didn’t. He just hauled me out of Belle’s crapper and hanged me.”
“Now let me get this straight. My father—hanged you?”
“Noose and drop and all.”
“I don’t suppose you want to explain.”
“It sure wasn’t the way to make friends with the sheriff, boy.”
“You calling me boy? You’re hardly older than I am.”
“I got the badge. I get to call old men boy if I feel like it.”
“So my father, he hanged you?”
“Complete and total. And when I’m done here, I’m gonna haul his ass to this here jail and throw away the key.”
King Bragg laughed. “Good luck, pal.”
He headed over to his sheet metal bunk, flopped down on it, and drew up that raggedy blanket. Me, I was satisfied. That feller wasn’t gonna weasel out of a hanging with that cock-and-bull story. As for me, I was ready to hang him whether I liked him or not, because that was justice. A man shoots three fellers for no good reason, and he pays the price. I’d just have to deal with Admiral Bragg one way or the other. Now I’d talked with the boy to check his story and nothing had changed.
I didn’t much like the thought of pulling the lever, but it would be my job to do it. They made me sheriff, and now I was stuck with it. I could quit and let someone else pull the lever that would drop King Bragg from this life. But I figure if a man’s gonna be a man, he’s got to do the hard things and not run away. So when the time comes, I’ll pull the lever and watch King drop. Still, it sure made me wonder whether I wanted to be a lawman. It was more fun being young and getting into trouble. I was still young, but this wasn’t the kind of trouble I was itching for. My ma used to warn me I had the trouble itch. If there was trouble somewhere, I’d be in the middle of it. Pa, he just said, keep your head down. Heads is what get shot.
I thought I’d ask a few more questions, just to satisfy myself that King Bragg done it and his ole man was being pigheaded, more than usual. Admiral Bragg was born pigheaded, and sometime it would do him in.
This sheriff business wasn’t really up my alley. It would take someone with more upstairs than I ever had to ask the right questions. I could shoot fast and true, but that didn’t mean my thinkin’ was all that fast. There was a feller I wanted to jabber with about all this, the barkeep over to the Last Chance Saloon, Sammy Upward. That was his sworn-out legal monicker. Upward. It sure beat Downward.
The Last Chance was actually the first bar you hit coming into town, or the last one if you were ridin’ out. That made it a little wilder than them other watering places. The rannies riding in, they headed for the first oasis they could find. It didn’t matter none that it charged a nickel more for red-eye, fifteen cents instead of a dime, and two cents more, twelve in all, for a glass of Kessler’s ale. It didn’t matter none that some of them other joints had serving girls, some of them almost not bad lookin’, if you didn’t look too close. And it didn’t matter none that the other joints were safer, because the managers made customers hang up their gun belts before they could get themselves served. No, the Last Chance was famous for rowdy, for rough, and for mean, and that’s why young studs like King Bragg headed there itching for some kind of trouble to find him.
It wasn’t yet noon, but maybe Upward would be polishin’ the spittoons or something, so I rattled the double door, found it unlocked, and found Upward sleeping on the bar. He lay there like a dead fish, but finally come around.
“We ain’t open yet, Sheriff,” he said.
“I ain’t ordering a drink; I’m here for a visit.”
“Visits cost same as a drink. Fifteen cents.”
He hadn’t yet stirred, and was peerin’ up at me from atop the bar. That bar was sorta narrow, and he could fall off onto the brass rail in front, or off the back, where he usually worked, and where he had easy access to his sawed-off Greener.
“We’re gonna visit, and maybe some day I’ll buy one,” I said.
“Someone get shot?”
“Not recently.”
“I could arrange it if you get bored. If I say the word, someone usually gets shot in this here drinkin’ parlor.”
He peered up at me. He needed to trim the stubble on his chin, and maybe put on a new shirt, and maybe trade in that grimy bartender’s apron for something that looked halfway washed.
“Tell me again what you told the court,” I said.
“How many times we been through that, Sheriff? I’m tired of talking about it to people got wax in their ears.”
“All right, pour me one.”
“I knew you’d see it my way, Cotton.”
The keep slid off the bar, examined a glass in the dim light, decided it wasn’t no dirtier than the rest, and poured some red-eye in. The cheapskate poured about half a shot. I dug around in my britches for a dime and handed it to him.
“I owe you a nickel,” I said. “Start with King Bragg coming in that night.”
He didn’t mind, or pretended he didn’t.
“Oh, he come in here, and he was already loaded up. I could see by how he weaved when he walked.”
“Why’d you serve him?”
“I make my living by quarters and dimes and nickels, damn you, and I’d serve a stumbling drunk if he had the right change. Hell, I’d even serve you, Cotton, even if it made my belly crawl. Just lay the change down, and I’ll take it, and that’s the whole story.”
“You sure are touchy. How come?”
“I’ll be just as touchy as I feel like, and I’m tired of telling you the story over and over. I ain’t gonna tell it to you no more. You heard it, you’ve tried to pick it apart, and you can’t. Now finish up and get out. I don’t want you in this place. It’s bad for business.”
Upward was polishin’ the bar so hard it was pulling the varnish off.
But I wasn’t quitting. “What did King Bragg say to them T-Bar cowboys?”
“He said—oh, go to hell.”
“That what he said?”
“No, that’s what I’m telling you. I’m done yakking.”
“How many T-Bar cowboys was in here?”
“I don’t know. Just a few.”
“Was Crayfish with the boys?”
“I don’t remember. You want another drink? Fifteen cents on the barrelhead.”
The man I was talkin’ about owned the T-Bar, a few other ranches, and wanted Admiral Bragg’s outfit too, just so he could piss on any tree in the county and call it his. His name was Crayfish Ruble. I don’t know about that
