Powder Keg (14 page)

N
ordberg wasn’t in his office but his night man, Dob Willis, was. He sat at the front desk reading a dime novel, a corncob pipe tucked into the left side of his mouth.

“Hey, hi there, Mr. Ford.” He was still a kid with cheeks full of freckles and a cowlick as tall as a small tree.

“There might be trouble tonight, Dob.”

“Trouble?” he said. And dog-eared his dime novel and set it down. He took the pipe from his mouth. “That don’t sound good.”

I explained to him what was going on.

“Tremont? Hell, he hated Mike Chaney. Now he wants to go after Flannery himself?”

“Yeah, I thought that was pretty strange, too. But he’s got a little bit of preacher in him and you get enough whiskey in those men and some preacher talk about good and evil and all of a sudden you’ve got yourself a lynch mob.”

“Well, the sheriff, he sure don’t hold with lynchin’.”

“You know where he is?”

“Deliverin’ a foal out to the Brammer farm. The doc’s busy treatin’ a boy that got lost in the storm yesterday. Don’t know if he’ll make it. Doc usually doubles up as the vet around here. But since he’s busy he asked the sheriff. The widow woman Mrs. Gantry, she’s all alone on her little acreage near the edge of town. She’s got the rheumatism and arthritis too bad to birth a foal. The sheriff usually spells the doc when the doc can’t make it.”

“Well, I’ve got some other things to do, so if you see him before I do, tell him to keep an eye on the saloons here. They might just have gone someplace else.”

“Well, I’ll make them rounds right now. There won’t be no lynchin’ in this town, I’ll tell you that for sure.”

“C’mon in but be real quiet. She’s asleep.”

Jen put a shushing finger to her lips and stood back so I could step in. The wind was such that she had to hold on to the door before it was ripped off its frame.

When I was inside, she tried to help me off with my sheepskin but I said, “I have to get back right away. But I needed to check on something. And I know you’ll give me a straight answer.”

“Say, I’m impressed. Asking me for my opinion. I must be a lot smarter than I think I am.”

The banter was light but the solemn eyes told of her sorrow. Be a long time before the worst of her
loss would be over. Her brother had been her best friend and confidant.

She pointed to one of the chairs next to the potbellied stove.

“How’s Clarice?”

“When she’s awake, she’s pretty good. But when she’s asleep—her nightmares must be terrible. She wakes up about every hour screaming her head off.”

“You look good.”

“Thanks.”

And she did. Her hair was pulled back, she wore a pair of butternuts and a white blouse that flattered a body that didn’t need any more flattering, and her eyes were clear from sleep and good food.

“You look pretty keyed up.”

“I am. Tremont’s got a bunch of the town boys thinking about a lynching.”

“Tremont? Who’s he want to lynch?”

“Flannery.”

“He’s going to take over where my brother left off—except up the ante.”

“They all seem to think that Flannery’s lying about selling some of his western land to his Eastern investors. They think he’ll just seize more land when their payments come due.”

“That’s what he’s telling people? That he’s going to sell them that land he owns west of here? That’s about the poorest grazing land outside of Utah or Montana up in the mountains. Nobody’d buy that land for cattle. Nobody. He’s been trying to sell it for years and his father tried before him. You could build a town up there. There’s a big timber operation in that area. The way everything’s growing, a small
town could probably do right nice for itself. But not cattle. No way.”

“Well, I figured you’d know if anybody would. I just wanted to check Tremont’s facts. I guess he was telling the truth.”

Just then Clarice cried out for her mommy. Jen touched my arm and said, “Well, if nothing else, I’d like to cook you a good meal before you leave town. I have to admit, I wanted to blame you for Mike’s death—not because you deserved it, but because I needed to blame someone. And I guess I still do. But not you. You tried your best to save him, I know that, and, to be honest, right now you and Clarice are about the only two people in the world I want to see.”

I took her to me, hugged her for a long moment. I’d been hoping for more than a meal. She got more attractive to me the more I saw her, and not just physically. She was a damned fine woman in every sense.

Clarice cried again.

“I need to go,” she said.

“I know.”

This time we kissed briefly and then she hurried into the bedroom.

I
went back to my hotel room to pull on a sweater. Though the wind had died down, the temperature was still in the teens. I had a feeling that I was going to need some heavy clothes before the night was over.

The desk clerk didn’t warn me. He was reading a magazine when I came in. He looked up, nodded a greeting and then went back to his reading.

I went up the stairs, dug my key out of my pocket, and started to push it into the lock. That was when I saw that the door was not snug with the frame. I was sure I hadn’t left it open.

I pulled my .44 from its holster, pressed myself flat against the wall on the side of the door, and then used my toe on the door to push it open.

A long silence.

Then a female voice: “The only weapon I have, Mr. Ford, is a hat pin.”

At first I didn’t recognize the voice but then she said: “It’s Loretta DeMeer, Mr. Ford. It’s safe to come in.”

I still didn’t take any chances. People weren’t supposed to be in your room unless you invited them. Not even very good-looking middle-aged women with only hat pins to protect them.

I stood in the open doorway, my .44 still in my hand.

“You look like a magazine illustration, Mr. Ford. I guess it’s the way you’re sort of crouched down. And your .44 all ready to shoot.”

Quick check of the room. She seemed to be alone. “How’d you get in here?”

“The desk clerk’s daughter is in our choir at church. We’re old friends.”

I holstered my gun and closed the door. She sat on the only chair. I sat on the bed. I reached over and turned up the lamp.

She was as tawny and lush as some great creature of myth, the enormous brown eyes dazzling with amused confidence. She wore a brown seaman’s sweater and tan riding pants. The rich abundance of the body and the shining blond hair would be right at home in both an elegant apartment and the jungle. It just depended on where she wanted to eat you up.

“Any particular reason why you’re here?”

“Well, a couple of reasons. I should’ve introduced myself that day at the library for one thing. You looked intelligent. My husband was a book reader. That was one of the many reasons we got along. And one of the reasons I still miss him. And for another reason, I’d like to convince you that I’m not some harlot who seduced Mike Chaney, despite what Jen and the town think.”

“Why do you give a damn what I think of you?
Why would you care what people think, Mrs. DeMeer? You’re rich. You’ve got one of the biggest spreads in the Territory. I don’t even know why you work at the library.”

“I like being around books. And it gets me away from the ranch. I only work there a few hours a week. It’s a nice break from worrying about cattle and the price of feed and how many hands short we are at any given time.”

“I still don’t know why you care what people think.”

She shrugged and put her head down, seeming to study the hands that lay in her lap. “I don’t deserve my reputation.” Then she startled me by starting to cry.

“Mrs. DeMeer, I don’t know why you’re here but I’m pretty busy tonight and I’m really not good at this.”

When she raised her head, her eyes were as shiny as her golden hair. “Not good at what? At listening to women? Admit it. You think I’m some kind of whore.”

Now I put my own head down, studied my own hands. This was confusing, her in my room crying. Confusing and irritating.

“You know how long I was chaste after my husband died?”

I kept my head down. I felt stupid. I didn’t know why she was saying all these things.

“Eight years. I was chaste for eight years. I didn’t so much as kiss another man. But that didn’t stop all the rumors. The women in town were afraid I was going to steal their husbands. It was ridiculous. I
never flirted with anybody, I never even gave a hint that I was available in any way. But that didn’t matter. They still whispered about me, anyway. Do you know what that’s like, Mr. Ford? To have people smirk when they see you; and then whisper something when you pass by? To be shunned? Even at church they didn’t accept me. They pretended to. But nobody ever invited me for dinner. I was always the outsider and I was ashamed of myself for some reason, even though I wasn’t anything like they said I was. Nobody ever invited me to church activities—I had to invite myself. And all that time I was chaste. Completely chaste. Then I took up with Glen, my foreman. And it wasn’t this mad passionate affair everybody winked about. His wife and daughter had drowned in a flash flood a few years earlier. He was in as much pain as I was. A lot of the time we didn’t even make love. We were just comfortable with each other. Just talked and played cards and sometimes I’d read to him.”

“And then you took up with Mike Chaney.”

“Not the way you think. He worked on my ranch from time to time. One day I saw him just sitting under a tree with his head in his hand. I went over to talk to him.” She smiled. “He couldn’t help himself. He flirted with me. He just did it by instinct. I could tell he didn’t mean anything by it. It was just the only way he could deal with women. I just ignored it and asked him what was wrong. He wouldn’t tell me at first. Then he just opened up. He was like a little boy. Very sad and very confused. Woman problems. This was before he started robbing Flannery’s banks. He had two women pregnant and both of them were
married and both of them were sure the children were his.”

I was rolling a cigarette and she said, “May I have one of those?”

It was still considered scandalous behavior, women smoking cigarettes. But more and more of them were doing it in private. I rolled a good one for her, got it lighted, and carried it over to her.

She took a deep, long drag of it. “Anyway, even when he wasn’t working on my ranch, he’d come around just to talk to me.”

“About the women?”

“About everything. I think everybody saw him as somebody who never gave much thought to anything. But when you got him alone, he was a lot more serious than that. And I needed a confidant, too. Glen had left—and not because of Mike, despite all the gossip saying otherwise. He’d met a woman at a horse auction over in Drover City about four months ago. He decided right on the spot that he wanted to marry her. She came and visited him once on the ranch and stayed with me overnight. Very nice woman. She and Glen are very happy.”

And that was when the gunfire started.

All I could think of was Tremont and his mob.

I went to the window and peered out. In the silver moonlight the shapes of maybe a dozen men could be seen in the middle of the street outside Fred’s saloon. That didn’t look good.

“Do you have to leave?”

“Afraid I do.”

She stood up, came to me. “What I wanted to ask you was if you would talk to Jen and tell her the real
story. Because nothing happened between her brother and me other than friendship. She just wouldn’t believe it when Mike told her, either. Would you just talk to her?”

“I will,” I said, reaching for my sheepskin.

“Promise?”

“Promise,” I said. But I was already out the door.

That long night I’d been dreading? I had a sour feeling in my stomach that told me it was just starting.

T
urned out much worse than I expected. Or dreaded, would be more like it.

By the time I reached the dozen or so men in the street, two of the saloons facing that part of the business lane had pretty much emptied. Worth standing in the cold for a show that good.

“You’re in big trouble, Jake. Now you let me have that gun back.”

There’s one thing a lawman probably ought not to do and that’s plead with people who are breaking the law. Spit on them, slap them around, kick them in the balls if you get a chance—but don’t plead with them.

But poor Dob Willis wasn’t experienced enough to know how to handle a situation like that.

I could pretty much figure out what had led to that moment. Young deputy wanting to stay in charge of things hears or sees some kind of commotion down the street. Shrugs into his sheepskin and heads for the spot where all the voices are coming from.

But when he gets there—and this was the part I
wasn’t too sure of—somebody or somebodies relieve him of his pistol. And being in a hurry, all excited and everything—being in a hurry, he forgets to grab a carbine from the rack that Nordberg put up for a moment just like that one.

So now he stood in front of the crowd of laughing, jeering, drunken men, begging for them to give him his gun back.

Tremont wasn’t the man with Dob’s gun but those were the boys he’d stirred up so I walked over to him.

Before he had time to even make a fist, I slapped him hard across the face, grabbed the collar of his jacket, and flung him to his knees right in front of his gang.

“You tell them to give Dob his gun back or I’m going to kick your teeth in.”

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

“I’m not waitin’ long, Tremont. Tell them to give Dob his gun back.”

The gallery started shouting.

“It’s that federal son of a bitch.”

“Hey, federal man, go back to Washington. We don’t want you here.”

“Kill him, Tremont. Shoot him in the back if you need to.”

The man with Dob’s gun said, “I ain’t givin’ him his gun back, Ford. He had to be a big important man and tell us to break it up. Then he made the mistake of wavin’ his gun around.”

“Give him the gun, Jake,” Tremont said, struggling to his feet. And struggling was the right word. Between the liquor and the humiliation of me tossing him around, he wasn’t doing well at the moment.

I drew my own .44. “Couple of you boys help him up. And you, Jake, you give Dob his gun back.”

Somebody in the gallery shouted, “Hey, Dob, why don’t you get your mommy down here? Maybe she can get Jake to give the gun back.”

That of course turned out to be just about the most hilarious thing these souses had heard in their lifetimes.

I walked over to Jake. He then had Dob’s gun pointed at my chest. “Hand the gun over.”

“I could drop you right now.” His words were whiskey-wobbly. So was his backbone. He looked ready to fall over, a scrawny man with a rat-mean face.

“Sure you could.”

“Better give it to him, Jake,” Tremont said.

“Shoot the bastard, Jake,” somebody at the back said.

“That’s right, Jake,” I said. “Shoot me. Waste your whole life on one bullet to impress a bunch of drunks.”

Tremont said, “Dammit, Jake. Hand him the gun. Think about your new granddaughter. You want to see her again, don’t you?”

Because I was reasonably preoccupied with Jake and the possibility that the drunken yahoo just might kill me, I didn’t notice Sheriff Nordberg until he stood to the side of the crowd with his carbine trained right on Jake’s temple.

“You got five seconds to hand him the gun, Jake. Or I’ll kill you right where you stand.”

And that was that.

Nordberg’s words managed to penetrate even
Jake’s thick head. One glance at the sheriff was all it took. Nordberg was not only big, he was fierce, something I hadn’t seen in him till then. I had no doubt he’d kill Jake on the spot. Nobody else did, either, including Jake.

He handed me the gun.

I tried not to look relieved.

“You send these men home now, Tremont,” Nordberg said. “And I mean now.”

“You throwin’ in with Flannery, Sheriff?” Tremont asked.

“If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t even say something like that, Tremont. You know I support you men. But not when you act like this. Now before something bad happens, get these men home. They all have to work in the morning and they’ll need a good night’s sleep to work off their drunk. Now git and git fast.”

“Thanks for helping me with Jake.”

“Doing my job is all.” He sipped as much coffee as he could. The stuff was scalding. We’d drifted to the café after the men went their various ways home. “Jake’s all right when he’s sober. He’s actually a quiet little fella. But when he gets drunk he thinks he’s tough.” This time he just blew on his coffee. “And he can be dangerous when he’s got a gun in his hand.”

“Flannery should think about hiring a bodyguard.”

Nordberg smiled. His nose was still red from the night air. “I’ve told him that, too. He tells me that I should be his bodyguard. Whenever things get kind of threatening, I send a deputy out to stand guard for a shift. It’s usually an off-duty deputy, though, so I
have to pay him extra, which the town council bitches about.”

“Why don’t they ask Flannery to pay for the deputy?”

He laughed. “That’ll be the day, when that council stands up to anything Flannery wants to do. One of the council members works in Flannery’s bank and another one is his second cousin. Flannery gets what he wants and he usually gets it on the cheap. He’s a tight bastard.”

“I guess that’s how the rich get richer.” I figured I’d give my coffee a try. It was still pretty hot but I managed to gulp down a taste of it at least. “You have any luck?”

“Went about as expected. Nobody can account for his time yesterday. I’d almost be suspicious if they could. They’re out doing chores by themselves or they’re checking on their livestock or they take a day trip somewhere. I can check it out if it comes to that. But to be honest, my money’s still on Flannery.”

“Mine, too.”

He yawned. “Be good to get to sleep. In fact—” He pushed his coffee cup away from him. “I better not drink any more of this or I’ll be awake all night. A lot of men can sleep on coffee. But I’m not one of them.”

He pushed back, picked up his hat, dropped it on his head and said, “Tomorrow morning, I’m going to work on those men again. See if I can’t pin them down a little better. There’s always a possibility that it wasn’t Flannery.”

“Maybe we just like him for it because he’s such a son of a bitch.”

He laughed. “You tryin’ to tell me that I don’t hand out impartial law and order?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I am.”

“You know something? You’re probably right.”

“I got the same problem. I want it to be Flannery, too. You want to see it all catch up to him on the end of a rope.”

He feigned mock shock. “Why, you don’t understand the ways of the West, mister. Out here the onliest people we hang are poor whites and Mexes and coloreds.” The mocking tone vanished. “I don’t know about back East but out here a rich man would have to burn down an orphanage before a judge would even consider hanging him.”

“It’s not any different back East.”

“Yeah,” he said, standing up. “I kinda figured that.”

The wind rattled the window as I tried to sleep. I was in long johns under two blankets and I was still cold. The demons came back, all my drinking years, all the mean and embarrassing things I’d done. Hard to forgive yourself; hard to have any sense of dignity after the whiskey nights come screaming back. I wanted to reach into my head and rip them out so some fine night I could lay my head down and not remember what I’d done and who I was back in those terrible dark days.

I had a nightmare that I was in that room with the wind screeching and distant people screaming and crying as in the aftermath of some disaster. But when
I went to the window the streets were bare. And when I tried the door, it was locked from the outside. The wind got louder and louder and when I woke up—

When I woke up somebody was tapping faintly on my door. My first thought was that it was the wind. But after I sat up and reached for my gun holstered on the bedpost, I heard it again.

Who the hell would be knocking at that time of night?