by Mark Warren
For several seconds Walton scratched his fingernails along one of his long sideburns. Finally he reached down below the bar and laid the Colt’s revolver on the polished countertop. “All right,” he said, “tell him I don’t want him back in my establishment. You can tell him that’s official.”
Peshaur lifted one corner of his mouth. “You bet!” He raised his mug and gulped down the beer in one breath. Then he exhaled heavily, picked up the gun, and left.
Wyatt set down his cup and looked at Walton. “Better give me that shooter behind the bar.”
Walton frowned and stared into the steadiness of Wyatt’s eyes. “You think there’ll be more trouble?” When Wyatt said nothing, Walton removed a pocket model Colt’s from inside his coat and offered it butt first. “Use mine.”
Wyatt nodded his head toward the bartender’s shelf. “The Remington,” he said. Walton put his gun away and retrieved the longer-barreled pistol. As he offered it to Wyatt, a gun roared in the street, and glass shattered in the front window, scattering shards across the floor, just as the back wall spat out a sound like the sharp blow of a hammer. The piano had started up, but now it quieted. Almost every man in the room sprawled flat on the floor as the women raced for the side room.
“Hey, Califo’nia boy!” called Pinard’s shrill voice. “Get ou’ heah, you thonovabith!”
Wyatt checked the loads on the Remington and looked at Walton. “This your gun?”
Walton’s eyes were large as quarters. “Hiram’s . . . my bartender.”
Wyatt called over Walton’s shoulder to the barman. “How fresh are these loads?”
“Just this morning,” Hiram said.
Wyatt let the hammer off half cock and pulled it back quickly all the way. He did this again and then eased down the hammer.
“It’s reliable,” Hiram assured him. “Never jammed. Never a misfire.”
Keeping out of sight Wyatt walked toward the front window. The sound of his boots crunching on broken glass seemed magnified inside the unnatural silence of the saloon. Easing his head around the doorframe he spied Pinard standing alone in the middle of the street, his pistol leveled from his waist at the hotel’s front door. Searching the far side of the street, Wyatt spotted Peshaur in the shadows of a store awning catty-corner in the next block. Both his hands were in sight gripping an awning post.
“What’sa matter, Califo’nia boy?” Pinard yelled, getting his tongue working again. “You yellow?” He lowered the gun beside his leg. “Get on out heah! I got thumthing fo’ you.”
Wyatt turned to see Walton crouching at the side of the bar. “You got any law here?”
“They won’t come down here,” Walton whispered, “unless there’s a killin’.”
Wyatt watched Pinard another few seconds, checked the street again, and cocked his gun.
“Wyatt,” Walton said, now with urgency in his voice, “if you kill him, it’ll make trouble for me with the law.”
Wyatt leaned back to the window and watched through the glass as Pinard glanced down the street toward Peshaur. Taking this opportunity, Wyatt pivoted and stepped through the door onto the boardwalk with the Remington pointed down beside his leg. Pinard’s shot came unexpectedly, and right away the door lintel cracked. Wyatt raised his weapon smoothly, aimed low on the torso, and fired. A plume of smoke temporarily blurred his vision as he thumbed back the hammer again, but Pinard was down, his Colt’s out of reach in the street. Wyatt swung the barrel of the gun to the corner of the intersection. Peshaur was gone.
The saloon patrons began to trickle out onto the street, fanning around the prostrate man and gawking as if he were some unfamiliar creature just dredged up from the river. Walton stepped beside Wyatt, cleared his throat, and swallowed audibly.
“Is he dead?”
“No,” Wyatt said, watching Pinard writhe in the dirt of the dark street.
A boy holding a stack of newspapers stepped down from the walkway where Peshaur had stood. “Better get the doctor,” Walton yelled to him. The boy stared for a moment, then ran off.
“What about the law?” Wyatt said. “Will they look into this?”
Walton looked back at Pinard and licked his lips. Several men had lifted the groaning man and started carrying him up the street.
“Maybe,” he said, turning back to Wyatt. “What do you want to do?”
“Why don’t we go see if we can finish a cup of coffee.”
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Summer, 1869: Beardstown, Illinois, to Peoria by keelboat
Sipping coffee in the small office, Wyatt sat opposite Walton at his desk as the hotelier peeled away bills from a three-inch roll and pushed them across the desktop. “I doubt that stain will come out, Wyatt. Let me at least buy you another shirt.”
Wyatt set down the cup and shook his head. “I might take it from Pinard . . . not you.”
“So what are your plans, Wyatt?”
“Headin’ to Peoria to see Virgil.”
Walton sat back, propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, and steepled his fingertips. Lightly bouncing his fingers against his pursed lips, he stared down at the papers on his desk.
“No chance you’d consider staying here to work for me?”
Wyatt hitched a thumb back toward the saloon. “Out there?”
Walton parted his hands to point at the ceiling. “Upstairs. I need a good enforcer.”
Wyatt looked into his coffee. “You mean . . . for your whores.”
Walton nodded. Wyatt looked around the room.
“You own this place?”
Walton frowned at the bare walls and shook his head. “I run it. Manage the saloon and the whores. There’s good money in it.”
Wyatt faced the window where the factories and warehouses stretched beyond the commercial district and appeared as colorless as a tintype. “Reckon I’m looking for something with more of a business future to it,” he said and looked back at Walton. “I don’t see how banging on the heads of drunks is gonna help me do that, John.”
“Do you have a horse?” When Wyatt shook his head, Walton cocked his head to one side and pushed out his lower lip. “Well,” he said, “if you’re set on going to Peoria, I’m taking some of my girls up there in two days. How’d you like to go along? We’ve got plenty of room.”
“In what?”
“I’ve got a fifty-foot keelboat.” He smiled. “I need one more pole man.”
Wyatt took another sip of coffee. “How much does a man make poling up the river?”
Walton raised his eyebrows at Wyatt’s interest. “Four dollars a day. Six days.”
Wyatt set down the cup and settled deeper in his chair. Threading his fingers together over his stomach, he gazed through the window again. Beyond the warehouses he could see the open air over the Illinois River.
“Been cooped up in a train and a stage most of a week. Might like bein’ on the river.”
Walton half stood and reached across the desk to shake hands. Straightening, he added two more bills to the money on the desk and pushed it on Wyatt.
“Buy two shirts. I want a natty crew when we pull into Peoria. And get some good gloves.”
Wyatt pocketed the money. “What about this shootin’? Shouldn’ I talk to the law?”
Walton shook his head. “Long as nobody’s dead. Pinard works for the Rock Island Railroad. They might raise a stink, but they’ll raise it with him, not me.” He shrugged. “Somebody’ll kill the sonovabitch soon enough. That or he’ll learn he’s not the cock of the walk around here and move on.”
“They all learn it sometime or other,” Wyatt said.
The going was easy near the river banks where the current was sluggish, but the abundance of snags was tedious. Still Wyatt liked working in the cool air coming off the water. East shore in the mornings, west in the afternoons—the long ferry in between to keep the boat out of the heat.
It felt good to work his muscles as he pushed the pole from bow to stern and then walked
his pole cabin-side up the deck to start the cycle again. At night they tied fore and aft ropes to stout trees on the bank, and the poling crew played cards while the whores whispered about feminine toiletries and fussed with their hair after a day of preparing the cabin cribs for Peoria.
On the second day out during the noon break, the youngest whore—little more than a child, she seemed—approached Wyatt where he sat alone on the larboard deck with his back against the long cabin. He was eating cheese and bread and a jar of cooked apples.
“You’re Wyatt?” she said.
Wyatt looked up and stopped chewing. Up close the girl appeared gaunt yet resilient, as though she had lived more years than he had guessed. He drew his boots beneath him and looked down at the food laid out in his lap, thinking he ought to offer her something to eat.
“Please, don’t get up,” she said. She backed to the low gunwale as though she might sit on the rail, but after peering at the dark water she changed her mind. Putting her back to the cabin she slid down beside him. “I’m Sarah,” she said matter-of-factly. “You’re the one shot Tom Pinard?”
Wyatt looked at her for a long five seconds. “After he shot at me.”
The girl’s mouth and nose were small, and this, he realized, made her appear fragile. Her skin was wrapped around her facial bones with clean angles—until she pulled her upper lip into a childish snarl.
“He needed shooting. He was real hard on Lilah. Busted her lip twice.”
Wyatt screwed down the lid on the jar. “I expect he was hard on a lot of people.”
She turned her head to look squarely at him. “Yes,” she said and kept staring. “So, is this what the eyes of a killer look like?”
He tore off a piece of the tough bread and chewed it into submission as he noted her self-amused expression. “Far as I know, didn’ kill him.”
“Now that you’re working for Walton, are you gonna take care of us?”
“I’m just earning my way upriver. Once I get to Peoria, I ain’t sure what I’ll do.”
She flopped her legs out on the deck and tapped her shoes together like a little girl unconscious of her actions. “Can I call you ‘Wyatt’?”
“I don’t mind.” He gave her a sidewise glance and then looked out over the water. “How’d you get mixed up in this line o’ work?”
Her feet stopped tapping, and she gave him a sharp look. “Is that a problem for you?”
Wyatt shook his head. “Nothin’ wrong with bein’ a whore. Just seem young for it.”
They listened to the mooring lines stretch from shore. The river flowed steadily past them as though they were still making their way slowly to somewhere.
“Guess I was born into it,” she said. “My mother is Jane Haspel.” When Wyatt showed no reaction, she added, “She runs one of the biggest brothels in Peoria.”
Wyatt did not know what to say to that. She caught him frowning, so he nodded.
“Your brother worked for her,” she said, as if that somehow justified her situation. “He looked out for us. Not no more though. He works for Vansteel now, protecting his women.”
Wyatt tried to imagine Virgil working in a whorehouse, but with the sun glinting off the ripples in the water and the breeze blowing pleasantly across the deck, he could not make the picture materialize in his mind. “Just how old are you?” he asked her.
“Almost fifteen,” she said without hesitation. She smiled at his surprise. “I grew up fast.”
Wyatt began wrapping the cheese and bread together, glad to be doing something with his hands. “I reckon you did,” he said as gently as he knew how.
“Can I use your name?” she asked, the question dropping out of nowhere like a flicker of lightning flashing in a blue sky.
“What?” he said, frowning.
“If we get boarded by the law, can I say I’m your wife? They might go easier on me.”
Wyatt stared out at the trees on the horizon, feeling the skin on his forehead crease into tight furrows. “I reckon you can, if you need to . . . long as there ain’t nothin’ bindin’ to it.”
She smiled, pulled her knees to her chest, and hugged her arms around her shins. “I won’t henpeck you,” she said and laughed. “Sarah Earp.” She turned her full smile on him. “How’s that sound?”
“Sounds all right, I reckon, long as you understand it’s just a loan. I might need it back.”
Sarah poked his ribs and giggled. “Are you thinkin’ on gettin’ married any time soon?”
Wyatt shook his head. “No plans to.”
She buried her face in the folds of her dress between her knees. “Maybe you’ll marry me,” she said, her little girl’s voice muffled by the material.
When she looked up at him, he felt his face flush with color. He kept looking at that far shore, trying to think what to say without hurting her feelings.
“If I ever do get married, I hope it’ll be to someone as pretty as you . . . but older.”
She laughed as though he had said something illogical. “Well, I’ll get older, Wyatt.”
He conceded that with a nod. “Yeah . . . I reckon we all will.”
Wyatt found the Vansteel House in the Bunker Hill district of the Peoria waterfront. It was a squalid section of town with the stench of gin mills and slaughterhouses and breweries and a class of people who seemed not to abide by any standard of appearances. The docks teemed with boatmen and roustabouts who labored in the sun, while the streets and sidewalks just a block away appeared more like a darkened cave, where a more primitive breed of people thrived. Every man and woman Wyatt passed seemed worn out by some travail of city life.
At one in the afternoon he walked into Vansteel’s saloon and waited for the bartender to see him. The aproned man glanced at Wyatt, went back to his conversation with a customer, and then immediately turned back for a second look. Wiping his hands with a towel, he came slowly down the length of the bar with his head cocked to one side and a question on his face.
“Looking for Virgil Earp,” Wyatt said.
“He’s prob’ly asleep. Who’re you?”
“I’m his brother.”
The man’s inspecting gaze traveled down Wyatt’s torso and back to his face. “I figured.” He pointed to the upstairs landing. “Last room down the north hall. There’s no number.”
Climbing the stairs, Wyatt heard the bartender mumble the Earp surname as he resumed his conversation with his patron. Wyatt could feel the two men’s attention on him until he turned down the dark hallway. At the end door, he paused and heard a soft purr of snoring that could not have been Virgil. Wyatt frowned, considered the numbered doors behind him, and then knocked on the unmarked door.
When it opened, Virgil stood squint-eyed in his long drawers. A red-tinted moustache had begun to fill out over his upper lip, and his wheat-straw hair was mussed as though he’d just stepped inside from a stiff wind. His skin was paler than Wyatt had ever seen it.
When recognition hit him, Virgil’s face lit up, and his eyes danced with light, like the sun playing off the river. “Holy Jesus,” he said, dredging up the familiar laugh from deep in his chest. He pulled Wyatt into an embrace, and over his brother’s shoulder, Wyatt met the dark watery eyes of a lithe, black-haired woman looking back at him from the rumpled sheets of a small bed. “It’s about time,” Virgil laughed, bracing Wyatt at arm’s length. “Get on in here while I get dressed.” The woman pushed up on an elbow, exposing one breast.
“I’ll just wait outside,” Wyatt said.
“Oh.” Virgil laughed and looked behind him. “This here is Rozilla.” He walked to the bed and covered her with the sheet. “This is Wyatt, Rosie. You ’member I told you ’bout ’im.”
“Ma’am,” Wyatt said and nodded. The woman offered no more than a blithe stare.
“She a French lady,” Virgil said and winked, as if some joke were inherent in the claim.
Wyatt backed through the door. “I’ll go see if I can get some coffee at the bar.”
�
��Hell, Wyatt, she won’t bite . . . ’less you want ’er to.” Virgil laughed and fanned his hand at the air. “All right . . . go on . . . I’ll be down directly.”
Wyatt had finished his coffee when Virgil came down the stairs wearing a blouse with stitch marks showing where the material had ripped in front. He poured coffee at the bar and carried it to Wyatt’s table by the front window. Sitting down, he lowered his brow.
“What the hell happened to your hands? Not back at the plow, are you?”
Wyatt checked the blisters on his palms. “Poled upriver for six days with John Walton.”
Virge snorted. “What, that old gunboat of his? It’s supposed to be for pleasure, not work.”
“Paid pretty good,” Wyatt said. “Figured I could use the money.”
Virgil frowned over his coffee. “There’s better ways to make money than pushing a damn boat up a river. Walton make you any job offers?” When Wyatt nodded, Virgil said, “And?”
“I wanted to see what you had in mind.”
Virgil shrugged. “Same kind of work as Walton’s, but the pay’s better.”
Wyatt looked at the moth-eaten buck’s head mounted above the bar. Then he wiped at the table and inspected the dust on his fingertips.
“Ain’t much of a place,” he said.
Virge squinted. “I thought you liked saloons.”
“I do,” Wyatt said and nodded at the spare furnishings. “This’n could stand some work.”
Virgil spewed air through his lips. “Beats bumpin’ your ass on a freighter’s buckboard.” As he drank, Virgil narrowed his eyes to a smile over his cup. Setting down the cup, he leaned forward on his forearms and lowered his voice. “Sometimes you gotta bust a head or two, but mostly it’s lettin’ a man know you don’t mind doin’ it. Once you get a reputation, that’ll do most of the work for you.” He sat back, relaxed, and pointed at Wyatt. “You already got the reputation. People around here just don’t know it yet.”
Wyatt looked around the room again. “Why don’t we open up our own place? You and me . . . maybe James. Fix it up nice. Get a better class of people as customers.”
