“Shut up,” Dodger said, yanking on her hair.
Caleb did as he was told.
“Now the other one.And remember to move real slow.”
As he laid the second revolver on the ground, something about this fella tugged at a memory.It was something about the voice.
“Do I know you?”he asked.
Dodger smirked.“I’m the man who’s gonna put you in the ground.”
“We’ll wait and see how that plays out.”He shook his head.“But we ain’t met before?”
“You really don’t know me?”
Caleb wracked his memory.“I can’t recollect, but there’s something.”
“I’m Dodger Clanton.”
A face popped fleetingly into the back of his brain but didn’t take hold.“You famous, Dodger Clanton?”
“How about this name…Jack Clanton?”
Jack Clanton.Caleb reached back to see if he could catch the image of that face.The memory darted by like a swallow in April, so quick that it was gone before he even got a good look.Then, it set down in a nest on the wall of his brain, and Caleb threw a net over it.
“Jack Clanton,” he said.
It all pieced together like a nine-patch quilt.And that quilt had blood on it.
Jack Clanton was a drunken bruiser of a ranch hand who thought he was the meanest, toughest, quickest gunslinger south of the Badlands.
One night, while Caleb was playing nursemaid to a couple of touring dignitaries and delivering them up to Cheyenne City in Wyoming, Clanton and a few of his friends rode in to raise hell in Greeley.And raise it they did.They started in one saloon, where after a few hours of drinking, they got into an argument at a poker table.The fight that followed involved about thirty fellas and nearly wrecked the bar.From there, his pals went on to another saloon with smaller but similar results.
Jack Clanton and one of the boys, however, decided that a visit to a brothel just off Maple Street was in order.It was a place Jack had visited before, and the whore he was interested in still couldn’t hear out of one ear because of him batting her around.She wanted no part of him.Instead of leaving, Clanton and his pal beat the hell out of the bouncer.And then Clanton decided that the woman needed a beating as well.
Caleb arrived back in town in time to drag the filthy dog out of the brothel without anybody getting killed, which was a miracle in itself.Clanton did have a few bruises himself, however, by the time Caleb got him stowed in the Greeley jail.But at least he was breathing.If there was one thing he couldn’t stomach, it was a big man laying his hands on people who couldn’t defend themselves.He never could sit still for that.
The next morning, the madam running that brothel didn’t want to press charges.Bad for business, she said.The woman he beat up knew what would come of the trouble if she pushed it.He’d get thirty days, if that, and then he’d come looking for her.
So the end result was that Caleb had to turn him loose about noon, whereupon Clanton went down to a saloon he hadn’t wrecked, drank up some courage, and came back to the jail with his six-shooters loaded and loose in his holsters.
It was sheer luck that Caleb had been sitting out front when Jack Clanton came walking up the street with his friends mouthing off and goading him the whole way.The fool called him out.He wanted blood for being “humiliated,” and Caleb couldn’t talk him down.The man threw down, and that was that.Clanton lay in the dust, his own blood draining away in the street.
Curiously enough, Jack Clanton had been working on the same ranch as Grat Horner.
Sometimes life was like one big patchwork quilt.All connected.
And now his boy was following in his old man’s footsteps.
“I remember,” Caleb said.“You sound just like your pappy.”
“Well, this is the last voice you’re gonna hear.”
Caleb nodded at Sheila.“She don’t have nothing to do with this.Why don’t you let her go, and we’ll settle this.You and me.”
“She’s been getting at me since I first saw her in Elkhorn.The business I got with her is separate.Though it’s more pleasure than business.”
Dodger released her hair and grabbed her around the waist.Even if Caleb were able to get to his guns, the outlaw was using her as a shield.
