Sliphammer

While he stood watching, Josie Earp came out of the Inter Ocean, pouted at the rain, and said something to Wyatt, who nodded and gave her his sly, slow smile and whacked her rump affectionately before she turned to go back inside. At the door she paused and gave Tree a long direct glance. She excited his interest, and she knew it: she was a girl who exuded a subtle air of compressed amoral sexuality, calculated-by design or by nature-to excite a man. With a fleeting lidded smile she pulled her glance away from Tree and went inside, hips churning.

Tree dropped off the boardwalk and quartered across the muddy street, climbed onto the porch and kicked excess mud off his boots, and walked down the rail to where Earp sat. Earp only looked up when he stopped six feet away.

“Pull up a chair. I hate to have to look up at a man.”

“You could stand up.”

“Still digesting my breakfast,” Earp replied, and waved his — cigar toward a vacant rocking chair. “You keep regular hours for a man with nothing to do.”

“Habit, I guess.” Tree pulled the rocker forward and sat, batting his hat against the side of the chair and hooking it over his knee. “Another day of this and the whole town will float away.”

“Heard anything from Denver?”

Tree looked at him and gri

“If it’s any comfort to you,” Earp said, “I haven’t had any word either.” Which meant he had no news about whether there had been any success in his long-distance effort to pull strings in the Governor’s office.

“No particular comfort,” Tree said.

“You’d just as soon have it over with.”

“One way or the other-either way,” Tree agreed. “Waiting drags on a man’s nerves.” He gave Earp a sharp, sudden scrutiny in an effort to detect whether Earp felt the same pressure.

There was no change in Earp’s expression-the impassive face of the professional gambler. He said, “Put that you get orders to arrest me. What do you do?”

“If I didn’t mean to follow orders I wouldn’t be here at all.”

Earp’s big head moved back and forth morosely. “Then you’re a gold-plated fool, amigo. Digging yourself a grave.”

Tree shrugged. “You can’t lead my kind of life and expect to live forever. Yours either.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I expect to live to a ripe old age.” Earp gave him a guileless cocked-eyebrow glance; hard to tell whether he. meant it humorously. “If I’m religious about anything,” Earp said, “it’s that. I firmly believe I’ll have my threescore and ten, and then some.”

“Who told you that? Tea leaves or a crystal ball?”

Earp shifted his seat, leaned back and crossed his legs. He murmured, “Let’s use cards, Deputy-let’s lay them face up on the table. Now, I’ve been gentle with you because nobody had to tell me the courage it took for you to come in here at me, in a town where every gun’s against you. It takes guts to humble yourself to duty, obey an order you don’t like and maybe don’t even believe in. But you came here carrying the seeds of trouble-for me and my family. Every time the clock ticks it could mean you’re coming at us with a warrant and a gun. I don’t intend to hang, or see my brother hang, for doing what any decent man would have done to a mad dog like Stillwell. I don’t have to ask any questions, I know I’m right. You haven’t got that luxury. You’re not sure, down deep, whether arresting me is the right thing or the wrong thing. Which puts you in a bad position-you’ve got a private conscience hanging deadweight around your neck no matter what your notion of duty tells you you’ve got to do.”

Earp turned to look him in the face. “It’ll slow you down, you know. It’ll take the edge off. You’ll hesitate when you can’t afford to.”

“Maybe.” Not liking it here any more, Tree got up out of the chair, holding his hat.

Earp said, “It’d be a shame if you got yourself hurt to no purpose.”

Tree thought, God help me, I think you’re right He didn’t say a word; he walked away, putting on his hat before he stepped into the rain.

When he turned into Main Street he saw the white thatched figure of Sheriff McKesson standing just inside the open door of the sheriff’s office, ever vigilant, watching the town. As Tree went by on the opposite side of the street, the sheriff’s grave face turned slowly, indicating his interest in Tree’s passage. Tree waved at him and went on down to the little hotel. The clerk wasn’t on the desk; nobody was in sight. He went back through the corridor to his room and, from habit, glanced to see if the tenpe

It wasn’t. The door stood ajar, open an inch.

He stood making a puddle in the shape of a ring around his dripping poncho. Disgust welled up in him. He drew both guns out through the pocket holes in the poncho, lifted his boot and kicked the door open.

Both of them jerked, startled. Caroline was by the window; Tree’s half brother Rafe lay on his back on the bed in sock feet.

Rafe gri

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Come in and shut the door and we might tell you.”

“Aagh,” Tree said in disgust, putting his guns away and lifting the poncho over his head. He tossed it across a chair, removed his hat, ran fingers through his matted hair and said, “Well?”

Rafe got off the bed and went past him to shut the door. Then he turned. Caroline was watching Tree, looking pretty and blonde and milkmaid fresh in spite of the mud on her clothes and the tangled disorder of her hair.

Rafe said, “You got a nice warm way of greetin’ us, ain’t you?”

“What the hell is this all about?”

Caroline said, “We were afraid you’d get hurt. We came to help.”

“Sure you did.”

Rafe came around him from the door and went back to the bed, where he sat down and tipped his head to one side. “That ain’t exactly the whole truth. We couldn’t get the fare together so we came in the buggy.”

“All the way from Tucson?”

“Left right after you did,” Rafe said, not without pride. “All the way across the goddamn desert and the goddamn mountains in that old buggy, campin’ out. Caroline’s a right good traveler, she’d of made a good Forty-niner.” Rafe gri

“Both of you,” Tree said, shaking his head. “Why’d both of you come, for crying out loud?”

“Because,” Caroline said quietly, “I wouldn’t let him go without me. He came with me or not at all.”

Looking at both of them, Tree saw how it was. Once more he remembered what Caroline’s father had said to him not too long ago: J told her not to marry your brother because he just ain’t tough enough for her. She’ll put spurs to him one time when she ain’t even thanking about it, and she’ll rip him to shreds ‘thout ever knowing how it happened. It was clear to see how this marriage had settled down, who wore the pants. Tree thought, You poor son of a bitch, you should’ve known better.

He said to Rafe, “I suppose you’ve still got your tongue hanging out over that four-thousand-dollar reward on the Earp brothers.”

“I still need the money to buy that ranch. Where else am I, go

“You’re both pretty damned young,” Tree said, looking straight at Caroline. “Couldn’t you settle for something less than your own ranch to start out with?”

“Why should we?” Rafe demanded. “You take what you can get, Jeremy, it’s a me-first country.”

Tree jerked a thumb toward the invisible hills. “A lot of bleached bones up in those mountains thought the same thing.”

“I ain’t scared of Wyatt Earp.”

No, Tree thought, you’re not, are you? It surprised him a little-particularly because even if Rafe didn’t think he was scared of Earp, he was certainly intimidated enough by his own wife. But that was a different sort of thing: petticoat power was too subtle for Rafe to handle. Rafe was brash, bold, full of bullheaded guts, and no less callow than an ignorant puppy.