Willis asked the question over the brim of his mug as he took another swallow.
“A lot,” Deckert answered. “In fact, some folks say it’ll be as much as forty, maybe fifty thousand dollars, and it’ll be comin’ into town by stagecoach.”
“When?”
“Next week sometime, from what I hear. You seem uncommon interested in all this,” Deckert said.
Willis laughed. “Maybe I’m plannin’ to hold up the stagecoach.”
“Yeah? Well if you do, I hope you have better luck than them three boys that just tried it.”
“They was just particular unlucky is all,” the bartender said. “They happened to try and rob the particular coach Matt Jensen was ridin’ on.”
“You got that right,” Deckert said. “I know there was only one of him and three of the robbers—”
“Five if you count the two that got away,” the bartender said, interrupting Deckert in mid-sentence.
“Five then,” Deckert corrected. “But here’s the point I was gettin’ at. They was five stagecoach robbers and only one of Matt Jensen, which means the robbers was outnumbered.” He laughed.
For a second or two, neither the bartender nor anyone else at the bar reacted.
“Don’t you get it?” Deckert said. “They’s only one of Matt Jensen and they’s three—maybe more of the robbers, but I said they was outnumbered.”
There was still no reaction.
“Because he’s so good,” Deckert explained in an exasperated tone of voice.
“Oh, I get it now,” the bartender said, and he laughed out loud.
“So you see, friend, if you really are plannin’ on holdin’ up the coach, you might want to think about it again, lessen you run into this here Jensen fella.”
“There you go, friend, you just talked me right out of it,” Willis said, laughing and holding up his beer.
The others in the saloon laughed as well.
When the Dry Gulch closed its doors for the night, Willis and Meechum, not having enough money to waste on a hotel room, rode just outside of town where they bedded down in an arroyo beneath the huge dark slab of the McDowell Mountains.
“We goin’ to try and rob that stagecoach, are we, Willis?” Meechum asked.
Willis shook his head. “No, I don’t think so,” he said.
“Good, ’cause to tell you the truth, I wasn’t lookin’ forward to something like that again. I think waitin’ till the money gets here, then robbin’ the bank that it’s put into, will be a lot better.”
“We ain’t goin’ to do that either.”
“What do you mean we ain’t goin’ to do that? Ain’t that what we come here for?”
“We come here to get money the best way we can,” Willis said. He smiled. “We’ll just wait around until this here Bixby fella takes the money out of the bank. It’ll be a lot easier takin’ the money from him than it would be robbin’ a bank.”
A big smile spread across Meechum’s face.
“Yeah!” he said. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“So, all we got to do is spend a week or so here without gettin’ into any kind of trouble.”
After Meechum spread out his blanket, he stepped a few feet away to relieve himself. As he stood there, urinating, he happened to look up just in time to see a falling star. Long ago, his pa had once told him that every time you see a falling star, it meant someone was about to die, and he wondered if it was an omen for his own fate.
He shivered.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning, the sun was a quarter of the way up in the east as the wagon lumbered along the road. Its transit was accompanied by a symphony of sound, from the footfalls of the mules to the jangle of the harness, the rattle of the connecting pins, and the squeak of one of the wheels.
The driver, a grizzled old man, spat a plug of tobacco, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, then turned to the boy sitting next to him.
“Dewey, did you grease that right rear wheel like I told you?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Malcolm, I done greased it just like you said,” the twelve-year-old replied.
“Do you hear that?”
They quit talking for a moment, the silence interrupted by the incessant squeak and chirp of the right rear wheel.
“Yes, sir, I hear it,” Dewey Calhoun admitted.
