Wyoming Hardware (An E. R. Slade Western Book 3) Page 11

  “Let’s give the law a chance,” Buck said curtly, and left.

  ~*~

  By closing time Buck’s sour mood had lifted nearly to the point of actual cordiality with customers. The cattle were all branded and satisfying progress had been made on both the corral extension and the new livestock barn. Also, despite the forbidding look in Buck’s eye, quite a respectable amount of business had been transacted.

  But as soon as Hastings hove in sight, a knot formed along the back of Buck’s jaw and the weather turned cold in the store.

  Hastings went around back and surveyed the doings, and then came in through the rear looking both impressed and pleased.

  “I knew giving you this chance was the right thing to do,” he said expansively, as though taking credit. “Didn’t I tell you trading in cattle would be to your advantage? Didn’t I?”

  “Depends what you call an advantage,” Buck said. “So far it adds up to one man killed—two, if you count Fred Smithly—three jailed for murder, and my brand likely blackballed. I guess that’s a pretty good haul for only four days of operation.”

  Hastings cooled to match the frost level in the vicinity of Buck. “The Smithly affair sounds unfortunate. But you must admit you are doing quite well here—for only four days, as you just mentioned.”

  “Perhaps you don’t realize what a blackballed brand will mean?”

  “But certainly there are other markets ...”

  “In this Territory animals that don’t carry brands recognized by the Stock Growers’ Association are considered rustled. They confiscate them, sell them, and use the money to pay brand inspectors. A man without a brand has two choices: drive out of the Territory—if he can get by the range detectives—or deal with rustlers. I never dealt with rustlers before; I ain’t going to now. Trailing out of the Territory ain’t practical for me.

  “Day after tomorrow I’m driving to Casper. If it turns out I’m blackballed, I’m done dealing cattle.”

  Hastings stiffened. “You have an odd attitude toward agreements you make, Maxwell. But let me be clear. The Committee expects you to hold up your end of the deal. I had thought you were a man of your word, but it appears I was wrong.”

  “No man’s word is equal to an impossible condition.”

  “If it was impossible you should not have agreed to it.”

  “Pious bastard,” Buck muttered, as Hastings disappeared out the front door.

  The damn thing was, Hastings was right.

  Chapter Fourteen

  With only indecision for company Buck found his quarters lonely and lacking in comfort.

  He stirred the fire and put on the stew he’d bought from Hilda earlier in the day, then sat down to straighten out his accounts. But all he could think of was that log jail with three men in it waiting for a trial two weeks off while their families worried and doubled up on chores. If those men had shot Smithly back on the ranch Tar would have awarded them a dollar apiece and that would have been that.

  He threw down his pen and went to the front of the darkened store to look out the window.

  Right and wrong had always been plain and straightforward in the Bighorns. With Indians you tried smoking the peace pipe. If that didn’t work, you fell back on gun smoke. Simple. Mostly he and Tar had done pretty well with the Indians. Rustlers you ran off or shot down as necessary. You got your cows back if you could. Simple. You did these things because they were obvious and because if you didn’t you were soon either dead or out of business.

  But in town it was different. There were lawyers and liens and written deeds and contracts and bills of sale. And Church Building Committees. In town he was no longer a cattleman among cattlemen. He was a storekeeper whose business it was to get along with everybody—and play by rules made up by people like Hastings and Tole and that fellow with the drooping mustache.

  Yet, it wasn’t only those rules. It went deeper. Out on the range it was reasonable to figure a man was responsible for himself. But once there were women and children involved, everything changed. If he let those men out of jail and Snake Ed shot them down there’d be that many more widows. Like Darholm’s. Three children, he’d been told, and another on the way.

  Just let a man move to town and everything he’d always assumed was obvious turned out useless as a branding iron without a fire. Instead of worrying only about his own affairs he had to fret about how to avoid bringing disaster on people who couldn’t be expected to manage without help.

  It did make you wonder if men like Calpet were right after all, in a way. This was no country for weaklings.

  Buck went back and ate his stew—cold now—then set to work cleaning his guns, which soothed him a good deal more than entering up his profits.

  ~*~

  Perhaps due to the rain, or more likely because word had gotten around that all the repairable machinery had been sold, customers were sparse Tuesday morning. He worked on his accounts and rearranged stock, but it hadn’t gone eight o’clock before his edginess pushed him to a decision.

  He called in Mack Payson. “I’ve got things to do. Tend store for me, will you?”

  Payson looked curious, but Buck made no explanations. He crossed the muddy street, hunching under his painted-canvas overcoat against the cold rain, and stomped his boots somewhat clean on the opposite sidewalk. Here he paused, double-checked the load in his Colt, thought things through again.

  Then he went along to the Bucket of Blood Saloon, stopped outside the batwings. Just the barkeeper and a couple of men playing cards at a table to the left.

  Buck pushed in. The barkeeper looked up, a slight sneer of recognition overspreading his face. His hands dropped out of sight and he stood still. Shotgun, Buck figured, and decided not to turn his back.

  The card players were paying no attention. The beaver-hatted professional regarded the glum cowpoke across from him somewhat sardonically. The cowpoke studied his hand.

  Buck crossed to them, picking up a chair from another table along the way. He sat down where he could keep an eye on both the barkeeper and the door.

  The gambler raised an eyebrow at him. “Looking for a hand of poker?” His tone was condescending.

  The cowpoke glanced up, gave Buck a sour, preoccupied look over, then went back to willing his cards to be something other than whatever they were.

  “I’m figurin’ you know Snake Ed,” Buck said.

  Both the gambler’s eyebrows went up now. The cowhand’s attention shifted to Buck.

  “Snake Ed like to play cards, does he?” Buck asked.

  “Occasionally.”

  “Lose much?”

  “Not to me, he don’t.”

  “Meaning you see to it he wins, or meaning he’s a good poker player?”

  “Mister, if you want to play cards you’re welcome at my table. Otherwise, clear off.”

  “Flash around quite a bit of money sometimes, does he?”

  The gambler looked at the cowhand, lifted his chin.

  “I fold,” the cowhand said, and threw down his cards.

  The gambler raked in the pot of a few dollars, shuffled the deck with miraculous speed and smooth precision.

  “Stud,” said the gambler, and started dealing, including Buck.

  Buck stood.

  “I never did have any luck at poker,” he said. “Who does Snake Ed work for?”

  “Play cards or quit bothering’ me,” said the gambler.

  “You know who he works for?” Buck asked the cowhand.

  “Nope.” Like he didn’t want to know.

  “You?” Buck called across to the barkeeper.

  “Nope.” The sneer had increased almost to the point of derision. Buck quelled an urge to find out how much of that look would be left once the barkeeper’s nose was flattened.

  “Anybody here know Calpet, from the lazy L?”

  Silence.

  “Who’s the owner of the Lazy L?”

  Silence.

  “Live in Cheyenne?”

&nbs
p; Silence.

  “Obliged,” Buck said. He adjusted his Stetson and walked out.

  He spent the next hour and a half asking the same questions in the rest of the saloons in town, learned only that the Lazy L was owned by Nate Hovell, and that he’d been away somewhere all winter. Nobody knew when he would be back. One man said he’d heard that Hovell’s wife had left him and that Hovell had gone after her, but nobody else had heard that.

  Buck was leaving the Eldorado Saloon on the way to see what the liveryman might know when he noticed Snake Ed coming out of a doorway fifty yards north on the other side of the street. Snake was yawning, looking a bit seedy. He went along to the Bucket of Blood, paying no attention to anybody.

  “Whiskey for breakfast,” Buck muttered aloud, and looked speculatively at the doorway Snake had emerged from. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and went north along his side of the street until he was opposite the building.

  “D. Boggs, Shoe Repair,” was painted on the false front. There were two doors: the one opening into the shop, and the one Snake had come out of to the left of it, which let into a boxed stairway built against the side of the building.

  Buck continued on to the end of town, then crossed over and went back along behind the row of buildings to the shoe repair shop. There was a second story window up under a gable end. Below it was a lean-to roof open underneath on three sides, with wood stacked under. An itinerant shoemaker’s wagon, with one end of the rear axle propped on a stick of firewood in place of the missing wheel, stood conveniently close to the shed.

  Inside the wagon he took off his coat and muddy boots. Then, gingerly, he got onto the wagon’s flimsy top of thin, canvas-covered boards. From there it was a short jump to the shed roof.

  Landing made noise and he lay listening, the rain soaking the back of his shirt.

  Nobody came, so Buck crawled up the roof and peered in the window.

  Looked like a rat’s nest in there. Just one room. Nobody in sight.

  Buck tried the window, it opened easily and on the windowsill there was a stick to prop it open with. In ten seconds he was inside.

  The place smelled overpoweringly of stale sweat and tobacco, seasoned with the aroma of unwashed socks. To the left a weary little table supporting a pitcher and basin leaned into the wall for stability; then came the stove, and a closet occupied the rear left corner. To the right was the door, beyond it a lumpy tick on a rope bed. A ratty blanket was in a snarl, half on the bed, half on the mud-gritted floor of wide boards. In the middle of the floor were two shirts, a pair of pants, and a pair of socks. An oil lamp with a sooty chimney stood on a small shelf over the far end of the bed, the bare wood of the wall underneath discolored from use as a headrest.

  Buck took a step and a floorboard creaked loudly. He halted, holding his breath, listening. The tapping of the shoemaker’s hammer paused, then at length resumed. Buck took another careful step, then another, gained the bed and looked under it. A pair of worn-out boots, that was all.

  He went cautiously to the closet, found a couple of suits of good clothes, some clean shirts, pants. And hanging on a hook in the back, a tooled-leather gun belt with two holsters. Buck pulled out one of the ivory-handled weapons, found it was loaded. Brass and nickeled parts gleamed.

  He put the weapon away, squatted to see if there was anything on the floor—just a pair of fancy riding boots. On the shelf above the hanging clothes he saw two boxes. One contained five old pistols of various makes and types. The other contained a can of gun oil, boxes of ammunition, and gun cleaning tools. That was it for the closet.

  Buck backed out, pushed the closet door to as he’d found it, and looked around. There just weren’t many places to hide things in the room.

  He stepped to the stove, looked into the wood box, then circled past the window to the door leading to the outside stairway. He found it was neither locked nor lockable. After a glance into the bare stairway enclosure, he turned back to the room. If Snake Ed had money hidden here it would have to be in the mattress.

  He stepped toward it and landed on the squeaky board again, which let out a howl. He halted instantly, awkwardly poised. The tapping below had stopped. Buck waited and waited for it to resume, but it didn’t.

  He had to move: the board squeaked. From below came footsteps. Buck held his breath, waiting.

  A door opened, shut; then another opened, shut. The outside stairway started to resonate to footfalls.

  Buck glanced at the window, the bed, the closet.

  Without worrying about creaking floorboards he turned to the window, let it down; as the footfalls arrived outside the door he darted into the closet, pulled the door to, and got behind the clothes.

  The stairway door opened with a slight complaint from the hinges. For a long minute nothing more happened. Then the shoemaker walked into the room, stepped on the creaky floorboard and said, “Mmph.”

  Presently there was the sound of the window going up.

  “Mmmm,” the man said thoughtfully, and the window was shut.

  The board squeaked again as the shoemaker came across the room toward the closet, stopped outside it, stood there for some moments. Buck fingered the butt of his Colt.

  But the man only grumbled something to himself and went out.

  The shoemaker’s footfalls were still echoing in the stairwell when Buck began feeling for a way into the mattress. It was a straw tick and seemed to be sewn tightly shut. Remembering that both his own savings and most of the church money were in coin, Buck picked up the tick in several places and shook it. There was no sound of rattling coinage, no suspicious weight.

  He heard voices. Then the lower stairwell door opened and the voices were louder: one of them was Snake Ed’s. Footfalls began to sound.

  Buck crossed to the window, raised it, propped it, climbed out, let the window down. He had just time to step sideways out of sight before the stairwell door opened.

  The board squeaked. Then twice more.

  “That’s what I heard,” said the shoemaker. “Somebody was in here, Mr. McFee. I was just on my way to get you.”

  “How many times I told you I want a lock on the door?” Snake said, irritably. Then, his voice fainter because he’d crossed the room, “If there’s anything missin’, I’ll skin you alive.”

  “Mr. McFee, I’m certain nobody came in or went out by the door. I’d have heard him. That stairwell is like a big drum. Nobody could get in that way without me hearing him. No chance of it at all.”

  “You just said yourself somebody was in here—that’s the point. It don’t make a difference how he got in here, he got in.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. McFee. Was anything stole?” he added timorously.

  “That ain’t none of your business,” Snake Ed said, but from the tone of his voice Buck got the feeling Snake was satisfied all his guns and ammunition were intact. “Been foolin’ with my bed, I see. Lookin’ for something. Come in the window, looks like.”

  Buck heard footsteps, and didn’t wait for more. He turned and slipped backwards off the end of the shed roof just as the sash was thrown up. He landed in the mud, which broke his fall.

  “I’m going out back and take a look around,” Snake Ed said, and the window sash was dropped shut again.

  Buck hurried to climb into the shoemaker’s wagon, smeared the worst of the mud off his feet, hurriedly put his boots on as footfalls resounded in the stairwell—then didn’t.

  When the two men came around the corner of the building, Buck just managed to disappear into the opposite alley. Pulling his coat on, he hurried along the sidewalk going south, then crossed the street and came back ten yards to his own store.

  “Much business?” Buck asked Payson casually as he stepped in.

  “Not much.” Payson’s eyes glimmered with curiosity. “Errands go all right?”

  “Fair,” Buck said. “Just keep an eye out the window for Snake Ed, will you? Tell me if he heads this way.”

  “All right.”
He paused. “Gunnin’ for you?”

  “Hard to say. I’ll be in my quarters for a couple of minutes.”

  He took off his boots and clothes, cleaned his feet, put on dry from top to bottom, including a different pair of boots. He put his damp clothes, his painted-canvas overcoat, and the muddy boots under the bed. Then he wiped the mud spots and rain off his gun belt, put it back on, and went into the store. Payson was watching something out the window.

  “He’s out there,” he said, tensely. “Coming along the walk on the other side.”

  “He decides to visit, let me know.”

  “All right.” Payson’s brow was getting furrowed as a sodbuster’s field.

  “He’ll probably be mad.”

  “All right.”

  Snake Ed had reached a point opposite the store and stood looking over. Either he wasn’t able to follow the tracks on the sidewalk or he figured they were misleading.

  Buck waited until Snake stepped off the walk and strode straight across toward Wyoming Hardware.

  Then he said, “I’ll be in my office. Accounts to catch up with, you know.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “What can I do for you, sir?” Payson said, just as though he didn’t know Snake Ed from the next man.

  “Where’s Maxwell?”

  “Mr. Maxwell is in his office. But if you need something, I ...”

  “That the office?”

  “Yes, but ...”

  Snake Ed appeared in the doorway.

  Buck looked up inquiringly, not standing. “Come to bring back the money?” he asked calmly. “Little late, but if it’s all there, I won’t press the issue.”

  “Quit palaverin’ and lemme look at your boots.”

  Buck kept his boots where they were, out of sight under the desk, also kept his right hand not far from the handle of his Colt.

  “Boots?” Buck said, as though simply perplexed.

  “Lemme see your boots, Maxwell. I ain’t got all day.”

  “Oh, you mean you want to buy some boots? Sorry, we don’t have any in stock now. We did, but the last pair went yesterday. Seems to me there’s a boot maker in town ...”