Sliphammer (7 page)

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.

Warren Earp said, “Who the hell's that?”

“Floyd Sparrow,” Reese Cooley muttered in a flat voice. “Stinking dude agitatuh.”

Wayde Cardiff, the baron, twisted his bulk to look. His flinty eyes narrowed. “Those goddamn radicals got a hell of a nerve coming in here.”

Josie Earp said archly, “It's a free country.”

Wyatt murmured, “Mind your manners,” but he seemed more amused than annoyed. Having alerted the others, he seemed satisfied and no longer interested in the intruders.

The miners had spotted the Earp table; they came forward in a crowded wedge. Their faces were almost comically grim and determined. Little Floyd Sparrow's mouth was compressed into a thin lipless slash.

Cardiff and Cooley got to their feet, and Tree, seated between them, stood up as well, not wanting to be trapped in an armchair, surrounded by primed men on their feet. Across the table, the three Earps kept their seats. Wyatt Earp's hand lay near his coat lapel; other than that, if he was at all uneasy he gave no sign of it. He looked sleepy and only casually concerned.

Floyd Sparrow stopped six feet from Wayde Cardiff. The millionaire opened his mouth angrily but Sparrow spoke first, in a high-pitched nasal voice: “We want to talk to you.”

“This ain't the place.”

Reese Cooley drawled, “You boys drag-gin' your pickets. This room's out of bounds to you.”

Tree heard Josie snort. Floyd Sparrow snapped, “We'll go anyplace we have to go to make you listen. We've got grievances—we mean to be heard.” His raspy voice was an unpleasant irritant, perhaps deliberately so; it echoed with the harsh, hurried accents of city slums. Abruptly his mean glance shifted to Tree: “Who're you?”

Wayde Cardiff growled, “You're disrupting the peace. This is a private club for gentlemen—take this rabble out of here.”

One of the miners cleared his throat and said, in a singsong Welsh voice, “Rabble, are we?” His fist, raised and poised, was the size of a sledgehammer and appeared just as hard.

Sparrow shook his head. “We came here to talk. If anybody starts violencing, it'll be them, not us.” He wheeled, jabbing a pale finger toward Cardiff: “We've got just and reasonable demands. Either you meet them or you've got a miner's strike on your hands—not just you, Cardiff, but every high-pockets son of a bitch on the Gunnison Slope. That's the message. You bastard robber barons have exploited us long enough. We mean business.”

“
Us?
” Cardiff said with soft insinuation. He gave the miners a sardonic look. “Any of you boys ever see this Eastern sewer rat dirty his hands on a pick? Don't you know when you're being used?”

Sparrow said quickly, “That's why they're here—because you bastards are using them. They've had all the contempt and cruelty they're going to take from you and your kind.”

Cardiff measured him with insulting calm over a long stretch of time that made Sparrow's hands flutter; Cardiff finally said, “In just ten seconds I'm going to send for the sheriff. You people are trespassing on private property, which is a misdemeanor punishable by thirty days in jail.”

Warren Earp's voice shot forward from behind Tree: “And if the sheriff wants help he'll get plenty—from the Earp brothers. You understand what that means?”

In the corner of his eye, Tree saw Wyatt lift a hand casually to silence Warren.

Sparrow went right on talking to Cardiff as if he hadn't heard: “We're not afraid of your hired gunmen. Look at these men, Cardiff. You ever take a good hard look at the men you've made slaves of?
Look
at them! Fallon here lost two brothers when your number seven shaft caved in—because you're too goddamned skinflinted to put proper shoring in those tunnels. Weed here's got a wife back East and eight kids to support on the stinking sixty dollars a month you pay him to break his back a thousand feet underground in a tunnel that may collapse any day now.”

Cardiff turned without hurry and spoke across the room to a man standing at the bar. He hardly raised his voice. “Leroy, trot yourself on over to Ollie McKesson's and ask him to come down here. Tell him he'll need half a dozen sets of handcuffs.”

“Yes
sir,
Mister Cardiff.” The man headed for the door on the run.

Floyd Sparrow stepped toward Cardiff and made as if to grab the front of Cardiff's coat, but evidently thought better of it; he poked Cardiff's chest with a rigid finger. His voice rose in pitch. “Sixty dollars a month, Cardiff—could
you
live on that in a camp with boom-town prices where everything's got to be freighted in across the mountains? Sixty stinking dollars—and even to earn that, a man's got to sweat thirty half-day shifts in a month. That's three hundred and sixty hours of slave labor. One month. A miner handles a thousand tons of rock with his bare hands every month to earn your puking sixty dollars and make you rich. And what happens if there's a cave-in? Who takes care of the widows and the orphans you've made? Who takes care of the men if there's a drop in the market price of silver next fall and half the men get thrown out of their jobs?”

Tree thought the man had a point. He glanced at Wyatt Earp, whose eyes were half-lidded; he was a picture of arrogant disinterest. When he caught Tree's glance he showed a small smile at the corners of his mouth.

Wayde Cardiff said mildly to Sparrow, “I didn't force them to come to work for me. They can quit if they don't like the pay. And that's all I've got to say to you. Now get your ass out of here before the sheriff comes. If you're still here you'll have a month in jail to think up more useless speeches.”

With a flat gesture of dismissal, Cardiff turned around and sat down and reached for his drink.

“Don't you turn your back on me!” Sparrow cried.

“Unh,” growled Reese Cooley, still on his feet. “A man shouldn't ever ought to turn his back on you. Looky here, I'll give you a hand outside.” He grinned mirthlessly, grabbed Sparrow by the collar and hauled him up on his toes. The big Welsh miner roared and moved forward but Cooley was very fast. He spun Sparrow around, planted a boot on his butt and shoved the little man with brutal force. Arms flapping, Sparrow plunged against a deserted table. Its rim caught him below the waist; he buckled and slammed down face first on the table, fell off the side and got tangled up in the chairs.

“All right, now,” roared the Welsh miner, they asked for this,” and swung a great looping punch at Reese Cooley.

Five

Cooley avoided the roundhouse punch easily. He let it sweep past six inches away. The force of the blow carried the Welsh miner off his feet. Cooley rabbit-punched him in the kidney as he went down.

A lot of things happened at once. It was instantly clear to Tree and everybody else in the saloon that a brawl of riot proportions was on. Nobody could stop it now. The only thing to do was get the hell out of the way, or pick a side.

As soon as the trouble started he saw Josie Earp get up and drift quickly, but without unseemly hurry, around the open end of the bar to cover. She moved the way you learned how to move when you had got used to seeing trouble erupt.

Cardiff was on his feet; Wyatt Earp had shoved his chair back to get free room, but he was still seated, wearing a slight twisted smile. Warren was up, raging. The six miners waded forward, choosing targets. Tree had no fight with them but he was in the wrong place to avoid it: he stood between Cardiff and Cooley, and that was all the miners needed.

Two of them converged on him. Tree, who had fast hands and knew a few Indian things the miners didn't know, felt more regret than fear. He wheeled to one side, to place both charging miners on the same side of him; grabbed the nearer man by the wrist and twisted. He used one man as a shield against the other. His two-fisted grip was so tight an ape couldn't have pried it loose. He swung the miner's thick arm around, levered it up toward the shoulder blade and planted the heel of his boot against the man's spine. It was a brutal hold: if the victim struggled, either his arm or his spine would break. All it would take to snap his backbone would be a hard thrust of Tree's boot heel, but he withheld it, only interposing the helpless man against his companion and. speaking in a calm voice loud enough to be heard: “Back off or I'll cripple him.”

The second miner stepped back reluctantly. Warren Earp, Cardiff, and Reese Cooley were going around with the other miners. Cooley had two of them on him. It was none of Tree's affair. He backed up, pulling the helpless miner along clumsily, until his shoulders were wedged into the back corner of the room. He held the miner in front of him as a shield. It wasn't dignified, but it wasn't his fight. The miner said in a pinched voice, “Ease off, for the love of God,” but Tree ignored him.

Wyatt Earp left his chair. Men rushed forward from the bar to pitch in against the miners. Earp sidestepped a wrestling pair and came toward Tree, seeming to amble unconcernedly; only alert attention could detect the speed with which he actually moved. He made it look effortless; yet with half the room boiling with hurtling fists, jabbing boots, and tumbling bodies, he reached the corner without a hair out of place. He tipped his shoulder against the wall beside the helplessly snared miner and said to Tree, “You've got real balls to pull out of it and not care a damn who notices.”