The noise whistled in my ears for a time after I flattened out on my stomach, a position I was beginning to get used to. Pistols are noisy things outdoors; inside they're skull-rattlers. The air was hazy blue and stank of rotten eggs. I felt something on my back and knew that it was a litter of shattered glass from the mirror of the dressing table. An inch and a half to the right and I wouldn't have been feeling much of anything.
It may have been that my hearing was still affected or that my assailant was lighter on his feet than a prairie antelope, but I lay without moving for what seemed a long time before a shard of glass crunched not four feet back of my left ear. There was another long silence, and then I heard an almost inaudible rustle, as of clothing brushing against furniture. I heard it again a moment later, nearer, much nearer. Then silence again.
My heart was bounding between my ribs and the floor. I hoped whoever was in the room with me couldn't hear it. I kept my eyes open, concentrating my vision on a bit of gray lint on the carpet two inches in front of me to give them that glazed, motionless look. They burned in their sockets. I was working so hard on not blinking that I wasn't sure when the shadowy shape crept into the extreme corner of my range. Half a heartbeat later a shoe appeared beside me.
A woman's shoe.
It was expensive footwear, with a black patentleather toe and an ivory top fastened with matching buttons. Above that was a trim ankle in a black stocking and six or seven petticoats under a gray taffeta skirt, gathered up to keep them from scuffing the floor. It was as tempting a target as had been presented to me since the day Judge Blackthorne entered his chambers wearing a brand new beaver hat as tall as a riding boot. I snatched the ankle in one hand and yanked.
She went down in an explosion of petticoats. More glass shook loose from the dressing-table mirror. Something tipped off the marble top, struck me between the shoulder blades and rolled off. I ignored it. Still grasping her ankle, I threw myself up onto my knees and forward, sprawling on top of her. I'll try to report the rest in order.
She tried to bring a knee up into my crotch but missed, the blow glancing off my left hip. Something flashed in her right hand and I grabbed for it, but I misjudged and the something banged the back of my skull. My hat had slipped to cushion the blow, and
her aim was off anyway; still, I had to fight back nausea and unconsciousness to get my hands around her flailing wrist. She raked my cheek with the nails of her free hand. I cursed through my teeth and concentrated on gaining possession of the gun. She bit my hand, took aim at my groin again with her knee, and connected this time. The bottom dropped out of my stomach, but before the real pain started I threw a left hook at her jaw and she went limp.
By this time my insides were roiling. I started to climb off her and noticed for the first time that we had attracted an audience. A group of people whom I took to be guests were standing in the open doorway behind the prissy clerk, who had tucked his cravat and collar back into place and was staring down at us the way I suppose desk clerks everywhere stare down at men and women locked in mortal combat on hotel room floors. I drew my Colt.
“Get the hell out of here.”
I don't know if it was the gun, or the look on my face, or the authoritative croak in which the command was delivered, but it worked. He backed out, herding everyone with him, and pulled the door shut.
My opponent was still out. When the first wave of nausea had passed I stashed the Colt, scooped her gun out of her handâit was a Smith pocket .32, smaller in caliber and more streamlined than the S&W carried by Yardlinger's young deputyâand stuck it in my belt. I got up and spent a few minutes with my hands on my knees, breathing deeply and waiting for the agony to move up and out. When it had, I attended to the other pains.
There was a knot the size of a quarter on the back of my skull. It was tender but the skin wasn't broken. With the scratches I wasn't so fortunate; I touched the stinging cheek and my fingers came back bloody. My handkerchief was soaked by the time the leaking stopped. By contrast my sparring partner, whom I had to all intents and purposes vanquished, had only a purple-black smear on the side of her jaw to show for our introduction. It hardly seemed fair.
Aside from that, it was an attractive face, if you liked them unconscious. She had a high white brow and eyes with long lashes, set a little too far apart, but from there down I couldn't fault it. The nose was unremarkable, the jawline delicate-looking but strong (I'd confirmed that), and she had the broad mouth then out of fashion but more suited to her than the popular Cupid's pout. Her hair was auburn and a litter of pins around her head said that she usually wore it up. She had a decent shape if you could trust first impressions in those days of whalebone and wire.
The struggle had disarranged her skirt and petticoats, exposing three inches of creamy thigh over the top of her right stocking.
One of the closet doors stood open and a woman's handbag lay on the floor inside. I picked it up. Inside I found the usual feminine accessories, among them a lace handkerchief embroidered with the initials C.B. in silver thread and a milliner's receipt for fifteen dollars made out to Colleen Bower. A stiff leather holster, decidedly unfeminine, was stitched to the bag's lining. I tried the Smith & Wesson in the
holster. Perfect fit. I left it there and put the purse on a lamp table next to the closet.
The woman on the floor moaned and began to stir, showing more flesh above the stocking. As luck would have it, she came to just as I was covering it.
“I guess you don't like them moving,” she said.
She had opened her eyes without any of the preliminaries and sat up, catching me in the act. They were nice eyes, pale blue with gold flecks in them. At the moment they were accusing.
“I only beat women,” I rejoined. “I don't ravish them.”
She flushed from hairline to bodice. “You'll excuse me if I don't take you at your word.” Savagely she readjusted the skirt, concealing everything to the tops of her shoes. Then she put a hand to her bruised jaw.
“I don't usually hit ladies unless they try to kill me first.” I tossed her the federal star. She caught it in one handâsurprising me for the third time since we'd metâglanced at it, and flipped it back. I had to clap it against my chest with both hands. This round was hers.
“Does a name go with it?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Not always. It's the kind of information bushwhackers have to earn. You can start by telling me what you've got against me breathing.”
“If I'd wanted to kill you, we wouldn't be talking. I'm a fair shot with a pocket pistol.” She glanced around for it halfheartedly, then gave up. “When I heard the key in the door I thought you were the desk clerk or Yardlinger come to take away some
more of Bram's things, so I hid in the closet. I opened the door a crack, saw you searching the room, and thought you were one of those ghouls that read the obituary column and then rob dead men the day of their funerals. I wanted to put a scare in you. Only you don't scare.” She rubbed her jaw. “Did you have to hit so hard?”
“Probably not, but it felt good. You're Colleen Bower?”
Her eyes widened slightly, then shifted to the floor of the closet and wandered until they found her handbag on the lamp table. Her smile was rueful. “You're law, all right. Yes.”
“How'd you get in?”
She reached inside her bodice and produced a key identical to the one I'd extorted from the clerk. “Bram gave it to me. Marshal Arno.”
“I'm beginning to understand,” I said.
“Bright fellow.”
“What were you doing here?”
“I came to get something. May I stand?”
I nodded. She wobbled to her feet, found her balance, then brushed the dust and pieces of glass off her skirt and crossed unsteadily to a tall chest of drawers next to the bed. From the top drawer she took an ornate wooden jewelry box and opened it for my inspection. Its contents sparkled in the sunlight slanting in through the window overlooking the main drag.
“Pretty,” I said.
“Bram sent all the way to New York for them. Of course, I couldn't wear them anywhere but in this room or there'd be talk. So we kept them here.”
“That's like owning a fancy buggy and never taking it out of the stable.”
“You're not telling me anything I don't know. But they're mine and I'm taking them with me.”
“Guess again. How do I know he bought those baubles for you? Maybe they belong to his widow.”
“That witch!” she spat. “They didn't even live together. He only went home to eat, which is why he's dead. If she didn't poison him, I didn't graduate at the head of my class from Miss Jessup's School for Genteel Young Ladies. Anyway, what business is it of yours who takes them? What federal law am I violating?”
“None that I know of. But as of an hour and a half ago I'm Marshal Arno's replacement.” I told her my name. Her lips curled mockingly.
“Page Murdock. It sounds chivalric, like Childe Harold. Do you rescue damsels from dragons?”
“No, I generally knock them cold and have my way with them. The box.” I held out my hand. She hesitated, then snapped shut the lid of the fancy case and surrendered it.
“If your story checks out I'll give it back,” I said.
“It won't. The jewelry wasn't in my name and no one knew about them but Bram and me.”
“That simplifies things. I'll hold onto them, and if no one asks about them, I'll know you're telling the truth.”
“How do I know you won't just keep them?”
“Because I'm telling you I won't.” I tucked the box under one arm. “Now I have to ask myself what I'll do with you. So far I've only your word that an arrangement existed between you and the late lamented
peace officer of Breen. I know from experience that getting a key to this room is no problem.”
“Ask around.” Her smile remained mocking. “Don't confuse discretion with secrecy. Out here everyone knows everyone else's business. We just didn't parade it around or we would both have been run out of town on a rail. I've come close to that in other towns and it's not pleasant. Ask anyone how it was between us. Ask them.”
While she was speaking, the door flew open and Oren Yardlinger spilled in, accompanied by the hotel clerk and three armed men. One was Earl, holding the scaled-down .38 I'd made him give up earlier. He glared at me with adolescent hatred.
“That's him, Marshall!” cried the clerk, pointing a nail-bitten finger at me from behind one of the deputies.
Earl was quaking worse than the last time. “Didn't I say he was a bad one, Oren? Look at them scratches on his face. You remember the last time we brung one in like that? The judge hung him once for rape and once for murder.”
Yardlinger's muddy eyes regarded me, lingering on the scratches, my disheveled clothes, the dust on my knees. Then he looked at the woman.
“What about it, Miss Bower? You want to prefer charges?”
“The lady tried to put a hole in me,” I said. “Ask the clerk. He heard the shot.”
“That's true,” he acknowledged uncertainly.
“Trying to defend herself!” Earl was wound tight.
Yardlinger kept his eyes and his Navy Colt on me. “Miss Bower?”
I looked at Colleen Bower and read nothing in her expression. Tension grew in the silence.
“Randy, take his gun.” The former marshal's voice was taut.
One of the armed men stepped forward. Tall and rawboned in a hide jacket, he had wind-burned features and eyes that were bright points of light set in sharp creases, like nailheads driven deep into old wood. His weapon was a double-barreled shotgun cut down to pistol size.
They had me six ways to Wednesday, but I wasn't going to give up my gun in the face of twelve feet of hemp and a short drop to hell. I grasped the butt, ready to pull.
“Wait, Oren,” said the woman.
“If you have something to say, you'd better say it damn quick, begging your pardon, ma'am,” Yardlinger advised her.
He was standing where he had been when the door opened, sideways astraddle the threshold with his right arm extended and the Navy aimed at my head. Behind him and to his right stood the fourth armed man, a slack-skinned gaffer with gray stubble on his chin, bloodhound eyes, and a Colt Peacemaker nearly as long as a carbine held at chest level in both hands.
“I did take a shot at him,” said the woman. “He knocked me down in self-defense.”
The deposed marshal took his eyes from me for the first time in a while and it felt as if an anvil had been lifted from my neck. He studied her.
“No offense, but you don't appear to be someone a man would need much defending from.”
She fetched her handbag and took out the .32, holding it by its butt between thumb and forefinger, the way my mother used to remove a dead rat from a trap by its tail. She hadn't held it like that twenty minutes earlier.
“Don't you men have a saying about these things being the great equalizers?”
“They say that about the Colt. Different gun. But you made your point.” He held his stance. “If it's not too much trouble, maybe you'd care to explain why you shot at a federal officer.”
“I caught him searching Bram's room and thought he was a burglar. I'm afraid I panicked. I was about to shoot again and would have if he hadn't hit me.”
The lawman played statue a moment longer, eyes dancing from the woman to me and back again. Then he crooked his arm and let down the hammer on the Colt. “Something about it stinks,” he said. “But I'm just the joker in this hand.”
“Why don't we haul him in anyhow?” Earl hadn't lowered his weapon. “Could be he's wanted somewhere.”
Yardlinger holstered his gun. “Earl, if we locked up everyone in this town who could be wanted somewhere, we wouldn't have cell space for those that are. Put up that toy pistol before you put a hole in United States property. Randy? Major?”
The rawboned deputy lowered the shotgun, followed by the old man, who replaced the Peacemaker's hammer and thrust the gun into his belt. Earl was last to comply. I kept my hand on the Army Colt until Colleen Bower had returned the little Smith to
her bag and drawn the string. A disappointed sigh swept through the crowd in the hallway. Yardlinger ordered them to disperse. They obeyed reluctantly and he stepped the rest of the way inside and kicked the door shut.
“Anything else?” he asked the woman.
She shook her head. “Marshal Murdock was about to return some property to me when you came in. I'll just take it and be on my way.” She held out her hand for the jewelry case.
“If that's a box full of pretties, we'll hold onto it for now,” said Yardlinger.
“You knew about them?” She took an involuntary step backward.
“I found them in that chest of drawers when I came to pick up Bram's clothes for Mrs. Arno. Murdock?”
I gave him the box. “If there's a safe in the office, lock them up. We'll hold them for ten days. If no one claims them in that time we'll return them to the lady.”
“Who the hell are you to give orders?” demanded Earl.
I stepped to the door and opened it. “Miss Bower?”
She tilted her chin haughtily, picked up her skirts, and swept out into the now-deserted hallway. Men keep making and buying better firearms, but women have all the weapons. When she was clear of the threshold I closed the door and in the same movement swung around and belted Earl on the chin with the fist I'd used to silence the woman earlier.
He was husky so I put everything I had into it. It wasn't enough. He stumbled backward, slamming into the dressing table and knocking the last of the glass out of the devastated mirror. Then he shook his head and came at me headfirst. He tripped over Yardlinger's outthrust leg and pitched forward his full length to the floor at my feet. The room shook.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Cross barked.
“For this.” The former marshal pushed a telegraph form under the weathered deputy's nose. “Blackthorne's confirmation,” he said to me. “I was reading it when the clerk came to complain that some rough-looking road agent posing as a deputy marshal was tearing his hotel apart.” To Cross, “Murdock's the law in this town until someone in authority says different.”
“Not my law he ain't.” He started to take off his badge.
“Leave it alone,” I said.
He paused, staring down the muzzle of my hip gun.
Earl had started to push himself to his feet. He held his crouch, glaring up at me from under pale brows.
I said, “I've been appointed to keep the peace in Breen, and until I'm off the hook that's what I aim to do. That means I'll need every man in this room. I may hang for it later, but I'll blast a hole a yard wide in whoever reaches for that doorknob.”
“He's bluffing,” said Earl.
“Raise or call,” I countered.
There was a short silence.
“Hell,” said a voice, “that's too rich for my blood. I'm in.”
I'd almost forgotten the old man, seated now on the edge of the stepping stool next to the bed. His rheumy eyes glistened under his floppy hat as he placed a fresh cut of chewing tobacco skewered on the end of a wicked knife into his mouth. He spoke with a high Ozark twang dragged over Mississippi gravel.
“I like you, mister. You remind me of this here Yankee lieutenant a bunch of us boys cornered in a pigsty by Ox Ford. Sergeant Maddox shot him in the hand when he went for his side arm. He grabbed for it with his other hand and Maddox smashed that one too. Then he threw out his stumps and charged. The Yank warn't three feet off when ole Mad opened a hole in his chest you could drive a four-horse team through. He went down, but you know what? He crawled the rest of the way and bit ole Mad on the leg!”
His cackling turned to a hideous, racking cough and he bubbled off into silent convulsions that ended only when he stuffed a pink-mottled handkerchief into his mouth. He was a saintly old fellow.
“What about it, Randy?” Yardlinger asked the man with the shotgun. “I can handle Murdock's threats. In or out?”
Cross chewed on his ragged moustache. His bullet-like eyes surveyed me without affection. “I don't know,” he said. “I ain't ever run from a fight yet, but I can't watch my front and my back at the
same time. How do we know he's what he says he is?”
I laughed harshly. “I can't blame you for being suspicious. I bet they're beating down your door to be made lawmen in this town.”
He ruminated on that for a moment. “I still don't know. How about you, Oren?”
“I never had any choice in it, you know that.”
“Well, if it's good enough for you.” I wouldn't have bet a Confederate dollar on the conviction in Cross's voice.
“It ain't good enough for me.”
I looked down at Earl, who hadn't moved from his starting position on the floor. “Who said I wanted you? Hit the street and leave the star here.”
“He's a good man,” Yardlinger cautioned.
“He whines too much and he hides his gun. People who don't want you to know they're armed are looking for a chance to squirt one at your back. Besides, I think he's our spy.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I don't like him.”
The young deputy rose. Upright, he turned the tables and looked down at me as if from a great height. I had known a scalp hunter in the Bitterroots who could have palmed his head in one hand, but in that room he was formidable enough. I wasn't sure I could knock him down a second time even with a bullet.
“I'm as good a man as anyone here.” He'd bitten through his lip when struck and the swelling slurred his speech. “Better than some.”
“What's this about a spy?” pressed Cross.
Yardlinger filled him in. The old man guffawed.
“Hell, if I knowed someone'd pay for it I'd tell a story or two myself.”
“If Earl wants in, I'll vouch for him,” said the former marshal.
I stifled a yawnâfrom fatigue, not insolence. “Who'll vouch for you?”
“Son of a bitch,” Cross muttered.
Yardlinger was unmoved. “You've probably been too busy playing the put-upon outsider to notice, but the likelihood of your being elected to Congress in this city hasn't improved since you came. Without me, you don't have deputies, and without deputiesâ”
“I'm sold. Introduce me.”
“You they know.” He nodded at each in turn. “That's Randy Cross with the scattergun. He's good with it. Couple of years ago he used one like it to blow the lock off a Wells, Fargo strongbox headed for Deadwood. Pinkertons tracked him down in Canada and he got twenty to life, but he was released for helping put down a riot in territorial prison. He put in time as a railroad detective with James Hill before Bram swore him in here. Earl Trotter's a Breen native and a hell of a fine pistol shot.
“And then there's Leroy Cooperstown Brody.”
“
Major
Leroy Cooperstown Brody.” The old man squirted a yellow-brown stream at a brass cuspidor six feet away. He hit it square.
“Major Brody commanded a cavalry unit in Virginia
during the late hostilities, though I imagine he'd have a hard time recognizing the country in broad daylight.”
“Night riders,” I said.
Brody made a soggy snapping sound with the plug in his mouth. “The First Virginia Volunteers. Our flag was bonny blue, not black.”
“I'm sure that was a source of comfort to the people you murdered,” Yardlinger replied. “Anyway, when there's shooting to be done the Major doesn't back off, which is why Bram made him jailer. He doesn't have a badge because I don't want him to go around thinking he's a deputy. That's what you have to work with.”
“I've worked with worse.”
Yardlinger looked at Earl. “What about it? You've had plenty of time to make up your mind.”
The hulking deputy squeezed his torn lower lip between two fingers. “I get to walk out when I don't like it, right?”
“Wrong,” I said. “In now, in to the end.”
“I got to take orders from him?” Looking at Yardlinger, he jerked his chin at me.
“There's room for only one marshal in any outfit,” nodded the other.
“Come on, Earl-boy,” twanged the Major. “What you going to do, you don't throw in with us? Go back home and haul plow for your old man?”
“
No!
” The violence of the retort made even the old reprobate jump. “Not for him. I reckon I'm in.”
Brody chuckled nastily and took another pass at the cuspidor. This time he barely hit the rim.
“What now?” Yardlinger was watching me.
I considered. “When do you expect the hands from the Six Bar Six?”
“Sundown.”
“Unless cowhands have changed, the trouble will start about two minutes after the first one has his belly full of whiskey.”
“They haven't changed.”
“I counted fourteen saloons. Any more?” He shook his head. I glanced out the window, at the sun straddling the false front of the livery across the street. “We'd best get started. Any temperance folks in town?”
“A few,” replied Yardlinger, bewildered.
“Place like this, I don't imagine they have much to sing about.”
“Of course not. But what the hell has thatâ”
“Well, they'll be singing tonight.” I began rummaging through drawers. “Help me find the key to that gun rack.”