Hawkins gave him a stern look. He said, “You right sure you can handle it, Marshal? I’m going to be in the midst of that bunch coming in, and I’d just as soon not get killed until I have one last drunk. If I’m going to get killed, I might as well finish that bottle for you.”
Longarm shook his head slowly and clicked his tongue. He said, “Tsk, tsk, tsk, Mr. Hawkins. You don’t want to break your resolve over a little thing like this. You’d feel silly if you got yourself all drunked up and then didn’t get killed.”
Hawkins gave him a look. “I suppose you have a point, Marshal. But, say, are you certain that I am under obligation, that I’ve got to do this under the Constitution?”
Longarm gave him an eye. He said, “Mr. Hawkins, there are a few things I don’t tease about. Pussy is one of them, good whiskey is another, and the law and my job are the other two. So I am dead serious when I tell you that you are a fully constituted member of the United States Marshal Service and subject to my orders. If you don’t follow them, you can go to prison.”
Hawkins looked up at him. He said, “That’s a fine how do you do. A law-abiding citizen like me ends up like this.” He began gathering up the cards. “Well, the least you can do is play me some head-up poker. Maybe I can make a profit off that deal. Hell, two dollars a day! Why, that wouldn’t even pay for my whiskey in other days and times.”
Longarm said as he reached into his pocket for his roll of money, “I wouldn’t count on it paying anything. Playing me poker doesn’t generally improve a man’s pocket. In fact, you might lose your two dollars a day for a long time to come.”
Hawkins began to shuffle the cards. He said, “We’ll just see about that, Marshal. Or do I call you boss?”
Longarm smiled. He said, “Either one of them will do, Mr. Hawkins. Just shuffle them cards and give me a cut. And ante up a dollar while you got it.”
Chapter 7
The two men had finished playing poker and the cards had been put away. Now they were sitting, Longarm with a drink of whiskey and a cigarillo, and Mr. Hawkins with a pipe. Very little money had changed hands in the poker game, and the man had proven to be a rawhide-tough player, though Longarm claimed you couldn’t tell anything about a man’s skill by playing two-handed poker. He claimed it was about like trading horses blindfolded. He said, “Hell, it’s all luck. You might as well turn them all face-up. Very few hands are going to come along where they are even enough to get some decent betting going.”
It was growing late and Longarm was about to go back to his room. They had made their plans for the next day. Hawkins had groused a bit about delaying his departure for his next stop, but Longarm believed that he was secretly delighted to be a part of a law adventure.
Hawkins had wanted more details than Longarm had been able to supply about how they would operate the next day. Longarm simply said, “We leave here and along the road, I’m going to look for a likely spot. You’re just going to go up to Archie Barrett’s place. I’m going to wait for you. That’s all it comes down to.”
That had left Hawkins looking uneasy, but Longarm had reassured him by saying that he was a crack shot. He said, “Look at it this way, Mr. Hawkins. If it’s you and Mr. Barrett and four riders, that’s six people and I’ve got a one out of six chance of hitting you.”
For a second, Hawkins stared at Longarm before he realized that his leg had been pulled. He said, “Aw shucks, Marshal. That kind of talk ain’t funny, especially from a man wearing a badge on his chest.”
Just before they were to leave, Longarm wanted the story about what happened to Mrs. Thompson’s husband, Milton.
It brought a somber look to Hawkins’s face. He said, “Maybe what happened to Milton Thompson is one of the main reasons I’m willing to go along with you on this foolishness. Milton was a good man. He came here and built this big house we’re sitting in right now—fortunately for his wife or she wouldn’t have a way to make her living—and he set about to make a community out of this place. He had some experience in banking and there were all these settlers coming in, most of them with little or no resources. They were a long way from the bank in Junction or the bank in Brady and certainly from the bank in Austin.
The man paused and looked at Longarm. “He proposed to set up a type of community bank. It wouldn’t have been a regular bank, not in the same terms that you would think of one. It would be one that everybody put in a little money—twenty-five dollars if you had it, fifty dollars if you had it, or one hundred dollars if you could. And then, they’d make loans to whoever was the most needy. It was a good idea, Marshal, the kind of idea that would have worked and the kind of idea that would have saved many of these settlers that were close to going under. Well, naturally, the Barretts and the Myerses didn’t like it at all. Not only that, he was going to put up a feed and grocery cooperative, staples, work clothes and such so that these settlers could kind of own that and be able to buy whatever they needed at the cheapest possible price instead of being held up by some of these townspeople here who are scared to death of the Barretts and the Myerses.”
Hawkins paused again for a moment. “See, at first, Jake Myers and the Barretts were content to just try and starve them out, but Milton Thompson got in the way of that. They rocked on like that for maybe a year or so until one of them, maybe both of them, got impatient. There was a string of riders came blazing through here at noon one day just as Milton Thompson was walking across the street from the little building he called a bank to take his noon meal with his wife. They shot him down in the street. They put enough holes in him that he looked like a colander right in front of his wife and in full view of half of the town. The townspeople knew who those riders and gunmen were. I wasn’t here at the time, but I arrived a week later. It was a sad sight. So, that’s the story of Milton Thompson.”
Longarm adjusted his hat. The story made him feel bad. He said, “And Mrs. Thompson was willing to try and hang on?”
Hawkins nodded. He said, “Yes, she even tried to run the bank for awhile. In fact,” and he smiled at this, “it was one of those storefront kind of places. The last one on the end on the east side. She put up a sign on the front that said Kill Me If You Dare. She’s a pistol. She’s got a lot of bottom to her, a lot of grit.”
Longarm said, “I’m afraid she’s had just about enough, though.”
Hawkins shrugged. “Yes, and I don’t blame her. She couldn’t make the bank go. It was a narrow thing as it was, a near thing. It didn’t have one chance in a hundred, anyway, and without Milton Thompson to drive it, it had no chance at all. Everybody came in and got what little money they had in it and that pretty well blew it up. Somebody else bought the feed store. Sims works over at the mercantile. I think Myers owns it; I’m not sure. You’re looking at a ghost town that is in the midst of happening. All these settlers will soon be gone and all this land will end up being divided as they intended from the very first between the Myerses and the Barretts. That is, unless you think you can stop it. I don’t think you can, not without a troop of calvary.”
