Savage Guns. William W. Johnstone

      Most horses, a jog is real comfortable, but not Critter. His jog bent my tailbones and sent aches up my back. But it was a mile-eater pace, so I just stood in the stirrups now and then and let Critter ruin his own bones instead of mine. I figure if he wanted to wreck himself, that was his business. Let him; why should I care?

      Twilight came, and then night, and the crickets started up, and the air chilled real quick. But I rode into the T-Bar just when the last light was fading. Log buildings made it solid. There was a main house, well lit with lamps, a bunkhouse, a barn, a couple of sheds, and pens. The log house had a comfortable porch stretching across it, facing the mountains, and it looked like a fine place for a man to sip a toddy and eye his empire. The place wasn’t fancy, just solid, but that was not Crayfish’s doing. That’s how he bought it from Thaddeus Throckmorton.

      It looked like I was too late to chow down. Lamps were shining from the bunkhouse, and I could see cowboys, mostly in their long underwear, playin’ cards in there. I figured it wasn’t too late to come callin’, so I wrapped Critter’s rein around the hitch rail and banged on the door. I was curious about Crayfish’s domestic arrangements, and when the man himself opened up, I wasn’t surprised. I couldn’t imagine no woman staying with Crayfish for more than an hour or two. A day would be stretching it. A day and night would be beyond imagining.

      There he was, wearing his eye patch. This time it was gold. He had a dozen of them, all sorts of colors, and I hardly ever saw him wear a black patch. This here one, gold colored, had a turquoise stone set in the middle.

      “You’re looking at the wrong eye, Sheriff,” he said.

      “Never saw that one,” I said.

      “I got more patches than women got hats. You want to come in, or are you gonna stand there all night?”

      He waved me into his lamplit parlor. He was medium short, with black hair slicked straight back. There never was a hair out of place, and the word was that he glued his hair down, using the juice of boiled-up pigs feet. His hair lay so shiny and flat you could pretty near ice skate on it.

      “You want something to wet your whistle?” he asked.

      I nodded.

      “This here’s for guests,” he said, holding up a decanter. “That one’s for me.”

      He poured some red stuff into a cut-glass beaker and added a splash. When he handed it to me, I noticed he had a ring on every finger. Then he poured another from the other decanter for himself.

      “Always like to treat guests to what’s tasty,” he said.

      I sipped. That stuff, it cut a channel down my tongue and scraped the hide off the rest of my mouth. I coughed, swallered, and downed it, expecting to start quaking.

      “Mighty nice,” I said.

      He leered at me, and sipped cheerfully at his own beaker.

      “Strange hour to come calling,” he said.

      “Well, that gets me straight to it,” I said. “Say, this is mighty fine stuff, mighty fine.” I sipped again, felt savaged, and swallowed that varnish, feeling it scrape paint off my innards all the way down. “You treat company better than you treat yourself,” I added.

      “Well, when I sell this spread, I’m going into the hospitality business,” he said. “This is just a way of fattening my wallet. Give it another year, and I’ll be in some metropolis. I’m thinking Kansas City.”

      “What’ll you do there, Crayfish?”

      “Run the best whorehouse in the United States,” he said.

      “That your dream, is it?”

      “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Gambling parlor downstairs, fiddlers and pretty bar maids, poker tables, no one walks in except he’s all dressed up, top hat and tails, boots shined, and a fat purse on him too. And upstairs I got the prettiest girls in the world, all refined, bedsheets washed, the girls bathing at least once a week, and perfumed just fine. Ten dollars a pop, and most of it for me.”

      “That’s a dream, all right, Crayfish.”

      “Beats ranching in Wyoming,” he said. “And I get to graze wherever I want.”

      He sipped. I sipped and coughed.

      “This ain’t a social visit,” he said, not quite making a question out of it.

      I wasn’t in no hurry. I just wanted to see if he’d sweat a bit if I didn’t come direct to my business.

      “Mighty fine stuff here,” I said, swirling the glass. “Just right for company.”

      “Brought it up from Utah,” he said. “Them Saints make mighty fine Valley Tan.”

      I figured it was something like that. “I imagine you can afford any hooch from anywhere,” I said.

      “I could afford a lot more if I had more land,” he said. “These foothills, they’re not half the pasture that Admiral’s got. Now if I had his spread, I’d been sending you a barrel of whiskey once a month.”

      I listened real hard to that.

      “I guess you would, if I wanted it,” I said. “But I don’t. I’m not a drinkin’ man, and not a dry man neither. Once in a while, I take a little sauce for the kidneys. My ma, she said do whatever you want, but don’t do it often.”

      “Smart woman, I’d say.” He downed the rest of his stuff, and built hisself another, with a generous splash of springwater in it. “This a social call?” he asked.

      “Oh, I’ve got me a few questions, loose ends, things that didn’t get tidied up,” I said.

      “Well, I’ll be glad to help any way I can, Sheriff.”

      The social moment had vanished, that’s for sure. He wasn’t one to sit and yarn with a law officer if he could help it.

      “Them three got kilt, the ones working here. You know, I need to git ahold of next of kin. I never let their ma and pa and brothers and all know what happened. That’s a part of being a sheriff. A peace officer, he’s got to send along the bad news. I thought maybe you could tell me something about each of them, and I’ll send along a wire or a letter to their folks.”

      He seemed almost to deflate. For a while there he was all ballooned up, trying to look six inches taller than he was, but now the gas was leakin’ from his bag, and he just smiled some.

      “Oh, that. Well, I don’t know much. The pair of Jonas brothers never did tell me much about themselves.”

      “Where’d you meet ’em, Crayfish?”

      “Beats me. I think they were from down deep in Texas but I wouldn’t swear to it.”

      “Texas, eh? Well, you Texas fellers can spot each other easier than I can.”

      “Why do you think I’m from Texas, Sheriff?”

      I shrugged. “Just a hunch. If I got her wrong, you can put me straight.”

      “I’m from all over the place,” Crayfish said.

      “Well, these Jonas boys. Them that got kilt. The county put them in a potter’s field out of town, seeing as how you didn’t feel like buryin’ your own men. Foxy and Weasel was their handles, but I need to know what names they got christened by.”

      “Blamed if I know, Sheriff.”

      “They had a ma and pa, and probably got named something like Elmer and Harry, and got the Foxy and Weasel names later. If I’m gonna write their kinfolk, I kinda need the names.”

      “Funny, Sheriff, but I never asked. Here, it ain’t polite to ask a gent.”

      “Well, at least you know where they came from.”

      “Waco, maybe. Someone once told