He said softly, “You might not be in any condition to take up anything with anybody, Mister Williams. No, I don’t think you’re going anywhere. Not until we find a way to settle our business. I’m back on my feet now and I’ve got fairly deep resources. I don’t think you want to find out just how deep.”
“Frankly, Flood, I ain’t a damn bit interested. I’m gone from here tomorrow. I advise you to leave me alone, that is, unless you want to cut your payroll.”
He said calmly, “The threats are over. You spoke of a rifle sighting in between your shoulder blades. Not much defense against that. There won’t be any more messages or warning shots. You count your life against thirty-two thousand dollars and find it wanting? That and perhaps the lives of your brothers?”
I flexed and unflexed my right hand. “You ought not to have said that.” I was slowly straightening in my chair. “Don’t put your mouth on my family.”
“Why? Are you going to shoot me here and now? You’d certainly go to jail. The sheriff is a friend of mine, as is the judge here, and a lot of people around here owe me. I’m unarmed. You’d have shot an unarmed cripple.”
I stared at him. Finally I said, “Flood, why all this foolishness with the messages, the threats? The herding me up here? Why the hell didn’t you just come to Blessing and state your demands? How did you even know all this would work?”
“Oh, for the same reaction I got when I mentioned your brothers. I knew you’d leave the ranch. I knew you’d go off alone.”
“But how’d you know I’d head west?”
“It was an obvious choice,” he said. “You couldn’t go east. That way is the gulf. North is towns and cities. No, I knew you’d want to get out on the open plain where you could see for miles in either direction and hope to bushwhack your would-be assassin. You had no way of knowing at that time if the threats were real or not. So the only way to come was west. If you’d changed courses we meant to take you in hand and deliver you up to Del Rio. We even tried it once.”
“Yes. Whiskey Jack.”
“But then you kept on in the direction we wanted. We only had to turn you once when you seemed to want to go to Uvalde.”
“Which is where I’m going now.”
“Let me tell you something about myself, Mister Williams. I’m not a well man. I’m a cripple. I am in pain a great deal of the time. I don’t have a particularly long time to live, which is just as well because life doesn’t hold a great many pleasures for me. Because of my appearance and my handicap I have to pay for women. You’ve never had to pay for women, have you, Mister Williams? I find it degrading. I have to be careful of what I eat. I can’t ride, I can’t even walk by myself without effort. The doctor denies me stimulants, and that includes whiskey. About the only pleasure I can take out of life is outwitting other men with good sound bodies. I take their money by outwitting them. It has become very important to me, this pursuit. It would to you if it were the only recreation you had. I doubt if I need to add that I’m not too concerned about the law. My aim is to outwit and not be outwitted. But you got the best of me, Mister Williams.” He leaned his head forward until his chin was almost touching the top of his cane. “You outwitted me, Mister Williams. And I can’t have that.”
We stared at each other. I thought, what a twisted mind and soul the man has. But it wasn’t my business to judge him; my business was to get shut of him and get home to my wife and my ranch.
He said, “I want my money, Mister Williams. Twenty-five thousand for the herd of cattle and seven thousand for additional costs. Thirty-two thousand.”
“I won’t give it to you,” I said.
“Then you won’t get home alive. And if you manage to it will start all over again.”
“What, the threats?”
He shook his head. “There’ll be no more threats. Those were only used to bring you to me. No, you ruined my herd. Now I’ll ruin yours. Whether you’re alive or dead.”
“You ain’t the only one can hire border gunslingers, Flood. As a matter of fact I think I can hire more than you can because I’ve got more money than you do.”
“You may can and you may have,” he said. “But I have an advantage that you don’t. It will be a bitter fight and I won’t care how it turns out so long as I do you great harm. Can you say the same?”
We stared at each other again. I finally got out a cigarillo and lit it, not bothering to offer one to Flood. “It won’t just be a fight held on my range. We’ll come up and visit you here too. I don’t think you’ll sleep so good nights, Flood.”
“As it happens I don’t anyway. In case you have been wondering over these years but have been too polite to ask, I had poliomyelitis as a child. It twisted my body and shortened one leg. However, it didn’t affect my brain.”
“Yes, it did,” I said. “It’s twisted too. You’re crazy as hell. You got brought up short when you were doing something wrong and now you want to get even for what you done. By rights I ought to be looking to get even with you. But I ain’t twisted.”
“You see no way to work this out?”
“If by that you mean am I going to give you any money, then the answer is hell, no. You can work it out by backing off. That will save a lot of time and trouble and blood and money. But that’s up to you.”
Out of the clear blue sky he said, “That’s a pretty good running horse you have, Mister Williams.”
“Why, planning on shooting him too?”
“No. I was just thinking. I’m particularly fond of running horses. I saw his race this morning. Why don’t you run Junior another race? Maybe at a longer distance.”
I laughed. “What the hell has that got to do with you? Are you banking him?”
“Yes. As a matter of fact that was my horse you beat.”
I said, watching him, “Which one would I race tomorrow, that one or the first one he showed me?”
“Ha, ha,” he said. “I see you have been talking around. I hear you’ve become friendly with a Mister Wilson Young. The man is a notorious outlaw, you know.”
“Yeah, he’s a bad one,” I said, knowing Wilson could hear me. “I know I ought to leave such as him alone and seek the company of the genteel folk such as yourself, Mister Flood.”
“Seriously, why don’t you race Junior again?”
“Other than the fact I’m leaving tomorrow and I can’t run my horse two days in a row?”
“Then the day after. I think, Mister Williams, that it would be unwise of you to try and leave until we’ve found a way to settle our differences.”
“Any way that involves me handing you money for what you calculate to be a wrong I done you don’t sit right with me. In fact, I think you can put that one out of your mind. But what you can keep in mind is that if you start something with me, something more than you’ve already started, I won’t back off and neither will my family. You think we wiped you out before, you wait and see what happens this time.”
He gave me his cripple’s smile, a sort of chilly, wintery look that didn’t have anything to do with good humor. “You forget, Mister Williams, I don’t care. But I will not be outdone or outwitted or beaten. Not until I’m dead.”
I said, but only half seriously, “We could always cut the cards over the difference. You win you get your thirty-two thousand dollars.”
He looked at me. “Are you serious?”
I said drily, “No, Mister Flood, I’m not serious. But it makes a hell of a lot more sense than a shooting war between us.”
He got up slowly with the aid of his cane. “Maybe a way can be found.” He was looking thoughtful, if a man could make that remark about a face as scheming as J.C. Flood’s. He said, “Milton!”
Then he said to me, “Delay, Mister Williams. Perhaps an idea will come to one or the other of us. As you say, it’s better than a war. Milton!”
The door opened and his helper came in. I didn’t bother to stand up or offer to shake hands or anything else. I just watched him being helped along, leaning on
his cane with Milton holding his other arm. He paused at the door. “I will talk with you very soon, Mister Williams. But I really would like to see how your horse does at a three-quarter-mile distance. Say, for a thousand dollars? Day after tomorrow at ten in the morning?”
I stared at him, not quite sure what I wanted to say. I finally said, “You seem to be taking it upon yourself to give me my share of instructions. You reckon I’m going to put up with that much longer? You reckon you can keep me from leaving this town?”
He smiled faintly and turned back towards me. “Mister Williams, I’ll give you something else to think about. You may well try and leave. And you will most probably get killed in the process. In fact I would say that was almost a certainty. But do you think it would end there?”
I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What the hell you talking about, Flood?”
“You are just the oldest brother. You’re not the only brother. If you were dead one of your other brothers would be the eldest. Do I make myself clear?”
I took a step toward him, but he let the door close. The sonofabitch was slowly binding me hand and foot. In a fit of anger I suddenly smashed my fist into the wall. He had to be killed or some other means had to be found to stop the crazy bastard.
CHAPTER 10
Wilson Young said, “Appears you two know each other mighty well.”
“The man is loco,” I said. There were two straight-backed chairs in the bedroom. Young was sitting in one by the washbasin. I poured myself a drink of whiskey and sat down in the other, which was at the foot of the bed. They were light-weight, cane-bottomed affairs, and mine creaked and sagged as I let my full weight down on it.
Wilson said, “You planning on trying to leave on the train or cross-country?”
I sipped at my drink and then said, “Well, loading two horses on a train is going to make me kind of an easy target. But I’ve had enough of that damn trail.”
“You could leave the horses. And I could watch your back until you were out of here. Flood don’t want to fool with me.”
“I’ll just be damned if I’ll leave my horses on account of J.C. Flood.”
He was busy leaning down and pouring himself out another tumbler of brandy. Both bottle and glass were set on the floor in front of him. “I wouldn’t either,” he said. “I just thought you maybe wanted to just get out of the trouble I’ve been listening to.”
“It wouldn’t end,” I said. “It would just start up again. Only this time they’d come to do damage, real damage. Like he said, there’d be no more threats.”
“You believe him?”
“I believe he’s crazy.”
“That’s partly true. What he was saying about not giving a shit was pretty much the straight of it. But he plays on that crippled stuff, don’t he? Life cold-decked him. He got the short straw. I think he’d of still been a mean, greedy sonofabitch if he’d been bom the healthiest bastard in the state. But nobody wants to shoot a cripple. Or wring his neck.” He looked around at me and half smiled. “Though that’s what ought to be done.”
I was staring at the wall, thoughtful. Mister Flood seemed to take great pleasure in horse racing. “Mister Young, what do you know about Flood and horse racing?”
“He’s a bug on it. Races here, races in Mexico. Races wherever he can find somebody to run. I guess it’s all them things he can’t have that he was talking about, whiskey, women, whatever, all rolled into one. Lives for it.”
“Well, you heard the whole conversation. I don’t know if you can make sense out of all of it, but I figure you might know him a little better than I do because I was too busy blowing up him and his cattle to sit down and have a palaver. But what do you think? Will he go as far as he says? Or will he back off?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say what’s in another man’s head. But he’s got money and he can hire plenty of folks to do his dirty work. Seems like, from what I heard you and him saying, that he’s already gone to considerable trouble. I don’t know that he’d back off now. I never had no direct run-in with him because I ain’t got no ranch to be attacked like you do. Just me, and ain’t too many people who want to mess with me straight on. But I’ve heard he’s like a dog with a bone. If I was in your boots I’d have to figure he was going to keep on.”
I sat there thinking how easy it would be for a band of marauders, even a small band, to shoot up our herds, especially my purebred herd of Herefords. That was nearly a half a million dollars of cattle on the hoof. And then there was the chance that some of my folks could get hurt, and I included ranch hands in that. I was either going to have to shoot Flood, or I was going to have to pay him, or I was going to have to find some other way. I didn’t want any long, drawn-out fight. No matter how many gun hands I hired there would still be damage done to me and my family. And I had Nora on that ranch.
Wilson said, “He’s got you in a box, don’t he?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah, it’s a box all right. Except I’m open on too many sides. No way to fort up.” I looked at the window that looked out over the street. “I may just have to shoot the sonofabitch.”
Wilson said slowly, “That’s been tried. Ain’t all that easy. And I’ve heard it ain’t real safe. Or sure.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“There’s a story around that he’s got money set aside, supposedly big money, to avenge his death in case somebody pops him off. He’s got two or three hombres like that Milton that are close to him. They’re supposed to know how to use the money or get at it or something.”
I pulled my head back. “That sounds like one of those stories that get started in somebody’s head and just keep going.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is there’s a power of people around here would like to kill Flood and he ain’t dead yet. Man is not real well liked. He’s pulled some stunts on some folks he ought to have been hung for.”
“Hell!” I said. I had another drink.
Wilson said, “Is thirty-two thousand dollars a lot of money to you?”
“Not to our business. And not to me personally. But that ain’t the point. I wouldn’t give that sonofabitch the sweat off a pig’s ass.”
“Why don’t you cut him high card like you mentioned? Be done with it.”
“I’ve been thinking on something else.” I got up. “You got time to walk back to the livery stable? Something I want to show you.”
“Hell, I ain’t doing nothing.”
The black Thoroughbred was in the last stall in the barn. It was too dark in the livery, what with his color, for Wilson to get a real good look at him. There was a door that opened out into a little corral where they kept the draft animals, mules and oxen and such, and I opened that. “Wilson, why don’t you just lead this horse out there and have a look at him. Just barely into the light where you can see him. For reasons I’ll explain I don’t want nobody to connect me with this horse, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Flood didn’t have somebody keeping an eye on me.”
“You can bet on that,” Wilson said. He stepped over and pushed the back door open as I backed the black out of his stall. The rest and the good food were making him feel prancy. He stamped his feet and danced sideways as I got him out. I said, “This is my packhorse.”
Wilson still couldn’t see him good, but he said, “Don’t look like no packhorse to me.”
I handed him the horse’s lead rope and he took him by the head and walked him just out into the sunshine. I heard him, after a half a moment, say, “Sonofabitch! What have we got here?”
The door had blown partly closed so I couldn’t see him or the horse very clearly. After a few more minutes he came back in leading the black. He didn’t say anything until he’d put him in his stall. Then he said, “Is he sound?”
“I haven’t had occasion to run him. But he acts like he’s never been foundered.”
Wilson looked at me and shook his head. “Boy, I thought I was looking at Xantano.”
“Who?”
“Xantano. He’s the great-granddaddy of most of the blooded stock that has come out of Mexico. Of course I never saw the horse himself but I’ve seen tintypes of him, and this here gelding is the spitting image of him. You mind me asking where you got such a horse?”
I told him the story, complete with the laming of my packhorse by the stick of dynamite and about Mister Gamp and how Mister Gamp had come to have the horse.
He shook his head. “That’s got to make you the champion horse-trader of all time, swapping an old cow pony for a sure enough racehorse. I seen that tattoo in his mouth. They don’t do that in Mexico but I know they do it up East in them racing states like Kentucky and Tennessee and such places. I reckon he was headed up there when that train wrecked. They buy a lot of blooded stock out of Mexico and they train a lot. And then sort of bring them in on the quiet.”
“Illegally?”
“Naw, naw. They just ain’t got no record. They’re finished horses and fast as hell, but they keep records in those states and these horses come in there supposed to be as green as persimmons, only they ain’t.”
“So? What do you think?”
He looked at me and laughed gently. “It might work. Except Flood has got a hell of a horse. I haven’t seen him beat in anything up to a mile yet. Course he generally won’t run anybody at less than three quarters of a mile.” He glanced into the stall. “This gelding looks like he could run all day with that barrel chest he’s got. Likely he’s got enough lung to blow down a small house. Long back, hell of a set of muscled-up hams. Hell-of-a-looking horse.”
“Thing is,” I said, “I don’t know how much shape he’s in. I don’t know if he is ready to run. He did an awful lot of standing around in that farmer’s stock pen getting poor feed. He needs work. And of course I can’t work him out around here without giving my hand away.”
“You know, I’ve got a little place just across the river. It ain’t much but I got some pretty straight and level dirt roads right handy. We could find out right quick if he’s sound and what kind of shape he’s in.”
Gunpoint Page 20
