Course, I was more interested in the revolver. It felt different because it had been cleaned. I could feel the oil on the cylinder, the barrel, could smell it, too. It also felt heavier.
“It’s loaded,” my savior told me.
I shot him a quick look. He was holding the cigar with his left hand, dangersomely close to one of them kegs of powder, but the thumb of his right hand was hooked on that fancy sash, just a hop and a skip from the Colt near his left hip. Next, I studied that Spiller & Burr a mite closer.
Carefully, I laid the .36 between my legs.
“Yeah,” I said, “but it don’t work without caps.”
He chuckled, slid the cigar into his mouth, and used his left hand to reach into another vest pocket. Something shiny come flying toward me. This one, I managed to catch.
It was a straight-lined capper, brass, fully filled with likely fifteen number-eleven percussion caps. Put them babies on the nipples on that cylinder, and I’d be ready to tackle some sore losers from Fort Mojave or set up another crooked poker game.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Reckon you owe me,” he said.
“Reckon I do,” I told him.
He pushed himself to his feet, kneeling a mite, holding out his right hand. His left, I noticed, wasn’t nowhere near none of his guns. Unless he had some hideaway derringer up his sleeve.
“Come on,” he said. “Meet the boys. We’ve got food that’s more solid than soup, and genuine Tennessee sour mash.”
My rough hand took his soft one, and he pulled me to my feet.
“Name’s Bishop,” I told him—and yes, I thought of using another handle, but hell, he had saved my life, so I reckon I owed him at least that much honesty. “Micah Bishop.”
“Whip Watson,” he said, and he was heading out the back of the wagon, and I was following him.
CHAPTER THREE
Outside, gathered around a right cozy fire, assembled the worst-looking bunch of ruffians I’d ever laid eyes on—and I once rode with Sean Fenn. And, well, Big Tim Pruett wouldn’t have never gotten mistook for some handsome thespian. I’d expected to find teamsters. You know, mule skinners and freighting types, ugly, burly men handy with whips and cusswords. Well, they was certainly ugly, and plenty of them I’d call burly, and I suspected that all of them knowed more cusswords than Webster.
Only I wasn’t so certain I’d call them mule skinners. No, sir, what I’d call them boys was . . . gunmen.
Squat assassins. Shootists. Man-killers. Vermin.
A thin, leathery graybeard rose from behind the coffeepot. I thought he might be fetching me a cup of that brew, which sure smelled better than the soup I’d just et, but he come with empty hands. I figured him to be Juan Pedro, and I figured right.
The sun had just set, so it was still fairly light outside, and that fire was roaring hot, so I got a good look-see at the Mexican. He dressed like a vaquero—or maybe one of them Spanish noblemen— if you savvy what I mean. A dandified silk shirt, tight-fitting black jacket with pretty red and blue braid all up the sleeves and shoulders. Dark blue pants called calzoneras decorated with silver conchos from the hem to the knees. Black boots and spurs with large rowels. And a flat-brimmed, flat-crowned hat of the finest beaver, and a fancy-braided stampede string to keep his hat from flying off.
I never cottoned to stampede strings. They choked a body’s neck, and too many folks already wanted to put ropes around my neck as it was. Big Tim Pruett always told me that the best way to keep a hat on your head in a windstorm was to buy one that fits snug. Mine, while not much to look at, fit me just fine.
Juan Pedro also wore a brace of Schofield revolvers in a red sash around his belly. There was a Green River knife stuck inside one of his boot tops, and I could tell by the way his left arm hung and from that bulging fancy jacket that he also kept a smaller revolver in a shoulder harness.
Juan Pedro, I decided, was a right careful man.
With a slight bow, he introduced hisself. His name was a lot longer than Juan Pedro, but Juan Pedro was part of that handle. Then his left hand reached into a pocket on his jacket, and he fished out a coin. I knowed it was gold. I could even see the word liberty on the gal’s head, and them stars all around the coin. A gold eagle. Looked to be fresh-minted.
He spoke some smart Spanish, then started to extend the ten-dollar piece to Whip Watson, but quickly pulled it back.
“Ah,” he said, switching to English, “but I believe the bet was that this norteamericano would live to see Calico, Señor Watson. We are a long way from Calico, still.”
Whip Watson stood a bit behind me, and after that introduction, I wasn’t about to take my eyes off of Juan Pedro, but I heard Watson say, “That was the bet.”
“So if I kill him now, you would owe me ten dollars.”
“I reckon so.”
Me? I’m thinking: These are the guys you wanted me to meet?
Juan Pedro was staring at me then, smiling. He had right pretty teeth. Real straight. Mostly white. Excepting for top front one with a silver speck in the middle. It glittered like a rattlesnake’s eye. He was slipping that gold coin back into his pocket, but that pocket was right above one of them bit Schofield revolvers, and I wasn’t the fool he must have thought me to be.
What I done was cocked that .36.
Don’t know why—fate maybe—but I still held that newly cleaned revolver in my left hand. Course, what Juan Pedro and Whip Watson and nobody else knowed was that I can’t shoot worth a nickel with my left hand. Even with my right, it ain’t a sure bet I’ll hit the target, though I had gotten lucky with Sean Fenn and some of his boys, and those other rapscallions I’ve already mentioned who are now roasting in hell. What Whip Watson and I knowed, however, was that I hadn’t put percussion caps on that old relic, and a cap-and-ball gun don’t work without the cap part. What I was gambling on was that Juan Pedro couldn’t see that them nipples was empty.
Must have worked, because Juan Pedro laughed and dropped the coin in his pocket real careful, then inched both of his hands away from both of his revolvers that I knowed he carried.
“This is a smart man you have here, Señor Watson.” Juan Pedro was still grinning, but I was looking past him at those other, ahem, freighters. “Perhaps he will live to see Calico.”
“He will.” Watson walked to the fire, and squatted by the coffeepot.
Juan Pedro gave me another one of his bows, then stepped aside, extending his left arm in a friendly gesture that wasn’t sociable at all.
“After you, amigo,” I told him.
Laughing again, he turned and went back to his place. I taken myself a deep breath, let it out, and found that capper Whip Watson had give me back inside the wagon. Set that .36 on half-cock, and began putting those caps on them nipples—all six of them, deciding against safety for the moment—and stepped toward the fire to meet some of the rest of the boys, wondering if they’d be as sociable as Juan Pedro.
They wasn’t the most talkative bunch. Mostly they just grunted, drank, and farted. I counted fifteen of them, besides Juan Pedro and Whip Watson, and I ain’t that fast at ciphering but I do know how to count. Cards mostly. But seventeen mean-looking gents around a campfire didn’t tax me none.
What struck me strange was that nobody was eating. There was food hanging from pots, and it smelled real fine, but the pots just steamed and bubbled, yet nobody taken nothing except the coffee. Didn’t bother me too much, on account of all the soup I’d swallowed, and besides, I spied a jug making its way around that circle, and assumed that was the genuine Tennessee sour mash that Whip Watson had mentioned.
So there I sat, between Whip and a sour-smelling guy with a fat gut and arms that looked as solid as two-by-fours and a rough, black beard that was moving, not from the wind, on account there wasn’t no wind, but on account of the bugs. I wanted to move, but didn’t want to disrespect the gent none. So I just slid as far away from him, but not too close to Whip Watson, as humanly possible.
I
looked at the jug. Then I looked at the fire. Then I looked at the Spiller & Burr, which I decided wasn’t very sociable being in my left hand, so I slid it into my waistband. No one noticed. Also, I started to notice something. They wasn’t considering me, wasn’t even following that jug of liquor, and most of them wasn’t watching the fire or the food. They stared out at some rocks, but it was getting darker by the minute, and I couldn’t see nothing but the shadow that was some boulders.
It couldn’t be Mojave or Paiute Indians. Couldn’t be bandits. Because these boys I was sitting in a circle with certainly wasn’t greenhorns and if there was something dangersome in them rocks, they wouldn’t be sitting around a campfire waiting on a jug of Tennessee sour mash. Since I didn’t find no interest in looking at boulders that was disappearing in the darkness, I stared at the wagons. It was an odd assembly. Not those big long-hitch freight wagons pulled by massive spans of mules or oxen that I’d expected to see with a freighting train. No, these was mostly farm wagons with rear wheels topping four feet high, some with canvas covers—like the one I’d rode in—and others without. There was two combination market and pleasure wagons, and four old Conestogas like they’d taken on the old Oregon Trail all them years before. I’d never even seen one in person, just woodcuts in magazines and such. But the damnedest thing of all was that I also counted four Columbus carriages. They were parked closest to the fire, so I could see them real good. And Big Tim Pruett had once stole a Columbus buggy and give this rich lady whose husband owned one of the mines in the mountains the ride of her life up and down Wyandot Street in Denver City till he got arrested, and I got conscripted by another lawdog to help carry the lady, who had fainted in pure terror, to the nearest pill-roller.
Now, you can hall freight in market and pleasure wagons, and certainly Conestogas hauled supplies from Missouri to Oregon or even California, and farm wagons would fill the bill iffen you didn’t have freight wagons. But I didn’t see no reason anybody would be taking four—that’s right, four—fancy rigs that I’d seen selling for three hundred dollars and more in towns like Kansas City and Dallas.
The next day, I’d get a real close look at those buggies, and they all was top notch. Made of hickory, with full fenders, silver-plated glass lamps so they could go at night, and canopy tops of fancy body cloth with full back and side curtains. And two-seaters, all of them, with buffed leather that didn’t look dusty at all. On account that Whip Watson had some of his burly men buffing that leather, getting out all the dust and grime, making those rigs look like they’d just come out of that factory in Ohio.
But that evening, before I even saw what care Whip Watson had his men giving them buggies, I was already wondering: Why in blazes would you haul supplies to a mining town in the middle of the Mojave Desert in fancy carriages? Then it struck me that Whip Watson planned to sell those buggies in Calico. Shrewd man, this Whip Watson. Miners get rich, and they want to show their wealth. A fancy conveyance like a Columbus carriage would probably bring six hundred dollars in a remote spot on the map like Calico, California.
I was just about to compliment Whip Watson on his capitalism when something caught my eye. Didn’t come from those boulders where most everybody still was watching. It come from one of the Conestogas.
What drawed my attention was an orange dot that got brighter, then dimmer, then disappeared, then glowed all orange again. Somebody out there was smoking a cigarette. Then that somebody stepped around from behind the feed box on the back of the wagon, and I spied another orange dot that twinkled. I could make out their shapes now as they met near the water barrel on the wagon’s side.
So there was nineteen men in this company.
No. More. Two other shapes of men came dimly into view beside the second wagon. I looked down the line, and, sure enough, there was a fellow sitting on the wagon tongue who must’ve been cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. I just guessed that there was another guard on the other end of that wagon, so I looked at the final wagon. It taken a spell, on account that the light was fading fast, but I saw another glow from another smoke. That led me to guess that there was twenty-five men.
Well, it’s a handy thing to have guards posted at night in country such as this. The West ain’t no place for careless folks, but those guards—iffen that was the case and they was truly guards and not just cigarette smokers who didn’t feel like waiting their turn for a taste of sour mash—appeared interested in only those four big wagons. Which got me to suspicion that there must be something right valuable in them wagons.
Ever seen a Conestoga? Not just a woodcut in Harper’s Weekly or some such. I mean in person.
They remind me of that big white whale that this peg-legged Captain Ahab was chasing in another one of those books that gal from that hifalutin society read to us boys in Folsom before we got real sick of all that harpooning and avast-ing and whale blubbering and guys named Queequeg and Quahog and Ishmael and so we asked her to read something from the National Police Gazette instead.
Those wagons are eighteen feet long and maybe eleven feet high, curved fore and aft (I did pick up them two words from that book nobody had heard of about that crazy captain and that whale) with the thickest white canvas covers you’ll find anywhere. The wheels’ rims was made of iron. They looked like whales, I mean to tell you, but they was built like forts. Once I’d heard tell from some old-timer that Conestogas could haul twelve thousand pounds. So whatever Whip Watson and his boys was hauling in those wagons, there must be a lot of it. I didn’t figure it was gunpowder, hammers, pickaxes, and copper mining pans.
Twenty-five men. But by then it was too dark to count the number of wagons.
Then my brain reminded me of something else. It takes mules or horses or oxen to move wagons, especially Conestogas. Those animals would be off somewhere real close, but they would be guarded, too. I’d put at least two men to make sure no animals wandered off or got wandered off by men like me who got attracted to good horses. Maybe four.
Twenty-nine men.
Make it thirty.
Somebody said something in our campfire group, and I looked back toward those boulders, or where the boulders were because now you couldn’t see that far. Another orange glow. Too big, too bright, I figured, for a cigarette, so I decided this gent smoked cigars.
Everybody seemed taken by this cigar-smoker. A side glance even showed me that Whip Watson found the man coming from the boulders interesting. I started to look back at Cigar Smoker when the man with bugs in his beard jabbed my arm with the jug.
He said something to me. Or maybe he just farted. I took the jug, and he looked at the orange dot. That was just my luck. I got to drink after a man who stank worse than the rankest of farts and had bugs in his beard and probably everywhere else on his person.
I didn’t want to be disrespectful, but I didn’t want to be swallowing graybacks or ticks or whatever those bugs were, so I wiped the lip of the jug with my shirtsleeve, hoping that Bug Beard wouldn’t find offense to this act and stomp my head into the ground. He didn’t. Didn’t notice me. Like everybody else, he focused on the man coming from the boulders.
The jug came up to my mouth, and I drunk. No bugs, no forty-rod whiskey, but pure, genuine Tennessee sour mash. Went down smooth as silk. Maybe that’s what Whip Watson was hauling in those big wagons.
I savored the taste, but figured that Whip Watson wanted a snort hisself, but he would not begrudge me one more nip. The jug went back up, and came straight back down.
Thirty-one men.
As they neared the camp, the flames from the fire was so high, I could tell that there wasn’t just one man coming from those rocks. Only one was smoking. The other, a slimmer shadow, trailed along a few feet in front of the big guy with the long nine cigar.
Thirty-one. Maybe more, maybe a couple less. But quite the crowd.
I started up with the jug again, and was drinking. Then I was spitting and spluttering and brushing the liquor off my face and clothes.
Bug Beard cussed me, Juan Pedro shot me the evil eye, and a few others glanced my direction, but none focused his attention for long on me. They looked straight at the slim person who didn’t smoke a cigar as he come into camp, slipping between a guy in Levi’s and a bowler hat and a guy in buckskins that was older than them Conestogas.
What had caused me to spit out good whiskey was the thirty-first man.
Who wasn’t a man at all.
I doubted if she’d come up to my chin. Tiny, she was, and thin. She wore a robe—a changyi, I’d come to know it was called—the color of slate, but all embroidered into that dark satin was colorful silk of gold and red and green, butterflies mostly, but also bouquets of flowers, and the edges were a shiny gold trim that caught the light from the flames of the fire just right. Her feet were the tiniest things I’d ever seen. Maybe they weren’t that tiny, but they was wrapped tighter than a tourniquet and with dark green silk bindings around the ankles.
Yet it was her face that drawed most of my attention. Hell’s fire, that was what every b’hoy in camp had been staring at them rocks for, waiting for her to come back into view. Small, round, almost like a porcelain plate, dark hair parted in the middle and curved just above her ears, tucked up in a bun behind her head. She wore silver earrings. Her lips were thin, in a hard line. I couldn’t see her eyes. She seldom looked up.
Cigar Smoker, who had an old Henry rifle tucked up under his arm, kept puffing on his long nine, and found a space to sit. The girl just walked straight to the fire, kneeling ever so royally, and finding one of the hooks to check on a pot of grub. She had real long fingers, meant for playing the piano or running through a fellow’s locks who needed a haircut.
My fingers went to my hair, which was knotted like a crow’s nest and dirtier than the guy next to me, only with no bugs . . . I hoped.
I wondered if she’d cooked my soup. What was heating over the fire sure smelled better than anything I’d tasted.
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