“Snick as the devil,” I said.
“Yar! So when it comes to racing those nags around the little track he had made, any miner who can ride, does ride. It’s powerful comical to watch em smashin their nutsacks up n down, set my watch and warrant on that. And I’m allus there to keep order. I’ve seen every race for the last seven years, and every diggerboy who’s ever run in em. For riders, those boys over there are it. There was one more, but in the race Sammy put on this New Earth, that pertic’ler salt-mole fell off his mount and got his guts squashed. Lived a day or two, then goozled. So I don’t think he’s your skin-man, do you?”
At this, Wegg laughed heartily. Peavy looked at him with resignation, Jamie with a mixture of contempt and wonder.
Did I believe this man when he said they’d rounded up every saltie who could sit a horse? I would, I decided, if he could answer one question in the affirmative.
“Do you bet on these horse-races yourself, Wegg?”
“Made a goodish heap last year,” he said proudly. “Course Shunt only pays in scrip-he’s tight-but it keeps me in whores and whiskey. I like the whores young and the whiskey old.”
Peavy looked at me over Wegg’s shoulder and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, He’s what they have up there, so don’t blame me for it.
Nor did I. “Wegg, go on in the office and wait for us. Jamie and Sheriff Peavy, come with me.”
I explained as we crossed the street. It didn’t take long.
“You tell them what we want,” I said to Peavy as we stood outside the batwings. I kept it low because we were still being watched by the whole town, although the ones clustered outside the saloon had drawn away from us, as if we might have something that was catching. “They know you.”
“Not as well as they know Wegg,” he said.
“Why do you think I wanted him to stay across the street?”
He grunted a laugh at that, and pushed his way through the batwings. Jamie and I followed.
The regular patrons had drawn back to the gaming tables, giving the bar over to the salties. Snip and Canfield flanked them; Kellin Frye stood with his back leaning against the barnboard wall and his arms folded over his sheepskin vest. There was a second floor-given over to bump-cribs, I assumed-and the balcony up there was loaded with less-than-charming ladies, looking down at the miners.
“You men!” Peavy said. “Turn around and face me!”
They did as he said, and promptly. What was he to them but just another foreman? A few held onto the remains of their short whiskeys, but most had already finished. They looked livelier now, their cheeks flushed with alcohol rather than the scouring wind that had chased them down from the foothills.
“Now here’s what,” Peavy said. “You’re going to sit up on the bar, every mother’s son of you, and take off your boots so we can see your feet.”
A muttering of discontent greeted this. “If you want to know who’s spent time in Beelie Stockade, why not just ask?” a graybeard called. “I was there, and I en’t ashamed. I stole a loaf for my old woman and our two babbies. Not that it did the babbies any good; they both died.”
“What if we won’t?” a younger one asked. “Them gunnies shoot us? Not sure I’d mind. At least I wouldn’t have to go down in the plug nummore.”
A rumble of agreement met this. Someone said something that sounded like green light.
Peavy took hold of my arm and pulled me forward. “It was this gunny got you out of a day’s work, then bought you drinks. And unless you’re the man we’re looking for, what the hell are you afraid of?”
The one that answered this couldn’t have been more than my age. “Sai Sheriff, we’re always afraid.”
This was truth a little balder than they were used to, and complete silence dropped over the Busted Luck. Outside, the wind moaned. The grit hitting the thin board walls sounded like hail.
“Boys, listen to me,” Peavy said, now speaking in a lower and more respectful tone of voice. “These gunslingers could draw and make you do what has to be done, but I don’t want that, and you shouldn’t need it. Counting what happened at the Jefferson spread, there’s over three dozen dead in Debaria. Three at the Jefferson was women.” He paused. “Nar, I tell a lie. One was a woman, the other two mere girls. I know you’ve got hard lives and nothing to gain by doing a good turn, but I’m asking you, anyway. And why not? There’s only one of you with something to hide.”
“Well, what the fuck,” said the graybeard.
He reached behind him to the bar and boosted himself up so he was sitting on it. He must have been the Old Fella of the crew, for all the others followed suit. I watched for anyone showing reluctance, but to my eye there was none. Once it was started, they took it as a kind of joke. Soon there were twenty-one overalled salties sitting on the bar, and the boots rained down on the sawdusty floor in a series of thuds. Ay, gods, I can smell the reek of their feet to this day.
“Oogh, that’s enough for me,” one of the whores said, and when I looked up, I saw our audience vacating the balcony in a storm of feathers and a swirl of pettislips. The bartender joined the others by the gaming tables, holding his nose pinched shut. I’ll bet they didn’t sell many steak dinners in Racey’s Cafe at suppertime; that smell was an appetite-killer if ever there was one.
“Yank up your cuffs,” Peavy said. “Let me gleep yer ankles.”
Now that the thing was begun, they complied without argument. I stepped forward. “If I point to you,” I said, “get down off the bar and go stand against the wall. You can take your boots, but don’t bother putting them on. You’ll only be walking across the street, and you can do that barefooty.”
I walked down the line of extended feet, most pitifully skinny and all but those belonging to the youngest miners clogged with bulging purple veins.
“You… you… and you…”
In all, there were ten of them with blue rings around their ankles that meant time in the Beelie Stockade. Jamie drifted over to them. He didn’t draw, but he hooked his thumbs in his crossed gunbelts, with his palms near enough to the butts of his six-shooters to make the point.
“Barkeep,” I said. “Pour these men who are left another short shot.”
The miners without stockade tattoos cheered at this and began putting on their boots again.
“What about us?” the graybeard asked. The tattooed ring above his ankle was faded to a blue ghost. His bare feet were as gnarled as old tree-stumps. How he could walk on them-let alone work on them-was more than I could understand.
“Nine of you will get long shots,” I said, and that wiped the gloom from their faces. “The tenth will get something else.”
“A yank of rope,” Canfield of the Jefferson said in a low voice. “And after what I seen out t’ranch, I hope he dances at the end of it a long time.”
We left Snip and Canfield to watch the eleven salties drinking at the bar, and marched the other ten across the street. The graybeard led the way and walked briskly on his tree-stump feet. That day’s light had drained to a weird yellow I had never seen before, and it would be dark all too soon. The wind blew and the dust flew. I was watching for one of them to make a break-hoping for it, if only to spare the child waiting in the jail-but none did.
Jamie fell in beside me. “If he’s here, he’s hoping the kiddo didn’t see any higher than his ankles. He means to face it out, Roland.”
“I know,” I said. “And since that’s all the kiddo did see, he’ll probably ride the bluff.”
“What then?”
“Lock em all up, I suppose, and wait for one of em to change his skin.”
“What if it’s not just something that comes over him? What if he can keep it from happening?”
“Then I don’t know,” I said.
Wegg had started a penny-in, three-to-stay Watch Me game with Pickens and Strother. I thumped the table with one hand, scattering the matchsticks they were using as counters. “Wegg, you’ll accompany these men into the jail with the sheriff. It’ll be a few minutes yet. There’s a few more things to attend to.”
“What’s in the jail?” Wegg asked, looking at the scattered matchsticks with some regret. I guessed he’d been
