Текст книги "Sliphammer"

Автор книги: Brian Garfield

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“Uh-hunh.” Tree was beginning to enjoy the game; he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been for the looming shadow of Wyatt Earp, which lay dark in the back of his mind and colored every thought and deed.

McKesson said, “I do like you. You size up like a man. I think you deserve a free lesson in politics-it may save your life.”

“I thought we were talking about friends.”

“We are. To a man like Wyatt Earp, friends and politics mean the same thing.”

“All right. You’re in a mood to lecture-I’ll listen.”

“Smart,” McKesson remarked again, and then he chuckled. “If you’d known me longer you’d know I’m always in a mood to lecture. Lately I haven’t had many good audiences, though, unless you count the drunks I gather into the fold every night. All right, young fellow, settle back and enjoy your coffee and try to appreciate my wisdom as much as it deserves. I’ll tell you about Gunnison and I’ll tell you about Wyatt Earp, and his politics, and his friends.”

McKesson was smiling-but his eyes were at odds with his lips. He spoke with a flat down-East accent, Tree noticed.

McKesson said, “We’ve got a tough Httle town often thousand tough people here. It’s a new mining region but it’s rich as hell. If you’ve seen the town, and you couldn’t have helped that this morning, then you’ve seen that – it’s a spectacular monument to what unlimited money and baroque bad taste can achieve. That ought to tell you something about the kind of men who built this town-the men who still own it. There are about fifty of them all told-strike-it-rich millionaires. Two years ago almost every one of them was a down-and-out prospector. They’ve got all the money in the world but they’ve got no traditions, no education, no taste, and not a hell of a lot of good sense. I’ve seen two of them sit in the lobby of the Inter Ocean Hotel during a cloudburst and bet fifty thousand dollars on which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a windowpane.”

The sheriff sipped coffee and cleared his throat. “Now, these old boys made their strikes just in the past couple of years, and big-money mining’s changed a good deal since the old days when they used to pan and sluice. The fortunes that are being made in these mountains are coming out of deep shafts in the ground, not out of creek-bed gravel. It takes a lot of manpower to dig a thousand-foot mine shaft and drag ore out by the thousands of tons and wagon it down into the smelters and mill it down into pure metal. A hell of a lot of manpower. For every overnight millionaire in Gunnison there are a couple of hundred hardscrab-ble miners working for day wages. Or more-some of these mines carry payrolls of six or eight hundred men. Nowadays a lot of these miners think they aren’t getting paid enough or looked after well enough. We’ve got a troublesome little bunch of loudmouthed agitators frdm back East calling themselves Knights of Labor trying to form strike unions. Maybe you’ve heard what happened in Leadville and Creede when they tried the same thing-a lot of heads were smashed.”

“I heard,” Tree murmured, lulled by the rambling run of the sheriff’s voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“I’m coming to that. Let’s look and see what we’ve got here. We’ve got a handful of lucky millionaires who want to stay rich and get richer, and we’ve got thousands of unhappy miners being stirred up by radical agitators, and into the middle of this comes a big man with handlebar mustaches and two revolvers and a big-gun reputation that’s made him as much of a legend as Wild Bill Hickok. This is the man who licked the Clan tons in Tombstone, the man the dime novels call the Lion of Tombstone.”

McKesson paused to see what effect his speech had taken. Tree was lighting his pipe. He was thinking about Wyatt Earp, a man he had never met, wondering how it would be, not liking the possibilities.

McKesson said, “The people who own this town gave him the key to the city.”

It made Tree look at him. “What?”

McKesson nodded. “They’re treating Wyatt Earp like visiting royalty. Given over the whole Inter Ocean Hotel to him and his wife and his brother.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, these ore barons of ours are like kids when it comes to celebrated visitors-they’d do the same thing for an actress or a senator. And second, these Yankee millionaires of ours know it was the Earps who whipped hell. out of the Johnny Reb Texans in Kansas, and they respect a case-hardened man above all ethers. They’ve got a good use for Wyatt – Earp, you see. Just the fact that he’s holed up in the Inter Ocean is enough to give pause to these radical agitators. The miners know Earp’s on friendly terms with the owners, and nobody wants to get into a fracas where he may find himself staring down the wrong end of Wyatt Earp’s gunbarrels. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. The point is, you’re supposed to arrest Earp and take him out of Gunnison. The millionaires aren’t going to like that. Earp’s doing them a favor by being here, and they’re doing him a favor in return.”

“What favor?”

McKesson’s smile, again, was colder than it should have been. He said, “I’d have thought you’d have figured that out by now. This is a mining state-the men who own the mines pretty much control the politics. It’s for sure they control the governor’s office. You can’t arrest Earp unless Governor Pitkin signs the extradition papers. Now do you see? Earp’s friends are trying to persuade the Governor not to sign the extradition papers.”

Tree’s pipe had gone out; he found a match and lit it. When he looked at the sheriff, the long-clawed hands were spread in a gesture that meant, So there it is. McKesson’s smile was small and almost apologetic. “Friends,” McKesson said, “and politics. Earp stays in town to intimidate the agitators, and in return, the owners protect him against extradition.”

“You think they’ll persuade the Governor not to sign?”

“Who knows? My private opinion is it’s a tossup. But whatever happens in Denver, your problem’s right here in Gunnison, and nobody here will give you any help. The only men in Gunnison who’d be tough enough to join you going up against the Earps are the owners’ hired strike-breakers. They’re a pack of thugs but they have a purpose-they help me keep the peace by keeping the lid on ten thousand miners. Point is, of course, the strikebreakers are Earp partisans because they’re all on the same side, against the miners and agitators. You won’t get any help there.”

McKesson had finished his coffee. Now he stood up. “So you see the whole city’s united against you. Regardless of what happens in Denver, you haven’t got a chance.”

Tree said, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“If the Governor signs the extradition, where does that put you?”

“In a rather uncomfortable spot, I’m afraid. I’m a county official, of course, not a state employee, so there’s some question whether I’d be bounden to obey instructions from Denver unless martial law was declared.”

Without comment, Tree stood up and knocked the bowl of his pipe into his hand. He stooped over the spittoon to dump ash into it, pocketed the pipe and rubbed his hands. He gave McKesson a dry look.

McKesson said, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a coward.”

“What word would you prefer?”

For the first time, McKesson flushed. But he regained composure quickly; he said, “Realist. I prefer realist. I happen to know which side my job’s buttered on. I’m a hired hand, you know, and if you eat a man’s bread then you’re obliged to sing his songs.”

“Thanks,” Tree said, “for telling me where you stand.” The tone, if not the words, was without sarcasm.

“Think nothing of it.”

“I will,” Tree replied, and saw it take effect; he added, “Just one other thing.”

“Name it. I’m always anxious to be of service to a friend.”

“Aeah. If I have to arrest him will you try to stop me?”

McKesson’s pitted face was too animated ever to be blank, but he held it now in stern, guarded repose. “Probably not. I’ll have to wait and see.”

Tree tugged his hat down, feeling dismal; he said, “Listen, I’ll fight you too if I have to.”

“Will you, now. You’re talking as if you had a chance of winning.”

“No point in acting as if I’d already lost.” Tree managed a cool smile.

“You have, you know,” McKesson breathed. “You can only get killed.”

“You can’t always go by that.” Tree went outside into the morning sun and heard the screen door slap shut behind him. He squinted. The brilliant light was not in keeping with his bleak mood. Belly churning, he went up the street.

Four

As he traveled the one-block distance between the sheriff’s office and his hotel, he was thinking darkly of the spare slipham-mer six-gun and holster packed away in his carpetbag. The way things shaped up, it looked as if he would need it: any time gunplay moved from remote possibility to likely probability, a sensible man needed two guns. Not that anybody in his right mind would use both guns at once, or be likely to need all that firepower-even case-hardened killers admitted that if you couldn’t do it with five or six bullets you probably couldn’t do it at all. But guns, even the most finely tuned and smithed guns, were never wholly reliable. You never knew when a vital spring would break, or a cartridge misfire, or a firing pin crystallize and shatter.

As he turned into the narrow lobby he became caustic with himself: Was this a legitimate errand, or was it just-a way to postpone meeting Wyatt Earp? Was he scared of Earp? Or was it that he cherished certain illusions about a legendary man and feared Wyatt Earp in the flesh wouldn’t live up to them? Or was it simply that he didn’t like this job and didn’t want to do it? If Stillwell had gone after my brother, he thought. Was it justice to arrest Earp? He couldn’t help remembering what he had said to his half brother Rafe: Fair my ass. It was a job.

He reached the back of the corridor and fumbled the room key out of his pocket, thinking maybe Earp’s influential friends would solve his problem by quashing the extradition. In the meantime, he reasoned, was there any reason why he should’hurry to meet Earp?

The key was within an inch of the lock when a corner of his vision registered warning in his mind. Alerted, he froze. The nail was gone from the doorjamb.

His left hand palmed the sliphammer gun. He moved to one side of the door and reached out to thumb the latch. The door wasn’t locked; it rode open, squeaking a little with a sappy protest of green wood. He flattened his back against the outside wall, gun up, holding his breath. Chances were there was nobody inside-somebody had searched the room, maybe, and gone…

He wheeled inside, crouching low, gun fisted tight. When the intruder fired the bullet went over his head.

Tree’s eyes registered the lancing bloom of muzzle flame and not much else: the intruder was in the dark corner. Tree shot twice, very fast; the afterglow was his aiming point.

The man came walking out of the corner as if on stilts, tripped and fell across the bed, and rolled off, leaving a red smear on the blanket. When he hit the floor his left hand opened and a tenpenny nail rolled out, clattering like a spinning coin on the floorboards.

Tree was down on one knee; he got up and strode forward and kicked the gun out of the man’s fist, and then had a look at the man.

The eyes were open, losing focus. It was the same man he had seen talking to McKesson-the man who had pointed him out to McKesson. Black bile formed in his throat; he wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and laid his fingers along the man’s skinny throat, feeling for a pulse. There was none.

Ears still ringing, Tree walked down the hall to the lobby. He still had the gun in his fist. The clerk, alarmed by the noise, stared at him and trembled.

Tree said, “Get McKesson and bring him back here.”

Swallowing, voiceless, the clerk nodded in spasms and ran flapping out the door.

Tree went back to the room, stepped across the body, and opened his carpetbag. He took out the spare gun and threaded the holster onto his gunbelt; he was buckling the rig around his hips when McKesson came in, red-faced and out of breath.

McKesson’s boot heels skidded when he came to a stop. He wore a gun, but it was holstered. His white hair was awry.

“For crying out loud,” McKesson said helplessly.

Tree bent down and picked up the intruder’s gun; glanced at it and handed it to McKesson. “One thing before you start making a speech. That’s a. 38. You can tell he fired it by the smell, and you’ll find the bullet in the wall out there in the hall. He was waiting back in that corner when I opened the door.”

McKesson took it all in his eyes, without moving from his stance in the doorway. When he spoke, he was surprisingly crisp: “Why did he miss?”

“He telegraphed. I came in low and he shot over my head.”

“If you knew he was in here why didn’t you speak out?”

“He heard my boots in the hall. He saw me open the door. If he’d had anything to say to me he had plenty of time to say it.”

McKesson gave him a sharp look. “You’re a tough son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I’m still taking nourishment,” Tree said. Then his temper broke: “Who the hell was this bastard? I saw him toll you onto me.”

McKesson nodded. “Grady Jestro was his name.”

“And that’s all you’re going to tell me?”

McKesson said, “I’m not obliged to tell you a damned thing. It’s within my power to run you in for homicide.”

“You can try,” Tree intoned.

“If that’s a threat I’ll ignore it. This sizes up as self-defense. Justifiable homicide. I’ll release you on your own recognizance as a courtesy to a fellow peace officer.”

“Still trying to show me what a good friend of mine you are.”

“Yes-whether you want to believe it or not.” McKesson moved into the room and Tree saw the little knot of onlookers crowded into the hallway. McKesson turned his head and said, “You two make yourselves useful. Get this out of here.”

Two men came inside; one of them said, “Where to?”

“For Christ’s sake the undertaker’s-do I have to draw a blueprint for you?”

“Okay, Ollie, keep your shirt on.” The man grimaced and bent to gather up the corpse. They carried it outside; the crowd made plenty of room for them. McKesson closed the door rudely in the onlookers’ faces and turned to Tree: “Now about Grady Jestro. He was a hired tough.”

“Strikebreaker?”

“Yes. The day after the Earps arrived here, ‘Jestro made a pass at Wyatt’s wife, not knowing who she was. It got Wyatt a little angry, to say the least, and Jestro’s been trying to make up for it. Buttering Earp up, running errands, trying to please Earp.”

“Did Earp put him up to this, then?”

“Knowing Earp I would say definitely not Jestro probably had the idea he’d be doing Earp a favor by killing you. If he’d succeeded I imagine he’d have found out Earp wouldn’t have appreciated it one bit. But the world is full of misguided idiots and when one of them gets his hands on a gun it’s disaster.”

“Yeah.” Tree brooded toward the bloodstains on the bed blanket and on the floor. He went to the door and opened it. The crowd had mostly gone away but the clerk was still there, halfway down the hall, scrubbing his hands nervously together. Tree said, “I’ll want another room. You’d better get somebody to clean this one up.”

“Yes, sir. You can take the room across the hall there. Door’s open. I’ll bring the key.”

Tree went back inside, buckled his carpetbag shut and picked up his coat; carried them across the hall into a room with a slightly higher ceiling and a smaller window; there was no other distinction. McKesson followed him as far as the door and said, “What’ll you do now?”

“What do you suggest, Sheriff?”

“You already know my advice. Get back on the train and go home to Arizona.”

“I guess not.”

“It’s your funeral.” McKesson turned out of sight and Tree heard his boots bang stiffly down the corridor. When the sheriff had gone beyond earshot Tree closed the door and sat down on the bed and waited for the needles to go out of his knees. His hands, he saw, were steady; but his heart pounded and his eyes throbbed and the pulse in his throat seemed loud. He closed his eyes very tight and held them, making fists, drew great ragged breaths into his chest, lay back on the bed, and stared at the ceiling. Then, abruptly, he jumped up and ran around the foot of the bed to the basin on the commode, and vomited his breakfast into it.

Bathed, shaved, still tasting his lunch, he stood on the boardwalk and scrutinized the ornate facade of the Inter Ocean Hotel. The second story boasted gabled windows and corner gargoyles. The balconies were carved in friezes and spiral rails. The building covered most of an entire block. Three separate street entrances gave admittance to the hotel lobby, the dining room, and the saloon bar. The building had a fresh coat of brown paint with crimson trim. The sidewalk in front of it was broad and shaded by wooden awnings that ran the length of the building like a Southern veranda. Gaslamps were posted at ten-foot intervals. It was just past noon; cooking smells issued from the dining room and wafted along the street on the light, cool breeze.

A few yards down the walk from him, a little knot of jackbooted miners in overalls stood tight-packed and grumbling in muted voices calculated to reach no one’s ears but their own. The man doing most of the talking was a shrill little man, nervous’and narrow, who wore miner’s clothes but didn’t look like a miner. His hands, which gesticulated frequently toward the hotel with angry sweeps, were pale and fluttery. His face was feral, big-nosed and rodent-toothed. Several times Tree heard the miners growl angry assent to something the little man said.

He forced his attention away from them and took his reluctant, tall body across the street onto the veranda. He stopped at the lobby door and looked inside through its glass panes. The room was high-ceilinged and long, with rich dark beams and heavy furniture and a thick dark-cherry carpet. The only occupant was an emaciated old man with urine spots on the front of his pants, who wandered from the front window to an overstuffed chair and sat down to read a newspaper. Tree walked the forty feet to the dining room window. The place was crowded but not with anyone he cared to meet. It was strange: he had never met Wyatt Earp or seen a picture of him but he was certain he would know the man when he saw him.

He saw him when he stepped into the saloon bar. The entrance was on the intersection corner and, consequently, was set into the corner of the saloon, giving admittance at a forty-five degree angle so that the entire huge room was in sight at once. The polished maplewood bar ran the length of one wall, backed by two big mirrors, the obligatory ten-foot painting of a hefty naked woman draped in translucent veils, and a shelf of ornate beer mugs each of which had its owner’s name painted on it. Two sweating bartenders served the medium-thick throng of patrons standing at the brass rail along the eighty-foot bar.

The rest of the rpom was given over to chairs and tables of various sizes, ranging from small square ones to big round ones seven feet in diameter and covered with green felt. The room was carpeted in deep luxurious brown; the walls were stained dark and had the look of mahogany-a considerable feat since they were probably constructed of aspen or pine. There was no dance floor, no stage, no piano or bandstand; it wasn’t that kind of saloon. This was Gunnison’s gentlemen’s club. Only the Rich Need Apply. Even the chairs at the card tables were upholstered armchairs. Altogether, what the place reminded him of most was a railroad baron’s private car he had once entered to make an arrest. The men who had built this room had money and wanted everybody to know it.

It didn’t make him uncomfortable but it didn’t make him feel at home. He would always be an outsider in a place like this; it occurred to him obscurely that this gave Wyatt Earp an immediate advantage over him. He didn’t dwell on the thought. He had entered and absorbed the place with one glance; his attention had narrowed like a cone to focus on the five people sitting around the biggest of all the felt-covered card tables-four men and a woman. The table was back toward the rear corner. Gaslights on the windowless walls shone on the woman’s reddish auburn hair and the thick tawny hair of two of the four men-the Earp brothers. He didn’t have to be told.

The woman was slim with nubile roundnesses and skin made deep gold by the lamplight; she threw her head back to drink, displaying a long, swanlike neck. They all had drinks but they were not playing cards; they seemed to be engaged in desultory conversation.

Tree made a place for himself at the bar and ordered a drink. He had picked a spot from which he could appraise the Earps in the back bar mirror. Warren, the young one, wore his hair the same as Wyatt. His mustache and clothes were similar to Wyatt’s. The way he sat in his chair, trying to look muscular and easy-sprawled all at once, was a direct imitation of Wyatt’s unconscious position: chair pushed back, one knee crossed over the other, polished black boot swaying a little with easy rhythm as he talked, and one elbow on the arm of the chair supporting a half-full whisky glass held by a vertical forearm. It was significant that Wyatt held the glass in his left hand: Tree assumed that, unlike himself, Earp was right-handed. His right hand lay across his lap and it could be taken for granted a shoulder-hung gun was within six inches of his fingertips, just inside his coat lapel.

Tree’s drink came. He stood at the bar and twisted the glass on the bar surface and picked it up, observing the wet ring it left. Without looking up he knew a good many eyes were studying him from all over the room. But if he looked in the mirror he would not find Wyatt Earp looking at him. He smiled to himself, briefly; he lifted the drink to his mouth. He had a fleeting vision of Grady Jestro’s gun flaming at him from the dark corner of the hotel room. He closed his eyes momentarily and felt the whisky thunder into his blood.

He turned around, glass in hand, and hooked both elbows over the bar behind him, and stared straight at Wyatt Earp. Earp didn’t seem to notice; he was talking calmly to the man next to him-a big dark man who wore an expensive suit that did not make him look genteel. One of the overnight millionaires of Gunnison.

Wyatt Earp had a wise, tough, worldly face. Tree felt neither disillusioned nor disappointed. Earp was long-legged, whipcord handsome, self-assured, a healthy man in his mature hard-gutted prime. He was, Tree knew, thirty-four years old, which made him an elder statesman among the righting gamblers of the Western circuit. He had a tough, sleepy look of leonine competence.

Tree wondered whether he ought to feel relieved or sorry. The job would be less disagreeable, if not less difficult, if Earp had turned out to be a buck-toothed, snarling savage.

Abruptly, Earp turned his head and looked straight at Tree. Evidently he felt he had given Tree time enough to size him up. Earp’s free hand rose gently from his lap and he beckoned with a slow nod of recognition.

Tree made a gesture with his drink and walked forward without hurry, purposefully casual. Approaching, he glanced at the two other men at the table-the big dark millionaire and the muscular blunt-jawed tough who had to be one of the thug strikebreakers.

The girl looked up at him coyly from under lowered brows. Tree reached the table, facing Earp across it; Earp said to Warren, “Bring up another chair and make a place for friend Tree. How’re you making it, Deputy? Enjoying the town?”

Three only nodded, still trying to feel out the direction Earp wanted to go. He didn’t feel anything as specific as warning currents in the air, but it was an uneasy stretch of time.

Earp said, “The Deputy goes by the name of Sliphammer Tree. From Pima County, down in Arizona. He’s going to keep an eye on our obedient servant, gentlemen.”

Warren Earp put a chair down behind Tree’s knees and went back around the table to his seat. The two men on the near side of the table shifted their chairs to make room. The big dark millionaire said, “Howdy,” and offered a thick, hard hand. “I’m Wayde Cardiff, I own the Spurlock. Fellow on your left there, that’s Reese Cooley.”

Cardiff had sweaty palms. He was a once-tough man gone soft: his breasts were womanly, his arms flaccid, his chin padded and underhung by loose flesh. But his eyes were flinty. Cardiff shook Tree’s hand, hitched his suety belly and slumped back in his chair.

Reese Cooley, thuglike, had a horseshoe fringe of hair around a glossy bald spot. His chin was dark with heavy Mediterranean stubble. He had a greasy appearance. His handshake was a childish contest, as if to tell Tree he could break every bone in Tree’s hand if he felt like it. Tree matched him for pressure, heard Cooley’s grunt and saw the surprised respect in the blunt face, and set his drink down before he sat. He noticed that Wyatt Earp had not offered to shake hands; Warren, of course, had followed suit. Earp said casually, “My brother Warren, of course-you had that figured out. And this is Josie.”

Josie gave him a mock-sweet smile. He wondered what went on behind those flirty bemused eyes.

Reese Cooley said, without preamble, “You gunned one of mah boys. Jestro was one of mahn.”

Earp said, “Don’t hold that against him, Reese.”

“I ain’t decided yet. I’m still thanking on it.”

“Jestro was a stupid pig,” said Wyatt Earp.

“He smelled terrible,” said Josie. “He smelled like horse shit.”

Wayde Cardiff said, “Jestro got what he deserved.” Tree was still staring at Josie, who began to laugh in her throat.

Wyatt Earp said, “I make no apologies, Deputy, but I’ll say this to you, just once. What Jestro tried to do was not my idea.”

“I didn’t think it was,” Tree said.

Warren Earp said, “Good thing, too. You better not.”

Tree gave him a wry glance; he went back to Wyatt: “You know why I’m here. What I may have to do.”

“We’ll talk about that,” Earp said. “Plenty of time, Deputy. Let’s get to know one another first” His smile was genuine, not false, but it was layered with ungiving steel.

Wayde Cardiff explained, “No reason why we can’t all be friends, Deputy. There’s no harm mentioning that me and my friends get along right well with Governor Pitkin. It’s our considered belief there’d be a miscarriage of justice if Wyatt got hauled back to Arizona and put on trial by a rigged Rebel-style court for the justified killing of a Rebel-style cowman. Some of my friends are up to Denver right now impressing the Governor with how we feel. So you see it ain’t likely you’ll have to do anything at all, after all.”

When Tree looked at Wyatt Earp he saw an indolent smile, a slight dip of the head in acknowledgement. Earp murmured, “I like to avoid trouble when I can, Deputy. It’ll be my pleasure if you’d be our guest here as long as you’re in town.”

Tree said, “Why?”

“To avoid any more mistakes like the one Jestro made. If it’s common knowledge you and I are friends, nobody’s going to take potshots at you.” Earp was still smiling, still holding his glance; now Earp added, “Jestro was a fool but he knew how to use a gun. You’ve earned respect from me.”

Warren said, “But don’t let it go to your head, Deputy. We’d as soon-”

“Gentle down, boy,” Wyatt said, his voice a deep, soft basso profundo that rolled effortlessly over Warren’s talk, cutting it off.

Tree watched Earp, half fascinated, half baffled. Earp took a sparing sip of whisky and said mildly, “A lot of the things you’ve heard about me are probably true.”

“How do you know what I’ve heard about you?”

“I’d be a fool not to know my own reputation. I’ve got admirers and I’ve got enemies-it always pays to know both. It’s a mistake to be uninformed. Which is to say, I know your reputation too.”

Tree said, “I didn’t know I had one.”

“A man who’s named after the gun he uses is bound to be a man worth investigating,” Earp said. “You rode scout for fifteen years, served five years under Crook and two under Mackenzie. You’ve killed three white men-four, counting Jestro. You had an Indian wife, Papago, died of smallpox in ‘seventy-six. You’re left-handed and you handle a rifle well at long range, and once you drank Al Sieber under the table.”

Secretly, childishly pleased, Tree kept his face blank, reaching for his drink to mask his confusion. He said, “You probably know what I had for breakfast three Tuesdays ago.”

There followed Earp’s brief grunt of amused acknowledgement. It was neither grudging nor condescending; it was the absent chuckle of a man with other things on his mind. He appeared to be the kind of man who could juggle a dozen unrelated thoughts at the same time-a man whose brain was always busy. His eyes missed nothing; he was probably a fountain of information from petty trivia to matters of vital, if subtle, significance. All of it lurked behind the mask of massive secretiveness with which he held all men at a distance. It would probably be impossible ever to get to know him well; yet he was splendidly. endowed with animal magnetism. His appearance was one of force. A natural leader; a man who set his own standards and made his own rules. All put together, he was larger than life, it couldn’t be denied. As much as anywhere else, it was evident in his choice of a woman. Only a flamboyant stud could control the wildness and vitality in Josie; only a monolithic giant of a man could have attracted her in the first place.

No, Tree thought, he wasn’t disappointed

Earp had begun to speak, but then something stiffened him-the sight of someone at the door. “Heads up,” Earp murmured, and in the spuriously gentle tone of his voice Tree caught the run of ruthlessness: the hint of a core-deep, whetted hardness that Sheriff McKesson must have meant when he’d said Wyatt Earp was capable of swatting a man like a fly.

Tree’s head turned; in the edge of his vision he caught the front door and the men who stood just inside: the group of hard-rock miners he had seen outside on the street arguing. The leader was the narrow man with feral features and pale nervous hands.