I come out of a deep sleep hearing someone yelling and walloping a door down the hall and the first thing I thought of was them people we had woke up last night. But sunlight poured in my windows, and I finally reconized who it was screeching like that.
"Sheriff Shannon! Sheriff Shannon! Open up!"
After I drug myself up out of bed, I unlocked my door and looked down the hall. Sure enough, there stood that damn little Banty Foote banging on Clete's door and raising hell.
"He ain't there," I called. "He was leaving with Sheriff Bullock pretty early. What time is it, anyway?"
Banty stopped his pounding and looked me over good, then took out a big pocket watch. "Why, it's nearly eleven. Ten minutes of eleven, in fact. "Most men has been up for hours. Looks like you're just gettin' up now. I'd be ashamed to be getting up now if it was me. Nosir, the sun don't catch me lyin' in bed. I been up all night. Rode in from–"
"Come in here if you got more to say, though I don't see how any more talk could come out of a fellow your size." He followed me into my room and I started to get dressed while he walked around the room looking everthing over careful and running his mouth.
"Like I said, I rode in from Hay Camp. Rode all night. Almost no moon at all. Man in a saloon there told me he seen you men. I figgered Deadwood and I figgered right. Took that woman and that boy to Marsh's and left right away. Where's that sheriff?" He put his hands on his hips and glared at me like I was hiding Clete somewheres.
"I already told you," I said, buttoning up a clean shirt. "He went out with Bullock to look for the man we're after." My head was aching pretty good, and I had heard about all I wanted to of his loud, fast talking.
"Good!" Banty yelled, starting to strut around the room again. "I was worried you might of caught him. Strung him up before I got here." He spun around to face me again. "How come you ain't with that sheriff? You was with him before, back at the Perfessor's dig. How come you ain't-"
"Because he don't need me right now. He's off with Bullock. Sometimes sheriffs like to spook around on their own together, don't you know that?"
Banty moved his head quick side to side, like the rooster he was named for, while he frowned and thought that over. "Of course they do, everbody knows that," he said after a minute. "Say, what's this on the floor?" He went over beside the door, bent over and picked up a little piece of paper and started to read it out loud, a lot slower than he talked. "Dear-Willie, I-went-with-Sheriff-Bullock to-Eliza-Elizabeth-"
"Give me that!" I told him. "Can't you see it's got my name on it and not yours?" I figgered Clete'd slipped it under the door that morning before he left.
Banty held that note to his vest and it looked like he wasn't going to give it up for a minute. Finally he did, but not before he tried to sneak a peek at the rest of it.
Clete's note said that he would be back around dark if they didn't find DuShane in Elizabeth and that I should stick around Deadwood and keep my eyes peeled for our man and find out what I could.
Banty ask me what the rest of it said and after a while I told him because I knowed he would not leave me alone about it 'til I did.
"Who's this Elizabeth gal he's goin' to see?" Banty wanted to know.
"It ain't a gal," I told him. "It's a town a ways from here."
"How'd ya git there? Which way is it? How–"
"Hold on," I told him. "Yougoupthere and Clete will be mad as hell. He's with Bullock and he don't need you around, getting in his way."
He looked kind of disappointed, but then he nodded his head. "What're you gonna do?"
"Why, I'm going to do just like Clete said, stick around Deadwood and see what I can see. Only first I'm going to get some breakfast."
"Good," Banty snapped. "I could eat too. I missed breakfas', ridin' all night."
Well, I didn't mean to invite him along, but I could see no way out of it so we went down the street to where I'd ate my dinner the night before, Banty asking me a string of questions the whole way, sometimes two or three on top of one another.
The place was nearly empty. I had a pair of eggs and some bread and coffee, but Banty ate the same meal I did the night before-beefsteak and mashed potatoes and gravy. He ate almost as fast as he talked, which he did both at the same time, and he was done with that big plate of food before I even finished my eggs. He waved his arm at the woman there and told her to bring him the same thing again. She stood and looked at him a minute, then shrugged her shoulders and went to get it.
"You going to eat a whole 'nother meal?" I ask him.
"A course," he said, acting like I was a fool for not knowing why. "I said I missed my breakfas. A man has to eat. Can't work if you don't eat."
I couldn't see what work he had to do that required all that food, but I didn't say so. I waited 'til the woman brought his second plate and took away his first. "I'm going to walk around town and have a look," I told him.
"Where'll you be?" Banty ask.
"In the saloons, mostly," I told him, heading for the door.
"I'll eat this and then find you," Banty hollered across the room at me. "After I eat me some pie I'll–"
"All right," I said, and went out the door.
I don't know whether it was especial quiet in Deadwood that noon or if it just seemed like it after listening to him for almost an hour. The sun was bright and the day warm, but I felt tired out already and walked down to the Red Bird for a rye to settle my nerves. Bessie wasn't there and the barman didn't know where she was so I went out in the street again.
I stood on the board walk outside Herrmann and Treber's wholesale liquor emporium and looked in at a case of Kentucky sour mash bourbon and thought maybe I would just go in there, buy it, take it back to my room and drink it all. But I didn't.
Instead, I walked into the Green Front and had another shot of rye. The piano player there knowed Mandy but he didn't see her at all that day. He did talk to Justin Thebideaux early in the morning, though, and he thought Mandy and Thebideaux had plans to go somewheres together, but he didn't know where. Course, I'd already heard them talk about New Orleans. I asked him to play any old song he knowed about Texas and I sat down at a table to listen. I had give up on the rye and was sipping a beer when Banty walked in, blinking the sunlight out of his eyes. I pulled my hat down some and slid down in my chair, but Banty spotted me anyways.
"Here you are, Deputy. I was looking all over for you. I already looked in three–"
"Well, sit down and have a beer if you have room for one," I offered, trying to hear one of the Texas songs the man was playing. "Texas Sunsets," I think it was.
"Nosir, don't drink no beer," Banty said, shaking his head fast enough to rattle his brains. "No beer for me. I could sleep, though. I'm sleepy. That beefsteak musta made me sleepy. I was up all night. Rode in from Hay–"
"You can sleep in my room if you want to," I told him, more to get rid of him than anything else. "Ask the man at the desk for a key. Tell him I said it was all right."
Banty stood there scratching his stubby little chin and thought that over awhile. "All right," he said, nodding a couple of times. "All right. I could sure sleep." He yawned a big one so fast I almost missed it. I reckoned he even slept fast.
"Just sleep on top of the blankets if you keep your boots on," I said.
"Where'll you be?" he ask.
"Probly right here," I told him, slapping the table and propping my feet up on a chair.
"All right," he said again. "But, mind now, if you see that killer, you come and git me. Don't you take him yourself. Come git me, you hear?"
"He'll, I don't even know what he looks like, but if he should walk up and interduce himself, I'll just say 'Excuse me a minute, Mr. DuShane, but I got orders to go get Banty Foote before I shoot you,' and then I'll come get you. Is that what you had in mind?"
Banty thought that one over a minute too. "I doubt he'd do that," he said. He shuffled toward the door, turned around and waved, and then walked out before I could even wave back. He could of thanked me for the use of my room, I thought, but I wasn't mad about it because that stinking old saloon went back to peaceful so fast you could almost hear it.
That piano player at the Green Front was good at his work, and he knowed even more songs about Texas, or that had Texas in them somewheres, than I even did. I got to buying him drinks and thinking of Mandy, how maybe she would want to go along to Texas with Clete and me. Two big ranches side by side, Clete's and Mary's and mine and Mandy's. Course, that was only a drunk having himself a pipe dream, I see now, but it seemed real enough at the time. He played all them Texas songs, some of them twice when I ask him to, and I must have drunk more beer than I thought I did. When I stood up, I knowed how much though.
I was just coming back from the little house out behind the saloon for the third or fourth time when that boy from the National-the one whose daddy kept throwing him back out the door-he come up to me and grabbed my arm before I could sit back down. "You're Mr. Goodwin, ain't you?" he ask.
"Yes, I am," I told him, feeling pretty woozy and wobbly on my feet.
It was then I noticed how worried that young fellow looked. "My Pa says for you to come quick. That sheriff you was with, he's been killed."
"Sheriff Bullock, you mean?"
"Nosir, the other one. The one you rode in with."