Ludlow continued up past the second landing and into the second-story hall, where more doxies were moving in and out of rooms at the behest of Dr. Norton Dahl, yelling at them from an open door midway down the hall, on Ludlow’s left. Another man, likely one of the several wounded who’d fled the Buchanon ranch late yesterday afternoon, was moaning and groaning loudly from behind a closed door on Ludlow’s left.
Another man behind another closed door was yelling for whiskey.
Ludlow poked his head into the room from which Dahl had been yelling orders.
“Doc?”
The sawbones, looking sweaty and harried in his shirtsleeves, his arms and white shirt and wool vest nearly as blood-sodden as the bedding the whore had been carrying, snapped his head toward Ludlow. “What the hell is it?”
He was standing over the still figure of a man on the bloody bed before him. The man appeared dead, mouth open in a silent scream, wide eyes glaring at the ceiling.
“Oh . . . uh . . . sorry, Mr. Ludlow,” Dahl said, moderating his tone. “I’ve, uh . . . just had a long night is all.”
“Did he expire?” Ludlow glanced at the obviously dead man before him.
“Yes—finally, thank God,” said Dahl through a long sigh, staring at his bloody arms raised before him. “I didn’t know a single man could hold that much blood, much less lose it and retain his ghost for so long.”
“Who is he? I don’t recognize him in death.”
“Fella named Tatum. Riley Tatum.”
“Ah, Tatum.” Ludlow remembered now. Tatum had been an ore guard—a good one, as Ludlow recollected. He gave a satisfied half smile. “He was well-liked, has quite a few friends in town, I believe.”
Friends who would no doubt eagerly sign on to another posse formed in the pursuit of exacting both revenge and justice for those murdered by the Buchanons. There were only two Buchanons left—the middle boy whom Annabelle was improbably sweet on, and the old man, who’d taken a bullet. How hard could it be to finish the job out at the 4-Box-B? How many men would it take?
The doctor turned to the rancher again, frowning curiously.
“Never mind, Doc. How’s Chaney?”
Dahl jerked his chin. “See for yourself. Two doors down on your left.”
Ludlow had just started walking toward the door indicated when a girl’s shrill scream rose from a door on his right. The doctor ran out of the room behind the rancher, and threw open the door just beyond it.
“What the hell is going on in here?” Dahl yelled as he slammed the door behind him.
“Lousy cur bit me, Doc!” the girl cried.
The commotion continued as Ludlow moved on down the hall and knocked on the door the doctor had indicated. He didn’t wait for a response but opened the door and poked his head inside. The room was small. Like all the other rooms up here, it was a crib where the Purple Garter doxies plied their trade.
Max Chaney sat on the edge of the room’s sole, single-size bed. He was clad only in balbriggans. His bulbous paunch sagged over his lap like that of a woman eight months pregnant. He was around the same age as Ludlow, in his sixties, but his longish, curly hair was still black, and he had a long, drooping mustache on his craggy face, which was the washed-out color of a sun-bleached adobe.
Chaney’s right side faced Ludlow standing in the doorway. The only indication of the man’s injuries was a thick white bandage wrapped around his forehead. The right side of his face appeared unmarred.
It was when Chaney turned his head to face the rancher that Ludlow winced.
“How do I look, Graham?” Chaney lifted a brown paper quirley to his mouth and took a deep drag. In his other hand he held a bottle of whiskey atop his thigh. Another, empty bottle lay at his feet. The whiskey in the current bottle had been taken about two inches down.
“Christ,” Ludlow muttered. He wanted to add that he didn’t look all that worse than his son Cass, but did not.
Chaney’s blood-splotched bandage angled down over his left, heavily padded eye socket. It dropped down to cover that ear as well. Blood shone over the ear. Or where the ear had been, rather. Chaney’s cheek resembled freshly ground beef bristling with sutures.
Ludlow moved into the room. He removed his hat, held it before him, and nudged the door closed with his boot. Chaney took another drag off the quirley as he dropped his gaze to the hat.
“Christ, Graham, I ain’t dead yet.” Chaney gave a caustic chuff and exhaled smoke through his nostrils.
Ludlow glanced down at his hat, drumming his fingers on the brim. He looked at his business associate again, feeling the burn of irritation. He didn’t like Max Chaney. He never had. Having to pretend he did strained his nerves. But then, he’d often suspected the feeling was mutual. They’d joined hands several years ago because at that time they happened to be the only two men around with money burning holes in their pockets, though Ludlow had come by his (relatively) honestly, while everyone knew that most of Chaney’s had come from sheer thuggery—claim-jumping, rustling, and selling firewater to the Sioux.
“I just came to pay my respects, Max. No need for the nasty tone. I wasn’t the one who shot you.”
Chaney lifted the bottle. The air bubble at the bottom lurched toward the neck several times. When Chaney had taken down three more inches, he lowered the bottle to his thigh, smacked his lips, and ran a grimy longhandle sleeve across his mouth.
He turned again to face Ludlow, his lone eye rheumy from drink, his torso swaying on his hips. He was more than a few sheets to the wind. Sagging slowly backward, lifting his legs and bare feet onto the bed, he said, “Nah . . . but you might as well have.” He badly slurred his words, and he seemed to have trouble keeping his lone eye on his visitor standing in front of the closed door.
Ludlow moved forward, his anger burning hotter. “What’re you talking about, Max?”
“This never would have happened if you’d kept a shorter leash on Li’l Miss.” Lying back on the bed, his head carving a deep valley in a sweat-stained pillow, Chaney wrinkled his nose. “You know who I mean. That girl of yours. If you’d have seen fit to let Luke marry the harlot, none of this ever would have happened.”
Ludlow opened his mouth for a harsh retort, but Chaney interrupted him.
“No, no—you thought you were too good for us Chaneys. You thought she was too good for Luke! You don’t mind my money and my expertise in certain matters . . . the kind of men I know.”
Chaney shook his head, flaring his nostrils as he glared up at Ludlow through his one rheumy, dung-brown eye. “But your Li’l Miss is far too good to marry up with a Chaney. So, instead, she drops her under-frillies for some no-account Rebel scalawag. Runs off with the Grayback!”
He laughed loudly, hoarsely, and without humor. “And there ain’t a thing you can do about it! Even after she pummels your useless son and burns down your barn! That’s right—defies you, works over your son, burns down your barn, and throws in with a Grayback! Oh my God, if that ain’t the richest thing I ever heard! Haw! Haw! Haw!”
Ludlow glanced back at the door, wondering how far away Chaney’s tirade had penetrated, how many others had overheard his lashing words. The rancher walked up close to the bed, his jaws hard, his eyes dark with menace. “Shut up, Max! Keep your damn voice down! That’s not how it was!”
Through his loud guffaws, Chaney yelled, “She was too good for my son! You were savin’ her for some dandy from back east! But instead, she lets some louse-ridden Grayback have his unholy way with the—ah, achhh!”
Ludlow had grabbed the nearly empty bottle from Chaney’s hand. He’d turned it over and shoved the lip into his business partner’s wide-open mouth. Gritting his teeth, the fires of fury burning more hotly inside him than the flames that had consumed his barn, he rammed the bottle as far down Chaney’s throat as it would go.
The liquor chugged as it flowed down through the neck and out the lip into Chaney’s throat.
Chaney choked and gagged, struggling wildly, throwing hi
s hands up over Ludlow’s arms, trying to pry free the rancher’s fury-fueled grip on the bottle. He kicked up with his legs. Weak from the wound as well as drink, none of his thrashing packed much of a wallop.
Ludlow held the bottle fast, overturned in Chaney’s mouth, pinning the man’s head down hard against the pillow. Chaney kicked and gargled and spewed the whiskey out his nose and over Ludlow’s hands and arms and into his face. Each time he tried to draw a breath, he inhaled more of the whiskey, a portion of which spewed out his nose. His lone eye was wide and bright with terror.
The rancher turned his face away, squeezing his eyes closed against the burn of the spraying whiskey, until he felt the last of the busthead leave the bottle. He could tell by the way Chaney convulsed, his chest swelling, that most of the whiskey had rushed into his lungs. When the rancher opened his eyes again, Chaney was staring up at him, his face set in a mask of frozen horror, his body lying limp and unmoving.
Whiskey filled the broad, dark “O” of his mouth, spilling over his lower lip and dribbling down his chin, like water from an overfilled stock tank.
Chaney’s hands lay to either side of his head, the fingers curled toward his palms.
Ludlow dropped the bottle and stumbled back against the dresser. The room turned around him. The crab in his chest was stirring. The rancher gripped the edges of the dresser, drew a deep, slow breath, tried to relax. He drew several more slow breaths. Gradually, the crab returned to its slumbers. The pain abated, though his heart was still thudding from exertion.
Ludlow rubbed his arm across his forehead, stared at Max Chaney in shock and horror at what he’d done. The shock abated quickly, however, and he found himself chuckling. Nervously chuckling but chuckling, just the same.
Quietly, he said, “By God, I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time.” He flared his nostrils in renewed anger. “A harlot, eh? Maybe. But only I have the right to call her that, you swine!”
The doorknob clicked.
Ludlow jerked his head to see the door open. Doctor Dahl stepped slowly into the room, frowning, casting his befuddled gaze between Max Chaney lying dead on the bed, and Ludlow standing back against the dresser. Dahl had washed his arms but a lot of blood remained—stubborn, dried streaks of it around his fingernails and clinging to the hair on his pale, slender arms.
“What in God’s name . . . ?”
“Heart stroke.” Ludlow shuttled his gaze to Chaney. “Poor Max. We were just having us a chat—you know, two old friends gathering wool. He made a strangling sound and died. Spilled whiskey all over himself.” He shook his head. “Poor Max.”
Ludlow looked at Dahl. Dahl looked back at him.
The doctor walked into the room, held a finger to Chaney’s neck. Finally, he turned to Ludlow. “Poor Max.”
Ludlow stooped to retrieve his hat from the floor. He set it on his head and walked to the door. As he passed the sawbones, he gave the man’s shoulder a reassuring pat. “You did the best you could, Doc. No hard feelings.”
Ludlow opened the door and stepped into the hall.
CHAPTER 22
Ludlow was heading back down the hall toward the Purple Garter’s stairs when a door on his left opened. A copper-skinned girl clad in virtually nothing and touting nearly all of her wares—which were not half-bad by a long sight—stepped into the hall, nearly running into Ludlow.
“Easy, young lad—!”
The rancher’s admonition was cut off by a man’s petulant, sleep-raspy voice saying, “And bring back a bottle of something from a higher shelf than the one on which you found the last one! Good Lord—my head is . . .”
The speaker’s voice trailed off when he saw Ludlow standing in the doorway, staring into the room from over the young doxie’s bare left shoulder. The young man kneeling on the rumpled bed, beside yet another doxie, this one totally naked and lying belly-down and sound asleep under a honey-blond tumbleweed of sleep-mussed hair, was none other than Kenneth Earnshaw.
Earnshaw was as naked as the day he was born, a fact he immediately tried to compensate for by drawing up a badly twisted sheet from the bottom of the bed. Naked, he was even more unimpressive than he was clothed—small and bony and fish-belly white with an unseemly potbelly for a man so young.
“Earnshaw!” Ludlow exclaimed.
“Uh . . . uh . . . hello there . . . Mr. . . . Ludlow, uh . . . I was . . . I was . . .”
“Yes, I see what you was.” Ludlow looked at the doxie standing before him, to one side of the open doorway, staring up at him with her full lips drawn up with amusement. She was a severe-looking, black-eyed half-breed. Probably more Sioux than white, with a ripe, buxom body and coarse, blue-black hair spilling across her shoulders.
Earnshaw scrambled down from the bed, taking the sheet with him, ripping it off the bed and wrapping it around his nakedness. “Look, Mr. Ludlow—”
“Oh, I know, I know, Earnshaw,” the rancher intoned, trying not to sound sarcastic but knowing he was failing. “You were just distracting yourself from a broken heart.”
“Well, uh”—Earnshaw glanced at the girl sound asleep on the bed and then at the mostly naked half-breed in the doorway before Ludlow—“I guess you could . . .”
“Look, Earnshaw,” Ludlow said, placing his fists on his hips and squaring his shoulder commandingly at the younger man, “do you still want to marry my daughter? She’d be quite a catch for you.” The rancher let his eyes flick across the younger man’s embarrassingly unimpressive body once more. “Quite a catch for you, indeed!”
Earnshaw’s mouth moved several times before any words made it past his lips. “Uh . . . well, of course. Of course, but I, uh . . .”
“A woman like Annabelle is like a wild-assed bronco filly—don’t you know that, Earnshaw? She wakes up with her tail arched and her neck up, and she goes to sleep the same way. But, my God—isn’t she magnificent?”
“She is, indeed, Mr. Ludlow, but . . .”
“But nothing! The magnificent wild filly that is Annabelle Ludlow needs to be run down and tamed. Broken, by God! Buckled to harness! You don’t take her first no for an answer. You don’t even take her second or third no for an answer. Each one of those no’s is merely her saying—‘How bad do you want me? How hard are you willing to fight for me?’
“That’s how it is with a bronco like Annabelle. If you want her, you set your hat for her and you ride out and throw a loop on her at all costs. You don’t let any other stallion stand in your way. If you do, you aren’t working hard enough and you don’t deserve her. You’re not stallion enough for her. Hell, you aren’t man enough for her! Do I make myself clear, Earnshaw?”
Ludlow didn’t wait for an answer. He swung away, pinching his hat brim at the half-breed whore, and strode on down the hall, leaving Earnshaw staring wide-eyed and hang-jawed after him.
As he descended the stairs, the rancher chuckled, silently opining that it would be interesting to see how that played out. It was only right, though, really, that the man who wanted to marry Annabelle fight for her at least half as hard as Hunter Buchanon was fighting. You had to give that much to the Grayback. He was willing to fight and even die, it seemed, for Annabelle’s hand in marriage.
Die it would be. Graham Ludlow wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Mr. Ludlow, I didn’t know you were here.”
The speaker was Lon Avery, one of the Purple Garter’s bartenders—a slight, hawk-beaked man in his late twenties with a pronounced limp. He’d once worked for Ludlow and Chaney until a rattlesnake had spooked the mules in the traces of the ore wagon he was driving to Cheyenne. The frightened mules ran themselves, the wagon, the ore, and Avery into a shallow ravine, breaking the mule skinner’s left ankle in half a dozen places.
Now he wore a brace on the limb and served busthead in the Purple Garter, which he would likely be condemned to do for the rest of his ill-fated life.
He limped around back there now, removing corked brown bottles from a wooden crate and aligning them o
n various shelves in the back bar. He peered over his shoulder at the rancher, his weary eyes cast with curiosity. His face appeared a little more drawn and paler than usual. He’d likely been up all night, running whiskey upstairs to the doctor’s ailing patients.
“Came to see my business partner,” Ludlow said. “Toss me one down—will you, Lon?”
“Sure, sure, Mr. Ludlow.” Avery popped the cork on a bottle and set a shot glass on the plain pine bar fronting the rancher. “How is Mr. Chaney doing this morning?”
“Not very well, I’m afraid.”
Avery arched a brow. “Oh?”
Deciding not to elaborate but to change the subject, Ludlow sipped down half his whiskey and then asked, “Lon, you got any idea where Sheriff Stillwell ran off to?”
He was of a mind to give the sheriff a good dressing down for running with his tail between his legs when the chips were down. Not only that, but he wanted Stillwell to turn his badge over to him, Ludlow, personally. The man’s cowardice had put Ludlow in one hell of a bind, and he wanted Stillwell to know it.
The rancher still had a battle to fight, by God, and now he was going to have to bring in more help from only who knew where. Stillwell had come highly recommended. Turns out he was nothing more than a chicken-livered confidence man.
Badge for hire, Ludlow’s ass!
“I sure do.”
Ludlow arched both brows in surprise at the gimpy apron. “You do?”
Avery jerked his spade-like chin toward the front of the Purple Garter, indicating the large hotel and saloon, the Dakota Territorial, looming largely on the other side of the street. “He’s sitting over there in the saloon, playin’ solitaire. Calm as you please. I just seen him not a minute ago when I was scrubbin’ blood from the front boardwalk. He’s sittin’ up close to the front window. Even gave me a big grin and a two-fingered salute.”
“Pshaw!”
“Odd, ain’t it? After he lit out like that . . . like he done the other day?” Again, Avery turned his incredulous gaze toward the Territorial and smoothed his little caterpillar mustache with the first two heavily calloused fingers of his right hand. “I never expected to see him again. Not after he disgraced himself like he done. But there he sits. Two-fingered salute an’ everything!”
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