“Now there’s a rare outlook,” Tyrone said. “When it comes to this lazy outfit, that is. Mostly they jes’ sit around playin’ cards or cleanin’ their guns. Sometimes doing some target shootin’ so’s they can go back and clean their guns some more.”
“Man who does gun work for a living has to take good care of the tool of his trade,” Buckhorn pointed out.
“Yeah, and I keep my pots and pans clean, too,” Tyrone snorted. “But sooner or later I also gotta cook with ’em!”
Tyrone did a thorough job of taking him around, showing him the washup facilities, the grub shack, and where he could target shoot. He pointed the way to the outhouses, told him the meal routines, and introduced him to the rest of the gun hands milling about.
Some were playing cards at the big round table near the front of the bunkhouse, some were reading tattered old magazines, a few were just lying or sitting around smoking cigarettes or drinking coffee to pass the time. Their introductions to Buckhorn were acknowledged by brief eye contact, simple grunts, and a few gruff “hullos.” Nothing more elaborate or welcoming. He had crossed paths with a few men in the past, a couple others he knew by name. As a whole, they seemed to add up to a pack of reasonably seasoned veterans, though not exactly the cream of the crop.
As it turned out, he was in the grub shack kitchen with Tyrone by the time Sweetwater got back. Not peeling potatoes, just sitting off to one side making small talk.
“They seemed willing to tolerate me,” Buckhorn summed up for the gunman, “but at the same time I don’t get a warm feeling they’re ready to nominate me to head up the Saturday-night singalong.”
Sweetwater grinned. “Probably just as well. I got a feeling your singing voice is about as pleasant as a bullfrog’s.”
“My horse likes it fine,” Buckhorn countered. “Leastways he don’t buck me off when I take to singing out on the trail.”
“Well, before you get the urge to bust into song around me, consider yourself bucked outta here,” said Tyrone. “Move along, the both of you. I gotta have elbow room to work my cooking magic.”
Buckhorn and Sweetwater retreated to the bunkhouse. The lengthening shadows of evening fell over them as they passed between buildings.
“In case you’d like to know, I gave your two pals a right proper send-off,” Sweetwater said once they were inside and had moved on past the tableful of card players.
“Good riddance to bad garbage, is all I can say,” replied Buckhorn.
When they reached the bunk he’d selected for himself, Buckhorn stopped short. Laying in the middle of it was Blevins’s shotgun. Buckhorn cut his eyes over to Sweetwater.
“Seems to keep finding its way back to you,” said the young gunman, answering the unasked question. “Reckon that means you’re best suited for it.”
“Next you’re gonna tell me Blevins presented it to me as a gift.”
Sweetwater shrugged. “Let’s just say he’s all through with it.”
Buckhorn kept regarding him.
Changing subjects somewhat airily, Sweetwater said, “I stopped by the main house when I got back. Boy, is the old man in a tizzy now. Seems he got a report about some goings-on in town that really tied his tail in a knot. He wants me to take a couple men and ride in first thing in the morning to check up on what he heard. I told him I’d take you. That’d be enough.”
“What kind of report did Wainwright get?” Buckhorn said.
Sweetwater rolled his eyes. “Crazy talk about some fella who’s showed up with a magic stick or pointer of some kind who claims he can use it to locate underground water. Did you ever hear anything so loco? In spite of that, he’s got a whole passel of the town folks all stirred up, half believing he knows what he’s doing.”
“I’ve heard of his kind. They show up wherever there’s drought and misery, trying to make money off the hopes of the desperate.”
“You ever hear of any of ’em actually striking water?”
“Can’t say as I have.”
“Well, we’ll see how far this one plans on taking his act. If it’s farther than Wainwright wants to allow—and that wouldn’t be none too far, I don’t reckon—we’ll have to see to it that he hits a dry hole.”
“First thing in the morning you say?”
“Uh-huh. We’ll have ourselves some supper here in a bit. After that, if you’re a card player and worth beans at it, I’ll tell you that sorry bunch over there is always good for some quick pocket jingle. Be a way to kill some time and make money doing it before it’s time to turn in. We can head out tomorrow after a good night’s sleep . . . since it won’t get interrupted by you roaming out after Blevins and Poudry.”
Buckhorn frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean? Why the hell would I be roaming after that pair? I want ’em as far gone as possible with no desire to ever lay eyes on ’em again.”
Sweetwater smiled slyly. “But what you got even less of a desire for is them to get anywhere near that widow lady and her daughter again. And you know damn well, just as sure as I did, that’s where they would have beelined for as soon as I peeled off from ’em. That’s why you had every intention of slipping outta here tonight, the first chance you got, and catching up to make sure they’d never be able to follow through with their low-down plans.”
Buckhorn’s eyes went again to the shotgun on his bunk. “So you took care of ’em for me.”
“For you. For Widow Laudermilk. Hell, for the good of mankind. Don’t tell me the world’s any worse off with those two scraped off of it.”
“Wainwright know what you did?”
“Not by me telling him, but he’s a pretty shrewd ol’ rascal. Don’t ever sell him short on that. I got a hunch that he had a pretty fair hunch what those curs might try and what you’d probably do about it. You heard what he said about the bad treatment of vulnerable women and such. He meant that. Me, I feel the same. As you obviously do.” Sweetwater showed his teeth in a wide, crooked grin. “Hell, we’re all just a bunch of shiny knights galloping around the countryside slaying evildoers and saving damsels in distress.”
Buckhorn shook his head. “I think you must’ve taken a chaw of Blevins’s locoweed-laced tobacco before you saw him off. In any case, I reckon I’m obliged to you. At the very least, you saved me some lost sleep.”
“So you was gonna go after them rascals, wasn’t you?”
“It was on my mind,” Buckhorn admitted.
“I knew it. I saw it in your eyes when you handed me Blevins’s shotgun.” Sweetwater’s expression turned somber. “But listen. You feeling obliged for what I done ain’t necessary. I’ve never said a proper thanks to you for saving my bacon earlier today in that dry wash. I’d ’ve been a goner for sure, if you hadn’t come along when you did.”
“You already squared that,” Buckhorn reminded him, “when you had to shoot the old man off my back because I failed to take care of his son proper in the first place.”
Sweetwater shook his head. “No, I don’t see it as being that clean. You were spinning on the old man and had a good chance of putting him down on your own. I just lent a hand, that’s all. But the fix they had me in ahead of that—I had no chance. It was just a matter of time before they would’ve got me. I see it as me still being beholden to you.”
“You’re a stubborn cuss, aren’t you?” Buckhorn arched a brow. “I guess the only thing for it now is to agree to disagree. Otherwise we’ll end up arguing half the night away and all I’ll accomplish is wasting the sleep you gained me.”
CHAPTER 33
“The thing about drunks like me,” Carl Orndecker was saying, “is that everybody says how we shouldn’t drink at all because we aren’t able to stop after just one or two social drinks. That’s not really the problem. Speaking strictly for myself, I guess I should say, the problems usually start to arrive after I don’t stop drinking after one or two days!” With that, he tossed back the shot of tequila he’d been holding in one hand and then let out a loud laugh as he lowered the emptie
d glass.
Next to Carl, leaning on the battered old bar of the nameless Mexville cantina just across the border from the south end of Wagon Wheel, Martin Goodwin listened and looked on with a guardedly dubious expression. Other voices and bursts of loud laughter filled the smoky, crowded cantina and drifted out into the dusty nighttime street. Off in one corner a mariachi band was playing poorly but loudly and with much energy. The mood throughout seemed lighthearted and happy.
Only Goodwin appeared a bit reserved, not quite caught up in the merry atmosphere although the plump, pretty brown-skinned young woman keeping herself plastered to his right arm certainly was doing her best to put him in a better mood. Her low-cut, off-the-shoulder blouse was showing a voluptuous amount of cleavage and the warmth of her large, cushiony breasts rubbing against his arm made it clear they were quite unrestrained under the thin fabric of the blouse.
“You look decidedly skeptical, Goodwin, about my well-researched discourse on the subject of drinking,” Carl said. “Are you yourself such an expert on the subject that you can debate my observations? Or is it the opposite? Are you so ill exposed to the subject matter that you haven’t the basis for a firm opinion one way or the other?”
Goodwin replied, “If you mean have I done my own share of drinking, the answer is yes. I’m hardly a teetotaler.”
“You couldn’t prove it by me. Not so far, at least,” Carl said as he refilled his glass. “This will be my third, You haven’t finished your first. Tequila not to your taste? You want to get warmed up with some wine? Maybe some beer?”
“The tequila’s fine,” Goodwin said. “It’s just that I usually don’t approach my drinking like a race to see how fast I can get smashed.”
Carl laughed again. “Well, I do. And my tolerance to the damn devil’s brew is so high I have the luxury—or curse, if you will—of being able to run for a very long time before I reach the point of getting, in your words, smashed. Isn’t that right, darling?” He turned to the brown-skinned lovely on his left arm, a close twin to the girl with Goodwin and equally free with her display of cleavage, and planted a hungry wet kiss on her lushly accommodating lips.
When the kiss ended, the young woman threw her head back, tossing her long hair, and laughed gleefully. “No smashed for Mucho Carl—never for a long time!”
When the two men first entered the establishment, the two cantina girls had appeared immediately. Carl had introduced them as Conchita and Rosalita. Goodwin couldn’t keep straight which was which, but it didn’t really matter. Carl himself generally referred to them simply as his chiquitas most of the time.
When they gushed all over him, calling him Mucho Carl, he’d had to explain somewhat sheepishly that this pertained to how much he could drink and how often he elected to take one—or sometimes both—of his chiquitas to a private room.
Turning from the kiss back to his tequila, Carl promptly knocked back the glass he had just refilled. Goodwin joined in, then seized the bottle and began to refill both glasses.
Carl leaned closer and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “If we’re going to make this work, damn it, you’re going to have to do your part to sell it. Don’t worry about me. I’m in control and I’ll stay that way. But they’re used to seeing me act in a certain manner and I’ve got to stick with that or the whole thing will fall flat. You’re the water dowser who’s been poking your stick all over town up north, and now you’re down here to have some fun because you got plenty of Don Pedro’s money to spend. Start acting like it!”
As soon as Goodwin had their glasses filled, he and Carl held them up and clicked them together.
“Viva Don Pedro!” Goodwin proclaimed before tossing his back.
Carl followed suit, hesitating slightly because he was caught off guard by the suddenness with which Goodwin had brought out the use of Don Pedro’s name. On second thought, maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea. Why waste time about it?
“You got that right, buddy,” he said, grabbing the bottle to pour their next refill. “Since the old don is paying you so handsomely to work your water magic for him, you’re damn right we’ll raise a glass to him. Hell, he’s footing the bill, right? Viva Don Pedro, indeed!”
Toward the middle of the room, two narrow-faced, dark-complexioned men sat over their own bottle of tequila and quickly caught the mention of Don Pedro’s name. They exchanged thoughtful glances through the smoke that curled up from the dark cigarillos hanging from the corners of their mouths.
Over the course of the next two or three hours they heard the loud gringos speak the name of Don Pedro several more times . . . as did numerous others within the boisterous little cantina.
CHAPTER 34
“Yeah, I know the fella you’re talking about,” Sheriff Banning said. “The way he started drawing a crowd by yesterday afternoon, I couldn’t hardly miss him.”
“So what did you do about it?” Sweetwater wanted to know.
The sheriff frowned. “What do you mean, what did I do about it? What was I supposed to do about it? Wasn’t like he was breaking any laws or anything.”
“Wouldn’t you call it disturbing the peace, stirring up a bunch of people that way?”
Banning’s frown deepened. “Wasn’t like he was stirring ’em up in a bad way, like a riot or anything. Basically, they were just flocked around, curiouslike, watching him parade around poking his stick this way and that.”
“And the stick is the thing that’s supposed to lead him to the water he’s promising?”
“I don’t know that he’s ‘promising’ to find water. But, yeah, the stick is the thing that’s supposed to lead him to it if there’s any there.”
Sweetwater leaned forward in his chair, eager, insistent. “There’s the thing. Right there! Flimflamming folks like that—there’s some kind of legal word for it, but I can’t remember what it is. Ain’t that something you can act on? He’s getting their hopes all built up and then, when he’s got ’em practically panting like a dog, he’ll be asking for money to finish finding the water. The water that ain’t there, as anybody with a lick of sense already knows. Once this trickster gets some money gathered up, he won’t be there neither. He’ll be gone like the last drop of rain. That’s the flimflam!”
Banning arched a brow skeptically, leaning back in the chair behind his office’s narrow, cluttered desk. Sweetwater, along with Buckhorn, was seated before the desk. The sheriff had poured coffee for everybody.
Just about the worst he’d ever tasted, Buckhorn judged.
The holding cells were empty. Outside, the main street of Wagon Wheel was coming alive in a wash of morning sun that was already hot and promising to grow steadily hotter as the day progressed.
“Well now,” said the sheriff, “I appreciate you riding all the way into town to warn me about the ways of a flimflam artist, Mr. Sweetwater. But I’ve gotta say, I’m a little surprised by your deep concern.” His eyes cut to Buckhorn. “And I’m even more surprised at the allegiances you seem to have taken up, mister.”
“Never mind about his allegiances or my concern,” Sweetwater snapped. “What your concern oughta be is knowing that General Wainwright don’t like this nonsense about people getting all het up over a new water source.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You figure it out.”
“Look, just because Wainwright owns most of the land in every direction, he don’t own the water that might be down in the earth and he don’t own this town.”
Sweetwater stood up. “Apparently you’re forgetting what he does own around here. When we get back to the ranch, I’ll have to remind him how forgetful you seem to ’ve gotten lately. In the meantime, me and Buckhorn are gonna take a stroll around town. Might be fun to see the show this dinker or dipper or whatever he calls himself puts on.”
“Be careful about starting anything, Sweetwater. I’ve cut you plenty of slack in the past, but folks have been suffering and worrying about the drought for quite a spell
now. The hope they’ve raised over this dowser maybe coming up with something is pretty high. They won’t stand for anybody giving him a hard time.”
Sweetwater paused in the doorway and shot a hard look back over his shoulder. “That sounds to me like the makings of a mob, Sheriff. If they rile up over me and my pal asking a few questions out of simple curiosity, I sure hope you or one of your deputies are around to save our hides. Elsewise, keeping in mind your advice not to start anything, if there’s any trouble—strictly as a matter of self-defense, you understand—we might have to end it.”
* * *
Martin Goodwin paused in the lobby of the Traveler’s Rest Hotel as he contemplated the brilliant sunlight pouring into the street beyond the open front door. His face scrunched in a sour expression barely an improvement over the pale, haggard, bloodshot-eyed way it had looked a few minutes before. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “My head already feels like it’s going to explode. All that bright sunlight out there will set off the fuse for certain.”
Standing beside the worse-for-wear dowser, Carl Orndecker, looking fresh and rested, urged, “Aw, go on. It’s like taking the plunge into a pool of chilly water. Absorb the shock all at once and then the worst of it is over. Your eyes will water a little bit at first and then you’ll be fine.”
“I feel about a million miles from fine.”
“You think you invented the hangover or something?” Carl said. “You had one night of moderately heavy drinking and got three or four hours of sleep. Hell, that’s nothing. I’ve been on benders that lasted for weeks and came out of ’em alive. You’ll be surprised how quick you snap back once you make up your mind to move on past it.”
“I’m not sure there’s any snap back in me.”
“Oh, sure there is. There’d better be. If we didn’t generate enough notice with our little act last night, we may have to go back tonight and do it all over again.”
Goodwin gave him a sidelong glance with eyes as big around as silver dollars.
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