boss and the foreman.
'What’d he say?” Jake whispered to Luttie.
“Hell, don’t ask me. Sounded dirty.”
“Gawddam, boy!” another Seven Slash hand said.
“Cain’t you talk English?”
“I was,” Mills responded.
“A blot on one’s escutcheon comes from medieval times,” a man spoke from a corner table. Smoke cut his eyes. The man wore a dark suit with a white shirt and string tie. He’d seen him get off the stage earlier. “An escutcheon is a shield, upon which a coat of aims was painted. In other words, it means a stain on one’s honor.”
“Who the hell are you?” Charlie demanded.
“No one who would associate with the likes of you,” the stranger said.
“Damn, Charlie,” a hand said. “I think the stranger done insulted you, too.”
“Now, look here,” Charlie said. “I’m gettin’ tarred of being insulted.”
“You could always leave,” Smoke offered him an option.
“And you could always shut your trap,” Charlie told him.
“I’m right here, Charlie,” Smoke told him. “Anytime you think you have the
Nice way of making him stand alone whether he fishes or cuts bait, Moss thought. I’ll keep that in mind.
The cowboy looked hard at Smoke and then sat down without another word.
“You just saved your own life, cowboy,” the stranger said, rifling a deck of cards.
Charlie mumbled something and concentrated on his beer.
It isn’t going to work, Luttie thought, staring at Smoke. The man is just too damn sure of himself and has the reputation to back it up. He’s . . . Luttie couldn’t think of the word, right off.
“Intimidating” was what he was searching for.
And who in the devil was that stranger sitting over there? He didn’t think Jensen knew who he was either.
Smoke could sense the steam going out of the hardcases seated around the saloon. Four double-barreled Greeners at this distance would take out about half the crowd, inflicting horrible wounds on those they didn’t kill outright. He’d seen men soak up five .44 caliber slugs and still stay on their boots and keep on coming. He had never seen anybody take a close-up shotgun blast and keep going.
Smoke watched as Luttie and Jake exchanged glances. Both men knew that whatever momentum they might have had was gone.
“Drink your drinks, play cards, do some tobacco buying or whatever,” Smoke told them. “First one of you that makes trouble, I either put in jail or kill. Let’s go, boys.”
Before he could leave the bar, a young man jumped to his boots. “They call me Sandy!” he yelled. “And I say without that shotgun, you ain’t nothin’, Jensen.”
“Don’t be a fool, lad,” the stranger said. “You don’t have a prayer. Sit down and shut up and live.”
“You don’t show me nothin’ either, mister!” Sandy said.
“Don’t crowd me, lad,” the stranger said. “I came into town to do some gambling and some relaxing on my way to California. I have no quarrel with you. So don’t crowd me.”
“Stand up, you funny talkin’ dude!” Sandy yelled.
Smoke placed the man then. The accent had been worrying him. Earl Sutcliffe. And the Earl was not a first name. He really was an earl over in England. At least he had been until he killed a man after a game of chance (the man had been cheating); The man had been a duke, which was higher than an earl, and a man of considerable power. A murder warrant had been issued for Sutcliffe, and he had fled to America. Here he had made a name for himself as a very good and very honest gambler . . . and one hell of a gunfighter.
“That’s Earl Sutcliffe, Sandy,” Smoke said. “Sit down and finish your beer, and there’ll be no hard feelings.”
Earl Sutcliffe! Luttie thought. Now what in the hell was he doing in this jerkwater town?
“Stand up, Sutcliffe!” Sandy yelled the words that would start his dying on this day.
“Here now!” Mills said. “You men stop this immediately.”
“Shut up,” Smoke told him. “This is none of your affair.”
Mills gave him a dirty look. But he closed his mouth.
“I said stand up!” Sandy yelled.
Earl put down the deck of cards and pushed back from the table. He slowly stood up, brushing back his coat on the right side.
“Primitive rites of manhood,” Mills said in a whisper.
“Young man,” Earl said. “I do not wish to kill you.”
“You kill me?” Sandy snorted the words. “Dude, you the one that’s gonna die.”
“I don’t think so. But I suppose stranger things have happened.” Without taking his eyes off of Sandy, Earl spoke to Luttie. “You are his employer. You could order him to stop this madness.”
“Sorry, Earl. The kid’s on his own time today. What’s the matter, you afraid of him?”
Earl smiled. “One more time, lad: give this up.”
Sandy smiled, sure of himself, his youthfulness overriding caution. The young think of death only as something that happens to someone else, never themselves. “Anytime you’re ready,” he told the Englishman.
Sutcliffe shot him. The draw was as fast as a striking rattler. The kid never had a chance to clear leather. The slug took him in high in the chest, driving through a lung and slamming him back, sitting him back down in the chair he should have stayed in . . . with his mouth closed.
He opened his mouth and blood stained his lips as he struggled to speak. “You! . . .” he managed to gasp.
“Sorry, lad,” Earl said, holstering his six-gun. “I tried to tell you.”
“Tell me! . . .” Sandy said.
“It’s too late, now,” Earl’s words were softly offered.
“I’m cold,” Sandy said.
Mills shook his head as he watched the young man hover between life and death, with death racing to embrace him, rudely shoving life aside.
Luttie’s hands sat silent, occasionally letting their eyes shift to the muzzles of those deadly sawed—off shotguns, all four of them pointed in their direction. To a man they wanted blood-revenge, but to a man they all knew that this was not the time or the place.
“I’ll be damned!” Sandy suddenly blurted. “Would you just look at that!”
“What are you seein’?” Charlie asked him, his words just above a whisper.
“You hear that?” the kid said, as blood dripped from his mouth onto his shirt front.
“What are you hearin’?” Charlie asked him.
Sandy’s head lolled to one side, and he closed his eyes.
“Nothing, now,” Mills said. “He just died.”
The Seven Slash men rode out shortly after Sandy died. They took the body with them, to be buried on Seven Slash range.
“They’ll be back,” Smoke said. “Tomorrow, next week, next month. But they’ll be back. And when they come back, they’ll do their damnest to tear this town apart.”
“I concur,” Mills said.
“That was pushed on me,” Earl said. He had sat back down and was shuffling a deck of cards. “I really did not want to kill the lad.”
“I know it,” Smoke told him. “I’ve had a hundred pushed on me.”
“What’s going on in this town?” the Englishman asked. “I stopped here because it seemed so peaceful.”
Smoke had the barkeep draw him a mug of beer and carried it over to Earl’s table, pulling out a chair and sitting down. “How’d you like to be a deputy sheriff of this county?”
Earl looked startled. “I beg your pardon?”
Smoke smiled and Mills laughed out loud.
