and generally kept locked save for when trash — of one sort or another — needed to be hauled out.
Jay left the walk at the gun shop, went down the alley to the back, and moved two buildings down to the Branch.
He tested the saloon’s back door. It was locked. Good.
Jay circled back to the street, passed the hitching post, which was empty — smart men didn’t leave their horses tied up there during the heat of the day, even, though there was a trough with water where the animals could reach it. If you lived in town, you walked to the saloon; if you came from elsewhere, you paid the livery stable boy a nickel to put your horse in the shade, and make sure he had food and water.
Jay opened the door and stepped inside.
It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, smoky, and not much cooler than outside. The beer was warm, too, but if you drank enough of it, you didn’t mind the heat, and these frontier towns were full of what would later be called “alcoholics”—men and women both.
The piano player didn’t pause, but kept on tinkling away at the off-key instrument, playing some kind of New York show tune from the late 1870s.
Jay didn’t look particularly threatening. He wore a shopkeeper’s duds — boiled shirt and starched collar over a pair of gray pinstriped trousers and low-heeled English-style riding books. His coat — even in the heat, men often wore coats when they went out — was a cutaway frocklike thing of gray wool. His hat was closer to a derby style than a cowboy ten-gallon.
He didn’t want to look threatening, not like some
He had his gun, of course. The coat’s right-hand low pocket was heavy canvas stiffened with leather, and in it was a chrome-plated 1877 Colt.38 “Lightning,” with a two-and-a-half-inch barrel. The revolver looked like the Peacemaker, sort of, though the butt was rounded. It was a somewhat delicate machine compared to some weapons, but it had the advantage of being double-action, which meant that you didn’t have to manually cock the hammer for each shot. You could just point it and pull the trigger repeatedly until you ran out of ammunition. The hammer spur had been removed, so as not to catch on the pocket during the draw.
Billy the Kid had owned a similar gun. Pat Garrett had carried a larger model, the “Thunderer,” in.41 caliber. And John Wesley Hardin, one of the meanest of the gunslingers, had gotten one just like Jay’s as a gift from his brother-in-law, Jim Miller.
Definitely not a gun for shooting at targets twenty-five meters away. It was for taking out a bad guy ten or fifteen feet away. The short barrel made it easier to get out and working.
Jay moved to the bar, pretending a nonchalance he didn’t feel, while searching the faces for his quarry. The person he’d glimpsed out front had been a man, he was pretty sure — or a woman dressed like a man. That meant he could discount the three trulls in low-cut dresses who worked the crowd, and the woman playing cards in the side room with four men. He could probably eliminate those men, too, since the one he was after wouldn’t have had time to break into an ongoing game — there was usually a waiting list for poker on a Saturday.
Jay grinned. His scenarios were a mix of fantasy and genuine history, but when he put real stuff in, he usually had it from two or three sources.
“What’ll you have, friend?” the bartender said.
He was, like Jay, wearing a coat, white shirt and tie, and wool trousers.
“Beer.”
“Two for two bits, special.”
“Draw two.”
Jay took his hat off and hung it on a rack mounted on the wall next the bar. There were maybe thirty people sitting at tables or standing next to the long wooden bar, which was made from gleaming and well-waxed hickory, albeit stained and scratched in places. A big looking glass in a horizontal oval frame took up much of the wall behind the bar, and next to that, a painting of, of all things, a sea battle between sailing ships, blasts of smoke from the ships’ cannons and a raging fire on one of the vessels giving the painting a sense of action.
The beers came, in heavy glasses. Jay put a quarter on the bar, picked up one of the beers, and sipped at it. Warm, acrid, sudsy, the way beer used to be drunk. He used the mirror to see what he could, then turned slightly to regard the smoky room.
Every other person in here smoked. Hand-rolled cigarettes, cigars, pipes. Some chewed and spit at strategically placed bell-mouthed brass spittoons, and some of the spitters were very accurate, the local equivalent of NBA three-point shooters.
Twenty years from now, if they survived the other ills of the frontier, a lot of these folks would have emphysema, lung cancer, or throat cancer. Jay shook his head.
He started eliminating suspects mentally as he sipped at the beer, which he held in his left hand so as to keep his gun hand free. Just in case.
Anybody who was obviously part of a group that seemed to have been there a while — easy enough to judge from empty glasses on their tables — was out. Jay’s quarry had just come in, so he looked for men with glasses that were mostly full.
That dropped the numbers to maybe six or seven on the floor, and two at the bar besides himself.
Then Jay looked for men who seemed to be alone, not part of a conversation. This wasn’t a sure thing, but — and this was where his intuition came in — Jay was sure that the man he wanted wasn’t a local, but somebody passing through.
Right away, that narrowed it down to the men at the bar.
Of the two, one was a tall, greasy-looking cowboy with a full beard, wearing leather chaps over canvas pants, a patterned flannel shirt with a dark blue bandanna at the throat, and a short stag-handled sheath knife on his belt. No hat, and no gun, and no place to hide a shooter of any size, at least not that Jay could see. He might have a little revolver or a derringer in his pants pocket, but if so, neither would be coming out with any speed, judging from the cut of those trousers. Six months away from his last bath, easy.
The second man was shorter and paler. He was hunched over his beer so that Jay couldn’t get a good look at his face, but from what Jay could see the man looked clean-shaven. Like Jay, he wore a cutaway-style coat over dark trousers, and low-top shoes with buckles.
Jay glanced away, trying to see the shorter man’s face by using the mirror. At that moment, the fellow looked up at the mirror himself, and Jay had the feeling he was also using the mirror to check the patrons.
Jay cut his gaze away, so as not to be caught looking. But before he did, he had the impression of something odd about the man’s eyes. Nothing he could pin down immediately, but…
It was one of these two. He was sure of it.
But — which? Cowboy, or Buckles?
In his quarry’s position, Jay wouldn’t be going around in any scenario unarmed — in this case, “armed” being a metaphor for defensive programs that would be apparent to anybody bright enough to be here. Since Cowboy didn’t seem to be packing — and that knife would only be good at close quarters, unless he was an expert at throwing, and even then, he’d only have one chance — then that pointed to Buckles.
Then again, maybe the quarry was banking on the idea that somebody looking for him would assume he’d be armed, and the fact that he wasn’t would allay suspicion.
Buckles could be carrying a hand-cannon in that big floppy coat pocket, or have a hidden belt holster under it, though he, too, could be unarmed.
Jay took another long pull at the beer. It was a problem.
He wanted this guy alive, to question, whichever one he was, and so drawing his revolver and potting them both was out.
If he drew down on the wrong one, the other would be forewarned, and Jay would be behind the power curve.
If he did nothing, eventually one or both would leave, and he would have to choose which one to stay with, since he obviously couldn’t follow them both.
Not unless they hooked up, which wasn’t likely in
