Max Collins - The Legend of Caleb York

“Always this careful?”

“Why learn the hard way?”

“That’s what I like,” she said with a chuckle. “A man who knows his mind. Now, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

He’d brought his beer along and he sipped it. “Not much to tell. Just drifting my way to California.”

A bartender delivered her a mixed drink that she hadn’t needed to request.

She asked the stranger, “What’s a hard man like you doin’ wearing such soft threads?”

He shrugged. “I like to look good.”

And he did look good to her, but the clothes had little if anything to do with it. Such a big rock-jawed man with those hard Indian angles in his face, but such beautiful eyes peering from those cautious slits, a blue the color of faded denim. This was a man. But she somehow knew that this was not a man who would raise a hand to a woman, like some she knew.

“Anyway,” he said, “if I look like a mail-order cowboy, I figure nobody will see me as a threat.”

“And just leave you alone.”

“That’s right.”

“How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

Her deadpan expression finally made him burst out laughing.

He seemed genuine as he said: “I like you, Lola.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

He waved that gently away. “Not worth knowing. Just passing through. Why make attachments?” He yawned. “Sorry.”

“Am I boring you, cowboy?”

“Anything but. I just been up a long, long time.”

“And killing dunderheads wears you out?”

He chuckled deep. “Something like that. But there’s not a room available in the hotel, I’m told.”

“Probably not. Payday hangovers gettin’ slept off.” She lifted a satin shoulder and set it down. “But I can arrange a room for you upstairs.”

He half-grinned. “Well, uh... aren’t those usually used for other than sleeping?”

“There’s neither sleeping nor the other in most of them right now. I can fix you up so you can nap awhile. And come wake you up around supper.”

“That would be very kind.”

She walked him to the rear of the saloon and up the stairs to the landing along which half-a-dozen doors waited. She unlocked one at the end and showed him into the small functional area where there wasn’t much but a brass bed and porcelain basin, though the red-and-black San Francisco-style wallpaper lent a certain mood.

“Thank you for this,” the stranger said. He sat on a chair and started taking off his boots.

She got the kerosene hurricane lamp on a small bedside table going. “I’d sleep on top of those covers, if I were you.”

“I already made that deduction, thanks.” He was in his stockinged feet now. He stood.

She came over to him. “I just want to make sure you knew you were right in what you said.”

“What did I say?”

“That this is a friendly town.”

Which called for a friendly kiss, which she got on her tiptoes and gave him.

Then he put his arm around her waist and drew her close and returned the kiss with interest.

Her breathing was heavy and halting when he finally let go of her.

He gave her a boyish grin that lit up the raw-boned face. “Just my way of saying ‘you’re welcome,’ ma’am.”

Her upper lip curled back over her teeth in an insolent smile. “My name isn’t ‘ma’am.’ It’s Lola.”

And she kissed him again, the way he had her.

Then the kerosene lamp got turned down, and in the darkness came a rustle of satin and the clunk of a belt buckle hitting the floor.

Later, at the door, she stopped to look back and asked, “Your name wouldn’t be Banion, would it?”

“Sounds like maybe you already know the answer to that.” He climbed back onto the bed and the mattress springs sang. “You mind leavin’ that key, ma’am?”

She grinned and threw it at him and left.

At her father’s request, Willa put on a navy-and-white calico dress and played hostess for the meeting of the Trinidad Citizen’s Committee at the Cullen ranch. Dutifully, she delivered smiles, gathered hats, and guided each man into the dining room, where Papa waited.

This impromptu gathering, on the afternoon after the morning of the gunfight outside the sheriff’s office, was not being held in the usual space at the rear of Harris Mercantile. That was too public — anybody might wander in and overhear the discussion.

Including the sheriff. Or any of his men, for that matter.

And what the Citizens Committee had to discuss was about as private as town business got.

Before leaving Trinidad this morning, Cullen had told Thomas Carter, the president of Trinidad Bank and Trust, to spread the word for a two o’clock get-together. And now the six men, including her father and foreman Whit Murphy, were seated around the big dining-room table, a heavy dark-wood, decoratively carved Spanish piece with matching chairs that her late mother had brought back from one of her buying trips across the border.

Willa served coffee, refilling cups, staying on the periphery as was expected of a female... but missing nothing.

Mayor Jasper Hardy, also the town barber and as such a well-groomed individual with slicked back hair and trimmed mustache, was saying, “My understanding is that this... this drifter is reluctant to give out his name. Could be he’s a wanted man.”

“Or a bounty hunter,” said slender, bug-eyed Clem Davis, who ran the apothecary, Adam’s apple making his bow tie bobble. “He knew those two, Stringer and Bradley, were wanted men, didn’t he?”

Clarence Mathers, fleshy and in his fifties, bald on top with compensating muttonchops, was a reluctant partner of the sheriff’s in the town hardware store. He said, “Could be anybody. Bounty hunter? Maybe. Former lawman? Possibly. Gunfighter? Surely. But just passing through.”

Her father was shaking his head, his hands flat on the table. “He isn’t just ‘anybody,’ Clarence. I’m telling you, my friend Parker sent him.”

“You have confirmation of this, George?”

“No.”

“Yet you’re saying this man is Banion?”

“Or someone as good or better than Banion.”

Mathers threw his hands up. “Then why in hell hasn’t he identified himself to you, George? Excuse the French, Miss Cullen.”

She smiled a little, but said nothing. She was making a round of filling coffee cups.

Her father was saying, “If he’s Banion — or some other professional gun that Parker sent in response to my instructions — he came to do a job. That didn’t require checking in with us. In fact, he could be protecting us by putting distance between himself and those who hired him.”

“ You’re who hired him, George,” the mayor reminded her father. “We didn’t approve this enterprise. And if you’d brought it to us, I’d venture to say we would have voted it down.”

The old man shrugged. “Well, it was my decision, my choice... and my money.”

Wearing a humorless smile, banker Carter was shaking his head. “In any event, it’s a moot point. This couldn’t be Banion, or anyone else your friend might have sent.”

“And just why is that, Tom?”

The banker flipped over a hand. “Simple reality. Very unlikely that any man could have made it here so fast.”

The sightless host seemed to return his friend’s gaze. “Is that so? Railroad at Las Vegas is only twenty-five miles from here. Parker could have reached Banion by wire and the man could have made it here from, hell, as far away as five hundred miles.”

“What about those last twenty-five miles?”

“He’d been riding all night!”

Whit, smirking in doubt, said, “Mr. Cullen, what about his horse ?”