The Lawmen Read Free Page B

whacker across the ribs with the stock.
    “Ow! ” The bull whacker bent over. Clay shifted the shotgun and cracked the bull whacker behind the head with the steel barrels. The bull whacker dropped to the dirt floor.
    “You didn’t put down your guns,” the bull whacker complained.
    “No shit,” Clay replied. “I’m not that stupid.”
    Outside, the excited crowd pressed around the saloon, watching the action. One-armed Peter McCarty turned to Judge Saxon and the lawyer Dunleavy, beaming. “I told you he’d do.”
    Inside, the bull whacker rolled onto his back. Clay sat on the bull whacker’s chest and started going through his pockets. “Ow! My ribs!” the man squealed. “My ribs! I think you broke them.”
    “Sorry,” Clay said, shifting his seat to the bull whacker’s thigh. The bull whacker bit his lip, holding back the pain. In one of the man’s shirt pockets Clay found a leather purse. He pulled it out and looked toward the saloon door. “Judge Saxon! What’s the fine for drunk and disorderly in this town?”
    “Why, fifty dollars is the usual amount,” the judge replied, taken aback.
    Clay poured out a handful of gold eagles and counted five. He tossed another coin to the saloon keeper. “That’s for the damages. He done anything else in here?”
    “Yeah,” the barkeep said. “He pissed in the corner.”
    Beneath Clay, the bull whacker cried, “Hey, that’s not fair—everybody pisses in that corner.”
    Clay considered. “I think we’ll let you go on that one,” he told the bull whacker. “No need for you to go to jail, either. I saw a veterinary’s shingle on Tucson Street, though. You might want to make an appointment.”
    Clay rose and started for the saloon door. He was met by drunken cheers and laughter from the crowd in the street. Stopping, he handed Judge Saxon four of the gold eagles. The fifth he put in his pocket. “My ten percent,” he said. He looked at Saxon, McCarty, and Dunleavy. “I could get to like this job.”
    Then he went down the street.
     

 
    4
     
    Evening settled into night. Clay patrolled Topaz’s streets. He was made welcome everywhere. The entire town seemed to have heard about his encounter with the bull whacker at Tom Anderson’s Place, and it seemed like everyone wanted to buy him a drink.
    Clay refused them all. “Not while I’m working,” he said. Truth was, Clay had never been able to hold his liquor well, and he didn’t want to be half swozzled the next time he had to go up against a troublemaker.
    As the night wore on, the noise level in the town grew. Every night was Saturday night in Topaz. Lights blazed, music blared; the clink of bottles vied with the rattle of poker chips and men shooting pistols at die moon. There were fights for Clay to break up. He spent close to an hour searching for a horse that a drunken cowboy reported as stolen, only to find that the cowboy had misplaced it.
    There was a near riot on Grant Street, where the town’s two fanciest brothels faced one another, and whose madames—Dutch Annie and Francie de Lisle—were conducting their own version of the Franco-Prussian War. Francie had her girls on the porch singing a fractured version of “La Marseillaise.” Dutch Annie, a German by way of Hoboken, responded with two shotgun blasts in the direction of Francie’s place. Francie’s girls and bouncers were about to retaliate when Clay showed up. There was a lot of screaming and threats and refighting of battles Clay had never heard of, but at last Clay got tempers calmed and the situation smoothed out.
    After that, Clay wandered south of Grant Street, to the dimly lit cribs of the Line, where the poorer prostitutes lived. He found himself on a nameless alley of run-down shacks, from which poured drunken laughter and off-key singing and music.
    In front of Clay there were sudden angry yells. There was a crash and a door flew open, releasing a shaft of weak light. A woman stumbled out the door, sobbing. A