“No. I ain’t bettin’ ol’ Betsy.” He rubbed his palm against the shotgun’s twin barrels. “And I ain’t bettin’ Clyde. That’s my mule. She’s in Leadville.”
Clyde, Dooley thought, is a she?
“But . . .” Chester whined.
Dooley let out a breath and dragged his winnings toward him, including the filthy deed to some hole in Leadville. As he was doing that, Chester reached across the felt and overturned Dooley’s hand.
Nine of spades. Ten of hearts. Queen of spades. King of clubs . . . Jack of diamonds.
“See,” Chester said, nodding at Horatio. He turned over his hand, three eights, a deuce, and another jack. “He had me beat.”
“Wait a minute,” said Chester. “You mind telling me what you drawed?”
Dooley smiled. “The jack.”
Chester settled into his chair. “You don’t know no better than to try to draw to . . . to . . . to an inside straight?”
“You checked,” Dooley said, “and raised?”
Horatio frowned, then grinned, and finally laughed.
A good thing, Dooley thought. His luck had to be changing. He had managed to break every poker player’s rule: Never draw to an inside straight. He had won.
“But he could’ve beat you,” the merchant said. “He drew two cards.”
“If he had anything better than three of a kind,” Dooley said, “he would have bet the mine to begin with. He’s no sandbagger.”
The grizzly bear put his elbows on the table, rested his big head in his huge hands, and nodded. “Yep,” he said glumly. “But at least I didn’t lose ol’ Betsy . . . or Clyde.”
Dooley pushed his winnings to the dealer. “Cash me out, will you. And take a ten for yourself. And another round for the table.”
The dealer nodded. And after drinking and talking with the boys, Dooley rose at last, the money belt heavy across his waist.
“Come on, Blue,” he said. He looked at the grizzly bear. “How do I get to Leadville, sir?”
“You can ride in my stage,” Chester said.
Dooley shook his head. “I’d rather ride my horse.”
The big head moved slightly, but the toothless man spoke: “Ride west, mister. Then climb the tallest hill you see and keep on climbing till you reach the moon.”
“And how do I find your mine?” Dooley asked.
The grizzly shrugged. “I’ll draw you a map tomorrow morn when I’s sober. And iffen you still can’t find it, I’ll show you myself when Chester and me hit Leadville.”
Nodding his agreement, Dooley Monahan felt pretty good. Well, who wouldn’t with a silver mine and a good dog and a great horse and a lot of money in his belt. He had drawn to an inside straight. He had won more money than he had seen in years. No one had tried to kill him. In fact, everyone here in Denver City seemed right friendly. Things were looking up.
He stepped onto the boardwalk and felt a bullet rip off his hat.
CHAPTER TWO
The long-barreled Colt .45 leaped into Dooley’s hand, but Dooley did not leap. He dived, landing against the water trough in front of the saloon as another bullet slammed into the batwing door. Blue growled, barked, and started to charge whoever it was across the street shooting at Dooley, but Dooley reached out with his left hand, gripping the makeshift collar he had affixed—the bouncer at the saloon had told Dooley in no uncertain terms that the Elkhorn did not allow dogs in the establishment unless they were well trained and had a collar. Dooley understood. He had unfastened his bandanna and tied it around the merle-colored dog’s neck. Then he had tipped the bouncer a dollar.
He wasn’t about to leave Blue outside with General Grant—not in a town like Denver City. He hadn’t been crazy about leaving his gelding tied to the hitching rail.
A third shot boomed, and Dooley felt cold water splash on the brim of his hat. He sucked in a deep breath and stared at the doors to the saloon, waiting for somebody to come out, to help, to yell for the constable or marshal or sheriff or army or vigilantes or whoever was responsible for law and order in this rough town.
He could see where the bullet had punched out some tiny planks in the door, which still swung on its hinges. Shouts inside the saloon slowly ceased, replaced by, Dooley thought, whispers. Nobody appeared. Nobody called for the law. Finally, once the door stopped swinging, the big door, the real door, on the left side, closed. Dooley frowned. Blue growled. A second later, the door on the right side shut.
Someone twisted a key in the lock.
“Great,” Dooley whispered.
Another bullet splintered the column post to Dooley’s left. The horses, including General Grant, began pulling against their tethers, stamping their hooves, snorting, and causing quite the commotion, but Dooley had to give the gunman credit for one thing. The man didn’t want to hit a horse, even by accident. He just, for some unknown reason, wanted to shoot down Dooley.
Or did he?
That first shot—the one that had punched two holes, entrance and exit, into Dooley’s hat—easily could have taken off the top of Dooley’s head. Had the gunman merely wanted to get Dooley’s attention?
It was an interesting theory, Dooley allowed, and he might have studied on it a little longer had he not quickly disavowed that notion altogether.
He looked down the boardwalk and darkened street, at another hitching rail and watering trough that was nowhere nearly as crowded as the one he crouched behind now. He couldn’t see the building that clearly for the streetlamp was not burning, but Dooley could make out the design of a star on the window. He had not noticed the lawman’s office when he rode up to the saloon, but he had not been thinking much about lawmen . . . just poker . . . and a beer . . . and . . .
Dooley sucked in a deep breath, held it for just a moment, and exhaled. “Stay here,” he whispered to Blue, and he came up to his knees, then on the balls of his feet, and exploded through the mud toward the darkened corner and the building with the lawman’s badge on the window.
A bullet burned his back and shattered glass in the saloon that was no help, and Dooley dived as another bullet tore a gash across the corner of the trough. Dooley landed behind the safety of the watering spot, came up, and caught his breath.
“Hey!” he shouted to the darkened building.
Then he cursed.
It was darker here than it was in front of the saloon, even after some jerk had closed the main doors, but Dooley had good eyesight and had learned all his letters back at the subscription school and through his mother’s instructions and at church back in Iowa.
STARR’S MILLINERY
He had to laugh.
So much for finding safety at a lawman’s office. Well, he thought, my own hat’s got holes in it now, but I don’t know how I’d look in an Orleans turban or some fancy thing of braid, satin, and flowers with a bow tied on the top. He also wondered:
What kind of town has a ladies’ hat shop sitting next to a saloon and gambling parlor?
He stopped thinking when another round pounded against the watering trough. This time, Dooley came up, felt the .45 buck in his hand, and ducked before he got his head blown off. His back burned from where the bullet had torn his shirt, just below where the vest has risen up on him, but he felt no blood, just heat. That also told him that either the man shooting at him had to be the best shot in Denver, Colorado, if not the entire Western frontier of these here United States, or that the man certainly meant to do Dooley Monahan harm.
Blue growled, causing Dooley to panic.
“Stay!” he shouted, and cringed as a bullet ripped into the door of Starr’s Millinery.
He looked up and down the street, but nothing came into view except the horses still dancing and snorting and scared in front of the saloon. Dooley started inching toward the corner of the trough nearest the saloon, but stopped, reconsidering, and moved the other way. When he reached the edge, he looked down the darkened street, waited, and came up again, firing the Colt, and this time waiting just long enough
to see a shadow disappear. He thumbed back the hammer, aimed this time, and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flash pained his eyes, as it had done before, but Dooley saw splinters fly from the wooden façade across the street. He dropped down, shoved open the loading gate, pulled the hammer at half cock, and worked the plunger and cylinder until the hot empty casings fell beside him.
His fingers pushed fresh loads from his cartridge belt. One dropped into the mud. He didn’t pick it up until he had every chamber filled, the gate shut, and the hammer pulled back to full cock.
One he had wiped the grit, mud, and moisture from the shell, he slipped it into his vest pocket and moved back the other way, toward Blue, closer to the saloon, and stopped at the trough’s edge. Blue whined. Dooley tried to give him a smile and wink of encouragement. He wet his lips, pressed his body into the cold dampness of the mud, and inched a bit forward again.
Now that he knew exactly where the assassin was hiding across the street, Dooley figured he had at least a chance of surviving this gunfight.
Providing, he thought, the man hasn’t moved to another position.
He looked up at the outline of the building.
The shooter could be on top of the roof.
He looked underneath the bellies of the horses, including General Grant, and through the legs of the steeds at another alley.
Or he could be down there.
He felt his back burning again from the slug the man-killer had fired.
Or he could be behind me.
“Stop thinking!” he whispered to himself. “You’ve been in scrapes worse than this.”
The assassin might be . . .
“Stop it!” he snapped. His voice startled him. He hadn’t meant to yell anything.
He told himself: You’ll worry and think yourself into Boot Hill if you keep this up.
A movement across the street caught his eye. He steadied the heavy Colt in his hand, waited.
So . . . the man shooting at Dooley had not moved after all. Dooley slowed his breathing, steadied himself, refusing to blink or move.
The barrel of a rifle caught the reflection of a street lamp down the street. Dooley squeezed the trigger.
He came up this time, fired again. The rifle dropped into the dirt. A hand reached for it, and Dooley pulled the Colt’s trigger.
“Yeee-owww!” The hand disappeared back behind the corner of the building across the street. Dooley sent another round, heard the ricochet as the bullet whined off something in the darkness. Then he dropped back down into the mud and worked on reloading the pistol one more time.
He had hit the gunman in the arm, maybe the hand. That much Dooley knew, and as long as he could keep that rifle out of the killer’s hands, he would be all right. Maybe. For a brief moment, Dooley considered charging across that street, Colt blazing in his right hand, screaming like some wild rebel soldier—even though Dooley had Northern leanings as a farm boy from Iowa—but saving two or three rounds until he reached the corner.
Reasoning did not elude him, however, and he understood that the man with the rifle could very well—indeed, in a town like Denver and in a state like Colorado—most likely had a six-shooter in addition to the rifle he had dropped.
Dooley would stay put.
But the man had been shooting a rifle. He might not be much of a hand with a six-shooter. Most people weren’t. Dooley happened to be one of those exceptions, though he always considered himself lucky, not a real marksman.
Besides, a rifle cost a lot more money than a revolver. The killer won’t leave it in the mud. Not if he’s as cheap as I am.
All I have to do, Dooley told himself, is just keep my eyes open, wait for him to make a play to fetch that rifle back. He made himself relax, or as much as one could, lying in the cold mud on a wet street in winter in Denver, Colorado. He wet his lips. He did not blink.
Blue began to growl.
“Hush,” Dooley told his dog without looking. The dog started barking, and then Blue charged.
“Blue!” Dooley saw the dog run past him, leap onto the boardwalk, and then Dooley understood how serious a mistake he had just committed. He rolled onto his back, bringing the Colt up, firing at the shadow in the alley on the far side of Starr’s Millinery. Dooley tugged again on the hammer and found it stuck.
He swore. Pulled harder. But the Colt had jammed.
Blue barked, and Dooley saw the gunman step onto the boardwalk. The man laughed. Dooley saw him bring up the rifle, and he wondered if these were going to be his last thoughts:
How did that son of a gun get his rifle back and get around to this side of the street?
The man quickly turned away from Dooley.
“Don’t!” Dooley yelled, fearing that the man would use his gun on Blue. He then threw the Colt in that direction, but all he heard was the gun smash through the painted star symbol on the plate glass window at Starr’s Millinery.
All this had happened in mere seconds. Blue remained a good ten feet from the man on the boardwalk as the glass shattered. And in the hours that followed, when Dooley had time to think things clearly, he understood that the man lifted his rifle, not at Blue, not even at Dooley, but down the boardwalk.
That’s when Dooley’s ears began to ring after an explosion detonated behind him. And the man dropped the rifle he was holding as dust and blood jettisoned from his bib-front shirt. And more splinters flew off the planks on the wall of the millinery, and the man was flying backward, disappearing into the alley, until Dooley could see only his boots, toes upward.
The sulfuric scent of gun smoke reached Dooley, and as Blue skidded to a stop on the damp boardwalk, Dooley spun around to see the man from the poker game, standing on the other corner of the saloon, holding a double-barreled coach gun in his hands.
Now the horses were really pulling, and the hitching rail’s post grunted and budged. Dooley saw Blue turn around and find the new assailant, but Dooley said, “It’s all right, Blue.” He reached across the trough, grabbing the reins to General Grant. “Easy,” he said. “Easy.”
Two of the horses did not listen. Both broke their tethers and galloped down the street. Another pulled free, too, but seemed to understand the excitement had ended and just backed out into the center of the street.
“Easy,” Dooley told his horse again, and looked back at the old messenger as he opened the breech of the Parker ten-gauge, extracted the remnants of the fired shotgun shells, and replaced the loads in the barrels before the shotgun clicked shut.
Dooley looked at the boots in the darkness—they still did not move—and the rifle on the boardwalk, and at Blue, and then at the grizzly bear who had been playing poker.
The grizzly named Horatio yelled at the still-shut front doors.
“It’s all right, Chester. Ever’thin’s done that needed to get did.”
Dooley found his voice. “How?” He couldn’t hear himself. He coughed and tried again.
“How . . . I mean . . . why . . . why did you help me out?”
The bear of a man looked at Dooley as if he were the dumbest man in Colorado.
“That cur was gonna shoot you in the back.” He spit tobacco juice into the mud. “That ain’t right.”
The door opened, and light bathed the front of the saloon. Chester, the stagecoach driver, stepped out, followed by a saloon girl, a bouncer, and a man in a silk top hat who swore and said, “Damn, you won the bet, Milton. The guy with the dog’s still alive.”
Suddenly, Blue growled, and Horatio spun, bringing up the shotgun. Dooley spun, too, and saw the flash of a rifle from across the alley.
Dooley remembered that he had thrown his revolver through the Starr’s window. But the bouncer had a Remington, and he fired from the hip. Once. Twice. The rifle in the far alley roared again. The people in the saloon door screamed and dived back inside, and the horses in the middle of the street stampeded. By then, however, men came riding down the street.
“It’s the marshal!” a woman on her knees in the saloon
doorway shouted.
“Across the street!” Dooley yelled. “He’s in the alley yonder.”
The lawman and his deputies ran that way, swallowed by the shadows, and Dooley started to thank the stagecoach guard named Horatio and the bouncer.
The thanks died on his lips.
CHAPTER THREE
“Damnation, Horatio.” Chester, the toothless old coot who drove the stagecoach, sniffled and pried the Parker ten-gauge out of Horatio’s stiffening hands. Dooley moved over, stepped onto the boardwalk, and looked over Chester’s shoulders. The jehu was on his knees, bending over that grizzly bear of a guard’s body. Dooley saw the stagecoach guard staring at him, but not seeing a damned thing.
Dooley swore softly under his breath.
The saloon girl on her knees in the doorway sniffed, too, and said, “Oh, that poor, poor, sweet old man. Is he . . . ?”
“He’s dead.” Chester’s knee joints popped as he rose. “I told’m not to come out here, that this weren’t none of his nor our business, but you couldn’t tell that fool nothin’. Not even to call a tinhorn’s bluff.”
“But he wasn’t bluffing,” said the dealer from the poker game that now seemed to have been played centuries, not minutes, ago.
Dooley knelt beside the man named Horatio. He reached over and closed the dead hombre’s eyes. He sighed heavily, shook his head, and looked at Chester the stagecoach driver.
“He saved my life,” Dooley said.
“Yeah.” Chester wiped his eyes. Found a rag in a dirty pocket and blew his nose. “That was Horatio. That’s why he rode shotgun with me all these years. That’s why he fought for the Union during the late War Between the States. That’s why he carted that Parker . . .” He looked at the heavy, still-warm weapon in his hands. “. . . ever’where he went. Poor Horatio. He just always wanted to shoot somebody. Even when it weren’t his fight.”
“I’m sorry,” Dooley said.
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