surprise me.'
'What's a preacher doing in a little place like Twenty-Mile?' Matthew asked.
'What are any of us doing here?' B. J. Stone replied.
'Not playing cards, that's for damn sure,' Coots grumbled.
'I'm thinking! Now, let's see… I led with the seven, and you took it. But did you take it with the queen? That's my question.'
'I ain't telling. That's my answer.'
'Hm-m-m. ' B. J. turned to Matthew. 'The Surprise Lode is owned by Boston merchants, descendants of folk who came over on the Mayflower, not in search of religious freedom like the history books tell us, but in search of a place where they could impose their own brand of religious intolerance. You'd think that once the oppressed got the upper hand, they'd banish oppression from society. But no. No, human nature being what it is, as soon as the oppressed manage to snatch a little power, they use it to oppress their erstwhile oppressors… or anybody else handy.'
'Who gives a big rat's ass?' Coots wanted to know. 'Are you going to play cards or not?'
'These pious Bostonians dismiss the maiming and death of workers in inadequately reinforced mine shafts as an unfortunate by-product of the need to maximize profit, but their moral sensibilities insist that their wage slaves be exposed to the word of the Lord God Almighty at least once a week. So the manager of the mine had to find somebody willing to go up there and threaten the poor bastards with eternal damnation every Sunday. And what kind of preacher would live in a place like Twenty-Mile and tend to that reluctant flock up at the Lode? The Reverend Hibbard, that's what kind.'
'Are you going ever to play?'
'Patience, patience. Aequam memento rebus in arduis servare mentem, as old Horace says.'
'I don't care what the old whore's ass says! What I say is you should either shit or get off the pot!'
'So you see, Matthew, Reverend Hibbard does what everyone else in Twenty-Mile does. He serves the mine. Even poor old Coots and I work for the mine. They use donkeys in the shafts, and we bring the lame and sick ones down to tend to them and feed them up, and we keep a few backups out in the meadow yonder. You must have seen them, along with the beef.'
'The beef?' Matthew asked.
'Every week the train brings a live beef up from Destiny to supply the boardinghouse. Usually a stringy old cow that's gone dry. We let the Bjorkvists keep it in our meadow in return for a few 'steaks.' Sometimes the poor old cow arrives with a broken leg, because no one's taken the trouble to tie it up properly in the train. But, thank God, it only has to suffer for a few days, until Bjorkvist and his dim-witted son butcher it. Not proper butchering, just cutting it up into slabs that mostly get eaten by the miners, but the Bjorkvists sell some to their fellow townsmen. A couple hours of butchering each week is the only contribution the male Bjorkvists make to our economy, but without their 'steaks' we wouldn't attract the miners for the Kanes to sell things to, and for Professor Murphy to bathe and shave and perfume, and for Delanny to provide with whiskey and poontang-which, come to think of it, could be considered another aspect of the meat-selling business. So you see, son. Serving the silver mine is what everyone in Twenty-Mile does!'
'What we don't do is play our goddamned cards!'
'Twenty-Mile is a community of has-beens and never-wases. Misfits all. Once in a blue moon, a prospector climbs up out of the ravines and stumbles across that meadow into town, craving some of Delanny's whiskey, or a little relief from one of the girls. But pretty soon he drifts back into the mountains in search of the big strike that'll put him on Easy Street.'
'Crazy old fools!' Coots grumbled.
'Maybe they're not so crazy,' Matthew said. 'Maybe they're just looking for the sizzle.'
'Looking for what?' B. J. asked.
'… the sizzle?'
The men exchanged dubious glances.
'Ah… what sizzle is that, Matthew?'
Embarrassed, Matthew applied himself energetically to oiling the pincers he was working on.
'Maybe you're right,' B. J. conceded. 'Maybe the prospectors are no crazier than those of us who've let ourselves get marooned in this butthole of the Western Hemisphere.'
'Why do you stay if you don't like it?' Matthew asked, remembering that he had asked Mr. Delanny the same thing.
'Why do we stay, Coots?'
'Beats my two pair. Maybe because we're just too old and worn out to move on.'
B. J. Stone nodded thoughtfully. 'Yes, I guess that's it. And at least they leave us alone here. I'm not saying we're welcome. Hell, we're not even accepted. But we are left alone, and that's something.'
Matthew didn't understand this, and he was wondering how he might ask why they weren't accepted without seeming too nosy, when Coots suddenly cried out, 'All right! All right, goddamnit! I played the queen of clubs! I played it! I played it! Now can we please get on with the goddamn game?!'
'Ah! That's all I needed to know,' B. J. said. 'Because if you played the queen, then my jack, ten, eight are good. And that bleeds out your trump. Which makes my hearts good.' He laid down his cards. 'Looks like I win again.'
'That's it!' Coots slammed his cards onto the barrel. 'I ain't never playing cards with you again! Never!'
'I'm sorry you have to witness this peevish behavior,' B. J. confided to Matthew. 'It's an ugly sight: a grown man being such a bad sport.'
Matthew didn't let himself smile. He wasn't going to take sides.
'I take it you and the Reverend had words about your setting up in the marshal's office?' B. J. went on in a calm, conversational voice he knew would irritate the silently fuming Coots. 'He wanted to live there himself when he came to town, but Mr. Kane told him it was town property and he couldn't have it.'
'How did you know me and the preacher had words?'
'There was tension and anger in the way you were standing, facing one another. From the way you sauntered off, it looked like you won. That may not have been smart, Matthew.'
'You're saying I should have let him win?'
'No, no, but you should have let him think he'd won. You see, Hibbard's a coward, and cowards are dangerous because they strike from behind. There's an old Spanish proverb-'
'Oh, shit,' Coots groaned. 'Here we go!'
'— a proverb that says, 'Beware the man who knows but one book.' And that's especially true if that one book is 'sacred.' The man-of-one-book will slit your throat without a moment's hesitation or an ounce of remorse, confident that he's done it in the service of all that's good in this world and rewarded in the next.'
'Well?' Coots asked impatiently.
'M-m-m?' B. J. asked, his face spread in innocent inquiry.
'Are you going to deal or not?'
The second game had no sooner begun then a pitiful bellowing brought the three of them out to the donkey meadow, where they were reluctant witnesses to a botched job of slaughtering the weekly beef. The Bjorkvist man and his son had failed to stun the animal properly with their sledgehammer before hanging it up on a tree branch by its hind legs to slit its throat. And now the cow dangled upside down without struggling, narcotized by panic. Oskar Bjorkvist took out his butchering knife and looked over toward Matthew as he tested the edge with his thumb. He bared his teeth as he drew the blade across the cow's throat. The beast died a messy, gurgling death.
'Bjorkvist!' Coots snapped.
The father shambled over to them, his sledgehammer in his fist, while his son began cutting up the beef and putting the joints onto the barrow they had pulled over with them. 'Ya? Vat y'vant?'
'Do that right, or don't do it at all,' Coots said.
'No old man tells me how-'
But Coots pointed a forefinger at the middle of Bjorkvist's chest. 'Don't you sass me! Just do like I say.'
Bjorkvist's fist tightened on the neck of his sledgehammer. Coots was unarmed, and his wiry sixty-year-old body was slight by comparison to the Swede's broad frame. Bjorkvist looked into Coots's Cherokee eyes and recalled the stories about this man's past as a gunfighter. To save face, he sniffed and flipped up a hand
