By the Neck

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  He paused and Rollie, as was his custom, said nothing. He’d always found that perfuming the air with words of sorrow was useless. He waited for Pops to continue, and in a few moments, he did.

  “I was out tending to the sorghum like I did every day with the rest. My little girl was too young to work, so she was kept by an old woman too old to work the fields. Ma Grunt, we called her. I don’t know why. She always had that name. One night, we got back from the field, and all the babies was gone. Ma Grunt was bruised up, stoved in like she’d taken a mighty kicking, which I am certain she had.

  “We come to learn that the master shipped off all our babies to the slave market, and when Ma Grunt tried to stop his men, she took a beating, a hard beating. Died later that night, on a pallet on a dirt floor, all alone and blaming herself for those babies being taken off like that.”

  Rollie nodded, not looking at his friend, and sipped his cooling coffee.

  “The rest of them, they talked big and cried and carried on. Me, I left. That night. Had to find my baby. I had nothing but my own two feet, pair of old trousers more hole than cloth, and a shirt with no sleeves. Then the war got in my way. I did my part, figured I should. But that left me as poor as ever, and with a couple of scars, and a cold trail. I been chasing clues and notions since. Never did find those babies. But then again, I ain’t dead yet, neither.”

  There was another long pause as they watched Chauncey part the curtains in his store windows and prop open the front door.

  “So,” said Rollie.

  “So what brought me to Boar Gulch? It isn’t the conversation.” Pops chuckled. “Talking with you is like talking with a stick of firewood. Except that will eventually crackle and tell you what it’s thinking.”

  “Yep,” said Rollie, knowing Pops was right, and also knowing he wasn’t about to change.

  “You know I was trailing those nasty Dickey twins. I guess you could say they led me here. But I was only after them so I could make money to keep going. Only reason I’m here is to make money to keep going.”

  “To find your daughter,” said Rollie.

  “You bet.” Pops nodded.

  “That’s fair. Anything I can do to help?”

  “You’ve done enough already.”

  “Not really. It’s been mutual. I used to track people. I might be able to help.”

  “I know, and I appreciate it. Truth is, I have come to the end of the rope I was following some time ago. I’ve been guessing for a couple of years now.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, but that usually doesn’t end well.”

  Pops nodded. “I know that, too.”

  “Well,” Rollie stood, stretching his back and massaging his game thigh. He clapped a hand on Pops’ shoulder. “You let me know if I can help. Might be two old heads are smarter than one.” He walked to the door.

  Pops nodded. “Unless they’re our heads.”

  Rollie glanced up and down the street. He’d only been in Boar Gulch a few months, but he guessed the town had tripled in population since his arrival. And all manner of businesses had emerged to help satisfy the needs of the coming hordes. The most notable to Rollie had been the appearance of another saloon that doubled as a gambling den, the Lucky Strike.

  When the owners, a husband and wife, first arrived, they’d visited Rollie and Pops and made their intention known. He’d appreciated their candor, but what could he do? Competition is a healthy thing, Pops had said. Rollie didn’t say much, but decided he could live without competition.

  The structure they’d set up was no more or less than The Last Drop. He figured they didn’t have much of a stake to begin their venture with, so he’d wished them well and did his best to keep the miners coming to his place. He and Pops built more tables, had Chauncey order more poker chips and cards, and they were considering a faro setup.

  The clincher was when Nosey said he had experience bucking the tiger. And more important, he knew how to deal.

  “I can’t argue that a faro table would bring in money,” said Pops. “House usually wins. But as a junior partner in this venture, I am obligated to remind you that Nosey’s out West because he’s on the run from powerful folks back East, folks he owes a whole lot of money to. Money that he lost while gambling. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like the sort of fellow who should be running a gaming table. Of course, maybe I’m wrong and he’s what you call a reformed gambler. Maybe he’s gotten very good at bucking the tiger.”

  Rollie had grunted and turned back to fighting with the bung on the new keg. He wondered how hard it would be to learn to deal faro.

  Aside from his direct competitors, there was also the tent filled with all manner of hardware that set up at the far end of the street, bookending Wheeler’s Mercantile and Emporium. In contrast, it was run by a moody little man, Horkins, from New York City, who wore a full black suit even in the hottest weather—he was consequently ripe much of the time. He squinted through his thick spectacles at each item a person wanted to purchase as if he were reluctant to let it go. In the end he did let go, but not without making each file bought and each pick purchased a painful process.

  His younger brother, Horkins the Younger, a smaller version of the hardware merchant, set up an assay office next door. He seemed to have the proper credentials and more important, the equipment to make his professional assessments with validity.

  In this instance, competition was something Rollie highly recommended.

  The other big topic of chatter in Boar Gulch proper was the construction of a hotel backed by the mayor himself. The underpinnings were built of overly robust logs so that it would last for a long time, so said Chauncey.

  Pops figured Wheeler’s cash flow was pinching out, otherwise he wouldn’t have sold off the various lots around town so easily, which would no doubt have earned him more money if he’d waited for the town to prove up, as he had predicted it would.

  A blacksmith came to town—a welcome addition to the community as nearly everyone had need of tool repairs, shoes for their horses, wagon parts, nails, and more. Pieder Tomsen, a slender fellow with a full, black beard and deep-set blue eyes that glittered like shards of river ice, set up shop on a ridge a five-minute walk from the main street. He was close to trees, which soon fell to his axe blows, at first for a meager cabin, and then for fuel for his forge.

  He spoke not a lick of English but seemed to understand everybody fine, if his nodding head were to be believed. He turned out good-quality work in a timely manner, and everybody was impressed with his industry. Smoke chugged upward around the clock from the chimney in his open-air shop, and from first light through dusk, sparks flew from his hammer blows, and the sharp stinging smack of steel on steel rang in the air throughout Boar Gulch.

  At the south end of Main Street, an eatery was erected overnight by a strapping man who looked more like a blacksmith should than their blacksmith did. Geoff the Scot hung the sign FOOD above the always-open flaps of his tent, though most folks sat around outside on stump ends of logs, balancing their tin plates heaped with solidly made—if unimaginative—fare such as fried potatoes, fried venison steaks, biscuits, beans, and coffee. He was savvy, though, and told Rollie he was going to hire a woman to cook as soon as he could find one.

  That became a joke in camp because despite the mayor’s arguments that a wagonload of prostitutes was set to arrive any day from over in Montana Territory, the only available woman around, other than Camp Sal, was Delia Holsapple. And cooking wasn’t something she seemed interested in. Rollie had heard she was a popular attraction among the miners, and it became apparent that she’d been talking about him to her customers. While he sold more booze than ever, he noticed a drop in the number of folks who’d sit at the bar and tell him all about their lives.

  He didn’t much care if everybody in town knew he’d been a Pinkerton agent. He was proud of the work he’d done. What he was bothered by were the rogues who were sure to descend on the town because of the notices Del
ia had placed in the newspapers.

  It bothered him more than he let on. So much so that Pops and Nosey had asked him if something was eating him.

  “Truth is,” Rollie told Pops and Nosey one afternoon, “I am a tiny bit worried. I can handle myself, or at least there was a time when I could have.”

  “What happened to change that?” said Nosey, actually looking up. It was a rare moment when he wasn’t half-listening, his eyes stuck to the pages of his journal, his left hand scribbling words fast, or with his nose sunk in a copy of a Dickens novel or a ratty copy of Deadeye Davis, Demon Gunhand of Death Valley!

  Rollie looked to the door, then back to the two men, and told them about that day in the alley in Denver City, and about his subsequent convalescence. He told how Delia Holsapple had as much as admitted she had hired the man to kill him that day. Pops had overheard but it was news to Nosey.

  “So that’s what she was on about. I thought she was off in the head and talkin’ in riddles.” Pops tapped his temple.

  “Well, it doesn’t mean she isn’t deranged,” said Rollie, offering a rare half smile.

  “That would also explain why that lung of yours whistles!” Nosey picked up his pencil, licked the end, then said, “Are you certain you don’t want me to usher your life story into print? You are a national treasure! Why, we could make a mint. Naturally I’d split the earnings with you.”

  “Oh, that’s big of you,” said Rollie. “But no. And never. But you can do me a favor and keep an eye on the door, on newcomers in town. It’s getting to where I’m starting to see faces I think I recognize on every greenhorn in the Gulch.”

  “Any idea what we’re looking for?” said Pops, drawing on his pipe.

  “That’s the trouble. I helped put a pile of people behind bars over the years, and another pile ended up at the end of a rope.”

  “That narrows it down,” said Pops, chuckling.

  Wolfbait strolled in then, and the day began.

  A few hours later, Nosey and Pops were playing blackjack at the end of the bar. For the third time in ten minutes, Nosey shouted, “No! It can’t be!”

  Pops stepped back, hands wide and eyebrows high. “You think I’m cheating?”

  “Well, no, but . . . I’m broke, Pops.”

  Pops jutted his chin and tapped it with a long finger. “You know, I expect you and I are about the same size. And I could use a new shirt . . .” The statement hung in the air like smoke.

  “Oh, no. Not the shirt off my back!”

  Pops shrugged, said nothing.

  Rollie glanced up from drawing a beer and tamped down a smile. Nosey sighed and began unbuttoning his shirt. When he finished, he peeled it off and held it out toward Pops, not looking. He held it that way for a few long moments, and only turned around when he heard a wheezing sound.

  Pops was laughing so hard silently that tears squeezed out of his eyes. The rest of the bar had fallen silent during the exchange, but burst out with laughter. Nosey, for the first time that any of them could recall, turned red. But he held out the shirt to Pops, who shook his head.

  “Keep the shirt, Nosey. But the next time you are tempted to do anything with cards, you run, okay? Next fella you lose to might want the whole suit!”

  “I don’t understand. I’ve studied treatises on gaming. I’ve pored over books devoted to poker, let alone blackjack. I have memorized the intricacies of every game devised by man.”

  “Books are for stories. You got to play cards by instinct, son. I play because it’s fun. I don’t play because I have to win money. I did that, like as not, I’d lose.”

  As soon as he said it, he knew he was wasting words. Nosey was already sorting through the deck of cards, shuffling and analyzing them, his brows tight in concentration. Chuckling and shaking his head, Pops walked out back to visit the outhouse.

  “Stoneface Finnegan! Where you at?” The bellowing shout ripped through the low hum of conversation in the bar.

  All the men huddled over drinks, cards, checkers, and dominoes swung their heads up like a herd of cattle on hearing a coyote too close. The clink of poker chips ceased and glasses were set down.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  As usual, the door was propped wide open, letting in bluebottles, cool breezes, and sunlight, which backlit the man in the doorway.

  “You and me, Stoneface! Outside! Now!”

  “You bet,” said Rollie in a tight, grim growl. He ripped off his grimy apron and let the fingers of his left hand brush his Schofield to make certain it was there, riding right where he needed it, midpoint on his hip, belted tight, hammer thong slipped free. He needn’t have checked. He’d oiled the gun, loaded it, and double-checked it before he strapped it on at the start of the day, as was his custom.

  “You and me!” the man in the doorway shouted even louder.

  Wood cracked and splintered as the door to the back room burst inward. “Naw,” shouted Pops. “Just you!” The door slammed into the plank wall and spasmed in place on it’s hinges. Pops bolted through, closing the gap between him and the man in the doorway, with Lil’ Miss Mess Maker leading the way.

  Within ten feet of the far end of the bar, he triggered both barrels of the sawed-off Greener, and the room filled with cannon fire. Smoke and flame bloomed outward, following buckshot that drove straight into the man silhouetted in the doorway.

  The man whipped backward as if jerked by ropes. He smashed through the new railing, his arms and legs trailing and flailing, a spray of fresh blood blossomed skyward as he flew into the street. He slammed to earth inches in front of a loaded, ox-drawn ore wagon grinding its way down the slight decline.

  The oxen, barely flustered, dragged forward. The wagon rolled on—and over—the twitching stranger, creaming him into the roadway, damp from the previous night’s downpour, making a gruesome paste. Two onlookers gagged and one revisited the meal he’d just eaten at Geoff the Scot’s Food Tent.

  “Pops!” shouted Rollie, aiming his pistol out the side window.

  The man with the Greener dropped low out of instinct, joining the bar’s patrons hugging the floorboards. He dug out two smoking shells and thumbed in a second fresh pair. He didn’t need an explanation from an old trail-hound like Rollie.

  All was still within the bar. The ex-Pinkerton man’s intentions were telegraphed to every tense soul in the smoky, metal-stench air of the barroom.

  In the next instant, they saw why. A tall, black, slope-crown hat rose up in a corner of the open side window. It kept rising to reveal a forehead, then two dark eyes followed by a long bent nose topping a drooping dragoon mustache. A wide mouth fronting a scatter of horsey teeth sneered. A long-barrel Colt rose up with the face and leveled off inward toward the room.

  The black eyes widened as they saw Rollie. “You!” the mouth spat.

  “Yep,” said the barman, and cored the Peeping Tom’s forehead with a dead-center shot. The man dropped from sight, back onto the narrow catwalk running along the outside of the bar.

  At the same time, Nosey gripped a thick beer glass by the handle and swung it out the opposite window. A thin groan rose up. He knew it grazed something, pulled his arm back, and swung the blood-smeared mug out the window and downward once more. Whoever was out there grabbed his arm by the wrist.

  Nosey dropped the glass and shouted, “It’s got a hold of me!”

  A quiet little Pennsylvania miner in a floppy straw hat grabbed onto Nosey’s other arm and tugged, which only made the former journalist wail even louder. A bald head appeared at the bottom of the window—and stared straight into the double-barrel snout of a smoking Greener, with a narrow-eyed Pops holding the shotgun and shaking his head at the bald man.

  Behind them, they heard Rollie bolt for the shattered back door, his game leg making an off-rhythm sound on the puncheons. Keeping low, he poked his head through the back door, saw no one to either side, and scampered down the boards to the dirt and sparse clumps of grass to the corner of the building.

  Scann
ing around the corner, he saw the man in the black hat he’d shot in the head. Minus the hat, the man was flopped half off the narrow walkway on the side of the bar. Rollie heard rising voices inside the bar. Good. That meant everything was getting back to normal. His job was to find any other attackers. If there were three, there might be four. Or more. He didn’t hear any more shots and assumed Nosey and Pops subdued, but kept alive the third man Nosey had wailed with the beer glass.

  Rollie made it to the road out front, saw the crowd gathering around the dead man in the road behind a stalled, loaded ore wagon hooked to a pair of oxen dozing in the roadway. He kept one eye on the crowd as he made his way around the raised front of the bar.

  Around the north side of the bar, he saw no one at the window and figured Pops and Nosey had yanked the third man through. He backed up and climbed the steps. At the top he eyed the snapped railing. Maybe Pops could fix it for good. Or maybe they should leave it broken, save them from having to deal with it the next time killers came knocking.

  The patrons saw him and filed out past him, eyes wide. He noted that three of them were carrying their drinks. He’d remind them later. Glassware wasn’t cheap.

  Pops saw him and through a cloud of pipe smoke—he always puffed up an extra hard after a fight—he dragged a small bald man to his feet. He held him by the collar. “You recognize this one?”

  Rollie walked over to the man, his Schofield cocked, poised, and ready. He looked him up and down, spent extra time eyeing the man’s face. He saw a pocked, stubbled face of a man who looked prematurely old because he had no teeth, only a puckered hole of a mouth.

  “Who are you?” When the man didn’t answer, Rollie whipped a savage backhand across that pocky little puckered face.

  The man’s head snapped sideways and he grunted out a quick, high-pitched squeal.