“Sheriff Hopper is in this? He doesn’t have as big a problem with gambling.”
“I know. He didn’t seem too concerned, but that doesn’t mean this is over. Somehow, that miner and those other two got it in their heads that I’m the one to solve their financial woes.”
Fishing out bullets from his vest pocket, Doc fit them into the pistol and snapped the cylinder shut. He then slipped the Colt back into his shoulder holster and positioned his feet so that he was standing sideways in relation to the fence. “If you had their financial woes, you might be getting a little desperate yourself.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Just what you think it means. Our mutual friend the prospector isn’t exactly on stable ground when it comes to his finances. Then again,” Doc added as he flexed his fingers and fixed his eyes upon the bottles, “not many in that profession are.”
“How do you know all this?”
“It’s my business to know.”
“Why? Do you fix Orville’s teeth?”
Doc glanced over to Caleb and then pulled in a breath. There wasn’t too much of a wheeze associated with that action today. “I’m referring to my other business.”
Caleb nodded and looked out to the bottles. “Ah, that’s right. You’re quite the gambler. I hear you’re becoming a man to keep an eye on when it comes to poker.”
“Orville’s new to poker. He’s more inclined to buck the tiger.”
“You mean faro?”
Doc nodded before drawing the pistol from his holster and taking a shot. Caleb had seen quicker draws, but Doc’s aim was on the money. The bottle that had already been blasted in half now shattered into a glittering mist. “The trick is to keep everything steady,” Doc recited. “Right down to the breath you take before and after you fire. Concentrating on the breath after is what pulls you through.”
“How bad is Orville’s debt?” Caleb asked, ignoring Doc’s free shooting lesson.
“At least seven hundred, and that just covers what he owes to Champagne Charlie.”
Caleb scowled when he heard that name. Champagne Charlie ran the St. Charles Saloon and was known to be one of the happiest fellows someone could meet. “I never knew Charlie was that hard on the folks who owed him money.”
“He’s not. It’s his partner that needs to be watched.”
“Partner?”
After placing the Colt back into its holster, Doc drew and fired in a motion that was slightly quicker than the time before. He took a piece from the next bottle in line and swore, even though that bottle teetered and eventually fell off the fence.
Caleb walked around to stand between Doc and the fence. Looking straight into the dentist’s eyes like that made Doc seem younger somehow. His cheeks were sunken as always, but his blue eyes still had a spark that was as bright, or brighter, than anyone else in their early twenties.
“Didn’t you ever learn the finer points of gun safety?” Doc asked in his normal, droll manner.
“I never knew Charlie had a partner, Doc, and that doesn’t sit right with me, since I’ve made it my business to know such things.”
“Don’t feel too badly. I doubt I would have known myself if I hadn’t had a few bad nights dealing faro at the St. Charles. I’d just gotten my layout, and Charlie was kind enough to let me start in on a busy night. After the house lost one too many hands, I was approached by a rather somber gentleman who didn’t have too many kind words for me.”
“Do you know who he was?”
Doc shook his head. “Only that he showed a bit too much interest in Charlie’s affairs to be anything but a partner or his father. Since his age doesn’t fit the latter, my money would have to go to the former.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That I could either become a better dealer or I’d have to repay my losses out of my own pocket. I told him what I thought of that in none too many words, and he promptly threatened to eviscerate me with my newly purchased Will & Finck shears.”
“Card-trimming shears, Doc?” Caleb asked with a grin. “You should know better than that.”
“They came with the rest of the layout. Anyhow. I assured him my dealing would improve, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“He must have put a fright into you.”
“Hardly,” Doc replied as he drew his pistol and fired three shots in quick succession, causing three more bottles to pop. “I intended on improving without being so rudely commanded.”
“Well that doesn’t help answer my original question.”
“And what was that again?”
“Why you handed over one hell of a bargaining chip to a man in desperate need of money?
My
money!”
Doc smiled and extended his arm. After using the pistol to nudge Caleb to one side, Doc sighted down the barrel and then let his arm drop to his side. “Do you know the root of all evil?”
“Yeah. Money.”
“No. The love of money is the root of all evil, and there seems to be plenty of roots squirming around just beneath the surface here.”
Caleb’s frustration was becoming difficult to contain. “I’ve got a saloon to maintain, Doc. I can’t afford to have someone coming after it that’s got some real ammunition to use against me. If things get too bad, I might just find myself broke or dangling from a noose before I know what went wrong.”
“Now you’re just working yourself into a tizzy.”
“That’s easy enough for you to say. You’re not the one with his head on the block. You’re the one that handed the ammunition to them Deagles in the first place.”
Doc wasn’t shaken by Caleb’s accusations in the least. Instead, he seemed to be chewing on something in the back of his mind, which soon brought a smile to his face. “You recall those roots I was mentioning before?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. I guess.” The more he stood there, the more Caleb realized it was useless to try and steer Doc’s mind anywhere it didn’t want to go.
Holding his Colt at arm’s length, Doc sighted down the barrel but didn’t pull the trigger. “With all these folks scrambling so desperately for their money, we might be able to treat ourselves to our own nice little payday.”
“We?”
“Yes. As in, you and I.”
“All I want is to get my saloon out of harm’s way.”
“Is it?” Doc asked.
The suddenness of that question took Caleb by surprise. “Why else would I be going through all this trouble? Why else would I come here to talk to you?”
“Maybe it’s because you know we can help one another.”
“All right. Since you’ll just tell me anyway, I’ll bite. How can we help each other?”
“By sinking a few roots of our own,” Doc replied with a crafty smile.
“I’m more worried about staying alive and in business.”
“Yeah, you’re too worried,” Doc said as he pulled his trigger.
Caleb didn’t flinch at the gunshot. Instead, he felt the hackles rising along the back of his neck. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
When Doc opened the cylinder of his Colt this time, he did it with a snap of his wrist and dumped the spent shells quickly. “You spend your life worrying too much about the worst, and you miss out on everything else. Believe me, Caleb,” he added while reloading the pistol. “I know all about that.” Snapping the pistol shut, he added, “Take how you found me as an example. That took something else than just being worried.”
Caleb laughed and said, “Oh, well I asked around a bit. That’s all.”
“It would take more than just asking, I hope.”
“Well, I talked to Dr. Seegar and then had a chat with a man at the Dallas County Bank. Once I made him think I might put some money in your pockets to pay your rent, he was more than willing to lend a hand.”
“Very enterprising,” Doc said with a nod. “That’s the spirit I’m talking about. Between the two of us, we have no need of fussing about with things like pennies for profits every month and sweet-talking customers just so they can remember us the next time they feel a thirst or a pain in their mouth. There’s plenty more out there besides just that. Haven’t you ever thought about that?”
“Sure I have, but there comes a time when a man has to think about little things like settling down or running a business.”
Doc flipped the pistol around his finger with a flourish. “And why is that?”
“Because . . . that’s just the way things go!”
But Doc was still staring at Caleb, spinning the pistol as though the weapon was just something to keep his finger busy. “You know who you sound like?”
“No, but I’ll bet you’re gonna tell me.”
“You sound like me, right before I got fed up and started doing what made me happy rather than what I set myself up for when I didn’t know any better.”
“Running my saloon makes me plenty happy. I’d just like to keep it open instead of having it taken away by some dumb-shit miner.”
Doc shook his head. “That’s not it. If you were just worried about that saloon, that’s where you’d be right now. I may not be a businessman, but I know that you have to have angry drunks spitting threats at you on a daily basis. It just comes along with the territory.”
“Yeah, it does. But that’s not—”
Doc cut in after quickly raising his hand. “”It seems to me that you’re more upset at the very notion that these loudmouths have the power to step in and make such a mess out of the quaint little garden you planted for yourself.”
“Jesus, you’ve been drinking again. That explains all this chatter.”
Spinning the pistol once more, Doc dropped it into his holster and turned to stand toe-to-toe with Caleb. “Sure I have, but I’ve also been thinking about things. Some of us may look the part more than others, but we’re all dying. Either one of us could get trampled by a runaway bull, get struck by lightning, or perish from any one of a long list of things that folks can die from. Does that mean we need to sit in a cramped little office and just wait for it to happen?”
Hearing those last few words practically slapped Caleb across the face. “What did you say?”
“You heard me. I sat in a smelly office yanking rotten teeth from people’s heads. Hell, I went to school for it! How absurd is that? But I feel more alive when I’m out there doing what makes me happy than when I’m keeping my mouth shut and doing what I’m told. We may not have crossed paths too many times just yet, but I can see that same thing buzzing around inside of you. Am I wrong?”
Caleb knew the quickest way out of that conversation was to tell Doc that he was wrong. Dead wrong. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shake the thoughts of sitting in his own dirty little office, longing for the escape of working behind a bar. Compared to that paper-filled, dusty office stuck within those thick walls, Ben Mays’s jail cell hadn’t seemed too bad.
“I’m not wrong,” Doc said to fill the silence. “I can see that.”
“So what? This ain’t nothing new. Practically every man that comes into my saloon gripes about what he does for a living. Either that, or he gripes about not being able to make a living. All men gripe. So what?”
“But how many men do something about it?”
Caleb shook his head quickly and backed away. “Don’t do anything to put my place at risk, Doc. That’s what I came to say.”
“All right then. How about we work to make sure that the Busted Flush not only stays in business but also gets out of any financial woes you may have?”
“And how would you suggest we do that?”
“Well, the first step would be to put your place on the circuit.”
Caleb’s eyes lit up. Being on the gambler’s circuit meant being in the loop for every big game when the real professionals came to town. Big-league players meant bigger house takes, and even when those gamblers had bad streaks of luck, others would come to fill their shoes or get in line to take one of those players down. In the end, it was the saloons that came out ahead, and only saloons on the circuit even made it into those games.
“I’ve tried to get on the circuit for years,” Caleb said.
Nodding, Doc said, “I’ve been doing some gambling myself and have come to appreciate the fineries of that profession. I believe all you need is to expand your gaming repertoire and allow someone with similar interests to take an active role.”
Caleb couldn’t help but laugh. “You’ve got a hell of a way of saying a little thing like you want to work at my saloon.”
“Seeing as how I’d rather pull my own teeth out rather than grow old in my current profession, I think a steady job dealing faro might be a welcome change.”
“I never did see the sense in faro.”
“That’s because playing it is a step above tossing your money into the street. Not everyone thinks along those lines, which is why
dealing
faro can be quite lucrative.”
“And how will that get me on the gambling circuit?”
“It’s a first step in bringing your saloon up to snuff. What do you say? Are you willing to take on a new dealer?”
Caleb pondered that for a few moments before nodding. What put it all together for him was the notion that it would be so much easier to keep an eye on Doc in the Flush than having to track him down whenever something went wrong. “All right. But if the law comes snooping around, just keep your mouth shut. Sound good?”
“That sounds marvelous,” Doc replied, extending his hand.
Caleb shook Doc’s hand, finding himself once again surprised at the strength in the dentist’s bony grasp.
“You keep in mind everything else we talked about,” Doc said. “I’m not one to wax philosophic with just anyone, you know.”
“In order for the Flush to last the week, I’ll need to find a way to get those goddamn Deagles away from me for good.”
“I am so glad you mentioned that. I’ve been entertaining some intriguing notions regarding that very topic.”
“I hope you don’t intend on shooting up my place,” Caleb said with a nod toward the fence. There were only a few more bottles lined up, and when Caleb shifted his eyes back to Doc, he found the Navy model Colt being handed over to him.