by John Shirley
“It’ll do for now!” Wyatt said. “What do you say to some Draw Poker. Ante up.” They anted up, and he dealt the cards.
Dudley, peering dizzily at his cards now as the liquor hit his innards, said, “I’ll take … two. No, three.”
Wyatt and Leahy drew cards. In a moment Leahy threw his cards down with disgust. “I’ve got but a pitiful hand.”
Wyatt nodded approval at him. “And I … I’ll bet you three dollars, there, Dudley.”
“Three! Well, what the hell.” He placed his bet. “I call you! I’ve got three deuces, right there! Three of a kind, one for each dollar I’m winnin’ from you!”
Wyatt had a full house but he shook his head sadly and threw the cards onto the table, face down. “Beats me. Time to have another drink.”
He drank off more of what was in his bottle, Dudley had another tumbler of whiskey, smiling and pleased. Wyatt watched him, thinking that winning at cards made a man affable and talkative, almost as much as drinking, and Dudley was doing both.
The game continued another forty minutes, Dudley mostly winning, Wyatt never betting big, and drinking from his own bottle as much as Dudley did from his. Leahy, mostly folding each hand, watched Wyatt with evident curiosity. Thirty-two minutes into the game a couple of cowboys stood up from a game at the next table, each cursing the other, shouting about card cheats. The shorter, rangier one swung a long arm, his fist just grazing the edge of the bigger man’s chin; the bigger man, balding and chewing a hand-rolled cigarette, stepped around the table and pulled a knife from nowhere visible.
“Hold it, boys!” Wyatt called out sharply, making his voice deep for the occasion. Fists and knife raised, the two cowboys froze and snapped fierce looks at him, as Wyatt pulled his coat back so they could see his badge. Pretending not to notice that Dudley was monkeying with the deadwood, Wyatt eyed the cowboys icily. “You don’t want to make me go to work when I’m tryin’ to be off-duty over here.” He dropped his hand to his gun butt. He made his voice carry real regret as he added, “I’ll either crack you over the head or shoot you. Can’t quite make up my mind which.”
The two men stared at him for a moment, then the balding one blew a long breath out so that his mustaches fluttered. He put the knife away, making it vanish as mysteriously as it had come. “Well Avril,” he said to the rangier cowboy, “maybe I mistook you. Let’s us have us a drink.”
The other man nodded, licking his lips, and they hurried to the bar.
The game resumed. Dudley called for show-down and gleefully displayed three aces; Wyatt paid off accordingly, and dealt another hand. When Dudley raked in another pot, Wyatt judged the moment had come—just when it looked as if Dudley’s face might split from grinning.
“I’ll just cut these cards,” Wyatt said, “and shuffle them a few times too—might change the luck at this damn table. Say Dudley …” He expertly shuffled the cards together with a neat zipping sound. “… you still with old Abel Pierce?”
“Me? Wellllll, not exactly. Not as you’d say employed by ’im. The drive’s over, you see, and here I am, not sure where I’m gonna jump. Mr. Pierce tends to put me on drag, and I’m sure tired of eating dust. Up the Western Trail we come—Chisolm’s not right no more. But what a ruckus, near a hair raiser, when we got into Indian territory. Cheyenne was hungry, not enough buffalo coming down from up North, and they were trimming out our stock—well sir, we caught ’em about midnight but then they called their pals and nigh caught me and ol’ George Hoy out on the wide-open. We had to light for the camp like nobody’s business! Cheyenne bullet gouged up George’s new saddle too.”
“George Hoy, he still in town?” Wyatt asked, as casually as he could.
“He ain’t. He lit out. Mr. Pierce’s still here, though. He cain’t go back to Texas no time soon.”
“That right?” Wyatt asked, endlessly cutting and shuffling the cards. “Why’s that? And say—have another drink, you’re letting good whiskey go to waste …”
“My Mama didn’t raise me to waste whiskey. She liked a dram herself. Thankee. Now what was we talking about? Oh—Mr. Abel Pierce. Welllllll, I shouldn’t be windy on that one but I guess it ain’t too much a secret. Mr. Pierce lynched a couple of rustlers—and the new law down there, they was going to prosecute him! Can you believe it, Abel Pierce, going to jail! The man owns two hundred fifty thousand acres down there. Owns a lot of people too. Starting up his own town, over in Colorado. Can’t imagine him going to jail. Why, one time a preacher asked him to donate some lumber for a doxology works. Mr. Pierce pays for the whole church to be built, every stick of it. Now that gent ain’t knowed for his generosity, he’ll squeeze a penny till it yowps—so I wondered if maybe he was a member of the church. ‘You belong to that doxology works, Mr. Pierce?’ I asked him. ‘No Dudley,’ he says, ‘That church belongs to me.’” Dudley cackled with laughter. “You see? That’s Abel Pierce! He isn’t going to sit down for any trial. He owns the world! His Uncle Fergus told him so.”
“His Uncle Fergus? How’s he figure in?”
“Figures in from the next world. He’s dead. But Mr. Pierce talks to him. Hears his voice, carries on conversations. Gets hisself inspired. Fur as I can tell, Uncle Fergus usually gives good advice—whatever any older hombre would say. Wished I had my Pa to advise me that way.”
“How’s Pierce going to get out of that trial in Texas?”
“Why, he’s got friends in the government, down there, they’ll get him out of that one. Takes a little time though. Meanwhile, he cools his heels up here …”
Wyatt nodded thoughtfully. “But why Wichita? He’s done with his business here. Why wouldn’t a wealthy man like Pierce go to St. Louis, or Chicago? They’ve got the comfortable hotels there. Have another drink, Dudley …”
Wyatt filled a tumbler for Dudley, then poured himself a glassful from his own bottle and drank it off. Leahy looked at the bottle, probably realizing it wasn’t really whiskey. But Dudley, seeing Wyatt draining his glass, had to drain his too.
“So why Wichita?” Wyatt prodded.
“Oh,” Dudley said, after a moment, swaying in his chair, “Mr. Pierce, he likes to be where the fun is.”
“That right? Too many rules up in St. Louis? He likes to be where the sportin’ is right down the street, easy to find, eh?” Wyatt winked and Dudley winked hugely back.
“Thas right,” Dudley said, slurring his words now. “Things is cheaper here too. Say, you sure take a long time shuffling. You don’t take no chances. Yesh, he … you know, he likes what he likes.”
“Now me,” Wyatt said, lowering his voice, “I like those Chinese girls. If I was to go to a cat-house, I mean. That what Pierce likes? Course, they’re kind of small, those Celestials …”
“Oh he likes ’em small. Likesh the young girlsh, fourteen, fifteen, petite things. Funny, that, him being such a big man.”
“But I expect with such a big man a girl like that’d get hurt some …”
“With Mr. Pierce? No, I’ve been in the same room with him, a-sportin! We had three beds and three women, him, me and old Yo-Hann, one time. Mr. Pierce—not that I watched, but you could tell, all in all—why, he was gentle ash a little ol’ lamb with them girlsh.”
Wyatt nodded, unconvinced—and sipped the water, colored with a little coffee, that he’d been drinking from the tumbler. The whiskey bottle James had put it in was camouflage.
Then he thought: Yo-Hann? “Did you say Yo-Hann?” Wyatt asked, dealing cards. “That an Indian name?”
“No, no, that’s a name from out of Germany or Swiss-land or some such. He’s half Dutch-y, don’t you know. Yo-Hann Burke. Works for Mr. Pierce. Gun-hand mostly. His Daddy was an educated man, named him after some foreign songwriter. Name like Burke but not Burke.”
“Bach?” Leahy put in. “He named him after Johann Sebastian Bach?”
“That was it!” Dudley said, raising a finger exultantly. He swigged straight from his whiskey bottle—and then, hugging the bottle, he sagged
forward onto the table, head on the cards Wyatt had dealt for him as if they were a pillow. He lay there chuckling and snoring by turns.
“You get any of what you were looking for, Wyatt?” Leahy asked softly, as Wyatt stood up.
“Could be,” Wyatt said. Johann Burke, he thought.
Johann. Which you could hear another way too …
Joe Hand.
* * *
When Wyatt got back to the hotel room a little after midnight, he found that Mattie had cleaned it up, washed and pressed his clothes—or anyways she’d had the Chinese laundry do it—and his other suit was tied up in a neat pressed bundle on a chair. She had picked some daisies from the prairie and placed them in a vase, and set extra candles around the room. Wearing a lavender camisole, she’d arranged herself attractively on the bed: she was the centerpiece of a picture of her creation. She’d let her hair down, and it flowed over her shoulders, shining like brightly-polished brass in the candlelight.
“Well now,” Wyatt said, because nothing else came to him. He unbuckled his gun belt, took off his hat and boots. “Why, look at you …”
“You had your dinner?” she asked softly.
“I have. You?”
“I ate something. Would you like a glass of wine? I got some of this German wine, the German settlers send for it all the way to Dutch-land over there …”
Wyatt hesitated. A little wine, he decided, would do him no harm. “Sure. German wine eh? Germans practically run this part of Kansas,” he muttered, thinking of the Hauptmanns.
He pulled off his pants, sat beside her on the brass bed in his long johns. The brass bed squeaked as he shifted to get comfortable, sipping the yellow wine. “They sure know how to make wine. I like the taste of this stuff.” In fact he thought it a bit too sweet but he wanted to make Mattie happy.
Wyatt liked being with her in this quiet room, in the candlelight, Mattie with her hair down; away from the noise of the saloons, the drunks; away from the dusty streets with their sudden, illegal horse races; away from the simmering cowboy hostility. Bat was better at seeming like the cowboys’ gruff big brother suggesting they all cool down. Wyatt, by contrast, supposed he came off heartless, himself. The cowboys’ sullen dislike wore a man down, after awhile. Especially when they assumed he didn’t like Texans, or cow-hands. He had friends from Texas—had worked at hunting game to feed railroad workers with some Texans, and he had liked them. But once you got tarred with that brush …
He sipped wine, and thought that Mattie, no great beauty, was prettier by candlelight. He supposed he ought to tell her she looked nice in this golden light, but he was afraid he’d get it wrong somehow and end up seeming to insult her. That’s what’d happened when he’d tried to compliment Urilla. Women didn’t seem to care if he complimented them, anyway. Long as he stuck by them.
“Wyatt … there’s something I want to ask you …”
Uh-oh, he thought. It’s going to be talk of marriage and babies already.
But it wasn’t that. “Wyatt, when I was with men before, you know, working, why, some were decent, some not—but I was always pretty much the same.” She sipped her wine, looking at the candlelight, and went on, “I kind of just waited for it to be over, and made those ‘Go Darlin’ noises, and counted the money. Of course, there was times I almost felt like something more was there, but it was still like business … Do you know what I mean?”
He didn’t, not exactly. “Um—go ahead on.”
“It’s just … I’d like there to be something more. I mean—I don’t know how … how to be like a woman should be for her man when he’s not … when he’s not a stranger … It’s not like I did it all that long, but—it’s all I ever knew of being with a man …”
There were tears in her eyes and he thought he ought to say something. “Is there some sort of thing that, um, you want me to …to do?”
“If you could … you know how you kiss me sometimes, and you just touch my face? If you could start out like that—I like that so much. If you could touch me all over like you touch my face sometimes … I just think … well … after that … we’d … we’d just know.”
Wyatt nodded. He thought he knew what she meant, after all. He drank a little more wine and got into bed.
It went the way she thought it would, and it surprised him too.
There’s more to some women than a man would think, he decided, later on.
He was leaning back, then, propped on pillows, Mattie sleeping in his arms. He wondered if he could blow out the candles from here without disturbing her.
That’s when the rapping came on the door. It was the way someone raps when they’re not sure they want to wake you, but they think you might be up.
Mattie moaned, and rolled onto her side, snoring softly, as Wyatt got up, pulling on his pants.
Bat Masterson was standing in the hallway holding a kerosene lamp borrowed from the hotel clerk. “Wyatt? I’m sorry if I woke you. But there’s a fella broke into the jail and he’s stabbed Sam Montaigne. Stabbed him dead.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Who the hell breaks into a jail, if it isn’t a lynch mob?” Wyatt asked, as he and Bat rode down to the jailhouse. They’d mounted up to save time.
“Carmody says it’s Plug Johnson, that Swede with the feathers in his bowler and the Indian bracelets.”
“I’ve seen him around,” Wyatt said, remembering the man he’d rousted from Bessie’s discreet little whorehouse. “Had a big knife on him, near to a Bowie knife.”
“That’s him,” Bat said. “Mostly uses the knife to cut a plug from his chaw, always has one going unless he’s asleep and maybe then too. Carmody claims Plug was shouting around town that he loved that LeTrouveau woman and he was going to slice up the man who killed her. Well, Carmody was out back answering the call of nature, and by the time he gets back in, Plug must’ve gone in and found the keys, got in and stabbed Sam—killed him in his sleep, cut his throat. Carmody saw him running down the street—away off East.”
“Now why would he be going around shouting about what he was going to do to Montaigne?”
“Could’ve been drunk, or hopped up. Some get peculiar when they take that opium from the Celestials.”
They reined in at the jailhouse, and stepped down. Bat peered at Wyatt’s chest in the moonlight. “You missed a button on your shirt there, Wyatt. You’re buttoned up crooked.”
Wyatt set about correct buttoning. “Only a clothes monkey like you could see that out here without enough light to confuse a firefly.”
He’d just finished when Marshal Smith and Carmody came out of the jailhouse office, shaking their heads dolefully. “Well that’s the end of that, anyhow,” Smith said, as he took out a cigar. He bit off the end and spat it in the street as he took notice of Wyatt and Bat. He pointed the cigar at Wyatt. “Earp, I want to talk to you, and now. You can’t thump on my deputies and expect—”
Just then Bat put a hand on Wyatt’s arm, nodded down the street. They could just see the shadowy silhouette of Plug Johnson climbing up onto a horse—the feathers in his hat were unmistakable, though he was a ways off. He set off at a gallop—headed for the Delano bridge and the open plains beyond, Wyatt figured.
“Earp—!”
But Wyatt had swung his horse around, was already spurring after Johnson, with Bat close on his tail.
“Earp you get your skinny rear back here!” Smith shouted. “You ain’t authorized! Come back here!”
But Wyatt made as if he hadn’t heard the Marshal. Some part of his mind had already worked out the reason he was being called back, and he leaned forward, urging his mount after Johnson.
He and Bat thundered over the bridge, shouting a warning to a group of cackling drunks in the road to get out of the way—the drunks were staring after the galloping Plug Johnson.
The drunks scattered, almost falling under the hooves of Wyatt’s horse, and soon he and Bat were riding their snorting mounts on the thin, almost invisible trail twisting out into t
he Great Plains, following a sketchy shadow in the buffalo grass.
Wyatt lost sight of Johnson for awhile when he rode down into a deep buffalo wallow, and then veered into a creek bed. They slowed to a fast trot to pick up his sign, and it wasn’t hard to find. Clear in the moonlight, Wyatt could see the mud raised by Johnson’s horse in the creek-water. The billowing mud followed the creek’s course toward the Indian Nations.
“He’s not going to give up easily,” Bat muttered, maybe wishing he hadn’t set out on this ride. “And we didn’t bring so much as a handful of jerky with us. No, nor have I got a canteen. I suppose we can drink this creek water … but I am not enthusiastic about the prospect.” He buttoned up his coat. “It’s getting cold on this prairie, by God.”
Wyatt didn’t reply, and they splashed along the creek bed, breaking up the reflection of the moon in the water, for several twisting miles more. It got colder yet; the outbreath from Wyatt’s horse was silver in the moonlight, rising in twin plumes from her nostrils. His legs began to ache from holding himself in the saddle, as the horse rollicked along, and he realized he hadn’t ridden much for months, and his muscles were out of shape.
“He’s changed direction,” Wyatt said, at length, pointing at the tracks leading up the clay bank. He rested his horse a moment; the mare ducked her head to drink from the creek. “Trying to throw us off—or else he’s got somewhere in mind to go … Well, let’s see where that is.” He started up the bank to the open prairie.
Bat sighed, but trailed his mount after Wyatt, up onto the grassy flatland. They dared not ride at more than a fast trot through the buffalo grass. There was no clear road, not even a trail, and neither wanted their horse to stumble into a prairie dog hole, maybe break a leg.
Another hour passed in the saddle, with Wyatt pausing now and then to squint at Johnson’s tracks. “Looks like he’s slowed down quite a bit. Doesn’t seem to think anyone’s following him.”
