Joe paused, though, outside the open doorway to one of Denver’s many saloons. A bath would feel good, but it would feel even better if he had a drink in his belly to warm his innards first.
And the aromas coming out of the place . . . beer and whiskey and cigar smoke . . . were purely tantalizing.
Yeah, the bath could wait just a little.
“Beer for you, mister?” the barman asked.
“Whiskey,” Joe answered, leaning the Henry against the front of the bar. He dug into his pouch for another piece of paper currency, a twenty. He hadn’t gotten around yet to exchanging his paper money for coin. Tomorrow maybe.
The barman eyed the bill, then said, “A drink costs more if you don’t have hard money.”
“How much?”
“Fifty cents.”
The price was outrageous, but Joe nodded acceptance of the highway robbery.
The barman made change with a mixture of coins and paper, then poured a generous tot of bar whiskey into a mug. The place did not skimp on its measure.
Joe checked to see that there was no Confederate money mixed into his change, then tried the whiskey. It was the real thing, not Injun whiskey, smooth on the tongue and fiery in the gut. He had a second swallow, then set the mug back onto the bar before turning sideways to the bar and propping an elbow next to his drink.
He liked the place. It did not pretend to be anything but a place for a man to have a drink and relax. There were no wheels or faro or dice. No piano or dancing girls. Not even any whores.
There were a good many men in the place, most of them in the rough clothes of working men with not a batwing collar or a boiled shirt among them.
A large man with a black beard and whiskey-flushed cheeks stopped beside Joe. “Is that one of them newfangled Henry rifles?”
Joe nodded. “Aye, so ’tis.”
“Can I pick it up and feel the heft of it?”
“Sorry. No,” Joe said. “I don’t let anybody handle my weapons.”
“I been thinking about trying to buy me one of those,” the bear of a man said.
“You won’t be sorry if you get one,” Joe said, then pointedly turned to face the counter, giving his shoulder to the fellow. He picked up his mug and had another very small sip of the whiskey. Like all whiskey, it was getting better-tasting the more he had of it.
“I just want to touch it. I ain’t gonna run off with it.” The fellow’s voice was rising and taking a hard edge.
Joe craned his head around and looked the fellow up and down. The increasingly belligerent fellow did not seem to be armed. Joe looked him over, then turned back to the bar.
There was a piece of polished steel on the back wall instead of a mirror. It was sufficiently reflective that Joe could keep an eye on this gent while ignoring him.
It was a shame, but the thought of a second whiskey was becoming less and less attractive.
Joe raised his mug again. A couple more swallows would finish this drink; then he could go get his bath.
The big man reached in front of Joe and wrapped his hand around the barrel of the Henry.
Damn, Joe thought. Just damn it all to hell anyway.
He whirled, his elbow slamming into the fellow’s face. There was a satisfying crunch of breaking cartilage, and blood sprayed for four or five feet around.
The man’s eyes went wide. He tottered backward two paces and shook his head like an old buffalo bull that is already dead on its feet but does not yet know it. Then the fellow threw his head back and roared.
That sounded like a bull, too, Joe thought. A little.
The fellow lowered his head and charged straight ahead.
51
JOE STEPPED AWAY a pace and took a sharp, backhand swing with the Henry. The octagon steel barrel caught the fellow across the face and caved in his cheekbone.
The man cried out. But he did not quit. He blindly reached for Joe with one hand while he wiped blood out of his eyes with the other.
Joe rather admired the son of a bitch’s grit. But not so much that he was willing to let the fellow put hands on him. Instead, Joe took another step backward and brought the butt of the Henry up into the tough son of a bitch’s nuts.
There was no outcry this time. The guy simply folded up and collapsed. Passed out cold as a trout.
“Mister, you’d best not be here when Dinkin comes to. He’s the meanest sonuvabitch in the territory.”
Joe picked up his whiskey and drained it. “Was maybe,” he said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, nodded a friendly enough farewell to the gents who were standing around gawking, then took the gentleman’s advice and left. He still wanted that bath, after all. Make that needed.
Off to the west, the sun had already slipped below the mountain peaks, and there was a decided chill in the air, but the barbershop was still open. There were a couple gents inside playing some sort of game on what looked like a checkerboard but with different-shaped pieces. One of those fellows turned out to be the barber.
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“I’m needin’ a bath. A trim might not go too bad since I’m already here.”
“Sit in the chair there. I’ll be with you soon as I make this next move.” He did something with one of the pieces on his board, and the other gent scowled. Judging from that, Joe would have to figure that the barber was winning.
Joe propped the Henry against the wall and settled into the chair, a proper barber chair that lay back or swung around in circles and was bolted to the floor.
Joe had not seen a chair like that in a very long time. In San Francisco, would that have been? Or Santa Fe? He was not sure, but it had been years back. He was positive about that much.
“Do you want a shave?” the barber asked. “Or just a trim?”
“Just the trim, thanks. Shave it off an’ it’ll just itch me half t’ death when it starts growin’ back in again.”
“A trim it will be, then.”
The barber threw a striped sheet over him and snugged it tight around his neck, then took up his shears and began snipping. A few minutes later, Joe’s shaggy mane had been chopped down to a manageable length and he felt five pounds lighter.
“Now for that bath,” he said when the barber took the sheet off him, curls of dark hair mixed with gray falling to the floor when he did so.
“Through that door there. Got a row of stalls back there. Pick any one you like and step in. My China boy will pour water into the bucket overhead. Bucket’s got little holes in the bottom so the water runs over you when you stand under it. It works good and you never have to be sitting in water that has the last fellow’s dirt in it.”
“I think I like that idea,” Joe said.
“Most do. Go on now.” The barber tugged a cord that led into the ceiling.
“What was that?”
“Bellpull. To tell the Chinaman there’s somebody coming.” The man handed Joe a large Turkish towel—a real towel and not just some discarded grain sack—and motioned him toward the door.
Joe picked up his Henry and went into the back room, which smelled of soap and moisture. It was lighted by a pair of good lamps mounted high on the walls. There were three narrow stalls, each with a swinging door to give privacy. Fancy, Joe thought.
He peered inside the nearest stall. Sure enough, there was a bucket hanging overhead, and the floor had slats that allowed water draining out of the bucket to drain away somewhere. There was a hook bolted to the back of the door where a man could hang things, the towels perhaps, and a metal dish of pale, runny soap on the back wall.
He could not see behind the stalls, but apparently there was some sort of platform or ramp back there because he could see some shiny black hair and a pair of slanted eyes peeping over the back wall. The Chinaman, he assumed, stationed where he could reach over to pour the water. Joe smiled and waved and the eyes quickly disappeared.
Joe went down to the last stall and looked inside, then leaned his rifle in a corner jus
t outside the door to that stall. He sat on the bench that ran along the side of the room and removed his boots—when he had time to think about such things he wanted to find some moccasins instead, maybe find himself a squaw who could make him some because he doubted that Fiona would know how—and piled his clothing and accoutrements on the bench. He placed his revolver and bowie on top of the pile, then stepped into the bath stall.
He heard a faint rustling noise from behind the back wall and saw the Chinaman—he was a wiry little son of a bitch and wore his hair in a pigtail—lean over and dump a pail of water into the overhead bucket.
Immediately, thin streams of water, warm water, began streaming down all over him. It was like a very warm summer rain. Joe liked it.
He took a fingerful of soft soap from the metal dish that was screwed onto the wall and began to wash himself.
Now, this was some kind of all right! Maybe, he conceded, there was something to be said for fancified city notions after all.
While he lathered himself up, he began softly humming a Lakota chant.
Then he heard the door to the back room open and the approach of heavy footsteps. A moment later, a deep voice growled, “All my life I heard the expression ‘caught with his pants down.’ Now I see it can happen for true.” The voice laughed. “Come out, Moss. See if you can make it to your guns before I cut you down.”
Joe heard the Chinaman scurry away.
All of a sudden, the warmth inside the bath stall evaporated, and Joe felt a chill rise up out of nowhere to make his skin prickle with goose bumps.
“Come out of there, you son of a bitch.”
52
“DINKIN?”
“What the fuck is dinkin?” the voice returned.
All right. This was not the fellow Joe had busted up in the saloon. And he knew Joe’s name, which meant he likely was one of Ransom Holt’s assassins, damn him.
“You kinda caught me at a bad time here,” Joe said. “Can we talk about this?”
“Hell, no, we can’t. And you ain’t climbing out over that back wall neither. I get my bath here lots and I know how the place is laid out. If you try and climb over, I can see you and shoot your hairy ass. Might have to take a head shot, though, and that would piss me off. It’d be messy, and I got to have your head to deliver to the man.”
“Give me a minute to wipe the soap outa my eyes an’ I’ll come out,” Joe said.
“Go ahead. But don’t think you’re gonna camp there too awful long. Come out and try for one of these guns whenever you’re ready.”
“You’ve already took my guns, ain’t you?”
“Have I? Come out and see,” the fellow taunted.
“D’you mind if I know your name?” Joe asked.
“When you get to Hell and the devil asks what happened, you can tell the son of a bitch that James Drew killed you and collected the bounty.”
While the two were talking through the thin wood of the bath stall door, Joe was carefully assessing where James Drew was standing. Once he was sure of that, he silently slipped the hook free so the door could swing freely open.
He took a deep breath and, with a roar, used his left hand to slap the door open. He stepped confidently out of the stall. He had the bath towel wrapped around his waist.
And he had his tomahawk in his right hand.
James Drew’s revolver spat flame, and a wreath of white smoke blossomed from the muzzle. Joe felt a hard thump low on his right side.
He was hit. He did not know how badly, but he could not take time to worry about it. Not now. First he had to . . .
He gauged the distance and stepped back a pace while Drew’s thumb hooked over the hammer and started to draw it back for a second shot.
The man did not have time enough for that. Joe’s tomahawk flashed, turning end over end toward Drew.
The hired gunman flinched away from the spinning ’hawk, trying to bat it aside with the barrel of his revolver. The gun discharged harmlessly to one side while the tomahawk buried itself in Drew’s shoulder.
Drew looked up in time to see Joe Moss flying toward him. Slamming into him with a snarl of rage. Driving him backward onto the bench that ran along the wall.
Joe’s knee found Drew’s cods, and Drew shrieked.
Drew was a wiry sonuvabitch who looked like he had been in a fight or two in his past, but he had never fought with Joe Moss, probably not with any of Joe’s mountain man companions either. Mountain men were accustomed to rough-and-tumble. They fought like this for sport. And sometimes for survival.
Joe took a handful of Drew’s black, greasy hair and used it as a handle so he could drive the man’s head repeatedly against the barbershop wall.
“Quit. Please. I . . . I yield. I give. You win,” Drew grunted desperately as consciousness began to slip away.
“Damn right I win,” Joe snarled. He stopped pounding Drew’s head against the wall and sat up. Without changing expression, he took the shaft of the tomahawk and with a jerk and a twist yanked it free of Drew’s flesh.
“Thanks,” Drew mumbled. “Thank you . . . for that.”
“Oh, don’t thank me yet,” Joe said.
Then, smiling, he drove the blade of his ’hawk square into the middle of James Drew’s forehead. The man’s body stiffened, quivered just a little, and then deflated.
With a grunt, Joe stood and jerked his tomahawk free of James Drew’s brain. Then he turned and began gathering his other weapons and clothing.
He surely did feel better after that bath.
53
AFTER JOE DRESSED and had all his weapons in their proper places, he sat on the bench beside James Drew’s corpse and cut a scrap of cloth off Drew’s shirttail. Then he began meticulously cleaning the greasy brain matter and drying blood off the tomahawk.
His movements were slow and methodical. His thoughts were anything but.
Drew was a total stranger. So had been James Tuttle back at Fort Laramie. Yet both had tried to kill him. They wanted the Peabody reward money and were willing to take a life to get it. Take a life and deliver the head.
Dammit, they could come at Fiona just as savagely. Cut her beautiful head from her body and take it to Ransom Holt. And he, the son of a bitch, would send it on to whichever of the Peabodys was still alive. Damn them all!
It occurred to Joe that pickling salts discolor anything placed in them. He might take the hounds off Fiona’s trail by sending Ransom Holt a woman’s head.
Not Fiona’s, of course. But he could rob a grave. If he could find a young woman freshly dead. But dammit, even if he could do that, how in hell could he find one with red hair? That flaming hair was Fiona’s most distinguishing characteristic. It was mighty unlikely that he could find a freshly dead female to decapitate.
He would not hesitate, not for a heartbeat, if he could do that.
Take the already dead woman’s head—he was no murderer, dammit, no matter how many men and, yes, women, too, he had killed—and send it to Holt.
He chuckled. He could even collect the bounty Holt was offering on Fiona. Now, wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth for the Peabodys?
With a sigh, Joe slipped the tomahawk back into his sash where it belonged. He was just daydreaming, dammit, and dreams won’t come to beaver.
Joe had been looking forward to a little rest here in Denver. But while he was lollygagging around with a bath and a haircut, there were men out there in the night who were actively looking for his own dear Fiona. And they would most cruelly handle her if ever they caught up with her and that little chestnut horse.
Piss on this, Joe decided.
He could rest when Fiona was safe. And he knew the best way to make that so.
Joe stepped out into the barber’s front room and hooked a thumb over his shoulder. “That fella you sent back there t’ get me got got his own self. You might wanta drag him out of there before your bath customers start complaining ’bout the stink.”
“Stink?” the startled barber repeated.<
br />
“Aye. The man shit his britches when I kill’t him.” Joe shook his head. “Had no sense o’ decorum a’tall.”
He dropped a quarter into the barber’s tip plate to help pay for the removal and burying, then headed at a fast walk for the hotel where he had left his bedroll.
He could think about sleep later.
Fiona needed him now.
54
JOE PUSHED THE big Shire hard, dragging the recalcitrant little mule along behind. He hit the headwaters of Fountain Creek well before dawn and followed it south.
He had been on Fountain many a time in other, older days, back when there was nothing but buffalo and mule deer to be found on the rolling hills that lay beneath the Front Range. Game, that is, and Indians, not all of whom were friendly.
Back then, the only outposts of civilization had been Pueblo all the way south to the Arkansas and Bent’s Fort well east in the Arkansas Valley.
Those were damned fine days, Joe thought. Damn fine.
Now there was a town called Fountain and another at the mystical springs at Manitou. Lord knows where-all else the emigrants might be making towns for themselves.
Not that Joe was complaining. He accepted the fact that the days of beaver and the free trapper were past. He accepted it. But he hated it nonetheless.
He pushed the Shire until the white foam of sweat mottled the shiny black of its hide, and dawn found him close to the foothills below the wall of magnificent mountains, nearing the place where Four Mile Creek flowed into Fountain Creek. Close, too, to the young town of Fountain, close enough that he could see the smoke from folks’ chimneys there.
Joe angled west, cut across some hills, and encountered a road. Damn thing hadn’t been there the last time he came this way, but there was a right proper road in place now. It even had some bridges and culverts to ease the way for wagon traffic.
“What d’you make of a thing like that, horse?” he asked, shaking his head. A road. Be damned if it wasn’t.
Why, there was even a town of sorts there, too. He didn’t know what it was called and did not particularly want to know. Ransom Holt was supposed to be in Manitou, and that was still a couple miles west, smack at the foot of the pass the Utes took each year on their migrations from the mountain wintering grounds to the vast plains where they spent their summers hunting.
Blood at Bear Lake Page 15