was lyin’ on his bunk, which was a metal shelf with a blanket on it. The Puma County lockup wasn’t no comfort palace. King’s bucket stank.
“You want to push that through the food gate there?” I asked.
“Maybe I should just throw it in your face.”
“I imagine you could do that.”
He sprang off the metal bunk, grabbed the bucket, and eased it through the porthole, no trouble.
“I’ll be back. I want to talk,” I said.
“Sure, ease your conscience, hanging an innocent man.”
I ignored him. He’d been saying that from the moment I nabbed him out at Anchor Ranch. I took his stinking bucket out to the crapper behind the jail, emptied it, pumped some well water into it and tossed that, and brought it back. It still stank; even the metal stinks after a while, and that’s how it is in a jailhouse.
I opened the food gate and passed it through.
“Tell me again what happened,” I said.
“Why bother?”
“Because your old man hanged me this morning. And it set me to wondering.”
King Bragg wheezed, and then cackled. I sure didn’t like him. He was a muscular punk, young and full of beans, deep-set eyes that seemed to mock. He was born to privilege, and he wore it in his manners, his face, his attitude, and his smirk.
“You don’t look hanged,” he said, getting smirky.
I sort of wanted to pulverize his smart-ass lips, but I didn’t.
“Guess I’m lying to you about being hanged,” I said. “So, go ahead and lie back. Start at the beginning.”
The beginning was the middle of February, when King Bragg rode into Doubtful for some serious boozing, and alighted at Saloon Row, five drinkin’ parlors side by side on the east end of town, catering to the cowboys, ranchers, and wanderers coming in on the pike heading toward Laramie.
“You parked that black horse in front of the Last Chance and wandered in,” I said, trying to get him started.
“No, I went to the Stockman and then the Sampling Room, and then the Last Chance. Only I don’t remember any of that. Last I knew, I took a sip of red-eye at the Last Chance, Sammy the barkeep handed it to me, and I don’t remember anything else. I couldn’t even remember my own name when I came to.”
THREE
There’s some folks you just don’t like. It don’t matter how they treat you. It don’t matter if they tip their hat to you. If you don’t like ’em, that’s it. There’s no sense gnawing on it. There was no sense dodging my dislike for King Bragg. I don’t know where it come from. Maybe it was the way he kept himself groomed. Most fellers, they got two weeks to live, they don’t care how they look. But King Bragg, he trimmed up his beard each morning, washed himself right smart, and even washed his duds and hung them to dry. That sure was a puzzle. The young man was keeping up appearances and it didn’t make no sense. Not with the hourglass dribbling sand.
Now he stood quietly on the other side of them iron bars, telling me the same story I’d heard twenty times, and it didn’t make any more sense now than the first time he spun it. It was just another yarn, maybe concocted with a little help from that lawyer, and it was his official alibi. Actually, it was more a crock than an alibi.
What King Bragg kept sayin’ was that he had dozed through the killings, and when he woke up, he was holding his revolver and every shell had been fired. So he’d gotten awake after his siesta and got told he’d killed three men. And that was all he knew.
Well, that was a crock if ever I heard one.
“Maybe you got yourself liquored up real good, got crazy, picked a fight with them T-Bar cowboys, spilled a lot of blood, and got yourself charged with some killings.”
That was the official version, the one that had convicted King Bragg of a triple murder. The one that was gonna pop his neck in a few days.
He stared. “I have nothing more to say about it,” he said.
“Well I got nothing more to ask you,” I said.
“Why are you asking? I’ve been sentenced, I’m going to hang. Why do you care?”
“Your pa, he asked me to look into it.”
“Admiral Bragg doesn’t ask anyone for anything. He orders.”
“Well, now that’s the truth. He sort of ordered me to.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t. He just hauled me out of Belle’s crapper and hanged me.”
“Now let me get this straight. My father—hanged you?”
“Noose and drop and all.”
“I don’t suppose you want to explain.”
“It sure wasn’t the way to make friends with the sheriff, boy.”
“You calling me boy? You’re hardly older than I am.”
“I got the badge. I get to call old men boy if I feel like it.”
“So my father, he hanged you?”
“Complete and total. And when I’m done here, I’m gonna haul his ass to this here jail and throw away the key.”
King Bragg laughed. “Good luck, pal.”
He headed over to his sheet metal bunk, flopped down on it, and drew up that raggedy blanket. Me, I was satisfied. That feller wasn’t gonna weasel out of a hanging with that cock-and-bull story. As for me, I was ready to hang him whether I liked him or not, because that was justice. A man shoots three fellers for no good reason, and he pays the price. I’d just have to deal with Admiral Bragg one way or the other. Now I’d talked with the boy to check his story and nothing had changed.
I didn’t much like the thought of pulling the lever, but it would be my job to do it. They made me sheriff, and now I was stuck with it. I could quit and let someone else pull the lever that would drop King Bragg from this life. But I figure if a man’s gonna be a man, he’s got to do the hard things and not run away. So when the time comes, I’ll pull the lever and watch King drop. Still, it sure made me wonder whether I wanted to be a lawman. It was more fun being young and getting into trouble. I was still young, but this wasn’t the kind of trouble I was itching for. My ma used to warn me I had the trouble itch. If there was trouble somewhere, I’d be in the middle of it. Pa, he just said, keep your head down. Heads is what get shot.
I thought I’d ask a few more questions, just to satisfy myself that King Bragg done it and his ole man was being pigheaded, more than usual. Admiral Bragg was born pigheaded, and sometime it would do him in.
This sheriff business wasn’t really up my alley. It would take someone with more upstairs than I ever had to ask the right questions. I could shoot fast and true, but that didn’t mean my thinkin’ was all that fast. There was a feller I wanted to jabber with about all this, the barkeep over to the Last Chance Saloon, Sammy Upward. That was his sworn-out legal monicker. Upward. It sure beat Downward.
The Last Chance was actually the first bar you hit coming into town, or the last one if you were ridin’ out. That made it a little wilder than them other watering places. The rannies riding in, they headed for the first oasis they could find. It didn’t matter none that it charged a nickel more for red-eye, fifteen cents instead of a dime, and two cents more, twelve in all, for a glass of Kessler’s ale. It didn’t matter none that some of them other joints had serving girls, some of them almost not bad lookin’, if you didn’t look too close. And it didn’t matter none that the other joints were safer, because the managers made customers hang up their gun belts before they could get themselves served. No, the Last Chance was famous for rowdy, for rough, and for mean,