“Look,” Sam reasoned. “You take things much too serious. I could just as well have said stupid Northerners.”
“It was stupid Southerners,” Verve Larn said. “My ears hear just fine.”
Abe Haslett nodded. “Could be you are one of them who looks down their nose at us. Could be we don’t take kindly to that. We don’t take kindly at all.”
Crooked Creek Sam placed a hand on his Colt Dragoon. “Don’t threaten me. You have treed a cougar when you threaten me.”
“I ain’t seen one of those percussion Colts in a coon’s age,” Abe Haslett commented. “They were prone to misfire.”
“Not mine,” Sam said.
“Big and heavy, those old models,” Stern Larn said. “Even us stupid Southerners know enough not to rely on one.”
“Takes a real gun shark to handle one halfway decent,” Jefferson Haslett said.
“And you don’t strike us as a gun shark,” Happy Larn threw in.
Crooked Creek Sam broke out in a cold sweat. He recognized the signs: the hard stares, the pinched mouths, the tense bodies. “Now, you just hold on! Every last one of you, hold on!”
“He sounds scared to me,” Stern Larn said.
“To me too,” Abe Haslett agreed. “Usually when someone is scared they have done something they shouldn’t.”
“He shouldn’t ought to call people stupid,” Cordial Larn said.
Sam had put up with all he was going to. “I want you out of my saloon! Every last one of you coon-eating sons of bitches!”
The next moment Abe and Stern and Cordial had their six-shooters out, and the others were unlimbering theirs.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Crooked Creek Sam screeched.
“What do you say?” Abe Haslett asked. It was hard to tell who he was asking since he was staring at the Dragoon.
“I say the North has insulted us enough,” Stern Larn said. “I say for once the Larns and the Hasletts have common cause.”
“Twice,” Abe said. “We wore the gray together.”
“It is a shame we are enemies,” Stern said. Then, to Sam, “Any last words, you stinkin’ Yankee?”
Crooked Creek Sam could not believe what was happening. “I will give you more than a word, you lousy Reb.” He started to level the Dragoon but could not make up his mind who to point it at. The moment’s indecision was costly. The last sound he heard was the crashing boom of revolvers. The last sight was a roiling cloud of gun smoke.
The shooting went on and on. It stopped only when every cylinder was empty.
“We done shot him to pieces,” Verve Larn said, grinning.
“It is too bad we have to do the same to us,” Abe Haslett said. “Coffin Varnish, here we come.”
Chapter 19
It was a warm night. The breeze that had picked up from out of the northwest did little to alleviate the heat of the day. The sky was clear, the stars a sparkling host shining benignly down on Kansas.
“It is a night made for romance,” Adolphina Luce remarked.
Chester Luce was so shocked he nearly tripped over his own feet. They were taking a rare stroll down Coffin Varnish’s dusty street. He had been watching out for horse, pig, and chicken droppings, and glanced up in bewilderment. “Did I hear you right, my dear?” He could not remember the last time his wife had been in a romantic mood. There had been their wedding night, of course, and five or six times after that. It got so that he wearied of waiting for her to say yes, and stopped hinting.
“Romance,” Adolphina confirmed, her usual hard tones softened. “A girl thinks of romance when she is happy.”
The shocks kept coming. Chester never thought of her as a girl. Not as old and as big as she was. A woman, yes, a bear, often, but she had given up any pretense at girlish ways long before she met him. And to hear her say she was happy was enough to convince him he must be dreaming. But no, a pile of horse droppings made his nose want to curl in on itself, and no dream ever did that. “I am glad you are happy,” he said. “Was it Gemma’s meal?” They had been invited to supper at the Giorgios’, another first. Gemma had cooked traditional Italian fare, with lots of pasta and thick sauce and meat rolled into balls, and it had been delicious. Much more so than anything his wife ever cooked. Her food tended to be bland and unappetizing. Some nights, he had to force himself to have three helpings.
“No, it is not that. Who can stand all that garlic she uses? And those brats of her always underfoot. If I were her, I would take a board to their backsides. That would cure them.”
Chester had considered the boys well behaved. Although the oldest, Matteo, had made an unfortunate remark to the effect that Adolphina was the first woman he ever met with a mustache.
“Things are going nice for once. A girl is happy when things go nice. When they go the way she wants them to go.”
“We sure had a lot of people come to view Paunch Stevens,” Chester said. “We made more money off him than we did off that first bunch.”
“There will be more,” Adolphina said. “A lot more. I can feel it in my bones. I feel something else, too.” She squeezed his arm.
It had never occurred to Chester that money made women romantic. The revelation put his brain in a whirl.
