She frowned. “I’m sure you wouldn’t sip on duty.”
“I’m always on duty, ma’am.”
“Well, it’s your prerogative,” she said.
There was another of them big words no one ever taught me. “My what?”
“Your choice, your privilege. You are privileged to do what you wish.”
“I never heard that one before. Where’d you get a carpetbag full of words like that?”
“I was an English teacher in the Minnesota Normal School before I came here.”
“English? You?”
“This is better. I earn a living here. Don’t ever go into English, Sheriff. People who work with words don’t get a wooden nickle for it. People who write starve. People who teach reading and writing and spelling can’t make ends meet.”
“So you came out here?”
“Mr. Pickens, I make three times more money running the Sampling Room than I did teaching English to students who intended to be teachers. And in the Sampling Room I serve a better class of customers.”
I got to chewing on that for a while. I thought maybe to chew some tobacco too, but thought better of it. The Sampling Room had its own ways, and I was probably crosswise of half a dozen of them.
She set the bottle of red-eye on the bar, along with a tumbler.
I poured two fingers, being real careful not to get too enthusiastic.
She watched me with approval. At least she’d sell one drink this slow day.
I sipped, wheezed, let that first firewater slide down and start some trouble in my gut, and then sipped again. You had to ease into red-eye, and not take her all at once. Once it numbed your tongue and throat, then you could swaller a little more, but only after it scoured your stomach and started south from there. It took skill to drink red- eye whiskey, and not many fellers ever got the hang of it. It you took it too fast, it’d make you crazy, and if you took it too slow, it would poleaxe you.
She studied me to see if I measured up. I’d just flunked her English lesson, and was fearful I’d flunk whatever else was coming along the pike. But she sort of smiled. She had a lovely smile, even if she was sort of too soft for me. I prefer women who ain’t too soft-lookin’. My ma, she always told me to mind my knitting, and I never did understand that until now. But Mrs. Gladstone was a real pleasant lady, maybe twice my age, and maybe I’d come to like her some as soon as she stopped scaring me.
So we sort of hung there at the bar, she behind and me in front, with a boot on the rail.
“Is there something you wished to see me about, Mr. Pickens?”
“Well, ah, yes, ma’am. I want to talk about King Bragg.”
She sighed. “I can’t bear it. Talk about anything else. The sands of time are running through the hourglass.”
I could never understand talk like that. I’d just say he was gonna croak pretty quick, but she got it all tied up with sand and hourglasses, and I never got the hang of that way of talking.
“I’m sort of looking into it a little,” I said. “Do you remember how he was acting around here—before he, ah, got himself in trouble down the street?”
“He was always a little youthful and impetuous, Sheriff. And he was that evening.”
I figured I’d just pretend to know what that word impetuous meant. I wished she’d talk plain English.
“Was he drunk as a skunk?”
She eyed me real patiently. I don’t think I had said that in any way she approved of.
“He had sipped one ale, Mr. Pickens. Just a little ale, made in Wisconsin and shipped clear out here. I keep a little on hand for him and his father.”
“That’s all—some ale?”
“It’s a very gentle drink, Sheriff.”
“Why did he leave here and go over there to the Last Chance?”
“A man pushed him into it. A gentleman came in and told King Bragg that the cowboys over at the Last Chance were saying bad things about him and his family and the Anchor Ranch, and if he wasn’t a coward he’d come and settle their hash.”
“Someone goaded him into leaving here?”
“Goaded is a good word, especially coming from you, Sheriff. Yes, a sort of heavy gentleman came in, goaded him, and finally King drained his ale and stepped out into the dusk.”
She wiped her eye. “I didn’t want him to go. I knew something bad would come of it. And it did. That was the last I saw of the young man.”
“Do you know who that man was, the one that goaded him?”
“Why yes, I knew him slightly. It was the T-Bar foreman, Plug Parsons.”
SEVENTEEN
I found Judge Nippers in his office, nipping a little amber stuff from a flask.
