“How ’bout the stew?” Cole said.
“Been simmerin’ ’bout six years,” the woman said. “Just keep dishing it out and addin’ in stuff.”
We ordered some.
“What are we going to do?” Allie said.
“We’ll wait until tomorrow afternoon,” Cole said. “Then we’ll take Bragg back.”
“I meant us, Virgil,” she said.
I started to get up.
“I’ll have a drink at the bar,” I said.
Cole put his hand on my arm.
“Sit,” he said.
“Does Everett have to be here, Virgil?” Allie said.
“Yep.”
I wasn’t comfortable with it. But staying might not be a bad idea. If Allie started talking about us at her half-constructed house that rainy day, I would want to be around to see that the story got told adequately.
“Ring forced me to do that with him,” Allie said.
“Nope,” Cole said.
“He did, Virgil, I swear he did.”
Cole shook his head.
“I seen what I seen,” he said.
“I was afraid,” Allie said. “I was doing what I had to do to stay alive.”
“He wouldn’ta killed you,” Cole said. “He’d just trail you along with him till he didn’t need you no more.”
“Maybe you know that,” Allie said. “But I didn’t know it, Virgil. And the other men. I was a woman alone with four terrible men.”
Cole drank some whiskey and stared into the glass and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then he said to me, “Tomorrow this time we’ll have settled things with the Sheltons. If Ring kills me, you think she’ll go off with him, Everett?”
“I think Allie needs to be with a man,” I said.
“You bastard,” Allie said. “Don’t listen to him, Virgil. The sonova bitch tried to put his hands on me one day when I was showing him our house.”
Cole looked at me.
“No, Virgil,” I said. “I didn’t.”
Cole looked at me for a moment longer. I looked back. Then he looked back into his whiskey glass.
“No, Allie,” he said. “Everett didn’t do that.”
“He’s lying, Virgil. You believe him and not me?”
Cole studied the surface of his drink. He nodded his head slowly.
“That is correct,” he said.
“You men. You always stick together, don’t you. What chance has a woman got, alone?”
Cole finished his drink and poured himself another. The hotelkeeper’s wife brought us food. We all ate some and were quiet while we did. It was better than fried salt pork and hardtack.
“Well, if it’ll help you feel easy,” Cole said after a time, “nobody’s killed me yet, and I don’t think Ring can do it, either.”
“Why do you have to face him?”
“He’s got my prisoner.”
“Can’t you get the local marshal or whoever to help you?”
“Maybe,” Cole said. “Either way, he’s got my lawful prisoner.”
“And you just have to get him back,” Allie said.
“He’s my lawful prisoner,” Cole said.
“And that’s all there is to it?”
“I’m a lawman,” Cole said.
“And that’s all you are?” Allie said.
“Mostly,” Cole said.
After we ate, Cole and I went out and sat in a couple of chairs in front of the hotel. It was dark now, and the street traffic was mostly rail hands and cowboys heading for the saloons, and now and then a whore hurrying to work. Allie had gone back up to her room without speaking to us again. The night insects were making noise. I could hear the sound of a bad piano somewhere up the street.
“What happened at the house?” Cole said to me.
“I didn’t make no advance at Allie,” I said.
“I believe it. I tole you that already. But I’d like to know what transacted.”
I told him. He nodded slowly as he listened. If he felt anything, he didn’t show it. He sat with his chair tilted back, looking up through the clear night at the stars. After a while, he shook his head as if answering a question no one had asked.
“I never met no woman like her,” he said.
I was quiet.
“Mostly, I been with whores, and some squaws.”
Cole took out a cigar and lit it, turning it in the match flame, and got it going good and even.
“She talks good and dresses nice, and she’s good-looking,” Cole said.
He took in some cigar smoke and blew it out and watched it thin out and disappear in the night air.
“She can play the piano, and she cooks nice, and she’s very clean.”
Cole’s voice was quiet in the near darkness. He was listing assets, I thought, deciding whether to buy.
“But,” Cole said, “it appears she’ll fuck anything ain’t gelded.”
I shook my head.
“I ain’t sure that’s quite right,” I said.
“What do you think’s right?”
“I think she wants to be with the boss stallion,” I said.
“Ain’t but one stallion in a herd,” Cole said.
“At a time,” I said.
Cole smoked his cigar quietly for a time.
“So when I’m around she loves me,” Cole said.
“I think so,” I said.
“But I ain’t around and you are, she loves you.”
“Probably ain’t love,” I said.
“And when neither one of us is around, she loves Ring.”
“Again, I ain’t sure I’d say love.”
“She love me?” Cole said.
“I can’t say that she don’t,” I said. “You?”
Cole’s voice sounded a little hoarse to me. Maybe he was embarrassed. I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen him embarrassed.
“I think she does,” he said.
“You’re the one should know,” I said.
He smoked some more of his cigar, holding the tip up and exhaling past it so he could see the smoke.
“That thing with Ring,” Cole said. “It sticks in my throat, Everett. I can’t seem to swallow it.”
“Sticks in mine, too,” I said.
He puffed his cigar.
“You know she takes a bath every evenin’?” he said. “ ’Fore she goes to bed.”
It was very dark, and I could only see Cole’s face a little in the coal-oil light that came out of the hotel.
“I like bein’ with her,” he said.
“Nothin’ against it,” I said.
“No. I just got to get past the Ring business.”
“Might not be the last time,” I said.
“Be the last time with Ring,” Cole said.
A single horse and rider walked down the street in front of us, the horse’s hooves making a kind of slurred sound in the dirt, the saddle creaking gently, a quiet sound of harness metal.
“Gonna talk with the town marshal tomorrow?” I said.
“Yep. Got no objection to help.”
“And if he’s no help?”
“We done it by ourselves before,” Cole said.
“We’re going up against Ring because of Bragg,” I said.
“Can’t be a lawman and let somebody come take your prisoner,” Cole said.
“Nothin’ personal.”
“Nope. Business.”
“We done pretty good over time, Virgil, ’cause it’s never been personal. Always just a job.”
“It’s always been the law, Everett. It’s got to be the law. People like us got to have the law and got to do it by the law. You understand that, Everett. Otherwise you’re just a damn shooter. Nothin’ to prevent you from killin’ anybody.”
“And that’s how it is this time, too,” I said.
“That’s how it is every time,” Cole said.
