By the Neck Read online

  Crude shelves, chest high, stood in one corner. A couple of shirts, a pair of trousers, and a few other scraps of garment trailed off the shelves. A red and black checked wool coat hung on a nail on the wall. A crooked back door took up the rear right corner.

  The room smelled stale and felt to Rollie dreary and depressing, as if Dawber had not enjoyed good sleep in it. He would have to spiff up the place. No need to live like an animal in a cave.

  The saloon had been built against a slope, as had the rest of the few buildings along that side of the road, most of them log cabins for miners. Out the back door, a pair of planks made a short ramp down to a short, worn path, at the end of which he found an outhouse. He’d visit that later. Another smelly spot, no doubt.

  He noted he’d have to make certain the front and back doors, as well as the door from the bar to his quarters, could be secured within and without. Cravings for drink could make people behave in foolish ways, especially people who may be losing their shirts, meager savings, and their souls to the elusive allure of gold yet to be found.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the end of his first week in Boar Gulch, Rollie had met thirty or forty people, about the limit he was told by the mayor that the town held. “So far!” the chubby man had told him with a smile and a raised finger as if he could smell the coming hordes.

  Rollie had lost count after two dozen, but he didn’t forget their faces. He’d met the majority of them at the end of the workday, when they’d wandered, ragged and exhausted, into town on foot, on horseback, on mules, and a few on donkeys. All the critters of burden would be lined up out front, expected to wait for their masters until they would wobble out again hours later, drunk and braying louder than the mules. They’d ride the beasts through the dark, down and up mountain trails, back to their own diggings.

  Rollie had no idea how they managed to find their way home each night. And in fact, he learned that some of them didn’t, and ended up sleeping it off on the roadside, the beast dozing nearby. All well and good, he thought, but what about when winter comes? He felt some sort of odd obligation to keep those fools alive.

  Of all of them, there was one woman, the one who’d screamed during the killing of the previous keeper of the bar. She was known as Camp Sal, a woman who, while she didn’t appear to be much older than thirty, had, from her own accounts as well as those whispered by others, been a camp follower for years. She routinely took up with various men, drifting from one cabin to another as the whim grabbed her.

  She was willing to keep house, to launder and mend torn clothes, and do whatever else the man she was with at the time required of her. Though it sounded to Rollie like a recipe for a dozen jealousy-fueled gunfights, no one seemed inclined to fight over her. To a man they spoke kindly of her and perhaps with sympathy, as one might talk about a relation who’d failed to live up to early promise.

  All that was little more than a curiosity to Rollie as he had no intention of availing himself of her services. He could mend and clean and cook for himself, and loneliness was something he’d never been much tormented by. From its ravages on the lives of other men he’d known, he counted himself fortunate.

  On his first night he’d been told about the killing of Dawber, the previous saloon keeper. It seems he had been an unpleasant sort who’d grown too fond of his own product, and who had been in the habit of wearing a long knife on a belt strapped above his apron. On the afternoon Rollie had arrived, Dawber had been in his cups, having started well before his midday opening time, and hadn’t slowed as the day lengthened. Everyone in the Gulch knew his bristly demeanor did not improve as his drinking progressed. It grew worse, darker and meaner.

  Ogilvie had asked him for another beer, but didn’t think Dawber had heard him. He’d asked again, and the surly publican lurched around the end of the bar and set on Ogilvie with both hands about the little man’s throat. They tussled, thrashing around and around the room, knocking over chairs and tables, sending a friendly game of euchre to the floor and upending drinks in the process.

  Two other men finally intervened. They had almost pinned the big barkeep to the floor. He kicked one of them in the crotch and slammed their heads together. He was up and searching the wrecked room for Ogilvie once more—with his long knife drawn. Dawber slashed at the smaller man as if he were a lion raking the air before him in a fog of raw rage. He advanced, growling threats, and finally lunged once more at Ogilvie.

  The smaller man remembered he wore a clunky but serviceable revolver and clawed it free in time. Its presence, aimed as it was at Dawber’s gut, seemed to enrage the big drunk even more.

  He’d growled and howled, “I’ll kill you!” and indeed, was an eye-blink from plunging the great knife into Ogilvie’s chest when the smaller man sidestepped and fired.

  The first bullet caught Dawber high in the gut. It stopped his momentum and he wobbled in place. He focused once more on Ogilvie, and the surprised look on his face slid back into a mask of rage. The barkeep advanced once more. Ogilvie shot again, stopping Dawber a second time.

  Ogilvie advanced and squeezed another bullet out, backing Dawber to the door. Another, and the big man dropped his knife and crashed backward through the door. The momentum carried him across the short porch and through the railing. He hit the packed earth out front, flattening a fresh dumping of donkey dung, and expired right there, with a host of townsfolk staring at him and one newcomer in a small work wagon reined up and watching from the south end of the street.

  Back inside, Ogilvie poured himself that beer, then finding himself alone in the den of his now-dead nemesis, followed it with a couple of quick shots of whiskey, learning that the “good stuff” Dawber had charged more for was the same swill they all paid too much for every day. So he had two more.

  “Well,” said Rollie when Ogilvie had told him the story. “I can’t promise I’ll never come after you with a knife, but I can promise I’ll gladly sell you a beer when you ask.” He thought it was funny, but the rest of them all looked at him as if he’d threatened them.

  In that first week he made a number of changes, keeping the former owner’s schedule of opening at noon only as long as it took him to instigate a few others. He intended to open in the mornings as well, to serve coffee to whoever required it. First, he had to spruce up the place. It was dark and dank inside, and if he was going to spend so many hours a day and night there, it had to be a more welcoming place.

  He began by making a quick leather strap cradle for his rifle, easy to grab should the need arise. He vowed to purchase a sawed-off shotgun as soon as he was in the chips enough to afford it. They were brute tools but effective for close-in work such as keeping the peace in a roughneck saloon.

  For all doors, he built crude but effective locks, simple wooden bars to slide in place that would serve to keep out the nosey and ill-intentioned, and hopefully keep his goods and gear safe. That completed, he turned his attention to the scant living quarters. He rearranged the cramped space and found his solution gave him more elbow room and made him feel as if he were finally sleeping in his own home and not that of the dead former barkeep.

  For his personal possessions, he cobbled together a wooden locker secreted between his bunk and the stacked crates of libation. He fixed it with a padlock atop, and in it he stashed his valuables—a few small items he’d kept that had belonged to his parents, a small stack of important papers, and his daily takings from the bar.

  He had intended to stuff the silver pocket watch inside, too, but he’d worn it too long now, and had come to rely on the convenience of having a timepiece close at hand. That it was solid silver didn’t hurt. He liked the look and feel of it. Besides, he reasoned, what was the use of owning something decent if you kept it locked away? He had never been one to wait on a rainy day, and if his near death in the Denver City alley told him anything, it was that life was a fickle wraith, here and gone with finger snap speed. No time for saving something away—except money. He had time now for doing that.


  Rollie swept, scrubbed, and spit shined every surface he could reach, in and out. He repaired the snapped railing out front, and replaced the weakest rails with stout, skinned lengths of spruce. He framed up two windows and made shutters for them, barred from the inside during closed hours. And then he borrowed a paintbrush and paint from the mayor at the mercantile and hung a new, sizeable plank sign above the front door.

  “The Last Drop, huh?” A kindly old regular everyone called Wolfbait shuffled in right at noon that Friday. “That’s a good one.” He winked, then looked at Rollie in mock horror. “Well, you didn’t think I was illiterate, did you? Just because I ended up here in the mountains, clawing away at a dirt pile doesn’t mean I’ve always looked and behaved like this.” He climbed aboard his usual stool at the end of the bar.

  “Never thought about it,” said Rollie.

  “Was a time I taught school at a private academy in Connecticut. That’s a state in New England, in case you didn’t know.” Wolfbait winked again and sipped the foam off his first beer of the day. “Ayuh, I instructed a generation or more of young minds in the fanciful and fickle ways of the classics.” He sipped again. “Good God, what a waste. I could have been out here, drinking in the beauty of the mountains and the mule piss that is this beer. No offense intended.”

  “None received,” said Rollie, smiling as he draped a towel over his shoulder. He had turned around to take stock of the levels in the bottles behind the bar when he heard footsteps. Another customer, he thought, as he turned and grabbed a beer mug to dry.

  He saw a trim, handsome man in his early thirties stroll on in through the propped-open front door. The stranger wore a brown derby hat with a noticeable bullet-size hole in it, and wandered in without looking up from the notebook he was scratching away in with a pencil. The man didn’t look much like a miner, but then again if Rollie had learned anything in his years as a Pinkerton man it was that people were nothing if not full of surprises. The stranger mumbled to himself as if in conversation with someone, walked behind the bar to where Rollie was drying glasses, and continued right on behind him.

  The stranger slipped his notebook in a trouser pocket, slid his pencil over his right ear, and hung his jacket on a hook. Then he lifted down an apron and tied it on. When he’d finished, he looked up at Rollie.

  “Who are you?” he said, his eyebrows scrunching.

  Rollie shook his head. “That’s my question.”

  “I am Eustace Parker. What are you doing behind the bar?”

  Again, Rollie shook his head. “That’s my second question.”

  The stranger walked over to Rollie and stared up at him, the new barkeep being half a head taller.

  “You know, with your face, you’d be better off without that beard.” The stranger pointed to old Wolfbait. “On him, a full beard is unfortunate, however. I have made a study of such things. Do I know you? You look familiar. Have we met?”

  Rollie felt his face heat up, his ears redden. It had been a long stretch since he wanted to punch someone in the mouth for being annoying, but this whelp came close. He decided instead to boot the fool out of the bar before he said anything else.

  He heard Wolfbait wheezing. It sounded like he was having a seizure, but looking close, Rollie saw the old buck’s shoulders working up and down and tears sliding down his wrinkled cheeks. Finally he cut loose with a “Har har har!” and slapped his leg.

  “Don’t you mind him, Finny. That’s ol’ Nosey Parker, on account he can’t keep himself from doling out advice and pesterin’ everybody with questions until they’re about ready to choke the life out of him!”

  Rollie fixed Parker with a hard stare. “That doesn’t explain why he’s behind my bar.”

  “I work here when I’m not at my claim.”

  “You work here? I haven’t seen you, and I’ve been here a week.”

  “I told you I work my claim.”

  “Ha!” said Wolfbait. “I seen plenty of worked claims in my time, boy, including a few of my own, boom and bust, and I tell you, yours ain’t hardly been touched.”

  “I admit to being distracted of late,” said Nosey. “I am working on an opus. A grand-scale piece of work that requires time I can’t spare on digging in the earth for a fantasy.” He turned back to Rollie. “And who are you?”

  Rollie sighed and set the mug down hard on the slab bar top. “I am Finnegan. I own the place.”

  “Where’s Dawber?”

  At the same time, Rollie and Wolfbait said, “He’s dead.”

  “Oh.” Nosey pooched out a bottom lip in thought, then said, “Not surprising. But why? How did it happen? Was there gunplay? Knowing that cantankerous drunkard, I would place bets on it. Oh, did he employ the use of that brutal knife of his? More of a scimitar, I should think. What a madman . . .” He muttered to himself like that for another few minutes, edging in front of Rollie and taking over the drying of glasses, sweeping the floor, and tidying.

  All Rollie could do was watch in what was a mixture of anger, surprise, and disbelief. Finally he snatched a damp rag from Nosey’s hand. “How much was Dawber paying you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Parker.

  “What do you mean?”

  The younger man shrugged. “I never counted it.”

  No sooner had he said that than a couple of early-afternoon regulars, Tyson Jack and Swede, walked in. “Nosey! Good to see you. Any luck at your claim yet, boy?”

  This was met with laughter from everyone but Rollie and Nosey, who didn’t seem to notice the dig at his poor mining skills. He drew two beers and set them on the counter before the men.

  As the afternoon wore on, Rollie began to see another side of Nosey. Despite the young man’s odd, detached demeanor, he’d pop into a conversation with a series of pointed questions. It appeared Nosey heard everything being said. The ex-Pinkerton man in Rollie half-admired the trait.

  The kid also seemed to know how to make change and, most important, the customers knew him. And though he was odd, they liked him. Rollie decided he could do with a bit of help. Only a week into his ownership, the long hours were wearing on him. If he wanted to go to the store or visit Cap to take him out for a walk or a ride, his time was limited. But with Nosey around, he might be able to relax a little. Trouble was, the man seemed to come and go at his whim. He’d only be useful if he could be counted on.

  No sooner did he think this than Nosey turned to him and said, “So what’s your story? You weren’t born suited to tend bar, that’s obvious. How did you end up here? What are your plans for the future? I don’t think this camp has much promise as a gold town, but I’d welcome your opinion if you have experience in such matters.”

  Rollie was set to chuck out the window any charitable thoughts he might have entertained about the kid. He was about to tell him to get the hell out when another miner walked in.

  “Nosey Parker! Where you been, boy?”

  As the place filled and Rollie saw that Nosey did indeed have a knack for tending bar and that instead of taking offense at the man’s annoying—nosey—questions, the miners found him amusing and seemed to like talking with him.

  Another admirable trait, Rollie had to admit. He had found keeping up conversation to be the single most challenging task he’d faced since arriving in the Gulch. He was by nature not a talker. Hence the unfortunate nickname Stoneface he’d earned years before from a smart-ass prisoner.

  Later, as the place quieted and Rollie was cleaning up, he leveled questions of his own at Nosey.

  “I am a displaced journalist from back East,” said Parker as he righted chairs and shoved them under tables.

  As an old hand at sniffing out lies and peeking into shadows, Rollie knew from the vagueness of the reply that there was more to Nosey’s story. But unlike Nosey, he didn’t want to know more about his fellow Boar Gulchers. At least not until they offered their stories, unbidden.

  “I am out here to seek my fortune in the vastness of this fabled place.�
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  Rollie knew what he meant, but looked around the bar. “Here?”

  Nosey either didn’t understand the stab at wry humor or chose to ignore it. Before locking up, he held up two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. “You drink?”

  Nosey smacked his hands together. “Does a priest marry?”

  Rollie didn’t know what to make of that. As far as he knew priests weren’t allowed to marry, so that was a no. At least not in the Catholic church. Of course, they did perform weddings for others, so maybe yes. But Nosey had slid himself into a seat at a table as if waiting for the drink. Rollie poured them each a dose and sat down himself with a groan and a sigh.

  “Some injuries you have there, Finn,” said Nosey.

  Rollie nodded and sipped. “How often did you work here in the past? And don’t tell me whenever you felt like it, because that won’t work.”

  “Oh no. I was going to say three or four days a week.”

  “And the times?”

  “Oh, when I walk in until I leave, usually about now.” Nosey looked around as if a clock was going to appear on a wall.

  “The thing is, Eustace, I would consider keeping you on, but I need to know that you’re going to show up when I need you to.”

  “Understood,” said Nosey, downing the last of his drink.

  Rollie waited for the remainder of the reply he wanted to hear.

  Nosey stood, tugged on his coat, plopped his bowler on his head, and whistling, walked out the door, leaving Rollie as confused as he’d been hours earlier when he first met Nosey Parker.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Much to Rollie’s satisfaction, within two weeks after his arrival in Boar Gulch, the mine camp showed signs of becoming a genuine town. More people arrived daily, one or two at a time, but by the end of the second week the population of the camp had doubled.