Loomis shook his head. “No, sir, I sure don’t.” He hooked his thumbs in the suspenders that held up his overalls and added proudly, “I own the place. Well, not the barn itself, I reckon, but nobody was usin’ it. I brought everything in and set it up, though.”
“Where do you get your booze?” Matt asked.
Loomis shook his head. “That’s a secret. I’m already takin’ a chance just tellin’ you about the place, but you boys look trustworthy to me.”
“We just helped Marshal Coleman arrest some men who were disturbing the peace,” Sam said. “He’s the one who told us to bring our horses down here.”
Loomis started to look worried again. “Oh, shoot. You’re friends of Marsh Coleman, are you?”
“We just met him,” Matt said. “Don’t worry, Mr. Loomis, we’re not gonna run back to the marshal’s office and tell him about your saloon.”
“I expect he’ll find out sooner or later, though,” Sam said. “He seems like a pretty smart man.”
Loomis nodded. “Oh, he is. Marsh is sharp as a tack, and a damn fine lawman, to boot. Reckon when the time comes, he’ll close me down. But I plan on makin’ a nice tidy sum before that day dawns.”
“That’s your business.”
“That’s right, sonny, it is.”
“Can you take care of our horses?” Sam asked.
“Oh, sure, sure. That’s my business, too, takin’ care o’ horses. They’ll be took good care of, too. You got my word on that, Mr….”
“I’m Bodine,” Matt said. “He’s Two Wolves.”
Loomis scratched at his graying red beard and frowned. “Bodine and Two Wolves…seems to me I’ve heard them names before.”
“Must’ve been two other fellas,” Sam said. He held out the reins. “Here you go.”
Loomis took the reins of Matt’s mount, too, and said, “That’ll be a dollar a day for each, plenty o’ grain and water included. I’ll make sure they get rubbed down good, too.”
“We’re obliged,” Matt said with a nod.
“Now don’t tell anybody what I told you about that barn,” Loomis warned.
“Don’t worry. We’ll keep it to ourselves,” Matt promised.
As they left the livery stable, carrying their saddlebags and rifles, Sam muttered, “I can’t believe you’d do that.”
“Do what?”
“Tell that old-timer we’d keep his secret, when we’re going to Marshal Coleman’s house for dinner this evening.”
“Coleman offered to feed us because we rounded up those troublemakers for him,” Matt said. “The way I see it, one thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”
“He’s sworn to uphold the law here in Cottonwood, and you just agreed to help someone break it.”
“Loomis is gonna be runnin’ that illegal saloon whether I say anything about it or not,” Matt pointed out. “He was runnin’ it before we got here, and I figure he’ll be runnin’ it when we leave.”
“Unless we tell the marshal about it and help him close it down.”
Matt stopped in his tracks. “Oh, now, wait just a minute. It’s a far piece from tellin’ Coleman about it to helpin’ him put the place out of business.”
Sam shrugged. “You heard Hannah. He doesn’t have any deputies.”
“Well, don’t go volunteerin’ me for the job. We didn’t even wear badges when we helped out ol’ Seymour Standish down there in Sweet Apple, Texas. We were unofficial deputies, at most.”
“All I’m saying is that the deck is stacked against Marshal Coleman the way it is.”
“And we don’t have cards in that game,” Matt said. “I’d just as soon keep it that way.”
Sam grunted and shook his head. “Now you’re saying we should avoid trouble. Never thought I’d see the day when Matt Bodine did that.”
They glared narrowly at each other as they reached the Cottonwood Hotel, a nice-looking, two-story establishment. While the blood brothers got along quite well most of the time and had for many years, it wasn’t unheard of for the two of them to clash. A time or two, they had gotten so mad at each other that they split up and rode separate trails for a while. They had always come back together eventually, but who was to say whether or not one day their trails might fork for good?
Not today, though, not over something as minor as this. They went into the hotel and got a couple of rooms, Sam paying for both of them since he usually kept their cash.
Matt looked through an arched entrance that led into a smaller room off the lobby and saw several men sitting around a table playing poker. “You’ve got a card room,” he said to the clerk.
That slick-haired, bespectacled gent nodded. “That’s right. When all the saloons closed, folks still needed a place to play, so Mr. Winston, the owner of the hotel, made a card room out of that storage room.”
“High-stakes games?”
“Well, more friendly, I’d say,” the clerk replied. “But from what I hear, the pots sometimes get pretty big. Two
