“Or expecting to cause it,” Wolfson said.
“What would O’Malley want to cause trouble about?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Wolfson said.
I didn’t quite believe that he didn’t know, but I saw no reason to say so.
“Can you get Cole?” Wolfson said.
“Don’t know where he is,” I said.
“He’s not in Appaloosa anymore?”
“That’s what I heard.”
“How can we find him,” Wolfson said.
“Don’t think you’ll have to,” I said. “I expect he might come drifting in here, next few days.”
“Here?” Wolfson said. “Why?”
“See me,” I said. “Sometimes he likes to talk with me about things.”
Wolfson looked like he wanted to ask more, but he didn’t quite know what to ask, and I didn’t help him out. So he didn’t.
Instead, he said, “What are we going to do about Cato and Rose?”
“How about they don’t bother us, we don’t bother them?” I said.
“They’ll bother us,” Wolfson said.
“Why do you think so?”
“Eamon wants to be the studhorse around here,” Wolfson said.
“And you’re in his way?”
“I guess,” Wolfson said.
“He runs a mine,” I said. “You run this place. How does that put you in his way?”
“Don’t know,” Wolfson said.
“How about the lumber operation?” I said. “Who’s way is that in?”
“Got no idea,” Wolfson said.
I didn’t believe that, either, but I could see that Wolfson had said all he was going to say on the subject, so I didn’t pursue it.
14.
I was about to get in my chair in the late afternoon on a Friday, when one of the clerks from the general store came into the saloon.
“Mr. Wolfson wants you in the store,” he said. “Bring the shotgun.”
The saloon was next to the hotel, and the store was on the other side of the hotel. We walked through the lobby of the hotel to get there. In the store were six men, sodbusters probably, gathered in front of the counter, behind which Wolfson stood with a second clerk. Everybody looked at me when I came in.
One of them said, “And we ain’t gonna get scared off by your bully boy, neither.”
The speaker was a small, dark, wiry man, with a kind of sharp angularity about him, like a farming tool. I stopped inside the door and stood against the wall with the shotgun beside my leg, pointing at the floor.
“Make your point, Redmond,” Wolfson said.
“You got no right takin’ our property,” Redmond said.
“I ain’t taken your property, Redmond.”
“We’re all in this together,” Redmond said. “You take Pete Simpson’s land, it’s like takin’ mine.”
“Simpson owed me money, and he couldn’t pay. What am I supposed to do, just give it to him?”
“Give him time. He’ll pay,” Redmond said. “Thing is, and we all know it here, you don’t want him to pay. You want his land. You want all our land.”
“I’ve already made an arrangement for Pete Simpson to stay on his land.”
“Sure,” Redmond said. “Except now it won’t be his land. It’ll be your land. And he’ll pay you rent.”
“Nobody made him run up a bill he couldn’t pay,” Wolfson said.
I looked at the other sodbusters as Wolfson talked. I wondered which one was Pete Simpson.
“So how’s he supposed to feed his cattle, or plant crops, or feed his kids?” Redmond said.
“You know, Bob,” Wolfson said, “when you come right on down to it, that ain’t my concern. Simpson and I made a business deal and he couldn’t hold up his end of it.”
“You knew he couldn’t when you went into it with him,” Redmond said.
He was a fierce little duck, with small, hard eyes on either side of his big plow-blade nose. Wolfson shook his head.
“We’re done here, Bob,” he said. “This is getting us nowhere.”
“We ain’t leaving till we get some justice,” Redmond said.
Without looking at me, Wolfson said, “Everett.”
I nodded and stood away from the wall I’d been leaning on.
“Time to go,” I said.
All the sodbusters looked at me. Redmond the hardest.
“You can’t shoot us all,” Redmond said.
“Actually,” I said. “I probably can. Got a big scatter, probably get at least two of you, first shot. Long as I don’t get too close.”
Nobody said anything. I moved toward Redmond a step.
“I get too close I’ll just mangle you.”
I stopped.
“’Bout here,” I said. “Then I get you and some people near you.”
A couple of the other sodbusters began to back up. A fat guy with pink cheeks behind Redmond spoke to him.
“Come on, Bob,” he said. “This ain’t the way we want it to go. We ain’t even got guns.”
Somebody else said, “He’s right, Bob.”
And somebody else said, “Come on, Bob.”
And somebody else opened the front door of the store and slowly, one after the other, the sodbusters backed out. Bob Redmond was the last one.
“This ain’t over,” he said to Wolfson. “This ain’t over.”
“Nice work, Everett,” Wolfson said.
I nodded.
“If they hadn’t left would you have shot them?” Wolfson said.
“They left,” I said.
“But if they hadn’t.”
“Sometime maybe they won’t leave, then we’ll find out,” I said.
“It may get rougher,” Wolfson said. “I need to know I can count on you.”
“So far so good?” I said.
“Yeah,” Wolfson said. “I guess so.”
I nodded, and grinned at him.
“Bully boy,” I said, and walked back to the saloon.
15.
Virgil Cole arrived just after sunset on a Monday. He walked into the saloon, a tall man in a dark coat and white shirt wearing a big bone-handled Colt.
He walked to the chair where I was sitting and said, “Evenin’, Everett.”
“Virgil.”
