The door opened.
Two men stood there, back-lighted, and Zak couldn’t see their faces well. They wore grimy work clothes and their boots had no shine, dust-covered as they were.
“You what?” the taller man in front growled.
“Lost my horse. Well, he broke his leg in a gopher hole and I had to put him down. Been walking for a couple of hours. Saw your light. Smelled that Arbuckle’s when I came up.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Name’s Jake,” Zak said, the lie coming easily to his lips. “Jake Baldwin.” A name out of the past, one of the mountain men who had trapped the Rockies with his father. Jake wouldn’t mind. He was long dead, his scalp hanging in a Crow lodge up in Montana Territory.
“Let him in, Lester. Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Lester said. “Come on in. Coffee’s just made.”
Zak noticed that Lester’s dangling right hand was never very far from the butt of his pistol, a Colt Dragoon, from the looks of it. Well worn, too. There was the smell of rotten flesh and decayed fat in the room, mixed with the scent of candle wax and whiskey fumes.
“I’m Dave Newton,” the second man said. “We don’t get many folks passin’ this way, stranger.”
“Jake,” Zak said, stepping inside where the musty smell of an old dwelling mingled with the scent of the coffee. “Pleased to meet you.”
“That’s Lester Cunningham,” Newton said. “My partner.”
“Set down,” Cunningham said, his gravelly voice so distinctive that Zak looked at his throat, saw the heavy braid of a scar there, dissecting his Adam’s apple. He was a tall, rangy man with long hair the color of steel that hung down past his shirt collar. His complexion was almost as gray, pasty, as if he had been in a prison cell for a good long while.
Newton was a stringy, unkempt man with a sallow complexion, bad teeth, and a strong smell that emanated from his mouth. His scraggly hair stuck out in spikes under his hat, which, like him, had seen better days. His eyes appeared to be crossed, they were so close-set, straddling a thin, bent nose that furthered the illusion. His face and wrists were marbled with pale liver spots, and Zak could see the blue veins in his nose, just under the skin.
As Lester took the coffeepot off the small square woodstove with its rusty chimney, Zak glanced around the room. There were coyote skins drying on withes, others, stiff and stacked, tied into bundles with twine, and, in a small oblong box resembling a cage, a jackrabbit hunched, its eyes glittering with fear. Some potato peelings littered its cage.
Newton saw Zak looking at the rabbit and let out a small chuckle.
“That’s Bertie,” he said. “Me ’n’ Lester pass the time huntin’ coyotes at night. We take Bertie out there in the dark and twist his ears till he squeals like a little gal. Them coyotes come slinkin’ up for a meal and we pop ’em with our pistols. For sport. But we can sell them hides to the Mexicans in Tucson for two bits or so. Drinkin’ money.”
Zak saw that both men wore skinning knives on their belts. Newton packed an old Navy Colt, converted from percussion to handle cartridges. The brass on it was as mottled as his skin.
Lester poured coffee into three grimy cups. He handed one to Zak, who took it in his left hand, the steam curling up from its surface like tiny wisps of fog.
“What’s this about your horse?” Cunningham asked. “You say it stepped in a gopher hole? I ain’t seen no gophers ’round here.”
“It was a hole,” Zak said. “I thought it was a gopher hole. Maybe a prairie dog hole.”
He held the cup up to his lips, blew on it, but he didn’t drink.
“Ain’t seen no prairie dogs ’round here neither,” Cunningham said. “Where’d you say you was from?”
“I didn’t say,” Zak said.
“Les, you don’t need to be so unsociable,” Newton said. “Let the man drink his coffee.”
“He ain’t drinkin’ none,” Cunningham said. “You left-handed, mister?”
“I’m ambidextrous,” Zak said.
“Huh?” Newton said.
“Yeah, what’s that?” Cunningham said. “Some kind of disease? That abmi—whatever.”
“Ambidextrous. Means I’m good with either hand, Lester,” Zak said, an amiable tone in his voice. “From the Latin. ‘Ambi’ means both. ‘Dextrous’ means right.”
Both men worried over Zak’s explanation. Newton was the first to figure it out.
“That means you got two right hands?”
“Something like that,” Zak said. “Means I can write or play with my pecker using either hand.”
Newton laughed. Cunningham scowled.
“Mister, seems to me you got a smart mouth,” Cunningham said. “Something wrong with the coffee?”
“No, why?” Zak said.
“You ain’t drinkin’ it.”
“Too hot.”
