It hadn’t been long since Carlo had last been to Wichita. Although he hadn’t let on to either of his young companions on this ride, he knew his way around town fairly well. Fortunately Luke’s eye was drawn to a gunsmith’s shop they found on their way to put up the horses for the night, and Red was drawn to almost every saloon he saw. The last he’d seen of that one, Red had been grinning back at a girl dressed in a filmy skirt and a bodice that was laced up tight enough to put her finest assets on prominent display. There had been a few words exchanged between Red and Luke, but Luke was willing to part with some more of Scott’s money if only to stop being pestered for it.
“You need any?” Luke asked as if he were handing out drinks of water instead of crumpled cash.
“I suppose for expenses and such,” Carlo replied.
Only when he caught a few passing locals taking more than a casual interest in the bag he carried did Luke bother to cover what he was doing. He handed over some money without making a show of it and said, “We should arrange a time and place to meet up to figure out what to do next.”
“We know what to do,” Carlo told him. “Take a look around town and listen to what folks have to say about Granger and the men posted in that camp. Just don’t be too obvious about it or you’ll draw them soldiers straight to you. Understand?”
“Yeah, I understand,” Luke replied skeptically.
“I’d go with you, but it’s best if we split up. That way, if word gets back to Granger that someone’s been asking about him, it’s only one or two men doing the asking. They won’t be looking for all three of us if things go from bad to worse.”
Although Luke nodded, he did so reluctantly. “Remember that hotel we passed on our way into town?”
“Which one?”
“The one that was across from that saloon Red was all worked up about.”
“That doesn’t help narrow it down very much,” Carlo said.
“It was a big place hosting a poker tournament,” Luke explained.
“Now I remember. I think that hotel was called . . . something about a horse. I know which one you mean.”
“Meet up with us tonight at that hotel sometime around midnight. That should give Red enough time to burn off some of the steam he’s been building up.”
“I don’t know,” Carlo said. “That kid can hold a lot of steam.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I grew up with him. We’ll meet up and go over what we found out when scouting.”
“Just remember what I told you. Keep your ears and eyes open for whatever you can find about Granger, but don’t draw attention to yourselves while doing it. And be wary of men wearing an army uniform. They don’t need much of a reason to drag you into a jail cell, and if they’re one of Granger’s, they’ll need no reason at all.”
“Where are you going?” Luke asked.
“Other end of town. I figure you and Red have the saloon district covered well enough.”
Luke nodded and they parted ways. Carlo could tell the younger man still had his suspicions, but was biding his time before acting on them.
For the next hour or so, Carlo kept moving from one spot to another without paying much attention to where he was going. Instead he was more concerned with anyone else that might be tagging along from a distance. He knew Luke had it in him to try to follow him through town to make sure Carlo was doing what he said he’d be doing. There was also the chance that one of Granger’s men was on his trail after having lost two of their number in the ambush just before Carlo, Luke, and Red had made it to Wichita. Carlo kept alert as he wandered the streets and didn’t find anything to make him believe he was being followed. That made him feel a little better, but not much.
One of the places he stopped was a corner saloon that seemed inviting enough from what Carlo could see through doors that were propped open by an old milk jug. Of course, with all the trail dust collecting in the back of his throat, any place serving beer would have been inviting. He went inside, stepped up to the bar, and knocked on the wooden surface to attract the attention of a mouse of a man wearing a dented bowler hat.
“What can I get you?” the man asked.
Carlo asked for a beer and when it was given to him, he picked up the mug and drained half of it in one swig. Before he could lift his arm again, he felt a frail hand take hold of his wrist.
“Not so fast, mister,” the barkeep said. “You need to pay first. And if you’re thinking of trying to get one over on me on account of my size, you should know I’m plenty strong enough to pull the trigger of the shotgun I keep within easy reach.”
Carlo set the mug down. “No need for threats. I’m just thirsty, not a thief. I got every intention of paying.”
“Good. Then I’ll have the money for this drink.”
“This right here should cover it and the next few rounds,” Carlo said as he laid down the clay chip he’d taken from one of the dead bushwhackers outside town.
The barkeep looked down at the chip as if it had dropped from the back end of a mule. “That’s not one of mine,” he said.
“It ain’t?”
“You see anything around here to make you think I’d honor that?”
Carlo looked around at the sparse amount of decoration in the place, which mainly consisted of a few grainy photographs on the walls and signs spelling out the house rules for everything from gambling to spitting on the floor. “Well, where would I go to cash this in?” he asked.
“The Red Bison! It’s a billiard room across town.”
“Just billiards?” Carlo asked.
Scowling, the barkeep said, “I ain’t about to sing the praises of some other place. You gonna pay for that beer you drank or do I have to take what you owe out of yer hide?”
Digging into another pocket, Carlo took out enough money to pay for the beer he’d been given and one more. After he handed that over, the barkeep became a bit friendlier. When he was finished, Carlo stepped outside and looked up and down the street for any familiar faces. He found none and even as he made his way down the boardwalk, nobody seemed to take notice of him in the slightest.
Now that he was fairly certain he was alone, Carlo had some business that needed tending. This wasn’t the first time he’d been to Wichita, but he wasn’t exactly looking for street names or landmarks. Instead he took his horse from one stable to another, asking about prices and rates for different kinds of feed. The first place he went to was clean and had plenty of open stalls.
“These the best rates in town?” he asked the burly stable man.
“Damn straight.”
“Is it worth it?”
“We’re the best in Wichita. Ask anybody.”
Carlo moved on.
The next place he found was a few streets over. It was a bit smaller than the first, and when he asked about prices for feed, he noticed the old man speaking to him losing interest by the second.
“There’s a bigger place near here who offered some good rates,” Carlo said as a way to test the waters.
The old man shrugged. “Go where you please, mister.”
“A friend of mine put his horse up in a stable that was a lot worse than this one. Little place. What was the name of it?”
“Probably the Bar T Corral on the corner.”
“Could be it. Is that the smallest stable in town?”
“Only three stalls,” the old man said after spitting onto the ground between them. “Any smaller than that ain’t hardly a stable.”
“All right, then. I’ll be back.”
The old man hardly seemed to care when Carlo walked away.
It took some doing, but Carlo eventually found the Bar T wedged in between a butcher shop and a tobacco store. His horse was far from fussy, but even he began to fret when he got in the midst of those competing scents. Carlo stroked the horse’s gray and black mane and coaxed him into the run-down structure that barely passed for a stable. As promised, there were only three stalls inside. Two were fit to host a horse, and the other was roped off where a gate should have been. Its back wall had been kicked out by an unhappy customer some time ago and was never repaired.
“What are your rates?” Carlo asked the man tending the place.
Rail thin and looking like death warmed over, the keeper chewed on a piece of straw and replied, “How much you got?”
“You serve quality greens?”
“No.”
“I’ve got fifty cents for the rest of the day.”
Shrugging, the sickly man said, “That’ll do, I suppose.”
“I may be using the stall myself if I can’t find a room.”
The keeper held out a filthy hand. “You pay yer money, you do what you please. Just like everyone else.”
“You get a lot of folks wanting to sleep in your stalls?”
“Just drunks and vagrants,” the keeper said while wandering off. “Any of you come around asking for breakfast and I’ll toss you out on your ears.”
Before Carlo could ask about that, the keeper had shuffled out of earshot. He was either going to an outhouse or just finding someplace that didn’t smell like dead pigs and cheap cigars.
Carlo had been able to see everything the stable had to offer by looking in through the front doors. Actually he could only look through one of the doors because the other was nailed in place and refused to budge. Despite his low expectations, the inside of the stable wasn’t too bad. Most of the straw had been recently changed and the horse that was occupying one of the functional stalls seemed friendly enough. Carlo opened the gate to the second stall and led Old Man into it.
“Real good system you came up with,” said a gruff voice from the next stall.
Placing his hand on his holstered pistol, Carlo turned toward the man who’d spoken up and said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
The man who stood up and brushed himself off was tall and slender with a narrow chin and scraggly mustache. His face was smeared with dirt and his clothes looked as if they might have been lying at the bottom of that stall longer than the man wearing them. He showed Carlo half a smirk and said, “The hell you don’t know what I mean. It was your idea. Find the sorriest excuse for a stable in whatever town we were meeting in and wait there like a vagabond.”
“Only when we’re on the run,” Carlo replied.
“And when aren’t we on the run?”
“Lately . . . not too often.” Carlo extended a hand across the low wall separating the two stalls. “Good to see you, Frank.”
“Where you been, Carlo? I waited for you in Topeka for three days and you never showed.”
“I was headed that way but got sidetracked.”
“Marshals?”
Carlo shook his head. “Bounty hunters. Five of ’em.”
Frank let out a low whistle. “They’re stepping up their game. Most I ever had on my tail at once was three.”
“That’s just because my head’s more valuable than yours,” Carlo said with a grin. “Always will be.”
“If they’re in the market for the smelliest scalp in Kansas, maybe,” Frank was quick to reply. “Haven’t seen you for the better part of a month! What kind of trouble have you been getting into?”
“Same as the rest of you, I reckon. How many of us are here?”
“Just me for now, but a few stragglers are on their way.”
“How’d you know to come here?” Carlo asked. “I tried sending word to you to meet me here, but never got a reply.”
“Where’d you send it from?”
“Some little hole in the wall called Wendt Cross. It’s a few days’ ride from here.”
Frank’s eyes were sharp as an oiled blade. They studied Carlo intently as he said, “Last we heard, you’d be found in that town near the Missouri border if things took a turn for the worse. How come you never showed? More bounty hunters?”
“Same ones I already mentioned. They ran me so far from where I was supposed to go that I couldn’t exactly double back and risk leading them to the rest of you.”
“I suppose that was a good notion,” Frank said.
Carlo slapped Frank on the shoulder and laughed. “Unless you and the rest enjoy fending off a bunch of bloodthirsty killers who’d stab you in your sleep just as soon as they’d look at you, it was a good notion indeed. I’m just glad you tracked me down. How’d you manage that?”
Although Carlo was still smiling, Frank didn’t appear to be in such high spirits. “We crossed paths with a pack of bounty hunters that had been tracking us since we left Missouri,” he said. “Had a word with them over a long couple of nights. Well, long for them anyhow.”
“Yeah. I bet it was.”
“Worked them over the whole time. Some of the others hurt them real bad. Once two of them died, the others were willing to talk.” Narrowing his eyes until his gaze became as focused as sunlight through a magnifying glass, Frank said, “None of them mentioned seeing you.”
Carlo knew better than to make a move toward his gun, but the muscles in his arm and hand flexed in preparation for a quick draw. Frank was a good man and a loyal partner, but he was also smart and deadly with any shooting iron he carried. “There’s prices on our heads, Frank. All of our heads. That’s a lot of money, which means plenty of men looking to collect.”
“Sure,” Frank said in a cool, detached tone. “But what are the odds that anyone, even someone as stupid as most of the bounty hunters we find, would forget an ugly cuss like you riding a horse that’s older than the dirt beneath its shoes?”
Finally allowing his gun arm to relax, Carlo balled up his fists and put them up to stand in a sloppy fighting pose. “I told you to never say a bad word about my horse! Don’t make me beat the tar out of you like I did back in Leavenworth.”
Frank defended himself against Carlo’s halfhearted attacks while cracking a smile of his own. “You got in a few lucky shots in Leavenworth only because I was drunk.”
“So, was that true, what you said about those bounty hunters?”
Now that the friendly assault had abated, Frank placed his hands on top of the low wooden wall separating the two stalls. “Sure enough. After what the bunch of us have been up to in these parts, we’ve got plenty of men looking to bring us in.”
“And it doesn’t look like it’ll let up anytime soon.”
“That isn’t up to us.”
“If those men you caught never even heard of me,” Carlo said, “that means I’ve either been doing something real wrong or very right.”
“Probably a mix of both,” Frank told him. “Those men I told you about hadn’t heard anything about you, but the pair we caught a few days later had tracked you almost all the way to Wendt Cross. That’s how I finally caught up to you.”
“Someone in Wendt Cross knew who I was?”
“The fella running the shoddiest stable in town remembered you. Actually he remembered Old Man over there,” Frank said while giving the gray horse a friendly pat.
“Folks tend to remember the more handsome one between the two of us.”
“I was gonna say something along those lines, except it was which one of you two smelled better than the other.”
“I like my version better,” Carlo said.
“There was a shop owner by the name of Bickle who told us you’d left town, probably heading to Wichita. So,” Frank said while still patting the horse, “what brings you here when the rest of us were gathered in another part of the state? And don’t go on about bounty hunters, because I didn’t see many of them in these parts.”
Carlo felt his muscles twitch again. Several times in the last few seconds, his stomach had clenched at his tenuous position much as it would if he was leaning back in a chair and teetering on the precipice of falling over. Any shift of his weight in that chair had to be done quickly or it was all over. “I had some business to conduct,” he said.
“Did you, now?”
“That’s right.”
“What sort of business?” Frank asked.
The man in front of Carlo was several years younger, but had been chiseled into a formidable presence by the hardships of war and a life on the run. The bloody days of brother fighting against brother had a similar effect on many men, leaving every family member scarred and stronger for the experience.
“You remember that double-dealing captain that hunted us down just to make us pay a toll for crossing into this state?” Carlo asked.
“The one selling the guns that were stripped from some of his own dead soldiers?”
“That’s him. He’s the one who sent some of those bounty hunters after me. After all of us, really, but they found me first.”
“Makes sense,” Frank said. “He’d only be doing his job by hunting us. Doesn’t make the rest of what he does any easier to swallow, but at least he’s doing some of his duty.”
Carlo spat on the ground as if it were someone’s face. “When those bounty hunters came for me, the first thing they did was try to recruit all of us. I was to pass along a message to Anderson that if we joined up with his bunch and took orders from Granger, our days of being hunted by troops and bounty hunters alike were over.”
“I would have liked to pass that along to the others. We’ve all been holed up for so long we could use a good laugh.”
“That’s what I thought any of you would say,” Carlo told him. “Which is why I decided to take the opportunity I was given.”
“What opportunity would that be?” Frank asked.
Carlo reached into his pocket for the poker chip he’d acquired outside town and tossed it through the air. Frank caught it in one hand, turned it over, and studied the picture drawn on it.
“That came from a place called the Red Bison Billiard Room,” Carlo explained. “Obviously there’s more than just billiards being played there.”
“This isn’t exactly the only billiards room in Kansas.”
“Maybe not, but it seemed important to some of Granger’s men. After what he pulled when we first rode into this state, I’ve been wanting to get my hands on that strutting bastard so bad I could taste it.”
“You’re not the only one. Without him making things difficult for us, we could have free rein in this state and a good part of Missouri, besides. That captain is dug in worse than a tick. Even if he ran his men by the book, he’d be enough of a problem. Him being crooked only makes things worse.” Turning the poker chip over by rolling it across his knuckles, Frank asked, “You think he can be found at this billiard hall?”
“I’ve got reason to believe so,” Carlo replied. “I need to have a look-see for myself before doing anything that might scare him off.”
Frank shook his head and sighed. “You and your scouting. Enough to test the patience of a saint.”
“I go in alone and I should be able to keep from being noticed. If more than one of us goes anywhere near Granger, we’ll be spotted for sure. That happens and he moves to some other place he’s got staked out.”
“Or he tucks himself into a fort or some other armed camp,” Frank said.
“Which makes things messy.”
Although only in his early twenties, Frank wore his scars with the weariness of someone twice his age. When he grinned, he looked more like the young man he truly was. “We like messy,” he said. “Messy is what we’re here to be.”
“Messy, yes,” Carlo said. “Not dead. If the rest of the men were all here, I’d say we burn that billiard hall to the ground with Granger and as many of his soldiers in it as we could fit. We could even flush him out and hunt him like the mangy dog he is. But the rest of the men aren’t here.” Studying Frank a little closer, Carlo asked, “Are they?”
Frank let the question hang in the air for a few moments before saying, “Not yet. It’s just like I said before. Most were in the northeastern part of the state. Anderson and the rest are pretty well scattered for now. Given some time, I’m sure I could round up a few reinforcements.”
“Given enough time, I’d like to round up all of them. Lord knows they all deserve to carve off a piece of Granger for themselves. That captain is slippery, though, and he could be moving along any day. If he’s here, I’d like to make the most of the opportunity to nail him to a wall.”
“And I’d like to help in any way I can.”
“Much obliged, Frank. Let me do some more scouting and I’ll let you know what I find. After that, we can put something together that will shut Granger down for good.”
“I like the sound of that,” Frank said as he once again offered his hand.
Carlo shook it firmly.
“Now that I found you,” Frank continued, “I ain’t about to spend another night in this stall. There’s a hotel not too far from here called the Horse Tether. I’ll stay close to there all day tomorrow. That give you enough time to see whatever it is you’ll be out to see?”
“More than enough.”
“Good. I’ll look forward to hearing from you. Sure you don’t need any help before then?”
“I appreciate that,” Carlo replied, “but I’ll need to move swiftly to keep from being seen. That’s best done when I’m alone.”
“Figured that’s what you’d say. Of course, the last time you went off to scout on your own, we didn’t see you again until . . . well . . . now.”
“There’s a war on,” Carlo said with a weary shake of his head. “Things tend to derail awfully quickly sometimes.”
Frank’s eyes narrowed in a way that Carlo found particularly troubling. “Yeah,” he said. “They do. Think you’ll know something by noon tomorrow?”
“Without a doubt.”
Frank nodded. “That’s good to hear. Try not to get sidetracked again. If you’re too late, I’ll have to come looking for you.”
Carlo did a good job of hiding it, but he did not like the sound of that.