough now, even for Lat. It wasn't his manners entirely that were the thing. It was the look of him, the lean, honest look and just now and then, like a call on a mother, the soft show of the boy in the man. "Weanlin'!" Aunt Fran had said once, though she couldn't know, and "Handsome is as handsome does," and "Ambition's fine, but cash is trumps in this game, dearie." It was his need of her and his spells yet of backwardness. It was that there was no meanness in him. It was that he would be spent with his arm under her head, and then they would talk, through words or through silence. Bad business, according to Aunt Fran, who liked men who got the act done and pulled up their pants and made way for others, as unheeding toward the girl, almost, as toward a chamber used. Most men were that kind. Payment, maybe thanks, good-bye -and they were gone, except sometimes one asked how was it that so nice a girl fell to such work.