Duff chuckled. “Every time Skye saw a meteor, she would say that it was the soul of some departed loved one saying hello. I laughed at her then, but find some comfort from it now. She spoke to me many times while I was sea.”
Duff almost told of hearing her voice in the wind and seeing her eyes in the fluorescent flash of fish, but he knew that Falcon wouldn’t understand. Every time it happened, he had passed it off. But now he wondered—could it be true? Could it have actually been Skye, speaking to him? Was that golden streak across the sky Skye? Or was it merely a dead rock falling to earth from outer space?
“I guess you think that is crazy,” Duff said.
“No, I don’t. Not at all,” Falcon replied, his answer surprising Duff. “The Indians have a much better connection to nature than the White man. And Indians believe, strongly, in such signs. And I know better than to question them.”
The two men sat in silence for several minutes, though it was hardly silent around them. Night insects whirred and clicked, in a nearby pond frogs croaked and sang, and in the distance a coyote howled. The windmill answered a freshening breeze and the blades began to spin. The leaves of the nearby aspen trees caught the moonbeams and sent slivers of silver into the night.
There was no need for the two men to talk any further; they had already shared with each other their pasts, or enough of what they thought was important. They had taken the measure of each other, and had found it acceptable and reassuring. Now they could sit confidently in each other’s presence, content in their own musings and comfortable in the developing friendship that went beyond the remote familial connections. And yet, though the blood they shared of the original Falcon, great-great-great-great-grandfather to both was small indeed, that seed of kinship was still there.
“I wonder if he is looking down at us now,” Duff said. He purposely did not identify the “he” he was talking about.
“I expect he is,” Falcon said. “I have thought many times about the fact that I have his name. I hope he is proud of that. I know he is looking down now and proud that two of his grandsons, though so far separated by distance and time, have come together.”
Falcon knew exactly what Duff had meant. And Duff wasn’t in the least surprised.
Chapter Fifteen
Denver
If the outside of The Black Dog had been rudimentary, the inside was even more so. Whereas the bar at Aces and Eights had been polished mahogany with a brass foot rail and customer towels hanging from rings spaced no more than five feet apart on the front of the bar, the bar of The Black Dog had no such amenities. It was made of the same kind of wood as the rest of the saloon: wide, unpainted and weathered boards, filled with knotholes and other visible imperfections.
There was no mirror behind the bar to reflect the many varieties of whiskeys, tequila, wines, and aperitifs. There were no bottles of any kind visible, for the bar served only one kind of whiskey and one kind of beer. There were no brass spittoons, though there was a bucket sitting at each end of the bar. Perhaps half of the tobacco chewers and snuff users took advantage of the buckets. The rest spat upon the floor, and the floor was filled with old expectorated tobacco quids and stained with squirted snuff juice.
A bar girl came over to greet them, her smile showing a mouth of broken and missing teeth.
“Would you gentlemen like some company?” the girl asked.
“If I wanted some company, I would pick someone better lookin’ than you,” Shaw said.
“Honey, if that’s the case, you are going to have to go somewhere else, ’cause there ain’t no one better lookin’ than me in the Black Dog,” the girl said. She turned and walked away from them.
“This place is a disgrace,” Malcolm said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.
“What does that mean?”
“It means it is a disgrace to pubs and taverns the world over.”
“Yeah, well, maybe so. But this here is the kind of place we’re goin’ to find the men we’re a’ lookin’ for,” Shaw said.
Even as the two men were taking their seats at an empty table, a drama was playing out before them. It had started before Malcolm and Shaw had entered the saloon.
“I don’t want any trouble with you, Pogue,” a man, standing at the bar said. The speaker was a big man with wide shoulders, powerful arms, and big hands. His appearance was in direct contrast to the person he was addressing, a man he had called Pogue.
Pogue was slender of build, with long hair, a thin face, and a badly misshapen nose. The nose was more than misshapen, it was flat on his face, and turned up at the bottom with nostril openings so pronounced that they almost looked like a pig’s snout.
“Well, you got trouble with me, Gentry,” Pogue replied. Snorted would be a better way of saying it, for the words came out in a wheezing, grunting sound. “You should’a never butted in between me’n my whore.”
“She ain’t your whore, Pogue, she’s anybody’s whore who will pay her. Hell, as ugly as you are, Pogue, you should already know that. The only way you’ll ever get a woman to pay any attention to you is by payin’ them,” Gentry said.
“If I’m the one payin’ the whore, then that means she’s my whore.”
“Yeah, that’s the whole point. You hadn’t paid her nothin’ yet. That means she don’t belong to you, and if I want to talk to her I can.”
“Stop it, both of you,” a nearby bar girl said. “I don’t belong to either one of you.”
“You stay out of this,” Pogue said to her. He turned his attention back to Gentry. “I reckon there’s only one way me’n you’s goin’ to settle this.” Pogue smiled, though the smile did nothing to alleviate the repulsiveness of his features. “We’re goin’ to have to fight it out.”
“Fight it out?” Gentry laughed. “Pogue, you don’t want to fight me. You’re so scrawny and weak, I’d near ’bout break you into little pieces first time I hit you.”
“Oh, I ain’t talkin’ about that kind of fightin’,” Pogue said. “I’m talkin’ ’bout makin’ this here fight permanent. I’m going to give you the chance to draw ag’in me.”
“Don’t be a dumb fool. I ain’t gettin’ into a fight over a whore. Like I told you, I don’t want no trouble.”
“And like I told you, you already got trouble. Now I’m tellin’ you, again, to draw.”
Gentry turned toward Pogue. He was holding a glass of whiskey in his hand.
“Go away, little man, before I come over there and break your neck.” Suddenly Pogue pulled his pistol and fired. A little mist of blood sprayed from Gentry’s earlobe, and he dropped the glass, then slapped his right hand to his ear.
“What the hell? Are you crazy?”
Pogue put his pistol back in his holster as quickly as he had drawn it.
“Draw,” Pogue said again.
“I ain’t a’ goin’ to draw ag’in you.”
Again, Pogue drew and fired. This time he clipped Gentry’s left ear. Gentry let out a cry of pain and slapped his hand to his left ear.
“Next time it will be a kneecap,” Pogue said.
With a yell of rage and fear, Gentry made an awkward stab for his pistol. With the macabre smile never leaving his face, Pogue waited until Gentry made his draw and even let him raise his gun.
For just an instant, Gentry thought he had won, and the scream of rage and fear turned to one of rage and triumph. He tried to thumb back the hammer of his pistol, but his hand was slick with his own blood, and the thumb slipped off the hammer. He didn’t get a second try because by then Pogue had drawn his own pistol and fired.
As the bullet plowed into Gentry’s chest, he got an expression of surprise on his face. Then his eyes rolled up and he fell, dead before he hit the floor.
“You killed him!” the bar girl Gentry and Pogue had been arguing over shouted.