Appaloosa

15

" A lone?” Raines said.

“Me and Everett,” Cole said.

“But that’s all?” Raines said. “You two alone?”

“Me and Everett,” Cole said again.

“Bragg’s got forty gun hands up there.”

“Twenty-five,” Cole said.

“You say that like it made a difference.”

“Makes a difference of, ah, how much, Everett?”

“Fifteen,” I said.

“It’s still so many,” Raines said.

“Specimens I’ve seen so far don’t enliven me much,” Cole said.

“We could get a posse up, deputize a bunch of us.”

“Coulda done that ’fore you hired us, Abner,” Cole said.

“You don’t want help?”

“No. I got help, I gotta worry about them. They get in trouble, I got to get them out. Better just me and Everett.”

I thought Raines looked relieved.

“Well, you say so, Virgil. It’s your kinda work, I guess.”

“It is,” Cole said.

Raines stood and walked out of the marshal’s office. He turned left on the boardwalk and disappeared.

“You got a plan?” I said to Cole.

“Well, we ain’t going to go riding in there bold as brass,” Cole said. “Like Jack Bell done.”

“I hear Bell was good,” I said.

“He was. He was good with a gun. Worked a lot of tough towns.”

“Overconfident?” I said.

“Be my surmise,” Cole said. “Thought he could back Bragg down. Thought they wouldn’t shoot lawmen.”

“You think you could back Bragg down?” I said.

“Just me and him?” Cole said. “Just the two of us? I could back him a ways. And then he wouldn’t back no farther.”

“You know this?”

“Sure.”

“How?”

“Been doing this a long time, Everett. Ain’t just gun work. Gotta think about men, too.”

“Which would, I guess, be one reason you’re here and Jack Bell ain’t,” I said.

“Yep,” Cole said and nodded his head. “That’d be a reason. You’d be another.”

I opened my mouth and closed it and sat. I didn’t know what to say. Cole had never been quite so straight with me about what I was worth. I sort of smiled to myself.

“What you smilin’ about,” Cole said.

“I caught myself thinking,” I said. “And what I was thinking was that you was right.”

Cole didn’t comment.

“So,” he said. “What we got to do next is drift on up there and look at Bragg’s layout.”