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They drew back, Pickens glaring at me and Strother glaring at Jamie. The door slammed hard enough to rattle the glass. For a moment the four
of us stood there, watching the great clouds of alkali dust blow up the high street, some of them so thick they made the saltwagons disappear. But
there was little time for contemplation; it would be night all too soon, and then one of the salties now drinking in the Busted Luck might be a man no
longer.
“I think we have a problem,” I said. I was speaking to all of them, but it was Jamie I was looking at. “It seems to me that a skin-turner who knows
what he is would hardly admit to being able to ride.”
“Thought of that,” Jamie said, and tilted his head to Constable Wegg.
“We’ve got all of em who can sit a horse,” Wegg said. “Depend on it, sai. Ain’t I seen em myself?”
“I doubt if you’ve seen all of them,” I said.
“I think he has,” Jamie said. “Listen, Roland.”
“There’s one rich fella up in Little Debaria, name of Sam Shunt,” Wegg said. “The miners call him Shunt the Cunt, which ain’t surprising, since
he’s got most of em where the hair grows short. He don’t own the Combyne—it’s big bugs in Gilead who’ve got that—but he owns most of the rest:
the bars, the whores, the skiddums—”
I looked at Sheriff Peavy.
“Shacks in Little Debaria where some of the miners sleep,” he said. “Skiddums ain’t much, but they ain’t underground.”
I looked back at Wegg, who had hold of his duster’s lapels and was looking pleased with himself.
“Sammy Shunt owns the company store. Which means he owns the miners.” He grinned. When I didn’t grin back, he took his hands from his
lapels and flipped them skyward. “It’s the way of the world, young sai—I didn’t make it, and neither did you.
“Now Sammy’s a great one for fun n games . . . always assumin he can turn a few pennies on em, that is. Four times a year, he sets up races for
the miners. Some are footraces, and some are obstacle-course races, where they have to jump over wooden barrycades, or leap gullies filled up
with mud. It’s pretty comical when they fall in. The whores always come to watch, and that makes em laugh like loons.”
“Hurry it up,” Peavy growled. “Those fellas won’t take long to get through two drinks.”
“He has hoss-races, too,” said Wegg, “although he won’t provide nothing but old nags, in case one of them ponies breaks a leg and has to be
shot.”
“If a miner breaks a leg, is he shot?” I asked.
Wegg laughed and slapped his thigh as if I’d gotten off a good one. Cuthbert could have told him I don’t joke, but of course Cuthbert wasn’t there.
And Jamie rarely says anything, if he doesn’t have to.
“Trig, young gunslinger, very trig ye are! Nay, they’re mended right enough, if they can be mended; there’s a couple of whores that make a little
extra coin working as ammies after Sammy Shunt’s little competitions. They don’t mind; it’s servicin em either way, ain’t it?
“There’s an entry fee, accourse, taken out of wages. That pays Sammy’s expenses. As for the miners, the winner of whatever the particular
competition happens to be—dash, obstacle-course, hoss-race—gets a year’s worth of debt forgiven at the company store. Sammy keeps the
in’drest s’high on the others that he never loses by it. You see how it works? Quite snick, wouldn’t you say?”
“Snick as the devil,” I said.
“Yar! So when it comes to racing those nags around the little track he had made, any miner who can ride, does ride. It’s powerful comical to
watch em smashin their nutsacks up n down, set my watch and warrant on that. And I’m allus there to keep order. I’ve seen every race for the last
seven years, and every diggerboy who’s ever run in em. For riders, those boys over there are it. There was one more, but in the race Sammy put on
this New Earth, that pertic’ler salt-mole fell off his mount and got his guts squashed. Lived a day or two, then goozled. So I don’t think he’s your skinman,
do you?”
At this, Wegg laughed heartily. Peavy looked at him with resignation, Jamie with a mixture of contempt and wonder.
Did I believe this man when he said they’d rounded up every saltie who could sit a horse? I would, I decided, if he could answer one question in
the affirmative.
“Do you bet on these horse-races yourself, Wegg?”
“Made a goodish heap last year,” he said proudly. “Course Shunt only pays in scrip—he’s tight—but it keeps me in whores and whiskey. I like the
whores young and the whiskey old.”
Peavy looked at me over Wegg’s shoulder and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, He’s what they have up there, so don’t blame me for it.
Nor did I. “Wegg, go on in the office and wait for us. Jamie and Sheriff Peavy, come with me.”
I explained as we crossed the street. It didn’t take long.
* * *
“You tell them what we want,” I said to Peavy as we stood outside the batwings. I kept it low because we were still being watched by the whole town,
although the ones clustered outside the saloon had drawn away from us, as if we might have something that was catching. “They know you.”
“Not as well as they know Wegg,” he said.
“Why do you think I wanted him to stay across the street?”
He grunted a laugh at that, and pushed his way through the batwings. Jamie and I followed.
The regular patrons had drawn back to the gaming tables, giving the bar over to the salties. Snip and Canfield flanked them; Kellin Frye stood
with his back leaning against the barnboard wall and his arms folded over his sheepskin vest. There was a second floor—given over to bump-cribs,
I assumed—and the balcony up there was loaded with less-than-charming ladies, looking down at the miners.
“You men!” Peavy said. “Turn around and face me!”
They did as he said, and promptly. What was he to them but just another foreman? A few held onto the remains of their short whiskeys, but most
had already finished. They looked livelier now, their cheeks flushed with alcohol rather than the scouring wind that had chased them down from the
foothills.
“Now here’s what,” Peavy said. “You’re going to sit up on the bar, every mother’s son of you, and take off your boots so we can see your feet.”
A muttering of discontent greeted this. “If you want to know who’s spent time in Beelie Stockade, why not just ask?” a graybeard called. “I was
there, and I en’t ashamed. I stole a loaf for my old woman and our two babbies. Not that it did the babbies any good; they both died.”
“What if we won’t?” a younger one asked. “Them gunnies shoot us? Not sure I’d mind. At least I wouldn’t have to go down in the plug nummore.”
A rumble of agreement met this. Someone said something that sounded like green light.
Peavy took hold of my arm and pulled me forward. “It was this gunny got you out of a day’s work, then bought you drinks. And unless you’re the
man we’re looking for, what the hell are you afraid of?”
The one that answered this couldn’t have been more than my age. “Sai Sheriff, we’re always afraid.”
This was truth a little balder than they were used to, and complete silence dropped over the Busted Luck. Outside, the wind moaned. The grit