The Drop Edge of Yonder. Rudolph Wurlitzer

a horse from me, or even thinks about it. And I never jacked it. It was that ferriner or one of them vaqueros or ranch hands at the billiard table. Or that breed. Hatchet Jack. Ask him. He’s in there now. I can take a loss. Hell, that’s my middle name. Lost and never found. If you don’t believe me, we might as well slap to it here and now.”

      “It’s your call,” Zebulon said. “But if you dry-shoot me, do it with your whizzle in your pants.”

      He dismounted and pushed past him into the cantina, not giving a damn one way or the other.

      “No sense to it,” the bandy-legged man said to the two whores. “The man come back from the dead. What do you want me to do, send him straight to hell again?”

      Inside the cantina the only signs of a shoot-out were dark stains on the floor, a few smashed chairs, and a blown-out window.

      Hatchet Jack was sitting at the bar, a bandage wrapped around his head.

      Zebulon shoved Hatchet Jack’s money toward the bartender, motioning for a bottle of Taos White Lightning.

      “No hat size to this town,” Hatchet Jack said. “Only thing left is to get shut of it.”

      “Who shot me?” Zebulon asked.

      “You don’t recall?” Hatchet Jack rolled a shot glass between his palms. “When I went over to the bar I heard someone, I don’t recall who, sayin’ the woman was dealin’ off the bottom—snakin’ a queen of hearts straight flush to your full house. Or maybe it was the other way around. A bunch come in the door and I was too pissed and likkered to notice. Next thing, I’m cold-cocked. When I come to, you was gone and I went upstairs and slept it off. I don’t recall the rest. Who gives a damn. We’re still on the dance floor, ain’t we? More than some.”

      “You see anything?” Zebulon asked the bartender, a squat man with a bushy mustache and wide red suspenders.

      “Not a thing,” he replied. “I was out back haulin’ likker stock. When I come in, it was all over and everyone had cleared out. I don’t remember. Hell, that was two nights ago.”

      “Anything can happen in two nights,” Hatchet Jack said. “Or one, for that matter. Or none.”

      “You been here two nights?” Zebulon asked.

      Hatchet Jack poured himself another shot. “Like I said, I was upstairs. Now everyone’s zippered up or rode off. You might have noticed I ain’t in the best of shape myself. If someone don’t try to plug you, he might settle for me. And that ain’t why I rode down here. How about it? You want to ride up to see your ma and pa? It ain’t like you got anything better to do.”

      “Tell me one last thing,” Zebulon asked. “Did you throw your loop over that bay horse in Galisteo?”

      “Hell no,” Hatchet Jack replied. “I snagged a zebra dun. The bay wasn’t worth a bag of rocks.”

      When they pushed through the swinging doors, the bandylegged man was sitting on a bench. He didn’t look up when Hatchet Jack rode down the street, followed by Zebulon riding the bandy-legged man’s horse.

      Hatchet Jack and Zebulon rode north across the high desert toward the Spanish Peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Two days later they reached the cabin, a hard little stand at the end of a steep valley, quilted halfway to the roof with drifting snow.

      Nothing much had changed. The cabin’s roof still had most of its shakes blown off, the makeshift corral hosted three starving mules, and a curl of smoke drifted up from the chimney like a lonely question mark. After they walked their horses over the ice-covered river that snaked in front of the cabin, Zebulon hollered a long “Hallooo.” When there was no answer, they secured their horses inside the sagging corral and pushed through the stiff door of buffalo hide.

      An ancient stern-faced woman sat behind a three-plank table in patched red long johns, pointing a shotgun straight at them. In front of her a torn deck of cards was spread across the table for a game of solitaire. Brown streaks of tobacco juice ran down her chin, and a thin curtain of gray hair fell over one side of her ravaged face.

      “I thought it was your pa come back,” she said to Zebulon. “I was lookin’ forward to smokin’ the old grizzle-heel straight to hell.”

      She looked him over top to bottom. “A bit off your graze, ain’t you, son? Last I heard you was hangin’ out with flatlanders and gold-suckin’ Argonauts.”

      “I was, Ma,” Zebulon said. “No more.”

      “You sure are a sorry piece of used up sod,” she went on. “You look like a damn ghost. Beat-up and thinner’n a snake on stilts.”

      “I’m comin’ around,” he reassured her.

      “You might be comin’, but you ain’t yet around.”

      “Howdy, Ma,” Hatchet Jack interrupted.

      “Howdy yourself,” she replied, spitting a thick stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of a copper spittoon. “And don’t Ma me. Use my Christian name or put your scrawny halfbreed ass back on the trail.”

      “All right, Annie May.” Hatchet Jack picked up a bottle of whiskey from the table and took a long pull, then handed the bottle to Zebulon.

      “You got some big fat cojones comin’ back here,” Annie May continued. “Last I heard you was down on the Brazos rollin’ steers and makin’ mischief.”

      “No future in steers these days,” Hatchet Jack said.

      “I’ll vouch for that,” Zebulon said, pulling off his bloody shirt and dropping it on the dirt floor.

      “I’ll just bet,” Annie May said, shooting him a weary glance. “Vouchin’ bein’ a particular specialty of yours. That and poochin’ stray women.”

      She turned her head toward Hatchet Jack. “What brings you here?”

      “I need to get square with Pa,” Hatchet Jack said. “I mean, Elijah. Finish my account with him.”

      “You gone to Jesus, or just loco?” the old woman asked.

      “He’s become a healer,” Zebulon explained.

      Annie May cackled, slapping her arthritic knees with her palms. “Well don’t the sun just shine. You’re too late, Mister Healer-Dealer. He took his sorry ass to Californie. Who knows where? Now you got me to deal with.”

      “It ain’t the same.”

      “The hell it ain’t. The horse and traps you stole were mine the same as his. By rights I should plug you for thievery and be done with you.”

      Hatchet Jack shrugged. “That’s up to you. I still got a horse to give back, even if I lost the traps.”

      “We’ll eat,” she said firmly. “Then speculate.”

      She sighed, shifting her gaze to Zebulon, who was slicing up a pair of his pa’s pants with his bowie knife.

      “To think you’re all I spawned,” she said. “All that I care to recollect anyways.”

      She picked up the bottle of whiskey, studying his bloody chest. “What happened to your pump?”

      “I guess I been shot.”

      “You guess?” She hobbled over to him and poured the rest of the whiskey on his chest, an act that made him howl more from witnessing the last of the bottle than from the acute pain. He shuddered as she carefully wrapped a strip of pant leg around his chest.

      “How come there ain’t no bullet hole?” she asked.

      “I wondered about that,” he said.

      “Might be the slug passed through you. Who done it?”

      “Most likely a pecker-head sneakin’ a card off the bottom.” He nodded at Hatchet