The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  It began to strike him as amusing that these people would look at him in surprise, and then in confusion. With his notoriety because of the fight, they had begun nodding or speaking to him when he passed. Now, having got accustomed to speaking to him, and later having heard that he was a thief and a killer, they were embarrassed. They didn’t know whether to keep on talking to him or not; they didn’t want to be caught being friendly with a brazen robber whose hands were still bloody from killing a couple of peace officers, but because he was such a bad man, they were afraid to snub him.

  Webster watched the confusion on their faces, and inwardly he was laughing at them, as he deliberately made it a point to speak pleasantly to them. And occasionally when one of them showed a little more than average embarrassment, he would deliberately stop the man and speak a couple of friendly words with him.

  There was little enough amusement in Jim Webster’s life, and he had to get most of it out of laughing at the petty postures and pretenses of shallow men.

  He went leisurely into the Red River saloon and found a place at the comfortably empty bar. Stoney set out a full bottle, remembering the brand he had drunk on that night. There was a gold toothed grin on his face as he pushed Webster’s coin back to him.

  “See you’ve got that mirror replaced pretty quickly,” Webster said in a friendly tone.

  “Yeah. I reckon I owe you the drinks for a while,” he grinned. “That busted mirror was an attraction that made money for me for a couple of days. Everybody was telling everybody else about the fight, and they all had to come down and have a few drinks and look at the broken mirror and the cuspidor. See it? I had it washed out and set up there like a prizefight trophy. Lot of fun you started around here, mister.”

  “Glad to be able to break the monotony for the boys. Gets dull when people are packed around a camp with nothing to do but argue.”

  “Reckon it ain’t been dull for you since, from what I hear.”

  This was the hint that Webster had been fishing for. He had figured it all out. If he were silent about what had happened, people would believe Dustin’s yarn, and his own reticence would convict him in their minds. But if he handled it like he had handled it with Faulkner, if he just brushed over the truth, leaving out the most important part, he stood a chance to make friends here. The best thing was to talk frankly and openly—up to a point.

  “Yeah, it has been a little rocky since I left,” he admitted, “I damned near got caught in a hailstorm.”

  “Hail? It didn’t hail here.”

  “It did over the mountain. There was a hail of 30-30 bullets flying around my head like hornets. I took to the tall grass without wasting more than an hour and a half.”

  Stoney laughed. “I was just wondering how you made out. What actually happened? You hear this and that; everybody guessing; nobody knowing anything for sure.”

  Webster repeated about what he told Faulkner, admitting his own part in ducking out after his gun had been lifted, and admitting that he had wandered around the mountains a while before he had found his way home.

  “There are a lot of mountains to get lost in,” Stoney said sympathetically. “Me, I’d just as leave get lost in a desert. At least on a desert you can see which way the danger is coming from. Up there—” he shook his head from side to side. “Me, I don’t want no part of them woods. There’s booger behind every bush.”

  They talked of this and that, and had a few drinks. Two others came in and had a couple of drinks. They looked queerly at Webster through the backbar mirror, and then turned away. Stoney got on the job as host, relaying Webster’s story. The men seemed to be weighing it, then they cautiously edged into the conversation. And gradually in this way, Webster had them in a friendly mood.

  Cloyd Martin, to whom Dustin had introduced Jim the night he left town, came in, and after a couple of rounds, they got a poker game started. They played half an hour or so, then another man joined them, and a little later Emory Dustin came in.

  Webster watched him out of the corner of his eye while Dustin drank at the bar and talked a while with Stoney. He saw Dustin’s eyes studying him through the backbar mirror for a while. Then Emory came over to the poker table and pulled out a chair.

  He laid some bills and silver down on the table and asked for a hand. He looked up and said, “Howdy, Webster.”

  Webster said, “Howdy,” and went on playing his hand of cards.

  A quietness built up a little, and the men around, knowing why that was so, were embarrassed and nervous, and consequently didn’t talk, and this built the quiet and the tension up still more.

  They played a few rounds, and Webster was thinking less about the tension than he was about a scheme that was forming in his mind. These men at the table all knew the story that Dustin had told about him. Dustin had taken a few facts and formed them into a case against Webster, on the strength of which he had branded Jim a thief.

  Why had he done this? Webster wondered about it, though he thought he knew the answer. But the answer to that was not the important thing in his mind now. The men at the table were prepared to see—no doubt expected to see—Webster call Dustin’s hand. But Webster had no desire to do it. He wanted to use the incident for an entirely different purpose.

  He deliberately let the suspense develop. He watched it, and by his silence and by his tense, alert attitude, he deliberately cultivated it. He knew that Dustin sensed it, too, for Dustin did not tighten up like the rest of them, but became more playful, more casual and carefree in his talk and his playing. Dustin was trying to cover up his own growing uncertainty of what Jim had in mind.

  Webster let it ride that way for half an hour, while he deliberately increased the stakes in the game until they were playing for big money. Webster played carefully, watching his chances to hook Dustin, almost carelessly passing up his chances to win from any of the others. It became so apparent that it was itself a silent taunt. The other men noticed, and Dustin himself could hardly keep from realizing that every time he made a bet Webster rode him to the limit, taunting him in a casual friendly voice that both men knew was merely a mask for a deliberate and serious attack.

  Webster now had most of Dustin’s stack of money in front of him. He had been reading Dustin’s face, and he had seen the hunger there. Dustin had the gambling fever; he did not play coldly and mathematically, but was driven by a greed to win. He played to feed his egotism, and now added to that was his urge to beat the man whom he knew was silently taunting him by focusing his bets against him.

  When Webster saw that Dustin’s nerves were keyed up as high as it was safe for him to go, he changed his tactics suddenly. He said softly to Dustin. “You shouldn’t have done that, Dustin.”

  “Done what?” Dustin’s question was almost explosive.

  “Said what you did about me.”

  Dustin eyed him with suspicious sharpness. “Listen, friend. I didn’t do any more than anybody else did. Everybody watched you and so when that business happened, they figured that you had been making a play. All right; we were wrong. I was wrong, like the rest of them. That suit you?”

  “Sure. I know how it was. Still, I can’t get over one thing. I’ve always heard that a man who talked about another man behind his back was a coward. But somehow you don’t strike me as being a coward. I don’t understand it.”

  “I told you, didn’t I?” Dustin’s voice was a few notes higher than it had been before. “I told you I was wrong. What do you want to do, work me over like you did Flint?”

  “No. Did you expect me to do that?”

  “Well, you weigh half again as much as I do. I thought you might intend to try it.”

  “And what would you do if I did?”

  “Look, Webster,” Dustin said. “If I haven’t said enough to satisfy you, then crawl my frame. I’m not afraid of you if that’s what you’re trying to find out. And I’ll be fair wit
h you; I haven’t the slightest intention of letting you mop up any barroom floor with me. If you’re not satisfied with less than a fight, then we’ll step outside and let you try your luck with bullets. Say the word and I’ll call you quicker than hell can scorch a feather.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Webster said soothingly. “But that wasn’t what I had in mind, either. Like I say, I figured that you had plenty of nerve.”

  “I’ve got enough to protect myself with.”

  “Yeah. I know. But you know it’s a funny thing. This business of getting sore at each other and blasting away with guns. It ain’t smart. Let me tell you something. I’ve got a friend who got shanghaied on a boat down on the Barbary Coast in San Francisco. This boat took him to China, and there he killed the mate who wouldn’t let him go ashore, and escaped. He hung out in China quite a while, got mixed up with some of them bandit chiefs or whatever they call them, and fought in some of them rice wars. Got around and saw a lot before he got back to his home range. “Quite an experience for a cowpoke. Well, you know how them bandit chiefs fought a lot of their battles?”

  “No, I haven’t been what you would call a close student of Chinese bandit warfare.”

  “You should study it. It makes sense. Take these two bandit armies facing each other now. Instead of going out and blasting each other’s guts out, they used sense. These two opposing generals would meet somewhere on the battlefield in a tent, and have a lot of tea and liquor and eating stuff brought in. Then they’d bring out their maps of the battlefield, and they’d lay the maps on the table, and they’d start their battle. The first general, he’d say, well your men are here at this spot on the map. So, I’d naturally put my men here on this hill overlooking you, and I’d do so and so. Then the other general would say, yeah, but that was a trap I had for you. When you did that, I’d do this, that or the other. Well, they’d go on like that, fighting their war there on the maps like a couple of men playing chess, and finally one of them would get the other one cornered, and the other one couldn’t think up a way to get out of the trap. So he lost the war. They’d have their drinks, and the losing general would get out of the country, and everybody would go home, and the winning general was in command of the situation. And nobody got hurt. Now ain’t that a more sensible way for a couple of men to settle a difference?”

  “That is very interesting,” Dustin said. “But what are you getting at? We are a long way from China.”

  “Oh, nothing. I reckon it took some courage for the losing general to admit he was licked and walk out without firing a shot. Anyway, I kind of like that way of fighting. That’s why I was just experimenting. I was trying to see how long you was going to keep on playing head-on poker with me.”

  Dustin looked at Webster suspiciously. Webster dealt the cards and kept on with the game. And now the men around the table knew that Webster had dared Dustin to keep on playing against him. Webster’s taunt had became an open challenge.

  The game went on now with most of the rest of the men dropping out at the first sign that Webster was after Dustin on a hand. Webster and Dustin played head-on most of the hands, Webster playing coldly and methodically, taunting Dustin with soft jibes at which Dustin could not openly take offense, but which were making him boil inside. Dustin was keeping a smiling, indifferent face, but he was pink around the ears, and frequently the anger and cupidity showed in a fleeting look in his eyes.

  Webster methodically took his money, mercilessly made him dig more and more out of his pockets. The saloon was gradually filling up, and customers had their drinks and came and stood behind the table, so that now they were three or four deep in a big circle around the players. The house was tense; word spread all over town, and the crowd grew in the saloon.

  The crowd and Webster’s soft nagging remarks had Dustin in a position where he could not drop out. Finally he used up all his silver and his bills, and he was in the middle of a big pot.

  He looked at his hole card after Webster had made a hundred-dollar bet on an exposed deuce, and then he unbuttoned his shirt, and then unbuttoned the flap on a chamois money belt around his waist and brought out a handful of gold pieces.

  He threw five twenty-dollar pieces into the pot, calling Webster’s bet, and lost the hand to Webster’s flush. Now he brought out a big stack of gold, and tried to win by forcing the bets higher and higher. Webster dropped out except when he had the percentage, never once succumbing to the temptation to plunge.

  It took him half an hour to take the thousand dollars in gold which Dustin had dug out of the belt, and now Dustin was out of cash. He got up from the table.

  “That’s all I’ve got with me,” he said with a strained smile. “You won it, and before you try to make something out of it, you won it fair, so far as I know. And I’m no more afraid of your poker playing then I am of your fists and your guns. I’ll be back looking for you, and loaded next time.”

  Webster gathered up his winnings. “I’ll be waiting. Beats doing it with guns, don’t it?” he grinned. Then shouting to Stoney. “See what the boys want. I’m buying.”

  He had won more than money in this game.

  CHAPTER X

  Report of Progress

  It was dark now, and Webster was again in Mrs. Halsell’s living room. Swanson was there with Asa Cromwell, an elderly, erect lawyer who wore small glasses and an air of reserved suspicion, as though he assumed that the world was guilty until proved innocent. Swanson himself was more reserved than usual, and seemed to lack the friendliness he had displayed toward Webster at their first meeting.

  Except for Mrs. Halsell’s renewed display of cordiality, Webster had the feeling that he was on trial.

  After the introductions, Swanson, who was seated in the easy chair in the corner that seemed to be reserved for him, spoke to Webster about the matter that must have been uppermost in his mind.

  “I don’t know exactly how to say this, Webster,” he began hesitantly, “but Mrs. Halsell was telling me that you were somewhat concerned by the company that my daughter keeps. I haven’t found any objections to her friends, and—”

  Webster interrupted him quickly. “I understand what you mean. I have told Mrs. Halsell that I would say no more about the matter. I suppose it could be called meddling, though I meant well. At any rate, I apologize to you. I won’t intrude on your private affairs again.”

  “I don’t think that I’m a particularly bad judge of people,” Swanson continued, as though he could not relinquish his pique at Webster, “and it is my opinion that Emory is a particularly smart and up-and-coming young man. Mr. Cromwell gets the same impression.”

  “I’ve apologized,” Webster said. “Are you ready to proceed with my report?”

  “Yes,” Swanson answered. “What have you learned?”

  “Let me put it this way,” Webster returned. He opened his wallet and extracted two pages torn from a small notebook, and laid them on the round table in the center of the room. “It happens that since coming here, I’ve been deputized both by an Indian Territory Marshal and a Texas Ranger. Both those men are now dead, as I will explain, but I consider it my duty to transmit a record of the case I was working on with them to their superiors. Since I expect to take a step in which there is some risk of my not succeeding, I want to make an affidavit of the things that have happened so far. That is why I asked you to bring a lawyer, and pens and paper. If Mr. Cromwell and Mrs. Halsell will each take down my deposition in writing, it will serve as my report to date to both the Rangers and the Marshal’s office, and at the same time you will hear it and it will be my report to you. Is that satisfactory?”

  “I see nothing wrong with it. But how does it come that you were deputized—”

  “That will come out in its proper place in the deposition. There is one point on which I will have to obtain a promise from both of you. This matter is not closed, and any leak in the information I have to report
would wreck the whole case. I have to ask all three of you to give me your words that you will not act on, or discuss, anything I have to say until such time as I release you from that promise. Is that agreeable?”

  Cromwell cleared his throat and looked at Webster over his iron-rimmed glasses. “As I understand it, your recent—shall we say—adventure involved a robbery and two murders. Now if you give us the facts about the robbery and the murders, and we do not take them to the authorities, that would put us in the position of withholding information about a crime. A crime must be reported to the proper authorities—”

  “Yes, sir,” Webster answered, impatient at the man’s hairsplitting. Pointing to the papers on the table, he said, “There is my authority. I am for the time being an officer of the law, so you have no responsibility on that score. I am also working on this case, and it is not necessary for an officer to reveal his findings until he has completed them. If he had to publish everything he found out the minute he learned it, the crooks would be warned. No officer would ever catch a crook. Isn’t that true?”

  Cromwell gave this matter some thought and then agreed.

  “The next thing, I want one copy of this deposition placed in safe keeping in a lock box in your local bank while I am gone. Will you do that, Mr. Cromwell?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I have certain evidence. Mrs. Halsell has perhaps already shown you the rifles and the shells that were tampered with?”

  “Yes, she has,” Swanson said. “It is hard to believe. But, there are the shells to prove your statements.”