City of Widows (3 page)

I woke up just after dawn, feeling sore all over and more rested than I had at any time since quitting Helena. I thought about treating myself to a barber shave, then remembered that Hernando Padilla was in jail thinking about his own neck, and shaved myself. I put on corduroys, a fresh shirt, and a mackinaw against the morning cold and reported for breakfast to the Chicago House, where Feeny MacAdo had had the black fortune to sit in the line of Billy the Kid's magic fire.

I had a short wait. The room, plastered and wainscoted, with framed lithographs of Greek ruins leaning out from the walls, was just big enough for six tables and was clearly the most popular place to eat in town. At length I was seated by the owner, a bald, loose-jowled German in his fifties whose waistline was his best advertising. He brought out my steak and eggs in good order and filled my cup from an old campaigner of a two-gallon pot.

“Big doings at the Orient last night, you bet,” he said. “You heard shooting?”

“Last night I'd have slept through Shiloh.” The coffee was thick and black and strong enough to float a fifty-cent piece. It scorched a furrow all the way down to my stomach. “Who got shot?”

“Sid Boone, the real property man. They are saying he had a bad run at the sheriff's table and went on the prod. He took out his pistol. Mr. Baronet put a round in him while he was still cocking. He is dead as Judas.”

He spotted an empty cup and boated off before I could ask questions.

My steak had had all the fight pounded out of it. Cutting it up, I reflected on how rapidly a man's luck could change in a game of chance.

3

T
HE SUN WAS
barely above the Oscuros when I stepped out of the Chicago House and already the heat was crawling off the dirt street. It lay across my shoulders like an oak beam when I took off the mackinaw.

The larger of the town's two liveries was an unpainted barn with a roof that extended four feet past the front, throwing a triangle of shade on a man sitting on a bench in overalls with one strap gone, brogans with black steel toes poking through the leather, and a slouch hat with no more shape than a bar rag. He was shirtless and the hair on his chest was pale against the boiled skin.

“I need a saddle horse for a couple of hours,” I said. “What's the best you've got?”

He had to tip his head all the way back to see up from under his flop brim. He was a towheaded twenty, a surprise. He had slat shoulders and the general dilapidated posture of a man in his seventies.

“Depends on what you want it for. I got a buckskin wouldn't throw a child or a fly but you'd have to carry it back from the lip of town on your hip.”

“It has to carry me out to the Whiteside ranch and back. No flies or children.”

His head dropped. “Patch get you.”

“I heard the Apaches were raiding Arizona this year.”

“Patch don't know when he's across the line.” He spat. The spittle evaporated in the air.

“I'm obliged for your time,” I said, turning. “There's another stable.”

“Don't get your bowels in an uproar, mister. She's too hot to argue.” He stood, stretched, and went inside. The sun moved, and then he came back out leading a gaunt bay by its bridle. Its hip sockets showed and its right eye was milky.

“That's as good as it gets?”

“Good as
you
get anyway. You don't have to stand in front of my uncle and tell him Patch et his sorrel for noon dinner.” He tipped his head. “What's that for?”

I had drawn the Deane-Adams. I plugged a cartridge into the empty chamber and spun the cylinder with a diamondback buzz. “I want to be sure I have enough shells to hit a swift-moving target like you once I finish putting this sack of umbrellas out of its misery.”

“Hold on, mister. There's law in this county.”

“Curious thing about the law. It almost always gets off the second shot.” I holstered the revolver. “Ten minutes from now I'm going to step out the front door of the Socorro Hotel and throw a leg over an animal with some kind of pulse. If I should fall off the porch for lack of anything to break my drop, the law in this county is going to hold an inquest over your remains. That's if it can find a difference.”

“Two dollars for the day,” he said after a minute. “Saddle's fifty cents extra.”

“I'll use my own.” I handed him two cartwheels and left.

A sorrel with some years left on it was hitched at the rail when I came out carrying my gear. The boy was there and so was Frank Baronet. The sheriff had on a Prince Albert and a pinch hat squared over his brows. His thumbs were hooked inside the armholes of his vest and the gutta-percha handle of the large-bore Remington poked out of the notch above his belt buckle. He looked like an election poster.

He blinked up at the sky. “There's worse days for a ride.”

“Not in Montana.” I set down the saddle and Winchester and smoothed my faded blanket over the horse's back. “Is it always like this?”

“Nine months out of the year. Then it heats up.”

I slung the saddle into place, jerked the cinch before the animal could puff itself up. It whickered and tried to crawl out of its skin. “I heard you had a row.”

“Yes sir, I did. I'm going to miss old Sid. It's sad what the love of money will do to a Christian.”

“The cards must have gone sour for him all at once. He was a piece ahead when I left.”

“They will do that. I won back the table stakes plus an interest in his real business when he got frisky with that belly gun he carried. His widow can keep the store. I only let him wager it because he was determined to quit even. If I knew how determined I'd have shut down the game.”

“I guess you had a crowd by then. When a man loses that much that fast it generally draws an audience.”

“No, it was late. It was just Sid and me and Mike Henry behind the bar. Mike was asleep on his hand at the time. He fell off it and chipped a tooth when I fired.”

“You're proficient with that buffalo pistol.”

“I was elected to keep the peace. I don't play at it.” He blinked. “I'll have that hip gun.”

When a man says that, right out of the blue with both hands occupied, you look around. Jubilo, the deputy sheriff with no last name, was standing at the end of the hotel porch with his Creedmoor rifle resting on top of the railing. The bottom half of his face was a desert beneath the shadow of his flat brim. At that range he didn't need the folding sight.

I looked back at Baronet. “I'm headed into Apache country.”

“You should have thought of that before you threatened the life of young Ole here. I'll have the whole rig. Just hang it over the hitch.”

I unbuckled the cartridge belt and draped it next to the sorrel's tie. The sheriff stepped forward and lifted it off. “Hang on to that.” He thrust it at the boy, who seized it eagerly, his head tilted back to watch me. His face was all anticipation.

“You don't wear the tin, you don't abuse a free man.” Baronet jerked the Remington out of his belt and backhanded it in the same motion. A drop of red paint on the front sight caught my eye just before the sun exploded. I missed the fall. I was lying on the porch boards looking at the remains of my steak and eggs.

“Aw.” Ole was disgusted. “He got something on my pants.”

I rolled over quickly. The sole of a boot fastened on my throat.

“Come around here waving a letter from the governor,” Baronet said. “I kill a man, I don't eat for three days. You can thank Sid Boone for your life, him and the fact I don't take to starvation. Otherwise you'd be bucking the devil's tiger right along with him.”

“Aw, kill him.”

“Shut up, Ole.”

I was having trouble squeezing wind down my pipe. The sheriff leaned in, shutting off the rest of the supply. I clutched at his boot, but the blow to my head had done something to my connections. I had no feeling in my fingers.

“There's one law in Socorro.” His upper body blocked the light. “It isn't a yellowback former federal named Murdock and it sure isn't that carpetbagging Wallace in Santa Fe. Let me hear you say its name.”

I couldn't talk. He leaned harder. My vision broke up into black-and-white checks.

“Say its name.”

The white checks shrank to pinholes. I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my eyeballs.

He leaned back then, relieving some of the pressure. I sucked in air and coughed.

“Frank Baronet.”

He removed his foot, straightened. His face was an oval blur inside the circle of his hatbrim with sharp blue sky behind it.

“‘Satan's Sixgun,'” he said. “My ass.”

*   *   *

I lay there for a space of time. I knew Baronet had left and probably Ole and the deputy, but I was aware that I was still an object of curiosity for a portion of the local tax base. My hands were starting to tingle when I pushed myself into a sitting position. My cartridge belt slid off my chest and the Deane-Adams clunked against the boards. I hadn't even felt its weight when it was dumped on me.

I picked it up along with myself, found my hat, Winchester and canteen, and went back inside to use the basin in my room. The barrel of the sheriff's pistol hadn't broken the skin but the entire right side of my head felt like rotten wood. I inspected the loads in the five-shot, gripped the handle hard until I could feel it as far as my elbow. I brushed the sawdust off my corduroys and went out.

The countryside was ablaze with that dry heat that opens your pores and sucks out the moisture like lemon carbonate through a straw. For all that it was a green land, dotted over with juniper and scrub oak connecting in the distance to create the illusion of a grass ocean. The mountains too were flecked with green, cloud-capped, the air so clear around them I might have been looking at them through a glass. The sky came down to the ground.

The ranch road led past a long low adobe house with a red tile roof and a corral next to it containing half a dozen horses. Behind the house I found a Mexican cook and his Negro helper scalding a hog in a cauldron the size of a bathtub. The cook said I'd find
Señor
Whiteside stringing fence in the northwest corner. I didn't waste time leaving the pair to their work. I don't mind the smell of singed bristles, but a dead hog looks too much like a naked man to my taste. On my way back to the road I paused to look over the horses in the corral.

John Whiteside is in most of the history books now as the man who opened up New Mexico to the cattle trade. Severely wounded at the head of his own regiment at Cold Harbor and mustered out, he got a head start on the other barons who went west after the war, rounding up the red-eyed, ladder-ribbed descendants of Cortez's longhorns wandering wild in Mexico and booting them up into the territories, inventing a new business in the process. Comanches raped and killed his Mexican wife of six months and ran off his first herd, and when he got through fighting them the Apaches came and burned his headquarters and strung his partner head down over a mesquite fire until his brains boiled. Whiteside was still fighting them at the time I caught up with him in the summer of 1881, but his fame had not yet spread north of Taos and I didn't know him from General Grant. He was just a short twist of rawhide seated on a wagon loaded with spools of barbed wire in a faded blue flannel shirt, canvas breeches, and a wide Mexican sombrero, holding the team while a trio of men in overalls and leather gauntlets spun the jacked-up left rear wheel to seat the wire around a fencepost. He had brown whiskers going gray around his mouth and restless blue eyes in a thicket of wrinkles. His left arm was gone above the elbow, the empty sleeve pinned back.

“I require all the horses I have.” He'd glanced at me when I rode up, then returned to his seemingly aimless study of the horizon. If an irregularity appeared there he'd spot it.

“I'm no hand at bargaining,” I said. “The truth is I stink at it. I'll pay two hundred for that claybank in the corral.”

“Murdock, is it? Mr. Murdock, I'm in the fence business. I used to trade in cattle but right now I spend most of my time restringing wire. I've strung this section six times. Billy the Kid showed the world how easy it is last October when he cut it the first time and spirited out five hundred head. Between the goddamn thieves and those Apache bastards and that greaser son of a bitch Don Segundo del Guerrero down in Chihuahua and every lost tramp who cannot be bothered to ride half a mile to the nearest gate I have strung more wire in this one corner than Western Union. You will pardon me if I don't feel the necessity to add a livery operation to this here booming fence trade I have going.”

“The sheriff gave me your name.”

“Sheriff.” He snarled the word. “Dolan men counted the ballots. They were only just through counting when the first silver shipment to the bank in Socorro City went missing. It was Frank's brother Ross done it and he has been behind all the others since. I supply beef to all the bigger mining companies in the territory and what injures them injures me. When I suggested taking this to Lew Wallace, Frank started arresting my best hands for shooting up Mexicans.”

“He said something about it. He didn't say your men were involved.”

“My hands were swapping lead with Don Segundo's vaqueros over the ownership of cows when the Baronet brothers were still abusing themselves to cigarette cards. Anyway I took his message. It isn't my silver, and I need men to run a ranch.”

“You must have choked on it.”

“It wasn't my first choice. However, times are different. Sooner or later some ass would decide to call in the army just like they done in Lincoln County. That is bad for business.”

“The fence business.” I grinned.

He turned his blues on me. They were as austere as the sky. “I see someone has used you.”

I let the grin slide. “Baronet. I was foolish enough to give him a reason, but his real purpose was to warn me. I was there last night when a man named Boone caught him in a lie about his brother being dead in Mexico. He killed Boone later. He said it was an argument over cards, but he was the only witness.”