Steel and other stories [SSC] Read online

  Then his eyebrows flew up as he noticed that a latecomer was just entering the front door.

  “Oh, no!” he cried, covering his face with his hands. “I’m going to go up in a puff of smoke!”

  But he didn’t.

  When he opened his eyes, his bride was holding his hand tightly.

  “You see, Frank,” she comforted, “you were full of baloney all the time.”

  The ceremony was performed. And he was so numbed with surprise and shock and bewilderment that he forgot about shoes and bouquets and hats and rice and everything.

  As they rode to the hotel in the hired limousine, she stroked his hand.

  “Superstition,” she cooed. “It’s the bunk.”

  “But—” Frank offered.

  “Shush,” she said, pressing shut his protest with a kiss. “Aren’t you still alive?”

  “Yes,” said Frank, “and I can’t understand it.”

  At the door to their hotel room Frank looked at her. She looked at him. The bellboy looked away.

  Finally she said, “Carry me across the threshold, darlin’.”

  He smiled a flimsy smile.

  “I’d feel silly about it,” he said.

  “For me,” she insisted. “I’m entitled to one superstition.”

  He smiled then. “Yes,” he admitted and bent to pick her up.

  They never made it. She was awfully chubby.

  “Heart failure,” said the doctor.

  “Satan,” breathed Fulvia, remaining in a mottled funk the ensuing ten years.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE CONQUEROR

  That afternoon in 1871, the stage to Grantville had only the two of us as passengers, rocking and swaying in its dusty, hot confines under the fiery Texas sun. The young man sat across from me, one palm braced against the hard, dry leather of the seat, the other holding on his lap a small black bag.

  He was somewhere near nineteen or twenty. His build was almost delicate. He was dressed in checkered flannel and wore a dark tie with a stickpin in its center. You could tell he was a city boy.

  From the time we’d left Austin two hours before, I had been wondering about the bag he carried so carefully in his lap. I noticed that his light-blue eyes kept gazing down at it. Every time they did, his thin-lipped mouth would twitch—whether toward a smile or a grimace I couldn’t tell. Another black bag, slightly larger, was on the seat beside him, but to this he paid little attention.

  I’m an old man, and while not usually garrulous, I guess I do like to seek out conversation. Just the same, I hadn’t offered to speak in the time we’d been fellow passengers, and neither had he. For about an hour and a half I’d been trying to read the Austin paper, but now I laid it down beside me on the dusty seat. I glanced down again at the small bag and noted how tightly his slender fingers were clenched around the bone handle.

  Frankly, I was curious. And maybe there was something in the young man’s face that reminded me of Lew or Tylan—my sons. Anyhow, I picked up the newspaper and held it out to him.

  “Care to read it?” I asked him above the din of the 24 pounding hoofs and the rattle and creak of the stage.

  There was no smile on his face as he shook his head once. If anything, his mouth grew tighter until it was a line of almost bitter resolve. It is not often you see such an expression in the face of so young a man. It is too hard at that age to hold on to either bitterness or resolution, too easy to smile and laugh and soon forget the worst of evils. Maybe that was why the young man seemed so unusual to me.

  “I’m through with it if you’d like,” I said.

  “No, thank you,” he answered curtly.

  “Interesting story here,” I went on, unable to rein in a runaway tongue. “Some Mexican claims to have shot young Wesley Hardin.”

  The young man’s eyes raised up a moment from his bag and looked at me intently. Then they lowered to the bag again.

  “ ‘Course I don’t believe a word of it,” I said. “The man’s not born yet who’ll put John Wesley away.”

  The young man did not choose to talk, I saw. I leaned back against the jolting seat and watched him as he studiously avoided my eyes.

  Still I would not stop. What is this strange compulsion of old men to share themselves? Perhaps they fear to lose their last years in emptiness. “You must have gold in that bag,” I said to him, “to guard it so zealously.”

  It was a smile he gave me now, though a mirthless one.

  “No, not gold,” the young man said, and as he finished saying so, I saw his lean throat move once nervously.

  I smiled and struck in deeper the wedge of conversation.

  “Going to Grantville?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he said—and I suddenly knew from his voice that he was no Southern man.

  I did not speak then. I turned my head away and looked out stiffly across the endless flat, watching through the choking haze of alkali dust, the bleached scrub which dotted the barren stretches. For a moment, I felt myself tightened with that rigidity we Southerners contracted in the presence of our conquerors.

  But there is something stronger than pride, and that is loneliness. It was what made me look back to the young man and once more see in him something of my own two boys who gave their lives at Shiloh. I could not, deep in myself, hate the young man for being from a different part of our nation. Even then, imbued as I was with the stiff pride of the Confederate, I was not good at hating.

  “Planning to live in Grantville?” I asked.

  The young man’s eyes glittered. “Just for a while,” he said. His fingers grew yet tighter on the bag he held so firmly in his lap. Then he suddenly blurted, “You want to see what I have in—”

  He stopped, his mouth tightening as if he were angry to have spoken.

  I didn’t know what to say to his impulsive, half-finished offer.

  The young man very obviously clutched at my indecision and said, “Well, never mind—you wouldn’t be interested.”

  And though I suppose I could have protested that I would, somehow I felt it would do no good.

  The young man leaned back and braced himself again as the coach yawed up a rock-strewn incline. Hot, blunt waves of dust-laden wind poured through the open windows at my side. The young man had rolled down the curtains on his side shortly after we’d left Austin.

  “Got business in our town?” I asked, after blowing dust from my nose and wiping it from around my eyes and mouth.

  He leaned forward slightly. “You live in Grantville?” he asked loudly as overhead the driver, Jeb Knowles, shouted commands to his three teams and snapped the leather popper of his whip over their straining bodies.

  I nodded. “Run a grocery there,” I said, smiling at him. “Been visiting up North with my oldest—with my son.”

  He didn’t seem to hear what I had said. Across his face a look as intent as any I have ever seen moved suddenly.

  “Can you tell me something?” he began. “Who’s the quickest pistolman in your town?”

  The question startled me, because it seemed born of no idle curiosity. I could see that the young man was far more than ordinarily interested in my reply. His hands were clutching, bloodless, the handle of his small black bag.

  “Pistolman?” I asked him.

  “Yes. Who’s the quickest in Grantville? Is it Hardin? Does he come there often? Or Longley? Do they come there?”

  That was the moment I knew something was not quite right in that young man. For, when he spoke those words, his face was strained and eager beyond a natural eagerness.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about such things,” I told him. “The town is rough enough; I’ll be the first man to admit to that. But I go my own way and folks like me go theirs and we stay out of trouble.”

  “But what about Hardin?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know about that either, young man,” I said. “Though I do believe someone said he was in Kansas now.”

  The you
ng man’s face showed a keen and heartfelt disappointment.

  “Oh,” he said and sank back a little.

  He looked up suddenly. “But there are pistolmen there,” he said, “dangerous men?”

  I looked at him for a moment, wishing, somehow, that I had kept to my paper and not let the garrulity of age get the better of me. “There are such men,” I said stiffly, “wherever you look in our ravaged South.”

  “Is there a sheriff in Grantville?” the young man asked me then.

  “There is,” I said—but for some reason did not add that Sheriff Cleat was hardly more than a figurehead, a man who feared his own shadow and kept his appointment only because the county fathers were too far away to come and see for themselves what a futile job their appointee was doing.

  I didn’t tell the young man that. Vaguely uneasy, I told him nothing more at all and we were separated by silence again, me to my thoughts, he to his—whatever strange, twisted thoughts they were. He looked at his bag and fingered at the handle, and his narrow chest rose and fell with sudden lurches.

  A creaking, a rattling, a blurred spinning of thick spokes. A shouting, a deafening clatter of hoofs in the dust. Over the far rise, the buildings of Grantville were clustered and waiting.

  A young man was coming to town.

  ~ * ~

  Grantville in the postwar period was typical of those Texas towns that struggled in the limbo between lawlessness and settlement. Into its dusty streets rode men tense with the anger of defeat. The very air seemed charged with their bitter resentments—resentments toward the occupying forces, toward the rabble-rousing carpetbaggers and, with that warped evaluation of the angry man, toward themselves and their own kind. Threatening death was everywhere, and the dust was often red with blood. In such a town I sold food to men who often died before their stomachs could digest it.

  I did not see the young man for hours after Jeb braked up the stage before the Blue Buck Hotel. I saw him move across the ground and up the hotel porch steps, holding tightly to his two bags.

  Then some old friends greeted me and I forgot him.

  I chatted for a while and then I walked by the store. Things there were in good order. I commended Merton Winthrop, the young man I had entrusted the store to in my three weeks’ absence, and then I went home, cleaned up, and put on fresh clothes.

  I judge it was near four that afternoon when I pushed through the batwings of the Nellie Gold Saloon. I am not nor ever was a heavy drinking man, but I’d had for several years the pleasurable habit of sitting in the cool shadows of a corner table with a whiskey drink to sip. It was a way that I’d found for lingering over minutes.

  That particular afternoon I had chatted for a while with George P. Shaughnessy, the afternoon bartender, then retired to my usual table to dream a few presupper dreams and listen to the idle buzz of conversations and the click of chips in the back-room poker game.

  That was where I was when the young man entered.

  In truth, when he first came in, I didn’t recognize him. For what a strange, incredible altering in his dress and carriage! The city clothes were gone; instead of a flannel coat he wore a broadcloth shirt, pearl-buttoned; in place of flannel trousers there were dark, tight-fitting trousers whose calves plunged into glossy, high-heeled boots. On his head a broad-brimmed hat cast a shadow across his grimly set features.

  His boot heels had clumped him almost to the bar before I recognized him, before I grew suddenly aware of what he had been keeping so guardedly in that small black bag.

  Crossed on his narrow waist, riding low, a brace of gunbelts hung, sagging with the weight of two Colt .44s in their holsters.

  I confess to staring at the transformation. Few men in Grantville wore two pistols, much less slender young city men just arrived in town.

  In my mind, I heard again the questions he had put to me. I had to set my glass down for the sudden, unaccountable shaking of my hand.

  The other customers of the Nellie Gold looked only briefly at the young man, then returned to their several attentions. George P. Shaughnessy looked up, smiling, gave the customary unnecessary wipe across the immaculate mahogany of the bar top, and asked the young man’s pleasure.

  “Whiskey,” the young man said.

  “Any special kind, now?” George asked.

  “Any kind,” the young man said, thumbing back his hat with studied carelessness.

  It was when the amber fluid was almost to the glass top that the young man asked the question I had somehow known he would ask from the moment I had recognized him.

  “Tell me, who’s the quickest pistolman in town?”

  George looked up. “I beg your pardon, mister?”

  The young man repeated the question, his face emotionless.

  “Now, what does a fine young fellow like you want to know that for?” George asked him in a fatherly way.

  It was like the tightening of hide across a drum top the way the skin grew taut across the young man’s cheeks.

  “I asked you a question,” he said with unpleasant flatness. “Answer it.”

  The two closest customers cut off their talking to observe. I felt my hands grow cold upon the table top. There was ruthlessness in the young man’s voice.

  But George’s face still retained the bantering cast it almost always had.

  “Are you going to answer my question?” the young man said, drawing back his hands and tensing them with light suggestiveness along the bar edge.

  “What’s your name, son?” George asked.

  The young man’s mouth grew hard and his eyes went cold beneath the shadowing brim of his hat. Then a calculating smile played thinly on his lips. “My name is Riker,” he said as if somehow he expected this unknown name to strike terror into all our hearts.

  “Well, young Mr. Riker, may I ask you why you want to know about the quickest pistolman in town?”

  “Who is it?” There was no smile on Riker’s lips now; it had faded quickly into that grim, unyielding line again. In back I noticed one of the three poker players peering across the top of half-doors into the main saloon.

  “Well, now,” George said, smiling, “there’s Sheriff Cleat. I’d say that he’s about—”

  His face went slack. A pistol was pointing at his chest.

  “Don’t tell me lies,” young Riker said in tightly restrained anger. “I know your sheriff is a yellow dog; a man at the hotel told me so. I want the truth”

  He emphasized the word again with a sudden thumbing back of hammer. George’s face went white.

  “Mr. Riker, you’re making a very bad mistake,” he said, then twitched back as the long pistol barrel jabbed into his chest.

  Riker’s mouth was twisted with fury. “Are you going to tell me?” he raged. His young voice cracked in the middle of the sentence like an adolescent’s.

  “Selkirk,” George said quickly.

  ~ * ~

  The young man drew back his pistol, another smile trembling for a moment on his lips. He threw across a nervous glance at where I sat but did not recognize me. Then his cold blue eyes were on George again.

  “Selkirk,” he repeated. “What’s the first name?”

  “Barth,” George told him, his voice having neither anger nor fear.

  “Barth Selkirk.” The young man spoke the name as though to fix it in his mind. Then he leaned forward quickly, his nostrils flaring, the thin line of his mouth once more grown rigid.

  “You tell him I want to kill him,” he said. “Tell him I—” He swallowed hastily and jammed his lips together. “Tonight,” he said then. “Right here. At eight o’clock.” He shoved out the pistol barrel again. “You tell him,” he commanded.

  George said nothing and Riker backed away from the bar, glancing over his shoulder once to see where the doors were. As he retreated, the high heel of his right boot gave a little inward and he almost fell. As he staggered for balance, his pistol barrel pointed restlessly around the room, and in the rising color of his face, his eyes l
ooked with nervous apprehension into every dark corner.

  Then he was at the doors again, his chest rising and falling rapidly. Before our blinking eyes, the pistol seemed to leap back into its holster. Young Riker smiled uncertainly, obviously desperate to convey the impression that he was in full command of the moment.

  “Tell him I don’t like him,” he said as if he were tossing out a casual reason for his intention to kill Selkirk. He swallowed again, lowering his chin a trifle to hide the movement of his throat.