"You don't recall?"
"I remember a queen-high straight flush to Hatchet's full house. Then a shot. Maybe two. And a lamp blown out. Nothing else."
"You didn't shoot nobody?"
"I might have. It went by like a dream."
"Ain't that the truth?" Large Marge said. "Lately I come to see life like that, one damn dream after another."
Large Marge sighed and looked out across the harbor, where the last strip of fog was drifting over the horizon.
"When I heard the shots, I took my time comin' downstairs. No sense gettin' myself killed over a card game. Everything was dark when I come in the room. One of the floozies was kneelin' behind the bar havin' a fit. When I asked about you, she said you and Hatchet Jack had yourselves a shoot-out. No one had a clear picture about what went down. The barman said Hatchet shot that bow-legged man comin' for the reward, and then someone shot you as you followed Hatchet out the door, or maybe it was the other way around. One of the Ruskies said it was you that shot Hatchet, but the planer player says it was Delilah who picked a gun off the floor, plugged you, and then went after Hatchet. The whole thing happened too fast for anyone to know who was doin' what to who."
She sighed and drank a last long gulp of screech. "I always knew one day you two would go at each other. Crazy mountain lunatics. That's what you all do. Shoot each other straight to hell. Now the whole place is zippered up and everyone's spooked. Looks like you got away with it, ornery and stubborn bastard that you is."
"What about Delilah?" he asked.
"She sailed away on The Khinelander. You'd think she would have waited to see if you was dead or not, but I guess she knew all along, bein' a witch and all. Anyway, she had all that money from the poker game to pay for her passage"
Zebulon pulled the planks off the door and walked into the saloon to the billiard table, where he picked up a cue stick and knocked a few balls around, just to see if he still could.
An hour later, when he still hadn't come out of the saloon, Large Marge peered through the window There was no sign of Zebulon, and she didn't have the courage to try to find out what happened to him. The way things had been going, she suspected that she might have imagined him, and that he might not have been there at all.
She never told anyone about seeing Zebulon on the porch, preferring to keep at least one part of the legend for herself, out of old-time sentiments, if nothing else.
'HEN THE WARDEN RODE UP TO THE TRAIL'S END SALOON a week later with the Sheriff, the photographer, and a halfa-dozen soldiers, there was no sign of Zebulon. Reports of his whereabouts varied. Some said that he had gone up to Canada to the newly discovered gold strike on the Frazier River, which by all accounts promised to be the biggest in the history of the world. Others were convinced that he had returned to the high mountains of Colorado. And there was another rumor that he had set sail for the Aleutian Islands with a renegade band of Kwakiutl or Tlingit cannibals.
The Warden and his soldiers, along with the photographer and the Sheriff, rode back to San Francisco.
Large Marge, who had avoided capture by hiding in a storage shed, became the madam of the whorehouse above the Trail's End Saloon; it was a successful enterprise that was staffed almost entirely by Asians and Negro runaway slaves.
Delilah died on the Isle of Wight at the age of one-hundred and five, having lived a reclusive life translating Sufi poetry from Arabic into French and Portuguese, and growing medicinal herbs in the sanctuary of an enclosed garden. She was survived by a son, an actor and theatrical entrepreneur celebrated in most of the major capitals of Europe, as well as New York, Boston, and San Francisco.
Ten years after Delilah sailed away with Captain Dorfheimer, the photographer's portraits of Zebulon, along with a dozen landscapes of the Far West, were shown to enthusiastic acclaim in a New York gallery. The most famous portrait was bought by a French collector and showed Zebulon sitting on a billiard table in the Last Chance Saloon, staring into the camera as he cradled his dead father in his arms.
The photograph was later sold to a San Francisco museum, where it was never shown, the image having faded to such a degree that Zebulon's face had become blank.
— ie; &/
