Bathed, shaved, still tasting his lunch, he stood on the boardwalk and scrutinized the ornate facade of the Inter Ocean Hotel. The second story boasted gabled windows and corner gargoyles. The balconies were carved in friezes and spiral rails. The building covered most of an entire block. Three separate street entrances gave admittance to the hotel lobby, the dining room, and the saloon bar. The building had a fresh coat of brown paint with crimson trim. The sidewalk in front of it was broad and shaded by wooden awnings that ran the length of the building like a Southern veranda. Gaslamps were posted at ten-foot intervals. It was just past noon; cooking smells issued from the dining room and wafted along the street on the light, cool breeze.
A few yards down the walk from him, a little knot of jackbooted miners in overalls stood tight-packed and grumbling in muted voices calculated to reach no one’s ears but their own. The man doing most of the talking was a shrill little man, nervous’and narrow, who wore miner’s clothes but didn’t look like a miner. His hands, which gesticulated frequently toward the hotel with angry sweeps, were pale and fluttery. His face was feral, big-nosed and rodent-toothed. Several times Tree heard the miners growl angry assent to something the little man said.
He forced his attention away from them and took his reluctant, tall body across the street onto the veranda. He stopped at the lobby door and looked inside through its glass panes. The room was high-ceilinged and long, with rich dark beams and heavy furniture and a thick dark-cherry carpet. The only occupant was an emaciated old man with urine spots on the front of his pants, who wandered from the front window to an overstuffed chair and sat down to read a newspaper. Tree walked the forty feet to the dining room window. The place was crowded but not with anyone he cared to meet. It was strange: he had never met Wyatt Earp or seen a picture of him but he was certain he would know the man when he saw him.
He saw him when he stepped into the saloon bar. The entrance was on the intersection corner and, consequently, was set into the corner of the saloon, giving admittance at a forty-five degree angle so that the entire huge room was in sight at once. The polished maplewood bar ran the length of one wall, backed by two big mirrors, the obligatory ten-foot painting of a hefty naked woman draped in translucent veils, and a shelf of ornate beer mugs each of which had its owner’s name painted on it. Two sweating bartenders served the medium-thick throng of patrons standing at the brass rail along the eighty-foot bar.
The rest of the rpom was given over to chairs and tables of various sizes, ranging from small square ones to big round ones seven feet in diameter and covered with green felt. The room was carpeted in deep luxurious brown; the walls were stained dark and had the look of mahogany-a considerable feat since they were probably constructed of aspen or pine. There was no dance floor, no stage, no piano or bandstand; it wasn’t that kind of saloon. This was Gunnison’s gentlemen’s club. Only the Rich Need Apply. Even the chairs at the card tables were upholstered armchairs. Altogether, what the place reminded him of most was a railroad baron’s private car he had once entered to make an arrest. The men who had built this room had money and wanted everybody to know it.
It didn’t make him uncomfortable but it didn’t make him feel at home. He would always be an outsider in a place like this; it occurred to him obscurely that this gave Wyatt Earp an immediate advantage over him. He didn’t dwell on the thought. He had entered and absorbed the place with one glance; his attention had narrowed like a cone to focus on the five people sitting around the biggest of all the felt-covered card tables-four men and a woman. The table was back toward the rear corner. Gaslights on the windowless walls shone on the woman’s reddish auburn hair and the thick tawny hair of two of the four men-the Earp brothers. He didn’t have to be told.
The woman was slim with nubile roundnesses and skin made deep gold by the lamplight; she threw her head back to drink, displaying a long, swanlike neck. They all had drinks but they were not playing cards; they seemed to be engaged in desultory conversation.
Tree made a place for himself at the bar and ordered a drink. He had picked a spot from which he could appraise the Earps in the back bar mirror. Warren, the young one, wore his hair the same as Wyatt. His mustache and clothes were similar to Wyatt’s. The way he sat in his chair, trying to look muscular and easy-sprawled all at once, was a direct imitation of Wyatt’s unconscious position: chair pushed back, one knee crossed over the other, polished black boot swaying a little with easy rhythm as he talked, and one elbow on the arm of the chair supporting a half-full whisky glass held by a vertical forearm. It was significant that Wyatt held the glass in his left hand: Tree assumed that, unlike himself, Earp was right-handed. His right hand lay across his lap and it could be taken for granted a shoulder-hung gun was within six inches of his fingertips, just inside his coat lapel.
Tree’s drink came. He stood at the bar and twisted the glass on the bar surface and picked it up, observing the wet ring it left. Without looking up he knew a good many eyes were studying him from all over the room. But if he looked in the mirror he would not find Wyatt Earp looking at him. He smiled to himself, briefly; he lifted the drink to his mouth. He had a fleeting vision of Grady Jestro’s gun flaming at him from the dark corner of the hotel room. He closed his eyes momentarily and felt the whisky thunder into his blood.
He turned around, glass in hand, and hooked both elbows over the bar behind him, and stared straight at Wyatt Earp. Earp didn’t seem to notice; he was talking calmly to the man next to him-a big dark man who wore an expensive suit that did not make him look genteel. One of the overnight millionaires of Gunnison.
Wyatt Earp had a wise, tough, worldly face. Tree felt neither disillusioned nor disappointed. Earp was long- legged, whipcord handsome, self-assured, a healthy man in his mature hard-gutted prime. He was, Tree knew, thirty-four years old, which made him an elder statesman among the righting gamblers of the Western circuit. He had a tough, sleepy look of leonine competence.
Tree wondered whether he ought to feel relieved or sorry. The job would be less disagreeable, if not less difficult, if Earp had turned out to be a buck-toothed, snarling savage.
Abruptly, Earp turned his head and looked straight at Tree. Evidently he felt he had given Tree time enough to size him up. Earp’s free hand rose gently from his lap and he beckoned with a slow nod of recognition.
Tree made a gesture with his drink and walked forward without hurry, purposefully casual. Approaching, he glanced at the two other men at the table-the big dark millionaire and the muscular blunt-jawed tough who had to be one of the thug strikebreakers.
The girl looked up at him coyly from under lowered brows. Tree reached the table, facing Earp across it; Earp said to Warren, “Bring up another chair and make a place for friend Tree. How’re you making it, Deputy? Enjoying the town?”
Three only nodded, still trying to feel out the direction Earp wanted to go. He didn’t feel anything as specific as warning currents in the air, but it was an uneasy stretch of time.
Earp said, “The Deputy goes by the name of Sliphammer Tree. From Pima County, down in Arizona. He’s going to keep an eye on our obedient servant, gentlemen.”
Warren Earp put a chair down behind Tree’s knees and went back around the table to his seat. The two men on the near side of the table shifted their chairs to make room. The big dark millionaire said, “Howdy,” and offered a thick, hard hand. “I’m Wayde Cardiff, I own the Spurlock. Fellow on your left there, that’s Reese Cooley.”
Cardiff had sweaty palms. He was a once-tough man gone soft: his breasts were womanly, his arms flaccid, his chin padded and underhung by loose flesh. But his eyes were flinty. Cardiff shook Tree’s hand, hitched his suety belly and slumped back in his chair.
Reese Cooley, thuglike, had a horseshoe fringe of hair around a glossy bald spot. His chin was dark with heavy Mediterranean stubble. He had a greasy appearance. His handshake was a childish contest, as if to tell Tree he could break every bone in Tree’s hand if he felt like it. Tree matched him for pressure, heard Cooley’s grunt and saw the surprised respect in the blunt face, and set his drink down before he sat. He noticed that Wyatt Earp had not offered to shake hands; Warren, of course, had followed suit. Earp said casually, “My brother Warren, of course-you had that figured out. And this is Josie.”
Josie gave him a mock-sweet smile. He wondered what went on behind those flirty bemused eyes.
Reese Cooley said, without preamble, “You gunned one of mah boys. Jestro was one of mahn.”
Earp said, “Don’t hold that against him, Reese.”
“I ain’t decided yet. I’m still thanking on it.”
“Jestro was a stupid pig,” said Wyatt Earp.
“He smelled terrible,” said Josie. “He smelled like horse shit.”
Wayde Cardiff said, “Jestro got what he deserved.” Tree was still staring at Josie, who began to laugh in her throat.
Wyatt Earp said, “I make no apologies, Deputy, but I’ll say this to you, just once. What Jestro tried to do was not my idea.”
“I didn’t think it was,” Tree said.
