From then on, it was poker and only poker. He became a gambler. He wore a wide-brimmed black hat and a black frock coat, and carried a pair of pistols in the pockets. Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, wherever there was a high-stakes game, that was where you’d find him.
Aces might have gone on gambling forever if he hadn’t run into a young woman one day while he was strolling about to stretch his legs. Her name was Susie. She was his age, the daughter of a rancher, and the most beautiful female he had ever set eyes on. One look, and he was smitten. He struck up a conversation. Susie was warm and friendly and had the most perfect teeth in all creation.
She made it a point to mention that she came into town once a week with her mother, and Aces made it a point to be on the lookout for her when she did. They’d walk and talk, and at night he’d dream of her.
Aces imagined Susie as his wife. Imagined having a home and kids. Imagined living as he had lived before his father betrayed him. To test the waters he remarked to Susie how nice that would be. Susie said she’d like nothing better and her mother wouldn’t mind, but her pa would never let her marry a gambler.
Aces was mulling over how he could change her father’s mind when the matter was taken out of his hands.
He killed somebody.
Chapter 13
It started over cards.
Aces had learned all the tricks that cheaters used. Marked cards. Dealing from the bottom. Sleeve rigs. He had to. Not so he could use them himself, but to make sure no one cheated him.
He thought of gambling as an honorable profession. Certainly luck was a factor, but so was skill. Cheating destroyed the luck element and made a mockery of the skills needed to be a consistent winner.
Whenever Aces caught someone cheating, it was like a slap to the face. He took it personal. He pistol-whipped a cheater once. Another, he busted the man’s nose with the flat of his hand.
He had a reputation for fair play and he stuck to it like a medieval knight to his standard.
Then one day he was invited to sit in on a high-stakes game involving several wealthy ranchers. It was an annual affair. He’d been invited once before and had a fine time. That he came away from the table over four thousand dollars to the better had a lot to do with it.
Little did he know at the time but one of the ranchers resented it. The man was named Sparks. He was a poor loser but clever enough to hide the fact. Since a lot of that four thousand had been his, he conspired to get even.
There they were, Aces and five of the biggest ranchmen in all of Texas. They’d been at the game for hours. The room was thick with cigar smoke. The smell of liquor, the clatter of chips, the quiet slap of cards when they were placed down—the pulse of play was friendly and reserved.
Then Aces saw Sparks dip two fingers into a sleeve. Not up under it, as was normally done when a cheater used a wrist rig, but into the underside of the sleeve itself.
And wouldn’t you know it? Sparks flourished four kings to win the largest pot of the night.
As Sparks grinned and reached for the chips, Aces had lowered his right arm to his side, close to his pocket with its special leather lining for his pistol.
“I shouldn’t think you’d need to, a man with as much as you have,” he’d remarked with an edge to his voice.
Sparks went still, his hand half across the table. “What do you mean by that, Mr. Connor?”
“The size of your ranch, you have more money than you know what to do with. Why cheat?”
The other ranchers shot sharp glances at Sparks. They all knew Aces, knew he believed in fair play and was as honest as the year was long. It was part of the reason he’d been invited to sit in.
“I don’t know what in hell you’re talking about,” Sparks replied, “and I resent your accusation.”
“Resent it all you want,” Aces said. “But you are a no-account cheat and out of this game.”
“Like hell I am.”
“I’ll have a look at that left sleeve of yours.”
“Like hell you will.” Spark slid his arm close to his vest.
“You’ve taken advantage of your friends. They trusted you to play fair. As have I. If you won’t tell us why, we’ll at least know how.”
“You so much as touch me and I’ll shoot you,” Sparks said.
The rancher who had organized the game said, “Sparks, please. We’re all gentlemen here.”
“He isn’t,” Sparks snarled, with a nod at Aces.
“What have I ever done that you’d say that?” Aces asked.
“You don’t have to do anything. You’re a gambler. You put on airs of respectability but prey on the misfortunes of others for your livelihood. You’re despicable, each and every one of you.”
“I never knew you felt that way.”
“I’m not the only one. That filly everybody knows you’re sweet on? Her pa is a friend of mine. He told me flat out once he’d never let a gambler marry his daughter, not from now until kingdom come.”
“Keep her out of this.”
Sparks had sneered and said, “What’s the matter? Don’t you like hearing the truth?”
“The issue is you cheatin’,” Aces had said. “Show us that sleeve.”
“Go to hell.”
“Then I’ll take a look myself.”
Aces had started to rise. Sparks, with an oath, reached under his jacket and drew an Open Top Pocket pistol. He pointed it, but Aces had his own Colt out and up. Aces fired as Sparks went to shoot. The slug smashed Sparks against the back of his chair, but he gamely tried to take aim. Aces fired again. The chair tilted and Sparks heaved out of it, screeching like an enraged bobcat. He got off a wild shot, putting a hole in the forehead of the player on Aces’s right. Aces shot Sparks in the face.
Everyone said the shooting was justified. That slit in Sparks sleeve held a queen and an ace. The sheriff refused to prosecute, despite the outrage from Sparks’s kin.
Aces should have been happy. His reputation wasn’t tarnished. He could have gone on gambling the rest of his days, but he lost his enthusiasm for the game. Part of it was that the cards turned cold. Not just for a game or two. All the time. It was as if he’d been jinxed.
The cards weren’t to blame for the final blow to his gambling days. He’d continued to see Susie until one day her mother came to their rendezvous instead and informed him that the father, who appeared to be the last person in Texas to find out about their secret romance, had become incensed and prohibited Susie from seeing him.
No daughter of his would marry a worthless tinhorn.
Rumor had it that a relative of Sparks had whispered their secret into the father’s ear to get back at Aces.
Aces was heartbroken. He lost all enthusiasm for cards and the saloon life. Even the taste of whiskey went flat in his mouth. He kept on playing, but he lost every cent he’d socked away.
Six months after his heart was crushed, Aces was busted and drifting. He got rid of his gambler’s duds. There was no sense in dressing as one when he wasn’t.
There he was, twenty years old, with no life to speak of. He had no prospects whatsoever.
Then he ran into a rancher he’d played cards with a few times. The man took pity on him and offered him a job as a cowhand. Just until he was back on his feet, the rancher said.
With nothing else to do and about ten cents to his name, Aces figured he might as well. He would eat regular and have a roof over his head when he was at the bunkhouse.
He could ride and he could rope, so it wasn’t as if he was worthless at it. He got better at the roping and learned as much about cows as he’d learned about cards, and something unexpected happened.
Aces found that he liked it. He liked being a cowboy. Liked being outdoors, liked working cattle, liked the company of other cowhands. He soon became a top hand and was well respected by his brothers in the pr
ofession.
He was also more than a little feared.
Aces discovered that a shooting marked a man for life. Everywhere he went, people whispered and pointed. He wasn’t just Aces Connor, cowboy. He was Aces Connor, gun shark. Aces Connor, shootist. In his own eyes he was no such thing, but what he thought didn’t matter. He was whispered about, and pointed at.
Aces had a brainstorm. To escape his past, he left Texas and drifted as far as Wyoming before he found a job that suited him, working for Mr. Horrell. The whispering and the pointing stopped.
For years he didn’t shoot anybody. Then came that cardsharp and the rustler and the drummer, and Mr. Horrell, as decent a man as ever drew breath, had had enough and let him go. It was nothing personal, Horrell said. He just couldn’t have a man-killer on his payroll. It gave a ranch a bad reputation.
Now here Aces was, riding south with an old lawman, a kid with an attitude, and a poor soul bound for the gallows. It was the day after he drove off the Arapahos and they had been riding for most of the morning when Marshal Hitch brought his bay alongside the palomino.
“Mind if we talk?”
“So long as it’s not about those men I shot.”
“It’s about why you’re taggin’ along. Cheyenne is a far piece and we’re all strangers to you.”
“What else do I have to do?” Aces said, not without bitterness. “No one in these parts will hire me.”
“Man-killers aren’t all that popular, I’m afraid,” Fred said.
“Yet folks gab about them no end.”
The marshal shrugged. “That’s human nature, I reckon. Most people live humdrum lives. They go day in and day out with no excitement whatsoever. So when they hear about someone like you, it makes you special.”
“Special, my backside,” Aces said.
“It’s like back in ancient times. You ever hear of a place called Troy? Or a warrior called Achilles? Or how about Robin Hood? There was a book written about him not long ago.”
“Now you’re bein’ ridiculous.”
“It’s the same thing, I tell you. Folks look up to those who do things they couldn’t do. Brave things. Excitin’ things.”
“There’s nothin’ excitin’ about shootin’ somebody.”
“There is to those who never have,” Fred insisted. “Shootists become heroes of sorts, whether they’re on the right side of the law or the wrong side. Look at Billy the Kid. Or Wild Bill Hickok. Or John Wesley Hardin. Hell, I could name twenty more.”
Aces didn’t say anything. He hadn’t ever thought of it that way.
“Like it or not, you’ve sort of become a hero to some. Take Tyree. I can tell he looks up to you.”
Aces had noticed the boy giving him peculiar looks. “What’s the kid’s story anyhow?”
“His folks died when he was in the crib and he grew up in an orphanage. That’s all he’s been willin’ to tell me.”
“He seems a little young to be going after bounty money,” Aces observed. Especially since most of those who had bounties on their heads wouldn’t hesitate to do in whoever was after them.
“There’s more to him than meets the eye,” Fred observed. “I don’t have him entirely figured out yet, but I’m workin’ on it.”
Aces put the kid from his mind. It was none of his affair. Then that night, as they sat around the campfire drinking coffee and not saying much, he caught the boy giving him that peculiar look again. “Cut it out.”
“Cut what out?” Tyree replied, sounding surprised.
“You know damn well. I won’t be gawked at, thank you very much.” Aces had had his fill of that.
“You’ve shot three men,” Tyree said.
“Four, but who’s countin’?” Aces frowned and rested his elbows on his knees. “Shootin’ a man isn’t anything special. Sometimes it has to be done. You do it and get on with your life and hope others will forget, but they don’t.”
“You know you can squeeze the trigger when you have to. That’s somethin’.”
“How so?”
“What if you had it to do but didn’t know if you could?” Tyree said. “I shot at McCarthy there—”
“And hit a horse,” Fred interjected.
Tyree glared at him, then said to Aces, “But he’s the only one I’ve ever shot at, so I can’t say as how I’ll be when I have to do it again.”
“Why is that so important to you?” Aces asked.
“It just is,” Tyree said sullenly.
Aces sipped coffee and pondered. He hadn’t lost his knack for reading people, and he read something here. “Tell me,” he said. “How’d you get that scar?”
“I’ve had it since I was in diapers. And the how is none of your business.”
“You were a baby?” Fred said.
“Let it be,” Tyree said to him.
Aces refused to. “I was just askin’.”
“And I’m just tellin’ you it’s not anything I’ll talk about, now or ever. So let it be.”
“It looks like someone cut you.” Aces had seen more than a few knife wounds. Some were downright ugly, like this one.
“Who would cut a baby like that?” Fred said.
“Someone who wanted the baby dead,” Aces said.
Tyree set down his tin cup so hard his coffee spilled. Heaving upright, he spat out, “You will not pry into my past, you hear me? You’re nuisances, the both of you.” Wheeling, he stormed off.
“Where does he think he’s going?” Fred said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
Tom McCarthy, who had been disconsolate all day and refused to say much, now stirred. “You hurt the boy’s feelings. What do you expect?”
“He’s sure a puzzlement,” Fred said.
“Not if you can add two and two,” McCarthy said. “He’s already told us his parents were murdered when he was a baby.”
“So?” Fred said.
“So whoever murdered them tried to kill him and cut him like that.”
“That’s terrible,” Fred said.
“Worse things have happened.”
“I can’t think of anything worse than hurting a baby,” Fred said.
“Instead of badgering the kid, you should try to help him.”
“You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.”
“You can try,” McCarthy said.
They fell silent.
As for Aces, he drank more coffee and did more pondering. And a seed took root and sprouted.
Chapter 14
Aces waited a couple of days for the kid to simmer down.
They had stopped for the night. Aces and the marshal gathered firewood and the kid kindled the fire.
Earlier in the day, Aces had dropped an antelope with his Browning. “Time to carve this critter up,” he announced. The kid gave him the opening he needed by drawing the bowie that hung from a sheath hung around his neck.
“Here. You can use this. It’s as sharp as can be.”
Aces took it and tested the claim by lightly running a finger over the edge. A thin line of blood welled. “Nice honin’ job.”
“I like a sharp knife,” Tyree said. “What good is a dull one?”
Aces chuckled. “About as good as an empty six-shooter.” He was glad when the kid laughed. Now all he had to do was figure out how to get at what he wanted to know without offending him. Rolling the antelope over, he inserted the tip of the bowie and set to work. He didn’t like the stink of the guts and the internal juices, and held his breath at the worst of it.
“I’ve been wantin’ to ask you a question,” Tyree said.
Aces smothered a smile. “I’ll swap you,” he said.
“Swap how?”
“A question for a question. You get to ask me one and I get to ask you one and we both have to answer true.”
“I never had anybody ask me to do that before,” Tyree said. He didn’t sound the least bit suspicious.
“Ask yours,” Aces said as he cut.
“Why weren’t you scared of those Arapahos? You acted as if they were no more bother than some flies that needed shooin’. You just told them to get and shot that feather and they skedaddled.”
“Did they scare you some?”
“I wasn’t lookin’ forward to takin’ an arrow,” Tyree said, hedging. “Until we ran into you, that was how I’d reckoned it would go. So how come they didn’t worry you even a little bit?”
“I suppose I didn’t give myself time to be worried. I did what needed doing and that was it.” Aces peeled part of the hide from the underbelly. “It’s the same with the shootin’ scrapes I’ve been in. It always happens fast. You don’t have much time to think. You just shoot. It’s over before you can get scared.”
“I wonder if it can be that easy.”
“I never said it was that,” Aces said. “For me, the hard part is always after the shootin’. When I look back and think how I could have done things different.”
“But those times you told us about,” Tyree said, “you had no choice. It was you or them.”
“That’s what lets me sleep at night. I have a conscience, and it bothers me on occasion.”
“I might have one of those,” Tyree said. “I get bothered sometimes by this bounty business I do.”
“Then why do it?”
“I need the practice trackin’ men down,” Tyree said. “And I hate outlaws worse than anything.”
Aces let a minute go by. His next slash caused some of the intestines to ooze out and he helped them along using the flat of the bowie as a scoop. “My turn. And remember. You gave your word to answer.”
“I reckon I know what you’re fixin’ to ask,” Tyree said, and touched his scar. “You want to know about this.”
“It would please me considerable,” Aces said. He saw that Marshal Hitch was listening but pretending not to, and McCarthy had raised his head.
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