Heart of the West (54 page)

Except that Zach never was one for seeking company when he was brooding. Uneasiness trickled down Gus's spine as he looked up and down the deserted street. His brother wouldn't have gone to the trouble to pay an old Indian two bits to track him down and direct him here unless it was important.

He pushed open the swinging doors and blinked against the sting of thick cigar smoke. Inside, the saloon was just about what he'd expected it to be: air fetid with whiskey and tobacco, sawdust on the floor to soak up the spilled booze, deer antlers and curling brewery calendars tacked on the bullet-peppered walls, chairs worn bare of varnish, and tables circle-stained by wet glasses.

He searched the packed room, his gaze pausing a moment on the oil painting above the bar. It was of two naked women making love to each other. Gus's lips pinched inward with disgust.

He found his brother at one end of the bar, near a bunch of men who were standing like cows around a salt lick, spectating a poker game in progress. Zach acknowledged him by lifting his glass. The whiskey was already flowing wild in his eyes.

"Trouble," he said, "is once again among us."

Gus followed his brother's gaze. It was trouble all right— sitting all slicked up in fancy duds in the midst of the poker game with a mountainous pile of silver and bills at his elbow. One-Eyed Jack McQueen leaned back in his chair and fired up a long, thin cigar while the dealer fanned the cards.

Lamplight glinted off his long oiled hair, combed back sleek as jet against his skull. A pearl stickpin the size of a man's thumbnail nestled in the snowy folds of his silk tie. A seal-heavy gold watch chain stretched across his red satin vest. A fine linen handkerchief peeked out the pocket of his black frock coat. And an ebony-handled cane was hooked on the arm of his chair.

"What the devil did he do—rob a bank?"

Zach tossed off the last of his shot, grimacing as the raw booze bit deep. "Most likely he just hornswoggled someone good."

Gus fought off a violent urge to slam his fist into a wall. He really thought they'd finally gotten ridden of the old man, and now here he was back again. For two years they had been held up to shame before their friends and neighbors while the Reverend Jack McQueen traveled the sawdust trail of revivals and tent meetings throughout western Montana, using his God-given gift of gab to wheedle money out of the poor, the sick, and the hungry.

Unfortunately, a propitious flash of forked lightning during an early preaching had convinced the country's shepherdless flock to open up their pockets. But it didn't take long for the Reverend Jack to fall back into his old sins of drinking, fighting, whoring, and gambling. Eventually even the most gullible sheep got wise, and the dollars stopped ringing in the old stovepipe hat. One day in the fall of 1881, he'd up and disappeared, and Gus had thought that at last his prayers had been answered.

Now here he was back again, as perennial and tormenting as fleas in summer. From the look of things, he'd given up on the sin-busting game and found another way to separate the world's fools from their hard-earned money.

The last hand had played itself out in a hurry and the deck had passed to One-Eyed Jack for the deal. Gus watched the graceful, long-fingered hands cut and shuffle the cards. When he was a boy the cards had seemed to take on life in his father's hands. Like magic, he could make them appear and disappear, turn a deuce into an ace, or shift a king from the bottom to the top of the deck. He had passed the tricks on to both his sons, but only Zach had had any talent for it. Gus thought of the hours he had spent watching Zach practice palming a card, learning how to cheat.

For the first time Gus took note of the other players in the game: Doc Corbett, Snake-Eye, and Pogey and Nash. The whiskey glowed like lampshine in their faces.

"They're playing no-limit straight stud, no joker," Zach said. He signaled to the bartender, who poured him another shot and drew a small glass of beer for a chaser. Zach took the makings of a cigarette out the pocket of his unbuttoned vest. "Big stakes and let losers cry."

"Big stakes?" Snake-Eye's livery was a mint in disguise, and it was said the doc had East Coast money. But all the two old prospectors had was their income from the Four Jacks lease, which kept them fine in whiskey and five-dollar-ante poker games, but didn't allow for any big-stakes doings. "What are Pogey and Nash playing with?"

"The old man bankrolled them. Five thousand dollars against their eighty percent of the Four Jacks claim. They've lost most it of back to him already."

"Lost it!" Gus's hands jerked into fists. "Lost it? My God, you know him, you know how he is. How could you just stand here and let it happen?"

Zach lit the cigarette dangling from his lips. "Because I don't fancy myself my brother's keeper like you do."

Gus growled deep in his throat and started to push past his brother, who laid a heavy hand on his arm. "You can't horn in on another's man's game," Zach said.

"I can if he's dealing from the bottom of the deck."

"He ain't."

"How can he not be? You know the man—he's as crooked and wily as a snake and always has been."

Zach's hat brim rose slightly as he peered at him from underneath it. "I've been standing here letting it happen, remember? He's shooting square."

"Well, hell." Gus shot a glare in the direction of his father and rubbed the back of his neck. He supposed that it took a scoundrel to know a scoundrel, and if anyone could tell if the old man was cheating, it would be Zach.

He also trusted his brother's sense of right and justice about as far as he could spit a brick. He narrowed his eyes the better to study the action at the table.

The Reverend Jack was drawing deep on his cigar, making its tip glow fierce. He nodded at Pogey, whose turn it was to ante or fold. Each man had one hole card and three cards showing. "It's back to you again, old-timer. Are you staying?"

Pogey took a peep at his hole card. He combed his beard, gave the hanging flap of his earlobe a tug, rubbed the shiny dome of his head, aimed a shot of tobacco cud in the general direction of the spittoon, then took another peep at his hole card.

Nash stretched and scratched at a fleabite on his skinny chest. "You foldin' or staying, Pogey?"

"I'm thinkin'."

"Well, think a little faster. You're so slow you'd miss your own funeral."

Pogey rubbed his nose. "Anybody ever tell you, pard, that it's hard to put a foot in a shut mouth?" He tapped his hole card with a gnarled knuckle. "A faint heart never filled a flush—I'm stayin'."

Every man stayed and every man held a pair in sight, except Pogey, who had three clubs. Nash had tens to a queen. Snake-Eye had a pair of jacks to a four. The doc had treys to a six. And the Reverend Jack had a pair of deuces to an eight.

He began to deal around the fifth card. "Here comes the train, gentlemen, rolling down the track. A queen matches a queen and two pairs in sight. A five to the jacks and no visible help. A heart for the clubs and the flush goes bust. Another trey and the doc is sitting pretty with three of a kind. The dealer draws a deuce." He set down the deck and looked over at Nash. "Your bet, sir."

Pogey pitched in his ruined flush. "I'm busted."

"Amen to that," Snake-Eye said as he turned over his cards.

"Three lousy treys don't like the odds of bucking two pairs in sight," the doc said. "But I'll ride 'em for a while yet. I'm in for a hundred."

Nash added a wad of crumpled bills to the pile in the middle of the table. "Call and bump five hundred."

Nash might have been an owl sitting on a fence for all the expression he wore. But his bet revealed what his face didn't. He had a full house, either queens and tens or tens and queens.

The Reverend Jack contemplated the coal of his cigar. From what showed on the table he couldn't beat Nash's full house, unless he had a fourth deuce hiding in the hole.

"I will see you and raise it fifteen hundred," he said.

"He's bluffing," Gus said out the side of his mouth. "He always could run a bluff and make it stick."

A half smile flicked across Zach's mouth. "Brother, never bet your convictions against a bluff."

The doc pulled a disgusted face and tossed in his hand. "I knew these treys would last about as long as shit in a goose. I'm out."

Nash peered at his cards with his large liquid eyes. "What's it to me, then?"

"Fifteen hundred," the Reverend Jack said.

The money left at Nash's elbow looked shy of the bet. A silence settled over the table, as thick as the smoke puffing from the end of One-Eyed Jack's cigar. Pogey flipped through what was left of his stake and passed most of it over to Nash, leaving only a few forlorn bills.

"I'll see ya, then," Nash said, and the last of the Four Jacks silver mine went into the pot.

Jack McQueen blew another plume of smoke over the table and then slowly, drawing out the drama of it, turned over his hole card. It was the fourth deuce.

Chairs scraped across the rough floor as the game broke up, and players and spectators alike crowded around the bar in a hurry to make up for lost drinking time. One minute it seemed to Gus that Zach was finishing off the last of his whiskey, and the next thing he knew, his brother was so close to disappearing out the door that Gus had to take long strides to catch up with him.

He grabbed him by the shoulder. "Just where do you think you're going?"

The face Zach turned to him was as blank as a fresh snowdrift. "I thought I'd go and watch the fireworks."

"You send for me to come down and witness this... this travesty, and now you're going to sashay on out of here as if nothing's happened?"

"What do you want me to do—play a funeral dirge for you on the piano? I told you he wasn't cheating. Those two old fools fell into his hands like a couple of ripe peaches on a hot summer day, and he ate 'em all up but for the pits."

"Then you can just go and win it all back."

"Now, how in sweet hell am I going to do that? I've got maybe all of ten dollars to stake. That and my share in the ranch."

"You could cheat." Gus's mouth pulled into a tight smile. "I heard you were taught by the best of them."

Zach's dark brows lifted in eloquent mockery. "I ain't believin' I'm hearing this out the mouth of my big brother, who wouldn't say boo to the devil—"

"Dammit, Zach."

"Like you said, I was taught by the best of them and so were you, though you never were much good at it. Maybe I've picked up a few tricks he doesn't know. But then, maybe he knows a few tricks he never showed me. You want to bet the ranch on which of us is the sharper blackleg?"

Zach held his gaze for a moment, then turned on his boot-heel, slapped open the door, and disappeared into the twilight.

"It looks like you and I are partners in a silver mine, son. Would you care for a cigar?"

Gus looked down into the open silver case, at the expensive cigars banded with silk, then back up into his father's canny blue eye. "You give up preaching to take up gambling full-time now? What happened—did the power of the Spirit desert you in the middle of the night?"

The reverend shook his head, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "Gustavus, Gustavus. For all your dreaming, you simply never have had any vision. T am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way of the Lord.' Except there isn't any wilderness anymore. It's been ruined by all these committees of elders with their building funds and membership drives. Organized religion has come in and taken all the fun and money out of preaching. So I followed the good Lord's holy promptings and took the pasteboards back up again in a serious way." He clamped his teeth deep into the butt of the cigar and looked himself up and down, his eye twinkling with mischief. "From the appearance of things, I would say I've found my true calling in this latter half of my interesting life."

Gus shook his head. Although he hadn't had so much as a beer all day, he felt a little drunk. His father could do that to him—confuse him until he didn't know which end was up. "The only calling I've ever known you to follow," he said, "was to stir up trouble just for the sick joy you seem to get out of watching it mess up other people's lives."

"I suppose you'd rather see me spend my days facing the ugly end of a mule, busting sod, or button-holed up in some tiny room bent over a ledger, getting ink stains on my cuffs and putting a strain on the only good eye I got left. Why, if you had your druthers—"

Gus sputtered a hollow laugh. "If I had my druthers I'd see you run out of Rainbow Springs on a rail."

Jack pressed a hand to his heart. "You wound me, son— grievously, most grievously. And what have I ever done to deserve it? What have I ever done to you boys except allow you find your own merry way to hell?" His mouth pulled into his wily smile. "If you go around seeking the light, Gustavus, you must also be willing to face the darkness."

Gus breathed a weary sigh. "I don't suppose it's ever occurred to you to try and earn your living by honest means?"

"'He that walketh uprightly, walketh surely.'" He took the cigar from his mouth, examined it, and tossed it into a sawdust spit box. "Maybe I will, now that I own a silver mine. Are you looking to unload your twenty percent? If you are, I'm buying."

Gus anchored his hat down on his head and put the flat of his hand on the door. "Too bad for you, because I'm not selling—"

He was interrupted by gunfire.

It was just a bunch of miners, who'd had a little too much beer and sunshine and who'd taken a notion to anticipate the fireworks display by displaying a few fireworks of their own. They'd hitched up an empty lumber wagon, climbed into the box, sent it careening down the street, and tried to see how many windows and signs they could kill. Bullets rained into the Gandy Dancer, clattering like hail, splintering tables and chairs, slapping into the walls, and busting open three full kegs of not-yet-diluted whiskey.

After the gunfire stopped, Gus picked himself up off the floor, brushed the broken glass, wood chips, and whiskey out of his hair, knocked the sawdust off his knees, and looked around, his heart pounding, to see if the old man had gotten himself shot.