shrugged. “I suppose. No particular hurry, though . . . especially not for them.”
CHAPTER 2
Once Hendricks was out the door with his charges, McQueen turned to the yellow-haired stranger who’d been standing quietly by with a bemused expression on his face. “Now then,” said the marshal. “I gave you the benefit of the doubt, because I know those three jackasses to be liars and troublemakers. Thing is, that don’t necessarily prove you ain’t a card cheat. I hope you’re not gonna disappoint me by turnin’ out to actually be one.”
“Trust me, Marshal, I very sincerely do not want to disappoint you,” said the stranger. “Like I told you before, those men were such terrible players there would be no need for me or anybody else to cheat in order to beat them.”
McQueen regarded him for a moment before making a gesture to indicate the paper bills that, along with the cards, ashtrays, and drinks, had been spilled from the table. “Reckon these winnin’s are yours, then.”
The stranger returned his gaze, the bemused expression remaining in place. He said, “If that’s intended to be some kind of trick to test my honesty, Marshal, then that would make me the one disappointed in you . . . I hadn’t yet had time to clean those gentlemen out entirely, you see. So not all of the money scattered there is mine. However, since I do know the amount I had in front of me before the trouble broke out, I’d like to claim what is. The rest can be returned to the men your deputy hauled away.”
“Minus the amount owed for damages, that is—from their part, not yours,” McQueen said.
“Sounds reasonable,” the stranger allowed.
“Reasonable, maybe. But not really necessary,” said Farrelly, the barkeep, who’d come out from his station to start righting chairs and putting things back in order. “The boss learned a long time ago to furnish this joint with sturdy trimmings that wouldn’t bust up so easy every time a fracas broke out. Looks like it paid off once again. I don’t see nothing that suffered much damage.”
He paused in what he was doing to glance upward. “Except for the ceiling, that is. Doggone it, Firestick, does Moosejaw have to fire off a blast into the ceiling every time he shows up to tame down a spot of trouble? Lookit up there. That’s three times in the past six months, and last time it was with a doggone shotgun!”
“Moosejaw don’t like wastin’ words,” McQueen said.
“Well, he oughta try not liking to waste bullets for a change. He’s gonna have that ceiling peppered with so many doggone holes that the next time we get a frog-strangler of a rain, it’ll leak in here like one of those Swedish shower baths I’ve heard tell about.”
“Art,” McQueen said, “when’s the last time we had a frog-strangler of a rain around these parts?”
Farrelly frowned. “Well . . . I don’t know exactly.”
“You don’t know because you can’t remember. Nobody can remember. Because it never happens.”
“We get some doozies now and then,” Farrelly said stubbornly. “But that ain’t the point. The point is, if Moosejaw keeps shooting holes in the ceiling, it’s just a matter of time before it’ll start to leak from even only—”
“Okay, okay. I’ll talk to him about it.”
“I mean, it ain’t like he ain’t big enough to just march in and give a loud snort if he wants to—”
“You made your point. I said I’ll talk to him about it,” the marshal interrupted for a second time, his tone growing a mite testy.
While McQueen and Farrelly were talking, the stranger had quietly gathered up the cards and money scattered across the floor. He placed the deck of cards on top of the table Farrelly had pushed back into place, and alongside it a thin stack of bills—minus a thicker bundle, his winnings, that he kept for himself. Brandishing the latter, he announced, “Gentlemen. Since I was a participant—albeit a reluctant one—in the disturbance that disrupted everyone’s afternoon, I’d like to make amends by offering to step over to the bar and buy a round of drinks.”
One of the onlookers already at the bar responded by saying, “Heck, mister, that wasn’t no disturbance to us. It was a right entertainin’ show you put on.”
One of the other patrons leaning on the bar next to the speaker gave him a quick elbow to the ribs, then was equally quick to add, “But that don’t mean we won’t still accept your offer to stand a round of drinks.”
“Reckon I’d better get back in place to do some pouring, then,” said Farrelly as he headed once again for the bar.
The stranger pointed to the money he’d placed on the table and said to McQueen, “That rightfully belongs to those other players. I presume you’ll see that it’s returned to them?”
The marshal hesitated for a moment, making a sour face, before finally reaching for the bills. “I ain’t done bein’ mad at those boobs yet, so I hate to do anything in their favor,” he said. “But, yeah, I’ll see to it this gets back to ’em.”
The stranger smiled. “I trust also that you will be accepting my drink offer? Or are you not allowed to imbibe since you’re on duty?”
McQueen’s sour expression suddenly turned into a wide grin, accompanied by a hearty chuckle. “Mister, I wouldn’t have a job that didn’t allow for a little im-bibin’. Which ain’t to say I go around half-pickled or anything like that. But I do enjoy a few nips on occasion, and I reckon this measures up as one of those occasions. So lead on, I surely do accept your offer.”
By the time they took their places at the bar, Farrelly had already served the other men farther down the line. Moving back to stand before McQueen and the stranger, the first thing he did was place a couple of damp bar towels in front of them. “The laundry lady will likely raise hell with me about the bloodstains, but here, you fellas might want to take a swipe at some of your cuts and scrapes before you get down to drinking.”
The long mirror behind the bar was the pride of the otherwise rather austere establishment. The Silver Spur’s owner, Irish Dan Coswick, liked to boast how he’d had it shipped special all the way from New Orleans, and he took great offense at any mention of the few distortions and blurry spots to be found across its surface. It nevertheless did give the place a nice added touch and proved quite helpful at the moment for the marshal and the stranger to see their reflections in order to take some “swipes” at their wounds. The latter, upon closer examination, proved numerous though mostly superficial.
“I guess,” said the stranger as he dabbed at the raw, reddened swelling under one eye, “we can take a certain amount of satisfaction in the fact that those men your deputy took out of here looked considerably worse than us.”
Wiping his chin clean of the partially dried blood smeared across it, McQueen grinned. “Like the old joke that goes, ‘You oughta see the other fella, eh?” Then his grin stretched even wider. “Of course, when you take into account those ugly-assed Dunlaps and stack ’em up against a couple of handsome gents like us, you’d be quick to conclude they looked considerably worse even before we did any poundin’ on ’em.”
Now it was the stranger’s turn to chuckle. “If you say so.”
As
