“Play at it long enough,” Danny had told him, “and I could even make you a poker player.”
“I’ll stick to guns and knives,” Billy had replied with a smile.
If Billy had had any good news it was that he’d cured the nightmares for the last couple of days. They had been getting bad, leaving Billy shivering with night sweats after Maw’s or Sarah’s ghosts had haunted him in the middle of the night.
Then two nights ago, shivering and shaken, Billy had dressed, and in the wee morning hours, found Lizzie’s crib—a rickety plank shebang housing her bed, an oil lamp, and table. Lizzie—homely as a plain board fence—had laid back on the bed, pulled up her skirts, and given Billy a gap-toothed grin as he blew out the light.
In the darkness, he’d been able to close his eyes, imagine Sarah, and pay her back for the suffering and humiliation. As she’d bucked and contorted beneath him, he’d pumped his loins. When he came back to his senses, she lay limp and unfeeling beneath him.
Billy had felt around until he found the lamp, lifted off the chimney and unscrewed the lamp and wick from the bowl. He had poured coal oil over Lizzie’s body and bedding. Then, at the door, he’d struck a match and tossed it. He’d watched blue-based flames start in the bedding as he’d closed the door behind him.
All that remained the next morning had been a pile of charred ash, burned planks, and a half-cooked corpse in the wreckage of what once had been a bed.
Word on the street was that it had been a terrible accident. Lizzie was known to drown herself in drink and opiates. Speculation was that she’d knocked the lamp over in a drunken stupor.
Billy appreciated the people of Helena. They didn’t bother themselves to think beyond the obvious.
He considered that as he and Danny walked through the cool evening, boots leaving tracks in the dusty street where boardwalks hadn’t been built. Billy looked up at the nighthawks where they flipped and flittered against the darkening sky.
“Long way from Elkhorn Tavern, ain’t we?”
Danny cast a sidelong glance at him. “Where the hell did that come from? You been having them nightmares again?”
Billy shrugged. “Not so bad these last couple of weeks.” He barked a laugh, then lowered his voice. “Can you believe? They done offered up a ten-thousand-dollar reward for old Meagher’s killer and ain’t nobody found his body.”
“Why’d you suppose that is?” Danny answered with a sly grin.
“Aw, I reckon sometime a hundred years from now, somebody’s gonna be building something out there in the uplands and dig up bones. They’ll be a story in the Fort Benton paper. Folks’ll find his buttons, the belt buckle, and the like. Reckon they’ll know it’s a white man, but that’s about all there’ll be to it.”
“It ain’t gonna last, you know.”
“What ain’t gonna last?” Billy glanced Danny’s way as they passed a saloon. Inside mediocre musicians were playing “Union Forever,” but the singers—most of them drunk and off key—were belting out the Confederate verses, singing, “‘Down with the eagle and up with the star! Won’t you rally ’round the flag, Won’t you rally ’round the flag, Dixie forever, hurrah, boys, hurrah!’”
That was another of the things he liked about Montana. Most of the men were Democrats—a bunch of them unrepentant Rebels—and though the black damn Republicans ran the government—what there was of it—they were in the minority.
“You being dream-free, the money, the job, what we got. It ain’t gonna last.”
“What are you talking about? We’re the best they is, Danny.”
He shot Billy a measuring glance. “We been lucky. That’s all. What if that old nigger deckhand had forgot something and stepped out just as you was sticking Meagher? What if someone had been looking out a slit in the door when I knocked on the old man’s stateroom that night? Somewhere, just like in cards, there’s gonna be an ace turn up at the wrong moment.”
“Such as?”
Danny lowered his voice. “Might be some bullwhacker sleeping in the alley under a tarp who just happens to wake up and see you step out of some whore’s shebang. Sees you moments before the thing goes up in flames. Maybe pulls her dead body out of the blaze.”
“You saying what I think you are, Danny Goodman?”
“Billy? We made us a pile of money. Hell, more’n I ever figgered to see. We could just up and quit. Go home. You ever thought of that?”
Billy kicked at a rock as they walked, happy with the cool breeze blowing down the canyon from the west. “I can’t go home. Ain’t nothing left there.”
“What about the farm?”
“Too many ghosts. If Sarah ain’t dead, she’s running it now. Or maybe Butler if he ever come home from the war. I ain’t never setting foot in Arkansas again.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Keep one step ahead of the devil for as long as I can. Ain’t no happy ending to this, Daniel.”
“Don’t have to be that way, Billy. You got enough to buy yourself a nice place. A tavern, a sporting house. A store if you wanted to be respectable. Me, I think I could enjoy bossing a gambling house. Run a couple of tables, have games like a spin-the-wheel, maybe one of them fancy roulette tables.”
“House always wins?”
Danny smiled. “That’s where the real money is. You got enough you could go someplace like Oregon, maybe Texas, or just stay here if you wanted. You could buy a place up in the hills, run some cattle, and market-hunt to keep busy.”
“What are you really saying, Danny?”
“I’m saying I want you to think about it. Not for tomorrow, not for next week, but sometime soon.” He raised a finger, eyes sincere. “’Cause sometime soon, Billy, that ace is
