In an empty restaurant a Chinese sprawled across a table, fast asleep. A barber next door trimmed industriously while a long row of men waited for the shears. Two men sat, hiked back in tilted chairs, in front of the livery stable. Just beyond stood a two-story structure, the word “Hotel” painted in a sprawl across one lighted window.
Packard pulled up at the stable, swung himself from the saddle. One of the men thumped down on his chair, clumped forward, picking his teeth with a stem of hay.
“Do somethin’ for you, stranger?”
“Got any grain for the horse?” asked Packard. “He’s been on the go all day.”
The man shook his head. “Nothin’ but hay. Good stuff, though. Can’t get no grain freighted in. Costs too much.”
Packard nodded, remembering the trail that he had covered. Freight would be costly along a road like that.
“If you come all the way from Devil’s Slide,” said the man, “you know what I mean.”
Packard smiled tightly. He recognized the words as a way to ask a question in a country where questions were something one simply did not ask.
“No harm in saying I came from Devil’s Slide, is there?” asked Packard.
The man scratched his chin with dirty fingernails. “Can’t say as there is, stranger. Didn’t happen to see anyone along the way, did you?”
“Aw, hell, Clint,” said the man still tilted against the stable, “he wouldn’t see anyone. The Canyon gang don’t bother with nothin’ except stagecoaches plumb weighed down with dust.”
“Only man I saw,” Packard told them, “was hanging in that old cottonwood just outside of town.”
“Oh, him,” said Clint. “He was a hombre who wandered in a couple weeks ago. The vigilantes got him.”
“Vigilantes?”
“Damn tootin’,” declared Clint. “This here town is plumb going to get civilized or bust a lung tryin’. Been too much hell-raisin’ to suit the citizens.”
“Shoot someone?” asked Packard.
The man tilted against the stable supplied the answer. “Yeah, he killed someone all right. One of the guards down at the express office.”
Packard nodded. “I see. Trying to stick up the place.”
“Hell no,” said the man. “Just met him on the street in broad daylight and let him have it. Never gave no reason.”
“Funny thing,” said Packard.
“Ain’t it,” the man agreed.
“Must of knowed him somewhere else,” Clint opined. “Maybe been followin’ him.”
The stable man moved away, leading the horse inside the barn.
“If you want to wash up,” said the other man, “the horse trough is out in back.”
Packard smiled. “Maybe I will,” he said.
“Crystal Palace is the only bar in town,” said the man, “and that place next door is the only hotel. If you don’t go for hotels, Clint can fix you up a place where you can spread your blanket.”
“Thanks,” said Packard.
A man shuffled off the board sidewalk and moved through the darkness toward them. He was a small man, Packard saw, and he wore a checkered suit of black and white. A gold watch chain glittered across his vest.
His cheeks were puffed out like a gopher’s scurrying home with a load of grain and his lips were puffed out, too, in what seemed an eternal pout. A jaunty mustache rode his upper lip and struck a grotesque note.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” said the little man.
“Good evening,” said the man in the chair.
“I’m looking for my eye,” said the man. “You haven’t seen it, have you?”
The chair crashed forward and the man in it was aghast.
“You’re looking for your what!”
“My eye,” explained the little man. “It fell out and I lost it.”
He pointed toward the left side of his face, out of which stared an empty socket.
“It was a glass eye, you see,” he said. “It would look something like a marble.”
The man in the chair wheezed in bewilderment.
“No, I haven’t seen it. What makes you think you lost it here?”
“Don’t know where I lost it,” explained the little man. “Got drunk, you see, and when I sobered up it wasn’t there.”
“Oh, I see.”
“It might be most anywhere,” said the little man.
“I’ll keep a watch for it,” the man in the chair promised.
“I wish you would,” the other told him. “I feel undressed without it.” He turned and shuffled off, head bent, as if looking for the eye.
The man in the chair looked up at Packard.
“We get the damndest people here,” he apologized.
Packard stood with his elbows on the bar, nursing his drink and staring in the mirror.
The Crystal Palace roared with life. Through the buzz of voices came the clink of glasses, the whir of gambling wheels, occasionally the soft snick of chips from the poker tables in the back. In one corner an old man with a violin and a younger one with an accordion teamed with the out-of-tune piano, fought a losing battle with the throaty rumble that ran through the place.
So Preston Cardway had shot an express company guard and been hung by the vigilantes, his body left dangling in the tree as a sort of grim warning for any who might come riding down the trail!
Well, it was something anyhow, Packard told himself, staring at the bottle-stacked mirror, to have that kind of warning. Even if Cardway had to die to give it. Cardway, the damn fool, going off half-cocked and shooting down a man. Although he hardly could be blamed for thinking he could get away with it. In his day, Cardway had shot down many men in the main streets of many towns in broad daylight and gotten away with it. What reason could he have had to think it would be any different here?
Only there was something wrong. Something that didn’t click somehow. Hangman’s Gulch didn’t seem the kind of town that was cleaning up, not the kind of place where vigilantes rode to bring law and order.
For one thing, Hangman’s Gulch wasn’t old enough. It still was new and raw, a boom town scarcely dry behind the ears. There was too much yip and ki-yi in it. Towns don’t get civic conscious, Packard told himself, until the shiny newness is worn off of them.
A man elbowed his way through the throng, thrust himself alongside Packard. In the mirror, Packard studied him. A man with a white collar and a black cravat in which a diamond stickpin gleamed, the tie bunched above a fawn-colored vest that sported a slender chain with a dangling golden toothpick.
The man’s mouth moved. “A stranger, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” said Packard, talking to the reflection in the mirror rather than the man himself. “Just rolled in tonight.”
“My name,” said the man, “is Jason Randall. Owner of this place. Saw you here. Wanted to tell you that you’re welcome.”
“Mine is Packard,” Packard told him. “Stanley Packard. Just riding through.”
“Thought maybe you might stick around,” said Randall. “Lots of people do. Hangman’s Gulch is a good town. Won’t find none better between here and the coast.”
Packard studied the man with open interest. A slick customer, he figured. Ruthless and mean. Glossy and soft like a spider squatting in his web.
Randall’s eyes shifted away from Packard’s, stared beyond his shoulder. Packard swung around. A man stood just inside the swinging doors. A tall, straight man who didn’t wear a gun, a man whose silver hair was brushed back from his forehead like a gleaming crown of light, shining in the crystal lamps swaying from the ceiling. His head was high and he looked at the smoke-dimmed crowd with something that was close to pity on his face.