Rudolph Wurlitzer - The Drop Edge of Yonder

"We'll need a stake," Zebulon said as they dismounted in front of the cantina.

Delilah hesitated, staring at two bearded men sitting on a bench, passing a bottle back and forth.

"The man wearing the bowler hat thinks he's seen you somewhere," she said. "Neither of them can figure out what you're doing with me, or what I'm doing with you, or if I'm for sale." She shut her eyes, her head shaking back and forth. "Bowler Hat hasn't told Yellow Rag about the nuggets he's keeping from him in his money-belt. Also, he hasn't heard from his wife in over a year. Mostly because she left him for someone else."

He looked at her as if she was mad.

"Lately I've become second-sighted," she said. "The way I was when I was a child."

As they walked towards the cantina, Bowler Hat leaned over and spat tobacco juice on Zebulon's boot.

"Ay know ye, dun' I?" he asked with a thick Scottish accent. "Ye be a bad un on the run."

"Bad enough to handle the likes of you," Zebulon said.

Bowler Hat stared at Zebulon with narrowed oily eyes. "Are ye makin' foon a' me? 'Cause if ya are, ya gaunna suffer."

Zebulon removed the man's bowler hat and stepped on it, grinding it into the dirt. "Ask your friend why he's hiding the nuggets he owes you. They're inside his belt. And forget about your wife. She's run off with someone else."

As they entered the cantina, they heard shouts, followed by a shot.

The smoke-filled room was loud and brimming with the usual collection of prospectors and whores. In the back, a rangy towheaded farmer and a tall cadaverous man in a shiny black suit were shooting billiards.

"The one in the black suit is known as the Undertaker," Delilah said. "He's the one with money and the one you have to watch out for."

The Undertaker sliced his cue ball off two balls, and then another, not looking up as the farmer staggered towards the door.

"Game?" Zebulon asked.

"Your funeral," the Undertaker replied.

Zebulon put his last twenty dollars on the table, then won three straight games before he missed.

As the Undertaker bent over the table, Delilah sat down on a chair, staring at him and silently moving her lips.

Halfway into his shot, he stopped to look at her with eyes as cold and white as the cue ball.

"Don't stare," he demanded, then looked at Zebulon. "Tell your whore to turn her back when I'm lining up a shot, or I'll have her thrown out."

"She sits her own horse," Zebulon replied. "Nothin' me or anyone else can do about it."

"I'll second that," Hatchet Jack said as he walked up to the table, looking prosperous in a black three-piece suit, a narrowbrimmed hat with a braided horse-hair band, and a stringed tie. "If you let the witch break your stride, you're done for. You'll have to take up dominoes."

He sat down next to Delilah. "Go ahead. Take your shot. I'll keep things under control."

The Undertaker twisted both ends of his mustache, then slicked back his hair and slammed his stick into the cue hall, sending it ricocheting around three sides of the table before it nudged a ball into a side pocket.

They played two more games, the Undertaker winning all of them.

"Now you're done," the Undertaker said to Zebulon as he took the twenty dollars.

"Not just yet," Hatchet Jack replied. "The meal ain't over."

He dropped Delilah's gold and ruby necklace on the side of the billiard table. "One game. Your whole stake against the choker."

The Undertaker slid the necklace through his long bony fingers. When he realized that it was probably worth more than he had won in the last five years, he dropped thirty gold eagles on the table.

"Not near enough," Hatchet Jack said, "considering that this choker belonged to the Czar of Russia's cousin and before her, the Queen of Sheba."

The Undertaker dropped twenty gold eagles on the table.

"All right," Hatchet Jack said, clapping his hands and walking back and forth as if he intended to rearrange all the energies in the room.

"Sit or I'll walk," the Undertaker said.

Hatchet Jack sat, then stood up, staring at Delilah, until she gestured for him to sit down.

All of the Undertaker's considerable experience told him that he was being set up and that he should quit while he was ahead. The only problem was the necklace. Once he had it, his life would never be the same.

He took a deep breath and bent over the table as side bets flew around the room.

"You know why they call him the Undertaker?" Hatchet Jack asked the crowd as the Undertaker sank the first five balls. "Because he's five feet under, goin' on six."

"Under! Under!" Delilah mumbled. "Who will bury the Undertaker when the Undertaker goes under?"

When the Undertaker's shot missed by less than a hair, Zebulon ran the rest of the points as easily as if he was playing a game that didn't matter.

"You set me up," the Undertaker said. "All three of you."

He picked up the gold eagles, then took out a pepperbox pistol from his vest pocket.

Before he could pull the trigger, Zebulon slammed his cue stick on the Undertaker's wrist, then over the back of his head, knocking him out.

He picked up the necklace, the Undertaker's pistol, and his fifty gold eagles, half of which he gave to Hatchet Jack, who ordered a round of wall-to-wall drinks for the room. Then all three sat down at a table and ordered a big sloppy meal of chicken mole and corn bread.

After they finished eating, Hatchet Jack removed a foldedup strip of newspaper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Delilah, who read it out loud:

"And here among us was a living example of the Wild West! He was a man of the wilderness untrammeled by civilized constraints, primitive and unschooled in society, but spontaneous and generous in his conversation and behavior. The questions we asked! And the answers that we received as Zebulon Shook regaled us with his astonishing tales of the Colorado mountains and the vast southwestern deserts and the gold fields of California!

"Imagine our surprise when we learned that Zebulon Shook was not only a famous outlaw wanted for murder, bank robbery, and horse theft with a price on his head, but that he was also a revolutionary sought by the Mexican government. After that, every passenger kept his cabin well locked.

"The entire ship was relieved when he was ushered off at a small fishing town several hundred miles from the Spanish port of Cartagena. As he stood looking back at us from a forbidding shore surrounded by dense jungle, there were few among us who believed we had seen the last of — "

Before she could finish, Zebulon reached over and tore the paper into small pieces, then slowly dropped the pieces one by one on the floor.

"Speakin' of breezy winds," Hatchet Jack said. "I ran into your Pa a month ago. He made a big strike on the Eel, then blew it all playin' stud poker."

"Where is he now?" Zebulon asked.

"Last I saw, passed out in the back of a feed store in Silver City. When I told him about you bein' in the newspaper and bein' wanted, dead or alive, he wanted to hunt you down and cut out your liver. `A Shook should never be in no newspaper.' Those were his words. He didn't mind the outlaw part. It was you bein' a lyin' pecker-headed lunatic that rattled his pan. 'Course me bein' the one that told him didn't help. I offered him a horse to square things up, but he turned me down. Said he preferred me to owe him rather than accept an old rim-rocker just to square a debt he didn't want to settle."

Zebulon took the gold and ruby necklace out of his pocket and fastened it around Delilah's neck. "If you wait long enough things come around."

"And then around again," she said.

"Hold on," Hatchet Jack said. "I took that choker off two pilgrims in San Francisco who tried to rob me when I crawled into their shack to get out of the rain. By rights it's mine, considerin' I had to shoot both of 'em to get it.,