“Come bringin no damn poison snake in here,” the bartender said. He was a squat solid man in striped shirtsleeves and apron, a thick handlebar mustache under his nose and curling downward over his mouth. “Now pick up that shitty quiverin thing,” he said, “and get it the hell out of here.”
On the bartop, the snake’s head lay motionless, but the other two severed parts were still wiggling and jumping. Hadley looked down at all three parts, and then reached across the bar and seized the bartender by the front of his shirt. The bartender’s apron was flecked with the rattler’s blood, the bloodstained cleaver was still in his hand. As Bobbo moved quickly forward, the bartender raised the cleaver over his head, and Bobbo’s heart lurched into his throat.
Hadley said, “What!”
There was indignation enough in his voice to have stopped a stampeding herd of cattle, no less a mere barkeep with a cleaver in his fist Bobbo knew that voice well. It had dogged him all the years of his youth; he had heard it razoring across mountaintops and meadows, gullies and gulches. It was the voice of Hadley Chisholm himself, whose ancestors had fought widcairns in Ireland, that could cut you dead to the ground with the icy edge of it, sharper than the blade on the cleaver in the bartender’s hand. That cleaver hesitated somewhere behind the man’s ear now. His eyes went wide, the brows shooting up in arcs that echoed the arc of his handlebar mustache.
“You dare to raise a weapon?” Hadley asked.
The cleaver still hung there undecided. The bartender felt he’d rightly and justly slain a wild creature placed on his bartop for no reason he could fathom. He’d reflexively reached under the bar for the cleaver and snick-snack, there went the head, and there went the body neatly cut in two. He wasn’t in the habit of having his shirt front gathered in a stranger’s hand. He was, in fact, widely reputed for his vile disposition and the meanness with which he wielded the cleaver he kept under the bar. But he held back the cleaver now, and stared into Hadley’s indignant blue eyes, and hesitated. He wasn’t afraid of the man, he certainly wasn’t afraid of him — but there was something told him to belay separating his head from his body as he’d done the snake’s.
“Put that cleaver down,” Hadley said. “Do it now.”
Across the room came another one, broader and taller but unmistakably kin, with the same blue eyes and fierce look could cut a man down like a scythe through wheat. The bartender decided to drop the cleaver after all. He let it fall from his hand to the floor behind him, and immediately wondered who was going to clean up the mess on his goddamn bar.
“You all right, Pa?” Bobbo asked.
“Aye,” Hadley said. “Join me, son. This man here was about to set out whiskey for us.” He looked into the bartender’s face, and then released his shirt front. A round of applause went up from the gathered customers, initiated by a man sitting at a table against the wall. There was a framed portrait of President Tyler over the table. Two small United States flags were crossed over it.
“Pa,” Bobbo said, “I met some men while I was getting my hair cut, they told me...”
His father wasn’t listening. He was staring instead at the man who sat under the portrait of President Tyler. The man was still applauding though everyone else in the bar had already stopped. He wore a flat black hat and wire-rimmed spectacles. His beard was the color of rust on a rain barrel’s rim, big red bushy thing that sprang from his cheeks and his chin and seemed to grow wild into his eyebrows. Sitting at the table with him was an Indian woman. Still clapping, the man got up and walked to where Hadley was waiting for the whiskey to be set out. Applauding him face to face, grinning in his beard, he said. “Bravo, sir, well done,” and extended his hand. “Timothy Oates,” he said.
“Hadley Chisholm,” Hadley said, and took the offered hand.
“Bobbo Chisholm,” Bobbo said and also shook hands with the man.
“Have a drink with us, won’t you?” Hadley said, and poured whiskey from the bottle the bartender had set on the bartop. The bartender was scowling. “I was fixin to turn the critter loose,” Hadley told him. “You had no cause to cut him up that way.”
“You did turn him loose,” the bartender said.
“He got out the sack, that wasn’t no fault of mine.”
“Carryin a damn poison snake in a bar,” the bartender said.
“Have a drink with us,” Hadley said, and grinned.
“Who’s paying for this?” the bartender asked, pouring himself a whiskey glass full.
“You ruined a perfectly good snake, didn’t you?” Hadley said.
“What’s that mean?” the bartender asked. “Ain’t a snake on earth worth a pile of rabbit shit.”
“This one was a pet,” Hadley said, and winked at his son.
“Well, you can find yourself another pet just beyond town. Hundreds of them out there. Sometimes they come wiggling right up the street.”
“Better not come in here,” Hadley said. “There’s a man in here’ll chop em up like green beans.”
The bartender smiled through his scowl.
“Drink hearty,” Hadley said, and raised his glass.
“Pa,” Bobbo said, “these men I talked to are fixin—”
“You live hereabouts?” Hadley asked the bearded man, and Bobbo sighed. There were times he wanted to yell his father down, same way he would anybody else was irritating him. Wouldn’t, of course; had too much respect for him. But here he was busting to tell what he’d learned, and he had to keep quiet instead till the head of the family ran out of steam. Times like this, when his father treated him like he was still in rompers, he felt like a big awkward dummy. Everybody always thought of him as dumb anyway. Was being seventeen did it Having pimples.
His father and Timothy Oates had told each other where they were from, and now they were telling each other where they were bound. Bobbo waited patiently for a break in the conversation, but it didn’t look like one’d be coming before Christmas.
“... have already left, you know,” Timothy said. “Most of them anyway. There’re some strays like yourself still coming in, though, and I’m hoping to join up with whatever kind of train can be put together.”
“Then you’re bound for California, too.”
“Not so far as that,” Timothy said. “I’m going only to the Coast of Nebraska, to take my wife home before her heart breaks.” He gestured with his head toward where the Indian woman sat under the portrait of President Tyler. “She’s Pawnee,” he said, “and far from home.”
Bobbo looked across the room.
The woman’s face was large and massive, thick black hair pulled tightly to the back of her head and braided there on either side. She was wearing a worn and greasy two-piece garment, skirt and cape of elkskin hide ornamented with porcupine quills, many of which had fallen loose. Hadley was looking at her, too, over the top of his glass. Bobbo leaped into the momentary silence.
“I’ve found some others as well,” he said in a rush. “Two families headin west, Pa. A carpenter from Baltimore with his wife and three children, and a man from—”
“We don’t need young’uns underfoot, thank you,” Hadley said.
“The sons are thirteen and fourteen; they can pull their own weight.”
“Which means the third one’s a daughter, eh?”
“Well...”
“Ain’t she?”
“She’s an infant in her mother’s arms,” Bobbo admitted. “But, Pa—”