Frontier of Violence

by William W. Johnstone

  “Sounds like a reasonable plan to shoot for,” said Bob.

  “The marshal here is one of the men you’ll be shooting against,” Gafford informed Eames. “You’ll most likely find him among your toughest competition.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll do my best to see that he finds me the same. The shooting’s on Friday, right? I’ll be camping a ways out until then. You’ll see me back in town on Friday.”

  McTeague pointed to the stack of papers on the end of the table. “We’ve got duplicate copies there of the targets that will be used in the contest. You’re welcome to take some, if you like, for personal target practice.”

  Reaching for his Winchester, Eames said, “If I ain’t got this baby sighted in by now, don’t reckon a few pieces of paper are gonna gain me much.” With that, the man in buckskin picked up the rifle, slung his war bag over his shoulder, turned, and threaded his way out through the crowd until he was gone from sight.

  “Rather strange one, wouldn’t you say?” remarked Gafford, watching him go.

  “Strange enough, I reckon. But if he’s the worst this shindig draws, I figure we’ll be getting off lucky,” Bob said.

  * * *

  Forty minutes later, Fred and the Macy brothers had shown up at the Crystal Diamond. They were in time to catch the last couple minutes of the final preview show scheduled to be put on by Alora Dane and her performing troupe for that day. To Bob’s surprise and relief, his men watched the closing number, applauded heartily, gazed longingly as the ladies left the makeshift stage . . . and that was it. Despite the display of leggy high kicks meant to titillate and reveal considerably more in the way of feminine curves than had been present the previous evening at dinner, the deputies showed no sign of being thunderstruck like before.

  Bob had no idea what to attribute this to. What was more, he decided not even to bring it up for fear of jarring the trio out of whatever had brought on this sterner behavior and causing them to revert back to the way they’d been acting last night.

  Once the beer keg was empty and the preview shows were done, the crowd began to thin out. There was still some novelty left at getting a gander at the prize guns, but not that much. Two more entrants had signed up for the shooting contest by the time Vern filled in the blank left for his name, making a total of seventeen. For the first day of sign-ups, it was a turnout Gafford seemed very content with.

  With reduced activity now in front of the Crystal Diamond and an early afternoon lull seeming to have settled over Old Town, Bob gathered his men around him and said, “I think this is as good a time as any to do some squeezing on the Red-Eyed Goat Saloon and see if we can’t get some rats to pop out and reveal themselves. What do you say?”

  “You know you’re not gonna get any argument out of me, boss,” said Fred.

  “Just say the word,” said Peter.

  “All you got to do is tell us how you want to play it,” added Vern.

  “Fred is the one who sniffed this out to begin with. I figure it’s only right for him to take the lead,” Bob said. “The three of you march right in the front. I’ll hold back. Fred, you start firing accusations and asking questions. Tell Swede you know about the notch-eared horse, that you know it belongs to Merle Conroy, and that everybody knows Conroy hops to Swede’s bidding. Not to sound boastful, but I don’t think Swede or whoever else is around will show you the same respect they would if I was there with you. I’m hoping they’ll act a little nervy, maybe run their mouths a little carelessly. When I think the time is right, I’ll show up.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Fred. “Let’s go do some Goat herding.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “What the hell’s the big idea?” snarled Swede Simkins when he saw Fred walking toward where he was drawing a pitcher of beer behind the Red-Eyed Goat’s bar, which amounted to a pair of thick planks nailed side by side and stretched over the tops of some upended wooden barrels.

  With the breakup of the crowd down by the Crystal Diamond, a handful of customers had found their way into the tent saloon. Moses Shaw and his sons were seated at a large round table on one side of the room, and the other occupants were leaving a cautious space around them. Three men were bellied up to the bar; three more sat at a small table with one side jammed against a canvas wall. Cigarette and cigar smoke hung in the air in thick layers, and the low rumble of voices was coarse and sullen.

  Swede continued his lament. “You figure to show up here every day and harass me in front of my paying customers? You got no reason and no right to do that. It ain’t even legal, is it?”

  Peter and Vern fanned out a few paces behind Fred and came to a halt, standing still and quiet, feet planted wide.

  Fred kept walking until his ample belly bumped against the edge of the plank bartop, sloshing some of the foam out of the pitcher.

  “Who says I’m here to harass you, Swede? You got a guilty conscience or something?” Fred said in an easy drawl.

  Swede scowled. “Why else would you be coming around?”

  “Why, Swede. You’re selling yourself short.” Fred made a wide-sweeping gesture with one hand. “I mean, you got to face it, man. This is a warm, friendly place you got here. The atmosphere, the charm. Not to mention you and that bubbly personality of yours that makes a body feel right at home. Is it so hard to believe I’m coming back around just because I enjoy it so?”

  “Yeah, it is hard to believe. You think I don’t know when somebody’s pulling my leg?”

  Fred grunted out a short laugh and then turned momentarily to the Macy brothers. “You hear that, fellas? There’s that keen wit and good-natured sense of humor I told you about.”

  “Yeah, I bet he’s a real hoot when you get him going,” said Peter.

  “Anybody can see that,” added Vern.

  “Hey, Swede,” called one of the three men from the table over against the wall. “You gonna bring that pitcher of beer over here before it goes all the way flat, or what?”

  “Get up off your lazy, drunk ass and come get it if you’re in such a big hurry,” Swede hollered back. “And don’t forget to bring your money to pay for it, else you’ll be making an extra trip.”

  “What the hell,” grumbled the man. “What happened to your fetch-it boy, Merle? He brought us our last pitcher.”

  “Well, nobody’s bringing you this one,” Swede was quick to say. “Not unless I come and bust it over your complainin’ head. I do that, it’ll cost you double—for the beer and for the pitcher, too.”

  The saloon man seemed to think this was very amusing. He issued a growling laugh and raked his eyes across the men lined up at the bar, almost daring them not to laugh along with him. He got a few weak guffaws for his trouble.

  Meanwhile, the drunk demanding the pitcher got to his feet and stumbled over to claim it. He tossed some coins on the plank, seized the pitcher in both hands, turned jerkily back toward his pals. The first lurching steps he took caused the beer to slosh violently and wet the front of his already greasily stained shirt.

  “Careful you don’t spill too much. You’ll ruin the wax job on my floor,” Swede called after him. Then he snorted out another garbled laugh, the joke being that a wax sheen on the hard-packed dirt floor of the Goat was about as likely as a pair of polished new boots on a coyote.

  When he cut his gaze back to Fred, the smile fell from Swede’s mouth and his eyes hardened. “All right, let’s quit dancing around it, law dog. What are you looking for?”

  “Same thing as the last time I was here, and the time before that,” Fred responded flatly. “I want to know about that notch-eared palomino horse that used to be tied behind your place all the time. And I want to talk to your hired man, Merle Conroy, who I have reason to think the horse belongs to.”

  “You can see for yourself that Merle ain’t here,” Swede sneered. “Matter of fact, I ain’t seen him since you was here last night. Far as I know, maybe the damn fool did something that’s giving him cause to avoid the law. Though I wouldn’t
know anything about that, a-course. Just like I don’t know nothing about that stupid horse you keep asking after.”

  “Conroy don’t ride a palomino?”

  “I don’t know what kind of nag he rides. Or even if he has a horse at all. When he’s in here working for me—which he’s supposed to be doing right now, in case anybody’d like to know—he ain’t exactly galloping around on a horse.”

  Fred frowned. “If you ain’t seen Conroy in two nights yet he’s supposed to be here at work now . . . that makes you kinda lax with your hired help, don’t it?”

  Swede spread his hands. “What can I say? I’m a pretty easygoing fella. Merle’s been with me a long time. If he ain’t showing up, he must have a good reason. Maybe he’s sick.” Swede’s mouth spread in a lewd grin. “Or maybe one of the whore cribs up the line has got a new girl and he’s fallen in love.”

  From behind Fred, Peter said, “Didn’t this old drunk over here with the pitcher of beer say, just a minute ago, that Conroy brought him and his pals their first pitcher? How can that be if Conroy hasn’t been around for so long?”

  “Hey, hold on a minute,” Swede protested. “How many different questions do I gotta answer from how many different badge-toters?”

  “As long as there’s a badge pinned to it,” said Fred, “you’ll answer whatever’s asked of you. If you’re smart, that is.”

  “Is that supposed to be a threat?” Swede’s eyes blazed. “I’m supposed to be intimidated by a fat slob and a still-wet-behind-the-ears punk?”

  “Like I said, only if you’re smart. And if you know what’s good for you,” Fred told him.

  Swede licked his lips. “Can’t you see that old drunk don’t know one day from another? Sure, maybe Merle did serve him a pitcher of beer at some point. But that could have been from the last time he was in here. Or the time before that. In his alcohol-mushed old brain it’s all run together.”

  “How about I ask the old-timer for myself? See if he’s as brain-pickled as you claim,” said Peter.

  “Aw, whyn’t you leave the poor old geezer alone?” wailed Swede. “You can see he’s drunk.”

  “Drunk don’t mean addled permanent-like,” argued Fred. “Go ahead, Peter, ask him if Conroy’s been in here lately.”

  “He ain’t been, I tell you,” Swede said anxiously. “I ought to know what goes on in my own place, oughtn’t I?”

  Before anybody could respond to that and before Peter made it over to address the old drunk seated at the side table, there was a commotion from behind the canvas flap hanging down behind Swede, a curtain of sorts that separated the bar area from the storage area at the rear of the tent. The meaty smack of a fist striking flesh and bone rang out clearly.

  An instant later, Merle Conroy hurtled backward out through a floor-to-ceiling slit in the canvas and crashed against the plank bar, nearly dislodging it from the barrel tops it rested across. The three men on the customer side of the bar jumped back, grabbing frantically to save the drinks poured before them. Swede grabbed just as frantically, managing just barely to keep the planks from tipping off and tumbling to the ground.

  Immediately following the flailing Conroy came Marshal Bob Hatfield, stepping through the slit opening and reaching to grab Conroy before he had any chance to regain his balance. The marshal jerked him upright and shook him like a rag doll.

  “What the hell’s going on?” shouted Swede.

  “We got a situation here that amounts to one of two things,” Bob said through clenched teeth. Conroy hung loosely in his grasp, head lolling, fighting for consciousness from the blow everyone had heard, evidenced by a split lip with a trickle of blood running from it. “Since I just found this rat lurking behind that curtain,” Bob continued, “I figure—since you claim not to know about him being anywhere close by, Swede—he must either have been looking to steal something . . . or, you’re a low-down stinking liar and you knew he was back there all the time and the two of you were conniving to keep him out of sight in order to avoid talking to my deputies.”

  “How was I supposed to know he was back there?” Swede sputtered. “I ain’t got eyes in the back of my head, do I?”

  “No,” Bob said, “and you don’t have very many brains inside that melon, either, if you think you can keep lying to the law.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Swede insisted.

  Bob cut his eyes to Peter and gave a jerk of his chin. “Go ahead. Ask your questions of the old gent at that table. Find out if he saw Conroy in here just before we showed up.”

  The three men who’d been standing at the bar started to slink for the door. Bob stopped them short with a command of, “Hold it right there!”

  Fred stepped in front of the trio to make sure they got the message. “How about you fellas?” he asked. “Can you do anything with those mealy mouths except suck down cheap whiskey? Did you know Conroy was in here and hiding behind that flap all the time I was asking about him?”

  “You don’t have to answer him, boys,” Swede advised them. “He don’t have no right to badger you that way and you got every right to have a few drinks in peace and quiet.”

  “How much peace and quiet anybody gets while they’re in my town,” Bob cut in, “is sorta up to me and my men. One of the places you got a good chance to get some, though, is behind bars in our jail. And one of the ways you got a good chance of ending up there is if I think you’re withholding information in a legal investigation.”

  One of the three men hung his head and then rolled his eyes to look plaintively up at Bob. “Please, Marshal, we don’t want to get caught in the middle of nothing. We just came in here to have a couple drinks and mind our own business. Honest, we wasn’t really payin’ much attention to—”

  “I been payin’ attention,” interrupted a loud voice from across the room. “Me and my boys been lookin’ on and listenin’ the whole while . . . and not likin’ worth a damn what we’re seein’ or hearin’.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Bob turned his head and looked over at Moses Shaw.

  “If you got something worthwhile to add to this,” he said, “we’d be happy to hear what you’ve got to say. So we’ll get to you in a minute. But first give us a chance to finish questioning these other men.”

  Moses shook his head. “No. That ain’t the way it’s gonna work. What I got to say I ain’t gonna wait on. What’s more, I ain’t gonna be hoppin’ to answer a bunch of your questions. What I’m gonna do is tell you a thing or two.”

  “Pop, maybe we oughta just stay out of this,” said his middle son, Cyrus, a bit uneasily.

  “You hush up,” advised his older brother, Harley. “If Pop’s got a piece to speak, best be lettin’ him do it.”

  Moses stood up, glaring at Bob. “This ain’t the first time me and my boys have come to town and run tan-gleways of you, Marshal. Seems like you and that fat deputy find a reason to plant yourselves in our way practically every time. And now there’s even more of you, what with these two new pups I ain’t ever saw before, puffin’ out their chests with badges pinned on ’em. You’re actin’ more and more too big for your britches, and it’s gettin’ plumb tiresome, if you ask me.”

  “Nobody did,” Bob reminded him calmly. “And if you button your lip pretty damn quick, there’s a chance that maybe—just maybe—me and my big britches won’t have to stomp all over you and your brood. My men and me are here about a matter that I don’t think involves you, not unless you push it.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m fixin’ to do,” growled Moses. “What you’re up to involves me on account of it’s interruptin’ my drinkin’ and carousin’ . . . something me and my boys have been lookin’ forward to for a good long spell.”

  “Then I suggest you go somewhere else to do it, and stay out of my way,” Bob told him.

  Moses’s head wagged slowly back and forth. “Nope. We’re settled here to get the ball rollin’, and here’s where we aim to stay until we say it’s time to go. The only thing
that leaves is for you and your star-packin’ nancies to prance off. You can come back and bother Swede some other time, when we ain’t around and you’re not botherin’ us in the bargain. Or try to root us out of the way now, if you think you got the stones for it.”

  Vern, who was standing closest to the Shaw table, turned to Bob with a bright flush of anger filling his face. “I don’t stand by and take that kind of talk off nobody, Marshal. Either you give the word for it—or I’m wading in by myself!”

  “And he won’t be by himself for very long,” said Peter.

  Bob hesitated. This wasn’t what they were here for. It was both unwise and unprofessional to be goaded by a pack of lowlifes like the Shaws. But Moses and his sons had been a thorn in Bob’s side for a long time. His mind flashed to an old saying his father used to fall back on when he was too quick and too harsh to punish a rambunctious young Bob and then would have some regrets after ward. “Well, I don’t reckon it was a lick amiss,” he’d say, trying to console himself.

  Even if tangling with the Shaws wasn’t really what they’d come here for, Bob decided, he didn’t reckon it would be a lick amiss if that’s what it came to.

  “To hell with it,” he said through clenched teeth. “Let’s do some wading!”

  Just that quick, the fight was on.

  The Shaw brothers rose to their feet as one. They tipped over the table they’d been seated around, shoved it ahead of them, and came boiling around the ends.

  Vern adroitly dodged to one side, causing the table to miss him. And then, cocking his fist as he rushed forward, he timed it perfectly so that the right cross he threw crashed solidly against the jaw of Wiley Shaw, landing the first punch of the fight. Wiley staggered back and might have lost his footing if he hadn’t fallen into the grasp of his father, who held him up.

  Fred wasn’t quite able to move his bulk quickly enough to get out of the way of the skidding table. It banged against his knees and thighs. The contact made him teeter on the brink of being taken off balance for a couple seconds. But he held his ground and, in the end, gave a shove with his knee that sent the table skidding back several inches.