Novel 1971 - Tucker (v5.0) (4 page)

Turning my head ever so slightly, I could see what he meant. The light from the window next door fell across the room, and anybody moving would surely be seen. Whoever had done that shooting was good.

So we just set still while the moments passed. It seemed a long time. My heart slowed down after a bit, and my hand got so sweaty on my gun butt that I moved to wipe it off on my britches.

“Give him time, Shell. Whoever he is, he’s standing in the rain yonder between the buildings. He’ll get tired of it before we will.”

“I ain’t movin’,” I said. “I’m fixin’ to spend the night—only that gent over there don’t know that.”

“You ever been shot at before, Shell?”

“No, sir. Not really. Had some Injuns one time who cut loose at the house. They were shootin’, all right, but not at nobody in pa’ticular. That gent yonder was mighty pa’ticular, I’m thinking.”

So we waited. My rifle was close by, but I hesitated to reach for it, although I doubted if it was where it could be seen.

“Crawl around close to the wall, then through the kitchen door. I’ll cover you.”

After I started to crawl I could reach my rifle, so I latched onto it, and when I got into the kitchen I stood up in the dark doorway and looked out at the rain-sodden street. I could see nothing but the slanting rain across the window.

Con crawled the other way and joined me.

We heard the cook stirring, saw the glow of his cigar. “You boys always pack trouble with you? Or is this here somethin’ new?”

“You got a back door?”

“Yonder.…If you boys was figurin’ on havin’ breakfast, there’s a good restaurant on the other side of town.”

“You’ll never get rich sendin’ business away,” I said. “We like your place.”

“I might not get rich,” he said dryly, “but I’ll live a lot longer. Well, come back if you’ve a mind to. On’y, if you boys don’t mind I’ll stand my ol’ Sharps alongside the door. If anybody shoots into my kitchen I’m goin’ to shoot back.”

“You don’t sound like a restaurant man,” Con Judy commented.

“Hell, I cooked for m’self nigh onto twenty year, an’ for cow camps and the like. Seemed to me it was a sight easier than sweatin’ it out down in one of those mines.”

At the back door we waited a minute and studied the layout. I reckoned the risk was mine so I stepped out first. But I’ll own to it…I was scared.

Con Judy followed and we slopped down the alley, circled back of a couple of buildings and went to the livery barn. We didn’t want to go hunting a place to sleep when the very place we found might be where our enemies had holed up, so we got our bedrolls and crawled into the haymow.

When we stretched out Con said, “Do you still have it in mind to hunt those boys down?”

“I got it to do,” I replied. “I’m not anxious to get my head blowed off, but pa surely would have hung on, was it him. I can’t do any less.”

“They’ll have divided it up by now.”

“Maybe. But you got to think about that girl. She won’t want any divvying done, if she can help it. She won’t want to see all that money getting away.”

Another thing worried me. The jingle of money in my jeans was a disappearing sound. Those few dollars were about gone, even with riding the grub line part of the way, and spending careful. Leadville was a town where folks lived high, and money wouldn’t last long. I had no idea how Con was fixed, but it was enough that he shared trouble with me, without carrying the load of feeding both of us as well.

Lying there, hands behind my head, staring up into the dark and listening to the rain on the roof, I studied the situation I was in.

In most places there was no law that extended beyond the limits of a town, although county governments had been formed here and there where they had a sheriff who would chase criminals if he felt like it. Jim Cook was, according to Con, making an effort to get marshals and sheriffs to work together against the bad ones.

But when it came right down to it I had no legal case against anybody. They had found a lost horse, and even if two of them knew who the horse belonged to they could deny it, and I hadn’t any proof the horse and money was mine.

What lay between us was a simple matter of justice, and I was in no mood to let them steal the money of hard-working folks who trusted us. Nor mine either, when it came to that.

Pa was dead, and had it not been for my fool bullheadedness and their stealing, he might still be alive.

Yet I did not want to get killed, and that bullet into the doorjamb showed me they knew we were on their trail, and they were ready for us. I studied about it, but came to no good conclusion. Of course I was scared, but it wasn’t in me to quit. Well, maybe it was…but not yet.

Toward the end, before I fell asleep, I got to thinking about Con Judy.

Why had he come with me? To see that I didn’t get my head blown off? Because he was ready to drift, anyway? Because he didn’t like to see injustice done? Here I was riding partner with a man I hadn’t known at all. About all I knew about him now was that I figured he had more education than I’d ever have. But I was learning things from him.

When morning came and I was brushing off the hay I’d picked up during the night in the loft, I laid it out for Con. “I want that money back. I’m not vengeful, but I aim to get it.”

Putting on my hat, I added, “I’m surely going to have to get it quick, or rustle some work. I’ve only got a little money left.”

“How do you figure to get it?”

“First off, I’m simply going to them and ask for it.”

Con made no reply until he had tugged on his boots. He got up and stamped them into place on his feet. “That is about as simple a method as anybody could suggest. And when they refuse, as they surely will, what then?”

“I’ll tell everybody in town what happened.”

“They may say you’re just crying. In this country a man fights his own battles.”

“You’re surely right, but I’m beginning to find out there’s a whole lot they don’t know. Pa was forever trying to tell me things, but I wouldn’t listen. I thought pa was a stick-in-the-mud, and Doc and the Kid knew more than he did.”

Belting on my six-shooter, I took up the Winchester. “What I figure is this. I want folks to know where I stand. I want folks to know why I am after those three, and just what they’ve done…”

“Do you think that will help?”

“I just ain’t sure. But if it comes to a shooting affair and I kill one of them, I want folks to know I’m not just a murderer.”

He nodded. “That’s good thinking. But if you tell that story around, one of them is sure to call you a liar.”

“And there’ll be shooting? Is that what you mean?”

We climbed down the ladder from the loft and studied the layout. Neither of us wanted to be dry-gulched. “When you tell that story,” Con said, “wear your gun loose. You’ll surely need it.”

We started off to get breakfast. “Have you ever been in a gun battle?”

“No, sir.”

“Then don’t try a fast draw. You’ll get yourself killed. Take your time, get your gun out, and make the first shot count…you may not get another.”

“I’m pretty fast.”

“Forget it. You’ve no idea whether you’re fast or not, and the only way you’ll find out is against somebody. If you’re wrong, you’re dead.

“Anyway, most of the fast draws I’ve seen ended with the first shot going into the dust right out between the two of them. So take your time, and make your first one good. If your man goes down, or staggers, continue to shoot. But slowly…and carefully.”

After a moment he added, “I’ve seen men kill with half a dozen bullets in them. Don’t count a man as dead until you’ve seen them fill in his grave.”

There seemed to be nobody watching the restaurant. A good many people were coming and going along the street, and some rigs were tied here and there, or were passing. The street was chewed up and muddy. The clouds had broken and a ray of sunshine was bright on the face of the restaurant.

We crossed the street, pausing once to let a freight wagon pass, drawn by half a dozen bulls. On the boardwalk we stamped the mud from our feet. My eyes happened to go up and I caught a flicker of movement at a curtained window.

“Somebody up there. First window over the hardware store.”

“All right,” Con said, “let’s go inside.”

The man who had served us the night before was on the job. He was a hard-bitten old man with gnarled hands that looked as if they’d spent years wrapped around a pick handle.

“I got the Sharps,” he commented. “I don’t take kindly to folks shootin’ into my place of business.”

“Ought to be a law against it,” I said.

He didn’t wait to take our order. He just brought out a big stack of flapjacks and a pitcher of syrup and set them on the table. “I got eggs and meat if you want them.”

“I’ll stick with flapjacks,” I said. “I got me an eggs-and-meat appetite, but a flapjack bankroll.”

“Eat up. If a man’s going to get shot coming out of my restaurant I want folks to figure he ate well, anyhow.”

We ate. The meat was venison, fresh shot in the mountains. The eggs were fresh laid—sometime or other.

The man was a talker, like many lonely men I’ve known. They herd sheep or cattle, or prospect by themselves, and when they come into town they talk, just to hear the sound of their own voice and somebody answering.

He told us about Leadville. It hadn’t had the name for long, and actually, he said, there was more silver than lead. The town had been Oro City for a while, and before that it was Slabtown. Back around 1860 a man named Abe Lee had done some placer mining in California Gulch.

The town never amounted to much until a prospector took on a partner who told him that reddish sand he’d been throwing out was carbonate of lead, with a silver content so high it scared him. Business picked up, and the town boomed.

Presently the man brought a fresh pot of coffee to the table and sat down with us.

“We’re ten thousand feet up,” he said, “and she gets awful cold. Folks around here say we get ten months of winter, and two months mighty late in the fall.”

Mountains reared up all around the town, with the trees playing out at timberline. The mountains were scarred with prospect holes; everybody was mining, everybody dreaming about making the big strike. Those who weren’t actually digging had grub-staked men who were. The idea of getting rich was in the air.

There’d been only a scattering of folks along the creeks at first, but now there was somewhere between thirty and sixty thousand people, depending on who you talked to and how sober he was. The men who were making money spent it; they drank champagne like water. Men who didn’t even care for champagne drank it because a man who had money spent it, and champagne was the mark of riches.

Con told me that a good deal of what passed for champagne was made in a building off an alley down the street. They had some youngsters running around picking up the empty bottles and refilling them.

One Irish laborer struck it rich and went down the street buying suits for everybody he knew. He didn’t know me and I was kind of slow getting acquainted. By the time I could call him by name his pocket had played out and he was putting the bum on me for a meal. My luck ran that way…and well out in front of me.

I wasn’t likely to be one of the nabobs who ate at the Tontine. I was lucky to get a plate of oxtail soup at Smoothey’s, which sold for five cents and was in my class of income.

Con and me, hunting them, ran into Doc Sites and Kid Reese at the Bon Ton. We were pushing through the crowd and came face to face with them.

“Hello, Kid,” I said. “You and Doc getting ready to return my money?”

Several people stopped to listen, smelling excitement, and the Kid’s face kind of thinned down. He threw a quick look at Doc, but Doc was looking at me.

“What’re you talkin’ about?” the Kid blustered.

“You took pa’s horse with our money on it, and money that belonged to a lot of poor folks down in Texas. You knew that horse was ours. I’d loaned it to you a time or two.”

The Kid started to push by, because more people were stopping to listen. “That ain’t so!” he said roughly.

Then I opened my big mouth and said the one thing I shouldn’t have, “You callin’ me a liar, Kid?”

All of a sudden we weren’t crowded any more. There was space all around us.

The Kid stood stock-still, his face white and stiff, and Doc was off to one side, as if he had no part in it.

I’d had no idea of throwing a challenge at him like that. It just sort of came out.

“I ain’t called you nothin’,” he said, and shoved by me. I let him go.

Doc started to leave too. “Doc,” I said, “I want my money. You and the Kid bring it to the Jolly Cork eatin’ house, and have it there by noontime.”

Doc never said a word. He just pushed by and went out, and folks started talking again. One man offered to buy us a drink. “What was that all about?” he asked.

So I told him.

“He may come a-shootin’,” he said when I’d finished.

“Yes, sir. I reckoned on that, but I can’t see my way clear to gettin’ my money unless I carry trouble to them.”

The man thrust out a hand. “I’m Bill Bush. I like the way you stand, so if you need a friend, call on me.”

“Yes, sir. If you know where a man could get a few days of work, I’d be obliged. Chasing these men has run me short.”

Con Judy stepped up then, and Bush saw him for the first time. “Howdy, Con. I didn’t recognize you there at first. Do you know this man?”

“We’re riding together.”

I’d heard tell of Bill Bush. He was partners with Silver Dollar Tabor, one of the most prominent men in town, and occasionally his rival.

“I didn’t know you were in this part of the country, Con.”

“Tried my hand at buffalo hunting. When Shell Tucker came along, I threw in with him.”

“You’ve got some old friends in town, Con. Dave May
²
has opened a department store here—I think you knew him. Meyer Guggenheim
³
has a share in some mining properties, and there’s talk of building a smelter.”

Bush finished his drink. “Why don’t you fellows join me for dinner at the Tontine? I’d appreciate it.”