Читать книгу Slow Joe - Frederick Schiller Faust - Страница 11

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When Zip was gone, Fellows stood up and said we might as well be starting. I asked him where, and he said to collect the pair of them. We could get Whitey Peyton, first.

I said:

“We can’t touch Whitey. We can’t touch Gregor. Not till we’ve got something on them. I’m a deputy. This is no private job. I gave my word to Werner, and you’ll play with me, Tom?”

“Certainly, Slow,” said he. “Whatever you say goes, of course. You were first on this job, after all. I’m only to help you where I can.”

“I know you’ll do two thirds of the work before the end,” said I. “But first, there has to be a little detection. I don’t want you to dirty your hands with it. But you might let Zip find out something—without telling him why. Just tell him you’re curious about the past of Whitey and Gregor. I know that they’re both thugs. You stay put out here. I’ll go into Kearneyville and hunt up Whitey and see what I can see.”

Fellows agreed to everything. But he insisted that he should drop in on me at the hotel that evening, by ten o’clock, to learn what I had discovered. Then I left and rode back.

I can’t tell you how differently I felt, now that I had Fellows with me, in spirit, at least. For, when the pinch came, I knew that wise head and those wise hands could carry me through the crisis.

I got into town, put up the nag at the livery stable, damned the stable man for the gait that horse wore, and went to the hotel.

Sam Guernsey was behind the reception desk. The first thing I noticed was that he was getting too old and tired to smile at new business, any more.

“Hullo, Sam, how’s everything?” says I.

“Hello, Runt,” says he. “One night stand?”

A fine way to welcome a guest.

“I dunno,” says I. “I just stepped in to see what your dump could offer. Everybody says that the Criterion is the only decent place in town, now. But I thought I’d see if you’d gone that far downhill.”

He pricked up his ears a little, and the ears were red.

“The Criterion is a rat-hole. If you’re a rat, that’s where you’ll fit,” he remarked.

He began to drum on the top of his desk, and look away from me, absently. But I saw where to slam him. I said, pleasantly:

“I suppose I’ll have to go back to the Criterion, all right. They certainly keep a cleaner lobby than this. I just wanted to drop in and tell you I’m sorry, Sam. But after all, a hotel can’t stay young forever, no more than a man can. Hotels, and hotel keepers, they get tired out, after a while. Well, so long, Sam.”

I got nearly to the door, when he yelled after me:

“Come back here!”

I went back.

“Who’s been talking to you, Slow?” said he. “Who’s been lying to you about me and the hotel?”

“Why, nobody,” said I. “It’s all around the town. That’s all.”

He looks at me pretty bitter, his head down, peering upward. He keeps on tapping on the desk.

“I don’t suppose you know,” says he, “that I put on a whole new roofing, two year back?”

“Did you, Sam?” says I, very innocent. “Then it was old history, what they told me about the rooms getting flooded all the time. They said that the guests in your house always went to bed wearing life preservers.”

“They did, did they?” said Guernsey, turning from red to purple. “And you don’t know, neither, that I got in a new range in the kitchen, and the slickest Chink cook in Kearney County to fit with the range?”

“No,” said I. “They all told me that the cooking here was what kept so many doctors going in Kearneyville.”

“They don’t know nothing!” yelled Sam. “Neither do you!”

“Why, Sam,” said I, “I’m just repeating what I heard. That’s all. I didn’t mean any harm. You know the way that people talk. I guess they’ve just exaggerated a little when they said the Guernsey Hotel was just a sort of a stable, now, and a drafty stable, at that.”

“They ain’t three men in this town,” bellows Guernsey, “that deserves to bed down in nothing better than sawdust, and wet sawdust, too.”

He banged on the desk:

“Did they tell you that I got seven bathrooms in the house, and running water in every room, and the damned Criterion ain’t got one?”

“No,” said I, “they only told me that the chambermaids, at the Criterion, was a hand-picked lot. That’s all they told me.”

I thought he would choke. He had to close his eyes for a moment before he bawled:

“And who picked the girls that work here, I’d like to know? And am I blind?”

“Why, Sam,” said I, “you know how it is. People just talk.”

“And fools stand and listen to ’em!” roared Sam. “Come up here, Slow, and I’m going to show you what the Guernsey Hotel offers. Old, is it? And me old, too, is it? Damn my eyes! The low-down bohunks! The Polacks! The Greasers!”

He took me upstairs, and showed me the best layout he had, a big double room on the corner, overlooking Fourth Street. There was a candy shop across the street; they were cooking some stuff then, and the sweet of it came thick on the air. That room had a bath connected. There were two beds. There was a rug between them, and three chairs, and a bureau and dressing table fit for a king. I told Sam Guernsey that the people who had been knocking his hotel ought to be shot, and he agreed, and he said, furthermore, that he would do the shooting. He got so hot and happy about the way he was going to massacre some of those hounds, that he up and offered me the room for half price. I told him he was an old friend.

I brought up my pack and slung it in a corner. Then I undressed, and filled the bathtub half full of hot water, and slid into it, and just lay there, corked.

After a while, the heat got through my muscles to the bones. I had been trembling like a terrier in a cold wind. Now the heat smoothed me out like an iron. I felt such a lot better that you wouldn’t believe it.

Then I scrubbed myself off, climbed into the bed and lay there, spread-eagle. That’s the best way to rest. I took a look at my watch and told myself that it was an hour to sundown. I would give myself that much sleep. And sleep I did.

When you’re out on the range a lot, as I’ve been, you learn to time yourself without a clock, even in your sleep. Punctually in an hour, I woke up, groggy till I ducked my head under a cold water faucet. That pulled me together. I shampooed my hair dry, and gave my clothes a couple of shakes, like a rug, before I put them on. The dust certainly flew!

When I was dressed, I felt like a new man. All the weariness that had been building up since I left San Whiskey seemed to be scoured away. The tarnish was gone, and I felt fit.

Then I sat down with a cigarette and tried to work out a plan of campaign. I couldn’t find a plan. I rarely can. I’m one of those stupid hombres that can’t find a way out of a corral without breaking down a bar. So finally I gave the thing up and started out to find what I could. I found plenty that wasn’t exactly what I wanted.

First of all, I wrapped myself around a couple of steaks with eggs on top of them, and plenty of French fries on the side, drank three or four cups of coffee, and smoked a cigarette on the veranda waiting for the grub to settle.

It was a pleasant time of day. Betwixt sundown and down, I mean. The day had let up. So had the men. It was the women’s turn, now. You could smell cookery on the wind; you could almost hear the hissing of bacon in the pan. Screen doors were slamming with a jingle. Four or five batches of kids were playing, far and near, and the sound of them put a sad tingle in my blood. This was the very hour for kids to enjoy. And many such an hour I had lived through and fought through there in Kearneyville. It made me feel old and wicked. One of which I was, plenty.

After a time, a teamster comes out and starts telling me how he can put a sixteen mule team around the curves of a mountain road, so I decided that I’d get up and drift. There’s nothing worse than a teamster. And the more mules he skins, the more lies he can tell about himself and his nags.

I went up the street, wondering where I would begin, and the first thing that I turned into was the Hard Cash saloon. I asked if Whitey Peyton had been there. The bartender was scrubbing down the bar, and he scowled at his work before he answered:

“You a friend of his?”

“Sure,” said I. “Known him for years.”

“Then you’ve gone and wasted a hell of a lot of time,” said the barkeep.

I decided that Whitey had been and gone, in this dive, so I barged out and navigated around into the First Chance. Whitey had been there. He was accumulating a pretty long lead, it seemed. They didn’t know where I’d find him. They advised me to sit down anywhere in town and listen for a noise like a big wind rising, and that would be Whitey, all right.

I went out and tried the Kicking Mule. Fatty Carson was still behind the bar, and spinning out drinks to half a dozen cowpokes all in one party, each of ’em trying to drink the other under the table inside of half an hour, and all of them succeeding, it looked like to me.

I asked Fatty if he had seen Whitey Peyton, and Fatty looked at me none too pleased.

“Is he a friend of yours?” he asked.

“Not at all,” said I, remembering. “I just heard that he was around.”

“Yeah, he’s around and about and in and out,” said Fatty. “Just now, most of him is in there!”

He pointed toward the back room of the place.

As he did so, the door opened, and a fellow came out with a burst of cursing and yelling behind him. He had his coat almost torn off his back, one eye was red and puffing fast. The other one was full of trouble; trouble coming, trouble on its way.

He said nothing to anybody, but walked straight across the barroom and bumped the swinging doors open with his chest.

“That cowpoke has gone home to get a gun,” I said.

“Why,” says Fatty, “you must have been around quite a lot to be able to see a thing like that.”

“Is that one of Whitey’s jobs?” I asked.

“Yeah. It looks like it.”

“He must be spending a lot of money, if you put up with that sort of a playmate,” said I.

“I ain’t the boss, here,” said Fatty, through his teeth, giving a real wicked look at the door to the back room. “You’ll find your friend Whitey in there, all right.”

“He’s no particular friend of mine,” said I.

“Well, he ought to be,” says Fatty.