At the bottom of the stairs Reynolds walked along the bar, pausing to squeeze one of Pettie’s plump thighs, and then crossed to where Jonas sat with his makings and his deck of cards.
“Evening, Eldred.”
“Morning, Clay.” Jonas opened the sack, took out a paper, and sprinkled tobacco into it. His voice shook, but his hands were steady. “Like a smoke?”
“I could do with one.”
Reynolds pulled out a chair, turned it around, and sat with his forearms crossed on its back. When Jonas handed him the cigarette, Reynolds danced it along the backs of his fingers, an old gunslinger trick. The Big Coffin Hunters were full of old gunslinger tricks.
“Where’s Roy? With Her Nibs?” They had been in Hambry a little over a month now, and in that time Depape had conceived a passion for a fifteen-year-old whore named Deborah. Her bowlegged clumping walk and her way of squinting off into the distance led Jonas to suspect she was just another cowgirl from a long line of them, but she had high-hat ways. It was Clay who had started calling the girl Her Nibs, or Her Majesty, or sometimes (when drunk) “Roy’s Coronation Cunt.”
Reynolds now nodded. “It’s like he’s drunk on her.”
“He’ll be all right. He ain’t throwing us over for some little snuggle-bunny with pimples on her tits. Why, she’s so ignorant she can’t spell cat. Not so much as cat, no. I asked her.”
Jonas made a second cigarette, drew a sulfur match from the sack, and popped it alight with his thumbnail. He lit Reynolds’s first, then his own.
A small yellow cur came in under the batwing doors. The men watched it in silence, smoking. It crossed the room, first sniffed at the curdled vomit in the comer, then began to eat it. Its stub of a tail wagged back and forth as it dined.
Reynolds nodded toward the admonition not to argue about the cards you were dealt. “That mutt’d understand that, I’d say.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Jonas demurred. “Just a dog is all he is, a spew-eating dog. I heard a horse twenty minutes ago. First on the come, then on the go. Would it have been one of our hired watchmen?”
“You don’t miss a trick, do you?”
“Don’t pay to, no, don’t pay a bit. Was it?”
“Yep. Fellow who works for one of the small freeholders out along the east end of
the Drop. He seen ’em come in. Three. Young. Babies.” Reynolds pronounced this last as they did in the North’rd Baronies: babbies. “Nothing to worry of.”
“Now, now, we don’t know that,” Jonas said, his quavering voice making him sound like a temporizing old man. “Young eyes see far, they say.”
“Young eyes see what they’re pointed at,” Reynolds replied. The dog trotted past him, licking its chops. Reynolds helped it on its way with a kick the cur was not quite quick enough to avoid. It scuttled back out under the batwings, uttering little yike-yike sounds that made Barkie snort thickly from his place of rest beneath the piano bench. His hand opened and the playing card dropped out of it.
“Maybe so, maybe not,” Jonas said. “In any case, they’re Affiliation brats, sons of big estates off in the Green Somewhere, if Rimer and that fool he works for have it straight. That means we’ll be very, very careful. Walk easy, like on eggshells.
Why, we’ve got three more months here, at least! And those young’uns may be here that whole time, counting this ‘n counting that and putting it all down on paper. Folks counting things ain’t good for us right now. Not for men in the resupply business.”
“Come on! It’s make-work, that’s all—a slap on the wrist for getting in trouble.
Their daddies—”
“Their daddies know Farson’s in charge of the whole Southwest Edge now, and sitting on high ground. The brats may know the same—that playtime’s purt’ near over for the Affiliation and all its pukesome royalty. Can’t know, Clay. With folks like these, you can’t know which way they’ll jump. At the very least, they may try to do a half-decent job just to try and get on the good side o’ their parents again.
We’ll know better when we see em, but I tell you one thing: we can’t just put guns to the backs of their heads and drop them like broke-leg bosses if they see the wrong thing. Their daddies might be mad at em alive, but I think they’d be very tender of em dead—that’s just the way daddies are. We’ll want to be trig, Clay; as trig as we can be.”
“Better leave Depape out of it, then.”
“Roy will be fine,” Jonas said in his quavery voice. He dropped the stub of his cigarette to the floor and crushed it under his bootheel. He looked up at The Romp’s glassy eyes and squinted, as if calculating. “Tonight, your friend said?
They arrived tonight, these brats?”
“Yep.”
“They’ll be in to see Avery tomorrow, then, I reckon.” This was Herk Avery, High Sheriff of Mejis and Chief Constable of Hambry, a large man who was as loose as a trundle of laundry.
“Reckon so,” Clay Reynolds said. “To present their papers ‘n all.”
“Yes, sir, yes indeedy. How-d’you-do, and how-d’you-do, and how-d’you-do again.”
Reynolds said nothing. He often didn’t understand Jonas, but he had been riding with him since the age of fifteen, and knew it was usually better not to ask for enlightenment. If you did, you were apt to end up listening to a cult-manni lecture about the other worlds the old buzzard had visited through what he called “the special doors.” As far as Reynolds was concerned, there were enough ordinary doors in the world to keep him busy.
“I’ll speak to Rimer and Rimer’ll talk to the Sheriff about where they should stay,”
Jonas said. “I think the bunkhouse at the old Bar K ranch. You know where I mean?”
Reynolds did. In a Barony like Mejis, you got to know the few landmarks in a hurry. The Bar K was a deserted spread of land northwest of town, not too far from that weird squalling canyon. They burned at the mouth of the canyon every fall, and once, six or seven years ago, the wind had shifted and gone back wrong and burned most of the Bar K to the ground—barns, stables, the home place. It had spared the bunkhouse, however, and that would be a good spot for three tenderfeet from the Inners. It was away from the Drop; it was also away from the oil patch.
“Ye like it, don’t ye?” Jonas asked, putting on a hick Hambry accent. “Aye, ye like it very much, I can see ye do, my cully. Ye know what they say in Cressia? ‘Ifye’d steal the silver from the dining room, first put the dog in the pantry.’ ”
Reynolds nodded. It was good advice. “And those trucks? Those what-do-you
callums, tankers?”
“Fine where they are,” Jonas said. “Not that we could move em now without attracting the wrong kind of attention, eh? You and Roy want to go out there and cover them with brush. Lay it on nice and thick. Day after tomorrow you’ll do it.”
“And where will you be while we’re flexing our muscles out at Citgo?”
“By daylight? Preparing for dinner at Mayor’s House, you clod—the dinner Thorin will be giving to introduce his guests from the Great World to the shitpicky
society of the smaller one.” Jonas began making another cigarette. He gazed up at The Romp rather than at what he was doing, and still spilled barely a scrap of tobacco. “A bath, a shave, a trim of these tangled old man’s locks … I might even wax my mustache, Clay, what do you say to that?”
“Don’t strain yourself, Eldred.”
Jonas laughed, the sound shrill enough to make Barkie mutter and Pettie stir uneasily on her makeshift bar-top bed. “So Roy and I aren’t invited to this fancy do.” “You’ll be invited, oh yes, you’ll be invited very warmly,” Jonas said, and handed Reynolds the fresh cigarette. He began making another for himself. “I’ll offer your excuses. I’ll do you boys proud, count on me. Strong men may weep.”
“All so we can spend the day out there in the dust and stink, covering those hulks.
You’re too kind, Jonas.”
“I’ll be asking questions, as well,” Jonas said dreamily. “Drifting here and there . . .
looking spruce, smelling of baybemes . . . and asking my little questions. I’ve known folks in our line of trade who’ll go to a fat, jolly fellow to find out the gossip—a saloon-keeper or bartender, perhaps a livery stable owner or one of the chubby fellows who always hangs about the jail or the courthouse with his thumbs tucked into his vest pockets. As for myself. Clay, I find that a woman’s best, and the narrower the better—one with more nose than tits sticking off her. I look for one who don’t paint her lips and keeps her hair scrooped back against her head.”