To a man from a cesspool, the gutter is heaven. Those were the words. He turned the whiskey glass around and around in its own little sticky pool of clear liquid on the bar top, and thought of them. If a man had said them, he’d have killed him—shot him down with the ferocious fury of a self-made gunman. Called, drawn, and shot, all with the unbelievable speed that had made him feared, hated, and fawned over the width of the raw, rude frontier.
But it hadn’t been a man, it was a girl—a slip of a woman at that. Not over 110 pounds of fragile, violet-eyed, taffy-haired girl. The kind that made heroes out of their men while they themselves lived and died unsung. A real Western woman.
He couldn’t get the words out of his mind; they were sort of poetic.
He slid the whiskey glass along, making the little pool take on an oblong, roughly heart-shaped outline. He knew what she’d meant, though. He nodded slightly, morosely. There was a difference all right, sure there was. He was an outlaw. That the law had never caught him didn’t alter the facts one damned bit. She knew it, and he knew it, and, he surmised tartly, so did the whole damned world. Even so, it sure hurt, when he’d tried to scrape up an acquaintanceship to have her drown it with a sentence like that. He downed the whiskey and turned bitterly away from the bar.
The First Chance saloon was a bedlam of noise, pungent odors of tobacco, liquor, and human sweat. The Vermilion Kid grinned wryly, sourly to himself as he made his way through the press of raucous, writhing bodies to the faro table. He gambled with his usual indifferent luck and the warmth of the room—generated by the hissing, glaring lanterns, the feverish, recklessly hilarious patrons, and the dingy, worn little iron stove in a far corner—made a small wreath of sweaty beads stand out on his upper lip and his forehead. His slate gray eyes were somber, constantly moving over the room with a liquid, smooth movement and a look of sardonic ridicule had settled over his tanned, lean cheeks.
He marshaled his chips and counted them unconsciously, always aware of the toss of that taffy hair and the proud, piquant face, and then the dagger of the words spanked up hard against the back of his forehead.
At breakfast the following morning, the Vermilion Kid’s badly mauled pride had shielded itself behind a mask of indifference, as it always did. In fact, he was pretty well along in the process of forgetting the whole damned episode—or so he told himself, when the hotel clerk came up to his table. He was the only occupant of the dining room and the man clearly showed that he had to talk to someone. The Kid motioned to a chair as the clerk hesitated. “Sit down.” The clerk sat with a slight, self-conscious nod of thanks.
“Sure’s too bad, ain’t it?”
The Kid knew the routine. He was supposed to look up, perplexed, and ask what was too bad? He shrugged instead, deliberately, and pointed to his thick plate of ham and eggs. “You had breakfast?”
The clerk was deflated. “Ain’t hungry.” He tried a more natural approach. “You hear what happened last night?”
“Nope, don’t reckon I did.” He continued to fork the food into his mouth.
“Some cowboys ridin’ back out of town come across ol’ man Dodge’s body, plumb shot all to hell an’ stiffer’n a ramrod, about two miles out o’ town.”
At the name of Dodge, the Kid’s soft, nervous fingers laid aside his eating utensils. His gray eyes came up smoky and he chewed methodically until he swallowed, looking at the clerk. “Well, what’s the rest of it?” There was a sudden earnestness in his voice that the clerk didn’t fail to recognize. He shrugged, anticlimatically.
“Ain’t nothin’ more. Them riders jus’ found the old guy shot to death, that’s all.” The last came tartly, a little indignantly, as though the clerk resented the Kid’s calm, steady eye and relaxed manner. He excused himself, got up, turned with a slight frown, and walked out of the dining room.
For possibly fifteen seconds the Kid didn’t move, then he got up, pulled his hat absently onto his head, flipped a ragged piece of paper money on the table, and walked out of the hotel into the blast furnace sunlight that was firing its molten wrath down upon Holbrook. Without seeing, he looked up and down the lone, ragged, unkempt street and turned toward the livery barn.
A hostler got his horse and the Kid saddled up, mounted, flipped a piece of change to the whiskeywrecked old sot who had gotten his horse, and rode out of the barn. He turned down the hot roadway with its tiny, whirling dust devils that jerked to life under his big black gelding’s freshly shod hoofs, and out of Holbrook, heading north, toward the vast D-Back-To-Back, the Dodge Ranch. The blearyeyed hostler looked from the coin in his hand to the disappearing rider and his filmy eyes were incredulous. He held a $20 gold piece in his hand—more money than he’d had since he’d been a top rider for the 101, nearly fifteen years before. Twenty golden dollars to hide in his filthy rags until it burned a livid hole in his pocket that’d match the searing ache in his ravished body for whiskey.
As the Kid rode toward the tremendous Dodge holdings, his mind went bitterly, fleetingly to the ten little words that had hurt worse than anything that’d been said to, or about, him since he’d carved his own violent, mysterious arc across the firmament of the frontier. He more than suspected that his intended offer would be bluntly, savagely refused by Toma Dodge. Still, he wanted to make it—perhaps so she’d hurt him again. He wasn’t sure why, but he fully intended to make the offer anyway.
As the Kid rode leisurely toward his destiny, back in Holbrook there was an explosive and profane council going on in Sheriff Dugan’s office. Emmett Dugan was gray and grizzled, hard and indifferent to everything except his job as sheriff of Concho County. He was a brooding bachelor, fiery of tongue and rough in appearance. The man opposite him was articulate, dark, and handsome in an oily, unprepossessing way.
“I don’t know when he come in, Sheriff. This mornin’, when I got down to the barn, Bob had put him in a stall and doctored him. He’s down there now, if you want to see him.”
Dugan got up slowly. “Well, let’s go look. Don’t see how the dang’ critter can be alive, though, if he’s shot like you say.”
Side-by-side the big forbidding-looking sheriff and his smaller, immaculate-looking companion walked down the protesting plank sidewalk to the livery barn. The dark man led up to a gloomy stall where a powerful bay horse stood forlornly in a shadowy corner, head down, lower lip hanging, breathing with bubbling, rasping sounds. The marks of a recently removed saddle were still outlined on the beast’s back. Dugan opened the stall door and went up to the wounded horse. Les Tallant, the livery barn owner, went in with him and pointed to a ragged, swollen, and purplish hole.
“Right through the chest.” His voice was unconsciously lowered. The horse didn’t look up. Dugan walked around the horse, studying the wounds. The animal had been struck a little forward of the left front shoulder. Already a bloody scab had formed over the torn, swollen flesh. Dugan walked softly over the straw bedding around to the other side, shaking his head. He looked thoughtfully at the hole in the wounded saddle animal for a second time, then turned and went out of the stall. Tallant followed him out, latching the door behind him.
“It’s Buff Dodge’s big bay, all right. I’d know that horse anywhere. He prob’ly ambled into town an’ come to your barn because he remembered that’s where Buff used to leave him when he come to town. Damn.” The sheriff shook his head wearily, sadly. “Ol’ Buff was one o’ my best friends.” That was as close as Emmett Dugan ever came to showing emotion.
