One
One thing he knew for a fact: he had to get these pistols hidden quick or his mother might kill him, too. They were much too valuable to flash around town. Sweet bearded Jesus! He now possessed J. B. Books’s matched Remingtons!
Gillom Rogers slowed his walk, wondering where he would get a double-holster rig to house these legendary nickel-plated Remington .44s. Or should he have a silk vest made like Books’s, with leather holster pockets sewn on either side of the chest, angled forty-five degrees inward for a cross-handed draw? Too late to get J. B.’s own now. That special weapons vest was all shot up and bloody on his corpse. Books was too heavy to clothe Gillom’s skinny frame anyway.
If I can just learn to handle these pistols as well as Mr. Books did, quick draw, spinning tricks, a sharpshooter, I can become as famous a shootist as that old man was! With a little gambler’s luck, if nobody fills me fulla lead, makes me look like a colander. Famous and feared.
“Hey, kid! Kid! Wait up!”
Gillom halted in El Paso Street and stepped back from the steel trolley tracks to turn to see who was hulloing. Shading his eyes against an afternoon sun, he squinted at the hullabaloo stirring around the Constantinople saloon, spectators shouting, hurrying in and out of the opened front doors. A spindle-shanked fellow in a striped suit and derby hat galloped out of the crowd and waved at Gillom.
“Dan Dobkins! Daily Herald!”
Gillom Rogers nodded as the young journalist caught his breath. “You interviewed Mister Books at our house.”
“Well, almost. Before that cranky old bastard booted me out.” Dobkins pointed at one of the shiny revolvers Gillom held. “His pistol?”
Gillom straightened, displaying a nickel-plated Remington in either hand.
“J. B. Books himself gave ’em to me the moment before he died.”
Dobkins couldn’t resist running an index finger along the five-and-a-half-inch sightless barrel of the made-to-order Remington.
“You stole ’em off a dead man.”
“I did not! It was our deal. If I told Cobb, Pulford, and Serrano over in Juarez to meet Mister Books in the Connie today at four, when the shooting was over, Mister Books said I could have these specials.”
Dan Dobkins only had about ten years on this callow youth, but he surveyed the teenager with a cynical eye. “So you took ’em off a dead man?”
Gillom reddened. “No! He asked me to finish him off. Hell, he was all shot up anyway, almost dead. So I pried this loaded pistol from his fingers and did what he asked.”
Dobkins’s mouth fell open. “You issued the coup de grâce?”
“The what?”
“Executed him?”
“Yup.” Gillom Rogers raised his narrow chin defiantly, risked twirling the revolver in his right hand by its finger guard, just once.
The star reporter of the El Paso Daily Herald noticed bystanders halting to overhear. He grabbed the teenager by the shoulder, turned him round, and marched them both toward the swinging doors of the Pass of the North’s best-known saloon, the Gem.
“Let’s get a drink. I’ll make you famous, kid, but I need your whole story.”
Opened in the fall of 1885, the Gem Theatre was a full-service establishment with a restaurant and saloon in front and its gaming rooms moved upstairs by order of a reformist town council. A stage at one end of the barroom hosted variety musical shows with singers and dancing girls, sometimes even dog fights and boxing matches, which were heavily bet.
“My name’s not kid. It’s Gillom Rogers.”
“Fine. But hide those guns, Gillom, or somebody will shoot you to steal ’em.”
Gillom stuck the Remingtons carefully under the waistband of his woolen trousers, covered by his light wool coat. Dobkins steered him into one of the red leather wine booths in a back corner.
“Two beers, Jimmy! McGintys!” Pulling a small notebook and pencil from his coat pocket, the ace reporter got right down to business. “So at J. B. Books’s behest, you summoned Jay Cobb, Jack Pulford, and that Mex, what was his name?”
“Serrano. El Tuerto. Cross-Eye, they called him. He was one bad bandido from Juarez.”
“So why were all three of these gunslingers summoned to the Connie today?”
“’Cause they were all good with guns. Mister Books was dying of cancer and expected one of those gunmen would save him the trouble of doing himself in.”
“Cancer? Books?”
“Yup. Doc Hostetler told him he didn’t have much time to live. That’s why my ma let him stay on in our bottom guest room even after all our other boarders fled, after those two jaspers tried to shoot him in bed earlier this week. He had nowhere else to go.”
Dobkins chewed his pencil. “Fits. I did hear a rumor Books was dying, but after what he did to me…” The journalist made a face at the sour memory of the great gunman booting him ignominiously in the ass off Mrs. Rogers’s front porch.
The rotund barkeep put one huge mug of warm beer in front of Mr. Dobkins, but he gave the young customer the fisheye. “Kid’s too young to drink in here, Dan.”
The reporter shook his head. “Not today he isn’t, Jimmy. This is the young man who just killed John Bernard Books.”
The barkeep gave Gillom a long stare. “On the house then. For helpin’ rid El Paso of our last pistolero.” Jimmy left to go draw another beer. Dobkins slid his stein of ale across the table to young Rogers, who grinned as he sucked it down. The teenager found killing worked up a thirst.
Dan gave him a smile oily enough to grease a locomotive.
“Okay, Gillom, who shot who first?”
“Well, most of the blood had been spilled by the time I snuck in there. Books had shot ’em all—Cobb, Pulford, that Mex, and some other joker I don’t even know. All the hard cases he invited to his funeral.”
Gillom gulped more beer as Jimmy approached with another huge mug, named after the McGinty Band, El Paso’s famous musical drinking society. The journalist’s eyes drifted to the ceiling.
“Invitation to a funeral … or, or, a gunfight. What a headline.… Or the title of a book…”
Gillom nodded, remembering. “Yeah, the gunsmoke and pistol fire echoing off those tile floors burned my nostrils and deadened my hearing. Heavy…”
Dobkins nodded, transported. “A vibrating mantle … of death. Like something out of Poe.”
Gillom slugged his beer. “Who?”
“Edgar Allan Poe. Dissipated Baltimore poet you might like.”
“Listen, Dan,” said Gillom. “It’s after five. I gotta get home for supper.”
The reporter snapped out of his wonderment. “Me, too. Gotta see if that photographer’s gettin’ those death photos. Crucial with a headline. So Books actually asked you to shoot him?”
“He was bleedin’, wounded bad, dyin’ anyway. Whispered ‘kill … me.’ So I blessed him with a bullet.”
Dan Dobkins listened transfixed. “A bullet’s blessing…”
Gillom’s chair scraped as he got up, remembered his manners. “Thanks for the beer.”
Dobkins hastily rose, too. “Sure, kid, uh, Gillom. Gonna make you famous. Tomorrow’s paper.”
They shook hands a little awkwardly under the circumstances.
“Thanks, Dan. Maybe this’ll lead to a good job. Something exciting involving firearms is what I fancy.”
“Finish your schooling first. You’re a game young man, Gillom Rogers. More education, you’ll go far.”
“Already on my way, thanks just the same.” With a spring in his step, Gillom was off, checking the weighty guns in his waistband as he bounced through the Gem’s swinging front doors. Dan Dobkins smiled as he dropped four bits on the table, leaving an uncharacteristically decent tip. Headline story this hot might make him famous, too.