Someday, he might climb aboard one of those trains and find out just where those rails led. He’d never been anywhere but here.
For the time being, he had to see Gramps, for Danny couldn’t imagine any more suspicious characters than the ones he’d just seen step off the train here in dusty and boring old Harveyville. They had to be trouble. They sure looked like trouble!
As Danny strode along the boardwalk, he kept his intense, all-business gaze locked straight ahead, pinned to the little mud-brick marshal’s office crouched between a leather goods store and a small café roughly one block ahead.
“Mornin’, Danny,” a voice on his right called out to the boy.
Not halting his stride one iota, Danny only said, “Mornin’,” as he continued walking.
“Hey, Danny,” Melvin Dunham said as he swept the step fronting his barbershop. “You want to make a quick dime? I need to get Pearl’s lunch over to her—”
“Not now, Mr. Dunham,” Danny said, making a beeline past the man, whom he did not even glance at, keeping his eyes grave and proud with purpose beneath the brim of his brown felt hat.
“Hello there, handsome,” said another voice, this one a female voice, as Danny strode passed Madam Delacroix’s pink-and-purple hurdy-gurdy house. “Say, you’re gettin’ taller every day. Look at those shoulders. Carryin’ that mailbag is givin’ you muscles!”
Danny smelled sweet perfume mixed with peppery Mexican tobacco smoke.
“Mornin’, Miss Wynona,” Danny said, glimpsing the scantily clad young woman lounging on a boardwalk chair to his right, trying not to blush.
“Where you off to in such a rush . . . hey, Danny!” the girl called, but Danny was long past her now, and her last words were muffled by the thuds of his boots on the boardwalk and the clatter of ranch wagons passing on the street to his left.
Danny swung toward the door of his grandfather’s office. Not bothering to knock—the door wasn’t latched, anyway—he pushed the door open just as the leather goods man, George Henshaw, delivered the punchline to a joke he was telling Danny’s grandfather, Town Marshal Kentucky O’Neil: “She screamed, ‘My husband’s home! My husband’s home!’”
Mr. Henshaw swiped one hand across the palm of his other hand and bellowed, “The way Melvin told it, the reverend skinned out that window faster’n a coon with a coyote chewin’ its tail, an’ avoided a full load of buckshot by that much!”
Gramps and Mr. Henshaw leaned forward to convulse with red-faced laughter. When Gramps saw Danny, he tried to compose himself, quickly dropping his boots down from his desk and making his chair squawk. Looking a little guilty, his leathery face still sunset red around his snow-white soup-strainer mustache, he indicated Danny with a jerk of his hand, glanced at the floor, cleared his throat, brushed a fist across his nose, and said a little too loudly, “Oh, hello there, young man. Look there, George—it’s my favorite grandson. What you got goin’ this fine Nebraska mornin’, Danny?”
Mr. Henshaw turned to Danny, tears of humor still shining in his eyes. “You haven’t let them girls over to Madam Delacroix’s lure you into their cribs yet, have you, Danny boy?” He was still laughing a little from the story he’d been telling, his thick shoulders jerking.
“No, no, no,” Gramps said. “He just cuts wood for Madam Delacroix, is all. His mother don’t know about that, but what Nancy don’t know won’t hurt her—right, Danny?”
Gramps winked at the boy.
“Sure, sure,” Mr. Henshaw said, dabbing at his eyes with a red cambric hanky. “First they got him cuttin’ wood and then he’s—”
“So, Danny boy—what’s up?” Gramps broke in quickly, leaning forward, elbows resting on his bony knees. He chuckled once more, the image of the preacher skinning out that window apparently still flashing in his mind.
Danny took three long strides into the office and stopped in front of his grandfather’s desk. He drew a breath, trying to slow his racing heart. “You told me to tell you if I seen any suspicious characters get off the train. Well, believe-you-me when I tell you I just seen three of the gnarliest-lookin’ curly wolves you’ll ever wanna meet get off the train not ten minutes ago, Gramps!”
Gramps arched his brows that were the same snowy shade as his mustache. “You don’t say!”
He cut a glance at Mr. Henshaw, who smiled a little and said, “Well, I’ll leave you two lawmen to confer in private about these curly wolves. I best get back over to my shop before Irma cuts out my coffee breaks altogether.” Judging by the flat brown bottle on Gramps’s desk, near his stone coffee mug, the two men had been enjoying a little more than coffee.
“All right—see ya, George,” Gramps said before returning his gaze to Danny and lacing his hands together between his knees. “Now, suppose you tell me what these curly wolves look like and why you think they’re trouble.”
“One’s a tall blond fella, almost red-headed, with crazy-lookin’ eyes carryin’ one fancy-ass . . . er, I mean . . . a real nice-lookin’ Henry rifle.”
George Henshaw had just started to pull the office door closed behind him when he stopped and frowned back through the opening at Marshal Kentucky O’Neil. O’Neil returned the man’s vaguely incredulous gaze then, frowning now with interest at his grandson. Not nearly as much of the customary adult patronization in his eyes as before, he said, “What’d the other two look like?”
“One was nearly as tall as the blond guy with the Henry. He was dark-haired with a dark mustache—one o’ them that drop straight down both corners of his mouth. He wore a dark suit with a cream duster over it. The blond fella must fancy himself a greaser . . . you know—a bean-eater or some such?” Danny gave a caustic chuckle, feeling adult enough suddenly to use the parlance used in reference to people of Hispanic heritage he often overheard at Madam Delacroix’s. “He sure was dressed like one—a red shirt with fancy stitching and brown leather pants with conchos down the sides. Silver- tipped boots. Yessir, he sure fancies himself a chili-chomper, all right!”
“And the third fella?” the lawman prodded the boy.
“He was short but thick. You know, like one o’ them bareknuckle boxers that fight on Saturday nights out at Votts’ barn? Cauliflower ears, both of ’em. He wore a suit and a wide red necktie. Had a fancy vest like a gambler.”
“Full beard?” Henshaw asked, poking his head through the front door.
Danny turned to him, nodded, and brushed an index finger across his cheek. “He wore a coupla tiny little braids down in front of his ears. I never seen the like. Wore two pistols, too. All three wore two pistols in fancy rigs. Tied down. The holsters were waxed, just like Bob Wade waxes his holsters.”
Bob Wade was a gunslinger who pulled through the country from time to time, usually when one of the local ranchers wanted a man—usually a rival stockman or a nester—killed. Kentucky never worried about Wade. Wade usually did his killing in the country. Kentucky’s jurisdiction stopped at the town’s limits unless he was pulling part-time duty as a deputy sheriff, which he had done from time to time in the past.
He should probably have notified the county sheriff about Wade, but the county seat was a long ways away and he had no proof that Bob Wade was up to no good. Aside from what everybody knew about Wade, that is. And maybe a long-outstanding warrant or two. Notifying the sheriff all the way in Ogallala and possibly getting the sheriff killed wouldn’t be worth taking a bullet from an ambush himself, by one of the ranchers he’d piss-burned by tattling to the sheriff.
He was too damn close to retirement and a twenty-dollar-a-month pension for that kind of nonsense.
“The big fella wore a knife in his boot,” Danny continued.
“How do you know that?” Gramps asked. His attention was fully on his grandson now. There was no lingering laughter in his eyes anymore from the story about Reverend Stillwell skinning out Mrs. Doolittle’s window. The old laughter was all gone. Now Gramps leaned forward, riveted to every word out of Danny’s mouth.
“’Cause I s
een the handle stickin’ up out of the boot well.”
From the doorway, Henshaw said in a low voice, “The knife . . . did it have a . . .”
“One o’ them fancy-carved ivory handles.” Danny felt a smile raise his mouth corners and the warm blood of a blush rise in his cheeks. “In the curvy form of a naked woman.”
He traced the curvy shape in the air with his hands, then dropped his hands to his sides, instantly wishing he hadn’t gone that far. But neither of these men chastised him for his indiscretion. They were staring at each other. Neither said anything. Neither really had much of an expression on his face except . . .
Well, they looked scared.
Chapter 2
When Kentucky had ushered his grandson out of his office, assuring the boy that, yes, he would vouch for him to Postmaster Wilkes, about why he was late, O’Neil walked up to one of the only two windows in the small building, the one between his desk and the gun rack holding a couple of repeating rifles.
He slid the flour sack curtain back and peered along the street to his left, in the direction of the train station.
George Henshaw walked up beside him, nervously smoothing his green apron over his considerable paunch with his large, red hands. Henshaw was bald and gray-bearded, with a big walrus mustache even more ostentatious than the marshal’s soup-strainer. He also wore round, steel-framed spectacles, which winked now in the light angling through the dust-streaked window.
“You think it’s them, Kentucky?” Henshaw asked, keeping his voice low though the boy was gone and none of the four jail cells lined up against the building’s rear wall held a prisoner. He and Kentucky were alone in the room.
“Hell, yes, I think it’s them,” the lawman said, gazing through the dust kicked up by several ranch supply wagons heading toward the train depot. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. I guess . . . I was hoping . . .”
“We knew they’d be back. Someday. We knew it very well.”
“Yes, I suppose, but what are we . . . ?”
Henshaw let his voice trail off when he saw his old friend Kentucky narrow his eyes as he continued to gaze toward the depot. The man’s leathery red cheeks turned darker from a sudden rush of blood. Henshaw thought he could feel an increase in the heat coming off the pot-bellied lawman’s bandy-legged body.
“What is it?” Henshaw said, his heart quickening. He stepped around behind O’Neil and gazed out over the man’s left shoulder through the window and down the street to the south.
Kentucky didn’t respond. His gaze was riveted on the three men just then stepping off the depot platform and into the street. They were carrying saddles, saddlebags, and rifles. Sure enough—two tall, lean men and one short, stocky one. Not just stocky. Laden with muscle that threatened to split the seams of Kinch Wheeler’s checked, brown wool coat. Sure enough, he had a knife poking up from his lace-up boot with fancy deer-hide gaiters. He’d always been a natty dresser. Wheeler must have walked straight out of the prison gates and over to the nearest tailor’s shop. Turning big rocks into small rocks for twelve years had added to Wheeler’s considerable girth.
Henshaw slid his gaze to the blond man in the Mexican-style red shirt and flared leather pants down the outside legs of which silver conchos glinted. He lowered his hand from his face, wincing as his guts writhed around in his belly with cold, dark dread.
“Christ,” Henshaw said over Kentucky’s shoulder. “Those twelve years really screamed past.”
“They sure did.”
“What do you think they came back for?”
O’Neil gave a caustic snort. Henshaw knew what they were doing back in Harveyville as well as Kentucky himself did.
Henshaw nodded slowly in bleak understanding.
O’Neil turned away from the window, retrieved his Smith & Wesson New Model Number 3 from the blotter atop his desk, and returned to the window. Again, he peered out, tracking the three as they slowly moved up the street toward the office. “Oh, Christ,” he said, hating the bald fear he heard in his voice. “They’re coming here.”
“They are?” Henshaw jerked his head back toward the window and drew a sharp breath.
“Of course they are!”
The three men moved up the middle of the street as though they owned the town. Horseback riders and wagons had to swerve wide around them. One horsebacker rode toward them with his head down as though checking a supply list. He raised his head suddenly, saw the three men heading right toward him, and jerked his horse sharply to the left. He turned his horse broadside and yelled angrily at the three men as they passed. The horsebacker’s face was creased with exasperation.
While Kentucky hadn’t heard the words, he’d heard the anger in the man’s tone.
“Easy, now, Ed,” he muttered to the man—Ed Simms from the Crosshatch Ranch out on Porcupine Creek. Noreen must have sent him to town to fill the larder. “Just keep movin’, Ed. Just keep movin’ . . .”
Ed hadn’t been in the country twelve years ago, so he didn’t know about the Old Trouble. Hell, a good two-thirds of the people in Harveyville and on the ranches surrounding it hadn’t been in the country back then. They wouldn’t know about it, either.
But Kentucky knew. He knew all too well. He knew well enough that beads of sweat were rolling down his cheeks and into his white mustache and his knees felt like warm mud.
He was going to die today, he thought as he watched them come. They formed a wedge of sorts, the tall, blond Calico out front, leading the way, like the prow of a ship cleaving the waters with supreme, sublime arrogance. O’Neil didn’t know why Calico’s return had taken him by such surprise. He’d known this day had been coming for the past ten years.
Hadn’t he? Or, like Henshaw, had he lied to himself, telling himself that, no, in spite of what had happened, in spite of O’Neil himself organizing a small posse and taking Calico’s trio into custody while they’d been dead drunk in a parlor house—and in spite of what they’d left in the ground nearby when they’d been hauled off to federal court in Denver—they wouldn’t return to Harveyville.
Well, they had as, deep down, Kentucky knew they would.
The three men, as mismatched a three as Kentucky had ever seen—the tall, blond, dead-eyed Calico flanked by the thick-set punisher, Wheeler, and the dark-haired and mustached Chase Stockton, who’d once been known as “the West Texas Hellion”—kept coming. As they did, Kentucky looked down at the big, heavy pistol in his hands.
He broke it open and filled the chamber he usually kept empty beneath the hammer. When he clicked the Russian closed and looked up again, the three outlaws had veered left and were heading toward the opposite side of the street from the marshal’s office.
“Look at that,” Henshaw said softly, under his breath. “They’re going into the Copper Nickel! You got a reprieve, Kentucky. They’re gonna wet their whistles before they come over here and kill you!” He chuckled and hurried to the door. “With that, I bid you adieu!” He stopped at the door and turned back to his old friend, saying with an ominous wince, “Good luck!”
Kentucky raked a thumbnail down his cheek. “Why in the hell are they . . .” The light of understanding shimmered in his eyes. Then his eyes turned dark, remembering. “Oh, no.”
* * *
Norman Rivers set a bottle of the good stuff on a high shelf behind the bar in the Copper Nickel Saloon. He had to rise up on the toes of his brogans to do so, stretching his arm high and peeling his lips back from his teeth with the effort. As he did, his sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary Kate, ripped out a sudden shriek from where she swept the stairs running up the room’s north wall, on Rivers’s right.
Rivers jerked with a start, inadvertently dislodging the bottle of the good stuff from the shelf. It tumbled toward him, bashing him in the temple before he managed to grab it and hold it against his chest, or it would have shattered on the floor at his feet—four-and-a-half dollars gone, just like that!
“Gallblastit, Mary Kate—look what yo
u did!” Rivers scolded, turning toward the girl as he held a hand against his throbbing temple. “What’s got into you, anyway?”
“That damn rat is back! Scared me!”
“Hold your tongue, damn you! You almost made me break a bottle of the mayor’s good stuff!”
“Why do you put it up so high, anyway?” the girl shot back at him from halfway up the stairs. She was a pretty girl, really filling out her simple day frocks nicely, and she knew it and was too often high-headed about it. Her beauty gave her a confidence she otherwise did not deserve. She was sweeping barefoot when if Rivers had told her once, he’d told her a thousand times not to come down here without shoes on.
She didn’t used to be this disobedient or mouthy. It had something to do with her mother dying two years ago, and her body filling out.
Rivers held the bottle up, pointing it like a pistol at the insolent child. “I have to put it up so high so you don’t mistake it for a bottle of the rotgut and serve it to the raggedy-assed saddle tramps and no-account drifters who stop by here to flirt with you because they know you’ll flirt back!”
Color lifted into Mary Kate’s ivory cheeks, and she felt her pretty mouth shape a prideful half grin. She shook a lock of her curly blond hair back from her cheek and resumed sweeping the steps. “I can’t help it if they think I’m pretty.”
“I can’t help it if they think I’m purty!” Rivers mocked the girl. “He pointed the bottle at her again and barked, “You shouldn’t be makin’ time with such trash. You oughta at least try to act like a lady!”
“You mean like the high-and-mighty Carolyn?” Mary Kate said in a scornful singsong as she angrily swept the broom back and forth across the step beneath her, kicking up a roiling cloud of dust. “Look what it got her!”
“Married to a good man!”
When All Hell Broke Loose Page 27
