The Bridegroom. Linda Miller Lael

he’d mentioned the incident, in passing, in one of his letters. Mail from home—Stone Creek being the only place Gideon ever thought of in that particular context, and then not with any great degree of sentimentality—was infrequent, and since he moved around a lot in his profession, it generally took some time to catch up to him.

      “You want another whiskey there, Horace?” the barkeep asked the old man. He sounded nervous, like he didn’t want to offer, but feared dire consequences if he failed to make the gesture. Not that the leprechaun represented any threat to the bartender; Gideon would bet the shriveled-up little old man wouldn’t have weighed in at more than a hundred pounds if he’d been sopping wet and wearing granite shit-kickers.

      And from the looks—and smell—of Horace, he’d gone past “enough” a long time ago, but he grunted, without looking up, and shoved his glass out to be filled again.

      The barkeep poured the whiskey, standing back farther than seemed sensible and sweating harder. Gideon took all this in, not because he was interested, but because it was what he did. Working for the Pinkerton Agency after college, and then for Wells Fargo, he’d learned to pay attention to everything going on around him, even in the most ordinary circumstances.

      Especially then.

      He’d have bet that barkeep hadn’t washed his hands in weeks, let alone taken a bath. Gideon frowned and studied his beer mug more closely, but except for a few smudges and a thumbprint or two, it looked passably clean. He wasn’t back East anymore, he reminded himself, with another slight contortion of his face that might have been accepted as a smile in some quarters. Best get over being so fastidious.

      He felt the slight shift in the air even before the doors to the street swung open, a sort of quiver, similar to the throb of the piano strings, but soundless.

      Setting his beer mug down, he watched in the mirror as two men came in from the street, single file, both of them the size of grizzly bears raised up on their hind feet.

      No, Gideon corrected himself silently, these yahoos would dwarf the average grizzly. Despite the heat—he’d left his own suit coat at the train station, with his bags—they wore the long canvas coats common to gunslingers as well as ordinary ranchers, and both of them carried sidearms, the butts of long-barreled pistols jutting out of the waistbands of their dark woolen pants. Their gazes tracked and found the old man, sliced over to Gideon, sharp as honed knives, then swung back and bored into their target again.

      “Monty,” one of them ground out, presumably greeting the barkeep. They’d paused just inside the doors, which were still swinging on their rusted hinges.

      Monty gulped audibly, set down the bottle he’d poured the old coot’s drink out of, and took a couple of steps backward. Came up hard against the shelf behind him, with its rows of bottles and glasses. The front of his shirt, damp before, was nearly saturated now, he was perspiring so heavily.

      “I only give ole Horace more whiskey ’cause he asked me to,” Monty spouted, as if he’d been challenged on the matter, working up a grimace of a smile that wouldn’t stay put on his face.

      Entertained, Gideon suppressed a smile, along with the sigh that came along behind it. When he got to Stone Creek and started his new job—the one he’d lied to Rowdy and Wyatt about in his last letter—such amusements as this one would be few and far between.

      He was in the Golden Horseshoe Saloon, he reminded himself, to have a beer, not watch a melodrama—or to participate in one. Still, the fine hairs were standing up on the nape of his neck, and the sixth sense he’d developed working as a detective was in fine form.

      “You’d better go on back to the storeroom or the office and check on whatever needs checking on,” the taller of the two men told the barkeep. His voice had a thick, stuffy sound, as if at some point he’d had his head held under water for too long, or hadn’t gotten enough air in the first few minutes after he was born.

      It was hard to imagine him as a baby, Gideon thought, amused.

      His mama must have been a big woman—or else she’d have split wide-open giving birth to the likes of him.

      Monty was only too glad to check on whatever needed checking on—he gave Gideon a look, part warning and part pity, and skedaddled.

      Gideon felt no need to reach for the Colt .45 riding low on his left hip, but he did take some comfort in its presence. Straightening, he rolled his shirtsleeves down and fastened the cuffs; and though he knew he appeared to be mainly concerned with emptying his mug, he had a full mirror-reflected view of the room through his eyelashes.

      One of the men cleared his throat, though the pair still hadn’t moved from their post just over the threshold. “Ma says supper’s gonna be ready early tonight,” he announced, not exactly cautious in relaying this news, but definitely tentative. “She wants to be at the church on time for the pie social.”

      So she had survived childbirth, Gideon thought. Either that or the woman in question was a stepmother. Out West, a lot of men ran through a whole slew of wives, wearing them out with hard work and childbearing and all the rest of it.

      Gideon’s own mother had perished giving birth to him.

      The old man grunted once more, that being his primary means of communication, apparently, but didn’t turn around or speak an intelligible word. He just drained his glass, made a satisfied sound as the firewater went down and reached for the bottle poor old Monty had left behind on the bar when he fled.

      At last, the giants moved again, as one, like Siamese twins with no visible attachment. Strange for sure, that was Gideon’s involuntary assessment.

      There were times when he’d rather just ignore goings-on, and this was one of them, but it wasn’t in his nature. He pondered everything, weighed and considered and sorted.

      The taller fellow snagged Gideon’s gaze in the saloon mirror. “We don’t want no trouble now, friend,” he said. “We’ve come to take Dad home for supper, that’s all, so we’d be obliged if you didn’t mix in.”

      Gideon gave a disinterested nod, waited to see if the old whiskey-swiller would raise an objection to what he’d no doubt regard as a premature departure.

      There wasn’t much to him, for all that his sons were big as trees.

      Like as not, he’d go along peaceable. Then Gideon would finish his beer, leave payment on the bar, and go on about his business—checking in to the hotel across the street, having some of his gear brought over from the train depot, getting himself shaved and sheared and bathed. He’d stop by the post office, too, in case some mail had straggled in since the last time he’d passed through Phoenix.

      The brothers positioned themselves on either side of the bar stool, set their feet as if they meant to put down roots right through the sawdust and the plank floor beneath, exchanged wary glances, and simultaneously cleared their throats.

      “Get on home,” the old man croaked, thereby proving he possessed a vocabulary after all, however limited, though he didn’t look at either one of them. All his attention seemed to be fixed on the bottom of that whiskey glass, Gideon observed, as if there was some kind of scene being played out there. “Tell your ma I’ll be along when I’m damn good and ready, and not before.”

      “She said we’d better not come home without you if we know what’s good for us,” the smaller brother said gravely. “And you know we’ve got to mind, lest Ma lose her temper.”

      With that, and another glance at each other, the brothers closed in and took hold of the old man’s arms.

      And that was when all hell broke loose.

      Dear old Dad turned into a human buzz saw, all jagged edges, ripping into the air itself, and practically throwing off blue sparks. He kicked and twisted and punched, spitting out oaths and cusswords that even Gideon, raised in the back of a saloon in Flagstaff, had never heard.

      The brothers had all they could do to contain their pa, and the three of them tangled all the way across