At the fifty-thousand-dollar offer he started for the door. At one-hundred thousand, plus royalties, plus a position with the company, the shaggy-looking miner-speculator stepped up to Mr. Vandozen and shook his hand. That part was done.

When the company superintendent, who was under Bren now in all matters except the actual operation of the mine, brought out a bottle of whiskey and said, “Mr. Early, I'll drink to your health but stay out of my way,” Mr. Early looked at him and said:

“You run the works. There's only one area I plan to step into and I'm going to do it with both feet.”

This shaggy-looking Bren Early entered the Gold Dollar with his buffalo coat draped over his left shoulder, covering his arm and hanging from shoulder to knee. He wore his Stetson, weathered now and shaped properly for all time, and his showy Merwin & Hulbert ivory-handled revolvers in worn-leather holsters. Business was humming for a cold and dismal afternoon, an hour before the day shift let out. The patrons, tending to their drinking and card playing, did not pay much attention to Bren at first. Not until he walked up behind the Sweetmary Deputy Sheriff who was hunched over the bar on his arms, and said to him:

“Mr. Bruckner?”

As the heavy-set man straightened and came around, Bren Early's right hand appeared from inside the buffalo coat with a pick handle, held short, and cracked it cleanly across the deputy sheriff's face.

Bruckner bellowed, fell sideways against the bar, came around with his great nose pouring blood and stopped dead, staring at Bren Early.

“Yes, you know me,” Bren said, and swiped him again, hard, across the head.

Bruckner stumbled against the bar and this time came around with his right hand gripping his holstered Peacemaker. But caution stopped him in the nick of time from pulling it free. The left hand of this shaggy dude-standing like he was posing for a picture-was somewhere beneath that buffalo cape, and only the dude and God knew if he was holding a gun.

Bruckner said, “You're under arrest.”

It was strange, Bren admired the remark. While the response from the Gold Dollar patrons was impromptu laughter, a short quick nervous fit of it, then silence. Bren was thinking, They don't know anything what it's like, do they?

He said to Bruckner then, “Wake up and listen to what I tell you. You're gonna pay me eight dollars and fifty cents for the seventeen days I spent on your work gang. You're gonna pay everyone else now working whatever they've earned. You will never again use prisoners to do company work. And as soon as I'm through talking you're gonna go across the street and get my Smith forty-fours and bring them to me in their U.S. Army holsters. If I see you come back in here holding them by the grips or carrying any other weapon, I'll understand your intention and kill you before you get through the door. Now if you doubt or misunderstand anything I've said, go ask Ross Selkirk who the new boss is around here and he'll set you straight.”

Bruckner took several moments to say, “I'll be back.”

Let him have that much, a small shred of self-respect. The son of a bitch.

As the batwings swung closed, Bren stepped to the bar, lifting his buffalo coat and laying it across the polished surface. The patrons behind him stared and nudged each other. Look-both his revolvers were holstered.

Brendan Early had come to Sweetmary.

7

A news reporter told how he had knocked on the door one evening and when Mrs. Pierson opened it he said, “Excuse me, is this a whorehouse?” The woman said, “No, it isn't,” not fazed a bit, and closed the door.

Someone else said, “It may not be a house for whores, but she is little better than one.”

“Or better than most,” another news reporter at the Gold Dollar said, “or he wouldn't have set her up as he did. She is a doggone good-looking woman.”

None of the reporters had known about Mrs. Pierson until Maurice Dumas turned the first stone and then the rest of them began to dig. Maurice Dumas himself, once he saw where the story was leading, backed off so as not to pry.

When the door of the house on Mill Street opened this time, the news reporter took off his hat and said, “Good afternoon, I'm William S. Wells, a journalist with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

The good-looking dark-haired woman in the black dress stepped back to close the door. William S. Wells put his hand out, his foot already in place.

“Is it true Bren Early killed your son?”

Mrs. Pierson did not fight the door, though her hand remained on the knob. She looked at the journalist with little or no expression and said, “My son was killed while robbing the Benson stage by a passenger named Mr. DeLisle.”

“If Bren Early did not kill your son,” the journalist, Wells, said, “why did he buy this house for you?”

“He didn't buy this house for me.”

“I understand he assumed the mortgage.”

“Perhaps as an investment.”

The journalist said, “Let's see now…the poor widow is running a boardinghouse, barely making ends meet following the death of her husband in a mill accident. Mr. Early comes along, pays off the note, gives you the deed to the house and you get rid of the boarders so you can live here alone…some of the time alone, huh?” The journalist produced a little smile. “And you want me to believe he bought it as an in vestment?”

Mrs. Pierson said, “Do you think I care what you believe?”

“Bren Early was on the stage your boy tried to hold up. The same Bren Early who owns this house.”

“I rent from him,” Mrs. Pierson said.

“Yet you're a widow with no means of support.”

“I have money my husband left.”

“Uh-huh. Well, you must keep it under your mattress since you don't have a bank account either.”

The journalist put on his grin as he stared at Mrs. Pierson-yes, a very handsome lady with her dark hair parted in the middle and drawn back in a bun-knowing he had her in a corner; then stopped grinning as the door opened wider and he was looking at Brendan Early, the man moving toward him into the doorway. The journalist said, “Oh-” not knowing Bren was here. He backed away, went down the three front steps to the walk and said then, “I see an old friend of yours is in town.”

Bren said nothing as he slammed the door closed.

“Why were you telling him all that?”

“What did I tell him? He seemed to know everything.”

“You sounded like you were going to stand there and answer anything he asked.”

The woman shrugged. “What difference does it make?” and watched Bren as he moved from the door to a front window in the parlor. “You said yourself, let them think what they want.”

Holding the lace curtains apart, looking out at the street of frame houses, he said, “We can't stop them from thinking, but we don't have to answer their questions.”

“They don't have to ask much,” she said. “It's your house-the arrangement is fairly obvious. But as long as it isn't spoken of out loud then it isn't improper. Is that it?”

Bren wore a white shirt, a dark tie and vest; his suitcoat hung draped over the back of a chair where his holstered revolvers rested on the seat cushion. He had been preparing to go out this afternoon after spending last night and this morning with her: preparing, grooming himself, looking at himself in the mirror solemnly as if performing a ritual.

As he turned from the window now to look at her she waited, not knowing what he was going to say.

Then surprised her when he said, “Do I sound stuffy?”