Westerns

Shawn helled into town along about sundown, put his strawberry roan apaloosa gelding at the Dirty Dog rack, and called for a double whisky while the honkatonkery’s batwings were still squeaking on their ancient hinges.

Taking a neatly folded square of paper from his breast pocket, he reread it.

“How many times is that you’ve reread that note from your bedridden father, calling for help?” the barkeep ingratiated, forgetting his baldness for the moment and wiping the bar again.

“Will you quit wipin’ that bar?” the edgy young gun-exile grated, nerve ends of irritation playing along one jaw muscle like summer lightning in the Tetons. “It’s the hundredth time I’ve reread it,” he added a moment later.

“What did your father do, Denny, call you back to home range, after you’d been sowing your wild oats south of the border for two long years?” the ‘keep inquired mildly.

“That’s right,” young Shawn said.

Then he saw Rio Reeter. He had a mouthful of double whisky, and he blew it all over the rheumatic, silver-thatched muleskinner who was latched onto the bar beside him.

“Who is that?” he demanded of the bartender, eyes bugging.

The apron wiped the bar before he replied.

“That’s Judge Reeter’s daughter, Rio,” the barrie supplied mildly. “She’s been singin’ here ever sence she went had. She’s a lovely percentage girl now.”

“Oh no you don’t.” The voice had come from behind young Denny Shawn, and an icy finger ran up his spine and a drop of cold sweat slithered down his side from his armpit and his palms felt clammy and there was a tightness in his chest and a taste in his mouth like the red plush upholstery of a smoking car.

The ‘keep said, “That’s young Matt Matthews behind you, Denny, come home to side his kin against the cattle barons. He’s been in love with Miss Reeter ever sence he was knee-high.”

The young newcomer kept his long-muzzled Colt .45 leveled on young Denny Shawn’s back while with his free hand he fished a sack of Durham out of his breast pocket and pulled the drawstring on it with strong white teeth. One of his eyes was a sliver of steel and the other was a chip of ice.

“I’ll be walking around town at sundown,” young Matt grated, building a quirley with the educated fingers of his free hand and tacking it to his lip, oblivious of the loose ends of tobacco.

“It’s sundown now,” young Denny said back over his shoulder.

“All right, sundown tomorrow night then.”

“How ‘bout sundown the following night, ‘cause I’m figurin’ on walkin’ around town tomorrow night with young Dode Barker.”

“What, is he back already? I thought young Dode had a rendezvous with death at railhead.”

“He received a telegram calling for help before he had made it halfway out of the county. I saw him last night rereading it for the hundredth time.”

“No kiddin’.”

“Billy!” the balding barkeeper greeted, beaming at the tall, slimwaisted young cowpoke who at that moment had stepped grinning through a rear window, both hands filled with Smith and Wesson ,38s.

“Received a message up in Donner Pass where I was winterkilling my last gather of white-faced longhorns,” the young newcomer supplied.

“What was it, a call for help?” the middle-aged apron inquired, his grin changing to a frown.

“Wow, catch that decolletage!” young Billy rumbled, his blue eyes having lighted on Rio Reeter’s full breasts and having noticed the manner in which they were struggling against the scant material of their confining vestments. (The son of a wealthy cattleman, Billy Carter had been East to college and was planning to sow his wild oats any day now.)

With the muzzle of one of his irons, he poked the brim of his creamcolored Stetson, to tip it back off an unruly shock of curly blond hair, revealing that he was a towhead.

“I’m callin’ yore hand, fella!” young Matt Matthews barked at young Billy. “Fill yore fist!”

“Both of his fists are already filled,” the balding apron supplied warningly.

“Why don’t you walk around town tomorrow at sundown?” young Denny Shawn suggested.

Young Matt whirled on him. “You know I’m all filled up until next Thursday!”

“What’s wrong with high noon then?” young Carter insinuated coolly.

The sun was directly overhead, the following day, when the kid rode in and stepped down at the livery.

“Grain him and then give him a good rubdown with old burlap potato sacks,” he said, handing the reins of his animal, or mount, to the silver-thatched hostler. “He’s a blown horse.”

The leathery-skinned old-timer ran experienced, gnarled finger tips along the sweat-soaked sorrel’s fibula.

“He’s foam-flecked, too,” the graybeard mused, his mind seeming suddenly to be far off with some distant memory — perhaps of fond Indian wars, or of two thousand head of longhorn cattle stampeding and plunging over a two-thousand-foot drop-off to their deaths. On the rocks below.

The kid high-heeled it for fifty feet along the boardwalk, then crossed diagonally to The Silver Queen, which was directly opposite The Devil’s Dream, after which two very popular Ward’s Cakes were named in later years. The dust in the street was an inch deep.

“You can’t hardly set foot in one of these trail-town main streets without the inch-deep dust spurting up in little puffs around your boot heels,” the kid muttered half aloud, half to himself. He also noted instinctively that the street was deserted.

And then it happened. One moment the only sound along the street was the raspy buzz of a bottle fly against the dirty Wells Fargo office window, the next moment the town was exploding in gun flame. The kid’s first realization of this came when he felt his nostrils contract against the acrid odor of powdersmoke. The next thing he knew he was down in the inch-deep dust, with ten bullets in his shoulder.

“You could have took three or four bullets in your shoulder, but no man can walk away from ten,” the medico said when the kid came to a half hour later, starting to draw a sheet over the prone youngster.

“What happened, doc?” the kid husked, momentarily staying the impatient sawbones’ professional gesture.

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” the medico explained: “There were just too many of you trigger-itchy kids walking around the town at the same time. The whole trouble was, fourteen of you from this area, actual count, had all received a call for help at the same time, a letter or a telegram or a message pleading with you to come back at once from wherever you were sowing your wild oats, there was trouble on the home range, bad trouble.”

“What happened to young Shawn and young Matthews and young Barker and young Carter, doc?”

The medico raised bushy eyebrows. “I didn’t know you knew them, son.”

“I didn’t, but the reader will want to know.”

“Dead. All dead.”

“Too many bullets in the shoulders?”

The kindly sawbones nodded. Then he said, “But you’d best tell me your name, son, or otherwise we’ll have to bury you in an unmarked grave.”

Unfortunately, though, a froth was already forming on the kid’s lips. The medico completed covering what had been little more than a boy, then on second thought reached down and lifted a corner of the sheet.

“Well, he died with his boots on, anyway,” the silver-thatched sawbones intoned.