by J. P. Sloan
“What’s that look about?” I press.
“What?”
“You talk to him already?”
Folger turns to the front window with a half shrug. “I’ve tried. Sure. I’ve tried once. I don’t believe I made the best impression on the man.”
“Why not? You’re about as smooth as a baby’s ass.”
Folger grimaces. “Thank you for that. I don’t think Sayles puts much trust in people with a particular deportment.”
I release a sigh and set the paper down on his desk. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“My education. My diction. Crimony, could be my posture for all I know. Sayles isn’t a particularly sophisticated man.”
“You’re saying he don’t cotton to stuffy, uptight, East Coast types.”
Folger grins and nods once.
“Well, I’m about as sophisticated as a handful of horse shit, so I reckon I’m the man for the job.”
Folger claps his hands and snatches a pencil. “Excellent. You’ll find his property if you ride out north, past the church.” He starts sketching an utterly worthless map on the back of his paper. “Hang left, then round the old jailhouse. Well, it’s basically ruins now.”
“Like the church.”
“Indeed. There’s a copse of trees just down the hill from the old jailhouse. When you round the dirt path, you’ll see his farm. Yellow clapboards.” He stuffs the paper into my chest with a smirk. “Just be yourself. I’m very sure he’ll pour you some whiskey if you play it right.”
I snatch the paper and adjust my hat. “All right, then. You stay in here, do your print thing. Don’t go nosing around, getting Richterman’s shorts in a lather.”
Folger lifted a hand in pledge. “I swear it. I will stay here.”
“Fine.”
I exit the shop and give two grimy gents across the street a long squint. They’re leaning on the posts in front of Richterman’s office. Scarlow’s men. One of them is sporting a familiar model of Remington on his hip. Must be an army man, too. The other? A sandy blond, lean and casual, like a man with no plans, nor plans to make plans.
They watch me like rabbits as I step around the cart to fetch my saddle and blanket to get Ripper set for our short stitch down the hill. They keep eyes on me. No stiff arms, no weapons readied. Just watching. Like everyone else in this damn town.
I mount Ripper and kick him along up the street, happy to be riding a saddle instead of a wood cart bench. We round the far end of the single street of Gold Vein, and I cast an eye to the burned-out church with its overturned steeple lying against the side like some fat child’s forgotten toy. The roof of the damn thing has collapsed in on itself in such a way that angles of timbers rest at odds with one another. The result is a dark, hellish-seeming maze of blasphemy. It sends a chill through me.
The path down to the Sayles property’s almost charming. A copse of aspen trees along the path is starting to turn. Hell. I’d forgotten it was autumn. Spend so much time in the high plains and the only thing to keep you current on the seasons was the particular bite of cold the wind happened to nip your ass with each night. I imagined what Sayles must look like. I had an image of a rusticated old coot with missing teeth and a forester’s beard, grizzled but blandly accepting of anyone not carrying a book. When I caught sight of his farmhouse, I was expecting either a holler or a wave, something between suspicion and hospitality.
I wasn’t expecting to get shot at.
A chip of stone jumps up near Ripper’s hoof just a hair before I hear the shot. Either he’d been real careful, or he’d missed by six feet.
I rein Ripper back and scoot to the side, diving off the saddle into some brush.
“Hold!” I shout from behind Ripper.
A scratchy voice barks from the farmhouse, “You get!”
Another shot, this one likely in the air as a warning.
“Stop shootin’, God dammit! I ain’t here to start no cuss!”
“Get on up outta here!” he replies. “I’m done with all a yis.”
I hold up my hands and peer over the saddle. If he’d wanted me dead, he’d have dropped Ripper, then me, by now. He’s just being a crab’s ass.
I call, “I was sent by Denton Folger, Sayles! Wanted me to talk with you.”
A long silence.
Then, “You what, now?”
“Folger! Shit in shellac, I just want to talk.”
I keep an eye on the house and manage to spot a shutter swing open. Something pokes through the opening, a long steel barrel of a rifle.
My hand falls to my holster, and I wince. One bullet. One silver bullet. I’m not wasting it on a human being. That’s not the way of Godpistols.
I swivel to a crouch, facing the town in the distance, wondering if Denton hadn’t had a similar misunderstanding with Sayles recently.
“I’m done talkin’,” he finally answers. “This is my property, and no one’s pushin’ me out!”
“Sounds fine by me, Sayles. But if you want to get Richterman off your ass, you’re going to have to talk to Folger. Richterman ain’t going away on his own, and shooting at everyone that rides up on your property is just making it easier on him.”
“Go to Hell,” he shouts.
Well, this was playing out about as poor as it could have.
I take another look up to the town and realize that it’s about to play out worse. Four riders are covering ground between the aspens and the end of town with all speed.
Scarlow.
It’s a fair walk up to the town from Sayles’s property, but probably close enough to hear gunshots. Perfect. Sayles just invited Richterman directly onto his head.
I turn and shout, “Sayles! Close your shutters and hunker down. Scarlow’s riding in.”
“I knew it! You bastards!”
“Just keep low. I’ll try and talk him down.”
By the time I pull Ripper into the aspens and tie him to a nearby truck, Scarlow’s men have pulled around, rifles in hand. Scarlow trots over to my side with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“You hit?” he asks evenly.
“No, but thank you for your fucking concern.”
Scarlow makes two quick jabs of his finger to the others, and two peel off to take a long track circling Sayles’s property.
“You’re very welcome.” He lifts a rifle and fires a shot at the house. One of the shutters leaps splinters and bounces ajar.
“Hold your fire, dammit,” I growl.
“Why?”
“Cause this is your fault to begin with. You and Richterman got him drawn tight. We can talk him out if you just―”
A bullet slices through the air between us.
Scarlow rolls off his saddle and grabs my shoulder, jerking me behind an aspen trunk.
I wave his hand off me. “What’re you doing?”
“Tryin’ to keep you unpierced.” He cranes his neck around the tree and bellows, “Sayles? You’re bein’ a mite unhospitable!”
“Go fuck yourself!” Sayles responds.
It only makes Scarlow laugh. “All right, then.” He turns to me. “You carryin’?”
I rest my hand on my pistol. “Empty.”
“Figures.” He cocks his rifle. “Stay low. Don’t need you bleedin’ out on me.”
“Wait, Scarlow. You’re just going to pinch him in and gun him down, I reckon that’s your plan?”
He shrugs.
“You satisfied with that? Murdering a man in his own home because some sumbitch wants his property?”
Scarlow lifts a brow with a dry sneer. “Perfectly satisfied. The goat fucker fired on us first. Which is against the law, I might mention.” He tips the dull badge on his lapel with his fingertip. “And I got orders. Can’t find a way to see the wrong in it.”
“The wrong in it is the part where you gun a man down in his own house.”
“So I should invite him outside, first? Lay out some gingham and some roast beef? Read him some goddamn poetry? You’re fightin
’ the wrong end of this fight, Odell.”
“Because you really think Sayles is in the wrong?”
His smirk steels. “Because he’s gonna lose.”
Two shots fire in the distance. His men have advanced on the rear of the property. Scarlow rushes out from the trees, his fourth man joining his side in a tempest of gunfire. The two fire and drop to their knees, crawl a few paces, and wait for gunfire from behind the house before displacing. They’ve done this before.
I’m unarmed and unseated. There ain’t much I can do at the moment except ride on back into town. But I can’t. I have to see this through, find the end of the story for Denton, though I know he won’t want this printed. He needs Sayles to be innocent. He needs the noose to fall on Richterman and Scarlow, not Sayles. So I stand in the shadow of the aspens, watching as Scarlow finally makes it to the front of the house. He fires into the window as his compatriot rams a shoulder into the door enough times to smash it in. Rifles raise and fire into the darkness of the house. The two disappear within, and shots continue apace before falling silent.
I feel cold. I know the old man’s dead at this point. I’d come with every intention of making his life better, but his life has been cut short. I was powerless on every level to stop this. That’s the way with humans. I can’t fight them. I just can’t find the will.
Demons? Sure. I’m quick enough to throw paws, but a fighting man has always been my undoing.
Scarlow struts back across the throw of grass between my trees and Sayles’s house. He wipes his forehead with a bandana and slides his rifle onto his saddle.
“You intact?” he mutters.
I nod.
“Good enough.” He gives me a tired look. “You still think what we done here is wrong?”
“I know it was.”
“Hmm, you know it?” He nods and looks back to the house. “You know less than half what you think you know. You need an escort back to town?”
“Go to Hell.”
He snickers. “Probably.”
I leave Scarlow and his thugs to whatever skullduggery was required of them inside the house and ride back to town. I brace myself along the way for Folger’s reaction to these developments.
When I step into his press shop, I find him scratching away at a scrap of paper.
“Sayles give you any time?” he asks without looking up.
“He’s dead,” I state as plain as I can.
Folger pauses, considers the tip of his pencil a moment, then shakes his head. “What happened?”
“Scarlow.”
“What specifically?”
I grab a stool and hunker down behind Folger. “Sayles popped off some shots at me, trying to broom me off. Scarlow and his boys heard the shots from town and swept in like God’s own vengeance. Stormed the house, put Sayles down. I figure Richterman’s got his property clean and even, at this point.”
Folger swivels slowly in his chair to face me. “You said he heard the shots?”
I nod.
“Scarlow told you this?”
“Well, not as such.”
“Because I didn’t hear gunshots.”
We exchange a long and tired look. Folger couldn’t hear gunfire from where he sat. And he’s right across the street from Scarlow’s usual vulture’s nest.
“He was waiting for it, you’re saying?” I ask.
“Probably saw you leave the shop. Richterman’s having you followed now, too.” Folger sighs. “This is going to be exactly as hard as I figured it would.”
“You’re real tore up about Sayles,” I grumble. “Man’s dead.”
Folger nods. “We can’t exactly use it.”
“Use it?”
“What happened. I mean, we’ll print it. Certainly. But it won’t advance our cause. Richterman was operating as Justice, and Sayles―crotchety as he is―made his own bed. He didn’t trust me. They never trust me.”
I keep my distaste for Folger’s attitude to myself, but it eats away at my stomach. I had Folger pegged as a do-gooder. One of the Good Men. But as he turns back to his scratching, I recognize he’s as much a bastard as anyone else I’m likely to find in this world. He has his fight, and if a man dies without―how does he say it―advancing his cause? He ain’t moved by it the way a decent man should be.
It’s possible I’m being unfair. After all, I’m not a Good Man any more than Scarlow. I suppose I felt I had something with Folger, here. A cause I was supposed to advance.
I do, in fact, but it just feels a little darker than maybe it ought to.
“Tell me something. Fellow by the name of Amil…”
Folger turns to give me a pinched look. “What about him?”
“Who is he?” I ask.
“Ranch hand over at the Grangerford property, east end of the valley. Why?”
“Had a little discourtesy with him, morning of the day we was shot. Seemed he had his guts in a twist over something or another.”
Folger rubs his brow. “I imagine. He… His wife was injured. Attacked.”
“Attacked?”
He clears his throat. “Raped. That’s the speculation, at any rate.”
“One of Scarlow’s boys?”
Folger draws in a weary breath. “Again, it’s speculation. There were no witnesses. She left last week. Took a horse bound for North Platte. Can’t say why Amil decided to stay. Some misplaced sense of vengeance, perhaps.”
“Probably thought I was in with Scarlow.”
“What happened to him?” Folger asks with a tight jaw.
“I don’t think he’ll be making it to North Platte.”
Folger shakes his head and jots down some notes onto the side of his page.
“What are you worrying over?” I ask, waving to his writing.
“Next copy. My account of the Hitchens murder.”
“That a fact?”
He sets down his pencil and hands me the paper. “This is damning. This will get people involved, especially if we distribute to Cheyenne or Kansas City.”
I take the paper and give it a once-over. His longhand is a touch flowery, but I muscle through it enough to realize I am holding a little piece of Hell in my fingers.
“What is this supposed to be?” I whisper as I hand it back.
“I told you.”
“Scarlow Guns Down Son of Rancher?” I quote. “He weren’t there, Denton.”
Folger blinks like I’d just tossed a glass of whiskey into his face. “Are you feeling all right?”
“What?”
Folger waves his article between us. “Scarlow was the one who shot Chris. I saw it happen.”
“No, Denton,” I state clear and slow. “He weren’t there.”
“He and his band of rascals most certainly were. Chris rode up to the house, knocked on the door, and I let him in. Before I could even close the door, I spotted Scarlow’s band clearing the ridge. We didn’t have enough time to defend ourselves. They opened fire. Peppered the whole house.”
“Denton…”
He holds up a hand. “Chris tried to crack the door open to return fire. I hid in the room. Like some cockroach. Just scurried behind my bed.”
He stares down past the paper, eyes wandering into his thoughts.
I suck in a breath. “Denton, this is slander. This will get you put directly in jail.”
“You arrived after the violence, Lin. When it was over. I saw everything.”
“Horseshit. I rode up on the Parson and two of his bone-chewing children. He’d already taken one of the boy’s legs―”
“Please don’t start with this insanity, again.”
“Scarlow didn’t shoot the Hitchens boy, Denton.”
He slaps the paper down onto the desk. “He took a bullet in the head.”
“I know. I was the one who shot him.”
Denton held still, fingers crawling slowly into a fist. “What?”
“Christ, Denton! We’ve discussed this already. He was just alive enough to draw on me.” I
rub a hand over my side. “Shot me once in the gut. I returned fire. That’s what happened. Richterman wasn’t involved. Not directly, at any rate. This was Magner’s doing.”
Denton shook his head slowly.
“Denton, you can’t print this. You’re making up facts, and it’s exactly what Richterman needs to put you away. I mean, for whatever reason he keeps you alive, I’m dead positive he’ll toss you in a cell. Maybe even hand you over to marshals. Then he’ll be free to do what he wants.”
I pause for Denton’s reaction. He just sits, staring at his article.
Finally, he removes his spectacles and gives them a wipe on his shirt before turning to me with a distant frown. “You’re calling me a liar, at this point.”
“Not a liar. Not on purpose, anyhow. You’re just… remembering wrong.”
“Uh-huh. Not exactly the quality one values in a journalist.”
“I’m just―”
“Maybe you’re the one remembering wrong?”
“You were passed out before I got to you. I saw most of this. If Scarlow was ever there, then Magner’s cannibals ran him off. But I would have seen them on my way back from town.”
Denton replaces his spectacles, his face drifting in and out of various states of pissed off. “This isn’t helping, Lin.”
I lean back and stare at him.
“Instead of two pieces to write, I’m left with none.”
“Better none than one piece of libel.”
“I’m no liar, Lin.”
“I know it. But you are,” I add, “a mite focused. You stare so hard at the one thing, you lose sight of what’s happening on the sides.”
“So, instead of being libelous, I’m just inexcusably myopic?”
“I’m not sure what that means, but you’re angry and you’re determined to put Richterman to rights.”
Denton rubs the back of his head and releases a single snicker. “You sound like Kate.”
“How’s that?”
“Never mind.” He takes a long breath. “Lin, I’m sorry if I seem angry. And I realize that I’ve been sick lately. Recovering from whatever happened at the house with Chris Hitchens. I recognize that violent experiences can cause people to lose their grip of the facts. And you’re right. If I am, in fact, misremembering the encounter, it’ll give Richterman the freedom he needs. I can’t allow that. Even if it means starting over, I have to keep the fight alive.”
