by Tabor Evans
"What you know doesn't seem to be paying you very well," Longarm observed.
The ransom hasn't been collected yet," Ray shrugged. "When it is, we'll get our share. Higgins said so."
"You boys believe that?" Longarm mocked.
"Shut up! We'll do all right. We already got your money, lawman. And after tonight's Cattlemen's meeting, the whole town will pay off. Too bad you won't be around by then," he laughed, as Musty returned with three shots of whiskey.
"Reckon that meeting will be starting in just an hour or so," Longarm mused. "Well, let's drink up, boys."
"And then get the other part done with," Musty added meaningfully as he tilted his head toward Longarm and shifted his mouthful of tobacco to one cheek to give the rotgut an unobstructed chute down his gullet.
Longarm felt Ray's knife blade momentarily lessen its pressure against his ribs as the man lifted his glass and knocked back his drink. Slamming his own left hand down upon Ray's right, so as to pin the knife in place, Longarm shouted at the top of his lungs, "Don't stab me, boys! Please!"
"Christ, Ray!" Musty gasped. "Get it done!"
"I'm trying, dammit!" Ray's face contorted with effort.
"Help!" Longarm shouted, doing his best not to break out laughing. He pressed down with all his strength as Ray's sweat-slippery fist slipped another fraction of an inch closer. Now the man redoubled his efforts to stab Longarm, but he just couldn't make that last crucial inch.
"Here now! What's going on?" It was Mr. Derby, with his scattergun. He'd climbed down from his chair and was coming over to see what was the matter. Just as Longarm knew he would.
"Ah, shit," Ray moaned. "Can't stab him with this bird watching."
"He's going to throw you two out," Longarm chortled. "Just as well, I've gotten to like you two jokers. It'd be a shame for me to have to kill you both."
"All right, you two," the bouncer growled, his scattergun hovering ominously. "This here gent was sitting peaceably enough, and then you two come in and start a ruckus. Out of here, now!"
Ray and Musty exchanged anguished looks. "Please…"
Ray began.
"I said now!"
Haltingly, both men rose. "Aren't you coming with us, old pal?" Ray coaxed Longarm. The knife had somehow disappeared from sight.
"No," Longarm drawled. "I think I'm staying right here. This is a fine establishment that knows how to look out for its patrons." He beamed at the bouncer, who smiled back.
"Come on now, Longarm." Musty tried to laugh. "Come with us!"
Longarm looked at the bouncer. "Weren't you throwing these two out?" he asked innocently.
"That I was." He tilted his derby forward and cocked both barrels of his scattergun. "Now git! Both of you."
Like two boys being sent to the woodshed, Ray and Musty began to trudge away. The bouncer turned and began to head back to his chair. Musty took the opportunity to spin around and spit a glob of chewing tobacco squarely against the back of the bouncer's neck.
The fellow almost lost his derby as he clamped his hand against the thick sludge. He turned, his face at first pale with anger, but his expression soon changed to aghast horror as the shit-brown, sticky mass began to run down beneath his undershirt. His fingers came away with gruesome webs of the stuff stringing down. "Who?" he managed to say, his voice shaking with fury. "Who did it?"
Without a word, Musty pointed to the plug of chewing tobacco still on the table where Longarm sat, and then at Longarm himself.
"All right, you son of a bitch! You go with your friends!"
Longarm was about to argue, but when the bouncer shoved the scattergun into his belly, he decided that now was not the time to claim he only smoked cheroots.
As he stood up, Ray put his arm around Longarm's shoulders. "Let's go, old pal!" he said triumphantly.
"I would have missed you fellows, anyhow," Longarm sighed. As they walked toward the tent saloon's flap doorway, Longarm realized that the knife had materialized once more in Ray's right hand, and that its blade was once again against his ribs. As before, no one could see what was happening, not the way Ray had his left arm around Longarm's shoulders, and his knife hand buried beneath the tails of Longarm's frock coat.
"Once we're outside," Ray whispered into Longarm's ear, "once we're in the dark, I'm going to cut your heart out!"
As the bouncer returned to his chair, Musty took up a position on Longarm's left, but when they reached the flap doorway, he had to fall back behind the other two.
Longarm made his move. He brought his left hand around to grab hold of Ray's knife, but not before he felt the icy bite of the blade slice through his vest and shirt to pierce the skin across his ribs. Ignoring the pain, he brought his right fist up in a short, stiff uppercut. The force of the blow drove Ray back, although the cowboy still kept hold of his knife. Longarm's hand snaked out to pluck his double-action Colt from where it was dangling in Ray's belt, but before he could get a shooting grip on the gun, Ray pressed his attack. His knife came around in a deadly windmill motion to slash down toward the point where Longarm's neck joined his shoulder.
Longarm threw himself backward to the ground, managing to send two shots Ray's way before he even hit the grass. Out of the corner of his eye, Longarm saw Musty draw his Peacemaker. There was nothing he could do about it in time. Longarm prepared to take at least one of the young cowboy's bullets…
There was a loud boom, and Musty screamed. His gun fell as he dropped to his knees, his shirt in tatters, his back peppered with birdshot. The bouncer, from his high vantage point, had sent his swarm of pellets over the heads of those in the crowded tent.
Longarm looked back at Ray. The man's knife lay in the grass, forgotten, as Ray concentrated on the two holes the .44 slugs had punched into his chest. He rocked on his legs like a seasick landlubber experiencing his first sea storm, and then fell forward, his head coming to rest between Longarm's boots.
The bouncer was making his way toward the scene, trying to get through the gaping crowd, as Musty — still on his knees — picked up his Peacemaker and pointed it at where Longarm lay sprawled.
"Don't do it, boy," Longarm warned him, but Musty wasn't listening. Longarm brought his own gun around.
"Gonna kill you!" Musty babbled. He clicked back his revolver's hammer.
Longarm fired first. He aimed high and to the left, to put his round into Musty's right shoulder. The bullet's impact knocked Musty backward, off his knees. Longarm rode the .44's recoil up, then brought the gun back down into position as Musty wailed in agony, his pellet-peppered spine scraping against the rough turf. Still he held on to his cocked Peacemaker.
"Please!" Longarm begged. "Drop that damned gun!"
Musty slowly brought up his revolver. He was holding the Peacemaker in both hands now, to steady his wavering aim. "Gonna kill you…"
Longarm fired again, an instant before Musty squeezed off that one damn shot he'd been working on. Longarm's shot went true, thudding into Musty's heart. As the young cowboy died, his own bullet ploughed a furrow through the grass just a foot in front of him.
"Throw it down!" the bouncer demanded. He'd exchanged his scattergun for his derringer. Longarm guessed that was his way of saying he was serious.
Longarm set his Colt down on the grass. His side was slick with blood and stung like the devil, but he didn't think it was a deep wound. Christ, he hated a knife! "I'm a federal marshal." He told the bouncer, thinking that his cover was blown to shreds anyway. His wound hurt, and the Cattlemen's meeting was due to begin and Longarm wanted to be there to see or hear whatever Ray had expected to happen.
"If you're a lawman, where's your badge?" the bouncer asked craftily.
"My badge is in my wallet," Longarm sighed; he'd been through this routine before. He gestured toward Musty. "That one lifted it." He'd underestimated these two cowboys, it seemed, and it had almost cost him his life. Longarm dabbed gingerly at his side with his pocket handkerchief.
"How come you spit at
me if you're a lawman?"
Longarm pointed at Musty, his bloodied handkerchief balled in his hand. "He's your damned spitter, not me!"
"Then how do I know he isn't the marshal as well?" the bouncer roared triumphantly, to the general approval of the crowd. "Somebody go get Farley!" he shouted. "And you…"
"Long's the name."
"You, Long, you sit right there and wait for the real law."
Sighing to himself, Longarm got comfortable on the grass. It looked as though he wasn't going to get to stop off at the Union Saloon before the meeting, after all.
Chapter 11
Ki surveyed the action from his vantage point at the Union Saloon. He was standing shoulder to shoulder with others at one end of the fifty-foot, polished mahogany bar. He had one foot on the brass rail — a booted foot. As Longarm had remarked about the hotel, the Union was not the sort of place where they let you in barefoot.
Poor Longarm, Ki thought. He felt a little guilty about fibbing to the lawman, telling him that the Union Saloon was a dull place, and that the best area to snoop around was Canvas Town. The truth of the matter was, Ki wanted to stake out the Union himself, and didn't want Longarm around to attract attention. Well, at least Longarm would stay out of trouble in Canvas Town…
Several bartenders were being kept busy by the crowd in the saloon. They drew mugs of draft from built-in taps decorated with ornate metal spigots, or poured shots from the extensive display of bottles on the backbar beneath a wide, gleaming mirror.
Ki stared into the mirror. He was, of course, known in Sarah, and had been recognized by several people, but there were enough out-of-towners in for the roundup for Ki to blend in. Those who knew him tended not to say more than a few words to him anyway…
He was, after all, a 'chink' to those who were American, just as he was a 'round-eyes' to the Japanese. He belonged to no race, no country — but then, he never really had.
Ki stared into that mirror behind the bar. He was wearing a blue-gray tweed suit, a sky-blue cotton shirt, and a black shoestring tie. His Stetson was steel blue. On his feet he wore black, ankle-high Wellington boots. The low cut of the boots gave his feet the freedom they needed…
All around him, reflected in the mirror, people went about enjoying themselves. Ki watched them, or their reflections in the glass, but he felt as much apart from them as he would have staring at aquatic creatures below a pond's flat, gleamingly clear surface. The saloon, the oldest and largest in Sarah, was a cavernous place brightly lit by gas lamps. Gaming tables, including a wheel of fortune, took up half of the room, with tables for drinking taking up the other half. Leading up to the second floor was a wide, red-carpeted staircase. If a man wished, one of the saloon's "hostesses" would escort him to one of the many rooms on the second floor, and there she would entertain him in private.
Ki turned around to lean against the bar. He hooked his fingers in his gunbelt. Wearing a firearm was a nuisance, but it was his experience that to blend in, a man had to look like everybody else. Not wearing a gun invariably attracted attention in these parts, so he wore one.
It was not that Ki was unfamiliar with firearms, or with any weapon. The study of weaponry, of killing, had been his life's work. His life had been decreed worthless on the day he was born. The only path of honor open to him had been the path that led to his becoming a warrior.
Ki sipped at his scotch, neat. Over the years he'd developed a taste for the spirits imported from Scotland in exchange for Texas beef. Once, scotch had been hard to come by, but now imported foods and distilled spirits from Europe were becoming commonplace in the larger cities and towns of America. He sipped at his whiskey, and remembered the past.
His mother had been high-born, a member of an aristocratic family in Japan. She was beautiful and full of life — the exquisite product of centuries of culture and high, fierce, Nipponese blood. When the Yankee barbarians forced their way into Japan, his mother fell in love with one of the American adventurers who came to take his fortune from the island nation originally dubbed Jibon by the conquered Chinese. Jibon, literally meant "origin of the sun."
Against all warning, and totally realizing the horror she was causing her family, his mother took the Yankee barbarian as her husband. The family disowned her in disgrace, society shunned her in disgust and contempt. To Ki's mother, all this made no difference. So completely and totally did she love her husband that she willingly made plans to leave her homeland and journey with him to America. Ki — but that was not his name then — was born to them a year later. He was to be their only child.
For six years the child's father labored, and then, finally, his business in Nippon was done. The long years of loneliness for the mother and son were soon to turn into a future of great adventures. Both mother and son had learned English, for they had no company other than barbarian company; the Nipponese shunned them totally. The child was only able to attend school because of his father's mighty influence, but even then, Nipponese children would have nothing to do with him. It made no difference that he claimed his heritage, for he looked like a Yankee, a barbarian.
It did not matter, the child told himself countless times, every day. It did not matter. A new world waited, his father's world — surely, in the fantastic land called America, the land his father had lovingly told him about, surely in such a place a soul would not be judged merely by how he or she looked? Surely in America he would belong!
Only a month before they were due to set sail, the child's father took sick. The finest physicians were sent for, but they could do nothing. 'A disease of the blood,' they'd said, shaking their heads. A disease of the blood; the little boy who would grow up to become Ki had always thought that funny…
His father died in Nippon. His mother, heartbroken, did not know what to do to protect herself and her son. She was a simple woman, for all of her noble heritage. Her husband's holdings were looted by rival businessmen in Nippon, and in America she was totally dismissed by her husband's relatives as a bizarre anomaly in the man's past. Without his father's patronage and funds, the little boy was soon expelled from his school. Soon after that, his mother died of a broken heart.
Her funeral was attended by the curious only, for no one would consent to mourn her. "This is what comes of the barbarians," the curious laughed at her funeral. "This is what comes of foolish love…"
But the hecklers at his mother's funeral would not consent to mourn. The five-year-old hoped that his lone mourning would be enough to soothe his mother's Kami, her spirit…
Ki grinned to himself as he sipped at his whiskey. Never had he blamed his mother for falling in love. Never had he taken from his origins the moral others had taken: that love could be wrong, a foolish thing. Love could be impossible, love could be doomed never to blossom — Ki knew firsthand about such love — but this did not taint it with foolishness. A man's love was like a wild horse, like a powerful animal that had to be controlled, but could never really be broken or tamed. One could not let love interfere with one's duties, with one's vow of service. Love had to be kept in its place, but never was love foolish.
Of course, such high-flown thoughts belonged to him now, but in the days following his mother's death, the little boy that he was then had no thoughts except for thoughts of fear…
His mother's relatives had disowned her, arid so they had disowned him. He did not exist for them. He went with the other urchins to sit outside the monastery gates, as was the custom for orphans. Most were, of course, turned away by the priests who taught spiritual matters and who conducted ryu in which the bugei, the martial arts, were taught.
Ki sat with the other orphans. He sat with them at gate after monastery gate, traveling with — but never befriended by — those who were successively turned away. When it came Ki's time for an interview, the results were always the same.
"It is not that you are lacking in any spiritual, physical, or intellectual capacity," the priests would intone serenely, sitting in their fine silk robes, thei
r shaven heads glistening like ivory carvings in the lambent glow of a thousand candles. "It is because your blood is impure that we must turn you away. Despite your mother, you are not Nipponese, you are the son of a barbarian. You must go."
The little boy would trudge from the light and warmth of the monastery, to try the next one. And then the next.
And then there were no more. What the little boy had once dismissed as childish taunts, he now realized were in fact a prophecy…
"Mongrel!" his schoolmates had jeered. "You are a cur, fit only to scavenge in the gutter!"
Months passed. His clothing became rags. He fought the dogs — his fellow mongrels — for the garbage tossed in the back alleys. He dodged merchants' sticks, criminals' knives. At night he solemnly prayed that his ancestors, and especially his mother and father, were not suffering disgrace and humiliation as they looked down from heaven at his poor circumstances.
It was during his wanderings that the boy stumbled across a blind alley buried deep in the heart of the city. Here there was a shack, and in front of it, a large, strong-looking man of fierce expression. His possessions were few, as far as the little boy could tell, and most of them were shabby, except for the man's gleaming, obviously well-tended collection of blades and weapons. This man, the child knew at once, was a bushi, a warrior.
The man sat on a thin, threadbare tatami mat. His hair was long and lacquered in back, shaved in front, as was the samurai's custom. The man's clothing was of thin, threadbare cotton. The little boy stared in awe at the man's arms and torso, marbled with muscle. Off to one side was a cooking pot over a small fire. Steam rose from beneath the lid of the pot, the fumes rising toward the heavens like incense, and oh! didn't the aroma smell just as wonderful! The little boy's senses had grown quite sharp since he'd lost his home, as sharp as the constant pangs of hunger in his belly. There was chicken cooking in that pot, and pungent vegetables…
