Appaloosa

“I will.”

“I don’t want to go up there,” Cole said, “and shoot up a lotta people, and get Bragg into court, and have you dry up and blow away.”

“I won’t.”

“You won’t relinquish on your testimony.”

“I’ll say what I seen,” Whitfield said.

Cole was silent. He looked at me. I nodded. Whitfield saw the nod.

“That’s right,” he said. “I’ll stand. I can’t do gun work no more, but I can say what I seen, and I’ll stand and say it.”

“I got your word on that?” Cole said.

“You do.”

“All right,” Cole said. “Everett and me will go up and apprehend him.”

15

" A lone?” Raines said.

“Me and Everett,” Cole said.

“But that’s all?” Raines said. “You two alone?”

“Me and Everett,” Cole said again.

“Bragg’s got forty gun hands up there.”

“Twenty-five,” Cole said.

“You say that like it made a difference.”

“Makes a difference of, ah, how much, Everett?”

“Fifteen,” I said.

“It’s still so many,” Raines said.

“Specimens I’ve seen so far don’t enliven me much,” Cole said.

“We could get a posse up, deputize a bunch of us.”

“Coulda done that ’fore you hired us, Abner,” Cole said.

“You don’t want help?”

“No. I got help, I gotta worry about them. They get in trouble, I got to get them out. Better just me and Everett.”

I thought Raines looked relieved.

“Well, you say so, Virgil. It’s your kinda work, I guess.”

“It is,” Cole said.

Raines stood and walked out of the marshal’s office. He turned left on the boardwalk and disappeared.

“You got a plan?” I said to Cole.

“Well, we ain’t going to go riding in there bold as brass,” Cole said. “Like Jack Bell done.”

“I hear Bell was good,” I said.

“He was. He was good with a gun. Worked a lot of tough towns.”

“Overconfident?” I said.

“Be my surmise,” Cole said. “Thought he could back Bragg down. Thought they wouldn’t shoot lawmen.”

“You think you could back Bragg down?” I said.

“Just me and him?” Cole said. “Just the two of us? I could back him a ways. And then he wouldn’t back no farther.”

“You know this?”

“Sure.”

“How?”

“Been doing this a long time, Everett. Ain’t just gun work. Gotta think about men, too.”

“Which would, I guess, be one reason you’re here and Jack Bell ain’t,” I said.

“Yep,” Cole said and nodded his head. “That’d be a reason. You’d be another.”

I opened my mouth and closed it and sat. I didn’t know what to say. Cole had never been quite so straight with me about what I was worth. I sort of smiled to myself.

“What you smilin’ about,” Cole said.

“I caught myself thinking,” I said. “And what I was thinking was that you was right.”

Cole didn’t comment.

“So,” he said. “What we got to do next is drift on up there and look at Bragg’s layout.”

16

Bragg’s ranch was on an upland meadow with a stream. There were some trees along the stream, and a small herd of beef cattle grazed in the grass under their shade.

“Pretty place,” Cole said.

We were sitting our horses behind the ranch, on a hill that looked over it. We could see across it to Appaloosa in the sere valley below. Someone spotted us there, and several men gathered on the porch of the big ranch house and looked up at us. I saw Bragg was taller than anyone else.

“No cover,” I said.

“Nope, nothin’ much,” Cole said. “Maybe a little among them trees.”

“For how long?” I said.

“Long as it would take them to send some people around behind us,” Cole said.

“No real way to slide in on them without them knowing it,” I said.

“Depends how hard they sleep,” Cole said.

“Don’t think they got a nighthawk?” I said.

“If they did, depend on how hard he listened.”

“There’s a way to find out,” I said.

“Un-huh.”

“ ’Cept now they seen us,” I said. “Makes it likely they’ll be more careful.”

“Don’t matter,” Cole said. “We’ll expedite us a way.”

“ ’Spose we will,” I said.

Cole was silent, looking down at the gray, weathered ranch buildings. There was a barn with a corral. Some horses stood quietly in the corral, the way horses do, heads down, doing nothing. There was a bunkhouse on the other side of the barn, with a cookshack angling off it. There were two outhouses: a big one near the bunkhouse, and another smaller one near the ranch house.

“We’ll ride on back to town,” Cole said. “Give them time to relax a little, and maybe two, three nights from now, we’ll ride on back up and see what happens at night.”

The horses knew the way back, and they moved almost without guidance. Behind us, as we moved downhill toward Appaloosa in the punch bowl, half a dozen riders from Bragg’s outfit sat their horses on the hilltop where we’d been and watched us go.

I said, “Law’s a little thin on this, Virgil.”

“Don’t see why. Bragg killed the marshal. Now I’m the marshal and I can prove he done it.”

“There’ll be twenty of them all swear he didn’t.”

“That ain’t up to me,” Cole said. “That’s for the trial.”

“Ain’t even sure we got jurisdiction,” I said. “We city lawmen. Bragg might not even be in the city.”

“He’s close enough,” Cole said. “He killed Jack Bell.”

“Might be able to prove Jack Bell got killed up there. Hard to prove exactly who done it.”

“Everett,” Cole said. “You gettin’ gun-shy.”

“Just examining the situation, Virgil.”

“Pretty soon you’ll be telling me Jack Bell ain’t dead.”

“Truth is, Virgil, we don’t know that he is.”

“Well, where the hell is he?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s dead. But we don’t know it, you understand, we only been told it.”

“What’s the difference,” Cole said. “You know it. I know it. You ever read this man Ralph Emerson?”

“Some sort of philosopher,” I said.

“ ‘What I must do concerns me, not what people think.’ ”

“He said that?”

“He did,” Cole said

“He might not’a been talking about the Appaloosa marshal,” I said.

“I knew Jack Bell,” Cole said.

Cole’s horse tossed his head and skittered a couple of quick steps sideways. I didn’t know if Virgil asked him, or if something had caught his notice. Didn’t matter. I knew there was no point talking to Virgil anymore. He was going to do what he was going to do. All I could do is trail along with him and keep him from getting back shot.

“Everything good with you and Allie,” I said when I got beside him again.

“Lovely,” Cole said. “She’s a lovely woman, and everything’s lovely between us.”

“She can rile you a little,” I said.

“She’s playful,” Cole said. “It don’t rile me at all.”

“Didn’t have nothin’ to do with you pounding on the teamster, Gillis.”

Cole didn’t answer. It was as if he hadn’t heard.

“Sorta thought it mighta had somethin’ to do with you bein’ a

“She’s a very lovely lady,” Cole said. “Very lovely.”