with the others. Then she resumed fanning. Is it true that Smonk took McKissick’s child? That boy William?
I heard it was.
Do I need to stress how your standing in our village will improve if you bring that little one back safely?
Nome.
You could be an important man in our town, Portis. Now that you’re a widower. With so little competition.
Yessum.
I think you should wash, she said. So we can see what you look like, those of us in need of a man, you now in need of a wife.
Yessum.
In search of the judge, Gates ran building to building, zigzagging through alleys, and had not been looking a quarter-hour when he spotted a pair of legs jutting from the rear window of town hall. Gates recognized the judge’s boots and seized him by the knees and wrestled him hard down into the dirt, papers from his bulging valise spilling into the sugarcane.
God damn, said the judge from the ground. He jabbed out his hand. Help me up and escort me to the gallows where I’ll see ye hanged.
They sent for ye, Gates said, pulling him into a headlock.
God damn, the judge’s muffled voice said. Let me go!
The blacksmith dragged the smaller man over the street as he flailed his arms and made a commotion of dust, still clinging to the valise. At the store across from the burnt-down hotel several women had congregated at the wagon in the alley as if the mounted gun had been scheduled to deliver a sermon or a serenade. When they saw the judge, they seized him from the smith and relieved him of his valise and raised him above their heads like a hero and he seemed to levitate down the street above them, his face the pallor of chalk.
Gates returned to his shack and sat alone at the table for the first time in ages—it was quiet without his wife’s fussing and the stepdaughters bickering at one another about whose turn it was to wash the clothes or who got to go and try to seduce McKissick. He left the table and rumbled in his dead wife’s trunk and found a shard of pierglass, a fingernail of soap, a razor, a nub of brush and a cracked washbasin which he filled with water. He studied the reflection of his face and began to scrub and shave. Twenty minutes later a ruddy white man slightly cross-eyed and with one long eyebrow looked at him from the glass, the water in the basin black as ink and full of gray whiskers.
Not half bad, he said, for a fellow of sixty-some year.
There were no weapons in his shop, but wearing his church shirt under his overalls, he crossed the dirt hefting his iron tongs and assessed them workable. He moved Clena’s legs and picked up a large pipe wrench and tested its screw. Lastly he put a fistful of nails in the bib pockets of his overalls.
I’ll be back, he said to the room. I hope.
He put on his hat and took it off when he entered the store.
We closed, said the owner’s widow. Unless it’s billed to the judge.
Then tally em up.
With her following, Gates bought a new Stetson hat, a scarf, a denim shirt with silver star snaps, three pairs of corduroy pants, long johns, two pairs of socks, a telescope and a bugle and several coiled ropes and a horsehair whip and the most costly snakebite kit on the shelf and two machetes and a compass and a Bowie knife. He bought a sleeping bag and saddle and bridle and blanket and knapsack and five pounds of salt, a bag of jerked beef, sugar, coffee, flour, cans of sardines and oysters, crackers, apples, hard candy, cigars and lard.
He bought a root beer soda and, sucking on his straw, requested a matching pair of Colt revolvers with hair- triggers if she had them and a twelve gauge shotgun with a pump action, and several boxes of shells, sixes or lower. No slugs, please.
We out of guns, she said. Bullets too. McKissick bought em all.
Ever one?
Well. I kept Abner’s birdshooter here. She drew the twenty gauge single from behind her counter.
How much?
What ’ll the judge offer?
One hundred dollars.
Sold to the judge.
In the livery stable Gates bought a silver gelding fourteen hands high without even bartering or checking its legs or eyes and a pack mule which he instructed the liveryman’s widow to lead to the store and load with his parcels, charged, including any special fees or taxes, to the judge.
You want these animals fed? the woman sobbed. She wore a sling around her arm and had a number of broken ribs. She also had two black eyes, a smashed nose and busted lips. Her dress was still torn and soiled with a hoofprint on her back. Either she was leaving it on as protest or it was her only one.
On the judge, Gates said. Was it you tried to stop Mister Smonk?
It was.
Look where it got ye.
Least I ain’t the fools going after him now.
Gates had ridden less than a mile when the horse, which was blind, stepped in a hole and projected him in his new outfit into the dust. When he rose he saw the animal had broken its leg. He raised the twenty gauge to his shoulder but it clicked. He checked was it loaded, it was, and tried again. Click.
He was using his pipe wrench to finish the horse, which was taking quite a while, when a gun fired.
Gates leapt over the animal as it convulsed one last time. He lay panting on the turf, his hands and shirt sleeves bloodied.
It was McKissick, his revolver smoking. He rode up behind Gates and reined in his mount and looked down. Who the hell are you out in these suspicious times?
The other half ye mob. Portis. Who’d ye think?
Who?
Portis Gates. The blacksmith?
Oh. McKissick put the pistol away and fanned his face with his hat. I ain’t never seen ye cleaned up’s all. Didn’t know you was so old. What the hell was you doing to that poor horse?
Putting it out of its misery. It got its leg broke and my shooter’s gone south.
Here. McKissick tossed him a thirty-thirty.
Where we going?
The bailiff nodded east. Smonk’s house first. Few more miles yonder-ways. He extended down a hand. We can ride double to save time.
And double they rode, east through fields of ruined cane, the blacksmith remarking how happy he was he hadn’t put his whole lot in sugar, considering the spate of weather they’d had. Wasn’t it something? How many weeks? Could McKissick remember the last drop of rain? Did McKissick think they could stop for some licker?
McKissick did not.
An odor had caught the wind and blew in their faces. What the hell is that? the blacksmith wanted to know and soon had his answer as they cupped their hands over their noses and McKissick tried to calm the horse, gazing down at a charred mess of burnt animal flesh beside the road, some dark satanic work of art, faces blended to other faces and eyes like strings of wax. Gates pointed out a few dog parts, a wildcat’s padded foot, a coon’s tailbone and a fox’s skull. His partner spurred the antsy horse along. The blacksmith said he reckoned the ray bees plague that had haunted Old Texas these last years was spreading all over.
McKissick said nothing.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tate pronounced the judge guilty despite his citing precedents and quoting the law in English and Latin and calling upon various prophets and heroes of the Old Testament as well as Homer, Sophocles, George Washington, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Buffalo Bill Cody who was a close personal friend. He reminded Mrs. Tate that she was a female, not a judge, as she bade the widows bind his hands. They scissored off his outer clothes and took his shoes and shoved him in undergarments wrung with sweat off the porch and past the gunwagon down the narrow alley to where his knees gave way as he beheld the town’s rickety gallows.
Ye can’t hang me! he cried. Ye can’t!
