Come Sundown

by Mike Blakely

  “You know, I’m pretty good with a deck of cards,” I said.

  Blue laughed. “I’ve never even seen you deal a hand.” “I’ve got a fair amount of coin on me. How much did this Sheffield cheat you out of?”

  “Now, Orn’ry, don’t go to thinkin’. It’s gone, that’s all.”

  “How much?”

  Blue’s face darkened with anger and embarrassment. “Don’t tell Kit.”

  “I wouldn’t tell anybody. Just between you and me.”

  “Almost three thousand dollars.” Blue looked down at the pine planks of the table. When his face rose again to look me in the eye, he was faking a smile. “Nothin’ another drive to California won’t fix.”

  But I knew he didn’t even have enough left over to buy a cheap herd here in New Mexico. Had I not just witnessed Blue trying to trade his hunting knife for a meal? “I think I’ll wander on over to that gambling hall this evening,” I said.

  “Now, Orn’ry, don’t get riled on my account, and let that slick bastard cheat you, too.”

  “I don’t have much to lose, anyway. Just a couple of hundred Kit loaned me until I can finish my trading at Adobe Walls.” The excitement of the endeavor must have shown in my grin. “I don’t mind taking a calculated risk with it. What do you say, Blue? Let’s see if we can figure this gambler’s game.”

  “How you plan on doin’ that?” he said, his skepticism plain in his tone of voice.

  “I don’t know. We’ll observe. You know what Plato said: You should learn to know evil—not from your own soul—but from long observation of the nature of evil in others.”

  Blue nodded as he chewed a fiery mouthful of his meal. “Who the hell is Plato?”

  “The same fellow who wrote, ‘Everything that deceives may also be said to enchant.’”

  “You got that from one of your confounded books. Orn’ry, you’re a caution.”

  I ASKED FOR a pot of coffee and a pair of cups from the proprietor of La Fonda, and we went up to my room to plot our revenge on the gambler.

  “We’ve got to act like we’re strangers to each other when we go into the gambling hall,” I said. “I’ll go in first and ask for a cup of coffee.”

  “Coffee?”

  “Well, I don’t drink whiskey.”

  “I didn’t know you drank coffee.”

  “I don’t.” About that time, I poured a cup of coffee from the pot I had carried up to my room. “But, watch this …” I got out my playing cards that I used to perform card tricks, for my entertainment, and that of others. There wasn’t a table in the tiny adobe room, so we sat cross-legged on a rug on the floor. I put the cup of coffee on the rug, and showed Blue how I could see the face of each card dealt in the mirrored surface of the coffee.

  Blue shook his head. “It happens too fast in a real game.”

  “I’ll practice. I can do it.”

  “Even if you could see the cards that way, how could you remember them all?”

  “Oh, my memory is pretty good, Blue. There are card cheats out there doing it every day. You’d be amazed at what a person can get away with.”

  To convince Blue, I dealt each of us a quick five-card hand, facedown, catching glimpses of his cards in the surface of the coffee as they flipped through the air toward him. Then I told him every card in his hand before he even picked them up.

  When Blue looked at the cards, he nodded and grinned, seeing that I was right. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked next.

  “You’ll come in an hour or so after me and get into the game. Pretend you never met me before. Don’t worry about winning or losing. Just keep your bets low, so you don’t lose too much. Your job is to stack the deadwood.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “When each hand is over, and you toss in your cards, facedown, stack them with the highest-ranking cards on the bottom.”

  “How come?”

  “That way, I can gather your cards last, and your best cards will be on the bottom of the deck.”

  “You’re gonna deal off the bottom of the deck?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Can you do that without gettin’ caught?”

  “That last hand I just dealt to you and me …”

  “Yeah?”

  “All off the bottom.”

  “Not much, hombre,” he said with deep skepticism.

  “I swear.”

  “Well, somebody’s got to cut the deck. Then how do you control what’s on bottom?”

  “I crimp the bottom card before the cut. That way I can put the deck right back where it was before the cut, and you’d never see me do it.”

  “No …”

  “I’ve been living in an Indian camp for the past three years,” I explained. “I have an Indian wife to cook all my meals and make all my clothes. I have a lot of time to mess with. You know I don’t sleep much. I practice magic tricks. The card tricks are the easiest ones.”

  “Son of a gun,” Blue said. “This might just work.”

  “We’re not going to get filthy rich. We’re just going to win your money back.”

  “Agreed.”

  We shook hands and went on with our scheming.

  THAT NIGHT, I polished my boots and put on my spurs. I wasn’t riding anywhere, for the gambling hall was within walking distance from La Fonda, but I wanted the spurs for show. For the same reason, I donned the felt hat I had purchased the day before, and my nickel-plated Colt revolver given to me a few years earlier by General Kearny for serving as his courier through the dangers of the Mexican War.

  I stepped out into the frigid evening air of a high-country winter and walked briskly to Burro Alley where several establishments of questionable repute operated around the clock. I went staightaway to the place that once belonged to Doña Tules. The moment I opened the old pine door, it was obvious that the business no longer belonged to that infamous old cigar-smoking madam. During her reign there, the place had possessed a simple honesty even if the dealers were trained to cheat for the house. A venerable warmth had resided here when Doña Tules ran the place, for everything was handmade of earth or stone or wood.

  Now the place looked as gaudy as a Mississippi riverboat.

  I walked in and felt the stares that shot my way as the old door hinges creaked. I jingled my spurs up to a new varnished bar that must have been hauled from Missouri on a freight wagon. I nudged aside a brass spittoon with my boot. The bartender glanced briefly at me without any hint of a greeting. He was a big bearded man with a grimy shirt under an apron that was passably clean. He was taking cigars from a box and placing them in a glass case on the bar, his thick fingers groping the stogies as clumsily as a big boar grizzly gathering bones.

  “Got any coffee?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, without looking at me.

  “Well, if you could make some, I’d be grateful.”

  “Do I look like a woman to you?” he growled.

  “I’ll pay for it, of course. I just wanted a little coffee.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Whatever happened to Doña Tules? A fellow could get a cup of coffee in here when she owned the place.”

  “Well, she’s dead.”

  “Then whom do I ask to get some coffee?”

  The big man crushed a handful of cigars and charged me like a bear, his snarl revealing yellowed teeth in the middle of his beard. Only the bar between us kept him from running right over me. I took a step back to stay out of his reach.

  “I told you we ain’t got no goddamn coffee!” he roared.

  I could feel every eye in the place on me. I glanced to my right and saw a gambler who just had to be Luther Sheffield, the new owner of the place, staring at me along with everybody else. About that time, the front door flew open, and in burst Blue Wiggins, almost an hour early, and rather drunk. With him was my old friend and mentor in the Indian trade with the Comanches, John Hatcher. If Blue was rather drunk, John Hatcher was a step ahead of him.

  “By God,
look, Blue!” Hatcher said in his drawl. “It’s Kid Greenwood!”

  Blue grimaced. “I forgot to tell you, John—”

  Hatcher stormed up to me to shake my hand. “Good to see you two together again,” he said. “You fellers used to be thick as fleas. Remember how you stood off them Comanches on the Cimarron? Tell it to me again, boys. But let’s get some whiskey first.”

  “No whiskey for me,” I said.

  “You want some coffee?” Blue asked, rather sheepishly.

  “They don’t have any coffee,” I said.

  “Three whiskeys!” Hatcher blurted.

  Blue leaned toward me to speak low. “Our plan ain’t goin’ so good, is it?”

  I shook my head. “No, Blue, it isn’t.”

  Four

  The name Kid Greenwood had carried a curious reputation with it ever since my duel with Snakehead Jackson. True, I had killed Snakehead, but only because Snakehead’s old Colt revolver had chain-fired and exploded in his hand, throwing off his aim. Even so, I was known as a fighter of sorts because of that damned gunfight. So, after Blue Wiggins, who was supposed to be acting as if he didn’t know me, showed up with John Hatcher, who blurted out my name, revealing the obvious truth about my friendship with Blue—well, after that, everyone in Luther Sheffield’s gambling hall looked at me as if I were on the verge of killing somebody just any minute. Except for the big ox behind the bar, who said, “Kid Greenwood’s ass. He ain’t no bigger than a cub.”

  Anyway, we sat down at a slender-legged parlor table that looked as out of place in the old adobe cantina as a marble sculpture on a mud fence. We talked to John Hatcher about the sheep-herding business and other adventures, until John finally got up to go relieve himself out back.

  “Hell, I’m sorry,” Blue said, reading the disgusted look on my face. “I didn’t know I’d run into John. He wouldn’t have it any other way. He just had to come in here. What was I supposed to do?”

  “It doesn’t really matter anyway, since I couldn’t get a cup of coffee without killing the bartender.”

  “Well, the deal’s off now, so let’s just have us a time.”

  “The deal is not off,” I insisted. “This is just a setback. I’ll figure something out.”

  When John Hatcher came back to the table, he was arm in arm with a little damsel of soiled virtue who called herself Rosa. We all knew her from the days when Doña Tules had run the gambling house. She was about half Mexican, a quarter Pueblo Indian, and a quarter something else that even she wasn’t sure of. She was pretty as a doll, stood five feet one, and weighed 102 pounds, all of which was rolling hell. Rosa was also crazy as a liquored Comanche. She would do about anything for a dollar, and sometimes just for the whimsical fun of it.

  When Rosa recognized me, she squealed, ran to me, and plopped right down on my lap, which didn’t hurt my feelings very much at all.

  “Easy, there, I’m a married man,” I said.

  “Your wife ain’t here, is she?”

  “I ain’t married,” Blue said.

  Rosa sprang from me to Blue and looked back at me with a mischievous grin that gave me an idea.

  “Rosa, what would it take to get a cup of coffee in this place?” I asked.

  “Come to my room. I will give you plenty of coffee and other hot things.”

  I smiled. “How do you like the new owner? Sheffield?”

  She glanced at him across the room and made a pretty sneer in his direction. Her eyes rolled beautifully in her head. “He’s all right.” She shrugged.

  “Well, tomorrow night, I’m going to sit at his table and play some cards, but I’ll need coffee.”

  “You don’t want to play cards with him. That’s what this fool did.” She wiggled on top of Blue, then abandoned him to come sit with me again. “Spend your money on me, not on cards. Both of you, I don’t care. All three of you!”

  “Leave me out of it,” Hatcher said. “I can find my own.”

  “Rosa, you’ve got to bring me some coffee to the card table tomorrow night.”

  “Why do you talk only of coffee, loco?”

  I reached into my vest pocket, fetched a five-dollar gold piece, and pressed it into Rosa’s hand. “Just say you’ll do it.”

  She opened her hand just long enough to see the coin. “This gets you coffee and sugar.”

  “Just coffee will do. The blacker, the better. Now, there’s one other thing we’ve got to do. Go squirm around on Blue a little, will you?”

  Blue grinned in appreciation as Rosa obliged, but he was getting suspicious. “What are you thinkin’, Orn’ry?”

  “You and I have got to get into a fight over Rosa.”

  “What for?” Blue said.

  “No need to fight,” she said. “You can share me.”

  “So it’ll look like we’re not friends anymore. For tomorrow night.”

  Blue let the logic sink in. “All right, as long as I get to win the fight.”

  “No, I’ve got to win.”

  “How come you get to win?”

  John Hatcher threw back his whiskey and got up from the table. “I don’t know what you boys are up to, but leave me out of it.” He walked toward the bar.

  I looked back at Blue. “She’s got to be my girl tomorrow night. She’s got to bring me the coffee.”

  Blue sighed. “I don’t win the fight or get the girl?”

  “All you get is your money back.”

  “Huh?” Rosa said, having lost track of the entire conversation.

  Blue frowned. “All right, but I ain’t gonna lose no fight easy, Orn’ry. I got a reputation to think about.”

  “Good. It’s got to look real.”

  Blue wrapped his arms tighter around Rosa. “All right, well … Ready?”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Un momento, pendejos! Por qué quiere luchar?” Rosa rattled.

  “Here goes,” Blue said, and he all but mauled Rosa. He grabbed her by one of her dainty breasts, and one of her skinny thighs, and went to kiss her mouth—all so suddenly that Rosa squealed in surprise, which was my cue.

  I sprang from my chair so fast that it slapped against the old dirt floor. “You’re no gentleman!” I hollered as I pulled Rosa from Blue’s grasp and drew my fist back to strike.

  From his chair, Blue kicked me in the stomach, and sent me staggering. I charged back at him as he got up, but he spun me aside and tripped me, sending me crashing into the parlor table, which splintered into kindling. Before I could rise, Blue had me by the collar. He pulled me to my feet.

  “If you’re gonna win this fight, you’d better git after it,” he growled in my ear.

  I took Blue’s advice, and elbowed him hard in the ribs. Then I spun and punched him in the mouth. Blue saw it coming, and though I only punched him hard enough to bust a lip, he threw his head upward and staggered backward as if I had knocked every tooth in his head down his throat.

  Suddenly, Rosa streaked by me and sprang on top of Blue, knocking him to floor, where she proceeded to pummel him with her tiny fists. I started laughing at the sight, until the big bullwhacker-turned-bartender made his way around the end of the bar with a hickory axe handle. He roared like a bear and took a couple of swings at me with the axe handle, which I avoided with some desperate maneuvers.

  I was thinking about reaching for my Colt when old John Hatcher sprang onto the bartender’s back, and started gouging at his eyes and screaming like a Cheyenne warrior riding into battle. This gave me a chance to pull Rosa off Blue, who quickly kicked my feet out from under me, and resumed our fight where most fights end up, on the ground, in kicking, groveling chaos. Rosa, of course, jumped right back on top of the two of us.

  I was trying to tell Blue that we’d better get out if we didn’t want our skulls split with that axe handle, when I heard the pistol shot. Blue and I looked up from the floor. I pushed Rosa aside to see Luther Sheffield standing over us, a white swirl of smoke coming from the muzzle of the pocket pistol in his hand. Hatch
er slid down from the shoulders of the big bartender, who dropped his axe handle, and started rubbing his injured eyes.

  “Gentlemen,” Sheffield said. “If I may make such a mockery of the term. Perhaps you’ve not been made aware of the fact that we allow no fighting in this establishment.”

  “No fightin’!” John Hatcher shouted. “What kind of a cantina don’t allow fightin’?”

  “This is no cantina,” Sheffield said. “Though it may be located in the pit of this uncivilized outpost of hell itself, this is a fine gambling parlor.”

  As I rose from the floor, I took a good look at Luther Sheffield. In addition to the small revolver in his hand, I saw a dagger sheathed on his belt. He was no bigger than the average man, but his hazel eyes revealed his complete disregard for any amount of danger three frontier ruffians might represent. Our little disturbance had not ruffled him in the least.

  “Parlor!” John Hatcher shouted. “Well, mister, I’m of a mind to clean house in your goddamn parlor. Any place with a dirt floor that calls itself a parlor ought to go on back to Ohio!”

  “Now, John,” I said. “Me and Blue can take our fight somewhere else. Come on, you just go with us.”

  I walked wide around the bartender, who was regaining his vision, and grabbed Hatcher by the elbow. “Come on, John, a man can’t even get a cup of coffee here, anyway. Some parlor.”

  “Someone needs to pay the damages,” Sheffield said.

  “Damages!” Hatcher blurted.

  I reached carefully into my pocket and showed Sheffield one of the gold coins I had gotten from Maxwell’s ranch. I tossed it to the gambler, who showed a hint of surprise when he caught it.

  “Will that cover it?” I asked. “It was just one little old parlor table.”

  “That should suffice,” Sheffield said. He let the hammer down on his pistol, and slipped it into the pocket of his coat. “You gentlemen might think about minding your manners, and coming on back sometime. No reason we can’t all enjoy one another’s company.” I knew this comment was intended mainly for me, for Sheffield wanted some of that gold I had just flashed at him.