That afternoon in 1871, the stage to Grantville had only the two of us as passengers, rocking and swaying in its dusty, hot confines under the fiery Texas sun. The young man sat across from me, one palm braced against the hard, dry leather of the seat, the other holding on his lap a small black bag.
He was somewhere near nineteen or twenty. His build was almost delicate. He was dressed in checkered flannel and wore a dark tie with a stickpin in its center. You could tell he was a city boy.
From the time we’d left Austin two hours before, I had been wondering about the bag he carried so carefully in his lap. I noticed that his light-blue eyes kept gazing down at it. Every time they did, his thin-lipped mouth would twitch—whether toward a smile or a grimace I couldn’t tell. Another black bag, slightly larger, was on the seat beside him, but to this he paid little attention.
I’m an old man, and while not usually garrulous, I guess I do like to seek out conversation. Just the same, I hadn’t offered to speak in the time we’d been fellow passengers, and neither had he. For about an hour and a half I’d been trying to read the Austin paper, but now I laid it down beside me on the dusty seat. I glanced down again at the small bag and noted how tightly his slender fingers were clenched around the bone handle.
Frankly, I was curious. And maybe there was something in the young man’s face that reminded me of Lew or Tylan—my sons. Anyhow, I picked up the newspaper and held it out to him.
“Care to read it?” I asked him above the din of the 24 pounding hoofs and the rattle and creak of the stage.
There was no smile on his face as he shook his head once. If anything, his mouth grew tighter until it was a line of almost bitter resolve. It is not often you see such an expression in the face of so young a man. It is too hard at that age to hold on to either bitterness or resolution, too easy to smile and laugh and soon forget the worst of evils. Maybe that was why the young man seemed so unusual to me.
“I’m through with it if you’d like,” I said.
“No, thank you,” he answered curtly.
“Interesting story here,” I went on, unable to rein in a runaway tongue. “Some Mexican claims to have shot young Wesley Hardin.”
The young man’s eyes raised up a moment from his bag and looked at me intently. Then they lowered to the bag again.
“’Course I don’t believe a word of it,” I said. “The man’s not born yet who’ll put John Wesley away.”
The young man did not choose to talk, I saw. I leaned back against the jolting seat and watched him as he studiously avoided my eyes.
Still I would not stop. What is this strange compulsion of old men to share themselves? Perhaps they fear to lose their last years in emptiness. “You must have gold in that bag,” I said to him, “to guard it so zealously.”
It was a smile he gave me now, though a mirthless one.
“No, not gold,” the young man said, and as he finished saying so, I saw his lean throat move once nervously.
I smiled and struck in deeper the wedge of conversation.
“Going to Grantville?” I asked.
“Yes, I am,” he said—and I suddenly knew from his voice that he was no Southern man.
I did not speak then. I turned my head away and looked out stiffly across the endless flat, watching through the choking haze of alkali dust, the bleached scrub which dotted the barren stretches. For a moment, I felt myself tightened with that rigidity we Southerners contracted in the presence of our conquerors.
But there is something stronger than pride, and that is loneliness. It was what made me look back to the young man and once more see in him something of my own two boys who gave their lives at Shiloh. I could not, deep in myself, hate the young man for being from a different part of our nation. Even then, imbued as I was with the stiff pride of the Confederate, I was not good at hating.
“Planning to live in Grantville?” I asked.
The young man’s eyes glittered. “Just for a while,” he said. His fingers grew yet tighter on the bag he held so firmly in his lap. Then he suddenly blurted, “You want to see what I have in—”
He stopped, his mouth tightening as if he were angry to have spoken.
I didn’t know what to say to his impulsive, half-finished offer.
The young man very obviously clutched at my indecision and said, “Well, never mind—you wouldn’t be interested.”
And though I suppose I could have protested that I would, somehow I felt it would do no good.
The young man leaned back and braced himself again as the coach yawed up a rock-strewn incline. Hot, blunt waves of dust-laden wind poured through the open windows at my side. The young man had rolled down the curtains on his side shortly after we’d left Austin.
“Got business in our town?” I asked, after blowing dust from my nose and wiping it from around my eyes and mouth.
He leaned forward slightly. “You live in Grantville?” he asked loudly as overhead the driver, Jeb Knowles, shouted commands to his three teams and snapped the leather popper of his whip over their straining bodies.
I nodded. “Run a grocery there,” I said, smiling at him. “Been visiting up North with my oldest—with my son.”
He didn’t seem to hear what I had said. Across his face a look as intent as any I have ever seen moved suddenly.
“Can you tell me something?” he began. “Who’s the quickest pistolman in your town?”
The question startled me, because it seemed born of no idle curiosity. I could see that the young man was far more than ordinarily interested in my reply. His hands were clutching, bloodless, the handle of his small black bag.
“Pistolman?” I asked him.
“Yes. Who’s the quickest in Grantville? Is it Hardi? Does he come there often? Or Longley. Do they come there?”
That was the moment I knew something was not quite right in that young man. For, when he spoke those words, his face was strained and eager beyond a natural eagerness.
“I’m afraid I don’t know much about such things,” I told him. “The town is rough enough; I’ll be the first man to admit to that. But I go my own way and folks like me go theirs and we stay out of trouble.”
“But what about Hardin?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know about that either, young man,” I said. “Though I do believe someone said he was in Kansas now.”
The young man’s face showed a keen and heartfelt disappointment.
“Oh,” he said and sank back a little.
He looked up suddenly. “But there are pistolmen there,” he said, “dangerous men?”
I looked at him for a moment, wishing, somehow, that I had kept to my paper and not let the garrulity of age get the better of me. “There are such men,” I said stiffly, “wherever you look in our ravaged South.”
“Is there a sheriff in Grantville?” the young man asked me then.
“There is,” I said—but for some reason did not add that Sheriff Cleat was hardly more than a figurehead, a man who feared his own shadow and kept his appointment only because the county fathers were too far away to come and see for themselves what a futile job their appointee was doing.
I didn’t tell the young man that. Vaguely uneasy, I told him nothing more at all and we were separated by silence again, me to my thoughts, he to his—whatever strange, twisted thoughts they were. He looked at his bag and fingered at the handle, and his narrow chest rose and fell with sudden lurches.
A creaking, a rattling, a blurred spinning of thick spokes. A shouting, a deafening clatter of hoofs in the dust. Over the far rise, the buildings of Grantville were clustered and waiting.
A young man was coming to town.
—
Grantville in the postwar period was typical of those Texas towns that struggled in the limbo between lawlessness and settlement. Into its dusty streets rode men tense with the anger of defeat. The very air seemed charged with their bitter resentments—resentments toward the occupying forces, toward the rabble-rousing carpetbaggers and, with that warped evaluation of the angry man, toward themselves and their own kind. Threatening death was everywhere, and the dust was often red with blood. In such a town I sold food to men who often died before their stomachs could digest it.
I did not see the young man for hours after Jeb braked up the stage before the Blue Buck Hotel. I saw him move across the ground and up the hotel porch steps, holding tightly to his two bags.
Then some old friends greeted me and I forgot him.
I chatted for a while and then I walked by the store. Things there were in good order. I commended Merton Winthrop, the young man I had entrusted the store to in my three weeks’ absence, and then I went home, cleaned up, and put on fresh clothes.
I judge it was near four that afternoon when I pushed through the batwings of the Nellie Gold Saloon. I am not nor ever was a heavy drinking man, but I’d had for several years the pleasurable habit of sitting in the cool shadows of a corner table with a whiskey drink to sip. It was a way that I’d found for lingering over minutes.
That particular afternoon I had chatted for a while with George P. Shaughnessy, the afternoon bartender, then retired to my usual table to dream a few presupper dreams and listen to the idle buzz of conversations and the click of chips in the back-room poker game.
That was where I was when the young man entered.
In truth, when he first came in, I didn’t recognize him. For what a strange, incredible altering in his dress and carriage! The city clothes were gone; instead of a flannel coat he wore a broadcloth shirt, pearl-buttoned; in place of flannel trousers there were dark, tight-fitting trousers whose calves plunged into glossy-high-heeled boots. On his head a broad-brimmed hat cast a shadow across his grimly set features.
His boot heels had clumped him almost to the bar before I recognized him, before I grew suddenly aware of what he had been keeping so guardedly in that small black bag.
Crossed on his narrow waist, riding low, a brace of gunbelts hung, sagging with the weight of two Colt .44s in their holsters.
I confess to staring at the transformation. Few men in Grantville wore two pistols, much less slender young city men just arrived in town.
In my mind, I heard again the questions he had put to me. I had to set my glass down for the sudden, unaccountable shaking of my hand.
The other customers of the Nellie Gold looked only briefly at the young man, then returned to their several attentions. George P. Shaughnessy looked up, smiling, gave the customary unnecessary wipe across the immaculate mahogany of the bar top, and asked the young man’s pleasure.
“Whiskey,” the young man said.
“Any special kind, now?” George asked.
“Any kind,” the young man said, thumbing back his hat with studied carelessness.
It was when the amber fluid was almost to the glass top that the young man asked the question I had somehow known he would ask from the moment I had recognized him.
“Tell me, who’s the quickest pistolman in town?”
George looked up. “I beg your pardon, mister?”
The young man repeated the question, his face emotionless.
“Now, what does a fine young fellow like you want to know that for?” George asked him in a fatherly way.
It was like the tightening of hide across a drum top the way the skin grew taut across the young man’s cheeks.
“I asked you a question,” he said with unpleasant flatness. “Answer it.”
The two closest customers cut off their talking to observe. I felt my hands grow cold upon the table top. There was ruthlessness in the young man’s voice.
But George’s face still retained the bantering cast it almost always had.
“Are you going to answer my question?” the young man said, drawing back his hands and tensing them with light suggestiveness along the bar edge.
“What’s your name, son?” George asked.
The young man’s mouth grew hard and his eyes went cold beneath the shadowing brim of his hat. Then a calculating smile played thinly on his lips. “My name is Riker,” he said as if somehow he expected this unknown name to strike terror into all our hearts.
“Well, young Mr. Riker, may I ask you why you want to know about the quickest pistolman in town?”
“Who is it?” There was no smile on Riker’s lips now; it had faded quickly into that grim, unyielding line again. In back I noticed one of the three poker players peering across the top of half-doors into the main saloon.
“Well, now,” George said, smiling, “There’s Sheriff Cleat. I’d say that he’s about—”
His face went slack. A pistol was pointing at his chest.
“Don’t tell me lies,” young Riker said in tightly restrained anger. “I know your sheriff is a yellow dog; a man at the hotel told me so. I want the truth.”
He emphasized the word again with a sudden thumbing back of hammer. George’s face went white.
“Mr. Riker, you’re making a very bad mistake,” he said, then twitched back as the long pistol barrel jabbed into his chest.
Riker’s mouth was twisted with fury. “Are you going to tell me?” he raged. His young voice cracked in the middle of the sentence like an adolescent’s.
“Selkirk,” George said quickly.
—
The young man drew back his pistol, another smile trembling for a moment on his lips. He threw across a nervous glance at where I sat but did not recognize me. Then his cold blue eyes were on George again.
“Selkirk,” he repeated. “What’s the first name?”
“Barth,” George told him, his voice having neither anger nor fear.
“Barth Selkirk.” The young man spoke the name as though to fix it in his mind. Then he leaned forward quickly, his nostrils flaring, the thin line of his mouth once more grown rigid.
“You tell him I want to kill him,” he said. “Tell him I—” He swallowed hastily and jammed his lips together. “Tonight,” he said then. “Right here. At eight o’clock.” He shoved out the pistol barrel again. “You tell him,” he commanded.
George said nothing and Riker backed away from the bar, glancing over his shoulder once to see where the doors were. As he retreated, the high heel at his right boot gave a little inward and he almost fell. As he staggered for balance, his pistol barrel pointed restlessly around the room, and in the rising color of his face, his eyes looked with nervous apprehension into every dark corner.
Then he was at the doors again, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Before our blinking eyes, the pistol seemed to leap back into its holster. Young Riker smiled uncertainly, obviously desperate to convey the impression that he was in full command of the moment.
“Tell him I don’t like him,” he said as if he were tossing out a casual reason for his intention to kill Selkirk. He swallowed again, lowering his chin a trifle to hide the movement of his throat.
“Tell him he’s a dirty Rebel,” he said in a breathless-sounding voice. “Tell him—tell him I’m a Yankee and I hate all Rebels!”
For another moment he stood before us in wavering defiance. Then suddenly he was gone.
George broke the spell. We heard the clink of glass on glass as he poured himself a drink. We watched him swallow it in a single gulp. “Young fool,” he muttered.
I got up and went over to him.
“How do you like that?” he asked me, gesturing one big hand in the general direction of the doors.
“What are you going to do?” I asked him, conscious of the two men now sauntering with affected carelessness for the doors.
“What am I supposed to do?” George asked me. “Tell Selkirk, I guess.”
I told George about my talk with young Riker and of his strange transformation from city boy to, apparently, self-appointed pistol killer.
“Well,” George said when I was finished talking, “where does that leave me? I can’t have a young idiot like that angry with me. Do you know his triggers were filed to a hair? Did you see the way he slung that Colt?” He shook his head. “He’s a fool,” he said. “But a dangerous fool—one that a man can’t let himself take chances with.”
“Don’t tell Selkirk,” I said. “I’ll go to the sheriff and—”
George waved an open palm at me. “Don’t joke now, John,” he said. “You know Cleat hides his head under the pillow when there’s shooting in the air.”
“But this would be a slaughter, George,” I said. “Selkirk is a hardened killer, you know that for a fact.”
George eyed me curiously. “Why are you concerned about it?” he asked me.
“Because he’s a boy,” I said. “Because he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
George shrugged. “The boy came in and asked for it himself, didn’t he?” he said. “Besides, even if I say nothing, Selkirk will hear about it, you can be sure of that. Those two who just went out—don’t you think they’ll spread the word?”
A grim smile raised Shaughnessy’s lips. “The boy will get his fight,” he said. “And may the Lord have mercy on his soul.”
George was right. Word of the young stranger’s challenge flew about the town as if the wind had blown it. And with the word, the threadbare symbol of our justice, Sheriff Cleat, sought the sanctuary of his house, having either scoffed at all storm warnings or ignored them in his practiced way.
But the storm was coming; everyone knew it. The people who had found some reason to bring them to the square—they knew it. The men thronging the Nellie Gold who seemed to have developed a thirst quite out of keeping with their normal desires—they knew it. Death is a fascinating lure to men who can stand aside and watch it operate on someone else.
I stationed myself near the entrance of the Nellie Gold, hoping that I might speak to young Riker, who had been in his hotel room all afternoon, alone.
—
At seven-thirty, Selkirk and his ruffian friends galloped to the hitching rack, tied up their snorting mounts, and went into the saloon. I heard the greetings offered them and their returning laughs and shouts. They were elated, all of them; that was not hard to see. Things had been dull for them in the past few months. Cleat had offered no resistance, only smiling fatuously to their bullying insults. And, in the absence of any other man willing to draw his pistol on Barth Selkirk, the days had dragged for him and for his gang, who thrived on violence. Gambling and drinking and the company of Grantville’s lost women was not enough for these men. It was why they were all bubbling with excited anticipation that night.
While I stood waiting on the wooden sidewalk, endlessly drawing out my pocket watch, I heard the men shouting back and forth among themselves inside the saloon. But the deep, measured voice of Barth Selkirk I did not hear. He did not shout or laugh then or ever. It was why he hovered like a menacing wraith across our town. For he spoke his frightening logic with the thunder of his pistols and all men knew it.
Time was passing. It was the first time in my life that impending death had taken on such immediacy to me. My boys had died a thousand miles from me, falling while, oblivious, I sold flour to the blacksmith’s wife. My wife had died slowly, passing in the peace of slumber, without a cry or a sob.
Yet now I was deeply in this fearful moment. Because I had spoken to young Riker, because—yes, I knew it now—he had reminded me of Lew, I now stood shivering in the darkness, my hands clammy in my coat pockets, in my stomach a hardening knot of dread.
And then my watch read eight. I looked up—and I heard his boots clumping on the wood in even, unhurried strides.
I stepped out from the shadows and moved toward him. The people in the square had grown suddenly quiet. I sensed men’s eyes on me as I walked toward Riker’s approaching form. It was, I knew, the distortion of nerves and darkness, but he seemed taller than before as he walked along with measured steps, his small hands swinging tensely at his sides.
I stopped before him. For a moment, he looked irritably confused. Then that smile that showed no humor flickered on his tightly drawn face.
“It’s the grocery man,” he said, his voice dry and brittle.
I swallowed the cold tightness in my throat. “Son, you’re making a mistake,” I said, “a very bad mistake.”
“Get out of my way,” he told me curtly, his eyes glancing over my shoulder at the saloon.
“Son, believe me. Barth Selkirk is too much for you to—”
In the dull glowing of saloon light, the eyes he turned on me were the blue of frozen, lifeless things. My voice broke off, and without another word, I stepped aside to let him pass. When a man sees in another man’s eyes the insensible determination that I saw in Riker’s, it is best to step aside. There are no words that will affect such men.
A moment more he looked at me and then, squaring his shoulders, he started walking again. He did not stop until he stood before the batwings of the Nellie Gold.
I moved closer, staring at the light and shadows of his face illuminated by the inside lamps. And it seemed as though, for a moment, the mask of relentless cruelty fell from his features to reveal stark terror.
But it was only a moment, and I could not be certain I had really seen it. Abruptly, the eyes caught fire again, the thin mouth tightened, and Riker shoved through the doors with one long stride.
There was silence, utter ringing silence in that room. Even the scuffing of my bootheels sounded very loud as I edged cautiously to the doors.
Then, as I reached them, there was that sudden rustling, thumping, jingling combination of sounds that indicated general withdrawal from the two opposing men.
I looked in carefully.
Riker stood erect, his back to me, looking toward the bar. It now stood deserted save for one man.
Barth Selkirk was a tall man who looked even taller because of the black he wore. His hair was long and blond; it hung in thick ringlets beneath his wide-brimmed hat. He wore his pistol low on his right hip, the butt reversed, the holster thronged tightly to his thigh. His face was long and tanned, his eyes as sky-blue as Riker’s, his mouth a motionless line beneath the well-trimmed length of his mustaches.
I had never seen Abilene’s Hickok, but the word had always been that Selkirk might have been his twin.
—
As the two eyed each other, it was as though every watching man in that room had ceased to function, their breaths frozen, their bodies petrified—only their eyes alive, shifting back and forth from man to man. It might have been a room of statues, so silently did each man stand.
Then I saw Selkirk’s broad chest slowly expanding as it filled with air. And as it slowly sank, his deep voice broke the silence with the impact of a hammer blow on glass.
“Well?” he said and let his boot slide off the brass rail and thump down onto the floor.
An instant pause. Then, suddenly, a gasping in that room as if one man had gasped instead of all.
For Selkirk’s fingers, barely to the butt of his pistol, had turned to stone as he gaped dumbly at the brace of Colts in Riker’s hands.
“Why you dirty—” he began—and then his voice was lost in the deafening roar of pistol fire. His body was flung back against the bar edge as if a club had struck him in the chest. He held there for a moment, his face blank with astonishment. Then the second pistol kicked, thundering in Riker’s hand, and Selkirk went down in a twisted heap.
I looked dazedly at Selkirk’s still body, staring at the great gush of blood from his torn chest. Then, my eyes were on Riker again as he stood veiled in acrid smoke before the staring men.
I heard him swallow convulsively. “My name is Riker,” he said, his voice trembling in spite of efforts to control it. “Remember that. Riker.”
He backed off nervously, his left pistol holstered in a blur of movement, his right still pointed toward the crowd of men.
Then he was out of the saloon again, his face contorted with a mixture of fear and exultation as he turned and saw me standing there.
“Did you see it?” he asked me in a shaking voice. “Did you see it?”
I looked at him without a word as his head jerked to the side and he looked into the saloon again, his hands plummeting down like shot birds to his pistol butts.
Apparently, he saw no menace, for instantly his eyes were back on me again—excited, swollen-pupiled eyes.
“They won’t forget me now, will they?” he said and swallowed. “They’ll remember my name. They’ll be afraid of it.”
He started to walk past me, then twitched to the side and leaned, with a sudden weakness, against the saloon wall, his chest heaving with breath, his blue eyes jumping around feverishly. He kept gasping at the air as if he were choking.
He swallowed with difficulty. “Did you see it?” he asked me again, as if he were desperate to share his murderous triumph. “He didn’t even get to pull his pistols—didn’t even get to pull them.” His lean chest shuddered with turbulent breath. “That’s how,” he gasped, “that’s how to do it.” Another gasp. “I showed them. I showed them all how to do it. I came from the city and I showed them how. I got the best one they had, the best one.” His throat moved so quickly it made a dry, clicking sound. “I showed them,” he muttered.
He looked around blinking. “Now I’ll—”
He looked all around with frightened eyes, as if an army of silent killers were encircling him. His face went slack and he forced together his shaking lips.
“Get out of my way,” he suddenly ordered and pushed me aside. I turned and watched him walking rapidly toward the hotel, looking to the sides and over his shoulder with quick jerks of his head, his hands half poised at his sides.
I tried to understand young Riker, but I couldn’t. He was from the city; that I knew. Some city in the mass of cities had borne him. He had come to Grantville with the deliberate intention of singling out the fastest pistolman and killing him face to face. That made no sense to me. That seemed a purposeless desire.
Now what would he do? He had told me he was only going to be in Grantville for a while. Now that Selkirk was dead, that while was over.
Where would young Riker go next? And would the same scenes repeat themselves in the next town, and the next, and the next after that? The young city man arriving, changing outfits, asking for the most dangerous pistolman, meeting him—was that how it was going to be in every town? How long could such insanity last? How long before he met a man who would not lose the draw?
My mind was filled with these questions. But, over all, the single question—Why? Why was he doing this thing? What calculating madness had driven him from the city to seek out death in this strange land?
While I stood there wondering, Barth Selkirk’s men carried out the blood-soaked body of their slain god and laid him carefully across his horse. I was so close to them I could see his blond hair ruffling slowly in the night wind and hear his life’s blood spattering on the darkness of the street.
Then I saw the six men looking toward the Blue Buck Hotel, their eyes glinting vengefully in the light from the Nellie Gold, and I heard their voices talking low. No words came clear to me as they murmured among themselves, but from the way they kept looking toward the hotel I knew of what they spoke.
I drew back into the shadows again, thinking they might see me and carry their conversation elsewhere. I stood in the blackness watching. Somehow I knew exactly what they intended even before one of their shadowy group slapped a palm against his pistol butt and said distinctly, “Come on.”
I saw them move away slowly, the six of them, their voices suddenly stilled, their eyes directed at the hotel they were walking toward.
Foolishness again; it is an old man’s trademark. For, suddenly, I found myself stepping from the shadows and turning the corner of the saloon, then running down the alley between the Nellie Gold and Pike’s Saddlery; rushing through the squares of light made by the saloon windows, then into darkness again. I had no idea why I was running. I seemed driven by an unseen force which clutched all reason from my mind but one thought—warn him.
My breath was quickly lost. I felt my coattails flapping like furious bird wings against my legs. Each thudding bootfall drove a mail-gloved fist against my heart.
I don’t know how I beat them there, except that they were walking cautiously while I ran headlong along St. Vera street and hurried in the backway of the hotel. I rushed down the silent hallway, my bootheels thumping along the frayed rug.
Maxwell Tarrant was at the desk that night. He looked up with a start as I came running up to him.
“Why, Mr. Callaway,” he said, “what are—?”
“Which room is Riker in?” I gasped.
“Riker?” young Tarrant asked me.
“Quickly, boy!” I cried and cast a frightened glance toward the entranceway as the jar of bootheels sounded on the porch steps.
“Room 27,” young Tarrant said. I begged him to stall the men who were coming in for Riker, and rushed for the stairs.
I was barely to the second floor when I heard them in the lobby. I ran down the dimlit hall, and reaching Room 27, I rapped urgently on its thin door.
Inside, I heard a rustling sound, the sound of stockinged feet padding on the floor, then Riker’s frail, trembling voice asking who it was.
“It’s Callaway,” I said, “the grocery man. Let me in, quickly. You’re in danger.”
“Get out of here,” he ordered me, his voice sounding thinner yet.
“God help you, boy, prepare yourself,” I told him breathlessly. “Selkirk’s men are coming for you.”
I heard his sharp, involuntary gasp. “No,” he said. “That isn’t—” He drew in a rasping breath. “How many?” he asked me hollowly.
“Six,” I said, and on the other side of the door I thought I heard a sob.
“That isn’t fair!” he burst out then in angry fright. “It’s not fair, six against one. It isn’t fair!”
I stood there for another moment, staring at the door, imagining that twisted young man on the other side, sick with terror, his heart jolting like club beats in his chest, able to think of nothing but a moral quality those six men never knew.
“What am I going to do?” he suddenly implored me.
I had no answer. For, suddenly, I heard the thumping of their boots as they started up the stairs, and helpless in my age, I backed quickly from the door and scuttled, like the frightened thing I was, down the hall into the shadows there.
Like a dream it was, seeing those six grim-faced men come moving down the hall with a heavy trudging of boots, a thin jingling of spur rowels, in each of their hands a long Colt pistol. No, like a nightmare, not a dream. Knowing that these living creatures were headed for the room in which young Riker waited, I felt something sinking in my stomach, something cold and wrenching at my insides. Helpless I was; I never knew such helplessness. For no seeming reason, I suddenly saw my Lew inside that room, waiting to be killed. It made me tremble without the strength to stop.
Their boots halted. The six men ringed the door, three on one side, three on the other. Six young men, their faces tight with unyielding intention, their hands bloodless, so tightly did they hold their pistols.
The silence broke. “Come out of that room, you Yankee bastard!” one of them said loudly. He was Thomas Ashwood, a boy I’d once seen playing children’s games in the streets of Grantville, a boy who had grown into the twisted man who now stood, gun in hand, all thoughts driven from his mind but thoughts of killing and revenge.
Silence for a moment.
“I said, come out!” Ashwood cried again, then jerked his body to the side as the hotel seemed to tremble with a deafening blast and one of the door panels exploded into jagged splinters.
—
As the slug gouged into papered plaster across the hall, Ashwood fired his pistol twice into the door lock, the double flash of light splashing up his cheeks like lightning. My ears rang with the explosions as they echoed up and down the hall.
Another pistol shot roared inside the room. Ashwood kicked in the lock-splintered door and leaped out of my sight. The ear-shattering exchange of shots seemed to pin me to the wall.
Then, in a sudden silence, I heard young Riker cry out in a pitiful voice, “Don’t shoot me any more!”
The next explosion hit me like a man’s boot kicking at my stomach. I twitched back against the wall, my breath silenced, as I watched the other men run into the room and heard the crashing of their pistol fire.
It was over—all of it—in less than a minute. While I leaned weakly against the wall, hardly able to stand, my throat dry and tight, I saw two of Selkirk’s men help the wounded Ashwood down the hall, the other three walking behind, murmuring excitedly among themselves. One of them said, “We got him good.”
In a moment, the sound of their boots was gone and I stood alone in the empty hallway, staring blankly at the mist of powder smoke that drifted slowly from the open room.
I do not remember how long I stood there, my stomach a grinding twist of sickness, my hands trembling and cold at my sides.
Only when young Tarrant appeared, white-faced and frightened at the head of the steps, did I find the strength to shuffle down the hall to Riker’s room.
We found him lying in his blood, his pain-shocked eyes staring sightlessly at the ceiling, the two pistols still smoking in his rigid hands.
He was dressed in checkered flannel again, in white shirt and dark stockings. It was grotesque to see him lying there that way, his city clothes covered with blood, those long pistols in his still, white hands.
“Oh, God,” young Tarrant said in a shocked whisper. “Why did they kill him?”
I shook my head and said nothing. I told young Tarrant to get the undertaker and said I would pay the costs. He was glad to leave.
I sat down on the bed, feeling very tired. I looked into young Riker’s open bag and saw, inside, the shirts and underclothes, the ties and stockings.
It was in the bag I found the clippings and the diary.
The clippings were from Northern magazines and newspapers. They were about Hickok and Longley and Hardin and other famous pistol fighters of our territory. There were pencil marks drawn beneath certain sentences—such as Wild Bill usually carries two derringers beneath his coat and Many a man has lost his life because of Hardin’s so-called “border roll” trick.
The diary completed the picture. It told of a twisted mind holding up as idols those men whose only talent was to kill. It told of a young city boy who bought himself pistols and practiced drawing them from their holsters until he was incredibly quick, until his drawing speed became coupled with an ability to strike any target instantly.
It told of a projected odyssey in which a city boy would make himself the most famous pistol fighter in the Southwest. It listed towns that this young man had meant to conquer.
Grantville was the first town on the list.