“It happened sort of fast,” Win said.
Chester avoided looking at Sally as he remarked, “It was terrible. Not fit for a woman to see.”
“I am not squeamish,” Sally said. “I’ve seen it before, more times than I can count. When you have worked in saloons all your life, you see it all.”
The batwings creaked and in came Adolphina. “Who were those four men again, Chester?” She was not upset; she was not disturbed in any way.
Chester related all he knew about them, which was not much, then all he knew about their killer.
Sally Worth listened with her arms folded across her bosom, and when he was done, she said, “Jeeter Frost made his name in Texas. He was a ranch hand on the Bar T. A friend of his owned it, by the name of Tyler. A squabble started over water rights. There was a lot of shooting and burning and pretty near twenty men died. Tyler was murdered, ambushed one night by five of his enemies. Frost hunted them down and shot them dead.”
“How is it you know all that?” Winifred asked her.
“I was in Texas at the time, in San Antonio. It was all anybody talked about.”
Adolphina was gnawing her lower lip, a habit of hers when she was deep in thought. “So this Frost fellow is famous?”
“Not famous famous, like Wild Bill Hickok was, or like John Wesley Hardin,” Win said. “Famous in a small way. One penny dreadful and a lot of bar talk.”
“Still, people have heard of him.” Adolphina’s dark eyes, which were more close set than was common, bored into her husband’s. “You need to call a meeting of the town council, Chester.”
“I do? Why?”
“Use your head. The sheriff will come. Others, too. The curious. Maybe friends and acquaintances of the deceased.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Chester said, brightening. “Why, some of them might even buy something in our store.” He turned to the liverymen, who had been quietly listening. “Placido. Arturo. Would one of you Mexicans ride to Anderson’s and tell the Swede I am calling an emergency meeting of the town council in an hour and he must be here?”
“Sí, senor,” Placido said. He had his sombrero in his hand as a token of respect for the presence of the senoritas.
“Do you understand what has happened?” Chester struggled to think of the right word. “Do you comprende?”
“I speak excellent English, senor. Remember?” Placido said.
It was true, and it rankled Chester that a Mexican spoke it even better than he did. “Those priests taught you good, didn’t they?”
“They taught us very well, indeed, senor,” Placido said. He was always polite to everyone. Always a pleasant smile and a pleasant manner, and much more talkative than Arturo.
“Then off you go,” Chester said. He noticed the Giorgios were drifting in the direction of their cottage and hollered, “Minimi, you have to be at the meeting, too.”
“Me, signore? But the consiglio, it is you and Mr. Curry and Mr. Anderson. I am not a member.”
“You are today,” Chester said. “We have a decision to make that will affect everyone, so you might as well sit in.”
“As you wish. You are the alcade,” Minimi said, but he did not sound particularly happy about the invitation. His wife said something in Italian and he replied and she cast a worried look at Chester.
“What was that about, I wonder?”
Adolphina shrugged. “Who can tell with foreigners? That’s the problem with our town. Too many foreigners.” She lumbered from under the overhang. “I will go freshen up and sweep the place out.”
Chester grunted. The council meetings were held in their store. Originally, the town council met in the saloon, which proved convenient when their throats became dry from excess talking. But when Adolphina started attending, they had to switch to somewhere respectable.
Sally Worth yawned. “Well, if all the excitement is over, I guess I will go back up and finish my nap.”
“You can sleep with dead men below you?” Win asked.
“Hell, I’ve slept with all kinds of men under me, and over me, too.” Sally grinned. “Smelly men, ugly men, stupid men, toothless men. Dead is an improvement.”
“The things that come out of your mouth,” Chester said.
Sally winked at him. “I never hear you object to the things that go into it. But then, you have cause not to, don’t you?”
Chester glanced sharply at the retreating bulk of his wife, a red tinge creeping from his neckline to his hairline. “Keep your voice down. She might hear you.”
“Not from there,” Sally said. “You worry too much.”
“I don’t blame him,” Winifred said. “If that battle-ax ever finds out, she will take a knife to his manhood, strangle you with her bare hands, and probably shoot me for letting him dally with you.”
“I do as I want,” Chester said curtly. “And I will thank you not to refer to my wife in that manner when I am standing right next to you.”
“Men,” Sally said in mild disgust, and stepped to the batwings. “But don’t worry, Your Honor, sir. I am not about to give your secret away. You are one of the few paying customers I have left.”
“Is that all I am to you? Money?”
Sally twisted at the hips and regarded him with amusement. “What else would you be?”
“A friend, at least. It has been a couple of years now.”
“Every Wednesday evening for two years,” Sally said. “Your wife permits you one hour to drink and sling the bull with Win and you spend part of that hour giving me a poke.”
“We do more. We talk.”
Sally tiredly brushed a stray wisp of gray-brown hair from her eyes. “You talk, I listen. You pay for that privilege.” She looked at Winifred. “Explain to your friend how it is. I don’t want him getting silly notions.” She left them, her hips swinging.
“You shouldn’t have said that to her,” Win criticized. “Now she will think you care for her more than she should be cared for.”
“How can you say that? She’s your friend.”
“She is my friend and she is a whore and I have the sense not to confuse the two. You should have the sense not to make more of her parting her legs for you than there is.”
“That is harsh,” Chester said softly.
“Life is harsh,” Winifred Curry replied. “If you think it isn’t, just ask the four bodies in my saloon.”
“Adolphina could be on to something. We can benefit from their deaths.”
“No good ever comes from killing,” Winifred said. “Mark my words. We will live to regret it.”
Chapter 5
Jeeter Frost had a crick in his neck from looking over his shoulder. He did not expect anyone to be after him, but he had not lasted as long as he had by being careless. For the first hour he used his spurs more than was his wont. The gruella, as always, did not let him down.
Jeeter was extremely fond of the mouse dun, so much so that once when a Comanche tried to steal it, Jeeter spent half a day whittling on the warrior, doing things not even Comanches did to captives.
Now and then Jeeter reached back and patted his saddlebags. He could not wait for sunset. He marked the slow crawl of the sun toward the western horizon with an impatience rare for him. He did not have many good traits, not by society’s standards, at any rate, but patience had always been one. Those who knew him well, and they were few in number, sometimes commented that he was the most patient person they knew.
Jeeter had to be. He had learned early on that in order to survive on the fringe of lawlessness he must not indulge in rash decisions or rash acts. Haste led to an early grave and Jeeter hoped to live a good long while.
The thought made Jeeter grin. There was a time when he did not care whether he lived, a time when he woke up every morning certain he would not live to admire the next sunset.
He lived by the gun, and the gun was a cruel mistress.
The gun. There were days when Jeeter wished he had never set eye on a revolver, never h
eld one, never fired one. Maybe then he would never have killed anyone. Maybe then he would not be a marked man. Maybe then no one would have heard of him. Maybe then he would not be wandering the prairie, an outcast, with no family, no home, and no prospects other than the surety that one day someone would prove to be faster or cleverer.
Funny thing. Jeeter did not live in dread of that day, as he once did. He wouldn’t run from it—he couldn’t run from it—so what was the use of fretting? He had learned a few things over the years, and one of them was that life was too short to spend it worrying about something that would happen one day whether he worried about it or not.
For a few minutes there back in Coffin Varnish, Jeeter thought that day had come. The Blights were supposed to be tough, a tight-knit clan that stood up for their own, and woe to the outsider who crossed them. Temple Blight, especially, had made worm food of more than a few. But the way he came walking into that saloon, as big and confident as you please, not bothering to draw his six-gun until he was over near the bar—he might as well have asked Jeeter to put a pistol to his head and shoot him.
Jeeter did not have many talents, but the one talent he did have, the one talent that separated him from the herd, was a talent for killing. As his grandmother would say, God rest her, he was a natural born killer.
That might not seem like much of a talent to some. You pointed a revolver or a rifle at someone, and you shot him. Or you stuck a knife between his ribs. Or you bashed him over the head with a rock. Or you roped him from behind so the noose settled over his neck and then you dragged him from horseback until his neck was stretched to where the head was almost off. Or you got him drunk and poured kerosene on him while he slept and set him on fire. Jeeter had done all of that and more.
The truth was, the talent did not lie in the killing. Anyone could kill. The talent showed itself in how the killing was done. Not in the shooting or the stabbing, but in never, ever giving the other hombre a fair break, in never, ever giving him a chance.
Take the Blights. The moment Jeeter heard them ride up, he drew his Lightning and ducked under the table. Not many would have thought of that. Some would have sat there stupidly waiting for the Blights to confront them. Some would have hid behind the bar, which was the first place Temple Blight looked. Some would have run out the back, but that would only postpone the inevitable.
No, Jeeter had done the one thing the Blights never expected. He had taken them completely by surprise. That was his talent. The knack for always catching the other fellow off guard. For always doing the one thing—the one thing—that meant he would live and the other person died. It was a knack most lacked, and it had kept him alive longer than most in his circumstances had a reasonable right to expect.
Some would say that alone made his talent worthwhile, and Jeeter would agree, to a point. Yes, he was still breathing. But there was dead and then there was a living death, a life of hand to mouth, of always looking over one’s shoulders, of never being able to trust, to care, to love. A life as empty as the emptiness of the grave, only, yes, he was still breathing. But that was the only thing he had to show for his talent. The only really good thing about it.
Until now.
At length the sun rested on the rim of the world, its radiance painting the sky vivid hues of red, orange, and yellow. Jeeter came to a hollow bisected by a dry wash and rimmed with brush. He drew rein and dismounted. Stripping the gruella and gathering wood and kindling a fire and putting a pot of coffee on to brew took the better part of half an hour.
At last Jeeter could settle back against his saddle and relax. He opened his saddlebags and slid out the item he had brought with him from Coffin Varnish. In the flickering glow of the crackling flames, he admired the stalwart hero with his arm around the slender waist of a beautiful young woman as painted warriors closed in from all sides. “Jeeter Frost, the Missouri Man-Killer,” he remembered the newspaperman saying. “His thrilling escapades. His narrow escapes.” He ran his finger across the cover and said quietly, “I’ll be damned.”
A slow smile spread across Jeeter’s countenance. He laughed, a genuinely heartfelt laugh such as he had not felt in a coon’s age. He flipped the pages, wishing he could read the words. So many words, and all of them about him. Or some version of him that others took to be the real him. It was silly, he mused. But it was also—and here he struggled for the right way to describe it.
The moment Jeeter had set eyes on that cover, something inside him had changed. He could not say what or how or why, but he felt it. This penny dreadful, this ridiculous fluff written by someone who had never met him and knew nothing about him but had written all about him, meant there was more to his life than he ever imagined. He was not the nobody he always believed he was. He was somebody. Not somebody important. Not somebody that mattered. But somebody people would remember.
“The Missouri Man-Killer,” Jeeter said again, and laughed. Hell, he hadn’t been to Missouri but three or four times in his whole life.
Jeeter was born in Illinois. He lived there until he was seventeen. He got too big for his britches and took to drinking and staying out to all hours. One night he was in a knife fight. Thinking he had killed the other drunk, he fled, only to learn months later that the man recovered. By then Jeeter was in Texas, where a cowboy by the name of Weeds Graff took him under his wing. Weeds taught him to rope and to shoot and Jeeter learned the shooting so well that when they signed on with the Bar T outfit, it was his six-gun and his newfound talent for killing that held the other side at bay. For a while, anyway, until they ambushed his employer and friend.
Everyone in Texas heard about what Jeeter did next. They heard about the five men he hunted down and killed. From that day on, Jeeter became marked. He could not go a week without seeing what Jeeter liked to call the look. Sometimes the look was one of disgust. Sometimes it was fear. Sometimes it was a glint that warned him he must never turn his back on the person with the glint. Not that he ever turned his back to anyone if he could help it.
For years that had been the pattern of his life. Riding from town to town and settlement to settlement, seeking a place to fit in but not fitting anywhere. He was a square peg and life was a round hole.
And now along came this penny dreadful.
Jeeter sat and stared at the cover until the coffee was hot; then he poured a cup and took jerky from his saddlebags. He sat and sipped and munched and stared at that cover. He could not stop looking at it.
Toward midnight a brainstorm hit him with the force of a thunderclap. He started to laugh and could not stop. He laughed so long, and so loud, that a skulking coyote, drawn by the scents of his camp, yipped and raced away into the night.
Since Chester Luce did not own a gavel, he used a hammer, and since he did not want to mark up the counter with dents, he placed a folded blanket on top of the counter before he struck it with the hammer. “All right, everyone,” he said to get their attention. “This meeting of the Coffin Varnish Town Council will officially come to order.”
Winifred Curry sat next to the stove, sucking on a gumdrop. He had a sweet tooth and gumdrops were his favorite.
Minimi Giorgio sat on a stool by the dry goods section. He was nervous about being there. He gripped the edge of the stool with both hands as if afraid he would fall off.
The huge Swede, Dolph Anderson, seldom sat. He stood with his brawny arms folded across his powerful chest, his cornstalk hair and beard neatly trimmed, as always. “What be so important that you call me from my work?” His English was thickly accented, so much so that everyone else had to listen closely to tell what he said, especially Minimi, whose English was not the best.
Chester came around the counter. He did not like to stand behind it because it made him seem short, even if he was short. “You have heard about the killings?”
“Ja,” the big Swede said.
“Then how can you ask a question like that? It isn’t something that happens every day, and it will have an impact on our community.
”
“How will it impact?” Anderson asked.
Winifred stopped sucking on the gumdrop long enough to say, “Shouldn’t we wait for your wife, Chester?”
Chester was about to reply that if she was late it was her own fault when steps thumped on the stairs and down she came.
Adolphina was almost as big as the Swede, and when she came and stood behind the counter, she made the counter seem small. “About ready to start, are we?”
“Yes, dearest.”
“Everyone pay attention,” Adolphina said. “I have been doing some thinking and—” She stopped and looked around. “Where are Placido and Arturo?”
“The Mexicans?” Chester said. “What do we need them for? They aren’t on the council.”
“Neither is Mr. Giorgio but you invited him,” Adolphina noted. “Go get them. They should be in on this as well.”
Chester’s ears grew red at being ordered about in front of the other men. “Is it really necessary? What can they contribute? All they do is laze about their livery all day. They hardly ever mingle with the rest of us.”
“We hardly ever mingle with them,” Adolphina jousted. “No, this is business, and it will affect them, so fetch them and be quick about it. I don’t have all night for this. I have sewing to do.”
“Very well,” Chester said, resigned to a force of nature he could never refuse. “I will be right back.”
The tiny bell above the door tinkled as he went out. Winifred promptly opened the gumdrop jar and helped himself to several more, stuffing them in his shirt pocket.
“You will pay for those,” Adolphina said.
“Naturally,” Win responded. “Put them on my account, if you please.”
Blood Duel Page 4
