Andromeda Gun (3 page)

The crowd grew silent, waiting for the sheriff to speak, and in the pause Ian McCloud had time to decipher the sign posted on the front of the building:

CITIZENS: PLEASE DO NOT DISCHARGE FIREARMS INSIDE THE TOWN LIMITS… SHERIFF FAUST

Sheriff Faust cleared his throat and said, “I’ll be, if it ain’t Will Trotter. Dead Man’s Curve get him, son?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then he died outside my jurisdiction. Why didn’t you leave him there? Buzzards wouldn’t bother him, not for a couple of hours anyhow. Let the stage line go bring him in.”

“I thought it was my Christian duty, sir.”

“Reckon you would think that”—the sheriff nodded—“not being familiar with the Territorial Stage Lines. I suspect the town owes you a vote of thanks anyway. What’s your name?”

He started to answer, “Johnny Loco,” and paused. Chances were, the sheriff would be more apt to recognize his alias than his name.

“Ian McCloud,” he answered, and the name sounded strange on his lips.

“The town thanks you, Mr. McCloud. Now, would you haul Will three buildings down to the Territorial Stage Lines’ office and let Mr. Birnie, the stationmaster, take care of the matter.”

Yawning slightly, the sheriff turned and went back into the jail, apparently to resume his afternoon nap. McCloud glanced at the horse tied to the jailhouse hitching rack. The sheriff’s nag wasn’t worth stealing. He nudged the draft horses forward.

Mr. Birnie, the stationmaster, was summoned from an early supper by someone in the crowd. Judging by the girth of the man who waddled from the door, McCloud figured it to be the first of a bunch of suppers. Birnie’s shirt was unbuttoned above the belt because the lower buttonholes couldn’t reach the buttons, and his belt, looped below his protruding navel, was as much a hammock for his belly as a support for his trousers. The stationmaster was munching on a half-moon pie as he walked onto the porch.

McCloud explained the circumstances of Trotter’s death and returned the dead man’s wallet, publicly itemizing its contents.

Birnie took the wallet, finished his pie, and declaimed to the crowd in a petulant whine, “Now, this beats all get-out. Long as that galoot’s been driving this run, he goes and wrecks my stagecoach. Haul him down to Near-Sighted Charlie’s, mister. Charlie’s the undertaker. Tell him I’ll be down later to settle the estate.”

McCloud bridled at the order. “Mister Birnie, I done my Christian duty, getting this poor soul to where he was paid to get me. You can take him from here. But I had a ticket to Green River which was lost with all my clothes and money when my valise fell in the river.”

“How much money you lose?”

“Better than eighty dollars.”

“I can sure sympathize with your loss, Mr. McCloud, because I just lost a six-hundred-and-fifty-dollar stagecoach. Between you and me, I figure I’m about five-hundred-and-seventy dollars more deserving of sympathy.”

Ian knew from the man’s plaintive voice he would get no rebate on his nonexistent clothes and money, but there was the possibility he might be refunded for the imaginary ticket to Green River.

“I sympathize with you, Mr. Birnie, but I wasn’t under no contract to get your stagecoach to Shoshone Flats. You sold me contract to get me to Green River. Since I ain’t getting there, I think you ought to give me my money back.”

“Where’d you buy your ticket?”

“Pocatello.”

“Mr. McCloud, I can’t give you money that’s back in Pocatello, but I’ll play fair with you. We got another stage coming through, Tuesday. You can ride it, free of charge, if the durned driver can get it around Dead Man’s Curve.”

“Tuesday!” Ian exploded. “You mean I got to set here till Tuesday, with all my money and clothes floating down the river. How’m I going to eat and sleep till Tuesday?”

“Times is hard, son”—Birnie shook his head dolefully—“but I ain’t no innkeeper. I run a stage line.”

“Least you can do is give me the driver’s meal ticket. He ain’t going to use it.”

“Son, that’s the company’s meal ticket.”

“Give him the meal ticket, Birnie”—a tall, red-haired man shouldered his way through the crowd—“or, so help me, if I catch you eating on that ticket at Miss Stewart’s, you’re going to lose about three hundred of them five hundred pounds before you get off the stool.”

Birnie flinched at the big man’s anger and reconsidered his position. “Well, seeing as how you brought in the horses, Mr. McCloud, I reckon the company can afford to be generous. Here’s the meal ticket.”

As Birnie handed up the meal ticket to McCloud, still astride the horse, the tall man turned and said, “My name’s Bain, Mr. McCloud. You can take the ticket to Miss Stewart’s. Her place is right across from my saloon. As far as your sleeping arrangements are concerned, you can hole up, upstairs over my barroom, till Tuesday, if you don’t mind a little female company.”

“No, Mr. Bain,” a man called from an outer circle of the crowd, “he can have the choice room at my hotel till Tuesday. He did his Christian duty by Brother Trotter and I’ll do my Christian duty by him. If that meal ticket runs out before Tuesday, son, you tell Miss Stewart to charge your meals to Jack Taylor.”

Ian appreciated all that was being done for him as he used his last few seconds atop the Clydesdale to survey the horses up and down the street. From where he sat, he could not see a horse he judged capable of outrunning a Tennessee walker. Still, all the palaver going on around him was about nothing. He’d take their meals and room, if he had to, and stay long enough to find a decent horse, but, come Monday, he’d ride out of here with all their money, heading for Green River and Colonel Blicket.

Followed by admiring looks from the crowd, he slid from the horse and angled across the street toward Miss Stewart’s Restaurant.

So it was that Ian McCloud, alias Johnny Loco, coming in part from the defeated armies of Robert E. Lee and in part from the great nebula in Andromeda, arrived in Shoshone Flats, Wyoming Territory. The stride carrying him across the wagon ruts was given additional jauntiness by the success of his plan, so far, to rob a bank and murder a colonel and by the first stirrings, deep in the nodes of his brain, of a drive toward sainthood.

Of saintliness Ian knew little, only a remembered aphorism dragged laboriously from McGuffey’s Third Reader that virtue had its own rewards. Awaiting him at the restaurant was the second lesson: that virtue could be as parsimonious as the Territorial Stage Lines. Inwardly the nobler being now diffused along the neuron paths of McCloud contemplated with keener awareness a different observation: In this small cluster of the breed called “man” it had observed pride, avarice, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth—six of the seven deadly sins.

Awaiting it in the restaurant was the seventh, lust.

Sunlight through a western window fell on the golden hair of a waitress, sole occupant of Miss Stewart’s Restaurant, who stood behind the counter reading a book with such intentness that she did not look up until Ian was seated on a stool across from her. When she lifted her head and he caught her eyes, cool yet friendly, their blueness accented by a swash of freckles beneath them, he took off his hat.

“Ma’am, I got a meal ticket from the stage lines that belonged to Will Trotter, deceased. If Miss Stewart should question you…”

“I’m Miss Stewart,” she said, moving down the counter and leaning slightly over it to smile toward him, “Miss Gabriella Stewart. I saw you bringing in Brother Trotter’s body, so you must be Mr. Ian McCloud.”

“Yes’m,” he said. He had placed her age at eighteen, but she had to be older if she owned the restaurant and read books. He wondered how she had learned his name so quickly, since she had not been among the spectators gathered to see the body. “Hope I didn’t turn your customers’ stomachs, hauling a dead man past your window. I must have been a sight.”

“Oh, no, sir,” she assured him as she handed him a menu. “ ‘I wad some power the giftie gie us,’ as Sir Walter Scott says, so you could have seen yourself riding into our town as a Sir Galahad on a draft horse bearing Brother Trotter like the Holy Grail. Brother Trotter was respected among us Methodists. He was a deacon of our church.”

She had taken a peculiar stance to deliver her benediction, backing toward the front window as she spoke and leaning across the counter, as if she were shielding her face from a view from the street.

Without looking at it, he laid the menu down. “I’d like steak and potatoes, ma’am.”

“Mr. McCloud, I can’t recommend my steak this week. It’s a little gristly. But my fried chicken is the best you ever tasted.”

He glanced at the book she had laid on the counter and said, “All right, Miss Stewart. I’ll take fried chicken and potatoes.”

He could decipher the word “Bacon” on the front of the book. Assuming it was a cookbook, he said politely, “I’d like to compliment you on your choice of reading matter, ma’am. Ain’t many young ladies who’d be reading up on their work while they’re working.”

“Yes,” she agreed, putting a place setting in front of him, “but I have to sharpen my mind for my children.”

She wore no wedding band, so her remark interested him.

“How many young ones you got, ma’am?”

“Fourteen, but I’d have more if I could get help from the Mormons in this valley.”

His soaring expectations suddenly fell as he realized she was a schoolteacher. That accounted for the children, the book and the “Miss” everybody put in front of her name.

“Ma’am, I’d think every man in this valley would be glad to do anything you wanted.”

“The lower half of the valley is all Mormons,” she said. “They won’t put their children in a Gentile school. Mr. Bryce Peyton, the stake superintendent, says he doesn’t want to get his angels mixed up with our angels.”

“Still, you must be busy with fourteen, teaching them and running a restaurant.”

“My mother helps during schooltime. Pa used to run the restaurant, but he was killed this spring in a fall from a horse.”

Her cooking range, set back in an alcove, was within talking distance of his stool. He watched as she bent to put in more firewood and turned to slice his potatoes. All schoolteachers had high ideals, he knew, but this girl had something more—lean flanks, well-turned shanks, and the prettiest haunch he had seen north of Sonora.

Schoolteachers went to respectable places, he reflected, like church, and a church hitching rack would be a good place from which to steal a fast horse. Ranchers would be riding their best animals to church, and the preacher would keep them occupied for at least an hour while the beasts went unguarded. Schoolteachers were seen only with respectable men, but, temporarily, Ian McCloud was a respectable man.

“Are you open Sundays, ma’am?”

“No, I’m not, Mr. McCloud, but I could fix you a box of chicken good for three meals, tomorrow, for the amount you’ll have left on Brother Trotter’s meal ticket.”

“I might take you up on that. Is there a Methodist church hereabouts?”

“Why, yes, Mr. McCloud.” Her face within the alcove flashed him a smile. “It’s just south of town. Brother Winchester preaches a fine sermon. Tomorrow, he’s going to tell us about heaven. If you care to join us, I’d be pleased to sit next to you and introduce you to our congregation.”

“If you’re willing to be so kind, Miss Stewart, I’d be happy to hire a rig and carry you to church.”

“I’d be honored to let you, Mr. McCloud, but I’m spoke for, coming and going. It’s only after I get there that I’m alone.”

“Reckon I should have figured that, Miss Stewart. A girl as pretty as you would be sure to have a courter for going and one for coming.”

“No, Mr. McCloud. Billy Peyton’s my only suitor. But he’s a Mormon and won’t go in. He just waits outside.”

Her remark dismayed him. It would be harder to steal a horse with Billy Peyton waiting outside the church. “If Peyton’s willing to court you, seems to me he’d be willing to take your faith, unless you took his.”

“No,” she said, above the crackle of frying potatoes, “and I’m not marrying into his church. Mormons can take more than one wife, and I’m not rushing home from my honeymoon so my husband can hurry away on another one.”

“Why don’t you refuse him?”

“Wouldn’t do any good. No other boy in the valley dares to come around, knowing how Billy feels about me. Besides, Billy’s Mr. Bryce Peyton’s first son by his third wife, as I recall, and Billy’s trying to persuade his father to send the Mormon children to my school. I’d certainly like to bring those children to the light, at two dollars, apiece, head tax, payable to the teacher.”

“Still, the young men in this valley must be lily-livered. Billy ought to have claim jumpers all over the place.”

“Billy’s a little ornery,” she explained. “Most of the boys know I despise violence, and Billy can get violent when he thinks somebody’s taking on over me.”

She brought his plate and a cup of coffee and set them before him. “Now, when you’re through with this chicken, Mr. McCloud, I want your honest opinion if it’s the best chicken you ever tasted. If it’s not, you needn’t say a thing.”

“All right, Miss Stewart, but why don’t you just call me Ian?”

“I’d be pleased to, Ian, and you may call me Gabriella until Billy gets here. After that, we’d best go back to Mister and Miss because Billy might think we’re getting too familiar.”

“Is Billy coming here?”

“He will if you have a second cup of coffee. He watches from the saloon across the street.”

“I didn’t think Mormons drank,” Ian said, biting into a chicken leg. It was good chicken, and a sip of the coffee told him he was bound to have a second cup.

“Billy’s sort of a backslider, a jackleg as the other Mormons call him.” Suddenly her voice grew excited. “Here he comes, already. He must have seen you smile at me, and he’s getting worried.”

“Well, if I’m not going to have the pleasure of your talk, Gabriella, maybe I could look at your book while I’m eating.

“Why, I’d be pleased, Ian,” she said, handing him the book. “I’m always glad to see somebody read an enlightening book. But, remember, call me Miss Stewart, and I hate violence.”