Silver Moon

by Sigmund Brouwer

  Almost in the middle was a small table. The two older brothers sat beside it, one on each side, ashtray between them, smoke upward curling from a lit cigarette. On the left sat a man who had spoken first to me. And opposite him, the one who had pulled Josh back down to his chair. Each made it plain they had no intention of lowering their revolvers until it was obvious I indeed had empty hands as I walked in.

  “Gentlemen,” I said politely. My hat remained in my left hand, and my right hand stayed clear of my holster.

  They did not rise. Did not lower their guns.

  Guthrie. The clerk. Dehlia. Now them. None of it was improving my mood.

  “Was I looking for a fight,” I said, “It wouldn’t be here. No. I’d arm myself with a posse and wait for a little more distance between me and your guns.”

  “What are you looking for?” This from the oldest. I felt tension, but couldn’t understand why. These men had enough experience to know that a gunfight was not brewing.

  “You Pete?”

  He gave a slow nod. Still kept his gun trained on my stomach.

  “Pete, I’m looking for a quiet, restful spot to put my feet up. I’m looking to forget this badge keeps putting me where I don’t want to be. But before I get to that quiet, restful spot, I’m looking to make sure it stays quiet and restful enough in other places in Laramie that I can enjoy my own quiet restful spot. What’s standing between me and that quiet,m restful spot is you and those guns and a bad attitude. Something I’d like changed before I forget I came here with peaceful intentions.”

  Pete grinned. “You sound meaner than a grizzly with a sore tooth.”

  He set his gun on the table. Wiley did the same.

  “Whatever brought you to Laramie is your business,” I said. “I ain’t asking. And I won’t, unless it involves the law. You go your way, and I go mine. Trouble is, those gray jackets bring hard feelings to some folks. Like tonight. I’ve got a man who swears up and down you boys ambushed him outside the Red Rose.”

  “We didn’t.” Wiley said. “That’s the biggest pile of —”

  “Do you see a posse with me? I’m not here to accuse you.” I took a deep breath. “Nothing about you boys smells of stupid, and my guess is you’d find a lot smarter way to bushwack someone.”

  “Why Marshal,” Dehlia began from behind me. “We’d never even consider —”

  “Be nice if you had someone to witness that you all stayed in the Red Rose long past six o’clock.” I cut Dehlia short without letting her build her mock hurt. “That way Guthrie won’t be able to stir up trouble against you.”

  I waited, but neither Pete nor Wiley volunteered any information. Something about the two of them was bothering me, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Were you playing cards?” I asked. “Spending time with a dance-hall girl?”

  Silent shakes of the heads. Then Wiley spoke. “Truth was Marshal, Pete and me did leave about then. Josh and Ike, they did stay behind for some billiards.”

  “It’d be nice if you had someone to attest to your whereabouts.”

  Wiley looked at Pete for approval.

  “Nope,” Pete said, as if he were answering a silent question from Wiley.

  “Too bad,” I told them. I was curious, but if they weren’t going to volunteer, I wasn’t going to force it. After all, if they didn’t want me to know, it wouldn’t be difficult to lie.

  I watched them a few moments longer, taking advantage of the silence to search for the cause of the troublesome nagging in my mind.

  Then I saw it.

  The smouldering cigarette.

  Neither brother had taken a puff during our entire conversation. Moreover, it was obvious by a bulge in their cheeks that each carried a chaw in his mouth.

  Who owned the cigarette? Dehlia? Or was someone else hiding somewhere in the room?

  Dehlia moved beside me and placed her hand softly on my arm.

  “If that’s all your business, Marshal, perhaps…”

  “Perhaps I’ll be on my way?” Why was she so sweet? And why the distracting touch on my arm?

  “Yes,” she said, “on your way. May I presume this time you’ll wish me goodbye instead of dashing through the door like a madman?”

  I nodded absently but didn’t reply. I hadn’t forgotten that sprint to the undertaker’s, but my mind was more on where a person could hide quickly in this suite. Under the bed?

  I turned to leave and let my left hand swing around to lightly brush against her hip, a movement that knocked my hat loose. I stooped to pick it up and used that excuse to sweep a glance low along the floor.

  “Marshal.” It was Pete.

  I straightened.

  “You stood us a round of drinks the other day. Never came back to collect yours. It’ll be waiting for you. Stop by.”

  I put my hat on my head and tipped it in his direction.

  Dehlia guided me by my elbow to the door. “You won’t be offended, Marshal, if I offer to continue our conversation when you stop by for that drink? You do intrigue me some.”

  “Be happy to oblige, Ma’am.” I gave her my best bashful grin, as if the thought of sitting nearby to her got my heart thumping like a dog’s tail.

  She smiled in return, then quietly closed the door in my face. I stood there in the hallway for a moment, staring at the dull white paint of the door.

  As if I didn’t have enough questions to occupy myself. Because I knew it wasn’t her cigarette that had been left to burn into ashes. Not when someone with pale snakeskin boots was standing behind the wardrobe on the other side of the suite.

  Chapter 17

  “Mawshaw,” the chinaman said in his rapid-fire rhythm, “mow sih-shoo-taw coffee.” The Chinaman poured into my half-empty mug with a broad grin, bowed slightly, added coffee to Doc’s mug, and walked to the next tables. His long braided ponytail swung with each of his quick steps.

  “Mow sih-shoo-taw?” Doc asked. “Sih-shoo-taw coffee?”

  “More six-shooter coffee. I do my durndest to teach him how to say it proper. But whenever I ask him why he can’t spit out a single decent ‘r’, he asks me to pronounce his name. In Chinese. First time I tried, he giggled so bad he nearly dropped the coffee pot.”

  Doc mopped his plate with a piece of toast to collect the last of spilled egg yolk. “I’d heard folks grumble that you spend too much time and money here,” he said. “Guess it’s worth something, now that he’s named his coffee in honor of your Colt.”

  This was the cleanest eatery in town. Grease didn’t cling to the tables and chairs. The food arrived hot with no imbedded hairs or insect shells. The price was right. Yet of the seven tables he had set up here, never more than three were occupied. Not because it was tucked in a small building away from Main Street. But for the same reason no one had let him rent space in a better location.

  That was on my mind as I spoke to Doc. “Folks that think all Chinamen should work on the railroad ain’t seen how many die to dynamite. Bothers me that they won’t look past the color of his skin. And you discovered how good he does breakfast.”

  Doc wiped a fleck of toast from the corner of his mouth. “Yup. Think I come here enough, he’ll name something on the menu after my scalpel?”

  I slugged back a mouthful of coffee, swished it visibly, then swallowed with a grimace. “Doc, it’s a joke he likes. One day I told the Chinaman this stuff was so strong it could float a six-shooter. I thought he’d choke himself, he laughed so hard.”

  Doc smiled. He forked the last of his eggs into his mouth, scraped his chair back to give his legs some room, and cradled his mug of coffee in his hands. “I can see how a man gets into this breakfast habit,” Doc said. “Beats hitching my horses and riding a half-day into the countryside to watch someone die.”

  “Don’t be hard on yourself, Doc. You done fine with Betty the other night. I’d never seen nor heard of that sand bur trick.”

  “That’s because I stole the idea from a Blackfoot medicine man.”

&n
bsp; I raised my eyebrows. “That probably ain’t something you’d take back East and share at college.”

  “I won’t ever go back East.”

  That hung there between us, the way he said it dampening the mood. Again, I thought of the inscription in his book from his loving wife Sarah.

  As if he realized the turn our conversation had taken, Doc made an effort to smile. He sipped at his coffee, grimaced in agreement at my assessment of its potency, and began to ramble.

  “I try to keep up,” he said. “Manuals, reports, things like that from the East. Doctoring is becoming more and more of a science. Someday folks might even call doctoring a profession.”

  Another sip of coffee. “You won’t hear many doctors say this, but the more we learn, the more that’s a mystery.”

  “Why’s that, Doc?” Around Doc, it was easy to slip into the role of listener.

  “I read considerably,” he said as introduction. “My interest happens to lie in what can’t be seen with the naked eye. In fact, I’ve got a microscope in my office so I can try some of the same experiments I read about.”

  “Doc,” I said. “Pardon my ignorance. A microscope? Some scouts I’ve met carry pocket telescopes…”

  He smiled. “Think of a microscope as a telescope that magnifies things real close to you, instead of things far away. Someday, you get bored, we’ll take a clear drop of water. With the microscope, you’ll see creatures wriggling around — so small that a hundred of them could fit on the head of a pin.”

  I remembered the brass urn object in Doc’s office. I remembered too what Doc had done with the stuff scraped from the woman’s tongue. “Betty’s throat — you wanted to look at what came from it too?”

  “You’re a quick study, Samuel. See, some forty years ago, this European fellow, Christian Gottfried, he wrote up papers about what he called bacterion, tiny critters that live everywhere, even on the inside of Betty’s throat.”

  Doc caught the skeptical look on my face. “Samuel, when you sneeze, you’re probably getting rid of whole country’s worth of them critters.” Doc was serious too. “I know,” he continued, “I’ve looked at the results of my own sneezing. The critters appear as tiny rods. More than a person can count.”

  “Doc, you got me curious now. I ’d like to look for myself.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “But what I was getting at is that we do our best to convince ourselves that we know something, anything, when we really don’t have a clue about this world.”

  “Doc, I know we’re both sitting in the Chinaman’s restaurant.”

  “You don’t know how to pronounce the Chinaman’s name. You’re sitting across from me and you don’t know how I spent the first fifty years of my life. You don’t know what was on this very same spot a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand years ago. You don’t know what will be here a hundred years from now. You don’t know how that coffee is spreading through your body, you don’t know what causes your hair and fingernails to grow, and you don’t even know if you or I will still be alive by the time the sun sets.”

  I put my hands up to fend off his attack. “I think I understand where you’re leading me, Doc.”

  He took a breath. “And I was just getting started with my list.”

  “Talk about Abe’s wife Betty is what got you started.”

  “Then take Betty,” Doc said. “She’s one of seven sharing their farmhouse. Whatever it was that started choking the inside of her windpipe could have just as easy done it to someone else. But it only struck her. It’s a mystery, Samuel, just like everything in life.”

  He shook his head. “Same with epidemics. Why’s one person get hit and not the next? No, Samuel, doctors don’t have near the control they wish they did. Fact is, the older I get the more I realize the best we can do is offer comfort.”

  A memory crossed his face and he grinned. “Comfort and the odd bit of common sense.”

  Doc had to pull in his legs to give the Chinaman room as he stopped by to pour more coffee. With a full mug again, he leaned forward, and rested his bony elbows squarely on the table.

  “Yup. Common sense. You notice hardly any women here in Laramie wearing layers and layers of skirts like in some towns?”

  I thought that through. “Now that you mention it…”

  “I’ve been here almost since the railroad,” Doc said. “About a year after setting up office, a preacher’s wife stopped by. Complained about her backache. Said she’d been suffering for years. Been to a dozen doctors, tried all their cures.”

  “And?”

  “I told her to go home, change into something else, and bring back what she was wearing during the first visit. She did. We weighed it. Twenty pounds. I then suggested, no matter what folks expected the preacher’s wife to wear, that she try hooped skirts, as they were lighter. Three weeks later, she was free of backaches. It caught on with the other women folk.”

  I nodded appreciation. Then it seemed like my turn to continue the flow of talk.

  “Ever prescribe turpentine for piles?” I asked.

  He thunked his coffee cup down. “No!” Doc said in disbelief. That brief animation brightened his face, and he seemed a decade younger.

  “I swear by it,” I said. “Heard it from an old colonel. Never believed him till it got so bad once, I couldn’t hardly ride. That night, I was so desperate I made application before going to bed.”

  Doc shook his head in sympathy.

  “The application sure made me prance some,” I agreed. “Sleep didn’t come easy neither. But by morning, it felt better and sure enough, day by day, they finally disappeared.”

  Doc snorted laughter. “Any other tricks you can teach this old dog?”

  “I’m fond of the whiskey and lemon cure,” I said, recalling the advice of a Texas rancher. “To shake the worst of colds, one quart of whiskey and a dozen lemons.”

  “Yes?” There was wariness in Doc’s voice. He knew I was setting him up.

  “Yup. Cure comes with directions too.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Throw the lemons at a fence post and drink the whiskey.”

  Doc groaned.

  I shrugged. “At least it didn’t matter none whether you hit the post.”

  We were the only ones left in the eatery now. The Chinaman had slipped away to the kitchen area. With nothing for either of us to say at this point, it was so quiet we would have plainly heard the buzzing of flies, had there been any banging into the window that overlooked the street. Which was another thing I liked about the Chinaman’s. His constant war with flies.

  Doc cleared his throat. “Was this breakfast just a friendly invitation? You don’t strike me as the kind that needs company just for the sake of company.”

  “Company’s been worse, Doc. Anytime you want to share coffee and eggs, just holler.” I tilted my hat back. “I was hoping today to run a few speculations past you on these murders.”

  “My ears are open.”

  I summed up for Doc what little I had learned by riding out to the ranches. Crawford had refused to lend Nichols money this year, when he had done it all other years. Crawford had also failed to mention that fact to me — and I couldn’t decide if it was because the lending issue was significant or just the opposite, so insignificant it had nothing to do with anything.

  I also told Doc about the strange good-bye from Mrs. Ford, and how I interpreted it as meaning she knew Calhoun better than should be expected.

  Finally, I told Doc that Nichols had left the ranch four days before his death, but he hadn’t packed grub, and how I thought that meant it was safe to assume he wasn’t riding range. I mentioned Denver as a possibility for where he’d been, and explained my theory that maybe something had happened there during his August visit which had drawn him back.

  Lastly, I told Doc that I intended to revisit the Bar X Bar to ask Clayton Barnes about the horse he’d found and returned to Jake Wilson. Little as that was to work on, with all the rest, I still
had hardly anything and needed to grasp as many straws as possible.

  Doc absorbed it all and closed his eyes in thought.

  He remained silent for so long, I wondered if — at his age and with a full belly — he’d managed to overcome the effects of the Chinaman’s coffee and against all odds had fallen asleep.

  Doc opened his eyes and gave me an owlish squint.

  “Samuel Keaton, you want more from this breakfast than my listening ear.” He wagged his finger at the silent protest of my upraised hands.

  “Doc!” I tried indignation, but couldn’t hide my grin.

  “Son, don’t forget I’ve got thirty years on you. When a stubborn independent cuss like you sits down to ask for advice, I start listening for what he really wants. What I heard was that you’re going to visit Crawford and lean on him for answers. You’ll go to Denver if you have to. And you don’t need me to help you talk to that Barnes fellow. All of that’s straightforward. You don’t need help with those speculations, ’cause all it will take to confirm or deny those speculations is legwork.”

  Doc steepled his fingers and stared at them for a few moments. A smile played at the edges of his mouth. “You drew up a pretty list, threw in all that smoke, and what’s left when it clears is Lorne Calhoun. I’m the one who told you no one else knew him. So who else can you dog for information on him and Eleanor Ford? You sat me down not for advice, but to see if I knew anything about the two of them.”

  “It did happen to cross my mind that he might have mentioned her name in passing.”

  Doc pursed his lips with satisfaction at the accuracy of his assumption. “I told you earlier,” he said, “that I believe a doctor has a moral obligation to hold secret what he learns from a patient. I’ve seen how loose talk destroys a reputation. Doctor or patient.”

  “That notion struck me as sensible,” I said. “It also struck me that in a town this small, there’s not much you don’t know about folks here or on nearby ranches.”

  Doc started to say something, but I wagged my finger at him in the exact manner he’d done to me minutes earlier. “I’m not suggesting you give me dirt to help me do my job, Doc.”