24

JUG WOKE UP. His head hurt and the taste in his mouth was positively vile. He was . . . he didn’t know where he was. Someplace that . . . oh, yes. He remembered now. Sort of. He’d taken a swing east when he left Tie Siding. Instead of going straight back north to Bonner, he had gone over to Hansen’s place on Muddy Branch.

Hansen’s was a hog ranch situated just outside the Injun reservation boundaries. Hansen claimed it was a legitimate trading post. What it was, in fact, was a whiskey trading point. Red or white, a man could count on finding a drink there or a woman. The women were Injun and Jug supposed they were paid in whiskey rather than cash. Not that he’d ever asked—nor, for that matter, cared. What somebody else chose to do was their own affair.

He’d never had much to do with Hansen before, if only because his place was so far out of the way. Jug and some of the boys had been by there a time or two over the years, stopping off when they’d driven small herds over to the reservation for beef issue delivery—once delivered and paid for, the beeves were turned loose in a valley and the Injuns were allowed to shoot them down from horseback as if they were wild buffalo instead of regular old crossbred steers, and wasn’t that a helluva sight—but none of them liked it all that much and rarely went there.

Nobody liked Hansen all that much either, never mind his place. The man smelled bad and had been wearing the same vest and moth-eaten fur hat for as long as Jug had known him. Word was that he’d been one sharp-eyed, fine-shooting professional hunter of buffalo when he was in his prime. That’d been a long while back. Now the buffalo were long gone and Hansen was a bad smelling relic who liked his own products, both liquid and fleshy, somewhat too well.

Not that it was any of Jug’s nevermind.

He sat up and discovered he’d been sleeping in a pile of straw. It took him two tries to make it onto his feet. His head was spinning and his stomach felt like he’d swallowed somebody else’s puke. He staggered outside the shed and got rid of everything that was in there. Didn’t feel all that much better for it, but it had to be done.

If Hansen had a well, Jug couldn’t see it so he walked—slow and gingerly—over to the Muddy Branch. This time of year there was enough water in it to have a discernible flow. Jug made his way a little upstream from Hansen’s outhouse before he got down on hands and knees and pushed his face under until his nose touched bottom. The water felt good. Almost good enough to wake him up the rest of the way. While his head was partway underwater anyhow he took advantage of the opportunity and sucked some in, swallowing a couple quarts or so, it felt like. The water felt heavy in his otherwise empty belly, but at least it took some of the taste of old whiskey and new puke out of his mouth.

Jug straightened up and shook his head like a dog just coming out of a pond. That was a mistake. It made his head start pounding. He wiped his face with both hands then stood—on the first attempt this time—and squinted toward the sky. It was the middle of the morning. Unless it was the middle of the afternoon. He had to think for a few seconds to remember how Hansen’s place was situated, then decided it was midmorning.

Of course, he wasn’t for sure just what day this was, seeing as how he’d gone and lost track of time since he left the Siding. Didn’t matter anyway. There wasn’t anyplace he had to be right now nor any particular time to get there.

Jug was his own man. Free as a bird in the air. Free as . . . why the hell didn’t that thought make him feel any better?

No matter.

He walked—very careful not to stagger or stumble lest someone think he was a drunk—over to Hansen’s to see about having himself an eye-opener.