Cord 3, p.8
Cord 3, page 8
But they had not. They stayed and listened, while Rawlins told them how it would be.
“The reason none of the miners will bother you from here on is simple,” Rawlins said. “I’m going to give them a reason for keeping you alive.”
“You’ve seen how they are,” Prentiss said. He shrugged in deprecation. “They’re savages. That’s simply a function of gold. But they like their entertainment, and they don’t much care what kind it is, so long as it’s got something to catch the eye and the baser emotions. You saw how the Reverend Paine and his wife made out. A good-looking woman and some work with a gun is plenty enough.”
Rawlins was leaning back in his swivel chair, his delicate gambler’s hands clasped behind his neck, and Prentiss was posed by the window, punctuating his explication with his cigar. The two were full of the confidence that comes of holding a lock hand.
“Ladd has been accommodating the boys,” Prentiss went on. “He’s staged some sporting events—and handled the wagering, of course. He’s held prizefights—damned near dead-man fights is what they were—cock fights, and pit bulls going at each other. He brought the dogs up from Denver. Once he sent for a Mexican and staged an afternoon of bullfighting. He killed seven bulls, that Mexican, no trouble at all.”
“But the eighth bull won,” Rawlins grinned, enjoying himself.
Prentiss puffed out a billow of cigar smoke. “Tomorrow,” he said, “we are having a gunfight.” Chi took an angry step toward the smug writer, but Cord put a hand on her arm. There was nothing to lose in hearing the two men out.
“Max has told you the name of that boy in the saloon,” Rawlins said. “The boy’s got a brother riding in, and the brother is Cash Culhane. You probably already figured that part out.”
“You know the name,” Prentiss said. “Most people in the West do. It’s nearly as well known and regarded as the name of Cord.” Prentiss gestured with his acrid cigar. “And yours, of course, Miss.”
“There is going to be a time,” Chi said.
“What sort of time?” Prentiss said blithely. He was the kind of man who would have already blocked out of his mind his humiliation at Chi’s hands that afternoon in the café.
“When I bully you around some more,” Chi said. “Just for sport.”
“I sent for Culhane,” Rawlins broke in, “nearly a month ago. There’s a part of the story where I left out the full facts. About the road agents, I mean. They tried to take one of my shipments before, and I wired Culhane to come in and stop them.”
“Why did you give us five thousand dollars?” Cord asked.
“An investment. I want those hijacking sons of bitches stopped for absolute certain. Long as they are out there I’m hog-tied. You’ve got an idea of how much gold I’m shipping. Five thousand is cheap enough. Two extra guns, of your class, could only help that much more.
“But there’s another reason,” Rawlins went on. “Call it a gambler’s hunch. I had the idea you might come in handy in other ways.”
“What ways?”
Rawlins considered. “In my business some bets are simple as the turn of a wheel or the fall of a card. Others are not so clear. Sometimes you have to wait a spell for the payoff. Culhane’s kid brother, the way he was gunning for you, that was pure chance. But I already had my chips down on that layout.”
“Make your point.”
“I know the shoot-out with the kid wasn’t your doing, so does everybody. So will Culhane, but I’m betting he will want to gun you anyway. You after all shot his brother; nothing changes that. I’m going to manage the gunfight, and put up something to make it worthwhile.”
Prentiss smiled. “Winner take all—of course.”
“Shut up, Max.” That crack had been a little strong, even for Rawlins. “My profit comes from a rake on the bets. That’s how it works. Real simple.”
“You’re talking about men facing down for killing and dying,” Chi said. “You’re meaning to wager on who lives and who gets smoked?”
“It’s going to happen,” Rawlins said. “It makes no difference whether I bet or not. You know that.”
Cord frowned. He didn’t like any of this, but Rawlins had the last part right. He also didn’t like Rawlins having him figured so finely, so on the money.
“First,” Rawlins said, “you know sure as me that Culhane will insist on the fight. You can run but you won’t; you’re not the running kind. Even if you did, Culhane would follow. And second”—Rawlins held up two fingers—“there’s the money.”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars to the winner,” Prentiss said, “and a fortune in stories for generations to come.”
“I figure you have done worse and for less money,” Rawlins said.
“No,” Cord said. “Not ever anything like this.”
Rawlins shrugged. “The more you look at it the cleaner it is. There’s no way it doesn’t work. You get paid big for doing what you are going to do in any case. And you will do it.”
Cord saw he was right. The gambler had read him like marked cards in a hand of draw poker.
“He read me all right,” Cord said now to Chi, up in the hotel room. “But I’m getting over that. What I cannot stomach is being part of his dog-and-pony show.”
“Maybe Culhane ...”
But Cord was no longer listening. Up toward the western end of town, riders were coming in, emerging out of the setting sun’s glare. Chi came to the window and stood beside him, her arm just brushing his.
The riders reached the edge of town and Cord could see them more clearly. Backed by four men, Cash Culhane was riding into Virtue.
Chapter Nine
Cord waited on the boardwalk in front of the saloon as the five mounted men moved down the center of the street. Culhane, in the lead, scrutinized the shabby town as he rode through it, finally looked at Cord. Cord stood his ground. As much as possible, he had determined to take a hand in how this all went, and he thought it best if the way Culhane found out about his brother was not through a bunch of secondhand stories.
Culhane reined up but did not dismount. The other four fanned out behind him. Culhane nodded and said, “Howdy.”
Culhane’s men shifted in their saddles, their interest in this meeting vague at best, more taken with thoughts of whiskey and whatever might come with it. Two of them had to be brothers. Both had the same shock of unruly dirty sandy hair and the same coarse features. The older one stared coldly down at Cord, as if to say, What kind of a man are you? But his kid brother’s face was lit up with a silly idiot’s grin that might have meant he was easygoing, or more likely, blood-simple.
The third man was blond, with open handsome square-cut Germanic features. His dress was a mite dandy for the trail: a white Stetson that had been brushed mostly clean of road dust not long before, a sky-blue silk neckerchief, and a rough-out leather vest over a soft buckskin shirt. The last man was a dark squat half-breed, hatless, his long greasy hair tied round with a bandana.
“Go get your drinks,” Culhane said, speaking to these men but still watching Cord.
The other three were shifting out of their saddles when the hard-eyed older brother said, “What we got here?” and immediately the others settled back, waiting.
“Looks like one of them bold shootists you hear tell of, Ardee. Wouldn’t you say?”
“Looks like, Jake,” his brother parroted.
“You two old trail pards, or what?” the older brother said to Culhane. “Or just looking to pass the time of day?”
“You boys see to your own business.” Culhane turned in the saddle to give Jake a hard look. “There’s plenty of trouble to come, if it’s trouble you are itching for.” Culhane looked at each man in turn. His tone was quiet, almost gentle. Jake scowled and looked to be toying with the thought of saying something else.
“What is it, Jake?” Culhane said. “Anything that troubles you troubles me. Isn’t that right?”
“Nothing.” Jake swung down from his saddle without meeting Culhane’s look. The other men followed.
Culhane watched from horseback while his men looped their reins over the hitch rack. The one called Jake stared hard at Cord before backing in through the swinging doors to the Gilded Palace. More of the same, Cord thought: another mean and mighty hombre, full of bluster—with guns backing him. Like Mart Nolan. Like lots of other dead men.
Culhane climbed down off his heavy-necked Morgan-cross gray gelding and stood holding the horse’s reins. He looked up the street, then called, “You, boy, you come here.”
The scrawny kid who waited tables in the cafe was peering out the door at the newcomers. He shuffled to where they stood, looking sheepish.
“Is there a livery barn in this camp?” Culhane asked the boy.
“No, sir. Got a corral out back of the saloon there.”
“Is there anyone watches over it?”
“Yessir. Old Man James. He’s too stove-up for prospecting and such.”
Culhane dug a gold coin from his britches and flipped it into the air. The boy snatched at it and missed, and it clattered to the boardwalk. The boy picked it up and held it on the flat of his hand, staring as though he had never seen one before—or maybe the coin was easier to look at than Culhane. The gunman’s eyes were shocking deep blue, the pupils like drops of incandescent ink.
“You take my horse around to there and you tell Old Man James to pull his saddle and rub him down and grain him, if there is any grain in this place.”
“There’s grain, mister.” The boy held up the coin. “But it’ll cost you more than this. This is gold country, mister. Everything is dear.” He delivered this speech in the same solemn tone he used in the cafe.
“That’s for you. You tell Old Man James he’ll be paid right enough.”
The boy took the bridle reins of the Morgan-cross and led the animal around the side of the Gilded Palace. Cord watched all of this with some impatience, wondering if this ritualized attention to his animal was Culhane’s way of making some point for his benefit. But then Culhane gestured with a thumb over his shoulder at the four tethered horses and said, “Those boys would be the kind who’re more interested in getting their gullets outside some red-eye than seeing to their mounts. This badlands country is poor to chance being set afoot in,” and Cord reckoned that was true enough.
“Just between us,” Culhane went on, “I wouldn’t show my hind end to any one of them. They got the smell of back-shooter to me.”
“I thought they were your bunch.”
“I haven’t got any bunch. There was a job to be done here, and I had to rustle up men quick. Them four is the best I could do.”
“I guess,” Cord said meaninglessly.
“There anyway aren’t so many of the good ones left nowadays.” Culhane shook his head ruefully. “I can’t shake the feeling them four could turn bad on a man.” Culhane looked down the street toward the setting sun, now a quarter hidden behind the red-rocked hills. It had no answers to offer. “I expected we’d butt into each other somewhere along the trail, but I wasn’t figuring it to be here. I heard tell you were in Owyhee River country, you and the woman, not so long ago.”
“We were there.”
Culhane pursed his lips, unwilling or maybe too courteous to pursue the subject. “Drink?”
“There’s something first.”
Culhane stood easy, waiting.
“There was a man in town, more a boy really, claiming to be your brother.”
“Yey high”—Culhane held his hand out, palm down—“shy side of twenty, a little quick-draw on the temper.”
“Danny is what they called him.”
Culhane nodded. Cord wondered if he had an inkling and was going through this act deliberately, making this telling tough as he could; or if this measured easing into things was only his way of playing careful. Cord had determined Culhane was going to get the news from him, but now he wanted it over and done with.
“He called me out,” Cord said.
“Dead?” Culhane frowned slightly. “I guess he would be. The damned fool.” The frown darkened, but whether that was a reaction to Cord’s hand in his brother’s death, or to the brother’s plain thick headedness, Cord could not tell.
“This will take some working through,” Culhane said finally, and he went past Cord and into the saloon.
For a moment Cord felt something kin to contrition, but it passed. He had done the only thing he was allowed. Culhane would have to deal with it as he saw fit.
After a suppertime lull, the Gilded Palace was now beginning to fill for the evening. The gambling tables were busier than they had been in the afternoon, and Cord counted eleven whores working the floor, trolling for their first customers. What they did for their gold dust had the primary thing in common with mining: Every work shift was hard and long. Four bartenders jostled one another as they drew beer and splashed whiskey into shot glasses, bottles of amber liquor flashing in the chandelier’s light.
The piano man, in his black bow tie and arm garters and tinted celluloid visor, looked like any one of a hundred of his brothers in as many saloons. He was attacking “Sweet Betsy from Pike” on the tinny piano, pounding out the melody as though he held a personal grudge against girls from east Missouri.
The door at the far end of the bar was propped open, and the slight breeze that had come up with sunset was sweeping some of the unpleasant smell out of the room. But at the same time it was drawing in a fruity odor of manure from the corral out back. Still, Cord preferred the smell of horseshit to the stink of other men’s bodies.
Culhane’s four men had found a place at the bar. They stood facing the room, propped back on their elbows with thumbs hooked into gunbelts, surveying the crowd of miners. They looked to be seeking out the meanest possible entertainment, or dark mischief; to men like these, Cord knew, it was all one and the same. Culhane stood beside them but paid them no mind. He was hunched over a shot glass of whiskey with the bottle standing within convenient reach, brooding things out.
At a table in one corner, as far from the bar and the gambling alcove as they could get, sat the Paines. Maxwell Prentiss was with them, huddled close to the preacher, their heads bent in confidential conversation. And to complete the company, Ladd Rawlins was on the balcony, standing with both hands on the railing and surveying his business with the satisfaction of a coyote contemplating a herd of sheep.
Cord found Chi at the end of the bar near the open back door, toying with a half-full glass of tequila. Since the events of the afternoon, she was surely one woman who could drink in this bar without being bothered. A miner in a gray Confederate army cap shoved down to make room for Cord beside her.
“Que pasa?” Chi asked.
Cord shook his head. “His play now.”
One of the bartenders came down and set a shot glass and bottle of bourbon in front of Cord and went away again. Cord poured but did not pick up the glass.
“He won’t let it lie.”
“Most likely he won’t,” Cord said. “But then we figured on that all along.”
“Damn the man,” Chi said. “This doesn’t have to be.”
Cord had no good answer to that. He finally picked up the shot glass and drank, and was setting it down when a voice at his elbow said, “Good evening, folks. Welcome to the party.”
Chi did not look around. “What do you want?”
“To buy you a drink,” Maxwell Prentiss said. “Why don’t you join me and the Reverend and Mrs. Paine, kind of make their acquaintance and friendship? I think you’ll enjoy their society.”
Chi turned to face him. “We made their acquaintance this morning. I didn’t like them any better than I like you.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Prentiss said, unruffled. “How about you, Mr. Cord? Mrs. Paine has been asking about you.”
“You go ahead,” Chi said, a little quickly and harshly.
“No thanks.” Cord was not sure which of this was eating at her.
“There’s some things it might profit you to hear,” Prentiss pressed.
“For God’s sake, Cord,” Chi snapped. “Take him away from here.”
It was easier than arguing with her, if she wanted to be by herself. Probably she was still feeling nettled over what had happened in her room that afternoon. She could not have liked the memory of those men’s hands all over her, knowing what they had in mind. Cord took Prentiss by the arm and led him away from the bar. The writer looked back over his shoulder at Chi. “Does she get that way very often?”
“Only around your kind.”
“It must make for some lively times,” Prentiss said blandly.
They were at the corner table by then. Katherine Paine looked up and said, “Well, here we all are. Good evening, Mr. Cord.” She had pinned up her blond hair with three tortoise-shell combs and she wore an unadorned white shirtwaist buttoned to the neck. A long dark linen skirt was draped over her riding boots. Cord thought she looked damned fine.
Cord pulled the empty chair and sat down across from the preacher. Paine took a noisy slurp from a mug of lager, and from the stale-beer odor he was giving off, it was not his first of the night. As if he had divined Cord’s thought, Paine looked up at him and said, “The Good Book tells us, ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.’ One Timothy, chapter five, verse twenty-three.”
Prentiss dropped into the seat next to him. “Yeah,” he said. “It also tells us, ‘The drunkard shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags.’”
“That, sir, is sophistry.”
“No it ain’t,” Prentiss said. “It’s Proverbs.”
Prentiss winked at Cord, leaned closer, and said, “I used to give temperance lectures, back on the seaboard circuit.”
But Paine was watching Cord. Now he placed both palms flat on the table and impaled Cord with a baleful stare. “‘The wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord shall be like the fat of lambs. They shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away.’” The preacher’s voice was a low malevolent rumble. But then Paine knocked back what was left in his beer mug and waved it in the air for a refill, as if he had lost interest, or perhaps forgotten the rest of them were there.
