Tiger's Chance

by H. V. Elkin

  “You figure it’d do any good for me to go talk to her?” Bean asked.

  Hansen sensed this was only a preamble, the torero dancing with the bull before the moment of truth. He played along. “About what?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Bean said, scratching some more. “I could use a woman around here. Since my daughters moved away, I’ve had to take my meals at the boarding house. I could maybe make it worth the girl’s while to come work for me.”

  Hansen’s expression did not change for a moment. Then he put on a very thoughtful face as though seriously considering the possibilities. But behind his mask, he was amazed at Bean. The man had no concept of the circus and the appeal of it to a girl like Molly Barrie. Bean seemed to have no awareness of anything outside Langtry, except for his worship of the legendary Lily Langtry. He was the proverbial big frog in a small pond, and he had become so big, so puffed up with a sense of his own importance, that he could actually entertain the notion that a beautiful, talented girl like Molly Barrie would consider spending the rest of her life in a place like Langtry. With a man like Roy Bean. “Well ...” Hansen hesitated, looking even more serious than before, “I just wonder ...”

  Bean looked at Hansen as though prepared to hang on every word the young man was going to say. But that was a mask, too. What Bean was not showing Hansen was how well Hansen had been sized up. From the moment the animal trainer got to the porch, Bean knew what kind of man he was. Hansen was a go-getter and an opportunist. And he was a man easily fooled, too. A man who wanted to give orders and be in charge of things. So right now Hansen was trying to string Bean along and see how he could use Bean. Hansen probably would not mind getting even for losing three dollars. The man was a rich lode for Bean. He would be easy to manipulate. All Bean had to do was appeal to Hansen’s greed and Hansen would dance any jig Bean wanted.

  “It’s not like I’m a poor man,” Bean prompted Hansen.

  “No . . .” Hansen nodded. “Not likely at these prices.”

  “I ain’t counted recently,” Bean said. “But say a few thousand sheep. What do you figure they’d be worth?”

  “A few thousand?”

  “Say fifteen.”

  “Fifteen thousand sheep?!”

  “Give or take a thousand. They’d be worth something, wouldn’t they?”

  “Well, Judge, yes, I guess they would be worth something:’

  “Then there’s the place here. Usually not as quiet as it is right now. Lots of drinkin’ goes on in Langtry. Gamblin’, too. And the trains stop long enough for men to come by and wet their whistles. There’s money in all that.”

  “Yes,” Hansen nodded seriously, “I guess there might be.”

  “And the court stuff, that supports itself on the fines. There’s that, too. Guess I must have some money lyin’ around somewheres. Don’t buy much for myself.”

  Hansen looked around the room. “Yes, I can see that.”

  “So if it’s money the young lady’d be concerned about, well ...”

  Hansen licked his lips and took another swallow of beer. “Well, Judge, this is the way I see it. If Molly wanted a lot of money, she wouldn’t be traveling with the Maroney Circus.”

  “She don’t want money?” Bean pretended to be surprised. “What else is there?”

  “Well, there’s the circus and working with her horses in front of a crowd. She’s already got what she wants, I think. I guess the only way you’d have any say about Molly is if you owned the circus.”

  “You figure the boss’s the one to talk to then?”

  “No, Maroney wouldn’t want to sell. I’m sure you could make him a handsome offer, Judge, a very respectable offer. But the circus is his life. And a man doesn’t sell his life, does he?”

  Bean shook his head and sighed. “Guess not.”

  “Not without a lot of provocation, anyway.”

  “Business been good, has it?”

  “Yes, it has, unfortunately for you. But who knows? That could all change in another year. Think you could wait that long?”

  “Oh, I could wait all right. But I don’t know anything about runnin’ a circus.”

  “I do,” Hansen said.

  Bean pretended to be discouraged. “Oh, I don’t know . . .”

  “Don’t be hasty, Judge. It just might be our lucky day that I happened to walk into your saloon, that you happened to see Molly stick her head out a train window, that I’ve got knowledge and you’ve got money.”

  “Well, guess the least I can do is listen to what you got to say, but I got to tell you right off, I don’t put much stock in it.”

  “Now there’s a lot more chances up the road, Judge. Maybe the circus will have another good year and Maroney won’t be any closer to selling than he is right now. But just supposing luck changes for Maroney this year. Time we pass through Langtry next year, he may be in a different frame of mind. Now if that were the case, how’d you feel about you and I going into a partnership and taking over the show?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’d know how to run it. And with some of your money, we could make it a bigger circus. Langtry could be its home base. It would put the town on the map.”

  Bean seemed to get his dander up. “The town is on the map!”

  “I mean in a bigger way. Langtry! Home of the Bean Circus! Greatest show west of the Pecos!”

  “The Lily Langtry Circus!” Bean shouted, seeming to get enthusiastic about the idea.

  “Right! The Lily Langtry Circus! Starring Judge Roy Bean’s protégée, the beautiful and talented Miss Molly Barrie ... the second most beautiful and talented woman in the world!”

  Bean slammed his fist on the bar. “Bedamned!”

  “Is it a deal?”

  Bean shook his head and chuckled. “Like to say yes. Like to. But everything’s ridin’ on a big maybe. You see about gettin’ the circus to play Langtry next year, then we can talk some more. If the maybe’s come through and the show ain’t doin’ so good, then maybe we can make a deal. But if the show has another good year, well, there’s no sense in wastin’ a handshake on it now.”

  “That’s good enough for me, Judge.”

  “Okay. That’ll be a dollar for the beer.”

  “I thought it was on the house.”

  “That one was.” Bean brought out another bottle. “But it’s a dollar for this one you’re gonna want to take on the train with you.”

  The train whistle blew.

  Hansen pulled out a silver dollar and threw it on the bar. He figured the investment was worth it. “See you next year, Judge.” He picked up the beer and started out the door. “And don’t you worry. I think luck’s going to be on our side.” And he was gone.

  Bean chuckled to himself, got out a deck of Spanish cards and dealt some monte on the bar, knowing what each card was before he turned it over. “Luck!” he said to himself. “What’s that? Some kind of highball?”

  John Cutler sat in a corner of the Elkhorn Bar in Ten-sleep, Wyoming. It was almost a year later and hundreds of miles from Langtry, too far in time and distance for any betting man to gamble there was going to be a connection.

  Cutler liked the Elkhorn, probably better than the bar in Thermopolis, or the one in Cheyenne. All three saloons, plus one in Casper and another in Laramie where Cutler had not been yet, were owned by a lady named Iris Shannon.

  To Cutler, luck was not some kind of highball. It was arriving at one of Iris’s places and finding out she was there and not at one of the other four saloons instead. And it happened often enough to be spooky that Iris was in the saloon where Cutler settled down. She was in Tensleep now. In fact, she was over there at the bar talking to some customers, her flaxen head bent over a newspaper one of the men was showing her. Cutler had a lot of respect for Iris. A lot of affection, too, but he kept that under control. There was something he had to do before he could even think about getting seriously involved with a woman. Not that it seemed to matter to Iris. She would not see Cutler for week
s or months at a time, and when they met no questions were asked about what had happened in the meantime. It was not that Iris was not interested. She was. She would be happy to listen to anything Cutler wanted to tell her, unless it happened to be about another woman. She would not find that very interesting or pleasant and would rather not hear about it. Anything else, though. It was only that she was not the type to ask questions. You never knew when a question would touch a sore spot inside a man as troubled as Cutler.

  Cutler did not look troubled now. He had had his bath and shave and got out of the stinking trail clothes and into some new ones, but still wearing, as always, his Colt .44 on his right hip and his Case sheath knife on the left. He had finished off half a bottle of his favorite Kentucky bourbon. And he was feeling human again, and almost at peace with himself. Iris Shannon was in residence in his favorite bar. It was the closest thing he had to home, next to that spring wagon in which he slept most of the nights of his life in hundreds of places from Montana to Mexico, from Oklahoma to Arizona.

  But everyone knows about John Cutler. Cutler who grew up among Comanches in the Oklahoma panhandle, then graduated to Federal Marshal in the same area working under Isaac Parker, the hanging judge. He figured he had had four lives so far. One was when he was a kid and learning from the Indians. The second was when he was a lawman and really got his reputation started by cleaning up the Boone Gang and bringing in the Thomas boys. Folks still talked about those things. Cutler’s third life was as a rancher in Arizona—after he got tired of hunting and killing men for a living. His fourth life was the one he was living now, a professional trapper. A trapper and hunter who specialized in rogue animals, the kind that killed for no reason, the kind that had gone mad and abandoned the ways of their kind. He was good at it, too. Good enough to be able to get a thousand dollars a job. He did it because he thought it had to be done, that somebody had to do it, not because it gave him any pleasure. People knew he was a conservationist at heart and had lived his beliefs by taking on the dirty work that had to be done in the name of conservation. He was no parlor philosopher. He expressed himself through action. These things everyone knew. These things you could mention in front of Cutler.

  Then there was the other part, the part that no one with any sense would bring up. But it was just as well known as the rest of it. It was the reason Cutler went from his third to his fourth life, from the settled life of an Arizona rancher to the lonely, wandering life of a rogue hunter. It was that the woman with whom he had lived on that Arizona ranch, his wife Doreen, had been killed by a rogue grizzly. It was that he found her dying, her arm a bloody stump, her breast punctured and ripped, and she died in his arms. It was that she had been carrying their child in her womb. It was that the bear had gone mad because Cutler had failed to check his traps one day, and that gave the grizzly time to chew off its foot and get away to murder Doreen. Now in Cutler’s search for rogue animals, there was always one in particular he was after. He could not rest until that rogue was dead, and maybe not even after that. He would not be concerned, though, about what would keep him going after he had got his bear. There was no life or reality yet on the other side of Cutler’s obsession, no seeing beyond it.

  Among the things people said about Cutler, these were true. There were other things, too. And maybe they got their start in reality, but they had left the earth long ago. It is not that people wanted to make up lies about Cutler, only that some people could not resist improving on the truth a little to make a better story, one less connected to a real man and more connected to the legend. The older the West got, the more people seemed to need legends, and Cutler provided all the raw material they needed to satisfy their cravings for a folk hero. One story had Cutler in a showdown with Billy the Kid. The fact is, though Cutler did have his share of showdowns and the Kid was supposed to have killed twenty-one men not counting Mexicans and Indians, the two of them were never closer than fifty miles apart, and the Kid had been dead for fifteen years. Stories like that probably got started because folks liked their legends to meet up with each other; they liked the idea of giants meeting up and doing battle. Now, if the day ever came when Cutler met up with that grizzly of his, that would satisfy the storytellers, all right. But until that great day, there were plenty of lies to go around.

  The grizzly had turned into legend, too. Everybody knew he was a big, snake-headed silvertip missing his left hind foot. Everybody knew the bear had a blaze of white along its shoulder that probably came from an old wound. Some believed the bear had been crazy before it got caught in Cutler’s trap and chewed off its foot, and that was what that old wound was all about. And the bear did not, like a sane grizzly, stake out its territory and stick to it. This one, like Cutler, was a wanderer, and he might turn up anywhere. And that was the jumping-off place for making a legend out of the grizzly. The bear had been spotted in the Big Horns at the same time it was seen a hundred miles to the south. It had become like one of those animal spirits the Indians invented. It had even become something harried parents would use to make their kids behave. “I hear Cutler’s grizzly comes around to take care of bad little boys that don’t clean their plates.”

  And everyone knew that if the bear was spotted, word should be sent to the Elkhorn Bar in Tensleep. You could never be sure where Cutler was going to be, but you always knew he would be checking in with Iris Shannon. There had been a number of wild goose chases, but Cutler would follow up on any lead that seemed reasonable.

  So much for truth and legend. And because one had been transformed into the other, there was something about it that made folks believe they knew John Cutler, that they had the right to walk up to him and shake his hand like he was a long lost relative who had not been seen for a long time. That was not real either. The people who really knew John Cutler, most of them, showed their respect by giving the man a wide space. Like that man with the newspaper at the bar. He was pointing out something in the paper to Iris and glancing in Cutler’s direction. Cutler knew the man had something to tell Cutler but was not going to cross the room to Cutler’s corner table unless he was damned sure it was going to be worth Cutler’s while. So the man was checking it out, whatever it was, with Iris first.

  Most of the people who talked about Cutler did not know him. They had their own private images of what Cutler looked like, but they would not recognize the man if they passed on the street. Once introduced, though, they would probably not be disappointed. Cutler was a big man, over six feet tall, in his early thirties. He had broad, sloping shoulders and a barrel chest that tapered to a lean waist and slim hips. His hair was black and threaded with gray. His thick eyebrows were big black marks over his gunmetal eyes. The eyes looked through narrow slits with lines around them, an expression set from spending a lot of his life looking through bright sunlight across long distances. They were that way now even though he was looking over a short distance and was out of the sun. He looked at Iris Shannon who was nodding to the man near her. He watched her saying something to the man, then she brought the newspaper to Cutler.

  “I don’t exactly know, John . . .” she began, her voice with a trace of an English accent. “This may be something and it may not.”

  Cutler could no longer get excited about possibilities. There had been too many times when the news did not amount to a hill of beans. He did not look at the newspaper when she slid it toward him across the table. For a while, his gaze lingered on her. Sights like Iris were not common in Cutler’s travels. For one thing, her skin was soft and white from spending a lot of her life indoors. Her gold hair, which she wore up just now, was striking. Her face had strong features, especially her chin, which told you she could be stubborn if she had to be; she had spunk. In contrast was a soft look in her gray eyes, eyes that could be cold but never were when they looked at Cutler. There was no need to be on the defensive with him, for she knew him now as well as any other woman and better than most. Together, she and Cutler had that comfortable way with each other that told you t
hey had shared the same bed.

  “John?” That pleasant, questioning smile.

  “Yeah?”

  “The newspaper.”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at the paper.

  It was the El Paso Daily Times, dated a week earlier. Iris’s finger pointed to a headline where the paper was open.

  CALLING JOHN CUTLER

  Rumor has it that a big, silvertip grizzly has been spotted a hundred and fifty miles southeast of El Paso, along the southern foothills of the Davis Mountains. Opinions differ as to whether the great bear is missing a foot. However, some believe that if John Cutler has not already killed such a bear, it might be worth his while to come and investigate.

  The story went on to fill in the reader on Cutler’s background, and the paper had to be credited with getting most of the facts straight. The story concluded:

  Although we are unable to establish the authenticity of this story, we might find conviction in the fact that great events do seem to congregate near here of late. For a long time, El Paso thought it would be the location of the Fitzsimmons-Maher prizefight before the powers that he scared it away to Langtry. El Paso was the starting point for all who attended the fight from the west. Now citizens can look forward to the arrival of the Great Maroney Circus which will be spending two days here before it, too, goes on to Langtry. That should please the children. Would it be too much to hope, then, that Cutler should find his bear here? Town boosters think it highly likely.

  Likely? Cutler shook his head and took a swallow of whisky. He looked across the table at Iris. “Likely?” he asked her.

  She shrugged. “It’s a long way to go if it isn’t true.”

  “Hard to believe the bear got that far.”

  “But it could happen.”

  “With that grizzly, I guess anything could happen.”

  “You know the country down there?”