Gunnison’s horse threw a shoe as he reached Paxton, and he spent the rest of the day finding a blacksmith to deal with the problem. By then it was too late to travel farther, so he took up lodging in a flea-ridden, low and long cabin with a sagging roof and a bad smell—a typical kind of hotel in far too many Western towns that Gunnison had visited.
The night, spent in a big room with three soggy, sunken beds and six snoring men, was miserable, but had one interesting aspect: before they fell asleep, the men, most of them strangers to one another, talked among themselves. The topic was Gomorrah, and the man who had prophesied its destruction.
The story was becoming distorted, Gunnison noticed. Peabody’s prophecy, it was said, had been made in the center of the town, spoken to the entire populace. It had forecast not only that the town would be destroyed, but at precisely what minute, and who would die and who would live. And the fire, Peabody had reportedly said, would not be quenchable for a month.
It was remarkable to watch folklore in the making.
The snores echoed through the hotel like unending rolls of thunder. Gunnison, though exhausted, lay awake most of the night. By the hour just before dawn, he was praying for morning like a man dying in a desert prays for water.
Gunnison reached the Joe Rush trading post late the next morning. Built of logs still in the bark, facing at an angle toward the river, it was an ugly building, poorly designed and inconsistently chinked, so that from certain angles one could see light penetrating the building back to front.
He sniffed the air and smelled cooking meat, borne on the smoke that rose from the chimney. Ah, yes. He was very hungry. Suddenly the place looked much better.
Gunnison was halfway across the stony yard of the trading post, just about to come around the corner of a big woodshed, when he was shocked to hear the blast of a gunshot from inside the trading post. His horse nickered and reared; just a little.
“Whoa, whoa there!” he said softly. “Settle down now.”
He backtracked a few yards, dismounted, and tethered the horse securely to a sapling. Another shot sounded from the trading post, then a third.
Gunnison, though no coward, was as human as anyone, and the thought of just mounting up and riding past this place by some alternate and unseen route crossed his mind. Whatever trouble was going on there—if it was trouble at all, and not just some harmless target practice out back—needn’t involve him.
A couple of things kept Gunnison from riding away, though. One was the fact that he knew he’d be ashamed of himself if he did. The other was that, between the last two shots, he’d distinctly heard the pleading cry of a distraught woman.
Gunnison went to the corner of the shed and peered around it at the trading post. Through some of the unchinked portions he could see movement against the daylight coming in from behind, but could not make out any details.
Another shot, another scream.
Without knowing enough facts to make a plan, he could only follow intuition. He holstered his pistol, went and freed his horse, and rode it around the shed into the trading post yard, acting casual, a man just happening upon the scene.
He dismounted and tethered his horse to the hitchpost, then walked toward the trading post door.
He entered just as the next shot blasted. Gunnison let out a yell of apparent surprise. “What the…”
“Howdy, friend!” said one of two burly, roughly dressed men who stood in the middle of the room with pistols drawn. On the floor between them was a crockery jug of homemade whiskey. “You come in just in time to watch the dance!”
“What’s going on here?” Gunnison asked. He glanced toward the corner, where two middle-aged women and a boy of about ten stood looking very frightened and worried.
The only other person in the room was an old man who stood in the opposite corner from the women and boy. He was trembling like an aspen leaf and looked like he might faint.
“Just a little bit of fun,” the other gunman answered. “We found us a good dancer here. See?”
He lifted his pistol, aimed at the floor just beneath the old man’s feet, and fired.
The old man yelped a little and went into a weary jig. The men with the pistols laughed.
“I thought this only happened in dime novels,” Gunnison said.
The men laughed and fired again.
The old man looked pleadingly at Gunnison as he continued his frail dance. A glance at the women and boy revealed the same pitiful expression.
“Why are you treating that old fellow that way?” Gunnison asked.
Neither gunman answered. One paused to reload his pistol while the other took a swig from the whiskey jug.
The old man, looking ready to drop, stopped dancing. “Uh-uh, old fellow! No stopping! Keep a-jigging!”
Gunnison feared the old man would fall over dead at any point. He wondered what motivated this bit of cruelty. Maybe there was no motivation beyond alcohol, opportunity, and meanness.
Gunnison took a step forward. One of the roughnecks wheeled to face him. “Where you going, swell?”
Swell? Gunnison was honestly offended. Everywhere he went, no matter how dirty, rumpled, and whiskered he became, there was always someone telling him he looked like a swell. The curse of his urban raising, he supposed.
“Just wanted to get a better view of the dancing,” Gunnison replied.
The men glanced at one another, then laughed. “Yeah. Well, watch this step!” one said. He fired a shot that very nearly clipped the heel off one of the old man’s shoes.
The gunmen howled in mirth.
“Please!” one of the women begged. “His heart is weak…you must stop!”
“Shut up, cow!” one of the pair replied, aiming and firing a shot that struck even closer yet to the dancing man’s feet.
Gunnison grinned and chuckled. “He’s a good dancer,” he said.
“Hell, yes!”
“How long you had him at it?”
“Why, half an hour or more. Hey! Don’t slow there, nimble-toes! Step lively!” The pistol blasted again.
Gunnison sneezed. “Mighty lot of gunsmoke you’re filling this place with.”
One man took a swig, passed the jug to the other.
“I think you ought to stop now,” Gunnison said. “That old man will die if you don’t.”
The pair ignored him. One leveled his hot and smoking pistol again.
Gunnison reached over and grasped his wrist.
The man turned and stared at him in astonishment. “What the hell!”
The old man didn’t quite quit dancing, but he slowed down.
“You trying to kill yourself, young man?”
“Just trying to keep you from killing an old one.”
The man looked down at his wrist, still gripped in Gunnison’s hand. “Let go my arm.”
“If you’ll quit shooting at the old man.”
“I might just shoot you instead.”
The man’s partner, amazed at Gunnison’s effrontery, raised his pistol and aimed it at Gunnison’s temple. “If’n I don’t do it first.”
Gunnison’s heart hammered, but he kept his expression calm, and stared without blinking at the man whose wrist he held. Kenton had taught him that trick: an unblinking stare, he said, adds five measures of courage to a man. Gunnison was praying hard, meanwhile, for he had no real idea what he was going to do. These men could kill him at any point, and probably would.
He could think of only one possibility. “If you want someone to dance for you, I’ll do it. You just let the old man rest.”
The two ruffians looked at one another, both breaking into a grin. “You just made yourself a bargain!” the man said. He yanked his wrist free.
Gunnison went to the corner where the old man still shuffled, not quite sure whether it was safe yet to stop.
“Go to yonder corner,” Gunnison said quietly, clapping his hand on his shoulder. “Sit down and rest your heart.”
The old man nodded, reached up and touched Gunnison’s hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” he whispered.
The old man shuffled off to his grateful loved ones, and Gunnison faced the ruffians.
One lifted his pistol, aimed it at Gunnison’s chest…
The blast made Gunnison jump in surprise. He looked down at his body, expecting to see a gush of blood, but there was none. The pistoleer had jerked the pistol downward at the last moment and fired it into the floor.
“Step up to the music, boy!”
Gunnison got himself to breathing again and began stepping. He clicked his heels on the puncheon floor, kicked his legs, did everything he could to put on a satisfying show of buffoonery in hope he could soon satisfy these drunkards and they would go on their way.
He looked past them to the people in the corner; one of the women, in tears, silently mouthed, “Thank you.”
Gunnison, feeling very foolish but also knowing he was the hero of the hour in the eyes of the grateful audience in the far corner, gave his dancing all he could. He turned, bowed, curtsied…all to the occasional blast of a pistol.
When one of the bullets nearly caught him in the calf, Gunnison stopped dancing abruptly.
“Enough of that!” he shouted, out of breath. “I’m dancing willingly—no need to shoot at me!”
The answer was another blast. Gunnison began dancing again.
He began to think he’d made a mistake. He’d anticipated that these men would soon tire of such juvenile amusement, but they seemed content to go on this way as long as the whiskey lasted.
On it went, another ten minutes, then fifteen…Gunnison was growing exhausted, and angry. He even resented the silent people in the corner for standing there and staring and doing nothing. Didn’t they have a rifle or a shotgun hidden somewhere?
Another shot, and this time the bullet ripped through the cuff of his trousers.
Gunnison had had enough. Sweating, weary, he reached under his coat and yanked out his pistol from its holster. He leveled it at the nearer of the two gunmen, who in turn lifted his own pistol. The second ruffian, as luck would have it, had just emptied his pistol and was about to reload.
“No reloading!” Gunnison shouted. “Drop it, or I’ll kill your partner!”
“I’ll kill you first!” the one with the raised pistol said.
In fact, neither man fired. Both stood there, pistols raised at each other, both frozen in place.
“Looks like we’re in a standoff,” the ruffian said at last.
“Afraid not,” said a new voice.
Gunnison shifted his eyes just long enough to see who had spoken. It was the same singing traveler he’d encountered earlier at the spring. He was standing in the doorway with a shotgun raised, leveled at the two ruffians. The barrels were sawed off horrifically short, and the stock as well. The weapon was so small it could have been concealed in nothing larger than a good-sized saddlebag, which is exactly where Gunnison figured it had been.
“The pattern of this shotgun is mighty broad,” the man said. “One shot, and both you gentlemen will go down. I suggest you drop your weapons and haul your backsides out of here, and far away, before I give you a demonstration of this shotgun that neither of you will live long enough to be impressed by.”
The men complied, glowering, faces and eyes red from anger and liquor. “We’ll not forget this!” one said. “We see you again, you’re a dead man. Same goes for all of you!”
“Out!” the man at the door said, sidestepping carefully to give them egress while also keeping them covered.
They left, took their horses from the corral, and rode away, shouting obscenities as they did so.
The newcomer fired off a high blast from the shotgun in answer. They hastened their flight and were soon gone.
Gunnison holstered his pistol and walked toward the man, hand outstretched. “I thank you, sir. I’m quite happy to see you again, believe me.”
“Good to see you as well, Mister…Gunnison, if I recall?”
“Yes. And you are named McGlue and several other things as well, I believe.”
“In fact, my name is Rush,” the man said. “Joe Rush. Welcome to my trading post.”
The details of what had happened made Rush’s face go red and sent a vein to visibly throbbing in his temple. But it established Gunnison at once as virtually an honorary member of the Joe Rush family. He was given food, drink, assorted free supplies, and more praise than he’d received at any one time in his life.
The old man whom Gunnison had saved from dancing to death was Rush’s father. One of the two women was Rush’s wife, the other his widowed sister-in-law, who was also mother to the boy.
“I’m sorry I was so cagey with you about who I was when we met there at the spring,” Rush said. “I’ve just learned it don’t always pay to be overly forthcoming with information. Folks sometimes tend to believe a man who operates a post like this one probably has money on him at any given time.”
“All I care about is that you came back at just the right time to save my bacon,” Gunnison said.
“Pshaw! You’d have done fine even without me. You got gravel in that craw of yours, young man. You ain’t the swell you look to be.”
There it was again: once more he was being labeled a swell. And once more he ignored it.
Rush continued, “I go from time to time to pay a visit on my cousin, who lives a mile beyond that spring we met up at,” he said, “I was on my way there when I met you. Danged if he wasn’t home when I arrived. A neighbor fellow there told me he’d gone off in the direction of Fort Brandon, where there’s been a lot of religious revivaling going on because of the Preacher Peabody’s prophesying.”
“I’m glad he wasn’t there. Otherwise you’d not have come back when you did. But I’m…” Gunnison cut off and glanced at the women, boy, and old man. He drew closer to Joe Rush and said in a whisper, “…I’m concerned about those two. I’m moving on, so I’m not likely to encounter them again. But they know where to find you.”
“That they do, but talk is cheap, particularly when it’s soaked in whiskey. I’ll keep an eye out for them. You do the same. Paths cross sometimes in ways you don’t expect.”