Caleb turned and looked at Sally. Her large eyes were glassy. “Sit down, Sally. Get a hold of yourself. I’m awfully sorry. It shouldn’t have happened in here.”
A rush of color came back into the girl’s cheeks as she turned to Caleb. “Is he dead?” Caleb looked down at the stunned Texan and shook his head. Sally let a long, pent-up gust of air out of her lungs. “Caleb Doom”—the violet eyes were snapping angrily with released tension and relief—“you’ve hurt that man badly. You ought to be ashamed, Caleb. You had no right…. ”
Caleb was halfway up the plank sidewalk toward his room at the Lincoln House, before the voice finally died away behind him. He was amused at Sally’s reaction and irritated at the overbearing arrogance of the Texan, and, when his mind reviewed the happenings of the day, he felt foreboding over what the future held. If all the drovers with the Texas herd were of the same stripe, there would be no way to avoid trouble. The hotel was dark when Caleb went up to his room. The bed felt good, and, until he sank down into it with a comfortable sigh, he had had no idea how tired he was.
When Caleb awoke, it was to find a pair of worried, squinted blue eyes, faded and anxious, bending over him. “Come on. Hell, ya can’t sleep all day.”
“No? Jack, you don’t know me, once I’m in one of these manmade beds.” He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for his boots and britches with a prodigious yawn. “You get run off the ranch this morning? Hell, it’s twenty miles from your place on the Verde to Lodgepole. You must’ve gotten astride before sunup.”
Britt rolled a lumpy cigarette while he waited for Caleb to finish his toilet. His voice drowned out the splashing of the scout at the commode set on the marble-topped dresser. “Well, dammit all, I didn’t allow I’d have to come to town till later, but some of the Box J boys come by last night, pretty late, an’ tol’ me that some firebrand laid out the foreman of the Texans in Sally Tate’s café.” He popped the cigarette into his mouth having lit it with an angry gesture. Through a cloud of grayish smoke, his voice was edgy and harsh. “As if trouble ain’t comin’ fast enough, some damned fool has to beat hell outen the ramrod of that trail herd, makin’ trouble a certainty now. Oh, Lord, sometimes I wished I’d never seen this burned-out corner of hell.”
Caleb cocked his head a little as he held up the worn towel to dry his face. “Ain’t that rain, Jack?”
“Sure it’s rain. Been rainin’ off an’ on all night. Well”—the hard lines softened a little—“that’s one blessing, anyway. Now the grass’ll come back.”
Doom rubbed himself musingly. “Jack, that Texas gunman came into Sally’s lookin’ for trouble. I’m the one that downed him.”
Britt looked up incredulously. “You?”
“Yep. He didn’t leave me any choice.”
Britt groaned and took a deep draw on the quirly in his hand. “Well, I know you ain’t a troublemaker, so he more’n likely got just what he was after. But it sure clinches things.”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“Did you say he was a gunman?”
“I reckon. Anyway, he had two tied-down guns an’ that look about him, if you know what I mean.”
Britt nodded curtly. “I know what you mean, all right. Well, let’s go down an’ get some breakfast.”
Sally glared at Caleb when she set the thick plates of fried eggs and side meat down in front of them. “Bad enough to knock him unconscious, but why did you have to leave him here for me to take care of?”
Caleb shrugged and smiled. “The way you were eatin’ into me, I figured I’d be safer with a nest of mountain lions, so I left. Did he say much after he come around?”
Sally smiled lopsidedly “Well, nothing complimentary, I can assure you. He wanted to know who you were and I told him. Also, he said he’d be back today with his crew and they were going to take over Lodgepole, as well as all the grass land they needed to run their cattle on, until their boss figured out what they were going to do about the Crows’ refusal to let them go on north.”
Jack Britt finished his breakfast, paid Sally, and got up. “Sally, I wish you’d get married.”
The girl was startled and looked up quickly. “Why, Jack?”
“Because you’re the only one I’ve every known who could make this hombre settle down.” He wagged his head solemnly at the red-faced girl and ignored Doom’s embarrassed frown. “He’ll never amount to a damn, Sally, till you take him in hand. The West is changin’, girl. Scouts an’ the like are a lost breed now. It’s goin’ to be a cowman’s West, an’, if you’ll get him shook outen those fringed suits, he’ll make his pile along with the rest o’ us.”
Caleb was smiling dourly at his old friend. He nodded at Sally with a wink. “Sure must be some-thin’ in what he says, Sally. That’s the longest speech I ever heard him make. Scouts turned cowmen sure get windy, don’t they?”
Jack growled under his breath. “Come on, Caleb. Let’s go see this here imported town marshal Lodge-pole hired a few months back. They tell me he’s a ripsnorter from down in New Mexico Territory.”
III
Marshal Holt was a hard-eyed, lean-jawed III man of middle age with a bear trap line for a mouth and an angular, spare body Tomatch. Only his thinning gray hair gave a clue to his age, and that seldom was uncovered from beneath the low-crowned, flat-brimmed hat he wore tilted slightly forward, low over his slate gray eyes. “Yeah, Britt, I heard it was comin’.” The bony shoulders rose and fell. “Well, let’er come. I’ll kill the first gunman who draws a gun in Lodgepole. That’s my job.”
Caleb studied the marshal and didn’t particularly care for what he saw. Marshal Holt was a killer, through and through. Cold, unemotional, and ruthless. Jack Britt frowned heavily. “Oh, I don’t think we gotta take any such quick action as that. Do…. ”
“Look, Britt. This here is my headache, not yours. I get paid to keep the peace, and, by Gawd, I’ll keep’er. Any o’ them Texans come into town huntin’ trouble, I’ll handle’em.”
Without a word, Caleb and Jack left Marshal Holt’s office. On the plank sidewalk outside, Jack’s smoky eyes were narrowed a little. He pulled his coat a little closer about him. The rain was starting again and its tiny fingers were cool on the back of his neck. “I’ll be damned if I like what’s comin’, Caleb. That marshal’s a gun hawk if I ever saw one. Oh, hell”—he turned up the walk toward the Long-horn Saloon—“let’s go get a drink.”
Caleb pulled the flat, stiff brim of his low-crowned hat down over his eyes. The rain didn’t bother him half as much as the brusque town marshal did. They walked among the huddled people on the sidewalk and edged into the saloon. A rancher was loudly praising the rain over a tin cup of lukewarm beer. He raised the cup with one hand, his luxurious mustache with the other, and drank with loud, gurgling sounds. There were about fifteen Lodgepole townsmen and cattlemen in the place. A sprinkling of younger cowboys, flushed and alert, were scattered through the crowd. In a far corner, a poker game was going full tilt, the players impassively smoking and ignoring the rest of the room.
“What’ll it be, gents?”
“Couple o’ beers, Sam.”
The tin cups slid before Caleb and Jack, and the bartender looked at them anxiously. “Trouble’s brewin’, boys.”