A
rthur's Castle was the somewhat exotic name for the four-story hotel that stood at the north end of Staghorn's main street, but it fit; operated by an Englishman who insisted upon being addressed as Sir Andrew Southerly, it was the only place I knew of in the Northwest where the towels were as thick as rugs and there was a bath to every floor. The fact that there was only one attendant, who could haul buckets of steaming water to only one bath at a time, was immaterial; in an area where bathtubs of any kind were scarce as passenger pigeons, the presence of four in one building was a luxury almost unheard of. They were the hotel's main attraction. If you're wondering why I bother to go into so much detail concerning bathtubs, it's merely to explain why, when first encountered in this narrative, I am naked.
I had been sent out from the U.S. marshal's office in Helena to bring back a wife-murderer named Brainard who had been picked up on a drunk and disorderly charge in Staghorn, where the sheriff had identified him from his description on a wanted dodger. Now, it was a rule of Judge Harlan Blackthorneâ²s court that each of his deputies check in with the local peace officer immediately upon reaching his destination, but it was a rule of my own not to let any rules hinder me. I figured that if Brainard had waited during the week's ride it had taken me to get there, he'd wait a little longer while I freshened up at the Castle. What I hadn't figured on was the impatience of the local peace officer.
I was immersed to my chin in nearly scalding water when the doorknob began to turn. My gun, a .45 caliber Deane-Adams English five-shot revolver, was hanging in its holster on a chair beside the tub. I palmed it and drew a bead on the door between my bare feet, which I had braced against the tub's cast-iron lip. I cocked it just as the door swung inward.
The steam rising from the tub was so thick I could barely make out the dark smudge of a man's form standing in the doorway, but that was enough. In my profession, when someone comes in on you without knocking first, you've got to figure he isn't there on a friendly visit. I'd learned that the hard way; the same thing had happened to me twice before and two men were dead because they hadn't
taken that extra second to brush the door with their knuckles. My finger tightened on the trigger.
“You still carrying that dandy's gun, Page?” drawled a deep voice with a faint trace of Mississippi around the r's.
I held onto the gun. Boot Hill is full of those who put their weapons away when they heard a voice they recognized.
“It's this way, Henry,” I said. “Only two men in the West ever carried a gun like this one. The other was Bill Hickok. You figure it out.”
He laughed then, and I knew it was going to be all right. Even so, I didn't relax my grip on the revolver until he came farther into the room and I could see that his gun was safely in its holster. I let the hammer down gently and leathered the five-shot.
Henry Goodnight hadn't changed much since I'd seen him last, which was going on three years ago. Hatless, he wore his auburn hair shoulder-length, the way some of them still do up in the mountains, and he dressed like a banker, complete with Prince Albert coat and shiny beaverskin vest with a gold watch chain glittering across the front. The effect was somewhat marred by the silver star he had pinned to his belt. His gun was ivory-handled and rode waist-high in a cut-down holster designed to carve seconds off his draw. He had moist brown eyes, kind of gentle and slow-looking, that had fooled more than one self-styled fast draw into thinking he could take him. To date, none had.
He had been elected sheriff of this isolated community of trappers, farmers and cattlemen eight years before and there had not been an election since. The locals recognized a good thing when they had one.
“You've changed some,” he said, grinning behind his moustache. “Back on Ford Harper's spread you wouldn't take a bath but once a month, and then only when it rained.”
I grinned back. I'd almost forgotten those days when we made our way from one cattle camp to another with one rope between us and a pair of backsides like buffalo skins. “What makes you think this isn't my first this month?”
“From the looks of the water, I'd say it was.”
“There's a lot of dust between here and Helena.” I extended a soapy hand, which he took in a grip usually reserved for the butt of his six-gun. “What's on your mind, Henry? You know I would have showed up at your office sooner or later.”
“More likely later.” He swung a black-booted foot up onto the seat of the chair and leaned forward with his forearms resting upon his thigh. This made him look casual but alert. It was one of a half-dozen or so poses he had practiced to the degree that he could go into any one of them without looking as if he were affecting it, which he was. Henry was vain as a bride. “Hobie Botts told me he saw you ride in half an hour ago. I need your help.”
“Don't tell me your prisoner got away.”
His teeth glittered behind the reddish fringe along his upper lip. “You know me better than that, Page. When was the last time I let a prisoner escape?”
I shrugged, soaping the back of my neck. “I haven't seen you in three years, Henry.”
“I suppose I deserved that,” he said. “What I've got is a drunk and disorderly over at Goddard's who's a mite more drunk than I can ignore and a damned sight more disorderly than I can tolerate. If you listen close you can hear the glass breaking clear over here. He's got friends with him who are behaving themselves, more or less, but I can't say I trust them if it comes down to me or him. The town doesn't give me a deputy. How'd you like a part-time job? Say, fifteen minutes at the outside?”
“Indian or white?”
“Half-breed. His name's Ira Longbow, and he's hell with any weapon you put in his hand. Some folks say he's the son of old Two Sisters himself, but no one knows for sure. He acts like he believes it. Can I count on you?”
I sighed. “Hand me that towel.”
Dressing, I ignored the change of clothing I'd laid out and put on the outfit I'd worn during the ride from the capital, stiff with dust and sweat. I didn't want to get any blood on my fresh linen. I put on my holster without bothering to tie it downâmy gun was going to be in my hand all the time anywayâand together we left the hotel and crossed the street in the direction of the mercantile, a long low
building constructed of logs that served a dual purpose as general store and saloon, with a thin partition in between. Henry hadn't exaggerated; the sounds of breaking glass and splintering wood were audible all over town.
Something big fell apart with a tremendous crash as we neared the building. I winced. “Goddard won't be happy with you for taking so long to investigate.”
“Bart's been acting lately like he owns me and everything else in town,” he said. “It won't hurt him to be taken down a notch or two. Here he is now.”
A beefy old man who had been pacing the boardwalk in front of the log building came storming over to meet us, pushing his way through a crowd of onlookers. He had thick white eyebrows and a great shock of hair of the same color which had a habit of tumbling over his forehead like an avalanche of fresh snow. It had been white as long as I'd known him, and I'd been born and raised in Staghorn. “Where the hell you been?” he demanded of the sheriff in a voice just short of a bellow. “That son-of-a-bitch breed is running me out of business!”
“Hello, Bart,” I said.
He glared at me in a preoccupied manner from beneath the shelves of his eyebrows. “Page Murdock,” he said. “I heard you grabbed a badge up at the capital.” Without waiting for an answer, he returned his attention to my companion. “What about it, Sheriff? Are you going to do something about that maniac, or do I go get my shotgun?”
“Hold onto your hat, Bart,” drawled the other. “What got him started this time?”
“How the hell should I know? I ain't no injun. He come in falling-down drunk, and I refused to serve him. That could of been it.” Something struck a wall inside the building hard enough to knock the chinking loose from between a couple of logs. He jumped at the noise. “You going to stop him while I still got a place of business?”
“Where'd he get drunk, if not here?” asked Henry.
“What is this, for chrissake? Everything I own is being smashed to bits and you act like I'm the bastard that's doing it. There's a dozen families run stills up in them mountains that don't care who they sell to; why else you think I got to operate a mercantile? The competition here is worse than in Virginia City!”
The sheriff looked thoughtful. “I sure hope you're telling the truth, Bart. I warned you last time if I ever caught you serving liquor to Indians, I'd close you down.”
“You won't have to. Two more minutes and Ira Longbow'll do it for you!”
We left him fuming in the street and stepped up onto the boardwalk. The crowd parted respectfully for the dashing figure of the sheriff, taking little notice of the dusty saddle tramp at his side. My gun was in my hand. Henry's remained in his holster, but with him that was as good as holding it. With his left hand he gave the bat-wing doors on the
saloon side a shove and stood back while they swung shut. When no bullets followed he cautiously led the way inside.
It was a long room with a low ceiling, half again the length of a railroad car and several feet wider, leaving less than a third of the building for the mercantile on the other side of the partition. Red- and green-striped Indian rugs decorated the bare logs that made up the walls. A number of hooded kerosene lamps swung from the ceiling. The glass had been broken out of two of them, which explained the oily tang that accompanied the normal saloon smells of cheap whiskey, stale sawdust, and sweat. Smashed tables, bottles, chairs and glasses formed a pile against the walls and bar. The big mirror on the wall behind the bar was a web of jagged cracks forking outward from a triangular hole in the center where something had struck it, giving me a fly's eye view of the rest of the room and its contents.
A trio of youths stood behind the bar, two of them drinking quietly while a third poured himself a tumbler full of amber liquid from a brown bottle in his left hand. They wore leather vests that had never touched cactus and narrow hats with cocked brims that had never held a horse's fill of water. They dressed alike, looked alike, even wore their cartridge belts at the same low-slung level in imitation of a gunfighter in a dime novel. Kids. I treated them as I would any nest of baby rattlesnakes that
blocked my way out of a cougar's lair; I kept them covered. The fourth youth was Henry's worry.
Standing in the center of a cleared section, he was a scarecrow, bones and sinew covered by skin the dusky red shade of old barn siding. Dull black hair hung in lifeless wings on either side of his forehead from the part in the middle. The whites of his eyes, though bloodshot, were dazzling against the lackluster copper of his complexion, in the centers of which the irises were as black as his hair and as shiny as the buttons on an old maid's shoe. His nose was fleshy, his lips thick and flat. Wisps of downy black beard clung like spun sugar to his cheeks and chin. His clothes were homespun and faded, his boots run down at the heels. He wore no gun belt. His hat, a black Spanish affair with a low flat crown, hung between his shoulder blades from a thong knotted at his throat.
He stood with his legs spread apart and the upper half of his body bent forward at the waist, swaying slightly, as if the weight of the Dance six-shooter he held in his left hand was slowly pulling him over onto his face. The barrel showed a tendency to drift as well, but it remained pointed in the general direction of the sheriff.
Somewhere along the line, Henry's own gun, a Colt Peacemaker with the front sight filed off and the hammer shaved to ease the trigger pull, had leaped into his right hand. I hadn't seen him draw, so he must have done it as we were entering and
my attention was claimed by the three at the bar. Not that I would have seen it in any case. Eight men had died who hadn't. He covered the half-breed.
I could see that the boy with the bottle was going to go for his gun before he made a move. They get a special look on their faces when they're thinking about it, kind of sly and frightened at the same time. I fired, there was a crash, and he was holding the neck of the bottle and nothing else.
“Don't,” I advised him. He took it in the right spirit. He raised his hands.
“There's two ways we can do this, Ira.” Henry spoke in his professionally tough voice. “I can take you to jail and you can sober up in a cell that's not too dirty, or I can turn you over to Josh Booker. Your choice.”
That meant something only to those who knew their way around Staghorn. Josh Booker was the local undertaker. If it meant anything to Ira Longbow, however, he didn't show it. He maintained his unsteady stance, his gun barrel-to-barrel with Henry Goodnight's.
I decided to toss my own two bits into the pot. “You boys had better talk some sense into your partner,” I told the three at the bar. “If that Dance goes off, you're next.”
“You can't shoot all of us,” muttered the youth at the far end. His tone was petulant, scarcely audible, like that of a boy talking back to his mother, but who wasn't sure he wanted to be heard.