The Running Gun

by Jory Sherman

  Dan rode out from behind the building and back onto the street. He looked up at the sign over the hotel, The Double Eagle. Another sign below it read Bar, another one, Bath, and another, Eats. At the bottom on a 1 by 6 board tacked up almost as an afterthought, a sign read: Low Rates for Cowhands.

  He rode to an empty hitch-ring embedded in the street just in front of the hotel and looked down at the brand on the stranger’s horse. The letters burned into the hide were CA, which he thought must mean Confederate Army, although he had never seen such a brand as this one before.

  He stepped out of the saddle, tied his reins to the large ring, and walked up the steps to the hotel doors. Both had glass panels and writing on them. Good Eats was on one, Good Drinks on the other. Dan’s stomach roiled once with a sudden hunger pang.

  The lobby was small and unassuming, with a table and lamp, three chairs, a rug, lamps on narrow shelving attached to the painted walls. The desk clerk looked up as Dan tramped toward the desk, carrying saddlebags, bedroll, and rifle.

  “Need a room, bath, shave,” Dan said, setting his gear down in front of the counter.

  “How many nights?”

  “Two at most.”

  “I can give you a weekly rate, or it’s four dollars a night, fifty cents for the bath, and there’s a shaving mirror, bowl, and pitcher in the room and where the bath is.”

  “I’ll take one night,” Cord said, laying a five-dollar bill on the counter.

  The clerk turned an open register around and pushed it toward Cord as he scooped up the bill. “Sign your name or mark on the next open line,” the clerk said.

  “Do you have a stable?”

  “We do. We share it with the other hotels along Second Street. If you want, I can arrange for someone to take your horse there, groom, feed, and water it.”

  Dan made the proper arrangements then forked out more money. He signed the register using the name “Jason Martin” since it would be easy to remember. The clerk handed him a key to room 204, the next floor up. Dan glanced at the stairs. He pictured a soft bed in his mind, with pillows. He had bruises all over his back from sleeping on the hard ground. Taking the key, he carried his gear up the stairs. He had a corner room facing the street, so he could watch the comings and goings. He looked down on the carts and riders traversing the streets in his vicinity.

  The room smelled of whiskey and cigar smoke, but he didn’t care. It was dry and homey enough for one night. A luxury, in fact, after weeks of dodging people, sleeping under stars, or the bright sun, on unplowed ground with the snakes and the bugs.

  Dan shaved in his room while constantly being interrupted by a series of knocks on his door. Vendors came in and showed him everything from clothing to toiletries. He bought a pair of denims and a blue chambray shirt, a pair of socks and underwear, turned the rest away, and hung out the Do Not Disturb sign. He bathed in tepid water downstairs with his old clothes on, changed into the new ones, and hung the wet ones to dry on a back porch line that caught the breeze, but very little sun. He hoped they’d still be there after they dried.

  The dining room was small. It had three booths against one wall, a counter, and two tables in the center. It was empty when Dan sat down and ordered the Bill of Fare—beefsteak, turnips, potatoes, and a baked apple. He drank coffee and chewed his food slowly, thinking about his fate, being there in such a cheerless room, with only a cook and a waiter nearby, but no company for himself.

  The waiter hadn’t spoken five words to him and he only saw the cook once, briefly, when he came out for a minute, looked at him, then went back into the kitchen.

  Dan thought the worst thing that could happen to a man was that he would have no friends. At the moment, he felt as if he hadn’t a friend in the world. Calvin Harris might have been that friend, once, but Dan’s life had changed and he couldn’t even say howdy to the man who had befriended him, had helped him up in Kansas.

  He was starting to feel sorry for himself, so he stood up, left money on the table, and walked out of the dining hall without a word. The saloon was in another room off the lobby, and he went in there as the sun was going down. He didn’t know why, except he thought he might find companionship there. Saloons, he thought, were for lonesome people. There was always friendly talk, some tall stories to be heard, someone to laugh with.

  But when he entered the room, the lamps were not yet lit and the bartender was reading a newspaper. There was only one patron, and he sat at the back wall, by himself, watching, it seemed, to see who came in. His face was in shadow and Dan couldn’t make out anything about the man, except that he wore a hat and was smoking a cheroot.

  The barkeep looked up and Dan moved to the counter, expecting him to come down and take his order. The man kept reading something in the paper that had caught his interest.

  “I’d like a beer, maybe,” Dan said.

  “Well, when you make up your mind, let me know,” the bartender said.

  Dan swallowed. He wasn’t used to saloons and he supposed it showed. Maybe he should have ordered a whiskey. That’s what the man in the back was drinking. There was a shot glass and a bottle on his table. Dan glanced over at him.

  “Maybe a whiskey, I guess,” Cord said.

  The bartender looked up. “Still can’t make up your mind, eh? Well, we got seventeen different kinds of whiskey and other spirits, and the beer’s hotter’n a two-dollar pistol.

  “Just one of your regular whiskies, I reckon.”

  The bartender shot Dan a dirty look and stood there, no longer reading the paper, but regarding Dan as if he were an unwelcome intruder.

  “Maybe you better come over here, Pilgrim,” the man at the back table said. “Leon, you give him a clean glass. I’ll buy him a drink.”

  The bartender lurched away from the end of the bar, got a glass from underneath, and handed it to Dan. He leaned over and whispered to him as Dan took the glass.

  “You might just want to walk on out of here, Sonny,” Leon said. “That man back there’s big trouble for the likes of you.”

  “Keep your trap shut, Leon,” the man said.

  One minute his hand was empty. The next, it was filled with a blue-black Colt with a long barrel. The snout was pointed straight at Leon.

  As Dan stood there, openmouthed, he heard the snick of the hammer as the man thumbed it back to full cock.

  The silence rose up around him like something he could reach out and touch, it felt so thick. His legs turned to jelly and, despite having just eaten, his belly turned as hollow as a gourd.

  Chapter Six

  Dan hesitated, then walked over to the back table. He kept the bartender in sight out of the corner of his eye and made a circular path, so he didn’t walk into a crossfire, in case the bartender decided to shoot it out. He sat down to the stranger’s left, his legs still wobbly, his body shaking from the waist down. His stomach fluttered with a thousand wings, a thousand spiders crawled up his spine and into his prickly scalp.

  Leon laughed and walked back down to the end of the bar to read his paper.

  “Kid,” Leon said, “meet Clay Allison. It’s your funeral.”

  “Leon, just shut up,” Allison said. He eased the hammer back down to half-cock and holstered his Colt .45 with the 9-inch barrel. It slid into his holster as easily as a hot knife into butter. He looked at Cord. “It’s just a game we play sometimes, when I’m in town and some green kid walks in for his first drink. Scared the shit out of you, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, you did,” Cord admitted.

  Allison chuckled mirthlessly. He poured whiskey into the shot glass Cord had brought.

  “What’s the name you’re going by, Sonny?” Allison asked, as he set the bottle back down on the table.

  “My name’s, uh, Jason Martin.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one you wrote down in the hotel register, and I reckon it’s good enough for me. Out here, a name can get a man into a heap of trouble. Like mine, for instance.”

  “Are you…the real Cla
y Allison?” Cord asked.

  “None other, Jason. I got to keep careful, especially here in Waco. You know what they call this town, don’t you?”

  Cord knew. “Six-shooter Junction,” he said.

  “You ain’t as dumb as you look, I reckon. Have a taste. That’s good whiskey, Jason. Old Taylor. Best bourbon west of the Mississippi, north of the Rio Grandy.”

  Dan took a sip of the whiskey and was glad he did. It warmed his mouth and throat, drowned all the moths and butterflies in his stomach and the spiders traversing his spine.

  “It is good whiskey,” Cord said. “I just ain’t used to it much.”

  “If you take it sociable, it won’t hurt you none. When I get to drinkin’ it, well…”

  Cord knew who Clay Allison was. The man was practically a legend, in Texas, at least. He knew Allison had moved from Tennessee with his family to Texas after the war and had worked for Oliver Loving and Charlie Goodnight—driving cattle up the Goodnight-Loving Trail to Colorado and Wyoming. It was rumored that Allison had been in a lot of gunfights, and some said he was wounded badly in the war and had an iron plate in his head that made him crazy at times.

  “I don’t plan to make a habit of it,” Cord said.

  “That’s good,” Allison said. “You ride the owlhoot trail, you got to keep your wits about you.”

  “What makes you think I’m ridin’ the outlaw trail, Mr. Allison?”

  “You call me Clay, hear? Oh, I seen enough fellers on the owlhoot to spot one a-dodgin’ the law. Makes no never mind to me. ’Ceptin’ you seem to be new at it.”

  Allison, whom Dan figured to be in his early or mid-thirties, was still a handsome man. In fact, it was hard to believe all the stories with him sitting there, so friendly and all.

  Yet he had heard the story of a man named Charles Kennedy, who was arrested and put in jail up in Elizabethtown, near Cimarron. A lynch mob broke into the jail and dragged the accused out and strung him up in a slaughterhouse. Allison was a part of that mob, but what he was said to have done next positively curled a man’s hair to hear it. Allison, it was said, cut off Kennedy’s head and stuck it on a pole and carried it to the saloon where he put it on display for everyone to see.

  It was a gruesome enough story, Dan thought, but there were others, too.

  “What makes you think I’m an outlaw, besides something you see in me?” Cord asked. “Do I look guilty of something?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know if you’re an outlaw or not, and it don’t make no difference to me. There’s plenty of ’em to go around out here in the West. And, Lord knows, some of ’em got justification. The law ain’t always right and a man’s gotta eat, take care of his family. But you give yourself away, Kid. You kind of slump over and hide your mouth with your hand when you talk, and you’re always lookin’ over your shoulder.”

  “Maybe I slump over ’cause I’m tired.”

  “Ain’t that kind of a slump? It’s the slump of a man who’s got his likeness on a dodger and don’t want nobody to see his face. You want to stand up straight when you walk. Look like you own every piece of dirt your boots touch. You want to make people give you a wide berth when you walk by and don’t give you too good a look because they’re scared of you.”

  “People are just naturally curious, Mr. Allison. I can’t keep ’em from lookin’.”

  “Call me Clay, Son. When you walk a street, act like you got important business to do. Stand up straight and square your shoulders. People will see someone who ain’t on the run and means business. Witnesses, anyways, ain’t worth the powder to blow ’em to hell.”

  “I didn’t commit no crime,” Cord said.

  “Ain’t a guy in jail who ever did.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m just goin’ home and ain’t seen many people in a while.”

  “Up in Abilene, was you?”

  “I ain’t sayin’.”

  “No need. A man named Calvin Harris was tellin’ me a story, just today, matter of fact, ’bout a young feller around your age who got his pecker caught in a bear trap up in Abilene with a no good scoundrel name of Jake Krebs. Calvin said this young feller might just be ridin’ this way, runnin’ from the law.”

  “Well, it ain’t me,” Dan said, and took another sip of whiskey because the jittery flutters were starting up again. Allison was hitting not just close to home, but right, square in the breadbasket.

  “Smoke?” Allison asked, fishing two cigars out of his pocket. He offered one to Dan.

  “Nope.”

  “That’s good. A smoke’s a giveaway.”

  “A what?”

  “A giveaway. A man on the sly has certain habits. A bounty hunter looks for these. A man has a hankerin’ for a certain brand of whiskey, or smokes a certain kind of cigar. Rolls his cigarettes a certain way, or with a certain kind of paper. These are like a poker player’s twitch when he gets a bad hand, or a good one, and to a hunter, they give away the culprit.”

  “You know a lot about such things, Clay.”

  Allison chuckled. “I got years on you, Son. I pick up things. You never know when a little knowledge might come in handy.”

  Dan took another sip of the whiskey. He was beginning to like what it gave him; warmth, a feeling of self-confidence, a lifting up of his spirits. It's like lightning in the mind, he thought. It made him feel tall and strong and added a glibness to his tongue that had not been there before. Maybe that was the danger in getting to like strong spirits, he thought. It made you think you were something you were not.

  “Why are you tellin’ me all this, Clay? Because you think I’m a criminal, running from the law?”

  “I’ll tell you a little story, Son. One I heard today. It might not mean much, but I don’t believe much in coincidences. I think some things happen ’cause they’re supposed to happen. Do you follow the drift of my horse?”

  “Sort of.” Dan did not know what Allison was driving at, but he liked the sound of his voice. And he knew he was learning things, valuable things that might stand him in good stead if he had to stay on the owlhoot trail for very much longer.

  “No matter,” Allison said, with a wave of his hand to wipe the smoke away from his cigar. He had lit it so expertly and easily that Dan had hardly noticed. Now, with one end bit off and resting on the table, Allison had filled that corner of the room with a pall of blue smoke.

  “You go right ahead, Clay.”

  “I don’t live in Texas no more,” Allison said. “I took me three hunnert head of cattle and went up to New Mexico and started me a ranch up yonder. But, I come down here to Waco to look over some herds and do some pickin’ before the drovers take ’em on up to the railheads in the north. I’m buyin’ a few head to build my herd.”

  Dan nodded. That explained why Allison was in Waco, not why he was at the Double Eagle.

  “Like you, I’m on the dodge, you might say.”

  “I ain’t on the dodge,” Dan insisted. “I got me a home and everything.”

  “Sure, Son. And, so do I. But there are men who would kill me just to get a reputation. I don’t think there’s any wanted posters with my name on it, but if there was, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. But it’s the lone wolf I got to watch out for, the waddy who’s heard of me and thinks he can quit bein’ a nobody if he puts my lamp out. So I stay on the owlhoot trail pretty much. Don’t linger long in strange towns, get me a cheap room like here at the Double Eagle, where it’s quiet enough so’s I can watch my back.”

  “All right,” Dan said, when Allison paused to draw on his cigar and blow perfect smoke rings into the air above his head.

  “I looked over some cattle this mornin’. One herd caught my eye. Owned by a man named Calvin Harris.”

  Allison paused, as if looking for some reaction from Cord. Dan felt the man’s stare, eye to eye, and he didn’t flinch. The whiskey, he thought. The whiskey gave him that ability.

  “Me’n Harris got to be chums, right off. He knew who I was, knew my reputation, deserved or othe
rwise, and he told me a little story about another herd he had driven up to Abilene. Only his herd was stolen, his hands all murdered, you know.”

  “No, I don’t know,” Cord said, the lie coming easily to his lips.

  “Seems a crooked scoundrel by the name of Krebs, Jake Krebs, kilt all Harris’s hands south of here, hired on a couple of fine young men from Waco and a Mexican, as drovers and they went up to Abilene. Krebs killed one of the brothers and some lawmen and the other brother caught the blame. Interestin’ story, eh?”

  “It’s some interestin’,” Dan said.

  “Harris liked this kid. He doesn’t know what happened to the Mexican drover, but thinks this Krebs killed him, too. Anyways, he goes up to Abilene and sees this kid and tries to help him, but last he knew the young man was still in the hoosegow up in Abilene.”

  “Did he tell you the name of this kid?” Cord asked.

  “He did, but I don’t recollect it right off.”

  “Just wonderin’. What’s the point, then?”

  “The point is that Harris thinks this kid is made of the right stuff and might escape from the Abilene jail and come back here to Waco. Kind of like you done.”

  “I didn’t escape from no jail.”

  “He tells me if I run into this young feller, to tell him he’s in town and wants to help out if he can. That’s all.”

  Dan finished his whiskey. When Allison picked up the bottle to pour him another, Dan waved him away.

  “I got to go, Clay. Thank you for the drink. But, I’m not running from the law.”

  “Well, maybe not. But, you run right into it, anyways.”

  Dan stood up, puzzled. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Are you the law?”

  Allison chuckled. “Nope, not by a long shot. But Leon there, the barkeep. His name is Law.”

  Dan looked over toward the bar. The bartender nodded to him and smiled.