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“Enjoyed the dinner,” Tom said, getting up.
Rudabaugh was heading outside, but his odor would linger for days.
The Kid saw that no one else was volunteering to pay for their dinner, so with exasperation he said, “Here, let me get this,” and generously laid down five authentic two-dollar bills with Thomas Jefferson in the left oval and a vignette of the United States Capitol in the center.
“Dziekuje,” the owner told the Kid. Thank you.
“I’m really sorry about the fuss.”
“Yes, yes.” Padre Polaco smiled. “But all my customers bring me happiness. Some by coming, some by leaving.” And then he said like the gravest of teachers, “But I have a warning for you about your friends. ‘He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.’?”
Exiting, Billie Wilson yelled, “This is a fine way to treat your dinner guests!”
Padre Polaco yelled back a Polish get-lost expression that in English would be “Oh, go stuff yourself with hay!”
* * *
Tying a woolen scarf over his skull and ears again and fixing his sugarloaf sombrero over it, the Kid adjusted his fine sable coat and got up on his latest horse. And then he heard hooting from the night of Grzelachowski’s corral as Wilson, Rudabaugh, and a what-the-hell Folliard urged four stallions, four geldings, four mares, and four fillies through the yanked-open gate using spurs to various hindquarters. Charlie Bowdre was overseeing the theft and sheepishly twisted in his saddle. “Won’t listen to me, them.”
The Kid yelled, “What are you doing? Alex is a friend of mine.”
“We thought we was your friends,” Rudabaugh said. “And he disrespected us.” His hand was on his six-gun, and the Kid could tell he was wanting to use it. The Kid felt so tired of all this quarreling and menace that he made the mistake of giving in, just riding gloomily toward White Oaks as planned, his skin feeling the itch of fleas.
And that continued as he just watched Billie Wilson sell Padre Polaco’s horses to West & Dedrick Livery & Sales and divvy the cash among the thieves. Then Wilson, Folliard, and Rudabaugh felt a hankering for the saloons and sporting ladies of White Oaks, while the father-to-be and the Kid just gambled.
With the dealer shuffling his cards, the Kid asked, “You feel worn-out, Charlie? Not just tonight, but lately?”
“Well, yeah. A-course. We got so much to-ing and fro-ing I don’t know whether to scratch my watch or wind my nuts.”
The Kid collected his cards and immediately folded. “I’m frazzled, too. We ought’ve quit the territory when Waite and the Coes did.”
Bowdre finished his jigger of whiskey and said, “That locomotive done left the depot.”
And then Rudabaugh, Wilson, and Folliard shambled in with a burden of stolen overcoats, woolen blankets, and cardboard boxes of tinned food. Tom Folliard grinned as he said, “Look what we got!”
Wiping his coined winnings into his left hand, the Kid stood. “Where?”
“Will Hudgens’s store.”
The Kid hissed, “But he’s from Lincoln. Will Hudgens knows you and me, Tom.”
“So?” Rudabaugh said.
Charlie Bowdre looked at the many rubberneckers in the saloon and whispered, “We best get outta here.”
* * *
The five hustled out, the Kid forgetting his yellow gloves, got on their horses with their ill-gotten gains, and galloped off to the Greathouse & Kuch ranch and trading post. All that hard, freezing ride the Kid was thinking, You have lost control.
Will Hudgens was not just a storekeeper, he was a deputy sheriff in White Oaks. Happening upon the wreckage of his mercantile operation, he shouted a hue and cry for a lynching and collected a posse of fourteen men to chase down the thieves overnight by following their horses’ hoofprints in the deepening snow. It was not yet five in the morning when they got to the Greathouse & Kuch roadhouse, so the fourteen reclined on horse blankets in the snow, hating the zero cold as they cradled Winchesters and waited for the sun to rise.
Whiskey Jim Greathouse got his nickname from his moonlighting job of illegally selling liquor to Indians. He employed a short-order cook from Berlin, whose first job that morning was to harness a Clydesdale horse team in the stables. His boots were crunching in the snow and he was hiding his face from the wind with the lifted collar of his buffalo coat when he was tackled and pinned deep into a drift by a few of the White Oaks men.
“Who ya got in that house?” Deputy Jimmy Carlyle asked.
The Kid was first up and heating water for coffee in a fireplace pan when a cook who was floury with snow hurried inside and held out a folded sheet of paper. “Der ist a posse,” he said. “Here a message.”
Charlie Bowdre and Tom Folliard wandered over as the Kid read aloud, “?‘We have you surrounded and there’s no escape. We demand you surrender. Deputy Sheriff William H. Hudgens.’?”
