The Big Dry. George Garland

      He felt the presence of it as he tied his horse before the Frontier Saloon; a number of A-T horses were there ahead of him.

      He entered the saloon and looked it over. The bar ran down the right wall. Behind it a big mirror framed in gingerbread work was flanked by shelves and open stained-glass doors, and topped with pictures, the largest of which was an artist’s conception of the Battle of Gettysburg. Young took these things in at a glance, as he did the fat barman with a black club beard, the tables about which men played poker and talked and drank.

      Suddenly he realized that all eyes had turned on him.

      Only one face was familiar. It was big-boned and full with stretched thin lips under a sweat-circled range hat. Young felt a sense of sharp warning as he met Charlie Wyatt’s glance, seeing in it a shrewd and ominous perversity at work. The A-T foreman had already warned him to “put some distance between him and these parts.”

      Young moved carelessly to the bar through hanging layers of smoke. The black eyes of the barman dug into his as he ordered a drink, and continued to gaze at him for a second or two. Then the barman broke the quiet with a question:

      “What about it, Charlie?”

      “The man asked for a drink, Jase,” Wyatt said, in a slow pleasant drawl.

      Jason Muench placed a bottle and a small glass on the bar. Young poured slowly, lifted the glass, with his left hand, turned about and said, “Thanks, Charlie.”

      Wyatt said nothing, though the humoring smile left his face. He sat still, his bull chest lifting and falling. His men caught on, and Young saw them move slowly away from the bar until he was the only man between the crowd and the mirror. A little man moved to the yellow-white piano in a corner, looked at the keys, raised his hands, then apparently thought better of it, until Charlie Wyatt said:

      “Go ahead and play, Big Man. Something sad like.”

      An old bearded man jumped up and asked for a song. A laugh followed, and soon a man said: “Sure, Big Man. Loco Tom will give you a piece of solid silver rock from his secret vein.”

      Then Charlie Wyatt told them to leave Loco Tom alone. Big Man hit a chord and found his way. Young downed his drink in a gulp, paid for it, surveying the crowd through the mirror. Then he turned around.

      “Ask him who he is, Jase,” Wyatt said.

      “Who are you?” the barman asked.

      “Young West.”

      “Ask him if he ain’t the Sacaton Kid, Jase.”

      Young propped elbows on the bar lip and said: “Tell him I was, Jase. But not any more.”

      “Tell him, Jase, what happens to stage robbers out here.”

      “They hang.”

      Young smiled. “It’s a small world. They hang where I come from, too.”

      Wyatt said: “Jase, tell him we don’t want no trouble, that we got a rope handy and anxious, that he has a ten-minute start. As of right now.”

      Young was quick to reply. “Jase, tell him I don’t scare easily. I came out here to find out who got my old man and I’m not leaving until I settle the score.”

      Wyatt glanced lazily from him to the watch he held. A minute ticked by, then another, each of which was marked by Wyatt’s warning.

      “Tell him he’s got nine minutes left, Jase. Tell him he’s got eight minutes, Jase.”

      Seven minutes had slipped away when the man next to Wyatt got up and walked outside. He returned shortly with a lariat rope.

      “Throw it over the rafter, Bugs,” Wyatt ordered. “Jase, tell him he’s got one minute left.”

      “Hell, not in here! Hell, no!” Jase protested.

      “In here, Jase, where we can all see it,” Wyatt said, in humoring but firm tones.

      The rope swung over the center beam and the tall poke called Bugs tested it with his weight.

      “Now, Jase, tell him his time’s up.”

      “The hell! Tell him yourself, Charlie.”

      Young’s expression had not changed. With a calm that seemed too controlled, a little disconcerting to the crowd and to Charlie Wyatt’s men in particular, he faced them as if he were a mere spectator at their proposed hanging. Then he glanced lazily at the rafter. What happened next was a little too fast for the eye.

      His gun came up. A shot sounded and the rope fell in two pieces.

      Jase Muench’s bellowing voice had a placating ring in it as he said: “Drinks on the house, boys! Line up! Hit the keys, Big Man!”

      Charlie Wyatt annulled the invitation. He said nothing, all he did then was stand up with feet pushed apart and thumbs in his belt. It was enough. His eyes were thin and fixed on Young; they flashed and a cold light played in them, a lusting challenge that seemed to demand a shedding of blood. Slowly his elbows bent upward until his arms were straight out from the massive shoulders and his hands were hovering a foot out from his two guns. He was hunching over, mouth slack, eyes boring, when Young, still calm, elbows on the bar lip, said easily:

      “Tell him he’s making a mistake, Jase.”

      “Hell, yes, you are, Charlie! I can tell! The Kid’s too calm!”

      Young was anything but calm inside, though excitement in him sprang from effect instead of cause: he was weighing the value of victory over McQueen’s foreman and finding it wholly unedifying. To shoot Charlie Wyatt would brand him forever the Sacaton Kid. The town wouldn’t have it otherwise. His mind was made up.

      He said: “I reckon he wins, Jase. Take my guns.”

      An oath of surprise, scorn, and unslaked desire fell from Wyatt’s lips.

      “Damn yellow!” he said. “All yellow! Gut deep yellow. Calm, you say, Jase? Just scared. So we’ll get on with it. Knot the rope, Jones, and hit the rafter. On the first try.”

      From the back of the room a commanding voice was heard: “Just a minute, Wyatt.”

      Young had not seen Sack move through the batwing door. But there he stood rubbing his red mustache, arresting all movement in the saloon.

      “The new deputy,” Bugs laughed before throwing the rope over the rafter.

      Sack walked slowly up to the bar. He looked at Young, then Wyatt, and said slowly, convincingly: “Charlie, a man has a right to think what he wants to about a man who won’t draw with him. And about a stagecoach robber. Your opinion is good as mine. But I’m sayin’ this. The Kid here would of dusted you on both sides, expert and proper, before you touched guns. And why he didn’t weren’t yellow. It was good judgment.”

      Wyatt laughed. “Yeah. Damn good judgment. But yellow all the same. First he robs the stage, then scares and returns the money. Then he bluffs it up before A. T. with a lot of threats. He was hidin’ behind Miss Bonnie. But she ain’t here, so he ups and quits when I call his bluff. And he ain’t yellow, you say?”

      “That’s what I say, Charlie,” Sack replied, in a voice that wiped the grins off faces in the crowd. “What’s more, I guarantee it.”

      “That ought to be enough,” Wyatt said, pushing his hat back on his head. “Seein’ as how it comes from the man Luke Mason picked for deputy sheriff.”

      As the crowd responded to this surprise with rising conversation, Wyatt said in loud edged voice: “But it don’t. Not quite, it don’t. ’Cause it just don’t make sense.”

      “All right,” Sack said. “Granted it don’t make good sense, that’s what it is. You heard the Kid say he was John Hammond West’s boy. We all know West was arrowed just after he struck pay dirt up at Queeny. The Kid wants to know who done it, same as you or me would.”

      “Hell,