Territory (26 page)

Doc met Ringo’s cold, straight gaze—wonderfully like Wyatt’s, in its way. “Mr. Ringo, I thank you for your concern for my reputation and my soul. But I have chosen my ground.”

“Time comes you regret that, you remember my offer.”

Doc looked down at the cards he’d dealt face up on the table. “I always wonder why people will gamble. They seem to think the cards are angels, sent down to Earth to do them a kindness.”

Ringo rose from his chair. Judging by his expression, he thought Doc had drunk too much. Not enough, never enough.

“The truth is,” Doc went on, “the cards hate us, no matter what we do, no matter what we give them. They hate us because they’re trapped in there, and
we’re free, changing all manner of things, taking charge of the world. They can’t do that. They can only hold our luck, and twist it around, and ruin us for spite. Because we have everything they want and can’t ever get.” Doc leaned back and smiled up at Ringo. “If you want to give good advice to someone, tell that to the poor souls around the faro table. They’re more likely to be able to use it.”

Ringo stood rigid for an instant. Then he turned and pushed out through the crowd to the door.

Doc studied the cards on the table before him. What had made Ringo come to him, now or ever? He ran his fingertip lightly over his spade flush and meditated on darkness, and swords, and one’s life in someone else’s keeping.

 12 

Even for Hoptown, it was too damned early. Jesse rode Sam down Second Street past ground-floor windows dark behind their wooden shutters, second-floor windows with only a rare candle burning. A hanging sign squeaked once on its hook and fell silent, as if rolling over in bed.

In the east the night sky seemed to be thinning at its edge, tarnished silver instead of ink. He could make out the shapes of things, the contrast of light railings against dark walls, walls against the light dust. But deep darkness knocked the corners off, lied about distances, turned passageways between buildings into shallow embrasures and embrasures into passageways.

Jesse felt vulnerable, itchy between the shoulder blades. It had been years since the world had looked like this to him. Had looked, in fact, the way it did to normal people. Had he minded, back then, not being able to see in the dark? Probably he had. He’d certainly minded when, after falling off a river ferry in Kansas and being fished out again, he had found his eyes painfully sensitive to light. A doctor in San Francisco hadn’t seen anything wrong with him. Then Jesse had been afraid the effect was a hallucination; after all, his sister had gone mad.

Lung had told him it wasn’t, of course. Jesse had ignored him: even very clever men could be fools now and then, he’d thought, not noticing that it applied to himself as well.

His eyes had returned to normal, but Jesse rather regretted the timing. Tombstone didn’t feel like the sort of place one should be blind in at night.

He wanted eggs, bacon, biscuits, a cup of strong coffee, and at least three hours of sleep. Sam seemed dozy beneath him, head low, ears lax on either side of his black forelock. Grooming and saddling him at the livery had given Jesse a chance to come to terms with their errand, but one didn’t, it seemed, take every chance one was given.

He turned the corner and saw a long-legged black riding mule tethered to
Lung’s porch post. There was a pack roll tied behind the saddle. How long were they going to be at this?

As he rode up, the mule swiveled its ears and turned to look at him. Jesse could make out its molasses-colored muzzle and the rings around its eyes. Sam gave a little chuckle of greeting, and the mule stamped.

Lung stepped out his front door, a roll of something under his arm. He looked up and down the street with what, even at a distance in the dark, seemed like brittle cheerfulness. “What a beautiful day!” he said, shockingly loud in the sleeping street.

So they were playacting. Jesse had no idea why, but he stepped into a role. “It can’t be. It isn’t day yet. Do you have any coffee?”

“The fresh air will wake you. If not, we shall beg some for you in Saint David.” Lung tied the roll he carried onto the back of Jesse’s saddle.

“Mormons don’t drink coffee.”

“Even in Saint David, I am sure there are unbelievers.” Lung untied the mule and swung easily into the saddle.

Lung wore ordinary drover’s clothes: an old brown sack coat, striped cotton shirt, woolen vest, pants, and boots. There was a dark felt hat hanging by a lanyard from the saddle horn.

It seemed wrong. It didn’t look wrong; dressed this way, Lung looked more Indian than Chinese—almost like the Apache scouts who rode with the cavalry. But he
was
Chinese. As far as Jesse had been able to tell, that meant more to the Chinese than being German or Italian or Irish meant to other immigrants. Clothes, food, neighbors, customs, religion—if you were Chinese, everything was Chinese, and stayed that way.

Yet Lung had seemed unconcerned about the loss of his queue, which no respectable Chinese man would be. It was true that Lung wasn’t perfectly respectable—he’d befriended Jesse, after all. Jesse pondered a way to broach the subject.

Lung crammed the hat on and grinned out from under the wide brim, as if he were going to a masquerade and was particularly proud of his costume. If there had been a moment when Jesse could say something, it was gone. He settled for, “Nice sombrero.”

“Thank you. How well can you see it?”

“Is it
not
a nice sombrero?”

“Very. How are your eyes?”

Jesse wrestled with a surge of illogical resentment. “They’re fine.”

Lung reined the mule closer. “I told you that your sight would be cured when you no longer struggled against your nature. When did it happen?”

“Maybe a week ago.”

“Ah,” said Lung, a world of self-satisfaction in the syllable.

Jesse scowled at Lung, then relented. “I miss the night vision.”

Lung cocked his head. “Summon it, then.”

“What?”

“You will learn how.” Lung turned the mule’s nose to the Benson Road.

Jesse waited until they were well past the outlying houses to say, “We’re going to the river?”

“We are.”

“It’s thataway.” He jerked his head to the left.

Lung’s artificial good cheer was gone. “The murderer may already have removed the signs of his presence from the place. If so, we will have ridden far for nothing.”

“But in case he hasn’t, we’re trying to get there unnoticed.”

“Exactly so.” Lung’s mule broke into a trot.

A few minutes later they left the road and headed west, toward the line of cone-shaped hills and the rolling country that circled Tombstone like a moat. They could have taken the Charleston road, blending in with traffic. But there was no reason not to be careful. As the sun rose behind his back, Jesse watched the fine detail of the land grow back up around him: creosote bush, sage, and tough high desert grasses; the shadow of a rock cast on a bare patch of ground; a lizard motionless on the rock. Prickly poppy waved its papery white cups, and globe mallow stretched clustered spires of orange against the green-brown landscape of spring. If it wasn’t for their grim errand, he would have been enjoying himself.

They headed up the slope toward a little pass between the hills, dodging spiked buggy whips of ocotillo as they went. “How long will this take?” Jesse asked. “I’d had plans.” Like, say, talking Mildred Benjamin into having dinner with him. He wanted very much to know what she was like with her guard lowered. So far they hadn’t met under the best of conditions for that.

“Mmm,” Lung replied.

“Couldn’t we, I don’t know, conjure up the girl’s ghost and ask her who did it?”

Lung looked scornful. “Ghosts are a peasant superstition.”

“At the undertaker’s, you said—”

Lung gave a dismissive snort.

Jesse resolved not to offer any more suggestions.

They came out of the hills at last. Before them the ground dropped steadily to the San Pedro River, then stretched out flat, a sea of shivering pale grass, to
the high, ragged Huachucas and the Mustang range. Jesse could see the line of intermittent green that marked the San Pedro and the bottom of the valley, the line of mesquite
bosque
and ground that would be marsh when the summer rains came. It was a sharp contrast to the subtle colors of the hills they’d just traveled. But it was a broken line. From the rise they stood on, Jesse could see the smoke and dust rising from the town of Charleston to the south, and from the stamping mills at Contention northward. North of that, he knew, where the eastern banks rose above the river, were more mills, and the endless roar of giant hammers crushing rock.

Dark satanic mills,
he thought suddenly, and was startled. They were neither dark nor evil; they were just what happened to silver ore after it came out of the ground. They were part of the architecture of prosperity. Was it the business they were on that made him think dark thoughts? He couldn’t shake the idea, though, that there was a shadow threading the hills that the clear, clean morning couldn’t wipe away.

With a downhill slope ahead, Sam was prepared for more than a trot after a soft life in town. He was obeying Jesse’s hands, but only with considerable head-tossing and bit-mouthing. The mule cut a path through the grass, and it sprang back to hiss against Sam’s legs as they followed.

“Does that long-eared coat rack of yours canter?” Jesse asked.

“He knows better than to waste his strength. Mules are more intelligent than horses.”

Jesse rode up next to Lung again. “Few things are more intelligent than Sam. Including most people I know.”

“Sam was a Confucian scholar in a life long past.”

Jesse stared at the spot between Sam’s flicking ears directly over his brain. He felt suddenly odd about holding the reins. “Is that true?”

A grin split Lung’s face. “What a shame you will not always believe everything you are told.”

“You,” Jesse declared, “are the biggest son of a bitch who ever drank tea.”

“Speaking of tea …” Lung reined the mule into a thicket of mesquite and slid off. He untied a leather-covered bottle from his saddle and held it out to Jesse.

Jesse dismounted, opened the bottle, and sniffed. “You couldn’t have handed me this back in town?” He took a good-sized swallow of strong lukewarm tea and passed it back to Lung.

“We were in haste.” Lung drank, and sat on his heels in the freckling shade of the mesquite.

“You know where on the river she was found?”

Lung nodded. “I spoke to the man who found her.”

Jesse looked down the slope of the valley, to the line of green that wandered to both horizons. “How did he just happen to find her?”

Lung pursed his lips and frowned at the sky.

“Never mind—it was something illegal that involved following the riverbank, and you’re sworn to secrecy.”

“That was very good.”

“I’ve seen that expression before. When we get to the place, what are we looking for?”

Lung stretched his hands and studied them. “I would rather not say.”

“Can you at least say why you brought me?”

“You may be useful.”

Jesse sighed. “I’ll do my best to brighten the corner where I am.”

Lung corked the bottle with a smack of his palm. For a long moment he stared out at the mountains across the valley. Jesse couldn’t read anything from his profile, but he was certain something was simmering under that hat. Something about the dead girl, perhaps?

But when Lung turned, Jesse had an instant’s warning—it wasn’t the girl. “I am treating you like a fool, and proposing to use you as if you were a chisel or a rake. Once you would have been offended.”

“That was when I thought it was personal. Now I know you’re just naturally ornery.”

Lung shook his head. “No, listen to me. You have changed. Why do you allow others to direct the course of your life?”

“Just because I let you boss me around doesn’t mean everyone gets the privilege.”

“You have been ‘bossed around’ by circumstance since you arrived in Tombstone. You were not like this before.”

Jesse tried to suppress his annoyance, but he heard it in his voice when he said, “Before what?”