Two girls burst through the door. One of them held her head tilted far back. “She’s got a nosebleed, Mrs. Morgan. Judy punched her right in the face.”
I headed back to the office.
TWO
YOU KNOW HOW it is when you first start a job. Everybody eager to please you and you eager to please them. The only thing that gave them pause the day I took the job was a request for $500 in office furniture. “Hell, Lane, we’ve got a desk and a chair there.” But I wanted more than a desk and chair. I wanted the curtain-top style of desk I was used to working at, and two standard-style desks for my senior day deputy and my senior night deputy. I wanted a cork bulletin board for wanted posters that would be updated once a week, and I wanted a plain five-shelf oak $4 bookcase that I’d load up with books and magazines pertaining to modem law enforcement. I wanted a good coffeepot and a small box-style stove that would fit unobtrusively in the comer. All this got the inevitable laughs among the council members and all the people they told, but the day it was all put together and unveiled, the town saw something it had never seen before: a professional town marshal’s office.
The same cleaning woman who took care of the four-cell jail on the second floor also dusted and tidied up the office every morning, too.
When I walked in, I smelled sweet-scented furniture polish. Solid Tom Ryan, my senior day deputy, was at his desk doing paperwork, the scourge of all peace officers who take their job seriously. Tom Ryan was solid of body and solid of mind, one of the best deputies I’d ever had. Some people found the big towhead a little cool, but that was just because he didn’t allow himself the luxury of running his mouth. He sized up a person or a situation before he said or did anything. He had one problem. He’d bought a small ranch on the edge of town when he was younger. He lost money on it every year. He was a terrible rancher. Now the bank was going to take the paper back on it. He was always looking for new ways to raise money to pay off the ranch. He was so damned sensible otherwise. Every man and every woman has something that makes them a little crazy. That was Tom and his ranch.
“How’d it go at school, Lane?”
“They wanted to know how many train robbers I’d killed lately.”
He laughed. “That’s what they wanted to know the time your wife invited me out there.”
“Any business?” I said, sitting down at my desk. The night sheet was written in neat longhand for me to see. The usual. Two drunk-and-disorderlies. Another drunk who smashed out a saloon window with a rock after the barkeep cut him off. Nothing notable.
“You want to go see Mrs. Daly or you want me to do it?” I shook my head. “Poor old lady. But at least I have some good news for her.”
Mrs. Daly was a widower a scam artist had managed to swindle $500 from. He’d convinced her that he had to sell the family jewels, literally, in order to save the family manse near Denver. He brought a forged letter with him from a local banker whose name she recognized. She gave him the $500. I caught the bastard four days later in a whorehouse where the madam had summoned me. He’d gone through all the money and was now drunkenly demanding free merchandise.
Leaving Lucy Daly with a tax bill she couldn’t pay and hadn’t paid for nearly three years now.
“What’s the good news?”
“I got the county assessor to re-appraise her property. He cut the tax assessment in half and agreed to accept quarterly payment for the next four years.”
“Lucy’s going to be saying a whole lot of masses for you, Lane.”
“I could use them.” Lucy probably would, too. She was a devout woman.
“Any prisoners upstairs?”
He shook his head. “I got them over to the courthouse. The judge fined all three of them and let them go.”
“Good. I want to open the doors and windows up there and air the place out.”
“You sure do run an accommodating jail. Clean, good food, the guard gets fined if he gets too rough.”
The slight sarcasm in his voice edged upward when he came to the last part, about the guards being fined. Very few townspeople, including my deputies, liked my idea of running a clean, safe jail. They especially didn’t understand why I’d fine a guard who got too rough with a prisoner. But to me, it was all part of being a professional lawman. There’s nothing in the law that gives a peace officer the right to brutalize a prisoner. On the other hand, I have a rule that says that any prisoner who lies about a guard hurting him gets the exact punishment he lied about. If he said the guard hit him three times in the face, he gets hit by that guard three times in the face.
“Oh, I got Conroy on the stage,” Ryan said. “He gave me quite a tussle. Didn’t want to leave. Seems he liked our little town. Drew a nice little crowd when he started fighting me in front of the stage.”
“Thanks, Tom.” Conroy was a confidence man who’d just started working Skylar. We managed to catch him fast. And get him on a stage and get him out of town.
I hadn’t had time to sort through the mail stacked on the far right comer of my otherwise clean desk.
Seeing the mail there, I thought of the envelope Callie had stuck between two of her schoolbooks. The letter from the Royalton Hotel in Chicago. I wondered what she was going to tell me tonight. Something I probably didn’t want to hear, to know. Something that just might alter our marriage forever.
I slogged through the mail. There was a time when I thought illiterate people were stupid. I’d graduated high school myself. But I’d been out on the street long enough now to know that the opposite was true. Illiterate people could be awfully smart and literate people could be awfully dumb. A lot of the letters of complaint I get are in a kind of pidgin English. I’d gotten pretty good at translating. What all these letters came down to was that they wanted help. Most of them were immigrants, Germans, Irish, a handful of Jews and Swedes, who were finding America less accommodating than they’d expected. The problems they described weren’t monumental, but it was easy to see that they were ongoing and frustrating problems-mostly having to do with getting hired and getting a line of credit and finding a neighborhood that would accept them-and so I helped any way I could. I usually went to the party they were having trouble with and pleaded the immigrants’ case for them.
And got some satisfaction. If you approach most people reasonably, they’ll respond reasonably.
I was halfway through the pile when Tom Ryan said, “That Hastings kid is still looking for you. He’s been here a week now.”
“Aw, shit,” I said.
“Says he wants to ‘fight the man who outdrew Sansom.’ ”
“I didn’t outdraw Sansom. He was so damned drunk he fell into the path of my bullet.”
Tom grinned. “Well, that still hasn’t stopped people from turning you into a legend. Peace-loving lawman kills notorious killer. That kind of thing.”
“And Hastings traveled all the way from Mesa, Arizona, to fight me?”
“That’s what I’m told. I guess some yellowback writer said if he managed to kill you, he’d write a book about him.”
“He came all the way up here because of that?”
“He’s nineteen, Lane. You know how you are when you’re nineteen.”
“Thank God I was never nineteen that way. I wasn’t any wizard, but at least I knew better than to take the word of some asshole who wrote yellowbacks for a living. Where’s he staying?”
Tom looked surprised. “You aren’t going to fight him, are you?”
“No, but I’m going to have a little talk with him before I swing out and see Lucy Daly with the good news.”
“He’s at the Excelsior.”
I got through the mail before I left. Most of it went into the wastebasket. I stood up, grabbed my hat, and said, “I’ll be back around three.”
“You need any help?”
“Last time I looked, Lucy Daly weighed about eighty pounds and was blind in one eye. I think I can whip her.”
“Very funny. I mean with the punk.”
“Thanks for the offer, Tom. But I think I can handle him, too.”
Perry Dolan, the day clerk at the Excelsior Hotel, nodded when he saw me approach the front desk. “You look pretty serious this morning, Marshal. You must’ve lost some money in one of Gunderson’s card games upstairs.”
I smiled. “I’m smart enough to stay out of those, believe me.”
“You looking for somebody?”
“You got a kid named Ned Hastings.”
“I figured that’s what it was about. He ran his mouth all over town last night. We had to carry him up to his room.” Dolan had a round, friendly face. “He ain’t in no danger of becomin’ a beloved figure.”
“He’s going to fight me?”
“That’s what he tells everybody.”
I shook my head. “I’ve got a few other things on my mind. I need to settle this fast.”
“He’s up there if you want him.”
“Give me the extra key.”
He did.
“You going to shoot him, Marshal?”
I smiled. “Sure, Perry. Shoot him in his sleep. That’s pretty much what I’m known for, isn’t it?”
He laughed. “You know what I mean. You going to force him into a gunfight?”
“Can you remember any gunfight happening in this town since I became marshal?”
He hesitated. “Say, that’s right.”
“And there won’t be any this time either.” I nodded to his coffeepot. “How about giving me a cup of that to take upstairs?”
He looked puzzled, then shrugged and got the coffee.
***
The hotel was pretty much empty for the day. The drummers who stayed here would all be out drumming, and the new folks hadn’t yet arrived for tonight. An orange tomcat sat at the top of the landing, his fur being bombarded by the dust motes in the golden sun streaming through the window.
Ned Hastings was snoring loudly enough to rattle the door. I let myself in. He looked like every would-be tinhorn gunny I’d ever seen. He’d been so drunk he slept in his clothes. Fancy leather cowboy boots. Fancy white six-guns riding in a fancy black holster rig. A fancy black vest that would have looked nicer against the white shirt if the white shirt hadn’t been soiled with vomit, beer, and blood. His nose was bloody. Drunks were always hurting themselves. Or letting other people hurt them.
A carpetbag sat in the comer. On the bureau was a framed reverent photograph of a striking young woman who bore a definite resemblance to Ned. Either his sister or his mother in her youth. Hard to say.
I didn’t have any trouble with his six-guns. He went right on snoring. Every once in a while he farted. The room was starting to suffocate me with its hothouse odors.
When I finished with his guns, I grabbed his hair and yanked him to his feet. He cursed, managed to get his eyes open, cursed some more, tried to swing at me, and made a choking sound convincing enough so that I let him go long enough to throw up in the chamber pot.
While he was wiping off his mouth with the back of his hand, I handed him the steaming cup of coffee. He needed a shave, a bath, and a little humility.
“Who the hell are you?”
“The first clue,” I said, tapping my marshal’s star, “is that I’m the law.”
“I shoot somebody last night?”
“You probably tried.”
He sipped some coffee, made a face. “This tastes like shit.”
“Drink it anyway.”
He was gradually coming awake. He glanced at the bureau. “What’re those?”
“Bullets.”
“I know they’re bullets.” Then he looked down at his guns and said, “Hey, those’re my bullets.”
“That’s right.” I took out my Colt. Held my hand out, palm up, emptied my own gun. Set the six bullets on the bureau next to his. “And this is my gun.”
“What the hell you trying to prove anyway?”
“That you’d be crazy to fight me.”
“You killin’ Sansom doesn’t scare me none.”
“I didn’t kill Sansom. Sansom killed Sansom. He was so drunk, he fell into my bullet. He stumbled at the exact moment my bullet was going past him. It was a warning shot was all.”
He touched a trembling hand to his forehead. This was probably too much for him to grasp in the first hot, dehydrated, spooky moments of hangover. “So what’s the point of empty guns?”
“When you finish your coffee, I want you to draw down on me.”
“With an empty gun?”
“That’s right.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because if there were bullets in our guns, I’d kill you. And I don’t think your mom or your sister or whoever’s in that picture over there would appreciate that.”
He grinned with bad teeth, his wisp of a mustache looking like spider legs on his upper lip. “You gonna teach me a lesson, huh?”
“I’m going to try. And if you’re smart, it’s a lesson you’ll remember.”
“This is damned silly. People’ll laugh when they hear it.”
“It’s not any sillier than fighting with bullets. Most things can be worked out by talking them through. Unless the people involved are drunk or stupid. Now put that damned coffee down and draw on me.”
He made a big show of starting to feint to the left, setting his coffee on the bureau. But what he did, of course, was angle to the right and grab one of his guns. Even with his momentary head start, my Colt was clear and pointing right at his chest before his had even cleared leather.
“You sonofabitch.”
“You’d be dead, kid.”
“You got me at a bad time. I’m still sorta drunk from last night.”
“Kid, I spent six years in the Army. Dullest job I ever had. We mostly pulled sentry duty. But instead of walking post, we played a lot of cards and worked on our draws. I was about your age. I got pretty fast, but I was slow compared to a lot of the other soldiers. There never was a Wild West, kid. Not in the way you think there was. There were a lot of drunken back-shooters and ambushers and men like Sansom who were so drunk they stumbled into bullets. But actual gunfights between sober men? The old duels in the South, those were gunfights. And they had strict rules. But you’re trying to live out some bullshit you read about in a dime novel. That’s up to you, kid. But you’re not going to live it out in this town, you understand? There’s a train at three and a stage at four. Take your choice. Be on one or the other.”