The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  They talked a few minutes, and after a few more drinks of Webster’s whiskey, Jake was deep in the job of recounting the many things he had seen with that one good eye of his.

  “Ever watch how a man acts when he’s going to die and don’t know it?” he asked with a hint of philosophical wisdom, in his cracked voice.

  “Why,” Webster said thoughtfully, “seems to me that if a man didn’t know he was going to die, then he’d act just about the same way he would if he weren’t going to die. Of course, on the other hand, if he knew he was going to die, then you’d expect him to act somewhat different. Seems like that would be the case, anyway.”

  Webster knew how to talk to corral-fence philosophers.

  “Well, yes and no,” Jake answered sagely. “But it’s interesting just the same. Now you take a man that’s gonna die but don’t know it, and you know what? He just goes on about doing this and that as if there wasn’t anything in the world going to happen. Strange, ain’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Webster admitted. “I don’t remember that I ever saw a man acting just like that.”

  “Well, I’ll show you,” Jake said. He tapped his glass on the bar, and the bartender filled it again, while Webster dropped a coin to pay for it. “See them two men sitting across over there by the wall? Came in on the stage with you.”

  Webster recognized a man in a salt and pepper business suit the worse for wear, and another in a black broadcloth suit in a little better state of repair. He had spoken a word or two to them on the stage during the long day, but knew more about them than he cared to admit.

  “Yeah, I remember them. What about ’em?”

  “Just watch ’em,” Jake said. “Them men’s going to die in the next few days and they don’t know nothing about it. And yet they act just as though they didn’t think anything was going to happen to them. Funny, ain’t it, how men act?”

  Webster did not try to straighten Jake’s philosophy out for him, but agreed with him that it was funny. “How long you reckon they’ve got to live?” he asked, his interest picking up to the point where Jake was glad to show off his knowledge.

  “Well, just till a little while after the river goes down.”

  “Then you’re going to kill them?”

  “Me?” Jake widened his eye. “Why no, of course not. Think I’d be telling it if I was?”

  “No, reckon you wouldn’t, come to think about it.”

  “Of course not. Nobody would.”

  “Then how do you know somebody has put the mark on them? You know the hombres that’re going to do it?”

  “Why no, of course not. Think I’d tell it if I did?”

  “No, reckon you wouldn’t, come to think about it.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then maybe you’re wrong. Maybe they’re going to go on and die of old age, just like you and me and everybody else.”

  “Don’t be loco,” Jake said scornfully. “You ever hear of a deputy United States Marshal dying of old age in this country? Ever hear of anybody carrying a load of gold through the Territory living to a ripe old age?”

  “No, I don’t reckon I did, come to think about it.”

  “See,” Jake said triumphantly. “Goes to show I can see more out of this one eye of mine than you young squirts can out of two. I knowed that marshal from a long time back—don’t matter how I happened to know him—and I know the weight of gold when I lift a box of it into the boot of that stage of mine. Not to mention that I know that there ain’t no other kind of men that wears dude clothes like them, that’s going to be traipsing up into them hills across the river. Them two fools is just begging for somebody to put a bullet right where their suspenders cross and take that gold. I never seed the like! And to watch them, you’d never think that they was digging their own graves, would you?”

  “Maybe you’re wrong. They might have iron washers in that box, or horseshoes.”

  “You loco?” Jake snorted. “What do you think they was escorted down to the stage by two shotgun guards for? To guard a box of washers or horseshoes? Men from the Fort Worth bank. I know. And there’s some kind of payment due the Choctaws; everybody knows about it. That’s what makes it such a damn fool play. Them Indians won’t see hide or hair of that money.”

  His interest now at high pitch, Webster took pains not to show it. “Maybe you’re just afraid of ghosts,” he said. “Maybe they’re not government men, and maybe they’re not going up into the Territory.”

  “No?” Jake said scornfully. “Friend, you can’t read signs very well, can you? What’d they come in here with Faulkner for if they hadn’t been arranging with him for the trip? Tell me that.”

  “Maybe I could if I knew who Faulkner was.”

  Jake pointed a dirty finger up the bar. “See that long beanpole up at the far end of the bar, drinking strawberry soda pop? That’s J. B. Faulkner. He’s a trader and commission man. He runs wagon trains up into the Territory, selling his own goods or hauling other people’s, anything there’s a dollar in. He’s what you call a responsible business man; he neither smokes nor drinks nor swears nor chews tobacco. He’s a credit to the tribe, I reckon some folks might say.”

  “So you think that pair will go up into the Territory in a Faulkner train, and won’t get there.”

  “Probably. Unless Faulkner sends Ike Flint along with him. Ike could take care of them or anybody else, including the cavalry, probably.”

  “Ike sounds like somewhat of a man. Who is he?”

  “Ike is that big ox drinking with them settlers down in the middle of the bar. He is what you’d call a grizzly bear that has learned to walk on his hind legs and to talk—in a way. He is three men rolled into one; his fists are made of cast iron, and when he walks, the ground shakes. When he speaks, it bursts your ear drums, and when you’re in his way you had better crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you. Otherwise, he’s as harmless and gentle as a mountain lion with a foot caught in a trap.”

  “And he works for Faulkner?”

  “He’s Faulkner’s head teamster.”

  The idea for which Webster had been keeping his mind open came to him then. It had been developing unknown to him until the last part of it dropped into place. And then he knew what his first step was to be. He played with the idea, weighed his chances of doing anything with it, while he speculated on the form of the man called Ike Flint.

  Jake’s description fitted the man very well. Flint was built like an overgrown beer keg with legs, thick through the chest, rounded in the middle so that his arms had to hang somewhat outward when they were beside him, and with legs that seemed too short for him. He had small eyes in a face almost hidden by a dirty red beard, and his voice was deep and arrogant as he talked with the pilgrims who were buying his drinks and listening to his tales of the dangers of the Territory, dangers he was saying that practically nobody but himself had ever lived through.

  “Jake,” Webster said with sudden decision, “I never liked a man that thought he was the top man on the totem pole. Do you?”

  “Then you wouldn’t like Ike.”

  “That’s right, Jake. I do not love Ike.” He unbuckled his gunbelt and handed it to the stage driver. “Here hold this for me. I’m going to ask Ike to shut up. Reckon he’ll do it?”

  “You ain’t that crazy, are you?” Jake said, blinking, and looking down at the weapon in his hand. “You’ll need this gun and another one if you’re thinking of telling him to shut up.”

  “That, my friend, is a question I’m not sure about. I want to find out where all that noise comes from that pours out of his mouth.”

  “You’ll find out what you’re stuffed with,” Jake said mournfully. “He’ll tear you to bits and throw you to the dogs. Then who’ll buy my drinks?”

  “I wonder.”

  Webster walked up the bar along the backs of the men until
he came to the point where Ike Flint was holding forth on his adventures in the Territory, and there he listened a while, measuring Flint’s body size, taking the measure of his strength and of his mind, and of his moral stature.

  Flint was talking. “—So those two rannies up there in that mountain hideout pulled their guns on me at the same time. There I was with them guys on each side of me and their guns in my ribs. I says, are you guys kidding, thinking you can take my money away from me? Well this big towheaded one says you’re either stepping outside with us or we’re dragging your dead body out by them whiskers of yours. Suit yourself. So I says, it’s a shame your daddies didn’t teach you no manners. I’m plumb resentful of people that makes remarks about my whiskers. And with that I set my whiskey cup down and grabbed both of them by the hair of the head at the same time as I stepped back. Well, I yanked their heads together so hard they popped like cocoanuts. Knocked ’em both out cold as a cucumber, just bouncing their heads together. Then I picked ’em both up by the shirt collars and threw them out the door. This here man that run the place took one look at them rannies and he says to me, they shore are out like a light. They look like they had been drugged. They was, I tells him. I drug them both out and threw them in the road.”

  The pilgrims standing by Flint laughed, and one of them said with a touch of admiration. “You must be a pretty strong man.”

  “I ain’t exactly as weak as a day-old colt, if I do say it myself,” Flint admitted. “And I ain’t partial to people making snide remarks about my whiskers.”

  Webster squeezed in to the bar beside Flint.

  “You seem to admire your own whiskers a little more than the rest of us do.”

  Flint saw him for the first time, and was slightly startled by the statement. His small brown eyes snapped while he tried to read the meaning in Webster’s remark. Finally he answered, smelling the possibility of a fight.

  “They happen to suit me. Don’t they suit you?”

  A silence fell on the room, and then Webster answered.

  “Well now, I don’t think they do.”

  “And what’s the matter with my whiskers?”

  Webster’s hand encircled a glass of beer on the bar before him. “They’re filthy from the lies you’ve strained through them. They need washing.”

  He flung the glass of beer in Flint’s face. Flint shook his head with his eyes closed. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his gray flannel shirt, and the frothy beer dripped from his beard.

  While he wiped the beer out of his eyes with the heels of his two hands, the crowd, hungering for a fight, became suddenly silent, their eyes moving from Webster to Flint. Knowing Flint, they waited for his bull voice to explode in a roar, and for him to be on Webster. The silence became tight as a fiddlestring.

  But Flint was in no hurry. He took his time wiping his eyes. He groped for a red bandanna handkerchief in his hip pocket, and took a long time wiping the beer out of his beard. And during those tense moments, his small brown eyes were on Webster’s face. Then he looked around the room in a kind of measuring glance, and back at Webster, and Webster could see the puzzlement in the man’s mind. Flint was trying to figure out the meaning of this gratuitous attack. It was a new thing to him to have a man insult him, and in his canny mind a suspicion flashed some kind of a signal warning that there was something back of it.

  His mind seemed unable to adjust itself to such action, and he blinked at Webster again and again, as though trying to read the meaning behind it.

  Finally he asked, “What did you do that for?”

  It was as though he hoped Webster would give him some kind of explanation that would resolve his puzzlement.

  “Because I didn’t like the damned lies that you’ve been pouring out of that crop of dirty red hair on your face. Isn’t that reason enough?”

  “No. There’s some other reason. There’s got to be! A man don’t just come up and yank my whiskers for no reason at all.”

  “Like this, you mean?” Webster’s hand shot out, his fingers lacing in the man’s red beard. As he jerked the man’s head forward, the open palm of his free hand slapped the man’s face with a sound like a rifle shot. Flint jerked backward, and Webster suddenly released his whiskers.

  Flint’s weight now free, carried over backward out of balance, and he fell on his shoulders in the dirty sawdust covering the floor.

  He sat spraddle-legged, bracing himself with one hand, the other rammed into the cuspidor used by the tobacco-chewers at the bar.

  He looked down at the brass cuspidor, then up at Webster, and it seemed to take a long moment for him to realize what had happened to him.

  Then realization came; his face went black, and that did it.

  He picked up the cuspidor and flung it at Webster’s head. Webster ducked and it went crashing into the big back-bar mirror, shattering the glass into a thousand tinkling shards.

  Then a noise like thunder came out of Flint’s throat, and he was on his feet rushing at Webster.

  CHAPTER III

  Knockdown and Drag Out

  Webster waited until the last moment, then stepped aside to avoid Flint’s outstretched arms. The crowd had quickly made way from the bar to give them room, and now as Webster stepped aside, Flint came up hard against the bar rail in a dead stop. Before he could turn, Webster’s fist crunched into his ear, spinning him half around.

  Flint threw his back against the bar, shook his head and saw Webster within four feet of him. Bracing a foot against the bar, Flint threw himself forward at Webster, arms outflung. Webster sidestepped again, but not before Flint’s hand hooked into the open collar of his shirt.

  Caught, Webster felt himself pulled in as Flint’s two arms went around him in a bear hug. Webster threw blows at the man’s head, and Flint buried his face in Webster’s chest, so that Webster’s fists crashed only against the solid bone of his skull, completely ineffectual. The blows hurt his hands worse than they hurt Flint.

  Webster twisted in the hold, but Flint’s head was pressing his chest backward while his arms were bringing his middle forward. Flint was cutting off his wind, slowly bending him over backward.

  Webster used his feet, back-stepping fast, so that Flint had to follow him up or be pulled down. Backing thus, Webster went into the poker table and knocked it over. The players were already scrambling out of their chairs, and now as the table went over it carried cards and chips and drinking glasses to the floor in a pile as it landed on its edge.

  Webster suddenly took his weight off his feet, so that his body went downward, bringing Flint’s body forward over him. Flint would have had his head cracked on the table edge if he hadn’t broken his hold and righted himself.

  But Webster was on the floor under him, and Flint lifted his foot to sink a boot in Webster’s face. Webster rolled over and caught the sharp point of the boot on the side of his head, feeling himself knocked dizzy for the moment. He kept rolling, and thus escaped the second kick that Flint delivered.

  But now his hands were free, and he caught Flint’s ankle while Flint’s foot was off the floor. He lifted it with a sharp jerk, and Flint landed on his back on the floor. By the time he got to his feet, Webster was already up and brandishing one of the poker players’ chairs.

  As Flint came on him, Webster lifted the chair and brought it down over Flint’s head. The man’s thick skull came up through the rungs, so that the legs of the broken chair hung around his neck like a necklace of kindling wood. Flint’s face was bloody and his eyes blinking as he cursed and yanked the chair legs off his neck.

  He held one of the legs in his hand after he had got himself free of it, and his eyes went to it and lingered on it lovingly. He hefted it in his hand as a smile came over his face, moving the weapon like a woodsman trying the feel of an axe. Then he turned his gaze to Webster, and the smile on his face broadened.

  “Now,” he said
. “We’ll see, my friend! We’ll see!”

  The saloon crowd had made a wide circle around them, and some of the men had turned about and sat up on the bar for a better view. None of them were saying a word, all of them were breathless with the excitement that gripped the room.

  Webster had the chair back in his hand, all that was left of it, except the one leg with a protruding rung, which Flint was swinging like a warclub.

  Flint used the hickory chair leg like an axe, swinging it over his head and bringing it down as though to cleave Webster’s skull. Webster caught the blow with the chair back, then dropped it low and sent it into Flint’s ribs, knocking a grunt out of the man.

  Flint fell back against the bar, clutching it with one hand while he drew the wind back into his lungs, his head hanging downward and his mouth open full wide.

  Webster waited while he had caught his breath. And then Flint again had his back to the bar, raising his chair leg. But instead of hefting it, he threw it suddenly, so that it came at Webster in a spinning motion which he could not dodge.

  The chair leg caught Webster on the side of the head with a solid blow that knocked him down, blind, and with a head full of stars. When he opened his eyes he saw Flint coming toward him, and heard Flint growling his words of victory.

  Webster rolled over in time to keep Flint from kicking his ribs in. He scrambled back of the overturned table to give himself time to get back to his feet. And when he was erect, Flint was already around the table after him.

  Webster had lost his weapon in his fall, and now both men were unarmed again. Flint lost no time in pressing the attack. He lowered his head like a mad bull and charged in, his two arms moving like the drive rods of a locomotive.

  His blows hurt. Webster felt them in his body and on his head. They were hard and solid, like the blows of a sledge hammer, sending their messages of pain to his backbone and up to the base of his skull. They made him dizzy; they drove his senses from him. He had his own fists going, but he was conscious of the fact that they were doing little damage.