At roughly the same time that Wes Hart was tracking Cantrell and Bennett along the cottonwood ridge, R. G. Fowler was lurching from sleep and hurling back a sprawl of sweat-sodden clothes in an urgent need to get his feet to the floor. The shock of impact jarred him and he set both hands to the sides of his burly head and groaned. Despite the discomfort he swayed to his feet and started to negotiate his way, bleary-eyed, across the room. A stack of fliers and magazines went flying as he struck it with a flailing arm; a pile of law books stuttered as he floundered past and two volumes upended themselves onto a plate thickly coated with congealed gravy flecked gray with cigar ash.
He had to piss even though taking a piss caused him considerable discomfort, even though the releasing of the deep yellow fluid made him wince and grit his teeth and rock backward and forward above the rising steam.
Fowler groaned with a mixture of consternation and delight and fingered himself sloppily back into his long Johns, ignoring the fresh pee stain which was spreading in a loose circular shape over the others. He shook his pudgy fingers and wiped them down the sides of his vest, cleared his throat, spat down into the steadying swirl of piss at the bottom of the brimming chamber pot, and stumbled to the window.
Three shots of fresh air and he closed it again and reached over for the bottle and uncorked his breakfast.
In less than half an hour Fowler had dressed himself in the least shabby of his two dark suits, that with only one cigar burn on the vest and without frayed cuffs. His shirt was creased but clean and there was a perfunctory shine on his boots from where he’d brushed them up against the backs of his suit pants while leaning against the wardrobe. His dark, thinning hair looked, rightly, as if he’d managed to poke his fingers through it and rid it of the worst of the tangles; his beard and moustache – also dark but lighter, almost ginger, about the mouth – were less unkempt than was usually the case and free from traces of food for the sole reason it had been some time since Fowler had sullied his stomach with solids.
The left side of the suit jacket bulged somewhat on account of the shoulder rig that his fingers had succeeded in securing at the third, or was it the fourth, attempt. A Smith and Wesson .44, its barrel shortened from the regulation six and a half inches to five, sat snug in the holster, hammer resting on an empty chamber.
Fowler had woken once in the middle of the night with a start, sure that someone had come into the room where he’d fallen asleep on the floor with his street clothes still on and smeared with vomit. In his urgency, he’d grabbed the .44 and came very close to shooting off his left foot.
Ever since that time he’d vowed always to remain conscious till he’d removed his holster and had been careful to slip no more than five shells into the chamber.
At the front door he shrugged his bear-like shoulders round and growled so viciously at his landlady’s request for some rent money that she retreated as fast as she could behind her parlor door and worked at her sampler as quickly as her swollen and arthritic fingers would allow.
Fowler stood for a few minutes on the sidewalk and looked up and down the tree-lined street and decided for the fifth time in the past five days that he was as sick of Sacramento as a jelly roll stud who’d fallen through the roof of a whorehouse and couldn’t get back out.
He sniffed at the air and found it treacherous enough to merit a shot more bourbon. The silver flask came out of his hip pocket almost as fast as another man would draw a pistol. Thing was, the bourbon took a deal longer to stretch a man out and was a sight more pleasurable in the process.
He walked towards the livery stable with all the assurance of a man whose mind is toying with the idea that the earth is liable to crack apart at any moment. Which, since he was in California, was not quite as fanciful as it might seem.
~*~
Mrs MacPhail lived in the foothills of the Sierras, about an hour’s ride north-east of Spanish Flat. Fowler had quarreled with the office, demanding that his client, if that was what she was to be, should get in one of the several fancy carriages she obviously owned and get herself driven down to Sacramento. But his argument carried no weight with the Old Man, who was too pleased with the prospect of some of the MacPhail gold coming his way to pay heed to the likes of Fowler.
Indeed, he was loath to send someone as disreputable as Fowler at all but all of the other operatives were out of town on other work and the only alternative would have been to have made the journey himself.
He didn’t want the gold in his safe that much.
So it was Fowler who sat heavy in the saddle of his placid chestnut mare and took the Green Valley road to the American River, sweated and cursed up the Marshall Grade until he leveled out on the Black Oak Mine road and was all set for Spanish Flat.
Well, he should have been set, anyway. But other things intervened, like the mare taking a stone in her back shoe and Fowler getting a powerful thirst that his flask couldn’t handle. He had no sooner wiped the dirt from the knees of his suit after dealing with the horse’s stone than he remembered there was a little general store up into the hills to the north of Black Oak Road. It sold about every damn thing you could think of, from hard tack to nails, and at times a man could be excused for thinking he’d paid for one and come away with the other. But what mattered to Fowler was that the place also sold liquor.
He managed to make his way up the winding track, ducking under low branches that sought to unseat him, and succeeded in tearing a rent several inches wide across the center of his coat back. Insects swarmed about his face and lashing out at them angrily he bloodied his knuckles against a tree close enough to meet the end of his swing. By the time he’d convinced himself that he’d taken the wrong track – or that the store had been a figment of his drunken imagination – there it was. Built out from the hillside so that the earth formed the back wall and part of the roof, it was fashioned from all manner of planks and boards and packing cases, patched here and there with tin. A mule was tied up outside and gazed at Fowler forlornly before depositing a giant turd as a form of greeting. A black and white goat, attached to a stake, sat on the roof and bleated.
Fowler tethered his horse out of range of the mule and pushed open the door.
The interior was dark and musty and smelt of rancid goats’ cheese and corn liquor and a few other things Fowler likely could have identified if he’d worked at it. Instead he nodded briefly at the couple of farmers who were taking a drink at the only table, set a squat hand on the greasy counter and asked the one-eyed man back of it for a shot of bourbon.
When it came it was in a glass that was chipped in several places round the edge as if one of the previous customers had tried to bite his way through the rim. The contents bore about as much resemblance to bourbon as a Nogales whore to a convent nun. Fowler drank it with his eyes more or less shut and his breath clemmed up in his throat. It still didn’t taste any better.
He wiped the back of his grazed hand across his mouth and put the glass back down with a bang. ‘Sure that’s bourbon?’
‘What it says on the label.’
‘Put up a sign out front callin’ this the Excelsior Palace, still wouldn’t be no more’n a flea-bitten old shack stinkin’ of goat shit!’
The one-eyed man stood back from the bar a-ways and set his head to one side. ‘Shouldn’t say things like that, mister. T’ain’t nice. ’Specially from strangers.’
Fowler nodded. He was hot and thirsty and riding up the Grade hadn’t helped his temper. At the end of it all he’d likely spend ten minutes with some rich old woman who’d give him orders like he was a kid with dirt hangin’ out of his ears and send him on his way without so much as a drink. He leaned a little towards the man and said in his growl of a voice: Tell you what you do, you throw some lamp oil about the place an’ hand me a match. That’s about the only way you’ll clean this hole up and make it fit for callers. You understand me?’
One-Eye scratched at a red sore at the side of his neck, close by a jutting angle of bone. His fingers were long and ingrained with dirt, their nails cracked and jagged. His single eye was large and dark and watery, a sliver of deep yellow passing over the top of the pupil. As Fowler stared at it, the eye twitched.
‘Got scratched an’ stung all the hell comin’ up here,’ Fowler went on, warming to his subject, letting all of his anger and frustration well out. ‘All for what? A shot of somethin’ out of a bottle with a bourbon label stuck on it which you get filled by lettin’ that mule of yours out there piss in it!’
‘Hey, mister!’ called one of the farmers off to the side. ‘That’s my mule you’re talkin’ about.’
‘You shut your damned mouth!’ burst Fowler, swinging him a threatening look. ‘This ain’t none of your concern.’
‘I told you, that’s my mule.’ He stood up and it took him a long time before he stopped. He wasn’t slow, just tall. Very tall. With his black hat crammed right down on his head, he was too tall for that room by a good twelve inches.
Fowler shrugged his heavy shoulders and turned away. The feller behind the bar was still looking put out and he showed a few broken ends of tooth in an otherwise empty mouth. Fowler wasn’t sure if the man was about to say something or spit.
Either way, Fowler moved to one side and slid his hand over the counter pretty quick, palming the quarter he’d paid for the drink.
The single, watering eye stared at him astonished. ‘Mister, you can’t—’
‘Just did,’ Fowler informed him, and he tipped the coin down into the side pocket of his torn coat.
‘That’s robbery.’
‘If that’s robbery, what d’you call chargin’ a quarter for that rotten mule’s-piss you call bourbon?’
‘I told you afore, stranger,’ called the farmer, his head jammed up against the ceiling, ‘don’t you go bad-mouthin’ my mule.’
‘An’ I told you to shut your mouth!’ Fowler scowled at him and his partner and headed for the door.
‘Mister!’
Fowler shook his head and kept on walking. The farmer was beginning to move across towards him and he glanced round and looked to see if he was carrying a gun. Which he wasn’t.
One-Eye was.
He’d pulled it out from where it lay inside an old biscuit box under the counter and now he was holding it at arm’s length, the long barrel pointing towards Fowler’s back.
‘Mister, you come back here with my money!’
‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Fowler, turning just before the doorway. ‘How many times I got to explain …’
Then he saw the pistol and knew that the time for explaining had run out. As the man’s bony finger started to pull back on the trigger, Fowler decided to take evasive action. He threw himself sideways as quick as he could, his burly body hammering into a couple of flour sacks and driving them into a crate of assorted nails and a pile of boots and shoes, none of which matched. The moment he hit the floor the gun exploded and a bullet tore away a section of the roof a couple of feet from the top of the door.
Fowler shook his head, breathing with difficulty. His elbow stung where it had struck the floor and his forearm was numb. He made the mistake of taking his weight on that arm and toppled forward, butting one of the flour sacks. Over his shoulder he could see the one-eyed man struggling with the hammer of the long-barreled gun. He shifted his weight onto his other arm and started to reach inside his jacket for the Smith and Wesson. The stubbed ends of his fingers had just passed between coat and shirt when the tall farmer kicked him in the chest, the toe of his boot landing immediately below Fowler’s arm.
He was shunted several feet backwards, mouth open to a roar of surprise and pain, hand still half inside his coat. The farmer laughed and advanced on him, swinging his leg back to take a kick that sought to take his head clean off his body.
At that moment One-Eye succeeded in releasing the hammer of his gun and the slug ripped through the side of the farmer’s throat and embedded itself in the front wall. Blood spurted up over the ceiling, down the wall and across the floor. The farmer’s hands were at his throat, clapped over the wound as if trying to hold the torn flesh together. Blood seeped between his fingers and dribbled down his arms.
His friend ran towards him, stopped when he saw the extent of the wound, the amount of blood.
One-Eye now had the pistol in both hands but it was pointed down towards the top of the counter and slowly sliding forward through his long fingers.
A loud gurgling sound came from the farmer, but not from his mouth.
The man back of him cursed and turned away, one hand to his mouth to catch the vomit.
Fowler managed to get to his feet and to clear his Smith and Wesson from his holster. He approached the bar side-on and took the gun from One-Eye’s hands without the least resistance. He thought about pushing it down into his belt but didn’t want to blow his balls off so he ended up hurling it through the door.
The wounded man pitched forward until his forehead was resting on the scarred boards and the blood was running freely down both sides of his face, curling, some of it, into his nose and eyes. His hands fell away from the back of his neck and smeared the floor.
The sound of his partner’s vomiting was loud in the enclosed space.
Fowler waited until the retching had stopped and pulled the man over the table and made him sit down. He forced a glass of corn liquor down his throat so that the tears sprang to his eves. He asked him his name and that of the dying farmer. The feeling returning to his arm so that the blood tingled and itched like crazy, Fowler wrote out an account of what had happened, using a stub of pencil in the front of the notebook the Old Man insisted he carry but which he hardly ever used.
When he’d done that he read it to the man at the table and to One-Eye, taking the words clear and slow like he would have done talking to a child or an idiot. All the while, the farmer’s throat was gurgling air and spluttering blood through the wound at its back.
Fowler got the two men to make their marks at the bottom of the paper, though he doubted if either of them had really understood what he’d written or what they were doing.
Fowler looked at the farmer, whose long body was now stretched across the flour sacks, the front of his work overalls deep with blood. The building stank of blood and vomit now, to accompany the smell of goats’ cheese and liquor. He reached over the bar for the bottle labeled bourbon and took a swig from the neck, washing it quickly around his mouth before spitting it out without swallowing a drop.
Outside, his chestnut mare looked at him questioningly and he gave her some water in an old bucket before mounting up and riding out. Half-way down the track he looked back and could only see one small section of the ramshackle wall. He wondered if the farmer had managed to die yet, whether the other two were in a strong enough state to bury him before stiffness set in and they would have to break his long limbs to fit him into the ground.