Powder Keg

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by Ed Gorman


  “And then you took up with Mike Chaney.”

  “Not the way you think. He worked on my ranch from time to time. One day I saw him just sitting under a tree with his head in his hand. I went over to talk to him.” She smiled. “He couldn’t help himself. He flirted with me. He just did it by instinct. I could tell he didn’t mean anything by it. It was just the only way he could deal with women. I just ignored it and asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t tell me at first. Then he just opened up. He was like a little boy. Very sad and very confused. Woman problems. This was before he started robbing Flannery’s banks. He had two women pregnant and both of them were married and both of them were sure the children were his.”

  I was rolling a cigarette and she said, “May I have one of those?”

  It was still considered scandalous behavior, women smoking cigarettes. But more and more of them were doing it in private. I rolled a good one for her, got it lighted, and carried it over to her.

  She took a deep, long drag of it. “Anyway, even when he wasn’t working on my ranch, he’d come around just to talk to me.”

  “About the women?”

  “About everything. I think everybody saw him as somebody who never gave much thought to anything. But when you got him alone, he was a lot more serious than that. And I needed a confidant, too. Glen had left—and not because of Mike, despite all the gossip saying otherwise. He’d met a woman at a horse auction over in Drover City about four months ago. He decided right on the spot that he wanted to marry her. She came and visited him once on the ranch and stayed with me overnight. Very nice woman. She and Glen are very happy.”

  And that was when the gunfire started.

  All I could think of was Tremont and his mob.

  I went to the window and peered out. In the silver moonlight the shapes of maybe a dozen men could be seen in the middle of the street outside Fred’s saloon. That didn’t look good.

  “Do you have to leave?”

  “Afraid I do.”

  She stood up, came to me. “What I wanted to ask you was if you would talk to Jen and tell her the real story. Because nothing happened between her brother and me other than friendship. She just wouldn’t believe it when Mike told her, either. Would you just talk to her?”

  “I will,” I said, reaching for my sheepskin.

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” I said. But I was already out the door.

  That long night I’d been dreading? I had a sour feeling in my stomach that told me it was just starting.

  Chapter 29

  Turned out much worse than I expected. Or dreaded, would be more like it.

  By the time I reached the dozen or so men in the street, two of the saloons facing that part of the business lane had pretty much emptied. Worth standing in the cold for a show that good.

  “You’re in big trouble, Jake. Now you let me have that gun back.”

  There’s one thing a lawman probably ought not to do and that’s plead with people who are breaking the law. Spit on them, slap them around, kick them in the balls if you get a chance—but don’t plead with them.

  But poor Dob Willis wasn’t experienced enough to know how to handle a situation like that.

  I could pretty much figure out what had led to that moment. Young deputy wanting to stay in charge of things hears or sees some kind of commotion down the street. Shrugs into his sheepskin and heads for the spot where all the voices are coming from.

  But when he gets there—and this was the part I wasn’t too sure of—somebody or somebodies relieve him of his pistol. And being in a hurry, all excited and everything—being in a hurry, he forgets to grab a carbine from the rack that Nordberg put up for a moment just like that one.

  So now he stood in front of the crowd of laughing, jeering, drunken men, begging for them to give him his gun back.

  Tremont wasn’t the man with Dob’s gun but those were the boys he’d stirred up so I walked over to him.

  Before he had time to even make a fist, I slapped him hard across the face, grabbed the collar of his jacket, and flung him to his knees right in front of his gang.

  “You tell them to give Dob his gun back or I’m going to kick your teeth in.”

  “You son of a bitch,” he said.

  “I’m not waitin’ long, Tremont. Tell them to give Dob his gun back.”

  The gallery started shouting.

  “It’s that federal son of a bitch.”

  “Hey, federal man, go back to Washington. We don’t want you here.”

  “Kill him, Tremont. Shoot him in the back if you need to.”

  The man with Dob’s gun said, “I ain’t givin’ him his gun back, Ford. He had to be a big important man and tell us to break it up. Then he made the mistake of wavin’ his gun around.”

  “Give him the gun, Jake,” Tremont said, struggling to his feet. And struggling was the right word. Between the liquor and the humiliation of me tossing him around, he wasn’t doing well at the moment.

  I drew my own .44. “Couple of you boys help him up. And you, Jake, you give Dob his gun back.”

  Somebody in the gallery shouted, “Hey, Dob, why don’t you get your mommy down here? Maybe she can get Jake to give the gun back.”

  That of course turned out to be just about the most hilarious thing these souses had heard in their lifetimes.

  I walked over to Jake. He then had Dob’s gun pointed at my chest. “Hand the gun over.”

  “I could drop you right now.” His words were whiskey-wobbly. So was his backbone. He looked ready to fall over, a scrawny man with a rat-mean face.

  “Sure you could.”

  “Better give it to him, Jake,” Tremont said.

  “Shoot the bastard, Jake,” somebody at the back said.

  “That’s right, Jake,” I said. “Shoot me. Waste your whole life on one bullet to impress a bunch of drunks.”

  Tremont said, “Dammit, Jake. Hand him the gun. Think about your new granddaughter. You want to see her again, don’t you?”

  Because I was reasonably preoccupied with Jake and the possibility that the drunken yahoo just might kill me, I didn’t notice Sheriff Nordberg until he stood to the side of the crowd with his carbine trained right on Jake’s temple.

  “You got five seconds to hand him the gun, Jake. Or I’ll kill you right where you stand.”

  And that was that.

  Nordberg’s words managed to penetrate even Jake’s thick head. One glance at the sheriff was all it took. Nordberg was not only big, he was fierce, something I hadn’t seen in him till then. I had no doubt he’d kill Jake on the spot. Nobody else did, either, including Jake.

  He handed me the gun.

  I tried not to look relieved.

  “You send these men home now, Tremont,” Nordberg said. “And I mean now.”

  “You throwin’ in with Flannery, Sheriff?” Tremont asked.

  “If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t even say something like that, Tremont. You know I support you men. But not when you act like this. Now before something bad happens, get these men home. They all have to work in the morning and they’ll need a good night’s sleep to work off their drunk. Now git and git fast.”

  “Thanks for helping me with Jake.”

  “Doing my job is all.” He sipped as much coffee as he could. The stuff was scalding. We’d drifted to the café after the men went their various ways home. “Jake’s all right when he’s sober. He’s actually a quiet little fella. But when he gets drunk he thinks he’s tough.” This time he just blew on his coffee. “And he can be dangerous when he’s got a gun in his hand.”

  “Flannery should think about hiring a bodyguard.”

  Nordberg smiled. His nose was still red from the night air. “I’ve told him that, too. He tells me that I should be his bodyguard. Whenever things get kind of threatening, I send a deputy out to stand guard for a shift. It’s usually an off-duty deputy, though, so I have to pay him extra, which the town council bitches about.”

&nb
sp; “Why don’t they ask Flannery to pay for the deputy?”

  He laughed. “That’ll be the day, when that council stands up to anything Flannery wants to do. One of the council members works in Flannery’s bank and another one is his second cousin. Flannery gets what he wants and he usually gets it on the cheap. He’s a tight bastard.”

  “I guess that’s how the rich get richer.” I figured I’d give my coffee a try. It was still pretty hot but I managed to gulp down a taste of it at least. “You have any luck?”

  “Went about as expected. Nobody can account for his time yesterday. I’d almost be suspicious if they could. They’re out doing chores by themselves or they’re checking on their livestock or they take a day trip somewhere. I can check it out if it comes to that. But to be honest, my money’s still on Flannery.”

  “Mine, too.”

  He yawned. “Be good to get to sleep. In fact—” He pushed his coffee cup away from him. “I better not drink any more of this or I’ll be awake all night. A lot of men can sleep on coffee. But I’m not one of them.”

  He pushed back, picked up his hat, dropped it on his head and said, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to work on those men again. See if I can’t pin them down a little better. There’s always a possibility that it wasn’t Flannery.”

  “Maybe we just like him for it because he’s such a son of a bitch.”

  He laughed. “You tryin’ to tell me that I don’t hand out impartial law and order?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

  “You know something? You’re probably right.”

  “I got the same problem. I want it to be Flannery, too. You want to see it all catch up to him on the end of a rope.”

  He feigned mock shock. “Why, you don’t understand the ways of the West, mister. Out here the onliest people we hang are poor whites and Mexes and coloreds.” The mocking tone vanished. “I don’t know about back East but out here a rich man would have to burn down an orphanage before a judge would even consider hanging him.”

  “It’s not any different back East.”

  “Yeah,” he said, standing up. “I kinda figured that.”

  The wind rattled the window as I tried to sleep. I was in long johns under two blankets and I was still cold. The demons came back, all my drinking years, all the mean and embarrassing things I’d done. Hard to forgive yourself; hard to have any sense of dignity after the whiskey nights come screaming back. I wanted to reach into my head and rip them out so some fine night I could lay my head down and not remember what I’d done and who I was back in those terrible dark days.

  I had a nightmare that I was in that room with the wind screeching and distant people screaming and crying as in the aftermath of some disaster. But when I went to the window the streets were bare. And when I tried the door, it was locked from the outside. The wind got louder and louder and when I woke up—

  When I woke up somebody was tapping faintly on my door. My first thought was that it was the wind. But after I sat up and reached for my gun holstered on the bedpost, I heard it again.

  Who the hell would be knocking at that time of night?

  Chapter 30

  Two minutes later I found myself standing in my long johns with my .44 in the face of a tiny gray-haired woman of hunched back and spidery fingers. She had an intensely sweet face, so sweet in fact that I felt stupid holding my gun on her.

  “Is that loaded, young man?”

  “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Well, you’re not going to shoot me, are you?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “I know this is late.”

  “Gosh, I guess I hadn’t noticed that. Couldn’t be any later than one, two o’clock in the morning.”

  “Now you’re making fun of me.”

  She huddled inside her long draped black coat. The red wool scarf lent her face a touch of vivid color.

  “I need to know who you are.”

  “Mrs. Ralston.”

  She sounded as if I should have known who that was. I had no idea.

  “Tim Ralston. He owns the livery?”

  “Oh, I see.”

  But I didn’t. What the hell was the wife of the livery owner doing at my door that time of morning?

  “He would’ve come himself but he’s scared. He needs to talk to you. It’s important.”

  “Did he tell you what it’s about?”

  “He said he just needed to talk to you and it was important. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. That’s the way he is. He knows all these things about people in town but he won’t trust me with anything. He told me somethin’ once and I kind’ve gossiped about it with my friends and it got all over town and he blamed me. The person it was about, he had to move out of town, it got so bad. So Tim won’t tell me anything ever since that time.”

  “So he wants me to come out there now?”

  She nodded. “He’s scared. Whatever it is, he just wants to get it off his chest. He said you was in and askin’ him questions and that he told you a lie and that he’s sorry he done that.”

  A lie.

  I’d asked him about two people, Tremont and Long, whose son Flannery had fired after the robbery. I wondered which one he’d been lying about.

  “Dress warm,” she said. “It ain’t far but it’s mighty cold.”

  She waited in the hall while I dressed. Tremont or Long. I still wanted it to be Flannery. No family had the right to “own” a town the way they did that one. It was like the mining towns where the company owned all the stores and the houses the miners lived in. I didn’t see much difference between that sort of situation and the socialism that was finding so much support in the workingman ranks.

  I dressed warm the way she told me to.

  Chapter 31

  The Ralston house was a long, narrow adobe structure that sat on the side of a hill and was surrounded by oak trees. A lamp burned in the front window, sitting on a table and shining in the night like an icon.

  When we reached the front door, Mrs. Ralston said, “It shouldn’t be open.”

  But it was, not by much, maybe half an inch. The wind had died down so the door stood still.

  I drew my gun. “Let me go in first.”

  “Oh, Lord, I hope he’s all right.”

  “Wait here, Mrs. Ralston. I’ll be right back.”

  St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York couldn’t have had many more paintings of Jesus than this one did. Or much more palm from Palm Sunday. Or Bibles and prayer books lying around. I was a fallen-away Catholic but all this was familiar to me. My folks hadn’t ever become fanatical about their religion but whenever I had to stay with my Uncle Norm and Aunt Bess, this was the environment that damned near suffocated me. My Aunt Bess knew the names of every saint in the Book of Saints. She also knew what ailment/catastrophe/dilemma was confronting you. Sneeze and she’d tell you the name of the saint who protected sneezers; open a window and she’d tell you the name of the patron saint of windows; curse and she’d tell you the name of a saint who’d gotten his tongue cut out because he wouldn’t deny his religion. That particular one was supposed to be a moral lesson for me. Here was this saint who willingly let them cleave his tongue with a knife—and here I was, tongue intact, taking the Lord’s name in vain.

  The whole house was churchlike. Rosaries or palm were draped over every framed painting of Jesus and in the bedroom alone I counted three Bibles.

  The only thing that interested me was the note that had been left on the table where they ate their meals.

  HONEY SEND THE FEDERAL MAN AWAY.

  I’LL BE BACK IN THE MORNING.

  I called out Mrs. Ralston’s name. She came inside breathing hard, wound tight from the mystery of the situation.

  I handed her the note.

  “Oh, good Lord,” she said, crossing herself. “He must be in some kind of trouble. Maybe whatever he was going to talk to you about. Do you think somebody came here and took him away?”

  “I don’t think so. I can�
�t be sure. But look around. The place isn’t messed up. And I happened to notice that there weren’t any footprints in the snow when we came up here. Is there a back door?”

  She nodded. Led me to a large enclosure that served as a washroom and a pantry. A door was at its end.

  I opened the door, looked out. “Hold your foot up, would you?”

  I got a good impression of the size of it and then stepped out on the small stoop. In the moonlight I could see two sets of footprints. One of them was hers. And one of them had to be her husband’s. Had to be because there were no other prints to see.

  “Doesn’t look like anybody took him away.”

  “He was nervous about talking to you, that was for sure.”

  “Any idea where he might have gone?”

  For the first time her small, elderly face showed cunning. She was one of those virtuous people who couldn’t lie well.

  “Nearly anywhere. He knows a lot of places he could go.”

 

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