Dead Man's Poker

by Giles Tippette

  Justa said, “Ben?”

  Ben said, “What kind of horses you want, Wilson? Trail horses?”

  I shook my head. I said, “I don’t figure to track Phil Sharp overland. He don’t strike me as the kind to spend all day in a saddle. No, I just want something with some damn quick speed and some staying power.”

  Justa said, “Why don’t you take that little bay mare of mine that you’ve been riding. She’s plumb full of quarter horse and is dependable as hell.”

  I said, “She’d suit me fine. But I need another horse that can carry a big man. Chulo has got to weigh at least a hundred pounds more than a big stump. He’s the biggest Meskin I ever saw.”

  Ben said, “I got just the horse. A piebald gelding. Least he’s piebald in the face. Rest of him is mostly black. He’s nearly seventeen hands high and must weigh a little over a thousand pounds.”

  “Is he steady?”

  “He’d stand in the middle of a lightning storm and never flinch. He ain’t as fast as some, but he’s pretty quick. Looks mean as hell, but is gentle as that bay mare of Justa’s.”

  I said, “Well, I am much obliged. I’ll get them back to you quick as I can.”

  Ben said, “Keep ’em as long as you need ’em. Ain’t no shortage of horses around here.”

  I said, “Well, I’m going to bed. I’m going to make an early start for town tomorrow. Or early for me I guess I ought to say.”

  Ben said, “I’ll bring that piebald over in the morning all saddled and ready.”

  I gave them a good-night and then turned in. For all practical purposes I was healed up. I was still wearing a bandage, but that was more to keep me from picking at the scab of the front wound than anything else. I’d come out of a near miss with luck on my side. Now I was going to go and see how Phil Sharp’s luck was. I was hoping that Chulo would be on the noon train, but if he wasn’t, I was going on without him. I’d been laying around too long, and the steam that Mr. Sharp had started up in my boiler with his ambush was about to blow over the top.

  * * *

  In spite of my protests Justa rode into town with me the next day. We left about nine of the morning. Nora fixed me a good breakfast and then put me up some cheese and cold roast beef and biscuits for the train trip. I thanked her for her hospitality and promised to send Justa right on back to the ranch and not let him get into any poker games with anybody over twelve years old. She surprised me by giving me a light kiss on the cheek and saying that I was welcome back anytime. Riding away from the house, Justa said that there was no accounting for women’s judgment. He said, “Here you are, a notorious sinner, bank robber, gunslinger, horse thief, cattle thief, and ain’t seen the inside of a church since yore mama and daddy was married, and Nora still likes you. And she generally don’t like nobody except schoolteachers or lawyers or federal judges or what not. Likes a man like you. Beats anything I have ever seen. How do you account for that?”

  I said, “Your dear wife is a good judge of character. So far as I’ve seen it has only failed her once.”

  We took it slow, just ambling along. The piebald wasn’t used to being led, and he nearly jerked me out of the saddle a few times, but then I gave him some of his medicine back and he found it to be a good idea to trot up alongside the rest of us.

  It was just before eleven o’clock when we got into town. We rode down to the depot, and Justa helped me arrange for a stock car for the two horses. Normally you had to pay for the whole car on an arrangement like that, a stock car usually carrying eight horses, but the Half-Moon ranch did so much business with the railroad that the agent let me have a car to myself for just the two horses and me and Chulo.

  After that we rode down to visit with Lew Vara for a few minutes. He was in his office but thought that Justa looked like he needed a beer, so we went down to Crook’s Saloon and Café and had a couple of rounds. I was a good deal interested in anything that Lew could tell me about the Galveston sheriff.

  Lew said, “He’s an older man. Been in the law business a good long time, I’d reckon. Might not be sixty, but he ain’t lacking it far. Name of Mills, Ben Mills. He was mighty sociable to me. I don’t know how he’s gonna act toward you.”

  Justa said, “What do you think of him just walking in there and announcing he wants to bring charges against Sharp?”

  Lew shrugged. “He might just surprise the old man so bad he won’t know what to do. But I don’t think Mr. Young will have any trouble about who he is. There is enough outlaw trade running loose right now to keep ten times the sheriffs busy. Mills’ll know that Wilson is a different case. But I don’t think he’s going to do a damn thing about Sharp. Course he don’t like them damn vigilantes.”

  I said, “I don’t want him to do anything about Sharp. I just want it on the record that I’m going after the man in a legal manner. I’ve got the right of self-defense.”

  Lew smiled. “You going to put a gun in his hand?”

  “If I have to,” I said. And I didn’t smile.

  About a quarter of noon Justa and I took leave of the sheriff and rode on back to the depot. I got down off the bay mare and tied the stirrups over her saddle so they wouldn’t be swinging around and agitating her on the trip to Galveston. Justa did the same with the piebald. Off in the distance I heard the train blowing, announcing its coming.

  Justa said, “Wilson, now you keep me posted. You get in a bind somewhere, you get off a wire to me. You hear?”

  I nodded. “All right. You do the same. Of course I don’t know where I’ll be.”

  “You figure to come back through here when you get your business tended to?”

  “I might,” I said.

  Then the train came hurtling in, brakes screeching, bell ringing, whistle blowing, gasping out great clouds of steam. It was a combination freight and passenger train about twenty cars long. The engine ran on past us and stopped the other side of the depot. Justa and I were a good ways back, back with the cattle cars that were hitched into the train just in front of the caboose. One of the railroad hired hands came and took the piebald and the bay from me to load them into a cattle car. Up toward the depot the passenger cars were letting out a few people who had come to their destination. They was about fifty yards off, but Chulo wasn’t hard to recognize at that distance. I said, “Well, there’s my Meskin. Guess I better gather him up before he scares some of the women and horses.”

  Justa put out his hand. He said, “Be careful, Will. This Phil Sharp sounds like a slippery customer. You get a loop on him, don’t give him no slack.”

  We shook, and then he got on his horse and rode away, and I went up toward the head of the train to collect Chulo.

  CHAPTER 6

  It had always been my custom, when taking a horse along with me on the train, to ride in the stock car with the animal. I found it more comfortable than the chair cars, cooler, and a hell of a lot more private. But Chulo didn’t care for it on this occasion. He’d worn a new pair of brown gabardine pants and a good-quality white linen shirt, and he was afraid he was going to get his new clothes dirty in the stock car. It made me laugh. I had known Chulo when it would have taken a whole river to wash him clean. He was just about the last candidate for fastidiousness that I would have picked out. But since we had gone “honess’,” as he called it, he’d become mighty particular.

  I was wearing one of the new shirts that Wayne, the clerk at the hotel, had bought for me, and a pair of lightweight corduroy riding britches. I’d abandoned the frock coat I’d been wearing when I was shot. Juanita and Nora had tried their best to get the bloodstains out, but it had been a lost cause, and I had sent it home with Juanita for use by one of her male relatives. But the weather was turning unseasonably warm, and a coat would have been just a decoration. I was content to be dressed as we were, and what little straw and dust and hay we picked up on the train ride could easily be brushed away in a barbershop.

  I asked Chulo how things were going back at the Palace. He said, “The besiness is not so
good, but et es not so bad. The wheesky besiness is good. The girl besiness es good. The besiness with the cards an’ the leetle dice es not so good.”

  I said, severely, “You been leaving those girls alone?”

  Chulo was terribly addicted to that secret that girls had between their legs. He was convinced that if he could get between enough of them, he’d finally figure out what the secret was. I had been convinced for many years that he would screw a wildcat if he could get somebody to hold it.

  He said, “Oh, chure.”

  I said, “Don’t you ’oh, chure’ me. I know you, you son of a bitch. I have enough trouble making you leave those girls alone when I’m there. God knows what you tried with me gone.”

  He looked a little guilty. He said, “The Senora Evita she say no. I leesen.”

  I said, “She ain’t a senora. We ain’t married. But you better ’leesen’ when she talks. That woman would cut your balls off in your sleep. Do you know that?”

  One of the horses snorted and stamped his hoof. The train was rushing through the landscape, the terrain just flying by. I calculated we were doing upwards of thirty miles an hour. I’d never, if I lived to be a thousand, figure out how they got something as heavy as a railroad train to run as fast as it did.

  Chulo said, “I doan geeve Señora Evita no troubles, jefe. Che pretty bad, that woman.”

  “Damn right she’s pretty bad. So you better leave her girls alone or she’ll shoot your pistola off.”

  We’d been traveling better than half an hour, and so far, Chulo hadn’t asked me where we were going or why, or why I’d sent for him. But then that was the way it was between Chulo and me. In the seven or eight years he and I had rode together, it was understood I was the boss, the jefe, and he wasn’t. That meant he did what I told him and didn’t ask a lot of questions. But then Chulo had never been much of a hand about the why of a thing. If there was something needed doing, you just went and did it. I had to occasionally take him in hand about women or when he occasionally got too much whiskey in him. But most times he was easy to herd. Chulo, for reasons I had never known, was afraid of me. At least that was the impression he gave. Well, if he was, then I was the only man breathing that he was afraid of.

  I said, “Chulo, you got any idea why I sent for you?”

  He shrugged. Somebody had left some empty wooden boxes in the car, and he was sitting on one. The box was little and Chulo was big, so he wasn’t far off the floor. In fact he looked like he was kind of doubled up. I was standing up, leaning against the slatted side of the car. Chulo shrugged. He said, “Yo no sabe. I doan know.”

  I said, “We are going to Galveston to look for a man, a man that shot me.”

  He’d been kind of lazing around until then. Now he sat up straight. He said, “Some mans chot you?”

  I nodded and raised my shirt to show him the bandage. I said, “It was about an inch from being real bad. I got real lucky.”

  Chulo mulled that over for a moment, and then he said, “I doan thenk thees mans he gets so lucky. Maybe hees lucky es real bad. We see heem en Galveston?”

  “I hope so,” I said.

  A lot of folks made a mistake about Chulo by thinking he wasn’t very smart. Now, I ain’t going to say that he was a candidate for the university up at Austin, but there weren’t no flys on Chulo when it came to being smart in the matters that were of concern to him. He was smart like a hog; he wasn’t going to waste time rooting around under a pine tree looking for acorns. And his English was better than he let on. He wanted folks to think he was just a big, dumb Mexican who didn’t speak the lingo so good and who was an easy mark. He heard everything he wanted to hear, either in Spanish or English. Sometimes he’d slip up around me and speak pretty good English, but most times he’d stick to that stumbling gait he used just to keep his hand in. I didn’t object because it served him well and I generally could understand him anyway.

  He could be lazy, when I’d let him get away with it, but most folks just thought of him as some big, shiftless, shambling low-class Mexican. But Chulo could move as fast as he needed to move, and he was strong enough that when he took hold of something or someone, that something or someone wasn’t going anywhere until Chulo decided that something or someone could get loose. I reckoned he would have weighed over two hundred pounds except he was missing half of the little finger on his right hand. He’d lost that on the occasion of our first meeting. He’d come into my camp outside of the town of Uvalde, where I’d planned on robbing a bank as soon as it had got open. I was cooking up some breakfast, and he reached out for some of my bacon without asking me first. To teach him some manners I shot the end of his little finger off. Actually it was a bad shot, because I’d been aiming for the middle of his hand. But it impressed Chulo so that I’d never got around to telling him that just taking off the tip of his smallest finger had been an accident. He’d joined up on the spot, and it was a certain fact that without his presence through the years, I might not have been in a position to go searching for Mr. Philip Sharp.

  He’d brought along his saddlebags, containing, I reckoned, a change of clothes and some other odds and ends. Now he opened a flap and got out a bottle of rum. I never could understand how anyone, Meskin or not, could actually drink that stuff and claim to like it. He offered me the bottle even though he knew better. I just shook my head and moved over to the bay mare and got out a bottle of brandy that Justa had thoughtfully provided me with. I pulled the cork, and then me and Chulo clinked bottles and said, “Luck,” and each took a good hearty swig. Then I pointed at the rum and said, “Now you go light on that, senor, or I’ll throw you off this train. You got to be on your best behavior in Galveston.”

  He looked at me in some amazement. “En Galveston es thees man that chouts you. We going to be nice?”

  I said, “He ain’t going to be easy to find. I’m going to have to ask some people some questions.”

  Chulo said, “That es berry good. You ask thees mens the questions and I will get the answers.”

  I said, “That’s about the way I had it figured.”

  Chulo said, “What we do primero?”

  I said, “First I got to get you settled someplace where I can find you when I want you and you can’t get in no trouble. I guess we’ll take a room in a hotel, even though we may not stay the night. Then I’m going to go see the sheriff.”

  He pulled his head back. He stuck a finger out at me. He said, “Chou are going to see el shereef?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Train is supposed to get into Galveston by four o’clock. If I get done with the sheriff in time, we may be going to see a Mr. Patterson who is a worker for the man that shot me.”

  I didn’t want to try and explain who Patterson was. There was never any point in overloading Chulo with needless information. He did better with a light cargo.

  He said, “Why doan we chust go see thees Patterson? He tell us plenty queeck about theese other mans. I doan theen you want to see thees shereef. Es no bueno por nada.”

  “Yeah, it is,” I said. “We ain’t outlaws no more, remember? I got to do this legal.”

  “Oh, chure,” he said, and looked up at the ceiling of the car.

  We pulled into the Galveston depot just about on time. We had a few minutes’ wait until a couple of trainmen came along and opened the door on our car and put up a ramp we could lead the horses down. After that we untied the stirrups, tightened up the girths, and swung aboard the two horses. I could see without looking very hard that the piebald was just about a fit for Chulo. I could also see he was well mannered and calm. A man who is in a business where guns are liable to be going off around his horse’s head wants an animal that don’t spook too easy. Justa said there wasn’t an animal on the Half-Moon that hadn’t been trained to the sound of gunfire.

  From the depot we rode on down toward the docks and then turned onto what I calculated to be the main street. It was a good, wide affair, but it wasn’t too wide by much. The thoroughfare was just th
ronged with the buggies and carriages of the gentry, some of the gentlemen even wearing plug hats and nearly all of the ladies turned out in their finest. And then there were wagons hauling every possible commodity, from squealing pigs to lumber to sacks of corn. And working their way through that crowd were solitary horsemen, or here and there a bunch of them, having to go single file to make their way through. Some daring souls were venturing to leave the wooden boardwalks in front of the stores and risking their lives by trying to cross through that stampede of vehicles and animals. Somebody had told me there were twenty thousand people in Galveston, but I didn’t believe it. There might be twenty thousand passing through at some given time, but there couldn’t have been no amount like that actually sleeping over at the same time.

  We took rooms at the Galvez Hotel which was right in the middle of town but still pretty close to the docks. Galveston was an up-to-date town, and they had gaslights in the rooms and running water. They even had some boys that wanted to carry our saddlebags up for us. I’d seen them before in my travels, but Chulo thought the boy was trying to steal his and drew his arm back to give him a cuff. I got the matter straightened out and gave the boys a dollar to mollify their feelings. We had two rooms side by side, which they got four dollars apiece for. But then, the Galvez was a first-rate hotel, and a man had to figure to pay such prices if he wanted to stay in that kind of place.

  We had rooms right next to each other on the second floor. We could have got by with just one room, but times being what they were and in a place as fancy as the Galvez, it wouldn’t have looked proper for a white man to be rooming with a Mexican. But I got Chulo settled, strongly recommended to him that he stay in the room until I got back and not get drunk, and then I set out to find the sheriff. As luck would have it his office was just down the street, right next to the biggest post office I’d ever seen. I’d have reckoned there weren’t that many people in Galveston could read and write to require such an edifice to handle their daily mail.