Amy dressed quickly. She combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick and a touch of rouge to each cheek.
Slocum watched her dress and felt desire for her all over again.
“Well, I guess this is as good as I’m going to feel all day,” she said. She gave Slocum a peck on the cheek. She stood on tiptoes to reach him with her lips.
“There will be other times,” he said.
“Promise?”
“I promise,” he said. “Before you go, can you give me a starting point?”
“A starting point?”
“A name, or names. Those fellers you overheard in the saloon. I’d like to talk to at least one of them.”
“There was only one whose name I knew,” she said. “Wally Fowler. He’s more of a regular than the others. He’s not a miner or prospector. I think he owns a hardware store. Sells mining tools and such.”
“Thanks. Know the name of his store?”
“Oh, I think it’s Fowler’s Tools or something like that.”
“Good. That’s a start.”
“John, I wish you’d stay out of this. I’ll just worry about you and get sick.”
“I’m not going to stick my neck out. I’m just curious, that’s all.”
“Ha. You’re a town tamer if I ever saw one.”
Slocum laughed and kissed her on the lips.
“See you at the saloon later,” he said.
“I’ll be a nervous wreck until you walk through those batwing doors.”
“Don’t be. Just take care of your girls.”
“I will,” she said.
“But don’t take the place of any of them.”
Amy laughed heartily.
“Never,” she said, and then Slocum walked her to the door and opened it.
“Good-bye, John.”
“Good-bye, Amy.” He locked the door as she walked down the hall. He wanted her again when he saw the bounce of her buttocks.
He found the store owned by Wally Fowler. The sign on the false front proclaimed that it was FOWLER’S MINING EQUIPMENT CO. “Close enough,” he said to himself as he walked up to the front door.
Inside, he saw stacks of picks, shovels, adzes, sluice boxes, plowshares, harnesses, boxes of DuPont dynamite, percussion caps, fuses, knives, gold pans, square nails, and assorted pieces of heavy timbers and planking, sacks of concrete, trowels, water jugs, and wooden canteens.
There were two customers in the store and a man arranging items on a shelf behind the counter where sat a bulky mechanical cash register and jars of hard candy. The place smelled of wood and metal and the faint aroma of stale hardtack.
“Help you, mister?” the man behind the counter said as he turned around at Slocum’s approach.
“You Wally Fowler?” Slocum said.
“Yep, I’m Mrs. Fowler’s boy, Wally. What can I do you for?” Wally grinned at his corruption of the standard customer greeting.
“I wanted to ask you about your friend, I don’t know his name, who was caught up in the old badger game.”
“What?”
“The man who was surprised with another man’s wife or gal friend.”
“Oh, that. That’s old news. What’s your interest?”
“I’m more interested in the gal that got him into that fix and the man who claimed he was being dishonored.”
Wally looked askance at Slocum. He was a wiry man, stood about five and a half feet tall in his boots. He wore a faded green shirt and a tattered vest with pencils jutting from one pocket, striped trousers. He had beady eyes and a furrowed forehead that projected over a slightly bulbous nose that was raw around the nostrils from a nasal drip that he wiped every so often with a crumpled handkerchief.
“You ain’t the law?”
“No. But I saw a man killed this morning, and I think a gal worked the plunger that dynamited the man from his mine.”
“I hadn’t heard,” Wally said.
“Probably one of your customers,” Slocum said. “Wilbur Nichols.”
“Wilbur? Hell, I just saw him last night. Had a drink with him.”
“Well, you won’t drink with him anymore. What I’m trying to find out is who killed him and why, if I can.”
“Everybody liked Wilbur.”
“Somebody didn’t,” Slocum said. “That feller who got tangled up with a gal in a badger game. I need to talk to him.”
“Why?”
“It was a gal who dynamited Wilbur’s mine. Might be a connection there.”
“Awww.”
“I need his name,” Slocum said.
Wally’s eyes went wide and rolled in their sockets.
“Man’s name is Ed Jenkins. But you can’t talk to him.”
“Why?” Slocum asked.
“Because Ed’s dead. Somebody shot him in the back less’n a month ago.”
“Know who killed him?”
“Nope. He was backshot at his mine early one morning.”
Slocum thought for a minute.
“He have any kin?”
“Not that I know of.”
“So who got his mine, Wally?”
Wally scratched his head.
“Damned if I know. You might check at the assay office down the street. I know Ed filed a claim.”
“Any other miners you know who got backshot or dynamited?”
Wally blinked.
“There’s always somebody buys the farm up here. It’s a rough town. I seen a gunfight in the saloon one night. Two or three men started blasting away with Colts and they carried one of them out, and he was buried next day.”
“Miner?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Drifter, maybe. Gold brings the bad men to town and they . . . hey, wait a minute. I just thought of something.”
“What’s that?” Slocum asked.
“A man came to town about four or five months ago. He looked like a gunslinger when we saw him belly up to the bar at the Mother Lode. ’Bout a week later, another’n come in and they acted like they knowed each other. And pretty soon there was a bunch of them. They didn’t buy any tools from me. They played cards and kept to theirselves. And one of ’em come in with a pair of pretty gals. I think they was his daughters. But he was one of the bunch all right.”
“How many, and do you know the names of any of them?”
“There’s a half dozen of ’em. That first ’un what come to town is the leader, I think. They called him Wolf. He’s got a face ragged up with scars and wears a red bandanna, sports a pair of Colt pistols on his belt. Wooden grips and they got notches in ’em.”
“Just Wolf, huh?”
“Onliest name I heard him called by. They was another’n called Hobart, I think. Hell, I don’t remember names when I don’t know a feller. But they’re a secretive bunch. Stay to themselves and don’t buy no drinks for nobody. They go up to the cribs now and then, but never seen them gals since. Both mighty purty, though.”
“Do you know the name of the man who brought the gals into town?”
“Clemson, I think. Faron Clemson. He looks meaner’n a bulldog, but don’t come out much.”
“Thanks, Wally,” Slocum said.
“You goin’ to remember all them names?”
“Like I grew up with them,” Slocum said. He touched a finger to the brim of his hat and walked out of the store.
Wally stared at him for a long time until Roy Cheever, a man who worked in the store, came up to him.
“Who was that, Wally?” the man said.
“I don’t know. Forgot to ask him what his handle was.”
“He looks like he can take care of hisself,” Cheever said.
He was a thin young man with peach fuzz on his cheeks and a hatchet face. He had a tablet in his hand with writing on it.
“I wouldn’t tangle with him,” Wally said.
“I never saw so much black on a white man,” Roy said. “Maybe he’s an undertaker.”
“No, I think he’s probably a gravedigger,” Wally said.
“A gravedigger?”
“I mean he puts men in the ground, I think.”
“Golly. He don’t look like no gunfighter I ever saw. Too polite.”
“Don’t kid yourself, Roy. That man strikes me as somebody who eats gunfighters for lunch and cleans his teeth with their bones.”
Roy’s jaw dropped as he watched Slocum vanish from the front window.
He swallowed a gob of saliva and his Adam’s apple bobbed under the taut skin of his neck.