When he awoke his room was dark; the cloth screen at his window let in a flickering brightness from the street below. He heard distant shouts beneath the querulous murmur of many voices, and the snorting of a horse and the clop of hooves. For a moment he could not remember where he was.
He got up abruptly and sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress rustled beneath him; he relaxed, and ran his fingers through his hair, down over the back of his head and neck, and stretched his head backward, welcoming the soreness that warmed pleasantly up between his shoulder blades. In the darkness he walked across his room to the small table, which was outlined dimly beside the window. He found a match on the table and lit the lamp beside the washbasin. In the mirror his face was a sharp contrast of yellow brightness and dark shadow. He put his hands in the lukewarm water of the basin and rinsed his face. He dried his hands and face on the same shirt he had used the day before. By the flickering light of the lamp, he put on his black string tie and brown sack coat, which was beginning to smell of his own sweat, and stared at himself in the mirror as if he were a stranger. Then he blew the lamp out, and made his way out of the room.
The street lay in long shadows cast by the yellow lights that came from the open doors and windows of the few buildings of Butcher’s Crossing. A lone light came from the dry goods store opposite the hotel; bulky figures moved about it, their sizes exaggerated by the shadows. More light, and the sound of laughter and heavily clumping feet came from the saloon next to it. A few horses were tethered to the roughly hewn hitching rail set out eight or ten feet from the sidewalk in front of Jackson’s; they were motionless, but the moving lights glinted on their eyeballs and on the smooth hair of their flanks. Up the street, beyond the dugout, two lanterns hung on logs in front of the livery stable; just beyond the livery stable, a dull red glow came from the blacksmith shop, and there could be heard the heavy clank of hammer upon iron and the angry hissing as hot metal was thrust into water. Andrews went in a slow diagonal across the street toward Jackson’s.
The room he entered was long and narrow; its length extended at a right angle from the street, and its width was such that four men could not stand with comfort shoulder to shoulder across it. Half a dozen lanterns hung from unpainted, sooty rafters; the light they gave was reflected sharply downward, so that the surface of everything in the room glinted with yellow light and everything beneath those surfaces fell into vague shadows. Andrews walked forward. To his right a long bar extended nearly the length of the room; the bar top was two thick-hewn planks placed side by side, and supported by unfinished split logs set directly on the unevenly planked floor. He breathed deeply, and the sharp mingled odor of burning kerosene, sweat, and liquor gathered in his lungs; he coughed. He went to the bar, which was only a little higher than his waist; the bartender, a short bald man with large mustaches and a yellow skin, looked at him without speaking.
“A beer,” Andrews said.
The bartender drew a heavy mug from beneath the bar and turned to one of several kegs that stood on large wooden boxes. He turned a spigot and let the beer slide in white bubbles down the side of the mug. Setting the mug before Andrews, he said:
“That’ll be two bits.”
Andrews tasted the beer; it seemed warmer than the room, and its flavor was thin. He laid a coin on the table.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Miller,” he said. “I was told I might find him here.”
“Miller?” The bartender turned indifferently and looked at the far end of the room where, in the shadows, there were two small tables about which were seated half a dozen men drinking quietly. “Don’t seem to be in here. You a friend of his?”
“I’ve never met him,” Andrews said. “I want to see him on a matter of—business. Mr. McDonald said that I would probably find him here.”
The bartender nodded. “You might find him in the big room.” He indicated with his eyes a point behind Andrews; Andrews turned and saw that there was a closed door that must lead to another room. “He’s a big man, clean shaved. Probably be sitting with Charley Hoge—little feller, gray-haired.”
Andrews thanked the bartender, finished his beer, and went through the door on the narrow side of the saloon. The room he entered was large and more dimly lighted than the one he had left. Though many lanterns hung from hooks on the smoked rafters, only a few were lighted; the room lay in pools of light and larger irregular spaces of shadow. Rudely shaped tables were arranged so that there was an empty oval space in the center of the room; at the back a straight staircase led up to the second floor. Andrews walked forward, opening his eyes wide against the dimness.
At one of the tables sat five men playing cards; they did not look up at Andrews, nor did they speak among themselves. The slap of cards and the tiny click of poker chips came upon the quietness. At another table sat two girls, their heads close together, murmuring; a man and a woman were seated together nearby; a few other groups were gathered at shadowed tables elsewhere in the large room. There was a quiet, slow fluidity to the scene which was strange to Andrews, and it absorbed him so that for a moment he did not remember why he had come here. At the far end of the room, through the dimness and the smoke, he saw seated at a table two men and a woman. They were somewhat apart from the others, and the larger of the men was looking directly at him. Andrews moved across the open space toward them.
When he stood before their table, all three of them were looking up at him. The four remained for several moments unmoving and silent; Andrews’s attention was on the large man directly in front of him, but he was aware of the girl’s rather pale plump face and yellow hair that seemed to flow from round bare shoulders, and of the smaller man’s long nose and gray stubbled face.
“Mr. Miller?” Andrews asked.
The large man nodded. “I’m Miller,” he said. His pupils were black and sharply distinct from the whites, and his brows were set closely above them in a frown that wrinkled the broad bridge of his nose. His skin was slightly yellowed and smooth like cured leather, and at the corners of his wide mouth deep ridges curved up to the thick base of his nose. His hair was heavy and black; it was parted at the side, and lay in thick ropes over half his ears. He said again, “I’m Miller.”
“My name is Will Andrews. I—my family are old friends of J. D. McDonald. Mr. McDonald said you might be willing to talk to me.”
“McDonald?” Miller’s heavy, almost hairless lids came down over his eyes in a slow blink. “Sit down, son.”
Andrews sat in the empty chair between the girl and Miller. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“What does McDonald want?” Miller asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“McDonald sent you over here, didn’t he? What does he want?”
“No, sir,” Andrews said. “You don’t understand. I just wanted to talk with someone who knew this country. Mr. McDonald was kind enough to give me your name.”
Miller looked at him steadily for a moment, and then nodded. “McDonald’s been trying to get me to head a party for him for two years now. I thought he was trying again.”
“No, sir,” Andrews said.
“You work for McDonald?”
“No, sir,” Andrews said. “He offered me a job, but I turned it down.”
“Why?” Miller asked.
Andrews hesitated. “I didn’t want to be tied down. I didn’t come out here for that.”
Miller nodded, and shifted his bulk; Andrews realized that the man beside him had been motionless until this moment. “This here is Charley Hoge,” Miller said, moving his head slightly in the direction of the gray man who sat opposite Andrews.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Hoge,” Andrews said, and put his hand across the table. Hoge was grinning at him crookedly, his sharp face sunk down between narrow shoulder blades. He slowly raised his right arm, and suddenly thrust his forearm across the table. The arm ended at the wrist in a white nub that was neatly puckered and scarred. Involuntarily, Andrews drew his own hand back. Hoge laughed; his laughter was an almost soundless wheeze that seemed forced from his thin chest.
“Don’t mind Charley, son,” Miller said. “He always does that. It’s his idea of fun.”
“Lost it in the winter of sixty-two,” Charley Hoge said, still gasping with his laughter. “It froze, and would have dropped clean off, if—” He shivered suddenly, and continued to shiver as if he felt the cold again.
“You might buy Charley a drink of whisky, Mr. Andrews,” Miller said almost gently. “That’s another one of his ideas of fun.”
“Of course,” Andrews said. He half rose from his chair. “Shall I—”
“Never mind,” Miller said. “Francine will get the drinks.” He nodded at the blonde girl. “This is Francine.”
Andrews was still half raised above the table. “How do you do,” he said, and bowed slightly. The girl smiled, her pale lips parting over teeth that were very white and slightly irregular.
“Sure,” Francine said. “Does anybody else want something?” She spoke slowly and with the trace of a Germanie accent.
Miller shook his head.
“A glass of beer,” Andrews said. “And if you would like something?”
“No,” Francine said. “I’m not working now.”
She got up and moved away from the table; for a few moments Andrews’s eyes followed her. She was heavy, but she moved with grace across the room; she wore a dress of some shiny material with broad white and blue stripes. The bodice was tight, and it pushed the fullness of her flesh upward. Andrews turned questioningly toward Miller as he sat down.
“Does she—work here?” Andrews asked.
“Francine?” Miller looked at him without expression. “Francine is a whore. There are nine, ten of them in town; six of them work here, and there are a couple of Indians that work the dugouts down by the river.”
“A scarlet woman,” Charley Hoge said; he was still shivering. “A woman of sin.” He did not smile.
“Charley is a Bible man,” Miller said. “He can read it pretty good.”
“A—whore,” Andrews said, and swallowed. He smiled. “Somehow, she doesn’t look like—a—”
The corners of Miller’s wide mouth lifted slightly. “Where’d you say you was from, son?”
“Boston,” he said. “Boston, Massachusetts.”
“Ain’t they got whores in Boston, Massachusetts?”
Andrews’s face warmed. “I suppose so,” he said. “I suppose so,” he said again. “Yes.”
Miller nodded. “They got whores in Boston. But a whore in Boston, and a whore in Butcher’s Crossing; now, there’s two different things.”
“I see,” Andrews said.
“I don’t reckon you do,” Miller said. “But you will. In Butcher’s Crossing, a whore is a necessary part of the economy. A man’s got to have something besides liquor and food to spend his money on, and something to bring him back to town after he’s been out on the country. In Butcher’s Crossing, a whore can pick and choose, and still make a right smart amount of money; and that makes her almost respectable. Some of them even get married; make right good wives, I hear, for them that want wives.”
Andrews did not speak.
Miller leaned back in his chair. “Besides, this is a slack time, and Francine ain’t working. When a whore ain’t working, I guess she looks just about like anybody else.”
“Sin and corruption,” Charley Hoge said. “She’s got the taint within her.” With his good hand, he grasped the edge of the table so tightly that the knuckles showed blue-white against the brown of his skin.
Francine returned to the table with their drinks. She leaned over Andrews’s shoulder to set Charley Hoge’s glass of whisky before him. Andrews was aware of her warmth, her smell; he shifted. She put his beer before him, and smiled; her eyes were pale and large, and her reddish-blond lashes, soft as down, made her eyes appear wide and unblinking. Andrews took some coins from his pocket and put them in her palm.
“Do you want me to leave?” Francine asked Miller.
“Sit down,” Miller said. “Mr. Andrews just wants to talk.”
The sight of the whisky had calmed Charley Hoge; he took the glass in his hand and drank rapidly, his head thrown back and his Adam’s apple running like a small animal beneath the gray fur of his bearded throat. When he finished the drink, he hunched himself back in his chair and remained still, watching the others with cold little gray eyes.
“What did you want to talk about, Mr. Andrews?” Miller asked.
Andrews looked uncomfortably at Francine and Charley Hoge. He smiled. “You put it kind of abruptly,” he said.
Miller nodded. “I figured to.”
Andrews paused, and said: “I guess I just want to know the country. I’ve never been out here before; I want to know as much as I can.”
“What for?” Miller asked.
Andrews looked at him blankly.
“You talk like you’re an educated man, Mr. Andrews.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I was three years at Harvard College.”
“Well,” Miller said, “three years. That’s quite a spell. How long you been away from there?”
“Not long. I left to come out here.”
Miller looked at him for a moment. “Harvard College.” He shook his head. “I learned myself to read one winter I was snowed in a trapper’s shack in Colorado. I can write my name on paper. What do you think you can learn from me?”
Andrews frowned, and suppressed a tone of annoyance he felt creep into his voice. “I don’t even know you, Mr. Miller,” he said with a little heat. “It’s like I said. I want to know something about this country. Mr. McDonald said you were a good man to talk to, that you knew as much about this country as any man around. I had hoped that you would be kind enough to converse with me for an hour or so, to acquaint me with—”
Miller shook his head again, and grinned. “You sure talk easy, son. You do, for a fact. That what you learn to do at Harvard College?”
For a moment, Andrews stared at him stiffly. Then he smiled. “No, sir. I reckon not. At Harvard College, you don’t talk; you just listen.”
“Sure, now,” Miller said. “That’s reason enough for any man to leave. A body’s got to speak up for his self, once in a while.”
“Yes, sir,” Andrews said.
“So you came out here. To Butcher’s Crossing.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And when you learn what you want to learn, what’ll you do? Go back and brag to your kinfolk? Write something for the papers?”
“No, sir,” Andrews said. “It’s not for any of those reasons. It’s for myself.”
Miller did not speak for several moments. Then he said, “You might buy Charley another glass of whisky; and I’ll have a glass myself this time.”
Francine rose. She spoke to Andrews: “Another beer?”
“Whisky,” Andrews said.
After Francine left their table, Andrews was silent for some time; he did not look at either of the two men at the table with him.
Miller said: “So you didn’t tie up with McDonald.”
“It wasn’t what I wanted.”
Miller nodded. “This is a hunt town, boy. If you stay around, there ain’t much choice about what you do. You can take a job with McDonald and make yourself some money, or you can start yourself some kind of little business and hope that the railroad does come through, or you can tie up with a party and hunt buffalo.”
“That’s about what Mr. McDonald said.”
“And he didn’t like the last idea.”
Andrews smiled. “No, sir.”
“He don’t like hunters,” Miller said. “And they don’t like him either.”
“Why?”
Miller shrugged. “They do the work, and he gets all the money. They think he’s a crook, and he thinks they’re fools. You can’t blame either side; they’re both right.”
Andrews said, “But you’re a hunter yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Miller?”
Miller shook his head. “Not like these around here, and not for McDonald. He outfits his own parties, and gives them fifty cents a head for raw hides—summer hides, not much more than thin leather. He has thirty or forty parties out all the time; he gets plenty of skins, but the way it’s split up, the men are lucky if they make enough to get through the winter. I hunt on my own or I don’t hunt at all.” Miller paused; Francine had returned with a quarter-filled bottle and fresh glasses and a small glass of beer for herself. Charley Hoge moved quickly toward the glass of whisky she set before him; Miller took his own glass in his large, hairless hand and cupped it; Andrews took a quick sip. The liquor burned his lips and tongue and warmed his throat; he could taste nothing for the burning.
“I come out here four years ago,” Miller continued, “the same year McDonald did. My God! You should have seen this country then. In the spring, you could look out from here and see the whole land black with buffalo, solid as grass, for miles. There was only a few of us then, and it was nothing for one party to get a thousand, fifteen hundred head in a couple of weeks hunting. Spring hides, too, pretty good fur. Now it’s hunted out. They travel in smaller herds, and a man’s lucky to get two or three hundred head a trip. Another year or two, there won’t be any hunting left in Kansas.”
Andrews took another sip of whisky. “What will you do then?”
Miller shrugged. “I’ll go back to trapping, or I’ll do some mining, or I’ll hunt something else.” He frowned at his glass. “Or I’ll hunt buffalo. There are still places they can be found, if you know where to look.”
“Around here?” Andrews asked.
“No,” Miller said. He moved his large, black-suited body restlessly in the chair and pushed his untasted drink precisely to the center of the table. “In the fall of sixty-three, I was trapping beaver up in Colorado. That was the year after Charley here lost his hand, and he was staying in Denver and wasn’t with me. The beaver was late in furring out that year, so I left my traps near the river I was working and took my mule up towards the mountains; I was hoping to get a few bears. Their skin was good that year, I had heard. I climbed all over the side of that mountain near three days, I guess, and wasn’t able to even catch sight of a bear. On the fourth day, I was trying to work my way higher and further north, and I come to a place where the mountain dropped off sharp into a little gorge. I thought maybe there might be a side stream down there where the animals watered, so I worked my way down; took me the best part of a day. They wasn’t no stream down there. They was a flat bed of bare ground, ten, twelve foot wide, packed hard as rock, that looked like a road cut right through the mountain. Soon as I saw it, I knew what it was, but I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was buffalo; they had tromped the earth down hard, going this way and coming back, for years. I followed the bed up the mountain the rest of that day, and near nightfall come out on a valley bed flat as a lake. That valley wound in and out of the mountains as far as you could see; and they was buffalo scattered all over it, in little herds, as far as a man could see. Fall fur, but thicker and better than winter fur on the plains grazers. From where I stood, I figured maybe three, four thousand head; and they was more around the bends of the valley I couldn’t see.” He took the glass from the center of the table and gulped quickly, shuddering slightly as he swallowed. “I had the feeling no man had ever been in that valley before. Maybe some Indians a long time ago, but no man. I stayed around two days, and never saw a human sign, and never saw one coming back out. Back near the river, the trail curved out against the side of the mountain and was hid by trees; working up the river, a man would never see it.”
Andrews cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice sounded strange and hollow to himself: “Did you ever go back there?”
Miller shook his head. “I never went back. I knew it would keep. A man couldn’t find it unless he knew where it was, or unless he stumbled on it accidental like I did; and that ain’t very likely.”
“Ten years,” Andrews said. “Why haven’t you gone back?”
Miller shrugged. “Things ain’t been right for it. One year Charley was laid up with the fever, another year I was promised to something else, another I didn’t have a stake. Mainly I haven’t been able to get together the right kind of party.”
“What kind do you need?” Andrews asked.
Miller did not look at him. “The kind that’ll let it be my hunt. They ain’t many places like this left, and I never wanted any of the other hunters along.”
Andrews felt an obscure excitement growing within him. “How many men would it take for a party like this?”
“That would depend,” Miller said, “on who was getting it up. Five, six, seven men in most parties. Myself, on this hunt, I’d keep it small. One hunter would be enough, because he’d have all the time he needed to make his kill; he could keep the buffalo in the valley all the time he needs. A couple of skinners and a camp man. Four men ought to be able to do the job about right. And the fewer the men, the bigger the take will be.”
Andrews did not speak. On the edge of his sight, Francine moved forward and put her elbows on the table. Charley Hoge took a deep, sharp breath, and coughed gently. After a long while, Andrews said:
“Could you get up a party this late in the year?”
Miller nodded, and looked over Andrews’s head. “Could be done, I suppose.”
There was a silence. Andrews said: “How much money would it take?”
Miller’s eyes lowered and met Andrews’s; he smiled slightly. “Are you just talking, son, or have you got yourself interested in something?”
“I’ve got myself interested,” Andrews said. “How much money would it take?”
“Well, now,” Miller said. “I hadn’t thought serious about going out this year.” He drummed his heavy pale fingers on the table top. “But I suppose I could think about it, now.”
Charley Hoge coughed again, and added an inch of whisky to his half-filled glass.
“My stake’s pretty low,” Miller said. “Whoever came in would have to put up just about all the money.”
“How much?” Andrews said.
“And even so,” Miller continued, “he’d have to understand that it would still be my hunt. He’d have to understand that.”
“Yes,” Andrews said. “How much would it take?”
“How much money you got, son?” Miller asked gently.
“A little over fourteen hundred dollars,” Andrews said.
“You’d want to go along, of course.”
Andrews hesitated. Then he nodded.
“To work, I mean. To help with the skinning.”
Andrews nodded again.
“It would still be my hunt, you understand,” Miller said.
Andrews said: “I understand.”
“Well, it might be arranged,” Miller said, “if you wanted to put up the money for the team and provisions.”
“What would we need?” Andrews asked.
“We’d need a wagon and a team,” Miller said slowly. “Most often the team is mules, but a mule needs grain. A team of oxen could live off the land, going and coming, and they pull a heavy enough load. They’re slow, but we wouldn’t be in a great hurry. You got a horse?”
“No,” Andrews said.
“We’d need a horse for you, and maybe for the skinner, whoever he is. You shoot a gun?”
“Do you mean a—pistol?”
Miller smiled tightly. “No man in his right mind has any use for them little things,” he said, “unless he wants to get killed. I mean a rifle.”
“No,” Andrews said.
“We ought to get you a small rifle. I’ll need powder and lead—say a ton of lead and five hundred pounds of powder. If we don’t use it all, we can get refunds. In the mountains, we can live off the land, but we have to have food going and coming back. Couple of sacks of flour, ten pounds of coffee, twenty of sugar, couple pounds of salt, a few sides of bacon, twenty pounds of beans. We’ll need some kettles and a few tools. A little grain for the horses. I’d say five or six hundred dollars would do it easy.”
“That’s nearly half of all the money I have,” Andrews said.
Miller shrugged. “It’s a lot of money. But you stand to make a lot more. With a good wagon, we ought to be able to load in close to a thousand skins. They should bring us near twenty-five hundred dollars. If there’s a big kill, we can let some of the hides winter over and go back in the spring and get them. I’ll take 60 per cent and you get 40; I’m taking a bit more than usual, but it’s my hunt, and besides I take care of Charley here. You’ll take care of the other skinner. When we get back, you should be able to sell the team and wagon for about what you paid for it; so you’ll make out all right.”
“I ain’t going,” Charley Hoge said. “That’s a country of the devil.”
Miller said pleasantly, “Charley lost that hand up in the Rockies; he ain’t liked the country since.”
“Hell fire and ice,” Charley Hoge said. “It ain’t for human man.”
“Tell Mr. Andrews about losing your hand, Charley,” Miller said.
Charley Hoge grinned through his short, grizzled beard. He put the stump of his hand on the table and inched it toward Andrews as he spoke. “Miller and I was hunting and trapping early one winter in Colorado. We was up on a little rise just before the mountains when a blizzard come up. Miller and I got separated, and I slipped on a rock and hit my head and got knocked clean out of my senses. Don’t know how long I laid there. When I come to, the blizzard was still blowing, and I could hear Miller calling.”
“I’d been looking for Charley nearly four hours,” Miller said.
“I must’ve knocked a glove off when I fell,” Charley Hoge continued, “because my hand was bare and it was froze stiff. But it wasn’t cold. It just kind of tingled. I yelled at Miller, and he come over, and he found us a shelter back in some rocks; they was even some dry logs, and we was able to keep a fire going. I looked at that hand, and it was blue, a real bright blue. I never seen anything like it. And then it got warmed up, and then it started to hurt; I couldn’t tell whether it hurt like ice or whether it hurt like fire; and then it turned red, like a piece of fancy cloth. We was there two, three days, and the blizzard didn’t let up. Then it turned blue again, almost black.”
“It got to stinking,” Miller said, “so I knew it had to come off.”
Charley Hoge laughed with a wheezing, cracking voice. “He kept telling me it had to come off, but I wouldn’t listen to him. We argued almost half a day about it, until he finally wore me down. He never would of talked me into it if I hadn’t got so tired. Finally I just laid back and told him to cut away.”
“My God,” Andrews said, his voice barely a whisper.
“It wasn’t as bad as you might think,” he said. “By that time the hurt was so bad I could just barely feel the knife. And when he hit bone, I passed out, and it wasn’t bad at all then.”
“Charley got careless,” Miller said. “He shouldn’t have slipped on that rock. He ain’t been careless since, have you, Charley?”
He laughed. “I been mighty careful since then.”
“So you see,” Miller said, “why Charley don’t like the Colorado country.”
“My God, yes!” Andrews said.
“But he’ll go with us,” Miller continued. “With only one hand, he’s a better camp man than most.”
“No,” Charley Hoge said. “I ain’t going. Not this time.”
“It’ll be all right,” Miller said. “This time of year, it’s almost warm up there; there won’t be no snow till November.” He looked at Andrews. “He’ll go; all we’ll need is a skinner. We’ll need a good one, because he’ll have to break you in.”
“All right,” Andrews said. “When will we be leaving?”
“We should hit the mountains about the middle of September; it’ll be cool up there then, and the hides should be about right. We should leave here in about two weeks. Then a couple of weeks to get there, a week or ten days on the kill, and a couple of weeks back.”
Andrews nodded. “What about the team and the supplies?”
“I’ll go into Ellsworth for those,” Miller said. “I know a man there who has a sound wagon, and there should be oxen for sale; I’ll pick up the supplies there, too, because they’ll be cheaper. I should be back in four, five days.”
“You’ll make all the arrangements,” Andrews said.
“Yes. You leave it all to me. I’ll get you a good horse and a varmint rifle. And I’ll get us a skinner.”
“Do you want the money now?” Andrews asked.
The corners of Miller’s mouth tightened in a close smile. “You don’t lose any time making up your mind, do you, Mr. Andrews?”
“No, sir,” Andrews said.
“Francine,” Miller said, “we all ought to have another drink on this. Bring us all some more whisky—and bring yourself some too.”
Francine looked for a moment at Miller, then at Andrews; her eyes stayed upon Andrews as she rose and went away from the table.
“We can have a drink on it,” Miller said, “and then you can give me the money. That will close it.”
Andrews nodded. He looked at Charley Hoge, and beyond him; he was drowsy with the heat and with the warm effects of the whisky he had drunk; in his mind were fragments of Miller’s talk about the mountain country to which they were going, and those fragments glittered and turned and fell softly in accidental and strange patterns. Like the loose stained bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, they augmented themselves with their turning and found light from irrelevant and accidental sources.
Francine returned with another bottle and placed it in the center of the table; no one spoke. Miller lifted his glass, poised it for a moment where the light from a lantern struck it with a reddish-amber glow. The others silently raised their glasses and drank, not putting the glasses down until they were empty. Andrews’s eyes watered at the burning in his throat; through the moisture he saw Francine’s face shimmering palely before him. Her own eyes were upon him, and she was smiling slightly. He blinked and looked at Miller.
“You got the money with you?” Miller asked.
Andrews nodded. He opened a lower button of his shirt and withdrew from his money belt a sheaf of bills. He counted six hundred dollars upon the scarred table and returned the other bills to his belt.
“And that’s all there is to it,” Miller said. “I’ll ride into Ellsworth tomorrow and pick up what we need and be back in less than a week.” He shuffled through the bills, selected one, and held it out to Charley Hoge. “Here. This will keep you while I’m gone.”
“What?” Charley Hoge asked, his voice dazed. “Ain’t I coming with you?”
“I’ll be busy,” Miller said. “This will take care of you for a week.”
Charley Hoge nodded slowly, and then whipped the bill out of Miller’s hand, crushed it, and thrust it into his shirt pocket.
Andrews pushed his chair back from the table and arose; his limbs felt stiff and reluctant to move. “I believe I’ll turn in, if there’s nothing else we need to talk about.”
Miller shook his head. “Nothing that can’t wait. I’ll be pulling out early in the morning, so I won’t see you till I get back. But Charley’ll be around.”
“Good night,” Andrews said. Charley Hoge grunted and looked at him somberly.
“Good night, ma’am,” Andrews said to Francine, and bowed slightly, awkwardly, from the shoulders.
“Good night, Mr. Andrews,” Francine said. “Good luck.”
Andrews turned from them and walked across the long room. It was nearly deserted, and the pools of light on the rough-planked floor and the hewn tables seemed sharper, and the shadows about those pools deeper and more dense than they had been earlier. He walked through the saloon and out onto the street.
The glow from the blacksmith shop had all but disappeared, and the lanterns hung on the poles in front of the livery stable had burned down so that only rims of yellow light spread from the bottoms of glass bulbs; the few horses that remained tethered in front of the saloon were still, their heads slumped down nearly between their legs. The sound of Andrews’s boots upon the board walk was loud and echoing; he went into the street and walked across to his hotel.