Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Page 10

  Fletcher rode along a narrow main street crowded with riders, belted and bearded miners on foot and freight wagons hauled by ox or mule teams. Men and occasionally women picked their way from one side of the street to the other across an oozing sea of churned-up black mud that was in places eighteen inches deep.

  Saloons were everywhere, the grandest of which were the Bucket of Blood, the Montana, Nuttall and Mann’s No. 10 and the Green Front Sporting House. Posters outside the Gem and Bella Union theaters advertised acts from as far away as New York and Chicago, and C. J. Allen’s Gun Shop proclaimed it had the latest Winchester rifles for sale and, “back by the demand of the populace,” brass-cased, factory-loaded ammunition in .44-40 and .45-75 caliber.

  Fletcher rode his sorrel through the open doors of Patrick McGowan’s livery stable and stepped out of the leather.

  A small man in dungarees and a battered Confederate cavalry kepi came out of the office and patted the sorrel’s neck. “Nice hoss you got there, mister,” he said. “Haven’t seen one quite like him since the war.”

  Fletcher nodded. “He’ll do.”

  “I got a bait of oats,” the man said. “And good, fresh hay.”

  “I’d be obliged,” Fletcher said, stripping the saddle. “He hasn’t had much by way of either recently.”

  The gunfighter pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Sign outside said Patrick McGowan’s Livery. That you?”

  The man nodded. “Came up from Texas last year. Never struck it rich, but I panned me enough to build this place.”

  McGowan had a gentle, knowing way with horses, and Fletcher let him lead the sorrel to a stall.

  When he came back, Fletcher said, “I’m looking for a woman—”

  “Plenty of those in town.” McGowan grinned.

  “She’s a blonde,” Fletcher continued, ignoring the man’s interruption. “About this tall. Her name is Savannah Jones, and she’s riding a hammer-headed buckskin.”

  McGowan shook his head. “Sounds like nobody I’ve seen.” He waved a hand around the stable. “There ain’t a buckskin hoss in here.”

  “Is there another livery?”

  “Yeah, there’s another two, both of them on the other side of town, toward the top of the gulch.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Well, I’m obliged.”

  He stepped toward the door of the stable, then stopped. “Say, I have a friend in town, James Hickok. You know where I can find him?”

  “Wild Bill, you mean? Why sure, he’s down to the Ingleside Cemetery.”

  “Cemetery? What’s he doing there?”

  “Not much, mister. Bill’s been dead more’n a month.”

  Fletcher was stunned. Bill Hickok dead? It was hard to believe.

  “How did it happen?”

  McGowan shook his head. “He was shot in the back by a no-good tramp whose name”—he spat—“it ain’t fit for a man to mention.”

  Bill was dead. The realization was slow in coming to Fletcher. But why should it surprise him?

  That’s how men like Bill, like himself, were destined to die: face down in the sawdust of a saloon in some roaring, wide-open and doomed town that was just a small step removed from hell itself.

  Once the West had needed men like Wild Bill Hickok, but that time was passing.

  Despite their violence and arrogance and an uncompromising desire to walk their own path, gunfighters had played a vital part in taming a rough and turbulent land. But now, with talk of streetcars and telephone exchanges and schools and churches, their kind was writing the last chapter of a blazing, flamboyant history that had begun at the end of The War Between the States. They would soon be gone, like the buffalo fast disappearing from the Plains. Very soon it would be as if the Red Man and the gunfighter had never been.

  And the land would be all the poorer for their passing.

  Fletcher’s melancholy thoughts were interrupted by McGowan, who had evidently been talking for some time.

  “... maybe the Bucket of Blood for starters.”

  Fletcher shook his head like a man coming out of a trance. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I was saying,” continued McGowan, unfazed, “that I would ask around the saloons about your woman. Me, I’d first try the Bucket of Blood. There’s always a lot of danged loose talk in there.”

  Saloons were clearinghouses of information in the West, and often ranchers visited them more to talk cattle prices and Washington’s policies toward the open range than to drink.

  Fletcher nodded. “I’ll do that. Thanks.”

  “One thing,” McGowan said, his eyes running over Fletcher’s well-worn guns. “If you visit the Bucket of Blood, stay clear of a man named William Buford. While Hickok was alive, this Buford pretty much stepped light around him and kept his mouth shut. But now Hickok’s gone, he’s claiming to be the new Wild Bill, and he’s pizen mean and cutting a wide path. He plans to make his mark.”

  Fletcher smiled. “I’ve met his kind before. I’ll be careful.”

  “Mind you do, pardner,” McGowan said, his face concerned. “Last week Buford killed an old miner called Charlie Bell ’cause Charlie laughed at him when he spoke big and ordered him to call him Wild Bill. And a week before that, he killed a drifting cowboy who’d just come up the trail from Texas.

  “That cowboy couldn’t have been any more than eighteen, but Buford taunted him into drawing, bad-mouthing Texas and Texans alike, and then he killed him.” McGowan’s eyes were wide. “Mister, they say this Buford can draw faster than a striking rattler and then some. Every man he kills, he gets a little gold cross made up and has it inset into the handle of his gun. So far, he’s got seven of them crosses.” The little man shrugged. “Hell, what am I talking about? Maybe he is the new Wild Bill.”

  “There was only one Wild Bill, and there won’t be another,” Fletcher said mildly. “But thanks for the warning. I’ll step real light and talk soft when I’m around that ranny. He sounds like a man best left alone.”

  As McGowan talked, Fletcher had been looking around the barn. Off in a corner, two tall mares stood in their stalls, now and again stomping away flies.

  Fletcher strolled over to the stalls and studied the mares. They were both bays, with fine heads and long, clean limbs, standing around sixteen hands high. They looked to weigh better than one thousand pounds: big horses built for speed and endurance.

  “Kentucky Thoroughbreds,” McGowan said, stepping beside him. “They belong to a gambler named Whitcroft, runs the faro table at the Montana. He won them in a poker game from a feller who figured to race them.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Fine horses.”

  He picked up his saddlebags, bulging with Jeb’s gold, and asked McGowan to recommend a bank.

  “I’d say the Mercantile,” the man replied. “It’s owned by a former senator named Silas T. Pendleton. He’s a solid citizen, and his bank has the reputation of being sound.”

  To Fletcher’s relief, the bank was on the same side of the street as the livery barn, and he’d no need to cross that fetid swamp of mud.

  By Deadwood standards, Fletcher’s deposit was a small one, and the transaction was quickly handled by an efficient but low-level clerk.

  “I make the total seven thousand, six hundred and fourteen dollars, Mr. Fletcher,” the clerk said, visibly unimpressed.

  But this was more money than Fletcher had ever seen in his life, and the total staggered him. “Give me two hundred cash and put the rest on deposit,” he said, his voice a little unsteady. “I will draw on it later.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Fletcher left the bank and stood outside for a few moments, stepping out of the way of the miners and townspeople crowding the boardwalk.

  The Thoroughbreds were very much on Fletcher’s mind. As brood mares mated to his big American stud, they would produce foals with plenty of size and bone, ideal mounts for the Dakota and Montana territories and their winter snowdrifts.

  And he could buy more mares a
nd maybe another stud.

  But that would mean settling down on the Two-Bit. Was that what he really wanted?

  Jeb had told him that the cabin on the creek was his home, the place he’d been searching for since he was a boy.

  Could he settle down there, away from the roaring guns and the sudden, deadly violence of his calling? Or would his past always catch up to him, a dark shadow that never left him, making the dream of a normal life impossible?

  Fletcher shook his head. Now was not the time to search for answers to those questions, he decided.

  Mañana, the Mexicans said.

  There is always tomorrow.

  But still, he would buy the mares, if he could.

  Chapter 11

  When Fletcher stepped into the Bucket of Blood, it was still early in the day, and the place was almost empty. Miners who weren’t working were nursing hangovers and wouldn’t start drifting in with the rest of the good-time crowd until after dark.

  A couple of drummers in broadcloth suits sat at a table, halfheartedly playing a penny-ante game of poker, and a plump man in greasy buckskins, a mule skinner by the look of him, sat at another table with a bottle of rye and a single glass.

  The saloon’s piano player was trying to tune his battered instrument, watched by a bored ten-cents-a-dance girl in a stained and faded dress of red silk.

  When Fletcher stepped to the bar, the girl looked at him with interest and gave him an artificial smile, then quickly took in his guns and bruised face and immediately dismissed him as a potential partner. This big, solemn man didn’t seem the good-time type. She shrugged her naked shoulders and went back to watching the piano player.

  All this Fletcher took in at a glance.

  Then, out of the corner of his eye, he studied the man standing at the bar close to him.

  This could only be William Buford, the new Wild Bill.

  He was tall and heavily built, only a little of it fat, and he wore the accepted uniform of the frontier gambler: a black frock coat to his knees and checked pants, the cuffs falling elegantly over highly polished, elastic-sided boots. The man sported a frilled shirt and black string tie, and, as Bill’s had done, his long, perfumed hair hung in soft waves over his shoulders.

  He wore two walnut-handled Colts butt forward in matching black holsters, and Fletcher noticed the row of little gold crosses on the right-hand gun. A bottle of Anderson’s Little Brown Jug bourbon stood on the bar in front of him.

  “What will it be?” The bartender, a red-faced man in a flowered vest, wiped the bar in front of Fletcher with a towel.

  “Do you have beer?”

  “Sure do, all the way from the Golden Brewery in Denver.”

  “Is it cold?”

  “As a stepmother’s breath.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Draw me one.”

  Buford turned his head and looked at Fletcher with contempt. “Beer,” he said, like the very word was poison in his mouth. “He drinks beer.”

  The man’s eyes were a hard blue in the florid red of his face, and they held a challenge. His cheeks were veined with red from alcohol and the harsh downstroke of the razor, and his lips were thin, framing a small, cruel mouth that was now twisted in a sneer.

  Fletcher, knowing this man for what he was or aspired to be, let it go. Buford was a born killer who fervently wanted to build a reputation so that other—and as he saw them, lesser—mortals would step lightly around him.

  He wished to be feared by all and thus never called to account.

  It was a measure of the man’s arrogance that he did not see in Fletcher a quiet potential for danger and sudden, shocking violence that the real Wild Bill had recognized instinctively years before—as he’d recognized it in John Wesley Hardin, another soft-spoken and deadly gunman of his acquaintance.

  To gunfighters like Fletcher and Hardin, a Colt was a tool, a chunk of iron to be cleaned and oiled and kept in good working order.

  Notching the handle—or, in Buford’s case, decorating it with crosses so he could sit in his lonely room and gloat over the men he’d destroyed—was a tinhorn’s trick. The true professional shunned it as he would the plague.

  “Your beer, mister,” the bartender said. The man’s hand was shaking so bad that when he laid the glass on the bar, a little wave of foam spilled over the rim.

  The man picked up Fletcher’s nickel and whispered, “Watch yourself.”

  Fletcher nodded and put the glass to his lips, sipping appreciatively. The bartender had been right; the beer was fresh, and it was ice cold.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Buford asked. It was a challenge, not a conversation opener.

  Fletcher shrugged and sipped his beer. “Lost a fist-fight,” he said finally.

  “Somebody cut you down to size, huh?” Buford said scornfully.

  “Something like that,” Fletcher said.

  He picked up his glass from the bar and stepped toward a table in the corner. Behind him, Buford yelled, “Hey you! Don’t walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”

  Fletcher ignored the gunman, and he heard the bartender say, “Take it easy, Wild Bill. You got no right to scare that man so bad.”

  As he took a chair at the table, Fletcher was followed by Buford’s laugh. “By the lord Harry, I got the right. There’s too many yellowbellies in Deadwood,” he said loudly and pointedly. “I sure aim to cut me down a few.”

  That last remark lit Fletcher’s fuse, and he felt sudden anger flare in him.

  “Let it go, Buck. That son of a bitch isn’t worth it.”

  Fletcher, surprised at hearing his name, looked up and saw the mule skinner in the greasy buckskins standing over him, his bottle and glass in his hand.

  “Don’t recognize me, do you, Buck?” the man said, his voice light and high. “Truth to tell, it took me a while to recognize you, all battered and beat up the way you are.”

  Fletcher looked more closely at the man’s face. Then a grin lit up his face. This was no man!

  “Martha Jane Canary, as I live and breathe.” Fletcher rose to his feet and extended his hand. “Hell, I haven’t seen you since Abilene.”

  The woman took Fletcher’s hand. “That was in ’71, Buck.” She smiled, showing teeth stained brown from chewing tobacco. “Been a long time.”

  “Haw, haw, haw,” Buford bellowed from the bar. “The yellowbelly climbed onto his feet for Calamity Jane!” He slapped his thigh. “I never seen the like in all my born days. Standing up like a perfect little gentleman for a two-dollar whore.”

  Fletcher stiffened, but Calamity shook her head. “Let it go, Buck. Tinhorns like that just ain’t worth killing.” She motioned to a chair. “Can I sit?”

  “Sure,” Fletcher said, still rankled. But he knew Calamity was right—a two-bit wanna-be like William Buford wasn’t worth a bullet.

  As Buford stood with an elbow on the bar, a slight smile on his face, intently watching them like he was at a magic lantern show, Calamity poured herself a drink and offered the bottle to Buck, who shook his head.

  “I’ll stick with the beer,” he said.

  “So what brings you to Deadwood, Buck?”

  Fletcher studied the woman for a few moments. Her hair, showing gray at the temples, was cut short like a man’s, and her face was puffy and mottled. The buckskins did nothing for her sagging, overweight body, and Fletcher had to allow that Martha Jane was a homely woman to say the least. But her blue eyes were bright and showed both keen intelligence and a degree of humanity not unmixed with a great deal of humor.

  Quickly Fletcher outlined the events of the last couple of weeks and then summed it all up by saying, “And that’s the reason I’m in Deadwood. I have to find Savannah. Don’t ask me why, but somehow I feel responsible for her.”

  Calamity nodded. “Buck, do you think maybe she’s here working the line?”

  That thought had lain unspoken at the back of Fletcher’s mind, and now that Calamity had brought it into the open, he was forced to face it.r />
  “It’s possible,” he said hesitantly. “She told the hotel clerk she was in the Territory looking to buy a ranch. But she must have realized pretty quick there was a range war brewing, and there was no land for sale.” Fletcher looked puzzled. “She carried a Remington derringer. I thought it was odd for a young lady to carry a stingy gun.”

  “That’s a whore’s weapon, an up close and personal ace in the hole,” Calamity said. “Buck, there’s a lot of money to be made here from the miners. A young girl might figure to make her fortune on the line then retire and get married and raise a family. It’s happened before.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Maybe. But that doesn’t explain why somebody was trying to kill her.”

  “A jealous customer maybe,” Calamity suggested. “A spurned lover. That’s also happened before.”

  “It just doesn’t seem possible, Martha,” Fletcher said. “I mean, Savannah is educated, beautiful, and she looks like she comes from a good family. If she wanted to get married, she could have any man she set her sights on.”

  Fletcher couldn’t bring himself to believe that Savannah had come to the Territory to work as a whore in Deadwood. She just didn’t seem the type. But what was the type? He’d seen plenty of soiled doves who were beautiful, well-educated and came from good families. Was it just that for the first time in a long time he’d found somebody he cared about, and now he couldn’t bear the thought that she was selling her body to other men?

  Or was he arguing against Savannah working as a whore because he was more concerned about his own bruised male ego than he was about her? That was very possible, and now Fletcher faced up to it.

  “I’m going to talk to the girls on the line, see if any of them have seen or heard of Savannah Jones,” he told Calamity. “I have to find her, no matter what she’s doing.”

  The woman shook her head. “They won’t talk to you, Buck. They’ll figure you for some kind of johnny law and tell you nothing.” Calamity poured herself another drink and downed it in one gulp. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, an oddly masculine gesture, and continued. “They’ll talk to me. I’ve worked alongside most of those girls in the past, and they know and trust me. If your Savannah Jones is working the line in Deadwood, I’ll find her.”