A hand-painted sign nailed to the wall, by the single cobwebbed window, proclaimed the single word Mom. It seemed to have been there for a number of years, cracked and heavily weather stained.
The door was ajar, and they heard another roar of laughter from inside.
Lively conversation stopped the moment Ryan, leading the others, pushed his way inside the small restaurant.
It took a few moments to acclimate his vision to the darkness. There were about six tables, each one with a smoking oil lamp at its center. Half of them were occupied.
At first glance it didn’t look like there was a woman in the place. Two men sat at the table nearest the door, middle-aged, wearing a ragged assortment of furs. The next table had a single man, much older, white bearded, dressed in sober black. The last table had a trio of younger men, all of whom wore white cotton shirts and pants of light brushed denim. Ryan noticed that they each wore identical chisel-toed Western boots in polished black snakeskin.
From habit he also noticed what kind of weaponry was on display.
The pair of hunters had long-barreled Kentucky muskets leaning against the wall by their chairs. The older man didn’t appear to be carrying any kind of blaster, but Ryan had a sneaking suspicion that he might be sporting a hideaway derringer, spring-loaded against his forearm. The trio at the last table didn’t seem to be wearing any sort of blaster.
“Hi, strangers!” The voice was deep and hoarse, floating out from the darkness behind the bar that ran along the farther wall of the cabin, and carried the flavor of too many black cigars and too much bootleg liquor. It was impossible to tell whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman.
“Hi, there,” Ryan replied casually, his hand resting informally on the butt of the SIG-Sauer. “This’d be Mom’s Place, would it?”
A throaty laugh. “This downright would, mister, and what’s more to the point, I would be Mom.”
The figure moved sideways into the light of a gently swinging brass lamp. Mom was close to five feet ten inches tall and looked like she’d tip the scales somewhere around the 250 mark. Her grizzled hair was cropped shorter than of most men, and she wore a plaid shirt about three sizes too small, bursting open across the front. Ryan put her at about forty years of age, with the etched lines around her mouth and puffy, watery eyes that bespoke a heavy drinker.
“Seen enough, mister?” An acerbic note of hostility crept into the voice.
“Didn’t mean to stare, lady. Just that you’re about the first human we’ve seen for quite a few days. You serve food here? Jerky?”
“Seen the ‘rising signs, have you? Well, I like to say this is the best jerky east of the Cific Ocean. Right here on God’s little acre.”
“Sounds good. What’s it come with?”
“What would you like it to come with?”
Jak answered, from just behind Ryan. “Beans and heap whipped potatoes.”
“Christ on a mule, child!” she exclaimed, catching sight of the albino teenager, the fading sunlight spearing through a window into the mane of snowy hair. “When the Lord Jesus made you, he must’ve been having a kind of an off day.”
“Amen to that,” added one of the young men, his words echoed by his two companions. All three of them crossed themselves, eyes never leaving the companions.
The pair of trappers both laughed loudly, the same noise that Ryan had heard from outside the isolated eatery. He also noticed that each of them had shifted a little in their chairs, to be that much closer to their flintlock muskets.
“Don’t think funny,” Jak said, thin lipped. His hand was a long way off from the butt of the Colt Python. But, Ryan knew, it was near enough to the taped hilt of one of his concealed throwing knives.
“Take it easy, Jak,” he said quietly. “No point in forcing blood.”
The woman had sensed the sudden tension and moved a couple of steps to her right, hands disappearing behind the bar. Ryan would have staked a fistful of jack that she had a sawed-down scattergun there.