Authors: Massacre Mountain

Tags: #Murder, #Western Stories, #Wyoming, #Westerns, #Fiction, #Sheriffs - Wyoming, #General, #Mountain Life

William W. Johnstone (23 page)

“What’s the story?” he asked me.

“They discovered life too late; that’s all there is to it,” I said.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-EIGHT

Well, I still have a job. And they even raised my pay by five dollars. The whole town was real glad to see the gold back in the bank along with the greenbacks. And glad to see the three in jail that started all the trouble.

The directors named our Mayor, George Waller, president of the bank, and he got the doors open real fast, and it was business as usual. There’s money in Doubtful. They buried Hubert Sanders real good, with lots of wreaths and speeches, and the bank paid the freight.

Rusty, he is no longer a deputy. I appointed him undersheriff, with a two-dollar raise, and he’s happy as can be. I’m looking around for a couple of deputies now, not my old ones who aren’t worth spit.

The trial’s coming up and I don’t know who’ll swing and who won’t. There’s some feeling about Delphinium. She set the trouble in motion, but didn’t really know what sort of kindling she’d touched a match to. It was Iceberg’s gun that killed Sanders. I’d guess the jury will spare her, but give her some time in the pen at Rawlins where she can think about undoing all the trouble she started.

Ralston’s opera house is doing just fine. That Royal Arabian Nights show packed them in, especially after I starred in the beheading act. Ralston told me that was the first show that made some money for him. When it left town, it traveled safely up to Casper, and that’s the last I heard of it. I never did see Ambrosia again, or Zelda Zanadu, when she hired on to that show, but that’s how it is with show people. You can make friends with them for a few days, and away they go and you never see them again.

The next show rolled in on schedule, and I’ll see it one of these days. It’s called Joe Gibson’s Flora Dora Girls, and it’s mostly comic sketches and a lot of dancing by ladies with big hips and skinny waists. I might fall for one or two of them ladies, too, but I’ll know it will be real temporary.

Ralston’s opera house sure changed Doubtful. All sorts of interesting people started coming to town and entertaining us. We all heard new music, heard good jokes, listened to pretty interesting orchestras, watched some new dance steps, and got taken on little trips whenever a scene was set somewhere like New York, or Paris, or Tahiti. There was a regular circuit for these shows, and there were comedians like Eddy Foy who went from town to town making people laugh, or singers like Jenny Lind who warbled away, and got every randy male in the audience dreaming of a cottage with lilacs and children.

So I have to thank Ralston for all that. Instead of a town full of bored cowboys looking for trouble on Saturday nights, we have become a town brimming with entertainments. In fact, because of Ralston’s opera house, Doubtful is booming. There’s people moving here just so they can enjoy all the troupes that come rolling through town.

I think he’s doing all right, too. His problem is not getting customers, but getting shows to come to a small town like Doubtful, and sometimes he has to guarantee them a minimum gate, and if he doesn’t make the minimum he has to fork over some of his profit.

The bank got the new safe installed real fast, and could store the money again. Me, I’m still at Belle’s boardinghouse, and on my dresser are them explosives we took off of Jardine. That guncotton is still in its enameled box, and the blasting oil is still in the flask. Maybe some day I’ll have cause to use that stuff.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp.
119 West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

PINNACLE BOOKS and the Pinnacle logo are Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off. The WWJ steer head logo is a trademark of Kensington Publishing Corp.

ISBN: 978-0-7860-2910-5

ISBN-10: 0-7860-2346-5

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