Sliphammer (11 page)

Rafe got off the bed and went past him to shut the door. Then he turned. Caroline was watching Tree, looking pretty and blonde and milkmaid fresh in spite of the mud on her clothes and the tangled disorder of her hair.

Rafe said, “You got a nice warm way of greetin' us, ain't you?”

“What the hell is this all about?”

Caroline said, “We were afraid you'd get hurt. We came to help.”

“Sure you did.”

Rafe came around him from the door and went back to the bed, where he sat down and tipped his head to one side. “That ain't exactly the whole truth. We couldn't get the fare together so we came in the buggy.”

“All the way from Tucson?”

“Left right after you did,” Rafe said, not without pride. “All the way across the goddamn desert and the goddamn mountains in that old buggy, campin' out. Caroline's a right good traveler, she'd of made a good Forty-niner.” Rafe grinned at his wife.

“Both of you,” Tree said, shaking his head. “Why'd
both
of you come, for crying out loud?”

“Because,” Caroline said quietly, “I wouldn't let him go without me. He came with me or not at all.”

Looking at both of them, Tree saw how it was. Once more he remembered what Caroline's father had said to him not too long ago: J
told her not to marry your brother because he just ain't tough enough for her. She'll put spurs to him one time when she ain't even thanking about it, and she'll rip him to shreds ‘thout ever knowing how it happened.
It was clear to see how this marriage had settled down, who wore the pants. Tree thought,
You poor son of a bitch, you should've known better.

He said to Rafe, “I suppose you've still got your tongue hanging out over that four-thousand-dollar reward on the Earp brothers.”

“I still need the money to buy that ranch. Where else am I, gonna get that kind of money?”

“You're both pretty damned young,” Tree said, looking straight at Caroline. “Couldn't you settle for something less than your own ranch to start out with?”

“Why should we?” Rafe demanded. “You take what you can get, Jeremy, it's a me-first country.”

Tree jerked a thumb toward the invisible hills. “A lot of bleached bones up in those mountains thought the same thing.”

“I ain't scared of Wyatt Earp.”

No,
Tree thought,
you're not, are you?
It surprised him a little—particularly because even if Rafe didn't think he was scared of Earp, he was certainly intimidated enough by his own wife. But that was a different sort of thing: petticoat power was too subtle for Rafe to handle. Rafe was brash, bold, full of bullheaded guts, and no less callow than an ignorant puppy.

“Listen,” Tree said, “you two just get back in your goddamn buggy and drive back to Arizona. There's nothing here for you.”

Caroline scowled at him but did not speak. Rafe, his face red, said, “Damn it, when you gonna quit treating me like a kid?”

“When you quit acting like one.”

Caroline said, “That's not fair.”

He looked at her. “Shut up.”

Rafe sat up straight. “Who you tellin' to shut up?”

Tree ignored him; he said flatly to Caroline, “You put him up to this—you filled his head with notions. If you don't want him dead, you'd better change his mind.”

Caroline gave him a savage mock-sweet smile. “Rafe's a man—he makes his own decisions.”

“In a pig's eye. Now grab him by the ear and get him out of here—or I'll do it myself.”

“You just try,” Rafe growled, eyes flashing. “You just try that little thing, Jeremy.”

Tree snorted, walked around the foot of the bed and picked up a newspaper from the little lamp table. He went over to the bed and lay down, crossing his muddy boots on the coverlet, and held the newspaper up in front of his face.

Caroline said, “What do you think you're doing?”.

“Reading,” Tree said.

“And just what are we supposed to do?”

Tree lowered the newspaper and looked at her. “I couldn't care less what you do,” he said, and lifted the paper.

Caroline said, “We haven't got the money for a hotel room.”

“Should've thought of that before you came all this way, shouldn't you?”

“You bastard,” she said.

Tree said, “There sure as hell isn't room for all three of us on this bed, Caroline.”

“Jerr, you're a first class A number one son of a bitch.”

“Uh-hunh,” he muttered, reading.

Rafe got off the corner of the bed, assembled his dignity, and said, “Come on, honey, let's you and me go get something to eat. To hell with his majesty.”

“Enjoy yourselves,” Tree intoned, without looking away from his reading matter.

Caroline said in a stifled, angry little voice, “You just wait till you need our help arresting Wyatt Earp. You'll come begging on your knees, Jeremiah Tree.”

“All right,” Tree drawled. “You two just stay out of trouble until I do.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” said Rafe, yanking the door open. He stopped. “You coming?”

Caroline came away from the window. “You just wait,” she fumed.

The two of them went out; the door slammed angrily. Tree put the paper down on his chest and frowned at the ceiling. The frown turned to a scowl.

Wyatt Earp said to him, “I've got a skittish brother too,
amigo,
but I can handle him. You put hobbles on that kid or he'll get hurt.”

Tree glowered down at the man in the rocking chair. “What'd he do?”

“Came right up here and told me he wasn't scared of me. Now, I don't mind a man not being scared of me. I never asked him to be scared of me, did I? But I don't like it when a man sneers at me.”

“You won't kill him for a sneer.”

Earp gave a loud bark of laughter. “Hardly—hardly. But I'll tell you something, it's the kids you always have to watch. They're the ones who haven't got a layer of sense grown onto their hides. At thirty you start counting up the odds, you start recognizing consequences. At twenty you don't believe a damned thing can ever happen to you. A tough kid is a lot more dangerous than a tough grown-up man. Which is to say I won't give your brother as much leeway as I'd give you, because I don't trust him half as far as you. If that kid makes the wrong move in front of me I won't wait to find out whether he's bluffing. I state that as a warning between friends, not a threat to scare you. Understand me?”

“Aeah.”

“Then hobble him,” Wyatt Earp said, got up from his chair and went inside.

Tree stayed put, scowling. Across the street, Sheriff McKesson ambled into sight and gave him a courteous look of mild inquisitiveness. Tree yanked his hat down tight and strode away up the street, breaking out into the brass afternoon sunlight with long-legged strides, tramping his shadow into the ground, heading with enraged aimlessness toward the telegraph office, where he knew there would be no message for him.

Eight

“Look at him,” Rafe complained. “Sittin' up there on that porch like an old lizard lazy in the sun, actin' like he owned all of Creation. I'd like to bring him down a peg.”

Caroline said, “You couldn't beat him in a fair fight and you know it. It's not smart to needle him, Rafe.”

“What the hell am I doing here if I can't lick him? Hell yes I can lick him. He ain't so tough. Look at him, he's half asleep—he's tired and he's gettin' old.”

“He's thirty-four years old, Rafe.”

“Which means I'm a dozen years faster than he is. Listen, whose side are you on?”

They sat at the window table in a miner's lunchroom. Empty plates sat before them gathering flies. They had wiped up every last drop of gravy with hunks of stone-ground bread. They had almost no money and they had eaten meagerly the past three days, sleeping outside town underneath their wagon; luckily, the afternoon they had arrived the rain quit.

“I'm on your side, Rafe,” Caroline said. She was using that persuasive tone of voice that always made him pay attention. He took his eves off Wyatt Earp across the street and settled his attention on her face. She said earnestly, “You've got to be realistic. You're no gunfighter. But if Jerr decides to arrest Earp, he'll know how to go about it so there won't be a big gunfight. Hell get the drop on the Earp brothers somehow.”

“He would,” Rafe said flatly.

“It's the only smart thing to do. And that's where you'll come in. Jerr hasn't got a soul in this town to take his side, outside of you and me. Once he arrests them he'll need someone to guard his back against the Earps' friends. He can't get them out of town without help. And once you've helped him that way, they'll have to pay you the reward.”

“Yeah,” Rafe said. “Sure, I guess you're right. I was just making bluff talk anyway. I know my limitations. I wouldn't really pick a fight with Earp. Jesus.” He grinned at her. “But by Christ I'm not scared of the bastard either.”

“I never thought you were.”

A fat waitress brought two cups of coffee to the table and waited to be paid for the meal. Rafe dug in his pocket and counted out coins with care. The waitress took the money impassively and waddled away. Rafe picked up the steaming cup of foul brew and held it in both hands, blowing across the surface and looking out the window. A small group of men—three or four—had come out onto the porch of the Inter Ocean and ranged themselves alongside Wyatt Earp. He recognized Warren Earp and the mountain-sized strikebreaker, Reese Cooley. A bartender had told Rafe about the big fight in the Inter Ocean Hotel bar, where Sliphammer Tree had wrestled Cooley down. Rafe didn't like Cooley's looks at all.

The group on the porch was looking across the street at something Rafe couldn't see, something on this side of the street but down the block in the other direction. Cooley and Warren Earp were talking. Wyatt Earp hadn't stirred in his rocking chair. Cooley walked forward and stood on one leg with the raised second boot propped against the porch rail; only a very big man could do that without losing his balance. Cooley's right hand wag thumb-hooked over his holstered revolver. His face had narrowed down to a mean stare directed at whatever was on the sidewalk down the street.

Rafe gulped his coffee down and stood up, pushing his chair away with the backs of his knees. “You stay put,” he said. “I want to see what the fuss is all about.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“Sure—sure.” He-headed for the door, weaving a threaded path among tight-crowded tables.

Warren had come out onto the porch feeling sour-mouthed and unhappy. He was remembering last night, and still feeling hung over from it. He'd made a fool of himself, he'd admitted that, but he still felt rage against the world in general.

Last night Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs early. There was no mistaking what they had in mind as a way to pass the time for the rest of the evening. Those two spent a hell of a lot of the time balling it in the sack. It didn't make Warren angry; it made him envious. Just thinking about it got him horny. He'd had a steady girl back in Ohio, a mousy little seventeen-year-old with underdeveloped breasts and buck-teeth. She wasn't any world-beater but in the farm country where he lived there wasn't much choice; there were damned few girls around and not many of
them
would put out. An awful lot of Bible-thumping \ back there, patriarchal farmers protecting their daughters' virginity as if it was crown jewels. But he'd found this one buck-toothed girl and he'd got used to doing it with her every week or two. Now he'd been gone six or seven weeks from Ohio, maybe more, it was hard to remember, and he wanted a woman badly.

So last night after Wyatt and Josie had gone upstairs grinning at each other, Warren had gone on the prowl, and after he'd panned no pay dirt in three saloons he hit the real mother lode in the fourth: a big cow of a woman she'd been, but she looked ripe and ready, for it, and when he'd sat down next to her she hadn't objected. It was one of the foul-smelling saloons the miners used; there were half a dozen used-up women in the place, but this one somehow didn't look like a whore. She sat with heavy thighs spread loose, her big breasts lying on the table, moistening her lips when she looked at him, and after he'd bought her two drinks she'd told him her sad story—she was married to a miner on the night shift; he worked all night underground, and by the time he came home he was too tired to do anything but eat and sleep, and she was sick of it, drinking down here trying to work up the courage to leave him and go back home to Kansas where her folks had a soddy homestead.

They had both got very drunk together and she had let him take her home. He had no idea what time it was. They had gone into the dismal little shack and made love with hurried urgency on the filthy straw-tick mattress on the floor. It was after that he made the mistake: head wheeling with drink and exhaustion, he had fallen asleep, sprawled across her great mound of a snoring body.

Maybe it was something that was born into you if you were an Earp—an automatic warning signal built into the brain, like eyes in the back of the head. Wy att had it, he knew; Wyatt always seemed to know everything that went on in back of him. But whatever it was, it had saved his life this morning. He'd woken up, not completely aware of what had awakened him, but instantly and totally alert. He'd looked up and he'd seen the door creak open. The bright shaft of morning sunlight came cruelly inside the shack. The miner stood silhouetted, chest expanding to let out a roar, hefting his miner's pickax and charging into the shack.

If Warren hadn't been awake and alert, he'd have taken the head of that pickax through the back. As it was, he managed to roll off the far side of the mattress and scramble to his feet.

The miner roared in agonized howls, rushing forward and swinging the ax—but he'd tripped over the big woman and almost lost his balance. The pick came down and hit the floor.