The Bold Frontier Read Online Free PDF Page B

the responsibility. The job. Which he cared for as little as he cared for the town. He picked up the yellow metal star with the word Sheriff stamped in, and pinned it on his plaid shirt with a little puff of his lips, as though he’d just tasted something bad.
    He walked downstairs and turned into the dining room, where the Widow Thorne’s three other boarders of the moment were already ravaging the plates of eggs, thick tough sowbelly slabs, fresh baking powder biscuits. “Morning, Lou,” said Bill Toombs, the recent widower who ran the hardware. “Morning, sheriff,” said a man who stopped for a night every month or so; a drummer with a handlebar mustache and showy Burnside whiskers. Lou Hand greeted both of them, then the 13-year-old boy, Will Pertwee, who sat at the end of the table, watching him with a peculiar intensity.
    “Sheriff, did you hear?” Will asked. He was a shock-haired kid; an orphan. Jesse gave him room and board in exchange for his work around the place.
    The door to the kitchen opened. Jesse Thorne looked in, rosy-faced in the heat rolling out in blessed waves from the unseen stove.
    “More coffee here? Why, good morning, Lou. Sleep well?”
    “No, I nearly froze. I’m getting old, Jesse. Blood’s too thin.”
    “If you got thin blood, a place at this altitude ain’t no good,” announced the drummer. Lou shot him a look as if to say, Tell me something I’ve not heard before.
    Will Pertwee was practically jumping out of his chair. “Sheriff, did you hear, or didn’t you?”
    “Hear what?”
    “About the gent who came to town last night. Walked in ’cause he had to shoot his horse up at Five Mile Wash. It’s Bob Siringo.”
    Bill Toombs was watching him, resting his fork in the gooey yellow residue of his eggs. The Widow Thorne looked stricken, noticeably pale; even women knew the name of the notorious gunman who had been through trials for murder at least four times, had done a stretch in Nevada Territorial Prison, and was said to have done away with up to a dozen enemies.
    “How do you know it’s Bob Siringo?” Lou Hand said with a deadly heaviness filling his belly, where only a moment before there had been the first pleasurable and diffuse warmth produced by Jesse’s strong coffee.
    “Well, I don’t,” Will said with a grin, as if he knew very well what the whole conversation implied for Lou. “But he sure looks like Bob Siringo. I mean, he’s a ringer for that drawing on the dodger hanging in your office.”
    Lou swallowed. “And where is the man?”
    “Staying at the Congress Hotel.” Will Pertwee leaned so far forward, his chin nearly upset his glass of buttermilk. “Guess you’ll have to look him up and see he behaves, huh?”
    “Not necessarily,” Lou said. “Not if he is behaving.”
    It came to him that, in his customary fashion, he’d left his .44-40 Frontier Model Colt and gunbelt hanging on the bedpost, where he always kept them. That was his morning routine, to walk downstairs for breakfast without the gun. Other times, it was of no importance. This morning the absence of the familiar pressure against his thigh seemed of keen, even dangerous significance.
    Jesse Thorne gave him a long, quizzical look. She was a heavy, handsome woman, ten years younger, with red-gold hair and large slightly tilted gray eyes. She had a soft, billowy breast; Lou had always fancied the buxom kind.
    Jesse was self-educated, and religious in a quiet way. She read the Bible every evening before she retired, but he hadn’t learned this until they’d been acquainted for over a year. She wasn’t prudish, though. She loved to dance, and play cards, and mix up a rum toddy on cold nights. She didn’t belong to a regular church, no doubt because they’d have scorned her, and her habits, as un-Christian.
    Lou and Jesse often shared cups of hot tea of an evening, when White Pass was quiet—as it usually was—and they enjoyed playing hands of rummy once or twice a week. In the