Will handed over another pair of dollars. “I’ll be back later,” he said.
The meal at the saloon wasn’t half bad: the steak was large and thick and cooked so that thin blood ran from its middle. Will sat at his table, drank a pot of coffee, and then started on beer. It was good beer—not cold, but not warm, either. He rolled smokes until his fingers no longer obeyed and he scattered perfectly good Bull Durham all over his table, put a bunch of money next to his empty plate, and weaved back to the cathouse. He slept the rest of the day away as well as the full night.
In the morning he ate a half dozen fried eggs and most of a pound of bacon, along with a helping of thin-cut fried potatoes and several cups of coffee. He walked down the street and checked on Slick, who snorted at him and then dropped his muzzle back into a nice serving of crimped oats and molasses.
Will spent the rest of the day sitting in the shade of the saloon’s overhang, went inside at late dusk, drank too much, and crossed the street to his room. He flopped onto the bed fully dressed except for his hat, which he tossed toward the door, and slept deeply and dreamlessly for the night.
The screams he heard at first light tried to work themselves into a dream, but failed. Will sat up as the howls of pain from the street brought him to full wakefulness. The window of his room no doubt hadn’t been cleaned for years, but it was possible to see through parts of it.
There were two men on horseback—Indians, obviously—and a white man with a rifle.
The two drunks from the day before were yelling with pain, screaming for help. The Indians fired arrows at the drunks, starting low—just above their heels, and then moving upward. The Indians were good: their shafts went where they wanted them to. Their speed and skill with their weapons was nothing short of amazing. A man barely had time to scream before the next arrow was unerringly on its way.
Some grunted words were exchanged between the two Indians. They laughed and nodded to one another. The next two arrows severed the spines of the two harmless drunks at about midback. They fell clumsily, with no control of their limbs, like a child’s rag doll hurled against a wall.
Will scrambled from his room and down the stairs, his right hand checking the position of his Colt. He burst out of the cathouse a few seconds too late. The two men were facedown in the dirt of the street with arrows buried several inches into the backs of their heads—the final punishment for speaking of One Dog.
An arrow slashed a shallow furrow across Will’s cheek and blood cascaded down the side of his face. He was on the ground, rolling in the dirt, before the next arrow from the second Indian missed his face by a couple of inches. It was hard to keep moving and fire accurately at the Indians, and even if he dropped them, there was the white man with the rifle.
Will fired twice at the Indian who’d cut his face and he got lucky: a slug tore through the archer’s shoulder and the second entered his right eye socket. The second Indian was drawing his bow as Will got his balance on the ground. He put two bullets in the man’s chest.
The rifleman was the problem now and Will rolled again, just as a gritty volcano of dirt spurted an inch from his face. He blinked away the grit, and as the rifleman worked the lever of his weapon, Will blew the top of the man’s head off, blood, bone, and brain tissue scattering in a pinkish red mist.
The rifleman collapsed from his horse. Will recognized him—the rag-dressed boozer in the saloon who was slumped over the table with the empty bottle in front of him.
Will walked to the pair of dead Indians. Both wore war paint on their faces, but their clothing was strange— one wore a rebel outfit with bullet holes in the shirt that were there long before he met Will Lewis; the other, butternut drawers and a Union shirt. The rifleman looked like a down-on-his-luck cowhand who hadn’t seen a new shirt or pair of drawers for a good long time. The serape he wore was too large for his body and there were bullet rents through it—mainly in the back.
Will slid the cylinder of his pistol to the side, let the empties drop to the ground, and replaced them with fresh cartridges. He holstered the Colt and raised the fingers of his right hand to his cheek. Blood was gushing, cascading, onto his neck and shirt.
A quick flash of a thought flicked into his mind and he forgot his wound and his flowing blood. He set out at a clumsy run to the saloon where he’d asked questions about One Dog. He pushed through the batwings and breathed a sigh of relief. The ’tender was peeking over the bar, unmoving.
“I’m glad you’re OK,” Will began as his vision cleared in the dreary light. “Those two boys . . .”
He looked more closely. The bartender’s head was planted on the handle he used to draw beer from a barrel. Will looked closer, wiping blood from his face. A long tube of bloody, glistening intestine snaked out of a lengthy gash in the man’s stomach. His pants were at his knees; his groin was a bloody, sexless mess.
Will turned away, gagging, choking, bile burning in his throat, dizzy from what he’d just seen and from his loss of blood.
He stumbled out of the saloon and down the street to the barber’s place. The usual thick scent of ganja filled the room. The barber was in his corner chair, almost invisible behind a shroud of smoke.
“How screwed up are you?” Will asked. “I need some stitches bad.”
The barber smiled. “I’m jus’ havin’ my mornin’ smoke, is all. I can sew you up right fine.” He laughed then, totally inappropriately. “I seen what happened. Them Injuns was for sure handy with the arrows. An’ you—”
Will stepped closer and backhanded the barber—hard. “You drink a pot of coffee an’ then git to work on my face ’fore I bleed to death. Hear? You don’t, I’ll gun you as dead as them bodies out in the street.”
“I don’t need coffee. I can stitch you up just fine. Thing is, it’ll hurt like a bitch. How about you take a few sucks on my pipe—relax a bit, kill the pain?”
“No. Jus’ do your sewin’.”
“Maybe some booze? Like I said, this is gonna hurt bad.”
“Goddammit . . .”
“OK, OK—no need to get feisty an’ outta sorts.” He fetched a leather kit box such as surgeons used during the War of Northern Aggression and selected a hooked needle and a long length of suture material. “Too bad I don’t have some chloroform, but I don’t. See, chloroform will put a man to sleep an’ he’ll—”
“Do your work an’ shut the hell up,” Will interrupted.
“Yessir.”
The suturing was an ordeal that had Will digging his fingernails into his palms until they bled. After an eternity the barber placed the last of thirty-seven stitches and tied off his handiwork. “Gonna leave a scar, but what the hell,” he commented. “You wasn’t all that pretty to begin with. Now—here’s what you gotta do. Go over to the mercantile an’ pick up a quart of redeye an’ a clean bandanna. Every mornin’ you soak the bandanna in booze and wash down the wound.
“Take a nip if you want—the cleanin’ is gonna sting some. After maybe twelve, fourteen days, cut the first suture an’ pull the whole length out. Don’t yank—kinda use steady pressure an’ she should come right on out, slick as can be.”
Will stood up from the chair woozily, but quickly regained his balance. The side of his face felt like a mule had kicked him. He handed the barber a gold eagle. “Thanks. You quit burnin’ that weed an’ you might could make a good sawbones.”
The barber pocketed the coin and mumbled something that ended with “. . . an’ the horse you rode in on.”
Will strolled on over to the mercantile, weaving slightly but walking fairly well. It was the messiest, most poorly kept store he’d ever been in. The storekeeper was a large—very large—woman who quickly brought the image of a Brahma bull to Will’s mind. He wandered the aisles until he came to an uneven pile of bandannas and pulled one out from the bottom of the pile. He went to the counter. “I need a quart of decent whiskey,” he said, “an’ this bandanna.”
“What happened to your puss?” the woman asked. There was no sympathy in her whiskey-and-gravel voice, only mild curiosity.
“I bit myself,” Will said. “How much for the booze an’ the bandanna?”
“Say—ain’t you the gunman who put an’ end to them three this morning?”
“No.”
“Yes ya are—I seen it from my window right here. Ornery sumbitch, ain’t you?” She turned and plucked a bottle from under the counter. “This here’s a good sippin’ bourbon,” she said. “Aged.”
Will looked over the bottle. The label was slightly crooked, and the print on it was fuzzy and next to impossible to read. “Old . . . old what?” he asked. “I can’t read this.”
