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The tamales provided by my hosts were delicious, but the heat of the piquant salsa sent me on a direct flight to the water-barrel, to the great amusement of the town’s law enforcement; “Les, are you sure you’re a Texas man?” Doc drawled.
I came up for air, still gasping. “Doc, if your brains was leather you couldn’t saddle a flea.”
The two other men at the table burst out laughing – Doc laughing just as hard at my candor as did the sheriff.
“That does answer your question, Doc.” Sheriff Lock took a long swig from his water-tumbler himself, his reddened face showing his own reaction to the food. Neither he nor Doc touched the bottle of Kentucky bourbon I had on the table and which I keep for just such town meetings. “We really ought to have warned you, Mayor Strade – one does not attempt Señora Jimenez’ salsa without acclimation first by eating something easier on the tongue. Such as barbed wire garnished with rattlesnake poison.”
I returned to the table, laughing ruefully. Both were from other places, other states (Doc from Georgia, Lock from “east,” all he would say on the subject), but they were as thoroughly Texas as I was now.
We needed the laughs. Both Lock and Doc had visibly stiffened when I told them the news I’d picked up from Gustav that afternoon (a pimp is better than a spy at getting the latest news; lots of men talk to their whores and the whores trade gossip as much as any other women). A bandit gang was on their way to Bakerstown from the town of Dynamo, a day’s ride away – and both men harbored the suspicion that their leader, “some Irish bastard,” was none other than Moriarty, the sole surviving James brother. Lock had called for a meeting with me that night over dinner (the tamales provided by the livery-owner’s wife), and with one sad thought for my wife’s chicken pie I’d agreed.
“If we’re right and it’s Moriarty, that gang will not be content with robbing the bank and the people.” Lock looked over at his friend (Lock might be the sheriff of Bakerstown, but no one who valued his life called Doc a deputy). "It’ll be a toss-up which of us he wants to kill more.”
“I killed his brother and shot his right hand in half.” Doc pulled out a cheroot from a pack. “Forty-dollar gold piece says it’s me.”
“And he wouldn’t have lost brother nor hand if he hadn’t been focused on killing me for interfering with his murder of the blacksmith.” Lock fixed me with a steady look, his hands still busy filling his long wooden pipe. “Plain fact is, Mayor Strade, that the two of us are now a threat to Bakerstown’s safety. If Doc and I go on the lam, Moriarty and his wolves will do some bad damage here till you cough us up or point where we went – and then they’ll shoot you for thanks.”
“So, about as sociable as any gang of bank robbers.” I lit my own cigarette. I was just as frightened as they but covered it the same way. “We could send the women and kids into hiding; some of the whores are damn good with a knife, they’d make good protection for ‘em.”
Doc spit his cigar-end into the cuspidor. “I don’t run and hide for no son of a bitch. And I don’t make civilians do my fighting for me. Moriarty wants us, Sheriff Lock. I say we give him us, before he ever makes it to town.”
Lock’s pipe tipped up slightly from his skull-grin. “The arroyo.”
“Damn right the arroyo.”
The dry wash that acted like a natural dirt-road from the east, the same direction as Dynamo. A rare horseman that didn’t take advantage of that smooth path when it was dry, which was most of the time. And raised sides on either side to mark where the river ran in the rainy season, a good place to station armed men as a welcoming committee.
This Moriarty son of a bitch wanted to kill Lock and Doc, the two men who’d turned a violent little clump of drunks into a town. He wasn’t going to do that to my home.
For once I was as sharp as Lock and as bloodthirsty as Doc. "It’s a plan. I’ll call the able-bodied men of the town together right now and ask for volunteers. You use ‘em as you see fit. Let’s end this business.”
Doc grinned and raised his Colt to load it. “If we’re lucky, it’ll all come out in the wash.”