along with a tumbler and a pitcher of cold water. I thanked her.
“Looks like you got a full house this afternoon,” I said.
“My best customers,” she said.
But they weren’t buying much this afternoon. It looked like sarsaparilla in most of them beakers.
I poured myself a generous shot, and added a splash.
“Here’s to the Anchor,” I said.
That got me more silence.
“You fellers don’t want to salute the Anchor Ranch? What happened? You all draw wages?”
I couldn’t get a rise out of any of them.
“George, how come you ain’t toasting the Anchor? You got shut of the place?”
Big Nose George eyed me a moment. “Sheriff, Admiral Bragg, he’s just the finest gent this side of St. Louis, and we’d all be glad to toast our excellent employer. But we’re all going out on a picnic any time, and we’ll toast Mr. Bragg and his beautiful daughter Queen when the time comes.”
“George, that’s a noble idea,” I said.
Spitting Sam nodded solemnly. “We all love and respect Miss Queen, so it’s gonna be sort of a Sunday School affair, soon as we get word from Mr. Bragg.”
“Yeah, dat’s it,” said Smiley Thistlethwaite.
“Well, here’s to Queen,” I said, and sucked on the red-eye a bit.
“She’s a beautiful lady, Sheriff,” said a gent down the bar. He was one of them in the hanging party, so I gave him a cold stare.
After that, things dipped into silence again, but all them fellers was watching me, watching me sip a little, and maybe calculating how much the hooch might slow me down if it came to that. The hooch wouldn’t slow me down because I had no intent to pull the iron out of my holster.
This here was the strangest business I ever seen in a saloon. It was like a bunch of saints dropped in. They was all behavin’ themselves mighty fine, for some reason or other. It reminded me of one of them billboards put up by the Temperance women that said, “Lips that touch liquor will never touch mine.” I always figured them women deserved it. But here was a whole saloon full of gents with their bark on, sippin’ sarsaparilla. Who was I to complain? Not a one of them was breaking any law, far as I could see. Mrs. Gladstone, she just nodded cheerfully and winked at me. I thought about arresting the whole lot and charging them with good behavior, which would have got them fined ten dollars and jailed overnight. No one in Doubtful wants cowboys around that are all behaving themselves. There ain’t a nickel in it.
I polished off my red-eye, left two bits on the counter, and thought to quit the place.
But first I turned to Big Nose George. “You be kind to grandmothers and dogs now,” I said.
“I kiss grannies and kick dogs,” he said.
“I kick grannies and kiss dogs,” Spitting Sam said, trying to raise an argument.
But it didn’t fly. Them fellers standing along the bar, they just smiled and nodded.
There was no point hanging around the Sampling Room, so I pushed through the batwing doors onto the peaceful street, and wondered why it felt like the quiet before the storm. I howdied my way toward the courthouse square, and then I spotted that blood bay and palomino and another saddled nag in front of the Stockman Hotel. It wasn’t much of a hotel, four rooms and a dining room, but Doubtful didn’t need much of a hotel. It was mostly empty anyway, except for an occasional whiskey drummer peddling his sauce.
I’m always looking for ways to get into trouble. So naturally, I was wondering who belonged to that horse tied there beside the blood bay.
So I steered my aching feet—I’m enough of a cowboy so I hate to walk more than ten yards—over to the hotel. Riding boots, like most cowboys wear, are an invention from hell, and Western bootmakers ought to be hanged from the nearest hayloft. Sure enough, in the saloon and dining parlor on the left, there was Admiral and Queen, and with them was Judge Axel Nippers, the selfsame judge as sentenced the boy to be hanged. They was all chomping on filets of beef and mashed spuds. Last I knew, Judge Nippers didn’t own a saddle horse, which made me all the more curious about this business.
I decided then and there to have me some lunch. “Howdy,” I said.
Admiral, he nodded curtly, and Queen peered down her long nose at me, and the judge was too busy wolfing down beef to bother. No one was inviting me to the table, at any rate, so I continued on to another one within hearing distance.
Mrs. Garvey was all a-twitter. “Why, Sheriff, we’ve not seen you in here but twice.”
I couldn’t recollect when, but she knew more arithmetic than I did.
“I’ll have what they’re having,” I said.
“Oh, you’ll enjoy it. Sauteed filets in burgundy sauce, with pickled beets.”
I smiled, since I was getting in over my head. I like chicken-fried steak, maybe once a year, and deviled eggs now and then.
Well, whatever the palaver was at the other table, it quit real sudden, and that threesome was busy patting lips with real cloth napkins, and hurrying through the chow. I was sort of hoping to pick up a notion or two of what was happening around Doubtful, but I saw it’d be a lost cause. That bunch wouldn’t even talk about the weather.
I tackled them sauteed filets and pickled beets, and when she laid the bill on me, I pretty near fainted. It was about a week’s salary. And all I got for it was a mess of silence at the next table. Them three lapped up their chow
