High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  No, sirree, what you did was get the attention of everybody in town as quickly as possible, usually by slipping a bee under their bonnets. That way, no one had time to get suspicious of your intentions, because they were too busy getting their backs in a hump.

  Then, when they were good and distracted by anger, you started prodding them a little here and there, until you began eking out information, sort of like pulling a single thread until the entire garment became unraveled.

  Or, as the saying went, stir the honey pot, and the biggest chunks of shit float to the top. It was not a foolproof method of operation, and it was often dangerous, might even prove deadly someday, but it was Haskell’s own method, and it was as effective as anything ol’ Allan himself had come up with.

  You couldn’t go swimming without getting wet, by God!

  Bear chuckled.

  Sitting the black, he stared up at the three-story building before him. The hotel sat alone on its lot, which was a good three times larger than any of the others Haskell had seen so far. All the windows had colored shutters, each shutter a different color. There was gingerbread trim along the eaves of the peaked, shake-shingled roof, and a long balcony with a rod-iron rail decorated with gold leaves ran across the second story. On the first story was a broad gallery painted pink, with stout spruce-green roof support posts.

  The broad gallery had two sets of broad front steps. Flanking it were two sets of doors. The one to the left was marked “Dining Room.” The one to the right was marked “Saloon.”

  All in all, the Sawatch was quite the fancy-pants place, and it had the look of a real money mill, but at this time of the day, mid-afternoon, the combination hotel and saloon appeared relatively still and quiet—at least, in contrast to the rollicking town around it.

  The general hubbub of Wendigo was set against the regular thumping-grinding of what Haskell knew to be stamping mills likely situated somewhere on the town’s other side, near where the freight wagons would haul the raw ore down from the mines higher in the mountains to the northwest.

  The thumping of the processing mills was so violent that when he dismounted, Haskell could feel the tremor through his boots. He loosened the black’s saddle cinch, so the horse could stand easy, and he slipped the bit from the mount’s teeth, so it could drink from the stock tank conveniently provided.

  And with an appreciative pat to the horse’s sleek neck, Haskell started up the broad stone porch steps on the gallery’s right side, beneath the saloon doors.

  Halfway up, he stopped. A white shingle trimmed in varnished oak was set against the support post before him, admonishing in fine green script: “All visitors, please scrape all soiling from your boots before entering. Snuff chewers, take care to use the spittoons provided. Thank you.—The House.”

  Haskell said, “Soilings?” He looked at the black gelding eyeing him skeptically. “Do they mean shit, you think?”

  The horse twitched an ear.

  Haskell regarded the sign once more. His lips spread into an evil grin, and one eye narrowed, looking down at his prized boots.

  “Sorry, my lovelies,” he said. “Duty calls.”

  With a fateful sigh but also a mischievous twinkle in his eyes, Bear looked into the street, found just what he was looking for, and set his left boot down in the heart of it. He didn’t have the courage to look at what he was doing to the precious footwear, handmade by Felipe Rivera himself, but he knew he’d done the job right when he felt a clinging warmth ensconce his left foot. The vinegary stench momentarily took his breath.

  He wrinkled his nose against the smell as he tramped up the porch steps, crossed the gallery, and pushed through the scrolled oak batwings with bucking broncos carved into the middle of each.

  The room before him was as grand as a ballroom, with burgundy carpeting running from the left wall to within six feet of the bar on the right, where a stretch of darkly varnished oak caught the reflection of the brass footrail.

  The tables were round or square, stoutly but elegantly hewn of fine wood. A large brass-and-crystal chandelier hung over the room, which was twice the size of your average barn, and the gleaming zinc-topped bar itself was flanked by a back bar as splendid as any Haskell had seen in Leadville. And he was pretty damn sure that he’d seen every bar in that rollicking mining town north of here that was sort of a work-in-progress of Bear’s millionaire acquaintances, Horace and Baby Doe Tabor.

  Dropping down three steps to the sunken drinking hall and striding across the thick burgundy carpet, he grinned through his shaggy beard at the liveried bartender who’d been stocking the back bar shelves. The bartender glanced at Haskell, looked away, then snapped his startled gaze back to the big man in the brown slouch hat, black vest, and blue chambray bib-front shirt, with two big pistols shell-belted around his waist and the cuffs of his tight gray tweed trousers stuffed into the tops of his black, red-stitched boots.

  It was on Bear’s boots that the barman’s eyes settled and widened.

  “Friend, I’ve traveled far, and I’ve worked up one powerful thirst,” Bear announced in his booming, jovial baritone, which fairly rocketed around the cavernous room, his thumping boots and rattling spurs keeping the beat. “I’ll have a drink of your best bourbon—Sam Clay from Kentucky, if you have it—and keep the nectar runnin’!”

  The bartender turned full around to the man striding toward him. He opened his mouth and pointed in shock and dismay at the black tracks trailing the customer from the batwings, down the steps, and across the opulent rug to his still-churning left boot.

  Before the bartender could speak, however, Bear had gained the bar, and a shrill female voice shrieked from somewhere above, “My rug! My rug! Oh, my lovely rug! You . . . you beast, don’t you read signs? Get out of my establishment this instant, or I’ll have you thrown out and shot like a rabid dog in the street!”

  10

  Haskell set one elbow on the bar and looked up to see a beautiful redheaded woman in pearls and a long, elegant gown a shade darker red than her hair glaring down at him from the second-floor balcony that ran around three sides of the main drinking hall. The velvet gown was edged in feathery spruce-green fur.

  “Out!” she screamed, as she began striding along the balcony toward the broad, carpeted stairs at the room’s far end. “Out, or I will indeed have you shot! Whipped and then shot!”

  Haskell tracked the woman with his eyes. He smiled and said amiably, “Oh, I don’t think you will. No, sir . . . er, I mean, ma’am.”

  “Mister,” said the tall, elegant bartender, who wore a vest the same color as the rug that his latest customer had just soiled, “if you can’t read a sign, you’d best get someone to read it for you. You just tracked mule shit in here, and Miss O’Brien just had that rug installed two weeks ago!”

  The pretty redhead Haskell assumed was Miss O’Brien was coming down the stairs, having to take her time and hold her long red velvet skirt above her ankles lest she should trip and take a header. “Rock!” she called, tipping her chin toward the ceiling. “Samson! Where are you men when I need you?”

  As she gained the bottom of the stairs, Miss O’Brien cast her angry, brown-eyed gaze at Haskell once more.

  “Were you raised by wolves, sir?”

  Haskell glanced back at the tracks he’d made on the floor. “Ah, jeepers.” He chuckled. “I do apologize, Miss O’Brien, but it is only a rug and all. And I guess you might say that in a way, I sorta was raised by wolves. See, Mam and Pap, they didn’t have money for such a big, expensive rug. All we had was an earthen floor, though we did lay down some puncheons after a time, when we finally got our beeves trailed to the railhead at Abilene. So you see, there wasn’t no real reason to pay such partic’lar attention to our boots. Anyways, set up the Sam Clay, partner! Nectar of the Kentucky gods! What the hell you waitin’ for?”

  “Rock!” Miss O’Brien screeched at the ceiling. “S
amson! Get down here pronto!”

  A door at the top of the stairs opened, and a balding middle-aged man well attired in a tailored gray suit stepped out, scowling down the steps at the main drinking hall. “Good God, Judith, what in heaven’s name is going on down there?”

  Judith O’Brien spun to yell up at the man, “Benjamin, fetch Rock and Samson for me, will you?” She spun again to glare up at the big man before her. “Seems we have another bear down from the mountains to wreak holy havoc on the good citizens of Wendigo!”

  Her brown eyes scudded across the Pinkerton’s impressive frame, and her pupils appeared to dilate.

  Bear stared down at her, grinning, enjoying the redhead’s beauty. She still had a well-turned figure, although judging by the crow’s feet around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, she was probably pushing forty. Her pretty face was liberally freckled.

  The freckles were the same color as her eyes, which sparked angrily as she planted her fists on her nicely rounded hips and said, “Mister, you’re going to pay for that rug if I have to extract payment from your hide.”

  Bear looked her up and down, let his eyes linger a second or two longer than respectable on her well-filled, spruce-edged bodice, cut low enough to offer a generous sampling of her freckled wares. The pearl choker around her neck glinted in the bright sunlight angling through the room’s front windows.

  “Well, if you say so, little lady,” Haskell said, laughing and lifting his hat straight up and down on his head in jeering salute. “Your place or mine?”

  The woman gasped. “Why, you demented moron!”

  She lunged and cracked him hard across the face with her right hand. Haskell threw his head back and laughed louder. She had put some venom behind the slap, but he’d been struck by far scarier bullies sporting brass knuckles, so he was used to taking much more than what Miss O’Brien could throw at him—and besides, his beard had cushioned the blow.

  She gasped again and hardened her jaws till the muscles in her attractive face bulged. She swung her right hand back behind her shoulder, and as she swung it forward once more, Bear grabbed her wrist and spun her around. She gave another enraged screech and followed it up with yet another as Haskell swatted her rump.

  “Oh!” she cried, swinging toward him again, her face flushed with fury. She was so enraged now that words seemed to fail her, although she was doing a good job of flinging sharp little javelins of raw rage at him with her lustrous brown eyes.

  “Say there!” This from the man who’d stepped out of the door at the top of the stairs. Scowling, he closed both hands around his jacket lapels as he started down the stairs. “Say there, Mister, just who in the hell do you think you are?” He lifted his head toward the ceiling to join Miss O’Brien’s refrain: “Rock! Samson! Where in God’s name are you?”

  Another door opened, this one to the right of the one through which the well-attired gent had surfaced. A plain-faced young blonde poked her head out of the room, blinking groggily, as though she’d just awakened from a long nap, wearing a powder-blue robe and pink slippers. “What’s going on out here?”

  “Morgana,” the man said, wheeling toward her. “This is none of your affair. Please, go on into my suite, and see if you can straighten out the mess I’ve made of the books.”

  As the dour-looking girl did as she’d been told, closing the door of her room and looking warily down toward Haskell and Miss O’Brien as she crossed to the other door, the well-dressed gent continued on down the stairs. As he did, boots thumped on the balcony above him.

  Haskell saw one large brute of a man come running out of a hall to the right of the door into which the dour blonde had disappeared. Another brute was close on his heels, just as big as the first.

  Both were dressed in suits that appeared to have been tailored to accommodate their lumpy muscles bulging beneath several yards’ worth of broadcloth. The first man was shoving his blond curls down against his head and donning a hat, while the other, who had long black hair and the large, flat face of an Indian or at least a half-breed, was still shrugging into his claw-hammer frock coat.

  Haskell had the impression that both men, like the dour blonde, had been napping. They were probably all catching up on their sleep in preparation for the long night ahead in the Sawatch Hotel and Saloon, which boasted a gambling layout, likely a large one, through a closed door beyond the stairs. Haskell always recognized such rooms because they were hardly ever marked, lending an air of alluring sin.

  “Rock! Samson!” Miss O’Brien yelled. “I hope you were enjoying your slumbers while this behemoth ruined my new rug! Throw him out of here. Bloody him! Go ahead, boys, have some fun with this son of a bitch!”

  The blond gent was almost as large as Haskell himself, although he had a rounded belly. Round but hard beneath his coat and vest. The half-breed was long-striding up behind him, his long hair blowing out behind his shoulders. He stretched his lips back far enough to reveal two silver front teeth, adding an air of menace to his narrow-eyed glower.

  Miss O’Brien stepped back to make way for the brutes.

  Haskell stepped away from the bar, giving the apron a wink, and said out of the corner of his mouth, “You can go ahead and set it up, pard. This’ll just take a second.”

  With that last, he ducked a roundhouse flung by the blond brute, whom he assumed was Rock. Rock grunted as his big fist whistled through the air where Bear’s head had been a moment before. Haskell rammed his clenched fist so deep into the big blond’s hard belly that he thought he heard a rib pop.

  When the blond brute jackknifed with a loud chuff and grunt and dropped to his knees clutching his belly, his eyes bulging, Haskell drove his right knee into the man’s forehead. The blond flew back against the knees of the half-breed, forestalling the big, dark-eyed brute’s progress toward his target.

  Haskell stepped back, spread his boots, planted his fists on his hips, and poked his hat back off his forehead. “Ain’t leavin’ here, no, sir, not till I’ve met up with that old rascal Malcolm Briar. Son of a bitch told me he had a job for me up here in this high-and-rocky boil on the devil’s ass, and I ain’t leavin’ till I’ve found the son of a bitch and kept him to his word!”

  That froze the half-breed in his tracks on the other side of the groaning blond. The woman, Miss O’Brien, stared at Haskell incredulously. The look turned to narrow-eyed suspicion. The middle-aged dandy had stopped about twenty feet away, regarding Haskell with much the same expression as the woman.

  She seemed to shake off her momentary befuddlement and whipped her head toward the half-breed. “Samson, what’re you waiting for?”

  The half-breed leaped over his downed comrade and bolted toward Haskell with both fists flying. Samson was about the blond’s size, maybe a little shorter but broader through the shoulders, but his fighting skills were no better. Haskell, who had earned extra money in the Union Army over the dreary Southern winters as a part-time bare-knuckle fighter, made quick ground beef of the half-breed’s face, punched the air out of his lungs, and left him writhing back-down on a near table, groaning and spitting his silver teeth out from between his lips in a spray of liver-colored blood.

  “There,” Haskell said, turning toward the bar and winking at the apron. “Told you it’d just take—”

  But he didn’t like the way Miss O’Brien was suddenly grinning like the cat that ate the canary. The well-dressed gent merely cleared his throat and tugged on his coat lapels. The barman’s gaze fluttered over Haskell’s left shoulder to something or someone behind him.

  Haskell saw a shadow slide across the floor on his left.

  The shadow moved quickly.

  Something very hard smashed against the back of Bear’s head, setting up the tolling of many cracked bells in his ears.

  He was aware of a hot, searing pain radiating down from the crown of his skull, turning his shoulders to pudding, a half-seco
nd before his eyes closed, and his knees hit the floor with a thundering boom. He groaned, “Ah, shit,” and everything went dark.

  11

  There in a nutshell—and his head did feel like a cracked nutshell—was the trouble with that technique, Haskell vaguely ruminated, as his eyes fluttered open and he became aware of two men, one to each side, half leading and half dragging him along the street.

  He stared down at his boots—one still “soiled”—which with every missed step carved long furrows in the finely ground dirt and the horse and mule shit of the trace.

  Yes, there was the trouble with the technique. While it did get everyone’s attention, it sometimes—not all the time but enough times to give the Pinkerton pause—got him a cracked skull for his efforts. What it did do, however, was cause no one to believe him a professional investigator, merely a big blowhard who didn’t mind getting an entire town’s shorts in a twist. He was only looking for a man who’d promised to give him a job, and he was piss-burned because he couldn’t locate said gent, never mind that he hadn’t actually tried.

  An annoyance with fairly innocent intentions rather than a genuine threat . . .

  Now, if he lived past the braining he’d taken in the Sawatch House, he might be able to learn something by hook or by crook about the missing Malcolm Briar. Although his brains felt as if they were being scrambled inside his head by two sharp-tined forks that had been poked through the top of his skull, he hoped he’d be able to understand what he learned.

  The two men “accompanying” him, whom he hadn’t gotten a good look at yet but who he assumed were lawmen, were dragging him toward the opposite side of the street and some distance east of the Sawatch, toward a low, shake-roofed log cabin that appeared to be L-shaped, with a front stoop boasting a wooden washstand topped with a tin pan. A white sign attached to two posts jutting into the street in front of the place was painted with the words in black, “Sheriff Jack Goodthunder—Looking Out for Wendigo!”