The Bold Frontier (6 page)

Lou Hand picked up his shot of whiskey with a short nod to Clarence, who was still staying out of range. He sat down opposite Bob Siringo, who had a pleasant, watchful expression on his face. The sheriff sipped from the shot of redeye, wanting the Dutch courage, every last drop of it. But he held back because he was fearful of losing whatever advantage a clear head might give him.

Noting again the alertness of Bob Siringo’s pale eyes, he realized that was exactly none.

“Mr. Siringo …” Lou Hand cleared his throat. “What are you doing hanging around this town?”

“Well, sir, I didn’t know a man had to explain himself that way in the free United States …”

“A man like you always has to explain himself.”

Siringo didn’t like that. He started to reply, then checked as a shabby man Lou Hand didn’t recognize rubbed some dirt from the outside of the window and peered in at the drinkers.

The man’s jaw dropped; he knew who was sitting there in the corner. He rushed away. The winter twilight was closing fast on the sad, nearly deserted street. A few snowflakes flurried suddenly, and Lou Hand wished he were lying buck naked and frying on a sandy beach back home …

Bob Siringo sighed. “Day before yesterday, up the trail a piece, when the snowstorm hit, my mount foundered and snapped a leg in a drift. I had to shoot Rex. Then I had to come the rest of the way on foot. That was a pisser of a storm, sheriff. For a long time I didn’t know whether I’d find a town. Whether I’d make it. I did, and here I am, resting up.” He smiled and lifted one shoulder in a shrug, then drank a good swallow of beer.

Lou Hand helped himself to another sip of courage. “Well, I’m not on the prod, Mr. Siringo, because you haven’t caused any trouble. But the town fathers want you to leave White Pass.”

“Shit,” Bob Siringo said, losing his smile and thumping his stein on the table so hard some of the golden beer slopped out. The smell was strong; sweet; melancholy, somehow.

“It’s that girl, I’ll bet. The one at the livery—?”

“You’re a quick study, Mr. Siringo. Yes, exactly right. You see—ah—unfortunately, she’s the daughter of the mayor.”

“Just my God-damn luck,” Bob Siringo said with another sigh. “I’ve had two bad, bad weaknesses, sheriff. One is for young females with a lot of stuff up here.” He patted the bosom of his duster. Now, instead of smiling, he smirked.

“Every man’s got a weakness, sheriff. What’s yours?”

Mine? I hate this place. This job. I don’t want to die here … for the sake of a godforsaken, frozen, no-account town full of people with no hope left …

“Never mind. May I ask you to move on, Mr. Siringo?”

“Well, you can ask. But I can’t find myself a decent horse. I’ve looked.”

“There’s a coach through here at six
P.M.
every evening. Going the way you want to go—down toward Sacramento.”

“Oh, no, I don’t take that kind of transportation,” Bob Siringo said. “Too many strangers. Too many windows for people to get at you.”

Lou Hand swallowed again.

“I’m afraid you haven’t got any say in it. I’m ordering you.”

Bob Siringo’s pale eyes showed a moment’s murderous malice. Then he covered it by leaning back; relaxing; letting the tension visibly leave his shoulders.

“Oh, come on. You do that, sheriff, you’ll probably draw to back it up—I’ll kill you—what’s accomplished? I came to this burg by accident. I’ll leave when I can.”

“No, not good enough …”

“I’m not getting on any fucking stage, do you understand?”

Lou Hand just stared at him, terrified. Bob Siringo turned in his chair. “Barkeep? What’s the time?”

“Quarter past five, sir,” Clarence sang out.

Bob Siringo put on another smile, though Lou Hand thought this one was false; intended to lull him. “Then we’ve got at least forty-five minutes to be friendly. Don’t go wild when I unbutton my duster and reach, sheriff. I’m going to put my hogleg on the table as a gesture of my good will. You can take hold of yours if you want, just in case. But don’t shoot me by mistake, all right?”

“All right,” Lou Hand whispered.

He lowered his hand down to his Colt while Bob Siringo pulled his. It was a .45-caliber Colt, U.S. Army model, with the intimidating 7.5-inch barrel. A real show-off piece. Well cared for, too. It gleamed faintly with oil, showing not a spot of rust, as Clarence illuminated the room by lighting three of the kerosene chimney lamps in the fixture hanging from the ceiling.

“There,” Bob Siringo said. “That’s my one and only weapon. So relax.” He rubbed his upper arms. “Jesus, it’s cold in here.”

“It’s always cold in White Pass.” Outside, Lou Hand saw someone dart along the far side of the street, pointing toward the window. A second dimly-glimpsed figure rushed away. Youngsters, he realized as he watched the first one tie a muffler tighter under his chin and over his ears. Will Pertwee.

“Sheriff,” Bob Siringo said with apparent sincerity. “I want to show you that I don’t have any bad intentions. Barkeep? Bring us a bottle. A good bottle. On my tab.” Clarence delivered a bottle of expensive Kentucky whiskey. Siringo uncorked it and sniffed. “Very fine. Put a good tip down for yourself, barkeep.” Clarence swallowed his answer and hurried away. Siringo shoved his stein to one side and gestured for Lou Hand to finish his shot, which he did. Then Siringo poured.

“Have a good drink, sheriff. Warm up. Think it over. Do you really want to push this issue of my leaving town?”

Lou sipped the smooth warming whiskey.

“No, but it’s my job.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be doing something else?” Siringo asked, and Lou Hand had the feeling that the young gunman was mocking him somehow, but he was not clever enough to figure out how he could be sure. Siringo leaned back and smoothed his long shiny pointed mustaches with his index fingers. “Wouldn’t you rather be sleeping, or reading a fine novel, or eating a plate of stew, instead of sitting here wondering if, and how soon, I’m going to blow you to kingdom come because I can’t take your orders?”

Just a little fuzzy from the whiskey, and knowing he was probably in even more desperate trouble because of it, Lou Hand answered. “You’re right, I’d rather be doing something else. Rather be sitting in the sunshine in a rowboat in the middle of Red Fish Pass.”

“Where’s that?”

“Back home. West coast of Florida.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Why did everybody leave the East? To start over. To make a fortune. I listened to Mr. Greeley.”

“Who?”

“Horace Greeley. ‘Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.’ ”

“Oh, him.” It was clear Bob Siringo didn’t know who the devil Mr. Greeley might be.

“Tell me about Florida,” the younger man said affably. “I’ve never been down there. I’m from Hoopeston, Illinois, originally.”

“Well,” Lou Hand said as the darkness settled faster outside the dirty window, “first thing is, it’s warm there. Warm, and bright. The light’s almost unbearable when the noon sun hits the sand and the water on a hot day. A man could go blind, and fry his hide red as a lobster, too. But it isn’t a bad way to d …”

He cut it off, realizing what he’d almost said. All of a sudden his mouth was dry as sand above the tide line. The liquid he’d drunk was exerting a ferocious pressure in his bladder. He wanted to run. Jump up, and run. He just sat there.

“Why don’t you go back to Florida?”

“I don’t know. I’ve sure thought about it. Maybe one day I will. Meantime …” He stared. “I’m responsible for doing this job the best I can.”

Bob Siringo stared right back for what seemed forever. Then:

“Barkeep? What time is it now?”

“Twenty-five to six.”

Lou Hand coughed. “The coach is almost never late. We’ve got to get back to the main discussion.”

In a flat, mean voice, Siringo said, “Subject’s closed, sheriff.”

“No. You’re going.”

“That’s it?”

Hoping he wasn’t shaking, Lou Hand looked him in the eye and said, “That’s it.”

“Well, shit.” Flurried motion outside the window caught his eye; whipped him around in his chair. “Get away. Get away, you little fuckers,” he shouted, gesturing at the shadows lurking on the other side of the steamed-up glass. Two of the boys ran. The other, Will Pertwee, simply darted back to the edge of the walk and hovered there, captured by the spectacle of the adversaries facing each other across the table.

Slowly, carefully, Lou Hand pushed aside his coat. Freed the butt of his gun. His heart pounded like surf in his ear. Bob Siringo eyed his Army Colt gleaming there, then suddenly wriggled in his chair.

“Damn, some kind of vermin in this place. Bit me.”

Angry, he reached under the table. Alarms rang in Lou Hand’s head. “Siringo, keep your hand up where …” Then, the small popping shot. Lou Hand felt the bullet hit his foot and stiffened with a cry. He tried to draw, but there was sudden pain, and a feeling of warm blood in his boot, to distract him. Before he could act, Bob Siringo had a small two-barrel hideout pistol above the table, aimed right at Lou Hand’s brain.

“You draw on me, sheriff, you’re guaranteed dead. Hands flat on the table. Flat!”

Lou Hand obeyed. He was sweating despite the cold. Cringing behind the bar, Clarence looked embalmed; he gestured wildly toward the lobby door, where, apparently, the clerk had rushed. “Stay out, Sid, stay out!”

Bob Siringo blew a whiff of smoke off his little pistol. Then he managed a tense smile.

“One of my bad faults is a weakness for big-busted females, but the other one is lying, sheriff. I lie right, left, and Sundays. I lied about my hogleg. This is true, though. If I placed that bullet right, your left foot won’t be much good any more. A gimpy sheriff, a sheriff who isn’t agile, who can’t run, that kind of sheriff’s not much use to anybody. I’d say it’s time for you to go back home.”

He jumped up suddenly, overturning his chair, sweeping his hat onto his head, then switching the hideout pistol to his left hand and snatching up the fearsome long Army Colt with his right.

“You bastard, you really fucked things up for me,” he said, spitting it like a little boy robbed of his candy and the privacy to enjoy it. “By God I’m not too sure why I didn’t kill you, so you damn well better speak some good about Bob Siringo after this. Don’t say he never did anything but bad to folks.”

And he ran, straight back past the bar, brandishing his weapons and screaming venomously at Clarence, “What are you looking at, shit-face?”

Clarence dropped to his knees, out of sight. Bob Siringo ran through the penumbra of lamplight and down the hall and out into the wintry dark with a slam of the back door, and was never seen again.

Still seated, with his boot full of blood, Lou Hand was gripping the table’s edge while trying to keep from fainting.

He failed.

Four mornings later, Jesse Thorne called on Lou Hand in his room at 11
A.M.
She brought him a mug of hot beef broth, which she’d been doing ever since the shootout at the Congress saloon bar.

“Here’s the weekly,” she said, showing him the four-page single-sheet tabloid paper. “The editorial calls you the town’s hero.”

“Oh, yes, sure,” he said, turning his face away, toward the lace curtain and the familiar sad spectacle of Sierra Street all churny with mud and dirty water from the snow-melt. And no sunshine; just winter gray.

“Well, it was very heroic …”

“Just to sit there? I don’t think so.”

“You’re wrong. Maybe it wasn’t dime-novel heroics, but it was brave. You knew he was a killer. But we won’t argue,” she said, coming closer. “Time for you to drink this nice hot …” Through the steam from the mug, she sniffed something. “Lou Hand, have you been imbibing?”

“Definitely. Bottle in the drawer over there.”

“Why?” she said, with mystification and some outrage.

“To work up courage.”

“For what?”

Almost as terrified as he had been at the Congress Hotel, he couldn’t reply for a minute. Inside the heavy bandage on his left foot, which was resting on an old footstool, he hurt, badly. Doc Floyd had confirmed that the vanished Bob Siringo was an artful shot, or at least a lucky one, because Lou might indeed be permanently crippled, since some muscle or other had been severed.

“For what, Lou?”

“For asking—Jesse—would you consent to become my wife?”

When she got over the surprise, he asked her politely whether she would bring from the bureau the little news clipping from the Atlanta paper. She knew what it was; she saw it when she cleaned the rooms of her boarders once a week. He uttered a soft thank-you and immediately tore the clipping in half, then in quarters, which he dropped on his lap robe.

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“Because, Jesse, I realized the last day or so that the same dream won’t work for everybody. And it’s nobody’s fault that it doesn’t.” He clasped her big, work-rough hand. “I’ve got my own dream, Jess. Come with me back East. We’ll make out somehow. Let me show you Florida while there’s still time. Sitting there with Siringo, I realized there isn’t as much as I always pretended. Will you go?”

She crouched down beside him, eyes tear-filled, which was something quite unusual for a woman of her independence and strength.

“Of course I will, Lou. I’ve always wondered why you couldn’t work up nerve to ask.”

She smiled and put her right arm around the shoulder of his nightshirt. He was, as usual, dreadfully, resentfully cold.

But that wouldn’t be the case much longer.

T
RACY RODE DOWN FROM
the rimrock with the seed of the plan already in mind. It was four days since they had blown up the safe in the bank at Wagon Bow and ridden off with almost fifty thousand dollars in Pawker’s brown leather satchel. They had split up, taking three different directions, with Jacknife, the most trustworthy of the lot, carrying the satchel. Now, after four days of riding and sleeping out, Tracy saw no reason why he should split the money with the other two men.

His horse moved slowly along the valley floor beneath the sheet of blue sky. Rags of clouds scudded before the wind, disappearing past the craggy tops of the mountains to the west. Beyond those mountains lay California. Fifty thousand dollars in California would go a long way toward setting a man up for the rest of his life.