“I bet Cain sent you.”
“Could be,” Fargo said. “But you’re making this a lot more difficult than it needs to be.”
“Wait a minute,” Thomas said. “I heard about you. You’re the Trailsman or some damned name like that.”
“Names don’t matter. I just want to know why you were seen a couple of nights before the robbery talking to the three boys who stuck up the stage.”
“That’s a damn lie!”
“I’ve got two witnesses who’ll swear to it in court.”
For the first time Bobby looked to his mother for help. Fargo figured she’d probably been helping him out of situations like this all his spoiled life. “I want to get back to work, Ma.”
“Mr. Fargo, if Bobby here says it’s a lie—”
“Excuse us a minute, ma’am.” In a single motion Fargo grabbed a handful of Thomas’ fancy blue shirt and shoved him out the door. “Bobby and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
The air was cooler coming off the river. The birdsong was different, too. Down on the cargo ship men moved back and forth like ants carrying their loads. Fargo pushed Thomas off the dock so that he fell two feet and landed on his bottom. He tried to scramble up but Fargo was already beside him. “Now you’re going to answer my questions, sonny boy, or I’m going to break a few bones and then your ma will really have to start taking care of you.”
Thomas glared up from where he still sat on his bottom. “You don’t have any right—”
“What about the two witnesses who saw you with—”
Thomas snapped, “I told you that’s a lie! Two nights before the robbery I wasn’t even in town!”
Thomas was right. It was a lie. The Pinkertons Fargo had helped showed him how accusing somebody of something false could sometimes trick them into admitting something true.
“Then it was some other night.”
He didn’t need to say anything, Bobby Thomas. It was right there on his face. So he had gotten together with the three boys.
“What night was it?”
“No night. I told you.”
“Get up.”
“What?”
“Get up.”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Get up and find out.”
“You’re going to hit me, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, and I’m going to keep on hitting you until you tell the truth. There are three boys dead. Plus an Englishman and a stagecoach driver. And maybe you know something about it.”
“You don’t hurt him!” Ma Thomas was now on the dock above them.
“She’s got a shotgun, Fargo, and she knows how to use it.”
“Well, she’d better start shooting then. Now get up!”
“Oh, shit,” Thomas said. He frowned and shook his head. “I saw them one night. Two nights in fact. But I didn’t have anything to do with the robbery.”
“Why’d you see them?”
“The fire. I wanted them to help me.” He made a face. “Can I get up now?”
“Get up.”
“And you won’t hit me?”
“Not if you’re telling the truth.”
Thomas wasn’t nimble. He had to thrash around to get up. When he was upright he said, “Well, that’s damn nice. Look at my pants!” He started brushing them.
His ma shouted again, “Don’t you hurt him!”
“Tell her to shut up.”
“She’s my ma.”
“Tell her.” Fargo made it as menacing as possible.
“Shut up, Ma, and go back inside!”
“Well that’s a fine howdy-do! You tell your own ma to shut up! See if I fix you squash the way you like it again anytime soon!”
Fargo was surprised that Thomas—who had to be twenty-five or so—didn’t look embarrassed by any of this. A regular lady-killer tied tight to his mother’s apron strings.
“The fire. Tell me about it.”
“You going to tell Cain?”
“Not unless he asks me about it. Nobody was hurt, were they?”
“No.” He actually sounded humble. “It was a stupid thing to do. I was just mad at Lenihan and mad at the three boys.”
“Why were you mad at them?”
“They wouldn’t help me with the fire. Which made me mad because I knew they were going to do something. They kept smiling at each other, the way you do when you’ve got a secret. Then all of a sudden they wanted me to leave. They got real nervous. I think somebody was coming.”
“You didn’t have any idea who?”
“No. And when I said something about it they got mad. Real mad. They damn near threw me on my horse they wanted to get rid of me so bad.”
Fargo decided he was telling the truth, enough of it anyway. From what he’d seen of Thomas it was no wonder the boys hadn’t wanted to get hooked up with him. Mama’s boy. A dress-up boy for the ladies. Not somebody you’d want along on a robbery.
Thomas said, “Look at this grass stain on the side of my pants.”
Fargo was well shut of him. He walked quickly back up to the office and Ma Thomas.
“I seen you throw him down.” She still had the shotgun. It was pointed right at Fargo’s chest.
“Maybe it’s time you start throwing him down, Mrs. Thomas. He’s awful old for you to still be doing his fighting.”
She muttered something to his back as he left. He assumed she wasn’t wishing him good luck.
Fargo had heard the worst of them called “deadfalls.” And that was, in fact, what they were. Just as a deadfall was a trap for a large animal, the worst kind of saloon was also a trap. In San Francisco there were dozens of the places. A man could go into one, get drunk and wake up and find himself on a freighter bound for the China seas. All it took was for one of the saloon girls to put something in your drink and you might never be heard from again. And if the violence didn’t get you the venereal disease did. A man who survived twenty-four hours on the Barbary Coast was lucky indeed. And it was in saloons like this one that the worst of the worst was found.
The Trail’s End probably didn’t qualify as a real deadfall but it would do until the real thing came along. After riding out to see Bob Thomas, Fargo had swung back to Cawthorne to look up a man named Frank Nolan. He was the brother of Ted Nolan, the second of the three young men to be killed.
Tom Cain wanted Fargo to carry things out the way a Pinkerton would so Fargo got Cain to write down the names of people Fargo could talk to about the dead men and how they’d spent their final days.
The Trail’s End was long and narrow and lighted only by lanterns placed along the bar and at tables. Though it was barely midmorning, drunkards could be seen passed out along the bar and at one of the tables. Judging by the stench, the place could have doubled as a latrine. In the smoky lantern light, Fargo approached the crude plank bar and the beefy bald man with the black eye patch. The man’s wide face reflected his displeasure with Fargo. People like the Trailsman didn’t belong here. They could be law and they could most certainly be trouble.
“You lost, stranger?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Well, I think you are.”
“Nice place you got here.”
